So as, apparently, the game industry's main source of bitterness and cynicism, it's always nice to encounter things that reaffirm my essential sourness. (I'm paraphrasing a nastygram I got recently.)

Thus we have Dvorak pontificating on the field, basically saying there hasn't been any real innovation since Doom. He also makes fun of Nintendog, pointing out that virtual pets have been around forever--which is true, but Nintendog looks exceptionally well done, and I have no doubt it will be successful. (Electroplankton, on the other hand, I'm very skeptical about; a toy with no evident goals, and no goals means "pointless.") Ultimately, he claims, the games industry is headed for a 1983-style meltdown due to lack of innovation.

Unfortunately, whatever Dvorak's merits as a PC pundit, which are considerable, he comes across as pretty clueless about games. In fact, there's still some innovation in the field, if usually in the PC realm (The Sims, anyone?), even if trends in the field mitigate against it. And a 1983-style crash depends on Joe Gamer waking up tomorrow and realizing, You know? Most of this stuff really does suck, and why do I need to buy yet another driving game with the same damn gameplay as every other driving game but maybe prettier cars? That's not a cultural change that happens over night...

More likely, I think, is my nightmare scenario: that lack of innovation slowly chokes the market, with people drifting away as they realize it's basically the same-old same-old, and that ultimately we're like comics in the 70s--relegated to a niche audience that recycles the same crap over and over. In other words, without innovation, I think we're doomed to slow strangulation, not instadeath.

Similarly, Elixir Studios has announced that they're closing; Gamesindustry.biz quotes co-founder Demis Hassabis as saying "It seems that today's games industry no longer has room for small independent developers wanting to work on innovative and original ideas." Anyone who reads this blog regularly will have no doubt that I sympathize... And yet there are some niggling doubts. Elixir is best known for Republic and Evil Genius; both are unquestionably innovative and interesting titles--Republic a sort of revolution simulator in a post-Soviet state, Evil Genius a sort of version of Dungeon Keeper in which you play a Bondesque villain, building a lair that pesky secret agents keep invading. Yet innovation is only part of the equation: You also need good execution, and both games suffered badly on that score, with mixed (to be charitable) reviews. Mind you, I'm not placing the blame for mediocre execution squarely on Elixir; I'm not familiar with the firm or its principals, and they're presumably dealing with the same inane publisher demands, refusal to bend the schedule, etc. that are the everyday existence of independent developers relying on publisher funding. And it's a point in Elixir's favor that they're engaged in an orderly close-down--that is, they've decided to throw in the towel with enough money in the bank to pay off the bills and salaried employees, which says something for their business ethics (something for which the games industry as a whole is not exactly noted). Still, it strikes me as a little much to say "innovation isn't valued" when in fact Elixir did manage to get a couple of innovative titles funded--and then, when you get down to it, failed to deliver excellence.

Oh, well. What I take away from both Dvorak and Elixir is that the meme is spreading; the lack of creativity in gaming is starting to bother a lot more people than me... Even if, in some cases, the people who adopt the meme strike me as a little off key.
posted by Greg at 5:55 PM 5 comments

Years ago, when I ran game development for West End Games, we released a pretty good boardgame called Eastern Front Tank Leader. At the time, we had a "flags in conflict" image on all of our historical games, so five of the six box sides had a little Nazi flag and a little Soviet flag with arrows pointing at each other. We didn't sell a lot of product into Germany, but some--and, because of the laws restricting display of the swastika, we had to put five stickers on every box we shipped to Deutschland, to cover up the swastikas. It was a bit of a pain, but you know, whatever.

I've been playing Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich in the last few days, and I'm finding one aspect rather annoying: everywhere you go (when in "the past,") there are big red banners bearing in their center--the Iron Cross. Now, the Iron Cross is an old German symbol, and appeared on the wings of German aircraft during the First World War, and was indeed used by the Nazis at times as a symbol of the nation, but you know, realistically, those banners should have swatiskas on them.

During the cut scene that describes the origin of Tricolour (the sword-wielding Free French superhero), she wins the gold medal in fencing at the 1938 Olympics, defeating a German. On her breastplate as she fences is, naturally, the bleu, blanc et rouge; on the breastplate of her opponent is the black, red and gold flag of the modern German Federal Republic.

This is just wrong. Indeed, its insulting. The black, red and gold flag was first flown in 1848 by student leagues revolting for freedom and democracy against the petty monarchies that then ruled divided Germany; it was used by the Weimar Republic; and it was revived by the Bundesrepublik after the war. It is, in short, the symbol of Liberal Germany. If it were absolutely necessary to avoid having a swastika on the character's chest, you could conceivably have used the black, white, and red flag of Imperial Germany, which was used as the flag of trade under the Third Reich--but to use the modern German flag is disturbing.

Moreover--come on. I assume Irrational has a German build--and I assume that they (or their European publisher) spent quite a lot of money localizing all the voice acting in German. How hard would it have been to use swastikas in all other builds, but replace them with the Iron Cross for the German edition? And wouldn't the gain in authenticity be worthwhile? I mean, when I kick Nazi butt "For Freedom!", I want it to be Nazi butt, goddamnit.

(Oh yeah, nary an Italian fasces to be seen, either.)

(Oh, by the way--cool game. I'm just whining.)
posted by Greg at 12:19 PM 2 comments

Wired story here, via /. games, lotta commentary on Terra Nova.

So far just for EQ2, but its possible they'll extend it. I'm actually surprised none of the majors has done this before; by letting sales occur on eBay, they're passing up some money and buying into a customer service problem, since if there are any problems in transferring the virtual goods (or outright fraud), people will doubtless bitch to SOE, despite the EULA. By bringing the auctions in house, you can pretty much eliminate fraud, because SOE can do what eBay can't--enforce transfer once a transaction is completed.

Smedley is quoted in the Wired article as saying that 40% of their customer service time is spent dealing with fraud issues which, if true, makes the auction system even more economically attractive to SOE--not only do they make some money on sales, but they reduce their overhead by eliminating (or drastically reducing) fraud. However, the figure also somewhat blows my mind--that much? Really? Of course, SOE's community management sucks, so it may be that this is 40% of a staffing level I'd consider wholly inadequate to doing a good job.

There are, of course, two downside risks. The first is that you'll annoy some customers--lots of people hate "eBayers," because they view purchasing stuff as cheating. The 50th level wizzo with the cool shit could just be some rich dude instead of a good Norrath citizen who has worked like the devil to get to that level. The second is the risk that the game becomes dominated by pharmers, the way (anecdotally) Lineage II has become--to the point that "real" players have problems getting rare drops or the like because all the good spawn points are camped by pharmers. Possibly, by monitoring what goes on at its own auction site, SOE will be better able to identify pharmers (as opposed to players just looking to cash out or get some money out of stuff they're now too high-level to use), and ban them. And while pharmers could still try to sell stuff on eBay, they'd presumably get lower prices--and presumably, most people will prefer to buy on SOE's own auction site, because of the security in knowing that transfers are enforced.

It will be interesting to see how it works out.
posted by Greg at 8:46 AM 3 comments

So when Gamespot et alia reported that Oddworld Inhabitants as shutting down, they made it sound as if they weren't getting out of game development entirely, but taking more of a contractor approach to things... But at least according to Paul Hyman's column in this week's Hollywood Reporter, that's not the case. Instead, they're getting out of the game industry entirely, and are going to do video shit (movies, TV, and so on).

I'm of two minds about this, perhaps predictably. E.g.:

Lanning: It's an industry-wide problem. As game production costs rise, publishers want more sure bets because with rising costs come rising risks. What we see is an industry which is rapidly discouraging innovation because people don't want to take chances on more innovative types of titles.

Yes, precisely. On the other hand--more colonial cringe, godammit. Yes, it's frustrating working in the damned game industry, but turning to Hollywood as a superior alternative strikes me as pretty darn goofy. And of course all the usual yadayada (what makes game developers think they can make movies any better than the games movie people make, which generally suck? And why aren't games good enough, eh? You've gotta be a Tinseltown star instead? Stop whining.)

We've gotta get outa this place.
posted by Greg at 3:22 PM 2 comments

So while away, I gave a slew of presentations.

The Fastaval folks asked me to give a presenation on the convergence between tabletop RPG and digital games, which is largely bogus, because they aren't converging--but they do cross-fertilize each other, as I said.

I also gave a presentation at Learning Lab/Denmark on the basics of mobile game design.

As well as one at the Copenhagen ITU on the future of mobile games. And a talk for Miguel Sicart's class at the ITU, on getting beyond the ludology/narratology divide. (And got to see Jesper Juul, Julian Oliver and Espen Arseth while at the ITU, which was fun.)
posted by Greg at 8:36 PM 3 comments

Back from two weeks away (one in Finland, the other in Denmark), and finally catching up...

In Denmark, one of the things I did was attend Fastaval, Denmark's largest roleplaying convention. Anders Hojsted squired me around, while Jost Hansen vacated his apartment in Aarhus to give me a place to crash. Fastaval is apparently the "elite" Danish con; while others still host a fair number of sessions based on commercial RPGs, that's definitely not the case at Fastaval. Instead, "writers" (the word they use) compete to create interesting roleplay scenarios, generally with a fairly minimal rules set, but with interesting set-ups, characters, settings, and/or plot-lines. At the end of the show, they hold an awards ceremony--the awards are called Ottos, and shaped like penguins--and the Danish RPG subculture takes them very seriously. In short, this is a subculture driven by peer recognition, rather than money--not that this is untrue of, say, the US "adventure gaming" industry, since money is pretty darn scant there, compared to what most folks make--but sales are still a big concern.

Apparently, this is true to a greater or lesser degree in the other Scandinavian countries as well. What they're doing bears some resemblance to what the indie RPG movement is doing, and they're aware of it--but there has been little cross-fertilization, since most of their work is in Norse languages (or Finnish), and thus there's little awareness of it elsewhere. There are some important differences, however; Scandiavian roleplaying is rules-light or rules-nonexistant, and more akin to freeforms than indie rpgs.

Since most games were run in Danish, I played only two; one was a Sorcerer scenario. The GM agreed to run it in English--though I think it was a bit nightmarish for him. None of the players were familiar with the game (I've leafed through it, but don't know it well), he was running it in a foreign language--and the scenario very much depended on the players taking the initiative, without clear direction for the character set-ups. The GM was wearing a pink bunny suit throughout, which provided a bit of intellectual disconnect, as the scenario was extraordinarily noir--and Sorcerer is anyway about characters with (literal) demons.

The second was run by a group of Swedes who had come to the show, and was run in English because both Swedes and Danes speak English (with greater or lesser facility), so it provides a common tongue. (Swedish and Danish are notionally mutually comprehensible--they're pretty close--but that's about like saying Italian and Spanish are mutually comprehensible. An Italian might get by in Spain, but he'd have a hard time following a fast-moving conversation.)

In this scenario, the GMs (two of them) played the "hosts" of a reality TV show. The players were participants in the show. Each of us had a mate (whether married or simply involved), and in the show, these pairs were split up, and each participant partnered with a "date" of the opposite gender. At the end of the show, each participant would vote whether to "upgrade" to the date, or keep his/her original partner.

The game session itself was, notionally, the final episode at the end of the week. Each player was the "choose a clip" from those "filmed" during the previous week... discuss it briefly... and then the clip would be "shown," meaning that the player and whoever else was involved in the scene would roleplay the clip.

So, for example, I (playing a woman as there were more male players than female, and we needed more women) chose a scene in the sauna with my "date." We sat in chair facing the "audience" (the non-roleplaying players, for this scene). I had stated that my date had wanted to go to the sauna, because of an event in which he fell on rocks in the cove, so he was bent over groaning, and I massaged his back. I then leaned forward and remarked on the size of his member, comparing it favorably to that of my husband. At this point, he became somewhat defensive, and suggested that I must have real self-esteem issues if I fixated on such things.

Now the complication: Other players are allowed to leap up during such a scene and say something like "Brenda, at age 12" or "Lars, three weeks later." That player then takes the role of one of the players in the base scene, pulling up other players to tkae the roles of others as necessary, and play out a brief scene. Scenes in "the past" are canonical, meaning they actually happened; scenes in the future are "possible futures."

So another player (one of the other women, in this case an actual one) springs up, and says "Brenda [or whatever my name was, don't recall], promoting her self-esteem video, six months later"). And in her little scene, makes it clear that I thought my date right, that I did have real self-esteem issues, but now I'd worked through them, and thought I could help other women with like problems).

In other words, part of the genius here is that you are not in complete control of your character: I hadn't realized I had self-esteem issues, but it was a good trope, and now I had to work with it.

Almost immediately, the hosts leap up and roleplay a scene: they are in the editing room after the day's shooting on the day that the "sauna scene" happened, drunk as skunks and laughing in each others arms. My god, what a mess, they say. It took the staff forever to clean the stones. (There are traditionally stones on top of a sauna stove, on which you throw water, which is almost immediately turned into steam, increasing the perceived temperature.)

Okay, so, um.....what do I do with this? There are a limited number of things that could have, ah, spurted into the stones, and... wait, I have self-esteem issues. I'm really upset that my date has criticized me. No problem; I vomit into the stones.

Yeech.

Anyway, you see the basic set-up here: There is a structure and a backstory, in this case of a somewhat degrading reality TV show (as most are), with a set of rules to define player interactions and character development, but it's almost closer to improv than traditional RPG. Still, it's not improv: the structure, in terms of defining scenes, allowing other players to modify character motivations, etc., is far more pervasive than in traditional improv. Instead, we have something that moves away not only from tabletop and the indie RPG, but in the direction of theater. And in fact, as I told the organizers later, I think this could -become- theater--that is, I think if there had been a non-participating audience for our game, it would have been amused.

Jarkko Stenros (my date, as it happens) writes:

Anyway, the reason I'm writing to you is to keep you updated on the roleplaying scenario book that I'm putting together with Juhana Pettersson. It seems that there really has been a need for an outlet like this for some time -- in a little over a week we have gatehred 15 confirmed and a possible 9 games for the book.

They are from Finland, Sweden and Denmark, from the past 10 years (with emphasis on the new stuff) and some are tabletop, some freeform and some LARPs. As an added bonus, it seems that we'll have some Nordic roleplaying theory guys submitted scenarios that have been created with certain theoretical models in mind. So if all goes well the book will be an important step in building a bridge between the different Nordic roleplaying cultures, between the forgotten past and the present, between tabletop and freeform and LARP--and possibly even between theory and practice!

They'll be publishing in English, and I've offered to help out with a final edit (always a good idea to have a native English-speaker look things over with an eye to idiom).

But in English, it also gives English-speakers a view into Nordic roleplaying culture, with, I think, possible opportunities for fruitful cross-fertilization with the indie RPG scene, as well as the Australian LARP community (which seems to be the most vigorous outside Scandinavia).

Incidentally, for an interim fix, you may want to check out Beyond Role and Play: Tools, Toys and Theory for Harnessing the Imagination, a book published for Ropecon, the Finnish national RPG convention, and available as a free downloadable PDF.
posted by Greg at 7:20 PM 2 comments