Skepticism You Can Believe In

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mike Fahey. Fahey is appropriately dubious of a study whose methodology is to ask a number of MMO players about their weight and exercise regimens and then… take their word for it. Survey respondents are notoriously averse to telling the truth about any number of issues, and there’s no reason to believe MMO players would be any worse. Since their answers are counterintuitive, I suspect Fahey is right to doubt them: do we really think that MMO players are 10% leaner than the average? I don’t mean that it’s impossible that they could be healthy - plenty of gamers don’t fit the slob in his parents’ basement stereotype - but to think that they are in general significantly more fit than the average seems to be implausible.

Good job, Mr. Fahey. Everyone else, more of this, please. I don’t often see this level of analysis in gaming pieces, especially those related to scientific studies.

Hostess Bars

There’s probably some garden-variety “stop accepting gifts from the people you’re assigned to cover” scandal around this Joystiq post, but hostess bars are a pretty common Asian practice and they’re not particularly sketchy… so this isn’t that big a deal. I didn’t go to any when I was over there, but my understanding is that plenty of people do.

UPDATE: Now this, my friends, is how you do “conflict of interest.”

The Ides of Thompson

I didn’t comment on Jack Thompson’s disbarment, mostly because I didn’t have much to add, but thought this GSW meditation on whether he was real or a partial creation of the industry press was worth passing along.  I come down along the middle of the road on this one; he was newsworthy in his sheer persistence, and so had to be reported on, but the gaming press tends to fixate and probably fed the flames more than it needed to.

Fuel On The Fire

What’s wrong with this headline: “Bungie: Game companies should pocket money from used sales“?  Answer: Bungie never said it.  Rather, an audio director at the company, giving his personal opinion, provided that argument.  The headline is wrong and is likely to start a flamewar over Bungie’s involvement.

Needless to say, inflammatory, inaccurate quotes aren’t a good idea.

Simsulating Reality

N’Gai Croal asks the reasonable question, “Should a game whose core audience is teen girls become a movie aimed at teen boys?” The Sims is being made into a bizarre movie that sounds like equal parts Weird Science and Jumanji.  You might suspect that the answer is no.  I won’t disagree with that, but in this particular situation, I think it’s actually sort of irrelevant. 

The main theme of the Sims - the source of its popularity - is the ability to create your own domestic reality and move people through the mundanities of regular life.  People enjoy it because they get to create their own worlds.  Unfortunately, because movies are entirely different media, you can’t do that in a film… you might be able to vicariously enjoy watching someone else do that, but it just wouldn’t be too fun to watch someone recreate the same world you’re in a theater to escape.  So it wouldn’t be possible to make a Sims movie that really captures what women liked about the game.

This leaves open the question of whether or not it made sense for the studio to license the Sims in the first place.  It seems pretty obvious that the answer is no to me.  What about the film made it impossible to create without branding the game that the kids receive “The Sims”?  The only benefit of licensing it is to get people into the theater in the first place, and as Croal points out, there’s no reason to think this will work (not that there was much of one in the first place).  But movie studios have been licensing all sorts of terrible ideas, so it’s not that surprising to see.

An Exercise In Logic For The PSP

Proposition: It is easier to make poor-quality ports than it is to produce quality original content.

Proposition: Because it is easier to produce poor-quality ports, it is also cheaper, and thus more people will elect to produce poor-quality ports than the alternative.

Proposition: If people are uninterested in producing poor-quality ports for your device because they are concerned about the ability of a game to sell on it, they will also be uninterested in producing original content.

Proposition: Limiting the number of games on your console is not a recipe for its future success.

Conclusion: Prohibiting poor-quality ports on the PSP is insufficient at ensuring its successful turnaround.

I understand that Sony believes the PSP’s audience is best served by original extensions of popular franchises, but I fail to see how this move addresses its biggest problem: it doesn’t have a lot of games that people want to buy.  It’s all well and good to argue that they need better games, but this move seems most likely to do two things: dry up some of the existing supply of games that might encourage people to get a PSP right now, and further convince other publishers that there’s no audience for a new original game.  Where’s the reason for them to take a chance?

Weekly Column - 9/23/08

Our weekly Counting Rupees column is up - the topic this week is crisis management.

Big World, Big Problem - A Challenge

I’ve recently been playing quite a bit of Mass Effect (I missed the boat initially).  I really love the game, except for the long vehicle sequences that have you driving around on each planet searching for metal deposits and fetch quest items.   It’s just tedious to have to move across huge expanses of mountainous terrian in what is effectively an ATV, for items whose purpose is basically completionist in nature.

While doing so, it occurred to me that Bioware has done a great job creating a massive universe, with purposeless planets, sprawling locales, and side quests galore.  Yet like most RPGs, it runs into a central contradiction: although expansiveness is valuable in creating the sensation of believability, it runs contrary to the central tenet of game design - keep your game fun.  In short, although it’s nice to know there are “real people” out there running about their daily business, they’re not people you really want to interact with.  Nor do you really want to have to move across the massive world in order to have that one conversation that marks the end of your quest and the award of loot or experience points or what have you.  Rather, when you play a game, you want to quickly identify who has something of value to you, interact with them as quickly as possible, and move on to more gameplay, which is the reason you’re playing in the first place. 

Many games attempt to alleviate this problem.  Mass Effect tries to help the process by putting notations on your map to highlight areas of interest; WoW has its exclamation marks, and many games offer “instant warp” spells or airships to ensure that you don’t actually need to cross their worlds in order to get where you need to go.  Yet the fundamental issue - that a massive world is great to see but not to touch - is left unresolved.  Taken to its logical extreme, the “warp” spell reduces the game to a series of scenarios, dialogue trees whose purpose is to load you up with information or items as efficiently as possible.

It seems to me like there has to be a better solution.  Yet I can’t tell you what it is.  Any thoughts on how designers can keep the feeling of exploration and scale in their RPGs, but avoid the tedium of pixel-hunting fetch quests and boring terrain traverses?

Missing The Point

John Keefer over at Crispy Gamer suggests that game embargoes aren’t actually necessary.  This is true, albeit also rather obvious.  Unfortunately, Mr. Keefer seems to imply that this doesn’t benefit gamers.  Although I can’t fault him for the sentiment, I would actually disagree.

Keefer argues that there are two reasons for embargoes: first, to time with some publicity drive from the company (earnings calls, conventions, etc.), or second, to reward a journalist with an exclusive.  Let me suggest that there is really one reason for them, and it is the latter.  If companies really didn’t want journalists to potentially write something about a game - if they were planning a grand reveal of the product on some particular schedule - they wouldn’t give them the game in the first place until it was absolutely necessary.  I suspect very few games need their reviews timed in this way.  It may make publishers’ lives a little easier to provide the embargo, but look at it this way: if they couldn’t trust people to hold off, they just wouldn’t provide the game at all.  Rather, the exclusives are pretty much the only reason to have an embargo.

I agree, it’s a crappy practice.  But blaming gamers - “[t]he sad part of this whole equation is that the existing system, coupled with many gamers’ insatiable desire to read whatever information is first available on their favorite big games, leaves those trying to establish some type of journalistic credibility in the dust” - is pretty unproductive.  It also happens to be true.  But what you end up with in the end is the fact that the existing system exists because of the people it’s designed to serve.  More people want exclusives than care about the very valid issues that Keefer raises.  Therefore, it won’t change. 

But there’s not much that can be done about that.

Loot

So there have been a number of posts recently about the concept of loot (collectibles) in games, this being among the most recent, but I think the majority of them have missed what is for me the most interesting trend: games are increasingly becoming focused almost entirely on loot. Or at least, there’s a subgenre emerging that is.

At its most innocuous, you can see its effect in the addition of achivements and trophies. These have always existed since the days of RPG easter eggs, but have since become more and more ubiquitous - even PC games like Spore have started adding them en masse for such run-of-the-mill accomplishments as, well, playing the game: you get an Explorer’s Medal in the latter simply for moving your UFO around. The trophy system on the PS3 and 360 Achievements, along with Gamerscores, have driven the message further home.

One notch up, however, are those where the game can be significantly affected by these accomplishments. Consider CoD4, where you earn new powers and abilities that can be used even in multiplayer as a result of the collectibles and loot options. Consider what is probably one of the forerunners of this subgenre, Pokemon. At its essence, the game is a series of gear collections - you find Pokemon so that you can use the Pokemon to fight other Pokemon and capture them. Reiterate. In fact, the entire game is designed to serve as a showpiece for the Pokemon, reducing them to weapons that you might find in a typical JRPG. You can see similar echoes of this idea in Pokemon knock-offs and spin-offs.

Similarly, MMOs like World of Warcraft are premised entirely on the attractiveness of loot collection. Your primary reward for obtaining powerful items is the ability to collect even more powerful (or attractive) items, an artifact of the lack of a real plot, narrative, or differentiated challenges (you beat a weak enemy largely the same as a powerful one, albeit with fewer people and abilities).

I raise the issue for two reasons: first, it’s amusing to see people - including myself - so interested in obtaining things with essentially no value outside of the specific game in question. More to the point, I’m a little concerned about the potential implications… with a purely loot-centric environment, purely gameplay-oriented attractions may begin to become overlooked.