Orson Scott Card And Shadow Complex

I’ve been following the semi-debate about Orson Scott Card’s involvement in scripting Shadow Complex with some amusement for the past week or two.  For the uninitiated, Card has expressed strongly conservative political views on a whole range of subjects, including homosexuality (he’s not a fan); Card is a Mormon and is opposed on religious grounds.  As a result, some gamers have expressed the view that SC should not be purchased as a form of protest against the involvement of someone they view as morally unsupportable.

Leaving the actual merits of those positions aside - I don’t think they’re relevant to the discussion - I have to come down on the side of those opposed to the boycott, for both practical and philosophical reasons.  First, boycotts tend to work only when they can clearly target a specific individual: regardless of whether or not you agree with Card, he was hardly the only person involved in Shadow Complex and boycotting the game hurts a ton of people who probably don’t share his views. 

Similarly, it’s difficult to conclude that boycotts on political grounds make a ton of sense for a game that isn’t political: the world in which Shadow Complex takes place is apparently based on a politically-tinged series that Card has authored, but as far as I can tell, the game itself avoids inserting itself into the debate.  As a result, it’s tough to see where you would draw this line: if you start boycotting products with any connection to people whose ideological views you find objectionable - even if those products don’t reflect those ideological positions - you begin to stifle free debate rather than protect it. 

I should be clear that there’s nothing wrong with freely expressing one’s personal views on any range of subjects, and this one should be no exception, no matter in which direction those views tend.  However, I don’t see a game boycott being a useful or appropriate outlet for the expression of those views.

Think Tanks?

Will Wright has left EA to form a “think tank” that will let him explore new ideas.  As far as I can tell, this basically means that Will Wright is forming his own development house, allowing him to do whatever he wants… which is basically what he’s been able to do since Sim City, so I’m unclear on why this is a particularly strong vehicle for him.  That said, anything that lets Wright make more games is fine with me (especially since I wasn’t particularly enthused by Spore).

Reuters Interpretation

Reuters reports that gaming is set to continue growing, despite the recession, this year, but that gamers are “spending more carefully” on higher-quality titles./

I puzzled over the meaning of this for a while, because there seem to be one or two possible interpretations: one is that there are more gamers buying the same AAA titles (if the number of “high-quality” games is roughly the same), or that the same rough number of gamers are buying more AAA titles (because there are more AAA titles to buy). 

Logically, you might suspect that a little of both is an issue, because in the same article, it points out that the average age of gamers is rising.  This is because people who started gaming in their youth are aging, while new gamers are continuously being added to the mix.  Unfortunately for Reuters, this really has nothing to do with a flight to quality and everything to do with simple demographics and a willingness to keep buying games in roughly the same proportion as before. 

Similarly, I think we would generally agree that there are more quality games on the market now than in the past.  That said, I don’t see any evidence in the article that people are actually buying more games on a per-capita basis than they did before (nor is that claim made in the article).  That would be an argument that people are willing to spend during the recession as long as new games are solid: a contention that may be perfectly valid but which is unsupported by evidence… most games in the February NPD top sales charts, aside from SFIV, are actually fairly old games like Wii Play and Wii Fit, Mario Kart and NSMB, which people are probably either snapping up at a discount or finally getting around to buying.  In either case, it’s not because of a flood of new, higher-quality games.

I’m picking on this Reuters article not necessarily because it’s wrong (we certainly can’t know that from the article), but because the idea that gamers are seeking higher-quality games in a recession seems like a plugged data point - someone figured out that revenues were rising, and so analysts rely on some pat, logical, and as yet unproven response to try to explain why.  (Indeed, the fact that people often lament the poor quality titles that sell well seems like an obvious counterexample.)  They may have reams of real data behind it, but it’s certainly not presented in the news piece.  This is a journalistic problem as well as potentially an analytical one.

Croal Out

I should have guessed this from the dead space that has been his website for the past few months, but N’Gai Croal is leaving Newsweek.  Although I wish him the best as an independent consultant (slash everything else, it would seem), I’m disappointed that another mainstream news outlet is losing its videogame voice.  It’s probably to be expected, given the current state of such publications, but it’s disappointing nonetheless.  I wonder if it’s due to the economy.

Apparently, www.ngaicroal.com will be ramping up shortly, although it’s just a GoDaddy blank slate at the moment.

Music Of The Spheres

Fascinating article on the newly lucrative career possibilities of video game scoring.  I rarely listen to the music playing in my games, but sometimes it can be quite effective.  I was a little sorry to see that many composers fail to take this seriously - sometimes they play for only seconds to compose a section’s music, leading me to believe that they may be taking advantage of people who are not musically inclined to begin with and who don’t have a clear vision for where their game’s mood needs to go (a gaming nouveau riche?).  Watching special features on Wall-E, I was surprised to see how involved Andrew Stanton was in the musical direction. 

Fallout and Bioshock get it right, though.

Always The Stick, Never The Carrot

Why game industry personalities feel compelled to speculate in public about things that can cause only blind rage in the larger gaming populace is something that defies most rational explanation.  Is it ignorance?  A trial balloon?  Confusion about the inner workings of the internet?  Epic President Mike Capps serves up this week’s helping of disaster with the bizarre idea that developers might charge separately for portions of their games to fight secondhand game resales.

Reasons this is a bad idea, off the top of my head: people resent being told what to do with what they consider their property; they don’t understand why developers consider it their “right” to take portions of it; they like to share with their friends; and many people only buy resold games and wouldn’t purchase the retail version at full price to begin with.

A modest proposal: why don’t developers enter the resale market?  Offer gamers the option to sell their games back to you instead of their neighborhood Gamestop.  You could potentially offer a lower price point, or even a higher one if you’re willing to create a “preferred gamer” loyalty program, with future game discounts, preferential news, gaming DLC, or what have you for those who sell their games back to you.  That way, gamers think you actually value them and are willing to reward them for their loyalty, instead of punishing them for doing what they feel they’re entitled to do in the first place. 

I have no idea if this is feasible, or if there are better alternatives.  But it seems like there’s plenty of room for win-win solutions here that don’t involve alienating your major customer base.

Creativity and Film

Valve’s Gabe Newell is interviewed here by Earthworm Jim creator Dave Perry on what it takes to become a successful entrant into the gaming industry with a developer.  I’m grossly underqualified to comment on any of the practical advice, but I thought one comment in particular deserved attention.

Newell:

Specialization and hierarchy are the norms in film production, and are antithetical to what needs to happen in the games industry. The reason for that distinction is that the game industry is more focused on invention than on repeatability/measurability. Programmers that can draw are going to be in much better shape than an animator specializing in putting talking mouths on cats. The solutions of tomorrow are not going to fall into the production or organizational categories of today. 

This may be true for a very specific sub-set of developers, but it’s not clear to me that this is generalizable to, well, most companies.

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Say It In Runic

Apparently Richard Garriott held up a sign on his trip to the space station in his fictional language from Tabula Rasa.  Aside from being insanely jealous of people who can go into space, I find fictional languages fascinating.  Truly different languages actually take a long time to develop - they’re more than just a cipher used to disguise an existing language - and they’ve been employed in everything from books (think Tolkien’s incredibly elaborate elvish) to movies, games, and tv shows. 

Part of the interest is probably due to the fact that they’re such an intrinsic part of the world creation process.  But another piece is that I find it interesting how many fictional languages tend to be elaborately pictorial in nature: Garriott, Tolkien, even the alienese from Futurama (actually a cipher rather than a language) all use some sort of complex runic stand-in for either a sound (elvish) or meaning (Logos Elements).  But not that many of the world’s actual languages are like that - most are purely alphabetic and much more functional than attractive - an exception maybe being the Middle Eastern languages like Hebrew and Arabic - and the few pictorial languages like Chinese are syllabic shorthand for complete words.  (As you can see from the poor descriptions, I’m not a linguist). 

I would imagine that this is because the main function of languages in the real world is to communicate meaning, which requires simplicity and concision, whereas their function in fictional worlds is to communicate a sense of uniqueness, which just requires being different.

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.

The Art And The Artist

When I was younger, there weren’t too many gaming personalities that stuck out strongly enough to stick in my memory.  One exception was John Romero, who came out of id’s early 90’s successes with burning ambition and a big ego.  His infamous Daikatana ad (copy: “John Romero’s About to Make You His Bitch… Suck It Down”) led to a huge gamer backlash when Daitakana showed up years later, late and mediocre.  Oddly, the game itself was, if not successful, at least not a complete failure: it sold reasonably and hasn’t turned out to be the complete disaster it seemed at the time.

It was this memory that came back to me during the recent discussion of Too Human and the backlash that Denis Dyack has spawned.  Gamers are hardly unique in their willingness to transfer distaste for individuals to the products those people have created; Michael Bay is widely loathed for his film style, and it’s difficult to dissociate Ezra Pound from his support for Italian Fascism.  That said, gamers seem to me to be more willing than normal to hold games accountable for the sins of their makers.  (They’re also more willing to put certain individuals on pedestals and follow them avidly.)

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