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.

PAX Pix

I’ll have more later (I know I promised this awhile back), but I wanted to post the link to the excellent pictures Megan took at PAX.  Here you go.

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.

Guitar Hero to out-Rock Band Rock Band?

I’ve already bought Rock Band 2 and a significant amount of downloadable content for the original (which, of course, also works with Rock Band 2), but I have to say that 1up’s Guitar Hero: World Tour preview, which gives 10 reasons why you should still get it even if you have Rock Band 2, makes it sound pretty damn good.

Once Activision (finally) confirmed cross-instrument compatability with Rock Band instruments I figured I’d be picking up the game anyway, but even the new hardware for the game is sounding pretty impressive.  Not only that, there seem to be several gameplay tweaks that actually do a bit more to change up the game than what Rock Band has added.  Based on this list and what I know about Rock Band 2, here are what I consider all the significant new additions/features in the games:

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The Devil Beats the Protoss

At least the rumor is that Diablo III will beat Starcraft 2 to the market. I, for one, have absolutely no problem with that whatsoever. I saw Starcraft 2 at PAX and it looked beautiful, but pretty much the same as Starcraft 1.

I suppose the same could basically be said for Diablo III vs Diablo II. So sue me. I want Diablo III far more than I want Starcraft 2.