“What if we’re all just brains in a vat?”

Before becoming the premise of the (increasingly disappointing) Matrix Trilogy, this was one of the more popular Epistemological essay questions for undergrad Philsophy students the world over. “If we got ourselves put in a situation where all of our experiences were simulated, would they be real?” and then “If you could arrange to put yourself into such a simulation, would you want to?”

There is a lot of hand-wringing in Epistemological circles about whether or not certain experiences or knowledge are ‘genuine’. This involves a lot of strange thought experiments with painted albino zebras and twins sitting in front of complex arrangements of mirrors. Being a dedicated gamer by the time all of this came to my attention, I had a lot of trouble understanding what the fuss was about. There are already millions of humans choosing to spend a large chunk of their leisure time having crudely simulated experiences. The first company to patent the Holodeck is going to clean up.

The media and our disapproving parents and friends also already know the answer to the first question: No the simulated experiences are not real, get outside and read a book. The latest warrior to toss her hat in the ring on the side of all that is good and genuine is Susan Greenfield.

She sets out a catalogue of repercussions: the substitution of virtual experience for real encounters; the impact of spoon-fed menu options as opposed to free-ranging inquiry; a decline in linguistic and visual imagination; an atrophy of creativity; contracted, brutalised text-messaging, lacking the verbs and conditional structures essential for complex thinking. Her principal concern is how computer games could be emphasising what she calls “process” over “content” – method over meaning – in mental activity.

Greenfield is an actual scientist and so enlightened by her argument, I humbly apologize to all the world for the part that I played in the imagination holocaust that is game development. I promise to turn my back on the simple spoon-fed menu options of The Sims, Grand Theft Auto and Fallout and devote myself to the genuine free-ranging inquiry of Independence Day, Sex and the City and anything by Danielle Steele.

I don’t normally link to Dilbert, but this is a pretty much spot on explanation of the Developer / Publisher relationship.

It seems like the key to being a tech columnist is having discussable opinions about things. Knowledge is for the sissies over in the reporting department. Making pronouncements of either Doom or Ultimate Glory for some new device is the kind of thing that puts (something I like to call “asses in the seats 2.O”) links in the blogs. It is in this spirit of prophecy for page views that Brian Caulfield of Forbes asks whether or not the Apple iPhone could kill the Nintendo DS. Showing the kind of visionary spunk that gets you employed at one of the top business magazines, Caulfield doesn’t let the fact that a clear answer, “no,” already exists.

It’s a good gambit. Like small town residents cheering whenever their name is mentioned on the Tee Vee, the industry, perpetually suffering from “hey we’re relevant too” syndrome, gets excited when one of the big players mentions us. Here is my prediction about Forbes’ prediction: lots of gaming sites will link to it and then it will turn out to be utterly wrong. Things start to go badly in the early paragraphs.

The Nintendo DS has had a good run, too, dominating the market for handheld gaming gizmos despite determined assaults by Sony and Nokia .

The DS didn’t HAVE a good run. It’s HAVING a good run. There are over 70 million of them out there right now. The PSP is doing well too, with over 30 million units sold. But to describe the sad joke that is the N-Gage - a failed Gameboy Advance competitor / phone that launched in 2003 and may not have even sold a million units - as a “determined assault” by Nokia is to severely misunderstand the market.

Apple is the first to master a pair of tricks that have made Nintendo’s latest products so compelling–a touch-screen interface and the ability to pick up on motion. The key difference: Unlike Nintendo, which has created a gaming console with a motion-sensitive controller and a touch-sensitive handheld gaming system, Apple has crammed both capabilities into its iPhone and iPod Touch.

Leaving aside motion sensing, which the DS doesn’t actually have, Caulfield’s argument is that the iPhone has a touch screen which the DS also has but you can download new software on to the iPhone, and he heard that some companies were making games for it, so it’s a DS killer.

Let’s compare them for real.

The DS is a rugged little single purpose gaming system that retails for $130 in Canada. It has two screens, including a dedicated touch screen and dedicated control buttons, plays GBA games as well as DS titles, has build in local wireless networking for multiplayer gaming as well as a connection to Nintendo’s ‘it just works’ worldwide multiplayer service. It is supported by brands such as Mario, Pokémon and Final Fantasy. You can find it at just about any department store in the world and it’s loved by kids, casual and core gamers.

The iPhone is a multi-purpose device which retails for $400 (minus contract subsidy). It has a single large screen (lord help you if you drop it), no local networking, no wireless gaming service and no library to speak of. In order to buy one, you need to sign up for cellphone service and in order to buy and download games you will need a credit card and an iTunes membership. It is not a device for grubby handed kids, Nintendo’s bread and butter.

If there is any direct competition to be had, it’s between the iPhone and Sony’s rumoured PSP phone. They’ll (probably) cost about the same, and both are convergence devices meaning that for a slight premium, you can get them do to several things that you don’t really want.

It’s too late to kill the DS. The DS is a runaway success. iPhone gaming might have a chance at killing some future Nintendo handheld, but I wouldn’t want to start mouthing off about it. Much as Sony learned when they went after portables, Nintendo is much, much smarter than you think and they know games very, very well.

Over at Game Career Guide Brian Nathanson talks about his struggle at breaking in to the games industry. Well, his failure to break in to the industry.

It’s a sad story. He doesn’t mention what school he went to, just an unnamed “game program in Arizona”. He only hints at the details but it seems like he entered a program with high hopes, took out massive loans and discovered at the end of the process that he wasn’t prepared for a job (he can’t even get a phone interview).

I am completely aware of how many people want to be a part of the video game industry. I will admit, openly and publicly, that I probably don’t have a very competitive portfolio.

When I was in charge of hiring at a video game company, I saw a tonne of applications like Brian’s. A lot of people have paid ridiculous tuitions for generalist educations and came out at the other end masters of nothing. It was heart wrenching, knowing how much these people had invested in their education and how little they got for it. They’d have been better off using the tuition money to pay for rent and food while they worked full time on a mod project.

I feel for Brian, but I also totally disagree with him.

Individuals with base skill sets and true passion are ready and waiting to be given a chance to shine. These talented and passionate people bring fresh new energy and commitment into an industry that seems to always be juggling profitability with volatility. New ideas, new game mechanics, and new appeal could be created by those who just want to make a game they would like to play. Smaller, more tightly focused, and perhaps less expensive games could be the result if the industry allowed more inexperienced developers to work while growing their skill sets.

Ideas are cheap and plentiful, we don’t lack for them. Nor do we lack for fresh young talent. This is an industry with an average age of 31 and an average career length of 5.4 years.

I’ve worked with newcomers and with hobbyists and and I’m here to tell you that inexperience does not lead to “smaller, more tightly focused,” games. It leads to sprawling, unfinished, genre-defying epic failures. We don’t need fresh young faces to reinvigorate things. We need old non-burnt-out faces to stick around and be the voices of experience and history.

Brian is right about one thing, it is very hard to even get a phone interview. It’s not because we can’t be bothered to talk to the passionate people who wish they were involved. It’s because there is something like a 60:1 ratio of applicants to job postings. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to call each of them.

N’Gai Croal at Level Up has a pair of interviews with Sony and Microsoft marketing about the 64/36 sales split of Grand Theft Auto IV on the Xbox 360 and PS3 at Gamestop. The close to 2-1 advantage in favour of the Xbox is a clear victory… for everyone!

You see, while there was a 64/36 split on GTA purchases, there is a 70.7/29.3 split on U.S. installed Xboxes and PS3s. While the 360 won on pure sales, the PS3 came out slightly ahead per capita. In other words, it’s a wash. Watch how each of them plays with the numbers and analysis to tell their story.

Microsoft’s Aaron Greenberg has the easier job. The raw numbers look very good for the Xbox 360 and so the only real task is to dismiss the per capita advantage of the PS3 by arguing that they expected it to be worse. Taking advantage of the email interview, he completely ignores the final question, hits ’send’ and then knocks off for some lunch.

Poor Sony’s Peter Dille has to really make the numbers sing. Using the magic of rounding, the sales advantage becomes a mere 60/40 and the console advantage swells to 3-1 (3-1 would be 75/25). Given these new numbers, Playstation is doing FINE, in fact it’s practically 50/50! Later, when talking about the console race, Dille, perhaps realizing that there such a thing as being so far behind that you’re just a loser, quietly revises the earlier rounding and scrappy underdog PS3 pulls ahead to a respectable 70.1/30 install ratio.

The endearitating thing about Dille is that the tactic WORKS. As other blogs,news outlets and fansites pick up the story, they paste Dille’s money quote (”If I had an installed base advantage of 3-1, I wouldn’t be crowing too much about a 60-40 sales advantage.”) uncritically, letting the dodgy math stand.

Of the many things I like about James Portnow’s weekly design challenges (and there are many) my favourite thing is the way that it quietly breaks down the oh-so-common myth that good game ideas are hard to come by and need to be kept secret.

It’s stunningly common in the industry for people to try to hide ideas. I used to interview candidates for an entry level positions at the last company where I worked. When it came to talking about game design ideas, so many of them clammed up (and so weren’t hired). They claimed they had ideas, but they didn’t want us to steal them. You see this over and over again on message boards, with prospective designers asking how they can approach a publisher with a new game idea for funding without risking that the publisher will take their pitch document and run.

Here’s the thing. Every company has a massive vault of ideas that they’d like to work on. At Capybara it was an excel spreadsheet with hundreds of entries, which grew every time we had another pitch meeting. There would be 20 ideas of which 5 were good with only 1 slot for a new project. We had a running joke for every good idea on our list: Within 12-24 months, someone would announce that they were making the game. It happened over and over again. Every idea you have, someone else is already working on or has thought about and rejected for one reason or another.

Apparently, George Lucas has people who’s job is to open every letter to him, destroy the ones that have suggestions for improving Star Wars, pass on the rest and then never talk to him. You could argue that he might have been better off if he’d peeked at a few of them but this is so that he can’t ever be sued for accidentally coming up with the same idea as someone else.

Game developers and publishers don’t need your ideas. The limiting factor in this industry is not the rate and which ideas are being produced. It’s the rate at which ideas can be implemented, tested, tweaked polished and shipped.

Good design is about the thousands of tiny decisions that happen at every step of development. Consider the hundreds of tiny decisions that led to Juiced instead of NFS: Underground 2.

So I love James Portnow’s design challenges, because they get people to approach ideas the right way, as disposable sparks that need to be examined, explored and subjected to criticism by your peers in order to have any value. Design exists in a context of creation, and the realization of the ideas is far more important than the dreaming of them. We all know what happens to those who forget this truth and start shouting “design is law”.

This is a little old but worth reading.

A week ago, link aggregator Kotaku posted a story called Matt Damon OK With Movie Violence, Not OK With Game Violence. Not content to sit on their “we fit the entire story in to the headline” laurels, Kotaku tacked on a few sentences of body text and threw up a quote from Matt Damon’s mom before ending with a snarky “Double standard, much?”

Queue the outraged comments thread.

Except that Matt Damon never said what the headline says he said.

Tom Chick picks up the trail and after doing what must have been UPWARDS OF 10 MINUTES of research online, works out the real story.

If bloggers are truly the new journalists, we can at least rest assured that they’ll be applying the same standard of fact-checking and error correction that we complain that Fox News applies to the gaming industry.

There’s a kerfuffle on the Internet about the fact that you can kill people in a video game series and how you can pay to have sex with women in the same series and how you can choose to do these things in rapid succession to the same fictional person. The geniuses at IGN decided to put out a video featuring hooker killing.

The result has been an entirely rational discussion consisting of game enthusiasts and feminists coming together to form a nuanced understanding of freedom of speech, the troubling depictions of women in violent situations, and the interplay of player agency and creative narrative and mechanics in forming the content of a game along with the shifting line between stereotypes and satire. It certainly has NOT resulted in shrill protestations of innocence by gamers who often fail to even grasp why there is a big deal and even shriller condemnations by feminists, many of whom have never played the game that they are tearing apart.

The problem with trying to find a nuanced middle ground here is that it’s difficult to defend the game without falling back on either the “it’s just a game” or the “well no one HAS to kill a hooker” defenses. Both are disingenuous.

If we believe that video games are an important cultural force (and I do) then when the criticism comes, we can’t back away and say “hold on, it doesn’t count here”. There should be no take-backs. If we think that games have merit then we should be able to defend them on their merit. Grand Theft Auto 4 has a Metacritic score of 99/100. It’s pretty clear that the gaming press broadly agrees that GTA:IV is a good and important game. So it should be defensible as such.

We can’t hide behind “no one has to kill a hooker” or “it’s the players not the designers doing the murder” either. The fact is that any video game is created by a bunch of people and the collective decisions of the developers, publisher (and sometimes regulatory bodies) determines what rules and verbs are implemented in the game. Designers shape the world and decide what can and can’t be done. In GTA:IV, for all its realism, I can’t climb over a wall that’s waist height. At some point during development, Rockstar had a meeting about my character’s movement abilities and “climbing short walls” was left off the list.

Which is just to say that if they’d wanted to, Rockstar could have prevented hooker killing. They could have left hookers out of the game. They could have made it so that the hookers were invulnerable to damage after you’d paid them. They could have had cut scenes as part of the sex act that involved the hooker walking away to safety while the main character dozed in post-coital bliss in his driver seat. They could have made the game’s sanction for killing paid hookers (perhaps a bunch of crazed heavily armed pimps) so high as to make the decision untenable. There’s no way that Rockstar was unaware of the controversy around this feature in earlier games from the series, so we can’t argue ignorance or emergent gameplay. Hooker killing is in the game and it’s in there on purpose.

Does this make the game misogynist?

GTA:IV is a game about transgression. Liberty City, as photo-realistic as it is, is not a neutral simulation of the world. Just get in a car (you can borrow your cousin’s) and try to avoid committing a crime and you’ll see what I mean. The controls are tuned for high speed chases - it takes real finesse to stay under the speed limit and in your own lane without causing a pileup. Traffic moves at a snails pace and you can’t help but gun the engine and blast past all the suckers, careening around corners sending cars, pedestrians and lamp poles flying. Cars are disposable and easily stolen and a multiple homicide killing spree and police chase can be ended by ducking in to a spray shop to give your car a new coat of paint or simply by laying low for a few minutes out of sight of the police. You can attack, at any time, anyone that you see. It is far easier to be violent than it is to be law abiding in the GTA universe.

The main storyline tells the tale of a Eastern European immigrant’s rise through the ranks of the underworld, with all the violence of Scarface (the movie) and with the body count of a Mario game (which is to say - a lot). It stars a mostly male cast of racial and cultural stereotypes, though some female characters are present. In order to advance the story, you’ve got to commit a whole lot of crimes.

It also, incongruously, features one of the most robust dating simulators I’ve ever seen in a video game. You meet girls over the course of the game, you exchange phone numbers and then you can call them and ask them out. Sometimes, they call you. Once the date is arranged, you can choose to actually meet them, you can calls to cancel or you can just stand them up. Sometimes you have to choose between completing a game mission and keeping your plans. They’ll comment on your car and your clothes as you take them to places you think they’ll like (bowling, darts, cabaret show, drinks) and have awkward small talk with them. You can decide whether or not to go in for a kiss when you drop them off (I haven’t played long enough, but I’m pretty sure that you can’t date rape them, thankfully).

But it is misogynist?

On balance, I think that it’s hard to argue that GTA:IV makes it hard to play a misogynist lead character. As far as I know, there aren’t any male prostitutes offering their services, and you definitely can’t play a female lead (though to be fair, even Deus Ex had to cut the female option because of time and space constraints). There is sex in this game and the sex is clearly aimed at a straight male audience.

That said, it’s easier still to be an equal opportunity scum bag. Of all the people I’ve passed (or run over) on the street, I haven’t identified a single prostitute. The game pulls from criminal and mobster pop culture for its tropes, so the vast majority of the people you will be gunning down will be men. You have to go out of your way to hunt down and kill women. It’s part of the game play but it’s not a core part. There are tutorials or how to date someone properly in the game. You have to work out for yourself (or read about it in someone’s angry or purile screed) that you can hire and murder prostitutes.

The difficulties in talking about games like GTA:IV are legion. For one thing it’s so big that every player’s experience will be very different. Comparing notes with a friend, I learned that he’d spent a good chuck of time watching TV in the game! I didn’t even know you could do that. The scope, scale and detailing of the world in which the game happens is astounding.

The biggest reason for any of the controversy around GTA is that it sits on this weird crossroads between a realistic setting and video game ethics. No one is up in arms about the death toll in any of Super Mario Bros, Mega Man or Final Fantasy despite the fact that the number of flattened Goombas in a single session is APPALLING. GTA takes that ethic and transplants it into a world that looks very much like our own. It’s very easy to stop seeing pixels and start seeing real people, which is why Jack Thompson characterized the games as “murder simulators”.

So cultural commentators see a video featuring the death of two virtual women and get up in arms and the defense, which is “yeah but I killed hundreds of other people too” just takes the discussion on a turn for the worse. Grand Theft Auto 4 is probably one of the best games ever made. It’s also one of the most violent both because of the mandatory storyline killings and because of the freedom you are given to prey upon civilians (prostitute or otherwise) whenever the whim strikes you. It’s a fantasy about being able to cause mayhem in the real world and is all the more effective for how real the world seems.

Warren Spector, who is one of the smartest people in game design, sums up my feelings really well in an interview with Gamespot.

I am frustrated that the games in the GTA series, some of the finest combinations of pure game design and commercial appeal, offer a fictional package that makes them difficult to hold up as examples of what our medium is capable of achieving. The fictional context of GTA all but ensures that it will be portrayed in the mainstream press (and, I guess, in the courts!) as little more than a ‘murder simulator’ when it clearly is so much more–if you take the time to look.

Sadly–and this is part of the point I was trying to make in the interview last week–most people won’t take the time to look past the surface, the fiction, the context. They don’t see the fun and the freedom the game provides. They see carjackings and gun battles and hookers. You can talk about game design genius ’til you’re blue in the face. The people who want to regulate games, and the mainstream audience we want to reach, will ignore you. And then they’ll drop the hammer on our medium. Hard.

In which I complain about the results of the Great Canadian Video Game Competition.

You may have heard that this Mind Habits is the winner of the great game competition. I downloaded and played it. It’s a flash game of really simple tasks (there are like 4 total) that supposedly, if you can stand to do it every day, will make you happier by associating your name and things you like with good things. It’s all back up by Brain Training style “Science”.

So the winning game is a sort of knock off of a popular casual game. OK so far so, so. Not exactly award winning material but it might make some dollars.

Except that these games are dead easy to throw together, so their competition is like a million, billion of the same fucking game. http://www.ukresistance.co.uk/2007/11/oh-sega.html

Good Work, Telefilm.

In which I go on at some length about the things in Bioshock that frustrated me to the point that I gave up on finishing the game.

I’m doing this thing where I am trying to finish the games I buy.

I have a bad habit of buying games as talismans for leisure time, going into the store picking up three games that I’ll never really play. So my new policy is that before I can buy a new game for a system I have to finish the game I’m playing on that system.

Barring that, I have to admit that I’m not going to finish the one I’m playing.

My Xbox360 game since I got it back from repairs has been Bioshock. After a hiatus due to The Orange Box (PC), I picked it back up last night and played for a few hours. This morning, I admitted to myself that I wasn’t going to finish it.

This came as something as a surprise. I’ve been excited for Bioshock since I heard about it like two years ago. A spiritual sequel to my beloved System Shock 2? Set in an underwater art-deco steam punk world? YES PLEASE! I loved the game for the first bits but then it came apart for me. (Spoilers!)

The overall game is great and I’m glad that this style of FPS seems to be doing well in the marketplace. But so much of the later game felt so rushed or lazy to me.

Things started to go wrong when I came to the twist in the plot. See,
when they said that Bioshock was a spiritual successor to SS2, I didn’t expect that to mean that they’d use THE SAME PLOT TWIST. In both games, you are guided through the first half or so by a distant ally who communicates with you via radio. In both games they lead you to believe that someone is your enemy. In both games there is a climactic moment where you learn that THEY’RE REALLY SOMEONE ELSE and they’re your enemy after all (and maybe the other entity wasn’t such a bad guy after all? OR WERE THEY?!?). Oh and now there is a new voice actor.

Having an exact mirror of the twist from SS2 was a really disappointing blow and I don’t think I ever really recovered. From that moment on I became less and less willing to overlook the rest of the flaws in the game.

They followed this up with a sequence where your maximum health is being steadily drained due to a poison and you must search an area for the cure. The cure, it turns out, is locked behind a door with a combination lock that cannot be hacked open. You must search through a series of very similar apartments, one of which has the code written down somewhere I guess (I’ll never know because after 30 minutes of searching the same area over and over, I consulted a walkthrough for the door code).

For some reason these apartments are all populated with a small subset of the same enemies that you’ve been fighting all along, except that they have more health than ever. And the vending machines that have historically been widely available before are nowhere to be found.

The result of all this is that where before the game had been about careful resource management and there were a lot of choices for handling situations, the game suddenly became about running around (lest your health get fully drained), dying a lot (because there’s no way to buy health) respawning and fighting the same two enemy types over and over again.

After getting through that section, the cure restored my health. At this point they decided to take away my suite of plasmids (magic powers like telekenesis and pyrokenesis) and started assigning me a random power, one at a time for 30 second stretches apiece. So now, I’m moving around but every 30 seconds the screen goes blue and I have a random new power, many of which suck.

I struggled through this section (now with swearing!) and came to what appeared to be an extended chase sequence with enraged enemies between me and my quarry. I glanced at the walkthrough again, to see how far I was from the bitter end, saw the words “escort mission” and turned the console off.

Here are some lessons I have taken from my frustrations with an otherwise excellent game:

Design lesson 1: Know when to fuck with the player’s abilities.

The random assignment of Plasmids could have been a very cool idea if it had happened near the start of the game. It would have been a great way to give the player a taste of powers to come and given them something to aspire to. Instead, they did it at the end after I’ve already invested all my Adam (points) in one path or the other. By the end of the game, I have devoted many hours of game play to customizing my abilities so that they are fun for me. Why are you taking that away from me and giving me unfun crap?

Design lesson 2: Frantically rushing can be fun. Searching can be fun. Frantically searching is not fun at all.

The reason I chain my keys to my pants is that the experience of tearing apart your apartment when you are late for work is probably one of the most unfun experiences in the world. I’m not sure why the fine folks at Irrational thought it would make for good gameplay.

Design lesson 3: Beware complexity vs complication.

By the end of the game in Bioshock, you have 8 different weapons. Not counting the Wrench and Camera, each of them has 3 different ammo types which are, broadly speaking, anti-soft-things, anti-hard-things and general-purpose. Bioshock is a game of resource management so at any given time you’ll probably have a little bit of each type of ammo left in each weapon. This means that in the heat of combat, you are being asked to remember which of 18 different weapon + ammo configurations you should be using against one enemy or the other, and whether you have enough bullets left to do the job with that weapon.

Halo’s any-2-weapons or even Bioshock’s limited-Plasmids-active system is a much better way of handling this, giving the player lots of choice in the wider scheme of things (tinker with your loadout all you want between fights) while keeping the in-combat decisions down to a small and meaningful set of choices.

Design lesson 4: Make sure all styles are supported at all times.

After however many hours of methodically working my way through areas and hacking vending machines for sustenance, it was irritating as hell to find myself in a situation where moving slowly was explicitly punished and vending machines were nowhere to be found. This is a difficult line to dance on, because you want to switch things up for the player so that they don’t get bored. But the risk of saying “I know you were enjoying doing that but we’re doing THIS now” is that the player says “I don’t want to do that” and then they turn your game off.

In their defence, they stopped short of making me jump across giant chasms.

Design lesson 5: More is not different.

New enemy types are expensive in terms of resources. They take design and implementation and lots of tweaking to make them right. The alternative approach, taking the guys you have and giving them more health or damage is easier. It also risks making people bored. Even if it’s fun to shoot at a guy, shooting at that same guy for twice as long is very unlikely to be twice as fun. Familiarity breeds contempt.

I came to Bioshock with very high hopes and the first half of the game delivered. I just felt that in the end, the game design ran out of steam (har, har).