When you work on a product for too long, you get used to all of the little workarounds you need to do in order to use your software. Part of you is aware that they need to be fixed at some point, but then deadlines loom and memory fades and bugs become features.

The best cure is external playtesters. Fresh eyes, attached to bodies that have never played your game before. People who are as new to the experience as the people who will pay money for your product. In a perfect world, this means having the resources to build a multi-million test centre like Microsoft did for Halo 3 or building it in to your design process like Valve does and running playtest sessions every week or two.

Failing that, it’s a good idea to have people in your company who are not part of the day to day production of your game try a build. An outsider to the project doesn’t know or care about WHY you made the compromises that you made, they only care about their experience of the product. You should be using the same techniques as you’d use if it were external playtesters. Valve has a good PDF that covers this.

What put me in mind of this was a rant by Bill Gates about his experience trying to download Moviemaker in 2003. Most commenters seem to be taking potshots at Microsoft or at Gates, but it’s actually a great example of why having outside eyes is so important. Without knowing them, I am pretty sure that the people who worked on Microsoft.com were all pretty intelligent. Having worked in the trenches of software development, I can only sympathize and cringe along with the poor developers when Gates says:

So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying - where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.

Over at trustygamer.com, smakus writes an at once touching eulogy and scathing rant about the colour palettes used in modern games. Current screen shots and updated list of buzzwords aside, he could have saved himself the typing and simply linked to page 3 of Old Man Murray’s Rune review. Which is nearly 8 years old.

Here I am rollerblading on top of a city bus that’s travelling across a layer of concrete beneath which is - presumably - a river of sewage. The Japanese creators of Jet Grind Radio were polite enough not to make me visit it. And that’s after we bombed the darn heck out of them in World War 2! Developers: Note bright colors and sky and sun.

smackus’ post is weird, relying on a ‘back in the day’ golden age that I don’t think exists. First, the strange assumption that it’s a choice between realism and colourfulness, as if real reality wasn’t colourful as hell. The real conflict is between drab and bright. Then, smackus uses screenshots of Super Mario 64 to show us what a colourful game could look like. As if that was the last example of bright palettes in gameplay. As if Super Mario Galaxy didn’t just come out.

The truth is that an enormous number of brightly coloured games (you get the idea) are being released, even in modern times. The real question is why so many blockbusters continue to be set in Blade Runner, Mad Max or a sewer. This is not new. The same year that Super Mario 64 came out, iD released Quake. Old Man Murray again:

Here’s a depressing rundown of the levels you’ll death-march through: Nali village, cave, cave, cave, cave, dark castle, lava cave, lava dungeon, lava waterfall, lava sewer, cave, dungeon, sewer, Nali village, dungeon, cave, sewer, cave, Nali cave, tall cave with the ceiling removed, cave, dungeon, cave. I think I forgot a sewer in the middle there. If I wanted to visit a dank, lightless cave, I could go explore my own edgy basement right now. For free. I have no explanation for the tedious, sewer-centric art direction in virtually every game. Maybe publishers have convinced developers that the game buying public is composed entirely of homesick C.H.U.D.S.

I have a different theory: I think that publishers have convinced developers that the game buying public is composed almost entirely of teenage boys.

If the binder doodles, film and music consuption habits of my friends in junior high is any indication, adolescence is as much about proving that you’re not into “kids stuff” anymore, as it is about anything else. Remember when Nintendo made Wind Waker more cartoony? Remember how sales spiked when Prince of Persia went from this to this? Remember what the monsters of Doom 3 look like?

This is the legacy of teenage boys that continues to shape our industry. We sell to our audience, our audience thinks that they want “mature” titles and someone told them that mature meant dark, dank and bloody. Dystopian novels English curriculum, I am looking in your direction.

Cracked.com’s story about 7 Real Conspiracy Theories reminded me of a game I’ve wanted to work on for ages. I started thinking about it in college when I was simultaneously obsessed with Robert Anton Wilson and Civ II. In keeping with my philosophy that ideas are cheap and that it’s implementation that matters, here’s the game so far.

The main concept of the game is that there are secret masters of history behind the scenes, controlling and crafting events. The player takes on one of these puppet masters, in conflict with all the others, which are controlled by AI (or other players?). The goal is to (secretly) take over the world.

At first glance, the game appears to be very similar to any game in the Civilization series. However, all nations are entirely AI controlled. The player has no direct ability to manage unit production, send out settlers or any of the other standard Civ activities. Instead, they can direct members of their conspiracy to infiltrate organizations and governments, foment dissent, assassinate or indoctrinate leaders and other shadowy things. The idea is to shape history and humanity in a way that matches the ideology of your conspiracy.

Early portions of the game are Player vs City and then Region and then Nation. The conspiracy grows, takes over other groups as puppet organizations, and slowly winds its tentacles around the immediate area. As agents infiltrated different levels of government, the player gains more and more ability to see and then affect the direction of policy-making by the AI Nation. In time, the player encounters another shadowy organization and the real war begins.

The conflict plays out backstage, with assassinations, infiltrations and counter-infiltrations of puppet organizations, occult ceremonies, and the occasional out and out attack on your enemies. Wars are started and stopped, economies collapsed and restored and surveillance systems are created and cracked. Half the battle is getting accurate information about where and who your enemies are.

Once the existence of other secret masters comes to light, the game becomes an exercise in paranoia. Are the leaders that you’ve installed actually loyal? Is the information that you’re getting from your agents compromised? Have you really infiltrated the enemy, or is it yet another front or has your agent been brainwashed? With each passing turn, the player must sift through public information (which may or may not be lies) and secret reports (possibly also lies), attempt to sort out what’s going on and act accordingly.

All the while, the player is attempting to drag humanity toward enlightenment or bring about total submission or cause Armageddon or just built enough new landing strips for their Extra Terrestrial allies.

Aside from the Civ games where you play an apparently undying ruler over millennia, the closest game I can find for this idea is Republic: the Revolution a game I had high hopes for - hopes dashed by the lukewarm reviews. Steve Jackson’s Illuminati also has some inspiring material, though it doesn’t have a world simulator running underneath the main conflict.

Someone should make this game!

Starting in the 1930s, a psychologist named B.F. Skinner did a series of experiments involving rats, pigeons, and something called a Skinner Box. The experiments involved conditioning the animals to activate a lever and rewarding them for the behaviour with food based on a variety of different reward schedules.

It turns out that a Variable Ratio schedule, where you give out rewards after random number of actions is the best way to get an animal to hit a lever over and over again. Unlike more predictable schedules, which are associated with a lull in activity after the reward is given out, Variable Ratios mean that any lever press could be the one that dispenses food. In the delightful language of psychology “Variable schedules produce higher rates and greater resistance to extinction than most fixed schedules.” Extinction is when you stop doing something because it’s stopped rewarding you.

I first came across the Variable Ratio reward schedule in an article on Gamasutra about using behavioural psychology to make games more fun. If you stop and think for a moment, you’ll recognize the schedule in the loot drops of Diablo and just about every MMO and RPG in existence. You’ll see it in the random power-ups dropped by enemies in FPSs and SHMUPs. And you’ll see it in slot machines, Craps tables and just about every other form of gambling.

We have a funny relationship with addictiveness in this industry. When reviewers talk about a game being addictive, it’s high praise. When publishers talk about it it’s a laudable business goal or a selling point. As part of the Civilization IV marketing campaign they released a series of ads and a website for CivAnon, an Alcoholics Anonymous for Civ gamers.

Perhaps conditioned by years of defending ourselves from the charge that games are corrupting the youth, when it comes to the idea that games might be addictive for real we tend to circle the wagons.

At some point, the industry is going to have to take serious stock of the charge the claim that games are addictive. More specifically, that we have a moral obligation that conflicts with our financial obligations to decide how addictive we want our games to be.

Consider this quotation from the Gamasutra article:

The distinct pause shown under a fixed ratio schedule can be a real issue for game designers. Having a period of time where there is little incentive to play the game can lead to the player walking away.

The business side screams “OH GOD NO, we can’t let them walk away from the game! They might stop paying!” The ethical side should be asking “Ok, I want them to like this game and keep playing it, but I also want them to have a rest of their life. Where’s the balance?” Jonathan Blow asked this question eloquently at MIGS 2007. Raph Koster asked it again just last week.

If we can agree that the tobacco industry should be held culpable for deciding how much nicotine to put in its cigarettes and we can believe that there is such a thing as problem gambling, then we have to accept that it’s possible to make games that are too addictive. We have to accept the possibility that we may already have.

Way back before Daikatana came out, somewhere around Columbine, someone, I think Paul Keegan at the New York Times, wrote an amazing article about the FPS industry, especially Romero, and how they were handling the fallout. Old Man Murray linked to it, I think. I remember a key line about John Carmack being the anti-Romero.

I’ve searched and the best I can find is this letter to the editor which seems to refer to it and this comment (scroll down) which pastes some of the article (but frustratingly has a “*stuff deleted cause it was boring*” section). Anyone know if I can find the full article anywhere? Why won’t the NYT give it back?

Update: Here’s the full article. Thanks Sam!

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.

but reading essays like this and this make me want to have.