Games Industry Needs to Expand and Grow Up

This isn’t new to anybody who’s followed the games industry but the conversation always seems to be the same: change is needed but nobody knows how to make that happen. Essentially, the game industry needs more depth to it in regards to a greater variety of stories and some culture change.

At Gamasutra they have David Cage’s list of nine things the industry needs to change. I really like this list, with some of his suggestions standing out more than others, for example I totally agree with his take on meaning:

3: The importance of meaning. “When you think about it, you realize many games have absolutely nothing to say!” says Cage. “There’s nothing against that, but that’s a toy. Can we create games that have something to say? That have meaning?”

To do this, we need to let authors come in, he says. “Games today, most of the time — not all, but most — are written by programmers and graphic artists and the marketing team. We need to have authors really at the heart of the project.”

In addition, we should use all real-world themes. Most games take place in a world we can never enter, but Cage says we should focus more on human relationships. “We need to put games at the center of our society, the center of our life. Games can do that in a very unique way.”

I think another importance aspect of getting games to grow up is having more people to make games. This is why I think things like Ladies Learning Code, easy game making software, and every game jam out there.

Check out my page of game creation software for some tools to get you started on making your game.



February 14th, 2013 by Adam

Some Game Companies Pay to License Guns

I’m trying to remember if I’ve paid for a game with realistically branded guns in it. If I have then I have given money to the arms industry and I don’t like that. I have never before cared if the game was so realistic in its virtual arms that it included brand names.

An image for the sake of having an image

The whole rigamarole around the NRA and the no no longer rare school shootings in the USA have got the video game industry looking at its portrayal of gun use. People talking about guns in games as happened before and it will happen again (relevant BSG clip). This current round of media coverage on the issue has been lacking any real depth. Although it has shown that the NRA doesn’t understand irony.

Luckily, one person at EuroGamer asked a good question: do gun companies get licensing fees like car companies do from video games?

The short answer is yes. There is more to it than just licensing fees, it’s treated as a branding opportunity by the gun makers. Plus, it turns out that even BB Gun sales do increase when a model is used in a popular franchise.

The game companies the reporter spoke to were not willing to divulge any deals for guns made with arm manufactures.

However, the gun makers are more forthcoming. “[It's] absolutely the same as with cars in games,” says Barrett’s Vaughn. “We must be paid a royalty fee – either a one-time payment or a percentage of sales, all negotiable. Typically, a licensee pays between 5 per cent to 10 per cent retail price for the agreement. But we could negotiate on that.”

According to Vaughn, the cost of the license fee depends on the reputation and achievements of the developer in question. “It could be a few thousand dollars or many thousands, based on past projects and projected sales,” he explains. The way in which the weapon is presented in the game is important too. “We must give prior approval to the image or logo in order to protect the brand’s integrity.”

What’s more is that, just like we’ve seen in hollywood, the arm makers want to ensure that their weapons are used by the “good guys.” When it comes to branding you don’t want to mess it up; this goes right down to gun performance.

Turns out that people really do care about this stuff. Just this week on Reddit user Waja_Wabit posted some graphs on the efficiency of weapons in Call of Duty (MW3).

MW3 weapon graph

Still, when it comes to people killing one anther in real life it’s a symptom of a societal problem that goes well beyond gaming. Games include people running people over in a car for fun, but that hasn’t proven to be a problem that’s increased from gaming. FarmVille is focused on farming and when was the last time you heard a farmer say they started farming because they were told to by a video game?

Gun violence is a cultural problem. Canada gets all the same games as the States but we don’t have problems with bullets like they do down south. Indeed, most guns used in crimes in Toronto come from America. Blaming games does nothing to actually save lives – gun control does.

What really stuck me is that guns are so commonplace in the USA that at least one kid (allegedly) forgot he carried one (also from the EuroGamer article):

“It was a Monday and I was coming [to school] from my grandpa’s,” Smith says. “We had gone to the target range. I accidentally left a gun in my book bag. I forgot about it and took it to school. I don’t know how they found it.”

Or, one accidentally shoots their neighbours’ table.



February 7th, 2013 by Adam

Insight into Games and Business from Gabe Newell

Gabe Newell of Valve fame is one wise fellow – particularly when it comes to his day job: making games and running one of the best companies out there. Recently I’ve listened to a few interviews with him about nearly everything.

In a talk he gave to The LBJ School he reveals Valve does not have QA department but they do a ton of play testing. I also love how hat selling in TF2 was happening so quickly that it broke PayPal!

In December he sat down not once but twice (the second time with coworkers) with The Nerdist. Both interviews are worth listening to and can be found here.

The Valve handbook for new employees is referenced a bit in the Nerdist interviews and is worth looking through (PDF).

EDIT:
Here’s what Gabe said at the DCIE Summit:



February 2nd, 2013 by Adam

Approaching Customer Experience

I’ve mentioned user experience (UX) before and now there’s another term to be aware of: customer experience (CX). The main reason I think this is noteworthy is that often UX and CX are the same thing; this is particularly true as to when the experience starts.

The best approach to crafting a good experience starts before the experience proper.

Here’s a post from CX Journey blog that captures this approach:

he customer’s experience doesn’t start when the salesperson comes calling or when your customer first purchases your product. The customer experience begins long before that, when the customer realizes he has a need. By the time you try to sell something to him, it’s too late.

If you take a look at the customer experience lifecycle that I depicted in a previous post, you’ll see that the lifecycle begins when the Need arises. That Need begets Awareness (sometimes it comes after Awareness). If you’re communicating, if you’re getting the word out (through messaging and through actions) about who your company is, what your products do, how your services differ, what value you bring, what needs you meet or problems you solve, and, most importantly, what you stand for, your customers will never recite the words from the Man in the Chair.



January 25th, 2013 by Adam

Must Read: The Verge Interviews Gabe Newell

Valve CEO Gabe Newell was interviewed by The verge and it’s an excellent read. Gabe discuss the Steam Box gaming console/computer that Valve is making (the article has pictures of prototypes) and how they don’t want to replicate what’s already out there.

Controllers have their advantages and their disadvantages it looks like at Valve they have spent a lot of time thinking about how to best use a controller. This is great as they are even thinking of using biometric and gaze tracking to help make games better. They are looking beyond the gimmick:

I think you’ll see controllers coming from us that use a lot of biometric data. Maybe the motion stuff is just failure of imagination on our part, but we’re a lot more excited about biometrics as an input method. Motion just seems to be a way of [thinking] of your body as a set of communication channels. Your hands, and your wrist muscles, and your fingers are actually your highest bandwidth — so to trying to talk to a game with your arms is essentially saying “oh we’re gonna stop using ethernet and go back to 300 baud dial-up.” Maybe there are other ways to think of that. There’s more engagement when you’re using larger skeletal muscles, but whenever we go down [that path] we sort of come away unconvinced. Biometrics on the other hand is essentially adding more communication bandwidth between the game and the person playing it, especially in ways the player isn’t necessarily conscious of. Biometrics gives us more visibility. Also, gaze tracking. we think gaze tracking is gonna turn out to be super important.

He also offers some design decisions about Half-Life and Valve’s overall appoach to making games that are fun to play:

One of the things that started to drive me crazy in video games is that when I walk into a room, I’m covered with the gore and ichor of a thousand creatures that I have slayed, and the monster in there reacts to me exactly the same. So in Half-Life there’s this whole progression depending upon what you do and how scary you are [to enemies]. Eventually they start running away from you, they start talking about you, and that was just another example of having the world respond to you rather than the world kind of being autistic and ignoring everything you’ve done. So then we did Counter-Strike, [and found] the rule we used for Half-Life doesn’t work in a multiplayer game. We got all this weird data, like you put riot shields in and player numbers go up. Then you take riot shields out and player numbers go up. Fuck! It’s supposed to go the opposite [direction], right? So we had to come up with a different way.

You really should read the full interview.



January 9th, 2013 by Adam
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