Results tagged “marketing” from Softcore Gamer

Brenda Braithwaite posted a very eloquent eulogy for the text parser as a method by which players can interact with games.

I am regrettably forced to announce the death of the text parser. It is a death that I suffer with great sadness and fond memories of its life. I am not sure exactly when it died.

It's really very nicely written, so you ought to visit her site and read the whole thing. I started to write a reply in the comments under her post, but it turns out I have a lot to say on the subject, so I moved it here. For anyone interested, here is my response:

I can't help but wonder what brought on this sudden funereal outburst. Did something happen that causes you to suddenly toll the death knell for text-based games? I'm especially curious because it seems a bit premature - or, at least, somewhat misleading.

All your points stand, and you have presented them beautifully. Text parsing was once the dominant modes of player interaction - at least within certain genres - and now it is not. I do not expect it will ever reclaim that position. The modes that replaced it are, frankly, more evolved. They are better suited to the things that are typically demanded of a user interface, and more accessible to a wider audience. These facts are unlikely to change.

But I hope you're willing to recognize that there is more to gaming than the mainstream. The fact is, today there is a vibrant community of text-based game designers producing interactive fiction. It's not mainstream, but that hardly makes it irrelevant. Modern IF frequently pushes against boundaries that most designers ignore: emotion and conversation models, narrative voice, dynamic plot, emotional agency. Games like Galatea, Photopia, Floatpoint, The Baron, Violet - these are games that all aspiring designers should play, not because they represent the dominant form, but because they demonstrate mechanics and techniques that are commonly absent from the traditional corpus.

I would argue, although this comes down to little more than guessing at future trends, that IF has the potential to be relevant outside the relatively small circle of designers and design-enthusiasts, as well. The audience for games is expanding, and I believe that when all is said and done, it won't be a simple bifurcation of the market into casual and hardcore camps. Art games - experimental games - are now getting more exposure than has ever before been possible. I would place your Mechanic is the Message series firmly in this category, along with a number of the interactive fiction pieces produced in the last five years. I believe the audience for this sort of game is growing, and will eventually establish itself as a significant segment of the games market.

(And Twitter may not be able to revive the popularity of textual interaction as we remember it, but I am far from convinced that we won't see a new sort of text-based game that enjoys success through modern technological trends. These phenomena are simply too new for the possibilities to have been thoroughly tested.)

But that, really, is neither here nor there. My point is that, although the text parser may have passed its heyday some time ago, it's hardly fair to call out its death while talented and hardworking designers are busy iterating against important design problems in precisely that format. To do so suggests that the work being done in interactive fiction today is irrelevant - merely a throwback to the glory days of text adventure games. Nothing is farther from the truth.

Happy April Fools' Day, everyone. A funny thing happened to me today: I got a letter informing me of my acceptance into the Interactive Media grad school program at USC's School for Cinematic Arts. I was introduced to the program by Jamie last summer and worked hard to put together what I felt was a strong application at the end of last year, so I'm both relieved and excited to get this news. I think this program is an excellent fit for me and exactly what I want to spend the next three years doing. I'm also nervous as hell because going back to school will mean completely changing my life around. This is not a bad thing in itself - from the right perspective, it's a very good thing - but change is always scary.

I do want to point out the comedically bad timing on the part of the Cinematic Arts Admissions Committee. Sending out acceptance letters on April Fools' Day? That's a good way to cause a lot of nervous breakdowns. Er, did that come off as unappreciative? Sorry. Please don't send me another letter on April 2nd taking it all back. Thanks!

Seriously, though, we've been conditioned not to believe anything we read on April Fools' Day - especially those of us who are connected to the tech industry and get our news from the Internet. Most of our trusted news sources and the iconic companies they report on have a history of prankishness that comes out this time of year. I like the way John Murrell put in today's Good Morning Silicon Valley: "...maybe we need a day like this each year. Thanksgiving reminds us to be grateful; April Fools’ reminds us to be skeptical. Both qualities are helpful year-round." In case you missed them, there were a couple great April Fools' Day gags today. My favorites included IGN's exclusive trailer for a live-action Legend of Zelda movie (which clearly represents a great deal of effort for a joke and, frankly, makes me wish it wasn't April first; this movie would be terrible but I would probably go totally crazy and I would definitely stand in line for it on opening night); the trailer for Blizzard's new cutting-edge version of WoW, Molten Core; and ThinkGeek's revolutionary Betamax to HD-DVD converter.

Have a happy April and stay skeptical!

This time of year is always busy, but this year has been especially busy for me. This is the first chance I've had in a long while to come up for air and leave a post on the blog while I'm here. Other projects have kept me from updating for the past several weeks, which is a shame mostly because I left a lot of interesting comments hanging on the previous entry. Certainly there is a lot to be said on the relationship between games and movies, and it's a topic that I hope to revisit in the near future.

For the moment, let me share with you a bit of what I've been working on lately. Here's the Cache website, which is intended to be the public face of a series of projects that Jamie and I are currently working on, all related back to one key idea: creating narrative through a process of discovery rather than role-playing. The first such project, titled CONTROL, is currently in a beta stage and can be downloaded from the website.

CONTROL is based on a card game created by Jamie and Mike Rossmassler. There are 256 cards, laid out in sixteen four-by-four grids. Each card in the grid represents a space; each of the sixteen sequential pages represents a fifteen-second span of time. The player chooses a card and reads it: it describes the space during that time. The player chooses more cards, or turns the page in order to increment or decrement time. After a few such moves, the player selects one card out of his or her hand to set aside; the others are returned. After sixteen turns, the player has build up an inventory (a cache, if you will) of sixteen carefully-selected cards which tell a story.

This story represents the creative aspect of the game. Although the player doesn't create, or even influence, what is written on any of these cards, they get to choose which ones to include and which to ignore, and how they should be assembled. The results can be surprisingly unpredictable. Some players are documentarians; others take artistic license with their stories. Once the game is completed, the story remains, an artifact of the experience.

We're looking for feedback from playtesters so that we can continue to improve CONTROL and the other games that will follow. You can help by downloading and playing the beta version and filling out our survey. Any feedback is appreciated! This is an experimental game, so we're trying to push boundaries, but ultimately we're trying to figure out how to make it fun, as well.

Special note to people who have already played an earlier version of CONTROL: There were a couple versions that saw closed beta testing. One was the original paper prototype that Jamie and Mike put together. Another was an early digital version that suffered from a massive memory leak. If you played one of these versions, I encourage you to at least register your email address at the Cache website. The memory leak has been fixed, and the most recent version added in a much-requested feature that was missing from the original release. We will continue to update the game with features, based on feedback and our own wishlist, and we'll notify you occasionally when a new version goes live.

Busy weekend, busy week; I've been stressed out and too busy to write. Expect more following this weekend, including: interactive fiction, gender and sexuality, and my wonderful companion cube t-shirt.

In the meantime, treat your ears with some more Portal-inspired music, courtesy of Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Looks like the viral marketing is really starting to kick in; it seems that a lot of people are talking about Portal, and encouraging people who don't usually play games to check it out. This track, created by the aptly-named Victims of Science, is very well done and I will be listening to it alongside Still Alive for a while yet. Also, on that subject, check out this interview of Jonathan Coulton. Apparently Still Alive will see an official release over Steam before too long. And, Valve promised cake but never delivered. The cake is a lie!

Game|Life reports that developer David Braben is claiming Bioshock and Halo 3 aren't next-gen games. Obviously this is an incendiary comment intended to stir up controversy and draw attention to Braben's upcoming "techno thriller" The Outsider, which I had never heard of before now. So, congratulations, Mr. Braben, mission accomplished.

Braben can make this statement because he's not using the generally accepted definition of "next-gen." According to his own definition, games "must give the player the chance to change the story beyond simply following a good or evil path" in order to qualify. I consider this an admirable proposition, in some sense - certainly, I agree with him that Bioshock and Halo 3 represent a traditionally linear sort of game design, which results in a fundamentally predictable narrative experience. This has advantages and disadvantages over a nonlinear system, such as can be found in, for example, Second Life, Civilization or Animal Crossing. I also agree with Braben that the industry could stand to see more exploration and innovation in the nonlinear game space. But the fact remains that, while Braben might consider this the criteria for creating a next generation game, no one else does.

In common understanding, generations are strictly defined and indelibly related to hardware cycles, and games are classified by the cycle during which they're released. For the most part, it's a clear-cut classification. Braben is clearly trying to redefine generations based on something other than hardware; presumably, as artistic movements based on universal design philosophies. Movements are similar to generations in that they're sequentially progressive - each iteration is a reaction to its predecessor. But I don't think that's an accurate description of the way games are developed. First of all, it would be difficult to pin down design philosophies that come anywhere near universal at a given time. There's simply too much variety in the industry. Additionally, even though one could argue that games are designed as reactions to previous games, there generally isn't a stable progression to it. Rather, a game's design is likely to include a number of philosophical precepts, each a response to a different (or, more likely, many different) earlier games.

The best way to classify games uses genres rather than artistic movements. Genres are relatively stable and tend to coexist rather than occur sequentially. Generally, games are well suited to this sort of organization, but certainly there are clusters or sequences of games within some genres that can be classified or analyzed differently - and, for that matter, there are many cases of games that straddle genres, or fuse them, or defy them. Genres are complicated, and a favorite subject of mine, so no doubt the discussion of how genres are differentiated and how games are classified within them will continue to be a common theme of my posts.

While I think all this is fascinating (and maybe that's just me), I suspect that Braben's intention isn't to imply a different sort of classification system for games. I think he's merely trying to use the phrase "next-gen" as a synonym for "cutting-edge" or "avant-garde," or maybe even "buzz-worthy." Which I don't think is particularly accurate, either. The claim that Bioshock and Halo 3 don't push the envelope is simply wrong, even if the envelope they're pushing isn't the same one Braben is interested in. Game design is eminently multi-dimensional, and these games, along with Portal, and others, no doubt, are breaking ground in one particular dimension of it: narrative context.

Certainly this is true of Portal, which hints throughout at the larger world in which the game takes place, and contains just the right amount of mystery to ensure the player is considering the implications of the things they are presented with throughout the course of the game. And that's for new players who are unfamiliar with the Half Life universe - for anyone who has played through that saga, Portal preserves much the same sort of mystery by hinting strongly that it exists within the established universe but being coy with details such as when it takes place and how it influences the larger world. I'd walk on thin ice to talk any more about Bioshock (although I have acquired the game, now, so expect more informed analysis in the future), but my impressions of that game lead me to believe it also invests heavily in the backstory of the setting. Details like the frequently-referenced dancing couple are excellent examples of a focus on creating a rich, detailed atmosphere as a backdrop that continually informs the plot - and may in some cases, I would argue, be a more important component to the narrative experience than the plot is. I'd also make the claim that Halo 3 plays a very strong hand in terms of creating and engaging the audience with a substantial backstory. For the past several years, Microsoft and Bungie have invested an enormous amount of marketing capital into accessories to the Halo franchise: a series of paperback books (that aren't about the main characters of the game), a pair of world-class ARGs (again, detailing events that occur outside the scope of the games), and two incredible television campaigns for Halo 3 (Neill Blomkamp's three part series and the Believe campaign, which are remarkable in that they do not show content from the game or deal directly with the plot or characters from the game). The purpose of all of these products, aside from obviously generating awareness and excitement for the games, has been to expand the Halo universe. I think it's also worth noting that Halo 2 broke from the original's precedent to detail the social and religious organizations of the Covenant, drawing the focus of the narrative away from the simple Space Marine story and instead swinging our attention around to the explore the political landscape of the game world.

Are these games the first in history to include backstories? Of course not. But they raise the stakes, elevating the idea of narrative context and carefully designed atmosphere and its role in game design to a new height, much as Braben is - I can only assume - attempting to do with nonlinearity.

So, to conclude, David Braben's disparagement of Bioshock and Halo 3 is without qualification baseless and completely out of line. I wish it were more unusual for a developer or publisher to make this sort of outrageous claim in an attempt to draw attention to themselves, but the fact of the matter is that it's a common and effective tactic. Certainly it has brought The Outsider to my attention, and I will be curiously following its progress from now on. Any attempts to experiment and break new ground in any aspect of game design is welcome news to me. We'll just have to wait and see if the game can live up to the significant promises its designer has been making.

Portal could be the best game of the year. I'm just going to put that out there right now. I know, I know; there's a lot coming out in the next two months that I'm pretty excited about. But even so. I'm pretty sure it's head and shoulders above anything that's come out so far, which is saying a hell of a lot. Better than Guitar Hero II; better than Phantom Hourglass; better than Halo 3; and speaking confidently without having played it, better than Bioshock. (Anything I'm overlooking?) These are all fantastic games, but I'm absolutely in love with Portal.

The game's best quality, without question, is its spectacular sense of humor. This is a pervasive aspect of the environment, and although it's strictly secondary to the gameplay (primarily taking the form of the unmistakable modulated voice-over you'll recognize from the advertising, as well as signage and graffiti decorating the game's levels) it absolutely makes the game. The game actually has a surprisingly varied emotional score - surprising for a puzzle game, certainly - with a fair bit of pathos thrown in, like the humor, almost off-handedly. The bit about the Weighted Companion Cube is brilliant. All of this contributes to the game's sense of style, which is excellent. Not the same caliber as Bioshock's, perhaps, but still very well done.

As for the gameplay itself, all of the fears I had about the game being more of a platformer than a puzzle game proved completely unfounded. Certainly there is an element of platforming, but that is almost never the focus of the game. There are threatening elements, but they exist primarily in service to the art direction; there's just enough to create a sense of danger, without ever making the player feel like they're fighting against the level designer. The levels are actually put together to be quite forgiving (the thing that really assuaged my worries is that the character doesn't take falling damage), which fits the general puzzles-first philosophy: the hard part is always figuring out what you have to do and how to make it work; once you have a solution, you might have to practice a couple times to get it right, but you don't have to worry too much about the execution. And when you do trip up on something, well, there are two things that come to your rescue: one, the game is generous with its save points, so dying has a relatively low cost; and two, the nature of the portals means that if you fall from the area you want to be in to an area you've already completed, nine times out of ten there's still a portal open up where you want to be, so getting back is trivial.

Let me say a couple things about the portals, while I'm at it. They're great. It's incredible how Valve could take a physics-based puzzle game, add a set of completely nonphysical interactions, and make the whole thing feel so damn intuitive. Partially it's the way they've put together the physics of the portals - the first time you see yourself through a portal across the room, or watch a cube bobbing up and down between two adjacent portals in the floor, you'll be amazed at how natural it seems. Mostly, though, it's a testament to the level design and difficulty progression, of which I have never seen the like. The game is divided into nineteen parts, but really it's seventeen tutorial levels, one practice level, and then the game proper. Each tutorial level teaches you something new - introducing you to an aspect of the environment or a skill - but almost all of it is taught by discovery. That is, unlike every other game I've ever played a tutorial level for, you are never explicitly told how to interact with the environment. The things you're supposed to learn aren't spelled out for you. That might sound intimidating, but it's done so skillfully, you hardly notice it. The pedagogical goal for each tutorial levels is so simple that it's easy to figure it out, but when you start using them all in combination it's breathtaking.

I'm also a big fan of some things that are more indirectly related to the game. The theme song, which plays in full over the credits, it by one of my all-time favorite artists and is one of his best. (If you're looking for the song, "Still Alive," there are several YouTube videos that include it, or you can find just the mp3. But be specifically warned, the song contains some spoilers, and you're really better off playing the game first.) There's an Aperture Science website that was launched a while ago as part of the marketing for the game (type "login", any username, with the password "portal" to apply to be a test subject, which is fun) but there's actually some extra content there for anyone who pays close attention in the game. (Again, watch out for spoilers on the website. If you really want to see it, use the username CJOHNSON and password TIER3 and you can read a history of Aperture Science. Spoilsport.) And, not least by any stretch, the Weighted Companion Cube has turned into a whole thing, which I could not be more pleased about. Rock, Paper, Shotgun, also excited, has been doing a fantastic job keeping track of it. They're reporting that Valve is planning to release a plush WCC sometime before Christmas, which will go great with my new wallpaper.

I probably don't need to gush any more, so I'll wrap up. In summary: if you inhabit space, have emotions, and if you have any interest in puzzle games at all, go play Portal right now. I can't personally vouch for any of the rest of the Orange Box yet, because I physically could not tear myself away from this game, but basically I can't imagine that you'd be disappointed with your purchase.