Next stop Preachyville

One of the few meager joys I manage to squeeze, blood like, from the arid stone that is my life, is watching the Games Industry adjust to radical market shifts (exiting I know). It reminds me of that old show, Harry and the Hendersons. You know… the one where the average American family (stupid husband, homely wife and sarcastic kids) ends up living with bigfoot. I knew when I was watching the show, that Harry just wants to make the Hendersons happy, but I also knew that no matter what he tries to do, be it vacuuming the carpet or making us a nice cake, he’s going to find an incredibly destructive way to fuck it all up.
The games industry is Harry.

“Hey Harry! When is Duke Nukem Forever coming out? Also, the new Diablo game is way too bright. Sort that shit out!”

One such market shift came just after a small Derby based developer discovered (or rediscovered) that adding a pair of triangles to a cuboid made not only one of the crudest representations of a pair of tits to grace our culture since we stopped painting on cave walls in Woolly Mammoth blood, but also a huge fuck-off pile of money. Gold watches all round!

Although I was too young to appreciate it at the time, having just mastered the art of turning on the telly without jamming my slimy fingers into the plug sockets, the industry’s response to Tomb Raider and it’s polygonally busty heroine, Lara Croft was nothing short of downright hilarious… providing you happened to be male.
Seeing Croft’s bizarrely angled head adorning the front page of then popular fashion-cum-smut-rag ‘The Face’ was amusing enough, especially considering that the technical restraints of the time meant that even a full blown pre-rendered image of the buxom grave robber looked more like the Master Control Program from Tron than the sultry acrobat the art team had in mind. But it was the industry’s reaction to the big pile of money Tomb Raider brought in (which was somewhere between a fat marketer screaming “KACHING” in a crowded church and Golum leaping into the volcano after the ring in Lord of the Rings) that really tickled, and continues to tickle, my funny bone.

“I heard if you complete the game without saving you get to see her naked”
Now I’m certainly not blaming Tomb Raider for the likes of Ninja Gaiden, Heavenly Sword or even the more direct demeaning rip offs of the time (Deathtrap dungeon anybody?). In fact I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a programmer present at the unveiling of the world’s first game Tennis for Two who didn’t immediately think “You know what would be awesome? If this had tits in it” but it was Tomb Raider that tried to sell us the idea that no matter how much of a improbable sex object your character is, you can get away with it as long as she (ugh) “Kicks enough but”.

“Good show old chap! Quite the Marvel! But if I might make one small suggestion? A pair of mammaries. Yes, perhaps two pairs… right there… in front of the net”

This is where the Industry goes all Harry on us. After the rip roaring success of Tomb Raider, Harry tried desperately to give us a similar experience without really understanding what was drawing us (or at least some of us) to the game in the first place. That’s Harry’s biggest flaw. He always wants to give us what he thinks we want. He just wanted to give us a nice cake, but instead he took a great big steaming sasquatch shit on the carpet.

A swarm of marketers chase Gabe Newell in an attempt to make him put more breasts in Portal 2.

Now we’ve entered another age of gaming. An age where your girlfriend has a level 70 druid in World of Warcraft and your mom spends her time playing animal Crossing on her DS. There’s been another market shift and it’s safe to say new gamers, like your mom for example, don’t really want to play Deathtrap Dungeon.

“So is the type of game you like to play Grey?”
“No Mom I-”
“It’s no wonder you don’t have a girlfriend. Tsk tsk”

The industry’s reaction so far has been typically Harry like. They’re too terrified of releasing their King Kong grip on the male gamer market to make major games towards both sexes, despite the fact developers like Valve have shown that games that don’t show women as base sexual objects can be just as successful as those that do, and they’re equally scared that this new market, as lucrative a market as it is, is eventually going to dry up, so the money they sink into female friendly game development is just enough to churn out steaming piles of condescending shit.

What Harry has failed to realize is that it’s his desperation to please the lowest common denominator for fear of not being able to find a new market that’s driving away female gamers in the first place.
Thankfully the girls haven’t taken this lying down (hoho). So while the male gamer population seems content to let their wallets and bitchy forum posts speak for them female gamers seem more intent on speaking directly for themselves, usually in very loud voices to shell shocked developers who really don’t know what misogyny actually means but they sure as hell don’t want their company associated with it.

“I… I… Oh god Dave. I met a real one… what? What? No they’re nothing like Aeris. Nothing at all.”

It isn’t limited to the gender revolution either. Want another example of Harry fucking things up? Look at his reaction to casual games. What does he do when he realises there’s a market for accessable, easy to understand but fun games? Does he start working on new ways to make games more accessible while still providing the same amount of depth? No. He just shovels a big pile of shit right on top of us.

So what’s the moral of this drawn out story? Simple. Things are going to change, eventually for the better, but before that can happen we have to face up to our own role in this farce. If the games industry is Harry then we’re the Hendersons. And it’s about time we showed that hairy bastard who’s boss.

Doctorpus M.D: “All the world’s stage 1, and all the men and women merely goombas”

Like many other Xbox live users with few spare gamer points in their pockets I spent most of the weekend pouring over the latest bit of eye candy-cum game-art Braid and came away from the experience with a largely positive impression. It’s a beautiful piece of work and it’s sold amazingly well for a game so at odds with mainstream game marketing (although not well enough to spare us the occasional livejournal-esque whine from unfortunately named game creator Jonathan Blow)
Before the game decided it was time to start melting my brain with a furious barrage of time fuckery I initially mistook the game for a Mario clone filtered through a Monet painting, a concept that filled me with pretentious art-wanker glee. I was actually just a little bit disappointed when the whole ‘Sands of Time’ style stuff kicked in, but not much. It was these first few minutes of arse-on-head baddie stomping that got me thinking about how we treat the games that are so important to our history and what we’re leaving behind for the generations that may not innately understand our love for plumbers and oddly colored hedgehogs.

Braid. Gorgeous. Go play it.

As any technology evolves it becomes increasingly user friendly, even if the complexity of that technology is growing exponentially. Game design tools are no exception. When the PC turned from the very definition of avarice into something remotely affordable the public’s demand for the tools to create our own game content began popping up on crude message boards the world over. Developers began supplying aspiring game creators with a game’s source code, then a simple level editor and then when the amateur game creator’s demanded even more, developers starting releasing the very tools used to create their games to the public. Some developers even saw a market for products with game production specifically in mind and they’ve been a staple of PC software ever since. With these tools and with no training or instruction save what they could scrounge off the internet amateur games designers have created not only extra content but they’ve made game modifications that grew to ecclipse the original game completely. It’s not hard to imagine then that sometime in the future we’re going to see a Video game creation suite so robust and user friendly it completely revolutionizes the industry. The Macromedia FLASH of game design.

While every game fan out of their early teens is crying out for something new and creative FLASH based games are taking the internet by storm. These games although lacking the budget and manpower of full fledged releases are way ahead in terms of originality, creativity and downright good design.
That’s right. A format designed originally for developing porn ads and informing people they can win an IPod if they punch a monkey in the face three times is home to more original, clever and downright great games than any of the three gaming consoles combined. Why? Because FLASH takes away the biggest barrier to entry in the game development market. The need for programming knowledge.

A first person shooter from the future.

Although hardly straightforward game development in FLASH is a breeze compared to the complexities of a language such as C++. By taking away the programming barrier you remove a problem that dogs the development process. Current game development plays out more like a game of Chinese whispers with the design staff passing on information to the programmers who then have to pass it on to the game engine. How much of the message is lost when it’s passed along from designer to programmer and so forth? How much of an idea do we lose when an idea is ‘translated’ by someone who might not understand it? Wouldn’t it be better if the designer could pass on the message to the computer directly?

That’s what a user friendly game development format would offer. The chance for artists to deliver a game without it being filtered through the minds of other people.

This shift in the development process would spill over into the amateur community as well. Anyone with a computer and an idea could pick up a copy of this game creation suite and compete on level footing with a well funded development team. The quality of the game will be decided not by who has the most expensive technology or who head hunts the best programmers but by whose design is better. It’d be a battle of ideas instead of money.

In this picture you can see how the EA designer on the left has beaten the amateur designer on the right.

I believe we’d end up with a Games community as opposed to a Games industry. With set up costs being so low perhaps the community could take a few steps away from the profit orientated movie like market it currently inhabits and perhaps takes a cue (heh) from the theatre. I’d like to see a games market where the classic games that shaped gaming history are treat and cared for as publicly owned pieces of art rather than corporate assets to be strip mined and slung on a lunch box every few years. This is all sounding a bit ‘Red Dawn’ I know and I’m sure the marketers and lawyers most developers keep in their respective dungeons would start flagelating themselves in public before letting this happen but I would like for any game creator to be free and able to make his own version of Super Mario or his own Pacman. He should be able to take Tomb Raider and reinvent it, remake it, make it relevant or make it irrelevant, he should be able to take an idea and add a little bit of himself to it. Just like a theatre director would with Shakespeare. Games could be art if we just started treating them as such.

“To Pac or not to Pac. That is the question.
Waka Waka Waka”

Developers would be free to re imagine a license as they saw fit so while some people may love the classic version of Silent Hill 2 others may enjoy the absurdist take where James is chased around ‘Disney Hill’ by a terrifying mascot called ‘Goofy Head’. Didn’t like Grand Theft Auto? How about a version that’s set in Feudal Japan? The idea that any one developer knows the only ‘right’ way to do a game is absurd and I think we’d all be better off by trying versions that offer different points of view.

Rockstar’s 2023 take on ‘The Legend of Zelda’ did not sit well with fans of the classic.

Not only would this offer a greater degree of choice, female gamers for example might appreciate Gears of War more if it had an all female cast, but it could also allow developers to create games that raise issues but still remain fun or they could question the very nature of games themselves. How about a game where you spend your time carefully putting gold coins in question marked boxes only to watch helplessly as a maraudering plumber jumps on them?
If want video games to be accepted as a valid art form then we need games that makes us think, make us consider, and above all, challenge us and I don’t think the current market is capable of giving us those games.

If you’re interesting in Braid read a sterling review of it here

Three gaming jobs that suck in real life

As I talked about earlier this week Escapism is the little white rabbit that leads Alice down the gaming hole and turns her into a human meatslab that lives on cheetos and posts ten thousand word JRPG plot summaries on IGN FAQS. In short Escapism is gaming. So it shouldn’t surprise you then that not only are game characters designed to satisfy our demands for escapism but so are the worlds they inhabit.
Designers quickly realized that not only could the characters that populated their made up worlds be completely detached from reality so could their profession. Take Crazy Taxi for example. They took a job known mostly for uncomfortable working conditions, horrific levels of tedium and racism, and made it into something awesome. So what else have they lied to us about?

3: “Oh God there’s shit everywhere” – Plumbing

Before I started my career in not getting paid to write about games on the internet I actually tried my hand at being a plumber’s apprentice. Lured in by promises of hefty paychecks and nubile big busted housewives who needed their pipes servicing I approached the job with the bright eyed, cheerful attitude people posses right up until they have to spend a day up to their knees in someone else’s shit. Needless to say the job wasn’t for me.

Super Mario would have you believe that plumbing is in fact a mystical adventure complete with princesses, rainbows and drugs that give you magical powers but the unfortunate truth is that yes, you’ll be mooching around (quite often green) pipes but usually with the intention of removing what’s blocking them and let you tell you, it’s not often piles of floating gold coins. There’s money to be made for sure if you don’t mind defrauding vulnerable old ladies but the anything else the game tries to pass off on your is pure bullshit. You’ll probably encounter some turtles but not the kind you expect and the only mushrooms you’ll find are those growing on the inside of your lungs after you accidentally inhale a big chestful of human waste.

Unfortunately. No. Not like this.

You don’t even get to fight giant alligators because rumors of giant fire breathing lizards roaming the sewers of New York are unfortunately entirely false and the only princess your likely to come across is ‘Princess’ an aging hooker whose decapitated head was blocking some Yuppie’s kitchen sink.

What Mario promises you: Hot chicks who want to make cakes for you, gold coins, drugs, adventure.

What you get: Human waste. Salmonella.

2: “CHARGE!” – Soldier

It’s unusual how games are the only form of media that get away with trying to tell us that the second world war, which killed 72 million people (47 million of which were civilians), was in fact, totally awesome. If a movie tried to show WW2 as anything but a series of tragic death scenes with a haunting ethereal soundtrack it’d be bounced out of the theaters by angry critics before you could say “Spielberg” But if video games are to believed the Normandy landings were like a 1940’s Thunder Mountain with allied soldiers lining up to experience it ‘just one more time’ before they had to go back home. If there’s still any veterans alive by the time the next generation grows up they’re going to find themselves answering a whole different set of questions. Gone are the innocent days of “What was it really like Grandpa?” and instead kids will be asking questions like ” Did you ever headshot any n00bs with the springfield Gramps?”

I… wait… what?

Getting shot in real life is a deeply traumatizing event that causes you, in most cases, to shit yourself instantly, but in games it’s barely more than an inconvenience often easily solved by walking over the next medpak you see or by simply waiting a few seconds for your wounds to heal via magic. As for mental side effects like say, horrifying flashbacks of your friends being roasted alive by flame throwers aren’t really an issue either. The only flashback you’ll be having is playing the game again in ‘Hardcore’ mode.

Even if you do bite the bullet, and by bullet I mean about 400 of them, your ‘death’ is barely even a setback as a quick tap of the quickload key brings you back Jesus Christ style to unleash some groundhog day-esque whupass on your Nazi murderers. Forget rigorous training and harsh assault courses, Boot camp lasts at most about five minutes, just long enough for a guy doing a bad impression of Tom Sizemore to teach you how to throw a grenade before you’re dumped into a firefight in the middle of France.

What Call of Duty promises you: Honour, glory, invincibility, the ability to drive any vehicle and fire any weapon without training, the occasional zombie.

What you get: Shot in the face, shot in the throat, shot in the back, shot in the ass, shot in the legs, shot in the eye, shot in the balls, blown up by tanks, blown up by planes, blown up by blimps, post traumatic stress disorder, dysentery.

1: “So I was on the toilet last night and…” – Doctor

Med school is an 8 year nightmare of constant work and study which can reduce even the most hardy student into a sniveling prescription abusing wreck. It doesn’t get any better when you qualify either. Not only must you know the illnesses and intricacies of the human body so intimately that everyone you love seems only a few heart murmurs away from instant death you also have to practice being nice to obese women so they don’t sue you when you accidentally leave a thermometer stuck up their rectum at the end of a 28 hour shift at the clinic. Games often show the best part of Medicine, that is, the part about making people not die an gloss over all the hard work, research and above all, the piles of paperwork, that come with it. This is true of just about every game ever made. When was the last time you saw Gordon Freeman crack open one of those medkits and use the supplied tweezers to pull a manhack out of his forehead? How exactly do green herbs cure zombie bites? Do you eat them or what? In gaming the medical profession has generally been reduced to leaving medical kits scattered around the place so the wounded can just walk over them and heal instantly. No need for expensive and difficult to perform procedures. No need for the slow process of actually extracting bullets and stituring wounds. Hell, most fps characters don’t even bother removing the enormous amounts of lead their bodies are riddled with which presents a whole boat load of problems when it comes to airport security. Old school games take this even further. In pretty much every brawler ever made no one ever uses medical supplies to treat their broken ribs and torn muscles, they just eat some god roast turkey or chug a soda they found in a dumpster.

“Lung Cancer? Please, step into my office”

Games like Trauma Centre tell us that surgery lasts closer to 2 minutes than 8 hours and that you’ll spend most of your medical career defusing bombs and using lasers to fight intelligent mutating bacteria instead of treating the usual assortment of skin sores, genitals legions, and extracting foreign objects from people’s rectums and none of it’s true, not one tiny little bit of it. These games would have us believe being good at ‘operation’ the board game makes us all excellent doctors.
But by far there’s no better example of Medical escapism than Team fortress 2. You never see a medic putting a heavy’s torn off hand on ice so he can sew it back on later or trying to hold a scouts guts in while performing vital surgery and you sure as hell never see him applying topical cream to the Sniper’s haemorrhoids. Instead he shoots his team mates with a healing gun. If that doesn’t sum up video games entirely, I don’t know what does.

What they promise you: Life saving techniques at your fingertips, magical powers that let you slow down time to perform medical procedures, exciting cases in volving helocopter accidents, a gun that makes people invincible.

What you get: Old women with anal prolapses, bodily discretions, close contact with all kind of wonderful contagious diseases, shit loads of paper work, student loans up your arsehole

The inevitable Watchmen video game tie in and how not to make it suck.

One of the biggest surprises about the long awaited movie adaptation of Alan Moore’s seminal ‘V for Vendetta’, aside from the fact it was to be directed by two directors known less for their apt handling of complex moral intricacies and more for stilted dialog and scenes of people being shot in slow motion, was the lack of a video game tie in. The movie (as opposed to the comic) just seemed ripe for a quick and dirty cash in. Squatted out quickly by an overworked development team (probably working for E.A or working for a company that’s working for E.A or working for a company that’s working for a …. yeah) and quickly shoveled onto 360, ps3, wii, ds, psp, the ngage or anything else they can shoehorn it into with as little trouble as possible. Just imagine it. The lithe, easy to render, figure of V complete with regenerating health and a rocket launcher stalking around London murdering vaguely Orwellian thugs and dishing out his odd brand of rhyming one liners as he goes. It would have been a travesty yes, but perhaps a profitable one.
Now with the release of the saliva inducing trailer of Moore’s best work to date ‘Watchmen’ I can’t help but think while the publishers took the subtle route with the marketing for V perhaps Watchmen won’t be so lucky.
Now don’t get me wrong, not every movie tie in is terrible. There’s Chronicles of Riddick which was okay and uh… well Quantum of Solace looks pretty good I suppose, but if they were going to do a Watchmen game right, they would have done it long before now.
So this is to whichever 3rd string development team that gets the uneasy task of taking a much loved franchise and turning it into a gross Frankenstein monster at the behest of an unfeeling corporate giant. Follow these guidelines and the game might not suck. That much.

1: We want to play as Rorschach. Not the Night Owl, not Dr Manhattan, certainly not the Silk Spectre Ozymandias, maybe the Comedian, but especially Rorschach.

Let me share something with you here. Rorschach is the best character in the series, bar none. Two parts batman to one part Charles Bronson in death wish Rorschach is the very definition of badass.
Now you may be tempted (or pressured by management) to include all of the active heroes in the series so you can please all of the fans at once or at least sell more action figures. Take my advice and make a stand on this one. One of the things Watchmen established early on in the series is that the masked heroes of the story are fallible, neurotic and ultimately, with the exception of Dr. Manhattan and perhaps Ozymandias, fairly ineffective. By the time the story of the Watchmen takes place the heroes, who were never exactly supermen to begin with, are made even less useful by old age, weariness and in the Night Owl’s case, a hefty paunch.
Not so with Rorschach.
While all the other characters wax lyrical about the human condition Rorschach is busy throwing people out of windows, breaking fingers at random and just generally being a vicious psychopath. Essentially, he’s like Batman if he were real.
Can you even imagine what the tutorial would be like for a game featuring Rorschach? Press A to enter the fridge. Press Right trigger to leap out of the fridge and punch and old man in the face. Press B to shoot a policeman in the chest with a god damn grappling gun. Press Y to kill a man with a toilet seat.
It would be awesome.

2: It must be a Brawler

Now don’t get me wrong, sneaking up on people is great and Rorschach (we’ve already established that we only want to play as Rorschach) often sneaks up on people, but only so it hurts more when he punches them in the face.
Forget sneaking past guards or driving cars in a sandbox environment. Those are obvious examples of features that look good on the back of the box but actually irritate the crap out of gamers in practice. What’s needed are nice big stretches of new York with plenty of walls to climb (a little bit Assassin’s Creed climbing is fine, as long as we get to measure the distance we’ve climbed by how long it takes a random person to hit the ground when we throw them off a building) and most importantly, a never ending stream of victims. Rapists, Muggers, Serial Killers, Parole Offenders, people with traffic tickets, any kind of criminal will do.
Make sure the world is populated with plenty of environmental and makeshift weapons. Think Assasins creed meets ‘The Warriors’. I want to be able to beat hilarious dressed 1980’s thugs to death with busted TV’s, lampposts, cricket bats, toilet seats, other thugs and anything else I can get my hands on.
You could throw in some God of War style minigames while I’m breaking someone’s fingers or throwing them down an elevator shaft if you feel the need to but make sure you get the ‘hurled through a window’ physics right first.

3: You must not follow the plot of the comic too closely

This one sounds a little odd I know as most comic book adaptations make the mistake of abandoning the plot of the comics in favour of a back story more suited to slowmotion gunfights and adverts for Nike shoes. ‘Watchmen’ on the other hand judging from the trailer and the Director’s treatment of ‘300′ (which did happen to get a crappy tie in) the movie will stick quite closely to the story of the comic book. Which is great. But chances are, being a games developer, you’ve read the comic and you’ll know that the series wasn’t exactly action packed. Sure we had Rorschach doing all this cool stuff, but a lot of the truly awesome stuff he did was done off panel or merely talked about in hushed voices by the other characters. The series as a whole was more about the human condition and perceptions of morality than it was about awesome violence. Rorschach himself was supposed to be the human embodiment of Objectivism rather than the human embodiment of Defenestration as I’ve made him out to be. Now while this makes for great reading in comic book form it does not make for a particularly exciting video game So how about setting the story a few years before the events of the comic? In the so called golden years of the heroes. Not only would this give you some freedom in terms of storyline (you would no longer need a weak excuse for having Rorschach say, travel to Nepal and throw someone off of mount everest) and allow you to add in some of the oft mention but never seen Villains present in the series.
Also you may recall that the original story does not end all that well for our intrepid hero when he’s forced to make a choice between his principles and the future of mankind. Again fantastic on paper but very unsatisfying when you’ve just fought your way through a million bad guys only to (spoiler) have your character killed by a bright blue Yule Brenner (end spoiler)
Remember how one of the Matrix game tie ins (the one that didn’t suck) Shiny’s ‘Path of Neo’ completely did away the dodgy ending of the film series and added a bizarre completely non canonical end boss battle with a giant Agent Smith composed out of lots of smaller Agent Smiths and bits of breeze block. Neo then got to beat the crap out this giant Mega Smith and rock out to ‘we are the champions’ an ending that not only made the game a better experience, but actually delivered a more satisfying conclusion than the movie did.
Now I’m not saying you’re going to out write Alan Moore because let’s be honest, there’s no hope of that even on one of his bad days (Promethea) but perhaps the watchmen game could try something similar. Instead of being rewarded with the thought provoking and morally grey original ending when the player finally beats the game he/she is instead greeted by a quick interview with the developers detailing what they changed and why. Then Rorschach beats Ozymandias to death with a coffee table. Roll Credits.