Having just visited the “E3 of China” for the fourth time – I had sworn the third was going to be my last – I was recently looking at some old photos of the very first one I attended, in 2005.
My memories of ChinaJoy since then mainly consist of consecutive increases in volume and average number of booth girls per exhibitor… to say nothing of the performances of said booth girls. The vast majority simply stands on or around elevated platforms amongst her contemporaries, DSLR shutters clicking inches away. On the other hand… someone told me this year that there were pole dancers. I did not see this. There were belly dancers in 2008, but no poles. My jaw has been saved from impact by the floor at least for this year.
While enormous at roughly 3.6 billion USD in 2009, the Chinese games market (read: Chinese online games market) appears to offer only a few categories of major market games, especially in terms of context, metaphor, and aesthetic. MMOG, pseudo-historical/period, high fantasy, cute, social networking focused, and … and that seems to about do it. There are more things going on under the surface, but to the average western gamer looking into Chinese games, close enough.
I noticed that back in 2005, major international publishers and first party developers were clearly in the middle staking out ChinaJoy, with many having a significant presence. Five years later, its hard not to be struck by their seemingly smaller numbers. They’ve already made their move now, most having partnered with Chinese operators or running dedicated sourcing studios.
What does the continual expansion of the local market, along with the increased reliance of international players on Chinese operators mean for the local industry and with the rest of us? The Chinese games industry won’t be just the Chinese games industry for long.
Simply localizing a Chinese MMO for the West won’t cut it. The other trouble is the business model, which has come a long way and is being caught up to by the rest of the industry even now, but I don’t expect to see any significant business model innovation coming out of a Chinese game presence in the West. The reason microtransactions were an innovation here was from necessity for the local industry to monetize here on a consumer market that simply could not sustain any sort of viability for traditional retail. While microtransaction-based business models are in the process of finding their places in the west, particularly in SNS and mobile markets, Chinese devs will not find the same success using the same practices internationally. But since they are powerhouses of their operation/monetization models, don’t expect them not to try.
What they need to be doing now is hiring international talent at their foreign hubs, and lots of it. Then along with whatever SNS or MMO based games they’re bringing to the west, they will need to develop original games tailor-made for the international market, ditching any expectations that may have accompanied them from the mainland. I believe one happily-dropped traditional issue would be a certain “influence from on high”, but thats another story.
International publishers and developers have moved from staking out ChinaJoy, just a few years back, to now working extensively with local (Chinese) operators.
For Chinese devs to move to the international scene? The law of the land is different. It won’t be about operators, business models, or monetization at this point. For them it will be about local (international) developers.
As long as E3 doesn’t start resembling ChinaJoy, I’ll be fine.
For the last few weeks, I’ve spent the greater part of my free time soaking in the experience of Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption.
It’s everything the critics say it is – beautiful, immersive, well-written, well-acted, epic, and in terms of the physical environment, incredibly well realized. Most agree that it does a better job in plunging you into its world than GTA IV or its previous incarnations.
Its not only the improvements on performance and rendering that make Red Dead Redemption more immersive than its predecessors, and its not gameplay in the single-player either. The reviewers who do address it are right to say they stick with what works in RDR… Grand Theft Horse, one might say.
There are two fundamental differences with RDR’s sandbox that makes it much easier to get lost in the simulation, and I would argue that these particular elements position it closer to Bully than GTA IV. Its not gameplay, its not graphics, its not technology or voice acting, its not writing – its the setting, and how it relates to people and violence, and the player’s interactions with both.
Although Red Dead Redemption is without a doubt setting the bar extraordinarily high in terms of realistically and compellingly rendering huge, wide open swaths of land that feels right, in a sense the GTA series is fundamentally more ambitious; ambitious to an extent that the experience becomes less sustainable – immersion as a function of authenticity becomes more difficult to maintain.
LIBERTY CITY
Grand Theft Auto IV was another incredible technical achievement. I had never experienced such a feeling of place and life in a simulated environment in the opening hours of its gameplay – and the referential, satirical nature of the entire place only increased the delight I felt walking its streets. This was a familiar feeling – they did the same with GTA III when it was first released, and San Andreas also captured a certain sense of life, space, and danger in its take on suburban Los Angeles neighborhoods.
What happens after a few hours go by in the game? The immersive quality of the simulation as virtual place starts to crack. The more a player delves into the world, the more the experience of this fictional, satirical, living city returns to the category of “game to be gamed.” As a virtual place, that not tied into the inherent mayhem of the player’s potential actions is ultimately hollow – a collage of facades, fake doors and storefronts, a Hollywood set.
How much more ambitious can you get than attempting to capture the life and activity of a major global city, and to give the player freedom to go wherever, whenever? If the illusion of authenticity as virtual place fades for some players (it did for me), what keeps immersion in GTA going is the time-tested sandbox gameplay, technology/rendering, and unparalleled writing.
My main point though is that the beginning of GTA IV doesn’t feel like only a sandbox, it feels ALIVE. You drive carefully(maybe), observe the locals. Listen to hours of radio shows. Sit and watch television. Take a stroll through the neighborhood. You take care of your car, park it nicely. Maybe take a girl to a show.
But by the end, you know it. You’re gaming it. The sheer amount of violence you’ve experienced creates a dissonance between Liberty City as virtual city and Liberty City as deathmatch map. You careen around corners, slamming into curbs and passerby. You dump a car into the river for the fun of it. Do whatever you want, and its fun, but its not quite as alive anymore. Whether or not this is developer intention is one thing, and it is fun – but still nothing in GTA feels quite so compelling to me as those first moments of feeling the life of the city.
BULLWORTH ACADEMY
If we compare Grand Theft Auto to Bully, we see a much less ambitious, but structurally similar setting to its parent series. It remains brilliantly written with the usual solid gameplay, but incorporating such a different setting that the player’s potential actions are dramatically different, while utilizing similar progression and narrative logic.
Bully takes place in a fictional New England town, where the prep school is its most defining feature. It is no metropolitan center, but it has its quirks, its neighborhoods, its alleys. The school itself is a microcosm itself of typical school-age social groups – still a satirical take, but one much smaller in scope.
You navigate the social landscape of the student body – try to get what you need from the geeks, try to impress the girls, fight off the bullies, harass the jocks, and so on – while slowly gaining access to more of the town itself, but don’t get caught breaking curfew, mind you. The protagonist spends his time avoiding townies, exploring the natural surroundings, participating in bike races, and so on.
Bully is a take on American adolescence that should resonate with authenticity to anyone who received a contemporary American education, in ways that GTA’s stories of car chases, shootouts, and gang wars does not. Nevertheless, in terms of gameplay logic and narrative progression, Bully is still GTA at school, minus guns.
Regardless, Bully felt much more alive and authentic throughout the entire experience, simply because there is less facade(actual and symbolic) in a more fictionalized and less urban space. There is no attempt to simulate the immensely complex social ecosystems of a major global city, or even the open countryside – instead just that of a little prep school and its environs.
By reducing the amount of effort needed to make an inherently social, massive environment compelling and visually striking in order to counteract the inevitable struggles with authenticity, time can be spent instead to fleshing out the personalities of the much more limited nature of the school, town, natural environment, and social groups.
Just as importantly, the actions the player takes may be fictionalized and cartoonish, but they don’t create a dissonance between the life of the area as virtual place and the mechanisms and meaningfulness of what the player is doing.
Ultimately its far less ambitious, but the game positively teems with culturally relevant authenticity and life.
NEW AUSTIN, ET AL.
Red Dead Redemption has taken huge leaps from GTA III, Bully, and GTA IV in terms of displaying the virtual environment. GTA IV had its vistas, but RDR has VISTAS with capital letters. It without a doubt recreates the initial immersion of playing GTA IV again – the place is empty, desolate, and unforgiving, but oh-so-alive.
Here’s where Red Dead Redemption has more in common with Bully than Grand Theft Auto, however. Though technologically unparalleled, in a sense New Austin and RDR’s other territories are much less ambitious environments than Liberty City. There are very few social landscapes to map. The suggested population is the tiniest fraction of that suggested by GTA. There are no blocks and blocks of storefronts, no floors and floors of apartments. There are no crowds of people going about their business on the streets, every day, all day. There is only the desert.
The characters, the writing, and the gameplay are still all on point, but nothing new. RDR feels better than GTA because less holes show through the facade; there’s less to simulate; there’s less to impersonate. The key was making the frontier feel like the frontier, and the less people are involved, the easier it is to do that.
Red Dead Redemption is GTA in a lawless wilderness, giving greater context to the violence which you inflict and suffer, and showing less set pieces of complex AIs to simulate which ultimately feels that much more authentic and immersive. Does it make RDR less ambitious? In that sense, yes – but the experience feels richer and more alive throughout the entire game.
DESIGN NOTES:
People and social environments are hard to sustainably convey authenticity with over the course of a long game. Unless you want to attempt GTA-level scope of writing, acting, rendering, technology, narrative, and gameplay, strategically limit social environments with deliberate settings to create less fractures to cover.
Violence can make a realistically simulated environment feel less alive, less real, and less immersive over time, unless violence is an intrinsic part of the setting.
“Instead of relying on adults to spend money they don’t have on things they don’t need, now we’ll have kids spending money they don’t have on things that don’t exist.”
“A short existential game about alienation and refusal of labor.
Or, if you prefer, a playable music video.”
I felt a trace of Tale of Tales’ The Path – in order to fully experience and “finish” the game the player is required to essentially do the opposite of what the character is told; the opposite of conventional designer-dictated narrative. “Don’t stray from the path” as “Get to your cubicle.”
One could play the game forever, but the monotony of the looping routine gradually becomes agonizing.
Suicide is a game element but is used in an odd way that can’t quite seem to decide if it wants to be reminiscent of “Groundhog Day” or “Moon.”
Some of the most memorable moments are those of player-initiated absurdity. Standing alone in a field in your underwear with a cow, while your idling car blocks traffic being one. Most of it involves being in your underwear, actually.
A curiosity about this “follow/don’t follow”, “do what i say” or “don’t do what i say to do” binary is that in the end, everyone can pretty much discern the ultimate intent of the game designer, following an initial mental re-adjustment, but again, that’s the point, isn’t it?
Are the only true player-subversions of perceived or actual designer intentions through cheating, bugs, or exploits, or is it in unexplored emergence? The latter is an exploration of systems and mechanics interplay, whereas the former can be supplemented with player-constructed narrative explanation? Narrative fallacy?
I found the game to be more contemplative than subversive, and ultimately bleak, but moments of beauty persist.
The juxtaposition of commercial/mass-market imagery and Chinese Revolutionary iconography and nostalgia are nothing new in the Chinese contemporary art scene (or print T-shirt scene, for that matter)…
To see these things placed in the context of 8-bit gaming, specifically those ubiquitous Mario Brothers, is something a little less explored.
It brings a new element into play; combining the Japanese origin of the context for this piece – Mario – with the dissonance already rising from the mix of both historical (and current?) hyper-nationalistic sentiment and the wave of mass consumerism in China.
In the piece, the Revolutionary soldier throws Coca-Cola cans at Mario. What more is there to say?
Is it so possible to shut into a box what “experimental” means for games?
If so – couldn’t an experimental game push the boundaries of what we consider a game at all? Something that pushes against the definitions of given categories and expectations we have for them – something more than just incorporating unorthodox or non-mainstream elements?
What makes an unorthodox element? Swink says that most experimental games toy with our core notions of reality and how it behaves – and thus how we expect things should behave in a simulated environment. Don’t all games do this, to some extent?
The question seems to be simply how far does it go – that is, does the sense of reality in the simulated environment match what FEELS appropriate once we’re immersed, regardless of whether or not our sense of what feels right IS right – and how central is the unexpected behavior to the game mechanics?
Portal, Braid and Shadow Physics all make use of a simulated reality that runs strongly contrary to that of our own experience – but still make sense and are consistent, once a mental check and adjustment is made.
Mario and Sonic make use of representations of characters and elements that also run strongly contrary to our own experience in reality, but we don’t see it as experimental. With a Fire Flower I can shoot a fireball out of my hand… and through the water no less. However this isn’t the central mechanic, and isn’t violating a principle of reality as core to us as the idea that time moves only forward.
Is a truly experimental game a not-game? Most experimental games are all still games after all – systems of rules, meaningful decision-making, winning, losing, progressing.
There seems to be a split between what people consider experimental – one side looking at unusual/brain-bending game mechanics, but still couched firmly within the framework of “gamey” principles – and the other looking at more experiential interactive experiences aiming for immersion, but not being games per se.
Something to watch for from the USC EA Game Innovation Lab:
“The player’s voyage through The Night Journey takes them through a poetic landscape, a space that has more reflective and spiritual qualities than geographical ones. The core mechanic in the game is the act of traveling and reflecting rather than reaching certain destinations – the trip along a path of enlightenment.”
“It’s a game that rewards you for slowing down and for introspection,” says Viola, 59, a pioneer in the medium of video art for more than 35 years. “You’re alone and you’re not even told why you’re there. You just fall out of the sky into the middle of this amazing landscape with mountains, sea, desert, and forest, and go wherever you want,” he explains. “The more you do things mindfully, the more is revealed to you.”
Playdead just announced that Limbo is headed to XBLA. Looking forward to seeing this at GDC.
Limbo looks fantastic, and there’s something just so archetypally elegant about that little stroll in the woods; its evocative of Miyamoto’s childhood hillside wanderings, and my own memories of the intersections of exploration and imagination.
Are atmospheric silhouette graphics all that it takes to impress me these days? I think no – Feist and Limbo in particular look to be particularly subtle and refined in gameplay and sound as well – but there still is something to be said for simplicity of visuals taking such a strong position in the indie community now.
One of our tenets is to look closely at what the big studios do, then do the exact opposite.
This is a stylistic as well as practical decision. What happens if non-mainstream style is appropriated, to some extent, by the mainstream (as things often do with very near everything besides games)? What’s next?
Jesse Schell gave a must-watch talk at DICE this year, encapsulating a lot of issues I’ve recently been thinking about. He starts on the topic of the rise of social media games and moves to discussing convergence of social/new media, technology, entertainment and so on through game-like constructs; essentially, gameplay being incorporated into everything else we do.
Part one of this post will outline my experience with one aspect of his talk – the rise of social media gaming.
DEVIOUS, DEVIOUS SOCIAL MEDIA GAMES
As Schell states in his talk, social media gaming – specifically on Facebook – got huge in 2009.
I recently took a month or two to do some research on quite a few – “X-Wars” games, Farm games, Pet games, Quizzes, Puzzles, etc. The ones I spent the most time on were Word Challenge, Farmville, Yoville, Mafia Wars, Cafe World, Country Story, Who Has the Biggest Brain, Geo Challenge, and Crazy Planets among others.
Spending so much time on these games pained me, greatly – and yet I still managed to find myself extremely, disturbingly, addicted. I have since broken my habit and am hoping to avoid a relapse.
My experience playing them consisted largely of performing progressively repetitive, task-based, time consuming chores; making up largely an empty gameplay experience, with the system constantly prompting me with its aggressive monetization models, as well as encouraging its its viral spread across my social network.
I can’t conceal my distaste at these strategies for addiction. And yet, again… I was addicted. Briefly, but absolutely addicted.
My experience was that gameplay consisted largely of creating a sense of compulsion and obligation to move on those tasks, and yet there is some fun to be had in these games, true. In particular I enjoyed Crazy Planets with its basic artillery (e.g. Worms) gameplay.
But overall, these were the feelings that these games brought up in me:
Do this! Share this! Share to your friends! Look at this sad kitty that wandered onto your farm! Give him to your friends! Don’t wait or your crops will go to waste! Get your friends to join you otherwise your mafia is too weak! Now spend some real money on in-game currency! Go go go! Be on our game, all the time! Otherwise your fake stuff will go to waste; all of it!
What’s the bottom line?
Here’s the thing though – it works, and it works WELL. All one needs to do is to look at Zynga’s numbers to know that. But is it sustainable? And what of now these highly polished gameplay conventions, now tried and tested in social media, making their way to previously uncharted territory for games? (Part 2)
I definitely encourage everyone to watch Jesse Schell’s talk if you haven’t done so already.
“the industry was so young, no-one knew what was impossible”
My boss often jokes that if a game was made after 1995, I’m not interested. Not exactly true, but…
A nice article from Evan Stubbs pointing out just how derivative most of what we are playing now essentially is.
“I believe there [are] still lessons to be learned by studying and playing the classics. I believe that it’s fundamentally important to have a strong grounding in the history in which one designs and writes; the twisted thing is though, I can’t explain why it’s important. Often, their mechanics are somewhat broken, their graphics pitifully archaic by modern standards, and their difficulty punishing; by comparison, modern games are a marvel of design, similar to comparing the Kitty Hawk to an A380. And yet surely, if it’s been done before, isn’t it important to know about it and understand how it was done?”
These are images from a new photobook, Gameface, by Studio Kinglux.
It’s always a little disturbing being confronted with what exactly we look like when we (gamers) play most single player, non-motion controlled games.
There’s always something of a disconnect between the heightened mental stimulation and engagement we feel, and…
…the look of blank boredom that we actually physically express, despite obvious concentration.
The zombie look that dominates the gamer’s countenance never does justice to the mental engagement that is happening beneath the surface.
It makes what has been accomplished with Wii, the potential of Sony’s “Arc”, Rock Band et al, and of course Natal seem even more appealing in comparison … despite the fact that the potential of more physical inputs has been shown so far to have many, many more limitations when it comes to pure gameplay – i.e. potential of mental engagement.
Can we have games that engage us equally mentally and physically? Or is the zombie look an expression of the necessity of heightened mental engagement of these kinds of games? Is same-screen social gaming – good ol’ trash talking in one-on-one beat ‘em ups, for example – the middle ground? Is it Alternate Reality Gaming? Is it somehow finding a way to bring increased gameplay sophistication to physical input games?
“The iPad is the beginning of a new category‚ one that is hyper-convergent and humanistic.” (via designmind)
I am definitely impressed with some things (and less impressed with others), though I personally wouldn’t buy one until perhaps the 2nd or 3rd generation. That seems to be the trend for my purchasing of Apple products, anyway.
Regarding the possibilities for the iPad as a gaming device… it seems there is major potential, although it may not be as attractive to developers as Apple would like. Gamasutra had a good summary.
“…although Apple’s official specs page simply lists “accelerometer,” an Apple representative at the event told me the device’s accelerometer will be able to detect tilting on both the X and Y axes, unlike the iPhone, unlocking true 3D control as a possibility, but this capability was not demonstrated.”
True 3D control? Old school arcade turret games come to mind…
“The iPad will be as big a crap shoot for developers as the iPhone is. Forstall promised “another goldrush” when the iPad launches. But that promise, rather than exciting them, might make most developers a little queasy.”
A bigger crapshoot, I’d say. Especially within the first generation.
Also … still no Flash(!) – but Unreal Engine 3 on the other hand… the combination of low cost SDK/developer access and Unreal’s free UE3 licensing plan is an explosion of UE3 content waiting to happen, provided it sees support for non-PC dev.
Having spent some time designing for user interaction and interface on the Civilization Revolution iPhone/iPod Touch port here, I’m pretty excited to see the beta SDK for iPad roll out… I want to see the capacity for multitouch recognition. Two players simultaneously? Four?
I found this video (posted after the jump) amusing – using a gaming icon to illustrate trends covering a few different topics. Also Ratatat as soundtrack!
Commenter response to the video on Kotaku seems to communicate disdain, ambivalence, or utter bafflement. The struggle seems to be with either the lack of a powerful message or the strangeness of familiar game elements used out of context. It is what it is … only using a somewhat unorthodox medium for the subject matter.
Certainly by this point, Mario and other gaming icons have adequately penetrated the cultural/societal lexicon to be used effectively to communicate an out of context message. Will framing real life issues within the vocabulary of interactive entertainment become more widespread with technological accessibility and increased (possibly) cultural relevance? This also has plenty of implications for the serious games movement.
