The Pretentious Gamer

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.

Should all be interesting, anyway.

Look! Free t-shirt!
…

Guys, you’re really not selling me here.

Just visited Tokyo for the first time for Tokyo Game Show. My branch was being represented by just two of us, in place of my boss.

Unfortunately I was much too busy to really spend much time with games at the show itself – I was mostly running around like a maniac. I’ll refrain from commenting much on the show itself. Although I have to say I was very struck by Inafune’s comments on the state of the Japanese game industry:

“Personally when I looked around [at] all the different games at the TGS floor,” Capcom’s Ben Judd translated Inafune, “I said ‘Man, Japan is over. We’re done. Our game industry is finished.’”

For many people Japan does represent the past of the games industry. But there are better places to read about this assessment than here. So what’s the future of the industry? China and Korea? I work in a Shanghai branch of a US publisher, but I’m not ready to agree with that sentiment just yet.

One other note… when you’ve seen cartoon versions of a city your whole life, it can get a little surreal to see the real place.

Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Design Introduction

An approach to classifying early game concept design sees design methodologies classified as either top-down or bottom-up. Gamasutra has a good article on this here: Game Design Cognition: The Bottom-Up And Top-Down Approaches.

The short of it is that one can approach a game from the verbs or use-cases that the player can utilize, proceeding to elaborating specific mechanics for those verbs, moving onto the features and content that makes up the majority of the game itself, before finally arriving at the context and greater thematic content, etc.

The opposite approach starts with developing an overall abstracted concept of the game – answering questions such as what is this game about, what is the meaning, the setting, the ideas at play? This abstract concept is then used to construct a context which the features, gameplay mechanics and specific actions can be ultimately derived from.

Top-Down Design Plus Values Consideration at G4C 101

The first day of the Games for Change festival was focused on the “G4C 101 Workshop” – directed at nonprofits and other professionals new to game design and production concepts and essentially coach them through the processes and concerns inherent in building a social issue game. Mary Flanagan, a professor at Dartmouth and head of the Tiltfactor Lab research group just gave a talk (when I began writing this, several days ago) for the workshop detailing a somewhat altered perspective on the top-down design approach.

She began by laying out some of the challenges for aspiring serious games developers, among which include technical proficiency (programming, art, etc.), business models and sustainability (costs, funding, boards), affordability, and finally design proficiency. Since the audience was in large part new to thinking in terms of game systems, giving a basic understanding of the process of design was the goal of the talk. The main challenges were to incorporate consideration of values in the design process, and how to make rules which support that value.

Led by Professor Flanagan, the Grow-A-Game exercise directed participants through a primarily top-down approach to game design. As injecting a particular human value or principle into gameplay systems is generally a central focus of social issue games, this particular design approach began with examining potentially relevant values, and proceeding from there. Some examples of commonly accepted human values across cultures included privacy, creative expression, diversity, cooperation, group success, community, humility, and so on. The exercise used different color cards to randomly select values, verbs/actions, games, and challenges, which were then used to brainstorm new gameplay concepts using the selected value and other guidelines. One of our early card combinations was security/safety plus monopoly, from which we envisioned a game which had community security performing as a sort of gameplay capital.

It was interesting to see what a diverse group of concepts came together from such a simple exercise, although conceptually it wasn’t much of a stretch in terms of design methodology. Values become a part of the high level concepting, which can complicate matters, but a good gameplay mechanic can be designed for almost anything.

Apparently a number of serious games have been made starting from this method, including Hush (singing + human rights) and Layoff (empathy + security), both of which are worth checking out.

Here I am at West 13th street in NY; the Games for Change festival is underway. Posting soon on the sessions I will be attending.

A quick link reference of some notable speakers:

Opening Keynote – Nicholas Kristof: author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at the The New York Times.

Lucy Bradshaw: of Maxis and the Executive Producer of Spore

Jim Gee: Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Chair in Literacy Studies at Arizona State University

Henry Jenkins: Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities, author of Convergence Culture among many others

Ian Bogost: CEO of Persuasive Games and author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. Also runs Water Cooler Games with Gonzalo Frasca (of Ludology.org, Powerful Robot Games, and Newsgaming.com).

Heather Chaplin: journalist (NPR, NYT) and author of Smart Bomb. She also gave a pretty critical talk at GDC this year, which I do hope to comment on eventually here.

N’Gai Croal: Formerly of Newsweek magazine and the Level Up blog. Looking forward to seeing what he comes up with next.

Mary Flanagan: Director of the Tiltfactor Lab

Tracy Fullerton: Director of the Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab and author of Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Designing Innovative Games

Judith Helfand: Independent filmmaker

John Nordlinger: Microsoft Research

Seth Scheisel: New York Times game critic

Eric Zimmerman: CEO of Gamelab and author of Rules of Play

Brenda Brathwaite: veteran game designer and professor at Savannah College of Art and Design

G4C twittering happening here.

Some very interesting conceptual things going on here. A conjunction of art, nonprofits and NGOs, academia, media and new media, and finally… games development – the results of which are still clearly at a very nascent stage. Very glad to meet some people I’ve been reading about for a long time.