The Pretentious Gamer

“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.”

Old and a dated look at Kwedit but still an amusing take on virtual goods and microtransactions in general.

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.

I love this.

Tektite? Is that you?

The first look at From Software‘s 3D Dot Heroes Game (PS3) recently made the rounds through the blag-o-web, but is so far limited to a number of nice looking high-resolution screenshots and some vague information about the context of the game.

Despite being intrigued, I’m fairly confounded by the popular reaction, especially from reader comments.

Destructoid: “Oh, From Software … you really know how to make me drool.”

Joystiq: “From Software’s latest PS3 game takes 8-bit sprites and mostly updates them for the current generation, with amazing results.”

G4TV: “The look and idea of 3D Dot Game Heroes is amazing, and I want to share it with you.”

Beyond some critical observations, reader comments mostly consist of “WANT”, “ZOMGs”, and hyperbole about how the game is “the most (insert beautiful/creative/anticipated/pretty here) thing ever”. The look certainly is attractive, but I don’t know if I would go THAT far.

A comment on GameSetWatch smartly pointed out the similarity to an older prototype of the Yuusha No Kuse Ni Namaikida games. The “8-bit graphics redone as voxel graphics” idea itself is certainly not original, as 3D tribute art and mods of this kind have been floating around for some time now. For example, see Justin Buonvino’s DeviantArt.

The question is – is this a cleverly managed/optimized birds-eye view in the same engine? Or different rendering altogether? I suspect the latter.

Essentially the game appears to be a tribute (or potentially parody) to both the aesthetics and conventions of 8-bit Japanese RPGs. Apparently the player starts out in a traditionally 2D 8-bit world which somehow turns 3D. Depending on how central this dimensional shift is to the context and/or gameplay of the game, it could actually be hilarious – imagine the mass chaos such a alteration would cause in the 8-bit residents’ lives – or at least very interesting.

I absolutely can get behind the self-referential, ironic nature of this idea. However, aesthetically speaking, the appeal so far seems to be driven on nostalgia alone, along with some basic post-processing work – a tilt-shift style focus and so on. It’s attractive, but what we’ve seen at this point doesn’t suggest too much beyond being a 8-bit-style game in 3D.

Don’t get me wrong – there’s nothing that suggests this game will be bad! It absolutely COULD be genius self-referential parody or tribute. It doesn’t even need to be brilliantly inspired to still be a solid game. However – so far there isn’t much to suggest it WILL any of those things either. What may be compelling about this title entirely remains to be seen.

My point is that that the popular reaction to this early news seems to have jumped the gun – and that 3D Dot Heroes could very easily fall into the trap of relying entirely on a visual-nostalgia gimmick. I certainly hope that won’t be the case!

Gel? Stalfos?

Now I am being a little hypocritical as usual… An 8-bit JRPG-inspired/tribute game that would get me drooling and ZOMGing? A Dragon Quest I or Legend of Zelda remake that looks, plays, and feels like one of Fumito Ueda’s games, in all their atmospheric, minimalistic glory.

Edit:
Now THIS I would pick up in an instant… if it were somehow possible to have an abstract, voxel graphics Asteroids/Pong/Space Invaders/Mario/Pac-Man mashup be coherent in the least as a game. Or maybe not.
“>

The past two years have seen the continual estrangement of Sony’s once fiercely loyal base of consumers. Specifically – all of Sony’s current issues notwithstanding(I’m certainly not ambitious enough for a commentary THAT broad at this point) – Sony’s PR situation has been prickly at best.

Just a quick recap:

So in short, not very smooth sailing.

I suppose they just had to see what else they could stir up with these: (after the jump)

(more…)