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.

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.

“One of the buzzwords in the game industry these days is immersion. Rockstar scoffs at that. Red Dead Redemption … does not merely immerse you in its fiction. Rather, it submerges you, grabbing you by the neck and forcing you down, down, down until you simply have no interest in coming up for air.” – Seth Schiesel

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.”

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

image source – FFFFOUND

“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.

Every Day the Same Dream.

Now, as a short film and in full color:

Every Day The Same Dream from Seni Kovski on Vimeo.

“…I’d rather be considered a game artist than a Political Pop artist…This doesn’t mean that I don’t care about history, simply that I can’t be responsible for it.”
- Feng Mengbo

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?

Photos taken at James Cohan Gallery Shanghai.

More on “Game Over: The Long March”:
http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2010/02/04/new-acquisition-feng-mengbos-long-march-restart
http://www.cityweekend.com.cn/beijing/events/50754/

“…it felt like “experimental” was starting to mean something dangerously specific. It meant finding a unique, promising mechanic dealing with spatial perception, imaginary physics, time manipulation, or some combination of the three and trying to squeeze all the possible interesting permutations of interactivity out of that one unique mechanic. Time, space, sound, color, structure. The criteria seems to be innovation as a mind-expanding riff on physics, and the games can almost always be seen as an attempt to answer one or two interesting questions as fully and satisfyingly as possible. And then culling the cruft.”

- Steve Swink

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.

What would be a non-digital experimental game?

Video after the break.

“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.”

http://www.thenightjourney.com/

More info here.

“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.”