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"The premise was this: Division 9 would have put players (and their friends) in the middle of an ever-encroaching zombie menace. Co-op gameplay, scarce resources, base-building, and strategic rescues were a part of the conceptual blueprint." Big interview with Ken Levine – including some video footage – of Irrational's cancelled take on the zombie genre. In a nutshell: slower, more strategic, more long-term survival than L4D's short campaigns, and had it been released, would have come out around 2006/2007.
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"This suggestion was derided by EA execs at the time — they literally couldn't imagine going to Wall Street with a message of increased profitability rather than top-line revenue growth. They wanted to make the transition to digital while continuing to grow the packaged goods business." Great Mitch Lasky post on the problems facing EA – and, indeed, almost every big games company out there. Though it stems from their announcement that they missed their targets last year (again), really, it's about the changing shape of the games industry.
16
January
2010
January
2010
Links
Tagged as:
business, cancelled, division9, ea, finance, games, interview, irrational, kenlevine, mitchlasky, profitability.
22
October
2009
October
2009
Links
Tagged as:
ea, fifa, games, integration, online, statistics, twitter, visualisation.
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Hmn. Visualisation of tweets about the word "FIFA" (do the maths there) and all games played of FIFA 10 – so you can see both which teams are doing well, and which countries have good FIFA gamers in them. There's little bits of stats-fluff, but it doesn't go nearly deep enough. It's lovely EA are doing this… but it could be, you know, useful, rather than just shiny? Bungie's statistics crown is still a long way off.
29
April
2009
April
2009
Links
Tagged as:
budget, casual, criticism, dantesinferno, design, development, difficult, ea, engineering, frontend, games, hardcasual, humour, indie, industry, job, literacy, mainstream, management, mechanics, play, product, programming, progress, project, resignation, software, work.
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"In this piece, each of the departments involved in making a videogame are examined and accused of one particular vice. In making these assessments, the assumption behind each is that the purpose of the videogames industry is to make games that players want to play, and not to make the games that developers want to play." It is good, and I'm looking forward to the second part.
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"…as developers, we need to deal more honestly with the disparity between our reach and our grasp – which is to say, what we tell ourselves our games are about, versus what they are actually about. History will see this decade as the period when games struggled with their destiny in this way." 2K Marin's JP LeBreton with a smart, insightful take on the road ahead for games design, and the many positive steps being taken along it (and: a decent commentary on the "shooting people" issue).
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"With limited influence, unlimited hands in the pie, a low barrier to critique, and the perception of triviality, frontend engineers are the janitors of software development. Rather than cleaning up trash, the boulder they toil beneath is skew: the distance between team member's conceptions of a project." This really feels very familiar: it's the most under-appreciated art in the stack of software development, and the one that takes the brunt of the crap.
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"Best of all, for impatient gamers the developer plans to conceal load screens with a mini-game where players can connect a USB keyboard and write an undergraduate thesis on the illustrations of Gustave Dore." Seriously, this already sounds much better than the Redwood Shores version…
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Farbs quit 2K Australia. This is his resignation note. It's fun, and not in any way mean.
28
April
2009
April
2009
Skate 2: Sharing play experience done right
I’ve written about Skate before, in the context of designing online games for a generation of players used to a world where they are in control, and where everything is shareable. Writing last year, I said:
I find Skate exciting because it’s a prime example of a game that understands Generation C; it allows players to share game-information outside the game – and in a manner that is so much more easily referenced, due to it having a permanent link – just as they share movies, photos, and blogposts.
The original Skate had an impressive community website, for sharing screengrabs and videos. It wasn’t without faults, though – it was very difficult to permalink to, as every request to Reel (the video-sharing community) first asked you what country you were in, and then redirected you to a homepage, rendering the permalink useless.
How refreshing, then, to see the improvements made to the new Reel site for Skate 2, released at the beginning of this year. Now, permalinks are encouraged – here’s an example – but the concessions to creative end-users go several steps further.
Once you’ve uploaded a video, Reel not only lets you view it and share it with friends, but also now provides proper good embed code, making it trivially easy to re-contextualise the video on your own site. Even more remarkably, though, Reel allows you to download the FLV (flash video format) file for the video, so you can upload it somewhere else – Youtube, Flickr, Revver, wherever you store your video. Here’s a video of me skating a short session – just click on it to watch:
They let you download the FLV! That’s brilliant. Because, you see, even though Reel is good, it’s not where my friends are; my friends are on Youtube and Flickr. When the first game was out, smart Skate-rs wanting to upload their videos to Youtube had to rip the FLV file by peeking into the source of the page; now, EA are enabling them to do that licitly. The file is, after all, still watermarked with the Skate 2 logo, still understood as a fragment of that product – so what if somebody wants to tweak it in iMovie or Windows Movie Maker, or cut it into a best-of compilation, or re-upload it to Youtube? They created the content, and so they should be free to do what they want with it.
The web facilitates and encourages this – the FLV file was always present, it was just obfuscated. By adding an explicit download link, EA demonstrate that they understand not only the fact that you want to share your footage, but also the reasons why you might want to share it, and also that they understand their place in the ecology of the web. They’ve provided the hard part: exporting video from a 360 or PS3 to the web. Now, you should be free to do what you want with it.
EA have even released a downloadable pack with more advanced cameras for filming replays – cameras that can track and follow motion-controlled patterns, for instance. Whilst you could argue that this functionality should have been free, it’s interesting to note an add-on for a game that’s about creativity and sharing, rather than gameplay – and more interesting to note that as well as providing more tools, the “filmer pack” also bumps the amount of video you can store online nearly four-fold.
The Reel site for Skate 2 is a great example of the enabling of permanence, and ‘going where people are”, that I discussed in my talks at NLGD and Develop last year. It’s also an interesting example of the kind of social play that’s much more common than simultaneous, co-operative play – namely, the sharing of play experiences around or after the fact; the objects that emerge out of play. That’s something I talked about at Playful last year (and which, I discover, shamelessly isn’t online yet. Will rectify that soon!) As ever, it’s always exciting to see real-world, big-money, examples of good practice in action. And, as a bonus: here’s my profile on Reel.
(I’ve been meaning to write this post for ages, and it’s been sitting in my draft folder for way too long. If in doubt: just release it into the world)
07
April
2009
April
2009
Links
Tagged as:
assembler, atlantis, awfulawful, corewar, data, ea, europe, fidelcastro, gameboy, games, gba, godfather2, hardware, history, horrendous, internet, license, memory, nighthorses, nintendo, portable, privacy, programming, security, stealthmissions, tomchick, toys, uk.
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"The first Godfather game had a stealth mission in which you sneaked into the Hollywood producer's house and put the horse's head under his covers. You might expect that in The Godfather II, you have to sneak out onto Lake Tahoe to assassinate Fredo. Close. Instead, you have to sneak into Cuba to garrote a bunch of soldiers whose backs are conveniently turned and then you assassinate Fidel Castro. I did not make that up." Oh jesus.
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"…the 1996 target date for Project Atlantis and the GBA's 2001 release is quite a gap. Why the delay? My guess is: Pokémon. Game Freak's socially-driven cockfighting RPG was an unexpected end-of-life hit for the Game Boy, and its out-of-left-field success added years to the fading system's life. The popularity of Pokémon might actually have been the first time Nintendo realized that technology and profitability don't go hand-in-hand." That's an interesting way of looking at it. (Also: an interesting piece on the Nintendo super-portable that never was).
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"POWERFUL MASTERS FROM THE FUTURE WITH THE STRENGTH OF A HORSE AND THE MIND OF A MAN" Ther are no more words, really.
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This is not good. And the worst part: "Hundreds of public bodies and quangos, including local councils, will also be able to access the data to investigate flytipping and other less serious crimes." It's not the police having this that's the big worry; it's the incompetent lower echelons of civil service. who shouldn't need this.
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I'd forgotten Corewar: another programming game, even more abstract than CRobots, and slightly more arcane. This Gama piece provides a nice primer to the game, its history, and its tactics.
12
February
2009
February
2009
Links
Tagged as:
cakephp, dantesinferno, development, ea, frustrating, games, horrible, makeitstop, mysql, osx, troubleshooting, wtf.
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"The first viewings of Dante's Inferno suggest the action adventure will be very similar to God of War… enemies can be smashed into the air and juggled around using simple combos that mix light and heavy attacks. Magical abilities will also feature, and fallen enemies will spill health and magic orbs that replenish respective status bars." Oh Jesus, please make it stop.
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The reason CakePHP has issues connecting to MySQL database on OSX 10.5 is because its database adaptor is explicitly looking for the default mysql socket defined in your php.ini. If you fix that, everything works. The critical adjective, if you ever search for this again, is the "OSX" part.
07
January
2009
January
2009
Links
Tagged as:
art, bloggings, blogs, boxart, boxes, ea, fifa, games, gaming, history, mainstream, packaging, petermoore, policy, popularity, protocol, socialmedia, web20.
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"A scrapbook collection of awesome videogame box art." Added to subscriptions immediately. This is going to be lovely.
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"Now I get that the sports genre is the Rodney Dangerfield of games when the awards are handed out. But c'mon, one of the best sports games of recent times not even in the Top 50? This title will sell in excess of 10 million units when all is done and dusted, but doesn't even rank a mention?" Peter Moore didn't read the editor's explanation of how the EG top 50 was worked out. Then again, neither did half the internet.
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Really not that stupid when you think about it, even if it is accompanied by Yet Another US Army Infographic…
17
December
2008
December
2008
Links
Tagged as:
activison, bobbykotick, book, children, dantesinferno, design, ea, firing, flickr, funny, games, harcasual, humour, idiocy, illustration, redundancies, story, typography, yahoo.
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"A modern tale about caring, mending and letting-go, drawn with letters and punctuation marks." Oh! This is just beautiful – a short story about a girl, and a snail, composed entirely out of type.
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"Not what I had in mind at all." George Oates on how her firing from Flickr played out, which was pretty horrific as it turned out – she was on the other side of the world, presenting on behalf of the firm. I am really not sure what Yahoo! hope to gain from many of their recent redundancies, and least of all this one.
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"You want to hear some gluttons eternally force-fed cake and chocolate milk? I don’t know what else XBox Live microtransactions were made for, broseph. " Hardcasual, I love you.
15
December
2008
December
2008
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Bye, Maggie Greene. You made Kotaku a much, much better place, and you'll be missed. After your sabbatical, please get back to writing about games somewhere.
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This is for real, people. Redwood Shores or not, I'm scared.
07
December
2008
December
2008
Links
Tagged as:
advertising, api, application, community, creation, ea, everyware, games, homebrew, infrastructure, littlebigplanet, marketing, michaelabbott, nifty, nintendods, objects, osx, play, plugin, programming, public, smart, texteditor, textmate, tigerwoods, ubicomp, video, viral, wiedenandkennedy, youtube.
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"…most public objects – and certainly all municipal objects – should offer APIs. Furthermore, specifically with regard to public infrastructures like transit systems, I believe that this should be a matter of explicit government policy. What’s a public object? A sidewalk. A building facade. A parking meter. Any discrete object in the common spatial domain, intended for the use and enjoyment of the general public. Any artifact located in or bounding upon public rights-of-way. Any discrete object which is de facto shared by and accessible to the public, regardless of its ownership or original intention. How’s that for starters?"
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Better than GetBundle, apparently – hunts down unofficial bundles on github and the like, as well. Nifty.
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"What a wonderful idea," Jennifer noted. "We never get to see the people who make the games." Michael Abbott is talking about LittleBigPlanet.
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Leanoard rounds up his favourite DS homebrew games. Some good stuff in here that I didn't know of.
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"This is just one of many examples that show you can participate in online community without having to pretend to be something you’re not. In fact, participating with authenticity is not just morally good, it’s measurably more effective."
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Powazek is right; this is definitely smart advertising, and full props to EA/W+K for just taking the credit and not trying to make it "viral"; it'll do that anyway. Although: it really is a glitch, you know.
Links & notes for this month
- A whole bunch of vintage Rawlings fashion photography from 30s and 40s Vogue. Something about many of these that's just magic; great direction, great pictures.
- Freddie25 plays the Wind Waker theme, on a selection of instruments, as a Christmas treat for you. It's delightful, and the bit when the nine-part vocals come in is lovely. Proper good, this.
- "..some tweets were destined for fail." - or, at least, not for public consumption. Oh dear.
- Nothing out of the ordinary, but the take-on-release tip is a good one, and I'll be checking out Pano.
- For each of the 25 days leading to Christmas, Paul and Storm have done one of their Randy Newman theme-songs. Twenty-five pastiches of Short People, for your pleasure. Die Hard, The Godfather, and the Big Lebowski are stand-outs.
- "I'm not sure if I have made it clear about how much I want a Sega Genesis for Christmas. I have developed a way that the gift of a Sega Genesis for me will not only benefit me with many hours of enjoyment, but it will also benefit you with many clean bathrooms, clean rooms, and meaningful hugs." Chris Baker finds the evidence of how (he thinks) he managed to get a Sega Genesis for Christmas in 1992. At least they'd stopped shipping Altered Beast with it by then.
- "Here's the most important thing to understand about the mass market for videogames: these players – the ones who aren't even remotely interested in the kind of videogames the hobbyists want to play – have very specific tastes, and when something takes off with them it continues to sell, and sell, and sell. But these players don't buy many titles – when they find the game they want, they generally just keep playing that."
- "But in a game - or, at any rate, in the kind of game you used to get for Christmas - you’re literally the only person in the universe, and literally the only person with the power to fix things. No-one’s going to come and help, no-one’s going to come and tell you off or second-guess your choices: there’s just you and a world that will stay broken unless you fix it. What’s in the box isn’t a frog power fantasy - it’s a vibrant, momentary taster of the glorious pressure of being a grown-up." Margaret, being brilliant (again) on games, Christmas, childhood, and what it means to be meaningfully alone.
- "Picking out political buzzwords from 2008 is like shooting moose in a pigpen. The fundamentals were so dizzyingly strong, it could be tough to keep them all straight." Good selection, though, both political and non.
- "Waveform Series is the laser-cut shapes of the waveform of the sound in sound editing software environment. I used some human sound such as yawn, atchoum, giggle, wow, and the sound of church bell." Utterly, utterly gorgeous.
- "A Mac OS X Leopard developer tool for debugging HTTP services by graphically creating & inspecting complex HTTP messages." Oh, that could come in handy.
- Lovely way to generate pages for your github projects - and to do so as a branch of said project. Clever.
- "CCP Games has uncovered an exploit in Eve Online that survived in the game for 4 years and may have had a massive impact on the game and game economy." Read the links for more details; suffice to say, EVE is going through a major economic upheaval right now; exploits that have lasted for four years are no longer viable, and everything's getting very expensive. Sound familiar?
- "Semi-jestfully I would talk with my friends about how stupid it would be to get an I <3 Helvetica tattoo... an even stupider idea would be to get it as a tramp stamp. Well, I got good reviews from my posse and impulsively I got it last night..." Oh boy.
- A nice post to end the year from Kars - it feels like a top-trump of so many things that have risen to the surface in my head in 2008.
- "Today is a fairly momentous day in the history of Ruby web frameworks. You will probably find the news I’m about to share with you fairly shocking, but I will attempt to explain the situation." Yehuda Katz weighs in with a great, informative post.
- "Merb and Rails already share so much in terms of design and sensibility that joining forces seemed like the obvious way to go. All we needed was to sit down for a chat and hash it out, so we did just that." No, really. Not an April Fool. It sounds like the architecture changes that are going to be made are going to be a big win for Rails 3. Looking forward to it.
- Not concerned with the Javascript bundle, but the Vibrant Ink syntax-highlighting link is lovely.
- "Left 4k Dead was made by Markus Persson, for the 2009 Java 4k Competition. The entire game is less than 4kb." Impressive, and even a bit fun.
- "Mirror's Edge is not a perfect game, perhaps, but it is something more important: it is an interesting game. It can be played and experienced on its own terms, for its own sake, if players would only allow themselves to take a single videogame specimen at face value rather than as yet another data point on the endless trudge toward realistic perfection." Ian Bogost taking a considered approach to Mirror's Edge.
- "'Why do you build your own computers?' Gloria asked earlier this week. 'Why don't you buy just buy one that's already built?' ... It's because computers are fire... If I was a caveman (I'd be dead, because I can't see clearly two feet in front of myself without glasses, but that's not the point), I wouldn't go to the guy who discovered fire and ask if I get a light off his torch. I might let him explain the process--documentation, as it were--but then I'd go off, hold the torch backwards, cut myself with the flint, and generally do it wrong."
- This appears to be some kind of 3D-tinged mind-mapping software; Flatblack were behind the rotoscoped look of Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly; this is clearly an interesting digression for them.
- The Offworld 20 "...isn't just a list of independently made and under-appreciated games, it's a list of the games that celebrate what makes Offworld Offworld: the beautiful and the bizarre, and the games trying to push the medium forward and give us something we've never seen before, in whatever incremental way." Smashing. I love Offworld already, and this is a lovely list.
- "Monopoly, in spite being the classiest of all board games, unfortunately is packaged just as boringly and uncreatively as every other garbage board game on the shelves. So, I decided to repackage it... turning the class up to 11." Very pretty, but I miss the original typeface: the 30s-style sans-serif was very important to the tone.
- "...my feeling is that the barriers to verismilitude in video games aren't technological-- lighting effects, texture work, mocapping-- but /technical/. They're matters of technique, mastering the extant toolset in order to produce the novelistic details that make for the feeling of authentic transport. Game design doesn't need a better camera, or a holodeck. What it requires is old-fashioned artistry and imaginativeness, an obsessive and nerdish Flaubert who will come along and show us how games work."
- "...it’s become apparent to me that social software is a medium turns all communication into a self-representation game whose ultimate goal is popularity."
- "I am a terrible gaming evangelist. Every time I think I’m onto something my mind’s invaded by Marcus Fenix and his sweaty, homoerotic pecs, by Cloud and his implausible sword and cod-philosophy and, most poignantly, by me, in my pajamas aged nine playing Tetris on the toilet and by me, in my pajamas aged twenty-nine, playing Tetris on the toilet." And Simon powers straight into /my/ favourite games writing of 2008. Bravo.
- "I am a terrible gaming evangelist. Every time I think I’m onto something my mind’s invaded by Marcus Fenix and his sweaty, homoerotic pecs, by Cloud and his implausible sword and cod-philosophy and, most poignantly, by me, in my pajamas aged nine playing Tetris on the toilet and by me, in my pajamas aged twenty-nine, playing Tetris on the toilet." And Simon powers straight into /my/ favourite games writing of 2008. Bravo.
- "I was startled to realize that stock photo and video purveyors actually create material in anticipation of demand... These suppliers of the world's commercial imagery are making bets on what life will look and feel like in the near future." But of course.
- "The city is here for me to use, and it tells me so." Indeed.
- Lanchester writing about games, from the point of view of a smart person who's actually played the games he described. I certainly don't agree with all his points, but I don't disagree with them all, and he's not mouthing off: he's making smart connections and indicating more than a passing familiarity with the medium. Might write a tad more on this.
- "1352 components driven by a 450 link chain and nickel silver drums, prices range from $275k–$400k." Ignoring the price: do want very much.
- It's basically Outrun 2 SP, but in hi-def, and on XBLA and PSN. And it looks like it has all the music intact. Very exciting!
- The metagame is the game. Use the elephant to earn achievements. Apart from earning slightly /too/ many instantly at the beginning, it's a lot of fun. Don't reach for the hints too early.
- Yes, it's an app about weight loss. But: the UI is superb in its touchability and suitability for task at hand, and the reporting functionality is solid (and looks like it'll get much better).