Reality Panic

As part of The Escapist’s “Gaming Über Alles” issue, I whipped up an article on positive/cool trends going on in the game industry. I cover stuff like indie viability, charitable efforts, interface diversification, social impact, etc.

As noted at the start of the piece, it is easy to get caught up in all the negative stuff, working to fix problems and so on. We rarely do take the time to see the positive.

Happily, my small contribution to balance things was appreciated by a least a few folks, as noted in the comments section, for example:

…reading articles like this make me smile and when I feel good about the games industry I feel good about me…

Nice :)

Gotta say I was quite surprised by the recent Microsoft announcement to delist underperforming Live Arcade titles. First thing that came to mind was that they needed to create better user-rating and filtering tools (in line with long-tail thinking). Or, is the cost to storing those games on the server greater than just a few conversions?

I was going to whip up a more thorough brain dump, but looks like Tadhg Kelly beat me to the punch via his opinion piece at Gamasutra). I very much like Tadhg’s dissection of the issues - though he’s a tad more colorful than needed (and attracted the ire of several commenters). Like Tadhg, I’m not buying their “forces quality” argument.

Something Tadhg doesn’t really touch on is how MS usually boasts about their unusually high conversion rates (for many of the titles) as part of their pitch to win/attract content to XBLA. Perhaps culling the duds allows them to artificially keep boasting…

The Video Games Live! concert tour finally made it up to Montreal for a two-night performance. VGL front-man Tommy Tallarico was kind enough to invite me (along with my wife) to attend.

The performance of the orchestra and singers/choir was even better than I remember it from the the show I saw in San Jose a couple of years back. Hmm, must be the awesomeness of local Montreal talent ;)

Anyway, the best part was that my wife - a total non-gamer - really enjoyed the show. She didn’t care much for the geeky cosplay portions or the big video screen with game clips. She just thought the music was enjoyable and well performed.

After the show, Tommy was curious to get suggestions from my wife on how to attract more non-gamers to the show. Despite her praise, she quickly admitted that there’s no way she ever would have come if I hadn’t dragged her along. I don’t think Tommy can really hope for more than that - at least not for a long while…

Anyway, some quick shots from the show:

Cosplayers vying for audience appreciate (and cool prizes).

Tommy Tallarico and Jack Wall pump up the audience.

Martin Leung, the Video Game Pianist, was impressive and got a standing ovation.

Tommy, Jack, two “roadies” and Martin hanging out backstage.

TED seems like such a cool conference. No doubt, they are doing something right when they sell out a year in advance of each conference! In an interesting twist, releasing much of their session content as free online videos has done nothing but drive further interest in the live event.

Anyway, there’s a ton of great presentations archived at the TED site (including one by game design guru Will Wright) and I’ve made it a personal mini-goal to watch a bunch of them. Browsing the archive, I caught myself bookmarking all the speakers/topics I was already familiar with.

So what? There’s gotta be some research out there already regarding the “magnetism” of the familiar. Well, the irony here is that TED is explicitly designed to cross-pollinate topics/speakers/areas of knowledge via their single track approach (and of course, very careful curation over the sessions) and their vetted attendee list.

And, now that I think about it, I often do this at bigger multi-track conferences. Rather than looking for new stuff, I always go to see the topic I already know a lot about (ya know, so I can “compare notes” or more successfully heckle).

Would be nifty to put on a game industry conference on all the stuff we don’t know much about (aka, “The Stuff You Should Know, But Have No Clue You Should Know Conference”). Would anyone actually show up?

Finally found the time to read “Working Without Crunch at Relentless Software“. Being a Relentless fan, I bookmarked the article a few weeks back… Anyway, nice coverage on Relentless’ approach to quality of life in the often harsh working conditions of the game biz.

The best bit of the article was a reference to this:

(It is a little clock widget on the Relentless homepage that ticks up for every second the studio has not done crunch.)

Wow! Kudos to David and Andy for making QoL a core value of the company, and making it work.

Back at the Montreal Game Summit, Ben Sawyer did a great lecture - ok, more like a rant - on games for kids and how crap they are. In this case, he meant very young kids: 6 years and under. In short, he was lamenting how it is hard for him and his son to have a fun/shared experience playing video games.

As a father of two young kids, I can certainly relate…

What really struck me from the audience Q&A after Ben’s lecture is the degree to which games for kids are expected to be educational (ie, “edutainment” that teaches ABCs, basic math, etc). Ben was very clear that he was just looking to have fun with his kids. If there was any teaching he was interested in, it was more of the intangible/intrinsic “gaming literacy” style…

Still, audience members just would not stop going on about how hard it is to design gameplay mechanics around early childhood curriculum, etc.

Why is it that parents can buy Lego without the expectation that kids will learn their ABCs from it? Or, build a sandbox without hoping better math skills will result? These forms of play/fun are understood to provide value in and of themselves.

The growth of the gaming parent demographic will likely bring about needed changes; when we can look to kids games as purely fun/shared experiences (without the supposed validation of increasing ABC skills). Meanwhile, I’ll just have to endure the pain of watching my son struggle with simple stuff like driving around a race track in 3D…

Update: Gamasutra recently featured an article by veteran design Scott Nixon titled “Piggybacking: Gaming Across the Generation Gap”.  It’s a concept that Ben mentioned during his Montreal lecture, but didn’t have a chance to get into much…