Reality Panic

I got a call from Wired Magazine today. Seems like they were looking back at all the coverage they gave the recent Matrix movies/game, and couldn’t quite understand why the game has not faired as well as expected (critically and commercially)…

Among many other questions, the journo wanted to know why publishers always figure that a licensed game was the safer bet, despite the fact that historically original games are the big money earners. Big question.

Interestingly enough, I had just been chatting with Scott Miller about this - being one of his favorite topics to rant on. To some extent, it boils down to a gamble on stats:

- Revenues generated by licensed games are, for the most part, clustered tightly together (think of a tall/thin bell curve). Despite a few outliers to the left (ET) or right (GoldenEye), most licensed games fall within this tight cluster of revenue figures.

- Revenues generated by original games are, for the most part, all over the map. While you may get a few extremely profitable outliers at the far right of the curve, you’ve got just as many utter bombs (revenue wise) at the left of the curve, and everything spread along (think of a very wide/flat curve).

So, what’s the conclusion? Publishers see much less risk in licensed games because they can predict with some certainty that they’ll hit within that tight cluster of revenues. Trying to predict where an original game will land is much tougher, no doubt. Or, as Scott puts it, publishers use licenses to save their butts…

Still, is that an excuse?

(On a related note, I found this Hollywood style mock-pitching editorial to be quite amusing…)

This news bit covering a recent media ratings/censorship conference in Australia briefly mentions how Oz censors are being too uptight when it comes to games. This is no surprise, as many can remember their ban of GTA3 and other recent games…

This all reminds me of the cross-cultural interface design session I attended back at SIGGRAPH (which I’ve mentioned before). In particular, the concept of “uncertainty avoidance”, which is one of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. Uncertainty avoidance can be defined as the degree to which people feel threatened by, and attempt to avoid ambiguous situations; and cultures that desire to avoid uncertainty are resistant to change, and engage in stabilization practices such as rigid rules and rituals. (This is pretty serious stuff that global orgs like the Peace Corps study).

So, it is quite interesting to see that in the above mentioned censorship article criticizing the Australians for being too uptight, it is the Swedes that are most lax (Sweden has a pretty low UA index). The Brits, with a slightly higher UA index, have classifications but are not overly anxious. The USA is about the same level as Australia (but I am sure it is guys like Jack Thompson that bump up the score). Even Canada has a similar UA score, which might explain earlier bans on games like Soldier of Fortune and looking to games as a reason for police disrespect/violence.

The real clincher is Greece. The Greeks have the highest level of uncertainty avoidance among all the profiled countries. Ah, their desire to wipe out all digital gaming starts to make a bit more sense ;)

I went to see Sony’s new flick, Underworld, this weekend. Not sure what critics are saying, but I quite enjoyed this stylish, very Goth melding of The Matrix, Blade and Romeo & Juliet. Not likely to win an Oscar, but fun nonetheless.

My guess is that most will view Underworld as pretty shallow - focusing on the leather clad heroin and Woo-inspired fight choreography. But, on closer inspection, one can notice some good character development, multiple story arcs, good use of visual/textual symbols, decent dialogue, a plot twist or two, emotionally complex decisions, etc. A lot of good stuff that we should see more of in games, come to think of it (good thing David Freeman is putting out a book on the topic of adding emotial depth to games)… But I digress.

From an Underworld related post at Game Girl Advance, it is interesting (shocking?) to hear that pen&paper RPG creator White Wolf is trying to sue Sony over copyright infringement - hmm, I swear I’ve seen such things as vampires/etc before…

Finally, thought it was ironic that in many theatres in the US (ie, the ones run by Regal Cinema) won’t be allowing violent/etc arcades games to be played, while simultaneously showing on the big screens all those depictions it aims to ban - I must say, Underworld had a lot of game-like gunplay to it. Sadly, how can we expect less when our very own “followers” can’t get the ratings thing figured out :(

A session back at SIGGRAPH this summer on mods/art really opened my eyes to some of the really cool stuff being done with games, by artists. Part of that session’s look at mods was their ability to serve as an outlet of artistic expression (as opposed to just coding up new weapons and levels). One of the mods talked about was the infamous (and sorely misunderstood) 9/11 Survivor piece…

Spurred by a recent post in the IGDA forums by a guy doing a survey on games as social commentary (whom, at this very moment, I realized is the same guy who put up a paper on his Mexican immagration games, which was referenced in this Buzzcut posting), I started noticing a certain level of awareness building…

For example, there’s an interesting piece at the BBC looking at the politics of Elixir’s recently released Republic: The Revolution. Also, the NY Times has a piece exploring mods as a reflection of reality. Then we have the hint at Ludology.org of their project of news inspired game sims.

Not that social commentary in games hasn’t been explored already, but it is nice to see some further momentum building. Imagine when games/mods are as easy to create as picking up a DV cam…

One of the major recurring themes from the recent GDC Europe, was the concern over the arrival of the next next-gen consoles. In fact, there were 7(!) panels dedicated to the topic (ie, one each to cover programming, visual arts, production, business, audio, design and the industry in general). This is no joke. Developers hit many stumbling blocks with the current transition and it is not likely to be any different for the next…

Well, unless of course, we all get a little more disciplined.

On the engineering front, it still baffles me that development is not done in a more disciplined fashion. Despite several attempts to bring light to our shortcomings, there does not seem to be much in terms of implementing established software development methodologies. Not that something like extreme programming is THE answer, but a recent Wired article does make it seem compelling.

Interestingly enough, our shortcomings are most evident when an experienced programmer gets hired into a game dev studio. I’ve heard first hand of attempts to instill more rigorous development methods, only to be laughed at and told “that’s now how you make games”…

But, if you actually look at it, only via a more rigorous approach to development can developers actually be free to be creative and innovate. The usual reaction is that systematic approaches will stifle creativity when in fact the inverse is true…

And we wonder why games take so long to make, are full of bugs and rarely reach their full potential.

Are all sequels bad? I’ve been playing Soul Calibur II (Xbox rev) this past week and it has given me much joy. For one, it feels like I am playing a juiced up version of the Dreamcast game, which I so fondly remember.

SC2 is all of the first, plus more. True, the more is pretty cosmetic and superficial (eg, collecting a range of weapons for each character). I suppose I would have been just as happy if SC1 had been ported as is from Dreamcast to Xbox (or current-gen console of choice).

Funny how the console cycles train us to be more than happy (n�, foaming at the mouth in anticipation) to be playing the exact same game every five years. Hmm, they should be calling them remakes or re-releases, not sequels ;)

I suppose I really should elaborate more on the topic, but damn, I’ve got some fightin’ to do!