Reality Panic

Something about the green/orange color scheme makes the cover of “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything” very appealing to me. More importantly, I like economics because it attempts to describe the behavior of rational people and helps to make jumbles of data meaningful.

Freakonomics doesn’t have anything to do with games per se, but does delve into a few tangentially related themes:

* Big discussion on the drop in crime and how it is due to the increase in legalized abortion. Damn, there goes our theory that video games have pacified the nation ;)

* Brief coverage of the “rat race” and why folks are so willing to work so hard (or take so much flack) at the start of their careers, only to give up down the road. Interestingly, this was mainly in the context of street gang culture. The main premise is that you have hopes of making it big, making it to the top, etc, and are willing to put in the effort only to later realize there’s just no way you’ll be one of the few to make the top slot. Could the heavy burnout/dropout in the game dev workforce be less of a physical thing and more of a realization that, after 5+ years of grinding, you’re never actually going to get the chance to make the game you want to or get paid to be the hancho designer?

* Some discussion on how public/political reaction to issues relates to the following equation “risk = hazard + outrage”, noting that when hazard is low and outrage is high, people overreact (via regulation, etc). Hmm, where do we see this happening in games?

Anyway, the book is full of interesting and freaky tidbits.

Would be fun to see similar economic principles and study applied to the game industry on stuff like piracy, player demographics, the violence debate, lack of innovation, etc, etc, etc… Ted’s MMO work is an early indication of the potential.

Among all the top notch speakers/sessions on tap for next week’s Montreal International Game Summit, perhaps the most stimulating session will be the sex in games design challenge.

The abstract reads:

“Video games are emerging as the dominant form of art and entertainment of the 21st century, enjoyed by hundreds of millions of players worldwide. As a culturally potent and expressive medium, developers should be able to explore all aspects of the human condition - as we see in film, literature, etc.

However, the stigma that video games are simply “toys for children” is holding back the industry - both creatively and economically. The concerns over the hidden sex scenes in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is just one indicator that industry critics cannot accept that a wide range of diverse content is played by a just as diverse audience.

That said, even if these barriers didn’t exist, could we even create a game with meaningful representations of sex? From cheap titillation to eroticism to more complex notions of sexuality, sexual tension and innuendo, if challenged, what could we design?”

And, the challengers are:

• Heather Kelley, Ubisoft
• Frank Lantz, area/code
• Pascal Luban, The Game Design Studio
• Eric Zimmerman, gamelab

Not sure how Frank and Pascal will fare, as both Heather (she’s a woman) and Eric (he created the format and runs similar sessions at GDC) seem to have a bit of an edge…

Coincidentally, Aleks put up a sex post at the Guardian about the action down in Austin and Brenda’s interview, hinting at how we’ve just not figured out how to convey meaningful sexual content.

Well, I certainly hope the challengers come up with some engaging concepts - implementation (and distribution!) issues aside ;)

Somehow, I felt obligated to go see the Doom movie this past weekend… Or, at least that’s the excuse I used to get out of the house ;)

As an action heavy sci-fi movie, I thought it was mostly good (at least better than AVP was). No Oscars, of course, but an overall fun bit of entertainment. Others have certainly been more critical. And, despite the liberal take on the Doom storyline, I felt that it was one of the few game-to-movie conversions that paid homage to its roots (eg, incorporating developer names as characters, the 1st-person sequence, the BFG, handles, drugs=4x booster, the end credits, etc).

The few things that were off for me were:

• The clunky GameBoy style device that looked 10 years old instead of 40 years ahead
• The melee fight sequence at the end (ie, when have you ever thrown a punch/kick combo in Doom?)
• The almost complete lack of credit/thanks to id Software in the credits - didn’t they help out or advise somehow? (hmm, unless I missed credits beyond the “based on the game by id”

Anyway, with an estimated $70m budget, and an opening of only ~$15m does seem to hint at doom and gloom for yet another ill-fated game movie…

According to the IGDA’s latest report, I’m pretty typical of most folks in the game industry (ie, white, male, 31, university education, no disability, straight, etc).

The report, titled “Game Developer Demographics: An Exploration of Workforce Diversity“, is an interesting, and quick (ie, lots of pretty graphs), doc to read through… And, it is quite simple. If we had had the statistical expertize, we could have probably done a lot more sophisticated analysis (eg, regression testing on the compensation numbers would have been valuable). Anyway, hopefully by releasing the data, we’ll get back some interesting derivative work from the research community…

That said, to me, the most interesting results came from the write-in comments (over 1000 of them!). The comments provide insight into developer thoughts on diversity at a much deeper level than the numbers could ever show. At 100+ pages, it is at least worth a skim (hint: text search on swear words to get at some of the truly caustic ones ;)

In a town more focused on Spartan football, it was nice to discuss the future of digital games (and, ironically, football video games often came up as a point of discussion).

More of a boutique academic(+some industry) event, FuturePlay did a nice job of pulling together some notable speakers. Admittedly, I was expecting a bigger turn out than the sub-200 who showed, but I guess Lansign is not a major attraction for most developers (well, despite Mark LeBlanc’s obsession with the Apple Butter Festival also in town that week).

I came in mainly to speak on the big censorship panel, which was really exciting and insightful. It was one of the few times when, at a game conference, you actually have speakers from “the other side” there to bash games. I could see attendees boiling in their seats. It was a 2-hour session that others have already commented on: see the notes from litagemini and Gregg Seelhoff.

The conference folks have kindly put up some videos from the censorship, and other key panels.

I also participated on panels covering quality of life issues and academic/industry research collaboration.

Anyway, was a fun event that I am sure will get even better over time.

Here are a few pics I took:

EA’s John Buchanan talks about stories and games, essentially drudging up the whole ludogoly vs. narratology debate…

Ernest Adams apparently quite pleased to be in between two women (Brenda Brathwaite and Kelly Rued) talking about sex. Ya, ya, cheap shot. It was the panel on sex and gender.

Jay Semard (Red Leader Audio) and Brian Winn (Michigan State University) on the streets of Lansing.

Kathy Schoback (Ageai) in animated discussion with Trevor Fencott (Groove Games).

Jim Gee at play. As he says, a benefit of being tenured is that he can play a LOT of games!

Ernest Adams and Bary Pollack (Sierra Nevada College) enjoy one of the student game projects from the mini-festival.

Contagion was cool student project from York.

Henry Jenkins (MIT) “attacks” Craig Anderson (Iowa State University) during the post censorship panel dinner.

Guillaume Provost (Pseudo), Trevor Fencott (Groove Games) and Greg Costikyan (Manifesto Games) chat during the GarageGames indie developer reception.

I’m a bit late to the party, as I only just had the chance to read through Steven Johnson’s latest book, “Everything Bad Is Good For You - How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter“.

The book makes a very convincing case for how, indeed, popular media (games, movies, TV, the web, etc) have been increasing in complexity over the years, and how that complexity is making us smarter (ie, higher IQ, better problem solving skills, etc). Certainly, as someone who’s written on neuroscience, Johnson has the chops (and data) to back up his claims.

Very early on, Johnson tosses aside concerns related to questionable content, in effect saying “let’s just ignore all that for the time being”. His case for the benefits of pop culture (the making us smarter part) is made without reference to the moral value of the content saying that content is just (often meaningless) dressing on top of the all the good stuff. And, in fact, this is a similar approach taken by Jim Gee in his “What Games Teach Us…” book as well as Raph Koster in his “Theory of Fun” book. The message being, look deeper than the surface and all shall be revealed…

But, as someone who deals with the emotional side of the debate over the goodness/badness of games, it is clear that not everyone can appreciate the orthogonality of content vs gameplay complexity. So, I was happy that Johnson came back to the issue in the last few pages of the book, in effect arguing that content is pretty irrelevant and has minimal impact (and pointed to some pretty useful references in the process).

As an industry, we really need to do a better job of conveying the benefits of games/gaming. A heavy consequentialist approach to ethics looks at games as providing only bad consequences with very few good things to offset. Would society (or rather the critics) be more forgiving if there was a greater perception of balance?

Anyway, all good stuff to think about as I prep for the big panel on censorship at Future Play next week!

(FYI, you can check out Metacritic for an extensive list of reviews/info on the book.)