Welcome, to the world of Tomorrow!
The first half of an interesting piece on ‘The future of video games’ was posted on players only recently[1]:
It’s an interesting watch. The general consensus seems to be that online distribution will be the future of the industry. Possibly they’re right, but in the same way that hovercars have been a few years away for decades[2], a mass migration towards digital distribution has been being predicted for a while now, and it has yet to grind the retail market beneath its remorseless tread.
See, at the moment, direct download is the main digital distribution option around. This is a great idea for developers, because they see it as a route to market that might allow them to sidestep the publisher altogether, and thus keep a bigger slice of the profits. With a slightly different spin on it, publishers like the idea, because they hope that it might give them a distribution method which is a bit more resistant to piracy than physical media.
It isn’t, however, always such a great deal for the consumer. It can be wonderful when it comes to getting indy games, which typically have a relatively modest download size and which would struggle to see a retail release. When it comes to a big AAA title though, it runs into problems.
Direct download stops looking like the sensible and convenient option if it takes me six hours to download a game: I could have been to the shops and bought it in a fraction of that time. Then there’s the fact that once you’ve finished the game, you either have to leave it squatting in the depths of your hard drive, hungrily gobbling up the gigabytes, or face that whole six hour slog again when you get a sudden urge to boot up that game from six months back you fancy having another bash at.
Yes, I’m well aware of the staggering success of digital music distribution, but big games are rather a different proposition. Aside from the (much) larger download times mentioned above, music download services offer the significant advantage of allowing the consumer to pay a lower price to purchase only to exact songs they want. DD doesn’t offer that: I can’t purchase only those levels or gameplay features that interest me.
Beyond that, the fact that a game is a larger investment in time and money than a couple of tracks off iTunes means I’m more inclined to look to the advantages of physical ownership, like the fact that I can lend the game out, take it to a friends house to play, or (and this is important) keep using it when some change to operating standards would have rendered my digital collection unusable[3].
More exciting is the potential advance of in-browser gaming and ‘cloud computing’. Indeed, over the past few years we’ve already seen sites like Kongregate rocketing to popularity.
The advantages of taking away the download and not running the game locally are manifold. No need to wait for the download, obviously. But also no need to worry about system requirements, and with the added bonus of being able to access the content wherever you have an internet connection. There’s still the potential for changing standards or collapsing businesses to render your collection obsolete, but at least there are some more concrete advantages to balance that out.
Ultimately, I think although downloadable game services will become a bigger part of the way we access content, it’s not going to catch on in the way some believe, if only because by the time the storage capacity and internet connection required to make it truly attractive become ubiquitous, it will already have been overtaken by the cloud computing[4] revolution.
[1] Actually, the second half has been posted as well, but I haven’t been able to watch that yet because it opens with an exec at Acclaim saying that the games industry should be more like U2. It’s already too much like U2: rich, hypocritical, risk-averse and dead inside. My shouting at the monitor precluded further viewing
[2] That’s real science, right?
[3] Case in point: I recently re-installed and started playing my copy of Giants: Citizen Kabouto (released 2000) recently. Would my digital download service still be offering the game after nine years, or honouring my original purchase? Hell, would the company I downloaded it from still be in business after nearly a decade?
[4] Incidentally, we sorely need a cooler name for the concept. Answers on a postcard.
Letters from the front
I think, given the content of earlier entries, I’m going to have to make a qualifying statement before beginning this post.
I don’t hate Peter Molyneux.
I don’t even dislike him. I’ve got at least some enjoyment from all of his games1, and a great deal of enjoyment from some of them. His games tend to be technologically innovation, and artistically pleasing. Too often they don’t tie their good ideas and good looks into good gameplay mechanics, but hey, you can’t have everything.
His comments, however, frequently annoy me, because they often seem to reveal either an ignorance of, or disregard for, the ways game design has changed in the past couple of decades, and of the advances that other developers have been making.
Which leads me to my point. Apparently, Peter Molyneux sent out a note with review copies of Fable 2, asking reviewers to “Please, please, please” get a non-gamer to play the game, observe what they did and how their world turns out.
The problem here is that, for a whole host of reasons, and regardless of whether it was designed with the non-gamer in mind or not, Fable 2 is not a game that’s going to appeal to the casual market.
1) It’s on the Xbox 360
Much as Microsoft (and Sony) might wish otherwise, non-gamers don’t own gaming consoles. Who’s going to blow £200+ on top of the line gaming hardware just to use Xbox Live Arcade? Some of them might own a Wii. But if you really want casual gamers, you go for the PC, and make sure it can be played on any machine capable of running Windows XP.
2) It’s a full price release
The other thing non-gamer’s don’t do is blow £50 on a game2. That’s new pair of trainers, or a weeks groceries for a couple, or two nights down the pub. £20-£25 (one night in the pub, a reasonable two course meal) is the upper limit if you want the casuals to come streaming in. £10 is ideal, because that drops you into the realm of the impulse buy3.
3) Movement and camera control in 3D is essential to the game
One of the reasons for the success of the Wii is that Wii Sports removes the need for 3D, dual analouge camera control. For those of us who have spent over a decade getting accustomed to dual analouge control it comes naturally, but most people picking up a game for the first time struggle with it, particularly with syncing character movement with camera direction. If you don’t play games, and you pick up something with this steep learning curve, you’re probably not going to enjoy it, conclude that gaming isn’t for you, and go on your way.
4) It’s a Fantasy RPG
Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings films may have made fantasy at least moderatly cool these days, but RPGs, or anything else with the whiff of dragons, rule books, and dice with a number of sides other than six is still seen as some sort of weird social aberration to be avoided at all costs. A good portion of those who don’t feel this way are also already video gamers, and thus not the people who can truly appreciate Fable 2. Apparently.
5) Violence is central to the game
Although there may be lots of enjoyable4 padding like buying houses and dancing for the townspeople, advancing the story in Fable 2 ultimately involves repeatedly bashing your fellow sentient creatures with sharp metal sticks. As a general rule, if you want the broad audience, you have to avoid using violence as the driving activity of the game.
Given the above, much as Mr Molyneux might like to get the non-gamers perspective, they just aren’t the people that are going to be buying Fable 2, so it seems rather skewed to base reviews on that point of view. Indeed, I’m not really convinced that someone not familiar with gaming would actually enjoy Fable 2 that much even if they didn’t have to pay for it.
Peter Molyneux really should realise this. If he doesn’t, then he also doesn’t understand that much about the casual market, or even the gaming market in general. If he does already appreciate it, then the letter starts to look like an attempt to guard himself against accusations of shallowness in Fable 25.
On an unrelated note, I’ve been made aware that the links to the footnotes only work for the most reccent blog post: otherwise they bring you back to that footnote number in the top post. I’ll try and find some ingenius solution, but until then either view the posts one at or time, or scroll down to see footnotes in older entries.
1Or at least, the games of produced by Bullfrog and Lionhead. Let’s not fall into the trap of assuming that because he happens to be the public face of the company, Peter Molyneux single-handedly puts these games together.
2For the console they don’t own, but we’re moving on from that point.
3As we all know, any purchase of under £10 (no matter how many individual £10 purchases are made), has no impact on your budget.
4Behold my restraint at not putting that word in parenthesis.
5Wrongly, because a good casual game should be simple to learn, but have depth to the gameplay. Again, most of the Wii Sports games provide good examples of this, as does the recently released World of Goo (which if you have a human soul in your body you should be downloading right now, but that’s another post).
Let Me Tell You A Story…
For me, the first ripple of the new wave in video game storytelling came in 2005, from an extremely unlikely source; Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. Unlikely because, much like his so-thick-you-could-beat-a-mugger-to-death-with-them novel’s, Tom Clancy games traditionally have storylines that could generously be described as ’serviceable’.1 Indeed, Chaos Theory itself was, for the most part, pretty standard fare in the plot department. It did, however, manage to provide one perfect, shining moment of storytelling genius.
It’s the second-to-last level, and you confront Shetland, a man who has sold out his country and betrayed Sam Fisher (the player character in the Splinter Cell series, for those who somehow missed it2) personally. Shetland tries to convince Sam of his viewpoint, that a nuclear strike on the US is really the way to go, so they can “tear it all down and start again”. He steps back, raises his hands, and tells Sam to let him go, saying “you’d never shoot an old friend.”
And then you shoot him.
It doesn’t sound all that spectacular, does it? But what makes that moment great is that it’s not a cutscene, it actually you, the player, who raises that gun and pulls the trigger. It puts you right in Sam Fisher’s shoes. Rather than just showing you the character’s sense of betrayal, his anger at this man who’s calmly discussed killing hundreds of thousands of innocents and then dares to talk about friendship, it makes you experience it, and react as the character would. For that brief handful of moments, you are Sam Fisher, and you’re angry.
It’s a form of storytelling that only games can do. An average book or film will tell you about it’s character’s emotion’s and state of mind. A great book or film will show you. But a great game can make you experience those things for yourself, just as the character does.
It’s a trick that I suspect Chaos Theory pulled partly by accident, and it’s something that games are only now coming to use extensively. Bioshock, for example, cleverly uses the structure of an FPS games, where you’re given an objective and carry it out without thinking, simply because you were told to do it, to mirror the experience of the character, who it emerges is in exactly the same situation.
The Darkness did it nicely as well: there are an outstanding couple of minutes at the end of that game where you storm a Mafia mansion. Jackie, the character, has given it to The Darkness, a demonic symbiont that bonds with him at the start of the game3. He can no longer tell who’s in control of his actions, him or The Darkness. As you fight through the mansion, the game cuts between a number of brief scenes. Sometimes, you’re in control, sometimes the game, whilst still being in first person, is on autopilot. The genius part is, it’s hard to tell which is which. In the autopilot sections, the game is doing exactly what you, as an FPS player, want to do, namely waste the baddies. The same is true for the character: The Darkness is doing exactly what Jackie wants to do. For a short while, the game makes you directly experience a little bit of what Jackie is going through.
Perhaps it’s just me, but I find the potential of these techniques, once developers and scriptwriters really start to get their heads round them, to be truly exciting. They’re hard to pull off, of course. The traditional videogame development model sees the developers put together the actual game, with a lose story in mind, and then a freelance scriptwriter and the cinematic team come in to tie everything together with some snappy (or not so snappy) dialogue. But to create those moments when the game thrusts you not only into the character’s shoes, but into his mind, require a close collaboration between games developers and writers. You can’t just tack them on at the last minute.
Of course, it will probably also help when we start to get some big-budget, well written games about something other than large men wielding guns.
Meanwhile, Elsewhere in the City…
If you’ve made it this far through my ramblings, I salute your fortitude. For anyone who hasn’t had their fill of games storytelling theory, this series of blog posts by Professor Roger Travis of the University of Connecticut is thoroughly worthwhile reading, drawing parallels between recent video games and ancient epics. Give it a whirl; it’s entertaining and educational!
2Shame on you!
3It’s a video game, just go with it.
