Stuff that sells itself — literally.

In the course of my noodling on the commodification or art, I stumbled on this little gem of a talk by Bob Levy of Alloy Entertainment, about the art of commodification, aka pointed trans-media IP creation and marketing : the bit starts at 08'00" into the track.

Trans/cross-media properties are nothing new, nor is book-packaging or algorithmic storytelling, obviously. What Alloy Entertainment does could be seen as mere incremental refinement of established forms of commercial artistry (think cartoons as promotional vehicles for toys) and IP franchising as a brand strategy, but the outlook here sets itself apart in its conceptual purity.

No longer is it simply about synergistic marketing, nor opportunistic milking of a successful IP through every possible adaptation or derivative, it's about the design of IP blueprints that 'tap into the zeitgeist', then handing those wireframes over to contractors or licensees, for them to develop and iterate in every possible format.

Character development is gonna be a bitch…
 

What I can't help but find disturbingly poetic here is the mechanization of the entire creative drive, from impulse, through process, to purpose : in the absence of original or initial art or product to derivate from, the entire 'art vs commerce' debate is moot. It's so perfectly commercial art — the artefacts exist only to promote their own existence — it's as creepy and fascinating as watching robots breed.

Forget about Skynet : somewhere, a freak marketing hacker is busy coding the tween-lit procedural content generator that will eventually unleash the tribble scourge upon mankind. 

~

The Chocolate Factory - Part 2 : is it worth it ?

[I know I kinda promised an entry about video games as brain-washing, mass-murderer-making machines of ebil, but I got sidetracked in more ways than I care to contemplate right now, so here's a coupon : I'll ring you when we restock on that peculiar brand of bile.]

Today on the Chocolate Factory specials : 

Is striving to design good games in this age of vapid loudness a waste of time ?

One way video games as a hobby stand apart from many other forms of recreation is by how often gaming enthusiasts are asked to consider whether they may be wasting their time and could, you know, be doing something 'constructive' instead.

Provided they make a living of it (or attempt to), game designers are not called out in the same fashion, because "hey, it's work" is justification enough for anything these days, and the gamebiz is one of those few sectors that's still hiring more than it fires.

The stigma on video games is multilayered : not only is playing them seemingly unproductive, it's very often perceived as masturbatory-like behavior …yet that's not even the worst of it.

Precisely because they aren't passive and casual distractions, it's for their pointless intensity that video games are oftentimes perceived as worse-than-slacking : they're an affront to our deeply ingrained preconception that the worth of an activity can be judged by the level of engagement it elicits — unless you're prepared to accept games may be of some worth, or that there's something wrong with how you assess the value of stuff.

That's why even slouching in front of daytime TV doesn't suffer as much social stigma as videogaming …as long as you don't start acting like you really care about the storyline in that home-shopping show.

'Casual gaming', and social network gaming platforms offer an interesting contrast : playing a few hands of Solitaire or Bejeweled won't lead people to look at you weird, and — as long as you keep it low-key — diddling around with your virtual garden or fish tank while you hold on a phone call may not be a fireable offense in places where being caught playing a FPS would.

The perception is different because it appears noncommittal to onlookers, keeping the games where they belong, next to the paperclip twiddling and the napkin doodling, and far from the podium of important stuff such as your job at Starbucks, your studying for the realtor license exam, your cookie-baking for church or your buttocks-tightening salsa class… you know : duties.

All of which goes to explain why a frequent argument of gamers and game makers in defense of the hobby goes along the lines of "it's really good for something", like improved hand-eye coordination, problem-solving skills or self-confidence. Such benefits, and even the 'spirit of discovery' are routinely invoked to make games look less like addictive time-wasters, which I'm sorry to report is a load of crap.

Certainly, games have a wondrous potential as teaching and learning tools, and I'm sure once in a blue moon somebody actually designs a game with such purpose in mind and maybe doesn't screw the pooch too badly on execution, but trying to justify the whole on the merits of the very few, or claiming credit for unintended, second-order consequences falls somewhere at the intersection of manipulative and delusional.

Another, less common argument to defend the hobby is to say games are just like sports, ie you do it for fun and it's still good for you. That's cute, but no dice : it's part of the sports-as-hobby formula that most amateurs do them largely because 'it's good for you', to get/keep in shape, the fun aspect making sports a more pleasant substitute or complement to other forms of workout. 

When it comes to video games, on the other hand, aside from the sub-genre of fitness-oriented games and a handful of dance/rhythm games that require players to stand up and move, the overwhelming majority of titles, measured by volumes of sales or cumulative hours spent playing follow no other agenda than pure distraction (which is not to say they don't have other, possibly beneficial, effects).

*

Ultimately, there's little point in such weak attempts to vindicate gaming and game making on other grounds than the value of playing for its own sake, for video games need no further justification than literature, dance or movies do : they're art and entertainment.

I've made the case in the past that video games should ostensibly position themselves as fine art rather than mass-market entertainment, as a practical line of defense against would-be censors and other righteous idiots, and that idea still has merit, although I reckon going AO should be more than enough in most cases to ensure creative freedom. Legal standing aside, the notion of video games as creative art holds on its own self-evidence, too, and is not necessarily detrimental to their study and progress as craft and trade, even though I see how it could be a slippery slope and an easy cop-out in some instances.

For being works of art, today's video games are no less heavy machinery, and the craft of them more readily compares to moviemaking than book writing ; such is the nature of the medium that game making faces the exact same challenges and systemic issues other popular hybrid arts suffer from, the same tension between mercantile exploitation and elitist isolation, the same conflicts between the  oft-divergent interests of creators, public and financiers, forcing games to grapple with money and technology in the same violent dance movies and TV fiction do.

Facing the apparent disconnect between commercial and artistic value, games creators must therefore individually answer for themselves the same uneasy question so familiar to moviemakers and TV writers : do I want to make creative art that accounts for the need to sell, or commercial art as a means to sell as much as possible ?

*

Strangely enough, the ongoing transformation of the market may be shifting the balance in favor of the first option, as the second approach becomes increasingly irrelevant.

'Big games' are the exclusive province of large publishers who can back the costs of thumb-thick eyecandy coating, and shoulder the cost of failure when consumers don't bite. These games are risk-averse behemoths that can't afford to get stranded while sailing uncharted waters. Marketing and focus groups reign supreme in this land of ever-cloned franchises, and they all agree : customers want more of the same, only louder, until they don't want it anymore …and then let's clone the next hip thing or die trying.

There's no room for more than a visionary or two per generation in those parts. If that's you, congrats on landing the job, but what are you doing reading this ?

'Cheap games', which can be built on a budget small enough to not prohibit experimentation, break into two categories : junk food and artisanal. They also cater to two distinct types of players.

Junk food games are made by companies that see games as commodities, and go about building, packaging and selling them accordingly. The idea here is to recombine a limited set of cheap elements in a great many variations to give the impression of diversity, pimp them out in attractive, flashy packages, and sell them bite-size so people don't really notice how much they pay in aggregate. Carefully monitor what works best out of your manicloned product line, and iterate.

These are games for people who don't care much, and play for the most part as one would distractedly munch potato chips, except for the few that will develop a strong addiction to some unique recipe of crisps, and are subsequently known by the trade as "whales".

What is called 'art' in these parts is the monkeywork of churning pirate or steampunk themed sprites by the hundreds for a pittance, in infinitesimally distinct mutations of the same templates, seeking the 'bliss point' of the week. As you can imagine, the demand for creative or inspired game design in that field is minimal, as it would presumably just mess up the conjoint analysis routines.

The last group of 'cheap games' is the most promising for people who care about games worth playing, owing to their being creatively designed and carefully crafted — they're what I'd call artisan games.

These, more often than not, are of the indie scene, and unless Raph Koster's musings about Oscar Bait games become a real thing (entirely possible), it's still where most 'passion projects' will sprout from in the future.

Not that all indie games are passion projects, mind you : a good portion of the derivative drivel currently cluttering various app stores comes from independant developers that aren't backed by a publisher or external investors.

Games that qualify as artisanal might sometimes turn out to merely be 'pretty' art, of the vacuous, faux-simple humblebrag sort that draws hipsters in like flies, and there's already some of that a-plenty in the artsiest corners of the indiesphere. If you can run it on dedicated hardware, say an arduino board encased in amber-looking resin, and sell it as handmade unique pocket arcade system on thinkgeek, you're probably it.

Some of those artisan games could also be genuinely fine art, but on that I couldn't comment, because it probably would still look like hipster doo-doo to me (see above).

Alternatively, if you build something that's both disturbingly moving, and still really a game, you could end up making Love, or something like it.

Point being, if you're into creating games that are unique, innovative, moving, or just plainly fun, and are able to understand they're also products that should account for the reality of players, then your kind of art may speak to some, maybe enough to pay for the work. 

*

Provided you're willing to be just a little accomodating and practical about giving others a chance to enjoy your creations (like not totally ignoring usability, looks and stability concerns), the rest of the industry is currently busy doing you a favor, by making it fairly easy to tell what's what.

More importantly, the players are learning, too, and fast.

I mentioned TV last week as proof that good things can come from the less likely places, and I'll do it again : looking at TV fiction and the food business, two fields that are seemingly dominated by the most cynical, exploitative and mediocre products, it seems clear there's also a growing demand (and supply) of alternative offerings that cater to people unwilling to eat crap, however loudly advertised, yet prepared to go out of their way to find the stuff they crave. 

It may look like it's all just one big market with some segments only now better served, but it goes beyond that : we're talking about people who will simply not buy at all unless it's good enough for their taste, and will postpone buying rather than settle for an inferior product range, which for them simply doesn't register as a possible substitute.

Anecdotally yours, and keeping in mind how, in addition to my game design interests, I'm also a foodie and a big fan of good storytelling (thus it all may just be a self-serving argument) I find it increasingly easy over the last couple years, not just to find good eateries or good TV shows, but also easier to tell them apart from the junk types at a glance, and not often be disappointed.

As marketing-driven businesses find decreasingly useful to even bother with the overhead of adding any substantial value to their products, instead selling nothing but puffed-up simulacrum, those products that seem carefully crafted are more likely to prove more than just bait, and actually deliver.

All this hints at some new truth to the old saw that if you make it (and put a little effort in getting the word out), they'll come.

So, is it worth the trouble to design deep, or clever, or moving games, even as the marketplace is overflowing with trite tripe coated in bright colors, while creative quality or innovation don't seem to be much of a selling point, judging by the top 100s ? 

My bet is yes, there's a public that itches to pay for that, if only they can find the wares, which is what I'll discuss in the next episode.

~

The chocolate factory.

In this tentative series, I'm going to explore how videogames and particularly online social/multiplayer ones are both better and worse than we like to think. It doesn't start from a joyous place, and I can't guarantee the end will be a happy one either, but I'm not here to sell ad space, so live with it.

*

Metaphorically and not, the 'civilized' world is sinking in its own waste, and trying to keep its collective nose above the stench by slurping the goop faster than it excretes it — you'll thank me for that image later. Wherever people aren't saturated by pointless crap, they're short of essentials, while a few places such as the US of A manage the incredible feat of routinely combining both, overfeeding toxic slurry to their poorest until their brains melt whilst their bodies inflate, until they can't afford even the most basic physical or mental exertion.

That was just to get the preamble out of the way, because I don't feel like making the full inventory of the many ways we are dooming ourselves. I'm sure there are many different and valid definitions of what civilization means, but a population of mindless blobs tube-fed by hyperactive stepfordian gerbils for the benefit of sociopaths most likely doesn't meet your standards more than it does mine. If we can agree on that, let's move on.

*

What I really want to talk about here is videogames, and most specifically MMOs, but not only. I'll use games because they're part of the question, and because that's a convenient vehicle for me — if the notional "10k hours of practice makes you proficient in any given trade" holds any truth to it, I'm probably some kind of 3rd dan black belt in gameology.

Here's my problem : I do love games, making and playing them, it's been a large part of my childhood, as is likely true of you too, reader, and an even larger part of my adult life, and yet I don't feel so good about that, lately. 

Designing and playing simulation, strategy, RPG and action games, on tables and on screens, has shaped my outlook on most things, from personal relationships to politics and from work ethics to parenting. On the balance, games have done me more good than harm, by a wide margin, and I count myself lucky for the help gaming and game making have been in turning me into slightly less shit of a person over the years.

Because of this, I find myself with a bit of a conundrum : when I look at what's on offer these days, at what's most likely to end up on people's phones, tablets and computer screens, I can't help but feel slightly uneasy advocating the idea videogaming is not junk food for thought, because in truth, it mostly is.

This is an apt comparison, too, because what makes junk food junk food is not that it's pizza, or meat sandwiches, or fizzy cold drinks, it's that it's those things, only made from the cheapest, most addictive and fattening, sugary, yet least nutritive crap the companies can find, with a single objective : leave you hungry and craving for more, no matter how much you gorge yourself.

In that regard, MMOs stand out as the worst culprits among videogames, because most of them are predicated on exploiting your frustration. Much like fast food, they need to offer something reasonably attractive to get you through the door, then keep you wanting for just a little more so that you stay and pay rent (subscriptions), or shell out for extras (Freemium). 

*

I could make the easy and common comparison with crack or meth instead of food, for sure, but it really wouldn't be an apt analogy. The worst aspect of the whole affair is this : food and games are not unmitigated evils, they're essentials, and when done right they can play a big part in making our lives better.
If crack cocaine is a nasty virus, essentially sprawling death incarnate, games are the gut bacteria that help you process stuff (otherwise wasted or toxic), unless the wrong sort of bacteria start to proliferate in your system, and things go bad.

Metaphor overload yet ? Me too ; let's back it one step and stick to the food-games thingie.

We're omnivorous apes, and there is an argument that it's been a defining trait throughout our history, for not only did it allow our ancestors to colonize environments otherwise inhospitable, hadn't they been adventurous enough about what constitutes food, but it also favored the quick and smart learners, and contributed to boost our specific inference engine. Our weird regimen also led us to develop technologies like food making, which paved the way for chemistry, pharmacology and in the arts and aesthetics department, at least in places, cuisine.

Many other animals play, among them all mammals (afaik), at least in their young age. 

Playing is a low-cost way of learning basic skills and behavioral rules, of socializing and honing one's abilities. Those individuals who are more eager to play are more likely to end up 'good at life', and thus most of their descendants (that's us) are primed to be aroused by preset signals, when it comes to food and play.

The more is known about us as a species, the easier it gets to exploit these traits — once evolved to keep us alive and fit — to now trick us into doing stuff that isn't beneficial but in the shortest term, like scratching itches purposefully designed to get slightly worse every time we touch them. 

Much of business, economy, and culture presently revolves not around the satisfaction of needs and urges elicited by our accidental and environmental circumstances, but around engineering the precise type of frustration or anguish that will trigger our feel of want for a designated object.

So what ? Everybody does it.

True, and if you agreed on the premise that our world is turning to crap because we've made churning and eating shit a competitive pastime, you may feel a little uneasy about that.

Games are a special case among other mass market artefacts because they're powerful behavior prescriptors, and because playing is nearly as integral to our condition as eating. We simply can't go (far) without eating and playing, and what we choose (and get) to eat and play affects our sanity and capacities, among other things.

In a weird fit of mental acrobatics seldom observed outside tea-party rallies, the same gamers and game makers who will tell you how big of a deal gaming is in their life and world outlook will simultaneously and reflexively dismiss the potency of games as mind-altering devices of any harmful consequence, which is at the very best oxymoronic.

My contention is that, for better and worse, videogames are more powerful magic than the industry cares to admit, and that game designers have no excuse for their shirking the corollary duty to use this power responsibly — which doesn't entail being defensive, nor knee-jerk over anything controversial.

On a brighter note, the more we know about games and how to make them, the more good they can potentially do. If TV, the titular village idiot in the popular fiction family has finally managed to bring us stuff worth watching voluntarily in the last two decades, I want to believe videogames are not cursed to eternal mediocrity, and MMOs can aspire to better things than making professional human traffickers feel woefully inadequate at ruining people's lives.

Inevitably, I'll be talking about stuff that will rub some friends the wrong way, because of unpleasant things to contemplate, and also because Jack Thompson, but it's all for the children, and also the worthy cause of feeling OK with what you do.

Speaking of which, next episode is about how videogames really cause mass shootings, and stuff. 

Nah, just kidding — almost.

~

[Sorry, no pretty pics on this wall'o'text : I suck at iconography, plus I don't have the time for it. Suggestions are welcome however, and I'll update the article if warranted.] 

Agree to disagree ?

In democracy, politics is the art of misdirection.

Whether you believe in democracy as a virtuous and working system depends strictly upon where you fall, between your urge to be heard, and your distrust of your fellow citizens' ability to make competent political choices.

If getting your voice heard is important enough to overshadow the risk of idiots contributing the majority of the vote, congratulations : you do believe in democracy.

If deep down you're terrified by the idiots having any sort of say in public matters, and realize your own opinions may not be that interesting, congratulations : you don't believe in democracy.

…yet you likely are even more afraid of something else, like communism or dictatorship, and democracy sounds like the lesser of many evils.

Here's a series of well-know facts about us all — they're truisms, but they'll come handy in a minute: 

• Most people are idiots. 
• Most people believe most people are idiots. 
• Most idiots don't know they are. 
• Most people don't believe they are idiots.

It follows that idiots (who think they aren't) distrust the mental and political competency of most other people (who they believe to be idiots), and yet feel of critical import that their personal opinions are heard and accounted for.

C'mon… you know you want to click on me.

The above may seem like an issue unfairly framed, and in some ways it is.

That's meant as an object lesson : because of the underlying assumption (shared by most) that a significant portion of the citizenry is in fact politically inept (by virtue of diverging from one's own views or interests), any debate in the context of a democracy tends to be framed in such a way as to either exclude, void or redirect the contributions of the people the speaker disagrees with, and favor those views she subscribes to.

I could write a book about the inherent self-contradictions of democracy as a mode of government (don't taunt me), but right now, here's a simple question for the presumed idiots out there, and also for you, my dear reader :

Can you imagine a working democratic government system that wouldn't hinge on misdirection ?

~

The Bourne Legacy - A Vicarious Postmortem

The other day I almost-reviewed — mostly spoiled and snarked at — the fourth movie in the "Bourne Whatever" franchise, and hinted there was more to come…

Well, here it is.

Today's post is about learning lessons from that wreck, and about the abilities and constraints applicable to spinoffs and expansions in a series.

Also it's a pic-less wall'o'text, because looking for iconography is too much of a timesink, and I'd rather get back to the next episode of The Fair Game series. Deal with it.

*

To start off the right foot, let me state for the record, The Bourne Legacy, as it is, is not a bad movie entirely, and falls from only as high, to fail only as hard as it set itself in the first place. What goes wrong mainly happens on the expectations management and internal consistency fronts, two topics dear to my heart.

As may not be obvious from my previous spoilerific review, the first 90-or-so minutes of the movie stand on a firm leg, and really do a quite honorable job of upholding the franchise style and character, that is until the flick suddenly takes the kind of unexpected turn in both style and substance that manages to ruin both everything that has come before and make the — otherwise pretty good — pulp-action in the last  half-hour fall on the painful side of campy.

That sort of slip-up is especially inexcusable and damaging when applied to a franchise that's entirely about taking a fresh and clever view on otherwise tired genre clichés, and we'll get back to the question of why and how, but for now let's just say the end of the end of the movie was just about as welcome as a strawberry icecream floater lobbed into a garlic clam chowder bowl.

Let's have at it, in from-the-hip postmortem style.

What went right: 

In the absence of the titular character, the writers made the right choice by setting up The Bourne Legacy as a side-story rather than a sequel : this allows for tighter integration of the new story into the mainline storyline and instantly establishes the legitimacy of the expansion as part of the larger verse.

Similarly, most of the defining elements and themes of the early Jason Bourne movies are reused, but not so hamfistedly that it looks like a reboot by any other name. 

A particularly nice (if under-exploited) touch comes with the theme of the anti-captain america supersoldier, who owes not so much his physical abilities but his intellectual competency to being a military guinea pig, and fears a demotion to his previous state or metal retardation. It's a rather clever play on the classic allow me to show you my true worth by granting me superpowers, because the protagonist himself believes he isn't worth crap without his spook-special makeover.

Aaron Cross is slightly less of a wandering hero than Jason Bourne, but even though most of the plot is resolved over only three locales, mostly urban, we still get some sense of moving around quite a bit and all the right checkboxes get crossed in terms of scenes that should be in a Jason Bourne movie : the roof chase, the weird/tense meet with a peer agent that ends up in dead peer, the house assault, the epic car chase in economy-class cars/bikes, a bit of improvised weaponry… the works. 

The main cast is generally a success : Jeremy Renner works as a footsoldier upgraded way above his comfort zone, in a bit of clever metaplay on the actor's public perception as a second-tier star, and (nearly) gets a chance to grow up throughout the movie into a lead in his own right. Edward Norton is also a nice pick for the half burned out post-facto rationalizing baddie, and Rachel Weisz sells a surprisingly well-written fish-out-of-fishbowl scientist girl. 

In the extras/red-shirt department, there are a couple nice touches too, with Zeljko Ivanek and Elizabeth Marvel, both of TV fame as morally ambiguous typecasts, who make the best from the small parts they're given. Some of the cast from previous installments reprise their roles without fault, which helps bring the whole thing together with the main universe and storyline.

The principal photography is not bad either, and generally fits alright with the atmosphere and codes established in the previous movies, if a bit different, but that's not a bad thing in itself.

What went wrong:

As subtly hinted in my previous review-cum-spoiler, the entire last quarter of the movie goes horribly wrong, not because it's poorly done (although at times it is), but because it runs off the rails from the entire franchise by moving into over-the-top pulp bombasticness for no apparent reason but lazyness. 

I have other gripes with the movie, but they also boil down to lazyness : Stacy Keach is appropriately hamming it as a generic cynical military-turned-conspiracy underboss — but sadly, it's entirely out of place in this specific setting. That kind of characterization is just phoning it in, writing wise, and so are most of the other minor blunders in the movie, so let's focus on the core issues of lack of direction, consistency and proper storytelling.

Where the entire Bourne franchise hinges on stretching believability while keeping it hollywood-gritty and reasonably verisimilar, the Bourne Legacy drifts into a pure pulp from the moment the main arc for the hero is resolved with a fetch quest of a magic cure for his illness/Achilles' heel. At this point, there is no story left in this beast, and the whole thing is runing on fumes, so we're treated to a very intense and spectacular chase against a terminator-like baddie that goes on for the last 20 minutes of action in the movie, yet fails miserably because a) it lacks purpose, and b) it's stylistically off.

The point is… ?

From a simple storytelling perspective, the lack of purpose is obviously at odds with the supposedly climactic nature of the big finale chase and confrontation with the baddie, but let's see exactly how and why, because that's a common issue with some action flicks that endeavour to carry more of a story than a dungeon crawler.

The Bourne series is not about a protagonist kicking the arse of incrementally tougher henchmen until he gets to kill the bigbad. It's about a guy travelling around a world of trouble, in a quest for answers, and hopefully peace of mind — and breaking a few skulls if and when it's the most convenient solution to get baddies out of his way. The face-off with the dragon happens because the dragon is sent after him, not because the protagonist works his way up to to the confrontation as a milestone.

Arguably that's the case in Legacy, too, as the determinator sent after Bourne Cross is not somebody Cross looks forward to meet and fight. The problem here is there's nothing at stake : the dragon is an obvious case of last-minute release monster X and his obstruction accomplishes nothing but to slow down the hero's eventual escape from his pursuers, which we know must by law of the genre succeed - the only question here would be whether the girl is to get killed en route, but by that point we already trust she won't, for she's been sticking with him past the point of usefulness, and she's pretty much all he has to show in the way of spoils of war.

The big car chase is supposed to be a serious mountain to climb during the journey, ideally culminating in some flag capture or equivalent milestone in the storyline : in the original movie, it's the clincher to bond Jason and Marie into a team, in the second, it's the pilgrimage en route to Bourne's confession and contrition to the daughter of one of his victims, in the third, it's the opportunity for Bourne to spare the life of a fellow operative at the end of a serious confrontation, who will repay him later by not shooting him when he could. In any case, there is more to come, and the chase happens as Bourne is intent on getting somewhere, not merely escaping, the latter we know he could manage at any time, because duh, he's Jason Bourne.

Yes, this make your ass look huge.

That's not even the worst part about the final chase : style is the main offender here. Simply put, it doesn't even try to be believable and it's a mess to boot.

When your car/bike chase is so much of a collage of nonsensical show-off tricks that it would be hard to turn into a playable mission in GTA, that should be a solid hint something is wrong with it. Much worse is the fact it just doesn't fit the overall style of the series and manages to make a mockery of everything that came before (and wasn't an embarrassment) by throwing away the Bourne franchise earnest efforts of keeping things mostly realistic (for a blockbuster value thereof) and switching to an action-comedy gear we didn't know was supposed to be there.

There's nothing wrong with action comedy, or Hollwood-amped pulp/B-movie action : I've enjoyed some of Jason Statham and Vin Diesel action flicks without remorse or shame, and I can even go through any of Tom Cruise's ridiculous MI without gouging my eyes out with a spoon. but the moment you throw a trenchcoat on a ninja-zombie and pretend it fits into a John LeCarré spy novel, you'll see me cringe.

Bend it like Hawkeye.

But let's backtrack to the true moment of derailment, and what it indicates about the true wtf is it you think you're doing ? aspects of The Bourne Legacy.

The Bourne series is a fairly classic lone-spy setting, and revolves around a guy using his talents against his masters to both survive and unveil conspiracies after his being marked for termination. Without going into the minutiae of the franchise, that's the bare essentials.
Where it differs from a pure action flick is in the rather involved story, with multiple reveals, twists and concurrent interests of major players/groups, and a protagonist that is expected to outsmart them all as he's peeling the onion of lies and coverups, all the while struggling with his not-entirely reliable mind. No such thing here, even though everything was properly set from the beginning.

There is only one conspiracy at play in Legacy, as you can safely ignore most of the mainline Bourne stuff happening in the background : bad guys are worried about being exposed and initiate a wholesale cleanup of all the people involved in the project the hero is a part of, flagging him and scientist girl for termination. The mission therefore, is to go in hiding forever after grabbing a MacGuffin to take care of the hero's addiction to pills.
Thus we're looking at a fairly straight line, with a single waypoint enroute, laid on a flat surface, as opposed to the aforementioned conspirationist onion of the previous Bourne movies. The endgoal is equal to the initial starting condition, with a slight detour. That may be OK for a straight-up action movie, but a Bourne it does not make, legacy or otherwise.

What could have been done differently ?

We start with an interesting protagonist, who's more the grunt-next-door and less the elite-spook type than Jason Bourne, and who comes with a strong personal motivation : more than his life, which his type is expected to be prepared to risk at every turn, he's running against the clock to save his mind, which he knows only exists thanks to the chemical enhancements provided by his former masters turned enemies. Much like the original Bourne was driven by his compulsion to learn about himself, Cross is forced to get in the thick of things in order to not lose himself, and everything is primed for us to get a taste for the looming curse that's chasing him forward… except it will never happen.

We get a glimpse of what could possibly be Cross blanking as the meds start running out, shortly before he reaches the MacGuffin in Manila, but he gets injected with the magic cure for stupidness momentarily, and we never see him in his diminished state (he shakes a cold-like fever overnight, during which he has bad dreams, wow).

That's too bad, considering we also have Dr Marta Shearing on call, who it is established is very competent in her field, and has proven to be quite smart and resilient generally. 

We'd have ample room here to work in a couple scenes right around or after grabbing the virus sample, where she'd get to carry the ball (and our hero) forward, while his abilities diminish to a rather terrifying point. We know of his potential value to her in his fully-able state, and that would be reason enough for her to put in the effort and risk to try and restore him, while it would go a long way toward explaining why he doesn't dump her the moment he is permanently fixed and she becomes dead weight (OK, we got hints of his good heart and possible crush on her earlier, but still). 

All of that could have been sorted just fine by the magic cure not being such a turnkey solution, and requiring a bit of time, work and tools.

That would have entailed a bit of respite for our heroes, which could have been brought about by their fortuitous "death" occuring after…  a car chase ! 

There are ten different ways to make this work, thanks to the semi-random nature of the chase context : slow down or minimize the chasing party at will, for a minute or more, get the girl behind the wheel because the hero ate a bit of a scenery or just went retrograde, etc.

This also would have given meaning and purpose to the mandatory car chase, and who nows, offered a bit of an opportunity to actually care about the determinator, too, provided he did not die right away — maybe he can't believe they're dead because of his built-in "amped mission fidelity", and thus keeps looking for them after they're declared dead, who knows…

*

This pace change alone would have solved two out of three problems, provided the chase was not so ludicrously designed (but that's a self-contained issue), and would have added a bit of depth to the whole thing, leaving only the conspiracy side of things a bit light for the price.
…which is convenient, because we might want something to wrap things up, even though reaching the point where the hero recovers his full cognitive abilities could be enough to provide a satisfying conclusion. Of course, that would leave the girl in charge of all the meaningful parts until the titles roll, which in itself could seriously screw with the alpha-male mythos here (although I personally would deem it a nice twist, and argue her doing the dragon in at the end of the bike chase was indeed a step in that direction).

Being an expansion and side-story to the Bourne mainline, there are limitations to what can be allowed, conspiracy-wise : Legacy couldn't afford to break the canonical storyline, nor kill any of the recurring bigbads, and generally had to avoid affecting or triggering verse-shattering events, for fear of closing plot branches and making things harder for the future of the franchise. Still, I'm confident Ed Norton's character is not above using child soldiers in african wars as a test group for new supersoldier juice or something equally disturbing, now that the whole Bournery thing is canonically commoditized in pill form.

How you get Aaron Cross in the loop, or to care about it, is another question, and one that would have been fitting of another installment in the Legacy subseries.

ttfn

~

The Bourne Legacy - as if…

Between sourcing my research by tripping on peyote while playtesting games old enough to get their own passport, then editing my ramblings before poasting*, not to mention all the stuff that happens off-stage, this editor sometimes needs a break, and last night I watched a movie…

The Bourne Legacy 

(IMDB 6.8, RT 56% , MC 61%)

Fair warning — for reasons that will soon become apparent, I'm going to spoil the socks off this mother, so if you plan on watching this flick and are keen to preserve your sense of wonder, here's all you need to know — it will be good, while it lasts.

*

If you somehow managed to never see a Jason Bourne movie, here's what you need to know in addition: Jason Bourne is a super-spy, and a wanted man.

Previously on…

The Bourne Identity (Matt Damon is Jason Bourne)

In episode one, he starts as a bullethole ridden amnesiac who soon discovers he has superhuman skills and more passports than fingers (counting the toes). He subsequently goes on a journey of self-discovery across europe, taking along a cute bohemian hipsterette and riding in her mini, all the while chased by people who don't want him to remember. It sounds like it would suck in all the usual boombastic ways, yet really is both good fun and surprisingly verisimilar and low-key (for Hollywood values thereof).

The Bourne Supremacy (They should have left him alone) 

In the second installment, our now-retired protagonist is framed by the baddies for the death of several CIA agents, sending the CIA after him. Just to cover every base, the baddies still send an assassing after him (as if) with the net result that the girl eats a bullet, thus sending the hero into a revenge frenzy. If it starts to sound like a Liam Neeson movie, it's because it kinda drifts towards that precipice, but manages to avoid the cliff jump by hanging on a solid thread of _noir_ spy intrigue and deviousness (some cool baddies, too).

The Bourne Ultimatum (This summer Jason Bourne comes home)

Part three is arguably where the series comes into its own, our by now soulcrushed hero is dead set on a course of revenge and redemption, with a side of death wish that gives some consistency to his going against all odds, _fear the one who has nothing to lose_-style. It pulls itself above the tarpit of tired cliché'dness through a fairly clever and earnest treatment and some good acting and direction.

…which brings us to The Bourne Legacy (There was never just one).
A hell of a misnomer of a title to boot, as it takes place concurrently, and not after the run of the original trilogy as you'd expect.** 

The legacy part appears to be a case of nobody remembering to change the working title in time and getting stuck with it, or they just didn't care, who knows. What it really tells you is how the production approached the problem when confronted with the absence of both the titular character/actor and the director who fleshed him out.

Back to basics.

The Bourne legacy is a Jason Bourne movie without Jason Bourne, and Tony Gilroy seemingly decided to go back to the original recipe, and do it all over again, with a slight change in flavoring oil, and while keeping the option open to carry on with the original product line in the future.

What it came down to is this : refresh a tired trope with clever treatment.

In this case the tired trope-a-looza is made of : 

• plentypotent field agent is chased by baddies from a government spook program gone feral, 
• is not too sure he can trust his own mind, 
• and takes a cute but-not-Disney-cute brunette along for the ride, 
• because she's a witness and the baddies want her dead too, now. 

Also part of the deal, srs bzns car chases using economy-class vehicles, some parkour-ish rooftop acrobatics, improvised weapons, travel to exotic-yet-gritty locales, and a face-off with a dragon of similar background and skills to the hero's.

As pointed above, pulling off the Bourne-sans-Bourne trick is all about tweaking the flavour and treatment, and the extra ingredients here are one dash of supersoldier sauce, a pinch of extra trope-metagaming with a lancer-to-hero tour de main, and one part moar peppa ! in the shape of extra-crippling mental condition.

So, does it work ?

Yes but — quite literally — only up to a point.

See why after the jump.

Coop vs AI

An emerging trend in the world of strategy/tactical games of late is the focus on coop multiplayer vs AI, as opposed to the more traditional use of AI as a stand-in for an absentee 'real' opponent.

While not entirely new, this is an interesting development, and one of the many subtle ways in which the wargames (as a broad category/genre) are finally getting payback from the adventure/action/RPGs that have shamelessly 'borrowed' from strategy games forever, without giving back much love until recently.

***

While other genres have evolved spectacularly over time, thanks to genre fusion/bending and cross-pollination, strategy games have known few significant changes since the emergence of RTS:

at core, most strategy games tend to fall in either of two categories: computerized renditions of boardgame-styled designs, or mildly brainy action games sitting in a fancy simulated environment, with eyecandy added to taste.

The reason for that is simple: strategy and wargames are traditionally and by nature thought of as 'versus' games, yet current AI do thoroughly suck at emulating a 'real player' opponent.

Thus the tried and true solutions to make the AI look good boil down to either very solid game mechanics that even a seriously retarded bot can't screw up, or relatively simple game design (that an AI can handle, with cheats if needed) fleshed out by a rich enough simulated environment to overload the cognitive capacity of the human player and create the illusion of lifelikeness.

As a result, designing for single or multi player(s) has often been perceived as an either/or choice: a good single-player campaign usually will hinge on RPG-like scripting, crafty level design, extensive playtesting, with some storytelling and cutscenes thrown in to thicken the sauce, while the multiplayer PvP mode requires solid boardgame-like game mechanics to work — it's really tricky to do both at once and well enough in a single game.

***

Luckily, other game genres bring a comparatively lateral-thinking answer to this dilemma: cooperative multiplayer.

As hinted above, this is a counter-intuitive option for strategy and wargames, and although coop mode has been present in the multiplayer options of many a RTS in he past, it generally has been there for the sole sake of exhaustiveness, and rarely if ever been a defining feature of any srs bzs strategy game until recently…

Just to be clear, I'm talking about coop vs computer here, not team-based PvP, which is indeed cooperative too and can spice PvP quite a bit, but is still PvP at core and is not an essentially different play mode from FFA PvP, mechanics-wise.

Coop vs AI (CVA) comes from CRPGs (notably MMOGs) and action-adventure genres, which have been struggling for a long time to reconcile their single-player heritage with the commonly accepted wisdom (and now built-in expectation) that multiplayer adds value to a game. In those genres, Coop gameplay is a fairly obvious way to go about bringing more than one player on the same boat, and is also a welcome answer to the seemingly insurmountable problem of Artificial Stupidity of henchmen and other computer-driven teammates in RPGs and action-adventure titles.

***

Applied to strategy games, the eureka moment of going CVA involves putting the genre on its head: the common ancestors of all wargames are about two guys sitting on chairs across a table and duking it out over a board and tokens — at face value, making it about two guys helping each other to beat the crap out of a machine is more of a leap than a stretch — but in hindsight, CVA looks just as elegant and obvious applied to strategy games as to CRPG.

CVA works best when freed from the preconception that the AI's there to substitute an absentee human opponent, which AIs are notoriously bad at.

Dropping the Turing-test idiot ball and instead embracing a PvE-centric design approach allows to build a game that can be equally interesting in solo and multiplayer mode, as the game mechanics no longer need to cover for Artificial Stupidity. It's certainly extra work over just bolting more seats on a single-player game, but it's definitely the easier path (compared to faking human intelligence with scripts) to get something worth playing.

Coop doesn't mean the challenge, tension and sense of accomplishment have to be diminished, either : the human factor and drama fuel can be just as strong when players try to work together rather than intently butt heads, and a CVA design can still be spiced up with multiple coops competing against both the AI and each other, as long as the AI is clearly defined as the primary threat/target.

The brilliant (despite disputable looks) 2009 poster child for that approach is probably AI War — go check it out now if you haven't yet.

…and if you want to know more about the AI in this particular design, here's a good and thorough writeup series.

***

Economy in playmonies

Managing a Virtual Economy

From the Virtual Goods Summit 2009.

The meaning of PvP.

…meanwhile, on the other blog.

I usually try to keep things separate between my EVE-specific rants and musings, and the broader design issues I discuss here. The last two downtime fillers on EVE is broken obviously relate to EVE, but really are what I believe to be generally valid observation about the nature of the relationship between carebear-type players in R-POW and the PvP playstyle(s).

If you're interested in pop-psychology applied to PvP, you may want to check at least the first entry: it was a bit of a shocker even for me as I drafted it (obviously, odds are I'm not the first to have this specific eureka! moment).

Today's filler is a bit more EVE-centric, but I reckon anyone with a passing familiarity with the subject in other R-POW can work their way around the spacenerd-flavored rocks easily enough to keep it legible.

ttfn, time for coffee.

Eventually Stuff Rendered Bland

As I was doing the rounds of various game-related websites today, both designer and end-user oriented, it struck me: almost all popular western R-POWs are tween-to-teenager friendly — or at least try to be, according to their ESRB ratings.

The only exceptions I found after a cursory search are Age of Conan (rated M to AO/18+ depending on who's talking), a Korean-made mediaeval-horror I don't think I ever heard of before (although the name is so generic it's hard to tell), and, in its own contorted ways, Second Life (while Linden Labs hate seeing their over-hyped cathouse lumped with vulgar MMOG, SL still qualifies as a R-POW, I guess).

Two of those are deemed NSFW on a basis of a lot of gore and gratuitous violence, plus the occasional b00bs and semi-explicit deviant sex, and the last is… well, Second Life, homeland of furries and middle-aged local politicians who love to go wild in latex diapers.

But I digress… my original point, I guess, was that it's surprising how few commercial R-POW take advantage of the creative freedom afforded by not having to give the time of the day to the hysteric 'for the children'  lobby.

An Adults-Only rating allows designers to drape pretty much anything under the First Amendment (or  applicable equivalent) and be reasonably safe from moral crusaders and wrong-footed art critics …which would be nifty enough on its own, yet the real beauty of it is: it doesn't require you to actually produce boring pornography or unimaginative Nazi-flavored gorefests… seriously.

Going AO essentially amounts to running a private club: you can post the most stringent EULA you want, and nobody will be able to build even a half-decent case against your policies on the basis they were too lazy to read, or to claim a natural right to access in the holy names of free market and consumer choice.

Much like this blog is set as 'Adult Content' — although I don't think I ever posted anything even as mild as a wardrobe malfunction — taking the non-family-friendly approach means you don't have to answer to the mouthbreathers who'd want to dictate their terms in your space.

A double side benefit is you'll still get the kids, as per the first law of Forbidden Fruits and attractive exclusivity, yet the onus will be on them to behave like grownups in order to avoid being detected (and subsequently insta-banned without trial).

Honestly, I can't see a downside to hanging a large AO/18+ sign on your door — without even stopping to consider if  you could go for a T instead, and try to sneak your most controversial material under the radar of rabid soccer moms.

The only obvious (if short-sighted) rationale for the lack of AO offer on the R-POW market would be that game makers live by the mistaken belief their only potential market gravitates around the kids demographic… that could go a long way towards explaining why most MMOs are firmly planted on the stupid side of the creative spectrum, though.

Not to imply kids are stupid, or only going for brain-dead entertainment, obviously: rather to say that if you can be so far off the mark on who your userbase is, you probably also hold very flawed assumptions about what they're paying you for.

New Gaming — HowTo (New Gaming, part 2)

[read me first, if you dare.]

New gaming is what you'd get if you were to design a hardcore game such as it could attract casual gamers and be playable by them, without dumbing down the gameplay. That's roughly it.

Because 'Real' Casual Players will not commit more than a very small amount or time, brains and money (if any) to a given game, and because old-school hardcore nerds make for very small niches, both by their head count and by the number of titles which they will devote their individually high commitment to (while dictating exclusionary gameplay/styles in the games that cater to them), New Gamers are where most of the (smart) money and designers' attention should go.

New Gaming is not just a fancy rebranding tag for the fabled 'mainstream' Casual Gaming of the last decade, though: you can perfectly design niche games for New Gamers, and don't have to go for maximum eyeballs at every turn, at the expense of theme or gameplay originality.

What sets apart New Gaming from the usual understanding of Casual and Hardcore Gaming is it doesn't target any specific age-class, hardware requirements or gender (to name but a few). Those standard demographics parameters are something that the feature set, gameplay and theme can be concerned with if the designers so choose, and they're of importance, but New Gaming is less about who you expect the player to be than what New Gamers would expect from any game they will play.

As such it is more of a positive definition: a game must meet a set of conditions in order to reach New Gamers, as opposed to reach out for players who fall in a specific market demographic.

New Gamers demand games that acknowledge players who want deep, immersive, challenging and engaging gameplay, and are willing to commit brains, time and money to that, under the provision the game makes it easy to get in, allows them to play unobstructed by poor usability or frustrating artificial difficulty, and lets them learn as they go without fearing a forced restart from scratch halfway through the game — oh, and it must not look ugly, either.

Yes, I know it sounds like a blanket 'make better games' admonition, without consideration for realistic funding, release dates, or production and technical limitations. Weirdly it is not, and it can be managed by sticking to a few rules.

1) Do it right, or do something else.

New Gaming designs assume players are reasonably smart, and as such will both notice and cringe at sloppy work. That they're also smart enough to work around design or engine quirks doesn't mean they're OK with those being there in first place: most likely they just crossed a mental checkbox towards the total that will qualify your game for a trip to the nearest tradeback store and a scathing review on Amazon.

New gamers don't care for groundbreaking AI if their units can't pathfind their way through an empty parking lot. It could know how to flirt with them in their native language and deduce their favorite breakfast dish from unspoken clues in the player weapons' choices, it would still be broken if it doesn't do what the player can sensibly expect it to manage as a matter of course.

On the upside, they will buy in games that don't sport a grocery list of features if there are a few good reasons to play the game, and the rest of it doesn't spoil the fun: in that sense they're closer to casual gamers who will play something because it's fun, even if it's not the most cutting edge on the technical side, as long as it doesn't make eyes bleed.

2) Stuff must make sense (in context).

It ties to 'do it right…' above, but applies more to internal consistency of the design, ruleset and universe than to individual features' merits, performance or polish. Players should be able to make informed guesses about new content and game mechanics from their prior experience of the game levels/worlds.

That doesn't require the gameplay to be in any way dumb or simplistic, only that — however complex — the arrangement and relationships between moving pieces (and scenery) shouldn't be unduly complicated or arbitrary.

If some stuff is so arcane that it can't readily be understood early on, but is deemed too important to drop (because it enables really interesting gameplay later down the road), either provide players with ways to circumvent it during the early stages, or give them the means to both gain at least a superficial understanding of it, and to use it with reasonable (if limited) success without relying entirely on luck/cheats/hints/save-reload.

3) Replayability value is a one-way street.

Notably, that a game is even better on the second run shouldn't mean it's fine if it only becomes worth playing after the first play through. New Gamers won't make it through the first run if the game sucks until you know it by rote, or pack 00ber gear.

It is true that RealLife™ doesn't always do this favor to us monkeys, and many things only start to make sense retrospectively, with the invocation of external knowledge not readily available at the time you first faced a problem — there's a reason why New Gaming is not called New RealLife™.

Easter eggs, hidden gems, unlockable s33kr1t levels and equipment are not a mortal sin against New Gaming, but if you need that to justify finishing the game, you have a serious design problem.

4) Learn early, learn often, learn easy.

Internally-consistent 'laws' should be hinted at early and through the learning stages of the game, while the visible connections and interactions within a limited feature set make plain that upcoming content will follow the same internal logic.

Combinatory functions are cool because they reuse content (saves monies) in many ways , and if done right make for exciting deductive challenges and exploration (as opposed to robotic 'try every possible combo'). If players can stumble on entirely new toys with significantly different effects from previous ones, but can correctly figure how to use them and what to expect without too much poking around, you've done something right.

This 'common wisdom' allows to introduce progressively more intricate and complex content to the players as they venture further through the game, which they'll be able to learn  on the fly as they build up on previously acquired knowledge.

Formal, mandatory Tutorial segments longer than a few minutes (beyond teaching the control schemes) are generally a copout in this regard. 'Lab' zones that allow players to experiment and practice at their leisure (without breaking immersion and rule 2 above) a by far preferable if some mechanics are worth spending time getting the hang of.

5) Shine shouldn't blind.

No matter how cool your particle algorithm is, or how much you like flare effects, if I can't use my torchlight without losing half the screen-estate to various graphical fluffery, it better tell me something I didn't know until then about my circumstances. Likewise, I don't care if true-3D rendering is more reelistic, I'll take roto-sprites over 3D any day if it means I can tell my soldiers apart from my peons at a glance.

While we're at it, if the game challenge hinges on the scenery and objects being semi-illegible, and if a simpler rendering would make the game 'too easy to play', there is a problem: graphics should add context, emotion, and possibly tell me more about the gamestate, not obfuscate it, unless it really serves a purpose — I'm not averse to walls being opaque, mind you.

6) Fun, polished fun.

Fun is something you make for yourself, as the saying goes, so it's a rather subjective thing, but if you have a game idea that sounds like it would be fun for you, chances are you're not alone — that's not a bad start.

Beyond that, making things fun is more art than science, and discussing it in detail would turn this article into a book, something neither you nor I look forward to — so let's assume you can recognize fun when it bites you.

…and that's the gist of it: look for it, see that every step of your game, from the intro to the controls, to accessing inventory management or moving around is, at least, not a bore, and whenever possible enjoyable.


7) Design early, design hard, design a lot.

Probably the worst thing that can happen during the early and core design stage of a game aimed at New Gamers is to leave too much to be sorted out later, especially if something doesn't quite feel right about an important feature that you know you'll reuse a lot.
Good design is cheap, compared to do-overs: it takes mostly time, talks, paper and a handful of people with various perspectives, using each other as sounding boards. Putting some stuff out in the open on a forum during pre-alpha may sound scary (OMG, BlizzardArts™ stole my ideas), but if you've been at it for a while, you may have a head-start in familiarity with your design that's hard to beat, and you don't have to go fully public either.

There's no such thing as having too much material: there are plenty of ways to prioritize the goods and decide what won't make it to v1.0… On the other hand, finding yourself forced to make up critical design elements as you go, halfway through production or (much worse) during crunch time, is a recipe for sloppy if not downright terrible results — neither will pass muster with New Gamers.

To conclude this once-again way too long entry, here's a quick summary and two examples:

New Gamers want games that are easy to get in, yet reward the dedicated and skilled, without screwing too hard on the beginner, unlucky or underdog — if there is a wealth of world/game mechanics to explore, all the better.

A near-perfect example of such design, far from R-POW and sandbox games is Mario Kart, which is not exactly a $50 million development project.

Another, which could probably turn into a commercial sleeper hit on the iPhone or any comparable device, with only a very slight coating of shoeshine on, but has everything that matters already in the box…

If you started videogaming this side of the 80's, odds are you never played anything like it. It's not old-school iso, or top-view 2D, it's ascii, which is beyond exotic ; and not only does it not hurt the eyes too badly, it's a fantastic game to play. Not 'good for an indie title'-good: it's worth playing regardless of any outside considerations. It's Dwarf Fortress.

I will write more about this beauty of a game someday, but until then I recommend you take a look at this page, yet only after you've spent a couple hours digging caves and fending off batshit insane mourning dwarven.

Gaming species (New Gaming, part 1)

 Games are art (not only, but also), and as such they're seen differently by the critic, historian, designer or budding artist than they are by the players.

While a botched game can still be worth the attention of a critic or game designer, who may spot the promising new feature or hidden gem amidst the debris of a production or artistic train wreck, the player who paid 5 movie seats or good paperback books worth of expected fun may not be so well-inclined toward a game that crashes, doesn't play well, or sports glorious-yet-ultimately-illegible graphics.

Because video gaming started as a niche hobby chiefly dominated by obsessive teenagers and early twenty-something, it used to be that the critic and player culture largely overlapped, in ways that made many players tolerant and supportive of ambitious-yet-failed attempts, as they knew to focus on the potential for the genre/platform to forgive or overlook flaws in a product that pushed the envelope.

Kids these days…

Most critics nowadays are gamers with soda-induced ADD, who grew up on games with a very high ratio of shiney/gameplay, while the player demographic has broadened to such a point that the gamer genus now encompasses uncounted species, many of which have never heard of each other.

More and more people are new to games, regardless of their birth date: the broadening of game demographics and the multiplication of platforms types (cell phones, browser games, cross-generation consoles) is bringing (back) new consumers to the games market every day. As all players before them, their tastes and expectations are shaped by their early experiences, and the near-instant availability and variety of today's offer mean they don't have to spend any more minutes than they feel like on games that aren't satisfying to them.

The emerging majority among this 'generation' of players share only one characteristic: they will settle for what they perceive to be the best in the current readily available crop when deciding where to put their time and money. They won't seek out promising monstrosities, or stroll a forum in search of a rare indie game that sports a unique feature or gameplay style — they game surf like they channel surf or watch DVDs: from the top 20 sellers in their favorite genre/shop.

New Gamers vs 'Real' Casual Players.

This trend has been widely acknowledged by the industry, and identified as the 'rise of casual gamers', which I believe to be a fallacy.
New gamers aren't inherently different from old-school gamers, many among them crave deep, challenging, involved gaming experiences, while casual players will never commit more than 15% of their brain's bandwidth for cycles longer than a few minutes to an hour at a time. What has changed is access and expectations.

The 'Real' Casual Players, who are only interested in 'light', non-committed playstyles now have more readily-available games that cater to their tastes, thanks to increased accessibility (notably via new platforms): this demographic is less growing (in absolute head count) than it is discovered and reached out to by a suitable offer, which wasn't the case before.

As for the New Gamers, even though they started video games in the current century, and can take internet for granted as their shopping mall, playground and grapevine through which hearing what's worth playing now, they have the same hunger for immersive, compelling fantasy worlds and alternative realities the two earlier generations of gamers had — except they won't eat their delicious gaming marmalade if it's spread on a burnt toast, even if served on a day-glow plate …which we were willing to do, because that was the only way we knew 'serious gaming' could be.

The intarweb ate my homework !

New Gamers and Casual Players both are raised on games that are instant-on, don't crash, come cheap or free (at least during the demo/trial/early play), can be jumped right in, unencumbered by arcane instruction manuals, clunky control schemes and configuration requirements, and provide a satisfying experience from minute one.

How come they get to enjoy such a carefree player career, compared to us who had to rebuild entire PCs and hunt down *custom* video drivers on BBSes to get a single game to run, hopefully without setting our study/dorm on fire in the process ?
Curiously, not because games nowadays taste less like burnt toast on average (although arguably, they do), but simply because New Gamers will dismiss games who fail those basic usability and enjoyability litmus tests without a second thought, a luxury they can afford because they have alternatives we didn't. It may not be 'better' games in your or my eyes, but they are humanly playable games, which is more than can be said about many of those responsible for most of my all-time fondest gamer memories.

Picking targets.

From the above, today's gaming market basically breaks down to three categories of potential customers: 'Real' Casual Players, old-school hardcore nerds, New Gamers. Platforms and RL demographics distinctions are largely irrelevant to that breakdown, although there may be more natural affinities between some than others.

To have any reasonable hope of a headshot, any game project can and should aim for only one of those groups at once.

•  'Real' Casual Players are both the most numerous and fickle, in theory.

In spending power, they may not be the strongest group, as they are raised on free (as beer) games, leaving you with nothing to get revenue from but ad-placement and possibly micro-transactions  — both of which I personally think are largely doomed models for this, but that's beyond the scope of this article.

On the plus side, real-casual games can be made for reasonably cheap, are typically low on art assets and coding complexity, and make easy to itemize and derivate new products from a single codebase. They can potentially support a low-overhead business model in its own name, or act as gateway drugs to lure in potential New Gamers toward more ambitious products.

• Old-school hardcore nerds are a stable niche.

Due to increased life expectancy and the OCD type of most hardcore gamers, they are in for the long haul, and won't stop playing and buying games as long as they can afford the time and money.

Capturing the attention of those players is a good way to build up ambitious game designs that take years/lots of sequels to reach their full breadth. Hardcore gamers play a game (series) as much for its development potential as for today's game as is, if not more.
The high barrier to entry that comes with games that are almost certain to never fully deliver on their overambitious promises (and player expectations) means they are not for the faint of heart, however: players and game makers alike who sign up for these projects must be ready to enter a world of pain and frustration, only redeemed by the occasional moment of pure bliss and ecstasy when things accidentally fall in place just right.

Because of the opposite aims of OSHN games compared to 'Real' Casual Players games, almost no  bridging between the two groups is possible inside a given game, and if it was, it may not be beneficial for either party to allow anyone to cross over too easily.

The ranks of OSHN can be replenished to make up for those who fell to diabetes complications, by tapping the pool of New Gamers: provided a OSHN game offers some desirable features that can't be found in more user-friendly titles, and the game look'n'feel is not too much like a smelly shantytown, a fraction of New Gamers can be enticed into taking the leap in OSHN-land. Once there, they'll start growing bellybutton lint with their new brethren, soon to morph into proud OSHN forever, after they've alienated all relationships dating from their former New Gamer life.

• New Gamers are not exactly sitting in the middle…

New Gamers aren't 'Real' Casual Players, by a long stretch: although they may occasionally play those, they don't consider real-casual games are 'true' games, as they expect more from theirs.
This doesn't make them OSHN, either, as they don't subscribe to the notion that poor gameplay and ergonomics, ugly graphics and show-stopping bugs are an acceptable and worthy price to pay for a richer game experience, which sets both groups apart, divided by fundamental values. …at least at first.

Designing for New Gamers requires the game to be accessible and easy to enjoy from the first moment in, yet to also hint at hidden depth and complexity early on, without making it overwhelming or angst-inducing. The second-to-last thing a New Gamer product should do is have players worry about making irrecoverable mistakes during their learning phase of the game, the kind that will only become obvious hours or days into it, forcing them to re-roll/re-start (hint: they won't, and will quit in frustration instead).

To an extent, successful design for New Gamers can be achieved without ever venturing further into complexity and depth than a lap-dance: the mere tease of flirting with deep gameplay can be enough to capture most New Gamers' attention for a long (and paying) time.
Good examples of this can be found in many modern CRPG, where the save-everywhere and 'rewind' mechanisms ensure no drastically unforgiving consequences can result from player choices, while still imposing some sense of loss/worth through the penalty imposed on 'wasted' playtime by the 'rewind' option.

In multiplayer games, New Gamers are looking for deeper and meaningful experiences, where their decisions do have lasting consequences and manifest impact on the gamestate and others, but where 'losers' always get a chance to bounce back and at least catch up with the head of the pack.
Although they will be welcoming high amounts of content if it is diverse enough, they usually care more for variety and emergent gameplay potential than for sheer quantity of features or size of the map.

Animals Crossing.

To a large extent, RCP, OSHN and NG don't mix well inside a same game: the antagonistic expectations about what makes a game worth playing (or dropping) mean it's rarely possible to reconcile them in a common environment.
What is true of individual games isn't of individual players, however, and just like many New Gamers can occasionally enjoy some RCP-aimed games, they can be lured into mainly OSHN-flavored titles that offer extra depth at not too steep a toll on accessibility.

'Real' Casual Players will usually not cross over into NG territory, because of the insurmountable time and attention commitments required by more involved styles of play — when they do, they're possibly budding New Gamers who didn't realize it before, and are likely to spend most of their  play-time on NG games after they've taken the leap once.
Barring serious blows to the head, RCP obviously never slip as far as OSHN-land, and run away tearing their eyes out if they mistakenly do.

As for OSHN, they're savage, smelly creatures living in caves, jealously guarding the entrances of their basement dwellings and spiteful of anything that roams the earth in the sunlight — don't expect them to  waste any time on n00bt0yz: their games are srs bzns.

***

[In the second part of this series, I'll have a look at how to make games that cater to New Gamers. 

Stay tuned.]