November 12th, 2009, 10 Comments »
I recently participated in a game of Pictionary. My team came second (or “first loser” as somebody described it), despite the fact that we had four arts degrees between us.
I was given a particularly challenging word to draw, and I thought I did a smashing job of it. My team disagreed. Travis kindly snapped a photo. My rendering is everything above my finger–we did multiple drawings on every sheet of paper. Can you guess the word? Click for super-sizing:
Hmm…in retrospect it’s not really that clear. Though, in my defense, two people from another team guessed what I was on about.
UPDATE: The correct answer is ‘taxidermy’. So maybe I failed. I did like an alternative suggestion I received by email: “Dance dance critter death edition”, which seems to be in the ballpark of correct.
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August 14th, 2008, 5 Comments »
The Internet, as you know, changed everything. Well, not everything, but it sure disrupted the way we make and distribute art. Ever since I saw geeks posting encoded files to Usenet, I’ve been curious to watch how the web has turned content creation (an awful, generic term) on its head.
One truth of the web in 2008 is that it is a much flatter playing field for creators. If you made an independent film in 1993, and you didn’t get backing from a studio, you couldn’t imagine how, say, 100,000 people would ever see it. YouTube makes that quite achievable in 2008.
But that flatter playing field isn’t necessarily accompanied by a lot of money-wielding players. And an artist has gotta eat. YouTube and other video sites have revenue sharing programs, but I doubt even 100,000 views would generate much money. I did a few quick searches on this, but couldn’t find any sample numbers.
Email Lists and True Fans
In a lot of cases, the old economic models are shot, or in sharp decline, and we haven’t figured out new ones yet. A recent guest columnist–a musician–on the Telegraph’s blog shed some light on how his band has survived in a post-Napster world:
When we left EMI in 1995, our most recent album had sold over 300,000 units. While we were still contracted for more, EMI decided to drop us. We were no longer commercial.
Today, after the internet boom, that level of sales would get us a deal with any of the major labels. After three more badly-marketed albums with an independent label we were down to 100,000 units.
In 1999 we released our final contracted album for Castle Records and, in anticipation of the way we planned to do business in the future, called it Marillion.com. We had already collected the email addresses of more than 20,000 fans through free CDs, downloads, etc. and by asking these fans to order and pay for the upcoming CD in advance, we were able to finance the writing and recording.
The precious email list reminded me of Kevin Kelly’s excellent essay 1000 True Fans.
Indie Games Come of Age?
The video game industry has, by comparison, remained unhindered by piracy. I’m not sure why this is. I assume that the industry’s explosive growth over the last decade has more than compensated for the revenue lost to pirated games. Plus, of course, I suspect that relatively few console players have the skills or inclination to play pirated games.
In any case, I’ve seen the video game industry as kind of like Hollywood’s studio system. There are a few big publishers, and they buy development studios or license their content. Even a ’small’ development studio would, I think, have dozens of employees.
The revolution in casual gaming, however, enables smaller teams and individuals to earn more attention. There’s a ton of free casual game sites on the web now. I don’t know how much revenue a given game creator sees from advertising, but I do know that their games are constantly copied and posted on new sites with advertising wrapped around them.
Still, I recently read about a success in the relatively new world of casual gaming on the consoles. Jonathan Blow developed a reportedly excellent game called Braid. He released it on XBox Live Arcade, an in-game system where players buy and download (I gather) generally cheap games. Braid had no in-store distribution–you can only get it through your XBox 360. It cost $15 to download the game. Via Silicon Alley Insider, I read Blow’s blog post about his first week of sales:
As I write this, there are 62,242 entries on the main leaderboards. I don’t have official sales numbers for the full week, but I would guess about 55,000 people have bought the game so far.
That works out to $825,000 in the first week. Microsoft takes a cut–possibly 33%–but that’s still terrific revenue for an independent game developer. Wikipedia provides a little information about the development process, but I’m unsure of what the budget for such a game would be, and how many people contributed to it. It’s enough, apparently, so that Blog can build another game without a day job.
I’m not sure, but I guess XBox Live Arcade and its competitors casual gaming portals can (have?) become the iTunes and YouTubes of the gaming industry, enabling the little guys to get greater distribution and, hopefully, revenue. Will indie game developers be as, on average, penniless as documentary film makers, despite their new-found distribution? Or will Johnathan Blow’s experience be repeated a thousand times over?
Clearly there are more questions than answers about the new economics of content. I mostly wrote this post to point to these two developments, and two industries at, seemingly, different stages of their evolution. For anybody interested in the background or context of these shifting tides, check out John Perry Barlow’s The Economy of Ideas and The Next Economy of Ideas.
UPDATE: Speaking of casual games, Andy points to a clever game called Coign of Vantage.
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May 17th, 2008, 10 Comments »
I first watched the trailer for Portal about a year and a half ago. It kind of blew my mind.
Last night I finally found some time to play it, and the game kept me up to 1:00am. It’s a wonderfully-crafted little short story of a game. If Samuel Beckett was a game designer, he might have made Portal.
The setting is a sparse, clinical testing facility evocative of THX 1138. You are only accompanied by the friendly voice of GLaDOS, a psychotic computer with a love of euphemisms. She guides you through 19 tests of increasing complexity. This all sounds pretty ordinary, and though all the details–the level design, the voice acting, the physics–are fantastic.
The first big difference between Portal and other games is that you have no real weapons. Though, of course, the only person to kill is yourself. You do have the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, which is the key to Portal’s extraordinary gameplay. From a review:
At heart, it’s a puzzle game built around the “portal” mechanic, which lets you blast a pair of holes onto any two surfaces and teleport between them—for example, to get across a room, or drop on top of a high platform, or blip around an insurmountable barrier. Portal adds this to the standard repertoire of sliding platforms, tripable switches, and near the end, robotic gun turrets that whisper playfully, “I see you!” (When you knock one down, it adds, “I don’t blame you.”)
To borrow a term from Douglas Adams, the result is mind-buggering. When I first saw the trailer, I thought that the portals would make the game very difficult. In fact, after a while, your brain adjusts to this new dimension of travel. Or dimensional travel, if you like.
Themes and Post-Modernism (and Beware, Half Life 2 Spoilers Ahead)
Video games are obviously evolving very rapidly. Increasingly, they’re reflecting more and more similarities with narrative art. The best new games have sophisticated plots, decent dialogue, more rounded characters and original and sometimes breath-taking aesthetics. Portal features a particularly creepy yet catchy ditty sung by GladOS over the closing credits (hear it sung by its composer).
However, Portal is one of the first games I’ve seen that reflects (for want of a degree in literary criticism) some more sophisticated aspects of art. For example, the game explores themes–the tyranny of mechanization, how corporations dehumanize us, the dubious ethics of scientific testing. They’re not examined in vast detail, but they’re present and feel reasonably fresh.
Additionally, Portal is the most post-modern game I’ve ever played. We see this in trivial ways. The whole game is vaguely reminiscent of Q*Bert. GladOS hilariously refers to “Aperture Science Weighted Storage Cubes” or a “Weighted Companion Cube”, sly nods to the crates and boxes that inexplicably populate many games (I think it’s partially because they had a low polygon count, but that’s just a guess).
But the game is self-aware in more profound ways. As you play, you begin to get peaks behind the curtain of the cold, white testing rooms. You discover debris and graffiti (hence the meme “the cake is a lie”) left by former test subjects. At the games’ mid-point, you avoid incineration after the 19th room and spend the rest of the game escaping the facility. You wend your way through rusty catwalks, grimy corridors and soulless offices. You are figuratively and actually inside the game, looking back into the test chambers. It’s the kind of radical (not to mention fun) shift in perspective that you find in novels.
Criticisms? Well, the kill-the-boss ending is ordinary, though comical. And the end game cinematic didn’t provide me with much explanation or satisfaction. Once again, it was very THX 1138.
Portal is a little masterpiece. It’s remarkable that’s it’s just one of five games that come in the Orange Box set of Valve projects. The two Half Life 2 chapters are more conventional, but still excellent (when was the last time you played a game that ended with a fade to black while a woman cried over her dead father?). I’m not a huge fan of Team Fortress 2’s gameplay, but its design is breathtaking.
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September 6th, 2007, 5 Comments »
And feel good about yourself, because it’s pretty easy:
85%The Movie Quiz
FilmCritic.com - Movie Reviews
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June 21st, 2007, No Comments »
Since I’m on a Mac laptop with a limited bandwidth allowance, I’ve been playing more Flash games:
Of course, it could just as easily be ‘widower’.
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April 6th, 2007, 7 Comments »
Thanks to Kirsten, I discovered Boomshine, which is kind of the Aveda spa of web games. It’s got calming music, and pretty bouncing dots, and is exceptionally simple to play. Simple doesn’t equal easy, though, and I’ve only gotten to level eight.
Aside from playing the corners and planning for hitting fast-moving dots, I haven’t really developed any sound strategies for winning the game.
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September 18th, 2003, 1 Comment »
My latest column in the Yaletown View (they’re having a party tonight) is about massively-multiplayer online role-playing games or MMORPGs. I’ve been playing Star Wars Galaxies for a few months, and have had mixed feelings about it. My column has more to say on this subject. In the meantime, here’s a few screenshots (kicking some ass, lazing around camp, Grace and her pet rancor and hanging with some fambaas). Yes, I play a girl. Yes, I’m aware of the subtext. Yes, I think her hairbun looks fetching. Yes, I’m a titanic nerd (click for much larger versions):
Read more…
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