Size Matters!

Is it unprofessional to write a love letter to a publisher or developer? Whether it is or not, I’m going forth and stating my compassion towards Bethesda and all they’ve done to keep me glued to Fallout 3 for dozens of hours on end without any stopping point in sight. This is something more than just my extreme satisfaction with a particular game (though it’s certainly part of it) it’s a model that developers should aspire to achieve in an effort to satisfy gamers over a longer stretch of time. Sticking strictly to console based games, there are two extremes here. On one hand you have the mentioned Bethesdas and Criterions of the industry that work towards expanding their titles beyond the initial feature set offered on the disk. I should give Criterion a special nod for making its first wave of Burnout Paradise content free, but that’s another topic entirely. On the other end of the spectrum, you get the guys at Grin who recently put out the Terminator Salvation game and Wanted: Weapons of Fate which offer nothing more than a story mode clocking in under five hours of gameplay with little else to offer. I’m not putting down Grin for making bad games, but rather using them as an example to point out the minimum that can be put in a game that sells for $60. Rushing through Fallout 3 will take between fifteen and twenty hours. How’s that for a value? Playing through the game and seeing everything could take up to sixty hours when, again, you’re rushing. Not only that, but once you finish the game, you can download content that seamlessly integrates itself into the game adding new missions, sometimes in new locales, to an already massive world with sure to be unexplored terrain. Criterion is offering another island to their massive world that is Paradise City after already giving away motorcycles, a day/night cycle, new multiplayer modes, and a restart function to races! They gave it away! Capcom should have thought about that before charging $5 for the adversary mode in Resident Evil 5, which was already on the disk to begin with.

Allow me to summarize: I won’t be buying Terminator Salvation because it’s $60 for a five hour game. I will, however, continue to buy additional content for Fallout 3 and Burnout Paradise. Recent drops in game sales prove that gamers are being more selective about their purchases and as a result will be looking towards the future and how a game will continue to stay fresh. It’s why World of Warcraft has stayed so popular and continues to attract new users. It’s why I’m still playing Burnout Paradise over a year after I bought it. Most importantly, it’s why anyone is still playing any given title long after it’s release.

- Jason Polansky

The Dos and Do Nots of In Game Advertising

In IGN US’s recent Bionic Command review, one of the biggest issues the reviewer had was the product placement throughout the title, referencing Pepsi vending machines and NVIDIA billboards. Really? Is that such a big deal that it hampers the enjoyment of the game? I’ll admit that there are times when product placement can be excessive to the point where I refuse to buy a product because of its annoyance, but you have to acknowledge that not all advertising is bad? Games have to be funded, and guess what… a portion of those funds come from the brands in the game. I don’t mind a Pepsi vending machine in a break of an office. That’s fine. However, don’t put a row of them in some otherworldly setting for the hell of it. A good example of how to do obscure brand placement right is Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee. In it, Sobe vending machines were periodically scattered throughout the world to give the player power-ups. Did it make sense? Not really, but it conveniently fit within the game’s themes of flatulence and general hilarity. On the other hand, if you dropped a vending machine in Shadow of the Colossus, there would be a problem. There are times when product placement can be a blessing and times when it can be the epitome of shameless nonsensical cash-in as was the case with Darkened Skye for Gamecube which revolved around collecting magic Skittles.

Some will give the argument that when playing a game you should be able to escape from the we live in. I can relate to that, especially after putting numerous hours into Fallout 3, a game world entirely self sustained. The standout case of avoiding product placement for the better of the game is in the case of making fictional soda manufacturer Nuka-Cola as opposed to splatter Coke all over the Wasteland of post-apocalyptic Washington DC (though something tells me a certain plot point would have probably turned any brand manager off). So these fictitious worlds can lead to some controversy over what’s acceptable or not, which can be why the reviewer of Bionic Commando was so annoyed by it, but it’s not something you are constantly surrounded by (such as in Fallout 3 where you can drink to regain health), it’s more of a matter of swinging through a city, seeing a billboard, and thinking it’s a legitimate billboard advertising something. I don’t recall there being a huge outcry against EA’s billboards in Burnout Paradise, which constantly change and promote a lot more than just Pepsi and NVIDIA (there were Barack Obama ads at one point).

The point I’m driving at here is use product placement strategically. The best use of product placement could be seen in sports games, where the idea is generally to make the game as realistic as possible. If that’s the case, you’re going to need to have a bunch of ads all over the place, just like the real event. In fact, there are times when a lack of brand placement can be detracting. For example, EA owns the rights to ESPN, but still insists on putting “EA” on scoreboards and timers. How about putting that license to use and giving me the true ESPN broadcast experience like the 2K sports of 2004? Ultimately use your brands wisely. The thing to remember is to use the brand with a certain respect for the environment on hand, and, most importantly, respect for the gamer and their world.

- Jason Polansky

Twitter Games... Some Big Opps Ahead

Twitter is on my mind in a way that you wouldn’t expect Twitter to be on one’s mind. What I’m thinking about are Twitter games. As an open forum of sorts for celebrities and the average Joes of the world to post whatever they want to everyone on the planet, it should come as no surprise that games are slowly creeping onto the service. The problem is, to make a game work, you must be sure to stay within the parameters of the particular platform. In the case of Twitter, you’re saying goodbye to sound, visuals, and nearly every other characteristic that makes the modern game what it is today. Well, all but one: the community. One of the greatest assets a game can have is its followers and players that interact with each other. Would Call of Duty still be relevant without its multiplayer component? It’s hard to say, but for a better example just look at World of Warcraft or the more recent success of the free Runes of Magic, which recently reached one million users. The difference between these online game communities and Twitter’s community is that one group showed up to play the game whereas the other is there simply to keep tabs on friends, celebrities, and anyone else they may have some interest in. However, with that being said, one can draw parallels between Twitter and Facebook, which didn’t initially offer games but eventually opened the floodgates for free apps to earn a presence on nearly everyone’s page, whether gamers in the traditional sense or not. Though Twitter is a service that only offers basic status updates like a mini-blog of sort, you can bet that various games will become more prevalent in the near future. The best example of a Twitter game so far is Sony Pictures attempt to hype up the upcoming Terminator Salvation which encourages players to “join the resistance” by following their account Resistance2018 in which various trivia questions and anagrams will be put up for them to answer and earn points to be contending with others on the leaderboard. This is a great start for building up a new gaming platform that is Twitter, but what I want is more. To completely take advantage of creating a great game on Twitter, take the community features to the next level. Leaderboards are ok, but why not do more? One post from someone should affect someone in some significant way that will retain their interest. What I want is a game that gives the user as much of an incentive to reply to some enthralling event as it does for them to reply to Ashton Kutcher’s tweet stating when he’s going to sleep. By now you may be asking “how?” How do you achieve something like this on a platform that’s so limited? The Game Agency is focusing on this question because the answer could inevitably be very rewarding for the right marketer or those simply looking to create a sub-community within the large Twitter population. When you take the time to stand back and look at tools at your disposal, you’ll find that the limitations fade away and possibility is all that remains.

– Jason Polansky

VG Karma

Today, developer Factor 5 announced they are closing their doors. The company behind the fantastic Star Wars: Rogue Squadron (N64/Gamecube) series and the not so fantastic Lair (PS3) has finally met its end and brings to light the idea of video game karma. Strange, I know, but it’s an interesting topic. Can it be that if you make bad games, bad things will inevitably happen to the respective developer and/or publisher?

First of all, I don’t want to say Factor 5 was a bad developer; on the contrary, they were a fantastic developer consistently pushing the technology of whatever platform they were developing for. However, Lair was a disaster of epic proportions when it came to gameplay, as was Haze (PS3); Free Radical’s last effort before nearly going under until being bought out by Crytek, known for creating the graphical powerhouse that is Crysis (PC). Free Radical is another example of a developer that made one misstep and the roof came down on their heads, similar to Factor 5. So perhaps there is a karma in the industry, but one that is particularly brutal and more lenient towards some wrongdoers than others. We are in an age where information is free to access by anyone that desires to find it. This includes the gaming press, which can instantly raise the hype of a title with positive review, or bring it crashing down with a negative one. But one has to ask, if this is the case, then how do some companies slip through the cracks, such as Midway and their Game Party series on the Nintendo Wii, which enjoys unbelievable success despite critical lashings? Perhaps this is where the karma truly takes effect and has varying degrees on relative wrongdoings. One poor game will bring a developer down in a year or two, but a continuous stream of titles that take advantage of unsuspecting customers will result in a slow and painful death, as is the case with Game Party publisher Midway.

This theory is completely theoretical, so take it simply as a thought, but there is an undeniable trend and it’s one that is tough to ignore. Of course, I have mainly talked about negative karma as the result of bad games, but what about the opposite? Going back to Crytek, you see a developer with immense talent and one that consistently delivers top-notch games. Even though they are one of the biggest victims of piracy, they still stand strong in the industry today. In fact, not only do they stand, but by some fortune, they were able to purchase one of the best console first person shooter developers that is Free Radical. Interesting.

- Jason Polansky

What's Next In Game Design?

Looking at core games available today, gamers might think every possible style of game has already been invented... sports, action, shooters, racing, simulation, RPG, fantasy, horror, sci-fi, war, superheroes,etc.

But, is it possible that computer games have only at their infancy? Suppose we could set aside all assumptions -- what kinds of games could be imagined if we consciously decided to do something new? Let's step outside the box a little.

Consider MMORPGs. A core assumption of these games is that players want to compete against each other. So what happens if we challenge that assumption?

What if instead of making yet another Hobbesian world of constant competition, a game could be funded that subordinated competition to cooperation? What if the highest-level goal baked into the game was not personally topping a leaderboard or belonging to the biggest guild, but something more constructive instead?

There could still be competition in such a game. Competition in moderation is healthy; it's a very effective way of efficiently distributing finite resources. But in a game where resources can be considered infinite, competition would not be the be-all and end-all of play -- it would be a subgame that ultimately supports the top-level cooperative effort.

As an example of this, what about a "Big Challenge" game where all players have to work together in complex ways over a long time to avert some disaster or complete a major accomplishment?

Below is a diagram I that shows various forms of computer games that have been invented so far and how they interact to form specific modes of gameplay:

The specific details of this diagram are less important than the general relationships suggested and the size of each ellipse is irrelevant; there's no correlation with "importance. When I look at this diagram, I see the gaps.

What if the Adventure Games circle were expanded to intersect with MMOGs? Could there be a massively multiplayer adventure game? What if the Strategy Games circle were expanded to CRPGs, so that you actually played a character whose effectiveness at strategic planning determined your character's story arc? What if the Strategy Games circle were expanded to MMORPGs, so that gameplay wasn't just a bunch of mindless one-on-one slapfights but represented hundreds of thousands of massive empires spanning a galaxy?

What if the Software Toys circle, with its emphasis on simulation, were expanded into MMORPGs? Can you imagine a game where the gameplay revolved around how well your characters responded to dynamic but comprehensible changes in complex systems? What kinds of systems would be fun to simulate if you could allow thousands of characters to fiddle simultaneously with the switches and dials of a gloriously complex gameworld?

In short, these gaps are the opportunities to experiment with new kinds of computer game products. So let's start exploring...