Gamer Hate

Well I never thought the first question would be THIS easy.

If you’re looking for something to kill WoW, there’s a very easy and obvious answer to what will finally topple this giant of the MMO games. If you’re thinking it’s a better MMO, you’re wrong. Let me give you a little background on where MMOs came from.

Back in “the day” (TM), if you wanted to hang out with the on-line community, you had to use a modem. A modem used your phone line to connect to another computer that allowed for multiple incoming calls to be maintained at once. These were called BBS, or Bulletin Board Systems. When they started, they were just for having forum discussions, but eventually they started using them for games. One of the most popular types of games was called a MUD.

MUD stands for Multi-User Dungeon. When MUDs started they were entirely text based. In fact, they were a lot like the old classic adventure games where you would walk North by typing N and hitting enter. My personal favorite was called Crossroads, where you could multi-class in different elemental power types.

Anyways, the MUDs were wildly popular among people who knew anything about BBS systems. Of course, most people didn’t. Then the internet became more and more popular and graphical interfaces for games became required. It wasn’t until about 5 years later that a MUD would meet a GUI and really click with the public though.

That game was called Everquest. Everquest was my first foray into a graphical MUD, or as they became known, an MMORPG or Massively Multiplayer On-line Role Playing Game. Everquest became an obsession for many at Blizzard, and we all played it to the detriment of our jobs. I was definitely not a hardcore player by any means, but I devoted nearly 4-6 months of ACTUAL PLAY TIME over the course of the 3 years I played it. When I did quit, I had to remove it from all my computers, smash the discs, and swear an oath to never touch the damnable thing again.

A couple years later I picked up the game again and played a Shaman to the upper 60s, but the game soon became frustrating enough to never even want to play it again. You could not solo in that game. You had to be in a group, and it was very difficult to find a good group because anyone decent was already at the level cap. The game became so frustrating that I quit without even really caring. I never returned to Everquest after that.

But at Blizzard, the passion for MMOs was only beginning, and since the team played that game so frequently, it became an obsession for them to create a better MMO that would rival and even defeat Everquest. Sadly a game I was much more interested in was cancelled as a result. Nomad, you will be missed.

When WoW started development, I had little interest in playing. Having just gotten over an Everquest addiction, I found the very idea of playing another MMO repulsive. The grind to reach the higher levels was ridiculous, and the penalties for death in EQ were extremely harsh. You could cycle die all the way back to level 1 if you bound yourself over lava. Everquest made a lot of poor game design decisions, but the fact was, there wasn’t another game in town that even came close to its immersion. Which is why making World of Warcraft made sense for Blizzard.

What World of Warcraft had was a good design sense. Sure, there were mistakes made (like slow typing the text out on the quests to force players to read them) but they fixed them in relatively short order. WoW had all the immersion of Everquest without the super hardcore under theme that Everquest had. This was an MMO that everyone could sink their teeth into and enjoy.

Indeed, it has been quite the success story. Millions are playing WoW and shelling out 15 dollars a month for that privilege. No other MMO has ever come close to their success and I doubt there will be many afterwards that will unless they’re not fantasy based (Starcraft MMO anyone?). However, something is brewing within the lands of Azeroth that will topple the mighty WoW empire within the next couple years.

As you may have noticed, WoW has had 1 expansion and 90% of the content for the expansion was content for the additional levels they added. In fact, no new classes have been developed for WoW as of yet (though the Burning Crusade promises one, it is a “hero class” meaning that it starts at level 55 (seeing as how there’s going to be no content for it 1-55, that makes sense).

In addition, the majority of the content when you reach the end level for the game is Raid content, which requires multiple competent people to get together to defeat a large enemy. This is one of WoW’s major flaws, because the people who enjoy raids are probably about 10% of their customer base. Raids are a major source of frustration for most people as they don’t want to play the way that is necessary to accomplish things in a raid (meaning being extremely attentive for 2-6 hours at a time).

The other way to spend your end time in the game is to fight in the arena or battlegrounds. Both of which are hardcore situations due to the competitive nature of being placed against opponents. Either way, you lose anyone who isn’t a fairly hardcore gamer in your end content. A lot of what the casual gamers enjoy is the easy and fun questing system that WoW has. But that content dries up quickly or often becomes a series of collection quests instead of individualized and super interesting quests. For example, the first 10-20 quests in the Burning Crusade expansion were totally awesome. Who doesn’t remember sifting through poop or dropping bombs while flying?

The problem is, that content dries up and you can only play through the game so many times before there’s really nothing you haven’t seen. Will the next expansion hit before you’ve reached the max level for the current game? Most of us have been at the level cap for many months. Let’s face it, WoW is an easy game to level through which is a good thing because leveling up is the thing that keeps people playing. Some people will make multiple characters to keep their addiction going, others will get into the hardcore raid content (though if they turn out to be slackers, they’ll fail repeatedly or be booted by their guild). A few more will take to ganking n00bs for hours… Assholes…

At the end of the day though, the lands of Azeroth will begin to become stale. The players have seen it all and done it all, and the thought of grinding through the old levels as a new character will no longer appeal to them. The thought of grinding experience at all in fact will not appeal to them. You see, the major flaw of all MMORPGs (to date) is that the actual gameplay is not all that appealing. When you really think about it, what are you doing? You’re standing in front of a computer generated object and hitting buttons to kill it. Yes, there’s more strategy to it than that, but how many times do you have do it before it becomes annoying? 100? 1000? 1,000,000?

What I learned from my MUDs was true for Everquest and is also true for World of Warcraft. Once you realize what you’re doing and how much time you’re spending doing it, the game ceases to be fun. Expansions can’t keep up with the need for new content once you reach the level cap, and those who are super casual may never reach the previous level cap at all, instead choosing to make a new character whenever the game becomes too difficult. What you develop is a rift.

The hardcore players will crank straight to the max level in a few days (with no sleep). The super casuals will never quite catch up because just as they get close (if they ever do) there are more levels stacked on top or the game becomes too difficult for them so they restart. The regular casual players aren’t good enough to raid and their equipment pales in comparison to the hardcore battleground and arena junkies, thus making them unable to have fun in any of the end game content.

So to answer the question (finally), what will ultimately end up killing WoW is time. When you finally do quit an MMO, the act of quitting is typically so final and decisive that you will never choose to play again (those who had extreme addictions will never play another MMORPG again). Some might periodically return for each expansion, but that’s typically the hardcore types who will burn through the content in a month and then realize they’re back where they started. The super casuals were already frustrated by the original jump in levels so they won’t bother. The regular casuals might give it a try, but the end content of WoW is still super competitive arena/battlegrounds OR Raids, neither of which appeal to the regular casual players.

There doesn’t need to be a bigger and better MMO to crush WoW. WoW will eventually crush itself under the heel of the design flaws of MMORPGs. Once you realize that you’re grinding, the game ceases to be fun. Once the new content is absorbed, the game ceases to be fun. If you can’t raid and you can’t compete with the hardcore in PVP, the game ceases to be fun. Eventually, everyone realizes this despite all the addictive elements of character building. Eventually, everyone realizes that if they’re going to play a game, they may as well play something that’s actually fun to play…

So, I felt it. I’m pretty sure anyone who reads here regularly felt it, but I’m starting to slow down on the topics. One of the most difficult tasks for a writer starting from almost nothing is finding a topic you’re passionate about and starting to write. Thus, I’ve come up with a better way for me to regularly get on-point and interesting articles about the game industry written for all of you.

I’m opening up Gamer Hate to reader questions. If you have a question about game development, games, or specific industry related stuff (like how to get a job, what’s Chris Metzen like in person, or how long did Warcraft III really take to make and how many iterations did it go through), send that question to commanderhate@gmail.com.

I can’t promise I’ll answer every question, but I will do a minimum of one a week. This is going to be a lot easier for me as I find it much easier to answer a question in depth than to write a topic from scratch. I may or may not post information about the question asker, but if you ask to remain anonymous, I will respect your wishes.

So, there you go, a 10 year game industry veteran has opened the doors to any and all questions about the game industry and its related fields (as well as any topics of knowledge specific to my experiences). I will likely still have my own topical posts, but hopefully this will allow me to post a lot more frequently without feeling frustrated that the topic I’ve chosen is a little… uhh… lackluster. Like this one for instance.

As I’ve mentioned previously, Braid is a side scrolling puzzle game reminiscent of Super Mario Bros that I really enjoyed playing an early version of. I can only imagine that after several months of polish, it’s an even better experience. If you are a game developer with a 360 dev kit, you can grab it off XBLA right now. I can assume this means it will be available to the public fairly soon…

It wasn’t until I saw Gamespot do a report on a game that I had worked on that I realized just how idiotic the news people really are. Do they know anything about what they’re reporting on, or do they just reach into a blackhole and spew bullshit every time they want to sound like an expert on the subject. What the game industry news reporters have shown me is that they’re extremely bad at faking their knowledge as they’ll say something like “I think” or “Something like” or “I believe” before they start their completely incorrect “fact.”

What scares me is that I know the reporters on CNN and other big news channels are MUCH better at pretending they know what they’re talking about. They can lie without it seeming like they are. All in the name of seeming like they’re informed on the topic at hand.

Isn’t that the point of being a news reporter though? Aren’t you SUPPOSED to be informed about the topic you are discussing? Isn’t it necessary to study the topic and learn about it before you start blabbing on national or local television all about something that may be important information for people to know?

Yes, yes you are supposed to do that. That’s why a reporter is called a reporter. They report the information that they have gathered about a topic. Yet these days I’m beginning to suspect that most reporters don’t do any research before they start droning on about something. Fox news in particular seems to be more about vomiting out their vitriolic opinions on anything and everything without so much as doing a single bit of research. Of course, all of this is particularly true for broadcast news. A medium that up until the last few years, the video game industry has largely avoided.

Yes, now there are on-line broadcast shows like On The Spot at Gamespot, and though G4tv and others beat them to the punch, Gamespot Live seems to suffer from a particularly bad case of uninformed reporters. Particularly irritating is that despite their geeky looks, they seem to have very little understanding of the finer points of gaming, or at least when they open their mouths it appears that way. What’s worse is that they have the person playing the game as they attempt to discuss its finer points, which inevitably ends in that mind numbingly idiotic kind of speech reminiscent of trying to discuss Greek literature with someone getting a blowjob.

Yet despite them actually playing the game as we watch, they still get the majority of information about the game completely wrong. That’s because doing that would require research above and beyond what they’ve done which is simply to play the game for an hour. They don’t know how many levels there are, or boss encounters, or how amazing the story is. They haven’t really done their research at all.

How difficult would it be to get in contact with a member of the development team to get that information straight from the source? Not hard at all… Yet, the broadcast medium reporters don’t do it. Game developers LOVE free press, they would be falling all over themselves to get these people as much information as they wanted on their games. I think it’s time the video game industry’s satellites started getting their shit together. I want our industry to be the one that shows the others how things should be done.

So I’m calling you out game reviewers! Do your damn research before you open your damn mouths. If you don’t know how many levels there are in a game, say you don’t know, but for the love of all that is Unholy, do your damn research so you know the basics!

If you don’t know the following, you shouldn’t be speaking as an authority on any game:

• The genre and premise of the game.
• How this game is different from others in its genre (bullet points of features).
• The average amount of playtime hours.
• The basic storyline of the whole game.
• Difficulty settings (if any).
• Whether it has multiplayer.
• The platforms the game is on.
• The release date or expectation thereof (directly from the developer if possible).

Note that specific games may require you to have more information or be familiar with certain aspects of the product itself that are unique. For instance, if you were to talk about Spore, I expect you to have spent more than an hour with the Spore creature creator. =P

You see, one of the things that has always bothered me about real world network news reporters, is that they do not experience the stuff they are talking about. Most of them don’t have the slightest clue about any of the crap they are speaking (aside from embedded and undercover reporters who I have the utmost respect for). As video game reporters, you have the unique opportunity to immerse yourself into the core of every story you do. You can almost become an expert on every topic you are going to discuss on your show simply by spending several hours of your time playing the products that you are going to be talking about. In addition, developers LOVE free press so all you need to do is some elementary research to get a phone number and you can know ANYTHING that people might want to know about the game you will be discussing.

Don’t fucking blow this by being lazy assholes. Do your damn homework like a grownup…

Every new designer comes into the industry thinking they’re going to reinvent a genre or a methodology of design. In Japan they take this to an extreme and have almost no communication between their game development teams, even if they’re at the same company. The idea is that this gives you a fresh look at making a game and your end product will be entirely new and totally different from everything in the market.

Unfortunately, what that really means is that even if there is a tried and true method for doing something, you have to reinvent that methodology from scratch. This problem is particularly severe in Japan where even technologies are not shared. So every time they make a game (even if it’s the same team working on a sequel) they start from scratch. Is it any wonder that Japan seems to be behind the U.S. in technology for games?

From a purist design standpoint, I can see where the Japanese game developers are coming from. In fact, I once thought that way too. If you start over from scratch every time you create a game mechanic, you might come up with something wonderful and new. Sadly, 90% of the time you’ll come up with something someone else has already done and when you do that, you’re behind the curve and you’ve wasted all that effort.

You see, what most industries have learned (and the game industry is learning/partially knows) is that if there is a tried and true method for doing something, rather than wasting your development time and money trying to reinvent it, you should copy the best components of that thing and subtly improve on it. The old design adage of taking the wheel and making it square is something we should all keep in mind when doing this. It’s very easy to take something simplistic and make it overly complicated to the point where it does the opposite of what it was supposed to do (and that is typically to make your job easier). For the most part, many simple design mechanics can be taken wholesale from other games and adapted to fit your particular game with little changed.

As an example, let’s look at money in MMORPGs. Most MMORPGs have a simple monetary system of 3 to 5 types of coin with each coin having a base 10 divisible value compared to the other coins. So in World of Warcraft I believe it’s 100 copper makes a silver, and 100 silver makes 1 gold. Thus 10,000 copper = 1 gold. Not that it matters in WoW since they automatically convert your money to the highest denomination possible. WoW did a good job of simplifying this system to its core component and honestly, unless you’re making a game that has a need for more types of coins or a slightly more complicated monetary system (perhaps you’re doing a MMORPG that revolves around economic fluctuations??) then I see no reason to change much.

100 copper and 100 silver is enough granularity at the early levels to keep the players motivated and at the end game there aren’t many items that will go for over 5000 gold on the auction house. Though there is something to be said for introducing a new coin type in a future expansion as gold becomes increasingly worth less. Perhaps a Mithril coin that is equal to 100 gold would help keep things in order… However, it’s not totally necessary since money has no encumbrance in the game, but there is a programmatical limit to the amount of gold a character can carry, thus a higher value coin isn’t a bad idea at all for WoW.

The point is that whatever game design system you’re looking to make, there’s probably 100 examples of it being done already. Some are good, some are bad, but you can learn something from every single example. That is why it is absolutely critical for game designers to play games. If you play games you will see how other games execute their design systems and you’ll learn a lot of what to do and a lot more of what not to do (as its easier to be annoyed by a system and point out its flaws than to notice that it doesn’t bother you in the slightest and is therefore a nearly flawless system).

Improving on and modifying already established game design systems is a critical component of a game designer’s arsenal of tools. You might have a lot of great ideas, but if you can’t recognize the great ideas that are already out there, you’re going to lose a lot of time trying to recreate them from scratch. Almost all areas of thought and creation advance by building on the foundations of the past. Deciding to throw those foundations away is a critical error that most “creative” types make repeatedly and are largely responsible for the wide number of games that come out with seemingly idiotic mistakes in them.

Consider for a moment the film industry. They have a long established set of guidelines for how to use the camera properly. One example is the 180 degree rule of the camera. Once you have established two speakers in a scene, you are never supposed to move more than 180 degrees around them as it can disorient the audience and confuse which character is on which side of the conversation. If you have a 3D program and can try it out, I recommend trying it out as you’ll see just how disorienting it can be. However, as an established rule in film, you’ll almost never see this rule being broken in movies (without an extremely good reason). There are many rules like it, and as such, the film medium has a foundation with which even an amateur movie maker can cobble together a cinematic piece that does not confuse the audience. Of course, a lot of amateurs ignore the rules (thinking they are above them) and it shows.

Game design has a similar set of rules but they haven’t been solidified enough yet that everyone agrees on what they are or the specifics and merits of each particular rule. However, there are plenty of games out there to study and extrapolate design techniques from. As a game designer, it is your duty to play them and understand what techniques they used and why. Once you understand that, you’ll know when to borrow outright, when to improve on what they have, and most importantly, when it’s actually time to create something from scratch.

I’ve only discussed politics a little since I started this blog, but politics are a very important issue to me. Primarily because they determine the outcome of our economy, how much the government will be watching over our shoulder, and what our future will hold. Most recently I’ve been watching the primaries very carefully.

I initially supported Ron Paul for his anti-government stance. This is what Republicans were originally supposed to be about. Less government, more freedom. Now it would seem Republicans are about Jesus and wiping out foreign countries and making certain the rich people stay richer and the poor people get ass fucked until they bleed out. Libertarians are what Republicans used to be (a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away), which is probably why I identify with that party the most (less government, yay). However, Ron Paul was ultimately rejected as a candidate by the populace at large and the Republicans now have John McCain at their helm.

As a side note, I find it incredibly amusing that Barack Obama is the prominent figure on both the democratic and republican web pages. It almost doesn’t matter who the Republican candidate is… In addition, the Republican website is entirely about showing the democratic nominee in as negative a light as possible, while the democratic one is about showing the democratic nominee in a positive light. I find it incredibly lame that a political party would go entirely for a smear campaign instead of telling us what they would do right… That makes me wonder what their real agenda is. =P

In 2004 I was pro-Howard Dean because he was the only candidate who wasn’t owned by a lobbyist group or ten. Dean’s money came from web donations from normal people and his policies made a lot of sense. Take care of the people, stop corporations from having the upper hand on everyone and get the government to have some damn fiscal responsibility (Bush had already put us billions into the hole, which sucked after Clinton had gotten us so close to being out of the hole). Yet people laughed at Howard Dean as a candidate, and instead of looking at his policies, the vast majority of people mocked his (over)excitement during a political rally and made him look like a clown. I always seem to be backing the people who are the least corrupt by politics, and they always seem to get laughed out of the political race. I guess, in a really sad way, that makes sense.

However, 2008 has shaped up to be the most promising election to date. We had a woman and an african american as the potential democratic nominees. Barack Obama has won the primary now and is the first ever african american candidate running from a major political party (the only other one I know of was Frederick Douglas in 1872, a former slave, who ran for VP with Victoria Woodhull running for President under the Equal Rights Party, she was the first female to run for the presidency). Have we come a long way?

That remains to be seen, as a lot of the voting in the democratic primaries seemed to be split along racial lines. I like to think that both black and white voters are just voting for the candidate they think is best based on their political stances, but that’s a little too far on the side of optimism for my taste. At the very least I hope that people agree with all his economic and political talking points if they are voting for him, rather than because his skin is closer to the same shade as theirs.

That being said, I am voting for him and my skin is about as white as it gets without becoming translucent. There are a number of reasons for this, the primary ones being that I have researched the issues and I agree the most with Obama’s policies. The secondary reason is that he seems the least corrupted by his political dealings. He also got a lot of his money from web donations as opposed to lobbyists and corporations. I don’t like the idea that our president can be bought (like our last one clearly was).

Anyways, this is a historic event in our country. We’re finally at a point where both a woman and an african american were taken seriously as presidential candidates. I expect record numbers of voters to come out for the presidential election given that a precedent has already been set for shaking up our political system. Who knows, maybe in 8 more years we’ll be ready for a whole new political party to take the limelight (Libertarians or the Green party perhaps).

Either way, the onus is now on you to make a decision based on what’s best for you and the country. If you haven’t realized it by now, the Republican party has steadily become a corrupt entity hell bent on twisting the United States towards feeding their corporate greed. Capitalism is all well and good, but the government of the United States should not be directly feeding corporate entities at the expense of the health and welfare of its own citizens (particularly entities that are owned or tied to people IN THE FRIGGIN GOVERNMENT).

So I want you to answer this question aloud (if you can) right now. Just say the first thing that comes to mind. Who are you voting for in the coming election?

Did you answer that yet? It’s important your answer is spontaneous…

Okay…

So if you said the following: “I am voting Republican,” or “I am voting Democrat,” or “I am voting insert_political_party,” you have made the biggest error you can possibly make when it comes to making an informed decision in a voting process. The error is that you are voting for a party instead of a candidate. The presidency is one person, their political party is almost irrelevant, that person will be helping make decisions for the U.S. of A. Not the political party they happen to belong to.

It’s also very telling if someone says they’re voting for a political party instead of an actual candidate, because that means that either they haven’t researched the candidates (and thus their opinion is uninformed) or they intend to vote for their political party REGARDLESS of who the candidate of that party is. This is the worst thing you could ever do, because you are basically casting your vote for someone you don’t even like just because you believe that you are of a certain political party. This is worrisome to me so I have a little homework assignment for you.

I want you to take a good hard look at what you actually believe and make sure that the reasons you believe those things are because you honestly think that way. You would be amazed how many people can’t reason through their own beliefs.

As an example: If you believe abortion is wrong because your parents said it was wrong or because your political party says it is wrong, you have not really thought about abortion. If you believe it is wrong because abortion is murdering something that will eventually become a human being, you’re probably actually thinking about it in real terms. I personally believe in abortion because a baby is technically a parasite within a woman’s body and should have no rights of its own until it is able to survive without using her body to do it. If I were a woman I might feel differently, but as a man I have no idea what the whole baby growing inside you thing feels like so if they want to get it out of them, let ‘em. Their body, their right, etc. And yeah yeah yeah, I wouldn’t care if my parents aborted me, I wouldn’t be alive to give a shit about that. For all I know, my not being born could have brought about a renaissance of humanity, but I think I’m giving myself far too much credit.

I digress…

The point is this. To make an informed decision, you must be informed. To pick a proper candidate you must stop looking at race, pin wearing, political party, etc, and actually learn what the candidates intend to do when they are president. When you find a candidate that you agree with, VOTE FOR THEM! If you choose a candidate for any other reason, you are making a mockery of the reason we have a voting system in the first place. To pick the people we honestly believe should be running our country.

So do your research, I’ll see you at the voting booths.

It’s a sad and sorry fact that the vast majority of game companies don’t control their own cash flow. In order to make a game they need money, and the people with money are the publishers. The publisher is who these game companies attempt to pitch their games to in order to convince them to give them money so they can fully make and sell the game. The publisher is the one the game companies sell themselves to when they’ve run out of funds. The publisher is the first to reap the rewards of a game’s sales. The publisher is God to the game developer…

But this isn’t the benevolent all knowing all seeing God that the Christ-pushers would have us believe in. No, this is a spiteful backstabbing evil God that wants only to reap and rape the benefits of a game developer’s hard work. You will find the majority of them unwilling to try something new and bold, and you will find they are quick to point you towards making a game that has already been made. Gears of War just came out? Make a Gears of War killer. People like Call of Duty 4, make a 1st person war simulation. World of Warcraft is popular, make a MMORPG.

That’s right, if you see a trend in video games and silently curse to yourself, “Why the fuck are they making another one of THOSE?!” then you now know who to blame. The publisher controls the money and the publisher wants a sure bet. If 1st person military shooters are popular, you can bet your ass that they’re going to push anyone pitching a game to them in that direction (even if they’ve already got 3 in development). They’re also more likely to fund a 1st person military shooter so most game companies will be pitching that to them anyways. In fact, the only way you’re likely to see a game that isn’t just like everything else on the market, is if they’ve either funded their own “creative” game development team, or someone with a lot of money decides to fund one themselves.

The sad truth is, a publisher is a group of people. A group of people with a lot of money and weighty decisions to make about how that money is best put to use. Since this group of people has to agree on what they’re going to bet their money on, do you think they’re going to try something off the wall that none of them can agree on, or would they put it on something that is similar to an already successful game or franchise? Sadly, the answer is obvious.

But let’s say you happen to get your amazing game pitch through and the publisher has decided to fund it. No matter what the publisher says to you about letting you do the game to your own specifications, there will come a point in time (usually around a critical milestone or towards the end of the development cycle) where they will bring in a certifiable imbecile who will crap all over your game and try to make it more like something that’s successful and already on the market. Yes, even when they say they trust you, they really do not. The only company in the entire history of the game industry where I’ve seen publishers give their honest and full fledged trust to a game developer was Blizzard Entertainment. So you can see that the bar is… pretty high.

What you can expect once development is in full swing, is a constant uphill battle as the publisher tries to push you towards the mainstream and what’s known to be successful and you try to make something unique and new that people have never seen before. What you will end up with at the end of the day, is something that attempts to be like something successful already on the market, but fails because it was not initially designed with that in mind. All thanks to the wonderful publisher who will now never trust you with another dollar again because you’ve fucked over a “sure thing.”

It’s a sad and sorry state of affairs, but there is some hope in the independent market. You see, they don’t have nit-picky publishers like the larger game companies do. They are pretty much their own boss as far as I can tell, and they call all the shots at the end of the day. There’s a certain beauty to that, but also a danger. When you make a game with just one creative vision, the cohesiveness is bound to be amazing, but whether or not that reaches out to the larger populace is a crap-shoot. In fact, it’s quite likely to only appeal to a very small minority. Without commercial success the end result is a failure and no future development on those independent games. Japan seems to be going through this phase right now, and their current solution is to give their franchises to American game developers in the hopes that they will make their games more mainstream.

More on that later…

Narrow is one who has sought no answers,
Narrow is the one who accepts the first thing handed over,
Deep and wide runs the river of questions,
While the narrow one can do naught but fetch from the bible like rover,
Without truly understanding their preaching the narrow dog finds they are in a chasm,
The sides too narrow to move forward or back,
But the river of questions will fill the chasm to the top,
Will rover stubbornly stay stuck at the bottom and drown,
Or swim to the top where those with open minds can see the world is round?

About 10 to 15 years ago, when a group of people would work on a game, they could expect to see royalties for the number of copies sold. Typically it was written into their contract and rather than the company absorbing all that and then deciding whether or not to hand out that money as “bonuses,” the money would go straight to the actual designers, artists and programmers. Yes, straight to their homes in fact, so that even if they quit, the hard work they put into the game was not for naught. They would get those checks no matter what company they worked at, even if it was a competitor to the company they originally made the game for.

A friend of mine recently told me that he got the last royalty check for a game he worked on 15 years ago. One I had never heard of, and it occurred to me that despite having worked on about 5 games that have sold well over a million copies each, I will never see another dime for those games because I don’t work at that game company anymore. With all of the grueling hours that goes into those games, you’d think that we would get some sort of personal stake in its outcome. Some companies do have a bonus system, but the bonuses typically only come if the company as a whole is considered profitable, and as we all know, once a company starts making a lot of money, they usually start expanding explosively. There goes your bonuses.

What is worse though, is that if you ever leave that company, all of the hard work and creativity you put into making that game is pretty much lost. Even if that game goes on to sell another 5 million units, you will never see a dime.

It’s rather odd to have seen how quickly the game industry went from a group of creative individuals pouring their hearts and souls into a game, to a corporate entity that uses and discards its talent like paper towels. Quite literally they will wait until a game is pouring blood from every seam and then throw every developer they have on top of it to try and seep up the mess. Yet, no sooner has that game hit store shelves that everyone finds themselves walked outside of the office only to discover they’ve all been let go. I’d like to say that the number of companies that does that is low, but it’s actually still surprisingly high. Even the ones that don’t lay off everyone still do a lot of layoffs whenever a project ends or whenever they can’t seem to find a project. It’s all to stay afloat I suppose.

So we developers who take these risks with the companies. We who sacrifice nights and weekends (often without extra pay) to make a game that we think is something special. How is it that we are not attached to the income of the end product? Why is it that we don’t see a dime if our game does well unless the company we work for deems us worthy of a bonus (pending profitability and what not). In the movie industry, the actors make money based on how well the dvds sell, or if their tv series gets another season. If a sequel is signed for a game we created, we don’t see any extra pay (although we get to keep getting a paycheck). Yet, we don’t really complain about it.

Why is that? All this work and effort and if our game goes on to sell millions of copies we don’t necessarily see any of that money, yet we continue to work in this industry. Well, we must like it. Despite the long hours and hard work, we must. I believe we must.

So it is with great disdain that I look upon the voice actors and writers who moan and complain about not getting residuals for the game. I sympathize a bit, I do, but seriously, fuck you guys. I’ve seen your work schedule. It’s about 40 hours of a voice actor’s time, maybe. Yet you get more than my yearly salary for that… And on top of that, you want residuals for the game? Fuck you. Writers work for about 3-6 months on the game, from home, yet get twice over my YEARLY salary. You want residuals too? Fuck you.

No one puts in more effort and time into these games than the designers, programmers and artists who make them. Voice acting is almost an afterthought. I long for the day when a computer generated voice rivals a human one so that we never have to use you bastards again. Writers? Pah, game designers have long been better at writing for games than you fools. You just can’t grasp some of the core ideas of what game writing is (not all of you, just most, particularly the hollywood types who want residuals).

So to any of you tangential people in the game industry who want residual payments from games. Seriously, go screw yourselves. If the developers themselves don’t get it, you don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell. Now if you fight for the developers getting residuals, then you might have a chance, but until that day, just shut-up. You guys honestly don’t seem to have even the faintest grasp of what we put ourselves through to make those games.

I’ve left out publishers on purpose for now. I just realized that they’re a whole other ball of wax… =P

Having started off as a game designer n00b myself, I’ve made my fair share of mistakes. The funny thing about being in the game industry for 10 years is you start to see new designers making the same mistakes you did when you started. Trying to explain to them why they’re making a mistake is often difficult as they’re rarely willing to listen, or they just flat out disagree with you.

However, the internet is a funny place. If you put something up on a website, people are far more inclined to hear you out and perhaps even agree with you. So, in the hopes that I can prevent n00b designers from making the same mistakes I did, I will attempt to go over as many of them as I can.

The first mistake I made, and the most common first mistake of many n00b designers is to assume that players need to play the game the way you want them to play for it to be an enjoyable experience. That is to say, the designer will have something in mind for the level and will attempt to force the player to play the game exactly that way.

Unfortunately, what you ultimately end up with when you do that, is a level that is frustrating for the people who don’t understand what you want. As an example, in the game ICO there is a point in the gameplay where you are supposed to run away from an endless stream of shadow people. I of course, didn’t know this, and since the previous sections of the game required me to defeat all the shadow people in an area in order to advance, I assumed that the gameplay dynamic had remained the same. Of course I was wrong, so I ended up fighting shadow people for about 20 minutes before getting frustrated. Then I thought about what the designer might have intended for me to do. Assuming the shadow people were endless, the only course of action was to run away.

20 minutes of frustration could have caused a lot of people to quit, assuming they ever did figure it out. Of course had they put some indicator that I needed to run away, it would have been a much cooler experience. The lesson to be learned, if you are going to try to force a method of gameplay on the player that differs greatly from what they’ve experienced until this point (in this case, a chase sequence) you need to let them know what’s going on. For ICO I think the best way to have shown this would have been to have the girl bolt ahead of you to the next area, thereby breaking one dynamic (of you having to lead her everywhere) to showcase another (run the hell away, there’s no point in fighting this time). In addition you likely would have chased after the girl since you’ve had to save her in every other situation.

I used the ICO example to show you that even veterans can make the mistake of trying to force the player to have the experience that they intend. In fact, it’s not always the worst thing in the world and you can sometimes force certain experiences in an intelligent way. The important thing to realize is when you are forcing a path of gameplay on the player.

As much as I despise “sandbox” games, they do allow the player a lot of creative freedom in how they choose to play the game. Ultimately there’s only so many true options and the rest are just the player making up their own games (not unlike when we were children and decided that certain colored tiles were lava and would do everything to avoid stepping on them when walking through a supermarket). The key is to not arbitrarily restrict the player to only the options you think are worthy.

In Warcraft III, in the Dungeons of Dalaran level, there was a fairly easy path through the dungeon if you used your troops in a specific pattern. Of course, if you didn’t use a certain ability here or there, by the end of the dungeon you wouldn’t have the troops necessary to defeat the last section and you were totally hosed and had to start over again. By simply adding a couple more troops I allowed for people who blustered through to just barely make it, and for people who fully utilized their available spells to feel like a hero for losing almost no units. The difference between punishing the player for not playing the way you want, and patting them on the back for playing the way you intended is huge. The key is to not make the game unplayable for people who want to go a different route than what you intended them to.

Final example. On the game I’m working on now we decided early on to have a difficulty slider. You slide it towards easy, the hit points of the enemies go down. You slide it towards hard, and their hit points and damage goes up. This is probably the easiest way to implement a difficulty setting and one I personally endorse as it allows for a lot of granularity. A couple of people were adamantly opposed to the difficulty slider. They argued that the game should be fun for everyone on only one difficulty setting, hence the exclusion of any sort of difficulty selection at all. I pointed out that not everyone is at the same skill level and that what some may find simple could be impossibly hard for another player. They scoffed at this and argued that if a difficulty selection option is in a game, everyone will choose the easiest setting and play on that and then the game will not be fun at all.

That argument is of course, ridiculous. Whenever you start a game, do you immediately put it on easy, or do you start it on normal? If you do put it on easy, is your gameplay experience less enjoyable, or did you put it on easy because you are playing more for the overall experience rather than the visceral enjoyment of combat? There’s no singular answer to those questions because everyone plays games for different reasons. Ultimately, people want to play the way they want to play. Some will choose easy so they can burn through the game and get to the story tidbits. Others will crank it to hard because they enjoy difficult encounters in a game.

Whatever the case may be, limiting the players to only one possible way to play will not limit the players to your one vision of the game. It will limit the audience that will play your game, and soon you’ll be out of a job.