In the piece, Peterson recounts comments made by Jacques-Bellêtete regarding his influences:

In describing his influences, Jacques-Bellêtete mentioned he was heavily influenced by Metal Gear and Final Fantasy. Then he went into a two minute riff about “always trying to have very beautiful female characters,” noting that these were characters he would want to sleep with. After making a semi-disparaging remark about female characters drawn in a North American style, he concludes “I’d rather have female characters from Final Fantasy or Soulcalibur [sic] to sleep with.” This draws chuckles from the crowd.

I’m incredibly disappointed by Jacques-Bellêtete’s comments. I fear that they are a sad reflection of the current state of thinking of many in the video game industry and, unfortunately, do much to impugn the video game that he worked on (which, it should be said, employed a woman in the high profile role of lead narrative designer).

As I expressed on Twitter, I consider consumer activism is about the only power I have to impact this kind of behaviour and will not be purchasing the game Deus Ex: Human Revolution. This is disappointing, both because I was looking forward to the game and because the original Deus Ex did so much to try to push video games forward as a medium. That Eidos hired someone with this attitude to work on a sequel is a real shame.

When I first tweeted about this, one response was that this was kind of what you would naturally assume about the video game industry (arguably NSFW) and that all that Jacques-Bellêtete was doing was saying it out loud. The implication¹ was that it was unfair to pick on one guy who was either brave enough or stupid enough to say what a lot of people think.

I don’t disagree that this is a problem in video games (and in the wider popular culture) but I do disagree that, because of that, there’s something wrong about making an example out of this incident. In the West, our social attitudes today towards women, non-whites, non-Christians and gay men and women are far advanced from where they used to be. But the way that they got there was by people taking a stand and, particularly, taking a public stand in response to public injustice. If the calculus by which we determine whether action in respect of a particular type of behaviour should be taken is whether that behaviour is representative of the broader status quo, things will never change.

I don’t think Jacques-Bellêtete’s comments were the worst in the history of sexism in the video game industry. I don’t think that they were much more than what a lot of people (men) in video games think. Nevertheless, they were aired at a public forum. They were received with chuckles. This behaviour is wrong and the way to help change it is to help correct it when we see it.

Back to Work

http://feeds.feedburner.com/back2work
Merlin Man (he of Inbox Zero fame) and 5by5′s Dan Benjamin have joined forces to waste at least an hour of your week and prevent you from getting back to work. I jest, of course. The idea is to discuss strategies to help you work better. I’m not sure how well that works but I’m enjoying listening to it anyway.

The Brainy Gamer Podcast

http://feeds.feedburner.com/brainygamerpodcast
The only thing that’s disappointing about the Brainy Gamer Podcast is that there aren’t more of them. Michael Abbott was almost entirely responsible for me buying a PS3 (which might not sound like an achievement but, given the state of my relationship with Sony, is really more akin to the Paris Peace Accords).

Build and Analyse

http://feeds.feedburner.com/buildanalyze
One of the new podcasts and I’m listening to and, like most of the new additions, a member of the 5by5 network. Dan Benjamin (of The Talk Show and the Pipeline fame) has expanded his podcasting empire throughout 2010 and, together with Tumblr co-founder and Instapaper owner/developer, Marco Arment, discusses iOS, Mac and mobile web development. It’s pretty Apple-centric at present but they do detour into coffee from time to time.

Downloadable Content

http://feeds.penny-arcade.com/padlc/
I’m pretty sure this one is gone and yet I hang on just in case.

Dungeons & Dragons Podcast

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/rsspodcast.xml
Downloadable Content may have bit the bullet but the boys from Penny Arcade still make an appearance every so often on the D&D Podcast and, when they do, I put everything else on hold.

Front Page

http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/podcasts/frontpage.xml
The Front Page is one of the casualties of the end of my commute. Without a daily trek to and from work I’m often a few days behind at which point listening to the news is kind of beside the point. I do still like this podcast, though, so I’m hoping I can fit it into my schedule somewhere.

Hypercritical

http://feeds.feedburner.com/hypercritical
This is probably my favourite new podcast. John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin discuss issues relevant to the tech world. There’s an Apple angle often but it’s often about issues bigger than just Macs and iPhone. John’s observations are incredibly insightful and, because he doesn’t have a regular outlet (John has a blog but doesn’t update it that much), this is the best place to hear his thoughts.

The Japan Considered Podcast

http://feeds.feedburner.com/JapanConsideredPodcast
Am still subscribed to this but, in my heart of hearts, I know it’s gone.

JapanesePod101.com

http://www.japanesepod101.com/wp-feed-audio.php
I have about 40 of these backed up. I promise I will get to them.

The Moth Podcast

http://feeds.feedburner.com/themothpodcast
I can’t believe I’ve only been listening to this for a year but it’s a terrific podcast. Recommended by Dave.

New Yorker: Comment

http://feeds.newyorker.com/services/rssfeeds/comment_podcast.xml
The Comment section of the New Yorker is a short essay that begins every issue of the magazine. At least 50% of these will be written by Hendrik Hertzberg and be about the filibuster.

New Yorker: The Political Scene

http://feeds.newyorker.com/services/rss/feed/campaign_trail.xml
This is still my favourite discussion of politics. Although their discussion of the recent earthquake in Japan was laughably poor, there’s usually a nice smattering of experts to talk about whatever issue is most timely.

NHK English News

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/rj/podcast/rss/english.xml
Same problem as the Front Page podcast. I wish NHK put out their Japanese-language news as a podcast.

Slate’s Spoiler Specials

http://www.slate.com/podcast/id/2144834/
I’ve caught up from last year and am now only 11 podcasts behind. I still have /Lust, Caution/ on the list, though.

The Pipeline

http://feeds.feedburner.com/thepipelineshow
If you don’t include The Talk Show (see below) this was the first 5by5 show I started listening to and it’s still one of the best. Hosted by Dan Benjamin, I thought this one might run out of steam as Benjamin worked his way through friends and associates. Thankfully, that’s not the case (or he just has an incredible rolodex).

The Talk Show

http://thetalkshow.net/index.xml
Suspended for a brief ‘two week’ hiatus, The Talk Show has returned as part of the 5by5 network. Notable for a running segment in which hosts John Gruber and Dan Benjamin dissect a new James Bond film each week (they’re working their way through the series in order). This alone makes it worthwhile.

東京slow style

http://www.tokyoslowstyle.jp/podcast.xml
I still listen to Sasha as he continues exploring odd and different parts of Tokyo. This is the only podcast I’ve ever listened to which seemed to use an animated GIF as the image it displays on an iPod/iPhone. I assume it’s an animated GIF because as the show plays it cycles through images relevant to what’s being talked about. Kind of impressive just for the effort that goes into that side of things.

8-4 Play

http://eightfour.libsyn.com/rss
There’s not a lot of video game-related podcasts in this list any more but this is a new one that’s found its way on there. 8-4 Play is a translation company based in Tokyo. The reason I’m listening to the podcast? The company is home to Mark McDonald (formerly of EGM) and he leads a biweekly podcast with the rest of the 8-4 Play crew. The Japan angle is excellent for me.

37signals Podcast

http://feeds.feedburner.com/37signals_podcast
It’s not as regular as it was when it started out but if you enjoy listening to the guys from 37signals, you’ll enjoy this.

So that’s who’s on there but who fell off the list? Only one podcast! Incredible! And it only fell off because it stopped being recorded.

• アクセス The podcast was cancelled! Now I’m never going to find out what ガガンボン means.

It’s probably good that I waited a couple of months, though, because there’s a few new ones that have snuck in just in time. Let’s see what I’m listening to this year and how many sentences I can end with a preposition.

The Brainy Gamer Podcast

http://feeds.feedburner.com/brainygamerpodcast
Hands down, still the best video game podcast I’ve ever listened to. There appears to be no rhyme or reason to the schedule other than Michael puts one out when he’s got someone to talk to and something to say. This is a formula that results in a few podcasts throughout the year but my God they’re good.

Downloadable Content

http://feeds.penny-arcade.com/padlc/
There hasn’t been a podcast since June 2009 and, given that there were only 8 podcasts in 2009 alone, it’s tempting to write this one off to the dead pool. The only reason not to? It’s just so good and I have faith.

Dungeons & Dragons Podcast

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/rsspodcast.xml
I subscribe to this podcast solely to be able to listen to the Penny Arcade guys (and whoever they have with them at the time) play D&D. If you have even a remote interest in roleplaying or board games, you must listen to it. So funny.

Front Page

http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/podcasts/frontpage.xml
The New York Times recently started making this into more of a ‘value added’ podcast by adding things like short interviews with reporters to the podcast. I’m not sure it really does add any extra value but for a quick wrap-up of what’s going on, I rate it highly.

The Japan Considered Podcast

http://feeds.feedburner.com/JapanConsideredPodcast
I’m still subscribed but there hasn’t been a new podcast since February 2009. I think it’s gone.

JapanesePod101.com

http://www.japanesepod101.com/wp-feed-audio.php
I’m still listening to Peter, Naomi and the rest of the crew over at Japanese Pod. I no longer bothering with the newbie and beginner lessons but the intermediate podcasts are still at a level I find challenging.

New Yorker: Comment

http://feeds.newyorker.com/services/rssfeeds/comment_podcast.xml
If you believe liberals are sanctimonious blow-hards, this podcast is not for you.

New Yorker: The Political Scene

http://feeds.newyorker.com/services/rss/feed/campaign_trail.xml
Dorothy Wickenden leads the best weekly discussion of US politics that brings together the depth and analysis for which the New Yorker is renowned. There are occasions where I wish they’d dwell on an issue for a little bit longer but it’s probably for the best that they don’t. Whereas I eventually tired of the Slate Political Podcast, this one is still going strong.

NHK English News

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/rj/podcast/rss/english.xml
This is one that I’m sure I’ve been listening to for ages. Why I didn’t have it on last year’s list, I’m not sure. It’s obviously an incredibly Japan-centric news show but if that’s what you’re looking for, I haven’t found better.

Slate’s Spoiler Specials

http://www.slate.com/podcast/id/2144834/
I am so far behind in the movies that I’ve seen that this has now blown out to 16 podcasts that I have yet to listen to. I can only imagine how much more awesome I’d find this if I didn’t listen to everything about 8 months after the world had move on.

The Pipeline

http://feeds.feedburner.com/thepipelineshow
This is one of the news ones that I just started listening to. Dan Benjamin of the Talk Show fame (see below) spends about 30 minutes interviewing a designer or web developer. If you’re interested in design and the web, this is a great podcast. Dan has had a crackerjack line-up of guests so far and my only concern is that he’s going to run out of awesome people to interview every week.

The Talk Show

http://thetalkshow.net/index.xml
Here’s another one that I think is gone (this is becoming something of a theme). I keep it in iTunes for the same reason as the others, though: when there’s a new episode I’m listening to it immediately.

アクセス

http://www.tbsradio.jp/ac/index.xml
I still don’t understand what ガガンボン means and I still don’t understand most of what’s being said but it’s my goal in life to one day be able to answer both those questions.

東京slow style

http://www.tokyoslowstyle.jp/podcast.xml
Here’s a new one that I started listening to this year. It’s a recording of a radio show in Japan. We don’t have so many of these in Australia — at least not aimed at younger people — but in Japan they seem a lot more popular. If you’re familiar with Triple J’s Hack, it’s kind of like that, only just about an interesting place or business in Tokyo.

37signals Podcast

http://feeds.feedburner.com/37signals_podcast
I think there’s a real danger this is just not going to have the legs to keep my interest for the next 12 months — you can only listen to the 37signals message so many times before it becomes repetitive — but it’s only been a month or two and I’m still listening!

So that’s who’s on there but who fell off the list?

• GWJ Conference Call I had the same problem with the GWJ guys that I seem to have with almost all gaming-related podcasts: after a while they just become too repetitive. I think it’s no coincidence the ones that remain on my iPod are the ones without a schedule that release a show only when there’s a show worth releasing.
• Slate Magazine Daily Podcast Sacrilege! Yes, I’ve stopped listening to John, David and Emily. After the election was over I’m afraid it felt like the same discussions were being had each week and it was just going around in circles. The other Slate podcasts, although fun to listen to, weren’t the reason I was sticking around.
• University of Sydney Podcasts As interesting as these often were, I just couldn’t justify the time. When I thought about the 2 hours that you could sink into one of these, that’s a lot of Japanese study I could be doing instead.

OK, Andrew. You didn’t answer my call last year. Don’t let me down now!

The Brainy Gamer Podcast

http://feeds.feedburner.com/brainygamerpodcast

Last year my schedule was chock-full of gaming podcasts but since the demise of 1UP I’ve managed to whittle it down to two. I started listening to the Brainy Gamer podcast over the New Year. New episodes don’t appear to come out on any schedule that I can see but if the three 1.5-hour long holiday episodes were anything to go by this is the podcast to listen to if you want intelligent analysis of the latest games.

Downloadable Content

http://feeds.penny-arcade.com/padlc/

The irregular podcast for the web comic Penny Arcade stays on the iPod. Artist Mike Krahulik and writer Jerry Holkins are sharp and witty observers on video gaming culture and their discussions of the issues that inspire their comic is as good–if not better–than the finished result. One wishes it were updated more often but I guess that’s what makes each new episode so special.

Front Page

http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/podcasts/frontpage.xml

Another one to return, the Front Page podcast is still the best 5-minute summary of the big stories of the day I’ve found. More than just the headlines you get a feel for what the story is about. It’s published relative to New York’s time zone so it’s about a half a day behind the news but I still find it useful for keeping up with what’s going on.

GWJ Conference Call

http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/taxonomy/term/408/0/feed

New for 2009, the Gamers with Jobs Conference Call is the eponymous podcast for the Gamers with Jobs web site. Usually featuring four regulars, Shawn Andrich, Sean Sands, Julian Murdoch and Rob Borges, the production quality is top-notch and although the show is regular 90 minutes or so in length it never drags. Refreshingly the boys are as conversant about PC gaming as they are about the latest titles to hit the 360 and PS3 so I find it a great all-in-one replacement for 1UP Yours! and GFW Radio.

The Japan Considered Podcast

http://feeds.feedburner.com/JapanConsideredPodcast

Still on the iPod is Dr Robert C Angel’s podcast about Japanese domestic politics and international relations. Dr Angel retired from his teaching gig at the end of last year so my fingers are crossed he can keep to a weekly schedule. Even if he does miss the odd one it’s hard to blame him. He runs the Japan Considered Project for free and uses his considerable network of contacts to interview a number of Japan experts you’d rarely get to hear otherwise.

JapanesePod101.com

http://www.japanesepod101.com/wp-feed-audio.php

One of this year’s rookies, I started listening to JapanesePod101.com about six months ago. A new episode is published each weekday with a slightly confusing schedule. Monday is their newbie series, Tuesday is their beginner series, Wednesday alternates between their lower-intermediate series and an onamatopoeia class, Thursday alternates between their upper-intermediate series and a short audio blog entry about Japan, and Friday is a video lesson. The site operates on a freemium model and if you subscribe you get access to level-specific feeds. To be honest, it was better last year when a new episode of the Lower-Intermediate (my level) and Upper-Intermediate series came out every week but when you don’t pay any money it’s hard to complain.

New Yorker: Comment

http://feeds.newyorker.com/services/rssfeeds/comment_podcast.xml

A reading of the weekly comment article from the latest edition of the New Yorker returns in 2009. If you’re a little worried about how the New Yorker‘s signature blend of upper class wit and overall snootiness translates into audio form rest assured they have a rotating cast of three of the most posh-sounding announcers outside of the BBC and Classical FM.

New Yorker: The Policital Scene

http://feeds.newyorker.com/services/rss/feed/campaign_trail.xml

Presented by Dorothy Wickenden, the Political Scene is the New Yorker‘s version of Slate’s Political Gabfest. As you’d expect it’s a lot more focused and at only about half the length tends not to deal with as many topics of discussion. That said, it’s an excellent overview of the political comings and goings in Washington for that week and the calibre of their writers means it’s always interesting. New to the iPod but definitely staying.

Slate’s Spoiler Specials

http://www.slate.com/podcast/id/2144834/

One of the bevy of Slate podcasts that remain on my listening listen. Slate‘s film critic, Dana Stevens, continues to go where other reviewers fear to tread. This is the podcast that discusses movies without regard to spoilers and as such is better listened to after you’ve seen a film. Unfortunately given the delay between movies coming out in the US and their release in Japan I’ve got quite a backlog building up. Hopefully I can cut it down to a more manageable size when I return to Australia.

Slate Magazine Daily Podcast

http://www.slate.com/podcast/

Since 2008 Slate has expanded its podcasts to include the Culture Gabfest and the Big Money podcast. Both are excellent talkfests about popular culture and economics respectively. The Audio Book Club is still there, as is the Political Gabfest. When it’s not one of the regular longform podcasts, Dale Willman reads a popular story from the site.

The Gabfests, Big Money and the Audio Book Club are also podcast separately if that grabs your fancy.

The Talk Show

http://thetalkshow.net/index.xml

Dan Benjamin and John Gruber, Mac nerds extraordinaire, remain on the list into 2009. They still do some of the best deadpan banter and although they often stray from topic (last week was a 15-minute show entirely about gridiron) I never seem to mind (even when it’s entirely about gridiron).

University of Sydney Podcasts

http://www.usyd.edu.au/podcasts/2006/rss.xml

They don’t come around every week but the University of Sydney has some fantastic guest lecturers (as you’d expect) and some bright spark thought it was a shame that you had to actually be at the university to hear them. Sometimes they’re a little boring (the medical science one I couldn’t make it through) but for the most part they’re brilliant lecturers you’d normally have to pay good money to hear speak.

アクセス

http://www.tbsradio.jp/ac/index.xml

Although I didn’t include it on last year’s list I have been listening to TBS’s アクセス (Access) since 2007. It’s a Japanese language podcast about current affairs and politics in Japan. To be perfectly honest, I think I understand about 10% of what they say but since that’s up from 5% last year it’s something of an improvement. I still don’t understand what ガガンボン means, though.

So that’s who’s on there but who fell off the list?

• ABC Insiders I stopped listening after becoming frustrated at the lack of detailed analysis (and at Andrew Bolt).
• Background Briefing I couldn’t justify the time it took to listen to. Thirty minutes is a long time and too often it was about a topic in which I had little to no interest.
• Backstory I really miss this one but I really felt the time on the train would be more productive studying Japanese.
• EGM Live* I stopped listening to this before it morphed into 1UP Radio. All the presenters I liked departed and it wasn’t doing anything 1UP Yours! didn’t do better.
• GFW Radio Another 1UP podcast I stopped listening to before it was renamed. I’m sorry to say once Jeff Green and Shawn Elliot left there wasn’t a lot keeping me there.
• KCRW’s The Treatment The delay between a film’s release in the US and its release in Japan just made the backlog of these too long to ever get through.
• Newsmaker I can’t remember if I stopped listening or if they stopped podcasting. Either way, not a good sign.
• OpCast Too often it was about a topic I had no interest in or it really needed you to read the op-ed first. Since I listen to podcasts away from the Internet this isn’t an option for me.
• Slate Explainer Podcast Another one I was really sad to drop. Again, I wanted to focus on Japanese and truth be told I didn’t need to know any of this stuff.
• TalkCrunch I don’t know if they ever did fix that feed.
• This Week in Law This podcast had real promise but the level of preparation got to me after a while. Frequently guests were unable to answer questions because they didn’t have an opinion on the matter. Why are you there, then?
• 1UP Yours! It seems to have gone the way of the dodo since the sale of 1UP to UGO. And without Shane will it ever be the same?

Well that’s it for this year. What about you? What’re you listening to? (Yes, I am talking directly to you, Andrew.)

I. Whereupon Our Hero Does the Right Thing

One of the most successful PC games of all time is Blizzard Entertainment’s StarCraft. It has sold approximately nine million copies since it’s release in 1998. It is, by all accounts, something of a religion in South Korea. It is to my eternal shame that although I have been playing PC games since the late 80s I never finished the game. Indeed, I had never even owned it until recently. When I was in high school, I played the game mostly at a friend’s house and at netcafé’s and so never progressed all the way to the end.

In June of 2007, feeling slightly bad about this, I took the opportunity to purchase a copy of the game. A friend of mine picked it up for AUS$10 and I very happily paid him back for it. $10! For a classic of gaming! What a steal².

But still I didn’t finish it. There was always something else to do and although I pottered around here and there I could never muster up the motivation to play through the entire campaign. I logged onto to multiplayer on occasion but after 10 years you can imagine the type of people that still play this game online. They have become almost one with the product. More machine now than man. Twisted and evil. They would kick my ass.

So I left the game for a while.

II. Whereupon the Fire is Rekindled

About two years ago Blizzard announced they were working on the sequel to StarCraft, imaginatively titled StarCraft II. Blizzard is notorious for taking a very, very long time to develop its games so no one expected anything especially soon. And that’s probably a good thing since it is, as I say, almost two years later and the game’s still not out.

To keep our appetite whetted (whet?) Blizzard recently released a clip of two of its developers playing an alpha build of the game. Called the StarCraft II Battle Report, I watched it the way an ex-smoker watches someone sucking down on a Marlboro. I had to play it. And if I couldn’t play it I oculd at least play the next best thing to it. It didn’t matter that most of what they were doing in the video wasn’t possible in the original version. I just wanted to be in that universe again.

I contacted a friend who’d been similarly afflicted and after spending a good portion of Friday afternoon discussing how awesome it would be rushed home to fire it up and play a few games. My wife was in Tokyo for the weekend which was perfect. She dislikes me wasting time playing games but with her not home it seemed like God himself was trying to tell me to play this game.

In the back-and-forth my friend had informed me it was now possible to download the game directly from Blizzard. All you needed was your CD key and you were then able to download it to any computer you were on. Now I love this type of thing. It’s why I have a terribly bad thing for Steam, the digital content delivery platform developed by Valve Entertainment for their Half-Life franchise.

Starting up my web browser, I pointed it at Blizzard’s site and was quickly setting up my account for their online store. It was all smiles until I got to the point where I needed to enter my key. Checking my email I typed in the code and was promptly informed that my key was already registered to another user. Surely this couldn’t be right. The game might have been purchased for $10 but it had been purchased new.

But it was true. I tried the key a few times but it was no good. The site refused to budge. A Google search promptly revealed the ansewr. Some enterprising individual had created a key generator for the game and it was common knowledge that you could use the keys it generated to download the game for free from Blizzard. Whoever had entered my code had stumbled upon it by chance. Unfortunately, Blizzard’s site didn’t recognise this and as far as they were concerned the game was now this person’s.

This is where it gets a little sad³. Still desperate to play the game I did the only thing I could do at 9 pm that night. I bought it again. This time for US$15 but this time directly from Blizzard, secure in the knowledge that they would recognise me as the legitimate owner of the game.

III. Whereupon God Shows Displeasure Towards Our Hero

I ended up playing StarCraft a few more times over the weekend but as good as the game is, it is 10 years old. I missed a lot of the innovations that have come to the RTS genre StarCraft helped establish. There is little squad combat in StarCraft and the game does next to nothing to help you stay organised and on top of things. For Korean masters this is perhaps part of the fun but for me it’s part of the not fun.

My collection of RTS games does not begin and end with a $10 (now $15⁴) copy of StarCraft, however. I also own a copy of one of StarCraft‘s illustrious successors, Relic Entertainment’s Company of Heroes.

I purchased Company of Heroes a month after StarCraft in July of 2007. It is an excellent game. It builds on a lot of what StarCraft did and takes great pains to flesh out the tactical dimension games in the RTS genre often neglect⁵. I purchased it through Steam and have never had a physical copy of the game. As far as I’m concerned it lives inside Steam. Whenever I log in to Steam, no matter where I am, I have the option of playing it. It downloads updates automatically and remembers my settings.

Feeling in the mood for an RTS that was slightly more cutting edge, I loaded up Company of Heroes. However, instead of loading the game presented me with a login form for Relic Online. I’ll admit it’s been a while since I last played Company of Heroes — probably around about a year — but I never remember needing to sign up for something called Relic Online just to play my game.

Oh well, I shrugged. I suppose this is what everyone does these days. I chose my usual username, filled out the remaining details and clicked ‘Create’. But of course it didn’t create. Instead it informed me that my CD key was already in use and that my account had now been banned. I was provided with an email address to contact to have the notice explained further. That was it.

Now I’ve written about what happened next (or didn’t happen, as the case may be) so I won’t repeat it here. Suffice to say that the problem turned out to be an old .ini file from a previous installation of the game. I don’t know why that .ini file had a stolen CD key in it. I guess that’s just one I’ll find out when I die.

IV. Whereupon the Ire is Rekindled

So here’s the thing. Over the space of a week, with two different games that I paid money to play, I was barred from doing so. In one of the cases I had to repurchase the game. In the other I spent about a week wrangling with customer support before I discovered what was wrong and fixed it. In neither of these cases was I able to play the game I had purchased, even when I was offline. In neither of these cases did anyone ever apologise. In neither of these cases did I, as far as I can tell, do anything wrong. And yet at the end of the day I was the one who was screwed.

It did not pass without notice that if I had just pirated the games I would have been able to enjoy them. I considered doing this several times but decided not to each time. Why should I? Why should I, a person who has paid money for these products, pirate them and receive an inferior product? Why shouldn’t I, a person who has paid money for these products, not be extended the courtesy of support from the developer?

This is what media companies need to understand. Call us old-fashioned but we as consumers expect something when we purchase a product: we expect to be able to use that product. We don’t expect to have to negotiate with someone via email to let us use the product. We don’t expect to have to purchase the product again. We just expect it will work. Now is that unreasonable? Is that asking too much? Is that something we should even need to ask?

We’re waiting for your answer.

Since I frequently get reactions to things I write about on this blog (much to my surprise) I thought in light of my failure to get a response from Relic Entertainment I’d write them a letter and publish it here. Letters don’t usually have titles but if mine did it would be called, ‘Hi, I want to play the game I bought from you with real money.’

Dear Relic,

I would like to be able to play my game. It is called Company of Heroes. I purchased it from you via Steam on 22 July 2007 at 7:54 am. I know the exact date and time I purchased it because I still have the email receipt that Steam sent me.

Unfortunately for me, you do not seem to know this. When I tried to play my game on the weekend of the 24th/25th I was taken to a new Relic Online login screen that I had not previously seen. After attempting to register an account with your service I was told that my serial number had already been used and my account was now banned. This confused me since I do not have an account with Relic Online and had never previously entered my serial number while playing your game.

Your service suggested that if there was a problem I contact coh-abuse@relic.com. Since there was a problem I did contact coh-abuse@relic.com. This was on the morning of Sunday 25 January 2009 my time (Saturday your time). I had not received a response on Sunday. Or Monday. Or Tuesday. It is now Wednesday and I still have not received a response (more than 80 hours later). I have written to you again asking that my inquiry be answered. This too has not had a response.

I would like to be able to play my game. I purchased it from you with real money and I am angry that this does not seem to matter to you. I have enjoyed your games in the past and was thinking about purchasing future games from you. I am now reconsidering this decision.

Please let me play my game. (I cannot believe I just had to ask that.)

Kind Regards,

Michael Camilleri

The snookering of the media by corporate and political interests feels like something that really only happened in the last 15 or so years. Maybe it’s that media consultants didn’t exist back before then and so most people weren’t wise to all the tricks of the trade. Maybe it’s that with so many media opportunities these days everyone’s just had a lot more practice. Maybe it’s because I was born in 1982 and what I remember of the 80s is mostly informed by Die Hard movies.

Whatever the case, what do you, as the media consumer, do when confronted with this sort of thing? I stopped reading the article, free as it seemed it was from any real content, but afterwards I couldn’t help feel as if perhaps I’d missed out on something important. After all, I’d started reading the article because I was interested in how the iPhone was developing as a video game platform. There might have been nuggets of information buried in there, only waiting for someone (me!) to dig them out. Avoiding the media hardly seems like the answer.

I wanted to blame someone for this development and the ‘fair and balanced’ approach to journalism seems as good a scapegoat as any. What does ‘fair and balanced’ even mean? Are the two compatible? What if being fair means being unbalanced? What if being balanced means being unfair? Campbell Brown, a CNN anchor¹, has referred to the approach as a ‘false equivalency’. In an interview with Jon Stewart she explained:

[My] view is that when Candidate A says it’s raining outside, and Candidate B says it’s sunny, a journalist should be able to look outside and say, ‘Well it’s sunny, so one of these guys is wrong.’

But if you’re in an interview with Candidate A when do you say this? During the interview? Aftewards when you’re backannouncing it? In a follow-up segment the next week? I feel like in polite society it’s rude to point out to someone that what they’re describing is diametrically opposed to reality. Or is calling someone on their shit what separates a journalist from a dinner party guest? Politeness be damned?

Of course there’s an immediate problem with calling people on their shit. You need to know yours. And really well. What this requires is an incredible amount of preparation by journalists to have researched the interview subject, the previous answers they’ve given during interviews, their likely answers to your questions, the obvious holes in these answers, oh, and the general topic area. In a 24-hour news world where budgets are being cut and newsrooms are being downsized does anyone have the time or the resources to do this?

Are we at a point where the capacity for impoliteness no longer exists? And what do we do if we are? Sometimes I wonder if news institutions like the New York Times have become too old and what’s needed is deep, deep reform. That the rhythms of old media are too well known and too well understood by those that they are tasked with shining a light on. Are the trailblazers of the Internet the solution? Can they even begin to fill this void? Who has time to do research when you’ve got to post something new every 30 minutes?

I’m not sure where this leaves us. I guess still not reading the Edge interview but no closer it seems to a solution. If we ignore the panderers in the media does this send the signal that newsrooms ought to get serious about their jobs or that they ought to get rid of those jobs? If we frequent the blogs do we simply enter a deafening echo chamber where the spin that assaults us is our own? Is there a third way, something that’s rougher than old media but better funded than new media?

And where does that funding come from?

The thing, though, is that when I blow off steam about something (like, say, a certain fast food restaurant in a certain country missing a certain crucial condiment) I’m not used to someone employed at the target of my ire responding to me directly. I’m not sure I even want them to. It’d be weird if while I was out with friends I suddenly got a call from Colonel Sanders telling me it was all to do with licensing.

But that’s exactly what happened. (Well, not exactly. Still no word, Colonel Sanders!) On Wednesday night I complained about the new site GamerDNA on Twitter. On Thursday I got a message from the community manager of the site saying they were always eager for comments and asking if I had any constructive feedback. After they did that I felt a little guilty. Which is why I wrote the following.

In case you were wondering.

Dear GamerDNA people,

My name is Michael Camilleri and I use your web site. I also really dislike your web site. As you are aware I made these feelings known on Twitter and received a very kind response from Sam Houston. Feeling like I owed you something slightly more constructive in return I wrote the following. Please forgive the tone. I’ve tried my best to be constructive but I am at times really frustrated by some of your design decisions and my tone probably reflects that.

If I could only fix one thing about the site it would be its consistency. Consistency is usually viewed through the prism of reactions. Is the reaction to something the same every time? If not, then it’s not consistent. But sometimes consistency is about actions. Is the action to do something the same every time? If not, that’s not consistent either. It takes us a while to learn how to use something and we learn by doing. If we’re doing it a different way each time that’s going to slow down the learning process and potentially frustrate the user when they don’t seem to understand how a site works.

Adding games, arguably the primary purpose of the site, provides an illustration of what I’m talking about. There are at least four different ways to add games. Each is reached by a different path described below.

Method 1

1. Go to any page.
2. Click on ‘Home’.
3. Click on ‘Add a game’.

Method 2

1. Go to any page.
2. Mouseover the ‘Home’ menu.
3. Click on ‘Games’.
4. Click on ‘Add a game’.

Method 3

1. Go to any page.
2. Click the drop-down arrow next to your username.
3. Click on ‘Add a game’.

Method 4

1. Go to any page.
2. Click the drop-down arrow next to your username.
3. Click on ‘Edit my GamerDNA’.
4. Click on ‘Games’.
5. Click on ‘Add a game’.

This all borders on ridiculous when you realise that if you click on the top-level menu item entitled ‘Games’ you can’t actually add a game from this page! Not to mention that it’s just plain confusing that there is a top-level ‘Games’ menu item and a ‘Games’ menu item within the ‘Home’ drop-down menu. Labelling like this confuses the user and makes it difficult to create a mental map of how the site is laid out.

But perhaps you think having multiple paths to achieve an outcome is a good idea. Cutting down on paths isn’t consistency but minimalism, you might respond. For the sake of argument, I’ll grant you you’re right. Let’s see what happens if we judge consistency purely in terms of reaction to user input.

Look at the menu bar at the top of the screen. The top-level menu bar features five links: Home, Games, Players, Groups, Quizzes, News, Tools and Forums. Some of the items on this are drop-down menus in addition to being links. (Why this is the case isn’t clear. Aren’t there subsections to Games? Or at least shouldn’t there be on a site called GamerDNA?) Drop-down menus are identified by a little down arrow. Links that don’t have an arrow aren’t drop-down menus. And drop-down menus require a mouseover to activate… except when they don’t. In the case of the username drop-down menu at the top of the screen you have to click to make this menu appear. Why? As the user I don’t know and it makes me unsure what else might be a drop-down menu. So now I have to click things to find out. Except now I’ve clicked something and it’s taken me to a new page and now I’m frustrated and angry and am going off to Twitter to complain to all my friends.

Or consider the inconsistency of the site’s design. Clearly, there are (at least) two sites here. One is a Rails app that looks typically Railsy (or it might be Cake or one of the alternatives but I’m guessing Rails). It’s what you see when you go to www.gamerdna.com and what you see when you edit your GamerDNA or add a game.

The other site is a forum. This looks typically forumy, circa 2001. Which is to say crap. It’s most visible in the forum (surprise, surprise) but you can see it when you edit your profile and do a few other things on the site. While clearly some effort has been made to glue the two together the result is far from seamless and I find this sort of inconsistency interrupts my enjoyment of an otherwise pretty site and makes the whole thing feel unfriendly.

Well, maybe you did all of the above on purpose or at least have very good reasons^TM for why things are the way that they are. Fine. I don’t think you do but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. We’ll put consistency to one side and look at a couple of the other problems on the site.

Let’s take the the act of logging in to the site. Many sites these days accept either a username or email address to log in but the GamerDNA site accepts only a username. This is not in and of itself a problem but because of the way the login box works it becomes one. GamerDNA uses a trick to place the phrase ‘member name’ inside the username field. This word disappears when the field is selected. You can see a similar trick employed at Tumblr. The problem is that when you click ‘Log In’ from the top menu the field is automatically selected and the user never sees the phrase ‘member name’ but instead an empty field. They assume, since this looks like a social networking site, that they’ll be able to type in their email address. When that fails they don’t know why and they’re confused. They’re frustrated and angry and now they’re going off to Twitter to complain to all their friends.

And while we’re on the topic of social networks, how about trying to find your friends list? Our prototypical user–let’s call him ‘Mike’–is on his home page and wants to view his friends list. Mike looks on the page for a link to something titled friends list but can’t find it. Not being able to find a direct link he looks to the top menu and see the menu option ‘Players’. It seems reasonable a friends list might be located within such a top-level menu option so he clicks ‘Players’. But this doesn’t take him to a friends list. Instead, he’s taken to a page that allows him to find people based on their avatar (why?).

Well, there must be some way to look at his friends list. Maybe it’s in the ‘Home’ drop-down menu. Nope. Maybe it’s in the username drop-down menu somewhere. He clicks on that but nothing promising there. Maybe there isn’t a friends list. But wait, he added a friend at one point. Now just guessing, Mike figures he’ll try look at his public profile page. He open the username drop-down menu and clicks ‘Public Profile’. He quickly looks over the page; doesn’t see it. (It is actually there, it’s just hidden halfway down the page in the right-hand side column.) Becoming increasingly frustrated at this point (urge to twitter rising) he gives it one last chance. He’ll view his GamerDNA. The only way to do this seems to be to edit it so he goes back to the username drop-down menu and clicks on ‘Edit my GamerDNA’. Ah, there’s a section called ‘Friends’. This might be it! Mike clicks on it and there it is. Finally!

That took 5 minutes. To find my friends list. On a social networking site.

And that’s why I twittered.

Your friend,

Mike.

PS. I really would like to help the site. If further critique is useful let me know. I can go on for a bit about the process of deleting a game after it’s accidentally been added.

It’s been available on his blog since last November as an mp3 download (with the PowerPoint slides he used) but for some time now I’ve been wishing it was written down somewhere. Because I have a wedding to organise I found the time to put something together that approximates a transcript.

I say ‘approximates’ because it was never my intention to transcribe word-for-word the contents of the lecture. The mp3 is there if you want that. Instead what I wanted was something like a transcript but that was readable as a written piece. As I’ve indicated in the title of this post, I think it’s kind of worthwhile.

If you’d like to discuss this lecture I suggest hitting up his blog. The ‘transcript’ and images are reproduced by permission of the author.

Design Reboot

by Jonathan Blow

I’d like to start with a quote. This quote comes from Daniel Radosh speaking in The New York Times this September. He was writing a review of Halo 3 and he said:

The formula followed by virtually all games is a steady progression toward victory: you accomplish tasks until you win. Like cinema, games will need to embrace the dynamics of failure, tragedy, comedy and romance. They will need to stop pandering to the player’s desire for mastery in favour of enhancing the player’s emotional and intellectual life.

Then he went on to say from there:

The first 35 years of motion pictures, from 1895 to 1930, yielded a handful of films that are considered masterpieces for their technical innovations, but the following decade is when cinema first became the art form that we know today. As cinema matured, films developed the power to transform as well as to entertain.

Video games are poised to enter a similar golden age. But the first step is not Halo 3.

And I find myself thinking along the same lines these days. I don’t tend to think in terms of film analogies so I don’t see it quite the way Daniel does but I have a similar dissatisfaction with games. I’m finishing up a project right now, deciding what I’m going to devote the next three years of my life to and I’m finding that games I would have been excited to work on five years ago I’m no longer excited about. They’re no longer good enough and I’m playing around with concepts, trying to find the thing that is really worth three years of my life. I’m trying to break away from what I feel is this huge body of assumptions that we are steeped in from decades of games industry tradition and the hundreds of games we’ve played through in our lives, just reinforcing these assumptions over and over. So I’m going to try and talk about my viewpoint and my thought process here.

I’m going to start at square one with the question ‘What are games?’ to begin with (for our purposes here I’m going to be talking about software running on computers mostly). Games are where you’re trying to achieve a goal and there are some rules governing the actions you can perform and their effects on the game world and also what the game world can do back to you. It’s basically a running program and the program implements a bunch of rules.

And the way that I’ve started thinking about it recently that’s a little bit less dry than that and a little more meaningful to me is that games create a sort of temporary world, a low-stakes subdomain, simpler than the real world, where there is an explicit meaning of life. There’s a point to be there, whether its maximising a score, or getting to the end of the story, or rescuing the princess or something like that. You know why you’re there and you know what you’re trying to do. Even in sandboxy games there are explicit objectives. Suddenly that created a shift in my viewpoint. It’s like, ‘Wow.’ The meaning of life in this existence is something that I really care about. It’s something that’s been tugging at me for my entire life and to people throughout the ages and I don’t think I’m alone in this. This is part of why games are compelling to me.

So games have these goals that you’re trying to achieve. Before you play a game you usually don’t know exactly what those are and you learn how to achieve them because the game trains you as you play it. You build a mental model of what’s in the game world and how the game works and the game communicates back to you how you’re doing and this feedback helps you to win the game.

Here’s a screenshot of Super Mario Brothers 3, and because I’ve played this game a bunch I now know that there’s a bunch of things I can do. I can walk over to the left and jump on that monster’s head, I can walk to the right and jump on this platform, knock that turtle over and throw his shell. I can jump under this question block to get a reward. I know that it’s a question block even though the bitmap is kind of scrolled right now and you can’t see the question mark. And maybe I can climb into that pipe over there. These are things that a normal human who has never played Super Mario Brothers would not know. I learnt a lot of specific, weird things by playing this game.

What I mean to say is that all games actively teach; not just edutainment games, not just serious games but all games teach you as you play them. This teaching can happen at many different levels. It can be a very explicit rules of the game level, like this is a monster and you jump on his head to kill him, or they can be more broad and general, you figure out what kinds of strategies will serve you well in different situations. In a Mario game maybe you figure out that you should look before you leap.

I’m not going to go too much more into this idea of games as a teaching mechanism but here are two books that you can read if you would like more information on that. The one on the left is A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster and the one on the right is Persuasive Games by Ian Bogost. They’re both very good books.

So now that we know what games are the next question is ‘What can they provide?’ What can they do for me? And why would I play a game? Why do people play games? Well we already know one of the answers; it’s pretty obvious. Games can provide entertainment, fantasy and escapism. I think that’s fine. We need some of that in the world and we get a lot of it from games already. But if this is all that games were I would intensely dissatisfied because fantasy and escapism is not fulfilling to me. At the end of the day I want to feel like my life has some meaning. If you’re only escaping all the time you don’t get that. I think a lot of other people are dissatisfied with that, too, and it’s not something that we really talk about in the industry. I wish that we would a little bit more.

Another thing that games can provide is meaningful artistic expression. Where you express something that you care about communicating and your audience cares about receiving. There still seems to be some kind of debate about this–about whether games can be art–so I’ve put up some examples to sort of show my point.

Before I do that I’ll say that if games were just an avenue of expression maybe that too by itself would not be too interesting. But what is interesting is that when we develop the medium to where we can express competently and consistently through it, then those artistic expressions are going to come at a different angle, or from a different perspective, than they would through other media. That’s why I have these examples.

In the upper left is a still frame from a film. We know that in film ideas and emotions are often conveyed through moving compositions of objects in the scene coordinated with sounds and things. In the upper right is a poem. In poems the entire form is based on presenting rhythms and patterns of words in a way that is peculiar only to that medium. I didn’t want to stop here and play a song for you guys but the lower left is supposed to represent live music like in a concert. As we know music doesn’t feel like a movie or a poem. In fact, if you have a song that is sad and a poem that is sad, the sadness from the poem is going to feel fundamentally different than the sadness of the song. They’re different things; even though we call them by the same word they’re different.

As human beings our life experience is enriched–it’s made broader–by the fact that we have these different forms to communicate with and to feel by. What games can do is add another one down in this corner where this question mark is. The reason why I’ve made it a question mark is that I feel we haven’t quite developed games to the point where we really exactly know what their special contribution is. That might take hundreds of years. Really. But I think that we’ll get there eventually.

So because of this debate about whether games are art I thought I’d put forth two examples of games that are clearly art. The first one is Everyday Shooter by Jonathan Mak. This was recently released on the PlayStation Network. You can download it for the PlayStation 3. It’s an eight-way shooter like Geometry Wars or Robotron but it’s–aside from being a shooter and presenting a challenge to you as a player–also about expressing audiovisuals and gameplay.

If you haven’t actually played this game it’s hard to communicate because as I said what this game has to tell you only can come through games. I can’t quite say it in a speech. Lots of games show you audiovisuals but what this game does is that it’s really giving you a composition and it’s a composition that works with the gameplay. The gameplay of Everyday Shooter is the way it is, not just because it’s supposed to be challenging or fun, but also because the author wanted to express that specific gameplay to you. And it makes this game feel different from a lot of other games.

Here’s another one. It’s called The Marriage by Rod Humble. It’s a free download for the PC over the Internet. This one expresses things also but it does it differently. Whereas Everyday Shooter is about expressing sensations this game is about expressing the author’s life to you. He’s trying to tell you here’s what it’s like to be in my marriage with my wife and encountering all these social situations and different people that we do. And the way that he does this is through the rules of gameplay, the rules of interaction.

So when you sit down to play The Marriage you don’t really know very much but then you start that process that I was talking about of building the mental model of the game in your head, of learning the rules. And as you do that you move your mouse around, you interact with those pink and blue squares and the little circles and you notice what happens and how they interact with each other. As you learn the rules your mind also builds an interpretation of those rules, like ‘Oh, this means that the man doesn’t really like spending too much time with his wife; he feels a little bit stifled or something’ but it doesn’t come across in words, which is the brilliant part, it comes across as gameplay. It’s a very interesting and fascinating game and everyone should play it who wants to design games.

The third thing that games can provide–and this is going to be a hard one to convince some people of but it’s true–they can provide a means of exploring the universe in two different ways. One is for the designers of the game, by exploring different designs and their ramifications, and another is for the players of the game, by being in this space that’s given to them and by seeing what it’s like to move around in there, what happens and what the results are.

There’s a very interesting aspect of games that’s different from all other media that will contribute to that question mark, which is that games are formal systems. They are software running on a computer and that’s rules that take input data and process it and generate output data. Systems like that are biased to producing truth or at least consistency unless you mess them up with lots of bugs or deliberately corrupt them.

To try to put forth a simpler example to make that more understandable you can think of mathematics. You start with some axioms that are defined or assumed as true and then you have some rules that you can use to combine those axioms, put them together into equations, rewrite that over and over and you get different and different equations until eventually you end up with something that must be true that you didn’t know when you started. And that’s how mathematics proceeds.

Games are like that but in a messier, more complicated way. Instead of axioms you have the state of the world, some objects sitting around. Instead of rewrite rules you have your program that manipulates those objects in the world either via a physics system or by logical rules or AI rules or whatever and it flows that world from time step to time step until you end up with a result. And it’s up to the designer how much veracity there is in that procession. But that’s something I’m going to talk about in later slides.

As an illustration of understanding the world, here’s a picture of a well-known board game, Go. It’s famous for having these very minimalistic rules; they might be the simplest rules of any game. But it’s also very profoundly respected. Many think it may be the greatest game ever made and the reason is, despite the simple rules, the situations you can get into are very complex and subtle. You can learn a great deal by trying to become good at Go and trying to win against a good player. Many players report that after playing this for a long time they’re kind of learning things about the universe, about strength and structure, and life, from the patterns of the stones. There are Go proverbs you might have heard. A famous one is don’t throw good stones after bad. That comes directly after common advice for a new Go player.

The next part of my talk is just thinking about the ramifications of this statement: games are going to be huge. By which I mean that a lot of people are going to be playing them. We maybe think that a lot of people play games now–they’re pretty popular–but as we’re always happy to see every year the market grows. In the past year we’ve seen some extra growth due to some very interesting hardware and software moves. So for example, Nintendo came out with the Wii and the DS has exploded in popularity and they’re reaching audiences that we wouldn’t normally have considered to be gamer audiences. That’s very exciting because we’re going to have more people playing our stuff than ever before.

What that means to me is that games are going to be moving more and more to becoming central to our culture. They’re going to heavily impact the patterns of human thought and thus help define what it means to be human. A hundred years from now what it means to be human is going to be determined in a significant part by video games. And that sounds like a kind of weird, risky statement to make but it’s obvious. It’s obviously true because we have other media now that have already done this.

So books, both fiction and nonfiction books, are a fundamental part of what it means to be a human today. Think about what your life would be like if there were never any books. You never could have learned out of books at school, you wouldn’t be literate, you certainly wouldn’t be sending email on a computer. We would be in a totally different situation, certainly not at this conference. So books have been important and the development of that medium has been important.

Film, to a more subtle degree, and it’s a newer medium, but yes, that also. Most of us have seen a large number of films and a lot of hours of television and that visual language of composition and proceeding through scenes informs us. When we visualise things on our own, apart from a film, the way that we visualise has been informed by what that film showed us or what all that history of films that we’ve seen have showed us.

I’d like to come back to the point that all games teach and if games are going to be one of the foundations of human thought in the future we really need to think about what those games are going to be teaching all these people that we’re selling them to. Again, the question is not if it’s teaching them something because games, by definition, teach. The only question is ‘What? What do they teach the audience?’ And I have a concern here.

My concern is that game designers of today lack discernment when we’re thinking about whether our game is good or bad. The way we evaluate a design, usually, is by looking at whether a lot of people want to play our game. If they play it and they report that they’re having fun we’re like, ‘Hey, that’s a good game.’ If they say they’re not having fun maybe we sometimes say, ‘They just don’t understand it’ or something. But in the scope of the larger industry that’s the metric. It’s like if it’s a fun game a lot of people want to play it and it’s a good game. Otherwise it’s probably not that good of a game.

As designers we don’t tend to care why people want to play our game. We certainly don’t apply any method of critique to that. And I’m going to claim that that means that we don’t show concern for our players’ quality of life. Here’s what I mean by that. We have a number of tools to keep players playing our game. The majority of them fall into one category and that is scheduled rewards. We give players things to mark their progress. And this is part of that communication process that I was talking about earlier. A game communicates to you that you’re proceeding toward a goal by giving you rewards as communication that you’re doing well. But sometimes those rewards can be gratuitous and extraneous.

Some examples of rewards are collectibles (gotta get all of something in a game), unlockables (you play the game enough and it gives you new characters), advancement of the story (maybe there’s gameplay and then there’s a plot and you want to play through the game and beat the boss monster so you can see what happens to Joe when he goes through the next door). And now we’ve got these achievements which are like an extra layer on top. Where you hand someone a little medal when they beat the boss monster so they feel extra good about it and can show that to their friends.

Sometimes we take this really far. Massively multiplayer games, for example, are notorious for having relatively empty gameplay but also being very addictive. They keep players hooked with constant, fake rewards. I say ‘fake rewards’ because an MMO will give you gold, or experience points, or extra levels, or nice equipment or something, but we all know that as soon as you have enough of that to have advantage over the monsters you’re trying to fight then it’s going to make those monsters not very valuable to fight. Now you need to fight stronger monsters that exactly match your new power. The rewards are actually illusionary and this creates what designers and players call the treadmill or the grind. The rewards are a way of lying to the player so that they feel good and keep playing our game when in fact nothing real has changed.

This can get really extreme. We’ve all heard of guys in Korea and China dying from playing MMOs for five days straight or however long. That’s certainly not good but I’m also going to say that this element in a less nefarious way pervades all of our game design. Even in cases where gamers aren’t dying. Even when they report that they like a game, I’m claiming that it’s still bad.

There are a lot of different ways to make a game fun but because we don’t understand games very well as designers we usually pick one of the easy ways to make a game fun. That easy route involves sacrificing the player’s quality of life. So we keep players hooked by giving these rewards and as long as they’re hooked it doesn’t necessarily matter what the quality of the core gameplay is. The gameplay can be not very good but as long as they want to collect all the little achievements or get the nicer sword and the nicer armour then they’ll still play the game. And as long as people play it’s all the same to us designers. We’re like, ‘Oh, it’s a pretty good game, you know, a lot of people want to play it. They say they like it.’

I’m sure that at this point a lot of people think that I’m kind of needlessly babbling on about this point. But maybe to clarify it I want to put forth this question at the bottom of this slide. Think of any game that has a lot of rewards in it like this and ask yourself if you took out all of the scheduled rewards–the power-ups that didn’t directly affect gameplay, the ever-escalating weapons and armour, if you took out the story unless the story is necessary to play the game–would players still want to play your game? Would they still want to do the same fundamental activity without all the whiz-bang particle systems and things like that?

I’m not saying that wouldn’t damage a game. That would damage almost any game that we’re talking about. Any game is going to be less compelling if you take out those extra rewards. What I’m saying is if you take all that stuff off, if you strip it and just have the gameplay, does your game fall below a certain threshold or not? Does it fall below a line where no one wants to pay attention to it any more? Or is it still something that a lot of people would want to play? That’s what I’m getting at here. We need to build that kind of discernment about the quality of gameplay.

I’ve been saying this kind of thing in public for a few months now and a lot of people say, ‘Well what? You’re saying rewards are bad. That doesn’t make sense.’ But I’m not saying that rewards are bad; I’m saying that they can be divided into two categories. Some rewards are like food in that they’re naturally beneficial to you when you consume them and they help increase your quality of life. And some rewards are like drugs, where maybe they’re fun and they taste good but they don’t really give you any nutrition and if you do too many of them that’s actually detrimental to your health.

As game designers we don’t understand food. We don’t know how to make food. So we resort to drugs all the time. And that shows. That shows in the discontent of many people with the state of games they have in front of them. For example, Daniel Radosh, who gave that nice quote at the beginning of this talk, he was hungry, he wanted some food. But Halo 3 was just giving him cheap drugs and he didn’t want that.

The game industry is chasing bigger and bigger player bases every year and I claim the industry exploits them in an unethical way. We as designers usually don’t see it as unethical but I think that’s only because we refuse to stop and think about the ramification and the magnitude of what we’re doing. And magnitude is the key.

Here I’ve got three pictures of things that are not necessarily bad. They’re not bad if you do them as an individual a little bit at a time. You could smoke once in a while, you could have some fast food, you can play World of Warcraft. I’m totally serious when I put World of Warcraft in that line. When you talk about these things at a societal level, it becomes a societal problem. People die from smoking all the time even though you’ve probably smoked some cigarettes individually and it’s no big deal. People’s quality of life is tremendously lowered and their health is damaged by fast food. And I’ll talk about World of Warcraft in upcoming slides.

The thing I want to get at is that I’m not trying to blame players here or anything. I’m not trying to say you should feel bad if you eat McDonald’s or anything. What I am trying to say is that if you’re the CEO of McDonald’s or you’re an exec at an ad agency whose job is to put a hamburger in the hand of every child in America you should not feel good about your job. You should feel ashamed. You should. We don’t have that in the games business. We don’t have that sense because we feel that games are just entertainment; we don’t really have the sense that we could do things that we might be ashamed of yet. If we’re powerful people, if our medium is powerful, we should have the capability to do things that we should be ashamed and then make the choice about whether we’re going to do them or not.

What does World of Warcraft say? I just picked a few things of the many things I think it says. Like I said earlier, the rules of a game, the kinds of interactions that a game puts you into, is the meaning of life for that game. And the meaning of life in World of Warcraft is that you’re some schmo who doesn’t really have anything better to do than sit around pushing a button and killing imaginary monsters that are meaningless. It also says it doesn’t really matter whether you’re smart or adept at trying to get ahead in the system because what really matters is how much time you sink in (because of all the artificial constraints on you). That also says you don’t need to do anything exceptional because to feel good, to be rewarded, all you need to do is run the treadmill like everyone else.

Now I’m not saying that World of Warcraft teaches you those things explicitly and logically. You don’t come away after playing World of Warcraft with those ideas in your head. But what I am saying is that those things take root subtly and subconsciously. It’s like advertising impressions and brand identity. Lots of people say, ‘Oh advertising, it doesn’t work on me. I see ads on TV and it doesn’t affect my purchasing decisions.’ Well those people are wrong; it does. That’s why advertising is such a huge business because people have been doing it forever and they know that it works. Our minds are impressed upon by these things that we see all the time and even moreso by these things that we do because in games we’re active participants.

People identify with their activities. If you work at a really horrible, boring job and you’re just there for the money and you do that for years and years that becomes part of your identity. It becomes difficult to separate you from all this time you spent at your job. Same things with games that you play. People are products of their origins and their environments and we’re giving people these environments that they’re ostensibly having fun in, these games. We’re helping determine what they’re going to be.

To finish up this idea about natural rewards versus artificial rewards, I thought I would give a positive example of what I think is a very natural reward. This one came from a posting on Clint Hocking’s blog and it’s about the game Portal which I’m sure many of you have played and enjoyed. It’s a great game. Manveer Heir wrote:

The brilliance in Portal lies not only in its simplicity (and excellent humour) but also in the moments of realisation when you figure out a puzzle.

No puzzle stumped me for more than five minutes in that game yet I went from being completely dumbfounded one moment to feeling like a genius the next as I realised what I was supposed to do.

His own brain rewarded him for solving puzzles in Portal. I would claim that that means that the activities he was performing were somehow intrinsically worthwhile for him. He got a reward out of it without the game needing to jump up and down and sing Ode to Joy and launch fireworks every time he solved a puzzle. It didn’t need to say, ‘You’re a genius!’ for getting to the exit. No, all the game had to do was set up situations to challenge him at his pace and for him to succeed genuinely. I think that’s important and I think that’s something we could really learn from.

So I’m not sure that I want to keep harping on this… but I will. Because I say this kind of thing about game design being a serious problem and everyone’s like, ‘Whatever, dude.’ Like you’re smoking something. So I want to frame this, and again it’s a matter of scale. Games are going to be huge. We’re selling a lot of them. And what I see as the primary challenge for mankind in this century–and this could change because we’re still early in the century–is to understand and deal with the fact that despite all these enterprises that create good things for us (things like human rights, safety, leisure time and fast transportation–those are pretty good things) we do these things at such a scale that we cannot help but affect the world.

On the left there are some things, some of them at least are unintentional side-effects of these good things that we’ve created. We’ve come to understand this but we haven’t really effectively dealt with it yet. In this next century, as societies, we need to understand that long-term sustainable existence is a lot harder than just doing the basic things. Having fast transportation in a healthy world that exists and lasts for a long time is a lot harder than just having fast transportation. We engage in these enterprises at such a magnitude that our actions heavily influence, almost to a point of creating, the environment (whether or not we intend it). We don’t intend to harm players but we might be harming them.

When tens of millions of people buy our game we’re pumping a substance into the environment. And I don’t just mean the packaging; I mean the mental content of that game. This is a public mental health issue and that’s kind of scary if you take it seriously but it’s also kind of cool. It means that we have the power to shape humanity. It means that we in this room are very powerful people. And how are we going to use that power? What are we going to do with it?

And what I see right now is that we’re kind of doing this. We’re cultivating a style of gamer that is ‘I want more of that because it tastes delicious and that’s all I know.’ What’s the world going to be like if we do this? On the food front and on the mental front? I haven’t actually seen Idiocracy but something like that.

A lot of you might be thinking, ‘Well, I work on this big game and I don’t have that much power to control the design. It’s being made by a publicly-held company, certain things have to happen.’ All I have to say there is if you can make one small improvement in that game to somehow make it more worthwhile and more beneficial or less meaningless, if you can win one argument in a meeting one time or convince one programmer to do an extra thing for you, think about the multiplier. Your game goes out to millions, or tens of millions, of people and that small improvement has affected all of them. That’s pretty cool. You can even make a difference on a 150-200 person team.

Enough of that. Sort of. I’m going to go onto a new point which sort of hooks into what does it mean to create meaningful or interesting gameplay and how can I find that kind of gameplay? Part of the problem is that we have assumptions about what it means to design a game that are a little bit incorrect. I think that we have this presumption of architecture right now. What I mean by that is that we start with a plan and go top-down and the process of game development is about imposing our will on the art assets and the code. Often our plans are ambitious and two-thirds of the way through the project we can’t get it all done and we have to cut features and it’s all painful. But this is the way that we do things.

Through my past couple of projects I’ve become acutely aware of another way to do things which is exploring. You can be adaptive and nonhierarchical. You can start out with a cool idea but then just start developing it and see where it goes. And adapt and accept it and find the best thing that’s there. And this is related to what I was saying earlier about using games as a method for exploring the universe. You can develop a really good game by exploring the ramifications of a concept. I’ll have some examples of that later.

First I want to talk about how architecture can fail us and to do that I’m going to talk about how much BioShock sucks. I’m confident that a lot of people in this room played BioShock and really liked it. And I could probably convince you a lot better if I picked a game that nobody likes. But that just seems too easy and kind of cheap. So here we go.

As the PR people for BioShock spent a lot of time hyping to the press prior to its release, one of the big things that happens in this game is there’s these creatures called the ‘Big Daddy’ and the ‘Little Sister’. The Big Daddy is really tough to kill and he protects this Little Sister who has this valuable resource that you want to get to buy upgrades. What you’re supposed to do in BioShock is kill the Big Daddy and capture the Little Sister and then decide at that point do you want to kill the Little Sister and steal all of her resource (which you can’t do without killing her) or do you rescue her (which is kind of altruistic because you get less of the resource)? It’s supposed to be this big ethical dilemma and they played this up as a unique selling point of BioShock.

So you would think thus the meaning of life in BioShock is about this moral choice: do I save the Little Sisters and be weaker in the world or do I kill them and be stronger? But as players figured out very rapidly after the game was released that’s not actually the meaning of life in BioShock. As it turns out it doesn’t really matter whether you rescue or kill the Little Sisters because the game throttles the rewards either way. So the very idea of this save or kill moral dilemma is a kind of architected idea imposed from the top: ‘Let’s make a game with this moral dilemma in it.’

There’s this other architected idea imposed from the top which is that a shooter needs to be well-balanced. No matter what path you choose we need to ensure the difficulty matches the player’s skill level and stuff. These two things conflict really badly. As I was saying before, the game’s rules determine the actual meaning of life in the game and the game rules in this game say the Little Sisters don’t matter. Whatever you do to them you get a slightly different flavour of upgrades, that’s all. Yet the game is trying really hard to convince you that they matter; there’s all these animations and they go, ‘No, no!’ when you grab them (which you pretty much have to do), there’s all this dramatic lighting and stuff. The ultimate message ends up being like a meta message which tunnels up one level and says the designers of this game are trying to manipulate your emotions in a clumsy way because they can’t get the story together. They’re obviously not trying to give me an authentic experience about what it means to be altruistic because there is no altruism in this game. But it gets worse than that.

When you really start looking at it, not from a gamer’s perspective, it is a really weird game. It’s supposedly about altruism and humanity but it actually teaches you to headshot everyone without warning from as far away as possible. Because you’re supposed to shoot every creature in this game. They even start out and there’s a couple of guys–they’re supposedly like drunk people having a domestic dispute or whatever–and it turns out that they’re splicers and they kill you. Anybody that you can shoot in this game you’re supposed to shoot with the exception of one. Everyone else is bulletproof.

The second interesting point is that the only people who are bulletproof are women and pre-teen girls. Which is weird. I guess they pretty much presumed that the average player was going to be male and that they would think that the sexy, ex-Nazi chick was kind of hot and the pre-teen girls, you give them another 8-10 years and they’ll probably be pretty hot, so you understand why they’re valuable. The Little Sister is supposed to be valuable but you’re supposed to shoot the Big Daddy. Yet he’s actually much more sympathetic. He’s a very protective character; he walks around, he makes these sort of mournful moans like a big whale or something and you’re just supposed to kill him without even thinking about it.

This game screws up in so many ways. If you put this game in front of somebody outside of games, somebody well-steeped in philosophy and said, ‘Here’s what games have produced. This marvellous ethical dilemma of altruism or not.’ They would laugh at you. They would would be like, ‘What are you talking about? This is so weird.’ You couldn’t show it to your Mum, probably. Your Mum would be like, ‘Wow, you really need to get out and meet some nicer people.’ And she would be right. That is the hard part of this. She would be right.

BioShock only makes sense to us, so many people in the press and so many gamers on message boards only bought into it, because of what I was talking about before. We’re steeped in this tradition of games that don’t have this level of humanity and don’t have respect for human life or thoughtfulness about what they’re doing. We have been conditioned by all those games so that as soon as a game comes along that does something a little bit different, or purports to do something a little bit different (even though it does it very badly), we’re like, ‘Woah, woah, humanity, woah, woah.’

A game that did well is Portal, and I would claim that it had a healthy dose of exploration in the design but it was also augmented by architecture. The idea behind Portal is that you have this little gun that, instead of shooting bullets, makes dimension doors on various walls and you can walk through them and you can see through them. It’s basically then what are the laws of physics like in this world where you can create portals? What kind of interesting situations arise? And then there are puzzles that they architected but those puzzles are largely about showcasing these natural results of having portals. It doesn’t feel contrived. And so Portal is kind of magical that way. I could say a lot more about it but I’m skipping ahead.

I want to go to this issue of humanity and empathising with a character in a game. BioShock has the Little Sister who you’re kind of supposed to empathise with as being helpless. It’s this very architected choice: do you save the Little Sister or kill the Little Sister? Portal has the Weighted Companion Cube which is not even a character, it’s a box with a texture map on it. But it happened in an explorational way. The way it happened was that the team decided it would be cool to have a level with a bunch of puzzles where you carried a crate from one end to another, using it in different ways and with the portals to circumvent all these puzzles. And they did that and they saw that because there had been crates earlier in the game players didn’t quite understand that they should bring this crate all the way. So they said maybe we should mark the crate as being special and they got the idea of putting this heart on it. They noticed that people felt kind of weird of getting rid of their crate at the end of the level after doing all that stuff so then they contrived this whole great situation where the narrator/computer pretends that this is your imaginary pet rock kind of friend and you cannot exit the level without throwing this crate in the incinerator and being accused of murdering it.

This actually works really well. It works at least as well as BioShock. Here’s mkozlows on the Quarter to Three forums saying:

It’s a measure of BioShock‘s quality [he disagrees with me, he actually likes BioShock, but we'll go on] that killing little girls actually made me, a jaded and manipulated gamer, feel guilty and slightly uncomfortable.

But Portal made me guilty and slightly uncomfortable about throwing a crate into a pit.

That’s pretty damn impressive.

And it’s true. I had exactly the same reaction. I tried for 20 minutes to outwit the computer and open the door without putting the crate into the pit. It wasn’t possible and I eventually gave up and murdered him. But what else are you going to do?

What I have to get from that is the idea that this traditional way that we think when we try to design a game for people to empathise with–the Alyx Vance kind of thing or the Little Sister kind of thing–where we try to make this very human character that interacts with you a lot, maybe that’s the wrong direction. Or maybe it’s not the only direction and maybe gameplay itself can give us some other things.

My last topic is listening skills. This is a topic actually from the martial arts and there it refers not to listening with your ears but with your body. So you’re fighting somebody, they’re going to punch you and you block them. Then what are you going to do? You can fight back by pulling their arm down and punching them in the head. You could do that but it takes a lot of energy and it has a high probability of failure. But there are other things you can do. Since you’ve got this point of contact you don’t have to watch them do something and then react when they’re going to come at you again, you can feel them. And as they move their arm, they move their body and you can follow that and then at a chosen moment just react in a way that takes advantage of the situation, that’s harmonious with what you want to do and what they’re trying to do but that achieves your agenda. What I want to say here is that we can apply this kind of idea in game design.

I was talking before about how do you merge architecture with exploration. Portal started with exploration and added architecture but I think we can also go the other way with games that are largely architected. The problem is that it’s hard to listen if you’re shouting all the time. If your game development process is always about fighting fires and enforcing this design from the top-down, hammering the code and art into doing what you want to do, then you blind yourself to the possibilities that are being revealed. I want to illustrate some of those possibilities now.

Here’s an old game called Smash TV, which hopefully a lot of you guys have played. It’s another eight-way shooter. Basically, it takes place in this arena and guys come through these four doors on the side, try to attack you and kill you. It’s very important in Smash TV whether these doors are open or closed. If they’re closed you can sort of stand around them and feel safe. But if they’re open you can’t really be safe there because guys are going to rush through at any minute and kill you. Notice that because of the camera perspective chosen for this game (which was pretty much an arbitrary, artistic decision) you can’t see the door on the south side of the screen. You can’t tell if it’s open or closed. But it’s super-important for gameplay.

What that does is that it makes the bottom half of the screen this extra danger zone which I’ve coloured in red. You don’t want to be standing around the bottom of the screen in Smash TV because you don’t know how safe it is. You feel extra nervous. It’s this extra little ripple in the game design that makes it more wonderful to play. Without that red zone the screen would be pretty much this flat surface of equal danger everywhere in its steady state. Here in its steady state it’s uneven. There’s more variety for gameplay. When you would die sometimes in Smash TV–some prizes show up towards the bottom and they’re really tempting and you run to grab them and you get killed–it feels fair because you knew that was the situation. You learnt through play, your mental model contained the fact that you can’t know what’s down there, there might be a landmine or whatever and you knew what you were getting into when you went down there. It feels fair.

Now interestingly Smash TV had a sequel called Total Carnage which starts out in a jungle. What would happen in Total Carnage, and this happens very early in the game, is that there are landmines placed that you have to avoid. Some of these landmines will be placed behind trees exactly in the way that things could be hidden behind that wall in Smash TV. But there’s a difference. And the difference is that in Total Carnage none of that is random or the circumstance of gameplay. The level designer specifically put that mine there to kill you when you walk behind the tree. But the problem is you want to search behind the trees because there are things you need, there are keys you need.

So you feel totally screwed. It feels like this sadistic situation where the level designer just wants to kill you; it doesn’t feel fair. This is a really interesting case where you have something that arose out of exploration, that felt natural and improved the game, and it was reused in the sequel in a more architected way without sufficiently listening to the effects on the player and it was a detriment to the game. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that while Smash TV was a huge arcade hit not that many people have played Total Carnage. It didn’t really have that much success.

Another one: Pac-Man Championship Edition (which is a wonderful game). It’s a sequel to the original Pac-Man of course. And in Pac-Man these ghosts are chasing you and trying to kill you but you can eat a power pill and the ghosts turn blue and run away. You can chase them and eat them if you want but you’re safe for the duration of that power pill. How do you know how long you’re safe? Well when the ghosts are about to turn mean again and be ready to harm you they’ll flash. They’ll flash blue to white, blue to white and then they come back after you. There’s this interesting interaction where in the original Pac-Man if you were to eat all four of the ghosts then you no longer have a visual indicator of when that timer is going to end.

In the original Pac-Man that didn’t necessarily matter too much but in Pac-Man Championship Edition it’s very important because you can eat chains of power pills and drive up the bonus multiplier by eating more than four ghosts; you want to eat as many ghosts as you can in a row. So there’s this wonderful sort of interaction where you want to get a power pill at the last minute so you can maximise your ghost-chasing time. You want to effectively know very accurately when that last second is but if you eat all the ghosts, which you want to do to maximise your score, you have a much vaguer idea of when you can go and eat the next power pill. It’s a very interesting interaction that was actually improved from one game to the sequel.

I find that remarkable given the large number of things that were changed between Pac-Man and Pac-Man CE. The original Pac-Man had cut scenes. How many games that had cut scenes eliminate cut scenes for the sequel? It’s crazy. If you look for delightful little design ripples that happen like these, you’ll see them all over. Not only in older games but in newer games, not only in other people’s games but in your own games.

Now if you’re working on a big game–it’s AAA, it’s got 200 people working on it, it’s very story-based–in story-based games it can be hard to do this kind of exploration. You’re trying to create believable characters and any time something weird happens you have to squish it because you lose suspension of disbelief. What can you do? It’s not my preferred environment to work in but I would say that if that’s your job, to fix those design problems instead of capitalising on them and exploiting them, then you could at least notice those little things you’ve explored before you squish them. Feel what they feel like and feel maybe where they could go, even just for a minute. And then squish them. But you’ve built a little bit of listening skill and over time you build it stronger and stronger and someday when you go start your own studio you’ll have an advanced sense of listening and that’ll be very useful.

So here’s my conclusion inasmuch as I have one. Going back to that quote at the beginning: ‘As cinema matured, films developed the power to transform as well as to entertain. Video games are poised to enter a similar golden age.’ As a designer, I want to see that golden age. I want to see us harness this power to transform society that Daniel also wants to see. I’m a designer now because once a long time ago I was a gamer. I was a little kid who loved games; I played a lot of games. And I feel like I’ve grown up, I’m a smarter and wiser and a more experienced person now. Games are a lot bigger but they haven’t really grown. They haven’t kept pace with me. As a player I have this desire to be transformed like Daniel mentioned but I’m not getting it. At least not most of the time.

I get very frustrated by games. I’ll go to the store and I’ll buy ten games for $60 each–that’s $600, that’s a lot of money–I’ll go through the stack and I’ll start playing them one at a time and I’ll play them for about half an hour and I’ve gotten pretty much all that game has for me. Because it doesn’t have anything fundamentally valuable to me that any other game hasn’t already given to me. I still love games but it’s frustrating and I think we can do a lot better as an industry.

So I’m encouraging all of us to make things that are worthwhile (or deep or interesting) but what is worthwhile? That’s a very subjective question. Surely your ideas about that are different from mine and games that I would make left to my own devices would be very different from what you make. But as designers there’s an entire community with all of our different ideas about what’s worthwhile. We can at least hold the intention to make our games embody those ideas, to be worthwhile, and to respect the player’s potential to live a high quality life (not treat players as somebody from whom we’re trying to siphon money or attention or fame). I think that if we do that for a while and get good at it and we’re diligent, players will feel it; they’ll feel the difference, I think we’ll broaden our market, and if we get good enough at it then someday we’ll be able to see where that next step is to build games up to their full potential.