I’m getting really sick and tired of listening to people who’ve built their careers by telling me what games are and what they aren’t (and there are a lot of ‘em). How many times do I have to listen to someone tell me that games could one day communicate through interaction, and not through cutscenes? How games need to strive to create experiences that really touch the human soul?

And if I hear anyone EVER ask, “Can a game make you cry?” I will make THEM cry by punching them repeatedly in the face. And then point them to Ico, Planetfall, Skies of Arcadia, or any number of games that have already done that.

So let’s be clear. Games already do these things. And maybe it can be hard to see, because they don’t look like one might expect them to look, but just because it doesn’t look like a book, or a movie, or some other “accepted” form of art doesn’t mean it isn’t.

Games encompass a huge variety of things, from vacuous, largely visceral entertainment to a really highbrow, subtle, and memorable way to express an idea. I think the beauty of games is in their breadth - there are so many tools at a creator’s disposal that you can express an idea in an unprecedented number of ways.

Sim City made a very bold personal statement about the efficacy of public transportation. And that was expressed entirely through its interactive systems. You wanted to make an optimal city? No problem - build a city without roads. No traffic jams, and the train system is wonderfully efficient, as long as you fund it properly. Happy citizens abound! That is a beautiful combination of authorial intent communicated through systemic behavior.

The Sims did something similar - but this time, it was a joke about trying to attain happiness & contentment through endless materialism. Buy stuff to make yourself happy. Get bored of that stuff. Get a better job to get more stuff. Wash, rinse, repeat until dead. I’ve never seen a method of communicating that futility that was funnier, more visceral, or more potent.

Even the most pop-culture blockbusters have interesting things to say, and interesting ways to say them. The point of the “No Russian” mission in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was that the interaction was what made things extraordinarily uncomfortable. Same with Manhunt, which I hated. Same with Shadow of the Colossus, which I couldn’t keep playing. Same with… Gitaroo-Man. Yeah - it’s abstract, hitting buttons to play guitar to win over the girl of your dreams, but when playing, you felt insecure.

You want something that captures the brilliance of some of the human content of film’s best works, but dramatically surpasses it in almost every way imaginable? Go to an MMO and immerse yourself socially - whether you’re role-playing or simply listening to someone’s personal stories or creating your own new memories with people you’ve only met in-game. With the breadth of people you’ll encounter, you’ll have a more “human” experience than the vast majority of movies can provide. You may lose authorial control over the long arc of the entire experience, but the short arcs of interaction with people, mediated by the game, can far surpass anything that film can provide. You may say that’s “social interaction” and not “gaming,” but I disagree.

You want a game about friendship? Trust? Kindness? Altruism? Something heartbreaking? Surprising? Shocking? Disgusting? Unbelievable? Tender? Loving? You want a social experience that builds lasting relationships? Games. With people. Already happens all the time. Is the problem here the presence of people? I don’t see it that way. The system gives you a framework within which to interact. It gives you a means of expression, and it gives other players a means to respond. The designers create the mediating mechanisms, and by design, encourage specific types of behavior, just as in any game. If that’s not interactivity mediated through systems, I don’t know what is, and more, I don’t know why it’s not already widely recognized as such.

Take Fleck, for instance. It’s simple, but one of the things we wanted to do was create a social experience that encourages people to interact with each other in positive, cooperative ways. Whether it’s helping each other maintain their plants, showing someone around your neighborhood, or shooting zombies together, the mechanics of the game encourage friendly interactions between players at a relaxed, low-pressure pace. Different kinds of games may bring people together in similar ways, but the social experience in Fleck is a very different experience than playing Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer. That’s not an accident.

The thing that drives me crazy is simple - you have a bunch of people talking about how games should be more than they are, but in the midst of those conversations, you have a lot of people ignoring what games already are, and what the hardworking people in the industry are striving to create, dismissing it as pop-culture pablum.

The thing is, since they’re too busy comparing them to film & books & comics & whatever existing media they’re aspiring to, they’ve already missed what makes games different.

You want meaning through systemic interaction? It already exists. You want games that are about deep parts of the human experience? They’re already here. Sometimes they involve actual humans, but they’re still games - they’re still videogames, and the rules that the creators build dramatically impact those interactions.

So, stop complaining that games aren’t what you want them to be, just because you can’t see what they already are. Thousands of people, every day, are working really hard to make games that push the boundaries - that create new ways to interact with the world - to create novel new experiences that already are what you’re looking for and more.

If you can’t see that, then maybe you should stop talking and start playing.

A couple new things:

A new box! Also unfortunately the source of some of our troubles, but hey, it’s a snappy box with a cutout, and it’s custom for the size of the Word Ace deck, so it’s pretty swankity.

Now, instead of the weird printed instructions, they’ve been printed on the cards - crazy! Sides 2 & 4 are on the back sides of these cards, but it means everything fits nicely in the box, and you can just whip out the instructions for n00bs while you’re shuffling the deck.

What, you want something else? You can flip a card around when you put ‘em away and now it looks totally different!

Everything else looks like the first run of cards. The card back & fronts still look just like they do in-game, so you can get the full Word Ace experience in person with your friends!

We’ll be posting instructions on how to purchase decks as soon as the last of the kinks are worked out, and the decks are all absolutely 100%.

Woo!

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
– Albert Einstein
While I won’t get into a debate about the merits of this particular quote, it did spark a discussion with a friend of mine about how various companies approach making whatever they make. Instead of the dependence between science and religion that Einstein talks about, instead let’s talk about vision & data.

With our newest project, we’ve released it in a relatively early stage. We push out new features as fast as possible, and we get a lot of feedback from our players. They both write us via our feedback form, and let us know what they think of the game, and they provide us data about what they’re actually doing in-game by simply playing, and letting us see the resulting data.

This is really, really different than how I’m used to designing a game, where there is a lot more distance between the designers and the players. Most of the time, you’d need to build a system, get it completed to the point where it’s very nearly finished, and only then do you get any sort of feedback from the end user. So it requires a designer to say, “Here’s what I think will work,” with relatively little supporting evidence other than that person’s vision.

There are a lot of companies that are embracing the idea of data-driven design. In this case, basically, we’re talking about a situation where you get a couple of alternatives, test them against some quantifiable measure, and go with the one that gets the best results. There are a lot of reasons this is incredibly successful - mostly because you only end up with things that you know are successful (at least in the way that you measured them).

If you look at this new crop of spam engines disguised as games, they’re highly data-driven - which is why, I think, people are content making the same games over and over - because these things have been proven to be successful - after all, they’re not measuring for creativity or originality. If you take a company like Zynga, who basically just cloned existing farming games, what they added was a highly data-driven approach to cranking up spam, and getting people to spend money.

Is that a bad thing? Well, it’s pretty mercenary, but it’s also the same thing that the folks at Bungie use to make sure you don’t get lost while playing Halo. It depends on who’s doing the data collection, and to what end. But that, gets back to the issue of vision. Why are you making what you’re making?

But at the same time, most game design is done almost completely blind. While it seems like doing a lot of A-B testing or focus testing should be so commonplace that no one even gives it a second thought, the level of data collection that’s done on *most* console games is still shockingly sparse. So you rely entirely on peoples’ guesses as to what the audience wants, not what the audience actually wants. And as a result, sometimes you have very talented people working in the completely wrong direction, and the end result is something that is in some way horrifically broken, not what people expected, or what they wanted.

I spent a little while trying to find some elegant way of rephrasing Einstein’s quote - but in this case, it really comes down to the fact that data without vision gives you something that lacks direction, while vision without data is just an incredibly risky endeavor. Not really a snappy rephrase, but whatever.

In the end, I think the only sensible thing to say is that you really need to balance the two. Game development is like a benevolent dictatorship - you want someone, or a small team with a strong vision for what they’re actually building that is listening to, and cares, about the audience. For us, the data-collection aspect of things is pretty new to us - we’re getting our sea-legs in that regard. The vision thing? Well.

You’ll have to let us know.

So, with most console development, all a player will ever see is a finished game, or a very late beta. As a result, with most games, during development, you build a set of rules, you build everything that goes around ‘em, and at the very end, when the game’s released, you can figure out if people like playing the game you’ve built.

We’re trying something new. With our newest project, we’ve spent a lot of time building the infrastructure, and we have some long-term goals, but one of the things that’s been the most interesting is that some of the simplest mechanisms have turned out to be the most fun.

When you say “user-generated content”, what people mean these days is that they give users tools to build levels and then distribute them to a bunch of people. These are often incredibly complex to build - things like Little Big Planet & ModNations Racers have tool systems that are elegant, but have a HUGE number of rules & restrictions.

But what we’ve found with this project is that we haven’t given people ridiculously complicated stuff. We’ve given them extraordinarily simple stuff - things with such basic rules that they can be summarized in a sentence or two - and then we see how they end up playing with them. It ends up being like a giant sandbox. Or a box of Lego before they started introducing those really specialized pieces. Players are given the freedom to play, and when they do that, they can let their imagination run wild.

It’s then up to us to enable the players to keep building on that fun. It’s a really backwards way of developing, compared to how console developers are used to working, but in essence, it’s sort of like being back on a playground, making things up as you go.

Ok - so, “Social Gaming”, obviously, is the “New Hotness” - or rather, was the “New Hotness” about a year ago, and has spent the last half year percolating into the wider consciousness. And it drives me absolutely batshit crazy.

Why is it called “Social Gaming”?

Yes, the initial thing that differentiated games was their presence on various social networks, and the ability to use things like Facebook’s friend features to involve your friends at some superficial level maybe at some point wasn’t just a pure Spam Engine, but now?

Now the only differentiating factor between “Social Games” and your run of the mill lousy Flash game is that the “Social Games” require you to mount a full on assault on your friends to do anything of note. Or spend a bunch of money, which removes even the cursory “socialization” from the games.

I guess the thing that really bothers me isn’t even what they are - I mean, a game really just is what it is, and complaining about what it isn’t just means you want something else. But the point is that I want something else. I want a game that fulfills the promise of “social gaming” but isn’t what “social gaming” has come to mean.

So, I poked Self Aware’s twitter account & asked what other people thought. Their responses included things like:

• Teamwork
• Rivalry
• Mastery of a skill
• Chat
• Simplicity
• Addictiveness
• Safety
• Asychronicity, when possible

So, the question of asychronicity is an interesting one. Clearly, a game like Words With Friends uses that incredibly well - you can let moves queue up, and then address them at your leisure, which means you almost always have something to do in a free moment, but you’re also not pressured to do something right now.

But at the same time, the asychronicity means that there’s really not much of a distinction between playing with someone I know and an AI that behaves like them. In some cases, that’s enough to feel like I’m interacting with my friends, but other times, not at all. At the same time, with most asynchronous games, if you’re taking your turns fast enough, it basically becomes a real-time experience.

But so, again - what’s a “social” game? Teamwork, rivalry, and chat are obvious ways to interact with others. But there’s the simplicity & addictiveness - are these parts of a good social game? Addictiveness, well - that’s almost a reflexive way to describe something compelling. Simplicity/Accessibility is critical as well, since the more simple/accessible, the more people can play - mastery isn’t a requirement to participate.

At the same time, you should have some measure of mastery. Simplicity’s great to start, but without a sense of mastery, you lose a sense of progression. And mastery isn’t always, “execute a command perfectly or die” - there are many axes of mastery - strategy, efficiency, dexterity… Heck, in a social game, having friends who will help you is a sort of mastery, I’d say.

One thing that no one mentioned was “spam your friends to progress.” Yet it’s clearly effective at creating awareness about the game. Developers wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t effective, and I think that in order to build an audience of the scale necessary to maintain these sorts of games, encouraging people to spread the word is a critical function. But geez - there’s a balance to be had.

In a single session of Frontierville, I’d be surprised if there were less than a request every thirty seconds for me to spam my friends in some manner. That’s ten separate requests (often interruptions) for about five minutes worth of game time. And the game itself? It really starts to feel like the “reward” for accomplishing *anything* in game is a request to spam your friends.

Now, maybe complaining about this sort of thing is going to bite me in the foot later. Maybe it’s all necessary for creating a sustainable, profitable “social game”. But I’m sick of it. I want a social game that’s about socialization. That’s about interaction with others, synchronous AND not. That’s about cooperation, competition, exploration, mastery, and simplicity that grows into complexity and depth. I want an experience that’s social. I want something that’s fun, as a game - but also more. I want something that fulfills the promise of the new wave of awareness and connectivity, instead of something that uses it as a bludgeon.

Now, obviously, this isn’t just idle speculation. Will we be able to strike that balance?

I guess we’ll find out.

So, I used to work on console games. I’d worked on smaller games for the PSP, fast games that took 9 months and 120 people, and big games that took hundreds of people years to make.

As a game designer, two things you try to do are predict the future, and guess what people will want. Or rather, you’re trying to predict what people will want in the future.

If you design a game based on what people want now, by the time you’re done making it, your game will already be obsolete. So you have to look ahead a little & try to see where the trends that are starting now will be when your game is done.

If you’re not good at this, you end up making another game with a balding space marine. One of the things I always tried to do was keep up on technology, as a whole, because new display tech, or new control types, or even just control trends in existing games can really change over the course of the two years it takes to make most games.

Fast forward two years, and you finally get to see if you were right. Usually, you get some things wrong, and you get some things right. You learn from both, and hopefully, the next time you do it, you don’t make the same mistakes.

Each iteration of this, you get a LOT better at your job. But in console games, this happens once every two, maybe three years. You learn from the process of development, but not nearly as intensely as you do from the feedback you get from your players. So you make some minor progress over the course of a few years, then every two or so years, you make a big jump forward.

The thing that I’ve found really, really interesting about the new wave of mobile & web development is that those skills are useless.

But that’s okay, because you’ll learn really fast.

Self Aware Games started, tentatively, in January of 2009. Since then, we’ve released:

1. Taxiball
2. Word Ace, on iPhone, webOS (Pre & Pixi), and Facebook
3. Card Ace: Hold ‘Em, on iPhone, webOS (Pre & Pixi), and Facebook
4. Card Ace: Blackjack on iPhone, webOS (Pre & Pixi), Facebook, and Android.
5. New Project, into open beta on the web

On top of that, we’ve done something on the order of 10 updates to the various Ace games, and a few updates on Taxiball. Realistically, we’ve gone something on the order of a major release *every month* on average, since we started. And that’s only counting the relatively major releases. Including what we’ve learned from pushing rule changes, daily tweaks to values, various data logging of revenue & marketing things, we’re learning something new every week.

Even better, it’s much, much easier to isolate the information that you’re learning because everything’s incremental. Instead of having a full game, which is a whole handful of systems, level design, engine performance, marketing, timing, and a bunch of other stuff, from which you have to divine the player’s response through distant channels and the muddy waters of all the various systems interacting with each other, we get information about a new feature almost instantly, and it’s almost entirely about that single feature.

Do we learn? Yes, we learn. Not from every lesson - we’re not perfect - but in the last 19 months, I’ve grown tremendously (as has the entire team). It’s a new way of developing, and an incredibly exciting place to be. The other major difference? We’ll save that for next time. What I’d say is that we’ve put the cart before the horse, and it’s turned out to be a really exciting way to develop a game.

Looking for Card Ace: Blackjack on the Android Marketplace? Look no further! Just snap a pic of the QR code, and witness the magic of TECHNOLOGY!

So, pardon me while I geek out for a second.

When it was originally announced, I wasn’t all that interested in Transformers: War for Cybertron. After all, there hadn’t yet been a game that captured what was actually good about Transformers… well, ever. Not to mention, with the recent Michael Bay-ification of the franchise, what were the chances it would appeal to a G1 fan like me, and not the more recent (and awful) stuff?

Fortunately, someone I new (hi, Chad) was ludicrously excited about the game, and wouldn’t shut up about it. So I ended up biting the bullet and picking the game up. First good sign? The game was sold out almost everywhere. Second good sign? Stellar reviews. Third good sign? Ridiculous end credit sequence with song by Stan Bush posted to YouTube.

Anyway - I finally plonked it into the 360, and … wow. Now, I know I’m late to the WfC evangelism crowd, here, but holy cow. In terms of a game that does its license right, WfC is up there, if not better than Batman: Arkham Asylum, which was one of the biggest surprises of last year. The developers, High Moon, either genuinely LOVE the source material, or can fake it very, very well.

Everything just screams reverence for the source material - from the writing, which is faithful to the tone of the original TV show, to weird little snippets that are familiar to the hardcore fans of the series. There’s a point, about halfway through the game, where the word, “Guilty…” made me feel like I was 10 again.

More than that, though - more than the bickering between Megatron & Starscream (who have excellent new voices), to the new “transforming sound,” which is still reminiscent of the original - the game itself is awesome.

Stripped of its license, it’s a more-than-passable 3rd person action game with some neat mechanics. Add in 3-player co-op, a great twist on Gears of War 2’s Horde Mode, and then stick on a Call of Duty-inspired class-based multiplayer mode, and you’ve got a game that’s just a ludicrous abundance of riches. Everything’s well-implmented, well-thought out, and solidly designed. With a campaign and a couple multiplayer modes, there *should* be something in here that feels like it was second fiddle. There isn’t. It’s all solid.

The transforming mechanics aren’t necessarily all that useful in the single player game. There are times when you’ll need to fly, where it’s cut & dried, but for the most part, transforming is left up to the player. In multiplayer/horde, though, you *need* to transform to survive. With the scout, your speed & mobility is the point of your class - and hitting a jump, transforming into robot form, cloaking, jumping into a crowd of enemies, meleeing someone from behind as you come out of cloak… it’s like how you played with toys when you were a kid, except now you can do that in a game with dozens of other people.

It’s bonkers. Absolutely bonkers.

If you have any love of Transformers at all, you *have* to have this game. Kudos to High Moon, who pulled off a game that goes well beyond what I thought was possible with the franchise. I can’t wait to see what they do next (though I sincerely hope it’s WfC 2)!

I’ll go out on a limb, here, and say that they’ve completely missed the sea change.

First, let’s talk motion control. No, wait - let’s just talk immersiveness in gaming, because it’s the core issue behind why motion control and 3D, as they’re currently envisioned, will both be flops.

The problem with motion control is resistance. The problem with 3D is position. In both cases, they’re up against their particular form of the Uncanny Valley.

With motion control, you can have as much fidelity as you want. When I played around with Sony’s Move, it’s pretty incredible - it’s fast, it’s accurate… in short, it’s everything the Wii isn’t. There’s a lot you can do with the Move that you simply couldn’t do with the Wii. No one’s going to care, though, because without *feedback*, it’s impossible to really get that sense of immersion.

Here’s the thing - the best game to come out on the Wii, by a long, long margin, is Wii Sports - specifically, Wii Sports Bowling. I’d venture that that one minigame, on its own, sold the bulk of the Wii’s hardware. But the thing is, with bowling, you really have very little feedback in real life. You release the ball - to an expert bowler, there’s probably a lot in that release. But to most people? Not much.

But expand beyond bowling to tennis, and you’re screwed. A tennis racket hits something. It’s that satisfying thwack that’s a huge part of the joy in real tennis, and it’s something that Wii Sports tennis utterly lacks. Same goes with boxing. Hitting nothing is not the same as hitting something. And the Move is equally screwed, because the better fidelity doesn’t make hitting nothing feel like hitting something. It just doesn’t. And if you talk to people, or if you simply think about what you want in a motion controlled game, it’s involvement - it’s physicality - it’s interaction with something, not interaction with nothing.

That lack of feedback is where motion control falls into the uncanny valley.

With 3D, it’s functionally the same. Current 3D gets you partway there, then falls completely apart. Current 3D technology gives you a nice sense of depth. That’s really it. The effect falls apart at the edges of the screen, and to me, it looks a lot more like someone set up a bunch of billboards at differing depths, rather than really being 3D, but even ignoring that, the effect is just a gimmick.

The use of 3D - the benefit of moving beyond a 2D image, ideally, isn’t just to create a vague sense of depth, it’s to make you feel more immersed. Well, the problem is that looking at a 2D image, I have a lot of mental skill in understanding it as a representation of something three-dimensional - but give me a little bit of actual representation of depth, and it either has to work completely, or it’s really distracting. Worse, I can now see depth, but I can’t interact with it in any physically meaningful way.

I can’t run around to the back of the image, for instance. With both motion control & 3D, the problem is that it strives to create a more robust virtual environment for me to interact with, but in doing so, just makes the limitations all the more dramatic.

Does that mean that I don’t think they should be pushing this tech forward? I absolutely think that they should. Personally, I’m really interested in Move & Kinect, and will almost certainly get them both. 3D I don’t care so much for. But I think until someone invents something that projects images directly into your optic nerve & stimulates your neurons to believe you’re actually interacting with something physical, these new technologies are fun toys, but don’t really enhance the sense of immersion in the world.

Where was I going with this?

The point is actually kind of simple - and I wish that MS/Sony/Nintendo really “got it”, but they seem to have missed it entirely, and it’s why Apple/webOS/Android are going to sucking users (and money) out of the “traditional” game industry at a rapidly increasing rate.

The social aspect of gaming is important, and the ability to play *anywhere* has tremendous value. Nintendo has a great success in the DS as a mobile device, but as a connected device, it’s a worthless piece of garbage. With the new wave of mobile devices, you can play anywhere with *real people you actually like*. To be up-front, honest, and kind of crass about it, I can jump online and play with other human beings who are spread out all over the country in the few minutes it takes to go to the bathroom. No matter where that bathroom is.

Think about how insane that would have sounded even two years ago.

The future of gaming isn’t 3D or motion control that you use while sitting in front of a television at home. The 3D you’ll be interacting with is the real world. The motion control is you moving in it. Add to that the social element of being connected to anyone you want at any time. And it’s not Move, Kinect or 3D TVs that will make that happen. It’s the phone in your pocket that will be your window into a new world of play.