The Aging of Gaming

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Written by Tasley a fellow gamer, and Doone – Edited by Doone

Is there an analog for gaming history to human history? I’m tempted to start looking for a neolithic revolution of video gaming, but somehow that seems wrong. Maybe I should just reach for the dusty tomes on the days when universities owned all the games.

We can all read the Wikipedia page on gaming history and/or catch up on the well written video series by The Gaming Historian over at Retroware TV, so we can skip over detailed accountings of each event significant to gaming in this article.

So let’s assume you clicked those links above and got at least a cursory reading of where video games come from. Actually, you’re a real gamer right? So you should just magically know this already. Except gaming today is played by people who always had them around. It’s like growing up when TV was already invented and well established and seeing it as an archaic device which can’t even keep up with your new smartphone. That’s what gaming is for most gamers these days. And that there shows us just how old gaming is …and also how different it is from how it used to be.

There was a time when video gaming was a very niche, white, male, and middle class thing. No one owned computers so the first gamers were playing games at work! HA! Imagine that today …how many meetings have you been in, silently ducking into a corner of the table while tapping away furiously at a game on your phone? It seems not much has changed in that regard.

What’s different now, though, is accessibility. Games are EVERYWHERE. It’s scary. It’s like everything is being turned into a running joke via video games. It’s like …peak hedonism, if we may. Gamification is teaching us that we ought not take anything seriously. In order to do that we consume games on every topic imaginable with a strong emphasis on violence. This isn’t a debate on how games create murderers, but it’s important to point out the ways in which companies use gamification these days to sell us things we’d ordinarily find repulsive. It’s like, if they just make a game out of a serious topic it’s some how less serious, something we can be cool about and regard as No Big Deal. Happens all the time? Prevalent on every corner? Hey, it’s like games are trying to send the message that if you just “level up” in your life you’ll overcome and things will be better and you’ll win recognition as one who has triumphed over the evils of the world. Or something like that.

It’s not clear why we need to gamify homelessness. Not sure at all why we gamify rape. What in the world are we trying to achieve by gamifying war? And what are games supposed to be doing anyway? There was a time when our fascination with games was their ability to work up our imaginations make our brain cells sizzle with delight as we solved strategic problems. Now games hold importance as devices to teach us things without having to actually experience them. However, the lesson is more potent when there’s a realistic chance that the thing we’re doing in the game can actually happen to us. In this sense, games broaden our imaginations about the possibilities, while also being able to show us the horrors of actions we might previously believed to be benign. Still, that depends on developers actually getting consequences right and being brave enough to show us the various ways in which those things harm others. In the cases of poverty and violence, it means less focus on glory and more on the realities of how and why these things happen.

If we look at gaming for what it is we’ll see it’s just really elegant and fascinating equation design. Games are translating the rhythms of our daily life into algorithms, mathematical expressions of how things work, how they happen, and how we can mechanize our daily activities. Just think about that for a second: Games are basically well designed loops which predict and encourage human behavior in order to actualize the game. You can’t play Super Mario without jumping, thumping gumbas, and banging your head on boxes. But why would someone feel compelled to keep doing that? There’s an equation for that. What about the more complex games like Baldur’s Gate? It’s like swordsmanship can be refined down into simple arithmetic. Having strength gives you the power to carry and swing a sword while some dexterity increases your skill at manipulating it. How hard you hit that monster relies on a simple formula that calculates just how much force is required by a character of your skill to lop his head off in one stroke. Just an equation.

Of course this is a simplification. There’s way more calculus and trigonometry and logic involved in programing our most complex games. The ones with the AI that’s spookily responsive, like say an old favorite, Dragon Age. The computer knows you’re there and there’s a lot of thought that goes into making the computer recognize human activity …AND RESPOND TO IT! Math, math everywhere.

So gaming is essentially a history of how developers are getting better at mapping out human interaction through equations. Who says math is useless?

As gaming ages, it becomes easier to see it for what it is: algorithms for human behavior, experience generators. Games are one of the most important developments on the road t human progress. For the first time, we can learn about the consequences of our actions without killing living things. That is, of course, the other edge of the sword: consequences are important to training our morals. As we age with our newfound technology, we will have to be conscious of developing ways of maintaining our humanity and reverence for life.

Morphing MMO Communities

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Interesting post popped up a while ago by Liore at Herding Cats, and since I’ve been away I never go the chance to respond so here I am. The discussion began with friendly jeering around the topic of chaos and order in MMO communities. Observing is the best part. Every time a new online game is announced, I rush to the scene to see the kind of people it attracts and to watch how the community develops. It’s not much different from game to game to be honest and that’s usually because veterans are the first to any of these communities. What you get is a new game with features not much different than the old and the same players which make-up it’s formative community.

So I guess I’m wondering how games achieve just the right amount of dynamism while not allowing abusive players free reign. I agree that spontaneity is fun and exciting, but being abused certainly isn’t. I suppose I don’t believe our options are to have unbridled abuse or total sterility.  In one sense, Liore kind of implied that if we try to maintain a sense of order at all then we’ll miss those rare events that make the game worthwhile. Angry Dwarf is in the middle on this, but I think that’s the place to be in this case. The rare stories are exciting precisely because of their novelty.

How are MMO communities formed and why do they all look so similar?

It always starts with some announcement of a new world (most likely high fantasy), whether previously established by books or other games, or whether a famous writer sets out on a fresh project. Next comes announcements of who lives within that new world (if there were green elves in your last MMO, this one will have blue and taller elves!) and promises of when players will first get to see it (it will be years). An official forum is created. Developers set-up some kind of dev blog/news feed and drop little morsels of game info into the cage/forum for the players to collectively devour. Role-players begin developing the lore through speculation and via this process of infrequent feedings and cage rattling fans are created, packaged, and distributed in the form of new fansites, blogs, and databases. The players then split into factions based on how often they play the game, favorite features (such as raiding or PvP), and age. Finally, the community creates rules and vie for developer attention to make them official, and before long the community is indecipherable from the MMO communities which these poor players came from.This is the very general and non-specific way MMO communities have developed, but don’t take my word alone. Take an internet tour to any of these game sites and their communities and you’ll find the same kind of content. Yeah, rough sketch here but the results are invariably the same with rare exception. We could even split up MMOs into western and eastern versions and among the two different player styles we’d still see the same patterns between games.

And for whatever reason I’ve found plenty of new reasons to love my new MMO communities, cloning be damned. These communities generate a lot of buzz and excitement and for a short time we all get to relive the newness of the game. While each game may have some unique cultural aspect, they all fit within the culture of the MMO world the same. The most important content in MMOs, however, are the players. This steady stream of unique experiences makes the generation of a distinct player-base inevitable. And that comes with a unique culture amongst other game genres, but a pretty consistent one within the genre itself. A comparison of any handful of traditional MMOs shows that the main features of the community just don’t change much. So why is that? I think it’s because the games themselves don’t change enough from title to title to give the communities room to be distinct and to adopt a unique culture.

So when we talk about the rules of our MMO games and what kind of behaviors are desirable by the different kinds of players, we’re having the same conversation we did years ago. Creating a different gaming culture would at least require that the game be different. So far, MMOs have been different mostly in name only. This would indicate that the community actually has very little new things to work with to generate a different kind of culture. MMO culture has been almost completely monolithic.

Who Makes the Rules?

The traditional MMO has a seamless world, character leveling, dungeons, raids, and PvP. They’ll also have some sort of crafting system and questing makes up a substantial portion of game-play. The standard group format is, with limited variation, 5 players. Players can tweak the heads on their characters, but almost never the body except through garments/armor. Finally, there will be guilds players can join and create. How different can a community be from game to game given the sameness of features? This sameness means player interactions don’t vary much, since they are interacting very similarly from game to game. Try to list any features of the following traditional MMORPGs which have given it’s community a distinctive culture.

  • Everquest
  • World of Warcraft
  • Warhammer Online
  • Age of Conan
  • Rift
  • Guild Wars

The communities morph following popular trends in gaming and social media, so each community isn’t a replica of the other. Instead, if we look at the culture such as the community values, history, customs, and language. The communities seem to only change shape, but not nature.

What’s most interesting is the belief among players that we can have a different experience in the next new MMO. This healthy optimism is carried from game to game by MMO veterans, which is an increasingly larger proportion of gamers. As virtual worlds become a popular escape in our leisure time, MMO becomes a household term. These veterans migrate from games for reasons simple enough: we grew tired of the old game and now we’re out seeking fresh horizons, new blood to befriend, and a better experience …and “better” in MMO communities usually means different/better players. The word community is so important to MMO gamers because players have traditionally made up a substantial portion of the game experience. What better way to find this raw experience than by being the first citizens of a newly minted MMO? And so the cycle continues.

We set out to make our new community by being the first fans in that game and attempting to set the tone for what it will become. That’s where the official forums come in, usually somewhere around alpha or beta testing. We’ll set up shop there, create information threads, brown-nose the devs (who are ever so glad to chat it up with players in the early days when buzz is critical to awareness), and talk about our previous home worlds. We talk a lot about what we DON’T want to happen to our new found game and report our fears to the game’s creator in the hopes that they will avoid those pitfalls. The very first “rules” are made by players, who set-up the boundaries for how the game is played. Examples are the help/sticky threads we hang in the forums. We legitimize the activities in our community, such as creating rolls of faction guilds, player-driven events, and raid progression logs. As we begin to split up into communities hosted on non-official fansites, we become more competitive and the rules even more intricate. The advent of progression websites is a prominent example of this rule-setting behavior. We’ll promise to always be friendly so that our new community isn’t like our last was. We’ll very liberally use the public chat in-game to police things and during these earliest days, reporting a player has much more power than it does as time wears on. As the game comes out of beta, the player-base grows and with it the number of guilds, factions, and unique players. And from there, the game becomes less and less distinguished from other contemporary MMO communities.

To Be

The question to answer is: how are gaming communities forged and are they best governed by chaos or order? Or put another way, should the game establish rules of conduct that players must follow? This is usually what we’re asking when talking about chaos and order, the amount of griefing, account abuse, theft, and game exploitation should be allowed.

I think I agree with most of the comments on Liore’s and Angry Dwarf’s articles: spontaneity is fun and exciting and our MMOs definitely need them. But why haven’t our communities been able to find a happy balance to the chaos and order? Largely because the formative communities of new games don’t change and then also because the MMOs themselves are too alike. The difference between awesome and repetitive isn’t very difficult to grasp, yet game design in the genre hasn’t settled on a good solution for it. On the one hand, players are the best content an MMO can offer. On the other, not all developers seem capable of harnessing that content into progressively enjoyable moments in game. We seem always to arrive in a place where chaos (griefing and the like) and order (the sterility of static environments) exist together uncomfortably.

For me, it all starts with the game. When our MMOs change, we’ll see new dynamics and new player behaviors …even if some old ones linger.

Response to Kotaku’s Nickels, Dimes, and Quarters

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The article over at Kotaku is more of an opinion piece rant. I appreciate that everyone has different perspectives on how things should be, but I think our media in the gaming industry too often doesn’t tell us enough about how it actually is. The fact is there’s too much money being thrown around for most media outlets to give a damn about doing deep research and returning with data backed by hard facts. That’s the kind of thing that would set the basis for discussions about capitalism in the games industry, such as what the author wants to do here. But gamers and fans don’t get those kinds of conversations because it’s far easier for reporters to write and appeal to emotion. Well, bloggers can do much the same. The problem for many bloggers like myself is we don’t have industry access like a Kotaku does. Access to data and information is literally a very closed door for the independent researcher when it comes to getting companies to divulge facts about game development. I don’t have to tell you that Kotaku has far greater access than I do.

And that’s where my bone-picking comes in here. I’m not attacking Cliff Blezinski personally. Instead I’m challenging the notion that reporters can just give the picture a gloss over with their two eyes and come to gut conclusions while spinning it as fact like this:

To produce a high quality game it takes tens of millions of dollars, and when you add in marketing that can get up to 100+ million. In the AAA console market you need to spend a ton of cash on television ads alone, never mind other marketing stunts, launch events, swag, and the hip marketing agency that costs a boatload in your attempts to “go viral” with something. Not only is the market more crowded than ever but your average consumer has many more entertainment options than ever before in the history of humanity. (Hell, when levels are loading in our games my wife and I read Twitter and Reddit.)

If this is true, then the video games industry is not a free market. The entry fee to compete is far beyond what most developers could ever pay.

Most games cost nowhere near this amount of money to produce nor to have a success. In fact, it would take only 1 or 2 hands tops to recite the high budget AAA titles that release each year. That’s how few of them there are! That means that if we only count successful, high quality games as those costing over $100 million to produce, then there would be no games industry to speak of; who would invest any money in an industry where only 5 companies are having any success at creating games? No one, that’s who.

Instead, we can look to the thousands of smaller and often independent games studios who crank out quality games every year on far less than $100 million. I’m really tired of the argument that AAA titles are: 1) good for the industry and 2) worth every penny spent. We have to stop drinking this Kool Aid, gamers. AAA titles represent a tiny minority of corporations who have a disproportionate amount of power in the games market. And their games, often, just aren’t that good. They make lots of money, one might reply but it’s sheer probability. If I tell everyone on my block I’m selling lemonade, I’ll net fewer buyers than I would if I told everyone in my district. Whats’ more is that if the first batch is tasty, then people will come for the second batch even if it’s not lemonade. Good luck getting them all back for a 3rd batch though. It’s not far off the mark to look at the EAs of the industry and describe their marketing tactics as throwing a lot of spaghetti on many walls, but with slightly less arbitrary planning before the toss. It’s what is known today as mass market. Quality matters less than how many people you sell a mediocre product to.

The top selling games for 2012 came from just 6 studios: Activision, EA, Ubisoft, Microsoft, Warner Brothers Interactive, and 2K Games. Over 600 games were released in 2012 in North America from dozens of studios from the elite to the smallest indie. Just 6 studios had high grossing market success as Cliff would describe it. Of those, 5 of those companies are known for their big budget titles.

If Cliff is correct about needing to spend $100 million to have a successful video game, someone ought to inform these other companies who are winning nominations and awards at GDC (Faster Than Light),  Spike (Fez), and other gaming conventions all year long …on substantially, even sub $1 million, lower budgets.

This is the kind of information sites like Kotaku should be giving fans a closer look at. Gamers would be very interested to know about how the industry belief that bigger budgets equal more and better games is a big fat lie at worst, gross exaggeration of the truth at best. This is the culture that misleads the fans into believing that unless you’re a super-rich, international corporation then you’re not doing well enough …it’s sadly one of those self-fulfilling prophecies. This toxic propaganda doesn’t serve the industry and gamers least of all. In fact, it’s one of the reasons no meaningful change ever occurs in video game culture: everyone’s spouting the same non-sense about what it takes to be a successful company.

People love to beat up on Origin, but they forget that, for a good amount of time, Steam sucked. No one took it seriously for the first while. Years ago, when Gabe pitched it at GDC to my former co-workers they came back with eye rolls. (Who’s laughing now? All of Valve.) It took Valve years to bang their service into the stellar shape that it is in these days. Yet somehow everyone online forgets this, and they give EA crap about trying to create their own online services.

People have lost patience for repeated mistakes, and rightfully so when so much money is on the line. We can’t misinterpret disappointment with EA’s buggy Origin as the poor new kid on the block when they are one of the richest developer-publishers in the world. Of all companies, they have the resources to put together functional software. In fact, this argument as quoted above works against them in every way: if Valve made these mistakes years ago, then why do we owe EA a break for making the exact same mistakes many years later? Plus there’s the fact that the EA Updater, which is much older than Origin, was also a pretty crappy experiment (it was a software downloading application from EA seen in such games as The Sims and Spore).

This is the part where we analyze whether this aspect of capitalism is serving companies and consumers. The cut-throat competitive attitude in this one case shows us how having a monopoly on information, ideas, and technology holds back the entire industry. Let’s just assume for example that Valve had learned some really awesome things about creating the Steam platform that would have benefited EA in their creation of Origin, thereby producing a better technology for customers and pushing progress for the industry forward a couple steps. However, by the sacred laws of competition, Valve would have had a duty to keep that information secret and let EA fail. This is why we can’t have nice things. This isn’t healthy, it’s just stupid. More cooperation within the industry could prevent abominations like Origin from re-occurring. How many more games and technology would we have available today if not for the ideology of competition? How much more prosperity would developers have? This isn’t idealism, but the reality of what the games industry does. It shoots itself in the foot. It forces itself into this primitive state of competing ideas in order to preserve exclusive, not increased, profit. It’s eating itself alive.

Players should be pissed at EA for the less-than-good state of Origin. In fact,

Remember, if everyone bought their games used there would be no more games.

Seriously?

Listen: Once upon a time there were just a few video games. In that time only the moderately affluent could afford a new game, but over the years those used games were sold at lower prices that allowed poor customers access to those games. This in turn expanded the market for video games and allowed the industry to thrive. And, who would have guessed, more new games were made. Welcome to 2013, many decades after the advent of video games, many decades after the lucrative used game markets (thanks Game Stop) and here we are with yet more games than we can shake a joystick at. Seriously, Cliff. Grow up.

If you truly love a product, you’ll throw money at it.

Then this ought to be true for the companies as well, no? If Blizzard loves their games, they’d be willing to part with them for the sheer joy of making them …FOR LOVE. But they need the money, you say? Oh …SO DO CUSTOMERS.

It should go without saying, but in capitalism it’s not about love. We can’t adopt the stance that it should be about love for those parting with their dollars and about profit for those making the game. That’s as much as I’ll indulge this consumerist argument.

Some companies have plenty of money, swimming pools of it. Others are begging their friends and relatives for loans to stay afloat while they finish production on their latest work of art. There are far more of the latter than the former. It’s not fair and it’s not truthful to try to convince people that spending millions on creating a game is our best option. It’s propaganda. It’s like calling the movies at the Oscars the pinnacle of good film. Those movie projects spend billions and yeah, they make billions at the box office. But thousands more studios around the world make far superior movies with far less dough. Besides it being not true, it’s not even sustainable if it were true.

Instead, I’d like to ask our game media reporting sites to focus more on research and bringing real information to the table for gamers to talk about. What was the average development cost for video games in 2012? What was the lowest budget for a successful title in 2012? How much growth, in terms of fans, has the industry seen and in what genre/platform? How many new studios successfully launched their first title in 2012? Not even a hint of this kind of information was present in Cliff’s article, despite the great assumptions about what works in the industry, what doesn’t, and how it works at all.

Let’s put aside the idea that game reporting should be largely about opinions — leave that to bloggers like me who don’t get paid a dime and have little to no access to insider industry information. We’ll write the opinions, but we need real information from sources like Kotaku to base those opinions on. Kotaku, you can certainly afford to do a lot better than this. I’m a regular fan of the site, so I’d really like to see some improvement in this area. We need a game media source that’s not about sensational Reddit reporting. Go out there and get some data that only you, as a media outlet, have access to and start spreading the knowledge. Talk about something with substance. And stop drinking the Kool Aid.