What Games Are

How Real Will Wearable Games Be [TechCrunch]

Tadhg — Mon, 07 Jul 2014 07:42:09 -0700

In this week's TechCrunch article I'm considering the pros and cons of the smartwatch as a platform for games. Because of their pervasive nature, smartwatches hold a lot of potential (for some kinds of) innovative gameplay but they also faces many potential hurdles. Screen size, power, form factor and dependence on mobile all present their own constraints, and the worry is that there may be too many limits to make smartwatch worthwhile.

Is it the next big thing or just a fad?

Pirate Radio And YouTubers [TechCrunch]

Tadhg — Mon, 23 Jun 2014 09:08:32 -0700

As the YouTuber phenomenon grows and grows (that is, channels like PewDiePie covering games with extended and often comedic Lets-Play videos) it raises some awkward questions. Developers ask whether YouTubers are effective in helping to promote their sales while journalists worry whether YouTubing constitutes the end of their craft. Some notable figures even consider YouTubing a form of piracy and demand tribute. At the same time for the millions of fans of these channels, they provide valuable insight and community, and a way to get around the packaged-product and deception that they perceive in how games are sold.

Some thoughts on all of the above, here.

The Resonance Of Bacon [Game Design]

Tadhg — Thu, 05 Jun 2014 12:43:32 -0700

Yesterday, for fun, I reposted the above image to my personal Facebook. It represents a pretty typical meme, similar to Twitter hashtag games (or gamelets, as I've taken to calling them). It went on to garner over 150 comments, far more than most things I post, and this is instructive. It teaches us once again about how important resonance is for engaging an audience.

Games (actually, all created things) are constantly pulled between what their creator wants to say versus what an audience needs to hear. This typically leads to two kinds of failure. (1) The creator makes the thing that expresses what she's about, but her work falls on deaf ears, or (2) she cynically looks at what the audience already has and copies it, making an outright clone or a clone with extra features. And again, fails.

The problem is not that the audience is full of dullards who only want to be served the familiar. That's a comforting interpretation in the face of obscurity, but not real. The problem is that the creator is not doing the difficult work of figuring out how to resonate with her audience. She's either not speaking their language, or she's saying the thing that they've heard a thousand times before.

And of course, there is no one fixed audience. Monument Valley's audience is not the same as Candy Crush's audience, and neither audience is the same as that for Cow Clicker. Bacon resonates while lamb doesn't. Star Wars resonates where Battle Beyond The Stars doesn't. In the world of fantasy fiction dragons are resonant. In the world of art games the ideal of the adventure game is resonant. What resonates for the E3 crowd doesn't for the zinesters, and vice versa.

To get to the audience you want, you have to play into them. If yours is a horror crowd, for example, maybe you need vampires. If yours is the Steam Early Access audience, maybe you need an indie style (PS: read Jesper Juul's latest on this here). If you want to make a game about human desperation then maybe you need zombies to be the bridge.

Of course every once in a while new ideas establish new signifiers. Old resonances die off for a variety of reasons. The difficult news is that the most common source of new signifiers is not games, nor movies. It's books. Most other media don't have the same capacity for depth as a book, and therefore the same capacity for originality. Instead they adapt what they see in the world of books and magnify. This is also true for games. If you do find yourself in the position where you want to create a brand new kind of universe, maybe what you need to do is write a book.

I'm not trying to deflate you here, but you will find it a hundred times harder to get game players to where you want them to be if they have no way to resonate with your game. Be cognizant of the landscape of signifiers but not slavish to it. Use the memes that you see around you to unlock your audience, but don't then fall back on tropes. Push your audience into new territory, new forms of participation and new directions. But remember that you need to bring them along for the ride.

Thoughts On The Future Of Indie Games

Tadhg — Thu, 22 May 2014 10:52:50 -0700

The meme has caught on that indie games are facing difficult times. Nicholas Lovell made the point about two months back when he said that Valve had started the race to zero, but this sense of impending disaster has been floating about the scene for a while. Most recently Jeff Vogel's post entitled The Indie Bubble Is Popping nailed it, explaining it all as a simple supply and demand problem. As supply increases in a market of relatively fixed size, prices decrease. Eventually the benign conditions turn malignant, and then everybody's in the soup.

Privately I've heard many similar sentiments of doom. Speaking with indie developers there's the sentiment that the good times have passed, and some have even darkly hinted that they feel the ladder needs to be pulled up lest all is lost. Many are looking to the safer havens of consoles, particularly to Sony, to shield them - but history would indicate that that kind of help only lasts so long. Taking all that in mind I took to Twitter this morning to think these issues out.

I ended up here:

DDoS Outage

Tadhg — Tue, 22 Apr 2014 14:58:16 -0700

Apologies if you've attempted to get access to What Games Are over the last 48 hours. Typepad got beaten up and down the block by a massive denial-of-service attack but we seem to be back, for now at least. Strange to think how such things can still wipe you from the face of the Earth.

Things That Make No Sense [Oculus and Facebook]

Tadhg — Wed, 26 Mar 2014 01:27:19 -0700

"Remember," as I was heard to say on Twitter earlier today, "that time when eBay bought Skype for reasons?" That's my initial reaction to the news that Facebook has purchased Oculus Rift. For reasons. Some vague ideas about the future of social and presence and other sci-fi-ish ideas that few can readily express. You know: the future or something. Mark Zuckerberg wrote Palmer Luckey a big check for reasons. Palmer Luckey then went on Reddit to explain why this was a good thing and got roundly yelled at. And he still is.

Why?

Because it makes absolutely zero sense. I mean I know the technology press loves to enthuse, and my good friends over at TechCrunch are doing that in force. But it still makes absolutely zero sense. Like eBay buying Skype on some half baked notion that people might use the conferencing service to pay for stuff, it's just a wonky fit.

One possible angle is that the move to purchase Oculus is defensive. To keep Amazon or Google or Microsoft or someone away. To estabish a wedge. But that begs the question: A wedge in what? Purchasing Instagram and WhatsApp made sense because they were essentially large-scale purchases of users. Those services were very much in Facebook's wheelhouse. But purchasing Oculus Rift? A technologist's technology that still has major questions hanging over it and its use case? It makes about as much sense as Google announcing it was making robot cars. A bit of fun perhaps, but come on. It's not a serious thing.

And then there's the untold damage to Oculus itself. There's a a thing that's emerged about Kickstarter-funded technologies. Their initial supporters feel very much a part of the adventure. They become the biggest evangelists and supporters, the ones who cheer through thick and thin. Marketing stories. Unless they sense that you've sold out. Then the opposite happens, and in every sentence about the project you hear the word "disappointing". It's very hard to come back from that.

Indeed I'm currently of the mindset that Oculus is now, to all intents and purposes, dead. A while ago I wrote that there are some big questions facing VR because it's reliant on PC, and the PC may be going away. I found it hard to see a market beyond the enthusiast set for what amounted to a very fancy sounding peripheral. Nonetheless I could see it doing something. Now, not so much. Now it's a technology without a tribe, just another back-pocket project in Zuckerberg's long list of things-that-are-supposed-to-reinvigorate-Facebook.

Perhaps Oculus did need a partner, but if so it clearly should have been Valve. Indeed I'm somewhat shocked that it isn't. Valve and Oculus together would make amazing sense because they naturally complement each other. As a second place choice maybe Microsoft would have been good. But Facebook? With its terrible reputation in games and its increasing tendency toward short termism and such? Luckey could not have made a worse choice.

Oddly enough the main beneficiary from all this will be Sony and its recently announced Morpheus. I doubt the folks at Sony would have seen that coming two weeks ago, but there it is.

Thauma: My GDC 2014 Microtalk

Tadhg — Fri, 21 Mar 2014 11:54:00 -0700

I just got done giving my GDC microtalk. It was every bit as nerve-racking and exciting as I hoped it would be, with so many talks from excellent speakers. It will definitely be one to watch on the GDC Vault when it comes out, just as it is every year.

My talk centered around thauma, the components of game design and the real questions of legitimacy that still trouble the videogame art form. As it was a strict format of 20 slides with 16 seconds per slide, I wrote mine out almost in the form of a poem. It had stanzas and pauses, which I think I mostly stuck to in the talk (I always ad lib a little). Here's the text:

Thauma

Leo Tolstoy once wrote that artists evoke a feeling in themselves and then - by means of expression - evoke the same feeling in others.
This, he said, was the activity of art.
Games also evoke feelings by means of expression.
I use the word thauma to describe how.

Thauma derives from Greek, meaning a wonder or marvel.
Thaumaturgy is the ability of a magician to work miracles.
As we describe the sensation of powerful story as dramatic.
I describe the sensation of powerful play as thaumatic.

There is an experience unique to games.
An enchantment that steals over us.
As we play, as we watch and as we retell the story of play it comes back to us.
We feel transferred to a different context of being.
We are here, yet we also feel elsewhere.

Where?
On a race track, pulling incredible turns.
On a tennis court, trying to score.
On a battlefield. In a city. In a haunted house.
A childlike landscape. A long forgotten shore.
An abstract space. An infinite plane.

Our journeys vary.
In some games we appreciate individual qualities.
But they don’t transport us.
Some games transport us but we don’t tarry long.
For each of us the criteria of thauma is different.
The nature of evoked feelings unique.

But to Tolstoy art was not mere beauty.
Or the expression of energy or emotions or pleasure.
He considered art not to be about how you feel.
Or who you are. Or if you cried.
But about what feelings the artist intended to generate.
And was she successful.

There are four schools of thaumatic design.
The school of mechanism, formal and elegant.
The school of simulation, complex and authentic.
The school of behavior, guided and rewarding.
The school of narrative, directed and emotive.
Each is valid.

As designers of thauma we add and remove.
We make giants of puny humans or gnats of fearsome egos.
We empower players with roles and fairness and resonance.
We toy with them and set the terms of their existence.
From these beginnings feeling is evoked.

Thauma is the holistic pot of fun, grokking, mastery,
skill atoms, veracity, flow, reward, action
meaning, narrative, magic circles, winning, losing
persuasion, immersion and ludonarrative resonance.
It is the feeling that a game world matters.

Thauma has many components.
That sense that a game must be fun.
That tendency of the mind to abstract.
That need to learn and grow.
Imperfection. Physicality. Time. Profit,
For some these are pillars. For others, boundaries.

Some games like to play with boundaries.
They should, particularly for criticism.
Yet the thaumatic experience rarely succeeds when only critical.
Or clever.
Especially if intended to be played for long.
Successful thauma is often grounded in rules.

In the elsewhere we know the rules.
We equate action with power.
In sports and board games rules make the world smaller and more focused.
In tabletop roleplaying they do the opposite.
The world grows larger.
In videogames?
Both at the same time.

Some would argue otherwise.
Why does a game have to be fun?
Must all roads lead to multiplayer?
Must all avatars have the same identity?
Is a player really a hero?
Is a game really a game?
These debates should show you how games are art.
But do you see it that way?

Or are you stuck on what games are meant to be?
That some games are art and some are problems?
That games will be an art one day?
That games must be destroyed so they can flourish?
That games must go beyond fun?
Are you frustrated by the present?

Future addiction gets depressing.
It’s fun to consider where games might go.
But as a group we get hung up on saying they have to go there.
And advocating that they have to change.
Or else be doomed.
Perhaps games are what they are today.
Warts and all.

Silly games with flapping birds are thaumatic.
Nagging games about making words are thaumatic.
Bewitching games about plants and zombies are thaumatic.
Cinematic games about solving murders are thaumatic.
Personal games about identity are thaumatic.
Ours is a broad church.

Arguments about “should” are a distraction.
The real argument is not about game versus story
or fun versus art
or future versus past
It’s about function versus institution.
The thing itself versus its place in the cosmos.
It’s about legitimacy.

Gamers often feel like outsiders.
So they co-opt the language of other arts and say “games are these too”.
And eventually get to “games should move on”.
Or they prefer to be outsiders.
They demean some voices to make them shut the fuck up.
For fear that they will “ruin games”.

Who Looks Outside Dreams.
Who Looks Inside Awakens.
We all already know that thaumatic feeling.
But we compromise it by only speaking to its future.
Or demeaning the present experiences of others.
We should own that feeling on its own terms.

We are neither scientists nor dramatists, psychologists nor economists.
We are thaumatists.
Our art of powerful spaces generating feelings is an art on its own terms.
It always has been.
In whatever form we choose to express them, this is what games are.
Thank you.

And breathe...

Thoughts On Patreonomics [TechCrunch]

Tadhg — Sun, 09 Mar 2014 22:42:37 -0700

I've been wondering whether the kind of model as evinced by sites like Patreon will form part of the future of the games business. From retail through free-to-play and crowdfunding we've seen more and more economic innovation in the games than most of us really know what to do with. Most of them involve bringing players closer to creators, and this seems like another step in that direction.

Read the full article here.

At GDC 2014

Tadhg — Mon, 03 Mar 2014 08:24:33 -0800

If you are attending the upcoming Game Developer's Conference, make sure to say hi. I'll be there for the full week (and briefly at Game Connection too) taking some meetings, attending some events and such. Email me if you want to set something up.

I'm also giving a talk. After two years of cajoling Richard Lemarchand, he's given me a slot at the fabled GDC Microtalks session. A microtalk is a specialised format in which each speaker has 5m20s and 20 slides to present an idea. The slides advance once every 16 seconds. So you have to be concise and pointed, with no room for error. The talk can be on anything. In the spirit of saving the surprise I won't spoil it here, but regular readers of What Games Are might have some inkling. The session will be on Friday March 21st at 10:00am in room 135 of the North Hall.

Finally this year I'll be doing the dev-rel thing at the OUYA booth. We're there in force to show new games coming to the platform, talk to developers and announce a few under-the-hood developments that we hope you'll like. So I'll be spending large portions of my time in the Expo and surrounding area, which is a first for me (at conferences I'm usually a talks junkie). So if you do fancy dropping by I'll be there or thereabouts.

At Casual Connect Europe

Tadhg — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 09:53:15 -0800

I'll be in Amsterdam next week for Casual Connect Europe, where I'm giving two talks. The first is about publishing as a service (delivered jointly with Eric Goldberg) and the second is about microconsoles, OUYA and the future. If you're there and want to talk about Ouyan opportunities, or more generally about games-related stuff, contact me and we'll set something up.