Every video game has certain benefits and constraints in the way it represents space. Interaction fiction, arcade titles, 2D side-scrollers, isometric RPGs, and first person shooters all have advantages and disadvantages to how they deal with space–some technical in nature, some design-based. This month’s topic invites you to explore the ways games have represented the spatial nature of their storyworlds and what this does for the audience experience. Is it possible to ignore the constancy of spatial relationships in a graphical game? What would such a game look like? Are there ways of representing spatial relationships that we haven’t explored? Do you have ideas for games that could intentionally twist the player’s perception of space, or do you want to write about a game that already has?

Back in the old days, video games were almost entirely side-scrollers or vertical-scrollers. The camera either didn’t move (Space Invaders) or it tracked to the right, or upwards. This had one massive benefit - you weren’t going to get flumoxed by an uncooperative camera, nor were you ever going to be surprised by finding yourself going in a different direction to the one you thought you were going.

But the quest for both realism and a love for the cinematography of the film industry led us neatly into a number of different ways of handling the camera. There was the first person ’shooter’ perspective, the top-down, RTS perspective, the rolling 3-D mid-range ‘fighter’ camera. As it became more complex, it became much easier to screw up. A first person camera, designed to increase realism and immerse you in the characters world, would instead cause vector-buildings to explode into bizarre polygons when you came too close. Just like in the real world.

Hands down, the top-down, or side-scroller is still the easiest, simplest and most useful of all the ways of creating space. First person has its uses, and shooters could never abandon that now. However, clever use of space and camera can enhance and develop certain themes within a game.

Claustrophobia is an easy one. A first person pov, a small light-source, rapid movement that you’re never quite quick enough to catch, and all the unseen horrors of the imagination can create an atmospheric back-drop for a game. Equally, a rolling panorama with wide-angle mid-range lenses can firmly drop characters into a beautiful and well-realised world - ideal for fantasy and sci-fi.

My suggestion then, would be to keep to the simplest camera/perspective possible, and only deviate from that if you have a very well realised and developed reason for doing so. In which case, make it flawless. The camera should be invisible, a subtle undercurrent to the atmosphere, and not an obtrusive and difficult mechanism that increases the games difficulty.

Once your website is up, and polished, your cover art is done, and your promotional materials finalized and ready for the public eye you have to ensure that the public actually notices. Many people spend a huge amount of time and effort on their publicity materials, and then just trust that people will find their way there. Not so.

I am not going to get too in-depth with this, as generating publicity is an entire field in itself. But for the bootstrap developer with no money this quick guide should get you pointed in the right direction.

1. Google and other SEO

SEO is a bit of science and a bit of magic and a bit of a con. But basically - think about what people might be searching for that your site would be a relevant result. Make sure that phrase/keywords are on your site, in several locations. If ‘fun free games’ is something that you provide, then make sure you specify that your site has lots of ‘fun free games’ somewhere in the text.

For more resources go to Google and type SEO guide or something similar. There will be more information than you can handle. Just keep it simple, and avoid anything that seems a bit ’scammy’. Remember that Google isn’t buying your game - people are.

2. Online Communities

Social media is a bit of a buzzword, and if you’re already into Twitter, Facebook, Stumble, Digg etc etc. then it will be of no hardship for you to start up a sideline account for your game/company. Focus on making it worthwhile for your followers. Don’t just link spam your latest game, but run competitions and (if appropriate) dive into the personal side a bit.

Go deep and narrow rather than wide and shallow. If you sign up to all 40k social media sites and post one thing, you will get nowhere. If you pick one community and focus all your effort on it, it will pay off.

Make friends with other developers, bloggers, and those who are really into games. What you want is for them to start talking about your game.

3. Hit up the Influential Bloggers

You already know what kind of game you have. Now you want to send out preview copies. One tip - don’t send a derivative but fun game to someone who is all about the difficult and cutting-edge. Or vice-versa. Find blogs that talk to the people who would be interested in your game. Send them a free copy. Worse that could happen is they ignore it. Best that could happen is that they send several thousand people with a favorable impression your way.

Vary the kind of blogger you send it to. Big sites get a lot of stuff sent to them - you have less chance of being noticed and reviewed. Small blogs will almost definitely discuss the game, but will have a smaller readership (but get enough of them talking about it, and hopefully it will spread).

When you send a preview copy be polite and don’t make any demands. Make it easy for the blogger to find and download the game, and include any codes they need to play it.

4. Try some forums

Again, avoid spamming. Put a link in your forum signature, and then get involved with the posts that are already up. Post interesting, insightful responses, not just “I agree”. Remember - at all times you are a public face to your company. Come off as spammy, stupid, cruel or dull, and those attributes will pass to your game.

Focus on the above techniques, and just try and network network network as much as possible. You will be off to a good start, and hopefully the quality of your game will do the rest!

Anybody got any other tips for generating word-of-mouth?

But if you’re serious about video games earning you enough to pay your bills and let you quit your day job, then you need another skill set. You must be good at writing, drawing, modelling, coding, and animating - or good at finding people who can do those things - but you must also be good at selling.

The internet is either the best thing, or the worst thing, to happen to the industry. If you want to make games the traditional way - big boxes of promo material, shelf space in Game, DRM protected disks going for $40+ a pop… then you’re reading the wrong article.

Can you use the internet to help sell your game? Absolutely. The best part is that there is a very low barrier to entry. Anyone can buy a domain name and some cheap webhosting, and you are ready to go.

First of all, assess your game. Is it a cheap ‘n’ cheerful flash game with an addictive hook? Then you’ve got a good chance of going viral, and ad revenue may well work nicely for you. Is it a more traditional downloadable game with slick graphics? Then you are going to want people to pay for it.

You might think this is as easy as getting x-million people to look at your site. Not true. If your website (or facebook page, or twitter stream, or whatever) is boring, difficult to navigate, or gives off completely the wrong ‘feel’ then you won’t sell anything. So what do you do?

1. Make it easy. Really really easy.

Explain what the game is. Provide a preview or trailer. Put the ‘buy’ link in big letters. If it only works on Windows 7 then SAY THAT. Nothing more annoying than downloading a game that you can’t then play.

Of course, sometimes you want to go for a sense of suspense or mystery. That’s fine - as long as people can still find their way around the site. Especially to the download page, the help page, and the contact page.

2. Remove barriers

What’s a barrier? Simply put - the journey from random visitor to customer should be as painless as possible. That means no long surveys. It means accepting credit and debit cards. It means as few clicks as possible, as every click gives someone making an impulse purchase to decide not to be so impulsive.

3. Provide a Freebie

Nobody likes spending money on something they aren’t sure about. Providing a demo will (hopefully) get them interested enough to see more. Providing a demo means they make a time investment before a financial investment. If you make it easy to buy the game from inside the demo, you will sell more copies than otherwise.

Gamers are often completionist. Let them start, and they will want to finish.

4. Make it Exciting

Okay, you’ve spent the last six months working night and day on this thing. But nobody apart from you - and possibly your Mum - cares. You need the visitors to feel like they would enjoy the game. You need to make it exciting. Use good artwork, preview clips of the most exciting/funny/scary parts, and entertaining language to sell the game.

Once the website is up, test it. Make sure you can actually buy and download the game successfully. Get friends on other browsers and computers to test it. Ask friends if they would - honestly - want to buy the game based on the site.

Once you’re convinced that the site works, you can start the next step. Getting people to actually visit the site.

So when you create a truly international forum, you can expect misunderstanding and conflict to spring up. Unfortuantely, the only way to progress to a deeper understanding of other people is to interact with them. Somehow, we have to create a place that allows us to see past the immediate ‘wow, look at how different they are’, and observe that everybody thinks, breathes, feels, loves and despairs.

Enter online games.

Firstly, online games give you an avatar. You can be anyone you want - and lots of people want to be exotic. Different. Skin colour can be white, black, gold, pink, blue, or a rainbow motley. You can be tall, short, a dragon, a patchwork bear, or a giraffe. Your back story can be fantastical, mundane, or non-existent. You can explore everything that is taboo in a safe (or safer) environment.

And you can do all that with people from a completely alien background to you.

The problems? Well, language for one. The English speaking world will remain forever shut-off from those who do not speak English, and the Chinese reading world will remain a mystery always to those who don’t read Chinese. Even where a second language is spoken, subtleties of meaning may well be lost.

The second problem? Server borders! The fact that when I play World of Warcraft I cannot play with both my friends from the USA and my friends from the UK at the same time is truly frustrating, and one of the reasons I eventually quit. Luckily, this is not so much an issue with console games, but nonetheless, geographical borders need to be rescinded in online communities.

My solution to the first problem? Well, the radical one would be to get every online game Esperanto only, but I can’t see that happening. The other is to improve automatic translators - get them to a level where people can type in one language and everyone can read it in their own (is it so far away?)

Anyway, these two problems aside, video games are an excellent place to create a truly global culture. Events in MMO’s become historical, and in-game celebrations and holidays are familiar enough to be welcoming and different enough to work for everyone. Combating an imaginary evil is a great way to draw disparate groups together, and I would far rather we worked together to overcome the Undead, than we work together to overcome [insert current real country of 'Evil' here].

Of course, peace would not be around the corner. But, much like football tournaments and the Olympic games, competition would be channelled into something other than missiles. Which country has a first class raiding group, for example, or into long-running PVP tournaments.

Just a fantasy? Or will this - combined with lots of other factors - really make a difference in how we perceive each other?

Where one company leads, others are sure to follow (and sometimes overtake). The wiimote began the trend, and the end point will be … well, quite possibly all you’ll have to do is think what you want to happen - and it will.

In the meantime, motion-sensors are going to be the next big thing. In turn, game designers are going to be walking a strange line - on the one hand, the sense of immersion and virtual reality can be improved by having people ‘act out’ the role they are playing. On the other hand, the gap between what video game characters are capable of and what real people are capable of may have to be questioned. Sure, I can cope with running around pretending to shoot things - but I’m not sure I can execute drop kicks and saumersaults. It doesn’t take much except co-ordinated thumb movements to work the average game at the moment, but in the future how are the less physically able going to be able to cope with the range of movements that may well be required?

On the other hand, video games will quickly leave behind their couch potato status, and become a bonafide fitness and education tool. When a system can see exactly what I am doing wrong with my downward facing dog pose, or exactly why my golf balls always fly 50 miles straight up in the air, they can teach me how to fix those problems - all without expensive lessons that create a barrier for many people.

One thing is for sure - like DDR mats and the wii mote before it. Project Natal is going to bring yet another wave of non-gamers into the gaming domain. This can only be a good thing.

Somewhere, the line between video games and electronic tools became blurred. Now the DS has as many or more ‘lifestyle’ titles as it does hardcore games, and the difference between them is not always easy to spot. Devices such as the iPhone have brought games into a world more normally dominated by useful tools, and portable gaming consoles have brought useful tools to the world of gaming.

We expect all of our devices to do much the same things. Voice-chat, internet browsing, basic applications, some kind of ability to store files. Of course, each device has its strong points and weak points, but generally speaking you can get decent functionality from them all. The result is that most of our lives go into these devices - or into the cloud that the devices access. The result? A kind of smushing together of all these things - they utilise the same interface, the same input methods, the same kind of instructions and reward mechanisms. So what’s the difference? Well, presumably you are playing the games for fun, and the other stuff is merely useful - a way to achieve a goal like becoming fit, cooking a great meal, managing your time productively. Yet, at the same time, many games are a grind that only becomes fun at the moment when you finally accomplish the big goal (defeating the super-boss, getting the exalted rep, acquiring that rare item, getting the high score). Meanwhile, the tools often add a layer of ‘game-like’ fun, by measuring your progress, providing detailed instructions on how to progress, and rewarding you with cut-scenes, points, or unlocking harder ‘levels’.

You could argue that story-telling is the difference, with games containing escapism and role-play. You might be right - but many games contain little to no story, and are just basic repetitive puzzles. Meanwhile, tools can place themselves within a story, treating you like a master-chef (role-play) or placing you in an alternate world whilst doing what you need to do.

What do you think the difference between the two is?

Well, I’ve been sold on the Lego games now - Lego Batman is fun, and you can pick it up instantly. It’s a game of choice to bring out when friends come over, no matter how new to gaming they are. It’s also polished, with the details on the various characters giving them a greater acting ability than many of the actors who have played them over the years.

One thing that struck me was how non-linear the storyline was - you can more or less mix the missions up into any order and switch between the good guys and bad guys, and still make sense of the overarching plot. Not bad for a game with no dialogue!

There’s nothing that innovative about the way the levels themselves play out - a mix of platforming-action and puzzle solving - but it’s done well, and nothing jars or annoys you. In short, I really like this game.

Lego Batman is a prime example of a comfortable, middle-of-the-road game that accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do. It’s unique style and lack of dialogue forced it to up the ante as far as animating the characters went, and that paid off. Although not particularly challenging, it’s definitely entertaining.

Like most entertainment, video games are defined by a duality of purpose. On the one hand, they are a hobby, an amusement, escapism, for most people a fairly casual de-stressing activity after a stressful day. On the other hand, they represent interactive imagination - a story telling medium capable of causing us to transcend our limited experience, designed to share emotions, ideas, a culture.

They are, in short, both a reflection of reality, and an escape from it. These apparent contradictions make for some interesting results. We play games that make us angry and frustrated, because of the resulting high when we finally conquer a level or a stumbling block. We play games that explore violence and conflict, yet are able to maintain a distance from the carnage that allows us to focus on strategy and score. We play games that present us with moral dilemmas, and out of a sense of completion, we play both pathways. We are inside the game, a part of it, creating consequences. We are outside the game, viewing and considering it.

Being evil is fun. This is why griefers and loot ninjas exist. It’s why games like Overlord are so popular, and why so many people go on murderous rampages in Grand Theft Auto. The attraction of evil - of being able to take what you want, when you want, without social consequences - is immense. Video games confront that head on. Evil is fun. Period.

Sadness, regret and guilt are not fun. When people generate virtual communities, they also generate social consequence. Raid groups, RPG groups, PVP groups, clans, guilds and the friends who regularly play Rock Band together. Suddenly you’ve got a political environment, with real people whose egos can be bruised, whose esteem can be shattered, who can dominate or submit.

Equally, story telling games can create characters that we identify with, and whom we become emotionally invested in. We may discover ourselves simply unable to kill the crying, helpless child. We may be appalled by the sudden murder of our favourite NPC. We may find ourselves drawing uncomfortable parallels with our own lives, and our own culture.

A good video game can exploit this tension. Logically, the best move in a video game is the one that results in the biggest rewards - the most experience points, the largest amount of gold, the best upgraded weapons. Providing a social consequence to those moves creates a conflict in the player, far more so than simply rewarding ‘good’ behaviour with the points and gold. Does crime pay? You can become the king-pin, wildly rich, and yet unable to ever have an honest, fulfilled relationship. Is that ‘winning’?

Then, one fine day, my parents upgraded. I had a PC. And the first game I played on that PC was Final Fantasy 7. A new love of gaming was born on that day.

The Final Fantasy series is the poster child for Japanese RPGs. Depending on how old you are, and which game you played first, you’ll have a different fave and a different relationship with each game. What Final Fantasy managed to achieve, however, was to continuously hook new generations with each game. Ask the question “Which Final Fantasy is the best?” and you will get someone arguing for every single one - with the possible exception of X-2 (and I’m sure there is someone, somewhere).

The enduring appeal of the series is shown also in the number of re-makes. Older Final Fantasies are made-over for the PSP and the DS, and characters from each game make cameo appearances in other games. Nobody liked the idea of Kingdom Hearts - but everyone liked the game.

Now, twenty years after the birth of the Final Fantasy, comes the next installment - Dissidia. Featuring characters from each installment, and using the same basic good-v-evil premise it has always run with, Dissidia immediately shot up the best-selling lists in Japan, and will no doubt do the same once released in North America and Europe.

The real question is - how did Final Fantasy become so enduring? How did each installment manage to reinforce the brand as opposed to reduce it to ‘just another sequel’?

Mythology

Rather than create a unified world, and an ongoing storyline, the Final Fantasy series revolves around a mythology. Each world is different, and has room to be unique and explore different ideas, yet each world is linked through chocobo, mogs, a cast of supernatural beings, and forms of magic. By not trapping themselves into a purist fantasy world, or a specific steampunk world, by allowing themselves to develop different cities, lands, races, social systems, characters and visual styles Squaresoft were able to evolve and develop the series. The Final Fantasy brand covers everything from Tactics to Spirits Within to Kingdom Hearts to FF12.

In short, by understanding that mythology and themes last, and individual characters don’t, Squaresoft allowed the series to endure.

Story, Music & Art

Squaresoft understood that to make a brand appeal, it had to have more than just gameplay. By investing in some truly great artists, composers and writers, they were able to produce games that resonated with people. Final Fantasy games have an emotional impact, and the reason they have that impact is because of that combination of story, music and art. We are far more likely to remember and stay loyal to a media that involves us emotionally. Every detail counts - from your characters unique walk, to the bombastic music that rouses us to action.

Time Investment

I’m a big fan of the short game. I love quick but unique games, and games that express a single idea extremely well. When creating a series that will last however, time investment matters. Each game in the Final Fantasy series last for hundreds of hours. Once a person has committed that amount of time to a game, it becomes a habit. The more attention we pay to something, the more attention we are likely to pay to it. Final Fantasy becomes a fandom, a lifestyle. When not playing the games, fanfiction is written and fan art produced.

Now if you’ll excuse me - I’m going back to my copy of Final Fantasy 3.

Designers in many fields, not just games, often think in terms of negatives (subtracting things) rather than positives (adding things). Design is creating a form (a game in our case) that fits a context.

An excellent article on subtractive design posted at sirlin.net. I highly recommend it.