Blips: Living Under a Rock

Source: The Rust Diaries: Letting go of structure in video games
Author: Kris Graft
Site: Gamasutra (blog)

This new post by Kris Graft over on Gamasutra has made me significantly more interested in Rust. That said, I doubt I'll get into the game since it seems a bit daunting to go in alone, but my mind has been shifted as it pertains to Rust's status as an Early Access title. Graft reflects, diary-style, on his time with the game and how individual happenings could be viewed as "missing" features in most "complete" games. Where Rust ultimately ends up, if it's even going to be something that's considered "finished," is a mystery, but the point of it, at least for now, seems to be the experience of playing within such an unsure space.

As the saying goes, "it's the journey, not the destination," which is a phrase that seems quite appropriate for Rust. But it's not just the Early Access status of the game that makes the phrase so fitting, but the freeflowing, open ended nature of Rust's world and the constant string of "win some, lose some" confrontations. The game doesn't track your moral decisions or help you find friends; that's entirely up to you and how you choose to play. Also, you could be killed at any moment and lose everything on your person. Material wealth in Rust can make you feel powerful, but also a target, Graft notes. It's Graft's conclusion that really hits home though, which asks "what's it all for?" given how easy it is to lose "progress." Graft's answer is that games never really give you anything tangible, only the hopefully engaging experience of playing them. Perhaps the games that shower players with virtual trinkets and compliments are the game that we should really be scrutinizing, since those games are more about accomplishment than play.

Blips: What's the Story?

Source: Games by humans
Author: Brendan Keogh
Site: The Conversation

Source: Irrational Games, journalism, and airing dirty laundry
Author: Leigh Alexander
Site: Gamasutra

I'm presenting a double-shot of reading material upfront today, so I'll try to keep this brief. Unless you've been living in a cave, you've probably heard about the closure of Boston-based studio Irrational Games, developer of BioShock, BioShock Infinite, and a host of other games across the past 17 years. The announcement was framed by a letter by creative lead, Ken Levine, who's one of the few game developers to garner a Hollywood director auterism within mega-budget game development. In the announcement, Levine states that he'll be staying with parent company 2K Games along with a dozen hand-picked Irrational staff to form a new venture within the company. The rest of Irrational's now-former staff, are seemingly on the job hunt. This isn't the way these types of things usually go, which has prompted rampant speculation as to what's really at the heart of a studio closure in the wake of a critically acclaimed, high-selling game.

At the heart of the responses from Brendan Keogh and Leigh Alexander are considerations for the largely unseen labor forces that make AAA games possible. While it's not the job of the press to help find these folks new work (though showing a bit of goodwill seems only courteous), it does seem worth reporting on these issues as they effect industry labor trends. I'm not seeing a lot of reflection on what 2K's part in Irrational's closure was, but they're the ones with the power in this situation, more so than Levine. This kind of reporting is extremely difficult because the "grunts" aren't allowed to speak with the press in most instances, as any negative sentiment about the company has the possibility of costing those individuals their jobs, or in the case of a studio closure, they've likely signed away their grievances into silence. It often feels like the only way we ever hear about this stuff is from journalists who used to be in the industry themselves, and thus can draw from personal experience and the trust of contacts they were able to make during their industry tenure.

So, while I'm not interested in the story that foretells the downfall of Irrational Games a year out from when it actually happens from an anonymous inside source, there is value in labor practice transparency. For me, it's a question of timing and audience. "What good would it do?" Leigh Alexander asks. I'm less concerned with impartiality as I am with fairness. I'm not the sort of person who'd "do anything for a story," because the story itself is only half of the equation. What you do with a story is just as important, and sometimes that means publishing a very public expose, and sometimes that means withholding comment. Though, I'm of the mind that we need a lot more of the former at present.

Blips: A Life More Ordinary

Source: Beauty in the ordinary
Author: Kris Graft
Site: Gamasutra (blog)

I'm loving this post from Kris Graft about the virtues of games that focus on "the ordinary." Graft sets this up by contrasting the views of his Midwestern existence with those of his city-dwelling friends, and vice versa. It's all a matter of perspective of course, and so what one views as an ordinary day means significantly different things depending on setting. Having grown up in the Midwest and now having spent the past 5 years living in east coast cities, these points of contrast are starkly illustrated in my mind. If I change cities again, what will I miss from my previous sense of ordinary, and what what will I be happy to be rid of?

I was likewise drawn to meta-ordinary games like The Stanley Parable last year for their powerful examination of both ordinariness in human existence and ordinariness in gameplay. The literal approach in a game like The Stanley Parable isn't the only way to go about it though, and in fact it's likely a trend that will fizzle out before long (how many obscure simulators can the market realistically support?). Any game world can establish a sense of the ordinary, given the time and space to do so. What do the characters do when they're not embroiled in the craziest thing that's ever happened to them. And no, those quiet comedown moments of fireside chatting in the wake of a tragedy don't count. I want to see when those characters return home and go back to work. What does the extraordinary look like once it reverts back to the ordinary.

Blips: Derivative Works

Source: The Players-Authors Project
Author: Greg Lastowka
Site: Gamasutra (blog)

I realize I just railed against the use of "content" to describe video games, but the term can serve as valuable industry shorthand at times, even if I have to cringe a little when I say it. I'll keep the mentions to a minimum. I put in this disclaimer because I wanted to share Greg Lastowka's blog post on research he's done on what players are actually doing with "user-generated content" (UGC). This blanket term is used to cover everything from character customization to modding tools with wide spectrum of degrees in between. We've heard that allowing players more creative control in games is the way of the future, Minecraft being the recent blockbuster success story. But what about when players use those customization tools simply to make references to other games, skirting a fuzzy line between fair use and copyright infringement?

Well, this is where Lastowka's research comes in. He has a link to the full 160 page report in his blog, but I'll just be focusing on the highlights he summed up so nicely. First, consider the snap judgement that if you give someone a level editor, they'll just make World 1-1 from Super Mario Bros and be done with it. While that's not entirely untrue, that level and others like it don't represent the vast majority of user-made levels in a game like LitteBigPlanet. However, in many cases the most popular custom levels and characters tend to be referential in nature. Still, the referential slant of popular UGC would still fall under the umbrella or original, creative material, not piracy. Your fake World 1-1 isn't meant to be a stand-in for actual Super Mario Bros, but a similar experience translated through a different platform. Also interesting is how little the oft-lauded act of "remixing" actually occurs. This means that most use of co-opted intellectual property in UGC would have a hard time justifying itself as "fair use" under close scrutiny.

There's a lot more to the report, which I'd encourage checking out. What with all the recent YouTube issues when it comes to footage of video games, it's interesting to see research on how players use the tools that developers have provided in-game. OK, I only said "content" a few times; I can live with that.

Blips: Share this article with your friends?

Source: With the luster of social games gone, what now?
Author: Leigh Alexander
Site: Gamasutra

I've never played a Facebook game, and I'm kind of proud of that considering the general reputation of the platform. Granted, I stopped using Facebook before there were even games to play, some 6-7 years ago, so it was as much an aversion to Facebook in general as it was the trashy games being developed for it. Leigh Alexander has written up a great recap of the social games industries rise and, well, not necessarily a fall, but a sort of leveling. The perspective on the Facebook games platform and the games made for it is pretty damning, all told. A gold rush mentality set in place standards for doing business that then hamstrung progressive design ideas in favor of innovative revenue streams. A stereotyped stay-at-home mom target demographic that pushed developers to make games that they didn't enjoy making. A constantly shifting development platform that is near impossible for a small studio to keep up with resulting in unoptimized or broken games. The result of all this is a horribly tarnished reputation for "social games," a term that, taken literally, has a whole lot of appeal.

Alexander's article is titled with a question, "what now?" which isn't so much answered as it is exemplified in the text that follows. The designers that were interviewed range from apathetic, to disappointed, to downright hateful toward the Facebook platform and flailing social games giant Zynga. It's not that people don't seem to have interesting ideas for using a social network like Facebook as the grounds for game systems, but the waters also seem so toxic these days, that it's difficult to convince small upstarts to do so. I can't even tell Facebook games apart from one another, which seems to be equal parts copycat design and purposeful market confusion (one of the worst traits to be passed on to the mobile sector). So, we return to the question, "what now?" Well, the resounding answer from developers in the article seems to be "just leave it to rot."

Blips: Grunge Games

Source: Grunge, Grrrls and Video Games: Turning the dial for a more meaningful culture
Author: Leigh Alexander
Site: Gamasutra

"Gamer culture" is nothing if not off-putting, and I like video games, so I have to imagine there's not much incentive for those disinterested in the medium to want to join in. In a recent piece by Leigh Alexander, she states that the culture that surrounds video games needs to change if it's going to be a culture worth remembering. The parallel she draws is the grunge music counter-culture of the early 90s which was a reaction to the glam and excess of the 80s and hair bands in particular. Alexander speaks of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Rage Against The Machine, but also of Riot Grrrl bands like Sleater-Kinney and Bikini Kill, and how the spirit of that movement is carried on in the feminist DIY game scene: perhaps the medium's first true counter-culture.

Though grunge music and personal games have their share of differences, not the least of which is the change in environment from mainstream monoculture to the fragmented subsets of specialized niches we have now, there's an "against the grain" tone in both. I firmly agree with Alexander that this counter-culture is the most interesting thing happening in the games space right now, and it's disheartening the degree to which young people would rather in-fight over corporate loyalty than embrace the rebellious element.

In my opinion, this comes down to what's cool, and what's not. Grunge music was cool, but in a way that youth latched onto and adults largely repelled. For a long time, games in of themselves fulfilled the same purpose. Adults didn't understand them, and though they weren't cool in the high school clique sense, they were cool within the circle of people that appreciated them. Now, even though the grunge fad has passed, games haven't changed all that much, except for how they look and a refinement of mechanics. In games, instead of each new generation growing up with their own unique counter-culture like grunge, punk, goth, metal, or dare I say dubstep, they each get their own iteration of Mario Kart. In music, these movements are driven by youth and ambition, which stagnated in games around the time of grunge. There is an alternative scene in games right now though, and it's one worth championing.

Blips: Early Access

Source: The strange, sad anxiety of Jason Rohrer's The Castle Doctrine
Author: Leigh Alexander
Site: Gamasutra

Well, Jason Rohrer's home invasion/security game The Castle Doctrine is certainly proving to be quite the conversation starter, and it's not even out yet. The game, which centers around the titular Castle Doctrine, which is an American legal principle wherein individuals are justified in using lethal force against perceived threats inside their home puts players in the role of a paternal figure who must both fortify his home to protect his family, and break into other players' homes to steal from them. The concept of "perceived threat" is a politically charged issue with a great deal of visibility right now due to the Trayvon Martin court battle and the state of Florida's "stand your ground" law. However, Rohrer seems less interested in making public comment on this hot-button issue and instead focusing on his own personal experience as the de facto "defender" of the household.

In an enlightening profile in Gamasutra, Leigh Alexander discusses Rohrer's motivations for making The Castle Doctrine, as well as his reactions to the controversy stirred by media around his unreleased game. I feel the unreleased nature of this title is a huge caveat in the criticisms that have been leveled against the game so far. By the sound of it, players are supposed to learn to care about their family of characters though repetitive play, which is a concept that only exists and succeeds or fails in theory until we can actually play it. Likewise, Rohrer feels that critics of his game are misreading what the game is saying, and I'm inclined to refute that statement on the principle that meaning is not bound to the singular track of authorial intent, but if these critics are going off of interviews and small gameplay samples, they may indeed be misreading the work, because they're judging based on literal or conceptual fragments.

By all accounts, The Castle Doctrine seems like it'll be a pretty disturbing experience, and I'm curious to find out how prescient or out of touch it ends up being, once I can actually play it for myself.

Blips: Free-to-Play and the New Harpoon

Source: Chasing the Whale: Examining the ethics of free-to-play games
Author: Mike Rose
Site: Gamasutra

In an expansive report for Gamasutra, Mike Rose researches the ethical implications of free-to-play financing models for games, and how they thrive off of whales: individuals who spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on these games. While the majority of F2P players never pay a penny for their time in those games, a very small percentage of players pick up the slack by spending what from the outside appears to be an unhealthy amount of money. Do these types of games exploit individuals most susceptible to these kind of addictions? How closely are F2P models tied to gambling? What are developers doing to acknowledge this issue?

Rose's piece doesn't have firm answers for all of these questions because it is an area that has received little research and not all F2P games use the same approach. The most unethical business models seem to be the ones derisively referred to as pay-to-win. These games are free upfront, but delevopers have carefully constructed walls that push players to pay for virtual items that will increase their performance and get them past the blockade. In competitive games, pay-to-win strategies are often seen as unfair in that players who spend more money will trump players who might exhibit more skill, but haven't made certain performance-enhancing purchases. Other F2P games like the super popular League of Legends and DOTA 2, strive for a level playing field where virtual goods are only purchased for aesthetics and have no direct impact on performance.

Still the question remains, how ethical is it to make the majority of your company's money through the addiction of a select few players, some of which play and spend to the detriment of their quality of life? No one seems to want the government to get involved, so hopefully the industry can refine their practices on their own. As pointed out in Rose's article, players are already shifting in droves to more balanced playfields that eschew pay-to-win models, but until developers put a cap on how much their willing to let players spend on virtual goods, or intervene when players exhibit signs of addiction, there's still a lot of work to do.