Blips: Drop the Vase

Source: This Vase Is A Mirror
Author: Tim Schneider
Site: Kill Screen

If you've ever been bewildered by the art market's ever-inflating auction value headlines, consider Tim Schneider's debut piece for Kill Screen an excellent introduction to what the hell is happening there, helpfully framed in the context of video games no less. I won't go into the whole backstory since Schneider does so in the article but there was an incident earlier this year where an artist (un?)ceremoniously broke an Ai Weiwei painted Han dynasty pot while it was on display in a gallery. Everyone in the press seemed eager to note the proposed value of the pot in their assessment of the situation –supposedly about $1 million. As a response, another artist, Grayson Earle, created Ai Weiwei Whoops!, a game which allows players to similarly drop facsimiles of said pots while racking up an obscenely escalating damage assessment in dollars. That's all there is to the game, and Schneider argues that's, in a sense, all there is to the current art market.

The experience of playing Ai Weiwei Whoops! is worth noting here, which Schneider goes into elaborate detail to explain. It's a game that you'll probably play for 30 seconds, maybe a minute tops; not something that is particularly thought provoking out of context. But in conversation with the smashing incident and the larger art market, the "throwaway" nature of the play experience means something all on its own. Ai Weiwei Whoops! isn't a particularly fun game; the pot crashing doesn't even grant a destructive satisfaction, just the matter-of-fact uptick of the perceived dollar amount lost to the void.

Blips: Time To Pay

Source: Gaming;s Long Con
Author: Simon Parkin
Site: The New Yorker

In a new column for The New Yorker, Simon Parkin wonders whether we put too much stock into the length of games as a gauge of quality. For the most part, I'm in agreement with Parkin here; there remains an expectation that games should be a certain length, and disappointment when they don't extend to such a point. This instinct is outdated since the length of a game has little bearing on the quality of that experience. Now, I think the chances are greater that a game will stick with me if it goes on for at least an hour or so, but that's not necessarily the case and becomes a fuzzy distinction when considering games with short, repeatable loops of gameplay like Tetris. And Parkin is also correct that the time-as-value mentality made more sense when games were exclusively targeted at younger age groups who have infinitely more free time, who hope single games will sustain them for months. One of my favorite resources when selecting a new game to play is How Long To Beat, which let's me know on average how long a game takes to complete, not so I can pre-judge its value, but so I can predict how playing it will fit into my schedule.

What Parkin mentions only briefly is how monetary value plays into this, which I think completes the circle of logic here. Just as the amount of time someone can dedicate to playing games varies from person to person, so is the dispensability of $60. It's not worth getting upset about MGS Ground Zeroes being just a couple hours long, but if that experience is not conducive to replayability and costs $40, it begins to sound like a questionable value. There are fully-fledged, amazing games like Journey and Proteus that take fewer than 2 hours to complete, but they usually only cost $15 to $20. And it's a tough call to make because Ground Zeroes may very well feel like it's worth $40 after playing it, but it's pricing model flies in the face of expectations, asking players for a heightened amount of trust going in. So, as much as I'd like to dismiss the value of game length entirely, I still care about game duration in terms of entry fee. This judgement is made in conjunction with many others, but it still holds some degree of merit, and can be especially helpful when considering the worth free-to-play transactions. They say "time is money," and while I'd argue that there's more to it than that, the phrase isn't without at least a modicum of truth.

Blips: Feature Complete

Source: Early Access exposes the lie that the best games should, or even can, be finished
Author: Rowan Kaiser
Site: Polygon

Another week, another opinion piece with some interesting gray areas to discuss. Over at Polygon, Rowan Kaiser picks up the discussion of Steam's Early Access games and what it means for a game to be "finished." Many players and critics have voiced complaints about Early Access games for a variety of reasons ranging from their pricing structure, to the clarity of their current status (i.e. what's broken), to their prominence and quantity in the Steam marketplace. Kaiser posits that we've been playing "unfinished" games for years, and in fact that unfinished-ness is by design. He states that in addition to what we understand as unfinished games that have not seen a complete development cycle and final retail release, there are also games that the player can't complete.

Unfinishable games include sports games, endless runners or puzzlers (Tetris), MMOs, and pretty much anything resembling a multiplayer mode. We can think of every version of Street Fighter as the same game, just with various updates, each sold separately of course. Kasier's essay draws a parallel between Early Access games and unfinishable games in that they both see tweaks and additions to gameplay months and years after "official release."

There are two points I'd like to voice in response. First, while it's great that there are seemingly "mandatory" status notices on the store pages for Early Access games, they're not all super helpful, including Rust, which is cited in the article. The description for Rust currently reads: "We are in very early development. Some things work, some things don't. We haven't totally decided where the game is headed - so things will change. Things will change a lot. We might even make changes that you think are wrong. But we have a plan. It's in our interest to make the game awesome - so please trust us." While this is enough information to tell me that now is not the time to spend money on Rust, I also don't think this is evocative of the transparent development process that consumers are supposedly buying "access" to, unless Steam starts allowing players to return games for refunds.

Point 2: Players can also "be finished" with games, unfinishable or no. Being finished with a game can occur at anytime for a player and even after the credits roll in "finishable" games, many players still aren't done playing them, be it a New Game+, some other bonus mode, or investigating speed run possibilities. And the rub with Early Access games is that players can "be finished" with them before they're even feature-complete or at their least broken. I prefer to think of game sequels as continuations of one game instead of disparate entities, which applies to unfinishable games like the ones Kaiser cites, but "finishable" games as well. This is why sequels to games like Gears of War are met with sentiments like, "well, it's more Gears" because that's exactly what it is. That the nature of Early Access games would be inherently tied to a conventionally unfinishable status just seems like a leap of logic to me.

Blips: Gaming the System

Source: The strange, shady world of $1,000 iOS apps
Author: Mike Wehner
Site: Tuaw

It's rough out there in the App Store world, to the extent that some game developers are attempting to pull one over on the system through some price fluctuation trickery. In a report by Mike Wehner for The Unofficial Apple Weblog, it is revealed why a simple game like The Fleas, made by Vhlamlab, would retail for $999.99. Turns out it's part of a scheme to get some eyeballs on the game by having it show up on the App Store's "Top Grossing" list. So how do they earn enough money in sales to rank on such a list? Well, that's the trick of it.

There is some back door money handling going on that results in, say, $10,000 being loaned for purchasing the game across 10 accounts. Once Apple takes their 30%, the developers have spent $3,000 to get their game on a very visible list for a few hours. At this point, the price is dropped back down to $1 to try and capitalize on legitimate sales and attempt to recoup that $3,000. It seems like an incredibly risky and shady thing to do for such a potentially small payoff, but it does happen. In fact, as Wehner notes, The Fleas is still selling for $1,000. Apparently, some people have actually bought it at that price. Madness, I say.

Blips: Support Indies, Buy Direct

Source: Want to support your favorite developers? Ditch Steam and buy direct
Author: Ben Kuchera
Site: Penny Arcade Report

I was quite pleased to find an article on a well-trafficked site like Penny Arcade Report about buying games directly from developers so that those teams earn more profit from game sales. And it's true, as Ben Kuchera points out, that in sales through Stream, Valve takes a certain percentage of each sales, leaving less for the actual game makers. While Steam is a pretty impressive and worthwhile service, if I already know about a game from other media and decide I want to buy it, I will always search for a direct purchase option before resorting to a middleman service.

This is part of what makes Humble Bundles so great. When you purchase a suite of games through Humble Bundle, you can choose to divide up where your money goes between developers, charity and Humble Bundle services, meaning you can ostensibly give it all to development teams if you would like. As someone who doesn't care for most of the meta-game services that platforms like Steam offer (automatic updates are nice though), I don't have any reason not to buy as directly as possible. In fact, I get a little bummed when I have to buy through Steam, as is the case with Antichamber and Kairo.

I'm not vouching for the abandonment of Steam and similar services across the board, but on a case by case basis where the option is available, it's worth the extra effort (if it actually ends up being extra) to find a developer site and purchase directly. This is a plea to the informed consumer to take action in greater support of some of the most creative voices making games today.