Blips: Connected Worlds

Source: The Last Survivors of Meridian 59
Author: Simon Parkin
Site: The New Yorker

I can't claim to have much experience with MMOs, but I am consistently fascinated by the stories told by players of happenings within virtual worlds. For his latest New Yorker piece, Simon Parkin checks in with Meridian 59, a game considered to be the first ever MMO, and talks to some players who have been active in the game for 15 years. As usual with these types of communal environments, it's the people moreso than the battle systems or loot that keeps players coming back, but what I was most intrigued by in Parkin's report was that the style of gameplay in Meridian 59 is given significant credit for maintaining interest in the game.

Particularly, the brutal nature of Meridian 59's world where death means that you can have items taken from you, instead of just a semi-inconvenient respawn point. Attacks can happen anywhere, not just in specifically sanctioned battle arenas or modes. As a result, survival depends on players banding together and looking out for one another. If anything, this sounds quite a bit like recent Early Access sensations DayZ and Rust, where you're dropped into a lawless open world and your survival is contingent on the trustworthiness of the friends you make. It's easy to look back at a game like Meridian 59 and balk at the way traditional MMOs have gone post-WoW, but new games like Rust and DayZ are actually taking some of those old MMO ideas in interesting new directions. Plus, there's an attempt right now to bring Meridian 59 to Steam in the near future, so maybe a triumphant resurgence is in order.

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 This instinct is outdated since the length of a game has little bearing on the quality of that experience.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: Shipping Out

Source: Who Built That Video Game?
Author: Michael Thomsen
Site: The New Yorker

If you've sat around for the credits on any video game with a big budget or from a large studio, you've probably noticed how long they seem to go –much longer than they used to. While maybe some have slowed the scroll, more often it's because a greater number of people is required to make these kinds of games than it used to take. As Michael Thomsen's recent New Yorker piece speaks to, this has lead the majority of video game companies to outsource at least one aspect of their development process. This means that some element of most games (probably art assets) was produced outside of the country where the game company is based because it's cheaper to do so. Why keep 20 artists on staff in California when you can pay for 20 artists in Malaysia for a fraction of the price?

Thomsen also points out that these low paying outsourced jobs can be economic opportunities for the laborers that acquire them, but as far as general corporate practice goes for the commissioning corporations, it's a race to the bottom. The video game industry has a difficult enough time providing decent labor conditions for their in-house staff, let alone the responsibility for conditions of workplaces on other continents. I certainly don't expect an industry with a reputation for "crunch" labor and a high rate of worker burn out to approach a dicey practice like outsourcing with careful oversight. I'd love to see the game industry get its own house in order first, but I fear that outsourcing might actually be seen as a solution to those domestic issues instead of a simple matter of expansion.

Blips: Wargames

Source: The Video Game Invasion of Iraq
Author: Simon Parkin
Site: The New Yorker

Simon Parkin's latest article for The New Yorker is a real eye-opener: an account of one Iraqi boy who's a top tier Battlefield player. It's the sort of story that seems like it would be at odds with itself, but perhaps speaks to how little I actually know about life in Iraq. As one would expect, there's not much of a gaming scene in Iraq; there aren't many places to acquire games, much less buy them legally. It sounds like more parents are warming up to games though because it keeps their kids indoors where it's safer. Yousif Mohammed, the teen from the article, speaks of how a game like Battlefield, which has settings in Iraq, is actually more popular because of it.

I'd have assumed Iraqis would despise the American jingoistic fantasies of Battlefield and Call of Duty, but it's interesting to see how someone like Yousif approaches the game: mostly as a well-made mechanical system, but also as a cathartic opportunity to kill virtual terrorists. After all, the point of focusing on Yousif is not that he's an Iraqi who plays video games, it's that he's an Iraqi who's in the top 2% of Battlefield players, and his story is shows great resilience amongst incredible darkness.

On a side note, why is it that every game-focused article Parkin writes for The New Yorker is met with suspicious or indignant comments about the very notion of writing about games? Someone on this post actually accuses Parkin of publishing near the PS4's launch as a promotional stunt, as if Sony was paying him for an article that never even uses the word "Playstation." I mean, at least it's a different kind of trolling than we're used to with games, but it's ridiculous all the same, and disappointing considering it's The New Yorker and what one assumes is an educated and open-minded readership.

Blips: Jenova Chen's Journey

Source: A Journey to make Video Games into Art
Author: Laura Parker
Site; The New Yorker

Looking for more video game talk in mainstream publications? Check out The New Yorker where Laura Parker has written a delightful profile on Jenova Chen and his studio thatgamecompany's fight to complete the critically-acclaimed Journey. It's a story of struggle and going all-in on a risky idea, a company driven to bankruptcy in pursuit of an artistic vision. I'd heard about some of thatgamecompany's troubles during Journey's development, but the triumphs of the game, and the inspirational talks of now-former developers always outshone the behind-the-scenes hardships. It all kind of makes sense now though that developers who became much more well-known names because of Journey, Kellee Santiago, Chris Bell, Robin Hunicke, all left thatgamecompany once their work was finished. A company with no money can't sustain livelihoods.

I'm also delighted to hear that Jenova Chen and company have rallied new financial support and are hard at work on their next title. As someone who saw Journey as the refinement of ideas represented in thatgamecompany's two prior games, flOw and Flower, I'm eager to see which direction they go next. The question of how to improve from Journey leaves me stumped.

It's a pity the commenters on Parker's article are so hung up on continuing to debate whether games are or can be art. The article itself isn't out to stake any sort of broad claim, merely to contextualize the aspirations of Jenova Chen and his team. That's the story of Journey's development, and it's a pretty interesting one at that. Don't let the mere mention of words like "art" and "Ebert" distract you from considering the human story at the heart of the article.

Blips: On 'n On

Source: Don't Stop: The Game that Conquered Smartphones
Author: Simon Parkin
Site: The New Yorker

If you play games on a smartphone, odds are overwhelmingly in favor of you having played an "endless runner." Endless runners are one of the most successful genre's of games to hit iOS and Android devices, in part because of their simple control schemes that seem perfectly suited for touchscreen devices. Though endless runners existed before smartphones, they have experienced a resurgent rebirth thanks to the new platforms.

Simon Parkin's features for The New Yorker looks at Canabalt, the poster child for touchscreen-controlled endless runners. The game was the result of a time-constrained game jam competition, which pushes minimalist visual design in favor of achieving games that actually function proficiently. Canabalt's monochrome aesthetic was striking though, and the original game jam design more-or-less made the cut in the final version. In the game you tap the screen to make an always-running character jump from rooftop to rooftop with increasing speed and decreasing margins for error.

Where will the endless runner go from here? It's tough to say but, as Parkin points out, games like Bit.Trip Runner, Temple Run, and Jetpack Joyride have all iterated on the basic concept in unique and interesting ways. Hopefully the positive design trend will continue.