covert.creations

Looking back over my observations resultant from a consistent troll of gaming RSS feeds, e-zines, news and even irc chat. Things are happening so fast out there, its so much fun.

As this year is done, I thought it fun to share a sampling of reading of my last 12 months! Yes, yes, fun I know. But it serves as a decent record of my zealous absorptions. It is also a point of interest for me personally, as I look back over the last year with some shock. I not only read these, but traced through them as completely as possible. The list of meat books (as opposed to the online sources I’ve consumed), in no particular order…

1. Designing Virtual Worlds
Author : Dr. Richard Bartle

Truly a fantastic tome! As a game-player and hopeful designer I was impressed. Bartle, is an pioneer of online multiplayer dungeon games, and possesses a unique and academic interest in the issues of online gaming. His model of player archetypes is a useful tool across all genres, and I found the topics to be engaging and informative. And I found myself often leaping away from the text to formulate my own ideas about persistent worlds and gameplay. Good books will tend to do that.

2. Game Architecture and Design
Authors : Andrew Rollings,

Somewhat less fantastic than Bartle, this is a more technical approach to game development. I agree this is such a hard topic to write or educate others about, since every instance has its own challenges. But an entire chapter on Project Management didn’t seem to educate or inspire. The basics are covered, especially within the models of gameplay atoms, so the text serves its purpose.

3. 3D Math Primer

If you’re interested in 3D graphics and how they are conjured, this is a great book. If math scares you, then stay away. This book is entirely focussed on teaching you the mathematics behind 3D graphics and rendering. I learned a great, great deal from my study of this book and will heartily recommend it to anyone out there interested in this vast subject.

4. Learning UML
The UML is fast becoming an excellent tool for software designers to capture and communicate the intracies of complex systems. Although the book lives up to the fine O’Reilly tradition of documenting technical topics, I found the real-worldness of it to be somewhat lacking. I had a difficult time applying the concepts before finding my own CASE tool to make the job easier. Anyone know of UML plugins for OpenOffice or MS-Word??

5. Game Design
Authors : Andrew Rollings

Fantastic, fantastic, fantastic. I loved this book so much I cannot recommend it enough. My highlight marking runs the entire text, front to back.

6. OpenGL Programming Guide

This is a reference book, and is essential for any graphics programmers. Several chapters go into significant detail on the rendering pipeline, and the writing is clear and thoughtful. I enjoyed reading most of this book. Space on your shelf should definitely be set aside for this and its companion, The OpenGL Reference Guide.

7. Role-Playing Games

I really liked the pretty graphics in this book. I’m not joking. After so many technical tomes, it was refreshing to just pore over a handy survey of “whats out there” from a RPG developer’s point of view.

8. Good to Great
Author : Jim Collins

If you’re starting out a new business, this is the book to read above all others. Most companies aspire to this, but few actually achieve it. And it covers aspects that you can utilize in all aspects of your life and business. Its fun, and its the future. If you haven’t read this, I would highly urge you to do it.

Pulpy Fiction

1. “The Scar”
Author : China Mieville

This is the most depressing piece of fiction that I’ve ever read. But if you’ve read my rants about innovation in gaming, you’d know that I’d appreciate innovation in writing. This is it. Its fresh and a pleasure to read the book from the writing style alone. Its no surprise that this author is winning numerous awards. I will definitely be reading more of Mieville.

2. “Marked for Death”
Author : Matt Forbeck

The Forgotten Realms has been a cash cow for WOTC for a great long time. And for good reason, since its the height of hero-dom for the D&D genre. So now comes Eberron, a new fantasy universe for WOTC, and also the result of the worldwide “setting search” contest (of which I participated). I enjoyed the writing of this novel on a surface level, and the pulpy aspect is easy to digest. This is a chill-down book, when your brain is too tired from the day, and a fun read.

Thank-you Amazon!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

My wishlist this year included, Raph Koster’s “Theory of Fun“, the Half-Life2 development tribute, “Raising the Bar” and a Planetside giftcard. Have fun everyone, and enjoy your time with friends and family!

Wow, this was a hot topic.Literally, ten thousand people clicked through the source articles in various places as it spread across the ‘net, and almost a thousand individuals read my journal entry from yesterday. Its not surprising, considering what a great piece of work that 3D image is.

Here is a nice backgrounder that Max Kor (the artist) prepared. Its a really interesting read, even if you just look at the pretty pictures.

The big argument? Its this : how far away are we from seeing this in a game?

Although my knowledge of 3D graphics is somewhat limited to intermediate OpenGL coding, I have a very strong belief that this will not only be possible, but it will be done within five years! Other people, disagree strongly. 20 years, they say!

I ttotally understand the industry professionals who contend that such things are impossibly difficult on a games budget and timeline. I mean, they know what they’re talking about, right?

Yet, I still cannot help but think where we were 12 years ago, in the literal ‘genesis’ of computer graphics. You think this stuff is expensive now? I don’t recall the specifics, but I remember Lucasfilm saying that it took days or weeks to render that famous “Genesis flyby” scene in Star Trek II. Do you remember that?

ftp://ftp.luth.se/pub/misc/anim/tv/genesisp.mpg

It was awesome… at the time.

I can only think of those early-eighties CG experts neighing in disbelief at Doom3 today. “Because of X Y & Z! It will never work! Neverrrrr!” The Incredibles? “Not in my lifetime!”. And this proves how conventional thinking works. To think I had arguments in 1994 with a telecomms engineer about whether ADSL was possible. The engineers know their biz, they’ve done their homework, and life is good. Right?

Wrong.

Costs will drop. Hardware capabilities will increase. Software will get smarter. Libraries will expand. Refinement will increase. And everything will get cheaper and faster and all that. I mean, this is the tech business people!

I can’t predict the future exactly, but I know the folly in shrieking “impossible!” when faced with musings on future tech. When will people learn.

What do you think? Sooner or later?

If you close your eyes and peer into the possible future of gaming, you might glimpse an image such as this. Today this noble warrior was generated entirely in Maya3D, but its not difficult to guess that one day computer games will be peopled with characters of such depth and realism. Maybe not today, but one day.

Do graphics make the game? Hardly! Yet I would argue that characters are an equal contributor. Adding personae of such extreme levels will one day take games well beyond that of any Hollywood movie. Not just to watch, but to interact with, to fight against, to hate, to fear, to save, to love. If the gameplay is served by the story, then what a day when the story is served by characters like this! “Video game moments” of yesterday were as evocative for me as movies or novels (even when they werely merely games with text!), so its no surprise that I should greatly look forward to truly rich and interactive characters. It is one of the biggest challenges of this emerging artform. Storytelling without convincing characters is like a movie with bad actors.

This will be a critical aspect that brings the storytelling potential of videogames closer to the mainstream (and one day consume it). Maybe the publishers who relish rich graphics over gameplay have a point in this : they are attempting to expand the market with greater and greater eye-candy (while the rest of us real gamers get bored). Personally, knowing that I got excited in the days of text, I’m a shoe-in for great graphics done right. Give me a game that delivers on all levels of gameplay, narrative, interactivity and characters, and I will be happy. But we know this isn’t true for everyone. Gaming fans are a rarity in my generation (yet less so, I’ve noticed, in the next one).

However, as realistic as computer-generated characters become, there is a well-known problem referred to as “the Uncanny Valley“; the psychological consequence of increased photorealism actually decreases the believability of characters. The argument is that one should avoid (or minimize) the realism of graphics in order to heighten believability.

Personally, I would not shy from realism in this fashion. I see this barrier as part of the cost of having highly realistic characters in an interactive 3d environment. We may have a twinge of a “this is not real” creepiness, yet perhaps this will serve as the best reminder that we are, in fact, only playing a videogame. Is it not a fair trade-off from what we’re seeing these days? Compare the warrior above with the visage of a typical WoW character. I’d take the uncanny valley any day over that! Do non-human characters exhibit the same problem? Is it OK for them to move and appear realistic? Even if the valley rears itself, we’ll instinctively know that they are not real.

One day, that warrior will call out your name as he ambles towards you at the fireside. His footsteps will crunch across leaves as he nudgers closer, and emerges into the flickering light of the fire. Later, he will reveal himself as the King in disguise… and asks you to undertake a secret mission to save his daughter, the princess.

A little corny, but it sounds fun, right? For me, it is truly just as much fun to imagine.

And now a question for you! When will we see graphics at this level in computer games? 2 years? 5 years? 10? Never?

After a long and undeniable fade, I finally uninstalled WoW and cancelled my account. Many months have gone by where I have not touched the game, for a variety of reasons. The strongest of these, hurridly scrawled below :

Despite my contention that its a complete design, a perfectly overflowing package with busy little treats for everyone, the game is essentially dead for me. Getting to 60, the current maximum level, was “mostly harmless” fun. Despite fits of sheer boredom, peppered with many instances of reading magazines during combat, I finally did it and by mid-summer dinged 60. Surprising yes, but a promise was made, and I always try to do what I say I will do. I was glad to have my compatriots with me while I did that : Iolo, Dorgrim, Thorgar, Davina, Iara, Gropp, Kali… the many nights of fun we had is undeniable.

Everything in the game is there because Blizzard chose it to be. If you look closely, you see the design and technical decision points all over. For the good and bad, it is what it is. I won’t fault Blizzard for the “why’s” of what they did, but I will fault them for the “because” – that is, the result of their decisions :

The end-game for WoW
As meticulous a design it is, did not appeal to me. I strongly feel that they really did a fantastic job with the game as a whole, and the effects of what they have wrought shall be felt throughout gamedom for a very long time. Yet there is so much missing from what could have been a “funner” game. The prerequisite for large group instances included a party of absolutely correct composition, but this manifested a direct barrier to actually playing and enjoying the game! If you couldn’t find the right healer or tank, you did not play. Why pay for a game that you cannot play?

The objective is fighting, yet combat is dull
The prevailing mode of point-and-click combat is hopelessly deterministic, thus removing the visceral pleasure one should have when vanquishing an opponent. A joyless exercise to be sure. And complete ignorance of the five-second rule.

The story? What story!
This is a huge world, filled with peoples and places and legends and history. Yet I challenge anyone to tell me five story threads from the top of their head. The God Hakkar did what, exactly? What did Overmaster Pyron do to deserve repeated assasination? ETC.

The warped and cartoon-like visual design
It fills the world from each end with a lovely, contiguous language making each corner different yet predictable. The work of a consistent hand. A god. But the lack of photorealism and the cutesy elements lead me astray from immersion. If they were to drop an entire new continent into the game (and they will), it would actually appear far too similar to what appeared before it, and no matter what they were attempting to render for us. One may argue, but the visuals actually get tedious.

The characters
By the characteres I mean the design. Not compelling and far too similar. Yes, they create ownership and uniqueness as a game reward (ie. time spent in procuring new “looks” in the form of weapons and armour), but too often I would meet another night-elf rogue that looked identical to me. My opinion (and you may disagree) is that this should not happen. And looking at my character’s face, right from the start, caused me to curl my lip in slight disgust.

Inertness
If you drop a sword in the forest, does it make a sound? Not in WoW. The world is a backdrop to a player’s interactions with a database. You cannot interact with the world in any way, nor can you drop items, move objects, build things, destroy them, or do anyhting to change or disturb this lovingly crafted universe in any way shape or form. This breaks immersion (at least for me). It makes the world less interesting to spend time in.

And thats it. I recall grinding my way through Azeroth’s Silithus region for a rare item, doing it for several hours, and decided to listen in on my guild Ventrilo server for the whole voyage, partaking in the conversation. Three hours of nothing but discussion of particular pieces of armour and weapons. “Those gloves are nice.” “Yeah if I combine them with this and this, that will complete the set I’ll need to do that and that.” “Fantastic”. I am not joking, this was a three hour non-stop discussion for two enthusiastic players. I will not fault them at all – its the game that they are playing, and they enjoy it as they have every right to. In my humble opinion, three-hour discussions about gloves and boots do not a game make.

For what it is, the game is great. But at this point, time-based games just aren’t for me.

From Terranova, I saw a recent post from Dr. Richard Bartle detailing a new game engine and MMO platform called Multiverse.

Its essentially a “do it yourself” toolchest for online game development. Their idea is to have multiple, singular MMO’s essentially linked to each other by a central registry. This is a serious foray into a distributed model of online games.

Aside from their bluster about “revolutions” in MMO development, its quite interesting. They give you the engine, some pre-canned assets, the server code, and an editor. Create the world you want and voila! Instant MMO. They even host it for you. They make their money by charging you a percentage of your game’s subscription fees.

The DIY aspect isn’t new. Bioware’s Neverwinter provided a dev toolchest with charge-for-use content and they seem to be very successful with it.

Yet, there does seem to be a lot of buzz around Multiverse. Bartle wants it for his research. I think others might like the challenge of making something fun with it. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. I’d like to see what the engine’s capabilities are. Check it.

In other news, I looked at the trial edition of Irth Online, just out of curiousity. Its a brand-new fantasy-themed MMORPG made by a smaller developer in Boston. I would be very tempted to call it an indie MMO, for a variety of reasons. It had almost no press or advertising, which struck me as odd for a brand-new commercial MMO. After looking at the game, I’m not surprised.

Its a complete clone of what we’ve seen already in that genre. Although they’ve obviously worked very hard on it, the most irritating aspects are that its very clunky, confusing and non-innovative. Damn. Every aspect of a typical MMO appears within Irth as if its merely fulfilling a checklist of what an MMO should have, all very hurriedly slapped together.

I don’t want to dismiss it out of hand, but there are quite a few problems with it. Generally, I find it very instructive to look at bad games as well as the good ones. In this case, I’ll suffer through the experience even if its merely to answer the question : is “Irth” an elaborate experiment or a true commercial product?

There’s a reason big game fishing is so popular. Even if its a passing thrill, its fun to chase something bigger than yourself.

There has been a consistent murmur out there. A collective disgruntled buzz about games. I’ve been watching as closely as I am able, but to summarize it goes something like this.

Its boredom. Developer blogs, fansites, magazine articles, ezines, and some personal in-game chat all point to it. Its hard to find concrete examples, but I note an unsatisfied yearning for something new and different. Frustration with an interminable stream of derivative crap, siphoned from the big-media trough. And I see the complaint everywhere, from either overt commentary on the “state of the industry” or as a side-comment between players on a CS:S server.

The jaded sentiment is that gamers are getting bored with repeated renditions of games they’ve already played. People are ready for something new beyond lusher, linear games and big-name voiceovers. And like I’ve never really seen before.

Our appeasement, or how to get it, is starting to shift. How so?

Well, for starters, we see the XBox 360. I mentioned it earlier, noting from pure observation that there really truly is nothing new there. But the kicker is that there damned well should be in the face of 50 million dollar marketing budgets! And its not just a matter of big business. Its not simply that budgets for game production are soaring, and are expected to rise. Not just the boggling amount of assets that are required to produce the latest-greatest. Not just that the newest halcyon of NextGen gives us sports games with sweat simulation and FPS’ with absolutely no variants in gameplay. Its about the atoms of game activity. What do we do in the game? How do we do them? Very little progression has been achieved by our big media contemporaries in this vein. They play it safe, because they absolutely positively have to. Its easier to pile on the detail instead of coming up with something new.

So where is the innovation?

Its in the indies. The mythical upstarts. The smaller companies whose concentration is centred on the games they’re making, and not the happiness found in the genre numbers game. The indies take more risk, because they can. They don’t have armies of artists and programmers and suppliers and SKU’s and shareholders to maintain. They are the ones who push the bar sideways instead of upward. They change the playing field. And the communities exert an influence that no Superbowl ad could accomplish. They shift the market to follow them.

Since the first day of this blog so very long ago (10 months?) I have watched the debates swing around. People clamouring to tell us that PC Gaming is DEAD, and that the time for indie gaming companies has long passed the glory days of iDSoftware. I conversed with assorted developers at DIGRA Vancouver, and was met with the same eye-rolling recitation. And its clear to me that people have been overcome by something, perhaps even fear. But after over a year of observation and deliberation, I am utterly convinced that the “indy gaming is dead” mentality is COMPLETE AND UTTER BULLSHIT. In fact, it serves the big media to keep telling you that “making games is too hard”, “it costs too much money”, or “publishers are too restrictive”. Its not that they’re wrong, but the emphasis is. If you’re committed, these things are merely barriers to be navigated. Just think about what they gain by scaring off the masses from innovation. They scare off their most dangerous competition. They are free to churn out the same derivative crud without so much as a blip from underfoot. I set to thinking about these issues some time ago, and I am doubly sure that the world is ready for the next idSoftware more than you can ever believe. The gaming community is fickle, yes, but in this industry (more than most), getting mindshare of the end user is a live-or-die enterprise. And top-down marketing is not going to be able to reign in the enthusiasms of the collective headspace of millions of gamers that talk to each other daily.

Thats essentially my rant. People need to stop thinking that big media owns the space. And don’t think that better games can’t be made by the little guy. Anyone who believes that has been duped (yet again) by news and entertainment media.

I hate to rant about rallying the little guy and then talk about Nintendo. But in the sphere of computer electronics and future media, I really do believe that Nintendo has its sights in the correct places. And they really are innovating when the bigger players bat around around their latest Hollywood-style triple-A contender.

It only takes the will and a small group of committed individuals to innovate. And the time is right.