covert.creations

There are three titles that may appear with great frequency as one meanders the gaming news these days. Each are certainly worth discussing on their own, simply on the merits of having such attention bestowed upon them. However, there is a common thread to be pulled from these stories in particular. These companies, and their gaming products, are faced with tremendous obtacles. The bigger and better they become, the harder it is to grow beyond . In essence, their fight is a fight against themselves. Success can be a cruel instructor. Read on to see what I mean.

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A series of business miscues… and the last vestiges of a rational gaming press have finally succumbed to the forces of stupidification.

Computer Games Magazine, my favourite magazine in the industry (and quite possibly, ever) has fallen. It takes with it another promising venture, Massive Magazine.

Tom Chick, Henry Jenkins, Cindy Yans, and a host of other fantabulous writers and illustrators will now presumably move to other places to share their insights (or hilarity, depending on which you’re looking for).

It’s hard to describe what a stunning loss this is for me. I even shipped a select boxload of back-issues to Australia. And up until this month, a nice treat would arrive monthly in my email – the digital edition.

It was a magazine that reinforced the notion that games are not just for teenagers and nut-jobs, but “normal” adults like you and I (yeah right!).

Many people have had their say, so I’ll just post a couple comments from CGOnline’s forums.

CG, ye will be missed. Massive, we barely knew ye.

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As mentioned in my previous article, gamers expect a community from the game publisher. In a sense, this demonstrates the unique position of videogames in the landscape of entertainment. Consequentially, feedback and community become a cost of doing business.

I believe we’re quickly reaching the point where publisher-run communities no longer serve their purpose. The communities are too vast. Moreover, the gamers themselves have evolved toward a deeper level of sophistication. Gamers are the reason we’ve come this far, and we simply demand more.

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The nature of things

When online gaming was getting started, there was a certain novelty in spending vast swathes of time with the same people on the same game servers, night after night. It seemed inevitable that we’d eventually all team up. And team up we did. Forming groups is the most basic of human qualities, and is certainly no less true in virtual worlds.

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A big congratulations goes out to Neardeath Studios on the 10th year of Meridian 59. What a fantastic accomplishment. M59 is the first, the longest-running, and most respected MMORPG of them all.

This article is in response to M59 co-creator Brian “Psychochild” Green’s post, “Why middleware will not save us“. He hits pretty hard, and sets his sights on the “middleware market” in the MMORPG space. I’ll say I agree with the bulk of it. Yet, some of the specifics cause me trouble. Thus this post.

His argument noted two levels of the MMORPG industry, the indies and the AAAs (”the blockbuster games”). The gist of his article is that, as a technological cure-all, MMORPG middleware companies fail in their promise. They will make little impact on game development in MMORPG games. A gross-oversimplification on my part, so I’d encourage you go read Psychochild’s post.

First off, how does one define middleware?

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TerraNova highlighted it, I watched it, and ‘iCoke’ blazes a trail for World of Warcraft into China. The ad is actually somewhat old, but combine it with this :

With 7 million subscribers, WoW is now in the list of the world’s top 100 most populous countries.1 2

It easily exceeds the population of Lebanon or Israel. It will likely surpass them both put together. Think of how all those Wow players could represent a significant force for massive social change, if only the damned Horde would stop getting in the way!

Priorities, priorities.

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In my last post, I talked about technology’s promise. More specifically, how the PSP is proof in my hands of a very likely future. I shared a quick thought about the supposed “ubiquitous connector” – a theoretical device through which I can interact with my world. A system by which I freely overlay a “meta-world” atop the real one, either through interesting games and media, or via information. I’d love to talk more about what this fictional device could do, but I’m sure you can easily imagine your own specifics. Your ideas about it are just as valid is mine. Oh, and it will be a part of our future. I also held that the Sony PSP is a great little system, one that reminded me of my earliest encounter with technology as a whole. As a promise for my future, a digitally integrated world. Not a bad feat for a commercial product, and kudos to Sony for a nicely designed multimedia machine.

Note : One thing I didn’t mention, is that you could have taken my post, search/replace on “Sony” and “PSP” with the words “Nintendo” and “DS”, and it all still applies. I like both these systems for their respective innovations, and for what they bring to the world of gaming and mobile entertainment.

Politics and Proprietorship

It’s unfortunate that neither of these systems fulfill even my most conservative leaps of inductive speculation. Yet, they could have. Remember, I briefly mentioned politics and the Internet. I’m not well qualified to go in-depth about it, but there are obviously countless reasons for this situation. For simplicity again lets restrict this to social impacts. That is, the way that internetworked applications have the potential to adjust our very social realm. Email is the first “killer app” that comes to mind, turning traditional means of communicating on its ear.

So politics comes into play as a controlling measure, to protect ourselves and reliant entities from disaster in the face of new, sweeping technologies. Take the music industry as an example, and I’ll oversimplify even further. On one side is the business of music. Royalties and other income for the employees, from radio stations to merchants. On the other side, it’s about free speech and devices that are immune from inefficient (and grossly unfair) control mechanisms. Ideally, a free and democratic society would attempt to strike a balance between the sides, to the betterment of all. Magic happens, and we get “pay-for” mechanisms that seamlessly allow us to obtain the music we want, whenever we want. So politicking is the necessary evil by which we obtain such a lovely and peaceful outcome.

Supposedly.

Not so, in the case of Sony and their PSP. Not even close. To protect itself, the PSP system is a closed one. The minidisc format, that Sony pretty much invented, is not copyable. For example, I cannot buy a writer for these discs. I have to buy them, pre-written, directly from a Sony-approved vendor. The “Universal Media Disc” (UMD), is great. Small form-factor, reliable read stats, smooth ejection and insertion, all engineered very slickly and sweetly. Yet, UMDs suck. They suck because they are closed and unwritable. They suck because they are extremely expensive. They suck because they come from a tech company that is also a huge music company, selling them to you at grossly inflated prices. They suck because they inherit the sensibilities of a hardware company that wants not only to sell them, but control the mechanism by which information contained within them is PUBLISHED.

Their agenda was not to create a ubiquitous wireless media experience. They clearly set out to construct, publish and sell UMDs.

Please tell me we aren’t back to Gutenburg versus the Church? This type of measure is regressive and backward, and the realisation of a sick corporate fantasy. Lock down the thing, control the product from publisher to consumer, and punish anyone who tries to circumvent any of it. Yes, hack your PSP and go to jail. Its a meaningless threat since its happened and will continue to do so. But again, why even bother creating a system that does not meet the desires of its users?

Remember Aibo?

A Footnote in History

Happily, all of these ridiculous corporate tactics won’t work, which is why the PSP will be sadly nothing more than a historical footnote. I promise you, one day you will say : “Oh yeah, I remember THOSE!”

The next problem, and why I hate my PSP, is where Sony has stumbled again.

I paid $79.00AU for “Tomb Raider : Legend” on UMD. I went physically into a store, took the item off of a shelf, paid for it with a stack of paper-based currency, and took it home and unwrapped the layers of plastic off its cover. Tell me how this is the future of mobile entertainment in the Internet age? Why can I not use the device itself to securely purchase additional content?

Well, here’s a hint. They didn’t even try to do this. Using the builtin 802.11b security with WPA and TKIP would be YOUR responsibility if you transmitted your credit card number over the airwaves. Talk to me sometime about the headaches of wireless infrastructure security.

Esther Dyson, famous tech futurist and investor (whom, through chance and the magic of a mutual colleague, I’ve had the sincere pleasure of meeting some time ago), said of the future of big-media,

“Well they’re going to lose worse. All the gate keepers who were controlling access to things. Many distribution channels for content , which are dependent on putting content in inefficient containers, putting it somewhere where it sat on a shelves, only half of it was used. The other half had to be destroyed. So all these things that create inefficiencies and benefit from them are going to lose…”

Profit from inefficiency and die, that’s the message. Is this not the very definition of the UMD?

That ubiquitous wireless Internet dream, is exactly that. Politics (especially in North America) have slowed the wheels of progress in order to exact a measure of control on this promise. Its funny, I could have sworn Casey and I were discussing this… back in 1996. We should have bought stock in something, preferably a lobbying organization.

The Meat of the PSP

So if you’ve skimmed this terribly lengthy post, I hope you get to this part. If all that political or techie stuff is not relevant to you, then how about the games?

Well, to this, I can unashamedly admit that many of them are totally excellent – balancing gameplay with its natural form factor, designed perfectly for console-style interaction, and solid integration with the other features of the system (i.e. networked multiplay). Yet, if I were to complain about the third-person interaction of MANY of the titles (Tomb Raider, Splinter Cell, Metal Gear Acid, Grand Theft Auto, and so on) – the camera view absolutely sucks in all of them. In some cases, it is so frustrating to control as to make the games virtually unplayable. I’m not the first person to say this. And these games were the “big titles” that attracted me to the system in the first place. What a disappointment.

So. The Sony PSP, for what it is, is totally fantastic. The Sony PSP, for what it could have been, miserably fails. In fact, I’m somewhat despondent about the platform as a whole. It’s not going to last.

That promise of my ubiquitous connector? Sigh. Such long way to go.

Or maybe I’m just pissed off that my girlfriend kicks my ass at Lumines.

Its official. I’m sick of shopping malls. Since moving to Sydney, I have been marched into the cavernous maw of capitalist frenzy almost daily. Suffice to say, its been a challenge to my usual intrepidity. And each time, in a fit of sheer exhaustion and a stark, penetrating need to maintain some semblance of sanity…

…I find myself in EB.

Games here are extremely expensive, but still I have oft-visited this dayglow nest of the ultra-nerd. It’s irresistable. And recently, I chanced upon the ‘once a year’, mega-super-clearance sale.
PS2 for 186$ Aus? That’s not too bad. It was tantalizing to think, actually. Finally able to play Guitar Hero (and perhaps, just perhaps, beat my friend, Headcrash). Finally able to play Wipeout. Metal Gear. Shadow of the Collosus. Mmmmm….

The list goes on and on. And I might have had one nestled sweetly under my arm had they not been out of stock. But something in me also twigged. Was I selling out, resistance waning into vapour? So I didn’t buy one. Yes, I just finished saying they were out of stock, but I wanted you to think that I had victoriously resisted the evil wiles of Sony. And Microsoft. And Nintendo.

Um, did you guys hear me? I almost bought a console. Can you imagine my state of mind, now?

So yeah, I’ve now got a PSP.

And the clearance sale beckoned. 2 movies (PSP) for 15$. PSP Tomb Raider. A couple of 10$ PC clearance games based on the faintest wisp of memory that they were actually worth playing. Riddick. Dungeon Lords. BF2 Special Forces. It would have continued, this massive geek orgy, had Mel not dragged me out of the store.

I went home, installed the lot. It was all a close call. I think the PSP is as close to console-dom as I’ve come in a long time. I never even owned an Atari. I’ve since returned to the same store in Bondi three more times… resisting the temptation again, each time. Or was I just checking their stock?

Is it only a matter of time?

So the whole world has presumably played (and perhaps even completed) the latest incarnation in the Half Life 2 universe. My experience with it was quite enjoyable. I downloaded it, played it, and completed the entire enterprise in about three hours. Great! So what do I have to complain about?

Well, its the new entry in the market sloganeering that’s been tossed out into the world of gaming. Episodic Content. Supposedly, this is the “wave of the future”, solving all sorts of nasty little problems in both developing, producing, marketing, selling, buying and playing games. And to some degree, I believe this to be true.

Reasoning it out, bite-size bits of our games get made and sold, freeing us from waiting a year for a “full expansion” to get cooked up pig-on-a-spit style, and forced down our throats in one gulp. Makes sense. Smaller price, smaller timeframe, smaller gameplay. I like it.

I just wish they called it something else.

To me, the notion of “episodic” invokes a somewhat nostalgiac image a small boy… tuning in to the radio each week for the next installment of his favourite serial superhero drama. Or in a more modern sense, scrambling to mininova to download the next episode of “Lost” (present company included).

With the ridiculously named “Half Life 2 Episode One”, its essentially a contradiction. It was half a year late, reduced in scope, and didn’t advance the story in any significant manner. OK, you say, its a game, games don’t tell stories. Then where is the “new gameplay”?

Give me episodic. I’ll pay for it. But give it to me fast. If you’re telling a story, then tell it. If you’re giving us more “game”, then finetune the gameplay. HL2E1 does none of this.

I say lets rename it. How about, Half Life 2 Nano-expansion 1?

“WE”.

Yup, thats what its called. Not, “revolution” as we’ve come to know it. But “Wii”. Iconic, unique, and something pushed out and slightly to the left as Nintendo seems to want to do these days.

Do I like it? No! Do I get it? I think I do. Its Nintendo wanting to be totally Nintendo and nothing but. In some dusty city Walmart I bet people try to buy “PS 360s”… so maybe this is the way Nintendo asserts its shelfspace. Something that’s impossible to confuse with anything else.

Prevent brand confusion. Make something unique thats Nintendo. If thats one of their goals, then I believe it’s spot-on. It will serve that purpose justly and reliably. Will we be making fun of the name this time next year?

Doubtful… we’ll all be playing Zelda.