Sundays are for getting mild sunburn. Which, to the ever-hypochondriac minds at RPS, is clearly terminal sunstroke. Expect delirium in this, my final post, on RPS. It’s been great doing this for you, and I hope you’ll think of me when I’m gone, occasionally. It doesn’t even have to be fondly. So now, for the last time, I set forth to compile a list of interesting (mostly) videogame related reading from across the week and try to resist with all my failing strength linking to some pop-video or another.
- This PlayThisThing Greg Costikyan piece was cut and paste into my Sunday Papers Google document with the note “This is fucking dark”. Entitled “Mothers, Don’t Let Your Children Grow Up to Be Game Developers”, it’s Costikyan’s response to Epic’s Mike Capps defending 60-hour working weeks.
- Let’s just quote the title on this one: “Too Human versus the enthusiast press: Video game journalists as mediators of commodity value”. Rebecca Carlson of the University of Pittsburgh’s piece for Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 2 (2009). I love academia, me.
- More 360 malarkies, but relevant to anyone watching the indie scene. The Community Games – that is, basically, XBox Live Arcade without the quality control/microsoft interference – have had the first set of sales listed. They’re really bloody terrible. While not actually revealed in the list, Mommy’s Best Games, makers of the fun Weapon of Choice, talk about how even though they’re one of the bigger games, they still sold well beneath expectations.
- On a more PC-indie side, Jason Konoske pointed me in the direction with this interview with Spiderweb’s Jeff Vogel about indie RPG malarkies.
- Poisoned Sponge interviews Mr Love Eskil Steenberg about Love and the inside of his fascinating noggin. That’s Eskil’s. Not Poisoned Sponges, though I’m sure his nogin’s interior is pretty fascinating too.
- Gahk. Just deleted about four links due to this stupid fucking laptop and my stupid fucking fingers and my stupid fucking me. Links shorter! Anyway, the Escapist write about the clever tricks developers use to make us feel as if we have more interactivity than we do. I think the word “illusion” is a misreading of both the form and interaction, but there’s lots of good quotes here.
- Ellie Gibson interviews Peter Molyneux, somewhat irreverantly. Go Ellie!
- Actually, while we’re talking Eurogamer, Oli Welsh interviews NetDevil about their forthcoming Lego Universe. Go Oli!
- Dan Ariely does a talk – i.e. video, so not actually inside The Sunday Papers’ remit, but fuck it – on our buggy moral code, and why we find it okay to sometimes lie, cheat or be a dipshit.
- Everyone picked up on this one this week, but in case you didn’t get it from anywhere else: Videogames are the new carrots, in terms of night-vision.
- We weren’t too fond of Merchants of Brooklyn. The movie script, however? That’s something else.
- A couple of splashes of the old Games-journalism-journalism. Firstly, Simon Parkin talks about the issue of subjectivity and facts and malarkies. And quotes me, because I’m always hot for quotes. Meanwhile, Civ-4/Spore’s Soren Johnson argues that Metacritic has a purpose – specifically, to give publishers a metric for quality – and its position as kicking boy isn’t really fair. I’m actually more fine with Metacritic than you may assume. Sure, I tend to describe them as professional parasites and take occasional pleasure writing something with one eye on screwing up their marking system. But – hey! – at the least it’s an easy way to get a big ol’ list of reviews for a game. I’m easy, me.
- I’ve been listening to… brain… failing. No… words. No… pop. Only… death.
Pyrrhic Success!
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Ooh look, my URL has gone weird.
That Escapist article is ridiculous. Games Found To Use Mechanics Other Artforms Have Used For Ages Shocker!
Games are all about creating an experience for the player, it has nothing to do with ‘lying’, unless you see a game as one huge lie you’re participating in.
I appear to have had a miraculous recovery by sleeping! It was just sunburn after all.
KG
Shit. He abides.
OK, Plan B – a falling piano. Dodge that, Gillen.
Shouldn’t God have one of those golden backgrounds too?
He’s only here on loan from His beachfront.
DigiPen has a 99% graduate placement rate. Mull on that for a second.
If you’re going to get a game design degree, it better be a good one. There are plenty of DeVry Institutes out there that have figured out slackers will pay for something like that.
The two objections:
A. A professional culture of obscene working hours leads to burnout. The same used to be true of all computer jobs in the 80s. Beyond two weeks, “crunch time” produces disastrous results and considerably lower efficiency. Low hours/high efficiency is the only sustainable route.
this is known, the question is what your employer knows.
B. A dedicated games degree limits your options compared to a standard CS degree.
If you want to go into game development, you come out of a games program not only with standard CS skills, but also with a proven portfolio showing four years of game development and experience working on a team. Big software companies are increasingly aware of the talent and capabilities of graduates from these programs (for example, last I heard, Microsoft counts DigiPen among its top ten schools for recruitment).
Will it hamper you in the future? Maybe — it all depends on how your sell yourself. On the bright side, the field of game development is growing, and even in today’s market, you’re seeing Fortune 500 advertise for “game developer” jobs (serious games, anyone?).
Or, get a standard CS degree and develop a kick-ass mod.
Do you have sun in England? Call me surprised.
Acosta: Why do you think I got burnt? I was surprised too.
KG
It’s a little depressing to see the poor sales of those Xbox games.
When I heard of the sales of Armageddon Empires (I think it was roughly 3.000?) and the Spiderweb Software games, my immediate thought was, that they would sell better at a cheaper price.
But I guess this proves, that indie games simply don’t regularly sell more than 10.000 copies, and it confirms the 20$ price point that most PC indie games have had for a while.
Also some of those games aren’t much more than flash games. And no one pays for those, no matter the price.
I think XNA uses C#? Anyway, there might be non-game use for general AI programming, for things like automated systems and so on. For military UAVs, automation routines in games may be useful, although possibly something a bit smarter than most game AI might be handy.
Dinger: Yeah, I don’t think the article was dissing DigiPen per se, but was simply advising people to have an escape route if managers do expect ridiculous hours all the time – like you say, it depends a lot on what the management culture is like at a given company.
CS definitely. Of course it depends on what you want to do with your degree. Something like Digipen focuses on games, and teaches pretty much anything about games. And the problem with that (apart from the obvious, it limits what you can do *outside* games), it also means that there’s often a heavy focus on what’s hot *now*.
Something like Computer Science is a much more timeless degree. It’s not *about* programming, and certainly not *about* games. But it covers a wide range of stuff that’s useful in both areas. And will still be useful in 10 years time.
A game degree may well teach you programming, and it may even make you a *good* programmer. But it won’t make you a computer scientist.
Both degrees can probably land you a job in game development (although I believe most companies would prefer a good CS graduate if given the choice)
But of course, studying CS means that you’ll have to show some initiative if you want to make games. A Digipen graduate ends up with a portfolio of a few games. A CS graduate likely doesn’t. Unless he makes them himself.
Another factor may be who you meet. At something like Digipen, you’re pretty much guaranteed to meet a lot of people with a burning interest in game development. That may boost motivation, may make it easier to find people to work with on hobby projects, and it may give you a network to draw on after you graduate.
CS is a much more mixed crowd. There are certainly wannabe game developers at any decent CS college, but there are *also* people who don’t give a damn about it. And again, I’d argue that may be an advantage. One of the problems with the games industry is that it feels so “special”. It is cutting edge when it comes to graphics rendering, and decades behind on everything else, pretty much. There is a lot to learn, about programming practices, about project management, about physics simulation, about using, or creating, the right programming languages for the job, about a lot of things that there’s simply no room for at Digipen. But all stuff that a CS graduate will have gotten some exposure to.
Rather than saying that one course offers breadth of knowledge, and the other offers depth, I think it’d be more accurate to say they both offer breadth, but along different axes. Digipen teaches “everything about games”. CS teaches “everything about writing good software”.
There is a certain overlap that they both teach, but for the most part, they are distinct. But just because CS isn’t directly “about games” doesn’t mean the rest of it won’t be *useful* in games.
Finally, of course, there’s the reputation factor. A lot of companies are still skeptical about the quality of the “games only” schools. Your employer will often, even in the games industry, be more impressed by a CS degree than a Full Sail diploma, whether or not it’s justified.
My opinion about the 60 hours:
Going astranaut, olimpic sport, to the NBA, etc.. stuff that is for some people like a dream. And to live a dream, you have to pay the price. And the price to be gamedev’s, is stuff like crunch mode and these unreasonable 60 hours.
What pay the industry?, we probably lost the people with expertise, and we probably burn really interesting people.
It will be cool if this change, and the result helps mantain cool people inside, and these with more experience.
When I thought Kieron Gillen was leaving RPS, I was honestly truly very sad. In my heart. Very sad.
So, er, never leave. Ever.
You will be missed on these hallowed pages, Mr. Gillen. I do hope you pop in from time to time to share some of your insight.
I can’t speak to the other major issue in this thread. Coding was never the life for me and finding a degree in “Fixin’ ‘Puters” has never been easy. I’ll just say I’m happy with my Certs and Job.
*Err or just keep the tongue firmly planted in your cheek for those of us too dense to miss obvious attempts at humor and for whom it is an all together too early Monday morning with too little caffeine in our bloodstream*
“Gamers that will engage in forum debates et al regarding particular games or genres’ do not neccessarily represent a broad spectrum of views.”
Yea, players suggestions are boring and limited. Almost all suggestions are reusing existing stuff to make it incrementally better. Or evolve everything into a e-sport.
Using players feedback to create other than a FPS arena, could be …shortsigned. With gamers suggestions, you will have Quake 1.1, Halo 1.2, … never Quake2 or Halo 2.
God, maybe, just maybe he will see the piano falling, as in; “Why is that humongous crane swinging a piano above my head” kind. Just saying…
With gamers suggestions, you will have Quake 1.1, Halo 1.2, … never Quake2 or Halo 2.
Gabe [Newell] thinks that the movie industry would benefit from incremental products. Toy Story 1.1! Just make the graphics better!
I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not. Why make TF3 when you can keep patching and updating TF2 for years and years?
“I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not. Why make TF3 when you can keep patching and updating TF2 for years and years?”
Programs are like persons. Get older. And die of lots of different problems.
Speacking of this… the removal of crits is something to make the game less fun, but better has a e-sport.
Theres also the thing “Gamers” is a group of people. There are people that want to move the game in one direction, and others in other different. Theres no superior design, motivation or ego, to drive changes. Are pure random. While a game is a design.
I actually found that Escapist article really interesting, but not for what it said, so much. Rather, it was interesting to compare to ancient literary criticism (bear with me here).
The talk of games ‘lying’ to us by trying to convince us that there is more freedom on offer than they actually simulate is very, very similar to the ancient problem of literature ‘lying’ to us by trying to convince us of the reality of their fiction. These days, we talk about the ability of literature to help us ’suspend our disbelief’ – we accept that while fiction is, well, fictional, it works best when it convinces us, albeit temporarily, of its ‘truthfulness’. This doesn’t bother us at all, but in early literary criticism it was a /huge/ stumbling block to get over; there simply wasn’t a culture of literature in place to allow critics to accept that while lying was bad, the ‘lies’ of fiction were an altogether different kettle of fish.
It would seem that games criticism is currently at that stage, where the ‘lies’ of games in their attempt to immerse gamers more fully are still seen as troublesome, and not simply accepted. I wonder how long it’ll take us to get over the problem? (It took the Greeks a few hundred years, by comparison)
There’s also a good essay on chiptunes from that same issue of Transformative Works:
http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/96/94
A very interesting group for sure, check out the About page if you don’t believe me…
And the MGS4 corridor sequence? Please. It was complete and utter bullshit. The points where Snake were zapped were so obviously scripted the only emotional response I got out of it was a frown that deepened every time.
Thank you. I literally can’t think of a more instantly, laughably obvious scripted scene in a game. You run in a straight line along an empty corridor. It would take even a rubbish player an epileptic fit to accidentally walk off the path, and the game is 90% scripted throughout, so who would ever be fooled?
It’s a terrible example.
Something like the ‘dock’ end of Kane & Lynch (rubbish game, yes, but that’s irrelevent) would have been much better – it’s only obvious that it’s scripted the second time – the first time, you’ll just think you screwed up.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with games cheating a bit with semi-scripted scenes to manufacture an experience in a supposedly open-ended game, but the problem is in the vast majority of cases it’s very obvious when they’re doing it. And even with hours of careful tweaking, I can’t imagine it’ll ever be remotely easy to disguise it.
As far as gamer opinions negatively effecting future games without having anything to do with current game reviews: See the current glut of games that have forced co-op as their main feature. About a year and a half to two years ago, “Where all da co-op gone?” was this big huge axe gamers had to grind in nearly every overarching discussion of gaming. Now there’s a ton of games that have jumped on this bandwagon in just AWFUL ways, completely to the detriment of single player gamers, and almost always using what would’ve been a normal single player game for their retrofitted cash-in on a fad.
That I can’t think of a single one of these co-op games that does co-op right and make it a communal ass-kicking, social experience (think Smash TV) rather than you forcing someone to play with you because the default AI partner is retarded and then you try not to step on each other’s toes as you play Single Player-esque speaks volumes about modern publisher intelligence when it comes to design decisions.