Sundays are for avoiding tidying up the house by compiling a list of interesting reading from across the week, while trying to avoid mentioning a certain comic that may have been released. And how much I’m trying to avoid tidying can be ascertained by the length of this hefty Sunday Papers special…
- The most essential thing from the week was Chris Delay’s look at Introversion’s 2008, where he talks candidly about how Multiwinia almost brought down the company. Full of totally hearbreaking vignettes. Choice one: “Tom had always fantasised about building a sales counter that would sit in the corner of the office and tick up whenever we sold a copy of a game. This time around he actually did it, building the device out of second hand parts bought from Ebay and writing custom driver software for it that linked directly to our Multiwinia sales counter. During our launch party dinner and celebrations that evening, what was truly amazing about this counter was how little it was actually going up. I’m not kidding when I say that we actually checked the connections and the software several times to make sure it was actually working, only to find out it was. Even then that very night we knew it was bad, that our whole future was in doubt.” Go read.
- JG Ballard’s been dead for a while now, but Jim only got his chance to do his tribute over at Offworld this week. Rossignol does a fine job of showing exactly why he mattered and inspired people – and his relevance to games. Oh, just read it. He gets to use the title “Ragdoll Metaphysics” too, which we always like.
- After Zeno Clash’s array of positive reviews, Tom Jubert of Games Brief wonders whether Indie games get an easy ride. Someone drags out this position every time someone doesn’t like a mainly-well-reviewed indie game, and it never really gets any more convincing. On the topic of Zeno Clash, if our cryptic mentions of director/writer/awesome-chap Jodorowsky in our review intrigued you, here’s the oft-brilliant Joe McCulloch on the Metabarons, his definitive comic work. FULL BORE MENTAL.
- The Sunday Times on adding smells to games. Yes. So, at last, we will have games that really do stink.
- Clive Thomas at Wired, inspired by Jonathan Blow’s asking people to not use walk-throughs, segues close to something we were covering in the podcast – as in, the Internet’s effect on game experience, specifically puzzle solving. The solution of embracing the hive mind strikes me as somewhat pat. The vast majority of people in ARGs don’t solve the puzzles – they sit back and let everyone else find the answer for them. The people analysing Lost are mostly just consuming more slowly generated User-generated-FAQs. And “people know when not to use them” strikes me as pretty naive in a world where avoiding spoilers on a game solution is tricky, assuming you actually *want* to be involved in gaming discourse.
- Greg Costikyan’s had a busy and controversial week. First, at Gamasutra he looks at US boardgaming’s past and tries to extrapolate it into US gaming’s future – using the Twiggy boardgame as evidence. It’s grim stuff – and probably too grim, for my money, but it’s worth chewing over. Costikyan’s an invaluable scholar due to his ability to tie all of modern gaming’s prehistory together. Secondly, on Play This Thing, he takes on Indie, Punk rock and pretension inspired by the genuinely very funny if you’re not indie, fuck off video. At least, watch that. Yes.
- Phill Cameron interviews Offtopic Production about their recently released epic Deus Ex mod, The Nameless Mod. I still haven’t had a chance to go back to it yet, annoyingly, but it’s a pretty towering achievement.
- The Thoughtshake looks at monthly fees and grinding.
- Wot No Bridge Simulators? SWIZ!
- Andy Johnson at Resolution magazine writes about the concept of terror and security in videogames. And… well, it’s the start of a series, and possibly fertile ground.
- Eurogamer on the End of Publishing – which is spinning off the BAFTA debate this week about the future of digital downloads. I actually attended, but didn’t write about it – interesting, but not really much we didn’t already know. Perhaps most telling, even someone like Paradox – who own their own digital distribution channel – still only sell 20% of their games via it. Though, admittedly, that still makes 40% of their profit.
- The Art Game debate trundles on, with Leigh Alexander talking to some key players for Kotaku.
- Gamasutra looks at ever-rolling Soap Opera which is Midway, focusing in on the boom to bust of the Mortal Kombat creators. Interesting fact: Midway haven’t turned a profit since 1999. That’s mental.
- After enormous delays, there’s a new issue of my bloody, horrific child out. The second issue of Phonogram: The Singles Club is entitled Wine And Bed And More And Again, available from all good comics shops. There’s a preview here, its reviews are here and it’s inspired by this record, amongst others.
Failed. Yet avoided tidying for a bit, so a little bit of win.
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@Mr Lizard: Flopped… twice? Darwinia was a success.
Hmm, maybe. Although the evidence suggests a moderate success at best.
EDIT – also this.
By Indie standards (back then, at least) Darwinia did fine. Although admittedly Defcon did significantly better.
And what’s the relevance of the second link? That was made days after Darwinia Steam release, which was the point at which the game really took off.
I have no idea what Darwinia’s sales were. All I know is that noises coming out of Introversion at the time and subsequently suggest they would have liked it to have sold more, which in itself indicates that a new version of Darwinia could fail to sell in sufficient numbers to sustain the company Introversion has become, which would be a great shame.
Darwinia was a lot of fun. I hate RTS, but I loved Darwinia. I never even looked at Multiwinia because I don’t want to play a MMO game. I don’t even want to play an online game. I think Introversion completely misunderstood their Darwinia audience, thinking all those Darwinia sales would translate to Multiwinia sales. It didn’t. Single player gamers didn’t want it and multiplayer gamers that didn’t buy Darwinia couldn’t have cared less.
Developers, don’t make MMO games. Period. The market is saturated already. You’re going to crash and burn if you pour resources into an MMO. There is no niche for you to carve. The halls of the dead developers is littered with people that tried to put out an MMO.
Chris: Erm. Multiwinia isn’t an MMO. It’s a RTT game with a lot of randomness.
Hum… Multiwinia is not a MMO.
Also, Multiwinia history is a bit more complicated than that, indeed the game wasn’t supposed to exist in the first place. Multiwinia was created as a necessity (imposed by Microsoft) to add multiplayer for the XBLA release. Since IV decided they didn’t want it to be an half assed add-on, they turned it into a full game. Notably, they considered naming it something completely unrelated to Darwinia (while keeping the graphic style) so as to denote it was supposed to be a completely different game as opposed to a pseudo-sequel (they eventually decided against it as everyone, community included, was calling it Multiwinia before it had been officially announced).
Additionally, if you read those blog entries by Chris Delay, he’ll note he didn’t even want to develop Multiwinia, especially since the Darwinia series had given them countless troubles.
I have to say it isn’t me saying “Oh my god he has a different opinion to me he must be bribed” in fact I find that kind of insulting. I’m not a scores man i don’t say oh my god they got an 8 it was defintily a 5. i just look at things in a different way I look at the bigger conspiracy here. Yes it’s not widespread and yes it’s very hard to track any evidence down, probably because they are very good at hiding what they do. Sometimes it will slip but still people ignore it. It’s not widespread but saying it might not happen and it doesn’t happen is wrong as well. Its many shenanigans, it could be PR guys blackmailing, or bribing a publication which goes down to the writers. It could be the writers called up to there head offices and getting a nice meal for free while they play there games. It could be all these things and they have happened. It’s very murky but like people have said why should we care, we only sometimes pay for games based on reviews.
Sorry, not MMO I guess, but every preview I read said “Multiplayer Online version of Darwinia”. Yea, ok, sounds like a multiplayer focused version of Darwinia, hence no sale. I just assumed it meant MMO rather than MO RTS.
I still think it mis-targeted the Darwinia audience. I guess if it’d been billed more as a skirmished base Darwinia battles with multiplayer support, maybe I would have looked at it. I never saw any mention of single player support in Multiwinia period. Even the name doesn’t really imply single player was an option (though, reading a wiki entry, I guess it had bots to play against).
That’s the thing really, they weren’t targetting the Darwinia Audience, but everyone thought they did.
Greg Costikyan’s absolutist view that games can’t be artistically valid if they’re commercially exploited is hopelessly adolescent.
Whichever punk band you want to use as an example of that movement’s ideology, we wouldn’t remember them now if they had refused to engage with corporate world to the extent of getting a record deal.
But then has Costikyan made any game this century, or anything you could easily class as a computer game, ever? He’s a refugee from a dead form that has nothing to say about games (by which I, like most people who aren’t aging American dorks trying to hijack the conversation to legitimise their nostalgia for their irrelevant teenage hobbies, mean computer and video games) beyond how terrible everything is. Asking his opinion of the modern world is like asking a deaf, arthritic teddy boy about hip-hop.
(You may now resume bitching about Introversion.)
Xercies: You say it is hard to track evidence down, but then you give a list of concrete examples for which it should be possible to track evidence down.
Costikyan called them “The Talking Heads!” *punches him out*
Xercies: the problem is you’re repeatedly ignoring comments from people who actually work within this business. You’re also failing to define your own terms, and then moaning when people misinterpret what you’re saying.
Does a nice meal constitute a bribe? No. It constitutes politeness and friendliness. If a publisher offers me some free grub, I’m sure I’d thank them profusely, and would think very highly of them as people. It has no bearing on what I think of their game, though, and that’s where your assumption is flawed.
People being paid actual cashy money to write a positive review is obviously far more problematic, but it simply doesn’t happen. Exclusive access in exchange for high scores? Yeah, it happens, very rarely. And it’s usually pretty straightforward to see where it’s happened. And as such, it’s exposed. No problems.
Everything you’ve said in this conversation has been heavily loaded with no real justification. You look at the bigger picture with “this conspiracy”? What conspiracy? So yes, maybe it is a bit insulting to suggest someone’s shouting “FOUL” every time someone disagrees with their opinion – but when you say things like that, or “GTA 4 must have got a free ride with its 10/10s because it’s one of the most boring games I’ve ever played” you don’t help your cause.
The vast majority of my Multiwinia games have been single player (less through choice these days, but still). It’s no different from playing skirmish games against the AI in other RTSes.
Lewis: Well, actually, if a publisher offers you some free grub and it makes you feel highly of them as people, you are likely to, at least subconsciously, transfer some of that good feeling to their games. This isn’t really a controversial concept.
So, it does have a bearing on the marks you will arrive at.
However, this is still very different from bribery, conspiracy or any other kind of malfeasance, as you point out.
There is, of course, an ethical problem in accepting gifts of any kind from devs/publishers. Unfortunately, “BRIBE CONSPIRACY!!!!” talk clouds reasonable discussion of it. Read my link from earlier, Xercies (er, not the Gay Dad one); it’s not like games writing — or any published writing — MUST fall into exactly two Manichean camps of “completely untouched by the industry funding model” and “accepting packets of cash under the table”.