The Sandbox

The fervor behind the emergence of the first-person shooter ("FPS") game genre, began by Wolfenstein 3D and cemented by its successor, Doom, was in part because of the implicit promise: soon, I will be living in a virtual world. Heck, I'm already pretty much there, looking out through the eyes of a person as they have complete freedom of movement in a 3D world. Soon, I'll be in the cyberspace of Snow Crash. W00T.

That was 1993. Yeah, fourteen years ago. What happened? Why has the most significant interaction innovation in the genre been "jumping"? Why are "cyber-cafes" depressingly non-virtual places, where my consciousness manifestly does not exist in a luminiferous ether of an endless datastream? What went wrong?

In my previous post, I was talking about why games aren't "progressing" the way players imagine they would, why games seem to make only modest progress, when there's a clearly obvious "destination" that everyone can see. Why aren't we running full-tilt to that virtual universe, where everyone can do anything?

The first reason is that, well, worlds are expensive: worlds have a lot of stuff, and people need to make that stuff. The next has to do with the technology available to create those worlds. Moore's Law is fine and all, because it means polygons get shinier and bumpier as computers get faster. But why aren't the programmers of these games using this tech to its fullest advantage in the game design? They get most things right, but somehow every coder at every company is somehow too dumb to realize what players have been expecting for years.

The final post in my rant about why virtual worlds are only creeping along, instead of already being the total freedom universes we thoroughly expect them to be. Frankly, I'll be glad to be done with this topic: I should know better than to start things off with a multi-episode blogging saga.

To review: worlds are expensive to make, and the horsepower to run worlds of great sophistication is limited. Finally, and what I believe to be the most important – and interesting – reason why virtual worlds are slow to progress is that of interface and input devices.

This article at CNN points out something that most gamers have known for a long time, that games can be great ways to connect with other people, that they can foster good social relationships, instead of being the tools of isolation that they're accused of being.

On the heels of Rob's post about the possibility of a DSM classification for "video game addiction", Destructoid recently found an article on the research of Oregon psychiatrist Jerald Block which concluded that the denial of violent games to teen killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold was a catalyst for what became the Columbine massacre.

As someone who has worked on several FPS games, I completely understand this conclusion. FPS games are widely misunderstood in the popular media.

No, it's not a wireless guitar for playing the most excellent Guitar Hero. It's the Messenger Kit for XBox360. Thirty bucks, and if Microsoft is smart, they'll quickly make it standard in all XBox360s.

Why standard? Because then developers will actually develop for it. Whole genres of multiplayer games open up when you have a keyboard to chat: games where lots of people want to talk, and network performance makes voice a non-starter. Now please excuse me while I go get a contract to put the Infocom adventures on XBox Live...

CBS will, at noon today, be broadcasting the 2007 World Series of Video Games. Featured games will include Guitar Hero II and Fight Night Round 3, games that can be simply watched as if they were musical performances or traditional boxing matches respectively. I would go so far as to say that some folks would reasonably be able to tune in to see FNR3 and not immediately know it was a video game, the graphics being as good as they are.

But what does this mean for games? Or CBS? Anything?

Back in the day, you'd blast someone in a first person shooter for fun. Now, thanks to a new game and company called Kwari, you can do it for cold hard cash.

The game, now in beta, raises the stakes by letting players put up their own money in each match. With every kill, you get cash from your prey - and vice versa. There are also jackpot prizes that can be earned by, say, collecting keys or carrying a special item - the Pill - for a given period of time without getting slaughtered.

Someone told me that Halo 3 has hit the stores. I've been too busy playing Team Fortress 2 to notice...

Halo 3 has such hype, and such an economic swirl around it, that one would be forgiven if one thought that it represents the apex of action gaming. But I'm one of those folks that can't get past the fact that handheld-controller FPS gamers are dilettantes compared to mouse-and-keyboard FPS gamers. Maybe I'm an uninformed fogey, but from the brouhaha I heard about the ethical ramifications of the XCM XFPS adapter on the XBox online FPS community, I'm guessing that the FPS community at large thinks the same thing.

TF2 is my new game for the next little while.

Someone named Tuncer has a blog on Inside Mac Games, and he has entered an opinion in the recent, very minor dustup between Valve and the Mac gaming community over HL2. Gabe made some comment to the effect of, "Apple is hard to work with," to which Tuncer says that Valve made an "outrageous" demand of $1m upfront for taking the project on, that the only thing here is greed greed greed.

Um, yeah. Tuncer, the clue phone is ringing, and I think it's for you.

Gametap.com has Daikatana available to play for free until December 31st, which I discovered reading this retrospective linked from CNN. (I hope having Daikatana FOR FREE isn't indicative of the quality of Gametap, which I haven't tried. If Daikatana, in 2007, is supposed to be a draw, there's another fiasco in the offing, here.) Released in 2000 with expectations and press that really didn't get equalled until perhaps Halo 3, it did nothing close to the business it was required to do. Which everyone who was part of the industry knew, at the time.

Game companies are filled with people who are good at math, and when a game is delayed for as long as Daikatana was, with as many people employed by Ion Storm, in the most expensive office space in Dallas,... it was an obvious disaster, awaiting realization. That fiasco assessment doesn't even begin to address what was already known about the game prior to release: its design was supposed to be revolutionary and amazing, but "Superfly Johnson"? Really? What possible interest could there be in a design where "Superfly Johnson" is not an ironic character?

A sad, cautionary lesson, Ion Storm.

You are, if you like, able to download a teaser trailer for Duke Nukem Forever. iD has released Quakes 1, 2, 3, and 4, and Doom 3, in the time it has taken for this Duke Nukem sequel to generate something that might be a trailer with some game assets. The first version of Battlefield came along several years into the DNF vigil, and it has several sequels. And of course, no release year is given: just "Stay Tuned". For a game that will be a first-person shooter, which is a well-solved game genre, it's just mystifying what could possibly be at issue preventing release, aside from, "No one has actually been working on it, at all."

I'm sort of at a loss. I mean, picking on DNF as "vaporware" is the gaming industry's equivalent of jokes about airline food: there's absolutely nothing worth saying about it anymore. So why do I post? I'm just weirded out by the release of a trailer that does absolutely nothing to suggest that anything has changed about DNF. Nothing is imminent, that I can tell, nothing is clearer. It's just silly.

I bow before our new End of Year Best-of list overlords. Here's my short list of my favorites of 2007:

1. Lord of the Rings Online. Because I worked on it for four and a half years to ship it, and have worked on it since then, and it's clearly the best MMO of 2007. No personal prejudice here, no sir. But I'm playing it, which says a lot about a game that I've worked on (which I seldom play post-launch).

2. Rock Band. My childhood dreams of drumming, stifled by my parents who desired peace and quiet in their house, are now finding outlet, and obliterating my wife's goodwill towards me.

3. Portal. Great little game. Suffers from the "giant thick client to play a teeny-tiny game" problem, but who cares when it's this fun? You want thin client, play Flash Portal.

4. Super Mario Galaxy. I used to disdain Nintendo, early in my gaming career, as nothing but Cute. Jeebus, was I an idiot.

5. God of War 2 / Heavenly Sword. They're the same game, with different avatars of destruction. But they're both onslaughts of epic annihilation that appeals to the little kid in me that still writhes with excitement when I see shiny things.

6. Bioshock. Great art direction. Gameplay and story were sort of meh, but they tried.

7. Team Fortress 2. TF is back, and it's still fun. I miss EMPs, though.

8. Phase. Addictive little iPod game. Five bucks well spent.

Not on the list, but still decent: Halo 3, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect. They're really good, but I was not inspired to finish any of them, so I can't feel good about giving them a final score.

Didn't play: Call of Duty 4, Crysis, lots of other things. I only have so much time.

It was a good year for games. 2008 will have some work cut out for it: Metal Gear Solid 4 doesn't look so "ZOMG" these days, now that we've seen other games that look just as good.

As a relatively hard-core gamer (for some liberal value of "hard-core", as I don't have a lot of time to play these days), I am constantly surprised at the odd successes in the casual game market. I would think that among the most played games on the Web these days are Slayers, Werewolves, Vampires, & Zombies, and Scrabulous. I mean, I know, personally, only a handful of people playing. But none of those people are hard-core gamers, and the number of people in the world that are not hard-core gamers is counted in billions. And they're all apparently on Facebook, making Mark Zuckerberg a billionaire.

Meanwhile, I still grind away at more "important" games. Something's not right.

"Gold farming", for those that don't know, is the sweatshop business of this new century. It is the selling of virtual assets, usually virtual gold, in MMOs for real money. As an MMO developer, I know how pernicious it is: sellers are hard to track down, because they create disposable accounts faster than you ban them. Ban one, and they already have a lineup of other accounts ready to go. They spam chat channels, they spam players with the in-game mail system, they farm resources with a ruthless efficiency, which makes legitimate players angry.

And now Blizzard has won an injunction against one company, in what one hope is the first blow that kills the whole gold farming industry.

More categories for this article than I thought possible... it's about everything.

Leigh Alexander is very much worth reading, when you're in search of thoughts on the game industry. Two recent articles are the case For and the case Against this new world of entertainment media convergence. Is this intertwining of games, web, movies, television, cell phones, GPS, fresh baked bread, and the fat pipe connecting your checking account to media producers' coffers, is this good for games?

Leigh gives the definitive maybe. I mostly agree.

Found on Kotaku, Disbarment with Extreme Prejudice, that's the recommendation by the Florida Bar, for Jack Thompson. OK, "enhanced disbarment" is the term, but whatever, I'm a violent game designer, and I am trying to immolate your very soul with my overtly destructive vocabulary. Rawr!

So it goes to the Florida Supreme Court, for review on September 2nd: mark your calendars, I'm sure it will be a colorful countdown come late August. It doesn't look good for Thompson, who declared that the reviewing judge did not have the authority to rule over him and walked out on the hearing. "Do too," she said, unecclesiastically.