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?

Big gaming new this week as John Carmack of id Software demoed his latest game engine - dubbed id Tech 5 - at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference on Monday. His short video showed dune buggies driving through a sun-dappled canyon (more Halo than Doom).

Carmack touted the 20 gigabytes of textures contained in the landscape, and said game artists will have a seamless and "unlimited ability to change as much as they want" of the environments. The engine will run on Mac - duh - as well as PC, Xbox, and Playstation systems. He didn't mention what kind of game id will be making with the new wares.

Gamers recently marked the 15 year anniversary of Wolfenstein 3-D, id Software's seminal shooter. I spent many, many hours interviewing the original id guys about the development of the game when I was researching Masters of Doom. I looked back at my interview transcripts with Carmack, and noticed an interesting nugget that I'll share here with you. In it, Carmack says Wolfenstein could have had deathmatching before Doom. Here's an excerpt:

This July, the site GameTap will start airing animated series based on popular videogames. The first up is Tomb Raider.

But, behind-the-scenes, GameTap is up to something more interesting: digital distribution. GameTap, launched in October 2005, by Turner Broadcasting, is pushing an all-you-can-eat subscription model. For a nominal monthly fee, gamers download a choice of hundreds of games, from Dig Dug to Splinter Cell: Pandora’s Box. The model isn’t just Netflix, it’s iTunes.

You knew this post was coming, right? If there's one existential question both developers and players ask about games, it is, "Can a game can be considered Art?" The latest foray into this realm I've read is Ian Bogost's "Why We Need More Boring Games" on gamasutra.com. That article is also a – perhaps unknowing – member of a set that inspires one of my personal existential questions, namely, "Why do all 'Game as Art' conversations invoke Casablanca?"

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.

Here's one of several articles out about gaming on the Mac. With John Carmack at this year's WWDC keynote, showing off id Software's latest engine, id Tech 5, and Electronic Arts declaring a renewed love for Macs, people are singing hosannas about games coming to the Mac again.

Nope. Not going to happen.

In this installment of the behind-the-scenes interviews for my book Masters of Doom, former Microsoft Group Manager of Multimedia Technology, Evangelism and Marketing Alex St. John tells the inside story of how he corralled Bill Gates into donning a trenchcoat and shotgun for a video to promote Windows 95 as a gaming platform.

ALEX ST. JOHN: In 1994, Microsoft was about to introduce Windows 95. I was fan of Wolfenstein 3-D, and id Software had just released Doom. Doom was all the rage across Microsoft. We’d seen a lot of games come and go, but Doom was like a huge religious phenomenon...

Of course, I'm not calling you on an iPhone, I don't work with one of those. But oh, I want to. Get back to me about that, will you?

Yeah, the iPhone needs flash in the worst way. Why? Games, man, games. It's all about the games. Give me games on the iPhone. Imagine what you could do with that touch interface....

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.

Yes, I should be posting about E3: it's the biggest video game show in the US, and it's going on right now. Even though it has been moved to a gas station bathroom in Santa Monica, apparently, it's still a big deal. No more roaming for unknown gems in the wilds that were Kentia Hall anymore....

Anyway, on the heels of my last but one post, which was on the heels of Rob's post, about video games and their effects, yet another researcher has come out saying that violent video games may be good for some kids.

I posted earlier about Games as Art, a perennial topic among developers and players of games. Of course I come down on the side of the fact that games can be capital-A Art, at their best: not because I'm an artist myself, and not because I develop games, but because I know a thing or two.

Roger Ebert says I'm wrong. Clive Barker says I'm right, but really, do I want to be on Clive Barker's team? Sigh.

Maybe Webkinz, the virtual pet craze, haven't completely taken over your life. But if you've got young kids, or know friends with them, then you're probably hip to this craze. As I've blogged before, Webkinz are stuffed animals that have a virtual life online. You get a serial number on the tag, punch in the code, then "care" for the critter in a game-like world.

With the product selling 2 million copies, the imitators are falling quickly in line. Funkeys is one of the more intriguing candidates. As Kotaku tells us, these are little collectible dolls that contain games. Plug in the big-headed character into your PC, and it unlocks a new chunk of a branded virtual world called Terrapinia. The more Funkeys you buy, the more parts of the world you can explore.

Haven't had your fill of BioShock's watery wonders?

Check out GameSpot's clever comparison between BioShock running on an Xbox versus the game on PC. You may be surprised by the results. Systems running Vista and Direct X trump the 360 offer a clearly higher resolution. If that's not enough detail, check out the site's hardware guide for more fine tuning. And for added tweaking, boot up the game while you're on Xbox Live to get an update that improves game stability and Artificial Intelligence behavior.

What, you say, you haven't played it yet at all? And why is that?

Here's my long overdue second installment of the Masters of Doom Files - interview excerpts from my book on John Carmack and John Romero, co-creators of Doom and Quake. In this bit, Carmack discusses his first brush with user-created modifications. It happened shortly after the release of their seminal first person shooter, Wolfenstein 3-D.

JOHN CARMACK: We were seeing some of the early mods for Wolfenstein even before Spear of Destiny shipped. The way people had to do that, you had the data that Wolfenstein shipped with and they had to write tools which would patch the data files and replace the stuff with that. One of the things with the early aspect of Doom was that we would have way that you could add things to it without having to change the original stuff. Once someone patched their stuff, they can’t go back to the original one without reinstalling it. We consider that a bad thing.

Lately, a group of us at work have been looking through submitted portfolios. The major industry shows are done, and HR has a few boxes of DVDs and CDs for us to go through. And we go through them all. Having gone through a lot lately, I have some advice for would-be game artists, and this is as good a place as any to impart it. It's fresh in my mind, and since I've been away from technology lately, fly fishing for salmon in the middle of nowhere, I'm not good for au courant industry news.

So, I finished Bioshock a little while ago and ended up fairly disappointed. Although the environments continued to amaze and the Alice In Wonderland fullness of the art and model design remained sexy, in its way, the gameplay and narrative faltered badly in the last quarter of the game.

It's a nice idea, episodic games: developers love the notion of low-investment, fast-turnaround, high-upside games. Crank something small and polished out every 3-4 months, and it will eventually be an unstoppable juggernaut of cash that keeps building, as you keep churning out small highly-polished little gems, without killing yourselves with crunch-schedules and Mountain Dew.

Why doesn't it work out that way?

Often, players cannot understand why game companies seem to move at a glacial pace with updates. A bug hangs around for months before being fixed, and the question is why?

Because we know what we're doing.

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.

Not long ago, I blogged on EA's pitch for a super-machine: a universal console that lets you play any game on a single platform. Expect to hear more and more grumblings about this in months to come. What other medium parses your content access according to hardware? Imagine if you could only watch CSI on a Samsung TV set, or listen to Radiohead on an iPod. Shouldn't we be able to play Halo 3 and Metroid Prime 3 on the same machine?

Over in the UK, one developer is at least working to get PC games out of their tiny boxes. A company called t5 has created a way to bring PC games to set-top boxes. Here's the scoop: "Dubbed 'Instant Gaming', the virtual games console technology works similarly to the Remote Play option between PS3 and PSP (currently only poorly demonstrated with Factor 5's otherwise forgeable Lair) or video-on-demand services, essentially transmitting MPEG compressed video footage of the game from remote servers to set-top boxes. The games and t5 Labs software are maintained on central servers, meaning that consumers need only a compatible set-top box and no software."

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.

The news about the new MacBook Air cannot have escaped anyone reading this: if you're online at all, you have seen effusive mentions of this new, incredibly tiny, laptop. And it is pretty cool, if you don't mind sacrificing almost everything on the altar of size.

But for gamers, the sacrifice is large. Integrated Intel GMA X3100 graphics with 144mb of shared video memory is a poor display driver, very poor, and games from six or seven years ago can tax it. While obviously Apple has no intention of targeting gamers with this road warrior laptop, it is another sign that Apple never targets gamers. Which I find odd: the Aqua UI and technology like Quartz Extreme run better the better your video card is. If you please gamers, you'll please everyone with your performance. And you'll be able to run the most lucrative consumer software outside Microsoft Office.

Koreans have made the addictive online game Kart Rider a hit - and a cash cow. How? By shelling out money in microtransactions to upgrade their avatars and game experience. According to a BusinessWeek story, gamers spent up to $250 million on virtual goods alone.

Now Electronic Arts is getting into the free gaming game with the release of Battlefield Heroes, an online-only title that will be completely supported by ads and transactions. EA dipped a toe in the water with a free FIFA online soccer game that is reportedly pulling down $1 million a month in South Korea. I suppose the question is whether western gamers will spend real cash on virtual accessories. This is already happening to some degree in EverQuest, World of Warcraft, and Second LIfe, but we have yet to see a successful game in the west that is built on a Kart Rider style model. Ultimately, I don't think it's the model that's the problem - it's creating a game that compelling enough to make players want to bust out their wallets and accessorize.

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.

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.

Six or seven years ago, when strolling through a local EB, Gamestop or other chain retailer, the PC games section invariably rivaled the respective console sections in terms of real estate and density. These days, PC games barely get a 2-sided floor rack while the console games festoon the walls like party favors at a Paris Hilton bash.

Most assuredly, there are a variety of reasons for this phenomenon that I won't go into here. It is relatively safe to say, however, that PC games market share has declined in recent years. And PC games are losing their unique advantages as consoles begin to incorporate such elements as updates/patches, well-supported online play and other digital downloads. Consoles are even "catching up" in terms of hardware controllers and the like.

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.

I had the ultra-cool opportunity to check out Will Wright's astounding new evolutionary simulation game, Spore, not long ago. And some of the most fun was in creating the creatures. Now you can try this out for yourself.

The Spore Creature Creator is now available as a free trial here. When the game comes out this fall, you'll be able to really see your creature come to life - in a unique society and universe.

Prepare to be Spored.

Check out this write-up in ModDB for the growing discussion over user-generated content coming from Will Wright's upcoming game, Spore. As I mentioned before, the free Spore Creature Creator is now available and spawning some, um, provocative creations.

Spong has an interesting item about the Star Trek massively multiplayer online game. It seems the makers of the game are bullish on letting console gamers play with computer games on the same server - not an original or new idea, but a sort of Holy Grail that has always been interesting in theory, but in practice, not so much.

Why does this matter? Because the Big Geek Dream in the Sky is that players could (and should) be able to get their game on anywhere/anytime - including cross-platform competition and cooperation. Hopefully, Star Trek will deliver on its promise and take some needed strides to get gamers there.

Spong has an interesting item about the Star Trek massively multiplayer online game. It seems the makers of the game are bullish on letting console gamers play with computer games on the same server - not an original or new idea, but a sort of Holy Grail that has always been interesting in theory, but in practice, not so much.

Why does this matter? Because the Big Geek Dream in the Sky is that players could (and should) be able to get their game on anywhere/anytime - including cross-platform competition and cooperation. Hopefully, Star Trek will deliver on its promise and take some needed strides to get gamers there.