VectorStorm Blog

People look at me funny when I tell them this, but I’ve always had this strange, irrational desire to play a game where I got to pilot a properly huge capital ship.  Something like a Star Destroyer from the Star Wars universe;  something that takes a good three to five minutes to turn around.  And I don’t want to turn the ship by clicking on a UI element that instructs an auto-pilot to turn the ship around, and then perhaps speed up time to make the auto-pilot complete the manoeuvre faster;  no, I want to be able to have direct joystick control to the ship’s thrusters.

I occasionally think about making such a game myself, some day.  But it seems like a lot of effort to go to for an experience that nobody but myself would likely be interested in.  Or rather, anyone who might be interested in such a thing is probably playing Eve Online.

Instead, I’ve been playing around with Independence War a bit, which is a game from way back in 1997, and which was kind of halfway to what had been in my head.  Of course, it isn’t pretty by modern standards (or even by its contemporary standards).  And it’s not accessible at all — it positively requires reading the manual to figure out what’s going on, and the difficulty curve is all over the map (I was stuck on the first combat tutorial level for the better part of a week, for example, because the training opponent kept absolutely steam-rolling me).

I-War is pretty squarely focused on combat, rather than on exploration or.. well.. anything else at all.  but its deep simulation of a large starship, its component systems, and the mechanics of piloting it in a frictionless, zero-gravity environment are intriguing, and I keep wondering whether something more interesting than “…and they fight!” could be done with such a system.

I realise that this probably dates me horribly, but I’ve always felt that games such as Elite were made a lot stronger and more compelling by forcing the player to learn non-combat skills, such as learning to dock their spacecraft manually, learning to trade goods on their economic markets, figuring out how to navigate from place to place, and so on.  These extra things to do just made the world larger and richer than the exclusively-combat-focused games which followed.

I had a huge three-page-long essay here a few minutes ago, but I’ve changed my mind about posting it.

Instead, I’m just going to make a prediction.  Please feel free to ignore this post entirely.  It’s just that the last time I made a prediction, it was in a web forum post on TIGSource, and that prediction has long since vanished along with the thread of which it was a part (which is too bad, since the prediction was quite prescient, I feel, predicting the effectiveness of “pay what you want” pricing strategies about six months before 2DBoy turned the indie game movement on its ear by trying it with World of Goo, to spectacular success).

My prediction:

The next big revolution in game pricing, I predict, is going to be realising that the “Freemium” business model (“the game is free, but you can pay real money for extra features”) is unnecessary for attracting a large player base, and actually drives many of the most enthusiastic and dedicated players away from a game.

Specifically, I propose that the core business model behind “Freemium” will work better, without the “for extra features” part of its approach.  Without needing to design around monetization, you end up with better games, and therefore naturally larger player bases.  The larger player bases then result in an even smaller average payment being required per player, in order to cover development costs.

The return of shareware

My assertion is that modern technology and infrastructure has advanced to the point that early-1990s-style “shareware” has become viable (i.e.:  ”here, have this fully functional and awesome game.  If you like it and can afford to help me out, please send me a few dollars.  If you can’t spare anything, then don’t worry about it, but maybe think about it later on, once you’re doing okay.”).  This approach allows a game author to create any game at all, without needing to design monetization strategies which often only serve to fragment the player base, or even raise ethical concerns.  It focuses the author’s priorities exactly where we all know they ought to be:  on making a great game.

This open approach didn’t work in the 90s (in fact, it failed in a fairly spectacular way), because direct payments required people to write checks to somebody whom they’d never met or heard of, and to mail that cheque in the physical post (often internationally) to an address that was in some who-knows-how-old game, and may not even be where the author actually lives any more.  It was just too much bother and too uncertain a process for most people to actually bother with.

But today, game authors aren’t anonymous people who players don’t care about — you talk to them on Twitter and read their blogs and watch them on YouTube.  They’re real people in a way that they never were before, which means that their audiences can and do care about them.  What’s more, we now have this tremendous online payment infrastructure, so it’s no longer such a terrible pain to try to make a direct payment to an author you want to support.

Game makers whom I’ve met

I’ve written before about how when I was young, I decided that I wanted to make video games as a career, and how I made a list of the game makers that I wanted to meet, once I was in the industry.

I met Wil Wright by working at his company for six months.  I met Steve Meretzky at a Game Developer Conference several years ago.  I met Chris Crawford by sending him an e-mail while I was at university, and we had rather a long and interesting discussion about the state of storytelling in games at that time.

The one guy on my list that I’ve still never spoken or written to is Tim Schafer.  But honestly, I feel like I know Tim better than I know any of the others, simply because I’ve been reading his Twitter feed and watching him on YouTube, and hearing so much from him about his family and business over time.

It’s already proven

So my assertion is that the conditions are now such that the early-90s’ version of the “shareware” concept could work today, in a way that it never could have worked back then.  But technically, it’s already been working for a few years with Tarn Adams‘ development of Dwarf Fortress, which is funded in exactly this way.  But Dwarf Fortress is a niche game with a niche audience, and everyone in the industry has been treating it as some kind of special-case situation that couldn’t be replicated by anyone else.  But I don’t think that’s true any more.  All it’d take for someone else to achieve the same success is a really good game with a really big and passionate player base, and an author who strongly and consistently engages on a personal level with the players of the game.

And I think that we’ll be seeing a lot of this in the not-too-distant future.

An old-school simplistic definition would state that games are about choices;  that “gameplay” consists solely of the set of choices which can be made by a player.  You can see how someone who thought of games as being Chess or Backgammon or Go might define a game in this narrow way.

A more modern definition would also point out the role of mechanics;  that not only must the player be able to make a choice, but he must also be able to carry out that choice, as can be tricky in games like Jacks, Jenga, or Tiddlywinks.

An even more modern definition would advocate for the importance of setting;  that not only must the player be able to make a choice and to mechanically carry it out, but that the choice must exist within some external context to imbue that choice with meaning that extends beyond the boundaries of the game itself.

Today I’m going to be talking about choices.  I’ll leave mechanics and settings for another day.  Warning in advance:  this is kind of a long article, focusing on game design theory and practice, which I’ve been writing for the last few months, just trying to get it all straight in my own head.  Click through if you’re interested.

Continue reading “In praise of thresholds”

In between work, home projects, and other things, I’ve also been spending some time playing L.A. Noire, and trying to fit it into my worldview of the current state of the video game industry.  The following is going to be completely spoiler-free, so do feel free to read it whether or not you’ve played or are planning to play the game (and I would absolutely recommend anyone interested in the current state of the video game industry to play this game)

To begin with, I should again mention that I’ve been in the commercial video game industry (with one recent six month break) continuously for the last fourteen years;  that’s more or less since the first accelerated 3D cards hit the market.  My comments in this post (and indeed, all the rest of this site) reflect only my own opinions, and not those of any of the fine people who have employed me or with whom I have worked in this time.

I should also mention, just as full disclosure, that there was a point where I might have gone to work on L.A. Noire during the latter half of its seven year development timeline, and that I now know and work with people who did work on various parts of this game.  I’m not going to go into any of those details, but I thought I should put it out there just as fair warning, so that people can take the following comments with any grains of salt they feel are deserved.

Full discussion is below the fold.
Continue reading “L.A. Noire is Babylon 5″

Here’s an interesting thing I’ve learned from playing around with GUI stuff on the iPhone and iPad (and I expect this to carry over to other touchscreen surfaces as well):

On a finger-based touchscreen, it’s much easier and less stressful for a user to press buttons which are tall and narrow, than to press buttons which are wide and short.

Desktop computers and the Internet have made us all really comfortable with wide and short buttons.  We think of buttons in that capsule shape because the text labels that we put into the buttons tend to be wide and short as well.  But on touch surfaces, it’s tricky to see which part of a finger is going to touch the screen first, and so just precisely how high on the screen our touch is going to be.  By comparison, we can be pretty certain where the touch will happen horizontally.

With the two interfaces shown here, I’ve found that it’s far, far easier for someone to press the tall+thin buttons on the right than the wide+short ones on the left, even though the buttons on the left are much larger on screen (that is, they contain more pixels).

As a fun side-note, further testing suggests to me that square buttons are best when a stylus is being used instead of a finger.

Obviously, none of this has been rigorously tested in a scientifically valid way.  But in hindsight, it seems obvious that the ergonomics of finger-based and stylus-based touchscreens would work out this way.

Anyhow, just thought I’d throw it out there, in case it was a new idea to anybody else.