Branching Out

Yesterday was Dad's Day and I hope you all had fun with or thinking about your dad.

I was sick last week, so sorry for the lack of content in the middle of my firestorm return to blogging.

I want to provide you guys with new and interesting topics to chew over, but I'm presently drawing blank. Is there anything nerd-related you guys want more of? Things I've written about you want done differently? Guest blogging?

Because this entry is kind of a cop-out, here's a picture of sad E. Honda! Comment with suggestions if you have any!

A great quote from Chris Bucholz in a Cracked article today on How to Destroy Your Highly Anticipated Video Game:

Children and immature adults: Please spend your video game time playing video games, not reading about ones that don't even exist yet. We don't actually need previews, whether about video games or consoles or anything else. Fundamentally, it does not matter to us what the next Half-Life is about until we can play it. It does not matter to us how much grit the next whatever has before we can pick it from our own teeth. And it does not matter how powerful the next Xbox is until we can take it home and it accidentally sets fire to our house.

I guess it would put a lot of advertisers, games journalists, bloggers, conventions, and other industry hype-beast handlers out of work, but it's definitely some food for thought.

The Last of Us: Ducking for Cover from the Cover-Based Archetype

One of the most applauded and original titles to come out of this year's e3 is the Action/Adventure/Survival game The Last of Us, about a "ruthless survivor" and his daughter navigating a post-apocalyptic world filled with fungus spore-infected humans and other uninfected people. The game -- made by Naughty Dog -- has, to this point, writing, environment, and characters all hitting those cinematic notes seen in hit pedigree games like Uncharted and Max Payne 3.

In an e3 presentation, we follow Joel and Ellie from inside a cafe, into flooded streets, and up onto the upper levels of a former hotel, before the duo begins ducking for cover behind a bunch of overturned furniture and around corners to sneak past fellow uninfected survivors. The Joel mucks the whole thing up and starts shooting from behind cover.

I say "mucks the whole thing up" in the same broad comparison to Max Payne 3 and Uncharted because the three are massively cinematic, story-driven experiences of characters moving down a linear, if not entirely always clear to the viewer, path. And this strong, well-set, well-developed narrative is disjointed by periodic combat sections that break up a flowing story to fire pot shots at bad guys from around corners and behind window sills.

I say this mucks it up because this is your only route down the linear path. There's nothing wrong with making huge explosions, mowing through small cities of nameless grunts, or conserving health by using overturned tables and chest-high walls. My issue is that, as a medium, gamers have been able to do that and more, and they've been able to do it for some time. It's for this reason, I feel as though the cover-based action-adventure and/or -survival archetype should blatantly steal from one of my video game heroes, Hideo Kojima.

I've made it no small point of public record that I'm a Metal Gear fanboy, but don't click away just yet! Love or hate Metal Gear's sometimes inedible plot, the series has always been about linear cinematic storytelling with many avenues to a single conclusion. The highest "ranks" in the series are issued to players that make it through the game with the fastest time and the lowest number, if any, kills. Combat is broadly discouraged; making noise and alerting enemies is often fatal; stealth is optional but generally indispensable.

When Metal Gear Solid 4 was released, the game added cover and first-person shooter elements (expanding upon initial strings of its DNA from Metal Gear Solid 3 and its similarly "beta" Metal Gear Online) to supplement crawling, walking, and running as methods through your various goal points. The game was released 4 years ago, in 2008. It's 2012 and our action-adventure games only have "kill all the dudes shooting at you in this room" as a progression option.

There is no reason that intelligent stealth options -- be it complete avoidance, silent kills, rendering enemies unconscious, etc. -- can't be incorporated into these games. There's no reason we need to rely entirely on cover-based combat to make it through a story. I don't say this as someone adverse to violence -- one of my other favorite games of all time are the Devil May Cry series -- but as someone bored with the constant hail of gunfire at an invincible point of cover, punctuated by return fire at enemies often too dense to follow suit. Variety, they say, is the spice of life, and there's a lot of excess replay time in giving players more and varied ways to save to uncover secret plots, or what have you.

And don't say AI couldn't allow it -- in both Max Payne 3 and the demo for The Last of Us, enemies frequently do not acknowledge the protagonist until he's entered their line of sight, fired upon them, or made some general ruckus (though some Max Payne 3 and Uncharted enemies suffer from omni-environmental comprehension, where stepping within a certain range in a given area automatically triggers aggression -- but this shouldn't be the case at all, if possible).

The most common complaint I've heard of MGS4 was that it focused too much on cinematics and not enough on gameplay. Uncharted et al have largely perfected that seamless blend of cinema with gameplay, where the two are almost entirely bundled together. Development of environment, setting, and character, technologically and through storytelling, are at the highest they've been in the history of video gaming. Game mechanics, similarly, have advanced to the point where your environment is just as much as tool in aiding your end goal as the number of rounds in your active weapon. But developers seem to be stuck behind these chest-high walls, rather than incorporating them into a greater tapestry of valid gameplay options that steer our protagonist from point A to B and all stops in between.

I absolutely love where we are in video game storytelling. It's certainly not art yet, but it's definitely at or greater than many top-grossing movies I've seen. But the industry seems too caught behind a single-minded notion that all the best combat is had leaning against and firing a gun from an environmental prop. Maybe there's more to be seen in The Last of Us that I can speak better of, but current billing for the game says otherwise.

TwitchTV Merges with Gamespot, Tears Shed for Those Lots

Mid-stream browsing (it was Counter-Strike 1.6, in case you were curious), I refreshed my active streams list to find that Twitch TV had underwent a fairly dramatic overhaul, where once games were easily found  at the top of the page, now they were under a wall of Sprint Ads and E3 excitement.

That's my entire screen without scrolling. Where once content was quickly and easily available (the active games button was only a click away!), now there is a search function, many requests to sign up for the service, and a boatload of gaudy ad-space (as well as content unrelated to streaming games, massive frowny face).

I scrolled to the bottom to see if there was the older link for browsing games (because why would a search for a game that isn't actively streaming, new Twitch TV formatting?), where I was able to find it a whole page scroll later:

If you can read that, Twitch is now owned by Gamespot, hence the glut of advertising and criminally messy layout redesign.

Totally not ditching the service, but really hoping the change of presentation isn't permanent... or that it even lasts for the rest of the night.

A new added "feature" (or rather, removal of one) is in the browse games menu: while number of viewers for a particular game are still active, the number of channels streaming content for that game has (at present) been removed, meaning there may be 20 streams of 10 people or one really big stream, and damned if you know until you click through to the game you wanted to watch. This is a huge gripe for me, as I like to watch Magic Online streams from prominent professional players, and it's generally easier to tell when those players are online by the number of viewers over the number of streams. I'm sure this could be avoided if I signed up, but with so many accounts online, I just want to watch some video game Internet television, not have to dance around with additional user names and passwords.

What's more, no way to tell how this will affect -- if it does, at all -- users' ad revenue/s. I know a major perk of streaming on Twitch was the ability to monetize your stream, and part of that was the helpful "reminder" the service gave you to run ads after certain time spans (obviously users are earning only a fraction of the revenue pulled in by Twitch site owners, but that's part of why you get the helpful reminders in the first place -- c'est la vie in the world of free online video content).

I'm a huge fan of Twitch, so I hope this turns out for the positive and that hopefully the change-over hiccups will be brief.

Good News Everyone! from e3

New Paper Mario!

Backtracking Like Sonic in Reverse

I could just make this a little note at the bottom of the last entry, but I think it's important enough to make a separate post. Plus, you get an editorial on my own editorial comments.

I won't for a single second say what Zynga or literally every single other video game company is doing -- throwing in ads in the middle of your video gaming experience -- is wrong. After all, you've seen ads for in-world products placed into games throughout the existence of the medium. While many game designers have used such space to add creative flare (Nuka Cola, for example) to their "game-only" products, sometimes you gots ta get paid, ya dig?

The issue here is that the products are free, or certainly close to it (in case math is hard, $0.99 is roughly 1/60 of $60 required for your average new video game), so a manufacturer needs to make money from somewhere to monetize their product and offset the expenses of labor, time, and all that other fun stuff. After all, love of video games and fun is a beautiful thing, but it won't keep you fed. Unless you eat game cartridges, I guess.

"But what about those Mountain Dew ads I skate past in Tony Hawk's Whateverathon 18 in the game I did pay $60 for?," you may not actually ever say. That's a bigger problem, hypothetical reader. While it's unsurprising that a booming video games industry would seek out additional revenue streams because that's the way running publicly traded companies works, you're also forgetting that the industry is one plagued with the same boon that makes games like Draw Something so popular -- people want free (or fractionally-cheap) entertainment and they want it now.

It's a two-headed beast -- on one hand, you have pirates who are not paying for your game but have a copy that they did not pay for; while on the other, you have an explosive game resale industry that is even creeping into stores that have only sold games new for the longest time.

In games resale as in games piracy, the manufacturer of the game makes $0. Nothing. None dollars. And while I'm not going to argue for either side of the debate in this space, if you are a publicly traded company and many units of your product are moving, but you are seeing no return despite that movement, you're missing out on money, and that's not good when your job is to make the money from the products you put out.

But, up until this point, we've opened our doors to this. All of the forum posts in the world complaining about ads in games haven't dented game sales. And for the advertisers, even pirate and resold copy players are going to be told to drink refreshing Mountain Dew -- it's a win-win situation for them!

My hope? Aside from continuing my vampire analogy? That creative use of ad space -- once again, Nuka Cola -- doesn't disappear. Ads in games aren't new or interesting, even if real-world corporate advertisements in-game are certainly a newer concept (not entirely, of course, unless you think the Cool Spot game for Genesis was unrelated to 7-Up's 90s mascot Cool Spot), but we've also seen some neat, interesting, fun, and original things come out of these fantasy video game worlds. I'm hoping that corporate influence doesn't completely kill that going forward.

Why Zynga Represents Gaming Vampirism

Dear Internet,
I'm sorry I abandoned you for so long. Did you miss me? I missed you.
I blame tumblr for my absence, that stuff's addictive.

Anyway, I'm back for the foreseeable future.

Some updates? Zynga. It's everywhere. This isn't the hottest news, but it's a trend I want to put out in modern gaming -- monetization of free (or cheap) content. John Cheese touched on it briefly yesterday in a Cracked article, but one of my close friends noted that she was surprised to see Words With Friends under the Zynga browser/app game empire, and now I can't help but notice it everywhere.

Vampires, similarly, are not a new hot topic. But the theory behind most non-sparkly vampires is that they suck out your blood, the smart ones don't suck out all your blood, and, most importantly, they can't get into your house unless you invite them in (hence the whole dashing ladies'-man mythos behind most vampires -- most people wouldn't ask Nosferatu to come over and play XBox).

The company "recently" also purchased Draw Something, as evidenced by the fact that my iPhone now cuts to the game when I receive new drawings instead of allowing me to get to my next text messages that may be considerably more important than a picture of a taco one of my game-friends drew (that's a lie; I drew the taco, sorry friends who play Draw Something with me).

The theory behind this is, obviously, "Wow, Angry Birds has a theme park and knock-off merchandise sold in China Town; I want a cut of that sweet omnipresent popularity money pie." While it's decidedly more difficult to market "Phone Scrabble" and "Phone Pictionary" in a way that doesn't break existing copyrights, especially absent "likable" mascots, the company has all available information app makers are privy to even with a free app and no ad space sold in-app, so the joke's on you.

Oh, did I forget to mention ad space in-app? Yeah, they have that too. While I've only ever clicked on an in-app ad twice because of gorilla hands, ad dollars are huge. You're seen in a Zynga game, after all, and everyone on earth with a phone that doesn't still have an antenna plays those. It worked for Google, and while Facebook is sort of flailing right now, it worked and may work again for them.

What's the takeaway? In-game advertising adds value for the game maker. While it may be white noise to you, the gamer, it's a new stream of revenue for an industry that is frequently stolen from or that even gives away its products. And we're still buying games (or downloading them for free).

If you clicked the above link to Cracked, you'll note that the static may start getting louder and louder with these ads. Just remember, we started saying it was okay with increasing frequency around this time. And I mean we -- I'm just as guilty of helping generate more revenue for their company as any other person. We let the vampires in; I don't know how much blood you have to spare, but hopefully they're smart about draining it.