ihobo

Microsoft Counts Backwards

It’s like a question from one of those IQ tests that assess how white and middle class you are: Complete the following sequence: “Xbox, Xbox 360…” The answer, we now know, is the Xbox One, Microsoft’s newly unveiled ugly brick of a console. I’m fascinated by the number base that Microsoft’s marketing department are using that has ‘one’ in the third slot, and ‘360’ in the second.

The explanation for the new silly name is that it’s “The all-in-one entertainment system” – which makes it sound a lot like the PS4. Or for that matter the PS3. Especially considering that what makes the Xbox One into an all-in-one system is the final acceptance of the Blu-Ray Disc format, which Sony has been using for seven years. Everything else the Xbox One can do sounds awfully like everything the Xbox 360.5 (i.e. 360+Kinect) can do – except, hopefully, turn itself from something that looks like an ugly brick into something that is literally an ugly brick thanks to shoddy early version engineering problems.

Microsoft gained ground on Sony in the previous generation to the extent that they are currently ahead by a nose – the installed base figures are at 77.3 million versus 77.2 million. Of course, this figure doesn’t take into account the fact that Microsoft have made more money on the 360 thanks to their very clever online strategy based around Xbox Live, something Sony were very slow to recognise was going to be a requirement in order to remain competitive. But given that Microsoft went from number three to joint second last time around, you would think that they would use declaring their cards after all their competitors as an opportunity to announce something show-stopping that it would be too late for their rivals to imitate. Apparently, turned to their R&D department and found nothing that was ready.

What’s seriously missing right now is the answer to the question: “You must own an Xbox One because….”, and frankly at the moment the answer seems to be “you’re an Xbox Live subscriber and Microsoft need you to upgrade.” My Twitter feed this morning was full of 0people making jokes about the fact that the new Kinect is always on, and speculating about who it will Skype as you are doing something embarrassing… Apart from the fact that it is an upgrade over its predecessor, there’s little of interest about the Xbox One as it currently stands, and certainly no reason for anyone not already locked into Xbox Live to choose it over its rival, the PS4 (unless, of course, you are in love with Kinect – which almost no gamer hobbyists are).

Of course, it’s always been the “killer app” that makes a console – the original Xbox was saved almost single handedly by Bungie’s Halo: Combat Evolved, for instance, but the way things are going with AAA development it’s become much harder to make exclusives worthwhile. The problem is twofold: on the one hand, development costs continue to rise – Epic’s Tim Sweeney stated: “We are hoping costs at the start of the next generation to only be double the cost of the start of the previous generation”. Yikes! On the other hand, the truly big franchises can’t afford to be tied to a single platform any more. The moment Rockstar North decided ‘never again’ to platform exclusives, the “killer app” became a very different proposition since all the major franchises have now gone multi-platform and the odds of a new franchise getting major traction from launch is rather low.

Although I am no fan of Microsoft, the 360 did pull a grudging respect out of me because it successfully initiated a service model that made the economics of console manufacture less horrific. But the economics of blockbuster game development is becoming ever more horrific, and to describe the release schedules for retail games over the past few years as ‘stale’ is only unfair because there are still plenty of players lining up to play sequels of the same old franchises. I’m at a loss to explain why Microsoft think the Xbox One can succeed just on the basis of it being “The all-in-one entertainment system”, especially since Sony has for several years been touting the PS3 with the tagline “It only does everything”. Your unique selling point is supposed to distinguish you from your competitors – not make your new product sound like your competitor’s previous product.

The currently-ending generation marked a change in focus towards online – the coming generation is apparently marked by a general absence of any compelling ideas, coupled with the ever-present threat of a total collapse in the high street retail of videogames. Except for the original PlayStation, I’ve owned every console hardware released from the Sega Megadrive onwards. Perhaps I’m just getting old, but I’ve yet to see any reason to buy any of the new consoles and Microsoft and Sony better hope that it’s just us 8-bit gamesters who are nonplussed by the future being offered. With Nintendo’s Wii U sales failing to meet even the most conservative of expectations, Sony and Microsoft are locked into a deadly battle, tumbling into a high-tech Khazad-dûm of their own creation – and it’s not yet clear who is Gandalf and who is the balrog…

Dr. Juul in the House

Since I haven’t a new games post this week, don’t miss the exchanges with Dr. Jesper Juul in the comments for Fiction Denial. Some great points raised!

On the Verge of Beginning to Finish

Still more swamped than a drunken Cajun fisherman who mistakes a log for his boat. But I can see the light switch at the junction nearest the end of the tunnel, even if no actual light is reaching my retinas at this precise moment in time...

• I was on national radio yesterday, on BBC Radio 4's consumer affairs show, You and Yours, commenting on (of all things) the portrayal of disfigurement in videogames. It’s a step up from local radio, to be sure! Slightly too many 'ums' coming out of my mouth for my taste, but I guess I did fine. If you’re in the UK you can listen for the next week on BBC iPlayer. My slot is 20 minutes in, after gold traders and smart meters.
• Now less than one day’s writing (about 3,000 words) short of a first draft manuscript for Chaos Ethics! So far inside its world now that I no longer know how people usually use the word 'ethic'.
• Have a final version of my PhD materials approved by my supervisor squad now. Soon, I shall be a real fake doctor!
• After a year, the journal Games and Culture found one reviewer to provide feedback for "Implicit Game Aesthetics". Alas, I don't think they understood my paper but on the plus side I can now edit it to reduce the chance that others will also misunderstand it. In journal terms, let’s call it a win.
• Three games of Arkham Horror this weekend, all against Zhar. Result: 14 Investigators devoured. We had good fun, but it’s galling to lose so badly so many times in a row. Great to get a friend along for the last game, though – even if he was as doomed as we were!

So close to wriggling free of my obligations – expect far more frequent and regular bloggery from me this Summer!

Reposted from Only a Game.

The Final Winner

It’s with great pleasure that I announce that the winner of the third copy of Dungeons & Dragons & Philosophy is Samantha Blackmon. A signed copy of the book will be winging its way to Indiana shortly! (Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery).

Many thanks to everyone who contributed to the Spring Review Drive – you all won a book, so that’s a pretty equitable outcome for all concerned!

Fiction Denial

Are game scholars dismissing the importance of fiction in games?

Games studies has thus far been ideologically united by commitment to what can be called fiction denial. Fiction (setting, world, representations etc.) is guaged of lesser importance to rules, or of no importance whatsoever. The premise of this is expressed in multiple equivalent ways: that the setting and representations of a game are interchangeable and that only the mechanics are 'eternal' (something akin to what Raph Koster or Dan Cook occasionally suggest); that players initially engage with a game via the fiction but later this becomes unimportant (as Graeme Kirkpatrick and Jesper Juul assert); that the representation has no effect on how the player behaves (as Espen Aarseth claims). Espen gives the paradigmatic example of fiction denial when he says he wouldn't play Tomb Raider any differently if Lara Croft had a different character model. I believe him. But isn't this a fact about Espen Aarseth and not a fact about either Tomb Raider or its players?

The problem goes back to the dawn of game studies – well, the first issue of Game Studies – with Juul's seminal line in the sand between games and stories. Stories, it is claimed by Juul, are already set – they occur in the past, while games happen as you play – they occur in the present. At the time, it was necessary to make this distinction to prevent game studies from being colonists by neighbouring disciplines like narratology that would have silenced the emerging voice of games. But Juul's argument is not as plausible as it first looks. Any stage play that participates with the audience or environment (passion plays, for instance) are as much in the present as games. Furthermore, both games and stories are constructed, scaffolded, or designed before they are experienced – the player of Halo can no more prevent the ringworld from being destroyed than the reader of Ringworld can present the spaceship from crashing. Juul's concerns about the problems entailed in translating books and films to games are mirrored by the problems translating games of one kind into games of another.

What I'll call Juul's Trench is an effective defensive measure, but little more – as by Half-Real, Juul himself seems to recognize. However, the later Juul still asserts that rules are real and fiction is not, and this is precisely the ontological claim that undergirds fiction denial. The idea that rules have reality while fiction is lacking in reality inevitably places the rules into a contrast with fiction where it will always come out on top. In Imaginary Games, I try to unseat this ontology by showing how rules and fiction are different forms of the same thing – different forms of fiction. I effectively support Juul's division while rejecting his ontology. I don't want to suggest that either rules or fiction is 'more real' than the other. To be honest, I don't want to get into an argument over what is real at all if we can avoid it.

At heart, fiction denial wants to make the (ontological) claim that it is the game mechanics, the rules, that are the real part of the game. Graeme Kirkpatrick's observation that players gradually see through the fiction to the rules is meant to support this assertion. While I agree that this does happen, my counter-claim is that this characterizes the experience of a particular kind of player and is not essential to games as such. Furthermore, for players who do engage with the fiction of the game fully, this 'seeing through' to the rules is an aesthetic flaw, not a strength, since it breaks with that nebulous experience we term immersion. From this perspective, it is not that the player 'sees through' the fiction, but the rules 'tear through' the world. Only an ironic ghost train rider wants to see the gears – or perhaps someone who makes ghost trains.

I want to make an additional claim that is more controversial: the causes of fiction denial are ideological commitments to the positivistic sciences. Some phenomena benefit from being studied in a positivist stance – chemistry, for instance. But in game studies Juul's Trench functions to divide art from science, and to put game studies firmly into the latter camp. What a disaster for the aesthetic appreciation of games: art is excluded by the very people who extoll the virtue of games! The strange and wonderful game ontology project epitomizes this assumption – offering dry, 'science-like' terms for game mechanical features, and refusing to allow them representative terms. But it does not even achieve this (thankfully!) – 'shoot', 'teleport', 'inventory', these are not fiction-neutral descriptions of game elements, and hallelujah! We should not want them to be!

What fiction denial hides is the intimate connection between fiction and rules, and particularly the way the content of the fiction implies rules, and thus wedding the wrong kind of rules and fiction together creates an aesthetically displeasing game. If fiction denial were viable beyond the preferences of particular players, an interface designed for a tank could become anything. It cannot – Battlezone controls work for tanks and sci-fi or fantasy variations on the key of tank. Despite the belief that you can reskin a first person shooter to be anything, you are always constrained to worlds in which wielding and firing a gun or a gun-substitute (a magic wand, fire breath) are central experiences.

One way to break through fiction denial is to temporarily forget the idea that game mechanics are eternal ideas, the "laws of physics" for play. Instead, foreground the world, bring the fiction into focus, identify the props (the fictional objects of the game world; those things with imaginative implications) and then see how the rules support or undermine their usage. As a matter of fact, this kind of thinking was already central to the way games are designed, and has been for over a century. The FPS is the game that emerges from the gun and the first-person camera – and always would be thus. The (fictional) qualities of the gun dictates the rules that can work well with it, and thus with the players' imagination. It is not the rules that are eternal but the fiction: no matter what rules you make, you cannot change the nature of a gun without it ceasing to be a gun.

I do not want to deny that game studies has been valuable, insightful or scholarly – it has been all this and more – I only want to deny the ideology that would mistake an individual interest in systems for an important truth about games. It is a fact about games that they attract nerds who think about systems. It is not a fact about games that the fiction is tangential to their play. On the contrary, for many players, for many games, fiction is absolutely central to the experience.

Read Any of My Books? Win Another!

Last chance to win a book in the Spring Review Drive! There’s just a week left to enter, and at the moment only one other competitor so you have excellent odds of winning. All you have to do is review any of my books at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. What have you got to lose?

A Game for the Summer

Thinking about playing a AAA console game this Summer – but what?

To celebrate completing the manuscript for Chaos Ethics, and possibly getting my PhD by Publication if the wheels crank fast enough, I should like to indulge in playing a AAA game this July. I haven’t been playing many of these lately, in part because so few interest me as play experiences of my own (although I remain interested in other people’s experiences of them). Trouble is, I just don’t know what I’d play.

Of the releases still to come The Last of Us is a possibility, but I don’t particularly like Naughty Dog’s games – I still hold them responsible for murdering the 3D platformer genre by helping to make guns mandatory. Also, I’m so unbelievably bored of the post-apocalypse as it is usually presented. Two centuries after Mary Shelley's "The Last Man" the high point is either "The Day of the Triffids" (1951) or “The Road” (2006), and both are notable because they have stories that aren’t dependent upon gunplay. I long for fictional apocalypses that don't devolve into a gun survivalist's wet dream. There’s not exactly a shortage of gun stories – or gun games – so it’d be nice to explore outside this narrow space.

Of the releases that have already come out, I’m not sure there’s anything I want to play. I enjoyed Assassin’s Creed, but don’t see much point in my playing any of the sequels. The further they get from the Crusades, the less appealing they become, and I certainly have no interest in the crummy science fiction wrapper story. There’s Heavy Rain, but it looks a little tiresome. I could try the last GTA for context, but Liberty City bores me. Playing any of the first person shooters would be redundant – I’ve had more than my fill of guns from Counter-Strike, and I don’t need any more. If I wanted to shoot guns, I could visit my father-in-law and pop off some rounds on the back porch.

In the matter of Bioshock Infinite, I’m afraid I am thoroughly repulsed by the way it appears to represent its villains as the Liberal’s caricature of Conservatives. Contrary to what is apparently expected, making these people racists and theocrats isn’t a justification for a one-man campaign of brutal genocide against them. This kind of shoddy moral reasoning effectively endorses the ongoing extermination of Muslims – irrespective of their guilt or innocence – that is currently dishonouring the brave men and women of the United States military. I certainly don’t want to play a game that embodies this kind of bigotry. Maybe I am misjudging it – but the game footage I’ve seen thus far has been fairly disgusting. (Note that Miguel Sicart’s arguments about the ethics of computer game have no bearing on the morality of representation in game narrative.)

Since I don’t want to set up my Xbox 360 which is still gathering dust, I need a PS3 game (not necessarily an exclusive) that I might enjoy – perhaps a cRPG, since I am allowed one a year and haven’t had one yet. I’d love something as engaging as Front Mission 2, but that particular franchise peaked with its second outing and has never recovered the magic. I’ve never played a Final Fantasy and I’m unlikely to start now. Skyrim looks like a colossal waste of my time, although I enjoyed running around Oblivion for an hour or two. Mass Effect is a long way from what I’d like to be playing. What’s left? Disgaia 3? Life’s too short for an orgy of levelling to be my only game this Summer.

Bearing in mind that my favourite games of last year were Proteus, Bientôt L'été and Journey, can anyone suggest anything in the AAA console space worth playing that I might enjoy?

Winner, and Last Chance to Win

By the throw of a D6 the second winner in the Spring Review Drive is Oscar Strik. Congratulations to Oscar, who admittedly stacked the deck in his favour with a whopping four review submissions. A signed copy of Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy will be on its way to the Netherlands shortly.

One final copy is up for grabs, and at the moment your odds of winning would be 50% if you submitted two reviews. For more information see Win a Book in the Spring Review Drive!

Ridiculous Fishing

Remember Vlambeer, the Dutch indie developer who made the awesomely silly Radical Fishing? With the help of Greg Wohlwend and Zach Gage they have finally completed their souped-up version of the concept, Ridiculous Fishing, which is available from today of Apple's app Store. The new game is incredibly deep solely in the sense of distance, and therein lies the entertainment since the fun in this game lies wholly with its absurd excesses.

The developers at Vlambeer are too young to remember the arcade games that Ridiculous Fishing has the greatest similarities to, although the influence is implicit in their tag line ‘Bringing Back Arcade Since 1887’ (or 1934 – the implausible date varies quite often). The game consists of three phases, all of which follow logically from the concept of fishing-with-a-shotgun. First, you sink your line as deep as it will go, avoiding all the fish – which plays like 1970s 2D driving games where you dodge obstacles on a narrow track. Then, after you snag something, you try and catch as much as possible on the way back up (which also has a scrolling 2D, River Raid, kind of feel) before, in the final phase, shooting them all down Duck Hunt style. The sensibilities may be classic, but backed up with contemporary computer power the results are satisfyingly chaotic. The whole endeavour is tied together with a shop for progress, which also spreads out the tutorial nicely.

Presentation throughout is a delight – the triangular faux-pixelated art design by Greg Wohlwend (Solipskier, Hundreds) is wonderfully original, and takes some of the unpleasantness out of the butcher of millions of marine animals. It would be as silly as the game itself to suggest this is a political commentary on over-fishing, though, as this is sheer arcade joy packaged in nonsense and sent flying through the air with wild abandon. There is little thinking and much overkill throughout, and this is to its merit. It has the sensibilities of an early 1980s arcade game like Anteater or Dig Dug far more than anything contemporary. The overall structure is very contemporary, though, and the game design has a nice mix of ‘ancient and modern’ to it.

Note that the gameplay proceeds directly from the concept of its fictional world – a place where lone redneck, Billy, can hurl fish a kilometre into the sky and still shoot them down with a shotgun (or a bazooka, or an orbital laser). Contrary to the idea that games can be stripped of their fiction and still remain the same game, Ridiculous Fishing would be nonsensically abstract without its core conceit of fishing-with-guns. It is this that feeds the gameplay throughout, and although it is easy to imagine tinkering with the weaponry it is implausible that this could be anything other than a fishing game. The fascinating thing about all fishing games is precisely how they take a slow, meditative activity and make it exciting by tinkering with the temporality – Sega Bass Fishing remains the classic example, which makes fishing into a race against time. Ridiculous Fishing makes it into something far more bizarre but it is still recognisably fishing, and indeed would have to be for the game to make any kind of sense.

None of this will matter to players – it is hard to avoid the clichéd pun that they will be instantly ‘hooked’, but that’s exactly what will happen! I could barely put this down over the last week as I kept blasting seafood to smithereens in order to earn better weapons to obliterate even more fish in ever more extreme ways. The weapon balance seemed a little off at times, but I suspect this reflects my incompetence with some of the guns and it scarcely matters as there is enough choice to allow everyone to find what they prefer. Other than the port of The Lords of Midnight, I’d struggle to find anything I've enjoyed as much as this on iOS – it’s as dumb as a bucket of fish guts, and all the more enjoyable because of it. Arcades may be dying but the arcade game is alive and well and being channelled by indie devs like Vlambeer and friends. A rare pearl amidst the endless sardines of iOS games.

Ridiculous Fishing is available from today on iPhone and iPad.

PS4 and the Tightening Noose

Last month Sony unveiled the capabilities and controller for their new console, the PS4. The second of the three competing home consoles in the next-next generation of TV-based gaming, it gave a sense of where this market might be going. Unfortunately, where it seems to be going is ever-closer to a death spiral since the economics Sony and Microsoft have fostered are now the biggest threat these entertainment divisions face. With the noose tightening around home consoles, what could possibly save this once-proud market from collapsing inward under its own vast weight?

There were few surprises in Sony's slick presentation. The new box has the same hardware and controllers as the already leaked information suggested, the Gaikai buyout allows Sony to offer a neat play-immediately demo function but nothing truly game-changing, and the new console will guess what you'd like to play and download it for you speculatively. The biggest surprise – Sony finally overcoming their need to own everything they deal with and offering social media integration – is hardly a shock given that the 360 already does this. You don’t need to be an analyst to know that the Share button will not be anyone’s reason to buy a PS4, for all that it’s good for Sony to have you promote them. Although PS3 players were quite happy with what they saw at the press event, Sony will need much more than this if they are to escape the noose.

In terms of the difficult decision about their controller, Sony played it safe. Another gamer-friendly DualShock with a slight upgrade in line with what Nintendo did (an added touch screen). Classic Sony copycat policy. The Move will straddle generations, which means Sony couldn’t bear to drop it but didn't dare to require it, rendering it a hindrance to developers and marginal to gamers. Sony might believe they could offer a Move SKU for mass market players later on, once the gamers are bedded in. I think this is a lost cause at this point, but I’d like to be surprised.

Sony’s announcement was highly anticipated by a somewhat anxious retail because the disk-based games sector is struggling right now (as high street closures attest) and there is a general sense that something is needed to inject new life into the market. This might seem surprising: although the Wii outsold its competitors by a third, the installed base of the PS3 and 360 (each about 70 million units) exceeds every previous-generation home console but the original PlayStation and the PS2, which is the biggest selling console of all time (albeit only a whisker ahead of the DS). But these apparently buoyant numbers disguise the problem created by an escalating arms race between Sony and Microsoft, which has its roots in the rather marginal PC boxed games market.

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of technology markets: incremental markets like cars, flashlights and airplanes change only gradually because there is rarely any basis for escalating to another level. Slight continuous improvement is the essence of the incremental markets. Conversely, exponential markets like computers, consoles and cellphones offer giant step-changes between generations of hardware (or continuous logarithmic expansion in the case of PCs) thus encouraging consumers to replace their equipment regularly in order to keep up with the curve. However, for this to work there has to be reasons for the curve itself – hence the unholy alliance between corporate operating systems like Microsoft Windows and microchip companies like Intel who feed a mutually beneficial technology escalation with very little intrinsic benefit to the end user. Microchip technology is involved in almost all exponential markets, which does raise the possibility of this area eventually topping out, flattening exponentials into incremental markets – but this certainly isn’t the case at the moment.

For game consoles, the same kind of partnership as between OS makers and microchip companies exists between home console manufacturers and AAA game developers: the latter create demand by wowing players with what can be done, allowing the former to sell new and better machines. However, there is a problem with this arrangement in videogames: the escalating cost of developing AAA games places incredible strain upon the developers. Budgets and team sizes necessarily balloon to match the technical requirements meaning more money goes in but alas proportionately more money does not come out the other side. That’s the noose: the justification for a powerful games console is more technically impressive games that turnover bigger revenue with lower profit margins and ever-greater risk. To make this work requires something like World of Warcraft’s monster subscription model, but very few other games can pull this off. Instead, publishers find crypto-subscription models such as annual releases (possible only by fielding multiple developers), instalments of DLC, or the double whammy of premium purchase price and microtransactions that is set to become the new normal.

The most successful development companies still produce big profits – but the number of companies operating on this scale necessarily dwindles, and success is only attainable in the most over-competed, popularist genres – it isn’t coincidence that gun games dominate AAA development. The scope of the problem is indicated by the massive step down from AAA to the ‘next biggest thing’: team sizes of 250 fall to team sizes of about 25 (and then to 2.5 or fewer in the indies at the bottom!). Similar economics apply to movies, but the fall in revenue from a Summer “tent pole” blockbuster to a typical rom-com is much less stratified than in games. Crucially, the sweet spot for return on investment in videogames seems to lie primarily with teams of 25 not 250, which isn’t the case in film. It all lends a surreal quality to the upper market which makes it hard to believe that it’s sustainable in its current form.

The good news is that PS4 is much easier to program for and development budgets shouldn't need to rise by an order of magnitude this time around. But even if costs just double, there’s tremendous pressure on developers to recoup more money from games whose sales can’t  double because there is no relation between cost-to-make and audience size. It’s hardly surprising that EA are now declaring “microtransactions for every game!” The noose tightens with each generation, leaving fewer and fewer franchises competing for a bigger pot of money but without bigger returns, which is to say, unstable profitability. Ironically, indie games are more profitable than ever (admittedly on a very cosy scale) while AAA’s face an ever-taller financial cliff to scale in order to reach profitability. The latest State of the Industry survey confirms the 'rise of the indie' – there are more and more indie developers, and an ever-narrowing space for the big developers.

Don’t get me wrong – home consoles aren’t an endangered species, but they are at least threatened by the economic circumstances they’ve created for themselves. They also face stiff competition in the mass market from tablets, particularly Apple's iPad: Nintendo’s slightly disappointing sales for Wii U may reflect the number of casual players now getting their game fix somewhere other than the TV, a situation that Microsoft and Sony will also face in the near future since no home console can break even without selling to mass market players eventually. As the TV ceases to be the centre of the entertainment world and dedicated games machines lose ground to more flexible devices, the noose around blockbuster games continues to tighten. If we aren’t headed for a crash, then we are at least feeling choked. The PS4 tightens the noose just a little further, and you have to wonder which companies are going to be strangled out of the market by the constrictions this time around. Something has to give – and as usual it’ll be the big-but-not-giant publishers and the successful-but-not-huge developers that find themselves at the wrong end of this game of hangman.

What did you think about the PS4 or Wii U? Do you think the home consoles have a bright future? Share your thoughts in the comments!