Sony, MacArthur Foundation kick off socially responsible gaming competition

As much as I enjoy getting online to riddle my opponents full of bullets from my virtual high powered rifle, I often find myself wondering, is this really all there is? Can video games accomplish anything more than an overload of hyper real violence and mayhem—that is, can they be anything more than just totally awesome fun? Do they need to be?

Yes, I think they do. They need to do more, and I’m not talking about the lame “is it art” debate. I mean they need to be more connected with the larger community of which they are a part, they need to start becoming something that can change lives, not just allowing us to escape from them.

Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo have taken a few baby steps toward increasing interaction between the game world and the internet, but I am skeptical about what benefits gamers or the internet will see from letting people autopost their game progress or game purchases on Facebook and Twitter. I will keep them in mind, however, if I ever need to get myself unfriended as quickly as possible.

What caught my eye this morning was an announcement of video game support by the US President. The MacArthur Foundation is teaming up with Sony to hold the 2010 Digital Media and Learning Competition: Reimagining Learning ,with US$2 million in prizes up for grabs. The competition has two parts, 21^st Century Learning Lab Designers, and Game Changers, in which contestants can receive awards for creative new games or additions for Sony’s LittleBigPlanet, a popular and award-winning PlayStation 3 game that includes a comprehensive level creation tool. Sony’s supporting the event by donating “a significant number” (I’m guessing -4?) of PlayStation 3s and LittleBigPlanet copies to community-based organizations and libraries in low-income communities.

This sounds like a step in the right direction—merging game play with social action. And LittleBigPlanet, with all the social interactivity built into it, is a great place to start. I do wonder, though, how the people Sony is giving a chance to create levels will ever get to play their levels later—the game is PS3 only, and other than watching YouTube clips, the levels are downloadable only through Sony’s PlayStation Network. I’m also not really sure how it will relate to “Reimagining Learning”, but when you see the astounding variety of levels created in LittleBigPlanet, like

and

I feel optimistic contestants will come up with some pretty good ideas.

I discovered this story at Ripten.com, and here’s the contest homepage.

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Naughty Dog Plays Nice

Uncharted 2 developer Naughty Dog has not only made an amazingly beautiful game, but have also proved not to be so naughty after all—thatvideogameblog.com reports via gamasutra.com that Naughty Dog is developing tools that it shares with other 1^st and 3^rd party developers, giving others a shot to get their graphics looking as good as Uncharted 2’s.

In the game’s end credits, several other developers are thanked, including Bungie, Xbox developer of the famous Halo series that put Microsoft on the map. It’s great to see developers so willing to share their ideas like that, and I’m glad Naughty Dog is so supportive of collaboration at the tool level. In the end the difference between games should be in their artistic elements—style, mood, tone, music, dialog—and not so much the engine driving these.

Uncharted 2: the beauty

I spent at least 15 minutes wandering around this Tibetan village in Uncharted 2, but this video doesn’t come close to doing the scene justice. One of the great things about Uncharted 2’s visuals is that the draw distance pretty much goes to the horizon in some areas, meaning 3d rendered objects are visible a long ways off. Most games limit the draw distance to ensure the frame rate doesn’t drop, but doing this creates a very artificial fog of war that can cause game play problems, especially in multiplayer.

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Demons have stolen my Soul, with reservations [Demon's Souls]

 

Lately I admit I’ve been lazing about in front of the ol’ plasma a bit too much, staring at magically rendered universes of fantasy and adventure. Part of it is that I’m slowly recovering from a cold. It’s probably H1N1. If it’s fatal, I might die playing video games. Would my soul be revived in the Nexus? Somehow I doubt it. I’m no hero, I’m just a dude.

Apart from the fantastically beautiful Uncharted 2, a much lower profile game from the studios of Sony Japan has captivated my attention for a good twenty plus hours over the past few week. That game is Demon’s Souls, an action RPG that has won at least one claim to fame—it’s very hard to win. Yes, that’s one marketing angle they’ve taken deliberately, not one you often see on a game box, because, for some reason, game developers think that would be a turn off.

I’ll avoid going off on a tangent about how miserably easy most games have become these days, but suffice it to say, Demon’s Souls makes a solid effort at living up to its claim, but where I’m at in the game now, the difficulty seems to be fading to irrelevance.

The story is some throwaway about a demon that has ravaged the world and you’re the hero designated to defeat it. The problem is, you’re not all that much of a hero, not at first—more like a 98lb weakling. I like this, a lot. Probably because I’m a 150lb weakling and it gives me hope.

The game trains you in the basic mechanics of game play and then quickly kicks your ass by making you fight an impossibly difficult demon, and then the game really begins with your soul awakening in the Nexus, a sort of Void where you end up when you die. To progress through the game you warp to different worlds where you kill the baddies and collect their souls. Souls are like money, used for everything from equipment purchases to stat upgrades. Along the way you kill boss demons that give you a whole bunch of souls, and the added bonus of getting your human form back.

What makes the game difficult is that you start off very weak, and if you don’t pay attention to what you’re doing, you will die. You will die fast. Add to that that every time you die, you lose ALL of your souls. The only way to get them back is to get back to where you died and reclaim your soul stain that was left behind, which is not always easy since all the monsters come back to life in your ever so brief absence. Unfortunately if you die again, the souls are gone and you have to start collecting them all over again. So yeah, it’s hard and it only gets harder the more you let your frustration replace your patience.

The game no doubt pisses the crap out of me on many occasions, but I love that they really wanted to make the game a challenge. The problem lies in the inherent nature of almost any RPG, plus a couple level design flaws I wish they avoided.

The inherent nature of which I speak is the leveling up of your character. Every RPG has this. In Demon’s Souls you use the souls you gain to improve your stats, and inevitably this means you can take and inflict more damage. This also means that monsters in the earlier levels become much easier, making them easy to defeat for quick soul farming. This takes away from the difficulty of any RPG, not just this one.

The problem then is that Demon’s Souls has monsters that are too easy to defeat but still give you quite a few souls, letting you soul farm quickly, which in turn makes future levels easier than they probably should be. I think what they could have done instead is follow the Diablo method, where killing easier monsters gives fewer souls than they did before, maybe to the point that they give almost none. This would mean the player either has to take a long time soul farming, or press on fighting their way through the harder levels. Another option would be to make the monsters you kill give you more souls the first time you kill them, increasing the risk of dying. Granted I’ve not made it more than a quarter of the way through the game, so I may find my critique is totally misguided soon.

The second problem may be a spoiler, so don’t read further if you care about this game.

The boss demons I have battled so far are waaaaaaaaaaaaay too easy. The problem is that the bow is overpowered and there’s no limit to the number of arrows you can carry, so basically I just enter the boss battle with 200 arrows and blast them from a safe distance. After defeating the big guardian night in the second part of the first world with arrows without having to move at all, I knew something was amiss. Again, perhaps this becomes an impossible trick against later demons, but so far I’m a little disappointed with the boss battles.

More to come on Demon’s Souls in the next couple posts. I want to look more carefully at the ludic (read: game) elements and later at the multiplayer features, which are pretty awesome for what’s a mostly single-player adventure.

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Comment riposte: Tools are not enough

 

 

A few days ago I posted a comment on Kotaku to  this article, which discusses a bit of a PR fiasco game developer Infinity Ward has found itself in after announcing that it’s new FPS Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 would no longer support dedicated servers for PC gamers. The comment was lengthy enough that I’ve decided to repost it here, but first some context. (note: original comment appears near the end)

Call of Duty is a multi-million dollar franchise published by Activision and developed by Infinity Ward (IW) and Treyarch, each developer taking turns to put out a new game every year. Originally Call of Duty was a WWII first-person shooter, and was an instant hit when it launched. To freshen up the brand, IW released Call of Duty: Modern Warfare in 2007, which went on to be one of the biggest sellers in gaming history. That game put IW on the map, and a sequel was inevitable. Because the game is multi-platform, however, it had to appeal to two very different audiences—console owners and PC gamers. The main difference between the two is that PC gamers tend to be more hardcore and expect greater freedom and control over the gameplay, while console gamers range from hardcore to casual with plenty in between.

COD: MW was loved by PC gamers because it allows them to host their own dedicated servers to run matches. It also lets them to modify what options are enabled in ranked public matches, up to 64-player support (only 18 on consoles), the ability to lean, and most fun of all map creation and game modding, which lets the gamers change the game rules and graphics in almost any way they want.

an AWESOME Star Wars mod

The buzz for COD: MW2 was huge the moment it was announced, and honestly that’s no surprise. Robert Bowling, former community manager and current creative strategist for IW, was leading the communications charge in what started out with great promise.   He was already on Twitter and was writing his own blog, and MW2 had its own Twitter and news site as well. They had even set up a twitter site tracking #MW2 comments, and posted questions for fans to respond to. The latter had some problems, like tracking any #MW2 comments and not ones related to the questions being posed, but it let users vote up the best comments in an attempt to keep them relevant.

All in all, a great start.

 

So what went wrong?

On October 17, 2009, with less than a month before the 11.10.09 launch date arrived, Bowling announced during a webcast (around the 1:39:00 mark) that IWNet would be implemented as a match-making service for PC gamers—and the end of dedicated server support. He called this making multiplayer more accessible to the PC community, but it’s hard to imagine that he didn’t see the serious backlash from the hardcore PC gamers coming.

This was not the end of the announcements, either. Soon after PC gamers discovered that everything that made the PC version unique was being taken away from them—no more leaning, no more modding or mapping. No more console for granular control over game settings, and perhaps worst of all, no more 64, or 32, player matches, meaning larger game clans, essentially the sports teams of gaming world would have to split up if they wanted to play. And, without dedicated servers, they will face greater lag issues and greater difficulty connecting with only the players they want to play with, since IWNet will do the matchmaking for them.

At this point IW and Bowling had already made one big mistake in their PR campaign—they didn’t engage the small but passionate demographic of their gaming community early enough. Fine, everyone makes mistakes. The problem then is how they continued to ignore the PC gamer audience. During an open online QA hosted by Best Buy—good idea, by the way, gives direct access to the game developers—IW game designer Mackey McCandlish and weapons artist Ryan Lastimosa deliberately and arrogantly snubbed the PC gamers participating in the event with unfortunately classic examples of terrible PR responses. For example:

Q: Is there a console in the PC version of the game, so we can change our field of view from the Xbox’s default 65 FOV to 80 also can we tweaks the weapon damage for each gun, removes perks, graphical debris, breathing sway, also thru console like we where [sic] able to before or is this all gone?

Vince-IW: We would like you to play the game the way we designed and balanced it.

And even worse:

Moriarte: Ignoring IW.net, is the PC version a direct port of the console version?

Mackey-IW: No, PC has custom stuff like mouse control, text chat in game, and graphics settings.

To suggest that “mouse control, in-game text chat, and adjustable graphics settings” somehow makes the game more than just a port of the console version is not the best choice of words.

Bowling, meanwhile, wasn’t doing much better, suggesting that the number of hardcore PC gamers was so small as to be meaningless when it came to game design decisions. He also called MW2 “their most feature-rich PC gamer yet,” despite all of the features that had been removed, and called the hardcore PC gamers “a very vocal community [that is] all online.” Ouch.

The great and tragically ironic climax to all of this is that Bowling himself declared just a few days later that he doesn’t think “any developer should not have control of how their game is presented or marketed or communicated… and they should take control of that a lot, lot more.” I might agree with you, Mr. Bowling, but I would add that whomever is handling it be someone with some level of competence.

IW has the tools, but they don’t have the skills, the experience or the wisdom to engage with its community in a way that respects the many, many opinions they’ve received.

 

What should they have done? What should they be doing right now?

I’ll let my original Kotaku comment answer the first question:

The problem, and the great irony here, is not that IW has jacked the PC version--it's their total arrogance in going about it.

I'm not condoning the jacking, but they really needed to at least try to make their audience understand their reasons for doing so, and in this they've failed completely. I find it ironic because IW was JUST saying how important it is for developers to handle their own marketing, and so far they're doing a terrible job of it! They seem to be totally clueless--Bowling especially--about the importance of showing a little humility to their fans, especially when they make changes that they KNOW will piss people off.

No, the end-user is not always right, as some are saying here. But that doesn't mean you ignore them! Just because IW doesn't need to worry about the money they make on PC game sales doesn't mean you dismiss those gamers voices--in essence IW has told PC gamers they are 2nd class to console gamers, their opinions are insignificant. There's almost no faster way to destroy your brand.

If I were IW here's what I would have done:

1. Pay special attention to those who are complaining--show them you're listening and understand their feelings.

2. Make sure I'm engaging them on public platforms, Twitter, Facebook, developer blogs, whatever.

3. Explain the reasons for jacking the game, and BE SPECIFIC. None of this "game balance" crap, that is PR nonsense designed to deflect, condescend, and offend. Your real reasons might not make the complainers happy, but at a deeper level they'll appreciate your honesty AS LONG AS YOU ARE BEING RESPECTFUL. You're worried about piracy? Ok, say so! You've actually received a lot of feedback from other PC gamers who find the game too hard to play because of cheating? Say that too, but HAVE PROOF to back yourselves up.

4. Make it clear you are flexible--let people know you're monitoring the community and are searching for ways to let people enjoy at least some of the things that made PC gaming special, like mapping and modding.

5. Finally, take a page out of Valve's book on L4D2--they handled their PR crisis beautifully, and look at what happened: complainers came away more than satisfied, and sales are up 4x over the original game! Seriously they won on all counts and still managed to make the game they wanted to make.

I find it so effin funny that IW thinks they know how to communicate with their audience, when they clearly have no idea. Sorry, I mean when they clearly don't care. Methinks they've been watching one too many episodes of Madmen. Get a clue, IW--MW2 might sell like hotcakes, but your reputation has suffered tremendously. I was looking forward to getting this for PS3, but maybe I'll wait awhile.

And as far as what they should be doing now is making it very clear that a lot of the details about how IWNet will operate are not finalized and that there is room for change and that they are listening to user feedback from everyone, whether it’s hardcore or casual gamers. And drop the arrogant holier-than-though attitude, be apologetic and promise you’ll do better in the future.

You screwed up on this one, IW, not the gamers.

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I'm a preposterous posterous poster now.

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