What Games Are: Game Design, Development, Publishing, Marketing and Art

Console Aphelion: Are Consoles About to Make a Comeback?

An aphelion is the farthest point from the sun of an object's orbit, when the night is darkest. Here's the relevance to games: Retail gaming is down, consoles are often thought of as old fashioned, even dead. It's all smartphones and freemium Facebook and Steam games now. It's threats from Apple, gamification, speculation over the role of the browser and the PC. It's dead-on-arrival handheld platforms.

And yet something is amiss: Despite the pronouncements of imminent doom, there are a surprising number of consoles out there. Despite the portents for middle-grade publishers, it's only really on console that we see 20m units of a title sold. Despite the seeding of games on many platforms, it's still console that sets the pace and draws the sparkle of E3.

Are they dead, or are we more in the territory of darkest hours and dawns?

Is The Facebook App Center A Big Deal?

Last year I posted that Facebook was effectively over as a disruptive game development platform. My reasoning was that Facebook relied too much on algorithmic solutions to drive visibility, which was then gamed by a few companies, and largely failed at introducing users to new games.

Unless Facebook were to produce a highly visible app store, I thought, Zynga had won. I also thought Facebook would not make such a store. Happily I was apparently wrong.

Calling Out The Clones

In the same week, two stories about cloning are making various rounds. One involves Triple Town, a neat puzzle-sim game from Spry Fox, being cloned on the iOS App Store. The other story involves Zynga (predictably) first offering to buy and then copying Tiny Tower. Both have resulted in the original inventors calling out the clone for what it is in public.

Should anything be done?

Better Than Movies [Kill Hollywood]

“The Worm has turned”, Jack Nicholson once said in the otherwise-forgettable Wolf, “and it is now packing an Uzi.”

I’m minded of this quote when reading various reactions to the concerted move by the established entertainment industry to stop piracy. It’s not just SOPA and PIPA, but also ACTA in Europe and a variety of national-level legislative campaigns which propose draconian, over-reaching controls to protect content industries at the expense of all others.

The normally-placid geek industries, which prefer to make stuff rather than lobby, are nettled to such an extent that key figures are declaring that it’s time to saddle up. That it’s time to lobby and cajole on issues like relaxing copyright and patents for real rather than talk about it. That it’s time to, as Paul Graham wrote last Friday, kill Hollywood.

So do you want to take up the call?

Why I Don't Like Metro [Microsoft]

(This may seem off topic compared to this blog’s usual focus, but it’s relevant as a discussion of user interfaces, as well as one of next year’s bigger trends that will affect the games industry.)

Metro, to hear the folks from Redmond tell it, is the future. It’s in phones. It’s in the Xbox 360. Pretty soon it will be in PCs and tablets too. It’s a new marketing story about a new paradigm for a new decade.

But (for me at least) something is wrong: Metro leaves me oddly cold. I dislike the metaphor of tiles, and the way that it seems overly concerned with guiding people to content. It looks pretty and yet fiddly. It’s over-reliant on user memory and arcane actions. Its implementation on the Xbox 360 is downright bad.

More than that, it’s telling a different platform story to the one that Microsoft thinks it is, a story of a dumb PC and a more restricted future. At a fundamental level, that bothers me.

Can Games Be Radical? [Art]

I believe that games are an art form that defines the twenty first century. However, compared to some other art forms, they are somewhat conservative. They may be loud and violent, or quiet and serene, yet the kinds of worlds and roles that they offer are often recognisable and safe. Rarely do we see games that confront society as well as being fun to play.

Instead they tend to play it straight, focusing on the authenticity of escapism, the rewards and the gameplay. Their role, it seems, is to escape existing culture rather than define it.

Can games define new culture? Are they able to be edgy? Can we foresee a day when the ideas within a game cause discussion and debate much as a controversial play might? Are games capable of radicalism?

Windows 8 Plugin Woes [Questions]

First Apple refused to let Flash onto the iPad. Now Microsoft want to nix all plugins from Internet Explorer. Browsers, it seems, want to leave plugins behind. They want HTML5 to do what Flash used to, and from a certain perspective it makes a lot of sense. Even Adobe seem to realise that Flash is done and offers tools to recompile apps built in Flash for HTML5.

However, specifically for Flash social games, Java games, some Unity projects and some other more obscure plugins this is a really big deal. HTML5 is perfectly capable of being used for video and rich content sites, but does it really stand up for games? So far the consensus from the game development community seems to be ‘no’, but if the Windows default browser won’t support them then they instantly lose at least half of their market.

So where does this leave browser based games? Has Microsoft just announced their doom?

The Next Wave: Local Games?

Your MMO guild members may be good friends but they’re scattered all across the world. Your mobile games steal your attention away from talking to people. Your social game hassles you to bug your friends for gifts, but otherwise you play alone. Your co-op sessions of Portal 2 tend to be played with mute strangers.

Most innovations in digital gaming tend to produce solitary experiences. This is fine most of the the time, but players don’t always want to be solitary. They like to gather to play, to participate and hang out. Social contact is healthy, and games have always had an important role in helping to bind communities together.

Video games have not really tapped into that spirit yet, but it feels to me like that’s the next wave. Local games are coming.

Find Games For Your Players [Marketing]

A post from Nicholas Lovell yesterday on how to market your indie game highlighted three possible approaches: (1) Launch-focused publicity, (2) metric-driven advertising and (3) permission marketing. The third reminded me of a quote by Seth Godin:

Don’t find customers for your products
Find products for your customers

The idea of permission marketing is to build a following by finding a cause that early adopters care about. Then build a platform to share your ideas about that cause, the gift of which gains their permission to talk to them some more. Then gather customers together to form a community and build products that speak to the community’s needs but which also push the envelope of their expectations. So the community will act as your marketing channel to the outside world.

That’s the general idea. Does it work for games?

The PC's Future is Delightfully Complicated [Trends]

The PC is as ubiquitous as the telephone line. Even just for games, it’s home to big-budget retail, massive multiplayer and indie games, and also the primary means to access casual, social and open web games. It is the longest-lived and most robust platform of all time, and has been the starting point for countless success stories.

Yet it’s always been complicated, and that has created room for easier-to-use platforms to emerge. In recent years particularly, some of those platforms have become so important that the idea of Post-PC has gained traction. Fundamental shifts are occurring in how and where we use computers, and will likely have far-reaching consequences for PCs and PC games.

Here are some thoughts on what those consequences might be.