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In this week's TechCrunch article I'm considering the pros and cons of the smartwatch as a platform for games. Because of their pervasive nature, smartwatches hold a lot of potential (for some kinds of) innovative gameplay but they also faces many potential hurdles. Screen size, power, form factor and dependence on mobile all present their own constraints, and the worry is that there may be too many limits to make smartwatch worthwhile.
Is it the next big thing or just a fad?
As the YouTuber phenomenon grows and grows (that is, channels like PewDiePie covering games with extended and often comedic Lets-Play videos) it raises some awkward questions. Developers ask whether YouTubers are effective in helping to promote their sales while journalists worry whether YouTubing constitutes the end of their craft. Some notable figures even consider YouTubing a form of piracy and demand tribute. At the same time for the millions of fans of these channels, they provide valuable insight and community, and a way to get around the packaged-product and deception that they perceive in how games are sold.
Some thoughts on all of the above, here.
Yesterday, for fun, I reposted the above image to my personal Facebook. It represents a pretty typical meme, similar to Twitter hashtag games (or gamelets, as I've taken to calling them). It went on to garner over 150 comments, far more than most things I post, and this is instructive. It teaches us once again about how important resonance is for engaging an audience.
Games (actually, all created things) are constantly pulled between what their creator wants to say versus what an audience needs to hear. This typically leads to two kinds of failure. (1) The creator makes the thing that expresses what she's about, but her work falls on deaf ears, or (2) she cynically looks at what the audience already has and copies it, making an outright clone or a clone with extra features. And again, fails.
The problem is not that the audience is full of dullards who only want to be served the familiar. That's a comforting interpretation in the face of obscurity, but not real. The problem is that the creator is not doing the difficult work of figuring out how to resonate with her audience. She's either not speaking their language, or she's saying the thing that they've heard a thousand times before.
And of course, there is no one fixed audience. Monument Valley's audience is not the same as Candy Crush's audience, and neither audience is the same as that for Cow Clicker. Bacon resonates while lamb doesn't. Star Wars resonates where Battle Beyond The Stars doesn't. In the world of fantasy fiction dragons are resonant. In the world of art games the ideal of the adventure game is resonant. What resonates for the E3 crowd doesn't for the zinesters, and vice versa.
To get to the audience you want, you have to play into them. If yours is a horror crowd, for example, maybe you need vampires. If yours is the Steam Early Access audience, maybe you need an indie style (PS: read Jesper Juul's latest on this here). If you want to make a game about human desperation then maybe you need zombies to be the bridge.
Of course every once in a while new ideas establish new signifiers. Old resonances die off for a variety of reasons. The difficult news is that the most common source of new signifiers is not games, nor movies. It's books. Most other media don't have the same capacity for depth as a book, and therefore the same capacity for originality. Instead they adapt what they see in the world of books and magnify. This is also true for games. If you do find yourself in the position where you want to create a brand new kind of universe, maybe what you need to do is write a book.
I'm not trying to deflate you here, but you will find it a hundred times harder to get game players to where you want them to be if they have no way to resonate with your game. Be cognizant of the landscape of signifiers but not slavish to it. Use the memes that you see around you to unlock your audience, but don't then fall back on tropes. Push your audience into new territory, new forms of participation and new directions. But remember that you need to bring them along for the ride.
The meme has caught on that indie games are facing difficult times. Nicholas Lovell made the point about two months back when he said that Valve had started the race to zero, but this sense of impending disaster has been floating about the scene for a while. Most recently Jeff Vogel's post entitled The Indie Bubble Is Popping nailed it, explaining it all as a simple supply and demand problem. As supply increases in a market of relatively fixed size, prices decrease. Eventually the benign conditions turn malignant, and then everybody's in the soup.
Privately I've heard many similar sentiments of doom. Speaking with indie developers there's the sentiment that the good times have passed, and some have even darkly hinted that they feel the ladder needs to be pulled up lest all is lost. Many are looking to the safer havens of consoles, particularly to Sony, to shield them - but history would indicate that that kind of help only lasts so long. Taking all that in mind I took to Twitter this morning to think these issues out.
I ended up here:
"Remember," as I was heard to say on Twitter earlier today, "that time when eBay bought Skype for reasons?" That's my initial reaction to the news that Facebook has purchased Oculus Rift. For reasons. Some vague ideas about the future of social and presence and other sci-fi-ish ideas that few can readily express. You know: the future or something. Mark Zuckerberg wrote Palmer Luckey a big check for reasons. Palmer Luckey then went on Reddit to explain why this was a good thing and got roundly yelled at. And he still is.
Why?
Because it makes absolutely zero sense. I mean I know the technology press loves to enthuse, and my good friends over at TechCrunch are doing that in force. But it still makes absolutely zero sense. Like eBay buying Skype on some half baked notion that people might use the conferencing service to pay for stuff, it's just a wonky fit.
One possible angle is that the move to purchase Oculus is defensive. To keep Amazon or Google or Microsoft or someone away. To estabish a wedge. But that begs the question: A wedge in what? Purchasing Instagram and WhatsApp made sense because they were essentially large-scale purchases of users. Those services were very much in Facebook's wheelhouse. But purchasing Oculus Rift? A technologist's technology that still has major questions hanging over it and its use case? It makes about as much sense as Google announcing it was making robot cars. A bit of fun perhaps, but come on. It's not a serious thing.
And then there's the untold damage to Oculus itself. There's a a thing that's emerged about Kickstarter-funded technologies. Their initial supporters feel very much a part of the adventure. They become the biggest evangelists and supporters, the ones who cheer through thick and thin. Marketing stories. Unless they sense that you've sold out. Then the opposite happens, and in every sentence about the project you hear the word "disappointing". It's very hard to come back from that.
Indeed I'm currently of the mindset that Oculus is now, to all intents and purposes, dead. A while ago I wrote that there are some big questions facing VR because it's reliant on PC, and the PC may be going away. I found it hard to see a market beyond the enthusiast set for what amounted to a very fancy sounding peripheral. Nonetheless I could see it doing something. Now, not so much. Now it's a technology without a tribe, just another back-pocket project in Zuckerberg's long list of things-that-are-supposed-to-reinvigorate-Facebook.
Perhaps Oculus did need a partner, but if so it clearly should have been Valve. Indeed I'm somewhat shocked that it isn't. Valve and Oculus together would make amazing sense because they naturally complement each other. As a second place choice maybe Microsoft would have been good. But Facebook? With its terrible reputation in games and its increasing tendency toward short termism and such? Luckey could not have made a worse choice.
Oddly enough the main beneficiary from all this will be Sony and its recently announced Morpheus. I doubt the folks at Sony would have seen that coming two weeks ago, but there it is.
I just got done giving my GDC microtalk. It was every bit as nerve-racking and exciting as I hoped it would be, with so many talks from excellent speakers. It will definitely be one to watch on the GDC Vault when it comes out, just as it is every year.
My talk centered around thauma, the components of game design and the real questions of legitimacy that still trouble the videogame art form. As it was a strict format of 20 slides with 16 seconds per slide, I wrote mine out almost in the form of a poem. It had stanzas and pauses, which I think I mostly stuck to in the talk (I always ad lib a little). Here's the text:
I've been wondering whether the kind of model as evinced by sites like Patreon will form part of the future of the games business. From retail through free-to-play and crowdfunding we've seen more and more economic innovation in the games than most of us really know what to do with. Most of them involve bringing players closer to creators, and this seems like another step in that direction.
If you are attending the upcoming Game Developer's Conference, make sure to say hi. I'll be there for the full week (and briefly at Game Connection too) taking some meetings, attending some events and such. Email me if you want to set something up.
I'm also giving a talk. After two years of cajoling Richard Lemarchand, he's given me a slot at the fabled GDC Microtalks session. A microtalk is a specialised format in which each speaker has 5m20s and 20 slides to present an idea. The slides advance once every 16 seconds. So you have to be concise and pointed, with no room for error. The talk can be on anything. In the spirit of saving the surprise I won't spoil it here, but regular readers of What Games Are might have some inkling. The session will be on Friday March 21st at 10:00am in room 135 of the North Hall.
Finally this year I'll be doing the dev-rel thing at the OUYA booth. We're there in force to show new games coming to the platform, talk to developers and announce a few under-the-hood developments that we hope you'll like. So I'll be spending large portions of my time in the Expo and surrounding area, which is a first for me (at conferences I'm usually a talks junkie). So if you do fancy dropping by I'll be there or thereabouts.
I'll be in Amsterdam next week for Casual Connect Europe, where I'm giving two talks. The first is about publishing as a service (delivered jointly with Eric Goldberg) and the second is about microconsoles, OUYA and the future. If you're there and want to talk about Ouyan opportunities, or more generally about games-related stuff, contact me and we'll set something up.
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What Games Are is about game design, game development, games as art, craft, culture and industry and how you can make better games, written by Tadhg Kelly.
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