What Games Are

Why Games Fail [Publishing]

It’s never pretty, but game projects often fail. However the interpretation of why failure happens is almost always wrong. The easy thing to do is point at a developer and describe failure in personal terms. If only their ego didn’t run away with itself, or if only they didn’t do such a poor job.

Actually most failure has systemic causes. It’s the result of a dysfunctional publishing culture that is set up to be adversarial, and that in turn is what breeds failure. Most game failures are actually caused at the executive level.

The What Games Are Digest #6 [Weekend]

It’s been another great week. My Minecraft article gained a lot of attention, the Love Your Pirates article featured briefly on Reddit, and some previous posts were republished on Inside Social Games, Gamasutra and Gamesbrief. The blog broke over the 8,000 unique readers mark, but has fallen back a little to 7,700. This is due to the CityVille surge from last month falling out of the counting period. Subscribers are all up as well, with over 100 people each on Twitter and Facebook, 368 via RSS and 51 via Email. Welcome all!

I was travelling and working a lot in Ireland this week, so I couldn’t post as many in-depth pieces as normal. However it gave me more opportunity to think of the larger argument that I’m making with the book. I’m asking myself ‘If I were to give a TED talk, and needed to tell the What Games Are story in 18 minutes or less, what would that look like?’

More on this soon.

Little Wins [Game Design]

I write this having just missed the express bus at Heathrow Airport.

One of the things that fascinates me about my life is that I seem to respond to little wins. Catching that bus, finding there was more in my bank balance that I'd expected, navigating elegantly through the Underground and sundry other achievements make me feel good.

Numina [Games and Fantasy]

We often infer more from a game experience than is actually on the screen. We have the capacity to use the game as an imaginative springboard, inferring personality traits, characters, behaviours and a sense of a larger game world beyond even what the developer intended. We make cognitive leaps, little observations and associations that contain the quality of empathy, and so it feels like there is more there than meets the eye.

Videogames are capable of inspiring this sense, just as great novels and movies can, and this is why they are an art. I call these moments numina. Numina are the gateway to achieving magical engineering, and so they are an essential part of what games are. Numina are what lead us to believe.

Love Your Pirates [Heresy]

I came across this video from Extra Credits yesterday. It’s about piracy, and concludes that although DRM (digital rights management) never works, players should be good folks and pay for their games. Their argument is witty, but it’s not new. It paints file sharing as stealing money from developers’ mouths, and so has an either/or perspective. Either we get paid or we go out of business. Either we see sales or we’re bust.

They’re seeing their business as a content business, where the content is the thing that has value. This is not the case. The games industry, like all the arts, is about finding and interacting with fans, so that value comes from a relationship. As we slowly move into the post-platform, single-franchise future, understanding the difference between the two is crucial.

Connections [Engagement Hierarchy]

The bulk of games exist at the amusement level in the engagement hierarchy. They may be great fun, but they have difficulty standing out and being remembered unless they are founderworks or a part of a platform story. Connections are games that speak to players on a more substantive level, and the resulting bond makes the game memorable. Connections are not necessarily life-changing or deep and meaningful, but the player will stop and listen to what they have to say.

Like any kind of engagement design, designing for connection is complicated. There are many things that are best practise in creating distractions or amusements which you absolutely should not do in designing for connection. And vice versa. Connections are trying to reach out to players, acquiring not just their momentary attention but something that is more lasting, which means they have to treat the player differently.

The What Games Are Digest #5 [Weekend]

Onward and upward. Traffic is steadily increasing, and recently I’m seeing the effects of StumbleUpon start to come through. In addition, subscriber numbers continue to increase at a slow but sure pace.

Also, the What Games Are Journal experiment seems is yielding a variety of excellent content. Every day I am discovering something new and strange through it, so thank you all for being a part of it. And remember, if you want to be involved then all you need to do is follow the What Games Are Twitter account.

Do You Fight For The Users? [Cruft]

What is cruft?

In programming, code is said to be full of cruft when it contains many leftover or legacy objects, and is generally of poor quality. In user interface design, cruft is redundant elements that add visual clutter and detract from elegance. In writing, cruft is a general lack of editing. In music, cruft is the extraneous sound that detracts from the impact of the song. In games, cruft is legacy systems, half-included dynamics, irritating interfaces, pointless cut scenes and overall sloppiness.

Cruft is everywhere. It is the enemy, and it must be destroyed, because cruft creates negative user experiences. To permit cruft is to say that you do not care about your users enough to fight for them.

So why should they believe in your marketing story if you clearly don’t respect them?

Minecraft and the Question of Luck [What Games Will Be]

Minecraft has passed one million sales. At €14.95 a pop. For an alpha version. Bloody hell. So tweeted my friend and ex-boss Pete Morrish (who also wrote this).

Minecraft is a game that makes industry heads spin. Its developer is on the way to becoming a superstar, it’s generating huge sales for an indie game, and yet it is the nerdiest game that has been seen for years. Many insiders have quietly concluded that the game is just lucky. A non-repeating event. A freak of nature.

If it’s not lucky, then cats will lie with dogs and gravity is inverted. Everything that we think we know, we actually wouldn’t know. The truth is that Minecraft is not a freak of nature. It’s a harbinger of the shape of things to come.

 

The 3DS and the Decline of the Platform Story [Marketing]

In slightly comical scenes in Amsterdam yesterday, Nintendo reaffirmed the launch of the 3DS for the gaming media. Due out in three months, it promises to bring three-dimensionality to the handheld gaming world without the need for stereoscopic glasses. It will sell millions of units. The interesting part (for me) of the launch was that it showed one of the most powerful marketing stories, the platform story, in action.

Platform stories have long been the way that games have been sold to the public. But they are under threat like never before, and may well be about to go away. Why?