What Games Are

Zyngapocalypse Now (And What Comes Next?)

Significant losses, declining ARPUs, failing mobile acquisitions and shareholder selloffs. A stock price down to $3.01. A product catalog repeating previous mistakes. Media coverage ranging from the mystified to "I told you so". A vague promise to get into gambling. Last week was miserable for Zynga and, as the bellwether of social games, was not good news for the whole sector. As Zynga goes, so eventually go Wooga, EA Playfish and countless others.

Both inside and outside the walls of Facebook, the story of social games has become one of dead geese and golden eggs, flatlined growth, formulaic games and shady practises. Many warned that the sector was slowing down, but sometimes giants need to fall. It needs to get bad enough before people start to really consider what's next.

So what comes next?

Ouya? Booyah! [Marketing Stories]

With 26 days to go and $4.4m already raised the Ouya is probably on course to the be the biggest Kickstarter-funded project since the last one. However the reaction from the industry and its press has been generally negative. 

There are some fair assessments like that of Kris Graft, who welcomes disruption to the console space but is unsure if Ouya's the platform for the job. Then there are others who question whether it can be delivered on time, what the cost of manufacture could possibly be for it to "match up to expectations". There's even the comment from Jeff Gerstmann (of Giant Bombcast) that relying on Kickstarter is some sort of sleazy end-around tactic.

I think they're mostly missing the point. Unlike the Phantom, the Gizmondo and the Indrema, the people behind Ouya have proven on day one that there is a very excited market for a hackable console. Ouya taps into the same sentiment that's driving Raspberry Pi, Arduinos, Makies and so forth. It also verifies that there is great interest in an app-store, low power fun-games-on-TV machine as many wistullfy hope the Apple TV would become. In a word: resonance.

Almost nobody in games seems to have grasped that Kickstarter et al aren't charities (sorry Andrew) soliciting a few donations around business-as-usual. Crowdfunding is a direct manifestation of the marketing story, the cause in which people believe and want to see made happen (reason bedamned). The tribe is falling over itself wanting to give its money to make these kinds of project succeed, and yet the industry wants to tell us why they shouldn't. 

This is probably what watching dinosaurs fight while meteors streak overhead looks like. 

On Player Characters and Self Expression [Game Design]

"There is no such thing as a player character" is the kind of tagline that gets me into trouble in some places. So is "the emotional connection between player and character that many game makers believe exists in fact does not". Both contain a powerful subtext, questioning everything from a player's sense of identity to the validity of their experiences. Read the wrong way, they can seem to say that all the emotion you feel in playing games is made up. 

Of course that's not my intent. When I say "there is no such thing as a player character" I don't mean that there is nothing. When I say play occurs through "dolls", likewise. My intent is to reinterpret the emotional experience of play within a game-native context, and so derive useful insight that could apply to all games. In otherwords, the emotions are real but our way of talking about them is broken.

This is an essay to fully explain this concept, to set what's really going on when most players play games in context, about the importance of identity and self expression. (Warning: this article is over 8000 words in length.)