Boston, July 29 - Here are my notes from today's Sandbox: an ACM SIGGRAPH Videogame Symposium. The highlight of the day one was this panel:
In the Trenches - Game Developers and the Crisis of Creativity
* Jason Della Rocca
* Hank Howie
* Steve Meretzky
* Joe Minton
* Kent Quirk
* Tracy Rosenthal-Newsom
Jason Della Rocca: I'd like to ask all of the panelists to share three inspiring aspects of the game industry today. I'll start.
1) Half-Life 2: Episode One. I don't mean the episodic content or direct distribution aspect. I'm thinking of the player metrics. You can get all sorts of graphs and pie charts of interesting player statistics.
2) Relentless - it's a UK company that succeeds with great quality of life. Employees work 9-5 with no overtime. They don't surf the internet or play games during work, they just work. They make high-quality games that sell. They presented recently at Develop.
3) Korea is the future of the games industry. They're moving away from subscriptions and toward micropayments. They have almost no retail sales due to piracy.
Joe Minton:
1) EA. They've set a goal of having 50% of their new products use original IP.
2) Gameplay is finally beating out technology. In the handheld space, the PSP is being demolished by the DS, because DS games are better. "I love my PSP, but I'm still waiting to have a lot of fun with it." I see a lot of great gameplay with New Super Mario Brothers, the DS, the Wii, Katamari, Geometry Wars, and others.
3) I'm seeing more clout within the industry for developers. Foundation 9 has been able to pool studios to fund projects and shift the balance of power toward developers. BioWare/Pandemic Studios. Steam.
Hank Howie:
1) We're getting better at saving money with better and more appropriate prototyping.
2) The game industry is starting to look at processes beyond its own walls, like in software engineering. SCRUM, casual game development processes.
3) Developers are starting to think about new kinds of content and expanding the market.
4) Developers are more conscious of quality of life.
Jason Della Rocca: Check out Agile game development.
Kent Quirk:
1) Society is starting to see games as more legitimate. Politicians are getting more pushback when they bash games. Game journalism, game education at the undergrad and grad level, and game criticism are all adding legitimacy.
2) Undergraduate education in game development is improving. I recently taught a four-day workshop to teachers about how to teach programming to kids through games. WPI now has a game design major where students can concentrate in one third art courses and two thirds programming courses or vice versa. I'm on the board. eMagination game camp gives 16- and 17-year-olds a taste of game development.
3) Serious Games. Games are fundamentally about learning how to play them. People are starting to figure out that they could be used to teach something useful beyond the game. There's a mass market opportunity there. I'm working on building a mass market casual serious game.
Steve Meretzky:
1) The Escapist magazine. It offers a new level of game criticism.
2) The Independent Games Festival at GDC. A few years ago, there was no channel for this. Now we have it, and "I see more creativity and innovation in the IGF than in the entire rest of the industry."
3) University programs are providing great training. They also help make the case that games are an art form, which battles censorship. And, it creates another career path for aging game developers.
Jason Della Rocca: DIGRA is a good entry point for a game studies and criticism.
Tracy Rosenthal-Newsom:
1) We're broadening player demographics. We're making simpler games with lower barriers to entry. We're doing this at Harmonix, of course, with Guitar Hero, but I also see other great examples like Brain Age and Nintendogs.
2) Alternate controllers. When the game dictates the controller, play becomes more accessible. Karaoke Revolution, Guitar Hero, etc. The most common argument against this strategy is that an extra controller is cost prohibitive, but the population that's buying them says otherwise. They are willing to pay more for the best experience.
3) Lifestyle games are growing. Games are getting closer to having an image as a mainstream medium.
Joe Minton: Publishers always want to see a precedent for the game you're pitching. What's out there right now that's like your idea and what has it sold? [Addendum from Joe:] "It is always much easier to get a project signed up if there is a touchstone that marketing can use to help gauge sales – that is as true now (if not more so) with increasing budgets as it has ever been. That being said, the touchstone does not need to be an exact copy of the game – as long as the director of marketing believes that it will be similar in buying patterns."
Dan Scherlis: Mobile is an extreme form of what's wrong in the game industry. It's very risk-averse. What is to be done for distribution to break publishers' problem with creativity?
Steve Meretzky: I'm working in mobile, and you're right about the problems. The hardware is restrictive, carriers have all the power, purchase decisions are made by title in list form, so licenses are crucial, and a license brings along an army of guardians whose loyalty is to protecting that license and not the game, and who therefore end up saying NO to many of the best ideas for the game.
Dan Scherlis: Do you see any promise in the future of mobile games?
Steve Meretzky: "I would have to say no." [Addendum from Steve:] "My recollection is that Dan was asking was “Do you see this [the problems of making anything creatively interesting in the mobile space] changing any time soon?” Certainly, there’s promise in mobile games if you take a long enough time frame. (I’ve always felt that once there’s a convergence of devices, and instead of having a cellphone and an iPod and a digital camera and a PDA and a GameBoy and so on, you just have one device with all that functionality, people will be willing for that device to be bigger than any of those individual devices today. Also, there’s some interesting tech in very early stages such as rollout screens, that will also make mobile devices a more reasonable gaming environment. And someday, somehow, the stranglehold of the carriers will be broken…)"
Hank Howie: When more money comes in from alternate revenue sources maybe we'll see more creativity.
Joe Minton: The more money invested, the more risk-averse investors are going to be, but even small investors and developers might get risk-averse.
Kent Quirk: The IGF is evidence that small developers are not risk-averse.
Jason Della Rocca: Tracy, where did Harmonix get money for innovation?
Tracy Rosenthal-Newsom: From publishers. Sony backed Frequency. Initially, though, we had institutional money.
Joe Minton: Major publishers are funding new IP, even those traditionally tied to entrenched IPs like LucasArts.
Anonymous: How do you get over the barrier of new technology with the new platforms?
Hank Howie: It takes awhile to get familiar with the hardware whenever we move to a new cycle.
Kent Quirk: First we pay attention to graphics, then sound, etc.
Hiawatha Bray (Boston Globe): Red Sox owner John Henry funded a realistic racing game for the segment of gamers who care about the sort of thing. Is this the future -- wealthy individuals funding niche products?
Hank Howie: It's viable, but we've had that model of niche publishing before and it never grew very big.
Anonymous: Where is the effort to develop Serious Games?
Ben Sawyer: The Serious Games Summit, the Serious Games Discussion Listserv. People are reevaluating ways to make money with games. It's happening.
Anonymous: I'm not entertained by the home game interfaces.
Kent Quirk: I think you're talking about where games are played and with what equipment, like riding a bike through a certain route and then riding it again to ghost race yourself. People at health clubs are starting to play networked games. You can row with someone across the country. This is the great hope for mobile. People need to be less protective about their proprietary platforms, though, or this sort of thing will never take off on mobile. They need to realize that a smaller slice of a bigger pie is better.
Ben Sawyer: Will there be more opportunity or less in five years for people in this room?
Steve Meretzky: There will be more opportunity, but only because it's so low right now.
Other panelists: More.
Hank Howie: Less opportunity at the AAA end of the spectrum, and more at the lower end.
Anonymous: How viable is it to mod games and sell them?
Kent Quirk: Modding is great for designers to show off their skills. As a business model, it's more of a challenge. What qualifies as a mod? If you license an engine, does that count?
Anonymous: I have a question about educational games for children. Lots of educators are excited about it, but it's controversial. Some say play and learning just don't mix. What's your opinion?
Tracy Rosenthal-Newsom: Disney stayed far away from educational games after its business failure with them. They have a huge potential to teach, but I'm not sure about the business model.
Kent Quirk: "It's not that play and learning don't mix, it's that play and teaching don't mix."
