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This one’s about Myst and realMyst for the Nintendo Switch.

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New on Game Restart: Lone Wolf: A Role Playing Adventure — Pocket-Sized Fantasy Gaming in Print

#ChooseYourOwnAdventure  #AdventureGaming 

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California Extreme 2019: Pinball Games on Game Restart: http://orc.one/cae2019pg #GameRestart  #pinball #CaliforniaExtreme

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After consideration (and considerable effort), I’ve finished migrating as much of this blog as I can over to a relatively new project of mine. 

Game Restart will live here for the foreseeable future.

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Reblogging for coverage.

hinv

Sarcosuchus_imperator 1% hinv 2 360 MHZ IP30 Processors CPU: MIPS R12000 Processor Chip Revision: 3.5 FPU: MIPS R12010 Floating Point Chip Revision: 0.0 Main memory size: 8192 Mbytes Xbow ASIC: Revision 1.3 Instruction cache size: 32 Kbytes Data cache size: 32 Kbytes Secondary unified instruction/data cache size: 2 Mbytes Integral SCSI controller 0: Version QL1040B (rev. 2), single ended Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0 Disk drive: unit 2 on SCSI controller 0 Tape drive: unit 3 on SCSI controller 0: DAT Integral SCSI controller 1: Version QL1040B (rev. 2), single ended Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 1 Integral SCSI controller 4: Version QL1040B (rev. 2), single ended Integral SCSI controller 2: Version Fibre Channel AIC-1160, revision 2 Disk drive: unit 15 on SCSI controller 2 Disk drive: unit 63 on SCSI controller 2 Disk drive: unit 95 on SCSI controller 2 Integral SCSI controller 3: Version Fibre Channel AIC-1160, revision 2 IOC3/IOC4 serial port: tty1 IOC3/IOC4 serial port: tty2 IOC3 parallel port: plp1 Graphics board: V8 Integral Fast Ethernet: ef0, version 1, pci 2 Iris Audio Processor: version RAD revision 12.0, number 1

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At some point, I really need to talk about my love of these books. Picked the first two up in Seoul in 1984, from a rather large Stars and Stripes bookstore. They travelled well, kept me engaged and alive through a lot. I also loved Gary Chalk's illustrations in the original volumes (later I would encounter his work on the 2nd edition Talisman board game).

I still have all of mine, in spite of their decrepit condition through the years.

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This looks somewhat familiar.

STAR WARS arcade poster from 1983.

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Well, to be fair, the only reason I have a Nintendo at all is because of Sony.

The Super Nintendo CD-ROM, also known as the Nintendo Playstation. 

When your Mom called your Playstation a “Nintendo,” she had no idea how close she was to being right on that one.

In the early 1990s, Nintendo made a deal with Sony (inventors of the CD) to make a Super Nintendo add on with the ability to play CD games, known as the Super Nintendo CD-ROM. Over 200 were made as proof of concept and demonstrated it at several consumer electronics conferences. One video game on the SNES was originally designed to be on a CD for this upcoming add-on: Secret of Mana. However, Nintendo and Sony had a falling out (depending on who you ask, the story of what happened is different) so Sony took the product they designed as Super Nintendo add-on and turned it into its own system, the PlayStation. 

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Spyro!

I’m definitely looking forward to this, for many reasons, but for other reasons, I’m holding hopeful for an eventual Switch release.

It’s official!  Happy Spyro day everyone!! It’s out in the world :) I was blessed to be invited to redesign many of these characters alongside the amazing team at Toys For Bob. Working on Spyro was a real childhood dream come true! On the occasion of the release, I thought I’d bring back a handful of the concepts of mine that have been officially released- each character was its own unique challenge and hopefully in the end we’ve done right by the fans who have loved Spyro since his debut so many years ago! I’ve gotta go get in my dragon onesie and fire this up- see y’all in the realms :) www.nicholaskole.art

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Games Developer’s Conference 2018: Day Two

Remember what I wrote about it remaining to be seen if we dodged the “con-crud”? Well, forget all that. We came down with it as expected after all—which is why this missive from the second day wound up being more delayed than I would like.

Onward.

Here I am in Day Two. I look terrible—there’s reasons for that which involve both a general lack of sleep and a surfeit of confusion.

By the end of the second day, trends became apparent, and I’ve had time to reflect on a number of these: 

VR

AR

Analytics

Ads

Cryptocurrencies. (Really.)

Virtual Reality (VR) was heavily represented here. I’m going to come out and confess that VR is not something I seem to be able to take part in. I suffer from migraines even under ideal conditions, and motion sickness besides. This limits my ability to participate in VR—the one time I tried, I became nearly claustrophobic when the goggles went on, nausea set in very quickly and I had to take the set off. Even Raven can't use most VR headsets for very long—safe to say, neither one of us are within the target audience for this technology.

AR is another matter, since it doesn’t depend on my ability to focus on an image mere centimeters from my eyes. But I think the utility is kind of dependent on a given external environment or other factors, so I, again, I don’t have much to say about AR in general. Most of the cases presented at the conference were little more than tech demos.

While AR seemed a mere afterthought to the conference at large, analytics seemed to be almost an obsession. Knowing what the users of a product are doing with it at all times, aggregating the data to make better choices and create better worlds to play in, &c. Much of this would be useful for game devs who are engaged in level design, and some cases for analytics were presented with just that in mind.

However, many cases for the use of analytics verged into what I perceived as somewhat invasive territory, and I admit to being uncomfortable with that. One exhibitor offered what they regarded as a compelling use-case for using their service—say, a user hasn’t been playing your game “enough”, and in this case, we'll use the particular developer's example of a week of inactivity for a particular user who tends toward making lots of in-app purchases. Notifications can be automatically generated and sent to the individual user's account - pushed to not only remind a player that the game “misses” them, but to also dangle an extra treat or bit of loot valuable to the gameplay experience to sweeten the deal: come back to the game, and you can have this thing which you might have found by yourself after a few hours on your own.

It’s important to realize that some of these games are being used to sell advertising, and lots of ads being played during the course of gameplay leads to more income for the developer. All well and good. But:

Whatever the developer sets as “not enough time spent in game” is something I see as ultimately arbitrary— perhaps more disturbing to me, however, is now the process is automated. Is a week really too much time away? And would I personally be more inclined to play a game that effectively “nags” me to play it? The implications for the particular developer that we are using as example here also seemed a bit classist to me – users that paid more real world money into the game were obviously targeted with more notifications and enticements to return, which leads to some uncomfortable questions that didn't manifest for us until much later. Were lower-paying or free-to-play users targeted with the same level and quality of loot? What does this ultimately do to game balance?

Obviously, most mobile devices offer some level of granular control of how and even who can hassle the device’s owner, but this shouldn’t be necessary to implement from day one, because it violates a key principle of ownership and how anyone might choose to spend their own time. Would some folk be grateful of the reminder? And choose to accept the digital gift being offered? No doubt. But it’s a little creepy in an industry known for creating compelling and even addicting experiences in the name of having fun in a harmless pastime which then provokes a user’s attention in order to justify selling a few more ads. That this data is then being gathered and monitored I have no doubt, but I think game developers should tread cautiously when presented with such tools, however tempting:

Games are toys. They should only command our attention when we are ready for them, never vice versa. Hassling players in order to provoke engagement may be tempting, but accepting a passive role in entertaining others is perfectly acceptable.

Games are the kind of entertainment often easily associated with poor experiences. How often has anyone said “I hate that game” or “that game gave me cancer” and meant they were having a good time and would recommend that experience to their friends? A game might not be objectively terrible, but no player is going to be objective while playing. If free-to-play comes with a high price to play (in an annoying coin), folk may remember only the bad things about the product and forget the good things. 

It never looks good seeing your company’s name (or more) in a headline along with the terms “data breach” or “users of [game] had their personal information hacked”—even if it was harmless. An easy way to avoid this is to never monitor your own users beyond accepting payments from them. Does this leave you in the dark with regards to valuable informatics? Yup. But it also covers things pretty well in light of what is turning out to be a fairly regular occurrence—and may even be part of the cost of doing business. In a free-to-play scenario, violating that trust also won’t be good for attracting new users to your product.

If I seem out of place with my tone here, given that I am at this point certainly (as I have amply established) a relative outsider, consider that most game devs still come from games players. These things struck me as obvious, but as I’ve learned, no industry is 100% infallible when it comes to trends or even groupthink.

Ads seem to be a potentially good way of helping fund a project.

But I don’t really know if there’s a best practice for this. Ads are ads—there’s not much anyone can do to avoid ads, given how pervasive they are in television, magazines, and, recently, movie theaters. Why not in games? So long as information which doesn’t belong to the advertisers isn’t being handed off to third parties, I’ve no objection to ads as a revenue stream.

I will say I prefer to pay for games outright. That seems more sustainable and less susceptible to external factors over the long haul. It also seems like a small company could carve out a comfortable niche doing only games which are available for a small fee.

Some advertising requires a transaction, either a tap/click or other form of interaction either to dismiss the ad or—for those rare occasions when a player might actually want what’s being advertised—click through. Obviously there are entities ready and able to handle those transactions and deliver some sort of fulfillment—whatever it is—on whatever’s being offered. Certainly, groups who do not only ad design but make playable games within ads themselves were represented at GDC. (That latter one is clearly new to me, given the demise of Flash, but considering the ubiquity of JavaScript, maybe it shouldn’t at all.)

Ad Delivery is understandable. Cryptocurrencies, however…

What I don’t understand is the presence of cryptocurrencies (not just one, but I counted four when we went), some of whom represented themselves as an alternative to paying for games outright, possibly in exchange for a little (or more than a little) of a game player’s CPU/GPU time or unused disk space to facilitate mining.

Let me get this out right now: I don’t regard cryptocurrencies as valid economic vehicles, investments, or even valid currencies. Right now, they seem to be digital tulips run amok. I confess to dabbling with a bit of “mining” in the past, but the frustrations associated with cashing out now that the market has become so unstable has only affirmed what I believe about cryptocurrencies. It’s clear that crypto has a lot of black market movements associated with it, and some decidedly unsavory political movements as well as money laundering. It doesn’t matter to me that fiat currency is likely based on nothing tangible, except the agreement of an entire nation or treaty group that is has value, and the militaries that often come with such arrangements—something no cryptocurrency will likely ever have.

So I remain a hard skeptic of cryptocurrencies and all of their attendant industry, which is why it was a surprise to see any cryptocurrency represented at a game design conference.

My reading on this presence is as yet incomplete.

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We have been looking for alternatives to Adobe Creative Cloud, which has become cumbersome and costly.

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A reminder that Nintendo has been doing electronic gaming hardware for a while.

NINTENDO - Colour TV Game console series (1977-1980)

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It seems like some things are lost when we standardize.  Look at that keyboard and that case. They are both mini-technological marvels.

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We didn’t get to any of the conferences this year, so I’m grateful we’re able to see any of these.

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Games Developer’s Conference 2018: Expo Unpacking and Getting Cracking

This job involves doing strange things. My wife and I have a combined total of more than 30 years of print design experience. That means we don't know everything. Someone always knows more, and on certain matters, like, for example, electronic games, our experience is lopsided: she simply has more experience when it comes to electronic games. She's also the better gamer.

Our personal styles are different, too. Where I am reserved, tentative, and cautious, she is more daring and open. My feeling is she tends to introduce me to more new things than I can ever show to her. Is it complementary? Maybe, but I also think there's a congruent aspect to each of our approaches. But when it comes to developing a game? Design? The market is swamped with games. There are a lot to be seen everywhere. We needed to know more, and quickly.

So we went to GDC.

Which was never on my radar, and I think that was because I didn't know it should have been. I've been to perhaps one science fiction convention in my life, Expo 85 in Tsukuba, Japan, and several Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Meetings (both of which represented stepping far far out of my own personal comfort zone), but in spite of over 20 years in graphic design, I've never even once attended a career-specific convention. It wasn't from lack of interest, but. Mostly funds. But if I could make SVP, surely I could have made it to AIGA once. Well, never mind. The winds have shifted our ship towards new, demanding directions which require we tack away from print, and towards more digital and ephemeral destinations.

I'm told that GDC 2018 had over 27,000 attendees. As of this writing, it remains to be seen if either of us catches the notorious "con crud" involving some variation of the flu, but we went down with eyes, ears, and our minds as open and as receptive as possible in order to learn what we could, since, as Raven put it, "we don't even know what we don't know."

GDC’s flood of ambience? We were soaking in it.

That doesn't mean we went in as completely credulous naifs. Skepticism is a part of our complete critical thinking-fast, and these are companies/corporations, after all (although even universities should be afforded comparable considerations when encountering their booths and representatives). Just because I happen to belong to an LLC myself doesn't mean I'm going to cut anything or anyone else a pass.

I should make it clear we were only in for the Expo itself; the conference track was much too expensive—and anyway, as it is, I'm grateful. The expo is a pretty important part of GDC, and it would have been far too taxing to try to make all of the talks on our first attendance. As it was, the expo floor was gigantic.

Day One Was Wednesday

Of all the booths representing the games industry, I think the best one was also one of the largest: Amazon. This was a surprise (one of what would turn out to be many surprises).

Things which surprised me:

The presence of Amazon. No, really. If someone had told me Amazon had representation within a game conference I would have assumed they were only selling other people’s games. Turns out, they were not.

Also the publisher, Taylor & Francis Group, had a booth filled with reference books. I had no idea they published stuff for game development. We mostly knew them from being the publisher of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology for SVP.

Several localizers had booths. It seems absolutely obvious in retrospect, but I didn't expect it.

Universities and trade schools also had booths.

A dearth of tabletop games, though there were a couple.

The sheer number of game engines represented (Unreal, Unity, Improbable, &c.)

The obsession of developers with VR applications. Some of this was neat, but really, the best tidbit about VR we picked up was at the Qualcomm both.

Analytics. This is almost an obsession with this crowd, but when it comes to users, game devs sure do seem to want to know a lot about their users (otherwise why would there be all of these tools available). I'm not afraid to say that even as a creator, it was more than a little creepy at times.

Game tech companies, for gods' sake, consider shapes other than cubes for your products' logo(s). Yes, I'm saying that knowing full well how hypocritical I may sound. I don't care, I've had my little 2D cube logo since 2006, but it was interesting seeing how interchangeable most of the branding here was (which, of course, could well be considered a branding failure). Incidentally, we are available for logo design. Call us.

People there actually knew what a Lytro camera is. I brought it every day, but it was only on the last day that I brought it out and started taking photos with it. It generated more conversation than just about anything else we did. I'm not mad, it was great.

Cryptocurrencies—several of them. Seriously.

Things which did not surprise me:

The presence of in-game ad delivery companies. Lots of them. This makes sense, since makers of games need to earn a living somehow.

A propensity to automate a lot of things. Natural enough for games in many contexts, but this sometimes extended to sticky user engagement, and I find this to be a repellent annoyance whenever it’s tried on me.

The size of the PlayStation booth. Or field. It was pretty huge.

The presence of Microsoft and other large players in the games-making industry.

SideFX was demonstrating Houdini. There were presentations, but I was unable to spend time in any of them. I acquired a shirt, but I have to be honest, it’s vacuum-compressed into a tiny square and I may never open it. It’s just too perfect.

Wacom had their impressive new Cintiqs on display. (Ours are old—2007 vintage, and they always had issues with gamut. These new ones clearly do not.)

Amazon had the best presence in terms of informational accessibility, presentation, and sheer organization. It was impossible to not keep coming back to it, and as a consequence, absorb a lot of information relatively rapidly.

And there was a lot to absorb. AWS Cloud is the backbone of many projects on the internet (which can have its own consequences in case something goes wrong), but it’s also the host for their Lumberyard engine. I wasn’t there to evaluate engines myself (that would require a great deal more capability and experience than I currently possess), but the level of integration on display was impressive. I couldn’t find anyone to answer questions I had about how Spectre and Meltdown might affect AWS; possibly because these were not technical presentations, but marketing.

Apparently, Amazon had also purchased Twitch. That was news. (Twitch is also one of the many internet things I’ve just had no real time for. So it was news which had no effect on anything we’re currently doing.)

It takes a lot to impress me, and I’m honestly predisposed to regard companies like Amazon unfavorably, but their effort here was legitimately impressive, and I think it’s fair to say I spent most of my time there. Whether that means I might use Lumberyard (or even AWS) for anything in the future remains to be seen, however. (Our first project doesn’t require anything close to what was being offered.)

For the second day, I decided to spend time with more of the other exhibitors.

This was our first time attending GDC. It was made possible by Anthony Ruelas, who not only sponsored our tickets and access to the Games Developer's Conference Expo itself, but permitted us to crash on an air mattress on his living room floor during our stay in San Francisco. We owe Anthony a Great Debt. I don't think we could have had a more solid introduction to the world of games production in a purely business context without his help and hospitality.

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1, 2, 3, 4, I Declare a Console War

“War” is an easy metaphor often used to describe a given competition, and companies sometimes exploit our tendency to attach ourselves to tribal modes of thinking in order to move product.

In the case of a few media companies in competition with one another, war isn’t a valid metaphor, it’s marketing for invented tribes.

Marketing was responsible for setting the tribe’s belief systems with slogans (like "play it loud” and “blast processing”), with the ultimate manichaean goal of getting you to choose and then spend your money on your tribe. Nobody was ever born into this system. It had to be fabricated first.

That’s right Sega and Nintendo fans of the early 90s: I just wrote you belonged to tribal vapor.

The huge irony of all of this is that, even subjectively, video games should have objectively been considered all part of the same subset of the larger pastime of games. Literally every video games company saw itself competing for the same sliver of disposable income, and behaved as though growing their customer base meant taking customers from one group or another.

Perhaps they weren’t wrong to do so, really, considering how expensive game consoles are. It was probably not practical to hope that just because a family would buy one console, surely they would buy up to two others, even if this is now commonly the case. Today is rather different, though. Consoles haven’t changed much in price, and as a result, they have become less costly to produce and buy thanks to inflation.

A new console produced in 1990 at $299 is more expensive than a new console in 2015 at the same price point ($536.14 per CPI Inflation Calculator). That makes things a bit more palatable when it comes to indulging in what might otherwise have been considered an extravagance. And more TVs are common in a single household. Prices of displays have fallen considerably in the intervening years, to say nothing of computers themselves, which have become nothing if not more ubiquitous.

What I find interesting about this period—a period in which I wasn’t involved and didn’t affect me the slightest—is that nobody seems to have even tried what Nintendo eventually did with the Wii: grow the user base of video games in general, focusing instead on chasing a much smaller market to the exclusion of all else.

This is something humans do naturally: split up into factions both substantial and insubstantial. Sega and Nintendo weren’t doing anything that would have worked if human beings didn’t have these tendencies inculcated into us at the genomic level. And they wouldn’t have succeeded in dividing large numbers of players if neither side could offer the best quality games possible for their respective platforms.

Tribalism often creates more problems than it solves, of course. But it’s mostly harmless—if a bit bizarre—in being expressed as some sort of console choice. Since tribalism can often degenerate into bigotry, racism, or sexism, expressing a preference for a toy manufacturer is perfectly fine.

So the other thing about war is that it destroys things. I’m not going to recount the history of this period—that’s why we have books and/or Wikipedia—but some have argued that Sega was the clear loser because they no longer produce hardware. I’d agree that doesn’t look great, but in another sense it freed Sega from a commitment to its own platform and left it to pursue other platforms—including Nintendo (one of the best Nintendo racing games is from Sega—F-Zero GX for the GameCube).

Consider this: in the 90s I never once played Sonic the Hedgehog or even saw a Sega Saturn (even in a commercial). One might be inclined to wonder what authority I even have to cast aspersions on the notion of calling it war, and one wouldn’t be wrong, but my point is it was very easy to live without even hearing about it while it was happening. A console war might get a lot of press these days, but it was a tempest in a teapot back then. I sometimes wonder if people don’t, in fact, exaggerate how into their preferred tribe they used to be, but then I get on the internet and see comments from people who appear to be serious about how into their toys they still are—even to the exclusion of other sorts of fun in the same category.

But back to Sega and the loss of the hardware division.

There are, of course, downsides to not running your own hardware platform, such as: if a hardware maker folds, your games (and the investment they represent) could be orphaned. But this is a risk every publisher faces.

But ultimately, the result of this competition was a vast multiplicity of games—a near-Cambrian explosion of culture and productivity (some of it great, some … not so great) which I’ll be sampling here in the future. Wars don’t do this. Wars hold back, shatter capacity, and limit the future. That’s not what the “console wars” of the 90s actually did. But overall, more franchises were probably invented, launched, and refined between Sega and Nintendo than at any prior point in video game history.

In 2017, I finally got to play Sonic the Hedgehog on the PlayStation 3, part of a compilation of many of Sega’s games. I can see the appeal. It’s a fun game.

I still haven’t gotten past the first level.

I wrote this over a period of three days, stealing time as I could. But it will post while I’m in the air, flying to San Francisco, in part to attend GDC 18. I’ll be able to return to blogging after that point.

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Ah, the Vectrex. An utterly unique console.