Archive for the ‘Game Industry’ Category

Three years ago, when I first began this site, I posted this about voice actors complaining over the videogame industry’s position of not providing the same financial rewards as other more traditional media given their percieved profits - most notably residuals, (an ongoing stream of payments for the completion of past achievements). Since then, I’ve not only worked on more than a couple of projects with a heavy focus on high-quality voice acting, but also directed motion-capture actors in hollywood. This has given me a better appreciation of the artform and of the difference that a real talent can bring to a performance.

Nevertheless, I still got really mad at this recent interview in The New York Times with Michael Hollick, voice (sometimes mocap - though if all the actions in the game are done by one guy I’d be surprised) actor employed to breathe life into the main protagonist of the recent hit GTA4, Nico Bellic.

Mr. Hollick is understandably upset about the fuzziness of his contract that, unlike those offered in the mediums of film, television or radio, does not offer him pay whenever his contribution is featured in promotional materials, and perhaps that should have been made more clear to him. However, if he or any other voice actor believes that the work he provides is IN ANY WAY comparable to the years of intensive creative labour, off-hours problem-solving, and let’s not forget, unpaid overtime by the hundreds of talented developers at any given game studio then he is very, very mislead. I wholeheartedly agree with the below statement from the piece:

“The actor whose appearance or voice is used is more analogous to a session music for a band. The session musicians don’t get residuals on the sales of the CD. They get paid a session fee.” - Ezra J. Doner, a former Hollywood executive who represents entertainment companies as a lawyer at Herrick, Feinstein in Manhattan, N.Y.”

Funnily, an interview in the April issue of EDGE magazine sees series creator Sam Houser talk of Ray Liotta’s similar comments following the huge success of GTA Vice City:

“…I hate that kind of chat. It’s like, be cool. You know? I hate that - it’s so cheesy. Like he’s saying, “Next time I’m really going to pin it to them”. Well, how about we just killed off your character? So he doesn’t exist - there is no next time. That’s how we handle that.”

No more Nico Bellic then.

Read at Mayerson on Animation:

“If you make a half hour TV show and a million people watch it, you’ve used up 500,000 hours of human life. If you make a feature and a million people watch it, you’ve used up two million hours of human life. There are only 8,760 hours in a year, which means that your TV show burns up more than 57 years of human life and your feature burns up more than 228 years of human life for every million viewers. These amounts are not trivial. We should all ask ourselves if we are providing value for the amount of the audience’s life we are using up.”

This got me thinking about the sheer amount of time that can be spent inside a game as opposed to a film or individual television show. Doing a little rough calculation on a large-scale game like Mass Effect:

• The last official figures, (pre-holiday season 2007), showed the game to have sold over 1.7m copies. That number has certainly increased since then, but we’ll stick with that for now in the interests of being conservative.
• We know that only under 20% of games are ever completed, (though I’m estimating that figure might be higher based on the targetted RPG user-base over the perhaps more impatient “Halo crowd”), plus this is a game that actively promotes muliple playthroughs. Again though, in the interests of erring on the conservative we’ll just stick to 20%.
• Depending on how the player decides to approach the game, a single playthrough can last anywhere between 5-6 hours and 30-40 hours, so let’s take an an average of roughly 10-15 hours per playthrough. (Additionally, the remaining 80% will likely have sunk a significant amount of time before hitting a wall, but we’ll leave them out for now).
• 20% of 1,700,000 is 340,000, multiplied by 10-15 gives a total of 3.4-5.1 million hours, or at least 388-582 years of human life spent inside the game-world.

That’s a shitload of time!

Just think what these people could have been doing to further the human race - discovering cures for cancer, solving global warming etc. Of course, there’s a lot to be said for downtime and escapism. Losing yourself on an asteroid hurtling towards a human-colonised planet certainly allows you to punctuate your presumably less (than that) exciting existence, but imagine if we could infuse our unique entertainment medium with the kind of education and exploration of the human condition that has been the staple of much less time-consuming entertainment mediums since inception. We really as an industry owe it to ourselves to provide some kind of cultural value to the people who are going to be investing time in our creations so that not only can they justify the time, but us our creations.

On Tuesday I fly to San Francisco for this year’s Game Developer’s Conference so have drawn up a schedule below, (despite not being 100% fixed on many talks due to the amount of overlap on my topics of interest). Decisions are in bold, while same-time alternatives remain should I change my mind. Hope to see some of you there :)

Read entire post…

A lot has been said over the past few weeks concerning the sexual content of Mass Effect, most notably the controversially unresearched Fox TV spot below. As a former member of the dev team responsible, (who directed a portion of the motion-capture actors involved - though full cutscenes weren’t my gig), I can perhaps speak with a little more candor on the subject.

To recap, the story so far:

1. Conservative radio journalist posts 3-page condemnation of “Virtual Orgasmic Rape” allegedly portrayed in Mass Effect.
2. Fox picks up the story, (shown above), draughting book author and panel to blast the game’s supposed pornographic nature.
3. Gamers take offence to the author’s comments, particularly the fact that all of the commentators neglected to actually play the game, spamming reviews of her recent book on Amazon, (some of which is hilarious).
4. EA, (now the parent company of BioWare), issues a statement to Fox, requesting that they officially correct their misinformed allegations.
5. Fox responds to EA, inviting them onto the show for a second, predictably biased, debate.
6. Original conservative radio journalist apologises for his error-strewn piece, surreptitiously removing the initial post.
7. Author apologises, retracting her erroneous statements after finally observing someone play the game.

EA is correct in saying that this is not only a gross misrepresentation of the game but is also disappointing to someone that worked on a project he considers offered a somewhat more mature and substantial experience than that described in the segment. For an altogether more accurate description of the “Romance Plots”, as they were always named during development, Marie-Jo has posted an excellent write up. I know that others still at BioWare share this sadness that the game has been run through the mud due to a combination of ignorance, self-publicity and a prescribed agenda masquerading as journalism.

However…

Can we honestly, as an industry, say that these kinds of criticisms leveled against us are wholly without merit?

One thing I’ve been repeating a lot recently is that I’m sick of games that involve nothing more cerebral than just shooting people. That kind of baseless content is indefensible against mass-media criticism, and to be perfectly honest, is hard to justify as a daily job let alone a creative one. There’s an almost automated reaction against any form of censorship of videogame content but how often do we, as developers and as gamers, stop to consider the cultural validity of the way we spend our downtime?

I’m not here to argue whether “adult” games are influential to minors that shouldn’t be accessing that kind of material as that’s another debate more well-trodden elsewhere, nor am I to take apart the arguments and sheer lack of research present in the above piece, (which hardly deserves debate), but regardless of the answer, consider this. Videogames, by their very virtual nature, can conjure up any kind of experience imaginable. In the words of my first Lead Programmer, “Anything’s possible, it’s just a question of time“. Why then do we continue to churn out endless waves of purile and/or conflict-orientated entertainment, and more to the point, why does the general public continue to lap it up?

Our greatest mission going forward, (one that is shared with all the most passionate developers I speak with), is the search for legitimacy as a creative medium and cultural validity as a form of entertainment. I believe Mass Effect is one of a small but growing number of videogames that can stand against the generic criticism thrown around by the sensationalist press, which makes it all the more frustrating that it should be singled out in this way.

I finally concede defeat - I’ve played a Wii game that isn’t shit. Despite being a huge fan of the Zelda series, I found even the Wii launch title Zelda to fall flat on its face after just an hour’s play and has never been touched since. I did, however, receive a copy of Mario Galaxy for Christmas this year and actually found myself laughing while playing. On reflection though this wasn’t because of enjoyment of the game, which is fun in an old-fashioned, time-killing kind of way, but instead an appreciation of Nintendo’s genius behind such a no-risk design.

In the game, each and every level merely consists of a connected series of “planets”, (or rather floating platforms tethered together by splines on which Mario can travel). These planets feel like a series of unrelated test-levels where the designers were free to come up with various unique gameplay mechanics that would never have any adverse effect on each other. A safe, non-cohesive progression like this must have allowed for great experimentation at the Kyoto-based developer without fear of a quota of levels to hit. I imagine a minimum of 100 stars was laid down and 10 times that many were created, with only the best retained in the final game.

The non-linear order of level completion is unhindered by something so complex as a story, and as such the designers were free to create a game where good old-fashioned gameplay and fun take precedence over innovation. I’ve spoken to several colleagues that hail Call of Duty 4’s often one-time uses of game mechanics, with the downside only being game-length, (as re-use is a given standard in game design), but I imagine Infinity Ward were not afforded the same freedom as Nintendo due to the necessity for a cohesive linear narrative.

The reason I write this is that, while clever, it seems that every new challenge we face in bringing gaming to a more mature level is all but undermined by Nintendo. From consoles aimed squarely at children and non-gamers to consistently immature games sporting vacuous subject matter that conform to many a critic’s interpretation - is this really where games should be going?

A name like a bad guy from a Van Damme flick hasn’t stopped Johnny Lee from creating some incredibe 3D apps using a Wii remote connected to a PC, most recently this fantastic DIY Desktop Virtual Reality Display.

I recently saw Beowulf in full Imax 3D and came out wondering two things.

• Why did they bother to make it in CG anyway?
• Why aren’t we pursuing full 3D in games?

I’m sure we’ve all played a round of Quake with cheap VR glasses at some point in the past, but could you imagine how impressive the current generation of games would look, even if the quality was likened to split-screen to provide two displays? The VR fad all but died outside of academia since it’s brief flirt with the mass audience via more up-market arcades in the 90s, but I’ve always believed it will resurface at some point when the technology becomes affordable, (and side-effects like headaches and nausea are overcome).

With major hollywood directors like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Peter Jackson now looking towards 3D to bring crowds back into the cinemas, I’m confident the experience provided by film’s linear and passive nature would be easily trounced by that of a fully interactive 3D world, the likes of which videogames have been creating for decades.

Taking a break from regurgitating press releases, Gamespot has an informative article on the art of pitching your game concept to prospective publishers.

Brendan Sinclair’s insightful piece talks to several industry vets about how the videogame pitch has changed over the years, as well as highlighting alternative methods to get marketing onboard. I’m sure my younger self would balk at me saying this, but I really believe the best game concepts are not only fun and innovative, but should also sell.

This way of thinking can be useful on a macro level too. In a recent conversation with a videogame marketer, I explained that when creating the showpiece ingame animations for any given project it’s always a good idea to bear in mind, “would this pose look good on a poster?”.