Feelplus: Looking Back at LOST ODYSSEY - The Challenge of Cross Cultural Development

Ray Nakazato - President, Feelplus Inc.

As with each of the Japanese presentations, Nakazato began by detailing the hierarchy of the companies involved in the project. Feelplus Inc. was established in 2005, with the team quickly growing in size to the final headcount of around 100 developers, many of which came from Microsoft and SEGA. Feelplus is 1 of 3 companies under the AQ Interactive Group, (including Artoon and Cavia), and the project was a collaborative effort with Sakaguchi’s team at Mistwalker who formed the core desgin team.

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Sony Pictures Imageworks: A Believable Character Postmortem: Motion Capture on the Virtual Set of BEOWULF

Parag Halvadar - Lead R&D Engineer

Hailing from the same studio that created Monster House, Halvadar’s talk concentrated on facial motion as that’s a recent topic for games industry. As is often the case with movie industry approaches they couldn’t directly be recreated for use in a game development situation, but nonetheless provided an interesting insight into some of the lengths that must be gone to in search of the (some say, false) holy grail of truly photo-real virtual characters.

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I have many a fond memory of viewing beautiful scenes like this through rain-covered car windows, steamed up with a family’s-worth of impatient breath and opened flasks of tea, finally taking one triumphant run outside during a break in the clouds before driving back home again to our Sunday dinner and less weather-reliant pursuits of newspapers and videogames.

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.

Now, Nintendo is second only to EA for peddling the same franchises year on year with only minor tweaks and updates, and Mario Kart Wii is no exception - but once again, (and I’ve been playing this same game since high school), it’s an absolute blast - especially in team mode (co-op). What impressed me most though, and therefore resulting in this post, was the online experience - my first with Nintendo.

Being used to XBOX Live’s often unsavoury company of middle-American cowboy attitudes further shielded by online anonymity, as well as the downright embarrassing experience of being a grown man playing with children, it was refreshing to simply play a game against complete strangers that could not be interacted with in the slightest outside of the actions presented in gameplay - ie. throwing shells etc. I used to hate the idea of Friend Codes, (Nintendo’s enforcement of only being able to choose online opponents you already know in real life), but when I come to think of it, I rarely play against folks outside private matches on Live due to the aforementioned issues.

Every race, I am shown the geographic loaction of each participant on a spinning globe, (and the matches are truly international based on when you jump online), with only their smiling avatar and name to distinguish them. No headsets. No trash-talking. No ChildKilla69 or Assr8p firing bigoted insults with every other headshot- just a clean, simple race to the finish with friendly folks sporting names like Bill, Jake, Canadagirl and WingMario. I fantasize that, unlike the petty XBOX crowd, I was playing against similar young professionals as myself. Doctors and lawyers, designers and architects all kicking back in their loft appartments after a hard day’s work - donning the Nintendo avatars of which we all share a particular nostalgia, or their own personalised yet similarly cute Miis.

Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

via Kotaku

They seem to be pushing the immersive 1st-person view even more than Far Cry 2, but to be honest, the game could be about anything - what I’m most excited about is the fantastic world you’re let loose in. The architecture and music really capture everything I want in a near-future urban setting, without a gangsta in sight - perhaps something that can only best be done by a team in Scandinavia. This is Swedish design usually reserved for ultra-modern interiors and furniture. Videogame visuals take another step forward.

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.

Me: Can I just take 5 minutes in HMV beforehand?
MJ: We only have 30 minutes to eat :( We’ll have to get in line and…
Me: I won’t be long baby. I just need to pick something up.
MJ: Everyone was talking about the movie on the subway train here - it’s gonna be a huge line-up. What is it you want?
Me: You’ll see. Just give me 5 minutes…

[…5 minutes later]

Me: Here you go baby. Remember the game you were working on for a year and a half?
MJ: OMG! I completely forgot it was coming out today!