So I’m back after an exhausting week in the ancestral stomping grounds where the people are just so frustrated that they cling to their guns and religion. At least that’s what I’m told happens. I’ve never seen it.

I didn’t have anything to post about today, but someone made mention of Gamestop’s attempted “deal” with Penny Arcade regarding their upcoming game and I simply did not believe them. So I found a link to a Wired interview from a few weeks ago that confirms it. Here’s a snippet:

We had a meeting with GameStop to talk about selling a boxed version of the game. Once we had a bunch of episodes together, we would collect them and put them in a box, you know? And GameStop said, oh, that’s fantastic. We’d love to do it, we’d love to carry the game… but it’s not going to be available anywhere else, is it?

And Robert said, well, we’re going to digitally distribute it first.

They got really upset. And they said, no, you can’t do that. We can’t have it in our store if it’s coming out digitally first. And he said, well, I’m sorry, that’s the way it works. We’re publishing our game and we can say where it goes. And so the deal that they tried to strike with Robert was okay, well, listen: If you cut us in on the profits from online distribution, and XBLA, and everything it comes out on, then we’ll think about carrying it in the store.

Let’s dismiss for the moment the ethics of the situation as I think I’d be pretty one-sided with that analysis. What I’m interested in is how to get huge cajones like the suits at Gamestop.

Here is a company that needs publishers to survive - not the other way around. And they are faced with this dilemma of digital distribution that could bankrupt their company in the next decade if they don’t navigate the waters successfully. And if they were an agile, progressive company, they would be figuring out how to make that model work for them. Instead, they are trying to bully smaller publishers into giving Gamestop money for what is essentially tribute unaware that Rome burns around them? Sorry for the mixed metaphor, but I’m having a hard time believing it.

This is a game that will make Gamestop a healthy profit and they are turning it down because they won’t get all the retail-level profit? Who is running that company? Who is buying their stock for the long-term? I want to like Gamestop because despite their numerous instances of bad press, they do provide a good service for gamers. You know they will have the new releases on day one. You usually will be able to find older titles that are off of store shelves at the big boxes. And it’s really the only store that has a chance of serving as a cultural meeting place for gaming events. But they take that heft that they’ve established via hard work and expansion and they squander it piecemeal at seemingly every opportunity.

Hey all,

I had a family emergency and had to travel back to Pittsburgh for the week. Posting will resume Monday.

Thanks,

Zack

MTV Multiplayer asks: Can Video Game Marketing Teams Make Better Xbox 360 Achievements?

My answer:

Designers design features. Marketing folk help inform the designers as to what people are expecting and they help sell the game. Marketing can and should work with design to hit points marketing feels is important, but the call should be on Design.

Nobody but marketing people think that having a secret Call of Duty 4 achievement that unlocks when you watch a Call of Duty 5 trailer that may hit sometime in the future is a fun idea. You want people that have already bough Call of Duty 4 to watch the Call of Duty 5 trailer. Why? In the hopes that they will buy Call of Duty 5? How about instead of worrying about gimmicks, let the developers make a kick-ass amazing game without gumming up the works with the latest industry buzz-terms and people will line up for the sequel.

Meme time. I can be like Ken Levine and list my five favorites of all time:

1. ActRaiser (SNES)
2. Silent Hill (PS1)
3. Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past (SNES)
4. SimCity 2000 (PC)
5. Elder Scrolls: Oblivion (X360)

Unfortunately, I hold only ~1/100,000 of the clout of Mr. Levine.

Any other designer-blogger people want to chime in? It’s much harder than it looks. No copping out and saying things like: the Final Fantasy series. Five games. No honorable mentions. No series. No qualifications. Go.

I really started to grok the whole MDA framework at GDC this year. I’d seen it before but sort of arrogantly dismissed it as useless ludo-speak, which is easy to do what with the internet and the new glut of game-focused academics. If you don’t know what the MDA framework is, here’s a doc from the authors. An oversimplifying explanation would be that a game designer has an Aesthetic (A) he wishes to create and then figures out a dynamic system (D) that would create the aesthetic, working back to creating the Mechanics (M) that are the rules of the system. Players experience this framework from the opposite direction. They learn the Mechanics (M) first, participate in a Dynamic system (D) and glean some sort of Aesthetic (A) from the experience. It’s actually explained from the different direction in the document, but I’ve found the way I’ve phrased it to meld better with my experience. If you have an objection, leave it in the comments. I’m here to learn. Anyway, I’ve found the whole exercise surprisingly useful in analyzing what works and does not work in games since really picking it up.

Now, what brings me to this is two games that have come to my attention lately: Quest for the Crown and You Have to Burn the Rope. Play both and then come back. Spoilers abound.

Okay. So both are comedic games that subtlety lampoon aspects of mass-market games. In Quest for the Crown it lampoons storytelling - throwing this superbly trite unskippable story over an arbitrary game with the absolute minimum production quality and then ending it with some of what I like to call “Aren’t we great” credits that games like to make you sit through because of the ego of the dev team, which they obviously found more important than working on mechanics.

You Have To Burn the Rope is similar, but with much higher production quality. Here you have a one-level game with one monster and only one way to defeat him. In action games, the fun usually comes from figuring out what the boss’ weak spot is and then exploiting that weakness with your skill. This game eschews that completely by telling you in the title what you have to do and reiterating that on your way to the boss battle. They even cared enough to give you an axe throwing mechanic that serves no purpose as you can’t deal enough damage with it to overcome the boss’ regeneration rate. I found that to be great attention to detail. Then you beat the colossus and you are treated to a hilarious retelling of your epic story. To me, it effectively lampoons the game makers who think their story is much bigger than their game allows it to be.

So why do I bring up MDA? What is interesting to me about these two games is that the aesthetic value of comedy, which I presume they were shooting for is supported by mechanics that only serve the aesthetic when compared to other, external games. It doesn’t work in a vacuum. Now, I believe this is different than say, The Simpsons Game, which intersperses comedic skits with gameplay. In that, the sketches could survive without the gameplay. They are garnishes. While there were some funny moments in the game proper, the aesthetics served by gameplay were pretty weak overall. Or say, Portal, where the comedic elements were content, but the game could survive without it and still be successful because it hits various other aesthetics.

In the case of these two flash games, the game cannot exist without the comedic aesthetic they are trying to hit without being a completely broken experience. The in-joke was core to the experience, not a garnish.

I’ve always considered the mechanics to be something completely contained by the game. But these cases show that mechanics may be intertwined with something outside the game’s circle. Am I missing something? I’m still picking through this MDA idea.

I don’t know why I read comment threads. It’s like petting a mad dog knowing I’m going to get bitten. I know there is going to be boundless stupidity, yet I still read what people have to say. I guess it is because part of my job is having a good handle on what the community is excited about/hates, but that is tough to do when they are so self-contradictory.

Take for example this recent thread on Peter Moore’s blog that announces there won’t be a Madden 2009 on PC this year. There’s pretty much universal outrage for this despite the fact that it isn’t feasible for EA to make the investments to continue the product. I understand the disappointment there, but what I don’t understand is the response. Many of these folks are in the same post asserting that Madden PC has been a piece of shit for years AND that they are beyond pissed off that a 2009 version isn’t coming out. Huh?

If I was on Madden, I’d say that if you don’t like the games, don’t buy them. Nobody on the team is like: “You know what? Fans would really hate this, let’s do it. That’ll show ‘em.” Decisions that are  unpopular are usually done because of time, resource, or technology constraints. I know it isn’t a perfect game, but I also know how hard people are working to turn it into something better and get it ready for ship every year. If Grand Theft Auto had to come out in nine-month cycles, you would see some of the same problems. Actually, it would probably be a better situation for Rockstar simply because the simulation of an 11-on-11 game of football is more complicated than one guy shooting some NPCs that only need to know how to hide and shoot back.

The ironic part of the whole thing is that thanks to the crazy people kibitzing all the time, the team is probably even less likely to listen to the community because they will assume that they don’t know what they are talking about and will froth at the mouth regardless of what the team puts out.