I usually don’t post about politics, because I think it is a loser’s game, but this gave me a smile. In 2004, the Libertarian Party ran a wingnut candidate* named Michael Badnarik. The guy’s name STARTS WITH BAD, not to mention the name sounds like something out of Rocky and Bullwinkle.

I heard on the radio that Bob Barr would be running on the ticket this year, so I jumped over to the site to see if there was news when I saw the name of the fourth place guy on the ticket. His name is Michael Jingozian. His name STARTS WITH JINGO. People like this should realize that they are disqualified for winning offices.

I mean it’s like running Jimbo J. Puppykiller. He gets my vote.

*In the interests of full disclosure, I voted for him out of disgust with my other choices.

I just discovered the GDC pictures that Robin Hunicke (MySims, Boom Blox) put up on her blog a few weeks ago. First, not only is she a cheerfully vibrant person that made the Game Design Workshop tolerable on what little sleep I was running on, but she is an excellent photographer. So if you want to know what the Game Design Workshop is all about, check out the photos. The extremely sparse captioning makes it even more compelling because even though I was there, I’m WTFing at some of the pictures. It looks like we all had a great time!

Removing the context from some of them made for some really compelling shots. I was looking at this one for about thirty seconds before I realized that was my handwriting. Then I remembered the card game we created from which the shot comes, but explaining it I think would take away from the beauty of the shots.

One of my favorites has to be this one of Frank Lantz (Parking Wars, Chain Factor). I guess he is psychic?

Moral of the post: go to the Game Design Workshop.

From NY Magazine:

Video-game players — and critics — want GTA IV to be everything at once: They want the story to be Moving and Important and Consequential in the manner of Coppola so as to defend their medium. Plus they want to fire rocket launchers from a motorcycle while drunk driving. It’s unlikely that this combination will ever quite work — not just because of the uncanny valley, but especially because the balance of action to narrative is tilted so heavily toward blowing shit up.

The fact that there is over a half million people that are on Facebook, care enough to join and stay and think that this will work makes me very, very sad that there isn’t an intelligence test in order to vote. This is why politicians can bend us over and have their way with us.

There’s a great article on Gamasutra about iteration. I know, I know, if you’ve been in the industry for more than ten minutes, you’ve already gone deaf hearing the iteration drum beaten. But this article has some choice bits worth consuming. In listing the factors facing game teams today, he ends with “Management focus on risk because of all the factors stated above”. Then he elaborates:

That last one (increased management focus on risk) has created a cyclic dependency in some of these items that have actually increased them even further, particularly infrastructure. Increased focus on risk brings with it the wish to control the chaos, and implement systems that provide increased visibility and predictability into that chaos.

I assume this is the problem with so many bland unadventurous games out there.

Managers feel useless unless they are doing something. So they worry. They worry about what could happen to us developers while we pound on our keyboards. The market could change. The estimates may be wrong. Marketing partners could come up with something that HAS to be done. A meteor could fall on the studio and wipe out all life on Earth.

So they worry. And feeling that doing something must be better than doing nothing, they act. Like an overprotective parent, they pull back at anything that is a risk factor. Because what would be worse than a risk factor harming a project and having to tell their boss that they saw it there but didn’t think they needed to act?

Think back to your childhood. What are some of your favorite memories? Are they watching TV at home? Or are they when you went climbing in the woods with your friends? Is it sitting inside by the fire or outside sledding down Dead Man’s Gorge?

Moderation in all things. Something isn’t rewarding because it is risky. Don’t play in traffic. But risks have to be taken to get rewards. It is similar to supply and demand. If your currency is risk and something is free and useful, then everybody would buy it until there was a shortage. If you could get rich investing in savings bonds, everyone would do it and no one would buy stocks. So stocks have to provide a better long term return than bonds to reward people for taking the risk.

The same is true for developers. Take no risks and be the investor stuffing currency into his mattress losing to inflation. Take ridiculous risks and be the investor putting their life’s savings into a single penny stock. But smart investors take as much risk as they need and diversify and monitor their risk. Likewise, smart developers diversify their risks and embrace the uncertainty, trusting their teams to create more winners than losers in the long term.

I read MTV Multiplayer’s article “Trying to Make Sense of so Many ‘Perfect’ Games” with a bit of sadness in that many are realizing what I realized when I first started working in this industry – review scores are arbitrary.

I’m reminded of a conversation I had with one of the senior designers here around when Bioshock came out. This was when it was averaging a 100 metacritic, making it the critical best game of all time. He said “Is it that good?” I replied, “It’s pretty good, yeah.” His response: “How is the multiplayer?” I told them there wasn’t any multiplayer. He then said, “How can Madden get dinged every year for wish-list features like Online Leagues that no other major sports game has, yet Bioshock can get away with not including a mode that every major shooter has?” I tried to defend it, “The game is really about the story not the shooting bleh bleh bleh” but he was right. Expectations are arbitrary and set by the PR firms and gaming press. No one expected there to be a multiplayer mode in Bioshock, so it wasn’t an issue that it was absent. But why didn’t they expect it? I don’t know.

Look at Mario Galaxy. It has camera issues as every 3d Mario game did before so no one took those issues seriously and it got showered with 10s. But what if it was a Crash Bandicoot in space game? What if it was an original title from Ubisoft? I doubt it would get much better than 8s. But the expectation is that a Mario game will blow the doors off the place and so that’s what reviewers will see. Nintendo has earned the cultural significance for this willful blindness. Sony hasn’t. Look at Lair. Sony clearly hasn’t. Nintendo can release a buggy Smash Bros. Brawl with a truly insipid single-player mode and because they’ve earned their cultural significance, a blind eye is turned. You don’t get that amnesty forever, though – look at Sega.

If we are giving every good game that comes down the pike a ’10′ if their expectations are set high enough and they deliver on some of them, then the future looks bleak for blockbuster franchises. Look at how Grand Theft Auto has been rewarded. It hasn’t taken any major design risks in comparison to previous titles with the notable exception of adding multiplayer. Some bugs that we’ve seen way back in GTA3 remain. Where’s the drive to make a more technically sound game if you call what we have here the pinnacle? Where does one go from here? What can GTA5 possibly deliver?

The Madden team gets that criticism all the time. They have nine months or so to make a game and when they don’t reinvent the wheel every year, when they don’t address some of the bugs that have been lurking for the past three years,they are slammed and torn apart as lazy or stupid or unskilled. But when Rockstar has four years to deliver the same, they are heaped with praise. GTA4 is a better game than Madden 08, so it isn’t necessarily an apples to apples comparison, but the similarities are striking.

I’d love to just say “abandon Metacritic” and be done with it, but the industry uses it as its primary quality barometer. So I guess I just wish reviewers acted like critics and criticized rather than being awestruck little fanboys. Is there a solution or am I fighting windmills here?

When the first Iron Man (the game) trailer came out, I said “Damn, this looks like Superman Returns“. And it did. The flying, the camera, the animations, the generic bad guys, the sparse environments. It looked like SMR. I hoped that this studio learned from Tiburon’s mistakes, but it seems they have one more thing in common: the same review scores.

I know I haven’t been talking much about game design lately, which I should since I assume that’s what readers come to expect, but I am only human people. With the verdant expanses of Internet laid before me, I cannot help but share.

Grand Theft Auto 4 decided to end its game embargo against me on Friday and so I have been playing and enjoying it. No red ring issues yet, I hope that was a singular event. The game is playable, moreso than how I felt about its predecessor in San Andreas, although I’m pretty sure in that cause it was my fault. Get it? It’s a pun.

Anyway, what I am most surprised about with the game is not the depth of interactions in the city (I tried to steal a car while a guy was loading groceries in the back and he grabbed onto the door hanging on for a few blocks while I sped off) or the size of the city (which is an impressive technical feat, although there is some major pop-in, such as the case when I was running from the cops, spun out into an empty parking lot and a parked tractor trailer materialized above me, trapping me and my car).

I’m actually really impressed with the characters. While the story thusfar has been simple revenge flair, they are hinting towards something bigger. The characters make the game come alive. Niko is a bit of an asshole, but you can tell what he has been through, that he is just trying to live his life from day to day. Roman lives in delusions of grandeur to cope with the unreachable mythic American Dream. Brucie is rote comic relief, but believable. Manny is the kind of philanthropist that really wants you to know how great a guy he is.

I find myself doing the “just one more mission” trick so that I can meet new people. I’m not skipping cutscenes as I have in the past. Kudos to Rockstar for this. While most of the straight humor in the game is blue, when the rest of the world isn’t a shallow dick joke, you can come to appreciate it more. Yeah, the driving sucks, there is pop-up all over the place, there is too much running around, it doesn’t break much new ground insofar as the design, it took three days of crashing on the opening cutscene to finally get in and it certainly isn’t a 10, but it is definitely one of the more important titles of the year and deserving of accolades.

I’ve also been playing The World Ends With You this weekend. While the online videos made it look cringe-inducing (the word “Bling” is used many times, and it looked like a mindless beat-em-up with random  mechanics thrown together), I’ve found it to be anything but (terrible Japanese dialogue exempted). It is an extremely original action game, and I found the combat to be much better than that of Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword. One of the notable innovations is that you can level up while the game is turned off, which I thought was a nice touch. Instead of causing players to want to keep the game off, which I assumed would be the result, I instead want to fire up the game in the morning to see if any of my pins leveled up. A great, great game.

A game that has been introduced to me here at work is the sparse text-based sports MMO Goal Line Blitz. They seem to have a clever pay-for-items model that works well. I’m tempted if I can find a real team to sink some dollars into it. While there are a handful of areas that I would call design flaws, the overall experience is causal and enjoyable. It actually reminds me a little of a Parking Wars in that it is casual-looking and asynchronous, but hides a lot of depth and chances for collusion. If you are interested in football games (especially those free to play!), check out Goal Line Blitz. Maybe we can start a team?

Mark, don’t read this part. I broke our Rock Band mic stand last night. I’m not entirely sure how. I think it was just a shitty stand that had a weak point at the base such that you couldn’t lean on it too much. I do a lot of leaning. Anyone know how to reattach a mic stand pole to its base? I imagine glue, but I worry how weak it would be and how to get it to stand while the glue dries.