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Limitations of Licenses

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At the 2003 GDC, Warren Spector gave a talk entitled Sequels and Adaptations: Design Innovation in a Risk-Averse World. The gist of the speech was that working on a license doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t (or shouldn’t) innovate and create. Licenses are here to stay and may soon become the bread and butter of the industry (if they aren’t already), and developers need to deal with that.

After the GDC, Greg Costikyan posted a note on his blog about the lack of innovation in the industry. Reflecting on Warren’s speech, he said:

The writing is on the wall. And here we have my high-school buddy Warren Spector to confirm it: There in his keynote speech, telling us not to worry, just be happy. Drink the cool aid. Go to work for an in-house studio. Develop a licensed product. By God, Warren would be glad to do a Harry Potter game. What a lovely universe to work in. It’s the future. It’s the way things are. And it’s not so bad.

[You can read the full text of Greg’s rant, and Warren’s subsequent reply, here. Scroll down to A Specter is Haunting Gaming, then work your way back up.]

It seems to me they’re both right. The business reality is that more and more money is being thrown at developers for sequels and licensed titles. Content from other mediums is driving development of products in the interactive industry, because those more mature mediums are looking for ways to expand their hottest and most lucrative brands. The creative reality is that developers are taking on licenses in order to survive, which means they’re not innovating and growing the interactive industry itself. Which inevitably means we’re pushing back the day when mainstream audiences will embrace our medium for what it can uniquely do.

More recently, Jason Della Rocca, program director of the IGDA, posted a note on his blog about the relative success of licensed games versus non-licensed titles. Jason’s conclusion is that original games beat licensed games both in terms of critical quality and quantity of sales. While I hope Jason is right, and that publishers themselves will some day reach this same conclusion, I recently glimpsed another reason why licenses may ultimately turn out to be less attractive to our industry than they currently are.

My epiphany occurred while playing Enter the Matrix, the interactive game based on a license from the motion picture The Matrix Reloaded. After playing the game for a couple of hours, and watching my third-person, in-game persona shoot up the neighborhood, run on walls, and whoosh through the air in slow-motion “bullet time,” it hit me that most of what I was doing and seeing had been forced not by design decisions, but rather by the promise of the license itself. Unlike a ground-up interactive third-person title, Enter the Matrix began life encumbered by filmic conventions and film-related audience expectations, some of which were unrelated (or even antithetical) to a meaningful interactive experience.

(Whether the game as it stands is a success commercially or critically, or whether the developer could have made a better game facing the same constraints, is not at issue. What is of concern is that any developer working on any property licensed from passive mediums will necessarily face these same obstacles: obstacles that do not exist when developers work on original designs. Only products licensed from original interactive works, such as sequels and mission disks, avoid this problem.)

Consider for a moment the obligations presented by the bullet-time sequences in the Matrix films. Not only would any interactive product have to offer the player the same kind of eye candy, but legitimate implementation of the narrative idea behind the effect would involve allowing the player to elect when to slip into bullet time, as well as make that player choice meaningful within the context of the game. To the developer’s credit they accomplished both of these objectives in Enter the Matrix, but as I played I found myself wondering at what cost. How much of the budget and how much of the schedule had to be devoted to building a graphics engine capable of displaying on-demand bullet time? And how did that obligation change or preclude other features or elements of the original design?

Consider also that on-the-fly implementation of bullet time also limited the degree to which a roving or scripted third-person camera could be used to accentuate the graphics, or to emulate the filmic conventions of bullet time in the films. Is bullet time from a fixed perspective going to be as interesting and compelling as bullet time presented through cuts, wild camera angles and tight editing? Is any action sequence in any movie going to translate well under the same constraints?

And what about the loss inherent in translating filmed human beings expressing complex emotions (except for Keanu Reeves) into interactive products that are constrained by technological limitations in depicting virtual characters? How does an interactive developer get around that problem if the licensed material involves live actors? Even assuming photo-realistic avatars indistinguishable from filmed human beings, how can such avatars be employed in an interactive narrative context in anything remotely approximating the emotional power of a good movie, without ultimately turning the interactive product into a film itself? (Case in point: CGW’s review of Enter the Matrix specifically notes that the non-interactive sequences are actually the most entertaining part of the ‘game’.)

At its most basic, these problems are not about licenses at all, but about the differences between passive mediums and the interactive form. If we’ve learned anything over the past ten years it’s that many passive techniques don’t translate at all well into interactive works, which means that licenses from passive forms will inevitably exact a cost at the design stage. I believe this penalty is currently being vastly underestimated by developers.

(In a recent thread in the IGDA Writing Forum, I noted that there is almost no overlap between the ideas I have for original films, television shows, books and stage plays, versus the ideas I have for interactive works. Interactivity as a mechanism of audience entertainment is simply perpendicular to most passive mediums, and I don’t see that changing in the foreseeable future, if ever.)

So while Warren’s right – licenses don’t necessarily mean you won’t be able to be creative – there may still be a design downside to taking a license on, and particularly so if the license originates in another medium. Given that most licenses do come from passive mediums, and that the flow seems to be increasing, this would seem to be a significant problem.

The success or failure of licenses as a business model for interactive developers will ultimately turn on whether the cost paid on the design end is compensated for by the marketing tie-in that is any license’s raison d’être. If licensed products can’t leverage their brand against original interactive works over time, there will be little reason for the interactive industry to seek them out. And that may be the real silver lining in what could otherwise be a licensing Dark Age for our business: products based on licenses from passive mediums may simply be less fun and less interesting than original interactive works. (If this sounds far-fetched, apply the same theory to licenses going the other way, particularly from the interactive industry to film. Would you rather sink money into an original motion picture, or into a movie based on an interactive license?)

Years from now games like Enter the Matrix may simply be seen as testament to the difficulties of translating passive licenses into interactive products. At the same time, developers and publishers may begin to fund more original (and innovative) products as their first means of generating income, just as all other mainstream entertainment mediums do. If and when that happens, the interactive industry will have finally, convincingly demonstrated to itself that interactivity is unique, and that it is the most important thing we have to offer the entertainment consumer.

— Mark Barrett

Failing the Artistic License Test

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There is nothing quite so fulfilling to me as creativity. I love expressing myself, and entertaining others, through a variety of mediums. I’m happy for others who enjoy the same pursuit, and I’m not above being a fan if somebody wows me – particularly when I know I could never do what they’ve done.

Those of us who do creative work that is intended to be sold, however, have a responsibility that goes beyond feeding our own creative jones. Customers pay cash money for our products, and they expect them to be, at the very least, competent. That’s an implicit tradeoff our customers make with us: we get the right to shoot for the moon as long as we promise basic technical and craft competence.

I mention this because my new issue of CGW contains reviews of a number of products that seem to have failed to meet this minimum level of competence. Leaving aside the names of the titles, here are the number of stars those products received, out of a possible 5:

4
1.5
3.5
1.5
3
3
1.5
1.5
2
1.5
4.5
1
3
2
0

It’s no wonder Jeff Green, the Editor-in-Chief, wanted to put A Load of Stink on the front cover of the magazine. Out of 15 products reviewed, 80% were average or worse (3 stars or less), and more than half (60%) were 2 stars or less. What’s going on?

Well, it could be a fluke, or maybe an artifact of the fact that most AAA titles tend to ship around the end of the year. Maybe weak products are being disproportionately shoved out the door in early summer precisely because nobody’s buying now. They’ll die a quick death, all the contractual obligations will be filled, and there will still be six months during which the completely-screwed consumer can be lulled back to buy one of those AAA titles.

But that’s not what I think. What I think is that most of those crappy games were made by people who valued their own creative experience above the entertainment experience of their customers. Read the reviews and it becomes clear that in some of these games even the most basic, established design conventions have been ignored for no reason, as if no one had ever designed a game in that genre before.

Admit it: you’ve played an RTS at some point, and found yourself swearing at the screen because the developers came up with their own interface, instead of ripping off the interface from Age of Kings. Or you’ve played and raged at a console 3D title in which you don’t have the ability to immediately orient the camera behind the player-character, as you can in most Nintendo titles.

Beyond the damage done when bad titles ambush unsuspecting customers, consider the amount of time and development money that went into those craters. How many decent games could have been made with the same resources, if only the designers had known what they were doing? How hard would it have been to find good examples of games that could have been emulated?

There was a time when creativity had to take precedence in all things interactive because nobody’d done anything like it before, and we all have our heroes from that age. That age is now over.

— Mark Barrett

Suspension of Disbelief Explained

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Also in my new issue of CGW was this quote, from Thierry ‘Scooter’ Nguyen’s review of IGI 2: Covert Strike —

“The fact that ex-SAS/current-IGI-agent David Jones gets constantly surprised by third-rate terrorists and inscrutable Chinese troops goes beyond suspending disbelief, and is just one of the litany of annoyances that plague IGI 2: Covert Strike.”

I understand what the writer intended to say, but the phrase ‘goes beyond suspending disbelief’ is a bit strained. In fact, about the only think I can think of that’s beyond suspending disbelief is slipping into full-blown delusion – which may be what happened to the reviewer while he was playing the game, but it has nothing to do with suspending disbelief.

For those who have heard the phrase before, but haven’t had it explained, suspension of disbelief is an unwieldy term used to describe a distinct mental state. Our normal mental state in life is to expect that the things happening around us are real: the sun rises and sets, the grass grows, the lawnmower shreds our toes if we’re not paying attention. Put another way, we believe in these things.

In contrast to Real Life, where you can lose your toes, fictional experiences are not real, and not believable in the same sense. We all know going into a movie theater that what we’re about to see is a mechanical charade that has been intentionally rigged by a bunch of people working somewhere else.

Most of the time we actively disbelieve the reality of a movie, up to and including when we take our seats in the theater. Amazingly, however, as the lights come down, we can still mentally SUSPEND our DISBELIEF and become imaginatively and emotionally affected by the motion picture(s) flickering on the screen in front of us.

What’s truly great about suspension of disbelief for us as developers is that audiences usually suspend disbelief willingly: we don’t have to talk them into it much. What’s not great is that it’s very fragile, and almost anything can disrupt it once we’ve created it in the minds of our users.

In the quote above the reviewer simply should have said that the problems with the game disrupted or shattered suspension of disbelief, making it impossible for him to entertain imaginative involvement in the work. Which is the real point: suspension of disbelief, once created, must also be maintained.

— Mark Barrett

Postal 2 Gets Posterized

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My new issue of Computer Gaming World (CGW) contains a groundbreaking review of Postal 2. It’s groundbreaking because in the history of that venerable magazine, it’s the first time they’ve ever given a game zero stars. Zip. Zilch.

My great hope is that this marks a kind of game design nadir, and portends a general rise in the level of design standards. Hollywood has wrestled with issues like this before, and thankfully the market always tends to keep things from disintegrating into chaos. For example, Tinseltown went through a gore-fest period when new makeup techniques made open wounds believable, but after a while the audience became repulsed, and the industry backed away. Now such technology is usually only exploited in motivated contexts, such as the grisly opening sequence in Saving Private Ryan. (No, not the sequence with the perfectly framed breasts – the one after that.)

Maybe the deep-thinking philosophers at Running With Scissors will turn their considerable talents to actually making a playable game next time, instead of trying to set a record in the ‘Most Constituencies Annoyed by a Single Software Title’ category. In any case, I hope the design floor is now as low as it can possibly go in mainstream interactive entertainment, because we’ve already wasted too many resources trying to find that limit.

— Mark Barrett

Countdown Beatdown

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I happened to catch a few minutes of a relatively new show on MSNBC called Countdown with Keith Olbermann, and guess what subject just happened to come up? That’s right, Violence in Computer Games. And wouldn’t you know, their special guest was a lawyer from Florida who seems to be everybody’s special guest on this subject.

Unfortunately I can’t comment on the lawyer’s attempt to lock this legal turf up for himself, because I didn’t pay any attention to what he was saying. Instead, I was riveted by the images they were showing while the host and guest bantered back and forth. The images were (I believe) from GTA3, playing full-screen with the interview in voice-over, and it only took my gamer’s eye a few seconds to spot the fly in the ointment.

Most of what was being shown was not goal-oriented gameplay, or even mayhem-oriented gameplay, but was in fact TV-segment-oriented gameplay. For example, at one point the player-character is standing over a figure lying on the ground, repeatedly beating the person even though they’re immobile, for what must have been at least ten blows. I’m not kidding when I say that if the player-character would have been wearing an LAPD uniform it could have passed for the Rodney King tape.

And here’s what I’m thinking while I’m watching this:

    Who’s playing the game? Did they go find somebody who had a copy and shoot them playing, or did they get their own console and film that? If they are shooting somebody else (not a staffer) playing, how much footage did they shoot? Did they ask the player (either directly or indirectly) to show them some of the more violent aspects of the game? Or did they just film somebody beating a dead body for twenty minutes?

And here’s what I’m thinking Ma and Pa Peoria are thinking while they watch the same thing in the comfort and safety of their living room:

    Good God! Anybody who’d make something like that deserves ten times the beating that poor bastard is getting!

Sure, GTA3 is a violent game, but how many games could you exploit in the same way? And to what extent is context important in whether or not people find actions offensive or not? If I endlessly bayonet a Nazi in Battlefield 1942, will I take the same heat that I would for endlessly bashing a cop in GTA3? If not, where can I get a list of all the mayhem that’s okay?

I mention this as yet another reason why we need a point person who can respond calmly to this kind of report. Without someone who can speak to the broader issues involved, we’re toast in the public eye because of only a few titles, and only a few aspects of those titles.

— Mark Barrett

Quick – Move the Mouse to the Right and Press the Shift Key!

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I’ve played through a good number of games lately, and I’m noticing a design trend I don’t like much. Specifically, games in modern and futuristic settings are routinely providing the player-character with a constant telecommunications link to NPC’s in other locations, ostensibly so the plot can continue without the player having to return to base for each new mission. Fair enough: I enjoy a well-motivated device as much as the next guy.

Unfortunately, this ‘in your ear’ voice-over capability is being used for a whole lot more than just advancing the plot. It’s also being used to cover for lack of a plot, lack of a coherent plot, bungled level design, and worst of all, for the player’s own exploratory inputs. The final straw for me was an early mission in Splinter Cell, in which I was told by an NPC in another locale that I needed to go through door X, climb staircase Y, and open door Z – which, it turned out, was pretty much the only route I could have taken anyway!

Now, maybe some of this is necessitated by the reach to a broader, less hardcore audience, but I don’t think even that kind of pandering is a good idea. Any player who bought Splinter Cell and managed to load and launch it should probably be given the option of exploring for a while before a voice-over helper tells them what to do. Wind Waker seems to do this pretty well so far, with Tetra only popping up to tell you something new, or to point out that what you’re trying to do is something you won’t actually be able to do for a while.

— Mark Barrett

Setting Ascendant

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I’ve played enough Wind Waker now to say categorically that virtual sailing has never been more enjoyable. While the fact that I can cause my little boat to jump out of the sea on command may take away from the purity of the simulation, numerous other aspects of the game more than make up for that quibbling bit of fancy.

As with many games, however, some of Wind Waker’s greatest joys are passive: a glimpse of some far-off vista, a coming storm churning a foamy sea, a craggy island jutting into a swirling cauldron of clouds. In such examples it is the setting, and not the game mechanic itself, that provides an emotional payoff, and I’m hopeful that setting is going to become a more important aspect of game design for just that reason.

As I mentioned regarding Morrowind in my last post, the right combination of detail, distance, and discovery can make a place seem alive and vital, and I think our audience really craves that kind of virtual experience. Given that movement in virtual spaces is almost synonymous with the core interactive mechanics of most 3D games, spending time and money to elevate setting returns benefits to core gameplay — and that makes it distinctly different from time and money spent on cutscenes or canned narrative elements.

— Mark Barrett

The Morrowind Experience

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My main curiosity about Morrowind was whether the large scale of the world translated into greater immersion or greater tedium during play. Having played it extensively for close to a month I think I can say without equivocation that in this case more is more. Unlike any game I can think of, wandering around in Morrowind and bashing things for experience points gave me a real sense of place, and created an equivalent-sized mental space in my mind. Even better, I interpreted this space not just as distance, but as depth of setting.

Here are some of the things that I think helped create that effect:

  • Detail
    With the exception of the large mountains, there were no locations in Morrowind that seemed so similar as to reek of tilesets or recycled polygons. I don’t know how the world was created, or how much hand-crafting went into the placement of each bush and rock, but the simple fact that I never confronted a recognizable physical space in more than one location kept my suspension of disbelief intact.
  • Distance
    It’s a delicate balancing act, but in order to create a real sense of space I think you need to have areas of interest surrounded by a good deal of relative blah. Morrowind does this perfectly, and because most of the nonessential spaces are still unique, walking around in Morrowind just feels right. And while the game provides several means by which you can avoid having to walk to and fro on foot, quite often I found myself hiking simply for the pleasure of literally seeing the world.
  • Discovery
    One of the most basic and important techniques in interactive entertainment, discovery involves exploiting the innate human pleasure of finding things and seeing new places. In Morrowind, nonessential dungeons and monsters populate the landscape, making walks in the wilderness rewarding both visually and within the context of the game. For a narrative game, they got this about as right as I think you can get it: I never felt like I was on a treasure hunt looking for powerups, but instead felt like I was discovering ancient ruins, etc.

In fact, I got so wrapped up in just wandering and experiencing the world that I let much of the plotted story slip for a quite a while. When I finally got around to pursuing the story, the mechanics of language interaction that the plotting hinged on actually seemed constraining, and made the world less enjoyable. At one point I was forced into an action that I didn’t want to take because of the limited number of choices available to me, and it was only at that point that I really felt like the world broke down. I stopped playing soon after, but I do intend to begin a new game in order to experience the story the designers intended to tell.

The moral of the story, if there is one, is that Morrowind does an excellent job of simulated an interesting fictional space, and that that in itself was compelling for me.

— Mark Barrett

Zelda: The Wind Waker

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I’ve only just begun this game, but I’m far enough into it to say one thing for certain: cel-shading is huge, and it’s going to make a big difference in how we feel about playing games. In fact, I think it’s going to go a long way toward making games more immersive and less mechanical, simply because it bypasses the tired textured-polygon look and feel. Moving around in Wind Waker is like moving around in a Disney movie, and it feels great.

In an article (pages 7-10) I wrote a couple of years ago I said that the next step in graphics would be the development of house styles, where the products from one developer would take on a certain look, just as the animation styles from Disney and Warner Bros. did. I don’t know enough about cel-shading to know how costly and labor intensive it is, but if it’s at least comparable to the mesh/skin process, I think it’s going to take off for exactly this reason.

— Mark Barrett

The Last of the File Swappers?

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I was going to buy a book recently via Amazon, but before I pulled the trigger and clicked myself a copy, I remembered that we have an old, venerable institution in my home town called the Public Library. When I logged onto their online catalogue I found they had a copy of the book, and that it was on the shelf at that very moment, so I saved myself the price of admission and checked it out – literally and literally.

This reminded me that not only does my library check out books, but they also have a good video collection, and even a CD collection. Which made me wonder how long it’s going to be before the record companies try to jam Digital Rights Management legislation down the throats of America’s libraries. For the record, I don’t have a problem with people trying to protect their copyrighted property from theft, but there’s also no question that this is a slippery slope. Just as the computer makes it easy to copy works, it also makes it (or will make it) possible to monitor, track, and retaliate against people who may still be within their free-use rights to enjoy a product.

You’ll know the end to the debate is close when somebody (again) takes a run at public libraries.

— Mark Barrett