IE

Game Violence

June 12, 2012 By Mark Leave a Comment

Nathan Grayson put up an interesting post on RPS last week while attending E3. If you’re not familiar with E3, it’s an often-lampooned convention where game-industry professionals get together to decide the fate of each other’s bank accounts, in cavernous spaces far too loud to facilitate intelligible conversation. But it’s not all fun and games. Not only are unintelligible deals routinely struck at E3 that determine the games you will and won’t see in the coming year, but E3 quite literally saves lives.

The impetus for Nathan’s post was a game demo he attended, during which the interactive industry expressed enthusiasm for hyper-realistic gore effects:

I sat in a jam-packed arena-sized auditorium and watched a game demo unfold on a screen bigger than my hometown. OK, that wasn’t the surprising part. I’d been doing that all day. This one, though, came to a rather abrupt halt when – mere inches away from the camera – a man’s head erupted into a volcano of hyper-detailed gore after a point-blank shotgun blast. And then: deafening applause from hundreds of people.

This was the blaring exclamation point on the end of a day of gleefully grotesque neck-shanking, leg-severing, and – of course – man-shooting. I can honestly think of maybe five games – in four multiple-hour press conferences – that didn’t feature some sort of lovingly rendered death-dealing mechanic. And oh how show-goers cheered.

Now, as shocking as this may be, it’s worth noting that this sort of thing is really the norm when you stand at the corner of Tech Street and Cash Avenue. Put a few techies in a room with some suits and sooner or later somebody’s going to come up with something truly disgusting, at which point the suits will run the numbers and see if it’s profitable. Only when the project gets to the marketing phase will anyone conduct a focus group to determine if there are moral, ethical or cultural impediments to launching that product or service. [ Read more ]

Interactive Entertainment and Detached Eddies

May 25, 2012 By Mark Leave a Comment

Stand beside a mountain stream and observe the water for a while and you’ll see that most of it moves in a continuous flow. Look a little closer, however, and you’ll see that the bed of the stream and objects in and along the stream — logs, boulders, the legs of a bear — all have an effect on the flow due to friction. Look closer still — say, at a rock near the edge of the stream — and you’ll find that the flow may slow to a halt if not actually move in the opposite direction, creating what is commonly called a whirlpool, but more accurately described as an eddy. Peer at the boundary between the flowing current and the eddy and you’ll see smaller eddies form and detach again and again, dissipating as they flow downstream because they are no longer powered by the object in the stream that created them.

Known as detached eddies in the science of fluid dynamics, these disconnected but still churning whorls can also be spawned in the atmosphere, as bodies of air move over the landscape or interact with each other. Heat water to the right temperature and move a low pressure area over that water and you may spawn a monstrous hurricane that lasts for days and travels thousands of miles. Move that same hurricane over dry land, however, detaching it from its power source, and it will slowly dissipate, even as it may still wipe entire communities off the face of the earth.

The key component of an eddy, and what distinguishes an eddy from a vortex, is that in the middle of an eddy there is a void — a place of calm that experiences none of the rotational effects of the moving fluid that defines the eddy itself. Drop a leaf in the center of an eddy caused by even the most ferocious mountain stream and it will float exactly where you dropped it. In a vortex there is no void, but vortices can also detach like eddies. This is known, sensibly enough, as vortex shedding — a phenomenon that has led to practical applications in the real world such as winglets on airplanes. [ Read more ]

Driving Interactive Interest

August 23, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

Over the past thirty years or so, as computer and video games have become more mainstream, basic assumptions about the design of interactive entertainment have changed. In the early days, when the majority of the market was hardcore, designers aimed for more hours of play per title because longer games were in demand. (They often did so by rigging games with impossible battles and repetitive chores, but the demand for long games was real.)

Fifteen years ago or so the demands of the market began to change. Consumer research showed players in the aggregate preferring shorter and easier games. While hardcore gamers still existed, they now made up a much smaller percentage of a market that included casual gamers and people new to computer-driven entertainment. Presenting these customers with 100+ hours of hardcore (if not also tedious and unfair) gameplay made no sense, and ran the risk of alienating them from the industry.

Like mountaineers determined to cross another peak off their list, hardcore gamers tend to finish games no matter how grueling the experience. It’s a badge of honor and a way to differentiate themselves from the masses. Casual gamers, on the other hand, tend to explore interactive works like tourists, following their whims and interests for a few hours before heading back to the hotel for a nap. And according to a recent article on CNN’s Tech page, this sight-seeing approach is fast becoming the dominant response to interactive entertainment across all demographics:

“Just 10 years ago, I recall some standard that only 20% of gamers ever finish a game,” says John Lee, VP of marketing at Raptr and former executive at Capcom, THQ and Sega.

And it’s not just dull games that go unfinished. Critically acclaimed ones do, too. Take last year’s “Red Dead Redemption.” You might think Rockstar’s gritty Western would be played more than others, given the praise it enjoyed, but you’d be wrong.

Only 10% of avid gamers completed the final mission, according to Raptr, which tracks more than 23 million gaming sessions.

Let that sink in for a minute: Of every 10 people who started playing the consensus “Game of the Year,” only one of them finished it.

Computer and video games are not cheap to produce, and the best of breed — often called triple-A or ‘AAA’ titles — can be more expensive than big-budget films. Sinking previous development resources into a product most consumers will never fully experience might make sense if the expense was recouped through additional sales, but that’s a huge gamble in even the best scenario. Making the odds worse is the ugly fact that consumers are simply hard-pressed to find time to play and enjoy longer works.

[ Read more ]