The Early Days

A lot of times people want to know 'how I got like this' -- hooked on computers, writing about games, et cetera, et cetera. Answer: these childhood photos my dad just sent me.

Happy Thanksgiving!

To my U.S. SVGL friends, have a lovely holiday and hopefully some off-work time! Take Michael Abbott's advice: Bring the Wii home along with New Super Mario Bros. Wii and play it with your cousins and young ones. You won't be sorry.

SVGL will be on hiatus until next week. If you're bored over the holiday, there's probably some fun stuff to do at SVGL -- revisit the archives, vote in the latest poll, or check results of past polls, too. Use the ShoutMix chat in the right hand sidebar to see who else is hanging around the computer over the holiday and make some new friends or something!

Thanksgiving is a time for quality time with family (here is a post about my family). It's also often a time where people go stir crazy and feel trapped in the family homestead. That's why, two Thanksgivings ago (whoa time flies), I recommended you Guest House, this fantastic, intriguing escape-the-room game -- revisit it or check it out for the first time! When nursing your turkey coma, sneak off and give it a try.

What will you be playing over the weekend? I honestly doubt I'll be playing anything -- you might imagine that some of the time, playing video games is the last thing I want to do with my not-work time!

[Thanksgiving Day Parade Pikachu pic nicked from Giant Bomb.]

Comparisons

"That's what you're going to show to Ebert to convince him videogames are a legitimate art form? You're going to show him the morph bomb and expect him to nod repeatedly, and admit that the story of an extinct bird race and a woman with a bazooka on her arm is just as meaningful as La Dolce Vita? Seriously?"

-- Anthony Burch, Destructoid, 'Why Comparing Metroid Prime to Citizen Kane Is Ludicrous'

"The implication of this being that treating games as the inwards-facing exclusive province of boyish adolescence is perfectly acceptable as long as Mom and Dad aren’t looking; if they are, though, hide the controllers and put on a tie. This inferiority complex runs so deeply in the gamer mindset that we will often swear up and down it does not exist while we continue unbridled our wildly passive-aggressive approach towards the artistic establishment, equal parts brash and defensive, trying to look older and more experienced than our years: the hallmark of youthful insecurity."

-- "Matthew Wasteland", 'He Was Always Trying To Prove Something'

Bonus Material: Here's me earlier this year on why I'm tired of the Citizen Kane thing.

I'll just say it for the record now: I think repeatedly raising Kane is amateurish and useless. It's self-defeating shorthand for what Bogost and Wasteland correctly identify as the real desire: legitimacy for games.

...Legitimacy, in this case, actually meaning 'the approval of others' or 'the ability to fit in,' I suspect.

[dunno where i got header picture. if it's yours and you want credit, comment or mail me.]

Oops?

"We believe that the optics of this hardware cycle have been significantly distorted by the explosive growth of the Wii console."

-- Doug Creutz, Analyst, Cowen Group

Social Behavior

Yesterday, we were talking about social networks on consoles as yet another item of evidence that persistent, connected social experiences are where it's at. But when it comes to game design, it's cool to see that this trend isn't happening only in this much-buzzed social networking space.

Designers of traditional console games are looking at creative new ways to use multiplayer, too. No longer does "multiplayer" simply mean "some kinda group mode on an FPS where you either help each other or kill each other or play capture the flag," and I think we'll see more evolution and creative thinking about connected play as it becomes the norm, not the rule.

For example, look at Demon's Souls. If you saw my Kotaku feature 'In Praise of Hard Games,' you might remember producer Takeshi Kaiji's story of the inspiration for Demon's Souls' multiplayer -- it came from an experience he had of strangers helping strangers when several cars were stranded in the snow. In Demon's Souls, the multiplayer experience doesn't so much allow people to play together as it does allow them to share the same world, collaborating only when circumstances make it valuable and interesting.

In that way, the multiplayer enhances a solo experience, rather than acts as a separate "mode." And the fact that your interactions with other players are always anonymous -- you'll never know who left you that helpful message, or who that phantom was that helped you beat the boss -- it works with the lonely, ghostly feel of the game rather than clutter it with the presence of too many "others," which is often a turn-off for people who like games to be private experiences (me, me).

Over at Gamasutra, my colleague Christian Nutt recently talked to the producer of Monster Hunter Tri about (among many things) how the game's converging two popular design trends and using them to enhance each other. On one hand, it's becoming more and more fashionable to take elements required for the designer to communicate with the player -- say, HUDs and gauges and numbers -- and minimize them, or better yet, make them a seamless part of the environment, to aid immersion.

RPGs and strategy titles, however, rely heavily on statistical information, making this trend a bit more challenging to implement. With Monster Hunter Tri, the team focused a lot on making the monsters behave in lifelike ways -- that way, players could gather information about the monsters and about the environment through observing behavior and not by reading data screens.

The team also decided not to show monsters' health. It would seem like this would be the sort of concession to realism that would be enormously frustrating for players -- but on the other hand, in a game that relies on its multiplayer components, it was a deliberate choice aimed at encouraging social behavior. When certain information is withheld from the player, it encourages groups to talk among themselves and collaborate, learning the location of enemy weak spots, sharing monster strategies, and things like that.

Demon's Souls allows you to earn your body back if you die, but your "soul form" is weaker than your physical form, which is slightly counter-intuitive -- why make a game harder the more players fail at it? Kaiji has said that choice was intended to encourage players to work together using the phantom system, by which ghosts can aid other players and vice versa.

Withholding information or cranking the challenge level to force players to use multiplayer seems slightly risky from a design standpoint -- until you think about it some. Remember an earlier generation, when half the fun of gaming was all about "secrets"?

How did you learn how to get the whistles in Super Mario Bros. 3? How did you learn which walls were breakable in Symphony of the Night? How did you get infinite lives in Contra? You didn't look it up on the internet back in those days -- you heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend. Someone told you. Someone showed you. One day, you had a pal over, and you had the controller in your hand when he told you where you were supposed to stand to get something neat to happen.

You knew about the ins and outs of video game worlds because people told you, and then next time, it'd be your turn to be the cool kid who knew where a hidden room was. The way that you interacted with friends had the ability to enrich your relationship with a game (as I discussed in my July Escapist feature about how our childhood imaginations made simple games more exciting). Gaming also developed an entire mythos of urban legends, "secrets" that were way more rumor than fact (see the "Video Game Lies" wiki!). That was fun, wasn't it?

That's true social gaming, much more interesting than headshotting strangers and calling them names into your microphone. Now that gaming is working together better with a broader definition of "connectivity" -- one that integrates with real-world social behavior and is less game-specific -- hopefully we'll see more examples like these!

Blockbuster 2.0

"Video games" used to refer solely to one type of product; if you wanted to get granular, you could say there were "video games" and "computer games" (the phrase "video games" encompassing both home consoles and arcades).

Fast forward to now, and games have diversified so much by platform, specific genre and target audience that the word often feels inappropriate -- Farmville is nothing like Modern Warfare 2 which is nothing like World of Warcraft which is nothing like Wii Play, for example. We can embrace that there are loosely different sub-spaces, or vertices, of the game industry that have entirely disparate audiences and means of delivery, and therefore often completely separate design goals.

Which is why it's kind of nice when you start to see spaces converge, with design lessons from, say, Facebook gaming employed on Xbox Live. Have you tried Facebook on your Xbox 360 yet* (or will you try it on your PS3)? I'm actually skeptical that anyone will make their console a primary means of engaging with Facebook; Facebook works so well because on a computer, it integrates so easily and so thoughtlessly with the device on which users spend a significant share of their working or student lives.

Rather than accessing Facebook via console instead of on a computer, it's pretty clear that users will simply be able to augment their Facebook use -- if video game activity is a part of their lives, they'll now be able to reflect that on their social networking profile.

Which is why the Facebook integration is an even bigger value-add for video game platform holders -- and for gaming itself -- than it is for its users. Think about how many of your non-gaming friends and family will be able to see, at a glance, how much fun you're having unlocking achievements and earning trophies; it's like built-in social outreach not only for the fact you own a console, but for every single game you play.

Developers will also be able to work with their own ideas for Facebook integration and what kind of updates their games send. There could be some fun design implementations for this, don't you think? Taking the the socialization around games outside of the game itself and into the real world could create some cool game mechanics if you got creative.

Major facebook games like Pet Society and Farmville have millions of users because of the viral principle -- your friends see you playing it, and these days, those kinds of games are so pervasive that it no longer takes them sending you an invite for you to join them; you know whether or not you're interested because you're observing friends' activity.

Facebook integration with game consoles means major titles have the potential to tap into some of that "virality" (no, that's not a real world, but two-point-oh marketing types think it is). That's huge for traditional gaming. You might ask why Xbox Live needs access to a social network when it is a social network -- this is why.

During my coverage of Microsoft's E3 presentation, I said the biggest game-changer of E3 would be the one that received the least gamer buzz, and I stand by it!

*Note that if you're a Silver member, Microsoft's gonna let you try Facebook and Twitter, among other things, for free this weekend.

The Number Crunch

When I meet people and the "what do you do for a living" question comes up*, my new acquaintances tend to jump to the conclusion that I somehow fund my lifestyle by playing video games all day long, or they assume I simply do nothing but write reviews (for the record, I'm happy I don't!)

Although many of you who visit me here at Sexy Videogameland are probably more familiar with my consumer writing -- you might've found your way here because of my editorials, or my Kotaku columns, Escapist features or reviews, for example -- I make my living as a business reporter at Gamasutra, as you regular SVGLers know.

If there is a lull in SVGL posts, as has happened often lately, and you want to know what I've been doing with myself**, just search Google News for my byline and you'll see all my daily

Gamasutra pieces (and probably some occasional results about other people named Leigh Alexander, some of them criminals). Or better yet, just read Gamasutra, because I'm not too shy to say I think the news and features writing my coworkers do under the supervision of maestro Simon Carless is pretty top-shelf.

Anyway, the majority of my time is spent writing business news. And it's ironic that folks I meet out in the real, non-internet world tend to have trouble wrapping their head around games-as-business, because now more than ever, that's what it is, first and foremost. If it weren't for the prolific indie scene, the growth of alternative business models and social gaming, we'd have a worrying Hollywood-ization on our hands here.

The core games industry cares about investors, who care about Metacritic scores; the fates of our favorite titles and studios are determined by numbers, and success is measured in fiscal quarters, unit sales and revenue dollars. So while we as gamers might not give a rat's ass about the monthly NPD, about Nintendo's profit forecast or EA's restructuring, stories like this are a

crucial barometer of How We're Doing, and this has been a particularly tricky year for industry numbers.

Slump, Slump, Slump

You may or may not have noticed that the games industry has "declined" all throughout the summer months of 2009, which means that when we compare each month's sales dollars to the same month in 2008, we're not measuring up. Why should you care? Well, because how much money the industry is making affects everything from game budgets to publisher slates for next year, it determines how many gambles publishers can take on new IP, it determines how confident investors feel in buying into game companies, and overall, it spells whether or not we are a healthy, growing industry or a struggling one.

We had nothing short of a stellar year in 2008 -- the biz's Best Year Ever, by many estimations, in terms of both the quality and diversity of the title slate and the strength of those titles' performance. Remember how happy we were to be "recession-proof?" Unfortunately, that's all coming back to bite us now.

See, for NPD numbers to show continual growth, we always have to do better in any given month than we did in the same month last year; a really strong 2008 just sets the bar much higher for 2009. You may see the phrase "tough comparisons" all over the place -- that's what analysts and game execs alike have fallen back on to explain the declines. There's nothing wrong with the games biz, they've asserted: it's just we did too well last year. Well, you sure don't hear anyone saying "recession-proof" anymore.

Ahead Into The Unknown

Even Nintendo, basically the most successful company of the current generation, is taking a beating from analysts in the U.S. and Japan over a Wii that appears to be "tanking" -- only in a world where comparisons mean everything can a console that's sold over 56 million units be under the microscope. No wonder Nintendo's Satoru Iwata and NOA's Reggie Fils-Aime come across so defensive in current interviews.

To be fair, Nintendo brought this on itself -- by boasting that it carried the entire industry's growth on its shoulders last year (largely, it did), it set itself up to have everyone point fingers at it when Nintendo's declines drag down the rest of the biz.

It's true that part of what looks like a weakening games business is due to tough comparisons; some people also think the poor consumer economy has finally begun to catch up with Wall Street's golden sector. Maybe it's also that this year's games aren't as good as last year's -- while we're on the Nintendo example, the company admits that it hasn't had the same powerhouse software lineup this year that whipped up Wii sales throughout last year.

Analysts are currently divided on whether the game industry has a shot of ultimately posting annual growth this year -- most are pessimistic, actually, but it's all down to how things go this holiday season, the proving ground that'll demonstrate whether it's weakened software lineups or cash-strapped consumers that are slowing the biz down.

What You Guys Said

This is why I polled you guys recently on how your belts and wallets feel going into the holidays; 289 of you replied, and unfortunately, the largest share of you, at 35 percent, said you feel cash-strapped and plan to spend less money on games this year.

But the next-largest segment of you, at a healthy 28 percent, say you don't plan on doing anything differently, and will spend about the same; 14 percent of you might reduce your wish list by, say, one game, and 13 percent of you are so psyched by the bounty of holiday wishes on offer that you plan to spend more. The remainder, or 7 percent, say you don't usually spend on games for yourself and are hoping for gifts.

So if 28 percent of you will spend just as much as you did last year, and 13 percent of you will spend more, and let's say even a few of you gift-hopers get a game or two from Santa, the picture actually looks pretty good for a healthy holiday, don't you think? The ESA also did a poll that was a bit bigger than mine, and found 42 percent of 1,001 U.S. consumers it surveyed either plan to give or hope to get a video game this holiday. Who's up for some cautious optimism?

Have I gotten you all psyched about INDUSTRY NUMBERS yet? If you're into that kind of thing, you should know that we run a monthly feature by the excellent Gamasutra analyst Matt Matthews, who looks at the major trends and facts to emerge from the NPD numbers. Here's October, for example, and you'll find one on our site every month, usually the Monday after the numbers come out (which is most often the second Thursday of the month).

Plus, the shrewd crew at NeoGAF makes a monthly thread to dissect Matthews' work, so if you enjoy number crunching and chatting stats, you can always find one like this to get in on. C'mon, everybody's doin' the numbers dance, you know you wanna!

*Bonus Info 1: For more on dealing with the "what do you do" question, pseudonymous designer Spitfire once commiserated with me at length on trying to talk about working in video games with average folks.

Bonus Info 2: I stole this picture of a Pac-Man Christmas tree from here, where you can also see video of it!

**Bonus Info 3: You can also follow me on Twitter, join the SVGL Facebook group, or check out the "latest stuff of note" in SVGL's sidebar, or leave me a hello-note in the ShoutMix chat box, also in the sidebar. I miss you guys when I'm unable to keep up the blog ;_;

Asking Why

A couple months ago, I annoyed a bunch of gamers by telling them they need to get a life. I intended to be provocative, of course; the issue I hoped we'd all examine and discuss is the same-ness of many games on offer commercially, and what has always felt to me like a very shallow creative well.

The theory is that creativity and emotional richness comes from life experience; as the earliest adopters of what we hope will be the predominant entertainment medium of the 21st century, I've always felt it's on us, as audiences, to do more, demand more. Of course, if we're saying that "games are art," then that means they reflect the life experience of their "artists" -- and many game developers can be as narrow-minded as their audience is, with few creative influences to speak of other than, say, tabletop RPGs and Star Wars.

Not that there's anything wrong with tabletop RPGs or Star Wars (down, comic book fans, down!), but if game developers make games based on their own interests, and if game consumers buy games based on their own interests, it's better for everyone if those interests are diverse -- or else what we think of as gaming remains an insular niche.

You've heard this from me before, of course. Now, veteran developer and former Maxis guy Chris Hecker is adding a new dimension to the conversation with some thoughts he shared in an address at the IGDA Leadership Forum, which my colleague Chris Remo recently covered at Gamasutra.

Hecker also fears games ending up in (or remaining in?) a "cultural ghetto," and summarily suggests that generally, those who make games don't ever seem to consider it an act of self-expression:

"I had to write this book when my girlfriend dumped me," a novelist might say.

"That doesn't show up often in game development bios," Hecker pointed out. Developers rarely discuss what they were trying to convey or express with a particular game, outside the confines of the game's own entertainment value.

"Should we care about 'why'? I think the answer is yes. We should care," said Hecker.

Of course, when looking at any other entertainment medium, there exist plenty of soulless products made simply in accordance with the algorithm of the market's current tastes -- they have no higher aim but to provide basic entertainment. Well, maybe one higher aim: to sell copies.

But that paradigm is dominant in games; even our designers who qualify as deep thinkers and masters of the craft earn their stripes by interpreting ideas like accessibility, engagement and the nebulous "fun" through design. They are refining the art of hooking us players with mechanics -- they are not at all thinking about expressing themselves or telling a story, the way creators of anything else that qualifies as art would.

I actually touched on this early last year, in an Aberrant Gamer column about what makes a good actor: honest performance that draws on the individual's life experience with the goal of self-expression, as opposed to the manipulative act of simply imitating emotions with the goal of affecting audience members.

The game industry is full of brilliant designers -- when I see how Blizzard's gotten millions and millions of people around the world to spend hours and hours running around and grinding in World of Warcraft (even people who recognize that they're bored!), or when I see how Ubisoft is making necessary communication with the player an artistic part of the environment in Splinter Cell Conviction, my jaw drops. Whoever came up with that subtle red-crescent health system that dominates in first-person shooters should get some kind of award.

But in terms of expressive ability, it's still lacking, don't you think? I recommend reading Remo's whole writeup on Hecker's talk -- I think it's an important addition to a topic that always interests me.

This week, the tireless Remo is at the Montreal International Games Summit, and while we're talking about the goal of "fun," I might as well point you to his writeup of Tiger Style's Randy Smith, who says "games don't need to be fun; they need to be engaging." Randy Smith worked on System Shock 2 and Thief and now makes stuff like Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor instead, and the perspective of folks that make leaps like that is always interesting.

Does The Music That I Make Play On My Awkward Face

In my free time, when not working or gaming, I go to music shows with my friends. I like bands. Like, a lot, and I love to see live shows. Mostly I like the local stuff here in Brooklyn, but once in a while I'll pay a little more for a ticket to see a better-known touring band in a bigger venue (the sort I normally avoid because of the $10 beer or whatever!) .

One of my favorite bands is Animal Collective (yeah, yeah, you and every other d-bag in Brooklyn, Leigh). They're probably in my top five, at least for these days, and the music blogosphere is full of all kinds of cynical snark and eye-rolling about how they're about to "cross over" to the mainstream and blah blah. So seeing them live would be a pretty big deal, even if the ticket's going to be a bit pricier. And yet, every time the opportunity's arisen, I decline.

Hang in, I swear I'm going someplace video game-related with this.

It's not just because I prefer more intimate shows to huge affairs. It's because I don't think Animal Collective would be too much fun to watch, or at least not relative to how much it'd cost. This is because they're three dudes who make their music with major contribution from electronics and effects -- seeing them would be less "watching a band play" and more "watching some guys fiddle around with equipment."

As much as I love the band, "watching some guys fiddle around with equipment" is just not the same to me as "watching some guys rock out on stage."

Okay, and now I'm getting to the video game part. It's the energy of a rock show that makes plastic guitar games so successful -- that, and the aspirational rockstar fantasy. This is something I really don't think translates into hunching over a turntable in DJ Hero. In other words, I think DJ Hero is by its very nature less broadly-appealing than Guitar Hero, and yesterday at Gamasutra, I wrote about why, expanding so that my position hopefully makes a bit more sense to you.

Of course, I'm more intense of a music consumer than average, and I'm also more intense of a video game "consumer" than average, so the collision of two major interest spheres for me is bound to color my perspective differently from that of some dude wandering into GameStop. Nonetheless, I feel pretty strongly on this point -- check it out and tell me what you think.

By the way, if you're among the large swath of my gaming readers who couldn't give a hell about my nerdy music, you wouldn't know that the header image is the cover of Animal Collective's critical-darling Merriweather Post Pavilion, which you might like to listen to. I tried making a giant version of this image my desktop wallpaper once, and I lasted all of thirty seconds before my eyes started gushing founts of blood. Trippy, right?

[PS: As you can see, I survived both my move to a great new apartment as well as the most crippling flu I can recall ever having -- thanks to everyone who sent kind wishes and comments through my travails!]