Every once in a while, I come across another news post reporting that Microsoft wants to court casual gamers, not just hardcore gamers. (See links here and here; both links via Kotaku. Oh, and meanwhile, Kotaku also reports that Nintendo want to make sure everyone knows it won’t alienate the hardcore.)

Now, I’m no businessman, but from here it looks like Microsoft is being either disingenuous or self-delusional. The only way you’re going to get “casual” gamers to play games on a $400 console is if someone else in the household happens to be a hardcore gamer, which doesn’t boost console sales. Also note that the $300 version of the Xbox 360 doesn’t have a hard drive, so you can’t use it right out of the box to download casual games. Anybody who does want to play inexpensive games is much more likely to do so for free on a PC.

That doesn’t mean that Microsoft can’t tap this market with console sales, I think, but I don’t see the full-price, full-functionality Xbox as the way to do it. Rather, I’d be interested to see them release a small console with a small hard drive and limited processing power—the “Xbox Mini” or something—which can download casual games off Xbox Live and allow people to play together online. (You’d think it would be obvious that the $50 a year Xbox Live fee would also be a major deterrent for a market you identify yourself as “casual.”)

I have talked to plenty of people (and read enough comments online from people) who would love to play stuff like Pac-man Championship Edition, explaining, “I don’t like modern video games, but I like older stuff.” I’m not sure “casual” is really the right adjective for this market, as I imagine you could find some hardcore Geometry Wars and Pac-man CE enthusiasts if you only knew how to get a controller into their hands. Microsoft has acknowledged that $199 seems like the sweet spot for console pricing, but I’m saying they could shoot even lower. Live Arcade games shouldn’t be seen as a gateway drug to more expensive games or a quick-fix between big releases; I actually spend much more time playing the cheap stuff on my own 360 than I spend playing discs.

Video game download services like Xbox Live Arcade could bring a renaissance for non-narrative video games, but Microsoft seems to have missed its chance. Instead, that chance may be picked up by Nintendo, which will be offering a similar service (and not just repackaging old games for download) on a less expensive console that’s already got the attention of the non-hardcore players. I guess we’ll have to wait for the next next generation of consoles to see what we should have learned this time around.

Gamers seem pretty divided on the topic of Manhunt 2‘s Adults Only rating from the ESRB—not to mention the outright ban in other countries, including Ireland, the UK, Australia, Italy, and probably Germany soon enough. The banning won’t be necessary if the publisher doesn’t adjust the game so it can earn an M rating: Nintendo and Sony have already announced that they will not license AO-rated games for their systems, and even if they were to allow Manhunt 2 on their consoles, most game retail chains don’t carry AO-rated games anyway (including Wal Mart, which accounts for 25% of game sales alone). In other words, assigning a game an AO rating is basically the kiss of death.

Continue reading “When the Hunter Becomes the Hunted” →

Kyle Orland has an article up at the Escapist (a few weeks old) titled “The Slow Death of the Game Over”. He briefly describes how the limited number of “lives” or “continues” one gets in a game was based on the economic reality of arcade play, and how that has changed in the console world, with games that don’t require much tedium or keep you out of the action for long.

He notes that games that require you to replay material after dying do have “limited appeal to anyone who wasn’t willing to put in hours of mind-numbing practice,” but also suggests that forcing people to slog through the not-so-fun part of dying actually makes the game feel more tense and exciting because you actually have something to lose: “in an age where everyone seems to run from responsibility, it’s nice to see some games are willing to let you know that screwing up has consequences.”

I’ve been thinking enough about death and consequences in games that I’ll probably have to write a paper on the topic once my plate is a little more clear, so I figured this was worth keeping track of. I’m of two minds about Kyle’s point: on the one hand, I think that sending players back several minutes of gameplay and forcing repetition is out of place in story-based games, as it ruins any sense of continuous narrative. On the other hand, I do agree that death (or at least failure) should have consequences such that it too makes sense in the narrative.

The only possible alternatives that have occurred to me so far are to design work-arounds in which death doesn’t impede narrative sensibilities (e.g. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time lets you turn back time, or frames death as a misstep in a spoken narrative), or to to design games such that failure does not equal death except in extreme cases, and in those cases, death is final (or at least your initial protagonist dies and you take over another character). I’d be interested to find out what other games handle death in unusual ways.

Game designer Pixelate (click to see all games by the user on Kongregate) has created a series of interactive game/essays called “Understanding Games,” inspired by Scott McCloud’s comic/essay, Understanding Comics. Four parts (one, two, three, four) have been uploaded to date, though I’m not sure whether more are planned.

The parts about gameplay and identification are most interesting to me. I’d particularly like to see how Pixelate might engage with the question of how games provide an opportunity for less rule-based sorts of play. When I play Apples to Apples with friends, for example, we’re not really playing by the main set of rules, which say that you win by offering nouns that match with a particular adjective. The “winner” is usually the one who is most inappropriate (like when a friend of a friend won a round by playing the “Helen Keller” card for the adjective “Visionary”).

Even when you change the rules of such a game, the objective defined by the rules is still quite different from the purpose, which is just to laugh and be social. Games can (and do) facilitate this as well, but formalists studying game enjoyment seem to prefer flow theory, occasionally to the exclusion of other analytical approaches. Not that this should be a criticism of “Understanding Games,” which may yet be a work in progress, but I worry sometimes that reductive formal analyses lead to fewer directions in innovation down the line. Scott McCloud has done wonders for comics as a medium, including inspiring formalist efforts among new creators—but he hasn’t done any favors for the single-panel cartoon, which never made the cut for his definition of “comics” as “sequential art.”

That’s an awfully long title for a pretty short post, but I wanted to make sure I wrote this down to return to later before I forget it:

I’ve been watching the HBO series The Wire on DVD lately. It’s a serialized police drama that’s more about character development and social critique than catching bad guys. One thing that I’ve chatted about with friends regarding the show is that there are so many different characters to identify with; while there are a few particularly major ones the show focuses on at times, these can include police, drug dealers, and working-class schmoes alike. I’m not very far into it, but so far at least one pretty major character has died. It was foreshadowed, and yet it still surprised me.

I haven’t really seen this kind of multi-character identification done in a video game. It’s not that it can’t be done—I hear Indigo Prophecy features something like this, so maybe I should check that out. The problem is simply that games are so oriented on “winning” that drama takes a back seat. Would people even want to play a game in which working towards a goal with one character means potentially hampering efforts with another character?

Official PlayStation Magazine reports that the virtual environment interface of PS3 Home will only allow basic human avatars. (Link via Kotaku, via Games Radar.) Home’s executive producer told the magazine:

If everyone’s walking around dressed as orcs or stormtroopers or whatever, then you lose that welcoming, accessible element that means Mum, Dad and your sister might get involved as well. The idea is to keep it as accessible, mainstream and friendly as possible.

He’s probably right that allowing geeked-out avatars would turn away certain audiences, though I’m not sure how to respond to his use of the word “mainstream.” This also potentially raises some interesting questions: what could or should be mainstream in an environment when people can choose to look like practically whatever they like? Whatever the case, something tells me that persistent PS3 users will find a way around this limitation (assuming it’s not so limiting that people just don’t care to use it). It seems unlikely that Sony would go out of their way to police inoffensively geeky avatars.

Today my friend Caralyn came by to play some Guitar Hero II for the first time. You may remember Caralyn as the friend who claimed to not know how to play video games, which I took as a personal challenge of sorts.

We did indeed play some GH2, but then she asked if I had more games in which “you don’t die” (an interesting characteristic of video games that I’m not sure developers are actively considering, but which my girlfriend also identifies as her preference). She saw the case for Nintendogs, which I’m borrowing from friends for an experiment I’m working on this summer, and asked to play that.

It is amazing how badly we as human beings want to play with cute animals. I don’t even think the “uncanny valley” applies to dogs—even the handheld virtual ones are so cute that Caralyn proclaimed this game better than GH2. And when I told her to blow into the microphone to blow bubbles at the puppies onscreen? “This is like the future!” (Game system sales figures and Nintendo stockholders would probably agree.)

This is an important reminder to me that I must play video games with more newcomers—not because I need to convert them or anything, but because I need to see how people approach this stuff when they haven’t been doing it since they were three years old.