In response to an email on the Giant Bombcast, I wrote a quick reply with some calculator spam concerning how big numbers can get very big, very quickly. Too big to really think about. By the end of it we had covered the death of the universe, why an 8 by 6 pixel display is actually a really big space, and why a tiny Mariachi band playing inside someone's mouth isn't all that strange. You can read it here (scroll down for part 2 responding to some comments).
Friday, 14 March 2014
Tuesday, 4 February 2014
Copyright & Limited Run Works
Further to the discussion last year and the year before, here are two (potentially complementary) ideas for changing how copyright and trademarks work. This should, at least, provide direction in which there are solutions to orphaned works, hostaged works, and providing access to lore/'IP' without forcing very short terms on all works.
When I did a big "complying with copyright" thing in ~2010 (partially to explore things like Spotify as the potential future of managing to process consumption of media and distribution of fees to creators without a barrier to discoverability issue - other systems like try before you buy / free streaming of music / etc seemed to have the issue that when you move to this online, rental model they you can kinda subvert discoverability access to be free consumption so I wanted to do a deep dive into the all you can eat model of rental), I wiped all my ROMs (along with all my mp3s, etc). So since then I've been trying to keep it 100% legit. Stuff like GOG make that a lot easier than it would have been a decade ago but my nostalgia burns brightest for PC games/ports so the lack of available non-DOS stuff is less of an issue for me.
For copyright black hole content then I do think laws need to be tweaked (like defined limits on profitability before work enters the public domain, considered paid for in full by society, and changes to the copyright limits; here's what I plan to limit my work with as a personal experiment and not what I would consider guidance for legal limits) and thanks to Mickey Corp we have the legal standard that copyright changes are applied retroactively (despite this making no sense to the arguments given for creating a better incentive for current works by making them more profitable, previous works have already been created so that argument would not demand retroactive extensions to limits) so we can free a lot of content with changes that put the public interest before profits from long delivered commercial works.
There is a case for adding new elements to the balance of copyright (because, ultimately, a government can simply refuse to grant any copyrights to creators, the hard-ball deal is "we currently give you all this and you've been asking for more at every turn, we could give you no protection; there is no inherent right, only a government granted license of exclusive duplication to the creator to inspire the creation of works") like a restriction on the creation of limited works as a pre-defined special work. So before something went on sale, you could register it as a limited work with up to, say, 5000 copies (all numbered) and that would be the total run for this work and any sold derivatives. Those units could be sold and restricted with normal copyright. This would be how bespoke art would be managed, one off paintings with some reprints but a market that requires limits on the right of duplication of the original creator/copyright owner to ensure value. Rather than a contract from the creator it would be a legal structure that created a limited run work.
What this would allow was for mass duplicated works to not have to worry about this specific ecosystem of limited copies creating a vibrant second-hand value market with speculation and appreciation. You could then say anything not registered as such before it went on sale would be a mass market work. Mass market works could not be withdrawn from the market. If someone wanted to buy then they would be allowed to (at reasonable cost, based on the sale price of the previous copies and judgement on the increasing costs of materials to generate another duplicate) unless a work was forced from sale by legal issues (say it turns out the creator was only a "creator" as the work was copyright infringement itself). This would prevent the creation of limited time contracts that strip works from sale currently and also make it impossible for someone to sit on a copyrighted work, it they refused to make a duplicate then someone else would be paid the material costs of duplication and the difference handed to the owner by the state. The fair value of sale would be taken from their hands and put into that of a judge so it would be in the interest of the copyright holder to declare a value at the upper end of reasonable and contract the duplication themselves to maximise their profits from the sale.
As long as there was one duplicate in existence that had been analysed and the skills to make another duplicate then a mass produced item would remain on sale to any potential buyer. This would provide a strong protection to a cultural heritage without mandating very short copyright terms that could limit the scope of commercial works which required long tails or reward creators who are some years ahead of their time or slow to find widescale commercial exploitation of their work (although we generally don't see such a thing outside of a few exceptional cases which a sane copyright term would already prevent - the Lord of the Rings should be public domain about now and my earlier suggestions to a profitability and term cap would make sure that was true).
Lord of the Rings is in just as much need of handing over to the Public Domain as anything games have to offer (LotR being ~60 years old seems like it should be public domain by now, it has captured any due remuneration associated with the period of creativity during WWII and become part of broad culture - in fact it lives there often by people sidestepping and making derivative works that are transformative; by now it seems like others should get access to the core, the copyrightable block in the middle to mess with as more expression of culture that does not need to avoid treading around transformativeness) - even our icons like Mario are barely 30 years old. There may be some more time where the creator's right to sell Donkey Kong comes before the needs of the people to be unconstrained in riffing on their shared culture created when Jumpman debuted.
Each game in the Mario series would clearly create new copyright for that as a work but the character is born with the first game, which may follow on to a need to de-link the right to the IP of character created from the copyright of the actual work. Maybe our demand for Aragorn to be a PD character in a PD Mordor puts pressure on limited copyright terms that should not also drag the work, the LotR books, into the public domain with it. The words as written keep their copyright but if you want to use characters, locations, events then as long as you're not stripping vast chunks of original text (clear copyright infringement), you're golden. But how much quotation from the common lore of Aragorn's history is fair use and how much is simple infringement on the copyright of the book as written? That discussion would be critical to splitting culture's absorption of lore from the first work in which that lore was crafted.
More complicated would be how that lore developed. Say we put a 50-60 year copyright term on our mass duplicated media but the lore (definition required but roughly anything that isn't the work, any trademarks or copyright that relates to the trademark protection rather than the actual work; lowering of the bar for derivative works to be transformative) enters the public domain in 30 years, your children will be able to use your characters for their own work but you will still probably be able to sell the copyrighted works you create without competition for your entire life. Jumpman is not Mario, but he is. But you couldn't use to release of Jumpman lore into the public domain to get at Bowser Jr. or Birdo but in that lore they exist. Would this lead to the universe that characters inhabit slowly entering into public use as it was expanded in later titles? Mario starts out and then two years later the PD Mario gains a brother and two more years later Bowser turns up. After 7 years PD Mario can talk to Birdo but not a day sooner? There seems to be a conflicting demand to have access to the lore, all of it, and the way this will discourage connected universes if it collapses the (what we're mainly talking about is) trademark (and some copyright) protection of a new work by setting it in a universe that is about to expire from protected term. Maybe we can live with franchises that are 30+ years old having an incentive to be left behind by their original creator. That does not sound like the worst of worlds. But there's a discussion to be had about what we consider fair to the creators and fair to the future creators who want to riff on the shared culture they were raised with, without worrying about transformative tests or protected names.
Edit 04/02/14: Inspired by the same discussion points about the public domain and games, m'very'good'friends at Mode 7 were also narrowing down on some similar sticking points in that debate. While I don't agree with everything Paul has to say, it is a compelling argument with a lot of good points.
The Right to Refuse to Sell More
I think there's a pretty big line between: abandonware as sort of unofficial copyleft system of distribution for items that have no commercial availability or value and are hard to access for the millions of people who do have ownership rights to one copy due to advancing technology; and people who sell ROMs and so on for profit without correctly paying the fees to the copyright holders and those who are due royalties.When I did a big "complying with copyright" thing in ~2010 (partially to explore things like Spotify as the potential future of managing to process consumption of media and distribution of fees to creators without a barrier to discoverability issue - other systems like try before you buy / free streaming of music / etc seemed to have the issue that when you move to this online, rental model they you can kinda subvert discoverability access to be free consumption so I wanted to do a deep dive into the all you can eat model of rental), I wiped all my ROMs (along with all my mp3s, etc). So since then I've been trying to keep it 100% legit. Stuff like GOG make that a lot easier than it would have been a decade ago but my nostalgia burns brightest for PC games/ports so the lack of available non-DOS stuff is less of an issue for me.
For copyright black hole content then I do think laws need to be tweaked (like defined limits on profitability before work enters the public domain, considered paid for in full by society, and changes to the copyright limits; here's what I plan to limit my work with as a personal experiment and not what I would consider guidance for legal limits) and thanks to Mickey Corp we have the legal standard that copyright changes are applied retroactively (despite this making no sense to the arguments given for creating a better incentive for current works by making them more profitable, previous works have already been created so that argument would not demand retroactive extensions to limits) so we can free a lot of content with changes that put the public interest before profits from long delivered commercial works.
There is a case for adding new elements to the balance of copyright (because, ultimately, a government can simply refuse to grant any copyrights to creators, the hard-ball deal is "we currently give you all this and you've been asking for more at every turn, we could give you no protection; there is no inherent right, only a government granted license of exclusive duplication to the creator to inspire the creation of works") like a restriction on the creation of limited works as a pre-defined special work. So before something went on sale, you could register it as a limited work with up to, say, 5000 copies (all numbered) and that would be the total run for this work and any sold derivatives. Those units could be sold and restricted with normal copyright. This would be how bespoke art would be managed, one off paintings with some reprints but a market that requires limits on the right of duplication of the original creator/copyright owner to ensure value. Rather than a contract from the creator it would be a legal structure that created a limited run work.
What this would allow was for mass duplicated works to not have to worry about this specific ecosystem of limited copies creating a vibrant second-hand value market with speculation and appreciation. You could then say anything not registered as such before it went on sale would be a mass market work. Mass market works could not be withdrawn from the market. If someone wanted to buy then they would be allowed to (at reasonable cost, based on the sale price of the previous copies and judgement on the increasing costs of materials to generate another duplicate) unless a work was forced from sale by legal issues (say it turns out the creator was only a "creator" as the work was copyright infringement itself). This would prevent the creation of limited time contracts that strip works from sale currently and also make it impossible for someone to sit on a copyrighted work, it they refused to make a duplicate then someone else would be paid the material costs of duplication and the difference handed to the owner by the state. The fair value of sale would be taken from their hands and put into that of a judge so it would be in the interest of the copyright holder to declare a value at the upper end of reasonable and contract the duplication themselves to maximise their profits from the sale.
As long as there was one duplicate in existence that had been analysed and the skills to make another duplicate then a mass produced item would remain on sale to any potential buyer. This would provide a strong protection to a cultural heritage without mandating very short copyright terms that could limit the scope of commercial works which required long tails or reward creators who are some years ahead of their time or slow to find widescale commercial exploitation of their work (although we generally don't see such a thing outside of a few exceptional cases which a sane copyright term would already prevent - the Lord of the Rings should be public domain about now and my earlier suggestions to a profitability and term cap would make sure that was true).
A Work vs the 'IP'/Lore & are Games Special?
There has been recent discussion of copyright in games being special and the evolution of the medium requiring radically shorter terms than other types of works. I don't see why games are a special case so an argument like that seems very weird. Are we to propose a way of determining the maturity of a medium and build copyright terms based on a curve that slowly grants more longevity based on the progress the medium is making? "Games had three revolutionary new techniques discovered according to the judges so keeps the 20 year copyright terms but cinema hasn't had one in 5 years so that 50 year copyright is extended to 55 years now." I just can't see it working and I also don't see the need from a place of providing access to the shared culture to the next generation to remix without concern of transformativeness. I don't see games entering into the public awareness and integrated into culture at a different rate, so why would it need different terms?Lord of the Rings is in just as much need of handing over to the Public Domain as anything games have to offer (LotR being ~60 years old seems like it should be public domain by now, it has captured any due remuneration associated with the period of creativity during WWII and become part of broad culture - in fact it lives there often by people sidestepping and making derivative works that are transformative; by now it seems like others should get access to the core, the copyrightable block in the middle to mess with as more expression of culture that does not need to avoid treading around transformativeness) - even our icons like Mario are barely 30 years old. There may be some more time where the creator's right to sell Donkey Kong comes before the needs of the people to be unconstrained in riffing on their shared culture created when Jumpman debuted.
Each game in the Mario series would clearly create new copyright for that as a work but the character is born with the first game, which may follow on to a need to de-link the right to the IP of character created from the copyright of the actual work. Maybe our demand for Aragorn to be a PD character in a PD Mordor puts pressure on limited copyright terms that should not also drag the work, the LotR books, into the public domain with it. The words as written keep their copyright but if you want to use characters, locations, events then as long as you're not stripping vast chunks of original text (clear copyright infringement), you're golden. But how much quotation from the common lore of Aragorn's history is fair use and how much is simple infringement on the copyright of the book as written? That discussion would be critical to splitting culture's absorption of lore from the first work in which that lore was crafted.
More complicated would be how that lore developed. Say we put a 50-60 year copyright term on our mass duplicated media but the lore (definition required but roughly anything that isn't the work, any trademarks or copyright that relates to the trademark protection rather than the actual work; lowering of the bar for derivative works to be transformative) enters the public domain in 30 years, your children will be able to use your characters for their own work but you will still probably be able to sell the copyrighted works you create without competition for your entire life. Jumpman is not Mario, but he is. But you couldn't use to release of Jumpman lore into the public domain to get at Bowser Jr. or Birdo but in that lore they exist. Would this lead to the universe that characters inhabit slowly entering into public use as it was expanded in later titles? Mario starts out and then two years later the PD Mario gains a brother and two more years later Bowser turns up. After 7 years PD Mario can talk to Birdo but not a day sooner? There seems to be a conflicting demand to have access to the lore, all of it, and the way this will discourage connected universes if it collapses the (what we're mainly talking about is) trademark (and some copyright) protection of a new work by setting it in a universe that is about to expire from protected term. Maybe we can live with franchises that are 30+ years old having an incentive to be left behind by their original creator. That does not sound like the worst of worlds. But there's a discussion to be had about what we consider fair to the creators and fair to the future creators who want to riff on the shared culture they were raised with, without worrying about transformative tests or protected names.
Edit 04/02/14: Inspired by the same discussion points about the public domain and games, m'very'good'friends at Mode 7 were also narrowing down on some similar sticking points in that debate. While I don't agree with everything Paul has to say, it is a compelling argument with a lot of good points.
Saturday, 25 January 2014
Difficulty Isn't the Point & Often is a Problem
Here's something about what games are. Only weeks ago I was also riffing on the idea of how we all experience games differently, but I believe this piece is taking us down a path we should not travel. It's a very narrow definition of difficulty that tries to strip it from other mediums; the traditional narrowing of the definition of computer game to exclude things like Dear Esther, Proteus, Sim City, Gone Home. To try and point to competitive games as the origin and then rob the computer of player status if it does not participate enough and reject the notion that solitaire games have always existed, where there is no other player with agency in the system.
Computers are interactive, computer games can thusly be made to react to the player, to reform the words and images in such a way as to allow the continued consumption and understanding of the message despite the issues of the consumer. This, not their offering of roadblocks, elevates them beyond a book or a film, which must be repetitively consumed in the hope of being able to understand it for anything which wishes to have a message beyond the surface or being fully read by audiences of a range of abilities. Difficulty is not the enemy, but saying one size fits all and difficulty should not be complained about (as a wall that should not move to meet the height the player needs) is holding the medium back. Also, just immersing the playing in a virtual space has no traditional difficulty, it's still a game. There is nothing special about being blocked from continuing, which is the very specific form of difficulty being expressed in that piece, and nothing core about games that ties them to that design choice.
Here is Jeff Vogel talking about the repeated consumption of something to grok it, to endlessly mine it for more meaning, as being a sign of great art. You may not like his assertion that games have not reached that point but he does point at both the opening fallacy of the first piece (that a book is read by merely looking at every page or a movie is completely consumed by sitting in the room as it plays) and that games have the potential to really be incredible as adaptive systems that can work on many levels and tune what comes out for which level you want to read at, one size does not need to fit all. And it's got nothing to do with difficulty as blocking progress, of giving a path to some mastery or repetitive task.
That difficulty is certainly not THE POINT of games. Failing to understand the variable skills of the many players that will engage with the system, hiding anything beyond mechanical mastery of a system as the proposed pinnacle of gaming, is part of the problem. We can do so much more, we can make reactive systems that guide the player to different readings and provide alternatives to repeat consumption to see a piece on a different level, we can adapt. We must adapt. That's what makes games able to do things books and movies cannot, but we're still maturing and we've got plenty of work to do to get to a place of strength, to our truly great works. If we (not to say we will) start to get there in virtual spaces, using the power of VR to put the player somewhere as a jump from immersion to presence then I'm not going to be there complaining that there are no roadblocks in this interactive virtual space and it isn't a game and misses the point of games to be difficult. Computer games can be so many things, difficulty is a tool in many dimensions and the single dimension talked about in the original piece is something that must be tuned to the player as we move forward.
Edit: the repost of this on GiantBomb got some conversation flowing in the comments. I also ended up responding with a second piece on difficulty which half-stole a post I've been writing for here 'More on Skill & Flow' so maybe I'll actually finish that soon and post the complete, developed point. Think of my comment on the GB blog as a sneak peek of what my next blog post will be about.
Computers are interactive, computer games can thusly be made to react to the player, to reform the words and images in such a way as to allow the continued consumption and understanding of the message despite the issues of the consumer. This, not their offering of roadblocks, elevates them beyond a book or a film, which must be repetitively consumed in the hope of being able to understand it for anything which wishes to have a message beyond the surface or being fully read by audiences of a range of abilities. Difficulty is not the enemy, but saying one size fits all and difficulty should not be complained about (as a wall that should not move to meet the height the player needs) is holding the medium back. Also, just immersing the playing in a virtual space has no traditional difficulty, it's still a game. There is nothing special about being blocked from continuing, which is the very specific form of difficulty being expressed in that piece, and nothing core about games that ties them to that design choice.
Here is Jeff Vogel talking about the repeated consumption of something to grok it, to endlessly mine it for more meaning, as being a sign of great art. You may not like his assertion that games have not reached that point but he does point at both the opening fallacy of the first piece (that a book is read by merely looking at every page or a movie is completely consumed by sitting in the room as it plays) and that games have the potential to really be incredible as adaptive systems that can work on many levels and tune what comes out for which level you want to read at, one size does not need to fit all. And it's got nothing to do with difficulty as blocking progress, of giving a path to some mastery or repetitive task.
That difficulty is certainly not THE POINT of games. Failing to understand the variable skills of the many players that will engage with the system, hiding anything beyond mechanical mastery of a system as the proposed pinnacle of gaming, is part of the problem. We can do so much more, we can make reactive systems that guide the player to different readings and provide alternatives to repeat consumption to see a piece on a different level, we can adapt. We must adapt. That's what makes games able to do things books and movies cannot, but we're still maturing and we've got plenty of work to do to get to a place of strength, to our truly great works. If we (not to say we will) start to get there in virtual spaces, using the power of VR to put the player somewhere as a jump from immersion to presence then I'm not going to be there complaining that there are no roadblocks in this interactive virtual space and it isn't a game and misses the point of games to be difficult. Computer games can be so many things, difficulty is a tool in many dimensions and the single dimension talked about in the original piece is something that must be tuned to the player as we move forward.
Edit: the repost of this on GiantBomb got some conversation flowing in the comments. I also ended up responding with a second piece on difficulty which half-stole a post I've been writing for here 'More on Skill & Flow' so maybe I'll actually finish that soon and post the complete, developed point. Think of my comment on the GB blog as a sneak peek of what my next blog post will be about.
Tuesday, 31 December 2013
Goitees 2013
I guess this is annual now we're doing it again this year. Maybe 2014 will be the year activity on this blog kicks up another notch or maybe those conference papers and research will continue to steal most of my productive time while developing and playing games takes the rest of my non-reading/sleeping time.
There has been plenty of disagreement on which games are great or poor this year, which is a great space for an interactive medium to be in; people are walking away with very different experiences and not just collectively classifying games 'buggy or boring' or 'brilliant' into two piles. Not only can mechanics elicit very different reactions from people (Go is not a game for everyone) but also the narrative we play can be radically different and a few of the games below are noted for my experience of them, which it not necessarily the same thing someone else will experience when they pick up the game. In a couple of cases, exploring that is the theme of the game. A full exploration of any one game to feel out every limit of the systems and narrative and their interaction would be exhausting and you can only experience it for the first time once and are going to be influenced by that first taste. If you completely disagree with my selection then that's totally fine, but it is my selection of particularly noteworthy titles I've played this year.
If you're sensitive to spoilers then scan over the bold titles and avoid reading the text about each entry. I'm not aiming to ruin the games but if you want to play any of these games completely clean then (shockingly) I will be talking about what they contain.
My biggest criticism is that the achievements are for 10 hidden rooms that it never gives a hint about existing. There are no others, no completion ding to indicate how many people finished the thing or gave up after finding the final gate requires them to go back and complete the puzzles they missed. The biggest negative I can think of is in the metagame of surrounding features: you should definitely play this game.
Two hours of exploring a location and unlocking the several intertwined stories that took place there. That's the advertised content here and anyone who grew up in the '90s is probably going to enjoy just being immersed in that virtual space they half-remember from two decades ago. The stories hold together as you explore and you should absolutely play this game but I do hope this is a step towards something better. The leaning on horror game tropes to link the experience to and subvert the expectations of long time gamers works but I don't think this style of game needs to pander to those already very familiar with gaming conventions. I think there are interesting things to be done with evolving experiences that react, that change the story told and rebuild the world not yet seen based on play. As a first stab from a small, self-funded team, this is what it needed to be and maybe a signpost to much more to come later.
This was a game where I spent 60 hours doing almost everything that world had to offer and with only a few guiding indicators pointing me towards places I did not want to go. Maybe it was deciding what not to do, as I'd done previously in GTA games (never one for a random rampage, or to use the respawn mechanics of a wasted or busted screen to appear in a hospital or police station), that allowed me to avoid the disappointment others felt. Some of the game does fall flat, some of the content is immature and problematic, many of the missions are just an excuse to point you into this world and let you do a quick activity. But almost all of those 60 hours were ones I really enjoyed. The ability to switch characters, the improved movement and shooting, the heists, the writing: because there is so much of everything it's easy to focus on the few things it screws up but there is so much great stuff in GTA V that I couldn't not include it on this list, even if a few choices were pretty undesirable in my eyes.
Unfortunately there is a renewed call for all immorality to be punished in our media (it now hides under the banner of "satire is dead"). "This content does not explicitly condemn the actions or show the ruination of the actors it depicts and so I will take it as glorifying said actions, for satire is dead."
Maybe it is just the exhaustion of those tired of playing the hero role while performing the actions of a villain in so many games. But satire is very much alive, and writing about the inability to see it by completely failing to listen to any of the dialogue around a scene is disingenuous. But also this is where what I did and what that author experienced diverges. I didn't get a graphic torture scene, Trevor played it straight to the actual horror of the very real situation it pokes at; he repeatedly waterboarded the poor cooperative innocent who then, in desperation to say anything, led to another potential innocent being executed. The visuals of the torture was very tame but the underlying events were the horrific part. Events as has probably happened several times in recent history, orchestrated by people who claim to protect our freedom.
GTA V is not about good people. Beyond Maude I really can't think of anyone trying particularly hard to be anything other than the background level of self-obsessed, terrible to each other in that world. When you bring in a new protagonist by showing him brutally killing the previous game's sympathetic protagonist then the tone is set. There are bad people and people trying to keep their head above the water as the world sinks around them. There are so few good people that I can only name that one off the top of my head, after 60 hours of meeting and getting to know them. Everyone you meet and play as is a warning to the player, not a shining light. And just like the real world, many of them do rather well. Perpetuating the just world fallacy in our media is not the way to a better real world and claiming satire is dead will not lead you to any worthwhile interpretations of a world of caricature.
If you're interested in diverging experiences, the hard bounds of what a completely authored game experience can be, and some of the best laughs you'll have in a game then this is for you. I've already done a bit of a review recently (which got broken by Steam community's automatic expiry of spoiler tags) but avoid unless you're prepared for spoilers. This is a game you should go into blind. Grab the demo and see if it elicits a chuckle at any point, if so then grab the full game and enjoy.
Mixing story with mechanics for a sublime interactive experience that lets the player get a hint of the stress and uncertainty that it wishes to convey. This is a great game along the same lines as Cart Life or a sweatshop tycoon game.
The Last of Us is a series of stories about two characters as they develop a bond which perfectly plays to the episodic TV strength of narrative form to fit a 8-16 hour story that you play into the game rather than just taking a 3 hour movie plot, padding, and then dumping in enough disconnected gameplay to hit a 6 to 15 hour completion time.
I get the feeling that Joel is meant to be a gun person, at least somewhat. My Joel didn't enjoy guns unless absolutely required due to the noise issue and aim he had. So I played a stealth game in which a lot of necks were broken. A lot of waves of enemies all died without anyone getting alerted and this somewhat broke a few scripted things it would seem (spawning enemies need to be done better; seriously guys, I've had enough of your wave based combat arenas in my Tomb Raider games and spawning in the waves badly is not on when I've got magic see-through-walls so I can see you doing it!) The weirdness seemed to emerge from my slow methodical approach to the stealth game and then suddenly wave two has spawned sat on top of the corpses of wave one and their walking AI isn't switched on so they're lambs to the slaughter. But outside of a couple of arenas that seemed to break, my Joel was definitely alive in my head and muttering back to the enemies shouting out about hunting him that they were the hunted ones, they were trapped in this arena with him and he didn't need bullets for what he had planned. This peaked during the final section, where my play seemed to be least connected to the majority or reviewers, in which an unhinged and well stocked Joel walked through the hospital with effectively unlimited flamer ammo and the screaming of the soldiers made that descent into madness drive to the game close. That section where I took full control and exhausted that stockpiled ammo (I had previously not touched) as I hit the peak of the story played perfectly into the ending as Ellie as she decided that trust is forever dead but you take alliances where you can find them and they were both broken enough to survive.
Speaking of Ellie, she, on the other hand, was a gun person. I suppose this is required due to where she starts being played (with an infinite ammo machine NPC) and the rifle ammo that seems to be a lot more available to her from drops and placements. It was kinda shocking to play her when she takes over as she basically took aim at tiny dots and then later walked past scenes of popped heads. She knew a kill zone when she saw one and used them liberally. So she was already established as more than capable of dealing with a cult and the knife cutscene that ended it seemed a bit more 'unwinding joy of the sociopath' rather than 'driven to near insanity by fear' that I suspect the scene was intended to elicit. Joel was there to calm her down when it was over, not to comfort Ellie and bring her back to some shadow of childhood. As I said, my game was not the only way this plays out, but it was how it played out for me and fixed cut-scenes did not prevent divergence.
The links to Enslaved (AI-companion and stealth focus mutation to the sub-genre), with ancestor Tomb Raider, goes beyond an engine originally designed for Uncharted but with the traversal restricted to avoid the climbing walls that has been a staple of that sub-genre (fighting, traversal, & puzzles with plenty of cinematics for every moment to contextualise those levels). I was weeping for the great assets on display in the Last of Us and a renderer that couldn't do them justice. Other than the terrible snow light flicker and some low res assets that stood out against the high detail others, that game looked (just like Enslaved, taking a similar visual theme) like it would look real nice on something that wasn't a PS3. That they rendered out the cut-scenes is going to kill that kind of conversion to PS4 though. I have no idea why they didn't use a better offline renderer for the scenes for that (there is so much aliasing, but much less than the real-time rendered stuff so it does clearly mark the video from the real-time but not in a way as to make it so it'll look better than if the game was redone with a 1080p+AA real-time renderer - then the cutscenes will show more aliasing than the game would and it'd be messed up that way). It's like the video is trying to pretend it was real-time rendered. For a bit there I though they'd managed to get the game to actually render some of it (remove the overhead of doing the physics, gameplay etc and just render out scenes with a higher quality than the gameplay stuff) but then realised it was all video. I wonder how that works with the unlockable clothing for a new game plus. I assume they didn't render video for every combination so you get characters changing clothes.
I can't end on a negative for the Last of Us and the art design is incredible. That's why I'm disappointed, I wouldn't care about the rendering if it wasn't for what could be with current art and code unchained from 2005 silicon. As with all immersive experiences, you'll notice the rendering errors (eg aliasing) less and less as you progress and that's when the art will really feel amazing. But I couldn't end without mentioning the soundtrack, which does an impressive job of providing the backing and enhancing the emotions of the game without ever feeling like it crowds out the other audio.
But not everything can be a Game of the Year. Here are a couple of moments that I really didn't get along with:
Bioshock Infinite. Never the best of combat arena titles, despite trying to mix things up with magic + guns to get away from the prevailing design of FPSs, this is probably the least fun I've had with the shooting in a Bioshock game and they sure do like putting a lot of it in there for Infinite. The Luteces' story kept me going but I really didn't like the coming of age progression for Elizabeth (especially with how the blood was first let and so completed the gestation of a second enemy force to be generic antagonists) which felt heavy-handed, unrefined, and very much a surface level only arc. Maybe it stood out so much because Elizabeth felt like a plot device engine rather than a person, something for others to manipulate and derive power from rather than someone with agency or even desires. Come to think of it, the themes were many but felt almost all surface level. Care and time went into the stylistic rendering of this place but there wasn't much in there and throwing slavery (and everything else they could find to both ground the story and boost the theme) into a story about fatherhood seemed out of place and ultimately maladroit.
Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons. The 'woman as temptation of evil/destroyer of family' trope really ruined this game for me. As that is the inciting event for the entire of the emotional payload of the game's peak and diminuendo to the close, I was ripped away from the story just as the game wanted me to lean in to it. Great looking game, lovely use of mechanics and story uniting for the end chapter, really wish they'd used a different plot device there so I might have been invested in it rather than disappointed by the hand of the author.
There has been plenty of disagreement on which games are great or poor this year, which is a great space for an interactive medium to be in; people are walking away with very different experiences and not just collectively classifying games 'buggy or boring' or 'brilliant' into two piles. Not only can mechanics elicit very different reactions from people (Go is not a game for everyone) but also the narrative we play can be radically different and a few of the games below are noted for my experience of them, which it not necessarily the same thing someone else will experience when they pick up the game. In a couple of cases, exploring that is the theme of the game. A full exploration of any one game to feel out every limit of the systems and narrative and their interaction would be exhausting and you can only experience it for the first time once and are going to be influenced by that first taste. If you completely disagree with my selection then that's totally fine, but it is my selection of particularly noteworthy titles I've played this year.
If you're sensitive to spoilers then scan over the bold titles and avoid reading the text about each entry. I'm not aiming to ruin the games but if you want to play any of these games completely clean then (shockingly) I will be talking about what they contain.
The Swapper
Not enough people have been talking about The Swapper. That game looks unique (and cohesively competent); has great music; a decent story that doesn't try and make up an answer to the philosophical questions it asks to fit the future time period; and great puzzles that are rarely trivial but also not frustrating. The entire game was less than 5 hours long for me without looking up any of the solutions, showing respect for playtime with several fast-travel systems and some slack in the gating that allows you to progress and come back to incomplete puzzles if you don't want to sit and think about them. The bounds of the puzzles create the landscape of the puzzle rooms so by looking for things like raised steps you can read the language of potential solutions. This language is something you'll slowly get more adept at reading while the difficulty curve and new language is slowly added to as you progress, although you get all the tools you need to complete all the puzzles within the first few minutes of play.My biggest criticism is that the achievements are for 10 hidden rooms that it never gives a hint about existing. There are no others, no completion ding to indicate how many people finished the thing or gave up after finding the final gate requires them to go back and complete the puzzles they missed. The biggest negative I can think of is in the metagame of surrounding features: you should definitely play this game.
Gone Home
That bit where the entire game turns out to be the character remembering her fears and discoveries when entering the house as she reads the diary of her sister, found at the end of the journey. That's such a perfect way to explain audio logs and let them trigger without putting them in the world as recordings or just arm-waving it as a narrated experience. Clean decisions like that are what makes up Gone Home.Two hours of exploring a location and unlocking the several intertwined stories that took place there. That's the advertised content here and anyone who grew up in the '90s is probably going to enjoy just being immersed in that virtual space they half-remember from two decades ago. The stories hold together as you explore and you should absolutely play this game but I do hope this is a step towards something better. The leaning on horror game tropes to link the experience to and subvert the expectations of long time gamers works but I don't think this style of game needs to pander to those already very familiar with gaming conventions. I think there are interesting things to be done with evolving experiences that react, that change the story told and rebuild the world not yet seen based on play. As a first stab from a small, self-funded team, this is what it needed to be and maybe a signpost to much more to come later.
GTA V
Speaking of immersing yourself in a virtual space and exploring the stories there, this is both as far as you can get from Gone Home and the same thing done with a completely different budget and scope, with added games of skill that often involve shooting. A dazzling indication of what can be dragged out of 2005 silicon if you've got the resources to dedicate to faking everything to get the light to feel just right out into the distance. I really hope the next gen allows people to create these spaces and let the silicon illuminate it via some configuration to their tastes rather than the hard work on display here.This was a game where I spent 60 hours doing almost everything that world had to offer and with only a few guiding indicators pointing me towards places I did not want to go. Maybe it was deciding what not to do, as I'd done previously in GTA games (never one for a random rampage, or to use the respawn mechanics of a wasted or busted screen to appear in a hospital or police station), that allowed me to avoid the disappointment others felt. Some of the game does fall flat, some of the content is immature and problematic, many of the missions are just an excuse to point you into this world and let you do a quick activity. But almost all of those 60 hours were ones I really enjoyed. The ability to switch characters, the improved movement and shooting, the heists, the writing: because there is so much of everything it's easy to focus on the few things it screws up but there is so much great stuff in GTA V that I couldn't not include it on this list, even if a few choices were pretty undesirable in my eyes.
Unfortunately there is a renewed call for all immorality to be punished in our media (it now hides under the banner of "satire is dead"). "This content does not explicitly condemn the actions or show the ruination of the actors it depicts and so I will take it as glorifying said actions, for satire is dead."
Maybe it is just the exhaustion of those tired of playing the hero role while performing the actions of a villain in so many games. But satire is very much alive, and writing about the inability to see it by completely failing to listen to any of the dialogue around a scene is disingenuous. But also this is where what I did and what that author experienced diverges. I didn't get a graphic torture scene, Trevor played it straight to the actual horror of the very real situation it pokes at; he repeatedly waterboarded the poor cooperative innocent who then, in desperation to say anything, led to another potential innocent being executed. The visuals of the torture was very tame but the underlying events were the horrific part. Events as has probably happened several times in recent history, orchestrated by people who claim to protect our freedom.
GTA V is not about good people. Beyond Maude I really can't think of anyone trying particularly hard to be anything other than the background level of self-obsessed, terrible to each other in that world. When you bring in a new protagonist by showing him brutally killing the previous game's sympathetic protagonist then the tone is set. There are bad people and people trying to keep their head above the water as the world sinks around them. There are so few good people that I can only name that one off the top of my head, after 60 hours of meeting and getting to know them. Everyone you meet and play as is a warning to the player, not a shining light. And just like the real world, many of them do rather well. Perpetuating the just world fallacy in our media is not the way to a better real world and claiming satire is dead will not lead you to any worthwhile interpretations of a world of caricature.
The Stanley Parable (and demo)
A game for gamers about games with excellent voice work and writing; made of 100% spoilers to the point where the demo is a completely unrelated product about what it means to make a demo of a holistic, non-linear interactive experience.If you're interested in diverging experiences, the hard bounds of what a completely authored game experience can be, and some of the best laughs you'll have in a game then this is for you. I've already done a bit of a review recently (which got broken by Steam community's automatic expiry of spoiler tags) but avoid unless you're prepared for spoilers. This is a game you should go into blind. Grab the demo and see if it elicits a chuckle at any point, if so then grab the full game and enjoy.
Papers Please
There's never enough money if you play it honest and time is your constant enemy. Are you even doing the right thing for the future of your family by following the rules? Why does this random event come now, I just can't afford this expense, we already can't have heat and food every day! "Your niece has disappeared". Oh, for just a few more dollars or a bit more time to do my job and earn it.Mixing story with mechanics for a sublime interactive experience that lets the player get a hint of the stress and uncertainty that it wishes to convey. This is a great game along the same lines as Cart Life or a sweatshop tycoon game.
The Last of Us
What an example of interactive experiences making something personal. This is a linear progression with pre-rendered scenes showing much of the narrative and dialogue and yet it was completely my own. Some reviewers didn't find their play mixed in, didn't derive major character development via play. Yet others did, but developed completely different characters who just walked the same road and had some moments the same as the story I experienced. This is why games are something to be treasured. Potentially fragile but so precious and we must be allowed to develop the craft further to manage that fragility.The Last of Us is a series of stories about two characters as they develop a bond which perfectly plays to the episodic TV strength of narrative form to fit a 8-16 hour story that you play into the game rather than just taking a 3 hour movie plot, padding, and then dumping in enough disconnected gameplay to hit a 6 to 15 hour completion time.
I get the feeling that Joel is meant to be a gun person, at least somewhat. My Joel didn't enjoy guns unless absolutely required due to the noise issue and aim he had. So I played a stealth game in which a lot of necks were broken. A lot of waves of enemies all died without anyone getting alerted and this somewhat broke a few scripted things it would seem (spawning enemies need to be done better; seriously guys, I've had enough of your wave based combat arenas in my Tomb Raider games and spawning in the waves badly is not on when I've got magic see-through-walls so I can see you doing it!) The weirdness seemed to emerge from my slow methodical approach to the stealth game and then suddenly wave two has spawned sat on top of the corpses of wave one and their walking AI isn't switched on so they're lambs to the slaughter. But outside of a couple of arenas that seemed to break, my Joel was definitely alive in my head and muttering back to the enemies shouting out about hunting him that they were the hunted ones, they were trapped in this arena with him and he didn't need bullets for what he had planned. This peaked during the final section, where my play seemed to be least connected to the majority or reviewers, in which an unhinged and well stocked Joel walked through the hospital with effectively unlimited flamer ammo and the screaming of the soldiers made that descent into madness drive to the game close. That section where I took full control and exhausted that stockpiled ammo (I had previously not touched) as I hit the peak of the story played perfectly into the ending as Ellie as she decided that trust is forever dead but you take alliances where you can find them and they were both broken enough to survive.
Speaking of Ellie, she, on the other hand, was a gun person. I suppose this is required due to where she starts being played (with an infinite ammo machine NPC) and the rifle ammo that seems to be a lot more available to her from drops and placements. It was kinda shocking to play her when she takes over as she basically took aim at tiny dots and then later walked past scenes of popped heads. She knew a kill zone when she saw one and used them liberally. So she was already established as more than capable of dealing with a cult and the knife cutscene that ended it seemed a bit more 'unwinding joy of the sociopath' rather than 'driven to near insanity by fear' that I suspect the scene was intended to elicit. Joel was there to calm her down when it was over, not to comfort Ellie and bring her back to some shadow of childhood. As I said, my game was not the only way this plays out, but it was how it played out for me and fixed cut-scenes did not prevent divergence.
The links to Enslaved (AI-companion and stealth focus mutation to the sub-genre), with ancestor Tomb Raider, goes beyond an engine originally designed for Uncharted but with the traversal restricted to avoid the climbing walls that has been a staple of that sub-genre (fighting, traversal, & puzzles with plenty of cinematics for every moment to contextualise those levels). I was weeping for the great assets on display in the Last of Us and a renderer that couldn't do them justice. Other than the terrible snow light flicker and some low res assets that stood out against the high detail others, that game looked (just like Enslaved, taking a similar visual theme) like it would look real nice on something that wasn't a PS3. That they rendered out the cut-scenes is going to kill that kind of conversion to PS4 though. I have no idea why they didn't use a better offline renderer for the scenes for that (there is so much aliasing, but much less than the real-time rendered stuff so it does clearly mark the video from the real-time but not in a way as to make it so it'll look better than if the game was redone with a 1080p+AA real-time renderer - then the cutscenes will show more aliasing than the game would and it'd be messed up that way). It's like the video is trying to pretend it was real-time rendered. For a bit there I though they'd managed to get the game to actually render some of it (remove the overhead of doing the physics, gameplay etc and just render out scenes with a higher quality than the gameplay stuff) but then realised it was all video. I wonder how that works with the unlockable clothing for a new game plus. I assume they didn't render video for every combination so you get characters changing clothes.
I can't end on a negative for the Last of Us and the art design is incredible. That's why I'm disappointed, I wouldn't care about the rendering if it wasn't for what could be with current art and code unchained from 2005 silicon. As with all immersive experiences, you'll notice the rendering errors (eg aliasing) less and less as you progress and that's when the art will really feel amazing. But I couldn't end without mentioning the soundtrack, which does an impressive job of providing the backing and enhancing the emotions of the game without ever feeling like it crowds out the other audio.
But not everything can be a Game of the Year. Here are a couple of moments that I really didn't get along with:
Bioshock Infinite. Never the best of combat arena titles, despite trying to mix things up with magic + guns to get away from the prevailing design of FPSs, this is probably the least fun I've had with the shooting in a Bioshock game and they sure do like putting a lot of it in there for Infinite. The Luteces' story kept me going but I really didn't like the coming of age progression for Elizabeth (especially with how the blood was first let and so completed the gestation of a second enemy force to be generic antagonists) which felt heavy-handed, unrefined, and very much a surface level only arc. Maybe it stood out so much because Elizabeth felt like a plot device engine rather than a person, something for others to manipulate and derive power from rather than someone with agency or even desires. Come to think of it, the themes were many but felt almost all surface level. Care and time went into the stylistic rendering of this place but there wasn't much in there and throwing slavery (and everything else they could find to both ground the story and boost the theme) into a story about fatherhood seemed out of place and ultimately maladroit.
Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons. The 'woman as temptation of evil/destroyer of family' trope really ruined this game for me. As that is the inciting event for the entire of the emotional payload of the game's peak and diminuendo to the close, I was ripped away from the story just as the game wanted me to lean in to it. Great looking game, lovely use of mechanics and story uniting for the end chapter, really wish they'd used a different plot device there so I might have been invested in it rather than disappointed by the hand of the author.
Friday, 1 November 2013
Counting PC Gamers
There has never been a better time to work out how many PC gamers are out there buying new hardware each year.
Coming up for a decade ago we knew that around 90% of motherboards shipped with integrated graphics, back before CPUs gave up an area of their die for an iGPU. But they were also quite crappy a lot of the time and lacked the ports and performance, even for 2D sometimes, to be useful. Just as motherboard audio was often looked down on as no good, even if you didn't play games then a discrete GPU wasn't the worst of ideas.
But something changed. Just as with motherboard audio, combined in that case with the Vista driver changes that killed hardware audio acceleration, the floor kept rising and soon there was not a lot of reason to buy your own discrete AIB (add-in board). We are now at a point where the integrated graphics, now on the CPU rather than the motherboard chipset, are everywhere and good enough. Intel and AMD are even starting to push the claim that if you enjoy some 3D games then you'll still be able to just buy a single clip from them so before their claims hold too much water we are given an interesting opportunity to get some rough idea of how many new or refurbished gaming PCs are being purchased every year.
Luckily Intel and AMD have helped us out, because if you're not gaming then you don't need an AIB (discrete card GPU) or a laptop with an nVidia chip in (AMD also bundle their CPUs in the numbers so I'm ignoring them - nVidia numbers come with a percentage of discrete laptop GPU market indicator from which you can extract the real AMD numbers). There isn't even really a super-low end, not for discrete GPUs, because the rising performance of iGPUs that come with every CPU you buy has killed the market. There are not 115m AIB sales like there were in 1999 (seems to be the peak, also about the time more chipsets started integrating a graphics option on some motherboards) but almost all the ones that are left are for gaming systems.
We should have a rough idea of where the other major market is. Consoles, both home and portable. The market leading console can sometimes sell ~20m a years, which is how we get one or two consoles that break well over 100m global sales over their (previously somewhat limited for time in the Sun as the primary device) lifetime. Everyone else (at least in recent times, where there has been no clear loser) is getting closer to 10m sales a year (but you give sales from 2005-2013 and you get your 75-80m units that press releases from Sony and MS point to).
How does the PC platform stack up against that, in what we think is the last couple of years of some pretty good pickings for extracting only the 'gaming was a feature request' sales? You see about 35-40m nVidia desktop GPUs sold each year. AMD is more like 25m. That's still getting on for as many dedicated gaming cards in a year as there have been 360s sold since sometime in 2006. But if you consider the 50 million nVidia mobile GPUs and 20m AMD discrete units then we're not even playing in the same ballpark. There are almost certainly more gaming PCs sold every year (consistent for at least a while, much harder to get an impression of sales when I can't be assured people didn't need to buy a GPU to make a complete PC and so it becomes real murky to estimate gaming PCs more than a few years ago) than there have been console devices of a single platform in play at any one time. Only the lifetime PS2 and DS sales even poke their head above the ~100m ceiling to possibly eclipse PC dedicated GPU sales for a single year and with the hardware revisions, and expected lifetime, and known element failure rates (which don't really count for GPUs that are all within year 1 of the warranty) then how many of those were actually in any state to be used to play games by the end when the sales total reaches that high?
Lost, broken, sitting on the shelf at a used store, in the cupboard. That doesn't sound like the fate of many GPUs purchased in that year but a 6+ year old console (one of many iterations and colours) may have a significant hit to how many are really in the wild. I'd be pretty confident that annual gaming PC sales is significantly larger than the combined console market and that probably has been true for a long time. And unlike mobile sales, where you don't really know how many people want a phone and how many want a gaming platform with benefits, the current market segmentation means you're throwing money away for an identical product for your needs if you don't buy that discrete GPU because you at least know you'll want the option of gaming. Maybe you don't realise your 10 year old games will run just fine on the CPU's iGPU today but I'm still going to count that as a gamer worth counting. They're buying the gaming hardware. Just like a cinephile might have purchased a PS3 for the cheap access to a good HD movie player, or in today's market maybe a crazy person purchased a Netflix box rather than buying a $50 Android or similar device for the same purpose.
I hadn't seen it actually laid out, with a reasonably coherent argument for how the current market actually makes it pretty easy to count likely PC gamers. The numbers are more analyst report averages (GPU makers don't seem to publish chip volumes, only financials) but do roughly tie into where I was expecting and a vague idea of revenues (and the comparative volumes sold at each price tier). I don't think they're going to be off by enough for it to matter (even if you halve the GPU numbers you're still looking at quite a gap to the next nearest platform adding new units). When we talk about how well PC gaming does (is it dead, is it reborn, can it never truly die, is it going mobile tomorrow?), the only real question is how many gamers we can convert to the insatiable console appetite for a high attach ratio (several games per year habit, and paying for them at retail for the tracking to work) to make the software side explode into being more important than consoles. In terms of hardware then the consoles are the amusing iOS minnow to the Android shark, lots of noise and software sales but very few units out there globally when you look at the competition. And when I started writing this post I had no idea I was going to end on that apt comparison to another closed platform that can make far more PR and software sales via the mandated single store but not nearly the hardware sales volume of the open platform it competes with.
Coming up for a decade ago we knew that around 90% of motherboards shipped with integrated graphics, back before CPUs gave up an area of their die for an iGPU. But they were also quite crappy a lot of the time and lacked the ports and performance, even for 2D sometimes, to be useful. Just as motherboard audio was often looked down on as no good, even if you didn't play games then a discrete GPU wasn't the worst of ideas.
But something changed. Just as with motherboard audio, combined in that case with the Vista driver changes that killed hardware audio acceleration, the floor kept rising and soon there was not a lot of reason to buy your own discrete AIB (add-in board). We are now at a point where the integrated graphics, now on the CPU rather than the motherboard chipset, are everywhere and good enough. Intel and AMD are even starting to push the claim that if you enjoy some 3D games then you'll still be able to just buy a single clip from them so before their claims hold too much water we are given an interesting opportunity to get some rough idea of how many new or refurbished gaming PCs are being purchased every year.
Luckily Intel and AMD have helped us out, because if you're not gaming then you don't need an AIB (discrete card GPU) or a laptop with an nVidia chip in (AMD also bundle their CPUs in the numbers so I'm ignoring them - nVidia numbers come with a percentage of discrete laptop GPU market indicator from which you can extract the real AMD numbers). There isn't even really a super-low end, not for discrete GPUs, because the rising performance of iGPUs that come with every CPU you buy has killed the market. There are not 115m AIB sales like there were in 1999 (seems to be the peak, also about the time more chipsets started integrating a graphics option on some motherboards) but almost all the ones that are left are for gaming systems.
We should have a rough idea of where the other major market is. Consoles, both home and portable. The market leading console can sometimes sell ~20m a years, which is how we get one or two consoles that break well over 100m global sales over their (previously somewhat limited for time in the Sun as the primary device) lifetime. Everyone else (at least in recent times, where there has been no clear loser) is getting closer to 10m sales a year (but you give sales from 2005-2013 and you get your 75-80m units that press releases from Sony and MS point to).
How does the PC platform stack up against that, in what we think is the last couple of years of some pretty good pickings for extracting only the 'gaming was a feature request' sales? You see about 35-40m nVidia desktop GPUs sold each year. AMD is more like 25m. That's still getting on for as many dedicated gaming cards in a year as there have been 360s sold since sometime in 2006. But if you consider the 50 million nVidia mobile GPUs and 20m AMD discrete units then we're not even playing in the same ballpark. There are almost certainly more gaming PCs sold every year (consistent for at least a while, much harder to get an impression of sales when I can't be assured people didn't need to buy a GPU to make a complete PC and so it becomes real murky to estimate gaming PCs more than a few years ago) than there have been console devices of a single platform in play at any one time. Only the lifetime PS2 and DS sales even poke their head above the ~100m ceiling to possibly eclipse PC dedicated GPU sales for a single year and with the hardware revisions, and expected lifetime, and known element failure rates (which don't really count for GPUs that are all within year 1 of the warranty) then how many of those were actually in any state to be used to play games by the end when the sales total reaches that high?
Lost, broken, sitting on the shelf at a used store, in the cupboard. That doesn't sound like the fate of many GPUs purchased in that year but a 6+ year old console (one of many iterations and colours) may have a significant hit to how many are really in the wild. I'd be pretty confident that annual gaming PC sales is significantly larger than the combined console market and that probably has been true for a long time. And unlike mobile sales, where you don't really know how many people want a phone and how many want a gaming platform with benefits, the current market segmentation means you're throwing money away for an identical product for your needs if you don't buy that discrete GPU because you at least know you'll want the option of gaming. Maybe you don't realise your 10 year old games will run just fine on the CPU's iGPU today but I'm still going to count that as a gamer worth counting. They're buying the gaming hardware. Just like a cinephile might have purchased a PS3 for the cheap access to a good HD movie player, or in today's market maybe a crazy person purchased a Netflix box rather than buying a $50 Android or similar device for the same purpose.
I hadn't seen it actually laid out, with a reasonably coherent argument for how the current market actually makes it pretty easy to count likely PC gamers. The numbers are more analyst report averages (GPU makers don't seem to publish chip volumes, only financials) but do roughly tie into where I was expecting and a vague idea of revenues (and the comparative volumes sold at each price tier). I don't think they're going to be off by enough for it to matter (even if you halve the GPU numbers you're still looking at quite a gap to the next nearest platform adding new units). When we talk about how well PC gaming does (is it dead, is it reborn, can it never truly die, is it going mobile tomorrow?), the only real question is how many gamers we can convert to the insatiable console appetite for a high attach ratio (several games per year habit, and paying for them at retail for the tracking to work) to make the software side explode into being more important than consoles. In terms of hardware then the consoles are the amusing iOS minnow to the Android shark, lots of noise and software sales but very few units out there globally when you look at the competition. And when I started writing this post I had no idea I was going to end on that apt comparison to another closed platform that can make far more PR and software sales via the mandated single store but not nearly the hardware sales volume of the open platform it competes with.
Saturday, 19 October 2013
An Objective Review of The Stanley Parable
I have decided to do my bit for the forwarding of the cause for the proliferation of objective reviews of interactive media content by providing a review of The Stanley Parable.
This will provide readers with a useful method of deciding if The Stanley Parable if worth investing their time and money in. It will avoid all the wishy washy ideas of subjective analysis and simply provide you, the reader, with what you need.
You will, at the end of this process, be capable of making an informed choice based not on a demo that fails to show any game content but via my exploration of the game, as it exists.
As this game is a non-linear progression through a narrated experience I have decided to log how I saw the game through a series of progressive snapshots of the game. Please respect the spoiler warnings I have had to use in some places and not hover to uncover them unless you have already purchased and completed the game.
The full gallery, including the spoiler tagged images, will provide people who wish to have a walk-through with the most direct way of experiencing the game, as it exists. This includes a meticulously detailed path to the best ending.
Now please click through and explore my review of The Stanley Parable.
Click here to continue.
After taking in that gallery, you have concluded exploring my review.
I am sure you are now ready to make that important purchasing decision.
Edit, Dec. 2013: Steam currently automatically expires spoiler tags from screenshots after 4 weeks. This has kinda ruined the joke of this post when you follow the various links to the gallery.
This will provide readers with a useful method of deciding if The Stanley Parable if worth investing their time and money in. It will avoid all the wishy washy ideas of subjective analysis and simply provide you, the reader, with what you need.
You will, at the end of this process, be capable of making an informed choice based not on a demo that fails to show any game content but via my exploration of the game, as it exists.
As this game is a non-linear progression through a narrated experience I have decided to log how I saw the game through a series of progressive snapshots of the game. Please respect the spoiler warnings I have had to use in some places and not hover to uncover them unless you have already purchased and completed the game.
The full gallery, including the spoiler tagged images, will provide people who wish to have a walk-through with the most direct way of experiencing the game, as it exists. This includes a meticulously detailed path to the best ending.
Now please click through and explore my review of The Stanley Parable.
Click here to continue.
After taking in that gallery, you have concluded exploring my review.
I am sure you are now ready to make that important purchasing decision.
Edit, Dec. 2013: Steam currently automatically expires spoiler tags from screenshots after 4 weeks. This has kinda ruined the joke of this post when you follow the various links to the gallery.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)