I’m assuming you’re all up to date on Project Cafe, Nintendos new hardware venture (if you’re not then you obviously go outside to much and are a disgrace to geek culture. Details on Project Cafe can be found here: http://uk.gear.ign.com/articles/116/1162204p1.html).
While the name Project Cafe could merely be a name devised so that Nintendo executives can talk about it in public without anyone raising an eyebrow, I think it’s deeper than that. One thing that I find interesting is the gaming publics mockery of the notion that the console will be aimed at a hardcore gaming audience. While, on the surface, it would appear to go far against Nintendos goals with the Wii; that may be because we didn’t understand Nintendos goal with the Wii in the first place.
What if, rather than trying to supply to a casual audience who only buy games two or three times a year, they were instead trying to convert a wide audience into more mainstream gamers that buy games far more frequently. While this may seem ridiculous at a glance, when you look at past launch lineups my theories are supported a bit more. The Wii launched with a fair amount of mainstream and hardcore titles (with the stronger casual games being either free or bundled with a wii remote) that got Wiis into a fair amount of mainstream and hardcore gaming households.
The family come round for Christmas; oh joy! lets all play Wii Bowling! BAM! you’ve just sold the Wii to one or two casual gamers. I don’t need to explain to you the success of the Wii after that, with the casual gaming populous now comfortable with the idea of owning a games machine Nintendo can be ready with the next step; converting the casual gamers they just snagged.
In comes the 3DS. Its launch line up? Now featuring about 50% hardcore/mainstream titles and about 50% casual titles. This is an interesting change in strategy as it means Nintendo is confident that a more general gaming public will buy a 3DS within its launch window. If this were to be a prediction that came true then Nintendo would be able to assume that consumers would also buy games for the system when they launch.
This doesn’t seem to be the case though, the 3DS is not selling nearly as well as the original DS did (that said; the marketing behind the 3DS has been a bit of a mess) so it would definitely serve ninty well to stop trying to merge audiences together and instead focus on one; the casual market.
While this could be a dangerous move (Microsoft will undoubtedly try to rape casual gamers with their next hardware launch) Nintendo have Mario, currently the gaming equivalent of Mickey Mouse, they’ll do fine. It does make you wonder why Microsoft haven’t got a proper mascot really, the avatars won’t sell as much as Banjo would.
My predictions are that Nintendo, if they’re smart, will try and take back the casual market from the kinect. The controller is already rumoured to have a 6 inch HD screen and dual analogue sticks which sounds expensive, seems like a ridiculous move considering how put off a number of people are by the 3DSes price, I don’t want to spend £200 on a second controller so I can play Mario Kart with my mum.
(an image of the form I think Cafe will take: http://img857.imageshack.us/i/cafe.png/ )
I think that the controller will act as a portable gaming system in its own right or something along those lines, seems like the only thing that would justify the expensive controller tech. This brings me nicely back to the topic of what the name means “Project Cafe”. I think the hardware (in whatever shape it may come, maybe it’s just a controller with plugs into your TV with no main machine, a splicing between handheld and home console gaming) will be designed as more of a social hub than a gaming machine.
I think the idea of being able to do your own thing on your own console but being able to connect it to a wider network when you get home would be an interesting one to watch, if ninty could successfully implement game downloads and recommendations into the system then it would solve the issue of getting casual gamers to buy software regularly.
we’ll have to wait until E3 but, as is the norm when there’s a potentially hardware launch on the horizon, I’m absolutely stoked.
Guest article I wrote for Rock Paper Shotgun about my relationship with my father and how a game helped shape it. It was difficult to write, so please excuse any pacing problems. It touches on a very personal subject.
This was so moving. I never got this with my dad, I wish dragonmaws’ all the best.
When I say “Games are electronic dreams” I don’t mean it in a pretentious sounding way. While I love games; saying that they’re dreamlike because I find them beautiful or magical would, lets be honest, make me sound like a freak (no matter how true it may be).
People in the games industry are going to always have varying opinions but one that always astounds me is how people compare gaming to other mediums. Many see games as being electronic board games, many think of them more as interactive films (something that a large amount of consumers seem to agree with), and others go off on tangents into their own assessments of what being a game means.
Previously I believed games to be a splicing of real life (in terms of how the player can interact with the game world) and film. This was wrong of me. Obviously there are people who would rather not compare our industry to any others, something which I find to be a waste, our industry is young so we need to learn from as many other platforms as possible.
The comparison I have now settled with is the idea of games being equivalent to electronic dreams. I once had a dream (no Martin Luther King gags here folks) in which I discovered I had a daughter and spent the majority of my dream playing with her and learning about her, upon waking up (and thus discovering her fictional existence) I ended up being mildly depressed for about an hour. It was so obvious that she wasn’t real and never was.
Fast forward a year, I’m playing Bioshock 2, and I’m completely immersed in the experience. I’m wandering about with my little sister, gathering ADAM, and in the process of protecting her from bad people who seem to enjoy hitting the both of us with pipes and I start to love my twisted little daughter. It was genuinely humbling to hang out with her and she would frequently say how much of a great dad I was. Suddenly; a no good splicer runs towards me with a pipe and yells “You’re not her real dad!”.
That was one of the single most painful things I’d ever experienced in a game, it was the exact same feeling I got when I woke from my dream and realised I was daughter-less. Actually; it was worse because I was in that experience, in that world, I was still in the dream.
With this in mind; I no longer see games in the same way, I can only design in dreams. I’ve gone from being a designer to being Ellen Page in Inception.
The relation between games and dreams doesn’t even stop there. Ever been having one of those dreams where something amazing is just about to happen but then you’re woken by your mum or dad and feel shocked and frustrated? Eerily similar to when you’re about to do a cool bit in a game and you’re asked to do the dishwasher ain’t it?
From this you can usually draw direct correlations between those that find it hard to wake up in the morning and those who find it hard to stop playing a game once they’ve started.
If you’ve read this please let me know your thoughts on this and whether you agree with me on this, an ideology is useless if never challenged.
oh hello two-tone background meme. (not made by me, btw, these are just the funny ones)
So in my Tumblr travels I read a post by a member I follow, complaining about the lack of good mascots in gaming today (and by good she meant creatures etc, not space marines coated in so much metal they’d make a tank jealous).
While it’d be easy to complain and suggest the idea that there are no good mascots nowadays because designers are dumber now, that’s not the case. One of the first things I’ve found in the past year of talking to people in the industry in a bit more depth is that no lead designer is stupid (they’ve got into that position for a reason my friend). With this knowledge it’s easy to distinguish that it’s not designers who choose whether or not to have a mascot a large percentage of the time.
Every major decision (i.e. having a mascot) is made by a designer then filtered through the games producer and then the marketing executives. This is a dangerous process for a creative property as it can begin with a designer saying “I want the main character to be a kitten with attitude!” and the final, approved idea could end up being something like “so he’s this rough, tough, space marine with a tiger tattoo!”.
As a designer it’s important to accept this process (and ideally find ways to cater to it without harming your overarching vision) despite the fact that this process is often what stops colourful mascots getting onto game boxes. It just makes more sense from a marketing standpoint to make characters that are more macho and gritty. Most of the kids who grew up with Sonic the hedgehog, Crash bandicoot, and Spyro the dragon don’t find those characters appealing any more (hence the really quite odd rebirth of Spyro), prefering to take the reins of a big manly man.
It’s not de similar to what happened to the comic book medium a while back. As the readership aged the comics matured with them, unfortunately this left no enticing content for a new audience to get into leading to a monumental crash in sales. This can happen to the games industry.
Thankfully there are a lot of near-perfect games for kids to sink their teeth into, we still have mascots like Super Mario kicking about in some classic titles. Alas, with this comes a lot of shovelware to balance things out making it imperative that publishers and marketing execs alike commission more fun, bright, energetic characters for a younger generation, it’ll help them in the long run.
So while you (disposably yours, the person who sparked this particular post) may want to make mascots like in the gaming days of old, I gotta tell you, it’ll be a LOT harder than you think.
I picked up Pokemon (white edition, it has the coolest legendary on the box) yesterday, permission to feel like a child again?
I’ve not been able to give it the time I truly owe it as of yet (I’m roughly 45 minutes in so I can’t make a final judgement on the quality of the overall package) but I can say that I’m very pleased with it thus far.
I booted it up and, to be honest, I was sceptical. This is a series that, since Gold & Silver, haven’t been friends to change as much as other franchises and I was kind of getting bored of the GYM after GYM after GYM structure of the series.
In the past every element has felt slightly copy and pasted from past iterations and I expected no less from this instalment. I was right and wrong.
The games presentation is top notch, seriously incredible. It’s menus are slick, the start screen looks incredible on the DS, and the menu sounds are really soft but also very satisfying. It’s unusual that I would notice the front end of a game being this great but that’s just how fantastic the user-interface is. The game then opens with a female professor “that’s good of them” I thought to myself, they’ve been male in the past, kudos to Game Freak for adding that.
Following this the plot begins. In the past all the games have taken a uncomfortably subtle approach to morals and ideologies. They’ve always felt as though the writer was going “you may just possibly, maybe, slightly discover something about yourself on your journey… maybe… you know what? forget I even said that”. White/Black really grabs the idea of growing up and twirls it to the forefront.
I loved that, one of the first things the professor says to you in the game is essentially “you know what? You need to grow up… it’s a big world out there, with a lot of different people and a lot of different opinions. It’s important you learn about that and respect it, you’re going to be adults soon”.
Bravo! This is a message so critically important to the target audience who are anywhere between eight and ten years old, a very impressionable age.
The game delivers in a bunch of other areas to. Recently the series has felt as if they’ve just been doing the same thing every time just better and better. This generation is brilliant in the way that the designers have obviously one back and reconsidered what made the original game so good and combined that with the new knowledge they’ve gained over the years.
It’s a new beginning for Pokemon, it’s got back to its roots, developed what works, promises a more impressive story, and all of the above has been conveyed before I’ve even got passed Route 1.
that’s right… Route 1. A very fresh start for an incredible series, this may just be the best Pokemon yet. Crystal was pretty beastly mind.
Oh my Activison, what have you done?
Activision has a habit of getting people a bit angry… well, very angry. In this post I solemnly swear to remain as unbiased as I can, Activision aren’t monsters, they’re businessmen (although some may argue there’s no difference).
While I do often think it would do them some good to try and improve their corporate image like EA (people still hate on them but they’re a bajillion (that’s a real number (wow, it’s starting to look like triple brackets)) times better than they were six years ago).
Of course this particular post is concerning Activision burying their Guitar Hero, DJ Hero, and True Crime franchises. This really got under the skin of a lot of gaming fanatics like myself (but not actually me, I’m trying to remain unbiased here) and Activision then rubbed salt in the wound by opening yet another studio for the Call Of Duty franchise (bringing the studio count for the shooter to a grand total of five).
Naturally this got the internet REALLY riled up, especially the groups who are of the belief that every game should be arty like Limbo or Flower (I love both but I still loves me some Duke Nukem).
I don’t see to much of a problem with the whole thing though, while it’s always sad to see a series or game be cut off as it risks jobs, is demotivational for the team making the game, and a lot of work has to be scrapped (especially with True Crime, that game looked nearly done), people seem to be getting really frustrated purely because Call Of Duty is involved.
While I do think that DJ Hero was in it’s prime and it was a shame to see the mighty beast fall, Guitar Hero was becoming stagnant (even more so when compared to the superior Rockband), and True Crime wasn’t exactly a massive title.
The fact is, a lot of people really hate Call Of Duty. The sheer amount of times people say the franchise is killing the industry is ridiculous (it isn’t, it’s putting a lot of money into the industry and making more people take gaming seriously).
Honestly, at this point, I’m not picking sides, I don’t always agree with Activision but I understand their decision here (Infinity Wards Vince Zapella and Jason West may have left but Treyarch proved themselves worthy of doing the franchise justice with Black Ops), Call Of Duty is HUGE, it makes sense to expand upon it.
So while I don’t agree with everything Activision’s doing (they seem to screw over developers a LOT) I understand their decision here, it’ll be interesting to see it develop and see how EA respond.
My thoughts go out to anyone effected by Activison cutting off their project, it’s never fun for that to happen, good luck with your future endeavours, you deserve it!
That’s right, I’ve started playing Minecraft, goodbye life.
Minecraft is brilliant, the simple (admittedly quite easy to execute) art style is superb to look at and makes me feel all nostalgic, the music is dream-like and vivid, and the gameplay is more addicting than cocaine. The game deserves all of the praise it gets (I hate the pretentious people who dislike it because it’s not Limbo).
The gameplay is the real star of the show, the designer has done a fantastic job of making every resource, creature, or equipment in the game be of some worth to the player. Without this worth games like Minecraft fail, if the player doesn’t value the rewards they’re being given (in this case mud and wood) then there’s nothing they can get out of the experience. It’s why so many people get addicted to Farmville and the like, the game’s nothing special but they care about the rewards, if that care disappears then the game becomes lifeless. Thankfully the games mechanics mean that the resources are almost like digital LEGO blocks.
I’m really quite fond of the digital LEGO analogy, after all, when you were a kid playing about with LEGO, building a castle or whatnot, you would rummage around for blocks, build the castle yourself, and when the castle was done it’s of no use to anyone, it sits there… so you build something else.
This is what makes Minecrafts gameplay so brilliant and addicting, and that’s why, while I write this, I just want to be playing it more. There are more things that make the game fantastic though. The music is subtle, expertly written, and simplistically sublime. The soundtrack always puts me into this weird dreamlike state with each song sounding reminiscent of a lullaby, the gameplay makes the game fun but it’s when the music comes in that I become utterly convinced that Minecraft is the best game ever created.
But the reason Minecraft is so stunning, so enriching, and so emotional (despite it’s lack of NPCs or Round edges) is because it makes you feel like a child again. The nostalgic visuals? the lullaby songs? the digital LEGO gameplay?
Minecraft made feel free like a kid again and that’s more than any game has ever done for me. That’s why it’s one of the greatest games ever made…
and it was made by one guy for less than the price of a used car.
I was up in Scotland recently visiting Abertay University (it’s a great place, might blog about it in the future). In my travels I had the pleasure of meeting a woman called Jackie.
Jackie works for NESTA, a lottery funded group that has been tasked with making the UK more innovative (no mean feat) and Jackie is the head of the Video game arts division. Jackie was explaining to me a fairly heartbreaking tale; a naive designer once worked his fingers to the bone on a little game called Broken Sword. To ensure the game would make it to shelves the designer got a publisher, THQ. After the game released it was an absolute success making THQ millions in profit, the designer? He made a loss of £2,000,000… oh dear, oh dear…
I’m not going to point fingers and I’m certainly not bad-mouthing THQ (they give me a sort of Activision vibe at the moment, I’m not going to take sides just yet) but that’s unfair. NESTA, seeing these kind of situations appearing quite regularly are starting a campaign to cut out publishers all together by doing everything the publisher would with no charge.
Obviously NESTA will have to be very selective with what games are published, probably having a system similar to Ofcom (the product must be of some social, philisofical, or societal benefit) but it should mean that a few more developers will get the money back from the products they pour time, love, and thought into.
