Pesky Games

Video games are, naturally, at it again. At what? Destroying society, that's what. The latest offering to be targeted by those that seek publicity by launching a crusade against the popular (am I being cynical? Perhaps I just don't notice the campaigns against less high profile targets) is Skyrim. 

Apparently, the psychological and spiritual damage that this game metes out is more than any other game ever before. I can only assume that what these critics actually mean is "this game will take up a lot of time" although it's not going to be as much as World Of Warcraft.

This case if put forth in a petition, which you can read (I'm assuming you won't be signing it) here.

Everyone has a right to their opinion. 

And I have a right to laugh at it.

DIY Usability

Once upon a time I designed software without using any usability testing. Those were crazy days, full of arguments between team members, which went a lot like this:

Someone: I think it should be like this.

Someone Else: No, I think it should be like this.

Repeat for evvvvvvvvvvvver...

And so, time was wasted.

Then I found myself working at a company that had a usability lab, which I embraced like a bear greeting a picnic basket carrying long lost friend. 

Of course, not every company thinks it can afford a usability lab. So it's up to you, yes you, whoever you are dear reader, to step up to the oche (I've never played baseball, so "plate" has no personal meaning for me, however I have played quite a lot of darts). And I've just read a book that tells you how: Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug.

Steve Krug is the Thomas Harris of factual books, i.e. it takes him a long time to release a new book. His books are 100% wisdom, and 0% waffle. If you're not familiar with his work, you should be.

A Game About Game Literacy

This morning I have mostly been playing a brilliant little game called A Game About Game Literacy. It's a... I reckon you can figure it out. And you too can play it here.

Please play this game, it's superb...

Literacy of the audience, in any medium, is a problem for those that create in the medium: You can't sell a novel to someone who can't read. To pick up and play a video game you need to know how to read it and how to write to it, i.e. how to understand what's going on and then use the controller to respond to it.

All good games have some level of tutorial that helps the player to learn the controls. Which is just as well, because learning and remembering a control scheme is a difficult experience for most new video game players. Regular players (and I include game developers in this) rarely understand this problem, because games of the same genre often have similar controls. 

A good example of this are 3rd person games, like Uncharted and God Of War. In these games the character is moved with the left stick, the camera can be swung around with the right stick and the character controls are always relative to the camera. This last point is important, because the camera in these games is always dynamic, often moving around to frame the action. If the player wants to run in a straight line then they have to compensate for the camera as it moves. Equally, the player can just push in one direction on the left stick and manually move the camera with the right stick, changing the direction the character is running in that way. It takes some getting used to. Then, on top of this there are all the buttons, like jump, punch and shoot.

Generally, games pile on the control options quickly. That all adds up to a lot of learning, which (again), is tough on a player who's new to the genre. Bear in mind that your average human can only really learn about three things per hour! So, the more game literate the audience, the easier it is to make games for them.

And that's why most games are made for quite a small percentage of the population, the game literate. For the most part the most expensive games are made for a slice of the population that's probably no bigger than 20 million people.

I think the AAA console game makers need to address this and they need become as ambitious as the social and casual games makers. 

So Long Steve Jobs

On the odd occasion I have been known to mock Steve Jobs in my Mars Rocks! cartoons. In fact, just yesterday I was having a dig at Apple in general, a dig which had it’s seed in a Steve Jobs’ comment from last year.

The original Mac, one of the cutest computers ever made...

But I do have a great admiration for Steve Jobs as a rare type of person – a businessman with vision. Steve Wozniak might have been the technical genius, Xerox might have actually done the R&D on graphical interfaces and Jonathan Ive made sure we desired these things, but it was Jobs that got the damned things on the market.

I don’t personally think the world is particularly short on smart people creating, or at least trying to create, impressive things. However, the world has a dire paucity of people who have the talent and intuition to encourage, cajole and help the creative types. While he was still alive there weren’t enough Steve Jobs’ in the world, now the deficit is a lot worse.

It’s going the be very hard to replace the crowning glory of the breed.

To all those that actually knew and loved Steve Jobs in person, my thoughts go out to you, especially his family.

Play Games And Do Science

Game visionaries like Jane McGonigal have an ambition to make games that make the world better. I have an ambition to make games that the make the world better. Normally these games centre on social awareness, which is important, but the results are hard to measure. 

Jane McGonigal - doing some future envisioning, by the looks of it...

However, a crowd sourced, video game derived solution has now been found to the structure of a molecule, the form of which has been eluding scientists for longer than they would have liked. Further work through this approach to the problem could lead to a cure for AIDS. 

Ask not what science can do for you, but what you can do for science. Let's all go play Fold It.

Help Required to Help Others

Ok, so I'm working on a game that's so simple I'm probably never going to write a design doc. I've roped in a coder and an artist, who will do most of the work on the actual game, because, like I say, the design is so simple. 

However this doesn't leave me with nothing to do, just nothing to do that I have the faintest idea about. 

You see, the intention of the game is to raise money for the ongoing disaster that is the Christchurch earthquake, and its exorbitant number of aftershocks. 

Game development - we can't stop earthquakes, but we can help out in the aftermath...

It's also scalable, so new 'levels' can be added and bought with micro transactions to raise money for other unfortunate earthquakes around the world when they happen.

The game design is good, we're proud of the business model, but how the hell do we structure the business entity? The organisation we need to form won’t be a charity itself, but we do plan on giving away all the money we make (above operating costs) to different charities that are on the ground, doing the hard work of saving lives, cleaning up and rebuilding. 

New Zealand business law isn't area of expertise, and this is way outside of my business experience, so if anyone out there can give any advice (for free, of course) then please, please, please drop me a line at jon@twotailedtiger.com – thanks in advance!

Podcast 2 - Scrum on Down!

There's a new podcast available from me available here. This one's on the subject of Scrum, which is a project management process that I am passionate about. I also worry about it being wrecked, at least in the games industry, by poor practices.

Not that kind of scrum...