As reported by Gamasutra’s Chris Remo, Chris Hecker (formerly of Maxis, now an independent developer) addressed the International Game Developers Association’s Leadership Forum in San Francisco this past week. In the following excerpt, Remo digests Hecker’s remarks and their main point — that games remain fixated on narrow experiences, revenue and the easy appeal of proven forms of presentation — especially the “power fantasy”, with its attendant explosions and special effects.

“If we continue on our current path, we’ll end up in the pop cultural ghetto where [comic books] are,” Hecker said. “An alternative path is where film, books and music ended up.” Such media certainly have their low-brow offerings, but on the whole are “relatively bulletproof” as accepted forms of art, worth scholarship and refined criticism.

But even on four tests of popular culture acceptance — revenue, units sold, cultural impact and diversity of content – games succeed at only one, Hecker argues. Revenue. “We f—k it up on the other three,” showing that the medium is still an infant next to its supposed peers.

Here, in the words of Hecker as reported by Remo, is the bigger picture of how games, before aspiring to the old-money legitimacy of the fine arts, can first avoid a cultural ghetto.

IGDA Forum: Asking ‘Why’ Will Keep Games Out Of The Ghetto, Says Hecker [Gamasutra, November 13, 2009.]

Like literature, music, film and other forms, games offer their own intrinsic element to add to culture. For games, it’s interactivity. That uniqueness is necessary for a form to carve out its own cultural space, and it’s what will allow games to occupy such a space if the gaming community doesn’t wall it off.

But that means designers must strive to convey some kind of “why”, and when they do, it will ideally be conveyed through interactivity, not just cutscenes. Linear “theme park ride” games, as Hecker calls them — recently, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, et al. — can be great fun, and we have become quite skilled at making them, but they also represent something of a creative red herring: “The part that speaks to the human condition is in the cutscenes, not in the interactivity.”

Furthermore, while gamers are highly resistant to decreases in graphical fidelity, they seem on the whole un-bothered by regressions in interactivity, hence the flourishing of the theme park ride approach. And since, for technical reasons, it’s safer and cheaper to decrease interactivity as you increase realism, the latter may well continue to suffer.

The booming market of casual and social games, Hecker points out, has a different problem. “It’s great to have a game to play while you’re waiting for a bus,” he said, “but they’re not trying to say anything at all.”

That leaves the broad category of “systems games”, which are more intrinsically predicated on interactivity and player-driven choice. They contain the best candidates for creating unique, meaningful works in games, Hecker believes, but at the present moment, “these games aren’t really saying anything either, because we don’t know how to say things through interactivity, how an authorial voice works through a system.”

There’s no easy way out of this arguably slippery slope except for the dedication and intent of the people making the games. “I believe this is the big question for the next ten years of game design,” Hecker said. “We have so many opportunities.”

Mechanics and systems can be continually evolved, but designers would do well to keep the following questions in mind, he said: “What are you trying to say and why?” and “And are you trying to say it with interactivity?”

“If you can answer those,” Hecker concluded, “you’re on the right track.”

- Chris Remo

Weekend Reader is Kotaku’s look at the critical thinking in, and of video games. It appears every Saturday. Please take the time to read the full article cited before getting involved in the debate here.

Knights of the Old Republic was a four-star achievement in role playing games, but I do agree with Richard Naik at GameCritics. The choices you faced—even in the dialogue—lacked a lot of subtlety as to what they said about your character. It might have been a lot to ask of a game at the time, but you were still presented with a binary good/evil character, and games still have not evolved much more into shades of grey since then.

Naik brings inFamous, KOTOR, BioShock Mass Effect and Fallout 3, all of them acclaimed games, in for some criticism. The choices in inFamous were simply about power acquisition, he argues. Mass Effect let you be either a paragon of virtue or a belligerent jerk. And he even says the choice outcomes in BioShock “barely change the game at all,” although I disagree with that. Fallout 3 is the most open ended, but it leaves Naik wondering when, or if, a game will allow true open-ended decision making, and then react to that. Or has one already?

Decisions, Decisions [GameCritics, Sept. 16, 2009.]

The original Knights of the Old Republic is, as of the time of this writing, my favourite product of the Star Wars franchise. And its choice system generally serves the game well, but even a well-done implementation of choices such as this still leaves a somewhat odd aftertaste. To go down the evil path I have to make many choices throughout the game that lead me to the dark side, eventually leading to me becoming a cold, cruel, and calculating Sith Lord. But here’s the thing-would such an intelligent Sith Lord (as dictated by the game) really waste his/her time with senseless acts of brutality such as common mugging? I would imagine that an up-and-coming Sith Lord would try to use his victims to their fullest extent, then dispose of them when they no longer had value. Instead I found myself being a run-of-the-mill asshole, and that somehow led to me conquering the galaxy. The moral extremes of sainthood and belligerent sadism were extremely stark and awkward despite the quality of the story, leaving me to wonder how the ideal choice system would actually work.

Mass Effect (which has been getting lots of discussion time on this site lately) does a better job here, but the problem of moral extremes is still evident. Most of the time the evil choice is represented by a simple act of aggression instead of a more subtle cruelty or self-serving action. Now to be fair, such acts are more believably associated with the character of Commander Shepard rather than my character in Knights of the Old Republic. However, the basic problem still exists-I can’t be the scoundrel with a golden heart, only a universally loved hero. I can’t be the insidious mastermind, only an arrogant bully. While Mass Effect does present a better moral middle ground than many of its ilk, that path is largely dull and uninteresting. In order to access more conversation options I have to go towards one extreme or the other, meaning I have no real reason to toe the line in the middle. So now that we have an area between the two extremes, what next?

[...]Where does the evolution of player choices go from here? Someday I’d like to see a game where I can make virtually any choice in any situation within the bounds of the game world’s reason, and be rewarded or punished appropriately for it. Am I being too greedy? Is this impossible with currently existing technology?
- Richard Naik

Weekend Reader is Kotaku’s look at the critical thinking in, and of video games. It appears every Saturday. Please take the time to read the full article cited before getting involved in the debate here.

Speaking to Eurogamer—you really should read the entire story—Vertical Slice director Graham McAllister boils down the process to two things: backtracking through 154 Edge magazine reviews of games, and then analysing what people say and do while playing the games. The latter, called behavioural or sequential analysis, was used by a marriage counsellor who predicted, with 97 per cent accuracy, whether a couple would stay together or break up based on the first five minutes of observing them.

“People think you can’t predict a game based on quantifiable data,” McAllister told Eurogamer. “What we can do is get these estimators. Some people will just have a hard job believing it. We have analysed the statistics to death, thorough and rigorous, and what we’re saying is, ‘You may not like it, but this is the best model that anyone has come up with to date.’”

In this case, McAllister’s analysis is based on just a single minute of gameplay. “What’s important about that first minute is that it’s the time people play a demo for. That’s super critical,” he said. “After 30 seconds, we can predict if the game is going to be bad or good, to a certain extent.”

The reverse-engineering of the Edge reviews involves the usage of certain words or phrases, matched to scores. “All the high-scoring games talk about certain aspects; all the medium-scoring games talk about certain things; and all the low-scoring games talk about certain things. And there’s a very clear mapping between them,” McAllister said.

Can You Predict Review Scores? [Eurogamer, via Go Nintendo]

As some of you know, I’m living with my grandfather for the near term, because he’s 86 and needs some assistance, and the companionship’s good for him. But he keeps asking me about video games.

This past week our lunch and dinner conversations centered on video games, because one naturally talks about work, and this is mine right now. But I also sense that he’s increasingly curious about them – maybe from a big-picture standpoint. The guy’s a Harvard MBA after all, and video games are an enormous, multibillion-dollar business.

So I’ve done my best to keep this in contexts he understands. I talked about Nintendo, and its strategy of exploring growth among casual demographics – unsaturated markets, in other words. There’s a Wii bowling league in the retirement community club down here. He was especially fascinated by the back-and-forth between movie studios and game publishers, how one project will become an adaptation of the other, and why. We talked about military games – he was appalled by the concept of Six Days in Fallujah. A Marine colonel, he is familiar with that operation on a different level. I deliberately didn’t tell him of Atomic’s claims that they’d consulted with insurgents.

Granddad’s never played a game in his life but he looks like he might be interested in seeing what one looks like. He was amazed by the complexity of the PlayStation 3 controller I showed him, especially when I told him about the tilt control and rumble feedback. I told him I was playing The Godfather II – an exceptional movie he enjoyed greatly – for a review. That clearly intrigued him, but I didn’t show any of it to him. Had it been a better game, I probably would have at least shown him some of the cinematics.

The longer I stay here, the more inevitable it will become that he’s going to watch me demonstrate a game. And that brings up a question I’d like to put to you:

If you were showing someone the first video game he had ever seen in his life, and you wanted to show him the very best the industry had to offer, what would it be?

Call of Duty: World at War, or really any military game, is straight out, because this guy was a first-person shooter on Okinawa, and it wasn’t entertaining. But what do I show him? Bioshock? Do I try to impress him with the depth of a world in an MMO or a sandboxer? Do I keep it simple with something like Braid?

Would it only be a cutscene or an introduction? Would it be actual gameplay? Bear in mind my grandfather is an extremely intellectually curious man. But he’s also, with a gentle smile, said that the hobby “sounds like an enormous waste of time.” But he is genuinely fascinated that people would spend so much time and money with it.

Sega Europe boss Mike Hayes says Metacritic scores are indicative of certain games’ success, and while score targets aren’t written into every developer contract, Metacritic does have value — especially in judging expensive projects.

“We’re a creative business, and how do you put objectivity into it? But at the end of the day publishers will always want to do that, particularly if you’re spending $20 million — you have to try and find that objectivity, and it’s going to come from how much it costs, when it’s coming out, and how good the game is,” Hayes told GamesIndustry.biz.

Further, “If you’re going for a high-end PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 game and you want to break out in the genre, or something like that, you have to target that quality – because otherwise you don’t have a hope in hell,” Hayes said. “There’s too much evidence that shows games which score below a certain level in certain genres are not going to cut through.”

Hayes said that “we won’t say to every developer we work with that there’s a target in there.” Which sounds like, for some developers, there is. And the size of the deal seems to be a factor in how much a Metacritic score means to the project.

“Where we’re spending a lot of money, and the score is essential to the success of the product, absolutely I think there’s a value in it,” Hayes said, adding “I don’t think it’s unreasonable for publishers spending that much money to have certain expectations of quality levels. But to demand it on absolutely everything wouldn’t be right at all.”

Metacritic Helps Business Objectivity says Hayes [GamesIndustry.Biz via play.tm]

More than 80 years ago the movie rating star system was born in the New York Daily News.

On July 31, 1928, the paper announced they would be using a three-star reviewing system from then on out to rate movies. And almost from the same day, movie critics starting hating the system.

It took video game writers a bit longer to adopt the ubiquitous system for rating games, but the hatred was right on it’s heels.

Recently game reviews and the use of ratings have become a target of constant navel staring, with critics, writers and box-standers killing obscene amounts of pixels to talk about what should be done. Last year, we just threw ratings out the window, reinventing how we reviewed games.

I don’t expect the same sort of reaction from movie critics, but at least they’re starting to talk about their hatred of the system.

“We don’t seek to reduce our arguments about a particular piece of art to a number, or letter grade, or golden spatulas, or whatever,” says Sam Sifton, the New York Times’ culture editor told the Wall Street Journal for a recent article on the subject. “These are numbers that aren’t based on any rational or countable thing.” However, restaurant reviews in the paper have long included rankings from “poor” to four stars. Mr. Sifton, the former dining editor, calls those “the exception that proves the rule here.”

The article is a fascinating read for anyone interested in the subject. It talks about the history of reductive criticism, the good and bad, and how sites like Metacritic have helped bring the issue to a head.

One critic’s pan of “Pearl Harbor” originally was ranked 40 out of 100, until he contacted the site to say it was more like a 10. Marc Doyle, co-founder and senior product manager of Metacritic, which is now owned by CBS, says the site’s employees read reviews carefully, will change scores if they are protested by reviewers, and will reconsider them if readers object. “It’s just a tool, like any other tool,” he says of the site.

Doyle, for his part, says that Metacritic is exploring improvements.

Let’s Rate the Ranking Systems of Film Reviews [Wall Street Journal]

The profile of Rockstar and the Housers doesn’t really answer that (beyond mentioning the Goatie we gave it for writing). But the writer talks to critics and eggheads who say it’s a legitimate question.

“Look at film in 1908 — there was no sound, you viewed it through a nickelodeon, there was a limited filmic language developed. If at the time you had said film would be the literature of 20th Century, you would have been laughed at,” said Chris Swain, assistant professor of interactive media at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. “Games could be the literature of the 21st Century. But it takes vision.”

The soundtrack is also another evolution in, or departure from, the linear model of visual and recording arts.

Brown University ethnomusicologist Kiri Miller points out, the use of radio in “GTA IV” lets gamers choose their own soundtracks: speed metal for a high-speed chase, bebop for a nighttime cruise around the city. Choosing a station lets players set their own mood and illuminate their own character … “In ‘GTA IV,’ the radio is speaking more to the player and not so much the avatar,” says Miller, “and in ‘San Andreas,’ you could hear the radio really speaking to the avatar, and that, I thought, was an incredible achievement.”

The story’s peg is the upcoming release of Chinatown Wars. And there’s not much in the profile that’s going to tell you what you don’t know. (Although Rockstar does have an office dog named Niko.) It’s interesting because it’s mainstream media, of course, raising a point probably not yet considered by many among its readership.

And the lede, I’d never really thought of it this way: “Books let us imagine the impossible. Movies let us see the impossible. Video games let us do the impossible.” Can’t wait to do some impossible tonight.

Is Grand Theft Auto IV the Greatest Writing of the Century? [Chicago Tribune, thanks weber12]

Ray Huling argues that the next crop of Final Fantasy games will be, like theYamato, obsolete by the time they hit the ground. Impressive in their size, yet obsolete at the time of their completion. Huling says that the games have become such giant enterprises, it’s sapping the fun out of the whole production (does that mean ‘obsolete’ or simply ‘not fun anymore’?):

… the optional elements that demand so much effort to achieve on the DS represent only a bite-size version of the gaming Gargantua Final Fantasy has become. Mini-games, bestiaries, accessories, rare monsters, rare weapons – Christ! The humongousness of it all defies belief, defies completion. Sure, people have achieved all that can be achieved in a game like Final Fantasy XII – one of its FAQs, not even the largest, is spread across more than 770 pages. But people built the actual Battleship Yamato, too, which now lies in two pieces on the floor of the ocean off Okinawa.

Just as has happened with the main plot, the sidequests of Final Fantasy have become ends in themselves, separated from any notion of the fun they were supposed to provide. Final Fantasy has the most compelling profile of any videogame. It bristles with guns – but what can actually be done with all of that firepower?

I suspect there are many that would disagree, and while I didn’t like FFXII for a variety of reasons, I just turned it off and hoped the next iteration would strike my fancy (and if not, oh well — there are plenty of other fish in the gaming sea). I’ll agree that plenty of aspects of the games are ridiculous, but that’s hardly confined to the Final Fantasy series. Is the game formula ‘obsolete,’ or just tired (or is Huling just tired of it?)? And what does obsolescence (of a non-technological variety) really mean in the context of RPGs or games more broadly?

The Battleship Final Fantasy [The Escapist]

Instead of arguing about reviews and criticism, he argues, maybe people should just set aside a little space and do criticism. A lot of really talented journalists already do this in their own blogs, and it’s always nice to read. And what about the kerfluffle over reviews?

Nor is talking about how to review games even relevant. They’re fine. IGN writes good reviews, questions about their scoring aside. Nor does anyone need to care or start suddenly doing things the same way for reviews. Hell, my views on games are completely batshit: I don’t think game design has to innovate to be relevant, I factor in outside reviews, and I need to beg Ralph Koster to forgive me if I ever meet him for being such a brat about not liking mastering rules. But my take on reviews doesn’t matter because I don’t consider them criticism. They’re consumer reports on the elements of a game that advise the person of what they’re buying.

I sort of agree; on the other hand, I don’t see any reason other kinds of reviews couldn’t move toward the ‘criticism’ side of things (that’s probably the academic in me talking). Whether people would want them to is another matter. I think we can all agree that debating about things is all well and good, but it comes down to action or inaction, as the case may be.

Louder Than Words [Banana Pepper Martinis]

It’s pretty damn funny, and touches on a lot of the current issues without being pedantic. Here’s ‘CliffyB’s’ advice on streamlined writing:

4.) Treat Words Like Lovers, Be Picky: If you don’t choose your words carefully you will piss off readers and they will leave unproductive comments like “U R MR GAY.” Even if you are Mr. Gay, which is totally fine, you want a discussion in the comments, not aggressive statements.

For example, say a journo writes, “I think CliffyB’s friggin neat and he does neat stuff.” In reality, the journo knows I’m fan-friggin-tastic, I have perfect hair, and I make for a solid best friend. Now, don’t be verbose, but try to express yourself entirely and concisely with charm and wit. And if you’re lucky, your readers will want to be your friggin best friend too.

Welcome back, guys at Hardcasual — this piece is definitely good for a read, as are several of their more recent pieces.

The Cliffster’s Badass Plan to Fix New Games Journo [Hardcasual]