[As new markets emerge, social game designers are finding themselves oddly divided from their AAA peers -- is this really a battle of ethics in design, or is it a quest for the "soul" of interactive entertainment? Gamasutra's Leigh Alexander investigates.]
After years of struggling together for creative and spiritual recognition from the wider world, game designers seem to be turning on each other.
When a mobile game company is worth $400 million, and when whispers of a possible IPO for the industry's largest social game developer build to a dull roar, it's clear that new platforms have "broken in" to the mainstream.
Many of them, in medium or message or both, have been aided significantly by the input of storied veterans of the traditional AAA space: folks like Brian Reynolds, Raph Koster, Steve Meretzky and Brenda Brathwaite.
Designers like these have spent years, even decades, paying their dues in service of video games' battle for legitimacy in the eyes of a mainstream audience. And now that they're transitioning to a different space, those with whom they used to work are questioning their legitimacy as designers.
Few devs have put themselves on the line to call out their peers with constructed specificity, but it's clear that despite the millions of dollars their sector stands to rake in, social game developers are on the defensive. It's in the critical comments on our coverage of Raph Koster's first GDC Online lecture, where he stepped in for a Playdom exec to talk, perhaps not coincidentally, about "making the leap" from AAA to social games.
It's in the environment of disdain that permeates Twitter; it's in the silent rejection of peers' titles on Facebook. It's in the snarky tone the hardcore blogosphere takes in its reluctant coverage of the emerging markets that are getting harder and harder to ignore, it's even in the late-night cocktail chatter that follows the numerous conference talks that social game developers are increasingly traveling to present.
Ian Bogost, who with his satirical Cow Clicker title quickly landed himself on the side of the social game critics, frequently describes it as an environment of "anguish". In what was perhaps also not a coincidence, his GDC Online talk on the subject seemed to serve as an accidental counterpoint to Koster's although they took place in proximal time slots.
What's strangest of all about the defensive stance social game developers are taking, as if they felt the need to justify themselves to their peers or former colleagues, is that both camps are making games for the mainstream. Everyone, get over yourselves already.
What Are The Alternatives?
Is designing a metrics-driven title designed to engage users in a compulsion loop so that they'll keep logging in and spending money any more ethical or soulful than being one of 200 pairs of hands on one of however many market-researched, risk-averse mass-market console FPS releasing in the next few months?
Would colleagues respect the likes of Brathwaite and Reynolds more if they'd "stayed behind" to oversee the next painfully-subtle iterations in the sixth, seventh and eighth incarnation of a franchise that will never expand beyond its hardest-core niche?
It's hardly wrong to work on a product as beloved and successful as Civ, of course. Just as there's nothing wrong with making a product as beloved and successful as FrontierVille. Why do the opposing camps appear to feel the need to even make the argument that one has the same or more right to exist than the other?
But when we examine the "anguish" that Bogost describes, more interesting questions arise. If, as a reasonable hypothesis suggests, our veteran designers felt they had little more to do in a creatively-constrained and economically-dependent AAA space, are they resented for "escaping?" Should they have stayed behind, nobly frustrating themselves in fruitless aims to force drastic reinvention in a time and a space when to achieve it seems more down to luck than skill or effort?
Further, do traditional game developers expect "more", somehow, from those that flee the mill? Is it disheartening to witness that the most viable alternative to the wringer that most AAA development tends to be is spiritually and creatively a lateral move?
The Secret Sting
The answer we've used thus far is that traditional developers feel "threatened" or insulted by social game development: When some venture capitalist gets up and speaks at a summit entirely devoted to the economic models surrounding 50 cent Flash game hats and says consoles are irrelevant, it's fair that it raises the hackles of those who've been pouring their sweat and tears into devkits. When someone like Koster, who's helped parent long-held principles, says things like "you can no longer be a designer that doesn't understand money", it's probably actually painful to some.
But is Koster wrong? While there may be some "impurity" or distaste associated with admitting it, is there any segment of game development -- or any creative endeavor -- that realistically isn't concerned with money, least of all the traditional space in today's ever more hit-driven era? Even the indies care, battling one another valiantly for festival prizes and a drink at the communal funding hole.
Others argue that it's not the money issue -- it's the way social games are made. The common accusation is that so dependent are they on clicks and retention and user-numbers that they employ empty tactics to play on users' neurochemical reward centers. They're no better than slot machines, people say -- one could have even heard the word "cocaine" tossed into a few heated GDC Online debates.
So? Is that really better than the AAA space? Raising a virtual farm and clicking on corncobs is really so much less moral than smashing pumpkins or killing 12 wolves for a World of Warcraft villager the player just met? At least Facebook users all know each other's real names and don't seem to have a problem being civil to each other. Maybe it sucks that Facebook games ask you to view your online "friends" as services to be employed and points to be got, but how is Achievement and Trophy-whoring all that different? Your Facebook "friends" won't call you homophobic epithets if you let 'em down.
The point is, both are forms of entertainment without specific moral or spiritual quality. Their respective userbases enjoy them, so why keep clicking a dead cow? And even still, there is storytelling of real depth taking place in the traditional space, and one doesn't even need to continually resurrect Ico and Portal to find them.
Soul-Searching
Look at BioShock 2's carefully-authored Minerva's Den DLC, the emergent storytelling players have found in Red Dead Redemption, or the personal and philosophical approach to development employed by studios like Thatgamecompany.
Conversely, there is surely real socialization happening in the Facebook space -- personally, my friend and I have developed a series of lively real-world in-jokes thanks to some simple, frankly stupid "fortune-telling" wall spam apps, so imagine how much fun real people are having with FrontierVille. Give the audience some credit -- they can't all be cattle, ripe for the suckering!
So if there's actually merit on either side of this rapidly-emerging aisle, what's the debate really about? If both schools of thought are as equally-likely to be lifelessly commercial, then perhaps designers are pointing fingers at one another in a much bigger fight: The battle to recapture the soul in video games.
Because that's what everyone's struggling for, isn't it? For proof, one just needed to be in the room for Richard Bartle's show-closing talk on the history of MUD. He quipped that the only way he could present a critique of modern design was in the guise of a history lesson, and that's exactly what he did. MUD was motivated by the need to say something; most games today just aren't.
"You must want to say something," he told the packed audience, his voice taut as if he could inspire them with the kind of urgency that had once driven a pair of teenagers to create a multi-user world from scratch.
It's that ideal of soul in design -- a concept that doesn't depend on whether something's commercial or not, or metrics-driven or not. It's the goal of a game that is about something bigger than oneself, and perhaps all the "anguish" in the conflicted design landscape is that those on both sides of the argument are struggling to achieve it. Maybe it's just easier for each to accuse the other of failing than confront its absence.
The clash first came from a clash of aesthetic, it's achievement vs satisfaction. Social game are only the last evolution in that shift. Game were conceive first as challenge, but with the increasing power came the idea of immersion (the aesthetics of stimulation) which start to clash. Casual game also follow that aesthetics of stimulation over challenge and most mainstream game today are half beast of immersion and challenge.
As we move away from the original aesthetics of achievement and the lessening of challenge, gamers and traditional game developers feel a disconnection with what they had grown up with, care about and what they expect game to be. This discomfort is really what fuel the frustration express towards so called "new form of play" (NFP). But it's an old pattern: sim city, the sims, etc... are now critically acclaim game that had gone through similar hurdle and criticism.
The irony is that most modern challenge base game are built on the mechanics of arcade ... design to let the penny flow into the machine. Money was always at the heart of modern video game mechanics by history.
I find a lot of truth in this. Games have lost their souls. Any way you want to slice up the game market, we've become too focused on what to do, when to do it instead of why we are who we are.
I think this touches on the silly question: "Are games art?" (Reference Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics for a similar debate on comics where the answers are the same for the same reason: Yes, but that's irrelevant). Why does anyone care if games are considered art? Do we really need a sterile environment of a museum with a game being shown, not played and people standing around dumbfounded and asking: "but what does this one mean?" I'm not hating on art museums, I actually really enjoy them, but they have taken their pieces way out of context in most cases to the point where they are altogether different. Craft, Structure, Form are preserved but the meaning and purpose may have been left in ancient Greece or some 20th century starving artist's apartment flat.
My point is simple: if you want credibility, quit asking for it and do something to deserve it. You will get it. Infuse your own soul in your games and breathe life into them. Right now mostly all games are zombie games --- they have form but they have no substance, no life. They are just living to devour the brains or souls of something else to stay alive for a few more hours and seek out more brains to eat.
What do you mean by, "Games have lost their souls"? When exactly did games ever have souls? This is an amorphous word to me that I find meaningless. Can you explain how game X has soul and game Y doesn't, the way you can say song X swings and song Y doesn't? Please provide some examples.
Traditional game design never had a soul in the first place. It's simply designed to feed a player's addiction to a mechanic for as many hours as possible. It treats games as a product, or a service, no more, no less.
Social games are the same thing except they removed the finger-input "skill" and reaction time needed to get to that proverbial "just one more" feeling.
Simply put: Social Game developers make more profit on their projects, while AAA Game developers make more memmorable experiences and relativly less profit. However, both can be equally fun and addictive. So who is the true game developer? Who leads the industry into a new era? Truth is: both...and none.
It is because the Social Games are mainly focussed on making a quick buck, while the AAA Games are mainly focussed on...(hold on) making a quick buck! So whats really stopping development of new gameplay and/or genres? Money!
It's true that Social Game Developers can create new gameplay more rapidly. They are easier to produce and the financial risk is lower. However, the concepts that come from this are not really meant for AAA development and thus, those new genres are mostly possible with Social Games. Why?
Social Games aim for a totally different audience. The audience that has some small spare time left. The AAA Games on the other hand, aim for the target audience that has at least 1 hour of spare time. What comes of this, is a difference in experience for the user. Social Games do not require to give an experience (there is hardly any narrative component), they have to keep the player occupied with mechanics without sucking the player into another reality.
If u ask me, both industries have the chance to be progressive. AAA game development can offer new experiences that the social game development can't. With new technology comes new gameplay...
AAA game development is cutting edge, Social Game development is not, but does provide new gameplay (mechanics). The thing keeping both sides back is: money, cash...financial security....
Why invent a plane when you can make twice as much money by inventing the same car twice, only this time with the steering wheel somehwere else?
In the happy chaos of our mutational industry, money is the key to survival and dreams for new games get lost in the heat....
What I find a lot is that there are - frankly - a lot of blowhards in games who feel compelled to remind everyone that it's a business, that it's all about player numbers as though that kind of negation will somehow get people "out of the clouds" and back down to Earth. That kind of attitude is very much driven from the place of regarding the industry as essentially a virtual casino industry.
The problem I personally have with such thinking is that it basically says "Don't have any ambition. Make a social Poker game. That's where the money is." And it is both materially and creatively bull. In other forms of entertainment the exact same tension exists between the easy-to-make product and the hard-to-make product and it is a difference of VALUE.
Reality TV is the equivalent of the "it's just a business" mentality and the result is a product which has zero long term potential. Nobody is killing to syndicate content from most reality TV shows for any worth. Reality TV formats are also incredibly easy to copy, so if one channel is making a celebrity chef competition show then 5 of them are. If one channel is making Big Brother then so is everyone else. The problem with low-rent ideas, in short, is that anyone can make them and so competition at the bottom is fierce.
And, like with reality TV, there is an element of customer hate coming from the industry because a portion of the audience is apparently quite happy to respond to those sorts of products.
High value productions, on the other hand, are the ones that sell DVD boxed sets. They are identifiable as the shows which regularly show up on TV for years or even decades after they ended. They are all about a strategy of depth, but the problem that blow-hards have with such products is that they require artistry in order to work. The "head up in the clouds" stuff is otherwise known as spending the time to make something awesome. It doesn't just happen. Creative people make their best contribution when they are focused on doing something for users above and beyond the call to simply play, and users reward them with loyalty.
The tension is thus not between "art" and "business". It is between "building something awesome" and "money-now".
Players want to be really entertained, they want to connect, but much of the business seems to just want to find ways to skim money off the top of users for as little effort as possible. Like reality TV, it just wants to create the most minimum viable cash-generating product as possible and nuts to the long term implications. More or less how Vegas thinks, in short.
However the awesome-building creatives are usually proved to have the right stance over the long term in TV because what they make is wildly over-delivering to viewers in exchange for their time. And the same is true in games. There is real danger in making every conversation with players into a money conversation because it builds no loyalty. It's just a transaction.
Game companies that take the long-term strategic stance are the ones that endure and ultimately prosper. This business has always worked best when it creates players for life, not when it tries to behave in a money-now fashion. Short term, money-now seems successful but long term it ends up competitive and cut-throat, as is happening in metric-driven social games already.
It's too easy to think that games are all about money and too cheap to trot out "it's not about ideas, it's about execution/features/engineering/business plans". That's how you end up making the digital equivalent of just another coffee and donuts shop on the I-95, and that's how you set yourself up for struggle and failure.
We are in the business of entertaining and connecting people, just as we always have been, and that means doing the HARD work of figuring out how to make something that they really want rather than just another set of distractions. Ideas and the blue-sky thinking from which they come matter a great deal.
It might sound a bit jaded (luckily there are always exceptions to the rule), but generally the money is made by the least creative, most derivative, lowbrow entertainment. Always has, always will. Get over it. You're either a sellout hack or a starving artist.
This happens in every area of art: foreign indie art films with tons of soul vs. Michael Bay brainless blockbusters. Avant-garde artmusic vs. cookie-cutter cliche pop songs. IF (interactive fiction) text adventures filled with character development and soul vs. yet another FPS.
Game masterpieces of art can be found, but nobody's buying. Money talks. The public doesn't want gourmet haute cuisine, they want fast food.
With your 'jaded' comments there Chris, I think you've found something to really build on. That there can be a great range of experiences within an art form without infighting. I don't see a lot of acid argument between art film and blockbuster creators (save of course Bigelow and Cameron). And I don't recall any Nobel Laureates claiming dime novels weren't 'writing'.
Let our market embrace and allow for both and all. If your wish is to create a wonderful IF/VN creation, look me up; I'll probably be buying. But don't expect 2million folks to camp out all day somewhere to get it. If you want to create The Hurt Locker, by all means do so; just don't get overly pissed off when everyone else is out watching Avatitanic.
And with that, remember who had helped her ex write both -- it is perfectly ok for serious art creators to dabble as well. Unless of course you are one who puts Near Dark on the same level as her Oscar winner.
Very true, except there ARE examples of products walking the that fine line. And that's ultimately where everyone wants to be -- at least everyone who's not purely in it for business. So the $1M question is: How do we make something artsy that will sell, and how do we keep away from the devil's honey that is Facebook.
It's ultimately moot talking about Facebook vs. Hardcore games as though the two are oil and vinegar. Soon enough they will merge and you will have quality, artsty Facebook games as well as more mainstream, socially connected hardcore games. The most popular stuff will always be lowbrow, but Facebook games WILL be a viable option for those of us who want to have our cake and eat it too.
I'm curious what Miyamoto thinks of Facebook games. He's always stressing innovation, but at the same time he stresses that games are PRODUCTS (not art) whose number one goal is to appeal to as many possible. Personally, I don't see why developers are so eager to appeal to a wide audience. Does that really get you creatively excited?
Minecraft, world of goo, animal crossing, nintendo game in general. Just some from the top of my mind since there is some more.
edit: one major flaws is to appeal a lot of people we make assumption and do not explore other options. Animal crossing and the sims are pretty "anti game" convention and yet sells like cake.
Nintendo stress game as product but is very careful at considering them as craft. It's funny that a lot of nintendo designer are actually artist other technicien, while most people in the industry are technicien that pretend tobe artist.
Games have a soul when you can FEEL the game. Like BioShock, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Batman: Arkham Asylum, FFVII, Ico, etc.
As a developer, yes you're building the world, but if you just look at it as math and equations and if/then statements (like what I do in programming), then you're losing touch with your game.
Gamers will feel that they can't connect to it or get immersed and lose themselves in it.
Thank you, Leigh, for writing a well-balanced piece. It's about time.
I still believe in AAA blockbusters. I also believe in metrics-led gaming. I think that the economics of having to *finish* an entire game, and market it, before you launch it are shockingly bad.
But I do think that we all need to get along.
We are all part of the games industry. We fulfill our different roles to serve different markets.
I think Social Games vs. AAA Games is a false dichotomy. All the concerns and opportunities embodied in small vs. big can be expressed and explored in a variety of platforms, formats, and genres that have nothing to do with microtransactions. You can compare Braid and Limbo vs. Modern Warfare and WoW and there's valid discussion there. But I don't think devs working on AAA games are grousing about the likes of those smaller indie games.
The one and only issue that is truly driving designers apart is money, meaning business model. To misappropriate a metaphor from the free software movement, it's the Cathedral vs. the Bazaar, only the virtuous path is arguably flipped on its head.
In the AAA and even Indie worlds, a team (small or large) of skilled artisans labors to produce a finished work which you can purchase for a flat fee. As a consumer, you are getting all of their work and effort that has hopefully harmonized into an optimal, complete whole. That's the Cathedral, and whether you are Minecraft or Medal of Honor, that's how you're making games.
In the microtransactions world, each game is its own bazaar. The consumer enters the experience and starts getting pitched to spend money at every turn.
That's a very big distinction. A team building a cathedral knows that financially, their project will almost certainly live or die on the basis of quality. We can bitch about how annualized sequels are creatively stagnant but the reality is they still deliver a strong experience that millions of people keep buying. They may not innovate, but they work as advertised, look and play pretty good, and deliver what you expect. If you don't believe that, take a look at EA's new Medal of Honor, a game whose lower Metacritic rating actually caused EA's stock to fall this week; its emerging reputation as a not-so-good game is going to have a genuine impact on its sales and on EA's performance as a company. Every studio and publisher knows that fundamentally, it's the quality of the finished game that is crucial in success, and you can grouse about the lack of innovation but rest assured that come launch day, all those companies are hitting F5 on Metacritic with sweat on their brow. Quality actually does matter.
A team building a bazaar has a very different row to hoe. They can ship something that is primitive, flaky, and unfinished as long as they succeed in properly motivating a percentage of the playerbase to spend money. They are not incented to be excellent; they are incented to monetize excellently, and I do not believe those two things are equivalent.
One model incents quality; the other incents exploitation. Neither is perfect at what it tries to do. But to me, one is flatly inferior to the other in terms of what our profession should be good at and what kind of relationship we should have with our players.
I don't believe that all microtransaction projects are evil. I do believe that the gold rush surrounding them is driving good designers to do bad work, work that I believe they should be ashamed of.
If you want to be a professional game developer, you need to make money, it's as simple as that. However, I think there are honest ways to make money and dishonest ways. Creating a high quality product and selling it for a reasonable price is an honest living. Creating a product that is designed to make money by turning people into addicts is a dishonest living.
The thing is that this sort of dishonesty didn't start with facebook games - they're just the natural lowest common denominator result. It started with MMORPGs which is why I thought it was funny when the article asked if doing quests in WoW was any better than playing a popular Facebook. No, it's not any better, because they're both different stages of evolution of the same thing.
If you ask a Farmville user whether their experience is high-quality, will they say Yes or No? I bet they'll say Yes! They have different sensibilities than us.
Art may imitate life but art then shapes life and where does that cycle go? Perhaps it leads to a generation of cultural paupers. Is it possible that constantly catering to the lowest common denominator lowers the denominator?
50 years ago you could find a ton of young people having loved "Gone with the Wind." Now, you'll find more who would rather see Transformers 2 again.
To quote J Michael Straczynski who I believe was quoting someone else, "art is like a mirror. If a pauper peers in you can't expect a prince to peer back."
I think Leigh hinted on it, but yall are missing the point entirely. It's not about AAA vs social/casual games. I think a lot of indies have even missed the point too. Most games just don't stand for anything anymore. Partly because of the bureaucratic companies that make them. Others because they are hollow copies of former greatness. Words don't mean anything, people do. Likewise, games by themselves don't mean anything unless people put something real from their own soul into them. Americans have traditionally been people of all surface, but the surface isn't working anymore with a rotten core. Selling fast food and Michael Bay will only work for a few more years. Even if you extract all the financial gain out of it that you can, you will see that the value taken without adding value business model is quickly eroding. Machiavelli once wrote: "Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are." Quit making games that appear to be cool. Make games that share that which you really are with people.
And oh yeah...you will be able to make a living wage doing that. Or else you are probably doing it wrong.
Right now, social games are to video gaming what fast food is to american cuisine, it's popular, cheap and easy to make but if you look deeper the meat of is bullshit, it promotes low standards for both its consumers and workers.
The bottom line is there isn't a lot of complexity to social games, they're basic in their making and game play, and for those of us with a habit of finer games it's like trading filet mignon for a big mac, there's nothing wrong with preferring the latter, but you just can't compare the cuisine, and in the latter, you can't even talk about cuisine.
Maybe there's a future for an integration of social elements in video gaming, but as it stands, the future of social gaming is same crap, different name.
There doesn't need to be a reconciliation between soul-less games and soul-full ones.
There will always be gold nuggets to be found in a sea of pyrite.
The only thing I find irritating is when the pyrite dealers claim to be selling gold or worse (as if in response to some internal defense mechanism) claim that whether you're dealing in gold or pyrite, it's all equally worthless junk... as if debasing the works of the entire industry will put everyone at the same level.
This is deja' vu and I'm guessing the social games market will sort itself out the same way the dot.com market did. Right now it's a gold rush and it seems you can be half-asleep and make money in that market. That won't always be the case and then only the true quality performers will survive, enough sharks will go bankrupt that the rest move on to the next feast, and then we can go back to making games for the sake of having games we enjoy playing. Hopefully some of our friends we have learned to respect will be among those making a killing (more power to them) and not among those losing their shirts.
In the meantime, sit back, grab a bag of popcorn, and enjoy.
I have silently thought about this, but never seen an article about it till now.
I will just say this: People have to pay $50-60 up front to play a console game, not to mention the investment in the console itself. They expect more, and they get more... in overall value.
It's the same comparison as big studio movies VS independents. An independent movie studio isn't going to be able to attract the artistic talent or have the hardware to create something like Avatar. Just like no Facebook game (at the moment) can rival the Red Deads and Halos.
I wouldn't call casual web games a lesser form of game than AAA console games.... It's just different. They're both games.
But I do believe you get more value from AAA console games right now.
However More than a half of the 60-70$ games are buggy and/or have crap gameplay.
So if you consider these failures their price is way higher, something like 100$ spent to find good games. To get your money back you need to invest about 40 hours per game, thus 2 dollars an hour, not bad.
But if you don'thave the time anymore, it becomes a mute investment. Rather pay as I go, which is what social games, and mobile game do. Its just lifestyle.
I rather have a good life with friends, family, dinning well and playing cheap games, than playing games with nitwits on xbox live and eating nachos :)
As we move away from the original aesthetics of achievement and the lessening of challenge, gamers and traditional game developers feel a disconnection with what they had grown up with, care about and what they expect game to be. This discomfort is really what fuel the frustration express towards so called "new form of play" (NFP). But it's an old pattern: sim city, the sims, etc... are now critically acclaim game that had gone through similar hurdle and criticism.
The irony is that most modern challenge base game are built on the mechanics of arcade ... design to let the penny flow into the machine. Money was always at the heart of modern video game mechanics by history.
I think this touches on the silly question: "Are games art?" (Reference Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics for a similar debate on comics where the answers are the same for the same reason: Yes, but that's irrelevant). Why does anyone care if games are considered art? Do we really need a sterile environment of a museum with a game being shown, not played and people standing around dumbfounded and asking: "but what does this one mean?" I'm not hating on art museums, I actually really enjoy them, but they have taken their pieces way out of context in most cases to the point where they are altogether different. Craft, Structure, Form are preserved but the meaning and purpose may have been left in ancient Greece or some 20th century starving artist's apartment flat.
My point is simple: if you want credibility, quit asking for it and do something to deserve it. You will get it. Infuse your own soul in your games and breathe life into them. Right now mostly all games are zombie games --- they have form but they have no substance, no life. They are just living to devour the brains or souls of something else to stay alive for a few more hours and seek out more brains to eat.
Social games are the same thing except they removed the finger-input "skill" and reaction time needed to get to that proverbial "just one more" feeling.
It is because the Social Games are mainly focussed on making a quick buck, while the AAA Games are mainly focussed on...(hold on) making a quick buck! So whats really stopping development of new gameplay and/or genres? Money!
It's true that Social Game Developers can create new gameplay more rapidly. They are easier to produce and the financial risk is lower. However, the concepts that come from this are not really meant for AAA development and thus, those new genres are mostly possible with Social Games. Why?
Social Games aim for a totally different audience. The audience that has some small spare time left. The AAA Games on the other hand, aim for the target audience that has at least 1 hour of spare time. What comes of this, is a difference in experience for the user. Social Games do not require to give an experience (there is hardly any narrative component), they have to keep the player occupied with mechanics without sucking the player into another reality.
If u ask me, both industries have the chance to be progressive. AAA game development can offer new experiences that the social game development can't. With new technology comes new gameplay...
AAA game development is cutting edge, Social Game development is not, but does provide new gameplay (mechanics). The thing keeping both sides back is: money, cash...financial security....
Why invent a plane when you can make twice as much money by inventing the same car twice, only this time with the steering wheel somehwere else?
In the happy chaos of our mutational industry, money is the key to survival and dreams for new games get lost in the heat....
The problem I personally have with such thinking is that it basically says "Don't have any ambition. Make a social Poker game. That's where the money is." And it is both materially and creatively bull. In other forms of entertainment the exact same tension exists between the easy-to-make product and the hard-to-make product and it is a difference of VALUE.
Reality TV is the equivalent of the "it's just a business" mentality and the result is a product which has zero long term potential. Nobody is killing to syndicate content from most reality TV shows for any worth. Reality TV formats are also incredibly easy to copy, so if one channel is making a celebrity chef competition show then 5 of them are. If one channel is making Big Brother then so is everyone else. The problem with low-rent ideas, in short, is that anyone can make them and so competition at the bottom is fierce.
And, like with reality TV, there is an element of customer hate coming from the industry because a portion of the audience is apparently quite happy to respond to those sorts of products.
High value productions, on the other hand, are the ones that sell DVD boxed sets. They are identifiable as the shows which regularly show up on TV for years or even decades after they ended. They are all about a strategy of depth, but the problem that blow-hards have with such products is that they require artistry in order to work. The "head up in the clouds" stuff is otherwise known as spending the time to make something awesome. It doesn't just happen. Creative people make their best contribution when they are focused on doing something for users above and beyond the call to simply play, and users reward them with loyalty.
The tension is thus not between "art" and "business". It is between "building something awesome" and "money-now".
Players want to be really entertained, they want to connect, but much of the business seems to just want to find ways to skim money off the top of users for as little effort as possible. Like reality TV, it just wants to create the most minimum viable cash-generating product as possible and nuts to the long term implications. More or less how Vegas thinks, in short.
However the awesome-building creatives are usually proved to have the right stance over the long term in TV because what they make is wildly over-delivering to viewers in exchange for their time. And the same is true in games. There is real danger in making every conversation with players into a money conversation because it builds no loyalty. It's just a transaction.
Game companies that take the long-term strategic stance are the ones that endure and ultimately prosper. This business has always worked best when it creates players for life, not when it tries to behave in a money-now fashion. Short term, money-now seems successful but long term it ends up competitive and cut-throat, as is happening in metric-driven social games already.
It's too easy to think that games are all about money and too cheap to trot out "it's not about ideas, it's about execution/features/engineering/business plans". That's how you end up making the digital equivalent of just another coffee and donuts shop on the I-95, and that's how you set yourself up for struggle and failure.
We are in the business of entertaining and connecting people, just as we always have been, and that means doing the HARD work of figuring out how to make something that they really want rather than just another set of distractions. Ideas and the blue-sky thinking from which they come matter a great deal.
This happens in every area of art: foreign indie art films with tons of soul vs. Michael Bay brainless blockbusters. Avant-garde artmusic vs. cookie-cutter cliche pop songs. IF (interactive fiction) text adventures filled with character development and soul vs. yet another FPS.
Game masterpieces of art can be found, but nobody's buying. Money talks. The public doesn't want gourmet haute cuisine, they want fast food.
Let our market embrace and allow for both and all. If your wish is to create a wonderful IF/VN creation, look me up; I'll probably be buying. But don't expect 2million folks to camp out all day somewhere to get it. If you want to create The Hurt Locker, by all means do so; just don't get overly pissed off when everyone else is out watching Avatitanic.
And with that, remember who had helped her ex write both -- it is perfectly ok for serious art creators to dabble as well. Unless of course you are one who puts Near Dark on the same level as her Oscar winner.
It's ultimately moot talking about Facebook vs. Hardcore games as though the two are oil and vinegar. Soon enough they will merge and you will have quality, artsty Facebook games as well as more mainstream, socially connected hardcore games. The most popular stuff will always be lowbrow, but Facebook games WILL be a viable option for those of us who want to have our cake and eat it too.
I'm curious what Miyamoto thinks of Facebook games. He's always stressing innovation, but at the same time he stresses that games are PRODUCTS (not art) whose number one goal is to appeal to as many possible. Personally, I don't see why developers are so eager to appeal to a wide audience. Does that really get you creatively excited?
edit: one major flaws is to appeal a lot of people we make assumption and do not explore other options. Animal crossing and the sims are pretty "anti game" convention and yet sells like cake.
Nintendo stress game as product but is very careful at considering them as craft. It's funny that a lot of nintendo designer are actually artist other technicien, while most people in the industry are technicien that pretend tobe artist.
Games have a soul when you can FEEL the game. Like BioShock, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Batman: Arkham Asylum, FFVII, Ico, etc.
As a developer, yes you're building the world, but if you just look at it as math and equations and if/then statements (like what I do in programming), then you're losing touch with your game.
Gamers will feel that they can't connect to it or get immersed and lose themselves in it.
I still believe in AAA blockbusters. I also believe in metrics-led gaming. I think that the economics of having to *finish* an entire game, and market it, before you launch it are shockingly bad.
But I do think that we all need to get along.
We are all part of the games industry. We fulfill our different roles to serve different markets.
Vive la difference.
The one and only issue that is truly driving designers apart is money, meaning business model. To misappropriate a metaphor from the free software movement, it's the Cathedral vs. the Bazaar, only the virtuous path is arguably flipped on its head.
In the AAA and even Indie worlds, a team (small or large) of skilled artisans labors to produce a finished work which you can purchase for a flat fee. As a consumer, you are getting all of their work and effort that has hopefully harmonized into an optimal, complete whole. That's the Cathedral, and whether you are Minecraft or Medal of Honor, that's how you're making games.
In the microtransactions world, each game is its own bazaar. The consumer enters the experience and starts getting pitched to spend money at every turn.
That's a very big distinction. A team building a cathedral knows that financially, their project will almost certainly live or die on the basis of quality. We can bitch about how annualized sequels are creatively stagnant but the reality is they still deliver a strong experience that millions of people keep buying. They may not innovate, but they work as advertised, look and play pretty good, and deliver what you expect. If you don't believe that, take a look at EA's new Medal of Honor, a game whose lower Metacritic rating actually caused EA's stock to fall this week; its emerging reputation as a not-so-good game is going to have a genuine impact on its sales and on EA's performance as a company. Every studio and publisher knows that fundamentally, it's the quality of the finished game that is crucial in success, and you can grouse about the lack of innovation but rest assured that come launch day, all those companies are hitting F5 on Metacritic with sweat on their brow. Quality actually does matter.
A team building a bazaar has a very different row to hoe. They can ship something that is primitive, flaky, and unfinished as long as they succeed in properly motivating a percentage of the playerbase to spend money. They are not incented to be excellent; they are incented to monetize excellently, and I do not believe those two things are equivalent.
One model incents quality; the other incents exploitation. Neither is perfect at what it tries to do. But to me, one is flatly inferior to the other in terms of what our profession should be good at and what kind of relationship we should have with our players.
I don't believe that all microtransaction projects are evil. I do believe that the gold rush surrounding them is driving good designers to do bad work, work that I believe they should be ashamed of.
The thing is that this sort of dishonesty didn't start with facebook games - they're just the natural lowest common denominator result. It started with MMORPGs which is why I thought it was funny when the article asked if doing quests in WoW was any better than playing a popular Facebook. No, it's not any better, because they're both different stages of evolution of the same thing.
50 years ago you could find a ton of young people having loved "Gone with the Wind." Now, you'll find more who would rather see Transformers 2 again.
To quote J Michael Straczynski who I believe was quoting someone else, "art is like a mirror. If a pauper peers in you can't expect a prince to peer back."
And oh yeah...you will be able to make a living wage doing that. Or else you are probably doing it wrong.
The bottom line is there isn't a lot of complexity to social games, they're basic in their making and game play, and for those of us with a habit of finer games it's like trading filet mignon for a big mac, there's nothing wrong with preferring the latter, but you just can't compare the cuisine, and in the latter, you can't even talk about cuisine.
Maybe there's a future for an integration of social elements in video gaming, but as it stands, the future of social gaming is same crap, different name.
There doesn't need to be a reconciliation between soul-less games and soul-full ones.
There will always be gold nuggets to be found in a sea of pyrite.
The only thing I find irritating is when the pyrite dealers claim to be selling gold or worse (as if in response to some internal defense mechanism) claim that whether you're dealing in gold or pyrite, it's all equally worthless junk... as if debasing the works of the entire industry will put everyone at the same level.
In the meantime, sit back, grab a bag of popcorn, and enjoy.
I will just say this: People have to pay $50-60 up front to play a console game, not to mention the investment in the console itself. They expect more, and they get more... in overall value.
It's the same comparison as big studio movies VS independents. An independent movie studio isn't going to be able to attract the artistic talent or have the hardware to create something like Avatar. Just like no Facebook game (at the moment) can rival the Red Deads and Halos.
I wouldn't call casual web games a lesser form of game than AAA console games.... It's just different. They're both games.
But I do believe you get more value from AAA console games right now.
However More than a half of the 60-70$ games are buggy and/or have crap gameplay.
So if you consider these failures their price is way higher, something like 100$ spent to find good games. To get your money back you need to invest about 40 hours per game, thus 2 dollars an hour, not bad.
But if you don'thave the time anymore, it becomes a mute investment. Rather pay as I go, which is what social games, and mobile game do. Its just lifestyle.
I rather have a good life with friends, family, dinning well and playing cheap games, than playing games with nitwits on xbox live and eating nachos :)
http://tale-of-tales.com/blog/2008/03/14/games-less-casual/