Plan for Jay Barnson
by Jay Barnson · 03/14/2005 (12:45 am) · 7 comments
Evolution: Natural or Guided?
In Cameron Crowe's excellent movie "Almost Famous," there is a scene where legendary rock critic Lester Bangs (Phillip Seymore Hoffman) mentors young William Miller (Patrick Fugit) and warns him of the temptations he's going to face as a journalist. He maintains that Rock and Roll is dying, slowly being killed by rock stars and record companies in collaboration with journalists. He warns, "These are people who want you to write sanctimonious stories about the genius of rock stars, and they will ruin Rock and Roll and strangle everything we love about it, you know? And then it just becomes an industry of... 'cool.'"
I thought about this when I read an article in Game Developer magazine last week by Noah Falstein, a game designer with vast experience and expertise in the industry. His quote: "The coin-op arcade business in the 1980s may have been the most fiercely Darwinian game environment in history. New games appeared and thrived, or died in a matter of months if they didn't have ample sustenance (quarters). After great early diversity, arcade games converged on a few successful formulas that ate up all those quarters and starved later games that didn't follow the formulas."
So ... bearing in mind the complaints about the stagnation in our industry... which is it? Is it a natural evolutionary process with generations simply emulating their successful ancestors, or is it actually the result of a corporate agenda to make it easier to grease the wheels of industry to facilitate a predictable assembly-line approach to game development?
Back to the beginning...
Nolan Bushnell's first coin-operated game was Computer Space, based on the mainframe game "Spacewar". The game wasn't very successful. Bushnell didn't give up on the idea of videogames entirely instead, he took the lessons learned from Computer Space and tried again. He went for something simpler, more straightforward quite possibly the most basic gameplay possible. The result was Pong, and it launched an empire.
The interesting thing here is that from a game-geek's point of view, Computer Space was a superior game in almost every way. Pong was a total step backwards. But the audience wasn't ready for it. Later, its day came in the form of a game heavily inspired by it called Asteroids. In both cases, their success was met with a host of clones, imitators, and would-be successors. But they weren't alone - the explosion of innovation from the early 80's seems completely unattainable today. The arcade industry hit it's stride, boomed, and went bust in about the same time period as the expected lifecycle of the Playstation 2. The "Commodore 64 Age" really only lasted about four years or so yet we saw more incredible diversity on that platform in those four years than we have seen in twice that time on all major platforms combined in the last four years. No, not all of it was wonderful any user of emulation software can tell you how much crap and clones came out of that time period. But it certainly seemed like a larger landscape.
Losing Pace...
So did we achieve some sort of evolutionary plateau where we are all happy with the parade of publum getting generated by the industry? Or is the market simply being manipulated by marketers and their press contacts so that we are now simply, "an industry of cool? "
I am going to cop out here and say, "Neither." I think it's largely due to the glacial pace of game development nowadays. Game development is getting slower and slower. Back in 1980 a team could go from drawing board to a complete, commercial product in a matter of weeks. Nowadays you can take that long just negotiating the contract and milestone schedule with a publisher. We are getting buried by our own creations games are getting bigger, and the audience is more discerning and demanding than ever. This state perpetuates itself as game budgets and development time skyrockets, publishers are even more risk-averse, so they'll throw even more time and money into it to make sure that the game has every chance of winning on release... which in tern increases risk further and makes it ever more painful for the next game.
Even indies are suffering from long development cycles (partly because so many of us are having to do other things like contract work or full-time jobs to support our game development habits). Is there a way out of this mess? Is it possible that we can get tools and processes to the state where we can go back to the days of explosive innovation, sending shotgun patterns of new ideas into the wild to see what connects rather than spending months and months of time trying to perfect an evolutionary improvements on older games?
Cranking It Up to 11...
If there were a quick and dirty answer to this thorny issue, I'd be executing on it right now. But it seems like a chicken-and-egg problem to me. It seems like there's a non-trivial minimum threshold of production qualities and marketing effort that must be achieved to avoid a guaranteed failure. But in order to innovate, we have to be able to do it cheaply enough to absorb multiple failures (because face it innovation fails far more often than it succeeds). And finally we need better tools by which we can measure the relative success of efforts a magical crystal ball which we can gain immediate feedback on the worthiness of our efforts. Like dumping out the till of the arcade machines and counting the quarters at the end of a single day.
I suspect that a partial answer to this issue lay in the "Game in a Day" competitions that run from time to time (most notably Tom Bampton's efforts with the GarageGames community). The idea is simple a team forms and attempts to create a fully functional game in a 24-hour period. (which, by the GID rules, don't need to be contiguous, but should occur within the same weekend). All tools for development, content generation, and metrics would have to optimized for this kind of development effort, particularly bringing a GID-style effort to a marketable product in a matter of weeks instead of months.
So what's it gonna take to get us there?
Jay Barnson
Rampant Games
In Cameron Crowe's excellent movie "Almost Famous," there is a scene where legendary rock critic Lester Bangs (Phillip Seymore Hoffman) mentors young William Miller (Patrick Fugit) and warns him of the temptations he's going to face as a journalist. He maintains that Rock and Roll is dying, slowly being killed by rock stars and record companies in collaboration with journalists. He warns, "These are people who want you to write sanctimonious stories about the genius of rock stars, and they will ruin Rock and Roll and strangle everything we love about it, you know? And then it just becomes an industry of... 'cool.'"
I thought about this when I read an article in Game Developer magazine last week by Noah Falstein, a game designer with vast experience and expertise in the industry. His quote: "The coin-op arcade business in the 1980s may have been the most fiercely Darwinian game environment in history. New games appeared and thrived, or died in a matter of months if they didn't have ample sustenance (quarters). After great early diversity, arcade games converged on a few successful formulas that ate up all those quarters and starved later games that didn't follow the formulas."
So ... bearing in mind the complaints about the stagnation in our industry... which is it? Is it a natural evolutionary process with generations simply emulating their successful ancestors, or is it actually the result of a corporate agenda to make it easier to grease the wheels of industry to facilitate a predictable assembly-line approach to game development?
Back to the beginning...
Nolan Bushnell's first coin-operated game was Computer Space, based on the mainframe game "Spacewar". The game wasn't very successful. Bushnell didn't give up on the idea of videogames entirely instead, he took the lessons learned from Computer Space and tried again. He went for something simpler, more straightforward quite possibly the most basic gameplay possible. The result was Pong, and it launched an empire.
The interesting thing here is that from a game-geek's point of view, Computer Space was a superior game in almost every way. Pong was a total step backwards. But the audience wasn't ready for it. Later, its day came in the form of a game heavily inspired by it called Asteroids. In both cases, their success was met with a host of clones, imitators, and would-be successors. But they weren't alone - the explosion of innovation from the early 80's seems completely unattainable today. The arcade industry hit it's stride, boomed, and went bust in about the same time period as the expected lifecycle of the Playstation 2. The "Commodore 64 Age" really only lasted about four years or so yet we saw more incredible diversity on that platform in those four years than we have seen in twice that time on all major platforms combined in the last four years. No, not all of it was wonderful any user of emulation software can tell you how much crap and clones came out of that time period. But it certainly seemed like a larger landscape.
Losing Pace...
So did we achieve some sort of evolutionary plateau where we are all happy with the parade of publum getting generated by the industry? Or is the market simply being manipulated by marketers and their press contacts so that we are now simply, "an industry of cool? "
I am going to cop out here and say, "Neither." I think it's largely due to the glacial pace of game development nowadays. Game development is getting slower and slower. Back in 1980 a team could go from drawing board to a complete, commercial product in a matter of weeks. Nowadays you can take that long just negotiating the contract and milestone schedule with a publisher. We are getting buried by our own creations games are getting bigger, and the audience is more discerning and demanding than ever. This state perpetuates itself as game budgets and development time skyrockets, publishers are even more risk-averse, so they'll throw even more time and money into it to make sure that the game has every chance of winning on release... which in tern increases risk further and makes it ever more painful for the next game.
Even indies are suffering from long development cycles (partly because so many of us are having to do other things like contract work or full-time jobs to support our game development habits). Is there a way out of this mess? Is it possible that we can get tools and processes to the state where we can go back to the days of explosive innovation, sending shotgun patterns of new ideas into the wild to see what connects rather than spending months and months of time trying to perfect an evolutionary improvements on older games?
Cranking It Up to 11...
If there were a quick and dirty answer to this thorny issue, I'd be executing on it right now. But it seems like a chicken-and-egg problem to me. It seems like there's a non-trivial minimum threshold of production qualities and marketing effort that must be achieved to avoid a guaranteed failure. But in order to innovate, we have to be able to do it cheaply enough to absorb multiple failures (because face it innovation fails far more often than it succeeds). And finally we need better tools by which we can measure the relative success of efforts a magical crystal ball which we can gain immediate feedback on the worthiness of our efforts. Like dumping out the till of the arcade machines and counting the quarters at the end of a single day.
I suspect that a partial answer to this issue lay in the "Game in a Day" competitions that run from time to time (most notably Tom Bampton's efforts with the GarageGames community). The idea is simple a team forms and attempts to create a fully functional game in a 24-hour period. (which, by the GID rules, don't need to be contiguous, but should occur within the same weekend). All tools for development, content generation, and metrics would have to optimized for this kind of development effort, particularly bringing a GID-style effort to a marketable product in a matter of weeks instead of months.
So what's it gonna take to get us there?
Jay Barnson
Rampant Games
About the author
Jay has been a mainstream and indie game developer for a... uh, long time. His professional start came in 1994 developing titles for the then-unknown and upcoming Sony Playstation. He runs Rampant Games and blogs at Tales of the Rampant Coyote.
#2
I don't suppose there's a Torque for handhelds around... GID could be profitable for some!
Nick
03/14/2005 (10:36 am)
The small game idea is thriving for handhelds and through websites like Yahoo, RealPlayer, et al, and these show a lot of variety. These small games make money even if in modest amounts. The small games are great because they aren't so engaging that your game controller starts to fuse with your hands after 12 hours of continuous play, but just engaging enough that when you have 5 or 10 minutes to kill, its great fun to see how far you can get. I don't suppose there's a Torque for handhelds around... GID could be profitable for some!
Nick
#3
Games do provide an INCREDIBLE outlet for experimentation. I'm not too happy about the recent game that let you play Lee Harvey Oswald - but it's intriguing how incredibly powerful our medium could be for expression AND experimentation if we'd just let ourselves get out of a zombie-and-terrorist-shooting rut.
But if you and your team are going to devote months of your life (not to mention development costs) to producing a game, you'd certainly want some reasonable expectation of at least being able to recoup your costs on the back end. For studios now anticipating budgets averaging as much $20 million for a game, of course, that expectation becomes even more critical.
It's easy to pin the blame for the lack of innovation on "The Man." And whoever "he" is - EA, Wal*Mart, Nintendo, RealArcade - while "he" may share some of the burden of blame, I don't think that tells the whole story. They may feed the flames, but they can't start the fire. They weren't there telling people not to play Computer Space, but to feed their quarters into Pong later.
I know I'm exploring well-travelled territory here, but I'm asking myself some "why" questions here that I haven't asked before.
03/14/2005 (11:01 am)
Hmmm... curious observation, Jeremy. But I remember reading something about how fashions tend to get more conservative during times of greater upheaval. So there may be some truth to that.Games do provide an INCREDIBLE outlet for experimentation. I'm not too happy about the recent game that let you play Lee Harvey Oswald - but it's intriguing how incredibly powerful our medium could be for expression AND experimentation if we'd just let ourselves get out of a zombie-and-terrorist-shooting rut.
But if you and your team are going to devote months of your life (not to mention development costs) to producing a game, you'd certainly want some reasonable expectation of at least being able to recoup your costs on the back end. For studios now anticipating budgets averaging as much $20 million for a game, of course, that expectation becomes even more critical.
It's easy to pin the blame for the lack of innovation on "The Man." And whoever "he" is - EA, Wal*Mart, Nintendo, RealArcade - while "he" may share some of the burden of blame, I don't think that tells the whole story. They may feed the flames, but they can't start the fire. They weren't there telling people not to play Computer Space, but to feed their quarters into Pong later.
I know I'm exploring well-travelled territory here, but I'm asking myself some "why" questions here that I haven't asked before.
#4
A new medium becomes available, so a few pioneers jump on the bandwagon and create content
A few of those become successful to the point of becoming "standard"
The success of the innovators of the age become known to investors/money men, who step in and basically buy into the industry and attempt to take over
The grass roots of the medium go "underground", which means innovation still happens, but in a very sporadic and uncontrolled way
Ocassionally an innovation reaches enough critical mass so that the money men take note (another area to exploit)
Rinse, repeat
Look at what happened:
Music, originally "classical" had innovators like mozart etc
Then the "rock" era, with innovators like presley, hendrix, beatles, stones etc
Film with its early innovators like buster keaton, then later on with people like coppola
Ok, its a bit of a shallow analogy, but I think there ARE patterns within every media. We are in a cyclic thing here, so maybe the cycle is slow. Or maybe we're all just struggling to break through.
I guess that in the final summary, it doesnt REALLY matter :) just do what you do.
03/14/2005 (1:59 pm)
Jay: you only have to look at other media to see how things will go. We're the new boy on the block, but here's how it typically goes:A new medium becomes available, so a few pioneers jump on the bandwagon and create content
A few of those become successful to the point of becoming "standard"
The success of the innovators of the age become known to investors/money men, who step in and basically buy into the industry and attempt to take over
The grass roots of the medium go "underground", which means innovation still happens, but in a very sporadic and uncontrolled way
Ocassionally an innovation reaches enough critical mass so that the money men take note (another area to exploit)
Rinse, repeat
Look at what happened:
Music, originally "classical" had innovators like mozart etc
Then the "rock" era, with innovators like presley, hendrix, beatles, stones etc
Film with its early innovators like buster keaton, then later on with people like coppola
Ok, its a bit of a shallow analogy, but I think there ARE patterns within every media. We are in a cyclic thing here, so maybe the cycle is slow. Or maybe we're all just struggling to break through.
I guess that in the final summary, it doesnt REALLY matter :) just do what you do.
#5
Just like the old hardcore rockers now have their songs turned into jingles and sountracks to car commercials.
So I guess I'm kinda looking back into history for clues as to how to fuel my own personal revolution.
03/14/2005 (3:03 pm)
Shoot - we won. Videogaming is now mainstream. I watched an old Friends episode the other night and saw several seconds of two characters playing one of our games. I'd heard rumors of that, but I'd never seen the episode. It's hard to get more mainstream than being featured on the most popular sitcom of the day...Just like the old hardcore rockers now have their songs turned into jingles and sountracks to car commercials.
So I guess I'm kinda looking back into history for clues as to how to fuel my own personal revolution.
#6
03/14/2005 (7:52 pm)
@Jay: Curious--when you say one of "our" games, do you mean the industry in general, or something you were involved with making? And if it was something you were involved with, do you mean a AAA studio product, or indy? :)
#7
03/15/2005 (12:20 am)
It was a AAA Studio product - I was with SingleTrac in the old days, and was involved in the Twisted Metal series (Mostly on the first one... during the second one I was working on Jet Moto) 
Torque Owner Jeremy Alessi
Innovation does seem to be dying right now but I suspect it's because we're just in a politically conservative state overall. There are many big changes on the horizon and people are afraid ... they at least want to know their tried and true games are there for them to count on.
Look at the amount of successful war games out right now. I think that kinda lets you know how people feel about the world they live in. They're frustrated and want to fight but of course they don't want to fight for the wrong causes so they stick to these fictional games. New innovative gameplay doesn't have a place in many gamers' hearts who are pissed off about the way the world is working. More than ever they just want to blow something up or drive away really fast.
Innovation comes around successfully when things are stable and people are willing to take a chance on something new.