So what about the 3D? Well, to sum it up, my impression is that it is as immature as many new technologies tend to be, but an extremely cool technology nonetheless.

For those of you who haven’t heard of it, the nVidia 3D Vision system uses a fast display (120 Hz) and active shutter glasses that alternate what eye sees the image in sync with the display updates. This means that the 3D mode is only available in full-screen mode.

The Installation

I had a fair bit of trouble getting the whole kit to work. The driver on the CD simply complained that my graphics card driver was too new, and left me hanging. nVidia’s product page wasn’t all that friendly either, and it took a while to figure out how to download the new drivers (while there’s a direct download link to the movie player, you’ll have to select 3d Vision as the product type for drivers).

Once in the installation and setup procedure for the driver, there was a very friendly and helpful guide that told you most things you needed to know, which was a big plus.

Getting some movies running in the movie player required installation of a codec pack, which is was completely unhelpful in not suggesting, causing a fair bit of time wasted scouring the Internet for a solution. K-Lite Codec Pack eventually came to the rescue.

Setting up 3D for games was reasonably simple for most games — simply set the refresh rate for half of the maximum (60 Hz rather than 120 Hz). Borderlands was an exception as it started completely blacked out, forcing me to find the config file and manually edit the resolution in there. I imagine this isn’t a problem if you haven’t played the game before, on a different display.

All in all, the installation process could be made a lot smoother.

The Glitches

My first experience with 3D came just after the installation had ended. The last screen in the setup guide had a check box titled “Show 3D image slide show after setup”. I checked it, and then proceeded to be shown a few images side-by-side in a complete failure to do anything even remotely 3D-related. In fact, the glasses never even activated.

This was, mildly said, a bit of a let-down.

The movie viewer worked a lot better, providing a very smooth experience. Sadly, you have to specify what format videos are in quite often, which would be incredibly much easier if the viewer could have shown the first frame. This leads to a guessing game, which is a fairly minor problem in the end though.

Another problem with the movie player is that it becomes unhappy if I run certain applications. In general, anything running on my second monitor or in specific anything attaching itself to the edge of the screen like an application toolbar will cause it to simply flicker and refuse to work. This problem is even worse for the 3D Photo Viewer, which simply refuses to work at all if I have the second monitor active.

Considering that most games start without a problem, writing a working photo viewer really shouldn’t be that much of a problem.

So games then…? Almost any game can be run in 3D vision mode, but nVidia has classified games into different categories depending on how well they work. Some games have a problem where certain items aren’t rendered correctly for both eyes, which can be a bit of a strain on the eyes.

The worst problem tends to be “ghosting”. Ghosting is, simply described, a shadow of the image for one eye that “leaks” into the second eye. This is said to be due to an imperfect shutter synchronization between the glasses and the monitor and due to the monitor pixels not switching colors quickly enough. I don’t believe that explanation fully — ghosting seems to be restricted to only games (movies don’t have much ghosting problems).

In addition, some games are much better than others (more on that later). My impression is that much of the ghosting effects come from a mismatch between the rendering world size and the real world, making depth effects extaggered. This means that for many games, left-eye and right-eye images differ much more than they will for a properly tweaked game or for a movie. I also wonder if V-sync has anything to do with it.

The Content

So I’ve got this amazing 3D vision rig… what do I do with it? You can watch some example photos or download a few more from nVidia’s site. The same goes for movie clips. There are a few trailers out there, but far fewer than there should be. Youtube supports 3D content, but there is no easy way to view the youtube 3D videos using a stereoscopic viewer like 3D vision.

The best 3D movie clips I’ve seen this far are trailers, like the trailer for How to train a dragon, which is absolutely spot-on. I look forwards to watching 3D movies on this setup. The problem right now is that it’s virtually impossible to get your hands on some true stereoscopic 3D  movie content. The folks behind Avatar have said it will not be released in 3D “before November”… which could mean just about anything.

Which means that if you buy a 3D vision kit right now, it really has to be for the games. When it comes to games, the support really differs between games. There is some ghosting in some games, and it really depends on the game if it bothers me or not. In Dragon Age: Origins, it really did, so I will be playing through the rest of that game in 2D. I guess that style of game really means you spend a fair bit of time watching the environment, and that’s where you’ll see the most ghosting.

In Trackmania United, one of my favorite racing games, there was a fair amount of ghosting of distant things, but it really didn’t matter a single bit. The experience of mad racing in 3D totally made up for the ghosting, and when you’re driving at high speed you don’t even notice it.

Other games hardly manifest any ghosting at all. Borderlands was absolutely awesome in 3D, as the combination of the comic-book art style and 3D creates a really cool effect. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has been certified with nVidia and received their top grade for 3D vision ready games and works just as well as that implies.

One more game to mention is Left 4 Dead 2. There is hardly any ghosting going on there either, and 3D in that game added a layer of immersion to an already immersive game. The full list of game support is available on nVidia’s site. I personally look forwards to playing Metro 2033 with it.

The Experience

There are some things to note with active shutter glasses. One thing is that when they activate, things go a slight bit darker than usual, since basically your eyes will be staring at a blackened glass half of the time. You also effectively half the refresh rate of your monitor. The result is something hard to describe, almost a flicker, but not quite. This takes a bit of getting used to, but is not really any worse than watching a 3D Movie at the cinema.

The shutter glasses themselves are fairly bulky but fit nicely over normal glasses which is a plus. I’ve wore them for fairly extensive periods of time without feeling tired of wearing them. The insides of the glass reflects some light though, so if possible I recommend using them with the lights off.

Summary

It is very clear that this technology is in its infancy. I’m sure we’ll see a great development of this going forwards as it picks up momentum. The most crippling hindrance right now is the lack of movie content and the glitches in some games.

That said, playing games in 3D adds a lot of immersion for me, especially for fast-paced games like racing games or shooters. If you are looking at buying a new monitor, I definitely think you should consider buying a 3D vision capable one. The Alienware model I got was fairly expensive, but has an absolutely incredible picture when used normally as well.

If you want more info on 3D vision specifics, I suggest checking out the 3D Vision blog and their new forum.

I don’t believe we should shy away from violence in games – violence is a part of life, and can make for very interesting scenarios in games. And it’s no secret that a large majority of fun video games are based on conflict, much of which is combative. But I also believe that asking fans to think as hard as they can about an innovative way to kill someone is a very regressive thing for our industry.

Just think for a second about what EA is actually asking people to do. Yes, this is what many of us do every day – there are those of us who design combat and combat scenarios for a living. But asking fans to do it is just too much.

I’m not sure what he’s trying to get at here. There is pretty much two options: either game devs are much better than everyone else, or game devs are horrible people. Neither option seems very reasonable to me.

So why can’t our fans do what we do all day? Is it because as game developers, we are much better than everyone else, and can thus stand the moral strain of thinking about how to dismember humanoid monstrosities all day, without being irreparably damaged by the ordeal?

Or is it the opposite? Are we damaged people, horribly affected by the thoughts on monstrosity dismemberment, so bad that we should take care to shield others from the horrible things we go through daily to bring the public these sinful products?

Neither option really makes sense. Sheffield argues out of the old moral high ground that game violence would somehow damage people, and should be censored. We are talking about a rated game, for adults, not a kids game — so this is not about damaging the fragile world view of children.

Honestly, do you really think that asking someone “think of ways a fictional character could attack, dismember and kill a monstrous humanoid” will have any kind of affect of them that playing the game in question wouldn’t? That is somehow an idea that using the human imagination could be bad for you.

To me, nothing could be further from the truth. The human imagination is a beautiful thing — it creates all culture and all our progress.

Get off the “games are bad for you” horse. No one on this side of the 1980s would argue that the violence in a movie causes people to go on murderous rampages. Would asking someone to design a kill for a movie be as bad? I somehow doubt it.

What about an even more imaginative media, like books? Books are highly based in the communication of imagination between author and reader. We are asked “imagine this”, when we read descriptions of events in a book. But somehow I don’t think the “write a gruesome description of a brutal murder” competition would come under any flack.

There are many things that are wrong with our society, which lead people to do nasty things to others. Taking out your aggressions on characters in a computer game instead of reality is not one of them. Imagining new ways to kill computer game monsters is certainly not one either.

I’m not much for dismemberment and blood splatter in games myself — I just don’t think it adds much. But I’ll happily let other grown up individuals make their decisions for themselves on what they’d like to play — or imagine.

And if you’re going to argue that games are bad, please do so outright, don’t try to hide it behind saying that playing games is fine, but thinking about them isn’t.

So while I’ve spent the last few years trying to find a way to get some sense into circles of business leaders and politicians, I’ve never thought much about the consumer side of the same coin. It makes perfect sense in hindsight, but I didn’t see it at the time: many consumers are just as clueless about the changes we are going through. I don’t mean that as a slight to anyone — we’re living in a social and political revolution brought on by a technological leap forwards. It’s hard to understand this new world.

So let’s take a look at that statement from the consumer side then: It no longer makes sense to sell copies of digital culture. The music and movie industry is extremely reluctant to realize this, but pioneers in those segments still have, which is why we see things like streaming music services and donation-funded movie productions, generally from newer artists not already settled in old business models.

It has excited me then to see a some of the big game publishers move towards newer business models. EA is notable with things like Battlefield Heroes and other new models. Others are hellbent on locking in their old “sell-copies” mentality by introducing DRM that requires you to be online all the time, for instance.

I mentioned in the post on Project $10 that game resales are causing much of the same problems as piracy for publishers. This is tightly related to the fact that the industry is used to selling copies of things and that consumers are used to buying copies of things.

Fundamentally, though, a game is not a tool or a utility which you are bound to keep, or a consumable that you use  up — a game is an experience. It makes sense then for the consumer to trade in the disc, since he or she has already “used up” the experience on it, but it still has value for someone else.

When a publisher fights for the right to sell copies or when a consumer is fighting for the right to resell a game, they are both doing the same fundamental mistake: they’re mistaking the game as being a plastic disc rather than as an experience. Back when copying was hard and game resales not much of a deal, the game basically became the disc (or cartridge), just like the music tightly associated with the CD it came on.

As soon as this connection is broken, old business models fail, and people inevitably complain. Publishers complain that people copy or resell their discs, consumers complain that publishers are greedy and think they have some sort of “right” to be paid more than once for each game.

What is happening now is a rough period of trying to invent new ways of making game development business work. It does not involve companies thinking they “have the right” to be paid, but the simple fact that the companies need to be paid or they will go out of business, which would be bad for everyone involved.

The problem now is that we’re in the middle of the transition. We’re in a world where we cannot expect everyone to be able to download a game from the net, which means we need to sell copies. At the same time, hyperdistribution is a fact and game resale is abundant.

From my point of view, seeing EA try to find a way forwards with a middle ground of things like project $10 to earn money off resales and more “free downloadable content” included with the boxed products to start an ever so slight move towards providing services.

To see retailers complain about the move is expected — after all, they must know just like we know that we’re moving fast towards a world where music and games are not distributed on pieces of plastic anymore, which means that there wont be a need for a store to buy the pieces of plastic in.

Still, I said this in one of the posts I started off referring to, The future of PC Gaming:

Then he fails to grasp the core points of what makes Steam popular: It gives something back to the customer. It’s that simple — the other DRM schemes are all for the benefit of the producer, while Steam has loads of nifty features for me as a consumer that have “Future” stamped all over them.

This also goes back to the other post and human nature. People have come to expect being able to trade games back in for a part of the value towards a new game.

There is a disconnect here really, since the problem for publishers is that the same disc is used twice (which means disc != experience), but the problem for the consumer is that not letting the disc be used twice would stop his or her ability to hand in the game disc, essentially making games more expensive.

I’ve suggested that a solution to this would be to include a game disable function in a Steam-like digital distribution system to fill this need. Once you’re done with a game, you could disable it for a piece virtual currency. You could then use the virtual currency to buy new games if you have enough, or fill in with regular money.

Even more likely though, I think we’ll see more transitions towards games being cheaper content platforms and that part of what you get is tied to an account. Transitioning from a producer of boxed game products to service providers needs to happen for game publishers to survive, but I’m sure we can find ways to do this with both sides benefiting.

Of course the middle men are unhappy, but as soon as they’re out of the way we can live in a happy world where the price of games isn’t so outrageous.

Anyway, retailers have spoken out against the so called “Project $10″, saying it will cause consumer rage:

“The person you’re pissing off the most is the consumer,” McCabe told GamesIndustry.biz. “This affects [them] directly – they pay the same amount of money and yet the resale value is much reduced. From a retailer’s point of view, they’ll just readjust [the price] bearing in mind you have to buy the voucher.”

This is an interesting development. For those who aren’t familiar with the concept, the $10 project essentially puts a code in the box to unlock additional content online for the game. The code can only be used once, which means that buying the game new has additional value over buying the game used.

Consumers who buy a used copy can still choose to buy the online content, but for a fee (one would imagine $10, considering the name of the “project”, but I think it’s actually $15 for the current titles). It’s been done with a few recent games including Mass Effect 2 this far (awesome game by the way, I’ve been having a blast with it), and will be done for future titles, including Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

“EA’s project $10 move is aiming to stifle pre owned games sales, but what they don’t factor in is the damage this could have for them in relation to new sales,” said Day.

Wow, what a complete misunderstanding. This has nothing to do with publishers wanting to stop resales — it’s simply a business model where publishers can earn some money off of resales.

There are interesting parallels to be drawn for me, between the console and PC markets. Pre-owned games pose much of the same problem on the console market as piracy does on the PC market. The end result of both is the same: people play our games without a single bit of money ending up with the people who made the game. In the worst case, we end up paying a lot of money to keep servers online, while getting no money at all from the sale.

There has been a lot of whining from publishers and developers about both issues. Those of you who know my stance on piracy should not be very surprised that my stance on pre-owned games is very similar. Whining about it or blaming people for it is not going to help — yet you cannot deny that the fenomenon in itself is causing major problems for publishers and developers (just as piracy is) — there is no getting around that.

However, trying to “clamp down” on used games sales or piracy is pointless. Piracy is illegal, but unenforcably so which means that it doesn’t really matter. Resale is simply a business choice. While you might think that it is a bad business choice and that retailers would be better off long-term by staying clear of business practices that will kill their providers, they are making a ton of money short-term. There is no way they wouldn’t fall for that temptation, and in the end, any business choice that works for them is a valid one. Whining or arguing about it isn’t going to help.

This causes an interesting problem for publishers. One way would be to move to direct online sales only, but this excludes large chunks of consumers who can’t download large games or who aren’t connected at all. Another version would be to require online activation and to bind the game to a certain console or live/psn account, which simply wouldn’t be fair to the consumer and would cause a never-ending stream of problems and well-earned gamer hatred.

The middle ground, then, is to sell a full game to people through retail, but to provide extra value with unlockable content to people who buy the product new. It should come as no surprise that retailers dislike this — it will certainly cut a chunk of profitability out of the resale market. It will lower the value of a game for resale, which means it’ll be worth less to trade in. Will this annoy some customers? I’m sure it will.

Many people seem to be taking this as the publisher wanting to be paid twice, which I think comes back as the default gamer response to anything developers or publishers do to earn money being horrible and bad. It sometimes gets to me to see this kind of attitude with gamers. We can’t make games as a charity, and making these games on bleeding edge tech is extremely hard work, and the people in the industry are incredibly dedicated to their art.

The other side of things is that buying the game used will be cheaper, creating a much better “try before you buy” environment, where you can potentially buy the game used and try it. If you like it, you can buy the DLC that you would’ve got from the new version. This is sort of a win-win situation for the publisher and the consumer, but of course not that great for retailers.

To publishers, this is the option that provides the best value to consumers while moving to a new business model that allows us to actually start making proper money from games again, which could halt the current trend of studios closing and developers being fired.

I’m sorry if that takes money out of retailers pockets, but I really do think that the talented people who sweat blood making these games deserve the money more than people who only know how to push people to buy used instead of new. It may have been a good dream for you, but it was still a dream and now it’s time to wake up.

And yeah, retailers claiming to stand up for the consumer is nothing new. But just as with music labels claiming to speak for artists, they are simply middle men that are slowly losing their value.

Something interesting happens here. Maryland police has no legal juridistiction to subpoena things from Blizzard (situated elsewhere). The subpoena is more to be seen as a kind request for information. Months passed, and eventually Blizzard provides a chunk of information. Among others, the police gets an IP address that can be located and used to coordinate an apprehension together with Canadian police.

There have been plenty of reactions to the story, with comments like “if you don’t fancy prison life, you shouldn’t be selling drugs”. This is some form of the “if you’ve got nothing to hide” argument and thus misses the central problem of it all. You get caught on a quite common, but still quite false, line of reasoning that equates the possibility with the action. The problem here isn’t the action itself, it’s the possibility; not the result in itself, but the span of potential results that are made possible by the action as it is.

Let me explain that further. When the police nicely asks for information this way, Blizzard ends up in a problematic position of power. The company now has to take a moral position and in principle act as an authority of law. Maybe this had been a clear-cut case if we had been dealing with something that was illegal everywhere, and which everyone agreed constitutes an illegal and immoral action, like violent crimes.

Now it’s about the war on drugs. Regardless of how you feel about narcotics, you have to realize that laws about them are different in different parts of the world. So, now it’s suddenly up to Blizzard to decide if these sorts of laws also apply in the virtual Azeroth, regardless of where the people playing are in the world, or relative to where the police who’s asking the question is. Has Azeroth signed an extradition treaty with the United States of America?

In and of itself, it’s not a major problem, but the fact that Blizzard doesn’t answer “no” to any such requests as a policy is somewhat dubious. It opens the door for enforcement of any law in any country around the world — in the online world.

This is what I mean with that the possibility is the problem, not the specific action in the case at hand — what happens when Chinese authorities want some information? There are a whole lot of Chinese World of Warcraft players out there. Is that request equally much ok? The matter could concern different crimes there, and most of us agree that it would be less than pleasant if all the laws from all countries could potentially be applicable online, internationally. Is the next person who hides in Canada a Chinese dissident? What will Blizzard’s decision be in that case?

Of course I realize that Canadian police may not be very helpful when it comes to the Chinese government wanting to hunt dissidents, and that it’s very likely that Blizzard would take a different decision in that case, but there are issues in the decision to hand out information that are decidedly unpleasant, regardless of if you find the effect in this specific case upsetting. It’s a path that doesn’t look brushy, but leads deep into the djungle undergrowth.

Image credits: jluster.

My respect to Azarimy for some awesome comics, and my gratitude for his permission to share them with you here.

Awesome stuff. Azarimy’s got more coming, so if you like them, head on over to his thread on the forums. And on that note, I wish you all a happy new year.

(I’m a ninja, I’m a ninja, I’m a ninja, I’m a ninja!)

There’s a limited amount of internal stability testing we can do. That testing can run down most things, but can’t test large-scale things (like server backends and what happens when 5000 people all log in at once). So, we get three things out of the beta: backend/large-scale stability tech testing, large-scale balance data and feedback from people.

I understand that people would rather see us implement our fixes resulting from all three directly into the beta. But putting out an update of the beta would require us to use up some of our internal testing to make sure the beta update is good enough. If sending a broken build to 100 people is bad, sending a broken build to 10000 people is a lot worse.

So in that situation we’re in a place where we have to choose between a spending our quality assurance resources on a beta update OR on the final product. To me, at least, that choice is quite easy. The led to this comment from poster 1Bryce1:

Isn’t a beta essentially a broken build to begin with? Any patches just eliminating problems and addressing balance issues along the way. So unless you break it more, any update would be less broken. Not only that but the “Backend/large-scale stability tech testing, large-scale balance data and feedback from people.” you get from each patched version would be more accurate to the finished game and give you better results. Wouldn’t it? I mean some of the most basic tweaks can drastically change the game and how people play. Spending some QA resources on a beta update IS contributing to the final product.

I started answering on the forum, but I figured this could be interesting for a wider audience and moved it here. A beta build is expected to be more broken than a final release — though I wouldn’t call it broken as such. A public (closed or open alike) beta is a reasonably unbroken build, from where I sit. The catch in the above line of reasoning is in this: “unless you break it more, any update would be less broken”. Essentially this is how it goes:

Lots of people in the dev team are making changes to the game. Each such change is to fix a bug or improve something. However, each time you change something, there’s a small risk of breaking something without noticing it. So together, the small risks of any one change breaking the game becomes a fairly major risk of *some* change breaking the game in one way or another.

Which means that the more work you do on a game, the bigger the risk that more stuff is broken at any given time (while, on average, the quality increases). As a developer, you can put up with that… either go back to an earlier, working, build or ignore the error for a while until fixed. Sending a build out over PSN is major though… you guys can’t just go back to an earlier build, or not jump into the tank because that crashes the game, or ignore the fact that all names in the score board come out as “PLAYERNAMEHERE_PLACEHOLDER” or whatever… a hundred small fixes can cause one large error, which you then fix as you find it.

So the way to deal with this is to stop development, test the build thoroguhly to find all the bugs. The closer you get to shipping something, the more stuff you will leave in there because of the risk of breaking something if you touch it, which means that as you get ready to ship the game off, the only bugs you fix are the really major ones. That way, when we ship, the game has been really well tested and we’re sure that it wont break.

This procedure has to be done regardless of whether it’s a beta update release or the final game… and that sucks because of the thing with “stopping development” I mentioned. So for a beta, what you do is branch the development. This essentially means you copy the entire source for the game to a separate repository, where it sits while everyone else keeps on improving (and breaking ) the game. The beta branch is tested, and thoroughly bug fixed. Needed bug fixes are done to both the main game line and to the beta line, while other improvements are done only on the main game line.

A slightly simplified version of this procedure as an image:

Some things are easy to see from this image: First of all, when the beta gets released, the main (somewhat broken) game line has already progressed a fair bit beyond the state in which the beta was branched. Second, there is no obvious way to update the beta from where it is… you need to start the entire procedure over again, branch another branch out of the main line game, and stabilize that the same way, and it is this process that takes resources away from the main development line.

I know there have been some comments that other betas do update. I’m sure they have rational reasons for that, which make the cost worth paying. MAG has come up as a name, and though this is pure speculation on my part, I’m guessing that their player count makes the game hard to test internally, which would mean that doing public beta updates is a very good choice for them.

I’m hoping I’ll be able to write more again soon.

For now, I urge you to try the Playstation 3 beta of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, which opened yesterday. I have a couple of beta codes laying around (EU ones), so drop a comment here if you’ve got a PS3 and haven’t been able to get one.

The fear was that if this kept happening, the people creating works of art would tire of creating culture and seeing others profit while getting nothing for themselves (a reasonable assumption), so copyright was introduced, giving authors an unlimited right to association with their works and a limited economical exclusivity with regards to production and distribution. This would make sure middlemen would not be a problem in the production of culture.

Sadly, in this exclusivity now appears an effect that goes in the direct opposite direction related to the original intent. To explain what I mean, let’s discuss something of high cultural value — commercials. Leading up to the fifth season of The Deadliest Catch, Discovery Channel created a trailer. A music and sound design studio called Musikvergnuegen were hired to create a soundtrack for the trailer.

The trailer aired, and something somewhat unusual happened: People heard the music and rushed to the TV in order to see what it was about. On Musikvergnuegen’s blog, under a fairly short and simple post about the trailer, people started gathering in the comment fields with fantastic stories about how they reacted to the music.

Let me tell you my story of this song. I wasnt even in my house but i heard this music come through the surround sound so i darted inside to find out it was a commercial for my favorite show. But wut really mattered was this music. The celtic sailor feel and sorrow filled sound makes this one of the best pieces of music ive ever heard.

The blog post has more than 40 comments, with people asking that the song be released somewhere so they can buy it and listen to it. Several other blogs have called attention to the music and linked to the post on Musikvergnuegen’s blog.

The studio appreciate all the attention, but answer that sadly Discovery owns the rights to the soundtrack, and that  because of that they can’t sell it. Instead, they’ve mailed Discovery, and urge others to do the same. The only problem is that Discovery doesn’t reply.

So, here’s a middleman blocking the flow of culture between the author and the consumers, stopping the people from getting the culture they desire. Recognize this problem? This saga ends on a slightly upwards note, as Musikvergnuegen takes matters into their own hands and add the music to their demo reel, which means it’s now possible to stream it from their web site.

Another example of the same kind of cultural blockage is how music giant Universal let its lawyers loose a few weeks ago to prevent the performance of a theater play at the City Theater in Stockholm. Not, as you may have thought, because they hadn’t paid for it, but because Universal wanted even more money for it, claiming the music was a central theme in the play. However, it turns out the author of the songs in question, Paul Simon, doesn’t agree with the middleman that the play should not be performed.

Abandoned Goods

A similar development has been in effect when it comes to computer games for a long time (and here it’s even more clear). The whole concept “Abandonware” exists to denote older games which are no longer on the market. There are websites that specialize in catering to people feeling nostalgic about games. As with many other kinds of culture, there are a whole lot of people who long for the good old days — the older games have a higher level of quality, they claim. Others still just want the ability to play “the classics” — just like there are classic books and movies there are classic games… the difference is that you can’t get the classic games anymore.

The fact that games can’t be bought doesn’t mean the copyright on them has expired, however. The rights to various games and game intellectual properties are bought and sold between different companies and often you’ll find the rights to games far away from the people who originally created the games after a studio closed its doors.

The fact that they’re no longer selling the games doesn’t prevent companies from having a go at web sites providing Abandonware. Sometimes, whole web sites are the targets of attempted shutdowns by lawyer, at other times, only certain games are targeted and removed. But the games themselves are not sold, so the people who wanted to play them are left empty-handed.

Sometimes, people get so desperate for their old, lost games that they even gather up the people needed to form a team and go through the enormous effort of creating a remake of their classic game of choice, only to be shut down by the rights holder.

There has been a long debate about this in gaming circles, sometimes with thunderous accusations from big games companies. People who download abandonware are called pirates, and blamed for some form of loss of income, even more absurd than the normal kind of calculations.

The Upper Hand of the Middle Man

In addition to all the problems outlined above, the cost for both creation and distribution has brought back something a situation which is very similar to the world before the introduction of copyright: middlemen dictate the conditions they like and grab large parts of the pie, since the authors are so completely dependent on the chain of distribution. In these negotiations, one side has sharp lawyers with years of experience of writing contracts, fine print and cost vs revenue calculations. On the other side are inexperienced, often young talented authors with no experience of writing or even reading contracts.

The imbalance becomes extremely obvious in the average record contract. In normal venture capital business, investors come in with capital, taking a risk with that money in exchange for a slice of profit if the gamble plays out (highly simplified). This state of affairs is a quite reasonable starting point. Looking at the music industry, their standard contract is very different from this — it is more like a loan than an investment… but a loan that turns into an investment once repaid.

Let me explain. The musician or band gets money for recording an album, creating a video and other needed things. The album is released, and all the profits go directly into the record label’s pockets until the entire loan has been repaid. Only then does the artist get a first dollar for his or her hard work. At a glance, this seems incredibly skewed, and it’s just as skewed as it seems. If things had ended there, it would have been outrageous but somewhat real, but that’s not where it ends. In addition to these expenses, there needs to be marketing for the artist. Reasonable proposition if you want to sell the album, but the marketing money also comes out of the “loan” to the artist. Only it’s the label that controls the marketing spend.

So the standard contract is a shared partnership where all the risk is held by one part. In a normal start-up business, this situation would be interpreted as the artist talent and work having no value  at all (and thus should have no part of the income). Add to that the fact that the labels have binding contracts for the artists, but are free to pick and choose how they want to act themselves, and we’ve ended up incredibly far from the original intention of copyright. Let me explain further with two examples:

The New York-based band October Project created some beautiful (but hard to classify) songs during the 90s. They released two albums that were quite successful. Then, without a warning or official explanation, the record label terminated the contract, which killed the band. Two of the band’s founding members went on to start the “November Project”, a band which collected all the money they needed for their recordings themselves, directly from the fans on the Internet. On the homepage for the band, founder Emil Adler urged the fans not to buy the October Project records — “Not a single penny goes to the band”, he wrote. Not a penny, even though one of the albums had hit top-50 in the US.

Another band, Splashdown from Massachusetts, looked to have a bright future. They signed a contract with a child label for Capitol records and released an EP, which quickly sold out. The band made a song on the soundtrack for the movie Titan AE, and expectations were high. They recorded a new album, “Blueshift”. Once done, the label decides not to release the album. After a long fight with the label and because of the fear that Capitol would own any future songs, the band chose to call it quits.

Authors giving up on creating new culture because of middleman behavior was exactly what copyright laws was supposed to prevent in the first place! Something is wrong here. Instead of acting as a guarantee for the flow of culture into society, the effect is a draining of culture.

It’s Broken, Fix It!

There are already political forces in parts of the world that are growing stronger campaigning for a reformed copyright. In Europe, the Swedish Pirate Party has won a seat in the European Parliament. The German counterpart looks to be going strong in the coming elections for the national parliament. Support for both parties is extremely high among young voters.

Taken to its edge, you really could wonder about why the rights to works of art should be something that can be bought and sold at all. There seem to be plenty of problems that would go away if an author could never sell the actual right to their works.

There seems to be some very simple things to do though. Digital distribution has brought down costs of distribution by several orders of magnitude. This somewhat breaks the hold the middlemen have over the market, but there is still something of a monopolized market. Things are starting to change, but what is needed is a much more direct approach, fans meeting artists, players meeting developers directly. This has already started happening more and more in the computer games industry, and I believe we’ll see much more of it from musicians in the future.

Another thing with the Internet is that there is never any really good reason to stop selling something. Put all vintage titles you own the rights to online for a small fee. Even a fee of $5 or even $1 per game means a horde of people would buy them, and it would make you a whole lot of more money than any amount of lawyers sent hunting abandonware sites. Oh, and while you’re at it, skip the DRM. The new market is on the consumers’ terms, and with a direct connection to fans comes the responsibility of treating them like customers, rather than potential thieves.

The degree I’m doing currently has been very much centered around graphical programming, aswell as using various programming languages to bolster our CV’s I would imagine. We’ve not really touched on networking, or AI at all. Our main language in graphical programming has been OpenGL too, we’ve dabbled with DirectX a little, mostly managed directX with XNA.

As a programmer already in the industry, could you give me any advice on the type, and level of project I should aim for, for it to be a suitable demo project to show to prospective employers? It’s difficult enough as students to find our way into the games industry; if we don’t know what employers want, or what is considered worthy in the eyes of the employer, it lowers our odds tenfold.

In a way, the answer to the question depends on what kind of position you’re trying for. I’ll try to answer with regards to as many positions as I know.

For starters, is graphics programming what you want to be doing? If it is, things like what graphics APIs you know become a lot more important. From what I know, most games studios that do windows game development have gravitated towards DirectX. With that in mind, having done a large(ish) project on DirectX could definitely be a plus. If all other things are equal, I’d definitely go for learning DirectX.

Not having experience with networking or AI isn’t all that much of an issue, unless you imagine going specifically for a networking or AI programming position (and even then, it’s more of a bonus than a requirement). One thing is clear however… if you’re looking to get into professional development at a large studio, you should be going for C++.

Now if we look past the technical requirements, there are a few things that can be said about such a project in itself. What you get from a good project is a nice entry into your demo reel — something to show off. This has a few implications, but most importantly something I’ve touched on before, in A Spectacular Failure: your project is going to be judged on emotional first impressions, not how technologically advanced it is or how nicely coded it is.

Your number one enemy is over-scoping the project, ending up with something that does lots of things, but does none of them in a great way. Come up with a good core gameplay for the game, and then polish it to a great shine. Fix all those annoying glitches and bugs, make sure everything looks as impressive as possible. It doesn’t need to be rocket science, as long as it’s well executed. In the end, what a games studio is looking for is a programmer who knows how to finish projects in a good way.

That doesn’t mean your project should be Space Invaders, but in general trying for something too big is more of a problem than overdoing something too small.

Finally, as an entry on your demo reel, make sure you make the game available in an easy manner. Have a page with plenty of screen shots, videos and preferably the game itself easily downloadable. Your coding ability will definitely be tested with some form of work sample as you apply to studios, so the code itself being available is less important. Reading code is hard, so it’s unlikely that someone will have time to read yours. However, having a finished game to show off is worth a lot, as is the experience of going through all the phases in finishing a game.

Other posts you may find interesting, relating to getting into the games industry and getting started with games:

• Getting Into Games
• An Exceptionally Stupid Idea
• Let’s Make a Game Engine