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.

That is very different with games. A sizable portion of everyone who plays a game, especially multiplayer-enabled games, will put a huge amount of time into that game. That’s awesome, but those people are not in a majority. The majority of people who buy a game wont even finish the singleplayer campaign. For these people, the game was too long. This is something like the dark secret of game design, and its a reason that makes constructing games a bit sad — no matter how much love you put into your story, it’s unlikely that most people will see its conclusion.

You would never guess that this was the case, looking at game reviews. Reviews regularly complain about games being too short. This has happened to a range of great games lately — from Portal to Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and Mirror’s Edge — all games that I enjoyed a lot. What conclusions can we draw from this?

Well, first of all, if you are the kind of person who rarely completes games (like the average gamer out there apparently), game reviews aren’t taking your interests into account. I’m assuming here that being able to finish a game is more enjoyable than abandoning it along the way.

Second, we’re creating ever-longer games that cater to a portion of the gamer community who will not buy games that are too short, which means that at the same time we’re making sure that a majority of players will play even smaller part of the game. That’s quite a problem from where I see it — a small part of players are allowed to dictate how games are made, which actually lowers quality for the majority.

In addition to this problem, more time in games tends to mean more repetition. Content creation for modern games is incredibly expensive, which means that longer play means more play time made from the same content. Maybe that means more of the same kind of objectives (ever play Assassin’s Creed?). My own experience is that I’d much rather play through Uncharted on its Hard difficulty setting than play through a longer, but more repetitive game.

The result of this is a kind of scarcity of actual content in games. The longer we make any given game, the more diluted the experience becomes. We get more of the same enemies in the same locations, and more locations made up out of the same building blocks.

You can see this quite easily if you compare the soundtracks of different media. Movie music is a movie-length musical score which has changing music to the events in the movie, usually with common themes for parts of movies but with the music still shifting to each individual moment.

How much variation is there in game music? Sometimes, game music is a movie-length (yes) musical score, played straight or randomly to a game (usually 4 times longer than a movie). Sometimes it’s a song-length musical score played to each level. Sometimes it’s “dynamic music” which usually means tying musical start/fade triggers to action. I commented on game music before in Give Me Some Emotion, Maestro, where I suggested a more involved form of dynamic music for games with composers as first-class game developers, but that doesn’t go all the way — we also simply need an appropriate amount of music to cover the length of a game.

More enemies to kill in the same way, more of the same concrete blocks to make up new parts of levels, more of the same music and sounds, more of the same experience. These things all lead to the current playing experience you get from games, which tends to be a repetitive flat-emotion slaughter even if you look at non-shooter games. Yet making more content for the games would make them more expensive.

I think games as a medium need to focus better. Yes, shorter games would probably be good in the long run. There are some people who would wish that movies be 10 hours long as well — but those aren’t the main segment of customers for movies. In the end, bringing quality of games up needs more variation — in environments, in challenges, and in emotions. Then maybe the average consumer would actually have the pleasure of finishing the games they buy.

I don’t mean there can’t be long games here either. People obviously liked the The Lord of the Rings movies, despite their long run time. But those movies are still beautifully crafted all the way through, and do not lack the focus you would get from doing the same thing to other movies. It also has something to do with an insanely large budget.

For singleplayer games, the question then becomes how to satisfy the people who want longer play times? I sure don’t have that answer, and any comments are definitely appreciated.

Game story design lacks some maturity, compared to other media. It seems to me that we’re too obsessed with the spectacular, or too afraid of not making a splash, that we violate one of the fundamental pieces of storytelling advice there is: keep the story believable.

The central concept in all great storytelling is the suspension of disbelief. We’re asking the viewer, reader or player to ignore all their preconceived notions about how a world works, and join you in your world for a bit. This can work as long as your story is compelling enough to keep them interested, and consistent enough that the world makes sense in the mind of the viewer, reader or player.

Why, then, is it so common in games that start out with a fairly reasonable story, there inevitably seem to be aliens, zombies, super mutants, experimental super-soldiers or some similar monstrosity near the end? I’ve played through a fair number of games with this problem, and I’ve actually quit a fair number as well.

Some games have stories that aren’t exactly masterpieces, yet they still get smashed to pieces by this kind of move. One example of this would be Far Cry — not exactly known for it’s brilliant story, but I still lost my interest when the super-mutant-experiment-soldiers showed up.

Since actual good game stories are so few and far apart, story reviews tend to look favorably on anything that actually has a story.

Game story designers fall into this trap for several reasons. I think, first of all, that it’s a sign of a certain lack of maturity — we don’t take our stories seriously, don’t focus on them and thus we don’t think they can hold their own.

For me, the story adds so much to a game experience that it deserves to be treated better. Trust me, playing the single player campaign of something like Bad Company during development, before the story elements are in place, is but a pale shadow of the final product.

Our demands on gameplay and difficulty also makes this an easy trap to fall into. Adding more HP and weaponry to enemies only makes sense to a certain point, I guess, so in order to have an appropriately difficult grand finale, we throw in something supernatural. The funny thing about this is that many times, the same games have already shown themselves to not need this. Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, for instance (which is an awesome game by the way) has both a story and difficulty measures good enough to stand on their own feet. It simply didn’t need monsters.

These thrown in monsters, mutants and aliens provide an opportunity to make something spectacular. However, the best moments I’ve had in gaming must be the ones that both made sense and were spectacular.

I hope game stories can move with time to the more mature, nuanced theme of telling a simple but powerful story in an interesting way that keeps me hooked. However, that requires us to respect the power of a story well told… among all our fancy graphics, powerful hardware and surround sound systems, we get to face the idea that perhaps the most important piece of the game shares more qualities with a good camp-fire story than with the tech labs that produced the chip we’re running.

What do you think about the state of stories in games? How would you like to see them improve?

Image credit: kevindooley on flickr

Taste these:

“He believes it proved that, even in a 21st century digital fantasyland, an ugly side of real-world human nature pervades, a side that oppresses strangers whose behavior strays from that of the mainstream.”

“Myers was stunned by the reaction, since he obeyed the game’s rules.”

“It started to not be fun,” said Myers, a video game aficionado. “I became the most hated, most reviled player.”

“He said his experience demonstrated that modern-day social groups making use of modern-day technology can revert to “medieval and crude” methods in trying to manipulate and control others.”

Someone actually grants funds for this nutcase? Hell, I could have told you all of those things at once, without the need to be a total dick to people for two years: There are social systems in any context that go above and beyond that of the rules and laws of the context. Yes, this goes for online communities as well. No, you wouldn’t be stupid enough to do that to someone if you weren’t online and anonymous.

I’d urge Mr. Myers to try it out AFK sometime. A subway train could be a good place, for instance (though I’m certainly open for other suggestions, these things are common). Place yourself in the middle of the doorway. Stand in the way of peolpe trying to enter or exit the train. If they move to sidestep you, follow to block the movement.

This is not illegal or against subway rules, but it will still make people really fucking angry. The social context tells you “don’t do that”, not because it causes people to become “medieval and crude” when they force their way past you violently, but because you’re being a real dick to people if you do.

People started out by asking kindly, but then stepped up their efforts to change his behavior as he ignored them. Like people under threat from abuse AFK, they first tried all the normal, appropriate ways of dealing with normal, reasonably sane people, but then had to go to extremes when this didn’t work.

This has nothing to do with him being a “stranger” (hint: everyone’s a stranger in an MMO), but with the fact that he was making their lives miserable to the best of his abilities.

In any game there will be things that are possible according to game rules, but forbidden due to social context. In Battlefield and other shooters, it’s spawn camping. In golf, it’s crossing another player’s line of putt on the green. In World of Warcraft, it’s ninjaing a target or piece of loot from other players. I could go on for a long time.

In the end, we come down to the simple fact that this guy gets paid for being a twat to people for two years, and tries to interpret it scientifically as some sort of bullying on their behalf.

There are plenty of interesting areas to research when it comes to games… games are still a young medium, and especially the social effects and interactions of MMOs are fascinating. So picking an area with slightly more relevance could be nice. Better teach this guy the basics of human psychology before letting him near another study, though.

I think one of the reasons is that there simply aren’t as many great LAN games being made any more. Most multi-player games tend to be aligned for Internet play, and as a result don’t work all that well locally. We played some Left 4 Dead this time, which is an awesome game for LAN as well as online (if you don’t have it — seriously, get it), but with the cap of 4 people for a campaign game that was sort of limited to the times where we had only a few people around, with most people choosing to go to bed or off to find a snack or whatever.

Another of the reasons I think causes this is, strangely, we buy more games. This seems counter-intuitive, as buying more games should mean having more games to play, but seeing as most games don’t play well together with pirated versions that means we can’t play games not everyone has. The result is that in general only one game will be a smash hit enough to have coverage at one of our LAN parties (The Orange Box did it for Team Fortress 2, and Left 4 Dead did this time around as I mentioned).

Some older games came with functionality that countered this — Total Annihilation could be installed as a Multi-player Spawn version, and when you started a game only a certain number of people needed to play the “full version” (with the CD in the drive) — one CD for every 3 players I believe. Really, more games should do this for LAN play.

There’s also a number of classic games that are just outdated but still best in their genre — even some games that are hardly known, and some forgotten with time. The first game that caused this was Carmageddon II. We played that game through countless nights of hysterical laughter for a huge number of LAN parties, until at one point the game’s outdated code simply wouldn’t work with newer computers and operating systems (not a huge surprise, as it was IPX-based for multi-player). We’ve mourned the game since, to the point of trying to set up a dedicated network with dedicated computers only to play that game (which failed).

Another game that stuck around was Rune, which chances are you’ve never heard about. When I first played it at a LAN party it was already an aging game, and then later I managed to dig up a single online store that still sold it and the multiplayer version, Halls of Valhalla. We bought a stack of copies of both games, and we’re still playing it every party. No other melee fighting game has come close to the same kind of frenetic fighting feeling.

Operation Flashpoint has also stayed with us, regardless of the “sequel” Armed Assault which didn’t really add much to the game, but had significantly higher requirements. Flashpoint is the one and only game we play as a sort of large-scale co-op experience. The game engine is slow and looks sort of bad but the game play is unmatched anywhere else. The built-in map editor (despite all its quirks) has kept the game going. Far-out mods like LEGO models also help provide endless amounts of wicked fun.

One more game is actually the indie game Soldat. It’s a highly addictive, frenetic 2D side scrolling infantry combat game controlled simply with the mouse and WASD to move around.

I could go on for a long time. Total Annihilation held for so long I thought we’d never stop playing it, but eventually we did. Some of the Age of Empires games really rocked (we actually played AoE II this time as well). Flatout and then Flatout 2 are some of the nicest aggressive driving games out there (pale, in comparison to Carmageddon II, but still). We played  the Trackmania games for a long long long time, though now I seem to be the only one who still loves it. We played Battlefield 1942, Desert combat, Galactic Conquest, BF: Vietnam, Battlefield 2, and Battlefield 2142 for a number of LAN parties.

The new stuff this time around came mainly from mods. I found this wonderfully wicked steam mod called D.I.P.R.I.P. Warm Up which is another version of the whole “Car with guns” theme, extremely well implemented with the wonderfully entertaining Uranium Run and Destruction (bombing) game modes. It seems to lack a following currently — it was a blast to play, but the most I ever saw was two servers up.

Of course, Battlefield Heroes is coming along nicely, but without the ability to easily play with friends it isn’t ready for a LAN party… yet. Still, it’s a great game for all those little periods of time where there was nothing in specific going on, and I think some of the guys got seriously hooked.

I wish some of those games were still available for people to try them out. Regardless of the lack of fancy graphics, some games are still the best games around. Also, suggestions for more games and mods to try appreciated!

Anyway, the debut trailer is up for Battlefield: Bad Company 2. What do you think?

Skilled movie makers quickly understood the power music has in conveying and guiding emotions. Watching any movie would be rather flat and boring if you didn’t have the powerful background music to the fights, the dramatic music to the partings and the eerie music building up to something grand. The best movies with the most powerful music have composers be a part of the movie-making process, tailoring the score to the pictures shown, matching and enhancing the drama of the scenes.

Games developers don’t seem to have understood. Music is usually an afterthought, and even when it’s an integral part of the identity of a product, it’s still something that’s a separate entity from the game itself. Even the games with much heralded “dynamic music” generally only have a simple “fade in music when action starts” or “fade between two soundtracks when action level changes”.

I applaud the effort of identifying the action and making the music somewhat respond to that, but the music itself is still a separate entity from the game. The games I’ve seen the most with dynamic music have been strategy games, which is something of a genre that otherwise struggles with emotional content, since it’s by nature far removed from the actual humans or creatures involved. Zelda: The Wind Waker is supposedly good with it, but I actually haven’t played it due to lack of hardware.

I think this is one big reason that games are seen as lacking the emotional power of movies. In its current form, game music conveys not much else than “excitement” and “non-excitement” corresponding directly to “action” and “calm”, causing a rather flat level of emotion. We lack the various degrees of joy, sadness, fear, buildup, triumph and disaster.

Some would claim that this is because we focus so heavily on war as a subject… but anyone who says so clearly hasn’t seen Band of Brothers.

I believe we need invite the musicians and composers in. It’s time for composers to become first-class citizens of the gaming world, to adapt the concept of music to the games just like soundtracks are an adaptation of music to movies. Games are not linear, and as such the music can’t be linear either, and that requires us to take on composers not only to write a soundtrack or theme to the game as if it was a movie, but to work in development of actual in-game music, taking shape as the game takes shape.

It’s up to us as game developers to identify the mood of the game — but we need to get composers on-board to actually make musical pieces that fit that mood. The first truly emotional, triumphant computer game battle victory can only happen once that is in place.