Pretends to be Dumb; the average geek

Tuesday can go Fuck itself.

It wasn't that Tuesday was a bad day or anything, I'm sepaking of the idea of updating my blog on Tuesday. That idea can go cuk itself, because I didn't feel like updating my blog yesterday.

And I don't really feel like doing a Mini-movie review today. Its not that I don't want to do it, its that I don't feel like I'm capable of doing one as I haven't seen anything recently enough to be reviewable.

Something happened that made me really happy yesterday, I wish I could remember what it was, but suffice it to say that yesterday was good.

There was a cross country meet, and while Kevin may not be a great wordsmith, he is an excellent runner. He took fourth place, but the most startlingly amazing achievement was Abbie's. She took first place among the girls. She deserves some commendment for that.

Tomorrow is my sister's birthday, and I'm gonna try to be at my Dad's house for that because frankly, I'd rather not deal with her. especially not on her birthday, because during that time, her ego will be inflated and she'll be far more likely to get mad at me.

Also yesterday, I gave my speech for Public Speaking. I thought it was good but I lost a lot of my audience by being confusing and "technical," but I'll let my readers be the judge of that now.

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"The machinery of gaming has run amok. Walk into your local bookstore; you'll find tens of thousands of titles. Walk into your local record store; you'll find thousands of albums. Walk into your local software store; you'll find perhaps 40 games. The only games that fill those 40 slots are those on which publishers have lavished millions in placement and promotion and advertising and marketing dollars. ...they know that only a handful will succeed..."

That's from something going around on the internet called the Scratchware Manifesto. It was written anonymously and its point is to describe the problems of the video gaming industry, and to propose a solution.

Not only does it illustrate the industry's problems, but its mere existence indicates problems. Think about it, if things are so horribly wrecked and mutilated that people feel compelled to write a manifesto about what should be done about it, aren't things obviously in a bad place? You don't even have to read the Manifesto to understand as much.

And it isn't just general software and computing stores that have such weak stock of video games. Even specialty stores such as Gamespot and EBGames only have selections that consist of maybe 200 games.

Its not because there aren't as many games as there are books or records. There are thousands of games released each year. Most of them are released quietly and then they fade off into obscurity.

Quiet releases aren't gonna work for the majority of the game industry. On average, 80 percent of sales are made within the first two weeks of a game's release. There are only a handful of exceptions to this rule. Imagine if Charles Dickens's books were given only two weeks a-piece to sell and afterwards, be taken off the market. Future generations would be denied that greatness.

But games aren't thrown together in an afternoon. They're the product of work by teams that in order to be competitive consist of at least 30 people these days. And it will take a minimum of six months to get a working product together. It costs a lot of money to pay thirty people for six months. And a lot of games take it least eighteen to forty-eight months. Some games have staffs of around eighty people. The point I'm trying to drive home here is that a game is not a small investment. They cost millions of dollars and a fairly large devtime.

It used to be that someone could make a level for the game Doom in about a day. It used to be that a game like Doom would be put together by a small team of amateurs. It used to be that a game like Doom could pull in millions of dollars. Nowadays, we have Doom3. Its a game with insane graphics that were at the time of release the closest any game had come to photorealism. Putting a level together in Doom3 is a matter of weeks. And thats assuming you aren't gonna be making custom things like level meshes and textures. If you are, then who knows how long it'll take.

It might be said that this extra effort has made Doom3 better than Doom1, but that is a far cry from what the reviews have said. According to reviewers and in my personal opinion, Doom3 is not as much fun as the original Doom.

The bar keeps getting higher and thats a problem. Smaller companies can no longer compete with the bigger ones. If you were to release Doom today, people would laugh about the cheesy semi-2D graphics, and then probably forget about the gameplay aspects. Its safe to guess that it'd lose money. Then someone could release a game with absolutely amazing graphics and unlovable gameplay but it'd make money .

Electronic Arts is the worst perpetrator of the bar-raising. They recently spent fifteen million dollars on "Photorealistic Hair." This is just so that hair in their next generation games can be photorealistic. Fifteen million dollars is at least 3 games worth of money. No other company can compete with that.

Some companies have tried to get around the bar, and they do manage to still make money, but not too much. I think of games such as La Pucelle Tactics which used 2D graphics instead of much more expensive 3D graphics. The reviews all laughed at the graphics, saying they looked like something from a Super Nintendo game, but did applauded the gameplay anyway. I wish I had a poster I could show you all the graphics of the game with, but they were very good 2D drawings and animations.

Sony of America actually has a policy to prevent purely 2D games from being released on the Playstation 2. If the game is purely 2D, there have to be at least two games in the package. That just wastes the effort put forth by too many developers.

All of this I've said said so far is only one part of the problem.

We've still got horrible developer working conditions. in some extreme cases, such as was the case for the developers of the game Daikatana, developers were working eighteen hour days in total darkness.

Why were they in total darkness? Because apparently it made them work harder. They got one break for the entire workday. If they were being paid anything other than salary, that would not be a legal situation. It was essentially a cubicle sweatshop.

Why were they working eighteen hour days? They've got this thing in the industry called, "Crunch time." during crunch time, the managers of a project hold the developers to work longer days in order to meet deadlines. The intention is that well-managed crunch time means that during the two weeks before the project's completion, the developers work an extra two hours per day. However, in a lot of companies, such as Electronic Arts, Crunch time can last for months, and sometimes it won't just be two extra hours per day, but it'll be an extra six. The worst case of this was in Daikatana, but you know whats especially sad about that case?

Daikatana was a horrible game. The only aspect of Daikatana which could be rated favorably was its graphics. And those don't hold up to today's standards. Compared with the graphics of games today, those are no good. Thats just sad.

Now here's a story about developer-publisher relations.

Once upon a time, JoWooD Productions hired a group of developers called Perception PTY to make a game for them based Stargate SG-1. However, JoWood pulled the plug on the game and said, "Everything you made.... We want it. We get exclusive rights to it. And all that money we gave you to develop with, your salaries? We want it back."

I hope you can understand how screwed up that is. They wanted a game made and hired people to do it, then after nineteen months of having worked on it, they said it isn't good enough and that they wanted the developers' salaries back. A court battle is probably coming back soon.

The solutions, I believe are a de-emphasization of graphics because they take up most of a modern developer's time and resources, expansion of the audience, so that games have the potential to make more money and be less of an industry directed solely towards white males, and better endorsement of indie developers.

To such an effect, I point towards Real Arcade and GarageGames.

Garagegames provides inexpensive tools for amateur developers. They also publish games made by said amateur developers with fair deals regarding royalties and developer's rights. They emphasize original gameplay and make no fuss over graphics unless they're 2D, in which case, they will likely applaud them in the games they publish.

Garagegames helps extend the audience by making their game tools cross-platform compatible. A relatively good programmer can make port a game from Windows to Linux and Mac in less than a day. They even have a deal in which all new Apple computers come with a game they published, Marble Blast Gold, pre-installed. As the owner of an iBook, I can tell you that Marble Blast Gold is a great game. Its fun and the graphics are nothing special. Its just good gameplay.

RealArcade takes a different approach. They've published sixty games, most of which took very little initial investment. What is especially cool about RealArcade is that some of the games they've published, such as Diner Dash, have earned over $10 million dollars. Almost all of their games are 2D and a few are simple 3D.

The really cool think about RealArcade is that they target the people that the mainstream game industry doesn't. Their primary audience consists of people aged between thirty and sixty.

And the really cool thing is that any game developer can publish with them. People can just send them an installer file, and if the game is good enough, they'll publish it with a fair royalty. Its a good system.

Its been said that the game industry was once one of the richest and most exciting artistic fields to work in. But it seems those fields have been burned and now the mainstream game industry's machinations have malfunctioned. Its time for new systems to be put into place. When that happens, the game industry will be once again great.
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That was long and ranty. Its today's rant.

I got my grade on that today though and it was good. 9.7/10. I feel good.

In other news for today, Pat gets a shoutout for doing an excellent reading of the (In my inflated opinion) boring poem, Ulysses. I think its ancient or something so tahts to be expected, but the tone of voice he used was excellent.

By the way, that was in Public Speaking class.

Also, I got my Sattellite TV working again today. Let me just say that I am really happy. I can't wait to reap the benefits of properly working TV again.

^_^

Also, my online friend, Minnek and I had a spat some long time ago that resulted in him blocking me. I contacted him using a secondary SN today and got him to unblock me. It feels like a good victory.

Thats about all for today.

I'm glad I didn't miss two days in a row, because I almost did.

posted by the magnificent Cy "Brazanthr" Parker @ 12:39 AM

Bow down to my awesome-ness for I am nifty!