More voices, more games, more players. It's a deep desire of anyone who loves this medium. Today at E3, the games conference in Los Angeles, software publishers and journalists discussed the issues surrounding a maturing game market. They decided that games should respond to a players mood and behavior, movies will be advertisements for games, the core gamer is dead, and there should be more sex in games.
Reaching The New Gamer: Understanding the Mindset of Today's Consumer
A panel moderated by Naughty Dog's Jason Rubin, including these panelists:
- Vince Broady, Senior Vice President, GameSpot
- Bing Gordon, Executive Vice President and Chief Creative Officer, Electronic Arts
- Stuart Moulder, General Manager, PC Games, Microsoft
- Todd Hollenshead, CEO, id Software
Reaching Out: Cultural Innovation
Bing Gordon: How to reach out to new gamers? One way is through genre innovation - reach out through things that they already know. Sports is an example of this. Sports are familiar, people can understand that, it gets them engaged in the machine.
Stuart Moulder: They don't talk about it, but the number of registered users on Microsoft's Zone has continued climbing - predominantly female. But the dynamic of being online itself is not an attractor for new gamers, it is just one avenue for providing games and reaching out.
Vince Broady: Games have become more of an extension of the clothes, music and culture surrounding people nowadays. Games are better able to reflect popular culture.
Bing Gordon: We're trying to go from a culture aftermarket to leading with technology - implanting sound samples in Def Jam Vendetta that kids would want to memorize and share with their friends.
By 2010, digital assets will be co-developed between games and movies.
Vince Broady: Static non-interactive media will serve to set the stage for the game, the environment. The movie is the big commercial for the Star Wars World which we want you to pay $9.95 to belong to for the rest of your life.
New Genres: New Ways to Play
Stuart Moulder: I wish I could point to any of my own games that have innovated new genres, but the Sims is the best example of making something that didn't adhere to traditional goals and systems of gaming.
Vince Broady: Animal Crossing is like Food Television, you can leave it on, if something interesting is happening, you can check it out. Low stress, doesn't involve all of your attention.
Bing Gordon: Trying to make games for people who don't want to be addicted to games is so far a failing proposition at EA.
People who don't play games are hard to convince, unless they're a Lord of the Rings fan and they see a commercial. Best way to have a non-gamer start to play games is to have a dedicated gamer share games with them.
Vince Broady: I wish games would be more forgiving. For example, Age of Mythology could recognize that I'm slowing down, running out of gold and help me out. Don't dumb everything down the whole way through. Don't make me have to pause and then restart the game at full intensity.
Graphic Emotions
Todd Hollenshead: As the visual presentation improves with time and technology, people have their often five-year dated sense of state-of-the-art games exploded.
Jason Rubin: With graphics improvements in games, you can see the dimensions of personality expanding. PacMan - Mario - Sonic, each of them has another dimension of personality. From blank, to hat-wearing mallet-swinging plumber, to a fast-running hedgehog. But Sonic was only fast - the increase in pixels didn't yet support more expression than that. Then Crash Bandicoot, who could be heroic and dumb. Can't act Shakespeare, because he doesn't have the range of expressions. But PS2 era characters, some of them do have that capacity, they can have faces and body and animations that can express that range of emotion.
Bing Gordon: We focus more on the relations between characters to define relationships. The Sims uses a low-grade character emotional animations. We need the equivalent of a emotional physics engine.
By the way, we discovered that when we light human NPCs and you can see them, it can make shooting them a little less fun.
Todd Hollenshead: Graphics is only one way that programmers have to innovate games - there's also physics and AI, for example.
Stuart Moulder: Technology occasionally serves as a crutch, instead of creativity or innovation, people work to develop better backend that doesn't serve the game experience. Games call for subtler developments, more thought involved.
Jason Rubin: We're getting less and less bang for our buck with graphical innovation, from this generation of games further.
Death of the Core Gamer
Bing Gordon: There isn't a core gamer market any more. In the 80s, core gamers bought everything, and read magazines about it. Starting with Genesis, people started to buy within specific genres. There are very few sports customers who play two titles equally. A core gamer now is someone who plays one game, or a series of games. People make a hobby of a particular title - 40 hours a week of Dark Age of Camelot, for example.
Reaching More Mature Market
Jason Rubin: Besides, The Sims and GTA, what's an example of a game that has reached a more mature market?
Bing Gordon: World Cup Soccer from EA; 70% of the people that bought it hadn't bought another soccer game that year. They liked World Cup more than they liked leagues. Maybe because World Cup was on TV.
Jason Rubin: Is the timing of world events going to help the sales of particular games?
Bing Gordon: Definitely helped Command and Conquer; it helped that the war was in the Middle East. Way better than TV advertisements.
Vince Broady: Lord of the Rings, strong game. Splinter Cell, while not totally accessible gameplay, it's engaging.
Stuart Moulder: Halo has been interesting to watch. The story and the pace of the action has helped a for-hardcore game appeal to a broader audience. Maybe drawn in by the visuals, by the storyline. It's also moderately slower paced, and we have a easy level of difficulty which is actually easy and that's okay.
Vince Broady: We need an easier preview mechanism. If you hear about the Sopranos, it's easy for you to find it, and watch it once. How do I go through ten games and get a sense of each? I can do it online, can't really do it in retail - the back of the box is pretty limiting.
Advertising
Jason Rubin: MTV is now funded entirely by the game industry. How could people watch that and still not know what games are coming out? I don't go to see movies and still I know what movies are out. How come people still need to turn to their "gaming expert" buddy?
Stuart Moulder: We're going to advertise the new Microsoft flight sim on the Discovery and History channels. We've got to be more targeted.
Vince Broady: GameSpot has covered 550 games that are being promoted at E3 this year. Trying to have a broad awareness of this industry is unrealistic.
Bing Gordon: Somehow videogame commercials aren't sticking: people remember commercials and categories more than they remember name of the product. Maybe it has something to do with the nature of software.
Todd Hollenshead: Doom 3 will be more visceral than any game to date - graphics as well as sound and atmosphere. We make games that we want to play, interesting to the artists and game designers who build the game. A horror movie experience through interactive entertainment. Demons from hell are supposed to be scary.
Stuart Moulder: As long as people believe that games are for kids, then content over a PG level is going to continue to raise eyebrows. How do we change public perception? How do we let people know that we create content for adults?
Bing Gordon: I wish we had more sex.
Jason Rubin: Would EA do that?
Bing Gordon: I think that would be challenging.
Jason Rubin: Why?
Bing Gordon: Because we're prudes at EA. Also because we try to keep a statesman-like position on behalf of the industry so we can talk to Washington. EA feels the IDSA is important and we try not to be the boundary-pusher for the IDSA [the Interactive Digital Software Association, sponsor of E3]. In the original EA mission statement we said we don't want to resort to gratuitous violence. By the way, anyone who has read the Odyssey recently can see that it has much more violence than anything we publish. But trying telling that to Joe Lieberman.
Vince Broady: A game like Doom 3 will be scary, the graphics are only one part of that. Is it imagery we're opposed to? A frame of mind? A feeling that it creates?
Retail
Bing Gordon: Retail is still magic. 10 years ago, our competitors predicted that all software will be downloaded; that's come more slowly even than I expected. Micropayments will become important. People will have $200 a month internet bills by 2010.
Stuart Moulder: Pre-paid phone/game cards used in Asia show that our industry needs to offer more flexible payment means for our customers.
Vince Broady: Why don't retailers organize their stock by rating? Have all the kids "E" rated and sports games in one rack, and the T and M rated games on another rack, and then parents will know "My kid can get something from these racks."
Romance Games
My question: Romance novels are very popular. Where are the romance games?
Stuart Moulder: The emotional palette that games paint with is very limited. We have not picked up the skills, the emotional range of movies and books.
Jason Rubin: Are you saying that romance novels take skill?
Before Jak and Daxter 2, we've never tried to have a relationship, or a romance in a game. But now we're making a small effort with our latest title.
Stuart Moulder: Violence is easy, humor is easier than romance. But we'll get there.
Censorship Stifles Outreach
Speaking briefly with Jason Della Rocca, Program Director at the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) after the session, he wishes they would have mentioned the impact of censorship. If the government forces us to make games only for kids, where does that leave the medium? Videogames need freedom to explore artistic boundaries, including violence as well as romance.
romance games?
there's tons of it in japan... Look at all the dating simulation games. Toki*something* memorial, Kanon (despite it has a few light hentai scenes, it's seen as a classic date sim), and there are tons more. given, most american fans of these dating sims had to meet 1 important requirement, which is they had to learn how to read japanese, but for the most part those who do play it get hooked right away.
so i don't see whats the problem they have with romance games, given the success of the japanese counterparts in the game world.
Posted by: dafish | 05/16/2003 at 02:13 AM
Toki *Meki* Memorial - & yes, there are quite a few popular "dating sims" (as they are usually referred to). I suppose they are the closest thing to "romance games" that we have to date (no pun intended). However, there are many differences between "romance novels" (which the girls [not me] seem so fond of) & "dating sims" (which are often male-oriented games).
Consequently, anyone who wants to know more about "dating sims" can go to http://www.megatokyo.com/extra/dating_sim_faq-ver1.htm (WARNING! Some material may unsuitable for younger audiences.).
Or you can check this site for girl-oriented "dating sims" http://www.threeheadeddog.com/j1/lovelove/ (WARNING! This site may also contain material intended for adults-only!).
Of course, you can also e-mail questions to me: CoderAngel@yahoo.com
Posted by: Brandii Rhiannhon Grace | 05/23/2003 at 04:46 PM
Great links, nice suggestions. Definitely, romance is much more present in Japanese software entertainment than anywhere in the West.
I bought Tokimeki Memorial, one of the classic Japanese games (you mentioned it Dafish) in November 1999, and since then I've watched two more fluent Japanese readers/speakers solve it through, going after the pretty girl. Jane was one of those folks - she's experienced the pursuit of romance in games first hand!
I think a few of these games have been translated. But for anyone used to Halo or even the latest Barbie game, I think the slideshow presentation of most of these games would turn off people who aren't used to reading story into flat, unmoving pictures. And they're not terribly interactive - choosing which conversation to follow or which statistic to improve to get a girl is not so likely to get console fans - maybe PC fans might go for it.
I was watching these simple slideshow games and thinking, shit - we should just make our own! I mean, they seem really low-tech - not hard to reproduce, in Flash even.
Posted by: justin | 05/23/2003 at 06:39 PM