…in how not to introduce concepts, anything to players. A lesson in how not to open a game. Just a lesson. Don’t do this shit, people. Just don’t. Not like this.

This is the first experience people will have of Symphony. Each of the blue band screens are information screens that require a click to proceed. The shots with the game in the background? It stops the game to display these.

25 screens before you’ll even start the game. (24 in this gallery as I didn’t screengrab the splash screen at the start)
7 screens after announcing TIME TO PLAY!
2 in game interruptions.
12 more screens after game over.
And there’s more in the ship customisation screen but by this point, I’d gotten *really* bored of screengrabbing prompts.

Don’t do it.

Can someone explain why we don’t let people do this anymore? I mean, not just the hero but everyone. Why can’t we name everyone?

I’ve deleted 5 cut and paste Kickstarter posts off the owV forums in the past two weeks. I don’t even pause anymore. Quick scan. Delete. Goodbye. I roll my eyes whenever it turns out that an email I open isn’t trying to excite me or interest me in a game but raise awareness of a Kickstarter project. But still, they come. So I’ve made a graph. Hopefully it’ll make things clear to a few folks.

You see, the thing is, I get excited about games but I can’t, no matter how worthy or grand a project is, get excited about funding games. I don’t give a fuck. I know it’s a necessary evil in some cases and I’m certainly not anti-Kickstarter but I don’t want to write about Kickstarter projects. I want to write about games. I can only assume that a good tenth of the mail I receive for owV right now is more interested in scalping money from people than in exciting them about games. I say this because the descriptions, the pictures or whatever, they’re entirely secondary to the point that HERE IS A THING ON KICKSTARTER ASKING FOR MONEY.

Fuck that noise. But y’know, it certainly goes some way to explaining why a lot of Kickstarter game projects fall on their arse when there’s more effort expended in a Kickstarter page asking for money than there is on stuff getting people excited or interested in the game itself.

I’m not going to say I’m never going to put a Kickstarter project on the front of owV, or let one onto the forums because that’s silly, but I am going to say that astroturfing forums with a cut and paste begging letter, no matter how well/ineptly you try and disguise its intention (“post if you’ve got any questions!”) is never going to endear a project to anyone. And I will say that if you feel your Kickstarter project is of more interest to me than any of the myriad of things I could be posting about that already exist, you’re probably not really thinking this through.

I want to talk about games. I want to talk about what makes a game great (or not so great). Funding is business. And I’m not in the business of business writing.

Show me the games. Talk about your game. Because that’s the one thing you have that can get people excited and it’s your best shot at getting any publicity.

Nagademo is National Game Development Month. It alleges to be styled around the spirit of National Novel Writing Month.

I think National Game Development Month is a good idea.

I think that as it stands, right now, National Game Development Month (NaGaDeMo) is not in the same spirit of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) nor is it close. It is exclusive and off putting.

I don’t attribute this to malice, I attribute it to a lack of consideration. Something easily done and something easily remedied.

It is partly an issue of tone. It is partly more than an issue of tone. It’s something I find unsurprising, but also massively disappointing because I want people to make games and I believe NaGaDeMo currently only speaks to and for those who already do.

Let’s start by visiting National Novel Writing Month’s website and see what lies at the end of this particular rainbow.

“At NaNoWriMo you can:

Write a novel in a month!
Track your progress.
Get pep talks and support.
Meet fellow writers online and in person.”

Wahey, doesn’t that sound great? I *can* write a novel in a month. There’s a way for me to keep track? GREAT! People are supportive? Excellent! And there’s other people out there like me? Who just want to write a book? Amazing!

What else?

“Ready to Write a Novel? You’ve come to the right place”

EXCELLENT. I AM READY. MY LORD, TAKE MY BODY. I WISH TO WRITE.

From the about page…

“Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.”

NaNoWriMo goes to great lengths to stress that it’s inclusive, to stress it’s for everyone. From the very first second you hit the page, you know that NaNoWriMo is for you. Yes, you. Whoever you are. You the person who harboured the desire to write a book, you who just wants to see if you can or whatever. It is understandable, it is approachable, it is inviting. The message is clear: You want to write a book? COME HERE, WE’LL HELP YOU. EVERYONE IS DOING IT. NO WORRIES.

The shift in tone between the novel writing month and the game development month is stark.

“With the rise of Global Game Jam and other similar-minded events, more people are making more games than ever before. That’s fantastic! For some people, though, devoting a weekend so completely to a solid game development sprint is too much to ask. In such a compressed environment, you can lose the deeper insights that come from a game marinating in the back of your brain over time.”

Bang! Lost from the off. What are they talking about? What’s a Global Game Jam and what is it to me, who just wants to write a game? Oh, it’s for people who are already writing a game? Not me who is game curious? Oh.

Thus, in the same spirit as National Novel Writing Month, June is hereby declared as National Game Development Month. Heeding Chris Hecker’s call, there should be an emphasis on actually producing a finished game within the allotted time. “Small, but complete” is much more satisfying than “ambitious and broken

But this isn’t in the spirit of NaNoWriMo. It’s an event sharing a similar name, it’s sharing a timespan but it couldn’t possibly be further from “the spirit” of NaNoWriMo.

NaGaDeMo is about grinding a month to complete a project (something that could and has been levelled at NaNoWriMo also but…) It’s about listening to who the heck is that guy anyway and what is he to me that makes him so important that I should be heeding his call to finish a game and making it small but complete when I just want to make a game too and that’s more troubling*.

This is not about collective support, this is not about bringing people together to make something they may have only dreamed of prior, this is about finishing a game in a way someone else dictates. It’s a work ethic imposed. It’s not about the spirit of doing, it’s not about achieving something you’ve always wanted to achieve (which is a major sell of NaNoWriMo), it’s about committing yourself to someone else’s ideals. To someone else’s idea of right and wrong and what could and should be done. It’s an imposition.

This is not the spirit of National Novel Writing Month in any discernible way. This is scaring people with the time and effort required to finish. Because it’s someone else’s idea of finished.

A similar tone runs throughout the entire site. The wording is often careless, cumbersome, unintelligible to human beings who are not coders. It’s limited and limiting from the off. It isn’t encouraging. It isn’t empowering. It’s bollocks talk as only coders know how.

Go to the FAQ and there’s a definition of a game. Anyone who wants to write a game, they don’t need a definition imposing upon them as a first point of order. A small thing but needless and discouraging thing to begin with. Content wasted on vaguely technical things where it could be encouraging folks. Bore them first, eh?

This spirit of discouraging people continues when the site describes board games/card games being “second class citizens” with regards to the event.

They’re harder to share with the wider world, though, which sadly makes them kind of second-class citizens for an event like this one. But hey, who are we to stop you?

This is 2012, we have internet. There’s many ways of sharing board and card games now so they’re only second class citizens because they’ve been defined as such. Photographs, mock ups of the board, sharing the rules, sharing the cards… all these things can be done via internet so why are they second class citizens again? Because no coding? Either accept them or not but let’s have no “second class citizens”.

Then there’s the matter of “winners”. NaNoWriMo offers a certificate for those who manage to write 50,000 words over the course of the month.

“9.25) If you write 50,000 words of fiction by midnight, local time, November 30th, you can upload your novel for official verification, and be added to our hallowed Winner’s Page and receive a handsome winner’s certificate and web badge. We’ll post step-by-step instructions on how to scramble and upload your novel starting in mid-November.

There are some obvious objections to 50,000 words in a month but still, it’s a fairly non judgemental metric to work towards. You can go under and you’ll still have a novel just no certificate, you can go over and you’ll probably have War & Peace: Peace Hardest or something. It’s a choice that the author gets to make, the focus remains on the “writing a novel part” though.

NaGaDeMo’s “winners” are, well, they’re more awkward.

“A finished game should have no temporary graphics or audio, a complete (even if brief) set of content, and a few rounds of testing behind it. In short, the game should be ready for someone to play without the developer standing behind them.

I know defining “finished” on a game is hard given most get filed under “thrown out into the world” but y’know, you’re defining what it should contain in a more concrete, less abstract way than the arbitrary length that NaNoWriMo brings. What if I want to make a game I have to be standing behind someone to play? WHY ARE YOU OPPRESSING ME?

I suspect that in the case of games and in the face of the difficulty in defining an acceptable “amount of finished”, it’d likely be wiser to lose the idea of winners entirely or expand the concept to anyone who finishes a game, this is something that should be celebrated. Finishing a game is an achievement all by itself and worthy of celebration.

The resources page is even less inviting. Opening with an inspiration section that includes Eno’s Oblique Strategies, a set of cards designed to “jog the mind” makes you wonder who this is aimed at. By putting Oblique Strategies up front, by suggesting a shonky web version of a £30 set of cards by an ambient musician is the first place you might want to be looking for inspiration rather than, say, suggesting that nothing is out of bounds (something done wonderfully in Chapter 6 p137-p139 of Anna’s Rise Of The Videogame Zinesters which comes heartily recommended from me)… well, yeah. That’s weird, right?

And it gets more strange when you consider the tutorials.

Imagine confronting someone who just wants to write a book with an entire tutorial on how to write like James Joyce.

That’s NeHe Open GL Tutorials. Git Basics? What? “Catch The Clown” in Gamemaker is vastly more use to people than any of those. A short guide on level editing VVVVVV would offer more insight into useful design as would a guide to the Knytt Stories editor. If someone has but a month to write a game and they’re not a coder, an OpenGL tutorial in bollocksese and a tutorial on source control (more bollocksese) is massively uninviting and impractical. It does little to empower the wannabe game maker and far more to send the message that coding is full of hard things and bullshit. Great.

That’s sure to hook people in.

Is NaGaDeMo about making a game in a month or learning to code and following someone’s idea of best practices? The two things don’t have to go hand in hand, this is 2012. We have technology. If this is truly about writing a game in a month, then let’s make it so.

Let’s not have segments that could be used to help people who want to get a game out of their head wasted on bullshit. Why not tell people the tools in order of skill required, show them that they can just grab Twine to explore the details of a story, tell them that if their computer can support it, Klik And Play is an entry point, tell them GM can be done mainly with drag and drop with little or no code required. Tell them useful information, relevant to the reader, the reader who wants to make a game who like most people on the planet, does not understand a word of the bollocksese that coders speak.

NaGaDeMo has the potential to be a great thing. To bring people in who might not make games prior, to be an event that’s more open and accepting than even Glorious Trainwrecks. That shares some of the soul of what it dearly wants to call its spiritual cousin. But that will never be whilst it talks coder. Whilst it discusses terms of writing games as laid down by a coder. Whilst it subscribes to someone else’s idea of what a game should be and whilst it is little more than “a game jam that’s a month instead of a weekend so you can finish up your stuff and not rush, fellow game jammers”.

And I hope that it will be that great thing. Because that’d be really great. A yearly recognised time when people can gather round and make games, even if they’ve never made one before? To be encouraged and to have that encouragement as an integral part of what NaGaDeMo is? To speak to them in human not coder terms? And to help them get those ideas from head to screen? That’d be amazing.

For that to happen though, it has to stop imposing someone else’s idea of what a game should be and it has to talk to people as people and not just talk to coders as coders. It has to be accepting. Right now, it’s a long, long way from that. But it’s not too late to turn it around. And that’s why I’m putting this here, to ask them to consider changing the tone and the intent and to implore them to understand that right now, they’re so far from the spirit of NaNoWriMo, it’s disappointing. And it doesn’t have to be like this. It can change.

Hopefully, one day, the front page will be able to proudly proclaim, in the style of NaNoWriMo

“Ready to Write a Game? You’ve come to the right place

And all will be well in the world.

^{*obviously I know who Chris Hecker is and I’m fine with his opinion. But that’s an opinion that sits uneasy with the NaNoWriMo ethic.}

(this is an edited and rejigged version of an email I fired across to the organisers noting my concerns)

(cross posted from ow)

Browsing around Gamasutra this morning and stumbled across this great Brandon Sheffield piece on game preservation and once again found myself wondering whether in ten years time, there’ll be a big black hole where this generation of games lies^[1].

I’ll freely admit to enjoying the benefits that this uber connected-always-on world brings us and brings to our gaming. It’s an incredible time to have our hobby with so many things going on right now but more than ever, I find myself thinking that with the race to push the game player further and further towards service based, we’re kinda fucking it up a bit for future generations.

We’re already fairly reliant on piracy for preservation because the software industry is especially volatile, studios open, studios close, studios get sold on, people move on, time and hardware move on at a rapid rate. Companies buy IP but care little about heritage and why should they? They exist to make money not to preserve culture as icky as that is to me. Sure, there’s some money to be made from it in reissues but the amount of games that would be deemed worth reissuing? Not many, methinks.

The measures the industry is taking currently to combat their personal devil slims the chances of these things being easily preserved even further. Of course, it’s not just anti-piracy measures as egregious as those can be, there’s the move towards multiplayer and removing dedicated servers from the equation, there’s reliance on online scoreboards, social networks, all sorts of integrated things where each and every layer makes preserving the experience of a game even more difficult. Every service games get tied to is one more point of failure, one more chance of a server shutdown or service closing taking the game with it. Imagine for a second if we’d tied our games to Friends Reunited or to MySpace…

It wouldn’t surprise me to be looking back in ten years time definitely thinking “man, there’s just a black hole where some of the things we created were”, y’know? “Remember all those games we used to play but now can’t?”

John Anderson talked about a fair few of the issues surrounding the matter in his Where Games Go To Sleep series and the follow up Selecting Save On The Games That We Make, The National Videogame Archive is a thing that exists and that’s a good thing although of course, there always remains the questions of not just how to preserve things but what also. I’m in favour of The Museum Of Computing’s attitude of “all of it” and obviously, if it doesn’t include Williams’ Blaster then it’s all for naught anyway but that’s by the by.

There’s another aspect of preservation though that I’ve been thinking about for quite a while and it’s something that everyone can help in.

As a clue, here’s RR regular @ToreSupra damning himself for all eternity^[2] for Save The Videogame. We can all lynch him later, ok.

Over here in the UK, I’ve always found the way we talk about our heritage as a bit, well, fucking embarrassing mainly. This was brought home a few weeks back on the lovely Speccy’s 30th Birthday and rather than stand up and be truly proud of what we had, once again, we drift into the same pathetic arguments over which format was best, the C64 or the Speccy with the obligatory CPC owners looking on a little bit befuddled^[3].

I know, I know some of it is mild entertainment and it’s hard not to resist a breadbin dig and they can still be rather funny but I bring this up to make the point that the one thing we’re tremendously good at in the UK is letting our games history become footnotes rather than achievements and milestones.

We’d sooner squabble than celebrate and that’s kind of a shame.

We don’t champion our quirky stuff nearly enough, we don’t champion the stuff that’s distinct, unique or y’know, just bloody fun anywhere near enough. Because we don’t talk loudly enough about our games. And we don’t really discuss them with a critical voice either. How else could we still have people walk the Earth believing that Rick Dangerous was a good thing to happen?

3d Monster Maze becomes a footnote in first person shooters, Ultimate are those guys that went on to make SNES games and Xbox avatars and we’ll talk of Jet Set Willy and Elite and Minter and Chaos but little else. Obviously Retro Gamer magazine puts in fine service on behalf of most formats and most games but it’s an outlier, we don’t talk about our gaming heritage, our gaming history nearly enough and when we do, we talk about the same things.

We’re the ones who grew up with these games, we grew up playing them, we’re the ones who’ll be first to hit up an emulator to play Obscure-o-game X and yet, we do so little to pass this knowledge on. We just don’t talk outside of our little forums and communities, we don’t give these games a chance to be heard or replayed by those who will never otherwise know about them. And that, also, is something that contributes to games disappearing into the mists of time. Because there’s no-one to tell their tale.

Who then, of the next generation of kids, will know about Technician Ted or Rapscallion or Tir Na Nog? How could they know? What are the chances of them stumbling upon any of them when the history of videogames consists of Space Invaders, Elite, Mario and something something something NINTENDO something something PLAYSTATION something something GEN3 APPLE?

You’d never know we had such a rich and diverse history in this country when it comes to videogames because it’s always Elite, it’s always Jet Set Willy and it’s always bloody Chaos or something.

So your task, for today and for the future, is to go out there and talk about the videogames you played and loved. Tell people what you found great about that pocket money game from Mastertronic with no shame^[4] because it’s one step closer to keeping these games and our history alive.

Write a blog post, make a youtube video, make a tweet, tell your kids. Shout about it. Talk about these things outside of retro circles, outside of retro meets and outside. Let’s talk about our games, the videogames that are special to us because if we don’t no-one else will.

Let’s talk about videogames. For the future and for the past.

“Why must we do this?”, a thousand people who make games cry every time they hear the phrase “we still don’t have our Citizen Kane of gaming”. I don’t know, because it’s funny?

Are we after Citizen Kane:The Benchmark, Citizen Kane:Because It’s Black & White or Citizen Kane:It’s a sledge? It doesn’t matter. We’re doing fine at having our OLD MEDIA moments. But it’s always Citizen Kane isn’t it? Citizen Kane:The Ocarina Of Time of films. Critics adore it and rate it number one best ever repeatedly. Most people watch Transformers:Transform Harder/play Call Of Duty:Call Harder and care not a jot.

What a waste of time and energy looking to old media to light the way. The hand of old media has touched us already. We need not to look to a 70 year old film for our moment to aspire to. No.

Our X of Y list is manyfold already. What could adding one more possibly add? Aside from this imaginary “we can only be signifificant when we do wot he did” and HE IS LONG DEAD. If it is about shame then I would be ashamed to hold up a movie from the 1940′s and say THIS, THIS IS WHERE WE NEED TO BE.

If it is the “games are going through their teenage phase” then fuck off, what does that make the movie industry that pays Michael Bay more money than most of us will ever see to make films about plastic toys? If Citizen Kane is 70 years old and Transformers:Transform With A Vengeance is 1 or 2, how does that shit work out? How?

We’ve done old media anyway. We’ve done it all.

We’ve made The Aliens Of Videogames more times than Hollywood. We’ve made The Predator Of Videogames too. We’ve made The Rambo Of Videogames a hundred times in the eighties alone. We’ve made The Marx Brothers of games, we’ve made Carry On Up The Videogame and we can’t fucking stop making The Lord Of The Fucking Rings of games. Fucking orcs.

We’ve got our Murder She Wrote/Twin Peaks crossover of gaming and we’ve got our straight to video drama of gaming and we’ve got our Independence Day of gaming so we’re doing ok on copying old media, thanks. We’re even perfectly happy to completely ineptly try and sandwich scenes from Full Metal Jacket into games set elsewhere and in a completely different era. I don’t know what that is. Probably the Kentucky Fried Movie of Videogames or something. F3AR:F3AR H4RD3R is pretty much the Every Horror Movie Third Part Of Videogames.

Man, we even gave Cyril Sneer his own sweary science fiction outing we’re that good. So we’ve got The Raccoons Of Videogames too. Raccoons In Space at that. That’s one up for videogames. We’ve got The Soap Opera Of Videogames too. I should probably offer that one without comment for the sake of all of us.

Fuck, we can do ALL THE BOOKS of gaming if we want. We let the Shit David Bowie Album Of Videogames be a thing that exists. I’m pretty sure that’s not right but still, we did it.

Who needs The Citizen Kane of Games when we’ve got The Shit Bowie Album Of Games?

We have all that and we have our media. The things we make. Where it becomes tenuous to X of Y.

We have The Poetry Of Videogames. And The Prog Rock Of Videogames. The Documentary Of Videogames. And The Rambling Of Videogames. Never forget the rambling. Ok, rambling isn’t old media but still. We make games that are akin to rambling.

They’re a stretch, aren’t they? Because they’re ours. They don’t need to look to dead old man or soon to be dead old men. They’re the new fucking things in a new fucking form.

We don’t have to accept that Call Of Duty:Call Hardest is the way the form will always be. I fucking hope, sincerely, it won’t be. I hope we can shit off the hypersexualized mangaze stuff, the bro teabags and many other things as the niche that they are. But the videogame blockbuster is one possible thing of many. And whilst Activision pump a gazillion into Call Of Duty we have thousands more pumping their souls into videogames in new and different shapes.

And we try and hold them down with “but they haven’t made the DEAD OLD MAN of videogames”? “THEY ARE NOT GOOD ENOUGH! ASPIRE TO HERE WHERE HERE IS ON A CHART I INVENTED IN MY HEAD.” That’s not a goal, that’s abuse. It’s a goal no-one can reach because its meaning can move and change on a whim.

Man alive. And in the next breath some say videogames need to grow up? They want us to aspire to be like the work of a dead old man instead of carving our own way? And it is we who should grow up?

The X of videogames is a shit thing to be looking for. It’s a pointless and vague thing to lust after.

Let’s ask for THE BEST FUCKING GAMES WE CAN MAKE instead. Then we’ll get somewhere, right? And yes, that means not accepting that the status quo is the very right way to do things.

It means bringing more people into games. It means lowering the bar and lowering the barrier to creation. It means all the thinking bigger, thinking harder and fuck, thinking more. It means taking the time to make thoughtful pieces alongside crashbangwallopwhatanexplosion pieces. It means considering what we are doing and why we are doing it and whether we should be doing it.

And sometimes, it’s even saying fuck it, I do not know, let’s see what happens.

And it means not holding us back with old media. Because old media is old and old people die.

I don’t pay your bonus.
So when your boss comes in and says
“I’m sorry, but about those sales”
Before you take it out on me
Do I pay your bonus?

I don’t own a game store.
So when your boss comes in and says
“About those second hand sales”
Before you punish me
Do I own a game store?

I don’t pirate your games.
So when you sit there and say
“If we could just convert 1% of pirates today”
Before you punish me
Do I help pay your wage?