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Posts Tagged ‘new models’

The Future is Now

January 31st, 2013 1 comment

Season 3 in League of Legends is fast approaching. In fact, as of 20 minutes ago, ranked queues were shut down in preparation for the patch. The EU server qualifiers were last weekend. Teams are done.

We’re here.

You know, I find the interesting thing, the really compelling thing about League of Legends at the moment is the way they’re trying to bridge the divide between conventional and electronic sports. They’ve got a regular season schedule planned out, the way you would a hockey season. Each server bracket (NA and EU, who we might think of as conferences) has 8 teams playing against each other in single matches every Thursday and Friday for the North American server, and Saturday and Sunday for the Europeans. Teams are required to have subs, because they’re going to be playing for ten weeks straight. There’s going to be a midseason break, where each division’s lowest teams get pitted against rising non-professional teams from the ranked bracket, who you can be sure will be hungry for their spots. There will be salaries involved.

If you think that eSports is just a fad, we’re talking about millions of dollars in prize money, and more than that in advertising. These games are going to be streamed, HD, for free. There’ll be video on demand, we’re talking about the beginnings of an annual thing. MLB, NBA, NFL, and NHL will have at least one more acronym to add to the list by the time season 3 is over, mark my words.

So get used to the future, gamers.

We’re here.

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Free For All

January 29th, 2013 1 comment

The alternate title of this post is “A Few More Word On Why You Should Be Watching eSports”, because there’s a great video out from PCGamer. T.J. Hafer takes five minutes, and gives us some very compelling commentary.

Go watch it. I’ll still be here.

Ready?

I think it’s a great piece, but I also think that I can give you an even better reason for watching eSports, and the reason is accessibility. If you have an interest in the game, you can go be part of a community with not only people like you, but the competitors themselves, just as soon as you want. You can be part of a group within five minutes of learning about the sport.

The necessity of online gaming is there in its name: online gaming. It must be played on the internet somehow, and the truth of the matter is that the medium on which we play is also the medium on which the whole world communicates. I find this level of possible involvement and global influence in the sport itself fascinating. We can talk to the stars of the show on Reddit, or a blog. We can be part of the community of fans by going to the forums and email lists. We can spectate matches on justin.tv and twitch.tv. Because the sport has to be watched online, where anyone can access it, we create a necessarily large potential fan base. As the internet continues its global spread into our pockets, and the ability to get information spans from the mountain steppes of rural China to the slums of the favelas in Brazil, eSports has a path to be seen by everyone in the world.

The other side to accessibility comes from being on the field, and not just watching from the stands. Combine the following facts: Not only does the action take place behind the mask of a keyboard, but the competitors have such names as Locodoco, Saintvicious, and ZionSpartan. That anonymity creates a Mary Jane effect, where anyone could be playing. All of the time that the players put into this is something that everyone can do. Universal accessibility means that we could aspire to be as good as the pros someday. The characters we see being controlled on the screen could just as easily obey our own commands.

These two facets, universal visibility and unlimited participation, make eSports accessible to anyone and everyone. From a 30 year old woman who has just a passing interest in video games to people who have been playing them since they were 3, any gamer is welcome to come and watch.

And you should.

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Seats at the Table

January 1st, 2013 No comments

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking about player buy-in. That developers should have to pay attention to this resource should be a given at this point, but what do players have to do with their investment? How should they treat it, and what does it afford them as players?

First off, I don’t think players should be stingy with their investment. It’s not something that should be hoarded or treasured without ever expending. The cool thing about investment is that nothing sells like it. When all your friends convince you you should play in and be enthusiastic about a game, you tend to listen. That doesn’t mean that you should give 110% to everything. That’s going to just drain you until you don’t care about anything, much less a game. To that end, I suggest that you at least give yourself a chance to be hooked by a game. Read its synopsis. Read a blog article about it. Listen to your friend extol its virtues. Merely hearing about it isn’t going to hurt, and it may in fact get you involved in something you’ll enjoy. But be prepared to give constructive feedback, and let the developer have a chance to better his game with it. If your friend comes running up to you and tells you that he has an amazing idea for an Exalted game, give him the chance to pitch it. When he tells you it’s an Abyssal exalted game, and you’re all playing Heroic Mortals, then you may want to tell him why it’s not your cup of tea.

Similarly, do the developer and yourself a favor: be honest about your buy-in. If you have only a little to give because of other commitments, say that at the start of any game you’re going to be playing. “You know guys, this sounds really awesome, but I’ve only got a weekend a month to devote to it. Could we make a character that doesn’t need me to be there all the time?” People (and by this, I mean the game’s storyteller or developer and the other player) will listen. Their ability to listen gets clogged by signal-to-noise ratios though, so make sure the message is heard.

With so many people involved in the creative process, telling people how you feel about investing in a game is tricky. In a tabletop game, lots of these points would be easy to consider. It’s just six people, so there’s not a lot of other opinions to take into account. If you’re a potential player in a game that meets at your friend’s Bob house every Wednesday night and you know everyone there, your communication will be relatively clear. Alternatively, when you’re part of the Mind’s Eye Society or helping to develop inXile’s next RPG, there are going to be a lot of people talking, all at once, and not all of them will want to hear you. Not all of them will be paying attention. This is not always a reason to give up though. If you are enthused about a game, if you’re prepared to invest in it, you should keep talking, and encourage people to do the same. Work out what can be done with something you’re prepared to spend time and energy on and make it the game you want to play. You have a reasonable expectation to be entertained by a game, provided that you come in good faith to the table, just like everyone else.

If, at the end, you don’t feel like you’ve been listened to, or the game isn’t going to be what you want, remember that it is just a game. This shouldn’t devalue it, or your experiences with games, but please be mindful that if the investment you’re putting into it isn’t giving you back what you want, you have every right to walk away from it, and find something else that suits you. It’s up to everyone at the table to play with each other, and create an environment to play in.

This seems like a nice place to start the discussion on investment. How do you become invested in a game? How do you encourage investment? Take a look at the new mechanics for Requiem’s Majesty Discipline and think about how the very fabric of the power requires and promotes investment on both players. The Boon system, teased about in that article, suggests that if you play along as a victim of the power, you get rewarded. Buy-in is created on the part of the user of the power, the victim of the power, and the Storyteller. Tell us your thoughts about buy-in in the comments below.

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Purchasing Power

December 15th, 2012 No comments

When the medium was young, game developers didn’t have to care as much about “player buy-in”, the investment of energy, time, money, and other resources that is put in by participants. The novelty, particularly in video games, was a sufficient hook to entice people to make that investment. It was something new, something so unlike what had come before as to produce the necessary buy-in. People were practically lining up just for the privilege of trying such a thing.

But as we’ve come along, and as we begin to look critically at tabletop and video games, it’s becoming clear that player buy-in is absolutely necessary for a successful game. Where once Nintendo would get that buy in with the mere idea of a game, the power has shifted to the players. “There are so many games out there that I have my pick. Why should I choose yours?” People involved in the development of games, either those they are writing themselves, or those they’re leading as storytellers or narrators, must be mindful of this facet of gaming.

First, a little clarity. This phenomenon of investment has always existed, in one form or another. It’s what creates fans of books, or movies, or TV shows. “Did you hear about…?”, “Have you seen…?”, “You know what’s really cool…” and variants have existed for as long as we could talk about our interests, and share them. The desire to make communities around things we love is a very primal one, but with games, it’s taken a decidedly more communal turn. Books are written, produced, and finished. Feedback is submitted to an author, and perhaps he takes note of it (turning The Jew into Fagin for example), but it’s not a prerequisite for writing a novel, nor directing TV. Just ask J. J. Abrams.

Games though are an inherently collaborative experience, and investiture in them means getting something out of them than more than just entertainment. When you grab your five friends and tell them you want to run a game of Vampire: the Masquerade, what you’re saying is “I have an idea for a story I want to tell, and would love for you to help me write it.” When you become part of a guild on WoW or a corporation in EVE, you are throwing a lot more than just your time and energy into the game: you’re building something. You’re investing in something that can be transformed, which is why it’s all the more sad when those structures we build fall, as all things do in time. I’m sad I’m not playing WoW with my guild anymore, even though they’re all still my friends, and we spend a lot of time on LoL now. Some of my sweetest memories of tabletop are the outrageous stories I helped to tell with my characters and their actions, and in one notable circumstance, my character’s death.

The people who are mindful of this property of games are going to be the ones who make the most successful ones. Doublefine and inXile used reward tiers on Kickstarter to promote the idea that we weren’t just investing our money in these projects; they opened up forums for backers to come in and give their opinions as the very games are being made, and I think that’s a very wise move. It’s also something that Kickstarter encourages: you’re not only putting your money on the line for a product, but you are also given an amount of control in the production of what you’re funding. I’m not just a backer of Wasteland 2, it’s in a very real sense my game. That buy-in is, in itself, a reward, and will make for a better experience when all’s said and done.

I think, and I’ve talked about this before, that Kickstarter’s role in gaming is expanding. The ability to invest in games will become the new norm, and big name developers have got to be more responsive to their player’s wants and needs. That responsiveness is one of the reasons Valve and Riot are so successful. What’s keeping the bigger names afloat, the ones who chronically and habitually ignore the ideas and investiture of its customers, is capital. They’ve already got the buy in, but now they’re living on borrowed time. Get ready kids: it’s going to be an exciting few years.

(Next week: Part 2! What does buy-in mean for the players?)

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How Fine? Double Fine

February 11th, 2012 2 comments

Double Fine’s unprecedented success with its Kickstarter donation drive to produce a new game begs a question: Can this be a sustainable business model for the future of gaming? Before we tackle that weighty question, let’s start with some facts and observations, and wend our way from there.

For those of you who haven’t heard, Double Fine Productions, lead by Tim Schafer, decided that they wanted to start a new game. It is what they do, being a game production company after all, but still, they felt the itch. The being said, the problem with most independent developers (and Double Fine is one of the largest), is their inability to gain the financing necessary to produce their games. Many games that do get developed by indie teams are just labors of love, and any compensation for them comes at the end of the process, if it comes at all. Many actually just die on the operating table, and never see the light of day. Their producers are small 2-3 man teams, who need jobs to pay the bills. They can’t afford keep working all night in their garages, as they’ve got to get sleep at some point. The costs involved (the technology, the staff, the office space, and the energy requirements to name a few) in producing games like Call of Duty, Madden NFL, and Assassin’s Creed is the reason that Activision, EA, and Ubisoft exist at all.

So Tim decided he wanted to cut out the middle man. Enter Kickstarter. A website that accrues donations for creative projects, Tim decided to set up a drive there to see if he could get his game financed. He wanted $300,000 to fund it, and an extra $100,000 to film it.

He got that much in 8 hours. People didn’t stop. Currently, it’s at $1,521,422. For those of you busting out your calculators, that’s 3.7 times as much as he asked for. With 31 days left to go.

Unless something catastrophic happens, it’s easy to predict that this game will be a success. The talent is there, and so is the money. Gobs and gobs of money. But is this a sustainable business scheme for the future? That’s a little trickier to speculate on.

The buzz for this product may have really started when Notch tweeted “Let’s make this happen.” He was specifically talking about Psychonauts 2, but the internet noticed, and maybe Tim did too. It’s tough to say without interviewing him when exactly he got the idea to go to Kickstarter. It’s also tough to say if anyone else could have had the success in using Kickstarter that Tim Schafer has. He has the luxury of a great intro video, an impressive gaming resumé, and an amazing team. Though the games page on Kickstarter is full of projects that have been funded successfully, it’s tough to use that as a gauge to see the projects that have failed to be adequately funded, because they just don’t show up. However, there are plenty of games and other projects on Kickstarter that don’t have Tim Schafer behind them, and they get funded just fine.

But I think it’s the beginning of a new era, certainly. As with book publishing, game publishing is being… well not crowd sourced exactly, but definitely crowd financed. The major limiting factors for the creation for books and games have been money and avenues for distribution. But these walls are being torn down in this digital age. Distribution platforms such as Valve’s Steam, Amazon’s Kindle Store, and Apple’s iTunes, the bars for both the cost to produce these goods and the ability to spread them are being lowered substantially. Anyone with a computer can create something and spread it as they like. The real limiter then becomes, as it always should be, quality. The things that do well should be intrinsically more valuable than those that don’t. Because anyone can make anything, the good things will naturally rise to the top as more people examine, use, and play these games. The ones that are worth it will be talked about and shared, and the ones that aren’t will be forgotten.

As gamers, I think we should promote these trends for two reasons:

1. Encouraging the distribution of games increases their popularity be definition, giving us a broader and healthier community.

2. Having more options to pick from in terms of games gives us stronger games, and lets the medium develop as a true art form.

I realize that not everyone can afford to pitch in to the projects they would like to. Times are tough, and money’s always been tight for a lot of friends of mine. That being said, if you can’t contribute monetarily, please spread the word. These kinds of things need to be endorsed, for the good of both our hobby and community. And if you’ve got the time, and the inclination, then do so yourself. Get on Kickstarter, grab some friends, get out there, and make something. Do us all proud.

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Beware the Bear!

May 26th, 2009 1 comment

For all my Feral brothers and sisters, our time is at hand! We can rejoice, finally, after so long and take back our birthright!

Yay new models.

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