by Erin on January 20, 2010
Despite all blogular evidence to the contrary, I am merely buried, not dead — and nearly emerged. Since last we met, there was Thanksgiving (driving to San Diego), Christmas (see “Thanksgiving”), my father’s 70th birthday (flying to San Diego), three Escapist articles, a month-long still-in-action sinus infection (“chronic sinusitis”) with accompanying horse-pill-sized antibiotics, a game careening toward launch, and assorted press wrangling — I did mention that I was appointed to the Board of Directors of the IGDA in November, right? Maybe not. Pop my name into google “news” and you’ll find a bit of what’s been eating my brain the last couple of weeks. And — I’m two thirds of the way through the novel, pushing toward a March deadline.
You read (well, a lot of you did) the ever-inflammatory “Why Your Game Idea Sucks” — joining it in controversy is “Riot Grrrls Wanted”, which I will have more to say about later — much more, once I shake off this blog rust, but for now will just say it’s very peculiar how threatened boy gamers are when you say women should be making more games. A bit before that, the slightly less controversial “Ditching the V-Word”, discussing why the word ‘virtual’ is dead and should be stomped on until it stops moving. Today, the (I think) entirely non-controversial but hopefully equally (or more) interesting “When the Stars Align”, a piece on the development of the completely fascinating 1986 multi-platform Starflight — Greg’s first game. One of the many reasons I took this job was the opportunity to learn from, I now feel confident in saying, one of the most unique and excellent game designers alive today, and in studying his work (in order to understand his design aesthetic better so as to be better at my job as well as learn) I discovered how shockingly underappreciated and under-remembered Starflight is. So this is my attempt to share a small piece of what I’m fortunate to have access to.
In fiction: the good folk at Electric Velocipede were kind enough to select “Darkest Amber” for this issue’s web fiction, so take a gander while you can. This story was the product of a writing challenge from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
jsridler and justinhowe, and is cyberpunk set in a world I hope to do quite a bit more writing in in the future. It has a talking baseball bat and Greek philosophy — what have you got to lose?
In poetry: I am told that “Oneness” will be appearing in the latest Not One of Us special collection, called Hidden. It is yay.
…I think those are all the updates. At least the topline, anyway. I do not promise to bring no IGDA/Rockstar troublemaking over here, all things considered, though I expect the flurry to remain mostly on Gamasutra. And this is assuming I don’t think better of my rather aggressive current opinion.
Hope that you all are doing well!
by Erin on October 23, 2009
I frequently have game-related things I want to post about here (and writing-related things, and science fiction-related things, and…), but rarely feel like I have the time to post thoughtfully, so this is an experiment in writing something off the top of my head just as it occurs to me.
The concept of “user-generated content” has been a buzz-word for a good long while, and it can be perceived perhaps as just that, or maybe it’s something more significant, our inevitable yet exciting slide toward Hamlet on the Holodeck (and the “holodeck” is something that comes up often in any online world discussion)… because of the convenience of the business buzz term (UGC), we’re now beginning to accept in a major way that as we make advances into online space, one of the deepest drives that we have as people is to create, to shape that space for ourselves and not “merely” inhabit it.
But no one’s managed to create a truly workable, accessible UCG-friendly area yet. Second Life isn’t it. Metaplace isn’t it (sorry Raph). Thus far, properties that have made UGC their core mission have not been successful.
Maybe it’s technological limitations, the idea whose time is still not come. Maybe it’s what Will Wright says about The Sims and Spore — that people don’t really want to create, they want the illusion of creating — the illusion of the creative act in the same way Guitar Hero is the illusion and not the reality of musicality.
But I think there’s something else to it, and I also don’t mean to diminish the deep difficulty in creating a user-modifiable space with accessible tools — if it were easy, someone would have done it. The secret sauce balance between UGC and sticky gameplay — the core broad inspiration that hooks a player and makes them feel compelled to create in this space — hasn’t yet been found, though perhaps The Sims has come closest.
Again, though — something else to it. I suspect that game developers are uniquely inhibited in creating user-friendly user-generated-content… generators. We’re so used to forcing a system to do what we want no matter the barrier that it becomes very difficult to squeeze our brains into the experience of, perhaps, the one thing we can’t envision — a person who doesn’t have that immediate burning desire to bend a completely unreasonable tool to their will. And so we wind up creating only slightly less unreasonable tools rather than tools that are actually inviting and intuitive.
This is actually something that I love about designing games for kids. Kids will not give you a single inch. If you do something stupid, you don’t get away with it — they don’t stick around to see if you fix yourself. They tell you that you’re being stupid and they walk away. This applies in fundamental game design, in UI design, in art and in concept — in every dimension. It is a phenomenally educational experience for a designer, to make something for a kid you don’t know, who has no reason to cut you any slack.
And it’s also why we can learn from the web, why we need to reach out to marketing-minded folk and usability experts, because product marketing has learned an awful lot about how to track user behavior and dropoff rates, and what stems the tide. It has been abundantly clear for some time now that the future of online games is not in trapping a consumer through flashy advertising into traveling to a store and buying an expensive box — it’s in online lowest-barrier access. And that means we don’t have them shackled into stubbornly enjoying our product the way we do if they’ve already purchased a retail box — we have thirty seconds to five minutes (in the excessively patient) to differentiate ourselves significantly enough from our competition to keep them clicking. They need a reason in the first gut-check five seconds. Our hooks need to be better. Our content needs to be better. We need to stop thinking we can be sadistic and get away with it, that we can make the game entry process some sort of esoteric and bizarre hazing rather than a welcoming overture that compels and inspires.
So that’s your fast post. Have a great weekend, all!
