Video Games as Art

Do video games approach art? Without a doubt, according to curator Chris Mellesinos who will be mounting an exhibit in March of 2012 at the Smithsonian National Gallery of American Art. Mellesinos states:

"In the same way as film, animation, and performance, [video games] can be considered a compelling and influential form of narrative art."

Moreover, video games continues to eclipse other forms of media entertainment - more than seventy percent of American households play video games on a regular basis, and many families now have two generations of computer users, and gamers, at home. Developers are broadening the complexity of the content to reach every demographic.

Recent game releases are directly challenging us with compelling content. Industry observer Adam Weinberg presents this question to the public at large in his recent article, 'Top 10: Video Games That Approach Art'. Conspicuously absent from Weinberg's list is "Linger in Shadows", which stands as an example of a video game that was specifically made as an art piece.

Raph Koster argues in his book "A Theory of Fun" that Media becomes art when the communicative element is either novel or exceptionally well done. This communicative element should be open to multiple interpretations, for if there is only one possible meaning, the message no longer becomes an interactive dialog between the piece and the observer. He further argues that there is a crucial difference between games portraying the human condition and the human condition merely existing in games.

My personal definition of art is any communicative act or creation that is done or made with an intent towards aesthetics. The key here is communication - art is separated from craftsmanship in that beautiful objects absent of any message are simply beautiful objects. Thus a found object like Duchamp's "Fountain" must be considered art. Whether or not the object or act is particularly well executed is a debate over craftsmanship, but the intent of the art can't be refuted.

I believe the debate over the validity of video games as a topic for scholarly debate is a moment that has long passed us by. If you are still questioning whether the aesthetic study of video games is worthy of scholarly attention while the very medium is being featured in the marbled halls of the Smithsonian, you can conclude that the ship has long sailed along with all of the early advocates, leaving you on the dock. The moment to formalize the aesthetic study of this medium is now.

- St.John

YouTube reveals the dark matter in the Net Universe

I read a recent article about YouTube's mythical bandwidth costs, which to date have been left to speculation. YouTube minimizes it's costs by purchasing unused fiber optic cable known as “dark fiber” — and uses it to carry its traffic to other networks where it “peers” or trades traffic with other ISPs. Its costs for bandwidth are then amortized across the life of its fiber and routers. It is evident that over time, the top 30 content providers will become increasingly adept at finding ways to minimize bandwidth costs.

So what does this all mean? Bottom line: Profit from bandwidth will plummet - competition from content will increase as bandwidth costs decrease. As the room becomes increasingly noisy from content providers, the winners will be those who provide quality content.

Old School Games Research

Here's some great resources for Golden Age Video Games research:
Play it on the Web
The Basement Arcade

Quality vs Quantity

At this year's Casual Connect, Arthur Humphrey has this to say regarding competition among casual games:

"Developers can best weather the storm of increased competition and falling prices in the casual game space by creating strong, innovative brands rather than cranking out greater numbers of cheaper low quality titles".

A both a developer and a fan, I have to agree that bringing value to your customer is always the best long term business decision. The message here is to avoid the pitfall of making the quick dollar which will only serve to foul the very waters of your market with an over saturation of poor games.

The Rise of the Audience

While listening to "Which way, studios?" on KCRW's The Business, Kim Masters, Stephen Galloway, and John Horn introduced the idea that star vehicles and franchises are no longer reliably effective in guaranteeing a return on investment in a major motion picture. This is attributable to the rise of the power of peer to peer communication superseding the hype of the Hollywood press or the allure of the super star:



"Movie ciritcs might not have liked Transformers sequel but the audience did. We live in a day where the audience can go see a movie on Friday night, and by the time they come out, their texting their friends, their putting something up on their Facebook or their mySpace page, so you can pay Eddie Murphy 20 million dollars and put him in "Imagine that" and by Fri night the audience has said this movie is terrible and your dead."



This idea can also be extended to the video game industry insofar that in the face of rising development costs and market overcrowding, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ensure a return on your development dollars even if you are in possession of a valuable franchise. It is far more important to generate a positive buzz from the core audience who will tweet the virtues or flaws of your product more cost effectively than any other form of advertising.

The way to capitalize on this phenomenon is to adopt a strategy of selling your title at cost in order to focus on getting your product into the hands of your audience. Whether on XBox Live Arcade, PSN, Wii Network, Facebook or iPhone Apps, it's all about getting your game in the top 50 downloads. If you've done your job and made a good game, you will quickly amass a huge following which can be monetized on the back end via micro purchases, level add-ons and game sequels.

Titans of the big screen hope to conquer a smaller screen: video games

A new crop of Hollywood suitors are getting back into the video games ring and are promising to get video game development right. According to a recent LA Times article:

An increasing number of big shots from the movie business are seeing new opportunities in the $50-billion global interactive entertainment industry. Power producers such as Jerry Bruckheimer and Thomas Tull, as well as hot directors such as Gore Verbinski and Zack Snyder, have all recently dived into the still-growing game market.

But simply buying up development assets and inserting movie industry savvy personnel in key positions is not the right way to finding a development pipeline that will translate motion picture IP to video game consoles. The inherent problem is that you have to match the right kind of game genre to your motion picture IP and game engines are proprietary to each game genre. The list of Video Game Genres is roughly as follows:

Action
Shooter
Action-adventure
Adventure
Construction/ Management simulation
Life simulation
Role-playing
Strategy
Vehicle simulation
Party Games
Sports Games
Puzzle Games
Music Games

If you are in the business of making the same video game sequel over and over again, reusing the same engine works fine, but video game audiences have become quite sophisticated and demand a great deal of technically advanced content from developers. In order to compete, video games must not only tout new content with each release, they must also introduce new game play dynamics to wow their audiences.

Most importantly, these game play dynamics must match the action and mood of the narrative. For example, if you are developing a video game title for "The Matrix", you'll probably connect well to your core audience if you build a fighting game that features the ability to leap from building to building. But if you choose to build a realtime strategy game where you deploy agents in the matrix as an operator, you will probably loose your audience. In each case, both game concepts are popular genres, but a realtime strategy game is truly a poor choice to capture the live action in-your-face style of fighting that made "The Matrix" arguably so successful.

Ok, so arriving at the conclusion that a kung fu stlyle game requires a kung fu style engine is not rocket surgury. But the problem arises when the project that follows is an epic World War II saga that is better suited to use a realtime strategy engine that allows for the large scale deployment and control of troops. None of the infrastructure of the previous kung fu style game engine is suitable to build the game you want. Video game development teams are not interchangeable components that can be switched out on the fly. These teams often take years to put together and hone into cost effective, creative teams that can develop award-winning games. This makes the potential overhead for game studios that support motion picture intellectual properties pretty huge. A typical startup will cost about $30 - 40 million to develop a title of reasonable quality, but only $5 - 8 million a year to maintain thereafter. If you have to eat the same startup costs everytime you want to develop a new game genre, then you are either faced with an unprofitable games division or you will have to limit yourself to making the same kind of movie every time since you only have one variety of proven game engine pipeline. Lucas Arts did precisely that - they only had to worry about supporting one film franchise and dedicated the rest of their games studio to pursuing titles that were unrelated to supporting movie franchses, such as their acclaimed Monkey Island series and others.

If Jerry Bruckheimer was smart (and the record thus far suggests that he is), this problem can be solved in two ways. The first solution is to build a games division that is so large, it contains game development teams that specialize in every major video game genre. You would have to be involved in several major motion pictures a year to sustain this kind of game studio model, which is precisely why Disney Interactive has been successful, while Dreamworks had to sell their videogames division to EA.

But the better solution for the rest of us is to outsource. It is simply impossible for any single game studio to have the capacity to develop for any game genre. If your only producing a few motion picture titles a year and you want to develop your properties for the video games market, then you should be creating a small publishing team staffed with production and development veterans from the video games community who are smart enough to walk the line between the motion picture and video games development world.

Perhaps this time, Hollywood will get video game development right.

Solvent or Glue?

Will Wright, developer of The Sims , Spore and other computer games, is one of my most admired developers in the field of electronic entertainment. In a New York Times article he speaks about creating and managing development teams.

When I’m managing creative people, the way they relate to failure is very important. Because there are certain types of failure that you really want to celebrate. I personally learned a lot more from my failures than from my successes. And if you look at it that way, then all my failures, you know, in some sense brought me to my larger successes, because I recognized why I failed, and I learned from it. And so, at that point, you can even argue that it’s not a failure. It’s part of your learning process.

And so, even with interns, it’s kind of interesting to see how they relate to failure. Does it motivate them, do they go a different direction, do they give up or do they learn from it and get some insight and add it as part of their tool chest? In some sense it is an award that they’ve earned.

- Will Wright

Bruckheimer to launch video game studio

Bruckheimer is the latest Hollywood kingpin to dive into the $50-billion-and-growing global game industry. Lured by software sales that have eclipsed those of the music industry and long ago surpassed box-office revenue, many film and TV executives have gone down the same path -- only to find success elusive in the risky, hits-driven game business.

More...

But will it be successful? Deep pockets certainly helps, but check out what Paul graham has to say about the subject in his essay:

The 18 Things that Kill Startups...

- St.John

Report: Outsourcing Alone Not The Answer To Big Cost Savings

Video games are predicted to hit $42 billion in revenue by 2010, and game outsourcing will be a significant part of that. Video games veteran Shiraz Akmal notes, "One study actually says that game outsourcing will hit $1.1 billion dollars in terms of revenue by the end of this year, and $2.5 billion by the end of the decade".

But cheap overseas labor isn't as effective as a means of cost savings as some game developers may hope, according to an outsourcing study by consultancy firm Beriah.

This article is worth only half of the resulting comments. Jason Manley of Massive Black notes,

"The hourly or daily rate in outsourcing is not what studios should look at when doing this. They should be looking at total production cost including internal management hours, feedback loop quantity, production time and the like, on each asset. Some outsourcing studios will quote 20 bucks an hour but after your own managers pull their hair out with extended hours and a dozen feedback loops per asset, you end up paying more. It comes down to the total cost per asset, internal and external as well as overall quality grade."

My own experience suggests this is accurate. The cost formula I use is:

Admin cost /100 MD + Management cost/10 MD

Administrative cost: This includes the expense of identifying suitable outsourcing partners, Negotiating bids, and expediting business transactions. This cost will demand the part time attention of the General Manager, the Financial Manager and you Outsourcing Manager. The initial cost of identifying your outsourcing partner will likely include travel to meet the key personnel and familiarize the outsourcing vendor with your project. After the initial expense, estimate 1 internal man-day/ 100 man-days outsourced per individual involved. (e.g. 1 MD each for the GM, FM and OM).

Management cost: This includes tracking outgoing and incoming assets, inspecting work, generating feedback for corrections, and integrating final assets back into your pipeline. This job demands 1 manager-day per 10 man-days outsourced. In other words, if they've got a team of 30 artists working on your assets, you need at least 3 internal personnel to oversee their work. This cost will also demand the part time attention of your art director and your art lead during the inspection process. After the initial expense, estimate 1 internal man-day/ 10 man-days outsourced per manager involved.

Nexon's MapleStory Reaches 92 Million Global Users

Nexon's MapleStory will celebrate its fourth anniversary in the U.S. on May 11 -- the service has been running for six years globally -- and Nexon America has announced that the game is up to 92 million users worldwide, six million of those in North America.

MapleStory is a free-to-play 2D MMO by South Korean developer Wizet, published in North America, Japan, Korea and some Asian territories by Nexon, by Shanda in China, and by other publishers in regions including Brazil and Vietnam.

Nexon America also touts the game's thriving community, noting that over 200,000 fan-made MapleStory videos are available on YouTube.

More...

The Social Network Game Boom

"The Social Network Game Boom"

With over 200 million people registered on Facebook, the most popular social networking site, and millions, millions more on similar sites like MySpace, Bebo, and Hi5, social networking has become a part of daily life.
As quoted in the Financial Times, one CIO of a leading U.S. firm found that her young employees "communicate by Facebook and simply will not read their e-mail." Worldwide, social activists are using social networking sites to organize protests. Meanwhile, others have found old classmates and friends using these sites. It's a testament to the power of social networking.

More...

Women in Games

In his article on Women in Games, Chris Crawford writes:

I have long since given up participating in discussions on women in gaming. The games industry is so out of touch, such discussions are a waste of perfectly good electrons. When Microsoft wanted to publicize an event for women at a Game Developers' Conference a few years back, they splashed around banners showing a woman in a low-cut dress. Some people just don't get it.

I'm going to offer a fresh approach to the problem, coming at it from a completely different angle: evolutionary psychology.

More...

Video Game Legal Issues

Dale Dietrich writes a great Video Game Law Blog that answers a lot of legal issues in the Video Game industry.

Video Game Law Blog

Nothing for Something

Virtual goods is big business. How big? Habbo Hotel reports $77 million in revenue for virtual goods in 2006. That's $77 Million with an "M" for goods sold that don't actually exist.

Cash is not king

Eric Reis writes, "Cash on hand is just one important variable in a startup’s life, but it’s not necessarily the most important. What matters most is the number of iterations the company has left. While some cost-cutting measures reduce that number, others increase it. In lean times, it’s most important to focus on cutting costs in ways that speed you up, not slow you down. Otherwise, cutting costs just leads to going out of business a little slower.

The full formula works like this:

• runway = cash on hand / burn rate
• # iterations = runway / speed of each iteration

Check out the full article here: Cash is not king

Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

Google reported that its revenue for the fourth quarter period ending December 31, 2008, was $5.70 billion, yet charges nothing for many of it's products and services. Google succeeds because it creates value that attracts customers and makes money through the side door of advertising.

In this Wired Magazine article, Chris Anderson discusses why Free Is the Future of Business.