LovePosted by Eskil Sat, July 17, 2010 00:54:14Have you ever seen a real street fight? The sound of fists hitting flesh is eerily muted. You are immediately struck by how its nothing like in a video game or a film. Have you ever been present when some one dies? Have you ever been in the same room as a relative who just passed away? You may have waded your way through mountains of rag-dolled bodies in games, but It wont have prepared you one bit.
Again and again we are being told that video games are murder simulators that make us desensitized and unable to distinguish fictional violence from real violence. Then why is the first thing that hits you when you are confronted with real violence how different it is from video games? No matter how many games you play, you can tell the difference, its not something you even have to think about, its an immediate physical and emotional reaction. So should we discard the violence in videogames debate out right? No, I don't think so, but for a very different reason.
How many evil people have you meet? How about how many badguys do you know? How many people have you meet who you think deserves to die? Its an awkward question isn't it? You have probably met some jackass in a bar, maybe you have an annoying relative with a drinking problem, and everyone remembers that boy or girl you grew up with who was just mean. We all know people we don't like, or who behave antisocially, but its a long way from calling them evil. Even if they are incredibly destructive, you know they are very troubled people, and when you get over the initial anger, you feel sorry for them, because their inability to interact with others is sad.
Now if I ask if there are bad people in the world worth fighting, its a very different thing. People start naming terrorist groups, dictators and criminals that should be delt with. The emotional response is gone, people don't feel awkward or sad, its just something that should deal with as a matter of fact. Clean out the world, Eliminate the Cancer, Burn the trash. Why is that? Why do so many respond so differently to people they have had no contact with? If you have never meet anyone you think should deserve to die, why would you be so sure there are people you don't know who does? If you think its right to shoot people over there, why don't you go around shooting people you don't like where you live? What has perpetuated the idea that there are bad people who deserves violence out there when we have no evidence of it around us?
Maybe the problems with fictionalized violence, isn't that we cant tell the difference, but that we can. The further from our reality they go, the more they convince us they are depicting some other reality somewhere distant, far away from any of the people we know. By so clearly being different they can convince us that in their reality our laws of decency doesn't apply, and by extension they convince us that there are other places where our normal moral rules do not apply.
I think that you have to have severe mental problems to not see the difference between real and videogame violence. But lets not talk about crazy people, lets talk about normal people. Would normal people accept military force as a solution if the only contact they have ever had with violence was that jackass in the bar or some drunk uncle? Would people really think that engaging in a street fight of global proportions was a good idea worth voting for? I'm not so sure. The only way of accepting it, is to clearly separate it from all our real life experiences of violence, and create a separate fiction of violence.
We kling to arbitrary rules to clearly separate the violence we accept, from the one we know from real life. Bomb strapped to chest are bad while bomb strapped to a plane is good, unless the plane is be bomb of course. Dieing in uniform is dignified, while being alive and naked in Abu Ghraib is not. The loss and pain of 9/11 justifies violence, but the many many 9/11s in terms of civilians lost in Iraq or Afghanistan or Gaza has experienced does not justify resistance. As a society we tell ourselves that as long as we stick to theses rules of decency the morals of the world are that of a video game. Fiction has propagated the Idea that violence is a great solution, and even if we have never seen it proven in real life, we believe it because we can claim that if you go far enough away, all your arguments against it will be overruled by different circumstances.
I like shooters, I even make a shooter. To me an action game is escapism, because even if I'm against voilence, I wish things where as simple as they are in a video game. I wish that burly men with chainsaws attached to their guns was the solution to all things bad, but they are not. Maybe we can some day make a game that simulates the real impact of voilence. A game with parrents mourning their dead children and sons growing up to avenge their dead parrents, but would we want to play such a game? Probably not, it is not a comfortable experience.
We find comfort in the idea that police and soldiers are good men fighting the Locust Horde, the flood, Helghast, or Cyber daemons. We want them to be heroes with clear contains who protect us all. We feel safe, because they stand guard against whatever is out there. We don't care to know if the threat is like the fiction of a video game or just plane fiction, just as long as we don't have to think of what really happens, because we rather think that over there, it all a game.
LovePosted by Eskil Mon, June 07, 2010 05:59:11I am bit of a news junkie, and when something happens (Like when IDF
decides its a good idea to shoot peace protesters in the head) Its hard
for me not to reach for my browser. Much is made about how we now have
so much news instantly at our fingertips with the Internet, but I'm not
so sure we really do. Often I find myself reading 10 different articles
about the exact same event from 10 different outlets, just to find the
one or two sentences of information that I cant find in the other nine.
If more information means the same information many times I'm not so
sure I see the point. A friend of my presently relayed a news flash
with the head line "Premier of Japan resigns", and opening the message
it read: The premier of japan resigns, in a news conference on Japanese
TV The premier declared -I resign. Was it necessary to say he resigned
three times? Surly there must be context that would be more valuable to
read then that. In fact without context it has no value what so ever.
People are spending a lot of time talking about how print and TV is
dead, how attention spans are shorter and that "old media" need to
change in order to compete. Yes, they do need to change, but if you
look at successful old media, they are going the opposite directions.
Have movies become shorter and less expensive lately to compete with
Youtube? Have the Harry potter and Twilight books been shrunk down to
pamphlets to compete with blogs? I used to read the daily paper but I
have found it to be too short format so now ill rather spend my time
reading a 10page article in Vanity Fair then a single page in a daily.
Once radio was a medium that the family gathered around. But when TV
arrived and it became the medium families gathered around. Did Radio
die? No it became about music, it became something you listen to in
your car or while you work. I love
radio and
podcasts because they are
always about content and not about surface, unlike the medium that
"replaced" it.
I hear about how CNN is in a dire state, loosing viewers and relevance
to "New media", and nobody seams to think they can fix it. Nobody even
wants the job since they are so sure it doomed to fail. Well Ive always
had the secret dream of running a 24H news channels, so Turner if you
are reading (I'm sure you are) here is what I would do to CNN (or any
other "Old media")
Everything is interesting if you dig deep enough, nothing is interesting on surface.
I would like to see an hour long interview of a head of state talking
about a SINGLE issue. Don't move on, once you got the sound bite, let
them explain it and find the depth of their knowledge, bu asking follow
ups. A good interview has a single question and many followups. When I
watch or read something I want to learn something new, don't tell me
how many pages the bill is over and over, start on page one and explain
it to me. You say "that's too boring, no one will watch that", Well the
thing is that once you have gotten it explained to you, you will look
at the world differently and then you can see through all the pundits
because you know the truth. That's when you come back for more. There
are so many things I would like to know, Like right now I would kill to
be in the room with the engineers who are trying to fix the oil leak in
the Mexican gulf, They say its hard, and while i don't dispute that i
would really like to hear what the discussion comes down to. Sure I
would probably not understand every third word, but it would also mean
that there is a big chance i would learn some new ones. Show me a heart
operation and explain it to me, Show me what a pilot does in the
cockpit, just show me!
Don't cut away.
Why do we never get to see the entire thing? I see video clips form the
clamp down of the Red shirts in Thailand, but only a few seconds at the
time. Why not show a 30 minutes of almost real-time footage? Yes it may
be shaky, and it may be rough, but if there is one thing that real-time
footage can convey its mood. You feel what its like to be there. With
documentaries like "the revolution will not be televised" or "9/11" and
everything you need to know is in peoples faces. Forget about the
pretty graphics, show the grainy footage.
There is no dignity in censorship.
Why is it that media think that is dignified to show Linsey Lohans
Poonani, but not dignified to show dead soldiers, or civilians? If you
think about the Vietnam war you think about certain images. A suspected
spy being executed with a revolver to his head, a girl running naked
with napalm on her back. They aren't pretty but they are honest images
of war. We don't see thous images from the wars going on right now. Is
it because they don't exist?
They do, they just aren't published any
more, out of respect for the people in the pictures. Well I think a
news agency needs to first and foremost respect their readers and
viewers. Don't let them die in vain, let their pictures be their final
message. The rule should be show, don't tell. Follow the man who got
wounded in a can bomb in Baghdad, from arriving on the scene, to the
rescue to the ambulance all the way to the hospital. Convey what its
like to be there. Don't make people know what happens, make them
understand.
Forget first. Take your time.
Why do your reporters have to file every day? let them take the time to
make a mini documentary, filing that 3 people was killed in Gaza
doesn't mean anything. Instead make a longer segment
telling their
stories, find out what happened who they where and then, instead of
broadcasting a 45 second segment four times an hour for six hours, play
a
30 minute segment 2 times a day for a week. TV should be in the
documentary Biz not in the news Biz. With low cost cameras and laptop
editing, it doesn't cost much to have some one work a week on a
segment. You will never be first, and even if you are, it wont last, so
be the definitive. It is the long format that can really put us
somewhere we haven't been before.
Don't argue, just analyze.
Again and again we see people make statements on TV and then people
argue about if its good or bad. Why not just let the facts speak for
themselves? If some one says something was an "act of war" bring up the
carter and read the definition of what an act of war really is instead
of arguing about it, or let it slide. Show me the numbers, don't let
anyone say that the budget deficit is caused by pork, without pulling
up the budget and checking how much of it really is pork, and while you
are at it define pork. Why is Jon Stewart the only one who has figured
out that if a politician says something that contribute what they have
said in the past, you don't need to argue with them, all you need to to
show the tape. It beats any pundit.
No angles.
I'm amazed by how journalists claim to be impartial at the same time as
they are always looking for an angle? Once a person or event has gotten
a narrative they become caricatures of themselves, Bush is stupid, Kim
Jong Ill is evil and Linsey Lohan is drunk. Then what? It may be true,
but they aren't only that, so once you have told us, why not deepening
our understanding rather then reinforce a shallow understanding? It
feels like every story has a boilerplate that journalists think they
have to slavishly follow.(Ever read an article about me that didn't
have the angle "Crazy loner makes weird game"?) I don't think you need
to have a point of view to be a good journalist, and i think its your
job to challenge and expand our world view not reinforce it.
Set your journalists free.
Most of all, news organizations has to set their journalists free. In
my view a good boss is a protector. A TV station, a paper or a magazine
needs viewers, and they need subscribers or adds, but thous aren't the
journalists problem, and a good news director should protect her
journalist staff from all that. There is an amazing amount of
fantastic
people out there who want to tell stories, and with the Internet they
have never been easier to find. Today they don't have the support and
platform they need, so instead of making them chase the competition let
them do their thing.
In what ever you do, you have go to go your own way. What ever is in
now, is going to be so crowded by the time you get in to it that its
pointless. To make some thing good happen you have o have your own
ideas and go against the stream, and perhaps that is harder when its
our job to report on the stream. But remember that often the world is
often shaped by events, but how how the events are reported, so isn't
it time journalists took charge of their own place in history.
LovePosted by Eskil Steenberg Mon, May 03, 2010 09:37:20A month has past since Loves release, many smaller changes has been
made, and in its current form, Love is near complete. It was never
meant to be complete, so it must evolve. Its time to announce Loves
first major expansion: AVAIL
One of the greatest strengths of Love is that you are always playing at
the same level as everyone else, and you are never shut our because you
don't have a high enough level character or don't have the right gear.
I am very committed to protect this level of freedom but at the same
time there are some downsides to how Love works right now. Many players
feel that while enjoyable the game is pointless. You build only to have
it be destroyed, and they would like to see a more long term goal to
pursue. AVAIL will add character progression but in a way that is very
different from how other games implement it. While there are no
classes, players do take on different roles while playing, and the game
should acknowledge that. New players will know who to ask questions to,
and more experienced players will be able to direct, but never control
other players.
So how do you "Level up"? Killing scorpions? Collecting bore pelts?
Love is about playing together and who better to judge your progress,
then your fellow players? The game will give you the standing you
deserve by cooperating with other players. Your standing will also
change depending on who is online. No matter how nice you have been to
others, you will need to earn the respect of the players you are
actually playing with to gain standing.
Fundamentally the game is about finding and using tokens, and the most
obvious way to expand the game would be to add more token types,
however rather then add a featured here and there I would like to add
an entirely new system that interacts with the existing gameplay to
multiply the number of possibilities. Players will be able to mine and
harvest rare materials that can be used to make new tools and upgrade
tokens. It will also be possible to trade these materials to form the
basis of a monetary system.
In order to implement this major expansion, some upgrades needs to be
made to the games engine and server architecture. Many of these
upgrades will be released before the expansion, and will add some
features like player lists, and outpost monoliths.
Like all other updates, AVAIL will be a free expansion for all Love players.
LovePosted by Eskil Steenberg Mon, April 19, 2010 01:41:48Games are not about story. They are about interaction. I'm being told film are all about story but now I'm beginning to doubt that too.
If the story really made the film, "Point of No Return" would be just as god as "Nikita" and "Mac and Me" would be just as good as "ET",¨because they have the same story, but they aren't. Thinking of it, there are a lot of great movies that no one can even remember the story of. We remember the horse head in the bed and the gun stashed in the bathroom, but ask people to re-tell the plot of "the Godfather" and they run in to trouble. When we think of movies we think of moments, like Clint Eastwood trying to remember how many
bullets he fired, or everyone at Ricks rising to
sing La Marseillaise, Carving mountains out of
mashed potato or Dennis hopper telling Christopher Walken he has a
nigger gene.
Many of the films I love, have very little in terms of plot. Apocalypse now, has a few minutes of plot in the beginning where we are told Kurtz has gone insane, and then follows it with 2 hours of unconnected scenes that in the end leads us to understand, that its the world that has gone insane and that Kurtz is the only one who is honest enough to act accordingly. Many people miss the point, but nobody misses the scenes. You cant play "The Ride of the Valkyries" without smelling the napalm once you have seen the film.
A point is made in the end, and the scenes preceding supports that point, so yes it is a coherent unit, but there is no real story. Kurtz doesn't show up until the end, and when he does he doesn't do anything. Captain Willard is also a passive onlooker rather the a protagonist. Following the rules of story telling it should all fall a part but its brilliant. Blade runner doesn't get better when they tried to tie together the story, it ruined it. You can add many more great films with no real story like 2001 or Pulp Fiction.
You can argue that ETs end scene doesn't work without the beginning, but I would argue that its not the scenes supporting the story but the story supporting the scenes. Its about coming up with as many great moments, ideas and scenes as possible first and only then try to puzzle together the narrative. Why would you need a plot, if I dint have any thing to fill it with? Trying to stretch out a two line pitch to hours of entertainment is a recipe for disaster. Even a great story like Macbeth can get lost if you make a 4 hour play out of it.
If you have enough good content, people will love it even if the story is telling them something they don't want to hear. That's why Corporate raiders watch Wall Street, Criminals watch Heat, drug kingpins watch Scarface, and soldiers watch Apocalypse Now, they just don't watch the end in order to avoid what the story is trying to tell them. You can tell when watching these films that the film makes had so much great material, that they tried to fit more of it in to every moment.
A good story concept is one that opens up many possibilities for great scenes. The story services the content, not the other way around. Just like a good game is not the mechanics themselves, but how the mechanics supports you making your own scenes. Pacing and building are great ways of accentuating an emotional response but story isn't the only way to do that.
I return to my mantra that its not what you do, its how you do it. That's why its not one idea you should be looking for, its clusters of ideas that hang together that are valuable. Tell me any story idea, game idea or any other kind of idea, and ill tell you how to mess it up, or maybe, just maybe I can find enough good ideas in to it to make it great too.
LovePosted by Eskil Steenberg Thu, April 01, 2010 08:15:25This is a condensed version of the talk i gave at GDC 2010:
You cant teach anyone to be an artist. You can tell them what you know,
you can guide and advice them, but to be an artist you need to follow
your own direction and find your own way. Procedural generation is as
much an art as science, and as such I cant tell you how to do it, but
what I can tell you is what I know.
The earliest games to have procedural generation used it to create
massive amounts of content on machines that neither had the memory or
storage to keep them. Rescue of fractalus, Populous and Elite where
early procedural games that managed to do huge games on very limited
hardware.
The problem is that the generation of content needs to be
deterministic. This means that you must be able to determine the state
of a particular peace of data with nothing but the position of that
data. (you simply don't have the memory or anything else so it cant
depend on whatever is around it) This means that it is ridiculously
hard to make any interesting content and since the content is generated
while the game is being played it needs to be perfect since no game
designer can go in and fix it. More then anything the main benefit to
this approach is that you need very little storage and ram, but these
problems have largely been overcome by modern hardware.
So whats the point of Procedural generation? The main problem of game
development today is not lack or ram or storage, it is the cost of
filling it with content. By moving the procedural content creation in
to our tools we can solve that problem. The tools will output data
during development that we can use in any normal engine that that is
data driven and the designers can properly test and tweak any content
that is generated before shipping it.
Most developers only develop tools when they hit a wall and simply cant
do something without creating a tool. I on the other hand do a massive
game alone so I walk straight in to a wall just for waking up in the
morning. This has lead me to create some tools that save massive
amounts of time. Developers should stop thinking of in-house tools as a
necessary evil and start seeing the opportunities that come with making
your own tools. Rather then just looking at what you cant get done, why
not try to make tools that help you do the things you spend the most
resources on even if they are simple?
Here is an example: Fable II had 300 developers, Photoshop on the other
hand has about 15-25 developers. If a team making a game as big as
Fable II would use less then 10% of its workforce to make a new
Photoshop, that paint application would only need to improve the
productivity by 10% to essentially become free. Given that the design
of Photoshop is 25 years old, and was never intended for game
development, it shouldn't be hard to do substantially more then that.
Not only would it be a good investment for the development of a game,
the tool could also be sold and/or used on other projects. All of a
sudden all projects gets 10% better productivity.
A great example of this is the automatic UV Unwrapper i showed last
year. It makes the tedious work UV mapping fully automatic. It took
about two weeks to develop and could easily sate 20% of the art budget.
So if your allotted budget for you art department is more then 10 man
weeks, its a very good investment. All tool development may not yield
that kind of return, but given how stagnant the commercial tools have
become there are some very easy gains to be made.
For this years GDC I have spent a week (Sorry Love Players...)
developing a prototype texturing tools that lets you take any 3D model
and add procedural filters to it. It uses shades to composit the
different layers making it be able to operate on 4k textures in real
time. Lets have a look:
Lets start with a un textured model:
We start by applying a noise texture and we remap the color of the noise to resemble rust.
Then we a apply a layer of chipped paint. The paint algorithm finds edges where the paint will be more likely to have worn off.
Finally we add a layer of dirt. Note how the dirt predominantly gathers in cavities.
If we want we can with a few simple clicks change any parameter, to for instance change the color of the dirt.
The tool currently doesn't do multilayerd textures like bumpmaps,
specular maps and so on and it is missing lots of functionality that I
would like to add like polygon selection, decals and particle splatter,
still I think it proves a point. The uv-mapping and texturing above can
be done in about 2 minutes and with full artist control. Done by hand
it would most likely take hours.
One technique I use for semi procedural content generation is something
i call "Deploy" or "Polygon replacement". The basic idea is to create a
small prefabs of geometry who's outline has a simple, well defined
shape, like a quad, a triangle or a corner. Then you can build or
generate a very simple mesh describing a level, and then "replace" the
polygons in this simple mesh with the prefabs. This for instance can be
done to place trees on the ground, or be done recursively. (a house on
the ground, windows on the house, cracks in the windows...) The nice
thing about this is that you can art direct each small peace of
geometry with out the need to build the massive geometry of the world.
However, the true potential of procedural content does not lie in productivity, it lies in game play.
Ask yourself what is best: a hand animated death animation or a rag
doll? A hand animated animation may look better, but the thing is that
a rag-doll animation can react to your actions. You cant have a
animator sitting next to you to pauses the game for a few hours every
time you shoot someone so that they can animate the perfect death
animation for each situation. A rag-doll is a procedural death
animation, and if you want everything else in the game to be able to
react to your actions, you better make them procedural too.
To do this you need to put the procedural tech back in the engine.
Wait, you say, dint I just write that having the procedural generator
in the engine was a big mess? Yes, its hard as hell because there is no
margin for error (I know I have done it) but if you can make it work,
its worth it. In a game like love the procedural content can adapt to
the way players play. Its not about space, it is about time.
Lets say you are designing an adventure game. In order for the player
to reach the end they must overcome a bunch of obstacles or barriers.
Each of these barriers have a key that lets you pass. The "key" may be
a boss you must kill to progress, a task you must preform or a item you
must obtain like say a key. If a player finds a key they know that they
will need to find the door in order to progress. Each key must reside
on the right side of the barrier otherwise the game becomes unsolvable
(you don't want to store the key that opens the door to the castle
inside the castle).
Its not very hard to make a algorithm that can create a game like this,
but if we imagine that the environment is large and constantly
changing, then it becomes almost impossible to constantly make sure
that the game is solvable.
If you find a key on the street in real life, you know that it
represents an opportunity, but you may still not even pick it up, Why?
Because you know that the chance of finding its door is slim, that if
you find the door you still may not want to burglarize some ones home.
Most of all you know that your life will continue just fine with out
the key, or finding the door. You know that life is full of
opportunities and that this isn't your only one. Similarly if you loose
your key, you know that every thing in your apartment is not forever
unreachable without this key. It may be a hassle, but you know you will
find a way back in to your apartment because you can improvise.
This is the key to procedural game design; let the player improvise.
Instead of having one key to the castle, have five, then it doesn't
matter if a few of them are in the castle. Statistics will tell you
that it will work even if you cant actually test it. It doesn't even
matter if the players can figure out that you can just climb a tree and
jump over the castle walls and skip the need for a key altogether. What
would be a broken game under normal circumstances becomes a better one.
What does it matter if the player can skip your puzzle if you didn't
spend anytime making it? The goal is not to have the player see what
you have created, but to feel like THEY cam up with their own solution.
That creates a true emergent gameplay experience.
So how do you create an engine that can do this? At last years GDC I
was at a session where about the destructible environments in Red
Faction Gurilla, and at the end of it they stated that despite the
difficulties they had proven that it was possible to make a game with
destructible environments with current hardware. My mind immediately
went to Super Mario Bros. Is 25 years old and has a completely
destructible environment. The reason of course is that its a simple
block based game and its easy to remove any block in order to destroy
them. Today we use polygon soups, a much less organized primitive, to
draw our environments, making the modification of the environment very
hard. So in order to build a dynamic procedural game I would say its
less about he actual algorithms that creates the content and more about
the kind of primitive you chose to build your content out of.
There are many primitives that are far more structured to consider like
height maps, voxels, blocks, or implicit surfaces. Love uses a home
cooked block based height map that is reasonably simple while at the
same time provide lots of flexibility. You may not want to build a game
build completely out of blocks, and this is where the polygon
replacement comes in. Polygon replacement lets you "dress up" the
simple generated representation with hand modeled geometry. When you
place a token or any other object in LOVE you are basically telling the
engine to replace the ground surface with hand modeled geometry.
Given that you today can store the entire data set in memory you don't
need to make your content creation algorithm deterministic. The obvious
way would be to write an algorithm that plans out the game, but what i
rather suggest is a "opportunistic" algorithm. You basically start with
a simple deterministic base data set like a landscape (that may be
generated using something like a Perlin noise), and then you write a
number of "passes" that you run over the data that will try to detect
good places to add features like bridges, buildings, roads and even
puzzles. Since the algorithms will brute force check for any
opportunity, they will often discover opportunities that a human
designer would not. When writing these algorithms you usually end up
with very restrictive algorithms that need very specific circumstances
to come in to play, in order not to flood the world with a particular
feature. This brute force detection system often makes procedural data
feel very rich and natural compared with had made data where the
designer only focus on the path they want you to take. A opportunistic
programming model creates a great foundation for creating very complex
environments and lets you add more and more passes easily without
influencing other algorithms. For instance in Love i create houses but
first creating a pass that creates lumps, then a second pass that makes
the lumps hollow, the a third that ties to find the best place to put a
door, and then finally a forth pass to add windows. If i want to create
a different type hows i can just make a new lump pass and then re-use
the other three passes to make it in to a house. I even managed to
build houses out of mountains by applying the three later passes.
I believe that some day procedural content can revolutionize gaming and
make all other games feel old. I may be ahead towards that but that
doesn't mean that I will be the one who eventually makes it happen.
Procedural content generation is an art, so go out there and be your
own artist. Take what i have learned, and use it, but also go in your
own direction, because life is like a procedural game, there are always
more opportunities for experimentation.
LovePosted by Eskil Steenberg Fri, March 26, 2010 09:49:54About 24 hours ago Love went live. After over 3 years of work it is a milestone to behold. I am somewhat speech less. This is when you usually thank all the people who made it possible, but I have no list like that. I should be crazy busy dealing with customers, but the mail box, has stayed almost eerily quiet, simply because most people are playing and few have problems.
So what now? Love as it is now is at a plateau. It is working well and it is doing what it should. I could send my time just adding "more", but I think that good game design is about adding things for a reason. What am I trying to invoke? What do I want the possibilities of the game to be? I have ideas for the next major push and I'm still fleshing them out, but in short I can say that the theme will be: history, relationship, and identity. Over the coming weeks and months you will see the game evolve, and change. Will it work? If you play Love you know its like no other game, and what I want to add are things that push the game further in to uncharted territory, so who knows. Love is an experiment and I want you to be part of this evolution, as a player but also as a designer. Let me know what you think of the game, and how you would like to see it evolve. I have reached a momentous milestone, but we are far from the end of the journey.
LovePosted by Eskil Steenberg Sun, March 21, 2010 07:56:53If you ever want to know what my life is like watch "Iron man". I spend most of my time alone in a room anonymously tinkering with my things. But then every once in a while I get to go to GDC, and when I do, I am Iron man.
Tomorrow I'm going home after some strange weeks of everyone knowing my name, my game, and nightly cab rides to all the parties i am invited to. Its is a very different life from home (Before I landed in LA and got in a cab, I had not even been in a car this year..). I have not so much been going to GDC as I have been running parallel to it. The few sessions i went to had little to give, because despite my love for the crowds, and their love for me, still I am a loner who spends my time doing very different things.
Its easy to wish it was always GDC, but while showing off is fun, creating is better. Ill take being a producer over being a consumer any day. People ask me if I'm exited about Love´s release, but frankly what I am excited about, is not getting love released, but getting the release out of the way so that I can get on with adding all the things I want to add. Believe me when i say, I am ready to make more LOVE.
All i need now is a Pepper Potts to take out the trash.
LovePosted by Eskil Steenberg Sat, February 20, 2010 02:49:24On March 25th Love will go live. The beta sign-up will end on Tuesday the 23rd of February. Anyone who still have an active Beta account will be able to play the game right up until the release, and I will stop the timer, so no time will be deducted from your accounts during this time. That's just like the transition from Alpha to Beta.
I'm being told again and again this is the year of free to play. Apparently subscription is dead. Internet has shown that free is the only acceptable price. This at a time when, NewsCorp and New York times starts to charge for their content and arguably the most successful news organization is Bloomberg that has chooses to charge thousands of dollars for their news, and at the cinema people pay more then they ever have before to see Avatar.
With the Internet things have had the opportunity to get huge numbers and when we think of things like Twiter, Youtube, Facebook and Google, we think of their users not their revenue. The thing is that its the revenue that lets you do things not the users. The idea is that users gives you ad money, but the question is how much.
Lets do the math on ad based media. Lets assume that Coke buys an ad in a game. Coke would then expect to sell more coke and are then willing to share part of the profit. Assuming that they have a 10% profit margin, and they are willing to give the game 20% of that for putting up the ad, it would mean that for every dollar of coke sold the makers of the game would get 2 cent. Now when was the last time you bought something because of an ad? You probably see thousands of adds for every time you see an add that makes you actively go buy something. So if you buy something only once in a thousand ads, you need a thousand people to see the coke ad to earn you your 2 cents on the dollar. In other words, you are earning 0.002 cents per player, or you need three million players in order to earn 60 Dollars, the amount you would get from a single players if you just would have bothered to ask them to pay.
These numbers are obviously bogus, because in reality you would get more money then that for the simple reason that people spend far more on advertising then has a proven effect, but it still illustrates the difference between the different business models. One can also wonder who should buy all the ads when more and more of what we consume is ad based media. The idea that we can produce more things, with higher quality, and fund it with smaller payments seams unrealistic to me.
The smart money is not the ones trying to survive on microscopic payments, but the ones creating a platform to skim money from them. Apple wants the games on the Appstore to cost next to nothing, so that people buy more iPhones even if its not sustainable for the vast majority of developers. Google wants to you to think that you can become an overnight millionaire when everyone suddenly flock to your lolCat page with google ads on it, when they really make money on having millions of websites with their adds on that get a few hundred views each.
They feed us the stories of the few who make it big, but doesn't tell us we might as well by lottery tickets because they are so few. Not just hobbyists have fallen for it, huge conglomerates too. When companies give out things for free or next to nothing that's when you should be suspicious because that's when they want to take advantage of you some other way.
I don't want to force ads down your throat. I don't want to sell you a box, and then tell you you have to pay every month to use whats in the box. I'm not trying to sell you add-ons, expansions, in-game hats or divide the community in to regular and premium account holders. I'm not trying to force you to use a platform and I'm not trying to milk you on personal information.
I plan to charge 10 Euros for 30 days of access. It will cost the same no matter where you live and you pay each time you want to extend, there will not be some subscription that is impossible to cancel. There wont be an extra charge to start an account or download the client. The 10 Euros covers everything.
Is that too much to pay for the game? I don't think so, its one and a half movie ticket, its cheaper then most other Pay to play games, and compared to a 60Euro game, not many 60Euro games gives you 6 months of enjoyment. Add to that that you get two accounts, and I think its a good deal. I don't expect all players will pay every month, I think many will pay one month, wait a while and then check back in later to see whats new.
But if its good deal or not, really doesn't matter. What matters is that I can continue to develop the game. I could charge less, and hope to get so many more users that it would cover it, but I think that's unrealistic, and I don't want to run this like some DotCom who think that money will just "work out" some day in the future. The point of charging is not to get rich, but to make the game better, and believe me when i say that is a lot of things I'm planing to add and improve in the game. That's why you are paying for it, and you know that that's where the money goes, not to some stock holder, not to some distributor, not to Walmart or Gamestop. Nobody is going to buy a sail boat using the money you pay.
I think that is fair and honest, what do you think?
