At the EGX video games festival in Birmingham, Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios, took to the stage and essentially confirmed that there will not be a follow-up to the PlayStation Vita handheld console. “The climate is not healthy for now because of the huge dominance of mobile gaming,” he lamented.
But is this true?
When the smartphone started its inexorable rise as a gaming platform, thanks mostly to the launch of the iPhone in 2007, business pundits were leaping over each other to declare the imminent death of the specialist games console. Why would people pay hundreds of pounds for a dedicated games machine if they were effectively carrying one around in their pockets all day? And then the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One arrived, shifting tens of millions of units, selling faster than their predecessors and generally doing okay.
As for the handheld gaming sector, the area of gaming surely most at risk from mobile phones ... well, the Nintendo 3DS has now sold over 50m units, putting it within a whisker of the top ten best-selling games platforms of all time. It hasn’t done as well as the Nintendo DS, of course (150m sales), but then, the DS has been on sale for over a decade and the 3DS has only been out for four years – and it arrived in a very different, much more fragmented and diverse, market place. Unlike Vita, however, it ignored most of its competition – from internet-connected consoles, to smartphones and tablets – and did its own thing.
Doing its own thing is something Nintendo has always understood, and why it has utterly dominated the handheld gaming sector. There were certainly other companies vying for a portion of the market when portable electronic games first started appearing in the late seventies, but it was Nintendo – or more specifically legendary industrial designer Gunpei Yokoi – that realised form factor, price, battery life and cuteness were going to be the defining features of a successful product.
The Game & Watch games were super simple, based on very cheap LCD screens, but they looked lovely, they were sturdy and they were cheap. When the GameBoy arrived in 1989, its monochrome display looked out of step with the wondrous visuals of the 16bit console era, but again, the tech was inexpensive and sturdy, and the games (Tetris, Super Mario Land, et al) exploited the limitations in an entirely loveable way. The combination of portability and kawaii design sensibilities meant that people actively enjoyed taking these things around with them and showing them to others.
Nintendo knew almost instinctively that we would think of miniature games as endearing. There is just something about the reduced form factor that allows us to enjoy child-like experiences without feeling self-conscious. The industrial design legend Donald Norman talks about how humans project a series of expectations onto objects, and how designers need to understand these in order to make successful products. In short: we kind of want small things to be cute – and Nintendo gets that.
But Nintendo’s rivals have usually made the error of thinking that to compete with Nintendo they had to beat it in terms of technology. The Neo Geo Pocket and Bandai Wonderswan totally understood the appeal of cuteness, but they were largely restricted to the Japanese market. In terms of global competitors – from the Sega Game Gear, through the Atari Lynx to the PlayStation Portable and Vita – the philosophy has been “bringing the home console experience to your pocket”. Not only has that proved costly to the consumer in terms of retail price and battery life, it grates against what a lot of people want from a portable experience.
Sometimes, as a race, we allow ourselves to be loveable. It doesn’t happen much and we often have to express it in quite obtuse ways – through novelty socks, or action figure collections, or really liking Pixar movies. Portable games fit into this mode of thinking. The most successful handheld franchises – Pokemon, Animal Crossing, Cooking Mama, Professor Layton – they’re all reasonably complex experiences, but they’re also really, really cute. They fit the form factor – both physically and psychologically.
The PlayStation Portable wasn’t cute. Vita isn’t cute. Both tried to compete, in industrial design terms, with home consoles and with smartphones, dropping into an awkward aesthetic space between the two. When gamers first saw Ridge Racer on the Sony PSP they gasped in wonder – a true console experience on the go – but it turned out that not many people wanted that; not just because PSP was more expensive, but because (to a lot of people) it just felt weird to sit on a bus with this ostentatious piece of cold, sleek gaming technology.
The idea of the Vita as a mini PlayStation 3 or 4 has stifled the creativity of developers. Stunted compromised spin-offs of major console titles like Uncharted and Call of Duty have done very little except underline the differences between a home machine and a portable gadget. They didn’t work. It’s no coincidence that the most successful series on Sony’s handheld machines – Monster Hunter – is very much in the Nintendo mould of highly sociable titles with childlike collection systems.
Sony has tried to innovate in hardware terms with OLED screens, proprietary memory card formats, proprietary optical discs and strange touch pads underneath the display. But these have usually been ignored by developers and read by consumers as a way to gouge more money from them. The philosophy of the home console race cannot be applied to the portable market because the consumer mindset is totally different. Sony may have had more success if it had really, really pushed the product as a homebase for offbeat experiments and indie projects – there have certainly been plenty of those along the way. But the marketing attention was often elsewhere.
The GameBoy, the DS and the 3DS haven’t just dominated this sector because they got the basics right – battery life, cost and sturdiness – they dominated because Nintendo understands that small things are cute and that cuteness pervades the whole experience. This is exactly what’s going on in the smartphone sector with Candy Crush, Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds. Bringing a game like Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer into work or school is a very specific experience that has nothing to do with technology or gadgetry.
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Monday, September 28, 2015
Michael Fassbender: fearless performer with a craftsman's approach to the art of acting
You may not be hearing much from Michael Fassbender in the run-up to the release of his new film, the much-admired adaptation of Shakespeare’sMacbeth, which drew fulsome reviews on its premiere at Cannes earlier this year. The reason? He’s hard at work on his next one, Assassin’s Creed, a film version of the barnstorming video game. He couldn’t even spare the time to turn up to the world premiere of Steve Jobs at the prestigious Telluride film festival three weeks ago.
Steve Jobs review: Fassbender excels but iWorship required if you're to care
Danny Boyle’s talky look at the Apple icon boasts an assured leading turn but the dominance of Aaron Sorkin’s script and focus on business wrangles mean this will mostly appeal to the Apple geek
Video game movies don’t have much in the way of artistic pedigree, to put it mildly, so it may seem a little odd that Fassbender appears to be throwing so much into it. The film industry can sense there is big money to be found in them, but has so far failed to locate it – the recent Prince of Persia fiasco in 2010 a particularly costly example of the breed, despite the heavyweight presence of Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead. The participation of Fassbender – a bona fide Oscar nominee, no less – is something of a coup, if truth be told, and presumably the pot was sweetened by giving Fassbender an outlet for his increasingly apparent ambitions as a producer. With his Macbeth director Justin Kurzel installed too, Assassin’s Creed just might be the film to finally crack the game-to-screen transfer.
However, the three films – Creed, Macbeth and Steve Jobs – function as a sort of cross-section of where Fassbender, now 38, finds himself, as if extracted by some sort of career-borehole drill. Steve Jobs is a bid for leading-man credibility in an Oscar-bait Hollywood drama, edging along a path he’s previously trodden with The Counselor and, further back, as Rochester opposite Mia Waskiowska’s Jane Eyre. Creed is a big, fat commercial movie, no longer a handicap in a world where even Robert Redford does Marvel superhero movies. Again, Fassbender has a few of these already in his pocket: two X-Men prequel movies, where he played the young Magneto, and Prometheus, in which he took the creepy-android role. Macbeth, though, is part of Fassbender’s third string, the series of edgy, putatively dangerous films that, presumably, he would suppose is his “real” work. In this category you would find his Steve McQueen trilogy – Hunger, Shame and 12 Years a Slave, as well as David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, existential western Slow West and Frank, the oddity about a musician encased in a giant papier-mache head that is almost, but not quite, Frank Sidebottom.
Fassbender’s reputation is that of a fearless, total-immersion performer, capable of bringing extraordinary intensity to the screen but just as capable of reverting to normality when the camera stops turning over. He also has – to put it politely – a reputation as a bit of a Don Juan, and has a speed-freak side to him that means he is excellent fodder for the sort of men’s magazines that like film actors to test out high-performance cars. He has also so far resisted the temptation to up sticks and move to Los Angeles, having kept a flat in the London district of Hackney for years.
With woad-daubed face and Pictish beard, as well as the backdrop of primeval, Pasolini-esque landscape, Fassbender’s Macbeth is unquestionably a boundary-pushing take on Shakespeare. Its big pitch is that Macbeth is suffering post-traumatic stress disorder after fighting so many wars in medieval Scotland. “Never did it occur to me before this that this character was suffering from PTSD,” Fassbender said after the film’s premiere. “You have a soldier who’s engaged in battle month-after-month, day-after-day. Killing with his hands. Pushing a sword through muscle and bone. And if that doesn’t work, picking up a rock and using that.”
But if Macbeth is designed to satisfy the intellectually curious thespian in Fassbender, it is Steve Jobs that will push him closer towards realising the predictions – going back as far as his first lead role, in McQueen’s Hunger in 2008 – that he was “the next Daniel Day Lewis”.
Although it is possibly galling that he wasn’t the first pick for the role – Christian Bale had been heavily courted by the studio, but passed after director David Fincher left the film – Fassbender could at least be assured it was a blue-chip project. Scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin, best known for The West Wing, had proved his cinematic chops by writing another tech-era biopic, The Social Network, and while the replacement of Fincher by British director Danny Boyle may have spoiled the Social Network reunion, Boyle’s pedigree and long-proven skill with actors prevented the film drifting out of awards-season contention.
Boyle is certainly a strong admirer of Fassbender: calling it an “amazing experience” working with him on Steve Jobs, he said he particularly admired Fassbender’s flexibility of performance in what – true to Sorkin’s reputation – is a comparatively talky film. “When you start off your career you think there’s only one way of achieving anything, but when you get to work with really experienced actors, they’ll give you alternatives, and emotional differences between scenes. Hot, then cooler so that you’ve got choices in the editing for how the storytelling is emerging. That’s what you get with an actor like Fassbender – he finds variation on multiple takes, rather than just doing the same thing again and again. It is incredible to witness.”
Fassbender’s greatest cheerleader however, is director McQueen, who gave him that first big role and then cast him in his next two films. After Shame, the sex-addict drama in which Fassbender starred opposite Carey Mulligan, McQueen likened him to Marlon Brando, saying “there’s a fragility and a femininity to him, but also a masculinity that can translate. You’re not in awe of him. You’re part of him. He pulls you in.” After 12 Years a Slave, McQueen expanded on their “understanding” of each other to Vanity Fair: “I love him deeply … I don’t question it; that’s the funny thing. I think we have something and we just get on with it.” For his part, Fassbender says he repeats McQueen’s mantra – “We’re all going to die one day!” – when he prepares for a risky or potentially humiliating scene, and remains grateful to him for being cast in Hunger when, as a 30-year-old, he was beginning to think acting success had passed him by.
Fassbender, born in Heidelberg in 1977 to a German father and Northern Irish mother, moved to Killarney in the Irish Republic as a two-year-old where his family ran a popular restaurant, the West End House. Having got interested in acting thanks to some after-school workshops, Fassbender got a place at drama school in London, but swiftly dropped out. Like a string of other young male actors – including Tom Hardy and Damian Lewis – he got an early break on the Steven Spielberg-produced war series Band of Brothers in 2001; he then had to hack his way through the lower reaches of TV series and longform dramas – before landing his first feature film role in 300.
Even in this relatively difficult period he showed an ability to pick interesting projects – or at least, to attract the attention of those in charge of them. He swam the Atlantic for a Guinness TV commercial and turned into a goat for the Cooper Temple Clause’s Blind Pilots.
But it was playing Bobby Sands in Hunger in 2008, for which he lost 16kg as well as holding up his end of a celebrated 17-minute single-take scene, that proved his breakthrough to the big leagues. Despite his apparently instinctive facility for emotional intensity and undeniable screen presence, Fassbender adopted a craftsmanlike approach to the art of acting, telling the Guardian after the Belfast premiere of Hunger: “Tiger Woods is Tiger Woods because he practised that fucking swing 100 times a day. Why should acting be any different? It’s just boring repetition, and through that, I find things start to break down, and you start to find the nuances, all the interesting little details.”
Early on, however, Fassbender took care to associate himself with high-end, marquee directors: he played smallish parts in Fish Tank, for Andrea Arnold, and in Inglourious Basterds for Quentin Tarantino. Lead roles were a different matter – at the beginning, you take anything you can get. He played a husband menaced by feral youths in the widely liked horror film Eden Lake, and a Roman soldier in the underperforming action film Centurion; Hollywood came calling with a villain role in the dud horror film Blood Creek (Fassbender played a Nazi demon trapped in a cellar for decades), and Jonah Hex – another flop – a supernatural thriller based on a DC comic book.
However, Fassbender was still happy to remain an ensemble player as his star rose, especially if the director was a top-notch auteur. David Cronenberg cast him as Carl Jung in A Dangerous Method (opposite Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud), and Terrence Malick put him in Weightless, the long-gestating music drama due out next year (though Fassbender has expressed doubts his performance will make the final cut). Along the way he’s developed continuing relationships with Ridley Scott (for whom he played one of his relatively few top-of-the-bill lead roles, in The Counselor, as well as the Prometheus films), Kurzel and of course McQueen.
Can Fassbender go on to secure an Oscar nomination for Steve Jobs? It seems possible, if not likely. Can he become the first performer to be nominated against himself in the best actor category: Macbeth v Jobs? That would seem unlikely, but not outside the realms of possibility. With the admiration that Fassbender appears able to secure across all levels of the film world – from art-cinema purists to superhero-movie geeks – you wouldn’t put it past him.
• Macbeth is released on 1 October in Australia, 2 October in the UK and 4 December in the US. Steve Jobs is released on 8 October in Australia, 9 October in the US and 13 November in the UK.
Potted profile
Born: 2 April 1977
Age: 38
Career: Breakthrough role playing IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands in Steve McQueen’s awardwinning debut Hunger, in 2008. Followed this up with the McQueen-directed sex-addict drama Shame, as well as blockbusters such as X-Men: First Class and Prometheus. Moved into actor-producer role with Slow West and Assassin’s Creed.
High point: Landing title role in Steve Jobs after Christian Bale dropped out; very much in the frame for Oscar recognition.
Low point: Not working for a year after his first proper acting job, the Steven Spielberg TV series Band of Brothers; he said later he had been “arrogant and stupid”.
What he says: “I’m flavour of the month at the moment, but somebody else is going to roll around the corner in three months’ time. I just want to keep working.”
What they say: “I needed someone who could go beyond my reach. That’s what Michael does.” Steve McQueen
Steve Jobs review: Fassbender excels but iWorship required if you're to care
Danny Boyle’s talky look at the Apple icon boasts an assured leading turn but the dominance of Aaron Sorkin’s script and focus on business wrangles mean this will mostly appeal to the Apple geek
Video game movies don’t have much in the way of artistic pedigree, to put it mildly, so it may seem a little odd that Fassbender appears to be throwing so much into it. The film industry can sense there is big money to be found in them, but has so far failed to locate it – the recent Prince of Persia fiasco in 2010 a particularly costly example of the breed, despite the heavyweight presence of Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead. The participation of Fassbender – a bona fide Oscar nominee, no less – is something of a coup, if truth be told, and presumably the pot was sweetened by giving Fassbender an outlet for his increasingly apparent ambitions as a producer. With his Macbeth director Justin Kurzel installed too, Assassin’s Creed just might be the film to finally crack the game-to-screen transfer.
However, the three films – Creed, Macbeth and Steve Jobs – function as a sort of cross-section of where Fassbender, now 38, finds himself, as if extracted by some sort of career-borehole drill. Steve Jobs is a bid for leading-man credibility in an Oscar-bait Hollywood drama, edging along a path he’s previously trodden with The Counselor and, further back, as Rochester opposite Mia Waskiowska’s Jane Eyre. Creed is a big, fat commercial movie, no longer a handicap in a world where even Robert Redford does Marvel superhero movies. Again, Fassbender has a few of these already in his pocket: two X-Men prequel movies, where he played the young Magneto, and Prometheus, in which he took the creepy-android role. Macbeth, though, is part of Fassbender’s third string, the series of edgy, putatively dangerous films that, presumably, he would suppose is his “real” work. In this category you would find his Steve McQueen trilogy – Hunger, Shame and 12 Years a Slave, as well as David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, existential western Slow West and Frank, the oddity about a musician encased in a giant papier-mache head that is almost, but not quite, Frank Sidebottom.
Fassbender’s reputation is that of a fearless, total-immersion performer, capable of bringing extraordinary intensity to the screen but just as capable of reverting to normality when the camera stops turning over. He also has – to put it politely – a reputation as a bit of a Don Juan, and has a speed-freak side to him that means he is excellent fodder for the sort of men’s magazines that like film actors to test out high-performance cars. He has also so far resisted the temptation to up sticks and move to Los Angeles, having kept a flat in the London district of Hackney for years.
With woad-daubed face and Pictish beard, as well as the backdrop of primeval, Pasolini-esque landscape, Fassbender’s Macbeth is unquestionably a boundary-pushing take on Shakespeare. Its big pitch is that Macbeth is suffering post-traumatic stress disorder after fighting so many wars in medieval Scotland. “Never did it occur to me before this that this character was suffering from PTSD,” Fassbender said after the film’s premiere. “You have a soldier who’s engaged in battle month-after-month, day-after-day. Killing with his hands. Pushing a sword through muscle and bone. And if that doesn’t work, picking up a rock and using that.”
But if Macbeth is designed to satisfy the intellectually curious thespian in Fassbender, it is Steve Jobs that will push him closer towards realising the predictions – going back as far as his first lead role, in McQueen’s Hunger in 2008 – that he was “the next Daniel Day Lewis”.
Although it is possibly galling that he wasn’t the first pick for the role – Christian Bale had been heavily courted by the studio, but passed after director David Fincher left the film – Fassbender could at least be assured it was a blue-chip project. Scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin, best known for The West Wing, had proved his cinematic chops by writing another tech-era biopic, The Social Network, and while the replacement of Fincher by British director Danny Boyle may have spoiled the Social Network reunion, Boyle’s pedigree and long-proven skill with actors prevented the film drifting out of awards-season contention.
Boyle is certainly a strong admirer of Fassbender: calling it an “amazing experience” working with him on Steve Jobs, he said he particularly admired Fassbender’s flexibility of performance in what – true to Sorkin’s reputation – is a comparatively talky film. “When you start off your career you think there’s only one way of achieving anything, but when you get to work with really experienced actors, they’ll give you alternatives, and emotional differences between scenes. Hot, then cooler so that you’ve got choices in the editing for how the storytelling is emerging. That’s what you get with an actor like Fassbender – he finds variation on multiple takes, rather than just doing the same thing again and again. It is incredible to witness.”
Fassbender’s greatest cheerleader however, is director McQueen, who gave him that first big role and then cast him in his next two films. After Shame, the sex-addict drama in which Fassbender starred opposite Carey Mulligan, McQueen likened him to Marlon Brando, saying “there’s a fragility and a femininity to him, but also a masculinity that can translate. You’re not in awe of him. You’re part of him. He pulls you in.” After 12 Years a Slave, McQueen expanded on their “understanding” of each other to Vanity Fair: “I love him deeply … I don’t question it; that’s the funny thing. I think we have something and we just get on with it.” For his part, Fassbender says he repeats McQueen’s mantra – “We’re all going to die one day!” – when he prepares for a risky or potentially humiliating scene, and remains grateful to him for being cast in Hunger when, as a 30-year-old, he was beginning to think acting success had passed him by.
Fassbender, born in Heidelberg in 1977 to a German father and Northern Irish mother, moved to Killarney in the Irish Republic as a two-year-old where his family ran a popular restaurant, the West End House. Having got interested in acting thanks to some after-school workshops, Fassbender got a place at drama school in London, but swiftly dropped out. Like a string of other young male actors – including Tom Hardy and Damian Lewis – he got an early break on the Steven Spielberg-produced war series Band of Brothers in 2001; he then had to hack his way through the lower reaches of TV series and longform dramas – before landing his first feature film role in 300.
Even in this relatively difficult period he showed an ability to pick interesting projects – or at least, to attract the attention of those in charge of them. He swam the Atlantic for a Guinness TV commercial and turned into a goat for the Cooper Temple Clause’s Blind Pilots.
But it was playing Bobby Sands in Hunger in 2008, for which he lost 16kg as well as holding up his end of a celebrated 17-minute single-take scene, that proved his breakthrough to the big leagues. Despite his apparently instinctive facility for emotional intensity and undeniable screen presence, Fassbender adopted a craftsmanlike approach to the art of acting, telling the Guardian after the Belfast premiere of Hunger: “Tiger Woods is Tiger Woods because he practised that fucking swing 100 times a day. Why should acting be any different? It’s just boring repetition, and through that, I find things start to break down, and you start to find the nuances, all the interesting little details.”
Early on, however, Fassbender took care to associate himself with high-end, marquee directors: he played smallish parts in Fish Tank, for Andrea Arnold, and in Inglourious Basterds for Quentin Tarantino. Lead roles were a different matter – at the beginning, you take anything you can get. He played a husband menaced by feral youths in the widely liked horror film Eden Lake, and a Roman soldier in the underperforming action film Centurion; Hollywood came calling with a villain role in the dud horror film Blood Creek (Fassbender played a Nazi demon trapped in a cellar for decades), and Jonah Hex – another flop – a supernatural thriller based on a DC comic book.
However, Fassbender was still happy to remain an ensemble player as his star rose, especially if the director was a top-notch auteur. David Cronenberg cast him as Carl Jung in A Dangerous Method (opposite Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud), and Terrence Malick put him in Weightless, the long-gestating music drama due out next year (though Fassbender has expressed doubts his performance will make the final cut). Along the way he’s developed continuing relationships with Ridley Scott (for whom he played one of his relatively few top-of-the-bill lead roles, in The Counselor, as well as the Prometheus films), Kurzel and of course McQueen.
Can Fassbender go on to secure an Oscar nomination for Steve Jobs? It seems possible, if not likely. Can he become the first performer to be nominated against himself in the best actor category: Macbeth v Jobs? That would seem unlikely, but not outside the realms of possibility. With the admiration that Fassbender appears able to secure across all levels of the film world – from art-cinema purists to superhero-movie geeks – you wouldn’t put it past him.
• Macbeth is released on 1 October in Australia, 2 October in the UK and 4 December in the US. Steve Jobs is released on 8 October in Australia, 9 October in the US and 13 November in the UK.
Potted profile
Born: 2 April 1977
Age: 38
Career: Breakthrough role playing IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands in Steve McQueen’s awardwinning debut Hunger, in 2008. Followed this up with the McQueen-directed sex-addict drama Shame, as well as blockbusters such as X-Men: First Class and Prometheus. Moved into actor-producer role with Slow West and Assassin’s Creed.
High point: Landing title role in Steve Jobs after Christian Bale dropped out; very much in the frame for Oscar recognition.
Low point: Not working for a year after his first proper acting job, the Steven Spielberg TV series Band of Brothers; he said later he had been “arrogant and stupid”.
What he says: “I’m flavour of the month at the moment, but somebody else is going to roll around the corner in three months’ time. I just want to keep working.”
What they say: “I needed someone who could go beyond my reach. That’s what Michael does.” Steve McQueen
Friday, September 25, 2015
PewDiePie and KSI take their YouTube fame to the mobile app stores
Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg built his audience of 39 million YouTube subscribers by playing games. Now he’s releasing his own mobile game: Legend of the Brofist.
Released for Android and for iOS, the game stars a pixellated version of Kjellberg as well as fellow YouTube gamers including JackSepticEye, Markiplier and Marzia.
The game bucks the dominant trend of “free-to-play” mobile games that make their money by selling virtual items and currency. PewDiePie’s game costs £3.99 upfront with no in-app purchases.
It is part of Kjellberg’s expansion beyond YouTube, which includes his first book – This Book Loves You – to be released by Penguin Random House in October.
In both cases, the bet is that PewDiePie’s online audience, who have watched his YouTube videos more than 10bn times, will be keen to buy other products bearing his name. Even before these deals, he earned $7.4m in 2014 from his videos and related sponsorships.
PewDiePie’s new game has been released in the same week as another app from a prominent YouTube gamer-turned-author: Olajide “KSI” Olatunji.
KSI: I Am A... has been released for Android and for iOS as a £1.49 download, although in this case it is a spin-off from his book of the same name, published by Hachette.
The app promises exclusive videos triggered by pointing the smartphone’s camera at images in the book; a football mini-game; and the first chapter of the book for fans who have yet to buy it.
Olatunji has two channels on YouTube: his main channel has 10.6 million subscribers and just under 2bn video views, while his second has 3.8 million subscribers and 500m views.
YouTubers are hot property in the publishing industry, keen to repeat the sales success of books from online stars like Zoella and Alfie Deyes. Another YouTube gamer, Joseph “Stampy” Garrett, is releasing his first book through Egmont in October.
Released for Android and for iOS, the game stars a pixellated version of Kjellberg as well as fellow YouTube gamers including JackSepticEye, Markiplier and Marzia.
The game bucks the dominant trend of “free-to-play” mobile games that make their money by selling virtual items and currency. PewDiePie’s game costs £3.99 upfront with no in-app purchases.
It is part of Kjellberg’s expansion beyond YouTube, which includes his first book – This Book Loves You – to be released by Penguin Random House in October.
In both cases, the bet is that PewDiePie’s online audience, who have watched his YouTube videos more than 10bn times, will be keen to buy other products bearing his name. Even before these deals, he earned $7.4m in 2014 from his videos and related sponsorships.
PewDiePie’s new game has been released in the same week as another app from a prominent YouTube gamer-turned-author: Olajide “KSI” Olatunji.
KSI: I Am A... has been released for Android and for iOS as a £1.49 download, although in this case it is a spin-off from his book of the same name, published by Hachette.
The app promises exclusive videos triggered by pointing the smartphone’s camera at images in the book; a football mini-game; and the first chapter of the book for fans who have yet to buy it.
Olatunji has two channels on YouTube: his main channel has 10.6 million subscribers and just under 2bn video views, while his second has 3.8 million subscribers and 500m views.
YouTubers are hot property in the publishing industry, keen to repeat the sales success of books from online stars like Zoella and Alfie Deyes. Another YouTube gamer, Joseph “Stampy” Garrett, is releasing his first book through Egmont in October.
Thursday, September 24, 2015
Destiny one year on: Bungie's 12 months at the final frontier of gaming
On 9 September 2014, in a converted multiplex cinema in Bellevue Washington, a team of over 200 people launched a brand new kind of video game. They had spent four years preparing for this moment; among their ranks were some of the most experienced software engineers in the industry. But they had no idea what would happen next.
Months later, David “Deej” Dague, the community manager at Bungie Software looks puzzled when asked about that night. “I’m not sure I have any memories of the first two weeks after launch,” he says, sitting in the darkened entrance hall to the company’s vast office, surrounded by cabinets hosting dozens of awards. “All I know is, the game was pretty stable.”
That game, of course, was Destiny, an online sci-fi adventure set in Earth’s distant future. Combining the fast-paced action of a first-person shooter (FPS) with the in-depth progression systems of a massively multiplayer role-playing game (MMORPG), the title effectively sought to unite two very different audiences: gamers who just wanted to shoot at stuff and gamers who liked to build characters, explore worlds and level up to access increasingly potent equipment.
Certainly, these two genres have been borrowing ideas from each other for years. Shooters such as Call of Duty and Borderlands have taken the exhaustive character progression and loot-collecting concepts of the role-playing sector, while RPGs like Mass Effect and Fallout have in turn become more dynamic and action-orientated. But with Destiny, Bungie wanted to bring all of this into a seamless experience where players could easily migrate from hit-and-run “strike” missions to demanding co-operative raids and arena-based competitive shoot-outs. And it wanted all this to happen online, without any sort of server partitioning between different play types.
The preparations were exhaustive. Years before launch, Bungie built a large in-house user testing laboratory where it hosted dozens of volunteer gamers, watching how they played, even monitoring their eye movements to help design the onscreen displays. “We knew Destiny would have a much more complex UI than any game we’d ever made before,” says head of user research John Hopson. “A lot of shooter players have never experienced mechanics like gear and talent points. If they weren’t using those elements during play-testing we needed to know why: was it because they’d seen them and didn’t care, or was it that they hadn’t noticed them at all. By analysing where they looked on screen we could say, OK, yes they read the help window and closed it – it just wasn’t telling them what they needed to know.”
On the technical side, there was a simple aim: avoid the sort of total infrastructure collapse that had plagued other big online releases like SimCity and Battlefield 4. For Destiny, a game selling itself as a new type of connected experience, that would be a disaster. Bungie built a state-of-the-art data operations centre (DOC), a control room filled with screens showing stats and metrics from the vast global server infrastructure that would run the game. The company employed a 24-hour hit squad of systems engineers, capable of reacting to server shutdowns and overloads whenever and wherever they happened.Reportedly, some of the staff had previously worked on the Large Hadron Collider project at Cern.
According to Bungie, over a million players hit the game on day one. The traffic was managed through a server bunker in Las Vegas, as well as rented data centres all over the world. It held up. However, what the studio quickly realised was, this was just the beginning. “The DOC did incredibly well to respond to that demand,” says Dague. “But the real learning happened afterwards, in the months that followed, when we were able to identify how players felt about the story arc, the narrative of their own character, the end game content, and about approaching the rank cap. We had to prove to players that we understand our own game, that we played it, that we knew who they were and what was important to them.”
Peter Parson, Bungie’s chief operating officer, concurs. “Certainly, on the positive side, people were playing the game; and the way they were playing – the core investment loop – was really smooth. But there were questions about the story ...”
Indeed, many players felt the story was fragmented and unclear. What was the vast Traveller satellite that was protecting humanity? What was the dark enemy that had followed it across the cosmos? Why were alien races attacking Earth? There were rumours a lot of content had been cut in the run up to launch so that the team could concentrate on other technical challenges. “We’d tried to do something different,” says Parsons. “The story wasn’t about a fictional character you’d created, it was about you and your journey as a player, your own personal narrative. But we definitely didn’t get that right.”
Another problem was the unclear character progression at the end of the story missions. Suddenly, players had to start collecting exotic armour that added a value named Light – but it wasn’t clear how to find it, or how this related to levelling up. “What we really did not do a good job of was sending players off to the end game,” says Parsons. “It wasn’t just the raids, it was starting to use the bounties, doing the high-level strikes – that’s something we learned a lot about. The community really helped, not just by providing feedback, but by assisting other players across that bridge.”
Bungie knew it had to react – but a video-game studio with over 200 staff is like an oil tanker: it doesn’t turn fast
Bungie knew it had to react – but a video-game studio with over 200 staff, in a huge variety of disciplines, is like an oil tanker: it doesn’t turn fast. To cope with the constant influx of feedback from players, the company totally restructured its development team. While small dedicated groups were tasked with designing each of the incoming expansion packs, a large new “live team” was formed – a group of 20 or so senior staff with a specific focus on listening to and implementing player feedback.
“They’re the operations team,” explains Parsons. “They manage and monitor the game around the clock to ensure we’re always up and running, and making the experience better. Although the group is usually about 20 people, they flex much larger when we’re getting ready to ship new content or need the support of extra engineers. We also allow the group to tap in to other specialists across the studio, providing everything from bug fixes to new content. We’re continually pulling people into that vortex, then pushing them back out. The fun part of that is even if someone’s working on something that’s far down the road, they can feel part of the process along the way.”
Alongside the Live team, Bungie has also organised a handful of its most senior team leaders into a special triage unit. This is effectively a sort of development tribunal: when bugs or gameplay problems are encountered, they decide what gets fixed first. “At any given point in time there are thousands of things in the world of Destiny that we’d like to make better but there are only so many resources,” says Parsons. “That team is constantly deciding what are we going to fix and what are we not going to fix – it has it’s fingers on everything in the game world. It’s all about managing development priorities, and they’re constantly changing. They’re free to bring in other team leaders to bring them up to speed. It’s not uncommon to get an invitation from triage to come up and explain what it is your trying to fix and why it shouldn’t be pushed to a later date.”
Hopson and his user research team soon became heavily involved in this process, analysing the live data and using it to guide decisions. “Mostly what we do is prioritise,” he says. “Very few things that fans suggest are bad ideas - it’s usually, that’s awesome we should do that, but is it more important than the 50 other things we wish we could get into the game? If three million people are having a problem then yes we should fix that now, but if it’s 500 people that need the fix? The design team have to set priorities.”
There have been occasions, for example, where a particular weapon has appeared over-powered, and the immediate goal is to work out how many people are being affected. One example involved the Vex Mythoclast, an exotic fusion rifle. “In its heyday, people were posting videos on youtube just completely dominating the crucible,” says Hopson. “So we asked, okay, how bad is this? How many people are actually running around with this thing? And we found that there were only 600 people with this gun. We didn’t have to panic and do a next day patch - we could leave it a little bit.”
“We also look at which weapons people actually use. There are some we thought would be really popular but weren’t. I mean, I don’t think anyone thought that the No Land Beyond sniper rifle would be super popular but we had a role for that weapon and people didn’t pick up on it in the way we planned. A lot of it is analysing the live data. We’re saying, okay, how are people actually playing? Destiny is a really complex game there are a lot of different ways to do it. Players have certainly surprised us in a bunch of ways - the loot cave being the most prominent example. We never thought people would just sit there doing that.”
But Bungie isn’t totally indulging players with however they want to play: it has a plan for them. As the game was being developed, the company worked out that player retention was going to depend on getting as many newcomers as possible to try all the different experiences from co-op strikes to single-player patrols to competitive multiplayer death matches. In his GDC talk on user research earlier this year Hopson, who has a PhD in behavioural psychology, talked about the buffet effect – a phenomenon in which people will eat more if they are presented with greater variety. Destiny, with its array of game types and events, is the digital equivalent. For the game to remain successful, goes the thinking, it needs ‘omnivores’ – players who’ll try a bit of everything.
Right now, Destiny does allow people to have preferences for co-op gameplay (strikes, raids, etc) or competitive (The crucible) – but to unlock the best new kit, they have to occasionally switch over. To make sure no one was being alienated by this structure, Hopson formulated 15 different types of Destiny participant, based on phases of the player lifecycle and different types of preferred engagement. The team then began to compare proposed new features against those profiles to work out how they’d be affected.
“You do a bunch of analysis,” says Hopson. “You say, okay, how does each player type engage with the game and what can we do for them? We’ve actually been amazingly successful in creating omnivores – pretty much anyone who gets to level 20 or beyond is playing like an omnivore. Even when we talk about someone as being a raider – raiding still ends up being only 40% of their time so they’re spending a lot of time in patrol or PvsP - even when we talk about PvP people, they’re spending a lot of time in raids to get the gear they need to do well in the Crucible. So the game design is working amazingly well in terms of encouraging omnivores.”
According to Parsons, Bungie also looked to seduce shooter fanatics by making Destiny’s more in-depth, grind-heavy gameplay work within their usual timeframes. The team knew that people who like to play Call of Duty online for an hour, level up once or twice and then log off, may be intimidated by an RPG that was going to demand hours of their time in order to complete epic missions and progress. So the team designed the short Strike and Patrol missions, which both provide plenty of loot potential, so that the game could be played for an hour in an evening. As Parsons explains, “If you provide people with multiple ways to engage with the universe – even if the core mechanic is just building and growing your guardian - they can have a rewarding experience. People say that for a console game Destiny is very grindy, but you can get a reward in less than an hour by knocking off a couple of bounties.”
Destiny also makes clever use of what psychologists call variable-ratio reinforcement schedules. Whenever a quest is completed, there’s a chance that a boss will drop valuable exotic armour or weapons, but it’s never certain. Indeed, in the current form of Destiny, every single piece of gear you’ve earned by the time you run your first raid will have come though a double stack of randomised rewards: first, you have repeatedly killed high-level bosses waiting for them to drop a legendary engram (random chance), then you will have repeatedly decrypted that engram waiting for an item of a high-enough level to take on the raid; or you will have taken a low-level legendary item, and then used high-level rare items (which are also dropped randomly) to “infuse” it and boost its level.
However complex the system, the hope is always that the next drop will be the big one – it’s this variable schedule that compels players. In this sense, Destiny has been darkly compared to a slot machine, and the analogy is pretty accurate: both tap into that “the next one is the big one” compulsion loop. At the same time Bungie has learned from the ‘appointment gaming’ phenomenon we saw in the social space. Facebook titles like Farmville succeeded because they were designed to allow players to keep dropping in and finding new stuff to do. Destiny mimics this with its daily and weekly challenges, as well as having vendor characters who’ll often arrive unexpectedly in the world with rare goods to sell.
“We planned these calendar rituals,” says Parsons. “If you type ‘where is’ into a Google search, [the name of a vendor] Xur comes up as the third or fourth search. These rituals of ‘I can’t wait for the next Iron Banner tournament’ or ‘what will Xur have when he comes back?’, even the more regular public events – people look forward to the surprises.”
What the team seems very keen to stress however, is that everyone at Bungie is a player of Destiny, not just a developer. “I see people playing this game every single night,” says Dague. “They are as deeply invested as the people who bought the product – that’s a wonderful thing. We have our own email debates that rage over our server about what Destiny is or what it should be or what we need to do to fully realise the potential. Everybody at Bungie has an opinion about Destiny – if they don’t they shouldn’t be here.”
According to Parsons, the studio has its own elite team of Destiny players, called the Tiger Corps, who will dive straight into new updates and expansions as soon as they’re on the company intranet, and start testing them. “They’re on the frontline because they act and react as an even more sensitive and opinionated version of our larger community,” he says. “We actively challenge them to provide feedback and, man, they do not hold back.”
A year after launch, the latest expansion, The Taken King, is out and getting good reviews. People are saying that this is what Destiny should always have been. The progression system has been ironed out, it’s clearer, it’s more logical, and it’s easier to get into co-op gaming sessions. But the thing is, it’s taken a year of experience to get here. “I don’t think I can stress how much of a shock to the system this has been to Bungie,” says Hopson. “I mean, we used to take pride in the fact that our games didn’t require updates – it was lesser studios that did that. We were shipping these perfect shiny things that were perfectly balanced.
“Destiny is just not that kind of game and we really didn’t know what the reception was going to be. We’d worked really hard, we were proud of it, but last summer there was a lot of tension, a lot of worry. Is anyone going to play? The answer, clearly, was yes.”
Destiny forsaken: the three stages that Bungie lost players
Head of research John Hopson has spent the year analysing player data. Here he explains the points where people tended to leave the game during the first 12 months, and why.
Almost immediately: “The first place we lose people is right away. There’s a certain number of people who rent the game or borrow it from a friend - they play a few levels and it just wasn’t the experience they were looking for, that’s cool – not every game is for every player.
Level 18-21: “There are people who finish the story and never make that jump to the mid-game. They never quite realise that they need to be running strikes and upgrading their gear by collecting Light, they just don’t step into that section of the game.”
“We knew that was going to be a problem – we tried to make the transition as smooth as we could, but we did lose a few people there. It was a bad problem by our standards, it was a rough patch, but we were only losing something like 4% of the players – by the general standards of video games, that’s not a whole lot. We learned that we were too abrupt in that transition.”
Months later, David “Deej” Dague, the community manager at Bungie Software looks puzzled when asked about that night. “I’m not sure I have any memories of the first two weeks after launch,” he says, sitting in the darkened entrance hall to the company’s vast office, surrounded by cabinets hosting dozens of awards. “All I know is, the game was pretty stable.”
That game, of course, was Destiny, an online sci-fi adventure set in Earth’s distant future. Combining the fast-paced action of a first-person shooter (FPS) with the in-depth progression systems of a massively multiplayer role-playing game (MMORPG), the title effectively sought to unite two very different audiences: gamers who just wanted to shoot at stuff and gamers who liked to build characters, explore worlds and level up to access increasingly potent equipment.
Certainly, these two genres have been borrowing ideas from each other for years. Shooters such as Call of Duty and Borderlands have taken the exhaustive character progression and loot-collecting concepts of the role-playing sector, while RPGs like Mass Effect and Fallout have in turn become more dynamic and action-orientated. But with Destiny, Bungie wanted to bring all of this into a seamless experience where players could easily migrate from hit-and-run “strike” missions to demanding co-operative raids and arena-based competitive shoot-outs. And it wanted all this to happen online, without any sort of server partitioning between different play types.
The preparations were exhaustive. Years before launch, Bungie built a large in-house user testing laboratory where it hosted dozens of volunteer gamers, watching how they played, even monitoring their eye movements to help design the onscreen displays. “We knew Destiny would have a much more complex UI than any game we’d ever made before,” says head of user research John Hopson. “A lot of shooter players have never experienced mechanics like gear and talent points. If they weren’t using those elements during play-testing we needed to know why: was it because they’d seen them and didn’t care, or was it that they hadn’t noticed them at all. By analysing where they looked on screen we could say, OK, yes they read the help window and closed it – it just wasn’t telling them what they needed to know.”
On the technical side, there was a simple aim: avoid the sort of total infrastructure collapse that had plagued other big online releases like SimCity and Battlefield 4. For Destiny, a game selling itself as a new type of connected experience, that would be a disaster. Bungie built a state-of-the-art data operations centre (DOC), a control room filled with screens showing stats and metrics from the vast global server infrastructure that would run the game. The company employed a 24-hour hit squad of systems engineers, capable of reacting to server shutdowns and overloads whenever and wherever they happened.Reportedly, some of the staff had previously worked on the Large Hadron Collider project at Cern.
According to Bungie, over a million players hit the game on day one. The traffic was managed through a server bunker in Las Vegas, as well as rented data centres all over the world. It held up. However, what the studio quickly realised was, this was just the beginning. “The DOC did incredibly well to respond to that demand,” says Dague. “But the real learning happened afterwards, in the months that followed, when we were able to identify how players felt about the story arc, the narrative of their own character, the end game content, and about approaching the rank cap. We had to prove to players that we understand our own game, that we played it, that we knew who they were and what was important to them.”
Peter Parson, Bungie’s chief operating officer, concurs. “Certainly, on the positive side, people were playing the game; and the way they were playing – the core investment loop – was really smooth. But there were questions about the story ...”
Indeed, many players felt the story was fragmented and unclear. What was the vast Traveller satellite that was protecting humanity? What was the dark enemy that had followed it across the cosmos? Why were alien races attacking Earth? There were rumours a lot of content had been cut in the run up to launch so that the team could concentrate on other technical challenges. “We’d tried to do something different,” says Parsons. “The story wasn’t about a fictional character you’d created, it was about you and your journey as a player, your own personal narrative. But we definitely didn’t get that right.”
Another problem was the unclear character progression at the end of the story missions. Suddenly, players had to start collecting exotic armour that added a value named Light – but it wasn’t clear how to find it, or how this related to levelling up. “What we really did not do a good job of was sending players off to the end game,” says Parsons. “It wasn’t just the raids, it was starting to use the bounties, doing the high-level strikes – that’s something we learned a lot about. The community really helped, not just by providing feedback, but by assisting other players across that bridge.”
Bungie knew it had to react – but a video-game studio with over 200 staff is like an oil tanker: it doesn’t turn fast
Bungie knew it had to react – but a video-game studio with over 200 staff, in a huge variety of disciplines, is like an oil tanker: it doesn’t turn fast. To cope with the constant influx of feedback from players, the company totally restructured its development team. While small dedicated groups were tasked with designing each of the incoming expansion packs, a large new “live team” was formed – a group of 20 or so senior staff with a specific focus on listening to and implementing player feedback.
“They’re the operations team,” explains Parsons. “They manage and monitor the game around the clock to ensure we’re always up and running, and making the experience better. Although the group is usually about 20 people, they flex much larger when we’re getting ready to ship new content or need the support of extra engineers. We also allow the group to tap in to other specialists across the studio, providing everything from bug fixes to new content. We’re continually pulling people into that vortex, then pushing them back out. The fun part of that is even if someone’s working on something that’s far down the road, they can feel part of the process along the way.”
Alongside the Live team, Bungie has also organised a handful of its most senior team leaders into a special triage unit. This is effectively a sort of development tribunal: when bugs or gameplay problems are encountered, they decide what gets fixed first. “At any given point in time there are thousands of things in the world of Destiny that we’d like to make better but there are only so many resources,” says Parsons. “That team is constantly deciding what are we going to fix and what are we not going to fix – it has it’s fingers on everything in the game world. It’s all about managing development priorities, and they’re constantly changing. They’re free to bring in other team leaders to bring them up to speed. It’s not uncommon to get an invitation from triage to come up and explain what it is your trying to fix and why it shouldn’t be pushed to a later date.”
Hopson and his user research team soon became heavily involved in this process, analysing the live data and using it to guide decisions. “Mostly what we do is prioritise,” he says. “Very few things that fans suggest are bad ideas - it’s usually, that’s awesome we should do that, but is it more important than the 50 other things we wish we could get into the game? If three million people are having a problem then yes we should fix that now, but if it’s 500 people that need the fix? The design team have to set priorities.”
There have been occasions, for example, where a particular weapon has appeared over-powered, and the immediate goal is to work out how many people are being affected. One example involved the Vex Mythoclast, an exotic fusion rifle. “In its heyday, people were posting videos on youtube just completely dominating the crucible,” says Hopson. “So we asked, okay, how bad is this? How many people are actually running around with this thing? And we found that there were only 600 people with this gun. We didn’t have to panic and do a next day patch - we could leave it a little bit.”
“We also look at which weapons people actually use. There are some we thought would be really popular but weren’t. I mean, I don’t think anyone thought that the No Land Beyond sniper rifle would be super popular but we had a role for that weapon and people didn’t pick up on it in the way we planned. A lot of it is analysing the live data. We’re saying, okay, how are people actually playing? Destiny is a really complex game there are a lot of different ways to do it. Players have certainly surprised us in a bunch of ways - the loot cave being the most prominent example. We never thought people would just sit there doing that.”
But Bungie isn’t totally indulging players with however they want to play: it has a plan for them. As the game was being developed, the company worked out that player retention was going to depend on getting as many newcomers as possible to try all the different experiences from co-op strikes to single-player patrols to competitive multiplayer death matches. In his GDC talk on user research earlier this year Hopson, who has a PhD in behavioural psychology, talked about the buffet effect – a phenomenon in which people will eat more if they are presented with greater variety. Destiny, with its array of game types and events, is the digital equivalent. For the game to remain successful, goes the thinking, it needs ‘omnivores’ – players who’ll try a bit of everything.
Right now, Destiny does allow people to have preferences for co-op gameplay (strikes, raids, etc) or competitive (The crucible) – but to unlock the best new kit, they have to occasionally switch over. To make sure no one was being alienated by this structure, Hopson formulated 15 different types of Destiny participant, based on phases of the player lifecycle and different types of preferred engagement. The team then began to compare proposed new features against those profiles to work out how they’d be affected.
“You do a bunch of analysis,” says Hopson. “You say, okay, how does each player type engage with the game and what can we do for them? We’ve actually been amazingly successful in creating omnivores – pretty much anyone who gets to level 20 or beyond is playing like an omnivore. Even when we talk about someone as being a raider – raiding still ends up being only 40% of their time so they’re spending a lot of time in patrol or PvsP - even when we talk about PvP people, they’re spending a lot of time in raids to get the gear they need to do well in the Crucible. So the game design is working amazingly well in terms of encouraging omnivores.”
According to Parsons, Bungie also looked to seduce shooter fanatics by making Destiny’s more in-depth, grind-heavy gameplay work within their usual timeframes. The team knew that people who like to play Call of Duty online for an hour, level up once or twice and then log off, may be intimidated by an RPG that was going to demand hours of their time in order to complete epic missions and progress. So the team designed the short Strike and Patrol missions, which both provide plenty of loot potential, so that the game could be played for an hour in an evening. As Parsons explains, “If you provide people with multiple ways to engage with the universe – even if the core mechanic is just building and growing your guardian - they can have a rewarding experience. People say that for a console game Destiny is very grindy, but you can get a reward in less than an hour by knocking off a couple of bounties.”
Destiny also makes clever use of what psychologists call variable-ratio reinforcement schedules. Whenever a quest is completed, there’s a chance that a boss will drop valuable exotic armour or weapons, but it’s never certain. Indeed, in the current form of Destiny, every single piece of gear you’ve earned by the time you run your first raid will have come though a double stack of randomised rewards: first, you have repeatedly killed high-level bosses waiting for them to drop a legendary engram (random chance), then you will have repeatedly decrypted that engram waiting for an item of a high-enough level to take on the raid; or you will have taken a low-level legendary item, and then used high-level rare items (which are also dropped randomly) to “infuse” it and boost its level.
However complex the system, the hope is always that the next drop will be the big one – it’s this variable schedule that compels players. In this sense, Destiny has been darkly compared to a slot machine, and the analogy is pretty accurate: both tap into that “the next one is the big one” compulsion loop. At the same time Bungie has learned from the ‘appointment gaming’ phenomenon we saw in the social space. Facebook titles like Farmville succeeded because they were designed to allow players to keep dropping in and finding new stuff to do. Destiny mimics this with its daily and weekly challenges, as well as having vendor characters who’ll often arrive unexpectedly in the world with rare goods to sell.
“We planned these calendar rituals,” says Parsons. “If you type ‘where is’ into a Google search, [the name of a vendor] Xur comes up as the third or fourth search. These rituals of ‘I can’t wait for the next Iron Banner tournament’ or ‘what will Xur have when he comes back?’, even the more regular public events – people look forward to the surprises.”
What the team seems very keen to stress however, is that everyone at Bungie is a player of Destiny, not just a developer. “I see people playing this game every single night,” says Dague. “They are as deeply invested as the people who bought the product – that’s a wonderful thing. We have our own email debates that rage over our server about what Destiny is or what it should be or what we need to do to fully realise the potential. Everybody at Bungie has an opinion about Destiny – if they don’t they shouldn’t be here.”
According to Parsons, the studio has its own elite team of Destiny players, called the Tiger Corps, who will dive straight into new updates and expansions as soon as they’re on the company intranet, and start testing them. “They’re on the frontline because they act and react as an even more sensitive and opinionated version of our larger community,” he says. “We actively challenge them to provide feedback and, man, they do not hold back.”
A year after launch, the latest expansion, The Taken King, is out and getting good reviews. People are saying that this is what Destiny should always have been. The progression system has been ironed out, it’s clearer, it’s more logical, and it’s easier to get into co-op gaming sessions. But the thing is, it’s taken a year of experience to get here. “I don’t think I can stress how much of a shock to the system this has been to Bungie,” says Hopson. “I mean, we used to take pride in the fact that our games didn’t require updates – it was lesser studios that did that. We were shipping these perfect shiny things that were perfectly balanced.
“Destiny is just not that kind of game and we really didn’t know what the reception was going to be. We’d worked really hard, we were proud of it, but last summer there was a lot of tension, a lot of worry. Is anyone going to play? The answer, clearly, was yes.”
Destiny forsaken: the three stages that Bungie lost players
Head of research John Hopson has spent the year analysing player data. Here he explains the points where people tended to leave the game during the first 12 months, and why.
Almost immediately: “The first place we lose people is right away. There’s a certain number of people who rent the game or borrow it from a friend - they play a few levels and it just wasn’t the experience they were looking for, that’s cool – not every game is for every player.
Level 18-21: “There are people who finish the story and never make that jump to the mid-game. They never quite realise that they need to be running strikes and upgrading their gear by collecting Light, they just don’t step into that section of the game.”
“We knew that was going to be a problem – we tried to make the transition as smooth as we could, but we did lose a few people there. It was a bad problem by our standards, it was a rough patch, but we were only losing something like 4% of the players – by the general standards of video games, that’s not a whole lot. We learned that we were too abrupt in that transition.”
Wednesday, September 23, 2015
The Angry Birds movie trailer: the hottest film of 2012 is coming
Angry Birds is the red-hot iPhone app of the moment. It’s literally a one-in-a-million sensation. Your friends can’t stop playing it. The world’s edgiest comedians can’t stop referencing it – and now it’s heading to the big screen! What sort of blockbus… oh, hang on, my fault, sorry. I thought it was 2012. Let me start again.
Angry Birds is that iPhone game that people used to play a lot three years ago but don’t any more. And now it’s going to be a film. And there’s a trailer for it. There, that’s better. Still, while we’re here, let’s give the Angry Birds trailer a closer look.
We open with a shot of the character we’re most likely to remember from the last time we played Angry Birds several years ago – Nameless Red Bird. Here’s Nameless Red Bird eating a sandwich. So far, this is a film about a cartoon bird eating a sandwich.
Also present, three sexy birds. At least I assume they’re supposed to be sexy. God, I hope they are, otherwise I’ve just projecting a horrific amount of sexual availability onto three relatively gender-free cartoon birds. Not this week, Heritage. Don’t do this while nebulous almost-bestiality is such a hot-button issue. Get it together.
Oh, phew, they were supposed to be sexy after all. And they were aiming all their red-hot sexuality at that hunky sort-of blueish bird. I hope the red bird’s OK, and didn’t mistakenly think the other birds were actually coming on to him.
Ah. He did. And by the look of it he hasn’t taken the rejection well. In fact, I suppose you could say that he’s now a fairly angry bird. See what I did there? That was clever of me wasn’t it?
So angry is Nameless Red Bird, in fact, that he appears to have enrolled in some sort of anger management programme, along with an annoying yellow bird played by the annoying man who played the annoying snowman in Frozen. Typecasting issues aside, though, this literally seems like it’s going to be a film about some angry birds. That’s literally what this film is.
But it’s OK, because here’s a pig, which you might remember is the mortal enemy of the Angry Birds. Pretty soon these pigs will be constructing dangerously ramshackle homes for themselves, and the birds will kamikaze into them as revenge. If my memory is correct, the birds all die as soon as they’ve been catapulted at the pigs, which makes me think that the Angry Birds movie will actually turn up to be a sorrowful meditation on the futility of war.
Angry Birds is that iPhone game that people used to play a lot three years ago but don’t any more. And now it’s going to be a film. And there’s a trailer for it. There, that’s better. Still, while we’re here, let’s give the Angry Birds trailer a closer look.
We open with a shot of the character we’re most likely to remember from the last time we played Angry Birds several years ago – Nameless Red Bird. Here’s Nameless Red Bird eating a sandwich. So far, this is a film about a cartoon bird eating a sandwich.
Also present, three sexy birds. At least I assume they’re supposed to be sexy. God, I hope they are, otherwise I’ve just projecting a horrific amount of sexual availability onto three relatively gender-free cartoon birds. Not this week, Heritage. Don’t do this while nebulous almost-bestiality is such a hot-button issue. Get it together.
Oh, phew, they were supposed to be sexy after all. And they were aiming all their red-hot sexuality at that hunky sort-of blueish bird. I hope the red bird’s OK, and didn’t mistakenly think the other birds were actually coming on to him.
Ah. He did. And by the look of it he hasn’t taken the rejection well. In fact, I suppose you could say that he’s now a fairly angry bird. See what I did there? That was clever of me wasn’t it?
So angry is Nameless Red Bird, in fact, that he appears to have enrolled in some sort of anger management programme, along with an annoying yellow bird played by the annoying man who played the annoying snowman in Frozen. Typecasting issues aside, though, this literally seems like it’s going to be a film about some angry birds. That’s literally what this film is.
But it’s OK, because here’s a pig, which you might remember is the mortal enemy of the Angry Birds. Pretty soon these pigs will be constructing dangerously ramshackle homes for themselves, and the birds will kamikaze into them as revenge. If my memory is correct, the birds all die as soon as they’ve been catapulted at the pigs, which makes me think that the Angry Birds movie will actually turn up to be a sorrowful meditation on the futility of war.
Tuesday, September 22, 2015
Destiny: The Taken King review: finally, the game it should have been
It was a year ago when Destiny hit consoles, promising a new era of super-connected online shooting. The first new series from Halo developer Bungie since 2001, it combined the meaty gunplay and polished exterior of that series with the deeply satisfying loot-gathering of a game like Diablo. On top of all that was a smattering of World of Warcraft-style massively-multiplayer content such as raids and public events.
Those first few weeks flying around in space with your AI “Ghost” buddy in tow were glorious, even if Peter Dinklage’s delivery as the sidekick was so bad that simple adjectives like “bored” and “wooden” fail to do it justice. But as the novelty wore off, so too did the shine. For something so clearly standing on the shoulders of giants, there was a bizarre failure to learn the lessons of the past.
Where World of Warcraft has spent the best part of a decade iterating and improving MMO mechanics, Destiny seemed intent on reinventing them from scratch. The game launched with almost no matchmaking functionality for any serious play, requiring players to put themselves into teams of three to six friends manually. Bungie insisted on treating co-operative and competitive play the same for balancing purposes, ensuring that weapons were frequently bizarrely overpowered or completely useless. Earning high-level loot, explicitly required to participate in the game’s high-point, the Vault of Glass raid, was an exercise in frustration and destructive psychological loops to the extent that players chose to stand outside a cave shooting low-level enemies for hours on end to earn rewards, rather than play the game “as intended”. Those are problems World of Warcraft experienced at launch, too – over a decade ago.
Worse, Bungie had seemingly forgotten its own history. Where Halo’s sprawling space opera presented an engrossing world with memorable characters and fully-realised motivations from the off, Destiny’s plot was a forgettable, confusing mess, with plot threads left hanging, foes whose motivation was barely more than “space zombie”, and voice acting which took an all-star cast (Peter Dinklage, Nathan Fillion and Bill Nighy all play a role) and couldn’t eke a memorable line from any of them. Rumours of a wholesale rewrite months before release, stripping the majority of the plot out and shoving it in a companion “grimoire” app, were never confirmed, but lapped up by a player-base eager for some explanation as to how the developer could misstep so spectacularly.
A year on, I am still playing Destiny. Because for all that it gets wrong – and it gets so much wrong – it remains a phenomenally-executed game, offering moments of pure joy I’ve seen very rarely in any game before and since. Through two expansion packs, Bungie has ironed out some of the flaws present in the original game, retooling the hoarding instinct at the game’s heart to something more productive while steadily introducing more and better matchmaking to help those players (like me) who find it hard to pull a group together at short notice. I love it, but I’d taken to habitually describing it as “my favourite bad game of the year”.
Well, finally Destiny’s actually good.
Its latest expansion, The Taken King, comprehensively fixes the game’s most glaring flaws from the bottom-up. Even Peter Dinklage is stripped out, with everything – including pre-existing dialogue – now voiced by veteran videogame voice actor Nolan North. A new quest mechanic links together previously disparate missions into a coherent thread, boosted further by actually-interesting cutscenes, a first for the game. Nathan Fillion gets the chance to wisecrack, and it’s briefly like Firefly was never cancelled.
The game’s story picks up where the second expansion, House of Wolves, left off. Following the death of Crota, leader of the Hive (read: space-zombies), his daddy Oryx is out for revenge. He arrives in a dreadnought, blows a whole in one of saturn’s moons, and sits there daring the Guardians, last saviours of humanity, to come for him.
And come you do. The game’s new story missions provide a compelling core to the game, seeing you break into the Dreadnought, explore the area, and take on Oryx himself. While the first two mini-expansions to the game were criticised for being little more than remixes of existing content, this one is all new: the Dreadnought feels worthy of becoming the game’s fifth major location, and the Taken, the new race that fights for Oryx, are welcome as a fresh face.
When they were initially revealed, there was concern that the Taken might be little more than reskinned versions of past foes: in the lore of the game, Oryx “takes” creatures from other races, infuses them with his power, and puts them back in the world to fight for him. But in practice, they feel more than different enough from their past selves to justify their inclusion. Where Hive Thralls sprint towards the player, Taken Thralls lumber slowly, before teleporting to a whole new position in seconds; where Cabal Phalanxes hide behind their shields, shooting over the top, Taken Phalanxes gain a weapon capable of firing you backwards at speed.
But as with the base game, it’s when the story ends that the real Destiny begins. This time, that’s even more explicit: upon claiming the reward for finishing the last mission, a number of quests immediately open up, pushing the player towards the new strikes, encouraging them to revisit old areas to battle the Taken there, and reminding them that the Crucible, where player-versus-player combat congregates, is still there.
Sadly, also like the base game, the progression mechanic falls apart just before the end. Although the game caps out at level 40, a new “light level” measures the quality of your gear. Raising that to 280 is relatively trivial, involving earning the newest late-game currency (“legendary marks”) and buying gear from the vendors. But to run the newest raid, King’s Fall, requires a light level of 290, only achievable so far through lucky drops or the once-a-week special “nightfall” strikes.
It makes sense that the raids are limited to the highest level players, demanding strict teamwork and a deep understanding of the game’s mechanics. But if the King’s Fall comes anywhere near the quality of the Vault of Glass raid from the original (and I’ve not yet been able to play it for myself, so it remains an open question), it’s a crying shame that the vast majority of Destiny’s players will never load it up.
Even so, The Taken King is the first time since launch that it’s been possible to say to new players that now is the time to start playing Destiny. The flaws have been ironed out, and the future’s bright.
However, there’s one final sticking point. The “Legendary Edition” of Destiny costs £40 new, and contains the base game, as well as all three expansion packs published to date. The digital download of the Taken King costs … £40 new. And contains just the download.
The discrepancy isn’t quite as bad in the US, where the download costs $40 (£26), but it’s also not just a case of rip-off Britain. Someone who’s been playing Destiny since day one will have paid around $100 or £100, depending on where they are, for the content that now functions as an effective demo. Worse, if they paid that and decide not to buy the Taken King, the base game has had content removed in the runup to the expansion: high level strike playlists, as well as a number of side quests and other activities, are now only available to those with the latest expansion.
Those first few weeks flying around in space with your AI “Ghost” buddy in tow were glorious, even if Peter Dinklage’s delivery as the sidekick was so bad that simple adjectives like “bored” and “wooden” fail to do it justice. But as the novelty wore off, so too did the shine. For something so clearly standing on the shoulders of giants, there was a bizarre failure to learn the lessons of the past.
Where World of Warcraft has spent the best part of a decade iterating and improving MMO mechanics, Destiny seemed intent on reinventing them from scratch. The game launched with almost no matchmaking functionality for any serious play, requiring players to put themselves into teams of three to six friends manually. Bungie insisted on treating co-operative and competitive play the same for balancing purposes, ensuring that weapons were frequently bizarrely overpowered or completely useless. Earning high-level loot, explicitly required to participate in the game’s high-point, the Vault of Glass raid, was an exercise in frustration and destructive psychological loops to the extent that players chose to stand outside a cave shooting low-level enemies for hours on end to earn rewards, rather than play the game “as intended”. Those are problems World of Warcraft experienced at launch, too – over a decade ago.
Worse, Bungie had seemingly forgotten its own history. Where Halo’s sprawling space opera presented an engrossing world with memorable characters and fully-realised motivations from the off, Destiny’s plot was a forgettable, confusing mess, with plot threads left hanging, foes whose motivation was barely more than “space zombie”, and voice acting which took an all-star cast (Peter Dinklage, Nathan Fillion and Bill Nighy all play a role) and couldn’t eke a memorable line from any of them. Rumours of a wholesale rewrite months before release, stripping the majority of the plot out and shoving it in a companion “grimoire” app, were never confirmed, but lapped up by a player-base eager for some explanation as to how the developer could misstep so spectacularly.
A year on, I am still playing Destiny. Because for all that it gets wrong – and it gets so much wrong – it remains a phenomenally-executed game, offering moments of pure joy I’ve seen very rarely in any game before and since. Through two expansion packs, Bungie has ironed out some of the flaws present in the original game, retooling the hoarding instinct at the game’s heart to something more productive while steadily introducing more and better matchmaking to help those players (like me) who find it hard to pull a group together at short notice. I love it, but I’d taken to habitually describing it as “my favourite bad game of the year”.
Well, finally Destiny’s actually good.
Its latest expansion, The Taken King, comprehensively fixes the game’s most glaring flaws from the bottom-up. Even Peter Dinklage is stripped out, with everything – including pre-existing dialogue – now voiced by veteran videogame voice actor Nolan North. A new quest mechanic links together previously disparate missions into a coherent thread, boosted further by actually-interesting cutscenes, a first for the game. Nathan Fillion gets the chance to wisecrack, and it’s briefly like Firefly was never cancelled.
The game’s story picks up where the second expansion, House of Wolves, left off. Following the death of Crota, leader of the Hive (read: space-zombies), his daddy Oryx is out for revenge. He arrives in a dreadnought, blows a whole in one of saturn’s moons, and sits there daring the Guardians, last saviours of humanity, to come for him.
And come you do. The game’s new story missions provide a compelling core to the game, seeing you break into the Dreadnought, explore the area, and take on Oryx himself. While the first two mini-expansions to the game were criticised for being little more than remixes of existing content, this one is all new: the Dreadnought feels worthy of becoming the game’s fifth major location, and the Taken, the new race that fights for Oryx, are welcome as a fresh face.
When they were initially revealed, there was concern that the Taken might be little more than reskinned versions of past foes: in the lore of the game, Oryx “takes” creatures from other races, infuses them with his power, and puts them back in the world to fight for him. But in practice, they feel more than different enough from their past selves to justify their inclusion. Where Hive Thralls sprint towards the player, Taken Thralls lumber slowly, before teleporting to a whole new position in seconds; where Cabal Phalanxes hide behind their shields, shooting over the top, Taken Phalanxes gain a weapon capable of firing you backwards at speed.
But as with the base game, it’s when the story ends that the real Destiny begins. This time, that’s even more explicit: upon claiming the reward for finishing the last mission, a number of quests immediately open up, pushing the player towards the new strikes, encouraging them to revisit old areas to battle the Taken there, and reminding them that the Crucible, where player-versus-player combat congregates, is still there.
Sadly, also like the base game, the progression mechanic falls apart just before the end. Although the game caps out at level 40, a new “light level” measures the quality of your gear. Raising that to 280 is relatively trivial, involving earning the newest late-game currency (“legendary marks”) and buying gear from the vendors. But to run the newest raid, King’s Fall, requires a light level of 290, only achievable so far through lucky drops or the once-a-week special “nightfall” strikes.
It makes sense that the raids are limited to the highest level players, demanding strict teamwork and a deep understanding of the game’s mechanics. But if the King’s Fall comes anywhere near the quality of the Vault of Glass raid from the original (and I’ve not yet been able to play it for myself, so it remains an open question), it’s a crying shame that the vast majority of Destiny’s players will never load it up.
Even so, The Taken King is the first time since launch that it’s been possible to say to new players that now is the time to start playing Destiny. The flaws have been ironed out, and the future’s bright.
However, there’s one final sticking point. The “Legendary Edition” of Destiny costs £40 new, and contains the base game, as well as all three expansion packs published to date. The digital download of the Taken King costs … £40 new. And contains just the download.
The discrepancy isn’t quite as bad in the US, where the download costs $40 (£26), but it’s also not just a case of rip-off Britain. Someone who’s been playing Destiny since day one will have paid around $100 or £100, depending on where they are, for the content that now functions as an effective demo. Worse, if they paid that and decide not to buy the Taken King, the base game has had content removed in the runup to the expansion: high level strike playlists, as well as a number of side quests and other activities, are now only available to those with the latest expansion.
Sunday, September 20, 2015
Hardcore review – plotless, characterisation-free cinema du Xbox
For folks who are too lazy to play their own video games, there’s the movie Hardcore. For 90 minutes, first-time feature director Ilya Naishuller throttles your central nervous system with a stretched-out spasm of first-person action. Run here, jump there, slice this carotid artery, shatter that skull. The plot, what little of it there is, has mute amnesia victim Henry (ostensibly “you”), avoiding death at every turn and frantically racing to a series of checkpoints delivered to his phone by a reappearing guide in the form of a manic (and homophobic) Sharlto Copley.
From an acrobatic point of view, all the GoPro choreography is impressive. “How’d they do THAT?” you’ll wonder for the first 15 minutes. But as the relentless shaky-cam and ear-splitting weapons blasts soldier on, this query changes to: “Do I have any aspirin in my bag?” Hardcore taps into a 14-year-old boy’s brain, marinating in a vat of Mountain Dew, fantasising about high-energy kills, lusty women and loud music. Perhaps interesting for sociological study, but as a movie, it is vulgar, boring and embarrassing.
After a perplexing prologue that never gets explained, we’re woken up RoboCop style. Parts of our body are synthetic, and a gorgeous woman claiming to be our wife (Haley Bennett) is stitching us together. But then, an albino with telekinetic powers (Danila Kozlovsky) and his goons come in and destroy the lab. Turns out we’re in some sort of airship, and a cool dive in an escape pod takes us to a Russian city. That’s when our guide (Sharlto Copley in a collection of guises) appears to send us on a number of gruesome missions. Eventually this leads to a second fight against the albino, who is creating a race of super soldiers.
The opening chapters consist of leaping and climbing, but this eventually leads to repeated grotesque dismemberment. Naked women cower in fear as our guns blast up a nightclub. We leap down stairwells, dive through windows, bash our way through traffic like a pinball.
There is, admittedly, a straight shot of pure cinema that charges some of these sequences. Many of the visual gags are clever. (A grenade is thrown down a flight of stairs, bodies rise and fall, tossed like pizza dough.) But even a movie like Crank takes time off for story and characterization. Naishuller’s technique is one that could be well served as a shorter gimmick; a solitary action scene in a larger film. Hardcore is unrelenting and unforgiving in its commitment to be loud, fast, destructive and gross.
As my mind wandered (because it’s impossible to pay attention to this for too long), I wondered if this bombardment to the lizard part of my brain was unhealthy. When the image on the screen is “you”, and “you” are violently killing people with guns and knives at close range, it eventually becomes a transgressive act – particularly when it fails to be in the service of any story.
From an acrobatic point of view, all the GoPro choreography is impressive. “How’d they do THAT?” you’ll wonder for the first 15 minutes. But as the relentless shaky-cam and ear-splitting weapons blasts soldier on, this query changes to: “Do I have any aspirin in my bag?” Hardcore taps into a 14-year-old boy’s brain, marinating in a vat of Mountain Dew, fantasising about high-energy kills, lusty women and loud music. Perhaps interesting for sociological study, but as a movie, it is vulgar, boring and embarrassing.
After a perplexing prologue that never gets explained, we’re woken up RoboCop style. Parts of our body are synthetic, and a gorgeous woman claiming to be our wife (Haley Bennett) is stitching us together. But then, an albino with telekinetic powers (Danila Kozlovsky) and his goons come in and destroy the lab. Turns out we’re in some sort of airship, and a cool dive in an escape pod takes us to a Russian city. That’s when our guide (Sharlto Copley in a collection of guises) appears to send us on a number of gruesome missions. Eventually this leads to a second fight against the albino, who is creating a race of super soldiers.
The opening chapters consist of leaping and climbing, but this eventually leads to repeated grotesque dismemberment. Naked women cower in fear as our guns blast up a nightclub. We leap down stairwells, dive through windows, bash our way through traffic like a pinball.
There is, admittedly, a straight shot of pure cinema that charges some of these sequences. Many of the visual gags are clever. (A grenade is thrown down a flight of stairs, bodies rise and fall, tossed like pizza dough.) But even a movie like Crank takes time off for story and characterization. Naishuller’s technique is one that could be well served as a shorter gimmick; a solitary action scene in a larger film. Hardcore is unrelenting and unforgiving in its commitment to be loud, fast, destructive and gross.
As my mind wandered (because it’s impossible to pay attention to this for too long), I wondered if this bombardment to the lizard part of my brain was unhealthy. When the image on the screen is “you”, and “you” are violently killing people with guns and knives at close range, it eventually becomes a transgressive act – particularly when it fails to be in the service of any story.
Friday, September 18, 2015
Play it your way: how Twitch lets disabled gamers earn a living online
In the summer of 2014, Mackenzie had just started working two minimum-wage jobs in Colorado when she suffered a major epileptic seizure at home, one that left her reeling and disoriented. She was home alone and, following the attack, too bewildered and drowsy to know to call in sick. The infraction was enough to earn Mackenzie, who was 22 at the time, a so-called “no call, no show” blot on her record from each employer – a restaurant, where she worked tables, and a gym. While both companies knew about Mackenzie’s history of severe seizures, this was, they said, grounds for dismissal. She was told not to return to work. “I’m in the process of fighting it,” she tells me. “But both companies have a lot of money … ”
Mackenzie’s seizures are so severe – she was featured earlier this year on MTV’sTrue Life: I Have Epilepsy – that she is unable to drive (or climb, or swim, or wield a knife, among many other things). Neither will she take the bus to work because, if she suffers a fit on board, well-meaning members of the public inevitably call for an ambulance to take her to the hospital – a costly trip in the US. Indeed, Mackenzie’s medical debts currently total more than $30,000. Jobs that are walking distance from her home are hard to find, and harder still to hold down.
Around the time she was dismissed, Mackenzie had started watching Twitch.tv, the online video streaming service on which you can log in to watch so-called “streamers” present live TV broadcasts. She’d heard that some of these presenters, who usually played video games on air, were popular enough that they were able to earn a living from their broadcasts. Moreover, many of these streamers were unable to work other jobs. There was NoHandsKen, a quadriplegic streamer who is dependent on a ventilator to breathe; Brolylegs, who, despite having no arms, is an expert player of Street Fighter, a game that requires immense dexterity (he describes himself as the “best Chun-Li with no hands”);DHHGamers, which stands for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Gamers, a Twitch community for hearing-impaired gamers who stream and play a variety of online games; and a slew of others. Sensing a problem-solving opportunity, Mackenzie set up an account. Rather than trying to disguise her illness, she instead decided to advertise it via the droll handle Mackenseize.
In 2014, Amazon bought Twitch for $970m, a seemingly ludicrous amount for a website whose value and appeal might appear, to non-viewers, nebulous and ill-defined. In fact, the pitch is simple: Twitch is a service on which anyone is able to broadcast anything live online, from a live concert to a poetry recital. Broadcasters each have their own channel, and viewers follow their favourite presenters, like radio listeners who track their preferred DJs as they move from station to station. Viewers can channel-hop, leave live comments on what they’re watching, and even donate money to support the broadcasters they enjoy. Twitch is arguably the most democratic broadcasting television service yet devised, even if its subject matter is currently narrow. (Programmes on Twitch’s precursor, justin.tv, were general interest, but its popularity was immediately surpassed by that of Twitch, which launched as a video game-focused spinoff in June 2011.)
Unlike, for example, YouTube, the videos are not recorded for posterity (though some do end up there). Like live television, the moment passes and is lost. Log on to watch your favourite broadcaster while they are offline and you’ll be greeted with a blank page. This is appointment-viewing, as evidenced by the fact that, as well as individual broadcasters, Twitch also hosts live events, especially increasingly popular eSports tournaments, in which professional video game players compete for growing prize pots. In March, more than a million viewers logged in to watch the Extreme Masters World Championship in Katowice, Poland – the record for the number of concurrent viewers watching a single channel on Twitch to date.
Twitch’s inscrutability derives from two factors. The audience is predominantly teenage, and the material they watch predominantly footage of people playing and talking about video games. Nevertheless, the numbers involved are extraordinary. A data survey in April 2014 found that Twitch had a 43% share of all live-streaming web traffic in the US. In the same year the site began to attract an average of 100 million unique viewers per month. Viewers watch for an average of 106 minutes per day – which adds up to many billions of minutes watched on Twitch per month. Video games are no longer our species’ ultimate time-waster; that dubious accolade goes, instead, to watching other people play video games.
On a wet Thursday morning, Mackenzie sits at her computer wearing a grey hoody and a pair of bulky headphones, with one can slipped off the ear. Her webcam is positioned flatteringly above one of the two computer screens in front of her. She ping-pongs her head between the two screens, one of which displays the match she’s currently playing over the internet – a competitive card game called Hearthstone – and the other the Twitch chat log, where her viewers leave comments on what she is doing.
“Eight, nine, 10 … he’s coming up to 11 health and we have eight damage,” she says, leaning in to the monitor at the climax of a match. “So if we get a dark bomb … actually, we can Boom? No, we can’t Boom Hellfire. That’s fine.”
The conversation, which is arcane to anyone who is not versed in the complexities of Hearthstone, appears to be one-way. Mackenzie’s is the only voice we hear, but she routinely responds to questions that her viewers pose in chat, turning the stream into a dialogue – “kenz, whats your favorite vanilla-flavored ice cream flavor?” asks one viewer.
Later, the conversation turns to epilepsy. “I started smoking two years before I had any seizures,” she reports. Another viewer suggests that weed can be useful in controlling epilepsy.
“At first I didn’t know what to do,” Mackenzie tells me, of her Twitch debut. She watched other streamers, studied their techniques and the things they talked to their viewers about while playing their chosen game – usually tips and techniques about what they were doing in the game, mixed in with more general talk about their lives. “If I enjoyed sitting in a particular stream, I’d copy what they did.” It was a steep learning curve. “I knew that this wasn’t going to go anywhere if I only streamed for a few hours each day, or only every other day,” she says. “I had an opportunity, and I wasn’t going to waste it. Almost from the start I was doing 60 hours a week. I’d wake up, get dressed and showered, then start streaming from 11am through to 11pm every single day.”
The hard work paid off. At first, Mackenzie would have a few dozen players entering her stream. A year later, that figure averages around 350. Mackenzie now has more than 27,000 followers, who are notified every time she starts a broadcast. She is also able to earn a living from this newly minted vocation. “Because I knew I wanted this to become my job, I installed a donation button right from the off.” This allowed viewers to donate money to Mackenzie in one-off payments, but the income was naturally uneven. “One month someone would donate a crazy amount of money,” she recalls. “Then the next month I’d only make $400. The first few months it was random, but I was still making more money than I had made on minimum-wage jobs to which I had to walk or catch the bus.”
After six months, Mackenzie was invited to join Twitch’s partnership programme, which allowed her to add paid subscriptions to her channel. Around 11,000 of Twitch’s 1.5 million streamers are partners. It costs viewers $4.99 per month to subscribe to a channel; half of this goes to Twitch, and the rest goes to the streamer. While Mackenzie’s income is still uneven, it has steadied now, and she has even been able to pay off some of her medical bills.
The reasons for Twitch’s success can be difficult to unpick. Undoubtedly, it’s the latest triumph to rise from the recent seismic shifts in broadcasting. During the past five years, the rise of so-called “casters” has made internet stars of numerous young YouTube and Twitch broadcasters. The 24-year-old Swede Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg has more than 28 million subscribers to his channel, an audience that rivals that of America’s slick-haired talkshow hosts. PewDiePie reportedly earned $7.2m in 2014. The stars of these services share some of the attributes that propelled TV stars to fame in decades past: they are likable, watchable, humorous or insightful – even if they are, usually, laser-focused on a particular niche.
The site’s success is also down to the interactive relationship between streamer and viewer. “The reason why Twitch is so sticky is because it is not just people watching video games; it’s a social video experience,” explains Chase, who helped launch the service in 2011. “The broadcasters are talking to the viewers and the people in chat are interacting with the broadcasters and each other; it is a very dynamic conversation.” Stacey Rebecca, a Twitch streamer from Croydon who suffers from postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome – chronic back pain that makes it difficult for her to leave the house unaided – agrees. “It’s the excitement of it being live,” she says. “It’s more interactive and more personal for that reason. Getting to witness silly and cool things happen live makes it more interesting than YouTube to me.”
Nevertheless, positive communities don’t happen naturally on Twitch, just as they don’t elsewhere on the internet, where the veil of anonymity encourages abusive behaviour. “I had to be strict about who I let in,” says Mackenzie. “That stunted building my audience. It’s easy to get a large audience, especially as a woman, if you don’t moderate your chat at all, and you just let people come in and say whatever they want. A lot of people do drunk streams, or smoke on screen, and I don’t do that. It’s been slow and steady to build, but every time someone comes into the channel and enjoys it, they stay for a long time. I’m proud of that.” Nevertheless, Mackenzie chooses to keep her surname a secret, so as to maintain a certain degree of privacy, even as she lets strangers into her home via a video linkup daily.
Stacey Rebecca, who had a following as a cosplayer (someone who dresses up as characters from films, video games and comics) before she joined Twitch, has also worked hard to cultivate a non-toxic community. “There are things called ‘stream raids’, where a group of bored teens will visit certain channel and post insults in the chat log,” she says. “But it’s copy-and-paste stuff. Because I’ve already done the cosplay stuff, I’ve heard pretty much every insult. Very often it’s not personal. They’re just looking to get a reaction, and if they don’t, they get bored.”
Mackenzie’s seizures are so severe – she was featured earlier this year on MTV’sTrue Life: I Have Epilepsy – that she is unable to drive (or climb, or swim, or wield a knife, among many other things). Neither will she take the bus to work because, if she suffers a fit on board, well-meaning members of the public inevitably call for an ambulance to take her to the hospital – a costly trip in the US. Indeed, Mackenzie’s medical debts currently total more than $30,000. Jobs that are walking distance from her home are hard to find, and harder still to hold down.
Around the time she was dismissed, Mackenzie had started watching Twitch.tv, the online video streaming service on which you can log in to watch so-called “streamers” present live TV broadcasts. She’d heard that some of these presenters, who usually played video games on air, were popular enough that they were able to earn a living from their broadcasts. Moreover, many of these streamers were unable to work other jobs. There was NoHandsKen, a quadriplegic streamer who is dependent on a ventilator to breathe; Brolylegs, who, despite having no arms, is an expert player of Street Fighter, a game that requires immense dexterity (he describes himself as the “best Chun-Li with no hands”);DHHGamers, which stands for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Gamers, a Twitch community for hearing-impaired gamers who stream and play a variety of online games; and a slew of others. Sensing a problem-solving opportunity, Mackenzie set up an account. Rather than trying to disguise her illness, she instead decided to advertise it via the droll handle Mackenseize.
In 2014, Amazon bought Twitch for $970m, a seemingly ludicrous amount for a website whose value and appeal might appear, to non-viewers, nebulous and ill-defined. In fact, the pitch is simple: Twitch is a service on which anyone is able to broadcast anything live online, from a live concert to a poetry recital. Broadcasters each have their own channel, and viewers follow their favourite presenters, like radio listeners who track their preferred DJs as they move from station to station. Viewers can channel-hop, leave live comments on what they’re watching, and even donate money to support the broadcasters they enjoy. Twitch is arguably the most democratic broadcasting television service yet devised, even if its subject matter is currently narrow. (Programmes on Twitch’s precursor, justin.tv, were general interest, but its popularity was immediately surpassed by that of Twitch, which launched as a video game-focused spinoff in June 2011.)
Unlike, for example, YouTube, the videos are not recorded for posterity (though some do end up there). Like live television, the moment passes and is lost. Log on to watch your favourite broadcaster while they are offline and you’ll be greeted with a blank page. This is appointment-viewing, as evidenced by the fact that, as well as individual broadcasters, Twitch also hosts live events, especially increasingly popular eSports tournaments, in which professional video game players compete for growing prize pots. In March, more than a million viewers logged in to watch the Extreme Masters World Championship in Katowice, Poland – the record for the number of concurrent viewers watching a single channel on Twitch to date.
Twitch’s inscrutability derives from two factors. The audience is predominantly teenage, and the material they watch predominantly footage of people playing and talking about video games. Nevertheless, the numbers involved are extraordinary. A data survey in April 2014 found that Twitch had a 43% share of all live-streaming web traffic in the US. In the same year the site began to attract an average of 100 million unique viewers per month. Viewers watch for an average of 106 minutes per day – which adds up to many billions of minutes watched on Twitch per month. Video games are no longer our species’ ultimate time-waster; that dubious accolade goes, instead, to watching other people play video games.
On a wet Thursday morning, Mackenzie sits at her computer wearing a grey hoody and a pair of bulky headphones, with one can slipped off the ear. Her webcam is positioned flatteringly above one of the two computer screens in front of her. She ping-pongs her head between the two screens, one of which displays the match she’s currently playing over the internet – a competitive card game called Hearthstone – and the other the Twitch chat log, where her viewers leave comments on what she is doing.
“Eight, nine, 10 … he’s coming up to 11 health and we have eight damage,” she says, leaning in to the monitor at the climax of a match. “So if we get a dark bomb … actually, we can Boom? No, we can’t Boom Hellfire. That’s fine.”
The conversation, which is arcane to anyone who is not versed in the complexities of Hearthstone, appears to be one-way. Mackenzie’s is the only voice we hear, but she routinely responds to questions that her viewers pose in chat, turning the stream into a dialogue – “kenz, whats your favorite vanilla-flavored ice cream flavor?” asks one viewer.
Later, the conversation turns to epilepsy. “I started smoking two years before I had any seizures,” she reports. Another viewer suggests that weed can be useful in controlling epilepsy.
“At first I didn’t know what to do,” Mackenzie tells me, of her Twitch debut. She watched other streamers, studied their techniques and the things they talked to their viewers about while playing their chosen game – usually tips and techniques about what they were doing in the game, mixed in with more general talk about their lives. “If I enjoyed sitting in a particular stream, I’d copy what they did.” It was a steep learning curve. “I knew that this wasn’t going to go anywhere if I only streamed for a few hours each day, or only every other day,” she says. “I had an opportunity, and I wasn’t going to waste it. Almost from the start I was doing 60 hours a week. I’d wake up, get dressed and showered, then start streaming from 11am through to 11pm every single day.”
The hard work paid off. At first, Mackenzie would have a few dozen players entering her stream. A year later, that figure averages around 350. Mackenzie now has more than 27,000 followers, who are notified every time she starts a broadcast. She is also able to earn a living from this newly minted vocation. “Because I knew I wanted this to become my job, I installed a donation button right from the off.” This allowed viewers to donate money to Mackenzie in one-off payments, but the income was naturally uneven. “One month someone would donate a crazy amount of money,” she recalls. “Then the next month I’d only make $400. The first few months it was random, but I was still making more money than I had made on minimum-wage jobs to which I had to walk or catch the bus.”
After six months, Mackenzie was invited to join Twitch’s partnership programme, which allowed her to add paid subscriptions to her channel. Around 11,000 of Twitch’s 1.5 million streamers are partners. It costs viewers $4.99 per month to subscribe to a channel; half of this goes to Twitch, and the rest goes to the streamer. While Mackenzie’s income is still uneven, it has steadied now, and she has even been able to pay off some of her medical bills.
The reasons for Twitch’s success can be difficult to unpick. Undoubtedly, it’s the latest triumph to rise from the recent seismic shifts in broadcasting. During the past five years, the rise of so-called “casters” has made internet stars of numerous young YouTube and Twitch broadcasters. The 24-year-old Swede Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg has more than 28 million subscribers to his channel, an audience that rivals that of America’s slick-haired talkshow hosts. PewDiePie reportedly earned $7.2m in 2014. The stars of these services share some of the attributes that propelled TV stars to fame in decades past: they are likable, watchable, humorous or insightful – even if they are, usually, laser-focused on a particular niche.
The site’s success is also down to the interactive relationship between streamer and viewer. “The reason why Twitch is so sticky is because it is not just people watching video games; it’s a social video experience,” explains Chase, who helped launch the service in 2011. “The broadcasters are talking to the viewers and the people in chat are interacting with the broadcasters and each other; it is a very dynamic conversation.” Stacey Rebecca, a Twitch streamer from Croydon who suffers from postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome – chronic back pain that makes it difficult for her to leave the house unaided – agrees. “It’s the excitement of it being live,” she says. “It’s more interactive and more personal for that reason. Getting to witness silly and cool things happen live makes it more interesting than YouTube to me.”
Nevertheless, positive communities don’t happen naturally on Twitch, just as they don’t elsewhere on the internet, where the veil of anonymity encourages abusive behaviour. “I had to be strict about who I let in,” says Mackenzie. “That stunted building my audience. It’s easy to get a large audience, especially as a woman, if you don’t moderate your chat at all, and you just let people come in and say whatever they want. A lot of people do drunk streams, or smoke on screen, and I don’t do that. It’s been slow and steady to build, but every time someone comes into the channel and enjoys it, they stay for a long time. I’m proud of that.” Nevertheless, Mackenzie chooses to keep her surname a secret, so as to maintain a certain degree of privacy, even as she lets strangers into her home via a video linkup daily.
Stacey Rebecca, who had a following as a cosplayer (someone who dresses up as characters from films, video games and comics) before she joined Twitch, has also worked hard to cultivate a non-toxic community. “There are things called ‘stream raids’, where a group of bored teens will visit certain channel and post insults in the chat log,” she says. “But it’s copy-and-paste stuff. Because I’ve already done the cosplay stuff, I’ve heard pretty much every insult. Very often it’s not personal. They’re just looking to get a reaction, and if they don’t, they get bored.”
Thursday, September 17, 2015
The Gamechangers review – Daniel Radcliffe's GTA drama was on autopilot
There is a new genre in Hollywood, the tech origin story, and it comes with its own version of goodies and baddies. Critically lauded films such as The Social Network, the Steve Jobs biopic Jobs, and even The Imitation Game, all present young, socially abrasive mavericks rallying against unimaginative naysayers who can’t dream of the future. It’s a potent formula, so you can see why the BBC is keen to tell the story behind the biggest British success story of modern tech, Grand Theft Auto, one of the best-selling franchises in the history of gaming.
The origins of Grand Theft Auto (GTA) can be found in Dundee where a bunch of newbie programmers created an expansive, but slightly shoddy, 2D game in which players drive around a city completing crime missions. The Gamechangers skips all that, beginning when the franchise has been bought by Rockstar Games and 1m copies of GTA’s fourth incarnation, Vice City, have already been sold. The game’s production is now being run out of New York by English brothers Sam and Dan Houser.
The BBC’s feature-length show centres around battles between Rockstar and Jack Thompson, a conservative Christian lawyer who styles himself on Batman. Thompson tries to sue Rockstar, first because of the game’s potentially violent influence on children and later because of a sex scene hidden in the game’s code. What follows is a well-paced pitter-patter of courtroom battles, boardroom struggles and personal anguish.
There was plenty of ambition to make this a big-budget, US-style boardroom tech story, with some flashy graphics and an impressive early scene in which a copycat GTA-style police killing is shot in the style of the game. Big-name actors Daniel Radcliffe and Bill Paxton play the two main adversaries: Paxton’s moral crusader with anger management issues is particularly convincing.
It’s impossible not to compare The Gamechangers’ desire to ape one genre of Hollywood movies, with Rockstar’s aim to ape another one: the violent action film. One of the most revolutionary things about GTA is that it shows rather than tells: the story is told through gameplay and dialogue rather than the traditional expositional cut scenes, giving it an immersive film-like quality. Unfortunately, those games feel more genuine than this rather stilted take on how they were made.
The script feels underdeveloped – perhaps writers were constrained by the limited source material and the refusal of Rockstar to cooperate in making the show – but most of the characters talk in unnatural soundbites. In the opening minutes, it feels as if people are reading their character descriptions aloud: “Here she is, the successful wife” and “Come on little brother, you are the clever funny one.”
The portrayal of the game itself also falls short. Anything remotely technical is presented in a shoddy, unrealistic style, which, in the age of super-accurate technology TV shows such as Mr Robot and Silicon Valley, seems very old-fashioned. The scene in which people are furiously tapping away at keyboards and then suddenly watching a fully rendered sex scene seems particularly ridiculous.
a
But more problematic is that the show is disingenuous about what makes GTA revolutionary. The game is celebrated because of the detail in the landscapes and gameplay, and the nihilistic freedom with which players can hijack cars and murder prostitutes. None of that has much of a feelgood factor, so, instead, there is a pretence that the “gamechanging” thing about the new GTA is that the character can buy his own clothes and customise his style and that will affect his personality, something that has never really been at the centre of the game.
The origins of Grand Theft Auto (GTA) can be found in Dundee where a bunch of newbie programmers created an expansive, but slightly shoddy, 2D game in which players drive around a city completing crime missions. The Gamechangers skips all that, beginning when the franchise has been bought by Rockstar Games and 1m copies of GTA’s fourth incarnation, Vice City, have already been sold. The game’s production is now being run out of New York by English brothers Sam and Dan Houser.
The BBC’s feature-length show centres around battles between Rockstar and Jack Thompson, a conservative Christian lawyer who styles himself on Batman. Thompson tries to sue Rockstar, first because of the game’s potentially violent influence on children and later because of a sex scene hidden in the game’s code. What follows is a well-paced pitter-patter of courtroom battles, boardroom struggles and personal anguish.
There was plenty of ambition to make this a big-budget, US-style boardroom tech story, with some flashy graphics and an impressive early scene in which a copycat GTA-style police killing is shot in the style of the game. Big-name actors Daniel Radcliffe and Bill Paxton play the two main adversaries: Paxton’s moral crusader with anger management issues is particularly convincing.
It’s impossible not to compare The Gamechangers’ desire to ape one genre of Hollywood movies, with Rockstar’s aim to ape another one: the violent action film. One of the most revolutionary things about GTA is that it shows rather than tells: the story is told through gameplay and dialogue rather than the traditional expositional cut scenes, giving it an immersive film-like quality. Unfortunately, those games feel more genuine than this rather stilted take on how they were made.
The script feels underdeveloped – perhaps writers were constrained by the limited source material and the refusal of Rockstar to cooperate in making the show – but most of the characters talk in unnatural soundbites. In the opening minutes, it feels as if people are reading their character descriptions aloud: “Here she is, the successful wife” and “Come on little brother, you are the clever funny one.”
The portrayal of the game itself also falls short. Anything remotely technical is presented in a shoddy, unrealistic style, which, in the age of super-accurate technology TV shows such as Mr Robot and Silicon Valley, seems very old-fashioned. The scene in which people are furiously tapping away at keyboards and then suddenly watching a fully rendered sex scene seems particularly ridiculous.
a
But more problematic is that the show is disingenuous about what makes GTA revolutionary. The game is celebrated because of the detail in the landscapes and gameplay, and the nihilistic freedom with which players can hijack cars and murder prostitutes. None of that has much of a feelgood factor, so, instead, there is a pretence that the “gamechanging” thing about the new GTA is that the character can buy his own clothes and customise his style and that will affect his personality, something that has never really been at the centre of the game.
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Yes, you’ve got rhythm … so bring a tingle to your spine by playing a musical game
A delightful new puzzle game, Sentris, was released on Steam last month. Beautiful and engrossing, it leads the player through increasingly complex musical levels, in which you have to place blocks in the correct point in a spinning circle to add in different loops and instruments to an electronic track. The game is deeply enjoyable, tapping into one of the deepest human instincts: the sense of rhythm.
Newborn babies have a sense of rhythm. Only days after birth, scans can detect the brain anticipating a missing downbeat, or noticing the rhythm “stumble”. There’s still debate about whether animals share this trait but dance, drumming and music are common across human cultures. There’s something in us that just likes it. Even without the skills to play an instrument, there’s a satisfaction to a game that allows you to control music, to bring it to life, even to feel that you’re playing it.
The classics here are Guitar Hero and Rock Band, games with simplified “instruments” that rely on a good sense of rhythm to complete a variety of songs successfully.
The games have spawned numerous sequels and a new version, Guitar Hero Live, is out this autumn. The faintly sneery critique sometimes levelled at these games – that it’s not like you’re playing an instrument, and that you might as well spend your gameplay time on learning musical skills – misses the point. There’s a deep pleasure in joining in with a rhythm, as anyone who’s ever clapped along to We Will Rock You or taken part in a Mexican wave can testify. If you don’t regularly attend religious services, there are few opportunities for communal non-performance music-making. But musical rhythm games give players the opportunity to lose themselves in the music.
The cult hit Rez, released in 2001, was perhaps never bettered as an experience of entering the music itself, of letting you feel at one with the music. It might have been be a game best played when you had just got in from a club night in 2002, but its trance-like hypnotic combination of beats and visuals is still worth seeking out on older consoles. Again, in Rez, you don’t need to feel that you’re playing the music, rather that you’re playing with it, that it’s become tangible. An out-of-body experience.
If entertaining a fractious child on a wet afternoon, I can highly recommend the venerable Nintendo DS gameElectroplankton. It contains several ways to experience music, including a level in which the child loops tunes together, and one where the child sings notes to smiling, swimming underwater creatures which then repeat the music in a variety of funny voices. I say “the child”. It’s possible I mean “me, when I’ve just delivered a draft of a novel and I’m having a duvet day”.
For my money, the best of all music games is Auditorium, a puzzle game in which you move coloured blocks to redirect streams of light to add instrumentation tracks to a piece of music that builds across the levels. It’s mesmerising and calming, the game that’s most likely to give me that tingle at the back of the neck – the frisson which, like the sense of rhythm, is still being investigated by neuroscientists.
No one really seems to know definitively why frisson and the related phenomenon ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) happen, but everyone who experiences this feeling agrees that they’re deeply enjoyable, banishing stress and anxiety, with some even claiming they can alleviate headaches or other physical symptoms.
I’m not saying Auditorium should be available on the NHS, just that a half-hour spent with that tingle moving slowly down my spine and across my back … has rarely felt like a waste of time.
“All art,” said Walter Pater, “constantly aspires towards the condition of music.”
Newborn babies have a sense of rhythm. Only days after birth, scans can detect the brain anticipating a missing downbeat, or noticing the rhythm “stumble”. There’s still debate about whether animals share this trait but dance, drumming and music are common across human cultures. There’s something in us that just likes it. Even without the skills to play an instrument, there’s a satisfaction to a game that allows you to control music, to bring it to life, even to feel that you’re playing it.
The classics here are Guitar Hero and Rock Band, games with simplified “instruments” that rely on a good sense of rhythm to complete a variety of songs successfully.
The games have spawned numerous sequels and a new version, Guitar Hero Live, is out this autumn. The faintly sneery critique sometimes levelled at these games – that it’s not like you’re playing an instrument, and that you might as well spend your gameplay time on learning musical skills – misses the point. There’s a deep pleasure in joining in with a rhythm, as anyone who’s ever clapped along to We Will Rock You or taken part in a Mexican wave can testify. If you don’t regularly attend religious services, there are few opportunities for communal non-performance music-making. But musical rhythm games give players the opportunity to lose themselves in the music.
The cult hit Rez, released in 2001, was perhaps never bettered as an experience of entering the music itself, of letting you feel at one with the music. It might have been be a game best played when you had just got in from a club night in 2002, but its trance-like hypnotic combination of beats and visuals is still worth seeking out on older consoles. Again, in Rez, you don’t need to feel that you’re playing the music, rather that you’re playing with it, that it’s become tangible. An out-of-body experience.
If entertaining a fractious child on a wet afternoon, I can highly recommend the venerable Nintendo DS gameElectroplankton. It contains several ways to experience music, including a level in which the child loops tunes together, and one where the child sings notes to smiling, swimming underwater creatures which then repeat the music in a variety of funny voices. I say “the child”. It’s possible I mean “me, when I’ve just delivered a draft of a novel and I’m having a duvet day”.
For my money, the best of all music games is Auditorium, a puzzle game in which you move coloured blocks to redirect streams of light to add instrumentation tracks to a piece of music that builds across the levels. It’s mesmerising and calming, the game that’s most likely to give me that tingle at the back of the neck – the frisson which, like the sense of rhythm, is still being investigated by neuroscientists.
No one really seems to know definitively why frisson and the related phenomenon ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) happen, but everyone who experiences this feeling agrees that they’re deeply enjoyable, banishing stress and anxiety, with some even claiming they can alleviate headaches or other physical symptoms.
I’m not saying Auditorium should be available on the NHS, just that a half-hour spent with that tingle moving slowly down my spine and across my back … has rarely felt like a waste of time.
“All art,” said Walter Pater, “constantly aspires towards the condition of music.”
Monday, September 14, 2015
How Syrian Super Mario is taking on the refugee crisis
We can assume that David Cameron is a bit of a gamer, having been buste dobsessively playing Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds in the past. So there is an outside chance that, finally, he might soften his government’s harsh, grudging response to the Syrian refugee crisis. Because one of the gaming world’s most famous characters – the moustachioed plumber Mario – has been co-opted into highlighting the plight of those attempting to flee from the Scylla and Charybdis of Isis and Bashar al-Assad.
A Syrian artist, pseudonymously known as Samir al-Mutfi, has created Syrian Super Mario, a satirical video that is currently going viral, highlighting the horrors faced by Syrian refugees – by tweaking the 1985 video game Super Mario Bros. Mario has taken many forms over the decades, but this time he has become Refugee Mario. And instead of making his way to Bowser’s castle in order to rescue Princess Peach, he merely has to get to the castle, which now bears the forbidding legend: “Camp”.
Along the way, many perils (all rendered in the familiar Super Mario Bros style, with sound effects to match) await. Grabbing his suitcase and emptying his savings account by bashing a money-block with his head, Refugee Mario hands his funds to traffickers, undergoes a perilous Mediterranean crossing (thank goodness he has multiple lives), evades border-patrolling soldiers eager to lock him up and finally reaches the dubious sanctuary of a refugee camp.
Speaking to the BBC, Mutfi – who himself fled Homs for Istanbul in 2011 – said: “Five months ago, my best friend drowned in the sea while travelling from Turkey to Greece: the engine on the boat exploded. That’s when I got the idea for the video. It needed to be a simple and clear idea that would work irrespective of language. I used Super Mario because it’s famous all over the world. It’s like music – a universal language.”
Mutfi, now working for a Turkish outfit, Online for Media, fled Homs after two of his brothers were killed. He has since made a number of animations parodying Assad’s speeches, having discovered that he can mimic his voice uncannily. Which may – along with his Syrian Super Mario video – have made him a marked man. But that doesn’t worry him: “We used to live in Syria without any dignity or freedom, but we don’t have anything now. It’s so disappointing to see what is happening with this refugee crisis. It’s life or death. We have to make our own futures.”
A Syrian artist, pseudonymously known as Samir al-Mutfi, has created Syrian Super Mario, a satirical video that is currently going viral, highlighting the horrors faced by Syrian refugees – by tweaking the 1985 video game Super Mario Bros. Mario has taken many forms over the decades, but this time he has become Refugee Mario. And instead of making his way to Bowser’s castle in order to rescue Princess Peach, he merely has to get to the castle, which now bears the forbidding legend: “Camp”.
Along the way, many perils (all rendered in the familiar Super Mario Bros style, with sound effects to match) await. Grabbing his suitcase and emptying his savings account by bashing a money-block with his head, Refugee Mario hands his funds to traffickers, undergoes a perilous Mediterranean crossing (thank goodness he has multiple lives), evades border-patrolling soldiers eager to lock him up and finally reaches the dubious sanctuary of a refugee camp.
Speaking to the BBC, Mutfi – who himself fled Homs for Istanbul in 2011 – said: “Five months ago, my best friend drowned in the sea while travelling from Turkey to Greece: the engine on the boat exploded. That’s when I got the idea for the video. It needed to be a simple and clear idea that would work irrespective of language. I used Super Mario because it’s famous all over the world. It’s like music – a universal language.”
Mutfi, now working for a Turkish outfit, Online for Media, fled Homs after two of his brothers were killed. He has since made a number of animations parodying Assad’s speeches, having discovered that he can mimic his voice uncannily. Which may – along with his Syrian Super Mario video – have made him a marked man. But that doesn’t worry him: “We used to live in Syria without any dignity or freedom, but we don’t have anything now. It’s so disappointing to see what is happening with this refugee crisis. It’s life or death. We have to make our own futures.”
Sunday, September 13, 2015
Games reviews roundup: Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture; Resident Evil: Revelations 2; Beatbuddy: Tale of the Guardians
Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture
(PS4, Sony Computer Entertainment, cert: 16)
★★★
Games in the “walking simulator” genre – with an emphasis on exploration and light puzzle-solving – are somewhat divisive. Ever since they emerged in the past few years, there have been some that suggest that they shouldn’t be considered games at all. Sci-fi mystery Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, for good or ill, adds considerable weight to this argument.
Wandering the lifeless roads of a beautifully realised English village and uncovering the story of its departed residents can be moving, intriguing and quietly horrifying, but the question of why it is told this way is never really answered. There is practically no agency to the role of the player as the things unfold, and by the conclusion a lack of having had anything to actually do can leave a bitter aftertaste.
By no standard could it be considered a bad narrative, but for a better example of how walking simulators can also be interesting games, most would be better off with something like Journey or Grow Home. SR
(PS4, Sony Computer Entertainment, cert: 16)
★★★
Games in the “walking simulator” genre – with an emphasis on exploration and light puzzle-solving – are somewhat divisive. Ever since they emerged in the past few years, there have been some that suggest that they shouldn’t be considered games at all. Sci-fi mystery Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, for good or ill, adds considerable weight to this argument.
Wandering the lifeless roads of a beautifully realised English village and uncovering the story of its departed residents can be moving, intriguing and quietly horrifying, but the question of why it is told this way is never really answered. There is practically no agency to the role of the player as the things unfold, and by the conclusion a lack of having had anything to actually do can leave a bitter aftertaste.
By no standard could it be considered a bad narrative, but for a better example of how walking simulators can also be interesting games, most would be better off with something like Journey or Grow Home. SR
Resident Evil: Revelations 2
(PS Vita, Capcom, cert: 18)
★★
A bid to recapture the atmosphere and glory of the Resident Evil games of yore,Revelations 2 has a familiar set-up – a mysterious island surrounded by zombie-like monsters –returning characters (heroes Claire Redfield and Barry Burton) and the trademark hammy dialogue.
Fans will enjoy the classic feel, and it has a compelling story – albeit an inconsistent one – that switches between the unnerving and the unintentionally hilarious. Outside of that 10-hour story is Raid mode, which is a series of run-and-gun challenges. It’s the best thing in the game, particularly when played cooperatively.
Unfortunately, however, this Vita version is not on par with the console editions released in March. Although all the modes are present, the visuals have been significantly downgraded, loading times are painfully long, the frame rate often grinds to a halt and the controls are a little unwieldy, particularly in using the touch screen to crouch. Capcom have produced a solid horror game in Revelations 2 akin to early iterations, but it is really best enjoyed on other platforms. CD
BeatBuddy: Tale of the Guardians
BeatBuddy: Tale of the Guardians
(Wii U, Threaks, cert: 7)
★★★
A Wii U update for the PC adventure, BeatBuddy aims to make interaction with its soundtrack an integral part of play, as you take on the role of a blank-eyed alien charged with rescuing planet Symphonia’s music. There’s a lot to enjoy during the quest. The hand-drawn visual style invites investigation, as does the discovery of a fantastic musical ecosystem, where bouncing off bass drums, hi-hat crabs and other enemies adds pleasing flourishes to the soundtrack, which has been written by a different composer for each of the six levels.
Their work is successful, as the game engages the senses at each turn as levels unfold in complexity and depth. However, this novel exterior isn’t matched by the gameplay, which reverts to more familiar platform puzzles and light brawling, while things are further hampered by occasional glitches and visual slow-down. Still, the exploration is rewarding and each level hides 10 “beatpoints” that unlock a well-written development diary.
(PS Vita, Capcom, cert: 18)
★★
A bid to recapture the atmosphere and glory of the Resident Evil games of yore,Revelations 2 has a familiar set-up – a mysterious island surrounded by zombie-like monsters –returning characters (heroes Claire Redfield and Barry Burton) and the trademark hammy dialogue.
Fans will enjoy the classic feel, and it has a compelling story – albeit an inconsistent one – that switches between the unnerving and the unintentionally hilarious. Outside of that 10-hour story is Raid mode, which is a series of run-and-gun challenges. It’s the best thing in the game, particularly when played cooperatively.
Unfortunately, however, this Vita version is not on par with the console editions released in March. Although all the modes are present, the visuals have been significantly downgraded, loading times are painfully long, the frame rate often grinds to a halt and the controls are a little unwieldy, particularly in using the touch screen to crouch. Capcom have produced a solid horror game in Revelations 2 akin to early iterations, but it is really best enjoyed on other platforms. CD
BeatBuddy: Tale of the Guardians
BeatBuddy: Tale of the Guardians
(Wii U, Threaks, cert: 7)
★★★
A Wii U update for the PC adventure, BeatBuddy aims to make interaction with its soundtrack an integral part of play, as you take on the role of a blank-eyed alien charged with rescuing planet Symphonia’s music. There’s a lot to enjoy during the quest. The hand-drawn visual style invites investigation, as does the discovery of a fantastic musical ecosystem, where bouncing off bass drums, hi-hat crabs and other enemies adds pleasing flourishes to the soundtrack, which has been written by a different composer for each of the six levels.
Their work is successful, as the game engages the senses at each turn as levels unfold in complexity and depth. However, this novel exterior isn’t matched by the gameplay, which reverts to more familiar platform puzzles and light brawling, while things are further hampered by occasional glitches and visual slow-down. Still, the exploration is rewarding and each level hides 10 “beatpoints” that unlock a well-written development diary.
Saturday, September 12, 2015
Pokémon 2015 – magical beasts, star players and death threats
To many, Pokémon was a craze that peaked at the turn of the millennium. Yet to thousands of dedicated players, both the video games and the trading card game (TCG) are still cause for celebration, and not just among kids. It turns out the grownups are more involved than ever as they, alongside the younger gamers, take part in what might be described as Pokémon’s world cup – and British competitors of all ages are there in force.
Just as characters in the games (and animated series, and movies, and more –Pokémon remains a thriving media empire) employ virtual beasts to do battle, so too do the competitors who fight for a place at the annual Pokémon world championships.
This year’s event took place last month in Boston, Massachusetts. The tournament is split into video and TCG, and three tiers: juniors (under 10); seniors (11-15); and masters (16+). Despite the franchise’s kid-friendly nature, many competitors are adults.
“When I come to the events, yes there are children here but there are way more masters than there are younger people,” says Barry Anderson, a 27-year-old British hopeful. “If anyone asks why I play, I just explain that it’s the competitive side. It’s kind of like poker or chess. It has so much more to it than people realise.”
This is Anderson’s second time competing in the video game division, having previously battled in 2013 and placed ninth. This year hasn’t gone so well, but his enthusiasm and optimism, typical of so many players at the tournament, are unbowed. “Obviously it’s fun playing Pokémon, but it’s addictive as well,” he says. “You might say ‘Oh, I’m not going to compete any more’ but you will still want to.”
And so it goes on the trading card side of the arena. Charles Barton, 22, from Southport is another player seen as a veteran, having been competing since 2012. For him, playing Pokémon has been more than just a competitive pastime: it helped him get into university.
“For Ucas, I had to find an extra-curricular activity, and I thought, why not find something unique?” Barton says. “So I did Pokémon TCG as a competitor, rose fairly quickly, and my application was successful. I feel like mentioning it helped.”
The tone of the event balances between a serious sporting competition and a fan convention. There’s a buzz of excitement, even among those not competing. People walk around wearing T-shirts emblazoned with memes such as “Delphox ate my baby”, indecipherable to the uninitiated, while parents, far from long-suffering, enthusiastically follow their children’s progress. One proud American mother exalts her son’s standing in the top 10, talking over a father’s equally proud declaration that his son ranked in the top 20 for his bracket.
All major matches are broadcast, on stage and online, with eager commentaryfrom esports professionals analysing each move, as one would with a football match. It proves to be surprisingly tense viewing, and the crowd grows more rapturous with each victory. There are no sore losers though – everyone cites the friendly community as one of the main reasons they keep playing.
Yet there was also a dark side to this year’s championship. Two men from Iowa, Kevin Norton, 18, and James Stumbo, 27, who had both entered the tournament, were arrested on their way to the venue with a car boot full of guns and ammunition. The pair had allegedly made online threats to kill another competitor.
Just as characters in the games (and animated series, and movies, and more –Pokémon remains a thriving media empire) employ virtual beasts to do battle, so too do the competitors who fight for a place at the annual Pokémon world championships.
This year’s event took place last month in Boston, Massachusetts. The tournament is split into video and TCG, and three tiers: juniors (under 10); seniors (11-15); and masters (16+). Despite the franchise’s kid-friendly nature, many competitors are adults.
“When I come to the events, yes there are children here but there are way more masters than there are younger people,” says Barry Anderson, a 27-year-old British hopeful. “If anyone asks why I play, I just explain that it’s the competitive side. It’s kind of like poker or chess. It has so much more to it than people realise.”
This is Anderson’s second time competing in the video game division, having previously battled in 2013 and placed ninth. This year hasn’t gone so well, but his enthusiasm and optimism, typical of so many players at the tournament, are unbowed. “Obviously it’s fun playing Pokémon, but it’s addictive as well,” he says. “You might say ‘Oh, I’m not going to compete any more’ but you will still want to.”
And so it goes on the trading card side of the arena. Charles Barton, 22, from Southport is another player seen as a veteran, having been competing since 2012. For him, playing Pokémon has been more than just a competitive pastime: it helped him get into university.
“For Ucas, I had to find an extra-curricular activity, and I thought, why not find something unique?” Barton says. “So I did Pokémon TCG as a competitor, rose fairly quickly, and my application was successful. I feel like mentioning it helped.”
The tone of the event balances between a serious sporting competition and a fan convention. There’s a buzz of excitement, even among those not competing. People walk around wearing T-shirts emblazoned with memes such as “Delphox ate my baby”, indecipherable to the uninitiated, while parents, far from long-suffering, enthusiastically follow their children’s progress. One proud American mother exalts her son’s standing in the top 10, talking over a father’s equally proud declaration that his son ranked in the top 20 for his bracket.
All major matches are broadcast, on stage and online, with eager commentaryfrom esports professionals analysing each move, as one would with a football match. It proves to be surprisingly tense viewing, and the crowd grows more rapturous with each victory. There are no sore losers though – everyone cites the friendly community as one of the main reasons they keep playing.
Yet there was also a dark side to this year’s championship. Two men from Iowa, Kevin Norton, 18, and James Stumbo, 27, who had both entered the tournament, were arrested on their way to the venue with a car boot full of guns and ammunition. The pair had allegedly made online threats to kill another competitor.
Friday, September 11, 2015
Goodbye Angry Birds – Rovio takes on Candy Crush, but not in the way you think
Smartphone gaming is a tough business – even for the companies at the very top. Candy Crush Saga developer King has struggled to develop new games beyond its hit “match-three” puzzler, while Rovio announced more than 200 lay-offs in August as part of an attempt to restructure and refocus its increasingly bloated business. The app stores are dominated by a handful of longstanding titles, and that makes developing, marketing and launching new IPs even more expensive and risky, especially as it can take several months to start seeing significant returns.
It’s a problem Rovio is about to face head-on. The Finnish company’s latest title, released this week on the Apple and Google stores, is Nibblers, a match-three puzzler featuring a cast of aquatic creatures. As ever, players need to line up similar pieces of fruit to clear each level. Unlike the company’s other recent attempts to explore new genres – including Angry Birds Stella Pop and Angry Birds Go – there are no furious avian creatures or porcine antagonists. The cast – if not the design concept – is entirely new.
According to executive producer, Teemu Hämäläinen, the development process hasn’t been straightforward, despite the familiarity of the genre. “Rovio is all about the characters,” he says. “Everybody knows that Angry Birds is about the birds and the piggies. We looked around and thought, what do we need to do to have the characters right in the centre of a game – actually on the game board itself? You see a lot of puzzle games where the characters are at the very sides of the screen, but you’re not playing with them.”
Last year, a small team of 10 staff started the prototyping process, toying with the fundamentals of the match-three genre. “We played with ideas that let us combine a game board with the characters, within a set of game mechanics that balanced skill and luck,” he says. “We built more than 20 prototypes, but often we just couldn’t get that balance right – it was a long journey.”
Eventually, the team had the idea of including characters among the fruit as gameplay elements. In Nibblers, the heroes are a bunch of amphibian creatures who stumble onto a beach and find lots of delicious fruit, unaware that fish-eating reptiles are watching. In each level, then, the board features not just fruit to match, but also reptilian enemies who have to be dispatched by matching fruit nearby. When the player matches more than three fruit in one go, a friendly fish character pops up onscreen offering a power-up, which can be used immediately, or saved. Match four fruits and you get Coral, who can be swiped vertically or horizontally across the screen, destroying all fruit and enemies in her wake. Five or more matches earns Octo, who stomps through three rows of fruit in one go. Players can even unlock a giant battler called Bouncer who can splat a whole screen in one landing.
It’s a series of special-move mechanics taking from the fighting game genre. Although it’s not exactly a revolution, it’s a neat skill-based addition, accentuated by a combo mechanic that lets you combine the abilities if you have multiple characters on screen at once. As you progress the enemies start eating Nibbler characters and breaking up fruit chains, adding more sense of peril. The game even adds end of level boss fights between different map areas, including a giant snake that sucks up fruit and fish – these need to be hit with multiple fruit matches to defeat. Some of the enemies also move around the board, adding a timing element missing from most match-three titles. “The game is full of surprises,” says Hämäläinen. “We wanted to create a living environment with small movements and animations, even in the backgrounds.”
Advertisement
So why just Nibblers? Why not Angry Birds Nibblers? “We did ask ourselves: do we want to launch another Angry Birds game or do we want a new IP?” says Hämäläinen. “We felt we needed to be more daring. We wanted to create a wider cast of characters. In Angry Birds it’s clear that Red is the leader - we wanted it to be less clear this time. It’s more about the group. We also wanted characters that aren’t too childish - that are likeable but not as much huggable. They’re not too cute or over-polished. But we thought a new IP would allow us to take more liberties - we didn’t need to be worried about the brand or other constraints.”
There’s doubtless something else behind the decision, however. Through its cartoon-style character design and relentless merchandising, Angry Birds has become very much a kid’s brand – but the match-three genre tends to be aimed at an older demographic. Candy Crush saga has proved a huge hit with female players – its key demographic is women aged between 25 and 45. Nibblers had to take a bit out of that sector, so its characters are cute but not childlike.
The game was soft launched in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Finland in January (the latter so the development team’s friends and families could play). Rovio watched how the design was appreciated, but also how well it monetised. Unlike Angry Birds, a premium game with an upfront cost, Nibblers is swimming straight into the free-to-play ocean, with players able to buy extra moves or new characters when they’re stuck. Rovio is also toying with the currently trendy “incentivised video advertising” model: if you fail a level, the game asks if you want to look at a video advert in return for a free power-up at the start of your next go.
In terms of the gameplay, the big lesson has been to introduce the fresh gameplay elements slowly – match-three puzzle titles don’t usually have characters that move about the board, or boss baddie encounters – these are small but important shifts toward more “hardcore” gaming content.
Apparently, the priority for the development team – now up to 20 people – is to ensure a fast flow of new content. Free-to-play games have to battle for retention in such a crowded market place and allowing a title to stagnate for even a few weeks will see players moving on elsewhere.
“We want to make sure we can produce a lot of levels in a very short time frame,” says Hämäläinen. “You have to keep giving your audience more things to play. We’re launching with 200 levels, and the first update will be two weeks later when we’re giving an extra 60 levels, and then we’re releasing more content every fortnight – more levels, new islands, new opponents or new game play types. That’s why we have a big team.”
Nibblers certainly resonates with typical Rovio qualities: the visuals and sound are super-polished, with lots of smooth animation and the usual over-the-top victory displays at the end of each stage. And the slightly more complex play dynamics may well bring back match-three fans, who have grown tired of the genre’s staid and limiting properties.
It’s a problem Rovio is about to face head-on. The Finnish company’s latest title, released this week on the Apple and Google stores, is Nibblers, a match-three puzzler featuring a cast of aquatic creatures. As ever, players need to line up similar pieces of fruit to clear each level. Unlike the company’s other recent attempts to explore new genres – including Angry Birds Stella Pop and Angry Birds Go – there are no furious avian creatures or porcine antagonists. The cast – if not the design concept – is entirely new.
According to executive producer, Teemu Hämäläinen, the development process hasn’t been straightforward, despite the familiarity of the genre. “Rovio is all about the characters,” he says. “Everybody knows that Angry Birds is about the birds and the piggies. We looked around and thought, what do we need to do to have the characters right in the centre of a game – actually on the game board itself? You see a lot of puzzle games where the characters are at the very sides of the screen, but you’re not playing with them.”
Last year, a small team of 10 staff started the prototyping process, toying with the fundamentals of the match-three genre. “We played with ideas that let us combine a game board with the characters, within a set of game mechanics that balanced skill and luck,” he says. “We built more than 20 prototypes, but often we just couldn’t get that balance right – it was a long journey.”
Eventually, the team had the idea of including characters among the fruit as gameplay elements. In Nibblers, the heroes are a bunch of amphibian creatures who stumble onto a beach and find lots of delicious fruit, unaware that fish-eating reptiles are watching. In each level, then, the board features not just fruit to match, but also reptilian enemies who have to be dispatched by matching fruit nearby. When the player matches more than three fruit in one go, a friendly fish character pops up onscreen offering a power-up, which can be used immediately, or saved. Match four fruits and you get Coral, who can be swiped vertically or horizontally across the screen, destroying all fruit and enemies in her wake. Five or more matches earns Octo, who stomps through three rows of fruit in one go. Players can even unlock a giant battler called Bouncer who can splat a whole screen in one landing.
It’s a series of special-move mechanics taking from the fighting game genre. Although it’s not exactly a revolution, it’s a neat skill-based addition, accentuated by a combo mechanic that lets you combine the abilities if you have multiple characters on screen at once. As you progress the enemies start eating Nibbler characters and breaking up fruit chains, adding more sense of peril. The game even adds end of level boss fights between different map areas, including a giant snake that sucks up fruit and fish – these need to be hit with multiple fruit matches to defeat. Some of the enemies also move around the board, adding a timing element missing from most match-three titles. “The game is full of surprises,” says Hämäläinen. “We wanted to create a living environment with small movements and animations, even in the backgrounds.”
Advertisement
So why just Nibblers? Why not Angry Birds Nibblers? “We did ask ourselves: do we want to launch another Angry Birds game or do we want a new IP?” says Hämäläinen. “We felt we needed to be more daring. We wanted to create a wider cast of characters. In Angry Birds it’s clear that Red is the leader - we wanted it to be less clear this time. It’s more about the group. We also wanted characters that aren’t too childish - that are likeable but not as much huggable. They’re not too cute or over-polished. But we thought a new IP would allow us to take more liberties - we didn’t need to be worried about the brand or other constraints.”
There’s doubtless something else behind the decision, however. Through its cartoon-style character design and relentless merchandising, Angry Birds has become very much a kid’s brand – but the match-three genre tends to be aimed at an older demographic. Candy Crush saga has proved a huge hit with female players – its key demographic is women aged between 25 and 45. Nibblers had to take a bit out of that sector, so its characters are cute but not childlike.
The game was soft launched in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Finland in January (the latter so the development team’s friends and families could play). Rovio watched how the design was appreciated, but also how well it monetised. Unlike Angry Birds, a premium game with an upfront cost, Nibblers is swimming straight into the free-to-play ocean, with players able to buy extra moves or new characters when they’re stuck. Rovio is also toying with the currently trendy “incentivised video advertising” model: if you fail a level, the game asks if you want to look at a video advert in return for a free power-up at the start of your next go.
In terms of the gameplay, the big lesson has been to introduce the fresh gameplay elements slowly – match-three puzzle titles don’t usually have characters that move about the board, or boss baddie encounters – these are small but important shifts toward more “hardcore” gaming content.
Apparently, the priority for the development team – now up to 20 people – is to ensure a fast flow of new content. Free-to-play games have to battle for retention in such a crowded market place and allowing a title to stagnate for even a few weeks will see players moving on elsewhere.
“We want to make sure we can produce a lot of levels in a very short time frame,” says Hämäläinen. “You have to keep giving your audience more things to play. We’re launching with 200 levels, and the first update will be two weeks later when we’re giving an extra 60 levels, and then we’re releasing more content every fortnight – more levels, new islands, new opponents or new game play types. That’s why we have a big team.”
Nibblers certainly resonates with typical Rovio qualities: the visuals and sound are super-polished, with lots of smooth animation and the usual over-the-top victory displays at the end of each stage. And the slightly more complex play dynamics may well bring back match-three fans, who have grown tired of the genre’s staid and limiting properties.
Thursday, September 10, 2015
Star Wars: Uprising mobile game fills in gaps before The Force Awakens
Teaser trailers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens have left fans speculating on events within the sci-fi universe since Return of the Jedi, based on less than four minutes of heavily edited footage.
Now they’ll be able to spend a few hours exploring the period in a mobile game, Star Wars: Uprising, released for Android and for iOS by publisher Kabam, a company with form when it comes to mobile games – and colon-infused titles – based on popular movie franchises.
The US firm’s previous releases include The Hobbit: Kingdoms, Lord of the Rings: Legends, Fast and Furious: Legacy and The Hunger Games: Panem Rising. The new Star Wars game is its most high-profile yet.
Star Wars: Uprising is set in between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, making it an official addition to the Star Wars canon. That is a significant moment for mobile gaming, which until recently has more often been a source of licensing dollars rather than new stories for the franchise.
The massively multiplayer game will let players create their own characters – “become the next Han Solo, Boba Fett or entirely unique hero of your own design” runs its blurb – and exploring familiar environments such as the planet Hoth, as well as new scenes.
Like Kabam’s other games, it is free but funded by in-app purchases of virtual items including tips for the Cantina Band or goods from Kashyyyk (both £3.99) and hazard pay for Stormtroopers (£14.99).
Uprising’s release a few months before the premiere of The Force Awakens is no coincidence: it is a key part of the advance promotion for the new film, with Kabam and Disney well aware that fans will flock to the game looking for more hints on the movie’s plotlines and characters.
“It’s extremely exciting. Being the first canon thing that was worked on at all post-Jedi was a huge opportunity,” the game’s director Daniel Erickson told VentureBeat earlier this month.
“The respect and sort of trust that it shows from Lucasfilm that hey, we’re going to let this come out as in a game format, says a lot about what we’re trying to do with it.”
Uprising may be new canon, but it is just one of a number of Star Wars mobile games released recently. It joins strategy game Star Wars: Commander; card-battling title Star Wars: Force Collection; tower-defence game Star Wars: Galactic Defense; RPG Star Wars: Knights of the Old
There are also spin-offs including two Angry Birds Star Wars games, and several Lego Star Wars titles.
The new game is a big moment for Kabam, which reported $400m (£260m) of revenues in 2014 from its mix of movie and original brands, and raised a funding round of $120m that it claimed valued the company at $1bn.
It has been positioning itself as a creative partner – rather than simply a licensing partner – for film studios for several years now.
Now they’ll be able to spend a few hours exploring the period in a mobile game, Star Wars: Uprising, released for Android and for iOS by publisher Kabam, a company with form when it comes to mobile games – and colon-infused titles – based on popular movie franchises.
The US firm’s previous releases include The Hobbit: Kingdoms, Lord of the Rings: Legends, Fast and Furious: Legacy and The Hunger Games: Panem Rising. The new Star Wars game is its most high-profile yet.
Star Wars: Uprising is set in between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, making it an official addition to the Star Wars canon. That is a significant moment for mobile gaming, which until recently has more often been a source of licensing dollars rather than new stories for the franchise.
The massively multiplayer game will let players create their own characters – “become the next Han Solo, Boba Fett or entirely unique hero of your own design” runs its blurb – and exploring familiar environments such as the planet Hoth, as well as new scenes.
Like Kabam’s other games, it is free but funded by in-app purchases of virtual items including tips for the Cantina Band or goods from Kashyyyk (both £3.99) and hazard pay for Stormtroopers (£14.99).
Uprising’s release a few months before the premiere of The Force Awakens is no coincidence: it is a key part of the advance promotion for the new film, with Kabam and Disney well aware that fans will flock to the game looking for more hints on the movie’s plotlines and characters.
“It’s extremely exciting. Being the first canon thing that was worked on at all post-Jedi was a huge opportunity,” the game’s director Daniel Erickson told VentureBeat earlier this month.
“The respect and sort of trust that it shows from Lucasfilm that hey, we’re going to let this come out as in a game format, says a lot about what we’re trying to do with it.”
Uprising may be new canon, but it is just one of a number of Star Wars mobile games released recently. It joins strategy game Star Wars: Commander; card-battling title Star Wars: Force Collection; tower-defence game Star Wars: Galactic Defense; RPG Star Wars: Knights of the Old
There are also spin-offs including two Angry Birds Star Wars games, and several Lego Star Wars titles.
The new game is a big moment for Kabam, which reported $400m (£260m) of revenues in 2014 from its mix of movie and original brands, and raised a funding round of $120m that it claimed valued the company at $1bn.
It has been positioning itself as a creative partner – rather than simply a licensing partner – for film studios for several years now.
Wednesday, September 9, 2015
'Lamentable teaching' is damaging higher education, minister warns
The universities minister, Jo Johnson, has warned vice-chancellors that bad teaching is damaging the reputation of British higher education, and backed simplified funding to stop “Nobel physicists running car parks” within university bureaucracies.
Johnson’s speech signalled the government’s determination to use its new teaching excellence framework (TEF) to make universities more responsive to students, and upbraided colleges for the “highly variable” quality of undergraduate teaching.
“I hear this when I talk to worried parents, such as the physics teacher whose son dropped out at the start of year two of a humanities programme at a prestigious London university, having barely set eyes on his tutor,” Johnson told senior academics on Wednesday at the Universities UK annual conference in Guildford, Surrey.
“Her other son, by contrast, studying engineering at Bristol, saw the system at its best: he was worked off his feet, with plenty of support and mostly excellent teaching.
Don't let 'the market' dominate the debate on university teaching
David Blunkett and Matthew Flinders
“This patchiness in the student experience within and between institutions cannot continue. There is extraordinary teaching that deserves greater recognition. And there is lamentable teaching that must be driven out of our system. It damages the reputation of UK higher education and I am determined to address it,” Johnson said.
“This is not a contract I want taxpayers to underwrite,” he warned.
Prof Dame Julia Goodfellow, chair of the Universities UK group that represents the sector, told delegates: “We absolutely recognise the importance of excellence in teaching ... However, teaching excellence can only be delivered with stable and sustainable funding.”
Advertisement
The teaching framework will be outlined in a green paper published later this year, and is likely to link university tuition fee levels to the quality of teaching.
Johnson argued that even the best universities had allowed teaching to become a “poor cousin” to research, because their place on international league tables and funding income relied on scholarly research output.
“It is not at all clear to some students what their tuition fees of £9,000 a year actually pay for, and this has led to calls, which I support, for greater transparency from providers about what they spend fee income on,” Johnson said.
Research funding is also likely to be overhauled after an independent review by management consultants commissioned by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, which may support merging the current system of subject research councils into a single funding body.
“I do see scope for a simpler system of delivering vital research funding for universities,” Johnson told the vice-chancellors.
After his speech, Johnson highlighted the replication and overlap between the seven existing research councils, saying: “We don’t need Nobel physicists running car parks. We want the scientists focused on science.”
Sally Hunt, the general secretary of the University and College Union, said the quality and status of university teaching would be best improved by tackling the low pay and insecurity of academic staff.
“The reality is that over two-fifths of university teaching staff are on temporary or zero-hours contracts. Academic pay has fallen by more than 15% since 2009 and promotions, particularly at a senior level, focus on research,” Hunt said.
Praising higher education as “the most powerful driver of social mobility we have,” Johnson called for serious attention to the performance of disadvantaged white boys, and wants the Ucas admissions service to publish more data on attainment and family backgrounds to address underrepresentation at university.
Johnson also said he wanted more private institutions to challenge existing universities, and would make it easier for new providers to offer degrees.
Describing the current system, where new institutions have to bargain with existing universities to validate degrees, Johnson said: “It’s akin to Byron having to ask permission of McDonald’s to open up a new restaurant.”
The government is to lift its moratorium on allowing new private providers to gain university titles and earn degree awarding powers, although Johnson warned: “We need to be prepared for the fact that some providers may exit the market. Our higher education sector should only have room for high-quality providers.
Johnson’s speech signalled the government’s determination to use its new teaching excellence framework (TEF) to make universities more responsive to students, and upbraided colleges for the “highly variable” quality of undergraduate teaching.
“I hear this when I talk to worried parents, such as the physics teacher whose son dropped out at the start of year two of a humanities programme at a prestigious London university, having barely set eyes on his tutor,” Johnson told senior academics on Wednesday at the Universities UK annual conference in Guildford, Surrey.
“Her other son, by contrast, studying engineering at Bristol, saw the system at its best: he was worked off his feet, with plenty of support and mostly excellent teaching.
Don't let 'the market' dominate the debate on university teaching
David Blunkett and Matthew Flinders
“This patchiness in the student experience within and between institutions cannot continue. There is extraordinary teaching that deserves greater recognition. And there is lamentable teaching that must be driven out of our system. It damages the reputation of UK higher education and I am determined to address it,” Johnson said.
“This is not a contract I want taxpayers to underwrite,” he warned.
Prof Dame Julia Goodfellow, chair of the Universities UK group that represents the sector, told delegates: “We absolutely recognise the importance of excellence in teaching ... However, teaching excellence can only be delivered with stable and sustainable funding.”
Advertisement
The teaching framework will be outlined in a green paper published later this year, and is likely to link university tuition fee levels to the quality of teaching.
Johnson argued that even the best universities had allowed teaching to become a “poor cousin” to research, because their place on international league tables and funding income relied on scholarly research output.
“It is not at all clear to some students what their tuition fees of £9,000 a year actually pay for, and this has led to calls, which I support, for greater transparency from providers about what they spend fee income on,” Johnson said.
Research funding is also likely to be overhauled after an independent review by management consultants commissioned by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, which may support merging the current system of subject research councils into a single funding body.
“I do see scope for a simpler system of delivering vital research funding for universities,” Johnson told the vice-chancellors.
After his speech, Johnson highlighted the replication and overlap between the seven existing research councils, saying: “We don’t need Nobel physicists running car parks. We want the scientists focused on science.”
Sally Hunt, the general secretary of the University and College Union, said the quality and status of university teaching would be best improved by tackling the low pay and insecurity of academic staff.
“The reality is that over two-fifths of university teaching staff are on temporary or zero-hours contracts. Academic pay has fallen by more than 15% since 2009 and promotions, particularly at a senior level, focus on research,” Hunt said.
Praising higher education as “the most powerful driver of social mobility we have,” Johnson called for serious attention to the performance of disadvantaged white boys, and wants the Ucas admissions service to publish more data on attainment and family backgrounds to address underrepresentation at university.
Johnson also said he wanted more private institutions to challenge existing universities, and would make it easier for new providers to offer degrees.
Describing the current system, where new institutions have to bargain with existing universities to validate degrees, Johnson said: “It’s akin to Byron having to ask permission of McDonald’s to open up a new restaurant.”
The government is to lift its moratorium on allowing new private providers to gain university titles and earn degree awarding powers, although Johnson warned: “We need to be prepared for the fact that some providers may exit the market. Our higher education sector should only have room for high-quality providers.
Tuesday, September 8, 2015
Metal Gear Solid – everything you need to know about the entire series
Metal Gear is arguably the greatest action gaming series ever created – but it is also easily the most bewildering. What is the difference between Liquid, Naked, and Solid Snake? What is Foxdie? And why is the US president involved? These are just some of the questions lurking within Hideo Kojima’s expansive, convoluted and often contrived gaming classics.
So if you’ve been attracted to the series by the deliriously positive reviews of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, but are worried about not understanding anything that’s going on, here’s what you need to know. We’ve also ranked all the main titles for lasting quality – behind the latest title, of course, which we consider to be the very best.
Metal Gear
Year: 1987
Format: MSX2 (now on PS2, PS3, 360, PS Vita as part of MGS3: Subsistence / HD)
The one where : Special ops soldier Solid Snake infiltrates Outer Heaven on the trail of missing agent Gray Fox. Directed over the radio by his CO Big Boss, Snake discovers the existence of Metal Gear, a doomsday nuclear-equipped tank, and plans to take it out – but the enemy seems aware of his movements, and Big Boss starts acting funny. Eventually Snake offs the Metal Gear, and Big Boss reveals himself as the puppetmaster. The two face off, and after winning Snake flees the exploding compound. But after the credits, Big Boss vows he will meet Solid Snake again ...
Best bit: When Big Boss, panicking at Snake’s success, tells the player to “TURN THE MSX OFF AT ONCE.”
Weirdest bit : Metal Gear was “ported” to the NES but utterly butchered in the process, with many important aspects (like the Metal Gear) removed. Kojima publicly disdains this version.
Still playable? Technology has moved so fast Metal Gear is more of an historical artefact than a great game, but in its time the achievement was enormous.
Series ranking: 9
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake
Year: 1990
Format: MSX2 (now on PS2, PS3, 360, PS Vita as part of MGS3: Subsistence / HD)
The one where : An enormous refinement over Metal Gear, and the basis for many of Metal Gear Solid’s 3D mechanics, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake sees the retired Foxhound agent return for one last job. Again. Supported by Roy Campbell, Solid Snake infiltrates Zanzibarland to rescue a biologist, but discovers there’s a new Metal Gear project cooking away. Snake duffs up Metal Gear D’s creator, destroys the mech, battles ex-comrade Gray Fox to the death, and then faces off against Big Boss. Again. In a rather grim twist, Snake burns Big Boss to death with an aerosol can and a lighter.
Best bit: The wealth of new options Snake has for stealth, including robotic mice.
The weirdest bit: There are children knocking about the fortress, and you can shoot them (which is penalised with loss of health) .
Still playable? It was one of the best 8bit games ever made – but, unavoidably, of its era.
Metal Gear Solid
Year: 1998
Format: Playstation (also available on PC, PS3, PS Vita)
The one where : Metal Gear moves into 3D. The detailed environments and polished presentation set a new standard for action games - then Kojima’s gift for creative set-pieces and toying with the player elevate things even further. Solid Snake stars again, this time facing down his brother Liquid Snake alongside a great rogues’ gallery including Revolver Ocelot, Psycho Mantis and Sniper Wolf. Snake infiltrates Shadow Moses in order to rescue two hostages but, after both die in his presence, begins to suspect he’s the vector for a bio-weapon called Foxdie.
Another Metal Gear turns up, this time twinned with its guilt-ridden creator Otacon. The cyborg ninja slaughtering Liquid’s troops is revealed as Gray Fox, kept hideously alive by bio-mechanical engineering, who earns his redemption in getting crushed by Metal Gear Rex. Solid Snake duly takes out Rex, socks Liquid in his posh English jaw, escapes in a jeep, and then when Liquid makes a dramatic return – Foxdie hits him. Solid Snake survives and imagines a future free of this crazy stuff. Who wouldn’t?
Best bit: When Revolver Ocelot has Snake trapped in his torture device and advises that you submit before death because “there are no continues, my friend”.
Weirdest bit: Probably the fact that you can gawp at Meryl in her underwear while hiding behind the ceiling vent – then you have to punch her unconscious when Psycho Mantis takes over her mind and starts saying “make love to me Snake!”
Still playable? MGS holds up surprisingly well. The stealth is fast-paced with clear mechanics, and Shadow Moses is still a detailed, vibrant world.
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
Year: 2001
Format: Playstation 2 (later PC, Xbox, Xbox 360, PS3, PS Vita)
The one where : (Deep breath) Snake takes photographs to prove the existence of Metal Gear Ray, a new weapon, which is immediately stolen by the returning Revolver Ocelot – who now thinks he’s Liquid Snake. I know. Fast-forward two years and new character Raiden’s responding to a terrorist incident on an offshore rig called the Big Shell and, lo and behold, Solid Snake and Metal Gear Ray are right in the middle.
MGS2 is a rug-puller, not least in the fact you play as Raiden, and a core part of its technique is to bombard the player with information so they’re not sure what is true. As the mission proceeds, Raiden’s world starts collapsing, his support team begin to behave erratically, and revelations pour out of everyone – but what to believe? Liquid Ocelot reveals the Big Shell was set up to train a soldier as good as Solid Snake (ie Raiden), a new Metal Gear called Arsenal crashes into downtown Manhattan, and Raiden is ordered to assassinate Solidus Snake. Solidus? Yep. The third brother of Solid and Liquid, Solidus is also the president of the US (!) but makes zero impression before being offed. This is honestly the simplest explanation of MGS2 you’ll find anywhere.
Best bit : The revelation that Raiden is a rookie soldier who’s been trained through VR videogames to emulate his hero Solid Snake – making him not-unlike the target audience.
Weirdest bit : Kojima realised that killing off Liquid Snake in MGS was a terrible idea – despite the character’s terrible accent. So Ocelot returns, with Liquid’s hand grafted onto his arm, and is “taken over” by Liquid’s personality. Dire.
Still playable? MGS2 is an acquired taste, not least because it’s got far too much exposition. But the ideas are great, and the game underneath all the chin-stroking is even better.
So if you’ve been attracted to the series by the deliriously positive reviews of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, but are worried about not understanding anything that’s going on, here’s what you need to know. We’ve also ranked all the main titles for lasting quality – behind the latest title, of course, which we consider to be the very best.
Metal Gear
Year: 1987
Format: MSX2 (now on PS2, PS3, 360, PS Vita as part of MGS3: Subsistence / HD)
The one where : Special ops soldier Solid Snake infiltrates Outer Heaven on the trail of missing agent Gray Fox. Directed over the radio by his CO Big Boss, Snake discovers the existence of Metal Gear, a doomsday nuclear-equipped tank, and plans to take it out – but the enemy seems aware of his movements, and Big Boss starts acting funny. Eventually Snake offs the Metal Gear, and Big Boss reveals himself as the puppetmaster. The two face off, and after winning Snake flees the exploding compound. But after the credits, Big Boss vows he will meet Solid Snake again ...
Best bit: When Big Boss, panicking at Snake’s success, tells the player to “TURN THE MSX OFF AT ONCE.”
Weirdest bit : Metal Gear was “ported” to the NES but utterly butchered in the process, with many important aspects (like the Metal Gear) removed. Kojima publicly disdains this version.
Still playable? Technology has moved so fast Metal Gear is more of an historical artefact than a great game, but in its time the achievement was enormous.
Series ranking: 9
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake
Year: 1990
Format: MSX2 (now on PS2, PS3, 360, PS Vita as part of MGS3: Subsistence / HD)
The one where : An enormous refinement over Metal Gear, and the basis for many of Metal Gear Solid’s 3D mechanics, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake sees the retired Foxhound agent return for one last job. Again. Supported by Roy Campbell, Solid Snake infiltrates Zanzibarland to rescue a biologist, but discovers there’s a new Metal Gear project cooking away. Snake duffs up Metal Gear D’s creator, destroys the mech, battles ex-comrade Gray Fox to the death, and then faces off against Big Boss. Again. In a rather grim twist, Snake burns Big Boss to death with an aerosol can and a lighter.
Best bit: The wealth of new options Snake has for stealth, including robotic mice.
The weirdest bit: There are children knocking about the fortress, and you can shoot them (which is penalised with loss of health) .
Still playable? It was one of the best 8bit games ever made – but, unavoidably, of its era.
Metal Gear Solid
Year: 1998
Format: Playstation (also available on PC, PS3, PS Vita)
The one where : Metal Gear moves into 3D. The detailed environments and polished presentation set a new standard for action games - then Kojima’s gift for creative set-pieces and toying with the player elevate things even further. Solid Snake stars again, this time facing down his brother Liquid Snake alongside a great rogues’ gallery including Revolver Ocelot, Psycho Mantis and Sniper Wolf. Snake infiltrates Shadow Moses in order to rescue two hostages but, after both die in his presence, begins to suspect he’s the vector for a bio-weapon called Foxdie.
Another Metal Gear turns up, this time twinned with its guilt-ridden creator Otacon. The cyborg ninja slaughtering Liquid’s troops is revealed as Gray Fox, kept hideously alive by bio-mechanical engineering, who earns his redemption in getting crushed by Metal Gear Rex. Solid Snake duly takes out Rex, socks Liquid in his posh English jaw, escapes in a jeep, and then when Liquid makes a dramatic return – Foxdie hits him. Solid Snake survives and imagines a future free of this crazy stuff. Who wouldn’t?
Best bit: When Revolver Ocelot has Snake trapped in his torture device and advises that you submit before death because “there are no continues, my friend”.
Weirdest bit: Probably the fact that you can gawp at Meryl in her underwear while hiding behind the ceiling vent – then you have to punch her unconscious when Psycho Mantis takes over her mind and starts saying “make love to me Snake!”
Still playable? MGS holds up surprisingly well. The stealth is fast-paced with clear mechanics, and Shadow Moses is still a detailed, vibrant world.
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
Year: 2001
Format: Playstation 2 (later PC, Xbox, Xbox 360, PS3, PS Vita)
The one where : (Deep breath) Snake takes photographs to prove the existence of Metal Gear Ray, a new weapon, which is immediately stolen by the returning Revolver Ocelot – who now thinks he’s Liquid Snake. I know. Fast-forward two years and new character Raiden’s responding to a terrorist incident on an offshore rig called the Big Shell and, lo and behold, Solid Snake and Metal Gear Ray are right in the middle.
MGS2 is a rug-puller, not least in the fact you play as Raiden, and a core part of its technique is to bombard the player with information so they’re not sure what is true. As the mission proceeds, Raiden’s world starts collapsing, his support team begin to behave erratically, and revelations pour out of everyone – but what to believe? Liquid Ocelot reveals the Big Shell was set up to train a soldier as good as Solid Snake (ie Raiden), a new Metal Gear called Arsenal crashes into downtown Manhattan, and Raiden is ordered to assassinate Solidus Snake. Solidus? Yep. The third brother of Solid and Liquid, Solidus is also the president of the US (!) but makes zero impression before being offed. This is honestly the simplest explanation of MGS2 you’ll find anywhere.
Best bit : The revelation that Raiden is a rookie soldier who’s been trained through VR videogames to emulate his hero Solid Snake – making him not-unlike the target audience.
Weirdest bit : Kojima realised that killing off Liquid Snake in MGS was a terrible idea – despite the character’s terrible accent. So Ocelot returns, with Liquid’s hand grafted onto his arm, and is “taken over” by Liquid’s personality. Dire.
Still playable? MGS2 is an acquired taste, not least because it’s got far too much exposition. But the ideas are great, and the game underneath all the chin-stroking is even better.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)