Uncharted 4: a hands-on first look at the five-on-five multiplayer

While Sony was understandably keen to talk up Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End during Paris Games Week, we’re going to have to wait a while longer for information on the main story campaign. For now, the focus of attention is firmly on the game’s five-on-five multiplayer mode.

Via a public showing, a behind closed doors presentation and a chance to go hands-on with an early version, we were able to get a good look at how this supplementary element will turn out.

Those expecting a grand reinvention of the Uncharted multiplayer formula (a range of team-based shooter modes, with some “search and destroy”-style derivatives) will be disappointed, but it was never really likely to happen. Instead, Naughty Dog has stuck with its familiar blueprint while bringing in a few interesting elements from the online Factions component in the Last of Us.

What this means is mechanics such as upgradeable abilities, character classes, a “downed” state and the ability to purchase weapons and related upgrades during a match with cash earned from knockouts, assists and all the things you are rewarded for in online shooters.
While each of the above changes how Uncharted 4’s multiplayer plays, it’s the purchasing and downed state that mix things up the most. The former allows your arsenal to be ever-evolving: string a few takedowns together and you can afford an upgrade to, say, your explosive weapon, reducing its cool-down period and allowing you to use it more often.

The downed state kicks in when a player is, well, downed – basically, mortally wounded a la Gears of War. While crawling around on the verge of death, they can continue to be attacked, resulting in a KO – or they can be revived by a teammate if there are any in the vicinity. It’s a simple addition, but one that shifts Uncharted 4’s multiplayer from a stop-start staccato game of firearm whack-a-mole to one where teamwork and sticking together actually matters – and helps.

Back with the purchasable upgrades, this leads us into a couple of other new elements Naughty Dog has added, rather than cribbed from another of its series. One is the ability to employ sidekicks: pay a fee (which increases each time you use that particular sidekick), place your beamed-in helper with a press of L1 and watch as they go about their business in various ways.


One sidekick, for example, is a sniper – placed strategically atop higher ground and around a blind corner, we found our hired help hitting plenty of the opposition with her shots. Not as powerful as player-controlled snipers, she was best used as an ambush unit to confuse other players, allowing you to move in and finish the job.

Another sidekick is the hunter; this unit spawns in and immediately sets out tracking down the closest enemy player. Once found, he approaches them quickly – and usually stealthily, though we did notice some poor choices on the AI’s part here – before grabbing them and leaving them open to attack from you or your teammates.


Backing up these supporting sidekicks are a bunch of new supporting magical items. These supernatural relics run the gamut of Uncharted’s history, from the first game to the present day, and all offer an impressive, useful and expensive super power to unleash during a match.

The Wrath of El Dorado is one Naughty Dog was keen to show off , taking the form of the giant golden statue from the original Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, this particular relic unleashes a bunch of angry spirits all around it, which pursue and attack any nearby enemies. Used to clear out enemy-held bottlenecks, it’s something we admittedly saw more in the promotional videos than in-game. Perhaps people were too worried about its intense magical powers? Or maybe we just weren’t sure how useful it would be in these early days encounters.

It’s not all angry attacks though, with the Cintamani Stone – Uncharted 2’s object of desire – offering a different magical approach for players. Now this one we did see employed quite a lot: once engaged, it coats an area with a blue flame, reviving downed teammates and speeding up the recovery efforts of those not instantly brought back by its powers.

None of these new additions felt overpowered or – importantly – out of place. In fact, the addition of supernatural powers is something that probably should have gone into Uncharted’s multiplayer some years ago, what with the main campaign focusing so heavily on these definitely-not-Indiana-Jones relics.

Aside from the updated and introduced elements, playing Uncharted 4’s multiplayer is an instantly familiar experience. Though it has its idiosyncrasies and neat little features to get your head around, if you’ve played a third-person shooter in the past few years you’ll be running and gunning (and climbing) with the best of them.

Navigation has the sort of looseness you do feel in the Uncharted games, with characters ducking heads and listing left and right rather than turning like human tanks, latching on to cover but breaking from it just as easily.

What has changed – for the better – is how the character you choose to control makes his or her way over obstacles. It’s not quite on a par with Mirror’s Edge parkour, but the free running at play does make for a quicker, more vital pace to proceedings. This pace is something Naughty Dog was keen to point out it aims to maintain, to the point that Uncharted 4 will run at 900p resolution in multiplayer, in order to preserve the 60 frames per second yardstick (for comparison, single player will be 1080p and run at 30 frames per second).

It’s a concession that, from some time with the game, does appear to be to the game’s benefit. That general sense of smoothness keeps things flowing, and the purring, slightly-lower-resolution engine is backed up by some smart mechanics.

Climbing – a separate element from the free running-like traversal of levels – is quick and easy, which makes sense as nobody wants to be shot in the backside while trying to scale a three metre high wall. The same goes for Uncharted 4’s new way to get around, the rope/grappling hook combo, which can be employed with a quick press of the L1 button in order to swing, Indiana Jones-like, across chasms.

The ability to emulate tree-swinging apes also brings with it new tactical opportunities, very much like those seen in an earlier trailer for Uncharted 4’s single-player. Basically, if some of your team can run distraction efforts, there are times when you’re able to utilise your rope swing to get behind the opposition.

We were able to use this as a genuine, workable tactic in a couple of the matches we played. It’s sure to be something the player base gets used to and learns to counter (or at least pay attention to), but for the time being it was effective and, honestly, good fun. It’s a simple touch, but one open to all manner of different strategic uses – flanking, escape, looking like a cool archaeologist – and does help highlight a depth to Uncharted 4’s multiplayer that might not otherwise have been expected.

That’s not to say this is a shooter that needs more brains than reflexes and effective use of explosives, but giving the player another tool to take advantage of – and the ability to engage in some thrilling death from above moments as you swing above your opponent before dropping on top of them with a melee attack – does broaden the player’s choice somewhat.

There are other elements Uncharted 4’s multiplayer has in common with its contemporaries, ones which divide opinion. Naughty Dog has confirmed the in-game purchases will be present in Uncharted 4 from day one, though lead multiplayer designer Robert Cogburn maintained this would “generally” be for cosmetic items. “We are definitely not for the mentality of gating gameplay mechanics,” he told assembled journalists, “It’s not something we at Naughty Dog want to do. [It’s] generally for cosmetic stuff.”

That “generally” does stand out, and Cogburn’s confirmation of Naughty Dog Points – Uncharted 4’s in-game virtual currency – raises the question of whether this videogame cash will be available for purchase with real money. One thing that was clarified, however, was that the Points can be used to unlock items in Uncharted 4’s multiplayer: “With that virtual currency there’ll be no gameplay items that you can’t unlock,” Cogburn said.

This would appear to be the most effort Naughty Dog has put into an Uncharted multiplayer mode to date. Beginning as a pleasant aside in Uncharted 2 before developing into a decent attraction in its own right by Uncharted 3, the push the studio is putting into Uncharted 4’s multiplayer mode is apparent for anyone to see.

Whether it will be engaging enough to keep people playing beyond a few days or weeks after Uncharted 4’s launch will be another story altogether, though. The fundamentals are solid, if unspectacular, and while there are plenty of elements we’ve not see in an Uncharted title before, none of it is actually new to competitive multiplayer.

Cautious optimism is the best approach for a proposal like this: the meat of Uncharted 4 is always going to be in its single-player campaign, but the sheer endeavour Naughty Dog is putting behind its online push makes this a part of Uncharted 4 that might end up a dark horse.

GoldenEye on N64: Miyamoto wanted to tone down the killing

GoldenEye 007 was one of the greatest games of the 90s, and revolutionised the idea of the first-person shooter on consoles – but Nintendo was hugely concerned about its depiction of violence, game director Martin Hollis has revealed.


In a fascinating talk at the GameCity festival in Nottingham, the veteran designer explained how Twycross-based developer Rare was determined to forge a creative partnership with the Japanese company. After several approaches, the studio was finally visited by Genyo Takeda, the director behind the Punch-Out!!titles. “He went back to his hotel room, and when he came back for more meetings the next day, Rare had made a new version of Punch-Out!! over night, using their Silicon Graphics workstations and featuring huge rendered sprites. I imagine it impressed him a great deal.” A development deal was duly offered.

After producing the fighting game Killer Instinct, Rare was then offered the chance to make a game based around the GoldenEye movie, or “Bond 17” as it was known at the time. “Tim Stamper told me to write a design document,” says Hollis. “So I went away and thought about it for a month and wrote a ten-page document. And then I was making GoldenEye.”


According to Hollis, the game was originally much more graphic in its depiction of violence. “Bond is a violent franchise and making that fit with Nintendo, which is very much family-friendly, was a challenge. For a while we had some gore, it was just a flipbook of about 40 textures, beautifully rendered gore that would explode out. When I saw it the first time, I thought it was awesome, it was a fountain of blood, like that moment in the Shining when the lift doors open. Then I thought, hmm, this might be a bit too much red.”

He went on to explain that, towards the end of development, the team received a fax from Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, with a series of suggestions for the game. “One point was that there was too much close-up killing – he found it a bit too horrible. I don’t think I did anything with that input. The second point was, he felt the game was too tragic, with all the killing. He suggested that it might be nice if, at the end of the game, you got to shake hands with all your enemies in the hospital.”

Instead of this, Hollis added a credits sequence into the game, introducing all the characters, almost as though they were being portrayed by actors. “It was very filmic, and the key thing was, it underlined that this was artifice,” he explained. “The sequence told people that this was not real killing.”

Hollis also admitted that the team borrowed the idea of having multiple objectives on each level from Super Mario 64. “I studiously tried to learn what Nintendo was. I played [Zelda] Link to the Past from beginning to end – I got all the hearts and all but two of the quarter hearts. I could write a thousand pages about that game. Then Mario 64 came out during the development of GoldenEye and we were clearly influenced by that game. Ours was much more open as a result.”

Hollis spoke at length about his great admiration for Nintendo. “I value the idea – which I do see as quite strongly a Japanese idea – of respect to the player and trying to see into their mind and their life,” he said. “We have jargon for it nowadays: ‘user-centric design’. Nintendo thought about where the player would be when they played the game and who would be with them at the time.”

But it’s not just the players. Hollis argues that Nintendo also respects the creators, even when it might be financially detrimental. Apparently, Rare was asked if it would consider making a game based on the next James Bond film, but the studio turned it down. “I thought about this and was not sure I’d really want to,” said Hollis. “We had a small chat, three or four of us on the team. It was like, ‘No’. We sent the message back, ‘The answer is no. We don’t plan to make another Bond game from another Bond film’. And that was it.”

Years later, Hollis still seems surprised at how easily Nintendo accepted their refusal. “It must have grossed, I don’t know, $400m or something. You might’ve thought that on a commercial basis someone at Nintendo, even lower down or higher up or whatever, would’ve said, “Well, are you sure?”, but out of respect for the creator and the importance of the people who actually made the game, that was it.”

Instead of making another James Bond game, Hollis moved on to work on Perfect Dark, which he says was “definitely a spiritual sequel”. While he left Rare 14 months into the game’s development, he was there for the important decisions.

“I wanted to make a game that starred a woman. Partly it was Nikita, the film by Luc Besson, and also Dishonored, a 1930s movie starring a spy who was a woman, and a general sort of sensibility that I thought it would be interesting to have a woman be the centre of attention. We constructed this character, to the very best of our ability, to be the centrepiece of the game.”

Joanna Dark was born of the best intentions – even her name comes from Jeanne D’Arc, or Joan of Arc – but her game inevitably made less of an impression than GoldenEye. If there are people who think Joanna Dark was less interesting than her male predecessor, Hollis has an explanation: “It’s very tough in a first-person shooter to develop a personality or a backstory, and what Bond brings you is honestly a lot more. You hear the theme tune and you’re right there.”

Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate review – a historical failure

2015 has been a transformative year for open-world games, with standout releases like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain revolutionising individual tenets of the genre, from narrative depth to mechanical breadth. Unfortunately, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate is not one of those progressive titles, and instead of continuing this year’s trend of pushing toward higher expectations from triple-A blockbusters, Syndicate suffers from a litany of legacy issues that run the gamut from design to technical.

With a new studio, Ubisoft Quebec, making its Assassin’s debut, Syndicate does occasionally suggest a desire to affect change in an annual juggernaut so large that it can barely be steered. However, the team seems essentially powerless when placed under such monumental time pressure. The small shifts toward better worlds, characters, and in particular sharper writing, get lost among problems that have pervaded the series since its peak in 2009.

Syndicate’s romanticised rendition of 1860s London is certainly impressive – a smoky sprawl filled with cockney guttersnipes and towering chimneys. It is by far the largest Assassin’s world to date.

The enjoyable Horrible Histories approach to London works well. Each district, from the grimy slums of Whitechapel to the stately grandeur of Westminster, feels distinct – visually, at least – and London has a dank sheen that does look glorious under a cloud-covered rainy evening. Hopping across the Thames, bustling with a constant stream of tugs and barges, or using the new rope launcher to speedily rappel up Big Ben or St Paul’s Cathedral; this is a place that seems more familiar than 12th-Century Jerusalem or the archipelago of the Caribbean, and that familiarity leads to a sense of discovery.

But below the Victorian streets, the technical foundations are creaking. Syndicate is not nearly the technical disaster that last year’s Unity was, but frequent slowdown and texture pop-in are both fairly common on PS4, especially when travelling around in a horse and cart, where a disgusting motion blur literally attempts to disguise the fact the world is struggling to keep up with itself.

In story terms, the narrative fog swirls around Crawford Starrick, the latest Head of the Hydra that is the Templar regime; longtime enemies of the Assassins and all-round bad news. Starrick himself – shallow, softly spoken, sinisterly unhinged and clearly torn straight from Ubisoft’s Villain Handbook – is propped up on the shoulders of a ruthless network of powerful Templars controlling the capital, and he enforces his grasp with his violent street gang, The Blighters.

This simplicity, of a bad guy with his henchmen poised in positions of power, plays perfectly into Syndicate’s streamlined approach – it even omits the futuristic sections that plagued previous games, presenting these as infrequent and snappy cut-scenes for narrative context, and to confirm that the series’ perpetual pratt Sean Hastings is still alive-and-snarking in the present day. The game’s two new assassins – Jacob and Evie Frye – act as two sides of the same coin, creating narrative dynamism and some of the series’ best dialogue. Jacob, brash and cocky, wants to take Starrick head on, so founds a gang called The Rooks to take on The Blighters, while Evie, the more level-headed and intriguing of the two, is more interested in the search for ancient scientific artifacts Pieces of Eden, taking her adventure off in other directions.

It’s a strong setup, which quickly falls to pieces. The Rooks themselves don’t add much to proceedings – these AI companions, upgradeable using the experience and resources you earn through completing missions and exploring the world, feel more like a bothersome distraction than a compelling timesink. A whole host of side activities then further continues the series’ preference for quantity over quality. Alexander Graham Bell, Karl Marx, Charles Dickens and even Florence Nightingale, all excellently depicted, each have unique, occasionally interesting tasks to dole out, but none escape the underlying problems.

Then there are more minor assassinations to lessen Starrick’s grasp on the city: liberation missions have you freeing innocent child workers; there are investigations into sinister urban myths like Spring-Heeled Jack; and there are plenty of bounty hunts. The latter are particularly irritating, forcing you to kidnap key targets before marching them to a destination against their will. This quickly becomes another lesson in frustration as you try to manage one NPC while killing off a dozen more that appear on your way from A to B. And with its new levelling system, Syndicate essentially forces you to play these repetitive sideshows to level up enough to continue the main quest. In channeling you through the game this way – through activities that feel so throwaway, so hopelessly incapable of creating more excitement about the things you’re doing rather than the long-dead people you’re seeing – any compulsion disappears down the fetid Thames.

All of this would be easier to swallow if the simple act of playing didn’t feel so broken. The controls are a relic of the crusades (literally, as this is where the series began), and have become unsatisfying and woefully imprecise. All contextual actions are mapped to the same three buttons, which makes it the luck of the draw as to whether you do the action you want to, or the one the game thinks you want to. Firing your gun is the same button as dodging enemy bullets under timed prompts; opening boxes next to ledges is the same as jumping down off ledges if you’re accidentally holding the action button at the same time, as you often are; and bundling kidnapped targets into carriages is the same button as getting on to that carriage and driving off.

The game’s stealth is worse, relying so heavily on these broken controls that it’s almost impossible to pull off takedowns with satisfaction, instead leaving you fumbling against the set of world rules that oppose you at almost every turn. The main assassinations, unique set-pieces that punctuate the end of each narrative chapter, are some of the series’ most diverse - Lambeth Asylum, Cannon Street Station, St Paul’s - but are underpinned by this complete lack of finesse. Where Metal Gear Solid V filled its world with opportunities to feel empowered for using its emerging opportunities, Syndicate goes all the way toward making experimentation feel like a chore. It punishes you with getting stuck on scenery, objectives that don’t prompt progression mid-mission, and an imprecise quick-aim system that on one occasion auto-targeted our assassination target - not the half-dozen or so low-level thugs standing next to him - with a hallucinogenic dart, sending him into a frenzy so he was impossible to kill and complete the objective, forcing a complete restart.

When the stealth inevitably falls down, the game’s combat is repetitive, requiring you to hammer the same button with an occasional counter against identical NPCs. This was more forgivable in previous games, where a carefully executed counter attack let you slice open your enemies within a couple of sword clashes and string together kills, but neither of Syndicate’s assassins feel particularly lethal. You’ll hit individual enemies dozens upon dozens of times, smacking them round the face, stabbing them in the neck, twisting their arms, breaking their arms, smacking them some more and only then deliver the killing blow. While the intention was clearly for Syndicate to be a scrappier brawler, complete with knuckle dusters, canes and kukri blades, it comes off as loose and weightless. It just isn’t fun.

That dearth of fun is the crux here. As the series finally begins to carve out an identity for itself, shed the dead-weight of its futuristic fluff of a sub-plot, and really let fly with its caricatural depiction of human history, it’s simultaneously failing to keep up with even middling mechanical, technical and design standards. With searing irony, the series feels more historic with each profit-driven iteration.

PewDiePie: how the YouTube king clocked up 40m fans and 10bn views

With 40 million fans, YouTube star Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg could have his pick of broadcasters if he decided to move into television. But the man whose channel has more than 10bn video views plans to stick with his online community.

Television is just another promotional channel for his online work, rather than the next rung of the entertainment ladder, he argues.

“I started doing YouTube videos and that’s what I want to keep doing. It seems like maybe some traditional or old media feel intimidated by YouTube being a new medium,” Kjellberg said.

“I feel like we are the lucky ones doing YouTube. So I’m going to keep doing what’s fun.”

Kjellberg launched his YouTube channel in 2010, and has built a huge audience for his vlogs and “Let’s Play” videos, in which he plays a variety of games.

In 2014, his videos were watched nearly 4.1bn times and according to documents filed in the Brighton-based Swede’s homeland, the 25-year-old earned $7.4m (£4.8m).

Now, the traditional media world has come calling – and with it more mainstream attention. Kjellberg released his first book this week, This Book Loves You, through a publishing deal with Penguin Random House, and was recently a guest on high-profile US TV show The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

“It’s been a certain group that knows about me, for sure. A lot of people are still like, ‘What is a PewDiePie?’ But it really is interesting to see, as one of the bigger names on YouTube, that right now there’s a transition phase where YouTube is becoming more popular and accepted as a medium by itself,” said Kjellberg.

The online fandom for its stars extends to the offline world too: 1,400 fans turned up to Kjellberg’s book signing in London last weekend, while he has been mobbed when appearing at online-video industry award ceremonies.

“I see the numbers that are there online: a lot of people watching and commenting. But you go to these events and think, ‘Oh shit! It’s actually real.’ It’s a really big transition,” he said.

That transition has also seen Kjellberg become an ambassador of sorts for gaming in general, and the genre of Let’s Play videos in particular. His Late Show appearance came shortly after a rival chat show, Jimmy Kimmel Live, mocked the phenomenon. Colbert, by contrast, treated Kjellberg and his viewers with respect.

“It’s so easy to make fun of because it’s new and different. But once you get into it and understand it more, you realise that it is something cool and awesome,” he said.

Kjellberg is mulling over his next moves, including a plan to experiment with new formats beyond Let’s Play videos on YouTube, perhaps with live streaming that could bring him closer to traditional television, but in his own way.

“A lot of people keep a looser approach to live streaming: they can just play games and don’t have to worry about editing. That doesn’t seem that appealing to me,” he said. “I’d do it shorter and really make a show out of it.”

Kjellberg is also preparing to make a scripted horror series with the producer of The Walking Dead, funded by YouTube for its newly-announced YouTube Red subscription service.

He is also learning to exert his growing influence on the platforms he operates on, from criticising YouTube for its often-toxic comments section in 2014, to bucking the dominant trend in the apps industry for “freemium” games that make their money from in-app purchases – Candy Crush Saga being the most famous example.

Kjellberg’s mobile game Legend of the Brofist costs £3.99 up front, with no in-app purchases. “I don’t think that all games that have in-game purchases are bad, but we didn’t think it would fit the kind of game we wanted to make. It was cool to maybe change people’s approach to mobile games: they don’t always have to be Flappy Bird,” he said.

That game was a sudden (if short-lived) craze in early 2014: Kjellberg’s videos of Flappy Bird were watched by tens of millions of people, sparking its initial surge in downloads.

It was an early sign that PewDiePie and his fellow YouTube gamers are the new influencers in the games industry, capable of turning obscure, independent games into hits.

“People think that YouTube is going to replace games journalism. I don’t think that at all: they both have a place, and a different approach to promoting games,” said Kjellberg.

“But when I released my own game, it was really cool to see exactly what the impact of just one video of a game could do. It’s clear that if a YouTuber plays a game, sales go up. That’s just how it is.”

Penguin Random House is hoping it will be a similar story for This Book Loves You, which follows chart-topping books from fellow YouTubers Zoe “Zoella” Sugg and Alfie Deyes.

But unlike Sugg’s novel, Girl Online, Kjellberg’s book takes the form of a collection of mock-inspirational quotes, spoofing the kind of over-solemn memes widely shared on Facebook.

The idea plays firmly to his core fans, who he said played a key role in the original idea for the book.

Kjellberg’s communication with his fans has had to evolve from the days when he published his personal email address for them to contact.

“That would be impossible now, it would just be ridiculous!” he said, of the likely deluge of emails. “But I think they know I still care and take their feedback incredibly seriously.”

Like a number of other YouTubers, Kjellberg has successfully mobilised his online audience for charitable purposes, raising $446,000 (£288,294) for Charity: Water in 2013 and $630,000 (£407,232) for Save the Children in 2014 through crowdfunding campaigns.

Steam Machine – is this the future of living room gaming?

For years, PC manufacturers have been desperate to get their machines into our living rooms. They’ve tried producing smaller sexier devices, aping the design sensibilities of dedicated games consoles and they’ve tried making them look functional and discreet like DVD players or set-top boxes. But largely, they have failed: most of us still keep our PCs on a desk, in a bedroom, study or office space.

Then in 2013, after years of rumours and speculation, Valve, the company behind the dominant online PC gaming store Steam, announced that it was making a new bid for the living room with its own PC-based console, the Steam Machine. However, it wouldn’t manufacture the console itself, and there wouldn’t just be one version. Keeping to the open philosophy of the PC market, there would be multiple manufacturers, making their own versions, with different specifications. The uniting factor would be that every Steam Machine would run a Linux-based operating system named SteamOS, and that they’d all come with the dedicatedSteam controller – an innovative combination of traditional console joypad and computer mouse, developed in-house at Valve.

In November, the first dozen or so Steam Machine derivatives will hit stores, with units from Alienware, Origin and Falcon Northwest, among others. As expected, the specifications vary widely, from the entry level Alienware with an Intel i3 processor and Nvidia Geforce GTX graphics to the super high-end Falcon Northwest with Intel i7-4790K and Titan-class Nvidia GPU (GameSpot has all the specs). But the question on everyone’s lips is: what are these things for? Why do we need them?

Both the PS4 and the Xbox One are essentially PCs – they feature the same multi-core central processors, dedicated graphics chips and mammoth hard drives as desktop computers. “In fact, they’re getting more PC-like every year,” says Valve programmer Robin Walker, who once helped design seminal shooter Team Fortress but is now one of the leads on the design of the Steam Controller. “They’re trying to solve problems that we solved years ago”.

Valve’s business development specialist Erik Johnson concurs. “PC manufacturers have just had to sit there and watch a bunch of closed systems continuously get shipped into living rooms and they’ve had no part in that business, even though it’s pretty much a PC in all of these machines. And you can’t tell companies like Dell that the big problem is form factor – they’re like ‘dude, we can build anything you want!’ It’s about software. We had this theory that to get the PC into the living room we needed a user interface and a controller that works with the TV. I think we were right about that, but we were wrong about how hard it would be.”

Four years ago, Valve launched Big Picture, a special version of its Steam storefront, designed to run on a television. The new mode is essentially a “10 foot interface”. In other words an onscreen menu system designed to be viewed on a living room screen typically 10 feet away from the user; it’s the concept you find on your Sky or Virgin Media box, or indeed your games console. It meant Steam users could plug their laptop into the TV via HDMI, then browse and play games on their massive LCD screen rather than a desktop monitor. And it’s a tweaked and updated version of Big Picture that provides the UI for every Steam Machine.

And it works pretty well. Power up the Alienware Steam Machine for example, and you don’t get a standard PC desktop with tiny icons and a mouse cursor. Instead, you get what looks like a games console front-end. A Steam Machine logo appears, then you go through a familiar console set-up procedure, providing your region, letting it know the size of your TV, and signing into your Steam account.


Then you’re into the main user interface, which looks like the PS4 UI. A row of icons along the top offer all your settings, download and mail functions, while a larger row of options offers access to the Steam store, your library of games and the community features. Select Store, and all the browsing options you know from the PC version (searching by popularity, release, genre etc) are all there pretty accessible. Of course, you can go into settings and switch to a traditional Linux desktop if you want but, basically, this thing looks, runs and handles like a games console.

The most interesting element though is the controller. Valve has spent over three years designing something that can work with both joypad-centred games such as shooters and action adventures, and mouse-driven titles including strategy simulations. The end result has two large trackpads, as well as a single analogue thumb stick and multiple buttons on the fascia, shoulders and even on the innerside of the two “handles”. It’s also highly customisable – players are able to configure button settings for older Steam titles that don’t directly support the pad, and then share them online so that others don’t have to bother.

In practise, it takes a bit to get used to, but it does work. We tried Civilization V, using the right trackpad as a mouse cursor and it feels intuitive, helped a great deal by the detailed haptic sensor array beneath the trackpad, which provides little blips of tactic feedback, aping the friction you feel as you whizz a mouse over a surface.


As for shooters, during our demo, we got to try Just Cause 3 which is one of the forthcoming titles designed with Steam Controller compatibility in mind. Here, the analogue stick handles movement, while the right touchpad is used for aiming, which is incredibly accurate but also very, very sensitive. We spent a lot of time firing wildly around the screen, which – when your character has a rocket launcher and they’re standing on top of a flying aircraft – can be dangerous. Again, though, everything can be tweaked and customised, and its likely dedicated gamers will find their own way to tune the system.

And like the PS4 controller, Valve has also added motion detection in the form of a gyroscope for extra versatility. “We’ve found a lot of our hardcore FPS players are starting to map that to mouse input,” says Walker. “The gyro feeds mouse input in, and the right pad generates mouse input as well, and the controller synthesises those two inputs before it sends them to the game. So with something like CounterStrike, where you care about aim a lot, you use your right pad for large scale movement, turns etc, and your gyroscope for very fine aim on top of that. This was not something we expected, it’s not what the design was for, but they’re finding that mix of large scale and very fine movement is working for them”.

Stephen Colbert's love of gaming culture scores points with his viewers

Jimmy Kimmel, host of Jimmy Kimmel Live, will be a guest on tonight’s episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. While the two hosts have very similar jobs, they could not be farther apart in terms of their awareness of the diversifying American media landscape.

This summer, Kimmel decided to pick an unnecessary, multi-episode fight with the video game community. The feud culminated in Kimmel having popular online gaming personalities Markiplier and MissesMae on his show in an attempt to mend fences – and stop the mean YouTube comments – but even that got condescending when Kimmel and his guests engaged in an awkward three-way hug that ended with Kimmel suggesting they should “try being around other humans every once in a while.”

On Tuesday’s episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, the musical guest wasn’t a stylish indie rock band with an album to promote. It was The Legend Of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses, a 74-piece orchestra who performs music from Nintendo’s iconic video game series. Earlier this month, one of Colbert’s conversation partners was Sean Murray, who doesn’t have a new film or TV series on the horizon: Murray is one of the creators of the upcoming space exploration video game No Man’s Sky, and he guided Colbert through a live gameplay demoon air. PewDiePie, YouTube’s most popular gaming personality and highest-earning user, also guested on The Late Show a few weeks ago.

Kimmel still sees gamers as awkward, non-athletic, basement-dwelling nerds who forgot long ago what fresh air and human interaction feel like – a dated stereotype that has been proven to be inaccurate. Colbert, who has been praised for breaking new ground in late night TV, understands that video games have become the fourth pillar of entertainment – alongside movies, TV and music –and that this large and expanding audience deserves proportionate recognition.

It is estimated that the revenues of the video game industry worldwide will reach about $91.5bn when 2015 comes to an end, while live and recorded music revenues are estimated at about $47bn, movies at around $104bn, and television subscriptions at well over $200bn.

Conan O’Brien also understands that video games are a legitimate entertainment medium and has taken steps to demonstrate it. Conan hosts has its own weekly livestreaming program and a favourite recurring sketch on the show is Clueless Gamer – but it is Colbert who is the bridge between nerd culture and “what’s cool”. He became one of television’s biggest personalities on The Colbert Report, all while challenging James Franco to JRR Tolkien trivia contestsand starring in a comic book series, and his profile has only expanded since taking over for David Letterman at CBS.

Most importantly, despite being the oldest host in late night television at 51, Colbert relates to his young, video game-playing audience – one of the youngest in late night – because he is a self-proclaimed nerd who understands that his interests didn’t always demand widespread attention like they do now, and that his nerd peers, the early adopters of the new normal, deserve their time in the spotlight.

“I was a nerd when nerd was nerd,” he told Time in August. “OK? All right? There was no reward. No one catered to us. We weren’t a demographic. We were a punching bag and a punch line. There was a movie called Revenge of the Nerds because the nerds needed revenge because of all of the things that were happening to them. That’s a cultural artifact that people need to understand.”

While talking to Markiplier and MissesMae, Kimmel showed some humility and admitted that he is “old” and “out of touch”, but Colbert has proven that being older is no excuse for being out of touch, especially when having a firm understanding of popular interests is such a crucial part of your job.

Minecraft: Story Mode Episode 1 review: a treat for young fans

It’s untrue to suggest that Minecraft doesn’t have a story: it has thousands. It’s just that the vast majority of them weren’t made up by the game’s developer Mojang.

One of the reasons millions of children love playing Minecraft is that it’s a digital set for their own stories, whether they’re playing alone or with friends. Meanwhile, popular YouTubers like The Diamond Minecart and Stampy have built huge online audiences by spinning their own yarns within the game.

This is why Mojang’s moves into storytelling – through spin-off game Minecraft: Story Mode and the in-development Minecraft movie – is a fascinating risk. It’s one the company is well aware of too.

“We don’t want any story that we make, whether it’s a movie or a book, to create some sort of ‘this is the official Minecraft, this is how you play the game’ thing,” chief operating officer Vu Bui told the Guardian in October 2014.

“When coming up with a story, we want to make sure it is just a story within Minecraft, as opposed to the story within Minecraft.”

So, Minecraft: Story Mode is a – not the – story set within Minecraft, created in partnership with developer Telltale Games – well respected for its adventure games based on The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Borderlands and other properties.

Like those this will be an episodic adventure, told over five episodes, TV-style. The first – The Order of the Stone – was released this week for PC, Mac, Xbox 360 and Xbox One, and PS3 and PS4, with Android and iOS versions to follow.

The story is set within the world of Minecraft, focusing on a group of friends (and a pet pig) trying to track down a team of famous adventurers in order to save the world. You play a character named Jesse who can be a boy or a girl – a change from the original male-only plan – and one of three races.

For the most part, the gameplay involves watching the story unfold, while being prompted regularly with multiple-choice conversational or action questions.

There are also action sequences and fight scenes every so often, although nothing hugely challenging: this game wants you to find your way through its story, rather than to kill you off if you can’t hit a key or button fast enough. A good thing, because the combat is one of the game’s least fun features.

It’s all about the branching narrative, too: rather than shepherding you through a single storyline, there are real choices to be made that will affect what you see and do, and how the other characters react to you.

While some scenes do involve walking around, the general restriction on your movement and actions can feel jarring, given that it’s an accurate representation of Minecraft that you’re walking around in. No diving out of the plot progression to dig a home out of a hillside here.

That said, there are lots of references that will delight Minecraft veterans young and old alike: from Jesse’s wooden sword breaking at exactly the wrong moment, to neatly-worked pig and chicken jokes. Story Mode is steeped in Minecraft culture, but handles it with a light, humorous touch.

The first episode clocks in at around two hours, with four more to come. At $24.99 (just over £16) that feels good value, especially thinking about children’s likely desire to replay the game to discover the bits they missed first time round.

Adults may be put off by the game’s length and relatively high amount of watching rather than playing. But for children, Minecraft: Story Mode looks the perfect midpoint between playing Minecraft and watching Minecraft videos on YouTube.

A new story in the world that they love, but one in which they’re participating, not just watching – which isn’t afraid to raise some sensitive issues around topics such as friendship. Roll on episode two.

Star Wars Battlefront: what the biggest beta test in EA's history told us

It was, according to Electronic Arts, the biggest beta test in the publisher’s history. Over nine million people turned out this week to try an early version of Star Wars: Battlefront, the online multiplayer shooter set for release on 17 November. Most came away with some fun stories and a few huge questions.

One thing pretty much everyone agreed on was that this game nails Star Wars. The recreation of Hoth is visually astounding, with its glittering snowscapes and bustling rebel base – and the design of the storm troopers, the guns and the spacecraft is near perfect. The audio too, is wonderful, capturing all the well-known sound effects, from the whine of a swooping Tie-Fighter to the almost mournful laser blast of the AT-ST walkers. There is also thrilling use of the John Williams score, bringing in the main theme at certain points and never failing to produce a rush of adrenaline and nostalgia.

“Star Wars – what’s bigger?” says Niklas Fegraeus, design director at developer Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment (Dice), speaking to us on the eve of the Beta’s launch. “One of the main goals of the game is to be a Star Wars experience – that’s a huge thing. The whole franchise is enjoyed by so many different types of people – of course we want to give them something to enjoy, we want them to be able to just jump into the game and have fun.”

This brings us to the key complaint coming out of the beta experience: that the combat is too shallow. The four available laser guns, though exhibiting different specs, all look and feel the same, and success seemed hugely reliant on levelling up and grabbing the better items, rather than learning the maps and figuring out how to coordinate attacks with teammates. Right now, the distribution of power-ups over the map surface, which give access to sentry guns, defence shields and other goodies (replacing the genre’s now conventional “kill streak” style rewards), takes away the usual rhythm and sense of progress within a bout.

Of course, what the beta also lacked was the character progression element of the full game, which will hopefully allow players to personalise their avatars with specific skills – perhaps along the traditional lines of medic, sniper and assault – thereby fleshing out the strategic play. But then Dice keeps stressing that this isn’t a Battlefield game for Battlefield fans, it’s a Star Wars game for Star Wars fans. In truth, as we mentioned after playing the game at E3, the dynamics of the combat do very much reflect the feel of the Battlefield series – just with many of the more complex load-out options, progression systems and tactical elements (like squads and commanders) removed.

Fegraeus assures us however, that there will be something there for the more dedicated gaming audience – though that does seem to come down to the breadth of game modes, rather than the depth. “It’s just this large palette of experiences very closely tied to iconic Star Wars stuff that you can play,” he says, “I think that gives not only a big appeal to a lot of people - that’s the intent, we want Star Wars fans to feel like this is something for them - but at the same time, if you’re an advanced player and you want to be very tactical or competitive or whatever, there are modes for that too. It gives you options and choices when it comes to what you want to play.”

There were two key multiplayer modes available in the beta: the snappy Drop Zone, set on the new planet of Sullust; and Walker Assault, the more in-depth 20 vs 20 conflict on the surface of Hoth. Drop Zone is a take on Battlefield’s standard Conquest mode in which teams compete to secure key areas of the map – except here, the areas are escape pods that drop on to the surface in random positions, forcing a much more fluid, improvisational approach. Also, participants set the capture process off by holding down a button, but they don’t have to remain in the immediate vicinity for long, making defence more open and tactical. During the beta, this is where most players started out, engaging in the quick skirmishes and levelling up their characters to unlock the better guns and equipment such as grenades, one-shot sniper rifles and jet packs.

Walker Assault, however, was the beta’s true showcase mode. Here, two sides – rebel and imperial – face off in a recreation of the Empire Strikes Back’s opening assault. The rebels are required to reach a set of uplinks and get them running, in order to triangulate Y-Wing bomber strikes on the advancing might of the imperial AT-AT walkers. The Empire has to stop the rebel scum, while slowly watching its walking mega-tanks plod into the battle.

It’s a simple setup, but it proved exciting. With so many people involved, so much going on and so many options in attack or defence, it’s hard not to get caught up in the spectacle. Sure, manning a turret and blasting at distant enemies isn’t anything remotely original in an online shooter. Yes, it’s the sort of thing where there are objectives most players will ignore, leading to a quick defeat. No, you can’t have full control over an AT-AT.

That wasn’t the only problem some beta players had with the Hoth experience. Some felt 40 players (and no AI soldiers) isn’t nearly enough to recreate an epic battle. Others pointed to the currently borked spawn system that often shoves you into the game mere centimetres from an enemy, thereby ensuring your quick demise. The hero system, which lets you grab a power-up to transform into Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader, is fun, but again, there’s no sense of progressing toward the chance to experience this honour - you just have to be in the right place at the right time to pick up a token.

But once again, Fegraeus makes the same point: this is the Star Wars “battle fantasy” that Dice wants Battlefront to convey. Away from unlocking better weapons and grenades, the idea is that everyone gets a go at the fun stuff – the cool vehicles and the classic characters.

“We have lots of experience when it comes to these large scale designs, so we use a lot of that experience,” says Fegraeus of the overall Hoth experience. “But at the same time, it’s a great challenge for us to make something that really speaks Star Wars, being in that universe and working in that universe’s rules.

“... It’s been the really exciting part of the challenge – just diving into this universe and learning its ins and outs and kinks, and trying to make something that speaks to that, so it becomes a true Star Wars experience. We really started with this foundational idea of ‘let’s let people jump in to their Star Wars battle fantasy and play it their way’,” he says, “That has been the guiding principle, and that hasn’t changed at all.”

If that’s the guiding principle, then the beta is definitely a success of sorts. Taking control of a TIie Interceptor, carrying out strafing runs on fleeing members of the New Republic; swooping low and fast in a Snowspeeder (while dropping in the odd “I’ve found them, repeat, I’ve found them”); prancing about in full control of an AT-ST walker - there’s always plenty going on and plenty to do (even if the controls of the flying craft are currently a little unintuitive and weird, so dog-fighting with an X-wing can often feel a bit like trying to parallel park a Reliant Robin with two flat tyres).

Star Wars: Battlefront, then, is true to the source material; everything it does fitswith what you would expect. The problem could be that the underlying action is so familiar – we’ve had over a decade of the Call of Duty and Battlefield titles now, and they have rigidly defined the military FPS experience that Battlefront adheres to. It’s risky to draw too many conclusions from what is essentially a technical test not a demo, but if the beta is anything to go by, those who aren’t utterly seduced by the chance to fight as rebels or stormtroopers raiding Tatooine and blowing up snow bases may even – gulp – find themselves tiring of a highly recognisable shooter.

Perhaps the plan with Star Wars: Battlefront is to use it as a platform for future bolt-ons and additions; a constantly updating and evolving world of online Star Wars shooter-playsets, riddled with settings and characters from the entire franchise, old and new. In other words, the Destiny model. Indeed, we’ve already discovered that the season pass, which gives access to four forthcoming expansion packs, will cost $40. When you consider there’s no single-player Campaign experience beyond a series of short missions, it’s a relatively high price to play for those Star Wars fans unused to the dynamics of the online multiplayer marketplace.

On the subject of downloadable content (DLC), Fegraeus reminds us of what we already know – Battlefront is getting a piece of freebie in December, offering players a look at the battle of Jakku. But he won’t say more. “We wanted to have something that acted as a bridge, something that tied into the new Star Wars that’s coming,” he says. “The DLC is essentially the events that led to the way that planet looks in Episode VII. You’ve seen it on the trailer, with the huge crashed star destroyer in the desert. We’ll support the game post-launch, and we’ll listen to what the community says.”

Battlefront is going to do well, we all know that. It will see plenty of DLC and it will be a whole new franchise for publishing giant EA to exploit. But the real question is whether or not it will offer more than just a Star Wars skinning of Battlefield Lite.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 – five things we've learned about the campaign

It’s just a month until Activision unleashes the latest title in its blockbusting Call of Duty series. And while we’ve seen plenty of information on how Black Ops 3 is tweaking the multiplayer experience, there’s been much less focus on the single-player campaign mode.

Set 40 years after the events of Black Ops 2, the world is now divided into a patchwork of international alliances, all investigating advanced cybernetic and bio-augmentation technologies. The narrative follows a group of robotically enhanced super soldiers, investigating the disappearance of a CIA operative in Singapore, as well as a huge data leak of military secrets.


During a reveal event in April, developer Treyarch announced that the campaign would be a four-player co-op mode with large, open environments – it even promised a more complex story in which multiple playthroughs may be required to get the full picture.

But how does this play out in practice? Recently, we got to play a demo of the Campaign mode – here’s what we discovered.

It turns out, co-operative play isn’t just an option – playing with up to three friends, or with others online, will be the core campaign experience. It’s the first time co-op has featured in Call of Duty since World at War, and this time each player will be bringing in their own individual rank progression and class customisations as well as the game’s new features: tactical rigs (which provide physical boosts like longer jumps and sprinting times) and cybercores (which provide special skills).

The latter are pretty interesting. There are three different categories: Cybercore Chaos is all about destruction, with options such as Immolation, which uses enemy explosives like grenades and enables you to destroy robots; Cybercore Martial is more about the player – Active Camo, for example allows you to become invisible for a short amount of time; finally Cybercore Control is all about hacking, allowing you to, say, take control of an enemy robot or aircraft. The latter means you’ll be able to undertake aerial raids whenever you want, not just when the scripted mission demands it.

Furthmore, each player’s configurations will be based on the decisions they have made throughout their campaign experience: the more you play, the more cybercores, weapon attachments and other pieces of equipment you’re able to unlock and utilise. What we’ll hopefully see then are parties of players with very different experiences and abilities, having to use those disparate skills together – almost like an RPG guild.

To emphasis this sense of cooperation, more experienced players will be able to lend advanced weapons to their friends, allowing them to compete in missions that they aren’t yet equipped for. Once the level is over, the gun is returned. It’s an interesting attempt to encourage social play beyond simply turning up at the start of a mission with a bunch of strangers and no intention of working together.

The DNI (Direct Neural Interface) is a major new feature

Black Ops 3 is set in 2065 and there have been a major advances in robotic and bionic technology since the Black Ops 2 timeline – as we saw in the “Ember” trailer. Direct neural interfacing, part of a new Tactical Mode accessed via the d-pad, let’s you tap into the visual stream from any of your team mates. In other words, you can see what they see. The idea is, it’ll allow you to identify enemy types and dangerous locations on the map; it will also show, via an augmented reality HUD, where your grenade will land at the current throwing angle.

What we found from the demo is that it could well open a whole new level of tactics. If you want all your teammates to see the location of every enemy in the area, you can place one of your team on a high vantage point – they can then move safely through the area or at least figure out the best way to engage every situation. It’s also possible to find out which enemies can see you, based on the colour layered over the area you’re in. This could prove especially useful on higher difficulties as you’ll know key areas to avoid altogether.

Again, the idea is to get players thinking together, rather than simply making separate run-n-gun forays into each mission. The problem is, that’s kind of how a lot of people play Call of Duty – this isn’t Ghost Recon, after all. Treyarch seems to be aiming for a big culture change in CoD play – it’ll be interesting to see if the level design and co-operative tools are really sophisticated enough to bring this level of strategic planing into play.

The Safe House is a fun extra – with hidden features

Before players enter each mission, they access the Safe House, an area in which they can customise their character, set class loadouts, learn more about the upcoming objectives as well as show off achievements to friends.

Within the Safe House every player has their own “Bunkroom” which contains a wardrobe for character customisation, a little like GTA Online, and a Medal Case, which holds awards you’ve earned after completing tasks in the campaign. You also have a trunk to stores collectible, which you can use to personalise your Bunkroom. Any of your co-op friends can work into your room and view your customised layout. It’s another little RPG feature, which doesn’t add huge amounts to the actual gameplay experience, but just enhances that sense of playing alongside other people, and actually having an existence within the game’s universe.

Each safe house also contains a computer terminal, or PDV, like the computer found in Black Ops 1, giving access to background information (in fact, it houses 100 times more files that its predecessor). There’s background info on the events between Black Ops 1 and Black Ops 3, as well as hidden Easter egg’s and a few surprise game modes. There was an arcade-style zombie mini-game in Black Ops 1, so could potentially expect something very similar to that...

There’s a whole new difficulty setting

Forget Veteran, in Realistic mode, players will only have a single point of health, meaning the slightest damage will bring you down, whether that’s being caught on the edge of a grenade blast or taking a pistol round that’s been fired through a wall. Of course, the whole notion of ‘realism’ is rather stretched in a game set forty years in the future and featuring bio-augmented super soldiers battling intelligent robot tanks, but this is going to be a major challenge for fans. What next? Call of Duty permadeath?

You can skip to the end of the Campaign mode if you like

Don't worry, board games: video games can't steal what makes you great

Surely there’s nothing a board game can do that a video game can’t do better, right?

After all, board games are so limited. You have to fit them on a table, and make them out of real, tangible stuff. Video games can do whatever you can imagine!

And the best video games should already be stealing from board games. I think game designers ought to be out-and-out burglars, pausing their larceny only to remix and rethink the latest haul of ideas.

But there are also things that make board and card games great that can’t be stolen. At least, not yet. Those elements that exist only within the sphere of real-life cards, smiles and dining room tables.
Bluffing

Whether it’s lying to someone’s face in Werewolf or feigning an offensive in a war game, bluffing and duplicity provides almost all table games with a low-level electric current. It even shows up in board games’ most benign fiefdoms: German games like Settlers of Catan or Caverna, while ostensibly about the construction of peaceful settlements, will still see players protesting the fact that they’re doing well to stop the table from uniting against them by snatching away resources that they need. We do this constantly, and we do it because it’s fun.


It’s not that video games can’t do bluffing. From Street Fighter to StarCraft to Online Poker to EVE Online, you’ll find feints and deception, and I’ll drop anything to discuss Ubisoft’s beautiful failure Ruse. It’s just that video games are terrible at it. AI opponents are notoriously crap at bluffing, and lying over an internet connection is about as much fun as anything else in a long-distance relationship.

It’s not just that video games lose out on the joy of table talk. More significant is that they lose out entirely on the phenomenal genre of lying games. The Resistance is a contemporary example. Players all represent a group of people that must elect teams to go on missions, but which has been infiltrated by players which are double agents. Through failed missions and interrogations, the good guys have to figure out who they can trust before the bad guys sabotage three missions.

The Resistance is an exhausting, emotional and terrifying journey, and an incredible game. But if you’d prefer something more slapstick, Spyfall is a new release that’s also making waves. In each of its rounds, one player around the table has no idea where they are, while everybody else is told the location and their job within it. In a laughably evasive and bizarre conversation the players must try and work out who the spy is, while the spy has to try and deduce where the hell they are from everyone else’s answers. It’s one part James Bond, one part Monty Python and absolutely hilarious.

One of the reasons put forward for the 21st century resurgence of board games pairs them up with vinyl records. In an increasingly digital culture we long for something tangible to lavish affection on, collect, customise or lend. Many board gamers will write when they played and who won on the inside of the box lid, slowly turning a board game into a happy memory-jogging memento. I’ve recently started playing Infinity, and the discovery among my friends that as adults we have the patience to be passable painters is staggering.


But it’s not just that in existing as real-life objects, board games can be desirable in all-new ways. It’s also offers radically different opportunities for designers.


Rampage (also known as Terror in Meeple City) is an on-the-nose example, but it’ll do. This is a turn-based dexterity game that sees players racing to demolish a 3D city by flicking their personal godzilla-like monster around, chucking tiny wooden cars at one another, even placing their chin next to their monster and blowing as hard as they can. It’s very silly. But when a game works mostly within the rules of our human bodies and the laws of physics, as this does, you also instantly get incredible complexity with hardly any rules at all.

Two Rooms and a Boom makes use of space on a much larger scale. It’s a party game that divides players between two rooms, then allows tense hostage exchanges over the course of 15 minutes, after which a bomber player blows up, hopefully killing the president on the opposite team. Most of the game is talking (or more accurately, plotting, scheming, panicking and misleading), but where you’re standing, whether you can get privacy and your ability to read a room is vitally important.

Then there’s 2012’s Risk Legacy. Part board game, part advent calendar, this was a hugely successful reinterpretation of Risk that has players telling the story of their personal sci-fi world through consecutive games of Risk. From night to night players found megacities (scribbling their names on the board), place stickers showing which countries were eradicated, unpack new cards, unseal new, secret compartments in the box and even tear up existing components. By the end of the campaign your game would be utterly unique, and a treasured reminder of what a wonderful war you’d had.

All board games allow players their creative streak, because the rules can be bent or broken wherever you like. “Modding” is the process of painstakingly tweaking or repurposing video games, and the way I like to put it is that every board games ships with the most powerful mod tools imaginable. Rather than sulking when they play a bad game, a table of board gamers will leap on the design like amateur mechanics. “How can we fix this?”


It was actually Dungeons & Dragons that first let me perform game design. Cracking open hardback books almost as tall as my torso I’d sketch stories, draft dungeons, sprinkle treasure and attach far too many details to my pet antagonist (he was so troubled). Pen and paper roleplaying games are what I want to talk about here. Did you know they’ve evolved into a staggeringly broad and thought-provoking genre?


Let me illustrate just how much D&D has evolved. Monsters Hearts puts players in control of literally monstrous, sex-starved teenagers. Kaleidoscope sees players creating a fictitious arthouse film together, in less time than it would take to watch one. Fiasco remains the scene’s breakthrough hit, allowing players to thread together a Coen brothers-style disaster in a game that’s one-part improv, one-part dicking over your friends. Or perhaps you’re in the mood for something more serious? Night Witches is by the very same publisher, and casts players as members of a real-life second world war Soviet bomber regiment made up of women flying outmoded planes.


Picking the protagonist’s haircut and picking our way along some (mostly illusory) forking plots are as far as RPG video games go in offering players control. Next to pen and paper games, that’s the narrative equivalent of letting us reach over in the car to beep the horn. Not only do pen and paper RPGs let us create every facet of a whole cast of characters, they let us create the story.

Breasts: the ultimate weapons

Forget guns. Forget nukes. The real ultimate weapon? Breasts.

Exposed breasts are a significant tactical advantage. In pop culture, large-breasted women fighters invariably wear very revealing, breast-emphasising outfits. There are numerous examples in comics (Wonder Woman, Power Girl,Psylocke, Emma Frost, Zatanna, Black Cat, She Hulk etc.) and video games (Lara Croft, Bayonetta, Blaze, Ivy, Rayne, Mai etc.) Presumably such capable individuals would be able to wear what they like, so why would they choose to expose so much skin to danger?

You might think it’s just a cheap and crude tactic by male-dominated industries to get more attention from what they assume to be their young heterosexual male audience. But you’d be wrong. The creators of these scantily-clad protagonists are aware of a greater truth; breasts are actually the most awesome weapons a human can possess, and to cover them up limits their effectiveness. No wonder there are games dedicated to women increasing their breast size. This may all seem far-fetched, but the science backs it up.

Stability


Many women complain that large breasts are actually a hindrance to physical activity, requiring supporting equipment like sturdy sports bras to stop all the disruptive movement. However, this just reveals that these women haven’t had sufficient training in using breasts to maintain stability in extreme physical scenarios.

When undulated in the correct manner, large breasts can act as tuned mass dampers, aka harmonic absorbers. By swinging in the opposite direction to that of the main body, breasts can help cancel out the effect of external forces, like the large pendulum-like dampers in skyscrapers and wind turbines. Ergo, large breasts reduce the impact of hits sustained in battle, allowing the female combatant to remain standing and retaliate in kind.

More proficient female fighters have also mastered their breast to achieve rotational movements to induce a gyroscopic effect, allowing them to put their body through extremely elaborate moves and actions, without ever losing their balance. An obvious tactical advantage.
Offensive capabilities


Human breasts are ostensibly there to house mammary glands, which produce milk for the feeding of babies. This is fine, but this child rearing only ever takes up a few years of an adult woman’s life, assuming she opts to have any children at all. So why do women have breasts on a permanent basis?

Outside of child rearing, breasts actually produce a powerful corrosive acid, like hydrochloric acid in the stomach but much worse, strong enough to dissolve the flesh from an enemies bones and, given enough time, capable of burning through most refined metals.

Specific changes in diet can alter the nature of the fluid produced by breasts. It requires great discipline but some women can use their breasts to produce and emit highly-toxic venom like a cobra. Alternatively, a greater consumption of more-spicy foodstuffs can result in the production of a napalm-like substance.

The more of this weaponised fluid is stored, the more pressure it is under and the further it can be excreted. This causes breasts to expand, which explains why so many female combatants have such large, turgid breasts in defiance of the usual restrictions of anatomy.

However, this does mean the nipple and areola areas are “weak spots” on breasts, as they have to allow openings for fluid to escape. They also look a bit like a target too. This is why these are always covered, even if nothing else is. It’s not to avoid some arbitrary threshold of offensiveness to not get in trouble, it’s to not reveal the Achilles heel. Except it’s not a heel, it’s a nipple.

The alternative physics of breasts
Breasts don’t obey the usual laws of physics. Video game makers figured this out long ago, which is why breasts in video games often behave in such surreal ways.

This is because breasts extrude into as lightly different dimension, one visible from ours that we can still interact with, but with its own subtly different properties and physics.

For instance, size and mass fluctuate more often in the breast dimension, hence bra measuring is so imprecise; the breasts are actually shifting in size and shape constantly due to their exotic physics.

The gyroscopic properties and ability to store highly dangerous fluids are also results of the unique physics of breasts, but it also provides a distinct defensive property. Bullets and blades are very dangerous to humans due to the laws of conventional physics, but breasts don’t obey these laws, so are practically invulnerable to traditional weapons. You seldom see any of these comic or game characters with damaged breasts, and now you know why.

And if they’re invulnerable, there’s no real point in covering them with clothes. Clothes are damageable, so you’ll just ruin a good outfit.

As a result of all this, many women find breasts incredibly useful in combat situations, as writer and gamer Emma Boyle points out.

“Female gamers have long since known that we have an unfair advantage over our male counterparts. I’ve found that if my cleavage is large enough, it becomes an excellent place to store my collection of ninja throwing stars, a spare handgun, and a fighter jet. In fact, I don’t dare to use this move often, but the quasi-religious power of my breasts means that revealing even one nipple will result in face-melting scenes akin to the opening of the Ark of the Covenant.”

It’s not all advantageous though. Having such potent weapons attached to your chest all-day every-day is obviously going to have drawbacks, and they can sometimes become unmanageable and incredibly dangerous, as Gadgette editorHolly Brockwell discovered.

“Having giant boobs was a huge problem for me. Not just because of the vexing back and neck strain, but because it was like having two nuclear warheads strapped to my chest. It was the day they almost took out a school bus full of small children that I realised they had to go for the safety of the planet - so I booked myself in for unilateral disarmament and have never looked back”

People may read this piece and think “None of this is true. This is ludicrous!” And they’d be right. But when we’re at a point where a female characters in a modern video game wears revealing clothes because she’s literally photosynthetic, ludicrousness is sometime the only appropriate response.

Forza 6: all the thrills and spills of driving in the wet

“It is like driving down the M1 three metres behind a truck with your wipers switched off. But at 200mph,” explains Allan McNish on the experience of piloting a top-end prototype sportscar in the rain. And he speaks from experience. The former Formula One driver, three-times winner of the Le Mans 24 Hours and the 2013 FIA World Endurance champion with Audi, drove, during his extensive career, in every permutation of wet weather conditions imaginable.

Two of the cars in which he competed , the 2012 R18, in which he won the 12 Hours of Sebring and the R8 that was part of his American Le Mans Series title in 2006, both feature in the recently released Forza 6, as does, for the first time, racing in the wet and at night, now that developer Turn10 believes it can do the conditions real justice. But it has also gone further and simulated an even greater level of realism – that of standing water and the aquaplaning it can induce in cars.

Standing water, better known as puddles, causes aquaplaning when the tyre cannot clear the water quickly enough and a layer sits between rubber and track, at which point, if all four wheels are biting only H²0, to all intents and purposes the driver is along for the ride.

McNish knows it well, comparing it to “riding a horse, where if you are too tense it can react badly and you’re on the wrong end of it”. Indeed, as a motor-racing writer I have witnessed it on many occasions; it is a scary enough sight from the sidelines (as at the COTA round of the FIA WEC last year, where a sodden dusk saw the straight into turn 12 change into an ice rink) let alone from the cockpit. Which is an intriguing position for Turn10 to take, bidding for physical realism to such an extent that the player, for those crucial moments, actually has no control.

Nor was it an easy task on any of the wet-weather circuits simulated in the game, which include Le Mans, Brands Hatch and Spa. For example, to accurately place 500 puddles on the 12.93-mile Nürburgring Nordschliefe circuit, the forbidding test in the Eifel mountains that Jackie Stewart dubbed “the green hell”, the team used a laser scanning rig, walked the track repeatedly, took pictures of cracks, filmed HD video on a “ladybug” camera, consulted vast amounts of archival footage and talked to professional drivers with experience at the Ring.

“Our vision was to make the most accurate Nürburgring ever created,” said Dan Greenawalt, the creative director at Turn 10. “There was no way to approach it besides throwing everybody, the best brains we had and the most data and research we could at it.”

Nor was this a short-run, one-off approach. It is a long-term process that has seen Turn devolve its research team from the game production part of the process so they are free to pursue every end they believe will add to the realism in the long run. “There is constant improvement to stay ahead of science to be on the cutting edge of academics of simulation,” added Greenawalt. “And it takes a lot of time and research and a desire to push the boundaries and it takes a lot of money – having a big team that’s willing to do the research and throw a lot of time and energy at it.

But video games have always included an element of suspension of disbelief and racing in the wet is far from a new concept. In the past it has generally been achieved simply by scaling back the grip levels of the cars and adding a water-on-the-visor flourish. So why has Forza gone so far, so fast?

Trying to put the player as close as possible to McNish’s shoes is the simple answer. Greenawalt’s team consulted many professional drivers. “They commented on the fear and tension of driving in the rain and driving at night, and we wanted to understand that from a physics perspective,” he explained. They did so by ensuring they modelled all the grip levels at every part of the track in all conditions, rather than a straight scaling down. “We did the research on a per-surface level and we have the new full simulation aquaplaning system; it’s not just reduced friction, it is fully researched,” he said.

Which is the edge beyond the cosmetic they were looking for and crucially it works in-game. Playing on a reasonably high simulation level with a full race seat set up, running the rather beautifully engineered Thrustmaster TX next-gen wheel-pedal combo, this added element is a handful, mentally and physically. Offering a real sense of being on the edge of control, or as was the intention, briefly having none at all, before coming out the other side of one of those puddles and sighing with relief as the traction comes back. This simple idea, executed with precision, genuinely is another dimension, just as Greenawalt had intended. “We have 24 cars on track; they are packed,” he said. “When you have a car either side, and you see a puddle ahead and you realise that they are not for show, it creates that tension – you think, ‘Should I hit the guy on the left or should I hit the brakes and duck in behind him to avoid the puddle line?’ That’s the type of tension we wanted to recreate but we didn’t want to fake it so we did the physics so that it is created naturally.”

It is all about creating a sense of the moment, mentally, beyond just the visual. In the wet, as McNish notes: “You drive with a heightened sense all the time so mentally it is more energy-consuming because you are driving on your fingertips to some extent because you don’t have the same margin for error that you would in the dry.”

Which petrolheads will feel instinctively is right for a simulation, but gamers may also appreciate Turn10’s interpretation of the same. “A puddle could be taking up half the track and it totally changes how you drive it,” said Greenawalt. “So we wanted it to be physically based and completely accurate but we also wanted it to be a thrill ride.”

New York investigates DraftKings and FanDuel over fantasy sports cheating

New York’s attorney general has started investigating the fantasy sports companies DraftKings and FanDuel after reports that an employee may have used inside information to win $350,000 in a football contest.


Eric Schneiderman sent letters to the two big players in fantasy sports, saying that the allegations raised legal questions about the fairness, transparency and security of the companies, according to copies of the letters provided by his office.

The letters ask for the names of employees who compile data on athletes as well as daily fantasy players, whether access to the data is limited, and other information.

The letters also ask about policies prohibiting or restricting employees and others associated from playing daily fantasy sports, and ask for details about employees who may have used data to gain an advantage in playing daily fantasy sports. They request replies by 15 October.

The inquiry comes after an employee at DraftKings won $350,000 from a $25 entry in an American football contest on the rival FanDuel site.

The news led to a firestorm of criticism as employees are seen as gaining a potential edge by knowing how some of the best-performing participants behave before the information becomes public.

A spokeswoman for DraftKings said the company would co-operate with Schneiderman’s inquiry. FanDuel did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

On Monday the companies said in a joint statement that they had temporarily banned employees from playing daily fantasy sports until they come up with a more detailed policy on the issue.

The companies also have said there was no evidence the employee who won the $350,000 did anything wrong.

Destiny to introduce microtransactions and make future content drops free

All the new story content for the next year of Destiny, Bungie’s first new franchise since it launched Halo in 2001, will be free, as the company continues with a major overhaul of the multiplayer online game following its troubled first year.

To make up for the lost revenue from giving away the content for free, Bungie has announced plans to introduce microtransactions to the game for the first time, letting users spend real money to buy cosmetic items such as character gestures and visual changes to their “Sparrow” hover bike in game.

Microtransactions are often viewed with suspicion by players, and Bungie seems keen to emphasise that the purchases, from the in-game Eververse Trading Company, will have no effect on the broader game. “If you’re not interested in what [the in-game vendor] has to offer, you won’t ever be forced to pluck an item off of her shelf,” the developers wrote. “You’ll still receive updates to the game, and you won’t lose a Crucible encounter or fail to clear a Raid because you didn’t have the right Eververse Trading Company emote equipped.”

The revenue model established throughout the first year was a major release, followed by two smaller minor releases, and leaked slides suggested that the initial plan was to continue that model into year two. Instead, the company seems to have decided that the minor releases – which retailed for £20 each in the UK, and were widely criticised for being overpriced given the content contained within – are best delivered in bits and pieces, free of charge.

Bungie says the microtransaction revenue will fund those expansions: “Our plan is to use these new items to bolster the service provided by our live team for another full year, as they grow and create more robust and engaging events that we’ll announce later this year. It has been, and continues to be, our goal to deliver updates to the game. Going forward, our live team is also looking to grow beyond vital updates and improvements to focus on world events, experiences, and feature requests.”

In doing so, the change takes Destiny closer to the model of World of Warcraft, the ground-breaking massively multiplayer online game which entered its second decade last year. Warcraft offers major new content in paid-for expansion packs, and then drops smaller “content patches” periodically, which progress the story of the game world. Unlike Destiny, however, Warcraft still charges a monthly subscription fee for players – although that fee can be paid using in-game currencies.

Is now the right time to buy a new video game console?

It’s the time of year that every gamer loves: the shops are filled with brand new PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo releases and you can’t switch on the television without an advert for some blockbusting sci-fi shooter attacking your eyeballs.

But if you’ve resisted the lure of the latest games consoles for the last two years, is now the time to dive in?

Here are five reasons why the answer may quite possibly be yes.
Developers are getting to grips with the hardware

Just after the launch of PlayStation 4, the machine’s designer Mark Cerny said it would be three years before we saw studios starting to truly exploit the capabilities of the hardware – for example, using the graphics processor for other tasks such as collision detection and physics to boost performance. This, he said, would hugely increase the depth and accuracy of game worlds.

“It takes a while before the software development kits – the applications that developers use to make games – really come into maturity,” says independent developer Byron Atkinson-Jones. “It’s even longer before developers fully learn how to exploit the hardware. This means less constraints on your imagination – I certainly expect to see leaps in artificial intelligence, physics and graphical realism”.

Right now, we’re getting the first wave of big titles – Witcher 3, Star Wars: Battlefront, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate – that are leaving the last-gen machines behind. Coming up, Uncharted 4 is set to really push PS4 in its use of physics and graphical shaders, while on Xbox One, Quantum Break is promising state-of-the-art rendering tech and Crackdown 3 is using cloud computing to create 100% destructible cities. We’re also seeing interesting experiments with online multiplayer gaming, including hugely ambitious projects like No Man’s Sky on PS4 and Elite: Dangerous on Xbox One.
There are already lots of great games

The first year of a console’s life is usually pretty low on truly excellent titles. Developers are still getting to grips with the hardware, while the manufacturers are busy making desperate tweaks to the user interface and operating systems.

Two years after launch, however, things are really picking up for the current generation. Xbox One and PS4 have several bona-fide classics including Witcher 3, Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, Batman: Arkham Knight and Bloodborne (a PS4 exclusive). There are also strong second tier offerings likeDragon Age: Inquisition, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, Far Cry 4, Until Dawn (PS4 only), Forza Horizon 2 (only on Xbox One) and Destiny.

Both machines also support a large vibrant indie community producing beautiful offbeat titles like Shovel Knight, Guacamelee, Ori and the Blind Forest, N++, Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, Resogun and Lovers in a Dangerous Space Time. So it’s not all shooting serious looking men in the face with licensed firearms.

Nintendo’s latest machine was slow to start but now it has a beautiful collection of family-friendly titles like Mario Kart 8, Splatoon, Super Mario 3D World, Super Smash Bros, Super Mario Maker and Pikmin 3. There are also choices for older gamers including Bayonetta 2 and a great update of cult action role-player Darkstalkers II. It’s not a vast library that’s for sure, but you’ll get many hours of pleasure out of all of these – and you can’t play them anywhere else.

Alternative view: most of the big PS4 and Xbox One releases are also available on the PS3 and Xbox 360. They don’t look as good and are missing some of the more sophisticated features, but you’re still getting roughly the same game experience. Indeed, a lot of well-reviewed Xbox One and PS4 titles – including GTA V, Last of Us, Dishonored and Tomb Raider are merely graphically enhanced versions of last-gen titles. If none of the new or forthcoming releases interest you and you’re not a big online gamer, you could hang on for another year.
This is a pretty good Christmas for new releases – and more are on the way


So far this quarter, we’ve already had Metal Gear Solid 5: Phantom Pain, two great football sims (Pro Evolution Soccer and Fifa 16), Forza Motorsport 6 (on Xbox One) and the game-changing Destiny: Taken King. Coming up there’s the vast apocalyptic adventure Fallout 4, anarchic sandbox stunt ’em up Just Cause 3, Call of Duty: Black Ops III, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, Rise of the Tomb Raider and the long-awaited online shooter Star Wars Battlefront. As for exclusives, Xbox One is getting Halo 5: Guardians, while PS4 owners will need to wait a little longer for promising biggies like space exploration sim No Man’s Sky and rollicking action adventure Uncharted 4: Thief’s End.
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On Wii U, we’ve seen the gorgeous platformer construction kit Super Mario Maker and the super cute Yoshi’s Woolly World – there’s also a nice version of Skylanders Super Chargers which adds Donkey Kong and Bowser to the cast.

Things are looking healthy in 2016, too – especially if you like huge sequels. New Gears of War, Mirror’s Edge, Dark Souls, Crackdown, Hitman, Doom and XCOM are all on the way, with Zelda, Star Wing and Mario Tennis heading back to Nintendo’s console.

Alternative view: We’re yet to see any incredibly innovative, vastly experimental ideas on the current consoles. These machines are still relying on the same familiar franchises and well-worn genres from the last generation. If you love sci-fi shooters and open-world action role-playing fantasies, you’re going to be fine. If you’re waiting until we get an absolutely pivotal, epoch-shattering moment of transcendental genius – erm, keep waiting.
The prices are pretty good


The PlayStation 4 is around £300 with a one terabyte hard drive. Xbox One is £280 with a 500GB drive or £320 with 1TB. The Wii U is between £180 and £200 for a basic box. There’s also a vast range of decent bundle deals which come complete with big new games – often for no extra cash. Look out, too, for the nice limited editions and exclusives around big games like Halo 5, Destiny: Taken Kings and Metal Gear Solid 5. Retailers are really looking to undercut each other this winter so check around for good deals.

“Both Xbox One and PS4 are now around 20-30% cheaper than their original launch prices on the original specification machines with new, improved models on the way,” says Debbie Bestwick, the managing director of Team17. “These include the 1TB Xbox One with a 20% faster boot up time and the new 500GB CUH-1200 series PS4 which uses 25% less power, running cooler and quieter, as well as a 1TB model too.”

Alternative view: OK, these things are still not cheap. If you just want to play games alone or on the sofa with your family and don’t care about keeping up with your friends, the PS3 and Xbox 360 still have plenty to offer – and can be picked up used for less than £100 each. You’ll get a Wii and a shed-load of games for half that.
There are intriguing new things on the way


Playstation 4 is about to enter the virtual world with its PlayStation VR headset, due next year with a large list of supporting titles. There’s no firm release date or price yet, but even if it’s £300, it’ll still be one of the cheapest ways to get in on the virtual reality craze.


Meanwhile, Microsoft’s incoming Hololens augmented-reality headset will be compatible with Xbox One – as is the Windows 10 operating system which introduces cross-platform play between computer and console. Oh, and this winter, the Microsoft’s machine is getting a huge update. The New Xbox One Experience will update the look and feel of the interface and add new features such as backwards compatibility with over 100 Xbox 360 titles.
Conclusion – or “hey, what about the PC?”
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If you have the money to spare, then yes, it’s a good time to buy a console, particularly if you enjoy playing online with friends. We have three really strong machines that have large varied software back catalogues and plenty of intriguing games on the way. Developers are starting to test the hardware, especially the PS4 and Xbox One, leading to intriguing advances in areas such as physics, visual effects and artificial intelligence (advances that mean the PS3 and Xbox 360 are gradually being left out of release plans). There’s also a thriving indie community with lots of offbeat unusual titles like Grow Home, Beyond Eyes and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, which don’t fit into the well-worn genres.

“Both the Wii U and the PlayStation 4 now have a great selection of games to choose from, and the Xbox One has a great Christmas line-up ahead,” says Keza MacDonald, editor of Kotaku UK. “Shops are starting to get aggressive about pricing, too, so you’ll inevitably get a better deal – and be able to pick up more games for less money – than the early adopters.”

If you just can’t afford to spend £300 on a games machine though, there are plenty of beautiful, compelling experiences on Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360 that will keep you and your family entertained for a good while.

And of course, the consoles don’t exist in a gaming vacuum ...

Alternative view: “It’s worth considering making the jump to PC gaming,” says Oli Welsh, editor of Eurogamer. “It’s not much more expensive to get a console-equivalent machine, the games are cheaper, and you get all the big cross-platform releases and much, much more besides. The online service Steam –- which has a special mode for use on TVs and with console controllers - has a bigger, better library of games than either Xbox or PlayStation will ever have. It’s the most exciting platform in games right now.”

What the Rugby World Cup can teach game designers

This weekend, thousands of households are likely to become good natured war zones as families and friends argue over whether to watch the Premier League football or the Rugby World cup. 300 years ago, lucky sports fans didn’t have to worry – because there was no such thing as football, or rugby, or American football for that matter – they all existed together as one sport: hugball.

Perhaps the purest of all ball games, legend has it that hugball (also known as Shrovetide Football, Mob Football, or la soule in parts of France) used to be played with the head of an executed criminal – though Fifa regulations now generally discourage this. But, no matter the name or the nature of the ball being used, the rules (or lack thereof) were always pretty much the same: two vast teams would rampage through a town or field trying to get an object into the opposing side’s territory.

By many accounts, hugball was once played rather widely across Europe, and similar sports were popular worldwide. Why did it fall out of fashion? There’s a simple answer: it’s boring to watch. There’s no final whistle, you can’t tell what’s going on, and it’s pretty dangerous (though arguably that’s also the best part). Since the participants can do anything, with essentially no limits, it’s uninteresting. It’s too close to real life.

What a good game does is introduce friction – a limitation that holds you back, and consequently makes the game more challenging to play and fun to watch. Video games offer hundreds of possible frictions. In Super Mario titles the strongest friction is probably Mario’s jump, which is just long and high enough to reach certain platforms, but limited enough to ensure that players often have to be pixel perfect in their timing when navigating the platforms. This friction is so integral to the series that Mario’s first game, Donkey Kong, was originally titled Jumpman. If that jumping mechanic was easier or bigger, the game wouldn’t work. The meticulously designed limitation is what makes it so compulsive.

By adding friction to an otherwise limitless activity, you get a game – and with hugball, each different friction added over the years created a different sport. You can’t use your hands: football. You have to stop play between each tackle: American football. You can only pass the ball backwards, but you can kick forwards: rugby.

In football, not being able to touch the ball with your hands opens the game up and spreads the players around the field, creating a fluid and constantly shifting playing area that resists rigid strategy and defies statistical models. In American football, the friction leads to a rather stilted game where tactics have to be carefully pre-planned.

Rugby, though, is one of the most fascinating sports from a game design standpoint. The core friction of being forced to pass backwards when you need to go forwards creates a fundamental tension that is released when someone makes a great run, a strong hit – or a perfectly weighted kick forward resulting in a moment of chaos followed by relief or jubilation.


Passing backwards forces teams to line up across the field, each player inches behind the other in a gorgeous collapsing human wave, receiving the ball and laying it off in what the All Blacks consider to be a single motion: the catchpass(not dissimilar to what the Barcelona FC academy refers to as ‘a mig toc’ – half a touch). The regularity of this motion, punctuated by moments of unforeseen brilliance or all-too-predictable failure, is what makes the sport so captivating.

Rugby has a long history of tweaking the rules to adjust the game in response to different issues. Take the try, for instance. Coming from the phrase “try at a goal”, the original rules stated that touching the ball down between the posts did not give you any points, but rather gave you the opportunity to try for a goal by kicking the ball between the uprights. After 120 years of twists and turns the rugby world more or less settled on five points per try only in 1992.

Another example of the development of rugby is the scrum, which has been part of the sport since its beginnings at the Rugby School in the 19th century. Arguably the most visually striking aspect of the game, it is also the least interesting. Awarded most often when a ball is passed forward, the scrum involves eight players from each side locking heads and pushing against each other to try and gain a position of advantage over the ball. It’s even more dangerous than it sounds. If the scrum collapses, as it does very often, it must be restarted (or if a team is deemed to have collapsed it on purpose, a penalty is awarded).

Somewhere around half of all scrums fail for one reason or another. It’s the main part of the game where players get injured, and the constant resetting can take up to 20% of the game time. It’s incredibly boring to watch, and only rarely offers any strategic advantage to either team. However, the rugby world seems to be catching on to this – the rules for the scrum continue to be tweaked, resulting in some slow improvement, but more importantly there are signs that many teams are avoiding the scrum entirely whenever possible. In many ways this is game design in action: if a certain way of playing does not provide any advantage, it will eventually die out. Perhaps the scrum will one day become a vestigial part of the game, like the uncaught third strike.

Many other sports are very reluctant to significantly tweak rules, resulting in stagnation and angry debate – look at the confusion in football about whether a player can commit a foul even if he or she gets to the ball first. The world of rugby, however, seems to welcome rule changes with open arms: there have also been alterations to the line-outs, the yellow and red card sanctions, and many other elements. Perhaps this is as a result of there already being a number of variations on rugby – most famously Sevens and Rugby League – so it is easier to imagine how the game could be changed or improved. Or perhaps it is as a result of being a very physical and potentially dangerous game, so a watchful eye must be kept on the rules to make sure injuries are kept to a minimum.

In any case, it seems to be working. This year’s Rugby World Cup is breaking viewing figure records worldwide, and it offers a particularly interesting approach to tweaking the game off the field. Since 2003 the group stages have had a relatively unusual points system – wins are worth four points, draws are worth two, and there are two ways of getting bonus points: by scoring four tries in a game and by losing by fewer than eight points. Experimenting with points systems like this can lead to some bizarre and disastrous results – see what happened, for example, when the organisers of football’s Caribbean cup tweaked the rules in the 1994 qualifiers.

But the Rugby World Cup rules are working, and they lead to a tantalising possibility - that a team can lose a game and still get two points. In the recent South Africa v Japan upset, the Springboks managed this very feat despite their stunning loss, while Japan only received the minimum victory tally of four. It’s not outlandish to suggest that the points system helped produce such a thrilling result because it encourages teams to score tries, rather than grind out dull victories based entirely on penalties. It also gives teams something to play for all the way through a match even when they are losing, and it goes some way towards evening out some of the huge mismatches in quality between the top tier of teams and everyone else – one of the more intractable problems with international rugby union (the shock Japan result notwithstanding).

Developing a points system like this is exactly the kind of thinking that goes into video game design, and in many ways the game world would do well to pay attention to rugby. The major sports that we now watch on TV or take part in down the park have had hundreds of years of iterative development and play testing – and game designers are engaged in a similar process. Just as hugball developed into rugby and football, tic-tac-toe has developed into Agricola and Puerto Rico, the ancient randomised maze game Rogue has morphed into Don’t Starve, and Donkey Kong, after many twists and turns, became Canabalt, Fez and Tomb Raider.