Today’s rumblings are inspired by a post made by Gav Thorpe on his blog about criticism. He’s specifically talking about criticism of his work as a writer and how he reacts to that but a lot of what he says is applicable to other fields and especially the field of community management.

In case you don’t know, Gav is a former Games Workshop games developer who is now a freelance author. While he was at GW he wrote Codex: Chaos Space Marines (an army supplement for one of the popular Warhammer 40,000 factions) which launched to mixed reactions amongst the notoriously passionate fans of Warhammer 40k. Nowadays he earns a crust by writing fiction for GW’s publishing imprint Black Library as well as for more mainstream publishers. His post on criticism is clearly a result of the huge amount of feedback readers of his blog decided to give him about the Chaos Space Marines.

So, what does this all have to do with computer games?

Well, firstly criticism is criticism. The kind of things that are useful for an author to hear about his work are also useful to a games designer. Collecting and analysing criticism is also a large part of the job of a community manager (a hat I wore for several years). Generally people are pretty bad at providing criticism for a variety of reasons, many people are also bad at receiving it for entirely different reasons. We’ll address those people later.

Giving criticism is something that a lot of people are not comfortable with. While they may have deeply held opinions, it can be hard to express those opinions without sounding hostile or rude, thus many people prefer to stay silent and keep what would otherwise be useful feedback to themselves. Not all opinions are negative of course, but the ones you hear almost always will be. This is because things that meet your expectations tend not to incite you to write about them. If things are simply ‘ok’ then we smile and move on, things have to be significantly outside of our expectation zone before we are moved to comment on them. This is usually manifested in gaming circles as a rule where, for every person posting in a 200 page threadnaught on your game forums, there are several hundred people playing the game quite happily oblivious to this apparently all consuming issue.

Another problem with criticism is that people are always right when they say what they do or don’t like but are usually almost always wrong when they try to describe it. This is because it’s easy to get hung up on symptoms without thinking through the issues to identify the actual problem causing them. A large part of being a successful community manager is listening to problems that are described by the players and trying to determine what it is that they are actually complaining about rather than what it is that they are saying.

Taking feedback can be difficult for other reasons. Gav mentions confirmation bias and that’s certainly a problem that needs to be confronted. It’s not always so much of a problem in games where a team is responsible rather than an individual but it certainly still exists. A bigger problem is enabling useful feedback at all. Most games companies run forums for fans to discuss the product, most have a community team to filter the useful nuggets from the vast seas of noise and most have some kind of feedback form or CS ticketing system for more direct contact. All of that by itself doesn’t make people want to tell you the things you need them to be saying though. Companies should be training their customers to give feedback effectively, the tools to do so should be seamless and it should be regularly solicited. If spamming customers sounds bad then incentivise it instead, reward those who tell you what they think and encourage quality over quantity. Ask people to think about your product and give you those thoughts, help them to frame them and give them the tools to do so easily.

In all the projects I’ve worked on, getting quality commentary has always been the hardest part of my job. I wish people would express their opinions more.

WAR Free Trial

Very soon, you will be able to use our unlimited trial offer. Now you can enjoy the trial experience and New User Journey for as long as you like!

On the VN Boards Andy Belford, a Mythic CM confirmed that the newsletter was correct but declined to clarify what the limits of the ‘unlimited trial’ would be. Popular speculation is that the unlimited trial will restricted to tier 1 and capital cities as that is the current trial experience.

WAR is certainly hurting for subs and this may bring a few new people in but conversely a lot of current subscribers may decide to just roll the trial and replay the first few scenarios over and over. This is a popular playstyle in both DAoC and WAR and I’m certain that the number of people who’d downgrade from a paid account to the trial is a non-trivial number.

So, Aion then. A game that has the luxury of being a newly released game without many of the normal problems that plague newly launched software. No inexplicable crash bugs, no memory leak that the dev team swear they fixed in beta, no unforeseen balance changes in the live patch and so on.  Let’s start at the beginning.

Character creation is comprehensive in the extreme. Although there are only two races, the diversity of characters makes it seem a lot more varied than that. You can play about with an almost ridiculous number of sliders, presets and tone palettes. Customisation is a theme throughout the game that is taken very seriously. Most gear can be customised in a variety of ways. Not only do you have the usual dye options that other games allow but you also have a morph option that allows you to use the stats from one item and the art from a different one. Which is a superb idea. You can also tweak stats to a limited extent through socketing manastones into armour and weapons. Control over the appearance of a character is an important part of any RPG and NCSoft have clearly taken the decision to give the player as many tools as possible to handle that. Aion is a very visual game and the character is at the literal and figurative centre of that experience.

If the visuals are cutting edge then the gameplay is definitely not. There is some nice use of cut-scenes to introduce character story and to communicate background. A few quests also use cut-scenes for dramatic effect which is nice. However almost all of the quests you’ll get are very simple ‘kill ten [things] and bring me their [body part]‘ or simple fedex quests. Questing is thus very repetitive indeed. Combat is identical to every other DIKU variant out there, mash buttons until one of you runs out of hit points. Aggro ranges are typically very small and monsters give up chasing after a relatively short time so kiting is hard. Abilities come slowly as is generally the case and you’ll find that it will be a while before your combo chains are viable or you get access to pretty vital tools like roots, stuns etc.

Abilities are learned from books as you go up levels, you don’t automatically gain new skills when you level up. Your existing skills do get better but you need to purchase a skill book for any new skills you might be able to learn. This is good in a way because it means you can purchase the skill books in advance and carry them with you, thus saving you a trip back to town and interrupting whatever you might be doing at the time, on the other hand of course it means that if you’re broke, you can’t gain new skills until you’ve earnt some more cash.

Cash is an area that seems to suffer from some schizophrenic design. A player will earn a lot of money from questing and looting, however the game monetises everything. Your inventory and vault are laughably small to begin with and expanding those costs money. Learning a craft costs money, learning skills or spells costs money, transport around the world costs money and then of course there are costs for consumables, gear upgrades and other NPC services. Crafting is a huge cash sink until the very highest levels. Gold sellers will make a fortune out of this game. There are other economic decisions that don’t seem to make sense, you can have a private store for example where you sell items to passing players. This effectively turns your character into a stationary merchant, thus interrupting your play while your store is open. There is an auction house system too but I’m not convinced that forcing players to afk while selling is a good idea.

For a game that has wings as one of its USPs, the number of places that don’t allow flight is disconcertingly large.  Gliding is a fun mini-game in it’s own right but there are too many places early on where flying is prevented.

Crafting is another AFK activity. While crafting your UI is largely disabled apart from chat functions, you simply queue up your jobs and go and make a cup of tea or something. If you enjoyed copying Amiga games back in the day and love to watch bars moving across the screen then crafting is engrossing and fulfilling, for the rest of us, not so much. All crafting is recipe based (and guess what? You need to buy recipes!) and there are usually several levels of production to go through before you can turn raw materials into actual useful items. This is an idea that DAoC had in the original crafting system and wisely scrapped after a while. Let me say that again; a terrible crafting system dropped this feature because it was a bad idea. There is no good reason why anyone should be copying anything from that system, let alone a feature that was dropped because it was too horrible even for DAoC crafting.

The game is visually stunning, uses current technology well and yet, it could have been designed back in 1999 as far as the game mechanics are concerned.

I was playing Aion over the weekend in the closed beta preview event. For what it’s worth I thought it was a very pretty game with a lot of promise (I only managed to get to level 10 and out of the newbie area so I never saw any of the higher level gameplay or any PvP). I felt that it was a very traditional MMO (in the context of a genre that’s still only a decade or so old) and that – flying aside – it didn’t seem to advance the genre at all. This seems to be a game that (graphical aspects aside) could have been designed ten years ago. I will almost certainly play it some more in the open beta and commercial release but I’m not sure how long the prettiness alone will keep me interested.

A lot of people have predicted that Aion will kill various other titles. The more excitable ones are saying it will kill WoW, others are saying that Aion’s release will be the deathblow for WAR. That got me thinking about ‘gamekillers’ and, to date I don’t think we’ve seen one. I remember working on DAoC when WoW was gearing up for release and the common wisdom held that WoW would kill our game. That didn’t happen and, if WoW can’t kill a game then I don’t think anything can. WoW didn’t even kill EQII which had the double misfortune of launching the week before WoW and of not being very good at launch. Even that one-two punch didn’t deliver a deathblow to the game and now, while EQII may not have been as huge as perhaps Sony hoped, there’s no doubt that it’s a very solid game that’s been turned around into a successful product.

Aion will certainly bleed some subscribers out of existing games and will take a chunk of the market share but I’m not going to predict any closures as a result.

Then the company got a new game, the new game was going to be even better than the old game and a lot of people got really excited. The new game was going to make everyone very rich and so the company was given a lot of money to make sure that the new game would be a big success. The company bought a shiny new office and lots of shiny new computers with shiny new employees to sit in front of them and work hard for the players. This shiny new office was across the sea from the old company office and the people in charge of the company stayed in the old office while everyone else travelled across the sea.

For a while everything was good. The new game looked very exciting and the company spent a lot of money telling people about it. Lots of people were hired to look after the new game and a lot of these people were very clever and knew a lot about how to make games a success. The people at the old office however became unhappy because they were not so important to the game’s success anymore. So they made sure that they made all the decisions themselves instead of leaving it to the clever people at the new office. They tried to make important plans which the clever people pointed out wouldn’t work but the people in charge didn’t listen. Then the plans failed just like the clever people said they would and the people in charge got angry.

‘Our plans are good!’ they said. ‘The only reason that they don’t work is because you don’t obey us. We are the clever ones not you and you should listen to what we say.’

And the clever people at the new and shiny office mostly stopped caring at that point and started looking for new jobs.

The End.

This isn’t a new thing in Germany, some years ago (after a similar incident in Emsdetten) the topic was raised but quietly dropped again after many German developers advised that they would leave Germany if this law came to pass. Now we are in an election year, the Winnenden massacre has created a lot of media frenzy over the issue of violence in culture and there are strong calls from many quarters to be seen to do something. And so now the German Congress is considering a law that would make it illegal to develop or distribute these games in Germany. There’s a good chance that nothing will come of it, but the fact that it’s even being discussed in such terms should be worrying.

To be clear, these aren’t simply media soundbites from off-the-cuff interviews with fringe politicians, these are serious policies put forward by senior state ministers.

In the interests of full disclosure I should point out that I work for a German developer working on what would be classified as a ‘killerspiel’.

The argument that’s being used is that the people who do these horrific acts often play violent games and so there is an unspoken causality made between the two events. The assumption is that playing violent video games either makes ‘normal’ people into violent killers or it makes disturbed people more likely to externalise their feelings and become violent. Additionally some of the more… excitable… elements of the press are performing he usual hand-wringing ceremony and asking ‘but what about the children?’ as if Counterstrike (which is the most often referenced game in this debate) has the power to turn rosy faced cherubs into remorseless psychopaths.

Let’s deal with the first point. People who find violence attractive are attracted to violent entertainment. This shouldn’t be news to anyone. If you like hurting people, you are likely to enjoy games or films where people get hurt a lot in graphic ways. Somehow this fairly self evident piece of analysis gets turned around by magic logical leaps to ‘violent entertainment is enjoyed by violent people therefore anyone who enjoys violent entertanment is a psychopath.’ This is clearly false but it is at the heart of the argument being used against our games.

To be clear, I think that there is truth in the claim that constant portrayals of graphic violence have a desensitising influence, but how much that is has been a topic of several studies with no clear answers as yet. In any case the base assumption that bad people won’t go on shooting sprees if they never get to play GTA or Counterstrike is clearly absurd.

Secondly the ‘why are our children being exposed to this’ argument. Short answer, ‘Because you are a terrible parent’. I look forward to the day when the generation in charge have grown up with video games their whole lives. At that point we’ll finally bury this pervasive misunderstanding about games in general. Politicians assume that computer games (because they are games after all) are targeted at children and so when they are confronted with a game that is very much unsuitable for children they naturally question why this is allowed to happen. To them it is like putting a chainsaw rape scene in a Disney movie; it’s a fundamental paradigm clash.

Games are entertainment (or art if you must), and like all entertainment choices they are tailored for different demographics. The sooner that this is absorbed the better.

So what is to be done? Well, firstly consumers (especially parents and politicians) need to become more aware of the various ratings systems and how to use them to make informed decisions. PEGI in Europe and the ESRB in the US both provide clear and unambiguous guidance on any rated title. People need to pay attention to these. Retailers need to be better at restricting sales to underage customers and in helping parents make an informed choice. Yes I appreciate that this is unlikely to happen without at least some state coercion. Finally, people who need help need to be identified and treated before they become a problem. This means better resources for parents, teachers, colleagues and friends to spot the signals and provide assistance. There have always been crazy people who did terrible things well before we had computer games or movies or heavy metal music or books or whatever. The sooner that we can help these people, the less often we’ll be having this debate.

• Eurogamer review Darkfall and give it a very unflattering review.
• Darkfall devs complain publicly about the quality of the review on their forum. Highlights of the complaint are that, according to their logs, the reviewer only spent 2 hours playing the game and most of that was in character creation.
• Eurogamer responds, standing by their reviewer and his review but offer to re-review it with a different staff member.
• Darkfall comes right back with another post in which they’re very clear that they don’t want insinuate that Eurogamer are lying but this is somewhat disingenuous as they all but state outright that they believe this to be the case.
• Finally, the whole event comes to a (temporary?) close when the Darkfall devs categorically refuse a re-review from Eurogamer. Their rationale seems to be a little patchy however, they claim they don’t want the game to be re-reviewed because the old review will stay up until the new review is complete, but of course if the game isn’t re-reviewed then the old review will stand regardless. It’s a puzzle.

The review, is of course very hostile and is apparently factually inaccurate in some areas, what’s interesting is that none of the meatier criticisms of the game are unique to this article. Tasos rails that the reviewer didn’t give it a fair shake of the stick and was clearly biased against the game, but there are no new things being said in this article that haven’t already been pointed out by other reviewers. While Tasos and the Darkfall fans are complaining about the minutiae, the takeaway from the article is hard to dispute. Is it accurate? Possibly not. Does it accurately convey Mr Zitron’s feelings about the game? Very probably.

Anyway, I don’t really want to talk about Darkfall particularly but rather the relationship between the gaming press and the industry they cover.

As the ‘Gerstmanngate’ affair brought home to many gamers, the relationship between the journalists and the industry is a complex one. Both parties have a different brand of sweet, sweet candy that the other can’t do without. The usual balance is to indulge in some quid pro quo where marketing visibility is traded for marketing dollars. It’s not always quite as blatant as that, some places do hold their integrity in the face of some not-so-subtle persuasion from publishers to be more gushing, but at the end of the day, the publishers pay the meal ticket and integrity doesn’t taste very nice with ramen.

On the other side of the aisle, the publishers obviously have a strong interest in only seeing positive press for their product, a lot of money and a lot of people’s jobs can be on the line and one punk writer who wants to parade his rebel credentials can make a big mess of a carefully stage-managed launch. Because, as we’ve seen with the Eurogamer incident, this is news. Games sites aren’t talking about Darkfall right now, they’re talking about the 2/10 review and that’s not the context any developer wants their work framed in.

If I’ve given the impression that the gaming press is a bunch of craven hacks who can mostly be relied on to fellate publishers on demand, that’s not entirely fair. There are sites like that and for the most part you can spot them quite easily. Their news pages are entirely cut and paste jobs from press releases and no game gets less than an 8/10 except for easy targets from publishers who couldn’t afford mainstream advertising anyway. The rest of the industry however has to live with the uncomfortable truth that publishers spend more money on sites that they like and you can make publishers like you by writing nice things about their games. I’m sure that you, the astute reader, can spot the potential for a certain ambiguity of purpose in that.

Even when you go beyond the crass conversion of marketing budget to review scores, the publisher still has some aces up their sleeve. The gaming press is a very competitive business, there are hundreds of sites in all languages that are all serving much the same fare. For your site to stand out you want to have special things. You need access to publisher junkets, face time with devs, freebies to give away to your readership, exclusives etc because otherwise you’re republishing other people’s press releases and writing words into the internet that no-one has much reason to pay attention to. Whether you’re a huge portal like TenTonHammer or a tiny startup, you still need to compete with the entire rest of the internet for eyeballs. Again, as an editor, you get these perks by having a good relationship with the publishers and you get that good relationship…. by making sure that no-one in the publisher’s marketing dept is going to get a call from the CEO asking why his game got slammed on your site.

It’s why gaming editors all die at 35 years old.

So what does all of this have to do with Darkfall? Just that a hostile review is a newsworthy occurrence in itself. For Ed Zitron to have written the review and for Eurogamer to have published it, represents a rare conjunction in the symbiotic world of games journalism. Cheer on reviewers like Ed Zitron if you like the idea of integrity and impartiality in your games press – even if you disagree with his views on Darkfall.

Now clearly I have a horse in this race as a games designer who blogs and so you should definitely be listening to me. It’s posited that there are 3 kinds of design blog (Scott Jennings adds a fourth in the comments):

1. Ivory tower theoreticians
2. Enthusiastic amateurs
3. Guys who know what they’re doing and show a good example

(Scott’s fourth category was ‘Guys who know what they’re doing but prefer to spew bile becasue it’s more entertaining than playing nicely”).

For what it’s worth the blogs I read regularly are all linked in the sidebar to the right and the vast majority of them are in category 3 with a few of Lum’s category 4s for the slow news days and you should read them too.

Once you’ve visited here of course.

I’ve been toying with the idea for a while and I finally decided that I’d launch a separate blog for my wargaming and miniature painting exploits. If you’re interested in that kind of thing then head on over to Stormy Teacups where you can keep up with my adventures at German and international wargaming tournaments as well as see my collection of painted miniatures grow very slowly indeed (unlike my collection of unpainted miniatures which grows at an alarming rate…).

I’ll still be updating this with all the clockwork regularity that you’ve come to expect but I figure splitting the wargames stuff off from the video games industry waffle was a good move. Comments and feedback are much appreciated on either site!

Please update all your bookmarks and RSS feeds to this new URL and make sure you comment if you have something to say. I’m a little busy to make a real post at the moment but I’m always up for suggestions if there’s something you’d really like to talk about here. Leave a comment below if you have feedback, suggestions or just generally want to say hi on the internet.