Contents
Editorial: Fire & Brimstone on Community Spirit
Chris Crawford
Letters
The Journal Reporter
Kellyn Beck
Are You A Crook?
Richard Mulligan
Why Adventure Games Suck
Ron Gilbert
Editor Chris Crawford
Subscriptions The Journal of Computer Game Design is published six times a year. To subscribe to The Journal, send a check or money order for $30 to:
The Journal of Computer Game Design
5251 Sierra Road
San Jose, CA 95132
Submissions Material for this Journal is solicited from the readership. Articles should address artistic or technical aspects of computer game design at a level suitable for professionals in the industry. Reviews of games are not published by this Journal. All articles must be submitted electronically, either on Macintosh disk , through MCI Mail (my username is CCRAWFORD), through the JCGD BBS, or via direct modem. No payments are made for articles. Authors are hereby notified that their submissions may be reprinted in Computer Gaming World.
Back Issues Back issues of the Journal are available. Volume 1 may be purchased only in its entirety; the price is $30. Individual numbers from Volume 2 cost $5 apiece.
Copyright The contents of this Journal are copyright © Chris Crawford 1988.
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Editorial: Fire & Brimstone on Community Spirit
Chris Crawford
Some Sad Truths
I shall begin this editorial by reciting some facts. Let’s start with GEnie. On October 1, we opened up the JCGD RoundTable on GEnie. It took months of preparation, but we were convinced that the results would be worth the effort. After all, Neil Harris of GEnie had generously provided free time on the RoundTable for any JCGD subscriber. Who could turn away a deal like that?
Most of you, it seems. In the six weeks since the JCGD Round Table opened up for business, only 50 subscribers have even bothered to sign on to GEnie; participation in the JCGD Round Table has been similarly flaccid. While the area of the RT attended by the general public has seen lots of activity, the private area reserved for subscribers has been all but lost in the cobwebs.
OK, maybe you don’t have modems. Let’s turn to another issue: Jack Thornton’s industry directory. Last September Jack Thornton sent out over a thousand letters to industry people, asking them to fill out the enclosed form and return it to him for a free listing in his industry directory. All the software publishers returned the form. About 150 game designers returned theirs.
Or take the salary survey I tried to put together last year. I asked everybody to send me — anonymously — their 1988 income figures. I got a total of six responses. Out of 200 subscribers.
Or consider the rate of article submissions. I publish almost everything I get, with very little editing on my part. I hit up several people each issue for article submissions. It adds up to about 30 articles submitted per year. Roughly speaking, that adds up to a total of one article submission from each Journal subscriber every ten years. Oof!
Then there’s Elaine Ditton’s model contract work. At last year’s conference, Elaine gamely volunteered to put together a model contract for the industry, a tough task. Elaine published a plea in the Journal for everybody to send her samples of their contracts for her to use as source material. So far, she’s gotten a pitiful handful of responses.
I’ll conclude this sad litany by complaining to the choir about church attendance. The Journal has certainly done well. It is undeniable that the vast majority of game designers subscribe to this publication. But I still wonder about the few who don’t, or the many who forget to resubscribe.
Conclusion: No Community Spirit
The trend here is obvious. Game designers have not yet developed much community spirit. As a group, we are still pretty much loners rather than joiners. We don’t go out much for collective action. We’re too busy following our individual paths to invest any time in joint efforts.
This is made all the more ironic by the suggestion often floated that we should form some sort of professional organization, some group that would further our interests. A year ago I printed an editorial asking whether we should form an association, and requesting any interested parties to contact me. I did not get one single call, letter, or EMail response to my editorial. I have since decided to oppose such proposals on the grounds that we have not yet formed a sufficiently cohesive community to sustain such an organization. I never had any proof for my contention, just a hunch. But the confluence of all these events strongly backs up my hunch.
So what?
Now, you may be taking an unsympathetic stance toward my whining about community spirit. Who gives a damn if Crawford stands in his Game Designers’ Empire Club Tree Fort (“No Gurls Allowed!”) and moans that nobody will come and play with him? You’re not in this business to join social clubs; you’ve got a living to make. So you ask: why should I bother?
Well, that’s a pretty crass question, but I’ve got an even crasser answer: money. Lots and lots of lovely lucre. Is that crass enough for you?
There are three reasons why community spirit can increase everybody’s net returns: business connections, technical support, and contract awareness.
First comes business connections. Face it, without business connections, you’re isolated. The only person you do business with is your publisher. Should you rely on blind trust in what your publisher tells you? With a broad network of business connections, who knows what opportunities will come your way? Perhaps somebody will refer some lucrative business to you. Perhaps you will reciprocate when you’re overloaded. It’s hard to say what business connections will bring you, but one thing is certain: without business connections, nothing will come your way.
Next comes technical support. This works both ways. When you participate in the community, you get to know other people with other areas of expertise. These people can be useful resources. Why should you waste a week solving a particular problem when you know that there’s a specialist at the other end of your modem wire who can show you how to do it for a few hours’ consulting time? Conversely, once you’ve mastered a particular area, wouldn’t it be nice to pick up some extra income showing other people how to do it?
Lastly comes contract awareness. This may sound like an odd term — you probably are already aware of the existence of contracts. But just how savvy are you? I’ve been in this business for more than a decade now, and I continue to make embarrassing discoveries. I have learned a lot about contracts, most of it the hard way. Do you really want to go down the same path? Do you know what it feels like to create a product that earns nearly a million dollars for your publisher, and $40,000 for yourself? All perfectly legal, it was; but I’ll never make that mistake again. Perhaps YOU will...
What I want from you
OK, you’re convinced. You’ve been leading a life of sin, and now you want to repent. You promise to be a good boy, to show gobs and gobs of community spirit, and to pay for Tiny Tim’s operation. What else should you do?
First, I want you to get your electronic heiney onto GEnie. It will cost you very little money and a couple of hours a week of your time. I want you to participate in the discussions there. The acid test is this: if you fail to disagree with at least one of my postings there, you are being entirely too passive. We need your ideas, opinions, and judgements. We need your participation.
Next, I want you to get your name into Jack Thornton’s industry directory. Jack held up publication of the directory to get some more listings, so do it RIGHT NOW!!! Pick up the phone and call him at (702) 735-1800. Do it!
Third, I want you to participate in the salary survey when it comes out. I promise to make it easier by providing you with some sort of fill-in-the-blanks form. Maybe I’ll even provide a postage-paid envelope if I can figure out how to do it easily. In return, I want you to raise your right hand and say, “I solemnly swear to fill out the form and return it.” Thank you.
Fourth, I want you to tell your friends to subscribe to the Journal. Don’t ask them; TELL THEM. At 30 bucks a year, you sure as hell aren’t filling the evil coffers of Crawford Enterprises, Inc.
Next, I want you to submit an article to the Journal at least once a year. That way I’ll have enough that I can afford to reject a few. Probably it’ll be yours.
And lastly, I want you to attend the Computer Game Developers’ Conference next April. Be there or be square.
Now that’s not asking too much, is it?
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Letter
Greg Costikyan
I've just read Jim Gasperini's article on "The Political Subtext of Computer Games."
Sure! Let's have creative, cooperative games! Let's have games where there's no nasty competitiveness, no ugly violence! Let's have clean, wholesome entertainment! Sort of Smurfs for the computer.
Sorry, guys. Competition is essential to any game. Hence topics that aggrandize competition work best as games. The more "life and death" a game's fantasy, the more compelling it becomes to the player -- so violent competition is preferable to other forms.
Sure, games are sublimated violence. And better that we sublimate violence than act it out. We're hunter-gatherers, folks, forced to live in a society where the violence that was once required for survival is now verboten. We need sports and economic competition and games that deal with war and violent conflict. We need to sublimate violence in a socially useful way. If we don't, we go mad.
Might one point out that Japan's popular culture is among the most violent in the world? And that Japan has one of the lowest crime rates in the world? This is not, I believe, coincidental.
I remain, your humble and obedient servant,
Greg Costikyan
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The Journal Reporter
Kellyn Beck
If you were with us last issue, you remember that the Journal’s first news column began its life without a name. This was not an attempt to be mysterious. We simply thought you might enjoy personalizing your copy of the Journal by penciling in the title of your choice. It’s our way of making the Journal more interactive.
On with the latest happenings. In the news this month, we’ll find out how the shakeup in the computer game business delivered a knockout blow to the industry’s oldest publisher and we’ll also hear what Isaac Asimov has to say about the future of interactive entertainment. What say we get busy?
Epyx Says “We’re Bankrupt”
The world’s oldest publisher of computer games still has an office and a telephone, but on October 19th, the company filed for bankruptcy. Epyx apparently ran out of money after suffering huge losses during the past few quarters in its efforts to market VCR games and develop the Lynx game machine, a 16-bit hand-held technical marvel which was later sold to Atari. The apparent demise of the software giant follows attempts to reorganize the company in recent months, efforts that included across-the-board layoffs and project cancellations as Epyx management tried to cut costs.
Game designer Jon Freeman, who founded Epyx with Jim Connelley in 1978, expressed surprise at the news. “Hearing about the reorganization at Epyx was a big surprise,” Freeman said. “Hearing rumors of it going bankrupt was not as huge a shock as it might have been otherwise.”
Freeman pointed out that the problems at Epyx are a serious blow to the software industry. “I’ve been concerned about the financial difficulties of software companies. If there are a number of companies in trouble it limits the market for those of us who develop games.”
Originally called Automated Simulations, the company changed its name to Epyx, Inc., in 1982 and went on to create a new genre of computer games with the 1984 release of “Summer Games”. “California Games II”, one of the many follow-up products in the Epyx “Games” series, was being prepared for Christmas release in addition to a number of products by third-party developers.
Short Takes
The much-heralded Commodore Amiga ad campaign is in full swing, but the designer of the Amiga isn’t impressed. Jay Miner says the television commercials, featuring celebrities like baseball manager Tommy Lasorda and politician Tip O’Neill are slickly produced, “but they won’t sell any Amigas.” Jay’s answer? Every Amiga owner should become an evangelist, leaving Amiga magazines at the doctor’s office and the local newsstand.
Hoping that Santa will fill everyone’s stockings with computer games, Electronic Arts has discounted 105 titles just in time for the holiday shopping season, pricing the Bard’s Tale I and II series at $14.95 and Wasteland at $8.88, even though the IBM version of Wasteland is only six months old. Just out from EA is the long-awaited Swords of Twilight by Freefall Associates, Jon Freeman’s 18th computer game and almost three-and-a-half years in the making.
Over at Mediagenic, Chris Garske is beefing up that company’s videogame division. Recently hired was Impossible Mission author Dennis Caswell, and rumor has it they’ll be hiring more producers, designers and programmers in the weeks ahead. Taito continues adding new members to its staff in Seattle and Origin Systems is also expanding --- its newest producer is former Sorcerer’s Apprentice Jeff Johannigman. Good luck, Johann.
Asimov on Interactivity
Listen up, we’re all going on a trip. Interactive devices are humanity’s ticket to the land of Oz. Science-fiction author Isaac Asimov delivered that message in his keynote address to the Intertainment ’89 conference, held October 30th-November 1st in New York. Speaking before an audience of interactive entertainment professionals, Asimov predicted that interactivity will revolutionize both education and entertainment in the next century, erase all distinctions between them and combine the two fields into a single discipline. In his vision of the future, shared by many members of the audience, entertainment will be education and education will be entertainment.
Asimov points out that the 20th century edition of homo sapiens has been conditioned to believe education and entertainment don’t mix. “Education is a dirty word — no one thinks of it as amusement. Why is that true,” Asimov asks, “even though the human brain is made to be educated? Because we have never had a decent system of education.”
Asimov says interactive devices will play their biggest role in education, by taking over the process of teaching. Learning will become an individual exercise, a dialogue between a student and a computer. In the process, computers and other interactive devices will come to dominate both entertainment and education.
CD-I Developments
And the future of games is CD-something-or-other. Among the products shown to those attending the Intertainment ’89 conference were several CD-based games being developed by Mediagenic, Fathom Pictures, Trans-Fiction Systems and Cinemaware, including both CD-ROM and CD-I products. Mediagenic and Trans-Fiction are both working on CD-ROM games for the Macintosh that include characters who talk to the player. Fathom Pictures is developing a video golf game and arcade-style product for the Phillips CD-I (interactive compact disk) player, which is due for release in 1991. These CD demonstrations showed clearly that the addition of full speech capability and digital audio will have a huge impact on computer games, perhaps the greatest impact since the introduction of color graphics.
Bankruptcy and the Developer
As a regular feature of this column, we’re going to present advice on topics of interest to computer game designers. This month’s insights come from the experiences of software developers who were making products for Epyx and are now scrambling to recover the rights to their games before they become frozen in bankruptcy proceedings. Among those affected were Journal editor Chris Crawford, who had turned to Epyx to publish his next game, and independent producer Brad Fregger, who is working to recover the rights to Ishido, a Shanghai-style game by Michael Feinberg and Ian Gillman that was being readied for fall release. Their experiences call attention to the need for developers to protect their rights in the event that a publisher closes its doors.
Fregger says that if a publisher goes into bankruptcy holding the rights to your product, the rights are usually frozen. The bankruptcy court takes control of the company’s assets and any clause stating that the product rights return to you becomes null and void. He cites the Worlds of Wonder bankruptcy case as an example of this. The California toy and entertainment company went into Chapter 11 proceedings almost two years ago and product rights are still tied up in court.
Bankruptcy proceedings often take years, and you can’t afford to have your game, the key to your livelihood, disappear into the maw of the U.S. legal system. But how can you avoid the bankruptcy trap? Fregger recommends these steps to protect yourself and your products:
1) Have a lawyer review your contract with this in mind, preferably before you sign it.
2) Limit the publisher’s licensing rights. Never give a publisher worldwide rights to your game on all systems. Give them the license only for the IBM and Macintosh versions, if those are the versions you’re developing for them. That way, even if the rights do get tied up in bankruptcy proceedings, you are free to license the game in Europe and Japan or develop it for other computers.
3) Be sure to negotiate a “buy back” clause. Make sure your contract allows you to purchase the rights to your game by returning the money paid to you in advances.
4) Urge elected officials to pass laws preventing product rights from being tied up in bankruptcy courts. Such a law would insure that the rights to an author’s intellectual product would not become an asset of a publisher until the product is published.
That’s it for this month. Comments and contributions are welcome; post them in GEnie on the Journal bulletin board, or send them to me at 99 N. Hayden Bay Dr., Portland, OR 97217.
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Are You A Crook?
Richard Mulligan
[Richard is the Product Manager for games for GEnie.]
Copyright 1988 by Richard D. Mulligan
The doorbell rang at 8 pm; it was a good friend. He invited his friend in and showed him the latest in a series of Fantasy role-playing games from a major game publisher; he’d bought it that day for $49.
“Wow, that looks great!” said the friend.
“No problem,” said the host. “I’ll run you off a copy to take home with you before you leave.”
A hidden group exists in the USA today; its language is bizarre and arcane, its members secretive. They are engaged in an illegal activity. They are game software pirates, and their reach extends to every corner of this country, for just about every owner of a home computer does it.
“Casual piracy” may be costing the game industry as much as $50 million or more a year in lost sales, yet there seems to be no way to stop it without totally redefining just what “software piracy” really is, or so totally copy protecting game disks that you’ll never be able to put a game on your hard drive again.
If you’ve ever made a copy of a game for a friend, you’re a casual pirate. If you’ve ever received a copy of game from a friend, you’re a casual pirate. If you’ve ever made a copy of a game, then sold it, the FBI would like to speak with you.
“Round up the usual suspects...”
The call came at the usual time, 8 pm; the SysOp left the terminal, where he was updating download files on his BBS, and picked up the receiver.
“It’s me,” the voice on the other end said. “I’ve got the latest cracked version of that RPG we talked about last week.”
“Great!” the SysOp replied. “That must be a new record for you; it’s only been out for 2 days.”
“I didn’t have to crack this one,” the other said. “It’s a Beta Test version; I bought it at a swap meet in San Francisco for ten dollars.”
The SysOp laughed. “That’s excellent! Ok, you upload the RPG, and I’ll give you access to war games library. Someone just cracked the newest Midway game and uploaded it there.”
The tools of the software pirate are few; a home computer, a copying program and a spare disk. With these, even a novice computer owner can copy today’s most expensive game programs and give a copy to a friend.
The other side of that coin is the “professional,” the knowledgeable computer user who, with the aid of some specialized programming utilities, can “crack”the copy protection on a game in days, sometimes hours. When he’s done, he can upload the unprotected disk to any compatible computer with a modem.
Suddenly, a game that might cost $50 retail is being acquired for little or no money by dozens or, sometimes, hundreds of computer owners.
It isn’t big business, in the sense that pirates are making a profit; thecasual pirate never charges his friends for a copy of a new game, and very few “pro” pirates sell the software they crack. Almost all, though, put their pseudonyms, or “handle,” on the title screen of every piece of software they de-protect. They gain stature in the closed community of “crackers;” their friends and associates gain hundreds of dollars of software at no cost.
However, even casual piracy effects the end consumer; hundreds of thousands,perhaps millions, of dollars in sales are lost to publishers each year due to piracy, casual or otherwise. Money that could have gone to producing more or better games never comes in. As well, publishers price their products by how many copies they expect to sell; if everybody who owned a copy of, for example, Chuck Yeager’s Flight Simulator, one of the most popular programs around, had bought that game off the shelf, it might cost half of what it retails for today.
When I began researching this article, I figured I’d have about one hundred comments from publishers on the evils of software piracy, and no comments from professional pirates; I’ve never been more wrong.
Many people at the major game software publishers were willing only to make a grudging comment on the current state of software piracy, IF their name wasn’t used or the name of the company they work for referred to. Mostly, they just didn’t want to talk about it, or weren’t authorized to give out information on the subject. The exceptions were Mediagenics/Activision and Garde/Games of Excellence.
On the other hand, the software pirates and the System Operators (SysOps) who run pirate computer Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), wouldn’t shut up. I had to convince one of them NOT to reveal his true name; the chance of going to jail just didn’t seem to deter him at all. Considering the laxity of software theft laws in most states, I could hardly blame him.
The real shocker was the attitude of some of my friends and associates; they all work in the computer industry, they all know piracy is wrong, and yet each and every one of them had at least one piece of commercial software that they hadn’t paid for.
Background: the hacker ethic
Piracy is a term coined in the late Seventies, defined as “illegally disseminating software or software products copyrighted by another individual or organization.” In it’s baldest definition, piracy is the theft of a game or other software, most often by an individual. This person will then give or sell the program to others, depriving the designer and publisher of the price of the program.
Casual piracy, or individual acts of copying and distributing of software, grew out the fabled hacker mentality, originally fostered at MIT in the late 1950’s and early ’60s, by a group of precocious student programmers working on old batch processing machines. These hackers would leave their tapes in a drawer for anyone to use and improve on, the object being to get the best program using the smallest number of computer command codes. Sometimes dozens of students would hack at the same program; he who developed the tightest code was a true star, held in deep respect by other students.
As these students graduated and moved out into the world and to other universities, they took this “hacker ethic” with them. It was seen as the opportunity to fulfill a grand dream; a totally open society, with completely free exchange of information via computers. This attitude caught on among home computer buffs in the mid- and late Seventies; groups like the famous Home Brew Computer club in the San Francisco Bay Area were used to a totally free exchange of ideas, discoveries and theories among themselves and other clubs, and this helped spark the computer revolution in 1978 and 1979. The two Steves, Jobs and Wozniak of Apple Computer fame, were members of the Home Brew organization.
The hacker ethic didn’t start eroding until software and hardware designers realized how much money there was to be made in the home computer industry; suddenly, the words “public domain” became verboten, and the pioneers rushed to get copyrights and patents registered.
What was left after this shakeout was a small group of people who still clung to the hacker ethic of free information, freely distributed. Their passion has seen its own explosion, in the form of privately owned and operated computer BBSs.
There are now more free BBSs in the United States than newspapers, television stations and radio stations combined; some estimates place the number of BBSs as high as 40,000. Most likely, there are around 11,000 BBSs operating at any one time (they have a tendency to come and go, as SysOps discover that running a BBS takes more time than they are willing to spend). Many BBSs publish a list of BBS contact numbers, such as the PAMS List, which contains over 2,000 up-to-date BBS telephone numbers.
Background: copy protection
Copy protection has many forms, but comes in two main flavors: Disk Protection and Manual Keyword.
Until just recently, almost all computer games were copy protected with a disk-based system; the most common is called “checksum.” This is a routine embedded in the game that causes the computer to check various figures, add them up, and then continue with the game, if all is well. By leaving at least one track on a floppy disk unused, the routine knows what the figures should add up to at all times. Copying a disk, however, generally causes all tracks to be used, so a copied “check-sum” protected game would always come up with the wrong sum, and stop the game.
The problem with this form of copy protection is that it’s easy to circumvent. One commercial disk copy program, Copy II Plus, even provides parameter files for most games and other software packages, although they post notices through the program that these are for backup purposes only.
Using Copy II Plus, a novice computer user can guide himself, by using the manual, in copying dozens of commercial software products. A game that may have taken 8 months to program, test, debug and get on the shelves takes about 4 minutes to copy on a home computer.
Manual Keyword copy protection is a system that, at certain points in the game, demands that the player look up a certain word in the game manual and enter it on the keyboard. If he can’t, the game stops. This type of copy protection is much preferred by consumers, as it allows a game to be stored on a hard disk, where its more easily and quickly accessed. By creating very large manuals, sometimes 200 pages, the publisher can make it expensive to copy the whole manual and so deters the casual gamer from giving a copy to a friend.
The whole point behind copy protection, designers and publishers say, is to protect a large investment, in time and talent by the designers, and in money by the publishers. Ralph Bosson, of Garde Games and designer of such hits as Blue Powder, Gray Smoke and High Seas, makes the point that good copy protection does what it’s supposed to do — keep honest people honest.
“We put out High Seas without protection,” Bosson told me, “and the sales just dropped out.” While there are other factors--some games are just more popular than others — the clear inference is that copy protection helps prevent piracy.
Piracy: motivations
“I first started cracking programs in 1980 because a disk died,” says “Captain Crackers.” “I’d bought this $250 check writing program, ’cause my wife and I thought we needed one. The disk was heavily protected, so I had to use the original. Eventually, the disk went bad... and there I was, stuck. I had no choice but to send the disk back to the manufacturer for a new disk. They charged me $20 for the disk and took two weeks to ship it.”
Over the telephone, I heard a snort of utter disgust. “In the meantime, all our bills were on the computer, and we were two week late paying them. THAT made me mad, and that’s went I started looking into how to duplicate disks.”
Captain Crackers (he no longer cracks software, but prefers to remain unnamed) makes a valid point on the genesis of software piracy; software publishers helped start the trend of piracy and software cracking by charging exorbitant prices and not providing backup disks to their protected programs.
“The companies walked into it face first,” he told me, “by trying to gouge the user. They not only didn’t have the best interests of their customers at heart, they were charging incredible prices for disks that the user couldn’t back up. Who’s going to pay $300 for VisiCalc if they can get it for free?” He noted that he originally bought Visi-Calc for $250, then it saw it on store shelves for $20 two years later. “You think I didn’t feel like I was ripped off?” he asked.
“If the companies had first approached the market with an attitude of ’The buyer is honest, let’s trust the buyer and provide a good service for him,’ they would have made thousands of converts and the piracy issue today would be moot,” Crackers continued. “As it was, they came at the consumer with a ’Let’s squeeze every last penny we can from each buyer, as fast as we can and when we can,’ and that killed them.”
The Captain points to the phenomenon of “shareware” to illustrate his point. “There are some people who are making a living on shareware alone,” he notes. “People may not send the full asking price, but many send something, even a few dollars. It shows that it can work.”
It seems certain that both the consumer and the publisher, at least initially, were at fault for the explosion of casual piracy. While Crackers in no way endorses piracy, it’s easy to see how the attitude can be acquired. These days, passing a copy of a new disk to a friend or relative has become so commonplace, no one even thinks of it as stealing anymore.
The casual pirate: unthinking theft
“One of the problems is the term ’piracy,’ Ralph Bosson, game designer, told me. ”It glorifies the act of stealing.“
Its true; the word piracy brings up exciting visions of Bluebeard and high-masted frigates, scanning up and down the Spanish Main for merchantmen loaded with loot. It is a truly folklorish picture; most people never stop to realize that pirates stole what they got.
”People who wouldn’t take a candy bar out of a drug store think nothing of it,“ Bosson said, referring to the casual pirate. ”People have to be reeducated; kids see their teachers and friends do it, their parents don’t say anything about it... they grow up thinking its ok. Not right, just ok. We need to redefine the act of “piracy,” and put the guilt back into it.“
Tony Van, in Technical Support for Mediagenics, agrees. ”Personally,” he says, “I feel most people just don’t realize that its wrong, and it hurts the market.” Bosson says it most hurts the consumer. “If consumers bought the games they normally get from a friend, we’d (software publishers) have more money to put into research and development and, in turn, produce better quality games.” He sighed, “Can you imagine the great games that could be out there now? The Software Publisher’s Association, an industry organization that collects data and also prosecutes software pirates, estimates conservatively that for every piece of software sold, another is pirated. That’s a one to one ratio; Ken Williams, founder of Sierra Online, theorizes a 10 to 1 ratio in Stephen Levy’s book, Hackers. In an industry that saw over $300 million in sales last year, the lost money becomes significant.
Some say the estimates on the amount of piracy are overblown. “I tend to believe the industry highly overrates the amount of piracy that goes on,” says Captain Crackers. “Frankly, they’re just over-reacting.” Others, like Bosson and Van, feel that a one-to-one ratio is probably conservative.
What these people have to say goes to the core of casual piracy; making a copy of a program and giving it to someone is, basically, a wrong act and yet, who is going to deny a relative or close friend a copy of a game, especially if they live in the same house or town?
Background: the professional pirate
He was working late; his boss at the game software publisher thought it wonderful of him, but he had other motives. Being a temporary employee had its good points, but pay wasn’t one of them.
By 7 pm, everyone else was gone from the office, hitting the Interstate for San Francisco, San Jose or south to the depths of Silicon Valley; now was his time.
Stepping into the test lab, he used his key to open the cabinet that stored beta test disks of the latest games in production at the company. These games were nearly finished, and scheduled to go to Duplication within the week. Removing two disks, he stepped to a IBM compatible clone, switched it on and booted a copy program.
Once the two games were copied, he put the room back in its original condition and left, the disks in hand. He knew he could sell them to the right people for at least $200 a piece; he would never chance selling single copies to gamers; let the SysOps take that risk.
Their numbers are few, and they trust almost no one, and especially not right off the bat. They cultivate their “professional” relationships very carefully; court the wrong man, say an undercover cop, or a private investigator for a publisher, and it could mean time in jail. They either operate or frequent the “pirate boards,” computer BBSs that specialize in providing “crunched” commercial software; this is the place they either sell or acquire illegal copies of commercial games.
These people are the “pros” in the piracy industry; not the home “cracker” who seeks to impress his friends, but the person who illegally obtains a “cracked” copy of a commercial product and sells it, either singly to consumers, or a master copy to another “pro.” They represent fewer than one percent of pirates, but they may deal as many as 10% of all pirated products.
“I get most games before they are released in the US,” one pirate, “Ajax,” told me (Ajax is not his regular handle; he agreed to speak with me only in strictest anonymity. Even then, he had a voice distorter connected to the phone. I felt like I was part of a grade B spy thriller.). Sometimes he gets them from Europe or Asia, where games are often released for sale first; sometimes, he says, he buys unprotected copies from people he believes work for publishers, or are in contact with employees of publishers. “Where else am I going to get a master copy of The Last Ninja?” he asked. “A guy I know contacts me on a local board and offers it to me for $500; of course I’m going to buy it.”
It is infrequent for a “pro” to sell to a duplicator who has contacts with a distributor, Ajax told me. “When you read about illegal copies of games being pulled off the shelf, that’s the exception, not the rule,” he said, noting that most pros sell only single copies for $10 or $15 at local swap meets and flea markets. “I can make five or six hundred dollars on a weekend, and it’s virtually impossible to get caught.”
Most of his cracked software, over 90% of it, Ajax downloads from pirate bulliten boards from around the country. Operated independently by otherwise honest SysOps, these BBSs are generally open to the calling public, except for the valuable libraries where the cracked games are archived. SysOps and their close friends use such “hidden” libraries to pass cracked programs among themselves, not intending for them to be made available to the general users.
Taking as long as three months to cultivate a good relationship with the pirate SysOp, gaining his trust by uploading one or two choice games, Ajax is eventually granted access to “hidden” libraries where there can be as many as 100 cracked commercial games stored. These he downloads, duplicates at home, and sells at the above-mentioned flea markets and swap meets.
The most distressing thought about pros, especially for designers, is the constant rumors in the industry that beta test versions of games, versions that aren’t the final game, but close, are occasionally stolen right off a publisher’s property and sold to the highest bidder or uploaded to pirate boards.
Recently, a well-known author complained to a professional designer’s association that he logged onto a local BBS and found an early test version of his latest game, the final version of which had just been released. Since he only shipped that copy to the publisher, and it was not distributed to testers, it could only have been obtained from the publisher.
The designer did not want his name published, and refused to divulge the name of the publisher, saying only that it was “one of the big three publishers in the US.”
These kind of unattributed and unconfirmed reports pop up all the time in the industry; like heroic myth, there’s probably a little bit of truth to them, and a lot of exaggeration. The incident reported above is definitely the exception, not the rule, or publishing houses would be out of business in no time. Even the publishers will admit that it sometimes happens to them... as long as you don’t publish their names or their company’s.
It is impossible to say just how many copies of cracked games are downloaded from these pirate boards, or sold illegally at flea markets; the point is that these few people deal in bulk, as many as one hundred copies a day on a good weekend. And that’s more money out of the publisher’s coffers.
What motivates the casual pirate?
If you ask a group of 100 game buyers what they really want, 99 of them will tell you the same thing, “I want to be able to put the damn game on my hard drive and have a backup copy!”
From the early days, when cracking a program was the only way to get a quick backup disk to an expensive program, to the present, when casual piracy has become an accepted action among honest people, the same ideal has held true; “I paid for it, I’ll make a backup if I want to!” Honest people really do seem to want to be honest; most will accept the concept of copy protection, as long as it does not interfere with copying the product to a hard disk.
Some publishers, like Mindscape and Strategic Simulations, are heeding this clarion call from the users and producing games with strictly manual keyword protection. This allows the consumer to make a trouble-free backup copy but, unless a gamer has unlimited access to a Xerox machine, prevents the free distribution of those copies. Pure disk-based copy protection, of the sort that prevents a gamer from copying a game to a hard drive, seems to be on the way out.
The future of game piracy
It seems unlikely that publishers and law enforcement agencies will be able to significantly dent casual piracy in the near future. To date, no software publisher has made a point of prosecuting those accused of casual piracy, mostly due to cost. “The only time it now pays to sue,” notes Ralph Bosson, “is if the piracy is on a large scale and the pirate is taking payment.” If large publishers did sue the casual pirate more often, Bosson feels, we might see a change in the frequency of such theft. It seems a logical argument.
Part of the problem may be in the legal definitions; passing a copy of a game to a friend, but not accepting money for it, does not constitute theft on the copier’s part, but receiving stolen goods on the other end. And that is far harder to prove in court. It’s also costlier to prosecute.
The SPA will take from between 10 and 40 cases of software piracy to court in a year, and that does not even begin to address the problem. We keep coming back to Bosson’s statement on reeducation, and making people realize that casual piracy may be something everybody does, but that doesn’t make it right or moral.
The bottom line
The bottom line is: every copy of a game you hand out to a friend or relative is helping to drive prices of ALL games up. While software publishers don’t directly add in the estimated cost of piracy to a new game, they DO estimate how many copies they expect to sell and price accordingly. It’s simple mathematics; the more games you can sell, the less you have to charge. One representative of a publisher, off the record, estimated to me that piracy, indirectly, may add $10 to the price of a new game.
Casual piracy will never be eradicated, and some form of copy protection for games will always be with us; it might be interesting for you to remember the next time you give a friend a free copy of a new game, that you just drove the price of the next new game up a penny or so.
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Why Adventure Games Suck
Ron Gilbert
[Ron Gilbert has been working at Lucasfilm for the past 4 years. He was the designer and programmer of Maniac Mansion and co-designer of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: the graphics adventure. Ron is also the designer of SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion), Lucasfilm's story game system used in Maniac, Zak, Indy and the soon to be released LOOM.]
© 1989, Ron Gilbert
Of all the different types of games, the ones I most enjoy playing are adventure/story games. It is no surprise that this is also the genre for which I design. I enjoy games in which the pace is slow and the reward is for thinking and figuring, rather than quick reflexes. The element that brings adventure games to life for me is the stories around which they are woven. When done right, it is a form of storytelling that can be engrossing in a way that only interaction can bring. The key here is “done right”, which it seldom is.
One of my pet peeves is the recent trend to call story games “Interactive Movies.” They are interactive, but they are not movies. The fact that people want to call them movies just points out how lost we are. What we need to do is to establish a genre for our works that we can call our own. Movies came from stage plays, but the references are long lost and movies have come into their own. The same thing needs to happen to story games.
The desire to call them Interactive Movies comes from a couple of places. The first is Marketing. It is the goal of narrow-minded marketing to place everything into a category so it will be recognizable. These people feel that the closest things to story games are movies. The other source for the name Interactive Movie is what I call “Hollywood Envy.” A great number of people in this business secretly (and not so secretly) wish they were making movies, not writing video games. Knock it off! If you really want to make movies, then go to film school and leave the game designing to people who want to make games.
Story games are not movies, but the the two forms do share a great deal. It is not fair to completely ignore movies. We can learn a lot from them about telling stories in a visual medium. However, it is important to realize that there are many more differences than similarities. We have to choose what to borrow and what to discover for ourselves.
The single biggest difference is interaction. You can’t interact with a movie. You just sit in the theater and watch it. In a story game, the player is given the freedom to explore the story. But the player doesn’t always do what the designer intended, and this causes problems. It is hard to create a cohesive plot when you have no idea what part of the story the player will trip over next. This problem calls for a special kind of storytelling, and we have just begun to scratch the surface of this art form.
There is a state of mind called “suspension of disbelief.” When you are watching a movie, or reading a good book, your mind falls into this state. It occurs when you are pulled so completely into the story that you no longer realize you are in a movie theater or sitting at your couch, reading. When the story starts to drag, or the plots begins to fall apart, the suspension of disbelief is lost. You soon start looking around the theater, noticing the people in front of you or the green exit sign. One way I judge a movie is by the number of times I realized I was in a theater.
The same is true of story games (as well as almost all other kinds of games). As the story builds, we are pulled into the game and leave the real world behind. As designers, our job is to keep people in this state for as long as possible. Every time the player has to restore a saved game, or pound his head on the desk in frustration, the suspension of disbelief is gone. At this time he is most likely to shut off the computer and go watch TV, at which point we all have lost.
I have created a set of rules of thumb that will minimize the loss of suspension of disbelief. As with any set of rules, there are always exceptions. In my designs, I hope that if these rules cannot be followed, it is for artistic reasons and not because I am too lazy to do it right. In Maniac Mansion, in one place or another, I violated all but one of these rules. Some of them were violated by design, others by sloppiness. If I could redesign Maniac Mansion, all the violations would be removed and I’d have a much better game.
Some people say that following these rules makes the games too easy to play. I disagree. What makes most games tough to play is that the puzzles are arbitrary and unconnected. Most are solved by chance or repetitive sessions of typing “light candle with match,” “light paper with match,” “light rug with match,” until something happens. This is not tough game play, this is masturbation. I played one game that required the player to drop a bubble gum wrapper in a room in order to get a trap door to open (object names have been changed to protect the guilty). What is the reasoning? There is none. It’s an advanced puzzle, I was told.
Here, then, are Gilbert’s Rules of Thumb:
End objective needs to be clear
It’s OK if the objective changes in mid-game, but at the beginning the player should have a clear vision as to what he or she is trying to accomplish. Nothing is more frustrating than wandering around wondering what you should be doing and if what you have been doing is going to get you anywhere. Situations where not knowing what’s going on can be fun and an integral part of the game, but this is rare and difficult to pull off.
Sub-goals need to be obvious
Most good adventure games are broken up into many sub-goals. Letting the player know at least the first sub-goal is essential in hooking them. If the main goal is to rescue the prince, and the player is trapped on an island at the beginning of the game, have another character in the story tell them the first step: get off the island. This is just good storytelling. Ben Kenobi pretty much laid out Luke's whole journey in the first twenty minutes of Star Wars. This provided a way for the audience to follow the progress of the main character. For someone not used to the repetitive head-banging of adventure games, this simple clue can mean the difference between finishing the game and giving up after the first hour. It’s very easy when designing to become blind to what the player doesn’t know about your story.
Live and learn
As a rule, adventure games should be able to be played from beginning to end without “dying” or saving the game if the player is very careful and very observant. It is bad design to put puzzles and situations into a game that require a player to die in order to learn what not to do next time. This is not to say that all death situations should be designed out. Danger is inherent in drama, but danger should be survivable if the player is clever.
As an exercise, take one complete path through a story game and then tell it to someone else, as if it were a standard story. If you find places where the main character could not have known a piece of information that was used (the character who learned it died in a previous game), then there is a hole in the plot.
Backwards Puzzles
The backwards puzzle is probably the one thing that bugs me more than anything else about adventure games. I have created my share of them; and as with most design flaws, it’s easier to leave them in than to redesign them. The backwards puzzle occurs when the solution is found before the problem. Ideally, the crevice should be found before the rope that allows the player to descend. What this does in the player’s mind is set up a challenge. He knows he need to get down the crevice, but there is no route. Now the player has a task in mind as he continues to search. When a rope is spotted, a light goes on in his head and the puzzle falls into place. For a player, when the design works, there is nothing like that experience.
I forgot to pick it up
This is really part of the backwards puzzle rule, but in the worst way. Never require a player to pick up an item that is used later in the game if she can’t go back and get it when it is needed. It is very frustrating to learn that a seemingly insignificant object is needed, and the only way to get it is to start over or go back to a saved game. From the player’s point of view, there was no reason for picking it up in the first place. Some designers have actually defended this practice by saying that, “adventure games players know to pick up everything.” This is a cop-out. If the jar of water needs to be used on the spaceship and it can only be found on the planet, create a use for it on the planet that guarantees it will be picked up. If the time between the two uses is long enough, you can be almost guaranteed that the player forgot she even had the object.
The other way around this problem is to give the player hints about what she might need to pick up. If the aliens on the planet suggest that the player find water before returning to the ship, and the player ignores this advice, then failure is her own fault.
Puzzles should advance the story
There is nothing more frustrating than solving pointless puzzle after pointless puzzle. Each puzzle solved should bring the player closer to understanding the story and game. It should be somewhat clear how solving this puzzle brings the player closer to the immediate goal. What a waste of time and energy for the designer and player if all the puzzle does is slow the progress of the game.
Real time is bad drama
One of the most important keys to drama is timing. Anyone who has designed a story game knows that the player rarely does anything at the right time or in the right order. If we let the game run on a clock that is independent from the player’s actions, we are going to be guaranteed that few things will happen with dramatic timing. When Indiana Jones rolled under the closing stone door and grabbed his hat just in time, it sent a chill and a cheer through everyone in the audience. If that scene had been done in a standard adventure game, the player would have been killed the first four times he tried to make it under the door. The next six times the player would have been too late to grab the hat. Is this good drama? Not likely. The key is to use Hollywood time, not real time. Give the player some slack when doing time-based puzzles. Try to watch for intent. If the player is working towards the solution and almost ready to complete it, wait. Wait until the hat is grabbed, then slam the door down. The player thinks he “just made it” and consequently a much greater number of players get the rush and excitement. When designing time puzzles I like to divide the time into three categories. 10% of the players will do the puzzle so fast and efficiently that they will finish with time to spare. Another 10% will take too much time and fail, which leaves 80% of the people to brush through in the nick of time.
Incremental reward
The player needs to know that she is achieving. The fastest way to turn a player off is to let the game drag on with no advancement. This is especially true for people who are playing adventure games for the first time. In graphics adventures the reward often comes in the form of seeing new areas of the game. New graphics and characters are often all that is needed to keep people playing. Of course, if we are trying to tell a story, then revealing new plot elements and twists can be of equal or greater value.
Arbitrary puzzles
Puzzles and their solutions need to make sense. They don’t have to be obvious, just make sense. The best reaction after solving a tough puzzle should be, “Of course, why didn’t I think of that sooner!” The worst, and most often heard after being told the solution is, “I never would have gotten that!” If the solution can only be reached by trial and error or plain luck, it’s a bad puzzle.
Reward Intent
The object of these games is to have fun. Figure out what the player is trying to do. If it is what the game wants, then help the player along and let it happen. The most common place this fails is in playing a meta-game called “second guess the parser.” If there is an object on the screen that looks like a box, but the parser is waiting for it to be called a mailbox, the player is going to spend a lot of time trying to get the game to do a task that should be transparent. In parser-driven games, the key is to have lots of synonyms for objects. If the game is a graphics adventure, check proximity of the player’s character. If the player is standing right next to something, chances are they are trying to manipulate it. If you give the player the benefit of the doubt, the game will be right more than wrong. On one occasion, I don’t know how much time I spent trying to tie a string on the end of a stick. I finally gave up, not knowing if I was wording the sentence wrong or if it was not part of the design. As it turned out, I was wording it wrong.
Unconnected events
In order to pace events, some games lock out sections until certain events have happened. There is nothing wrong with this, it is almost a necessity. The problem comes when the event that opens the new section of the world is unconnected. If the designer wants to make sure that six objects have been picked up before opening a secret door, make sure that there is a reason why those six objects would effect the door. If a player has only picked up five of the objects and is waiting for the door to open (or worse yet, trying to find a way to open the door), the act of getting the flashlight is not going to make any sense in relation to the door opening.
Give the player options
A lot of story games employ a technique that can best be described as caging the player. This occurs when the player is required to solve a small set of puzzles in order to advance to the next section of the game, at which point she is presented with another small set of puzzles. Once these puzzles are solved, in a seemingly endless series of cages, the player enters the next section. This can be particularly frustrating if the player is unable to solve a particular puzzle. The areas to explore tend to be small, so the only activity is walking around trying to find the one solution out.
Try to imagine this type of puzzle as a cage the player is caught in, and the only way out is to find the key. Once the key is found, the player finds herself in another cage. A better way to approach designing this is to think of the player as outside the cages, and the puzzles as locked up within. In this model, the player has a lot more options about what to do next. she can select from a wide variety of cages to open. If the solution to one puzzle stumps her, she can go one to another, thus increasing the amount of useful activity going on.
Of course, you will want some puzzles that lock out areas of the game, but the areas should be fairly large and interesting unto themselves. A good indicator of the cage syndrome is how linear the game is. If the plot follows a very strict line, chances are the designer is caging the player along the path. It’s not easy to uncage a game, it requires some careful attention to the plot as seen from players coming at the story from different directions. The easiest way is to create different interactions for a given situation depending on the order encountered.
If I could change the world, there are a few things I would do, and quite frankly none of them have anything to do with computers or games. But since this article is about games…
The first thing I’d do is get rid of save games. If there have to be save games, I would use them only when it was time to quit playing until the next day. Save games should not be a part of game play. This leads to sloppy design. As a challenge, think about how you would design a game differently if there were no save games. If you ever have the pleasure of watching a non-gameplayer playing an adventure game you will notice they treat save game very differently then the experienced user. Some start using it as a defense mechanism only after being slapped in the face by the game a few times, the rest just stop playing.
The second thing I’d change would be the price. For between forty and fifty dollars a game, people expect a lot of play for thier money. This rarely leads to huge, deep games, but rather time-wasting puzzles and mazes. If the designer ever thinks the game might be too short, he throws in another puzzle or two. These also tend to be the worst thought-out and most painful to solve. If I could have my way, I’d design games that were meant to be played in four to five hours. The games would be of the same scope that I currently design, I’d just remove the silly time-wasting puzzles and take the player for an intense ride. The experience they would leave with would be much more entertaining and a lot less frustrating. The games would still be challenging, but not at the expense of the players patience.
If any type of game is going to bridge the gap between games and storytelling, it is most likely going to be adventure games. They will become less puzzle solving and more story telling, it is the blueprint the future will be made from. The thing we can not forget is that we are here to entertain, and for most people, entertainment does not consist of nights and weekends filled with frustration. The average American spends most of the day failing at the office, the last thing h
wants to do is come home and fail while trying to relax and be entertained.
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