Contents
Editorial: Portrait of the Gamer as Enemy
Chris Crawford
Some Thoughts on Network Games
David H. Schroeder
More tales from the Crypt
Chris Crawford
Types of Play
Evan Robinson
Big Trouble in Paradise
Ezra Shapiro
They're Playing My ’Toon!
By Jeff Johannigman & Warren Spector
Reviews and Reviewers
Rhett Anderson
Four Observations
Brian Moriarty
A little bit of history: The Atari computers
Chris Crawford
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 1991.
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Editorial: Portrait of the Gamer as Enemy
Chris Crawford
Picture the typical computer game enthusiast. He’s a white male in his twenties, well educated, and spends a lot of time every week playing games. He subscribes to Computer Gaming World, possibly Questbusters or some other specialist periodical. He is an opinion leader, guiding his friends in their purchase decisions. He spends a lot of time on national networks such as GEnie or Prodigy discussing the latest games. Most important, he spends a lot of money every year on games.
Now picture a cross-hairs centered on his head. Paint an evil moustache on his face, and an ugly leer on his lips. Picture him as The Enemy.
This picture doesn’t seem right, does it? The games aficionado is our bread-and-butter customer, the mainstay of our business. He loves games and loves to talk about games. He’s our kinda guy, the last person in the world you would want to think of as The Enemy.
But there’s a problem. You see, Joe Enthusiast is an activist. He makes sure that his opinions are known by the publishers. His voice carries a lot of weight because he speaks up. To use the polarized nomenclature of an earlier time, Joe is part of the Vocal Minority, as opposed to the Silent Majority who don’t send in their warranty cards or write letters or post messages on the nets.
“Why is this a problem?” you wonder. What could be more fair than to listen to the people who care enough to speak up? The problem here is that what may be fair to some people may be unhealthy for the industry. By listening to these people, we who create games could end up killing the industry. To explain how this could happen, I need to give some background.
Anatomy of a customer base
Let’s think of our customers in statistical terms. We know a lot about the average player, but the market is composed of people who fall above and below the average. There have been lots of market analyses, and their results show lots of scatter, but, roughly speaking, our average player has gotten about four years older in the last eight years. This means that we’re losing people as they age. The typical player enters the audience at a younger-than-average age, stays in for a few years, and then gets out.
Assuming that our goal is to have the largest possible base of players, our problem is two-fold: 1) to get more people to enter the marketplace; and 2) to get them to stay in longer.
Getting them in
This involves more than merely getting computer owners to try one game. Our problem is to get them to try several games, to get them to really dip their toes in the water. We face two obstacles here.
First is the general bias against games as an adult form of entertainment. “Games are for kids. Playing games is childish.” Our best strategy here is to differentiate computer games from video games. If we can establish a public perception that computer games are to video games as movies are to cartoons, we can whittle away at that long-held bias. But that’s another editorial...
The second obstacle is the likelihood that the novice player will get burned by purchasing a game that is completely beyond his ken. The most dangerous games here are the sequels, games based on earlier games in a long line that goes far back into the past. Examples include the Ultima series of games, almost anything from Sierra, the SSI wargames, or any game whose title ends with a Roman numeral.
Because these companies listen to their customers (or rather, the ones who talk), they refine their game systems with each new release. But — and this is the key point — the refinements reflect the tastes of the aficionados, the people who spend a lot of time with the games. These people want more depth, more complexity, more trickiness. And so the games get hairier with each new edition.
Guess what happens to the poor slob of a beginner who buys one of these games? The game stomps him in the first five minutes and makes him feel like a fool. This person is not going to become an avid gamer. Thus, these games poison the well of new players. This is not what we as an industry want.
And let’s dispense with the marketing bull that these games are accessible to the beginner even as they are challenging to the enthusiast. That’s ad copy, not honest analysis.
The magazines contribute to the problem. Beginners don’t buy magazines like Computer Gaming World or Questbusters; aficionados do. These magazines therefore quite properly reflect the tastes of the aficionados, bringing further pressure to bear on developers to make the games more suitable for aficionados — and less suitable for beginners.
Case in point: LOOM
Let’s look at this problem from the other direction. Let’s consider Loom, a game that was clearly designed for the beginner (see Brian Moriarty’s article on page 14.) I was appalled at the reception to Loom among the aficionados. Many of these people hated Loom. “Too *!&#ing simple” was the oft-repeated complaint. True, Loom is not a game for aficionados. It is a game for beginners. It will bring new customers into our audience. It will prepare people for bigger, more complex games such as those from Sierra or the Ultima series. But the aficionados worked hard to kill this game, and I suspect that its sales suffered as a result. That’s bad for our industry.
A related process took place with my own game Balance of the Planet, but that’s a can of worms of a different color...
Keeping them in
Our second broad problem is to keep players interested once they’ve been hooked. This is the major arguement in support of catering to the aficionados, but I think that it is misplaced. The key question here is, do the aficionados make up the majority of the gaming audience?
I don’t know, and I don’t think that anybody knows. It’s almost impossible to tell the difference between the player who hopefully buys a dozen games, trying to find one that strikes his fancy, and the player who avidly buys a dozen games, loving every one. When the only one who’s talking is the aficionado, it’s all too easy to congratulate ourselves that we’ve done a great job. When the former buyer gives up and abandons the market, we shrug our shoulders and ignore the implicit message.
It can be argued that the success of the games that cater to the aficionados is the best proof that we are doing something right. That’s true — but it’s also true that the slow aging of the gaming population strongly suggests that we are losing a lot of our audience. Maybe we are doing something right; could we be doing righter if we weren’t losing so many players?
It can happen here
We have a sobering precedent to consider. Back in the 1970’s a company called SPI rejuvenated the flagging board wargame industry and sparked a boom in the business. For five years, SPI rode high with a series of impressive designs. One of SPI’s secret weapons was its feedback survey. The principals at SPI paid close attention to those survey cards, and as a result, the SPI games grew progressively bigger, more complex, and more obscure. Introductory level games grew rare, and game rules manuals became longer and longer. Unsurprisingly, SPI began a long downhill slide, finally collapsing in 1981. The board war-games industry didn’t die, but it never regained the luster of its heyday in the mid-70s. There were many reasons for the decline, of course, but catering to the aficionados was one of them.
There is no law that says that our industry must continue. If we abuse our customers by catering to the needs of a subset, they could just walk away from us.
What should we do?
First, we should recognize that the aficionados are a vocal minority. An important one, but a minority nonetheless. We need to apply a “skepticism discount” to the comments we read on the nets or in the magazines. They don’t represent the majority.
Second, we need to make a greater effort to gather the opinions of the Silent Majority of customers, the people who don’t volunteer their opinions. We have to go to them because they won’t come to us.
And finally, we should label our games with honest representations of our target market. Labels such as “Perfect for Beginners!” and “Deep, Complex Game Play!” would help us serve both the beginner and the aficionado.
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Some Thoughts on Network Games
David H. Schroeder
For the past two years, I’ve devoted most of my time to designing and implementing on-line games for Broderbund Software on the networks of Quantum Computer Services. Perhaps some of my thoughts and experiences in this field will be of interest.
Adding modems to computers will have a profound effect on computer gaming, but as yet we know little about how much, or how soon. Every form of gaming by modem is in its infancy.
There are stand-alone games that give you the ability to dial up and play against one or more friends in real-time. These are direct modem-to-modem products; there is no network involved. To enjoy these games, everyone needs to have the same software, all the necessary equipment and be available at the same time.
There are ‘play-by-mail’ type games being run on BBS’s and networks. These are usually text- or symbol-based games, played incrementally over weeks or months. Chess and simulations of financial or military conquest are popular in this format. Players can submit their moves anytime within the specified time limit — they never need be on-line at the same moment. Some of these games are directly maintained by the BBS or network; others are privately maintained, and simply use the BBS or network as a benign host.
Broderbund, Quantum and I set out to develop animated games with computer-specific graphic software that would be operable only on-line. We wanted to write simple intriguing games that would attract people to play with each other in real time on the Quantum networks.
Each network has a personality
I am going to digress a bit here to make general comments about the various home computer networks. This is by no means a complete review of them. My point is that they vary widely in feel and flavor.
Each of the popular computer networks has a different philosophy about use of network-specific and computer-specific terminal software. Getting on to GEnie or CompuServe does not require network-specific terminal software, though some is available as an option. In contrast, getting on to Prodigy or any of the Quantum networks requires terminal software provided by the network — this limits the kinds of computers that can ‘tap in’ to those expressly supported by the network, but creates a much more graphically sophisticated environment for the user.
Each network has a different philosophy about allowing or encouraging real-time communication between users.
Prodigy does not allow any user to interact in real time with any other user. There may be 1000 players exploring the Prodigy maze game, and 500 of them may be with the hermit in his cave, but none of the 1000 are aware of each other; they inhabit 1000 parallel but separate universes.
Quantum’s philosophy is opposite. While users can be by themselves if they choose, the ‘chat room’ is the default environment. While you are in a chat room, your screen is largely devoted to the cascading text which displays the comments being made by anyone in the room with you. A header at the top of the screen shows the name of the chat room, and announces people by their screen names as they enter or leave the room.
In regards to allowing communication between users, most networks fall in-between these two extremes, most closer to Quantum than Prodigy.
A puzzle in two dimensions; a game in three
When I worked with Broderbund and Quantum to write on-line games, we knew we wanted to create computer-specific graphical game environments that would attract multiple players to real-time interaction.
For our first project, we wanted a simple game and chose Hangman — what could be simpler? We all assumed that taking a straightforward two-person game like Hangman and adapting it for up to eight players would be no big deal. I remember vividly the surprise I felt as the delicious complexity of our problem became apparent: How do you make Hangman multi-player? There is no default, no standard way of stretching out the game fabric to encompass a third or fourth player.
When a player chooses a letter, for example, against whose word is it applied? Everyone’s words? One player’s word? If only one, which one? When a player takes a turn, what are the other player’s seeing? If they see nothing, it will be a slow and boring game between turns. If they see everything, then what is gained by wise individual play? And so forth...
We ended up with a new game called MasterWord. MasterWord is, at its core, still Hangman, but profoundly altered to make a four- six- or eight-person game lively and intriguing for all. We abandoned the “strikes” structure of Hangman (three strikes and you’re out, or however many lines it takes to draw the Hangman figure and be eliminated), since early eliminations from an on-line game would discourage those players from hanging around to play the next game. (On-line players are paying by the minute.) We also made it possible for anyone to win the game up to and including the last moment, and we figured out a way for players to ‘plunder’ each other’s game information.
MasterWord remains a simple game, yet its development illustrates the profound challenges in creating true multi-player games. Hangman is a two-person “mutual puzzle,” if you will. The only way one player affects another in Hangman is by choosing the word that his opponent must figure out. In MasterWord, each player’s move potentially affects every other player’s knowledge and strategy.
This recalls the on-going discussion about the use of the words ‘puzzle’ and ‘game’ that has appeared in the JCGD. If indeed we have been writing only ‘puzzles’ all these years (or, at best, games with artificial opponents), then modems and networks offer us one of the first opportunities to write true computer ‘games.’
The challenge of network games
Networks are businesses. They want to turn a profit. It is tempting to think that the hits of one medium can be counted upon to be the hits of the next medium. So there will be a lot of pressure for us to bring established stand-alone computer game titles to the networks. It is not in the interests of the networks to stress to us the elusive nature of the on-line challenge.
Publishers with established game titles will feed this misconception. They’ll see networks as merely another way to increase the profit on their hits. To them, networks are a kind of “instant national coin-operated game machine” — they vaguely imagine people all over the country hooking on to the network and spending hour after hour (dollar after dollar) playing games they used to pay for once at retail.
The true breakthrough on-line games (the ‘Space Invaders’ and ‘Pac-Man’ of this medium) have yet to be written. They will not be adap-tations of stand-alone computer game titles. They will be as different from stand-alone computer games as Monopoly is different from Tic-tac-toe.
Monopoly and Tic-tac-toe are both played on paper, but that fact does not go far in defining the games. Similarly, the fact that network games will be played with computers does nothing to describe their deepest nature. It distracts us; we think that network games will feel something like what we’re writing now. They won’t.
I agree with Greg Stanley that we are currently writing primarily ‘games with artificial opponents.’ People will, by and large, not pay money by the minute to play artificial opponents — they can do that at home alone. They hook into a network to play other people. That is a whole new ballgame.
When undertaking projects in network game design, we must consider carefully and thoughtfully what we are trying to accomplish — or being asked to accomplish. It is up to us to realistically estimate the time and creativity it will take to accomplish our goals.
Some of the questions
Here are three issues that anyone designing a network game will need to address. They begin to define the nature of the beast.
1) Think about the centralized host computer and its dialogue with each user’s PC: WHERE IS WHAT DATA? WHERE IS WHAT INTELLIGENCE? This is largely a technical issue, and one over which the individual designer will not have complete control. Network philosophies, minimal target home systems, and downloading time constraints all affect how much stuff can be held where, or sent there how fast. On networks, grand graphical schemes and grand AI schemes get prohibitively complex very quickly. Even the simplest game will need some host logic, which may mean writing for a remote main-frame.
2) Think about the relationship between each user and the next: WHO IS WHAT TO WHOM? The ‘blind’ nature of being on-line encourages masks and role-playing, but how are these roles defined in a flexible, dynamic way in real-time to serve the game at hand? What if everyone wants to be a Chief, and there are no Indians? We tend to create flashy, shiny and seductively-complex AI environments for an audience of one; designing a successful on-line game might be more like being the social director at a summer camp. How can these people have fun together? How can this technology help them have fun — and not get in their way?
3) Picture the on-line game environment as a lobby, open 24 hours a day, with people strolling in and out freely and unpredictably: HOW DOES EACH PERSON ENCOUNTER THE TIME FRAME OF THE GAME EXPERIENCE? With a stand-alone game, we know exactly when the curtain goes up and when it comes down. On-line, potential game players can wander in and out of your game area at any time. If they aren’t intrigued by something or entertained by something that happens around them within a minute or two, they will probably leave and never return. What is the beginning, middle, end of the game experience? — and how do players deal with creating or encountering these beginnings, middles and ends? You may think “We’ll announce to everyone that games begin Saturdays at 9 pm.”, but that won’t work. Three people will show up at 9:00, the game will start with them. Twelve more people will show from 9:03 to 9:14. What happens to those twelve people is four times more important than what happened to the three. While wrestling with these issues, you will gain a healthy respect for the complexities of true democracy.
My guess is that the breakthrough on-line game environment will be the one that looks the least like a defined game. Perhaps before we can worry about ‘games,’ we just need to encourage and witness a lot of on-line ‘play.’ Spread out a big pile of toys on-line and see what happens. Perhaps from the toys will come the puzzles, and from the puzzles will come the games. a
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________More tales from the Crypt
Chris Crawford
I have not one but two terrifying tales of avarice and evil for you tonight, kiddies. The first one is so blood-curdling, I’m even going to name names! It seems that Mindscape and I had a contract for a product specifying that I was to receive a percentage of Mindscape’s net receipts as my royalty. When I signed the contract with Mindscape, they were a full-service publisher. But then Mindscape was sold to The Software Toolworks. This latter company is not a full-service publisher; they distribute through Electronic Arts. Because Electronic Arts takes its cut of the action, Mindscape’s net receipts per unit are less than they would have been had Mindscape continued as a full-service publisher. As a result, my royalties per unit are reduced by a substantial amount. And there’s nothing I can do about it. Cute trick, no?
My second tale has a happier ending. As the publisher of Balance of the Planet, I am responsible for all marketing costs, including the costs of my portion of the Accolade booth at CES. When Accolade presented me with the bill for my portion,they helpfully suggested that they simply deduct the amount from what they owed me for product shipments. This would simplify the paperwork for both parties, and we were ready to agree when my wife Kathy realized that this would shortchange the people to whom we pay rotyalties. After all, we pay them on net receipts; deducting a marketing expense from net receipts reduces the base on which they are paid. Being noble and virtuous, we rejected the suggestion and instead went through the more cumbersome process.
The interesting thing about this incident is the ease with which we could have gotten away with it. The books would have balanced. It would have required a sharp-eyed accountant familiar with the contract to notice the discrepancy. We could have pulled off the heist smoother than Charles Keating and nobody would have been the wiser — and we wouldn’t have had to pay off no Senators, neither.
Before I polish my halo too brightly, let me point out that the total amount at stake here was just a couple of hundred bucks. Doing the right thing here doesn’t make us honest, it just means that we aren’t petty thieves.
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Types of Play
Evan Robinson
The usual goal of taxonomy is to develop a tree whose leaves are the individual objects or systems that are being classified. We are attempting to create definitions that permit us to similarly classify computer entertainment products, beginning with Chris Crawford’s first taxonomy of Toys, Puzzles, and Games. I discount earlier, and continuing, attempts by publishers, marketers, reviewers, and others to classify games according to their subject matter. Such a taxonomy is undeniably useful, but it does not address the internal systems of the game so much as their external packaging.
I do not wish to quibble about specific definitions of Toys, Puzzles, and Games, although there has been a great deal of discussion on the GEnie JCGD RT. I suggest that the classification of systems into Toys, Puzzles, and Games, while initially conceptually elegant, is not appropriate. It is trivial to imagine a system which can be all three to different users. Working within Gregg Stanley’s definitions, for example (from the August 1990 JCGD article, It’s a Puzzle), SimCity can either be a Toy (if played with no regard to any of the various scoring devices and unlimited capital through embezzlement), a Puzzle (if the user allows herself to be sucked into the scoring devices and attempts to achieve some specific goal), or a Game (if the user requests a second user to come along once a year and do things to his city that will prevent or delay the self-selected goal). In the same sense, a ball and open field can be a Toy (kicking a ball around, learning to dribble), a Puzzle (try to put the ball on a specific spot using only your feet, or keep it up in the air as long as possible), or a Game (football or soccer or rugby). While our language and society is filled with similar examples, it’s disconcerting in a taxonomic discussion to discover that your subject moves around the classification tree according to some criteria over which you, the taxonomist, have no control.
The definitions put forth divide computer entertainment systems into Toys, Puzzles, and Games according to how they are commonly used as opposed to what they are, then try to shoehorn what they are back into the definition. Since this results in a taxonomy that is unstable (by which I mean any given computer entertainment system might fall into several different groups), I believe we are trying to categorize the wrong thing. I suggest that the critical element in our taxonomy is the way users interact with entertainment products, not whether or not the product has sub-systems that ‘anticipate’ the user’s moves. In addition, we are attempting to overlay new meaning on words that have common usage, which will invariably result in confusion both among ourselves and among our users.
In an attempt to create a more stable classification system, not for our products, but for how they are used, I put forth the following definitions of types of play:
Unstructured Play: Interaction with a system in which the primary goal of the user(s) is examination of the system’s behavior. Also called ‘Exploration’.
Structured Play: Interaction with a system in which the primary goal of the user(s) is to place the system in a specific state or to specifically effect some subset of the system’s variables (like score).
Competitive Play: Interaction with a system in which each user (including system constructs which approximate human users) engages in Structured Play, but where all the goal(s) of all the user(s) are not mutually attainable. Also called ‘Competition’.
This set of definitions provides us with a way of categorizing how a user interacts with a system. If we choose to categorize a system according to how a majority of users interacts with it, or how the author intended users to interact with it, we can extend these definitions to say that a system for Unstructured Play is a Toy, a system for Structured Play is a Puzzle, and a system for Competitive Play is a Game. But we should not let these labels blind us to the fact that different users will interact with our systems differently, and one user’s Toy is another user’s Puzzle and yet another user’s Game, but to our customers (both publishers and end users alike) they are all computer games no matter what we call them.
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Big Trouble in Paradise
Ezra Shapiro
[Ezra Shapiro has written extensively about computers for MacWeek, Byte, MacUser, and other publications. A once-fervent computer game player and reviewer, he now spends his free time reading books.]
© Copyright 1990, by Ezra Shapiro. All rights reserved.
When I walk into a room these days, welcoming smiles quickly fade into expressions of horror and pity. Nobody notices my face any more; all eyes move directly to my hands. “Oh my lord,” someone manages to stutter eventually, “what happened to you?”
I shrug and say, “I used a computer.” Then, self-consciously, I attempt to hide my arms from view as the predictable questions begin.
You see, for the past couple of days I’ve been wearing elastic and steel braces that extend from the middle of my palms to a point maybe five inches up my forearms. They’re pretty serious-looking medical devices designed to immobilize my wrists; I suppose I could explain that I’ve been in a skydiving accident and no one would wonder about it.
The splints will be worn round the clock for two weeks, while I take mega-doses of prescription-strength ibuprofen as an anti- inflammatory drug. Then my doctor will check my progress. If all has gone well, I’ll be able to avoid cortisone shots or surgery, and I’ll only be required to wear the splints while working at a computer keyboard. Unfortunately, that requirement might remain in effect for the rest of my life.
I have a moderately severe case of what is known as “repetitive motion syndrome.” In my case, its two effects are tendinitis in my hands and wrists, and “carpal tunnel” — distortion of the central nerve that runs through the wrist to the hand. I caused the damage through continual abuse of personal computers. Not only did I use the machines incessantly for work, I also squandered my leisure hours using them for recreation. There was no single moment of injury; I just gradually battered my joints to a pulp.
It is no comfort to me that I am not alone. At least five of my friends in computer publishing, writers and editors, have similar problems. I expect we will be joined by quite a few others very shortly. The Los Angeles Times has already logged over two hundred cases on its staff, and has opened an in-house clinic solely to treat computer-related injuries.
Looking back, I realize I’ve been experiencing symptoms for nearly four years. Occasional numbness in my fingers, shooting pains in the muscles of my thumb, sporadic aches in my knuckles, weakness in my wrists. It was very easy to dismiss them all. Maybe I’d lifted a heavy box a day or two earlier, or washed the car, or slept in an awkward position, or banged my hand in normal daily activities. The cramps and stiffness in my hands after a long session at the keyboard didn’t worry me. I simply did not connect things into a pattern until all the symptoms struck simultaneously one afternoon last week; my hands felt like I’d been the loser in a 15-round prize-fight.
Only then did I bother to visit a doctor. He listened to my descriptions, asked only a few terse questions, and did not seem surprised by anything I told him. My case did not strike my doctor as anything but routine; he estimates that ten percent of those in keyboard-intensive jobs will experience problems like mine. That is not a small number.
Of course, I haven’t had to endure the full range of possibilities, and I consider myself lucky. I’ve had some discomfort and infrequent pain; others have been reduced to tears from the agony. I’ll probably recover; some have damaged themselves to the point where they’ll never work without fear again. And I’ve only hurt my hands and wrists; related afflictions in the elbow, shoulder, upper arm, and neck are quite common.
Okay. So what does this have to do with game designers? Three things:
First, programmers are obviously at risk here, as is anyone who spends uninterrupted hours at a computer. Writers and journalists are merely the first group to reach the breaking point because we’ve been pounding away at terminals longer than anyone else. Programmers, secretaries, order-entry clerks, and financial analysts will soon follow us to the hospitals; other occupational groups will join the queue in order of their exposure.
So if you’ve experienced any pain or numbness in your hands, wrists, arms, etc., that you can’t attribute to specific traumatic incidents, get to a doctor and talk about this. Do it today. Don’t attempt to diagnose and treat yourself; there are a number of possible conditions, including arthritis, that should be explored by someone who knows the field.
Note that exercise and conditioning have nothing to do with the problem. Even if you’ve played the piano or lifted weights for years, you still might be over-flexing your wrists at a com- puter. This is a stress problem, not a strength problem. Thus exercise is likewise not a cure, and may even exacerbate your symptoms. An analogy: putting a bigger engine in a car with transmission trouble.
Take some time to analyze your posture and equipment. Spend as much money as it takes on a good chair. Be sure your workspace gives you enough room in front of your keyboard for a commercial wrist rest or a makeshift one; a rolled-up towel or a strip of high-density foam will do. Your arms should be relaxed, and your wrists relatively straight. It might help to elevate your mouse pad several inches above the surface of your desk, too. Just try to eliminate strain.
Second, as software developers, it behooves game designers to put pressure on the hardware industry both to publicize the problem and to develop keyboards with proper wrist support. As computer industry insiders and members of professional organizations, your voices carry a lot of weight.
Figure it this way: every case costs you a potential customer. I’ve had to erase all my games from my hard disk; I just can’t afford the risks of recreational computing any more. You want to keep your buyers healthy.
Finally, and this is a tough one, you’ve got to start thinking about health issues in the design of games themselves. By its very nature, a good game is both compelling and somewhat stressful. Imagine all those players hunched over their computers, bodies locked into one position, repeating motions again and again as they attempt to better their scores. This is true in all game categories, graphic, text-based, time- oriented, skill-oriented, whatever.
How can you design a game that induces a player to develop good posture, vary body position and movement, and quit before strain develops? Damned if I know. But I do know the question needs to be addressed, in great detail, right now.
This is the start of an epidemic, people. Brace yourselves. As public awareness grows of the muscular and skeletal dangers of computing, usage patterns are going to change dramatically. And I’d be willing to bet good money that consumer interest groups are going to target games as an enemy. What happens when a child develops symptoms and the parents sue a game publisher? What happens when they win?
I would hate to see computers and software in general, and games in particular, sold with warning labels from the Surgeon General’s office. But it may come to that if we, as an industry, do not move quickly.
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They're Playing My ’Toon!
By Jeff Johannigman & Warren Spector
[Jeff Johannigman has been in the computer game industry since 1982, working with such publishers as Atari, Broderbund, Synapse, Epyx, and Electronic Arts. Warren Spector earned his Master’s Degree in Radio-TV-Film with a thesis on the history of Warner Brothers’ cartoons, before developing the “Toon” and “Bullwinkle & Rocky” (paper) role-playing games. Jeff and Warren are now Producers at Origin.]
“The New Hollywood!! Computer games are THE NEW HOLLYWOOD!!” all the quotable industry pundits proclaimed, and a new catchphrase was born. “Why, we’re doing entertainment with graphics and sound, just like them. We run over budget, just like them. We have prima donnas, just like them. We’re gonna be rich, just like them.”
Not to burst any bubbles here, folks, but we think we’re still a far stretch from being the New Hollywood. Our productions still differ by orders of magnitude in cost, manpower, and mass market acceptance. However, there IS an entertainment industry model that strikes much closer to the realities of our industry: the cartoon studio.
Like computer games, animated films began as products of a cottage industry, with one talented individual producing everything that went into the finished product. Winsor McCay produced the first popular animated cartoon, Gertie The Dinosaur, in 1914, drawing over ten thousand frames on rice paper and photographing them himself.
McCay set the standard by which early cartoons were judged, but his competitors soon outstripped him not only in volume, but in market appeal as well. Many followed in McCay’s footsteps, bringing animation to the masses, but the most important innovators of the early post-McCay period weren’t artists whose vision and talent wowed the folks at the local Bijou. The most important innovators were people like J.R. Bray, Pat Sullivan, and Max Fleischer, whose assembly line techniques turned animation from an expensive novelty into a profitable venture.
McCay’s singular vision gave his cartoons an aesthetic appeal that was second to none. His beautiful, dreamlike visions of dancing dinosaurs and giant mosquitoes still amaze today. The new cartoon businessmen couldn’t match that aesthetic experience, but they more than made up for it with innovations McCay didn’t even dream of. The success of cartoons in this middle period (roughly 1920-1930) depended upon technical achievements. People were fascinated by the novelty of moving things that could not exist—cats that acted like people, dancing flowers, real people interacting with a cartoon world, or cartoon characters interacting with a real one. The studios tried to outdo each other, each new cartoon being more surreal than the previous one, each displaying some technical trick that had never been seen before.
That sort of novelty wore thin quickly, and the studios realized that audiences cared more for the storyline and continuing characters than for technical trickery. Innovative technology remained an important part of a cartoon’s appeal—witness Disney’s introduction of synchronized sound in Steamboat Willie (1928), realistic color in Flowers and Trees (1932), multiplane scrolling in The Old Mill (1937), and so on—but as early as the mid-1920’s, and certainly by the 1930’s, the most significant factor influencing a cartoon’s success was its star. Felix the Cat, Koko the Clown, and, of course, Mickey Mouse, drew the crowds.
The computer game industry has developed along lines similar to the animation business. In the beginning, games were often the product of a single creative individual, someone who could (and usually did) design, program, write, draw, score, playtest, and, sometimes, even package and sell his own work. Bill Budge, Dan Bunten, Andy Greenberg, Dan Gorlin, Richard Garriott, and Chris Crawford could be considered the Winsor McCays of our industry.
However, just as Winsor McCay found himself replaced by teams of animators working on assembly-lines of pen and ink, so too have the solo game designers found themselves competing with the larger and more structured teams building today’s hit computer games. The studio environment need not dilute creative energy, and can often amplify it. The cartoons of Walt Disney, Chuck Jones, and Tex Avery are intensely personal visions, but they are visions shaped and honed by the teams of talented animators that worked on them.
And just as the animation business thrived on technological innovation for a time, so too have we coasted on the strength of the newest sound system, the most sophisticated graphics, the hottest processor, the latest data storage device... Someday soon we had better learn a lesson from the animators and start paying more attention to story and character.
Evidence is mounting that such a move has already begun. If you look at the most successful games today, you’ll see Mario, Luigi, Link, Zelda, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Carmen San Diego, Lord British, Rosella, Leisure Suit Larry, and Roger Wilco. (It’s no coincidence that Carmen San Diego was created by a former Disney animator.) These characters sustain and build game-players’ interests across an entire series of games. In years to come, there is every possibility we will talk about these characters in the same breath as Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny.
Our growing emphasis on large-scale production and character has another important side effect—the emphasis of studio and star over creator. Again the animation industry provides a good model of what we can expect to happen over the next few years. In movies, the biggest draw—the star—is a real person. Stars are independent entities who can move from studio to studio, drawing ever-larger mega-salaries. In cartoons, stars are created, not born, and are owned lock, stock, and inkwell by the studio that created them. The end result is that the audience pays attention to what STUDIO produced the cartoon, not what individual. We all remember fondly the cartoons from Warner Brothers or the Disney Studios, but do you know the names of any individuals who created them?
This is not to discount the talents of the people behind such cartoons. Indeed, were it not for the genius of Walt Disney, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and Friz Freleng, there would be no Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, or Tweety Bird. These men guided production units of 10-20 people—character animators, background artists, effects animators, writers, musicians, film editors, sound engineers, and voice actors—who, as a team, made these cartoons great. Disney, Avery, Jones, and Freleng were not only talented animators, but more importantly, visionaries with the ability to share their vision and generate creative fervor in those they worked with.
The ability to communicate a vision and motivate a team may be the most crucial talent for game designers from here on out. Undoubtedly, it is important to know the tools of the trade—how a program works, how to write an effective story, how to create striking graphics—but it is now more important to understand Tom Peters and Dale Carnegie than to understand Donald Knuth and Niklaus Wirth. Since state-of-the-art games require teams of 10-20 people, knowing how to utilize people effectively is worth more than knowing how to utilize a programming language.
There will always be room for talented people to create great animated films (and great computer games) as solo endeavors. Even today, animators like Marv Newland and Sally Cruikshank made wonderful cartoons independent of the studio system. However, such works are usually shown in festivals at art cinemas. Perhaps there is a need for similar “artistic game” venues. In lieu of that, the future of commercial game design seems to lie in the hands of great game directors working with great game teams creating great game characters.
In retrospect, it was inevitable that animation would become both an art and an industry. By the end of the 1920’s, when addressing an audience of fellow animators, McCay berated his peers saying, “Animation should be an art, that is how I conceived it. But ... what you fellows have done with it is make it into a trade, ... not an art, but a trade, ... bad luck.” (If you substitute “computer game” for “animation” in the above quote, we’re sure you’ll recognize the howl of that endangered species, the lone wolf game designer.)
The years have shown how right—and how wrong—McCay was. The tradesmen did take over. And we owe them Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Mickey Mouse, Popeye, Betty Boop, Tom & Jerry, Woody Woodpecker, Bullwinkle & Rocky, and a host of others. We in the evolving computer game business should hope to do half as well...
Th-th-that’s all, folks!
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Reviews and Reviewers
Rhett Anderson
[Rhett Anderson is currently a columnist for COMPUTE magazine. He is the co-author of Mapping the Amiga (COMPUTE Books) and co-founder of Neandersoft, a game development group. ]
In May, in the turmoil of a magazine buyout, I packed up my blue pens and left COMPUTE Publications to pursue a longtime dream and become a game developer.
Well, I thought that I had left. Somewhere in between the long hours of program design and coding, I still manage to write a fair number of reviews for Amiga Resource, once an independant magazine, but now merely a section of the newly huge COMPUTE magazine. (You may remember me for my columns Taking Sides in Amiga Resource and Horizons in COMPUTE!’s Gazette.) As someone who has written dozens of reviews and edited countless others, I hope to help you get the best publicity and reviews that your game deserves, but keep in mind that these are my observations and I do not guarantee them.
The first thing that developers and programmers should know about reviewers is that good ones are hard to find. First, the pay’s lousy. Would you believe anywhere from $25 to $200 for a review, depending on its size? Second, good writers are hard to find no matter what you’re paying them. Third, a good reviewer has to know a lot about the software he reviews, including the history of whatever genre of software he or she specializes in.
Most magazines have a stable of reviewers that they rely upon. Magazines that take the trouble to rate programs (like Info and Amiga Resource) do their best to have all programs reviewed by competent and consistent reviewers. As you can see by comparing the staff page with the reviewers, many COMPUTE reviews are written in-house.
In-house Reviews
When your game is sent to a magazine, it’s under the scrutiny of a cadre of lunchtime game bandits who shuffle through the new games looking for the latest and greatest hit. Your game has precious few moments to prove itself in such a hostile atmosphere. It’s a sight I think few developers would like to see. Brilliant games like Tetris and Populous will be mastered by gamers with a joystick in one hand and a sandwich in the other. If you’re lucky enough to have written such a masterpiece, you have no worries. Your game will be reviewed by one of the best reviewers in the bunch.
On the other hand, if your game has a large Achilles heel, this gang will find it immediately. That’s what happened to Fiendish Freddy’s Big Top o’ Fun, which spent more time going to disk than letting the player play. Another victim was Sword of Sodan, which bored the troops with dangers which had to be learned one by one. Or Amiga Dark Castle, which made the players choose between a joystick interface that was baffling or a keyboard interface (in general, a no-no on the Amiga).
Most games, however, are neither superstars nor dogs. Some games will be taken home by the staffers for a test run, others will be sent out to out-of-house reviewers. We all know that a game that doesn’t become a breakroom hit may still be a gem. If you (or your publisher) know what you are doing, you will have sent as many as four or five copies of your game to each magazine. That way, your game will have a greater chance of finding a champion. This sounds like common sense, but even some of the largest publishers send a single copy to each magazine—an example of budget cutting where it hurts most. Taito wins the prize for sending out as many as 20 copies of each of their games, each addressed to a staffer or columnist. But Taito, watch your spelling—you got half the names wrong. It’s Arlan Levitan, not Arian Leviathan. Michtron and Innerprise also score high in this category. Reviewers have deadlines. If your program is hard to learn or play, it frustrates the reviewer as much as it will later frustrate those who buy your program. Your game will suffer greatly at the hands of a good writer who is frustrated. An example that comes to my mind is a poor game in which your space vehicle often blew up even when it looked like it was in the clear. Reviewer Randy Thompson said it all with his lead. A poorly digitized voice saying “Good luck, Commander” was translated by a frustrated Thompson as “Wood ruck, Commander,” the first sentence of his review. The moral of the story? Unless you want to be laughed at by a hundred thousand readers, make your game consistent.
Special Delivery
When you send your game to a magazine, don’t send it alone. Be sure to include all the information a reviewer needs to get started. Be sure to include the retail price, and the publisher’s address and phone number. A good publisher will take care of sending out your game for review (it’s their money, too). Ask the publisher to send you a copy of the kit before it’s sent out. And ask how many copies will be sent out, and to which magazines your game will be sent. If a magazine has a game columnist, or a columnist that sometimes mentions games, ask that he or she get a copy especially addressed to him or her. Also ask that the editor get a copy addressed to him or her. The key here is visibility.
If your game is an adventure, send some hints or a walk-through with the package. If your game is an action game that happens to have a switch that makes the game more fun (like the D switch in Datastorm that makes the game more like Defender), be sure to make that switch obvious. Or better yet, make it the default for the game. Reviewers have a thankless job. There are no Siskels or Eberts in the game reviewing business. Treat the reviewer as the special person he or she is. Send them something. I remember every t-shirt I ever got. These are not bribes, they are a way to keep your game and/or company on everyone’s mind. Something I enjoyed even more than t-shirts were the special letters I received from the programmers which told me how much time they spent working on the game. I especially prized the ones which detailed the special routines they had to write to achieve some special effect or another. But please, don’t plead for a good review.
Common Mistakes
Never, never, never send a beta copy of your program to a magazine. Magazines are not your beta testers. I realize (better than you do) that these magazines have long lead times and that your game may not be reviewed until several months after it hits the stores. But sending a beta will not help. Most magazines wait until they have a shrink-wrapped copy of the game before they review it. And the reviewer will be influenced by bugs that he or she had to work around and crashes that he or she dreaded in the beta copy of your program. One exception—Innerprise software, who gave us “beta” copies indistinguishable from the boxed copies which came a few weeks later. Once you’ve sent your game off to be reviewed, I suggest that you wait two weeks and give a single call to the magazine. Say that you are checking to see if the game you sent for review has been received. Talk to whomever your phone call is directed. Ask when your program might be reviewed, but understand that the review of your program may get bumped into the next issue, or the one after that, or may get bumped until the review is no longer timely, in which case it will be thrown away. Ask if “tear sheets” (rhymes with “bare feets”, nor “deer feets”) of the review will be sent to you. Do not ask to speak with the editor or features editor unless you already know them. If you can make it to a trade show, try to set up a short meeting (5-15 mins) with an editor, but don’t push it. Take my word for it, editors are incredibly busy people who are hounded by readers and writers constantly (or maybe it just seems that way to me after four years of editing). An editor won’t forget someone who got in his or her way of a deadline.
The Winner Is...
Make sure your documentation is up to par. If you must, search out your high school grammar teacher to check it. It’s hard for some programmers to understand why I should care that Photon Paint’s manual has its “its” and “it’s” mixed up, but bad grammar offends writers. And remember, reviewers are writers. You’re selling a game. Games are fun, slick, trendy. For heaven’s sake,if you have any control over it, make your packaging look fun, slick, and trendy. As is the case with Christmas, the most promising packages are usually opened first. (But having said that, I recall something my father once said about the uselessness of putting perfume on dung, and it seems important to tell you to concentrate on the game first, then worry about the box.)
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Four Observations
Brian Moriarty
[Brian Moriarty is the author of three Infocom prose adventures, Wishbringer (1985), Trinity (1986) and Beyond Zork (1987). His first graphic adventure, Loom, was published earlier this year by Lucasfilm Games. He is currently designing educational software for Lucasfilm Learning.]
The following paragraphs are drawn from notes I made during the production of Loom. Some of this material appears to be self-contradictory. Nearly all of it is self-serving. Opposing viewpoints are welcome but unnecessary.
1. Nobody buys adventure games for their stories.
People buy adventure games because they like to solve puzzles, explore fun places, and show off their computers. They do not buy adventure games for their stories. Why? Because there are other, much cheaper media capable of telling much better stories — and all the best storytellers work in those other media.
Generality and flexible interaction are basic requirements of traditional computer game design. Manipulation and linear causality are basic requirements of effective storytelling. These requirements are mutually exclusive. That’s why nobody has ever told a really good story in a really good adventure game.
It’s certainly possible to create a rich, interesting context for an adventure game. But calling this context a story is like designing a stage set and calling it a play. Nevertheless, many designers persist in referring to their products as “story games,” and styling themselves as “storytellers.” This self-indulgence is probably harmless, as long as we never forget that our real job is the creation of puzzles, environments and pictures. (I’m as guilty of such self-indulgence as anybody. In fact, my old Infocom business card specified my job title as Storyteller)
2. Most people who buy adventure games never finish them.
In fact, many never even get halfway through. Everybody in the industry knows this. Yet few acknowledge the seriousness of the creative and economic implications.
Suppose the average adventure game ships on eight disks. That means the majority of people who buy the game will never see more than four or five disks’ worth of material. Yet the second half of the game costs just as much to create as the first half. Sometimes more, if you've got a big finale.
Less than 50% of the money, time and effort we put into our games is being appreciated by most of our customers. This is not a good way to do business.
In Loom, I wanted everybody who bought the game to enjoy every byte I and my team had created for them. Why? Because ...
3. People like adventure games they can finish.
In its heyday, Infocom’s New Zork Times newsletter had a circulation of over 150,000. The marketing department used the Times to conduct consumer surveys. These yielded lots of interesting statistics.
One such survey included two questions: “What are your favorite adventure games?” and “What adventure games have you actually finished?” A remarkably high correlation was noted between the games people liked, and the ones they had finished.
I wanted people to like Loom. Not just the fanatic hobbyists who regularly invest tens or even hundreds of hours in a single game. I mean real people, working adults with limited leisure time and lots of attractive ways to spend it. So, from its very inception, Loom was designed to be finished.
Lucasfilm also conducts surveys. We telephoned 200 people who returned Loom registration cards in the month of June 1990, and asked them what they thought of the game. Those who were disappointed with Loom usually said that they liked what was there well enough, but wished there was more of it. The ones who were satisfied with Loom often expressed delight that they were able to complete it, and either did not notice or were willing to forgive its relative brevity. Those same people are clamoring for a sequel.
4. The Holy Grail may not be interactive.
The first movies were event recordings. Popular films consisted of trains pulling into stations, waves crashing on beaches, people sneezing or getting their heads cut off. This initial lack of sophistication is quite understandable, since event recording is the most obvious way to use a movie camera. It was years before filmmakers realized that the cinema could be used to tell stories, to educate, to persuade.
Interactivity is the most obvious way to use computers in entertainment. Unfortunately, some people in our industry have embraced interactivity as the sine qua non of computer games. They claim it is the only thing that sets computer games apart from other entertainment media.
It’s hard to believe that a fast-moving, high technology medium barely ten years old has already discovered its ultimate form of expression. It is, in fact, highly unlikely that we have found all the ways computers may be effectively applied to entertainment. We probably haven’t even discovered the best ways yet.
In Loom, I experimented with the idea that emphasizing storytelling at the expense of interactivity might make adventure games more accessible to the general public. The strong reaction to the product, both positive and negative, together with its respectable sales record during a slow summer, suggest that there may be a market for similarl limited interaction software out there, waiting to be tapped.
Interactivity is a powerful capability that should be exploited when appropriate. But let’s not pursue it so doggedly that we fail to notice other possibilities.
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A little bit of history: The Atari computers
Chris Crawford
In the early days of personal computers, there were three primary mass-market machines: the Commodore PET, the Radio Shack TRS-80, and the Apple II. In late 1979, Atari released the Atari 400 and 800, the second generation of personal computers. These machines were superior to the existing computers, containing a variety of custom chips to handle graphics, sound, and I/O. Indeed, the relationship between the Atari 800 and the Apple II was quite analogous to that between the Amiga and the Mac Plus.
The Atari had a rough time getting started. It had three handicaps: first, Atari was perceived as a games company, and nobody was willing to take the 800 seriously, even though it was patently superior.
Second, the disk drive for the 800 used a slow serial port, where Apple used a faster parallel port. Atari had used the serial port to comply with FCC emissions requirements; Apple had ignored these regulations. When the FCC finally served notice to Apple to comply, Apple responded with a wave of lawyers and lobbyists who managed to get the regulations amended in its favor.
Finally, Apple had Visicalc, the very first spreadsheet program. It was something of a fluke that Fylstra and Bricklin chose to program Visicalc on the Apple II, but their decision sealed Apple’s future.
Atari had a few advantages of its own. First was its vastly superior graphics capabilities; these were not widely appreciated for several years. I take some credit for evangelizing the Atari among software developers during 1981.
A big advantage was Star Raiders, an astounding real-time depiction of space combat. It boasted a true first-person view, with moving star fields, weaving enemy ships, fireballs, explosions, and fantastic sound effects. Commercially available in 1979, this game was not matched on any other computer for perhaps five years. Its author, Doug Neubauer, has disappeared from the games business. Star Raiders sold a great many Atari computers.
It was not enough. The Atari computers peaked in popularity in 1983. The twin disasters of the videogame collapse of 1984 and Jack Tramiel’s price wars doomed the Atari home computers.
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