ziadel

Forward this to EVERYONE you know in the gaming industry...

http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/...manifesto.html

if they could just get rid of the pet peeves listed there, things would be so great.

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Ron Paul '08
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Go ahead and google Dr. Ron Paul. You'll like what you read.

Siege

Good read. A lot of those things I gripe about too.

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"Your name's Geek? Do you know the origin of the term? A geek is someone who bites the heads off chickens at a circus. I would never let you suck my dick with a name like Geek"

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This part just makes my posts easier to find

FngKestrel

Excellent points. The problem is that the industry is risk-adverse and only willing to make licensed crap or copycat games.

Money talks people. Vote with your dollars. Stop buying crap. And don't buy a game because just because it's pretty. Will Wright put it best, "Are we trying to get games to be photorealistic? There's no point, movies have been photorealistic since the beginning and many of them still suck." (paraphase)

Pragma

Amusingly enough, a good friend of mine (who works on AI programming for one of the games screenshotted in the articles) was sitting next to me when we first saw that. He pointed out that the second point regarding AI was correct - that future processors are more geared towards graphics than AI computations, and so the quality of AI just won't be as good, as the producers are more interested in shiny games than smart games.

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hulk

Strangely enough, there's one major publisher who's not afraid to take a risk when the situation calls for it

Yay Nintendo! Hopefully their kookyness will shame others into trying it.

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"'There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person,' says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex."
-- From an IGN game review.

Destrox

That article, and website are truely great reads.

Its like they took my inner thoughts on a lot of things, and put it into a webpage.

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MooseMan3000

Except... one of his early points was that there should be wide diversity of games... yet he continually bashed attempts at new types of gameplay. Yes, a wide variety of homogenized games is the way to do it. Er, wait.

I mean, he made some good points... but he was reaching for 20. He should have left it at 10. Ah well.

Coppertop

It's a common courtesy to actually post the article, not just link it:

Jinn

Man I'm a gamer at heart and anything that improves the industry is definitely in my best interests. This guy sure has a lot of BAD arguments, though.

It really doesn't sound like this guy has tried to program AI or even studied game theory very much. There's entire research fields devoted to the study of games and their overall "funativity". One of the more important discussions is precisely this. It's actually EASIER to develop ungodly AI than stupid AI. Give the NPC's knowledge of everything.. every entity, it's viewport, its movement, its size, etc. They'll never miss, because they have 100% perfect aim. Anyone who has played against expert Counter-Strike bots has seen this.. they know where you are long before you even know they exist, and they one shot-kill every time. As soon as you start to do REALISTIC AI, you have to start calculating what it should know when, how accurate it should be, etc.. etc.. Furthermore, you ALWAYS want AI to be "challenging, but beatable." Otherwise, no one would play. Remember, people play games to have fun, and part of having fun is winning at least SOME of the time. Introduce other game design concepts like convexities, and you can interest the gamer even more.

EXACTLY. I think this is a very important point, and I think it defeats his whole argument. I'd MUCH rather have game developers focus on MULTIPLAYER than Artificial Intelligence design. Why? Becuase humans are fare more confusing, diverse, and challenging than any computer-generated human can ever be. I rarely play single-player games anymore, because no matter how intelligent the AI is, it doesn't compare to a well-trained and practiced human.

This one is just entirely silly.. there are clearly defined sets of genres, and there are games for all of them. The fact that they're not available on the new consoles is a twofold nonpoint: these games are still under development, as not every game releases with the console. Furthermore, popular games are determined by the MARKET. I don't think I'd be that interested in playing the "spy game" he's talking about. And I tell you what -- the hundreds of marketing and game-interests surveys that major producers do every year tell a different story about what people in general think is a good game. If these small genres he described were popular, there would be more games developed for them. Look at Katamari Damacy, for example.

WTF? I'll take my car-stealing, cop killing, prostitute smashing gang member game over that ANY day.

And I call BULLSHIT on this statistic. I've seen tons of demographic studies in my Game Design classes, and none of them even come near his overzealous approximation. Without a source, this is like saying that 3/4 of all statistics are made up.

This point is spot on, and I'll leave it. However, he shot himself in the foot later with..

He's obviously never studied advertising or marketing. People don't want teeny little pictures of what's going on in the game. That's what the BACK of the box is for. The front has to catch your eye and trigger a name-response. "Hey, I recognize that eye.. that's PERFECT DARK!" *flips box over*.. "Oh whoa, it looks neat.." My own personal first law of advertising is that you have got to grab their attention immediately, and game-scenes cropped to a 5 x 6 or smaller size to fit the front of a DVD/CD box isn't going to cut it.

This argument doesn't even follow. Having strict game rating systems does not prevent any type of game from being created. It only ensures a game is correctly labelled based on its' content. It doesn't *PREVENT* anything above PG-13 from being made, it just makes it less likely to be produced. Just like movies, there is LESS of a market for hardcore adult games, and so market forces drive this, not game design companies or ratings administrations. The "emotional plea" at the end to make you feel this is worthless, because having an AO rating has nothing to do with banning movies above PG-13.

Solid point. Nothing to say here.

This argument, again, reeks of no education into true game design. This is part of a "convexity" of difficulty. "Save-anywhere" savegames make the game MUCH easier than it could be otherwise. Imagine, if you will, that you can save at any given microsecond of the game. You know that a hard boss is coming up, so you save every second into the battle until you make a bad move. You just restore the save from a second ago, and try again until you get it right. This defeats the entire challenge of the boss, as you can break it down into scripted "one button combos" instead of the seven-move combo toss that you were supposed to be able to use. The further apart you make the saves, the more challenging you can make a game. This, coming from the guy who wanted more challenge in his games. Obviously, this has to be tempered with realism (two saves throughout the entire game), but making MORE savepoints just dices an otherwise enthralling, challenging game into "who can restore saves more quickly.."

This is absolutely garbage, and reeks to me AGAIN of an uneducated bafoon. Show me ANY modern hardware that can dynamically create and store game entities without any preloading, and I'll be amazed. When you're dealing with hundreds of megs of sprites, meshes, animations, AI every second, you need to have some of it in quickaccess RAM, not stored on some slow-accessing CD-ROM. His "solution" would be to make video games like a buffering WMV. Ever tried to buffer an WMV over the internet on 56k? It doesn't really preload anything, and tries to load as it plays. What this results in is a bandwidth chokepoint.. you watch about 6 seconds of the movie and then it stutters and tries to buffer some more. If you let the movie buffer BEFORE you watch it, it's decidely smooth and uninterrupted. I'd much rather wait 30 seconds for a load screen than have to watch my game stutter for 5 seconds everytime it needs to reload some entities.

Does he want speed or quality? This man just can't decide. Especially if you somehow expect the game to not load ANYTHING, you're not going to get quality sound assets. The more of these "different" sound clip assets that you add to a game like Madden, the bigger the game and the more you need to preload to ensure continuity. The re-used soundclips are annoying, sure.. but programming dynamic ones? ENORMOUS in complexity and resources. Until we master real-time sound generation from text (with something other than a robotic voice) this is a pipe dream. We have to stick with pre-generated audio, just as we stick with pre-animated graphics.

Emotional appeal, nothing to see here. He knows its as false as it can get, but he's got to garner your support for the next one.

I hate running into invisible walls as much as the next guy, but this is what we call an infinite decision tree. Unless you limit the choices the players have, your decisions become infinite, and so too does your gaming budget.

To illustrate.

Player can go either A or B

........A
P
.........B

From A or B, player can go to C or D / E or F.

............C
............D
........A
P
.........B
............E
............F

It keeps going and diverging until you have 50 seperate paths to follow. To quote our author, "How in the name of Islamic Fonzie" do you expect that to be programmed? You have to converge those decision trees back into smaller amounts of choices if you ever want the game to be finished. That's why you have to have artificial barriers, son.

I can follow this argument in RPGs. You really don't need to know the name of the enemy, although I think that it adds to the immersion level, personally. "Ohh I got killed by a Rock Golem.." not "Ohh I just got killed by that rock thing with the big arm.."

However, taking away "superimposed shit" in a FPS? No HUD? No Player names? I think that would make for one of the most confusing games you could play.

This is a very solid argument -- could have been taken directly out of a Game Studies textbook. Cause and effect is a VERY important concept in game design, and any time that the world doesn't appear to act in the way a player believes it realistically should, its going to be frustrating. Having a person not be where they say they're going to be is frustrating in real life, we don't need it in our games.

This is realism. How many people do you know that can carry around an ak47 and 900 rounds for it? I'm sorry if you find ammo limits restricting, but it makes AIMING more important than SPRAY N PRAY. Good thing? Yes.

ABSOLUTE contradiction of his point earlier. Remove all artificial boundaries? I think not, you'd be lost in the metaphorical hotel. You have to limit the player's movement, or you end up in situations like this. If you limit the player's movement, you have to do it with artifical boundaries. One or the other.

This, again, is realism. If you felt like you could trip an alarm and still live, what's the point of avoiding the alarm? If I were truly a super-secret international spy in a building loaded with alarms, I wouldn't want to set one off, no matter how many bad guys game forth. Odds are, however, that they'd easily outnumber me because they're armed to the teeth and know where I am. Perhaps infinitely many enemies is not the solution, but you must certainly make the reward for NOT tripping the alarm far better than the reward for tripping the alarm.

This sounds like he wants cookie cutter games that he can beat in 5 minutes. Sure, it was frustrating trying to figure out the Up down left right left right A B A A B move, but wasn't it rewarding when you figured it out? I'll deign that the argument about having to watch a cut scene repeatedly is obnoxious, but certainly lowering the difficulty of a game so that you can beat it without being challenged is NOT a good thing in the face of good game design.

If you're so concerned that you're not getting the Ferrari, save your money for a real damn one. For the rest of us GAMERS, EARNING the Ferrari gives us a sense of accomplishment, and driving it is that much more orgasmic after driving the shitty car with the slow transmission and horrid steering. If you've ever cheated and gotten the awesome car from the beginning of the game, it's FAR less satisifying.

No disagreements here, as a self-proclaimed internet revolutionary, copyright and patent law are the truest spawn of satan.

Excellent point. We saw this with the release of Battlefield 2 -- it was far less tested than it should have been before release, and they've realized that now. Being able to test the game AFTER you release it is no excuse for having poor QA test cycles.

Quality.

Man -- you just bemoaned the inability to jump over the stuff in your rant about artificial barriers. Make up your mind. I personally don't like jumping puzzles, but if you give the player the ability to jump, why not use it?

Waa waa waa.. one final gripe for an uneducated baffoon who managed to pull 5 or so solid arguments out of 20 "gripes" in his so-called manifesto. This man is certainly not the new headstone of game improvement. Let someone with a real education do that, please.

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"I'm typing on a computer of science, which is being sent by science wires to a little science server where you can access it. I'm not typing on a computer of philosophy or religion or whatever other thing you think can be used to understand the universe because they're a poor substitute in the role of understanding the universe which exists independent from ourselves." - Willravel

canuckguy

"Instant-Failure Stealth Levels. Ack. This brings back horrible memories of a Goldeneye level where if you tripped an alarm, an infinite number of bad guys poured forth. We knew a man who failed that level 37 times, then got the Infinite Health cheat for it and came back. He intentionally tripped the alarm, the guards rushed out. Laughing maniacally, he proceeded to shoot those fuckers for four hours, killing 1,183 of them - 682 with groin shots - before his thumbs cramped up. Your game should not create this kind of bitterness. "

that one described me perfectly! ahahaa

Carno

Meh. It was a good read I guess, but this guy wants every game to be perfect.

He's an idiot.

EDIT: One good quote I got from the forums by a poster named Herr Terror:

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FngKestrel

Sure he's jumps to some conclusions, but he also has good points.


I think his desire is that if a game is 'next generation' then it should be next generation in more than just a graphical aspect. I agree with you that a human player is infinitely more interesting to play against than an AI. (Although, in many RTSes I play, many people are trying to emulate a computer with perfect build orders.)

I disagree here. Marketing and game interest surveys cause publishers to avoid innovation and become risk adverse. Publishers want to cater to the money, err people, but even the people can't imagine what's over the horizon. That's why even though something as interesting as the GBA link up to the Gamecube was interesting, only 3 or so games took advantage of it. And I fear that the same thing will happen with the Revolution. It's quite a catch-22. Publishers are unwilling to adopt a new technology until gamers show a willingness to use it, and gamers are unwilling to use it until they see a publisher create a game that takes full advantage of it.

I'm reading 'Ten Faces of Innovation' by Tom Kelley from IDEO. His opinion is that most consumers can state that they want something faster, prettier, better, but that for true innovation, you have to get away from them.


Fair enough, but someone out there likes Dr. House and wouldn't mind playing him. The game industry can touch on any number of subjects and can fill any sort of niche. How else do you explain Michelle Kwan's Skating? Lego Adventure Island? Redneck Rampage? Nancy Drew Mysteries? There exists a game out there for everyone. Publishers willing to seep into those niches have the potential to tap into some markets.

I agree here. Statistics need references.

I agree with your point, but having had to make marketing and advertising screenshots, I have to state that I hate marketing and advertising for the bullshit they ask us to generate.

The other point to consider is that most marketing and advertising is created 6 months before the release of a console game, because that's how long it takes to run it through the process of approvals and whatnot. You're lucky if you have an alpha build and can get images that don't suck at that point.

You're right about market forces. And that his statement is very much a play to emotion. His prior statement is accurate, but is a disjointed thought. And his conclusion about Wal-mart brings up a point that is more widespread than just ESRB ratings. It's the fact that Wal-mart has a lot of power because of its extensive distribution scheme.

Ditto. He should look at companies like Limelife, which is focusing on females.


You're right that quicksaving marginalizes boss battles (lord knows I used it many a time), but there's also a point to be made that a good game designer place the save points at GOOD locations. Some of those designers out there, I swear, are just throwing feces at a wall and seeing what sticks.


Right, he's neglecting to note that NES was a solid state storage device as opposed to the optical media that everyone adopted in the PS2 generation.

But, then again, the quality of your coders can drastically affect your load times. Some games have badly placed load screens, extremely long load times and frequent load times. Many engineers these days are spoiled by the gigs of space that they are privy to on next gen machines and abuse that space with abandon. GTA has a long load at the beginning, but you never see another loading screen for a long time, if ever. In contrast, Stuntman has redundant loading screens that appear every time you start a level, even if you're just replaying the level you just attempted. I'm not really arguing his point here, maybe just blindsiding his point.

Agreed, but I do also agree that it's incredibly annoying.

Whew, I'm tired. JinnKai, you type too much. I'm not trying to argue with you directly. It's just that it seemed like you were saying, "the emporer has no clothes," and I just wanted to say, "well, I think he's wearing a loin cloth."

I'll continue on the other points later.

hulk

Well, since he didn't do it, I'll provide a source; The ESA study.

Nearly a quarter may be a slight overstatement, the figure rests at 19%.

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"'There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person,' says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex."
-- From an IGN game review.

djflish

It was a good read, made me laugh, but I prefered reading Jinnkai's reply

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Jinn

That's directly from the ESA report.. 19% of people over 50 played games, not 19% of people playing games are over 50. A very big difference -- misrepresented statistics are dangerous.

And yes, I'll deign he had.. well.. a loincloth..

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"I'm typing on a computer of science, which is being sent by science wires to a little science server where you can access it. I'm not typing on a computer of philosophy or religion or whatever other thing you think can be used to understand the universe because they're a poor substitute in the role of understanding the universe which exists independent from ourselves." - Willravel

jorgelito

You guys make some great follow up comments. But I don't thnk he ever made the claim to be programmer or such. Also, it was meant as a comedy piece (which I did find to be funny and entertaining). Anyways, good article.

hulk

Haha, look at the pie chart just by that statistic, my friend

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"'There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person,' says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex."
-- From an IGN game review.