Further sign of Microsoft's disarray with XB1.

http://www.destructoid.com/microsoft-boss-don-mattrick-leaving-to-head-up-zynga-257335.phtml

The head of the entertainment division is going to Zynga.

First off, it's a sign that things are bad, this close to a console's release.

And in a bit of a fnny note, geez, going from Microsoft to Zynga? Don Mattrick's next career step on this time line is apparently to devolve into pond slime

Australia: The Nanny Nation.

Man. Don't get me wrong. I love Australia. They play some of the greatest sports around (Two codes of Rugby, which are like American Football, except played by people in better shape and without pads, Australian Rules Football... you don't know Aussie Rules? It's the one when they score a goal the goal judge sticks both his fingers out like he's a Old West gunfighter? Yeah, that one)... they are one of the more "Macho" nations out there

But they sure don't like video games.

They just had a decade long fight over releasing games there, that was supposed to end when they added the equivalent of an R rating. (Before, if a game had violence or whatever, the game would be "refused classification", which meant it could not be sold in the country).

Well, the Nanny Nation is at it again, even with the new classification, two new games ran into the Brick Wall that is Australian censorship, with State of Decay being denied classification yesterday, and then today, the news that Saints Row 4 was denied classification today, for amongst other things, the Alien Anus Probe.

Which is just funny, if you ask me.

Australia, you're made up of some awesome folks, you're way ahead of us on some political things (I heard some conservative friends suggest they should move to Australia due to some recent decisions. When I explained Australia's views on these issues, they quickly changed their minds).. but seriously? Come on. I don't have a problem with saying that minors shouldn't play it.. which should be the reason for such ratings. But to say that it would inherently warp adults minds?

Come on. Give your countrymen more credit than that.

((and Aussies, if you need help on Steam, let me know))

Why Sports Games always fall short of the real thing...

This post is going to reopen some barely healed wounds on my Boston fan's sports psyche, but what we saw  Monday night is something that can never be duplicated in video games.

We actively seek out the improbable in real life, and actively abhor the improbable in video games.

Two goals in 17 seconds to win the Stanley Cup.

Ugh.

That hurts so much to type right now, but what would have happened let's say in NHL 13.. you're playing the computer in Game Six of a Stanley Cup finals, up one, and you give up two goals in seventeen seconds to lose the cup, after you've played out all the previous games. Do you shake your head and realize the magnitude of what just happened?

The Hell You Do.

One or more of the following happens:

A) The controller's un-aerodynamic properties are confirmed as it's thrown aside (in rare cases, into a wall, or bounce off the cushions of the couch at high speed). 
B) You hit the reset button on the console.
C) You mutter (either to yourself, to your friends or online) about "comeback code" or the game having it in for you.
D) The game never gets played again.

I have a friend, who will remain nameless, who loves the Football Manager series almost as much as I do, but he has a rule. Should he get screwed over too badly by injuries or freak incidents (either glitches in the game engine, or just things like getting a bunch of red cards in a game), it's time for the "Three Finger Salute" (ie, closing the game without saving, force closing, and then possibly reload).

That's why no matter how much developers try, video games will never cause the same depth of feeling as the real thing. There's no way to cause the joy of the Blackhawks fan who saw the improbable comeback, no way to simulate the pain caused to Bruin fans who had the metaphorical roof fall on their heads (or the joy about something like what they did to the Toronto Maple Leafs earlier in the playoffs.

Aft er all, we see how many bounces, and crazy things happen in a single season, and in the life of a console game, millions of seasons are played. Given enough time and game play, even the most wildly improbable thing is nearly certain to happen, after all.

But maybe it's a good thing that it's at best a pale echo of the real thing. After all, there's enough sports junkies out there without finding a way to give them an artificial fix of the same quality after all.

(XB ONE DRM) Gears of War creator blames Sony, not "Internet Whining" for reversal.

Cliff Bleszinski, the creator of the Gears of War series, is crying big crocodile tears today about Microsoft's reversal. He warns that without locking out used games, that we'll all regret it. More developers will flee to mobile games and PC Games, that we'll see more DLC and multiplayer modes tacked on to games, and that the current market cannot sustain continued expansion of budgets for big titles.

You see, that's the thing right there. The market cannot continue to expand in such a manner. Gears Of War 3 was rumored to be the first "nine-figure" development budget console game (between actual development and media campaign). At such budgets, you are literally betting the company on every release. That is unhealthy, because EVERY company will eventually roll snake eyes, and crap out.

Bleszinski goes on to say the reason that Microsoft reversed course wasn't the result of "Internet Whining" but because Sony didn't go along with the plan. I also have to disagree here to a point. Sure, if Sony went along with it, gamers would have had two options. Accept it, or sit the console generation out. I think at least a percentage of gamers would have sat the generation out, but we had to like it or lump it.

But Sony saw Microsoft's plans and played them like an absolute fiddle. They managed to do something found in both martial arts and smart business. Use your opponents force against them. Sony actually TIGHTENED their procedures (requiring PS+ to play online).. and still got cheered for it, because they were so far ahead of Microsoft.

So, folks on the internet may not have caused Microsoft's reversal (seriously though, wouldn't you love to have been a fly on the wall during the meetings during the time between E3 and now?).. but that's because Sony actually decided to listen to their owners, instead of the publishers dream list.

So, Mr. Bleszinski, with all due respect.. we do not have a problem. YOU have a problem. If you can't find a way to deal with it, do what happens to every dinosaur who can't evolve.

Go extinct.

How Video Games imitate Peanuts...

Here's a bit of a complicated equation for you.

Charlie Brown, Lucy, and the Football, is equal to gamers, EA and realistic game play.

That's right, gamers are Charlie Brown, and every year we get suckered in by EA/Lucy..

"This year's NCAA is more realistic than ever! You'll swear you're watching a game on ESPN on Saturday".

We buy into it warily and approach it, and at first blush, it seems that yes, this is the time we'll kick that football and have a realistic game! The first reviews come in, and talk about how smooth the players move, and how realistic it is..

and you want to believe it. Oh, do you EVER want to believe it. This is the year that NCAA will play true to life, and give us something worth playing over and over and over.

And then you start finding the small things, the glitches, the money plays, the vacumn blocking that makes no sense.

And it ends up, with us, just like Charlie Brown, staring at the sky, and wondering how we didn't kick the football. Yet again.

But we keep coming back. We want to believe.

The demo's out, and I'm trying hard not to play it. Because I know I'll get sucked in, buy the full game, and end up going "AUUUUUGHHH!" and landing flat on my back, wondering how EA managed to pull the football away this time.

Interview with Josh Allen of Gamenikki in Exile: Sexism, Independents and Xbox One DRM Reversal

8 Bit Mind: I'm here with Josh Allen, who is the Editor-in-chief of gaming blog "Gamenikki In Exile"... and we're just having a chat on the news of the week. We're saving the big one for the last question, so hold on for that.


Question One: Feminism, Sexism and Video Games:

8bitmind: Anita Sarkessian, a blogger who writes on issues of feminism and the like in the tech industry, went on twitter during E3 to strike a note of concern about the fact that there was very little positive information for women in video games. Not only were there no real female leads to be found, during a demo of Killer Instinct, a joke was made that the female developer should just "close their eyes, it would be over soon". These alone, were worthy of comment, but then the assorted masses of Twitter attacked her with some of the most misogynist, hateful, sexist posts I've ever seen. Did Anita have a point with her comments, and considering the response to the comments she made, and does the twitter response to it show that the video game public have a problem with sexism and misogny?

Josh Allen: That's...a landmine of a question.

She had a point with her comments. The industry has come a long way - witness Tiger Woods 14 including the LPGA for the first time ever - but it has a long way to go.

8bitmind: Agreed, and for a current view of the industry,, look at the history of the game "Remember Me", where according to the developer, several publishers turned it down because it had a female lead.

Josh Allen: It's still very much a "boys' club," and comments like that in what are effectively public venues don't do anything to make the industry female-friendly for young women who might be considering a career in game design.

On the other hand, I don't think the reaction to Anita's comment is necessarily illustrative of sexism and misogyny so much as complementary of other examples which have been around forever. Many of the same people slamming her in the Twitterverse will be people engaging in sexually loaded trash talk on Xbox Live and comparable services. This isn't something that's coming out of nowhere, in other words; it's just a much higher-profile example of the behavior.

8bitmind: How does the industry fight this kind of thing.. it seems like it's locked into a cycle where people buy "dudebro" games, so companies make "dudebro games", and it's forever perpetuating this view?

Josh Allen:I think the biggest way is with a focus on youth games. Nintendo has historically had the most success with female gamers, and that's because they don't target their core games at specifically male or specifically female audiences. Mario is a brand that has resonated with both boys and girls over the years, and that leads to a situation where 60% of Wii owners are/were female. You can't change the culture overnight with games aimed at older audiences.

"Dudebro" sells because the Tuesday game buyers are dudebros.

What you need to do is start building a gaming culture with the younger gamers who will be your future customers and perhaps your future employees and make games that both can enjoy, rather than dudebro-lite for little boys and Barbie Horse Adventures for little girls. That's not to say there isn't a place for the latter in the market, but up to now, games designed with girls in mind have almost exclusively occupied the horses-makeup-and-boys space.

Basically, it's not an overnight change. They need to start policing themselves better in terms of what they say and do in public, and if there's a desire to get women greater involvement in the industry going forward, that foundation has to be laid with the games that are made today.

Otherwise you'll continue to have a male-dominated space that insists that women who intrude have to "close their eyes and let it happen."

8bitmind: Agreed. The video game industry has a problem, they KNOW they have a problem, and now it comes down to how they deal with the problem.

Question Two: Sony, Microsoft and Independent Games

8bitmind: Independent games (that is, games without a publisher) were already a part of both systems, but with the next generation of consoles months away, it was interesting to see how the two consoles deal with Independent game makers.

Microsoft requires independent publishers to either use the Xbox authoring engine for their game (and to be stuck in the little-used Indie Games sub-area), or to acquire a publisher to be listed in the Xbox Live Arcade.
Sony seems to be more embracing of independent games, featuring them heavily in their E3 presentation, and in more than a few cases, waiving the requirement of $20,000 to release a patch.

How do you see the two behemoths of this generation of consoles handing independent games, and does it supply an advantage due to one or the other?

Josh Allen: I don't think there's a huge advantage inherent. I think Sony featured indies more heavily in their E3 presentation because they didn't have as much in the way of exclusive AAA titles to tout. It's a matter of if you can't have the one you love, love the one you're with.

I think Microsoft will probably continue the approach they've used on Xbox 360, and it may hurt their ability to attract indie developers - which is quite a change from where they were just five years ago - but I think their focus right now is on the AAA titles. Games like Journey on PSN are fantastic games, but how many people walk into Best Buy to purchase a PS3 so they can play Journey? I think Microsoft is banking that if they shift units on the strength of AAA titles, indie developers will come to them because that's where the market is.

I think Sony realizes that having indie developers means having things for their users to play - and the PlayStation Vita has shown them the importance of that so far - but isn't necessarily married to indie games as the lifeblood of the console. Just a way to paper over the cracks in the library.

8bitmind: It's still more than a bit unusual to see Sony to be the one embracing the little guy.

Josh Allen: It is. But remember that Sony hasn't been willing to pony up for DLC exclusives the way Microsoft has in the last five years. So where Microsoft's differentiator is getting DLC first on a time-limited exclusive, Sony's differentiator is having a diverse library of independent games that may not be on other platforms.

Question Three: Xbox One changes their DRM

8bitmind: And finally, the big one.. news today that Microsoft is doing a complete and total 180 on the Xbox One. Gone is the every 24 hour DRM check, and limitations on the sharing of games. It's not all good news, as this means you will need to have the disc in the system to play.

First off, have you ever seen such a radical reconfiguration of a system's requirements in the months before release?

Josh Allen: Never.

8bitmind: Microsoft put their hand in the cookie jar, and when it closed upon them like a steel trap, they decided that they didn't want the cookie after all,

Did they think that they could ride out the gamers dislike of the controversial system requirements, and only when it was revealed in the mainstream press, did they realize "No, NOONE thinks this is a good idea?"

Josh Allen: Without trying to get TOO political about this, I think there's a parallel here between Xbox One and "Obamacare." The White House strategy on "Obamacare" has clearly been that whatever the controversy, once things started kicking in and people see what those changes mean, they'd embrace the changes. Likewise, I think Microsoft felt, at least initially, that they could ride out the backlash and once people saw what was being enabled by the restrictions, that the public would drop its objections.

I think what ultimately happened here is the difference between government policy and trying to run a business. The former can say "This is how it is; deal with it," and wait for people to come around, while the latter is still in the business of making and selling widgets, and you generally can't sell widgets to people who don't want to be sold to.

Microsoft realized that they'd be fighting an uphill battle for the next 3-4 months that would completely overshadow everything else they're trying to accomplish with the console, and decided that discretion was the better part of not getting their ass shot off by Sony in the marketplace.

8bitmind: This probably has to annoy developers who designed their games for an always on connection (I've seen mentions elsewhere that to use the cloud properly to enhance graphics, you need a constant 1.5 Mps stream, which many but not all people have).. is this going to have a knock on effect for games that were designed to use the benefits of the console that just aren't there any more?

Josh Allen: I think to a certain extent what's going to happen is that those games are going to be sold as "Xbox Live required" titles. Future development will probably assess the likelihood that the userbase will be part of the "always on" community. The other possibility is that while Xbox One won't require a connection in order to play, we'll start seeing "Better with Live" branding to communicate to people that, hey, if you connect to Live, this game gets even better.

8bitmind: And the important question: How much damage does the recent few weeks do to Microsoft for this console generation? I said when I saw it, "They finally applied rule 1 of getting out of a hole... stop digging!" That being said, they're still in a hole... aren't they?

Josh Allen: In the long term, I think making this change is going to mitigate a lot of the damage that might otherwise have been done. There's a tendency to believe that those of us who read gaming sites and blogs on a regular basis make up the majority of the game-buying public, but that probably isn't true. There's an echo chamber effect, where we're making a big deal about the DRM and everything else, and a large segment of the population is simply unaware of the changes Microsoft had in mind. Had these policies persisted until launch, I think that could have been critically damaging to the business. Making the change now ensures another news cycle or two of bad PR, but by the time launch rolls around, it's going to be largely forgotten - except by families who buy an Xbox One and don't have a broadband connection to download the patch that removes the 24-hour check-in. That's gonna be an interesting Christmas morning.

You can check out more of Josh's work at gamenikkiinexile.com

Microsoft reverses course on DRM

I'm arranging for a back and forth with Josh Allen, the Editor In Chief of Gamenikki In Exile, and this will be on the burner for it, (look for it tonight or tommorrow) but I just had to comment on it now, while the news is fresh.
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Xbox One DRM has been scrapped. Completely and totally. It's going to function like the 360 did (disc required, no Every 24 hour DRM check)..

That's running the white flag up.. but how much damage has been done?