Category Archives: Indie

It’s Raining

Continuing with my commitment to revisit the Metal Gear Solid franchise alongside the HD re-release, I’ve finally written a fairly lavish tribute to what I consider to be overall the finest entry: MGS3, with particular attention to the fight against The End. That’s just one of the elements I think make the game such a standout; I re-finished the game at the weekend for the first time in a few years, and I still got all teary at the end.

There’s so much more I could say about it, too. The Boss as one of gaming’s best female characters ever-ever, the strange palate cleanser of that “ladder scene”, the impeccable use of Cold War anxiety elements, blah blah blah. Suffice to say I actually think MGS3 is a perfect video game, and I don’t say “perfect” often if ever.
If you missed any bit of my past month’s self-indulgent MGSism, here’s a blog post on MGS1, and a Kotaku feature about the authorial intent of MGS4. I’m never satisfied that I’ve said exactly what I want to say about these games, but once in a while, I should probably try writing about other things, eh?
Oh, I have done, a bit. I caught up with 5th Cell to see what it’s been like launching their first new IP since Scribblenauts (on iOS, no less!) — and moving into self publishing. They’re also working on an uncharacteristic 3D shooter for XBLA, and Jeremiah Slaczka tells me why it’s so important for the studio to continually try new things.
I also talked to Sulake, which makes Habbo, about this intriguing strategy the company is attempting to increase user retention by adding iPhone apps that integrate achievements with what players do in the main game world. What’s interesting is they aren’t Habbo apps; they’re stand-alone games that allow players to showcase their achievements and stuff in the Habbo world. Just about everyone is going multiple platforms in order to compete and engage users in the tricky online space, and it has interesting implications for the rest of gaming, I think.
GDC will be here before we know it, and with it, the most wonderful time of the year: The Independent Games Festival! I’ve got a bunch of interviews in the works with the finalists of the IGF that you’ll be seeing in the coming weeks. If you’ve got a newsstand near you, check out the December/January issue of NYLON Guys for an in-depth interview with Phil Fish about Fez, and in February/March, I feature Alexander “Demruth” Bruce about Antichamber.
In other news, Indie Game: The Movie showed at Sundance, and I hear via the Twitter that HBO is considering doing some kind of series about the experience of indie game designers based on it. I’m excited that the wider world is starting to understand that these people are some of the modern age’s most important artists.
I’ve been super busy; then again, aren’t I always? For some reason lately a high volume of you have sent me articles, blog posts, etc. asking for editing, advice, feedback, thoughts and whatnot, and I just haven’t been able to get to any of it. I’m really really sorry! I’ll get back to you if I can, but please don’t be too mad at me if I just don’t have the bandwidth right now.
It continues raining/snowing here in New York. Via thisismyjam.com, here is Broken Water’s Kamilche House, a good song for days indoors.

Out With The Old


Are you tired of it by now, how I have big gaps in blogging and then open my newest post with a statement about how busy I’ve been? Yes? Okay, then I’ll skip that part.

Who’s playing Halo: Reach? I must say, I’ve never been much of a Halo, player, which is to say I dabbled in Halo 2 (by “dabbling” I mean ‘held the controller for approx 5 mins, watched someone else play for approx 15 mins, and wandered off’) and never played the others at all.

But it’s easy to see why, regardless of personal taste, the launch of the title has been a big deal from every angle.

Hello, Halo

There’s the business aspect: Bungie’s last game before it’s officially independent, and the information it can offer about trends in packaged software sales. Those are declining, of course, but a launch of Reach‘s scale promises to offer some answers on whether the core gamer will still show up at retail for the right kind of game.

There’s the scope of the tech and design, too; I’m told they rebuilt the engine from scratch and used a mocap studio because having a lifelike world was so important to the game’s aim. There’s the design angle — how do you iterate on such a huge property and still please your core audience? And then, of course, there are numerous critical angles to explore, as Reach is arguably the most narrative-focused iteration in a franchise that no one would have ever called contemplative or narrative-driven in the past.

For someone like me, there were tons of brand-new angles to consider. So I attended the game’s launch in Times Square and covered it for Gamasutra. I interviewed senior staff from Bungie and also from 343 Industries, Microsoft’s internal division that will take the reins from here on out.

Are you worried about the future of the franchise now that it’s effectively changing hands? Concerned by Microsoft’s suggesting that it could decrease the time between installments and annualize the franchise more? You may or may not have noticed that the talented Chris Morris writes on current events for us at Gamasutra now — he sees cause for concern about Halo‘s future.

Doesn’t Anybody Stay In One Place Anymore?

Change is always hard, though — particularly for gamers. Innovation and evolution seem especially difficult to achieve successfully in this space. If you change what fans are used to, they react poorly. But if you give them more of the same — if, for example, a sequel doesn’t change much over its predecessor — they also react poorly.

This has been hard for game developers to keep pace with as it is, but now we’re in a long console cycle where there’s no new hardware on the horizon whereby tech advancements can refresh a property all by themselves. Notice an increasing number of franchise tangents, reimaginings, reboots under discussion? That’s because it’s so hard to sequelize in the current environment.

I’m impressed with the industry’s approach to combating staleness. Lots of designers have told me later that a long console cycle means that development on the hardware itself — you know, the basics — are pretty well down pat, so they can increasingly focus on refining less tangible elements like story, gameplay, and the interplay between the two.

In order to make things evolve and keep gamers engaged, devs are going to have to try some things they’ve never done before, and while they won’t always hit the mark, ultimately an environment of experimentation and learning is an excellent thing for games. It’s pretty exciting, actually — at this point in a long lifecycle you’d expect us all to be getting a little restless and bored, but the future’s full of possibilities that I, for one, can’t wait to check out.

But again, we’re talking about gamers, here, and many of them freak and pre-judge when they see something different. Easy for me to say — even I had a teeny episode of nerd rage when I saw the trailer for the new Devil May Cry reboot. If my reaction had been any more knee-jerk, my cat would have gone flying across the room.

So I decided to examine the deceptively complex situation in an in-depth analysis at Gamasutra. What a double-edged sword for Ninja Theory, appointed as the new steward of a beloved Japanese franchise. I don’t really envy them at all. I admit, I don’t like it much more than some of you guys do, but let’s be optimistic, because one trailer is not at all enough information on which to create a judgment.

Part of my hesitation comes from the ways I don’t like to see Japanese art and design trends so quickly sloughed away in the eagerness to “globalize.” Certainly, something’s gotta change over there, but I don’t know if the reason Japanese games don’t sell in the West as well as they used to can be fixed by exporting properties to European studios. We’ll see, I suppose.

All Together Now!

All of the major interviews and coverage I’ve done in the past few weeks, in fact, seem to point to the theme I’m discussing here: Innovation, freshness, evolution and change. In case you have missed:

Interview: Atari GO Goes For Online, Social, Mobile Publishing Strategy — The head of Atari’s newest and largest online publishing initiative explains why being a true online publisher is a key survival strategy in the changing climate.

In-Depth: THQ’s Farrell Thinks Outside The Old Hardware Lifecycle — speaking to investors, THQ’s CEO talks about our new climate and where publishers would be served to reallocate their attentions.

Interview: DeLoura On The Rapidly-Evolving Tools Space, New Divergence — longtime tech strategist, most recently of Google (briefly), talks about changes in the development tools space that both respond to and influence changing business models and design paradigms. Similarly, they’re both creating and reacting to a major gap between the AAA and the new mobile/social/indie space.

Interview: IGN Provides Free Office Space To Indies With New ‘Open House’ Program — speaking of indies, IGN has a cool new no-strings-attached program to support and network with indie developers.
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Interview: Building On BioShock 2 With Minerva’s Den — And pursuant to what I said on the narrative-building side, our friend Steve Gaynor talks challenges, opportunities and process in creating a compelling tangent to BioShock 2 and the world of Rapture with the new Minerva’s Den DLC.

I Ain’t Done, This Ain’t The Chorus

I have written a satire of the Gizmodo-browsing, startup-starting, latte-drinking social media entrepreneur over at Thought Catalog. It is all intended in good fun, so please read How I Became A Social Media Millionaire In One Week.

Going to GDC Austin? Are you a student, aspiring student or recent grad? If not, does the sound of me standing behind a podium asking questions of teachers who are sitting at a table sound awesome to you? Did you answer ‘yes’ to any of the preceding questions? If so, have I got the panel for you.

My article on first-person shooters is in GamePro’s October issue, which I think might still be on newsstands. I don’t know! I forgot that I even wrote it! I’m sure I’m forgetting some other things here, but hey, this is enough for you guys, right?

So lastly, I want to thank everyone who has checked out Babycastles and made a donation to help their fundraising efforts. Since I pleaded for the support of the SVGL Army, fundraising has really ramped up, and we owe so much of that to you guys, and those of you who passed the word along. Thank you so much for believing in the ideas that are important to me and my friends. I can’t say it enough.

Indie Games Take Manhattan (With Your Help)

I’ve talked to you a bit before about Babycastles, the arcade some friends of mine are founding in a local community space here in New York City. It’s meant to be a tangible showcase and play space for independent games, the kind a wider audience wouldn’t necessarily encounter on their own. How great for indies, how great for games!

What’s more is the founders want to take what they’ve begun with indie spirit out here in the DIY scene and build a bigger fancier indie arcade IN TIMES SQUARE. Imagine! A mecca for hands-on indie gaming in the culture capital of America! This is something I think all who love games might be interested in supporting.

Babycastles needs funds, though. You guys were so supportive of Kill Screen when I told you about it, and SVGLers helped very much in the fundraising effort — this is the same kind of idea, a spiritual alternative to what already exists that will be good for the gaming space on the whole.

Every little dollar helps, but the Babycastles team has put together a ton of awesome incentive packages, too (apparently they have added a pixelblock rendering of me to the available bonuses?!). Please check it out and consider making even a small donation in support of a great cause — we’ve only got a couple of weeks left!

(Wanna know what it’s like? Check the article I wrote — in the process of researching it, I learned I wanted to do everything I could to help).

The New Immersion


As social networking has surged, I’ve found myself blogging less. When I began SVGL, I used to post sometimes multiple times per day, if my time permitted; I was full of ideas and I loved having the opportunity to regularly connect and engage with the community that was building itself here.

So I’ve observed the slowdown in my blogging habits with some concern. Has it meant I have fewer ideas now? Am I just too busy with my pro work to keep up my dear little blog anymore? Am I less interested in video game conversation than I used to be, now that the majority of my waking hours are spent in that space? Am I burning out, or something?

Then I realized I still produce just as much community content as I did before; it’s simply taking a different shape. Many of you have transitioned with me from SVGL to the venues I use with far more regularity: Twitter and Formspring. I imagine that if one accumulated the sum total of text related to the video game community that I place on Twitter and Formspring on a regular basis, the result would be pretty parallel to the amount of content that I used to produce blogging. I’m still sharing my ideas with the community; it’s just taken on a different shape.

I remember when N’Gai Croal, one of the most venerated writers doing the work that I hoped to join, began to post less on his Level Up blog. Alongside that, he was becoming a real power Twitter user. I didn’t see the point of Twitter at the time; “why would anyone be interested in what I am doing all day, and what do I care what all these strangers had for breakfast,” I wondered. When I heard trendy folk saying that Twitter was anything close to “journalism”, I was scornful. It seemed preposterous.

I teased N’Gai a lot about his early-adopter Twitter evangelism. But he is well-reputed among us all for his prescience and his big-picture thinking, and I now realize that at the time, he had immediately realized something that took me a lot longer to grasp: Twitter is a brilliant communication platform, and it does, in fact, serve the same function for many that a lot of blogs do.

The first time I attended events like GDC or E3, people came up to me and said, “oh, I read your blog.” The most recent time I attended these events, people came up to me and said, “oh, I read your Twitter.” I found it bizarre, but it makes sense.

Twitter and Formspring are quick-hit, instant-access experiences. 140 characters are more effective than 1400, sometimes. Rather than cull my RSS feeds and read sprawling forum threads to discover what the community is interested in and speak to it, you use these social networking venues to bring your interests to me directly (that plenty of Formspring questions are about my sex life and shoe size or whatever is an unfortunate side-effect).

And I realized recently that these new media are having a similar transformative effect on the video game industry. We’re being trained in this socially-networked era of bite-size communications, and all media are evolving alongside it. I used to read music blogs to discover new songs, but now I simply follow those bloggers on Twitter and when they post a new track, I just pick and choose what links to click from their feeds. My favorite book right now is a reflection of these new fashions of interaction.

When it comes to video games, sales of traditional 60-hour packaged software video games are declining, but sales of smaller, easy-access digitally-distributed titles are on the rise. Even someone who was a “light” gamer before has new options: instead of downloading and installing some kind of PC executable, they’re playing iPhone apps while they wait for the subway.

Much conversation takes place in the social gaming space about how they will cannibalize the console industry, as if the two platforms were mutually exclusive. This message is often reduced to its barest bones, and translated as “Facebook games are the new ‘video game’, and console video games will cease to exist.”

Certainly that message is worth scoffing at; gamers still want depth. But the way they want it delivered is definitely evolving; social media is gaining steam, and we, the primary ‘gamer generation’, are growing older. Maybe the adolescents of the coming era are begging not for a gaming console, but for a Steam account. We want our content available in an accessible, jump-in-jump-out way. We want it always on, always there, living intangible and persistent on invisible digital strings.

But these rising trends are having massive impacts on the economic models of the businesses they’re enabling. To use the music example again, I can listen to 20 new songs a day if I want to, just by following artists and music bloggers on Twitter. Do I spend money, though? Not too often. I buy records often when I’m in love with a band, but I listen to free digital music much more. Most of the music I own, I found or someone gave it to me. How are bands supposed to make any money?

That the game industry is so high-risk has been my greatest lament regarding traditional games; when success is so hard and so much cash is required to even give it a shot, no one wants to lose millions because they tried something new and interesting that didn’t work. If people are buying fewer console titles — and they are — then the game industry becomes even more hit-driven than it used to be.

We’ve always looked to indies to use their freedom and agility to create real innovation, but independents have long had challenges of their own — low risk doesn’t mean no risk, and lower cost doesn’t mean “affordable.” If indies can’t reach their audiences, they’re still disabled. And broke, probably. The upside of this online shift in the way we consume is that the indie scene becomes even more relevant. When the real good content is discovered by crowdsourcing on social networks and obtained by a one-click download, the playing field of AAA guns and indie developers looks a lot more even.

That doesn’t mean I feel convinced we’re not losing something in the transition. My least-favorite phrase in developer interviews used to be “bite-sized chunks.” Not only is that aesthetically unappealing, but to me it spoke of a design philosophy that eschewed depth in favor of accessibility. I’m still not so sure it doesn’t.

I hope I never stop blogging, and I hope game developers will still make hours-long walled gardens for me to escape into, just like I’ve done since I was a little girl. There’s hope for console devotees in games like the rightfully-flourishing Red Dead Redemption, which seems to face an easy skate from here to Game of the Year for pretty much everyone. One can play that game for hours. One can also play it for five minutes.

The chronology of the gaming consoles I’ve owned is now finished over at Thought Catalog. I notice a marked decrease in sentimentality from the first installment to the last. Chalk it up to nostalgia, but my changing relationship with the landscape has a lot to do with it, too.

All Work, A Little Play

At Gamasutra we’ve been so busy with coverage of GDC Europe and GamesCom that I’ve hardly had time to eat, let alone blog! But if you’re at all interested in what game designers did in Europe all last week, we’ve got lots of coverage for you, so check out: my interview with Mattias Myllyrinne and Avni Yerli on the Euro scene, plus our Day 1, and Day 2-3 roundups for everything you need.

I’ve been doing a lot of interviews and things myself, lately. I just talked to Crystal Dynamics’ GM Darrell Gallagher about Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, the new co-op game for downloadable platforms (there’s a full, AI-less single-player mode, too). This game is extremely rad. Studio obviously knows what it’s doing in that space — and that’s not really a facile observation to make in emerging markets, even for a studio with that pedigree. For their first outing of a major IP on downloadable, I think they knocked it out of the park.

Another thing we’ve published lately worth noticing is that a number of the prominent indies whose games you love would like you — well, “us”, really, the critics — to stop weighing a game on how long it is or isn’t, and instead to look at it as a holistic experience. It is understandable that consumers are concerned about “value per dollar”, but why is value being measured in minutes? I’ve gotta say, I’m very much behind their sentiments, so you should read this editorial from Klei’s Jamie Cheng and the numerous essays published simultaneously from other devs linked in the piece.

Terminal Reality seems to have come out of nowhere as a powerhouse on the game engine scene. It’s the Ghostbusters engine, and it’s only been publicly available for licensing since then — but they already have some 25 games in development on the Infernal Engine. VP Joe Kreiner explains to me how they quietly ramped up, and tells me they have a Kinect project in house. I think I have a good idea what it is.

Despite the Madden series being one of my #videogameblindspots, I am weirdly fascinated with the annual development of the product. Maybe this interview I did with the EP will shed some light on how deceptively complex it is.

My goodness, how could I forget — I was here at the New York City event when Irrational showed off the new BioShock game, BioShock Infinite. I heard a lot of “why call it BioShock if there’s no Rapture” muttering from the internet, but hopefully my event coverage and interview with the art director will help answer that question. And maybe it’ll even make you as psyched for the game as I am!

This is just a little bit of what’s been keeping my colleagues and I running lately. With so much work going on, I’ve gotta play a little, right? Oftentimes, a lot of the ways I have fun look a lot like work, but hey.

Here’s an LA Times article I just wrote about Babycastles, the fantastic indie arcade some friends of mine are setting up in the basement of a community space where I love to hang out. It’s so cool seeing an indie game scene here merging with the music scene. I wish you could all check it out for yourselves, but until then, read the piece, willya?

Finally, I am weirding out the lovely literate community at Thought Catalog with a proud chronology of my gaming history; these are some personal memories of every game console I’ve ever owned — part one of four (it’s a long chronology!) Pass it ’round if you are into it. I’m really fond of Thought Catalog and read it for fun, and you should check it out too.

Oh, yeah. And still lots and lots of Persona 3 Portable. In general I think P3 is a much weaker game than P4; halfway through, it tends to take major shortcuts on narrative trajectories that it previously explored in-depth; whereas getting to know your housemates and discovering Fuuka early on were fairly fleshed plotlines, later on it just seems to start throwing party members at you. I loved the way that in P4, every character had their own individual story; P3‘s more like “okay, I said what you wanted, S. Link level up!” I guess preference for either installment depends more on whether it’s atmosphere or individuals that motivate you as a player.


[Today’s Good Song: ‘Murder Dull Mind‘, Amen Dunes’]

Good Hearts

So, following the whole ‘Hey Baby Game’ thing, I wanted to point out that there are other much more heartening ways games are being used to shed light on social issues. I recently had the privilege of being invited to judge a unique contest: the annual “Life. Love. Game Design Contest,” held by Jennifer Ann’s Group.

Jennifer Ann’s Group is a nonprofit organization focused on teen violence education and prevention, and each year it challenges designers of all stripes to submit games about teen dating violence — with the caveat that the games themselves must not be violent.
The game that won, Grace’s Diary, was pretty effective, and the art was just awesome (if you liked Hotel Dusk, do check it out, along with the other winners!). I really learned a lot from my experience judging, and so I did an interview with the founder of Jennifer Ann’s Group, Drew Crecente (yes, brother to Brian!) on the contest and how games are uniquely suited to social issue education.
Check out the article, and please consider making a donation to this excellent cause.
[Today’s Good Song: ‘Over The Balcony‘, Quiet Loudly]

Congrats Bee


Congrats to my former supervisor, favorite drunk-texting buddy and longtime friend Brandon Boyer on being named Chairman of the IGF. Brandon is the indisputable king of champions for our indie community and absolutely no one deserves it more.

Posting this photo of us at GDC (with David Hellman, no less!) so I can brag that I know him. Hope they don’t mind. This photograph is the work of .tiff, and overall I must say that those who photograph me/appear in photographs with me at industry events are people you should envy me for getting to hang with.
[Today’s Good Song: Animal Collective’s ‘Fireworks‘, the tune with which he taught me how to love the band.]

Post-GDC Mega Catch-Up, Yeah!

Well, I’ve been home for a few days from GDC — every year it’s an amazing, inspiring and invigorating time. I got to see Jason Rohrer discuss his new DS game, Diamond Trust of London (but Brandon Boyer’s writeup of Rohrer’s Sleep is Death is far more interesting than my article); he was talking alongside Molleindustria’s Paolo Pedercini, whom you know I adore.

I saw some truly impressive Unreal Engine tech demos and received reassurance on the future of AAA gaming from Epic’s Mark Rein (despite the concerted attempts of social gaming venture capitalists to discourage me) ; I heard wonderfully wacky Metroid and Wario Ware visionary Yoshio Sakamoto discussing his creative strategy, and I was refreshed to learn that at ThatGameCompany, development process actually comprehends that game developers are human beings and not design robots that produce when crunched upon.
It’s amazing what happy people who work well together can create, isn’t it? One of the highlights of my GDC was meeting many of the members of the team at Naughty Dog, who swept the Game Developers’ Choice awards (which I also attended, enjoying the hosting talents of Kyle Gabler and Erin Robinson). Friend and awesome person Andy Schatz won the IGF with Monaco!
To be quite honest, I have never been a big fan of the Uncharted games; when people ask me what I think of Uncharted 2, I use words like “impressive” “an achievement” “a beautiful game” and “very well done.” I mean all those words, of course, but when I’m writing criticism I tend to prize other traits. And I always like to root for underdogs; while I knew there was no chance whatsoever that Demon’s Souls would beat Uncharted 2 as Game of the Year at the Choice awards, I selfishly wanted to see it happen! I also would have preferred to see Brutal Legend recognized for writing, but hey.
However, having met a handful of the team’s senior members during GDC, I’ve gotta say I’ve never met a nicer or more humble group of game developers, and can’t help but feel that nobody deserves the recognition more. They are the kind of people who, when you ask them what they do while chatting at the bar, are humble to the max –you have to push to even get them to admit they made the Game of the Year, and they all seem thrilled and bewildered by the recognition.
(Leaders on a certain couple of 2009′s other major game successes often do not deign to socialize with us commonfolk, and if they did they would come in all popped collars, snakeskin boots and chest pounding over what they developed.)
The Dogs told me they feel like a family and love working together. I think that makes a difference. I would love it if more publishers got the idea that the way to get developers to make excellent games is to allow them to work according to their own internal culture (provided it’s a positive one).
These are the kinds of people and ideas that inspire me most when I am at GDC, although the indies tend to be my very most favorite. The Los Angeles Times has just run an article by me on the constituency of the Experimental Gameplay Project, many of whom I got to say hello to at the event this year. While at GDC I also heard 2DBoy’s Ron Carmel explain how a group of indie “angels” hopes to support independent designers in self-publishing.
I spoke on a panel, too. Mia Consalvo, Manveer Heir, Jamin Brophy-Warren and I discussed issues of diversity and race both within video games and on the development side. My friend Michael Abbott of Brainy Gamer fame (who is so warm and nice I cannot quite believe he is From The Internet, and who as usual I did not get to see enough of!) did an excellent write-up of our discussion. There seemed to be a great response to the discussion in general, and Cliff Bleszinski said it gave him ideas and “white man’s guilt”!!
Friend and fellow Kotaku columnist Tim Rogers completed a speaker evaluation of my panel that indicates he would not recommend it to others out of the desire to “keep it as a secret weapon,” that all speakers received zeroes except for I who received a rare “heart” ranking, and that “Bikini” is required to improve the panel. This was my favorite GDC Souvenir:

(courtesy of Tim, the high-res version of his speaker evaluation is here.)
The combination of hard work and hard drinking killed many of my brain cells, I’m sure — it was a whirlwind time and I’m glad to be back bumming around in Brooklyn with my snobby cat and not-snobby friends, but there’s nothing like GDC. I had a wonderful time, and to those of you who did come up and say hello to me, it was nice to meet you!
Don’t forget, you can find all of my GDC coverage, as well as the fine and excellent work of my colleagues, at Gamasutra’s designated GDC 2010 landing page.