Sixty Hertz

I've noticed that there are people in our industry that think games will become a 'legitimate' artform (whatever that means) when we achieve or include 'deep story telling' (once again... whatever that means... i'm guessing they mean some type narrative that evokes 'deep' emotions). This, to me, is one of the many symptoms of our industry's inferiority complex - a game is not as good as a movie because it doesn't have a deep narrative. It's possible that narrative is old fashion vehicle for involving the audience while interactive media is the new way. What's the real purpose of a narrative anyway? My take would be to involve and keep the attention of the target audience (reader, listener or observer), well this happens by default in any interactive medium, and especially in games - the player is involved and a good game keep's them involved.

The traditional form of narrative is almost essential to all non-interactive, passive, media (almost, i mean several music videos and/or commercials are quite enjoyable with out a traditional narrative - see an example below) but it's not at all essential to involve a player in a game. In fact games can be said to create a narrative, much like a basket ball game has a story that unfolds naturally, MMORPG (for example) players constantly have tales to tell that were not hardcoded by a 'deep involving' story line but happened because of the mechanics in place. (There is a good gamedeveloper/gamasutra article from years back that discusses this idea of games create stories, gotta track it down...)


Music Video with no Deep Storytelling (but still highly involving)

Tetris (one of my favorite examples) may have a story (i guess) but it's far from important to the player's enjoyment of the game. RPG's seem to need narrative to push forward but those narratives are sometimes very low quality compared to a decent (if there is such a thing) romance novel, let alone a masterpiece of literature and yet some of these games are just as enjoyable...

Another reason for narrative some would argue would be to evoke emotion, i also think it's another sign of our industry's 'issues' that we can't even see that games evoke emotions, and in several cases they evoke emotions you just can't get from other mediums. (Either we just can't see this or, more likely, people who are championing this idea just dont really play games.) Prime example below.

Emotions from a game? The holy grail has already been found!

Trying to get a user to cry is also touted around as some type of goal, well if you ever played any rogue-like with permadeath, i'm sure you've felt a deep sadness that rivals anything a novel can give you. When your level 99 character bites the dust in a serious of unfortunate events that you could've avoided if you had only not been so greedy, a sadness may just come over you or at least a sense of loss... this emotion was not triggered by any narrative but pure mechanics of the game...

Does story have a place in games? Of course it does, people identify with common narrative and since games are made for people it's a good idea to link mechanics with some type of world backstory and carry the level progression through a narrative, but i don't believe it's essential to a masterpiece game. A game's masterpiece-ness (lol) is in the interaction, they may have a great story or they may have a horrible story (Resident Evil 4's story comes to mind), but if the game mechanics and tuning are perfect the experience will be as well - despite the story... I mean, it seems to me that the player doesn't really need an excuse to go hunting zombies (or whatever they are...) so the weak story is quite forgiveable...

In my opinion games are the higher art form, since they can encompass both the interactive as well as the non-interactive, passive, arts (literature, movies, etc...) but the inverse is not true; passive non-interactive arts can not include interactive features and still be considered a movie, novel, etc... 

rant over.

Something that we've pointed out already but lets let the guys who make the big bucks tell us about it: click.

Interesting and unbiased take on the numbers... I would believe that there can be a similar article that can be writteon abouth the PS3... both far from succesful compared to the Wii and DS... The bigger is better arm's race in our industry has, so far, been quite suicidal (like all arm's races o.O)... as, even on the powerhouses of today, it's the small games that seem to garner the same if not more attention and revenue (XBLA's, for example, UNO!?!?!?!?)... special thanks to greezycheezy for the link.

Click Here for Article

Alot of people i've talked to with-in and outside of the game industry have some strange ideas about what hardware is selling and what's hot...

According to 4colorrebellion (one of my favorite sites) the NPD results are in and once again somevery interesting factoids can be gleemed (gleamed??? whatever) from this list...

DS - 485,000
Wii - 335,000
PS2 - 295,000
360 - 228,000
PSP - 176,000
GBA - 136,000
PS3 - 127,000
GCN - 24,000
Xbox - 480

No. 1 Wii is the dominant next gen machine.

No. 2 PS2 is outselling all other next gen machines (even sony's own ps3 and xbox 360) but not the Wii

No. 3 DS is the largest selling machine period, out selling all other consoles by a decent margin...

Conclusions???

Take these with a grain of salt... Sony is still making cash, the release of the PS3 was premature and will most likely harm them more than if they let PS2 run its course...

Wii will be the dominant machine from now and into the future... 360 and PS3 (especially) dont have next gen experiences just next gen graphics... (of course i dont have a wii yet so take that with another grain)...

DS is the dominant (and most overlooked hardware by most western developers who mostly made a mad dash toward the not-so-green next-gen pastures of huge teams, giant budgets and low (to no) profit margins)... I'm guessing we will see some increase DS interest, but now we have to play catch-up, and we have to focus on gaming again not graphics... good luck!

Those are my 2 cents (which i usually dont share on this blog but i fel the inspiration)...

For many, the purpose of criticism is to have your opinion broadcasted, or simply jump headlong onto the popularity bandwagon. I feel that there is more to criticism than this, something more selfless, less self-centered than broadcasting one's opinioin, or re-establishing financial reports. Here are my two major criteria for criticism:

• To further the artform by rewarding works that bring innovation and precision to a craft and criticizing works that take from the artform, play it safe and offer nothing to the industy in return.

• To further progess human culture not revert it. That is works that exploit humanity with out progressing it should be highly criticized, while works that do progress culture should be revered.

These two points illustrate what I feel a good artist's (game developer's) goals should be, to progress the industry (otherwise you are participating in industrial suicide) and to progress humanity (otherwise you are participating in cultural suicide). Works that accomplish these two goals are remembered in legend and studied far into the future. A critic should be able to identify such works and canonized them.

I feel the current approach to criticism is plain egocentric as it puts the indiviuals taste above the craft (and other individual's taste as well). The craft should be nurtured and protected (by the critics) or else it will dwindle and cheapen. Especially nowadays when development contracts are based on average review scores, these reviewers should at least be more than just opinion-driven (millions of dollars are at stake!). Why do publishers give credentialess reviewers so much power is beyond me... but i digress...

And i must ask... so what? Am i the only one in the world who feels the press is blowing this way out of proportion? To take nothing away from the games or the effort the individuals have put into those games, but i feel all this focus on Clover Studios ignores the contributions of the other teams in Capcom. Who *gasp* are putting out just as original and cutting edge titles as Clover: Phoenix Wright, Dead Rising, Lost Planet, Monster Hunter, Wantame etc...

Basically Capcom is not in dire straights with the loss of the two lead developers and for the life of me I can't understand why the press is so fixated on this studio's closure... Inaba will most likely still be making games, so the industry won't be at such a big loss...

Yoshiki Okamoto left Capcom long time ago and there was little to no fanfare from the press and arguably he was a more influential player in the history of Capcom and look... Capcom is still standing...

 

This article was brought to my attention by ever watchful fellow fanatic Ruffneck. Let me 1st state, I like to avoid making critques or reviews on games on this blog, especially before they have even came out, but the HYPE that Gears of War is getting is downright frightening. This article is an interview with the Marketers of the game! The Marketers! And this is on a so called Gaming Website. Something just doesn't smell right, am I the only one who thinks this is a bit too much? Hopefully lesser known games will get an ounce of this attention from press and Microsoft's marketing machine...

 

This is a letter to all review sites (which this is not one...):

1. Give all games the same amount of attention. Why do reviews of big market games get three to four time as much content as a more obscure game? Is this fair to the smaller game, will the scores be more accurate when it's obvious who gets the most attention? Is this fair to an industry?

2. Get some experience making games. Most writers are just people who play games with an opinion. There is no reason to respect one writers opinion over another, or even over a buddy of yours. I'd value more opinions if i knew that this writer has spent some time behind the scenes, especially when most writers will make comments about "how long the game was in development..." or "the developers were lazy..." as if they had a clue. Get some credentials.

3. Prove to me that you really played the game. Some games don't blossom off of the first two seconds of playing, some games have an amazing 2 seconds then peter off. There have been several cases where games would get reviewed that weren't even finishable because of a fatal crash bug. Should this game recieve the same score as a game that is playable? Think about it from a consumer stand point, when comparing what to buy, i'd guess you'd want to buy something you could complete.

We feel reviewers should place their scores, their play times what ever meteric is needed to show us how much time they have put into a game. Games are not like movies, they are meant to be interacted with.

4. Focus your review on gameplay! Why does story garner the same attention that gameplay does. Why isn't gameplay broken down into sub categories, like: player mechanics, enemy mechanics, level mechanics, ramp-up? Art should be broken up as well: Art and Graphics. They are two different things. How many review sites even have a section on Tech?

5. Cross Reviews. What happened to the cross review? Isn't it somewhat inaccurate to have one person review a game? Isn't it somewhat risky? Think about this: people want cross reviews - that's why sites like gameranking and metacritic are so popular. If you had cross reviews on your site you'd get higher audience retention. I see a review of a game on one site, i check gamerankings to get an overall metric. People want cross reviews.

 

- SixtyHertz!

Our take on this situation? 

Where are the Fan Conventions? E3 was always for Retailers 1st and Press 2nd, developers 3rd and fans are not even included. Where are the Fan Cons????

The death of E3 will hurt all the smaller publishers and developers that can't afford to hold their own retail shows or Fly around the country and attend the Retail driven shows or Press driven Shows. Reducing the amount of exposure for smaller pubs and smaller games. Is this good for the industry as a whole? I don't think so. Is this a sign of worse things to come. I would venture a guess: yes. Big Publishers already have a strangle hold on this industry, and when one of them does something dumb the whole industry feels it. Smashing E3 will leave the smaller guys out of the fight, and they've been barely in the fight to begin with. 

The industry is already too dependent on big titles to keep it afloat, when GTA isn't out our industry flounders, not because there areen't great games out, it's just nobody knows about them (thanks to the press and the retailers). The retailers don't care because they are making a killing off of second hand games, they need not sell new titles except for the big ones. Of course that keeps them alive but it doesn't help the smaller publishers at all. Retailers seem to believe they only need EA to keep the industry around, but EA has a 20% share of the market, that's big yes, but it's also only 20%.

E3's death is a sad sad thing for the industry, especially the smaller titles from smaller publishers. Hopefully we are wrong... 

In other words what can you gain from this website???

1. An objective way to compare the quality of games.

For example: If game A has the same graphic feature set as game B, but game A runs at 60 frames per second (fps) and game B runs at 30 fps, it is obvious that the game A (from the perspective of graphic tech) is higher quality than game B. Game A is doing the same processes as Game B but more efficiently. It amazes me how many game reviews seem to ignore frame rate in their discussions, especially since it's one of the few objective features that can be quantified.

2. For action games the more visual data is presented per second the better.

In the case of action games where hand - eye coordination is paramount, if the game is running at 30 fps the user is recieving half the visual data needed to make a reflex decision. Half! (The eye processes visual data at and past 60 images a second). You couldn't dream of hitting a major league baseball pitch at 30 frames, the ball moves way too fast in way too short a distance, it would be virtually invisibile because of the low sample rate. Once again, i am amazed at how few game critics actually discuss frame rates seriously when it comes to action games since it's such a paramount feature to the playability of them.

3. 60 frame games are "silky" smooth.

Due to the nature of how our eye and brain process visual information, the higher the framerate the smoother motion appears to us. A game the runs at sub-60 will not appear as smooth as a 60 frame game. Panning camera motions look especially jerky. Any object in fast motion will become harder to follow at sub-60. There is no such thing as silky smooth 30fps, unless there is another material that's smoother than silk, we should reserve the term "silky smooth" to games that run at 60.