I was invited by an editor at GameCareerGuide.com to expand on my previous post Game School Dropout: Whining 101 for publication on their website. I put together some of the thoughts I was planning on posting further about on the GL blog, combined with a re-worked version of my original post, and it is up today.
You can read the full article HERE. Feel free to leave comments, I am interested to hear your thoughts.
Allow me, if you will, the opportunity to whine a bit. Indulge me, please, if you can, so that I can have a chance to work this out of my system. It has been a difficult process for me to get back into the routine of blogging now that I finally have time to do it again, and I am thinking that perhaps my problem is that I need to get this self-indulgence out of the way. Thanks for your patience, I will try and keep it brief.
I am a game design school dropout. Having spent a scarce few (although rather intense) weeks in school does not make me an expert on the state of game design education. I know this is so true, yet somehow this wisdom has not prevented me from developing a mighty strong opinion on the matter in spite of the facts. Even though my reasons for leaving school were 95.7% personal, and were the result of real-life issues wholly unrelated to anything having to do with game design, I find I have an increasingly nagging feeling about the state of game design education and how it reflects on the direction of the industry.
In looking back on my brief experience as a student in pursuit of a Masters in Interactive Technology, Art Creation Specialization degree (ack, doesn't that sound so grand? - I just had to see it in writing one more time!) I keep having the same question pop up over and over again. Why is game design, and thus game design education, such a stressed-out affair? Over the last few months I have been thinking it over, and I have a lot to say about the answers I have come up with, but first I need to cover a little ground (Read: here comes the whining).
There are two words that have stuck with me that best describe my experience at game design school: Boot Camp. The military model was obviously in the minds of the creators of the educational philosophy behind the program I attended. Although none of the instructors resorted to calling us "maggots" and making us do push-ups, the over-all structure of the program was strict and grueling. A few of the young men in the program even went out and got crew cuts the first week of classes, assumedly to free up the extra ten minutes a day they devoted to their hair, giving them an edge on the rest of us high-maintenance slaves to personal grooming. The reason for the long hours and sleepless nights required of the students was the expectation that these would be the conditions we would be working under once we had our industry jobs: they were training us for crunch-time. As students we were treated like employees of the school (except we were doing the paying) and were given more work than we could reasonably complete and still have time for the luxuries of life like preparing meals and sleeping. The feeling this gave me at the time was that if I wanted to be in 'this man's army', meaning, if I wanted to hold my own in the game design industry, I was going to have to be put through the wringer and prove that I would be able to survive in the trenches once I had an industry job.
Clearly, I did not pass muster. The lingering and nagging thing about this for me is that this type of education favors the young and (dare I say it?) the male. If what the game design industry needs in order to grow and prosper is diversity beyond the traditional nerd boy army that makes up its proud history, then maybe they need to rethink a few things so that the first ones to drop aren't the females or the grown-ups that are used to having a life (such as, say, myself) so that they can grow beyond that stereotype. Texturing, modeling, level design, programming game engines and AI are all hard enough already that there are not so many people with a talent for this field of study. Do we really need to make this a battle of the sleep-deprived and the toxically caffeinated on top of all that? What about that is good for game design?
I have more thoughts on this, that I will explore in more detail, hopefully without the whining, but I have gone on longer than planned already. In the mean-time, your comments are greatly appreciated!
Imagine my surprise on Saturday when I opened the mailbox to find not only the most anticipated piece of fiction ever written, but the newest edition of Wired magazine sporting none other than Martha Stewart on the cover! The walk from the mailbox to my apartment went like this: Harry Potter in my right hand, Wired magazine in my left - Harry, Martha; right hand, left hand; Martha, Harry; left hand, right hand. Which would I open first? It was almost more than I could stand.
Well, as hard as it is even for me to believe, it was Wired magazine that I ripped into first. I turned immediately to the interview and read this great tidbit:
"I live in an old house with no closets and no built-ins. I hate big cupboards. So, where do you put your stereos and all that stuff? The solution is easy: Put an iPod in each room, like in a drawer. Add wireless speakers and the sound system disappears into the room. It's so simple, and you don't have to buy all that crap. You know how many years of crap I had?"
Besides giving an awesome bit of advice, Martha said "crap". Twice. And "like". She is now officially cool, and it is finally okay for me to express my love for all that is Martha Stewart. For years I have been taking abuse from my closest friends (the ones I dared tell) for my secret admiration of Martha (can you be a feminist and still want to have toile curtains?). Now that she has earned herself the ultimate in geek-cred (to add to the street-cred she picked up in the hoosegow) I can confess aloud that I knew her before she discovered the Blackberry.
And have you ever beheld any greater object of geek beauty than that Wii cake? Instructions for making your own are included, of course. I am all ready for a full year of Martha meets Wired magazine, and from now on will dream of the day that she publishes Martha Stewart Living 2.0. At least it will give me something else besides transferware dishes to think about for a while.
It's been a while, I know, but I do have a long list of really good excuses for not blogging. I will spare you all of the details except one: circumstances have been such since my last post in March that I have only had dial-up internet access. I can hear the collective gasps of horror among you, and the pitying thoughts of there-but-for-the-grace-of-wifi-go-I that quickly follow. All is remedied now, with the balm of this report from bandwidthplace.com:
Communications: 3.9 megabits per second
Storage: 473.6 kilobytes per second
1MB file download: 2.2 seconds
Subjective rating: Awesome
Awesome indeed!
Now that I can actually log into my TypePad account without having to go make a sandwich between page loads, chances are much better that I will be posting on the GL blog at more regular intervals. So if you are one of the devoted few who haven't gotten around to deleting the GL blog from your RSS feed yet- thank you very much for not giving me up for dead. I'm getting better, and I don't want to go on the cart.
I think I'll go for a walk.
Tekanji over at the Official Shrub.com Blog has joyfully announced the launch of The Iris Network:
"After what seems like years of yearning, plotting, planning, discarding, and plotting and planning again, the dream to have a feminist-oriented community for gamers has finally been realized."
Tekanji put together The Iris Network forum with the help of site administrator Ravena in record time over the course of the last few weeks. Their resolve to make this happen was fueled in part by a recent post on Kotaku which asked the question - Why aren't there more female gaming bloggers? - written by editor Brian Crecente. In his post Crecente complained about not being able to find women writers for Kotaku, blaming his difficulty on this cryptically expressed perception:
"So I know they're out there, but why aren't there more of them out there, or more specifically, why aren't they, you know, more out there."
His post in no way considers the often rabidly misogynistic sentiments directed toward women gamers (nor the sometimes harsher responses regularly present in the comments section) that have been the standard for Kotaku for some time. Perhaps he is trying to foster a change, but it may require a bit of introspection in the process. Whatever editorial direction things end up taking at Kotaku, at least now there is an increased opportunity for women gamers in the form of The Iris Network.
Here is the mission statement for The Iris Network:
"After yet another bout of the “where are all the women gamers?” on the internet gaming communities, The IRIS Network (TIN) was finally born. Though there are many individual women gamers who write about their experiences, and many sites for women who game to connect and play with each other, none of these sites are there for the express purpose of highlighting gamers (both in the industry and outside of it) and bringing women’s perspectives into the mainstream. Though it may be a lofty goal, that’s exactly what we here at The IRIS Network aim to do."
And a description of the target audience:
"Q: Who is this community for?
A: While I just described the forums as "feminist-oriented", this isn't a community just for feminists. It's for women of all walks of life who count gaming among their passions, men interested in networking with women gamers and perhaps learning more about inclusive game design in the process, and, really, anyone who has ever felt that they have been excluded from most games and/or gaming communities at large."
There are more things planned for The Iris Network, including an expanding directory of women who write about games, and an upcoming online gaming magazine called Cerise, due to launch next month. I am very happy to see this online community for women gamers coming together and look forward to seeing it develop into a strong online community.
UPDATE 4/9/07: I received some flak for describing the sentiments on Kotaku as being "rabidly misogynistic" (apparently we are not allowed to use the "M" word - I missed that memo). Tekanji over at The Official Shrub.com blog has written a thoughtful post, Harrasment, silencing, and gaming communities, that covers a number of examples specific to the Kotaku website that were in my mind when I chose those descriptive words in my post. Her post is very well done, and worth reading through, and gets to the source of the larger issues women gamers face in online communities. I stand by my original assessment.
In case you have yet to discover the Jade Reporting weblog, let me introduce you:
"The Jade Reporting blog was founded in September of 2006 for the purpose of archiving any and all information that deals with gender and video games. Bad news, good news, just news… it doesn’t matter, we will archive it all. The lofty goals of this blog are not to pass judgment on the news that we offer up, but rather to collect them in the hopes of enabling more dialogue to happen in the blogsphere on the topic of gender and video games."
This clearing house of gender & game related goodness is a great place to visit for a daily selection of links, and along with Wonderland's Crystaltips' Bookmarks on del.icio.us, it has become one of my favorite morning visits.
The archivers at Jade Reporting are the bloggers from three of my favorite women gamer related reads: Tekanji from The Official Shrub.com Blog, 100 Little Dolls from the 100 Little Dolls blog, and Lake Desire from New Game Plus.
I have added a permanent link in the sidebar under "Linkage" to make it easy to find. When you find yourself feeling that you would like to do some more blog reading along the various topics that include gender and video games, bookmark Jade Reporting and make it a regular stop on your daily blog read.
Well, as much as I hoped it wasn't true, it seems official: my beloved Computer Games Magazine has been done in by a lethal combination of corporate idiocy and spam. Gamasutra reported the following on Tuesday:
"Independent sources, both via an un-named publisher dealing with the magazines and from industry messageboard QT3, have indicated to Gamasutra that U.S. print publication Computer Games Magazine and its sister MMO-centric Massive magazine have apparently been shut down by publisher TheGlobe.com."
Recent corporate stupidity by TheGlobe.com resulted in losing a very expensive lawsuit involving illegal spam and MySpace:
"It's believed that a recent lawsuit against TheGlobe.com over spam-related messages sent out on social networking site MySpace may have been partly to blame for the shutdown - a California court found TheGlobe liable in late February for sending "at least 100,000 unsolicited and unauthorized commercial email messages to MySpace members using MySpace user accounts improperly established by the Company".
According to an SEC filing from TheGlobe: "Total damages under CAN-SPAM could therefore range between about $40 million to about $120 million." The filing also indicated that "...any judgment against it would materially and adversely affect its financial condition and future operations, including the potential bankruptcy or cessation of business of the Company", though a final judgement had not been reached as of March 5th."
So it would appear that we will all have to do without the best print source for game related news because some idiot built their marketing strategy on spamming 100,000 MySpace members. There is no indication that CGM was not pulling its own weight financially, or that their demise has anything to do with any failure on the magazine's part - they appear to be just a casualty of the larger business practices of TheGlobe.com.
Since I reached the saturation point a long time ago with the bad-boy focus of PC Gamer magazine, this leaves me now with no options for print media for my computer gaming news. Call me old fashioned, but I enjoy reading things that aren't on a computer screen. I am hopeful that the people of CGM and Massive will find a way to re-group and recover in a financially independent way that will shield them from this kind of pointlessness in the future.
You can read the full Gamasutra article HERE.
As it turns out, that graduate school thing I mentioned a few months back wasn't for me. I am now invoking one of the supreme superpowers of the gaming reality: The Do-Over.
"The do-over was one of childhood's most powerful rites, for it exerted our dominion over the laws of space and time. The clock was rolled back, the game was restored to its exact status as before before the contested event and play was resumed."
Time to find a different path to the same goal. The good news is that this means I have time to blog now. Just thought I would let you know.
Quote above is from the streetplay.com website, which now seems to be down.
Game developer Peter Molyneux is in the news for storyline innovations for the upcoming game Fable 2, which has no official release date but is expected some time later in 2007. In last Friday's BBC article Molyneux announced that one of the new goals of the game would be to create an emotional connection between the player and game elements. Peter Molyneux is building love into Fable 2.
I would like to say two things briefly before getting to the heart of this post: First - that I am happy to see that there will be an option in Fable 2 to play as a female character. The lack of this option has kept me from playing the original Fable game, although I have been very curious about the elements of character development used in its design. Second - it is also nice to see a developer speaking so strongly about the importance of story. Molyneux had this to say in a recent GamePro.com interview:
"My ambition is to really just tell a really compelling story. What I keep saying in our meetings is that we have got to think more like storytellers and less like programmers."
There is still a great deal of difference of opinion about the importance of story in games, but since my views fall clearly on the side of storytelling, I am eager to see how this will be explored in Fable 2.
The thing that I find most interesting about the incorporation of love into the design of Fable 2 is one of the ways it is being implemented. The main source of this emotional connection will be the love and devotion you feel from your character's pet dog. Here's what Molyneux had to say about it in the BBC article:
"We have spent an enormous amount of time and effort to make something that feels real. I want you to make you feel it is a real dog. I want you to feel something when you play a game; that's what this feature is about."
Your character's dog will be replacing the UI map in the game, acting as your guide through the game world. Your dog's appearance will be unique to your character, and it will change as your character changes based on the choices you make in the game. Here's more detail of your dog's function in the game, from a GameSpot UK article:
"One of the most intriguing things about your pet dog is that you'll have no direct control over it whatsoever, while almost everything that you do will influence its behavior. When you're walking around, he'll rarely stray too far away from you, but he'll actively explore the area and, in doing so, he'll draw your attention to points of interest and anything that has changed since the last time you were there. Furthermore, when he senses danger, he'll move ahead of you and start barking and growling to alert you. Your dog will be your guide through the free-roaming world that Fable 2 takes place in, and he purportedly performs that duty so well that Lionhead has seen fit to do away with the first game's minimap."
I find this to be a very compelling idea, and will be interested to see how this is actually implemented in the finished game. I may have to wait a while longer to get a chance to play this game on my PC, since Fable 2 is being released first on the Xbox 360, but it is definitely something I would like to experience playing.
This seems like such a vast improvement to me over the role that dogs have in Oblivion, that I just have to mention again how impossible it is for me to understand that the Bethesda development team would think that gameplay which includes regularly having to kill dogs, even if they are bad dogs to begin with, would be a good design decision (see my previous post on this HERE). Since Molyneux has identified the relationship between player and dog as one of the main ways in his game to generate the feeling of being loved - the feeling of unconditional love and devotion that is present in that relationship - then Bethesda's oversight seems even more glaring now than it did on release.
PS: There is an Oblivion pet mod called "Cheydinhal Petshop", created by Lady Eternity & Proudfoot, which allows you to have a pet in Oblivion that levels along with your character. I haven't tried it out yet, but it is listed among the featured Oblivion mods in the April issue of Computer Games magazine. Additionally, for a very simple fix that eliminates the need to kill dogs in Oblivion, try my "No Bad Dogs" mod available HERE.
I have been getting my GDC news from Wonderland again this year, and enjoying the chance to see things through her filter. This morning I was reading a post there about Whirled (from the creators of Puzzle Pirates), which Alice seems very excited about, and she also has some interesting things to say about the general state of the industry in contrast to more independent endeavors.
"Generally - I'm being broad - the games industry has been a pretty "closed" industry. Phil Harrison's nod to web 2.0 is the high-profile start of a big change, I think, but generally the games industry is (has been) mostly chaps doing mostly console games, for mostly very big budgets."
This comes as no surprise to anyone, I am sure, but there is something subtle about what she is saying:
"This year's GDC is strong on the alternative fu: indie games are Large. Casual games are Large. Serious Games are grabbing more and more attention.. and this web thing, MySpace is being mentioned a lot. The chaps with consoles are raising an eyebrow, perhaps, as this alternaindustry grows at a startling rate, bridging the whitespace between both the games and web industries."
I have been noodling around about these same feelings myself lately, trying to find a way to write about them on the blog without sounding like someone making unsubstantiated generalizations about the games industry. My thoughts about this have been pretty much based on instinct, a visceral response to what I have been exposed to in my introduction to my game education, and they haven't been settling in comfortably with me. Now that I hear similar ideas being expressed by someone running right along the edge of industry developments, smack dab in the middle of the GDC, I feel a little more comfortable expressing some of these gut feelings here.
Almost the entire reason for me starting and writing this blog, from its very inception, has been about the glaring need for better representation of women gamers in the industry. There has been a shift in my point of view - from originally seeing things as a gamer to looking at things from the point of view of someone wanting to work in the industry toward that change, but the focus has stayed the same. It only seems rational that the industry needs more women making games before it will begin producing games that more women will enjoy playing. But what has been percolating under the surface for me since taking the steps toward entering that industry is that the rational approach may not be the best approach, at least for me.
I now feel that the entire structure of the game industry is limited. I no longer see the possibility that large shifts will occur from within that structure, but I do see those shifts occurring already from outside independent forces. There will always be a fixed market for the kind of games that make up what we now think of when we think about mainstream games - the WoWs, Dooms, Halos, Ghost Recons, and Medals of Honor will continue to be successful in the way that summer blockbuster movies are. Like the big budget Hollywood model, the increased cost of producing games will limit the comfort level with change from those previously successful recipes, including even the small changes that might expand the audience to include more women. Games like The Sims and Spore - truly innovative and hugely successful games, are not going to emerge from that structure. Will Wright is the exception and definitely not the rule.
This is a 180 degree turn-around in thinking for me, and I am not sure yet where this is going to lead me, if anywhere at all. I would appreciate being able to have a dialogue about these thought here on the Guilded Lilies blog, and will be writing more about this in upcoming posts. Let me know your thoughts, and thanks yet again to Alice at Wonderland for her interesting coverage of the GDC.
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |
| 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
| 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 |
| 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |
Recent Comments