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A Virtual Game Writer Interview

Game Writer Central received this request for a few words across the ocean, and I thought it might be of interest to all:

I’m a student studying Internet & Business Technologies at Sheffield Hallam University and I’m currently in my final year. My final year project revolves around video game writing as a game design medium and it’s place in the computer games Industry. More specifically, I’m looking into the troubles of games writers attempting to get into the industry, and the trending lack of a writers talent’s, and in some cases, writers being excluded completely.

Stevie, thanks for writing…! Here are your answers, below. Questions in italics.

Are the requirements and or challenges of getting into the games development industry as a writer or even a designer more difficult than before?

I’d say yes. Games are no longer marginalized as the domain of pimply-faced teens, and the games themselves are more immediate and life-like than ever before. As a result, the industry has more hopefuls knocking on its doors and more students seriously pursuing it as a career, instead of falling into it by accident.

How would you say the life of a writer and the challenges that come with the job (or benefits) 15 years ago differ from today?

That is a wide-open question, all right. In many ways, game design and game writing is returning to its roots with the mobile revolution. Once again, it’s possible for a little one- or two-person team to change the world from their garage. But the game industry as a whole is getting more diverse and concomitantly more fractured, with all the different platforms and delivery media. More than ever, it seems to me it helps to be open to new fields and challenges, and well-versed in the eternal truths of storytelling. No matter what new devices hit the market, a good story is a good story.

What are your opinions on the industry today, do you think writers are neglected? have they always been? should there be a solid position in every creative team for a writer, especially with such large budgets nowadays?

It depends on your perspective. As with Hollywood, gaming is more sensitive than ever to large fan bases outside of their medium. We’ve seen games like Strongbad, Sam & Max, and Penny Arcade that really sprung from a writer’s head well before ever hitting an interactive form. But unlike Hollywood, the game industry isn’t really script-dependent and many games — heck, the majority of games — go out the door with story and dialogue flaws that would be universally panned by movie critics.

Sometimes this is because of budget, but just as often it’s because of the tremendous egos of producers and designers who never bother to have a professional check their work. It’s the same kind of flaw that induces everyone to think they could write a bestseller, but these same people would never try to pick up a paintbrush or step on a stage without training.

I don’t think every creative team should have a dedicated writer, though. There are some people who can capably handle, say, a programmer and a writer role simultaneously, and of course there are games that don’t really have much of a storyline, like Angry Birds or most puzzle and sports games.

Do you believe social platforms online could be used productively to give writers more recognition? If not, what alternatives could help? A common topic in recent years has been that games developers are
sacrificing emotional depth and narrative for more visually appealing features, what are your thoughts on these opinions? Can games fare better with the correct creative writing input regardless of visuals?

I do believe that social platforms could lead to recognition, but I don’t see it happening. What’s lacking isn’t information or tools — it’s the sheer disinterest in the way a game is made. When people start to care more about screenwriters than the actors who speak their lines or the directors who manage film projects, then perhaps we’ll have an environment where game writers will get their due.

Big-name writers could change things, I think. If Clive Barker’s Jericho hadn’t bombed, then maybe he’d have been at the vanguard of a new writer-driven game segment. Game writers get less credit than screenwriters, and often it’s difficult to figure out who wrote what on a game. If gamers demanded better accountability on that, I’m fairly sure we’d see a change because it’s not hard to reformat the credits. However, it’s a rarest of rare days when you see a designer or writer top-billed on a game as was the case with American McGee’s Alice.

I do think that blockbuster games can overlook the writing, but often gamers are quick to pick up on the weakness. Writing is comparatively cheap and any producer who slights it is really running a very competitive and expensive race while blind to the project’s flaws. There’s no doubt in my mind that better writing would make a lot of game SKUs more valued and more saleable.

In fact, I’d argue that slapdash, rote game writing and design is one of the primary reasons why games are not considered an art form today. It has the potential, but no one can seriously point to some of the generic sequelized shooters on the market today and call them art.

game writer central

A new jobs board has been launched as part of the new web site for the UK Game Developers trade association, TIGA. Built on the engine of DS Interactive Ltd’s very own Games Job Board the site boasts 248 senior level and 182 mid level games industry jobs in the UK (175), China (45), Germany (31), Sweden (23), Irealnd (22), and Canada (19) and many other countries. Vist the new site at http://www.tiga.org/jobs

Game Careers .BIZ – Video Games School, Jobs in Gaming.

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Thoughts on Bethseda’s Skyrim

I rented the popular new RPG Skyrim last weekend and lost 2 days to it. This game is a GOTY contender and has garnered over 200 perfect scores from game writers. The usually reserved (and incisive) Eurogamer goes as far as calling it a “masterpiece.”

I think it’s pretty good, although I’d say Bethseda’s older RPG Fallout 3 is still superior for a few powerful reasons:

• Fallout 3 takes itself less seriously, but is no less perilous. Only in Fallout can you plunder a ray gun from a crashed alien, for example, or follow a trail of clues to a life-or-death confrontation in a scavenger hideout over a treasure that turns out to be an item called “Naughty Nightwear.” And it’s useful, too; wearing it imparts great charm bonuses for trading, natch.
• It’s hard to do sword/axe/pikearm combat in a videogame. Without going third-person*, how do you tell a near-miss from a hit? (And when, oh when, will we get a game where a good sword strike stops the sword instead of clipping through the target?) With Fallout, it’s projectile-based combat, complete with the limb-subtargeting gameplay that the original Fallout was known for. No such thing in Skyrim, and as a result combat is simply much less tangible.
• Fallout’s retro alterna-’50s mood is entertaining and the vintage music enchanting. In my admittedly-brief exposure, nothing comes close in Skyrim.

Skyrim Still Totally Worth Playing

I also reserve final judgment for a full playthrough. Many of the game’s quests and character development are yet to be explored by this humble game writer. And there’s a lot to like about Skyrim. Like F3, it has a truly great UI for inventory, quest, and trading management, and it doesn’t suffer from grinding or slow-travel problems. I was a little annoyed by the heavily pixelated shadowmaps of the dynamic shadows in Skyrim (I’d rather have them turned off or static than see obvious globs of shadow fringing moving shadows), but I truly enjoyed the dragon encounters and the eerie combat in the catacombs of ancient Nordic temples.

Skyrim also has an entertaining thread where you can become a werewolf, and I’ve read that vampire is possible too.

Thanks to my fellow ex-3DO colleague Keith Meyer for triggering this post!

game writer central

Welcome to 2012! Here at Critical Distance, your regularly scheduled This Week In Video Game Blogging is taking a break to make way for our year-end retrospective. The editorial crew has been hard at work culling through the year’s 937 links plus reader suggestions to bring you the best written, the most memorable, most important and most representative writings of 2011. Without further adieu, Critical Distance is proud to bring you This Year In Video Game Blogging.

Critical Video Game Blogging

Like last year, most of the focus of this year’s writing was on the games themselves from this year and years past. The pieces ranged from looking at the title as a whole, just an aspect or connecting it to grander trends and themes within gamin as a while.

First off is Kirk Hamilton and Leigh Alexander’s 10-part Paste letter series on the classic Final Fantasy VII from the perspective of a newcomer and the nostalgia gamer. Later in the year when Kirk moved to Kotaku so did the second letter series in four parts, this time on the original Deus Ex with Leigh and Kirk’s newbie and old guard roles reversed.

Also writing on Deus Ex was our own Katie Williams, looking at the game through the lens of our possible future and how in the end it made her fear for it.

On the modern incarnation of the series, Kieron Gillen (who has since left Rock, Paper, Shotgun) observed that Deus Ex: Human Revolution is about DRM.

Joel Goodwin, aka the Harbor Master, from Electron Dance wrote about don’t take it personally, babe, it just ain’t your story calling it a look into The Glass Society.

Meanwhile, Jonathan McCalmont at Futurismic also examined Christine Love’s don’t take it personally and its perspective of a future where privacy has become an archaic concept.

Tevis Thompson wrote on Portal 2 and the varied concepts on point of view the game engenders in the player.

Kirk Hamilton reviewed the game for Paste, expressing his feelings and understanding of the game the only way he could: using dominoes as visual aids.

On the other hand Micheal “Brainy Gamer” Abbott opined that the cracks are showing just a bit with Portal 2’s story and game mechanics integration in comparison to the first because it takes a little too much time to get to its point.

At MaximumPC, Nathan Grayson explored Bastion’s multitextuality and how it succeeds where other games fail by presenting its differing meanings that exist in the game.

Scott Juster on his Experience Points column on the PopMatters’ Moving Pixels blog looked at how Catherine affected him personally by having the game’s main message hit a little close to home.

Speaking of close to home, editor-in-chief of Nightmare Mode, Patricia Hernandez, opened up to write about how she played Catherine as someone who related more than most to the protagonist’s situation.

Film Critic Hulk shifted gears to video games by turning the Hulk’s eye on Batman: Arkham City and its propensity for the word ‘bitch.’ Hulk also wrote a follow up to a number of the criticisms the piece received.

Kirk Hamilton popped up again to review L.A. Noire for Kill Screen and the strange position the game put him in with regards to his perception of the game’s reality.

Tom Bissell, meanwhile, attempted to isolate what L.A. Noire means for gaming in “Press X for Beer Bottle.”

At The Border House, Mattie Brice did a reading of mages in the Dragon Age franchise through the lens of The Fantasy Cyborg, the good, the bad and the mixed.

Our own Kris Ligman also paid tribute to Dragon Age II, specifically its characters Isabela and Aveline and how they bring the game the game into a whole new light in “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsless Rogue.”

Switching from one end of the RPG spectrum to the other, we have Tom Bissell taking on Skyrim and the world it presents.

Katie Williams, however, focused her analysis on the character creator and how she had to restart several times before she had a character she found acceptable in the fiction.

Eurogamer had a piece by Rich Stanton looking at the two releases of Skyrim and Dark Souls and how each in turn tells its stories.

Meanwhile, Brendan Keogh chronicled his journey through Dark Souls how it treats both grinding and its concept of time.

At Nightmare Mode, Eric Swain responded to posts that took umbrage to his criticisms of Limbo and its empty atmosphere by declaring “The Text Says No: Why You Can’t Interpret Limbo Anyway You Want.” Also writing at Nightmare Mode, Swain looked at Heavenly Sword as an example of ludonarrative resonance.

Coming off an episode on propaganda games, the Extra Credits crew set their eyes on Call of Juarez: The Cartel as a damning example of a game using its system dynamics and presentation to propagate lies and misinformation.

Robert Rath on the Escapist also took umbrage with the game in light of the very real tragedy going on in Mexico and how the game can consequently be viewed as dangerous.

Film Crit Hulk came back to games at Badass Digest to look at the evolution of the Modern Warfare series, declaring it “batshit.”

At The Boston Phoenix, Maddy Myers looked at the warrior women of Gears of War 3 and surreptitiously at the concept of woman in the Gears universe as a while.

We revisit Tom Bissell for his commentary on Dead Island in “Video Games Killed the Video Game Star” a look at the game’s problem with numbers.

Newcomer Lee Kelly at Ambient Challenge wrote “Learning Russian” in an effort to explain his emotional investment and reaction to Metro 2033.

For the last few months Joel Haddock has been busy with his 13 part (so far) series “Revisiting The Wasteland” on the original post-apocalyptic RPG, Wasteland, on his blog Spectacle Rock.

Other newcomers, The Brindle Brothers, posted on Red Dead Redemption and how Rockstar shot itself in the foot by not paying as much attention to detail to their combat mechanics as they did the with Western setting they put the player in.

Another huge series, this one could classify itself as a book on one man’s roleplay in the slow real time strategy game Neptune’s Pride and his inexorable descent into paranoid mess.

The BBC surprised a few of us when Paul Mason posted a provocative piece on Hearts of Iron III and how he re-fought World War II only to lose as he tried to improve the outcome.

New York Times writer Jonah Weiner gave us an expose on the creator of Dwarf Fortress, the game itself and the dedicated community of games that sprung up around its dense systems.

Kill Screen ran a contender for the greatest review of all time with J. Nicholas Geist’s interactive review of Infinity Blade using the form to further explain the play experience of the iOS gem.

Jorge Albor wrote about the ethical conundrums of the iOS game Tiny Tower and how after 30 floors he wanted nothing more than to unmake what he had wrought.

J.P. Grant of Infinite Lag also looked at Tiny Tower through the theory of Frederick W. Taylor on scientific management and how the player is driven to maximize efficiency.

Leigh Alexander spotlighted her friend Ian Bogost and his two games that represent the diametrically opposite roads gaming can take and how of the two his more despised effort, Cow Clicker, rose to infamy.

Tim Rogers on the rebooted Insert Credit wrote “Who Killed Videogames: A Ghost Story” about the Sims Social.

And finally, what better way to cap off our look at 2011 than to pay tribute to one of its more infamous releases? For this we turn to Jamin Warren’s review of Duke Nukem Forever and what it meant for Kill Screen’s review score policy.

Design Blogging

While many pieces focused on specific games others looked to design itself. Some went in depth into a single aspect of games, while others focused on overarching concepts.

In the realm of theoretical games two stood out as something we really wished existed. First was Matthew Breit’s conceptualizing if Groundhog Day was a game, its reception and its possible history as it became a part of gaming culture.

The other was Nightmare Mode’s Eric Lockaby fake review of Deliverance for the 3DS that tricked many of us into thinking it existed and many more of us disappointed that it didn’t.

And then there was Gregory Weir at Ludus Novus with his wonderfully hilarious satire piece asking “Why So Few Violent Games?”

Kirk Battle aka. L.B. Jeffries returned this year after a long hiatus and gifted us with his three-part examination on MMOs and the future they are going to confront should they create their own internal judiciary.

Talking of big projects, Troy Goodfellow of Flash of Steel completed his long running National Character project he started last year looking at how strategy games represent various countries. In episode 130 of his blog’s podcast Three Moves Ahead he discusses the project and the issues inherent with such an undertaking.

Looking at the representation of war in mainstream first-person shooters, Robert Yang on his Radiator blog declared that the modern FPS’s picture of war is wrong and there lies a danger in what it conditions us into thinking.

Robert Sample took us through the procedural logic of crime in video games.

Elsewhere, Martin at We Are Two Squares examined “The Fascist Politics of the Infinite Respawn.”

Meanwhile, Chris DeLeon at Newsgames does an in depth analysis of an interactive anti-smoking campaign modeled on Breakout meant to procedurally represent the effects of smoking on people’s lungs and the changes needed to get it right.

Ian Bogost took a number of swings at game design this year. First on Gamasutra about certain arguments calling video games up till now an aberration and what they meant by it, to which Frank Lantz responded in the comments. Bogost then took his now infamous first salvos at gamification in the process of which coining the term “exploitationware” and calling it bullshit.

At BrainyGamer, Micheal Abbott declared that games aren’t clocks and that they demand evaluation on far more than their mechanics.

Alan of Spit Screen wondered how we fell into such a despicable state of ‘journalism’ where the “vapid rubbish” of a game studio announcing they are going to “announce an announcement” is at all noteworthy.

In November, Eric Schwarz of Critical Missive wrote that size isn’t the only thing that matters in an analysis of the differences of open-world games and sandbox games.

Anticipating the subsequent FFVII series, Tom Bissell and Simon Ferrari wrote their own letter series on video game criticism. Read the trading of wits between the author of Extra Lives and the co-author of Newsgames: Journalism at Play.

Dan Cook of Lost Garden had his own things to say on the state of video game criticism in “A Blunt Critique of Game Criticism.” It has been altered and edited many times since it was first published, but it still worth a look.

Simon Ferrari, previously highlighted passing notes with Tom Bissell, delivered a new textbook standard (literally) with how to write a book about video games.

Speaking of books, Richard Clark dug into one of 2011’s more talked-about releases, Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken, and highlighted several of its problems by stating “(Virtual) Reality is (Just As) Broken.”

Culture Blogging

There is more to gaming than just the games. The art form is only as good as the culture that surrounds them and if this year was a sample we aren’t in that great a place. Art is by people and effects people. To understand the games you have to look at the people surrounding them as well.

I don’t know how to approach this. I hate it will all my heart for what this debacle did to good people. There is no easy way to introduce it and yet it cannot, should not be ignored, lest it happen in our community again. Trigger Warnings for Rape, Slut Shaming, Death Threats and all the other bile that goes along with it. The Dickwolves Timeline.

In response to the Free Play Panel, which has come to be known as That Panel, Ben Abraham wrote a feature piece on Gamasutra on Game Criticism, Women Critics and Challenging Sexism.

Laura Parker and Tracey Lien wrote their own letter series in response to the panel and how they as women critics get ignored.

Leigh Alexander stated that she was tired of being a woman in games and wants to know when she can just be a person in games. That is, a person who plays and writes about games without having to be solely identified by her adjective.

Alex Raymond of the Border House responded to a piece on Edge that called for women ot change their attitudes and be more open about their identity by stating that isn’t always possible or advisable. She goes on that men have to change too and that male allies are a necessary part to things getting better.

Drawing attention to how members of the industry perpetuate these same attitudes denying personal responsibility, Nicole Leffel wrote a memorable piece which struck a nerve with its Kotaku readership: “Passing the Buck in a Culture of Dismissal“.

And Tracey Lien of Zero Lights Seeds reminded us that “It’s not just one joke, it’s all the jokes.”

If Kirk Hamilton is the one great blogger of the year, Kate Cox is the other. In her three part series The Gamer’s Gaze she turns the media theory of the male gaze as a concept to how it applies to video games. Additionally, she wrote her Beyond the Girl Gamer series in 8 parts (so far) on “the role of women and girls as players, characters and participants in games and gamer culture.”

Extra Credits expanded their representation videos to look at “True Female Characters” and how biological differences and cultural differences aren’t the same thing and that great characters are formed from the later. They also tackled “Race in Games” by looking not at well done non-white characters, but how a game can use racial interactions as a concept to inform and deepen the game’s world and characters.

Kris Ligman went to E3 and chronicled her trip as an expose of the show’s increasing irrelevance.

Patrick Holleman of The Game Design Forum went to a different event and chronicled his weekend in “Scenes from a Game Jam” that took place in Philadelphia.

And finally we end somewhere quite close to where we began, back with Kirk Hamilton and his overview of Suparna Galaxy, the community driven satire project of the same name. A mass collaboration involving Kirk, Leigh Alexander, Sarah Elmaleh, Denis Farr and many others, it certainly shows what we can all do when too much bored talent gets together over social media.

This has been an exhausting year overall. Despite that, or maybe because of it, we have had a great year of game writing both expansive and deep. Even beyond the numerous links we present to you here, there were many more that we each personally championed for, to say nothing of all the wonderful links from TWIVGBs past. But even though some links had to be cut, in the end we are all happy with the results. This is our best effort to capture the zeitgeist of the year’s writing.

Next Sunday we are back to work with all the new posts coming our way. Don’t forget to submit any suggestions via email or via twitter @critdistance and also have a Happy New Year.

Critical Distance

Matthias Hellmund, Head of Mobile Development for Exozet Games in Berlin (Germany) talks to David Smith of Game Careers and Interactive Selection at GDC Europe. Matthias studied Media and Computer Science at Hochschule Furtwangen University (Germany) with stopovers in Tampere (Finland), San Francisco and Berlin. Today, he leads the mobile unit of Exozet games, creating award-winning games and lifestyle applications across a broad range of mobile platforms. His advice to those looking to apply for a job at Exozet:

“One thing we are interested in is which kind of practical projects you have done before. It always helps to not only describe your skillset, but also show some the projects you have done before. It can also be some mod projects, or just some drawings, or even if you are a programmer you can do something, just do some pen and paper drawings just with your address, and it always helps to tell us which areas you would like to work in. We are also very much looking into your motivation and personal situation.” See the full clip here:

Game Careers .BIZ – Video Games School, Jobs in Gaming.

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Surviving in the Stand-Up Arcade Business

by Game Writer Central‘s Michelle B.

I’m over forty and female which I think is a bit unusual in the gaming industry itself. [I think you’d be surprised - Game Writer Guy] I do think female gamers are one of the fastest growing demographics for games and what appeals to me will probably be different than what appeals to others. I also am having to learn new terminology – first person shooters, platformers, scrolling, etc. I find it a new and exciting world so please excuse my enthusiasm.

As I pondered which game I should review first, I found myself asking: why am I qualified to review computer games? The answer: I’m no more qualified than anyone else but I have been playing since video games came out in the early 1980s. I can remember being thrown out of my local grocery store for playing Galaga for over two hours. I have several high scores and MLB (my initials) has appeared on Galaga, Qbert, Pac Man, Space Invaders, Phoenix, and Tempest all over the Southwest? East Coast? needs something a bit concrete to give flavah. I have, sadly, been playing video games longer than most young people in the computer gaming industry have been alive.

There’s a new reviewer in town… and she knows how to play Donkey Kong with the best of them.

Given my background, I decided to sit down and talk to the Pinball Wizard, Darren Spohn, the owner of Pinballz Arcade at 8940 Research Boulevard just south of Burnet and 183. — Michelle B. (aka MLB)

MLB: When did Pinballz open?

Spohn: We opened November 2010. We’re coming up on our one year anniversary.

MLB: How did you pick this location?

Spohn: We wanted a good drive by for cars. We have 186,000 cars a day come by the road out front and we wanted a place that was in central Austin so we could reach both northern families as well as the downtown area too.

MLB: What were you doing before you started Pinballz?

Spohn: We have three technology companies we’ve had for about 14 years now. They’re data communication companies and this was more of a family business on the side that we started.

MLB: What made you decide on this business?

Spohn: It was kind of a collection gone awry. We just started collecting them and I have sons that are 13 and 15 and wanted to get them into working hard and learning business ethics. Our goal was to put a few pieces of equipment on route <what’s this mean?> and once we started looking at doing that, we decided we wanted to open a small arcade. And then my wife wanted to do a cafe which she’s doing downstairs. We decided to get something a little larger. Our goal of 5,000 square feet turned into 13,000 square feet.

We started out looking for 5 or 6,000 square feet and then we figured we needed enough games to hit all different audiences. When you’re looking at covering that broad a spectrum of people, you need to have a lot of different games. Our company was finishing up a seven-year lease in the Arboretum so we put all the companies together and rented out almost the entire building.

I saw a business need if you run it like a business. The problem is people run it like a hobby. It’s a weird hobby. It’s somewhat of a niche hobby. There’s a variety of reasons why they don’t succeed but a lot of people start off too small with a hobby in mind and don’t approach it from the standpoint of how to actually make money doing it.

We had to get into various things to make money. We sell games, we put them on route, we rent them out to locations, we do church events and other things like that so we do a lot of things to generate revenue. It’s not just coin operations downstairs.

Let’s say you have a doctor’s office and you want to put a game in your doctor’s office, We share revenue with you and you can entertain people and make some money too. All those things help make it a bit more profitable.

MLB: What was the hardest game to find and get?

Spohn: We’re trying to get the top fifty games of all time. There’s a couple games that are still out there that are like ,000 each. They’re a bit expensive so not that they’re hard to find; they’re hard to find at the right price. I guess the answer is finding all the top games at the right price. I could go buy them and collect them but I would go bankrupt trying to buy all the games I want. I’ve got to be smart in how I buy them.

MLB: Were any of the games difficult to maintain or hard to repair?

Spohn: The pinball machines are high maintenance. That’s probably the reason why a lot of arcades went out of business. Flippers go bad, play field issues. I mean you got a bunch of metal balls running around on a play field of wood and plastic so bad things are going to happen. You have to clean them constantly, you have to fix parts. You really don’t make a ton of money off the pinball machines. They’re more there for the uniqueness of the place.

We have party events – arcade rentals. People play redemption games – they like to turn in tickets for prizes. Selling games. There’s other things we do that make money that help us fund the arcade aspects of it.

MLB: How large a staff do you have for repairs and how much time do you spend on repairs?

Spohn: We’re constantly repairing machines. We have four technicians dedicated to repairs. It’s one of our largest expenses.

MLB: Do you have plans to open nationwide?

Spohn: We’re talking about multiple locations. Plans are in process. We have a lot of people in different cities saying let me know when you’re coming here, I’d love to help. We have a bit of a cult following in just one year. I don’t know if cult is the right word. We have a good following. We have a lot of members and a lot of regulars that come in. People come in here and say “oh my God” and then we see them every week.

We’re also cost effective. That’s the balance point – keeping it cost effective. Main Event and Dave & Busters are really expensive. People go there and take their kids and spend 0 bucks and feel like they broke the bank playing. Here you can come and spend , play with your friends, family, or whatever and not feel that you didn’t break the bank and still have fun.

MLB: What is your favorite game?

Spohn: I have a couple. Swords of Fury is one of my favorites. It’s a very hard game to play. I like the faster games like Tron and Star Trek because of the theme. Scared Stiff is probably my favorite – that’s my wife and I’s favorite. It’s an Elvira machine. It’s Elvira Mistress of the Dark and it’s got all these different deep modes to it and it’s really hard to beat.

MLB: What was a unique and challenging find game-wise?

Spohn: I got a Banzai Run prototype model which was hard to find. It’s the one that has two play fields. It’s got a horizontal and vertical play field to it. It’s only one of ten made. There’s only ten in the world and six of them were shipped overseas. So there are only four in the US and I negotiated and finally pried it out of the hands of one of the collectors.

MLB: I’ve heard that some games can be dangerous due to wiring and problems. Have you noticed anything like that since you opened Pinballz?

Spohn: We check them out before we put them on the floor. I wouldn’t say they’re dangerous but they’re dangerous to work on and they’re just poor designs. For example, one of them will have the transformer which is where the high voltage is at right behind the backglass area. If people decide to open that backglass to look inside of it, the transformer is right there. In any of these machines, you don’t want to open them up and stick your hands in them because they’re all high voltage. The older machines don’t disable the high voltage when you open them so you have to be really careful. We also do in home video and pinball repairs. That’s another business.

MLB: What has been the most difficult thing about running Pinballz?

Spohn: Working with the city on what we can and can’t do. For example, we want to serve beer but we have to work on the bathrooms and everything. We’ve been dealing with the city for almost a year to just build our basic infrastructure. That’s been the biggest challenge is working with the city of Austin. All the rules this city has on what you have to do to be able to serve alcohol. If you change the structure of a building, you have all these environmental rules and city rules. All the unions have basically gotten together and driven up the requirements for bathrooms, environmentals, to the point where you almost can’t do business.

We didn’t know it until we got in because we wanted to add some bathrooms and do some other stuff but to do all this stuff… it takes 0,000. It’s just brutally expensive and it’s time consuming. I think one of the reasons you see so many vacant stores in this town is the city rules are far too strict for how to do business. It’s too hard to start a business in this town. It’s so much easier to do business in Houston than in Austin just because of all the regulations.

MLB: What is the easiest thing?

Spohn: The easiest thing is if you have a passion for it. It’s coming to work everyday. It’s working in this business because the people are so cool. You run a retail business in this town and you get a broad swath of people through here and it’s easy to come in and work. It’s kind of like a Cheers bar – it feels like that sometimes.

MLB: What is the funniest thing?

Spohn: The funniest thing is buying new machines. I’ve touched now at least 200 different types of pinball machines and a total of 400 different types of games. It’s buying and playing the machines. It’s enjoying the fruits of your labors.

MLB: Any closing comments or things you’d like people to know?

Spohn: Pinballz is targeted for all ages. It’s a cool Austin place to play. We’ve created what we call a classic gaming experience or classic arcade experience because it’s tokens and quarters. It’s not the swipe cards. It’s real tickets. It’s not zip cards where you have to figure out how many credits you have. You see faces shine. The kids come up with bundles and even adults at night have their bundles of tickets buying their handcuffs or coozies or toys. It’s neat to build a place like that in this industry. It’s something Austin really needs more of. You have to appeal to a broad enough audience but still have things you do for each of the different audiences.

Austin Humane Society is our chosen charity. On [November] 20^th, we’re doing a big fundraiser for them. We’re going to invite all the press here on the 20^th and have a big tournament with the new Transformer pins. We’re going to have a new Transformer pinball machine and transform lives through adoption of pets. We’re going to re-release the company with all the media there.

[Pinballz also has a Boombox Arcade event on December 2nd from 9p to 2a. This cool event combines music from four Austin DJs, BYOB drinks for those with ID, and of course the full Pinballz arcade experience.]

game writer central

Scott Pitkethly, Lead Programmer at Creative Assembly in Sussex, England, talks to David Smith of Interactive Selection and Game Careers at the Develop Conference in Brighton. Scott has been at The Creative Assembly since 1999 and worked on the award wining Total War series for almost a decade. He has been working on the real-time battle AI and gameplay since the groundbreaking Rome: Total War and most recently worked on the critically acclaimed Total War: Shogun 2. He has been the Battle team lead since Napoleon: Total War. His advice for those looking to get into the industry as a programmer:

“Its very important to have a good technical background. We are always looking for people with very very good C++ skills, and ideally knowledge of maths and physics is useful, but not necessarily essential. To me one of the most important things is enthusiasm, I’m always looking for people that are reading around the subject because that’s what they like to do in their free time. People who are spending their free time coding up their own projects because that’s what they are interested in. If you get an interview and you come to interview and you have a load of projects you have worked on, not only does it show us you have enthusiasm, but it gives you something good to talk about and allows you to show off your skills and knowledge base.” See the full clip here:

Game Careers .BIZ – Video Games School, Jobs in Gaming.

Chee Ming Wong, the Creative Director at Opus Artz has over 12 years of creative visualization and design experience, working with a diverse range of game & animation developers worldwide such as Visceral Games, Sucker Punch productions, 2K Marin & 2K Australia. His roles include being the External Creative Director on The Edge of Twilight, Art Consultant on Bioshock 2, Dead Space & Infamous franchise and a ardent Wacom Evangelist.

In addition, Dr. Wong also regularly hosts artist workshops, tutorials and articles, and is a keen proponent of continuing art education and the promotion of entertainment arts to the wider public via the auspices of TIGA/UKTI. His works have been published in a variety of international books and magazines.

With a longstanding passion in future space and aerospace technology, Dr. Wong is an official artist for the International Association of Astronomical Artist (IAAA) and also holds a medical doctorate, having specialized in Anaesthetics and Intensive Care Medicine.

His advice for those seeking to find a creative role in the games industry:

“You have to start very early on. There are various forums where you can find out more about being an artist. When you finally do you apply for a games job you have to do the necessary background research. The chances are you will be competing with existing artists already in the feed so you need to be comparable or better than other candidates. Just sending a bland CV is not good enough, you need to personalise things, research, and find out what various styles or requirements each company has. Not everyone might like manga style or melissa style so you need to be very versatile. Apply yourself to various package tools like 3D, also have a strong base in 3D. As long as you have a good graphic of various skills I think you can do very well. The main thing is to be very enthusiastic and keep on trying. Don’t give up, you might have to try 40 or 50 times. That’s normal, its very competitive.

Have the right mind set; if you are not getting much luck with various companies you need to reassess why this is happening. Just asking someone to review your portfolio is not enough. You need to have enough acumen and an understanding of where you are. Sometimes its very hard to go to a friend to ask this.” See the full clip here:

Game Careers .BIZ – Video Games School, Jobs in Gaming.

Tim Closs, the Chief Technical Officer at Ideaworks3D in Notting Hill, London talks to David Smith of Game Careers and Interactive Selection at Develop in Brighton. Ideaworks3D Ltd is a leading developer of mobile games and mobile applications technology. Tim had several 8-bit games published whilst still at school. He gained a Maths degree at Cambridge University before returning to the games industry. At I3D, Tim has overseen the creation of Airplay, a binary-portable solution for native applications on mobile devices. His advice for those looking to apply for a position at Ideaworks:

“If its on the engineering side, we look for people with really strong core skills. We have a gaming side to our company but its not all about games, there is a real strong technology core to what we do. We do look for people who have a strong degree in mathematics or computer science or one of the related sciences. And also some real demonstration of interest and ability outside their coursework, so a portfolio that’s purely based upon projects that are done within your course is not going to get us excited, but if you’ve done something, however small, however esoteric on your own, then that’s gold dust to be honest. Especially in today’s app store economy where you can build a Facebook game and put it up yourself, or build an android app and put it up on Android Market without any cost investment, then we are really looking for people to do that extra step as part of their portfolio.” See the full clip here:

Game Careers .BIZ – Video Games School, Jobs in Gaming.

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Nominating Resistance 3 As The Buggiest Console Game

The buggiest game in consoles, at least in our eyes, has arrived, and it’s Resistance 3 for the PS3.

There have been a lot of buggy console games, especially after standard-issue local storage made it acceptable for game publishers to burp out a buggy videogame and then patch it with an online update. But this game writer says that Resistance 3 (R3) has taken the cake as the buggiest.

What’s An A Bug?

In game testing, an “A bug” (as opposed to a B or C bug) is a showstopper. When encountered, an A bug halts gameplay entirely, forcing the player to restart from a save or reboot the console completely. These are the kinds of bugs that cause games to get bad reviews. They’re also the kind of bugs that get games to be thrown out open windows.

In my day, whippersnapper, an A bug got serious attention. No game went out the door with such a bug. In fact, one of the final tests of any game on its way for approval (by Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft, usually) was a full start-to-finish playthrough in one session, usually performed by one ace game tester. No mean feat.

What Makes R3 The Buggiest

Simple: I’ve never seen this many A bugs in one title, and this is after a weighty patch.

Last weekend, I rented R3 and shortly after, hit a bug where the NPC I was following failed to open a door that led to the next part of the mill level. This lost me many minutes of playtime as I explored the sprawling level again, looking for possible exits. I wasn’t sure if it was an A bug or simply an NPC brainfart. Guess which it was? Fortunately the game came back to life after a full quit and restart. This happened on the second level of the campaign – not exactly hard to find.

Next up was the coal tower level in St. Louis. This level was clearly trouble for the game engine. Merely pressing the “aim” button caused a hard lockup for my PS3, twice. (The aim button is pretty important.) Once the lockup even corrupted the autosave, which meant the game reloaded at a black screen when restarted. Pieces of furniture don’t draw in the level, and picking up data folders causes crashes.

More St. Louis Bugs

Later in that same dadgum level. That big white space is… nothing. It should be the interior of a warehouse. Was it draw-in? A bad texture? A corrupt object?

It’s always a bad sign when you look into the next room and see infinity. This next shot, facing what should be the warehouse’s floor and corner, was taken shortly before I advanced a few feet, fell through the bottom of the level, and died from hitting the bottom of the worldbox. Not a draw-in problem. Worse.

I got a little bit further and hit yet another stopper: my avatar got stuck in “run” mode when a cutscene triggered while I was running. I still had movement control when the cutscene ended, but my guy was stuck in his running pose. What else happens when you’re running? Right. You can’t shoot or change weapons.

That’s where I stopped playing this buggiest game of all console-o-rama.

What About Multiplayer?

I rented R3, and guess what? Sony has a new scheme where each copy of R3 ships with one code that enables online play. This means that renters can’t even sniff online play. Thanks a lot, Sony.

I definitely fear the day when we start seeing “standard” and “online enabled” versions of games, and online play is considered something “extra.”

What About The Game?

It hurts to dump on Resistance. I’ve played both of the previous Resistance games all the way through — and enjoyed them and Resistance multiplayer too. It’s a fine franchise. Although R3 suffers a bit from the chunky, camera-so-tight-you-can-barely-see-the-end-of-your-rifle gameplay that makes Gears of War such a self-parody, it’s still a hot blast of fun.

Insomniac’s website says that patch 1.05 is getting final Sony approval now. This is nice, but read between the lines. The fixes are almost entirely focused on multiplayer; out of some 40 items, the campaign gets one bulletpoint, “misc fixes.” Hmm.

I know MP is more important than SP to a lot of players. Even renters. And I know Insomniac had to kick out this puppy for the holiday season. But I saw a campaign that was vaporizing at the seams. And 1.05 means there have already been four patches.

With R3, Insomniac has taken some of the grind and repetition out of R2 gameplay and replaced it with some fun strategic challenges and chokepoints. Best of all, the game keeps upping the ante with the introduction of nasty, roided-up aliens, each badder than the last. I was looking forward to seeing several of them in play at the same time. I also was intrigued by the addition of upgradable weapon levels, much like Battlefield 3.

I wanted to keep playing. But the game wouldn’t let me. If this is the future of console gaming on the PS3, show me the exit now.

game writer central