#electronic-games — Public Fediverse posts

Galleries of Art, Rules of Play, and the Problem of Agency

Games and art share a common spot in the Calvinistic world view; they’re both largely useless entertainment that are suited for children and are not considered a suitable profession. If you’ve ever visited art galleries, you probably have heard at least some mutter that their five-year old child could do the same kind of painting. Nevertheless, the art world is as serious as it can get. Millions of dollars are at stake, depending on getting the right people to consider a painting or a sculpture as proper art. Modern electronic gaming is in a similar position, where millions are poured into developing games that aim to satisfy a very niche audience that isn’t necessarily even the paying one, but one that would appreciate the contents the game presents. Game journalists are then presented incentives to portray this game in a positive light for the masses to consume.

In traditional art galleries, having interactive installations is still somewhat uncommon. In the 1990s and after the change of the new millennium, some galleries had experience with video installations and interactive devices. While video installations offered something between inert art and a film, interactive devices were more often than not relegated to be teaching experiences for children. When art becomes interactive, it becomes less serious and commoditised. When the distinction between art and entertainment becomes vague or non-existent, art has been institutionalised as a common consumer good.

Film has been walking a razor thin line, where it is equally considered a form of high art and a consumer goods. Despite junk-food-equivalent media like the Marvel Cinematic Universe raking in millions, you see serious filmmakers making serious art. It’s not about the subject, not always, but also the way movies are made. A daring director putting everything he has on the line may revolutionise special effects and how films are made, while others are still stuck making and thus presenting their visions in an old fashioned manner. When you have film that is serious art”, its intention is not to entertain, but present a vision and a message. It’s not a commodity to consume, but something to experience and to analyse as serious art. Perhaps this is why video and computer game media want to use the term experience as in order to present games as a form of serious art. Interactivity, however, damages this view as games are by their very nature built to entertain. Numerous developers who refuse or forbid the term fun within their house reflect this; they are making serious games, not fast food for the soul, not the games equivalent of the MCU.

If we reverse the view, and apply games’ paradigm as is to art, we end up with inter-passivity. This does not work in an art gallery context, where Pavlovian reaction to stimuli is not expected or even wanted. However, that’s what video games largely are, where players need to learn rules in order to reap rewards. Arguably, numerous games have become Skinner boxes by design. Loot boxes especially have become a reward system that publishers and developers abuse through micro-transactions. This is the furthest thing from art, which in a romanticised world would unapologetically not chase money.

The physical presence art requires from a person is something a digital thing you interact with via a controller opposes. Within a game, you must touch, that is the point. However, motion in games is merely a metaphor for the physical motion found in galleries, but the core concept of a person moving through carefully laid-out environment where art is carefully laid in sequence for consideration. The difference of course is that rarely set-pieces like rocks or trees in games get the same consideration as a sculpture or a painting in a gallery would. Gaming generally wants you to see the forest, while galleries require you to see the individual trees. In this sense, games are digital space for art, where each individual asset and texture represent an intentional formation to interact with the game. However, the gaming view of these is  largely How good it looks? rather than considering whether or not it represents an intentional art selection and how it functions within the given space. Countless hi-res texture packs shows that rather than considering games as valid art in their time and place, they’re considered outdated images that were limited by technology and not part of the art that builds an electronic game.

Thus, visual fidelity, as much as some publishers and players tout as an important aspect for their game, can barely be considered as art. The increased commoditisation of these assets and how PC gaming culture is willing to “upgrade” them puts the dot on the i how easily these are swapped around. Mod culture itself can represent itself as a form of rebel-art, where replacing existing art is the point. Modders in general don’t represent themselves as this though, and the point is to increase the fidelity of the game rather than change it as art.

The modern modding is a descendant of hacker culture from the 1970s. The Homebrew Computer Club is probably the starting point for modern hacker ethics, where information was regarded as something freely shared and gained. The modern Personal Computer, and ethics of digital piracy, can trace their origins here too. The same people would code or modify existing code to develop their own programs and games, and by the 1980s, these same university kids would end up building cornerstones all modern gaming stands on, like the Wizardry series.

The term mod wasn’t as common as it is now. The term patch predates it, and only a few certain games had their own terms for their hacks. Doom’s WADs are probably the first many people think of, with mod coming from Quake’s different patches. Hacking games with patches and modifying them is as old as digital gaming and was seen as part of the gaming culture as a whole. With the emergence of arcade and console gaming, it solidified its position as a major part of PC gaming. While patching and modding games wasn’t in conflict with publishers’ or developers’ interests, nowadays there are cases were a publisher like Be aims to monetise community mods for themselves. In Bethesda’s case, it could be even said that they expect the community to fix their games and modify them to cater to wide interest. Their more popular games work more like a groundwork and tools modders then go to work with, changing the game’s world and characters, even the rules, for whatever interest or fetish they might fancy.

Mods and patches used to be very important for the publishers and developers, as it offered an incredibly cheap way to start R&D on current trends among consumers and what certain engines could do. The faster the Internet allowed people to exchange mods, the more data the people selling games had.

Hacker art, at its most basic, aims to replace something that they see as disagreeable with something of their own. Simcopter raised some eyebrows when it came out, as one of its coders, Jacques Servin, included scantily clad gay men kissing each other when he was asked to include scantily clad women kissing each other. Due to a bug, rather than only a few appearing in the game, hundreds of them would spawn. This was fixed in revision B, but Servin was fired for it. An anti-consumerist activity group RTMark claims they paid Servin $5000 for the prank. It should be noted that Servin was a founding member of the group. This hacker art “prank” stemmed from RTMark’s views and Servin’s own homosexuality to undermine the demand for eyecandy for the men playing Simcopter.

Total conversion mods change everything about the game while retaining the underlying rules. Doom is the most recognised example of this, making the game live for the rest of time with all the mods and patches it gets on a monthly basis, with some being more political than others. Rather than looking at a Doom wad, I’d like to introduce you to Los Disneys, a mod for Marathon Infinite, where Disney has bought Florida from the US government. As the mod’s site puts it;

You have been hired by a special interest group to infiltrate it’s capital located in the Magic Kingdom. Shoot your way through tourists, brats and yes, Michael Eisner clones to find and destroy the cryonically-suspended head and torso of Walt Disney, located right beneath Cinderella’s Castle. But the fun doesn’t stop there. Terminating Disney initiates the Doomsday Device which will wipe out all mankind- unless you can stop it.

The mod’s very over the top, as subtlety is for cowards. While the tone is tongue-in-cheek, the game now puts the player in a morally questionable role in shooting kids and visitors in order to stop the Doomsday Device.

The best point of comparison for patches, wads, mods and whatnot snots would be to sound sampling and reggae dubbing in music. Mixers manipulate and change the existing assets and cores for their own ends. Hackivists and hacker artists tend to have a message, something to say when they’re doing this. Game mods and hacks have a symbiotic relationship with their hosts, as they could not exist otherwise. Through these methods, people have found a way to bring out cultural criticism and commentary outside the closed gallery doors.

Hacking and modding is intervening with existing systems, usually by outsiders. It’d be outsider art at best. Artists who embrace modern technology often find themselves balancing between interaction and passivity.

Virtual Reality at one point met the gallery and the virtual space halfway through. Art, however, has traditionally aimed to avoid commercial terms wherever possible. Rather than talking about virtual reality, art has opted for terms like immersive virtual space, as Char Davies did with Osmose.

Modern VR is just as much about the interaction with the software as any game. Paper Beast Enhanced Edition offers an interactive art installation, where the player explores a surreal ecosystem. Museum of Other Realities forces the player to walk through artworks that supposedly can only exist in VR. REZ Infinite is the latest version of the game, probably delivering the best synesthetic experience VR can offer. All these, however, still break the watch-but-don’t-touch rule traditional galleries have and necessitate personal interaction due to the nature of them being games first, art second.

Another major difference that separates modern games and art is the space. Galleries, by their nature, are public spaces. You share art with others and automatically have to interact with fellow people to some extent. As for gaming, it is personal. It is up to each person if they want to share their game with another, be it via couch co-op or just someone watching on the side. Streaming and online multiplayer games have changed this significantly, but not to the extent of taking that freedom of choice away. Some consider online gaming and streaming depersonalised as there is no physical closeness. Parasocial interactions with streamers and unknown players have become a common thing, but these are still done through a screen in a largely solitary environment at home. Arcades used to offer a public space where players could meet and interact face to face, yet even in these spaces there are rules to follow, and people could play their coin alone if they so choose. Only games where contest was a major factor, like in Street Fighter II, would it be allowable to injure solo play.

Galleries as public places don’t have such rules. Whatever rules there are come from the establishment and interaction with each individual person there. The time of the “activity” at a gallery is murky at best compared to the structured play and length a game has. The people you used to see in galleries were more varied, but nowadays the Internet and online interaction have changed that drastically. However, the people you meet at galleries are more reserved, as online offers people no reason to hold back on their words and virtual actions.

Gaming and gallery spaces can be described as having similarities with each other in general, but cultural contexts alone make them very different. In fact, modern game spaces have more in common with other game spaces, like hockey halls or football stadiums. This holds especially in streaming, where a population of viewers watch one or more people playing a game, cheering on or mocking all the while interacting with fellow benchies. eSports has made this similarity apparent, as video and computer games get designed more around sports concepts rather than solitary games to share with a friend or two.

Trying to marry game and art together as a gallery space means that one has to give room to the other. Either the art suffers from the game’s need to allow interaction with its elements, or the game has to suffer from the art’s need to be viewed and appreciated. In addition, no matter how structured a game is, player actions will always take the agenda away from the developer. Developer versus player agenda is another balancing act developers have to deal with, as taking away agenda and consequence of action turns any game into a linear movie-like product. These tensions have become clearer with time, especially with contemporary games.

Mixtape is art. It represents itself as a coming-of-age story, mixing high framerate backgrounds with limited framerate for characters. The latter has been rather popular in animation features since that animated Spider-Man flick. The game’s main point is its presentation and music, which probably cost close to a million as the licenses are perpetual. The player has no agenda, however, he cannot affect the end result in the game. There is no Game Over, there are no game rules to break. Mixtape presents itself as an interactive video, where you can have the controlled character (but not avatar) do kickflips or jump over cars.

That’s not the point of Mixtape, the music is. The game says as much in the first ten minutes, explaining the main character’s yearning to become a Music Supervisor. Everything else is secondary to this masturbatory approach to music and songs presented in Mixtape, as the player is expected to sit down and accept their lack of control. Whenever the player has limited control and “fails,” the result is a rewind. This instant gratification is something that games are still being criticised for. In art, you can’t fail as you aren’t “in control” of it. The point is for the main author to tell you his views on music and who has right to sound and loudness.

It can’t be called hacker art either, as Mixtape is an establishment product, banked by one of the richest in the world. It’s not taking an existing base and building on top of it. What Mixtape does is taking a romanticised view on place and films from another continent, chasing something fleeting that never was as viewed by people who never lived in that time or place. It tries to say something deep, but ends up being shallow. It’s like watching a skinwalker prancing about.

To make a comparison to a game that was considered art space as well, Myst succeeds in balancing itself better. It became a game that everyone and their mothers played. Mixtape builds itself like a movie and uses film techniques married with limited interactivity as its backbone. Myst’s approach was the opposite as its backbone is in mystery and player freedom to interact with the world. While Mixtape is closer to the gallery mindset, Myst was/is highly regarded because it presents itself as a gallery of interaction, where the player is challenged to think and wonder. Its failure state is perpetual stagnation, slow movement forward and inspection of clues and writing, and literal worlds they lead to. Modern interactive digital art requires its makers to consider how they intend to have the person influenced by what they see and recognise it must be a result of action, however limited, rather than inter-passivity.

Mixtape could be a movie or a miniseries and not lose anything that makes it what it is. Myst can’t, and neither can be any game. Art is the same, it can’t be transformed into another form and not lose an integral aspect of it.

Mixtape is one of the end points where art has been common good. There’s no real point of it being a playable software, there’s nothing that warrants it. It has nothing special to say, and whatever it says is not noteworthy. It’s not even something players experience as much as they watch virtual caricatures have fun because of lack of theplayer agenda.

Games don’t need art galleries and their patrons’ approval to be art in their own right. Neither does art have any reason to bend away from its long roots to become something that caters to consumer whims. Nevertheless, games should not need acceptance as art. No other form of play has. What players value as art in games is very different from what is valued in classical art. The ground zero where art and play meet in video and computer games will continue to create tension, but as long as there are developers willing to push the medium forward on its own terms, rather than by applying the rules and techniques of film or literature, games will continue to be appreciated on their own merits.

Galleries of Art, Rules of Play, and the Problem of Agency

Games and art share a common spot in the Calvinistic world view; they’re both largely useless entertainment that are suited for children and are not considered a suitable profession. If you’ve ever visited art galleries, you probably have heard at least some mutter that their five-year old child could do the same kind of painting. Nevertheless, the art world is as serious as it can get. Millions of dollars are at stake, depending on getting the right people to consider a painting or a sculpture as proper art. Modern electronic gaming is in a similar position, where millions are poured into developing games that aim to satisfy a very niche audience that isn’t necessarily even the paying one, but one that would appreciate the contents the game presents. Game journalists are then presented incentives to portray this game in a positive light for the masses to consume.

In traditional art galleries, having interactive installations is still somewhat uncommon. In the 1990s and after the change of the new millennium, some galleries had experience with video installations and interactive devices. While video installations offered something between inert art and a film, interactive devices were more often than not relegated to be teaching experiences for children. When art becomes interactive, it becomes less serious and commoditised. When the distinction between art and entertainment becomes vague or non-existent, art has been institutionalised as a common consumer good.

Film has been walking a razor thin line, where it is equally considered a form of high art and a consumer goods. Despite junk-food-equivalent media like the Marvel Cinematic Universe raking in millions, you see serious filmmakers making serious art. It’s not about the subject, not always, but also the way movies are made. A daring director putting everything he has on the line may revolutionise special effects and how films are made, while others are still stuck making and thus presenting their visions in an old fashioned manner. When you have film that is serious art”, its intention is not to entertain, but present a vision and a message. It’s not a commodity to consume, but something to experience and to analyse as serious art. Perhaps this is why video and computer game media want to use the term experience as in order to present games as a form of serious art. Interactivity, however, damages this view as games are by their very nature built to entertain. Numerous developers who refuse or forbid the term fun within their house reflect this; they are making serious games, not fast food for the soul, not the games equivalent of the MCU.

If we reverse the view, and apply games’ paradigm as is to art, we end up with inter-passivity. This does not work in an art gallery context, where Pavlovian reaction to stimuli is not expected or even wanted. However, that’s what video games largely are, where players need to learn rules in order to reap rewards. Arguably, numerous games have become Skinner boxes by design. Loot boxes especially have become a reward system that publishers and developers abuse through micro-transactions. This is the furthest thing from art, which in a romanticised world would unapologetically not chase money.

The physical presence art requires from a person is something a digital thing you interact with via a controller opposes. Within a game, you must touch, that is the point. However, motion in games is merely a metaphor for the physical motion found in galleries, but the core concept of a person moving through carefully laid-out environment where art is carefully laid in sequence for consideration. The difference of course is that rarely set-pieces like rocks or trees in games get the same consideration as a sculpture or a painting in a gallery would. Gaming generally wants you to see the forest, while galleries require you to see the individual trees. In this sense, games are digital space for art, where each individual asset and texture represent an intentional formation to interact with the game. However, the gaming view of these is  largely How good it looks? rather than considering whether or not it represents an intentional art selection and how it functions within the given space. Countless hi-res texture packs shows that rather than considering games as valid art in their time and place, they’re considered outdated images that were limited by technology and not part of the art that builds an electronic game.

Thus, visual fidelity, as much as some publishers and players tout as an important aspect for their game, can barely be considered as art. The increased commoditisation of these assets and how PC gaming culture is willing to “upgrade” them puts the dot on the i how easily these are swapped around. Mod culture itself can represent itself as a form of rebel-art, where replacing existing art is the point. Modders in general don’t represent themselves as this though, and the point is to increase the fidelity of the game rather than change it as art.

The modern modding is a descendant of hacker culture from the 1970s. The Homebrew Computer Club is probably the starting point for modern hacker ethics, where information was regarded as something freely shared and gained. The modern Personal Computer, and ethics of digital piracy, can trace their origins here too. The same people would code or modify existing code to develop their own programs and games, and by the 1980s, these same university kids would end up building cornerstones all modern gaming stands on, like the Wizardry series.

The term mod wasn’t as common as it is now. The term patch predates it, and only a few certain games had their own terms for their hacks. Doom’s WADs are probably the first many people think of, with mod coming from Quake’s different patches. Hacking games with patches and modifying them is as old as digital gaming and was seen as part of the gaming culture as a whole. With the emergence of arcade and console gaming, it solidified its position as a major part of PC gaming. While patching and modding games wasn’t in conflict with publishers’ or developers’ interests, nowadays there are cases were a publisher like Be aims to monetise community mods for themselves. In Bethesda’s case, it could be even said that they expect the community to fix their games and modify them to cater to wide interest. Their more popular games work more like a groundwork and tools modders then go to work with, changing the game’s world and characters, even the rules, for whatever interest or fetish they might fancy.

Mods and patches used to be very important for the publishers and developers, as it offered an incredibly cheap way to start R&D on current trends among consumers and what certain engines could do. The faster the Internet allowed people to exchange mods, the more data the people selling games had.

Hacker art, at its most basic, aims to replace something that they see as disagreeable with something of their own. Simcopter raised some eyebrows when it came out, as one of its coders, Jacques Servin, included scantily clad gay men kissing each other when he was asked to include scantily clad women kissing each other. Due to a bug, rather than only a few appearing in the game, hundreds of them would spawn. This was fixed in revision B, but Servin was fired for it. An anti-consumerist activity group RTMark claims they paid Servin $5000 for the prank. It should be noted that Servin was a founding member of the group. This hacker art “prank” stemmed from RTMark’s views and Servin’s own homosexuality to undermine the demand for eyecandy for the men playing Simcopter.

Total conversion mods change everything about the game while retaining the underlying rules. Doom is the most recognised example of this, making the game live for the rest of time with all the mods and patches it gets on a monthly basis, with some being more political than others. Rather than looking at a Doom wad, I’d like to introduce you to Los Disneys, a mod for Marathon Infinite, where Disney has bought Florida from the US government. As the mod’s site puts it;

You have been hired by a special interest group to infiltrate it’s capital located in the Magic Kingdom. Shoot your way through tourists, brats and yes, Michael Eisner clones to find and destroy the cryonically-suspended head and torso of Walt Disney, located right beneath Cinderella’s Castle. But the fun doesn’t stop there. Terminating Disney initiates the Doomsday Device which will wipe out all mankind- unless you can stop it.

The mod’s very over the top, as subtlety is for cowards. While the tone is tongue-in-cheek, the game now puts the player in a morally questionable role in shooting kids and visitors in order to stop the Doomsday Device.

The best point of comparison for patches, wads, mods and whatnot snots would be to sound sampling and reggae dubbing in music. Mixers manipulate and change the existing assets and cores for their own ends. Hackivists and hacker artists tend to have a message, something to say when they’re doing this. Game mods and hacks have a symbiotic relationship with their hosts, as they could not exist otherwise. Through these methods, people have found a way to bring out cultural criticism and commentary outside the closed gallery doors.

Hacking and modding is intervening with existing systems, usually by outsiders. It’d be outsider art at best. Artists who embrace modern technology often find themselves balancing between interaction and passivity.

Virtual Reality at one point met the gallery and the virtual space halfway through. Art, however, has traditionally aimed to avoid commercial terms wherever possible. Rather than talking about virtual reality, art has opted for terms like immersive virtual space, as Char Davies did with Osmose.

Modern VR is just as much about the interaction with the software as any game. Paper Beast Enhanced Edition offers an interactive art installation, where the player explores a surreal ecosystem. Museum of Other Realities forces the player to walk through artworks that supposedly can only exist in VR. REZ Infinite is the latest version of the game, probably delivering the best synesthetic experience VR can offer. All these, however, still break the watch-but-don’t-touch rule traditional galleries have and necessitate personal interaction due to the nature of them being games first, art second.

Another major difference that separates modern games and art is the space. Galleries, by their nature, are public spaces. You share art with others and automatically have to interact with fellow people to some extent. As for gaming, it is personal. It is up to each person if they want to share their game with another, be it via couch co-op or just someone watching on the side. Streaming and online multiplayer games have changed this significantly, but not to the extent of taking that freedom of choice away. Some consider online gaming and streaming depersonalised as there is no physical closeness. Parasocial interactions with streamers and unknown players have become a common thing, but these are still done through a screen in a largely solitary environment at home. Arcades used to offer a public space where players could meet and interact face to face, yet even in these spaces there are rules to follow, and people could play their coin alone if they so choose. Only games where contest was a major factor, like in Street Fighter II, would it be allowable to injure solo play.

Galleries as public places don’t have such rules. Whatever rules there are come from the establishment and interaction with each individual person there. The time of the “activity” at a gallery is murky at best compared to the structured play and length a game has. The people you used to see in galleries were more varied, but nowadays the Internet and online interaction have changed that drastically. However, the people you meet at galleries are more reserved, as online offers people no reason to hold back on their words and virtual actions.

Gaming and gallery spaces can be described as having similarities with each other in general, but cultural contexts alone make them very different. In fact, modern game spaces have more in common with other game spaces, like hockey halls or football stadiums. This holds especially in streaming, where a population of viewers watch one or more people playing a game, cheering on or mocking all the while interacting with fellow benchies. eSports has made this similarity apparent, as video and computer games get designed more around sports concepts rather than solitary games to share with a friend or two.

Trying to marry game and art together as a gallery space means that one has to give room to the other. Either the art suffers from the game’s need to allow interaction with its elements, or the game has to suffer from the art’s need to be viewed and appreciated. In addition, no matter how structured a game is, player actions will always take the agenda away from the developer. Developer versus player agenda is another balancing act developers have to deal with, as taking away agenda and consequence of action turns any game into a linear movie-like product. These tensions have become clearer with time, especially with contemporary games.

Mixtape is art. It represents itself as a coming-of-age story, mixing high framerate backgrounds with limited framerate for characters. The latter has been rather popular in animation features since that animated Spider-Man flick. The game’s main point is its presentation and music, which probably cost close to a million as the licenses are perpetual. The player has no agenda, however, he cannot affect the end result in the game. There is no Game Over, there are no game rules to break. Mixtape presents itself as an interactive video, where you can have the controlled character (but not avatar) do kickflips or jump over cars.

That’s not the point of Mixtape, the music is. The game says as much in the first ten minutes, explaining the main character’s yearning to become a Music Supervisor. Everything else is secondary to this masturbatory approach to music and songs presented in Mixtape, as the player is expected to sit down and accept their lack of control. Whenever the player has limited control and “fails,” the result is a rewind. This instant gratification is something that games are still being criticised for. In art, you can’t fail as you aren’t “in control” of it. The point is for the main author to tell you his views on music and who has right to sound and loudness.

It can’t be called hacker art either, as Mixtape is an establishment product, banked by one of the richest in the world. It’s not taking an existing base and building on top of it. What Mixtape does is taking a romanticised view on place and films from another continent, chasing something fleeting that never was as viewed by people who never lived in that time or place. It tries to say something deep, but ends up being shallow. It’s like watching a skinwalker prancing about.

To make a comparison to a game that was considered art space as well, Myst succeeds in balancing itself better. It became a game that everyone and their mothers played. Mixtape builds itself like a movie and uses film techniques married with limited interactivity as its backbone. Myst’s approach was the opposite as its backbone is in mystery and player freedom to interact with the world. While Mixtape is closer to the gallery mindset, Myst was/is highly regarded because it presents itself as a gallery of interaction, where the player is challenged to think and wonder. Its failure state is perpetual stagnation, slow movement forward and inspection of clues and writing, and literal worlds they lead to. Modern interactive digital art requires its makers to consider how they intend to have the person influenced by what they see and recognise it must be a result of action, however limited, rather than inter-passivity.

Mixtape could be a movie or a miniseries and not lose anything that makes it what it is. Myst can’t, and neither can be any game. Art is the same, it can’t be transformed into another form and not lose an integral aspect of it.

Mixtape is one of the end points where art has been common good. There’s no real point of it being a playable software, there’s nothing that warrants it. It has nothing special to say, and whatever it says is not noteworthy. It’s not even something players experience as much as they watch virtual caricatures have fun because of lack of theplayer agenda.

Games don’t need art galleries and their patrons’ approval to be art in their own right. Neither does art have any reason to bend away from its long roots to become something that caters to consumer whims. Nevertheless, games should not need acceptance as art. No other form of play has. What players value as art in games is very different from what is valued in classical art. The ground zero where art and play meet in video and computer games will continue to create tension, but as long as there are developers willing to push the medium forward on its own terms, rather than by applying the rules and techniques of film or literature, games will continue to be appreciated on their own merits.

The many games of The Most Successful

With Rockstar and Grant Theft Auto 6 in the news for some unsavory reasons, I saw quite a lot of hubbubs about the success of the fifth game in the franchise and its comparative success compared to other games, and other forms entertainment. I’m slightly flabbergasted that someone would claim that GTA5 was the most successful form of entertainment, when people without much contact with the modern world knew about Michael Jackson. Thriller permeated everywhere, you can’t beat it.

Nevertheless, this made an interesting thought experiment on what counts as The Most Successful Video Game. It didn’t help that I saw the goal being pushed after one or two rounds of discussion, under which at least few realized that there’s more than one way of seeing this. Business has a different view on things compared to the customers, and then you have the historical view that has a longer view on how games have affected culture in general. This is why Pong, Space Invaders, Breakout and Pac-Man still live on in the cultural memory, even if the amount of success they’ve seen in terms of money is less than whatever big Triple A title that’s come after.

I should probably note that there’s also a slight difference in how some use the term franchise. While I tend to use it wrong as a synonym with Intellectual Property, an example of a franchise would be Street Fighter II. Street Fighter III would be its own franchise, while all falling under the same umbrella of IP. This is because of merchandising rights and all that business jazz.

Units Sold is of course a big one, the cumulative sales made by one game, or a series of games. For example, the Mario games have a cumulative sale of 957 million units, while Mega Man has 43 million units.

As for individual titles, Minecraft is an evergreen title that hits 350 units sold. GTAV follows It at 220 million units.

Units sold doesn’t really keep you afloat a lot, unless you have Revenue. This is the total gross the series does through game sales, possible DLC, merch, and other licensed material. Pokémon tops this chart with $115, followed by Call of Duty with $31 million.

The way digital games are consumed is different from purchased titles, of course. That’s why something like Candy Crush or Dungeon Fighter Online can top the chart of games with most revenue, as individuals put more money into these games. This compares apples and oranges; the business models are ultimately very different and the amount of money you can squeeze out of a customer via single sold title plus DLC is ultimately less than digital-only but squeezing small amounts throughout their play time. Gacha mixes things with the whole gambling aspect.

I don’t think we should count individual downloads. This is because a download doesn’t translate to a purchase, or revenue. There are numerous cases of curious people testing a free game out and then proceeding not to continue. These people are often counted to the player metric nonetheless, which shows that the total number of players can be skewed to showcase a more positive statistic for PR reasons. This is the same reason why Sony cites the total number of PlayStation 2’s when asked about the total number of consoles sold. It just looks better, and they can fudge the numbers for their benefit.

Then again, Subway Surfers has 2.05 billion individual downloads and spawned numerous imitators so there’s something value in that too.

Player Count is also something that seems to be a significant metric, with Roblox topping the list with the estimated number of players being in billions cumulative. Minecraft hitting a nice spot of 600 million plus players shows that it really is the Tetris of the modern age.

I would argue that the peak number of players, and how long that plateau is held, is a more significant counter simply because it shows how many players consume the game in each span of time. Through this, we get an idea whether a game holds its audience, which is far more important in the long-term in terms of customer satisfaction and how well customers make emotional connection to the game. A game that gets massive sales at the start but sees the player count sink like a rock in water has no lasting hold on the market.

While I don’t give much weight on the Critical Acclaim the journalists give to games (as they are nothing more than just an extra arm in the PR machine), The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Soul Calibur top the chart with 99 and 98 according to Metacritic. I’d like to say the User Score is the metric we should use, but seeing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 topping the current list reminds me how customers can’t be any more objective than the journalists most of the time.

If we count Spacewar! as the progenitor of all modern video and computer games (and we are,) gaming is 63 at the time of writing. There are only a handful of game names from the early era of electronic gaming that are still strongly alive. Pac-Man and Mario are the handful, with the rest of their brethren being relocated to nostalgic revivals and retro collections. While we may think the most popular games we have now will last for all time, we’ve seen so many game names simply vanishing, dying out or otherwise fall into torpor. Mega Man is a great example of this, sometimes popping its head up only to fall back into Capcom archives. Maybe we’ll get another game by 2030. Prince of Persia seemed like a name that would never die, but overexposure and simply being owned by Ubisoft clearly took its toll on the name. Same thing could be happening to Assassin Creed now, one can only hope.

Some of you might’ve noticed that I counted Donkey Kong as a Mario title. So does Nintendo, as that’s the first appearance of Mario, then named Jumpman. If you want, we can count Mario being started in 1983, making Mario 42 to Pac-Man’s 45. These are still small numbers compared to something like Universal Monsters, which have lasted for good 117 years. Looking at the comic book world, both Superman and Batman are in their 80s.

However, the gaming industry influences itself. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was influenced by Final Fantasy, which was seen as the premier gaming IP at one point in the Western World. However, going back and seeing what influenced Final Fantasy we find Dragon Quest and its numerous copycats and imitators. Going further back we find both Utima and Wizardry influencing the game, which also influenced so many other Japanese computer RPGs like The Black Onyx, which inspired the creation of The Legend of Zelda. Ultima and Wizardry have their roots in MUDs, which have roots in table-top RPGs, mainly Dungeon and Dragons, which have their roots in the military games generals and other army leaders would play to train their leadership.

The roots of video and computer gaming lie in the games and play of children and adults alike, alongside how stories were told by acting and playing them out. This tangent is to remind ourselves that gaming is not something that just came along with computers and consoles but is just the latest iteration of mankind has been doing ever since we dwelled in caves.

Nevertheless, the game with most cultural impact is probably Pokémon. Its Trading Card Game sales generate about one to three billion dollars per year, which rivals the top-most successful film’s revenue in their lifetime. Of course, TCG is an evergreen product compared to film’s finite runs, so this should illustrate how different the media are. Still, the franchise IP generated that $150 billion plus dollars and probably is Japan’s single most important import product. Pikachu is the face and mascot of the franchise, well-known across the glob, and served as an ambassador to 2014 World Cup, 2020 Tokyo Olympics and in 2025 World Expo. Its yellow face is featured in over fifty embassies across the world. Surprisingly, Pokémon has shown itself to be a multi-generational product, a cornerstone of sorts that sees constant parodies in other shows and games while drawing tourists of all ages to Pokémon Centers across the world, especially to Japan.

Even if Pokémon is a 1990s product, it can be placed alongside Mario and Pac-Man as a long-lasting face of gaming, with it probably ending up as the face of gaming on the long run if we had to choose one, for better or worse. This also illustrates some why Nintendo, The Pokémon Company, and to a lesser extent GameFreak would be freakishly overprotective of their IP. There are numerous other contenders we could put there, but I’m making a point there; there must be generationally recognizable face for all without really any breaks.

The list of games that influenced other games is as wide as the library of games out there. Talking about First-Person Shooting ends up someone tracing back to Halo, then Half-Life, a mention of Quake’s code still running in some modern games, another mentioning Goldeneye 007, with usually ending with either Doom or Wolfenstein 3D in a similar fashion I did with RPGs above.

While we have been seeing the influence of video and computer games on the culture ever since the 1970s in an increasing fashion, it’s hard to determine how well a game or a name will endure as history happens. Only in hindsight can we properly determine the ebbs and flows of masses, something the current gaming industry seems to ignore in favour of trying to appease each other with the press as their echo chamber. When Demon’s Souls was put out for the first time, nobody expected it to become a cultural cornerstone. However, history has shown us that people like to play challenging games, and from that challenge comes customer satisfaction. Well-built world and framing, with play-first mentality, is a sort of silver bullet. It’s not a game for everyone, and that’s fine. You can’t please everyone with one product, and trying to is simply being dishonest toward the game and the customer.

#electronicGames #entertainment #games #gaming #videoGames #videogames

Philippine gaming industry figures are in, with e-games being 53% of total GGR - The Philippine gaming industry has seen increased gross gaming revenues (GGR) in t... - https://readwrite.com/philippine-gaming-industry-figures-e-games-ggr/ #electronicgames #philippines #gambling

Philippine gaming industry figures are in, with e-games being 53% of total GGR - The Philippine gaming industry has seen increased gross gaming revenues (GGR) in t... - https://readwrite.com/philippine-gaming-industry-figures-e-games-ggr/ #electronicgames #philippines #gambling

History rhymes

The more things change, the more things stay the same. I don’t subscribe to the idea of history repeating itself. Instead, it rhymes. Certain kind of events keep happening generationally, and the whole hundred years cycle seems to have a point to it. That’s enough generations to go through some hardship, who has children seeing what happens, who can’t really get it through with the next generation, and then we lose the point of connection with people and events. Rarely people look at history and learn from it. School teaches as about history, and that’s where we usually stop. That’s good enough. However, politicians and businessmen should learn from history. That changes the game drastically. Resorting to the way of thinking technological and social advancements somehow refute or disvalue the past successes and mistakes.

Things change constantly even if we don’t notice it ourselves. A lot of things don’t matter to us, and we’re lulled that the world is an unchanging place to a certain extent. Take Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an example. After the Berlin Wall and Soviet Union fell, that was seen as a certain point where history ended. The Western World would include Russia, as it was seen the democratic change in the country would make all things better. It was a march for all things good. This didn’t happen. A nation and culture going through a shock treatment of sorts, freeing industries and economy from the socialist stranglehold into Russian version of capitalism, but Yeltsin’s government didn’t implement rules and regulations that would direct the change. Instead, the oligarchs would sweep government issued vouchers (that could’ve been traded for shares of a company, deposited in mutual funds, sold or exchanged) from people who didn’t know investing and owning stocks worked, privatizing Russia’s industries to a large extend under their own names. Not that the government could’ve done much to prevent this, they didn’t have the resources or the knowhow.

Fast-forward to 1998 when the Russian government went through a financial meltdown partly how to oligarchs kept fighting with each other. Russia never had a chance with democracy or proper capitalism. The change was too fast and unregulated, letting people who knew how to game the system take advantage of others and thus screwing up the whole pot for everyone. With Putin in the big seat after Yeltsin, the New Millennium saw oligarchs being chased out of Russia, or killed, as a class. His autocracy and direction promised Russian people better living. Under Putin, Russia is a democracy in name only. His long-term leadership has the long cultural aftertaste of the tzars, and in recent years it has gained the poisonous tinge of leader worship in fashion of Stalin.

Despite the recent history of Russia, and the 2014 Annexation of Crimea, Western powers believed Russia to be a benevolent power that was going toward good for all through hard patches. Especially European powers believed there’d be no large-scale war in Europe anymore, but here we now are. Europe’s defences are largely scuffed, major centre powers were reliant on Russian gas for energy while downsizing their nuclear power, and then the Middle East powder keg began to shake again. People know about the history Russian and Middle East history, but only a few would’ve voiced out loud how we’re going to see the shit hitting the fan. We live through history every day. If you look under the crust of it all, we always live in interesting times. Not necessarily directly related to us in any manner, but the psychohistorical forces are working onwards each day. Some work hard to be on the right side of history, but in the moment of things taking place, there is no right or wrong side. That’s for the future generations to decide with (hopefully) better hindsight. They could be completely screwed by the historians interpreting events and people wrong, politicians intentionally changing the story to fit certain narratives to make them and the people feel better.

The whole SARS-Covid-19 Pandemic is an example where this happens. The amount of first-hand anecdotes historians will have to go through in the future is immense thanks to the social media. Then you have all the cases where politicians and the mainstream mass media told the people you wouldn’t get the virus if you were vaccinated. Of course, that’s not how vaccines work; they give you better resistance, but you’ll still catch the virus and can spread it around. Suspicions about the vaccines themselves were raised, seeing they didn’t go through any of the long-term testing other vaccines had to go through. No governing body was ready for the pandemic, and now that we’re at a point where its endemic, the global response was lacklustre.

The idea of global pandemic had been something that belonged in the realms of fiction. Very few people were alive, who had gone through the Spanish Flu, or the Great Influenza Epidemic. We know about it, but no government had anyone who had learned from it. There were no protocols to rely on, no people who had expert knowledge on what to do or how to enact whatever policies. People just did what they thought was the best, with some taking the advantage of the situation, as usual.

How does this reflect on the general motif of the blog? Entertainment doesn’t really change, it reflects the times and cultures it is created in. A parody of the ruling class made in the Ancient Greece has the same pushing power as the modern late-night comedy show dissing whomever is the in the Big Chair. Games naturally are there to offer friendly competition.

Video and computer games are still a relatively young media, but it has already seen a generational change once or twice. Much like how some people can’t stand black-and-white movies or read books that have old-fashioned language, there is a generation that can barely tolerate games that don’t have polygons. First and Second Generation of consoles are outright dismissed as unplayable junk. Quality of life is a must for everything to streamline the experience, which in some cases means cutting out part of the play. I’m looking at you, Monster Hunter.

The US Video Game Crash of 1983 has been exaggerated (mainly by US video game historians) as it had no real effect on the European or Asian markets, where consumers were buying different kind of machines. Often flooding the market with lousy games and rising interest in personal computers are cited as the main reasons why the Crash took place, but rarely the core reasons are pin pointed. The one point I want to put a pin on is how all the suits pushing for more games at a lower quality weren’t players themselves. They understood making money on video games in then-current paradigm, but not how to sustain the market properly. When you’re looking at the numbers, you often forget the people. You may understand what sells, but not why it sells or how to evolve the market. That only leads to weakened state, where you’re open for competition to disturb the market with a new product. In Nintendo’s case, kick the market back into action in the US, while staying in the second place in European markets.

Currently, the major console manufacturers are in a similar position, where they’re running on investor fumes and chasing an unchanging market. Nintendo must rely on their souped-up handheld now to carry them all the while Sony’s porting all their possible system sellers to other platforms and Microsoft has all but waved a white flag on the console business. A competitor could come from the woodworks and offer a home console at an affordable price with attractive exclusive titles, the lifeblood of console gaming. Electronic gaming is so safe nowadays, nobody is taking risks or chancing to kick the industry into a new curve that might excite customers. None of the Three Big Ones have leadership that understands their customers or play games themselves. At its core, the ’83 American Video Game Crash was because of corporate complacency and unwillingness to have customer-driven approach. Then again, both Microsoft and Sony seem to be bending out of the race

Gaming won’t crash a second time, however. Much like how computer gaming got its rise during the Crash in the US (in Europe, micro-computers were already trending over US consoles, with Sega later upping the stage by offering a cheaper and more accessible alternative than its supposed main competitor, Nintendo), modern gaming is rhyming with the small single-developed computer games of the era.

More than a handful of remarkable games were developed by a small team of enthusiastic people working toward their dream. Ultima and Wizardry, the mainstay examples were developed by what’d be called now as indies. Even if the console market crashed, PC gaming kicked off to a whole new start, leading to multiple manufacturers to compete with their own hardware. Atari’s consoles may have been a footnote in the European market on the grand scale, but the Atari’s computers’ rivalry against the Commodore Amiga had its own system war worth talking about one of these days.

The interest in indies hasn’t vaned since the term was coined sometime in the ‘00s. Just the contrary, indies have become the place where people are able to find far more interesting and daring games that big companies aren’t willing to entertain a thought of. Hence, quite many voices says the most interesting games are now found in the indies-sphere. Some claim to have abandoned Triple A games altogether in favour of indie titles. Not just because they’re more interesting, but also because they’re cheaper and often better optimized.

History rhymes in gaming. I’ve seen a steady rise of want for games that are distilled play. People who played one game for hundreds of hours are now looking for games that are shorter and meatier. People want games that have the arcade spirit, games you can get quickly in, have dense play, and you can get quickly out. Life changes. As a kid or a teenager, you’ve got all the time to walk around in a RPG that’s mostly walking around, a hot-air game. After you start getting responsibilities, work starts to take time, kids roll around, and suddenly you find yourself an adult, games fall behind in priority. That’s only natural, but you can’t really let go of a loved hobby. So, games that pack a punch become more valuable. Mega Man 11 was a great entry, because it wasn’t a hot-air game. It was all play, like Classic Mega Man should be. Arcades as a place may have gone the way of the dodo, but the need for games that have the same function has never gone away.

There is a market for console gaming. Sega’s and Nintendo’s mini-consoles sold out fast, necessitating additional production runs. Sony’s mini-PlayStation lingered on the shelves a bit longer, mostly due to the bad choices in its design and game selection. The current state of console gaming is waiting for some company to disrupt it. I know there are Sega diehards who would like see their return to the home-hardware business, but Sega has largely been a Red Ocean company when it came to consoles. One of the reasons why they had lacklustre success in Japan compared to US and Europe, which the Sega of Japan heads didn’t really understand. Sega’s innovation in the arcades never really translated into innovation with consoles, even when they had the best D-Pad in the industry up until the Dreamcast. Apple probably won’t try consoles again thanks to the failure of the Pippin. Google showing how big money can’t really net you a workable console either, especially when you’re tying it into something crippling like cloud service.

Console gaming fails when the companies behind the consoles are failing to deliver. Nowadays, all the consoles are dumbed-down PCs, Xboxes the most. When all systems share the same library, none of them is unique. Nintendo still has an edge in this regard, but even exclusives will carry them only so far. New physical game carts that function as keys to game downloads and customers not even owning their consoles according to their TOS are all steps toward the customer not owning their hardware and software anymore. At some point, anti-consumer antics will come home to roost and then there’s hell to pay. I keep saying exclusives matter with consoles, but at some point the scales will tip to the opposite direction and only sycophants will pay for lesser value hardware and software. History will rhyme at some point, and if console companies don’t realize it, someone else will be taking the top spot. Big things happen and change will take place in your lifetime. It’s just a matter of time. The harmony of things will get disrupted.

#computerGames #design #electronicGames #games #gaming #microsoft #Nintendo #sega #Sony #videoGames #videogames

I don't even know that's exist!! :0)
Cool stuff.. from hard gaming time.. :0))

"Save any game
Any level
Any time".

Advertisement in first issue of Electronic Games Magazine (1995)

#nakitek #gameaccessory #gaming #games #videogaming #videogames #nintendo #snes #retrogaming #press #add #advertisement #magazine #electronicgames

Legends appearing on the cover of first issue of Electronic Games Magazine (1995).

You can read it on Archive:
https://archive.org/details/electronic-games-1995-01/mode/1up

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#magazine #electronicgames #DOOM #fps #johncarmack #johnromero #idsoftware #devs #game #gaming #press #retrogaming #retrocomputing #archive #archiveorg #legends
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“You’ll flap over it” ohh 😮
.
Williams electronics advertisement 1982.
.
#Electronics #Games #Gamer #ElectronicGames #Advertisement #DoubleEntendre #Retro #vintage

“You’ll flap over it” ohh 😮
.
Williams electronics advertisement 1982.
.
#Electronics #Games #Gamer #ElectronicGames #Advertisement #DoubleEntendre #Retro #vintage

Want to own the games you buy in the future and have them accessible after the publisher ceases support? Do you live in a European country that’s party of the EU? Then you can help by signing this initiative.

Stop Killing Games. The project has a goal; have games in functional state at the end of their life. Lot of games already have this built-in. However, every game that requires always-online functionality has a high probability of just dying on you. You won’t get to play the game because the publisher doesn’t support it anymore. The game’s obsolescence is built-in, planned to get you off that game and move to another product of their. Shut up and consume products, you have no right to this license. I don’t think many will agree with my take here, but this is something I want to get out of my system. Give the above links a read if consider the idea of Stop Killing Games a good one.

I hate the idea of government needing to tell companies to stop being abusive towards their customers. However, current laws across the globe largely benefit the companies, as they’ve had lobbyists doing that for them. The balance of power between consumers and corporations is grossly unbalanced. Consumers are expected to pay up and be happy to own nothing.

Therefore, you go in bed with the devil yourself in the best way you can. This EU Initiative is not making a law. It can be a start for a ruling. It’s a far shot, as members of the EU parliament are largely clueless idiots, who don’t read the papers and rulings they vote on. These parliament members are informed by their assistants, whose job is to read through these papers and help to make informed voting decisions. Of course, these assistants have their own agendas and will mislead the parliament members if they want.

I have no love for the EU, but this is a chance consumers can’t really sit on. On the long run, this isn’t just about having all video and computer games independently functional. This is also about ownership and license purchases work. There’s only a net positive if purchasing a license would end up equating to purchasing a physical product. Think it much like buying a music CD. You own that particular copy of the CD, but not the intellectual property on it. That’s your copy to do what you want with, even sell it to someone else. We should have the right to sell digital goods we’ve bought. The only reason you can’t is because the gaming industry might lose revenue from that. Again, the teeter-totter is against the consumer.

If this initiative would pass and the ruling would require publishers to ensure games would be in a reasonably working condition, it would also make a precedent for other industries. For example, a music player that requires an always-Online connection to the provider servers might be required to ensure the player would still work after they drop support and close the servers down. This naturally ties to Right to Repair, where customers fixing their own stuff to make them work again would be that much easier and simpler if the companies wouldn’t fight them to tooth and nail.

Unlike some buzz on the Internet about this initiative solely being to kill Live Service model games, that’s not the case. Live service games would be heavily impacted, but that’s just because they’re inherently anti-consumer. The core audience of video games have been treated like trash for long enough, and if this initiative doesn’t pass, and then hit its intended target, the industry will end up even more draconian. In no part of history has an industry looked at itself and considered whether or not they’re going too far. Instead, they’ll plough straight through into injuring other consumer protection laws and then decimate them through lobbyists and gerrymandering.

The game industry won’t stop the bad, anti-consumer practices and standards they have going on wilfully. It’d be nice if they’d start being consumer friendly and transparent, yet only a few developer and publisher ever seems to go for that. Instead, there have been even more layers obfuscating the separation between the consumers, developers and publishers. It doesn’t help that the gaming media is just another arm of the publisher PR machine. Hype the Big Game, buy the Big Game and a year later the Big Game is announced a disappointment after million dollars initial sales. There’s no monetary benefit for the industry to be pro-consumer, not at this point. Some talking heads have raised worries of this initiative opening publishers and developers for abuse from the consumers, but that’s goddamn rich talk when the industry is openly abusing its customers. To be make a very extreme point, anyone who sells you something should be treated with high suspicion, like they’re a drug seller trying to sell you bad juju instead of the good and pure stuff.

The initiative isn’t perfect and is intentionally rather vague. There are tons of stuff that can’t be pinpointed down until the later by the parliament starts their discussions on the topic. Some people want to know the details how these games would be kept functional. All that minutia would just slow down the conversation, and in the end, that’s up to the developers. Be it allowing consumers to access server binaries or built a multiplayer-only game to have AI opponents, that’s fully on the developers to figure out as far as I’m concerned. Every industry rejects and fights change that’s for the customer, but just like how car manufacturers nowadays have seatbelts, the game industry will too adjust and design games to be accessible in the future as well.

Future being the keyword, as it wouldn’t be fair to grandfather in games that have been already published and abandoned. I would include games that are currently active and live, e.g. Street Fighter 6 wouldn’t just go poof after Capcom shuts the servers down.

Which of course begs the question about console games. The Big N, MS and Sony would need to provide some method to access certain online functions after they drop support on their consoles. For example, they could patch the Wii to have an option to access a custom server that can run online-only game. Or maybe an older example, Capcom would need to offer a way to access Online-only quests in the original Monster Hunter. Not that either examples would be grandfathered in, they’re just examples. Still, that’s mostly beside the point. The minutia of how comes after.

It shouldn’t be any surprise that I support this initiative. Everything that’s pro-consumer, pro-Right to Repair and pro-ownership is only a net good thing. Anything that empowers individual more and allows individual rights and freedoms to be expressed without oppressive corporate oversight is one step toward a brighter future.

https://aaltomies.wordpress.com/2024/08/20/you-can-help-to-stop-killing-games-if-you-are-a-eu-citizen/

#customerAndService #customerService #electronicGames #games #gaming #videoGames #videogames

Some bits from #ElectronicGames magazine, August '93.

Some bits from #ElectronicGames magazine, August '93.

Tonight's finds in my parents' basement: vintage 1980 magazines with ads for #HandheldElectronicGames (#HandheldGames #ElectronicGames).

Minimal Tic Tac Toe Business Card - The PCB business card has long been a way for the aspiring electronics engineer to... - https://hackaday.com/2022/09/24/minimal-tic-tac-toe-business-card/ #electronicgames #arduinohacks #businesscard #atmega328p #hardware #games