I have written a number of articles on here telling the truth about what Chinese gold farmers are doing with the game Evony. What I wrote was the truth and is supported by massive evidence from elsewhere. They are just trying to bully me, for instance threatening to sue in Australia in order to make things as difficult as possible. And it is ironic that they try to use the legal system against me when they blatantly stole other people’s game mechanics and graphics in order to make Evony. Also I wonder if they are trying to be so heavy handed against the Guardian? And cheek of all cheeks they are trying to deny comment spamming this blog.
According to the Merriam Webster dictionary propaganda is: the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person. Which is a pretty broad net to cast and covers quite a lot of what I think of as marketing! However we tend to think of propaganda more as when media is used to promote a political viewpoint which we disagree with. Such as Lord Haw Haw in World War 2, who annoyed us so much that we over reacted and executed him when we won. A fate that Hanoi Hannah avoided.
The traditional, non interactive, media are massively used for propaganda. In World War 2, and subsequent wars, both sides frequently used their bomber aircraft to drop propaganda leaflets. Which in some circumstances may have been more effective than using them to drop bombs. Many of the world’s newspapers are set up to promote a particular viewpoint. And huge swathes of the world’s media are government owned and used to promote the cause of the ruling administrations.
Yet in this world of people trying to persuade other people of the rights or wrongs of a particular cause, video games have largely been left alone, which, when you think about it, is very strange indeed. Video games are played by hundreds of millions of people of all ages, with a concentration of 20+ year olds. Yet the actual content has been dictated more by the needs to entertain or educate than the desire to promote a certain agenda. So far.
The reason we have been left alone is quite obvious. Games are just another media, albeit a technically superior media. But the people with all the power, the politicians and journalists, don’t realise this because mostly they just don’t understand video games at all. We see this in the way they blame video games for violence in society when the opposite is true. And now that ignorance is protecting video game players from propaganda.
However we haven’t avoided politics in games completely. Here are a few that sneaked through:
The Global Islamic Media Front released a first person shooter called Quest for Bush, something that perhaps a lot of Americans would have been very pleased to play!
Rendition: Guantanamo is a game that has been cancelled because of pressure from journalists.
Left Behind: Eternal Forces is a nutty extremist christian propaganda piece, that is probably the most distasteful of the lot. Far worse than any game that politicians and journalists complain about.
Kuma\War is a first person shooter. Where it is different is that its frequent new episodes are drawn from current events, but from an American perspective.
America’s Army is the big one. A series of games designed to foster the American Army view of the world on an unsuspecting public and also to work as a recruitment tool. This has been a remarkable success at promoting gung ho American militarism.
And just now the Iran National Foundation of Computer Games revealed several new games at Gamescom in Cologne. Which will reflect opinions and views refreshingly different from the usual American propaganda that the conventional media force down our throats. According to the BBC one is “an adventure game where you play the role of a girl called Sara; a young student caught up in events during the early stages of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.” Exciting stuff.
Finally we have a pathetic British attempt which, as far as I am aware, nobody played. This involved taxpayers money being spent on a number ten Downing Street game. This now seems to have died off and of all the propaganda games I have found it is the only complete failure. Which is just so typical of anything Gordon Brown does.
As you can see, with the exception of the pathetic Gordon Brown effort, all these propaganda attempts have been a success. They have been incredibly cost effective at getting the attention of the world’s press and of game players. So it is inevitable that we will see a massive increase in video games designed to promote or rubbish different political, military and religious agendas. Up till now games have been largely living in an age of innocence. This has been a false dawn.
Battlefield Heroes is a cartoon action shooter game for the PC. Exactly the sort of game where you would expect to see well over 90% piracy. Which is the reason publishers have largely given up on them. So Electronics Arts have beaten the pirates by giving the game away for free as a download. Obviously they still need to pay their staff, so they have implemented a couple of different business models.
The first is advertising. Not in-game as that can spoil the experience unless the advert is actually a part of the game itself. Instead EA have put the adverts on the game website and on the front end of the game, where they don’t detract from the gaming experience.
Then there is the purchase of in-game items: the Kommendant’s Coat, the Special Forces Officer Cap, Maverik’s Sunglasses, the Elite Camo Trousers and the Marksman’s Honor being the most popular.Players can also buy advancement widgets, which allow players to earn hero abilities and purchase better weapons, and emotes such as the robot dance, laughing, throat-cutting and cheering.
EA have dumbed down the specification of PC that the game will run on so as to give themselves the biggest possible audience. A trick that Runescape and World of Warcraft also do. They also reduced the spawn time from 15 to 5 seconds so there is a lot more action and less waiting.
And it has worked. The game went into “open beta” at the end of June and there are now 1.5 million players from 133 countries registered. The average buyer of in game items is spending $20.
This is brilliant for EA and has the following advantages:
No need to manufacture physical plastic and cardboard inventory.
No shipping, warehousing and other logistics costs.
No margin given away to distributors and retailers, all the revenue comes to EA.
No piracy. None. Zero. In a market riven with piracy.
A long tail. It effectively costs EA nothing to keep this up on their server for ever. And players will be buying in-game stuff for a long time to come. The exact opposite of a retail game that gets thrown off the shelf after a short life.
Potential to refresh the game to maintain interest. For instance currently it is third person only, first person could easily be added later to give a whole new gaming experience.
Reaching new markets. Getting to 133 markets means they can reach Mongolia, Sudan and lots of other places where it is not worth setting up distribution for physical stock. But all added together they will now make a nice contribution to profits and allow EA to build for the future.
Enhanced direct relationship with game player. This is immensely valuable and can be leveraged in a myriad of ways.
That is a whole lot of very good stuff and must surely presage the end of boxed, retail PC games. The success of Battlefield Heroes added to the explosion of application stores and the various business models on Xbox Live have radically brought forward the day when high street retail has no relevance to the video game industry.
All three current generation home consoles are about to or have had substantial price cuts. Sony have been forced into it by being ridiculously overpriced, Nintendo are doing it to counter a huge slump in Wii sales and Microsoft are doing it because they can and because they want more market share. So let’s look at the current state of the Xbox 360.
Firstly for every three Sony Playstation PS3s in the world there are four Microsoft Xbox 360s. A considerable success considering that this is only Microsoft’s second machine and that they entered a market dominated by Sony.
All this will change going into Q4, not only will the hardware price cuts be felt (for instance with PS2 owners upgrading) but there is a veritable glut of new AAA blockbuster titles on all three platforms, a glut that is continuing into Q1 ’10. It will be very interesting to see what the state of the industry is like in March, after the dust settles.
Browser MMOs are very fashionable just now, but the market was led by Andrew Gower’s Runescape, which is in the Guinness book of Records, and the company Jagex, which he founded. Jagex is based in Cambridge and with around 400 staff they are the biggest independent UK developer. In addition to Runescape they have the FunOrb online gaming portal and a second MMO under development.
Q: Cunning and Devious games, developing for the Atari ST from 1995 was your first foray into the industry. Was this a deliberate career choice or did you drift into the industry?
A: I’ve been programming computers games in one form or another since I was age 7 (1985), originally starting out on the ZX Spectrum, and I knew from about age 10 that I wanted a career in computer games. The games I made in 1995 were a bit of a milestone in that they were the first games I wrote in assembler and were the first ones I felt were good enough to actually release to the public. They were also the first ones I made any money from. So yes it was a deliberate career choice, although it didn’t turn out quite how I expected!
—
Q: You are the founder of Jagex, the most successful British owned games studio. You must be very proud of this achievement. What were the main hurdles you had to overcome?
A: The biggest hurdles have generally been to do with that the fact that I’ve always tried to pioneer new things, and not just copy what is already being done. However this has often meant that the tools and technology we need don’t exist either, so rather than being able to use off the shelf products to create our games we’ve always had to develop our own tool chains, game engines, etc.. When starting out with RuneScape there wasn’t much like it, so before I could even start making the game I had to build a whole load of supporting technology to determine if a game of that complexity was even possible at all in the browser. Also as one of the earliest MMOs we’ve had to learn the hard way how to manage a live, and evolving game, how to support the community etc.. It’s been one continual learning experience.
—
Q: With RuneScape you went for server based browser gaming many years before it became fashionable. Now the hottest technology is cloud computing and netbooks. How far do you think that the games industry will eventually move to your way of doing things?
A: I think the industry will continue to diversify, and make increasingly varied games for increasingly diverse platforms, and the appropriate technology to use will therefore be equally diverse. I don’t think things like browser games will totally replace retail games any time soon. As each has its own unique strengths and weaknesses. I personally play both and enjoy them both, for different reasons. I’m going to be controversial and say I don’t really buy all the talk of convergence, it seems to me the number of different technologies, and the number of ways of making games and doing business is increasing, not the opposite.
—
Q: You are personally responsible for a lot of game design and advanced technology to make a game with millions of global players work. What advice would you give to a schoolboy who wanted to follow in your footsteps?
A: Well what worked for me was sticking to what I had a real passion for, and what I was good at. I never sat down and said to myself ‘I want to make a hugely successful game and make lots of money’, that was never the aim, and I think if it had been it wouldn’t have worked. I also think it is important to have realistic goals, if my initial objective had been to create a game as massive as RuneScape it would have seemed like an impossible task, I’d have been totally daunted and would never have got anywhere. Instead focus on what you can realistically do, make a simple game, certainly don’t start with an MMO. And importantly set an achievable goal you will enjoy. Make a simple game for the love of making that simple game as well as you possibly can, and seeing just how well you can make it. Just because it’s simple and achievable doesn’t mean it can’t be beautifully crafted and something to be proud of.
—
Q: When I worked with Richard Darling he hated being on the Sunday Times Rich List, yet Jez San in his interview for Bruceongames brought the subject up himself! How do you feel about being on there each year?
A: I really don’t like it. I’m just a normal guy who lives a rather normal life, with a passion for creating games, and wish people would focus on the games I’m making rather than me! Also people don’t realise that the value is very much an ‘in theory’ figure, based on the value of my studio, rather than being money in my bank account that I could actually spend. I feel these ‘on paper/in theory’ valuations really just give people the wrong idea. For me it’s really not about the money anyway.
—
Q: A lot of your gaming heritage is on the FunOrb game portal. How do you see the more casual side of gaming developing, especially with the influence of the Wii?
A: Well the first thing I should say is that I don’t see FunOrb as a casual gaming portal And we’re trying very hard NOT to make it ‘wii like’. One of the perceptions we are challenging is that if game is accessible, lightweight, and doesn’t have a huge manual to read before you play, then it MUST also be ‘casual’.
It seems to be that is ignoring a huge gap in-between ‘core’ and ‘casual’. The perception seems to be that games must be either massive budget (And therefore very high risk and so not very innovative), or exceedingly low budget casual games, with no depth or lasting gameplay, targeted at non-gamers. FunOrb is trying to fill the gap in between the two with games that aren’t all just the same ‘low risk’ FPS/RTS formula over and over again, but ARE still proper games designed for gamers, that are very deep, and (at the end) present a real challenge even to a seasoned gamer.
FunOrb is targeted at the sort of people who used to enjoy playing games on the Atari-ST or the Amiga, who say to themselves ‘why they don’t they make games like they used to?’. Those 16-bit games were never considered ‘casual’. They were very certainly targeted at gamers. But they were far more varied, were quick to pick up and play, and didn’t require a huge commitment to get started.
—
Q: It is inevitable that MMOs migrate onto many new games platforms. Already we have Free Realms coming to the PS3. And Android looks like a fantastic mobile platform. Where do you see this going?
A: Yes I think MMOs will migrate onto every (internet enabled) games platform. We’re pretty well positioned to take advantage of that, because we have a lot of experience making games for low spec devices.
—
Q: Finally, it is an open secret that Jagex has the working title MechScape under development, aimed at different demographics and introducing new state of the art technology. Is there any specific direction you are going in with this game? And when are we likely to see it ready?
A: We’re deliberately keeping pretty quiet about MechScape, because we want to surprise people, and also want people to enjoy exploring it for themselves and seeing what we have created without lots of spoilers. It’s very much a game of exploration and discovery and has beautiful art direction and back-story which I’m not going to give away The original rational for creating it was very much ‘if we made a new MMO we could do it so much better given everything we have learned doing RuneScape’. So we did! RuneScape grew very organically, whereas MechScape was created with the benefit of years of experience so is much more cohesive. In terms of when it’s ready…, the version in the office is now pretty much feature complete, it’s fully playable and is due to enter the final internal testing and polishing shortly, which is massive milestone for us. How long the testing takes depends on how much we decide we still want to improve, it could be a little while longer because we’re not going to rush it, and aren’t going to launch it until it’s awesome.
Jon Blyth – Freelance (PC Zone)
Tom Francis – PC Gamer
Matt Handrahan – Games TM
Matthew Castle – NGamer
Darran Jones – Retro Gamer
Gillen McAllister – Official Xbox 360 Magazine
Specialist Writer (Web)
Dan Howdle – Nowgamer.com
Wesley Yin Poole – Videogamer.com
Pat Garratt – VG247.com
Ellie Gibson – Eurogamer.net
Chris Schilling – Gamerzines
Simon Parkin – Freelance (Eurogamer)
Games Coverage in a Mainstream Magazine
Zoo Weekly – Bauer Consumer Media
Nuts – IPC Media
Shortlist – Shortlist Media
FHM – Bauer Consumer Media
Front – Flip Media
Games Blog
Rockpapershotgun.com
VG247.com
Ukresistance.co.uk
Guardian Games Blog
Nowgamer.com
Coverage in a National Paper
The Guardian
The Daily Telegraph
Daily Star Sunday
The Independent
The Sun
The Daily Mirror
Games Broadcast/Podcast
One Life Left – www.onelifeleft.com
Eurogamer.tv – www.eurogamer.tv
Game On – BBC Radio 5 Live
Start/Select – uk.gamespot.com
Games Weasel – www.gamesweasel.com
Johnny Minkley – BBC Radio 1
Rising Star
Neon Kelly – Videogamer.com
Samuel Roberts – 360 Magazine
Matthew Pellett – Xbox World 360
Chris McMahon – Games TM
Graham Smith – PC Gamer
Mike Channell – Official Xbox 360 Magazine
Regional Games Columnist
Ross Wilkinson – Press Association
Dave Cook – The Scotsman
Steven Fox – Metro
Dan Slingsby – Games Addict
Ian Crump – Southern Daily Echo
Games Media Legend
The winner of this award will be named on the night
And we’re trying very hard NOT to make it ‘wii like’. One of the perceptions we are challenging is that if game is accessible, lightweight, and doesn’t have a huge manual to read before you play, then it MUST also be ‘casual’.
