NOTE: I would classify this post as not at all spoilery for any of the series mentioned, but that’s just me.

There are two TV series that I love more dearly than any other series in existence (aside, obviously, from Doctor Who) and those are Twin Peaks and the Prisoner.

The astute reader might already know where I’m heading with this line of thought, but for those that may not have experienced these two televisual masterpieces, they are infamous for their endings. At the time of the Prisoner’s initial broadcast Patrick Mcgoohan had to literally leave the country to avoid fans’ ire over the fact that its final episode raised more questions than it answered and, come to think of it, didn’t really answer anything that had gone before. Twin Peaks too left its main threat very much present after one of the most powerful finales ever crafted, giving only a minimal sense of closure to a select group of characters’ story arcs.

A lot of people didn’t like this, a lot of people did. Personally I stand in the group that says; if the only way out of this dire situation is a deus ex machina, then don’t bother even trying to show me a solution because it will serve only to undermine the trials and threats my favourite characters have faced up until now.

What a lot of people didn’t do, however, was convince themselves that that wasn’t the real ending and a comforting, cosy, straightforward ending was going to appear later and consist almost entirely of going through every single plot point that had ever arisen and tying them all up in a neat bow.

Because that’s the trouble with DLC, and Mass Effect in particular has suffered from having not-quite-major-but-still-quite-important plot points being amputated from the main game to be sold on later. I know in my game the characters wouldn’t stop banging on about the destruction of a mass relay that occurred in a DLC pack six months after ME2 came out (give or take)- a piece of DLC I’d not played and I would assume most others weren’t even aware of at that late stage.

DLC storytelling sets a dangerous precedent, because it forces developers to add leeway to the plot for business reasons and so undermines any narrative decision to leave a storyline open for interpretation.

Games are a young medium, but they are also one of the few forms of entertainment where the act of selling them intrudes so strongly on the content of that entertainment. Is it any wonder, therefore, that if we present gamers with a game as open as John Carpenter’s The Thing- or even a Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid- they react with cynicism rather than admiration?

When superstar developer Tim Schafer’s decision to crowd-fund an old school adventure game was met with overwhelming (and record-breaking) support on Kickstarter the other week, gamers took it as a sign of things to come. In this golden future developers would make games funded by fans for fans and not have their tastes dictated by the mainstream Triple A publishing system that had long since abandoned such genres as the adventure game.

But there’s one problem with this future, and it’s the fans.

It might be a sweeping generalisation, but more often than not it’s entirely true that fans hate change. They hate CGI in their Star Wars, they hate FPSs in their X-COM, they hate Bob Dylan using electric guitars and they hate it when any film ever isn’t exactly the same as a book that it’s based on.

So when Tim Schafer, the father of old school adventure games, is funded by his most hardcore fanbase to make an adventure game- how innovative do you expect this game to be? His backers are backing him so they can get their long overdue nostalgia fix, and whilst the point of Kickstarter is the ‘no strings attached’ source of income, there’s going to be trouble if this game doesn’t fulfil its purpose of being the most traditional adventure game ever.

Fans know what they like, and because they like it they want more of the same- which is no bad thing. But in a Kickstarter future where these people are the main fundraisers, who will make the games that gamers don’t even know they want?

We tire of publishers making modern day shooter after modern day shooter, but these blockbuster games fund our Dead Spaces, our Mirrors Edges, our Mass Effects and a host of other titles that we’re fans of now, but how were we to know we wanted them before?

As much as it’s fun to call the publishers the bad guy and bemoan the general public’s lack of taste when the unfairly maligned COD sells millions year on year, we forget that without them and their blockbusters we would never be presented with original ideas made well. Instead it would be our job to scour the internet searching for great ideas in indie games with no funding because not enough people found them to donate, or they had no faith that the unknown company behind it could achieve their vision.

Publishers have the power to take risks, to find things they think we want to play. So next time we sit down to enjoy a niche gem like Alpha Protocol, it’s worth remembering that without the Call of Duties of this world, it would probably never have been made.

This post was inspired by a conversation with @worthyofmention who is indeed worthy of mention.

Yet still the game remains unreleased.

So, hyped to high heaven, I eagerly await the arrival of my pre-order. And it does, and I play it, and…

Well, by that point everyone’s moved on to the next big release.

But hold on, I want to talk about what you’ve just persuaded me to buy! Now that we can shed those spoiler tags I want to hear if you too, beloved games reviewer, were a little disappointed about the fact that Heavy Rain had a narrative twist that doesn’t sit well with the “Press L2 to hear what a character thinks” button. I want find out how you dealt with the augmented lawyer in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and why you chose that option. Hell, I just want to mutually high five you over the internet for finally taking down the latest Metal Gear in a boss battle that lasted longer than the entire rest of the game.

Because previews and reviews are only interesting until a game is released. Once I’ve played a game I want to hear other’s opinions, and a review doesn’t scratch that itch. It’s too busy dancing around the plot, trying not to ruin the experience and when I- ever current- did finally get around to playing Metal Gear Solid 2 last month I was astonished to discover that, despite it being one of the most talked about games of all time, there was almost bugger-all articles that actually wanted to write any of that talk down. Sure there are a few, quickly consumed features, but compared to the reviews available- which seem naively unaware of the eventual impact of the game and outright lie as to the identity of the protagonist- there is very little actual discussion.

Luckily in that instance Leigh Alexander had just begun her own series of retrospectives on the series so I got some kind of fix, however it only served to highlight the drought of features elsewhere. Indeed Alpha Protocol, a huge favourite of mine, would seem perfect for a spoiler filled discussion of it’s tangled and sophisticated choice system, one that had been so touted in previews but was barely acknowledged in the overly negative reviews that followed, and LA Noire may have merited further comment on why it seemed to not quite sit as well with the general public despite its stellar scores.

Retrospects are able to deal not only with the full features of a game from story to mechanics, but they are also able to do something that reviews and previews can’t- and that is to put a game in context. They can address public reaction, critical acclaim and a game’s ultimate impact on the industry as a whole. But most importantly retrospects never age, and in a world as disposable as video game journalism it would be nice to see a few more pieces that stand the test of time once the hype-dust has settled.

However, I believe that the exact same argument can be applied to game design, and I shall use the release of the excellent 2D platformer Rayman Origins to back me up.

You see, Rayman Origins is proof that game design doesn’t sell. Despite its critical acclaim, most if not all reviewers commented that it would struggle to sell at a triple-A RRP and when it failed to chart in the top 40 in the UK it appeared that they were right. At the time most podcasts were alive with discussion on why exactly this was. Could it be that it was too colourful and childish in its style and therefore off-putting to the hardcore gamer? How about the fact that it’s not a brown FPS- that’s what all the kids are buying these days after all? Is the genre itself dead?

My response would be; because I can play as good if not better 2D platformers for free.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me present to you a little site called Kongregate, a place where you can play all manner of indie games for free. These “CV pieces” are wildly varied and can often be quite embarrassing, but unfortunately for the professional 2D platformer designer, they can also be exceptionally good.

Because anyone can make a 2D platformer. The tools to do so are widely available in various GameMaker style formats (or just a copy of LittleBigPlanet 2)- tweak the parameters for gravity and inertia and you’re good to go. The skill therefore is not in creating a 2D platformer, but in designing one, and it doesn’t matter how good or bad your graphics are, if the platforms and spiked pits aren’t put together well, it’s not going to be fun.

This need for fine-tuned perfection is not present amongst the traditional triple-A genres, no one slates you if the door positioning is a little out of place, and your game doesn’t flop if your gun’s rate of fire is slightly slow. Sure they detract from the experience, but there’s so much else there to pick up the slack- fancy 3D graphics, a sense of scale, the dozens of hours running time, hundreds of enemies, vehicles, explosions! These blockbuster trappings are what sell games and blockbuster trappings as we know from actual blockbusters take huge teams of people months if not years to produce. When customers slap £40 on the counter they’re paying for that scale, they’re happy to spend that money because it took hundreds of people a very long time to make that product, so of course its justified. It’s the classic example of quantity over quality, but not in the sense that the two are mutually exclusive, but in the sense that what customers pay for is quantity, quality is a lovely bonus.

Rayman Origins is just quality. Pure perfected gameplay crafted by designers at the top of their game with a subtly sohpisticated art style that is not only unintrusive, but also complementary to the gameplay.

Unfortunately, Braid has all that as well.

And Super Meatboy.

And if you strip away the premium animation and art, there are a lot of designers on Kongregate who can provide as high a quality of entertainment in a much smaller burst. But when it’s free you can just find another burst to make up the time.

Pure game design doesn’t cost time or resources (comparitively) it simply takes skill, and now the internet has made skill easy to discover and distribute, people become less willing to pay a premium for it. Indies are proving now more than ever that they have skill, what they don’t have is the budget or resources to make Gears of War, and it’s only by making an experience that cannot be easily replicated for much less cost, that the triple-A games remain at triple-A prices.

I also love video games.

Because of these two things I feel well positioned to comment on fan reaction when the release of something they love is staggered from country to country.

Now, I don’t know how many of you go on “teh forumz” to talk about your favourite show, but I’ve made a few exploratory passes through the worlds of Gallifrey Base and Doctor Who Online in my day and I think what strikes me the most about them is just how important these discussion boards are to people. People who are fans of Doctor Who can and will log on every day to talk/argue/go ballistic about the show they love. Not only that, but forums are where life-long friendships are formed, meet-ups founded or podcasts created. In short they are the ultimate form of “pub”; one where the punters are united by what they have in common as opposed to where they live.

So when the transmission of an episode of Doctor Who (or BSG or 30 Rock) in the States is at any time other than the exact same time as its transmission in the UK, then that show (or game or film or book) is actively forbidding friends from talking.

We’ve all seen it, the Twitterers who scream “No spoilers! I haven’t watched it yet!” five minutes after a mind-blowing twist has been revealed. And sure we all laugh and say “Silly you, a social network isn’t going to stop talking about event TV just for you!” but until that person has seen whatever it is they’re a fan of then no, they can’t go on any social network until they have. Or read the blogs they usually visit. Or listen to the podcasts they subscribe to.

And if you don’t make that product available to those people simultaneously, then they pirate it.

Because what else can they do? If you run a Torchwood podcast and half of your hosts are in America and half of the hosts are in the UK then should you simply NOT cover this week’s episode because the guys in the UK are a week behind for the entire series?

Of course not. And that’s why it used to be hugely difficult to gauge Doctor Who’s popularity in America, because the viewership for the American transmission of the show a week after the UK broadcast was likely to be made up either of non-fans who happen to find it, or fans who were dedicated enough to not only want to watch that episode again, but to also support the viewing figures for the show because they understand that that’s how its popularity is gauged. Simultaneous(-ish) transmission is an issue that Doctor Who’s most recent series has succeeded in rectifying admirably (along with the help of iTunes for an extra special sprinkling of convenience), and hopefully it will pay off not only for the show but also for the fans as their demand for merchandise, books or simply more Doctor Who is able to be more accurately measured.

And this is something a lot of games, movies or anything else that has a cult following could learn from. I mean, the new Muppets movie has just come out over here in the UK, but if I were a die-hard fan of the Muppets, why would I go and see it now when I’ve been able to watch it via a link on Youtube since *googles* the 2nd of November 2011. In HD.

Part of the joy of being a fan is being able to talk about what you love with people similarly impassioned, and it’s inevitable that the value of that ability is eventually going to outweigh the ‘duty’ of a fan to support their favourite product.

When that happens it’s the product’s responsibility to make being a fan as easy as possible, because piracy will always be there to fill in the gap.

I’m very proud of this one, and I hope you enjoy it!

All material is ©BBC and reprinted with permission.

Here in no particular order, for no particular reason, are the games I played this year that really stood out to me- these are the games I spent the most time playing, the most time looking forward to playing and the most time telling anyone that would listen that I was playing them and what was happening to me within the game at that exact moment.

Please note, the above definition has cleverly failed to specify that the games listed below need to have come out THIS YEAR.

Metal Gear Solid 1

I know, what am I like eh? But I’d never played a Metal Gear Solid game before and with the imminent arrival of the HD collections and the fact that NOT having played MGS has been putting a serious dent in my credibility, I thought it was time to rectify the situation.

My god it’s good isn’t it. The Kill Bill of video games, a hyper-real world with immediately iconic characters and this pervasive feeling of myth, even from the start. The bad guys aren’t just bad guys, they’re archetypes, and Snake is destined to fight them in one form or another throughout his existence.

I became an MGS fanboy the moment I met Cyborg Ninja and spent most of the time between play sessions forcing people at work to have the same conversations about it they’d already had a decade and a half ago when it first came out.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

Haha, no silly, not The Old Republic, KNIGHTS of the Old Republic, the original one, which came out on the Mac App store THIS YEAR so it totally counts.

I had started playing it on the original Xbox for about 5 minutes about 5 years ago, but back then, with the game sitting on my shelf between Halo and Burnout, I wasn’t hugely in the mood for a thoughtful, slow paced role-playing adventure.

I find playing on a PC/Mac creates a far more intimate experience than a console, which lends itself to a more thoughtful approach and during the late late nights of summer I rinsed this game of every fricking side-quest there was and in the end made a declaration of undying love to Bastilla who, at the opening of the game, was far too posh and snooty for me to even let her out of the ship. Trust me, it was a moment.

This game made me want to play table-top roleplaying again, it made me remember that Star Wars is still awesome if George Lucas isn’t involved and ultimately it forced me (FORCE forced me, probably) to purchase the out-of-print Star Wars: Saga Edition role-playing rulebook from some expensive American collectors store in an effort to get my fix.

Triple Town

or as I like to call it “Fuck you, Ninja Bears.”

Yes, if you thought I was about to go onto the ‘proper’ games any time soon think again, because I sunk more time into this indie Facebook game (which did indeed come out this year) than probably anything else. It’s a perfect match-three game, generous enough with its freemium model that you don’t mind throwing a few Facebook credits its way and with an irresistible art style that updates for festive occasions.

What I’m trying to say is, if they made a range of t-shirts for this game, I would buy them all.

And throw all my other clothes away.

SpaceChem

I bought this game on Steam after hearing the Oh No! Videogames! podcast bang on about it every other episode. Then I bought it for the iPad, because sometimes I’m not near a computer and not being near a computer shouldn’t ever get in the way of my SpaceChem fix.

It’s a beautiful, intelligent, ridiculously hard puzzle game that challenges you to create mini ‘programs’ that dismantle and reconstruct molecules in ever more elaborate processes. Each level can take hours to create, although most of that time will consist of banging your face against the screen in frustration, which makes your final solution all the more satisfying. I go back and look at my previous levels just to admire the shear clockwork beauty of them and bask in my own genius, until I see that someone else in the community managed to solve it with half the instructions.

SuperBrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP

A tweetable script! Isn’t that the most bloody genius idea anybody has ever had ever?

It helps that the script is witty, self-aware, pretentious and perfectly suited to the retro-simplistic gameplay as well, just the right side of knowing to never be smug, yet effortlessly aware of its own quality. #Sworcery is what you always remembered adventure games to be but they never were, it’s the REASON I bought an iPad (that’s not even a joke) and the soundtrack deserves every videogame music award going.

Portal 2

Well duh.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Again, there isn’t much to say about this game that hasn’t been said better everywhere else except for the fact that I’m insanely jealous of anyone who got to work on this game. It out Batmans Arkham Asylum and whereas with that game I’d complete a level and go “oh, I should have/could have done it that way” with this game I fricking DID IT THAT WAY.

Also I didn’t bother with that non-lethal nonsense, my Adam Jenson stopped giving a shit about the 3rd time all of his friends screwed him over.

Frozen Synapse

Okay sod it, I’m going all out hipster here because I was playing this game before the rest of you knew about it. Before Steam, or the Penny Arcade column, I saw Mode 7 Games give a talk at February’s World of Love conference about procedurally generated AI and bought into the Beta the moment I got home. This isn’t me trying to boast, it’s me being honoured by the fact that I was there, and got to see this small British Indie become a huge, huge thing, and my god it’s well deserved; postal chess for the digital age.

If chess were a squad-based shooter with a Tron aesthetic.

Warhammer Quest

So my final game of 2011 is a 16 year old board game set in the Warhammer universe.

Well the title didn’t say VIDEO games of the year.

One of the great things about joining Mediatonic has been the fact that I now know people who are into board games and it’s bloody brilliant. In fact, as split-screen gaming dies a death, I’ve been returning to board games more and more for those ‘invite friends over’ event nights that used to be ruled by teh Haloz. It brings people together, it’s cheaper than a night down the pub and you don’t have to worry about friends who’ve never met not having anything to talk about; the game IS the conversation.

This dungeon crawler is simple to learn, hard to master, and is the perfect gateway drug to the scary scary world of Dungeons and Dragons.

Just don’t play the wizard, or everyone will hate you.

In fact, recent undisclosed but almost certainly true research has shown that second hand smoke and cigarette sharing is EQUALLY as bad as tobacco piracy, in which one person will steal a tobacco plant and use its seeds to grow a limitless number of others.

Now, some naysayers claim that this is not the case, that the act of sharing cigarettes will actually instigate nicotine addiction in a whole host of potential new customers who will go on to legally purchase their own packs. They might even go so far as to say that being able to count on someone to give you a cigarette if you’re caught short actually HELPS them continue the strength of their habit so that they will be able to purchase new packs in greater quantities.

But these short-sighted people haven’t factored in the hobos who smoke butts off the floor, or the social smokers who will only have one or two off a friend when they’re out on a Friday. These people will never contribute to the hard working tobacco industry, and whilst those cigarettes have technically already been purchased, the owners shouldn’t be allowed to pass them on to whoever they please just because they parted with money for them.

Therefore, in an effort to do my part to aid in the production of many more cigarettes in the future, I’ve made a list of a few things we can do to help the vulnerable tobacco industry.

• Swabbing: all packs of cigarettes should come with a special swab, and before the purchaser can have even a single drag they must swab the inside of their mouth and send it off to the tobacco industry along with the unique code that will now be included on every pack. From then on, after smoking a cigarette, the tobacco industry can examine the DNA on the butts to make sure it matches only the purchaser’s. (In a slightly more extreme version of this, smokers must send a swab from the butt of the cigarette between every drag- although this has proved unpopular).
• In an effort to make up the lost profits on cigarette sharing (of which there is a great and easily calculable number), the tobacco companies should raise the price of cigarettes.
• People who are offered a cigarette by a friend should only be able to take a single drag (of course, the tobacco companies aren’t Nazis!). If they wish to smoke any more though, they will need to purchase their own code and swab separately from a newsagent.
• Packs of ten cigarettes should be reduced to packs of eight, with the final two being attainable only if you send off a swab and a code.
• In addition to the above, extra cigarettes should be made available over time at a discounted price for those who purchased new packets, but only if they can prove that nobody but the original purchaser smoked them.
• A few years ago the tobacco industry attempted to increase the attraction of purchasing cigarettes new by offering special bonuses (cosmetic ones naturally, like the colour of the filter) to those that purchased new. But whilst that did appeal to some customers, they decided that it would be better to simply deprive cigarettes from those customers that failed to purchase packs quickly enough.

As you can see, with a few simple changes we can wipe out the cancer that is second-hand smokers whilst barely impacting the experience of new purchasers. Obviously these changes will be expensive to implement and may detract from the time spent on making sure the quality of the cigarettes is maintained but it’s nothing compared to how much extra money will be gained from wiping out the non-contributing members of the hobby. And who cares if sometimes the swabs and codes don’t work and you’re not able to smoke the pack you’ve legally bought from a shop? Remember,  it’s the tobacco industry that we’re helping here, not you.

This post was inspired by a twitter conversation between myself and @nolan_mcbride

A symbolic representation of my career move.

I’ve only gone and got a proper job. By which I mean a job involving a commute and a travel card and an office and things. As a games writer/producer at Mediatonic in Covent Garden I seem to have stumbled across the role I was always meant to do- combining not only a great deal of creative freedom in coming up with game ideas, stories and pitches but also that more rigid role of actually designing game mechanics- harking back to my days in secondary school where I would fill exercise books full of pen and paper roleplaying rule-sets that I’d inflict upon my long-suffering friends for playtesting.

I’ve recently revisited my limited skills in computer programming by playing around with the iPhone SDK and doing so reminded me of the satisfaction of creating something that is fully, 100% right. There’s an elegance to creating a program that works in the minimum number of lines of code that you do miss when writing fiction because in the medium of prose there’s simply no ‘end point’. You decide to stop when something’s good enough in the time available, or when your editor is happy, which is fine- but it’s never quantifiably complete.

Whilst programming isn’t part of my job in any way, creating rule-sets for games is, and it’s a similar moment of euphoria when you find out that you can link this aspect with that aspect through this points system and in doing so cut the number of stats the game needs to keep track of in half. Does that make sense? No? Well that’s a shame, because it’s fun.

And that’s all I’m going to say about my current job at the moment- apart from the fact that I’m working with an intimidatingly talented bunch of people who’ve been really good at helping me get to grips with it all (which is a big deal when you’ve been sitting at home alone mostly for the last two years- winging it). I’ll update the blog on how things are going as soon as something I’ve worked on is released and in the mean time I’ll be returning to writing my fancy opinion pieces on games I like, which I hope people enjoy.

Finally, the freelance question. Whilst I’m obviously not taking on any freelance work as I throw myself into the new job, there are still a couple of loose ends that were completed last month and have yet to see the light of day (apart from my Moshi Monsters game guide which is out in summer).

The first is a Doctor Who audiobook entitled Blackout which will be out in September. That’s all I can say about it right now, except that in my opinion it’s one of the best things I’ve written and also one of the darkest. I’m very proud of this.

The second is more mysterious- a freelance video game script for a project which I can say even less about. But it’s funny, and more details will be available in a couple of months.

Games take a long time to make don’tcha know.

If anyone’s about, it’d be great to have a natter.