The Errant Signal Thread

[Damned Registrations]

Pretty much. Just because video games are a new thing, doesn't mean games and the concepts behind them are. They just generally weren't explored much until now since there wasn't a huge fucking industry involved in selling games to people. But people figured out a long fucking time ago that soldiers are less likely to save their own ass and let the country fall if they get some trivial awards nobody will recall 2 days later.

Of course, they used to have actual rewards as well (titles and land and such). But why reward the soldiers when you can just pretend to reward them?

 

[DraQ]

I hate this species so much.

 

[Infinitron]

Of course, they used to have actual rewards as well (titles and land and such). But why reward the soldiers when you can just pretend to reward them?

Fellow conscriptfag detected Keep in mind that in a professional army, higher rank also comes with higher salary.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Along with the significantly more valuable privilege of sitting behind a desk more often instead of inside a mobile explosives magnet.

But ranks and medals aren't the same thing. I'd imagine the reality of the situation is that rank has more to do with politicking than anything else. Don't piss off the wrong guys, suck up to the right ones, make your peers look bad. Scum rises to the top very quickly where money is involved.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Along with the significantly more valuable privilege of sitting behind a desk more often instead of inside a mobile explosives magnet.

But ranks and medals aren't the same thing. I'd imagine the reality of the situation is that rank has more to do with politicking than anything else. Don't piss off the wrong guys, suck up to the right ones, make your peers look bad. Scum rises to the top very quickly where money is involved.

Bingo.

 

[Derek Larp]

Along with the significantly more valuable privilege of sitting behind a desk more often instead of inside a mobile explosives magnet.

But ranks and medals aren't the same thing. I'd imagine the reality of the situation is that rank has more to do with politicking than anything else. Don't piss off the wrong guys, suck up to the right ones, make your peers look bad. Scum rises to the top very quickly where money is involved.

But on the other hand a shiny medal might raise your chances of making rank. I've heard stories about german officers in ww2 that recklessly and deliberately had gotten their men killed just so they could parade around a Ritterkreuz in the officers club.

 

[Infinitron]

It's time to give Campster his own thread.

New video: "An Aimless Diatribe On Fun"
http://www.errantsignal.com/blog/?p=337

 

[Xor]

I wasn't aware he had a youtube channel.

The guy has interesting opinions and I really appreciated his insight on movement and the "feel" of a game.

 

[Infinitron]

Spec Ops: The Line

http://www.errantsignal.com/blog/?p=342

For further reading, I sincerely recommend Tom Bissell’s piece on Spec Ops:

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8157257/line-explores-reasons-why-play-shooter-games

Additionally, this piece comparing No Russian to what Spec Ops does is really great:

http://www.magicalwasteland.com/mw/...lets-spec-ops-no-russian-and-interactive.html

Comment of a Codexian nature from blog:

I find it kind of hard to take anything in this video seriously because the footage is, over and over again, just standard manshooting. I don’t care what some voice actor is saying while you do this shit. You know who also doesn’t care? All the dudebros who buy this at wal-mart because it looks like the latest and greatest war game… the dudebros that were very intentionally focus-tested and marketed to with the game’s box art, art direction, and use of booth babes at E3 this year.

The harder the writers ham-fist it, the more their war critique comes across as supremely insincere and cynical. As you say, good intentions don’t necessarily result in moral action… likewise, good intentions don’t necessarily result in effective communication. Shooting hundreds of dudes, in effect taking the mechanics-led perspective that human lives are garbage and that /nobody/ in the game is a real, actual fleshed-out human at the end of the day, is the real message. People are robots who stop moving when damaged and then you get to take their stuff.

Your points are all excellent and astute but I can’t go along with the implicit assumption that mechanics and fiction speak equally loud. I think in the case of any war shooter, mechanics speak louder than fiction. If the fictional subtext only matters to the people who are looking for it, it is not successful communication. The creators of these games are fooling themselves if they think they’re saying anything substantive and penetrating and powerful about war. I tend to see people digging, however good their intentions, for meaning in these games as helping keep the bar low. In another year or two, someone else will make another “subversive war shooter”, the same people will notice and talk about it, and nothing at all will really change.

“there’s always a choice”
except when you’re making a war game that has to sell X million copies for your parent company’s stock price to stay up so you won’t be shitcanned.

protagonist: “didn’t have a choice” blah blah
I feel like I’m hearing the game designers speaking by proxy, again and again, that they had to make a game where you kill hundreds of people. Because that was their publisher’s mandate, or whatever.

Bioshock didn’t give the player a choice and then taunted them for it. That was 2007. Five fucking years ago now. Are we done with that one-off, simplistic trope yet? We should be. Instead we’re content to beat it to death and pat ourselves on the back between each stroke.

“increasingly horrific output”
Really? Is the death of standard FPS enemy #900 really more horrible than standard FPS enemy #1? Or is it just the people in cutscenes, and the context the fiction is trying to overlay on the manshooting?

Also: GOD I AM SO DONE WITH STORY REVEALS ABOUT THE NATURE OF REALITY. get a new gimmick people.

You know what I’d like to see? A game actually talking about how fucked Dubai really is.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/the-dark-side-of-dubai-1664368.html
I’m starting to be convinced that it is just categorically impossible to do if you have to shoot 900 people though. Let me walk through that city as a journalist or a tourist, talk with its people, hear their stories, try to do good and see lives crumble. Turn me into a death faucet and all that becomes meaningless window-dressing. The real “monster that only knows how to destroy” is the AAA game industry.

“these [war-glorifying] games it so despises”
I guarantee you these “despised” games were used as reference constantly throughout its development. It despises them only insofar as they are its competition in a marketplace of products.

Here’s my thesis:
Compared even to, say, strategic war games, AAA war shooters are a fundamentally, terminally crippled medium for saying challenging things about war. People working on war games are deluding themselves. Some systems cannot be reformed from within. Some worlds you just have to leave to the serpents.

 

[Metro]

The more videos this guy makes the more I end up disappointed. He's basically a trumped up apologist now.

 

[Infinitron]

Chris' response to that comment:

I'm sympathetic to your argument - a lot of this is a videogame/ludic version of Truffaut's supposed assertion that there's no such thing as an anti-war film. And if anything it's worse in videogames. In film a lot of the glorification is subtext - framing shots in ways that capture the horror of war also simultaneously capture its supposed glories. The opening of Saving Private Ryan was tragic, yes, but it also was "awesome" enough to be ripped off in every first person shooter game for six years after its release.

But in videogames, we don't just frame the act - we actually ask that you spend your time shooting people. You know, for fun! And yeah, it's hard to deny that results in a glorification of war even as you might rail against it. The achievements in Spec Ops might have ironic images with the intent of sarcastically rewarding you for killing ten guys, but they still reward you for killing ten guys. The game might intend for you to feel bad about shooting some people, but it still asks that you shoot people while heads explode in slow motion and rock music blares out of some speakers.

This is an ugly game that tears down other games for also being ugly, and after a while the bile and violence do get to be a bit much. Really, whether there's any value in those awful feelings this game provokes comes down to personal thoughts on Truffaut's philosophy. Does the fact that Apocalypse Now has a scene where helicopters bomb a Vietnamese village while Ride of the Valkyries plays glorify war to a point where the rest of the film's message about violence can't be taken seriously? Or does subtext and intent override the core tennets of what makes the medium work? Can a game that asks you to shoot dudes for six hours in the name of liesure really be all that against the act of shootin' dudes?

As usual, those aren't rhetorical questions. They're hard questions that require serious thought, and the answer may well be different for each of us.

 

[Gragt]

There are some problems with that stuff you quoted. What Truffaut meant, quite rightly, is that it's impossible to make an anti-war movie that isn't at the same time a war movie. It's no secret but there is thrill in war and our specie is fascinated by it. Bashing our neighbour's skull is one of our simplest and basest impulses. Knowing that, it's no problem at all that movies can both show terrific war scenes and yet at the same time insert bits against the war. Even music can do that, take Holst's Mars, the Bringer of War for exemple, a piece that is both very menacing yet enthralling. And going back in time, The Illiad spends a good deal of time describing fights, both globals and personals, in details and yet tell of the grief that they cause. Art easily allows to explore more than just one thing, and great art takes advantage of that. Apocalypse Now is a war movie and shows the thrilling aspects of it, but it also explores the darkest side and the horror that comes with it, and both facets are more powerful because they are put vis-à-vis of each other. After all, we love to kill even if it also repulses us.

Knowing that, should you really think that because a movie shows the thrill of battle it makes the apology of war? At worst it is shown as a spectacle, like Saving Private Ryan where the banality of the message is apparent because we all know that war is bad. But is there such a thing as a pro-war movie?

As for the "supposed" glories of war … There are glories to be had in war and denying that is just being PC. Masculinity for the young people who crave it is one of them. Recognition. Fame. Or maybe like at the end of The Big Red One, survival is the only glory that can be had in war.

And video games … Well, video games are immature for the most part. What else is new? Of course they'll show the thrilling parts of war, because who would want to play a game that is all about its horrors? Insert some clumsy anti-war snippet if you want to give you good conscience, with bonus point if its ironic because then you can pretend to be PoMo, but it won't change the fact that war attracts us. Oh and no: you don't shoot people in a video game.

 

[Metro]

I really think developers need to spend less time making social commentary with games and more time focusing on game play, mechanics, and creating believable in-game universes (wouldn't hurt if Chris the Errant Signal guy did the same). At the end of the day it's just another crappy and consolized AAA shooter. Couldn't give two fucks for whatever larger point it is trying to make. That's not why I play video games.

More and more this guy is glossing over the actual important aspects of gaming and focusing on trivial nonsense like pointless philosophical debate on thematic tropes. It used to be limited to a few brief thoughts at the end of his videos but now it permeates them so much it makes them not worth watching.

 

[Infinitron]

I think you're exaggerating, he's still primarily a game mechanics focused guy. But feel free to tell him that.

 

[Gragt]

I don't claim to follow his stuff closely, but so far it seems that he mostly imbue meaning where there is none to be found. Simply put, he sees what he wants to see, whether it's actually there or not. I don't mind the comparisons to movies — it's true that many games are inspired by movies, and in quite a few cases I'd say that movies have plots fitting video games, like Matrix or The Phantom Menace — but he doesn't really appear to have a huge culture of the subject beyond the obvious. I still remember the comment I made about his first video where he claimed that two people talking wouldn't work despite the fact that there is a whole movie doing it. Then he talks of the opening of Saving Private Ryan as tragic while it's just a long and gory sequence. Plus I'm not entirely sure that every FPS for the next 6 years "ripped it off"; the Medal of Honor game did it, but what else?

 

[Infinitron]

I don't claim to follow his stuff closely, but so far it seems that he mostly imbue meaning where there is none to be found. Simply put, he sees what he wants to see, whether it's actually there or not. I don't mind the comparisons to movies — it's true that many games are inspired by movies, and in quite a few cases I'd say that movies have plots fitting video games, like Matrix or The Phantom Menace — but he doesn't really appear to have a huge culture of the subject beyond the obvious. I still remember the comment I made about his first video where he claimed that two people talking wouldn't work despite the fact that there is a whole movie doing it. Then he talks of the opening of Saving Private Ryan as tragic while it's just a long and gory sequence. Plus I'm not entirely sure that every FPS for the next 6 years "ripped it off"; the Medal of Honor game did it, but what else?

I'd say the WW2 Call of Duty games ripped it off by extension. There's a good chance that entire genre would not have existed if not for SPR.

 

[Carrion]

Plus I'm not entirely sure that every FPS for the next 6 years "ripped it off"; the Medal of Honor game did it, but what else?

It's an exaggeration, of course, but an Omaha Beach multiplayer map was seen in quite a few games. Return to Castle Wolfenstein was the first to do that as far as I remember.

 

[Destroid]

It was pretty obligatory in all WW2 shooters I think.

 

[Infinitron]

Errant Signal (sup hipster?) disapproves of Greenlight's model:

I try my hand at "short" videos and still come up with something that's seven minutes long.

Relevant links:

Valve removes sex game from Greenlight:http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-09-05-no-sex-please-were-gamers

One indie dev's take: http://www.sophiehoulden.com/fuck-steam//

Ben Kuchera's 180: http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/the-100-fee-for-steam-greenl...

 

[Destroid]

I've read quite a few indie devs express a distaste for it.

 

[Infinitron]

Hipster class conflict!

http://www.errantsignal.com/blog/?p=352

A TALE OF TWO INDIE COMMUNITIES

I’ve already talked about my feelings on Greenlight itself elsewhere. But there’s another issue that’s been unfolding across the twitterverse and blogosophere and interwebs in the days since Greenlight’s go-live. It’s starting to feel as if there are two indie communities* out there that share the same name but fundamentally different values. There’s an indie scene of commercially viable and comparably expensive-to-develop titles, and there’s an indie scene of smaller and more intimate games made by developers without the resources, credit, or cash flow of the other.

Whenever things are done in the name of the “indie scene,” both groups believe themselves to be the target audience. And, naturally, this leads to conflict as both groups have radically different expectations of what a game platform is or what it means to create meaningful works. It’s the debate that seems to crop up every year during the IGF nominee announcements – does IGF exist to celebrate the “best of breed” games that are likely to get or already have publishing contracts, or does it have an obligation to highlight smaller titles that won’t otherwise get attention? Greenlight seems to have provoked a similar debate in the indie community, and all of the usual lines are being drawn – only this time it’s tinged with issues of classism and the worth of a work, both because of the whole “$100″ issue and because the conflict is over generating sales rather than being featured in a contest.

Small developers of personal titles argue that the $100 is classist and exclusionary to developers who simply do not have $100 to spend. And the response from the richer, more successful indie developers basically amounts to two recurring points:

• $100 isn’t that much money, and you really should be able to afford it. Seriously, it’s just $100! That’s like, only a day and a half of minimum wage labor!
• If you can’t afford $100, you’re not making a serious game that deserves to be on Steam. I.e., “Come back when your game doesn’t suck.”

The first point shows a complete lack of understanding of poverty or the nature of creating art when absolutely broke. It’s a point made by people who undergo self-induced suffering without understanding those who suffer without a choice. Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes may have maxed out their credit cards and risked bankruptcy while working 100 hours weeks when making Super Meat Boy – and that’s not to be made a trifle of. But at the same time, a lot of people interested in the medium of games don’t even have that option. And this is where things get tricky, because you have to be delicate in describing how two white guys voluntarily suffering great pains for their art (and I’ve no doubt they did suffer for their art) is different from someone suffering poverty while making art. But there is a difference, especially when it comes to pulling $100 out of nowhere to place down on something as big of a gamble as the Greenlight service is.

The second point could spiral into its own discussion about the modern aesthetics of the games industry – absolutely obsessed with polish, lush graphics, and a “complete package” more than artful intent or doing a single thing exceptionally well. But more to the point, it assumes an objective measure of quality defined entirely by commercial success that’s being put forward by those who already have it. “Good games always sell” is an easy fallacy to make when your game has successfully sold. But there are plenty of great games that are not currently selling nearly the numbers they probably deserve, and not having access to Steam is certainly not helping.

And combined, I think, it shows that there really isn’t a single cohesive indie block anymore – if there ever was one. Here we have one half of the indie community – the visible half, the half that gets interviewed on Kotaku or Gamasutra, the half you can name-drop to gamers and expect them to follow you – telling the other half that they are functionally unequals. Yes, the particular context is the Steam storefront, but there’s a clear subtext of outright dismissal from commercially successful indie developers when talking to the arthouse developers.

My goal with this article isn’t to call anyone out but to highlight the sort of discourse that is actually taking place in the indie community. A lot of these people have made games that I absolutely adore, and I respect them as creators. But it’s also important to highlight what’s actually being said, and with that in mind here are some tweets from popular indie devs:

Now, these are far from the only indie developers making similar points, but I felt it necessary to include some of the actual language in the discussion, as it’s important in pointing out the condescension taking place. This isn’t a matter of polite disagreement. There’s a vehement insistence that this is a non-issue; that $100 is no big deal and that anyone who disagrees is acting like children. And if you can’t raise $100? Hey, you’re not a serious game developer, or your game isn’t good enough, or you were never going to be commercially viable and therefore your game doesn’t deserve to be sold on the same boutique storefront my game is. Staltsman’s insistence that people who can’t afford $100 are by necessity physically/mentally challenged or foreigners is pretty telling about the privilege that pervades the upper echelons of the indie scene and how little they think of games that don’t have the budgets their games do.

So what does this stratification mean for the indie community? Well, for one, it means that the indie scene is now divided along class lines – an inclusive and amorphous group of students, unpublished indies, hobbyists, and starving artists on the one end and a plethora of small businessmen on the other. And again, there’s nothing wrong with that – making money on your games is not a crime. But there’s a clear difference between someone making a Flash game and hoping the Kongregate ads will help pay rent this month and someone having the ability to scrape together $200k as an investment into their very first indie title. But we still refer to both people simply as “indie developers**,” and increasingly that’s been the source of tension, debate, and misunderstandings.

There has been at least some attempt to span this gap – Dejobaan and others, for example, have tried to raise Greenlight money to support those that don’t have it. But I think as budgets rise even among small titles, we’re going to see the gap widen between the two types of indie developers – those who can afford to treat their passion like a business and those who can’t, those who see money spent on their game as an act of investment and those who see it as an act offiscal irresponsibility, those who see games as a career and those who see it as acalling. And while everyone wants to be in the former group, it’s important not to declare the latter group illegitimate or undeserving.

* I’m calling it “two communities” for argument’s sake, but in reality it’s more of a gradient. Which is part of the absurdity, really – today’s starving artist might be tomorrow’s superstar who tells the people coming up behind them they can’t sell their game unless it’s already successful, and there are plenty of people that straddle the commercial developer/starving artist line for their entire careers. For the sake of argument, though, let’s assume that most indie devs can be rounded to one side or other of this gradient, okay?

** This is not a “what is indie/this guy isn’t indie/this guy is so totally indie” statement. This is more of a “the word indie means such a wide swath of things now, we may need to reevaluate our ability to simply use that one word when developing indie platforms, indie tools, indie business guides, or indie conventions” statement.

 

[Destroid]

On the one hand the $100 fee sucks, but there really isn't any other practical way to keep useless spam off there than to have a token fee of some kind. Although it could have been less, say $20.

 

[Stinger]

Yeah I don't have too much of an issue with setting a price but it should be practical.

For an indie developer $100 is huge and paying that off might make it difficult to pay something like rent. $10 on the other hand only means missing a day's lunch at most.

And no one will waste $10 making up shit for steam greenlight, think of all the games you could buy on Steam during sales with that kind of money!

 

[Infinitron]

Some good comments there:

Let’s say I am an indie devs, who has programmed his entire life and who loves games. Let’s say I’ not rich. Let’s say I have a (not well payed) job to pay my expenses, and I spend all my nights programming and tuning my games. Let’s say that in some way I can afford that $100 even if they are a pretty big investment for me and for my dream. Let’s say I consider this fee a fair one because I think I have a pretty solid fanbase and a good chance to gather the 200k votes required, and I think that the quite high fee could reduce the number of impulse submission of bad games, giving me and my games a greater visibility even if my game is not accepted.

Now, let’s say that another indie developers start complaining about the fee, and start to call me privileged and classist, and he say how the world is unfair for people like him. Let’s say that this dev has made a game with a ludicrous graphic and he has almost no programming skill at all even if he had been a devs for almost 10 years. Let’s say that this guy is a full-time game developers even if, apparently, he couldn’t pay his rent with it. Let’s say that I read him tweet things like “the rich get richer” talking about Greenlight. May I have the right to be pissed at this pompous moron?

Completely off topic but I just started to hear your writing in your voice in my head.

On topic: I think the real problem lies in the misinterpretation of Greenlight, something you addressed in the video. Steam didn’t suddenly become an indie games platform, they just figured out that they have a lot of submissions and many of them are hard to judge because of the innovation factor. They don’t do Greenlight to be indie friendly, they do it because they don’t want to miss the next Minecraft. The fee being 100$ rather than 10$ or even 5$ is precisely there to make it more prohibitive, as is the 200k upvote mark (which I imagine will be finetuned later), it means they are not interested in games that would have less than, say, 10k release day sales (I’m making that number up but it is definitely a fraction of the required votes).

I don’t understand why so many devs think they have a “right” to be on Steam and the prohibitive measures introduced into Greenlight are infringing on that right? Not only doesn’t Steam have any kind of “obligation to the community” it is even their right to say, and they do so, “we are not interested in marginal profits.” I imagine once games start making it past Greenlight there will be an entire new set of issues with stuff like free games or in case the dev wants to give out free Steam copies to those who already bought the game through some different channel, especially with titles that are already a few years old and it seems likely that they run through a large portion of their selling course already.

Does Steam say “if your game can’t earn you enough to have a disposable 100$ we’re not interested?” Yes. This is their right, this is their business model. For some reason a lot of people just assumed that Greenlight will turn Steam into a “youtube for games” like Kongregate is. Again, Greenlight is a way for Steam to lessen their own workload and, perhaps even more so, to keep a buzzer for those innovative games that could slip below the radar. Yes, a lot of arguments in favour of the 100$, or a high voting margin, or other prohibitive measures could be more diplomatic. Yes, there is a number of games in the system that I think are well deserving but are doing poor in votes (Immortal Defense and Frayed Knights come to mind). But at the end of the day Steam isn’t asking if your game is good, they’re asking if your game can earn them money.

 

[Brotherman Bill]

100$is huge?

How much work should a man put down into a game before it is close to be released...? I mean for any self-respecting game, 100$ should look trivial compared to the time downed into it. Yeah, this might alienate the transsexual third world ethiopians whose only dream was to be published on steam, and the hobo who used public libraries to code while pulling himself up by the bootstraps, but for anyone who can actually afford to spend lots of time at coding, and lots of money on a computer, 100$ should be a fairly cheap admission price. And if it isn't, well they could always self-publish (lololo)