Game Industry Observations, Ten Years Later

With a new decade comes the realization that I’ve worked in or around the game industry now for over ten years. Wow. There are questions people have frequently asked me over the years and one of those is whether I’ve ever thought of going back into science and the answer is yes, of course I’ve thought about it, but I love what I do now and don’t plan to leave this line of work any time soon. Other questions I’ve frequently been asked inevitably revolve around my gender: how do I feel about being a woman in a male-dominated industry? Does the ubiquity of porn-star-like female game models ever turn me off of gaming or working in the industry? Do I wish there were more “girl games?”

Kotaku’s article today about the ten most influential women in gaming of the past decade got me thinking that these questions seem so antiquated now and that our industry doesn’t really get a whole lot of credit for the advancements it’s made in the last ten years, not just in terms of gender but in terms of sheer quality and maturity. If a site like Kotaku had tried to make a similar list ten years ago they would have struggled to find ten women at all that could be called influential in gaming, and what women they’d have found would likely have been Internet celebrities roughly in the same camp I was in when I worked at GameSpy ten years ago: women who wrote about games or had some kind of online personality cache but couldn’t be said to be involved in their development in any meaningful way. Yes, women in game development ten years ago existed, but they were extremely few and far between.

Now we’re so commonplace that I feel like the subject of women in games — words crammed together so frequently over the years that, when pronounced, seem like one word, womeningames — is hardly a subject at all. The issues that women in the game industry have to face aren’t non-existent to be sure, but how many industries that have traditionally been male-dominated can claim to have seen so much gender distribution in such a short time period? Maybe there are many (to be fair, I haven’t researched it) but having been a part of it for ten years I feel like so much has changed for us that doesn’t get recognized: more games are featuring better designed female characters, both in terms of their visuals and their places in the world and story, and more women are showing up across all aspects of game development: programming, design, art, you name it.

And while a huge percentage of people are still under the misconception that games are strictly for kids, our industry has made huge leaps in the maturity level of our product. I’m not talking about simply the “rated M for Mature” aspect of our games, though that certainly is also the case — like movies, there’s a segment of games designed for adults that contain a lot of blood and violence. But the presentation of games has also matured. First-person shooters with only a shred of a backstory, just enough to give the game’s world a reason to exist, had their place over a decade ago and continue to show up as fun, throwaway shooters. Now we have games like Uncharted 2, Modern Warfare 2, and more that have the depth and presentation of a movie or contain content designed to evoke feelings in you via the one thing that games are good at above all other media: putting you in the driver’s seat. We may not always get that right but how long have movies had to evolve compared to the game industry?

So be proud of what you do, fellow game developers. I feel like the next ten years are going to be just as exciting as the last ten.

Good UI Principles: PC to Console, Console to PC

The days of the PC-only game developer are about as alive as the days of the dinosaurs — if you’re a PC-only game developer these days, the chances are good that you’re making casual games, not full-on triple-A shooter or RPG titles. Even RTS games, the genre with devotees that cling doggedly to the “PC is the only viable platform for RTS!” mantra, have transformed with the recent release of Halo Wars by Ensemble.
And that brings us to today’s Good UI Principle:

Principle 1: It is far easier and cheaper to develop a multi-platform UI for the console version first and use it as the basis for the PC version than it is to develop the UI for the PC version and back-develop it for the console version.
Principle 2: In the era of multi-platform (and thus multi-input-device) games, UI coding language and algorithms need to be changed from language that uses words like “mouseover” and “rollouts” to “on-actions”, “on-exits”, and “on-selects.”

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Good UI Principles 2b: More Info Is Not Good Info

Okay, I admit that I’ve only just started these essays and I’ve already blatantly lied to you. Not only did I not post my first one over the weekend like I promised, I’m also doing a bait and switch on the topic. Instead of talking about the development path between console and PC UI first, there’s something that came up in conversation today that I’d rather devote the first entry to, and its position on my list is 2b (because it kind of dovetails into a couple of other points I had made earlier on my list). Here’s the tenet:

Giving the player all information at all times is not only not advantageous, but actively damaging to the game experience.

It’s a subpoint on my list because it dovetails into a larger point, which is that a UI’s job is to present only the information you need when you actually need it, and that information shouldn’t crowd your screen at any other time.

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Good UI Principles: The Intro

I’ve spent the last five years of my game industry career making user interfaces for games of many types — PC games, console games, games that ship on PC and multiple console platforms, first-person shooters, third-person action games, and strategy action games. And I spent the five years prior to that working in areas of game development that touched heavily on the user interface experience — web design for some of the largest game web sites on the net, marketing materials for games, and more.
I’ve learned a lot over those many years, and about a year ago I decided it would be kind of cool to keep track of the things I’ve learned about UI design and the user experience in games in some kind of list. The list has since grown to include about twenty items so far and as long as I work in UI I can only assume that the list will continue to grow. I’ve taken to calling the list “Good UI Principles” and I’ve decided it would be a great idea to start expanding on each one of the items in my list in a collection of blog essays because discussion about good UI design is surprisingly hard to find. As to whether or not I’ll actually contribute anything to a discussion about good UI design remains to be seen, but hey, what’s the harm in trying?

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UI, Entropy, and the Tipping Point

I’ve been designing user interfaces for games for about five years now, and one of the things I decided to do about a year ago was to keep a list of “good UI principles,” those things that people in other positions in the game industry often don’t understand or realize about game UI development. This week I discovered one, what felt like a very important and revelatory one, and realized that it deserved more than just a two-line blurb in my text document.
For the past few months I’ve been working on the UI for Demigod (and by the way, we released the first official trailer today) and we reached a point a couple of weeks ago in which the UI needed a complete overhaul. The other leads on the project were worried about how I’d take this because they knew they were essentially telling me, “we’re sorry, but you have to completely redo this, it doesn’t fit with the game now.” After discussing what changes we wanted to make one of the leads asked me worriedly, “are you okay with this? I mean, we’re basically redoing everything.” And when I said yes, explaining that this always happens in UI because there’s a point you reach at which it just sort of…well, happens, he said, “it does? So what are we doing wrong, then?” Speaking in the broad, industry-wide sense of the word we.

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women don’t want to be spaceships

What do women want in a game? What they don’t want, Magnus Bergsson of EVE Online developer CCP says, is to be spaceships. They want to be people, he said in a recent interview.
If you’re an atypical gaming female like me, it’s easy to let a knee-jerk reaction get the best of you and make you want to call him a misogynist or sexist, but if you have that reaction then you need to remember one thing: Magnus Bergsson isn’t talking about you. He’s talking about your average woman, and you know what? He’s right.

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oh bill o’reilly, you crazy kook

I’ll talk about this anyway, even though Bill O’Reilly doesn’t need any help from me in exposing his screeching, shrill Chicken Little ignorance — he’s certainly done it quite well on his own in saying that video games are going to be the death of society as we know it. He believes that “a large portion” of people “under the age of 45″ have no grasp on reality and no skillset to acquire a job, and that the launch of the Playstation 3 is going to change this country into some kind of unrecognizable monstrosity.
O’Reilly’s comments focus a lot on the erroneous belief that so many anti-game people hold: that people who play video games lose the ability to socialize with people. They don’t know their neighbors, he says. Nothing could be further from the truth. Video games have, especially in the last few years, become a foundation for vast social interactivity. Hardly anyone sits in their room anymore playing a game in the dark by themselves; they’re adding people to their Friends Lists and playing games together, either against each other or cooperatively. Or they’re playing World of Warcraft with a thousand other people and making friends with them. Or they’re going to game conventions or E3 and meeting people in person who they’ve only ever known as a voice on the other side of the Xbox headset. Video gamers have grown up and are having children, and now parents spend time with their kids playing video games together. As a video game developer, I can say that the social interactivity factor of games and the new console systems is nearly more important than the game itself now.
O’Reilly talks about gamers as if his sole exposure to them comes from a poorly written TV stereotype. I’d wager he’s never actually met one. A video game console in a home is about as common a site today as a toaster. Video games are so common place that MTV, that shining beacon of social trend prediction, now has its own video game show. (Which bears the unfortunate name of The G-Hole…but we’ll save that for another entry.) There are socially inept and withdrawn people who play video games, and there are socially inept and withdrawn people who have no idea what an XBox or a Playstation is. There are surgeons who have been shown to have improved motor skills and coordination because they play video games. There are soldiers in O’Reilly’s beloved Iraq War that are better UAV pilots because they play video games.
There have always been people like O’Reilly — people who are fearful of some new technology or new fad and think that it will be the death of civilization as we know it. It was said that comics would ruin society (they didn’t), and the same was said about television and radio, the very media that O’Reilly relies on for his paycheck and yet conveniently considers benign.
He goes on at length about how impossible it is to hold a conversation with a computer geek, and that you can’t really talk to them. The moment he said this, O’Reilly might as well have hung a big neon sign around his neck that read, I’M IRRELEVANT. While everyone else in the world moves on with new advancements and new technology, the dinosaurs of our society, the people who fear change, fear advancement, and fear their own relevancy and ability to keep up, wail and gnash their teeth about how society is dying and no one else can see it but them. And society doesn’t crumble beneath our feet.
If O’Reilly can’t have a conversation with a person who plays video games, uses computers, or uses an iPod (another device that he complains about), devices that are considered these days to be as basic as a calculator, it’s much more telling about his own inability to keep up with the rest of society. Perhaps he should be more concerned about his imminent irrelevancy and less concerned about people who don’t fear technology and are out talking to their friends and their coworkers about it.

how to fight sexism in games: stop making cool female characters

The title is a little extreme, but bear with me.
There was a time in games, back before Alyx in Half-Life 2, before Jade from Beyond Good & Evil, when female characters in games came in only one variety: overboobified, underwaistified, barely-dressed stripper. For a female gamer like me, it was an easy time championing the fight to include less sexed-up female characters with more clothes on on their body and a few more brain cells in their head. All we had to do was hold up any ad from any gaming magazine that had a prominent female character and point to it. Or just say, “come on…just look at Lara Croft, for God’s sake.”
Then we were rewarded with the Alyxes and the Jades, and we female gamers were the happier for it. Finally we had some realistic female characters, ones who were smart, ones who wore real clothes and didn’t exist solely to serve the male fantasy. We had characters we wanted to be.
So we should be happy, right? We won our fight, didn’t we?
I had an interesting discussion with friends and fellow game developers today, and it made me realize that we’re in danger of thinking we’ve won the war when we’ve only really won the battle. The discussion started with video from Gears of War that I can’t link to because it’s been pulled for copyright reasons, but the video had a shot of a female character that helps the player through the game — her name is Anya and she’s an intelligence officer that you mostly hear but never see. The video, however, gave us a sneak peek of her and one of my friends raised an interesting point: while Anya certainly isn’t scantily clad by any means, my friend found it interesting that in the video she’s standing with a fully-armored soldier having just landed in a helicopter. My friend wondered why the one female character didn’t have any armor on while the male soldiers had full protection?
I’m not going to pick on Gears of War specifically — Anya is a great character. She’s exactly what a great female character should be: intelligent, approachable, and not oversexualized. I think the way Epic designed her is terrific. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt that she’s another character in a trend that I worry is almost eroding the very thing we’re trying to get video games to stop doing: perpetuating the idea that women are an unusual commodity unfit for ordinary places in these fantasy worlds.
In an effort to raise video games out of the depths of sexism, more game companies are designing female characters that aren’t oversexualized, that are approachable, and that play a pivotable role in the game. This is commendable, certainly. But what do Alyx and Anya have in common? (Or seem to — I’ll certainly be quite happy to retract any of this once GoW is released and I’m wrong about the role Anya plays.) They’re helper characters. And they’re almost always the only female character in the game.
It’s as if the designers have figured out that they need to have a woman in the game in order to help work out this whole strippers-in-games problem, but they didn’t broaden their scope enough to go beyond a band-aid solution. So they put in a female character that’s certainly important enough to be a key part of the game, but its at the expense of the rest of the game world. (I should note that I’m mostly limiting this to shooters and other “hardcore” genre games — RPGs generally do a pretty good job of having a lot of characters of both genders in their game worlds.)
Women make up 51% of the population. Women are construction workers, CEOs of large corporations, soldiers, some of whom serve in combat now. Why, when we’re creating futuristic worlds, are we not including them among the background characters of our game world? Why is it that when you’re walking around a military base in a futuristic world and encountering one generic soldier after another, not one of them is female?
I’m not absolving my own company (Raven Software) of this. We made Quake 4 and we absolutely should have had a good female marine in the game. We have a few women at Raven and all of us told the team that we really wanted a female marine. One of our artists even concepted a very good character but due to memory andtime constraints, we were told, there was no way to put her in. It’s unfortunate, and it’s something we ought to remedy in future projects.
But the remedy isn’t making one very special female character, one carefully crafted to please the eye yet not offend the sensibilities, charged with carrying the burden of representing the entire female gender in the entire game. The remedy is actually a lot more plain than that: just add female characters to your game world. Add them in ordinary positions doing ordinary things. Got a game that has a scene in a futuristic space dock? Make one out of four of your generic dock worker models a woman. Got a game that takes place on futuristic battlefields with squads of soldiers, most of whom are there to add a living element to the game? Make one of them a woman. And if you can’t spare the memory for the extra female model plus her voice files, put a couple of generic female voice files on one of your armored-up helmeted soldiers. After all, do men and women soldiers in heavy armor really look that different? (This idea was suggested by my friend who originally asked about Anya’s armor, and I think it’s a great idea. Okay, the model animations should definitely look different between a man and a woman, but hey, I’m willing to sacrifice that for something so much more obviously female as a voice file.)
Making special female characters is great, but in doing so we shift the focus from wondering why there are only strippers for female characters in a game to why there is only one woman in the game. That just shifts the problem, it doesn’t help to solve it. We’re an industry that’s grown up a lot over the last couple of decades and we’re really making strides. Many of the young guys who make games today have gone on to become family men, yet we’re still seen as the socially awkward pimply-faced teen who has completely unrealistic ideas about women in games and art. Imagine how your wife, your girlfriend, or your daughter live in a world in which they can do anything they want and be represented, and then look at the game world that you’re helping to create and re-evaluate why you might be leaving them out of it.
Special female characters are great and it shows how far we’ve come in our short history. But when the day comes that the inclusion of women characters in games is as ordinary and unexciting as the inclusion of male characters already is…that’s when we’ve really nailed it.
And by the way, I want to add a postscript here. Some of you may say, “but Caryn, what about the Hellchick model? That’s supposed to represent you, and she’s the height of oversexualized, underdressed game characters!”
I want to make it clear that I have no problems with these kind of characters existing, and existing especially in game worlds that are suited for them. I like the expression of sexuality in games; I just don’t want to see it as the only representation of women. Did anyone play Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K. 2? I did, and the main character was Julie Strain, a stripper heroine with only a few scarves around her that could barely be called clothes. And I loved her, because it fit the world she was in, just like the Hellchick model fits the world she lives in: a succubus creature designed specifically to be shown off in that way.
It’s great to have both kinds of characters. We just need a little bit more of the ordinary ones to catch up with the extraordinary ones.

“the house of representatives is filled with insane jackasses”

As my friend Fargo put it, “it’s pretty sad when a comedy show has to be the voice of reason.”
If you didn’t catch the segment on The Daily Show last night about the Congressional hearings on video game violence currently wasting your hard-earned tax dollars, your homework assignment is to watch it right here.
The first two thirds of the segment mostly just uncovers the complete out-of-touchness of the people that we hire to represent us to our government. You have some gems in there, such as Congressman Fred Upton (R-Michigan) proudly proclaiming that he’s a gamer because he’s an expert at Pong. I’m going to assume that right after he said that, he got into his Model T to go home and play the latest wax cylinder musical recording on his brand-new grammaphone.
Mr. Upton, if the last game you played was Pong, you haven’t played a game in about 25 years, and there’s generally a statute of limitations on the use of the word “gamer” when claiming that you are one. Things have advanced now. We have computers, there’s a space station in orbit, and we have these things called lattes. You might consider checking them out.
But the best part is that while Jon Stewart is doing what he does best — publicly making fun of those who deserve it — he slips in some absolute gems of blazing ignorance. Take this quote from Congressman Joseph Pitts (R-Pennsylvania):
“It’s safe to say that a wealthy kid from the suburbs can play Grand Theft Auto or similar games without turning to a life of crime, but a poor kid who lives in a neighborhood where people really do steal cars or deal drugs or shoot cops might not be so fortunate.”
I want you to read that passage again, folks, because those are his exact words, unaltered. And then I want you to wonder how someone so astoundingly ignorant could have had enough sense to put on pants that morning.
So let’s analyze this, shall we? According to Rep. Pitts, crime did not exist before video games. People didn’t steal cars, do drugs, or shoot cops before Grand Theft Auto told them how. That’s right, folks: Rep. Pitts actually stated the cause of poor kids turning to crime — that of living in an environment where crime is commonplace — and in the same sentence proceeded to blame it on a medium that is approximately 1/1,000,000th as old as crime.
And in case it wasn’t clear to you, Rep. Pitts wants to assure you that this is why suburban kids never steal cars, do drugs, or shoot cops. He wants to make sure you know that suburban kids can obviously — without any fear whatsoever of being influenced by them — play the most violent, gory video games and never, ever commit the crimes they see in them.
Wait…why are we having these hearings again? I thought they just said that kids are all influenced by the video games they play?
This is ridiculous. These people are assinine, and Stewart’s quote that Congress is filled with insane jackasses is absolutely dead correct. These people have no right to say one word against a medium that they so proudly display an astounding ignorance of.
Not only that, but they only seem to have one game they like to hold up as the example for all video games that have ever been made; to them, every game is Grand Theft Auto or Postal. This would be analogous to saying that every movie is Faces of Death, and because that movie is out there we need to have a Congressional hearing about movies and how our young people aren’t being protected from them. There is a world of video games out there of which the Grand Theft Autos make up a very small portion. But they refuse to get off of the Grand Theft Auto train because they are crusaders on a mission that lacks all common sense.
If you’re reading this and you live in the states that these Congressmen represent, you owe it to your own intelligence to write to them and tell them to get out of office and let someone with at least one living brain cell do their job.
These are the people trying to tell you what’s best for you and your kids. These are the people who say that you as a parent aren’t capable of making your own informed decisions on what your child should and shouldn’t be exposed to. These are the people who are making our laws.
Don’t let these ignorant jackasses tell you what you’re supposed to think, especially when they don’t even know anything about what it is they’re trying to legislate.

where is gaming’s Frank Zappa?

There’s this great page on PBS.org called “Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked”. If you haven’t read it, take a look and you might be surprised at what you read if you’re not a gamer. It’s nice to see an outlet generally recognized as intelligent and educational as PBS is stand up for the industry I work in when so many people want to tear it down. The article debunks the theories that youth aggression, violence, and desensitivity to violence increases by playing games, and even the myth that video games are aimed mainly at children (that hasn’t been the case because those of us in our late 20’s to 30’s have grown up with gaming and are the primary audience that’s introducing the younger generation to games).
CBSNews.org recently ran an article titled “Where Is Our Frank Zappa?” The bulk of the article is really just the transcript of Zappa’s hearings in the 1980’s with Congress in regards to the PMRC (Parent’s Music Resource Center). It’s definitely worth reading since many of the issues can indeed be applied to games. But the article never answers the question is poses.
And it’s a really good question. Why don’t we have a Frank Zappa for the games industry? Someone in a forum I read speculated that the reason we don’t have one is the age difference between music and video games. Zappa was in his 40s when he went before Congress. He was a seasoned veteran of the music industry. There was history and foundation there for him to work off of. But video games are only a couple of decades old, and that’s if you include the harmless roots video games like Pac-Man and Pong. But the real history of video games as controversial mechanisms for fostering youth violence started with DOOM in the late 1990’s. And this forum poster speculated that if you normalize the two histories, our Frank Zappa is probably a 26 year old without any clout to weild before Congress yet.
It’s a good theory and probably has merit. But I have another theory. I think it’s because we lack a diverse enough gaming portfolio yet that we can use to defend games as a valid medium of expression. Music is art, and no one at this point can really argue otherwise. And controversy in art is somewhat easily defendable because it’s part of what makes art what it is. But are games art? Not everyone thinks so, and game developers themselves don’t completely agree on the answer.
Within genres like rock and rap in music you can often find great examples to hold up that make the Moral Minority quiet down when you tell them, look, see? There’s no reason to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Movies have the same defense strategy — if you want to defend the issue of violence having a rightful place in all movies, then when people complain about Pulp Fiction you hold up Saving Private Ryan. It’s the defense strategy that says something controversial is valid within an entire medium as long as the medium has plenty of “valid” uses of it. But games lack that when it comes to the pivotal issue of violence. It’s hard to defend a game like Grand Theft Auto when we don’t have anything else to hold up alongside it. We have no Saving Private Ryan in video games, no game that uses violence to show how horrible realistic violence really is.
I wish such a game existed. I wish a game developer would make a game that made a point of using what games do that no other medium does — forcing the player to make decisions and experience the consequences — and tie it into the issue of violence in such a way that we could make the player feel the negative consequences of actions that result in the realistic violence that we’re capable of rendering in today’s game engines. I don’t wish this game existed because I have a problem with violence in games and want to attach morality to it — I don’t. (Hey, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy running around in Grand Theft Auto beating up innocent people and stealing their cars. It isn’t like I’m ever going to do that in real life, so why not enjoy doing it in a game?)
I wish it existed because it would force a discussion about broad-sweeping legislation of games that currently completely ignores any evaluation of the game content itself. We’re on the verge of government legislating against any video game that contains material considered “violent” or “adult” based solely on the “M” rating on the box, and legislating it in ways that the movie and music industries have never seen, in ways that completely sidestep any discussion about whether or not the content in question provides discussion or educational value. Why? Because we currently don’t have any games in which the violent or adult content actually does provide any value for discussion or education.
And we’re doing all of this legislating because people are afraid of what they don’t know anything about. Parents, the ESRB rating on the game box gives you just as much information about the game, if not more, than the movie rating gives you about the movie in its preview. If you’re capable of making an informed decision about movies based on their rating without the government’s help, then why aren’t you capable of making the same decision about the games your child plays?