As many of you may know I’ve been trying to land a job in the industry for over six months now – actually longer, it’s just been about that long since I finished my degree in Game Design so I’m only counting the time since school. If you take a look at my resume you’ll see that, while I don’t have a ton of experience in the game or entertainment industries, I have a wide variety of experience in other fields. Now, I’m not expecting to land a Designer, or even an Assistant Designer, position right off the bat. I may have tons of ideas for the next great game or how you can improve your existing game but I realize that ideas are a dime a dozen and companies aren’t going to put the design of their million dollar baby into the hands of someone without a track record. I do expect my experience outside of the industry to count for something though, I’m not about to move to California and take a $10.00/hour job in QA just to “prove myself”.

So lets look at a typical job posting for what most industries would consider an entry level position:

Assistant Producer

If you can identify with the following, we want to hear from you!

-A strong sense of curiosity. – Yep, got that in spades
-The need to be involved. – Got this one too, I always like to know what’s going on
-Willingness to learn and grow. – Been doing this one for more years than I care to mention and I always feel that there’s more to learn
-The ability to think for yourself. – Yes, and I even understand that its possible to think for yourself and still be able to follow instructions
-The ability to follow instruction. – Umm…yeah…see U.S. Navy on the resume
-Exceptional personal skills. – Not sure about exceptional but I’ve managed to get along with most people for quite a few years…even some I didn’t really like
-Good public speaker. – If it’s a topic I’m passionate about…say the latest cool game
-Exceptional organization skills. – Yeah, I think that’s covered by both Navy experience and other things on the old resume
-Strong attention to detail. – Did I mention I was in the Navy…I think that phrase was uttered about 1000 times a day during boot camp and it was actually a rating on our reviews
-Courage and tenacity. – Ummm…I guess that depends on what you mean…I’m not willing to take a bullet for the Producer or anything but I’ll stand up for my team and my project
-An aptitude for problem solving. – I think the resume shows I’ve solved my share of problems…I’ve definatly solved more than I created.

Experience:
-At least 1 year of game industry experience, preferably in production or QA role. – Nope, though I’m hoping that my time spent as an offsite GM will count even though I don’t get paid
-Knowledge of Microsoft Office products a bonus. – While I’m not expert I use Word and Excel almost daily. I’ve used Project and Powerpoint and I used to use Access quite a bit several years ago.

Responsibilities:
-Assists producers with product development.
-Assists with assessing and maintaining product quality.
-Assist in project staffing process.
-Assists in resource relocation processes.

I’ve applied for this position, posted on GamaSutra last week, and have yet to hear anything back from them. To be honest I doubt if I will, you see I don’t have that “At least 1 year of game industry experience…” that I highlighted up there. Everything else? I’m probably over qualified for to be honest, but I realize that I’m trying to break into a different industry so I’m willing to take a more entry level position. The problem is that, unless you’re a programmer, the game industry considers their only “entry level” positions to be either in QA or tech support.

This is fine if you’re a high school graduate looking to break into the industry. You’re going to be hard pressed to get people with a Bachelors degree to come to your industry if the only way they can get their foot in the door is to start out working for $10.00 an hour. As the NextGen article said, there are a ton of jobs going un-filled in the industry because the people that make the hiring decisions are hung up on this 1 to 2 years of industry experience with at least 1 shipped title. People wonder why creativity is dead in the industry, besides all of the other big money, imitating Hollywood issues, you might also want to look at your hiring practices. How many talented and creative people are turned away every year because they don’t have “industry experience”.

So if you’re in the industry and are looking for someone with a wealth of real world experience managing people an coordinating projects across different areas of a large company but doesn’t have a lot of Game Industry experience let me know, I’d be glad to take an Assistant Producer position to learn the industry specific skills.

As I said, I knew nothing about the rules of the game so you’d think that this kind of coverage would have been frustrating but in reality it allowed me to learn the subtlties of the game much faster. I had to watch what was happening, think about what the commentator said and try and relate the two to figure out what was going on. This kept me much more engaged in the match and I started to see plays developing. As a result I now find soccer much more entertaining than, say, American football.

This weekend I found myself experiencing that same engagement watching people play a video game that I have very little interest in actually playing myself, EvE Online. This weekend, and again next weekend, CCP is running a series of in-game PvP matches and they’re streaming live coverage of them over the web via a service they’re calling EveTV.

I know very little about EvE, I’ve tried it but it was just far to much of a spreadsheet simulator for my tastes, and I know even less about their PvP and these matches were not only PvP they were, apparently, high end PvP. So when I found the link and went to check it out I wasn’t expecting a lot.

First let me go over the rules, as I figured them out from the couple of matches I watched so these may be completely wrong. Each match consists of 2 teams with 5 ships each and is scheduled to run 10 minutes but the officials can extend that if they see fit. The winner is the first team to destroy all 5 of the other teams ships. Since this also appeared to be a tournament you wanted to try and protect your ships as well since you only got to take the survivors into the next round if you won.

Maybe I got lucky, the first match I watched was between two fairly evenly matched teams and as they were approaching 2 minutes left in the 10 minute time limit both still had all 5 of their ships. The CCP devs officiating the event said that if they reached the 10 minute limit still tied, or really close, they’d call it a draw – sounds like soccer right. Then in the last 2 minutes one team pulls some tricks out of their books and takes out 3 of the other teams ships, we’re talking from almost full health to gone in short order. So the officials decide to extend the time, it’s only fair that the team that pulled out 3 quick kills get a chance to finish off the others and get the win, so they added 10 more minutes. Less than a minute into this extended time they took out one of the two remaining ships leaving just a Raven (whatever the hell that is) with five other ships ganging up on it. The commentators didn’t seem to have a lot of respect for the poor Raven, they were talking like this would be over in less than a minute, but at the end of the 10 minutes of extended time the Raven was still hanging in there, shields above half and no physical damage. The officials decided to extend time yet again, they just knew that this Raven should be finished off any minute now. It took 5 ships and, easily, 15 minutes to bring down that lowly Raven!

They kept zooming in and you’d see these drones circling the poor ship with red beams locked on doing something…I think they were draining energy or something but it looked worse. You’d see torpedos coming in and these huge space explosions going off but when the flash cleared the Raven didn’t look like it was even scratched. You could see the shield bar dropping but it wouldn’t get much below half before it would slowly start to climb again. The commentators were dumbfounded, they couldn’t believe that this ship could take this much damage and just shrug it off. They were almost giddy with excitement watching this and, much like those early soccer matches, it started rubbing off on me.

In the end I watched a couple of different matches and all of them reminded me more of the slow methodical build up of soccer than the frenzied, fast paced, action of football. I found myself starting to see stratagies as they unfolded even though I still had no clue what the announcers were talking about half the time. In short I found it entertaining to watch, in contrast to most of the other competitive gaming TV I’ve seen.

For starters most of the competitive gaming uses FPS games, games that are inheriently much more frenzied and, most importantly, conducted in much tighter quarters. They also tend to use the players eye view, using the feed from one players monitor and switching between players. This is great for showing the action but doesn’t really allow you to see the stratagy of the game, they all look like a bunch of guys just running around, jumping constantly, and pressing the fire button. You don’t get to experience the subtlties of how they’re using the map to their advantage or they’ve learned a players tendencies and are exploiting them to set a trap. Stuff that I know is in there but is lost to the outside viewer. It doesn’t help that the commentators for these shows are more concerned with sounding all hip and cool than they are with the actual match and the strategy behind it. They focus on the “Boom-pow-up-the-middle” style of sports commentating.

So can competitive gaming be good TV? I think that EvE TV is showing that it can and I think that if these professional gaming leagues should try and learn from them.

First, don’t talk down to your viewers. Assume they know the game and the details of how to play so only focus on pointing out the strategies being employed and what you think of those.

To tie in with that let your viewers see the whole match, or at least a large chunk of it, at once. The first person view may be great for the player but it sucks for actually watching the game. I realize that they’re somewhat limited by the tools implemented into the games themselves so maybe developers need to look at giving them some tools if they want to make gaming into a sport. In reality I think they’d be better off not trying to televise Halo or Counter-Strike matches and start out showing an RTS. There’s a reason that StarCraft is huge in Korea, and it has multiple TV shows dedicated to it. The viewers can watch the game develop, they can figure out the strategies they can see the mistake that costs one side or the other the match when it happens.

I think that EvE TV has proven that competitive video gaming can be entertaining TV with the right combination of announcers and camera angles that get out of the way and allow the viewer to experience the match as a whole. Who knows, maybe Raid TV is just around the corner.

This was my first experience at E3 and while it was a lot of fun it was also very tiring, I think my feet started proceedings to disown me on Thursday, and loud. I understand that they had some strict noise policies in place and this year they were enforcing them but still, when you’ve got 100′s of games playing at even normal volume the din can be overwhelming. I heard that the NCSoft booth got fined for one of their bands being to loud and I can believe it, lets just say that watching someone playing Aion on a system 10 feet from the stage is NOT where you want to be when the drummers started up.

The demise of the booth babe was also overly exaggerated, they were still out in force and there were still lines of gamers lined up to get their picture taken with them…kind of sad really. There were also quite a few women gamers/developers there too which just goes to show it’s not strictly a “boy’s game” anymore – a good thing if you ask me.

And now on with the reviews…

I didn’t get to see the Wii or any of the games for it that were being shown in the Nintendo booth, I wasn’t going to stand in line for 3 hours for anything much less a console. I was also told that Spore was being shown behind closed doors to press only so I didn’t bother trying to see it, I’ve since found that anyone could get in if they were willing to wait in line…that one I might have waited for had I known.

So lets start with the console wars.

As I said didn’t get to see the Wii but I did see the lines and I did talk to several people that managed to get in. From all of the reports it looks like Nintendo might have a winner, especially for the “average” gamers and for attracting new people to the hobby. A lot of the gaming bloggers are kind of dismissing it saying it won’t compete with the XBox 360 or the PS3 but I think it has the potential to put Nintendo back on top, or at least near the top. There are only 2 flaws with it as far as I can tell. Lack of support for HD, especially a digital output, this is only going to be an issue long term and might be correctable by an add-on later. The bigger issue is no DVD play back, not HD-DVD or BluRay but plain old DVD’s. I think at the $200 price point being rumored they could throw in standard DVD playback no problem and it would help sell more units. If they can create some sort of add-on that will play DVD’s, or better yet an upscaling DVD player, then they’ll definatly have a winner. I don’t think that the whole HD revolution is that big a deal, but that’s for another article.

I did get a chance to see the PlayStation killer, and it’s the PS3, this console could end Sony’s domination of the console market, at least in the U.S. At $500 it’s a very expensive game console and Sony claiming that it’s cheap for a BluRay player doesn’t work for that unit since it’s missing the HDMI output that will allow you to play flagged movies at full 1080p. At $600 you get all the features but when you remember that you’re probably going to have to by at least 1 more controller, probably a video cable of some sort, and a couple of games you’re pushing $1000 which is a large chunk of change for most people. The price combined with only having 2 real exclusive franchises at launch, Final Fantasy 13 and the new Metal Gear, probably means poor sales. I’ve seen plenty of reports of people that had been waiting for Sony to announce pricing or launch titles before deciding whether to go for the 360 or the PS3 and many of them have already headed to the store to pickup the 360. It’s out now, it has most of the major titles they’re intrested in along with some nice exclusives coming and it’s cheaper. Sure it doesn’t play 1080p but I hate to break it to Sony, the average user can’t tell much difference, heck I’ve heard from numerous sources that the Gears of War demo that Microsoft had at their press conference was the most visually stunning game they’d seen and that wasn’t shown at HD resolutions. I had a look at Gran Tourismo HD – basically GT4 reworked to 1080p – and it looked good but it didn’t really better than the latest Project Gotham… especially not a $600 console worth of better. The other game I got to play with was Warhawks, which uses the new “DualShake” controllers motion sensor stuff. The controller made the game play slightly more immersive than using the dual analog sticks but it was still kind of clunky…not surprising since the devs said they added it in less than a week before the show. For all their touting “full HD” the game, to my unpracticed eyes at least, didn’t look that much better than a current gen XBox title and the gameplay was a typical 3rd person action flyer which isn’t a genre that screams launch title to me.

On the XBox front there wasn’t a lot of new info specific to the console, the Gears of War demo looked impressive as did a few of the other upcoming titles but nothing to make me want to rush out and buy one. The big news as far as I’m concerned was the Live Everywhere…or is it Anywhere, either way. Tying XBox live into the PC is going to be very cool and it might actually be a reason for a lot of us PC gamers to upgrade to Vista, something I hadn’t really seen a reason to do yet. I also liked the idea of tying it to cell phones so you could pay for a game like Zuma once and play it across all 3 systems. That and the idea of doing things like allowing you to customize a car on your cell phone or mobile device and then make that available in Forza on your console sounds really cool. The whole putting stuff that works well on the cell phone to keep people engaged in your game world is an interesting concept to me.

And now for the games.

I had a list I made before the show so I’ll just go down that list.

• Dark Messiah of Might & Magic - Still kind of rough but entertaining. It looked like a fairly typical first person RPG, similar to Oblivion. Graphically it was stunning, I liked it better than Oblivion but then it should look better being newer. Nothing made me want to rush out and pre-order it but for fans of the series it looks to at least take away some of the bad taste left by earlier versions.
• Hellgate: London - Just as I had imagined this looks to be the evolution of Diablo, not a complete surprise considering the developers, but that’s not a bad thing. It’s still a ways off but even so it plays really well with only a few camera glitches that I noticed and it looks amazing. If you’re a Diablo fan you’re going to want to pick this one up.
• Shadowrun - Probably the biggest disappointment of the show for me (other than not getting to see Spore). They took a pen & paper RPG license with a ton of potential for a wide variety of game styles and turned it into a generic sci-fi styled FPS. Sure they’ll call it an RPG because, since Diablo, anything that allows you to upgrade your character or weapons is called an RPG these days but it’s your typical FPS. From playing around with it, it’s not even all that great an FPS. All in all a depressing misuse of the license.
• Vanguard: Saga of Heros - Ok full disclosure time – I’m pre-disposed to not liking Vanguard because it’s my fervant belief that Brad McQuaid and his “Vision” did more to harm EQ than anything SoE could possibly have done. While I have some fond memories of EQ I also believe that what Sigil is doing, and the rabid fanboi’s seem to think they want, is taking all of the very worst aspects of a generation 1.5 MMO (if muds were 1st gen then UO, EQ and AC were just graphical updates) and giving them a prettier face. I will admit that the game looks good and the little bit of gameplay I got to watch, sorry no hands on, looked entertaining but then he didn’t die and have to do a naked corpse run to the bottom of some dungeon 5 zones away. See had they taken the combat portion of EQ, the long fights that were filled with opportunites to use your various skills to gain a tactical advantage, they might have had an interesting game. But no they had to take the corpse runs, the camping, the contested spawns, the grinding, in short the crap. When I asked about this they seemed proud they said that it made the game more challenging, making the mistake I see in a lot of MMO’s that time consuming and frustrating equals challenging. I do think there is a niche for the game and I think they’ll do very well in that niche, if they stick to their guns and don’t cave to the board whinners. It’s just not going to be the game for me.
• Dungeon Runners - I hadn’t heard a lot about this game before the show but it did sound interesting. Think an action RPG, a la Diablo, in MMO form using the Guild Wars system of cities as common areas but everything else instanced. That’s exactly what it plays like and, if you like Diablo, it’s a lot of fun. They haven’t finalized their pricing scheme yet but they’re wanting it to be free to download, free to play and maybe use micropayments for upgrades. A model that works well in Asia but may not do so hot here. The rep I spoke with also said they’re considering using the Guild Wars model as well. If they go that route then I can see this being at least as big a seller as Guild Wars and maybe bigger. Imagine Diablo without all the cheating you find on the public servers and big enough that you could find a game at just about any time.
• Tabula Rasa - The second biggest disappointment of the show for me. I had such high hopes when this game was first announced and was even still interested after the changes in direction before last years E3. Now, it’s basically a sci-fi based MMOFPS and we all know how well those tend to do. I will admit that I didn’t spend a ton of time playing the game, mainly because I was disgusted after less than 5 minutes, but I really didn’t see anything to set this game apart. It’s set in the future, you shoot things and you can upgrade your skills and equipment as you level. It was pretty but in the MMO world pretty just doesn’t cut it for me.
• Lord of the Rings Online - I didn’t get any time hands on with this one but I did at least get a chance to watch the game play. It looked a lot like D&D Online…I mean a LOT. I couldn’t snag a booth rep to get any specifics so I don’t know if it’s going to be as group oriented as DDO or if they’re going with the same quest to gain XP model though I tend to doubt it. The twitchy combat isn’t really my cup of tea but I can see this game attracting some new players if you made it more solo and casual friendly. I’ll be keeping an eye on this one
• Soul of the Ultimate Nation - Think console style action RPG game mechanics merged with an MMO. Everything is instanced but it’s kind of like setting up a multiplayer game of Halo2, you pick what type of instance you want, the number of players, teams etc. and then create your instance. If you’re in a group your group will be added to the instance otherwise it gets listed and others can join in. Once you’re in you’re playing your typical console style RPG, but with keyboard and mouse – and let me just say that the keyboard layout needs some serious work for me to use it. The graphics are stunning and the animations are extremely smooth and fluid, it really looks like a next gen console game. If I understood the booth rep it’s another game that’s looking at the micropayment model but don’t quote me on that, her English was better than my Korean but that’s not saying much.
• Huxley - Another one from Webzen (see S.U.N above) and yet another sci-fi themed MMOFPS – what is it with all of these things lately – this one at least has a hook. Supposedly both console and PC players will be able to play together. It’s supposed to be using the new Unreal 3 engine but if it is I couldn’t tell it. Maybe they decided not to use the cool new features of the engine so it could play on the original XBox or something but it didn’t look that much better than say Halo2 to me.
• Neverwinter Nights 2 - Simply put…amazing! The outdoors areas are much more flowing and natural than the original and the interiors, while still tile based, are leaps and bounds ahead of the current version. Other than a graphics update the game still plays very much like the first one but with a switch from the 3.0 rules to the new 3.5 rules. I didn’t see anything from Ebeeron but if it’s not in the base game I give it less than a month before it’s modded in. Speaking of mods, the new mod tool is a huge improvement over what I already considered one of the best mod toolsets on the market. The ability to use heightmaps for outdoor terrain is going to make for some very sweet outdoor mods. The new layout of the tool set with a tabbed style interface and the ability to only have the tabs you use open makes for a much more streamlined and professional layout. I can’t wait to get my hands on the tools…or the game.

All in all a very interesting and rewarding experience, now if only someone would hurry up and hire me .

In fact he makes several flawed points so lets dissect his arguments shall we.

It used to be, back in the days when your choice was either Ultima Online or Everquest, that there was one constant between them. They were hard! One of the key factors that made it so was their death penalty. The death penalty made the games exciting! Everything was not a cakewalk; you really had to consider your actions. You could lose all of the stuff that you had in your possession with one false move. This added a lot of tension and a bit of white-knuckle-mousing to the experience. How many of you back in the day found yourself, at some point, running for your life shouting ‘REDS!’ with your heart pounding? It was good times.”

One thing this argument misses is the fact that not only could your actions put “all of your stuff” at risk so could the very act of wandering around and exploring the game world. If, like me, you’re someone that really enjoys that act of running around and finding new places in these worlds odds are you’re going to find yourself in a place you really shouldn’t be. Now if the game allows me a reasonable chance to extract myself from that situation everything will be fine but in EQ for example if I came across a monster that was 20 levels higher than me I was probably going to be dead before I knew what hit me and my corpse and all my stuff were in a place where I had no chance of recovering them. This doesn’t make that game hard it just makes it frustrating and is likely to drive me away from the game.

Now I know the counter to that is that you really shouldn’t be in those places anyway and you knew the risk when you went off exploring. This is true, and if this is how you want your game to play fine, I’ll just go find one that allows, or better yet, encourages me to explore their world.

The other issue that he conveniently forgets was the horrible level design in those early games. I remember a time in EQ when a group of us were hunting Orcs in West Commons. We were all about level 10 and there was a full camp of these orcs and they were a challenge to us – this was also very early EQ, back when having Bronze armor meant something – so we were dying fairly frequently while we worked at learning our characters. This was hard, this was challenging, THIS was fun. Then out of no where a giant came wandering by, it basically killed everyone in the group before we could run 100 yards. Ok, that’s a risk we weren’t aware of but we can get back to our corpses and we’ll keep a sharper eye out next time. We run back to our corpses get them looted and start the long process of “rebreaking” the camp and getting back to the business of driving the orcs out of the Commonlands. During the first pull we have multiple mobs, this is going to be a close fight no matter what, suddenly I hear this kind of swishing sound and our wizard falls over dead. Next is the cleric so we all just take of running. Once again none of us made it and looking back we found that we had been jumped by a Griffon. Another monster at least 20 levels higher than us and this one was up in the air so once again we never saw it coming. We again made the run back to our corpses and in the process of recovering our stuff the giant appears again and kills the cleric while the rest of us run away. We come back one more time and are again jumped by the giant but luckily all of us managed to escape thanks to some random higher level that just happened to be running by. At this point we gave up. Four hours of game play and we had nothing to show for it but frustration.

What had we done wrong? Was there anything we could have done differently to prevent that frustration? Sure, we could have stayed in the safer areas and hunted the easier monsters but doesn’t that make the game less challenging and isn’t his point that challenging equals fun?

Another example of poor level design putting you at risk. When I was around level 20 I had a standing group of guildmates and we decided to head into a nearby dungeon that was filled with goblins. Some of the goblins in this dungeon were going to be way to tough for this group but smart play would allow us to avoid them and make the hunting here challenging, and once again challenge equals fun. For those of you that have played EQ this was Sol A, for those of you that haven’t the entrance to this dungeon was a narrow twisting path. On one side a solid wall and on the other a shear drop of about 50 feet into lava. If you happened to fall into this lava, and you had a decent fire resistance so could survive long enough, and you knew the way, it was possible to swim to an area where you could climb out. The only problem with that was you were in a place where those higher level goblins were, you know the ones we were trying to avoid right now. Now because some of these goblins were wizard type mobs they liked to cast a spell that not only damaged you but also tended to send you flying. As our group was working our way slowly down the entrance we spotted one of these wizard types through a hole in the wall and, unfortunately he spotted us as well. One of the game mechanics was that wizards couldn’t cast spells without line of sight, or at least player wizards couldn’t, NPC wizards on the other hand were able to cast their spells through solid rock. This wizard proceeded to knock one of our party off of the path and into the lava. Luckily the rest of us made it out so we go back in and try and see if we can recover the corpse of our fallen comrade. Again for those not familiar with EQ, there was in the game a command /corpse that would allow you to kind of drag your corpse from a short distance away. You could also /consent someone and that would give them permission to use the /corpse command on your corpse. The problem was that the range on /corpse was fairly short and trying to drag a corpse on the Z axis (up and down) was tricky at best. So while the group kept the area around the entrance clear of goblins and ran around trying to use the /corpse command on our mates corpse the person that died had to run back – through 3 different zones with no weapons or armor and at least 2 of those zones had things that could kill him in one shot. Once they got back they tried the /corpse command as well and since it wasn’t working sent off a petition. Again, this was fairly early in the life of EQ so we actually got a response within an hour. Unfortunately falling in the lava was part of the “risk” of that zone so they refused to help us. Lucky for use we were in a guild and had some guildmates that were higher level and in the area. They came over were able to levitate themselves and slowly drop down over the lava, grab the corpse and drag it back to the entrance then kill about half the goblins in the zone that had followed them. Once again, a night spent fighting game mechanics instead of monsters that ended in frustration.

I know many of you are thinking these are probably isolated instances but trust me they’re not. I played EQ for almost 6 years and during that time the death penalty didn’t get lighter but it did get much easier to counteract. As we got higher levels we got resurrection spells that nullified the XP loss. Certain classes got Summon Corpse that would allow them to retrieve your corpse from those places the game let you fall into etc. During the first year of the game I would guess that I spent more time looking for my corpse or a guildmates corpse than I did actually playing the game and easily half my nights ended in frustration after fighting these so called “challenging” death penalties.

So why didn’t we quit? Well at the time it was EQ or Ultima and that was it. Today, I’d leave that game in a heartbeat because there are games out there that are just as much fun to play without the frustrations imposed. But, I hear you saying, people are still playing EQ. Yes but they’ve eased the death penalty greatly. They’ve added resurrection spells at much lower levels, the GM’s are now allowed to at least drag your body out of the lava and place it on the nearest point of land, and with mud-flation those giants probably can’t 1 shot kill even a level 10 anymore and besides they’re rarely seen in the commonlands these days.

Next point please Frank:

“The stricter death penalty not only applies to those poor players getting killed while they are simply trying to quest, it also applies to those zergs. Zerging is a tactic that is a lot easier to partake in when you have no real penalty for it. Arguments about the morality of the tactic aside, it is unpopular. There is nothing to fear by earning a reputation as a zerger, ganker or whatever, because no one can do anything about it. Even if I were to avenge the activity and kill you, what’s the point? What’s more, fear of this tactic in an environment where the death penalty was unforgiving, encouraged community. People needed guilds in UO, and reached out to others for support. Playing solo in UO was a sure-fire way to get yourself killed a lot.

“MMORPGs are trying to attract more and more single-player gamers into their medium. These games are used to the security of a save game button and are not used to real consequences, except perhaps the occasional death where you must load the game from five minutes before. When these gamers enter the realm of MMORPGs and see that there is no reset button, they freak out and run away. As such, we are getting more and more MMORPGs with limited death penalties, if any at all, to accommodate this style of risk-nothing gamer. The more this happens, the more the MMORPGs are moving away from the first three letters in their acronym.”

Ok lets dispose of the second paragraph first. There are a limited number of people willing to pay a monthly fee to play games. Some of those were the early adopters that began playing UO and EQ but there aren’t enough of those to keep the games going long term. Of those a percentage have gotten burned out on the genre all together and an even larger percentage have gotten bored with the originals and tend to jump from game to game. So in order to be profitable the games need to continue attracting new players, this applies to the new games as well as the established games. Since you can figure that at least some new gamers are coming into the market every year as today’s kids grow up and as broadband and gaming in general become more mainstream. Some of those new gamers are going to be the early adopters of today so they’re going to want to play the latest and greatest game and yes maybe they would deal with the harsh penalties of the original EQ but I tend to doubt it since they have options. Most of these new gamers, as he suggests, are going to come from the ranks of the single player gamers. So yes the companies have to appeal to these gamers thus they tend to put in content that appeals to the solo player. I don’t look at this as “dumbing down” the game but in reality its an easy way out. What the designers really need to do is find ways to encourage these players to group without using the frustration factor of a harsh death penalty. The real issue isn’t so much that these players want to solo it’s that their play style forces them to solo. Most of these new gamers can log on for maybe an hour here and there because they’re also playing this strange game called Real Life.

Now for the first paragraph. The penalty not only applies to the poor solo player that’s getting ganked but the zergs that are ganking him? Come again please! The solo player is probably the only one at risk here, why do you think that Zerging is a tactic. It helps to eliminate the risk for the members for the zerg rush. Sure that poor player may kill one or two members of the zerg rush but he won’t get them all and they’ll most likely have the tools at their disposal to recover quickly. The poor player still has to navigate back to his corpse and get his stuff while there is a group of people hovering around it. And that’s just in a PvP environment.

Why do you think that zerging is a popular tactic? It’s because it helps to minimize the impact of harsh death penalties. In the original EQ the designers have said that they didn’t really expect people to kill the dragons as early as they did and they really never anticipated them killing the gods in the planes. The players did this by throwing 50 to 70 people at these monsters and just burying them under their numbers. Sure this is a cheap tactic but look around you, people are always looking for the shortest and easiest way to achieve their objective. If you decrease the penalty for dying you actually encourage people to attempt unique strategies for overcoming these challenges. A harsh death penalty actively encourages the easier tactics since not only are you having to overcome the challenge of the encounter but you also need to do something to overcome the challenge of the death penalty.

And finally:

“There is nothing wrong with single-player gamers coming to MMORPGs. However, they should expect a different type of gameplay. The MM means “massively multiplayer.” They would change it to MAORPG, Massively Anti-Social Online Role-Playing Games. The acronym used to me that the sole purpose in this genre is cooperation and interdependency. Doesn’t making the game solo-player intensive defeat the purpose?

“Besides, even those solo missions are just turning a crank with no death penalty. I can die a thousand times and all I need is the stubbornness to keep running at that brick wall.

“Death penalties make you think, “Okay, I don’t want to die again, maybe I should get some help,” and the MMO aspect of the game are then reinforced. Griefing is still present in WoW, with its limited death penalties; I think it is even worse. There are no consequences to obnoxious behavior. If all you can do is kill me, and that has no real penalty, I can just run back in three minutes and resume being a gerbil.”

Finally something I can agree with! These are Multiplayer games and that should mean that players are supposed to cooperate and work together. My only gripe with this is that having a harsh death penalty is really a cheap way to encourage player interaction. It smacks of lazy design to me. There are much better ways to encourage social interaction than to frustrate your players into seeking out other players.

A great example of the games coming down the pike would be Dungeons & Dragons Online. They have the advantage of having a source material that was built around small groups so they can just point at their license and say see you have to group. The thing is I don’t need to group in DDO just because there is a harsh death penalty, in fact they’ve really watered down the death penalty from their source material, I need to group in DDO to accomplish an objective, period. If I try and go it alone I just can’t beat the encounter. Sure I’m going to die a lot in the process but that’s really only mildly annoying – mainly costing me some time. The real penalty is that as I progress I just CAN’T win without a group.

As for the griefing aspect. I’ve tried playing on PvP servers in both WoW and EQ and quickly left because of the griefers. It’s an inherent flaw in any open PvP system that there will always be someone who gets their kicks by trying to ruin other peoples fun. Having a harsher death penalty doesn’t make that less likely. The person that’s ruining my fun doesn’t really care about their character, they’re getting their kicks from ruining my good time.

I played Dark Ages of Camelot for awhile and only once got “ganked”. We had a group PvE hunting in the frontier and a couple of much higher level players came along and killed us. Sure it was annoying but we knew the risk when we went in and we were in the first frontier zone out from our realm and within eyesight of the frontier fort. You had to respect that they made it that far into our territory. They also killed us and moved on, they didn’t stand around camping us trying to stop us from playing. They also took it in stride when we yelled for help and brought in a bunch of higher level players from our own side that chased them all the way back to their realm, killing them several times in the process. That was part of the game, the mechanics were such that I couldn’t be griefed unless I put myself in a position to be griefed. But that’s my rant on why open PvP is a bad thing so I’ll save it for later.

Lately I’ve seen a lot of different arguments calling for the “hard core” rules of the early games. People, like Frank here, seem to believe that frustrating equals hard equals challenging equals fun. They tend to forget that back when we were all being frustrated by the mechanics of EQ or UO we really didn’t have a choice but today’s MMO gamer has a wealth of choices. If your gameplay frustrates me then I have a lot of other places I can look.

They also go on and on about harsh death penalties and other such frustrations lead to communities and isn’t that what MMO’s are about. What they don’t get is that, yes these mechanics lead to guilds being formed but that those guilds aren’t real communities. I know people that were in large raiding guilds in EQ because the game forced them into those guilds not because they liked the people in those guilds. Most of them couldn’t stand their guildmates and wouldn’t go one zone out of the way to help them unless it was to do something that was going to benefit themselves on a raid in the future. Wouldn’t it be better if the game designers could come up with a way that encouraged you to form communities of people that you enjoyed hanging out with instead?

Of course that’s a lot of work and requires some serious thought on the designers part so why not just take the easy way out.

Today the gaming press responded. What I found most interesting was that, to me at least, their responses did more to prove Ms. Freyjadis-Chuberka’s point than to disprove it.

An Example:

“Suzanne Freyjadis\’s argument against marketing and magazines seems to stem from her opinion that todays games have the potential to be equally appealing to women — and that marketing and press are ignoring this to push their own “boys only” agenda. That’s just not true.”Sure, the games industry is (finally) starting to broaden with some titles that aren’t focused on just the guys, but — excluding The Sims — those games represent a very small section of the market. The overwhelming majority of games sold today are still primarily built on male fantasies. While a growing female minority are also enjoying these games, their numbers aren’t yet big enough to make them a target audience.

“As Editor-In-Chief of PSM, it simply isn’t within my power to affect who plays games and who doesn’t. For a magazine to appeal to its most likely audience, it must closely reflect that audience and the subject it covers. Since a large majority of PlayStation gamers are male, that’s who we write for. Likewise, if the best-selling games are filled with half-naked girls blowing stuff up, that’s what will naturally be reflected in our magazine.

“The real issue is that game publishers still haven’t learned how to consistently appeal to the fairer sex. Obviously, they’d love to double their consumer base — they just don’t know how. In such a high-stakes industry, everyone is scared of thinking outside the box.

“Things are getting better, though — just slowly. We will get to a point where there is a much stronger balance of broadly-appealing games, and then it will fall to marketing to get the right message across. And when the gaming climate does change, gaming magazines will be smart to follow along.

“But we’re just not there yet.”

Chris Slate
Editor-in-Chief – PSM

First off what’s “just not true” – that marketing and the press are ignoring the fact that todays games can appeal to women or that todays games can actually appeal to women?

Judging by the second paragraph I’d have to say that Mr. Slate is under the impression that, except for The Sims, most of the games today would not appeal to women and those that might are such a small niche market that it’s not an effective use of his resources to cover them. To me this is exactly what Suzanne was saying and he’s just proven her point for her.

Now, I don’t have a copy of the latest issue of his magazine handy but I was able to look at the cover online. I know plenty of women that like Prince of Persia and would be interested in the new version. Does he think that women gamers are less interested in the launch of the PS3 than their male counterparts or maybe they don’t need the kind of info provided by the 2005 Fall Game Guide? However, while I do think there are a lot of women gamers that might be interested in an insightful article about what’s gone wrong with the PSP and when it will get better I don’t think many of them are going to look to an article titled “PSP: WTF?” to get that information and this is the point that Mr. Slate is missing. This is the perfect example of the press focusing on the 18 – 24 year old male as their target audience.

I also have to wonder how someone can become Editor-In-Chief of a major monthly publication with such a huge problem with reading comprehension. In her speech Suzanne states, point blank, that the issue isn’t so much that the games and their content don’t appeal to women but that the marketing and the editorial slant of the gaming magazines are targeted at the 18 – 34 year old male demographic and purposefully excluding women.

If the Editor-In-Chief of the magazine doesn’t have some say in the editorial tone of the magazine who does? Sure he may not have control over the advertising that’s run but he could ensure that the articles are written in such a way that they appeal to women – hint: PSP: WTF? is not a good start. I’ve read PSM and it reminds me of PC Gamer for consoles, not a huge surprise as they’re both published by Future Network USA, and I have long thought of PC Gamer as Maxim for Games with pictures of hardware and screenshots instead of scantily clad women. Believe it or not I don’t have a problem with this just don’t complain that it’s not your fault when someone calls you on it. Dan Hsu, from EGM, was at least up front and honest about it, if only %7 of your readers are women then you want to write to appeal to the majority of your readership to keep them coming back. I can understand and respect that. Of course, he lost all respect when he asked “Plus, what does “target female gamers” mean anyway? More coverage on Barbie games?”.

I think what a lot of these editors are missing is that if they were to change the focus of their magazines away from targeting the 18 – 34 year old male market and would focus on delivering quality insightful reviews, previews and gaming news they’d easily double their readership. Not only would more women be attracted to them but you’d also get more men in the beyond 34 segment of the market and who has more money an 18 year old or a 40 year old? Sure they’d lose some of the less mature 18 – 20 year olds but I’m betting the vast majority of the true game fans, regardless of age or sex, would flock to a magazine like that.