Competition across devices and platforms

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb wrote an insightful post last week, noticing potentials from which web browser software and social networking services may evolve towards each other much closer than what we sense today. It is less surprising than it seems, because Facebook has been striving to become a single source of user identity and activity through projects such as Facebook Connect, while Mozilla is testing various methods to make it easier to organize one’s web browsing activities. As Kirkpatrick hypothesizes, if Mozilla integrates instant messaging, personal profiles and other networking functions to its Firefox web browser, it would directly compete with Facebook and other social networking services. Conversely, Facebook may come up with a proprietary client software which implements its social functionalities but still can be used as a web browser to surf other web sites (just more than eight months ago, no one could hardly predict that Google would build a web browser until Chrome took everyone by surprise, remember?).

As absurd as an idea might sound, there is another competitive front that spans across seemingly dissimilar markets. Only a couple of years ago, only a few would have foreseen that Apple would be a viable competitor to Nintendo; Microsoft and Sony were, apparently, but why would a computer and music player maker be any threat to the gaming console giant? Now we know, although both companies come from different backgrounds and hence divergent approaches to mobile gaming, but they do collide in the mobile gaming market more fiercely than ever.

Likewise, we would not know for sure, for now, whether web services like Facebook and web browser software like Mozilla Firefox may turn into direct competitors each seeking user participation instead of seperate products accommodating users in different levels. In a world in which PC manufacturer and mobile phone firm, movie studio and videogame publisher, or online service provider and productivity software developer become adversaries, competition heats up across various devices and platforms. Our implicit categories of products and services in these fields should be constantly revised, even fluidly reconnected to foster our own understanding of the development of such things.

R.I.P. 3D Realms

A few days ago, Shacknews reported that 3D Realms, a Texas videogame developer and publisher (the company’s official web site is no longer reachable the official web site has been updated with a good-bye message, although it is unknown until when the web site is going to last), has closed its doors. The company was infamous for being developing Duke Nukem Forever (DNF), the sequel to their 1996 hit shooter Duke Nukem 3D, for the past twelve years and failing to release it out the door. The delay was so ludicrous and notorious in the gaming world that it practically wiped away any positive image that 3D Realms had garnered over its history.

DNF had been under development for so many years (it was first announced on April 28, 1997) that it reigned the top spot on the Vaporware of the Year list written by Wired.com at the end of every year. They already gave it “the Lifetime Achievement Award” and retired it from the list in 2003, but brought it back on in 2005. Oh sure, even three or four years are like eternity in game development cycles. Yet, twelve years? Twelve years ago, we were still counting processor speeds somewhere along 233~300 MHz and did not even have a standard 56k modem (it was drafted in the following year), let alone any broadband Internet connection. Yes, DNF was the project born in those archaic times, but never done. We will never see it finished and shipped now.

There is a web site named The Duke Nukem Forever List that enumerates other videogame titles and movies released as well as major world events, scientific endeavors, sensations in pop cultures happened during the development years of DNF. Some notable facts include: more than 75 games based on the Megaman, and more than 50 games based on the Star Wars franchise have been released; Google and eBay did not exist at the time of DNF announcement; Stephen King has written sixteen novels; and even the Duke Nukem series itself has released ten “side projects” in between. It is an interesting list to go through, because we are not likely to see a videogame project drawing somewhat negative yet humorous attention in this form. Are we ever going to see another game that takes twelve years before having its own development studio shut down? I am skeptical.

If we look at the positive legacies of 3D Realms, we may notice that back in the 1990s, Apogee Software (the old name 3D Realms was known as back then) managed to establish the shareware business model, in which Apogee would distribute a portion of the videogame for free and ask the customer to pay for the full version if he or she liked it. It also nurtured some prominent videogame developers such as id Software and Remedy Entertainment in their early days, publishing some of their older games like Wolfenstein 3D and Death Rally. In spite of all the scorn it had received because of DNF, it still deserves to be remembered for its place in the history of gaming.

So, 3D Realms and its stillborn DNF is no more. Unless Take Two makes use of the Duke Nukem franchise in some form, it is very unlikely that we will ever see any sequel to Duke Nukem 3D. Probably, as indicated in the title, the promise of a sequel were not going to be fulfilled forever, after all. Rest in peace, 3D Realms.

Update: GOG.com posted a special editorial reflecting on 3D Realms’ place in the history of videogames. It is definitely worth a read.

Another update: 3D Realms issued a press release stating that it has neither closed its doors nor let go its ownership of the Duke Nukem franchise.

Videogame as a storytelling medium

One day, when I was carrying out a few quests in the snow-covered region of Dragonblight in World of Warcraft (WoW), it somehow struck me as an odd experience in terms of storytelling. I have been enjoying this world built for the online videogame for months, and all of a sudden it felt as if it is an interesting, albeit imperfect, rendition of “multiverse”. Suppose for a moment that you are given a quest to slay some evil, undead dragon; you might be an influential mage who summons a number of friends to mercilessly strike down the abomination, or a lonesome crusader who struggles to dispose of the monster only with your sword, although the latter version may be a heck of a burden. There are literally thousands of quests like this available in WoW, some of which, at least, the players have to muddle through in order to empower their characters to the maximum level. Players of this online videogame may begin one of those tasks with the same settings (for instance, “we have this villain X hiding in the forest to the southeast…”) and outcomes (“we give you this reward Y for taking care of the X problem”), the means to achieve the results are largely up to each of the players. Each player is bound to have his or her version of experience with certain jobs (“I struck down the bastard with ease” vs. “it was so hard that I had to fight the same target five times”), which consequently results in thousands of different stories for each player.

It reminded me of the time when I read the Korean edition of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (the Korean translation can be found here) by Roberto Calasso a few years ago. What impressed me yet also what I did not completely understand back then was Calasso’s interpretation of ancient Greek mythology as a tree-like system of different versions of stories and anecdotes, rather than a canonical set of legends à la Thomas Bulfinch; there would be a lot of variants in how Zeus kidnapped Europa or how Theseus killed the Minotaure in Crete, yet all those variations are valid in each of themselves (for more detailed information on Calasso’s book, please read Ivar Hagendoorn’s review). This rings somewhat salient of what can be experienced in an online videogame like WoW. Perhaps, in the official, canonical lore which would be later filled in by Blizzard Entertainment (the developer of WoW) the evil monster A had been terminated by a valorous hero named B, but in your own experience, you may have killed A some time last week with a few of your friends, probably during a late weekday night session or a long weekend raid. It is not just you, though; thousands, possibly millions of other players have done the same job in each of their own ways. Maybe you or anyone else’s name will not be credited as the slayer of A next time Blizzard updates the background setting of the game, but it is significant that you have your own version of the story.

I am not stressing that WoW reaches some unprecedented pinnacle of storytelling in videogames, although it is an excellent entertainment title in its own merits. The level of storytelling, in terms of conveying deeper implications and themes through a sophiscated storyline, is better accomplished in more traditional, single-player videogames such as Planescape: Torment, Silent Hill, Grim Fandango, or BioShock. In fact, some single-player videogames like Fallout and Grand Theft Auto espouse an “open-ended gameplay” which allows their players to choose which tasks to do in order to follow the storyline that there may be little difference between those games and WoW.

There are apparent limitations to grant freedom within the in-game world though; even in the likes of Fallout, while the player is at liberty to choose the order of which quests to do, even skip some quests entirely, he or she is still obligated to follow the primary storyline which is fixed overall. You may choose to do a quest or not in WoW, but you cannot change the outcome of each episode; for instance, you cannot convince a villain to repent its wrongdoings or turn it to your own side, other than the given goal of simply killing it. Even midway through a quest, you would be confined to certain settings or availability of resources to do the job, so the rate of variation on a certain lore is kept at bay, likely to be caused less by designers’ intent on controlling the integrity of stories, but instead by the lack of resources to extend the boundaries of the in-game sandbox. However good an open-ended gameplay may deliver to videogame players, it would still be of little merit to enable them to modify even the most crucial elements of the videogame as it may break the basic structure and also be costly and time-consuming (for example, inserting different outcomes in each of the quests in WoW would require an almost infinite amount of budget).

Up to this point, I am thinking of another question that should be addressed in the videogame world, probably not now but some time in the future. As seen in titles such as Planescape: Torment or Silent Hill, the level of narratives in videogames these days was hardly imaginable in the days of Asteroids and Pong. We would witness more and more of storytelling, increasingly sophisticated, in videogames. Yet the notion of assorting a variety of those games, with or without stories, into a single category, a single concept would turn out to be misleading at some point. Strictly narrative-wise, treating Planescape: Torment the same as Pong and Tetris, because they are both “videogames”, would be equivalent to asserting that Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings series is on the same level with the earliest films of the Lumière brothers, because they are both ”movies.” I am not saying that Tetris or the Lumière films are inferior or of less production values. The history of motion pictures have progressed so far that the oldest films taken by the Lumière brothers, like a train incoming from far away or a group of workers walking out the factory door, would be considered as short “video clips” today rather than “movies.” You may play your favorite movie and your home video on the same DVD player, but usually you do not think that those two are the same, especially in terms of narratives or artistry. A similar notion can be applied to videogames as well. Some videogames have achieved a level of distinction on par with some movies and novels that they may not deserve the same nomenclature as other electronic entertainment titles, aside from the fact that all of them can be played on the same electronic equipment. Probably in near future videogames may start to differentiate themselves from one another, which I consider is necessary for some of them to be recognized as a legitimate medium akin to motion pictures, literature or music.

Lines not to be crossed

Earlier this month Konami, one of the leading videogame publishers in the world, had announced their plans to publish an action game named Six Days in Fallujah that was to be released some time next year. The game would place the gamer in the shoes of U.S. Marines who would capture the town of Fallujah, door-by-door, fighting against and killing Iraqi insurgents on the way. The vice president of marketing at Konami, who were quoted alongside the announcement, contended that:

We’re not trying to make social commentary. We’re not pro-war. We’re not trying to make people feel uncomfortable. We just want to bring a compelling entertainment experience. At the end of the day, it’s just a game.

The background stories on development of the game further explicates this kind of view. The developer, Atomic Games, was allegedly working on virtual training software for U.S. Marine Corps in the beginning, but after the deployment of the Marines to Iraq and the (second) Battle of Fallujah, decided to create a military shooter off the experiences of those war veterans. The level of reality in the game had been accentuated throughout the whole explanation. Given the fact that the development interviewed more than seventy people on both sides of the battle as well as experts such as military officials and war historians, authenticity in replicating the war scene was expected to be achieved to a magnificent degree. A certain notion of confidence, almost condescendence, can be felt when Atomic Games defined Six Days in Fallujah as “a meticulously recreated in-game version of Fallujah, complete with real life Marines lending their names and likenesses, as well as recreations of specific events from the battle. It’s almost like time travel. You’re experiencing the events as they really happened.”

It should be recognized, however, the emphasis on so-called reality of war attempts to disguise itself as a neutral reflection on what happened in Fallujah. It would recreate the sounds of mortar shells detonating somewhere far away, gunfires somewhere next block, and U.S. marines shooting down an Iraqi armed man from a distance; but it would not reproduce any historical contexts of the war in Iraq, any sentiment that Iraqi people may hold against U.S. forces, nor any indication whether people who lost their lives in gunfights and bombings on Fallujah those days deserved to be killed at all. All it would present would be an authentic rendition of graphical images and sounds that permeated the U.S. soldiers from their points of view but never the sense of danger that Iraqi people may have felt, the sense of lives threatened, the sense of their hometown torn to shreds. It is this sense of so-called reality that can be so misleading, often more so than “reality TV.”

But to what extent would it be appropriate to depict warfare, or violence in general in videogames and other media? There are numerous videogames that utilize various wars as their core subjects, and some even overtly advertise themselves as “war simulators.” America’s Army, which is developed by the U.S. Army, has been released in 2002, and designed as a public relations effort to attract young males to the military service through popular electronic entertainment. Meanwhile, Full Spectrum Warrior, a 2004 videogame which features squad-based military action, had been derived from a U.S. Army project that sought to utilize commercial gaming consoles for training military personnel. Therefore a number of videogame titles actively blur the lines between entertainment and training for use of violence in many ways, but what they did not give rise to a surge of public outcry like Six Days in Fallujah did, because they only dealt with hypothetical, fictionalized situations as backgrounds (of course, there are a few exceptions like Delta Force: Black Hawk Down, which shares the subtitle and settings with a Hollywood film, received similar criticisms), not a war whose legitimacy has been at question since the beginning.

Due to intense protests following the announcement of the game, Konami recently cancelled the plans to sell Six Days in Fallujah altogether. It is yet unknown whether the developer Atomic Games will seek to secure another publisher to release the game, it may be for everyone else’s better that it has been retracted. Now I am reminded of a salient comment on the announcement of Fallujah earlier this month; a person who referred to him-or-herself as “mabadaba”, claimed to have served in the times of the assault on Fallujah, noted that,

I play games to enjoy myself, and I feel that there needs to be a certain amount of time before the terrible events of a war can be adapted for this medium. The battle, despite US overwhelming technical superiority, was hard fought and devastating. It shouldn’t be revisited so quickly by an entertainment medium, it needs to rest first, people need to digest these types of events for many years. I think there are several methods of exploring these events that should occur well before an interactive simulation of them is created, books and documentaries in particular. Wars should be intellectually explored, and I even think there is merit in using video games as a medium to view war from but it feels entirely too early.

There are certain levels of freedom that creative media, be it performed instantly or recorded on a material, should enjoy as forms of expression. Six Days in Fallujah wouldn’t have been legally challenged to be released as an entertainment title after all. The state is generally not eligible to judge nor sanction a particular manifest of expression, at least in the United States thanks to the constitutional basis found in the First Amendment. Whether Atomic Games depict killing Iraqi insurgents as an entertaining experience on their game title or not, it is not the role of government officials nor judges to regulate what the developer does.

The desirability of such things are rather left for the general public to decide, whether they are artistic paintings, feature films or videogames. Of course, the public can often be wrong about those expressions, too. Any forms of art, however, always brings a certain level of critiques to be recognized as a legitimate, artistic expression, and videogames cannot be an exception. If Six Days in Fallujah, a videogame, is entitled to be protected as a form of expression like other forms of art (as the medium has sought to have), it is also open to criticism which the Hollywood film Rules of Engagement met upon its release, or even a satirical cartoon (whose kind enjoys a wide range of political freedom in the U.S., by the way) on New York Post faced with allegations of racism.

Retracting and declaring “[a]t the end of the day, it’s just a game” therefore makes little sense here, as it simply compromises many years of efforts to debunk the myths about videogames (the same kind of myths that rhythm and blues music degrading American culture in 1940s; hippies corrupting America in 1960s; and hip-hop music degenerating the youth from 1990s to present day) and unfold serious arguments to have it accepted in the world. Though fortunate it is that Konami decided to pull the Iraqi-war-inspired game off its portfolio, I still find that Atomic Games and Fallujah, similar to any other creators of art and their properties, carry a certain sense of responsibility, although vague, not to cross some lines, especially considering that videogames have more robust power to put its users into the shoes of particular roles.

For example, even though World War II games are generally acceptable today, especially when it’s about killing Nazis (undeniably “bad” guys) in the name of justice and freedom, no videogame has so far allowed the gamers to simulate the Bombing of Dresden, because above all the conviction that Nazi Germany was an evil regime, destroying a city to rubbles and killing up to forty thousand civilians were hardly justifiable by any means. Similarly, would the Battle of Fallujah ever be suitable to be enjoyed as an entertainment, even if Operation Iraqi Freedom as a whole turns out to be righteous after all? Would someone first create a videogame on My Lai massacre or Tiger Force, appointing the players as the U.S. soldiers involved in the killings, please? Maybe Vietnam War could no longer be too early to make into a videogame.

Well, there are still grey areas between what is appropriate to be represented in a videogame (as a form of artistic expression) and what should not be recreated as an entertainment of any form. Some may reject any videogames that feature any rate of violence altogether as a deterioration of culture, and some others may defend all kinds of videogames, including Postal or Manhunt, as a legitimate form of art. Nonetheless, while videogames or any other forms of art or entertainment should not be prohibited (unless involved with criminal acts), they should be subject to various opinions and critiques that may arise due to their formalities and contents. The case of Six Days in Fallujah can indeed be seen as a healthy indicator that our world is not comfortable with exploiting a recent event of violence that, regardless of values, took thousands of lives. And the circumstance, under which videogames are intricated in certain political values and landscapes, may signify less that videogames are discriminated as an inferior form of entertainment, than that they are starting to be accepted as a serious form of art like films, novels, and music do.

An understated side of World of Warcraft

If you are at least a bit interested in online games, you must have heard about World of Warcraft. It is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) created by Blizzard Entertainment, more well-known for its Starcraft and Diablo franchise of games. It commenced service in Fall 2004 and since then accumulated more than 11 million worldwide subscribers, becoming the largest MMORPG in the world. The active subscription comparison chart on MMOGChart.com shows that, in terms of the number of customers, World of Warcraft simply squashes the competition (note the light green line drawing a very steep curve upwards).

As impressive the market share of World of Warcraft is in the MMORPG universe, what is little noticed is that it provides quite an open architecture for users with adequate skills to customize the user interface in the game. Employing the Lua programming language (see more about Lua on Wikipedia and Wowwiki), Blizzard harbors an environment in which many components of the user interface are editable–from changing the basic display of characters and surroundings to adding functions in order to make game experience more convenient. There are abundant collections of World of Warcraft ”add-ons” that help players navigate easier, find certain merchandise on auction houses quicker, fight more competently in combat, tackle boss encounters more efficiently, and so on. Some add-ons even act as intermediate platforms to support other add-ons. Curse.com, which owns one of the largest World of Warcraft add-on databases, hosts almost 5,000 add-ons; that is an impressively large number, given the considerable level of computer skills to produce one of them (there are many MMORPGs that struggle with active subscribers less than 10,000 out there, mind you).

Blizzard recently went on to announce the user interface add-on development policy for World of Warcraft, unfolding its official stance on customizing their flagship product. The policy may spur discontent among add-on developers, since it strictly forbid them from asking add-on users for monetary returns, let alone charging for profit (well, thanks to this policy, you can play Bejeweled on World of Warcraft, for free! Update: Peggle is playable as an add-on, too). Yet it can be seen, however, that Blizzard nurtures and pays attention to a lively community which develop and use little software programs that are available thanks to its adjustable design.

Blizzard seems determined not to monetize the add-on ecosystem, à la Apple’s App Store, maybe because it cannot weather a third party generating derivative revenues from its products (Blizzard’s lawsuit against WoW Glider last year, for instance, was not only for blocking cheaters but also for cutting off people from making money off World of Warcraft), or because it does not want to expend additional resources on overseeing nor be responsible for paid add-ons (the same way console manufacturers monitor their third-party games or Apple supervises iPhone apps on App Store), or even both. With its MMORPG sky high, however, the add-on ecosystem Blizzard generated would thrive, regardless of how other MMORPGs boast of being “WoW killers.”

Challenge Nintendo? You wish

Read this article from GamePolitics.

I couldn’t help but laughing at the Korean president Lee Myung-bak’s curiosity with Nintendo’s success. His mind, almost in naivete, cannot comprehend the nature of videogame console markets which rather requires a healthy ecosystem of software instead of one monolithic, powerful hardware. Maybe it has a lot to do with his background in the construction industry.

Lee is one typical figure of yesteryear’s minds which still haunt much of Korea’s industries. He seems almost confident that alternative products rivaling these consoles can be easily built when Korean corporations stretch their manufacturing muscles. To this kind of mindset, Nintendo consoles can be (and will be) replicated and manufactured within months, just like flat-screen TVs or refrigerators. Once you know what kind of parts are needed and find a way to manufacture the product under acceptable costs, you win. Oh, now we have a domestic console. We will outrun you, Japanese, the same way we make cars, build ships, and construct buildings! Voila!

Okay, that was the easy part. To someone like Lee, Software is trivial, other than the basic, minimally necessary bundle mounted on the product. Taking on Nintendo (and also Sony and Microsoft), however, is so much more than building some piece of hardware to run fancy graphics on your TV. Without all the software titles, your console is no more worth than a brick. Even Nintendo, which owns powerful in-house teams which released some of the best videogames in history, still requires the support of third-party developers to sustain the longetivity of DS and Wii. Hardware is nothing without software (lots and lots of software) in the videogame business.

The difficult part is that it becomes the chicken-or-the-egg problem for both the console company and videogame developers. A console would sell if there are plenty of software titles available for that console, but conversely videogame developers would only develop for a console platform which are widely sole already (therefore would guarantee minimum sales of their games). If a console fails to secure a reasonably large user base and hence has too few games, it would quickly tumble down the spiral of death. It happened to a lot of videogame consoles in history, including a Korean console (wow, Korean government should’ve subsidized this!) named GP2X.

Lee’s comment on Nintendo could be taken with a laugh and a sense of humor, but such a speech from the highest-ranking official of the country represents Korea’s incapability to enter markets in which creativity and systematic mind are more required than simply pushing forward, which emblematizes Lee’s leadership. Perhaps in coming months, we may see the birth of one Korean-manufactured Nintendo-alternative, and the eventual demise of it too.