There was recently an interesting game exhibition in Kassel called Spielsalon. They used the term “author games” to show a couple if indie / art games. Sadly, I couldn’t be there even though I like the term they used there. The guests they hard were nothing short of spectacular. Luckly, Katharina Tillmanns from CGL was there to record a spontaneous Interview with Paolo Pedercini from La Molleindustria.

There are some really good bits in the interview. I especially like how he doubts the usefulness of serious games that are specifically made to be used in a classroom. I too find this idea ridiculous. Using the film analogy – it’s like the educational movies they made us watch in class sometimes. They were hopelessly outdated, insultingly patronizing and simply boring. There is no way those could stand up even to indie documentaries. A much better solution is to leave the film making to actual filmmakers, use that money to raise overall educational standards and develop curricula around existing, “authentic” media.

I was enjoying Paolo’s work even before I met him at GDC 2010. He’s obviously an incredibly smart, witty and talented developer. We shall try to get him somehow involved in future Cologne Game Lab courses.

Here is something awesome. At Cologne Game Lab had some discussions with the University. We have been given the opportunity to boost our Master’s program by giving away 10 full scholarships for free. And also the deadline has been extended to 1st September. We call this deal CGL10.

The time has come…

I’m really happy that we are finally able to do this. Germany is one of the few countries where Universities generally don’t have any tuition fees. In the last years, there have been some experiments to introduce them. But apparently they didn’t take roots. CGL is one of the exceptions due technical details in the way our institute is set up. So our course has tuition fees by default. This made sense for international students, but I felt like it was a big disadvantage on the national market. Also, the people we got always had to balance their work against their study projects. I think CGL10 is a great opportunity to change things on a fundamental level. I’m really curious how this turns out.

So if you are interested a Master’s course in Game Design, it’s now or never. It’s a really great course. We work in small teams and give students a lot of freedom to develop own projects. And on top of that, there are a lot of opportunities to meet fascinating games scholars and people from the industry close-up and personal. So what are you waiting for? Do it!

Darn you Crytek! I realized I have been misspelling the word “Crisis” in most of my posts about Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core. I will keep the mistakes as they are. That will teach me.

I’m pretty much at the very last 5% with this game. I’m at the final chapter. I have done almost all side missions. Right now, I’m getting prepared to face the extra difficult side-boss. My character is so ridiculously overpowered that I kill most of the story bosses with one hit now.

Actually, the game is playing for itself as we speak. To get a specific piece of equipment I’m trying to unlock all “memories”. These are little cut-scenes that sometimes show up when a certain random special attack triggers. It’s actually a blunt but interesting way of mixing story tidbits with gameplay. They just fall a bit flat since you can’t review them after you unlocked them. Also, unlocking a specific memory depends a lot on random chance. One recipe I found online is to equip you character in a way that his health regenerates automatically, starting a mission where you need to defeat a huge amount of weak enemies and letting the game run for itself. The special attacks that unlock memories are triggered automatically. So sooner or later, all the memories will unlock. I always feel that it’s a sure sign of a deeply flawed game when it doesn’t even need a player to run and even rewards for doing that.

But I wanted to mention something else. Since I invested so much time in the game, I thought I could just as well get the official guide and the special edition. Here they are!

Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core Special Edition Box and Official Guide.

The special edition comes in a stylish hardcover-style box. Except for the standart-issue game, it includes a UMD case-sized hardcover art book. I usually try to get every art book I can. They are wonderful resources to get glimpses behind the scenes of game development. The games industry is very secretive, so this is quite a big deal. And that’s especially true for a game with such high production values as Crisis Core. I recently played a chunk of the story and it reminded me how incredibly polished the characters and character animations look. With the PSP being at the end of it’s life cycle, Crisis Core will definitively be remembered as one of the titles that pushed the envelope for this system.

Concept art in the special edition art book.

That being said, the special edition art book for Crisis Core could be a lot better. The main problem seems to be simply the format. There is just so much you can do when your art book is the size of a UMD case. So for example, there are some storyboards at the end. They are postage-stamp-sized and barely legible. To add insult to injury, orientation is portrait where most of the real-estate disappears in the fold. The luxurious hardcover sadly contributes to a page-count of merely 49. It feels like a classy brochure, not like a real art book.

More concept art in the special edition art book.

But I also got the Bradygames guide. Being a standard A4 game guide, it doesn’t have any issues with the format. And in fact, it’s one of the better game guides I had.

A typical page from the Official Guide.

There is a lot of information in there. This includes a tiny guide for every one of the 300 side-missions. There is a neat foldout table to explain the mind-boggling Materia fusion system. Personally, I love the tiny details such as a small world map in the corner of every dungeon map. There is no world map in Crisis Core. But all the locations are known from Final Fantasy 7 and that’s where this information is probably coming from.

Nice details – Crisis Core doesn’t have an overworld. That information must have been cross-referenced from Final Fantasy 7.

Of course not all is perfect. There is a tiny guide for every side mission. Sadly, the most difficult boss in the game is also a side mission and the guide for it is shoe-horned into a tiny text box. The hints for that particular boss are also lacking. They explain roughly what kind of equipment to bring but not how and where to get all that stuff. That’s actually a pretty substantial miss as many of the items are very difficult to get. I’ve seen similar issues with other guide books. And it may be one of the reasons why grassroots guides like GameFAQs are in some ways superior to guide books. They are more pragmatic. They explain the game from the perspective of the things that players are most likely to try to achieve, rather than trying to create a systematic, comprehensive reference book. One could say that GameFAQs tend to be inductive while guide books tend to be deductive.

Minverva is one of the toughest bosses in the entire Final Fantasy franchise. There are entire FAQs dedicated to it. Considering this, it’s somewhat under-represented in the Official Guide.

Finally, the game guide also features a couple of pages of concept art. They are similar to the tiny special edition art book but the larger format really makes the drawing shine. It’s only 10 pages but there is more concept art spread throughout the book.

The Official Guide is the better art book.

The game is a bit dated so none of the items are especially expensive. But even so, it doesn’t seem like the special edition was quite worth the trouble. When looking for concept art from the game, I recommend getting just the game guide and skipping the special edition.

Quick update on what I’m doing right now.

TRAUMA

I haven’t said anything about that for a while now. That’s because I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to disclose at this point. Besides my own website, the game will be released on a major digital distribution platform. I’m basically waiting for them. The communication is a bit bumpy since the process is fairly opaque and I don’t have the time to figure everything out on my own. But besides that, almost everything is primed for launch. I wanted to code a small mailing list app, which will take maybe half of a day. Also, I wanted to edit a Trailer which I will need at least a weekend for. Sadly, I didn’t have a free weekend since a Month. But the upcoming one looks promising. No matter how things will turn out with the platform, I’m planning to go ahead and release the game around the Notgames Fest anyway.

Games I’m playing

I finished Portal 2 recently. Don’t have too much to say about it, except from that one thing. It’s a well-made game. It’s very restrained in the complexity of the puzzles and in the way it handles the hype around it’s predecessor.

I finished Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker recently. I already wrote a couple of articles (on it’s sexism and on the wi-fi fucntionality). The game tries to be a lot like Monster Hunter. It works very much like it at the beginning but fails in the long run. I’m struggling to pinpoint exactly what the problem is. I think it has to do with game mechanics that implicitly break down the space of possibility into just one or two strategies. The wealth of availible weapons becomes meaningless when all you do is to use that one stun pistol anyway. Also, a lot of the mechanics like Metal Gear Zeke are utterly pointless. It seems like they didn’t think things trough or didn’t have time to implement the ideas properly. So they just swept the unfinished parts under the carpet of the very far end-game.

Finally, I’m finishing Crysis Core now. I’m about halfway done with the story and 75% done with the side-missions. As already mentioned Crysis Core shows problems similar to Peace Walker. I’m constantly collecting materia I will never use because I already have a ridiculously overpowered attack. Funny enough, the more difficult side missions have also ridiculously overpowered enemies. So the gameplay become very finnicky and unstable. You either wipe out everything or die instantly – it comes down to split-second decisions and that one piece of equipment the game expects you to wear. I’m curious how far it goes. I’m want to try to beat the hidden hardcore boss – Minerva. It’s apparently the strongest boss in all of Final Fantasy games. She has 10 Million health points. That’s crazy. I’m looking forward to it.

I recently stumbled across a phenomenon that delivers a good model to explain the persistence of certain clichés in culture. Consider car radios. I had to buy one recently. When you buy a new car, it often comes with a nice, generic car radio. It’s often simple and toned down to work well with the car’s interior styling. Bit if it breaks down, you might find yourself in a position of having to replace it. You will soon realize that the market consists exclusively of car radios that look like this:

The car radio industry’s equivalent to Halo.

Which is ok when you are driving a souped-up Nissan GT-R with a huge spoiler and a trunk full of subwoofers and nitrous oxide. Sadly, that’s not what most people drive. Most people drive an Opel Corsa with a booster seat and a trunk full of groceries. So having that kind of radio in your car feels somewhat awkward.

Compare this visual style to what you get when you buy a home audio system. There, the market looks very different. Most products come in some variation of a very minimalistic, toned-down styling like this:

Dear car radio industry: I would much prefer to have something along the lines of this in my car.

A home audio system is something people put in their living room. It makes sense to make it look not too exuberant so it doesn’t draw to much attention to it. It should harmonize with any kind of furniture and work for every occasion. So why aren’t car radios like this?

I’m not a car radio designer so I can’t tell for sure. But let us IMAGINE we were car radio designers. If we got the job of designing a car radio, the first thing we might do is to review the kind of products we would be competing with. It would become clear that the name of the game is saturated neon colors, organic shapes, lots of LEDs and generally going for a flamboyant, noisy visual impact. It would be difficult to even think of a different approach. And even if we did, it would take a lot of courage, skill and diplomacy. Basically an Asch Conformity Experiment, only with even more peer pressure and where the truth is not even clearly apparent anyway.

I believe this is an example of Groupthink – the inability to think outside of the box simply because the overwhelming unanimity of the group your in. Groupthink is the negative framing for this phenomenon. The positive framing is the old saying “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”. After all, we must consider that there are often good reasons for why things are the way they are.

Would a different strategy succeed? The car radio market is certainly financed by a small group of car audio enthusiasts, who invest incredible sums of money into their systems. Enthusiasts, who do drive Nissan GT-Rs or at least wish they would. Designing a car radio that doesn’t cater to this audience, means giving up a huge source of revenue. That radio could try to reach a wider, “causal” audience but it would need to sell significantly more units because that audience isn’t prepared to invest a lot of money into a car audio system. Also, those people don’t buy a new car radio unless they REALLY have to.

And of course, there is a very simple, practical reason for why car radios look like that. Cars are often driven at night with the internal lights turned off. A car radio needs to be usable even in complete darkness. So it makes sense to illuminate the buttons and the display. Now, this is not a reason to make every car radio light up like a Christmas tree. But it may provide us with an explanation why the car radio market drifted into this niche in the first place.

You probably already see where this is going. The video game market is actually very similar to the car radio market in some regard. The video game industry is also fueled by a small, dedicated group of enthusiasts. Video games are also plagued with annoying clichés that often hinder outsiders from getting into this medium and stunt it’s growth. So for example, game design students will often come up with sexist character designs even though their games will never hit that kind of audience. And that’s because they almost subconsciously immitate features of successful games without actually questioning where those tropes come from. And this is especially true for beginning designers because they are still learning and look up to the blockbusters for guidance. I believe that the many examples of sexist portrayal of women in games doesn’t necessarily come from developers deliberately expressing their Misogynist beliefs. They are just memes that might had some economic underpinning at some point, but have been blown out of proportion due to Groupthink. Like with the car radio example, it just seems like the way games should be made in order to be successful.

So what is a game designer to do? Well, the Asch Conformity Experiments show that having just one other divergent voice greatly reduced the chance of an individual yielding to peer pressure. And this is exactly why more experimental indie games can do a lot of good. They don’t even need to outsell the Call of Dutys. Simply being out there will help game designers consider alternatives. Developing climates where up-and-coming designers are encouraged to experiment – presumably in academic programs (like the CGL #shamelessplug) is will also help.

But these will all just help. It still takes us designers to stand up and reflect upon what kind of culture we are creating. So when in Rome, don’t do like the Romans do. Get mad! Make life take back the Romans. Demand to see life’s manager. I don’t want your damn Romans! What am I supposed to do with these? Do you even know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down! With the Romans!