Monday, March 14, 2005
Affordable Innovation
Evolution: Natural or Guided?
In Cameron Crowe’s excellent movie “Almost Famous,” there is a scene where legendary rock critic Lester Bangs (Phillip Seymore Hoffman) mentors young William Miller (Patrick Fugit) and warns him of the temptations he’s going to face as a journalist. He maintains that Rock and Roll is dying, slowly being killed by rock stars and record companies in collaboration with journalists. He warns, “These are people who want you to write sanctimonious stories about the genius of rock stars, and they will ruin Rock and Roll and strangle everything we love about it, you know? And then it just becomes an industry of... ‘cool.’”
I thought about this when I read an article in Game Developer magazine last week by Noah Falstein, a game designer with vast experience and expertise in the industry. His quote: “The coin-op arcade business in the 1980s may have been the most fiercely Darwinian game environment in history. New games appeared and thrived, or died in a matter of months if they didn’t have ample sustenance (quarters). After great early diversity, arcade games converged on a few successful formulas that ate up all those quarters and starved later games that didn’t follow the formulas.”
So ... bearing in mind the complaints about the stagnation in our industry... which is it? Is it a natural evolutionary process with generations simply emulating their successful ancestors, or is it actually the result of a corporate agenda to make it easier to grease the wheels of industry to facilitate a predictable assembly-line approach to game development?
Back to the beginning...
Nolan Bushnell’s first coin-operated game was Computer Space, based on the mainframe game “Spacewar”. The game wasn’t very successful. Bushnell didn’t give up on the idea of videogames entirely – instead, he took the lessons learned from Computer Space and tried again. He went for something simpler, more straightforward – quite possibly the most basic gameplay possible. The result was Pong, and it launched an empire.
The interesting thing here is that from a game-geek’s point of view, Computer Space was a superior game in almost every way. Pong was a total step backwards. But the audience wasn’t ready for it. Later, its day came – in the form of a game heavily inspired by it called Asteroids. In both cases, their success was met with a host of clones, imitators, and would-be successors. But they weren’t alone - the explosion of innovation from the early 80’s seems completely unattainable today. The arcade industry hit it’s stride, boomed, and went bust in about the same time period as the expected lifecycle of the Playstation 2. The “Commodore 64 Age” really only lasted about four years or so – yet we saw more incredible diversity on that platform in those four years than we have seen in twice that time on all major platforms combined in the last four years. No, not all of it was wonderful – any user of emulation software can tell you how much crap and clones came out of that time period. But it certainly seemed like a larger landscape.
Losing Pace...
So did we achieve some sort of evolutionary plateau where we are all happy with the parade of publum getting generated by the industry? Or is the market simply being manipulated by marketers and their press contacts so that we are now simply, "an industry of cool? "
I am going to cop out here and say, “Neither.” I think it’s largely due to the glacial pace of game development nowadays. Game development is getting slower and slower. Back in 1980 a team could go from drawing board to a complete, commercial product in a matter of weeks. Nowadays you can take that long just negotiating the contract and milestone schedule with a publisher. We are getting buried by our own creations – games are getting bigger, and the audience is more discerning and demanding than ever. This state perpetuates itself – as game budgets and development time skyrockets, publishers are even more risk-averse, so they’ll throw even more time and money into it to make sure that the game has every chance of winning on release… which in tern increases risk further and makes it ever more painful for the next game.
Even indies are suffering from long development cycles (partly because so many of us are having to do other things – like contract work or full-time jobs to support our game development habits). Is there a way out of this mess? Is it possible that we can get tools and processes to the state where we can go back to the days of explosive innovation, sending shotgun patterns of new ideas into the wild to see what connects rather than spending months and months of time trying to perfect an evolutionary improvements on older games?
Cranking It Up to 11...
If there were a quick and dirty answer to this thorny issue, I’d be executing on it right now. But it seems like a chicken-and-egg problem to me. It seems like there’s a non-trivial minimum threshold of production qualities and marketing effort that must be achieved to avoid a guaranteed failure. But in order to innovate, we have to be able to do it cheaply enough to absorb multiple failures (because – face it – innovation fails far more often than it succeeds). And finally – we need better tools by which we can measure the relative success of efforts – a magical crystal ball which we can gain immediate feedback on the worthiness of our efforts. Like dumping out the till of the arcade machines and counting the quarters at the end of a single day.
I suspect that a partial answer to this issue lay in the “Game in a Day” competitions that run from time to time (most notably Tom Bampton’s efforts with the GarageGames community). The idea is simple – a team forms and attempts to create a fully functional game in a 24-hour period. (which, by the GID rules, don’t need to be contiguous, but should occur within the same weekend). All tools for development, content generation, and metrics would have to optimized for this kind of development effort, particularly bringing a GID-style effort to a marketable product in a matter of weeks instead of months.
So what’s it gonna take to get us there?
Labels: Indie Evangelism
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 12:23 AM (Permalink)
Comments:
Links to this post:
<< Home
When I look at the way publishers treat studios, I see social evolution in action.
Many people have the mistaken notion that "evolution" is merely "survival of the fittest". Unfortunately, that moniker is not entirely appropriate to describe the process. It can perhaps be more adequately described as "death of the unfit", or "failure to compete adequately". A "less-fit" organism can still successfully compete if the fitness in question is not a fatal problem.
Recently, a friend of mine was trying to tell me that, due to evolution involving widespread toilet usage, human beings have lost the ability to squat in order to relieve themselves. I incredulously thought to myself, "what selection process would be at work there? How are people who are able to squat dying, and those who are incapable of squatting surviving instead?"
Truthfully, this is just a bit of urban legend. To "evolve" is not to progress towards some goal, but to have some sort of variation in a species' DNA or behavior which is "good enough" to avoid dying off. Humanity, to me, seems to be a massive case one primate surviving far more effectively than other primates, in part because we've evolved social habits very conducive to our survival, and grown a large brain which allows us to perceive complex patterns and manipulate them to our advantage.
There's a point at which metaphor can be extended beyond reason. That said, I think corporations are the way they are because that is the kind of organization, given human social patterns, which survives for the long-term in a market with many other "organisms" (corporations) competing in the same ecosystem. The tendency to continuously expand, pay employees the lowest wage possible, unofficially encourage working overtime without pay... these seem to all be manifestations of a "good enough" survival strategy.
The corporations which treat employees fairly and grow just to fill their niche are a rare breed indeed.
Computer games, IMHO, are in the same entertainment category, or "ecosystem", as the theatre and movies. Occasionally, there will be a modestly-budgeted work which excels and is widely imitated. Occasionally, there will be a work with wildly overblown budgets that nevertheless excels in revenues. Occasionally, someone gives a new spin on some technical detail which gives enough "eye candy" to attract patrons on its own.
These are the exception, not the rule.
Most attempts fail.
Luckily, those people attempting to innovate don't, themselves, die off. Their projects do, instead.
There are some critical differences between filmmaking and game-making, though. The platform is an equalizer. Expensive lights and sets can be simulated with a talented artist. Good programmers can create behavioral mechanisms lending themselves to fun gameplay. The expenses are not in the pyrotechnics and massive staff to support the technical stuff surrounding a film in production, but in the painstaking craft of fusing art and program into a fun game.
The cost of entry and participation is time and creativity. Yet the cost of success still seems to be kowtowing to the media moguls. They understand how to use advertising to make entertainment a successful enterprise. And they have the bucks to back it up, because they play the odds successfully. Sometimes they kill wonderful projects (*cough* Firefly) and promote stinkers. But on the whole, these media corporations succeed in growing and swallowing the less-successful enterprises. I don't think it's a *good* thing, or the way things *should* work, but it appears to be the way it *does* work.
I think there are many improvements to be made to the way things are done, but the only known way to force such improvements is through legislation and policing. I don't think I'd want legislation interfering so much in deal-making. Yet something should be done to improve the situation and allow creative independents more than a toe-hold in the entertainment ecosystem.
I just don't know what. And I'm not sure there is a good solution.
As a final note, there are many people who make a living making small, independent movies. Most of us don't see these works, because we aren't independent film enthusiasts. Same story with local theatre and independent games: there's a market, but unless you're part of the target market, you're probably never going to see that side of the industry. My wife and I happen to be part of the local theatre enthusiast crowd, and we've seen many productions that are, nevertheless, successful enough to support their small casts and technical crew.
It's not multi-million-dollar blockbuster stuff, by any means. But like to go check them out on a Friday night every so often.
Many people have the mistaken notion that "evolution" is merely "survival of the fittest". Unfortunately, that moniker is not entirely appropriate to describe the process. It can perhaps be more adequately described as "death of the unfit", or "failure to compete adequately". A "less-fit" organism can still successfully compete if the fitness in question is not a fatal problem.
Recently, a friend of mine was trying to tell me that, due to evolution involving widespread toilet usage, human beings have lost the ability to squat in order to relieve themselves. I incredulously thought to myself, "what selection process would be at work there? How are people who are able to squat dying, and those who are incapable of squatting surviving instead?"
Truthfully, this is just a bit of urban legend. To "evolve" is not to progress towards some goal, but to have some sort of variation in a species' DNA or behavior which is "good enough" to avoid dying off. Humanity, to me, seems to be a massive case one primate surviving far more effectively than other primates, in part because we've evolved social habits very conducive to our survival, and grown a large brain which allows us to perceive complex patterns and manipulate them to our advantage.
There's a point at which metaphor can be extended beyond reason. That said, I think corporations are the way they are because that is the kind of organization, given human social patterns, which survives for the long-term in a market with many other "organisms" (corporations) competing in the same ecosystem. The tendency to continuously expand, pay employees the lowest wage possible, unofficially encourage working overtime without pay... these seem to all be manifestations of a "good enough" survival strategy.
The corporations which treat employees fairly and grow just to fill their niche are a rare breed indeed.
Computer games, IMHO, are in the same entertainment category, or "ecosystem", as the theatre and movies. Occasionally, there will be a modestly-budgeted work which excels and is widely imitated. Occasionally, there will be a work with wildly overblown budgets that nevertheless excels in revenues. Occasionally, someone gives a new spin on some technical detail which gives enough "eye candy" to attract patrons on its own.
These are the exception, not the rule.
Most attempts fail.
Luckily, those people attempting to innovate don't, themselves, die off. Their projects do, instead.
There are some critical differences between filmmaking and game-making, though. The platform is an equalizer. Expensive lights and sets can be simulated with a talented artist. Good programmers can create behavioral mechanisms lending themselves to fun gameplay. The expenses are not in the pyrotechnics and massive staff to support the technical stuff surrounding a film in production, but in the painstaking craft of fusing art and program into a fun game.
The cost of entry and participation is time and creativity. Yet the cost of success still seems to be kowtowing to the media moguls. They understand how to use advertising to make entertainment a successful enterprise. And they have the bucks to back it up, because they play the odds successfully. Sometimes they kill wonderful projects (*cough* Firefly) and promote stinkers. But on the whole, these media corporations succeed in growing and swallowing the less-successful enterprises. I don't think it's a *good* thing, or the way things *should* work, but it appears to be the way it *does* work.
I think there are many improvements to be made to the way things are done, but the only known way to force such improvements is through legislation and policing. I don't think I'd want legislation interfering so much in deal-making. Yet something should be done to improve the situation and allow creative independents more than a toe-hold in the entertainment ecosystem.
I just don't know what. And I'm not sure there is a good solution.
As a final note, there are many people who make a living making small, independent movies. Most of us don't see these works, because we aren't independent film enthusiasts. Same story with local theatre and independent games: there's a market, but unless you're part of the target market, you're probably never going to see that side of the industry. My wife and I happen to be part of the local theatre enthusiast crowd, and we've seen many productions that are, nevertheless, successful enough to support their small casts and technical crew.
It's not multi-million-dollar blockbuster stuff, by any means. But like to go check them out on a Friday night every so often.
One of the problems with the "Evolutionary" approach is the problem with failure of sub-optimization (also referred to in AI as - IIRC - "local maxima"). Basically, it means that the ultimate short-term strategy is a very poor long-term strategy. But this doesn't become evident until "evolution" has taken its toll. What this leads to is...
Well, it leads to things like the dot-com bubble popping. The longer the poor strategy is employed unchecked without the negative feedback being recognized, the more disasterous the results later, because you've had several generations follow that same evolutionary path, possibly ignoring paths that would have greater long-term surviveability.
I guess there was a cartoon at one point lampooning a "Generic Problem Solver" AI program that exhibited these problems. It had a robot sitting in a tree looking at the moon. The robot explains "My goal is to get to the moon. I am closer to the moon here in this tree than I am on the ground, so I will stay here."
Post a Comment
Well, it leads to things like the dot-com bubble popping. The longer the poor strategy is employed unchecked without the negative feedback being recognized, the more disasterous the results later, because you've had several generations follow that same evolutionary path, possibly ignoring paths that would have greater long-term surviveability.
I guess there was a cartoon at one point lampooning a "Generic Problem Solver" AI program that exhibited these problems. It had a robot sitting in a tree looking at the moon. The robot explains "My goal is to get to the moon. I am closer to the moon here in this tree than I am on the ground, so I will stay here."
Links to this post:
<< Home
