U.K. site bit-tech.net posts a feature article dealing with narrative in games and whether games should follow the paths of films and novels in considering how to best tell a story.

The article starts out asking this question:

The question is do we, as gamers, limit ourselves by comparing games to the stories and structure of films and novels, by wanting a game equivalent of War & Peace or Citizen Kane? Are video games even storytelling systems in the same sense as novels or cinema? Can a story exist that's told in different way to the three-act, narrated structure of books and films?...

It goes on to cover cut scenes and cinematics as 'interactive movie' story-telling devices, the idea  that games are evolving more sophisticated stories over time similar to TV and comics, and includes some commentary from Rhianna Pratchett on game storywriting:

“Too often in games development ‘story’ is considered to be something that can be poured on top, long after a game has been designed and productions is in full swing. Like a kind of narrative custard,” Rhianna Pratchett, scriptwriter for Overlord and Mirror’s Edge, told us.

“But the uniqueness of games cannot be ignored. The challenges of immersing players in a story - really making them feel like an active agent in it and weaving narrative and gameplay together in a way that compliments, rather than clashes - are not to be under-estimated.”...

“Narrative in games isn’t often given the attention it both deserves and needs in order to flourish,” she explains. “In the past story construction and script has often been the remit of designers, producers or others who did it in addition to their main role. There’s a popular misconception that being able to construct the basics of language, namely the mechanics of writing, automatically means that someone can write a good story. It’s not the case.”

“Story creation is a skill that is honed, practiced and developed over the course of many years, even by the most successful of storytellers. Finding a writer is only one part of the challenge (and it’s certainly becoming a little more commonplace these days) using them correctly for the needs of the project is still an on-going battle.”

The article concludes with the idea of interactivity perhaps being the wave of the future:

Authorship in a game becomes entirely procedure based; rather than explicitly dictating the actions of the plot, the real role of the author here is to create the framework while the user propels the actual story.

It's just one idea though. The future of narrative in games lies in understanding the potential of games, instead of trying to evolve the One System to Rule Them All mentality. If there’s one thing that Façade has proven it’s that even though games aren’t movies they certainly have the ability to tell stories in their own way.

As a somewhat tongue in cheek twist on the usual "PC Gaming is Dying" motif, and because it's a slow newsday, here's UK site  bit-tech.net's look at the ongoing PC/Console rivalry:

Is Console Gaming Dying?
It’s okay; I know what you’re thinking: The title of this feature alone has “troll” written all over it, and I’m just another PC gaming zealot who’s somehow deluded his blinkered bundle of synapses into believing that console gaming is about to join the dodo’s ranks. So, before I start, I’m going to anticipate any potential flamewar by laying my gaming cards on the table.

I currently have a gaming PC, a Microsoft Xbox 360, a Nintendo Wii, a Sony PlayStation 2, a Nintendo DS, a Nintendo GameBoy Color, a Sega Megadrive and even a Sinclair ZX Spectrum in my lounge. I’ve been a committed multi-platform gamer since the early 1980s, and I’ve played hundreds of games on a diverse array of electronic gadgets over the decades. From Animal Crossing to Crysis, I have an eclectic taste in pixellated entertainment, and the box of silicon on which it happens to be running is about as important to me as the shape of a crisp.

Bit-tech.net posts a feature article on a subject PC gamers are more and more involved in these days, cross-platform game development and its impact on the PC product. This is a techie site, so it gets down into the nuts and bolts of coding, rendering and other technical aspects of game development, but their broad conclusions are here, and generally hopeful:

An inherent problem with multi-platform game development is the inevitable tension between the fact that much of the code is ported, whereas the core game itself is always going to be geared towards one platform. Economics dictate this platform will increasingly be a console, so as PC gamers it's likely that we're always going to have to put up with issues such as limited save games and strange camera angles. However, it's often worth persevering with these if the game is good enough to shine through and you should remember that not all multi-platform games are bad. Fallout 3, Call of Duty 4, Mass Effect, Dead Space, Psychonauts and Beyond Good & Evil all appeared on consoles as well as PC, but it's still well worth playing them on the PC because fundamentally, the games are great and the developers took care to make sure the code wasn't compromised.

What's more, PC gamers are now at least being taken seriously by multi-platform developers, and we're now getting a lot more in the way of advanced graphics options. So, the next time you complain about a PC game being a “port”, think about the reasons why the game isn't quite what you expected. Are the camera angles and limited save points really a product of lazy porting, or are they essential parts of the game experience? There's a stereotype that says that PC games should have a first-person view and a fully featured save game system, but there's no reason why you can't make other styles of game work on the PC. Be open-minded – there's a whole new world of fun from all sorts of different games, even if they don't have exactly the same control system as the one you're accustomed to using.

UK site bit-tech.net posts a brief op ed based on a recent report  spotted at Eurogamer  from the Joan Gantz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop which claims that video gaming, or at least certain kinds of video gaming, may not be the villain in child development it is so often made out to be.

Here's an excerpt:

A new report issued by the creators of Sesame Street claims that computer games can be just as good for children as any traditional classroom activity or form of educational media.

The report explictly advises governmental groups and healthcare organisations to begin investigating how they can use computer games to communicate effectively with children in a positive way.

"Despite their reputation as promoters of violence and mayhem, digital games have in fact been shown to help children gain content and vital foundational and 21st-century skills," the report says.

" Well-designed digital games show significant potential to promote children's growth and healthy development. They can foster skills and knowledge that help children with academic learning, as well as habits which contribute to better health."

" Digital games offer a promising and untapped opportunity to leverage children's enthusiasm and to help transform learning in America... Games are here to stay and offer the country a rare opportunity to leverage children’s already established enthusiasm in order to reform education and promote healthy development."

If you follow the link to Eurogamer, where the article is a bit longer, it's clear the report is not looking at violent video games, but  educational ones, so the conclusion is actually fairly obvious. Also since the mission statement of the Sesame Workshop is "to foster innovation in children’s learning through digital media," they would seem to have a bit of a lean toward a positive outlook on the subject.

UK tech site bit-tech.net has a geeky in depth look at the nuts and bolts of AI in gaming, from the basics of the state machine to how it functions in NPC view and pathfinding in terrain, destructible environments,  and how it's affected by hardware acceleration.

Here's a bit from the conclusion about where it's headed in future:

AI is clearly becoming much more important in games, but it still has to compete with pretty graphics when it comes to processing resources, and it’s often at the bottom of the pile.

Creative Assembly’s Richard Bull notes that "there’s still this disturbing mindset among programmers, particularly game programmers, that if the AI is taking any kind of considerable chunk of time, that’s a really bad thing. It’s only just getting to the stage now where people regard it as important enough to deserve this chunk of time in a game. If your graphics rendering is taking up 50 percent of your CPU time it’s like 'well, never mind, it looks great', but if you try to tell people that you have this really intelligent decision-making system that’s taking up 30 percent of the CPU time, they’ll say 'you obviously don’t know what you’re doing, it’s badly programmed' and so on".

However, with GPU hardware support and multithreading becoming more widespread, hopefully, we’ll see AI using a greater amount of resources. Just take a look at your CPU resources when you’re running Fallout 3 or GTA IV, and you’ll see that your CPU is being hammered. Anything that can provide game developers with more AI processing power will be warmly welcomed by the gaming industry, and we can then progress to even more sophisticated AI systems.

Tech site bit-tech.net has an op ed by Joe Martin delving into the state of abandonware, both substantively and ethically.

From the intro:

As PC gamers, we tend to be as much about the good games of old as the up and coming new releases. We know that, while Crysis is all very pretty and fun, there’s a lot of nostalgic joy to be had by going back to some of the old Infocom titles....being primarily PC gamers we’re in the unique position of being able to get a lot of our favourite old games easily and for free.

After going into some detail about what constitutes abandonware and what makes it legal or illegal, the author gets into what's going on now to make it more available:

Thankfully though, in this grim and mostly copyrighted situation there are a number of good people out there who are fighting to make abandonware more available.

The motives for doing this can vary greatly of course and, while there’s a large amount of people who just want to download free, old games, there’s also a lot of folks who want to see the software saved and preserved.

Preserving these games serves two uses – not only do you ensure it can survive even if physical copies are destroyed, but you can keep it until the copyright runs out and it becomes true abandonware. Once the copyright has expired games are often legally distributable...

The artcile ends with a list of the author's favorite abandonware, including Albion:

Though the learning curve can be pretty steep in this top-down RPG, the game is consistently fair with players who take the time to explore and understand the complex world of Albion. While the game itself is a fairly familiar mix that’s similar to the old Final Fantasy games – top-down navigation and turn-based combat for the most part.

What really sells Albion however is the obvious love and care which the fictional world has been built with, including some rather striking artwork

Cliff Harris over at bit-tech.net has an op-ed up entitlted Game Phone Home! on why having your games dial home over the internet may actually be a good thing:

We need to learn that sharing usage data is good. Right now, a singleplayer game that connects to a developers website is automatically considered evil, regardless of intent or reality. This isn't without good reason. Intrusive DRM systems and suspicious data harvesting without asking permission have made gamers rightfully defensive of what programs get allowed through their firewalls.

This reaction is understandable, but it's also holding back game design.

Lets look at why a game developer wants his games to phone home, and why you shouldn't mind – or even be keen to enable it!

The first reasons are technical. Gathering data from your customers is the only real way to know what machines are running your games. On the PC, no two boxes are the same. And no two games have identical demographics. It's good to know so many people have bought widescreen monitors but how many of them play Democracy?

I need to know what screen resolution my customers machines run at if I'm to make sensible decisions on default (and supported) resolutions. Knowing how much RAM and CPU horsepower those machines have is another great piece of data that lets me as a coder tune the game for the perfect balance of performance against shininess. Note; nobody cares what the average new PC has inside it, or the Steam Hardware survey - what I and fellow devs care about is what my customers PC's are like.

Knowing the hardware is great, but knowing the software helps too. Should I use Windows XP and Vista-only code? The only way to know is to see how many people played the last game on windows 9x machines.

Knowing what revision of video card drivers people have would be good too, especially if you manage to auto-capture performance data at the same time. Imagine checking the support page on a site and seeing that 'driver revision X for this card improves the FPS by an average of 34 percent'.

Technical stats are great news for the coders, but designers also have reasons for auto collecting data. How many people got to level six? How many attempts did the average gamer need to complete that mission? How many found the hidden passage? How many people completed the game?

This data is all gold dust to designers. Without it, we basically throw a huge pile of features and content into the game and cross our fingers. We have no idea what bits people are spending time on, or where they get stuck, so no idea what to put in patches or expansions. Listening to the 1 percent of gamers on forums is great, but hardly truly representative of the majority.

Bit-tech.net posts an article by indie dev Cliff Harris (Positech Games) which asks several worthwhile questions about the framework of modern games, such as " Why do games always cater for the lowest common denominator?" and "...why are so many games treating us all like idiots?" :

You can take a lot of great game ideas, and then dumb then down to the lowest common denominator and make them boring and dull, that's a given. There are some great game ideas though that you just can't dumb down before they fall apart. Right now that means the game doesn't even get out of the starting gate.

I've heard of games flopping because the marketing sucked, budget problems, piracy and poor design but I haven't heard about any big games failing because they were too highbrow. Yet nobody is even trying to make those games...

Here he gives a specific example:

There was a game called Hacker when I was a kid, that my dad was into. I always remember him telling me with great excitement that when you got to a certain part of the game, in France, the game spoke to you in French. No tooltips, no help, you needed to know French. Pre-Internet, this was a considerable stumbling block. My dad bought a French dictionary and kept on playing. He also therefore learned a bit of French. Awesome idea.

You would never ever in a million years get a game like that past a publisher any more, which is a pity because I think there is a group of people out there who would love it. Games challenge our reflexes, our puzzle-solving skills, our memories and our endurance but they rarely challenge our knowledge. Why not? We aren't all drooling idiots.

Bit-tech.net has an interesting editorial up by staffer Bret Thomas on the recent flap over DRM protection in such games as Spore and Mass Effect, and on the ethics of piracy:

...We're left with a chicken-and-egg scenario. If nobody stole it, would they need to protect it so carefully? But if the protection wasn't so invasive and the price so enormous, would we feel as pressing of a need for previously legitimate users to download cracks and patches that thwart it? Both sides justify their own actions by the actions taken by the other side.

Even the debate about product quality creates an inescapable paradox. Pirate-supporters say that it's ridiculous and unfair to charge full price for a game that isn't pretty well bug-free, while developers are stuck with less budget to pay people to bug-test when less people are buying the game. That amount is further decreased by the chunk that the publisher has to pay a protection company to attempt to stall the cracks by even a little.

Conclusion:

I know that EA has rescinded the draconian scheme that brought all this to light, and for that I am as thankful as you. But I think we need to pay special attention to what that really says – the battle has become so ugly that it's hard for the company to know that protection crossed one too many lines until it's almost too late. I wonder if we on the other side ever stop to think, “Did I cross a line, too? I really could have bought this...why didn't I?”

For those of you wondering what my (not-so) brilliant solution would be to this, well...I hate to disappoint you, but I don't really have one. See, it seems everyone's too busy fighting for the rights of pirates or the rights of DRM to remember that in the end we're all consumers and producers just trying to not get screwed.

So, the best that I can do is elect that we all step back and actually talk about it. Not talk the way forum users bicker and flame and troll – as consumers, we don't get anything by being at the front lines. Neither do the developers or producers (some of whom actually read this site).

U.K. site bit-tech.net has a column  up examining the ethics aspect of game reviewing in the aftermath of the Gerstman flare-up. The short article looks at some comments made by Variety video games reporter Ben Fritz in his blog.

Here's a sample from the column:

Games journalism has had a tough time as of late, with many alleging that the industry is spotted with corruption after the woefully-titled Gerstman-gate. The onslaught hasn't finished yet either as Variety call the practices of sites like IGN in to question.

Variety's Ben Fritz has pointed the finger at sites like IGN in a recent article on his blog, questioning the integrity of sites that offer 'exclusive reviews'. The very idea of an exclusive review is, Fritz says, ethically troubling.

"How can we trust a videogame review when the outlet running it has been given a major commercial favor — one that's worth money — from the publisher of the game? You never see a paper or TV station getting special access from a movie studio or TV network or book publisher to run an "exclusive review," " says Fritz.

"Imagine the L.A. Times or Roger Ebert touting their "exclusive review of 'Iron Man.'" Absurd, right? So why do we tolerate it for a videogame?"

Fritz also discusses the questionable quality of 10/10 scores, publisher review 'embargoes' and how being the first outlet to run a game review influences web hits and magazine sales. You can read the full blog entry here.