I have mine that I’ll post, but I’d welcome yours.
One notable thing – both of those guys, who are very accomplished, are struggling to match the changes dictated by the technology to create effective stories. Some things turned out to be universal – solving puzzles, triumphing — while others, like building guilds of players, were particular to specific types of technology (like lots of bandwidth and a delivery device where the player could comfortably commit for several hours.)
Much of the newer stuff seemed like entertainment for a world of continuous partial attention, didn’t it?
I thought it was interesting when they discussed how the push towards tablet and iOS has created a challenge for game designers to condense narrative from what used to be multiple hours necessary for a PC game to now a few minutes in order to fill in the user’s idle time throughout the day. It seems like there is a struggle between creative storytelling and a growing demand for mindless games.
That is certainly how they’d put it, though they’d probably tell you that it’s hard work to make something mindless.
It’s interesting to consider these so-called “casual” mobile games as time-fillers in a culture that fetishizes the idea of speed, immediacy, and gratification now. The pleasures of the game are so elementary — put the bird in a sling so it blows up the pig — compared with a rich environment, but it fills the moment. That wins.
I admire that there are people like our guest speakers still out there who are making games for the right reasons. I think Zynga is finally feeling the repercussions of focusing all their talents on building a product that makes heaps of money, quickly. Last year, when Zynga’s COO came to speak in one of my classes, I asked him how they plan to capture any portion of the vast majority of the market who get so much utility out of free games (or $2, without ads) such as Words With Friends. These people would never consider a game that required a monthly spend amount, especially when they are perfectly happy with cheap or free games. Moreover, this is a HUGE market.
At the time, I felt that his answer really skirted around the company’s fundamental problem of not having a sustainable or scalable user base. It became clear to me that Zynga was going to see some very hard times. The COO said something about people wanting social games, but didn’t offer much more beyond that. And here they are today, with its stock price and employee morale at devastating lows.
When monetization is the focus, most new businesses don’t stand a chance at long-term success.
I was fairly clueless as to what video games they were talking about, but I really found their opinions fascinating. I was particularly excited about the different types of gamers and how they really do relate to any sort of user challenges we face on the Internet or with hardware and software. I was curious to know what actually DEFINES a comic– it seemed like they were talking about more of a Quentin Tarantino movie than an actual comic. Again, I’m no expert.
I found these two guys as well as their carrers really interesting. One of the things that impressed me is how the scenarists/storytellers in the videogame industry are limited by technology and have to adapt their story. I really thought that almost everything was possible (except graphic performances) and that it was just a few lines of code to change. I was also surprised that they don’t believe in “user-content” games such as Minecraft because I believed it was going to explode?
They are in one sense “limited” by technology, but those limitations are also a means to successful communication. The constraints of the tablet — shorter duration of play, smaller screen size, lack of a ready and real-time social environment — only matter because a lot of people are using tablets. It’s also notable that these limitations are very relative — computer games are maybe 35 years old, deep graphics 20 or less, social sophistication like World of Warcraft about a decade.
The dilemma you are looking at here, though, is really the same one I was talking about in the first slides I showed in our first class – the 13,000 year-old cave paintings. Communication is always constrained by the available technology and by what the audience knows and wants.
In the case of these game designers, we were looking at the problems of moving from one digital form to another, in an industry at its roots directed by pre-existing analog entertainments (pen and paper fantasy games.) We’ll be looking at variations on that in today’s class, which will look at this phenomenon as it pertains to digital journalism – a move from traditional print to digital.
As much as it is a constraint, it is necessary. Look at it any other way — if you have everything, and you are about everything, you can’t really say much of anything.
By the way, we’ll also be taking up the question of user-created content in the Journalism session, and again next week. In every case, participation is a necessary element, but it seems increasingly clear that user-created content cannot drive most forms – it’s unfair to expect amateurs to create great stuff in media that is still quite challenging to master.