Over at trustygamer.com, smakus writes an at once touching eulogy and scathing rant about the colour palettes used in modern games. Current screen shots and updated list of buzzwords aside, he could have saved himself the typing and simply linked to page 3 of Old Man Murray’s Rune review. Which is nearly 8 years old.

Here I am rollerblading on top of a city bus that’s travelling across a layer of concrete beneath which is – presumably – a river of sewage. The Japanese creators of Jet Grind Radio were polite enough not to make me visit it. And that’s after we bombed the darn heck out of them in World War 2! Developers: Note bright colors and sky and sun.

smackus’ post is weird, relying on a ‘back in the day’ golden age that I don’t think exists. First, the strange assumption that it’s a choice between realism and colourfulness, as if real reality wasn’t colourful as hell. The real conflict is between drab and bright. Then, smackus uses screenshots of Super Mario 64 to show us what a colourful game could look like. As if that was the last example of bright palettes in gameplay. As if Super Mario Galaxy didn’t just come out.

The truth is that an enormous number of brightly coloured games (you get the idea) are being released, even in modern times. The real question is why so many blockbusters continue to be set in Blade Runner, Mad Max or a sewer. This is not new. The same year that Super Mario 64 came out, iD released Quake. Old Man Murray again:

Here’s a depressing rundown of the levels you’ll death-march through: Nali village, cave, cave, cave, cave, dark castle, lava cave, lava dungeon, lava waterfall, lava sewer, cave, dungeon, sewer, Nali village, dungeon, cave, sewer, cave, Nali cave, tall cave with the ceiling removed, cave, dungeon, cave. I think I forgot a sewer in the middle there. If I wanted to visit a dank, lightless cave, I could go explore my own edgy basement right now. For free. I have no explanation for the tedious, sewer-centric art direction in virtually every game. Maybe publishers have convinced developers that the game buying public is composed entirely of homesick C.H.U.D.S.

I have a different theory: I think that publishers have convinced developers that the game buying public is composed almost entirely of teenage boys.

If the binder doodles, film and music consuption habits of my friends in junior high is any indication, adolescence is as much about proving that you’re not into “kids stuff” anymore, as it is about anything else. Remember when Nintendo made Wind Waker more cartoony? Remember how sales spiked when Prince of Persia went from this to this? Remember what the monsters of Doom 3 look like?

This is the legacy of teenage boys that continues to shape our industry. We sell to our audience, our audience thinks that they want “mature” titles and someone told them that mature meant dark, dank and bloody. Dystopian novels English curriculum, I am looking in your direction.

At The Escapist, Wendy Despain looks at game design with new eyes.

Did you know you can win the first level of Star Wars just by standing in one place, turning in constant circles and holding down the “X” button? Aunt Wendy got something right. He was thrilled. And when he heard the cheerful chimes, a signal to those of all ages that you’ve won something, there was jumping around and fists in the air and lots of shouting I didn’t understand.

But then the next level came up, and things started to go downhill. The instant it began he looked confused. It took him a few seconds to put it into words, but then he said it. “I already won this level.”

And suddenly, the decision to make Super Marios Bros. World 1-2 happen in a cave is revealed to be utterly brilliant.

Cracked.com’s story about 7 Real Conspiracy Theories reminded me of a game I’ve wanted to work on for ages. I started thinking about it in college when I was simultaneously obsessed with Robert Anton Wilson and Civ II. In keeping with my philosophy that ideas are cheap and that it’s implementation that matters, here’s the game so far.

The main concept of the game is that there are secret masters of history behind the scenes, controlling and crafting events. The player takes on one of these puppet masters, in conflict with all the others, which are controlled by AI (or other players?). The goal is to (secretly) take over the world.

At first glance, the game appears to be very similar to any game in the Civilization series. However, all nations are entirely AI controlled. The player has no direct ability to manage unit production, send out settlers or any of the other standard Civ activities. Instead, they can direct members of their conspiracy to infiltrate organizations and governments, foment dissent, assassinate or indoctrinate leaders and other shadowy things. The idea is to shape history and humanity in a way that matches the ideology of your conspiracy.

Early portions of the game are Player vs City and then Region and then Nation. The conspiracy grows, takes over other groups as puppet organizations, and slowly winds its tentacles around the immediate area. As agents infiltrated different levels of government, the player gains more and more ability to see and then affect the direction of policy-making by the AI Nation. In time, the player encounters another shadowy organization and the real war begins.

The conflict plays out backstage, with assassinations, infiltrations and counter-infiltrations of puppet organizations, occult ceremonies, and the occasional out and out attack on your enemies. Wars are started and stopped, economies collapsed and restored and surveillance systems are created and cracked. Half the battle is getting accurate information about where and who your enemies are.

Once the existence of other secret masters comes to light, the game becomes an exercise in paranoia. Are the leaders that you’ve installed actually loyal? Is the information that you’re getting from your agents compromised? Have you really infiltrated the enemy, or is it yet another front or has your agent been brainwashed? With each passing turn, the player must sift through public information (which may or may not be lies) and secret reports (possibly also lies), attempt to sort out what’s going on and act accordingly.

All the while, the player is attempting to drag humanity toward enlightenment or bring about total submission or cause Armageddon or just built enough new landing strips for their Extra Terrestrial allies.

Aside from the Civ games where you play an apparently undying ruler over millennia, the closest game I can find for this idea is Republic: the Revolution a game I had high hopes for – hopes dashed by the lukewarm reviews. Steve Jackson’s Illuminati also has some inspiring material, though it doesn’t have a world simulator running underneath the main conflict.

Someone should make this game!

Over at Game Career Guide Brian Nathanson talks about his struggle at breaking in to the games industry. Well, his failure to break in to the industry.

It’s a sad story. He doesn’t mention what school he went to, just an unnamed “game program in Arizona”. He only hints at the details but it seems like he entered a program with high hopes, took out massive loans and discovered at the end of the process that he wasn’t prepared for a job (he can’t even get a phone interview).

I am completely aware of how many people want to be a part of the video game industry. I will admit, openly and publicly, that I probably don’t have a very competitive portfolio.

When I was in charge of hiring at a video game company, I saw a tonne of applications like Brian’s. A lot of people have paid ridiculous tuitions for generalist educations and came out at the other end masters of nothing. It was heart wrenching, knowing how much these people had invested in their education and how little they got for it. They’d have been better off using the tuition money to pay for rent and food while they worked full time on a mod project.

I feel for Brian, but I also totally disagree with him.

Individuals with base skill sets and true passion are ready and waiting to be given a chance to shine. These talented and passionate people bring fresh new energy and commitment into an industry that seems to always be juggling profitability with volatility. New ideas, new game mechanics, and new appeal could be created by those who just want to make a game they would like to play. Smaller, more tightly focused, and perhaps less expensive games could be the result if the industry allowed more inexperienced developers to work while growing their skill sets.

Ideas are cheap and plentiful, we don’t lack for them. Nor do we lack for fresh young talent. This is an industry with an average age of 31 and an average career length of 5.4 years.

I’ve worked with newcomers and with hobbyists and and I’m here to tell you that inexperience does not lead to “smaller, more tightly focused,” games. It leads to sprawling, unfinished, genre-defying epic failures. We don’t need fresh young faces to reinvigorate things. We need old non-burnt-out faces to stick around and be the voices of experience and history.

Brian is right about one thing, it is very hard to even get a phone interview. It’s not because we can’t be bothered to talk to the passionate people who wish they were involved. It’s because there is something like a 60:1 ratio of applicants to job postings. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to call each of them.

Starting in the 1930s, a psychologist named B.F. Skinner did a series of experiments involving rats, pigeons, and something called a Skinner Box. The experiments involved conditioning the animals to activate a lever and rewarding them for the behaviour with food based on a variety of different reward schedules.

It turns out that a Variable Ratio schedule, where you give out rewards after random number of actions is the best way to get an animal to hit a lever over and over again. Unlike more predictable schedules, which are associated with a lull in activity after the reward is given out, Variable Ratios mean that any lever press could be the one that dispenses food. In the delightful language of psychology “Variable schedules produce higher rates and greater resistance to extinction than most fixed schedules.” Extinction is when you stop doing something because it’s stopped rewarding you.

I first came across the Variable Ratio reward schedule in an article on Gamasutra about using behavioural psychology to make games more fun. If you stop and think for a moment, you’ll recognize the schedule in the loot drops of Diablo and just about every MMO and RPG in existence. You’ll see it in the random power-ups dropped by enemies in FPSs and SHMUPs. And you’ll see it in slot machines, Craps tables and just about every other form of gambling.

We have a funny relationship with addictiveness in this industry. When reviewers talk about a game being addictive, it’s high praise. When publishers talk about it it’s a laudable business goal or a selling point. As part of the Civilization IV marketing campaign they released a series of ads and a website for CivAnon, an Alcoholics Anonymous for Civ gamers.

Perhaps conditioned by years of defending ourselves from the charge that games are corrupting the youth, when it comes to the idea that games might be addictive for real we tend to circle the wagons.

At some point, the industry is going to have to take serious stock of the charge the claim that games are addictive. More specifically, that we have a moral obligation that conflicts with our financial obligations to decide how addictive we want our games to be.

Consider this quotation from the Gamasutra article:

The distinct pause shown under a fixed ratio schedule can be a real issue for game designers. Having a period of time where there is little incentive to play the game can lead to the player walking away.

The business side screams “OH GOD NO, we can’t let them walk away from the game! They might stop paying!” The ethical side should be asking “Ok, I want them to like this game and keep playing it, but I also want them to have a rest of their life. Where’s the balance?” Jonathan Blow asked this question eloquently at MIGS 2007. Raph Koster asked it again just last week.

If we can agree that the tobacco industry should be held culpable for deciding how much nicotine to put in its cigarettes and we can believe that there is such a thing as problem gambling, then we have to accept that it’s possible to make games that are too addictive. We have to accept the possibility that we may already have.