Raph Koster's Blog, page 20

My first game

At PAX East, there was a panel where a bunch of devs talked about their first games. They asked me and a few others to send in a video… and this is what I sent them.

The saga of how I managed to make it, though, is a little more intricate, involving copying all my Atari 8-bit floppies to PC. I used the USB SIO2PC interface from Atarimax to connect the floppy drive direct to the PC.  I then captured video directly within Altirra. Some of the disks were dead, alas, but I was able to recover about a half dozen games and partial games that I wrote when I was 14 and 15. Maybe at some point I’ll do posts on them.

You also get to see a glimpse of what was my real bootcamp in game design. It wasn’t the videogames. Frankly, I wasn’t a good enough programmer to make great games, really, and so a lot of the games were clone-like in a lot of ways. A truly ridiculous amount of them consist of nothing more than the title screen. No, it was the boardgames I did as a kid that in retrospect really taught me the basics… I must have made several dozen, and they’d get playtested during recess periods at school. At some point, I will definitely do a post about those. I still have many of them.

Moving on from Playdom/Disney

As of today, I am an unemployed game developer!

It was in the summer of 2006 that I founded Metaplace in a spare bedroom. By 2007, we had built an amazing, deeply involved community, and a powerful platform. By 2009, we had failed to make money at it and were forced to shut it down. Since then I’ve been privileged to see several of the folks from that community go on to join the industry and do great work.

We switched to social games. In the space of six months, we launched three of them. I still get emails asking for the return of My Vineyard. We introduced some real innovations to Facebook gaming, and were quickly acquired.

Then came two and a half years with Playdom and Disney. So much learning! Amazing views into metrics and science and the mass market from Playdom. That incredible culture of creativity and deep commitment to values at Disney. I held a frame from Steamboat Willie in my hands. I watched everyday people who never thought of themselves as gamers wake up to the power of games. And above all, I worked with many wonderful people.

Now it feels like time to apply the things I learned.

So, I am off on my own!

What’s next?

No, I am not doing a Kickstarter. I get asked about it about once a week. I suspect that those of you who want this all want me to make a worldy MMO. I may yet make one of those in the future, but I don’t think that you can raise enough money on Kickstarter to do it justice.
I’m available for consulting, if you can afford my soon-to-be-exorbitant rates.
I suspect I will be able to do a bit more writing and speaking than I have been doing. I look forward to catching up with all the stuff going on in the academic scene…
I don’t have a next job lined up yet. I am, as they say, exploring opportunities. I’ve talked with a few folks, and now that this is public, expect to talk to more. But…

Most likely, I will simply start making games. Lots and lots of games. Fun ones. About all sorts of things. I want to get my hands dirty. I want to explore ideas. It is a crazy exciting time in the industry right now, and I came away from GDC inspired.

I’ll keep you posted. Expect the blog to get a bit more active.

PS, press folks, you should direct any questions about my Disney tenure and departure to Brian Nelson over in the PR dept.

Image is by the amazing Bud Coy, from the farewell card from the San Diego team. You guys rock.

Yiynova MSP19U: A Cintiq alternative

The Yiynova MSP19U. And the piece I finished today on it.

I’ve always wanted a Wacom Cintiq: a tablet monitor, where you can draw directly on the glass screen at your desktop. I would enter the raffles at every GDC, hoping. I have used Tablet PCs for years now, but of course, that also means working on a laptop, which isn’t the same as having desktop power. (I just recently picked up a new one of those — see my last two posts for that experience).

As I was doing the new color versions of the cartoons for the revised edition of Theory of Fun without a tablet PC, I was borrowing my daughter’s Bamboo tablet and trying to adjust. I ran across mention of a new Cintiq competitor out of China. I was pointed at it by just a few reviews out there on the Net: Ray Frenden’s and PC Weenies.

For those who don’t know, a big part of the reason why Wacom is king is that they have a technological lead that is hard to surpass. Their digitizers have better pressure sensitivity, tilt support, and much more. Competitors typically struggle to keep up with the basics, like “tracking the pen as you move it across the screen.” You get jitters, lines hopping about randomly, etc.

Well, the good news is that the Yiynova MSP19U Tablet Monitor, while not matching the Cintiq feature for feature, is totally worth the price: a fraction of that of a large Cintiq. I’ve had it for a week now, and I like it a lot.

The rear view. You can see the power cord and the (thicker) dual USB/VGA cord. Also notice, it has a VGA jack for connecting a mirror monitor. The pen clip is supposed to go on the left side.

The bad news? They are hard to come by! Apparently there is a limited supply flowing in from China. There’s one US reseller, The Panda City. They post availability updates there pretty regularly. Amazon is the only way to get one, far as I know, as they sell out within hours. Believe it or not, before the holidays they were actually even cheaper.

What do you get?

2048 levels of pressure sensitivity, which matches the Wacom.


Excellent pen tracking — better, in fact, than the Wacom digitizer in my Samsung ATIV Smart PC Pro tablet PC, which gets flaky near the edges of the screen


Extra nibs for the pen.


A decent screen — you’ll want to color-calibrate it a bit, but it’s bright.


Adjustable angle from near-vertical 85 degrees, down to around 14 degrees.


It connects with a (rather short) dual USB and VGA cable. I used a generic USB extender for that cable, and my video card is actually a Sapphire with 3 outs none of which were VGA, so I am running it through a DVI adapter.


It does have a power brick as well.


There’s VGA out on the back. I haven’t actually tried this yet… after all, I am already running three monitors!


And this is worth calling out: great support people, by email or phone. My unit was missing the little pen clip to hang the pen on the back, and they are already shipping one out for me. There are stories all over the Net about their helpful support.

The pen. It takes a AAA battery, and has 2048 levels of sensitivity and a double button.

What it doesn’t have

There are no buttons on the bezel. This makes me sad. Tapping icons in Photoshop with the pen works OK at this size (unlike with my tablet PC) but reaching for the keyboard shortcuts while at the monitor does give me an arm ache after multiple hours. I may experiment with an AutoHotKey script to make larger buttons on the side of the screen.


There’s no support for pen tilt. I’ve never had pen tilt on a tablet anyway, so I don’t miss it.


There’s no eraser on the back of the pen. I rarely used it on the Wacom pens that had it, so I don’t mind.


It’s only 1440×900. This is noticeably lower resolution than the other large monitors I have on my desk. (I’m now running a triple monitor setup, with the Yiynova). And it’s a TFT, not IPS.


You can’t rotate the monitor on its stand, the way you can with a Cintiq (though it also weighs a fraction of what the 22HD does, so… tradeoffs).


The vertical stand adjustment is on the back and in a bit of an awkward spot. Works fine, but you have to lift the tablet to vertical first, then pull the lever and let the stand fall away until it hits the desk. I am adjusting it from vertical to flat a lot, so it bugs me.


The pen uses a battery. Wacom’s don’t. That said, the heft of the pen feels really nice in my hand, and estimated battery life for the pen is months. And it’s just a regular AAA.


Awesome industrial design. It’s boxy, nothing objectionable, but certainly not super-modern looking.


You cannot have the Wacom drivers installed at the same time as the Yiynova drivers.


Less calibration options than Wacom drivers do.


The TFT screen means that you do have color accuracy issues when off angle. On my unit, it’s pronounced when you are looking at a downwards angle, moderate when looking at an upwards angle, and minor when at side angles.


The screen is glassy smooth — no “toothiness” to it. This is fine with me.

As you can see, many of the disadvantages relative to the Cintiq are things that I just don’t actually care about. You might, though, so bear them in mind.

The last generation of stuff out of Yiynova used Waltop digitizers, which simply aren’t competitive. Do not confuse this model with the MSP19. That’s the one with the old digitizer. There’s a reason it has a lower price. But the new ones with the U in the model name use UC Logic digitizers, and suddenly they are comparable to Wacom. And the price! Yiynova has two models right now that use the UC Logic, and here’s a table comparing the Wacom and Yiynova prices, sorted by display size and with the current Amazon price:

 

Yiynova DP10U
$399
10.1 in
1024 x 600


Wacom Cintiq 12WX
$845
12.1 in
1280 x 800


Yiynova MSP19U
$599
19 in
1440 x 900


Wacom Cintiq 22HD
$1999
21.5 in
1920 x 1080


Wacom Cintiq 24HD
$2499
24 in
1920 x 1200

 

No contest if you’re on a budget. I am very much enjoying having mine, and the work is both better and faster with it than it was on the regular drawing tablet. If they ever do a higher resolution one, and/or one with buttons, I’ll definitely think about upgrading, too!

 

Windows 8 tablet, part two

Life with a new Windows 8 tablet.

Oh boy, are there teething pains. Here’s some of what I did, located after insane amounts of Googling and multiple days. I am posting it here to save other people all the pain.

An amazing resource: the forums at http://forum.tabletpcreview.com/

Gosh, the storage is limited.

Yes, it is. First off, don’t even bother getting a 64GB model. You need the 128, I guarantee it. In the case of the Smart PC Pro, people are even buying 256 or 480GB SSD’s – unlike the Surface Pro, the machine has some user-serviceable parts, and you can replace the SSD without a huge amount of hassle. If you’re brave, check here: http://forum.tabletpcreview.com/samsung/54457-ativ-700t-question-anyone-open-unit-yet.html

If you’re not brave, well, then:

First, add a drive! Buy a 64GB SD microSDXC card. Stick it in, and leave it there. This gives you a second drive.
Second, pick up a 32GB USB stick.

Swipe in from the right side to get the charms bar.
Search for “recovery”
When the results come up, you’ll have nothing. But on the right side will be a column for filtering results.  Select “Settings” – that will give you the results you need.
There will be two columns of options. “Create a recovery drive” is the one you want.
Put in the USB stick, and make sure you select it as the destination recovery drive.
Don’t pick “delete the recovery partition” yet. Instead, we want to test that you can boot from USB first!
Make sure the tablet is actually off all the way. Put in the USB stick.
Then turn it on. When the Samsung logo appears, hit the Windows home button. You should then go to the BIOS.
Tap Advanced and disable Fast BIOS.
Tap Boot and disable Secure Boot. The key here is that you need the UEFI option to be available so it sees the USB drive.
then tap Boot Device Priority
Pull down to USB, which should now be there
Save and say yes when it asks to reset.
Try booting from the USB drive.
If it works, you’ll go to start installing Windows. You can bail at that point by turning the tablet off again
Now you can delete the recovery partition! There’s a bunch of ways to do this, such as easy to use software, or using command line stuff. I leave it to you to decide which to do. It should gain you about 17GB back, but I haven’t actually done it yet myself.

Set Windows Defender to actually scan regularly:

Microsoft in their infinite wisdom disabled the simple scheduling that was in Win7 Security Essentials. Instead, you have to use the incredibly confusing Task Scheduler that people don’t even know exists and never use.

Worse, Windows Defender isn’t turned on at all, unless you buy from the Microsoft Store (I did).

Press Windows-R to open the Run dialog
Type in taskschd.msc
In the leftmost pane, navigate to Task Scheduler Library > Microsoft > Windows > Windows Defender
In the topmost pane you will see Windows Defender Scheduled Scan as the third item. Double click it.
In the window that opens, click on the second Tab, labeled Triggers.
Click the New button at the bottom of the window. A new window will open called New Trigger.
Choose “On a Schedule” from the top pulldown.
Choose Daily or Weekly. Monthly will not work.
Set up the times you want (like 4am or whatever)
Make sure the checkbox that says “repeat task every” isn’t ticked.
Make sure the Enabled checkbox is. Then hit OK.
Now click the Actions tab and click Edit.
In the Program/Script field, put quotes around the pathname. They aren’t there by default, and it won’t work unless they are there.
If you want a full scan as opposed to a quick scan, then put “Scan -ScheduleJob -ScanType 2” in the “Add arguments (optional)” field.
If you want this to only run when you’re plugged into power, click the Conditions tab and check the appropriate checkbox.
Sound complicated? Here’s a walkthrough with pictures. http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/14264-windows-defender-scheduled-scan-set-up-windows-8-a.html

Fix the lack of keyboard popup when you click in a desktop text field

By default, even if you are using the computer as a tablet, you don’t get a keyboard when you click in a text field unless you are in Metro. At the desktop, you have to actually click on the keyboard icon on the toolbar to open it manually every time. So if you want it to act like iOS…

Be warned: this little tool is very CPU-hungry when active (like, 19% CPU usage!)
Go here: http://forum.tabletpcreview.com/samsung/54862-my-fix-keyboard-popup-desktop-mode.html
Once you run this, it’ll stay running in the background. Clicking in a text field (including the text areas in stuff like Notepad!) will automatiucally pop up the keyboard. Click out of the textfield, and it’ll go away.
It’ll only do this when not docked, so if you have a real keyboard, no worries.
If you want to be scrolling around in a document without the keyboard up, then there’s a way to turn this off built in. Click the little keyboard icons in the Notifications area. Deactivating removes that CPU hit, if you need the processing power back.
If you like this, you want it permanently there. Add it to Startup Items!
Press Windows-R to open the command prompt.
Type shell:Startup to open the startup items window.
Drag a shortcut for Desktop Keyboard to the Startup window. Next time you reboot, you’ll get asked if you want to give this permission to run. Say yes.

Note, this does seem to still be mildly twitchy, but it looks like you can report bugs to that thread and they’ll fix ‘em. My dislike is that it resizes the windows of the programs.

How do I get to My Computer?

There’s no icons for your computer, your network drives, any of that. Given that I have tons of stuff on shares, etc, this was annoying. I am not hating all of Win8 — actually quite like the Charms bar, for example — but I did want these back on the desktop for quick access.

Get to the desktop (that’s on the tiles by default)
Right click on the desktop and choose Personalize
Click Change Desktop Icons in the upper right
Tick the checkboxes for all the items you want
With the My Computer one now there, you can open that up, and if you want your network drives on the desktop, you can drag shortcuts out.
You can then right-click on any of these and choose “Pin to Start” to get tiles for them in Metro

You may also want to go buy Start8. It adds an oldschool Windows Start button to the desktop mode. I actually left most of Windows 8’s functionality intact with this, and just use the start menu in desktop mode, because it felt far easier to find apps and use the command prompt with it.

Dealing with tiny icons in Photoshop.

Sure, you can use the keyboard. But that defeats the purpose of being able to use this as just an art slate (portable Cintiq!). And the tiny icons in Photoshop are way too hard to tap with a stylus, much less fingers. What you want is Artdock. This is a set of scripts for AutoHotKey.

Download AutoHotKey from here:  http://www.autohotkey.com/ Install it.
Download Artdock from here: http://konartist3d.deviantart.com/art...
Make a copy of AutoHotKey.exe and move it to where you have the Artdock folder. It needs to be in the same folder as Artdock.ahk.
Rename AutoHotKey.exe to Artdock.exe.
Next, fix a bug in the artdock script for Photoshop.  By default, it’s got a messed-up hotkey for switching to the eraser.
Go into artdock/ArtDock/txt/ and double-click on PhotoShopDock.txt
Find the block that says ROW 6.
Within that find the block that says #Control:VSliderDelay
Within that, find the line that says Downkey={i Down}{i Up}
Change it to  Downkey={e Down}{e Up} and save
Go back up in the directory tree and then drag Artdock.exe (the one you made) to the taskbar and pin it there.
Now when you go into Photoshop, you can tap that and launch a touch-sensitive toolbar that lives on the side of your screen.  It comes with menus for a host of art programs, which I have not tested, but you may want to check out the Windows level options, kinda handy too.
To get to the Photoshop one, tap the PS icon.
When your pen or cursor gets near it, it’ll close so it won’t interfere with menu access or drawing. But when you lift your pen away from the screen, you can tap these with your finger. The ones that have up and down arrows can be swiped up and down to get to more things (for example, tap the brush to get the brush – swipe down to get eraser, and swipe up to swap foreground and background colors.
Tap the arrow to get back to the top level dock, and then the X to exit it.

Everything is tiny

Windows 8 has terrible high-DPI handling. Meaning, it does not scale smoothly. For more on this, check out this great article: http://www.kynosarges.org/WindowsDpi.html  If you use pixel-accurate font sizes, everything will be way way too tiny. You can set it at 200% to try to do what Apple does with retina screens, but you’ll find that tons of software does not work right with it and will go off screen! So by default, Windows 8 has this scaling factor set to 125%. This was still too small for me.

Swipe in from the right side.
Tap Settings
Tap Personalization
Tap Display in the bottom left
Choose the 150% radio button.
You can click on “custom sizing options” to try other sizes. Just be warned about the scaling thing.
A lot of legacy apps will have blurry text. Boo! For me, this was Chrome, it was a lot of older coding IDEs…. Made programming in them impossible! It was also remote desktop software like Splashtop2, etc. Basically, yuck.
If you tick the “Use Windows XP scaling” checkbox, then hit OK, then hit Apply on the Display window, then sign out, and sign back in, you MAY find that a lot of the text that was blurry before in legacy apps is now crisp. If you go back to the Custom Sizing options window, you’ll see that the box is unticked again. I don’t know whether it’s actually on or actually off that makes it look better… so flip it back and forth.
I found that using custom scaling of 200% resulted in text getting cut off all over the place, which is why I stuck with 150%. Some things are still cut off with the settings I described above, usually in pulldown menus. If that bugs you too much, turn XP scaling back off. (I now am unsure whether to go back to 125% or not, actually…)
Note! If you have crisp text, Artdock will be smaller. If you have blurry text (XP scaling off), ArtDock will be as tall as your screen. You can fix this by going into ArtDock/txt/ and manually changing the sizes of all the buttons. They’ll get uglier since you’re scaling the art, but you can just go through and for example, change all the 50’s to 75’s, and so on, and tweak size to taste.

I use Firefox for my browser most of the time. You may want to try these add-ons:

Theme Font and Size Changer
Default Full Zoom Level

But what I did instead that made me happiest was to change the settings in Firefox itself.

Type about:config in the address bar. Click past the warning that comes up.
Look for layout.css.devPixelsPerPx, and set the value to 1.5 or 2.0, and see how you like it. The buttons should get easier to tap, the text in the pages will all get bigger, etc.
You may also want to go into the regular options settings and up the minimum font size, say to 13.

Random other things:

Windows 8 mail app sucks. I installed Outlook, and then iCloud to sync all my contact and calendars over.

I had to disable the ambient light detection, because brightness would basically just change randomly.

The People app got stuck, and kept saying I needed to re-enter my password, and wouldn’t authenticate me into all my social media. It turned out that the servers had not sent me a text to my phone to authenticate me, the way they were supposed to. What eventually fixed it for me:

Uninstall it.
Search on the Store for “Mail” – search matches the front of the name, so it wouldn’t find People if you searched for it
Reinstall it, but don’t launch it.
Swipe in from the right side and tap settings.
Tap “pc settings” at the bottom
Tap users
Switch to a local account. You’ll basically be disconnecting from your MS account.
After it’s set up, log in that way, and go right back again to users. Now set up the MS account all over again.
The text message will be re-sent, so you can auth the computer.
I also found ALL the approvals for the various social sites were stuck in my spam filter.

Bottom line on Windows 8

First, it gets a bit of a bad rap. But basically, it feels unfinished. Yes, Modern UI and the desktop have an odd coexistence, but I can see where they are going with it. It has a long way to go to match up to iOS and its simple ease of use. Even looking for stuff on the App Store is well behind. And there are definitely elements of Metro that are not only good but should stay and become part of the desktop experience.

Worse, though, is all the little usability messes like the stuff above. And there are more. A lot of stuff where existing functionality has been buried or made harder to use.

Everyone is hyped about Android and about iOS, but the fact is that Windows still has a truly enormous ecosystem and a library of software that cannot be matched the others. For many types of work, it’s your only choice, just as there are some types of work for which you want OSX or Linux. Windows certainly needed updated for the new world of more mobile computing, but as the relative responses to Win RT & Win 8 show, as well as the relatively slow pace of Win 8 adoption, what core Windows users need is Windows, that software library, access to all those old files, and so on. Don’t break it.

Windows 8 tablet, part one

Giant post ahead!

Some background: I have been using Tablet PCs for a decade now. Back in the UO days, I always walked around with a paper notebook full of doodles, and I often sketch out design ideas as diagrams and quickie cartoons. With a pressure sensitive stylus I can also then do artwork directly — concept paintings (the sort of thing you then give to an artist so they can make the real concept painting…!) or game sprites or whatever. These days, I carry my iPad pretty much everywhere, and I can code on it a little bit, I can sketch on it, I doodle with it in Notes Plus, and I even have the Pogo Connect pressure-sensitive stylus, so I can use that for art. But I am working on the colored cartoons for the second edition of Theory of Fun, and none of the iPad art programs will successfully load the Photoshop files I need to work in. And I was in the market for a new laptop anyway, so I went shopping for a Windows 8 tablet.

So this post is what I learned and what I picked. I have another giant post done as well, with everything I had to do to get the new machine set up to my satisfaction. It was info all scattered randomly all over the Internet, so I figured that it might be valuable to gather it all in one place. But this post was long enough already! So look for that one tomorrow.

What I picked

I ended up buying the Samsung ATIV Smart PC Pro 700T, after checking out everything that met these requirements:

i5 or i7 chip (not Atom. Watch out, they do make )
Running Windows 8 Pro — not RT. Frankly, I find RT useless — what I needed was a laptop replacement.
1920 x 1080 screen (though honestly, this may have been overkill — see below!)
Pressure sensitive stylus — with Wacom tech, not N-Trig or something else (after my experience with the UC Logic digitizer in my new Yiynova MSP19U Tablet Monitor, I’d maybe accept that too, but nothing had that).
Thin. I am spoiled by the iPad and even resent the case it’s in.

There is a handy spreadsheet here that dives into excruciating detail on the relative features of the very few machines that meet the criteria. For me, it came down to

The Smart PC Pro
The Surface Pro
The Lenovo Thinkpad Helix

I rejected these:  VAIO Duo (no touchpad, expensive, N-Trig), Asus Taichi (N-Trig), Fujitsu T902 (heavy! oldschool!). I ddn’t get to try the others listed in the spreadsheet, but they mostly all had N-Trigs.

I was sure I was buying a Surface Pro. Then I spent three hours trying it out next to the Smart PC Pro. Here’s what I arrived at:

 
Surface Pro
Smart PC Pro
Helix


Is it out yet
Yes
Yes
No, and it’s been delayed for months now


CPU
i5
i5
You can get i7


Storage
128
128
You can get 256


Size
Smaller – 10 inches
11 inches
11 inches


Weight – with the keyboard (they’re all basically the same without it)
Lightest, because the keyboard is a cover: just 2lbs
3.5lbs
3.75lbs


Real world battery life
The least Like 4 hours
5-6 hours. There’s no battery in the dock.
A battery in the dock means 10 hours in laptop mode, Lenovo claims


Touchpad
There are actual buttons for left and right click!
You can click anywhere for left click, and there’s a region for right click.
Actual buttons, plus their little red nubbin thing that I never use.


Pressure sensitive stylus working in Photoshop today
Nope!
Yes!
I asked a Lenovo blogger, and the answer was “not yet.” Since the machine is also “not yet”… well.


Stylus
1024 levels, pen-sized
1024 levels, small S-Pen size
2048 levels (!), pen-sized


Silo for the stylus so you don’t lose it
No. You can clip it into the power jack with a magnet, but that doesn’t help when it’s plugged in
Yes
Yes


Price
With the keyboard, $1100
$1200
“More.” I have heard $1700.


Fit and finish
Awesome.
Plasticky.
Probably nice, who knows?

So, I picked the 700t because

I couldn’t wait anymore for the Helix, and on top of that, waiting more for pressure sensitivity support whenever Wacom and Microsoft finish arguing about drivers. I may regret it, but I needed a machine before GDC. And by the time the Helix finally surfaces, it may be close to when Haswell architecture machines start to show up anyway.
The Surface Pro had nowhere to put the stylus, even though its stylus was nicer.
The Surface Pro had a smaller screen. I was squinting (I’ll be writing more on the DPI issues in my next post)
The Surface Pro has a touch button for the Start button on the front. The Samsung has a physical button. I cannot overstate how often I accidentally swiped the button on the Surface while handling it, and got dumped to the Start screen. Six times in three hours maybe? Incredibly annoying.
I found the typing on the (really cool) Type Cover more cramped. In typing tests, I consistently had better speed and accuracy on the more laptop-like Samsung dock.
The inking experience was smoother on the Surface Pro. But it was still acceptable on the Samsung. I’d add that now that I have the unit at home, it’s equally smooth, so I suspect that the demoware in the store was slowing everything down.
Mousing with the touchpad was smoother too. I think it is because all the touch gestures aren’t enabled on the Surface Pro. I’ll have to mess with this more. Reviews of all the different machines say that Windows 8 touchpads uniformly suck a bit.
The dock isn’t ideal (bulky to deal with when it’s not attached!) but it fits better on a lap or a plane seat tray than the Surface’s kickstand does.
In the end, I realized that I was going to use this either as an art slate or as a laptop — frankly, mostly as a laptop. In which case, the compromised laptop experience of the Surface was an issue. I ended up leaning away from the tablet aspect, realizing that in practice, I am almost certain to keep using the iPad for pure tablet browsing experiences — and even notetaking and light work.  I’ll use this machine for coding, serious art, Office, and audio recording.

Models of the 700t

I got the A02 from the Microsoft Store, at retail. That’s because 1) I could get it promptly 2) Microsoft bans bloatware, so all their laptops are blessedly free of crap. Online, odds are good you’ll get the A01 from Amazon, and it will come with gigs of stuff you don’t want.

There are four models, and three of them are basically the same. Don’t ask why, even Samsung does not seem to know. Ignore the specs on their site, they are riddled with errors. All of them have the same storage, RAM, clock speed, etc. One possible difference is whether they have the Infineon Trusted Platform Module. The A02 from MS does. But word on the Net is they all have it, it’s just turned off in the BIOS by default. I ended up turning it off in my case anyway. In the US, none of them have 3g or LTE. The sim card slot is blocked and there’s nothing behind it.

The A04 is the different one — it is physically larger, and stuff like skins and maybe cases won’t fit it. Also, the keyboard dock is apparently different. So I avoided it.

I have ordered a case — the only one that holds the dock too, the Poetic Flexbook Keyboard Portfolio. It won’t get here for a while yet, but it was only fifteen bucks, so I figured I’d take a flyer on it. It has an additional stylus loop on the back, so I will probably use on the of Penabled styluses from a previous Tablet PC and leave the small S-Pen in the slot as a spare emergency one. Experiments so far show that using that gives me even better pressure response.

Some hardware reactions

The plasticky doesn’t bug me, honestly. It’s really more the dock than the computer itself that feels that way.

I do hear the fan on occasion, which is disconcerting when holding a tablet.

There have been a lot of reports of the keyboard dock not clicking in or staying connected. I have had no issues with it disconnecting — there was apparently a firmware upgrade not long ago that may have addressed this. I do find it hard to get the tablet docked and undocked, but online reports suggest that the mechanism gets easier as it is broken in. You can certainly dangle the whole thing from the dock — it’s not going to slip out!

The lack of hard buttons on the touchpad is annoying. I keep resting my left hand where I expect the left click to be, and as a result, accidentally doing multitouch gestures on the pad. I bet I can turn that off though. Hmm. I did turn off tapping the pad in favor of actually pressing. There’s a satisfying click when you do it.

The screen is great.

Cursor keys laid out sensibly!

I had to buy a mini-HDMI-to-VGA adapter, so I’ll be able to project. (Side note: how annoying is it that monitors now come with such a random assortment of possible plugs? Can we get back to standardizing please?)

16:9 is a stupid aspect ratio for a tablet. But all the Windows ones are this way.

There’s no light indicating it’s charging. Boo.

And then…

…came the real issue. Getting it set up. For reference, I got this tablet four days ago. It’s still not really perfect, and almost all of it can be chalked up to Windows 8, which is frankly just not ready for prime time. But that’s a separate few thousand words. Look for that tomorrow, where I’ll cover

Getting more storage
Configuring Windows Defender, which is IMHO broken in Win8
Fixing the IMHO broken touch keyboard
Finding your network drives and My Computer which are missing (!)
Setting it up as an art slate
Dealing with the fact that Apple solved Retina Displays and Microsoft completely failed at it and instead put in two hacks neither of which quite work
…and more.

 

 

 

 

Why are QTE’s so popular?

Ah, the dread quick-time event. We may have to blame Shenmue for its wide adoption, though of course something like Dragon’s Lair used the same mechanic. They’re everywhere. They are one of the simplest game mechanics there is. And I have done my share of bashing on them too.

What is a QTE and why do big AAA tentpole titles love them? Well, the mechanic itself is “press a button within a very short time frame.” An incorrect press or failing to do it within the time limit results in a negative outcome. In other words, it’s basically whack a mole, or that game where you pull your hands away before they get slapped.

This makes it a mechanic almost entirely based on reaction time, naturally timeboxed to a minimal duration. As such, it’s incredibly accessible (one button!) and minimally disruptive to whatever else is going on.

Tentpole titles need to be as mass market as they can get, so by having an extremely simple mechanic, they minimize barrier to entry to the game.
Heavily narrative games want mechanics that do not break the story flow, and provide as cinematic an experience as possible. The QTE is about as small as a mechanic gets, and requires next to zero conscious thought.

In the case of AAA tentpole titles, narrative plus QTE therefore becomes the default gameplay mode. Often, we see highly varied stories where the protagonist can perform a huge array of actions, all condensed into the single mechanic. The story advances, the player feels powerful, and the systemic gameplay is tissue-thin. This then gets interrupted periodically with richer game interludes, such as combat sequences — still pretty simple, but rich enough to allow things like advancement and preparation and some degree of strategy, all of which are required to keep the player invested.

So QTE’s are there to help big titles reach the mass market, and to do better storytelling. But there is one huge irony.

Reaction time is not a mass market skill.

We all know this. Physical skill in general is not really mass market. When we examine the landscape of mass market titles, we find that most of the successful games are fairly slow (or at least start that way) or even turn-based, and that they generally involve mental skill rather than pure reflexes.

Just glance over the most popular genres:

hidden object games, heir to the adventure game. There are timers, sure, but the game is Where’s Waldo. The game skill is not reaction to stimuli, but visual perception.
match-3 games and puzzle games like Tetris, which require more advanced controls than QTEs do. There may be time pressure (usually ramping gradually), but the central challenge is a different core mechanic.
management games, where again, time is a factor, but the core challenge is actually planning and queueing.
the entire suite of games adapted from analog gaming, such as Bingo and poker and the like.
even game shows, where you may need to buzz in, but you have to know an answer

The mass market audience not only doesn’t seem to chase after games that are just about who can slap a button the fastest, but also seems to prefer games with deeper mechanics.

So who would prefer a purely reaction time based exercise?

Young folks, for sure. Reaction time is on a steady rise until age 20 or so, and the theory of fun would predict that therefore there would be a strong biological incentive to practice the skill. And reaction time declines gradually after a certain age, and rapidly after reaching advanced ages.
Probably those acculturated to show off their reflexes: men. Many studies have shown faster reaction times for males than females, though there is some dispute about measurement techniques. And the gap seems to be narrowing in more recent studies, so it may simply be that women were not given the opportunity to develop the skill until relatively recently. (And it may be that games are actually helping to train reaction times in girls, alongside things like greater access to sports activities, etc. Again, something mentioned in Theory of Fun ).

All of which leads up to a big question: to what degree have AAA tentpoles actually been limiting their market by pursuing the wrong mechanic in the name of accessibility?

Damsels in Distress

There have been two notable events lately as regards the portrayals of women in videogames.

One is the launch of Anita Sarkeesian‘s video series on Tropes vs Women in Video Games, the first episode of which covers “damsels in distress.” You may recall Sarkeesian as the person who launched a Kickstarter for funds to make this video series, and was promptly attacked in vile ways, up to and including threats of violence. (This would be why comments are disabled on the video, I presume, though that hasn’t stopped the nastiness from returning in a number of comment threads all over the Internet).

The other is the story of game developer Mike Mika, who hacked Donkey Kong for his three-year-old daughter, so that she could play as Pauline instead of Mario. This has resulted in lots of accolades for “best dad ever” all over the Internet.

Pauline is of course a prototypical damsel in distress — as Sarkeesian points out, one of the very first in videogames. From time to time, games have subverted the damsels in distress trope in various ways (in Karateka, the princess seems like a damsel in distress the whole time, but at the end, if you approach her wrong, she kills you; in Metroid, the protagonist famously turns out to have been female the whole time, concealed in battle armor). But by and large, it’s alive and well.

So lots of accolades for Mika, and a lot of vitriol for Sarkeesian. And along the way, a lot of apologia for the damsels in current games. We’ve seen people saying that rescuing women is a male instinct driven by hindbrain biology. We’ve seen the argument that it just costs too much to provide alternate gameplay modes. We’ve seen the case made that games already have a predominantly male market, and that’s why the games are designed the way they are, to maximize revenue — essentially a tautology (and one that ignores early games like Ms. Pac-Man, not to mention the enormous boom in the female audience that came with more casual play). And of course there’s the fact that it is undeniably a classic plot device used in many classics of literature.

My wife Kristen is an as-yet unpublished romance novelist. She’s got one novel out there right now being looked at for full-length publication (e.g., she got past the query and sample chapters). She’s been working on this stuff for years… and I first started paying attention closely back when I did that Love Story Game Design Challenge at GDC back in 2004. And I think there’s a lot we can learn from romance novels — and it doesn’t mean that the plot device has to go away.

Few genres are as rigid as romance. They are incredibly formulaic, and often exist as sheer wish-fulfillment. Many feminists will dismiss them outright as regressive.

Now, formula and genre go hand in hand, and to state that they are formulaic isn’t intended to denigrate them. Mysteries are equally formulaic, after all. A reader of romance novels has expectations: they want a Happily Ever After. They want an interesting story. They want challenges along the way to true love. This is no different than the various tropes around detectives, the expectation of actual science in hard SF, or all the various bits cribbed from Tolkien in fantasy novel after fantasy novel after fantasy novel.

And yet, here’s this genre that is all about finding a good husband — but it does a way better job of avoiding “the pattern of presenting women as fundamentally weak, ineffective or ultimately incapable” that defines “damsels in distress” (to use Sarkeesian’s words).

One of the core tenets of this genre is that at some point “the guy rescues the girl.” She is almost always an actual damsel (“a young unmarried woman of noble birth”, though sometimes she’s not actually noble and the class gap is one of the plot points to overcome), literally in distress: about to be married off to someone wrong, about to become penniless, whatever. But sometimes, she just needs rescued from herself: from a an emotional problem or “character flaw” that she must overcome. In other words, in romance novels, the arc is about a woman growing as a person.

Except that another core tenet is that at some point the girl “rescues” the guy. Romance novels don’t work unless both protagonists have a “critical flaw” that they must overcome, and find that the other person is the means to doing that. What makes a romance novel a satisfying story is that the couple helps each other grow. They “rescue” each other (in the broadest sense).

Generally, the woman is the viewpoint character. Oh, you can have the guy’s viewpoint too, and many novels do. But one of the commonest reasons romance novels fail is because the male character is cardboard, and takes no action other than worshipping the woman. Those tend not to get published, and the romance novelist forums are full of discussion on how to avoid this pitfall.

Having the female viewpoint also means that there is no way for the female protagonist to be passive. If she is, then nothing happens in the book — something must occur while the guy is offstage, after all. So passive protagonists are usually considered to be poor writing. (Many of the critiques around the Twilight series revolved around this… and yet, Bella is way less passive than the typical videogame princess!)

The female characters tend to be shy but spunky, feel constrained by their social roles, almost always do something that violates social convention quite badly (i.e., they play against the damsel trope)… in fact, you could see the entire genre as being a manual on how to deal with the fact that the world sees you as a helpless damsel. (In fact, one of the commonest “character flaws” for the female protagonist is an unwillingness to accept help!).

It is also typical that the actual slave to societal mores, the actual coddled princess, is usually an older female antagonist who is pushing the younger woman to conform to expected socially constructed gender roles (“you must come out at the ball!” “Don’t go there unescorted!” “Heavens, what will they think?!?”). It isn’t unusual for this character to have a moment sometime in the book where “she remembers the girl she used to be” or the like, and joins the protagonist in rebellion (often in a quiet way).

Of course, the biggest convention is HEA: Happily Ever After. Romance novels end there because what comes after is much harder and much more complicated. They are fairytales, after all.

But I think they have a lot to teach us as we think about the “damsels in distress” trope. If a romance novelist had written Donkey Kong, Pauline would escape sometimes. She’d save Mario’s bacon at least once.  When he got to the top, maybe she’d reject him at least once (romance novels usually have a “cold feet” moment, sometimes many). It wouldn’t even be hard to do these things, and the game wouldn’t have to change one whit.

There’s a difference between telling the fairy tale and the sexist trope.

Requiring online for single-player

In the wake of what has been happening with SimCity 5, a lot of folks are asking what the future holds for single-player games that require an always-on connection.

It’s not going to stop.

The future is that

Connectivity keeps getting better, which softens the blow for consumers.
Developers find the sweet spot between “always on” and “phone home when you can” that mobile games have already had to solve (because bandwidth and connectivity for mobile are far more erratic).
Metrics usage explores in the single-player market, to match what is seen in Facebook and mobile.

Yes, this means, with all the good and bad that brings to the table. The fact is that publishers simply won’t be able to resist it. When used right, it makes for better games. And even when used wrong, it generally adds to the bottom line.


Single-player games will continue to evolve towards being services.

Ongoing updates, because again, as seen on mobile, publishers won’t be able to resist the loyalty factor, the boost in retention, the revenue from re-acquisition… in the presence of things like charts showing popularity of games or top grossing games, there’s huge value in doing this even for games that don’t have ongoing revenue streams.
For games that do (be they sub, DLC, or microtransactions), it’s of course a no-brainer.
Really, the single-player model did this already, just without connectivity. Always on just makes it cheaper and better.


Ongoing erosion of the pure single-player experience, as I stated would happen ages ago.

Achievement system metagames.
Tweets.
Dashboards of friends, leaderboards
Getting interrupted with messages that pull you out of the immersion
Notifications
Asynchronous multiplayer features
Sharing your gameplay sessions (Twitch.tv, Everyplay, etc)

Basically, we will continue the march towards “everything you used to buy, you now rent as a service.” With all the good and bad that entails.

[image error]

Penny Arcade, “All of the Jokes”, http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/201...

Gamers may protest now, but if I may draw an analogy: when they came for your music collections (Pandora! Rhapsody!), you did not complain. When they came for your DVD collections (Netflix! Hulu!), you did not complain. When they came for your office documents (Google Docs! Adobe Creative Cloud!), you did not complain. Now they are coming for your games (Steam! You love Steam, don’t you?), and no one is left to complain on your behalf.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I keenly feel the drawbacks. As an example — as someone who cares deeply about the history of our medium, I shudder to think what happens to preservation efforts for games from this time period. We’re not going to be able to emulate things without reverse engineering dead server apps — which will mean reverse engineering every rule and bug.

Or another — we’re used to platforms obsolescing away the ability to play a given game. But when business realities mean shutting down a server as soon as the opportunity cost makes it not as profitable as doing something else, we’re going to feel like even single-player games have gotten to feel a lot like that TV show we loved that wasn’t allowed to finish out a full season and left us on a cliffhanger.

But for any business owner, the advantages greatly outweigh the disadvantages. Even with the issues SimCity has had, I am sure that right now the takeaway within EA is not “don’t do this” but “do it better.” The fact of the matter is that running a service seems to be one of those things that you have to learn by doing, stumbling along the way, and it’s a big adjustment for any organization that has been used to retail-style sales.

And the fact is that if it works seamlessly, customers will start to say “I like my Games On Demand” and sign up willingly.

It may be that at some point we see a swing back from the cloud — if the power on our devices exceeds that available in the cloud (if this happens, it likely will be due to bandwidth, not CPU cycles). But I don’t see that changing in the near future.

Instead, we’ll see disconnected games using their disconnected nature as a selling point, at first in contrast to the rocky services and later on as a premium offering for hardcore folks who want to keep going after the game is sunset.

Am I crazy about this scenario, all things considered? No. It has many pitfalls, and some old lessons are getting to be more relevant than ever. But at the same time… I design online games. I’ve been part of the problem the whole time.

Best of luck to the SimCity team with resolving the issues. I’ve been there.

The Devil Wears Prada game

[image error] The Devil Wears Prada game:

Easy Mode

A game about climbing the ladder at a fashion magazine. Lots of special event parties and lots of character customization

Normal mode

A game about attempting to edit a fashion magazine successfully — including taste-setting and photoshoots and budgets and ambitious editors

Hard mode

A game that teaches you that even the most frivolous-seeming of professions and activities have surprising depths; and people who passionately dive deep into the minutiae; and more, even consider it to be important to human civilization

Nightmare mode

A game that seems to be about the prices we pay to be at the pinnacle of a profession, and about what we sacrifice; but that in the end reverses it all, and becomes about the fact that we all make a commitment to something, even if it is inactivity, or a balanced life, and that in the end, we always still sacrifice everything we chose not to do.

[image error] The Cabin In the Woods game:

Easy Mode

A game wherein you have to stay alive during a vacation while someone is trying to cause a horror movie around you.

Normal mode

A game where you run a facility that generates fear and horror to feed an elder God. You have to put teenagers into horror movie scenarios (lots of theme-park style building game) and run them through your gauntlet, hoping to get them all killed.

Hard mode

A game about rituals that hold us back from disaster, and whether the sacrifice of a few for the sake of the ritual is ethical; but that manages to also raise the question of whether the imprisonment of all-powerful and presumably advanced quasi-deities for the sake of the survival of a bunch of entities that are nowhere near as advanced is ethical either

Nightmare mode

A game that seems to be about the construction of artworks that subvert tropes in a genre, but actually ends up being about the gleeful exercise of said tropes while knowing that it is a betrayal of the higher-minded ethos we lie to ourselves about; about the fact that by questioning the tropes we are perpetuating them through critique.

[image error] The Jiro Dreams of Sushi game:

Easy Mode

A game about making sushi, with lots of motion controls.

Normal mode

A game about running a sushi shop, with supply chains and choices on fish quality, and the issues of when and whether to promote assistants

Hard mode

A game about alienation of family due to artistic passion. Points are scored by how many family members and followers you manage to suck into your world, balanced with the artistic perfection of the pursuit. Multiple failure states: lots of followers, low quality; no followers, high quality; no followers, low quality.

Nightmare mode

A game that seems to be about the prices we pay to be at the pinnacle of a profession, and about what we sacrifice; but that in the end reverses it all, and becomes about the fact that we all make a commitment to something, even if it is inactivity, or a balanced life, and that in the end, we always still sacrifice everything we chose not to do. Hmm, wait, we did that one already.

Your turn. Pick a movie, and post the four levels of difficulty.

Edit:

I clearly needed to explain this post, based on some of the reactions I got.

Basically, these are the difficulty levels for game designers. Easy mode is the cop-out game adaptation, the easy answer. A more adventurous team might go for normal mode. But Hard and Nightmare are the regions we rarely venture to in games… some would argue because they aren’t commercial enough. But the movies mentioned all get these points across — in commercially successful content even… so why couldn’t the games?

 

Oscar bait

Hollywood just got done with its annual parade of self-congratulation. And I don’t mean that in a bad way — the Oscars may have originated as a marketing gimmick, but they are more than that. They serve as a way for creatives to honor creatives. And every year, movies are made which get called “Oscar bait” — films clearly made without much expectation of huge profits.

At a time when big game companies frequently speak in terms of “it it doesn’t make a million a day, or have a million players a day, it’s not worth making,” why do Hollywood studios keep making films that are small, play to small audiences, and aren’t anywhere near as profitable as a summer blockbuster? Wouldn’t it make sense to focus all your resources on the titles that have the highest ROI? While many small films have great profit margins, the absolute numbers are small, and thus there’s a large opportunity cost to doing the small movies.

Don’t worry, there’s a business reason. The logic goes something like this:

proven creatives increase the odds of financial success for a film (the evidence for this, particularly for actors, is actually somewhat dubious — there is much debate about the degree to which a given star can “open” a film; the evidence is much stronger for directors and producers).
creatives like working on things they are passionate about. Yes, some creatives are passionate about making blockbusters. But many, particularly the top ones, are interested in doing things for the sake of the art, not the money.
creatives are free agents and can go where they are offered jobs. And it matters that the projects are often of relatively limited duration. Movies take forever to get made, but activity is highly “bursty” — actual shooting schedules are measured in single-digit months.
to keep creatives happy, studios find ways for them to do passion projects, so that they can then count on them for their blockbusters.
awards tend to go to the passion projects, but these then serve as a marketing bump for re-uses of the creatives in other titles (“see Oscar winner Halle Berry in this schlocky thriller!”)

via http://fxrant.blogspot.com/2013/02/wi...

It is worth pointing out that this all sounds lovely for the key creatives, and it is. They get tons of money and fame. But for folks down the chain, things are not so rosy. The recent bankruptcy of visual effects house Rhythm & Hues has triggered a wave of solidarity from game developers, who can see the immense contribution that VFX houses provide. But the fact is that what Rhythm & Hues (and all VFX houses, really) offers is both incredibly important — and a commodity. It can be outsourced, it subsists on tiny profit margins, and frankly, no matter how awesome and indispensable their work is — getting to “good enough” is really the bar most of the time. The other commodity roles in the movie industry avoid this trap through heavy unionization, but VFX houses aren’t unionized.

So what’s different between the movie world and games? Lots.

Proven creatives do affect a game’s success. But marketability is largely by team and by brand, not by creative. We have Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo fans, which is like being a fan of Columbia Pictures. There are times in film where a studio develops a strong artistic identity (Pixar, Studio Ghibli),  but frankly it’s generally around a creative leader (Lasseter, Miyazaki).
Games work on a studio system still, whereas film long ago ended up with key creatives as free agents. Key creatives are salaried employees. There’s a thriving market for contractors (usually two sorts: high-end hired guns brought in to solve a thorny issue, and “warm bodies” brought in to be a force multiplier against a commodified problem, like generating loads of art) but these are never in the role of key creatives for the game.
This is because big games have development times measured in years, not months. Locking up a key creative as a free agent for a three year project is just plain unlikely, not to mention liable to be way more expensive than having them on board as an employee.
This means that key creatives quit their jobs to do passion projects instead of companies greenlighting passion projects. Oh, sometimes we hear of a key creative who has managed to get enough power to get a passion project made. But it’s the exception rather than the rule.
Only recently have awards started to go to the passion projects, and because gamers do not tend to follow key creatives but brands instead, there’s a lot less marketing value there anyway. Few gamers know how much their favorite brands have been handed off across multiple teams over the years. It’s like being a fan of a band whose line-up changes completely between albums.

There have been a few moves towards “Oscar bait” equivalent approaches from big game companies. The most obvious ones have come from Sony, which has a history now of supporting “artsy” projects with serious investment and marketing attention. (And if you think the support is negligible, check out the length of the credits on Journey… that’s a looong list for an “indie”). But by and large, it just isn’t a model followed by most of the industry. All in all, it’s a recipe for a very different industry from the movie business.

Today Gamasutra published a survey that reveals cracks starting to show in this model. If I had to summarize what’s happening, I would describe it as

new markets have opened up where it is possible to make and distribute a game in a lot less time and for a lot less cash. One of the biggest barriers that is lowered is the gatekeepers of portfolio management. It’s no accident that developers are looking at PS4 and asking for open submission policies, and that Gabe Newell is making noises about changing Steam’s Greenlight program.
this is resulting in a boom of indies — no small number of whom are veteran developers who are taking the chance to work on passion projects — we’re seeing lots of them doing Kickstarters, for example
because the games are small, and funding and marketing is often grassroots, there is much more of a culture of celebrity around key creatives
we’re also finally starting to see the rise of secondary revenue streams as indies manage to create products, characters, and brands that have value via original soundtracks, plushies, and the like
finally, the rise of free to play has enabled games-as-a-service to provide ongoing revenue to smaller shops in a way that mimics what online games have been doing for decades. Even though not everything has quite become multiplayer yet, it’s well on its way as every game ties into achievement systems, asynch play modes, and ongoing service models. This both helps customer loyalty and provides stabler revenue than a “retail” model.

via Gamasutra, from http://www.gamesetwatch.com/devplatfo...

All of that is basically the recipe I outlined back in “Age of the Dinosaurs” in 2006. But…let’s not kid ourselves. Moore’s Wall is still in full effect. The marketing budgets and development budgets for a top-tier iOS title are still enough to make a bedroom coder blanch, and the arms race is only going to accelerate as mobile technology improves. Open markets do allow the occasional indie to strike it rich, but a glance at the top charts will show that the real winners still tend to be deep-pocketed studios who can afford higher levels of polish and tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing spend. The window for small indies to get in while everything was cheap has largely already passed.

On top of that, open platforms lend themselves to a race to the bottom: since there is no portfolio management on the part of the publisher (and here, you may as well consider an app store to be a publisher), rampant clones tend to show up. They are cheaper to develop, lower market risk, and a “fast follower” strategy is typically more successful than an innovator’s strategy (a sad reality! The market rewards a well-executed clone better than it does an unpolished innovator). Given commodified product, vendors compete on price. So margins fall, making it even harder for indies to make a living.

All of those things are why I doomcast indies several years ago in my talk “It’s All Games Now.” The trend itself has within itself the seeds of its own destruction: more indies means less revenue per indie means less indies in the long run, because, well, indies gotta eat. The ones who are successful and bucking the trend end up as Rovios and Temple Runs: the new big boys, with more of the characteristics of a big shop than an indie.

The blessing for those of us who enjoy game innovation, though, is that it also means more passion projects. You see, once it’s unlikely that you are going to make money anyway, odds are much better that you will choose to do the risky, the creative, the unproven thing. You get outsider art movements, and punk ethics, and yeah, no small amount of hipsterism too… but way more innovative work.

In a world like that, “Oscar bait” is suddenly an incredibly valuable marketing tool. It helps you rise above the noise and increase the odds of eating. It connects you to the cognoscenti among game players, and they are far more likely to be “whales” — or put another way, “true fans.”

So really, the new world is likely to be much like the old world. App stores will have the same overwhelming power that platform holders always have. Even if consoles open up the submission process, marketing budgets will likely still win. Customers, overall, will still likely prefer the polished but retread experience over the unfamiliar. But it might be that this new landscape means that the new form of publisher start courting our equivalent of Oscar bait a bit more.