In today’s world, everything digital can, and will, be made available free. They’re non-scarce goods. One industry has reacted to this new reality by sustaining itself with its fans’ desire to voluntarily reward creators — even if it won’t admit that to itself.

The act of physically purchasing PC games is going extinct. More and more gamers are finding it simpler, easier, and more convenient to download their games without leaving home; sometimes, of course, these downloads come from unofficial sources and aren’t paid for. But Valve Software’s Gabe Newell has famously called piracy a “non-issue” for their company. That’s because they sell all of their games via their Steam platform, which he claims competes with piracy on service.

But in most cases, Steam doesn’t provide any real advantage over piracy. Nor do any other paid digital distribution platforms or methods. So why, then, do people continue to throw money at them? Is it marketing bullshit about convenience? Fear, uncertainty, and doubt about viruses?

No. PC gamers are a generally savvy group of people. They’re probably spending money because they want to.

Continue reading at Falkvinge on Infopolicy

Herp derp.

I’ve played games on consoles before, of course, but only because my friends always had them. Like any child of the 90s who had a life, I grew up on games, but not “video games.” Video games were on consoles (or, as they were called before I discovered proper English, “systems”). I played computer games. And I was a snob about that.

Mario and Sonic were not my childhood heroes because I didn’t have a Super Nintendo or Genesis like all the cool kids. And you know what, that’s fine. Putt-Putt can kick both their asses. As can Fatty Bear. Speaking of which, why the hell did Fatty Bear only get one game? I wanted to play more Fatty Bear games! Sorry, I’m going off on a tangent. Anyway, I was a PC gamer from the beginning, and Humongous Entertainment was the best thing ever conceived by humanity back then. Sure, I was interested in consoles. In fact, I wanted a Nintendo 64 so badly, and so did my brother, but my parents wouldn’t let one in the house, even if we raised money to pay for it. Why? Because it would somehow make us waste more time playing games than if we just had the option to play on the computer. Yeah, it didn’t make sense, but the concept of “logic” had been censored from our impressionable minds, so we couldn’t dispute it.

Spy Fox is fucking awesome. Anyone who disagrees is banned from the Internets.

That’s how I was for most of my pre-teenage and early adolescent life. I got into heated arguments with my console-playing friends about how inferior their toys were, and they responded with equally immature rants about how I was wrong and stupid and had no friends and picked my nose and ate it. But I was undaunted. My hatred of all things console was so great that I angrily tore up a Best Buy circular because it informed me that there was an Xbox version of Dragon’s Lair 3D. How could they put such an iconic DOS franchise on a console? No, I wasn’t aware that it was originally an arcade game.

So if I could go back in time and tell my 14-year-old self that one day I would grow tired of dealing with bad performance at the lowest graphics settings on my 3-year-old computer and purchase a console…well, I wouldn’t, because I don’t think I would survive the encounter.

Now, this isn’t my declaration of the death of PC gaming; I’ll still be playing PC games for sure. It’s just that some games inherently play better on a console. Or, in other cases, some games inherently play worse on my computer than on a console. Also Brütal Legend isn’t coming to the PC.

If the man who made this game were developing exclusively for a machine powered by human blood, I'd happily start bleeding.

In closing, this is kind of shocking when I think about how I was as a younger, more naïve person. I screamed about how terrible consoles were to everyone who’d come near me just five years ago. But you know what else I got angry about? When people downloaded music. Because it was stealing.

My how maturity changes people.

Béla Tarr is the director of cult classic Hungarian films such as Sátántangó. Hideo Kojima is the designer of massively popular Japanese video games such as Metal Gear Solid 4. These two men actually have quite a lot in common, save for the medium they work in, their popularity, and their pretentiousness when discussing their craft.

Let me describe Sátántangó to you, briefly. The opening consists of an eight minute shot of the camera doing almost nothing while watching a bunch of cows:

The film continues with these similarly lengthy shots, some of which have literally nothing moving for minutes at a time, for seven hours. The film could have been a series of still photographs, and not much would be lost.

Metal Gear Solid 4 opens with a 20 minute cutscene, during which the player has no chance to do anything meaningful with the controller. Here’s a snippet of it, presented Mystery Science Theater 3000-style to make it more palatable:

The game continues with these similarly lengthy cutscenes, interrupted occasionally by short interactive sequences which are heavily scripted and offer the player no chance for creativity, for 40 hours or something. The game could have been a Japanese animated film with giant robots and guns and explosions, and not much would be lost.

The key difference between Hideo Kojima and Béla Tarr is that Tarr has gone on the record saying that he doesn’t want to adhere to the conventions of “good” filmmaking and storytelling. Kojima, on the other hand, is trying so hard to prove that you can tell wonderful stories through interactivity, when in fact the interactive elements of his magnum opus add nothing to the storytelling.

Due to some technical limitations, such as the fact that one pixel is really hard to see, I magnified it by 600 times. With these extra 599 pixels of space, I decided to cheat and add some intro text, but all of the actual gameplay could theoretically be scaled down to a single pixel if you traded the mouse-based control for an analog stick.

I hope the game is relatively easy to figure out despite the limitations of the resolution. And because that was my goal, I’m not going to say anything else about it.

Hit the jump to play it, and to download the [wikipedia]X11 License[/wikipedia]d source code:

Source

WARNING: This code is really ugly. Please don’t lecture me about how sloppy I am at programming. I already know.

• Flash CS4 source (might work in CS3): 27 MB .fla
• Actionscript 3 file (From Scene 2, Frame 1 of the FLA. Will not compile on its own): 22 KB .as

Just…watch this video…

I am so, sorry, John Graham. I never meant for this to happen. Please forgive me.

So how can more physical activity by gamers, still often stereotyped as overweight nerds, be a bad thing? I started to have my doubts reading Gizmodo reader kagegiri’s comment on an article about the physically challenging (and possibly dangerous) Tony Hawk Ride:

It’s peripherals like this, Natal, and Sony’s baton that make me feel like some people don’t get the charm of video games and virtual reality.

When you get perfect-mapping motion games, yes, you can apply real-world skills to a game. But it turns out a lot of the population can’t swing swords properly, or kick a soccer ball far, or swing our arms fast enough to hit a real home run, or balance on a skateboard while doing tricks, etc. If it’s too realistic, it’s like your physical weakness in real life is translated into weaknesses in game.

This is definitely a concern for me. Frustration due to failure in Grand Theft Auto causes far more urges to go on a shooting spree than actually succeeding at shooting virtual people; anything to increase the chances of frustrating failure in a video game is not a good thing by any means. But while many people can overcome their “physical weakness” by excessive exercise, what about the people who can’t?

Like people in wheelchairs?

Some people are wheelchair-bound their entire lives. Others will be wheelchair-bound temporarily after playing Tony Hawk Ride. If video games get too physical, not only will the ability to feel like a superhero be limited to actual superheroes, but less people will be able to play. Some people already can’t play games because they can’t afford all forty-seven platforms; adding a physical ability barrier on top of the economic one isn’t a good idea.

That’s not to say the idea of greater physical immersion in games doesn’t excite me, but there always needs to be an alternative.

On Monday, I dismissed Microsoft’s Project Natal’s possibility to be the most revolutionary thing since sliced clichés, saying it was little more than both the good and bad qualities of the Wii taken to the extreme. On reflection, I’ve come to an interesting realization: my assumption that Natal was thought up by stupid marketers was a reaction to the fact that it was stupidly marketed.

The video which played the role of Project Natal’s big reveal featured many awful, awful uses of the technology, each doomed to failure without any haptic feedback: the discomfort caused by holding an imaginary steering wheel and hovering your foot over an imaginary gas pedal would be intense; throwing punches at an imaginary man (and getting occasionally punched back) would instantly de-immerse the player when a blow connects, changing the position of their avatar’s limbs but not theirs; jumping on an imaginary skateboard will do a better job of knocking fragile objects off shelves than conveying a crucial sense of balance. While not as important when using a gamepad, you need haptic feedback, not just visual, when the controls are haptic — no edges of mirrors or clashes of zenos can compensate anymore.

Where Natal will succeed is outside of classic “action” gameplay. That trivia game concept, for instance, could work quite nicely with Natal. And Milo (featured in this article’s video) is pretty self-explanatory. The technology to feel imaginary objects and experience imaginary changes in balance doesn’t exist yet (that I’ve heard of), but it’s not important in these types of games. Games in which a player is supposed to be moving fast, holding objects that weigh anything, getting jostled around, and similar physical things are not suitable for Natal. They will be fun until the novelty factor wears off, which won’t take long.

In a way, this is a good thing; while nothing is inherently wrong with video games focused on fast action and/or violence, the market is oversaturated with them. That’s not to say 99% of recent games are twitch-actiony (and sometimes violent, because that’s a compelling reason for fast action), just 99% of recent character-driven games. There are a lot of recent games which don’t focus on the player’s reflexes, but most don’t give the player very deep control of a character; they cast the player as an invisible “controller” or, rarely, simplify the player’s control of their single character. With Natal, though, game designers can allow the player to inhabit every aspect of a character’s body. The limitations come from physical space, as walking away from (or into) the screen is impossible and long periods of manipulating imaginary objects can be awkward and uncomfortable (in case I haven’t made the latter clear, pretend you’re riding a subway train and grab onto an imaginary bar overhead for ten minutes; stop beforehand when your arm gets tired). These limitations make these action games impossible to Natalize in an enjoyable way, so the only way to take advantage of its new capabilities is with new, fresh types of games. Milo is a very good example.

That’s not to say people won’t try to make Natal-based fighting games and racing games, and that’s not to say they won’t pass the farce that is Quality Assurance and make their way to store shelves. Those games will just quickly fall into the bargain bin and get terrible reviews. Meanwhile, people with actual talent will bring us games that don’t try to fight against Natal’s limitations, and turn out to be lots of fun.

The only thing that still concerns me is that there is still a distressingly low number of Wii games that use its motion sensors well, and a distressingly high number of games that still don’t get it. This is after three years, and those good Wii games still mix in some traditional control methods. Natal has zero traditional methods of control, so everything has to be rebuilt from the ground up. The potential for miserable failure by talentless hack developers forever set in the ways of their more skilled predecessors is even higher, and even veteran designers may have some trouble coming to terms with the fact that this thing is not good for first-person shooters.

For that reason, I see Sony’s motion control effort as being more successful, at least in the next several years. While it can only track two hands and doesn’t appear to recognize facial expressions, the player still has buttons to press, and still has something physical to hold. This is a much better way of adding motion-sensing to traditional action games; it could be used mostly for positioning, with much of the long-distance movement and object manipulation — which would be awkward for Natal — being controlled by buttons and analog sticks. This is nice because there will always be a place for video games about fighting, running, and/or jumping; they’re fun, they relieve stress (which, for violent games, is synonymous with the desire to partake in their real-world equivalents), and they speak to the primal instinct that all animals — a group which humans belong to, don’t forget — have. At the same time, it may serve as a stepping stone for designers who may not have a good idea about how to make use of Natal.

But based on the current push for games to be released on the 360 and PS3 and play the same way (which is good, because distinct platforms do nothing but limit the number of people who can play a game), we’ll likely see some Natal-optimized controllers on the market.

By the way, “Project Natal” is still a terrible name, but it sounds like it’s eventually going to be changed to something more generic.

With that said, I will now elaborate on all the things that infuriate me about the game, some new to The Sims 3, and some with roots that go all the way back to the very first game. There are plenty of reviews, like this one, this other one, and this third one from mainstream game journalists, which detail the wonderful experiences you can have with this game, so this is not going to be one of them. Instead, I am going to rant and rave about every tiny little problem the game has simply because someone has to.

My gripes come in three categories: problems with the structure of the new “living world” gameplay, small components that are (still) inexplicably missing or broken, and the fact that EA’s push for Sims 3 machinima has completely missed the point.


In order to understand some of the issues with The Sims 3, you need to know what’s new. Previously, the game was modeled on individual families: play as one household of sims in one location at a time. Every other location is frozen in time. Your sims can leave the house to visit restaurants, stores, and other such locations, but this freezes time back at the house. This created many peculiar situations, such as a father going out to the bar at noon, staying there until 3 AM, then returning home exhausted while it was still noon and the kids aren’t even home from school. The Sims 2 exacerbated this problem now that sims could grow old and die, creating strange situations in which a teenage boy and a girl could fall in love, but the girl would never grow older because she was a non-player character.

These issues are fixed in The Sims 3, as the entire neighborhood is being simulated all at once. A sim can go out shopping at 3 and come home at 8, and it’ll be 8 when they get home. In the meantime, anyone else still at home will have been continuing to live their lives. This comes with the added bonus of not having nearly as many loading screens to sit through. Meanwhile, the rest of the neighborhood will develop relationships, grow older, get married, move in, move out, have children, and pretty much everything except get promoted at work. I have no idea what’s up with that last one, as my police lieutenant character still has a “Traffic Cop” as a boss. In any case, this changes the overall feel of the game for the better while creating a great deal of its own unique problems.

The time-freezing of The Sims and The Sims 2 was certainly strange, but at least it gave players enough time to do what they wanted. Because of the compressed representation of time in The Sims (one sim minute is roughly 2 seconds real-time), it was quite difficult to juggle a career, a social life, and three-hour periods of making a fucking sandwich. Therefore, the best way to meet new people and socialize with them was often to go downtown. A sim can spend eight hours downtown to get to know three new people (because with The Sims’ weird representation of time, that’s how long it takes), and upon returning home there’s still enough time to use the bathroom before work the next day.

In The Sims 3, this is no longer an option. You have 48 (real world-time) minutes in a day, and that’s it. Given that job performance in The Sims 3 relies more on building up skills (which can be accomplished by reading books, playing chess, or painting pictures — for seventeen hours), and becoming friends with others seems to take much longer, maintaining both a job and a social life is extremely difficult. It’s just like real life, except The Sims has always been at its best when it sacrifices gritty realism for fun.

That’s not to say the increased realism in The Sims 3 is always a bad thing. The new mood system seems far more realistic than before; previously, a sim’s mood was calculated based solely on how full eight green bars were: Hunger, Energy, Comfort, Bladder, Hygiene, Social, Fun, and Room (how pretty the room they’re in is). Comfort and Room have been axed, and the green bars now just serve as a guideline for “power users.” The actual mood of a sim is now determined by “moodlets,” or little things with affect the mood one way or the other. Some of these are direct results of how full or empty these green bars are (i.e. “hungry” or “tired”); others are related to specific events (i.e. “stir crazy” from not having left the house, or “new car smell” from driving in a recently bought car, “dirty surroundings” from the sink being unclean, etc.). This is similar to the new personality system, built upon five “traits” as opposed to a bunch of overly restrictive statistics. It all makes a lot more sense, and it’s unfortunate that the rest of the long-broken systems in The Sims weren’t given such an overhaul.

Going back to the issue of time, specifically that it takes three hours to make a fucking sandwich, it still takes three hours to make a fucking sandwich. It also takes 30 minutes for a sim to get out of bed (which is kind of realistic, but not very convincing when the animation for putting one’s feet on the floor is playing for about 20 of them). It also takes about an hour to eat a bowl of cereal, 30 minutes to wash that one bowl of cereal, 20 minutes to close a laptop and get out of a chair, and 90 minutes to read a recipe for Philly Cheese Steak. This is probably familiar to long-time Sims players, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have been fixed; doubly so because time is an even more scarce resource in The Sims 3.

Oh, might I add that time is also still taken up by completely stupid, useless things? Another familiar thing to veteran Sims players is the tendency of sims to waste 45 minutes waving their hands angrily to the almighty hand of the player because they’re so tired, which is 45 minutes they could have spent getting into bed like the player told them to 55 minutes ago. This still occurs. It’s not cute, and it’s not funny. I know it’s a trademark of The Sims, but it was infuriating in 2000 and is still infuriating in 2009.

In addition, it still takes about four hours for two sims going in opposite directions down a narrow hallway to figure out how to move past one another. This time, though, such attempts will not automatically be canceled if they can’t figure out how to do it. There were several instances in which after four in-game hours of watching two sims tap their feet waiting for the other to move, I had to cancel a long agenda of using the toilet, washing hands, then making some dinner in order to tell a couple of idiots which direction to walk in. Again, a familiar experience for a veteran Sims player, and it will continue to be.

Another long-lasting problem arises in the character creation tools. The Sims 3′s Create-A-Sim mode is much more powerful, allowing a much wider variety of faces, body types, skin tones, hair colors, eye colors, and clothing colors. It has a few minor quirks — it’s not very clear that clicking the big checkmark button will prevent you from making any changes to anything ever again, for example — but it’s wonderful overall. Except, of course, for the fact that the player still cannot change a sim’s height. Every adult sim is just as tall as every other adult sim, and every child is just as tall as every other child. This severely limits a player’s ability to create accurate representations of themselves or others; it’s unfortunate because A) everything else is so much more customizable and B) this feature is available for frickin’ Nintendo Miis.

Other small issues are abound, and boggle the mind just as much as to why they turned out the way they are. Of particular note is the lack of hot tubs or diving boards, two types of objects which were available in both The Sims and The Sims 2 without any of the overpriced expansions. It’s quite confusing, and I sincerely hope that EA adds these back in free of charge. All in all, The Sims 3 has bits of confusing omissions or shortcomings which add up quickly.

All of that said, The Sims 3 is, as I mentioned, lots and lots of fun. It’s an addictive game that will suck you in, and its shortcomings aren’t major enough to derail the whole experience. On the other hand, if EA’s machinima-related hype got you interested, prepare yourself for an appalling anticlimax.

The Sims 3 can capture video of your sims doing their thing. It also includes a fairly basic video editor capable of amateurish-looking titles and transitions. That’s it.

Normally, a filmmaker writes a script before shooting, not the other way around. If you’d like to work the other way around, then The Sims 3 might work for your machinima film. Otherwise, prepare for a lot more work and frustration than it’s worth. Because The Sims 3 is always behaving as if it’s a game, and not a filmmaking tool, you are completely at the mercy of the game state in terms of what animation you can produce. Would you like the image of a leaking sink faucet in the background? Use the sink over and over and hope it breaks. Do you need two characters to have a fistfight? Sorry, they like each other too much. How about making a sim look in a particular direction? Good luck waiting for that to happen. Even getting my doppelganger sim to slam his head against the desk for the screenshot at the beginning of this post required too much waiting around and too much difficulty in pausing the game at the right moment. And don’t get me started on maintaining continuity between shots of dialogue; the randomized animations and inability to shoot with two cameras at once complicates that far too much.

It doesn’t have to be that way at all. It would be fairly trivial to give filmmakers a tool to trigger whatever situation they like; the developers likely use such a thing themselves for testing purposes anyway. Make it only available in a mode where the overall game isn’t affected, and the problem is solved. Unfortunately, because of this limitation, The Sims 3 is not likely to be used for a lot of good machinima. Anything that doesn’t look crude or uninspired takes a lot of unnecessary effort, often more effort than directing real actors.

The state of The Sims 3′s machinima tools is very sad. There are thousands of creative people without the ability to get actors or sets or cameras, and could effectively tell their story if only The Sims 3 had a better tool set. Without it, The Sims 3 machinima can only tell a very limited number of stories without looking laughably artificial. Perhaps it’s all right to some people, because nobody expects video game animation to hold a candle to carefully crafted animation or acting. The Sims 3, with such high quality character animation in-game, had an opportunity to change those expectations, and it missed it completely.

On a similar note, apparently absent, again, is access to the game’s scripting language for creating new types of things to buy or new gameplay. The rationale for this in The Sims 1-era was that some people might abuse the system and cause everyone in a player’s game to die horribly, and besides, the average player, no matter how dedicated and creative, wouldn’t comprehend programming. The arguments against this still apply today, the former refuted by the fact that reloading saved games and word spreading fast on the Internet prevents such damage, and the latter is complete and utter bullshit.

As a game, in and of itself, The Sims 3 has flaws, like any other game, while still being an enormously fun experience. Any more balanced review than mine will be happy to tell you why, and if you’ve ever enjoyed a Sims game before, you already have a pretty good idea. As a creative tool, The Sims 3 serves as a gateway drug for people to become artists, quickly catapulting them into the camp of people frustrated with how limited ones options are. In other words, it’s the first Sims for a new generation, and it’s likely to get even more millions of people hooked. But there are so many things which could have been better, both new problems and things that really should have been addressed after nine years.

Oh, and what the hell is with the musical score in The Sims 3? What was wrong with the excellent Mark Mothersbaugh soundtrack in the second one? The best song in the entirety of The Sims 3 is the one remix of a Sims 2 song, and the rest are like annoyingly cliché Broadway showtunes. Sorry, I’ll stop.

I mentioned on Twitter what I think the problem is, but because 140 characters isn’t enough to fully explain what I mean, I’ll now do so. In case some technological something-or-other is preventing you from watching the video, it features a series of people playing hypothetical games, including a fighting game where you (as in, you, the physical person) throw real punches and kicks, a racing game where you turn an imaginary steering wheel, a skateboarding game where you ride an imaginary skateboard, and other such marvels of techno-wowity.

Some of these demos look very interesting. I like the trivia game, where you pound your hand as if it’s a game show buzzer, and the gesture and voice-based interfaces are nice. I also like the ability to scan images you hold up to the camera (I don’t see how the camera could have scanned through that kid’s hand on the back of the skateboard, but it’s a proof-of-concept movie, so whatev). Everything else, though, is terribly misguided. Let’s ignore skepticism that the motion sensing works perfectly, because I’m never one to doubt what technology is capable of. Let’s also assume every Xbox 360 owner has enough space and lack of coffee table in front of their TV. Let’s talk about the inherent problem with the idea in general.

Do you have a small object next to you? Let’s say a pen. Don’t touch that pen. Instead, imagine there’s another pen about five feet away from it. An invisible pen made of air. Put your fingers around it and pick it up. Hold it in your fingers. Write with it. Now do the same thing with the real pen.

Notice how picking up and writing with the real pen caused your fingers to behave completely differently than picking up the imaginary one. You know why? Because there was nothing in between your fingers. It didn’t even feel like there was anything between your fingers. In fact, wasn’t it a little difficult to keep your fingers from moving closer or further away from one another because nothing was in between them?

We’ve already seen what this causes on the Nintendo Wii. Have you ever played Mario Kart Wii? You know, the one where you hold a remote control as if it’s a steering wheel? How about this, have you tried driving a car? You know how it becomes slightly harder to turn the steering wheel when it becomes more difficult for the actual car wheels to turn? You see, the thing about pretending a remote control is a steering wheel is that you don’t get that tightening of the steering wheel. Not even when you put the remote in a plastic steering-wheel enclosure does it feel like it’s attached to an actual steering column. This literal sense of detachment makes driving feel awkward, and I can only imagine it would be worse when you’re holding absolutely nothing.

This is a problem for just about every one of those hypothetical games. Especially that skateboarding demo; it’s laughable how many problems it would have.

Project Natal is, in all ways, Microsoft’s answer to the Nintendo Wii. It has a stupid sounding name which will totally not be stupid in a year if they keep saying it, it’s being marketed to people who have never considered playing a game before, and it has a wide variety of problems related to its lack of haptic feedback. With Natal, Microsoft has improved upon everything the Wii does right and fixed none of its problems. To be fair, I’m not sure at the moment how one would fix these problems in a Natal-like system with currently available technology. Regardless, its mere existence in this form makes it feel like it was conceived by a bunch of really stupid marketers. Which, judging by the name, is probably true.