RJ Layton

zomg itz me again! I swear I'll be brief this time. >_>

I think one thing we shouldn't forget about is *developer* accessibility. I don't really know much about it, but how easy is it to get a game on the Playstation Network compared to the Wii network thing? (if I'm not mistaken, Nintendo's not really using the Wii network thing like Playstation is using theirs. at all.) Especially if you're an indie developer without much money.

Don't forget that Jenova's flOw hit THE most "accessible" market, for both developers AND players, before it went to PSN... the World Wide Web. Despite the control accessibility of Wii and DS, there's still way more people on PCs than there are playing Wii and DS combined.

Imagine if WoW were a console game. 10 million subscribers? Yeah right. :x

Good point!

That's true, Cynthia -- developer accessibility is a big issue. Obviously ThatGameCompany is under contract with Sony right now, for better or worse as far as their goals from project to project go. I think right now they're focusing on making niche arthouse games, so they're actually on a good platform for that. But as far as making games for adults, I don't think they are at all. We'll see if WiiWare is able to attract the adult market or not.

Flow being a PC game first was certainly helpful and made it accessible, but the biggest factors regarding Flow's success online were the fact that it was free and that it was dugg/linked everywhere. Everyone could try it for 5 minutes pretty easily. World of Warcraft, for all its 10 million subscribers (who aren't all playing, to be sure) does require a PC to hit the market it's hitting, but at the same time, it's not a game for adults. I tried to get my mom to play it, and she found it really difficult despite using a computer every day for work. The game succeeds with the hardcore market more than anything else. And again, 10 million subscribers, while a huge accomplishment for PC games, is really a drop in the bucket as far as the potential market goes.

There are about 18 million people already that bought Wii Sports, for example. Sure, it comes packed in (in the United States), but that's not a reason to ignore it -- a huge number of people bought the Wii specifically for that game. In Japan, where the game is sold separately from the system, it sold nearly 2 million copies last year alone. Considering that the Wii hadn't even sold 5 million units until this year in Japan, that's a huge percentage of people buying the system for that game.

Wii Sports was on the Academy Awards the other day. While it was an awkward moment on the show, the point is that you would have never seen Stewart up there hunched over a keyboard and mouse, moving his WoW character around. That doesn't look fun to anybody who doesn't already play games. And on G4 last night, I watched the ridiculously bad airing of the GDC awards from this year, which were really poorly edited. All my relatives could say (besides noting the complete lack of charisma of the game development community) was that they remembered how fun Pac-Man was. None of the games that appeared looked interesting to them.

That's a huge problem.

Commented. Went on for a while. Posted here instead.

Hey RJ, I think you’ve hit on something there. If we really want to attract adult gamers or even elderly gamers, accessibility is very important. It’s got to be easy to use the software and Nintendo has made great strides in that direction. But, just like Cynthia said, the web is an even more accessible platform for games. Lots of people are on IM and E-mail. You pass someone a link, they click it, and they’re instantly playing a flash game. Why couldn’t we build games for adults on that platform? I know making web games isn’t very sexy but it reaches the widest audience.

I remember back in the day, I showed my mom Ico. I think we can all agree that Ico is a beautiful game. My mom admired it for five minutes then left the room. To her its kids stuff. She doesn’t get all the knobs and buttons on the game pad. Playing Monopoly is easier for her. Roll the dice, move the metal boot, collect or lose money. Playing Ico would be like giving her a marionette and asking her to perform. There was just no way to sit her down and immerse her in that game. When I was home for Christmas, my brother had a Wii with him and we played bowling with my mom. That was the first time I saw her enjoy a video game. It was easy for her to understand, she could actually play with her kids (big bonus), and she was even a bit competitive at it. Meaning be damned. If that doesn’t mean anything, I don’t know what does.

The whole “games as art,” “games have meaning,” and “games for adults” is well and good, but the developers rant only ever preaches to the choir. Everyone sitting in that room gets it. My parents still don’t get it and they’re never invited to that party. I think if we really wanted to pitch Bioshock to an older generation, we’d have to get them to play it and they’d have to convince themselves that it was meaningful. English teachers won’t have their students playing Bioshock over reading The Fountainhead any time soon. But, why couldn’t Ken Levine take Bioshock on the road and discuss his views and usage of Objectivism with an (academic) audience?

You know, on that same note, what does Mihály Csíkszentmihályi have to say about flOw? How come no one from the games’ world has gone to ask him? Or have we? If we want to get more people interested in what we’re doing and saying in games, we need to go out there and interact with them, then maybe we’d have more than Jack Thompson and a bunch of clueless talking heads on cable news sitting in the peanut gallery.

I know getting elderly gamers and parents to play expands video games and makes it more mainstream and fills Nintendo’s bank account, but ultimately does that matter if past generations don’t get gaming? It wasn’t the media they grew up on. Past generations had issues with comic books, film, and I’m sure even at one point people were against the novel. How sinful is that, a book completely filled with lies and scandal? In 30-50 years our society will be dominated by people who grew up on video games. They’ll be politicians, salary men, and grandparents, and when they come home playing a game will be the thing to do. We’ll just all be afraid of the new, new thing. You know, like robots with AI.

Thanks for a good read, RJ. But, you've left some pretty big points out. You mention that the Wii and DS have attracted players that are interested in something different from traditional game design, which I can't say I've seen much evidence of on either platform. You're absolutely right in that they are very easy to pick up and play, and everyone loves that, but most of the games are casual and fairly traditional in their mechanics and subject matters.

At the rant, I didn't think the designers were whining about gamers not playing their games. I felt as if most of them were talking as gamers themselves, and wanting to see more interesting content that pushes and challenges us a bit. But that's my interpretation.

Why aren't they making games for DS and Wii? Well, Jane makes games that happen the real world, so that one's obvious. Jon played with balloons and Daniel thinks everything is awesome, so that leaves Clint and Jenova. Why aren't they making games for DS and Wii?

Well, you're wrong in saying thatgamecompany's goal is to make niche arthouse games. We're actually trying to make games accessible to a wide range of people, and even though flOw PS3 was limited to... well... the PS3 audience, it was phenomenally successful within that audience. But why the PS3? Because our goal is to make the games we want to make, and Sony is letting us do that. And Clint gets to make the games he wants to make but unfortunately they are games not support by Nintendo.

The reality is, it's not as easy as saying "I'm making a game for the DS/Wii." You first need the money to make the game. Then you need to make it. And then you need to market the hell out of it. And Nintendo can be somewhat difficult to work with at any one of these steps, if not all of them (depending on your position). So while from a development standpoint DS & Wii are very exciting platforms, from a business standpoint they are far less exciting than other opportunities. And yes, that will hold back professional designers from targeting those platforms.

Finally, as I said in my own talk on Monday at GDC, part of being adult is weighing quality vs quantity, which is why Passage was one of my favorite games of last year.

Hi RJ, I guess my talk was not clear enough that it seems that you have a different understanding.

The talk I have given during the rant has nothing to do with getting old people who don'tto play games to play video games. Our last generations have grown up without video games, they are totally fine live their lives without video games.

My rant was about me who used to be a hardcore gamer but now an adult with much less time and mind to devote on playing video games. I loved and grew up with video games. And I wish I can keep playing video games just like I keep reading books and watching movies.

However, the depth in today's major video game market is not deep enough to keep me engaged in an intellectual level for forty or eighty hours any more. To put it simple. I expect more out of a game through more advanced social, emotional or intellectual content. I need to see something new, something that has a point that I will care as an adult, as someone who've played hundreds of video games.

Hi all, it seems as though the topic of accessibility of games for the masses has been beaten by a stick in this thread so I want to touch on some of the issues brought up about games for adults or games for the aging gamer.

Maybe I'm still pretty young, but to me games have grown with me thoughout the years. Not simply in technical prowess, but in content/issues/concepts. I feel if people want to go the route of declaring games in recent times are lacking in some fundamental arena, then I think these same people should take that extra step into looking deeper into the games that are currently on the market. Since we are all speaking primarily of commercial games, I will try to explain myself only using some of the bigger hits of 2007.

Mario Galaxy was a major hit this year, but I did not read a single review that noted the one concept of the game that made me fall in love with it. The spacial concept of negative space is prevalent in Galaxy. The first time I was sucked into the inner workings of a planet I thought to myself, "ah this is cool" but as I continued to play I immediately noticed that many of the truths that I found on the outer rim of the planet no longer applied on the inside. This was psychologically intriguing to me both as a gamer and a designer. Playing the first Mario no one ever said, "Oh so thats what it looks like underneath these bricks" whenever they got sucked down a pipe.

Bioshock has been talked about enough, but I just have to say that very few games have used aural and visual aesthetics to present hidden/side information as well as this game.

Mass Effect creates an emotional tie to the player through its vast conversation system. Even if it doesn't hit every point as you would like, the genre Bioware has created is a catalyst more meaningful interactions in games. That has to at least garner a bit of respect.

Rock Band is our generation's virtual reality. There is no other game on the market that has such potential for immediate immersion. By the way, this is the aspect of games that we need to hit for the demographic that aren't natively gamers. But I digress...

These are all of course just a few examples. Many new games have the intellectual concepts, you just have to be willing to accept that they aren't Oxford level, but rather 5th year Devry (no offense to anyone in their 5th year at Devry). However, this has not always been the case, games are maturing as we mature. I think we all just have to stop being in such a rush to grow up. We'll get there, trust me...

Wow, there are a lot of comments that this post sparked, something I'm really grateful for. I'll try and get to each in turn.

Glenn, good to see you on my blog! I think what you're pointing out is great -- that we're not really using the games as a springboard to discuss topics. We're kind of tossing them out there and hoping people react. I would love to hear what Csíkszentmihályi has to say about Jenova's Flow game, especially because I found the game to be somewhat antithetical to Csíkszentmihályi's point. And you're right, adults are not invited to the party.

Andre also posted on something you touched on at the end, which is that inevitably we will have a society that grew up on videogames and took them seriously. It's sort of an argument that "rants" on the issue are pointless, that we can't rush the future. It does make me wonder if with film, literature, rock etc., the producers of those arts went through the same cycles, through the same arguments, only to have their forms taken into serious consideration only with the passage of time.

More to come in the next comment.

Kellee, thank you so much for your insightful comments. I'm definitely aware of the business side of getting the games made and what that means for a developer. I know that Sony offered you guys a great opportunity and I think it was a wise choice to develop for them. However, I do think you're too dismissive of the Wii and DS' "casual" games, because I think that there's nothing that means that casual games can't produce meaningful discussion or offer complex themes. Passage, a game you brought up, is a great example of a casual game that has complex themes.

I was saying that Nintendo is making non-traditional games, not necessarily using non-traditional game designs. Their focus is on audience expansion. Rather than reinventing the wheel, they're letting more people use it. However this focus in of itself is a shift away from the way we traditionally design games. Design is about making something for an audience, and when you look at a completely different audience you are forced to design in a different way.

I'm curious as to who your "wide range of people" includes. Jenova says he doesn't care about basically anybody over 40, and your platform generally suggests the traditional market of the 16-30 year old male.

Also I'm sorry if "niche arthouse" seems to be a poor descriptor of your games, it's just what Flow as well as what I've heard of what Flower is about implies to me. I'm definitely not using it in a derogatory manner.