I’m very busy with about a half dozen different projects right now, so for the next few days I’m going to be shamelessly showcasing some video trailers I’ve produced over the past few months. Hopefully you’ll find them interesting and/or entertaining. If not, I’m planning to be back sooner rather than later.

Up first: A trailer for the Oh! Gnomes! video game. Awhile back I mentioned the game, which is produced for Groundling Games (a small indie game studio for which I have done some minor scripting in the past). It is available for both Android and the iPhone. I had nothing to do with the development of Oh! Gnomes! then and that remains true now, but I did put together this trailer for them.

I am you from the future. There is No Time To Explain. Follow m– AAAUAUUGHHH!!!! Be part of an indie game with a sense of humor.

Not that long ago I wrote about the Long Con of DRM. As a follow-up to those thoughts, I talked about the fact that Valve’s Steam is often seen as an exception to the general vileness of DRM systems, largely because it (a) added value through instant delivery and by allowing you to access your Steam account from any computer in the world and (b) Steam is generally not as intrusive as it might be.

Valve apparently decided I hadn’t made my point about how goddamn awful DRM is strongly enough, so they decided to give me some compelling supportive evidence: As of September 1st, I can no longer play any of my games — games I have been playing for a decade — because Valve decided to retroactively make those games incompatible with my computer’s operating system.

Ah, DRM, how I despise you.

(And if you think I’m ever buying another piece of software through Steam then you must think I’m a goddamn idiot.)

The Playstation Move and the Kinect will both fail.

This isn’t because they aren’t worthy technology: The Kinect is potentially revolutionary and slagging the Move because it’s dupiing the Wii’s controller is like slagging the Sega Genesis because it duped the NES controller. It’s obviously true. It’s also irrelevant.

But they will fail. Because add-on controllers for video games will always fail.

THE SIMPLE MATH

There have been 40 million X-Box 360s sold worldwide. The cut-off point for the Top 10 games sold for the X-Box 360 is Fable II with 2.6 million copies. Which means that if you can sell your X-Box 360 game to just 6.5% of your potential customers, you can break into the Top 10 list (which would obviously qualify your game as a huge success).

Now, let’s assume that the Kinect is a huge success as a technology platform and sells to 25% of X-Box 360 owners. This would mean 10 million Kinects sold with somewhere between $1 and $1.5 billion in total sales. Huge success for Microsoft.

Despite this massive success for the Kinect, however, the developer of a Kinect game is still going to be struggling: In order to sell the same 2.6 million copies of a Kinect game, they now need to achieve a 26% market penetration.

In other words, under this incredibly rosy scenario for Kinect, a developer has a choice: If they develop a non-Kinect game, their potential audience is 40 million customers. If they develop a Kinect game, on the other hand, their potential audience is 10 million and they’ll have to literally quadruple their performance in order to achieve the exact same success.

That decision is practically a no-brainer. Which is why game developers rarely develop games for add-on controllers and virtually never bother developing AAA titles for them.

IT GETS WORSE

But in practice things are even worse for the Kinect.

The second best-selling game on the X-Box 360 is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which sold 7.5 million copies on the platform. But total sales for that game are almost twice that (at least 14 million, possibly more than 15 million). If it had been a Kinect game (and thus exclusive to the X-Box 360 platform) none of those additional sales would have happened. One of the most successful video games in history would suddenly only be half as successful.

Which means that a game developer doesn’t have to just quadruple their performance with a Kinect game, they actually have to increase it by seven- or eight-fold in order to match their potential success with a non-Kinect game.

THE (NOT SO) BIG PREDICTION

Of the two technologies (Move and Kinect), I trivially predict that Kinect will be more successful. Not because it’s cooler or more innovative (although that may attract a few developers in its own right), but because I believe it will be easier for designers to incorporate Kinect-enhancements into games which will not require the Kinect (and can therefore still be marketed to the total X-Box 360 market and ported to other platforms).

For example, in Assassin’s Creed 2 there’s a section where one of the NPCs suddenly stops talking to the protagonist and instead turns to the camera and begins directly addressing the player. (Which, in itself, was a pretty nifty bit of meta-narrative since you’re actually playing as the guy who’s playing the Assassin’s Creed 2 simulation.) The effect is pretty cool. But it would have been even cooler if the game had a Kinect-enhancement which allowed the NPC to look directly at me no matter where I was sitting in the room (or even follow me around if I chose to get up and move around).

If I was Microsoft, I’d be doing everything in my power to convince AAA developers to include these kinds of subtle “Kinect Enhancements” to their games. If they could pull it off, they might even find the magic bullet to disprove my prediction: Making the X-Box 360 version of every AAA title into the “best” version of that game would not only help to sell the Kinect hardware (since every game you buy would make the Kinect more valuable to you), it could also prove to be a potentially devastating blow for Microsoft’s competitors (turning even cross-platform AAA releases into something akin to a “semi-exclusive” for the X-Box 360).

Go to Part 1

Most of the problems in Infamous are the result of its sandbox, but there are a couple of key problems with the main storyline as well, so let’s talk about those.

First, by its very nature, Infamous wants to give you meaningful choice: Do you want to be a supervillain or a superhero? But it runs into a problem because it also has a story to tell, goddamit.

The difficulty here is pretty easy to sum up: Content is expensive. If the game actually diverged every time it gave you a choice, the amount of content required would increase exponentially (and so would the production budget). So, instead, the game gives you the illusion of choice: No matter what you do, the ultimate result on a macro-level is the same and the next stop on the plot’s railroad remains unaltered.

Which is fine.

What you can do, though, is specifically color the events of the plot to suit the type of character the player is choosing to play. This is tricky, but it can be done. Infamous even takes a stab at it: Every so often the gameplay is shunted into a short semi-animated sequence that moves the plot forward. Some of these semi-animated sequences are swapped out depending on whether you’re a superhero or a supervillain.

The problem with Infamous is that the writers just don’t seem to have had their hearts behind the supervillain plot: No matter how villainous the character becomes, the game just can’t seem to shake the underlying themes of savior and redemption.

Fix #1: Develop a meaningful theme and arc for the supervillain side of the story. Most of the necessary pieces are tantalizingly within reach: They just need to be realized.

For example, here’s the end of the game:

Notice the complete disconnect between the end of the semi-animated sequence and the “evil epilogue”? How can you go from “when the time comes, I’ll be ready” to saying “only an idiot thinks I’m going to bother doing that”?

The fix here is simple: The narrative needs to explicitly embrace at every level the irony that Kessler’s efforts to indoctrinate Cole have had exactly the opposite result; that the unspeakable and almost incomprehensible sacrifices he made were all for naught.

More radically, it would be nice if not all of our choices were completely meaningless. (It would certainly improve the replay value of the game: After discovering how completely illusionary the choices in the game were, I didn’t bother going back to finish a replay.)

For example, you can watch the death of Trish in both the good version and the evil version. The different outcomes in this case depend on your morality rating within the game and suffers from the same incoherence as the end of the game: The fact that Trish, in her dying moments, chose to scorn you or to love you should have some sort of lasting impact on how Cole thinks of her. But it doesn’t.

In addition, the death of Trish is couched in a false decision: You can try to save her (evil choice) or you can try to save several innocent hostages (good choice). But, ultimately, the decision is meaningless: Trish is killed either way and the “decision”, like so many others in the game, is ultimately trivial and meaningless. (The game doesn’t even do a good job of giving a distinct framing to each choice.)

Supporting these variations in the death of Trish would be significant because this is a key moment in the game and its impact would be felt in many other places. But precisely because it’s a key moment in the game, a little extra depth here would go a long way towards enriching the entire experience. (And the differences, although pervasive, are cheap: A little extra time recording dialogue and a couple extra yes-no switches in the code.)

Similar changes at other moments in the game would be more isolated than the Trish divergence, and thus easier to implement.

(Tangentially: If you ever have the opportunity to write a video game, please avoid the temptation to include “you have succeeded at goal X in the gameplay, but now we’ll go to a cut-scene and reveal it was all a failure after all”. The discordant gut-punch is not effective. It is merely annoying. Particularly if you follow the example of Infamous and do it over and over and over again.)