Spore Is Awesome, But You Already Knew That
I’m not writing anything insightful in this blog post, but I finally got to use the Spore creature editor yesterday (I use OS-X, so it just came out), and had to write about it. All I can say is AWESOME! Will Wright deserves all of the accolades everybody showers on him. His team deserves a lot of credit as well.
Normally, I don’t pay much attention to what the mainstream publishers are doing, but I love the kind of “sandbox” games Will creates, and I have been waiting anxiously for Spore for four years now. While a lot of people, including myself, criticize the game industry for creating a lot of crap, and it does create it’s share of crap, the release of this game makes me feel good and gives me hope.
-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
Hit Of Nostalgia
My daughter Allison is really into photography. Today this photo of an old, worn out Gameboy went up on her Flickr:
A couple of things immediately jumped out at me. More…
Design Journals Rule
Lately, GarageGames has had the good fortune to begin to fund game ideas for publication. So, for a few months, starting last April, I began to talk to outside developers about what games they would like to create. My job was to pull together a portfolio of games that would be unique, fun, and, since it is a business, eventually sell and make money. I thought it would be no problem since we have been making games for six years with absolutely no money. I figured a few calls to developers that we had been working with and met over the years, and the portfolio would practically fall into place. Turns out I was wrong.
Our only requirement was that the games be fun. I was not looking to change the world, just pull together some fun games. After all, games should be fun, first, and anything else later. My assumption was that developers would be walking the talk of all the Indie blogs and game blogs that are complaining about mainstream publishers putting out the same old crap, and and have a bunch of ideas just bursting to get out into the world. Well, not so much. At least 80% of the developers we approached were like a deer in the headlights when asked to come up with an idea. We did end up with a bunch of great games, but it was just a lot harder than I thought it would be.
I can’t go into all of this too much more, but will cover it at a later time. Besides, the above story is just an anecdote to set up the premise of this article. The actual premise is game ideas. You should have literally hundreds of them floating around in your head. Even better, you should have hundreds of them written in your own design portfolio or journal.
I have been preaching this for years. At every IGC, I have gone over it, yet continue to see game developers that have only ONE idea. One idea won’t cut it. What if you can’t get other people on your team to buy into your one idea? What if the technology is not available to get you one idea done? What if you can’t find a publisher if your idea is too big to fund yourself? There are many, many reasons why you need a LOT of game ideas.
More…
Software Patents Are Bad
When working for big companies you sometimes are asked to do things that are not good for your future self or the industry. For instance, years ago when working for Dynamix/Sierra, just as it started to turn corporate, they went on a patent spree. The new Google patent search reminded me that Chris Cole and I have our names on a patent around some methods we used in a puzzle game called Sid and Al’s Incredible Toons. Here it is in all of its undecipherable badness.
Computerized puzzle gaming method and apparatus – Google Patents
All the gobbledy-gook boils down to “smart ends” that change a background shape automatically as another shape passes by it. As a designer, I can work around this patent all day long, but why should I have to? In addition, the thing is written to kind of look like the entire Incredible Machine type of game is patented, which it is not.
I was perusing some other patents related to this one that came later from other individuals. One of them has a patent on using “genes” to define how a 3D shape will be created when data is sent over the Internet. WTF? Hasn’t just about anybody that has worked in the games business thought of that kind of thing? Isn’t that just a form of data compression? Isn’t that pretty much just like fractal seeding of planets found many years prior in Starflight?
Again, software patents are bad.
-Jeff Tunnell ::: GarageGames ::: Great Games Experiment
Are Games Art?
OK, I know I’m really late to this party, but I haven’t been able to blog lately because every time I go to write an article about making it in the games industry, this debate pops into my mind. 
About 150 days or so ago, there was controversy stirred up by Roger Ebert, the well known film critic for the Chicago Sun Times, in which he skewered games, saying not only are they not art, but that playing them reduces time for people to enjoy “real” art. Of course, he got a lot of hate mail from game players, there were a lot of blog posts written about the subject, and even magazine articles chimed in. I saw a lot of writers defending games, but few game makers defending games. So, I’m going to take my shot at reviving the thread.
This kind of sucks. I make games, and don’t pretend to be a writer, so I don’t have the communicative tools to say what I am thinking. Writers don’t make games or movies or music, but they can pretend to be critics of the people that are pouring their guts out to make their art, and get the attention of an entire nation. So, in my own little non-writer fashion writing in an obscure blog about making games, I’m going to fight back the only way I know how. Here goes…
@Ebert. You suck. I always did like Siskel better anyway. Besides, now that we have Rotten Tomatoes, we don’t need guys like you anymore. I would much rather have “Joe Average’s” good, better, best review than your pompous, inflated crap of an opinion.
There. I wrote it and got it off my chest. Even if it isn’t journalistic art, I feel a lot better:) A little more seriously, my real answer is this:
Of course games are art.
Here are a couple of quick definitions from the Google search Art Definition (bold added by me for emphasis):
I can tell you this for sure. The games I work on are definitely an expression of my creativity and imagination.
I bleed to make my games. I live and breath my ideas, concepts, and designs. I strive to make alliances with other like minded people to help me bring these visions and ideas to life. Sometimes these ideas are carried around and researched for decades before they finally make it to a player’s screen. I think about what a player will feel like when playing the game, I think about situations that I want the player to be put in. Most of all, I worry about whether or not my game is fun. Sometimes I don’t know if a game will be fun until well into development. That all sounds a lot more like art than science or process to me.
Are Shigeru Miyamoto and Will Wright not artists? On the same note, how about Damon Slye, Kevin Ryan? What about the Fuzzee Fever guy, or the Large Animal guys? I say they are.
I have made music in the past. My son makes music now. Nobody denies music’s art stature. I know when I went to Aaron’s concert last night and saw the passion, creativity, and effort he puts into his music it assures me that music is an art form and he is an artist. I can tell you that as a student of both, games are every bit as much an art form as music. I know it feels much the same to conceive, design, and create a game as it does to write a song.
Most of the arguments about games not being art revolved around characters, storyline, or the actual game art (bitmaps, polygons, etc.) which is totally a diversionary argument. Games are not about story lines, or character development, or how good the graphics are. At the end of the day they are about fun. Making games is the art of making interactive fun. What else can it be?
-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker … Make It Big In Games … GarageGames
Art by Alex Swanson