SpiderMonkey

This whole thread can be summed up with "Don't feed the troll", tbh. One can only presume Kotaku has stolen Jack Thompson's rhyme-book. I don't really think it's worthy of a response, except to note that "making desperate attempts to ensure everyone knows you're too cool for mainstream tastes" has been a core part of my understanding of the word "pretentious" for the best part of a decade now.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=20390 It's too damn easy to giggle at, so I shall do no more of that. I found what he had to say pretty interesting. Does anyone have any links to more complete write-ups/transcripts? When he says "The big feature is the emotions that I want to you to feel. And for me, that is where the revolution comes", he is of course talking about catching up with what many developers have been doing for at least two years now. But hmm, a game that makes you feel loved. Interesting concept that I think I need to put more thought into to properly understand. Anyone care to share how they interpret the concept?

There's something ironically pertinent about you using a "recent" Molyneux quote that is in fact a rehash of what others have been saying for years. That sentiment, for example, was on the front cover of Develop a couple of years ago. I don't think it's really that simple though. I don't look at Fable and see a failure. I look at B&W2 and The Movies and see failures. And it's not failures to make a good game, or failures to sell enough copies. It's a complete failure to keep pace with the rest of the games industry. B&W2 was just a rehash of B&W1 and The Movies was a cynical throwback to Bullfrog's old strengths, a simple Theme Movie Studio. In that sense, Molyneux joins that pantheon of developers who have struggled to stay relevant in this now-ending generation of games. Rare, id, Ritual, and others whose names escape me now. Studios/people who seemed to take their eye of the ball and have struggled to move their game design sense beyond about the year 2000. Where other developers died and fresh ideas grew up in their places, there also exist this group of developers who died but never truly died and now just stumble on like zombies, trading off their 90s reputation and ideas and their 00s failure to keep up with their past. (Some of) his comments are just a part of that. It's embarrassing, like the kid in school who shoots his hand up suddenly in the middle of class to make a point about the discussion that moved on somewhere else 10 mins ago, and that he thinks is really sharp and novel but was on everyone else's minds at the time. ---- I seem to have responded to a vigorous defence of Molyneux with an equally vigorous dressing down, which I feel kinda guilty for. I consider Fable to be a success, not a failure, when assessed in the terms above. I don't begrudge failure to execute on promises, and it was certainly a commercial success. (But I do have trouble ascribing it to Molyneux, since afaik the game's concept was born of Lionhead satellite Big Blue Box and the Carter brothers.) And yeah, like both Drummand and SiN said, he's a fantastic dreamer so it's always interesting to look inside his head (hence this thread's original intent).

But, but Gears of War is totally the kind of system seller you need for your system's second Christmas when you are trying to start a push beyond early adopters!

It's a bit off-piste, but I think the reason university professors are interested in Spore is not to do with accessibility. It's everything to do with how major art forms and movements can reshape how people perceive the world around them, and how Spore looks to have massive potential to have that kind of impact.

Erm, could you be a bit more specific? I don't understand where the information content is in a statement like "she likes it because she finds it interesting". How does that guide a game developer who is trying make a game more likely to appeal to some female demographic? What do you mean by "engagement"?

"Easier to play" is kinda ambigious because it can mean "simpler" or "same level of complexity, but more accessible". Reading your comment, I noticed I didn't note the difference first time around. So I feel obliged to point out that I am a strong believer in the latter meaning and would disagree with the original line if it's read with the former meaning.

Oh god, Yufster, if you think that was bad, did you see the MCV issue from some point this summer that tackled the topic? One columnist rejoiced that "so many people thought the idea was so complex but all this time the answer was right under our noses". The 'answer' he was referring to? For reals. Problem solved. End of thread. Oh what, you're all still here? Hmm. The 39% statistic is a pretty clear case of being overly broad: My mum plays Spider Solitaire nightly for hours at a time. Whenever I read the small print on these surveys, they always say that that counts as being a gamer. Which is clearly bullshit. I spend a lot of time putting games in front of my girlfriend and asking her to tell me what she thinks about them, to try and better understand the issue. Things I've discovered so far: - She really really hates obvious polygons and bad animation. It's an instant turn off for her. She finds it very hard to make the leap from "that polygon has a rock texture stretched across it" to "that is a cliff face over there". By constrast, the first time I showed her HL2's first menu screen, she was gobsmacked that she'd finally found something that she could accept as real. (That's actually been a gender-neutral reaction - I've shown HL2's first few minutes to other non-gamer friends and they've immediately asked to play it.) She winces when I shoot the hostages in CS:S and tells me to stop it. - She is turned off by the perception that you have to put in big chunks of time to get anything out of a gaming experience. She can't understand why people would want to play a game for hours for the story. Further questioning reveals that it's specifically the teenage-male appeal of the narratives that turn her off. I played some Monkey Island with her once and she loved the story and laughed her head off at all the jokes. - She hates having to learn controls. She's got about a three sentence tolerance for being told the controls for a game. She loves Super Monkey Ball for its control simplicity (and the pick-up-and-play nature of it). Some female friends won't even touch that game through perception that they could never learn to control it successfully. - Even when it comes to things like Monkey Ball, she has loads of fun with it, asks to play it when people are round, but then readily admits that she'd never buy it. I think that outside the gamer-bubble, you have to be incredibly keen into games to want to spend £100/£200+ just to start playing and then pay £30-40 per game. Look at DVDs - most people only became interested when they could get a player in Asda for £40 and a few titles for £5-10. (Which incidentally, makes me really angry that this week's MCV has YET ANOTHER story about how aggressive retail practices are reducing the perceived value of games in consumers' eyes, and how it will be a disaster for the industry if people start expecting to pay only £20-30 for their games. Fuckers.) Oh btw (edit), That ties quite well with the conclusions I drew from talking to my girlfriend and seeing the appeal of things like Nintendogs and The Sims to other girls, e.g. my sister. I think it's always dangerous to draw strong lines in the sand on these kinds of things, but even if that did come from a bunch of males in a meeting room, I can't say I disagree with that particular line.

Of course. I guess I should have clarified my comments down to (my perception of) the context of his comments. He was saying that action games need to abandon the emotion of "check me out I'm all powerful and I'm kicking your ass" in favour of more nuanced ones. I don't think that's even remotely as "new and revolutionary" as he seems to think it is.

Yes, but no, right? If you point the camera at the centre of the planetoid then you immediately flatten the surface of the planetoid to 2D - you can no longer adequately perceive verticals. But I agree that it will make the camera a whole lot simpler, and thereby the gameplay purer and more focused, and that is the objective if I recall. I guess I'm weird in having no grief with Sunshine. Almost certainly due to never having played 64. I like that Nintendo take their series to different places yet keep the core feeling the same. I think it's a shame that people go "you need to make your Mario more like 64" and "you need to make your Zelda more like OoT". I don't really know what overall point I'm making, but I'm sure it'll be great fun.

I forget where I saw it, but I did enjoy the comment the other week saying that the fanboy 'fact' that the PS3 was harder to program for than the 360 meant simply that developers couldn't be as "lazy" making PS3 games as they were for making 360 games.

When you go for an interview, is it polite/expected/good form to send a note afterwards saying thank you? Or does it seem a bit desperate? I've seen non-games industry folk suggesting the former (on message boards, etc), but my friends and family are of the latter opinion. I'm really unsure which to follow (esp when it comes to the games industry, since it's so much more laid back than many other job types), so I thought I'd ask you guys what you thought. Bonus points if you're able to tell me if it differs culturally, e.g. UK versus US.

Did I fall through a portal and into the GameFAQs forums or something? Is it really necessary to be so trollish/fanboyish? "You can't lie to yourselves, you all know that my feelings about a particular game are the TRUTH of the matter."

Hey guys, thanks for the responses, they're very helpful. My greatest concern was that I was seeming rude by not sending a thank you note, but it seems that, despite the lack of overall consensus, this is certainly not the case. On the suit subject, I'd say it's another opportunity to display some personality, as Marek shrewdly puts it. One of my old bosses said that he'd never hire a guy who showed up in a suit, because it said to him that they didn't know anything about the tone of the games industry. I think that's overly harsh, but I certainly always make a point of showing up in a nice shirt, trousers, belt and smart shoes, because that's expressing respect for the people who are interviewing you. (Plus there's plenty of scientific evidence to suggest that physical factors like height and beauty contribute to interview success and salary, so I've no doubt that looking smart helps on a subconscious level too.) Given that, though, I'm sure people have been hired when they show up in white tie, and in hawaiian shirts too.

Sony bashing is the dead horse that you can't squeeze any more blood from, I know. But really, when are Sony going to stop trying to insult my intelligence? If adding a 50Gb storage device, sans movie playback, adds $200+ to the cost and a year to the effective release date of your console, then the decision is simple: Don't add it. Either the PS3's hardware engineers are incompetent in their inability to make those simple decisions, or Phil Harrison is lying. Hmm, I wonder which it could be. Link

Fucking weird lips, you mean?

More awesome doublespeak: The extra $200 for the Bluray drive is totally worth it, just for the gaming purposes, as Phil Harrison has just told us. But an extra $20 to put rumble in the controller is too expensive for consumers. WTF? Link

Yeah I found that quote pretty disappointing. "With Crysis, we have attempted to remove any suggestion of art direction! And remember, the key to enjoying good graphics isn't to use your eyes to look at what's on the screen, it's to read and embrace our boasts about the computational complexity of the scene!"

I think the word you're looking for is "nuance", a concept utterly absent from the Texan action-shooter genre (of which Max Payne is a member, by honour of its 3DR pedigree).

18 / 720, I totally suck on Japanese games and Japanese designers.

BONUS ROUND! Blogs ready ... FIGHT! (But really, this is pretty interesting. Poor AI performance was one of the things that Chris Hecker and others raised an early alarm on at a theoretical level, and people have kinda forgotten about that particular line of debate. I want to know whether this is marketing smacktalk or whether the theoretical predictions have come true.)

Click and listen More info

We could also have a poll of how many people got their 150 hours out of GTA:SA? It's not really that relevant, is it? If you had fun for 10 hours, you've matched what most games offer. Anything else is a bonus, in a sense, right?

It looks fucking gorgeous, but it looks no closer to being a game than it did last year. They've got the same lighting they had last year and now they've got some awesome physics and a dodgily animated player character. I call 2008, personally.

Randy Smith as well? Damn I'm interested to see what comes out of that (though tbh much more because of Randy and Doug than Steven).