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Idle Thumbs 74: That Meat Boy Sat Me Down

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Stealth. Steam. Murder.

Idle Thumbs 74: That Meat Boy Sat Me Down

PC Gamer Executive Editor Evan Lahti joins us as we pore over maps and documents in preparation to tail our mark. As we take one step out of line -- as giant circles of sound radiate from our feet for the world to see -- only then do we realize we were killed by the best.

Games Discussed: DayZ, Mark of the Ninja, Super Meat Boy, Steam Greenlight, Steam Big Picture Mode, Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie

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Just started listening to it and you guys are out right saying "Daisy" rather than "Day Z"... right?

Also, the whole player dynamic sounds like what early Ultima Online had, it really made an interesting game.

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I have opinions about Greenlight!

My crotchety-old-man take on the complaints about the $100 fee is here: http://www.spectreco...2/09/greenlight

(Short version: the question isn't whether a person without $100 is "good enough" to be on Steam; it's whether a game that can't drum up $100 worth of interest is going to be worth putting up on Steam in the first place.)

But what jumped out at me from listening to the podcast: several of the people being vocal about it -- in particular you guys & Ben Kuchera at PA Report -- are saying, essentially, that Valve's in a unique position to create an audience for obscure indie games. But that's got it reversed, I think: the only thing unique about Valve's position is that they can turn indie games into profit. It's you guys, on podcasts, blogs, news sites attached to popular webcomics, etc, that can bring attention to a game and create an audience for it.

I know I've never bought anything just from browsing Steam. I have bought stuff, sight unseen, after hearing about it on Idle Thumbs, Joystiq, or a message board posting.

It's reasonable to assume that Valve could afford to get into curation & moderation with Steam. But is that the way they want to go? It hasn't worked that great for Apple -- I'll pay attention to stuff on their "what's hot" list and the "Editor's Choice" sections, but they're constantly getting bad PR from the approval and submission process. On the same day, I've seen complaints that they're ridiculously strict right alongside complaints that they'll let anything and everything into the store, sometime on the same site.

As an outsider to the whole submission process, it's always seemed like Valve tries to stay as neutral as possible with Steam. I never get a sense of "Valve thinks this is cool" -- unless they put game-themed hats into TF2 as a cross-promotion or something -- but "Valve thinks this is popular" or "your friends recommend this" or "based on what you've already bought, here are some algorithmic suggestions." If they ever become more visible as curators, then they'll become The Man.

Which may be unavoidable, since people are already saying "they've got enough money that they should be giving indie developers free advertising and exposure," even when they made it clear that they went to crowd-sourcing recommendations specifically to avoid taking that position, and that all the money they get in fees goes to charity.

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Well, yeah, podcasts and blogs and other such mediums are the sort of word of mouth marketing that indie developers need since they likely have zero marketing officially. And your point about Steam making a profit off them in that regard is legit. But there's another angle about Steam making indie games / developers bigger - it's the barrier of entry to have content hosted and sold. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo all have these super bizarre conditions and certification processes.

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My signature on another forum is a quote of a community member which reads, "Ultima Online Pre-Trammel is the perfect example of why libertarians are full of shit." After hearing you guys talk about Day Z (which is the most I've "investigated" the game) I'm pretty sure it's a better example for that quote to use.

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@Murdoc At first, I was confused but that, too, since I learned British (also called cool) English in school. Apparently, Americans pronounce Z like C, which is just really confusing, I mean, how do you know which letter they mean? On the other hand, they call football soccer, so I’m not that surprised. ;)

Anyway, cool episode, as always. And Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie was actually pretty cool.

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Yeah we say "Day Zee," not "Day Zed." Also, "Zee" (Z) and "See" © are distinctly different sounds to my ear...

WAIT! I just re-read your post. Oh man, guh ... gha---

On the other hand, they call football soccer, so I’m not that surprised. ;)

Let's get one thing clear, here: There is no way in the history of American culture that we would have abbreviated "Football" to "Soccer." That came squarely from the Brits, a shortening of "Association Football," to, well, "Soccer."

Yes, only in England would they pull the "soc" out of "Association" and append an "-er" to it as some sort of casual term, then formalize and codify it over a series of decades... only to abandon it later and then act posh about it. So, in conclusion, "soccer" blood is not on our hands.

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Wonderful cast. I actually turned it off near the end before you started talking about the "documents" because I had to stop watching the livestream partway through and I figure I should check the rest of that out first.

But, with respect to the rest of the podcast, I agree with the Greenlight discussion 100% (and incidentally I'm glad to hear Chris say he doesn't like the new Steam community stuff: I haven't heard opinions on it one way or the other, but I thought I was probably the odd one out for thinking it's no good). Greenlight is just tailor made for certain kinds of games, and although I really look forward to playing games like Black Mesa or Routine, which are Greenlight success stories, I really really enjoy games like Thirty Flights of Loving which really ought to be just shoved into someone's hands with zero information.

Interestingly enough, another game like that, The Stanley Parable, is making an HD/expanded version (like Dear Esther) did, and it wants to be on Steam (like Dear Esther is), so it has to be on Greenlight. But the developer, because he is an amazing person, has completely subverted the Greenlight page as a way to pitch his game that completely subverts video games. So, I guess that is the right way to do Greenlight for these kinds of games. Too bad not every game can sell itself as an ironic subversion.

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Okay, I didn’t know the football/soccer thing, so my bad. It’s definitely interesting, for some reason I kind of dig that language history/development stuff, so thanks for that.

In German, Z is “Tset“ (similar to Zed, so it just sounds normal for me).

Also, "Zee" (Z) and "See" © are distinctly different sounds to my ear...

I still can’t pronounce “th“ (like in smooth) correctly, so no, I didn’t know there’s a difference between Zee and See.

PS: Thanks to the QuakeCon episode on Twitch TV, I now know which voice belongs to which person. I can clearly differentiate between your voices, I just never knew whose was whose (Except Chris). Also, sadly, your baldness isn’t visible in the podcast. ;)

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Day Z, Day Z,

Give me your answer do!

I'm half crazy,

All for the love of you!

It won't be a stylish marriage,

I can't afford a carriage,

But you'll look sweet on the seat

Of a bicycle built for two!

I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it.

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Oh, I'm Canadian and we are well aware of the "Zee" pronunciation. What I meant though is that on the cast it doesn't sound like they are saying Day Zee they are outright saying Daisy.... I know it's pretty much the same thing, but I thought they were just joking around with the Daisy Lords thing.

Or that's just how they actually say Day Zee.

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But there's another angle about Steam making indie games / developers bigger - it's the barrier of entry to have content hosted and sold. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo all have these super bizarre conditions and certification processes.

I'm not sure I completely understand your point. Is the objection to the $100 fee, or to having Greenlight be crowd-sourced instead of curated?

Steam is still easier to deal with than the console publishers, and from what little I've heard, it's even easier to deal with than Apple. It seems to me that putting Valve people into the position of curator or gatekeeper would push things more in the direction of Nintendo, Microsoft, et. al. They're no longer representing "what the people want," but "how Valve wants to sell the image of its platform."

Greenlight is just tailor made for certain kinds of games, and although I really look forward to playing games like Black Mesa or Routine, which are Greenlight success stories, I really really enjoy games like Thirty Flights of Loving which really ought to be just shoved into someone's hands with zero information.

I don't think I understand that bit, either. The trailer for Thirty Flights does a fine job of saying what the game is (a "short story", sequel to Gravity Bone, etc) without spoiling any of the surprises of it. Again, I may be an oddball since I never buy stuff after browsing randomly through Steam; I only buy off of recommendations, or from a developer (like Blendo) who consistently makes good stuff. So I don't think you have to make a trailer or landing page that tells the player absolutely everything about the game.

I don't think "zero information" is the way to go, either, though. You've got to establish what the game looks like, a rough idea of what type of game it is, and just enough to provide the hook. That was actually one of the things that I disagreed with Telltale management about, but gradually changed my mind over time: I think we actually did have a tendency to get a little too precious about withholding information from players for fear of "spoiling" it.

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I don't think I understand that bit, either. The trailer for Thirty Flights does a fine job of saying what the game is (a "short story", sequel to Gravity Bone, etc) without spoiling any of the surprises of it. Again, I may be an oddball since I never buy stuff after browsing randomly through Steam; I only buy off of recommendations, or from a developer (like Blendo) who consistently makes good stuff. So I don't think you have to make a trailer or landing page that tells the player absolutely everything about the game.

I think the difference here is that, regardless of how you use Steam as a store, Valve seems to be setting up Steam Greenlight for a loop of browsing, appraising, and voting. That might not be true, but it's my experience with it so far. If true, that means that some amount of putting on a show (screenshots, videos, demos, vertical slices) has to happen -- in public -- a stage or two before that is usually the case. The pitch process isn't the same thing as marketing the game, but it feels like the presence of Greenlight makes those two things intermingle in a way that they didn't have to before.

That is more understandable to me for something like Kickstarter, where you are appealing directly to that audience for funding -- in that case you ARE pitching literally to the people who will be giving you money. I guess that is technically the case with Greenlight, in that Steam customers are the ones reviewing Greenlight submissions, but the equation is different when they're just hitting "Yes" or "No" buttons. You are asking a community of gamers if they think they or maybe someone else might be interested in a product once a (now uninvolved) third party stocks it in a store. It feels off kilter to me.

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Thank you for revealing the Daisy secrets! They were pretty great.

I am so hyped for the X-com live stream! I've actually been playing the game like crazy for the last week.

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You are asking a community of gamers if they think they or maybe someone else might be interested in a product once a (now uninvolved) third party stocks it in a store. It feels off kilter to me.

What primarily worries me about Greenlight is the chicken-and-egg nature of it all: the games which have enough momentum to make it through Greenlight are most likely to be the games that won't benefit the most from that attention. It's abated somewhat by the co-mingling of sub-cultures within gaming—where it may be very popular within a specific social group, but virtually unknown to the larger audience that would be exposed to it through steam—but is still a worry for me. I'd much prefer it if they instead took a more active role in advocating for games that they thought would be interesting to their audience, and that push gaming forward. I can understand that Valve probably wants to be more hands-off about this and simply ensure they're efficiently picking any low-hanging fruit out there, but it could be so much more if they were willing to invest more effort.

This also got me thinking about some financial models gaming could import from other media to support innovative, indie work. I'd love to pay $10 a month for a carefully selected indie game delivered to my steam library. It seems the subscription model has only been applied to ongoing single games, while it could also be applied to more of a magazine model—providing a solid revenue basis to champion existing games and commission new work.

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As an already established indie developer with a new game coming out soon, I'm very, very happy about Greenlight, mainly because now I know exactly what to do to try to get our next game on Steam. I'm sure we could've figured out who to e-mail or whatever, but with Greenlight, there's now a totally clear path forward. Greenlight, from where I'm standing, replaces an opaque Old Boys network with something I can actually participate in.

That said, it's easy for me to say it's great, because we've got a built-in audience to whore votes from. And as a privileged white male, I think the world is hunky dory just the way it is!

Seriously, though, is the contention that the existence of Greenlight displaces some other, better method for indie games to reach an audience? My impression is that the traditional Steam channels still exist, and that Greenlight can't possibly be eliminating all of the non-Steam-related paths to success available to indie developers.

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I think the difference here is that, regardless of how you use Steam as a store, Valve seems to be setting up Steam Greenlight for a loop of browsing, appraising, and voting. [...] If true, that means that some amount of putting on a show (screenshots, videos, demos, vertical slices) has to happen -- in public -- a stage or two before that is usually the case. The pitch process isn't the same thing as marketing the game, but it feels like the presence of Greenlight makes those two things intermingle in a way that they didn't have to before.

I'm not being argumentative, but this is what I'm still not getting. It seems like they've tried to present the Greenlight submissions exactly as if they were games for sale on Steam, with the only difference being that you can't actually buy it yet. So it seems to me that you'd have to put the exact same information on a Greenlight page that you would on the sale page; your end goal is the same -- would you be willing to spend money on this?

That's assuming that Greenlight is for games that have already been finished and are ready to sale, which I assumed was the whole point of Greenlight from the start. It sounds like you're seeing more overlap with Kickstarter there, games that aren't complete but are looking for customer interest. Personally, I don't think that unfinished games should be submitted to Greenlight at all, or at least, they should be in late beta at worst. (But Valve's hands-off approach means there's no check for completion).

What primarily worries me about Greenlight is the chicken-and-egg nature of it all: the games which have enough momentum to make it through Greenlight are most likely to be the games that won't benefit the most from that attention. [...] I'd much prefer it if they instead took a more active role in advocating for games that they thought would be interesting to their audience, and that push gaming forward. I can understand that Valve probably wants to be more hands-off about this and simply ensure they're efficiently picking any low-hanging fruit out there, but it could be so much more if they were willing to invest more effort.

I can understand that, but I think that Greenlight and what you're talking about would necessarily be two completely different things. There's no room for ambiguity as with the "is this like Kickstarter or is it just like selling already completed, established games?", where the answer is "both? kind of? maybe?" If Valve got in the business of doing "Editor's Picks" (which I think could be a good idea, for what it's worth) then it'd have to be completely separate from any type of crowd-sourced thing, or else Valve's picks would get lost. And then of course you'd go back to what I mentioned with Apple's editor's picks & the like -- suddenly Valve isn't an objective third party and is opening themselves up to accusations of favoritism.

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Or that's just how they actually say Day Zee.

It's clearly dayzee (without the space), not daisy.

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It's interesting how Greenlight's entire purpose is to put *more* games on Steam, however everyone's concerns are that it will limit the selection instead.

To counter you guys' example about games like Amnesia possibly having trouble on Greenlight, it's worth noting that Routine (Amnesia in space, as far as I can tell) was accepted by Valve after only about a week of voting. I found Routine through Greenlight, with no idea what it is, and immediately voted on it because it looks super cool.

On the other hand, La-Mulana is a game with a very strong fanbase that has been asking for it on Steam for a while now, and it' still only 3% of its way to approval. It would be a real shame if it just sat in limbo forever, and Valve just assumed no one's interested because it isn't attracting a massive number of Greenlight votes.

I assume that for short ~10 minute long story games (like Thirty Flights of Loving), they'll just have to make a name for themselves outside of Steam first. I'm thinking of stuff like The Stanley Parable which has existed for a while as a free mod, and has a pretty strong following.

Personally, I'm not afraid of Greenlight limiting the selection of games, but rather reinforcing the status quo. Popular games that would get on Steam anyway will all be voted up, and niche or obscure games won't. But no matter what happens, it's not like Steam's the only place I can go to play games anyway, so I can deal with it.

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Thanks a lot for the discussions about UI and immersion: my strong opinions on the topic have been shaken, so :tup: .

Your reward comes in the form of a wall-of-text and requests for more details. :crazy:

Until now, I've mainly done gameplay programming on high-fidelity games with a focus on immersion, so I always found that transitioning from the 'in-your-face' signs & feedback of prototyping to the more final ones was damn unpredictable and risky.

It's a challenging process because you can suddenly break your gameplay ingredients in 2 ways that are often unexpected. Either the subtlety of 'art direction compliant' animations, SFXs, sounds and UI greatly hinders the readability of the mechanism or, at the other end of the scale, the increment in the artificiality of signs & feedback topples the overall balance - i.e. slightly too much of the underlying simulation is now revealed and immersion is compromised. The latter can happen slowly over time, sneaking on you like a bastard which makes it uncomfortable to resolve.

Anyway, these things are very tricky to evaluate internally, because the people who are involved quickly become biased, each iterations making them grow artificially aware of the designer's intent. Sadly, playtests - which reflect real playing situations way better than employee test - rarely happen that early or massively enough.

Before your discussion on the topic, I stood firmly on the principle that, when developing the kind of game mentioned above, if the sign & feedback of a gameplay ingredient disrupted the immersion or the fidelity clearly, then you had a nearly full proof case for cutting this element altogether; no matter how good it was.

As a gameplay programmer, I fight for the depth and breadth of the gameplay; but sometimes, it's not the ultimate objective of a game, and in this mindset, I couldn't think of any reason to not compromise.

Your point about players developing blind spots for UI elements and feedback in general is very new to me: usually when game and level designers support artificial feedbacks, it's because they think it's a lost fight anyway or they, hum, don't have the tendency or time to care enough.

You managed to shift my position on the issue because it's very 'thoughtful' and credible to say that it is better to pay an upfront cost for artificial yet concise info than to maintain immersion through a more integrated solution based on a metaphor: the first yields incredible value once players have absorbed the artificiality while the other will always trigger a conscious and longer mental process to access the final info.

So yay for giving me one more sound argument in the debate :tup:

I've got a few questions for Sean, Chris & Jake though (anybody else can join, but I bolded them out because wall-of-text) - some of them will be naive.

  1. let's say you want a piece of UI to be 'blind spot' friendly but you want players to notify a strong change of state, for instance Red flash of the widhet when going to critical health. Would you expect the blind spot to prevent the player from noticing that change at all or not?
  2. my instincts tell me that blind spot or 'blindness' is difficult to develop for in-universe overlay (like 3D arrows, marker on top of NPCs or highlights effect). What's your take on that?
  3. I'm thinking that players forget those elements because they have absorbed the standard signs & feedback (like fog of war or outline) and they are airbrushed out of their vision. How about newcomers to the medium? Do you think they'll benefit from blind spots too? Does that even matter since they'll probably be super conscious of the physical controller anyway?
  4. How long do you think a player would need to develop a blind spot? What can affect that in the design of the UI or the type of info?
  5. I'm probably to bring it up to some pals so, to clarify, would you go as far as saying that, if they are well designed, consulting UI elements becomes quasi-unconscious (like a virtual proprioception) or am I caricaturing Jake's point?

Anyway, great food for thoughts :tup:

On a side note: amazing ending to the Daisie session.

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I'm not being argumentative, but this is what I'm still not getting. It seems like they've tried to present the Greenlight submissions exactly as if they were games for sale on Steam, with the only difference being that you can't actually buy it yet. So it seems to me that you'd have to put the exact same information on a Greenlight page that you would on the sale page; your end goal is the same -- would you be willing to spend money on this?

That's assuming that Greenlight is for games that have already been finished and are ready to sale, which I assumed was the whole point of Greenlight from the start. It sounds like you're seeing more overlap with Kickstarter there, games that aren't complete but are looking for customer interest. Personally, I don't think that unfinished games should be submitted to Greenlight at all, or at least, they should be in late beta at worst. (But Valve's hands-off approach means there's no check for completion).

That's fair. I don't quite know how to express what I'm saying I guess. I feel like there are definite ups and downs to each approach, but with a traditional Steam arranagement, you can potentially know a couple weeks or months in advance of your public launch if you are on Steam or not, and then you have the opportunity to plan how you close your game, and how you build your marketing campaign and assets, around that fact. If the way to go for Greenlight is "finish your game, you have to build the Steam marketing assets anyway," that seems like it's placing even more burden of unknown on developers who are trying to close and market.

It's interesting how Greenlight's entire purpose is to put *more* games on Steam, however everyone's concerns are that it will limit the selection instead.

I'm not concerned that we'll have fewer games -- I agree that we will end up with more games post-Greenlight. I am concerned that we'll have different games. Steam is currently undeniably biased about which games get on there. That said, I don't think Greenlight will fix that bias, I think Greenlight will change the bias. It may allow more games onto the service, but it has the potential to do it at the expense of other titles which are already getting on there. That's not an optimal solution. I'd like a system which allows more content onto Steam but throwing a giant binary lever from "approval process" to "crowdsourcing" seems like it's going to have a lot of less than ideal side effects, regardless of the positives it also brings. It's also all speculation, and Valve does seem attentive to what's going on so far. I don't think anyone sees Greenlight as a catastrophe or something, but the potential ramifications seem worth discussing.

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throwing a giant binary lever from "approval process" to "crowdsourcing" seems like it's going to have a lot of less than ideal side effects, regardless of the positives it also brings.

I'm confused: I heard earlier in the week - but didn't believe it - that Steam had suspended their original game submission process. Is that true?

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Yes, they stopped accepting game submissions and told people to wait for Greenlight. Escape Goat got hit with this, I believe. To The Moon just squeaked by somehow.

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