Paul I’m going to be running a 1-day intro to games writing on May 3rd at AFTRS here in Melbourne. Anyone interested can register here.
This’ll be different, and way more in-depth, than the 2-hour Express Media workshop later in the month.
And if you didn’t hear – we announced this year’s Freeplay festival too.
It’s rare that I feel the need to write any sort of opinion piece on this blog, but over the past few weeks, there’s been a sudden upsurge in the number of poorly researched and negative games pieces in the mainstream media, and I wanted to draw attention to them all in the one place and maybe start a discussion about what we can do to address some of those issues.
Every new medium, no matter how similar to what has come before, has had to deal with the cries of the earth falling or our youth corrupting or the very threads that hold our decent society together fraying and unravelling, and games are no exception, but recently the number of mainstream articles with exactly that form have appeared online in the mainstream news.
I’m running a writing for games workshop with Express Media and the Emerging Writers’ Festival on May 22nd.
Details from the Express Media site are:
Express Media in partnership with the Emerging Writers’ Festival presents:
How To Write Computer Games with Paul Callaghan, 2-4pm. The Wheeler Centre, 176 Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne.
$10
Games, like all mediums, have their own strengths and weaknesses as a storytelling medium. This workshop takes a look at what makes games tick, what you can learn from traditional forms, and what you should know about the expressive power of mechanics.
2010 is shaping up to be a pretty interesting year…
I’ll be at the Format Festival – Academy of Words in Adelaide on March 13th. Definitely talking about non-paper publishing, but might also be chairing something else. Details here.
I’m also taking part in the next Meanland event – Reading in a Time of Technology – on May 19th at the Wheeler Centre. Details here.
And, lastly, I’ll once again be talking at the Emerging Writers’ Festival, sometime from May 21st to May 30th.
I’m on ABC Radio’s Tech Stream program (along with a bunch of other people) talking a little bit about GCAP and the year in review – link. For the record, my game of the year is Canabalt on iPhone.
And here‘s an article I wrote for Open Forum on the R18+ rating, the proposed Internet filter, and how they might affect the local games industry.
As the year scrabbles to a close, the steady stream of conferences and presentations comes to an end.
World Congress of Science and Factual Producers
On Friday December 4th, I took part in a speed-networking event at the World Congress of Science and Factual Producers. What was interesting about this was being able to step away from the traditional pc/console space and think about new opportunities to use games and games technology.
In talking to the directors and producers, I had the thought that perhaps games were closer to documentary features than to narrative features. The topics explored – happiness as a contagion that can be tracked using network theory, or a man who built his own 300-million search-and rescue empire – were built on the film-maker exploring the world, creating theories, and constructing the narrative as they go, which is a clear analogue for what players do in games.
Not to say that there isn’t room for narrative in games, but modelling gameplay & the reveal of narrative in more of a documentary style might prove to be a useful template.
Game Connect Asia Pacific
Or GCAP as it’s less mouthfully known, took place at Crown from December 6th – 8th. I gave two presentations – one on games and games literacy (which was attended by only 5 people due to a last minute room change) and one on the creative process of writing and how that applies to games. Due to meetings and general schmoozing (and also pulling together my writing presentation), I saw almost none of the conference itself (other than Tim Stellmach’s keynote & the indie games that I was judging), but came away with the overall impression that from an art & design perspective, the content was unfocused and weak – which is reflected in a single stream that contained all of the art, design, and audio talks. As design is one of our local industry’s challenges, it would be nice to see an increased focus on it next year.
Details on the presentations after the fold.
As a followup to my local data breakdown, I thought I’d link to some other interesting findings:
Added 17/11/09: Marketing influences games more than ratings
Survey: Game Score-to-Sale Theory Again Disproven
A study from 2006 that concludes no correlation between sales & score.
When Pundits Attack: Game Sales vs Game Quality
This compares metacritic rating to overall sales for 1281 games during the PS2 era.
Each metacritic point is worth 7.7 extra sales per day
Some data extracted from between March 2007 & March 2008
The influence of metacritic on games sales
A more recent study from May 2009.
In the interests of transparency, I’ve made available the data from my IGDA talk as a published google spreadsheet. You can find it here.
To gather the numbers, I used metacritic‘s advanced search restricted to developers (here‘s an example using Torus) and hand-copied the results straight into a spreadsheet.
In some cases, where data wasn’t available on metacritic and there was more than one sku for the game, I used gamerankings.com for a representative value.
To select by ‘unique’ title versus ‘port’ in cases where there was more than one version (both Heroes of the Pacific and Heroes over Europe are good examples) I treated the highest rated version as the ‘unique’ and the other versions as ‘ports’ of that. All versions of Heroes of the Pacific rated 76% so it’s just a function of a sorting algorithm that I took the Xbox version as the original. In the case of Heroes over Europe, the PC version rated 66% compared to 64% on PS3 and 62% on Xbox 360 so that’s treated as the lead platform and the others as ports.
Because of the way metacritic gathers reviews & collates data, there are omissions, so if anyone has additional data, feel free to email it to me or post it in the comments and I’ll update it.
Last night at the reboot of the Melbourne IGDA chapter, I gave a short talk on the state of things locally and options for indie developers. The full presentation is available below, but I thought I’d make the first half – the data on metacritic scores – a bit more accessible.
For more information on the second half – opportunities for independent developers – check out Simon Carless’ and David Edery’s presentations from Film Victoria‘s Digital Distribution Summit:
Simon Carless (from here)
Indie Game Metrics – October 2009
Digital Distribution Summit Video
David Edery
Digital Distribution Summit keynote
A more detailed breakdown of the numbers is below the fold…
Well, too many other projects took over last month – including helping to set up the Melbourne branch of the IGDA, presenting at iDef, and working on some other things that it’s too early to talk about. As a result, my October game didn’t really evolve beyond the previous iteration. I did manage to hook up collision and put torches and coins in, but it still wasn’t really a game. Hopefully November will be different because this month, I’ve decided to follow the theme used on experimentalgameplay.com, and this month it’s ‘Art Game’.
Head over to the Freeplay forums to join other people in Melbourne doing the same thing.