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As the old adage goes, “those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Yet, what is the history of the games industry? How do you study it, especially as an outsider?

Rudimentary history classes typically focus on the what. Students memorize dates and events, but they don’t focus on the why. That’s left to the higher level history classes. I always hated the rote memorization required of me in history classes when I was younger. They instilled a distaste for the subject and they failed to impart any important lessons. Yet, a good study of the why behind the events is both interesting and educational.

Prior to 2000, when I took my first job in the industry, I couldn’t definitely explain the why behind any but the simplest history lessons of the industry. I could speculate on the why, but I had little to no means to test any such hypotheses to see if they held a grain of truth. Even then, I spent time working for magazines before I did indie work, which meant the scope of the learning was somewhat narrow.

Where is the history of the industry recorded? Where can a student or a professional learn what has taken place on more than a superficial level? Have game design and development schools added why-focused history classes? Is there any broad-yet-deep knowledge resource of our past, or do we still rely on an oral history that has no strong oral tradition?

I can scrounge through postmortems and read superficial games industry time lines. There are relics both real and fake strewn across the landscape. But they do not form a cohesive picture. They do not explain why half the postmortems cite the same mistakes. They do not provide the foundation for in depth analysis and a true history. We’re in a high tech industry with an incredible potential to gather data and knowledge. Why have we not done so?

If you know of an encyclopedia of the why behind the games industry, I’d love to hear about it.

Eric Heimburg’s post on the MMO industry is a good read, and I’m going to use it as a lead in for the thoughts I’ve been wanting to share on the subject.  If the ideal business world as a whole is a ship construction yard, then the MMO industry is a group of castaways building a raft to escape a deserted island.

Building a Raft…

• … means you’re passionate and have a vested interest in the outcome. You give it everything you’ve got.  (dedication)
• … consumes your life, since you’re giving it everything. If you’re not careful, it will devour you and turn you into a shell. (burn out)
• … can show you that life is nothing like you believed. (disillusionment)
• … exploits a limited pool of resources for maximum productivity. (high man hours)
• … means you make do with whatever you can, which leads to gross inefficiency and wasted time. This effectively negates the extra man hours invested in the previous bullet. (lack of tools)
• … can either save you or kill you. (high risk, high reward)
• … doesn’t give you a vessel that can withstand the fury of the sea. If you try to use the raft for something it wasn’t designed to do, it’s only a matter of time before a violent wave will destroy it and all your hard work. (fragilty)
• … doesn’t give you a lot of control once you set sail. No matter how much you struggle, the sheer force of the currents may leave you helpless. Even if you know where you need to go, it can still be hard to get there. (powerless)
• … means figuring it out yourself, even if it’s already been perfected. (reinventing the wheel)
• … means you’re alone. (poor communication)

Of course, these characteristics are not isolated to MMO development, and they are not representative of any single developer. Neither are they indicative of the people working on the projects.

This post isn’t intended to be bleak. Growth always comes from learning the lessons of the past.

I played the Dawn of War 2 beta last night. It’s awesome. The scale is much smaller than the previous game, so it’s more focused on the squads and individual units. I saw no builder units, no buildings aside from power nodes and the HQ. It was much more focused on managing the battles. I ended up pre-ordering it on Steam, as it feels like an RTS I can play without getting RSI.

This morning, I ended up searching for Dawn of War 2 on Gamestop for unrelated reasons. I found… nothing. I mentioned it to a coworker, and he pointed this out:

http://kotaku.com/5136323/why-is-gamestop-no-longer-selling-dawn-of-war-ii

It’s a rumor, so I don’t know if that’s what’s really happening. But I’m willing to wager than whatever gets a major title pulled off a major retailer can best be described as juvenile distribution.

It’s a shame that really good games often fail to sell. This time it’s Valkyria Chronicles, which only sold 33k units in the US in November. Not necessarily a good time to release a strategy RPG, but still.

Valkyria Chronicles is a beautiful game. The presentation is amazingly well done and consistent. It doesn’t have as much character development as I like in my SRPGs, but it makes up for it with the combat system. It’s mechanically solid, unique and refined. Even with the relatively low variety in character growth and development, I still have lots of fun just playing with the combat system. There are a lot of good design lessons tucked inside , and I’d love to see a second iteration with some more complex SRPG elements. I’m not too hopeful of that with how it’s selling, especially for a game with such high production values.

The accursed Login Conference (previously ION, previously OGDC) is calling for speakers. Sure, they may not have any luck with their name, but it’s a good conference. I spoke last year, and I’m thinking about submitting a balancing lecture today… if I manage to overcome my overwhelming desire to be lazy. It’s not as interesting of a subject to me as the previous talk.

I usually ignore the hot-button issues because everyone else has them covered just fine. That said, I think the whole WoW Death Knight torture controversy is retarded. Let’s break this down into easy-to-understand bullet points!

• I’m on a journey to become the embodiment of evil
• It’s okay for me to mercilessly slaughter innocents
  
• It’s not okay for me to torture someone.

That’s broken logic. Seriously, it’s a game, and if people paid a little attention they’d see that quest is pleasant compared to the surrounding ones. Thanks, WoW, for teaching me that torturing one guy is worse than massacring thousands of good people.

Monday

Endgame: How to Build High-End Gameplay for Your Most Devoted Players was the first talk of the conference, and a good one. I can’t always point to something new that I learned from Damion’s talks, but he puts it all together in a way that makes it interesting and useful because it triggers ideas.

At Their Service: Making a Difference by Putting Players First was a worthless keynote. The message was okay, but the talk had about 2-5 minutes of content stretched out over 40 minutes. The only part that was remotely valuable came from the Q&A at the end, because everyone was asking the questions they expected to be discussed during the keynote.

Modeling Infrastructure Cost for MMO Launch was a rather dull talk. I often like attending lectures outside of my area because there’s a better chance I’ll learn something. However, I already knew everything about servers that came up. It also didn’t address the part of the description about modeling costs for budget titles versus triple A titles. To be fair, this lecture was passed off from one speaker to another, and it’s got to be hard to make a good lecture when that happens. It also makes me sad because I wanted to see Sticky from the Start, but I attended this one in the interests of spreading out within the company.

I also attended Pirates of the Burning Sea: A Post-Partum, but I wasn’t there to learn.

Tuesday

Hardcore Games for Casual Audiences was an interesting talk - one of the better talks I saw. I particularly liked hearing about a ride at Disney that was very accessible, yet layered with depth for repeat play. I’m thinking about grabbing his book.

Computer Entertainment 35 Years from Today is another keynote that I didn’t expect to be worth attending, but I had nothing else to do. It turned out to be very mildly entertaining and totally useless. I don’t really care to get mild entertainment from a conference… I’m there to learn and network. This is why I like keynotes coming first, because I value that extra hour of sleep more than the worth of a typical keynote.

From Development to Launch: the Keys to Building a Successful Free-to-Play MMO was a useful talk, if not a great one. He provided some good information, and a lot of simple rules about microtransactions. For example, as a rule he said Nexon doesn’t change for content.

Pirates of the Caribbean Online: Lessons Learned was a regrettable talk. It was a postmortem without the postmorten. I got the impression there was a talk in there somewhere, and then it was so thoroughly scrubbed and sanitized that there was no useful content left.

Economic Design and Management of Virtual Worlds with a Large Shard Population wasn’t very interesting in itself. The only interesting part came from the conflict regarding economies and fun in EVE.

Wednesday

I slept through the first seession. Otherwise, I probably would have attended Wake Up and Smell the Metrics! A Rant on Metrics-Driven Development in Online Games. I’m not really the target audience though, as I already agree with the message.

I skipped the next keynote.

Sustaining Player Engagement by Designing for Intrinsic Need Satisfaction was my favorite talk at this year’s AGDC. That’s somewhat unfortunate, because it’s an updated talk of my favorite from last year. Still useful due to the updates.

Everything I Need To Know About Virtual Worlds, I learned at Theme Parks was the last talk I attended. I didn’t get anything out of the talk, but I honestly didn’t pay much attention. It lost to a combination of being boring, and the pull of coordinating a meetup and sorting out some work issues.

There are a couple interesting articles on Gamasutra today. Bruce Shelley talks about Ensemble’s closure, saying that they thought they were immune to shutdown talks due to profitability... and there’s a loosely related article about Ensemble’s cancelled 2007 project being a Halo MMO.

AGDC `08’s over now, and I’ll post thoughts on the things I saw. First, a brief overview:

• The keynotes all sounded worthless. The two I attend were worthless.
• The best talk I saw this year was an updated version of the best talk I saw last year.
• The parties were loud like always, but most of them had a semi-quiet place to talk.
• The weather was decent. Unpleasant, but not hellish like last year.
• Apparently there was a really awesome talk on the game career track about getting into the industry.

“And, believe it or not, ladders — because we only got one ladder in the original game in act five and it was like a month and half of animation work, so I decreed there would be more ladders in the sequel,” says Capps.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=19892