Those “star” posts aren’t the ones with the most thought or research or insight. They’re not the ones I laboured over or even spent a while planning. They’re just shallow, flippant, jokey posts made on the spur of the moment, and it almost annoys me that they get so much more attention than the ones I spent the most time on. It’s just a human reaction to consider whether to make more of the “silly” posts, if that’s all the average reader is interested in.

Then I think about why I do it in the first place. I never started that blog to pander to the widest audience – if I had, I’d be blogging about Snooki!

It’s the same with my game mods. Sometimes I’m frustrated that the ones I’ve made particularly for Fallout 3 seem to be “ignored”, but I have to face the fact that the average player just is not that interested in the sort of things I make. I’m OK with that because I look at the most popular mods for that game and I’m not that interested in those either. I’m not a *unique* player, though, because other people, however few, want to download the mods I make to customise the game to my own tastes.

If I then tried to make mods to please those players, I couldn’t possibly please even the few hundred people who happened to want a pink vault in Fallout 3. Each of them would have some criticism that was different than the last, so if I tried to cater to them all, I’d end up disappointing everyone. I’m much better off making what I want to make to the best of my ability, trusting that it will naturally find its own place. I can ask for input, but not let a cacophony of divergent opinions turn it into some Frankenstein’s monster of other people’s bad ideas.

Something doesn’t have to underperform to be good, but it has to fulfil some specific vision from the director. You can’t look at the real AAA games, or even something like WoW, and think that they were made by suits staring at flipcharts. They’re audacious and distinctive, and that passion that inspired them to take that risk is contagious – look at a little game like Braid that got popular because someone thought “what can we do to make this great?” rather than “what will the average gamer like?”

Yes, you can put things in that you know that certain types of player will enjoy, and it would be both foolhardy and strange not to do that. You’ve worked hard on something and you want everyone who tries it to enjoy it, and that’s great. It’s just when “catering” becomes “pandering” that you have issues. Something that panders becomes necessarily bland because everything that is unique is a risk that someone might not like. A panda eats shoots and leaves – it’s a fickle bastard, best ignored.

The first official demo videos solidified that “This is not going to end well” feeling for me. Happy family playing games in a sterile, “nobody with kids lives like that” family/living room. Clean furniture lines, no clutter. Who lives like that? More importantly what GAMERS live like that? Show me that it works in the family room with a lumpy couch, a dog on the floor, and household clutter everywhere. Show me that it works in cramped and messy college dorm room. Had they done that, I might have reefed the sails a bit on the failboat of my expectations.

But my initial response comes from an earlier XBox 360 accessory that this current batch of MGS general managers were pushing. The XBox camera. My experience with the freebie copy of the webcame game “Urine the Movies,” I mean “You’re in the Movies” that MS gave us was not a positive one. My kids and I had to literally strip the family room clean of furnishings to get the thing to work (and I was sore for days from game activity). And all that to get a marginally (and I mean marginally) enjoyable experience … maybe if my kids were in their tweens+ instead of their 20s and if we were all much shorter it might have been more fun for them … I was just sore).

But after E3, when the hoop-la died down, there was that admission that one couldn’t play the device sitting down. Huh? The device and its recognition software wouldn’t deal with a seated player. Folks may use exercise software and Wii sports games that way, but I personally don’t know anyone who plays Halo Wars or Red Dead Redemption while standing (at least not by choice).

But you’ve nailed it on the head. Killer Apps sell add-on hardware, not vice versa. 25 years ago I helped design the driving module, roller controller (trac ball), and Super Action Controllers for the Colecovision. No one bought those because they were great controllers, they bought them because they let you play great games like Turbo, and Slither (a licensed arcade game much like Centipede) and Super Action Football and Baseball on the Colecovision.

But this is Microsoft we’re talking about. This is the company that got into PC games because they saw it as a way to promote and sell more PC operating systems. Only they didn’t learn their own lesson. Make the GAMES people desperately want to play and they’ll shell out for the OS, the console, or the peripheral that is needed to play them.

Meanwhile, back in the sterile family living room, Kinect has noticed that your 10 year old has walked in the room, has greeted her by name and logged that data in somewhere. Big Brother is watching …

This post was mentioned on Twitter by mittense: internet fights are the best fights (also holy shit at the creative director jab) http://is.gd/aL5i5...

I remember the first time I saw that email, I was stunned then and am still stunned today. That is passion!

But the last 5 to 7 years have certainly been a mostly dead era for original PC games. For exactly the reasons you describe above. Microsoft orginally going after Sony’s customers (none of whom were on the PC), and then Nintendo’s customers (None of whom are on the PC), and pretty much effectivly abandoning their own orginal native development platform.

And I may be wrong about this, but I also think the pendulum is swinging back right now and PC gaming is climbing out of that dark era. A large part of that is due to the explosion of social media games, which are mostly played in Facebook, through a browser, on a PC. This in turn, has publishers thinking “Oh heyyy maybe it *is* okay to put something on the PC again..” Not that the console makers aren’t scrambling to become “social media” aware as well.

And for awhile, certainly many so-called experts were claiming “Oh well the only thing succeeds on a PC are MMO’s — and by MMO’s I mean WoW, and gosh it must be becuase those kids spend all their time playing WoW that they don’t WANT to play our crappy port of a console game..” Again, this was not necessarily a viewpoint I shared myself, but you didn’t have to swing a dead cat in 2007 to hit someone that was saying it.

But when I see games that *aren’t* MMO’s, that aren’t casual, that aren’t on facebook — that don’t have any of the magic market buzzwords –succeed, it reminds me that the deal is — make the damn thing good, and people will play it.

Unfortunately, for most publishers, “good” == “sequel to established IP with current industry buzzwords in it”. I mean.. we know it’s only so long before Activision makes “Modern Warfare 3 For the Facebook”. The death of the traditional developer/publisher paradigm can’t happen soon enough..

Dusty