Our struggle to model a female character
We spent months figuring out how to make it look totally realistic when white guys run through dank sewers so that you can seriously feel the sweat and stench and now you want us to add girls to the mix? What are we supposed to do?
I know we’ve all gotten a lot of mileage out of making fun of Ubisoft lately, due to the fact that their reason for a lack of women in the new Assassin’s Creed game comes down to a simple difficulty in modeling ladies. It seems like a mockable standpoint, like a bunch of people trying to defend their complete unwillingness to do something with a poorly conceived cop-out that mostly shows a profound lack of care for the gender that makes up half of the gaming market.
Alas, while I’ve gotten my own jokes in, I suppose now is as good a time as any to reveal that I was on the team which tried to crack the modeling problem. Oh, certainly, it might seem silly to you, but as it turns out, women are a lot harder to put into games than you think. What follows, thus, is a completely accurate picture of the process wherein we tried and failed to add a single woman to the game as a playable character. Perhaps now we can finally put these matters to rest once and for all.
Thoughts on the E3 2014 presentations
IT LOOKS A LOT LIKE THE PRESENT AND FEATURES LOTS OF STUBBLE-DUSTED WHITE GUYS
Oddly, despite having worked in “the biz” for nearly five years, I’ve never actually been to E3. Part of this is due to my distance, part of this is due to my general distaste of being crushed into a convention hall, and part of it is because there’s a minority of stuff that’s relevant to my particular slice of “the biz.” If you want to talk MMOs, there are other venues that give you better options.
Still, as everyone who is reading this is well aware, I do things other than play MMOs. (Other game-related things, I mean. This is not going to be my recipe for taco burgers.) That means that I’ve still wound up watching and keeping track of most of this year’s conference, and as I trim this up not too long before it goes live, we’ve seen most of the big stuff that companies have on display. Some surprise reveals happened, some reveals took place that were kind of predictable but still nice, and a lot of it is worth analyzing.
We’re also not seeing another Mega Man game on the horizon, but that’s sort of a predictable disappointment by this point.
Challenge Accepted: What you’re wading into
If it were just this, it would admittedly be a little boring. it would also be consistent.
Can we talk about Frog Fractions? I want to talk about Frog Fractions.
If you haven’t played Frog Fractions, that’s easily rectified – it’s free right here. Aside from absurd humor, the developer’s stated goal for the game was to get back to a time before players knew everything about a game, to get back a sense of wonder and surprise when things keep changing on you as you play the game. It’s not really a spoiler to say that the basic version of the game that you start with isn’t what you end up playing when all is said and done (hint: the dragon can go down, too).
Don’t get me wrong, I think Frog Fractions is a great little piece of art. But as a pure game, it sort of comes down to a series of brain farts. It surprises you with its gameplay, yes, but that’s because it doesn’t deliver anything close to what it promised to on the tin, and the real challenge is figuring out what random direction to head in next. So how do you interpret the challenge in a game where the whole schtick is changing what you’re actually doing?
DRM has changed, DRM has stayed the same
All turns quiet; I have been here before.
A couple of weeks ago, I had a really good week on game services. Origin was giving away Plants vs. Zombies for free, so at some point I can now do what 80% of human beings on the planet have done and play it, thereby allowing myself to enter into conversations with others once more. Transistor also came out, and thanks to the kindness of my brother I also was able to download and play that all the way through. If you need a thumbnail review, it’s good.
I was talking with a friend about all of this, however, and the subject of Steam came up, since that’s really your main option for buying Transistor at this point. That led into a discussion of Steam as a form of generally benevolent DRM and how having DRM, however benevolent, is somewhat insidious. There is, strictly speaking, nothing that will stop Valve from cancelling your account, deleting all your game, and sending you a picture of a squirrel getting run over by a truck.
Which is true. But let’s face it – we’ve been dealing with DRM as long as we’ve been dealing with games. It’s not whether it’s restrictive or not now, it’s just about how it restricts us.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 