Short Fiction Monday: Midsummer

Some character profiles, bits and pieces of something I don’t yet know the shape of. ]

Short Fiction Monday: Midsummer

I had just started work in a new city when I met Summer Mei. I was still unpacking, boxes littering the apartment and piling up in the corners. She heard me banging around up the stairs, trying to wrestle a bunch of dishes and assorted cookware up into my apartment, and came out to see what the noise was. She saw me struggling and immediately grabbed the other end of the box.

“Here. I have this end.” I couldn’t quite place her accent– American, maybe, but I could see her eyes and her expression.

Watching and reading people is my job; I’m a professional negotiator and I worked for years in college as a salesperson. The woman who helped me with the box had an air about her that made me instantly feel guilty about making noise, about taking up space at all. I’d seen her face as she left the apartment, cold and annoyed, and I saw the mental calculations she did– helping me would rid her of the annoyance faster. I appreciated her help, but it made me feel very small. Despite the two of us being about the same height– I estimated that we were just about the same size, she had a presence that made her seem taller, more central, more real. I wanted to fade into the background.

It also became apparent quickly that she was much stronger than I was. She could have carried the box of kitchenware herself, easily, possibly with one arm. I wondered if this was another calculation– did she not want to waste time with the usual polite back-and-forth that would ensue if she offered to just take it herself?

“You’ve got the silver two-door. Nice car.” I blinked. “How’d you know–”

“Trunk’s open, saw the other box like this one in it. I mean, lucky guess.” She grinned, then, an expressive, mischievous look that transformed her entire face. I was grinning back before I realized it. I wondered whether the cold, calculating face she’d worn a moment ago or this beaming, insouciant one was more “her”, a better window into the person behind the expression. Maybe both.

The two of us got the box up to my apartment easily, and as she stepped through the doorway, years of childhood etiquette lessons crashed down on me and I instantly wished I had something to offer my guest. Tea, I could make tea. I mentally flipped through the boxes that were strewn about the place to remember where I’d kept the pot, cups, and leaves. Satisfied that I could at least find those, I spoke up.

“Thanks so much for the help. Can I offer you some tea?” I expected her to decline– after all, I was fairly sure she was only helping me to minimize the time she spent distracted by banging dishes. I needed to offer, though; I would have felt guilty about it for weeks if I hadn’t, and I didn’t expect I’d see my neighbor much after today. I saw a flicker of uncertainty cross her face, another glimpse of that calculating expression, before the bright smile returned. I decided I was going to choose to believe that the smile was more “her”.

“Sure, yeah, I can do that. Let me close up some stuff downstairs, I’ll be right back, yeah?” I nodded, and she bobbed a quick bow as she left, backing out of the doorway. In the instant between her turning down the stairs and my front door closing, I caught a glimpse of the holster at her back. I’d missed it while wrestling with the box, and we’d been facing each other the whole time we’d carried it up the stairs, but seeing it now left me stunned. Guns were illegal here, what was she doing with one? Was she a cop, maybe? I thought cops had to be in uniform to carry weapons. Something else? My curiosity overwhelmed me as I unpacked tea on autopilot. Some deeply-rooted etiquette habit managed to even find some cookies in one of the boxes to go with the tea, and I set up a table and some chairs while waiting for water to boil and speculating wildly about this woman I’d just met.

She came back with a knock on the door, and held up a bag of tortilla chips and a bowl of something green sheepishly. “I didn’t have much that went with tea, but I’ve got some chips and…” She searched for a word, finally making a kind of duck sound. I had no idea what she was talking about, but I assumed it was the green stuff. A dip, maybe? Definitely an American accent.

“Come on in, it should be almost ready.” I smiled, more comfortable in my own home, serving tea to a guest.

“Thanks,” she paused, “huh, I didn’t catch your name. I’m Summer Mei.” I couldn’t help chuckling, hearing the name of this woman who was in so many ways my opposite. She narrowed her eyes. “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing, nothing, I’m sorry. Just a funny coincidence. I’m Ciruela Winters.” I watched Summer blink, and I waited to see how much she picked up on. After a moment of mouthing my first name, she burst out laughing.

“What the hell is it about plums? I don’t even like plums.” That’s at least three languages she’s familiar with. Interesting. I grinned in return, I also can’t stand plums. We shared a laugh, then I poured the tea.

“You know, Winters. I’m going out for drinks tonight, want to come with? There’s a new place I want to try, and if it sucks, I want someone else to complain with.”

I thought of all the boxes I still had to unpack, and how little I had to spend on frivolous things like drinks, how I barely knew this woman, and a long list of other practical considerations that screamed “don’t do this, Cir”.

“I mean, don’t worry if you need to unpack or anything, I definitely know what it’s like to unpack. Figured you might want to unwind, though.”

Screw it. I threw the list of reasons not to out.

“Oh, this all can wait. Sure, I’ll go out tonight. Sounds fun!”

This is how I met Summer Mei. I’m still trying to decide if it was the biggest adventure of my life or the worst mistake I’ve ever made.

AggroChat #96 – Good Grind Bad Grind

Tonight Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Tam talk games that are particularly good at grinding… and those that aren’t at all

aggrochat96_720

Tonight we welcome back Grace to the fold as she has returned safely from her trips out into the hinterlands.  Additionally it was a little close but we actually got Tam this week who finished his Infinity Tournament in crazy record time.  As a result we talk a little bit about the new Infinity Tournament scoring system and his experiences.  Then we delve into a length discussion about crafting systems…. but more importantly the way Warframe seems to make a mad amount of grinding seem completely reasonable.  Then I finally manage to understand why people are so enthralled with Dragon Age Inquisition…. because I absolutely hit my click point.  We also get into a long discussion about when grinds feel bad, talking about Limited Time Chase items in MMOs that stop dropping after a period of time.  Finally we get into a discussion about Sleeping Dogs as Tam revisits it on his backlog list.

Topics

  • Infinity Tournament Scoring Rules
  • Warframe Crafting and Grinds
  • Warframe Sorties
  • Dragon Age Inquisition
  • Limited Time Chase Item Grinds
  • Sleeping Dogs

 

The Value of a Game

Recently, a handful of game devs, mainly in the indie space, have started speaking out to players who question whether or not a game is worth the price being asked. It’s an interesting discussion, because it starts to expose the otherwise opaque economic workings of game development, and it brings up some issues that have been growing for a while now.

The Value of a Game

The basic gist is that a player might pick up a new indie title for $15 or $20, complete it in two hours or less, and think about a refund on Steam, or complain that the game isn’t worthwhile for the price they paid. It asks the question of how much a game is worth to players, and whether or not that’s enough to keep a game developer afloat. For a lot of indies, it doesn’t appear to be. An impassioned forum response by a Firewatch dev talks about how long it took to develop the game and how that relates to paying themselves minimum wage. A similar reply by a Brigador dev breaks down exactly why their game costs $20, with a surprising amount of transparency.

It’s a discussion that hasn’t come up previously, not between devs and players directly. There’s an expectation of sorts that game devs are imperious, detached, and separate from players. We’ve come to expect an air of mystery, a sense that the devs know things we don’t and are comfortable in their ivory towers, so much so that when a game isn’t taking the direction we want, we’re quick to siege that ivory tower, not realizing that it’s often less a tower than a shack, and less ivory that cardboard and scrap metal.

I’ve spent long enough working in games to know that content is expensive. It costs a lot to make, in time, resources, and manpower. Content creation is a joint effort between multiple different skillsets– art generating assets, tech creating the infrastructure, audio bringing in sound, design pulling it all together, and QA ironing out the bugs– and that’s a bare minimum. Generating an hour’s worth of content can take a month or more of time from start to finish. The more elaborate the content, the longer it takes.

The question becomes, is the return on investment for creating content worth it? We love content, we love consuming it, but by and large we don’t want to pay for it. Games haven’t increased in base cost in a decade– by comparison, the average movie ticket has increased in price by 30% in the last decade. Movie tickets are a decent comparison to games, because they follow a lot of the same rules– they have a brief window of relevance (2 weeks to a month), after which sales drop off immensely, they’re expensive to make, rely on having a lot of people see them, and are content-driven works. Yet, movies have gone up in price 30% on average, whereas games have stayed the same. Why aren’t games $80?

Players, in large part, aren’t willing to pay $80 for a game, regardless of how much it costs to make. Many refuse to buy at the $60 price point, and the existence of services like Steam are invaluable for extending the lifespan of a game much longer than it otherwise would have been– games only survive on store shelves for a few weeks, tops, if they even show up on shelves. The advent of DLC has filled in the gap between the current games price point and the cost of creation, but people balk at this.

Instead, we wait for Steam sales, or pre-sale deals, or Game of the Year editions, or whatever will let us get away with spending less on a game. On the consumer side, the pull is towards cheaper and cheaper games, and on the development side, margins get thinner and the ability to absorb risk drops, with many studios simply not making enough to stay afloat.

It begs the question of whether or not the ROI on content is ultimately worth it. Star Wars: Battlefront has clearly decided that it’s not– there’s no campaign mode, and regardless of the frustration from players at this lack, as of January it was exceeding sales projections. Other games have similarly stopped bothering with story modes and other poor-ROI inclusions; the modern MMO is a lot more like a series of lobbies than an open world, and more and more games are dropping singleplayer entirely, or are purely singleplayer experiences and drop multiplayer entirely.

My big fear is that it isn’t, and what we’ve been seeing with shorter and shorter games is the natural reduction of story content because it’s simply too expensive to produce. It’s not a fast process, but I feel like there’s a pretty clear map of average game length that trends downwards starting in the early-to-mid 2000s and continues trending downward now. Games with a lot of content tend to spread that content very thin, or fill it up with relatively trivial things that are very cheap to produce.

A big problem with all of this is that the inherent instability of the games industry means there isn’t a lot of institutional knowledge over long periods of time to reduce the cost of creating content. Most teams are starting fresh with every new game, and it’s very difficult to see long-term trends on the development side. The studios that manage to stick around and develop institutional knowledge tend to release excellent game after excellent game, but getting there is very rare, and often requires being in the right place at the right time, with a lucky release.

This is what’s currently swirling around in my head from a “future of gaming” standpoint. There aren’t that many examples of content creation to draw from as a direction for games to go to stabilize and become less luck-driven, and the trend for consumers continues to be to pay less and less for content. Now, this trend is squeezing games that don’t have the margins to absorb it, and don’t have the resources to recoup the costs elsewhere (via DLC or otherwise). I’m interested to see where it goes, because I’m not sure how it resolves.

VR’s Killer App

As more and more excited, breathless news comes out of this iteration of the virtual reality push, it’s hard for me not to feel like this all isn’t really familiar. It seems like I’ve heard the same promises, the same giddy excitement, and the same “this is going to change everything” sentiments that existed the last (few) time(s) this circle has come around. Back then, Virtual Reality was a great big helmet you wore with screens for your eyes, and you looked around and waved your arms to interact with an immersive 3D… wait.

VR’s Killer App

Frankly, I have yet to hear what’s different this time. What’s the magic sauce that’s going to get millions of customers to buy a giant headset for a lot of money when they weren’t willing to do it the last time? I keep hearing the promises— movies rendered in glorious 360-degree panorama, games so immersive you’ll swear you aren’t in your living room with a big helmet on, life-changing experiences that you could never have in reality, but in VR it’s like you’re there. I don’t doubt that any of these things could happen, but they’re the amazing things you get on a mature platform. The best games of a console generation are rarely the release titles– it takes a while for developers to get comfortable with the hardware and really spend time investing in it.

To get those really awesome, mature-interface applications, you need a product with a userbase worth investing in. You need a spark that drives people to absolutely need that VR helmet. I feel like game consoles are a good analogue– consoles watch for exclusives because they all want that one killer app that makes everyone absolutely need to buy it. Even late in a console’s lifecycle, those apps are sought out, because they’ll sell consoles and grow that ever-critical userbase. Almost every major console release has a significant uptick corresponding to a massive, blockbuster release, that game everyone just has to have that drives not just game sales, but console sales as well.

There’s likely a business/marketing term for this kind of product that I don’t know; I know the term as “killer app”, because that’s what I’ve seen on the consumer side. These killer apps have a lot of things in common– they’re big, with very wide appeal, and very sticky. For consoles, they’re games that people play for hundreds of hours, sometimes they’re the only game people own on their console and STILL play it every night. They’re that experience you just can’t get anywhere else.

Why did smartphones take off when 3D TVs didn’t? 3D TVs are/were the new hotness in living room entertainment– buy this fancy TV and wear goggles while you watch to have an unparalleled moviegoing experience. Problem is, you can have an experience about as good without the need for (multiple pairs of) goggles that you have to wear in your own home every time you want to watch a movie. The addition of 3D is not compelling enough to sell millions of TVs, despite the marketing push. Smartphones, however, gave us something we didn’t realize we wanted but quickly couldn’t live without: easy Internet at our fingertips at all times. The killer app for smartphones wasn’t programmable alarms, or fancy touchscreens, or the camera, or the built-in camera or notepad apps. Those things are nice, but being able to easily check e-mail and browse the web and get GPS directions got us hooked. The more elaborate apps came later, once smartphones became ubiquitous. Arguably, these things weren’t even new, they were just presented in a user-friendly way when before they were obtuse, expensive, and unfun to use.

So. What is it that VR is bringing to the table, at launch, that’s going to move millions of units and build up a userbase big enough to make investing in cool 3D movies, immersive VR games, and promising virtual classrooms all worth it? I still don’t know. The latest thing I’ve seen touted as “the reason to get VR” is an astronaut sim– float around in space and be an astronaut. It’s got the same problems as all of the other launch VR apps; it’s a cool experience for about ten or twenty minutes and then you’re done, telling your friend who showed you the app that it was really immersive and thanks for showing that to me, that was awesome and then you go home, and, importantly, DON’T instantly go out to your local electronics store to buy one for yourself.

As an aside, I think Augmented Reality (AR) is much more likely to catch on, because the instant applications are much more obvious. Get a decent HUD on a pair of glasses, get a set of haptic-feedback gloves (or even just fingertip sensors), and plug both into your laptop. Now you have a computing space that doesn’t require a massive desk and multiple monitors, yet gives you more (virtualized) screen real estate than even the most elaborate monitor setup. You can get as much work done on the bus as you can in your office, and you don’t need a huge, bulky PC or even a table to set down your laptop. It doesn’t require terribly much in the way of technological breakthroughs, and you don’t need a screaming fast laptop to get the full benefit. That’s the hook, and once you get enough users sold by that (relatively-easy-to-deliver) promise, then you can start looking at the really exciting AR apps.

In the meantime, however, I still don’t know what problem VR is solving, or what app is going to suddenly make masses of people decide that this time, they do in fact want to wear a big headset. It’s a massive hurdle for VR to get over– we’ve proven time and again that people just don’t want to wear a massive thing on their heads for casual entertainment. Even 3D glasses for the TV was too much. I’d love to see VR become a thing, it’s been the promise of the future since I was a kid, but I still can’t tell you what would get me to plunk down a few hundred for an Oculus Rift or similar, and I like that hardware.

I’d like to be proven wrong, but I’m still waiting to see how it might happen.