Uncategorized

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

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.

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 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.