Daniel Erickson Interview

Daniel Erickson is the lead writing director at Bioware, perhaps best known for his work on Dragon Age: Origins, and the highly anticipated upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO. Mr. Erickson has also worked as a game critic for the now defunct Daily Radar website, and has production and design credit for the NBA Street and SSX series from EA sports.

Thank you for taking a few minutes to speak with us today

1. What’s the job of lead writer like? Do you mostly co-ordinate other writers and their work? Do you get to do much writing yourself?

Erickson: It varies from game to game. On Dragon Age and Mass Effect, for instance, the lead writers are critical path writers, contributing huge amounts of actual hands-on content to the game. With a writing staff the size of the one on The Old Republic I get to do a little writing here and there but most of the time I’m more of the guiding force behind the fiction content for the game. As a former lead designer, I’m also more involved in the senior design structure than I think is usual for a lead writer so my duties are a bit more eclectic.

2. How do you feel about working with a pre-existing Intellectual Property (Like Star Wars) as opposed to one that you’ve been able to build from the ground up? (Like Dragon Age) Do you have a preference?

Erickson: They both have advantages and disadvantages. I loved working on Dragon Age: Origins and being able to come up with a world the team owns is extremely rewarding. It’s also a ton of work and means you have to educate players on all the rules, expectations, etc. You can’t assume any familiarity with the content. With something like Star Wars you’ve got built in fan appeal and a huge amount of content to draw from so you can just jump in and get started which can save months or even years of time. That said, there are a huge amount of Star Wars experts out there so you better know you stuff and you don’t have the flexibility to change the way the world’s mythology works to get around a sticky design decision like you can with your own IP.

3. Have you found writing for games has challenges you didn’t expect?

Erickson: It can be difficult to work in an aspect of game design that’s so much in its infancy that many people still don’t understand why you’re there or see it as a necessary evil. I doubt programmers and artists have to justify their existence as much as writers do. Also, like design, it’s something everyone thinks they understand and can do/comment on.

4. You’ve been quoted as saying: “You can teach a writer to be a junior game designer. You cannot teach a junior game designer to be a writer.” Do you think the two disciplines should be taught and implemented together, rather than as separate aspects of game development?

Erickson: What I was saying there is that writing is a specialty discipline like anything else in games. You’re either a writer or you’re not and if you’re not, you’ll never be anything more than mediocre at it. If mediocre is fine for your game and nobody much cares about the writing than sure, give the writing tasks to a random designer who enjoys it and move on. In the same way I wouldn’t bring in a screenwriter, train them to do basic design and then ask them to balance my combat system! And yes, cross training is crucial so that all designers learn about the complexities of and respect each other’s specialties.

5. Do you have a favorite bit of Bioware writing? A particular conversation or narrative thread that you thought was exceptionally funny or epic or spot on in characterization?

Erickson: I don’t know about a specific line, but I’m proud of the city-elf origin in Dragon Age. I did a ton of research for that one; made sure I really understood the subject matter and tackled some issues rarely seen in videogames. And I tried to do it in a way that I felt was adult and mature in the actual sense of the words, not an excuse for juvenile titillation.

6. Any brief words of advice for the next generation of game writers/designers?

Erickson: Writers write. That’s how you know you are one. Run pen and paper RPGs. You’ll learn a ton about player agency and writing your stories for the audience instead of yourselves. Designers design. Make board games, make card games, learn to do basic programming and make web apps. Anything and everything you can do to test your ideas of what makes fun.

Thank you very much for your time!

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Strife Retro Review

This is will be the first in a series of retro-reviews, where we go back and take a look at classic games from days past. In addition to breaking down their gameplay we'll also be examining how they influenced the industry and later games.

The now venerable Doom engine defined the first generation of First Person Shooters. It wasn’t quite true 3D, and there were a lot of forgettable “Doom clones”, but the engine was responsible for an entire classic genre of play that hasn’t quite been replicated since. While limited by modern standards it’s fascinating to go back and play what was produced as mappers and developers first got to grips with the ability to carve out three dimensional space. Today we’ll be looking at a minor classic called Strife.

Strife was the last real commercial game produced on the Doom engine, back in 1996. It’s largely forgotten today because Quake came out less than a month later, with true 3D and a host of other technological advancements that left the aging engine in the dust. While Quake was a classic in its own right, with considerable impact on the industry, it was also a huge step backwards in some ways.

As a first generation game on a new engine Quake pared gameplay down to the very basics. Run, jump, shoot, hit the switch, etc… In many ways it was reminiscent of the first Doom. Both games were very reflexive and visceral. Levels could get quite abstract, and there wasn’t a lot of emphasis on story or world building.

Note that I'm lugging around an inventory of healing items, spare armor, and other goodies.

Strife, on the other hand, was produced on a mature engine. The developers had a lot of previous work and resources to draw from. They didn’t have to spend time learning the ins and outs of their tools, but could instead focus on pushing that engine to its very limits. What set Strife apart from both its other Doom engine brethren and the first generation of its true 3D successors (and what makes it warrant a look even today) were its features.

Strife could boast stuff that wouldn’t really be seen again until System Shock 2 and Deus Ex several years later. Strife had an actual story that advanced through the game, not a three paragraph blurb in the read me file. It had voice acting, cutscenes, and NPC conversations with relevant choices. There was light character advancement, an inventory system, weapons with more than one fire mode, and even crude stealth mechanics.

The premise, relayed via a colorful narrated comic slideshow on the main menu, has you working as a mercenary freedom fighter. You’re battling to overthrow a group of fanatical cyborgs called “The Order”, who manage to come off as surprisingly creepy. In addition to running missions for the resistance and storming Order bases you search for pieces of the ultimate weapon: The Sigil. 

Hints at the Order's nightmarish bio-technological experiments and other atrocities abound.

The game doesn’t just push you through an episode of maps full of enemies and pickups. Strife is laid out more like an adventure game than a traditional shooter. Most areas feature a hub where you can resupply and heal up between missions. You can always return to any area you’ve visited previously, although on rare occasions major plot points actually change an area. The resistance fighters abandon their old base once you take a bigger and better one from the bad guys, leaving behind rats and a few supplies for the careful scavenger.

The graphics are as blocky as you would expect, but the crisp art in the comic-book style cutscenes and character portraits really bring the world and characters to life. Voice acting is concise and not too hammy. Strife may have the distinction of being one of the first shooters with a “voice of mission control” constantly chiming in to feed you advice, objectives, and occasional humor. The warmly voiced Blackbird, your radio handler and spiritual ancestor of Alyx Vance, is easily the best character in the game.

Combat doesn’t feel quite like classic Doom, mostly because of the prevalence so many enemies with instant hit weapons. Even non-instant attacks move faster than pokey imp fireballs, so cover and line-of-sight is actually even more important than one might expect. Enemies themselves still move at the leisurely pace of most Doom engine creatures.

The weapon selection is satisfying, and the flamethrower is appropriately fun to use on enemy grunts. Strife has the distinction of the most terrifyingly dangerous grenade launcher I’ve ever seen, sending explosives bouncing in all directions with every pull of the trigger. You have about a 50/50 percent chance of blowing yourself up every time you use it. That’s before you break out the phosphorous grenades, which leave free-roaming jets of fire that can clear a room of enemies or toast you in a fraction of a second

Don't touch the flame.

As implied by the two types of grenades some of Strife’s weapons have alternate ammo types and firing modes. You still need to manually swap between them, but it opens up some cool tactical options. The signature maguffin, the Sigil, upgrades and changes its attacks as you claim more pieces. By the end of the game it’s able to drop most enemies in a single blast, mitigated only by the fact that it drains your own life.

The game has optional side missions and areas to reward careful exploration. Depending on which missions you accept and which characters you choose to side with you might not even see some sections. I suspect it’s because of the staggering expenses now involved in production, but I can’t think of a modern shooter that featured entire optional levels. Strife even has multiple endings depending on your choices and actions, adding a bit of replay value beyond bumping the difficulty level. 

You can load up on supplies at friendly shops.

Strife’s non-linear design is not without problems. It’s possible to get lost, confused, or forget what you were doing. The sewer level stands out as a pain to navigate, made worse by the limited number of protective suits available and the large number of areas that will damage you without one. Then there’s the truly bizarre choice of making the game un-winnable if you talk to the wrong characters and accept the wrong quests within the first hour of play. It’s possible to screw yourself out of being able to progress and not receive any indication you’ve done so till nearly an hour later.

Un-winnable dead ends are a cardinal sin of game design, especially in a game with an 8+ hour campaign like Strife. Fortunately it’s only possible to lock yourself into a dead end at one point, and only near the very beginning of the game. It’s still a bad design decision, but at worst you don’t lose too much progress. 

Slap down a teleporter beacon to call in a strike team of Resistance commandos.

 Least it seems like I’m being too critical, understand that this sort of flexibility is still one of the coolest things about Strife. Many of our painfully linear modern shooters could benefit from examining the more open flow of old school map design. Anything to get away from the lockstep of a series of rooms connected by corridors that you march through in rigid sequence.

The stealth mechanic is most notable in that it exists at all. The more human members of The Order generally don’t start a map hostile to you, and can be silently picked off with your punch dagger and limited supply of poison arrows. Your other weapons trigger alarms that send everyone after you and cause shopkeepers to cower behind shutters.

It’s a cool idea, but doesn’t hold up well. It’s impossible to “ghost” any area, because the numerous robot enemies attack you on sight and trigger alarms when they do. Your poison arrows only work on the weakest enemy types, whom watch listlessly as the goon right next to them takes one in the throat. Still, kudos for even trying on an engine clearly not built for this sort of thing.

Strife is worth checking out even today. Finding a copy and getting it running can be tricky, but a good place to start would probably be this source port: http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/SvStrife The game is a fascinating bit of FPS history with the bad luck to come out just in time to be overshadowed by a giant technological leap forward. Gameplay is rock solid and entertaining, and it’s a great way to see a lot of shooter features implemented before their time.

 Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Darksiders Review

Darksiders is an epic single player action/adventure that draws heavily, very heavily, from the God of War and Legend of Zelda games. We’ll go over this in more detail later, but it’s worth mentioning right from the start, because I can’t think of a better way to describe Darksiders in one sentence. 

I know I spend an inordinate amount of space in my reviews talking about what other games a particular game is like. Every piece of media draws on those that came before it. Tracking a game’s “lineage” is one of the best ways to describe and understand it. Understanding what games inspired the creators lets us better understand the game itself.

War atop Ruin, the Red Horse.

Darksiders is not a difficult game to understand, and most of its gameplay elements are rock solid. The slightly overwrought intro casts you as War, one of the Four Horsemen and enforcer to a group of lava breathing Tiki heads called the Charred Council. Darksiders pulls, loosely, from Apocalyptic Judeo/Christian themes, and the Charred Council serve as mediators and judges that enforce the truce between Heaven and Hell until the appointed time for the Apocalypse.

As Darksiders opens meteorites rain down on a large metropolitan city. Angels and demons erupt from the craters to battle in the streets. War, understandably, thinks the Apocalypse is underway and enthusiastically throws himself into the fight.

           

The game has a very bold presentation. The art team has created a cast that would be at home in Azeroth or the Warhammer 40k universe, with a dash of Todd McFarlane’s Spawn. Characters have overbuilt, visually complex bodies fit for a comic book cover, full of details and props. Demons trail colorful fire behind them, and angels flit through the air on glowing clockwork wings.

Beginning at the End

Fighting your way through the End-of-Days serves as a tutorial, although the extremely heavy emphasis on combat is misleading for the later parts of the game. War is the incarnation of focused aggression, and the first twenty minutes has you hacking your way through Angels, Demons, and tiny fleeing humans. Demonic growths erupt from the ground and the city burns around you. Darksiders makes it clear that War isn’t here to save anyone, much less the day. He’s here to kill anything and everything that moves.

The city won't be this intact for long

After a bit of plot and a fight with a building sized demon War finds himself stripped of his powers and called to account by the Charred Council. Apparently that was some other world-shattering confrontation he busted in on, and not the real Apocalypse. He’s blamed for kicking off the end of the world early, and, for reasons that honestly didn’t make a lot of sense to me, sent back to Earth a century later.

           

The world is now a charred, demon infested wreck, but on the plus side you now have Mark Hamill tagging along as the voice of the Watcher. Hamill’s character is a snarling sadistic shade that offers occasional gameplay hints and reminds you of your objectives between heckling you. He appears to be enjoying the chance to chew the scenery.

The game’s voice acting is bombastic and entertaining. It’s always a relief when the developers make the effort to hire professionals. For bonus points, see if you can tell which characters also did the voices of Illidan Stormrage and Samurai Jack.

A dish best served with a side of delicious ham.

War’s emotional range goes from murderous rage towards everything he can kill, to defiant surliness towards anyone he can’t, with flashes of mild confusion every time someone feeds him a plot point. That’s fine. War is the avatar of violent slaughter, not given to introspection. Other characters point him one way or another and he happily murders everything in his path to get there. He’s here to bludgeon, maim, and dismember, not talk. And to be fair, Link doesn’t really have much of a personality either.

Beg, Borrow, or Steal

One of the common criticisms leveled at Darksiders is that it’s not an original game. This is true, but it’s also missing the point. Darksiders draws iconic elements from a lot of other games. The combat, finishing moves, and chests full of souls would be at home in God of War. The exploration, dungeons, and puzzles follow the pattern established by the Legend of Zelda series. The bold art style and character design could be mistaken for Blizzard’s, with War himself a dead ringer for Warcraft’s Arthas. There’s even a portal gun, ripped from the research logs of Aperture Science.

Did you know you can hijack Griffins?

There’s nothing wrong with using elements from other games, so long as you do it well. Heck, Blizzard hasn’t had an original bone in their body for decades, but that hasn’t hurt them. Where Darksiders succeeds, for the most part, is in recapturing what made the elements it uses fun in the first place.

If you enjoyed God of War you’ll like Darksiders combat. If you’re a Zelda fan the dungeons and puzzles will satisfy you. If you couldn’t stand Portal then the corresponding game segment will probably annoy you. Darksiders doesn’t parody or mindlessly copy the elements it borrows. It feels more like homage to what are clearly some of the developer’s favorite games.

Blood-dimmed Tide

The combat system is fast and furious. It’s not the deepest, especially before you get the chance to buy a few additional moves, but it is intuitive, responsive, and tremendous fun. All the elements you would expect are here, such as blocks, aerial moves, charge attacks, and so on.  War, unsurprisingly, is really good at hurting things.

Some lesser enemies can be grabbed and instantly killed in satisfying fashion, but most foes need to be worn down before they become vulnerable to a God of War style finishing move. This doesn’t require any sort of mini-game or combo; you just tap the appropriate button and War takes care of the rest. These kills are entertainingly brutal, but a few more of them wouldn’t have gone amiss. You’ll see the same “chop the legs off the demon soldier” animation a lot before the end of the game. 

War knows his business.

Mowing through grunts is a blast, and many of War’s stronger attacks send them flying or smash them to the ground. Bigger mini-boss caliber enemies, (of which the game has quite a few) feel a little off though. Larger foes come with huge health pools and very strong attacks. There’s nothing wrong with big tough enemies, but most don’t offer a lot of feedback as to how close to death they are and you don’t gain attacks strong enough to stun or interrupt them for some time. I found myself spamming the ridiculously useful dash-attack to dart in and land a hit. Enemy health bars would have helped pace these fights.

Darksiders can be unforgiving when it comes to health resources, although you’re never punished too hard for dying. Outside of non-respawning health chests and extremely expensive consumables there aren’t a lot of ready sources of healing, and I found the dash-attack such a reliable way to fight while avoiding damage that it almost breaks combat. To spice things up there’s also a “wrath” bar that powers a few special abilities, and War eventually gains the power to turn into an invincible burning demon for a few seconds, for those times when you don’t feel like messing around.

The first hour or two of gameplay is extremely combat heavy, which is actually a bit misleading. The game’s other major element is Zelda style exploration and puzzle solving, which becomes apparent as soon as you reach the first dungeon.

Dungeon Crawling

The maguffins you’re after this time are Demon Hearts, held by a collection of massive, bestial bosses. To reach each of them you’ll need to venture inside their lairs, and complete an assortment of environmental puzzles. You flip switches, rotate platforms, flood and drain areas, and so on. Some of these puzzles can be quite challenging, at least until you’re able to understand the mechanics and what you’re trying to accomplish in an area. It’s surprisingly cerebral, and makes for a nice change of pace between hewing down demons.

This place looks safe enough.

Each dungeon just happens to hold a new inventory item which is critical for solving the dungeon’s puzzles, as well as ultimately defeating the boss at the end. Some items, such as the boomerang-like “Crossblade” can be used in general combat, but others, like the aforementioned portal gun, are restricted to specific puzzles and areas. These items are also used for opening new routes and recovering hidden powerups in the overworld. Expect a fair amount of backtracking if you want to find all the goodies.

The boss-kill cinematics are suitably epic.

The boss battles are one of the game’s highlights. Each pits you against an impressive and intimidating creature. In true Zelda style you’re never just hacking away at a pile of hit points. You inevitably need to observe and understand their attack patterns, and then use whatever item you gained in that dungeon to make them vulnerable. Once you finally bring them down the kill cinematic are spectacular.

Darksiders environments are another stand out element. This is no generic fantasy world, but the wreckage of modern day Earth. The game takes place in the ruins of a massive city, and War swims through flooded subway tunnels and swings between the heights of skeletal skyscrapers. Despite the demonic invasion some places are surprisingly lush and verdant. The combination of ruined human structures, demonic corruption, and nature slowly reclaiming parts of the earth makes for some striking and lovely vistas.

Some locations are surprisingly attractive.

Rough Beast

While combat, exploration, and puzzle solving are all solidly implemented, Darksiders does suffer from a certain amount of blatant filler. Some sections make you slog through a series of identical mini-arenas with conditions like “defeat five enemies while in the air”. These would have made perfect bonus objectives or side-quests, but feel like a grind when they slow your progress.

There’s also a mandatory late game scavenger hunt that has you revisiting a bunch of old areas that I thought killed the building momentum. Darksiders is already a meaty piece of work, clocking in at about 8-10 hours if you just push through and don’t explore. I’m not convinced it needed these contrivances to bulk up its playing time.

Darksiders didn't need padding.

The way-point system that lets you warp from place to place is handy, but having to manually run through the paths of the travel dimension every single time quickly becomes tiresome. I realize it’s probably giving the game time to load the next area; and I suppose it’s still more interesting than staring at a loading screen. While I’m listing complaints I also encountered an odd bug where the sound became muffled, with some effects and tracks obviously missing. It took a restart to fix, but only occurred in one particular area. Aside from that there were no obvious tech problems and performance was smooth.

Combat and environmental puzzles make up the bulk of gameplay, but there are a few sections that introduce something new. There’s a rail shooter early on, and you eventually recover War’s fiery steed, Ruin, allowing you to gallop across open stretches of terrain and hack down enemies from horseback. The animation of Ruin erupting out of the ground when War mounts up is exceptionally cool.

The best alternate gameplay sections have you looting a heavy weapon from your enemies and using it to mow them down by the dozens. These guns are so heavy that they slow even War down, but give him massive ranged firepower. Riddling demons with exploding javelins takes a long time to get old.

Kaboom!

Reasons to play: A polished action/adventure. Fun combat and satisfying puzzles. Cool environments and bold visual style. Makes good use of the elements it borrows.

Reasons to pass: A few repetitive elements. While it doesn’t detract from gameplay, story does a weak job of explaining itself.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.

Shape of things to come

Hey folks. Today we’ll be branching out a little bit from reviews. This will be the first of a series of three short articles reviewing some of the topics discussed at SXSW. Later we’ll discuss how gaming is beginning to affect the world, and how we might begin to harness the power behind gaming’s underlying principles. Today we’re going to take a look at the changing nature of the gaming industry itself, where it stands now and where its future might lie.

What has become clear is that the gaming industry’s center of gravity is shifting. This came up at last year’s SXSW a few times, but this year confirms it. I suspect many of the people reading this have already picked up on this to some degree, but the current format for game development and distribution has reached its maximum growth potential.

Today, when a company sets out to develop a “triple A” title, they’re committing to a major investment. By “triple A” I mean expensive, high production value games like the Call of Duty series. Games that even non-gamers think of first when games come to mind. AAA titles take years, teams of dozens (or more), and budgets of hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars (at least) to complete.

Pictured here: Not nearly enough money to make a new Halo game.

This is a high risk business model. With that kind of an investment you need to move a lot of $50 copies to break even. If your game isn’t part of a well established franchise, like Halo or Call of Duty, or at least being developed by a highly respected company, like Valve or Id, you have the potential to lose a tremendous amount of your investor’s money.

The state of the conventional gaming industry is reminiscent of Hollywood. Both movies and games are so expensive and resource intensive to produce that developers are reluctant to take risks. A studio would rather dreg up an ancient or marginal franchise with the slightest hint of name recognition before trying something new or original. (I can’t think of any other reason why that live action Yogi Bear movie could exist) Big budget games and movies can live or die by their opening weekend, gambling years of work and millions of dollars on their ability to hold the fickle public’s attention with what combination of hype, media attention, and word of mouth they can muster.

At some point someone thought making this movie was a good idea. We must find this person and hit them repeatedly with sticks

We managed to speak briefly with Mr. Stojsavljevic of Jet Set games (a mobile developer, btw http://jetsetgames.net/ ) after a SXSW panel. He told us (slightly paraphrased) that “I have a friend who’s part of a 100 person art team. With budgets in the millions, conventional games are just too expensive to develop.”

In their defense, the current generation of conventionally developed and published games can be highly polished, highly playable experiences. I’ve played them, enjoyed them, and reviewed them for this blog. It’s entirely possible to build something off an already existing franchise and have it be awesome, such as with the highly lauded Batman: Arkam Asylum. Predictably though, given the costs involved, these games not often what one could call revolutionary. Gameplay mechanics and elements that proved successful and popular in the past are used and re-used again and again, to varying degrees of success.

All is lost! (Well, no, not really)

The trend I’ve been picking up on is that conventionally developed games have reached the limits of their expansion. Now, I’m not saying “The PC is dead! The console is dead! Trample your loved ones in frenzied animal panic!” That sort of hyperbole has already been tossed around entirely too much, and it’s both stupid and inaccurate. Traditionally developed games will continue to make money and enjoy popularity for some time to come, but they’re not likely to see dramatic growth or innovative ideas. They find themselves in a situation not unlike Arcades did years ago, facing the rise of consoles and home computers. 

The Rise of Agile Development

Traditional PC and console games are hardly in danger if dying out, and there will always be an audience for them, but they are not where the future of the industry can be found. New gamers and new ideas are going to come from other sources. The future of the industry lies down several branches: Social, Mobile, and Indie.

Small, but agile.

The advantage that all these paths have is that they’re agile. By necessity and design they’re much quicker and cheaper to develop than traditional games. They generally won’t have as much raw content, but the shorter development cycles, lower price points, and alternate means of generating revenue make the next generation of games less risky and more resistant to piracy than their $50 brethren.

The next generation of mobile and social games isn’t being targeted at “Hard Core” gamers. Gamers who are willing to sit down at a PC or console and play for hours at a time already have a wealth of franchises and companies to cater to their tastes. They’re an already established market. The people new Facebook games are being developed for have neither the time nor the inclination for traditional gaming. They’re not interested in paying $50 to experience an eight-or-more hour single player campaign or to slug it out online. They want to play, (dare I say it) casually. 

And you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that. Social games (by which, I suppose I should clarify, I mean games that are hosted on and that serve as an extension of social networking websites) aren’t in competition with traditional games. They pull from different pools of players, time, and money. Many social gamers may have never looked at a PC or console game before they found themselves happily clicking away on Facebook. The two types of games occupy such different “ecological niches” that there’s no danger of them cannibalizing the same player base, like you might see with competing online shooters or MMO’s.

We’re also going to continue to see the number of agile social games grow, because like it or not, casual sells. There are a lot more people with fifteen minutes to spend playing something quick and simple than there are able to spend hours mastering an involved and intensive experience.

Quick. Simple. Fun. Sold 12 million copies.

Mobile development has very similar strengths, when people aren’t already enjoying Social games on a Mobile platform. While I’m sure you could put together a deep and immersive eighty hour epic for the iPhone mobile games lend themselves to gameplay that can be enjoyed in bite-sized chunks, and that can be picked up and put down at a moment’s notice. The very definition of casual.

Now, we’ve had dedicated portable gaming platform for decades (Game Gear, Game Boy, etc). What’s changed is that we now have portable devices built to be phones and PDA’s and a host of other functions (frequently at the same time) that can also play games just as well, if not better, than those platforms. This means that people who would never consider buying a dedicated gaming platform are exposed to games through the tools they use for everyday communications and organization. Mobile developers might not be selling $50 units, but an impulse-buy, fifteen minutes of fun app costs a lot less time and money to make.

  

Future so bright I gota wear shades...

“So that’s the future?” you might say. “A handful of 100 million dollar franchises pumping out sequels for diehard fans, and a billion other people playing Farmville on their cell phones? Sounds dull.” If you were the type to speak aloud to yourself while reading internet blogs. Perhaps you are. I’m not here to judge. Judge you, anyway.

But no, we’ll see plenty of new and innovative games in the future. These will come from the most agile of sources, Indie developers.  Sure, there are a lot of bad Indie games out there. There are a lot of bad games of every kind, and a lot of bad Indie art, music, and other media.  That’s the nature of the beast. 

Seriously, go download and play this if you haven't already.

        But Indie developers can afford to take risks that others can’t or won’t. Sometimes those risks pay off, and we get amazing new ideas like Minecraft, or polished gems like Iji. (http://www.remar.se/daniel/iji.php) Just read our write up of some of the games IndiePub demoed at SXSW this year. Our thriving Indie scene is one of gaming’s greatest assets right now. Their ideas will provide the force to push gaming forward. Those ideas will then, of course, be endlessly copied, imitated, and co-opted, but that’s the circle of life. They have to come from somewhere.

Articles copyright James Cousar, games and images copyright their respective owners.