I’ll be at the Format Festival – Academy of Words in Adelaide on March 13th. Definitely talking about non-paper publishing, but might also be chairing something else. Details here.

I’m also taking part in the next Meanland event – Reading in a Time of Technology – on May 19th at the Wheeler Centre.  Details here.

And, lastly,  I’ll once again be talking at the Emerging Writers’ Festival, sometime from May 21st to May 30th.

And here’s an article I wrote for Open Forum on the R18+ rating, the proposed Internet filter, and how they might affect the local games industry.

World Congress of Science and Factual Producers

On Friday December 4th, I took part in a speed-networking event at the World Congress of Science and Factual Producers.  What was interesting about this was being able to step away from the traditional pc/console space and think about new opportunities to use games and games technology.

In talking to the directors and producers, I had the thought that perhaps games were closer to documentary features than to narrative features.  The topics explored – happiness as a contagion that can be tracked using network theory, or a man who built his own 300-million search-and rescue empire – were built on the film-maker exploring the world, creating theories, and constructing the narrative as they go, which is a clear analogue for what players do in games.

Not to say that there isn’t room for narrative in games, but modelling gameplay & the reveal of narrative in more of a documentary style might prove to be a useful template.

Game Connect Asia Pacific

Or GCAP as it’s less mouthfully known, took place at Crown from December 6th – 8th.  I gave two presentations – one on games and games literacy (which was attended by only 5 people due to a last minute room change) and one on the creative process of writing and how that applies to games.  Due to meetings and general schmoozing (and also pulling together my writing presentation), I saw almost none of the conference itself (other than Tim Stellmach’s keynote & the indie games that I was judging), but came away with the overall impression that from an art & design perspective, the content was unfocused and weak – which is reflected in a single stream that contained all of the art, design, and audio talks.  As design is one of our local industry’s challenges, it would be nice to see an increased focus on it next year.

Details on the presentations after the fold.

Games and Games Literacy

This is a slightly modified version of a talk I gave at the VITTA conference last year on models of interacting with games in terms of their components as well as traditional literacy and numeracy skills.

“Today’s students have never seen a world without video games.  They’re an integral part of life now, becoming a new cultural artifact, a new entertainment medium, and bringing with them a whole slew of new employment opportunities.

But how do they work?  And what are the parameters for having a meaningful dialog about them with our students?

In this session, Paul Callaghan, a veteran game developer, will explore the elements that contribute to games literacy and how that can be applied to traditional literacy and numeracy skills.”

Presentation – GCAP – Games and Games Literacy

What does a writer do anyway?

Standing room only for this session, which was incredibly flattering.  Also set a new record for me – 60 slides in just under 50 minutes!

“Telling stories is an essential part of our cultural fabric, but in the face of a new medium, one in which mechanics, rules, and play are at the heart of the audience experience, we’re still learning how to work the thousands of years of accumulated knowledge in writing and storytelling to our best advantage.

An often-neglected discipline in video games, this session will look at the skills and craft that writers use when approaching storytelling, dialogue, structure, and characterisation, and how to apply those to video games without losing the particular strengths of the medium.  By dissecting the craft of writing, it will demonstrate the thought processes behind story creation, what does and doesn’t work within the medium of games, and why some of those boundaries exist.  It will also show how some of those core concepts are applicable to games without stories, informing mechanic, level, and systems design.

Looking to the future, the session will lastly speculate on the marriage of traditional narrative and mechanics, and the sorts of stories that can only be told in the medium of games by exploiting the fundamental gameplay forces of agency, choice, rules, and goals.”

Added 17/11/09: Marketing influences games more than ratings

Survey: Game Score-to-Sale Theory Again Disproven

A study from 2006 that concludes no correlation between sales & score.

When Pundits Attack: Game Sales vs Game Quality

This compares metacritic rating to overall sales for 1281 games during the PS2 era.

Each metacritic point is worth 7.7 extra sales per day

Some data extracted from between March 2007 & March 2008

The influence of metacritic on games sales

A more recent study from May 2009.

To gather the numbers, I used metacritic’s advanced search restricted to developers (here’s an example using Torus) and hand-copied the results straight into a spreadsheet.

In some cases, where data wasn’t available on metacritic and there was more than one sku for the game, I used gamerankings.com for a representative value.

To select by ‘unique’ title versus ‘port’ in cases where there was more than one version (both Heroes of the Pacific and Heroes over Europe are good examples) I treated the highest rated version as the ‘unique’ and the other versions as ‘ports’ of that. All versions of Heroes of the Pacific rated 76% so it’s just a function of a sorting algorithm that I took the Xbox version as the original. In the case of Heroes over Europe, the PC version rated 66% compared to 64% on PS3 and 62% on Xbox 360 so that’s treated as the lead platform and the others as ports.

Because of the way metacritic gathers reviews & collates data, there are omissions, so if anyone has additional data, feel free to email it to me or post it in the comments and I’ll update it.

For more information on the second half – opportunities for independent developers – check out Simon Carless’ and David Edery’s presentations from Film Victoria’s Digital Distribution Summit:

Simon Carless (from here)

Indie Game Metrics  – October 2009

Western Indie Game Trends

Digital Distribution Summit Video

David Edery

Digital Distribution Summit keynote

A more detailed breakdown of the numbers is below the fold…

The data was gathered from Metacritic for companies based in Melbourne.  There were 107 games released between 2000 & 2009, with an average rating of 62.82%, a minimum of 27% and a maximum of 93%

Since 2000, the number of SKUs released has increased from 3 in 2000 & 2001 to 18 in 2009, with a peak of 20 in 2007.

The nature of these titles has changed too, with most of the growth coming in the area of porting games across multiple platforms.  This has jumped from 2 titles in 2003 – 2005 to 13 in 2007 and 11 in 2009.

Broken down by platform, most of the titles shipped have been for the GBA (18), the Playstation 2 (20),and the Wii (16).  Next-gen consoles are poorly represented, with only 6 titles available on Xbox 360 and 2 on Playstation 3.

Looking at the breakdown by rating shows an almost bell-curve skewing slightly to the right.

Breaking down the ratings by year, reveals a downward trend of average ratings.  In 2000, the average rating was 81% with a minimum of 68%, a max of 93%, and a spread of 25.  In 2009, the average rating is 63%, with a minimum of 46%, a maximum of 76%, and a spread of 30.

The minimum rating is the one that has dropped most dramatically – from 68% in 2000 to 46% in 2009, with a minimum of 27% in 2007.  The maximum rating overall has dropped far less, but still tends slightly downwards – from 93% in 2000 to 76% in 2009.

Taking a look at just licensed titles, the overall trend is mirrored by the global average.  In 2000, the average rating for a licensed title was 81% and in 2009 is  58%.

Splitting this into minimum and maximum ratings, both are trending downwards.  In 2000, the minimum rating for a licensed title was 68% and in 2009 is 50%, with a minumum value of 35% in 2008.   in 2000, the maximum rating was 93% – also the global maximum – and is 70% in 2009.

Original titles, by comparison, have fared better.  The overall trend is fairly flat, although there are far fewer original titles – with none being released at all in 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2006.

Looking at the minimum and maximum, the lower values trend downwards slightly, but are also more erratic than for licensed titles.  In 2003, the minimum for an original title was 75% and in 2009 is 69, with a minimum of 38 in 2008.  The maximum rating for original titles has trended slightly upwards, with a maximum of 78% in 2003 and 76% in 2009, but with an overall maximum of 84% in 2007.

Looking at these values in aggregate, it can be seen that in years when original titles are released, they rate the same or higher than licensed titles.

So, what does all of this mean?

In the absence of other data (unit sales, profit, chart positions), it shows that in the core console & PC market, local developers have been producing more titles, but those titles have overall seen a drop in their critical reception.  There are any number of factors that are contributing to this and I’m not in a position to speculate on those.  What it does suggest though is that, as developers, we need to start thinking about alternatives to the current development model across all of the areas covered in my presentation – team structure, financial models, audience engagement, and creativity and innovation.

Head over to the Freeplay forums to join other people in Melbourne doing the same thing.

My session, What Does a Writer Do Anyway?, is on Tuesday December 8th at 3:35 as part of the Art / Design / Audio stream.

What does a writer do anyway?

Telling stories is an essential part of our cultural fabric, but in the face of a new medium, one in which mechanics, rules, and play are at the heart of the audience experience, we’re still learning how to work the thousands of years of accumulated knowledge in writing and storytelling to our best advantage.

An often-neglected discipline in video games, this session will look at the skills and craft that writers use when approaching storytelling, dialogue, structure, and characterisation, and how to apply those to video games without losing the particular strengths of the medium.  By dissecting the craft of writing, it will demonstrate the thought processes behind story creation, what does and doesn’t work within the medium of games, and why some of those boundaries exist.  It will also show how some of those core concepts are applicable to games without stories, informing mechanic, level, and systems design.

Looking to the future, the session will lastly speculate on the marriage of traditional narrative and mechanics, and the sorts of stories that can only be told in the medium of games by exploiting the fundamental gameplay forces of agency, choice, rules, and goals.

Here, the player’s movement speed is based on the mouse’s distance from the character – and the faster they move, the more they can see, but also the more noise they make, which will attract the spiders.

The gameplay is based on the Token Studios group currently in the Games Program at RMIT.  Working with them, I really wanted to see whether or not their core premise would work in a 2D space – it’s too early to tell just yet.

What’s interesting here is how much focus has been pulled away from the grid – which was the original element.  It feels like the more nouns that are added to the game space, the less interesting & dynamic it becomes.   All the player is really doing in this version is clicking on the red spikey particles, rather than balancing destroying the grid & stitching it back together.

Next step, I think, is to pare it back and consider how the player interacts with the grid because adding elements to the space doesn’t seem to work.  That might be some time because this week, there’s the Digital Distribution Summit, I’m running some workshops in Yarrawonga, and the flying to Sydney to do a presentation at Screen Australia – then we’ll be into October and the first of the Freeplay Experimental Gameplay Projects.