In the penultimate chapter of our postmortem article about The Path, we take a closer look at the reception of our birthday baby in the first year of its life. How did the press respond? How did the fans? How well did the Path sell? And where? All this and more in the fourth chapter of The Path postmortem.

Enjoy the read.

The Graveyard and The Path are now available on Stardock’s Impulse platform.

The start of a new decade feels like an appropriate time to get ambitious. Out with the old, in with the new! Not that there’s going to be any extreme changes around here. My resolutions mostly concern a change in attitude, in philosophy. But, with any luck, they will take us further. And in the right direction.

While these resolutions have been bubbling up for a while, two things were direct triggers: Auriea’s realisation that her favourite games of the decade are all over 5 years old and our recent visit to the Belgian incarnation of the historical Game On exhibition where it became very clear how much more fun the old arcade games are than the new pseudo-narrative shiny next gen titles upon which I had based a lot of my hopes.

Independence!

We don’t want to make obscure art. This is a big part of the reason why we choose to work with digital media. We don’t even want to make art per se. We just want to share beautiful moments and elegant thoughts with people who are open to them. And perhaps, in our most audacious daydreams, we’d hope to make a small contribution to a more harmonious world.

Accessibility is one of the reasons why we don’t shy away from commerce. Commerce is an efficient way to distribute things in a capitalist system. And thanks to the abundance of the digital, we can sell our work very cheaply. But commerce also has a way of confusing an artist, of holding you back. Commerce forces you to think about seduction -even when it’s not appropriate- and to favour projects with commercial potential over others that might be more relevant artistically. We like our work to be accessible. But we want that to be an artistic choice and not an economic requirement.

We’re not very good at commerce anyway. We don’t have clever business minds. And our work is just a bit too far away from the ordinary to appeal to people who do. But above all, thinking about commerce -however exciting it may sometimes be- always ends in bogging us down, to slowing us down, to depressing us.

I want us to become less dependent. Less dependent on money, less dependent on success, less dependent on quantity. And focus exclusively on quality. This includes improving the accessibility of our work! While commercial pressure may motivate one to lower the threshold of their productions, it only does so towards a specific target audience, effectively locking everyone else out. It would be possible to optimize our work to be very accessible for hardcore gamers. But at the expensive of other people we might also want to communicate with. We want our work to be more widely accessible. We don’t want to depend on any specific niche.

None of this leads to any radical decisions. This is just a resolution that can guide us when making future decisions. As of now, I want to focus on self-sufficiency. And favour non-profit or break-even operations over commercial ones. Or even figure out ways to make losing money bearable. It’s ok if that means working on smaller projects. As long as they are “big on the inside”.

Games over

This year, I’m going to care less about games. And as a result, I will probably enjoy them more.

I give up.
I give up on my hopes for videogames to become a valid cultural medium.
I’ve been fighting very hard. I’ve been putting my money where my mouth is. For several years already. Almost a decade.

But the games industry is merrily traveling in the opposite direction. Videogames are not changing anymore. They seem to have lost that capacity. Sure, the technology still evolves, so everything gets more shiny. But this is not leading to any sort of evolution, let alone the required revolution. The desire is simply not there.

Because videogames are happy just as they are. The videogame culture is extremely pleased with itself. A few years ago, people were still complaining about “sequelitis”. No everybody merrily plays Hip Shootgame #13 and Cool Jumpgame #26, with no objections. On the contrary! Everybody gets very solemn and deep when yet another war simulator hits the shelves. Only to forget it within the first week of release.

Gamers, publishers, journalists are all very happy! Who am I to spoil their fun? If they feel comfortable in a juvenile ghetto that is irrelevant to culture, good for them. I’m out of here.

Maybe this is another incarnation of my desire for independence: I want to be independent from the games industry. And from the games format.

Games are fun. Let them be fun. And let’s do something else, when we want to be serious. Let’s focus on interactive entertainment that is not games (let’s call them “notgames” for now :) ). With a technology that is so versatile and powerful, why should we limit our productions and enjoyment to the single format of games, a format that has been around for centuries and doesn’t even need computers to exist?

I realize that it has always been our mission at Tale of Tales to explore the potential of the interactive medium. But so far, this has happened in some form of conflict with videogames, based on our misguided belief that videogames had potential to grow, to grow into a medium (which, believe it our not, still seemed possible only 5 years ago). Simply letting go of the connection, will make our job a lot easier as it will help us explore with far less constraints. Leaving behind the idea that we’re making a game, opens up a world of creative possibilities!

Notgames

But more than that, I want to stimulate research and development of notgames. Instead of continuously having senseless arguments with game fans, developers and theorists, I want to gather together the brightest ideas concerning non-game interactive entertainment. Without the noise and the distractions. Maybe we’ll start a blog about the subject, with news, essays, opinion pieces, debates. A place where ideas can be explored and shared and discussed. I would also like to commission designers and artists to make new non-game interactive projects. Maybe there can be a competition like those ubiquitous game making competitions, but about making interactive entertainment that is not games -far more exciting and certainly a much larger area to explore. And finally, I’m looking into the possibility of starting a sort of label -like a record label- to publish and distribute notgames.

If you would like to contribute to any of this, please post a comment or send email.

Happy New Year! :)

Source: VGChartz

People like playing games

Nintendo didn’t do much. But they were smart about it. Rather than trying to start a revolution with a brand new medium, they had a good look at the way people play today and made digital versions of those activities. They basically made it possible for people to play the kinds of games they were already enjoying, on their television sets.

Some may celebrate this as the breakthrough of videogames into the mainstream. I don’t. I hope this is just a temporary setback in the evolution of the medium. I’m not a big fan of huge corporations, but I do share, to some extent, the dreams that Sony and Microsoft have about the interactive medium. With them, I see videogames as the great new art form of the new century. Videogames as the cinema, television and pop music of the young millennium.

It’s not about getting as many people as possible to play games (they were already playing games, have been doing that since the dawn of time, there’s nothing new here). It’s about giving our times, our cultures a medium that we can find ourselves in, that we can express ourselves in. A medium that can help us understand our world, and that can help define it. Just as literature and cinema have done in the past.

Nintendo does not share this dream. They never have. Mario and Zelda and Pokemon are nothing like Scarlett O’Hara, Jean-Luc Picard or Romeo and Juliet. Nintendo makes games. It’s what they do. And they’re successful at it.

But the dream of Sony and Microsoft reaches a lot further. They want to be part of your life style, part of your culture, embedded in your society. They want the experiences you have on their systems to be meaningful and dramatic. They’re not selling fun. They’re selling mystery and wonder, spectacle and discovery, experiences you have never had before.

And they failed. Massively. So much so that they are hurrying to try and pick some crumbs left behind by Nintendo by quickly introducing some motion sensing hardware to their systems. The irony of the cats following the mouse would be amusing if it weren’t so sad.

The failure of the nerds

Nintendo got one thing right. It’s an extremely obvious thing. But Sony and Microsoft continuously fail at recognizing it. Nintendo realized that the mainstream audience does not consist of nerds -in fact, one could argue that that is the very definition of a mainstream audience. As soon as they did, they were instantly successful.

There’s a lesson to be learned here. The “hardcore industry” has always insisted that games were great just as they were, that it was just a matter of time before the masses would start playing them. They were basically expecting that everyone would become a nerd. Obviously this did not happen. And it never will. If only because language doesn’t allow it. Nerd and mainstream are polar opposites.

The games themselves were not the problem. Any expert will point out that there is not a lot of difference between Tic Tac Toe and Gears of War, or between Super Mario and Devil May Cry. But Nintendo -finally- realized that people don’t play games for the pretty characters or the great stories but for the systems of interaction that they allow us to engage in. And those systems are far better served by simple graphics and sounds than by elaborate theatrical displays.

The games that Sony and Microsoft have been promoting were basically the digital equivalent of chess sets with pieces made to look like characters from Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. Only 1337 H4x0rz would actually believe they were attacking the Death Star while playing a match with such a set. Most people simply prefer to play a straight-up game with traditional pieces.

Games and… something else?

So now we’re at a crossroads. Do we give up the dream of a new medium for a new century and follow Nintendo’s example of simply giving people what they expect? Or do we strive for greatness and realize the potential of this marvellous new technology?

Nintendo has made one thing clear: people want to play games. But only if the games are simple and straightforward. They don’t want pretty pictures on their games or sweeping stories. They just want to have fun. However, the same people who are having fun with the Wii, also enjoy a visit to the cinema. They also love reading books. Their eyes fill with tears when listening to their favourite pop tune. And they’re hooked on several television shows. These people are not insensitive to narrative, emotion or meaning. They just don’t want to mix those experiences with playing games.

So the solution seems clear. If we want to realize the dream, if we want to give the new century the medium it deserves, the medium it needs, the medium it is sorely lacking, we need to stop wasting this technology on games!

It’s a difficult step to take. Because we love our games. We love battling our giant demons and riding our fire breathing dragons. We love planning our global wars and feeling the rush of victory against improbable odds. But let’s face it: we’re nerds. And only nerds like this kind of stuff. In the clear light of day, a sober eye quickly recognizes these videogames as the superb kitsch they are. Such videogames appeal exclusively to an educated elite and/or marginal ghetto.

This doesn’t mean that it is impossible to create interactive entertainment for people outside of the core niche. People still love their stories, and they still need fiction to help them deal with reality. And people also love to interact with their machines. That has ceased to be a geek exclusive a long time ago -if it ever was one. We just need to work a bit harder.

Instead of simply skinning ancient game routines with high tech spectacle, we need to sit down and have a good look at our medium-to-be and understand what is so uniquely interesting about it. Instead of trying to use new technology to do old tricks, we need to figure out what it is exactly that we find so fascinating about playing on a computer. And translate this to new audiences. This is not an easy thing to do, and it will take a lot of trial and error. But the rewards are great and the accomplishment will completely overshadow any of Nintendo’s current successes.

Down or up?

Will Sony and Microsoft realize this any time soon? I doubt it. The fight seems to have moved from the living room to the play room, from the media store to the toy store. And they will battle it out right there, on the brightly coloured carpet, in between the Barbie dolls and plastic machine guns, while the rest of the world is aching for a new medium, a medium that can deal with the complexities of today’s society, a fiction that can help us cope with our confusing realities.

I feel we have a responsibility here. A duty, even. We have a choice. We can continue to make geek kitsch for the niche audience of hardcore gamers. We can follow Nintendo and make simple games with pixels and code instead of cardboard and plastic. Or we can do something important, something meaningful, something that actually makes a difference.

Let’s end with a long picture:

Sources: VGChartz, Worldmapper, Wikipedia

(…) if Machinarium sold for just $10 more, a price I would still pay for the game, many gamers would instantly be turned off of the title. Not because they don’t feel the title is worth their money, or even because they don’t think it’s worth $30, but, rather, because they are accustomed to getting indie games at super cheap prices, despite how much money, effort, love, and creativity was put into the title.

Geoff Gibson, DIY Gamer

John Jackson responds to this that the problem is not that indie games are under-priced but that AAA games are over-priced. And to some extent, he is right. He just doesn’t seem to realize, however, that what you’re actually paying more for when buying a AAA game in a store is not the game itself but the wages of the shop attendant and the truck driver, the heating of the store, the bribes to get shelf space, the advertising and marketing, and in some places additional taxes. If you subtract all of this, you are indeed only giving $20 out of the $60 you paid to the developer and publisher of the game, the same amount as you pay to an indie developer who sells their games via digital download from their own website. This sounds fair (as long as the customers can accept that most of their money goes to other things than the actual production of the game).

If AAA games would be sold online, and not through expensive retail, their price could be the same as that of indie games.

But what should that price be?

The $10 that we charge for The Path will probably not be sufficient to cover its production cost, in the end. But if we had charged more, in the current climate, a lot less people would have bought it, likely resulting in an even lower return on investment. Many independent games suffer from this problem. Gamers are only prepared to pay a small amount of money for an indie game. But because the games are very niche (the very reason to buy them in the first place), they often don’t sell enough copies to fund their own production. As a result, quality levels drop (iPhone, I’m looking at you) which makes high prices even more difficult to justify.

For a consumer, of course, low prices are nice. And it would be possible to keep prices low while retaining the quality of the products, if games would sell in higher amounts. This means increasing the size of the audience. Given that the audience for games is currently a sort of mega-niche, there’s definitely potential for expansion.

But expanding the audience seems to be very difficult.

For games to attract new audiences, they have to become different (new controls, new themes, new formats, etc). But the core market of gamers is extremely reluctant to accept innovation. They love their hobby and they don’t want anything to change. And if games are not successful with the core market, the chances are slim that they will ever reach an audience beyond it. As a result, ironically, only mega-corporations like Nintendo can afford to innovate. Because their massive marketing budget makes them independent of core market success.

So, ironically, the desire of gamers to preserve their hobby, will ultimately destroy it. By refusing to pay higher prices for their games and simultaneously resisting change in the medium (which would lead to expansion of the market and thus justification of low prices), they are effectively destroying the thing they love.

The solution?

Buy more indie games. Indie games serve both the function of retaining the traditional qualities of games as well as expanding the format to appeal to new audiences. And pay more for indie games. So they can afford to be as niche and special as you want them to be. And don’t whine about a few Dollars more or less. The survival of a species is at stake!

We’re happy to announce that today we paid off our loan to CultuurInvest for the production of The Path. We are debt free! That took about 35,000 sales. The loan only covers part of the entire production budget. But the rest was funded with subsidies and art grants with much more modest expectations of return on investment.

Ergo: as of now, every copy of The Path sold contributes to new Tales of Tales!
Or returning to an old one…

BUT, FATALE is ready for your discerning eyes, your hungry ears and your greedy fingers.
At 1 US Dollar per veil… :)

Click on the moon.

listen.

artists need to make money to eat and to continue to make art.

artists used to rely on middlemen to collect their money on their behalf, thereby rendering themselves innocent of cash-handling in the public eye.

artists will now be coming straight to you (yes YOU, you who want their music, their films, their books) for their paychecks.
please welcome them. please help them. please do not make them feel badly about asking you directly for money.
dead serious: this is the way shit is going to work from now on and it will work best if we all embrace it and don’t fight it.

Amanda Palmer

This the edycja specjalna of The Path, published by the great guys at Topware in Poland. It is the very first Tale of Tales product that has been published for retail. We’ve had some great reviews in the Polish press, so hopefully The Path will do well in the stores in Poland.

While there were not many independent developers presenting at the conference, the few that were there quickly found each other. It’s nice to know that there is a little underground group of people who all resist the big games machine. Together we can look down on the suits with a big grin while they are desperately trying to keep their multi-million Dollar enterprises afloat.

We had a little booth at the GDC, thanks to the efforts of Elfya van Muylem at IBBT, where we were showing The Path (on the iMac, by the way, that also stored all of the production files of our upcoming project Fatale -but nobody saw it). Lots of people came up to us. Players of the game, people who had read about it, students, journalists, game developers, business people. It was fun to talk to them. Made us feel our work really means something to some. So thanks to all of you, in case you’re reading this (leave a comment here! :) ).

As a result, we didn’t see a lot of lectures. But of the few we saw, David Cage’s sermon about the future of videogames probably made the biggest impression. If only because he was almost saying word for word, the kind of things we have been talking about on this blog for years. But in a “for dummies” kind of style, which wasn’t to the liking of all attendees, but still managed to irritate a few sufficiently to make them leave the room.

Basically, Mr Cage was pointing out that the games industry is on a crossroads. Depending on the choices we make now, it will continue to be a successful children’s toy production industry or it could become a mature medium on the level and with the diversity of cinema. His references to cinema were perhaps a bit excessive (personally, I think, we can surpass cinema with a medium that is much more adequate to talk about complex contemporary issues). But in the light of his own work, this is understandable. And his continuous praise of thatgamecompany‘s Flower made it clear that he is broad-minded enough to recognize applications of the theory that are very different of his own.

Speaking of Flower, we also attended Kellee Santiago’s post-mortem presentation of the PSN game, which had drawn quite a decent crowd. She showed several prototypes of the game, made in Processing, Flash, XNA and on the Playstation 3 itself. And she finally explained why Flower changes so drastically half way through -something that had always mystified me.

We had a hell of time hanging out with her in a typical German brewery/restaurant with fellow indies (where the Koelsch beer eternally flows) and on the roof of Microsoft’s fancy new building (witnessing the joint attempts of suits and nerds to combine coolness with opportunism) where we met Steven -Slow Gaming- Poole too. That was nice! :)

The next day, Miss Santiago reappeared in a panel awkwardly called “Designing Women”, also featuring Tracy Fullerton and Sheri Graner Ray. It’s quite sad that women in games (both as players and as creators) continues to be an issue, even if most of the women on the panel do see it in a broader context of lack of diversity, both in development teams as in the games being produced. Which connects the issue quite neatly with David Cage’s plea for greater variety as a requirement for maturity. Ergo: more femininity in games equals more maturity.

It remain a question if anyone in the games industry even listens to these voices. We have heard the same comments and ideas for years now, and if there has been any evolution, it seems to be an evolution further away from diversification, and deeper into the niche of games for 16 year old boys (or grown men pretending to be). The few exceptions that exist (Wii & DS, independent games, casual games, iPhone games) always clearly manifest themselves as different, as a break with the industry to some extent, as an alternative, while the “mainstream” continues to dig a deeper and deeper hole. Perhaps GDC-founder Chris Crawford will finally be proven right. He has always maintained that the realisation of the potential of the interactive medium will happen outside of the games industry.

The last session we attended was Peter Molyneux’s presentation about choice in (Lionhead’s) games. The thing that bothered me about his otherwise amusing presentation, was that he focussed so much on the formal aspects of game design. Which was confirmed by him calling choice a mechanic. He doesn’t seem to be interested in the meaning and content of the particular choices presented in his games, but only in their emotional effect. Seeing choice as a mechanic does nothing to change one of the major flaws of videogames (and one of the major elements that reduces the target audience to teenage boys): the fact that games are power fantasies where apparently insecure humans can get the illusion of control. I can’t help but find that a sad situation.

Which reminds me of the pathetic display that is grown-ups pretending to play music to the antique tunes of the Beatles on plastic toy guitars. Instead of learning an actual instrument and experiencing the pure joy of interpretation, we can now happily be reduced to sacks of skin and bones that can pretend to be a star with no need to learn any useful skill whatsoever.

This is what the games industry seems to have become: a pacifier for the powerless. No inspiration is required, no imagination is desired. You don’t need to be able to do anything, be anyone. Just connect to the machine and it will make you feel like you are a hero, in control of an empire, on top of the world. You and the legions of pathetic nerds, too lazy or timid to actually do something with their lives, content to just sit there and pretend it all away, proud of the billions upon billions that the industry spends on keeping them sedated.

read the summary of this talk on GameSetWatch.

We will be attending the European Game Developers Conference in Cologne on Monday and Tuesday. We’ll be presenting our work in the Flemish Pavilion (booths 162, 163, 168 and 169) in the GDC expo.

We’ll be bring some posters of The Path with us to give away for free. We’ll bring 6 posters of each girl for every day. So if you catch us at our booth (we won’t be there all the time, we also want to attend lectures and meet people), be sure to ask for a poster of your favourite girl! :)

This, of course, made me immediately think about alternatives. The indie scene is too valuable to be spoiled by banal commercial considerations. There must be another way! But perhaps not within the games industry…

The games industry is -still- largely a manufacturing industry, not a creative industry. What I mean by that is that its focus is on the production of goods that can be consumed, rather than on invention and communication, or even entertainment. One of the oddities about the games industry is that the highest selling games and the games that get the highest critical praise are -by and large- the same. Whereas in other creative fields, the opposite is true: mass market products are looked down upon by the connoisseurs and marginal experimental products often get praised.

Within the games industry, the only criticism on this situation comes from academic circles and small groups of dissident gamers and journalists. Most people in the industry (publishers, developers and audience) are perfectly comfortable with reducing a game’s merit to its commercial success. There is no strong desire to invent new things or expand horizons. In fact, every new idea that comes along is heavily criticised, not for its intrinsic value, but for its potential lack of commercial viability. Even on the indie scene, where most developers are primarily driven by passion and not greed, success is still measured in commercial terms. Up to the point where indie developers congratulate their colleagues when they are bought by a bigger company or funded by a publisher (which, in essence, means they cease to be independent).

Commercial gain trumps everything in the games industry. You can make games that hardcore hobbyists despise, but if you sell well, you’ll be respected (Nintendo’s recent success, for example). But what’s much much worse is the opposite! If you make a game that does not sell well, it is simply ignored, shoved aside and dropped into a bin labelled “irrelevant”. If a game doesn’t make money, it’s considered to be irrelevant!

Even the few exceptions that exist, always carry this mark of shame with them. Any article that celebrates the greatness of underselling but highly praised games such as Ico, Psychonauts or Beyond Good and Evil, will invariably mention that the game did not sell well. As some kind of warning to anyone who would dare to do the same. While, seriously, after all this time, does the lack of sales still matter? In any other medium, first of all, commercial success is all but ignored when discussing a masterpiece. And second, a masterpiece that might have been commercially unsuccessful when it was released, makes up for that over time, after being praised on and on by the critics (Van Gogh being the most ludicrous example of this phenomena).

When it comes to games, it almost feels like commercial considerations are an integral part of the form. And I wonder if this is because of the kinds of people that are attracted to games. Games are competitive activities. And striving to win is a big part of the experience, especially in the prominent single player action game category. Gamers can be quite ruthless. In fact, it is expected of you to be ruthless. Your enemies must be defeated, if not destroyed. That’s the main winning condition of most videogames.

These goals happen to be shared by business culture, particularly its capitalist variety. Morals are set aside, friendship is set aside, care for the community or the environment all have to make way for the desire to win, to beat the competition. Business seems to be in a continuous state of war, where things are permitted that would not be accepted in normal society. When all factors in any issue are considered, profitability is the one that leads the decision. A decision that does not support growth of the company, growth of the market share, increased profits, etc, is considered foolish. Is considered playing badly. And will lead to losing the game.

If the people who are running the industry work from the mindset of gamers, it should come as no surprise that the games industry is not a creative one. In a field where financial gain defines success, there is no room for experimentation, exploration, expansion, maturation. And there certainly is no room for considering the quality of people’s lives, care for the environment, art (only when these concerns coincide with financial gain can they pop up on the radar). Maybe this is why the games industry never seems to grow beyond its confines as a manufacturing industry. An industry that is doomed to cater to the whims of the market, instead of leading the community by example, information and discussion. As a result, games are doomed to be forever shelved in the toy store, between to the board games and the superhero comic strips, never living up to their potential to challenge the crown of fine art, cinema and literature.

To compensate for your trouble, Direct2Drive is throwing in 4 other indie games (Defense Grid: The Awakening, Democracy 2, Zeno Clash and Cogs). They call this the Best of Indie Bundle and charge 17.75 US Dollars for it. But you can buy The Path for 7.76 Dollars less right here!

Steam is doing a similar -if not even more spectacular- stunt by offering a choice of two bundles, each including The Path, and one more expensive than the other! At Steam you can pay up to 29.99 Euros for The Path (or US Dollars if you are so unfortunate as to live in the Home of the Brave). You do have to accept the 9 other indie games they add to the bundle (Audiosurf, Everyday Shooter, Blueberry Garden, Braid, Crayon Physics Deluxe, Gish, Mr. Robot, Darwinia and World of Goo). If you’re worried whether your hard disk can take all that, you could settle for the 19.99 version of The Path (and only get Everyday Shooter, Blueberry Garden, Braid and World of Goo extra). Steam considers these to be Top Indie Games but remember that The Path is much cheaper here. Only 9.99 weak American Dollars!

So grab your chance to pay more for The Path now! It’s a limited time offer!

Seriously, for those who worry about our well being, we totally approve of these discounts. We only get a fraction of the share that we usually get per sold copy. But the theory is that you sell so many more copies that you end up making more money than if you were selling at the normal price. And so far, this does indeed seem to be the case. I guess this means that there’s a lot of cheapskate gamers. But on the other hand, our work gets exposed to a lot of people who had never considered purchasing it. And perhaps they end up appreciating it anyway. So, its a good thing!

It wasn’t easy to shoehorn the DirectX-slave that is Quest3D into the seductive arms of Mac OSX, but with the help of the friendly people at TransGaming and Act3D, we did it!

Now there’s no more excuses to stay on the PC path. The OSX forest is filled with temptations. Give in to your thirst for Knowledge of Good and Evil. Come, Adam, come! I have a sweet and juicy apple here for you!…

The Mac version costs the same as the PC version. $9.99.
Which means Good because it is 666 upside down.

Get it here. Now.

Oh, and for the occasion, we have made some new desktop wallpapers (in Mac resolutions only) and… new Deluxe Edition USB sticks!

Thank you, Vikas and Blair and Daniel and Mark and Rob and Paul and Ferry and Remko and Jos!

Tale-of-Tales.com is now being hosted by the great people at Ion in Luxemburg (who have been hosting The Endless Forest game server on behalf of Mudam for years now).

Things may be a bit rough in the beginning. Some posts may have gotten lost during the difficult transfer process. Please post a comment if you catch an error.

Nice to see you again! :)

What’s wrong with this picture?

Answer after the cut.

This is what’s wrong:

This is a frame from an advertising campaign for the new Assassin’s Creed game by Ubisoft, a game I’m personally looking forward to a lot because I really like the first one. But what’s wrong with the people who made this campaign?

So this is the state of maturity in the games industry? You insist on rating even your “viral” advertising 18+ (the highest age rating that I know of) and then you still feel the need to deface a classic work of art to make sure that your “mature” audience is not confronted with seeing a penis? I’m shocked!

Here’s the missing piece:

It’s beautiful!
Thank you.

Gamersgate is now offering both The Path and The Graveyard for digital download.
It’s like a Tale of Tales infection is spreading across the games industry!… ;)

Were we wrong about the games industry being conservative?

You can buy The Path as of now.

Thank you for supporting indie games! :)

Next to this website, Steam and Direct2Drive, The Path will also be available through the subscription services of Gametap and Metaboli. They’re working hard to get The Path up and running by launch time.

Steam does a bit for independent game developers what an art gallery does for fine artists. It offers a commercial channel and, perhaps more importantly, a certain recognition of your work. At least that’s how it feels sometimes when people congratulate us when getting our game on Steam.

The uncanny, the unlikely, the strange, the incomprehensible, the silly, the crazy, the irresponsible, the weird has just happened: our little pièce de controversy The Graveyard has just been published on Steam. This sort of completes the project. The snake bites its own tail. The punchline is out. It brings a tear to our eyes.

Even if you had already purchased The Graveyard here (many many thanks for that!), we think you should buy it again on Steam. Just for the heck of it. Just to see “The Graveyard” in between “Half Life 2″, “Left 4 Dead” and “Counter-Strike” in your games list. For 4.99 US Dollars. It’s worth it!

Join, Fan, Follow, etc., if you’re into that sort of thing. We’ll try to make it interesting for you.

(I notice that on Facebook there are not one but TWO Groups devoted to The Endless Forest, how nice!)

And to top it all off, some TEF fans went and made a wikipedia entry for the game. It’s our first time being in Wikipedia so, we’re excited.
Hopefully its meeting the wikipedia guidelines and they won’t take it down.

Now, I just need to convince Michael that he should be a “twitterer” and “tweet”… he finds it all quite undignified. ;)

On our request, long time player, forum moderator and The Endless Forest Club leader Jennifer Stuber has edited together a lovely calendar exclusively featuring artwork created by the talented players of the game. The pictures were freely submitted by their creators and democratically selected by the community. The calendar clearly testifies of the amazing creativity that can be found among the players of our little free online game. And the print quality courtesy of Deviant Art is very decent, indeed. All proceeds of the sales go entirely to further not-for-profit development of The Endless Forest.

Get it here!

Penny Arcade comic of 31 October.

Here’s my gaming schedule of the past, say, 5 years:

And it doesn’t look like it’s about to change.

It’s not that I don’t have time to play. Or money to spend. Or that I don’t want to play videogames. On the contrary. I’m aching for a game, I’m dying to play! But there hasn’t been anything on the market that appeals to me. For years.

Five years ago, I was having a great time. There was Silent Hill 2 and 3, Black and White, Ico, Fatal Frame. And also Grand Theft Auto III and Rez. I even had fun with Devil May Cry and Tekken and Soul Calibur. But since then, with the exception of Animal Crossing, nothing has been able to draw me in. And it’s not like I’m growing too old for gaming or something. Five years ago, I was already 35. Yeah, I’m one of those “adult gamers” that you hear about on the internets.

Except, not anymore, apparently.
I want a game. I have the cash. I’ll make the time. I’ll buy a new console and a new television set if necessary. Whatever it takes. Give me a game! Please?…

Silence.

Surely I’m not alone! Given that the majority of people on this planet continue to not play videogames. Despite even Nintendo’s recent efforts, there haven’t been very many videogames that appeal to us -or that can deliver on that appeal. And we do want to play.

The games industry seems to have more interest in squeezing yet another triple A action game into that tiny overpopulated market segment and carpet bombing us with advertising so we would pay attention. While at the same time, elsewhere on the market, there is a wide open field of opportunity, filled with people who actually want to play, who don’t need to be marketed to, who must be so desperate by now that they will play anything you throw at them if it’s in the least bit interesting to them.

Easy pickings, I would think. But nobody takes up the challenge. And I remain gameless.

Phew! It took longer to write the post mortem of The Graveyard than it did to make the game! ;)

A lot has happened since the release. One of the major things being that the lady who was a great inspiration for the design of the game, my grandmother, passed away last August. Which is why I wanted to finalize this article today, on All Souls Day.

Margriet was my godmother. She talked about dying all the time. And asked if we wanted any of her stuff. Her table is now in our living room. And we’re taking care of one of her plants. I know she was happy to go. Her husband had died a few years back. Her body was shrinking and practically falling apart (she was almost 100 years old). Yet she remained extremely lucid. Hence her desire for death, I guess.

I wish the final chapter of our awkwardly titled “post mortem” would have been a bit more solemn and quiet, but we had scheduled to talk about the public response to the game and evaluate the downloads and sales. So we’re sticking to the plan.

Please enjoy the final chapter of the epic saga that is The Graveyard post mortem:

Out in the world

The Graveyard has been nominated for the European Innovative Games Award. We’re up against none less than Heavenly Sword, Crysis and Wii Fit! I say: bring it on! :) May the best old lady win on November 6th in Darmstadt, Hessen, Germany!
Other nominees are Sharkworld, Rider Spoke, PES 2008, Blake White, Somersault and Remote Impact: Shadowboxing over a Distance.

vs vs

BATTLE!

As a parent I find age ratings useful for helping me decide whether a game would be suitable for my children. I don’t interpret the rating as a prohibition but as a recommendation. A game with an age rating of 3+ would be interpreted as not suitable for my 12 year old son, for instance. Because it would probably be too childish.

But for myself, as an adult gamer, the age ratings are mostly useless. If I would apply the same logic to myself, then a game rated 18+ would be too childish for me (I’m 40). But that isn’t always the case. In fact “18+” is considered “mature” by the industry. As a result, I often end up being treated by a game in a way that I find completely condescending. More often than not, games -even those rated “18+”-, are designed implicitly with a juvenile audience in mind. As a middle aged gamer, I take offense at being treated like a child.

So I would propose to add a maximum age rating to the current rating system. Again, not in any prohibitive sense (not to make it illegal for the elderly to play games, e.g.) but as a recommendation. Something along the lines of “this game is recommended for people older than 12 and younger than 25″ for instance. That would be a major help and would prevent a lot of hostility towards the games industry from older gamers like me.