ASYLUM

* Naked and Angry

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Since in the past week, two people have seperately asked me where I get my t-shirts from, here's the answer: Threadless, who's previous motto forms this post's title.

In particular, the two asked about were Corporate Zombie and Zombie Donkey. What can I say? I guess I'm on a shambling-undead kick.

I have about 3 others as well, but those don't feature the undead. They are, however, still very funky.

* Pr0n

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The American Culture Wars continue:

Comparing pornography to heroin, researchers on Thursday called on Congress to finance studies on "porn addiction" and launch a public health campaign about the dangers. — SF Gate

This heap of horseshit from the religious right masquerading as facts — see under Lysenkoism — brought to you, and the US Senate, by Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., "an outspoken Christian conservative who has championed efforts to curb indecency on television". Brownback is, naturally, chairman of the Commerce subcommittee on science. Yay.

In case you doubt this is Lysenkoism, check out this choice bit of scientific thought:

Judith Reisman, a vocal critic of the Kinsey Institute and the field of sexology, suggested Congress require police officers to gather evidence of pornography at crime scenes to further research.

Since, being honest, probably everybody has some porn (or as we call it these days, pr0n) stashed away somewhere, then of course they could find it at nearly all crime scenes. Then they would shout from the rooftops "95% correlation between crime and porn!" — conveniently forgetting, of course, the 95% of healthy non-criminal homes which also have porn in them.

This is an "experiment" designed, selected to give the political result desired. Any scientific study would have a control group, which this does not, in the form of non-criminal homes.

At least, non-criminal until they criminalise porn itself, which is where this is all leading, by a slippery-slope of stigmatisation:

Layden called for billboards and bus ads warning people to avoid pornography, strip clubs and prostitutes.

So what is the point of asking police for this information, as it's utterly meaningless from a scientific point of view? I assume to intimidate and embarrass people when their choice of reading material is dragged out in evidence bags — I can't see any other reason. Or perhaps Ms. Reisman has a few gaps in her personal collection that need to be filled. Apparently, she's not alone, since according to Brownback:

Some of [Brownback's] middle-age male friends limit their time alone in hotel rooms to avoid the temptation of graphic pay-per-view movies.

Too... easy... a... target...

Must... resist...

* Did You Know

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Here's something a lot of people don't realise:

Game development companies don't get paid for their work.

Nope. They get a loan. They are expected to repay it. If they ever do, then in theory, they get royalities. Hint: This never happens, unless you have a "mega-hit".

Publishers claim these are "advances", like with books. This is not the case. They also claim they are taking all the risk, because if the developer never pays the loan back, the publisher absorbs the loss. This is also not the case, unless the game is a complete ultra-flop, or the publisher "cans" the game before it's finished (their own damn fault...)

This is a (legal, sadly) scam, but an "industry standard" one, so they get away with it. (I'm hoping Steam will be one more piece of ammunition to shoot this down. Maybe, maybe not. Time will tell.)

You see, the "advance" is paid back out of the developer's cut.

It goes like this...

The Scam

• The publisher pays the developer an "advance". This pays salaries during development, as well as purchasing computers, software, paying rent on the developer's offices, etc.

• Typically, it's not all handed out at once, but divided up into chunks that are handed out bit-by-bit during development ("milestone payments"). If at any point the publisher is not happy with the game, for the most trivial of reasons, they can and will withhold payment. This can and does make developers go bankrupt (been there, done that).

• For this, the publisher frequently gets to own the work in its entirety. This means that, for instance, the publisher may take the game Developer A has produced, and give the whole thing — code, art, tools, and "intellectual property" if you believe in such a thing — to Developer B to make the sequel. (Contrast this with book publishing, where the work and copyright remain the property of the author, with the publisher effectively purchasing the limited right to print and distribute it.)

• When the game is done and gets sold, a portion goes to the game store, and distributor, and a portion goes to pay for COGs, and the rest ends up at the publisher, supposedly to share out between themselves and the developer.

• But of this profit, ALL of it goes to the publisher.

Let's say the developer is lucky and gets as much as a 20% royalty rate. And let's say, for the sake of making the math easy, the publisher receives $10 on each sale, after the rest get their cuts.

So $8 goes to the publisher as pure profit. And then the remaining $2 also goes to the publisher, but this portion goes to "pay off" the "advance".

If the "advance" ever gets paid off, then the $2 royalties start to go to the developer. This almost never happens.

At which point the publisher says to the developer, "Look, you haven't even paid off the advance on your previous game, we're putting all the money in, taking all the risk, we demand to call some shots around here/acquire a stake in your company/give you a smaller royalty next time/drop you like a hot potato".

Of course, this is a lie. By the time the advance is paid off, out of the developer's royalty, the publisher has already made a massive profit.

An Example

Let's say the advance was a paltry $800,000 (as it apparently was for Half-Life 1) — at a 20% royalty, with $10 arriving at the publisher for each copy, by the time the "advance" is paid off:

• 400,000 copies of the game will have been sold

• the publisher will have made $3.2 million profit

• the developer will have covered $800,000 of costs but made no profit.

Most games never "recoup". Publisher tout this as an example of how harsh the games industry is — "it's a hit-driven industry!" — but of course, in the example above, the publisher will have started making profit after only 80,000 sales!

Finally, remember how the publisher owns the IP? That's a critical one. Not only does this restrict what you can do with your own work, because the publisher owns it, not only does it allow them to string you up by the balls on a sequel — it's also worth a massive amount of money.

Let's take another example: When Remedy and 3DRealms made Max Payne, they negotiated a contract that kept the IP ownership with them. After the game went on sale and was a big hit, that left them in a position of strength from which they could either use it as leverage to get more out of the publisher on their next contract, or they could simply sell the whole lot on to them — but for a much greater price because the IP was "proven" (had sold lots).

How much? $10m cash plus a further estimated $30m in stock. Stock in Take 2, who own Rockstar, who sell the Grand Theft Auto series.

So yeah. Worth a bob or two.

* Tasty

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So, the first tasty thing is del.icio.us which I am now using to maintain a 'linklog'. Basically, this is a list of "links you might find interesting but which don't warrant a whole blog post of their own, probably because I have no particularly pithy comment to make on them".

Eventually, I hope to import the most recent 10 links or so into the sidebar or something like that. In the meantime, you can view the links on my del.icio.us page, which is also now linked from the navigation bar.

[Update: I've also now linked it into the RSS feeds page (in the navigation bar) so you can 'subscribe' to it.]

The second tasty thing is Half-Life 2, which was released yesterday. I'm hopefully not going to go on at length about this, because a million people probably already have. But it's worth a couple of quick comments.

First of all, it's an excellent game, from what I've played so far. A lot of people are likely to exclaim about Valve's technology but, you know, there's nothing that spectacular there, tech-wise. Don't get me wrong, it's good, but I've yet to see any tech that I haven't already seen in another game. HL2 might be the first to include all those advances in the same game, however, or with the same degree of professionalism and slickness.

Design

But what really sets it apart, is simply this: design. It's all about the use to which they've put the technology. It's a remarkably cohesive game. This is an argument I used to have at a previous job: to be immersive, games must be cohesive. This is, fundamentally, about setting rules for your world, and then not breaking them. People would complain about this saying, "it's a game, it's not supposed to be realistic!"

This completely misses the point. Realism is not the same as cohesiveness. If you want a game that is not realistic, that's fine: you (mr. game designer) get to pick the rules, so you get to pick unrealistic ones. Then establish them for the player. And then stick to them, dammit.

Half-Life 2 picks a bunch of rules, and sticks to them... here are some of them:

• It's set in a fictional world but one which is extrapolated from the real world: real-world expectations apply, but there are science-fiction elements added to the mix. However they are not used as excuses for the weakness of the simulation.

• The gameplay is essentially linear, in that it comprises a linear series of challenges with little choice about the order in which you encounter them or divergent paths. However, you do have much greater choice than many other games in how you approach each given challenge, and they take great care to mask the linearity. A variety of techniques are expertly wielded — smoke and mirrors to keep you on the right track so you don't bump into the boundaries of the simulation.

• Physics is simulated realistically. There is a strong expectation built up for the player that things can be pushed, smashed, swung, tumbled, thrown, see-saw'd and stacked. Also that if a 'support' structure can be destroyed, then what it supports will collapse (traditionally in many games you can destroy supports and the rest will remain floating in space: also acceptable — providing that is a rule and is clear to the player and stuck to — but with its own consequences).

• Storytelling is heavily illustrative — ie they "show don't tell" — and always, always told within the gameworld and from the perspective of your character, Gordon Freeman. This enforces certain limitations on them — no "meanwhile, on the other side of the city" style cut-away exposition, no easy way to show stuff affecting Gordon directly (since you can't see him, as you're "inside his eyes"). But it thoroughly embeds the player in the gameworld and grants much more power to the story they can tell as a result. The fact that you retain full control over your character while you do so causes more problems for them — they have to accept that the player may not cooperate and, at the very least, 'put it on hold' until you do — but again, enriches the experience as a result.

I guess what I'm trying to get at, is that there's nothing new here, nothing that couldn't have been done before, it's just that people largely haven't. What Valve did, what I respect them for, is that they had the guts and clarity of vision to actually do it.

Now, they're not the only ones — the System Shock games spring to mind as other excellent examples of similar design decisions. Valve simply had more time and money to take this further. But it's very difficult to persuade people that it's a good idea — even though HL and HL2 are some of the biggest-selling PC games 'evarrr'.

Steam

Talking of sales brings me to my second point. HL2 has been sold using a system called Steam. This, frankly, is deeply cunning and, in its own way, another example of Valve's vision and long-term planning. It has taken them years to develop Steam, get people signed up to it, iron out the bugs, build up the supporting infrastructure, and so on. But it seems to be paying off for them.

Here's the thing: Years and years ago, Valve negotiated a wrinkle in their contract allowing them to sell Half-Life 2 themselves, independent of their publisher, electronically (ie across the internet). The publisher conceded this contract point, probably because at the time, it seemed rediculous: downloading gigabytes of data across the internet? Preposterous!

So Valve busied themselves making Steam. Which not only delivers gigs of data across the internet, it does it quickly and without hassle. It does it in a fashion that allows you to start playing the game before all of it is downloaded, reducing your wait further (and it fetches the rest 'in the background'). It's all tied into a web-sales back-end, so you can whip out your credit card and purchase then-and-there from inside Steam and start downloading right away. It supports auto-updating with bugfixes, new content, mods, whatever. For luck, it's also tied into a server browser/buddy list, so you can easily locate your friends and join them in a multiplayer game across the net.

It's a solid piece of engineering. It had some teething problems, but my experience yesterday was effortless: A tiny 600k installer, a couple of minutes of auto-updating, sign up with CC and click away. Leave it downloading in the background and get on with some work. 45 minutes to get enough data to start playing; 90 minutes and the whole thing was done. Seamless.

Here's where it gets interesting: The publisher doesn't get their usual cut of those online sales — that wrinkle in the contract, remember? The publisher is pissed as all hell about this, and suing Valve for a wide variety of things that seem laughable to me (they boil down to "Waah! They didn't tell us about Steam when we agreed to that!" — apparently they feel they are somehow excused from doing due-dilligence...) but I don't know the wrinkles of US contract law, so, who knows how it will pan out?

But in the meantime, the publisher held back the release of Half-Life 2. Stupid, stupid move. Because Valve just sold it via Steam, effectively getting a free 'exclusive' for the duration of the delay. The publisher thought they were OK, because Valve was contractually forbidden from actually releasing the game until their publisher did.

But not from accepting pre-orders. So what Valve did was allow people to pre-order HL2 and immediately be able to play Counterstrike: Source, a seperate title not covered by their agreement with the publisher, but which uses the same technology.

Let's see... wait a month or two, buy HL2 in a shop, and then play it, or buy HL2 slightly cheaper online, play CS:S immediately for free, and be able to play HL2 literally the second it's officially released and the unlock code is downloaded? Tricky decision to make ;-P

Why do I care?

Mainly because between them, publishers and retail screw the developers, and Steam is a chink in the armour of the current system. More on this in a seperate post, coming soon...

* Atlantis!

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"Atlantis!" "Atlantis!" "It's only a model..."

Yes kids, Atlantis has been discovered once again, this time off the coast of Cypress.

Atlantis, the fabled city, the only reference for which is a tract by Greek philosopher Plato, in which he describes it as being on an island in the Atlantic Ocean that was "larger than Libya and Asia put together" and as having been destroyed around 9000BC, has previously been discovered in Cornwall, Greece, Gibraltar (again), the South China Sea, and the Spanish coastline.

(Have you discovered the Lost City of Atlantis under your semi-detatched bijou maisonette in Milton Keynes? Do you have a special insight that has lain undiscovered by philosophers and scientists for over 11,000 years? Do you have an overwhelming need to prove to the world, using a heady mixture of Indisputable Scientific Fact™ and arbitrary readings of random passages of the Book of Genesis, that the ancient city will be reborn in this, the new Millenium? Great! The Kilroy team would like to talk to you and your case-worker now.)