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Original post by cowsarenotevil
How is it a game, though?

-~-The Cow of Darkness-~-

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With the new "modify the NPC to look like your boss, ex, mean brother, etc." I could see it selling well.

But you touch on a subtler, more shall we say, salient point. How is it a game?

I had a recent shock the other day at a sports bar while trying to hit on the bartendress. An ESPN special was playing on the Stanley Cup. The cup was on display, and selected hard core hockey fans (lest we forget, sportgames are still games) got to actually view, be in the same room as, and marvel at the magnificent trophy.

And marvel they did. The various looks of awe, wonderment and outright worship on the faces of these fans of not only the trophy but the residual footprint of influence this simple sport had in the minds of these fans of the game willing to spend a hundred times a year more on their game that they love than any computer gamer would. This game influences their dress and display: they paint their faces, drive with team flags proudly waving off of their cars as if it were the 3rd army in a hummer outside Bhagdad.

No fans in our end of the game business do that. Even with the biggest games with a hundred times the preparation and thoughfulness and design values.

This simple game reaches so far into the pocketbook and the mind that it made me realize there are two very important points all computer game designers ought to remember.

One, that these games, will millions of fans and incredible incomes, simply need to remember that the bar (or barrier to entry in the marketing vernacular) in the game world is so low that all a player need do is be able to score, have more points that the other guy (and that is not even necessary in all designs) and win. So be sure to pack a paleolithic caveman club in with your next space adventure, in order to increase sales and have your players wearing Tyrannosaurus prints into the mall on their way to Gamespot.

Two, maybe we are setting the bar too high in our designs. Perhaps three layers of shift and control hot keys to access mechanical or feature functions has complexified what is usually simple and a great moneymaker in lots of other cases into a marginal market performer somebody overdesigned for.

Though I think the days of making something as simple as checkers and as profitable as pong are over, simply because too many people with too many approaches have worked perhaps the last fun tetris or tile clone out of the realm of unique and original captivating and fun game design, and, the fans, the people who spend the money, think and make purchase decisions on the level of the guy with the paint on his face, the hudred dollar team jersey on his back, the posters and team flags in his bedroom and the limited edition plates of the trophy, the team and the coach in his hutch, the team name license plate bracket on his harley, truck and wife's car and kid's lunch pail he takes to school.

How many Halo T-shirts really sold? Was there even a coffee mug? Has anybody ever done some market research to determine how many season ticket holders to a major sports franchise team also own the video game of the team?

What lessons are we missing in our end of the games business that prevents us from enjoying this kind of income and poplarity, nay, instituional reverece?

Some suggestions: There's no stanley cup of computer games, and, uuh, lookit, it's big, silver and pretty and I want it in our arena (real or virtual).

So maybe if he designed into the torture game gaining different kinds of torture tools as a benefit or gaining expertice and experience points, and also added a scoring mechanism that added bones coins tossed from the crowd for a good, gory show if the player is able to, a, make the screams the loudest, longest and most anguishing, b, keep the 'torturee' conscious or alive the longest, d, best combinations of torture for overall 'agony rating', and e, a big shiney torture trophy cutscene between levels hawked by MC torture, and his uberhottie sidekick, Torturella. Mmmm or ermmm?

Comments welcome.





[edited by - adventuredesign on May 10, 2003 11:57:45 PM]

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Original post by adventuredesign
[...]these fans of the game willing to spend a hundred times a year more on their game that they love than any computer gamer would. [...]

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It depends on who you are talking about. Many people pay hundreds a month for a game server for various online games (counter-strike is a good example). I''m in a clan that is just a group of friends, and we pay $48/month for a counter-strike server for 16 players and that is the cheapest we could find anywhere. The server companies with reputations all charge ~$150 for a server with the same number of player slots, and there are people that have 32 player servers from those companies ($400/month). Thats a lot of money in my book, almost $5000 a year to have a server 32 people can play on at the same time.

[edited by - Big Brother on January 1, 1984 12:00:00 AM]

There was an arcade shoooting game called Chiller that a buddy of mine developed back in the early days of gaming, and it had people in torture devices and some of the things that you shot would cause the devices to do things.
The game was actually in arcades so, there is probably still a market for it.

http://www.coldmilk.org - Quenching the thirst of the Game industry

Actually, they have tywo stress reliever games similar to this: Postal and Postal 2. The object of the game is to kill everything that moves. There isn''t a story beyond that.

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Original post by Extrarius

It depends on who you are talking about. Many people pay hundreds a month for a game server for various online games (counter-strike is a good example). I''m in a clan that is just a group of friends, and we pay $48/month for a counter-strike server for 16 players and that is the cheapest we could find anywhere. The server companies with reputations all charge ~$150 for a server with the same number of player slots, and there are people that have 32 player servers from those companies ($400/month). Thats a lot of money in my book, almost $5000 a year to have a server 32 people can play on at the same time.

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Yes, I agree some people are making good money. But there still is no real comparison. For example:

[quote}
...a combined 700,000 people play the five most popular online MMOGs, said Jay Horwitz, industry analyst at Jupiter Research.


Do those 700,000 + plus player have MMOG mugs, T-shirts, posters, flags, decals -- all the brand extending and lucrative merchandising rights add on sales the original example has? No.

My question is why not?

I suspect a possible reason may be that nobody''s tried, or it was shown it was not viable for this aspect of gaming. After all, gambling, another form of gaming (perhaps some of the oldest forms of game design extant, except the score was determined with money and not points) there are not a lot of "I love gambling with Republican Moralist Icons in Vegas''s Paradise Lost!" T-shirts out there. Maybe it won''t work. But I suspect that it is not generally true; the right kind of game has just not come along yet to support that kind of merchandising.

I remember when EQ first came out and I was working at Software, Etc.. Eash store was give a map to the EQ kingdom in a really nice cutchings ink imitated cloth map, simulating aged ancient maps. They were available for the first fifty or hundred buyers. The customers were not told that exclusive availability in significant quantities were available at al SE''s. I will also remember, or never forget, actually, the look on the gamers faces who got to the mall at 4 a.m. to buy pre-ordered titles at store opening time. It was like the look on the face of the rabid fan in awe at the stanley cup.

Addy

-ninety five percent of the time, even the fastest will instinctively move to the right. For the lefties who don''t, train the left side to be as fast and strong as the right side. If you can''t fight from both sides equally well, how trained are you? There should be no such things as favorite moves.

-Tak Kubota, the man who could literally punch the horns off a charging bull.

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Original post by Zefrieg
How about a game where you tortured people. You could put people on several devices and use a mydrid of tools to torture them.

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How about the interesting game of Boong-Ga Boong-Ga(some of the links on that page are NSFW, but the page itself is SFW, with a rating about PG-13)

You get a finger controllor, and a virtual butt, and you poke the but and watch the virtual people scream!
Then you get prizes on how well you poked.

I doubt your torture game will go over well. In video game circles, poorly designed christian games get more sales than poorly designed violent games.

adventuredesign: just a thought but maybe the difference is in the participation level of the people.

to clarify: the audience buys up the goods to feel as though they''re actually participating whereas the game player is participating in just installing, loading and becoming immersed/interacting with the game.

My reason for this assumption? The hockey players. I know a few low level hockey players who have no merchandise from their teams and the few they do have is because they were given them.

I''m sorry, but I''ve got to say it... someone does..

Some of you people make me sick.

it makes me sick that this makes someone sick!
and it makes me sick that i''m sick of sick people.
word.

i saw a news special the other night about "video games that encourage violence and racism"... while i usually avoid TV news shows, i had to see what great game they were going to blame for the way society is crumbling... but it turned out that it really WAS a video game promoting genocide ("white law" was the game i think, made by some KKK loonies in colorado). either way, the game looked pathetic, i mean sub-wolfenstein-3d (the first one)quality.

if i had a point, it would go here.

Awesome idea.
Violence kicks ass.