basicallilexi

@dasakamov: Cheers, for the response. Hadn't though of 'I litteraly just downoad half m games now, and they could be gone any second'.

BTW def not HW, I'm going to post it here when I'm done it. A retro retrospective on gaming ability to adapt, cause I'm willing to bet Google is going to announce a 'revolutionary' streaming service tomorrow, and xbox and playstation are going to have headline about how dead they are written about them, and then they'll continue to not die.

Hey everyone, I'm writing a piece on how videogames adapt to industry changes and I have two questions I'd be curious to hear people's opinions about.

How do you think games recovered from the crash of '83(beyond the NES was rad) and what do you think have been the biggest changes in how we consume gaming media in the last three decades(HD TVs increasing development time, things being expected to have online connections, moving from cartridges to discs)?

@soulcake: I feel really bad for the DmC guys too. The first game of there's I've played was Hellblade and after recently starting Bayonetta I thought about getting into Devil May Cry and honestly from the bulk of what I've heard, it would be a much better tone for me. Easier introduction into combat, more self aware humour, as someone not much into character action I'm a lot more interested in trying someone disconnected from a wider cannon than the story mess that 5 seems to present. It's been so strange seeing all these what went wrong pieces and videos on DmC lately and the people making them are very much so like; ' I know I can't say its awful, because it was actually pretty well received, but remember how ANGRY we were..... And were totally right to be; I mean the game director was a dick (he seems he's just super dedicated to a vision when you hear him talk Hellblade) and Keiji Inafune *whispers* wasn't directly involved, but set the company MANDATE to appease more western audiences! Yeah that game was a disaster because it ran at 30fps on ps3/360... and I know you can pick it up on ps4/xbone now bu--- We were right at the time to be angry and it wasn't disproportionate at all!'

@adamstambaugh as much as I support people playing offline or on mute, if they feel they need to, it makes me genuinely sad. I've met people I've been FB friends with for several years during my first Destiny raid and it makes me so sad my sister is reserved to never pulling in a headset cause she doesn't want to risk the hassle of it.

@reap3r160. Thanks for the lovely words, I'm glad you enjoyed it! If I was writing his piece again I'd probably put a much more historical spin on it and a give it a much more pessimistic: 'time is a flat circle' message, I agree things probably aren't going to change, especially any time soon, but I had to submit this to a student newspaper and knew it had to have a somewhat positive/encouraging undertone. If not I would have talked about way more dark shit.

@cikame. Yep, I'm pretty sure Dave Lang helped GB bracket out the worst fanatics in society and crowned a 'worst section of humanity'.

@ieee_gb: I was going to make a joke Dave Lang's fan bracket but this legit sounds like a kinda funny idea. What are the videogame equivalents to Drive and Fight Club. Great games but if someone says that they're their favourite game you know your in for a loooong conversation?

Skyrim?

Mario 64? (Maybe this idea is less applicable than I thought)

What about the opposite, what games being mentioned as awesome that may not have gotten a he recognition they deserve tell you your on the same frequency as someone else?

DMC?

Vanquish?

@yesiamaduck: Now if only someone could make us a barrack to decide what types of fans suck the most....

Glad you found some of the piece interesting and thank you for our honest feedback!

Preventing the Erosion of Gaming Culture: Why videogame developers must lead the charge in fighting their own communities’ toxicity.

(This was originally written for a, mercifully, unpublished student newspaper. So I swear I’m not talking down to you..... I promise. But I feel when I wrote those a few months back I raised some important points worth discussing, and with just how toxic the Anthem discourse and the Steam BS has gottten I felt it was worth re-posting).

The competitive videogame community has a problem, its one that simmers quietly under the surface, only to boil over with a disappointing regularity and ferocity: Toxicity.

Toxicity you ask? In the words of an anonymous Reddit user, ‘a toxic player is someone who constantly creates a bad atmosphere which interferes with your gaming experience’. In theory it’s someone who goes out of their way to make your experience fundamentally worse, however, in practice load up any competitive game; preform in such a way as to displease a team member and you’ll soon find a fellow ‘gamer’ willing to explain to you in great detail where you should take yourself and who/what/when/how you should do there.

Why does this happen? Has it always been like this? What damage does it do and what can we do about it?

There is no shortage of theories as to how certain games’ community have found themselves in this sorry state. Some of the most prevalent include:

Growing pains of a once enthusiast hobby becoming mainstream.

Gaming was once considered a niche and strange hobby for a particular stereotype: young, stay at home, social vagrant teens and young men yet to grow up, through the 80s and early 90s. From the mid-90s through the 00s the media shifted from presenting the stereotype of harmless young people in a phase using cutting edge technology for fun to reclusive and obsessional, underdeveloped men obstinate towards change. Naturally, this led to two mindsets among people who’ve been playing for years; wishing others never feel marginalised for something as menial as a hobby, seeking to make their favourite art form more inclusive, and open and those who due to this mild social stigma have garnered an, arguably, unfounded sense of entitlement and….

Protectiveness.

One of the key argument for those that act in toxic ways is, ‘games have always been competitive, like this, it’s part of them’, calling back to the days of simple competitive area based shooters like Quake and Unreal Tournament, where everyone had the same equipment and winning was purely decided by who had to best aim and most skill, fighting games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, which were home to some of the first competitive international tournaments. The stereotypes inflicted on these communities oft resulted in mass gatekeeping, against those whom didn’t conform to clichés that they once rejected, and an aggressive competitive scene. Those that felt they’d been boxed in, wished to cut themselves off from further ridicule. This paired with the sense ownership and the what for the safety of an unchanging culture has resulted in a part of the gaming community which despite now being in a minority in their beliefs (that gaming’s culture should be preserved as it was before it found its way into the wider zeitgeist. Back when they were a minority not for their attitude but for holding this interest to begin with). Time has only made them more vocal, intrusive and dangerous against those that seek to expand gaming’s horizons.

What effect has this sentiment had on the wider gaming community?

In short: a culture where harassment, death threats and abuse are considered part-in-parcel with being a vocal or prominent game developer, journalist, or content creator. Typical examples including: campaigns to get vocal progressive, female game developers/creators/etc. fired using mob tactics and slander, death threats to developers for having the gall to delay a game or change a mechanics or statistics within a game and most insidiously a ‘git gud’ (or get out) attitude being built among many competitive games. This mentality isn’t just seen in the toxicity of some competitive games’ communities but in the rejection of robust accessibility options for lower skilled or impaired people as ‘diluting the experience’ and ‘taking away from the achievement of beating certain games’.

Here we see a split in the wider gaming community, wherein many who push for inclusivity, diversity and acceptance are forced to hold a constant defensive position against an aggressive minority which feels that what was once a stalwart constant in their life is being co-opted by a group wishing to push agendas.

In reality games have always been a progressive movement where creators often sought to push back against the cultural mandate, expectations and norms of art. In the days of games like DOOM, Wolfenstein and even the arcade experience, this took several forms. Games pushed the envelope in terms of what was considered acceptable violence, the amount of time you’d have to invest to gain an appreciation for the art you were looking at and communities based solely on competition. These aspects have become common place in mediums such as film; with violence everywhere in summer blockbuster, franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe having so many entries we order their importance to an overarching narrative and more sports viewed on television than ever before respectively. However now this same ethos of pushing the norms of entertainment sees creators strive for representation of traditionally underserved groups (diverse characters) and inclusivity for those with limited access to other forms of entertainment (accessibility options for those with a disability).

This constant pushing of boundaries was prophetic before and will be again as we slowly see films regard diversity as a more normalised reality rather than an exception, yet often a hostile minority resists this progressive approach.

So, how should the gaming industry tackle this issue? It must be creator led. Extremely popular games such as the completive shooter Rainbow Six: Siege have gone from having a reputation for their unwelcoming community to being widely regarded as holding one of the best moderated and diverse ones, how?

It was surprisingly simple, yet risky. The Developers Ubisoft Montreal, loved their community but hated the small abusive section which had grown to the point that it would be difficult to play the game for extended periods of time without encountering one of these players. In response the Ubisoft, with a player base of 35 million, risked alienating a sizable section of their audience. Claiming toxic ‘trash talking’ was an integral part of the game’s experience, Ubisoft chose to instantly ban anyone who used a racial/homophobic/etc. slurs in the game’s in-game chat or was recorded over voice chat, including retroactively banning players previously reported and gone unpunished. Did they lose their base due to the loss of a ‘integral part of the community’? No, in fact the games are currently growing at a faster rate than ever before.

All the while companies like Sony push robust accessibility options for disabled gamers in their first party games and Microsoft-Xbox released an Adaptive Controller: a modifiable, cheap alternative controller for those with a disability. Resulting in a player base which now has more varied discussions, centred on more positive elements of gaming, as they simply can play more games than before. On top of all this, in the long run this has created more business for the creators by tapping into long neglected markets and creating goodwill for themselves with the majority of those that discuss games.

All this being said there is still a massive upwards battle and leading from the front is easier said than done. With some competitive games struggling to curb undesirable sections of their community in spite of the developers’ best efforts, see games like Overwatch and Battlefield mixed to failed implementation of teammate reward/punishment mechanics.

While some game developers do push for a diversity the likes of which have never been seen in another industry before. Other industry leaders like League of Legends developer, Riot, and Quantic Dream, studio home to overrated (very personal opinion) auteur David Cage, have been reported to ostensibly be boys’ clubs. Too often you’ll read reports of managers and company-higher-ups acting as catalysts for their community’s most negative members, condoning and even encouraging gatekeeping and bigotry in their own company. With reports from ex-Riot employees saying that if employees weren’t seen as ‘real gamers’, they were told they should get out and two riot employees, one former, on current, bring a federal case against the company for discrimination on the bases of sex, while David Cage’s studio has been caught with racist emails circulating among staff and Cage himself happy hanging a ‘penis painting’ in his office, with reckless abandon and zero sense of irony.

It’s an uphill battle. What can we do as community members and outsiders? We encourage developers to and celebrate when they do take positive steps. Whether that means taking a minute to thank Naughty Dog on Twitter for making the protagonist of the much anticipated upcoming The Last of Us: Part II a queer woman or Insomniac for including a rainbow flags on buildings around Manhattan in Marvel’s Spider-man, which they also loaded with options regarding granular difficultly and accessibility settings for players of all abilities. We must also, respectfully, be vocal when developers with resources and opportunities don’t make their games a better place for more players, telling them why, on mass, how it would affect us to be included or supported while playing games, explaining how this can inevitably only be a net positive for them in the long run. Ask developers like iD to fix their colour-blind options in their games, tell Rockstar you’re tired of playing as the same grizzled male architype, with unforgiving controller options and beg Nintendo to include Waluigi in more games (I love him, don’t shame me).

Games can only be made a better place by those making them, however, it’s our responsibly as consumers and players to vote with our wallets and be heard in our discourse to act as their supporters and critics, in the fight against toxicity.

Again I originally wrote this partially as an explain-er for people who might not know loads about games so I’d really appreciate any and all feedback and remember if you know someone saying shitty things in real life, call them out on it, you owe to yourself to ask for answers in person because someone online will rarely try to justify themselves!

@pezen: I agree with everything here; people still go to the cinema and have Netflix. When DVDs came out and when TVs started to be sold they didn't close every cinema.

If we're to compare consoles to film I think arcade cabinet to console was the huge drop change in consumption, similar to how the film industry had to fundamentally shift when TVs came out and people stopped going to the cinema weekly.

Microsoft seem to be smart; hedging their bets by keeping a finger in the disc drive and encouraging a streaming service. Google and Amazon could be flashes in the pan if they only offer streaming because, as its been pointed out. A LOT OF INTERNET STILL SUCKS. I just hope Sony and Nintendo don't lose to much market share to be competitive (release good games) by either only offering a bad streaming service or none at all.

This piece was originally written as an explain-er for a school newspaper on how videogame streaming works. I was told to pick a topic related to the future of gaming or tech and explain it to a dad or someone with the barest minimum of knowledge about games.

Feedback welcome, especially from those that understand serves and streaming better, this is an education piece for people with no knowledge and I don’t claim to have much more so educate me, make my analogies better etc.!

The pitfalls of live streaming videogames and the growing pains of cool tech.

Streaming is the future, everyone can see it. Like horses charging the horizon it’s the next Battlefield storming towards us. Similarly to the physical vs download debate there’ll always be a place for physical media, once internet speeds increase enough in built up areas it will become the primary outlet for gaming. So let’s look at it, it’s pitfalls and how the major competitors plan to tackle it.

What is videogame streaming?

It is the streaming of videogame gameplay not videogame livestreaming(I promise not to mention Ninja in this piece…).

As things stand now you have a box in your living room. This box contains a graphics card, motherboard, cooling components and all the other computer parts required to run a videogame. However the idea of streaming is that that box no longer sits in your living room. This box sits as one of many in a server farm somewhere else. This box and potentially several others (Xbox originally had planned on using cloud computing to allow multiple Xboxes to share the brunt of demanding games at the launch of the Xbox One, but we’re getting way ahead of ourselves with that) could play games and you would watch the results many, many miles away. You enter controller inputs at home, these inputs would be streamed to the serve farm and the results of your inputs would be sent back to you in milliseconds. This is why internet speed and latency is what’s been holding steaming back.

How does it work?

Think of it like the difference between a DVD player and Netflix. When you put a DVD into a player the disc is scanned next to your TV, the information on the disc is interpreted and displayed on your TV. Hitting ‘pause’ on your remote sends a message to your box saying ‘Stop the video,’ the box says ‘ok’ and the video on screen stops. When you watch something on Netflix imagine there is a computer with a hard drive loaded with films and TV shows which can similarly run(interpret) information (an episode of the office) instead of scanning it next to your box in the same room. The information is interpreted but now it needs a screen to display on. The footage makes its way through the internet and onto your screen. If your internet is slow the quality of the footage requested is reduced, if it’s fast it can handle more information, therefore the footage is higher quality.

When you hit pause this time there’s no box to tell the video to stop. Instead your command has to be sent over the internet to the farm of servers, one of which is computing the footage you requested. When you hit the pause button it’s told to stop. This is where input delay comes from and why sometimes it feels like it takes a beat between you hitting fast forward on Netflix and anything actually ‘fast-ing forward’.

What are the key problems with streaming?

Latency. When the box is in your room, the signal must only travel from the remote to the box. When the footage is being pulled from a far-off server, the message to pause is first sent to your TV and then your TV has to send a request through the internet to the server asking it to stop sending footage. Any footage that has already been sent can’t be stopped. This is why it can feel slower to pause on Netflix than on a DVD, you’re playing Chinese whispers… over the phone.

Why does this matter for gaming?

That DVD player I told you about just became a hard drive full of episodes of the office. Apply that to an Xbox. No longer does it sit in your living room but in a server farm far away or it could even be several idling Xboxes daisy chained together running all the calculations in the background when they’re not currently using their power to play a game for their owner. Interestingly, this was the original plan for games like Crackdown 3’s multiplayer. It was to have massive destructible environments that would see several Xbox Ones connecting to run one instance of a game allowing each one to compute an aspect of the game rather than one doing all the heavy lifting.

The computing power required for videogames to happen doesn’t take place next to your TV. You’re being sent a (almost) live video of that gameplay to your TV. This is only happening now because 10, 5 or even 1 year ago internet speeds were too slow.

If your connection isn’t fast enough it would be like trying to control a puppet if its limbs only moved two seconds after you pulled the string, nauseating. Or imagine turning your steering wheel and your car only deciding the wheels should follow suit a second later; not only would you have to be going through your normal driving, reactionary, thought process, you’d also have to keep in mind what you just did and remember it until it happens while at the same time trying to decide how much more you should turn the wheel to get around a corner. Like I said Nauseating.

Some games are better suited to this style of interaction between player and experience than others. It is ok for games where you are essentially making decisions and watching their impact play out then reacting. Everything from choice based adventure games to action games, with long canned animations you can’t cancel once they’ve begun, work great. These game have been designed so that you decide an action, you commit to it, you wait to see the games reaction and you continue. Either you say a line of dialogue and a second later you hear it and a character’s response(like a TellTale Game) or you run behind an enemy and choke him out while no one is looking (like in uncharted or Tomb Raider) – you ostensibly ask the game a question and it answers you. Hit one or two buttons and then the game will show you something cool. Things get troublesome when games begin asking you questions, that need a fast reaction. Like, think fast!

When a game asks you to react, is where streaming has fallendown for years. Let’s look at one of the most commonly cited examples; fighting games. In a fighting game, like Street Fighter, with two characters on screen you see what move your opponent is doing, the game asks you what are you gonna do about it, and you react; dodge, block or try to get out a quicker attack to interrupt. This has always worked best in person rather than over the internet. When online, one player is often deemed the ‘host’ (the more accurate gameplay, the instance the game is happening in) and as things happen on their screen the results are sent over the internet to their competitor, giving the host an advantage as the game is logic-ing out what is happening live for them, while sending that information to the other player after it happens.

Confused? Here’s an example; I punch the host, the host takes damage, on the host’s screen they see this and go to block, if we’re looking at the same monitor I’d see the animation start and back off. When we play online the game can’t predict, on my end, what reaction the host was going to have, so it shows them doing nothing, only for a few frames, but long enough that I commit to another attack. This attack doesn’t connect because when that message reaches the host, his characters hands are up and I’m left wide open to be countered. This can be somewhat mitigated with dedicated servers hosting the game, basically a halfway information hub between the two players to make the delay less noticeable because both player are connecting to the same midway point. This helps, especially for multiplayer games with many players. In general however, this is why fighting game tournaments can’t be held online and have to be in person. Any delay is too much of a delay.

How does latency affect streaming?

These same latency problems are inherent to streaming, it’s like adding more people to your game of Chinese Whispers, even if the message stays accurate, it still takes longer to pass along, more things(servers, consoles, TVs, controllers etc.) have to be pinged, checked and confirmed. This impacts any game where the game relies on your time to react to it rather than you making the game simply show you something. When streaming poor latency will make it feel like there is a delay between what you tell your character to do and when they do it.

So why now?

Basically our internet is fast enough now, with things like 5G on the horizon so that the time it takes these messages to travel between points where decisions are made is so short that the new limiting factor won’t be the delay from the internet’s end but the computing speed. The internet is getting fast enough that it’s beginning to no longer feel like we’re waiting for answers but like we’re having a conversation in person. We’ve gone from texting as fast as we can to having a phone call.

So how do the billion dollar mega-corporations plan on taking advantage of this infrastructure?

With millions of equally powerful computers(Xboxes) already in peoples homes, more server farms than you can shake a stick at and the sheer amount of people running Windows 10, Microsoft is an good example of a company that has high hopes and lofty ambitions to unite as many of your devices through one account, to quietly become ubiquitous. Only the other night at their most recent Inside Xbox event they showed off project xCloud for the first time in public.

If xCloud works as advertised it could be a game changer, allowing you to stream any Xbox game to anything with a screen and Xbox app, meaning you’d no longer need to even own a physical Xbox to play Halo on your TV. You would simply require access to fast enough internet and a bluetooth controller to allow you to play, theoretically, games at 1080p or 4k and 60fps or 30fps depending how demanding the game was on the offsite hardware. Their key feature would be that you could change devices and the games progression would follow you, play 10 minutes of Gears of War at home, come to a break, sign into your account on your phone and continue where you’d left off on your way to work.

From all the industry scuttlebutt we’ve heard this seems likely to be both Amazon’s and Google’s goal too. Convince people, ‘hey you have a google/amazon account already connecting your phone, laptop and TV so you can check your email on all of them or continue to seamlessly watch videos using Amazon Prime what if you could do the same for games? Buy this USB stick or download this app and pay a monthly fee and… Hey presto! Videogame-Netflix!’

With Mircosoft(Xbox), Amazon and Google going all in on streaming, competing for the game anything anywhere market what will the rest of the industry do? Nintendo will continue to do Nintendo things and make enough money to fuel a small country purely off of Pokemon-hardware-bundle sales. But personally, I think Sony will be in an interesting position. Back in 2015 it was announced Sony was buying the failing OnLive, one of the early game streaming services. OnLive were trying to do exactly what Microsoft showed off at Inside Xbox the other night, but at the time the infrastructure just wasn’t there. So Sony sat on the tech for a while only to launch PlayStation Live; allowing you to play PS3 games on your PS4 by (very basically) running them on PS3 hardware and streaming the results to you PS4. The service has changed massively since then to something more akin to Microsoft’s offering in Gamepass (basically you can download many of the non PS3 titles, I’m not getting into the complications of emulation right now! But it is basically a subscription service for videogames).But Sony still have the streaming tech. Personally, I believe Sony will offer a streaming service but it’ll be less robust than the other options being focused on streaming to a console or TV while still selling a box(mid-tier PC) for premium gaming experiences.

Basically Microsoft, Amazon and Google all want to become the interconnected Netflix/Hulu/etc. entertainment hub for games, Sony wants to be the entire box office film industry turning a profit (just no Super Normal Profits) on AAA/Blockbusters and indie experiences, saying that ‘this is the best way to experience them’, as we currently do. They’ll still sell a console and physical/downloadable games and advertise it as the true way to experience games with minimal lag or delay with the option to stream them.

And Nintendo? Well in this analogy they’ll keep selling Labos with Homemade covers out of the back of a sedan at a flee market. They won’t change, and their market will be there. But for everyone else? The race to fill the void of the morning commute is on and it’ll be down to who ever can offer the best service.

This giveaway has me bumble-buzzing!