I think the point is more along the lines of 'if we want this type of game on the Wii, and somebody really tries to make it, and the critical reception is good (like lots of the Wii games lately that are 'mature') but the sales are bad, then developers are just going to assume that these games are all going to sell poorly.

Maybe it's the critical reception that needs to be changed, or maybe it's just not the right demographic. I'm just saying sometimes it's good to support something on principle because down the road it's going to pay off ... like when Radiohead offers their album for 'whatever you want to pay,' sure you would love to have it for free, and some people will do that, but if *everybody* does it then it's not going to turn into a viable option for musicians.

Also the point about customers not knowing what they want - absolutely right.

Posted some thoughts about how gamers confuse developers and we really need to work on a more unified front - check it out with all the pictures etc. if you want otherwise I posted the full thing below:

If we ask for a game in which Broccoli Man and his sidekick Bariatric Bob beat the hell out of overweight kids to defeat Dr. Obesity, and Square Enix makes it, then we'd better buy it or at least hold off on the complaints. If we're clamoring for something new and somebody finally tries a revolutionary mechanic, we should support themeven if it's part of aterrible game. If we don't practice positive reinforcement for developers, the industry will stagnate.

Gamers are anodd bunch. We want game developers to have an original vision that they follow unflinchingly, yet any deviation from what we expect from a game isa travesty. Developers are in a no-win scenario. How do we expect the industry to effectively serve us if we give conflicting signals? I want to discuss a few situations in which gamers say one thing and do another, as well as how listening to fans can be both beneficial and detrimental to the development process.

When you're right, you're right

Before I jump into the discussion, I want to emphasize that there are certain situations in which developers rightfully ignore fans and the signals we send. When a developer has crafted something special, they know that the community will come around in the end regardless of people's resistance to change.

Diablo II had a monotonousart **** and it likely deterred some people from trying the game (yes, it could have been even more popular than it was). So when Diablo III screens first came out, all the petitions in the world wouldn't change the tone, and I'm pretty confident when the final product is released, that vocal minority will come around. The threat of 'I won't play your game unless you change this' from somebody who cares enough to sign an internet petition about a game to be released 2+ years in the future lacks credibility to say the least.

Similarly, when Infinity Ward developed a matchmaking system that they know is going to improve the experience and open it up to a broader demographic, all the petitions in the world to bring back dedicated servers aren't going to make a difference. Sure, some people will lose out, but it's all about maximum gain, and the relatively small 'hardcore PC community' is trivial in the long run. Go ahead, don't buy MW2. Their accountants will think it was a rounding error.

These exceptions aside, there are many situations where developers are looking for input from the community, and we aren't doing them any favors.

Listen to me! Well, only some of the time

Videogame community manager has to be the most frustrating job in the world. Not only are you attempting to squeeze valuable information out of the disorganized hive mind of the gaming community, but you need to constantly brush up on your sarcasm and racial epithet translation abilities. It would be manageable if this was the only obstacle, but you also have to deal with inconsistency.

Take the unveiling of the new Special Infected units in Left 4 Dead 2. Players had been discussing concepts for infected types on the Left 4 Dead message boards for months, some expressly with the hope that they would be implemented into the game. When Valve had the audacity to actually lift a few concepts from these suggestions, they were called thieves and liars.

It would be one thing if Valve took an idea and failed to give credit where credit was due. I understand those frustrations.Some of the criticism, however, was that Valve is lazy and they couldn't even come up with their own infected ideas without resorting to stealing.This was surely exacerbated by some of the outrage over the timing and price of the game, but why else would the suggestions have been offered in the first place if not to be used?

There are plenty of situations in which players welcome suggested changes, however, which makes the inconsistency that much more confusing. Gamers welcomed new controls implemented in Fight Night Round 4 after the experiment of the analog stick controls were poorly received. They are excited about a potential Borderlands trading system which is one of the few faults with the game and a point of interest for the community. Congratulations EA Canada and Gearbox, you lucked out.

Put your money where your mouth is

Publishers that churn out sequel after sequel are corporate hacks, while innovative developers are the real friends of gamers, right? Not if you follow the money. As gamers we vocally demand creativity; reviews dock points for unoriginality, yet 'Dragon Quest 55' and 'Pokemon Fuscia & Chartreuse' consistently have sales figures that require measurement in scientific notation. We need to start votingwith our pocketbooks.

The Wii is criticized for being childish. 'Where is the love for hardcore gamers?' is the refrain from the community. When Mad World and House of the Dead: Overkill finally came out, however, they sold terribly. I don't care if they were bad games; we should have bought them to encourage development for that demographic. If we didn't buy those, and developers give up on making 'mature' games on the Wii, then we have no basis for complaint.

Scribblenauts was held up as an example of the type of risks that developers should be taking. True, it was a terrible game, but I bought it anyway. I wanted to send the message to developers that efforts like these were ones I could get behind. Hopefully given the strong initial sales, we will see similar risks taken in the future. Some are bound to be good.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease?

Communication is approaching real time in today's digital world, and Twitter has taken rapid fire dialogue to the next level. When Diablo 3 announces significant gameplay modifications on Twitter, and Infinity Ward sets up an entire website for Twitter suggestions, you know it has graduated into the mainstream.

The problem with this, however, is that the loudest party is probably going to win out. If there is an extremely vocal minority on Twitter, the community managers for a game might come to a mistaken conclusion about what their fans really want.

This is less of a problem in a game like World of Warcraft, where there are enough committed representatives of each interest group simultaneouslyclamoring for buffs and nerfs that they cancel each other out, but in games where the primary demographic isn't the 'core gamer,' some things get lost in translation.

If gamerscampaign too much and encourage lots of mainstream-unfriendly changes in a series they love, the next iteration will be better for them, sure. Ifsales fall off a cliff because of those changes,however,it might be the last Halo Microsoft decides to finance. Be careful what you wish for.

It's in our best interests to work with developers and help them understand exactly what we want from their games. We should encourage them to listen to the community andfacilitate helpful dialogue instead of berating them whenever they do something we don't like.

Now, where's my Broccoli Man game goddammit? I'm making a stand against Dr. Obesity, who's with me? If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

Yeah I definitely agree with this - helpful in the background to flesh out the world even to the point of like a little game player in System Shock 2 taht is in game to flesh out what the people did with their free time, or magazines in Borderlands or something that type of thing, little details that make the world feel 'real.'

Where it's bad is when they throw it in your face with unskippable cutscenes ... sometimes their world isn't as interesting as the developers maybe thought it was and it can even put you off what might be fun gameplay.

Well - I think there are lots of things that 'add' to a game but that doesn't mean they're integral. Is it nice to have great graphics? Is it nice to have nice menus like Dirt 2? Sure ... is it nice to have strong lore? Of course, it adds to the game? Is it as critical as people think? I don't think so.

Should we really care about lore in games? Does it add anything to the experience? To read with all the pictures and extra crap check out the link otherwise I've posted the entire thing below: let me know what you think, or how stupid I am!

As you peel away at the veneer of a game, you start to reveal what makes the whole thing tick. Remove the pretty graphics, eliminate the physics and the sound effects, and completely strip a game down and you reveal the foundation: gameplay mechanics.

Some would argue that a game can be reduced further, however, to the lore that sustains each virtual world, be it Star Wars, Dungeons & Dragons or even the Mushroom Kingdom. This is why you can make a Mario platformer, a puzzle game and a kart racer, and they're always familiar; the game world is layered atop a cohesive idea.

Do we care, though? Should we care? Is it really important that 'this blade was stolen from Grimvold Quickfingers and possesses a deadly curse, woe be to he who bears it! WOE!' Maybe not.

I want to discuss game lore, what works, what doesn't, and how it helps to enhance an experience.

Gameplay first

The concept that 'a great story will always win out' is **** Maybe that's true in a book or movie where story is vital, but games are interactive. Gameplay is king. Genres that forgot this lesson fall by the wayside.

We fondly remember games like Grim Fandango and Monkey Island because they were humorous. It was about as fun to play Grim Fandango, however, as it was to watch it be played. This is because while they were great stories, they weren't great games. Game types that have persisted, even those that have a strong 'lore component,' are merely game mechanics dressed up with a distinctive setting.

While Diablo 2 stands out because of its gothic horror theme, instead of fighting the minions ofhell, however,it could have beenabout fighting robot unicorns from the planet Unitron and the addictive loot collection gameplay would have functioned equally well (well, maybe not quite as well). Games live and die by their mechanics, no matter how good their narrative is.

You can't force me to be interested

Lots of games have strong gameplay; it's the little details that distinguish a game from its peers, details like compelling lore. Gamers choose what they want to be interested in, however, and that frequently turns out to be something other than the developer anticipated.

When The Fast and the Furious took off, movie executives saw Paul Walker and wanted to make him a star. Soon we saw him in Timeline, Into the Blue and a slew of Fast and Furious sequels. While producers saw blonde and bankable, we saw blonde and boring. You can't tell people what to like just by pushing it enough.

NCSoft makes a huge deal of the lore behind Atreia, the world of AION, but does anybody care? They can cram it down our throats all they want and claim their lore is as sophisticated as that of Azeroth, and it might be, but we don't know Atreia. We haven't been living in it for years of development so we don't see what they see. We see overly complex nonsense.

Likewise, Blizzard never thought High Overlord Saurfang would become a figure of legend in the community. Square Enix never thought Sephiroth would be manna from heaven for cosplayers everywhere. The community decides what's remarkable.

Don't get in the way of my gameplay

If the players choose how much lore they want to be interested in, they should also be able to choose to ignore it entirely. A game should still play well whether you choose to consume only the gameplay or both gameplay and lore; if the mechanics can't stand on their own then the game probably isn't very good.

In Borderlands (and World of Warcraft for that matter) the quests are wholly irrelevant. They are useful because they provide experience, but most players skip to the punch line and ignore the flavor text. A game isn't a book and reading isn't what the player signed up for.

If you allow them to walk and chew gum, however, and overlay that quest in a voice-over or an audio log, then it integrates story with the gameplay. While some Arkham Asylum players are willing to sit and listen to the interview logs with patients, most will appreciate being allowed to continue playing while recordings flesh out the antagonist back stories. Nothing should impede gameplay.

A little bit goes a long way

Consider being introduced to a single new person. It's easy enough to learn just one name, right? Now imagine walking into a room full of people you don't know and having them all introduce themselves. It's very likely you retain none of it. Game lore is the same way, and introducing too much at once is a sure ticket to making players apathetic.

Fully fleshed out universes like that of Warcraft or Starcraft built up their history over time. The only games that can jump straight into the deep end are Star Wars games, or Lord of the Rings games, games where there is a preexisting familiarity with the lore. When Brutal Legend tries to introduce an entire game universe at once, however, the player quickly loses interest and it all starts to sound like nonsense.

Writing everything out behind the scenes to avoid conflicts in your story is good. It's nice that the Halo universe is tied together and after gamers showed such interest in it, it was expanded with a whole slew of books and sequels. You can develop a complete story, however, and only tell a small fraction of it in a game. Doing otherwise is a good way to overwhelm a gamer.

Lore is a game component that I am fond of. I like knowing that I am interacting with a fully realized world and one that is alive beyond my individual adventure. I appreciate picking up an item in Baldur's Gate and reading about its history and the adventures it went on before I got my hands on it. That is narrative that is there if I want it. It isn't forced upon me in an un-skippable cutscene.

Most gamers probably don't want lore, or at the very least don't care. Out of nearly 13.5 million World of Warcraft players, less than 500k play on Roleplaying servers. That's a relatively small proportion of players especially considering the MMO demographic is disproportionately concerned with narrative when compared to gamers as a whole.

I will always love a good story, but developers should focus more on making a fun game, and less on 'constructing a world.' I don't think those necessarily go hand in hand. Besides, if you make a good game, the community will fill in the back story for you with fan fiction; look at how involved the universe of Final Fantasy seems when it's essentially 'Machine fights nature. Repeat.'

Wrote up some thoughts on gameplay mechanics - if you want to see with pics feel free otherwise summary if you don't like wall of text: here are 10 gameplay mechanics that were elegant solutions to now seemingly easy problems, and yet you still see games that blow the same issues.

With the increasing pervasiveness of big budget franchises in recent years, videogames are increasingly building off what worked from their predecessors rather than reinventing the wheel. Although new game mechanics are constantly introduced, only a few of them become 'canon' for future game development.

Rechargeable health, simulation racing line and radial menus are innovative solutions to gameplay problems, and they are all now the de facto standard in their genres. These succeeded because they solved an issue with what I'm going to refer to as integrated design. Developers should endeavor to streamline their games as much as possible, with all lessons integrated into the actual gameplay. Players shouldn't have to grind levels to become powerful enough to access content; if the point of the game is to access content, you should be accessing content at all times. Get to the point.

Following is an examination of a few gameplay mechanics that excel through integrated design and should serve as lessons for future games.

Positive reinforcement

Games should encourage you to play 'correctly.' Many games choose to punish the player if they don't do what the developer intended. It's easier but far less creative to use negative reinforcement in all situations. If an action game wants you to be stealthy, they should make it the best way to play. Don't arbitrarily 'end' the game if the player is spotted; make it very difficult but possible to recover.

Games should promote the ****the developer intended through mechanics as it's far more rewarding to the player. Let's take a look at four games that exemplify this model.

Red Faction Guerilla: Red Faction is a fairly mundane and generic action game with one exception: blowing **** up. Blowing **** up is usually fun, but Red Faction takes it to the next level. Never has wanton destruction been so satisfying. The developers sensibly realized that unless the player was encouraged to blow **** up all the time their game was going to fail. So what do they do? They tie the upgrade resource (salvage) to building destruction. Well played, Volition.

Shadow Complex: This is a Metroidvania RPG with exploration as its core mechanic. It seems so simple now, but many games give experience from defeating enemies, or grinding repetitive tasks despite that not being the focus of the game. Shadow Complex gives you experience primarily from exploration. Nice synergies between what is best about the game and what the player is encouraged to do; it's not rocket surgery.

Company of Heroes: Relic Entertainment wanted to encourage a fast, expansionary ****of play and discourage turtling. Instead of simply forcing the player to expand, or penalizing them for not behaving in the desired manner, the developer simply tied resources directly to expansion. These mechanics all seem simple in hindsight. So does the wheel but I'm pretty sure the inventor of that got minted.

Planescape Torment: This is not a game about combat; it's about dialogue and exploration. It's also an RPG, a game type where experience is traditionally gained through combat. Here's a novel idea: tie the greatest experience gains to having interesting conversations. It sounds simple now, but many 'story heavy' games still refuse to adopt this mechanic.

Immersion

'Immersive experience' is a buzzword I've been hearing a lot of lately. Many developers claim to be immersive and then repeatedly introduce elements that scream to the gamer 'you're playing a game.' If I'm playing Metal Gear Solid, and a giant exclamation mark appears over the head of an enemy, I'm no longer thinking 'my god this is so true to life.'

Gamers will argue this is a requirement as it's difficult to tell through physical cues when a foe becomes aware of you. Let's take a look at a few games that came up with a more creative solution.

Left4Dead: You are a survivor of the zombie apocalypse. You are struggling with three friends to escape to safety in a terrifying world. When zombies are approaching, announcing 'zOMG zombies are coming!' in a garish pop-up on screen screams 'this isn't real.' Valve went a different direction: subtle instrumental cues that signify the onset of certain events along with distinguishing sounds for each special infected type. You become aware of your surroundings by listening to the environment, much as you might in real life. (I suppose they ran out of instruments to signify 'Tank is approaching!' You can't win them all)

Uncharted 2: While this is primarily an action game, there are a few stealth sequences. The 'awareness distance' of guards in most stealth games is arbitrary and difficult to identify. Another interesting fact: guards have flashlights. How can we integrate these two concepts to create additional immersion? Have the flashlight distance be equal to the awareness radius of the guard. Goodbye, exclamation marks.

Portal: Valve created an entirely new gameplay mechanic for Portal. Imagine playing an FPS for the first time. You would need extensive tutorials just to navigate the environment. Gameplay advances such as Portal require the same level of instruction, but cliché 'tutorial stages' are not immersive. Portal shaped the entire game around a research lab, making it perfectly natural for the game to begin slowly and progress through instructions. Now gamers understand the portal mechanic and Portal 2 can jump right into sophisticated environments.

Sophisticated Solutions

Sometimes you have a problem in a game where it's not merely difficult to integrate cues into the gameplay, or encourage the player to act in a desired manner. There are some problems that are just difficult to solve, period. Let's take a look at a few of those and how the games in question came up with an elegant fix.

World of Warcraft: Blizzard wanted to kickstart an economy for basic trading goods without allowing the trading of powerful raid items. To encourage players to auction goods such as skins or ore, they made them sell to vendors for far less than their worth to other players. The financial incentive to auction off resources from professions overcomes the inconvenience of auctioning a good. Likewise, arbitrarily preventing certain items in your inventory from being auctioned is an unrealistic situation, so Blizzard chose the Bind on Pickup mechanic. It's a far smaller jump to associate magical properties to magical items than it is to believe you just can't auction certain items.

Mario Kart: Mario Kart wanted to make an accessible kart racing game. How do you keep the people losing involved, however, without merely speeding up their kart arbitrarily as they fall behind (an inelegant solution). Enter: power-ups. Give the people in the back better items that cause them to catch up! Of course, they also just made their karts go faster. Nicely done, Nintendo.

Batman Arkham Asylum: To make a true Batman simulator, you have to pick off enemies from the shadows. Unfortunately, when you're out of sight or hiding in ventilation shafts and around the corner, it's pretty tough to actually play the game. Detective Mode allows you to see enemies through the walls, so you can confidently traverse around the level without being concerned the enemies are out-maneuvering you.

Game mechanics are constantly being crafted and refined. Many of the initial problems seen in games have been ironed out, and you'd never see a game with limited continues anymore despite their universality in the early days of gaming. It is disappointing that many games still have awkward or artificial gameplay mechanics when an elegant solution has already been invented. You just have to dig a little deeper, to the gooey core. Delicious

Considering Half-Life and Half-life2 are two of the greatest games ever made, that's completely understandable. I'd happily trade in all my Mario and Link games if I could keep HL / HL2.

Honestly the only reason I would have expected Link/ Mario to win is that there are more console gamers.

In all three cases, the characters could have been replaced with anything else and it would largely be the same game and just as fun - those are abouut the gameplay not the person. They're just iconic now because they have great games associated with them.

I frequently read that difficulty in games is going the way of the dodo. 'Players don't want challenges anymore, they want experiences. Punishing games such as Ghouls and Ghosts and Battletoads are a relic of the past, and designers have learned from their errors in difficulty tuning.'

With the release and warm reception of Demon's Souls, however, could tricky games be making a comeback, or is this a brief aberration in the trend towards obscurity?

I don't think difficulty in games is going anywhere. There is a demographic of gamer who likes a stiff challenge and there will always be developers who cater to them. I want to briefly analyze what challenges difficult games face in today's market, whether difficult games can ever become mainstream again and if not, what form difficult games will take going forward.

Does difficulty just get in the way of fun?

The critical verdict on Demon's Souls is that it's hard. Not 'Halo on Legendary' modern-day hard, but 'old school stab somebody in frustration' hard. The Brainy Gamer has an insightful article about how this works for Demon's Souls because it is consistently difficult and that difficulty serves a purpose. He argues that game difficulty when it's consistent and pre-established is acceptable. As long as the world is fair and you aren't merely being screwed by the random number generator, difficulty can be fun.

I would respond that difficulty for its own sake is not necessarily enjoyable, even if it's explained beforehand and has a gameplay reason for its existence. If you set up a fictional world in which there's a compelling plot reason for perma-death deleting your saved games and print it on the box cover, that doesn't exempt a game from criticism.

Fans of challenging games argue that they improve game skill and make success more rewarding, while critics dislike decreased accessibility. The question then is how to make difficult games more accessible?

Here's where the pictures start in – couldn't get them to paste right, if you want to check out the rest feel free and discuss, otherwise SUMMARY: you can't satisfy both hardcore and casual in the same game, difficult games have already started a trend towards simpler development teams, going to see more of the 'extreme difficulty' games appearing in downloadable titles etc.

I guess I just always found it odd ... everybody says 'oh Gamestop rips you off' but I haven't really seen it -their used prices are no worse than anywhere else, their trade in values are no worse than anywhere else if Amazon's new online crap system is any indicator (probably partially because they're so dominant and set the standards, but it's not like anybody has massively undercut them and amde out like a bandit) ...

Gamestop is vilified for being the evil empire of games, controlling pricing and availability with an iron fist. Many think their top priority is to rip off the customer and see the management team as greedy beyond measure. I want to suggest that this is far from the case, and Gamestop is merely another corporation in the industry we all love.

I will analyze many of the criticisms leveled against the company and explain why they're not fair. I will argue that you can criticize the game industry in general, but singling out Gamestop is unfair and unwarranted. (I realize I'm going to take a lot of crap for this one)

Does Gamestop really rip us off?

The chief complaint I hear from the gaming community is that Gamestop is ripping off customers with their pricing.

"They buy a game from the consumer for pennies on the dollar and then turn around and resell it for only $5 less than a new game. Gamestop isn't like any normal company looking out for their customers and building goodwill, they just want to use you and lose you. They're screwing both the developers and us, the consumer!" Sound familiar?

When we get into real financial statistics, however, it quickly becomes apparent this isn't accurate. Let's compare Gamestop to a company like Apple which has huge customer loyalty and is generally thought of as a company that does 'the right thing,' and has a target demographic that overlaps with Gamestop. Apple's operating margins are 21%. Gamestop? 8%. Apple is making over 2.5x the profit as a percentage of sales in comparison with Gamestop.

[The pictures start here and I couldn't really get them to transfer correctly – so if you're at all interested check out the rest … I go into how Gamestop adds value, how they help out consumers in a couple ways and how there are better targets for us to hate. I just didn't want to spam you guys with a wall of text if you didn't care and just wanted to respond to the headline.] Thoughts?