Conversations over

There is one more piece I want you to read about the Kane & Lynch affair, from N'Gai Croal of Newsweek/Level Up. Then I'll shut up.

First horse out of town

Eidos have pulled their advertising already. Reading through Rock, Paper, Shotgun's take on things, it looks like more experienced journalistic minds than mine have a credible explanation:

Review appears.
PR or someone similar phones up and go apeshit. Really apeshit. This is par for course. A major game getting sub average reviews is something which PR *have* to phone up about. It’s what their bosses expect. Better PRs and Editors all know that it’s part of the game they play with each other, and roll with it.
Problem in this case, is whoever above Greg isn’t a good editor or manager. They’re someone who actually takes the threats seriously instead of something that’ll blow over by the next game. The panic, cave and sack the guy.
Now, this is the last thing any experienced PR would expect. I dare say Eidos are as surprised as everyone else at the sacking - and horrified, as a sacking over a review score is the worst publicity they could ever recieve if it got out (And, of course, being the internet it WOULD get out).
Internet chaos.

So it looks like my previous statement may have been an over-reaction. My apologies Ian. It looks like the entire industry has ethical problems, not just yourself.

The reason why I say this, is that the unholy trinityuneasy triangle of game journalism, game PR and game advertising is ripe with ethical irresponsibility. Games journalists rely on game PR for a large proportion of their content: footage, previews, early code to review and so on. This historically has been more important, but the power of the Internet is such that even if you don't get the scoop, you can quickly link to whoever does and represent it as a breaking news story anyway (which is why you get so many duplicate stories in Google Reader for instance).

However, the power of game advertising has grown proportionately. When you are giving away your content for free, as opposed to retail or subscription models, the revenue from advertising is your only source of income. For the independents, this is not a huge problem, because you get a name for yourself, and write where ever you can get the work. But for in-house journalists, such as those employed by Game Spot, it is a delicate line between integrity and income. As a journalist, you rely on your editors to protect you. As a Game Spot, you rely on taking an hit on the income in the event someone pushes too far, and the kudos you get for saying no.

But as a major games publisher, you should recognise the serious conflict of interest integral to the industry. In 'the real world', what you'd do is develop a code of conduct at the board level to ensure that situations such as what is currently developing don't occur. And then you push the code of conduct out at all levels within your organisation, to ensure you don't have PR ringing up and going apeshit on people.

You do this because you have a fiduciary duty to your share holders to maximise return, while minimising the risk of failure or legal misadventure. And clearly this hasn't happened.

Eidos has already gone into damage control mode. Maybe when they pull their head back out of the sand, they'll realise the problem and ensure that such a document gets developed. I'd like to see some heads roll on the Eidos side at a senior management level first. You just don't make mistakes like this.

[Edit: Kevin Grifford at GameSetWatch has another great take on this, from a slightly different angle.]

Shame on you Ian Livingstone

I thought you were bad, I just didn't realise you were this bad...

Kane & Lynch: The Road to Hollywood

What a surprise! Ian Livingstone's sold himself out, as previously noted, in order to fast track himself to Hollywood via Tango & Cash, I mean, Kane & Lynch: The Movie. The sub-text of his mediocre presentation on character at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival was always 'how to sell your character across lots of merchandising opportunities, because I don't care about the gaming community anymore'.

And the gameplay and footage were decidly average, Ian. I guess one taste of the Hollywood gods via Lara wasn't enough.

[Edit: Maybe he's just talking himself up for the take over bid]

Day 1 of the Edinburgh Interactive Conference

Well, that's day one of the Edinburgh Interactive conference. As people stream off to the free drinks, I'm sitting around trying to gather my thoughts interrupted only by another journalist interviewing the energetic Hilmar Peterssun.

The theme for the conference so far seems to be the convergence of the games industry and other media industries. Yves was brilliant and provided good insight of the direction that at least one of the industries major players. Another Ubisoft employee whose name I didn't catch who was talking in the conference on involving female gamers in the industry and it sounds like the direction that Ubisoft is taking with casual games is very much similar to Nintendos: casual games is probably wrong word. Short serious games is a better way of putting it. We'll definitely be flooded with a lot more games of the Brain Training genre. My Life Coach, My Word Coach, Horsez and so on are all Ubisoft titles moving into this space. She made the point that Ubisoft is not trying to sell to female gamers, they're trying to sell to lapsed or uninterested gamers, which contains many more females. The objections of this segment in the focus groups Ubisoft ran were centred around 'What can a computer game do for me?' and these short serious games are the way to answer that question.

I'll elabourate on the Games Actually discussion a little more. The chair seemed a little concerned about moving away from market segmentation, to a different model of viewing the gaming market, but the market segmentation stories the rest of the panel were interesting. Sevket Goezalan had a lot of good points to make but didn't necessarily make them the best way, about his experiences in setting up a gaming magazine for women (Play Vanilla). There is a hardened market of gamer girlz, at about 10% of the gaming market, who are currently served by the existing gamer related base and reacted very negatively to the women's magazine style publication that Play Vanilla is selling to. However, when he was able to get Play Vanilla in the women's magazine section, which is where it was targetted, the circulation was about 80% of what he expected, but the positive feedback from people reading it was very high. He thinks that the biggest barriers to their targets are the fact that distributors are not necessarily willing to put a gaming magazine in the right place in the store, and that women readers are more likely to pick up what they know or have been told is worth reading as opposed to see a new title, browse it and purchase it if it looks good. This suggests strongly that the market is there, it just needs to be tapped in the right way. He also said later when questioning Ian Livingstone, that he's got feedback that lots of girls would play action games (e.g. 1st or 3rd person shooters) if there were female protagonists they would choose to play. Ian was disappointing, as I also mentioned, and was clearly selling Kane & Lynch with an eye on the Hollywood cross-over. For someone who gained so much off the backs of a (virtual) female protagonist, he was strangely uninterested in trying the same again. "Some other company will have to do it" seemed to be his attitude.

Sean Dromgoole broken down the market segmentation by gender and age, and points out that female gamers are playing games through to their teens nearly as much as boys but have a much steeper drop off then men from 15 onwards. In the 24-29 segment, the same percentage of men and women play e.g. the drop catches up. In terms of market segment, he broke it down into 4 categories: Tom Boys, Girly-girls (he apologised for the name), Alternative/Independent and Girl-guides. Tom Boys are as likely as men to play competitively and like all the genres as much as men, except for violent games, where they are not interested. Apparently the girl-guide segment takes over all others as women age: concern for others, responsibility and maturity were the characteristics of this segment.

In terms of hours played, girls are quickly catching up with guys. I think we'll see that discussions around 'how can we capture the female gamer' will be non-existent in five years, and people can return to worrying about 'how to create a great game for the segment'.

Live blog - Ian Livingstone

When I started off writing this, I was going to have this quite light-hearted. Since its nearly beer o'clock, I think I'll keep it that way.

Its hard to have a great character in a crap game. Clearly you can go for the ultra realistic characters or you can go the Nintendo route of the stylised characters. At the end of the day they are very important. I remember rolling up my very first character in 1975 and I had a lot of affection for him.

Film has taught us a lot about characters and dialog and we can start to talk about Hollywood. I'm not talking about 1st person shooters in this context.

From this rich pool of characters (And the UK is particularly fine at creating characters) (Aside: he's talking way too fast to get anything).

There is no guaranteed path from drawing board to fame. At the end of the day, if you're expecting a player to keep playing a role, you'll have to have a character who is interesting, easy to identify and likable.

[Plays video of characters over the years. He includes Elite, Gran Tourismo, Wipeout etc which I don't think particularly have great characters in. There's a typo on the release of Tomb Raider - listed as 1995]

Why are these easy to remember? [Shows shots from Hollywood. Daniel Craig as Bond, Snow White, ET, Superman, Wallace & Gromit, Spiderman, Thomas the Tank Engine, Kong, Yoda, Bart, Harry Potter etc. I think he's made his point. Nearly 40 characters shown.]

[Then games characters, Lara Croft, Gordon Freeman, Link, Mario, Sonic, Lemming, Pacman, Solid Snake, Space Invader, Duke]

What makes all these character resonant? If you get this right, huge financial revenues await you. Appearance, personality, name, background, dialog, voice, humour, facial expression, moves, story. For real people, the coolness factor.

[More bullet points: Different, memorable, cool, concept].

[Concept art: lots of choice, face / body / concept. Lock it down early. Target audience. Focus test.]

[What's in a name? Descriptive or whimsical? Target audience? Name + trademark = franchise.]

Lara Croft started life as Lara Cruz.

[Character background: personality, habits, beliefs, trademark moves]

[Kane & Lynch]

Kane started out a lot better looking and younger, but he was supposed to have had a tough life and been through a few war zones. Lynch looked good right from the start.

[Dialog: script writers, serious / humorous, emotion, film]

Looking to Hollywood again, we need to hire script writers. The concept of the dialog, and the emotion. Hollywood realises the importance of dialog and clearly its scripted and makes an impact on the audience. We should learn from them.

[Shows the clip a Few Good G-men]

[Voice: Matching, use professionals, catchphrases, people like people]

[Clip from Io technical demo]

[Mood: light or dark / backstory / sets the scene / film]

I think its interesting that Hollywood are looking more and more to our industry for content.

[Robert Mckee quote about true character]

[2 Kane & Lynch trailers - I think its a NiN soundtrack behind it]

[Intellectual property: sequels, franchise, valuable brand, leveraging]

[Lucozade Lara clip]

Lara Croft is such a big character she is able to survive parody.

[Kane & Lynch gameplay clip]

[We're running late, so only 1 question for Ian Livingstone]