Posted on

Pointeless Waste of Time: Games Manifesto

This is a terrific article that I had to pass on. It outlines many of the pet-peeves that us gamers have with game developers – the many cheats used by developers to save time, artificially expand game play etc. Gamers hate these things. Game developers should take a serious look at this list.

I most relate to:

  • Item 6 – Save Points: Since all consoles in this generation have hard drives, there is no excuse not to have user-selectable save points. I am an adult. If I found it fun and challenging to play an entire levels without saving, I could choose to do that. But I submit that the increasingly aging gamer demographic does not find it fun to play the same thing over and over due to deficient save point planning by game developers. The lack of decent autosave points or user selectable save-points is the primary reason I abandon otherwise good games.
  • Item 12, para 7 – Unnecessarily Difficult End Levels: I thoroughly enjoyed Gears of War and had EVERY intention of playing the entire game again on the harder level until I had to fight RAAM (the final boss) over and over and over. It took me hours to figure out what was necessary to kill this guy. The arbitrariness of this fight is silly in the extreme. The game gives you no indication as to what is required to kill him and how much effort, of which type, it will take to kill him. This final boss fight was so off-putting that I no longer intend to play the game through on the harder level because the last thing I want is to finish the game and find I can’t kill the final boss on the harder level. Cliffy! Watch the end of Halo 1 for an example of a perfect ending level! Back to EB goes Gears for trade-in!

I would also add:

  • Escort Missions Should be Outlawed: If the character being escorted would actually accept orders from the player to hide somewhere, stay behind until beckoned, shoot at the enemy etc. it wouldn’t be so bad. But too many games require the gamer to escort a hapless character that will not take direction and repeatedly gets himself/herself killed for no fault of the gamer.

I can’t complain about the “Short-sighted Business Bull***” mentioned in item 15. If this were solved there would be almost no raison d’etre for this blog. 🙂 And, as for me, wooden crates really don’t bother me all that much!

Warning!: The author uses both humorous and explicit language in this manifesto.

Source: PointlessWasteofTime

Posted on

A Game Developer’s Bill of Rights

Eric Zimmerman, co-founder and CEO of gameLab, proposes a bill of rights that postulates “the correct and proper ethical positions” for game developers to take when negotiating contracts with publishers. The x rights he discusses in this piece are:

  1. The right to full ownership of what we fully create.
  2. The right to be billed as the game creator in marketing and on game packaging at least as prominently as any mention of the game publisher.
  3. The right for every individual involved in creating the project to be given accurate and prominent credit within the game.
  4. The right to move freely between publishers on new game projects.
  5. The right to a fair and equitable share of profits derived from a game.
  6. The right to full and accurate accounting of any and all income and disbursements relative to our work.
  7. The right to promote and the right of approval over any and all promotion of our games and ourselves.
  8. The right of approval over means for distribution, as well as for licensing, merchandizing, and other derivative versions of our games.
  9. The right to a publishing arrangement that reflects the iterative nature of game development; one that recognizes that changing a game as it is developed is part of creating a game.
  10. The right to a publishing arrangement that results in a process that conforms to accepted standards regarding work hours, compensation, and labor practices.
  11. The right to acquire publishing rights to a game if the publisher has stopped distributing the game.
  12. The right to employ legal representation in any and all business transactions.
  13. The right to final say in creative disputes regarding the game.

Source: Gamasutra