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Let's Play... Screw the Banks!

Maybe you've been vacationing on Pitcairn Island since the beginning of April and you haven't gotten news yet, but a month or so ago millions of documents were leaked to the press from the Mossack Fonseca law firm in Panama. These papers reveal how hundreds, or potentially thousands of wealthy individuals have been using offshore companies, banks and law firms to avoid paying taxes in their home countries.

Leaving aside questions of whether or not this kind of shit should be legal at all, the probability is that some of it is not. I personally think tax avoidance (the legal optimization of your finances to minimize your tax payable) kind of sucks to begin with - for the simple fact that it disproportionately benefits people who already have lots of money and can hire lawyers and accountants to help them pay less tax. Tax evasion (the illegal concealment of income to avoid paying tax) is an actual crime - the crime that got Al Capone sent to prison. Money laundering is the transformation of money made through criminal enterprise (such as dealing in arms, slavery, drugs, conflict minerals, etc) into 'not-illegal' money. Law firms like Mossack Fonseca, and the offshore banks they work with, and the shell companies they create, explicitly, openly and legally help wealthy people avoid taxation. Unfortunately the same systems and structures they use to do so can (and are) used for tax evasion and money laundering. I think that sucks.

Anyway, the Prime Minister of Iceland was already forced to resign because of his involvement in this mess, but his is only the highest profile head to roll so far. Acting and former Heads of State and their immediate family members from over 40 countries appear to be named in the leaked documents along with many other wealthy individuals and public figures. Apparently on Monday, May 9th, a giant list will be published of all the people connected to the couple of hundred thousand offshore companies that have been created through Mossack Fonseca for the purposes of doing international business, avoiding taxes, evading taxes, cleaning the bloodstains off their cash, or hiding the fact that they simply stole it outright from the budgets of very countries they are supposed to be running.

While all of this has been going down, I got to reminiscing with Mathieu Berube, who I work with here at Ubi in Toronto. Mathieu was a level designer who worked with me back on the first Splinter Cell, and was the LD who built the Panama Bank level of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, which I personally think is the best Splinter Cell level ever made. In the story of the game, MCAS Banco de Panama was the financial middle-man able to conceal the people involved in the arms-for-information transaction between Displace International, Zherkezhi, and Peruvian revolutionary-wannabe Hugo Lacerda. Mathieu and I joked about how, when you work on these kinds of near-future political thriller kinds of games, you often end up predicting the future: the Bank level in Chaos Theory was ultimately about the power of offshore banks to make these kinds of illegal transactions anonymous.

After talking about it, we realized that it would be cool to see if we could get the game up and running and play through the level again while talking about how we designed and built it. It would also give us a chance to rant incoherently about our frustrations with all the shitheels who are screwing the rest of us by not paying their fair share. So that's what we did - we dug up a 360 (SCCT was on the original XBox, but was made backwards compatible) and did a run through and talked about some of the decisions we made.

So we made a Let's Play...



PS Making this video is not in any way intended to imply we are working on any particular game. What we're working on is unannounced. The fact that we're talking about Chaos Theory is a coincidence related to current events and nothing more.

Video Games Are Better

Having read Ian Bogost’s recent piece in The Atlantic several times now, I think I’ve managed to digest what he’s saying and figure out how I feel about it.

First off, I feel the piece is trying to do too much. Bogost opens by eulogizing Maxis, and celebrating the studio’s impressive contribution to our medium, but hitched to that wagon is a larger statement Bogost is making about the kinds of games we make, the kinds of games we could make, and the kinds of games we ought to make. The eulogy is fine; I don’t have much to say about that. But I feel like the rest of the piece makes a claim (I think unintentionally) about how we might categorize games that I have a really hard time agreeing with. 

Bogost laments that we (as players and as developers) have become fixated on characters in games, and suggests that we would do better to design games that allow us to explore and examine systems that are larger than ourselves. The effective unpacking of his title is that there are games that try to be about individuals and games that try to be about larger conceptual structures – social, political, economic and cultural ideas – and that games about these larger structures are better. Better, to Bogost, seems to mean at very least that the medium of games is more suited to present those ideas and thus games about them achieve better outcomes, but even beyond that, he implies these things are somehow qualitatively more valuable as things for us to explore.

Now, I strongly agree we should make games that afford us the opportunities to play with and thereby deeply understand the higher order systems that we exist within. I agree that games are uniquely suited to expose these sorts of large, complex systems which – outside of the context of a game are typically obfuscated, hard to isolate, hard to read, and impossible to examine objectively. 

However, I disagree that games about characters preclude the sort of examinability of higher order domains or formal structures or patterns that Bogost wants to see more of. I feel like Bogost is presenting a false dichotomy: that there are simulations that can speak to the higher order constructs of our culture, and that there are stories of the journeys of individuals that cannot, and that we must choose between them. Bogost is saying there is SimCity – which allows us to examine Wright’s Americanized synthesis of a range of sociocultural theories – and then there is The Last of Us which allows us to examine – at best – a few small relationships between a few poorly simulated individuals. Bogost’s lament is that SimCity’s perspective on the forces that shape our culture is elevating, while The Last of Us is at best an inferior novel. Without saying it directly, Bogost is making the claim that there cannot exist a category of game that allows the player to understand and feel and engage with those higher order systems while also undertaking an individual journey through them. I think this is already demonstrably untrue.

Molleindustria’s Unmanned provides fascinating perspectives into the banality of automated war-fighting, the proceduralization of violence, and the impact of ethical siloing on interpersonal relationships, and it does all of these things from the perspective of an individual character on a journey. Unmanned is a comparatively simple game, and it does not allow me to directly touch the sliders that embody the relationships between those higher order concepts – but it does enable me to feel that those sliders exist and are interrelated.

Bogost, I am sure, would argue that a novel or a film would do a better job of both providing me with that simple, authored perspective, and with taking me on that journey. Surely, taken as a whole, Syriana – which deals with all of these themes and more – does a better job of communicating them than Unmanned. I would agree – but not because games about individual journeys cannot also be about higher order constructs – rather, I would agree because Unmanned is just a very small game, and Syriana was a $50M film with an excellent script, a solid director and amazing actors to bring it together.

In terms of its themes, Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please is similar to Unmanned. In Papers, Please, I embody a character, and I go with that character on a personal, transformative journey that I control in large part. The game also gives me perspectives on the higher order structures of our culture: the numbing banality of bureaucracy, the deresponsiblizing power of distributed systems, and their impact on how individuals judge and treat one another. Papers, Please does not let me directly manipulate the sliders that control how oppressive or violent the State of Arstotzka is. It doesn’t allow me to objectively observe how the cost of food and gas affects the behavior of a border guard with insufficient training and ever-increasing pressure to process travelers quickly under ever more byzantine constraints.

Playing Papers, Please, I do not build and test the hypothesis that subsidizing the price of gas would diminish stress on border guards, and thus lead to more ethical outcomes in terms of how people are evaluated at the border, which in turn would reduce violence, increase regional stability and lower gas prices – removing the need for subsidies, giving my state more economic stability, and simultaneously increasing happiness. But at the same time, I feel that Papers, Please helped me understand those things the way Bogost seems to claim a game about characters could not. In fact, it helped me understand those things better than Syriana did.

So again, I think that Bogost has presented a false dichotomy by suggesting there are games about characters and there are games about higher order cultural constructs and that as game developers and as players we need to choose between them when we make a game or when we play a game.

I think that a game like Crusader Kings presents a model of complicated human interpersonal interaction, and a simulation of how the implicated personalities and their relationships drive human culture. In fact, Crusader Kings stands out to me as an exemplar of a category of games that Bogost seems to want to wave out of existence by asserting we have to choose between one of two categories into which Crusader Kings does not fit.

Admittedly, Crusader Kings is significantly closer to SimCity than Papers, Please is, but perhaps from Bogost’s perspective the ‘embodied characters’ are really abstract constructs and to him Crusader Kings is just another SimCity. That might be a fair stance.

But further out from Crusader Kings is Shadow of Mordor, where you clearly and undeniably embody a character, and yet at the same time you interact directly with an interactive simulation of the politics of succession, leadership and authority within Orcish society. Now, I will be the first to admit that the kind of ‘cultural takeaway’ Bogost seems to want players to receive from the games he is talking about is not going to be much informed by a more sophisticated appreciation of the Rites of Succession of the Uruk-hai, but subject matter is irrelevant if what we’re looking for is existence proof. There is no reason this kind of higher-order simulation of sociopolitical brinksmanship, applied violence and the consequences thereof could not be stood-up in a context that is relevant to the world we live in. Swap the Outcasts for some ex-patriate mercenaries, Orcish warlords for African ones, and Mordor for a failed African state, and suddenly you might find a game where good and evil, race and creed, partnerships and politics are significantly less cut-and-dry, and significantly more informative of the kinds of larger cultural forces that shape the lives of millions of people (if you succeeded - which no one yet has).

So yes, I think we already have numerous, though tentative examples of these kinds of games; games that are both about the journey of an individual, but also about the big ideas of the culture (fictional or otherwise) in which that individual exists. I will admit that along a number of axes we have mostly done a fairly poor job of achieving the goals Bogost implies. Bogost wants us to truly understand and feel the consequential interdependency of large scale, richly interconnected, sensitive systems, and it is definitely true that accessing the sliders that move those systems by using the guns or swords of our embodied characters to shoot or stab them up or down a notch is a clumsy interface at best.

But I don’t think we should bury the idea along with Maxis and throw our arms up in the air. I think there is a huge undeveloped space here for us to explore as designers, and a fruitful landscape of discovery here for players. I feel that if we make these sorts of games well, and continue to refine them, we can begin competing and innovating on the axis of ‘how my embodied character influences the sliders’.

I personally hope that we can evolve the play experience over time from one where you play the mercenary/assassin who tips the balance by killing the right people, to one where you play the spy with much finer grained control who murders rarely or not at all. Eventually, perhaps, we can play the diplomat, the senator or the lobbyist constantly challenged to overcome and manage her interactions with other players and characters in a dynamic, empathic exploration of these higher order cultural systems in a way that presents them as complicated - not because they are harder than shooting an AK-47 at a moving target through the jungle, but because humans are just really bad at them.

And maybe then, if these games are good, and we play them a lot, maybe we’ll get better at them, and maybe we’ll be empowered to confront these problems not as a bunch of sliders to be optimized, but as the messy interpersonal problems they are; mired in doubt and fear and weakness and frailty. Those sound like fucking spectacular games to me.

Dynamics: the long and the short versions

Last night was the opening night of the Art of Games exhibit at the EMP Museum, and along with several other great speakers from local the local industry, Valve co-worker Dave Kircher and I were there to give short talks about programming and design respectively.

My talk, titled The Art of Games, Why Are We Here, is about games and their relationship to more traditional art, and how games acheive their meaning. The slides (which include in the notes more or less exactly what I said) are here, as well as over on the right.

If you find the discussion interesting and would like a more robust (full hour) talk on the same subject, you can get the slides and notes for the entire GDC 2011 talk here (also linked on the right) or check out the full video of the talk on the GDC Vault, where it is now available for free.

I was never completely happy with the conclusion of the GDC talk, and the version of the slides linked here includes what I feel is a much stronger and clearer conclusion that better encapsulates the thesis and nails the point I was trying to make a little more strongly.

I'm Sad...

I totally don’t have the time or the emotional energy to be writing this post, but in fact, I kind of feel like I don’t have the time to not write this post. You see, someone who I don’t know seems to have un-Friended me on Facebook.

I first accepted a Friend Request from this person – whom I will henceforth call 'Gina' – sometime before GDC. I remember noticing her updates around that time because we had a friend staying at our place during GDC and I remember lamenting that this new Facebook Friend was causing me some consternation.

I am Canadian. As such, I tend to have fairly left-leaning political opinions and moral convictions. To boot, I am probably more left-leaning in the ideological sense than the ‘average’ Canadian. That said, when I agreed to come to America as a guest of this nation, I decided that I would put a lid on my politics, and do my best to observe and understand how Americans think and feel about their nation and about the issues they struggle with, while trying not to pass judgement. I suspect that I fail to keep my opinions in check more often than I succeed, but I do try.

Judging from her updates over the course of six months or more, my former Facebook Friend Gina has fairly right-leaning political opinions and moral convictions. Her stances on a variety of hot-button political issues in America today are virtually the opposite of mine. She questions the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate. She opposes gay marriage. She opposes more stringent gun control laws. She is against health care reform. She supports the Tea Party. When I told my friend during GDC about Gina, his response was simply that I should un-Friend her.

But I didn’t (and don’t) see the point in that. I don’t see the point in that for two reasons.

The first reason is Facebook itself. The beating heart of Facebook is the idea that you can connect with people who you otherwise would never know – never mind share ideas with – by way of something else you have in common. Whether Gina knows a friend of mine, or has played one of the games I have worked on, or went to a school I went to, the point is that whatever tiny thing connects us has the potential to be the thing that bridges the gap between us and allows us to reconcile our differences. Now, I am a pretty cynical guy, and while I see that Facebook has the potential to be that, I also see the reality that it is mostly just a platform for marketing and self-promotion and for reinforcing already-held ideas. In the end, though, that’s the point. If we give up on what Facebook can be by un-Friending all the people whose opinions we disagree with, then we submit to a more cynical Facebook that nobody wants or needs.

The second reason is America. If there is any country in the history of the world where thinking differently is not just accepted, but is embraced, celebrated, and rewarded, it is the United States of America. I didn’t come to this country because I wanted to be around a bunch of people who looked the same, acted the same, sounded the same, dressed the same as me and/or thought the same as me. I came here to be challenged. Now, being challenged does not mean rolling over and accepting things you oppose – and I remain opposed to most of Gina’s positions – but it does mean coming to understand how and why you hold the ideas you hold, and why and how others hold differing ideas. This understanding strengthens your ideas and prepares you to challenge their ideas when the opportunity arises. But that opportunity will only arise if you continue to listen and refuse to walk away from the table. You should never turn your back on someone with a bad idea. If you don’t convince them it’s a bad idea when you have the chance, they’ll convince others that it’s a good idea and when you next confront it, it will be a bad idea with momentum....

So why am I sad?

Well, the end of this story unfortunately starts with the recent shooting at the theatre in Colorado. I didn’t read too much about it, frankly. I already read that story when I was in high-school, and again in college, and again in university, and again, and again. I have my opinions about how to better deal with the problem of murderous rampages, but those are not ideas I want to discuss on Facebook. I am fortunate to have a career where I can share ideas about the shape of the world, both as I see it, and as how I feel it ought to be. When it comes to complex issues of human nature I would prefer to spend the three or four years of effort it takes to develop a well-reasoned position on one idea than to scream hundreds of ideas at the walls of Facebook – which after all is just that – screaming at walls.

After the Colorado shooting, Gina put a lot of updates on Facebook of the fairly predictable sort; pro 2^nd Amendment, anti-gun control rhetoric of the ‘from my cold dead hands’ sort. All of that is fine. I disagree with the idea, but it’s irrelevant because firstly I support her right to express those ideas (under the Amendment that comes before the one that enables them) and secondly because I am a Canadian, and I have no say in the matter anyway.

What did trouble me a bit was her blanket assertion that the guns used in the shooting must not have been legally owned by the shooter. When I later read the guns were all legally acquired, I was tempted to post on her wall to ask what she thought about that fact. But I didn’t. Maybe I should have. Maybe that was the moment when Facebook could have been good for something and allowed two people with differing ideas to connect. Opportunity missed.

But then, this afternoon, I read (sadly) about another mass shooting by a person with a legally owned firearm. I remembered Gina’s update (it wasn’t long ago), and wondered if in the ensuing weeks people had pointed out her mistake, and if a discussion had arisen there and if I might have been given a second chance to see if I could reconcile my ideas with hers.

I typed (her real name) into Facebook’s friend search, and turned up nothing.

In the preceding 24-36 hours, she had inexplicably un-Friended me. I know because I remember seeing an update from my timeline at mid-day on Saturday. I wondered if she was just cleaning out her Friends list, and so I scrolled back through the last day or so of updates to see if I could find a clue.

Then I realized I had posted this tweet relating the cost of the Curiosity Rover to the cost of the Iraq War.

And then it dawned on me that very probably she had un-Friended me because I had said something she didn’t agree with. I had shown her that I was not the same as her, and (probably) she wanted a wall that reinforced what she already believed, not a wall that challenged her ideas.

Now, probably, since most of my own friends, and most of the people who come to my blog, are self-selecting and will be inclined to agree with me, I suspect most of you will say ‘good riddance’. You probably think it’s a good thing that she has cut herself off and further isolated herself. If that’s what you think, I direct you to the title of this post. It’s not titled ‘fuck you, Gina’, it’s titled ‘I’m sad’.

I’m sad because the fact is that my and Gina’s differences – relative to the scope and scale of human disagreements in general – are effectively non-existent. Gina and I live in the most enlightening society in human history, and we have access to the most powerful connective technology in the history of the world, and we still managed to outmaneuver each other. I’m sad because, in some sense at least, I invested a lot of time and energy into this pseudo-relationship with this person I never met. I persisted in not un-Friending Gina based on principles that I actually care about, even though at times it diminished my own happiness to do it. I tried – for months – to make this technology work for these people in this culture, and at the end of the day it seems to have not mattered at all.

I’m sad because sometimes it seems like it doesn’t improve my life, or the lives of those around me to even think about these things, never mind talk about them. And that sucks.

I <3 Japan

I can't imagine that it is even possible that anyone who would end up on my blog would not have already been aware of this.

Gamers Heart Japan is an initiative launched by Victor Lucas and Electric Playground to help raise money to support the Red Cross relief effort in Japan. I'm honored that Victor would reach out to me to help with this, and super happy have been able to have the time and the resources and the assistance to get my segment shot and delivered on such short notice.

To see the hour long video special, with interviews from dozens of the smartest and most talented game developers in the world, go here. From there you are also just one click away from making a donation if your are able.

A Teacher's Primer

Middle of last week, The Globe and Mail published an interesting and well-written article about the Canadian Teacher's Federation (ironically abbreviated 'CTF') calling for a ban on the X360 and Wii release of Rockstar's Bully: Scholarship Edition.

Before getting into it I want to praise the unbiased and seemingly well-informed writing of the article itself by Jill Mahoney and Unnati Gandhi. It is a rare treat indeed to read an article about topics like violence in games, or the banning of games and not be left with the dreadful feeling that the reporter, editor and publisher of the article are in fact terribly biased in favor of the complainant and against games and the game industry. While I don't typically read The Globe and Mail, this article reminds me that I should get off my CNN junkfood diet and start giving a shit about what news media I consume. So there you go; G&M, you've gained a reader.

Now - to the point.

I have not yet played Bully. I never had an opportunity to play the PS2 version and was eagerly anticipating the X360 version. Unfortunately, circumstances have conspired to delay my attempt to play the game, but this will not last forever. Therefore, this is not going to be a defense of Bully by saying 'the game is great, you should play it' - simply because I don't know if that's the case.

This is also not going to be a defense of Bully on principle. I am not going to attempt to champion the freedom of expression of game creators. I'm not going to stand up and say 'you can't ban me - I have rights'. I'm not going to get sucked into the debate on your terms. The simple fact is, I don't need to. Reactionary cries to ban a critically acclaimed game like Bully are doomed to failure and involving myself in the debate on these terms contributes to nothing but a minor validation of the fears of the fearful. I think that with a little bit of effort, I can come up with a better contribution than that.

So, what is it that I or the CTF could contribute? Since I haven't even played Bully - and probably neither has Ms. Noble, President of the CTF, (nor probably have her counterparts in the coalition of teacher's unions in Canada, the United States, Britain, South Korea, Australia and the Caribbean who are mentioned in the article) I wonder if we even can contribute anything? Ought we enter into debate about public access to media that we have not even engaged ourselves? That seems unethical to me - especially given our roles. It is doubly unethical if Bully might in fact actively contribute to broader and deeper societal understanding of the very serious and real issues of bullying. While our teachers are certainly on the frontlines of the battle against bullying - they are not the owners of the issue and they are not the only ones entitled to examine or discuss it. Those who create art or other media such as films, novels or games that engage the issue are also part of society's attempt to deal with the problem.

So, no, I'm not going to defend Bully at all. Instead, I am going to invite Ms Noble and her counterparts to examine it with me, and to enter into a critical discussion of its merits and the difficulties it may or may not pose to students and to teachers who clearly and irrefutably have to deal with the daily reality of bullying in our society. If the concerns of these individuals - our de facto authorities on bullying - are not explored in a game like Bully, then perhaps Bully is nothing but sensationalist junk. On the contrary - if Bully does illuminate the social realities of Bullying within the reasonably defined scope and capability of the medium, then not only is it more than sensationalist junk - it is arguably an important work. Perhaps even a work that students should be playing in school as a part of their education in order to safely explore notions of bullying while having to neither engage in, nor be subjected to it.

So, to Ms Noble - and to her counterparts in the coalition of teacher's unions - I extend an open invitation to play Bully with me, and once we have all finished we can collectively engage in an informed dialogue about the merits or failings of the game. Think of it like a book-club, but instead of reading Jane Austen we'll play a game - and then we'll talk about it. We'll talk about what it says and how it says it. We'll talk about what it means. We'll talk about its contribution - or lack thereof - to our body of knowledge and to our emotional experiences as human beings - as relates to bullying.

As a primer - since you are probably not terribly literate in games - you might want to start doing some homework. You taught me how to read - so now is my chance to return the favor.

Start with Eric Zimmerman's and Katie Salen's book Rules of Play. This is probably the most complete work to date on the subject of games and what they mean. It's being used to teach Game Design in universities, you know. Probably you will even be adding it to your own ciriculum in the coming decade.

For more insight into the growing field of game design as theory, I suggest a couple of small articles that are becoming increasingly central to the development of the profession, art and craft of designing games. These are Doug Church's Formal Abstract Design Tools, and Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubek's presentation of the MDA framework. While certainly not applicable to 'reading' and appreciating games, they may help you bootstrap your understanding of this emerging medium and get us to the stage where we can all play Bully together a little bit sooner. If you only have time to read two short articles about the foundations of design theory - these are the two.

For formal discussion of numerous principles underlying game design and to brush up on the critical vocabulary you will need when we enter into discussion, I humbly recommend several of my own past GDC presentations, in particular, one on Intentional play, one on Exploration, one on Immersion, and one on Simulation Boundaries. More important probably than the presentations themselves, is the fact that each of them has numerous suggestions for further and deeper reading should you care to continue. Terminology and concepts introduced throughout these presentations will lead you all over the internet and into the heart of a whirlwind of knowledge about games from some of the smartest people in the world - people made smart by the previous efforts of you and your peers and colleagues to educate a generation of children who invented an entire medium.

I would also recommend you read my own discussion of the state of game criticism - in response to Ian Bogost's critique of (you guessed it) Bully, and - while I have not yet read Mr. Bogost's recent book, well, you might want to tackle that as well. I will certainly read it before we get around to our discussions.

Finally there is probably one remaining hurdle to this endeavour. I am guessing that you are not comfortable playing a game as complex as Bully. One of the unfortunate weaknesses of our medium is the barrier to entry created by the need to actively input meaningful expression into the dynamic system of a game (ie: it's hard to start playing games because you have to actually play them). Fortunately, the game industry has been working hard to lower this barrier to entry and open the doors to new audiences of people who have been up to now intimidated by this barrier.

If you, Ms Noble, are interested in playing Bully with me, say so. If you do not already own one, I will buy you an XBox 360 or a Wii and a copy of the Bully: Scholarship Edition. Once you have your new console, you can can use it to download a host of games either from XBox Live Arcade, or the Wii Virtual Console, and you can brush up on your gaming skills. Both platforms offer a fantastic wealth of titles dating back to the days of Donkey Kong and Pac Man. You can certainly choose a dozen or more different award winning titles of varying complexity and challenge level to gain comfort with the controller and prepare yourself to play Bully.

So there you have it. Since I am interested in the debate, but I'm not interested in the trite and dull perspective that the uniformed are bringing to the table, it's time to turn the tables. I welcome - even actively encourage - any informed debate on the value of games, or even of a particular game. If you want to talk about these issues as informed professionals with potentially conflicting perspectives in need of thoughtful resolution - I'm game. If you want to enter into ideological debate about whether or not Bully should be banned, I've got better things to do - and frankly, I would like to think you do as well.

In closing, I wanted to say I hope you don't think I'm being a smart-ass by throwing out an offer I know you won't accept. I sincerely do not mean it to come across that way. I'm simply trying to challenge what appears to me to be systemic bias and injustice arising from ignorance of what thousands of people working in my industry are trying to accomplish for the betterment of our society. It's easy to shake a fist in outrage, and I have done my share of that. It's harder to invite rational discourse and to work with those with whom you have conflicting opinions in order to do what you know is right - especially when it is unpopular.

I think I learned that from Atticus Finch when I read "To Kill a Mockingbird" in my eighth grade English class with Mrs Uchiyama at Kitsilano Secondary School in Vancouver. Despite numerous attempts made to ban the book over the decades - I am more than proud to say that the debate surrounding it, and the content within it has been formative of my world view. Despite the cited 48 instances of the use of the word 'nigger' in its text - the book taught me not to be racist, but instead to tackle difficult and sometimes unpopular challenges head-on and with courage. So regardless of where the CTF stands on the controversial and challenging issues surrounding Miss Lee's book today, it seems clear that the debate itself makes a difference and contributes to the shaping of who we are.

I hope you do not see this new medium that your children have created as being beneath debate and ban-worthy simply because you don't understand it. Especially not in face of an offer to examine it openly. Perhaps together we'll find out if The Child is father of the Man after all. (Mr Henderson's Lit12 class).

Canadian Game Industry Tax Credits - Gamespot

Emma Boyes, out of Gamespot UK, brings us a well researched and interesting piece on Canada's game development tax incentives.

It looks at the way the Canadian Government has incentivised the game industry, and the way many other countries have failed to, and why. In particular, she looks at the (increasingly tragic) case of UK game development.

She outlines the different kinds of tax incentives available to Canadian developers - from basic R&D credits that have been in place for decades, to incentives for employing digital animators to incentives for sound recording.

Anyway - kinda business focused compared to what I usually put up here, but I think it is a really interesting article and definitely worth a read.

177%

According to this article, recent figures from Invest Quebec show Montreal's game development workforce has grown by 177% in the last 2 years. We're 47 heads short of the 5,000 mark. Awesome.

I don't know what the numbers were when I moved here six and a half years ago, but I was (just over) employee 1000 at Ubi Montreal and there were less than 500 of us in the studio when I arrived. Probably the Montreal dev community was less than 2000 back then.

We're still not at the size of the dev community in Vancouver or the Bay Area, but with 5000 of us, and with so many major publishers launching new internal development studios, if we can maintain levels of growth anywhere near this for another couple years, we'll be the largest game development area in the world easily I imagine.

Harvey Smith Interview

Last month there was a short interview with Harvey Smith in Game Developer that I really enjoyed, though I thought it was pretty short. Fortunately - it was short - as in a condensed version of a much longer (and much more interesting) interview on Gamasutra.

Kudos to Harvey for making a game that says some things that he's feeling, and kudos to Midway for giving him the leeway to say things like that. I think it is critically important - if we want the industry to reach broader audiences - that we let our top creators (and Harvey is one) not only make games about challenging things, but also let them talk about it.

Frankly I'm getting really fucking bored of reading about how many weapons and vehicles there are in next month's AAA FPS mega-hit.

Also - I hope if I ever end up in a position overseeing creative at an entire studio as Harvey does, that I would still have the humility to get my hands dirty if it was needed. That boy's got character.

Virtual Minefields

This amusing story of how Minesweeper was updated for Vista floated across my desk the other day. The post is a year old now, but worth a read. With all the effort we expend trying to expand our audience beyond the rather easy-to-please domain of teenage boys and young men, I wonder how much we consider what would happen if our games we played by hundreds of millions instead of millions.

Minesweeper has that level of reach, and unfortunately for MS, among their hundreds of millions of players, are many who have to deal with landmines in their everyday lives. Sure seems to make things complicated and messy.