The Armchair Game Designer

Welcome to “Things That Need To Die”, in which I thoroughly ream the gaming industry for its perennial laziness.

Super Mario Underwater Levels

Super Mario games – the core games, that is, not the endless array of tangential spin-offs – are almost always consistently fun (though nobody can really blame Miyamoto and company for the oddity that was SMB2.) There is one notable exception to this consistent track record however: Mario’s foray into the world of deep-sea diving, in his much-maligned underwater levels.

Ironically, while the rest of Mario’s core mechanics have innovated and progressed over the years, the underwater gameplay mechanic has actually regressed and gotten worse. The few underwater levels in the original Super Mario Bros. were a decent change of pace from the usual running and jumping, and didn’t radically alter the control mechanics.

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Here it is: the highest-rated game on my list, and the second-highest rated game of all time after The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, according to Gamerankings.com. Does the world’s favorite plumber truly live up to the hype? Or are these reviewers full of the very thing that ordinary plumbers would find themselves up to their ankles in, were they to actually descend strange green pipes?

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Today I take a 4-night trip to Boston, and coupled with an upcoming research paper for my moral issues summer course, I doubt I’ll have a lot of time to blog in the coming days. But I couldn’t go without mentioning some very big local news: Ubisoft, one of the smaller ‘big guns’ of game development and publishing, is opening a massive Toronto studio.

Ubisoft, whose Montreal studio already employs about 1700 people and is responsible for a lot of triple-A titles, plans on hiring about 800 people for its new studio over the next decade. This move marks an important milestone in the Ontario government’s plans to increase high-tech jobs in the province, investing $263 million into the developer over 10 years. In an interview with Gamasutra, Ubisoft Montreal/Toronto CEO Yannis Mallat had this to say on the plan for Toronto:

We don’t want to shoot low; it’s important for the quality of jobs and the quality of the studio to aim as high as we can as a group.

So we want to make triple-A games. It doesn’t exclude the possibility we might make other kinds of games, but we’d want them to be the best and the most successful.

What’s interesting is that Mallat talks a bit about the convergence of the film and video game industry. I’ll be writing a separate post when I return on the benefits and pitfalls of closely associating the two mediums, but it sounds like Ubisoft is really sticking with a cinematically story-driven presentation:

Toronto’s a really interesting city for that because it hosts, for example, the biggest film festival in the world, larger than Cannes. That kind of thing is certainly going to help us gather talent and get a closer relationship to the film industry, because we need to get closer.

We need to learn from them and the things that they do, and when we talk to directors and they see our tools and work they are always surprised about how much closer our industries are than they thought. Making the most of that convergence is important to us and it’s going to create better jobs and ultimately better games.

Mallat ends the interview by praising a number of nearby universities and colleges, and the “brain gain” of hiring both graduates and coaxing former Torontonians back to the city (or the province).

Have I mentioned how exciting it is to live in this country, in this time? Canada- and Ontario in particular- have been aggressively pushing for an increased presence in the worldwide high-tech business. Canada has the third-highest concentration of game developers behind the United States and Japan, impressive when you consider our relative population differences. Yet traditionally, the biggest studios have found homes in other provinces. Quebec has had Ubisoft’s flagship studio for over a decade, Alberta has BioWare, and Vancouver has studios for big names like Rockstar.

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This video (also below the break, probably NSFW) has been making the rounds as of late on the Internet, supposedly showing a World of Warcraft player having a monumental freak-out over the fact that his mom cancelled his account. Whether or not this particular video is real (I have some doubts), I believe that this kind of reaction is absolutely possible from a hardcore W0W-player. I’m not here to argue about Blizzard’s moral integrity in creating an army of Azerothian slaves. No, I’m going to be a bit more favourable toward a game that stole so much of my own time as well, and see what sorts of things Blizzard did right in order to create an experience as addictive as WoW.

First, I want to talk about a guy named Abraham Maslow. Abe was a psychologist, and like most psychologists, he wanted to know what made people tick. But while people like Freud were busy studying crazy people and getting their names dropped at parties, Maslow decided to study “exemplary” people like Albert Einstein. His studies yielded him quite a bit of recognition when he published his so-called “hierarchy of needs” theory. The theory outlines the various things that are important to people, most notably suggesting that people’s needs form a pyramid-like ‘hierarchy’. Once the lower and more basic needs are met, the theory goes, individuals are willing and able to achieve the higher levels of needs.

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