Jim Rossignol

Ragdoll Metaphysics: Good Grief, The Victory Of Eve's Space Goons

Something Awful's Eve Online wing, GoonSwarm, has claimed what will likely go down in internet history as its greatest victory. It was an event described in a Metafilter headline thus: "It's as if Apple dissolved Microsoft".

That's an incredibly accurate diagnosis of the events of last week. Thanks to a brutal betrayal of trust by an Eve player, the Something Awful superpower has used the game's strange organisational mechanisms to take their arch-rival's name away from them. Band Of Brothers (BoB), once the most feared of alliances, is now gone for good. The Goon victory wasn't a great battle, nor a tremendous war brought to an end. Instead it was an inspired defector that led to the dissolution of one of Eve's most significant brands. It was a classic instance of underhand warfare tactics from the real world: sabotage by a traitor, trashing vital infrastructure, and leaving the gates of the fortress unlocked.

So what does it all mean? And how did it all come to pass? What it means is that upwards of several million man hours of work have been instantly obliterated, and a relatively peaceful region of Eve Online has been plunged into fresh war. The equivalent real-world costs are almost incalculable, given the sheer number of factors involved, and the thousands of people who have contributed to BoB. But it's safe to say that we're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars in virtual investment put at risk.

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Jim Rossignol

Ragdoll Metaphysics: Memories of 2003, or Why We Need Planetside Mk2

During a few quiet moments during the battle of blog-reading gentlemen that is our Planetside war, I found myself thinking back to 2003, otherwise known as The Bravest Year of the MMO.

It was the year that I spent the summer in a rented upper bedroom, playing both Planetside and Eve Online 'til dawn each day. Here, at last, were two massively multiplayer games that stretched the model to breaking point. My memories of Everquest awkwardness had been been swept away and replaced with what I assumed were just the first in a succession of brilliant new uses of MMO technology.

Neither game seemed particularly finished or well bug-tested, and they were nevertheless magnificent in their scope and ambition, and in their real-time combat. I began to extol the virtues of their genre-busting nature to anyone who would listen, and I recall a journalist colleague telling me that "both those games will be gone by next year, you mark my words."

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Jim Rossignol

Ragdoll Metaphysics: Soap Opera & The Sims

Next month sees the release of The Sims 3, the second sequel to one of the most popular videogames of all time. What's interesting about the series is not simply its success, but the fact that it has essentially created a genre of its own. There are very few social people-sim games, and none that can even pretend to rival The Sims. I think Sims 3 will be the last Sims title that will launch with that kind of comfort zone. Its time as a one-game genre will soon be up.

The Sims is a game that has, quite deliberately, tapped into the mainstream of modern life, not just mechanistically (in a game about everyday lives), but aesthetically and fictively (with stories about, er, everyday lives). All of which led me to think about where it is that The Sims connects to culture generally. Where outside games do we see similar methods? Where are the resemblances and likenesses across media? Where else does this kind of appeal-to-everyday stuff really connect with our culture? I'd say it was in soap opera.

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Jim Rossignol

Ragdoll Metaphysics: Ten Things That Made Me Glad To Be A Gamer In 2008

There maybe be spoilers ahead, but while there's volumetric-lighting, and Love and romance...

1. Not having enough time to play it all. If there was nothing else to remember 2008 by, there was at least the sheer fact of there being too much to play. In the past few months I've struggled to even know what to boot up, let alone what to persist with, what to bin, what to save for the dark months after Christmas, and what to avoid lest it eat my entire life. It was easier to sit there, paralysed by indecision, reading through everyone else's experiences of these games in internet forums.

Clearly I'm too lazy to perform any kind of accurate metric study here, but I'm fairly sure this has been the single busiest fourth quarter in the past fifty seven years. The variety has been refreshing too: from Saints Row 2 through to Mirror's Edge, from LittleBigPlanet to Dead Space. The mainstream has been hitting its stride and delivering convincing, intimidating monoliths of game timesink. I mean, I think it was a good thing the Fallout 3 story is so short. It meant I had time to buy Christmas presents for my loved ones...

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Jim Rossignol

Ragdoll Metaphysics: 2008 And The Indie Renaissance

There's nothing about 2008 that I'll remember more fondly than the bold success of independent games developers. Based on the past couple of years, and the guiding lights of companies like Introversion, I had been anticipating some positive trends for 2008, but things really started to clarify at February's San Francisco GDC. The signs were all there: 2008 was going to be a crucial year for the indie gaming scene.

It's fair to say that the Independent Game Summit was brimming with energy, and the independent developers had more to say - and more to be happy about - than any of the scores of well-paid big-studio professionals who were strolling lackadaisically around the convention centre halls. In fact, seeing games like World of Goo and Fez in motion was pretty unsettling: they were so imaginative, and so cogent, that the idea of their being built up by two man teams seemed absurd. If I were a developer working in a big studio game, I would have been rethinking my life choices around that time.

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John Brownlee

Why Left 4 Dead has the best tutorial ever... and why you never noticed it had one to begin with

Valve is a developer that sands its elbows: they spend a lot of time, money and care smoothing out a mottled fold of wrinkles that few but fetishists would ever consciously notice.

It's the largest part of what makes Valve the kind of developer they are. Valve's games are conservative, but perfect in what they try to accomplish, and the smoothing process makes even the least of their games eminently replayable... which is why they can get away with shipping Team Fortress 2, Portal or Left 4 Dead with so few maps. Those few maps have already been perfectly distilled.

None of this is to say that Valve's smoothing process is the way games should be designed. I use the word "conservative" to describe Valve for a reason: it is impossible to imagine Valve releasing a game like Bioshock, which is a masterpiece precisely for the reason that it makes no bones of being a big moist ball of scabbed, warty elbows. Or think of the the Half-Life 2 episodes, which have basically had their real charm and innovation sandblasted away through endless iteration. But the little details in Valve's games, the ones you only eventually notice, always reveal themselves to be the end result of sopping, moist-brow genius and endless refinement under closer scrutiny.

Which brings us to Left 4 Dead, which has the greatest video game tutorial I've ever seen. It's only a few minutes long, but it is simply soaked in developer perspiration: it is a perfectly distilled primer covering almost every strategy, monster, weapon and hazard in the game. Everyone has played the game has gone through the tutorial, almost all of us multiple times. And yet, if you ask most gamers what they think about Left 4 Dead's tutorial, they'd probably be mystified: "Left 4 Dead doesn't have a tutorial."

It does. It autoplays every time you boot up the game.

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