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Terra Nova asked a very important question the other day. They noted Blizzard’s localizing of WoW for China. When looking at the aspect of 1.3 billion new consumers potentially entering the gaming market, “What do we make of China? And what do we make of Chinese gamers, now and in the future?” Two easy answers for that one. The first? Family.

1.3 Billion potential gamers. What could we do except welcome them with open arms? They outnumber us, but more importantly they are us. Granted WoW-China will have it’s own servers, but eventually we’ll all be playing the same games anyway. What to do isn’t much of a debate; games are an excellent learning tool. Maybe this potential interaction will help us learn from each other. Maybe even more interesting, we can study how we all play and compare. After all, if we are so different, it would seem that we would be different at play as well. So, that’s what we do. We watch, we interact, and we learn. And hopefully we all get along.

The second answer is we fight. This is what will really happen. Need proof? Play Halo 2 on XBox Live sometime. I can’t go five games without being called either a ‘nigger’ or ‘faggot’. Try it sometime. Sometimes it’s enough to just make me put the controller down and walk away. Similar points were made by Brooks Brown, the Columbine student who spoke about video game violence, and the blame to be placed on children who go wrong. And think MMORPGs are different? Think players are more ‘enlightened’? I’d agree largely, but it’s not like it doesn’t exist. From the makes-you-wonder hijinks of Leeroy Jenkins to just plain name calling, it happens.

Though there was one thing that gave me hope. Pardon me while I tell a tale.

Playing Halo 2 I was on a team with three other English speakers, and four guys who seemingly spoke an Asian language. It was an eight-on-eight battle and we absolutely wiped the other team out, scoring 3-1 on Capture the Flag. Almost like it was planned the second the game started the four English speakers took the vehicles and went to get the other teams flag. We lost a guy, but we managed to come back with the flag. The second we jumped out to put the flag in the base and score, the non-English speakers were taking off with the vehicles to score on their own, and they did it without losing a guy. After that we lost the vehicles, but we all ran up the same side of the map, grabbed the enemy flag, and ran back. The enemy only took our flag once and got it half-way. (We met them on the way back the third time and killed them, leaving some guys to guard the flag, while others took their flag to our base.)

Sure it’s just one story. And it’s not a rosy picture of pleasantly working together interchangeably… But it’s a start. And it was great. The moral? Hopefully we’ll do more learning and playing, and less hating and assholing. (Yes, assholing.)

Why read my opinion? You’ve read the opinion of everyone else under the sun on interactive storytelling, so why not? So, is it possible? Sure. Will it happen? Yup. Will it be good? Sometimes.

Just like any other game, sometimes it’ll be a pain, sometimes it will be amazing, and sometimes it will be completely inconsequential. The thing I don’t get why people make such a big deal out of it. Let the narratologists do their thing. Let the ludologists do theirs. Occasionally stop in the others camp and say “Hey, how’s it going? Invented the Citizen Kane of interactive storytelling yet?” “No. How’s that ‘game that can make you cry’ coming along?” “Fine.” Live together and be done with it. Blah. Seems to me it’s a lot of noise about nothing.

The narratologists are seemingly convinced that the world will implode. “It’s impossible,” they say, “Impossible!” Of course the ludologists usually aren’t too different. “It WILL work, and when it does, narrative stories will be the thing of movies and books! Games will rule the media landscape!” Y’know what really scares both groups of people? What if it works? I mean, what if we DO get the genuine “interactive story” up and going strong? What happens then? Who will be right? My guess? Neither. Games will still be relegated to second class citizen status in the world of media for some time regardless of what they offer. (Acceptance only comes with maturity.)

But supposing it does happen soon, do ludologists really think anything will change? It’ll be relegated to bullet-point status immediately. Narratologists calm your fears, you’ll still have jobs in a decade’s time.

Commercially successful indy film, music, books, and comics all offer a huge variety to the mainstream forms of each entertainment and nearly without-fail have much fewer resources at hand and a higher (or equal) financial bar to clear.

And I think the lack of this happening isn’t even a technological impetus, but a problem of distribution. We’ve all made programs that we send to our friends over the internet that do something nifty, if not a tiny game we thought up and wanted to get an opinion on.

Game makers can do this, but it severely hampers the potential consumer base. (It’s just a matter of customers being technically proficient and knowing what they’re getting into. So few gamers are willing to buy a new game from a complete unkown over the internet. We’re just not ‘there’ yet. Why? That’s another post.) But I honestly think that when the people who made Eets, Gish, Hapland, or even interactive fiction are able to burn (or have pressed) discs and sell them out of the trunk of their car, then you’ll see variety in gaming. Hell, then people will complain about too much choice.

This entire post started out as a reply to something I read over at Brett Douville’s blog a bit back, but I decided to make it a blog post instead. Now that I’m finally blogging, here it is. Brett said:

Lately I’m really interested in how costs can be lowered so that the bar to entry gets low enough for there to be single auteurs, or at the very least, a smaller set of auteurs. I’m starting to wonder if that’s not the way to get more interesting games.Sure, there are means by which single auteur games can get made, but they are unlikely to see distribution beyond a very small group. Interactive fiction continues to be alive, but it’s a small audience and there’s not really a way to make money from it.

I couldn’t agree more on his saying smaller teams could be good for games. It’s definitely possible for two hundred essentially nameless film professionals to make a good movie from a script handed down to them from their bosses in the movie company. There’s a tiny chance it’ll even be a great movie. But you give Robert Rodriguez and a crew of twenty of his guys a camera and you’ll get a movie I’d pay to see without knowing anything about it. It makes perfect sense to me that smaller teams (or those with a more unified vision that they actively care for) could make a more cohesive game. (Given the technical proficiency to pull it off, of course.) It only makes sense that more people on a team means more interpretations of any given aspect of said game, and that more team members are more likely to not be interested at all.

Need proof? I recently read in Game Developer magazine that EALA (EA Los Angeles) is adopting Will Wright’s concepts of “cells” in which during the time no game is being produced, groups of 7 developers form and brainstorm on ideas. Yup. They’ve officially co-opted creativity and taken it away as a tool for the small dev to get a leg-up. It was small dev’s last weapon, but now the fields are truly even and the creativity itself will be judged.