On Saturday I attended the GameCamp 08 event organised by The Guardian. This was a meeting of a couple of hundred people with an interest and ideas about games of all kinds, modeled after the BarCamp series of gatherings, or in my frame of reference, like a larger-scale, greatly more informal and parallelised version of Dorkbot.

Being over-tired and under-prepared, I gravitated towards presentations by people I’d heard of for the most part, and away from things to do with table-top gaming and ARGs. (I’m not convinced that ARGs - essentially very weakly interactive marketing tools - have any place in an event about games, but as the day had been partly organised by an ARG company, there they were.) With talks going on in seven rooms at once, it was impossible to see everything, but I regret that I didn’t see some of the more esoteric talks (the controller hacking sounded intriguing) or anything focussed on MMOs.

I had originally planned to give a little post-mortem talk about what I’ve been doing in the mobile games sector for the past couple of years. The theme and message was that the mobile games industry had become preoccupied with fighting the ’symptoms’ (complaining about device fragmentation, fiddly controls, failure to address the casual audience, etc.) rather than tackling the underlying ‘disease’ (the fact that mobile games companies do vastly less to gain the trust and participation of their audience than their counterparts on any other format, when the nature of the platform and distribution method demands that they do much more). But it quickly became apparent that what I’d prepared would perhaps be a bit too specialised for the general audience.

Oh alright, I bottled it.

Highlights of the day for me included Ste Curran’s talk on games as a facilitator for shared experiences (which makes it sound a lot dryer than the set of funny and engaging vignettes it actually was), the afternoon’s rather freeform chat touching on Flash development, Ukranians, Peter Molyneux and Twitter, and the closing meeting of the ‘People’s Revolutionary Committee’ where many gaming bugbears (including console exclusives, tutorial levels, and Twitter, again) were condemned to death by firing squad.

All in all, it was a great opportunity to meet some very bright and games-obsessed people, and I hope we don’t have to wait a year for the next one.

My photos are here, and various attendees’ photos are here.

In a break from our usual programming, I made a game:

“Scrumper is a game that allows the player to engage in the ‘victimless’ crime of apple theft from the comfort of their own home. The object of the game is to catch as many falling apples as possible.”

It has already received glowing testimonials from beta testers:

“it actually seems fun now”

“are you sure it’s not virus?”

You can download the game (Windows only at present) from here and further explanation is here.

Judging by the traffic and feedback that I got from the earlier Games for Windows 2000 article (where I collected together workarounds that had been found to allow various supposed “Windows XP only” games to run on Windows 2000) it would seem that there’s still a small but dedicated userbase for this venerable OS among PC gamers.

In the intervening months, two industrious Windows 2000 stalwarts going by the handles of OldBoy2k and OldCigarette have taken up the gauntlet to fix every artificially incompatible game. The results of their efforts so far are catalogued on their Windows 2000 Gaming forum.

Most intriguingly, OldCigarette has developed a collection of API wrappers which goes some way to providing a general purpose solution for current and future games afflicted with these problems. In theory, the Windows 2000-using gamer need no longer rely on the good grace of the community to develop a workaround for a specific game - with this toolkit all they have to do is note the error messages produced when they try to run the game and simply drop relevant DLLs into the game’s working directory.

(There’s slightly more mucking about than that required initially - copying some files, a registry tweak and a reboot - but once it’s set up once configuration for subsequent games is minimal.)

I’ve so far successfully employed this box of tricks to play Stranglehold. Next on the list is Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, assuming I can circumvent the utterly deranged battery of booby traps that Relic are passing off as an installer program. But rare exceptions aside, I certainly have more confidence in buying Games for Windows (XP/Vista only) branded games now that I know that I can run them. Take that, inevitably rising tide of progress!

In the last couple of years, the line between PC and console gaming has been (in some respects) almost completely erased. The simultaneous release of high profile titles on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 is becoming the norm. It’s easy to forget that before the mid-1990s, computer and console gaming were completely different worlds - two hobbies running in parallel with very little crossover between them.

While console gamers gawped at Starfox, PC gamers chuckled to themselves and went back to X-Wing. We’d … seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Of course then the Playstation came along and all the fascinating things people had been doing under DOS got swept aside, but for a few short years PC gamers had a legitimate reason to be smug.

Today, the vast majority of development projects are railroaded into long-established genres, known quantities where schedules and budgets can be (usually over-optimistically) drawn up at the outset. Back in the early 1990s, developers and publishers seemed to have no such play book to work from, resulting in a raft of games that were staggeringly ambitious and seemed to have no obvious precedents - games which would be almost inconceivable as commercial ventures today.

Some such games caught the gaming public’s imagination, allowing their creators (such as Sensible, Origin, Bullfrog, or the Bitmap Brothers) to found dynasties and ensuring their games are still widely remembered. Other games (such as Alone in the Dark) didn’t stay the course, but inspired later, more mainstream games (Resident Evil) to secure their place in history as a footnote.

There were still other, equally fascinating games that haven’t survived into posterity.

One such game was Stunt Island, developed by The Assembly Line and published by Disney Software for the PC in 1992. Stunt Island was a game that had the odds for historical recognition stacked against it from the outset. It shipped on six floppies bundled with a 180-page manual and a poster map, pushing its retail price towards £49.99, not a reasonable price for any game, then or now. As far as I’m aware it never saw a budget or CD-ROM re-release, and its status as Disney’s intellectual property has frozen any chances of reviving the franchise stiffer than Walt himself.

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Earlier this month, Lindesay Irvine made a post on the Guardian’s books blog bemoaning the news that thriller writer James Patterson was collaborating with Oberon Media on a casual game.

Irvine’s confusion and apprehension at this specific instance of a writer crossing over into a new medium (he seemed, perhaps understandably, to be unaware of the casual PC games market that has been courting Patterson’s middle-aged female demographic for the past few years) quickly segued into a highly defensive rubbishing of games as a whole. He scoffingly suggests games we can expect from other literary figures, including a “Martin Amis first-person shooter”. (Presumably Irvine is unaware that Amis wrote a book on video games over 25 years ago.)

Setting aside the ill-informed bluster, the kernel of Irvine’s argument is mixing imaginative writing with any other form of media serves to dilute it. I have to admit that the bulk of the evidence is on his side. What works on the page may not transfer to the stage, screen, or even audio recording successfully without major rework acknowledging the conventions of the medium. It’s easy to see why someone who has a narrow and outmoded view of games would have difficulty believing that anything of worth could be carried over.

Alastair Harper promptly penned a response which tried to set Irvine straight and make a case for increased involvement of established writers in games. He made the insightful point that storytelling in games allows things that wouldn’t be possible in other media (giving Bioshock’s big reveal as an example). He waxed lyrical about point and click adventures but didn’t touch on the interactive fiction genre, which would have furnished still more examples (from Floyd’s death onward).

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I played through the single player campaign of Call of Duty 4 a few weeks ago. I’m not sure what I can add to that statement, as judging by the sales figures, most of you will have also played it and formed your own opinions already. Shifting over seven million copies in a few short weeks is nothing short of phenomenal, and the game will surely add a couple of million more to that total in budget and Game of the Year re-release incarnations.

Activision and Infinity Ward judged the market perfectly, managing to recapture the ‘extended audience’ that turned the Deer Hunter franchise into a $100m industry at the turn of the century. Which isn’t to say that the game is aimed squarely at jingoistic Americans, it’s just very idiot-inclusive in its design. It’s the gaming equivalent of a Summer blockbuster movie, and guaranteed to spawn many imitators.

The game is the latest in a long lineage of sanitised Hollywood-indebted war games, harking back to Combat, Ikari Warriors, Operation Wolf and Desert Strike more than its more immediate predecessors (the Medal of Honor, Brothers in Arms, and Call of Duty series et al, with their Band of Brothers/Saving Private Ryan inspired aspirations to historical reverence), and a million miles from the scant few attempts to portray the ugly realities of war such as Operation Flashpoint, Hidden and Dangerous and (oh, alright then) Cannon Fodder.

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Another of the highlights of 2007 that I’ve only just gotten around to playing is Irrational’s Bioshock, a game that has already been ludicrously hyped, critically feted, endlessly discussed, lashed back against and had its backlash lashed back at.

As a game, Bioshock isn’t as good as the best games-of-vaguely-comparable-genre out there (e.g. Deus Ex, the Metroid Prime trilogy - I’ll admit I’ve only ever dabbled with System Shock I and II). As a story, it was probably as good as anything that’s been done in the medium so far, although one that strained awkwardly to stretch a few brilliant high-concept narrative ideas across a standard length PC game.

I think that the astronomically high review scores that the game received can be put down to a mixture of outdated expectations (it shouldn’t be a surprise for a game of this type to have as good or better presentation than Oblivion and Gears of War, at this point), a lack of directly comparable games in recent memory (and a long drought of genuinely creatively interesting games, which affected the PC and 360 worse than most), and a widespread unconscious urge for there to be a ‘landmark’ title to decisively announce that the ‘next generation’ had arrived. In short, it was the right game at the right time. Which isn’t to say that it’s undeserving of praise, but by my reckoning it’s a solid 8/10 rather than the 10/10 that a lot of places gave it.

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2007 has been a banner year for games. Not the best year ever, but at least the best year of this century, with each format seeing their share of classics. Having gotten out of the habit of playing regularly, I’m currently scrambling to assimilate as many of this year’s ‘must play’ games as possible, so it’s likely that I’ll only get around to writing about most of them retrospectively.

In the meantime here’s some thoughts on what will surely come to be seen as the game of the year, Super Mario Galaxy.

Where to start? Well, firstly, it looks like this:

So presumably Robbie Bach is feeling a bit silly right now.

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The whole situation is profoundly regrettable. I hope that there will be a way to salvage Gamespot’s reputation and working environment before it’s too late, but it will require everyone involved to act quickly and cohesively to restore order before the damage can be addressed. Unfortunately I suspect that the person(s) at CNet who found themselves so embattled and out of their depth that they thought it would be a good idea to fire Jeff would be likely to continue to act in the same cowardly fashion. I hope I’m wrong.

There is a handy round-up of past and present Gamespot editorial staff reactions to the news here. Regardless of your opinion of Gamespot (I personally think that they are still better than pretty much any other site trying to cover the same remit, but recognise that they are not infallible), the people caught in the crossfire deserve our support.

UPDATE (06/12/2007):

A second official statement from Gamespot offers some reassurance. I guess we’ll see over the coming days and weeks what the impact if any will be.

A couple of years ago I had the good fortune to meet Ron Gilbert at an informal “meet the fans” event in London. I asked if he’d ever thought about making the production notes and materials for the Monkey Island games available to the public. His reply (paraphrasing from memory) was:

“Arrr! But why? Who would be interested? So anyway, the secret-”

- which I have to say surprised me somewhat.

I’ve since found that this mindset is quite pervasive in the games industry. Attentions are always focussed on the next big thing, and once a game has shipped it’s assumed to be of no interest except as a historical curiosity. Any documentation made during the development process ends up getting trashed or mouldering away in a programmer’s bottom drawer somewhere. (Occasionally fragments do emerge - such as this excellent ‘Vision Statement’ by the designers of Planescape Torment.)

In many cases access to these materials would answer a lot of players’ questions, ranging from geeky points of trivia about characters and plot up to the rationale for major design decisions. Canny developers would also stand to benefit from swotting up - attempts to cash in on the success recapture the magic of well-loved games and genres would be improved if they sought only to retain the features and conventions that enrich the game, rather than the ones that were imposed by technical limitations or a lack or time.

It would also help to explode a lot of myths, especially among obsessive fans who assume that because a game has the name of a popular franchise on the cover, everyone involved in it’s development must have encyclopedic knowledge of (and unquestioning respect for) previous titles made years ago by people they may not have even met.

Part of the reason that the industry has developed such a cavalier attitude to historical preservation is a lack or resources to devote to a process which has no obvious commercial benefit. What’s needed is a repository for these materials maintained by parties who can dedicate the necessary time and effort to preserving and presenting them.

It’s quite common for universities to keep libraries of the notes and artwork created by authors, illustrators and film-makers, but until recently there didn’t seem to be any equivalent initiative for games developers. So I was excited to discover that earlier this year, the University of Texas announced that it was starting a Videogames Archive, with the involvement of Richard Garriott, Warren Spector and a raft of big-name developers and publishers.

Hopefully this archive will lead to similar efforts being undertaken in Europe and elsewhere, and will help to convince developers that there is some value in preserving and sharing these materials. In the mean time, you can donate (money or items - assuming you agree with the concept and how they’re going about implementing it, of course) to the University of Texas’s archive here.