Illustration by Kotaku reader "Sughly". kramsdesign.com

I’d been meaning to do a Kirk Hamilton-type post about my first few months at Kotaku Australia but I never got around to it because I was overwhelmed by a case of “the lazy shits” (I think that is the scientific term for it, yes). Today I was going through the Kotaku CMS tagging stories, and seeing my older articles reminded me that I still hadn’t done some kind of a story round-up here on Zero Light Seeds. So here it is! Below are links to most of the big features I wrote during my first five months at Kotaku AU.

Gears Of War 3 Is A Crunchy Potato Chip

What Happened To Evony?

I Am A Body-Building. This Is ZiGGURAT

Knowing Your Rights In Game Development 

The Game That Saved Halfbrick 

Surprise Attack: When A THQ Marketing Director Goes Indie

Warco: The First-Person Shooter Where You Never Fire A Gun

Re-Classification Laid Bare: What R18+ Means For You 

The Brawsome Journey: The Indie Devs Writing Their Way to Success

The Fun And Games Of The FBI 

My 2011 In Games: Hyperdimension Neptunia And Repulsion

The Indie Handbook That Doesn’t Exist 

From Brisbane To Seattle: A Strange Loop Game 

Purple ‘N’ Pimpin — The Saints Are Back 

The Philosophical First-Person Puzzler: Antichamber 

The War Begins In The Other Ocean 

What Happens To Game Developers When A Studio Closes?

One Man’s Journey Through The Solar System

Resistance 3: The Complex Game That Keeps It Simple

Will Make Games For Food… Or Funding

Working at Kotaku sure has made me a lot more prolific than when I worked in print! Aside from writing daily news posts, I’ve also been given the freedom to pursue and write the stories linked above. I used to be so pleased with myself if I was able to write two large features a month for HYPER or PC PowerPlay. I guess I used to also be some lazy jerk of a university student!

I was not going to provide any substantial kind of comment on the post because I don’t feel comfortable putting myself out there, especially when it comes to a subject that generates so much anger and dismissiveness in the comments. I ended up commenting because a question was directed at me in a civilised manner and I thought it appropriate to respond. The question was:

I’m not justifying any sort of discrimination, but it seems impossible these days to make any sort of joke without offending people. Tracey, do you feel offended by this guys comments? Or do you find his joke funny?

Below is my response, which I have since extended for the purpose of this blog post (the original is still within the Kotaku comment thread (I’m going to get a bit more personal here because it is my own blog)):

Regarding this one comment in particular, I didn’t really find it funny, although I was annoyed that [Bissell] was perpetuating a stereotype. The thing I find frustrating when people say “it’s just a joke” or “you can’t make a joke without offending people” is this: people don’t just get offended for the fun of it. Generally speaking, women don’t enjoy getting angry about sexist comments. We don’t like writing angry blog posts, or calling people out for using gender-specific insults. We don’t get a kick out of this in any way at all. It’s really exhausting.

So WHY do we draw attention to it? Because sometimes it is genuinely hurtful. “It’s just a joke” doesn’t work when you’re constantly in a position of disadvantage. And the thing is it’s never just one joke in isolation. They stack up one after the other and they never go away. We hear it on Xbox Live, we read it in the comments, we see it in the games we play, we read it in the articles… when all these instances of sexism stack up, it’s not longer “just a joke”, it’s another hideous block of discrimination thrown on top of the mountain of blocks that we suffocate under.

A few years ago when I first started writing about games, I was able to easily shrug off sexist comments and “jokes”. I saw them as isolated incidents — moronic statements made by people who didn’t know any better — sexism wouldn’t play any defining role in my career as a journalist who writes about games. After that first sexist comment came another, and then another, and then another. It didn’t end. The first time someone makes a sexist comment and says it’s a joke, it is easy to believe. But when it happens again and again and again, it just doesn’t sit right. The more I was told that it was all just a joke, the more I felt that I couldn’t say anything when someone was completely out of line. I began to second-guess myself, I was worried that if I said anything I’d be dismissed for simply not “getting the joke”. A friend of mine gave me a simple analogy: “It’s like when you die in a videogame and your friend says ‘You just died’, and you’re like ‘I know’, and then ten minutes later they do it again. ‘Oh hey look, you died again.’ Such comments attack the psyche like the . . . slower, more ‘adult’ version of a child repeating every word you say immediately after you say it”.

Today on Kotaku we had one post about sexism and the comment thread was full of people ready to dismiss the concerns of women who felt that the way we as gamers talk about women is an important issue. A few weeks ago we had a post on a sexist advertisement run by a game retailer and again the readers came out of the woods to put down any person who expressed that they were offended by the ad. Weeks earlier, a post on female characters in videogames invoked a similar response where the writer was accused of over-reacting and making a mountain out of an ant hill. It goes much, much further back, and it’s not just on Kotaku — it’s everywhere, and it’s not okay.

What I have just identified is what upsets me the most. The day after a certain post regarding sexism went up on Kotaku, I went home feeling more defeated than I ever have during the time I’ve spent writing about videogames. I was disturbed, deeply saddened, and I found myself in tears, bawling harder than I have in years. What upset me was that all the jokes, all the dismissive comments, all the times I’d been told to toughen up and deal with it — all of that had snowballed to the point where a new “joke” would serve as a reminder for all the previous “jokes” told. It was a reminder that this isn’t a new and isolated incident where someone has made a silly remark about women; rather, this has happened before and people are clearly okay with it to allow it to keep happening. And it will happen again. These jokes are a reminder that if someone writes a post about sexism on Kotaku (or where ever) tomorrow, or next week, or next year, or five years from now, if I make a contribution I will still be dismissed, my opinion will still count for nothing, and I will still be accused of being anything other than a rational human being. The moment I contribute to the discussion, it won’t matter what my role is — I will just be another hysterical woman who is over-reacting.

I’ve been told that things will change in time, I just have to wait. Really? Really? Is waiting all it really takes? How exactly will things change if I just wait? And how long do I have to wait? What people seem to forget is that people who are discriminated against are feeling it right now. They live through it every day. It bothers me that we’re all being told to wait with no end in sight. It bothers me that waiting appears to be the solution. It bothers me that I feel like I need to tip-toe around a subject that concerns me, that as a woman I am somehow less qualified to talk about how issues affect me lest I be accused of being a “feminazi” who is pushing an agenda.

Understandably not all women feel this way. Some don’t believe there is a problem at all. But enough DO feel this way to speak up about it, and when they do we shouldn’t be dismissing them for being overly emotional or hysterical because if you were in their shoes you would understand why it bothers them so much. It bothers me. It bothers me so much I freeze up every time I see a headline in the Kotaku CMS about women, I wince before I look at the comments, and I’ll often sit there moderating them, feeling completely deflated, wondering why I bother writing about games when so many readers don’t even respect me as a human being. So, since you asked, that’s my answer. And the important thing to keep in mind with these things is that this may have been “one joke”, but how many “jokes” of this nature have women had to silently deal with, and how must it feel to be dismissed every time you try to stand up for yourself?

[Note: This post is written on my personal gaming blog and does not necessarily reflect the views of any of my employers. With that in mind, I have posted this here to get some thoughts off my chest, not to spark a debate or discussion. I've heard plenty of opposing views in various comment threads, I do not welcome them here.]

I had just done an interview with the developer of a war-themed game. The PR person from the game’s publisher spent the whole interview hovering over me and listening in on my questions and the developer’s answers, which is fairly normal in these situations. At the end of the interview, once the developer went off to be interviewed by other journalists, the PR person pulled me aside and said:

“I just wanted to make sure that you’re not writing a sensationalist story about this game – you asked a lot of questions about ethics and war and I just wanted to be sure that it won’t be for a story that sensationalises the violence in games because we’ve had a lot of negative attention from the media and…”

I assured this PR person (who is actually a really lovely person and does their job well) that I was not going to sensationalise anything and that the interview was in good hands. But what baffled me was that I had to do that at all.

First, I was a bit insulted that they thought I would sensationalise anything to begin with, as I am sure any journalist in my position would be. Second, I was annoyed that I was basically being told how/what to write. I hadn’t signed a contract of any kind; I was there purely to see the game and report on it if I wanted to, and if I was going to report on it the only person who I’d take instruction from would be my editor.

But what I found really baffling was they thought that talking about the issue of war and ethics in games somehow equated to attracting negative media attention. If anything, we should be talking about these issues more if we want to counter the negative image surrounding violent videogames. If you read sensationalist media reports, how many actually talk to the developers about how they chose to portray the violence and combat? How many talk to them about their ethical considerations, the experiences they tried to craft for players and the messages they tried to put out? These are the things we should be talking about. These are the questions we should be asking. Instead, whoever that is responsible for controlling the flow of information (I don’t want to lay blame on PR professionals because I’m aware they take their orders from higher up) encourages questions about how awesome the kills are, the range of weapons, how many dudebros you can smash in multiplayer and how powerful the next bazooka is… and that’s meant to somehow paint the industry in a better light?

I should point out that I don’t have an issue with those kinds of questions in general because I’m aware that many gamers do want to know about the weapons and sweet killz, but when that’s all we talk about and that’s the only kind of information we’re pushing out into the world, we’re really not doing the games many favours.

I don’t think every game needs to be talked about seriously, but some games do. I don’t think every article that comes out about a war game or a street crime game or a drug and sexual violence-themed game needs to Address The Big Issues, but the industry shouldn’t shy away from answering these questions, and they certainly shouldn’t worry that it will only result in their games being vilified by those who blame videogames for society’s social ills. If we discuss the issues openly and honestly and shed light on the development process, then I’m sure this will lead to people having a greater understanding of how and why controversial decisions were made, and that can only be a good thing, right?

This is what some might refer to as a "Bill Henson Model".

Review: Hyperdimension Neptunia
First published in issue 212 of HYPER magazine.

To laugh or to get angry; to let it pass as just following certain anime conventions or to be disgusted by the blatant sexism that sees well-endowed girls who look and sound 11 get exploited by the camera – I don’t know how I feel about Hyperdimension Neptunia.

Actually, that is a lie. I know exactly how I feel about the game. I feel disappointed. I feel uncomfortable, and most of all I’m annoyed that of all the Japanese games that could have been given an Australian release, it had to be this one.

The premise of the game shows so much promise: four goddesses, each the embodiment of a console (Wii, Xbox, PlayStation, Sega Neptune) are at war with each other over the land of Gameindustri. Much of the amusement and humour is drawn from references to the games industry as we know it, and while the game pokes fun at genre conventions and character representations (“Breasts are symbolic for both my maturity and fertility. The size of my bust equates to my aptitude as a goddess!” says the goddess Green Heart, while showing so much under-boob it’s a wonder they haven’t reached her knees), they are often done without purpose or reason. The game relies too heavily on the player’s existing knowledge of other games in order to entertain us, rather than an engaging story, clever use of dialogue and woven in gaming references, and gameplay dynamics that are actually worth playing.

With no worlds or towns to explore, you’re left to wander through uninteresting dungeon after uninteresting dungeon, each one boringly laid out with about as much to discover and get excited about as an airplane lunchbox. Running around awkwardly to a grating soundtrack, your exploration of the dungeon is frequently interrupted by random battles that quickly become repetitive and dull as you find yourself queuing up combos before hitting skip to avoid watching the same battle animations over and over and over again.

The characters are also needlessly irritating, with every female character sounding like a whiny, vacuous child with phenomenal levels of ditsy-ness (“Hello. I enjoy arts and crafts, and I’m good at math. I know I don’t look it, but it’s something I’m quite proud of,” says Compa, THE DITZ). The representation of females as stupid and shallow is offensive, and the level of fan service is discomforting. Case in point: almost every cut-scene involves an image still of a girl in a compromising position – the camera then slowly moves to and zooms in on the part of the screen that features the most crotch and holds it there. In an early scene, Neptune gets bandaged by Compa, but the bandages have only strategically covered parts of her breasts and crotch, exposing sufficient side-boob and EVERYTHING ELSE, all while we can hear the sound of her squeals. Every time Compa falls over, the camera also ensures we get to see what colour her knickers are (white).

Is this all a joke? If so, is it meant to be funny? Because rather than take a meta approach and be intelligently self-reflective and humourous, there appears to be a strong undertone of “Hurr…videogame references…durr…” and the kind of sexism that is simply too prevalent in a lot of Japanese anime. It’s gross. And while it could be funny, it’s just not. When all is combined, the interesting idea that showed so much promise falls flat on its white knicker-covered arse and stays there, waiting for the camera to zoom in.

1/10

This screenshot does not reflect my game. I am much worse at town planning than this. Also, pfft Aztecs.

I built a farm, and then another, and then another, watching my villager plough his tiny, pixilated patch of dirt until the food counter at the top of my screen started going up. Then I built houses and barracks, again right next to each other, causing my cavalry and army to spill onto my farms instead of…well, wherever I was meant to position my military for maximum defence. Strategy was never my strong point. But that didn’t matter, because I already knew how I was going to win.

As I was clicking and tapping away on a grubby keyboard and managing my troops in Age of Empires II at an internet café, London peak hour was in its full, chaotic glory just a few metres away behind the flimsy wall of the café. I sat in the dimly lit room just off Oxford Street, lined with grimy tables, chairs, and desktops, thankful that for the price of two pounds I could escape London for an hour or five.

It wasn’t that I was addicted to videogames. I didn’t enter the internet café because I needed to tie an Ethernet cable around my arm and shoot some Age of Empires right into my vein. I just needed some rest. I’d been backpacking for weeks through Eastern Europe where everything was so unfamiliar – the languages, the cultures, the laws, the transport systems – I was becoming increasingly worn out from adjusting from culture to culture, and mostly from worrying about getting lost, getting mugged, and figuring out how to not stand out like a sore thumb. I had thought that London would assuage all my concerns and I would simply be able to enjoy the easiness of an English-speaking city, but this quickly went out the door as I found myself constantly lost in the big city and more stressed than I’d been when I was in Budapest. Language familiarity, it seemed, was not the kind of familiarity I was after. The language of games, however, was.

I’d always played games just because I found the interaction with a virtual space engaging and the delivery of a good story rewarding. But for the first time, while sitting in this dingy internet café, exhausted and pining for home, playing Age of Empires II meant something different. I didn’t just see it as a game about building and conquering, but as a familiar place where I understood the rules, the language, the mechanics.

The ease with which I slipped into the game and just knew what to do was a stark contrast to how I’d been coping with London. I had mostly been feeling pathetic for getting lost on The Tube, panicking when I wasn’t sure what the sounds being echoed by various station speakers meant, and somehow managing to get lost even though I had a map. Coming from this environment, from this situation of feeling useless, brought my attention to how comfortable I was in the game and how well I knew it. I was familiar with all the maps and never worried or felt lost during my exploration for gold, stone, or berry bushes. Every time the game made a noise I knew what it meant – the horn meant I was being attacked, a “whoosh” meant a new villager had been created, and mumbling incantation meant my priest was converting the rival units to my side.

The feeling that I’d been here before, that I didn’t have to worry about feeling like I did in London, was so strong that the gaming session became something completely different to any gaming session I’d ever had with Age of Empires II. The combination of the situation I was in, the way I was feeling, and the timing of the game’s entrance into my trip abroad meant that I viewed the game as a comforting escape to a place that, despite containing warring civilisations and its own brand of chaos, was a place that I found peace.

At the time I was the furthest I’d ever been away from home. It was the longest I’d gone without seeing my friends and family. And as much as I loved being in Europe, hearing a familiar accent was nice. Seeing a familiar face was nicer. Being able to access a familiar world – a world that I’d always taken for granted – when I was in the most unfamiliar of places, however, was something that did more for me than I ever would have imagined.

As for how I ended up winning Age of Empires II? I switched all my diplomacy settings to “Friendly” and conquered everyone else. Tough in London, tough in videogames.

———————————————-

LONDON: The trip wasnt completely horrible. I actually enjoyed it a lot when I was there with my friend Alan, who is a fully bad gangsta from Laaahndaaaahn. Heres an example of fun times: when I was in Notting Hill I saw Brett Anderson and took a photo of him without him realising. Is that illegal in England? I dont know. What would they have done if it was illegal? Deport me? TOO LATE I AM IN AUSTRALIA NOW SO YALL CAN SUCK IT. Oh wait, Commonwealth. Their queen is our queen. :/

Ever since launching my online portfolio [www.traceylien.com], I’ve been unsure as to how much I should post there and how much I should post here, whether it would be okay to double up on articles, which articles are more “worthy” of being in the portfolio and which should still be shown but not in the portfolio. First World Problems, anyone?

Here’s an article that didn’t make the portfolio cut not because it’s rubbish (I like to think that my editors don’t have significantly impaired judgment) but because I already featured another article from the same issue of the magazine. I was approached by the editor of Atomic to conduct an interview with the CEO and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment, Michael Morhaime, and while I was initially apprehensive about whether or not I was qualified enough to do it (it’s part inferiority complex, part… no, wait, it’s all inferiority complex, but whatever), Michael was incredibly friendly and generous with his time and I didn’t feel as though I had “failed” at interviewing one of the biggest players in the games industry. HERE IS THE STORY:

————

It came onto the scene as Silicon and Synapse, produced some critically acclaimed games and ports, and with a few name changes, mergers, and the release of their smash hit Warcraft, became one of the biggest players in the games industry. Tracey Lien spoke to the president and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment to find out how their humble beginnings led to their current success.

It’s hard to imagine the gaming landscape without MMO giant World of Warcraft, RTS staple StarCraft, and the RPS classic Diablo, but there was a time when these games were merely ideas – ideas that had no programming code behind them, no players or subscribers, and no multi-million dollar figures attached to their sales. It’s even harder to imagine how three UCLA graduates – two of whom with absolutely no experience in game development – came to head what is now undoubtedly one of the biggest game development studios in the world. Blizzard Entertainment currently dominates the MMO market with more than 11 million subscribers to World of Warcraft and is a company synonymous with some of the best RTS and RPG games of our time. And it all started with just three guys.

“We started the company after I graduated from UCLA in electrical engineering, and a good friend of mine, Allen Adham, came up with the whole idea of starting up a games company,” says Michael Morhaime, president and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment.

“Alan independently recruited Frank Pearce and I for this start-up venture, but Frank and I didn’t know much about game development. I loved computers and I was really fascinated by the games industry, obviously I loved playing games, but I was really driven by the desire to learn more about computers and programming and how to make games. And it was a learning experience for me in the beginning. Alan was really our mentor in the beginning and really taught us everything we needed to know.”

The three men started out small, naming their company Silicon and Synapse and offering the service of porting games to other platforms. Morhaime explains that in the early days, companies more successful than them would hire them to convert their games released on PC over to the Macintosh and Amiga systems, with one of their main clients being Interplay. But they also made their own games, including the critically acclaimed Rock n’ Roll racing, which was awarded “Best Driving Game of the Year” in 1993 by Electronic Gaming Monthly, and The Lost Vikings.

Even with these early successes under their belt, the team never expected the company to grow to the size that it is today – they didn’t think that far ahead. Back then, they only had one vision in mind: making great games and having fun doing it. This vision, while simple and straightforward, would come to shape the company in the years to come. A name change took place and Silicon and Synapse became Chaos Studios before they settled on Blizzard Entertainment. Then came the mergers, of which there were many. First, they were bought by Davidson and Associates. Then CUC International took over, followed by Cendant, which was followed by French publisher Havas, and in that same year Vivendi acquired Havas before Vivendi merged with Activision and Activision Blizzard was formed. With that many mergers there was always the risk that Blizzard Entertainment would become diluted and scattered, but the vision that the company was founded on was what held it together.

“We’ve really tried to insulate the company from all the mergers and have the various mergers not have a very big impact on the company at all,” says Morhaime.

“To understand that I think that you have to understand the first acquisition, which was by Davidson and Associates. That’s where Alan and I first sold the company and we had a verbal agreement with Bob and Jan Davidson who were the majority stakeholders in Davidson and Associates.”

“Bob and Jan basically verbally committed to us that we’d be able to retain our autonomy, full-creative control over the games we were making, and basically nothing had to change from what we were already doing. They saw that we knew how to make great games, we were even back then selected as Best Software Developer of the year by Videogames Magazine, so they said ‘You guys know how to make games, so just continue doing what you’re doing and you’ll have access to our sales and distribution and fulfilment experience’ and we believed them. We didn’t get any of that in writing.”

By the time Davidson and Associates were acquired by CUC, Blizzard Entertainment had already accumulated a track record of multiple number one selling games and a loyal following. They’d started building a strong reputation for their brand, which gave them more and more leverage to protect their autonomy from each new parent company that came along.

“Our mission statement is ‘Dedicated to creating the most epic entertainment experiences ever’, and that is really what it’s all about,” says Morhaime.

“For a long time we had this idea that we wanted our name to stand for something to gamers, we wanted it to stand for high quality gaming so that if somebody saw that a game was put out by Blizzard Entertainment, without knowing anything else about the game, we were hoping they’d still choose to try our game. Sort of like the kind of reputation that Steven Spielberg has in movies, where you hear Steven Spielberg is involved in a project and you know it’s going to be good. We wanted to have that, and so we worked very hard to protect our brand image to make sure that we’re delivering a Blizzard quality experience that lives up to the name.”

As Blizzard Entertainment grew, so did their strong portfolio of games. Warcraft and all its sequels and expansions were incredibly well received by audiences, StarCraft was and still is played globally at a competitive level more than a decade on from its release, and in 2004 Warcraft evolved and was taken in a direction that would secure Blizzard Entertainment as the leading developers in the MMO genre. World of Warcraft launched and its success was immediate. Morhaime described one of his high points at Blizzard as being the launch night of World of Warcraft.

“The day that we launched World of Warcraft we all drove down to the local Fry’s electronics and I can tell you, driving there while I was on the freeway, I was thinking to myself ‘Gosh, I really hope people show up to this event, I hope we publicised it enough, I hope they know about it, it’s a midnight event, is anybody going to stay up? Do they even care about this game?’ Just wanting to know, because you just can’t know. And as I got to the off-ramp traffic was backed up getting off the freeway. There were all these cars and I saw the parking lot of Fry’s and it was packed. I could even see it from the freeway. And I was thinking ‘Oh shit, did we schedule this as the same night as some other event that was happening?’”

“You couldn’t park within two blocks of Fry’s, and there were waves and waves of people walking to Fry’s and the line wrapped around the building twice and then wrapped around the entire parking lot and headed down the street, and at that moment I knew that this was going to be something big,” he says.

The enormous queue at his local Fry’s may have been a sign that the game was going to amass a lot of players, but it was no indication of just how big World of Warcraft was going to get.

“The interesting thing about an online game like WOW is you don’t have to wait for the sales figures because we know every day how many people are playing and what we saw was right from the start, the popularity of the game exceeded our expectations. And we had to actually stop shipping boxes multiple times that first year to retail just to keep up with the demand from a server architecture standpoint. How did that make us feel? Well, it’s a good problem to have,” says Morhaime.

“I made some predictions back before WOW launched. I went to lunch with the folks from Vivendi and I was trying to describe to them what I thought the potential was. Basically I predicted that we had the potential to achieve five million subscribers globally. I thought that was pretty ambitious at the time, they looked at me like I was crazy, but we’ve actually talked about it a few years ago and I always say to them: ‘Hey remember that time we went out to lunch, yeah you didn’t believe me?’ Now we’re over 12 million around the world and I think we still have potential to grow even larger.”

But this kind of success isn’t without its stresses and downsides. In the initial months following the launch of World of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertainment wasn’t able to provide all their players with stable gaming experiences because the infrastructure they had built could not handle the demand. It took them a year to catch up, with Morhaime saying that one of his low points at Blizzard was the realisation that the server architecture they were using for the MMO was not going to have enough capacity to support all their players.

The rapid growth of World of Warcraft also meant that sacrifices had to be made along the way in order to give the game the support it needed – this included StarCraft: Ghost, a third-person shooter, being put on indefinite hold.

“StarCraft: Ghost was a great idea for a game, a great concept, and it just ran into some very bad timing because while we were working on StarCraft: Ghost was around the time that WOW launched and really took off,” says Morhaime.

“WOW was sort of a black hole that would suck in any resources that were available to help us scale-up the business and create content and catch up to the demand, so you can imagine if the StarCraft: Ghost team is trying to recruit a senior texture artist, and the WOW team is also trying to recruit a senior texture artist, and they both want to hire a person, guess who gets the person. And that was happening a lot.”

“We really couldn’t provide the StarCraft Ghost team an environment where they could be successful because they were competing for resources all the time with WOW and they would never win. So ultimately we made the decision to put the product on indefinite hold and we reallocated the StarCraft Ghost resources to StarCraft 2 and WOW.”

And will we be seeing StarCraft Ghost anytime soon?

“I wouldn’t hold your breath,” says Morhaime.

On top of that Morhaime says that some difficult decisions have had to be made along the way to better a company that was growing so fast, one of which involved the closure of Blizzard North and relocating the Diablo III team to Irvine. He describes closing down the studio as being very difficult and emotional, but it was ultimately the right thing to do.

Morhaime says that Blizzard is still growing and he sees potential for even more growth with their existing franchises. But what does this mean for new IP? As a company that has built itself on three franchises, what more can be done to three games that have already been around for so long, and how do they feel about starting a whole new game completely unrelated to anything they’ve done before?

“There’s an enormous amount of stress when we are working on something to make sure it lives up to our standards,” Morhaime says.

“We have these three franchises and it’s really a struggle because we want to really continue serving the communities that enjoy those franchises. If you look at StarCraft for instance, it took us about a twelve year delay between StarCraft 1 and StarCraft 2, so by any measure that’s a really long time, but the challenge is we want to make sure we’re providing enough focus and attention on each game that we put out, so we have resisted the urge to grow too many teams and spread our focus too thin.”

“Right now we are at a stage where we have teams dedicated to all three franchises, we’ve already announced that there will be two expansions to StarCraft 2, the WOW team is continuing to evolve the universe of Warcraft, some big changes to the world in Cataclysm, they’ve already started working on the next expansion and then of course Diablo 3 is about to go out – it’s been 14 years since we released the first Diablo game, so you can’t say that we’re putting out games in these franchises too frequently. No one can accuse us of that.”

As for new IP?

“We’re constantly talking about new possibilities. We do have a next generation MMO team that has started up. It’s an unannounced project that we’re not talking about, but it is a new project and we have some very senior developers who have experience developing WOW that are working on that project.”

Blizzard Entertainment turns 20 this year. From its humble beginnings as a small studio that ported PC games it has grown into an industry giant, and while many competitors might hope that their size and power might go to their heads and result in a decline in the quality of their games, Morhaime and his team show no signs of slowing down or becoming complacent.

“It’s a lot of work creating games nowadays, the things we’re doing are very large and complex, but I think a lot of that is self-imposed and it is difficult to continue raising the bar, but we’ve been able to assemble some of the most talented teams in the industry, so I feel very confident about our development capabilities,” Morhaime says.

“We’re not out of ideas or anything.”

WARCRAFT VS. WARHAMMER?

There have been many rumours as to how Warcraft came to be, but few have been more accusatory than the claim that Warcraft was actually meant to be a Warhammer game. Rumour had it that Blizzard Entertainment was in talks with Games Workshop about creating a Warhammer videogame. For whatever reason, talks fell through after Blizzard has almost finished the game, and so they turned what they’d made into Warcraft. For years people have been drawing comparisons between the two games, but now Michael Morhaime has finally put the rumours to rest.

“We pull our inspiration from all over the place from a lot of the things that we’re passionate about: sci-fi, fantasy, film, etc. There were no discussions with the Warhammer guys, although we have a lot of respect for their work. But we also played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons and read a lot of Tolkien, and you see a lot of influences and references to things in our games, but we had no intention of ever doing a Warhammer game,” says Morhaime.

“There were never discussions between Blizzard and Games Workshop to do a Warhammer game.”

So how did the team at Blizzard Entertainment feel when the rumours emerged that they’d taken ideas from the Warhammer universe?

“Wouldn’t we all love it if everything on the internet was true?” he says.

“Generally, in addition to following the rumours and the news, we also follow the blogs and comments and in my experience there’s usually a voice of reason that eventually gets at the truth, but in the mean time it’s not very fun to read things that aren’t true.”

Oh hey, a thing! First story with my third producer at Good Game.

Oh hey, so the ABC put up one of my Gamescom stories on YouTube. So many hours of filming, interviewing, and running around all condensed to 8:50mins. Enjoy! Or don’t. Mostly don’t.

The year was 2005. Warren Spector, the man who headed the development of videogame classics Deus Ex, Thief, and System Shock, stood before a group of Disney executives pitching his ideas for a new game. Having spent the majority of his career working on M-Rated titles that were often dark and gritty, he was unsure whether he was in the right place pitching to the right people, but his agent had assured him that Disney were keeping an open mind, so he went on with his pitch. He enthusiastically explained his concept for a fantasy epic or, if that wasn’t what Disney was after, he had ideas for a science-fiction game set in the near future. The execs didn’t seem particularly interested. Spector was certain that the meeting had hit a low point when they all began texting on their Blackberries during his presentation.

“As it turns out, they actually really liked what I was saying so they were texting each other at the table about whether or not they should talk to me about making this Mickey Mouse game they had in mind,” Spector said in a recent interview with Hyper.

“Lucky for them, I’m a Disney freak, so I jumped at the opportunity!”

A long-time Disney and Mickey Mouse fan, this was Spector’s opportunity to work on his dream project: combining the best of Disney with videogames. But aside from allowing him to indulge in his two loves, the project, which would eventually become Epic Mickey, served a greater purpose. For Disney, it was to reintroduce Mickey Mouse to a mainstream audience in a videogame and remind people that he is still relevant. For Spector and his development team at Junction Point, it was to make Mickey Mouse a videogame star and remind people that he is more relevant to gaming than we might think.

“You imagine space marines; well, a faceless space marine who kills a bunch of stuff, how interesting is that? How relevant is that to anything we do in our lives? Mickey is a guy we all know, we’ve all grown up with, he has a personality, he’s a hero,” said Spector.

“People will spend hours, months, even years of their lives pretending to be a plumber with a funny moustache or a blue hedgehog or a cat-like creature that even I can’t identify in Ratchet and Clank, but for some reason they haven’t latched onto Mickey as a videogame star and, frankly, I thought that was an injustice, so I wanted to do something about it.”

“My team and I signed up to make Mickey a big a videogame star as he has been a star in every other medium. I see how important Mickey has been to all our lives for 82 years, and the question becomes how do we not make a Mickey Mouse game? “

Spector believes that Mickey Mouse brings a certain legacy to videogames. He told Hyper that none of us have ever met or will ever meet anyone in the world, ever, who doesn’t know about Mickey Mouse, making his point by recounting a story about his encounter with a Russian journalist who said that even those from the former Soviet Union knew Mickey well: “He is a symbol of imperialistic, capitalist didacticism”.

But while he may be a symbol of capitalism and imperialism in the former Soviet Union, to most western audiences he is often associated with children’s entertainment and, because of this, the game was met with some trepidation from Warren Spector fans when it was announced. There was concern within the gaming community that Epic Mickey would be a kids’ game, and the fact that it was made as a Wii-exclusive did not encourage people to think otherwise.

“We don’t see Mickey as a licensed character in this game, nor do we see this as a licensed game,” said Junction Point’s director of product development, Paul Weaver.

“You only have to look at our flagship person at Junction Point, Warren Spector, who’s a gaming god, and you look at the people on the team and you look at the support that’s been given to the game – this isn’t some licensed movie game, this is a serious effort at making a truly triple A experience with Mickey Mouse.”

For Spector, going from making cyberpunk-themed action role-playing games to developing a Mickey Mouse game was always going to raise questions as to whether he was abandoning his existing fan-base for greener Wii pastures. But he says it wasn’t about designing for a new audience over an old one.

“I’ve made a lot of games that have been pretty successful at reaching 18-34 year old males… but when I went to Pixar, they talk about making entertainment for everyone, and I started thinking why can’t a game aspire to that too? Why do we always have to target a demographic?” he said.

“It’s incredibly important to me that the Deus Ex, Thief, Ultima and System Shock fans come along and understand that although the content [of Epic Mickey] is different, that core gameplay philosophy is still there. Play-style has always mattered in all of my games, and the gameplay goodness that those existing fans are looking for is still there and I desperately want to bring them along.”

Epic Mickey has been a success at the various tradeshows where it has been shown, with the most hardcore of gamers often seen playing alongside children and their parents. But whether or not the rest of the gaming market will respond in this way is still uncertain.

“We can make entertainment that appeals to everyone,” said Spector. “Will we succeed? I don’t know, you tell me. But certainly that was our goal.”

Me interviewing Jason Vandenberghe while waiting for my producer to set up the camera to do a separate interview, also with Jason Vandenberghe.

Being based in France this year has meant that I’ve had a lot of opportunities to do things that I normally would not have had the chance to do if I was back in Sydney. I’ve been on numerous press trips to Paris, spoken with the likes of Jon Shafer and Dorian Newcomb during the European press tour of Civilization 5, and more recently I was lucky enough to join Warren Spector on a tour of Euro Disney during the press tour for Epic Mickey, as well as squeeze in some interview time with him and the lovely Paul Weaver. On this same press trip I met and befriended a Disney artist, who has since given me a drawing lesson and allowed me into his Paris studio for an interview. None of this could have possibly happened if I was in Sydney, because no one would have sent a young journalist overseas to cover so many cool things when there are more senior writers waiting in line. Well, actually, I do know of a few young writers who have been sent overseas to cover some fairly big events, but whatever. I’m a girl, so the opportunity was never going to be there. So yeah, coming to France = an excellent decision. Good one, Tracey.

The funny thing is that I came to France for the purpose of not working. When I hopped on that plane from Kingsford Smith airport, I’d decided that this would be my year to be a silly, drunk student and, for a while, I did embrace that. But now the smell of mint leaves and limes reminds me not so much of Vietnamese cuisine as much as it does of mojitos, and that weirds me out a bit (read: it makes me feel like a filthy drunk). So in August of this year I decided I needed more structured activities in my life (since full-time study just wasn’t cutting it, especially when by “full-time”, they really meant “Okay, welcome to France, you have four months of summer holidays and there will be constant university strikes during second semester!”), and work has always been my favourite structured activity, so I decided to do that! I racked up some commissions from Good Game, Games.On.Net, and Gamasutra, my producer back at the ABC helped me get a press pass for GDC Europe and Gamescom, and I hopped on a train to Köln, Germany. I think a return plane ticket from Sydney to Köln would have cost me one mirrion dorrars, but given that I was coming from Paris, it only set me back 200€.

I’d like to go into more depth about what it was like being at GDC Europe and Gamescom, but I’m not sure if anything I say would be particularly interesting or new. Both events were fascinating, and the former was also particularly inspiring. I ate a bockwurst from the cafeteria, and that was kind of disgusting. My dictaphone died in the middle of my interview with Ken Levine, and I did not know this until I left the 2K booth. Luckily I took some shorthand notes, but it was still fairly disheartening. My producer and I ran after Warren Spector’s PR lady, and after lots of nagging we managed to snag 10 minutes with him. I was given the ugliest Mortal Kombat t-shirt ever (or, more accurately, the ugliest t-shirt ever. Period.).  I met Brandon Sheffield in the talk on Limbo and he asked me for a lock of my hair to give to Tim Rogers. We’re now Facebook friends! All of us! Highlight of my fucking life, I says.

Anyway, rather than have me crap on about crap, here are photos from both events. If you have any questions about GDC Europe or Gamescom, feel free to ask in the comments! I will probably be of little help, but that’s not exactly news.

Part of the exhibition space on the first morning of GDC Europe. My producer and I got there really early, so the place was still quite empty...

YOU WANT A PASS, MEC?

I'm not sure how many interviews we did over those five days. At one point my producer and I split up so that he could go interview people for Good Game stories that I wasn't involved with, and I went off and interviewed people for my own print/online stories.

Gamescom - again, we were really early, so no members of the public were allowed in yet.

One of the many exhibition halls at Gamescom.

Gamescom was divided into two main areas: the public exhibition area where everyone - including members of the public - could get hands-on time with games. The business area was kept separate to this, and in this section publishers set up discreet booths where journalists could interview developers. It was also where demos were shown. I photographed this 2K booth as I was waiting to see the trailer/demo for the new Bioshock.

I LOVE HAVING HEAPS OF OPTIONS.

Something about a computer game.

It is a Sorny.

Pew!

To my knowledge, there weren't many other Australians at Gamescom, and the few of us who were there all knew each other. This is me with Patch from IGN and Dan from Gamespot drinking teeny, tiny beers.

Fuck yo games. TINY TOMATOES!

Konamamamnannni

Fuck yo dictaphone. Tidy shorthand!

It's not assault if he didn't ask me to stop.

C’est tout!

The haunting ghost of Alma and the demons she brings with her aren’t the scariest things you’ll find in F.3.A.R. Scratch the surface of this first-person horror shooter and you’ll find a much scarier story about a broken family, the relationship between two brothers and their mother, and a reason to care.

The horror genre has been around for long enough that most of us know the bag of tricks that developers use to send shivers down our spines: the element of surprise, the sense of being alone in the dark, and on more occasions than not, zombie swarms. But when the third installment of F.E.A.R arrives, the title of the game itself carries with it a certain weight and expectation. F.3.A.R isn’t after a quick scare using cheap tricks – it’s here to delve into subjects close to our hearts to make us genuinely afraid.

Watching a demo of F.3.A.R, some obvious scare tactics spring to mind. There’s the eerie atmosphere that was present in the first two games; the combination of darkness and chaos that permeates the walls of every room you enter; the echoing sound of scattering creeps that may or may not appear; the generative AI that strikes when you least expect it. But, realising the need to make the game live up to its title, the team behind the survival horror have made sure there is more to it than just a spooky atmosphere.
“My favourite method is to make people care about the characters,” says F.3.A.R ’s scriptwriter and author of comic books 30 Days of Night and Criminal Macabre, Steve Niles.

“I always cite movies like Jaws. It’s very simple: you love everybody in that movie and you don’t want anything to happen to any of them, so you feel the tension you wouldn’t otherwise feel for yourself for those characters. Whether it’s a movie or a videogame, the most important thing is you have to care.”

Niles explains that in a game like F.3.A.R, the focus is placed on giving each of the characters a history so that players can sympathise with them and, as a result, care about them.

“In the case of Point Man and Fettel (the two playable characters), they have been living in a lab since they were little children; they grew up in a cell together. It’s the same thing with Alma – she is what she is because she was mistreated – and I just think that’s something that naturally in all our hearts we feel sympathy for.”

Niles also attributes the emphasis on family in the game to help players form attachment to the characters, thus heightening the sense of fear we feel for them and giving the game a dimension beyond mindless shooting.

“Even though we present a really horrific situation, this game is about family. It’s about two brothers trying to find their mother and possibly their new brother, so at it’s core that’s what it’s about and always has to be. I mean, it’s fun to just go out and shoot, and you can play House Of The Dead and just shoot zombies and have some arcade fun, but I think now, where we are with videogames and trying to incorporate story, it’s really important that we start to look at what makes things scary in movies and novels,” says Niles.

“F.E.A.R 3 is all about this family and what lengths somebody will go to, to protect their mother, even if her pregnancy could end the world. I don’t care if one’s dead, one’s a super assassin and one’s a pregnant ghost; they’re still family. And that’s really what it comes down to: in the end your family are the people you love no matter what.”

By playing on the bizarre relationships within the dysfunctional family, F.3.A.R’s senior producer, Dan Hay, demonstrates how the distrust between the two brothers is used to build tension, and how this is incorporated into the gameplay so that players not only feel a sense of fear while playing on their own, but are also be able to experience it in co-op mode when another player jumps in and plays as Fettel.

Hay illustrates this by showing me the game being played from the perspective of the first player – Point Man – and the cooperative player – Fettel. As both characters have distinctively different abilities, Fettel could either work with Point Man, giving him a heads-ups on things he could see that Point Man couldn’t, or he could work against Point Man, wandering off on his own and not communicating with his brother. In the latter, Hay explains, Point Man would be able to see that Fettel was ranking up but not know of his whereabouts or actions.

The tension that this builds ties back to the bizarre dynamics of the family: the two brothers need each other in order to find their mother, but at the same time have such a horrific shared history that it is almost impossible for a trusting relationship to exist. The situation echoes the idea of a person not being able to choose their family and the inexplicable ties among family members, even when each brother could not be more different than the other.

For Niles, a veteran of authoring horror comics, exploring the significance of family was central to the story of F.3.A.R and crucial to making the player care enough to be scared. But he also looks to the world around him to find out what it is that scares people.

“We’re all basically scared of the same things, and the one thing about horror is it’s one of the few genres that really reflects our fears as a society,” he says.

“Right now everybody is all ‘What’s with all the zombie invasions? What’s with all the vampires?’ Well, now because of what’s been happening in the world, we have enemies that aren’t defined. They’re not soldiers marching towards us, they’re people mixed in. So we’re afraid of us. Zombies are us, coming after us. Vampires are us, coming after us. It’s all very primal and it’s really interesting if you look at movies and trends you can almost always figure out a way it reflects what’s happening in the world.”

F.3.A.R isn’t exempt from the conventional tricks used in so many survival horrors before it – there’s grit and gore, surprise attacks from creeps and a dank atmosphere that keeps players on edge. But beyond that is the real sense that the team behind the game has tried to do something different – to not only achieve that quick scare and immediate tension brought on by the sound of a scattering creep or the nothingness of a deserted building, but to truly make us feel uncomfortable. We feel uncomfortable in the environment, with the relationship our character has with his family, at the morbid situation we find ourselves playing in. And, ultimately, when we think of the family we find ourselves a part of, it’s hard to imagine how the hairs on the back of our necks could not stand up.

—

[First published by Games.On.Net]

Weapon range, firing physics and military accuracy are a few things that the military shooter genre has down pat. For the team behind Spec Ops: The Line, the next step is to share the emotional experiences of the soldiers who fight the wars we play.

In the game of war, developers have spent years trying to achieve realism on the battlefield. There have been the increases in weapon choice; advancements in graphics and sound to make the player feel like they are actually pulling the trigger, and the games themselves have become more detailed and complex. But for the team behind Spec Ops: The Line, the future of the military shooter lies not in graphic realism and the impressiveness of weapons, but in player choice and emotional realism.

Lead designer of Spec Ops: The Line, Cory Davis, said that in the already saturated market of military shooters, it was essential for the development team to think outside of what had already been done and try to provide an authentic experience of being a soldier on the battlefield.

“We want to allow the player to take part in a number of scenarios where they have to make decisions between their moral preconceptions and what they’re willing to do – we ask them to approach that line with the soldier’s duty in mind,” said Davis.

“The inspiration for this came from our discussions and our research of modern conflicts. It’s the grey area that the soldiers of today find themselves in. Typically, there’s not a bad guy that they’re fighting against. It’s very hard to tell who is a good person or a bad person on the battlefield. These things get mixed up, and that’s the scenario we present in The Line – we want the player to experience it for themselves.”

Davis said that aside from providing a unique setting for the The Line – the opulent city of Dubai after it has been hit by a series of devastating sandstorms – the game features many moments where the player is thrust into a situation and forced to make a moral choice, one that reflects the grey areas that soldiers of today find themselves in. One such example, which he showed during a demo of the game, involved the torture of civilians. A man that the Delta Forces needed for information was also being tortured on the ground. The player did not know if there were more enemy forces waiting around the corner or what would happen if he and his squad mates intervened. Similarly, he didn’t know what would happen if they remained still. In that moment – without any prompts or pop-ups from the game – the player had to decide whether to fire at the enemy and risk everything, or wait and watch, as civilians were brutally tortured.

Davis pointed out that there was no clear right or wrong decision, nor was there one option that that made the player a saint and another evil. These binaries were not real, nor were they applicable to modern conflict.

“It’s very disappointing to only be able to make a choice to be good or bad because I think, especially in a military shooter, that’s not the type of decisions soldiers make on the battlefield,” said Davis.

“When I play games that are that explicit, I lose a lot of the suspension of disbelief, and that’s also because I don’t believe that’s how choices are made in the real world. We really wanted to just open the door to the player and say you’re in this scenario and this scenario’s important, and that’s all we tell the player. So he has to literally look around and make a decision for himself and look for opportunities because not everything is apparent the first time you play.”

The player’s actions would go on to affect the plotline, the relationship between the squad mates, as well as the emotions they would have towards each other. Davis said there were already a lot of great military shooters out there that allowed players to simply fire their weapons at enemies; in not wanting to reinvent the wheel, he and his team made their focus the moral choices that players could experience, as well as the emotional impact of war.

“For me in this genre, the thing that needs to happen is we need to focus on these emotional experiences that soldiers have on the battlefield. I think that is something that hasn’t happened enough yet, and that’s what we’re really excited about,” he said.

“If you go read some of the stories of things that have happened to soldiers in the real world, it’s absolutely surreal the types of events that take place. We haven’t really explored that enough yet. These things are absolutely horrific, but at the same time I think that we as developers and as gamers have the right to experience themes that are meaningful to us, and I think that absolutely, war and modern conflicts bring with them a lot of things that are very interesting and impact strongly on us as human beings.”

Davis explained that while the themes they were exploring were dark and sensitive, the team felt it was possible to make a game that was still enjoyable by treating said themes with respect.

“If you look around, there have been games that didn’t take it as seriously as they should have, and that can even be offensive,” he said.

“I think that we are doing something different. We’re actually treating these themes with respect and we’re not doing them for the sake of splattering blood all over the screen or something like that; we’re trying to treat them as carefully as we can and that’s something that we’re constantly discussing on the development side – what is too over the top? What is too brutal? What is actually detracting from that emotional experience that you may be having?”

Davis acknowledged that Spec Ops: The Line is, ultimately, a shooter game, and as dark as the themes explored in the game are, he wants players to be able to enjoy it.

“We are making a game, but we want players to think about it and feel those emotions that they’d have for a soldier that flanks them and is there to help them and is a friend of theirs that goes through these heart-wrenching moments with them.

“I think Spec Ops is, at its heart, an action game; it’s an exciting game, it’s a fun game, but at the same time there’s going to be a lot of moments where you step back and say ‘wow, should I pull the trigger here? I need to actually think about what I’m actually doing’.”

—

[First published by Games.On.Net]

So. Videogames, eh?

The old shaky hand, caused not by excessive consumption of energy drinks, but by my own inability to stand still.

I wasn’t meant to go to the Musée des Arts et Métiers tonight. I was meant to be drinking in Oberkampf or some other hipster Parisian district, bantering in French while sharing a duck joke that I’d painstakingly translated from English into French to try to impress people (it’s a really good joke). Whatever. It didn’t happen. Like birth with a normal spine or the development of big, pillow-like tits, it just didn’t happen for me. So I ended up on a train to the museum to catch MuseoGames instead.

In my expert French opinion, this says "Wah wah wah".

The mission of the exhibition, according to the website, was to showcase the histoire du jeu vidéo – the history of videogames. This excited me. There was a lot I didn’t know about videogames and I was hoping the exhibition would be able to provide some enlightenment. It didn’t. What it did provide was a superficial glance at the history of videogames up until, say, the early 2000s, capitalising on the popularity of “retro games” by projecting screen grabs of old games onto various walls, all the while providing little to no context for viewers to understand or appreciate the actual history of videogames.

Walking into the first room, gallery goers were bombarded with a wall of text, giant quotes, then more text on walls. There was one mounted TV screen that played interviews with game developers and scholars on loop, but no one stopped to watch. There was simply nothing engaging about this room beyond, say, David Cage’s face on the screen, but even then I only recognised David Cage because I’d seen footage of him from interviews. The video itself was actually quite interesting in terms of what the interviewees had to say about games, development, and their place in the world and, content-wise, it was probably one of the most important aspects of the exhibition; but god damnit, whoever produced it sure went out of their way to make sure it was the most boringly presented looped video in the whole museum.

The passage into the second room was lined with old gaming consoles… in cages. Why? What was the point of this? To be obnoxious and obstruct vision of the consoles on display? To obstruct the vision of the consoles on display that people had paid money to come and see? In fairness, the whole caged consoles thing had an interesting aesthetic, I suppose, but you know what else had an interesting aesthetic? Stalingrad.

"Hi, I'm a SNES. If a real person were to play me in a movie, it would not be Nicholas Cage because I CANNOT BE CAGED! Oh, wait... fuck."

I had mixed feelings about the second room, which was the main attraction of the exhibition. I thought it looked great. It reminded me of the 1989 film, The Wizard, specifically that scene during the finals of the gaming battles. Man, that was an awesome movie. It was sad that the kid’s sister died, though. Although I guess if she hadn’t died then he would have never become good at videogames. Or maybe he would have. I can’t really remember the plot at all. In fact, I’m not sure if that scene in The Wizard looked anything like the second room in this exhibition. Sometimes my mind likes to make things up and I am prone to believing it. But in any case, Room 2 looked rad.

Yeah, this definitely doesn't look anything like The Wizard.

Consoles old and new (although nothing newer than the PS2) were lined up on either side of a table, hooked up to monitors, and anyone could pick up a controller and play the games on offer, which ranged from Super Mario Bros. to Tetris, Pong, Pac-Man, and Rez. In the middle of the table, a bunch of old consoles were laid out on display, but it was a bit awkward leaning over people to get a closer look at them, and none of them were properly labelled with what they were, when they were released or whether they were country-specific. It was very much a case of “HEY LOOK AT THESE OLD SCHOOL THINGS LOLOLOL”. At each gaming station, there were little plaques that explained the history of the console that the gamer was playing, but only some stations provided information about the game that was being played. This was a bit weird.

On either wall there were projections of games that were particularly significant in the history of videogames – Top Spin made an appearance, as did Golden Eye and Rayman, but no Final Fantasy or FIFA. Under each of these projections was also a small plaque that provided some information on the game, but most people were occupied with playing the games themselves to read anything.

Yeah...I don't even know why I compared this setting to The Wizard. Maybe because it's a dark room? My room right now is pretty dark but I wouldn't make any Wizard references. Or maybe I would. Yeah ok, my bedroom is just like a scene from The Wizard. TRUE FACTS.

What really grated me about this exhibition was the wasted opportunity to be really informative and thorough while also being engaging and fun. It seems as though the curators had trouble consolidating information and gaming, and thus they kept the two completely separate. If you wanted to know more about the exhibition or the games or the consoles or anything to do with the actual history of videogaming, you could find this information in the form of laminated A4 sheets of paper that were placed at the end of the gaming table. Alternatively, there were thick booklets at the other end of the table about the console wars and the history of SEGA and Nintendo.

Would you like to read my materials about the Jesus?

This looks like a course reader from my first year of university.

This baffled me. If I, or any other gallery goer for that matter, wanted to read fifty pages on the history of SEGA, I could Google it. I could read a massive Wiki page on consoles. I could read a book, or a games magazine, or check out a forum. I go to galleries and museums for a different kind of education. I go (and in this case, I paid) for a qualified curator to present information to me in a way that stimulates my senses and makes me feel like I’ve learned something without working for it. I go for a complete experience that combines visuals, sounds and text in such a way that isn’t jarring or dull. I don’t go to a museum expecting to look at pictures in one room, then to sit down with booklet after booklet of text in the next room, then to try to consolidate the two and figure it out for myself. I mean, if it’s the intent of the curator(s) to make me work this hard when I go to see an exhibition, then I guess they’ve succeeded (or maybe they’ve failed because nobody at the exhibition took the time to read any of the cards or booklets).

From memory, there were seven of eight arcade machines in this room...

The final room (yes, this was a small exhibition) was the arcade room, which housed seven or eight arcade machines ranging from Space Invaders to some hologram thing that gave me a headache. In this room, there was no information on any of the arcade machines, nor was there anything on arcades themselves. It was merely a dark room where people could come in and play the games on offer. I enjoyed that every game in the exhibition could be played for free by everyone there – I think such a service (would you even call it a service? It’s more of a thing in an exhibition… yeah, a thing) is important in an exhibition of this nature because videogames are all about interactivity, and what better way to try to explain them than by letting the people experience the games for themselves? It was nice. But my main problem with this exhibition remains that one could easily go from beginning to end without learning anything new.

This exhibition is a glorified retro games showcase. There’s no real structure to the exhibition and nothing to guide viewers through the history of gaming. You’re thrown straight into a pool of retro games and that’s where you paddle the whole time. There’s no context for any of the games, no explanation about the significance of the move into 3D platforming, nothing on the introduction of certain genres, nothing on how videogames have changed the world (and how the world has changed videogames). If you knew nothing about games before you entered, you’d leave with only the knowledge that games these days don’t really look the same as they did back then. Who woulda thunk it.

I have no problem with this exhibition existing; I just wish the curators had tried a little harder to do videogaming a bit of justice. As it stands, this exhibition isn’t about the “histoire du jeu vidéo“, it’s more “Voici quelques jeux rétro” (“Here are some retro games“).

Tarifs:

Full Price: 5,50€

Discounted (students, pensioners, etc.): 3,50€

http://museogames.com

Story first published in issue #197 of Hyper magazine and re-published 17th March 2010 by GamesIndustry.biz.

THE RISE AND FALLOUT OF RED ANT

They were one of Australia’s largest independent videogame distributors until the Australian dollar crashed and brought them down with it. A year on from the collapse of Red Ant Enterprises, documents have emerged that raise serious questions about unexplained loans made by the company, as well as the movements of its director and his wife.

The Titanic
Red Ant was on a high. The videogame and DVD distributor that had only been set up in 2001 by entrepreneur Julian White had, within the space of a year, transformed itself from being a speck in the vast gaming ocean into a force to be reckoned with. It was a small but rapidly growing business, securing contracts to distribute blockbuster gaming titles that were not only highly anticipated by the Australian market, but also guaranteed to bring in millions in profits.

“We were the Titanic,” said a former product manager at Red Ant who wished to not be named.

“We had the biggest publishers, we had the biggest games, and everybody in this industry had all of a sudden changed their perception of Red Ant and people started to pay attention. People were ringing us and started hassling us instead of the other way around,” he said.

Like the Titanic, Red Ant did appear to be unsinkable. The independent Australian distributor had just come off the back of the success of Fallout 3, a science-fiction epic that took out numerous Game of the Year awards and became a household gaming staple. They had just signed a series of lucrative contracts with some of the largest game publishers in the world and were preparing to distribute a range of high profile titles that everyone anticipated would bring them yet more critical and commercial success for the year to come.

With an energetic and passionate team working behind the scenes, an enormous rise in their games’ sales and the promise of many more on the horizon, Red Ant’s future looked watertight. However, in September of 2008, Red Ant sprung a leak that would ultimately lead to its downfall.

The Fall

When the Australian dollar crashed at the beginning of what we now refer to as the Global Financial Crisis, it spelled trouble for the game and DVD distributor. As an importer of videogames and films from overseas, dealing mostly in Euros, the weakened Aussie dollar saw Red Ant lose money with every order they made. Being locked into contracts meant they had to go through with orders made prior to the dollar weakening and, even though the sales of their titles were up, the losses were far greater.

The receiver and manager of Red Ant, David Lombe from international accounting and consulting firm Deloitte, explained that the issue with foreign exchange led to the company becoming incapable of paying its debts.

“In Red Ant’s situation they didn’t react quickly enough to [the GFC] – perhaps it wasn’t possible for them to react, but whatever the reason, they didn’t hedge those purchases, so in effect, they had significant foreign currency losses, which basically stripped out the working capital of the business. That was fundamentally the problem,” he said.

Many staff members in product managing and sales positions began to feel the pinch in September as the value of the dollar plummeted. Product managers that once had the luxury of ordering stock when the Australian dollar was worth 60 Euro cents were suddenly faced with a dollar that was only worth 40 Euro cents. While it may be hard to fathom how a difference of 20 Euro cents could bring a company down, when large orders were made the losses were significant.

“The only thing that was really relevant to a lot of people was how strong or weak the currency was,” said the former national sales manager at Red Ant, Roy Stanton.

“For us, or any other business that purchased in Euros, that meant the Australian dollar weakened by 20% in a matter of a couple of days. That was the financial crisis for us,” he said.

And while those in management were aware that they had a problem on their hands, it didn’t seem like anyone was aware of the full extent of the crisis. Business carried on as usual, with the company signing on to distribute games by another big player in the game publishing industry, Konami, in October 2008 – a month into the weakened dollar. When asked why Red Ant took on such a large client during such financially unstable times, Stanton said that the company believed that things would improve.

“You run a business to grow your business so until someone comes up to you and gives you the axe, you’ve got to pursue business as usual,” he said.

“If something’s bad today it’s probably going to be good tomorrow. Things tend to go in swings and roundabouts. So was the decision bad? I don’t think so. Was the timing bad? Yeah, probably.”

On top of a crippled Australian dollar, David Lombe also attributed the collapse of Red Ant to another significant problem that they faced: being both a retailer and a wholesaler.

“One of the other things that was interesting, and it seems to be a trend in this industry, is that distributors – that is the people who sell to the retailers – tend to take on the risk of being a wholesaler plus the risk of being a retailer. And what I mean by that is when they’re selling to a retailer, they will allow that retailer to return product to a certain level, and what that often means is the product that they’ve returned can’t be sold because it’s simply stuff that isn’t selling, so it’s got to be severely discounted before it gets to sale…and that affects profitability,” he said.

“The primary reason [Red Ant] failed was because of foreign exchange issues, but they were losing money on both those limbs.”

Kept In The Dark

Former finance manager at Red Ant, Carol Philpott, said that while the issues surrounding exchange rates were evident back in September of 2008, it didn’t necessarily spell the end of the company. She believed that Red Ant could trade out of the problem it had found itself in – had the bank allowed it to.

“It was the bank that foreclosed,” she said.

“Basically we were talking to our creditors and going through some scenarios to arrange some payment plans which they accepted. We had the bulk for our creditors on board, and they were happy with the payment plans, but the bank said no. We didn’t have a loan as such, but basically the bank didn’t want to take the risk.

“The bank sent in the auditors and the auditors become the receivers so I think it was unfortunate because Red Ant could have gotten out of it.”

Amidst auditors making visits to the company, staff members were still assured that things were fine.

Redundancies were being made in November and by this stage, many employees of the company had started to sense that the company’s problems were greater than they were first thought to be. Product managers and those in the marketing department found that budgets and expenses weren’t being signed off and marketing campaigns were being knocked back for no apparent reason. Retailer deadlines weren’t being met because of the hold-up in product orders, and the company started receiving calls from suppliers who hadn’t been paid for work that they’d done for Red Ant. And as these calls became more frequent, people in the office started to talk.

Raj Wakeling, who worked as a product sales representative at Red Ant and also provided administrative support to the sales executive said that there were gossip and rumours in the office that something was going to happen, but no one knew how drastic it would be.

“I would say that it wasn’t something that everybody knew. It was talked about in whispers, very quietly – ‘Oh I heard this is happening, I heard that is happening’ – it was still very hush-hush, until the official announcement was made.”

That official announcement came in early December.

Those who were let go in and before December were paid off, while those who stayed on until January (when the company went into receivership) missed out.

It was only in the space of a few weeks that most Red Ant employees got the sense that the company was in trouble to the time when the first large round of redundancies was made. And within weeks of the redundancies, the company was handed over to the receivers.

“It happened in a blink of an eye,” said Red Ant’s managing director, Julian White.

“I was devastated. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy and it essentially came out of left field so we did everything we could. We actually contacted the bank before they even knew there was a problem and they were surprised and appreciative that we came forward; they looked at providing additional funding but unfortunately it was probably the worst time, the financial system was very nervous and cautious and as consequence they were unable to cover the hole that was created.

“We sold all the assets, the buildings, all my private assets were sold right away. Me and my wife and my family walked out with the clothes on our backs and that was it.”

Those who were let go in December were then faced with entering the holiday season without a job and having to wait for months before positions would open up in the new-year. The worsening financial climate also meant that jobs were scarce. Roy Stanton had to sell his house to support himself, while other former employees found themselves going through a long period of unemployment, relying heavily on what savings they had.

The employees who stayed on until January found out the day before pay day that they were not being paid for the previous month’s work. Julian White had told his staff that there simply was no money left in the company – no enough to pay staff wages, superannuation, sick-leave and holiday pay. Some employees were owed up to $27,000 in unpaid wages and holiday leave.

The high-profile titles and software that Red Ant had secured reverted back to their publishers and suppliers and staff were told no money would be seen unless the company was sold, and even then, there was no guarantee.

“In fairness, Julian White was noticeably distressed – he was not his usual self, he seemed to be really upset and apologised and expressed his grief at the situation,” Wakeling said.

“I couldn’t have faulted him – I don’t think he was uncaring about the situation, obviously it was his business and he didn’t want to see it fail – I guess it’s got to hurt your pride a bit, and I think he realised how we all felt about it and how it would affect us, so I don’t think he was uncaring. But I don’t think he felt any responsibility to assist anyone beyond apologising.”

Despite finding themselves in a situation where a company that they’d worked incredibly hard for had fallen apart, many former employees held no animosity towards the director or management – after all, he had been quite open with them about his own losses, too.

“It was Julian’s company – he founded the company and built it up and he as quite emotional when he was telling everyone,” Philpott said.

There were accounts of White crying when he broke the news to his staff, informing them that he’d had to sell his house and withdraw his children from private schools and put them into public schools because he could not afford any of it. It was believed that it was everyone’s loss – the employees may have lost their wages and creditors may have lost some money, but it appeared that Julian White had lost everything he’d spent the past eight years working for.

But amidst all of this, something wasn’t quite right, and some former employees sensed this not long after the company collapsed.

Unexplained Loans

Within a month of the company going into receivership, he had started up another company – a licencing consultancy agency by the name of Tuff Kat, and brought former Red Ant client, 505 Games, and former Red Ant staffer, Tim Emmerick, over with him. His actions led some his former employees to wonder how he managed to start another business and support another employee when he claimed to have lost everything just weeks earlier.

When the company’s Report As To Affairs was released late in October of 2009, it revealed that Red Ant had loaned more than $2 million to numerous other companies and trust funds – all owned by Julian White. Question marks still hang over when and why these loans were made, as well as where the money is now, especially given that there are creditors and former employees who are waiting to be paid almost a year later.

The report stated that White had loaned almost $700,000 to himself, with Red Ant’s holding company (also owned by White), borrowing $1,100,496. Almost $400,000 went to companies registered under the names Mad4Games Australia, Green Monkey, and White Commerce Trust – all companies of which Julian White was a director. All his other registered companies were still in operation at the time of writing, although his wife, Anne White, had assumed the role of both director and secretary of most of those companies before stepping down from all of those posts in late 2009.

White explained that all the aforementioned companies that were loaned money were set up over the years in association with Red Ant and that all the loans were made for business purposes only, and all the money was put back into the business through those companies, although he did not say how. When asked about his other companies, White said: “The bank has a fixed and floating charge over all those companies you’re referring to,” which would mean that all his other companies are in debt to the bank, which raises questions as to whether those companies have the capacity to repay the loans they borrowed from Red Ant.

When asked why he had made a loan to himself, White responded with: “If you go back through the history of personal loans, they were paid off by dividends.” However, loans cannot be repaid through dividends – they can only be paid off through loan repayments and interest. Furthermore, if those loans were paid off, they would not have appeared on the Report as still being outstanding.

Associate professor of business law and Taxation at the University of NSW, Frank Zumbo, who couldn’t comment specifically on the Red Ant case, said that while inter-business transactions aren’t uncommon, it raises serious questions about the business practices of an individual if they are lending money to themselves. More importantly, it raises serious legal concerns if the money was loaned when the company was insolvent, which then raises the question of whether or not the Corporations Act was breached.

The report revealed that while more than $2 million had been moved to other companies owned by White, Red Ant had accrued almost $10 million in debt to its creditors and owed its former employees approximately $250,000. The list of hundreds of creditors showed that the company owed amounts of money ranging from hundreds of dollars into the millions. Publisher of Fallout 3, Bethesda, were owed $2,860,046 – they declined to comment on their loss.

Bethesda weren’t the only game publisher to lose money in the fall of Red Ant. Other big players within in the industry also appeared in the list of Red Ant’s unsecured creditors, including (all in Australian Dollars):

•    505 Games – $220,049
•    Capcom – $1,128,591
•    Midway – $1,923,687
•    Black Bean Games – $151,616

Further to the list of creditors, the receiver’s report also listed two addresses as being the place of residence of Julian White – one being a large two-storey, newly built house in the affluent Sydney suburb of Turramurra, and the other, which was also listed as being the operating address of White’s other companies, a mansion in Sydney’s northern suburb of Dural. The house in Dural was listed as recently as November of this year in the Report as to Affairs and Anne White’s resignation document from her directorships as the residence of both Julian and Anne White. White said that his property in Dural had been auctioned off in June and that he no longer lived there, although he would not reveal where he now lived. The property was indeed sold to a couple for the sum of $2,430,000, but despite his assertion that the property in Dural was no longer his place of residence, the Report as to Affairs initialled and signed by him and his wife as recent as October of 2009 still list it as his home address. In the Report As To Affairs, White signed off on every page to confirm that the details were accurate and correct, including the pages stating that he lived in the property in Dural.

A director’s search on Julian White showed that his companies Green Monkey, Julianne Industries, Mad4Games Australia Pty Ltd, Tuff Kat, Red Ant Holdings, White Super Pty Ltd, and TK Ownership Pty Ltd all operated out of this premise, which covered hectares of land, came with a large swimming pool, manicured lawn, a water fountain that greeted guests who drove up the long driveway, and security cameras at the entrance.

ASIC searches on all these companies revealed little information – there was no explanation anywhere as to what these companies did – the only information that was available on the public record was that they had been loaned a significant sum of money by Red Ant.

In mid-November 2009, documents were also lodged to ASIC across all companies signifying the resignation of Anne White as director and secretary from the majority of the aforementioned companies – all on the same day. Her resignation came just two days before the Report As To Affairs – which detailed the debt that her companies were in to Red Ant – was lodged with ASIC. This raises questions as to when and why these companies were put in Anne White’s name, and what caused her to step down from all these roles at the same time. Julian White declined to comment on this and Anne White could not be contacted.

A lot is still unknown about the inner-workings of the company and where a lot of its money has ended up. When contacted in October, the liquidators PPB Pty Ltd said they were not ready to make a comment on whether they would chase up loans that Red Ant made to other companies. In December, they did not respond to further phone calls and it is still not clear whether the liquidator will recoup much of Red Ant’s outstanding debts.

Standing outside Red Ant’s office in Baulkham Hills, the signage was still there, albeit with a missing letter ‘A’. All lights were switched off; calls to the office’s phone number and intercom yielded no results, and it was fairly apparent that no one had worked here in a long time – the office’s only inhabitant was a life-size statue of a character from the company’s massive hit and Game of the Year, Fallout 3. With Red Ant’s symbol of success standing in an empty office of a company that was once thought to be unsinkable, one could only imagine what it was like to have been there when the company rode its high, took its fall, and lost it all.

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[Note from author: This whole investigation started out of curiosity. While I was working at Mania in early 2009, I had been in contact with Red Ant's PR department to organise promotions, when one day I emailed them and received an auto-reply telling me that my point of contact with the company no longer worked there. I was referred to someone else, who had the same auto-reply. When I checked with my colleagues, many of them were also having trouble contacting Red Ant. A few days later, I read reports that the company had gone into receivership. It all seemed awfully sudden and the reports/blog entries I was reading from people covering the company collapse didn't really answer any questions. I remained curious about it but did nothing until late 2009 when I decided to do some quick searches on the company to see what I'd find. These quick searches led to more than two months of collecting and analysing information, conducting interviews, liaising with academics and experts, and trying to piece together a story about what really happened. The above article is the result of my investigation. A big thank you to everyone who made a contribution.]

© Tracey Lien 2010