Gamer's Outpost Press (Archived)

by Dave Thier via Forbes

The big rumor out of last week, aside from everything out of the Game Developer’s Conference, is the Kotaku report that Sony might be working on something like a PS4.5 — a mid-generation hardware update that would increase the PS4′s graphical horsepower, assumedly to allow the console to handle 4K gaming. It’s a puzzle, from a hardware perspective: I don’t know quite how Sony would pull something like this off, or what it would look like, but those aren’t the only problems here.

It echoes something we heard from Phil Spencer recently, who suggested that the Xbox One would also be seeing incremental updates. The implication is extreme: essentially, these plans are an attempt to totally upend the concept of a console generation and further break down the barrier between machines like the PS4 and the rest of the panoply of personal computing options available to us.

There is something about it that makes sense, and lord knows that both the PS4 and Xbox One will start to look a little dated if they can’t manage 4K. But consoles begin to lose a lot of what makes them special if the hardware stops being static. On the consumer side, the magic is gone: a console plays any game designed for it, it plays it well, and it does so with no tweaking. A sliding hardware scale could work much like PCs do now, but you lose that uniformity that defines consoles now. On the developer side, you’ve all of a sudden got way more concerns than you had before, and you lose the optimization that static hardware can offer. Notice how much better games look late in a console generation than they did at the beginning? You get a lot of mileage out of a good team of developers learning a specific machine from the inside out.

The obvious concern is that you could split the market: that’s the last thing these companies want, but they’re going to have to be very careful to avoid it. Would a developer be allowed to press a console for all its worth, and make something that wouldn’t run on an older version? Could a company like Naughty Dog still make the graphical showcase it’s known for if it has to work on two different systems?

The counter-example that’s always giving is the iPhone, and there’s a lot of truth to that comparison. The iPhone manages consistency with constant iteration, and that seems to be what Sony and Microsoft MSFT -2.21% have in mind. But it’s also important to remember that older iPhones don’t run new games, and people don’t expect to have a smartphone as long as they expect to have a console. It introduces a whole range of questions that don’t have to be asked today.

This might be a necessary move: the death of consoles might have been vastly overstated, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t several existential threats to the way we game in the living room today. The PS4 and Xbox One may well need to adapt in order to remain relevant, especially if Sony wants to keep working on total living room domination. But it might be a rough transition.

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by Barbara Ortutay, Dan Goodman, and Derrik Lang via The Associated Press

NEW YORK — Nico Deyo, a 33-year-old e-commerce specialist from Milwaukee, used to enjoy mixing it up with players from around the world in the popular online fantasy game “World of Warcraft.” Then a stalker began harassing her on the game’s forums, impersonating her in the game and, later, sending her barrages of Twitter messages, some threatening her with graphic rape and murder.

While the stalker didn’t drive her from the game, the experience helped sour her on multiplayer gaming. “There’s a lot of things about the community that are very hostile,” she says of Warcraft. Deyo largely gave up the game almost two years ago and now mostly spends her time on playing other games by herself.

Deyo is far from alone. In the male-dominated world of multiplayer online games like “Grand Theft Auto,” ”Halo,” and “Call of Duty,” many women say they’ve had to take drastic steps to escape harassment, stalking and violent threats from male players. Some quit particular games. Others change their screen names or make sure they play only with friends.

Online harassment of women, often involving threats of horrific violence, has become a big issue — and video games are a frequent flashpoint. Two years ago, the online “Gamergate” movement, ostensibly a protest over the ethics of game journalists, also fueled Twitter attacks on female critics replete with gutter-level abuse and assault threats. Some targets left their homes or canceled speaking engagements, fearing for their safety.

On Saturday, the South by Southwest Interactive festival plans a daylong summit on online harassment ; one panel will address problems in “gaming and geek culture .” That summit, however, almost never happened; last October, the festival canceled two gaming-issue panels after receiving “numerous threats of on-site violence .” Organizers reversed themselves a few days later after BuzzFeed and Vox Media threatened to boycott the festival entirely.

Online gaming companies, however, have been slower to act. Major console makers Microsoft and Sony and game developers like Blizzard Entertainment have “terms of service” that explicitly ban stalking and other harassing behavior. The companies have the right to ban reported bad actors from their public forums. Players say that rarely happens — and when it does, as in Deyo’s case, their harassers often follow them onto Twitter and other social channels.

Becky Heineman, the 52-year-old founder of the Olde Skuul game studio in Seattle, was an aficionado of shoot-em-ups like “Halo” and “Call of Duty.” But constant catcalls from other players and questions about her bra size or “whether I do it on top or bottom, or other derogatory things,” she says, wore her down.

Reporting her harassers never seemed to make a difference, she says. She limited her play to friends for a while, but now mostly focuses on simple single-player games like “Cookie Clicker” on her phone and computer.

Contrary to popular stereotypes, women are avid video gamers; one recent survey showed that about half of all women play video games, about the same as men. But men are far more likely to identify themselves as “gamers,” and experts say that “hard-core” shooting and action games remain mostly male.

It’s only recently that “women players have been recognized as valid gamers that are interesting for companies,” said Yasmin Kafai, a University of Pennsylvania professor who focuses on gender and gaming.

Microsoft says recent changes to its Xbox Live service make it more likely that players with bad reputations will end up playing each other. It adds that its enforcement team monitors complaints at all times and that all reports are investigated. Sony, Blizzard and the Entertainment Software Association, a trade group, did not respond to requests for comment.

Those moves don’t impress some women in the industry.

“While they have very good statements about harassment and, you know, responsibility to the community and all that kind of stuff, the enforcement side of it is pretty lax,” says Kate Edwards, executive director of the International Game Developers Association. “Players basically have to adopt their own strategies to deal with it.”

Games and online game networks, for instance, let players “mute” messages from opponents and turn off voice chat, where trash talk can easily shade over into harassment. Xbox Live also labels players who get lots of complaints with a red marker so that other players can avoid them.

But constantly muting or reporting other players interrupts what’s supposed to be a fun pastime. And it doesn’t change harassing behavior.

“If I just block somebody, is that stopping them from doing the abuse?” says Kishonna Gray, an Eastern Kentucky University professor who wrote a book about racist and sexist interactions within Xbox. “They can go to the next person and do the same thing.”

That’s especially true when harassment shades into the real world. Mercer Smith-Looper, a 27-year-old Boston woman, found it annoying when male players patronized her and told her how to play. Then she started receiving unwanted gifts — a necklace, a sword — in the mail. One gamer unexpectedly showed up at her workplace after calling her repeatedly.

Fed up, she changed her gamer name and now sticks to playing privately with friends or alone. “I’m kind of in hiding,” she says.

What would effective anti-harassment measures look like? Experts like Edwards and Gray point to Riot Games, the maker of “League of Legends,” for its efforts to change player culture. Riot built a system based on artificial intelligence and player feedback to determine appropriate behavior during gameplay, and uses it to punish or reward players who draw complaints, according to the company’s onlinesupportdocuments .

When players show “signs of toxicity,” Riot can block them from competitive play, limit their chats or ban them entirely. The company shows players what behavior other players didn’t like when it punishes them. Jeffrey Lin, Riot’s lead game designer for social systems, has said that because of these efforts, only 2 percent of its global games experienced racist, homophobic, sexist language or excessive harassment.

Riot Games declined to comment when contacted by The Associated Press.

IGDA’s Edwards acknowledges that dealing with harassment is a difficult challenge. “You’re dealing with minors versus adults,” she says. “You’re dealing with free speech issues. It’s a struggle for companies to figure out exactly how to approach it.”

And while Riot-style moderation might limit harassment, it’s unlikely to solve the problem on its own. “This is a social and cultural problem, not a technological one,” says Dmitri Williams, CEO of game analytics firm Ninja Metrics.

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by Dave Thier via Forbes

In many ways, The Division feels like the game Ubisoft has been practicing to make for years. Everything that we’ve seen in other games is here: the open world side mission structure, crafting, a story mission that weaves its way through exploration and progression — etc. It’s the sort of thing that lends itself well to the MMO format that the developer is now testing out, but not everything necessarily translates. After a few days with The Division I’ve plunged my way into a New York shattered by a smallpox epidemic, I’ve mowed down hordes of countless enemies and a bunch of other people I’m pretty sure were bad, and I’ve begun upgrading my weapons and creating what feels like a customized agent. I’ve also got some skinny jeans. There are plusses and minuses to the whole thing.

The Good: The Division feels grounded. The 1:1 recreation of Manhattan is one of the best I’v ever seen in a video game, and that’s only enhanced by the way your character moves through it. Your agent slams into cover with a sense of weight, climbs up onto ledges with the feeling that he or she is actually doing a pull up, and dashes from the back of a car to a traffic barrier with urgency and grace. It’s a pretty game, and it offers up its nightmare versions of familiar landscapes little by little, unfolding more and more of the story as it goes. On top of that, the squad mechanics and environments are fantastic. This is a deeply tactical game, and it only gets more so the more skills you and your group members acquire. Every area I’ve been in has multiple avenues of attack, multiple ways of approaching the same group of enemies, and excellent opportunities for cooperation when it comes to taking down high-level enemies. There’s a real sense of satisfaction that comes with a successful flanking maneuver or a well-placed turret, and that speaks to how well some of these encounters are designed.

It all comes to a head in The Dark Zone, Ubisoft’s blended PvE, PvP environment that stands head and shoulders above the rest of the game. There’s a real sense of danger in there from NPCs, other agents, and even your own teammates. And the fact that you have to call in a helicopter to extract any loot found in there lends a superb sense of structure to a jaunt to the Dark Zone. It’s a striking transition when you cross over that wall: all of a sudden you sit forward, your fingers arch, and you activate in a way that the rest of the game doesn’t quite ask you to do. My only complain is that I can’t spend all my time in there.

The Bad: So far, things are a bit of a grind. In some ways, it’s a similar situation as with the earlier parts of Bungie’s Destiny, but without those ultra-satisfying shooter mechanics to keep you on an endless dopamine loop. I found myself grinding out some fairly repetitive side missions just a few hours in: that may have been fine for an MMO ten years ago, but neither myself nor the market at large has as much patience for grinding as we once did. The gameplay works, but the shooting lacks that tactility that makes navigation such a joy. Even low level enemies have a way of absorbing a whole mess of bullets before going down, and you never quite get the feeling that your shots are making much of an impact. Armored enemies are even worse. More than one engagement I’ve found myself in has resulted in finding a safe spot and just slowly picking off small moments of health before retreating, healing, and waiting. That’s not a good place to be in.

The story is fine, but not remarkable enough to fall into either a good or a bad category: it’s there, with one faction of interesting enemies, a few passable characters, and more deep New York accents than you can shake a stick at. There’s a real troubling moral ambiguity about what you’re doing: trying to fix the world by shooting anyone and everyone, and that wears on you after a little bit. All in all, I just don’t always feel that drive to move forward that I get even from other Ubisoft games. There’s a plod here, which slows you down.

The Bleak: Things have been better for New York. while the worlds in which we gamers clomp around killing computer controlled enemies are never exactly friendly, there’s something particularly depressing about this one. Part of it is the weather: so far, New York is caught in a perpetual winter, with the streets covered in snow and rarely more than that a slightly brighter version of overcast to mark the daytime. Things are cold, people are desperate, and it’s starting to wear on me. That feeling is exacerbated by the relatively constrained environments. We’re in Manhattan, and only a small part of it at that. Unlike other RPGs, there are no verdant forests or parched desserts to be discovered. Instead, we’re trapped in a relatively sameish environment, shooting the same enemies with upgraded versions of the same guns. That’s my main worry about the game so far: that Ubisoft is going to be able to give me that sense of wonder and excitement that needs to come with MMO expansion content. Part of that will be well solved by just melting the snow and moving on to winter. Or maybe we’ll just be able to go to Grand Central and hop on Metro North.

And that’s where we are now: a solid beginning, but one that worries me about its ability to keep me interested in the face of higher-energy games. Those are my initial impressions, and I’ve put enough time into the game to get a sense of what it is. Still, I’ll keep playing, and the changing nature of an MMO means that there’s bound to be plenty more to see, so check back.

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