Gamer's Outpost Press (archived)

by Matt Weinberger

(Brenda Romero / Wikimedia, CC) “There are many people silenced this year” —game developer Brenda Romero. At this week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, a panel of distinguished game developers and critics gathered for a very popular panel, the third annual #1ReasonToBe — as in, “the No. 1 reason to be” a woman who works in games and technology.

The goal of #1ReasonToBe is to focus on the panelists’ accomplishments and amazing experiences.

Last year, the panel reduced the audience to tears before concluding in a standing ovation, and it became the talk of the event.

This year, people lined up before the doors opened, and the crowd filled the large auditorium.

“I hope to do more than just live; I hope to thrive,”  Elizabeth LaPensee said of her experiences as a Native American woman in video games.

It’s a common sentiment lately. The rise of harassment campaigns like the infamous GamerGate movement makes women scared to make games or work in technology at all, and we hear more and more about women who quit technical jobs over it. Those who stay find themselves unwilling or unable to speak up for fear of losing their jobs, or worse.

“There are many people silenced this year,” panel moderator and game developer Brenda Romero said.

Game developers, designers, and critics discussed their reasons for staying in the industry at GDC 2015. In a powerful segment called the “Empty Chair,” Romero displayed anonymous comments made by people too afraid to speak up publicly, while the room stood completely silent. For example:

• “Games were supposed to be a fun career choice. Now I’m afraid I’ll get murdered.”
• “I used to check Twitter for fun. Now it’s fear.”
• “There isn’t a woman alive who doesn’t have to worry about this.”
• “I don’t draw attention to my femininity in order to survive as a developer. I disguise it with tomboyish behavior and silliness. I am neither.”

Audience members and panelists alike could be heard crying.

Professor  Constance Steinkuehler of the University of Wisconsin at Madison talked about how she managed to sneak a toy gun from the massively popular game “Portal” into the White House during her time as a policy adviser for President Barack Obama — as well as helping shape the Obama Administration’s policy on video games and gun violence.

“You can play the games that you want to play, and I can play the games I want to play, and that’s called free speech,”  Steinkuehler said. “I can make the games I want to make, and you can’t stop me.”

Prospective game developers lined up to meet with Wargaming recruiters at GDC 2015. That’s the reason to be in video games, for  Steinkuehler : It’s free speech, pure and simple.

The next panelist, EA creative director Amy Hennig,  discussed her love affair with old-school arcades and the Atari 2600, which eventually faded. She went to film school instead, and her dream was to become a cinematographer. But she was told it was for men only and to find another career.

She never gave up, and she eventually took a job at Atari making a game for its Atari 7800 game console to help pay for her tuition. Though the game wasn’t great, it made her consider a real career, working her way up in the industry, and doing a little bit of design work for EA on classics like “Desert Storm” and not-so-classics like Super Nintendo’s “Michael Jordan: Chaos In The Windy City.”

Her career continues to take off, with stints at major studios like Crystal Dynamics and Naughty Dog. Most recently she led creative direction for the “Uncharted” series, and now she is back at EA working on a “Star Wars” game.

For Hennig, her main reason to be in the games industry is that it has presented recurring opportunities and rewards for her, thanks to her tenacity.

“These things are not the game industry,” Hennig said of the GamerGate controversy and the harassment it involved. It’s not a man’s world, she said, adding that it was important to fight that perception.

Sela Davis, a software engineer with Microsoft, spoke on her experiences as a child who made games on her ZZT computer who then went to the Rochester Institute of Technology for information technology, only to take a break and go into creative writing and metalsmithing, and eventually a stint at SAP before going back to finish her degree.

“I wasn’t happy in art, and I wasn’t happy in tech,” Davis said of what led her to go back to RIT and learn to really make games.

Her career in games started to take off. Soon, she ran up against impostor syndrome, made much worse by the fact that she was often the only woman in the room. Not feeling as if you fit in with everybody else in the room can eat at your confidence.

Davis’ one reason to be in the games industry was that it needed more people who could feed one another’s energy.

Adriel Wallick, the independent game developer better known as ” MsMinotaur,” also touched on her own experiences with playing games. Video games were her escape when she was lonely, and she used it to bond with friends.

“They let us do lots of things,” Wallick said.

Eventually her interest turned to programming, and she built a rudimentary text adventure. Later in her life, she discovered the independent video game scene, and she started building small projects in between punching the clock at her day job. Soon, she connected with the Boston-based game studio Harmonix. Along the way, she found she got a lot of respect and support and mentorship from the games community.

“It’s allowed me to be a part of all these communities who have made me feel like family,” Wallick said of her No. 1 reason to love the games industry.

Finally, the panel turned to Katherine Cross, a Ph.D. candidate with the City University of New York, where she studies online harassment.

“Boy, have I ever been given a case study,” Cross said, referring to GamerGate, to laughs.

Cross took an academic approach to her presentation: Women are in the industry on paper, working as critics and coders, engineers and economists. The gap in understanding why harassment is a big deal, Cross said, comes because some do not realize the internet is real life, where people do business and present the work that matters to them. That’s why harassment matters, she said, because it interferes with and scares people away from a space that really matters.

When Cross faced with the wrath of GamerGate for discussing the subject publicly, she said, there was only one thing to do: Write about games more. Cue a standing ovation.

And so Cross’ reason to be in games is to be part of a community building new, interesting forms of criticism that tackle issues of sex and race in the gaming world. To create a world in which people understand why the internet and video games matter, and so aren’t threatened by women in the field. Change is being made, bit by bit, by people writing on the frontier.

“I study games because they matter. Because gamers matter,” Cross said.

The overall message is that women are here, playing video games, writing about video games, and making video games; they care about video games as much as any other gaming enthusiast, and they’re not going away just because of a hashtag. In fact, games critic Leigh Alexander announced she was launching a new website called Offworld just for criticism and interviews from and with women and minorities in games.

“I am here to stay, and there’s nowhere else I would rather be,” Cross said.

Once again, the #1ReasonToBe panelists each received a standing ovation.

Source: Business Insider

Photo credit: Matt Weinberger

by Collin Campbell

Xbox head Phil Spencer used his GDC presentation this morning to talk about Microsoft’s attempts to integrate Windows 10 with its Xbox and tablet businesses.

Spencer announced that Other Ocean’s sports-platformer IDARB will be cross-play enabled for Xbox One and Windows 10 tablets and PC.

The ID@Xbox program for indie developers is being expanded to cover all Microsoft platforms with tools provided for cross-play development. Various ID@Xbox games for Windows 10 are being demoed at GDC.

A wireless adapter for Windows 10 will be released that allows all Xbox One wireless peripherals to work on Windows devices.

A new action MOBA called Gigantic was announced from Motiga. The game will be available for Windows 10 and Xbox One and will be cross-playable between both, with the same account.

Windows PC space trading game Elite: Dangerous “will come to Xbox this summer.”

Spencer also spoke about the Windows Universal App Platform, which allows developers to create the same game across Windows 10, Xbox and HoloLens, adding that he understood that individual platforms would have their own display and input considerations. He said he wanted to see more games working across the different devices.

His talk, very much aimed at developers, also touched on the Windows Store, which will “enable cross-buy and cross use.” That will allow people to buy games on one platform and access them across platforms, but “it’s not something that we will mandate.”

A new Xbox Live SDK is being released to some “early adopter” developers today, with a full rollout of the API set to come out in the next 12 months. A Universal Development Center will act as a central tool hub for bringing games to multiple devices.

He touched on HoloLens and said that holographic APIs would be made available along with new details.

“All of the parts of gaming at Microsoft are coming together to show a complete vision,” said Spencer, adding that the company is committed to deliver services and games across multiple platforms, and not just console. “We are committed to making Windows 10 the best that gamers have ever had.”

Windows 10 is Microsoft’s new PC operating system, due to be introduced later this year. It will be freely available for anyone who owns consumer editions of Windows 7 through to Windows 8.1.

Back in January, Microsoft showed the multiplatform-designed Windows 10 on Xbox as well as its Xbox PC gaming app on Windows 10. The company how it planned to allow games like Forza Horizon 2 to stream Xbox One games direct to their local PC and Windows 10-based tablet, and indicated future plans to stream from Windows 10 PCs back to Xbox.

The company also talked about how free-to-play combat adventure Fable Legends will be cross-playable across both platforms. It unveiled the HoloLens augmented and virtual reality system and announced that Cortana, Microsoft’s voice-powered digital assistant, will be baked into Windows 10.

by Colin Campbell

Most game players find evil paths in narrative games a big turn-off. Overwhelmingly, they follow “good” paths as the default option.

Statistics presented by Microsoft technical evangelist Amanda Lange at GDC today showed that, in narrative games where “good” and “evil” were clearly defined as story paths, only 5 percent of players opted for “evil” on a first play-through. The number jumped to around 50 percent on a second run.

In her presentation, “Beyond Binary Choices: How Players Engage With Morality,” Lange showed a series of stats based on in-game achievements and path data. In Infamous, for example, 95 percent of players who completed the game reached the “good” ending while the number who saw the “evil” ending was 65 percent, most of whom, she surmised, probably saw it on a second play.

Lange described herself as a player who enjoys the “identity tourism” of experimenting with morality and identity in games. But based on research she conducted via online polls, she found that most players tended toward making in-game choices the way they might in real life.

This raises an important question for creators of narrative games. If players are not attracted to evil paths, what is the point of them as anything other than added content for subsequent play-throughs?

Some of the answers came through her research. Many respondents said that being evil for its own sake is not attractive, that it needs to come with specific rewards or, at least, a level of ambiguity. Players are more likely to “press the red evil button” if they are in situations where they are trying to impress a specific in-game character or faction.

Players will do unspeakable things to NPCs in open-world situations, but in narrative sequences, they are much more squeamish. Notorious examples include the Grand Theft Auto 5 torture scene and the “No Russian” scene in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, during which innocent civilians are gunned down. Many players reported finding these scenes distressing and uncomfortable.

I want to push the evil button and see what happens

She described these examples as good design, in that they achieved a lot of publicity, but they asked players to do things that they hated doing (No Russian was skippable). For Lange, this tendency to turn away from evil in games is strange. “I always play the bad guy,” she said. “I want to push the evil button and see what happens.”

She used Paarthurnax, the good dragon in Skyrim, as an example. She killed the dragon and enjoyed a lot of gated content as a result, but most players did not. The same with Skyrim‘s “Dark Brotherhood” quest, which she said was the best quest in the game, unseen by many players.

So what is the lesson for game designers who create “evil” narrative paths, and want players to experience those stories as viable first-play options? She said that presenting pure evil without context is a bad idea, because most people find the concept off-putting. Adding friction to evil is counter-productive. Evil should come with its own risks and rewards, as it (mostly) does in real life.

“People love to have their emotional boundaries tested,” she concluded, adding that evil paths can create the most interesting moral problems.

by Dave Tach

A seemingly remorseless 17-year-old friend of a friend is responsible for deceiving a fifth-grader and deleting two high-level Destiny characters, Game Informer reports, based on interviews with one of the victim’s mothers and the perpetrator.

And the bad actor admits to doing the same thing in a Grand Theft Auto game, too.

“I’ve done it multiple times,” he said. “I think three? Four? I thought it would be funny.”

Late last week, the griefer exploited his power when the 11-year-old turned over control of his console using the PlayStation 4’s Share Play feature. That allows PS4 users to give control of their systems to third-parties over the internet. Sony advertised the feature as helpful, like in a theoretical situation in which someone got you through a particularly difficult part of a game.

The fifth-grader believed the friend of a friend would show him a trick for leveling up his Destiny characters. Instead, the malefactor deleted a level 31 Warlock and a level 26 Titan, leaving only a level 23 Hunter before the middle-schooler realized what was happening and cut the power to his PS4.

A player whose PlayStation Network ID was seen in the video was on the receiving end of attacks after the child’s mother posted a video of the incident on YouTube; he claims that he didn’t do it. According to his mother, the perpetrator was in the home, visiting another of the 11 children who live there, when he took control of the PS4 account blamed for the attack. She claims to have tracked down the culprit through a series of posts on the Bungie.net forums, and hopes this information will put the situation to rest.

Told of the viral nature of the video chronicling the incident and the attacks on another gamer whose account appeared in the video, Game Informer asked the miscreant if he’d do it again.

“It depends on the situation,” he said. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

He doesn’t believe he has “to say anything” to the injured party’s family, and his advice for those suffering after the attack did not ooze sympathy.

“Suck it up and move on with life,” he said. “What else is there to say?”

Last week, the victim’s mother said she contacted Destiny developer Bungie, who said it was unable to reverse the deletion.

“Please be careful out there, kids,” a post on Bungie.net last week referencing the incident reads. “Bungie has some ideas for how we can make regrettable deletions like these less permanent. While we plan the right course of action (and build out new game features), protect your Guardians from sleazy online jerks — or dogs that step on your controller.”