We are Forever Blowing Bubbles

The future is a tricky place. Apart from being a fucking cock tease with its never materializing flying cars, jet-packs and nubile Lucy-Lu love bots its dammed... unpredictable. Shocking revelation i know but at a fundamental level it is and people seem to forget that.

This is why speculating on a 'sure thing' is such a bad idea. Investors do it in all walks of life but recently they have had a nasty habit of pumping the fuck out of social gaming companies and driving up hype. There seems this special type of investor that thinks that because something is making money now and has gone up in the past it MUST just keep going. They makes these decisions without the scantest knowledge of the sector they are investing in and assume that as long as something keeps going up then everything will always be fine. (these types of investor seem to also run Activision) You would think people would have learned what a bubble looks like after that whole kerfuffle in the 20s, the lie of the bull market and all, but i suppose not. And a bubble we have. The signs have been there for a while, as i mentioned previously EA threw their money down a Playfish shaped whole, never to be re-coped, but everyone seems a bit to baffled to say anything about it. We seem to have a "New World" mentality in the gaming press post-Wii assuming that everything will not go as before but ass long time gamers i think we can use old assurances and a dash of other sectors to make some educated guesses.

Take the dot.com boom for example, a lot of clueless investors throw their money behind Internet companies because they   seem to be magic money makers. Many of the paper millionaires we saw were just that and the value of most of these companies, and consequently their shares, dropped to a big fat sum of zero. Social and in a slightly different way mobile games have also done this; massive investment in something that is seen as a new, bottomless money spinner. The games journalist is in a sticky situation here; if you go with this line then you risk looking entrenched, embittered and irrelevant. If you go the other route and tout the rise of the social gaming you risk a snap-back from the traditional audience if all goes tits up. No one quite likes shoving your own words in your face like the forum dwellers. I think the main fear is one of looking closed off and insular, from one generation ago there has been an audience explosion in multiple places and at first many reacted with pretty irrational fear. But i think many should be able to see the underlying problems with the social gaming boom.

All it takes is a small shift in usership or advertising confidence and a million dollar prized cow can turn out to be a dog-turd. This isn't even going into mismanagement, small companies that make it big quick have a nasty habit on not being able to deal with it or making terrible decisions. Recently Zynga has decided to hoover up a sum total of 15 companies with its new found (if ethically and creatively dubious) wealth. Fast, forward to today and profits have fallen 90%, news with has been delayed since June due to the "Tough market conditions" leaving me with the tentative feeling that the news has been released over a more favorable range to their original numbers.

Woof Woof.

The shit will only really hit the fan when said investors get a whiff that their particular horse in this race might be horribly overvalued. When investor pull out in the sector starts i have a feeling it may not stop, speculators (especially when it comes to the fast world of tech) are ruthlessly fickle and jumpy as coked-up Meerkats. Here's hoping that a lot of good people don't get squeezed out of the industry all together as many social games have served as a foot in the door for new talent.

Season of the Nerd

Something has happened, and is still happening, in the mainstream entertainment industry; the Nerds have taken over. Take a look at cinema in particular; Super-hero movies, the return of many genre movies and tongue in cheek b movies and comic-book licences a plenty. Hell a Batman film caused an uproar when it was NOT nominated for best picture.

Of course all of this has been going on for a while but the quantity and most importantly the quality of much "Geek cinema" has improved dramatically so much so that a "Thor" movie can make a decent profit and get in the high 70s on aggregation sites. There have been a few financial 'bombs' (at least as seen by the studio) on the part of some very good movies, see; the sublime Scott Pilgrim and its much lower than expected takings, and on the part of some terrible movies, see; The Green Lantern but on the whole the studios appetite seems undamaged for movies aimed squarely at the 12-30 something 'geek'  male audience. The thing that wets the studio's appetite is that a move like "Thor", if they pitch it right, will appeal to anyone from the age of 10 right up to mid 40s nerds and almost every age group in between not to mention parents and grand-parents who take their kids to see it. Your 10-15 audience will want to see it because it looks awesome and is rated low enough for all involved to be comfortable with them viewing it, plus it has a dude with a giant hammer and explosions and junk. Your 15-18 audience will want to see it for mainly the same reasons but will feel comfortable going on their own because the movie is not seen as "just for kids". Your 18-30s will feel comfortable for the same reason but might also be existing fans of the on-going comic and have the time and disposable income to want to see it possibly multiple times. Your 30-40s age-group might have been a fan of the older comics and so the licence has geek nostalgia appeal to them.

You can please many demographics without really compromising your movie simply because so many people see no barrier to them viewing it as long as you make the appeal broad enough. Now this brings up issues of movies that started out intending to be one rating being brutally edited or stunted to fit a lower one (see Red Riding Hood, that movie wanted to be WAY more sexy/freaky than it was ever allowed to be and suffered dearly for it) but fortunately this seems to to happen too often in the Super Hero genre.

But how did we get here? The main reason i see is the continued quality of Marvel Studios offerings since Iron Man. They have not been the sole contributor to the rise but their steady efforts since 2008 have really underpinned the whole genre with an air of quality, consistency and class. 5 years before things had looked a little rockier with their properties; 2003's hulk seemed almost embarrassed to be a super hero movie instead pulling a bait-and-switch with a movie about daddy issues. The idea that having a movie hold up based on a "Big green dude tear shit up" still didn't quite sit right in the collective consciousness of the good folks over and Universal. The result was a critical and commercial flop and contributed to the, in retrospect excellent, idea of Marvel taking their toys back.  2008's hulk was widely seen as an apology for the earlier effort and sent a clear sign that marvel was both serious about keeping their own properties and dead serious about the idea of a unified universe.


There has also been a glimmer of big concept Sci-Fi peeping its head above water; inception and the ajustment beuro seem to be actively harking back to the grand ideas of the 1960s sci-fi writers to deliver pretty amazing ideas. The asthetic also seems to be grounded in this era, rich colours and swave locals. Heres to hoping we see some of the great work of Phillip K Dick make it to the sceen without all the pandering that has been layered on it before. If Hunter Thompson's Rum Dairy can make it then why not a well crafted "The Man in the High Castle"?

The place we stand now is pretty exciting, The Avengers Movie is gearing up and we see something that a decade ago would have been laked out of the building; a straight faced translation of large scale interconnected comic book continuity put into a fully blown blockbuster. The future seems set on an even brighter horizon; the return of actual ideas to hollywood.

Hipsters of the World Unite; My Antidote to Modern Ultra Mainstream Gaming.

So before i launch into what the game industry is doing wrong lets look at some areas that are doing something right for a change.

No im not talking about some pretencions 2D bobble headed platformer that claims to be some art masterpiece but is really just Mario bros stapled to Dostoevsky pretending to be really clever. No I'm talking about real 3D games, games that can rival the AAA industry in their scope, range and prowess (and surpass them many times over in their ambition). And they are more often than not coming from Eastern Europe; 


Let us start with my personal favorite; 


S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

The STALKER series by rights shouldn't work, the original game sat in development for 7 years with various BETAs and iterations (none of which functioned) with many of the dev team leaving to found 4A games (we shall come to them later) before development on the 1st game had ended. But it does work, oh boy it does. A FPS hybrid set in 2012 in an alternative sci-fi universe of the Chernobyl Exclusion zone the mix on ingredients that combine to make the gooey goodness of the STALKER cake are kind fo hard to explain  to someone who hasn't played/seen them but its an amalgam between many different genres and sub-genres. The main advantage of STALKER is more to do with the FEEL of the game than anything, the atmosphere and setting are engrossing to say the very least. The word Immersion does not do this game justice

But there are a few things i can pick out off the top of my head The gunplay is pretty spectacular with a grounding in more tactical games. Bullets obey gravity, axis and generally behave like bullets and weapons have a relatively realistic degree of accuracy (or should i say inaccuracy) and a real weight to them. The setting is both horribly grounded in the zones reality and filled with pretty out there sci-fi concepts that make it both more intriguing and more dangerous and the games structure, somewhere between open world choices and modular level design, gives the game a "lose yet structured" feel. 


All three games; STALKER; Shadow of Chernobyl, STALKER Clear Sky and STALKER; Call of Pripyat are all worth a look but Shadow of Chernobyl and Call of Pripyat are particularly special games.