wrote this awhile back, but i think it's a good article for this place - i wonder if many here disagree with its points or new light to shed on it.
Real-time Strategy (RTS)
**optional (as are "Parts")**
I‘ve broken this essay up into two parts. The intention here is merely to raise awareness, not to restate any known facts or get into arguments about market evaluations or trends. I’ve tried as hard as I can to avoid specifics, but in some cases name names to make comprehension easier. There are no references or footnotes that come with this, please do not use it for the purpose of asserting “proof of logic“. I merely ask that you absorb the proposed observations and dynamics and consider their future implications and potential.
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Part I
A term for the world to consider taking on. No doubt the phrase already exists in many disciplines, and refers to infinite models for dealing with industrial, commercial, political and social phenomena.
However, the context I mean here is the curious world of video gaming. Games have been talked up much in various media, as an industry all it's own. Hardly surprising as the money is starting to roll in for the gaming industry, and already overtaking many traditional forms of entertainment in terms of dollars spent, and profits made, as any of the numerous online articles and references point out. While initial costs and speculation are chaotic and potentially high, the profits with a series of successful titles is one of the highest yields in almost all categories games occupy: business, software, retail/consumer, entertainment, and many more.
The social stigma associated with video games seem to be passing as much as the days of owning a car, television or a mobile phone used to separate social classes, while the social changes don't seem to be occurring along traditional class lines. Rather, we're seeing a different kind of social change where unlikely demographics and, even celebrities, are turning up in the oddest of places.
Moms at home, retired folks, average people plugging into games instead of TV after work... college students, professional baseball players, Navy systems administrators... really unlikely demographics. Although, the demographics are unlikely, only if you fail to grasp what people are warming to.
For example, recently Robin Williams was quoted as being a bit of a fan of the online gaming phenomena, talking about a few experiences in another gaming genre: the FPS, or First-person Shooter; which would be shoot-em-up games like the original Castle Wolfenstein, the ground-breaking Doom, the addictive universe of Marathon, and a whole host of first-generation games - or their many evolutions over the years, e.g. Quake, Unreal Tournament or even the current Counter-Strike inspired games which seem to have really struck formulaic gold.
Robin Williams is an out-spoken/-acted proponent of peace. His body of work might be viewed this way, but I’ll accept I may well be misinterpreting him. You would think it unlikely Mr. Williams spent any amount of time playing games that mimic conventional warfare. Let alone in an environment with an average age of 20.
Mr. Williams talked of enjoying the anonymity of the interaction with thousands, and of this, I too am a sincere fan. It's really experiencing something similar to what many of us envisioned back in the first days of internet hype - the concept of surfing the net was only interesting because of the prospect of finding Massive Amounts of Everything to lose ourselves in.
The problem was for many years; all we found on the net for the most part was a bunch of cold, useless, marketing-driven rubbish that was lifeless and boring.
There certainly was a lack of people, or sense of any being present. Interaction was the missing element. There was nothing to engage, or what there was required too much pain, effort, personal compromise or mental anguish.
But that was only for normal stiffs. The promise of networked computing was being played out and realized in the minds of others, all over the world, every night and day. You just had to know where to find it, and we're still in that kind of mode.
Back then, they were using LANs - or their local office or home networks - to link together these games that enabled many people to play these graphically/tactically sophisticated multiplayer games. Sometimes they would do this when the boss wasn't around, in a worst-case scenario situation. Usually though, this was part of the culture of the company, and actually encouraged by the boss, if the boss wasn't in on the fun himself or herself.
Other cultures had their own forms of online gaming as well, e.g. UNIX crowds swimming in text-based games since the 60s. These folks are the true pioneers of these games, and while still holding the torch of innovation from time to time, much of the secret past of the UNIX world may never be really comprehended by much of the people they ended up impacting so critically.
Many design companies - bearing in mind design extends to any industry imaginable - were also breeding grounds for this, and indeed, my first experiences with large pools of people playing networked games, was while working in a London ad agency.
In 'exclusive' Chelsea Harbour, of Michael Caine-fame, our firm had a high-tech profile to maintain, and thus had the latest in network technology. Between a couple of these Chelsea design firms, we would use early 90s ISDN connections to create our own little internet (at the time, ISDN was a complete unknown in London and cutting edge) to play these games, or we'd just run game servers over our Apple Ethernet networks.
It took the bandwidth revolution of the late 90s however, to really make true, global, anonymous, online interaction possible, and make it possible in these unlikely places. That's when the capabilities for LANs - which only rich geeks in tech or design firms, got to use, see, hold in their own hands, see with their own two eyes and experience - finally started being available to 'anyone' (i.e., something other than interested/wealthy geeks), even the layperson with no real technical knowledge or history.
Just like any other technological swing in history, the people ate it up, and still seem to be very hungry. In fact, online gaming one major category of true Internet growth today. Serious Internet growth anyway, where market-size is not only advancing exponentially, still - but also where new competitors are entering the field and seeing the exact same explosion of subscription/buy in, just in varying degrees of scale. It’s very reminiscent of other more fabulous days for the rest of the tech sectors.
You may have noticed the quiet console wars that have been waged over the last few years between various large- and medium-sized players; Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, to name the obvious. It sparks and fizzles in and out of economic shifts, and tech/consumer market swings, but it’s been around for some time and becoming as large an issue as the PC vs. Mac or Word vs. Word Perfect type debates once were.
With the top two players - Microsoft and Sony - you will notice both have focused more recently on the prospect of networked gaming. The profit appeal for this is an obvious one, and one that Gates really invented, or at least exploited the most prominently.
This is the Microsoft economic miracle that many have identified, and it is quite simple. Lock up a network of people and make your business one of 'servicing them'. The real money, and thus goal, is in the middleman-ship - not the many stated goals, e.g. innovation, progress, competition in terms of excellence or even productivity. A simple look at Microsoft's history reveals this simple truth - which is on the verge of libelous and thus not discussed - and many who lived through it's wicked path are bitterly conscious of it, and it's continued persistence.
It's really that simple, and one that is now consciously mimicked by every group of executive managers on the planet. Microsoft didn't do it first, not by any means, nor did it first happen in a corporation, but MS remains "Exhibit A" of why we need to be extremely aware of what exactly is going on. Many know it’s not just happening at the level of simple consumer gaming, or other MS domains. However, this isn’t meant to be a religious discussion.
In chasing that ideal of network ownership, we're witnessing one of the more pathetic rollouts of technological evolution we've seen for along time. By that I mean Microsoft and Sony are engaged in an amateurish and ineffective first-attempt at getting networking into their gaming platforms (PS2 & XBox), and so it is important that evaluations consider the inappropriate solutions they've provided at the moment. Even given that however, and the recession, and the war on terror (some might argue this is actually the cause for the spike in interest), they are doing exceptionally well.
In other words, a "tip" for the onlooker is that one of the reasons the explosion is only semi-dramatic at the moment by just straddling movies in terms of cash made - and thus misleading - is that the current solutions aren't enough still to be on a par with TV or a DVD film, or a movie theater experience, or some other form of media with mass appeal that extends beyond the teenage, white male.
There are however, places where this is not the case - most notably, the PC game market, where the real online game world is currently at, has been at, and will be for what appears to be the very near-term future of online gaming.
PCs are still where all 3 of the major foundations of online gaming can be found: large numbers of users who expect to engage their medium (instead of let their media lead them, i.e. active users, not passive viewers), very powerful hardware, and finally tons of bandwidth. Without these three things in place, you simply cannot provide the kind of variety, socialization, entertainment and challenge that people know can be found in these applications and are looking for.
All of this merely lays the foundation for why these things need to be taken seriously, as anyone under the age of 20 or possibly even 30, understands that we are going to see a lot more people playing games in the future, than we probably are, merely watching television (with the majority engaging both). In other words games - like books, films, and television before them - are going to have enormous social reach in their appeal.
To the uninitiated, video games are misleading because they are generally thought of as parlor curiosities. Something like Pac Man is essentially what we think of.
If you looked at the vast array of games from around the 60s up to today, you would find many curious parlor games that essentially functioned just like Pac Man. However, these aren't the games - well, applications - which people are talking about.
Applications are a more appropriate term, referring to the fact that games are software programs, just like your spreadsheet is a program. In fact, what many people fail to realize is that much of the advancement of computing can be directly tied to the development of video games.
When you ponder the dynamics, it's not difficult to understand why:
Kids, who understood the language and processes of computing better than their own language given the right tools, will develop the solutions that interest them.
And games, interest kids. Even those girlie ones, we're finding out. Once you learn how to make games about something other than just killing stuff. We’re also stunned to find out that males enjoy non-killing games too.
While curiously fun played against a computer, games are very limited in this solo, player vs. computer, capacity. They need a social component to adopt this "profound" profile I'm painting for them. Thus the critical difference between video games, and 'networked' video games. This is something even the fans themselves have a tough time remembering because they get so wrapped up in the game itself.
Understanding something about what the human mind is capable of - training itself to learn incredible amounts of information, and employ deviously sophisticated strategies and tactics on the fly - it isn't difficult to see how playing competitively against a computer is often quickly mastered by the youngest of minds. They might lose the first time, but after they play the game 60 times, they’ll have mastered every single facet of the game.
While much hype is appropriately lauded on things like IBM's chess master-beating computers, in most other games, computer intelligence is often exceptionally limited and left unchallenging once their basic limitations of operation are understood by the human competitor. Whatever the cause for that limitation, or likelihood of rectification - the simple fact remains that AI in something like games is incredibly limited. It’s still in its infancy as a discipline this is not a failing of the principles behind it, just early days.
In addition to this traditional concept of competitive gaming though, there was much more to be realized. We often forget that computer models enable us to recreate virtual versions of literally anything one can imagine, and much more. Even our best examples of social activities, as opposed to competitive ones.
For those not aware, what we've been slowly doing is building the much more complicated tools needed to physically represent these models with infinite applications in the means needed to convince the human mind they're actually experiencing it in something approaching real-time, *breath*. That’s a complicated way of saying that we’ve been unable to build convincing and compelling uses of the technology we know to exist. Like the first ten years following the invention of the automobile, we’re still looking at some pretty shabby cars compared to what’s available today, well over a hundred years later.
We've lacked that in many ways in the consumer market. We've had the ability to create this stuff in the language of the computer itself (hence the UNIX geeks who could keep up with the typing involved with the text-based versions), but no way to print it to a screen in everyone's home, in the real-time, visual and audio contexts needed to recreate the experiences we human beings can buy-off on, and feel convinced by, or more importantly, be compelled by - as a group.
We need a convincing experience - like a blockbuster Hollywood film can deliver, when we get sucked into a great 2-hour film. Games are actually starting to surpass what you can do with film because the media are finally getting to be as good as film, and the sound and other principles at play are actually beginning to supercede film by enabling the user to control the experience. Most importantly, we can do it at the same time interactively, together.
Exponential growth in processing power and bandwidth in the 90s made huge inroads to the kinds of realities we'd theorized openly about then, but failed to really achieve. However, this technological gap has quietly been filling up over the last 5 or so years, with a lot of investment going into the development of these gaming networks, which are now aiming at how to bring the technology to the much larger audience which doesn't want to use their PC to plug in, or doesn't have one. Bearing in mind how much cheaper most of these costs are in a dot.com age gone bust, you see the current potential for overwhelmingly attractive profit.
Much like the big three television networks of old, Microsoft and Sony are hoping to be the backbones of the gaming future, and are attacking it from every possible angle, in their own unique ways, and funny enough, they are winning just by being there, as few would have guessed that the online gaming industry would be booming right now.
Part II
Part I of this piece looks at gaming from the market-success/social impact perspective. One that tries to predict consumer behavior, and technical inevitability, and invest/create/profit accordingly, with little concern or awareness still for its true social impact, especially in markets and genres unfamiliar and even traditionally biased against.
The piece’s name however, Real-time Strategy - is really about another aspect of gaming, which I believe could have fundamental impacts on our society, given a bit of time. The perspective of which I speak is education. Which is why the former two issues are important, to provide context for the concerns over how powerfully important games already are and will continue to be in our collective education.
Games are fun, usually because they are engaging. They compel the player to involve themselves in the process and outcome of the process, no matter what it is. This means often the gamer has to actually do a lot of the things we seem to have great difficulty recreating elsewhere in society.
Long periods - hours, days, and weeks - of concentration. Focus. Reading. Hearing. Seeing. Understanding by experience. Repetitive training. Decision-making. One-on-one tutoring. Hands-on experience. A whole galaxy of 80's human-resources buzzwords that our greatest minds couldn‘t provide many solutions for in the past, and still largely seem mystified over today.
It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to realize that many of these games are a series of cause and effect models, and are amazingly effective training simulations for these models. You just have to dig in and look at them, instead of assuming what they are. And they're getting pretty sophisticated, so digging in is often a lot harder than typical cursory examinations will provide.
Exactly like the early days of general awareness over the Internet, many people are looking superficially at a very powerful tool and making irrational judgments based on preconceived notions of cultural biases we bring personally. Which is only human, I do it many times in this article for the purpose of provocation.
Sometimes however, this reality is so simple that I remain utterly blown away at how many rational adults can look at this educational application and not kick themselves for being so blind to how simple and critical this tool is. It's as if the savior of humanity is staring us in the face (not that I would proclaim such a bold thing), and we're too afraid to touch it because it makes us feel kinda geeky.
I think adults get used to various modes of behavior, spend years mastering those modes of behavior, and then misunderstand their perceptions of kid’s behavior in the process (and their parents, and essentially anyone not focused on their own distinct problems in general). I think that when one looks at history, they will see most progressive and positive change is prevented in this manner - often turning what should be an enlightening issue into one that separates society out into heretics and fundamentalists and disinterested bystanders. I think games is fast joining music and film and television and other forms of media in that grand history, only the media itself is what is coming under fire first. People with little experience of this media seem to misunderstand this is a media, not a deviant activity, like Elvis shaking his hips.
If you don’t like the guns, then go make games about something else, and get your money and momentum moving in that direction. If one doesn’t like television, one has a better chance of making real changes to the medium by delivering superior entertainment for it in relation to it‘s target (see: Fox in the 80s/90s). Putting that same effort into trying to demonize television hasn’t been anywhere near as effective as what Rupert Murdoch has achieved in every imaginable way with television in this country (without going into everything else he‘s into) - and a lot of unimaginable ways.
At any rate, and finally - Real-time strategy is a category of gaming where I would contend much educational potential is to be found. It is the category of gaming most closely associated with Chess, but many have actually taken great pains - as Martin Scorscese would with one of his films - to get things like historical accuracy and context correct, or close enough to be useful - especially to someone uninitiated in the subject matter.
Likewise, they have the potential to do the opposite. Chillingly important when you realize people already are taking this very seriously.
One (I believe) positive example might be a series of games called, deceivingly enough, Total War. The first of this series, Shogun: Total War, was one of the best beginning history lessons in Feudal Japan a curious westerner could expect to find.
Perhaps more important than the information contained in the game (and the subsequent motivation to find much more) - and thus learned via hours of repeated game play - the game did such an amazing job of portraying the process of "nation building" that one could get a real sense of just what exactly causes a nation to get larger.
In other words, what expansionism really requires - aggression - is demonstrated in this simulator. That's a startling, critical truth that is very hard to identify and really accept from the comfort of a textbook or lecture.
The same could be said for FPS games. People might assume the opposite, but those who play these games are finding that the closer to reality these games get, the more respect people come to have for what the game is trying to simulate - the horror of an actual firefight.
Comparing the older shoot-em-up games to the modern Counter-Strike concept of FPSs games provides an excellent example. The norms for the older FPS games, most notoriously Quake, was an arcade-ish, ‘selfish’ or self-oriented style of game play that earned the nickname "twitch” gaming for a reason.
The more sophisticated these games tried to get with the aspects of reality that would go into a real fire-fight, with real guns and real bullets, and most importantly - real consequences - two things began to happen…
1. People got more interested, especially the less typical player of the time/tech market - user bases had much broader age ranges for example.
2. Games started teaching us things.
Sports have been held up in society since the beginning of recorded history as wonderful means of training the human spirit to be ready for the trials any life could expect to face. I don’t think many people disagree with this, whatever their stance on sports themselves. A couple of key foundations for this belief lie in the ‘experience of doing’ and the educational/experiential benefits of matching human wits against each other, or ‘competition’ - physically, but more often mentally.
Much like riding a bike, we often talk about many processes in society without the ability to experience first hand what is really going to happen. When you explain the process of riding a bike action by action, and really break it down, thought by thought, muscle by muscle - it would seem almost impossible.
And yet all it takes is the human experience of actually sitting atop a moving bicycle to understand how equilibrium can be established very quickly and provide the platform necessary for malice and smooth deliberation over what otherwise seemed unimaginable. Going back and understanding the physics that make it possible at that point is a lot easier.
But when you think about it, how many things in society do we try to teach the opposite way? How many times do we try to force people to learn physics inside and out before they can ever 'ride a bike', so to speak, and in some cases never let them even try, because they got hung up on some otherwise insignificant part of the equation?
I understand there are many places where seemingly unnecessary rules are in place for a very good reason. Indeed, as a Californian, I wish Enron understood this. However, this is not the point: the point is without reference of any experience in the given activity itself, how can one be expected to be motivated enough to overcome the depth of study we so often require?
This dynamic is great for separating the cream from the rest. However, is it possible society has a tendency to use what works for those few, and abandon the majority in the process? Even if this isn‘t the case, is it still possible that many people who wouldn’t typically be motivated to study a given issue very well, would study much better (better comprehension, creativity, and retention) if they were at very least provided the ability to experiment openly with the activity.
The same could be said for the process of learning how to land a plane, and yet computer games show us, in exactly that application, just how amazing these education tools can be. What used to cost thousands of dollars just to provide tiny, simple glimpses for students - can now be recreated somewhat well (well enough to help make intuitive many critical aspects of flying) for comparatively very little.
And how little indeed, gaming is becoming a very cheap. And how completely non-dependent upon the administrator of the application - i.e. the quality of your child's education will less likely be affected by the capability of the human being tasked with administering the education, because all the application does the engaging. Something I know many would argue is often the bigger problem.
Teachers can focus on what they know: how to teach. They can get their minds off of the increasingly complex business of keeping up with the latest technological advances, and redirect their efforts toward the qualitative interaction/human aspects of their esteemed profession. In the case of the child - if the child sees the teacher as being as respectful of the media that the child sees - the teacher is a hero at that point.
One could also hold up probably the most well-known and highest-regarded series of history games: Sid Mier's Civilization, as a great example of why our education facilities need to get their act together. In my opinion, this program should be a mandatory class at around the 8th grade level (12-16ish). Students should have around 200+ hours in this application before moving on with history in any form, and possibly many other subjects (while it would be a wonderful opportunity to provoke enquiring minds all the while with actual history contrasting the game). I'm dead serious.
Currently at Civilization III, this series has brought the concept to games of putting the whole of (relatively known) human history in context, in a way that is groundbreaking.
The game takes the player through history, following many critical innovations starting in the ancient world with a tiny fledgling civilization and seeing it through all the way to beyond our current future, by making all the decisions of the ruler of that nation. You can even play on a land mass fashioned after earth, and as or among cultures we all know.
What's compelling about Civilization is it's extraordinary depth of coverage of historical innovation. Economic, military, religious, social, and political advancements all critical to making it to the next new phase of history the world presents are presented in way that lets the player see how critical contingencies in history form and shape our world. For example, ignore the development of gunpowder in your society when it becomes available elsewhere, and you may find 100 years later that you‘re deep trouble scientifically.
As these things occur, you are presented with brief but informative explanations of each of these innovations and not only learn about their importance, but go on in the game to rely on their importance. This is where you 'ride the bike', and your brain takes over with the real learning process - not mindless memorization and disinterested recounting of historical dates and events that few understand much about anyway, because of the thankless and often impossible task of providing decent conceptual context.
Other games, like the famous SimCity franchise, do an amazing job of showing terribly important cause and effects models in civics, and many other games will exploit everything from commerce to crime to demonstrate yet another important aspect of how our society works. But you'd never know it, if you just focus on the fun factor of a game, or it’s publicity screenshots and ads, and dismiss it as mindless entertainment.
Focuses could be much better for the purpose of education - and I don't mean mindlessly pumping educational titles to meet some patronizing list of educational requirements either. I mean games that are designed for real, by talented, creative, motivated and concerned people who have the resources and time available to create an educational model/universe/application that has real value because it not only teaches, but is fun/compelling as necessary to really draw people into the subject matter. Kids would be great for that development process, in addition to the experts of all the other important areas. In every case, target audiences (or folks who share their perspective totally) should be included in the development process if possible - just like any effective design process.
Right now, the only people trying to make games are more focused on just making games, with a few exceptions, funded by a bunch of other people who only care about what tomorrow's gaming networks look like and who owns them (hence, my elaborate description in Part I). So, today games are creative exercises, the same way television or film was, until proper education minds turned their attention to those mediums, or at least what we see today. Not surprisingly they tend to look a lot like Hollywood films.
Online games are getting other unique validations, with the US Army backing a "free" game they've developed with US taxpayer money, in an attempt to get our kids 'thinking military', and have stumbled onto a marketing exercise that I guarantee you the marketing industry will all be writing and reading books about, ten years from now, if not already.
Advertising is changing radically, as our media environment continues to evolve so radically and on such grand scales, and one of the areas they are finally growing hip to - is games. But they aren't completely there yet because they haven't cracked the creative bubble of video game development, i.e. its successful formulas remain unknowns.
As talent pools increase, and more value is put on the creative minds behind the ideas, I think a responsible society would be one who appreciates and respects that value as well, especially where the potential is vast and something we desperately need. This is important to understand because these are the people in the direct business of influencing thought - they already influence the textbooks mentioned earlier, which we instead seem to rely on. I don’t think they see the opportunity for their aims yet, but when they inevitably do, I fear many avenues and opportunities for progressive change will have been lost.
If you want to have a say in what progressive thinking constitutes, you have to stay focused on where the progressive thinking is going on - and I would submit for your future reference: online video gaming is one of them, and will be an increasingly more important one, in the coming years as it’s ability to be one of the most dynamic mediums ever developed continue to make themselves tangible.
It’s also currently one of the most direct taps into the minds of youth one could imagine, but only a direct tap - not a magic translator, you still need to talk about something interestingly and have some value behind your message if you want their attention. The US Army understands this, or their promotional agencies do at least.
It won't be this way because of it's entertainment value, rather, the nature of the engagement will be what is compelling, almost the opposite of television/film and even literature. The competition, or the socialization of the activity, this is where people will be spending their time in non-passive entertainment, and as that category continues to grow.
I just would hope we stop to think about that. If you think of it as an opportunity, then you have an idea why I spend so much time brooding over this subject. |
