Replay: The History of Video Games (54 page)
Read Replay: The History of Video Games Online
Authors: Tristan Donovan
As well as bringing video games to prominence in China, the Korean free-to-play model also had a significant influence on Germany’s game industry. German companies took the micropayments formula pioneered in Korea, but sought to deliver such games via web browsers rather than the Asian-style game rooms that did not exist in Europe.
One of the earliest German companies to pioneer the approach was Bigpoint. The Hamburg-based company began life in 2002, creating online sports team management games such as
Hockey-Manager
. “Our key mission is very simple games you can just enter through the browser,” said Nils-Holger Henning, Bigpoint’s director of business development. “You don’t need any download, installation or administrator rights, which means we can offer these games wherever you have internet access – the office, the university, your home, the internet café, wherever. We offer all our games for free and monetise the active users by selling virtual goods or items.”
Although the initial games produced by Bigpoint and others were static, graphically unsophisticated titles such as
Hockey-Manager
, as broadband access and web browser capabilities increased Germany’s browser game firms started offering more complex and visually impressive games that emphasised the community and social aspects of online gaming to keep players coming back, such as Bigpoint’s 2010 effort 3D game
Pirate Galaxy
. These companies have also expanded outside of Germany, bringing free-to-play games to the rest of Europe and North America.
By late 2009, it was clear that the innovations of South Korean developers in the late 1990s and early 2000s had reconfigured the video game business on a global level. They had pioneered revolutionary business models, provided the foundation for the Chinese game industry, turned game playing into a national spectator sport and ended the hegemony of Japanese, American and European game developers.
[
1
]. Unlike most online games,
Second Life
is a unified whole. All players exist in the same world rather than copies of the world spread across different servers, as is the case with most onli
ne game worlds including
World of WarCraft
.
[
2
].
Hearts of Iron
is set in the years 1936-1948. During that time Tibet, Xinjiang and Manchuria were not part of China.
Big brother: Will Wright inspects one of his sims. Courtesy of Electronic Arts
25. Little Computer People
Maxis’ executives looked
on with an expression of uncomprehension. In front of them the company’s co-founder Will Wright, whose
Sim City
had kept the game publisher in business for most of the 1990s, was pitching what sounded like a strong contender for worst game ever imagined.
It’s called
Doll’s House
, explained Wright, because it’s a bit like one. The executives shifted uneasily in their seats. You have these little people in a house that you design and they watch TV, cook meals, go to work and sleep at night. And then something dramatic happens right, asked the executives hopefully, like someone coming to repossess the house? “No. It’s simulation, there’s not the save-the-world aspect,” replied Wright. Oh.
Maxis declined to fund Wright’s new pet project. “It sounded so mundane: going to the toilet, taking out the trash,” said Wright. “At that point most games were about saving the world or flying a jet fighter. It didn’t seem like an aspirational game. People were very conditioned to the idea that if you had a game about specific characters there had to be a story.”
The idea for
Doll’s House
, which would eventually be released as
The Sims
in 2000, grew out of Christopher Alexander’s
A Pattern Language
, an architectural theory book Wright had been reading. “Alexander is a physics guy who went into architecture and was frustrated because architecture wasn’t enough of a science for him,” said Wright. “He wanted all the principles of architecture to be clearly reducible back to fundamental principles, which was what this book was.”
A Pattern Language
consisted of 253 ‘patterns’, short principles that Alexander and his co-writers believed architects and town planners should embrace when designing living spaces.
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“I wanted
The Sims
to be an architecture gam
e that assessed what you did from a human point of view,” said Wright. “The people in
The Sims
were originally there to score the architecture.”
To create the virtual people that would assess the player’s building work, who were nicknamed sims after the residents of
Sim City
, Wright drew on his research for his 1991 game
Sim Ant
.
Sim Ant
was an ant colony simulation based on Bert Hölldobler and E.O. Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning science book
The Ants
– a comprehensive 752-page survey of ant behaviour, ecology and physiology. In
Sim Ant
, Wright had modelled the secretion of pheromones by individual ants that influenced the behaviour of other ants from the same nest to create what at, a macro-level, looked like intelligent co-ordinated behaviour across the whole nest.
“In most computer games you have a really good sense of the environment, very rarely does the player design the environment,” said Wright. “We had to be able drop a sim into any possible situation and have them behave reasonably intelligently and ants seemed like a really good model. The sims follow pheromone trails in a weird sort of way. Everything in the game is advertising what needs they fulfil and, depending on the sim’s need, they are attracted to those pheromones.”
To Wright’s surprise the emergent behaviour of the ant-like sims proved compelling to watch: “The humans worked a lot better than we thought they would and they became a lot more fascinating to watch and interact with.” While the house-building roots of
The Sims
remained in place, Wright’s game became more and more about watching and interacting with his virtual people. “We had to dumb them down a bit because they were so good at meeting their needs there was no reason for the player to ever interact with the game, so we actually made them stupid so the player had a role in the game.”
For Wright, his evolving game idea tapped right into the kind of innate voyeurism that lay behind the appeal of the reality TV shows that became popular around the time of
The Sims
’ release in 2000, such as
Big Brother
and
American Idol
. “I’ve always noticed, even felt myself, that people are inherently narcissistic – anything about them is going to be 10 times more fascinating than anything else, no matter how boring it is or exciting something else is,” said Wright. “In
The Sims
one thing almost everybody does at some point, usually right off the bat, is put themselves in the game along with their family, house and neighbours. Now they were playing a game about their life, they become the superhero on screen – even though it’s not so super. It surprised me that television went in the same direction. You wanted to see these glamorous people in exotic places, now it’s these average Joes sitting around drinking beer and arguing with their wives. That’s the voyeuristic aspect,
The Sims
feels very voyeuristic.”
Wright was not the first person to investigate video gaming’s potential for voyeurism and narcissism. In 1984 Activision bought the rights to Rich Gold’s
Pet Person
, a software program inspired by the Pet Rock craze of the 1970s where people bought millions of named pebbles with eyes glued on. Users couldn’t interact with
Pet Person
. Instead they got to watch an animated person wander around a virtual house. “
Pet Person
came to us virtually bankrupt,” said Activision co-founder David Crane, who landed the job of turning Gold’s creation into a game. “The idea of doing a computer-based Pet Rock was a grand one, but I came to the conclusion that as a non-interactive fishbowl it couldn’t recoup its costs, so I added two-way interactivity. Now you could have an artificial life form that even communicated back to you.”
After Crane’s improvements, players were able to interact with their virtual person by buying them food, encouraging them to write letters to you and by playing card games with them. Released in 1985 as
Little Computer People
, the game became a cult favourite, but a loss-maker for Activision. “The game had a small, but very dedicated following. Those who got the product were fanatics,” said Crane. “We had a letter from a grandmother who bought two Commodore 64s and two monitors so that her two grandchildren could each have a pet person of their own when they came to visit. The Commodore 64 also had an operating system bug that would damage the floppy disk where each little computer person’s personality and status was saved one time in a thousand. People got so distraught at the death of their person that I had to design a piece of ‘hospital’ software for our consumer relations department. You could send in your floppy and your little computer person could be resuscitated, complete with intact personality in most cases.”
Activision ventured into similar territory again the following year with the life simulation game
Alter Ego
. Peter Favaro, a recent psychology PhD graduate, wrote
Alter Ego
while trying to get his career as a psychologist off the ground. “Poverty prompted me to make a game,” he said. “I was a starving new PhD in psychology who was only 26 years old and looked a good bit younger. I was so young that even crazy people were sane enough not to trust their mental health to such a baby. I lived in a small apartment in an upscale area of the North Shore of Long Island, outflanked by more mental health professionals than there are Starbucks in Seattle.”
In need of an income, Favaro decided to make a video game that drew on his knowledge of psychology. “I wanted people to experiment with choices and outcomes they would normally encounter in life, freely and without fear of real consequences. I wanted people to see what it would be like to be the villain, the scientist, the priest or the slut they’ve always dreamed of becoming but never had the nads to follow through on,” he said.
To gather the information that would underpin the options and situations in
Alter Ego
, Favaro interviewed more than a thousand people to work out what made them tick and what life decisions, really affected their lives. “I did this for a year and I was quite a lunatic about it,” he said. “I interviewed people to get a feel for what people thought were important events in their lives, then I embellished them to make them entertaining and emotionally evocative. One of the things that I found odd was that the vast majority of people were quite eager to talk to me – a complete stranger – about highly personal and sensitive topics. If I were a smarter man I would have been able to predict that some 25 years later people would clamour to publicise, without the promise of anonymity, the details of their personal lives on
YouTube
and
MySpace
.”
Alter Ego
put players in control of a virtual person, making decisions at key junctures in their life to see how their situation and personality evolved from birth to death.
[2]
The game pulled no punches with its choices, which sometimes delved into sex, drugs, violence and other controversial subjects. “Ac
tivision supported everything I wanted to put in the game and nothing was removed. When the marketing department expressed concern over the violence and sexuality, which in my mind are necessary to portray an accurate cross section of life experiences, the only thing I had to accept was a parental warning on the packaging,” said Favaro.
