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 Page 2 Blix--as simple and addictive as Loop--is played by situating bumpers around a grid to deflect a ball into a cup before time runs out. The first level, with only one leisurely paced ball to deal with, is easy. But as you advance through the game it quickly becomes more frantic--with the addition of obstacles and more and faster balls careening around the screen. Zimmerman and Lee were able to open the studio with the advance they got for Blix, which became GameLab's first release. "A weird agony exists among designers," Zimmerman says. "For graphic designers there's this schism between doing personal work and doing work for clients. We don't have that schism here." He describes what they do as a "pop cultural practice," acknowledging that cultural appropriation is a significant part of their process. "We try to find new audiences for our games, so we design for people who don't usually play them. We also try to find new aesthetic languages that aren't normally found in the realm of games--meaning visuals and sound such as the techno-rave flier culture of Blix and the Eric Carle illustration style we appropriated in Loop." If you are designing a Web site, and your goal is to get a piece of information to someone online, it makes sense to work backward from the desired outcome. This is an impracticable way to design a game, however, because here the interaction is the experience. Loop is a good illustration of this principle. "You can never anticipate the success of an interactive experience," Zimmerman says. "As early as possible we develop a prototype that explores the core functionality--that little interactive nugget that is at the heart of the game." Loop's initial prototype contained its fundamental interaction--the ability to use the mouse to circle objects on the screen rather than pointing and clicking. A later iteration, built on the code of the first, added another element--looped objects of the same color would disappear. They sold the game on a slightly more advanced prototype, in which the abstract shapes of the earlier versions had evolved into butterflies. "When I tell people in New York new media that we are paid to do original work and that we also get royalties, they look at me like, 'What? That's insane! How did you ever get that arrangement?'" Zimmerman laughs. The game industry is analogous to the music and book businesses: it's a publishing model. Developers like GameLab come up with ideas for games and shop them around to publishers, who fund the creation process, and then manufacture and distribute the finished product. In the event that a game becomes profitable (which is by no means guaranteed) the publisher pays the developer a royalty that typically ranges somewhere between 10 and 40 percent. According to the Interactive Digital Software Association, the computer and video-game industry trade association, more than 219 million games were sold in the United States last year (which works out to about two for every household), racking up some $6 billion in sales--surprisingly close to the $7.7 billion Hollywood made at the domestic box office. "Games are one of the few kinds of content that are reliably generating a profit in the new digital environment," says Henry Jenkins, head of Comparative Media Studies at MIT and co-editor of the book From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. "That this rise in the profit of games has occurred parallel to the closing of so many dot-coms is telling." Most of this money is being made by a handful of major game publishing companies like Eidos Interactive, Hasbro Interactive, and Sony Computer Entertainment. The biggest, Electronic Arts, put out eight of the top twenty best-selling computer games last year. "To some extent the game business looks like the old Hollywood model, when the studios were vertically integrated and 'owned' everything from the talent that made movies to the theaters that showed them," says big-league game designer Warren Spector, whose projects include last year's Deus Ex, a sprawling multimillion-dollar-budgeted game that places the player in the middle of a vast government conspiracy. Its realistic three-dimensional environments, sophisticated interaction with nonplayer characters, and creepy sound effects and music make playing through the intricate story line (which can take more than a month) a rich experience that provides many of the same pleasures as reading a novel. GameLab's budgets (which so far have ranged from the mid-five to the low six figures) are a small fraction of the millions that Ion Storm gets, but they have been able to find a publisher that believes in their work and is able to give their games exposure on a massive scale. Blix and Loop, unlike Deus Ex, are not available at Toys 'R' Us. They were designed to be played on the Web at Shockwave.com, which funded their development. Shockwave.com generates its revenue from the sale of banner advertisements. Games (and porn) may be the only form of content attractive enough to make the old-media advertising model work online. |
