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 Page 3 As of April Blix has been played 3 million times. This makes its portion of Shockwave.com desirable virtual real estate. The United States Air Force signed on as sponsor for the site, making Blix's ad space its exclusive real estate. "I'm sure that if they'd paid enough," Zimmerman says, "Shockwave would have renamed Blix 'The Airforce Game.'" As a result Shockwave has recouped its development costs and is paying out royalties to GameLab. Loop--which went up on the site in February--was played almost 2 million times in its first three months, but has not yet made a profit. "In budgeting our expenditures, we can't ever count on a game earning royalties," Zimmerman says. "We get by because publishers like Shockwave fund the actual production of our games." If the three-dimensional narrative epics people like Warren Spector make are analogous to novels, GameLab's games--where a handful of simple rules result in an engaging play experience--can be better compared to elegant, rigorously structured poems. "The fact that they don't have a huge budget for developing these 3-D interactive environments enables them to pull games back to the basics," says Jenkins, who hired Zimmerman to teach a game-design class at MIT last semester. "It's almost a garage-band aesthetic: simple is better. Game play is more important than graphic realism. It forces them to be creative about thinking about new kinds of play that might not make their way into a more high-budget experiment. Independent game designers have targeted groups, such as women, who had not been in the scopes of the major studios until the indies demonstrated the viability of those groups as part of the game market." It's telling that last year's best-selling computer game wasn't a gory first-person shooter like Quake (which was burned into the national consciousness in the wake of the Columbine massacre, for which it was blamed by lazy pundits) but The Sims, a game about social interaction aimed at adults in which the player controls a simulated suburban family. (This includes dealing with such minutiae as instructing them to set the alarm so they don't oversleep, to eat so they don't die, and to use the toilet rather than the floor, as they would if left to their own devices.) Electronic Arts sold 1.8 million copies last year at about $50 a pop, netting some $73 million. Katie Salen, a professor of design at the University of Texas, Austin, has collaborated with Zimmerman on a book called Game + Design that MIT Press is publishing next year. "One reason we're writing this book is to say that games are an incredible model of study for designers," Salen says. "I began to look at them as a kind of closed system. A game has a user, it has this notion of play, it has an inherent methodology of prototyping and iteration. These are all things that we're trying to get our students to understand when they're learning design." "Games need to create forms of interactive design that are readily available," Jenkins says. "Kids don't read instructions; they simply sit down and play. A game has to be clear, it has to be fun, it has to be engaging. Games take these ideas about interactivity that other sectors talk about in a theoretical or aesthetic sense and make them sell. Anybody who wants to create an interactive design that's actually used--that enables people to do things--is better off looking at games than looking at the spiffy folks who work in Web design." "Games are actually starting to leak out into other forms of interactive design," Zimmerman says. "And in some ways playing games has made people more sophisticated users. If you look at cell phones, for example, the interaction is very gamelike. You are managing several things at once: your battery level, the number of minutes you have in your plan, the strength of your signal, all the phone numbers in your database." A cell phone's interactive design is remarkably similar to a Tamagotchi's (the Japanese virtual pet that was the big toy craze in 1997), but in the service of a real-world function rather than the care and feeding of a digital creature. GameLab is currently finishing a project for Lego's Web site (on a budget similar to Loop's) that will be available online later this summer. "We would like to make larger games," Zimmerman says. "If a publisher is going to invest a seven-figure budget in a project, they need to be comfortable with the company's track record." But that doesn't mean they just want to make another Sims or Deus Ex. In the movie industry, independent filmmakers work outside of the studio system for a variety of reasons: some make their low-budget movies as calling cards, actively pursuing mainstream success; others simply aren't interested in doing studio work. "In games, most independent development is just a miniature version of what the big boys are doing," Lantz says. "We see ourselves as a conscious alternative to the mainstream, using different conceptual models." |
