Skill Ratings in Games

In competitive games, rating player skill is a very hard to solve problem.  Not simply because player skill is a very broad concept, but because players have unrealistic views of their own skill level.

Skill in a game can best be approximated by a player's ability to influence the outcome of a game favorably.  This can take the form of anything from mechanical skill, to the ability to communicate.  Sometimes, you'll see players who are mechanically skilled but socially inept be unable to succeed in team based games.  Then they end up complaining about their teammates and blaming their teammates for their losses.

Players tend to overestimate their own skill level in a Dunning-Kruger fashion.  The majority of players think they are well above average in skill, which is a clear impossibility.  Part of this comes from players not wanting to accept responsibility for failure.  It's much easier to blame other players or circumstances when you lose.  Another part of this comes from most games being designed to make the player feel good about how well he does.  Games reward you for every little thing you do right.

I have seen countless posts on various gaming forums for countless games in which players complain about the skill rating system in the game because they feel that it does not work in some fashion.  There's actually quite a lot of math and statistics behind modern skill rating systems that show that they actually do work.

Nowadays, game developers have resorted to hybrid progression / skill rating systems, which allow players to have the convenient excuse that they simply don't "grind" progression as much as the other players who are at a higher level.  Players who play a lot and are truly competitive will reach their appropriate skill rating, whereas the players who play less can pretend that their lower skill rating is due to them playing less.  Of course there is some truth to this, since skill improves with practice.

If only the masses understood skill.

A Prime Example of Poor Game Industry Journalism

This terrible article claiming that "the problem with the gaming industry is that developers make too much" is a great example of poor journalism.  It recently made its rounds at work where my fellow developers were horrified and irritated by how wildly inaccurate it is.

Here's a brief rundown of glaring issues with the article:

1. The author did no actual research into the core of his issue, project budgets.  The largest parts of a game project's budget should be broken into three categories: employee compensation, marketing, and operating expenses.  Employee compensation is nowhere close to the amount that the author claims.  He cites an article showing how a single publisher employs 2000 developers, but he neglects to look closely enough to realize that all of those developers are not working on a single title.  It's a lot more accurate to estimate current gen team sizes as being around 200 for a "triple A" title.  This is typically only for the last year or so of a given project as they finalize content and get the game out the door.  Marketing can easily hit $10,000,000 for a "triple A" title if not much more for a highly successful title.  Operating expenses I can't really quote numbers for, but office space in a place like Los Angeles is pretty expensive.
2. The average developer compensation of $80,000 per year is heavily biased because most game studios are located in areas that have very high cost of living.  Renting a reasonable 2 bedroom apartment in Los Angeles can easily cost $2,000 per month.  Buying a 2 bedroom condo here can easily cost $400,000.  What kind of developer making $80,000 per year can practically afford a $70,000 car while making rent ($24000/year) and saving up to buy a house to hopefully retire in one day?
3. This leads into the point that he made a huge fuss over one developer who happened to get extremely lucky.  From the information in the article, I would venture the guess that the guy with the $70,000 car was able to afford the car because he was an early member at Riot Games, who were bought out by Tencent.  In that transaction, the employees there rightfully got nice compensation.  It's no different from any other industry where people form a new company and make a successful product and make some money when they get bought out.
4. This simple question shows how little thought the author actually put into the article: "Are we to believe there isn't an equally qualified person out there willing to do this guy's job for less pay?"  The simple answer is "yes."  Game development is a highly specialized field where the employees commonly work 70+ hour weeks performing roles that require a lot of training while trying to keep their personal lives from falling apart.  If it were so easy to succeed and make big bucks, then the author himself would do it, wouldn't he? He even lists himself as having "founded his own indie gaming developer called Penguin Run Games that creates play-by-post online roleplaying games."  He must be enjoying the highly lucrative, easy life too, right?

Maybe his degree in criminology didn't teach him enough about game development... or journalism for that matter.

Hip Hop + Street Fighter 4 = ?

For those of you who don't play Street Fighter 4, this won't be nearly as hilarious, but it's musically decent. The reference is that scrubby Ken players spam their strongest super uppercut in every situation.

bubble bobble + cute korean girls + ramen = ?

Apparently they licensed the theme song for "Bubble Bobble" (one of the old NES games I played a ton of) to have this Korean group do this ramen commercial. I dunno, I'm kind of sold.

Muramasa: The Demon Blade

I'm totally sold on Muramasa: The Demon Blade. There are simply not enough 2d side scroller style games these days. This game is pretty much eye-candy from start to finish, which shows how far we have come in 2d video games. Every time I reached a new area, I found myself looking around at the environments to enjoy the gorgeous artwork.

When you start the game, you have the choice of playing in Muso mode (easy) or Shura mode (advanced). Naturally, I decided to just go straight into Shura mode.

The difficulty in Shura mode was really good. It was challenging and occasionally frustrating, but I always felt like when I died, there was something I did wrong or that I could do better. I ended up playing through the whole Shura mode as Momohime in two long sessions.

After beating it in Shura mode as Momohime, the game informed me that I needed to beat the game as Kisuke to get a special blade (the demon blade?) and then if I beat the last boss with the special blade, I'd get a different ending. Additionally, it unlocked another difficulty mode called Shigurui mode, which is apparently equivalent to playing Muso mode but you only have 1 hp and that never changes. Basically, if anything hits you, you die.

At this point, I realized I was hooked. I want to beat the game as Kisuke to see his storyline and to get the different endings. But I also love the combat system, so I want to try to beat the game in Shigurui mode.

The combat system is really satisfying. It's super responsive and the moves are easy to execute. Your character is extremely maneuverable, which made me feel like if I got hit, it was my fault since I could have been somewhere else. You can even hit small projectiles back at enemies by just pressing attack right when they are about to hit you. You can string together ridiculous combos of your melee abilities, but the combos are not really strictly pre-defined. You can basically make up combos as you go and invent your own combat style.

I think this game was made specifically for people like me.

Here are a couple of videos of someone playing through Shigurui mode:
Early combat
First boss

Rap + Video Games = ?

I don't know this artist at all, but he managed to use video games in his rap video very fluidly and well. There are a ton of old school Nintendo 8-bit references that you may recognize. Worth a listen and a viewing.

Broken Picture Telephone

Do you remember playing that game "telephone" as a kid where people relay a message to each other and along the way, the message mutates in funny ways? Well, some folks came up with a nice internet version called "Broken Picture Telephone" where one person writes an initial message, the next person draws it, then the next person tries to figure out the message, then the next person draws what he wrote, etc.

It's definitely worth a few laughs how some of the messages mutate. Sometimes people do a really good job of figuring out the message (like http://www.brokenpicturetelephone.com/view?id=52307) but usually the message goes on a completely weird tangent (like http://www.brokenpicturetelephone.com/view?id=61486).

I've been having some fun participating.

Thoreau Meets Video Games

I must say, Thoreau's Walden is not one of the first titles that comes to my mind for books that can be turned into video games. However, it seems that Electronic Arts is tackling doing this. You can expect this game to be different and philosophical, but I'm really at a bit of a loss as to how you'd make a game out of it.

Still, I appreciate that video games are maturing as an art form.

Transformers 2 Game Trailer

Yay, our new trailer is out. I think it's a pretty good trailer overall. Take a look yourself.

Megan Fox

Megan Fox is seriously way too hot.

Yeah, I know that's not really what her daily life is like, but it's hard not to fantasize a little. haha.

In any case, she did at least come in to do her character's voice for our Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen video game. Unfortunately, our game is more about the big, giant robots than the hot, female humans, but hopefully she helps us sell more copies of the game in some way.

We should be releasing another trailer for our game any day now!

OnLive

As you may have heard, there's now a company generating some buzz about how they will revolutionize the video game industry by running video games in a cloud of computers and streaming the video to users. This would free users from needing major hardware (consoles or PCs), would eliminate piracy, and usher in a new age in video games.

After a little bit of critical thinking, I realized that their claims could not possibly be met. I was going to write up a nice long explanation when I had time, but I stumbled across this article that pretty much sums up all the technical reasons why their claims are pretty far fetched. Their writeup is better than mine would have been, but I would have put more emphasis on the impossibility of OnLive overcoming the basic latency inherent in home internet connections.

Why The PS3 Is Losing To The Xbox360

Quote from Sony's Kaz Hirai: "We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that (developers) want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is, what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?"

As a game developer, I have to say, developers will be encouraged to make games for a console that is easier to develop for. Companies trying to make games are trying to make money, not to solve a software engineering puzzle. Sure, as a programmer, it's fun to solve challenges, but we also have deadlines and milestones to meet. If they are not met, projects fail and jobs are lost.

Around the office, everybody pretty much runs the game on the Xbox360 as their primary development platform and people run the game on the PS3 to make sure it still works there. Now that we're getting close to shipping, more effort is being put in the the PS3, but it has been behind for so long that it's a bit of a hurry to get it up to speed.

Sony needs to take a look at the practical realities of game development and rethink their strategy for next time around.

Video Games Delivering Political Messages

Harpooned is a game about killing whales for scientific research.... It's great to see that video games are being used to deliver more meaningful messages than mindless entertainment.

Study Starcraft At UC Berkeley

UC Berkeley makes me proud very frequently. They're apparently the first university to offer a course in playing a video game. They now have a Decal course on Starcraft!

This is not the same as a core curriculum class, but you actually do earn units for taking it. =)

AnnaTheRed's Bento Factory

AnnaTheRed's bento factory is amazing. I've seen other sites showing some of the bento artwork other folks have made, but this one is my favorite because she often makes video game references.

The amount of labor involved in making them boggles my mind. It makes me realize how lazy I am when I cook. =(

P.E.T.A Uses Video Game To Deter Meat Consumption

It makes me happy to see that video games can be used to promote socially progressive notions. P.E.T.A. has a brutal, flash version of the famous "Cooking Mama" game on their website just in time for Thanksgiving.

Magic Pen - Completed!

I finished all 26 levels of the game and some of the last levels were pretty crazy. My friend pointed out that you can attach things to the red circle / square and that totally made some of the last levels doable. I don't want to ruin the game for anybody trying it so I won't say any more than that. =)

Magic Pen Flash Game

I stumbled across this Flash game called Magic Pen in which your goal is to move a red shape to a goal area by drawing little shapes and letting physics take place.

The game rule are extremely simple: you can draw shapes and attach them to each other with rigid (mostly) joints or hinges that allow the piece to swivel about each other. You can either draw polygons or you can draw rolling circle objects.

The drawing detection of the polygons is not too bad, but a little flaky sometimes. It's good enough that the game is quite fun because you eventually have to start building up lever systems with counterweights and stuff to move the red shape to the goal area. Occasionally, I found myself drawing shapes and dropping them on objects in motion to adjust the movement of the object.

The game is definitely worth a few minutes (or hours) of enjoyment. I love these more unusual games.

Super Mario Levels -> Music

Using Super Mario levels to play music was a new concept to me when I saw this clip. They not only make a Rube Goldberg style level that plays itself, but this one plays a medley of songs using the in game sound effects in conjunction with the audio track. I can't even being to guess how long it took to set this up.

Video games are truly a new medium for artistic expression. It's hard not to believe it when things like this are possible.

Dirty Harry Video Game Was Highly Anticipated?

This list of the most anticipated games that you will never get to play caught my eye because number 7 on the list was "Dirty Harry." I worked on that game! I had to check out what they had to say on it.

"So is there any chance it'll come out?
Sadly, the game was never as far along as that trailer makes it look (Warner Bros. just had an animation team cook up the trailer for marketing purposes, none of that was gameplay) and the project never really got off the ground."

Sadly, that's pretty close to the truth. I mean we did have more gameplay than they said but the terrible game engine that they have at The Collective Studios was really a huge obstacle to making the game fun.