E3 2013 (Or, Civil War)

Civil war is the ultimate process of transition. Whatever social or legal fabric held a state together collapses, and battle will assuredly be the only way to decide the new order.

The whole thing is ugly. Leaving the previous order is unpleasant. Conflict is hell. And by the obvious analog to the Arab Spring, we've seen that the new order is every bit untenable at its birth as the old one was at its demise.

And yet it's vital. In human society as with games, conflict is the ruthlessly efficient process by which the old is turned over and the new is released.

Welcome to gaming in 2013. Everywhere you go, there's conflict.

Investor Relations vs Consumer Marketing

The last 3 or so years marked 'crappy' E3s where extremely little of value was shown. Press conferences steered toward speaking to an investor audience rather than toward gamers. That ties in to the rest of the reasons below, but let's get to the good part first:

This year, for the first time in a long time, felt like Christmas morning once again. You could see real games - lots of them - that looked downright great. Tons of tickets for the Hype Train were bought. In all corners of the Internet, Fry from Futurama demanded that game companies shut up and take his money.

Microsoft opened things up with a breath of fresh air that just shut the hell up about their system and its restrictions and offered reasons to actually buy the thing. Gamers were happy. When you kick things off with Metal Gear Solid 5, people tend to sit up and listen. And then you tell them that the game has facial motion capture and Snake is now played by Kiefer Sutherland of 24 fame, people's heads explode. Predictably, MS made obligatory mentions of new games from their first-party stable; namely Halo 5 and Forza Motorsport 5. Then there was Titanfall, and that one's one to watch. Alumni of the early Call of Duty series - ya know, the really good ones that made it the franchise it is - left, started their own studio, and built a fast-paced, arcade-y shooter where humans and mechs fight on the same battlefield.

Then Sony came and blew the place up with a cornucopia of games. They even had 8 indie games on stage at the same time at one point. The whole thing was unreal. 2 straight hours of "But wait, there's more!" and every time, the "more!" was new games.

It's not that Sony's platform necessarily has a ton of better games. If you strip away the multi-platform titles, you're left with Microsoft's shooter and racing sim against Sony's shooter, racing sim, and handful of (good but ultimately forgettable) action games. But by showing games for two hours, Sony's marketing people proved that they Get It, and Sony has the privilege of being associated with last year's best of show Watch_Dogs in addition to Kingdom Hearts III, Final Fantasy XV, The Witness, Transistor, The Elder Scrolls Online, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand:

Destiny. Bungie's new one. Shooter MMO. Must-watch.

PC vs Console

A writer wiser than me once noted that there's a perpetual ebb and flow between heydays of PC gaming and consoles. Going back to 1990 or so, consoles peak halfway through their cycles: 2-3 years in old cycles, more like 4 years in the most recent generation. As consoles get long in the tooth, the PC starts to look like the "enlightened" platform once more with newer high-end GPUs and some real artistic creativity.

Amazingly, we're still not above asking the "Is <platform out of vogue> dead?" question like clockwork. Through the 2009-2012 dark years marked by Facebook and mobile games (see below), we declared Consoles to be Dead many times over, "finally" made obsolete by the iPhone and iPad.

This E3 brought almost all console games from publishers, despite the quietly thriving PC industry making a killing from Steam, the Humble Indie Bundle, and League of Legends.

Real Games vs Mobile and Social

For roughly the last year, Zynga has been worth less than the sum of its computers, servers, real estate and furniture. Think about that implication: the people inside the building actively detract from the value of the legal entity that remains.

The mobile/social wave has been ridden. There will still be an occasional hit casual game, just like the US now has Candy Crush Saga and Japan has Puzzles & Dragons, but the mainstream press will never publish a frank article saying that an app maker like Rovio has published their one-hit wonder app (even though they have).

Pac-Man fever happened in the 80s, and while Namco has never had a payday on that level ever since, it's gotten by by making good games. In ten years' time, what remains of Vh-1 will make programming asking "Hey, remember Angry Birds?"

In the last year we've seen a handful of AAA games get ported to iOS. Going forward, we may see some great indie creativity on this platform given the sheer market size and free availability of tools and access to the App Store.

Indies aside, though, surprise surprise - the gaming muggle press wrongfully predicted the demise of AAA gaming. Actually, that's an amazing analogy: the world's gaming muggles will be "sooooo addicted" to Candy Crush Saga or some other flavor of the moment, but the wizards - with their real magic - are alive and well.

Gamers vs Themselves

5 years ago, the Internet hated GameStop because gamers listened to complaints from publishers, ostensibly representing developers: used game sales siphon money away from the creative side and put it all in the pockets of a retailer.

Tables have turned: gamers now voraciously want value - or at least the status quo. Every E3 is marked by a singular moment or utterance, usually from an exec during a press conference. Over recent years it's been bad: "My body is ready." Mr. Caffeine. A strange backlash to the curiously good casting call of Aisha Tyler for a publisher presser.

This year's moment, without question, is the unbelievably riotous applause to Sony's announcement that the PlayStation 4 will retrench it self in its current disc-based model, shunning the complicated rights management rules Microsoft tried to adopt.

(I quietly wonder whether GameStop has taken to reputation management - that is, paying Reddit commenters to lean toward used games wherever possible.)

Discs vs Businesses of the Future

Gamers' roar at Sony's shamelessly old-school approach was so loud that it made Microsoft reverse course.

MS was on the verge of being the first firm to allow digital resale - something gamers have whinged about for years - but gamers' immediate fear of loss pressed harder. MS, to its credit, said "OK guys, we listened" and backed off.

Still, a few smart bloggers out there noticed that MS was trying - if imperfectly - to create an ownership system that would make sense seven years from now.

Right now, the gamers are still right. The world is unfortunately not ready for a full-on digital lifestyle, and when it is we shouldn't allow Microsoft to tell us how that lifestyle should be lived when they design it by committee.

Microsoft vs Sony

[Microsoft have] never been able to explain themselves, and part of it is an engineer culture that doesn’t (marketing term incoming) “face” consumers and, I would suspect, resents being made to explain why something which is so manifestly efficient and purposeful would need to be. Contrast this with Sony, which is almost completely a brand exercise and for whom the tone and texture of a message is the primary product.
Penny Arcade

To comment on press conferences - really, artfully crafted demos - is more to comment on their marketing outsourcers than it is the actual systems or games themselves.

In a sense, little has changed since the 90s. Sony brought the PlayStation into the world after being backstabbed by Nintendo. The brand, the company, and the box are born from the gaming world. Microsoft, however, has wanted a nebulous "set-top box" since the 90s. Bill Gates even wrote about it in The Road Ahead - the pre-internet hardcover version. A game console was a hypothesis on that quest, and the pre-reversal Xbox One was the clearest indication we've had yet that the quest remains unchanged. The system's focus is very nearly anything but games: Kinect, voice commands, media delivery, cable TV, rights-managed, Xbox Live subscriptions, all the labels signed on, and oh yeah I guess there's Halo (right guys? We have a Halo back there in the back, right?).

Microsoft's vision is potentially dazzling in the same way the iPhone was - holy crap, we have the Internet in our pockets now! - the possibilities for putting the Internet in our TVs are nearly as amazing. But when Microsoft lays out the details - the cable TV subscriptions, the logins, the rights management, the Xbox Live subscription plans, the labels being signed on - it's daunting.

Nintendo vs conventional wisdom

Nintendo always leaves us guessing. Let's not forget that they blew up that whole motion control thing in the first place.

This year, they brought more confusion. Wait, you're not holding a traditional E3 stage press conference, but you are holding a massive conference on YouTube? And you're bringing a ton of games but they're all slated for 2014? Even the ones that would seal the deal for any Nintendo E3, like Mario Kart 8 with zero gravity or Super Mario 3D World or a new Yoshi's Island or a new Super Smash Bros. or Pikmin 3?

And after the show Miyamoto-san let slip that they're going to take a quick stab at the free-to-play business model. This is the same company that led the anti-social-game charge in the early Dark Ages, say around 2010. Iwata-san used his keynote speeches to say that those free-to-play things are not games, these are, and they're worth the $39 rather than the $1 you paid Apple or Facebook.

The old adage stands true: don't bet against Nintendo.

Developer-curated vs user-created

Sandbox titles made some pretty big appearances. Just a couple years ago, LittleBigPlanet was as wide as the sandbox got. Now, Project Spark seems to be the full-featured evolution of Microsoft's Kodu, and according to the press the variety is truly unbelievable. Every platform will be host to Disney Infinity, a family-friendly sandbox with gaming's hottest revenue model grafted on (and that's not free-to-play - it's actually Activision's Skylanders, which is a game aimed at a young audience where characters are unlocked by the physical purchase of action figures).

The number of titles at the opposite end of the spectrum - fully directed by a developer, with no user-generated content input - has dwindled rapidly. The most obvious titles are GTA V, which will stay true to the series, and similar $100m budget titles like Metal Gear Solid V . Nintendo, naturally, will stay out of this world and continue to do its thing, but even they are showing a little agility in response to user feedback. This year, their presser went fully online-only and they promoted bumping up the release of a Wii U art title (think a new, less whimsical Mario Paint) to support users who have been using the U's tablet to draw very fancy pictures.

But the important shift here has been for many big publishers to move toward the middle of the spectrum and embrace games as a service. EA's most-publicized titles, like a new Need for Speed and a new Battlefield, are moving more toward being online-centric in their gameplay, and will doubtlessly experiment with their revenue models. Ubisoft's big hit of this show was The Division, an Enemy of the State-esque action MMO that looks positively Hot, and Activision brought a preview for Destiny, an MMOFPS from Bungie. The online nature of these titles means that stories told by players will be as unique as snowflakes. Conversations won't begin with "OMG, remember that part where..?" but rather "OMG, this one time I was in..."

Further boosting that:

Multiplayer vs omniplayer

Multiplayer will cease to be a relevant word. I propose "omniplayer" to replace it. This means a style of game where players log in to a persistent world but friends are brought together inside the game universe to play together.

Think of it this way: Halo multiplayer is signing in, forming a lobby with a discrete group of friends, playing one round of a game, returning to the lobby, and repeating that process. The line looks like this: |---|---|---|---| where the vertical bars represent matches and you can draw a line between discrete points in time where you're actually playing the game.

But nobody buys a $60 game for the menus.

Omniplayer more seamlessly weaves between multiplayer 'rounds,' and we're seeing this first in racing games like the new Need for Speed and MMO shooters like Destiny. So the little line I drew above now looks more like a double helix. I'm playing, and you're playing, and then we converge for a certain in-game event, and then diverge again after the event.

A big, tasty conflict

So we have a war with nine discrete points of conflict. Each one of these things is a transition of its own: consumers over investors, consoles are back, Real Games are back, gamers' voices have changed, digital distribution has stumbled, the Console Wars continue, Nintendo abides like The Dude, players will craft their own stories, and worlds will become more engaging as we seemingly naturally encounter our friends in them.

But I regret kicking off with that metaphor. In the real world, war, conflict and transition are hideously destructive, and all people involved inevitably lose on a personal level.

In gaming, however, conflict and transition are amazing things. They're the times when creators start taking risks. Gamers who love creativity and imagination uniformly win.

We have before us a veritable cornucopia of potential awesome. If you haven't been clicking links to games in this post, go back and do so - every link is to an in-game demo or official trailer. And they're all impressive. Every single one.

It is, without doubt, a great time to be a gamer.