The shape of the games industry seen from a developer's viewpoint - Mata Haggis - Codemotion Amsterdam 2017
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The games industry is a sprawling business with over $100bn turnover per year, but its audience spans genders, generations, and communities. How can we make sense of the diverse results of video game development? In this talk, Dr. Mata Haggis presents a model that allows both outsiders and developers to gain an overall understanding of the commonalities and differences in the areas of games development. Taking a view from the perspective of the developers themselves, this model creates a coherent picture of this exciting and innovative medium.
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The shape of the games industry seen from a developer's viewpoint - Mata Haggis - Codemotion Amsterdam 2017
- 1. The shape of the games industry seen from a developer's viewpoint Dr. Mata Haggis AMSTERDAM 16 - 17 MAY 2017 Copper Stone Sea – Founder Breda University of Applied Sciences, NHTV – Professor of Creative and Entertainment Games
- 2. Firstly… Thank you all for coming, and thanks to Codemotion for inviting me to speak to you I’m Mata Haggis Founder of Copper Stone Sea Professor of Creative and Entertainment Games Breda University of Applied Sciences I also speak quite quickly, so there will be text and diagrams of every main point that I make. Dr. Mata Haggis @MataHaggis
- 3. Previously…
- 4. In this talk… I’m going to give you a broad picture of the video game industry This model has been discussed with representatives of Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, among many others, so it has a solid basis in industry accuracy You are welcome to ask questions at any time, but I hope there will be a little time for questions at the end too Let’s get started with a bit of history…
- 7. = ?
- 8. The economic value of creative and entertainment video games
- 9. Culture and economics are part of understanding the value of games These are common political talking points in support of games But this doesn’t really give us insight into the way that games are created And we often hear about ‘serious games’, ‘applied games’, and other types of games But typically these are discussed without common understanding of what the terms might mean.
- 10. Let’s take a developer’s viewpoint Games are very hard to categorise from a player’s perspective – there are simply too many views For example, to some players the most accurate flight simulators are more enjoyable than any arcade game We can measure audience size, but what about the developers? What do we have in common? In this room we are surrounded by problem solvers: we are creators The model I’ll be talking about gives you window into how other creators approach their work.
- 25. Serious games
- 29. Applied games
- 35. Creative games
- 38. Pure simulation
- 47. ???
- 50. Pure art
- 55. But we learn through experiences…
- 58. SERIOUS GAMES APPLIED GAMES ENTERTAINMENT GAMES CREATIVE GAMES ECONOMIC, SOCIAL, AND CULTURAL BENEFITS
- 59. The future... Economically growth is likely to continue in all fields We are reaching a time where it is likely that photorealism is possible... But will it be desirable? ‘Fun’ will continue to be a major market, but a new generation will treat games like any other media channel And the hardware will be omnipresent.
- 60. The future: VR? But VR... In the near term, my bet would be on location-based gaming, MR, and AR becoming more significant for games VR is here to stay this time I still think screen-based devices (i.e. mobile, tablets, and TV) will dominate But we’ve seen the social factor surprise technologists before, so social VR might surprise us all yet!
- 61. The future: disruption? None of these ‘disruptive technologies’ are changing the basic design goals of developers The model I’ve presented today is likely to remain valid for the near future But the volume of sectors within it, and their funding streams, may shift considerably I hope they do – the medium of games have a lot of potential that is unfulfilled It would have been hard to predict the future of cinema from 1937, just as it is hard to predict the future of games from 2017. = ?
- 62. In conclusion Games are a unique and powerful medium There are a vast array of design choices that shape their final form I hope this talk has encouraged you to think about their development in a new light… And to understand a little more about how and why they are made There are games coming that we’ve not even dreamed of yet, and we have so much to learn about how games work I hope you share my excitement to see what the future of games will bring! = ?
- 63. Thank you for listening! The shape of the games industry seen from a developer's viewpoint Dr. Mata Haggis Copper Stone Sea Founder Breda University of Applied Sciences Professor of Creative and Entertainment Games e: Haggis.M@nhtv.nl t: @MataHaggis li: linkedin.com/in/matazone
- 64. Any questions? The shape of the games industry seen from a developer's viewpoint Dr. Mata Haggis Copper Stone Sea Founder Breda University of Applied Sciences Professor of Creative and Entertainment Games e: Haggis.M@nhtv.nl t: @MataHaggis li: linkedin.com/in/matazone
Editor's Notes
- In comparison to the other major creative fields, video games are a young medium. Atari launched Pong forty-five years ago, in 1972. It was the first video game playable by the public. Taito released Space Invaders in 1978, and it was 1980 before the world played Namco's Pac-Man. The video game industry today is often compared to cinema. But if video games are forty-five years old, then they are now in the equivalent period that cinema had reached in 1937:
- Where was cinema 1937? [CLICK] the first ever 'talkie' (a film with voice recording on it) had been released only nine years ago, and Disney released their first full-length film, [CLICK] Charlie Chaplin was at the height of his career with his previous year’s release of Modern Times in 1936 , Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane is five years away from giving birth to many of the techniques that became the essential language of modern cinema And we are still decades away from colour film becoming normal – even ten years later, in 1947, only 12% of films in the cinema were being shot in colour.
- Like films in 1937, video games are not yet a mature medium. [CLICK] Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare was our best selling game in 2016. Our investment of effort in understanding video games now is laying down the foundations for their development in the decades to come. In fifty years, the idea of an associate professor of creative and entertainment games will seem as logical and commonplace as having a professor of film studies, but we are not in that time yet. The efforts of NHTV University and myself today will hopefully help us to understand the form and potential of video games. I hope we will become part of a greater history of the development of this medium. Tomorrow… It could be you leading to the next breakthrough. It is a medium in its own right, and to understand the medium, we need to get some oversight on the industry…
- Video game industry research firm Newzoo’s data suggests that global revenue was 91 billion dollars in 2015 and will be 113 billion dollars in 2018, showing a growth rate of 10 billion dollars per year and defying the downward or stagnant trend experienced by many industries since the economic crisis of 2008. Alongside continuing growth, Newzoo are also predicting that the USA and China will earn 50% of the global revenue from entertainment video games by 2018 (Newzoo, 2015). The economic arguments for creative and entertainment games development are clear, but the European Union will need to actively pursue and support developers if it wishes to retain a competitive edge. CLICK
- Before moving forward, I should briefly define the sector of video games that I shall be discussing. The first term is 'serious games'. [CLICK] These are pieces of interactive digital software whose purpose is to educate the player in a particular field of knowledge or skill. [CLICK] They are focused on creating a learning outcome and so commonly address real-life situations by simulating an activity or scene.
- Both serious and applied games are growing markets with enormous potential. They are commonly funded by governments, corporations, or research groups and are considered overall to be of benefit to society. It is both socially and academically respectable to be associated with serious and applied games. However, these are not the topic of my lecture today. CLICK Instead, I shall be discussing the value of ‘entertainment’ and ‘creative’ games.
- Where serious games teach, applied games [CLICK] intend to reinforce or promote particular existing behaviours. For example, it is healthier for a person to walk up a staircase than take an escalator (CLICK), but most people will choose to do the latter, so an applied gaming strategy could be developed to make the stairs more fun to use (for example, by making them a playable piano [CLICK]) and in this way encourage healthier behaviour. Applied and serious games can also be used to raise political awareness and to educate players; for example the game Peacemaker illustrates the complexity of the Israel–Palestine conflict.
- The entertainment games sector is the most famous grouping of video games. Its lineage goes back to Pong, and beyond, but is best known today for games such as [CLICK] Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, World of Warcraft, and Candy Crush. The objective is entertainment of the audience through excitement, exploration, mastery of rules, fear, competition, and a myriad of other definitions of ‘fun’. Like serious games can be fun from a certain viewpoint, these games can be seen as healthy or educational too, and I shall discuss this further later in this lecture, but the objective of entertainment games’ developers is to drive audience engagement with playful interactions, usually to achieve commercial profit.
- Creative games take a different approach to entertainment. Rather than prioritising 'fun', they explore the range of experiences that can be delivered through video games. It is in this field that games are most often considered to be approaching art. These games may be largely aesthetic in their focus, such as [CLICK] Memory of a Broken Dimension (2016) or Proteus (2013), or they may be focused on creating a narrative experience, such as [CLICK]That Dragon, Cancer (2016) or my own game Fragments of Him {CLICK} (2016). The creative games sector aims to create interesting experiences through digital interaction. These games may address serious issues, such as grief or depression, and so can be interpreted as serious or applied games if the player chooses to do so, but often such interpretations and results are not the driving factor of the creator’s vision for the experience.
- Is The Last of Us trying to be fun? Or is it about being an experience? Is ‘Street Cleaning Simulator’ chasing the most fun possible interactions, or is it trying to find a form of pleasure for its players that might be described through other words?
- Linger in Shadows by Plastic
- Something interesting happens at the Creative end of the spectrum of games… Moral and ethical complexity transforms them from being purely about entertainment. Suddenly issues of social importance start appearing, such as religion & parenthood such as…. CLICK Love, grief, memory, and finding hope for the future such as…. CLICK Sexuality, friendship, childhood, and race such as…. CLICK Or expression of love outside of boundaries and with no consequence such as…. CLICK (talk about games)
- To return to cinematic metaphors, a useful comparison might be that [CLICK] serious games are like a documentary, [CLICK] applied games are aerobics videos that you watch time and again to remind you how to best keep in shape, [CLICK] entertainment games are like The Avengers (Whedon, 2012), and CLICK creative games are like Schindler’s List (Spielberg, 1993) or Eraserhead (Lynch, 1977). However, unlike the film industry, which respects this broad ecosystem, within current research, and especially in regard to funding, serious and applied games are given far greater emphasis in terms of academic interest and respectability. While the benefits of serious and applied games are self-evident, entertainment and creative games appear to be disposable entertainment at best, or indulgent and impenetrable artistic endeavours at worst; however, as mentioned before, there are deeper levels to these games. Creative and entertainment games have value for the economy and society, and they contribute to the creative arts… CLICK and I will go over these benefits for you after the break!