Whither Mario Factory?: The Downside to Academic Publishing

I've been sitting on this material for a while. Many of my informants would recognize it as coming from back in 2006 when I was passing the PDFs around Vicarious Visions. Starting in 2008, the essay has been reviewed well and reviewed poorly and still not accepted. One interesting thing has been that despite good reviews it has even been rejected, told to go to something more "New Media" or "Game Studies." One of those notes came from a journal with "New Media" in its name, but I digress. So while I'll continue to push its publication through, the empirical material is simply too interesting to keep closed off from view as I await further feedback. Thus, some excerpts from an as-of-yet unpublished manuscript, "Whither Mario Factory?"






On Halloween of 1994 Nintendo filed for a series of patents that were later granted between the years 1997 and 2000. This essay refers to them more homogeneously as "Mario Factory" (Hibino and Yamato, 1994; Yamato et al., 1994a; Yamato et al., 1994b). This sequence of documents describe a videogame development, testing, and manufacturing system designed specifically for hobbyists and users to enjoy the creative possibilities of developing games for console videogame systems. Many of the systems and ideas described in the documents have not yet come to market for licensed Nintendo game developers and certainly not for the general player or hobbyist game developer.

Mario Factory, at its core, was about creating, not only the possibility of (co)creative content creation for console video games, but an entire set of tools by which users could begin (co)creating games. Figure 1 depicts a splash screen from this hypothetical device. While the patent seems to specifically target less technically inclined would-be videogame developers, it was also stated that these same tools would prove as productive prototyping and testing systems for more experienced videogame developers.

This invention relates generally to a method and apparatus for generating unique videographic computer programs. More particularly, the present invention relates to a video game fabricating system designed primarily for users who are unfamiliar with computer program[ing] or video game creating methodology. Such users may conveniently create a unique video game through and icon driven, interactive computing system that permits a video game to be executed, stopped, edited, and resumed from the point where the editing began with the editorial changes persisting through the remainder of game play.
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In accordance with the present invention, unique video games may be simply created by users ranging from a relatively unsophisticated elementary school students to sophisticated game developers. A unique hardware and software platform enables users to create original games by selecting icons which access more detailed editor screens permitting the user to directly change a wide variety of game display characteristics concerning moving objects and game backgrounds. (Yamato et al., 1994a53)

As early as 1994, Nintendo was critically aware of the complexity associated with videogame development practices and the kinds of interdisciplinary creative collaborative practice that is necessary for success. While their patent hints at perhaps a declining collaboration between engineer, artist, and designer, it seems to be more about creating tools that foster effective collaborative practice between those groups.

Mario Factory was, in effect, a DevKit for the masses. This approach hints at a very different possibility than one that is currently experienced by game developers. DevKits were introduced so that game developers could create games for consoles where the hardware differed significantly from that of PC's. Nintendo developed technologies to bridge the gap between the PCs, where code was typically written, and the consoles, which ran the compiled code.

Hibino, T. & Yamato, S. (1994). U.S. Patent No. 5599231. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Assignee: Nintendo Co., Ltd.
Yamato, S. et al. (1994a) U.S. Patent No. 5680534. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Assignee: Nintendo Co., Ltd.
Yamato, S. et al. (1994b) U.S. Patent No. 6115036. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Assignee: Nintendo Co., Ltd.

Thus an Experiment Begins: Programmer Art

I've been prototyping quite a few different game designs recently and have been struggling with not having place-holder graphics that give enough sense of the overall aesthetic of a game concept. Boxes, lines, and colors are useful to an extent, but I've wanted something more before I start recruiting people to help me out with the art side. Plus, there are all sorts of technological issues associated with transitioning to real art created by talented artists that are already taxed for time that I would rather not put off.

Thus, began my new experiment. I started thinking about how much time I invest in the tools that make me a better programmer, designer, writer, etc. What I realized was that I had not put much time or energy into the tools and software that I was using to create art. I use Mellel for writing, TextWrangler for many text editing things, Versions for SVN management, Omnigraffle for diagrams, Bookends for bibliographic and research material, Evernote for research and archival, ScreenFlow for software demonstrations, and even a special program for using Gmail, Twitter, etc. Now, I will cut myself a bit of slack, because I long ago invested in Pixelmator for image editing, but I use only a fraction of its capabilities.

So, I have begun testing out graphics creation and editing tools. Some for bitmap graphics, some for vector graphics, etc. But I've also invested in a small "Bamboo" Wacom tablet. It only makes sense to invest in my tools, right? I ought to pay as much attention to how I'm going about creating graphics as I'm going about selecting a new graphics library. So, I'm going to document the process here. Now of course, I'm tweaking things a bit here. Obviously based on the above software selection, you can tell I don't immediately go for the Microsoft/Adobe solutions, but I try to support independent developers first. Often I find much "sharper" tools as I term them.

So, first on the docket are a selection of indy graphics tools before I launch into those "other" programs, unless I find the cat's meow first!

No Popcap Developer Framework Love for the Rest of Us

I'm working on another post related to my efforts on finding useful frameworks and tools chains to use in my classes and independent game development here in Athens, GA. That is a longer post, but this seemed important enough to be its own post. I recently found the Popcap Developer Framework, which for independent 2D game development looks really exciting. It is my understanding that this framework was used in the development of games like World of Goo and of course many ofPopcap's games. What a boon to the community I thought! Then I clicked the download button, which sends me the following message:

Forbidden
You do not have access to this page.
You must be logged in to developer.popcap.com before downloading files

To which I dutifully clicked the "Register" link, which returns the following:

Sorry, registration has been disabled by the administrator.

I've sent several messages through the "contact us" link with no reply. I have found the alternative Tuxcap port of the library, but it is a little sad to see such a great community boon lost to the non-responsive industry ether that pervades in many cases. Of course I can't ask the question on thePopcap developer forum because registration is closed. Thus I cry my tears into the Internet ether.

Game Studies Love/Hate Relationship with Game Development

You know you're behind with blog posts when you've had a tab open in Firefox for nearly a week and a half, with every intention of posting about it, but not having time. I blame my dissertation, which is currently at about 40% completion.

This is an interesting post over on Terranova, which is a site I look forward to reading in the RSS feed. I would say however, that typically they suffer from the regular game studies myopia of "in games" syndrome, where their concerns are focused on the play/use/experience/economics/social issues/etc "in games." I knew at some point that there would be a realization that production is an important aspect of all of that, and despite any arm flailing that I might do would not otherwise convince them. To put it in perspective I've submitted several chapter proposals to collected volumes on "social, economic, etc" approaches to games, and they were completely uninterested in anything to deal with production or industry inter-weavings.

So anyway, "authoring tools" came up, and I see some light. Perhaps it is simply a train barreling down, but I cannot help but think that game studies interest in authoring tools will lead to an interest in tools development, which will lead to an interest in game development more generally.

It's hard to say. You have to get past your Miyamoto/Wright worship for that to happen. Here's to hoping.

Terranova - A Hierarchy of Authoring Tools

In virtual worlds, we've seen some of the pitfalls with user-generated content (problems that have a parallel in Wikipedia). When users are given access to that layer of a virtual world, a few will attack the world as a whole, while others will look to ruin or damage the experience of other users. User-generated content as a whole is also often not quite as appealing or attractive as what authors with the full resources of a developer can create: open-source creativity sometimes generates broad but subtly unsatisfying experiences.
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Doing something similar in the most "open" virtual world environments is a lot harder, or at least I find it to be so. Second Life gives me a lot of tools, but I feel like the learning curve and time demands involved in using them is very steep. Author-oriented non-persistent games like Neverwinter Nights have seemed more demanding to me.

Yes, Yes, XNA Express is Cool

This is an interesting discussion from the Microsoft camp about the differences between Sony's Home and XNA Express. There is also some interesting discussion about the differences in how MS and Sony approaches their developers. I certainly think MS has an edge in that respect.

Either way it's an interesting read and insight into the worlds of developers and those that make tools for them.

Microsoft on Lowering the Barriers of Creativity

With XNA Game Studio Express, it is a different approach. It's not just about modding a game that somebody's made; it's about making your own game. I definitely take your point [because] you need some skill to do it. Now I do think we've made it much easier with XNA Game Studio Express than it's ever been before, but when you add our partner products on top—like what we've done with Garage Games—then you actually have systems like Torque GameBuilder (TGB), which is drag and drop game development. You literally drag pieces in and you drop them. And then we have starter kits, so if you just want to mod an experience you can do that... So imagine if you take TGB and load up a pack and there's all the cool animated things—you just drag and drop them in, say what behavior you want and can start playing a game. And we actually licensed that from Garage Games so if you're a member of the Creator's Club in XNA you get that in your subscription.
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And XNA is attracting a lot of professionals as well. A lot are doing this in their spare time because they're like, "I've got a great idea and I just want to make a real fun, simple game and I don't get to do that at work anymore." I think what you'll mostly see is lots of smaller games.
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The thing that we do at Microsoft is we're a software and services company. We build tools to build software and we build software; that's at our core. We're very passionate about enabling developers and we've been working on things like visual studio for the last ten years... So I am very confident that we provide the very best tools in the industry, and if you talk to developers they will back that up. And we have the best services that we put around it – our consulting services and developer support services. I mean, when I used to do PS2 development I still used Microsoft technologies like for debugging and for the IDE for the compiler because it was the best you could use. It's great for developers that Sony is bringing these new components out, but we've already got that in our SDK. PIX, our profiling tool, is probably one of the most favored tools in the developer industry. So I feel very good [about our tools]. That's why now 3 out of 4 are leading on our platforms because it's just the most productive environment.
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It's also questionable that in their keynote they spent about 30 seconds talking about their tools. It's like one slide; they're checking off a box.

The other thing is what we're doing with Game Studio and XNA Express is, no one else is doing in the industry – we are really, truly democratizing game development. 250,000 people have downloaded this, and there's only 20-25 thousand professional developers in the industry. So we're going well beyond that audience. And this is our commitment to the industry, with computer science enrollments being down, high-definition game development budgets rising, people needing more teams... that pipeline has to be filled. We want to make sure that the 15-year-old girls that are thinking about what they want to study, that they have programs where they can get involved in the sciences and gaming. It's an investment for us. The 'community arcade' ... We don't make any money off this. It's part of our responsibility to the industry.
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There's nothing free about a $600 console. Once you've spent $600 the online is free, but you still have to spend $600 to get out of the gate, before you have any games.