We Must Oppose Misinformation

A Utah bill that’s been in gestation for the last six weeks or so — rumored here, then confirmed here — has finally come to fruition. GamePolitics reports:

By a 10-3 vote, committee members approved H.B. 353, a bill drafted by Thompson and sponsored by Rep. Mike Morley. The measure targets the video game and film industries by amending Utah’s current Truth in Advertising law. Retailers and movie theaters which advertise that they don’t sell M-rated games or R-rated movie tickets to underage buyers and then do so would be liable for fines of $2,000 per incident. [...]

HB 353 will now move on to the full Utah House for consideration.

This is a weird bill. Utah’s past attempts — HB 257 in 2006, and HB 50 in 2007 — essentially tried (and failed) to make it a felony to make M-rated games available to minors. But this one takes a different tack, fining retailers who sell M-rated games to minors, but only if those retailers have previously advertised that they do not sell M-rated games to minors. This is certainly less damaging to the game industry than those other bills in that it seems to have more to do with advertising than with the games themselves, but by the same token, it seems like a pretty toothless measure and, as such, a waste of legislative effort.

There’s a bigger problem, though. If you’re a gamer, this isn’t news, but it’s one of those problems that’s become so common we’ve gotten complacent about it: the fact that our critics are so frequently misinformed, and perhaps more importantly, that our industry never steps up to defend ourselves in light of their lies.

From Eagle Forum President Gayle Ruzicka’s testimony in support of HB 353:

Anything we can do to protect our children from the violence, from the filthy pornography that the only way they can get into the pornography is being good at the game. They work hard and get to certain levels and when they get to the high enough levels then they get into the pornography – filthy, vile stuff that you would be appalled and never want your children to see. And then as a reward, they get to kill the women…

She’s referring to the Grand Theft Auto games, of course, and her inaccuracies are numerous:

• There is no pornography in GTA, unless your definition of pornography is “any sexual content or reference of any kind”. The closest thing you’ll get is the Hot Coffee mod for GTA:SA, and the (brief) male nudity in The Lost & The Damned. The comically-low resolution of the former, and the non-sexual nature of the latter, clearly distance them from any generally-accepted concept of pornography.
• GTA does not have “levels”, as it is primarily a sandbox game. The closest analogue is “missions”, which do not always have a strictly linear progression, and the games’ content does not become any more explicit as players progress.
• Explicit content is not used as a reward for gameplay. It is simply the overall tone of the games, and many well-regarded movies do exactly the same thing.
• Killing the prostitutes is not a reward for anything at all, nor is it encouraged. It does provide a marginal “reward” in that you gain a small amount of cash — should you choose to pick it up — but this amounts to virtually nothing in the overall game economy and is not generally worth doing.

I understand that people like Ms. Ruzicka are concerned about their children (and other people’s children, too, apparently). But it would be nice if the things such people are afraid of were actually real, and not inventions of rumor and fevered imagination.

We as an industry need to be much more proactive about correcting the record on these kinds of things. Allowing our critics — even those with the best of intentions — to paint an inaccurate picture of our industry is, in effect, allowing them to control our identity.

I’m So Proud Of Our Governor

Utah Governor John Huntsman is a Republican. If you read this blog pretty much ever, you’ll know that I’m not a big fan of Republicans. But Huntsman has broken rank and grown a brain. And to that I say, “Bravo, good sir.”

Bipartisanship, Again

I normally like CNN. They’re reasonably well-balanced between the left and the right; they’re not quite as agreeable to my heathen liberal self as Daily Kos, both neither are they as batshit insane as FOX News. But today, trumpeting the headline Clinton’s mockery of Obama proves true, I have to wonder which of us has gone off the deep end.

For a candidate who won the White House on a mantle of bringing the country’s two political parties together, Washington could not be more divided on Obama’s initial weeks in the Oval Office and the policies he has put in place.

That pretty much sums up the article: Obama promised bipartisanship, and we ain’t got none of that. What a dirty, lying bastard he is. Et cetera.

There’s just one problem: the lack of bipartisanship isn’t because the Obama Administration hasn’t been trying. It’s because Republicans keep spitting in his face. Case in point: they got $288 billion in tax cuts for the stimulus bill, and still voted against it. Twice. In Republican land, bipartisanship means, “Do exactly what the Republicans want.”

Dana Houle at Daily Kos put it quite nicely with respect to Judd Gregg’s voluntary withdrawal of his nomination for Secretary of Commerce:

Bipartisanship can only work when both parties put the national interest before everything.  All but a few of the Republicans in Congress put their party before the good of the nation.

Of course, both sides disagree about what “the good of the nation” actually entails. But the Republicans are the party that’s now trying to sell the idea that the New Deal actually caused the Great Depression, instead of fixing it. They are the party that insists that deregulation is the way to fix the economy, despite the fact that rampant deregulation is exactly what put us in this mess in the first place. They are a party that fielded as their 2008 vice-presidential candidate a woman so woefully unprepared for the job that she made a mockery of the entire political process. When we’re talking about the good of the nation, I’m not sure we need — or want — the voice of the present-day Republican Party to be at the table. For the good of the nation, the GOP needs to take a time out and reform the party, to become a lot more reality-based.

If you gave me just the text of the article, without the trappings of CNN.com surrounding it, and stripped all attributions, I’d be hard-pressed to believe this didn’t come from FOX News:

It’s the massive $787 billion stimulus bill that has drawn the most criticism — and praise — in the president’s first month. To be sure, while former president Clinton famously declared an end to the “era of big government” 13 years ago, Obama will herald its return in his speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday.

Shockingly, they stopped short of using the word “socialist”. But why are we raising the bogeyman of Big Government, when that’s clearly what we need to clean up the mess a two-term Republican “administration” left us? The last thing this nation needs is another dose of fear-mongering, as CNN’s own poll clearly indicates:

A new national poll indicates that nearly three out of four Americans are scared about the way things are going in the country today. Seventy-three percent of those questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Monday say they’re very or somewhat scared about the way things are going in the United States.

Now is the time to embrace the potential of government, not to nitpick at its faults. We’re faced with a Big Problem, and it’s going to take a little bit of Big Government to solve it. Kinda like the New Deal:

Instead of invoking the bogeyman, maybe some folks should take a few minutes to think about what Big Government really means:

In any case, the bill that got passed looks pretty bipartisan to me, what with the Republicans’ beloved tax cuts sitting comfortably at the top of the list. But, as further evidence that “bipartisanship” means “our way or the highway” to Republicans:

“If this is going to be bipartisanship, the country’s screwed,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, declared last week. “I know bipartisanship when I see it.”

Sorry, dude. Until your party gets its act together, bipartisanship is the last thing this country needs.

The Myth About Game Pricing

We have yet more evidence that video games are too expensive for their own good, in the form of Gabe Newell’s 2009 DICE Summit keynote address. Rock, Paper, Shotgun has the story, and some truly damning statistics:

The recent Left 4 Dead sale lead to a 3000% increase over the previous numbers. That is, more than in the weekend it was released. Plus, another 1600% in new customers to Steam.

The holiday sales lead to interesting numbers. A 10% reduction lead to 35% increase in amount of money which came in (i.e. Not just sales). 25% lead to a 245% increase. 50% lead to 320% increase. And 75% lead to 1470%.

(The Left 4 Dead sale dropped the normally-$49.99 game to $29.99 for a week, if my memory serves me correctly.)

Off-the-cuff intuition would seem to suggest that a price drop would result in more units moved, but not necessarily more overall revenue, due to the reduced income-per-unit. However, Valve saw significant revenue increases right out of the gate at 10%, and the jumps kept getting larger the lower they cut prices!

Obviously there’s a point of diminishing returns, hovering somewhere around market saturation. Specifically, there’s a finite number of people who are even potential customers, based solely on their personal interests. That is, even if your game was free, that doesn’t mean every person on the planet is going to want it. So once you’re moving enough units to approach market saturation, further prices drops are going to stop increasing sales volume and start reducing revenue.

But until then, the evidence seems clear: the more affordable the game is, the more likely it is people will buy it. So much so, that the increase in sales volume more than makes up for the decrease in income-per-unit.

I’ve said this before, and I remain an advocate of lowering the price of games. The argument that game pricing has gone up to keep up with the increased cost of development is, in my opinion, arguing for the wrong solution. As Valve’s numbers clearly demonstrate, lowering the price increases the revenue dramatically, making it far easier to offset development costs than the standard price jump from $49.99 to $59.99 back at the start of this console generation.

Game pricing also has implications for piracy, as Cliff Harris noted (and I commented on) last year:

A LOT of people cited the cost of games as a major reason for pirating… People talked a lot about impulse buying games if they were much cheaper.

Are there really any arguments left for maintaining the $59.99 price point?

AIAS Awards Results Are In

Gamasutra has the full list of winners for the 12th annual AIAS Awards here. LittleBigPlanet pretty much swept the awards, taking top honors as Overall Game of the Year and Console Game of the Year, while my personal GOTY pick, Left 4 Dead, took Computer Game of the Year and Outstanding Achievement in Online Game Play.

Other notable awards include Braid for Casual Game of the Year and World of Goo for Outstanding Achievement in Game Design. I’m really glad to see Braid in particular pick up an award; that game is a brilliant love-letter to platformers, and to game design in general.

There were a few confusing awards as well, as is wont to happen with these things from time to time. Mirror’s Edge took Adventure Game of the Year, suggesting that we no longer have any concept of what adventure game even means any more. Not that Mirror’s Edge is undeserving of an award, but that’s an action game if ever I saw one. Fallout 3 took Outstanding Achievement in Original Story, despite being up against what I thought was the clear winner for that category, Grand Theft Auto IV. And Braid is a casual game now? What?

But such is the nature of these things: nobody ever agrees 100%. In any case, congratulations to all the winners!