Category: Games

Gabe Newell from Valve:

Newell believes that if Apple makes a move on the living room before the PC industry gets a foothold, then the Cupertino manufacturer can “shut out the open-source creativity” possible with the Steam platform.

Valve’s DRM system makes Apple look like a saint. I love Valve games but Steam is a closed, DRM-heavy, anti-consumer stick. And on Mac it’s sluggish and buggy as hell too.

Waffle about open source creativity if you want, Gabe, but when your system means my account can only be used to play one of the 50 games I have bought from you at a time (meaning I can’t log in elsewhere and let my son play one of my other legally purchased games, then you look like the king of Digital Restrictions Management.

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As video games have grown from an obscure hobby to a $67 billion industry, management theorists have begun to return the favour. Video games now have the dubious honour of having inspired their own management craze. Called “gamification”, it aims to take principles from video games and apply them to serious tasks. The latest book on the subject, “For the Win”, comes from Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter, from the Wharton Business School and the New York Law School respectively.

Video games may not have been entirely mainstream but to call them an obscure hobby highlights a thorough lack of understanding of history. Almost since they appeared, video games have captured the imaginations of young and old. Whether the operation was in an arcade, at home on a console, using a PC or, more recently on your phone, the games market has been anything but obscure.

Does gamification merit the hype that has quickly surrounded it? The idea is only a couple of years old, but it has already spawned a host of breathless conferences, crowded seminars and (inevitably) TED talks.

The name “gamification” is only a couple of years old but the concept and the practice go back more than thirty years. Major UK retailer Sainsbury’s launched their Homebase reward card in 1982. Air Miles, possibly the most well known international brand, started operating in 1988. Collecting points for rewards is the simplest form of gamification but we’re supposed to ignore it because they didn’t invent the name?

Does the Economist merit the hype with this kind of shoddy research?

The problem is that, after the authors have finished instructing their readers in what not to do, the concept of gamification is left looking somewhat threadbare. That is a shame, because their central idea—that the world might be a better place if work was less of a necessary drudge and more of a rewarding experience in itself—is hard to argue with. But then perhaps it is called work for a reason.

If all you want to do is paste achievement badges and point collecting onto drudgery, then yes, the concept is threadbare. But that’s not gamification. You have to use game concepts and gameplay to entice better performance.

If all you want to do is produce some poorly researched and barely understood fluff about Gamification, then I wholeheartedly recommend that you contract whichever Schumpeter journalist produced this article. They deserve an Achievement.

First of all, I’m not a big fan of Borderlands. It’s not the genre, it’s not the art, it’s not the plot or the subplots. It’s not even the plethora of weapons and mods, too numerous to list. The problem is entirely in the gameplay.

It’s a fun, high octane and extremely capable first-person shooter. But when you’ve upgraded your sniper rifle to the max, doing four kinds of additional elemental damage and you have the badlands barbarian square to rights in your sights. He can’t see you but you’re three millimetres of trigger finger movement from unleashing a massive calibre, supersonic round with a quad-payload into his unarmoured head. And you squeeze that trigger, your entire view is disturbed by the incredible recoil from your two metre long weapon of death. You peer back down your scope, only to see that not only did you hit the savage in the back of the head but he’s barely injured and he’s walking towards you. So, you unload another five rounds into him from your longarm and, he’s still coming. And the sense that you’re a badass of the wastelands evaporates as this semi-naked brute bludgeons you to death with his fists despite absorbing twenty of your maxed-out shots.

Their latest instalment, Borderlands Legends, translates the game into a third person squad shooter. This sort of game I love more than anything. But I’m disappointed to say that Borderlands Legends does not deliver. It’s definitely not a squad shooter, it’s a shooter where you have to micromanage four individual units who can barely spot an enemy unit until they’re hit by it. This poor AI is made worse by the game being the exact opposite of Borderlands. Rather than an expansive world to explore, you’re limited to a series of identical arenas waiting for hordes of enemies to spawn from unlikely corners. They have managed to exactly translate the feelings of helplessness as your weapons prove to be increasingly inadequate against the randomers who pour from the spawn points.

It’s really not a lot of fun. It’s disappointing because it’s beautiful. Both games are absolutely gorgeous.