FEBRUARY 2002 GAME DEVELOPER MAGAZINE GAME PLAN 600 Harrison Street, San Francisco, CA 94107 t: 415.947.6000 f: 415.947.6090 Publisher ✎ Jennifer Pahlka [email protected] LETTER FROM THE EDITOR EDITORIAL Editor-In-Chief Jennifer Olsen [email protected] Managing Editor Tor Berg [email protected] Production Editor Olga Zundel [email protected] The Joys of Self-Regulation Art Director Audrey Welch [email protected] Editor-At-Large hat kind of kid itself against errors of fact in public opin- Chris Hecker [email protected] were you? Did ion, such as the persistent and pernicious Contributing Editors Daniel Huebner [email protected] your mom have to misperception that videogames are pre- Jonathan Blow [email protected] nag you endlessly dominantly made for and played by chil- Hayden Duvall [email protected] Advisory Board to clean your dren. When Australia’s Office of Film and Hal Barwood LucasArts room, your constant refusals erupting Literature Classification devised its first Ellen Guon Beeman Beemania W Andy Gavin Naughty Dog into all-out wars? Or perhaps you were videogame rating system in 1994, “...con- Joby Otero Luxoflux cheerful and obedient, always cleaning cerns were expressed about the interactive Dave Pottinger Ensemble Studios George Sanger Big Fat Inc. your room as you were told. Sometimes, nature of computer games and the possible Harvey Smith Ion Storm if you did it without your mom having to adverse effects on children, who were seen Paul Steed WildTangent ADVERTISING SALES ask, she might give you a cookie. as the primary target audience for comput- Director of Sales & Marketing The game industry got its cookie in er games.” (OFLC Discussion Paper, “A Greg Kerwin e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6218 December when the Federal Trade Com- Review of the Classification Guidelines for National Sales Manager Jennifer Orvik e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6217 mission issued its latest report to Congress Films and Computer Games,” 2001). Later Senior Account Manager, Eastern Region & Europe on “Marketing Violent Entertainment to guidelines established a 15-and-over rating Afton Thatcher e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6224 Account Manager, Northern California & Southeast Children,” a follow-up to a report submit- for some games, but decreed — in a tri- Susan Kirby e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6226 ted in September 2000 which criticized umph of ambiguity — “the stronger com- Account Manager, Recruitment Raelene Maiben e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6225 marketing practices in the music, film, and puter games are banned.” (OFLC Account Manager, Western Region & Asia videogame industries. The conclusion was “Guidelines for the Classification of Craig Perreault e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6223 that since the first six-month follow-up Computer Games,” 1999). Sales Associate Aaron Murawski e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6227 report released in April 2001, the film and The same week the FTC released its ADVERTISING PRODUCTION videogame industries have continued to updated report in the U.S., copies of clear- Vice President, Manufacturing Bill Amstutz improve their rooms’ tidiness with respect ly mature-themed games such as GRAND Advertising Production Coordinator Kevin Chanel Reprints to diverting their marketing of violent- THEFT AUTO 3 and GHOST RECON were Stella Valdez t: 916.983.6971 themed or otherwise objectionable enter- reportedly being whisked from store GAMA NETWORK MARKETING Senior MarCom Manager Jennifer McLean tainment away from minors. (The music shelves in some Australian jurisdictions, at Marketing Coordinator Scott Lyon industry, apparently, is still running away the height of the Christmas shopping sea- Audience Development Coordinator Jessica Shultz from Mom, screaming and slamming son, in order to undergo reclassification. CIRCULATION doors, and seemingly oblivious of the fact The head of Sony Computer Entertain- Group Circulation Director Catherine Flynn Circulation Manager Ron Escobar that Mom usually wins in the end.) ment Australia can tell a reporter for the Circulation Assistant Ian Hay The self-regulatory efforts of the game Sydney Herald Sun that half of Playstation Game Developer Newsstand Analyst Pam Santoro is BPA approved. industry’s trade organizations, in particular 2 owners are over 30 years old, yet the SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES the Interactive Digital Software Associa- country’s regulatory body concluded just a For information, order questions, and address changes tion and the Entertainment Software few years earlier that there was no need t: 800.250.2429 or 847.647.5928 f: 847.647.5972 Rating Board along with its Advertising for a mature rating for games as there was e: [email protected] INTERNATIONAL LICENSING INFORMATION Review Council, are commendable for for film, because games were for children. Mario Salinas willfully assuming responsibility for indus- Clearly there is a lot of confusion coming t: 650.513.4234 f: 650.513.4482 e: [email protected] try marketing practices while rightfully out of and real money evaporating into CMP MEDIA MANAGEMENT President & CEO continuing to defend our First Amendment this non-self-regulatory system. Gary Marshall Executive Vice President & CFO John Day rights. What they’ve so deftly realized is Lessons abound about the virtues of President, Technology Solutions Group Robert Faletra that when you address one critique pur- successful self-regulation and the perils of President, Business Technology Group Adam K. Marder posefully and with measurable success, yielding control to outside interests. The President, Healthcare Group Vicki Masseria President, Specialized Technologies Group Regina Starr Ridley you fend off outside agencies who would U.S.-based industry has fortunately been President, Electronics Group Steve Weitzner regulate this industry without its best busi- rewarded with praise for its efforts so far, Senior Vice President, Business Development Vittoria Borazio ness and creative interests in mind. but now is not the time to rest on our gos- Senior Vice President, Global Sales & Marketing Bill Howard Senior Vice President, Human Resources & Successful self-regulation also helps to samer-thin laurels, nor will it ever be. Communications Leah Landro dilute criticisms lobbed at other aspects of Vice President & General Counsel Sandra Grayson our trade. But we’re not out of the public- Vice President, Creative Technologies Philip Chapnick opinion woods yet. The most important thing for our indus- try to do now is to continue to defend 2 WWW.GAMANETWORK.COM SAYS YOU A FORUM FOR YOUR POINT OF VIEW. GIVE US YOUR FEEDBACK...C Game Engines, or Are imprecision), we can consider Quake to avoid if you’re precomputing mipmaps They? and NetImmerse members of a same using elaborate filters (such as the article family which, for historical reasons, we describes). You might as well get gamma object to Andrew Kirmse and Daniel can call engines. You will always have correct, too. I Sanchez-Crespo’s classification of closed engines, which will offer a faster If you’re smart, you do all this with at NetImmerse and Alchemy as “game time to market, and toolkits, which give least 12 bits of precision per channel, to engines” in “Test Drive: On the Open us greater flexibility. In the end, all these avoid banding (Jim Blinn talks about this Road with Two of Today’s Most products are nothing but close relatives, precision problem with gamma conver- Powerful Game Engines” (December, so the incurred imprecision in the nam- sion in his books). 2001). They don’t qualify as engines at ing is, in my opinion, justified. Eric Haines all; they’re component sets. via e-mail Anonymous Kudos for “The Inner JONATHAN BLOW RESPONDS: Actually, in an via e-mail Product” upcoming column, I talk about gamma correction. Rumor has it that the next DANIEL SANCHEZ-CRESPO RESPONDS: The have just read Jon Blow’s first “Inner chip design from A Major 3D Accelerator term “game engine” is pretty slippery. IProduct” column (“Mipmapping, Part Maker has deep enough channels and a Traditionally, it has referred to “closed 1,” December 2001). I am currently on a versatile enough RAMDAC or page copi- solutions,” which allowed the developer game project and the information he has er that you can just keep the frame buffer to concentrate on content creation. In supplied is more than enough to get my in light-linear space and exponentiate this respect, NetImmerse and Alchemy team thinking on how we could imple- everything after the whole frame is should be better called “game develop- ment a better mipmapping algorithm. drawn. This has good connotations for ment toolkits.” Both Andrew and I took lighting (in other words, it becomes basi- care that this idea was clearly stated in Steve Marth cally free to actually do lighting at the our reviews. via e-mail proper falloff rate). Still, this semantic precision is a dou- ble-edged sword. Being “traditional” Don’t Forget to Gamma Teaching Games engines, Quake & Unreal should allow Correct teams to concentrate on content, right? enjoyed Celia Pearce’s “Learning Still, when Valve used the Quake 2 ’m so glad to see that Jonathan Blow’s ICurves: The Present and Future of engine to create HALF-LIFE, some compo- I“Inner Product” column has picked Game Studies” (Soapbox, December nents were reworked or written from up the technical torch at Game Dev- 2001). scratch. Does that make Quake 2 less of eloper (“Mipmapping, Part 1,” Six years ago I proposed a videogame an engine? Now, consider HIRED GUNS, a December 2001). programming course to Paloma College, game built on top of Unreal. What’s so Besides the ringing mentioned in the a community college in San Marcos, interesting about it? Well, it’s a real-time article, another effect usually ignored by Calif., which I have been teaching part- strategy game, clearly not what the peo- game programmers (and almost every- time for the past five years.