In which Tolkien doesn't roll in his grave because he got all of it from the Norse anyway

I find it fascinating how much I totally don't give a crap about Dragon Age. It's amazing, especially considering that I find the Mass Effect games incredibly attractive.

It may have something to do with the bog standard fantasy world. Was it Yahtzee who noted how ridiculous it is that there is such a thing as a "standard fantasy world"? We desire to escape, go to a new, fresh,  universe - but after a quarter century, the fact that it's always the same "new" universe in each game, with what amounts to a new wig, is starting to really get on my nerves.

Mature and gritty!

I'm big on new realities. Planescape: Torment is one of my all time favorites, as are the Fallout games (haven't played 3, hope it's worthy - meaning, evocative). Zeno Clash was an instabuy. I have a soft spot in my heart for Albion, if anyone remembers that Blue Byte gem. The Void is coming up on my shopping list. And I can still recall seeing the first Baldur's Gate for the first time, and thinking, even as I gaped at the incredible Infinity Engine graphics, "Gee, that's not very innovative now is it?"

So come to think of it, Bioware have been doing it forever. Dragon Age is nothing new, in both senses of the word. All of it is lifted from elsewhere, as were its predecessors. But what about Mass Effect? Oh yes, utterly generic space opera pastiche. So why do I care? Maybe because RPGs are so starved for new worlds that even something as cliched as that seems fresh in this context? I doubt they'll be able to hold my attention past the Mass Effect trilogy though (if that).

It's kind of sad, really, that the most celebrated RPG maker in the world specializes in creating universes so plain and unimaginative. What does that say about us?

A fragment

This is more about tuning into the universe than any character work, I'm just trying a tone on for size.

[INT: Dixie Lady, a smallish, sub-10KTEU class orbital cargo transport. Bridge. A tight, almost cockpit-like space. Place for two crew, and two people present. The navigator's been here a while, the captain just came in. Then, suddenly...]

DAVE

Captain? Captain. You - captain, look at this.

ANNE

Can this wait until after my coffee, Dave? I'm not-

[She sees his face. She knows it's serious.]

DAVE

Sensors picked it up 8 seconds ago. It's headed our way. It's too hot.

ANNE

No, it can't be...

DAVE

It's too hot. Coming straight at us. It's...

ANNE

[She recoils a bit from the console.]

Motherfuck. It is. Fuck. Oh, my...

DAVE

Deltavee is at max on an ortho vector, I just flipped us. I can try and shake it.

[He's talking calmly and sweating like a pig.]

ANNE

Too fast. We're on a plate. It's not enough, not enough, not enough...

[She frantically casts about for an idea, hands squeezing the Con chair.]

Gimme cargo!

[The cargo manifest unfolds in front of her, a huge list.]

We're gonna dump it - oh God - and the water. No! The fuel! How much?

DAVE

Eight point three tons, sixty percent. Now fifty nine percent. Engines pushing at one-twenty two, any more and the nozzles melt.

ANNE
No, cut power! All of it, go to zero! Where's the comms laser?

DAVE

Here, panel two. You're gonna shoot at it? I can't overload the laser...

ANNE

I'm not gonna shoot, I couldn't even scrape it with this lamp. I'm gonna poke it in the eye. How do you get a continuous beam out of this?

DAVE

You can't, you need diagnostics. 'Power diagnostics', pick 'emitter testing', you can choose a beam shape.

ANNE

Is the cargo ready? What's the trajectory? And ready the fuel dump, K and L. You're gonna mix 'em and pour 'em over the containers as they come out. Flip the boat again. Is this the trajectory? Flip the boat, here - here, like this.

[A sketch on a nav screen.]

Then dump all of it at once. Blow the doors and dump it, and pour the fuel over. Can you dump fuel that way?

DAVE

Yeah, there's a valve. How much?

[EXT: POV of the missile. Spacescape in infrared, bright dot of the Dixie Lady resolving into a detailed image. Suddenly, a glare from the comms laser rotating and pointing straight into the optical sensor. It whites out. The missile is blinded. Back on the bridge:]

ANNE
Keep it open until I tell you to stop. Then you flip again and light the fuel with our exhaust.

DAVE
Jesus, Anne! We're gonna die in a ship fire!

ANNE

No! Dixie's ass is shielded, we should make it. Then push us into the cargo and match speed. Then switch the ship into standby mode, shut off the engine.

DAVE

You mean try and blend with the debris? Will that work? We'll still be lit up...

ANNE

How would I know? You got a better idea? Just do the thing! And hopefully the containers shine more than we do.

[EXT: Pretty CGI of aforementioned maneuver, lots of tension by the crew. Bridge:]

DAVE

Looks like it's good, maybe... 

[EXT: The missile suddenly shatters into a million pieces, very deliberately and slowly moving away, creating a huge swarm of spikes. Bridge:]

ANNE

Oh fuck. Oh God. Fu- 

[She's interrupted by a violent lurch sending them both flying towards the ceiling, and then a blast of plasma engulfing the cabin. They're gone.] 

[EXT: Looking at the Dixie Lady spinning in the metal rain, as hundreds of spikes tear through the burning cargo containers and the ship itself, dismembering it, the hull turning into plasma from the impact energy. The floating remains are pushed away by the spikes that keep impacting and transferring kinetic energy, until it all floats offscreen, and the rain stops. Now there's only darkness.]

Let's expound on that last bit.

Voting with my wallet is problematic.

And I don't just mean in the sense that it involves restraint and management of money. I mean in the sense that it doesn't tell the other side much. It's the most powerful communication channel we have with the developers and publishers, but it can only carry one bit of information. Yes/no, like/dislike.

Gamers that grumble on forums about this or that loved or hated (mostly hated) game and its qualities (or lack thereof) are often told to just vote with their wallet. But what will my vote mean to the people in charge? It won't tell them anything about why I did or didn't buy the game. Modern Warfare 2 is an excellent example: how do I convey to Activision that I love their embracement of Steamworks without implicitly supporting their... slightly controversial stance on PC multiplayer?

Shouldn't we be past this? Isn't it time for publishers to take a slightly more proactive stance with their audiences? I don't mean the forums; they're half-useless as a communication or survey tool, what with the amount of demographic self-selection that applies to every poster. No, we need something with more weight. And I believe that a good approach might be designed around stealing from Brad Wardell.

Specifically, we should start with his popular and controversial post on piracy, where he essentially posited that "Piracy doesn't matter, only sales matter." Let's paraphrase that bit into "Opinions don't matter, only sales matter."

Let's be realistic here: a lot of people that complain about Modern Warfare 2 are going to buy it. I will too, in a few years. That means we'll give money to Activision. And even if they ignore the vocal minority on the forums (though I'm sure they do care at least a little bit), they should be listening to their customers. It's impossible to know who might have bought your game but didn't and why, but it's comparatively trivial to ask the people who did why they did. Big publishers already do this to some degree, but it should be done far more comprehensively. Exit polls, maybe? Cooperate with game stores to ask customers why they've bought what they did? No, that's simplistic. So why don't we use our Gore-given Internet to do it?

It's easy. Most of these games are already integrated into one online service or another, most of them with social networking aspects and cute stuff like achievements. So let's expand on that. Every purchase comes with one online account. Let us give each account two vote credits. At any time from the moment of purchase any customer may use the game interface to cast a positive or negative vote on an aspect of the game. But the votes aren't fluff like achievements. You only ever get two for any game, and once you spend them you can never vote on that game again. There are no rewards for using them - in fact, casting a vote might carry a slight in-game penalty (to discourage frivolous voting). They should be used by customers who really want to tell you something, so much so they are willing to inconvenience themselves to do it.

You do this, and you are no longer listening to strangers on the Internet. You are listening to your faithful customers, who care about your game (meaning of course they might buy the next one) and have something important to say. The trick of course is to integrate these votes wholly and elegantly into the game. This isn't tech support. You don't want to hear just from people who know how to use the console commands in your FPS; in fact you don't want to hear just from people who play multiplayer (still a minority, despite what most pundits think; not everyone is a social animal and games have diverse patterns of use). Casting a vote should be as simple as saving a game. Everyone should be able to do it, quickly and easily. And if you promote these vote credits as much as achievements are touted (so that everyone knows about them), you can start estimating with some degree of reliability what percentage of your customer base really cares about this or that design choice. Not to mention the knock-on effect of customers feeling like they matter and their voices are heard, which is how fanbases are born.

You do want to know more about your customer base, don't you? We already have these wonderful communication and data processing machines on our desks - so let's use them more.