Edge November 2021

who was ever careful with what they wished for?

Perhaps it was different for you, but for some of us, having videogames as a hobby during our school years wasn’t a sure-fire method for becoming the most popular kid. When even the members of the Dungeons & Dragons lunchtime club look down their noses at you, it’s difficult not to ask yourself some questions. What was it about computer games, we wondered, that these people just didn’t get? Looking back now at the state of some of the things we played in the early ‘80s, it’s not difficult to appreciate why the entire planet wasn’t quite ready to be hooked just yet, but for a while there it felt like a mystery. The world of comics (not graphic novels – that rephrasing would come later) was similar: who couldn’t…

the trouble with game development

By now, you’re probably familiar with at least the broad strokes of the lawsuit brought against Activision Blizzard by the California Department Of Fair Employment And Housing. Since it was filed in July, its allegations have inspired a lot of discussion around “frat boy” workplace culture”, with “cube crawls” seeing male employees drinking “copious amounts of alcohol” and wandering between office cubicles, leading to “inappropriate behaviour toward female employees.” The full complaint makes for grim reading. The result of a two-year investigation by the DFEH, it describes “a breeding ground for harassment and discrimination against women”, spanning everything from unequal pay and opportunities for promotion to rape jokes and unsolicited comments about the bodies of female employees. Former World Of Warcraft creative director Alex Afrasiabi is named specifically, alleged to have preyed…

dream state

Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s E3 pitch for HitRecord was easy to get swept up by. His company would help community creators funnel music, animation and art assets into Beyond Good & Evil 2. Through the Space Monkey Program, as it was known, fans would get the chance to be part of the sequel to a cult classic, and Ubisoft would gain the extra material it sorely needed to fill the multiple planets promised for the game. The negative response from professionals, however, hit like a series of Inception bwarps. Since only those whose work influenced the final game would be compensated, creators would be working on spec. Some called the system exploitative, a sentiment echoed when Ubisoft worked with HitRecord again for Watch Dogs: Legion. While the publisher’s PR fought the flames, however,…

dragon scale

It’s the Dragon’s Den-style question Dean Anderson gets a lot: why would big studios incorporate a UGC platform such as Playerstate when they could build their own? “Some will build their own,” he counters. “But the reality is, once we get Playerstate off the ground and we have a significant community, we will have economies of scale on our side.” For many triple-A developers, he argues, UGC is a distraction they’d happily leave to a third party. He adds, “If we can come in with a solution that drives efficiency, it makes complete sense for them to use a platform like Playerstate rather than try to build them themselves.”…

rally up

The next time you’re walking down a street with friends, try playing a round of “corporate exorcism” game Skcubrats. You score points by shouting out corporate signs backwards. First player to ten wins. Alternatively, keep going until capitalism crumbles. Skcubrats is one of the lighter entries in Casual Games For Protesters, an archive of physical games to play at rallies and marches. The goal is to make “participating in social change [feel] exhilarating, social, intellectually and physically stimulating, liberatory and fun” – though, as the creators acknowledge, “context is crucial”. It’s one thing to ‘protest playfully’ in the UK, quite another to do so in a country where police routinely bear arms. Launched in 2017, CGP is the work of writer-performer Dr Harry Josephine Giles and Professor Paolo Pedercini, founder of…

sound asleep

Vancouver-based developer David Huynh says he “wanted to tell a story about how your own personal desires and anxieties can affect your dreams and vice versa. The story in Melatonin is about that feedback loop spiraling out of control.” Yet this is no dark, moody exploration of the human psyche, but a rhythm-action game that has you whacking alarm clocks with a baseball bat one minute and speeding after a box of delicious doughnuts the next. With minigames themed around followers, tech, money and food, it’s essentially Rhythm Paradise for the Twitter generation; those dreamy looks, meanwhile, are “a blend of styles from animated shows that I watch, such as Adventure Time and Mob Psycho 100.” Assuming reality doesn’t intrude on Huynh’s plans, we can look forward to entering a…