Is Pegasus Really a Horse with Wings?: Poland’s Role in the World of Gaming Systems

gaming_photo_giuseppe_manfra_gettyimages-1170428287.jpg, default, Is Pegasus Really a Horse with Wings?: Poland’s Role in the World of Gaming Systems

#digital culture

The history of gaming is a tale of war. Amiga vs Atari, Nintendo vs Sega, Nintendo vs Sony, PC vs console, Gameboy vs nobody, Steam vs Epic, Oculus vs Vive… and Microsoft vs everyone who doesn’t have Microsoft money. Competition is the driving force of any market, but to understand the rivalries of gaming, we need to know who’s fighting and what they bring to the battlefield.

At this point in time, we use three different types of devices to play games: computers, consoles and mobile devices. I will describe the discrepancies between and within these categories – and possibly make your future conversations about video games, or maybe even purchase scenarios, a bit easier to navigate. Throughout, we’ll hear about Poland’s role in the world of gaming systems.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

The video game market composition has changed considerably since 2012

Picture image

zielinski_market_share.jpg

Computers, consoles & more

It’s safe to say that we’ve all had experience with computers. We’ve lost our progress in Word. Printers have smelled our fear. We’ve been unable to change our passwords because the new one can’t be the same as the old one, but the old one doesn’t work. And finally, we’ve played games. The computer-OS (operating system) market is ruled by Microsoft, with more than 77% of machines running Windows, and Apple, with their MacOS at 17%. Most computer gaming is done via clients such as Steam, GoG or the Epic Games Store, which let you buy, install and refund digital versions of games in their storefronts. The Polish-founded GoG even allows these actions outside of its client. These services also offer social-networking functionalities, streaming and non-gaming-related software. In comparison to consoles, computers offer potentially limitless possibilities for customisation of both the exterior and the hardware, plus peripherals. A computer’s performance depends solely on the components you choose or the laptop configuration you decide to buy and, of course, the size of your wallet.

Consoles are, at their core, specialised computers, designed as closed systems to maximise accessibility and optimisation. There are three main console manufacturers currently operating on the market: Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony. Console history is divided into generations, and we’re currently on the brink or in the middle – don’t ask – of the ninth one. Microsoft’s Xbox Series X/S and Sony’s PlayStation 5 were released on 10th and 12th November 2020, respectively, and are the first traditional home consoles of the ninth generation. The Nintendo Switch has been the incredibly successful – 65 million units sold since March 3, 2017 – weird family member who doesn’t have a serious job, but somehow just landed their helicopter in your backyard. The Switch is a hybrid device which, unlike the Xbox and the PlayStation, can be used either connected to a display or as a handheld console. The console market hasn’t seen a major handheld release since the 2011 launch of the PlayStation Vita, which was supposed to go up against Nintendo’s 3DS… but barely even competed. One may argue that the recently released Nintendo Switch Lite is a handheld console – because it is – but it also functions as a less creative alternative to the regular Switch and not a purposefully designed portable device.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

You can use the Switch as a handheld console. You can also dock it, detach the controllers, and enjoy traditional console gaming.photo: Giuseppe Manfra / Getty Images

Picture image

zielinski_nintendo-switch-shot-02-e1484299745390.jpg

The last category of hardware is mobile devices, by which I mean our phones and tablets running Android or iOS. In 2019, the video-game market was worth $152 billion, and 51% of that came from mobile games – an astounding number for a segment which still hasn’t achieved legitimacy in the core gaming community. The mobile market is a being of its own, with drastically different delivery and monetisation mechanisms. The majority of the most popular mobile games are free-to-play, utilising a number of game design practices like pay-to-win mechanisms and microtransactions to turn a profit. Pokémon GO surpassed $4 billion in lifetime revenue in 2020 – despite being offered for free to Android and iOS users – and sparked a surge in AR games as well as a Hilary Clinton pun. Poland’s CD Projekt RED has also ventured into this segment by developing and publishing GWENT: The Witcher Card Game on Android, iOS and PC – which used to be on consoles, but support was discontinued. They recently announced The Witcher: Monster Slayer, an AR mobile game developed by Spokko – a member of the CD Projekt family – to be released in the future on all major mobile platforms.

Other entities are also trying to snatch a piece of the gaming cake for themselves, even though the cake is a lie. There are console-like experiences like the Google Stadia, which is based around a subscription system and cloud gaming. Similar services are offered by Microsoft and Sony, but only the former is currently available in Poland. However, the market is not limited to game-playing boxes. Netflix – the harbinger of doom for traditional cinema and therefore Martin Scorsese’s favourite thing in the world – decided to revolutionise once again and bring back the early-1990s movie-game genre, and mix it with a few modern ideas from games like The Walking Dead and Life is Strange to produce Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, to decent critical reception.

The industry has taken leaps forward due to the introduction of advanced peripherals and technologies facilitating play. AR stands for Augmented Reality, which means enhancing real-world environments with computer-generated information. The simplest example of AR would be Instagram filters, and the most popular AR game in the world is, hands down, Pokémon GO. VR – Virtual Reality – in games is a fully simulated experience delivered by a dedicated VR headset and hardware capable of handling VR content. VR also offers auditory and haptic feedback to increase immersion in the game world.

Genres & categories

‘Post-truth’ was named the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year in 2016, in order to emphasise how much humanity has moved away from accepting facts. It’s safe to say that video games have moved away from clearly defined genres just as strongly, and much earlier than 2016. In my previous article, I called the ‘AAA mission-based open-world action-adventure game with stealth and RPG elements’ the video game equivalent of tomato soup, so you can easily see why cookie-cutter genres are a thing of the past. That doesn’t mean we should stop categorising games just because we need to use three adjectives instead of one, but it does give the whole process a higher skill floor.

To properly describe a game, we need to have knowledge of core genres, design trends, and the circumstances in which the game was made. 2014 Polish indie title The Vanishing of Ethan Carter’s official Steam description describes it as ‘a first-person story-driven mystery game that focuses entirely on exploration and discovery’ – but it’s not difficult to imagine it being called an AA walking simulator, a first-person narrative experience, a Gone Home clone, or something entirely different. There is a certain degree of objectivity in naming conventions, since you wouldn’t call the Bloober Team’s Observer a racing game, but the details hugely depend on the person describing the game. The ‘proper’ genre for titles like Bioshock, Deus Ex, and Prey (2017) is immersive sim, but they’ve been called first-person RPGs, story-driven shooters, and ‘that other game made by Ken Levine before Bioshock Infinite’s misleading marketing campaign ruined everything’.

Dear reader, I’m going to use Dark Souls as an example here – and I think you should know something. Dark Souls is a dark fantasy-action RPG developed by Japanese developer From Software. It can be easily described as the most influential game of the last decade (believe me, I’m not biased). It reintroduced high difficulty as a commercially viable design strategy, put emphasis on environmental storytelling in modern games, and created a whole new genre – one which is currently being expanded upon by multiple studios around the world. Technically, the first game in the series is Demon’s Souls, but due to hardware exclusivity and certain design elements, it hasn’t enjoyed the popularity its spiritual successor has. ‘Soulsborne’ games are as easy as convincing your grandma that you’re not hungry, and as rewarding as convincing your grandma that you’re not hungry. Go play Bloodborne, though. NOW!

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Unfortunately, Dark Souls has one serious flaw. You can’t pet the dog; photo: Giuseppe Manfra / Getty Images

Picture image

zielinski_great_grey_wolf_sif_combat_ready.jpg

Game genres are evolutionary terms. It’s extremely rare to see a genre being created, and it’s simply hard to make another Doom (first-person shooter), Rogue (roguelike) or Dark Souls (soulsborne). Mark Brown’s ‘Game Maker’s Toolkit’, a fantastic YouTube series on video game design, describes the formation of genre characteristics as a journey from the imitation of a revolutionary title to freely interpreting its formula to create new experiences. At first, people just want ‘more of that thing they liked’ – so games like the Polish-German collaboration Lords of the Fallen are developed to quench the thirst for another glass of that Dark Souls cocktail. Later, developers take elements from that groundbreaking title and start putting their own spin on them, so games like Hollow Knight (an indie metroidvania with a soulsborne death system and elevated difficulty) or Nioh (a classic soulsborne focusing on fighting complexity due to the developer’s background in fighting and character action games) can be published.

Genres don’t only have to be a matter of mechanics, though. They can be associated with their creators like Toby Fox’s Undertale, Lucas Pope’s Papers Please, and Eric Barone’s Stardew Valley, or with a studio’s market and design philosophy like Ubisoft games for the seventh and eighth console generations. Most ‘meta’ or ironic, fast paced, bloody, pixel-art action games can easily be called devolver-like (from the name of the publisher Devolver) – and whenever you see a three-hour long cutscene, you know that Hideo Kojima is somewhere out there laughing at you because you keep putting off that bathroom break and, of course, you can’t pause mid-cutscene. The two biggest Polish titles, The Witcher 3 and Dying Light, are not revolutionary but have managed to create an aura of consumer-friendliness with continuous support, fixes, and extremely reasonable content pricing. Even though both Cyberpunk 2077 (CDPR) and Dying Light 2 (Techland) have had some rough patches recently – CDPR was under a lot of heat for delays and mandatory crunch time, while Techland had to part ways with their high-profile narrative designer Chris Avellone due to sexual-harassment allegations – it doesn’t seem to impact the players’ perception of their games. People still trust these developers to deliver highly-polished titles which will be continuously supported and improved due to the studios’ previously established reputations.

How do I play these things?

The answer is not as simple as it seems. Gaming has evolved far beyond just going to a store and pointing at a game so that your parent can mispronounce its name. Games come in two forms: digital and physical. Digital games – including all major platforms, social media gaming, downloadable content, and subscriptions – have been outselling physical games since 2013. The year 2020 marks the first in which physical console games lost their lead to their digital counterparts. The rise of new distribution methods has introduced a number of fundamental questions regarding gaming: what happens if a company goes under? Can I sell games I buy digitally? Do I actually own my games? Can I lend my game to a friend?

First and foremost, we don’t own the games we buy. We purchase a license to use them, and no change of actual ownership ever takes place. Companies like Valve, Sony and Microsoft have measures in place which are supposed to protect us from losing our game libraries in case one or the other company goes bankrupt – but there is a considerable amount of risk involved in counting purely on digital games. Licensing agreements expire, and developers and publishers go out of business. Digital storefronts won’t be there forever, and their functioning and upkeep depend solely on the company’s investment in keeping it alive. There is also the possibility that a game may simply disappear from digital distribution and become unavailable for redownload, thus becoming a collector’s item like P.T for PlayStation 4 or Flappy Bird for mobile devices.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

P.T(Playable Teaser) is a fun, cheerful and relaxing experience by Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro. The full game (Silent Hills) never came out; photo: Giuseppe Manfra / Getty Images

Picture image

zielinski_dhniljnxcaeq7ag.jpg

Game companies do everything they can to stop us from reselling their games. There have been services which wanted to make digital reselling possible, but they often ended up being sued by companies, user accounts were blocked, and everything returned to the status quo. We can’t lend or borrow digital games either. Different companies allow a different number of accounts to share a purchase, but that’s it. Selling accounts is also a frowned-upon practice and may lead to temporary or permanent bans of your accounts. It’s easier to get rid of a physical copy of a game you were disappointed with and never want to see again. All that takes is going outside and mailing it to someone who’s bought it from you or to the nearest video game store interested in taking it off your hands. Before the launch of eighth-generation consoles, ideas to bind physical games to your account (and therefore make them impossible to be sold or lent) gained traction. To be precise, it was Microsoft who wanted to make their console into an always-online machine which would link a physical disk to your console and make the game disk a verification tool. This, amongst other things, has contributed to its commercial underperformance over the last seven years. These ideas were never implemented but played a pivotal role in setting the stage for the eighth-generation rivalry. That doesn’t mean that other companies would gladly give up on the potential profits they’d get from a similar solution. Microsoft was simply the first company to try it, and nobody is getting in line to be the second to get burned.

Buying games isn’t the only way to enjoy downloading updates and getting error messages. It’s common knowledge at this point that the only thing harder than getting up when a cat is in your lap is cancelling a subscription. Game companies and hardware manufacturers are probably just as knowledgeable as cat parents, so they decided to ‘Netflix-ify’ the industry. In the beginning there were two: PlayStation Plus and Games with Gold. Both services were attached to semi-mandatory online-play subscriptions which would provide you with a number of ‘free’ games per month to try out and keep ‘forever’ – as long as you keep paying the fee (PS+), or just a normal, no-asterisk forever (GwG). But these are nothing compared to what we’re seeing now on the market. Most major publishers offer a subscription model akin to Netflix’s, where you get instant access to a library of games for a flat monthly fee. A curious case of a subscription service is Apple’s Apple Arcade, which operates on the mobile market – known for predatory monetisation and ‘free’ games – but has decided to offer a library of mobile titles which include none of that, provided you pay a monthly fee.

It might be difficult, but it’s indeed possible to enjoy gaming without spending. Free-to-play (F2P) is a business model mostly prevalent in casual mobile games, but more and more established studios are trying to introduce it into their core titles. F2P games are offered free of charge – aside from owning the hardware and an internet connection needed to download them. I will go in-depth into game design practices in the context of the video-game market in the third part of this series, but what you need to know is that the ‘free’ part of these games doesn’t necessarily last very long, and you may end up having to deprive your child of their phone for eternity and talk to your bank about questionable purchases. F2P games have to make money somehow, and they do it via microtransactions: small (or not-so-small) purchases available in-game to make the experience easier, or to spark jealousy amongst your friends because that limited-edition eyepatch is the thing to have in 2020. Predatory microtransaction design is a major issue that the video game market has to deal with. There are some F2P games which are not based around guilt-tripping you into paying for progress, but they are few and far between.

A very often-discussed type of microtransaction is lootboxes. These are in-game items which, for a price, offer you the draw of a number of further items to be used later in the game. They can be new soccer players in FIFA, cosmetic items in Overwatch, or literally everything in the recent F2P hit Genshin Impact. The reason for these discussions is the conviction of lawmakers that lootboxes are nothing but gambling mechanisms, since you pay a flat amount of money for the chance to obtain an in-game item and not for the item itself. There have been attempts to regulate lootboxes and to introduce measures meant to inform consumers, but, as with all legal issues, it takes time and effort to apply the law to new technologies. Game developers responded to these claims with language gymnastics by calling lootboxes ‘surprise mechanics’, which only led to them being ridiculed by both lawmakers and players alike.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

photo: Giuseppe Manfra / Getty Images

Picture image

zielinski_overwatch-10_8_2017-10_54_05-pm-100738180-large.jpg

A completely serious, but factually accurate mini-dictionary for future game snobs

4K/60FPS – An objective measurement of a game’s mechanical, artistic, gameplay and narrative superiority over another. The Ks refer to the number of pixels displayed onscreen per frame (resolution), and the FPS (frames per second) is the number of consecutive images appearing on screen per second. The more the better, but The Hobbit had a higher framerate option… and it didn’t make it a bearable movie, did it?

Emergent Gamplay/Story – Occurs whenever a developer is too lazy to write their own stories or design a level sequence. Could be described as the player’s own experience with the mechanics a game provides. If you choose to run away from enemies, but you spot a group of wolves halfway through and decide to pit them against each other, relying on the AI of both your pursuers and the wolves, then congratulations – you just did the developer’s job for them.

Esports – One of the reasons kids use to legitimise gaming to their parents. Usually developer-driven international and local game leagues or tournaments. Each game is its own sport. But there’s no decathlon yet. The biggest competitive games in the world include League of Legends, everything with punching in it, Gwent, Starcraft, Counter-Strike… and many others you’ll never be good enough at.

Feedback loop – Basically video-game karma. Systems where the output is fed back into the system as an input; in human language, that means a game system where a player’s success or failure impacts the likelihood of future successes and failures. It all boils down to whether a game makes it easy for you to keep succeeding if you’re already good, or punishes you for being bad (positive feedback loop), or tries to balance out the skill/reward equation (negative feedback loop).

Gamefeel– What your game feels like to play, but it sounds more academic when you change the order. The term was popularized by Steven Swink in his book Game Feel: A Game Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation. The tactile sensation experienced while interacting with spatial video games – i.e. if you take away the game’s story, art design, worldbuilding, dialogue etc., does it still feel good to interact with it? This can be subjective, but anyone who’s experienced a weightless dash or Bloodborne’s weapon transformations knows what I’m talking about.

Gatcha– A mechanicism used mostly in F2P games to put you in debt. Utilises lootboxes to give you a random draw of a number of characters/items/weapons out of a pool with a 0.2% chance of getting something decent. You either have to give up on your social life to try again, or succumb to microtransactions.

Ludonarrative Dissonance– Every game critic’s favourite phrase from 2007; coined by Clint Hocking to show how Bioshock’s story is at odds with its gameplay. Whenever your character cries that their favourite plant died in a cutscene and then, when you take control of them, you murder a small country’s worth of human beings, you’re absolutely allowed to scream: ‘Ludonarrative Dissonance!’ If there’s ever a loyalty program with rewards for spotting this phenomenon, certain players will become the most influential group in the world.

Procedural rhetoric– Every game critic’s second-favourite phrase from 2007. It’s when a game wants to tell you something but doesn’t want to use words or images, but mechanics. A term created by Ian Bogost to describe ‘the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions, rather than the spoken word, writing, images, or moving pictures’.

UI (User Interface)– The place where you and the game communicate. The game can tell you how much health you have left, how long you’ve been trying to finish a level, what upgrades you have, or how many bullets are left. There are two main types of UI: a diegetic UI makes sense in a game world by combining information conveyed to the player with the world or assumptions of a game. Non-diegetic UI is just a bunch of bars, tables and menus you interact with to find the name of the boss you’ve been struggling with for the past 30 minutes.

Written by Przemek Zieliński, Nov 2020

Language English

pegasus

polish game developer

computer games

the witcher saga