Stories are my jam. I make narrative games, I co-host a narrative podcast, and I studied English lit at university before I got a proper job. But I have different feelings for lore, the pickles in my narrative hamburger. A few lend some much-needed piquancy to an otherwise undersexed sandwich. Too many is like flushing your tongue down a vinegar loo. So I’ve developed a simple guide to establishing the lore content of narrative games: they’re Hobbits, LOTRs or Silmarillions.

The Hobbit is an approachable, plot-driven story with mass appeal. It entertains childrens and adults and relies on simple mythic touchstones: a quest for treasure, a slumbering dragon, a great evil bad guy. You don’t need lore to read The Hobbit. If you have insider knowledge of the Silmarils and the origins of wizards and the Ring, that’s great. But you can just as easily appreciate out-tricksing trolls and escaping wood elves in wine barrels without it. The game equivalent is Gone Home or What Remains of Edith Finch: well-made, much beloved and entirely self-sufficient.

The next level up is The Lord of the Rings. It’s bigger than The Hobbit and has more words with Capital Letters. It’s no longer ‘dwarves live underground’ – now it’s ‘Aragon son of Arathorn is the true heir to Isildor’s throne, and that’s why he can heal people with his hands (sometimes)’. The narrative spends time explaining the world and how it came to be. Characters’ motivations are linked to history and world events. There’s extra lore available but it doesn’t get in the way of the story – it’s tucked away in footnotes and appendices.

LOTRs are Diablo and Assassin’s Creed. You can read a bunch of extra stuff in collectable codices and some bits make more sense if you’ve played the earlier games, but broadly speaking, it’s more about the moment-to-moment experience. Did you know that Azmodan, Lord of Sin, originated from one of the seven heads of the great dragon Tathamet? For most Diablo fans, he’s just that spider-lookin’ tubster you fight at the end of Act III.

But some people do care about the great dragon Tathamet. For them, there’s The Silmarillion.

How do you know if someone’s read The Silmarillion? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you. Silmarillions are the hard-core games, the Dark Souls of narrative, the ones whose openings take two hours and are called ‘Prologues’ and give you a headache because they try to funnel ten years of narrative design through a grommet the writer’s bored into your skull. They’re your Tyrannies and your Tides of Numenera, who boast of word-count and whose forums are full of nerds arguing over which war nine epochs ago most influenced the UI. The lore is front and centre. The introductory FMV is a Dadaesque display of proper nouns and references you don’t understand and at some point there’s definitely something on fire. You’re here because the Throng of Boo were destroyed by the treachery of Ka’al the Deceiver as he rose to power in the Third Age of Meep. (If tooltips aren’t working in your edition of this blog, please email Alexis to complain.)

Ironically, there is no ring to rule them all with narrative approaches. Some people bloody love a wiki’s worth of worldbuilding. Others are driven to drink. But whatever your preference, it’s helpful to know what you’re getting into – no one likes surprise pickles.

A grumpy Russian model found himself ‘trapped in a 21st-century Kafkaesque nightmare’ as he reluctantly sang, danced and pouted his way to viral popularity on Chinese social media. Vladislav Ivanov – A.K.A. ‘Lelush’ – was trying his damnedest to get voted off Chuang 2021, a Chinese reality TV show following 90 contestants as they go through ‘boy band bootcamp’. It’s Pop Idol meets Groundhog Day. Or a millennial update of Brazil, where Michael Palin has dyed hair and it’s confusingly set in Hainan.

Lelush was a last-minute addition after being scouted by the producers. He quickly realised he, erm, hated singing and dancing, and didn’t want to be in a boy band – but leaving the show on his own recognisance would have triggered a significant fine from his contract, which he couldn’t afford. So he tried his best to be really, really bad at everything, hoping he’d be voted off. Instead, he accidentally connected with a bubbling Chinese subculture and rapidly became the face of ‘sang wenhua’. Composed primarily of teenagers, ‘sang wenhua’ rejects traditional expectations of overachievement, perfectionism and self-sacrifice in favour of fatalist Gen-Z ennui. A beautiful, sullen twenty-something refusing to engage with a reality TV show they also can’t escape is their perfect mascot.

Lelush – who I’m relieved to say was finally voted off after three gruelling, but really very funny, months – got me thinking about subculture in games. For most people on the planet, games are still an odd, nerdy pastime for boys who like computers, board games and wizards. Marketers are always telling me to use a ‘female’ angle for pieces because I’m still a ‘woman in a man’s world’. And so far, nothing the industry has produced has reached the water-cooler mass-market popularity of Marvel films or Game of Thrones. Pokemon Go nearly managed it, but not quite.

This is all at the macro-level. Look a little closer and you have hundreds of gaming subcultures, from relative normies who play the latest tycoon game on the train, to eleven year olds making ‘obbies’ (obstacle courses, for the uninitiated) for their friends in Roblox, to activist devs using their games to change the world, to the attractive influencer selling her bathwater to adoring fans. It’s a fun game deciding what the ‘face’ would be for each of these communities, and these are just a handful of major ones which leap to mind. Art is always reacting against what came before, so subcultures are constantly evolving, every generation peering slightly suspiciously at the one which came before. The one thing we all seem to have in common is that gaming isn’t just a hobby, it’s a lifestyle – and that’s why we see such a vast array of identities within it. The full spectrum of humanity’s reflected here, not just consumer spending.

So where does this leave us, and poor Lelush? Now he’s escaped Chuang, Lelush is embracing his new identity as the Slacker King by becoming an influencer, promoting mobile games to his 500,000 Weibo followers. And perhaps we gamers should embrace our position in the great cosmic hierarchy, too. Maybe we do like wizards. Maybe we aren’t mainstream. And maybe that’s okay. I’d just encourage you to look outside of games sometimes: the best art and culture draws from a wide variety of sources, not just others like it. The world is wide and full of beauty. And, apparently, boy bands.

Did you know that Agatha Christie is the best-selling fiction writer ever? Nuts to Dickens and Tolkien and J. K. Rowling. Murder’s what the public want.

Detective fiction remains hugely popular, but it’s never taken off in games. There are notable exceptions like L.A. Noire, and AAA RPGs often include a quest where you determine whodunnit from a pool of NPCs. But generally, detective games are few and far between, even though the genre flourishes in books (The Thursday Murder Club is the fastest selling adult crime debut in history), TV (find me a channel that doesn’t screen multiple police procedurals and Scandi-noirs) and film (Knives Out made nearly eight times its budget, spawned a sequel, and saw universally positive reviews).

So why do games shun the good old murder mystery? Detective novels usually work on two planes. There’s a colourful plot propelled by a brilliant investigator who’s always one step ahead. Then there’s the reader, who competes with the investigator and tries to guess the murderer before the book reveals them. Games can’t keep those planes separate. Players become the detective, propelling the game themselves and removing the competitive mental gymnastics you get from a book. Most players aren’t Peter Wimsey, so the game probably won’t move along at the exhilarating speed it would in a ‘scripted’ novel. And you don’t have the same certainty that you have everything you need to solve the crime – there’s always a possibility you missed some clue or took the wrong dialogue option somewhere, or simply that your reasoning differs from the game writer’s.

This is why the best detective games aren’t simulators or RPGs but simple puzzle games. They pare back their mechanics to an absolute minimum, giving players the necessary space for the whodunnit guessing game. The Return of the Obra Dinn, for example, doesn’t require the player to be Sherlock Holmes. It requires them to be an insurance claims investigator and walk slowly around. It’s about as far as you get from whizzing through Dartmoor at midnight being chased by a phosphorescent dog or discovering a sensational murder in a first-class carriage of the Orient Express. You look at things for a long time, and then you choose a name from a drop-down menu. But as Poirot himself says: “It is the brain, the little grey cells on which one must rely.” And that’s what makes Obra Dinn so brilliant: its primary mechanic is the player’s mind.

Another detective game, Her Story, also relies on the little grey cells. It doles out dopamine every time you type something relevant into a search engine. You only know what to type in by deducing things from the previous round of videos you’ve watched. I applaud her excellent 90s fashion sense, but the lady in the video is your competition, trying her best to thwart you. Her Story’s all about connecting the dots yourself, but all you actually do is sit there watching video clips.

Detective fiction is enduringly popular, but it requires people to think and the book to let them. Games don’t always trust their players. They’re worried they might miss an item (give it a glow!), or a cut-scene (make it unskippable!) or, worst of all, get bored (QUICK! ANOTHER MINIGAME!). Detectives need space for their little grey cells – and it takes a brave game to provide it.

Many Wireframes ago, I wrote about the upcoming launch of Steam China and what it might mean for developers. Now it’s live! So let’s compare predictions with reality.

In short, we all got to roleplay William Gibson: most of what we thought would happen did. Steam China hosts 53 games (0.2% of Steam’s international offering), all of which have gone through the official Chinese review process. It hasn’t – yet – cut off any localised games in the international store from Chinese players. But we didn’t expect Steam China to launch without forums, workshops or other Community Hub options, and I still think we’ll see access problems to Chinese audiences later down the line.

But what does this mean for indie developers? It’s not something we need to worry about now, but it’s a future we should plan for. We translated Cultist Simulator into simplified Chinese and released it asynchronously on mobile and PC in 2019. Cultist was never officially available to Chinese Android users (because the Google Play Store is blocked) and the iOS version was removed from the Chinese App Store this year (along with 30,000 other games that weren’t officially approved). But China still made us around £272k profit in two years. It’s such a large audience that even a tiny slice of the pie is worth having. 

“Outwit the Authorities,” this says. Hubris LOL.

China’s also a market hungry for variety. Chinese players like Cultist partly because they don’t see games like it. We haven’t a snowball’s hope in hell of passing China’s content regulations: among many other problems, games can’t portray ‘the supernatural, such as cults’, so Chinese gamers don’t see many games specifically about the supernatural, such as cults. These limitations will likely work in many indie developers’ favour, meaning we have a large, keen audience who want to buy our games – even though it’s difficult to reach them.

Steam China, I think, is a good thing for indies who localise. We might not get on the official Chinese Steam store, but there are several features which link the international and Chinese versions. Chinese games bought from Steam China appear in international Steam’s library, for example, so there’s a clearer route than ever for interested Chinese gamers to Steam’s international offerings. And right now, even though Steam’s international version isn’t officially available in China, there are huge numbers of Chinese players buying games through it anyway. We saw a nearly 400% increase in Chinese players since we localised – it’s a grey area, but the gains are worth the attempt.

To paraphrase a famous Confucius proverb: it doesn’t matter how slow you go so long as you don’t stop. Chinese gamers are hard to reach, and they may become particularly unavailable for a period of years, should Steam change how they currently operate alongside Steam China. But there’s a lot to gain by thinking about China now, and, I suspect, a great deal more to gain in the future. Keep the faith! Just don’t, er, make a whole game about it.

Nostalgia used to be a disease. A military doctor divised it in the seventeenth century to account for frequently miserable Swiss mercenaries with fever, stomach pains and fainting fits who yearned for the mountains of home. He thought nostalgia was caused by brain and ear damage from the relentless clang of Switzerland’s cowbells. Sadly, it wasn’t. Nostalgia’s a common, healthy human emotion: remembering the golden days of childhood and good things now past.

Games remind me of those Swiss soldiers. From the enduring popularity of pixel graphics to chiptune, it’s an artform obsessed with its past. Reddit is full of PC gamers opining about teenaged LAN parties. There’s serious hype about ‘Playdate’, a black and white wind-up Gameboy-looking console. Roguelikes are an entire genre of games defined by their similarity to a title that’s older than I am. You know what else is older than me? Syphilis. The past isn’t all great, people.

The Playdate console, by Panic

Nostalgia’s why we love a sequel. Games are particularly prone to them because we keep improving our graphical and technical capabilities, meaning games made even a decade ago can feel antiquated and drab. The classic titles everyone’s heard of but no-one under thirty has played – Silent Hill, Tomb Raider, Doom, Deus Ex – are still creatively brilliant but no longer meet the basic specs required in 2022. And it’s no coincidence that all of those games are the first in a long line of sequels.

But sequels set themselves a difficult task. It’s not just a return to Pallet Town we want, it’s the feeling we had when we were eight and chose our first ever starter pokémon. The beautiful Final Fantasy 7 remake is heralded as one of the best Final Fantasies in recent memory, but Square Enix updated the original turn-based combat, disappointing many who remember the old system. And games, like other art, is all about the feels. Recreating the emotions of a child in the cold, cynical heart of an adult is hard. Toy Story 3 manages it, but it’s a Pixar film with a $200 million budget about saying goodbye to childhood.

We’ve seen a classic nostalgic trip recently in Cyberpunk 2077. Cyberpunk’s a fun genre, but it isn’t woke. It’s James Bond fanfiction written by nerds, all sex and chrome and male heroes and uzis. It’s also a lot of other interesting things – American fear of Asian success, socio-political commentary, the future of AI and humanity – but you can’t separate that from the neon-drenched neo-noir of a man with a gun. A lot of people expected Cyberpunk 2077 to give them the same thrill they had when they read Neuromancer in 1984. For many, it did. For others, it challenged their modern politics in uncomfortable ways. You can revisit the 1980s, but you can’t stop living in the 2020s.

The 1986 hardcover of William Gibson’s Neuromancer

Sid Meier said a game is a series of interesting choices. The problem with gaming nostalgia is we’ve made those choices already. You can make new ones this time around, but you’ll never feel quite like before.

You’ve probably heard the phrase “art imitates life”, recognising when art reflects society’s real-world interests and views. Think Banksy, or The Mummy 3 being all about how much China scares the US. But you’ve also probably heard the phrase “life imitates art”, where reality copies what art presents. Think body dysmorphia from Instagram or people being kinder because they watched a Tom Hanks film. Games seem divided on which way round the equation should go. Broadly, players go one way and developers the other.

In October 2020, Larian Studios released Baldur’s Gate 3 to general acclaim. By the end of the year it had an 88% positive rating on Steam and 29,000 reviews. Boxleiter maths would conservatively estimate that to be 1.5 million sales, which means it grossed £72,000,000 already – and it’s still in Early Access. But less shiny was the mild industry buzz around a Steam update a week after launch. In the post, Larian gently ribbed its players for choosing, on average, a generically handsome white guy as their player character rather than the more exotic options offered by the character creation system. “We gave you demon eyes, horns, and even tails,” they wrote. “We are sorely disappointed.” 

This was widely reported in industry press as a fittingly progressive dunk on white male gamers. A lot of those articles chose to run the story with a headline image of a generically sexy female character with heavy eye make-up, but that’s for another day. For now, it’s worth digging into why the most popular player character was, in Larian’s words, “the default Vault Dweller”.

From Larian’s point of view, it’s a shame that so many people weren’t interested in the creative range available to them. But the player character is just that: the player’s character. Given the option, most people like being a hotter version of themselves. This is why gyms, make-up brands and cosmetic surgery are multi-billion dollar industries. The majority of gamers are real white men, some of whom are probably not as beautiful as they’d like to be. So it’s unsurprising and benign that the most popular player character is a handsome, generic white guy.

Larian hoped players would follow the game’s lead and play a variety of diverse characters: they’d expected life to imitate art. Players hoped Larian would let them play the game in their image: they wanted art to imitate life. We laughed at those players, though it’s worth remembering that the reason we want diverse characters in the first place is so minorities can look in-game like they do in real life. It’s inconsistent to praise some people for wanting that and mock others for the same thing.

Reality, as ever, is complicated. Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum, nor does it sit in an isolated dialectic with life. It exists in a boiling chaotic mess of influences and experiences and context. It’s vital to treat the world as it is: when we don’t, we get conspiracy theories and Brexit. Games are still overwhelmingly played by white men, and that’s neither apocalypse nor Utopia. We can encourage increasing diversity from our existing audience, as Larian has done, by offering diverse options and encouraging players to step out of their comfort zone. But art isn’t enough. If we want player characters to be as diverse as Baldur’s Gate 3 wants them to be, we need to diversify the playerbase. And that’s a long-term unsexy series of school talks and outreach and socioeconomic change and non-game-making-things that many of us don’t have the time to pursue. But unless we do that, change will be slow. We’ll make art for the audience we wish we had and scorn the one we do.

Friedrich Nietzsche was a brilliant man whose most famous theory, the Übermensch, has wrongly linked him to Nazi and fascist ideology. In reality, Nietzsche denounced both antisemitism and nationalism, and had nothing whatsoever to do with racial ‘master races’ legitimising Hitler’s genocide. It was his sister – curse you, Elisabeth – who contorted his meaning to justify a Nazi worldview. Nietzsche said lots of clever and non-Nazi things, many of which are handily contained in his masterwork, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. But like everyone who talks a lot, he also said some stupid shit. Here’s one of them, from the same book:

“The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.”

Lottie, you might ask: as (*checks notes*) a woman, might you be a little peeved at this idea, and might you be responding emotionally to the suggestion that women are male toys? Well, I’d respond: you got me. But dangerous female playthings also makes me think of someone I’ve been spending a lot of time with recently – Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla’s femtagonist, Eivor Wolf-Kissed.

Eivor is the most feminist character I’ve ever seen in games. She achieves this in two ways: one, by being the protagonist, and two, by not being relevantly female at all. So unimportant is her femininity that it makes no difference whatsoever whether she’s a woman or a man, though you still get to style her hair if you like. Ubisoft even went so far as to let players swap genders in-game with no effect on the story. So what is it that makes Eivor such a cool woman, if her womanhood doesn’t matter? It’s the one simple idea that mainwave feminism has been asking for since women realised we were bored of cooking dinner and quite fancied having it cooked for us sometimes: equality, regardless of gender.

If you’ve read any of my columns before, you’ll know that I’m actually quite a girly girl. I reclaim the colour pink; I’m goo around kittens; I wear make-up and like shopping for clothes. But this is an identity, not a gender. We’re all a collection of character points which paint a face on the otherwise featureless egg of a human head. Of course, games has a host of female identities: competent, kindly hacker Alyx from Half-Life; Elizabeth, oppressed time-hopping daughter from BioShock; Morrigan, sarky goth sex witch from Dragon Age. But their characters are inextricably linked to being female. It matters that they’re women, particularly to them. So they’re great as characters, but they don’t quite reach the feminist heights of Eivor, who’s so beyond being defined as a woman that sometimes she literally isn’t.

Ian Livingstone was once unfortunate enough to be seated next to me for three hours on a train. He was politely surprised that I didn’t know who he was. But we had a brief meeting of minds over Lara Croft: I thanked him for making her, as she’s the reason I’m in games, and he apologised for making her, abashedly saying: ‘It was the nineties’. I miss the original Tomb Raider series, but as I investigate ancient caves, parkour along crumbling masonry and occasionally shoot the odd endangered species in AC: Valhalla, I feel like nineties Lara has a feminist successor to be proud of, who is a plaything, and whose axe-skills certainly make her dangerous. But she sidesteps the male gaze and Nietzsche’s fleetingly silly opinions. Long may Eivor reign.

Simon Baron-Cohen is a leading clinical psychologist who developed something called the ‘empathising-systemising theory’. Essentially, it suggests that the brains of those born male tend to be systemising (having an interest in and talent for understanding how things work) and the brains of those born female tend to be good at empathising (having an interest in and talent for understanding how people feel). To be clear, this doesn’t mean men can’t be deeply empathetic or that women can’t be brilliant engineers. It’s just a way of explaining broad neurological patterns observed in humans and what they might mean.

This theory came up recently because I’ve been playing Ooblets, the Early Access Epic Store cuteathon borne of Pokémon and Stardew Valley. “Manage your farm, grow and train your ooblets, explore strange lands, and have dance-offs!”, its blurb blurbs. It mashes the best parts of several genres together – farming, pets, customisation, ‘combat’ – adds a few of its own excellent improvements, and packages them up in a surprisingly ironic kawaii pastel world. One glance at it tells you it’s the yin to Dark Souls’ yang: cute, easy, relaxing, and more traditionally female than most other PC games.

My fiancé, meanwhile, is playing Conan Exiles. Its graphics are realistic, its combat frequent and violent, and the average breast size of female characters damns all to chronic back pain. “Survive in a vast open world sandbox, build a home and kingdom, dominate your enemies,” blurbs the blurb. Tonally, Conan’s a world away from ooblets and dance-offs, demonstrably geared towards traditional male preference. But thematically and mechanically, they’re a lot more similar than it appears. I don’t have to break my ooblets on a Wheel of Pain to make them dance on my team, but I do have to plant and water them on my farm until they hatch – a classic ‘tend and befriend’ mechanic. My fiancé doesn’t have to grow sweetiebeeties to grind into Froobtose to make cakes to give to people so they’ll be his friend, but he does have to feed his captive wild panther certain types of raw meat to make it do what he wants – a classic simulation mechanic. We’re both farming, building, capturing, exploring and engaging in some sort of combat. Our games just come with traditionally feminine or masculine veneers.

It’s obviously not true that women only like easy and cute games or that men only like violence and breasts. But games data does support Baron-Cohen’s conclusions: you’ll find a lot of male players of Football Manager (a systems-driven PC game about men’s football) and a lot of female players of Pokemon GO (a socially-driven mobile game about cute animals). It’s great that both types – and all the spectrum in between them – exist, catering for the full breadth of human interest. But the next time you pick up a game that strikes you as particularly feminine or masculine, pause to think about what you really do in it. Is it Dark Souls in a dress? That’s more common than you’d think.

The Financial Times comes with a magazine helping rich people solve a difficult problem. It’s called:

It’s a good audience match for the FT, but it made me wonder: what would games’ equivalent be? If Wireframe were to start printing Gold Master: the Gilded Game Dev’s Guide To Being Stinking Rich (working title) telling us how to spend our Epic exclusive millions, it would be almost entirely useless. Most of us, most of the time, would glance furiously at it, eject some biting witticism about l’art pour l’art and the cretinous consumer base to which we’re forced to pander, and pointedly smash it in the bin.

But every so often one of us would have just launched the Next Big Thing. Every so often it’d be extremely useful. A small number of us are FT subscribers in waiting, on the cusp of a Cuphead, one try from a Terraria, one punt away from a new PUBG.

When it comes to ‘making it suddenly big’, two games spring to mind: Minecraft and Stardew Valley. Notch is worth about $1.3 billion and has his infamous candy room in the most expensive house ever sold in Beverly Hills. Eric Barone is a comparative pauper with a net worth of $34 million, but you can find his age, height, weight and, er, girlfriend listed on a high-ranking wealth record site. So that’s a consolation for him.

Neither dev seems to know what to do with their money. Notch has spoken publicly about feeling isolated, hasn’t produced a game in nearly a decade, and has now deleted his Twitter account. Barone famously drove around in a broken Toyota Camry and has only this year bought a desk that isn’t an upturned cardboard Wii box. Please join my campaign to fund Wireframe’s new Guide To Being Suddenly and Surprisingly Flush Cos of Games (alternative working title). It’s the movement this industry needs.

There’s something less frivolous about this, though. Making games for a living is one of the few professions where overnight fame and fortune really is possible. It’s worth (however unlikely it may be) having a think about what you’d do if you wake up tomorrow with BTS tweeting about you, Pewdiepie begging for a game key and Gabe Newell asking if he can pay this month’s Valve payment in several installments. Netflix’s hot new reality series, Selling Sunset, is chockablock with techpreneur millionaires sandwiched between impossibly attractive Californian women and, occasionally, their poodles. So it really happens! Netflix says so.

But there’s something similar that will affect you, many times over, during the course of your indie career. Game dev is volatile. Desperate make-or-break launches, draining post-launch blues, constant Twitter drama, the ever-changing and unpredictable marketplace – and, of course, that addictive idea that maybe, this time, this is your great indie hit. Making games for a living is almost certainly going to throw you into situations you never expected. When it does, your best hope is to have a clear idea of who you are and what you stand for so you can weather the storm.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, feel free to go back to being unsympathetic to rich people. And look out for Wireframe’s new insert, Bank You Kindly: The Introvert’s Guide To Big Spending (third time lucky?) coming soon to San Franciscan hotel lobbies, Tesla dashboards and candy rooms near you.

Imagine a dystopian future where big corporations sue other big corporations over mobile games, where everyone and their mum is making a PC game, and where eSports makes more money than any of us despite nobody really knowing what it’s for. You’re a small indie dev stuck in the middle of all this. How can you stand out and get noticed, in this picaresque world?

One way is to offer people something they can’t get elsewhere: top-notch merchandise. Indie merch is a blue ocean – most devs don’t bother with it unless they hit a certain milestone of success (think Darkest Dungeon or FTL). But it can make significant money – we usually make £2-4k profit each month from our our shop. It opens doors to other opportunities like attractive giveaways, and it diversifies your revenue streams so you’re not entirely dependent on the whims of store algorithms, influencers or press. In all, we’ve made around £75k profit from merch – this couldn’t sustain our studio like digital game sales do, but it’s very helpful as a side-gig!

Your first decision is what sort of shop you want. This’ll depend on your interests, skills and financial situation. Do you want a dedicated website? An integrated shop page on your studio’s site? Or would you like to be part of a larger outlet, alongside other games? A dedicated website requires the most technical set-up and makes you responsible for all the stock and ordering, but it gives your brand exclusivity. An integrated shop page keeps traffic on your site and moves the burden of stock-keeping and shipping to your provider. But it limits you to bigger, expensive providers like Shopify or Fangamer. Being part of a larger shop – getting a branded section on Gametee or Indiebox or AwesomeMerch, for example – brings great consumer traffic alongside threatening competition: someone who’s come to buy a Skyrim hat probably doesn’t want your octopus mug. And if they have come for an octopus mug, maybe Subnautica’s one is nicer.

[ This wasn’t out when I wrote this article, but I’d like to give a shout-out to Studio Zaum’s physical pop-up atelier in London, alongisde their online shop. Anything Zaum does is worth watching, ’cause they’re a smart, inventive bunch. ]

The type of shop you opt for has major knock-on effects. It’ll decide whether you design and produce your own items, and what items you can make in the first place. Most big producers offer a set catalogue: this makes your set-up easy but your offerings generic, reducing that vital stand-out-ability. Your shop front also determines customers’ experience: do you want social proofing, with your merchandise next to Destiny and Call of Duty? Or do you want to be a hidden boutique gem, at the expense of looking small? I chose to host our shop on Etsy, because it has a good balance between brand exclusivity and high-frequency footfall from people who are likely to want what we sell: notebooks, grimoires, tarot decks. Hippy-dippy nonsense for the magically-inclined.

The last major piece of the puzzle is pricing. If you’re making something unique and luxury – something people can’t get elsewhere – a good starting point is keystone pricing: essentially, your price is double how much it cost you to make. I found this difficult to swallow at first (what a bad deal for consumers!) but it makes sense once you add manual labour, postage, marketing and the human cost of doing business to the cost of actually making the things in the first place. Sense check your prices against the price of other similar items on your chosen platform to avoid looking like a bad deal in context, and you’re ready to go. It’s a bit of a guessing game – I’ve guessed wrong in the past! – but your audience will quickly tell you if you get it wrong.

All of this might sound like a lot of hard work. And it is. But play your cards right and you’ll not only end up with another revenue stream to feed your business, but a treasure trove of marketing fodder (think of the competition prizes, or the Kickstarter rewards, or the variety in your communication channels). If you’re at all interested in new business models and doing what other people aren’t, step into the church of the merch and take a pew with me.

While under communist dictatorship in the 1970s and 80s, dissenting Czechoslovaks arrived at demonstrations, stood in front of the police and beat each other up with vegetables. This was to save police the trouble of doing it with batons, though it also protested a violent authoritarian regime without doing enough to get arrested. All hail the subversive surrealism of European liberals!

Not that this has anything to do with authoritarian regimes, but China’s games market is worth $32-38 billion and comprises 750 million players. It’s also a relatively blue ocean for western games, thanks to an infamously difficult approval process required to release there. Currently, western devs can localise into Chinese and bung their games up on a storefront, knowing a reasonable percentage of those 750 million people will use VPNs or other workarounds to access their unapproved title. But this is changing.

First to fall is the App Store. Over 20,000 games were removed from the Chinese version of the store at the end of July 2020 for not having gone through official government approval. PC developers reading this might not care very much, but we could soon follow suit. Steam China has launched but includes less than a hundred of 30,000 games available on the global Steam store. These are the only ones who’ve been through the official Chinese review process.

The prospect of a happy backlog of localised western games automatically imported to Steam China looks unlikely. Valve hasn’t said it’ll cut Chinese players off from the original global Steam site, but Apple didn’t say that either. It just suddenly did it.

China’s National Press and Public Administration department – the people responsible for approving games for Chinese release – recently made it even harder. Online multiplayer games now need separate Chinese servers so Chinese players only interact with each other. A single untranslated word of English is enough to fail. And only 5,000 games a year can now be approved, shared between domestic and international titles across all platforms. In 2019 only 12% of approved games were international, so we’re looking at around 600 games a year. To put that into perspective, Steam sees around 23 new games released each day. One storefront on one platform could theoretically fill an entire year’s multiplatform quota in a month.

This is all before you get to content restrictions. Some of the new guidance forbids ‘vulgarity, pulp or kitsch elements or other content that violates the core values of socialism’ (no Hello Kitty games for China). You’re also not allowed to cast the player in ‘the role of a thief or criminal’ (tough luck, Cyberpunk) or portray ‘the supernatural, such as cults, fortune-telling, ghosts, zombies, vampires, etc’. Reading this as the developer of a game literally called ‘Cultist Simulator’ with a governmental antagonist called the ‘Suppression Bureau’, I should probably revise my sales estimates.

Here is a game that will ruin your life. It’s called ‘Horse Face, Plate Face’. It hinges on the eternal truth that every human who has ever been either had a long face like a horse or a round face like a plate. Occasionally there have been unspeakable comminglings between the two tribes which result in Rami Malek, but he’s beautiful and Egyptian which is the genetic equivalent of the Konami code. He’s cheating. Almost everyone else you will ever see for the rest of your life will be an HF or a PF. You’re welcome.

Humans love a system. We’ve evolved to seek patterns in the world, from predicting the weather to knowing not to bugger about with fire. In modern society, there are patterns upon patterns: red and black, which originally told animals to stay away, is now the most popular colour scheme for selling high-end gaming laptops to bold and fearless men. Selling high-end gaming laptops to bold and fearless men is, itself, part of the pattern of buying cool-looking stuff because that makes other people like you. That’s then part of the system of capitalism, which is part of the larger Platonic system of never being satisfied with anything because there is an unreachable universe out there, where we aren’t, where everything is literally perfect. Thanks, Plato.

Games capitalise on our, er, patternophilia. They place a player in a mesh of systems and much of the fun is identifying and mastering them. What once was new and unknown becomes a satisfying feedback loop of stimulus and response, of understanding and control. Pokémon teaches you to recognise types and respond with super-effective techniques. Dark Souls makes you learn enemy tells and dodge or attack accordingly. Celeste expects you to recognise terrain and react with the right moves to climb it.

The problem with systems is once you’re in one, it’s hard to get out. Most of our pattern recognition takes place subconsciously: we often don’t realise we’re inside. And one major side-effect of liking patterns is not liking change. If we’re ever smart enough to see the systems around us, it takes bravery to overcome our innate human desire to leave that system be. 

Change is a break in a pattern. Change is impossible to predict. From the base of our ancient monkey souls, change feels frightening and wrong. There are clear parallels to the Black Lives Matter movement which swept the world last year. There are also parallels to games industry culture, to how we interact with people on the internet, and how important it is to learn to think for yourself. We all have an evolved tendency towards following the pattern and doing what everyone else around us is doing. But you need just an hour or two in Playdead’s brilliantly pattern-phobic INSIDE to see how dystopian that can be.

Look, all I’m saying is games are part of a co-optive genetic narrative which preferences the status quo, and we’ll never build Utopia until we learn the importance of individualistic critical thinking. Oh, and that I’m a horse face. H/t, fellow HFs!

Philip II of Macedon invaded Greece, won a lot of fights and trembled lustily on the borders of Sparta. He sent the Spartans a threatening message asking if he should come as friend or foe. The ephors responded: ‘Neither.’

This wasn’t the sort of thing Philip II of Macedon usually heard. So he fired off another message telling them they’d better submit to him, pronto, ‘for if I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city’. The ephors responded: ‘If.’

There’s a lot of lusty trembling going on right now at Epic Games. Devs are abuzz with their steady flow of tasty, dev-friendly inducements, and on paper, Epic’s deal is great. Devs get a higher revenue cut than they would on Steam: Epic offers 88%, Steam offers the usual 70%. Devs also compete with fewer games on the Epic Games Store, meaning they’re more likely to get high-visibility featuring and it’s easier for consumers to chance upon them while browsing. I can’t find any official data about how many games are currently on the EGS, but they confirmed they had ‘over one hundred’ games in July 2019 and some friendly people with browser scripts estimate it’s now just under three hundred. That’s a decent number, but not when compared to Steam’s 30,000. Or their 51,000 if you include DLC, software and video.

I’m not dunking on Epic. Its store is the most impressive, pragmatic and tenacious challenge to Valve’s supremacy there’s ever been – great news for developers. But this is the fly in the ointment: Epic give you a bigger slice of the pie than Steam! 18% more pie! But please note that pie is many times smaller than that one over there.

Take this from another angle. In April 2020, the EGS saw roughly 72 million visits. That lands the EGS a #391 ranking in global internet engagement. There are 1,653 external pages linking in to the store, and the largest percentage of the store’s traffic – a whopping 21% – comes from, you guessed it, people Googling ‘Fortnite’.

In the same month, Steam saw around 148 million visits, ranked #301 in global internet engagement and is linked by 22,178 external pages. The largest percentage of their traffic is a teensy 1% where people have just Googled ‘Steam’.

These numbers tell us what we already know. Steam has been around forever, is the place people go to buy PC games, and currently is the untouchable PC king. And this is why Epic are trying so hard. They’re being so generous with revenue split, refunds and publishing money because they need devs and consumers to come to them before they actually have a comparable offering to Steam’s. People go to Steam because it’s Steam. Right now, people go to Epic because they want to play Fortnite, or because they’re offered a free game. I’d expect the generous developer incentives to tail off as the EGS gets bigger and more successful.

Epic’s approach is ambitious and aggressive. I love a bit of chutzpah, and you need a lot of it to wage war on a titan. But right now Tim Sweeney is Philip II, sending threat after threat. Valve recline at home, on wheeled chaises longues. And they’re thinking: If.

“All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.”

– Oscar Wilde, ‘Preface’ to The Picture of Dorian Gray

When you play a game, are you experiencing some sort of external experience – is Detroit: Become Human a game ‘about’ human nature and second-class citizens, or is it ‘about’ provoking the player to think about these things?

Do we consume external narratives when we play games – is there one definitive experience – or do we close a feedback loop, completing an otherwise incomplete piece of art in the act of playing it?

The latter is what literary reader-response theory believes. And the theory casts games industry in an interesting light.

It’s true that games comprise a limited set of themes and mechanics and can be described in factual terms. But they come alive in players’ hands: the ultimate experience of playing a game cannot exist without a player in the first place. If games need a subjective human to realise themselves, there cannot be objective experiences. No definitive readings or ‘true’ reactions. There is only art, blended with the human interacting with it at the time.

It’s important to remember this when it comes to critique, particularly when it’s controversial. Take Tynan Sylvester’s public dust-up with Rock, Paper, Shotgun in 2016 over a journalist’s interpretation of RimWorld’s code. The points the journalist made were valid and formed a coherent, interesting discussion. But the article was not empirical.

A journalist brought an existing idea (that simulation games define their world’s rules, and concretise reality in rigid ways) to RimWorld’s code (human sexuality written in C#, designed as a fun player experience). This is great: person-meets-art is what almost all artistic critique is. What’s not great is when people accept that critique as some sort of empirical, definable truth.

RimWorld is not a game which furthers existing and oppressive gender relationships between men and women or erases bisexual men. It can absolutely be discussed in the context of a simulation game’s ethical and essentialist restructuring of infinitely complex human reality, but it doesn’t change RimWorld itself. RPS rightly went beneath the surface and ‘read the symbol’. But the resultant piece is a reflection of the people who wrote it, not objective reality.

Subjectivity doesn’t make reviews, opinion pieces or other writing less meaningful. What it does do is highlight the prismatic quality of writing about art. Turn games one way and they glitter with starlight. Turn them another and they reflect the dawn. Whatever you feel about a game – and whatever critics or players or Metacritic feel about it – remember they’re shiny things. More often than not what’s said about them doesn’t really reflect the game. It reflects the gamer.

Arthur Ashe was a pretty cool guy. He contracted AIDs from a blood transfusion but turned it into safe-sex awareness campaigns. He founded ethnically integrative programmes for people without health insurance twenty years before Obamacare. He grew up in the 40s in segregated Virginia and went on to become the only black tennis player ever to win the Australian Open, the US Open and Wimbledon.

He also had a pretty cool motto.

“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”

I’ve found it surprisingly useful in games.

Devs do a lot of talking. Over the last decade I’ve heard increasingly frequent discussion of sexism and feminism, ethnic diversity, sexuality and gender, and whether you can play games on easy and still call yourself a gamer. But for all the noise on social media and all the panels at events, I don’t see the same level of activity in real life. We talk about problems, but do we do that much about them?

I think there are three reasons why we don’t. Firstly, actions are harder than words. Secondly, it’s easy to feel that sharing a post or by talking about a problem is the same as actually fixing it. Thirdly, the industry issues we talk about are all big problems: it’s not ‘we’ve run out of milk’, it’s ‘solve homophobia’, or ‘get more black schoolgirls to code and apply for programming jobs when they’re older’. I can see why faced with a problem like that, it’s hard to know where to start.

A new genre of games emerged over the last few years which reflect this sense that everything’s too much. #selfcare or Kind Words are good examples: they’re designed to give players a dedicated space to do something small and easy and feel good about it. More widely, escapist wholesomeness like Animal Crossing or Ooblets are more and more in demand, their popularity directly proportionate to how stressed and unhappy we are in real life. 

We all need an escape from reality, particularly in a global pandemic. And games about being kind to yourself are great. But doing your laundry in #selfcare doesn’t do your laundry in real life. Playing diverse games won’t encourage more black women to code. To make our industry a better place, we need to do things in the real world. But you don’t have to solve a problem definitively or find the ultimate cure-all. You can just help a bit. Spend an extra half hour finding unusual jobs boards to widen your likely pool of applicants. Update your HR policy with more generous parental leave. Enter your salary into the UK game dev salary list to foster equality and catch the gender pay gap.

Retweets are marginally better than not doing anything at all, but real-world acts are better. If we see any flaws in our industry, any at all, it’s our problem. Not someone richer, or someone more famous, or someone with probably more time on their hands. Games will be a better one if we take a more moderate, more achievable approach to social change.

Don’t worry if your game doesn’t tackle all possible diversity at once. It’s okay if you haven’t donated to every charity listed on UKIE’s website. Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can. Even if it’s small, it’s something.

Story in games is a hot topic. But what about structure? How does the narrative form of a game influence its player’s experience? What does the structure of a story tell us, and what does it reveal about a game’s themes? I have only the vaguest understanding of how this works when it comes to the visual arts – I can gesture confusedly about the golden ratio, and how the Parthenon has no straight lines – but I can talk usefully about text.

Take, for example, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. The novella is a Bildungsroman – a story of growing up – following its antihero from violent immaturity to adulthood. Its structure reflects this with three sections of seven chapters each: each section is believed to reference Shakespeare’s seven ages of man, while its twenty-one chapters are a deliberate nod to the milestone age of twenty-one years old.

The theme of growth stemmed in part from the violent sexual assault of Burgess’s pregnant wife at the hands of US soldiers which caused her to miscarry their child. Left with a lifelong void where they should have watched their real child grow up, Burgess developed a fictional one. The assault is believed to be the ‘inspiration’ behind a very similar attack perpetrated by the main character in A Clockwork Orange. Dark stuff, but illustrative of form and structure working to reinforce its author’s focus and its story’s central theme.

So what narrative structure do we see in games? Honestly, not as much as you’d expect. You hear narrative games described in terms of plot, but games don’t yet have established formal constructs like chapters or poetic metre. We borrow structures like Aristotle’s five-part narrative arc – exposition, an inciting incident, a crisis and climax, falling action, and a dénouement – but we haven’t yet developed narrative forms specific to games. 

There are some interesting examples, though. From its second game, the Diablo series has traditionally served up four acts each with its own narrative subplot and ultimate boss battle. This is an overt use of traditional narrative structure, but it doesn’t really reinforce any of Diablo’s themes (to wit: good versus evil, Christian-inflected moral and bodily corruption, and lots of jazzy loot). Here, content and structure don’t actually work together.

But here comes Alan Wake. This seminal sort-of-narrative, sort-of-survival-horror game is organised into six or eight episodes depending on whether you bought the DLC. They end with cinematic cliff-hangers and are recapped with a ‘Previously, on Alan Wake…’ summary at the start of the following section. Heavily influenced by TV serials like Twin Peaks and Lost, Remedy said they felt an episodic structure was best to maintain their high-quality mystery narrative throughout the whole game. This isn’t intricate Burgessian formalism, but it is definitely structure supporting content.

I look forward to more and more examples of structure being deliberately used in games. Because games is writing its own Bildungsroman. Games is growing up. There are lots of good reasons why structure and form might not be relevant for every game, but our stories are getting better, and our narratives more complex. Structure is a tool we’ve yet to master, but it’s just waiting to be picked up.

Every week I receive ICO Partners’ Steam newsletter. It’s a simple round-up of all the week’s latest Steam games, alongside their number of reviews and overall review score. As well as keeping me in the loop about new games I might be interested in, it’s also taught me a valuable lesson about nicheness, audience fit and what can be reliably termed the Law of Boob.

The single most consistent thing about new releases on Steam is that if you make a game with breasts in them you’re looking at a baseline of 80%+ positive reviews. This seems to happen with an uncanny consistency that makes me wonder if I and my heterosexual feminist principles are a blocker for good business decisions. Every week I see games called things like Hentai Asmodeus outrank games that are palpably higher quality, and while they might not make the megabucks of lower-rated but higher-grossing offerings, they show an audience resonance that many more successful titles fail to match.

This weekly trend is borne out across Steam. Monster Hunter: World is a cool 75%. Civilization VI is 71%. Once phenomenally popular, PUBG sits now at 51%. All are apparently less good than Cultist Simulator, the game my studio made in our pyjamas for £142k, which is niche and flawed and doesn’t have a tutorial and sits at 78%. This doesn’t mean AAA PC games are doomed to middling review scores, of course. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt  is 97%, and famously excellent AAA offerings like Fallout: New Vegas, Batman: Arkham Asylum and Divinity: Original Sin 2 are all happily 95%. But it tells me two things: one, that trying to please a wide audience tends to lower your overall review score, and two, we should all be putting colons in our games’ titles. 

You know what’s better than The Witcher 3? Meltys Quest, sitting pretty at 98% positive, which as far as I can tell is about a queen’s journey to find a bra. CD Projekt Red is also put to shame by DEEP SPACE WAIFU: NEKOMIMI, another 98% positive bastion of gaming brilliance where you’re a rat in a spaceship shooting clothes off megalithic cat-women. I think. Three other offerings equal The Witcher 3 and its 800 awards: NEKOPARA Vol. 3, ‘a heartwarming cat-comedy’ set in a sexy patisserie’, LOVE³ -Love Cube- which appears to have very little to do with cubes, and The Ditzy Demons Are In Love With Me which surely needs no explanation. All of these are 97% positive because the people who like anime boobs really like anime boobs and they’re all wonderful examples of product-market fit.

I’m not suggesting that games are at their best when they’re thinly-veiled pornography. But I am saying that we indies who don’t make boob games should consider what our version of boobs is. What’s the one thing about our games that will really resonate with potential players? What will excite people into loving our products, rather than filling the generic game-shaped space in people’s lives? If you don’t have an answer to this, you might be in trouble.

Every developer wants their game to be universally loved. AAA studios have the money to sometimes – sometimes – make that happen. Indies don’t. So don’t aim for everyone and end up making Meh Soup. Aim for one particular audience and really knock it out of the park. Or, y’know. Consider hentai.

There’s a concept in literature of the ‘oral tradition’, where stories spread by word of mouth rather than being written down. The upside is these narratives propagate rapidly and change to suit the context and audience of their telling. The downside is there’s no definitive version, only a revolving tessellation of the same names, events and themes. It’s human and organic, but there’s neither author nor authority.

Nowadays we value both of those things. We often buy games because they’re a Devolver game, or because Hideo Kojima’s involved, or because PC Gamer gave it a number higher than 75. We used to see things like Sid Meier’s Pirates!, and though the naming-trend is now unusual, the rise of influencers over the last decade shows how powerful individual authority still is. But games themselves are less and less tangible: what once came on a collection of hefty floppy disks and played on room-dominating desktop set-ups became trim CDs in laminated boxes, then formless bits of digital pseudostuff you can refund after playing for one hour and fifty-nine minutes. This is mirrored by the increasing intangibility of gaming platforms: hefty PC towers to under-TV consoles to hand-helds tucked in bags to cloud gaming. It’s interesting that while literature has gone from the ephemeral to the concrete – try ‘retelling’ Margaret Atwood’s Testaments and see how long it takes the lawyer’s letter to reach you – games seem to be going to other way.

The oral tradition put a lot of power in the mouth of the narrator, but for games, the narrator is what, our CPU? Wonderful though computer science and game design are, neither have yet cracked a fully responsive game-experience that tailors itself to the unique player before them. Part of this is because games don’t necessarily want a unique, tailor-made experience. Yes, we have hard mode and character customisation and branching narrative, but God of War is framed in a seamless, perfect one-shot experience, while Bioshock relies on telling Jack’s story exactly the way it was written. Games ship infinite digital copies of themselves to give the same curated experience to as many players as they can. People are free to respond to it individually, but the content itself remains the same. 

This is why, I think, I’m increasingly a fan of abstract games, or games that leave space for the player to breathe. The Stanley Parable had a lot to say about agency, the modern world, and corporate America, but because it relied on repetitive and increasingly meaningless actions, it didn’t really matter how you actually played. INSIDE seemed another meditation on individualism, agency and surveillance until its infamous denouement, which has no ‘official’ meaning at all. There’s a definite drive towards narrative excellence in our industry, but it’s the stories that have faith in their players’ intelligence – the stories that want you to connect the dots, rather than rendering gorgeous and definitive dots for you – that really lead the pack. They’re storytellers responding to their audience, not recitals of canonical text. Long may their audience listen.