China's Regulatory War On Its Gaming Industry Racks Up 14k Casualties

from the video-game-industry-violence dept

It isn't news that China has begun a campaign against video games within its borders. The battles in this war are being waged on a couple different fronts. In 2021, Beijing set new rules for what youths can play when it comes to games, as well as a strict schedule for when they can play them. This birthed an underground economy for account sharing to get around those rules, but the rules still had some effect. Chinese regulators also have exerted strict control over what foreign games are available in online stores, while those same regulators strictly control what games gain approval for release from within. This all seems to be some sort of legislative stream of consciousness from President Xi Jinping's belief that video games are somehow massively harmful and addictive to children.

So what has the impact of all of this regulatory warfare produced? Well, according the South China Morning Post, no less than 14,000 shuttered gaming businesses within China itself.

China’s freeze on video game licenses continues. South China Morning Post notes that the National Press and Publication Administration (NPPA) has not released a list of newly approved titles since July 2021. Because of this, state-run newspaper Securities Daily reports, approximately 14,000 small game studios and video game connection companies, including those involved in merchandising or publishing, have gone under.

Typically, the NPPA approves around 80 to 100 games a month, so the lack of an approved list has ground part of the industry to a halt. China is such a massive market, and the hiatus has caused uncertainty that has led to layoffs at game companies, and conglomerates with game divisions. However, it sounds like the smaller outfits have been hit the hardest.

This is almost always the story when it comes to heavy-handed government regulations over an industry. The big players have the war chest and know-how to work within the regulatory system, while the small or up-and-coming companies simply fold under pressure. In this case, many of the larger gaming companies have diversified into off-shore presence in order to weather the storms from Beijing. Smaller companies don't have the ability to do likewise.

And, in typical Beijing form, this freeze on approving new licenses to release games is being conducted with zero transparency.

No reason has been given for the hiatus, and the NPPA hasn’t stated when approvals will restart. Prior to this latest freeze, the longest period that new game licenses were not released was a nine-month window in 2018.

All of this coincides with China's larger culture war, which has seen the government engage in control tactics as silly as regulating karaoke playlists to the far more serious destruction of democracy in Hong Kong. This means that the Chinese government is coming off less like a socialist nation and more akin to something like the Taliban, where strict control over culture is seen as some kind of spiritual requirement.

Regardless, it must be a very bad time to be a game creator in China.

Filed Under: china, gaming, regulations, video games

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: The 24th Kandinsky

from the gaming-like-it's-1924 dept

This is it: the last in our series of posts focusing on each winner from our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1924! So far, we've featured Hot Water, Legends of Charlemagne, 192X, The Hounds Follow All Things Down, and You Are The Rats In The Walls, and now it's time to wrap things up with the winner of Best Analog Game and a game that, perhaps most out of all the entries, is completely suffused with a spirit of remixing and mining the public domain: The 24th Kandinsky by David Harris.

This game was one of the first to draw our attention as the entries were coming in, just based on its premise: players are tasked with using visual elements from the 23 paintings that famed Russian abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky created in 1924 to create a brand new work — a "24th Kandinsky". This is a game about not just admiring art but digging into it and picking apart its components, and all that's required to play is a blank canvas, some paper and drawing implements, a pair of scissors, and some sticky tack or tape. On each of their turns, a player selects an element from one of Kandinsky's newly-public-domain works — choosing from all the geometric shapes, swooping curves, checkered grids, intersecting lines and other abstract forms that are the hallmark of his work — and draws a replica of it, which they then cut out and affix to the canvas wherever they choose. They can overlap and underlap other elements as the new work grows, and at the end of each round all players vote to determine who made the best contribution, leaving their element in place while the others from the round are removed. Turn by turn the work grows more elaborate, until time runs out or players agree to stop, at which point the player who won the most voting rounds gets to keep the completed work.

There is just so much to love about this idea and its execution. It manages to celebrate just about everything that we hope to highlight with these game jams: the value of new works entering the public domain, the incredible creative power of remixing and appropriation, the joy of artistic collaboration and spontaneous creativity, and the way games can be an ideal medium for all these things — for both game designers and players. Mechanically speaking, it does this with elegance: the rules are loose and simple, but carefully combine cooperative and competitive gameplay to achieve a balance of incentives that produces just the right mood for a game like this. It also serves as a foundation for people to create their own variants of the game: one can easily envision it being adapted to use different source material, more elaborate art supplies, and even modified rules to create different overall rhythms of play. And with every play session, a new piece of art is created, and that's a special thing for a game to achieve.

You can download the rules and materials for The 24th Kandinsky on Itch, or check out the other submissions in our public domain game jam.

And with that, we've reached the end of our game jam winner spotlight series! One more time, thanks to everyone who submitted a game or played the entries, and to our amazing panel of judges. We'll be back next year with a game jam for works from 1925, but until then, keep on mining that public domain!

Filed Under: 1924, copyright, game jam, games, gaming, public domain

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: You Are The Rats In The Walls

from the gaming-like-it's-1924 dept

We're nearing the end of our series about the winners of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1924. So far we've looked at Hot Water, Legends of Charlemagne, 192X, and The Hounds Follow All Things Down, and this week the feature is the winner of Best Digital Game: You Are The Rats In The Walls by Alex Blechman.

This not just a returning win for Alex, but a second in the digital game category, following last year's win with Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening To Steal Treasure. While Stopping By Woods was a Twine-based remix of a Robert Frost poem, Rats brings things into the graphical realm with RPG Maker and takes on one of the more notable 1924 works to enter the public domain this year: H. P. Lovecraft's short story The Rats In The Walls. And both games have one thing in common: a sense of humor that pervades the writing and design. Rats takes the famous story — in which a man returns to his family's ancestral estate and discovers horrible secrets that drive him mad, made manifest in the form of scurrying rats that torment him — and gives the player the role of the titular vermin via a simple game mechanic: nipping at the character's heels to drive him towards various locations on the small but detailed map. Alongside this, it embraces a simple and highly effective comedy premise: combining the elaborate, heavily-wrought prose that Lovecraft is famous for with modern, casual, highly self-aware language. The result is consistently funny, with a few great surprise jokes and an absurd overall tone that just works.

As you can see, Rats also makes great use of RPG Maker assets to build a fitting and eye-catching (if unpolished) setting for the game, which was the first thing that made it a contender for the Best Digital Game category, but what really sealed the deal in that regard was the aforementioned game mechanic of driving the character around by controlling the rats that chase him. It's nothing mindblowing, and it can be (intentionally) frustrating, but it adds an element of gameplay and leverages the digital medium to make Rats something slightly more than just a simple story dressed up with sprite graphics (and also undoubtedly required some scripting to go beyond RPG Maker's basic capabilities). The mechanic also successfully makes the basic level of choice in the story (which just amounts to determining what order things unfold in) feel more integrated with the game. All this combines with the excellent writing to create a short experience that keeps players closely engaged from start to finish.

You can play You Are The Rats In The Walls in your browser on Itch, or check out the other submissions in our public domain game jam. And come back next week for the final winner spotlight!

Filed Under: 1924, copyright, game jam, games, gaming, public domain

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: The Hounds Follow All Things Down

from the gaming-like-it's-1924 dept

Over the past three weeks, we've featured Hot Water, Legends of Charlemagne, and 192X in our series about the winners of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1924. This week, we're focusing on the winner of the Best Adaptation award for the game that best embodied the original 1924 work upon which it was based: The Hounds Follow All Things Down by J. Walton.

J. Walton is one of our returning winners, having taken the award for Best Deep Cut last year with Not A Fish, and this year's entry feels in many ways like an evolution of the ideas and mechanics introduced in that game: they both break a work apart into component pieces, and let players discover its hidden meaning (and generate new meanings) by finding connections in a play-space that grows outwards like a puzzle or a map. But The Hounds Follow All Things Down situates this play within its world in an ingenious and beautiful way. It's based on the 1924 novel The King Of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany — a highly-influential early work in the fantasy genre that wasn't fully recognized as such until decades after its release — which presents readers with the fantastical and majestic world of Elfland and its inhabitants. The game imagines an epic and ancient poem within this world, which has been passed down for generations in countless incarnations, and tasks the players with performing their version of this poem to an audience of elves that is always hungry for new variations.

This premise speaks directly to the themes of changing culture and the public domain that directly inspired the game jam, and also to the spirit of fantasy and legend that suffuses the novel. Gameplay takes the form of a series of scenes, performed by the players and generated by drawing prompt cards and placing them in a grid where they form connections with each other. By the end the group will have composed and performed a version of this fictional poem that is entirely unique, yet intimately connected with every other version that comes out of the game and with Dunsany's world of Elfland.

One of the most interesting aspects of the game is how the prompt cards were developed: by playing around with the text of the book and a predictive algorithm. The designer's notes describe the process in detail:

The text excerpts were generated using a fairly strange process. As with some earlier experiments, I used Jamie Brew’s pt-voicebox, which is available for free download on GitHub. This program has the interesting tendency to get caught in loops. For example, if you give it the text of The King of Elfland’s Daughter and ask it to continually pick the 6th most likely word to appear next, you get this as output:

he knew the speed was in all other side the old songs of came down sitting elfland the flood the border was not the two wide stole and a wind loitered summer days the border but all as forest in that valley land the trolls had they let us from the trolls with they went by since one evening standing grey with her back from that bewildering black which she got left her and away from a pigeonloft but alveric in him and back a few days things in a he house amongst our earthly things waned the hounds saw him far this time had driven for all were content they went by since one evening standing grey with her back from that bewildering black which

After a while, it simply starts repeating the passage in italics. And a similar thing happens any time you tell pt-voicebox to pick words with a fixed ranking of likelihood (the 13th most likely word, etc.), as well as when you give it a regular pattern of picks (the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc.). The only way to avoid these loops is to pick words in a random pattern, either intentionally selecting ones that sound interesting—which is how it’s designed to be used—or picking words randomly (always choosing the 1d6th most likely).

I became fascinated by this tendency of the program, so I generated a bunch of text loops from The King of Elfland’s Daughter and then lightly edited the looped text to create the “poem excepts” used in the game.

The results of this process ("Mournfully the old leatherworker had to work his sword", "Upon those lawns, the hounds came for his dreams") are truly intriguing, and the stories that arise from play are sure to be as well.

You can download the rules and cards for The Hounds Follow All Things Down on Itch, or check out the other submissions in our public domain game jam. And come back next week for the another winner spotlight!

Filed Under: 1924, copyright, game jam, games, gaming, public domain

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: 192X

from the gaming-like-it's-1924 dept

So far, we've featured Hot Water and Legends of Charlemagne in our series about the winners of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1924. This week, we're taking a look at the winner of the Best Remix award, for the best game that incorporated material from multiple different newly-copyright-free works: 192X by designer Chloe Spears.

Several of the designers who entered this year's jam incorporated themes related to remixing and the public domain in their games, and 192X is a stand-out in this regard. It's a text-based interactive fiction built with the open-source tool Twine, and tells a story all about the way our popular culture is preserved, how it changes and gets parodied or reimagined, and how digital technology has impacted it — or, as Spears puts it in the game description, "about the art we leave behind for the future, and what we allow the future to do with it". Replete with references to the 1924 novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin and George Gershwin's 1924 composition Rhapsody In Blue, story is funny, engaging, and creative: it sends you back in time to a fictionalized dawn of computing (from a future made dystopian by ironfisted cultural restrictions that are worryingly close to today's copyright reality), and then inside the Buster Keaton film Sherlock Jr. (a 1924 parody that serves as a springboard to even more contemplation of the public domain and specifically the great detective's role within it).

If the story in the game sounds unclear to you so far, that's because it's difficult to summarize for all the right reasons — it's quite short but contains a lot of carefully chosen elements, without anything that feels extraneous or arbitrary. Every reference and everything that happens ties back to the central theme of how we interact with art and culture, and the prose itself is snappy and entertaining. In other words: no more spoilers, just play it!

Speaking of play: the actual gameplay involved is very minimal, with most of the interactivity just advancing the story down a linear path, with one traditional game mechanic temporarily employed more as an amusing nod than as an actual challenge. But the basic interactivity wasn't slapped on either, and meshes nicely with the overall design: the text prompts and careful timing combine with the use of color to effectively punctuate, organize, and enhance the story being told. The text-based game genre also enables the otherwise-rare second-person-perspective writing, addressing the reader as "you" throughout — and while it would only take a little bit of editing to make 192X work wonderfully as a short story, the writing is undoubtedly elevated by the game format.

Finally, kudos to Chloe Spears for not just exploring the idea of the public domain and mining it for material, but for expanding it by releasing 192X with a CC0 Public Domain Dedication!

You can play 192X in your browser on Itch, or check out the other submissions in our public domain game jam. And come back next week for the another winner spotlight!

Filed Under: 1924, copyright, game jam, games, gaming, public domain

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Legends of Charlemagne

from the gaming-like-it's-1924 dept

Last week, we featured Hot Water in the first Winner Spotlight from our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1924. This week, we're taking a closer look at the winner of the Best Deep Cut category, reserved for games that used 1924 material that doesn't appear on the popular lists of works entering the public domain this year. Abelardsnazz snagged the prize this year with the beautiful deck-building card game Legends of Charlemagne.

What's the "deep cut" that pushed this game into the winner's circle? A collection of amazing public domain paintings by N. C. Wyeth, primarily from a 1924 edition of Thomas Bulfinch's book that shares the game's name, Legends of Charlemagne. This collection of legends, more commonly published today as one third of Bulfinch's Mythology, was originally written in 1863 and has been republished many times over the years, but the illustrated edition from 1924 contained this complement of then-new artwork that is easily missed by people searching for things that have just entered the public domain. The paintings are prime specimens of the work of Wyeth, who was a prolific and unique artist in the early 20th century with over 3000 paintings to his name, and is known especially for his work for books, magazines and advertising, perhaps most notably the Scribner Classics series. His illustrations for Bulfinch are classic examples of his realist style, and boy do they ever make for some nice looking cards.

It's especially cool how this material turns the game into a link in a public domain chain: an adaptation of newly-copyright-free paintings that were themselves originally created to breathe new life into a classic work that was itself outside copyright, which was itself originally based on popular mythology and old stories with their origins lost to history. (Of course, it also really highlights how long copyright terms have gotten, with these paintings made for a then-60-year-old work being protected for nearly a hundred years before entering the public domain last month.) And as you can see, the designer didn't solely lean on Wyeth's eye-catching work: the cards themselves are perfectly designed to incorporate the paintings and bolster their aesthetic, resulting in a game that looks so professional and high-quality you can immediately picture it as a printed and packaged product in its current form.

The game itself is a straightforward, well-designed deck builder that will be familiar to a lot of players while still throwing them a few twists and offering plenty of strategic decisions to consider. It's a prototype and a proof of concept, and as such only has a small set of cards for now: this sort of game notoriously requires extensive playtesting and very careful rules calibration to stay playable and balanced as you add options and variety to the deck. But it's a sturdy foundation on which to build a truly great game — perhaps drawing on more work by Wyeth, or even other public domain sources. And for that to happen, people need to play it! So grab a copy, admire the art (there are several more fantastic pieces beyond those featured in this post), and go to battle in the age of Charlemagne.

You can download everything you need to play Charlemagne over on Itch, or check out the other submissions in our public domain game jam. And come back next week for the another winner spotlight!

Filed Under: 1924, copyright, game jam, games, gaming, public domain

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Hot Water

from the gaming-like-it's-1924 dept

This week, we announced the winners of Gaming Like It's 1924, our game jam celebrating the works that entered the public domain in the US this year. Just like last year, over the next few weeks we'll be spotlighting the winners from each of our six categories (in no particular order), and today we're kicking things off with a look at the game that won the Best Visuals award: Hot Water by reltru.

We never expect much in the visuals department from people who submit digital games to the jam, since one month is hardly enough time to produce elaborate graphical assets for a video game, but canny designers like the creator of Hot Water can surprise us by finding ways to create something visually striking with a combination of pre-made sprites, powerful choices, and attention to detail. The game, which is based on the 1924 silent film of the same name starring Harold Lloyd, has a clear and simple goal in mind: capture the distinct aesthetic and feel of early silent comedies in a retro 8-bit style video game. It's a beautiful little idea in and of itself, and one that exemplifies the fun of remixing multiple sources from throughout history: each of these two distinct and instantly recognizable visual styles occupies a similar spot in the timeline of its own medium, but they are separated from each other by more than half a century — so what happens when you put them together?

You get Hot Water, with its black-and-white 8-bit scenelets and its pixelated interstitial title cards (though a still image doesn't do the latter justice):

The gameplay (which is "soft boiled" by the designer's own admission) is your basic reaction-test obstacle course, tasking the player with dodging and jumping over benches and other obstructions to complete a mad dash to the end. It can be a little frustrating — while it's no Battletoads hoverbike or anything, the somewhat-sluggish controls and unclear boundaries on the obstacles are enough that I doubt anyone's getting to the end without a few false starts. But the manic music, and the silly and amusing little story unfolding via title cards, will make you keep trying until you reach the end of the game's one short level and receive one final little visual gag. And while the game clearly has no intentions of being anything more than the brief diversion it is, some fine-tuning and a few additional levels offering new story vignettes would quickly turn it into a full-fledged (if still simple) game. But either way, as a demonstration of what you can get by combining these two disparate vintage styles, it's a great success that makes me imagine an anachronistic arcade cabinet in a 1920s jazz club where dappers and flappers line up to play the new tie-in game for the latest Harold Lloyd movie.

You can play Hot Water in your browser on Itch, or check out the other submissions in our public domain game jam. And come back next week for the another winner spotlight!

Filed Under: 1924, copyright, game jam, games, gaming, public domain

Gaming Like It's 1924: Check Out The Entries In Our Public Domain Game Jam

from the the-games-are-in dept

At the beginning of the year, we launched our second public domain game jam to encourage designers to explore all the new works exiting copyright protection in the US and turn them into new analog and digital games — and as of this month, the submissions are in! Our panel of judges is hard at work play checking out all the great games, and while they try to determine a winner, you can check them out too.

Though we didn't get as many submissions as last year (after all, this wasn't the historic year in which new works began entering the public domain for the first time in a long time) the quality and creativity of this year's lineup is off the charts. You can play them all at our itch.io page, including things like: a deck-building card game about Charlemagne based on the paintings of N. C. Wyeth, a text-based choose-your-own-adventure game based on The Most Dangerous Game, a game about remixing the art of Wassily Kandinsky, and rules for a free-form LARP based on Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, among many others.

We'll bring you more updates as our judges get closer to choosing winners in in our six categories: best analog game, best digital game, best visuals, best adaptation of a 1924 work, best remixing of multiple public domain works, and the best "deep cut" game based on something more obscure that isn't included in the popular lists of notable newly-public-domain works. Until then, get playing, and share your own experiences and thoughts in the comments!

Filed Under: 1924, copyright, game jam, games, gaming, public domain

Google's Dead Wrong If It Thinks Broadband Caps Won't Hurt Game Streaming

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

For a decade we've pointed out how broadband providers have increasingly imposed arbitrary, confusing, and punitive usage caps and overage fees to cash in on the lack of competition in US broadband. Not only have industry executives admitted these limits aren't technically necessary, they've increasingly been abused anti-competitively. AT&T, for example, doesn't impose the limits on its broadband customers who use its streaming video service (DirecTV Now), but will impose the added charges if you use a competitor like Netflix.

For years, ISPs have slowly deployed these unnecessary limits, hoping consumers wouldn't notice they're the frog in the slowly boiling pot of water. But as higher-bandwidth services like 4K video streaming have arrived, consumers have started to notice the unnecessary limits in greater numbers. But, however tight caps may become with 4K Netflix, that's nothing compared to what's going to happen as companies like Google begin pushing game streaming services like Stadia, which eliminate local game hardware, move all processing power to the cloud, and then stream everything to the end user.

Early analysis suggests that at full 4K, users will burn through Comcast's monthly 1 terabyte usage cap in a matter of just three days. Many ISPs have far lower caps; AT&T for example imposes a 150 GB monthly cap on the majority of its DSL customers, who then have to pay $10 per each additional 50 GB of data consumed. It's fairly obvious that as game streaming expands, users are going to be looking at some significant sticker shock (which, from the ISP perspective, was the whole point).

Enter Google executive Phil Harrison, who this week in an interview was asked about the impact broadband caps will have on the company's game streaming ambitions. Harrison suggested the company isn't worried, though his justifications for that confidence are laughable:

"ISPs are smart [and] they understand that they’re in the business of keeping customers happy and keeping customers with them for a long time."

LOL, what? US broadband providers have the worst customer satisfaction ratings of any industry in America because they lack real competition in most of their markets. When you consider that means toppling the likes of the airlines, banking, insurance, and medical sectors, that's no small feat. ISPs don't have to "keep customers happy," because there's no penalty for not doing so. These customers usually have no alternatives to switch to, and rampant regulatory capture means there's no real penalty from regulators for bad behavior either.

Harrison's theory rests entirely on the false idea that ISPs will be shamed into raising usage caps:

"The ISPs have a strong history of staying ahead of consumer trend and if you look at the history of data caps in those small number of markets--and it’s actually a relatively small number of markets that have [data caps]--the trend over time, when music streaming and download became popular, especially in the early days when it was not necessarily legitimate, data caps moved up. Then with the evolution of TV and film streaming, data caps moved up, and we expect that will continue to be the case."

Harrison's wrong here too. Comcast is the country's biggest broadband provider, and is increasingly nabbing a monopoly in more and more markets thanks to telcos that refuse to upgrade aging DSL lines. In the last decade, Comcast has raised its usage cap exactly one time since it was implemented, from 300 GB to 1 terabyte in 2016. Numerous other ISPs, with caps as low as 50 GB, have been just as stubborn. US ISPs already charge some of the highest rates in the developed world. Usage caps and overage fees are just double dipping on captive customers.

It's like Harrison is basing his entire argument on a reality that doesn't exist. To stay ahead of game streaming, ISPs like Comcast would need to raise their caps exponentially to 10 terabytes or even higher. But that would defeat the entire reason ISPs imposed these limits in the first place (read: make even more money off of emerging new services). You can't shame natural monopolies into doing the right thing. Even if the inevitable stories blasting usage caps do force ISPs to raise caps, the new limits are going to be chosen based entirely on how to make the most possible revenue from captive customers.

Harrison also tries to claim in the interview that this will all work out thanks to 5G, which ignores that 5G isn't some competitive panacea, is barely available, and in most instances will cost users significantly more money, while bringing some obnoxious, creative restrictions (Verizon already bans 4K video on its "unlimited" wireless data connections, for example). That's before we even get to net neutrality, a concept Google hasn't actually supported in any meaningful capacity since 2010 or so. Most ISPs are busy testing their own game streaming services and, like video, are likely to exempt those services from caps while still penalizing competing services like Google Stadia.

Harrison may just be naive, or he may believe that Google is big and powerful enough to buy ISPs off should they try to get in the way of Stadia. But, either way, consumers are inevitably going to be seeing some bandwidth sticker shock as they blow through their usage caps. And with little competition and no meaningful oversight, "public shame" isn't likely to have nearly the impact Harrison seems to believe it will.

Filed Under: broadband, broadband caps, competition, game streaming, gaming, phil harrison, stadia
Companies: google