An open apology to computer video game creators everywhere.

This is my standard open apology to computer video game creators everywhere. It is an apology in the usual sense of "I'm sorry I did that to you." But it is also an apology in the ancient Greek sense of the word apologia - a defense. While I apologize to computer game creators everywhere for picking on their creations, I also defend the task I've set for myself: criticism of computer games.

That fact is, every time I criticize a game for something, there is a part of me that winces in sympathy with the creators of the highly sophisticated software that I am using. The average game creator will likely yell back at me: "Yeah, well lets see if you can do any better!" And I wince because, as it happens, I have tried and done quite a bit worse.

My first career was in Information Technology (or "Data Processing," as it was know then.) I have a bachelor of science in computer science, and for twenty years I was a computer programmer who worked for large retail and insurance companies, programming their (now obsolete) mainframes.

Since that in itself was a challenging career, I had to sit mostly from the sides lines and watch the personal computer world grow up from Steve Wozniak's basement into Bill Gate's friendship with Warren Buffet. But I did make one stab at participation. At about the time that Roberta William's lo-res "Mystery House" was out, I attempted to write a hi-res game I called "Toad Wars" for the APPLE IIe using the threaded interpreter, FORTH. I had the idea that it would be like "Asteroids," only instead of asteroids coming at you in a 360 degree circle., it would be these toads I wanted to animate. (With "Mystery House" being such a big deal for such a lo-res game, you could set your sights a lot lower back then).

That was a learning experience in the disguise of failure.

Number one, I found out why most games have a display of "credits" the same way the end of a movie does. Even at that early stage of computer video game creation, several very diverse and specialized talents were needed to put a game together in time for it become obsolete a month or two later. I was not a graphics maven, and my toads looked absolutely sick. I was also not a physics maven, so my animations were very jerky and didn't look right. And there were likely several dozen other things I was not that would have made for a professional looking game. Computer video game creation is not for those who want to be a one-man band. You have to form a band to make a game.

Number two, I learned about the just mentioned rapid obsolescence. It was in fact a month or two later that a spectacularly high res version of something like "Space Invaders" came out for the APPLE IIe. When you make a game, you have to move as fast as you can, because the technology is always changing. I have recently installed the original Cossacks on my hard drive to try out gaming the 18th Century. The recent advent of Empire: Total War has considerably cooled my desire to play Cossacks.

Three: I later learned that FORTH was not the best language to use for creating games. It was a stack language, and if your programmed subroutine forgot to the clear the stack before returning to the main routine, that would cause bugs in someplace other than where you made the mistake. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get a tons of mysterious bugs out of the game before giving up. The tools you use make a big difference, and even they are subject to rapid technological advance.

Number four: If you want to create a professional computer game from scratch, you can't give up. Ever. Computer game creation is not for the faint of heart nor the uncommitted. The whole computer game industry runs on people who have no relationships except with their PC's and their team mates.

Five: No man can serve two masters. If I wanted a career as a computer video game creator, I could not also have one as a mainframe computer programmer. And I had just proved to myself how successful I'd be as a computer game creator.

A sixth lesson I learned from my career as a mainframe computer programmers. I learned that computer games have some of the most incredible user interfaces that have ever been designed. The interfaces I'd seen in the business world - Optical Character Recognition documents, punched cards, CICS screens, etc, were all pitiful child's play compared to what computer game designers come up with everyday. If corporate IT really wants to learn something about intuitive graphic interfaces they can do no better than studying computer video games. They are the apex of the art.

A seventh lesson I learned from my career is how hard it is to bring a vision into reality. I'd found in my mainframe career that the end users of the programs that run on the mainframe are always at odds with the programmers and designers of those programs. This was sometimes to the level of actual white-hot hate. The industry had come up with the idea of another category of beings called "systems analysts" or "business analysts" just to have a layer of insulation between the end-users and the programmers.

From my perspective as a programmer, it seemed to me that this layer of insulation was actually contributing to the problem instead of solving it. It looked to me like the whole problem was about getting close enough to the end user to learn what it really was they wanted their systems to do. The real problem, it seemed to me, was that there were too many viewpoints and outlooks being taken into account in the design of systems. The end result was supposed to be about something somebody was going to use as part of his or her daily work. The end result very often was about something very much other than that. And the people who were trying to do their daily work were being systematically driven crazy every day. I'd always thought that if it was just me and just the end-user in an impromptu meeting, things would work out.

Then one day over a holiday weekend, I was sitting at home with my PC and I had an idea for a simple game that would be fun to play on the computer. I remember that it was some kind of a business game. It wasn't a game I intended to offer to the public. It was just a simulation game I wanted to play that I though the computer would make easier for me to play. So I started to program it on the computer. "Design At the Key Board" (DAKB) in all its glory!

And a very interesting thing happened. After an hour or two of work at the computer, I came to realize that the game I had created was actually less fun to play then the game I had had in my imagination! Here it was, the loop between vision and creation completely closed and contained within a single mind, and a design failure had resulted! I discovered the difference between having an idea for a computer game in your imagination and having the actual game fully implemented on the computer. These two things are not the same thing. They are very different.

And here I discovered the key pitfall of what I had been doing for a living up to then. Even with the best situation there could possibly be (vision and implementation within the same mind) there will always been a profoundly disappointed end-user. The hate-hate affair between the programmers and the end users will always be there no matter what. The whole problem is tied up with that elusive, abstract thing we all strive for and mostly can't get: happiness.

This, in essence, is what every computer game creator has set him or herself as a task: to deliver happiness of some kind to the human race. And it is as illusive a thing for a computer game creator as it is for God eternal. In a computer game, there is some itch that must be scratched. But what is the itch? And what is the scratch? Different strokes for different folks?

So there I was, early forced from being a computer game creator to being a computer game consumer.

And what a maddening time that was!

There was the early low-res "Sun-Tzu's Ancient Art of War," which I found to be quite horrible. My previous experience with war gaming was the hexagon worlds of Simulations Publications Inc. (SPI) and Avalon Hill. The lo-res sprites of "Ancient Art of War," and their limited play, was not the scratch for the itch I knew I had. This was my first experience of buying an expensive computer game that ended up being a big disappointment. More was to come.

I missed the birth of the Command and Conquer series (which I now regret), but I came back to computer war gaming with War Craft II. This was my first hard-core gaming addiction. And it was definitely the scratch for the itch. And it was absolutely perfect. It had all the classic elements of Real Time Strategy gaming: base building, scissors-paper-rock unit differentiation, a series of world maps, and a campaign game with a continuing story line. And the action took place in white-knuckle real time. No "game turns" and "dice."

Later on there was the dueling robot factories of Total Annihilation, which had realistic looking physics. Whenever a base's wind-mill thingy blew up, I could see the propeller blades whirl in the air as they came off! Here is where I found I absolutely couldn't live without computer games. It was a big transition in which I went from totally passive entertainment (like watching TV) to totally interactive entertainment. When you are the general of a little pixel army, you are the one who must drive the story. You are the one who must make the decisions. You are the one who suffers the consequences (even if only virtually.)

As this addiction began to take hold, I bought other RTS games to scratch the itch. And here I encountered disappointment. I did not realize that RTS games had just come through a long evolution which (at the time) had just ended with War Craft II and Total Annihilation.

I had purchased a earlier RTS game called M.A.X. And as I went through the documentation and learned all the in's and out's of the game and its units, I loved everything about it. Everything except the first time I played the single player mode. There I was, spending up to an hour or so, carefully building up my base, sending out reconnaissance patrols, ramping up my research, and all the other things Sun Tzu said a good general must do.

And when I finally found the enemy and was ready to do battle, I discovered that the enemy was --- two hundred or so artillery units crammed together in a hole in the corner of the map, not doing anything in particular. M.A.X.'s Artificial Intelligence was absolutely brain dead.

It was here that I encountered for the first time an "if-only" game. And "if-only" game is a game that is basically good that you would really like to play, but doesn't work well enough to be enjoyable because of one or two things that are seriously wrong with it. You say to yourself, "if only the game didn't xxxxxx." Or "if only the game did xxxxxx instead of xxxxxx." An "if-only" game has, in the words of Maxwell Smart, "missed by THAT much." Almost but not quite. And that's a crying shame.

Its a crying shame not only because a creative and artistic misfire has taken place, but also because once an "if-only" game is released, it is often accompanied by a degree of consumer fraud. M.A.X. should have been released with a warning that it was really meant to be a multi-player game. There are newer "if-only" games I've heard of that have packaging very similar to very popular, well-constructed games. "Me-toos!" from minor players. And very often new games are as buggy as the Arkham Asylum bug house.

But then again, what are you going to do if you are a company that publishes computer games? When some developer first presents a "vision," checks are already being cut and money is already being spent. The way advertising works on human psychology ( "loud enough and long enough") requires that the advertising campaign be started before the design of the game is even finished. The number of people involved in the project (the credits page, remember?) virtually guarantees the original vision is going to be changed for the better or for the worse. And the time until release date must be carefully budgeted and scheduled because an over-long development cycle can cause a game's underlying technology to be obsolete by the time it comes out.

And since the checks have already been cut and the money already spent, you cannot give up if things start going wrong. No, not ever. In Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine, the development and release of a new mini-computer is documented. We hear the project leader explain to Kidder that all technological development projects go through a "lets start over and do it right phase." The choices that are made early in the project start to constrain the choices that can be made later on in the project. Ugly patches and design compromises are then made to move the project through to the final stages for release. The closer the release date gets, the uglier the patches become as the design compromises become more hideous. You can never "scrap and go back." You must move forward no matter what happens.

As with the list of credits, its like making a movie. We've all seen bad movies that should never have been released but were. Didn't the producers know it was a bad movie that had come out the other end of the development process? Yes, they did. But the checks had been cut, the money had been spent, and its now time see what little money, if any, can be recovered from the fiasco. Woody Allen has said that he's never really liked most of his movies. He finds that as he is making a movie, his vision of what he meant his movie to be gets lost in the realities involved in actually making a movie. Every time he makes a movie, its not the movie he originally imagined. But does that stop him from putting the movie out? No. It doesn't. Because the checks have been cut, the money has been spent, and anyone who does anything creative knows that you can never completely control the outcome of a dynamic creative process no matter how hard you try. The realities of life in the computer industry only put the icing on that particular cake.

Computer video game creators, I do understand some of the forces that have forced your hand when your new game has come out and it is obviously not every thing it could have been. I know you're probably as sad, exhausted, and disillusioned as Woody Allen is when he finishes a movie. But my intention in criticizing your game is not so much to be the guy who says, "hey, you missed a spot,." but rather to be a cheerleader for the next game you come out with. After all, the checks have been cut, the money has been spent (and sometimes its my money too!) And the only thing we can all look forward to is the future.

And so here I am, a lover of computer video games, and critic for the sake improving future games so that they do not miss mark by so short a margin. My goals is to try and and stem the number of "if- only"s and "Coulda been's" . Computer game creator, if I have trashed your sweat-borne creation and wounded your creative spirit with my words, believe me that I do feel for you and what it was you tried to accomplish. But I must have my say if the administration of happiness is ever to improve. I am a critic who seeks the betterment of the art, and the opportunity to enjoy it better each time.