game over? (part one)

so, i'm just going to keep writing about video games, apparently, because that's all i think about anymore. and not even in a fun way, but in a pretentious, overly-analytical scholarly way. like, i can't even play vvvvvv anymore without thinking "why is the female stick figure pink and not some other, more gender-democratic color?" studying cultural and critical theory has already ruined books and films for me. if it ruins video games as well, i'm pretty sure that this world will quickly become one that i no longer want to live in.

but i digress (can one digress before actually stating their main point?).

today i want to talk about public alpha builds and how everyone and their dog is releasing unfinished games nowadays. hell, there are even alpha-themed indie bundles and people paying up to 2 million dollars for a game that hasn't even been made yet. generally, this is pretty awesome: it's another new way that the internet is allowing people to get money directly into the hands of their favorite indie developers and really democratize the game-making process. ideas that would traditionally have needed a publisher (and wouldn't have gotten one on account of being too interesting and weird) can now be designed using fans' money and then distributed for free to collect more fans' money, which goes into the creation of the next big indie thing. it's great.

brought to you by typing "dog made of money" into GIS. you're welcome.

the primary example of this, of course, has been minecraft. i actually got in on the ground floor of minecraft (a few days before the first beta) thanks in large part to my rock, paper, shotgun obsession. and not only was it great to get an excellent game for super-cheap, and great to be able to play said game months and months before it became mega-internet-popular, let alone before it was properly "released" in late 2011, it was a really thrilling process to be able to watch the game develop from inside the game.

there's nothing like buying a game, becoming enamored with its world, and then realizing that for regular intervals over an indeterminate amount of time you're going to get new content and more awesome things added to that world for absolutely free. not only that, you can often make suggestions to the developer and then see your own suggestions manifest in a later build. getting into the minecraft alpha was my first experience with this whole process, and i've bought a number of games in alpha or beta since and gotten to watch them grow, often in good ways and sometimes in bad ways. yet, even when a game develops contrary to what i myself would want, it's generally been a 1-5 dollar purchase, so it's a bit hard to get upset. most people blow more than that on coffee a day, and coffee always does the same thing to me:

what i'm interested in at the moment, though, is not actually what happens during the time that a public alpha game's development cycle is made available to the public for appreciation and scrutiny. instead, i'm interested in what happens when that development cycle ends (often under the opposite of appreciation and much more scrutiny).

take as a sort-of example the recent "completion" of terraria, a minecraft-esque 2d platforming game. the game's original release occurred in may of 2011, and was labeled "version 1.0" indicating that the game was more of less meant to be complete as it was. it sold 50,000 copies in its first day, a fairly amazing feat for a game made by two people and largely marketed through word-of-mouth, and buyers were informed that they would receive all future updates from of charge, but (much like public-alpha games) those buyers were not told how many updates there might be, what those updates might contain, etc. essentially they paid for a project that was still in development.

excellently, the developers delivered an absolute fucking ton of new post-release content, all free, for nearly nine months. then, recently, they announced that the game (which had been expanded far beyond its original scope) would no longer be receiving updates. in a move perhaps unsurprising for the internet generation (but still depressing), this news (that the enormously engaging and excellent game that they'd paid 10 bucks for and then been allowed to get substantively new versions of  for free every few weeks for almost a year) drove the terraria community into a frenzy of name-calling, death threats, and other such bizarre, ugly nonsense. the gist of the response was that terraria shouldn't have been "allowed" to end when there were still so many things that the community wanted to see implemented. and herein lay the dark side of letting your customers buy into your game before you're finished: they seem to lose the ability to understand that you can be finished. technically speaking, terraria was finished when version 1.0 was released. the rest was, as they say, just gravy. to see negative fan response to the degree that resulted from terraria's "ending" is bizarre and disheartening, and i think it speaks to the sense of entitlement that letting your community in on the ground floor of the development process can breed. plus, maybe most terraria players are whiny, entitled jerks (which seems to be the case). hilariously (to me), many players in fact have insisted that they will no longer play the game if it won't receive new updates. not too many years ago (two, actually) you just went to the store and bought a game, and that game is what you got. terraria's fanbase might be a huge pile of asshole-faces, but that doesn't eliminate the fact that between games with 900 dollars' worth of DLC and games that imply a future of infinite content updates for the buyer, people have gotten a little confused as to what exactly they're entitled to for the money that they pay.

terraria players: "this. we're entitled to this."

on the other hand, there also seems to be a potential problem with developers deciding when their game is finished. again, let's return to minecraft. it's official "release", version 1.0, occurred in november of last year. since then, the game continues to get updates, but markus persson, the game's creator, has long since stepped away to work on other projects, leaving minecraft in the hands of a few of his subordinate designers. recently, each new update is simply met with more scorn from the community, who seems to simply want the game to be "done".

is alpha buy-in the next big thing for gaming? or is it just a more seductive manifestation of caveat emptor?
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i don't have an answer, if you were waiting for one. i do want to write a bit about how the effectiveness of the alpha buy-in idea is affected by individual games' genres, but i think that's a discussion for tomorrow, because i need to get back to work.