The stark white walls of the Daelim Contemporary Art Museum in Seoul, Korea are familiar with the sound of adults speaking in hushed tones. They're familiar with the gentle footsteps of gallerygoers, of the carefully considered "umm"s, "aah"s and "hmm"s of art lovers and the composure of those who understand they have walked into a fine art establishment.
On a mild spring day in 2010, these walls are greeted with something less familiar: giggling. The sound of children chatting, laughing and animatedly giggling at the gallery's paintings. The schoolchildren have come to see a retrospective of Roger Dean's work. Their teachers have explained ahead of time who he is — his decades-long contribution to the world of architecture, his famous album cover art for rock bands, his powerful box art for video games — but it means little to them. They're too young to appreciate what Dean did for rock music and games. They just want to see the pictures.

Roger Dean's paintings light up the gallery space with vibrant colors that pop like balloons. His eclectic mix of paintings and architecture range from the fantastic to the futuristic, with some subjects that sit eerily in between. The children stare and grin. They excitedly point at paintings — a dragon soaring through a crisp blue sky, a lush green island floating in the air, robots that look like a cross between reptiles and armor.

Dean wanders the gallery, watching his audience watch his work. He has no idea what any of them are saying, but he can tell they are happy. The adults almost fall into the paintings. The children smile. Their cheery voices bounce from wall to wall.

Arms akimbo, Roger Dean beams. The smiles and stares are no happy accident. Dean knows why his work gets the response that it does.

In the world of video games and entertainment any kind of publicity is often seen as a boon. But it was publicity that ultimately prevented New York-based game developer Navid Khonsari from returning to his homeland.

Late one night last year, the Iranian-born game developer received an unexpected call from an uncle who had just returned from Iran. Unlike his usual calls, this wasn't an update telling Khonsari how his family in Iran was doing or how he enjoyed the trip. Instead, it was about the video game Khonsari was making. Khonsari's game, 1979, tells the story of the Iranian hostage crisis that took place in the same year. A government-run newspaper in Iran, Kayhan, somehow found out about it. The paper labelled it Western propaganda. If the news got into the hands of the wrong people, his uncle told him, it could spell trouble for both him and his family.

His uncle's message was clear: Khonsari couldn't safely return to Iran.

Stories like Khonsari's have come to dominate Western perception of video games and the Middle East: It's all too political, nothing can get made, and a foot in the wrong direction can mean trouble. Relations between the United States and Iran have spent decades on shaky ground, leaving both countries suspicious of each other and the games their developers make. Government-imposed trade sanctions and ongoing political conflict have served as effective roadblocks for the people of both territories – Western publishers, for instance, can't enter Iran, Iranian games seldom make it out of the country.

Little is known about game development in the region, and what is known is often miscommunicated. But the political strife, and locked-down nature of playing and making games in the area is far from the day-to-day reality for game developers there. A burgeoning game development scene is erupting in the region, one that is far more complex than the snippets of news that rarely escape the Middle East.

Adam Saltsman has run a full marathon. That's 42,195 meters. In Canabalt, the 2009 endless runner that brought Saltsman to independent game design prominence, such a distance is considered an impressive achievement that would eclipse all the current scores on the game's leaderboard. The furthest Saltsman has run in his own game? 12,000 meters.

"I can actually run further in real life than in a game, which seems kind of backwards," he says over lunch during this year's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

I meet up with Saltsman a few hours before he is due to give a talk about indie game development. Dressed in flip-flops and a hoodie, the Austin-based developer is laid-back, animated, and pretty chuffed about having completed a marathon.

"This was my first one," he says, proud that he conquered such a distance in five hours and 20 minutes (in Canabalt, a player can, on average, run 1,000 meters in 22.5 seconds; this means that a Canabalt marathon could be run in 15 minutes 45 seconds).

A rotund corgi - well groomed, adequately fluffy, perfectly pudgy - gently tugs on its leash as its owner walks it down Townsend Street in San Francisco. The corgi's feet make hacky-sack sounds as they flop against the ground; its owner, dressed in jeans and a hoodie, makes a turn into a building located at number 650.

Over the course of the day almost 2,000 individuals - mostly laid back 20-30 somethings, some with corgis, some with mixed-breed canines, and the odd person with a cat (who we shall not speak of) - will pass through the doors of 650 Townsend Street, an enormous four-story office that occupies an entire block in the district south of Market Street.

The brick building is home to Zynga, the world's largest game developer on Facebook. Its games boast more than 300 million monthly active users. It claims its players are performing one million in-game activities every second, and more than 55 million people from all around the world play at least one of Zynga's games every day. It has the market capital to rival some of the biggest video game publishers in the industry and flat out dwarf most traditional publishers that have been around for much longer.

Whether the corgis know it or not, their owners are making games that are played by millions and rake in billions. And they're not alone.

The crowd is going insane. People are leaping into the air as though the floor is charged with electricity, screaming, yelling, cheering like they're about to burst. On the stage, Ryan Hart finds himself buried under lively bodies that aren't sure if they want to hug him, kiss him, or plunge a hand into his afro before never washing it again. He reaches out an arm to shake his opponent's hand, but he can't see where he's reaching; there are too many people on top of him. If one more person from the crowd jumps in, this could get dangerous.

Moments earlier, the stage was occupied only by London-born Hart and Japan's most well-known Street Fighter player, Daigo Umehara. No one dared come close. No one dared touch either of them. The two fighting game players were poised with the focus of fighter jet pilots. The buttons were their triggers, their decisions the result of a tangled web of calculations that few could understand. The crowd watched intently, sometimes forgetting to breathe. They watched as the fighter pilots of Street Fighter 4 performed the most complicated of air acrobatics, one-upping each other until someone stumbled and a jet came crashing.

That day, in London, Ryan Hart (pictured, below middle) outperformed and outmaneuvered his top-ranked Eastern opponent on home soil. That day, the UK won a kind of fighting game Olympics. Their very own had beaten a player everyone thought to be unbeatable. The crowd erupted. Everyone went wild. The world was electric.

When you’re 14 years old and set out to make a game, you don’t anticipate it will take 16 years to complete. Nor do you imagine the hero of your RPG to be a balding, tubby knight based on your father. Adam Rippon certainly didn’t expect any of this, and his game, Dragon Fantasy, is all the better for it.

Ogden Thomas’ hairless head shines with the intensity of a polished shield. His armour snugly fits around the paunch he gained when he traded in his abs (plural) for a pudgier ab (singular). He’s old, he’s bald, he’s out of shape, and he’s exactly what most role-playing game heroes would look like if they did nothing for thirty years.

“The first chapter of the game is about Ogden, a 46-year-old knight who, when he was 16, was the awesome hero from all the role-playing games,” says Adam Rippon, the creative director of Muteki Corporation and the developer of Dragon Fantasy.

“He went out, slayed all the dragons, saved the princess, and when the princess who he rescued became queen she made him the captain of her royal guard… and then he didn’t do a damn thing for thirty years.

“So the story of the first chapter is really about somebody who hasn’t been out there in a while … someone getting back into the scene, getting his life back.”

It’s a quirky subversion of the genre — a game that wriggles its old-man buns at the generic youthful RPG heroes who look like they’re 12, act like they’re five, and have bigger hair than most sculpting products can support. But the desire to tell a different kind of story — a quirkier story — is only a part of the reason why Dragon Fantasy exists.

A member of the FBI is in the room but we're not sure who or where he is. He probably already knows everything about us. Our phone lines are probably already tapped. We've probably been x-rayed in our sleep. We bet he loves black coffee and cherry pie, too.

We keep our eyes peeled for men in suits, but the only men in suits we've encountered all day have been catering staff offering us more bread rolls. We're looking for a man who we are now convinced does not exist. He is here to talk to us about video games.

Randy Pargman gets up on stage and introduces himself. He's a member of the FBI, and he works at the FBI Training Academy in Virginia. He's not wearing a black suit, he doesn't constantly interrupt himself to talk into a voice recorder. From what we can see, he doesn't look armed. He looks like an ordinary, friendly guy. He could probably kill us all if he wanted to. The audience consists of Games Connect Asia Pacific attendees who are here to learn of better ways to make games. To widen our minds a bit further, Pargman is here to tell us how games help the FBI create better agents.

“Come play, my Lord”, the ad beckons. “Save your lover!” it cries, as two seductive porcelain-skinned women lean into each other. “Start your journey now, my Lord”, says another ad, this one featuring a busty, blonde bombshell in the process of removing her clothes. Any of this ring a bell?

The year was 2009. Ads began appearing on the internet for a game called Civony, later renamed Evony. They started innocently enough – “Free Forever” one banner ad claimed while an image of a knight wielding a sword took up half the ad. Then a woman appeared. “Start your journey now, my Lord!” this ad said, an attractive woman dressed as a fairy standing to the side. Over the next few months, the ads became progressively more risqué, first featuring CGI women displaying ample bosom, proceeding to real models undressing. Eventually the medieval theme of the ads was abandoned and replaced with models in lingerie.


The internet was buzzing with criticism over Evony’s advertising. Many people were upset that such sexualised images were being used to market a game, with claims being made that it was a poor Civilization clone that wasn’t worth anyone’s time. It was a controversial ad campaign that attracted criticism from both the game development and game playing community alike. It was also a successful one.

Morgan Jaffit, lead designer of Pandemic Studios in Brisbane, was standing on a train platform in rural Victoria on Christmas Day, 2008 when he received a phone call from studio president Josh Resnick: EA was closing the studio.

It was Jaffit’s job to take the news back to his staff.

“It was tough,” says Jaffit, who has since founded independent games studio Defiant Development.

Jaffit had to tell his staff that the studio they had worked so hard for was being shut down; it didn’t matter that they had already spent months working on a new IP, that some of the staff had been at the studio for years, or that Pandemic was one of the biggest studios in Brisbane. The plug was being pulled and that was that.

“The main thing going through my mind was that I was sad for the people: Pandemic was a good family, there were a lot of people there who had been there a lot longer than I had. They were really committed to the studio and I thought then and I think now that it was unfortunate that that value is lost.”

Red Ant was on a high. The videogame and DVD distributor that had only been set up in 2001 by entrepreneur Julian White had, within the space of a year, transformed itself from being a speck in the vast gaming ocean into a force to be reckoned with. It was a small but rapidly growing business, securing contracts to distribute blockbuster gaming titles that were not only highly anticipated by the Australian market, but also guaranteed to bring in millions in profits.

“We were the Titanic,” said a former product manager at Red Ant who wished to not be named.

“We had the biggest publishers, we had the biggest games, and everybody in this industry had all of a sudden changed their perception of Red Ant and people started to pay attention. People were ringing us and started hassling us instead of the other way around,” he said.

Like the Titanic, Red Ant did appear to be unsinkable. The independent Australian distributor had just come off the back of the success of Fallout 3, a science-fiction epic that took out numerous Game of the Year awards and became a household gaming staple. They had just signed a series of lucrative contracts with some of the largest game publishers in the world and were preparing to distribute a range of high profile titles that everyone anticipated would bring them yet more critical and commercial success for the year to come.

With an energetic and passionate team working behind the scenes, an enormous rise in their game’s sales and the promise of many more on the horizon, Red Ant’s future looked watertight. However, in September of 2008, Red Ant sprung a leak that would ultimately lead to its downfall.

Tattoo removal creams bought over the internet can result in scarring, ugly marks and in some cases can be totally ineffective, doctors warn.

People looking for cheaper ways to remove tattoos than laser therapy or surgical removal are driving sales of the creams, which cost between $80 for a small tube and $300 for a year's supply.

But experts warn that the creams, some of which contain the bleaching chemical hydroquinone or the skin-peeling trichloroacetic acid, may not meet Australian standards for health and beauty products and can end up costing much more than professional removal.

Blood spatters across the floor and all over the boot that has just planted itself in an alien’s head. The level of detail as the necromorph is thrown about and has its face crushed is impeccable – from the layers of skin being torn apart, to the crushing of the skeletal system and the mucous-like membranes that you’d expect to find in any real creature that was being destroyed in such a way. Shereif Fattouh, the producer on the Dead Space series, gives the necromorph one final stomp in his demo of Dead Space 2, before moving into another chamber that looks like a still from a sci-fi movie.

The game clearly prides itself in its realistic depictions but, according to Fattouh, it’s not about looking the best, nor is it a competition.

“You know, I’ve never been a huge fan of the idea that the most graphically impressive game is the best game. I don’t subscribe to that,” says Fattouh.

“I really think that the challenge comes into the game design, the level design, and the storytelling. I think people expect more from the medium than just good graphics.”

Walking up the stairs of the building where CD Projekt Red is located and going through their staff kitchen, there’s a picture of Commander Shepard from Mass Effect on the refrigerator. His face has been customised to form a silly grin – he almost looks demented – and he declares through a connecting speech bubble that CD Projekt Red’s fridge is the best in the world. The developers behind the Witcher 2 have a sense of humour, giving a knowing nod to a franchise that their game continuously gets compared to, even though their own game is yet to be released.

But the comparisons were always going to be inevitable, and CD Projekt Red was ready for it. With the announcement of the sequel to their 2007 RPG success, The Witcher, there was plenty of speculation as to how The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings would stack up against the AAA titles released by the RPG veterans at Bioware and Bethesda. Comparisons were drawn between Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and the Fallout series, with the planned releases of Dragon Age 2 and The Witcher 2 in 2011 fuelling notions of a rivalry between the two RPGs.

The Polish development team behind The Witcher 2 had seen this coming. While relatively small and young compared to the likes of Bioware, CD Projekt Red had strong ideas and were ready to stand up and speak out about where their game stood.

In the studio of Sid Meier’s Firaxis Games, the development team behind Civilization V is spending the day analysing the mannerisms of Augustus Caesar. They’re sifting through research documents about the Roman leader’s life and character, discussing potential voice actors, and thinking of ways to capture his leadership in Civilization V’s full scenes. They’ll do this for every leader who appears in the game, painstakingly trawling through the annals of history to make sure they get it right.

Meanwhile, over at Matrix Games, the developers working on a strategy title about the American Civil War have found themselves walking along an old battlefield, noting terrain features, getting a feel for the roads and obstructions, and imagining where the hex-lines would be drawn if the field were to be turned into a game map.

It seems like an awful lot of work, but the developers behind these history games feel that it’s well worth it, if not to simply indulge their passion in history then to satisfy an audience that has kept the genre alive and healthy since its inception.

The year was 2005. Warren Spector, the man who headed the development of videogame classics Deus Ex, Thief, and System Shock, stood before a group of Disney executives pitching his ideas for a new game. Having spent the majority of his career working on M-Rated titles that were often dark and gritty, he was unsure whether he was in the right place pitching to the right people, but his agent had assured him that Disney were keeping an open mind, so he went on with his pitch. He enthusiastically explained his concept for a fantasy epic or, if that wasn’t what Disney was after, he had ideas for a science-fiction game set in the near future. The execs didn’t seem particularly interested. Spector was certain that the meeting had hit a low point when they all began texting on their Blackberries during his presentation.

“As it turns out, they actually really liked what I was saying so they were texting each other at the table about whether or not they should talk to me about making this Mickey Mouse game they had in mind,” Spector said in a recent interview with Hyper.

“Lucky for them, I’m a Disney freak, so I jumped at the opportunity!”

At some point in time, a group of gamers somewhere on the interwebs decided that it would be socially acceptable to roll their collective eyes at JRPGs. The eye-rolling business caught on fast and, before long, everyone was making fun of the genre. Perhaps it was because they were excruciatingly pretty in a very anime-stylised kind of way way, or because they constantly featured a male protagonist with spiky hair, or maybe even because they all were incredibly linear, with the player's actions seldom causing any real effect. It was like the developers had removed the player – the real person – from the equation and, rather than involve us and make us feel that we were the ones behind the characters, we were merely asked to shuffle the characters along until the next cut-scene.

As a lover of JRPGS (and I swear it has nothing to do with my gender or race) and their never ending sameness, Chrono Trigger was a breath of fresh air. No, it was more than that – it was a foot to the face, and perhaps the most delightful foot to the face I have ever received.

I’m going to start with a seemingly irrelevant analogy, but bear with me.

In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, award winning music producer David Bendeth, who has worked with the likes of Paramore and Hawthorne Heights, said that music was getting louder, and mostly for the worse. He explained that sound engineers were making songs louder to catch our attention by applying dynamic range compression to reduce the difference between the loudest and softest note in a song. This, he argued, was robbing music of its emotional power, obscuring sonic detail, and removing any real sense of dynamic.

While Bendeth was talking about music, his words couldn’t be more applicable to Ninja Blade. An unabashedly over-the-top action-adventure, Ninja Blade has had its outrageous meter cranked up to 11 – and that’s where it stays the whole time. Players step into the silent shoes of a ninja named Ken, whose role is to slice and dice the inhabitants of Tokyo who have been infected by the mutant-inducing Alpha Worm, and the gory action never ends. There isn’t a moment to breathe and actually realise where you are or what you’re dealing with – you’ve just found yourself in a world of grotesque mutants and your character acts like it’s normal. Well, it isn’t. The game even shows us it isn’t in the opening cut-scenes. WHO IS THIS NINJA TRYING TO FOOL?