An important read about Tim Sweeney and Epic Games covering Unreal Engine, it’s use in interactive experiences from cinema to video games, the potential of VR and AR, and the state of free-to-play.

Chris Plante, The Verge:

When asked if Unreal Engine 4 will span the next 10 years, Sweeney says that it’s for the foreseeable future, that Unreal Engine will get to “the promised land,” a vision of the future Sweeney’s hinted at earlier in the day during his speech at the Game Developers Conference. “This is the word I was afraid to use earlier. This is the convergence of all these forms of media.”

Technologists, media theorists, and game designers spoke of the convergence ad nauseam in the 1990s, when film and video games came together in a garbage fire of media that could neither be called a good game nor a good film. In the 2000s, the convergence was replaced with the notion of transmedia, with entertainment spread across different mediums, connected through a shared universe or narrative. However Sweeney believes the convergence is making a comeback, that the graphics world is seeing humans and technology meeting at a unified point. Sweeney sees photorealistic 3D objects and lighting and virtual reality attracting game designers, sure, but also industrial designers, architects, and film makers to engines like Unreal Engine 4.

In this future, or present if you ask Sweeney, lessons learned from one field, say an architect designing a virtual building, can be applied to games or film, and likewise. Sweeney believes the potential application of the engine across all fields increases exponentially as information is shared.

All of this raises the question: does Epic Games identify purely as a games company? “We’re realizing now that Unreal Engine 4 is a common language between all these common fields.” Sweeney doesn’t see the industries as all that different. More interesting than Sweeney’s prediction of field-sharing information and experience is the speculation of the fields in some ways merging together. For their most recent demo, Epic Games partnered with Weta to create a VR demonstration featuring the dragon Smaug from the The Hobbit.

The separation between game and experience and art is becoming more defined. Under the guise of this piece, interactive experiences such as Journey and Dear Esther feel like the blossoms of Tim Sweeney’s greater vision, most recently demonstrated with Smaug.

Update: I failed to mention the main reason why this important. Not only does the diversity of Unreal Engine 4 practical uses help clarify the categories of computer generated media, there’s this:

… this year, Unreal Engine 4 is free — the company asks for a 5 percent royalty for any commercial product made with the engine that makes more than $3,000 a quarter.

Commercial product: a product that can make money (i.e. video games, VR/AR experiences, movies, TV shows, YouTube shorts, amateur animations, etc.).

Michael Martin, IGN:

Main character Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) is seen playing and describing the game in the fifth episode of the hit Netflix series. As a result, the game has soared into the top 10 top paid apps on iTunes, where it currently resides at number five and is number three in the paid games category on the Google Play store. The game did not rank in the top 25 on either app store before appearing on the show.

Speaking at GDC 2015, ustwo lead designer Ken Wong said the show’s producers reached out to the developer about the game appearing in House of Cards at no cost to the studio, according to IB Times.

“They called us up and they said, ‘Can we use your game?’ and we said ‘Yes,’” Wong said.

IGN’s Seth G.Macy reporting from PAX East:

“Any item that affects game play,” he told the audience, can be acquired “through grinding.” He compared his ideal F2P model to Disneyland, saying that when a person visits the park, they have the choice to spend money as they see fit once inside, but they can still enjoy and experience all the park has to offer. He contrasted that with Vegas, where the push to spend to increase enjoyment is non-stop.

“Be more Disney, less Vegas,” he said. Bleszinski also said that Boss Key is watching and taking note of the people on the forums and on reddit who are offering suggestions and participating in the community, hinting that they will be rewarded for their participation.

This seems like a very misguided comparison. Bleszinski seemed to skip the part where you pay to enter Disneyland. Get the most out of a $99 single park ticket means a Disneyland guest will spend anywhere from 11 to 16 hours in the park. Guests can bring food and drink into the park, but the realistic chances of anyone bringing in three meals plus snacks sounds overly ambitious. Needless to say, food will be purchased. And if a guest has gotten by without spending a dime inside of Disneyland, they still paid to enter. This is no where near a free-to-play model.

Polygon’s Charlie Hall reporting from GDC 2015:

Rosalind Wiseman and Ashly Burch collaborated to create their survey in the spring of 2014. Wiseman, herself a teacher, educator and author, was able to deliver the survey to 1,583 students aged 11 to 18 over the course of the year. The results, the authors say, are enough to turn the games industry’s understanding of gender issues on its head.

The most compelling data point for game developers is the fact that girls in high school are far more likely to prefer to play female characters than boys of the same age are likely to prefer to play male characters.

Only 39 percent of high-school aged boys surveyed preferred to play as male characters, while 60 percent of high-school aged girls preferred to play as female characters.

That 21 percent delta, the authors say, is more than enough reason for game developers to rethink who their main characters should be going forward.

“We as developers,” Burch said, “understandably … are afraid of our games not selling.

“It’s terrifying to imagine that your game’s not going to sell. But it could be that we are falsely attributing the success of past games to things that don’t actually matter to the kids that are playing them.”

Since hearing Rosalind Wiseman on The One You Feed podcast, I’ve been an avid fan of her and Ashly Burch’s work. In case you missed it, their GDC 2014 talk on The Connection Between Boys’ Social Status, Gaming and Conflict is worth the watch.

See also: My recent breakdown of protagonist gender and video game genre from the games announced or highlighted at E3 2014.

Continuing my research of video game genre and protagonist/main character gender, here is the collected data from E3 2014. The sample list of 152 video games was sourced from IGN’s Games at E3 2014, platform data mapped to a quantifiable “TRUE”/”FALSE” list, genre lists collected from both IGN and Wikipedia (limited to primary genre), and the main character gender researched to the best of my ability.

Elaborating on the gender categories:

“Multi” being either:

• multiple characters to select from (ie. Mario Kart 8 / Killer Instinct receive 1 count for “multi” although there are several characters to select from)
• customizable gender
• large customizable party

“n/a” being a:

• gender ambiguous character
• god-view game
• first-person with no direct gender association

Some key points:

• My data can be found here. (Numbers online)
• Sample size = 152 games
• 13 exclusively female protagonists/main characters vs. 47 exclusively male protagonists
• Female protagonists by year:
  • 2012: 2%
  • 2013: 6%
  • 2014: 9%

Additional reference:

• E3 2013: Genre/Gender Breakdown, along with E3 2012 data