Ian Bogost - Water Cooler Games - Why Vista Sucks for Casual Games

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Water Cooler Games served as the web's primary forum for "videogames with an agenda" — coverage of the uses of video games in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment.

The site was maintained at watercoolergames.org from 2003-2009, where it was edited by myself and Gonzalo Frasca. It is now archived here in full.

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Why Vista Sucks for Casual Games

by Ian Bogost January 10, 2007

categories: Casual Games

A few weeks ago there was a running thread on the IGDA casual games listserv about problems installing and running games in Windows Vista. Alex St. John, of DirectX and WildTangent fame, has just written an opinion for Gamasutra summarizing the issues, Vista Casts a Pall on PC Gaming. The article is nice, but it's missing some of the detail and ire of the original list posts; I'd recommend reading those too (Dec list archive; read the ones that start "Slow death", one key post)

The majority of the issues have to do with installation security warnings, non-ESRB rated games in Vista's Game Explorer parental controls system. The piece is relevant for anyone who can't afford ESRB ratings (most of us). One key point from the article:

The heavy handed implementation of parental controls presents several problems for PC game developers. First, most free family and casual games are "unrated" because the ESRB rating service, designed for multimillion dollar boxed titles, is too expensive for most small casual game developers. Any parent concerned enough about the games their kids are downloading online to use Vista’s parental control system are likely to block "unrated" content and break most family appropriate content that can be found online. Note that Vista’s parental control system does not apply to web games and is not accessible from the browser so parents who expect them to protect their kids from "all" online game content may be in for a shock.

How discouraging it would be if even Windows becomes a de facto walled garden for games, just like the consoles and the closed devices.

Comments (4)

Wow. As if Vista wasn't already going to suck enough.

More and more I'm thinking that there is some synergy between the model of Turner's GameTap and indy game / casual game creators.

Imagine if GameTap could put the entire catalog of manifesto games into GameTap, and wrap the Vista compatibility issue in doing so. Compelling NEW content for GameTap, broader market for Manifesto. Kind of feels like a win/win.

Turner can afford to do all that "big money" stuff and can aggregate the money across the smaller content creators in the same way they packaged multiple networks in the early days of cable TV.

Jonathan on January 10, 2007 2:59 PM

It seems like a win-win for Manifesto and Turner, but its not a win-win-win for those two parties and developers, since the money funnels down much more thinly. If the developers lose Manifesto also loses, since it depends on developer and audience solidarity.

Patrick Dugan on January 10, 2007 3:37 PM

A couple of points of information:

Firstly, you should only get an admin elevation dialog if you do things that require admin privileges, such as writing to parts of the computer that the current (limited) user doesn't have access to - Program Files, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, and so on. If you keep your demo within the bounds of the user's own profile folder you shouldn't have any problems.

Secondly, while unrated games /can/ be hidden from the Games Explorer, they can also be hidden/shown on a game-by-game basis.

Richard Fine on January 11, 2007 2:49 PM

Paul Hyman also wrote an article about this issue for his regular Hollywood Reporter column: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/features/columns/playing_games/e3i70a5636dd36012c7680e973b6f8b28ce

Ian Bogost on January 16, 2007 3:37 AM