One of the biggest stories to emerge from GDC 2009 was the emergence of OnLive, a server-based gaming platform which would allow any PC or Mac, including bare-bones ones, with a fast network connection to play any game by running all the code – including the graphics rendering – on the server instead of on the local machine. In many ways, this service is a return to the “dumb terminal” model of the ’70s where no calculations were run on the user’s computer itself. So far, reactions have been mixed. Osma Ahvenlampi argues that, due to network lag, this model could never work; Adam Martin claims that it could work if the servers are located intelligently. Keith Boesky points out that the actual business model is simply acquisition.

I don’t claim to know if OnLive’s specific tech will work or not, but I would like to talk about the implications of this potential shift to server-based games. (Even if OnLive doesn’t make it work, clearly this technology will arrive at some point.) Of course, we already have server-based games – World of Warcraft runs on numerous servers spread around the world, with appropriate bits of game info set to thin clients running on local machines. However, a client is still a tricky piece of software, and as Raph Koster like to remind us, “The client is in the hands of the enemy.”

With OnLive, the client is so thin, I’m not sure if it’s appropriate even to call it a client. It’s more like a video-player. In fact, while the phrase “YouTube for Games” always refers to user-generated content, one should recall that YouTube had a second, perhaps more important, innovation: regardless of how a video was created, as long as the viewers had Flash, they could watch it immediately. The same concept hold for OnLive – as long as you have their app, you can play any game capable of running on their servers.

The implications of this change are huge – simply put, it spells the end of client-server architecture. Developers no longer need to optimize what data is sent to the client and what is kept back. Or worry about cheating. Or piracy, for that matter. While these advantages are huge, of course, what really interests me is that making a game multi-player is now, essentially, trivial. Put another way, the set of developers making one-man MMO’s will now be larger than just Eskil Steenberg.

Writing multi-player games is very, very hard. Trying to keep everything in-sync between servers and clients in a safe, responsive, fair, and accurate manner is no small challenge. With a system like OnLive, these issues evaporate because there are no clients anymore. Developers simply write one game, run it on some server, and update it based on user actions fed in from the network. If such a technology existed when we made Civ4, not only could we have saved man-years of development time and testing, but we could have easily implemented advanced features (games-of-the-day, mod sharing, massive player counts, asynchronous play, democracy-game support, etc.) with very little effort. Of course, I don’t know if OnLive will be the one to do it, but – from a developer’s point-of-view – the importance of this change cannot be overstated.

Over the last few years, Metacritic has become a popular whipping boy within the games industry. A recent example would be Adam Sessler’s bit at GDC’s journalist rant session. At the risk of beginning to sound like a reactionary contrarian, I feel a case needs to be made for Metacritic. Unlike my argument for used games (or, rather, for thinking critically about what we are trying to sell consumers for $60), I feel much less conflicted in this case, so let me state my thesis very clearly: Metacritic has been a incredible boon for consumers and the games industry industry in general. The core reason is simple – publishers need a metric for quality.

What should executives do if they want to objectively raise the quality bar at their companies? They certainly don’t have enough time to play and judge their games for themselves. Even if they did, they would invariably overvalue their own tastes and opinions. Should they instead rely on their own internal play-testers? Trust the word of the developers? Simply listen to the market? I’ve been in the industry for ten years now, and when I started, the only objective measuring stick we had for “quality” was sales. Is that really what we want to return to?

Yes, I know translating all ratings onto a 100-point scale distorts them – a C is not a 60 is not three stars – but we need to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. What are the odds that we can get every outlet onto the same scoring scale? Not likely. Can Metacritic improve the way it converts non-numeric ratings into scores? Absolutely. However, the whole point of an aggregator is that these issues come out in the wash. When 50 opinions are being thrown into the machine, a 74 is actually different from a 73.

I use Metacritic all the time, and I love it. It’s changed my game-buying (and movie-watching and music-listening) habits for the better, which of course funnels money into the pockets of deserving developers and encourages publishers to aim for critically-acclaimed products. Have we gotten so jaded that we have lost sight of what a wonderous thing this is? Metacritic puts an army of critics at our fingertips. Further, consumers are not morons who can’t judge a score within a larger context. We all realize that, due to the tastes of the average professional reviewer, some games are going to be over-rated and some will be under-rated.

Ultimately, the argument against Metacritic seems to revolve around whether publishers should take these numbers seriously. Some contracts are even beginning to include clauses tying bonuses to Metacritic scores. Others are concerned that publishers are too obsessed with raising their Metacritic averages. Actually, let’s think about that last sentence in detail. Note that when I just wrote “others,” I was referring to journalists, not to investors. As John Riccitiello famously said, “I don’t think investors give a shit about our quality.” How bizarre is it that once the game industry starts taking journalists’ work seriously, they complain about it?

I’ll give my own perspective on this issue. Over the years, I have seen many great ideas shut down becomes someone in charge thinks they won’t impact sales. However, when I am in an EA meeting in which we talk about the need to raise our Metacritic scores – and the concrete steps or extra development time thus required – I’ll tell you what I feel like doing. I feel like jumping for joy. How incredible is it to work for a publisher who cares about improving the quality of our games in the eyes of critics and uses an independent metric to prove it.

As for the renumeration issue, isn’t it a good thing that there is a second avenue for rewarding developers who have made a great game? Certainly, contracts are not going to stop favoring high game sales, so – hopefully – Metacritic clauses can ensure that a few developers with overlooked but highly-rated games will still be compensated. Now, if a game doesn’t have high sales and also doesn’t get a good Metacritic score, well, there’s a name for that type of game, and these developers should not be protesting. Further, developers also need to stop complaining that a few specific reviews are dragging down their Metacritic scores. Besides the fact that both good and bad reviews are earned, in a world without Metacritic, one low score from GameSpot, GameSpy, 1Up, or IGN becomes a disaster. Score aggregation, by definition, protects developers from too much power being in the hands of one critic.

Journalists also need to have the guts to give games a score and stick by it. Putting a score on a review doesn’t take away the ability to add nuance to one’s criticism. My favorite music book is the Third Edition of the Rolling Stone Album Guide. As the reviews were written by just four critics, I have learned to understand the exact difference between five and four-and-a-half stars (or, for that matter, between two-and-a-half and three stars). If you are a great reviewer, the score you give a game helps me place it in context with everything else you have rated. Moreover, your score lets you contribute, via Metacritic and all the other aggregators, to the meta-critique of games on the Net. What exactly is the problem here?