Memrrtiks, Suashem is as odd as its name. Here’s the author’s “description” of the game:

A would have improduct desting quality, teamwork, cycle stratisfacticed the focused on increased by world-class leaderson that work environment.

Just in case that wasn’t clear, it’s sort of a side-scroller in which you shoot and dodge sprites. To start, press the space bar. It’s free.

4 Comments »

Oscar Villalon has been inspired by Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter to use the video games he’s played as “digital Madeleines” to remind him of the phases of his life.

Unfortunately, I’ve been playing the same game for the past few decades. All that’s changed are the targets — Nazis, mutant space creatures, zombies — and the quality of the graphics. This is not a criticism of the games, which I love. It is a rather sad statement about my life.

(Thanks to Evelyn Walsh for the pointer.)

1 Comment »

The world is less curious, reasonable, fun and awesome now that Martin Gardner has died.

The Nature of Things / Martin Gardner from Wagner Brenner on Vimeo.

2 Comments »

I don’t know why I’m being sent issues of Game Developer magazine, but I’m vastly enjoying them. It’s fun seeing how people so deeply embedded in their craft talk amongst themselves, eve3n though much of it is over my head.

It’s not all tech talk, though. There are thoughtful reflections on the meaning and role of games. For example, in the March issue, Soren Johnson has part 2 of an essay that argues that “a game’s meaning springs from its rules, and not necessarily from its theme.” In fact, he says, the two can be in conflict, which is not a good thing. So, Left4Dead’s theme is zombie survival, but it’s actually about cooperation. Grand Theft Auto’s theme is “crime and urban chaos, but the game is actually about freedom and consequence.” (The magazine charges for online access, but you can read a report of Soren’s talk on this topic here.)

In the same issue, there’s an editorial by Brandon Sheffield called “Making Decisions Matter in Morality-Oriented Games.” (You can read it here.) After observing that in Bioshock, although you make a moral choice about harvesting or helping “little sisters,” the choice turns out to have very little effect on the game. But, he also writes:

I believe if one is going to present choices or issues in games as ethical, those choices have to matter in the game world. But I get antsy when games present me with choices that clearly open one door while closing another, as I want to see all of the game’s content, since I’m unlikely to go through it multiple times.

Well, you can’t have your little sisters and eat them, too. If the moral choice is going to affect the game, then you necessarily won’t see all the game’s content.

This is more of a problem with games that are pathways through a narrative. In an open-ended online multiplayer game like Left4Dead, moral choices affect games constantly, and in far more complex ways. For example, on the normal difficulty setting, friendly fire incidents don’t hurt your teammates too much, but on advanced, you can pretty easily kill a teammate by accident if your aim isn’t good. (Um, not that I’ve ever done so.) If you kill your teammates on purpose, you’ll get kicked out of the game; that’s not a choice within the rules so much as an infraction of the rules. But, even if you’re trying to be a good teammate, you will have to decide whether it’s worth the risk of hurting a teammate in order to rescue another teammate under attack next to her/him. Likewise, you’ll have to decide whether to risk your own health by going back for a teammate under attack. These are not the sorts of examples we normally give when talking about moral questions, but they are quite like the moral questions we generally have to face in the world — balancing risk, skill, and probability while trying to accomplish an aim we are convinced is right. That is, they are instrumental moral questions, not questions of ends. Moral questions are unavoidable in multiplayer games because multiplayer games are by definition social, and all social interactions have a moral dimension.

5 Comments »

Roger Ebert has a thoughtful an respectful response to a TED Talk by Kellee Santiago, in which she says that video games already are art.

Besides a general annoyance that there already is a body of thought about what constitutes art and maybe it’d be helpful not to have to start over every time we talk about these things (insert an old man’s sigh here), I feel like we’re in definitional hell: If it looks like art, Ebert will say it’s not a game, and if it looks like a game, Ebert will say it’s not art. What’s the point?

Well, maybe the point is what Ebert asks towards the end: “Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art?” Good question. One answer is that they want to be taken more seriously than they are.What they’re doing aren’t merely games. Some are beautiful. Some are funny. Some are occasionally morally challenging. Some are well-told tales. Some are astonishingly clever. That doesn’t make them art, but, you know, we went to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona last week, and there are galleries full of art that don’t look a lot like art either.

And, unlike Ebert, I leave the door fully open for games to be art. Mass Effect 2 may not be great art, but it’s better than a lot of pretty good TV shows I’ve watched. The Path has a numinous quality. Bioshock had a narrative twist that Hitchcock would have liked. Why can’t they be art? Unless, of course, you say that games always have to be won or lost (they don’t — Wittgenstein covered this pretty well) and that art can only happen when you’re pursuing artistic experience in itself (it doesn’t).

In fact, I’d pass Ebert’s question back at him: Why is he, a film critic, so intensely concerned that games not be defined as art? The answer is, I’d guess, that he sees that games are becoming aesthetically competitive with movies.

Art happens in any form of human sematic construction that is developed long enough. Of course art can happen in video games. It’s not the medium or the rhetorical form that holds them back, but the commercial constraints.

28 Comments »

The title of this post is the subtitle of an article in Game Developer (March 2010) by Matthew S. Burns about the production methods used by various leading game developers. (I have no idea why I’ve started receiving copies of this magazine for software engineers in the video game industry, which I’m enjoying despite — because — it’s over my head.) According to the article, Valve — the source of some of the greatest games ever, including Half-life, Portal, and Left4Dead — “works in a cooperative, adaptable way that is difficult to explain to people who are used to the top-down, hierarchical management at most other large game developers.” Valve trusts its employees to make good decisions, but it is not a free-for-all. Decisions are made in consultation with others (“relevant parties”) because, as Erik Johnson says, “…we know you’re going to be wrong more often than if you made decisions together.” In addition, what Matthew calls “a kind of decision market” develops because people who design a system also build it, so you “‘vote’ by spending time on the features most important” to you. Vote with your code.

Valve also believes in making incremental decisions. Week by week. But what does that do to long-term planning? Robin Walker says that one of the ways she (he?) judges how far they are from shipping by “how may pages of notes I’m taking from each session.” That means Valve “can’t plan more than three months out,” but planning out further than that increases the chances of being wrong.

Interesting approach. Interesting article. Great games.

12 Comments »

More media for us Brad Sucks fanboys ‘n’ fangirls ! Next: Brad Sucks waffle irons! Can’t wait!

Be the first to comment »

Nicole Lazzaro, Amy Jo Kim, Susan Wu are on a panel about games ‘n’ fun, especially when it comes to people being social. (What follows are random ideas that struck me as interesting for whatever reason. It’s wildly incomplete, and lacks all of the connective tissue. But this was a terrific panel that generated a fascinating discussion.)

Nicole mentions that she doesn’t like the term “social capital.” Instead, she considers the emotions, and prefers to think of it in terms of social fabric and bonds.

Amy Jo says that almost any event can become fun if you draw a “magic circle” that announces that you are now in a play space.

Susan: Her company is trying to build games that blur the boundary between games and your social network. Your game’s avatar is directly linked to your FB and Twitter persona. Our games are more like Alternate Reality Games. E.g., Foursquare [a "game" I totally don't get]: Your game character is you and is sent on mission. Most are set in the real world. The whole world is your “magic circle.”

Amy Jo: Live Action Role Playing: LARPing is playing a game in the real world. You view your entire world as your playground. “There’s no reason why I couldn’t turn a meeting in my boss into a game and come out with points.”

Q: [me] What do points in a game like FourSquare signify to the players?

It gives us something to talk about. And becoming a mayor of a place is a competitive activity. Plus, by gaining points you put yourself on your friends’ maps.

Amy Jo: The metagame is a reward and feed back system on top of another system to drive behavior. Points make it feel like a game. But it’s not a game until there are rewards and incentives.

Nicole: Twitter followers is a type of points. eBay reputation levels are points. [But those points have meaning outside the "game," and they are not games. So what makes something into a game?]

Q: The line between fun and addiction?

Nicole: Addiction = repetitive behavior with intermittent rewards. Farmville, etc., are about social interactions and nurturing. They generate emotions between friends.

AmyJo: Farmville players generally wouldn’t classify themselves as gamers. But that definition is changing radical.

Susan: It can be difficult to balance an iterative approach to game design and keeping players unfrustrated.

Amy Jo: You need to do that within a vision. “If you totally respond to what people want, you’ll get gambling and porn.” PopCap throws away 90% of the games they develop. They do very little spec’ing. You build a draft, you test on office mates, on your family. Prototype and test and repeat. If it’s not fun, they throw it out.

Nicole: It’s usually best to test person to person, watching players play, looking at the expressions on their faces so you can see the emotion…

Q: [kevinw] Are there any areas of life that shouldn’t be fun?

Susan: Every single thing should be fun. We should always look to find ways to make things more engaging.

Charles Hudson (the moderator): A friend says Mint.com is fun. Who would think managing your money is fun?

Q: Is Google fun?

Susan: It gives you a sense of mastery.

Nicole: And they play with their logo, etc.

Q: [jeanne logozzo] Fun takes on different meaning depending on your context.

Q: [peter merholz] This is a cultural change in which we’re providing more carrot than stick.

Amy Jo: A generation has grown up with computer games. The notion of leveling up and earning badges is second nature. The changes on the Net — more pervasive broadband, more people online — now there’s both familiarity and the ability to deliver the basics of game mechanics.

[Audience] The WWII generation had a different sense. You didn’t do things because it was fun.

Peterme: Do we have a generation that isn’t motivated by intrinsic rewards?

[audience] Not everything in life is fun or should be fun.

Susan: Everything should be fun.

[audience] Not dying in a war.

Nicole: Not fun, but engaged.

Amy Jo: Some things are not fun. I just cared for my mother dying.

[me] Going back to Peter’s point about the meta-meaning of the infusion of games/fun into everything. We’ve gone in this discussion from games to fun to engagement. Climbing rocks is fun. The fun is intrinsic to the climbing. It becomes a game when points are added, because points are an extrinsic reward. So, are we actually creating less engagement by providing extrinsic rewards for so much more of life?

Amy Jo: I’m a parent and I worry about motivating through extrinsic rewards. The intrinsic fun can be lost. Extrinsic rewards can (but not necessarily) drive out the intrinsic rewards and the fun.

Susan: And keep in mind that we’re only talking within western culture. Fun is very subjective. Our job as game designers is to provide ways for people to find the fun they want.

7 Comments »

One side of effect of writing games for a lower common denominator platform is that it can force art in where effects lazily dominate. For example.

[Tags: games ]

1 Comment »

My nephew Joel Weinberger wonders why computer games we loved when they were new, ten or so years later aren’t as much fun to play. If Doom was a great game in 1993, why isn’t it still a great game? (To refresh your memory, you can play the first level of Doom online here.)

It seems to me that it’s particularly games that simulate the spatial world that suffer from this sort of aging. I find it remarkable and a little embarrassing that Doom had me crouching in my chair in fear, and got startle reactions out of me. Now my body hardly responds to it at all, although it’s still pretty much fun to play through. It seems that when Doom came out, it was so much better than the preceding run-and-gun games that my body treated it as if it were one step away from real. Contemporary games (say, the latest F.E.A.R., or Bioshock, or Dead Space) are orders of magnitude more photorealistic, but they don’t get me crouching any lower or startling any higher. It’s as if the brain has a Constant of Realism that invests the current highest-end simulation with the same maximal amount of attachment.

[Tags: games computer_games ]

13 Comments »