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"That's why guys like Tarn Adams or Vic Davis are a thousand times more interesting. They're making games, not DLC or marketing or anything else. A game, to them, isn't the launching pad. It's the rocket."
Romance isn’t a genre yet.
06 July 2010
Alice has a list of things she’s thinking about at the moment. Number four on that list:
Romance/love, the genre, is spectacularly underexplored.
Alice and I have batted emails about this topic around before. And now, as I look at that sentence, I think I have an issue with just one word in it: I’m genuinely not sure “romance/love” even is a genre yet.
So far, the takes on it I’ve seen are: Japanese dating games, which definitely is a genre and well-established and just doesn’t float my boat in terms of games about romance; the Western, simplified takes on that that you see on the DS and are very much watered-down versions of that trope; and, then, and most-to-my-tastes, the more experiemntal/thoughtful/niche/weird things. For instance: the Radiator mods for Half-Life 2 which (in part) are very much about love (in the context of a long-term relationship/marriage, or IF games such as the lovely Violet.
Games about love in all its forms, not just the fetch-quest that dating is so often reduced to: that’s genuinely interesting. But I don’t want that to be a genre, or a formula to be trotted out. I want it to be a broad topic to be explored, wrapped around everything. After all, if you look at other media, compare the volume of work which broaches the topic of “love” versus the volume that professes to be only about that. I want John Donne, but I don’t need Mills & Boon.
So: as a theme/topic/source-material, people have barely scratched the surface. As a genre: I genuinely don’t believe it’s a genre yet, and there are far more interesting things to be said in this space than are said by J-dating games. I’d rather “romance/love” never became a genre for games.
As far as “spectacularly underexplored” goes: agree entirely. I keep thinking about this too, from time to time.
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And yet: this just explains how, and shirks any understanding of what the presentation of that information might signify, and instead, essentially, says "there was information, so I made an app, and everybody likes a league table, so I added league tables". It's data visualisation as technical endeavour, when, of course, it is far more than that; the moment you start presenting any information, you're making a statement about it, and nowhere does Gilfelt talk about what he feels the app signifies, or whether its editorial stance is appropriate, which makes me a bit sad.
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"Holga D is a digital camera inspired from the extremely popular cult of Holga and other toy cameras of its kind. Even though it's a digital camera, it retains the qualities and simplicity of the original Holga camera and brings back the joy and delayed gratification associated with good old analog photography." I like this not because it's a digital version of a Holga, but what a digital camera might be like if it took the same approach as a Holga. I also really like the reversible top panel.
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"Hybrids are smooth and neat. Interdisciplinary thinking is diplomatic; it thrives in a bucolic university setting. Chimeras, though? Man, chimeras are weird. They’re just a bunch of different things bolted together. They’re abrupt. They’re discontinuous. They’re impolitic. They’re not plausible; you look at a chimera and you go, “yeah right.” And I like that! Chimeras are on the very edge of the recombinatory possible. Actually — they’re over the edge."
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Just in case you needed instructions.
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Composite keys for Rails/ActiveRecord. Really does appear to work, too, which is nice.
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"More primal and immediate than any of the previously mentioned examples, it was couch cushion architecture that established the basic building blocks of our design logic. Unrepresented and ignored for too long in the architectural industry, today’s post pays respect to the wonders of couch cushion architecture. We’ve rounded up a (mostly) admirable collection of projects, taken from a randomly conducted search on the internet. Join us as we take a critical analysis of the architecture, methods and design philosophies of living room furniture re-appropriation." Charming, and generous, too.
Carcassonne: Making Pretty Shapes
18 June 2010
I really like Carcassonne.
I like it because it’s as interesting with two players as with four – just a very different game in each case. I like it because of the various scoring methods it combines: simple play-piece/gain score for roads/abbeys/towns; longer-term risks with potentially higher rewards for farmers. I like that it forces you to juggle a limited number of scoring opportunities.
But I like it best because it’s about making pretty landscapes.
photograph: “Carcassonne: Inns & Cathedrals” by SimDawdler
When The Coding Monkeys (who, a good while ago, wrote the excellent SubEthaEdit), released their iPhone version of Carcassonne, I had to check it out. After all, if they can make a multiplayer text editor as good as SubEthaEdit, they might well be an ideal fit for an asynchronous, multiplayer boardgame.
Turned out I was right: they’ve really put some time and thought into their iP:hone version. The UI is lovely, as simple as possible, but rich where it needs to be: it’s very clear what’s going on and what the options available to you are. There’s also a nice focus on playing asynchronously – multiple games, taking turns as and when – which is only enhanced by the “next table” button that lets you ripple through open games without constantly returning to a menu.
But best of all is this screen:
The tile-layouts of each game are the thumbnail used to represent them.
As the games go on, this screen updates, their icons evolving from single green dots to sprawling landscapes. Of course the layout is the element of the game you place front and centre when it comes to navigation; it’s the most iconic part of any single game, and it works as a lovely aid to recognition.
Nicely done.
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Went in sceptical, but this is a very good/solid presentation: the emphasis on going beyond chucking around the adjective "playful" and actually considering what makes (different kinds of) games work, and what they may/may not be applicable to, is spot-on. And a reminder that I'm behind on my reading, as usual.
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"Hooray! Someone has put John Smith’s short film, The Girl Chewing Gum (1976), on YouTube… The film consists almost entirely of a single continuous shot of Stamford Road in Dalston Junction, a downbeat area of east London… The conceit of the film is that everything that moves or appears within shot – pedestrians, cars, pigeons, even clocks – is following the instructions of an omnipotent director who appears to be behind the camera: ‘Now I want the man with white hair and glasses to cross the road … come on, quickly, look this way … now walk off to the left.’ Pedestrians put cigarettes in their mouths, talk to each other, eat chips, take their glasses off, cast a glance behind them or look at the camera, all at the apparent behest of this offscreen director."
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"I’ve been having a lot of conversations with people recently about how they bookmark stuff. It seems to be on a lot of peoples’ minds as more and more of our reading moves onto screens. So I thought I’d share a few things, and ask for some feedback." James on bookmarking and annotation – something I'm a big fan of.
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"For the past 20 years I’ve had this urge to make a series of games that never were – mainly to suggest lost archives now discovered; to create an emotional resonance akin to that experienced by, say, new-found Beatles demo tapes – but also the idea of recreating contemporary games and themes in an old style to suggest an alternative past and present." Lovely writing, smart ideas, nice little game, but the clarity of thought is the real stand-out here. Another example of why I love Denki so much.
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"…The teachers, by applying the rules and practices of arithmetic to play, prepare their pupils for the tasks of marshalling and leading armies and organizing military expeditions, managing a household too, and altogether form them into persons more useful to themselves and to others, and a great deal wider awake.” Well done, Plato.
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"I suppose the point I was driving to that I let myself get derailed from is that all these trends in western cinema developed over time. It moved in eras of film, from the silent film, to the beginning of the talkies, to the pulp westerns, to their revival with Stagecoach and the classical period of westerns, to the revisionist and spaghetti westerns to the brooding psychological westerns of today. What RDR fails to pick up on is that these are all products not only of the time they were set, but the time they were made." This is a good post on one of my problems with the (generally very good) Red Dead Redemption: rather than trying to be *a* Western, it tries to ape *all* Westerns, and thus is all over the place tonally. Better examples in the full body – worth a read.
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"Thinking about what defines a particular game medium, one doesn’t always consider elements like the player’s physical posture, and where they sit relative to their fellow players. But the experience of playing a digital game with a friend on the iPad proves quite different than that of sitting side-by-side on a couch with Xbox controllers in hand, or sitting alone with a mic strapped to your head. Your sense of posture and presence is part of the game’s medium, as much as the material of the game’s manufacture. Playing Small World gave me a frisson of novel confusion, marrying the player-interactivity of a board game with the board-interactivity of a computer game. I felt the seam that joined them, but it felt right. This was something new, comfortable, and fun." Jason McIntosh on how tablet gaming is similar to the "cocktail" cabinets of old.
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Today's Guardian, from Phil, which is brilliant, for all the reasons explained in his post about it.
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"Although the finished site looks nothing like a newspaper I think it has more in common with newspapers’ best features than most news websites do. The sense of browsing quickly through stories and reading the ones that catch your eye, feels similar." Phil is smart. This is good.
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"I'm excited about digital books for a number of reasons. Their proclivity towards multimedia is not one of them. I’m excited about digital books for their meta potential. The illumination of, in the words of Richard Nash, that commonality between two people who have read the same book." Craig Mod, excellent as ever, on e-books. Whilst he mainly talks about type, his point runs far deeper.
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"Hitotoki stores literary 'sketches' of moments you experience every day. No check-ins. No bullshit badges. We think the most interesting stuff happens in the space between places. Hitotoki is built to help you capture those moments."
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Bookmarked because I'm fed up of watery allusions to this (last seen: Malcolm Gladwell, Freakonomics (which is annoying because it's watery despite Levitt having *worked on the paper*)). $5 for the *actual information* seems far more interesting than any volume of popular economics books.
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Hard to explain, but a must-watch; lovely spatial music sequencer/toy. (And: I miss Offworld :( )
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"The picture clearly shows the path of the sun through the sky over the last six months." Brilliant. (And: so simple!)
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"Philip K. Dick fans from around the world have contributed to this scanned collection of over 650 PKD book covers." Some of these are awesome, from the crazy french covers for VALIS to the German editions of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – retitled as "LSD-Astronauten".