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Explorations in fictional geography, seeded from a deck of cards, and methodically produced over many years. A lovely film, too: careful in the way it explains Jerry's map. Brilliant.
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Marvellous. Can't say any more – you need to read this (very) short story – but it's really, really lovely: shivers down the spine, and something heartwarming, all at once. And: set in a slightly magical part of the world.
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"…the insight I had playing Indigo was that map-based games, while non-linear in gameplay, are inflexible in narrative. There’s nothing variable about the story that emerges in the player’s head: it’s authored, split up, and distributed across the game like pennies in a Christmas pudding. All that changes is the pace at which it appears. But in time-based games, everything the player does is story, and so that story is constant flux.
To put this another way:
Map-based games are ludicly non-linear but narratively inflexible.
Time-based games are ludicly linear but narratively flexible.
(Of course, these are spectrums: some games, like Rameses or Photopia are ludicly linear and narratively inflexible, and some, like Mass Effect, at least endeavour to be ludicly non-linear and narratively flexible.)
…
Do readers want to interact, toy and play with fiction, or alter, bend and shape it?" Jon Ingold is smart. -
Really ought to make some of this sometime; I'm a sucker for onion jam/marmalade, ad it's so easy, I have no idea why I haven't tried it before.
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"My daughter was first sued in the womb. It was all very new then. I'd posted ultrasound scans online for friends and family. I didn't know the scans had steganographic thumbprints. A giant electronics company that made ultrasound machines acquired a speculative law firm for many tens of millions of dollars. The new legal division cut a deal with all five Big Socials to dig out contact information for anyone who'd posted pictures of their babies in-utero. It turns out the ultrasounds had no clear rights story; I didn't actually own mine. It sounds stupid now but we didn't know. The first backsuits named millions of people, and the Big Socials just caved, ripped up their privacy policies in exchange for a cut. So five months after I posted the ultrasounds, one month before my daughter was born, we received a letter (back then a paper letter) naming myself, my wife, and one or more unidentified fetal defendants in a suit. We faced, I learned, unspecified penalties for copyright violation and theft of trade secrets, and risked, it was implied, that my daughter would be born bankrupt." This is marvellous
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Marvellous, touching, sad short story from Jonathan Safran Foer, about how families communicate.
Twenty Years of Gnarly Games
30 October 2010
Twenty years ago this month, in a small garage, two young games developers – well established on the shareware and doujin scenes – decided it was time to make some real money, and Gnarly Games was born.
Their first retail title, Bot Out!!, set the tone for early Gnarly: a good, solid game, hiding beneath somewhat puerile “attitude” that has dated all too fast. A sequel soon followed, although its full retail price belied the fact it was little more than an expansion pack.
The success of the Bot Out!! titles brought Gnarly enough success to move onto console. Bottulism!! took Gnarly’s attitude – and trademark exclamation marks – to the Microx SX, though it transport the Bot Out!! mascots to the world of scrolling adventure. Alas, Gnarly’s inexperience showed, and it wasn’t a success. Nor was War of Wars, their attempt at a more sober take on the scrolling adventure.
And so they returned to where they began: the puzzle game. Bot Out!! SX, though a straight port, was a big success with fans of the franchise and console gamers coming to it afresh.
Having finally found success on consoles, Gnarly moved to what would become a second home for them: Intendro’s Game Kid. Puzzle VAMPIRE applied a trend-hopping coat of fantasy horror to Gnarly’s experience in puzzle games, and PUZZLE ROBOT soon followed – a game that would fondly be recalled as an early peak of their skills in the puzzle genre. Their puzzling titles were ideally suited to Nintendro’s handheld – but they were soon to graduate from puzzles to something far more involved.
Ultra Bot was Gnarly’s first action title for the Game Kid, and their first game to break the $1m threshold. Whilst not a massive critical hit, it demonstrated their mastery of the console, and their move into action games continued with Ultra Vampire – a return to their fantasy universe – and a follow-up, Giga Bot.
If there’s a curiosity in the Gnarly catalogue, it is almost certainly their next title. Real Robot X, for the PCC-FQX, was an involved robot sim – something nobody saw coming. With impressive graphics, a highly involved set of controls, and an unforgiving difficulty curve, it was at best a cult hit. Though it now sells for large sums on the collector circuit, it was never a hit at retail, and Gnarly never returned to this console.
They did return to the robot sim, though: Real Robot P ported their PCC-FQX title to the portable with remarkable fidelity, and it became a real hit for them. Gnarly by now were maturing, their early frivolous titles having given way to serious fantasy and mecha games. Real Robot RPG was an expensive experiment in the RPG genre, and only really loved by fans. Internally, it was well-understood as an experimental title, that would pave the way for something much greater.
VampireVerse was the Game Kid’s first half-decent RPG, and despite average review scores was a sales smash. A swift sequel – VampireVerse 2 – married again-excellent sales to a stronger review scores, and still appears on fan-favourite lists to this day. The series even spawned a dungeon-crawler, Vampire Crawl.
Bot Tactics took Gnarly back to their SF universe, and despite strong sales was woefully expensive; so much so that they made an unscheduled, unplanned, and almost incoherent Reversi title – Revampiresi – simply to make payroll. Vampire Hack was, at the very least, a more credible attempt to make a bankable hit.
For Gnarly’s twentieth game, Gnarly made a bold statement by refusing to change its development title upon release. Game #20, as it remained titled on shop shelves, returned to their robot-action roots. Vastly expensive, with graphics and audio that pushed the aging Game Kid to its limits, it was a critical success, but despite strong sales ultimately made a loss. More restraint was displayed in the budgets of Vampire X and its follow-up, Vampire XX, which were highly profitable hits that put the firm back on track.
But it was a jump into a new universe that gave Gnarly its first million seller: Ninja X would be their final Game Kid title, and they went out with a bang: it was both a critical and sales smash, it would turn out to be a critical turning point in their career.
Ninja X gave Gnarly enough clout to move to Sonny’s PlayStatus, but the changeover to new tech nearly ran them dry, and they launched with the solid, if unremarkable Ninjaversi, buried in the educational market. Bot Out 3D – now sans exclamation marks – was a more credible return to form, transporting the popular puzzle title to the third dimension.
It took a while for Gnarly to find their feet in the 32-bit world. Vampire 3D, Megabot 3D, and even the popular UberVamp were all solid, well-liked titles, but acknowledged to be lacking something. It seemed as if the Gnarly of yesteryear had faded with their shift to the home console market.
That perception would be shattered by the wildly ambitious Vampire World – an online RPG in their popular fantasy universe. Singlehandled, it shifted countless PlayStatus Network Adaptors, and brought Gnarly the success they deserved.
They put that success to use in Bastard Cop, a misjudged game that aimed for a “mature” audience and fell somewhat flat. Reasonable sales couldn’t disguise a lacklustre game – and so Gnarly returned to what they knew.
What they knew was robots and vampires; what they didn’t know was that combining the two, in the remarkable Action RPG RoboVampire, would lead them to a 4m-selling hit. This, and shooter Hyper Robot X, propelled them to the major league – a promotion that some would argue was long overdue.
Of course, what wasn’t visible from the surface was the reality of making videogames. Gnarly came close to bankruptcy several times, and frequently resorted to contract work to make ends meet. Despite the success of RoboVampire, they did so again, knowing that the PlayStatus’ time was nearly up, and they would have to find a new home.
A year of contract work, and great investment, brought Gnarly to the Intendro DM. The DM was an obvious move: Gnarly had great success with the Game Kid, and were always more comfortable with handheld titles.
Despite the terrifying expensive of yet another change in tech, Gnarly found success, with Tera Bot DM – a game that poured their knowledge of the 3D action mecha game into a perfectly-formed handheld package. Successful beyond their imagination, it entered critics’ Hall of Fame, and spawned an even more popular sequel, Tera Bot DM 2.
It was that title that brought Gnarly their first success at the annual Game Awards – a fitting way to crown twenty years in the industry. And though it might have at times seemed like they would not survive, survive they did.
The only clue that remains to Gnarly’s age is, in fact, right in front of you: their name. In 19XX, it was an unironic attempt at cool from renegade nineteen-year-olds, desperate to make a mark. Now, despite wild success and changing trends, they hold onto that name: proud of where they are, unashamed of where they came from. That tells you all you need to know: at the heart of Gnarly Games, deeper than their love of giant mecha and bloodthirsty vampires, lies nothing less than great integrity.
Gnarly Games aren’t real, but the title they were founded in – Game Dev Story – very much is. It’s nothing more than a spreadsheet, really, but it’s an engaging and affecting spreadsheet, and it allows you to tell stories like this. In a subequent post – coming soon, I hope – I’ll explain what I like most about the game. For now, you’ll have to make do with pastiche journalism, generated from numbers on a screen.
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"…it’s a bit disingenuous to claim, as [World War Z]’s dust jacket does, that Brooks does for zombies what Studs Terkel did for World War II. Yes, his choice of narrative frame refreshes a genre that had already entered its baroque phase. But World War Z never quite manages the same level of moral pique as The Good War and Warday; it is so constrained by its undead subject matter that it can only gesture at modern-day relevance before falling back on the same shopworn themes. Although it has more brains than the average zombie story, it still doesn’t have much of a heart." Really good piece on oral histories, real and fictional. And: I now want to read Warday, if I can find a copy.
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"…what Civilization provides is a story with a beginning, middle, and end, which is three times more than what you probably started with. If you play the game in particularly interesting way, then you can be rewarded with a delightful, surprising experience that you can’t help but weave into a story, inventing characters and lovers and intrigues all round. This story might tug at you so insistently that you begin to jot down notes and timelines, writing diary entries and newspaper reports of battles. Eventually, you might join all those pieces up, rewrite them, throw it all away, and rewrite it again – and then you might call yourself a storyteller." And this is one of the kinds of storytelling that games are best at: collaborative tales weaved between ruleset and player, between man and machine.
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Wow. One to return to: a super-comprehensive look at Pac-Man, including its AI routines and collision detection.
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"…In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography." Finally, found the Borges quotation about a map the size of the world.
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"Videogames are systems, not themes, but dress a system in the right theme and you can catch the attention of someone who would not otherwise be interested. So it is for my father, who, in these awkwardly rendered moments, catches a glimpse of what I'd been seeing my entire childhood." Lovely, lovely piece of writing from Simon.
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Fanfic, if you like, about App Store products. Lovely.
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"What this magazine requires," he said, "is red-blooded, one-hundred-per-cent dynamic stuff, palpitating with warm human interest and containing a strong, poignant love-motive." "That," we replied, "is us all over, Mabel." "What I need at the moment, however, is a golf story." "By a singular coincidence, ours is a golf story." Lovely short Wodehouse about the coming of Gowf to a far-off land.
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"Perhaps we should be turning up at the cinema expecting more stories about resilience, or reports from the future where the problems are what to do with limitless energy, or Japanese consciousness multipliers, rather than dustbowls and gasmask hipsters. Authors: is that nihilism really what you want to leave behind? Your silhouette a stoop, rather than a hurrah?" Jim, quite rightly, likes his "shiny retro shit".