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"Obama Says: Yes We Can is a Simon Says game based on Barack Obama's New Hampshire Primary speech, as later turned into song by will.i.am. Watch the game create a pattern of button and direction presses, and repeat that pattern correctly to score! The more you get correct, the harder the patterns become – can you keep up?" Oh blimey.
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Lots of good stuff in here I didn't know about, all for your DS, and all not illegal. Hurrah for homebrew.
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"With DS Reader you can read any e-book (or text file) on your DS. It even has a great little bookmarking function to keep track of your progress." Ooh.
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"Game Trivia Catechism is a multiple-choice trivia game, testing your knowledge of video gaming. It can be played as straight trivia, or as part of a story that follows Al and Sally as they compete in the King of Game Trivia Tournament." Looks awesome.
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"Current mass-market games present simulations of incredible fidelity. Many of these titles also push genre boundaries and offer new mechanics to players. The problem, argues Ubisoft’s Patrick Redding (FAR CRY 2), is that these two developments are disconnected. Game output appears information-rich, but how much of that information can the player actually use to play better, and how much of it is just there to be spectacular or cinematic?" I would pretty much kill to see this. Gah.
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For those of you who might not be aware of its size, James has put the size of Gaza in context through comparing it to maps of other cities. Simple, effective communication.
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Lots of (large) images; detailed, wonderful. A post to go back to and pore over
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"I must admit that I would have loved to get this richness of backstory into the actual game itself, but the longer pipeline of game asset development and integration made that impossible." Clint Hocking explaining the background behind the fictional blog for Far Cry 2.
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The blog of Reuben Oluwagembi, the fictional journalist you meet in Far Cry 2.
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"A few weeks ago we released our shapefiles via the API, and while most people were excited, some folks were a bit confused about what it all meant. Which is why Tom Taylor’s beautiful Boundaries application is so exciting. It helps you visualize the Flickr community’s twisty changing complex understanding of place." Tom is on code.flickr.com! Hurrah!
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"Renaissance ‘lace books’ have much to offer the modern digital designer, who also faces the challenge of portraying clear and replicable images in a constrained environment." A brief history of pixelfonts.
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"Obama's FCC transition co-chair is a WoW player, and has played in two different endgame guilds, including Joi Ito's famous We Know guild." This is exactly the kind of thing I was banging on about at Gamecity. Presentation online soon!
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"We're still going through the stats, but at the time of writing there were almost 170,000 messages on the Strictly [Come Dancing] board." Holy hell. Poor moderators. (And: for such an uninteresting story, as well!)
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"If the Barack Obama presidency fails to unite us as a country, I'm going to hold out for a fast-zombie apocalypse." Iroquois on co-op, and the way Left 4 Dead sees online co-op – and the bad behaviour of players online – as design problems to solve, rather than to ignore.
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"Who designs a character for gamers to never go near? Who spends the time to create the most terrifying creature imaginable, and doesn’t impose it on players? Well, clearly Valve. The temptation to have her be aggravated from great distances, to force her to attack when encountered, must have been there. But then she’d have lost her power. Her power comes from just sitting there. It’s that benign, ragged, vulnerable form. It’s the combination of singing and crying. Oh God, the singing *and* crying." John Walker examines the horror of Left 4 Dead's Witch. A little over-written perhaps, but he totally nails the fear the character instills, and the way you always notice her a split-second too late.
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Mitch just isn't inspired by user-generated content, no matter how charming a core game might be. The comments thread on this one is really good.
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"The next generation on from them – e.g. Jonathan Smith, Doug Church and of course Greg Costikyan (from whose classic essay on developing such a critical language the title of this post is lifted) are always eloquent, passionate and insightful speakers and spokespeople for their medium. Unlike Molyneux." Not too annoyed I missed this, given Matt's comments.
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"…the players are there for their character, not for your story. Your story is just the path for their characters, the medium through which they can play their persona. Once the GM realizes this, they should then realize that respecting the player and the character is paramount to their story. And it’s a surprisingly easy skill to master, because it really is as simple as recognizing what the players and characters want, what they came to do and then give it to them."
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"PROBLEM: There is no way I can justify to myself spending that much money on plastic cows. Really, there is no way. WIN-WIN: I could however justify giving that same amount of money, or more, to a worthwhile charity. That would be an easy thing." Matt wants cows, in return for giving money to charity.
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Oh wow; it's like a developer network for LittleBigPlanet. Smashing.
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"On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more…" Lovely.
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'"With respect to the franchises that don’t have the potential to be exploited every year across every platform, with clear sequel potential that can meet our objectives of, over time, becoming $100 million-plus franchises, that’s a strategy that has worked very well for us," Kotick said.' Kotick is very serious about his use of the word 'exploit'.
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""The ability to offer these songs on a subscription basis may very well result in the newest subscription opportunity in our portfolio," he said." Kotick wants you to pay Activision to subscribe to UGC. Oh dear.
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Beautiful.
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"As we move into a world in which we can manufacture things as cheaply as we print them, the skills that tinkerers develop– not just their ability to play with stuff, or to use particular tools, but to share their ideas and improve on the ideas of others– will be huge." Lots of good reflections from "Tinkering As A Mode Of Knowledge".
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Visualising the heights of people's towers by importing their savegame. Lovely.
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"By understanding the way bees respond to all the different aspects of the natural world, the beekeeper is able to recover his own relationship to the natural world through bees."
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"Every time Bobby Kotick opens his mouth, I see a giant cow with "GUITAR HERO" branded on its side, and Bobby Kotick is squeezing two teats as fast as he can."
Obama for America, the MMO
07 October 2008
Almost everybody’s linked to the Obama ’08 Official iPhone Application by now. With just cause, as well; it’s a nifty, attractive piece of crowdsourced software development that focuses on a single task that’s well suited to mobile – canvassing – and provides the amateur campaigner with the tools to canvas more effectively.
Skimming over the official page, though, I couldn’t help but notice this in the list of features:
See nationwide Obama ’08 Call Friends totals and find out how your call totals compare to leading callers.
So whilst you’re canvassing your friends and recording just how many of them are going to vote for Barack in November, you can also compare yourself to how everybody else using the app is doing. In one click, you’ve got a massively multiplayer high score chart – and of course, you’re going to want to beat everybody else on there, so you go off to canvas some more.
Obama for America just launched an MMO, and nobody noticed.