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"And so, day one of my Wii Sports Resort visit sees me unceremoniously carried limp and dazed from its courts, now forever slightly gun-shy about losing myself so completely to its instinctively direct-mapped movements, in lieu of remaining hyper-aware of my immediate surroundings: a victim to and of the virtual." Brandon gets a Wii Sports Resort injury, and this tale passes into legend.
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"…even if they make the rules explicit, it’s not going to help the “power-leveling problem” which is ostensibly the reason for all of this grief. Unless they remove all difficulty options from the system, there will always be easier and harder ways to level. And remember what I said above: users tend to prefer easier content with better rewards. This isn’t limited to user-created content — it’s true for designer-made content, also. But designer-made quests don’t get graded by the players. Player-voted content like this will always gravitate towards easy. And pick-up groups will always be picking the most rewarding content with the least annoyance. And the game devs will keep being unhappy about it." Smart analysis of the problems with City of Heroes' user-generated missions.
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"Games don't separate learning from assessment. They don't say "Learn some stuff, and then later we'll take a test." They're giving you feedback all the time about the learning curve that you're on. So, they're not the only solution to this problem by any means, but they're a part of the solution of getting kids in school to learn not just knowledge as facts, but knowledge as something you produce; and in the modern world you produce it collaboratively." Jim Gee is a smart guy. I need to read more on him.
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"I suggested that, when it comes to the design of embodied interactive stuff, we are struggling with the same issues as game designers. We’re both positioning ourselves (in the words of Eric Zimmerman) as meta-creators of meaning; as designers of spaces in which people discover new things about themselves, the world around them and the people in it."
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"Statisticians’ sex appeal has little to do with their lascivious leanings … and more with the scarcity of their skills. I believe that the folks to whom Hal Varian is referring are not statisticians in the narrow sense, but rather people who possess skills in three key, yet independent areas: statistics, data munging, and data visualization. (In parentheses next to each, I’ve put the salient character trait needed to acquire it)."
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Ron Gilbert plays The Secret Of Monkey Island again, and takes notes. Nicely measured – neither grumpy nor jubilant, it reads like an interesting director's commentary. Good stuff.
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"This week I've killed Steven Spielberg three dozen times. I'm feeling better about the whole thing now, so I'm not going to vent any more steam about his increasingly asinine – and frankly pretty arrogant – repetition of the 'games won't be important until they can make you cry, which up until now they haven't been able to, but don't worry I've come to fix things' line." Which, you know, is good, because it means Margaret can talk about the joy of cubes instead. Or Cube, to give him his proper name. A wonderful One More Go, this week.
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"An obsessive meeting schedule is an investment in the boring, but by defining a specific place for the boring to exist, you’re allowing every other moment to have creative potential. You’re encouraging the random and random is how you’re going to win. Random is how you’re going to discover a path through a problem that one else has found and that starts with breathing deeply." Oh. That's an interesting way of looking at it.
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Alan Taylor on a year of the Big Picture. It's been a successful one, if you ask me, and it's a wonderful site; there are few updates in my RSS reader I look forward to as much as it.
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If you want a wrap-up of the Microsoft keynote, you could do no better than Brandon's wrap-up for Offworld – spot on, nicely detailed, and covering all the facts with great illustration. Whilst their titles – L4D2, Forza 3, etc – are obviously real assets, it's their commitment to the 360 as a platform in the living room that was impressive.
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"I’ve mentioned before that I get the ’so how come you like games’ question pretty regularly, and don’t have a particularly cogent answer, beyond ‘because they’re awesome’ and some stuff about the funny quizzes my brother used to write for me in Basic. But one key component was an amazing pop-up book about computers that made it perfectly clear that they were the most exotic, powerful and fascinating things ever made and that, if at all possible, I’d quite like to grow up inside one." Turns out Margaret owned *that* pop-up book.
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Brandon on a genuine piece of interactive TV programming – Endemol's live 360 version of 1 vs 100, coinciding with the broadcast of the show in Canada. This sort of thing is always a nightmare, so impressive to see it working so well.
A new life awaits you in the Offworld colonies…
08 May 2009
Old news, but worth an announcement: I now appear to be doing some semi-regular writing for Offworld, the Boing-Boing stable’s wonderful gamesblog. As well as making the odd post from time to time, I also seem to be writing a regular feature entitled Something For The Weekend, which each week looks at one game – which you can play right now – that I’m going to be spending some time with over the coming weekend.
So far, it’s covered Outrun Online Arcade and The Chronicles of Riddick; this week takes a turn for the indie with Popcap’s awesome Plants Vs Zombies.
If you’ve not been reading Offworld, do check it out; Brandon – the esteemed editor – is a lovely chap, it’s got some fantastic regular contributors (including comrades Rossignol, Robertson, and Parkin), a great take on the world of games and game culture that really marks it out from most of the other gamesblogs there, and a lot of fine writing. In short: worth your time.
Service announcement over. You may return to the rest of your RSS feeds.
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"That is not to say that videogames need to be more sensationalist, more vulgar, or more crass, but that they need not fear being more transgressive, or more expressive, or more visceral. They need not to shy away from their darker depictions of our fantasies, or become embarrassed when people point out how they dwell on violence and excitement. This, the safe excursion to the gladiatorial arena, is what games do best." Rossignol on Ballard, and jolly good too.
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"I've always marvelled at the idea of a $25m game needing $35m of marketing. Doesn't that feel so wrong and weird? I'd make two $25m games, spend $8m on indies doing crazy new things, and have $2m left over for some nu-style publicity. Or better still, spend $60m across 60 indies full stop." Lots of good things in Alice's compainon to Matt's posts, but especially this; the constant shyness to 'spend less on more stuff' from the games "industry" always befuddles me.
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Lots of comics neatly surmising the plots of various Metal Gears; "Let's Destroy The Shagohod" is pretty spot-on, start to finish, and full of Giant Spoilers, obviously.
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"As I tried to unravel Braid’s interstitial text I realized that solving the puzzles and understanding the text required very similar approaches. Their concealed machinations and thematic ambiguities are teased out using the same mental processes, and are part of the same overarching search for meaning. In a way, I was “reading” everything in the game. It’s not the unification of narrative and gameplay that we’ve come to expect, but it’s a refreshing and effective one." Dan Bruno has an interesting perspective on Braid; not sure I agree with it entirely, but the feelings he describes are certainly familiar.
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So I'm going to be writing the odd thing for Offworld from time to time, and this is my first post, on a nice post from Steve Gaynor about architecutre, and leading players through stories with architecture alone. More to come, pop-pickers.
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Arcade Fire + looking like it's on 16mm + looking like somebody loved it, rather than they just loved CGI = oh wow, this could be quite exciting, even if it ends up being a bit weird.
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"Her mind is a marvel and her future is going to be extraordinary. I will strive to be her Cape Canaveral, and let her carve a streak of light across the world. She will leave me far behind, and I will love her even more for it. For that, and for an infinity of other reasons, and for the wonders she will see and the fearlessness with which she will deal with them, she is my heroine." A beautiful piece from James about his daughter. I failed to do anything for ALD, and not because I wasn't thinking hard on it. I should probably explain why at some point.
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This is very beautiful, especially the 4-colour CGA cave, although Brandon's commentary makes me realise there's a generation of kids who don't know what "CGA" is, or why you'd care about graphics modes.
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"An image a day and an MP3 to go with it, for no obvious reason." And no RSS, so you'll just have to turn up every day. Lovely concept.
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Wonderful, delightful, charming writing from Duncan Fyfe; this, and the eight chapters that follow it, are pretty essential, and they're nice and brief. Speculative fiction about games, culture, and the future. And fandom.
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Gosh, that looks lovely – and bonus points for a preview video that films the iPhone, showing the way fingers work on its surface, rather than just showing the results of interactions.
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"for a while now we’ve been meaning to post some early childhood snapshots of world of goo, to dig deep into our code repository and remember the good ol’ days. the early part of a game’s development is often very enjoyable because things evolve rapidly and there’s a great sense of accomplishment. it’s also a lot of fun to look back at those early days and laugh at what the game use to look and feel like." First in a seven part series, in which 2D Boy walk us through the – playable – origins of World of Goo. Game devs: more like this, please.
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"…it turns out that a GBA and a cart isn’t any more use than a GBA on its own. It’s only when you build a machine out of a GBA and a cart and a me that you’ve got a real Rhythm Tengoku Machine. Bolt those three components together and you’ve built an entirely new organism, an extraordinary creature who can shoot ghosts, dance with monkeys, and climb stars like staircases."
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"You’ll win the game if you’re the only one playing the game at the moment in the world. The game checks over the internet if there are other people playing it at the moment and it’ll kill the game if someone else is playing it. You have to play the game for 4 minutes and 33 seconds." High concept, I'll give it that.
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"Durham University's Dr Shamus Smith, who helped spearhead the project, told BBC News that that while bespoke 3D modelling software was available, modifying a video game was faster, more cost effective, and had better special effects." Quite true. Although: "gamers" tend to treat it as a game, wheras "non-gamers" treat it as a training exercise, and behave accordingly.
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Microsoft on their new MSN Music service, weighed-down by DRM. I don't normally link to stuff about DRM, but frankly, every single response in this is comedy gold.
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"The results from two surveys, based on responses from over 2,500 people who participate in an Internet chat group focused on video games, found that the inclusion of violent content did nothing to enhance players’ enjoyment. What did matter was feeling in control and feeling competent. “Games give autonomy, the freedom to take lots of different directions and approaches,” says Ryan."
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Beautiful.
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"Social media is people. People talk about stuff. The end." Yes.
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You can now use Shoulda macros in RSpec as well as Test::Unit. Thanks, Thoughtbot! Might take a poke at this some time.