Categories
Games Politics/Government

Truth About Violent Youth and Video Games

Maybe I am late to the party, but I just now read the article that talks about the decline of violence in recent years: The Truth About Violent Youth and Video Games

First off, I have absolute proof that video games are not the cause of this epidemic of youth violence in America. No, really, I do. Ready?

There is no epidemic of youth violence in America.

It shows that data from the FBI itself indicates a decrease in youth violence over the past few years. If GTA 3 and other violent video games are supposedly training kids to kill, wouldn’t the FBI have data that shows an increase instead?

But don’t confuse the politicians and media with the facts. Their minds are apparently made up.

Categories
Geek / Technical

Graphical Tip for X

While I think KDE and Gnome are great, I’ve grown accustomed to Fluxbox. It’s a lightweight window manager and does all I need it to do. One day I plan to use FVWM because it is so configurable, but Fluxbox is great for now.

I also use Debian. Debian has added a common menu for each desktop environment and window manager. While it is normally very nice, it doesn’t please everyone all the time, and there is one thing I can specifically complain about:

Now, xsetroot is a command line tool. It is, according to the man page, a “root window parameter setting utility for X”. Normally people use it to set the background to an image. KDE and Gnome and other window managers have simple, GUI-based ways to let you do so, but for people who prefer config files and scripts, xsetroot is the command you use. Of course, it needs arguments to be useful.

So what happens when you run xsetroot without any parameters? It resets your background and your mouse cursor to the default X settings. Essentially, it means your mouse is now a cross instead of an arrow and your background is made up of an annoying-to-the-eye pattern. So when you click on that menu entry, you end up with an ugly background and mouse cursor. Why would they put that entry in there?!

Luckily, Fluxbox lets you change the style from the main menu, so the background could revert back to what I had before, but the mouse cursor stayed the same. I didn’t want to have to restart the X server just to get a good mouse cursor back, so I decided it was finally time for me to learn how to change it manually.

After some IRC inqueries, man page requests, and some Googling, I found Customizing X Windows Tips. At one point, it mentions the various standard mouse cursors you can use. The command to use is xsetroot -cursor_name <cursorname> where cursorname can be one of entries in /usr/X11R6/include/X11/cursorfont.h
Some examples:

  • draped_box
  • hand1
  • hand2
  • iron_cross
  • left_ptr
  • plus
  • top_left_arrow
  • watch

Well, now that I know about it, it is pretty easy, but it isn’t very obvious to someone who doesn’t know. KDE and Gnome users are probably laughing at me as their mouse cursors are handled by the desktop environment, and Windows and Mac users might be thinking that using Gnu/Linux is tougher than it really is, but hey, I now know something that I didn’t know before. My computer is that much less mysterious. Some people might prefer to just get things done without knowing how the computer works, but I am a curious person. Before, I was always afraid of accidentally running xsetroot from the menu and not being able to recover. Now, I can feel comfort knowing that if something does go wrong, I can fix it, and I also know a lot more about the issue to make things better for me if I want. I am planning on writing a GUI to pick a mouse cursor for people who might not want to know about how things work and so don’t care to figure out how to fix it. I imagine that one might already exist for X11, but I haven’t seen it yet.

Categories
Games Geek / Technical

Machinima

The Escapist’s Casual Friday for issue #4 featured the article Machinima by JR Sutich. It started out alright. It talked about how cool some video game movies, like Red vs Blue, can be. It also talks about how much poor quality work is out there that passes as Machinima but is really nothing more than some kid trying to show off how skillful he is at a game.

Sutich talks about how the issue of copyright infringement hasn’t come up very often for these videos. If not for the games themselves, why not for the popular music that gets featured? Especially since MTV has decided to play machinima music videos, it would make sense that the RIAA might decide that unauthorized machinima should be stopped to protect “creative artists”.

And then Sutich says that it would be a good development! While I understand the idea that there is copyrighted work that should be protected and I understand that strict enforcement of copyright would get rid of a lot of the crap out there, I also think that if the only people who can make machinima are the people who are given approval by the game companies, it would stifle creativity rather than promote it. He says, “often the best way to get something legitimized is to have it come under such intense scrutiny that it becomes regulated.” So now machinima isn’t legitimate? Microsoft has embraced Red vs Blue, and EA clearly must approve of Rooster Teeth’s Sims 2-based series The Strangerhood.

People make some pretty good quality machinima out there. It isn’t always easy to find, but it is one of those things that makes the Internet so cool. If people become afraid to make it for fear of copyright infringement lawsuits, there will only be that many less people making it. Maybe the RIAA, MPAA, and other organizations would prefer it to be as controlled as possible, but I know I don’t.

Categories
General

Brain Games

Blow Your Own Mind talks about ways to give your brain a surprise to keep it on its toes. It isn’t enough to do things every day that require good thinking. You need to do different things once in awhile.

Some examples are:

  • Enter your house/apartment with your eyes closed. You can use tactile feedback to find your keys and open your door and follow your nose to the kitchen.
  • Take a different route to work.
  • Shop at a different market than you usually do.
  • Turn pictures and clocks upside-down.
  • Brush your teeth with your non-dominant hand.

Basically, when you find yourself comfortable with a pattern, do something jarringly different! I try to read a lot, so I could read an entire book or magazine upside-down or sideways. I could walk backwards while getting ready for work one day (I guess I’d have to be extra careful with the stairs). Maybe one day I might try to turn my computer monitor upside down and try to work at it. Basically, if I can use my senses in novel ways, my brain will get a workout.

At work I have a few motivational words and phrases posted up at my desk, but after awhile they lose their novelty. So I turned them upside-down or at a 45 degree angle. Now my eye is forced to stop and interpret what I am seeing. Some people I know are participating in National Novel Writing Month (thanks, Cableshaft!), which is a huge change for people who don’t write much. Simple but jarring changes like these can help keep your brain alive.

Categories
Personal Development

Saying No is Saying Yes to a Different Question

In the past couple of years, I’ve learned a lot about personal productivity. The value of my time, the importance of clarity, and the usefulness of having goals are a few things that have had a profound impact on my life. Along the way, I’ve learned a few practical tips. For instance, if the phone is ringing and I’m in the middle of something, I’ll now let it ring. I’ll check my messages when I am finished with whatever I am doing. Another example is placing reminders for your goals in a place that allows you to most effectively accomplish those goals. These are simple things to do that make a big impact, and sometimes it is good to be reminded of them.

Steve Pavlina’s Saying No reminds me that sometimes you have to say “No” in order to get things done. It’s easy to fall into the trap of wanting to please everyone. People invite you out to a movie, your boss wants you to work late, and your girlfriend wants to go on a date. Meanwhile, you have a list of projects that you were hoping to put some dents in. You can’t do it all, so you have to realize that someone has to be told “No”. Otherwise, how can you say “Yes” to every demand on your time?

That’s the power of the word “No”. It lets you say “Yes” to something else. It is very powerful and yet very simple. In order to accomplish things, you sometimes have to decline to do other things. Another way to look at it is the idea that to make the decision to do something, you necessarily had to decide to NOT do something else. If I decide to go on a date with my girlfriend, I necessarily had to decide not to work on a game review. Obviously there are times where it isn’t black and white. We could go on a double date with some of my friends, killing two birds with one stone. But the point is that something has to be refused in order for something else to be accepted.

Knowing when to say “No” to an action is just knowing what action would be a better use of your time. You need to be consciously aware of what these important actions are because otherwise your life will be dictated by other people’s demands, not your own. If I just have a vague notion that I want to work on my game project one weekend, it can be easy to accept a date on Friday night or an outing on Saturday morning. Eventually I can find that my entire weekend has been filled with all sorts of obligations while my own vague plans just don’t happen. They can’t happen unless I explicitly and consciously say “Yes” to them, which means I have to say “No” to other demands and requests.

Categories
Game Development

Oracle’s Eye Planning

I’ve been working on the design of Oracle’s Eye and have been trying to do a high level breakdown. I’ve also tried to work with the smallest subset of ideas that would make the game functional.

I’ve identified the following basic entites:

  • Ball
  • Player
  • Exit
  • Walls

I have more details on what I need for each entity, such as functions, but I will likely post them at a later time.

While I want other things in the game, such as pipes and warps, those aren’t strictly necessary to make the game. They may be necessary to make the game fun, but to make the game work at the simplest level I just need those entities listed above. I don’t know exactly how long it will take me to try to make this game, so if I work on a smaller subset I know I can finish it. If it turns out that it was too easy and I was able to accomplish it in less time, I can always add to the game later. Obviously I can’t change the gameplay terribly at that point, but I can add small things. If anything, it should give me more experience when planning schedules.

My plan is kind of hard to create. These days I find myself doing something almost every night, and my nights that are free aren’t consistent from one week to the next. I can’t just make a daily schedule. I can make weekly goals, however. No matter what, I always have some day available, so I can just make sure that I know what to work on that day. By Saturday, I should have met the goals for that week. And since I know I won’t have more than one evening to work on the game per week, I need to limit the number of things I want to try to implement.

So here’s my plan:

  • By August 6:
    • Should be able to move player about room in four directions.
    • Should have room take an arbitrary size according to input (10×10, 12×9, etc).
  • By August 13:
    • Should be able to kick ball across room.
    • Should be able to end level by getting ball in exit.
    • Ball should stop when hitting wall.

Technically the above is all I need to do to make the game basically work. It doesn’t sound too fun, and with only two weeks it probably won’t look great either. So the rest of the month:

  • By August 20:
    • Can load a level/map from a file.
    • Create banked walls to redirect ball.
  • By August 27:
    • Implement pipes to redirect ball and to move around when pushed upon by player.
    • Implement warps to move ball from one to another.
    • Create two different levels.
  • By August 31 or September 3rd:
    • Add new object, such as a grinder or pit.
    • Add as many levels as I can.

I think the above plan is ambitious enough. There are obviously a lot of details missing, but since I know that the game will evolve as I make it, I don’t think I will have too many problems.

Famous last words. B-)

Categories
Game Design Games

Power of Myth in Video Games

Awhile back, Gamasutra had an article on the Hero’s Journey that I’ve already touched on. More recently there was an article on story in games. Now, I am reading The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers to help in understanding game development and design. The introduction already had some great points about the existence of myth and ritual in modern society, and even touched on Campbell’s discussion about Luke Skywalker as the typical Hero.

I was thinking about how the Hero’s Journey and myth in general would apply in game development. I didn’t want to focus on how to write a good story for a game so much as how to make the game itself better. When reading the passage about the Hero above, I thought about my experience playing Darwinia by Introversion Software. Campbell mentions that the journey doesn’t end for the hero with access to heaven or escape from suffering. It ends when the hero changes or finds a way to serve others. In Darwinia, I thought that the game seemed to reflect this idea. When you start to play, you are there trying to fix what went wrong in the world. By the end, however, you find that your job has changed. Your role is now to help the Darwinians fight for themselves. You can’t just blast your way through the level. You need to help get the Darwinians to take control of the different areas.

And doing so is, I think, much more emotional. Their failures are your failures. You win only when they win. If the game hadn’t made the Darwinians such an important aspect of the gameplay, they probably would have been seen as annoying and in the way, like some AI sidekicks in FPS games have historically been. As it was, they played an important part of the game. They were the Others that you were supposed to serve. They learn and grow as you progress through the game. They aren’t just mindless NPC characters in a game at this point. They’ve become characters you actually care about.

I have no idea if Introversion consciously designed the gameplay around the Hero’s Journey. I may also be full of it or overanalyzing the game. Still, I think that by making use of motifs and ideas from myths, good game experiences can result. There are a number of rituals that happen in real life that people don’t relate to myths. After all, the word “myth” usually makes people think about Greek gods, so thinking of funeral or wedding services as just extensions of modern day myths is difficult. Still, that’s what made Campbell so important. He was able to relate myths to modern life. So I don’t think it would be a stretch to think that consciously working aspects of myths into game play can serve to make better game experiences for the player.

Darwinia could have just been a game where you progressed from one area to the next blasting viruses. Instead, it centered around the Darwinians and their destroyed world. Your role is not diminished. On the contrary, your role as the Hero is made all the more real to you when you know that your actions have an effect on the inhabitants of the world. You don’t just think of it as a game. You’re thinking, “They’re counting on me!”

And there are countless examples of games that evoke similar emotions when playing. Original War by Altar Interactive is a real time strategy game that concentrates on the people involved. You don’t just churn out infrantry whenever you want. If you have 10 people at your base, that is all you have to work with. There is no way to “build soldiers” the way you can build tanks. Human resources is important. When one of your people gets killed, it hurts a lot for practical reasons. That’s one less gun firing, or one less tank maneuvering, or one less mechanic to help build machines faster. But it also feels emotional. You don’t just lose Solider #42. You lose Joan, or Cpl. Frank Forsythe, or 2nd Lt. Lucy Donaldson. They won’t come back later in the game. What’s more emotional than knowing that your leadership decisions resulted in lost lives? Or saving them all?

I’d love to hear any ideas or comments from other game developers. How important a role does a specific myth play in your games? What general ideas from myths do you try to keep in mind?

Categories
Game Development Games Geek / Technical

I Knew Something Was Wrong With Wind Waker!

I love the Zelda series, like most people. I even liked Zelda II: The Adventures of Link, but it could be because I bought the game with my own money back when I was too young to get a job.

So when I played Wind Waker for the Gamecube, I was a bit put off. After all, I liked Ocarina of Time and expected that the Gamecube version would be very similar. And I’m not complaining about the graphics like a lot of people did when it was first revealed. In fact, I think they look great.

I’m complaining because things aren’t as obvious as I think they should be. Now, I’ve played the original, The Legend of Zelda for the NES, and I remember being confused as to where I was expected to go. I only knew about things because friends of mine had already been there. I played a significant portion of the game on my own, but the experience was kind of ruined for me. And the game never told you where to go really (or if it did, I was too young to understand it), so it was entirely possible to discover the entrance to Level 4 before finding Level 2. But I played through A Link to the Past for the SNES and Link’s Awakening for Game Boy and loved them. Ocarina of Time for the N64 was also an incredibly great experience for me. Everything flowed in these games. I never felt like something was missing or that I was fighting against the game’s programming.

So what happened with Wind Waker? Don’t get me wrong. I think it is fun to play…most of the time. Fighting is incredibly fun, and the puzzles are a staple in Zelda games. But as I go through the game, I periodically find parts of the game that do not seem well done or polished up.

For instance, after you manage to destroy the boulder and allow the spring to flow, you can swim across to the other side. What you see is the entrance to a cavern, but there is lava preventing you from going inside. I see that there are some Bomb Flowers, so I think that maybe I have to throw them at the statues. So I tried. I threw the bombs at the statues. I threw them into the walls. I threw them into the lava. I tried to throw them across the lava. Nothing. And after some time, I decided to give up and stop playing that day.

When I came back to it, I still struggled. Then I threw a bomb at a statue, and apparently it hit it just right, because then it fell over! I later found out that you were supposed to hit the bomb on top of the pot it is holding, but I had thrown it there before, or so I had thought. Close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and Flower Bombs (losing hearts because you didn’t stand far enough away is proof), and yet these statues needed precision hits?

There were other inconsistencies and frustrations that I can’t remember at the moment, but the point is that I kept feeling like Wind Waker was not developed with the same care as previous games in the series. While some parts of it were really well done, other parts were sources of confusion and frustration. I still don’t understand the Flower Bomb precision thing.

And then I find that Shigeru Miyamoto admits it. Later parts of the game were being made while working against the clock, with features being approved without enthusiasm. I am kind of shocked because I would think that you would give a person such as Miyamoto as much time as he feels necessary to make the game great.

I still like Wind Waker, but it is pretty sad to find out that the game was made in a way that didn’t even please the creator.

Categories
Game Development Games Geek / Technical

Escapist Magazine

A friend of mine recently emailed me to ask if I had heard about The Escapist, the new weekly magazine about video games and gaming culture. I hadn’t, even though it was covered at some blogs and gaming news sites…and Slashdot, the productivity killer which I’ve successfully been able to avoid for some time. Apparently this magazine is not just a new competitor for PC Gamer or Electronic Gaming Monthly. From the first issue’s letter from the editor:

The Escapist is an ambitious magazine, written, edited and styled with a fresh approach to communicating with gamers. We are the complement to the current gaming journalistic efforts. While the others give you up-to-the-second news coverage, we give you broad looks at news over time, discussing trends and proffering glimpses into the future. While the others provide previews and reviews of the next big thing, we give you a taste of the Cinderella game that might just steal the spotlight, plus a look at why. And while others ask developers about their latest projects, we delve into the masterminds’ thoughts and histories to find out what makes them tick.

So it is meant to be a magazine for mature gamers who don’t want hype and juvenile humor to litter their gaming literature. It’s for people who want to read about game culture instead of just news on the latest titles.

First impressions: I like it.

The magazine is free online (there are syndication feeds available), and there is a high quality PDF version to let you print out the magazine yourself if you choose to do so. I think I would like to actually order a subscription through the mail, but they don’t seem to offer that option yet. Also, their website apparently doesn’t work too great with Firefox if you increase the font size, and IE doesn’t let you change it at all. They hard coded the text to match the images, so the small font size isn’t fun to read, and increasing it makes it difficult since it will cover or get covered by other elements on the page. They tried to copy the print magazine (which doesn’t really exist!) look and feel onto their website, and that just doesn’t work well. Luckily, XFree86 (I use Debian so I don’t have X.org yet) lets me zoom in on the screen, but it is a silly thing to require this workaround.

Still, the content is good. I may not agree with the opinion of everyone who writes for it. For example, I don’t think “gamer” refers only to people who play games exclusive to everything else, and I don’t think that definition is as commonly understood to be the case, as claimed by one author. I also don’t think that games should be considered “crack-like” and “addictive”, as the article on Greg Gorden described them. But it is refreshing to read an entire magazine that discusses the topics in a mature manner that I’ve generally found exclusive to blogs.

It’s also quite informative, as Max Steele’s article on mobile gaming in the 2nd issue shows. Being American and fairly isolated from international news in general, I didn’t know that the N-Gage had sold so well in the rest of the world, but Steele’s article touched on that platform while talking about the upcoming Mobile Platform Wars between Sony, Nintendo, and Nokia. Until then, I didn’t even know Nokia was involved! And the article also described who each company is targeting. I don’t know if Nintendo will end up the clear winner and I don’t know if I agree that Sony’s system will be disgarded as just more-of-the-same-but-smaller. I also don’t know if anyone likes reading an author talk about himself in the third person. But it was definitely a high quality article that made good arguments. A different article in the same issue focused on that video feature for the PSP while another complained about the loooooong load times for it, so there was plenty of depth and breadth to the magazine.

The Escapist is definitely staying in my RSS feeds, although I wish that the website version wouldn’t be so badly “ported” from the PDF. At the very least make the text larger. Ideally, the web version should be made for the web.

Categories
Game Development Games Marketing/Business

The Rising Cost of Making Games

With the newest game consoles arriving soon, there has been a lot of talk about the cost of making games. EA is insisting that next generation games will cost $30 million to develop. Outrageous! And then Will Wright comes along with Spore and describes a way to make huge games without spending money on creating your own content. I had covered Spore previously. Of course, not all games can be made in this way, and as I’ve read elsewhere, the use of HDTV by game consoles will mean that games will need better art. Blocky and polygonal models can’t hide behind low resolutions anymore. So the idea is that costs will rise for mainstream game development. I think it will be natural for most people to expect indie game development to follow in kind. Graphics on the par of Super NES won’t be good enough, and I don’t think it is good enough today either. Of course, I’m just guessing, so feel free to slap me down.

The Gamasutra interview with Epic’s Mark Rein on the topic of middleware solutions shows that Rein doesn’t think costs will rise that much. Since EA acquired Renderware, companies that compete with EA are looking to other middleware companies, so Epic’s tools have found a market. When asked about the rising costs of game development:

I guess one of the biggest things we’ve seen that’s bothered us lately is big companies like EA going and tossing out “it’s going to take $30 million to make a next-gen game” and we just don’t see that. I mean we’re making our next-gen games for 25-50% more than our previous generation games, and when we hear those kinds of numbers, we think that’s just bravado, that’s just them trying to scare their competitors out of the marketplace.

We don’t subscribe to that, we don’t think it has to be ridiculously expensive to make next-generation games, and we’ve done a lot of work – like our visual scripting system is a perfect example – in making our tools really optimized so that artists and designers can get the most out of the engine without having to involve a huge amount of programmer resources.

My favorite part was the last question. Apparently Activision and THQ have announced that their games will cost $10 more than before. Rein basically pointed out that the market will likely not allow games to cost that much more. He said there would be an increase in piracy and people revolting.

I think we spend enough money on games, and I just don’t think that’s reasonable. I think what you need to do is make better games, take your time, do them right, and sell more! I don’t think we’re ever going to have 20 million selling games, until we bring the cost of those games down, not up. I think the way to build the market is to decrease the cost of the games, not increase the cost of the games.

Make better games instead of making more expensive games? Who’d have thunk it?! B-) How does all of this talk relate to indie games? I think that making better games, taking your time, doing it right will allow you to sell more. Oh, and effective marketing to make sure that people know about your better and rightly made game in the first place.