If you are a tourist in the Mazes of Menace, and you find a shopkeeper, do NOT, under any circumstances, take his picture with your camera. He doesn’t like it very much, and he has a problem with overreacting.
*sigh* YASD.
Categories
Category: Games
What you see there is my badge for the Great Games Experiment, the social networking community centered around video games. It was created by Jeff Tunnell of GarageGames fame as a platform to get game players and game developers together, solving at least part of the problem of finding an audience for your games.
Since joining, I have submitted a number of entries for the games section and have created one group. Jay Barnson of Rampant Coyote has done such a great job of submitting RPGs that he was given the title of admin of the RPG tag.
Maybe I’ll get the “Obscure games that people didn’t play when they were new” tag admin rights. B-)
In an interview with Jeff, he comments on the benefits for indie members of the site:
Having indie games presented side by side with commercial games should get more recognition for the indies.
Er, why are indie games not considered commercial? In fact, when I am entering information for new game entries, I always find the publisher section weird. The choices are “none”, “indie”, or “commercial”, and if you pick commercial, you get to input the name of the publisher. Why do indie publishers have to be anonymous? Why are indies considered different from commercial in the first place?
Anyway, I’ve found the Great Games Experiment to be a great way to interact with game developers and players. It’s still new, but it is much more relevant than MySpace. And much more stable.
Thanks to Slashdot, I learned about a News.com article entitled More video games, fewer books at schools?. Apparently some educators are proposing that video games should be used as teaching tools as much or more than books currently are.
Using video games as a tool to educate sounds like a great opportunity. Reading about economic variables can be mind-numbing, especially without context. It is easier to understand how supply and demand affect a business when you play one of the variations of Lemonade Stand. Learning about history is difficult if you treat it as a series of dates and names that you need to memorize for a quiz or test. It is easier to remember that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7th or that MacArthur said “I shall return” when driven from the Philippines if you play a game such as Koei’s PTO 2. Heck, I learned that Japan is in a timezone that puts that date at December 6th because of that game. Solving physics questions might be interesting, but calculating trajectories to launch bananas at opponents in Gorillas can demonstrate the concepts for you.
Good articles can provide balanced viewpoints, but this one had some strange quotes.
“But there’s still a question about the value to the extent that most of the world is not a video game. They’re not getting problems in real world situation,” [Dr. Joshua Freedman] said.
Most of the world is not a book, either. Children aren’t currently getting problems in real world situations anyway. I remember a physics problem involving a car approaching an intersection. You needed to determine if the car should continue, getting safely on the other side before the light turns red, or if it should stop to avoid an accident. I got the answer wrong. Why? Because the teacher did not tell me that the question was not about the safety of the car but about the red light. See, if you treat it like real life, then my answer would have been correct because I took into account the idea that if the light turns red when you are in the middle of the intersection, you’d be fine. The teacher assumed that as soon as the light turned red, the cross traffic’s light turned green AND, here’s the kicker, the cross traffic has instantaneous velocity. If this is an example of the real world settings children are expected to be getting, then I am sure that video games can do much better.
Technology taking over life is an article that touches on Hasbro’s new ION Educational Game System, but it mostly serves as a warning that technology is not a replacement for exercise or social interaction.
Well, neither is reading books, and yet I don’t see articles warning against the dangers of reading to the detriment of health or experiencing life.
I am not claiming that books are bad. I love reading books. I think that books are great for entertainment and learning. I just find it strange that when video games are offered as an educational tool, the arguments against it are that children aren’t getting real world situations or that they aren’t exercising or interacting. Even the person who argues for the need of video games in schools is quoted as saying something negative about them:
My 6-year-old, Julian, can step into a video game and a world of rules and figure them out. He’s not scared of the unknown or scared of failing. I think that’s something valuable that video games provide. But, I want him to experience much more, and [have] relationships outside of games.
And, of course, there are the quotes from the game-playing children who say some of the most uninformed things, such as equating entrepreneurship with hustling. These quotes are almost as bad as the news articles that use child game players to act as the balance to the arguments of psychologists and lawyers.
As I read the article, I got a weird vibe. It was almost as if there was a bias against the idea of video games being used to do more than subvert children. I don’t get it. I think using video games as educational tools is a natural fit. The Oregon Trail taught me history and geography. Lemonade Stand taught me about the challenges involved in running a business. Both expanded my vocabulary, as I didn’t know what it meant to caulk a wagon or what advertising was before playing those games. I learned that “inadequate” meant that there wasn’t enough grass to feed my oxen, which explained why they were dying whenever I got those messages. At the time, I had to look up these words in a dead-tree dictionary. I remember looking up scurvy in an encyclopedia when my character fainted from the disease in The Illusion of Gaia. And there were countless historical strategy games that led me to crack open my history books and read AHEAD of what my class was scheduled to learn in order to understand what really happened in the world I was participating in.
Books and video games. Why can’t they be complementary?
If you also didn’t get to go to the IGF and GDC, whatever your excuse, you can still watch the awards show at Gamespot. The show was one part inspiration, one part comedy, and one part romance.
This year, the IGF was hosted by former winner Andy Schatz. He’s not only an indie, but a snazzy dresser. He is also a great host, and his opening remarks almost gave me chills. Almost.
We’re indies. Someone else can wear the suit. Tonight’s show is all about the heroes of game development. Tonight we honor the ones who wake up and stumble to their computers in their bathrobes and their underwear for “work” all to pursue the dream of developing the next gaming breakthrough. THESE are the developers that will expand the public’s perception of the power of video games.
99% of us might not make it, and that’s what makes every single one of you a hero.
You. A hero. Chills, right? B-)
Being an indie sometimes means doing things even though there are plenty of reminders that you are likely to fail. The IGF is a highly visible celebration of the victories, and I think Andy did a great job of capturing the sentiment in those few sentences.
Categories
Game Design: History of Video Games
GameCareerGuide.com recently posted an article called On Game Design: A History of Video Games.
While it doesn’t treat the subject of game design very much, it does show you how games have evolved from the games of the past. The article takes you from ancient Egyptian board games to table-top pen-and-paper strategy and role-playing games through to the various console generations, arcade and PC games. Along the way, there are interviews with Ralph Baer, Ian Livingstone, and Steve Jackson.
Now, who wants to play a game of Combat?
Thanks to LinuxGames.com, I learned about the latest podcast of Open Source On The Air. This podcast focuses on open source game developers from the Thousand Parsec and Wesnoth projects as well as Kruel Studios.
I find it interesting that the developers pretty much agreed that quality artwork was their main concern. I suppose when you are all programmers, finding good code isn’t a problem.
I found this video on YouTube called PS3 Song that puts a video together with the song “How to Kill a Brand” by Doc Adams. It is actually a good look at how Sony’s marketing hype machine (“4D Graphics”? WTF?) and uninteresting game lineup failed to dazzle gamers and prevent Microsoft and Nintendo from basically laughing all the way to the bank.
Even if you don’t think that there is anything wrong with Sony, the song is a good parody.
There are quite a few carnivals popping up these days, and the latest one is the Carnival of Video Game Bloggers.
And for the first edition of any carnival, there are many good articles. They covered a variety of topics from the humorous, the rantish, and the serious. Posts railed against the Virtual Console on the Wii and Microsoft’s apparent hate of game players, compared game rental services, informed you how to put together your own arcade cabinet, and even educated you on the benefits of serious games for hyperactive children.
I counted 18 different posts covering those topics and more.
Once again, Juuso has put together the Carnival of Game Production with a collection of quality articles.
Featured articles include:
- Joonas Laakso’s Wannabe game producer’s confessions.
- Jay Barnson’s Should I Become An Indie Game Developer?
- Paul Eres’ Principles of Playtesting
- Vedran Klanac’s How it was made? Fire Flower
- Jochen De Schepper’s To Flash Or Not To Flash?
- Nicholas Savery’s The Free MMO Business Model, an Alternative to Pay-to-Play
- Joris Pyl’s Psychology in Games
- My If Old Games Were Made Today…
- And a special treat: Petri Purho’s The Truth About Game Development, a game about game production.
Plenty of people would argue that today’s games are influenced by yesterday’s games. For example, jumping puzzles are not as common as they once were because game developers have learned that jumping puzzles generally suck, something we wouldn’t know if game after game didn’t use such puzzles as filler. Likewise, using the WASD keys to control the game is so pervasive, no one even thinks twice about putting it in a game such as Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, a game that is not targeted to hardcore audiences, the only ones who would expect to use WASD.
But what would happen if old games were made for the first time today? Would they be the same games, or would “conventional wisdom” dictate changes? Below are a few guesses:
- Donkey Kong, Mario Bros, and Berzerk wouldn’t be considered casual enough. Significant changes would need to take place to make them more acceptable to mainstream audiences. Donkey Kong would need to throw different colored barrels that Jumpman would need to collect and match. Player clicks would dictate where Mario and Luigi should go and in what order to clean the pipes. Robots in Berzerk would be changed to colorful bugs, and the player would control the bouncing smiley face to try to save the flowers that for some reason are growing everywhere.
- Pac-man, Space Invaders, and Asteroids would provide medals with different shapes, names, and colors. Collect all of the medals, and show off to your friends!
- Centipede would be made into an RTS based on insects. There would be three factions, each with different abilities. Koreans would watch people play this game in stadiums and on television.
- Tetris would feature pop music and psychedelic colors flashing to a beat.
- Defender would be panned as too simplistic as the enemies don’t shoot nearly often enough to provide a real challenge.
- SimCity would be considered too free form. There should be specific goals, such as destroying as many buildings as possible in three minutes or tearing up the streets to prevent the SimCitizens from getting to work on time. Also, you would need to match three Residential Zones to get the condos, not just two. Eventually politicians would blast it for providing training to terrorists since they could set the city on fire or cause an earthquake on command.
- Jack Thompson would point to Custer’s Revenge as typical of sex-and-violence training simulators being marketed to children and takes it upon himself to “shutdown Mystique”. Sales of the game would skyrocket due to the publicity.
- E.T. would have multiplayer modes featuring kids flying through moonlit skies and saving dying flowers. Co-op mode would feature multiple phone components strewn throughout the world. Naturally, it would be a prime candidate for in-game advertising, specifically for The Hershey Company’s Reese’s Pieces. E.T. would still be considered the worst video game ever, and I would probably still be the only person who liked it.
Any other guesses?