GBGamesRussell Carroll, the mastermind behind Game Tunnel, the popular indie game review site, has announced the premier issue of the quarterly Game Tunnel Magazine.
It features news, previews, reviews, interviews, and in-depth articles. It is also a good summary of some of the major happenings on the Game Tunnel website. My name is printed in there, so that’s a bonus. B-)
Action posted a new Indie Game Developer’s Podcast featuring Amanda of Amaranth Games.
The intro was new and, er, interesting. You’d have to hear it to understand.
Amanda is the creator of the game Aveyond, and in this interview she talks about how she started making games out of cardboard when she was eight years old. While she was in college she made her first computer game which was panned by critics as “too vanilla”. Her next project was Ahriman’s Prophecy, the success of which led her to attempt to commercialize Aveyond. She talks about the difference in development practices for each game as well what brings her inspiration.
She is also asking other indies to finish some RPGs so she can play them, so get to it!
Chris Bateman announced the release of his new book Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames.
This is a book about how we currently get stories into games. Anyone interested in learning these skills would do well to pick up a copy.
Bateman’s blog posts on game design are thought-provoking, such as Non-verbal Communication and Toru Iwatani’s Escalator, so I imagine this book will also be of high quality.
While I think that narrative shouldn’t be the sole focus of games to the exclusion of, you know, gameplay, it is still painful to play games with horrible dialogue and a joy to play those that are written well. Developers who want to avoid causing the pain might want to look into this book.
I already wrote about Nolan Bushnell’s new venture of a restaurant chain that will feature video games, food, and alcohol that will somehow appeal to women.
turbo from the #gamedevelopers channel pointed me to the restuarant’s website. It actually does sound promising. You can play games with people at your table, other tables, or even the entire restaurant. You can order food from the touch screen display, which is actually something I’ve been telling my friends we should be able to do for years. You can even go to wine-tasting school by having wines brought to you and scoring them on the screen.
There is even a blog, and one of the recently made posts outlines the kind of games that you will see at uWink:
Nolan Bushnell’s Rules for Social Games
Will uWink develop all of its games in-house, or will they be outsourced to some enterprising indies? Is “social game” really a new genre, or is it just a marketing buzzword for making the LAN party experience more accessible to the masses? When will we see uWink in Chicago?
This past Sunday I read an article in the newspaper about a video game addiction center opening in Amsterdam.
Smith & Jones Addiction Consultants have created Game Zone Center, an “outdoor gaming treatment camp”, to help people with a video game addiction.
I am not going to claim that there is no such thing. In fact, I think it makes sense that there are people who have a serious addiction problem with video games since there are addictions to a number of other things. I take issue with the following statement:
The participants will gain true self esteem by spending 2 weeks in a team of real people, achieving real goals and having real fun!
That statement bothers me because it sounds too much like the uninformed statements I’ve heard from people in high school and college. “Why don’t you put down the controller and get a life?” or “Why don’t you go out and hang out with real people?”
To a lot of those people, going out smoking and drinking with friends until you get sick is healthier social time than LAN parties. They were not exactly the kind of people I wanted to use as role models. Besides, not all games involve solitary confinement, especially not today. Even the single player games can get communities of players talking to each other. It may sound like I am stretching the truth to make a terrible point, but I’m serious. Playing video games does not require cutting yourself off from the real world.
I don’t really know how to talk about “real goals” since I do not know what they mean. Video games involve goal-setting, and accomplishment of those goals can provide a very satisfying feeling. It does not compare to life accomplishments, such as getting a new job or winning a championship soccer match, but it isn’t as if video games promote inferior goal-setting techniques. I would argue experienced video game players are the ones most likely to create great goals for themselves. They know that if they set out to acheive something, whether in a game or not, they can do it if they attempt it. They’re the ones getting the experience of trying, failing, and trying again.
Video games are real fun. I’m sure that the clinic will offer their own enjoyable activities, and I’ll be the first one to tell you that I think sports are a lot of fun. I just don’t see how playing a simulation of a sport or any other type of game disqualifies it as “real” fun. Tell a bunch of people playing Super Smash Bros Melee or Guitar Hero in the living room that the fun they are having isn’t real. Tell them that it doesn’t count unless they are actually playing guitar or having epic martial arts matches. I’m sure it will be a real eye-opener and they’ll change their ways.
I don’t know nearly enough about the subject to talk about the addiction problem. I’m sure it is a real problem, and those suffering with it will need the help that such a clinic can provide. That issue is not what I am talking about. I simply don’t appreciate the sentiment that video games are the enemy of normal, healthy, and socially acceptable people. Not to get too dramatic, but I’m waiting for someone to say,”Well, have you ever tried not being a video game player?”
I keep forgetting to post about it when it happens, but the Carnival of Gamers is here! This time it is hosted by Kim Pallister at …on pampers, programming & pitching manure. My post about Roger Ebert is featured this month, as well as a number of great posts by other participants.
The Cloning Innovation is an article at Game Tunnel that focuses on the indie innovation issue. It essentially says much the same that Jeff Vogel claims: innovation doesn’t pay.
In the mainstream games industry, making clones of existing games is a sure-fire way to make your offerings mediocre, resulting in poor reviews and horrible sales. In casual games, however, cloning a successful game means that you can also be successful.
Weird? I think so. Then again, I don’t spend much time on casual game portals. I’m not familiar with what millions of people are playing in terms of casual games. Perhaps people loved Bejeweled so much that they wanted to play the Bejeweled clones as well. Would a Professor Fizzwizzle clone do as well as the original? Apparently so, especially if you find an audience that never heard of the original game.
If it is the case that you can be financially rewarded for simply engineering the same exact game that your competitors are making, what does it say about the importance of innovation? If the customers don’t care, then the only incentive is for the indie to be proud of making innovative games on principle.
No, principles don’t pay the bills, but there are a lot of moral choices that people make simply because it is the right thing to do and not because there is something in it for them.
Gregg Seelhoff recently posted about Beyond Pong, a student documentary about the maturation of video games.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to view it on my system since it requires a later version of Quicktime than I have. Still, if you have 40 minutes to kill, it will probably be worth your while.
Greg Costikyan posted a link to the NetHack song. You can find the lyrics and an mp3 of NetHack.
And, of course, the game is teh awesomes.