Category: Games

Categories
Games Marketing/Business

It’s Your Turn…Oh Wait…

I have a free account on itsyourturn.com, which is a great site to play games like Chess and Jamble (a Scrabble-like game) among others. Basically, you can play against real people without requiring them to be there in real time. You make a move and an email will be sent to your opponent if he/she does not move within a few minutes. It’s a great way to keep up with people, too. You can send messages to your friends, startup new games, or just talk about whatever. There are tournaments and multiple variations on games. I don’t play against many people, so I almost never hit the free account’s move limit, but you can pay a membership fee to get more benefits.

I always suspected that IYT was a small team. I knew it couldn’t be some large corporation, but I always wondered if it was just a few people working out of an apartment or something. It didn’t seem like an overly complex website, either, so it didn’t seem to require much more than maintenance. The site never betrayed any information. There was never an about page, never any info on the people behind it, etc.

Then disaster struck.

Friday August 19, 2005

We have experienced a major disk crash, and our backup is also unusable.

While we are trying to retrieve what’s left on the disk, the prognosis does not look good. We will be down for a few days at least, and this may be as long as 2 weeks. If it takes that long, your membership will be extended by a similar time.

It’s still down as of this writing. More updates were posted periodically, but the best ones weren’t the cold/professional “We’re working on this issue as fast as we can. Thank you for your patience”. The best updates were along the lines of:

When these things happen, some of you email us and ask us why aren’t we smarter or why don’t we work harder. We understand that this is a huge inconvenience for you, that you paid for this product, and any abuse we receive is well-deserved. Please understand that we do not do this intentionally. Given a choice, we would prefer not to have to go through this. We experienced what was almost a “perfect storm” of events that destroyed both our main disk and our backup file (which are on completely separate RAID disk units) at the same time.

We are working as hard as we can to get the site back online as quickly as possible. Please check here for more updates (I will try to post updates several times a day, but please understand that we are spending most of our time trying to fix the system).

“…any abuse we receive is well-deserved.” When was the last time your game company admitted to a fault and said, “Yes, we were bone-headed, and nothing we can say will make up for that”? They even opened up a blog to let people not only know what was happening but also let them comment about it!

In the first couple of entries, comments were VERY negative; however, very supportive fans arrived in force. A number of people expressed anger over a number of a issues over the years (and some very personal attacks were made as well), but most of the people informed the company that they will be patient and will renew membership.

Wow. You can’t buy that kind of loyalty. Something goes wrong, and the team of IYT are honest and open about it. No hiding or trying to be “professional”. Some people get turned off by the company, but most people stand by it. IYT may have had a huge disaster, but they did the right thing by being open about it. It’s actions like this that result in the real fans standing up and coming to the rescue. That’s passion.

Categories
Games Geek / Technical General

PWNED!!!

I don’t play WoW, but I thought this thread on their forums was hilarious: Son owned by Mother

Categories
Games General

Women Gaming Restaurants?

This topic is kind of related to my post on making girl friendly games. Apparently, Nolan Bushnell announced plans to found a new chain of restaurants designed to lure women into gaming. Bushnell is pretty much famous for Pong, usually incorrectly credited as the father of video games. He also created Chuck E. Cheeze series of restaurants.

I actually remembered going to a restaurant that had table top arcade games with my family when I was younger. The idea of arcade games that you play sitting down was pretty cool to me. Apparently Bushnell wants to make a restaurant that has games that appeal specifically to women. And of course, if women go, men will follow. And alcohol usually helps.

Of course, that’s the theory. Dave and Buster’s and Gameworks already fulfill the “gaming with food and alcohol”, but they don’t try to appeal to women much. What will Bushnell’s new restaurant actually do differently to bring in women? Will it actually bring in other non-gamers as well?

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
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
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.

Categories
Game Design Games Geek / Technical

Game Rules Are In Fluxx

I’m always trying to learn about new game mechanics, so when I discovered the game Fluxx by Wunderland, it was more than just fun. It got me thinking.

Fluxx is a card game in which the rules change as you play. Some people might be familiar with the game of Mao: the rules are secret, and part of the fun is figuring out what those rules are. Unfortunately it requires one or two people in the game to already know the rules, and there are apparently many variations on the game depending on the college campus you went to when you learned about it. Fluxx, on the other hand, is very specific. Everything is out for everyone to see, and so rule changes are always disclosed. Naturally, it is much easier to pick up the game after only a few hands.

Even though the rules change as you play, it isn’t difficult or confusing. In the beginning, you have three cards, and you must draw one card from the pile and then play one card from your hand. That card you play can change the rules immediately. For example, you can play a “Draw 5” card, and now each player must draw five cards and play one. The card “X = X + 1” means that you add 1 to any number. In this example game, playing this card will now require everyone to draw six and play two. Even the winning conditions can change as Goals are played or removed.

I thought this game would appeal mostly to technically inclined people, since it seemed like a programming game based on if statements. Apparently everyone, including children, gets into this game easily.

I think that there are a few things going for this game. The interface is simple. It’s a card game, and everyone knows how to play card games. The rules are simple. Just follow what it says on the table at any given moment. It is easy to handle the complexity. Some rules supersede others. Others simply change existing rules. And each card tells you exactly what you need to do. No need to go to the instruction booklet just to find out what it means to draw the “X = X + 1” or “Let’s Simplify” cards.

What can I apply to making video games? Well, for one, an easy to use interface isn’t just a suggestion. It’s necessary! As Xemu has said, the interface IS the game. If Fluxx made it difficult to follow or make the changes, it would feel more like work than like play. There are definitely elements of video games that feel like work, such as jumping puzzles. Video games should be as easy to pick up and play, or if that is not possible for some reason, they should at least make it easy for the player to figure out what they have to do. Fluxx has the equivalent of context-sensitive help screens, and games such as Super Mario RPG or The Sims are perfect examples that used them nicely.

Another thing to take away from Fluxx is the idea of modifiers and rule changes during the course of play. Imagine playing a sidescroller and then hitting a spot where the gravity is reversed or a different force is in effect. It will likely change the way you play that game or at least move about. Maybe an enemy will only be revealed when the wind tunnel is on, or perhaps you can only find an item when X-Ray vision is available. While it is normal for an item to have a simple effect, such as a bullet killing an enemy, perhaps rules that have a wide effect make for interesting gameplay? If all players on a server now have attacks with 50x the force due to some muscle-enhancing gas in the level, it will definitely change the way the game is played. Even if only one player is affected, it can be interesting and fun.

Sure there are power-ups, and none of what I am talking about is really all that new in video games. Games make use of these techniques more or less all the time. For example, speeding up, slowing down, and/or stopping time for all entities in the game are used in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Viewtiful Joe, and Max Payne. Quad damage in Quake 3 is another example. In Super Smash Bros. Melee, one of the pokemon will make the screen go dark for a few seconds, naturally affecting all players.

I simply want to be consciously aware of such generalized mechanics. Changing the rules and goals sounds like something that could make an otherwise bland game into something interesting and, as seen in Fluxx, can actually BE the entire game.