Play This Thing

Mockingbird

the99th — Thu, 08 May 2008 23:23:34 -0400

The impending singularity for interactivity is going to be brought on by successively more powerful platforms for rapidly prototyping and designing games. You've heard of the big ones, there's MetaPlace from Raph Koster's company, and in its own way, Storytron from the Crawdaddy himself. Mockingbird is a game-making platform oriented toward casual, spatial gameplay. It has limitations, but it also has tremendous potential for social commentary. (Ed's Note: Also consider Gamestar Mechanic.)

The game pictured is The Last Super Delegate. I made it in an hour or two, it was my first game; now that I know the interface I could make something similar in twenty minutes. Before I started I got lit, figuratively speaking, and dove into the gestalt of hacking the Democratic primary process with distorted found-art and pure cynicism. I started with the background, finding via Google Images a great pic of a brochure for the Pennsylvania Turnpike (this was back when that state's primary was ramping up). The tag-line struck me as perfect for my theme, which I slowly fleshed out as I introduced objects. I decided to go for vertical gameplay, since you don't see that so much. My protagonist was Barack Obama and Raziel, with the power to throw Hillary Clinton at automobilies scrolling up the screen, and then taking the jewels as campaign contributions. I didn't realize it until after I chose the items, but I had a red jewel and a blue jewel, pretty cleanly implying a conservative and liberal voter. I added some planes and jets scrolling horizontally and added a bounce function to them, I also put some cop cars next to the civ cars, made them invincible, and gave them a ricochet effect. The titular Superdelegate was originally going to be Charlie Manson, but I decided to make it David Rockefeller, for reasons that should be obvious to students of deep power. As I playtested and tuned it out, I realized that the process of metaphorically campaigning led there to be no civilian cars left on the road; things effectively become a police state. Mission accomplished.

The next game I started has the working title of Riccitiellovania: Rondo of Cash. I wanted to make a Metroidvania game where you play the current EA CEO, exploring the mysterious HQ and consolidating the shit out of everything you can for mad profit. I was going to lampoon the schiessty-ness of him merging two studios, then buying them after moving back to EA, or the likely arbitrage move on Take Two's stock when he tried to buy them. Once the Stop ability is optimized we'll be able to design these sprawling Metroidvania games, and I'll finish that game.

The latest title I did is called Arbitrage, which was inspired by my researching the word after Micheal Patcher mentioned it in relation to the Take Two cluster-fuck. It's a great word, beautiful and wholly evil, understanding it will help you understand a lot of how power and economy works. So I started playing with this idea, figured I'd do something along the lines of La La Land 2. I started playing around and researching images, and things took off. I ended up doing something about food commodity traders, where you have to "short" the poor people and bounce the food back to the rich fat kids. As soon as a feature gets added, I'll do it.

(Ed's Note: Actually, arbitrage is an important part of any diverse market, and helps to ensure the efficient spread of price signals.)

But these are just my pretentious expressions, you might want to make a game about how your wife gets on your case, or how much airline food sucks. Whatever. The beauty of it is, it's casual, it's like having a one-night-stand and making a baby right after you finish, but then being able to edit the baby in real-time, without any bioethics concerns. As the features get more numerous and robust, I think it's going to get really interesting. Sure, you've got PopFly and Game Brix and whatnot, but these don't let you design and play in real-time. Once sound uploading becomes supported, you can hear a song you like, have it inspire a dynamic in your mind, upload a clip and then go at it. I recommend being lit; lit with inspiration.

Games Studies is Good for You

costik — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:33:16 -0400

In an intentionally provocative essay at The Escapist, Roger Travis attack game studies as a very concept. He seems not to understand what he's attacking, though, despite carefully chosen quotes from Espen Aarseth and Ian Bogost. His claim is that "scholars are pursuing game studies to the detriment of gamer culture," and he begins by quoting Douglas Wilson as saying "I hate gamers."

Now, I am a gamer. I've been a gamer since before many of our readers were born, since I was, in the 70s, a board wargamer, the very people who coined the neologism, the first proud game geeks. So it would amount to self-loathing for me to say something like "I hate gamers." Yet there is no doubt that most gamers are plug-ignorant about games. Oh, they may know WoW instances like the back of their hand, or know every spot to snipe from on all the major Counter-Strike maps, but they often know very little about the historical evolution of our field, about the process of development, about the thinking of game designers, about the creatively important people in the medium, or indeed much of anything except the narrow range of genres that they themselves follow.

This is less true of other popular arts; movie fans are typically far more knowledgeable about cinematic technique, the nature of movie-making, the personalities involved, and the history of the medium.

And there's no question that the ignorance of gamers has pernicious effects: they lap up the same old goods repackaged with "IV" on the box, they mistake graphic trickery for advances in the state of the art, they conflate story with design, they push genres toward grognard capture. In a word they are (or many of them are) vidiots.

I have argued in the past that much of the artistic arteriosclerosis we see in today's game industry is due to a combination of Moore's Wall and publisher philistinism -- and that's no doubt true. But most gamers' ignorance of our form, and their lack of aesthetic breadth, compounds the problem.

And I've argued, as well, that disrupting the existing business model, with its relentless focus on best-sellers and unwillingness to fund creative risks, is essential to preserve the field's creative health, and our legacy of innovation; that's true, doubtless, but the other side of the equation is that we need to change gamer culture, to make gamers smarter about games.

Luckily, this is far from a lost cause; it's happening. It's happening in a lot of different ways; one example of how it's happening is, of course, The Escapist, which addresses games at an intellectual level almost unheard of in the game press of days past. But you can see it happening, too, in the level of creativity shown in student projects, in the increasing publication of books about games at every level, in the increasing diversity and level of innovation shown in games at the IGF. This website, too is, in its own modest way, an attempt to push the dialog a little farther, to cast light on interesting games outside of the mainstream -- because the mainstream is now so relentlessly focussed on a handful of genres that innovation, and a broader aesthetic, can only be found elsewhere.

One of the main reasons gamers are becoming more sophisticated, however, is, well, game studies.

Not that many gamers are ever going to read Cybertext or Game Studies; nor need they. But as the ideas expressed by scholars percolate through their students and those who read their work, they spread out into the community of gamers. Ten years ago, if I'd used phrases like "reward schedule" or "resource management" or "player skill vs. character skill" in conversation, I would almost certainly have had to explain what I meant; today, many, though not all, gamers would know what I meant without explanation.

Similarly, ten years ago, if you went looking for anything that talked about game design from a theoretical perspective, about all you'd find would be Chris Crawford's Art of Computer Game Design and one of my essays. Today, you can find hundreds of essays, and scores of books -- and yes, that's a good thing, because theory does make for better design (or if it doesn't, it's not very good theory).

The idea, in fact, that game studies is somehow antipathetic to gamers, or game culture, is absurd on the face of it; game studies is, rather, a natural evolution of game culture, a recognition by the academy that games, and game culture, are now sufficiently important enough to be worthy of, and to repay, study. And since gamers, or the more sophisticated among them, are among the natural audience for the products of game studies, game studies helps to inform game culture -- and, I believe, modify it for the better.

(Also see Ian Bogost's riposte to Travis's article.)

Dino Run

the99th — Wed, 07 May 2008 23:13:44 -0400

As a mile high wall of dust and moldering flame devours mountains behind me, frenzied stamped stumbling at my feet, meteors knocking out a stegosaurus, boulders crushing eggs and trees, I take the instant to thrash the neck of a small lizard, consuming it whole, and gallop toward the distant call of salvation. The meteor has hit. I have a window of seconds, no mistakes. I am a velociraptor, an agile predator. As I attempt to beat Dino Run on Insane difficulty I'm listening to footage from the latest World Economic Forum, discussing the role of private equity and hedge funds. The irony is not lost.

Dino Run is the kind of game that reminds you why you started playing games for the first time (assuming you belong to this blog's primary audience demographic). It's pure, simple, its premise has that certain geektastic wetness that games used to have before they sold out for every shade of brown and two flavors of protagonist (grizzled dude and power armor). You're a velociraptor trying to outrun the infamous extinction event. The aim of the game is focused on streamlined bio-survival consciousness. Go forward. Escape your doom. Do not let anything deter you, not the environment, not other life forms. Smaller animals are food that boost your speed. Eggs somehow magically go to a DNA clearinghouse that allows you to invest in stat improvements. Pterodactyls give you lifts. Everything can be turned to your advantage, all to that simple, inescapable reinforcement -- forward, faster.

This game is also a great psychological consolation for the troubles of our times. If you think surviving global fuel and food shortages, inflation and a looming panopticon are difficult, just think of what our reptilian masters had to go through. They outran an impact wave. Note the alien egg on level 5. It's clear that this game, like Raptor Safari, is yet another subtle exploration of the plain fact that raptors evolved into Quetzalcoatl-like avians who then cross-bred with hominids to create the shape-shifting master race currently ruling this planet. And now, I have total sympathy for them.

Idolcraft

costik — Tue, 06 May 2008 22:27:56 -0400

You're a Japanese record promoter, trying to recruit cute teen anime-style girls, train them artistically, and make them "idols" -- the Western cultural analog would be, of course, that you're hyping manufactured boy bands. Idolcraft is built using RPG Maker, though, so it's an interesting combination of a classic console-style RPG, an adventure game, and a resource management sim. You run around town, trying to make friends with cute girls and persuade them to sign with your studio, then training them, and trying to release as many successful CDs and DVDs featuring them as possible before the timer runs out.

Meeting and recruiting each girl (there are 12 possibles) requires solving adventure game-style puzzles -- some inventory based, and some more convoluted (there's even a Sokoban-style puzzle in which you need to shove fans surrounding a girl out of the way in precisely the right order to get to and talk to her). Even once you've signed some "idols" however, you still need to train them up, which requires money, which you can gain by exploring the map and performing odd jobs at various places there.

RPG Maker is not a sophisticated development environment (move with the arrow keys, space for all object interactions, 16x16 sprites), but this is a quite original and sophisticated use of its limited capabilities (only Aveyond, of games I've seen, exploits it better); and, begorrah, it's fun to play.

Though the graphics and sound are Japanese, used with permission of their creators, the developer is American; I suspect Americans will find it "very Japanese," though I suspect Japanese people will find this American reflection of their own culture off-kilter in an amusing way (just as Miyazaki's depiection of European culture is, to my eyes, charmingly not quite right). But that's a digression; Goodman is using the tropes of an alien culture, but producing his own offbeat gameplay as a consequence, and good for him.

Lucidity

costik — Mon, 05 May 2008 20:00:40 -0400

Lucidity takes place in the world of dreams -- a world filled with Dreamers, real people who dream without awareness, and Lucids, those few who understand where they are, have a sense of self, and can learn to manipulate the dreamworld to their own advantage. The players, naturally, are Lucids.

Yet "a sense of self" only takes you so far; the Lucids have snatches of remembrance from their former life, and the process of character creation is, in fact, a matter of deciding how many memories you sacrifice for the sake of power and sanity -- and what things you do remember. You can bargain with the Dream King (that is, gamemaster) for some additional memories, by taking disadvantages in exchange.

Because the world is, literally, such stuff as dreams are made of, you can attempt to shape it, creating 'dreams' within it, and moving from one 'dreamscape' to another. There are, naturally, monsters -- both Dreamers' nightmares, and 'dreams from outside,' Lovecraftian extrusions into consensual reality. And there is danger -- the danger of dying, of losing your memories and ultimately your lucidity -- and perhaps the danger of 'waking.'

As with many short RPGs, Lucidity offers little more than a character generation system, a conflict resolution system, and an evocative background -- but the background here is very evocative, and something that, in the right GM's hands, could easily create a compelling and disturbing campaign. Something more is needed, I think -- an story arc, secrets of the dreamworld to uncover, the connection between this world and the waking one but Prahl, perhaps sensibly, does not try to provide that here -- after all, if it's in the game rules, then it's canonical and available to the players, which obviates the mystery of discovery.

Unlike many indie RPGs, Lucidity is not playing with the nature of narrative and its expression through play; instead, it's taking roleplaying into the world of dream-logic, the sense of epiphany just around the corner, always delayed by the stream-of-conscious permutation of one event into the next through a sort of magical connection that defies logical analysis.

Synaesthete

Udon — Sun, 04 May 2008 20:09:08 -0400

This past Game Developers Conference, Synaesthete took home the Independent Games Festival's award for Best Student Game.

Synaesthesia, for which the game is most likely named, is a rare condition in which different sensations run together. Basically, a person with synaesthesia may be able see a word in colors or be able to taste a sound. Mind blowing, isn't it? True to its name, Synaesthete's visuals achieve an almost blurring interpretation of the synaesthetic process in its unique combination of both audio and visual stimulus. The game's abstract quality perhaps surpasses that of Rez, the acclaimed trance rail shooter that Synaesthete so fondly reminds me of.

Fans of the beat game genre will instantly recognize the familiar look and feel of the cascading note style at the core of Synaesthete's game play. This mechanic itself is very reminiscent of Konami's Beatmania IIDX series in both style and pacing. For gamers who are acquainted with the home brew Dance With Intensity and Stepmania games, binding the controls for the notes to the directional pad may come more naturally than the default J, K, and L keys.

Hitting the three different beats is only half of the game play. Players must navigate their Zaikman through various platforms, avoiding the enemies they encounter while simultaneously zapping them with well timed key clicks. Only after clearing every enemy available on a plane are players allowed to progress further or regain their health. While this all may seem daunting at first, there's a handy tip to know about hitting the notes. Though players are obviously penalized for hitting notes off key, they are not necessarily penalized for omitting them altogether. Players can choose to hit only one track, rather than attempt to nail all three. Even though this makes the game more accessible and allows players to avoid any combo penalties for mistakes it does limit the player's fire power. Players who are able to hit the maximum amount of notes are greatly rewarded for their effort.

The rest of the game is neatly tied up by an entrancing sound track, lovable names like Count Stabbington, and glitzy, euphoric special moves.

Activision and Vivendi No Longer ESA Members

costik — Fri, 02 May 2008 14:49:24 -0400

...according to Game Daily. Reading between the lines, they apparently feel that exhibiting at E3 was the main benefit of membership, and don't want to bother any more.

This will create a minor problem for the Independent Games Festival; one of the criteria for eligibility has long been that your game may not be published by an ESA member. They'll have to figure out some other wording to exclude games from such major publishers.

Cultivation

the99th — Fri, 02 May 2008 11:24:03 -0400

Rod Humble recently commented in an interview that someone should take another look at Cultivation and it's a good thing I did. Replaying this game has proven to me something I should have seen a long time ago: Jason Rohrer is a commie.

Who else would be inspired by a community debate involving Wal-Mart to make a game that features Kermit-The-Frog-eyed gardeners sharing resources? I don't know about you, but sharing resources isn't what I was raised to do, no free rides. And why else would he make the games' characters all bi-sexual hermaphrodites? What's he trying to do to America's youth? Apparently, gardening is really important to godless hippies that couldn't appreciate the special sauce on a Big Mac if a cow came up and licked them. This game is trying to tell you that we should all just tend the earth, develop permacultures, and "share fruits" with whatever transgendered wingbat comes along. Not in my country. I like my food grown the way god intended, by pouring oil all over a field of genetically modified seeds. And I only share fruits with the ladies, sir.

Jason couldn't decide which platform he wants to code for, so he went ahead and did all of them. Pick a side. And the content is all procedurally generated, fractal plants, genetic hermits (hermaphroditic Kermits), and "randomly" generated landmasses that look oddly like a hammer and sickle. Why couldn't you contract offshore art assets like the rest of us?

The interface is the worst part about it, it's almost as confused as the people who never realized you can walk down in Passage. You'd expect a one-button-mouse interface to be context-sensitive; you'd click and drag to lay down a garden plot, and you'd pick up water and seeds by clicking on them, and so forth. Good, clean, commercial-quality interface design. Instead, you have to awkwardly click a button to do every single action. Sounds like Central Planning to me. Wake up Jason. Central Planning doesn't work.

Over the long-term, the game requires you to limit population growth. In other words, the game is encouraging abortion and birth control. If you grow your garden enough, and share enough fruit, generations go by, eventually completing a gateway that leads everyone into a magical world beyond. All an elaborate psyop intended to make you accept controlled genocide, the portal is to extinction, naturally, otherwise you'd get to keep playing. Fortunately, it's possible to play this game in an honest way, by blighting the land of all the other hermits, starving them out, and leaving you a precious fraction to feed yourself and your family, with whom you'll proceed to have incest. This is the closest to family values that Mr. Rohrer can get. Note that the game has the word "Cult" right in there.

Skip playing Cultivation and go buy a boxed casual game at Wal-Mart - ask for extra plastic. You'll be doing the economy a favor.

Stalin's Dilemma

costik — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 20:02:33 -0400

It is 1928, and it is time for the glorious Soviet State to crush the Kulaks and bring the CCCP dragging and kicking into the Century of the Fruitbat, I mean, the 20th century. We must collectivize, industrialize, and electrify, Comrade, lest the forces of capitalist reaction overwhelm us in the inevitable world-struggle to come!

Created by Ed Bever, one of the original Microprose developers and now a history professor, Stalin's Dilemma is a little economic simulation -- little more than a spreadsheet, really -- in which you design three five year plans, spanning the period from 1928 to 1943. Your objective is to increase Industrial Capacity to 48, Military Effectiveness to 66, and Political Stability to 1.0 while suffering fewer than 10 million deaths due to unrest and starvation. The structure is simple, but 'winning' is not -- I've yet to do so, in fact.

Your peasants and tractors produce food, and you have a choice of how to extract it from them in order to feed the rest of the populace -- voluntarily, that is, bribing them with consumer goods, or forcibly, that is, by collectivizing agriculture and setting quotas. The former is basically a no-go -- you don't have enough industry to produce sufficient goods (though you might try expanding oil production enough to export and purchase goods). Thus, the peasants will suffer for the greater glory of the Soviet state, but what of that? The future belongs to the industrial proletariat, surely.

You use your surplus food production to feed your industrial workers, miners, and oil workers, as well as your soldiers, of course. Oil and metals are transformed by factories into production, which you can use to build more factories, as well as tractors, oil rigs, mining equipment, and weapons. The game tracks "Standard of Living" (SoL) for each sector of the economy -- you can improve it by making sure everyone gets enough to eat, and perhaps reluctantly allocating some small quantity of consumer goods -- and the worse the SoL, the more people die.

Despite the sparse--well, non-existent--graphics, this is a bleakly humorous game, a sort of noir version of Hammurabi in which your only hope of victory lies in fervent imposition of stringent tyranny. But we have no choice, Comrade. If you fail to play, the terrorists, I mean the Nazis, will already have won.

RPI Game Symposium Report

costik — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:27:42 -0400

Last Friday and Saturday, I was in Troy, New York, at the 2008 Game Festival & Symposium at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Like the SCAD conference I reported on a couple of weeks ago, this is a university-run meeting, with speakers from industry, and with mostly students in attendance. Michael Lynch met me at the Albany train station, and squired me about.

Friday night was the "festival" portion, with students showing off their final projects, some of which were quite impressive, for undergraduate games created over a single semester; staff from Vicarious Visions, a local developer (and now an Activision studio) were on hand to judge them, with the top 5 receiving small cash prizes at the end of the conference. (For what it's worth, I agreed with them on what constituted the top five, but would have ranked them differently.)

The theme of the conference was 'serious games,' though the RPI program is not particularly geared to such.

The first speaker on Saturday was Paolo Pedercini of Molleindustria, creator of the McDonald's Game, Operation Pedopriest, and Faith Fighter; he expressed the thought that we can really only hope to understand the modern world as a congeries of dynamic systems with emergent properties, that games are by nature dynamic systems with emergent properties, and that game developers ought to be working to grapple more immediately with real-world issues, and can thereby offer insight into matters of importance. Later on, in conversation, he chastised me for mentioning him by name in these pages, and in particular in association with his games: "I get death threats every day," he said. And I believe him, and perhaps will be more circumspect in future; yet it's hard not to acknowledge one of our most courageous and interesting auteurs in the chancy area of 'games for change.'

Next up were Paul Tarini and Dwayne Proctor of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a major heath-care non-profit, who were among the funders of Re-Mission; they talked about some of their game-related efforts, and also about their huge (half a billion dollar) commitment to reversing the trend toward childhood obesity in this country, and games' potential contribution to the effort.

After lunch, I spoke on the topic of Design for Serious Games: Why So Many Suck and How to Design Ones that Don't. (Link is to presentation, a tad over a meg in size.)

Following was a panel discussion with three RPI graduates who now all work for First Playable in Troy, and seem delighted to do so. They also praised the many virtues of working for a small studio--a bit of a one-sided discussion, really.... here's one example of why this isn't so rosy, and of course here's my bitter screed on the subject.

Eric Zimmerman was the last speaker of the day; he tried to combine one of his patented (and rousing) lectures on game design with a pitch for Gamestar Mechanic and a plea for creativity in design, and basically ran out of time -- any one of the three would probably have sufficed in its own right. But he's always fun to listen to.

Finally, Karthik Bala of Vicarious Visions (not incidentally an RPI alum) presented the awards for the Festival.

Eric and I took the train back to the city together; I nodded off, and he played Astral Tournament.

What I found interesting, and heartening, about the experience was something I also took away from the SCAD conference: as game development programs spread through academia, they are not, as you might first expect, becoming primarily vocational ventures to train people in the skills required of them by the conventional industry, but do seek to inculcate a design sensibility, an impulse to innovation, and an appreciation for the historical development of the field. We may at least hope that, just as Cahier du Cinema and the rise of film studies led to a creative renaissance in film, academic attention to games may do likewise in our own field.