Platypotamus

The Brainy Gamer has a piece on how Portal is being introduced as required reading for a course called "Enduring Questions" at Wabash College.  This is awesome.

The Brainy Gamer: Portal on the booklist.

Our charge from the faculty made it clear that we should apply a broad definition to "readings," and I believe my special purpose on the committee was to help identify films, music, art, and other 'non-textual' sources to challenge our students to think hard about the questions raised in the course.

And so, as you might expect, a little light went off in my head. What about a game? Why not? Which one? Will they bite on this? Who knows? Let's try.

Been a while since I updated, due to some travel, some visitors, and some other general busy-ness (as opposed to business).  Not only have I fallen behind on updating ye olde blog, I've fallen behind on my reading too.  So I've been generally catching up, and sometime during that time,was linked to the following piece, which is just fantastic:

The Brainy Gamer: Fun Factor Catalog.

If you've been following my recent posts, you already know about my Fun Factor project. I'm trying to account for the many ways games provoke us to play them. A few days ago I asked you to help me 'catalog the fun' delivered by some of your favorite games, and you came through big time. Thanks again for that.I've sorted through your responses and added some of my own. The result is below: a collection of fun factors and a list of games that exemplify them.

Read the rest of this entry »

This was a great idea for a feature.  Read what actual Yakuza guys have to say about the game Yakuza 3:

Yakuza 3 reviewed by Yakuza - Boing Boing.

Kiryu is fighting all the time. He's gotta be a fucking idiot. No yakuza is going to run around getting into fistfights like that. Especially not an executive type. He'll wind up in jail or in the hospital or dead, maybe even whacked by his own people for being a troublemaker. These days, he'd probably get kicked out before even going to jail. Guys like that start gang wars and nobody wants that now. When a yakuza gets into a fight, it's serious business.

Bad Pitch/Good Pitch is a recurring feature in which I take some sort of creative work, and pretend that I am pitching it to the executives.  One pitch is terrible, and would never get the project greenlit, and the other is presumably better.  In theory, both are factual portrayals of the content of the project.

Bad Pitch:  A society is built entirely on the premise of pleasure and stability as the highest goal of society.  Citizens routinely engage in sexually promiscuous acts, including orgies, while taking a euphoric drug called soma.

Good Pitch:  Wait, that was the bad pitch?  How am I supposed to compete with that?

Show ▼

Interesting Choices is a recurring column that examines a decision point in a game, focusing on those that are particularly interesting.  The point of the column is to examine what particularly makes each of the choices interesting, and the impact that this has on the game as a whole.

It is fitting that the first installment of Interesting Choices is a game that has Sid Meier's name in the title.  The title of this column is itself a nod to his definition of games as a series of interesting choices.  While Colonization does indeed feature a series of these choices, the one that I particularly want to focus on is the one presented to me in the following pop up message:

The founding fathers are a particularly well implemented series of choices in the game, and Alexander Hamilton is a particularly appealing option for me in the current game.  Since his benefit is increased productivity (for free!) at all settlements, and I've sort of settlement spammed the new world, I'll get quite a bit of benefit from him--essentially a free carpenter that doesn't eat, at each settlement, which I have seven of.  At first glance, there seems to be little reason to say no, in fact.  Why would I even consider it?  To understand that, we've got to take a look at the system used to determine which founding fathers are available to me.

You'll probably need to click on that to look at the big version to see the portions I'm referring to, but let's break this image a part a bit, and examine the important bits:

• First, there are a lot of founding fathers available.  Here we've got John Rolfe, Jan de Witt, Peter Minuit, and Lord Baltimore.  We can further see that each founding father has a (mostly) unique effect, which may be relatively meaningless to readers who have not played the game, and which are beyond the scope of this particular document.
  • There is a scroll bar, indicating further options to the right.
  • There are tabs at the bottom, indicating even more options with other specialties.
• Notably, we see that each of these four gentlemen are already spoken for.  I've got the two on the right in my congress, and the English colonies have John Rolfe, while the French colonies have Peter Minuit.   The important part of this:  each founding father can only serve one colony, and once they're snatched up, they are gone for good.
• Across the center we have two progress bars, one for Political Points and one for Trade Points.  These are earned through actions in game, and represent their own series of choices.  The UI is perhaps a little bit less clear than it could be on this, but the head of each founding father lines up with the cost to recruit him.
• In the bottom left, there is a box detailing how many of each type of point I've collected at this moment in the game.  It's worth noting that in addition to Political and Trade Points, I've also got Religion, Military, and Exploration Points.

Several things combine to ultimately make the founding fathers decision one of the most rewarding in the game.  The fact that you are racing with the competing colonies to attract the founding fathers is one factor.  As soon as they are serving one colony, the others are out of luck.  The fact that the only time they offer to join is when they first become available is another important factor.  I cannot go back an re-invite Alexander Hamilton if I turn him town now.  I'd have waived my right to Alexander Hamilton; it's now or never.  The final factor that really makes the decision intense though, is the fact that I have to pay for him.  His cost in points is deducted from my current total.   Looking ahead on the trade tab, here's what I've got coming up:

I've just passed up Adam Smith (faster factory construction), and will next have a shot at John Jacob Astor (more furs) and then Eli Whitney (more cotton).  As I haven't focused much on cotton or furs, neither is particularly appealing (this game, anyway).  However, Alexander Hamilton doesn't just cost trade points, he costs political points as well.  This is true of all founding fathers in the game.  So recruiting Alexander Hamilton doesn't just diminish my chances of getting those other trade founding fathers before my competitors, it impacts my ability to recruit exploration, religious, military, and political founding fathers as well.

Every time a founding father that interests me offers to join up, I have to carefully weigh the advantages he offers compared to the other founding fathers that I might be able to recruit (from any tab) in the near future.  I also have to weigh the odds that another colony will recruit those other founding fathers first.  I also have to weigh how much impact a given founding father will have if they are recruited by an opponent.  Perhaps I want to play spoiler, and recruit Eli Whitney before the cotton-reliant French do.

Ultimately, in this case, I decide to recruit Alexander Hamilton.  His benefit is fantastic for my setup, and he's the most beneficial guy on the trade track for me (Cyrus McCormick wouldn't be bad either, though, offering increased sugar and food production).  On the other hand, these were the next 3 gentlemen available to me in the politics tab:

While I'm still hoping to snag at least one of them (Patrick Henry being my top choice), my chances to do so just took a serious hit.  These three, being Political founding fathers, require only Politics Points, and I just spent a boatload of those recruiting Mr. Ten-Dollar Bill.  As I continue this game, I may come to regret the decision I made with Alexander Hamilton.  It wasn't an easy decision to make, and it may have been the wrong decision.  The consequences of this single decision--good or ill--will be felt, perhaps, through the rest of this game, and that's enough to qualify it as an interesting choice from my perspective.

Frequently while playing one game, I find myself creating a second game for myself on top of the original.  In this column, I detail these.  I do so partially simply to share the game-within-the-game, but also to explore what lead to the embedded game's creation.

I feel that I need to preface this particular entry by noting that I'm writing about a game I haven't played in nearly 5 years, and so there's a very good chance that World of Warcraft is significantly different now than it was when I played Chat Bomber.
Chat Bomber is a short game that was played in the short time span between taking off on a gryphon from Ironforge, and landing at my destination (which caused me to switch chat channels).  In this time, I would introduce a new topic into the chat channel.   I won the round if Ironforge chat was still discussing this topic upon my return (after the instance run, or questing, or battlegrounds, or whatever I was up to).

While I suppose chat bombing is kind of a trollish game (sorry Uther server of 5 years ago!), I found myself fascinated by the fact that a couple of hours would pass, I wouldn't recognize any of the users involved in the discussion, but it would still be ongoing.  Naturally, this worked best with controversial openers (the simplest, most effective one at the time was always a strong opinion, whether positive or negative, about President Bush), but the controversy wasn't necessary.

Ultimately, there were two reasons why I created this particular game.  First, I've long found chat rooms to be the extra fine, vintage variety of Internet inanity.   Not only was the level of discourse often banal, there was often a dearth of discourse entirely, with chatters seemingly shouting into a void only to be responded to with a nonsequitor shout from another chatter.  In a way, I looked at it as a challenge to actually create cohesive conversation in the channel, with as few messages and as little time as possible.  The second big reason that I made the game was that at the time, riding a gryphon was a serious bit of downtime.  After you'd done a given flight path a few times, the landmarks no longer impressed, and aside from the "bio break" or snack grab, there wasn't much to do during the interval.  Those are the times that I find myself creating my own fun.

Gamasutra - News - In-Depth: No Female Heroes At Activision?.

"Most of the focus tests that I have seen run at Activision are very questionable," says one source, an assertion with which the other sources agreed. "If someone from publishing has a point to prove or can't get an idea in the game, the focus test questions are skewed, and the Activision feedback is skewed in their favor," he says.

"I have sat in a focus test that in the team's opinion went exceptionally well, but the feedback sent to the higher-ups from someone on the publishing side were skewed to be the exact opposite," he adds -- even in cases where according to the source "some of them stepped in our studio maybe twice in two years."

(via Ron Gilbert's twitter)

I haven't had a gold account on Xbox Live for a while (primarily because I just don't play multiplayer online very often), and this tends to shock a lot of people.   Many see no value in the 360 without Live, even.  Well, here's an account that does an excellent job explaining things:

11 Things That’d Make Xbox Live Better | Player One Podcast (via Gazunta's twitter).

My frustration boils down to these:1) I really don’t like to play with strangers because in general it’s not a great experience.

2) Sometimes my gaming taste and the tastes of people on my immediate friends list just don’t jive, so while I have 100 friends maybe only a small handful are playing the same game I am (Hydro Thunder Hurricane).

3) Unless I look at everyone on my friends list’s recent activity or are on when they’re on, I can’t easily see what everyone’s playing or what games we might share. I have to hunt that information, it’s not being fed to me.  It’s akin to Facebook being nothing more than a list of your friends and the only way you could find out what was going on with them was by clicking on their profiles or being online at the same time as they were. There’s just a feeling of minimal actual social interaction on XBL.

4) After the first week of a big game’s release, it’s tough to coordinate a time to play with friends. It’s just luck of the draw whether they’ll be on when you’re on so you can throw them an invite.

The article goes onto explain things that could be done to improve the experience, and quite frankly nails things nearly perfectly.  In fact, off the top of my head I only came up with one thing I'd add to the final item on his list:

Read the rest of this entry »

I'm not sure how late to the party I am on this one, but a student today mentioned a facebook app called Cow Clicker.  I don't have a facebook account anymore, so I can't actually check it out, but reading about it on Bogost's site has me rather fascinated:

Cow Clicker is a Facebook game about Facebook games. It's partly a satire, and partly a playable theory of today's social games, and partly an earnest example of that genre.

You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks. You can buy custom "premium" cows through micropayments (the Cow Clicker currency is called "mooney"), and you can buy your way out of the time delay by spending it. You can publish feed stories about clicking your cow, and you can click friends' cow clicks in their feed stories. Cow Clicker is Facebook games distilled to their essence.

Ian Bogost - Cow Clicker.  His site features a link to the app, as well as some extended thoughts on the concept (which I recommend reading!).

As you've probably gathered from previous posts, I've been playing a fair bit of Red Dead Redemption lately.  Similarly, as you may have gathered if you follow me on twitter, one of the features in the game that I find most rewarding is the greet button.

The rather brave decision to include a button on the controller dedicated (even partially) to something so seemingly superfluous must have been a tough sell to producers on the game.  While surely it would not take too terribly many man hours to implement the feature, and the few lines necessary were undoubtedly a drop in the budget bucket for recording sessions, the part that I imagine was difficult was convincing the producers that the impact of the feature would be anything more than negligible.

My experience with the game, though, has been made much more memorable by the services of that red B button on my 360 controller.  As I walk through town (cowboys don't run, even if it is faster), passersby will occasionally float a greeting at me.  This is no different from most other open world games, of course, with the possible exception of me walking rather than running.  In some of these games, my character will even respond to these floats (notably, I have a strong memory of CJ from GTA: San Andreas responding to civilian chatter, usually with something a bit insulting).

The simple inclusion of a button to control whether or not I respond ultimately drives what was initially a decent audio feature into a great tool for both immersion and even role playing for the player.  As I am playing with John Marston being an honorable fellow, I've been diligently using the greet button to maintain his polite character in the public's eye.  I do this despite the fact that greetings seem to have no tie into the honor and reputation system at all (missed opportunity?).   From a power gaming perspective, there is absolutely zero reason to bother with the greeting.  Yet, as I pass by a woman standing outside the general store, tip my hat, and say "Ma'am", I feel more like a cowboy than at just about any other time during the game.   Since I had to press the button to do that, it was an active choice by the player, so it makes me feel like a cowboy, not a person controlling a cowboy.   The difference is noticeable, and appreciated.