Playdead just announced that Limbo is headed to XBLA. Looking forward to seeing this at GDC.
Limbo looks fantastic, and there’s something just so archetypally elegant about that little stroll in the woods; its evocative of Miyamoto’s childhood hillside wanderings, and my own memories of the intersections of exploration and imagination.
Are atmospheric silhouette graphics all that it takes to impress me these days? I think no - Feist and Limbo in particular look to be particularly subtle and refined in gameplay and sound as well - but there still is something to be said for simplicity of visuals taking such a strong position in the indie community now.
One of our tenets is to look closely at what the big studios do, then do the exact opposite.
This is a stylistic as well as practical decision. What happens if non-mainstream style is appropriated, to some extent, by the mainstream (as things often do with very near everything besides games)? What’s next?
Jesse Schell gave a must-watch talk at DICE this year, encapsulating a lot of issues I’ve recently been thinking about. He starts on the topic of the rise of social media games and moves to discussing convergence of social/new media, technology, entertainment and so on through game-like constructs; essentially, gameplay being incorporated into everything else we do.
Part one of this post will outline my experience with one aspect of his talk - the rise of social media gaming.
DEVIOUS, DEVIOUS SOCIAL MEDIA GAMES
As Schell states in his talk, social media gaming - specifically on Facebook - got huge in 2009.
I recently took a month or two to do some research on quite a few - “X-Wars” games, Farm games, Pet games, Quizzes, Puzzles, etc. The ones I spent the most time on were Word Challenge, Farmville, Yoville, Mafia Wars, Cafe World, Country Story, Who Has the Biggest Brain, Geo Challenge, and Crazy Planets among others.
Spending so much time on these games pained me, greatly - and yet I still managed to find myself extremely, disturbingly, addicted. I have since broken my habit and am hoping to avoid a relapse.
My experience playing them consisted largely of performing progressively repetitive, task-based, time consuming chores; making up largely an empty gameplay experience, with the system constantly prompting me with its aggressive monetization models, as well as encouraging its its viral spread across my social network.
I can’t conceal my distaste at these strategies for addiction. And yet, again… I was addicted. Briefly, but absolutely addicted.
My experience was that gameplay consisted largely of creating a sense of compulsion and obligation to move on those tasks, and yet there is some fun to be had in these games, true. In particular I enjoyed Crazy Planets with its basic artillery (e.g. Worms) gameplay.
But overall, these were the feelings that these games brought up in me:
Do this! Share this! Share to your friends! Look at this sad kitty that wandered onto your farm! Give him to your friends! Don’t wait or your crops will go to waste! Get your friends to join you otherwise your mafia is too weak! Now spend some real money on in-game currency! Go go go! Be on our game, all the time! Otherwise your fake stuff will go to waste; all of it!
What’s the bottom line?
Here’s the thing though - it works, and it works WELL. All one needs to do is to look at Zynga’s numbers to know that. But is it sustainable? And what of now these highly polished gameplay conventions, now tried and tested in social media, making their way to previously uncharted territory for games? (Part 2)
I definitely encourage everyone to watch Jesse Schell’s talk if you haven’t done so already.
Post by Bryan Thursday February 25th 2010, 8:09 pm
Filed under: game design, nostalgia
My boss often jokes that if a game was made after 1995, I’m not interested. Not exactly true, but…
A nice article from Evan Stubbs pointing out just how derivative most of what we are playing now essentially is.
“I believe there’s still lessons to be learned by studying and playing the classics. I believe that it’s fundamentally important to have a strong grounding in the history in which one designs and writes; the twisted thing is though, I can’t explain why it’s important. Often, their mechanics are somewhat broken, their graphics pitifully archaic by modern standards, and their difficulty punishing; by comparison, modern games are a marvel of design, similar to comparing the Kitty Hawk to an A380. And yet surely, if it’s been done before, isn’t it important to know about it and understand how it was done?”
Post by Bryan Friday February 05th 2010, 7:48 pm
Filed under: IRL
These are images from a new photobook, Gameface, by Studio Kinglux.
It’s always a little disturbing being confronted with what exactly we look like when we (gamers) play most single player, non-motion controlled games.
There’s always something of a disconnect between the heightened mental stimulation and engagement we feel, and…
…the look of blank boredom that we actually physically express, despite obvious concentration.
The zombie look that dominates the gamer’s countenance never does justice to the mental engagement that is happening beneath the surface.
It makes what has been accomplished with Wii, the potential of Sony’s “Arc”, Rock Band et al, and of course Natal seem even more appealing in comparison … despite the fact that the potential of more physical inputs has been shown so far to have many, many more limitations when it comes to pure gameplay - i.e. potential of mental engagement.
Can we have games that engage us equally mentally and physically? Or is the zombie look an expression of the necessity of heightened mental engagement of these kinds of games? Is same-screen social gaming - good ol’ trash talking in one-on-one beat ‘em ups, for example - the middle ground? Is it Alternate Reality Gaming? Is it somehow finding a way to bring increased gameplay sophistication to physical input games?
Post by Bryan Friday January 29th 2010, 11:51 am
Filed under: apple, impressions
“The iPad is the beginning of a new category — one that is hyper-convergent and humanistic.” (via designmind)
I am definitely impressed with some things (and less impressed with others), though I personally wouldn’t buy one until perhaps the 2nd or 3rd generation. That seems to be the trend for my purchasing of Apple products, anyway.
Regarding the possibilities for the iPad as a gaming device… it seems there is major potential, although it may not be as attractive to developers as Apple would like. Gamasutra had a good summary.
“…although Apple’s official specs page simply lists “accelerometer,” an Apple representative at the event told me the device’s accelerometer will be able to detect tilting on both the X and Y axes, unlike the iPhone, unlocking true 3D control as a possibility, but this capability was not demonstrated.”
True 3D control? Old school arcade turret games come to mind…
“The iPad will be as big a crap shoot for developers as the iPhone is. Forstall promised “another goldrush” when the iPad launches. But that promise, rather than exciting them, might make most developers a little queasy.”
A bigger crapshoot, I’d say. Especially within the first generation.
Also … still no Flash(!) - but Unreal Engine 3 on the other hand… the combination of low cost SDK/developer access and Unreal’s free UE3 licensing plan is an explosion of UE3 content waiting to happen, provided it sees support for non-PC dev.
Having spent some time designing for user interaction and interface on the Civilization Revolution iPhone/iPod Touch port here, I’m pretty excited to see the beta SDK for iPad roll out… I want to see the capacity for multitouch recognition. Two players simultaneously? Four?
I found this amusing - using a gaming icon to illustrate trends covering a few different topics.
Also Ratatat as soundtrack!
Commenter response to the video on Kotaku seems to communicate disdain, ambivalence, or utter bafflement. The struggle seems to be with either the lack of a powerful message or the strangeness of familiar game elements used out of context. It is what it is … only using a somewhat unorthodox medium for the subject matter.
Certainly by this point, Mario and other gaming icons have adequately penetrated the cultural/societal lexicon to be used effectively to communicate an out of context message. Will framing real life issues within the vocabulary of interactive entertainment become more widespread with technological accessibility and increased (possibly) cultural relevance? This also has plenty of implications for the serious games movement.
The “Avatar Machine” was created by Marc Owens, a recent participant at the designers in residence program at the Design Museum in London.
Incorporating a physical, wearable costume inspired by (and apparently directly derived from) low-poly in-game character graphics, a suspended, back-mounted camera system, and a head-mounted visual interface, the Avatar Machine essentially allows a participant to move about and interact with an environment while viewing him/herself in the third person - an entity in a 3D world, viewing oneself outside oneself.
His statement for the piece:
“The virtual communities created by online games have provided us with a new medium for social interaction and communication. Avatar Machine is a system which replicates the aesthetics and visuals of third person gaming, allowing the user to view themselves as a virtual character in real space via a head mounted interface.
The system potentially allows for a diminished sense of social responsibility, and could lead the user to demonstrate behaviors normally reserved for the gaming environment.”
Game nerds everywhere rejoice (…?). Gamers are intimately familiar with the experience of visualizing a self-representational entity from a 3rd person/over-the-shoulder/behind-the-back viewpoint, as it remains a standard convention of perspective in 3D games. With that shared experience as the context for the piece, it would be wild to be able to have it translated to your actual, physical self and environment, though I expect gamers and non-gamers would approach that experience very differently.
“The system potentially allows for a diminished sense of social responsibility, and could lead the user to demonstrate behaviors normally reserved for the gaming environment.”
For the most part, the language of third-person perspective 3D games is the language of violence. To a lesser extent, it also includes spatial navigation, exaggerated physical movement/capability, AI interaction, and so on - but pick up any 3rd person perspective game, and chances are good that the predominant way of affecting the virtual environment is through a physically destructive capability.
Is this what the statement suggests is the end effect of the Avatar Machine on the user?
Bearing that in mind, this hypothetical seems a bit bold to me. Can it potentially lead users to this conclusion? Or does it encourage it? Is that almost the intention of the piece?
Additionally, how much of this is enabled by the simple fact that a weapon representation is incorporated into the costume itself? Is anti-social behavior encouraged more by the simple fact that the Avatar Machine includes a modeled sword?
The language of 3rd-person games: arrows and guns. …And swords.
If anti-social behavior is simply suggested by a sense of viewing yourself from a traditional violent game perspective, would the implications be the same were the user unfamiliar with these paradigms of gaming? If you’ve never experienced a third-person perspective violent game, or controlled a polygonal fighter in a virtual environment, why would you have any inclination of these things in the Avatar Machine?
For non-gamers, people unfamiliar with this viewpoint and its conventions in games, I think what would be most notable is a sense of detachment; a sense of being outside yourself.
Therefore, does Owens suggest that this sense of detachment would lead a user to said gaming-environment-type actions without having game experience? That the natural conclusion of a sense/perspective of physical personal detachment is this diminished sense of social responsibility, contextual game experience notwithstanding?
Another thought: what would be the difference in self-perception if there was no “costume,” no polygonal wearable parts? Having the outfit - clunky, low-res models reminiscent of late 90s era 3D game tech - adds an immediacy, a visual impact to the piece, but doesn’t necessarily say anything about self-perception; the user’s place in the environment as an individual. Rather, wearing it, you become a generic bunch of abstracted polygons.
What if it incorporated appropriately digitized textures of your face, clothing, hair, etc. to a generic model, a la some existing attempts at in-game player texture mapping for custom characters? What if you were no longer “blond spiky-haired hero” and instead a differentiated, distorted representation of yourself as an individual? How then would you approach your place in the environment?
Post by Bryan Tuesday January 05th 2010, 12:58 am
Filed under: lists, games
One quick post before I get on my plane back to Shanghai.
In no particular order…
Portal.
Shadow of the Colossus.
Braid.
Half Life 2.
Katamari Damacy.
Why? Just because. No blah-blah this time around. There’s enough brilliant stuff written about these games already. I will write about why the other usual suspects didn’t make the list though (er… later).
