Recently in the Games Category

I'm sitting in the back of a meeting where the speaker has spent 40 minutes tracking down a technical glitch interrupting his presentation. Happily, the room has wireless access...

Rogue: Exploring the Dungeons of Doom (aka Rogue), created in the early 1980s[1] by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman, is an intriguing game for many reasons. For one, it's still being actively played, ported, enhanced, and forked[2] two decades later -- a fact that challenges its description as just a "vintage" or "retro" game. Advertisement It's also among a scant handful of games that have achieved worldwide recognition despite originating on UNIX[3], a platform better suited for science and industry than computer games.-- Matt Barton and Bill Loguidice

A great little indie game by Daniel Benmergui. The game is also a poem.

Today I Die

Wonderfully technical discussion of interactive fiction programming issues, presented by Andrew Plotkin at Penguicon 7.  Coding is art, art is code.

As I write this, Inform 7 is approaching its third birthday. I7 is a tool for creating interactive fiction (text adventure games). Like all the most powerful IF development tools, I7 is a programming language -- a powerful and peculiar one.

Inform 7 gets a lot of attention for its English-like syntax. I'm not going to talk about the natural-language aspects of I7. I'm going to talk about the underlying programming model, the system of rules and rulebooks. That's less attention-grabbing than the flashy syntax; but, in my opinion, it's equally radical. And perhaps a more important development, in the long run.

To be fair, I also like talking about the rule-based programming model because I contributed some of its ideas, back when I7 was first taking shape. I'm not claiming authorship here, mind you. I got into a long and digressive email conversation with Graham Nelson and Emily Short, in which we all threw ideas around, and then Graham went ahead and spent six years developing his ideas. I shoved mine on the shelf.

This means that I will talk about I7 for a while, and then break into a wild flight of "but this is how I think it should be done!" And then finish up with all the reasons I haven't made it work yet. Such is a hacker's life.

The St. Cloud Times gives retrogaming its due, with this profile of Matt Barton.

The most common misconception about video gamers is that they are young teenagers who absorb everything negative that the most violent games offer. Matt Barton has another take. The 30-something English professor at St. Cloud State University considers himself to be a more accurate reflection of today's typical gamer. And he's out to educate the rest of us by making a feature-length documentary about the history of video games.

The always-interesting Language Log offers this detailed and thoughtful analysis of gender and sports terminology. Here's just a snippet:

I've never seen man used to refer to a female athlete in an expression like "guard her man" or "I had my man beat". Nor, for that matter, have I ever seen woman used in such expressions. Instead, female athletes and their coaches seem normally to use girl.-- Mark Liberman

There's nothing terribly stunning or new in this interview with Steve Meretzky, but I'm happy to read his memories about the good old days of text adventuring.

SM: It's kind of hard to imagine, looking back on these text games now, but at the time, they were really the cutting edge--not just of games, but of any computer application. They pushed the limits of computing power. To be able to type in sentences in natural English and have the computer understand them seemed really cool to players. Infocom also did some incredible things in terms of text compression, frequent-word algorithms, and the like that allowed us to get what at the time seemed like an extraordinary amount of material into a game.

TR: Infocom created a "Z-machine," which was a piece of software that could serve as a container for any Infocom game. When a new type of computer came out, you could adapt the Z-machine to that computer, and Infocom's entire library would immediately be available for it. How did that help the company?

SM: It was certainly a huge component of Infocom's competitive advantage. It was just hugely important in the early '80s, when there was a new, completely incompatible PC coming out once a month or so. Digital would come out with one, and HP would come out with one, and Tandy would come out with another, and NEC would come out with another, and there were just so many. I think at one point we had 20 different personal computers that we were supporting. The great thing was that it was almost free to move our game to some new computer even if it would only sell a hundred copies. And the other huge advantage was the speed with which we could respond to a new computer. The biggest success was when the Mac came out in 1984. We wrote a Mac interpreter, and got about 15 games running on the Mac, at a point when there were only maybe 15 other games in the entire universe that you could find for your Mac. So half of all the game titles that you could find for the Mac were ours.

My son watches, as a baby becomes totally engrossed with a pair of sunglasses, puzzling over how to get them on his face. The baby keeps manipulating the glasses, turning and twisting them in attempt to get them to stay on.

"Look," says my son.  "It's like his 'Zork'."

You can't do this on dead trees.  A great example of how a new media widget makes a news article interactive. From the Wall Street Journal.

• Katie Retzinger, "Immediacy, Desire, and the Other: MMORPGS and Constructions of Identity"
• Mathew S.S. Johnson "The World is Subject: Gamers as Potential for Change"
• Phill Alexander: "Running with the Bulls: The Race Rhetoric of the Tauren in World of Warcraft"

The study of games and composition have long overlapped in the areas of popular culture and identity studies have long been areas of overlap.  I didn't detect a shred of defensiveness in the approach these scholars took, which has not always been the case at games-related CCCC events.  The idea of presenting games as an avenue for social change sounds like another potential growth area, in which the study of composition can turn games into a tool of inquiry and challenge, in much the same way that composition teachers often posit their role as preparing future citizens of a literate society.  I wanted just a bit more of the "How my thesis applies to college composition and communication" bullet point, simply because one expects that in a talk at this venue, but all three held up as explorations of issues relevant to both games studies and identity politics.

What follows are my own rough notes, lightly edited, with my own comments inserted in square brackets.

A brief overview of a handful of tools that help the game-creation process.

if you've got a brilliant idea and don't have the capital to build it yourself - or the inclination to pimp it to your local Big Name Publisher, create a proof of concept with these recommended game engine kits and let us know when you've got something we can play! -- Aleks Krotoski

"Playing video games all day, alone and friendless, is is simply the best way that we have to prepare our children for a life of solitude in a barren wasteland."

Nerd heaven.

In chase mode, Pinky behaves as he does because he does not target Pac-Man's tile directly. Instead, he selects an offset four tiles away from Pac-Man in the direction Pac-Man is currently moving (with one exception). The pictures below illustrate the four possible offsets Pinky will use to determine his target tile based on Pac-Man's orientation:

If Pac-Man is moving left, Pinky's target tile will be four game tiles to the left of Pac-Man's current tile. If Pac-Man is moving right, Pinky's tile will be four tiles to the right. If Pac-Man is moving down, Pinky's target is four tiles below. Finally, if Pac-Man is moving up, Pinky's target tile will be four tiles up and four tiles to the left. This interesting outcome is due to a subtle error in the logic code that calculates Pinky's offset from Pac-Man. This piece of code works properly for the other three cases but, when Pac-Man is moving upwards, triggers an overflow bug that mistakenly includes a left offset equal in distance to the expected up offset (we will see this same issue in Inky's logic later). Don Hodges' website has an excellent article giving a thorough, code-level analysis of this bug, including the source code and a proposed fix--click here to go there now.

I recently gave a brief presentation on games to our school's education faculty. One faculty member (I believe he used to be a school principal) got fairly excited, asking me whether he could use Crazy Machines to set up a scientific experiment to show his students. 

I suggested that he was thinking of the game simply as a tool for setting up a demo, but that was missing out on the power of games.  Rather than use a physics simulation program to create a fancy video for the students to watch, he should instead put the students in front of the game, and make them wrestle with the simulated system, as they strive to find their own path to a goal.

Emily Short gives an interesting take on this same idea, drawing on her own extensive experience as an indie game designer and critic.  She asks her students to design a game that will incorporate material they learn in a humanities course.  To pull this off, the instructor would have to know games inside and out -- not any specific games, but rather the principles that define good game design

I've used a variation of the following activity in a couple of different college classes (all of them courses in translation, pitched at a class of 30-40 students with no prior background in classics):

Divide into groups of five or six, and spend 30 minutes or so coming up with a core game design for a game based on some aspect of the Roman economy (or whatever -- specific content varies). Name your game. Choose a group member to present a pitch for it to the rest of the class.

Students love this activity. They think I'm letting them play in class, practically giving them the day off. The discussions are riotous. Certain male students who tend to be otherwise pretty quiet in class actually sit up and talk. It usually starts off a little goofy, but they get interested in some specific questions about the game design, and pretty soon they're paging back through their books to remind themselves about critical dates and data.

You are pleased to find scientific evidence of a phenomenon that you had been familiar with all along through your love of interactive fiction. You check BoingBoing, where you find exactly the same lame second-person intro gimmick.

When the volunteers read statements that began, "You are..." they pictured the scene through their own eyes. However, when they read statements explicitly describing someone else (for example, sentences that began, "He is...") then they tended to view the scene from an outsider's perspective. Even more interesting was what the results revealed about first-person statements (sentences that began, "I am..."). The perspective used while imagining these actions depended on the amount of information provided - the volunteers who read only one first-person sentence viewed the scene from their point of view while the volunteers who read three first-person sentences saw the scene from an outsider's perspective.

[...]

The authors suggest that when we read second-person statements ("You are..."), there is a greater sense of "being there" and this makes it easier to place ourselves in the scene being described, imagining it from our point of view.-- Association for Psychological Science

This is fairly recent news, and at the moment I only see press releases and mission statements, and bloggers. So I'm still not sure what to make of this, but it's definitely something to watch: an elementary school with a curriculum built from the ground up on the procedural principles of gaming.

Out of school we are seeing a radical expansion of the collaborative and creative capacities of young people who are eager to learn and participate. Quest responds by balancing traditional academic needs with the reality that students today can and do learn in different ways, often through work with digital media, games, online networks, and mobile technologies. Quest will open with a 6th grade class in Fall 2009.

Quest supports a dynamic curriculum that uses the underlying design principles of games to create highly immersive, game-like learning experiences for students. Games and other forms of digital media also model the complexity and promise of "systems." Understanding and accounting for this complexity is a fundamental literacy of the 21st century. -- Institute of Play

I've had a recurring dream since I was a teenager, somehow riding along behind my old car -- it's always the car I've most recently traded in or otherwise lost -- with a remote control in my hand. I'm controlling my car, which keeps rushing ahead of me, eventually disappearing around the corner where I can't see to steer it, and although I apply the brakes, I always hear a crash, then wake up in a cold sweat and feel very relived that "It was all a dream!"

I installed a bargain copy of Grand Theft Auto III a few years ago, since that game had gotten a lot of scholarly and journalistic attention. I was happily driving through the city when I noticed that many of the buildings in the back streets had low roofs situated near slanted boards of some sort.  Naturally I floored it and drove up one of those ramps, and suddenly I saw a rooftop auto playground that I didn't know existed.

As soon as I tried jumping from one building to another, and was feeling a bit of satisfaction because I'd lined up the jump fairly well, the camera shifted to a different view and tracked my car sailing through the air in slow motion.  While I was not in any "zone" at the time, I was still enjoying my discovery of the hidden level enough that I found the shifting point of view, and the feeling that I was losing control over my vehicle, unsettling.  I wanted to perform the stunt, I didn't want to watch slow-motion, third-person footage of the stunt happening.

While a game like Rock Band does involve players in a team and there is a joissance to be experienced that is not unlike group dance, the truth is that even the relationships between players is a faux social relationship. The players' attentions are mediated by the TV screen which must be studied and followed like a script, rather than performing as a harmonious ensemble, riffing off the sounds created by one another. Indeed, you often have to ignore your fellow players' mistakes if you hope to survive, and the only impromptu action you can take is lifting your guitar into the air to pretend that you're doing a solo. Yet the pleasure of the game comes when everyone is working in uncanny synchronicity, timed with the pulsing lights -- we win when become the stars on the screen by rote repetition of the programmed score, keeping the machine streaming prefab sounds in a steady and uninterrupted stream. Mechanical reproduction is the objective. It is, ultimately, the very antithesis of artistic production. -- Michael Arnzen

Perhaps a better title for these games is "TV Show Simulator." Car stunt sequence, music video, sporting event (complete with play-by-play commentary).  

I play with a 3D modeling tool called Blender. One of the filters you can add to your virtual scenes is lens flare -- the effect of sunlight bouncing around inside a camera. That filter doesn't add anything to the reality of the image, other than associating it with other mediated images that you've seen.

Interactive Fiction Writing Month (Feb 15 - March 15)

This is the blag for Interactive Fiction Month 2009, an attempt to lure beginners into learning Inform through a series of easy tasks with concrete deadlines, and to promote discourse on game design in general.

Great piece from Ben Kuchera at Ars Technica.

 

Today I decided to conduct an experiment. I started calling people I knew, and I asked if they had one or more video games in the house. Then I asked if they breast-fed their children. To my great shock, most answered "yes" to both. One couple I contacted switched to formula after their child's birth, and told me that they didn't play video games. The data, based on my first round of calls, was conclusive: if you play video games, you are much more likely to breast-feed your children.

Cantina

The current management of this rather seedy venue doesn't much care about appearances, apparently. Nonetheless, it's become one of the hottest spots in the area, attracting surly alcoholics from all around. A variety of local acts, the vast majority unrelentingly terrible, play here every Tuesday night.

Coincidentally, it's Tuesday night. A host of unsavory-looking people makes up your audience for the night. They're all staring at you expectantly.

A fake plastic guitar lies on the ground in front of you. Bolted to the wall is a television screen, dark and foreboding.

>_

So it begins. Text adventures, in which a world is presented in prose and interaction is through typed commands, are one of the oldest forms of computer game; music/rhythm games like Guitar Hero, in which a world is presented in dazzling color and blaring sound and interaction is through an instrument-shaped novelty peripheral, are one of the newest. When programmer Bill Meltsner combined the two recently in the satirical Champion of Guitars, the result was a textbook example of how an amusing artwork can catch on and go viral in a wired-up community that loves poking fun at itself. It's also a textbook example of the power of the so-called "lazyweb," the blogger practice of tossing a good idea out there in the hope that someone, somewhere, with more resources or less sloth, might make it a reality. -- Darren Zenko, The Toronto Star

Here's an excerpt from an article that appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of the Seton Hill University alumni magazine, Forward.


Page 1 | Page 2

There are no real details on the official site, but this is still worth watching.

Legends of Zork, which is being published by Activision, is currently in beta with no official release date yet disclosed. Prospective players can join the beta at the game's official website, as well as sign up for automated updates on Legends' development status. -- Wired

Some great writing and insightful observations in this review.

The story's arc is like that of a football thrown lazily against a crisp autumn sky: Even a dog can figure out where it's going to land. Hell, I could accurately predict individual lines of the game's dialogue. I'm not saying the narrative in Gears of War 2 was bad; I'm saying it was -- with a few, startling exceptions -- completely mediocre.

And yet here's the even crazier thing: I think the weak story made the game better.

Normally, we assume that shoot'em-up games need a good story to help you "care about the gameplay." Because shooters are extremely similar to each other in terms of mechanics -- kill things, scrounge for ammo, go kill more things -- they require a strong narrative to give the action some emotional payload.

We often say the same thing about role-playing games and other genres. The play is so generally similar from title to title -- complete quests, level up, complete harder quests -- that it is only the quality of the narratives that pulls you along. No story, no incentive to get to the end. Right? The story and characters give the play meaning.

Except, for me, Gears of War 2 worked in precisely the opposite way. The gameplay is so insanely superb that it imbued the narrative with meaning. --Clive Thompson

The "serious gaming" community is abuzz over Raid Gaza:

in which you take on the role of the Israeli military, building tanks, fighter planes and missiles in order to pummel the Palestinian territory and kill as many people as possible within three minutes. Bonus points are awarded for hitting hospitals and police stations. Meanwhile, the Hamas threat is characterised by spluttering Qassam missiles, which whir out of Gaza and usually explode uselessly in fields. The author of the game claims in a recent interview to have begun the project almost two years ago, in response to a UN report on the human cost of the continuing conflict.

Reactions have been mixed. News site Kotaku clearly feels it's in poor taste, but political gaming expert Ian Bogost writes that Raid Gaza is successful as a polemical attack on Israeli tactics.

At the heart of the debate is an ongoing question - are videogames an appropriate medium for political satire? -- Keith Stuart, Guardian

Are you a politician? a candidate for real political office? an MP in the UK? A Senator or member of the House of Representatives in the US? or the equivalent anywhere in the world? If so, I...a humble games programmer from the UK would like to give you a free gift. a FREE copy of Democracy 2 for you to practice with. There are no strings attached whatsoever, I won't publish your name anywhere unless you say I can, I'm not getting anything out of it other than the knowledge that just *maybe* I'm helping to make our current crop of politicians more prepared for the task ahead, especially with a global recession on the horizon. -- Positech Games (Via)

I was digging through my archives and came across this e-mail from caver and author Roger Brucker, responding to my request for anything he might remember about the well house -- described so vaguely in Will Crowther's 1976 game "Colossal Cave Adventure," but such a real-seeming place.

The wellhouse was one of a series of concrete catchments placed by the NPS [National Park Service] around the flanks of Flint Ridge. These mostly collected water draining from perched springs on top of the Big Clifty Sandstone, and routed water via pumps to collecting tanks on top of Flint Ridge. The original water collection system was built by the CCC in the 1930s. It was to supply the CCC camp AND Mammoth Cave hotel and visitor center. Around 1960 the NPS reactivated some of the system to provide more potable water for the upcoming Job Corps camp to be built at the site of the old CCC camp on Flint Ridge. CRF told the NPS this water system would be inadequate because during the summer when they needed the most water, the least amount would be supplied. Our prediction turned out true, and a waterline was brought in from out of the park. So the wellhouse was really a pump house, a relic of that old water system. To my knowledge it was not functioning in 1960, when I recall seeing it for the first and last time. My recollection is dim: I remember a 6 ft. x 6 ft. sandstone building with a cedar shingle roof and a sagging or missing door. It may have had moss on the roof. I think it did not contain a pump. And I do not recall a spring or pool of water in it.

Here's a picture of what's left:

Gaah! Is there anyone out there who's experienced with Wikipedia templates, who can help me resolve this mess? I uploaded a screenshot of Will Crowther's original Colossal Cave Adventure (freeware, c. 1976), but the Wikipedia copyright-protection policies are written for current programs (where the visuals are much more important).

Licensing

This is a screenshot of copyrighted computer software, and the copyright for its contents is most likely held by the author(s) or the company that created the software. It is believed that the use of a limited number of web-resolution screenshots: for identification of and critical commentary on the software in question in the absence of a free alternative, on the English-language Wikipedia, hosted on servers in the United States by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, ...qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law. Any other uses of this image, on Wikipedia or elsewhere, may be copyright infringement. See Wikipedia:Non-free content for more information. To the uploader: please add a detailed fair use rationale for each use, as described on Wikipedia:Non-free use rationale guideline, as well as the source of the work and copyright information. If this is a screenshot of free software (GPL, BSD, etc.) do not use this template! Use the license tag that correspond to the license instead, optionally alongside {{Free screenshot}} to categorize as a free screenshot.

Rationale: This is a screenshot of freeware, originally released by author Will Crowther in the 1970s.

This image does not meet Wikipedia's non-free content policy. The image needs a separate fair-use rationale for each article that links to (or names) the article it is used in. An explanation of how to do this can be found at Wikipedia:Non-free use rationale guideline - the easiest way to add a fair-use rationale is with a template such as {{non-free use rationale}}. If this is not fixed within a week, the image will be removed from any articles without a proper rationale. Please remove this tag once the problem is fixed. This image does not have an adequate rationale for the following article(s): MUD Adventure game Audio game

This came up in my feed reader today.  Like me, this gamer prefers stories to mindless shoot-em-ups, and laments the current state of commercial gaming.

There's a lot of hipocrysy in the minds of many gamers today. Almost every gamer I talk to tells me they want games with depth, carefully written storylines, and maginificent scenery - yet they camp out in front of game shops whenever the next game featuring a nameless space marine killing aliens/Russians/Chinese/terrorists comes out. I'm trying very hard to stick to my guns (you have to admit, that's a good one) when I say that I like games which at least promise me depth and decent storytelling - and I try to buy only those.--Thom Holwerda

Raph Koster comments on the internet buzz surrounding a blog entry that went viral.

The challenge in an adventure game is not based on fighting enemies, building armies, or the usual competitive activities associated with video games. Rather, the player has to figure out what the designers were thinking when they built the game and follow some script of events in order to win. These events are activated by actions the user can perform and the necessary actions are created by the player executing a particular command on a particular object in the game world. The player interacts with the world by performing actions on individual objects, using objects with each other, and navigating through the world. To progress in the game, the player needs to find a particular sequence of events or combination of actions which trigger other behaviors and events in the world. Gradually, those events lead to some winning state. The user is given a set of graphical, verbal, or textual descriptions of the game world and is supposed to figure out exactly what the programmer expects him or her to do. -- Mark Newheiser, Strange Horizons

I've blogged before about an episode of Blake's 7, a British sci-fi series from the late 70s, that centered on the thief Vila, who usually played a supporting comic-relief role. In this episode, the main action focused on his efforts to escape from a trap, and we see him develop a relationship (of sorts) with the long-dead designer of said traps.

Here's a bit of the script from City on the Edge of the World, written around 1980... I think it does a good job describing one way of thinking of the player's relationship with the puzzles in an adventure game:

KERRIL: We're shut in. Vila, we're shut in!
VILA: Don't worry. My man knows we're here.
KERRIL: Your man?
VILA: The designer. He knows we're here, and he knows we're not stupid because if we were, we wouldn't have got this far.
KERRIL: So?
VILA: So if he wanted to stop us, there's only one way left to him.
KERRIL: What?
VILA: Shh.
KERRIL: According to the locals, this lot is thousands of years old. You sound as though you're expecting to meet this character.
VILA: He may be dead, but he's still trying to outthink me. Keep behind me. Step where I step, and don't touch anything. Right?
KERRIL: Right. What are you expecting him to do?
VILA: I'm expecting him to try and kill us.

But note that the encounter with the puzzle is less meaningful when it's divorced from its context. As I noted, Vila is the comic-relief sidekick, who chooses cowardice and self-preservation over action. This episode is memorable not simply becuase of the cool puzzle, but also because the story furnishes the character with a love interest (who's turned on by the very geekiness that dooms him to sidekick status in an action TV series). I enjoyed watching Vila figure out what the designer was thinking, but that's becuase the show provided a framing narrative that explained the stakes, and I got to watch how Vila reacted to changes in the environment.

But if, while playing an adventure game, my primary reaction is "What was the designer thinking?" it's probably because the story was not sufficiently interesting. 

When I play an adventure game, I want to spend time thinking, "What would I do if I were in this situation?" or, better yet, "What would the protagonist do if he/she were in this stituation?"  If I click randomly on the screen in hopes of hitting a hot button, or if I have to type ten different synonyms to get the game to understand me, then the game world does not contain sufficient clues to help me solve the puzzle on my own.

Given my obsession with narrative, I would have liked Newheiser to have spent more time talking about the story that contextualizes the puzzles, so that the player feels that solving each separate puzzle advances the PC one step closer to reaching a goal.

An adventure game is a series of puzzles, solved by interacting with discrete elements in the game world, usually in a way that does not depend on reflexes or real-time concerns.

Bloxorz and Echochrome both fit Newheiser's definition, but they certainly aren't adventure games. Portal is a string of puzzles, but they're given meaning by a story.

It's worth the time to look back at Grahamn Nelson's classic "The Craft of Adventure," (which refers specifically to text adventures, which continued evolving on their own trajectory after the graphic adventures became popular) and Jesper Juul's Half-Real for some meaty analysis of the relationship between puzzle and story.