SHUSH

1500 plays

2011-07-02T02:23:00.000-07:00

Vexed Hedgehogs has 1500 plays at GameJolt. For me, this makes it far more successful than anything else I have made. A couple of my games have clocked over 1000 plays before, but this shows what you can achieve when you replace originality with cloning. Oh.

Mind you, chatting to a proper game developer the other day as he got his 1,000,000 th player for his commercial title keeps things in perspective.

The other joy is reading reviews in Russian, Italian and Czech where the fact that it relies on linguistic jokes that don't translate easily (sorry) means that it has been received as a fairly serious clone of Angry Birds. Oh dear.

Busy Busy Busy

2011-05-16T14:52:00.002-07:00

I have been busy. Oh so busy. And when I am busy, perhaps paradoxically, I have a habit of making games. Having discovered the joys of short burst development via the Experimental Gameplay Project I have found a lovely outlet for the frustrations of the day job. Anyway, I thought I’d share. Think of it as getting my feelings about some of contemporary game design off my chest. And I love Angry Birds, by the way.

Vexed Hedgehogs was built in a hurry and tweaked and tweaked and tweaked until it looks like it took an age to make. God bless physics engines built by other people, which made this far easier than it looks to make. I am ridiculously proud of this.

Go download. (PC only)

And then there is ZoomZoomZoom, which I am reliably informed isn’t up to snuff. Curse you, colleagues, for your honesty. I like it.

Go download. (PC only)

1000 plays

2011-01-31T03:35:00.000-08:00

Yay, Walk with Jack has got a thousand plays/downloads at Game Jolt, which is cheerful news. Given that GM games don't work in a browser (whatever the plug ins pretend) but have to be downloaded, that is quite a milestone for me. Peanuts to what your average Flash game can get at Kongregate or Newgrounds, mind, but still quite good. For context, Shush has a grand total of 989 plays/downloads and has been online since May 2007. May 2007? I have been doing this publicly since May 2007? Sheesh.

Have another picture:

Experimental Gameplay

2011-01-24T08:41:00.000-08:00

I keep telling myself that one day I will write a proper commentary on the little games I make, so that they make a little more sense than they currently do.

Three things occur to me, however:

I make games to relax.
I make games as experiments.
I make games that are more doodles than art.

I have had a fair amount of staring into space time lately, where I have found it hard to grind the day job into the weekends and the evenings so I turned to making a couple of (very quick) games according to someone else's theme, in this case that of the Experimental Gameplay Project.

I therefore offer these only as relaxing doodle experiments, largely about mouse control. The theme for January was 'inanimate', and both took four or five hours to complete (the brief for EGP is that dev time be under a week, so they are comfortably inside that).

The links take you to Game Jolt downloads of PC only exe files.

The first is called Danse Macabre and features the music by Camille Saint-Saëns and has the unquiet bones of a skeleton drifting away from its burial. The player is supposed to use left mouse to drag the bones back to rest. More experience than game, but there are some things I like here.

The second is All My Base, a space invader-a-like with a completely different control mechanic. There are blue and green invaders firing blue and green missiles at your bases, which cannot move. You need to manoeuvre the green on blue and the blue on green to destroy them before they hit your bases. The trick is that you can only drag the alien ships on screen as a single formation (they behave like a layer). It is slower than a true arcade game, and a bit puzzlish, but again there are things I am pleased with.

Walk with Jack

2010-12-11T02:10:00.000-08:00

href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_WHDvXnKQEf8/TQNP8K5ANvI/AAAAAAAAAX4/lOlxwtjEKCA/s1600/walkwith3.png">

So, this took two hours to build a prototype that remains almost unchanged from what I released, but took a while to polish in the wee small hours where I should have been doing something more productive.

I am never sure if my little games are really experimental games -- they are not often concerned with testing a hypothesis, but more explorations of ideas in interaction, but this one related to a problem -- if you put a game on iPhone the finger gets in the way when you interact. The solution means that this game is best described through its mechanic -- 'What you can't see can't hurt you'. It made the Jay is Games Weekend Download last week, and has picked up some positive comments (and about 800 plays in just over a week, which is pretty good for me, if miniscule by internet standards)

It also relates to the act of seeing in games, that I have written about from an academic point of view, and is a game I had planned to make for a while now. Oddly enough the variant I am playing with at the moment, which is a mini adventure of stitched together scenes, is closer to the original intention, which owed a lot to Mr McGoo.

Anyway, a 13.4 Mb download for the original at either Gamejolt or YoYo

Hubris

2010-09-02T01:03:00.000-07:00

Funny week last week. The children were away with grandma, and I had a bitty week of having to drop into work most days despite being technically off on leave. So I spent time playing with an idea until I could get it playable.

I guess I had been thinking about Lost in Static a little and I have always had a desire to make a flea circus game. I have a memory from childhood of Michael Bentine's Potty Time featuring dioramas with invisible protagonists moving (with footprints) across a sand table, but YouTube seems to imply I dreamed it all. And I have always had an interest in making games about games -- as the Pinball Panda games (and particularly Ultimate Toybox) make obvious, and an academic observation or two to make about the figure of the avatar and its visibility. So all this came together in making a game in which the avatar/protagonist is more or less invisible and which there is always a balance between movement and stillness. Bad guys and coins fade in and out depending on whether you are moving and, as with Lost in Static, it is hard to represent this with screenshots. I will try, however, with a level or two with more going on than most:

It has certainly gone beyond proof of concept, and I think does something new, but I can't seem to get anyone to play it, beyond colleagues forced at gunpoint. Another idea that fascinates me more than others, perhaps? It is available (for PC) at YoYo Games (where I entered it into a competition hoping that that would generate plays) and at GameJolt, and for intel Macs here. And there is a low quality YouTube video in the post below.

Audio isn't its strong point, but apart from that I think this is interesting.

2010-09-01T01:56:00.000-07:00

Very low quality video, but this is a gameplay video of a little experiment in making a flea circus inspired game while I had a week mostly off work and the rest of the family was away.

It looks a hell of a lot better in reality, but I have never turned out an AVI or registered with YouTube before, so this is a learning experiment all around.

Pinball Panda: Ultimate Toy Box

2010-03-30T05:14:00.000-07:00

So, I made a game at 480x272 (PSP screen size) for a competition. Possibly the only thing that has kept me sane over the last few months. UK Higher Education feels a little fraught at the moment, and I am now on the Dark Side and of management and can't just keep my head down and on my academic work. Anyway, this has been fun to make, for all its flaws, and I still fantasise (as the makers of Game Maker imply) that they might have a runner up so that I could see this running on a PSP. It is either that or get my head around Unity or Flixel. In all my spare time.

You can access it here, should you be so inclined. PC only, and you have to play at 480x272. Controls are Space and Arrow Keys. Esc quits to Windows.

Ninjas

2009-12-02T12:04:00.000-08:00

I am really quite pleased with this.

Brunel Talk 2008

2009-09-06T01:54:00.000-07:00

Yay -- what is a year between giving a presentation and letting anyone have access to it? Anyway, this is the Brunel Conference Keynote I gave from September 2008. It lacks the video and still clocks in at a 4.5 Mb Pdf, but it does cover some of the ground I am now working on related to videogames as essentially excessive. I was reminded of this when Ian Bogost gave an excellent keynote at DiGRA 2009 about videogames as 'a mess'. I am not sure how much sense it makes as slides alone. Stumbled across as I tried to finish up a presentation I am due to give next Saturday in Dublin. Busy busy busy.

[Oh, and I forgot to mention that this was an attempt at an analysis of where Spore fits in relation to Game Studies -- I am always intrigued about the process of allowing oneself to held to ransom by a quick response to games shortly after release, but so far this seems to have held up well enough.)

Nasty Bugs

2009-01-12T14:19:00.000-08:00

I wonder if there is any relationship between the fact that the corridors are now full of returning students and I feel utterly ill? Laptop out and feverish I stumble across a developer page (!?) at a site have never heard of Softpedia.com that has a stack of my little games on it. Strange -- there is even one there that I have never taken out of WIP because it doesn't really work (a garbage sorting game titled Junk). I am well aware of the complete and total lack of control you have when you put things online, and that I have never bothered putting a licence or anything more than a vague copyright sign on my games, but it still feels odd to see things travel without being told. I guess that is what Freeware is.

Meanwhile I have been tinkering with the layout and vocabulary of Pinball Panda. hence the screenshot:

And now to bed with a fever.

Panda Postscript

2008-12-20T10:47:00.000-08:00

So I have two more working days before I can switch on my out of office autoreply. And on Friday I taught for the last time for a while, as I have been asked to shift role away from front line teaching at least for a time. I probably won't have responsibility for a whole course again until next September/October, and that makes me a little nervous -- I like teaching, and I like students. On Friday, for example, I took a group of students from never having made a functional bit of interactive software before to having built a basic SHMUP. In about three and a half hours. What's not to like about that job?

Shooters have been a little on my mind lately. I am not a big fan (my reflexes are appropriate for my age, as I might politely say to my own parents), but I have seen Pinball Panda confront three in a row in the GMC Cage Match (a Game Maker Community bit of nonsense where members vote on two games in an online poll, with the winner going on to face a new opponent the next week) and I have a feeling that the poor little thing will lose this time (to I Have the Gun, having survived voting against Ever Scrolling Hue and Shoot 2008). A shame, but it has done well for such a casual game, whose core audience is unlikely to be the same demographic as that of the GMC.

Some random numbers: Plays (from all places) 322+8+27=357. Not bad, I feel, although minute by internet standards. Ratings: 2.7/5 (YoYo :(), 8.2/10 (64 Digits :)). Entries in Online Highscore Table: 42. Entries in Online Highscore deleted because of offensive tags: 2. Times Table Hacked: 1.

Ho ho ho, and happy holidays.

Online Pinball Panda

2008-12-12T15:39:00.001-08:00

Pinball Panda continues to be well received, which is nice, and is currently wrestling with Erik Leppen's lovely Shoot 2008 in a Cage Match on the GMC, for those who know about such things. It does suddenly occur to me that it isn't flagged anywhere that the version sitting in the Box.net widget to the right somewhere is offline only, if you want to play the version with online highscores you will need to go to YoYo or 64Digits.

[Edit] I have just uploaded the version with online highscores to the box.net widget. That'll be the zip file rather than an exe. Remember to unzip into one folder and keep the game file in that folder as it uses a DLL to access the magic of the internet.

Panda Reviewed

2008-12-04T13:11:00.000-08:00

I can't remember now if I was academically interested in User Generated Content before or after I started toying with Game Maker, but I have always seen it as an amateur pursuit that gives me access (and hopefully insight) into something I see as being more and more significant to commercial games. I have played around with Unreal, toyed with machinima, modded NeverWinter Nights (remade as Lilliput just by scaling -- much fun), and recently messed around inside Spore and now Little Big Planet, but I suppose my little experiments with Game Maker have been the closest thing to really making games. At some point I must write the article that all this is supposed to be informing, of course.

But sometimes it is just nice being inside the community. I missed it when it first came out, but there is a lovely little review of Pinball Panda in a community online magazine called GM Weekly (site here, issue with review here. I really like the concluding line: "a perfect casual game". Therefore am I happy. :)

Revised DiGRA 2009 CFP

2008-11-14T08:23:00.000-08:00

Revised Call for Papers

DiGRA 2009

PLEASE NOTE THE NEW DATES FOR SUBMISSION AND DEADLINE FOR REGISTRATION FOR GUARANTEED ON-CAMPUS ACCOMODATION

Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory
Brunel University, West London, United Kingdom, Tuesday 1st September -- Friday 4th September 2009

DiGRA is an organisation that embraces all aspects of game studies, and the conference aims to provide a diverse platform for discussion and a lively forum for debate. We therefore welcome papers from any discipline focused on any aspect of games, play, game culture and industry. The conference will be the fourth DiGRA conference, following Utrecht, Vancouver and Tokyo, and welcomes contributions from scholars working in any area of interest to the association. The official business of the Subject Association will also be conducted at the conference.

The Conference invites the following proposals for consideration:

Individual or Collaborative Papers
Panels
Workshops
Posters

Initial selection will be through the peer review of both full papers and abstracts of 500-700 words in all categories. Selection of presentations will be proportionate to the submissions received, and no distinction will be made between papers selected from abstract or full paper review. Panel and Workshop proposals should include abstracts for the contributions of all participants.

Individual or collaborative papers – addressing topics relevant to the wide remit of DiGRA (including therefore industry, education, political, social, theoretical concerns appropriate to the association). Presentations should be limited to 15-20 mins.

Panel proposals – 3 – 4 papers which address a common theme, a common research method, a shared conceptual issue etc.

Workshops – proposals are invited for 2 – 3 hour workshops that address a range of themes relevant to the aims of the association. Workshops that are particularly targeted at a wide audience are most welcome.

Poster sessions – presentations of work in progress in the format are most welcome and will be showcased throughout the event.

The conference committee are also interested in including featured symposia/colloquia to address particular ‘late-breaking’ research projects or issue-based topics (an example might be a colloquia based around Wii research or a symposium based around Women in Games. Please contact a member of the conference organising committee with any expressions of interest.

Graduate student participation

In order to support graduate students and early career researchers the conference will focus on graduate student issues on its opening day, 1st September 2009. The conference organizers seek appropriate mentors to work with those addressing common themes/topics/issues in graduate roundtables.

Strands

Please also indicate your preference for consideration in one of the following broad strands:

Games Culture
Games and Commerce
Games Aesthetics
Games Education
Games Design
Games and Theory

Key Dates

Deadline for all submissions for presentation at the conference (includes full papers, abstracts and workshop/panel/symposia proposals): Friday 6 March 5pm GMT

Deadline for full papers for inclusion in digital proceedings: Friday 26 June 2009 5pm GMT

Notification of acceptance: June 1 2009

Deadline for booking on-campus accommodation June 30 2009

Conference Dates: 1-4th September 2009

Abstracts should be of 500-700 words and include an indicative bibliography. Full paper submissions may be of up to 6,000 words, not including bibliography. Full details of the submissions procedure, including the method of electronic submission, will be published here and on other forums as soon as possible.

All contributions must be original, unpublished work. The conference language is English, and papers, abstracts and other proposals should be written in English.

Delegates are also advised that individuals will be limited to one paper presentation and one other form of presentation to allow space and time for the largest number of participants.

About the Conference Location

Brunel University is located conveniently near Heathrow Airport and is on the London Tube system. A range of affordable accommodation is available on campus, including 1500 en suite rooms all on one campus, 400 standard bedrooms, 8 holiday flats (5-7 persons per flat), 51 specially adapted rooms for people with disabilities, plus hotel standard rooms in the Lancaster Suite. The Brunel Conference Centre boasts 22 theatres, 29 classrooms and 5 seminar rooms all presented to the highest standard. The following are also available: Free car parking (on application); Full office support for photocopying, faxing, internet and word processing (on application); Comprehensive range of audio visual and media services; Mini market; Pharmacy; Banking facilities; Reference library; Sports Facilities; Fitness Suite; Medical centre; 24 hour security; Self service cafeteria; Licensed bars and cafes. There are also a range of restaurants, cinemas and shopping in Uxbridge town.

Local attractions

Historic Windsor & Eton -Windsor Castle, Legoland and shopping are just 20 minutes drive away London - Central London and West End are easily accessed by bus or Underground. Historic Oxford is a 40 minute bus ride away.

The Conference Organisers

The conference is being hosted by a consortium consisting of Brunel University, University of the West of England and the University of Wales, Newport.

Tanya Krzywinska, Professor of Screen Media, Brunel University
Helen Kennedy, University of the West of England
Barry Atkins, University of Wales Reader in Computer Games Design

Available Now

2008-11-12T13:28:00.000-08:00

So, for anyone who might be interested Pinball Panda now sits in the Box.net widget on the right.

Spent a time today after work playing Left 4 Dead, which was unexpected fun. The premise doesn't grab me half as much as the actual experience. No idea what it would be like long term, and after it comes out of demo, but this was a surprisingly satisfying experience. If I could only now cure my phobi of going online with real people I might even buy the full thing.

And I heart LBP. Even though I like shooting zombies, LBP is the FUTURE I tell you.

WIP

2008-11-04T14:35:00.000-08:00

Peggle, Breakout, Pachinko etc. etc. Happy that the ball physics now works, and am proud of the rubber duck that fills the level with water if the ball bounces off it. And I am waaay too busy for this.

Radio 4 -- Your Source for all things Videogame

2008-11-03T12:00:00.000-08:00

Another astute writer on games, James Newman (go buy Videogames before getting hold of More than a Game and Videogame, Player, Text) has just been speaking about Little Big Planet on Radio 4. I am very impressed, not just by his assured performance, but by Radio 4 (once more) acknowledging the existence of games. On a culture show. It makes me proud to be middle class and British. Although I have my own 'I am working class really' story I am a Radio 4 junkie, which is about as establishment as things get nowadays. Anyway, I was talking to my students only a couple of days ago about the shifting of attitudes towards games as signalled in part by the appearance of what amounted to Nintendo advertisements on ITV and Channel 4 news with Shigeru Miyamoto waving his Wii Music baton about, and this seems to me to be another step towards the normalisation of games in the media. A small step, and a long way to go, but promising.

Hmmm, must make dinner rather than blog, so links to be added later.

Working things out.

2008-11-03T09:26:00.000-08:00

Reading the always astute Steven Poole on "Working for the Man" brought back memories of discussions that followed DiGRA Utrecht where I saw someone (who I will look up) argue in detail that we were all essentially engaged in labour above play. In the spirit of nostalgia gripping me at the moment (was it really that long ago?)I thought I would republish an old old paper of mine here:

“Can I Please Reload From Last Save-Game?”: Getting it Wrong (and Right) in a Nascent Field.

[For some reason this paper generated a lot of response at the time. I would repeat what I have said elsewhere. This is a speaking text of a work in progress. Please regard it as such, and not as a finished article. I am quite proud of the film reference, however.]

Computer game and videogame criticism is a serious business. At the inaugural conference of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) in Utrecht in 2003 there was much public talk of taxonomies and typologies, and of grand theories of definition and categorisation. There was not much talk, however, about why people play games in the first place, and where we find our pleasures in digital games. In one keynote lecture an overarching definition of games was articulated by Jesper Juul that excluded any mention at all of pleasure or fun in its complex diagrammatic representation. Similarly, and in another keynote, Janet Murray asked the assembled students and academics to identify what they considered to be the ‘most significant games’, and not the ones that stuck in the mind of the critic-as-player and player-as-critic as necessarily the most pleasurable. There were no cries of dissent, no revolution on the floor of the auditorium. The audience nodded, satisfied. This is, after all, a serious business, and careers are now at stake. There is a difference between those working in the field, and those who merely enjoy the games. The days of academics commenting on games without ever having played more than a few hours of Myst are more or less over, and we might safely assume that most academic commentators are also players of games, but digital game studies has enough problems getting itself taken seriously without its practitioners giving the game away by talking about just how much fun they might be having. Outside the lecture theatres groups of enthusiasts who also happen to be academics could be heard exchanging anecdotal accounts of pleasures experienced while playing games, but the public rhetoric was all of seriousness and labour.

So much is only to be expected as this nascent field attempts to mark out its boundaries and limits. As Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman note in that most academic of interventions, ‘a footnote to a footnote’, in Rules of Play, there ‘is a tremendous amount of existing research on the philosophical, psychoanalytic, cognitive, and cultural qualities of pleasure’ (330), and it might be too much of a task for any critic to try and produce a synthesis of all extant work in the area into which games might be fitted. It is worth noting, however, just how absent examinations of pleasure have been so far in the burgeoning field of digital game studies, and it might be worth asking ourselves why this might be so, and whether the critical concentration on other issues might have consequences for the development of the field.

In part, of course, any academic engaged in the enterprise of game criticism is only displaying a certain amount of intelligent self-interest in shying away from discussions of pleasure when filling in grant application forms or defending her or his object of study before a still frequently suspicious general public and wider academic community. It might even be convenient, as well as commonplace, to call back to Johan Huizinga’s definition of homo ludens (man the game-player) to substantiate a claim that the playing of games is a constituitive part of our basic humanity, rather than something superfluous or excessive, essential to our selves rather than something we do in our spare time. Games must be more than mere frivolity if we are to justify the labour we are expending on them. In the case of digital games Espen Aarseth, once again, might be considered to have led the way, and his arguments from Cybertext have established a trend in game criticism that few have since questioned. His coinage of the term ‘ergodic’ (from the Greek for ‘work’ and ‘path’) to describe those texts in which ‘nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text’ (1) certainly set up an initial and hugely influential paradigm where the focus is not so much on ‘play’ but on its antonym ‘work’. Inevitably, this has meant that much of the language in which videogames have been discussed has been the language of labour. This is, after all, an industry worth millions, and we are far more likely to see a ‘Serious Games’ initiative than a ‘Non-serious Games’ initiative, and the promise of productivity inherent in ‘Games to Teach’ is more likely to gather industry support than an academic concentration on ‘Games to Play’.

Unfortunately, a side effect of this emphasis on labour might actually prove detrimental to the enterprise in which we are engaged, and move attention away from what should be at the core of what those of us who are cultural critics are concerned with – the identification of what the pleasures of the videogame as an independent artform might be.

What makes games art or what makes games work (in both senses, as efficiently functioning artefacts as well as Aarseth’s textual form necessitating non-trivial effort) seem to be questions that have been taken on board by many of those who would argue that we have a right to our place in academia: what makes games fun. What digital games studies risks if it always deploys a language of labour and work is that it will miss the point somewhat – that players enjoy digital games because they are emphatically not work.

All work and no play makes for a dull videogame

A haggard male figure sits before a keyboard pounding away. The action of striking the keys is mechanical, repetitive, and he has hit a rhythm that looks like it will allow him to continue forever. His concentration is absolute, but his facial expression betrays no pleasure, only a fixed determination to continue to strike the keys. He is ‘in the zone’. He could be playing a game. He could be part of a public information film showing the dangers of single-minded immersion in a videogame. The absolute focus on what he is doing is necessarily exclusive, marking off a distinction between the solitary activity he is engaged in and the social world beyond. He has isolated himself from his family and any kind of society in his monomaniacal compulsion to keep hitting the keys. He is neglecting personal hygiene and the needs of his body, as well as the emotional needs of his family. He explodes with anger when his partner interrupts his communion with the keyboard. But he isn’t playing a game. There is no screen attached to this keyboard. Jack Nicholson is having problems with personal issues in Stanley Kubrik’s film The Shining. He is typing not playing. The manuscript before him grows in size, but we know that this is not the artwork he has come to the Outlook Hotel to write. Page after page of repetition of the single sentence: ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’.

This reveals much about our understandings of the production of the work of art, and might also shed some light on the way in which videogame play has been positioned in contemporary culture. Jack is not only a ‘dull boy’, but is incapable of the production of the aesthetic object, and will descend into axe-wielding psychosis before long. Endless mechanical repetition will drive you mad, the film declares, and might lead to an explosion of violence. Read as an allegory of contemporary labour where the keyboard is more often the tool of one’s trade than the axe, this offers a stark warning of any repetitive action pursued in the cause of production. The keyboard is not a tool allowing or enabling creativity, it is a machine that binds us to obsessive repetition that strips away our individuality, our humanity and our sanity as surely as the machinery of the production line does.

This, potentially, is what much videogame play looks like from the outside. To the non-gamer (or the non-gaming literate) players of computer games and videogames are pounding away at their keyboards, their gamepads or the button arrays of their GBA SPs and their arcade cabinets. Hands move and eyes dart left and right, but they are chained to the interface. They too are engaged in repetitive mechanical action, in something that looks like the most dehumanising forms of labour, and not in imaginative play. It is no wonder that the rise and rise of the popularity of videogames has made some cultural commentators nervous.

But players of contemporary three-dimensional videogames, with their virtual spaces and ‘narrative architecture’ (Jenkins) open for exploration, are not so immersed in that other world that the playing framework disappears from consciousness and the player is magically transferred through the glass of the screen to somehow position themselves ‘in’ that world. Instead, they are immersed in the experience of playing the game, and something about what is happening on screen compels the player to continue. As the example of Kubrik’s frustrated artist shows so graphically, the worker, too, can be immersed in his task. Whatever Jack’s motive for remaining immersed, however, the game critic should be asking what invites the player to immerse themselves rather than merely noting the possibility of attaining an immersive state, lest the players of games also appear to be driven only by psychosis.[i]

Even critics who enthusiastically embrace videogame play as a form of emergent digital textuality have been sucked into using the metaphor of labour as a way of understanding what it is that players are engaged in during play. Janet Murray makes this point in Hamlet on the Holodeck, where she describes Tetris as
a perfect enactment of the overtasked lives of Americans in the 1990s --- of the constant bombardment of tasks that demand our attention and that we must somehow fit into our overcrowded schedules and clear off our desks in order to make room for the next onslaught. (144)

Of course, such a characterisation of the action of videogame play invites a misunderstanding of what can be seen from the outside (the physical action or enactment of play) over the experience of playing games that keeps gamers playing (the management and manipulation of the constantly changing image on the screen). Gamers are not, and never have been, engaged in simply repetitive physical action. We do not clear our screens only to have exactly the same task arrive to replace the one so recently disposed of. For all the observations that some games feel like work, particularly in their resemblance to the domestic labour of ‘tidying up’, games that demand truly repetitive mechanical action quickly fall into tedium. What Murray does not emphasise enough, perhaps, is the way in which Tetris never falls into the tedium of work on the production line, that most feared form of labour where there should be no deviation from the repetitive task before the worker and no form of independent agency is permitted. Where Tetris hooks its player is in its shifting of the exact nature of the task before us. It does so in an obvious and straightforward way, with its incremental increase in the speed of the falling blocks, but in each individual playing of Tetris we also always have a new challenge before us, never a straightforward repetition of the task just completed. If this were simply an enactment of the production line, whether in its traditional incarnation in the factory or in the white-collar manifestation that Murray alludes to, then it would fail as a game that we play for pleasure. Conversely, if our experience of work is comparable to that of Tetris, with its ever increasing difficulty ratcheting up towards an inevitable ending at which we will fail and must fail, than we should seriously consider a career change.

For all that games might reflect our working practices and, at least in the case of games played on the Mac and PC might actually occupy the same physical space as our labour, they are not simply versions of labour tasks that we have somehow been hoodwinked into mistaking for fun. If we are to think in terms of games as a series of tasks performed, then we need to recognise that they do not, in the main, rely on repetition (the monotony of a closed loop) but on iteration (essentially repetition always with difference). All work and no play makes for a dull and unsatisfying videogame, or, all repetition and no iteration makes for something which, as labour, hardly qualifies for consideration in terms of its aesthetics. This distinction is sometimes missed, however, when the pleasures of games are articulated, as in this article in the British games magazine Edge:

Then there’s the therapy of it all: returning to a repetitive game is a lot like alphabetising your CD collection. Remedial manual labour that allows your brain to have a cigar and a nice long bath. And, finally, there’s the necessary relaxation on behalf of the player. You’ve got to be able to let go and just cha-cha-cha with the one note rhythm. Put your brain into freefall, and let the gravity of a choice-free system do the work for you. (95)

Of course, this is an inversion of Murray’s formulation in its celebration of the relaxation that such games afford that still relies on the antonymic relationship of game to labour. The videogames referred to here, primarily rhythm-action games, on-rails shooters and side-scrolling games, provide respite from the whirring complexities of the Edge journalist’s daily grind. It might resemble one form of (manual) labour, but it is played because it is anything but a re-enactment of the professional labour of the writer. It is in the action of play as it is understood in the imagination of the player and not in the movement of the body that we might locate a key specificity of videogame aesthetics.

This dependence on iteration is even more evident in the more sophisticated games that have been produced as the technology available to games developers has advanced by leaps and bounds, especially in terms of speed of processing and data storage. The complex contemporary videogame role-playing game, third-person adventure or first-person shooter, in particular, are essentially iterative forms because they are designed to be played with, rather than simply worked at – that is, their aesthetic relies on repetition with difference within the governance of rules, and one of their core pleasures is located not in textual mastery, but in the iterative experience of the textual fragment allowed through play. In their huge virtual spaces, exponentially increasing levels of detail and sometimes convoluted emplotments such games are full of excess and redundancy, of experiences that can be accessed but need not necessarily be accessed in order to progress to a moment of victory over the game. This then sees the videogame caught in something of a double-bind, as one of the most significantly distinctive aesthetic characteristics of such computer games and videogames (that they do require ‘non-trivial effort’, that the range of tasks that must be undertaken to unlock all the experiences offered by a game is always increasing) is at least in part responsible for the location of videogaming outside the discourses of aesthetic criticism, at least by those who look in on gaming from the outside.

Kill the Boss

As you read these words thousands of workers in offices around the world are playing games on the machines provided to enable or increase their productivity. If they are careful they may well look as if they are working when they are actually playing. They might even, with their rapt attention focused on the screen and their controlled movements of the mouse and their deliberate taps on the keyboard, look like model employees. It all depends, or might depend, on whether the employer sees the player or the screen. Despite the best efforts of commercial IT departments, with their ever-increasing function of surveillance, workers are playing Solitaire, Hearts or Minesweeper in Windows. Virtual silver balls are bouncing around virtual Pinball tables in Auckland and Calgary, Manchester and New York, Rome and Budapest. Some of the more adventurous workers will be playing the latest Flash game accessed through the internet, or even engaging in a little LAN deathmatch with co-workers. Computing professionals might still claim that a multiplayer game of Quake played across their organisation’s machines is an essential part of their job that tests whether the system is robust, but most such play is marginally subversive, a transgression of sorts, and even an offence that might lead to disciplinary action if discovered. In my own workplace even access to the games that come free with Windows has been blocked. My employers have a clear sense that there is a distinction between work and play. And computer games are certainly not defined as work.

If the computer game is a form of leisure that is best understood through a comparison with contemporary working practices, then it offers a model of work that many of us can only aspire to and hope for. A lucky few have achieved a position in their working lives where they may dawdle and choose the tasks they wish to attend to, where they can make mistakes without any more consequence than deciding whether they want to attempt the same task again, where they can walk away and do something different if a task becomes tiresome, and where their personnel files are of as much significance as the save-game files on our memory cards or hard-drives. Chris Crawford has written about games as providing a place of ‘safety’ (quoted in Juul 31) where the consequences of a simulation are always less extreme than they would be in the world of lived experience, and he is absolutely right. There are always imperatives in games if they are understood as tyrannies that demand that I complete them, but my relationship with the games that I play is very different from the relationship I have with my institutional employer. The game may demand that I progress, advance and complete it. But there is no exterior imperative. I will not be fired if I just walk away from the unreasonable demands of a game that asks me to do anything that I do not enjoy, that gives me no pleasure. I enter into a contract which I suppose will mean that the product of my labour, my wages converted into a plastic DVD box and a silver disk, will provide me with something other than more labour. I am a consumer of the many and varied pleasures of games, and not a producer of game endings bound to follow the imperatives set out by the game’s developers. I can refuse the demands a game makes of me in a way that might make me much more nervous if I was refusing the demands of my line-manager.

It is even possible to see such games either positively or negatively as a form of leisure practice that is necessarily antithetical to work. This might be expressed in the liberating terms of allowing an exercise of individual agency that is missing from Murray’s characterisation of the lives of American workers (I am doing this because I choose to, and not because I must). Alternatively we might see them in a more negative light as something like a contemporary technological invitation to something like Theodor Adorno’s ‘false consciousness’ in allowing an illusory release from the demands of conformity made in so many commercial workplaces that acts as a safety valve that stops us rebelling against the organisations that crush and dehumanise us. However we view the games that we play and study, and however we dicuss them, we must remain aware that they are games that players choose to play, and that the motivation behind that choice is important.

It is more than mere accident that the adversaries who must be overcome in many kinds of videogame are commonly referred to as ‘bosses’. That the videogame often invites, and even necessitates, confrontation with bosses, and those bosses can and must be defeated emphasises the way in which the games stand in clear opposition to our daily labour. David Kushner’s entertaining Masters of Doom traces a familiar narrative arc in its account of the rise and subsequent fall of the founders of id Software, John Carmack and John Romero. It was the trappings of economic success and the seduction of the business the games became, according to Kushner, that saw the makers of Doom doomed. Great games, he tells us, were spawned when maverick outsiders ‘borrowed’ their employers’ computers and decamped to lakeside houses. Offices spawn the likes of Daikatana: Doom was a fan’s game, a maverick’s game. Kushner also includes a fascinating anecdote in which Romero discovers an Easter Egg left in the final boss encounter of Doom II by some of his programming team (180). Positioned behind the boss in a hidden room was a representation of Romero’s own head. A round that hits the final boss in the head, the difficult task that must be repeated if the player is to complete the game, would also hit their employer. In order to defeat the boss, at least for the team at id, one would have to kill the boss, a reminder that this remains a playful practice that is antithetical to labour and even threatens a minor and local subversion of the usual hierarchies of labour as workers attempt to exercise individual agency.

Of course computer game and videogame play often resembles work, just as much as other forms of play resemble other forms of labour, whether we are playing doctors and nurses, the three year old is knocking pegs into holes with a plastic hammer, or we are commanding an army made of sixteen finely crafted ivory pieces. But the player is still playing, and not working in any meaningful sense. Games are not only mobilized by progression down the line, the completion of tasks with robotic efficiency, or the production of endings in a drive to completion.

What I did today apart from play WipEout HD

2008-09-30T14:04:00.000-07:00

First Call for Papers

DiGRA 2009

Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

Brunel University, West London, United Kingdom, Tuesday 1st September -- Friday 4th September 2009

The South of Britain Consortium are pleased to announce the first Call for Papers for the Digital Games Research Association 2009. DiGRA is an organisation that embraces all aspects of game studies, and the conference aims to provide a diverse platform for discussion, and a lively forum for debate. We therefore welcome papers from any discipline focused on any aspect of games, play, game culture and the games industry. The conference will be the fourth DiGRA conference, following Utrecht, Vancouver and Tokyo, and welcomes contributions from scholars working in any area of interest to the association. The official business of the Subject Association will also be conducted at the conference.

The Conference invites the following proposals for consideration:

Individual or Collaborative Papers

Panels

Workshops

Posters

Graduate Student Roundtable Papers

Initial selection will be through the peer review of abstracts of 500-700 words in all categories. Panel and Workshop proposals should include abstracts for the contributions of all participants.

Individual or collaborative papers – addressing topics relevant to the wide remit of DiGRA (including therefore industry, education, political, social, theoretical concerns appropriate to the association). Presentations should be limited to 15-20 mins.

Panel proposals – 3 – 4 papers which address a common theme, a common research method, a shared conceptual issue etc.

Workshops – proposals are invited for 2 – 3 hour workshops that address a range of themes relevant to the aims of the association. Workshops that are particularly targeted at a wide audience are most welcome.

Poster sessions – presentations of work in progress in the format are most welcome and will be showcased throughout the event.

The conference committee are also interested in including featured symposia/colloquia to address particular ‘late-breaking’ research projects or issue-based topics (an example might be a colloquia based around Wii research or a symposium based around Women in Games). Please contact a member of the conference organising committee with any expressions of interest.

Graduate student participation
In order to support graduate students and early career researchers the conference will focus on graduate student issues on its opening day, 1st September 2009. We therefore ask for volunteers for mentoring sessions from established academics. For those graduate students whose research is at an early stage, and who wish to work with mentors, we invite work in progress proposals for presentations at mentor roundtables. Such roundtable participation, however, should in no way be seen as preventing graduate students putting in abstracts for other forms of participation.

Strands

Please also indicate your preference for consideration in one of the following broad strands:

Games Culture

Games and Commerce

Games Aesthetics

Games Technology

Games Education

Games Design

Games and Public Policy

Games and Theory

Key Dates

Deadline for all abstracts and workshop/panel/symposia proposals: Friday 17 April 5pm GMT

Deadline for full papers for inclusion in digital proceedings: Friday 26 June 2009 5pm GMT

Notification of abstract acceptance: June 1 2009

Conference Dates: 1-4th September 2009

Abstracts should be of 500-700 words and include an additional indicative bibliography. Full paper submissions may be of up to 6,000 words. Full details of the submissions procedure, including the method of electronic submission, will be published here and on other forums as soon as possible.

All contributions must be original, unpublished work. The conference language is English, and papers, abstracts and other proposals should be written in English.

Delegates are also advised that individuals will be limited to one paper presentation and one other form of presentation to allow space and time for the largest number of participants.

About the Conference Location

Brunel University is located conveniently near Heathrow Airport and is on the London Tube system. A range of affordable accommodation is available on campus, including 1500 en suite rooms all on one campus, 400 standard bedrooms, 8 holiday flats (5-7 persons per flat), 51 specially adapted rooms for people with disabilities, plus hotel standard rooms in the Lancaster Suite. The Brunel Conference Centre boasts 22 theatres, 29 classrooms and 5 seminar rooms all presented to the highest standard. The following are also available: Free car parking (on application); Full office support for photocopying, faxing, internet and word processing (on application); Comprehensive range of audio visual and media services; Mini market; Pharmacy; Banking facilities; Reference library; Sports Facilities; Fitness Suite; Medical centre; 24 hour security; Self service cafeteria; Licensed bars and cafes. There are also a range of restaurants, cinemas and shopping in Uxbridge town.

Local attractions

Historic Windsor & Eton -Windsor Castle, Legoland and shopping are just 20 minutes drive away London - Central London and West End are easily accessed by bus or Underground. Historic Oxford is a 40 minute bus ride away.

The Conference Organisers

The conference is being hosted by a consortium consisting of Brunel University, University of the West of England, and the University of Wales, Newport.

Tanya Krzywinska, Professor of Screen Media, Brunel University. Tanya.Krzywinska@brunel.ac.uk

Helen Kennedy, Chair of the Play Research Group, University of the West of England. helen.kennedy@uwe.ac.uk

Barry Atkins, University of Wales Reader in Computer Games Design, University of Wales, Newport. barry.atkins@newport.ac.uk

Space, the Final Bit

2008-09-08T08:29:00.000-07:00

Sporous thoughts. Rushed too fast at the game and got up into space. I always wondered how a game-that-was-4-games would play, and I guess my initial instinct that it would alienate almost everyone at least somewhere along the line was right, at least in the very limited sample of one that I have to hand. In converstion (ie, I have never checked the reference) I would evoke Stephen Hawking and his publisher's (?)injunction that he remove as many equations as possible from A Brief History of Time because his audience would halve each time one appeared. I kind of thought that the same would be true of a shift in gameplay control or focus, and I do have radically different responses to each of the parts so far. Cell level is pretty and relaxing, but feels fairly pointless to me, although my 7 year old daughter is a fan. Next stage was interesting enough as I boogied and waggled my butt to get through without getting violent once (and it was fun to play through with the junior game critic that is my daughter). The Civilised stage was a pushover as I tankrushed the planet, but with religous texts blaring from loudspeakers on my Converto-Wagon. Somehow I have gone interstellar as an evangelical godsquad herbivore, which is certainly playing against type. I'll see if I can dig up some screenshots and add in a while, but I am aware that I rushed the design side, which is where the real glory of the tools rest. Having helped aformentioned daughter (who, come to think about it is perhaps slightly overexposed to games) in MySims for the Wii it was all very familliar, but slightly more adult. Closer to Duplo than Mechano, and a long way from Maya, Max, or even SketchUp, but interesting enough to twiddle with if I wasn't being such a gamer in a hurry all the time. Hummm. More thought required.

TR: Underworld

2008-09-06T05:39:00.000-07:00

Ah, Lara. I continue to have an emotional attachment to the woman. If it wasn't for her I would still be a lecturer in English Literature...

Anyway, there is intelligent and considered commentary on the next Tomb Raider up on Gamasutra. This kind of developer conversation, that is featured a lot on Gamsutra, makes me think the future is not quite as bleak for games as I am sometimes given to think in the small hours when I look up at the now-no-longer-next gen games I have on the shelf and decide to boot something retro on the Wii or PSN.

Back now to Spore and the nagging feeling that I am kind of missing the point. I seem to have created a race of Jar Jar Binks-alikes, and somehow don't have the energy to do anything more than drive them to extinction. I remember when I got The Movies I sinned by accessing a cheat code so that I could go straight to making films, and feel I might have done something similar (although sans cheats) by rushing my species to the point of the game I am most interested in, rather than giving it the attention it probably deserves.

Not sure I particularly want to go back to the primordial soup, however, but we'll see.

More Pictures

2008-08-19T02:52:00.000-07:00

And then it occurs to me that Dual Core only makes sense when you see it against the original, so here are some pastel pics from The Lovers.

Dual Core

2008-08-19T02:44:00.000-07:00

And now the other half of the thing. A complete reskin of The Lovers. Exactly the same game, but skinned differently. If I were a Social Scientist and knew anything about questionnaires etc. I would have some questions to ask about whether the experience of what people call gameplay differs substantially as a result. Mind you, you have to get a compelling game together first.

Dual Core at YoYo

Both games/versions should be sitting in the Box.net widget off to the right as well.

Reboot

2008-08-14T01:30:00.000-07:00

Back again, with working grinding away since Monday. All the sensible things -- preparing for next year, catching up on email, responding to requests (although I am still gutted that the one to contribute to Al-Jazeera came the day I was setting off for France) both sane and less so. Time to clear the cupboard of toys:

The Lovers

PC only, a play around with some platform mechanics -- two characters in the same space who cannot connect. I am moderately pleased with it. As ever, this is no more serious than the doodles that cover my notes in meetings. The serious business of my research (and writing) goes on in the background, currently helped by the Chinese faking the fireworks at the Olympics...

Busy

2008-06-15T03:43:00.000-07:00

Spent yesterday at Nottingham Trent University at PKDD2 -- a Philip K Dick day, where I had a thoroughly pleasant day in the presence of academics and PKD enthusiasts. And academics who are PKD enthusiastslike myself, of course. People seemed a little keener to see Dick as prophetic than I would personally allow, but it was pleasant. As an Eng Lit apostate it felt good to see displays of books and people talking with passion about books. Something new to me was the palmer Eldritch blog, and particularly the 'Which PKD story are we in today' bit. Intriguing.

In other news, my children sqeal with delight as we play through the Lego Indiana Jones, claiming that the Indy in the college sections looks just like Daddy. I am secretly pleased.

Like Indy I am now getting long in the tooth, however, and it must be that (and not the dodgy camera) that means that I plunge to my doom so often from platforms that I KNOW I shouldbe able to reach.

For Father's Day I got given a 'Let the Wookie Win' Lego Star Wars T-shirt, a set of Obi Wan Kenobi nesting dolls and a vague sense that I should grow up. God bless Hallmark holidays.

Am left pondering the relationship between Assassin's Creed and PKD, of all things, after my talk at NTU.

Wire Loop Games

2008-05-02T09:43:00.000-07:00

Which is effectively what it is -- a wire loop game. Except instead of little buzzer it knocks a little health off. In the end I couldn't stop fidgiting with it, but now it is gone, done, finished, over. Funny how people keep saying they like the clouds... Maybe I should learn from that. Are they just being polite?

So the version labelled 5 should be in the BoxNet widget box, and also up at YoYo Games. I have a piece of academic writing about user generated content and game production through middleware that makes me think this is a positive use of my time.

Daedalus Done

2008-04-26T07:12:00.000-07:00

So, that is that. Finished, I think. A nice little experiment to distract me while I played with a follow-the-mouse mechanic. A joy to play with, really, as the grammar and vocabulary of the game were already in existence.

Were I to imagine a 1990s box blurb:

Daedalus & Son is a platform game where soaring flight replaces stilted jumping, and keyboard bashing is replaced with graceful mouse movement. Control Icarus as he enters the Labyrinth of the Minotaur and try to keep his feathers from frying and his wax from melting as he is assaulted by unique enemies and caught in the traps and puzzles devised by his genius father.

- A new look at a familiar genre, where the platform is your enemy and not your friend.

- Enemies and hazards unique to the game, including the Medusa and the Roc.

- Autosave/Load.

- Hero or Mortal Difficulty, and ranking on completion.

- Novel and satisfying mouse flight control.

- 20+ Levels.

- Lean design -- no padding, no filler.

Development (including all the rough and ready pixel art) took 6 days of fiddling, in between teaching, writing, childcare, marking, and validating a new degree at a different university. Just as well they have plug sockets on trains so that I can make games on long journeys now rather than play them.

Daedalus & Son

2008-04-24T14:13:00.001-07:00

Closer, by inches

2008-04-10T14:49:00.000-07:00

Wow, all working bar a few sprites and depth issues.

Getting There -- If a little ugly

2008-04-09T15:13:00.000-07:00

But perhaps not busy enough, yet.

Really playable now.

Triptych Alpha

2008-04-08T03:39:00.001-07:00

Waiting for students to turn up I have got my latest little game into what I’ll call Alpha. The screenshot is of one game. Or of three games. Anyway, I have been wanting to make a triptych game for a while, and this is the first version I have which has all three simultaneous games working and (to some extent) interacting. The one on the left is a crate stacking game which I have also let out into the wild as solitary game (it should be all zipped up in the BoxNet widget to the right as Stack5). The one on the right is a very very very nostalgic lane swapping driving game. And that is something like Pong over the top. There is a gentle roll out, but the player eventually plays all three at the same time.

I might go into some detail about why I am interested in this some other time (I have a theoretical understanding about game space and play that this reflects), and I might go on and on about gamers and multitasking , which is something those younger than me keep telling me they are adept at.

Strange process, though. I knew I had to get some simple games together so that this would work. And in the process I cloned a few. I have a clone of Tower Bloxx that works (which I replaced with Stack5 after I realised just how uncomfortable I am cloning things) and a sort of clone of Desktop Tower Defence with a lot of variation that should be in the second iteration of Triptych. Screen of Tower Bloxx clone below.

Term is now in full swing, so I don’t know when it’ll be done enough to release, but yay, it works. Oh, and I know it isn’t a proper triptych.

More Crates, More Barrels [WIP]

2008-04-03T11:58:00.000-07:00

Why I need to learn Italian

2008-04-02T01:44:00.000-07:00

I like getting books through the post, although nothing beats a bookshop, and yesterday delivered three copies of Schermi Interattivi (edited by Matteo Bittanti). Lovely. My essay is ‘Replicando Blade Runner, tra giochi di superficie e spazi profundi’, firmly about the fantastic Westwood game rather than the film. There is an accompanying website that should be interesting if you speak Italian. My essay was originally ‘Replicating the Blade Runner’ in The Blade Runner Experience- The Legacy of A Science Fiction Classic (edited by Will Brooker). Also lovely. Thanks to Matteo’s generosity as an editor (and a string of translators who must curse my prose more than most) I now have quite a list of publications in Italian. Some, such as this essay and (2004) “Amministrare il reale: per una letura di SimCity” [“Administering the Real: Reading SimCity”] in SimCity: Mappando le città virtuali [SimCity: Mapping the Virtual City], ed. and trans. Matteo Bittanti, Milan: Unicopli, 2004,156-73 are republications of English originals, while others are only available (unless people ask me directly) in Italian: (2005) “La Critica Videoludica Funziona?“ Ripetizione, iterazione ed estetiche del videogioco” [Is Game Criticism Working?: Iteration, Repetition and Aesthetics”], in Gli Strumenti del Videogiocare: Logiche, Estetiche e (V)ideologie [Understanding Videogames: Logics, Aesthetics and (V)ideologies, ed. and trans. Matteo Bittanti, Milan: Costa Nolan, (2005) “La Storia é un’assurdità: Civilization come esempio di barbarie storiografica?” [“History is Bunk: Historiographic Barbarism in Civilization”] in Civilization: Storie Virtuali, Fantasie Reali [Civilization: Virtual Stories, Real Fantasies], ed. Matteo Bittanti, trans. Valentina Paggiarin, Milan: Costa Nolan, 65-81, and (2005) “Presagi di Doom III: Tra le Viscere delle Prime Schermete” [“Portents of Doom III: Reading the Entrails of the Early Screenshots”] in Doom: Giocare in Prima Persona [Doom: The First Person Reader], ed. Sue Morris and Matteo Bittanti, trans. Paolo Ruffino, Milan: Costa Nolan, 95-105. The essay in Gli Strumenti del Videogiocare is probably my best piece of games writing. And I really like the Doom essay as well. The core ideas were reworked for an article in Games & Culture ((2006) “What Are We Really Looking At?: The Future-Orientation of Videogame Play” Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media, 1.2, 127-140) but it is a real shame it isn’t in English anywhere. Actually, it is a real shame that any of the books and book series that Matteo has so industriously put together haven’t been picked up by an English language publisher. As someone pointed out in a discussion of the paucity of current games writing kicked off by Greg Costikyan at http://playthisthing.com/, Italian is the language to speak if you want substantial (academic) games criticism.

A course production experiment?

2008-03-14T00:12:00.000-07:00

So these people (I think out of the OU - of which I suppose I am a graduate having completed my PGCHE with them) are braver than me -- a course on games developing daily online that includes adaptations of the GameMaker tutorials. So far both the basic functional stuff about the drag 'n drop menus in GM and the more game studies angles are both covered. I have nudged my students interested in protyping and making games (as opposed to getting to grips with Maya or focusing on some other area of asset production) in their direction, and it will be interesting watching it unfold.

Proof that machine-gunning your own brain is popular with gamers...

2008-03-13T12:00:00.000-07:00

OK, so this is something of a statistical anomaly (after 5 ratings and only 47 plays), but Brain in a Jar certainly gets a generally positive response, especially after I followed the advice of 2DCube and switched the controls to keyboard.

Ooops, I forgot

2008-03-10T10:01:00.000-07:00

Yep, it is called Brain in a Jar. And populating the highscore table with high scoring brains was fun.

The game I wasn't going to make

2008-03-10T09:26:00.000-07:00

I don’t make games with guns in them (too easy a design decision…). I don’t have loud bangs or explosions in the games I do make. I try and avoid easy sci fi as an aesthetic. I don’t make games any more in any case, as I am too busy. So this is the game I really didn’t make over the weekend when I should have been doing something else. 36 hours, but it has some nice touches, I think. A little influenced by the comments on suicide games on Jesper Juul’s blog and by the GM game Karoshi, this is yet another attempt at doing something interesting with deferred control.

The mute button is in the bottom left corner…

Available here and here.

Wiki

2008-03-07T16:18:00.000-08:00

I have a huge amount of respect for this guy and his work (which is required reading on the degree) and it is interesting that he seems to share some reservations about Wikipedia. This one is a note for my students, after our discussions of a couple of weeks ago.

Experiments in Games Design

2008-03-06T01:52:00.000-08:00

I have said it before, but it is worth reiterating: I am not a game designer, and am not a wannabe game designer. I am, however, interested in the nuts and bolts of making games, and in the whole process of making rewarding interaction happen in games, and the last year has been an interesting exercise in catch up as I have used some pretty basic middleware to start making little scratchy game prototypes. It all harks back to the days when I was fiddling with BASIC on the ZX Spectrum, and was buried under RPG rulebooks, 1/300th microtanks, and Avalon Hill boxes. The presentation I gave on Tuesday was a real reminder that I have other stuff to do, and I have a monograph in my head that needs to get itself on paper, so I figure I will have to shelve my little hobbyist attempts at game making for a while.

Before I put everything away and get onto the serious business of writing, however, I thought I would leave a record of what I thought I was doing with these little games.

Penguins and Polar Bears was all about deferred control – seeing if there was any satisfaction in forcing a bifurcation between looking and doing that meant the visual attention was split. It is a shame that it doesn’t completely work – the randomness of the reset renders it a non-game after a while, but it verges on the successful in a way that really frustrates. So near and yet so far. As a system it appeals to me – it has a balance and symetry that I find pleasing. Perhaps one day I will have the eureka moment I need to solve the gameplay problem.

SCMIV was more of the same, although it taught me more about my ignorance of a bit of PC gaming (the venerable Sokoban) than anything else. Another attempt at splitting control and effect. It is far more successful as a game, however, and tends to get mixed reviews erring more on the positive than the negative. I have an almost finished sequel that will probably never see the light of day that adds an anti-match 3 mechanic (three aligned blocks of the same type leads to meltdown) and so ratchets up the sarcasm.

Particle Tango was another experiment in taking ontrol away from any avatar and externalising it. I was incredibly busy when I made it, and yet wanted to nail the basic mechanic, so it is more an indicator of possibility than a fully polished game, but I think the setup has legs. This then got a second treatment in Flight of the Snowman, which took the control scheme and dumped it into a single wrapped screen environment (which is moderately successful again), but I have a version in my minds eye that is much closer to a platform/exploration game that would really work. Having seen the pulling on stars that happens in Super Mario Galaxy I am even more convinced that there is something there I could expand on. In that other life I occasionally consider where I have an independent income and no kids. Sort of a geeky version of the Woolfian room of one’s own.

Shush was a success. It did everything I wanted it to do. A lot of people find it a little too easy, but I really like the loop of interaction, the basic premise, and what I think is an original control methodology that works. It is the only thing that has made me want to grapple with Actionscript and get myself a wider audience. Add some decent audio and it could hold its own, I think, against a fair few of the more casual freeware games out there.

So Hail Caesar! Is a bit of a swansong. It answers a brief I give my students every year, so it will be useful as a tool in class. It is fairly original, and I like its brutal modelling of a simplified version of Roman political understanding. It was made with my 7 year old daughter’s input throughout (the audio screams were only added afterwards, so it remained pretty anodyne) and was a nice exercise we went through together (one thing I will continue to do is make little games with her in GameMaker – her artwork snapped on my phone camera, dropped into the game space and quickly assigned behaviours and we have little minigames up in minutes).

Things learned? I have no instinctive feel for faking Z depth in 2D. I am weirdly wedded to surfaces and left/right up/down thinking. Good ideas often change radically in the process of making. I can’t really draw.

And that I am too busy to make games.

Less WIP

2008-03-03T03:53:00.000-08:00

Ah, living and working in Caerleon (with its own little ampitheatre and the National Legionary Museum barely a pilum's throw away) it is hard to avoid the Romans.Hopefully this will get it out of my system.

Sort of Where's Wally mixed up with Find Mii from Wii Play. Available here as PC download.

I wonder if this is just a way of distracting myself from the paper I am due to deliver tomorrow?

WIP

2008-02-22T11:15:00.001-08:00

Contradictions

2008-02-21T01:07:00.000-08:00

So today I lecture to Games and Animation students about the use of internet sources in preparation for their dissertations. Last year I opened the lecture with Wikipedia open on the big screen behind me on the 'Luddite' page. I am aware that I will come across as the most reactionary anti-technology, anti-freedom of information traditionalist thug trying to make their lives harder by refusing them the easy option of Google as solution to everything.

And yet I have been known to venture online. I even use Wikipedia as a starting place when I want to find something in a hurry. I look up the Game Studies entry when I want to reconfirm my prejudices about the value of internet wisdom of crowds and community peer review thinking.

And yet I have been watching Noah Wardrip-Fruin's experiment with peer review with interest, and even chipping in. I have problems with some assumptions about peer review that are being discussed in the meta commentary, and hope to get around to expressing them, but the nobility of what he is attempting is clear, and I applaud it.

I wouldn't be keen for peer review in its current form, whatever its imperfections, to be replaced with such an alternative for my own work, mind.

I have a blog, but I will tell my students to distrust blogs.

I distribute my own work online, but I will ask them to be deeply distrusting of non-conventional distribution channels.

I have pseudonyms in various places where I hide my credentials so I can say things that are polemic and inflammatory without worrying about the comeback affecting what reputation I have. I enjoy many of the liberties of the internet.

And yet I will stress the need to connect knowledge to a material knowable being. I might even be frothing at the mouth and waving my arms like an old testament prophet by this point.

I may simply be a fossil already, at the very dawn of my forties. The offence I felt yesterday seeing pornographic images dropped (tagged? Stencilled?) onto the beautifully designed walls of Team Fortress 2's spaces was quite extreme. I wish to rend my clothes and wail against the collapse of civilisation that we endure in the face of the information slurry of the internet.

With any luck I will calm down enough to give them useful advice on how to navigate the internet and gather useful information.

Nostalgia

2008-02-07T05:15:00.000-08:00

One of our PhD students was talking about games and narrative in a paper here last night, which took me back to my beginnings in game studies, especially as he was using Half-life as his example. And I have been answering interview questions by email from someone who reminded me of some things I had written back in those early days. So, while I was in reflective mood I wandered over to Grand Text Auto, where Noah Wardrip-Fruin is allowing his new book to be exposed in all its pre-published nakedness and saw him writing about Knights of the Old Republic. I just thought I'd post a link to an early paper I gave on KotOR back in 2003 in Utrecht. If nothing else it lets me connect a lot of the work I have subsequently published. And I still have a warm fuzzy feeling towards KotOR (and a less than warm or fuzzy feeling towards the git who knicked my copy of KotOR II).

Small in Brasil

2007-12-22T01:02:00.000-08:00

Thinking about the little game prototypes I have knocked up, and the why of that has led me ambling across the internet. So it was a bit of a surprise to see SCMIV turn up at a Brazilian site redistributing freeware. What surprised me was that it has 719 downloads. So at least it gets played a bit.It only has 92 plays on YoYo, but I might BabelFish the Brazilian commentary and see what makes it attractive. [Edit: Ouch -- the grabled translation I got seems to indicate that whoever posted really really didn't like this -- from the black and white design to the deferred control. Go figure.] I know it gets some traffic on a Czech site (mentioned somehwere below), but I have no idea, in this age of Web 2.0 and hyperbole about numbers of hits and downloads etc. if that is good or bad, or indicative of the grazing of web content that is endemic. Is it good (perhaps) to have wasted the time and computing resources of 800+ internet persons?

Meanwhile, almost no one will touch Flight of the Snowman. I wonder why? The core of the game was knocked up in a few hours over couple of days (to show the students just how rapid prototyping can be. Since then I have added a fair amount of gloss and playability, but it just doesn't seem to attract anyone. Oh well, it is all a mystery.

And in my ambling I came across the Experimental Gameplay Project site, which seems like a fantastic idea. Just need to work out whether I should join in. Some very interesting ideas, and the same focus on something different that I kid myself I am trying to explore.

Mind you, I was in a staff development event early in the week dealing with IP issues (the upshot of which seemed to be that we should all cling like limpets to any idea rather than allow distribution without gain), and I begin to wonder if the university would approve of chucking my work out into the ether in this way anyway.

Doubts. Lots and lots of doubts.

2007-12-17T16:07:00.000-08:00

Should those who teach game design actually design games? If so, why? Answers on a postcard to…

I am seriously wondering about this – I don’t teach design per se (despite having been shunted out of the Film School into the Design department) but project management, game histories, game studies, and the basics of academic, intellectual and professional practice. So that’s OK. I am not a game designer, and would not want to swap my academic job (for all its faults) for that of a designer. Mortgage to pay, kids to feed etc.. And then there is the little matter of not having the prerequisite talent.

And yet I am still wondering. After the Arden project went the way of so many other academic projects, including one or two I was linked to at ICDC, it reminded me that academic departments are not in the main – and probably shouldn’t be – developers. At least unless they have the same funding and drivers (and the drivers are evil) so that it makes no difference.

So why do I feel the need to make scratchy little game prototypes? Does it help me professionally, or is it just a hobby that I should separate from the job, probably by using an untraceable pseudonym and not signing my posts with my real name?

I liked Shush. I really like Snowman. But it isn’t the job. Maybe practice should be left to those who really know what they are doing and I shouldn’t dabble, even on a hobby basis. I can’t even remember when I took my game links out of the sidebar, but there must have been a reason. Do I feel some strange need to disassociate myself from game-making to keep my credentials as cultural critic/academic?

Long term, long year.

Happy Holidays

2007-12-16T14:42:00.000-08:00

Hah, this actually works (unlike the prototype below which did its job as a prototype by showing me just how much unplayable mush what I thought was a good idea actually was).

Anyway, this is a very strange thing. Sort of a slow building bullet hell, but with a snowman in flight. And all the stylings are all wintry and mellow. Had fun putting the menu system together, which actually involved me sitting down and understanding some proper scripting/code. Maybe I was a programmer in another life. Certainly not in this one.

I think it is fun. And its seasonal too. Built for class, to show my lovely first years how you can throw something together fast for a presentation without relying on PowerPoint to drain all enthusiasm from an audience.

It lives here, and is a PC download.

Ho Ho Ho.

One Thousand Penguins On Ice

2007-11-29T16:07:00.000-08:00

When I grow up I'll stop doing this, but I have another prototype that is play test ready. Not sure how it works, and I am astounded that a couple of minutes watching Peggle over a colleagues shoulder should have such an effect, but never mind.

Next: Death by Cellphone, if I get the chance to put the bits together.

And, yes, I am too busy to be doing this.

Oh, and (PC only) it can be downloaded from [nowhere any more because it was rubbish, rubbish, rubbish -- although having worked out the maths of gettinga cannon to point at a target will come in handy sometime else...)

The Player Conference

2007-11-10T00:26:00.001-08:00

Somehow reposting stuff from elsewhere seems a bit lame, but what interests me about the CFP below is that it seems to coincide with the prokject Tanya Krzywinska and I tried to push through with Videogame, Player, Text. And if there is one outfit that has done more to shape current games research than anywhere else it is ITU, so it promises to be good. Now to think of something clever enough to get accepted.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University in Copenhagen is pleased to announce The [Player] Conference, a conference for games researchers taking place August 26th - 29th 2008.

There is no escaping the player in games research. Whether the focus is on formal aspects of games or on studies of actual gamers, the player is an intrinsic part of the gaming situation. Despite this, the underlying assumptions that inform the notion of the player are often not made explicit in the work of game scholars, regardless of their academic background. This is problematic in itself, but even more so in the inter-disciplinary field of games research where unclear terminology may cloud communication across the borders of academic traditions.

The central focus for The [Player] Conference is to uncover the assumptions that inform our work as game scholars with regards to the player and to consider how we think about and study the player as embodied, represented, derived, historical, idealised – to mention only a few of the positions the notion of player may be put in.

While all papers should focus on the player in some respect or other, there is a diversity of topics to consider. The topics include but are not limited to:

- Conceptions and definitions of players within different disciplines.

- Ideal and real players.

- Player experience, emotions, affects and cognitions.

- Player agency.

- Player taxonomies.

- Methodological issues of studies that deal with players.

- Ontology of player representations.

- The player’s perception and comprehension of the gaming situation.

- Player motivations.

- The position created by the game for the player.

- Player expectations.

- The player as subject and object.

- The player in history.

- Playing for academic purposes.

- The many different roles of players.

- Videogame’s possible effects on players.

- Assumptions about players within academia and the industry.

- Control of player creativity and communities.

We invite submissions of full papers and panels by the 31st March 2008. All submissions will undergo a double blind review process. Notification of acceptance will be announced by the 5th of May 2008. The maximum word limit for full papers is 10000, and 600 pr participant for panels. Note that the panels should focus on debating a chosen topic both among its participants and with the audience.

Inquiries can be sent to player2008@itu.dk. More information will be available on http://game.itu.dk/player/ shortly.

On behalf of the organising committee

Sara Mosberg Iversen

--
Sara Mosberg Iversen
MA, PhD Candidate
Centre for Computer Games Research
IT University of Copenhagen
Rued Langgaards Vej 7
DK-2300 København S
Denmark
www.itu.dk/people/mosberg

A long train ride home

2007-10-31T00:20:00.000-07:00

Returning from York to Caerleon from a wedding at the weekend turned into a grim marathon that came close to taking the same time as the flight to Tokyo. Crowded grumpy train almost all the way, but things eased off after Birmingham New Street and a change of trains and I got a chance to doodle. Spent a little time Sunday and Monday putting the doodles into the laptop, and hey presto, one very raw prototype. Again, it is mostly about doing something interesting with mouse control, but I think it has some interesting touches.

It looks like this:

PC only, but sitting here at the minute.

Now I had better get back to all the real work I should be doing. Meetings. Meetings. Meetings.

It's alive!

2007-10-29T07:06:00.000-07:00

Bob Rehak's comments on his blog are far more articulate and astute than anything I could come up with, so I'll just redirect you there for the minute. But I do actually have a physical, published material object sitting on my desk, which will come as a relief to the other contributors I am sure, and particularly for any UK academics under RAE stress.

Oh, and of course:

Buy me! and Buy me, I live in the US!.

Smiling

2007-10-11T13:09:00.000-07:00

Doris Lessing getting the Nobel Prize for Literature quite cheered me up. Harold Bloom's reaction made me laugh. Hiho. Well, I like all her writing, so maybe it's good that I left literature academia.

Newport University Game

2007-10-09T12:40:00.000-07:00

I can't knock this, I suppose. Games are everywhere. Games are cool. Games attract teh kidz. So of course my university wants to attach a game to its website.

Funny, really, as I have been using this -- design a web game to provide sticky to the university site -- as a nasty brief (along with the same for the RSPB, BNFL, Bernard Matthews etc. etc.) both in Newport and in Liverpool for years. Maybe I should have thought to send the resulting designs (apart from the Duck Hunt variants for the RSPB) to the marketing guys, because the game on the University of Wales, Newport Site is not exactly stretching the boundaries of original design. Mind you, you can win an iPod, so that's OK. Maybe anything more complex would be counter-productive?

Professional enough, and probably does the job, but maybe I need to start pimping our design skills a little more locally.

Good Things, Good Ideas and Good Games

2007-10-02T11:24:00.000-07:00

One for my students, this. Via the Guardian Gamesblog a project brief for a live ARG project, the chance of fame and glory and, far more importantly, the chance to do some real good. Basically a win-win for everyone concerned, which is a game that just has to be played some time.

If you thought those game briefs I set in year 1 were tough, then this one requires and deserves even more thought...

Film or Design?

2007-10-01T22:16:00.000-07:00

Apart from issues surrounding games and time lately I have also been thinking about where games are situated in relation to film. Which is ironic as the degree course that I run has just (literally, while I was away in Tokyo) been moved from the Film School into the Design Department. Seems the course is living out that balancing act on the knife edge between one discipline and another.

It really is just a managerial change, and it is not as if we are going to stop working with our film makers, but it does raise some questions in my own mind that might inform my take on the relationship between games and film that I hope will be explored in the DiGRA Film and Games SIG.

I wonder how these look as publications relevant to design:

-----. (2005) “Games” in Reading the Lord of the Rings, ed. Robert Eaglestone, London: Continuum, 151-161.

------. (2005) “Replicating the Blade Runner” in The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic, ed. Will Brooker, London: Wallflower.

-----. (2004) “To Infinity, and Beyond: Dialogue and Critique in Popular Film’s Portrayal of Video Games”, TEXT/Technology 13.1, 32-51.

Does it matter which institutional box I (and the games degree) get put in, I wonder? I knew I should have changed the name of the degree when I had the chance, but Computer Games Design was a bit of a giveaway...

Weird, but I can't say why...

2007-09-29T05:42:00.001-07:00

[Apologies for the quality of the photo, but that is a game of rock, paper, scissors embedded in Excel, played out at the banquet laid on by DiGRA Japan to give away freebie books to the winners.]

Still trying to work out my reaction to this. There was a little cultural cross confusion at the Banquet, some of which makes me a little embarassed in retrospect (and thanks to Bob Appleman for getting just a lttle hush before we totally got out of hand) but I couldn't quite work out why I found this weird. Maybe it seemed to chime with where I got the impression Japanese academic interest in games rests at the moment -- closer to Excel than to the planet of sophisticated and nuanced language use (cough) where I like to think I hang out. And I have no problem with that. Each to their own and stuff. And I have never bothered before to find out if the story of the flight sim in Excel were true, but I am quite prepared to believe it. And there is always Championship Manager. But this was odd -- maybe because it was making what I might dare to suggest is a mistake people sometimes make in other contexts of using digital delivery for a form of game that doesn't really need it? Or maybe I am being all pretentious and academic and seeing a metaphor here for the way poor little games are embedded inside the tools and frameworks of consumer capitalism. What really surprised me was how gripping the Noh play excerpt we were treated to was. For the first couple of minutes it felt incredibly alien, but there was something quite compelling about what unfolded. I have no idea what it meant, of course...

Nice place, Japan. And not just because I spent a few hours today shopping for the coolest toys I have ever seen.

Time Please

2007-09-29T03:55:00.000-07:00

Personal academic highlights of the last week included listening to stuff about time and games, and an MMO paper I enjoyed, despite my refusal to get with the C21st and go grind for myself.

I was presenting on games and temporality myself (can't seem to find the abstracts for any of the papers online, but I'll edit when I stop being stupid) only to find out (as if I shouldn’t have already known) that others are doing great work in the area. Actually I needed to get some things off my chest about the difference between academic and industry understandings of time, so I suppose it was the least academic presentation of my career to date. Then again, I have been known to skirt dangerously close to a rant before. I was therefore a little nervous seeing some of the scholars I have most personal time for in the audience when I was due to speak. I had thought timing (8.30 am last day) would have meant a more limited audience. Ho ho.

DiGRA is certainly good for reminding you that you work inside a talented community and not in isolation, and earlier in the conference I had listened to the work of José Zagal and Michael Mateas ('Temporal Frames: A Unifying Framework for the Analysis of Game Temporality') and Michael Nitsche ('Mapping Time in Video Games')and it rang all sorts of bells that would seem to connect it usefully with my own work. Now, I am aware that this is problematic, as I might be listening tuned to ‘me’ (that strange internal channel where everything connects with my own research and writing) while they are speaking about something only tangentially related. But there is enough of a connection in the attention to time and games to make me think I need to read the full papers properly. All that I heard was certainly good, useful scholarship.

The MMO paper was David Myers' contribution ('Self and selfishness in online social play'), which cheered me up, oddly, in its calm analysis (from what I understood as a visitor from distant planet Singleplayer) of PVP play that might be viewed as griefing by some.

And the keynote from the Japanese 'Gaming Gods', as they were characterised by the Conference Chair, was delightful. I would do a disservice to them to claim to be able to paraphrase their comments on the heady days of yore, but I think they managed to say both that videogames need to come out of an understanding of games and toys and leisure practice going back into the mists of time, and that they need to be understood in relation to other entertainment media. I am prepared to bow to the words of the gods there.

I can imagine I missed loads (and have just thoughtlessly excluded words of absolute genius uttered by others where I wasn't listening properly) and I wasn't able to go to everything I wanted, but I tried...

DiGRA Deja Vu

2007-09-29T00:34:00.001-07:00

Yay, I only skipped one session of the entire conference. Having been lagged all through the week I am a husk of the man I once was (despite the photographic evidence that may pop up via the evil surveillance tool that is Flickr). I even went to the karoake (which will surprise almost anyone who knows me), although I arrived a little late having spent a while in the Irish bar next door talking games and film with Grethe Mitchell. Ah the joys of drinking in fake european surroundings when in Tokyo.

I figure I should note down my immediate impressions before I forget, not in the interests of completeness or accuracy, but because I wish I had done the same after Utrecht and Vancouver.

Should anyone read this, please note that it was great, Tokyo was fantastic, and I would send the conference an invitation to be my Facebook friend or whatever if I could and if I had a Facebook account. I cannot thank everyone enough etc. etc. I moan only because I am a curmudgeonly git.

So, in no particular order:

1. DiGRA is a bunch of really nice passionate people and getting to see them once every two years is worth a little grief. This supportive little community is something I both need and adore.

2. Is DiGRA an academic research association, as its name sort of implies? If so I would question a couple of things about the conference, starting with some of the more prominent stuff. A clue -- More than once I would have loved to have been a Japanese speaker with a broken translation set.

3. Why had I sat through exactly the same papers that I had heard in 2003 and 2005? I figure the authors had changed, but I swear the papers were identical. Maybe WoW had replaced EQ, but otherwise they were the same...

4. Note to self. Programming has the potential to break a conference. Thematic days and not tracks make no sense, unless you are selling this as a conference to dip in and out of.

5. Question. Will I get thrown out of DiGRA because I don't carry a picture of my WoW avatar in my wallet alongside snaps of my kids?

6. Related. I wonder what the WoW equivalent will be in 2009? I have a thousand yen left to bet it isn't still WoW...

7. Nicest and scariest surprise was how many astute and careful scholars are working bang in the same area as myself. I almost dread rereading my dated and imminent PoP essay on time now.

8. Work out whether writing blog entries while still lagged and stuck in a hotel room smaller than your suitcase is really a good idea.

DiGRA 2007 Tokyo

2007-09-26T03:38:00.000-07:00

Now that I wasn't expecting. My Vaio makes it all the way to Japan with me, and I finally get an internet connection in my hotel room so I log on to Blogger and it has learned Japanese. Unfortunately I haven't, so this will be posted by dumb luck only.

And this isn't going to be an in depth post on how fantastic the food is, how fantastic the place is, or how fantastic the people are (as ever), but just a memo to self to record the URL of the IGJA Videogame Style Guide, put together by the fantastic David Thomas (and a couple of other probably fantastic people I don't know personally) which will be featuring in the research methods section of the undergraduate programme.

Trigger Happy

2007-09-10T03:17:00.000-07:00

I have just noticed that the archive of Steven Poole's Trigger Happy column from Edge is up online here. Poole was an astute commentator on games, although not exactly the greatest fan of academic writing on the subject. These are definitely worth a (re)read, however.

Actually, I begin to worry. Jessica Mulligan was pretty negative about academics in her keynote in Edinburgh, and to a large degree I agreed with her, if not in matters of detail. Similarly, what I remember Steven Poole saying about some academic wriitng rang pretty true (at least from memory -- not sure how I would trawl until I find it). Maybe there is something wrong with me.

The Phony War is Over

2007-09-07T09:37:00.000-07:00

Time to put away the toys of summer. I notice that all I have posted is text lately, so two not very colourful prototype screenshots that will now get filed away and probably never emerge again. Not that the world will be the poorer for the absence of a gecko wallpaper minigame...

Hardcore (the DiGRA column, not either of the other kinds)

2007-09-07T09:01:00.000-07:00

Friday. Too hot. The weather is close and oppressive. Emerge from a sweaty and tedious meeting about the death to intellectual activity that is the UK RAE only to remember I have a big presentation to finish for next week, am months overdue for an abstract I owe a very patient colleague, have all the preparations for a new term to finish, need to crunch staffing numbers into another format demanded by the university etc. etc. So nice to see something online to distract me while I get my other thoughts in order – a new Hardcore column out of DiGRA, this time authored by Jose Zagal. Intelligent, thoughtful, nicely argued. Strange how the same issues crop up again and again, though – this reminded me of a debate immediately after DiGRA in Vancouver (assisted by Tanya Krzywinska’s call for game studies academics to play games in an early Hardcore column) about who/what game studies academics are/should be/should do. And this was ground, as Jose notes, that Espen Aarseth had covered fairly solidly before. So far so conventional.

Can’t fault the logic of the latest Hardcore – how do we nurture a subject community without excluding some people? At least, I think that is what he is saying.

I used to joke that admitting to game studies was a bit like joining AA. ‘Hi, my name’s Barry and I am a gamer. I had my last game of Quake 2 hours and 14 minutes ago...’ It just doesn’t work in these enlightened times. Damn game studies for getting all respectable on me. Seems no one is surprised any more when I tell them what I do. Everyone is a gamer now, or knows a reasonably well adjusted gamer. I suppose we could thank Nintendo, or simply time and demographics.

But this Hardcore seems to be making an almost counter-intuitive claim that game studies courses need to accommodate those who don’t (or more significantly won’t) play games. An analogy springs to mind from my past life a s a literature specialist. As a student you were expected to read books if you took a lit course (expected to, but...) and I see no difference expecting students on a games course to play games. There are platform/ accessibility/economic problems with accessing everything, but we have a range of pragmatic solutions to most of those problems. My gut reaction would be to say ‘tough’ and force anyone on a course to play. You just can’t engage in productive analysis if you won’t look at the thing in front of you.

More intriguing, I suppose, is the implication that games courses should be the source of the next generation of games scholars. While there is a logic to this, and I have a few ex-students of mine now happily or not so happily grinding the treadmill of academia, I wonder if it is entirely a good idea. It will certainly be a consequence of all those programmes of study and the PhDs we supervise. But I do think we will lose something if game studies becomes its own subject area with defined entry paths, rather than something people come to with a training from somewhere else. I certainly don’t want to work out how much sociology we should have under our belts to be equipped for game studies, or have to change the habits of an academic lifetime and have to deal with empirical research, rather than its conclusions.

Having been one of those who would publicly admit (confess?) to being a gamer as well as an academic I am actually quite happy when non-gamers from other areas look at games. They certainly see them differently than I do with my gamer-goggles on. Just thought I’d better check that I had said so publicly, before and yep I even added to a blog discussion of this issue 2 years ago:

We all have something to say — including those who sit outside with a little more distance than gamers like me (and Tanya, and you, and William, and Espen, and [insert many others here]), and the more voices the better.

Which is good. Rather the babble of interdisciplinary babel than the tyranny of dull agreement. I do worry about us falling into orthodoxy by default, and agreeing to canons and rules and regulations.

From Jose Zagal’s column:

How do newcomers learn what Game Studies is, and what should newcomers to Game Studies know about games? Due to the youthfulness of our field, our members currently come from a diversity of backgrounds and our paths into game studies were haphazard and indirect.

I guess I just like the notion of the haphazard and the indirect because that is where the most interesting work seems to have come from, at least for me.

Play That Thing?

2007-09-06T10:02:00.000-07:00

This looks interesting. Greg Costikyan, who has done something very good for distribution of Indie Games through his Manifesto Games site, has got a sister site up not only plugging the Manifesto wares, but offering freeware and demos that should form the core of a playing community. Good commercial sense, no doubt, but somewhere else to go looking for the more quirky games to relieve me from staring at space marines in shades of brown.

Working with clever people

2007-09-04T23:11:00.000-07:00

Nice to see some of the people I know achieved something over the summer. Emma Westecott and Alex Mayhew are both members of our games research group Synergy, and have things I should link to.

Emma is an editor on a new games journal online:

Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture.

This new scientific, international, peer reviewed online journal deals with
everything ludic and looks at digital games from a multitude of
perspectives. Its approach is deliberately broad to accommodate the rapid
changes and constant growth of this highly trans-disciplinary field.

Looks interesting, and I know how much the band of game studies people like work to be available online, so it could be a nice addition to the established Game Studies.

Alex got a review of his Beethoven's Hair at Jay is Games, which is really quite positive, and actually declares that it is NOT "oh, another one of those 'New Media', self-smug clap-traps" which is good. Some nice comments in the thread as well, which is heartening.

Reminder: I know that I know nothing

2007-08-10T04:37:00.000-07:00

I just blew up a floor sander in the most dramatic way. Sheared bolts and everything. Ooops. At least this computer is less likely to explode, although I built it myself, so there is always a possibility that it might.

A comment on one of those sites that are redistributing SCMIV said that it wasn’t just another Sokoban clone. Hmm, I thought and looked up Sokoban (there is an academic page here). And then following links I looked at Chip’s Challenge. So I could have used either to illustrate what I wanted to say about basic spatial construction in games without having to knock my own up. I am constantly hit by my ignorance of games, despite having my head stuck into them for a long time and to an almost worrying degree. Ah well, I wasn’t trying to do anything particularly original, but it is interesting to see how the designers of those games made a virtue out of the problem of ‘boxing in’ that I addressed through a control system that seems to irritate its players. I live and learn.

Talking sense about games

2007-08-10T01:55:00.000-07:00

Games let you be a spectator in your own head. They're laboratories which let you contrive test after test - tweak a condition here and a parameter there - and give you a visible, beautiful read-out on just how smart your brain really is.

And in doing that, they give you more insight into your own capabilities than I've ever found in any work of literature or any piece of music.

More

Margaret Robertson, ex-editor of Edge, has an intelligent and insightful piece up at the BBC site. More insight there, at least, than in a few academic articles/book chapters on why we play games.

To do list

2007-08-07T04:04:00.000-07:00

Drawing up travel and accommodation plans and trying to check where I am supposed to be when, I now realise I am going to be a little busy in the near(ish) future. Talking/chairing at the Digital Interactive Symposium in Edinburgh put together by Ren Reynolds and Hannah Sommerseth next week – and incidentally catching up with an old friend and ex-colleague from my days at Manchester Metropolitan while goofing around the Edinburgh Festival. Off to Brunel for the postgraduate games event organised by Tanya Krzywinska, my editing partner for Videogame, Player, Text, in the week or so before DiGRA I also think I am speaking at Aurora in November, the animation festival where my folks are in Norwich, although the programme isn’t set yet, before hopping up to London for the games and film event that Diane Carr has organised. Apart from that I don’t think I have anything else booked in the near future. Gulp.

I’ll be talking about time and games at Edinburgh and Tokyo, and particularly about the different understandings of times held by players, developers and academics. About possible and virtual worlds in Norwich. About Blade Runner in London (and I still really like the essay I wrote for The Blade Runner Experience, which isn't’true of all my old games writing). And about life, the universe and game studies at Brunel.

Thinking about it, my own essay in Videogame, Player, Text is about time too –“"Killing Time: Time Past, Time Present and Time Future in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time".

DiGRA 2007 in Tokyo

2007-08-06T07:41:00.000-07:00

Having changed my mind about going several hundred times and undoubtedly annoyed all sorts of patient people I finally put in an abstract for DiGRA Tokyo. The preliminary programme is up, and it is nice to see so many familliar names on it, as well as a bunch of people I have wanted to meet for a while. Should be fun, as well as illuminating.

Nostalgia still as good after all these years

2007-08-06T02:21:00.000-07:00

This takes me back (via OgreCave). I used to be a sucker for pen and paper RPGs, and my poison of choice would have been either Traveller or RQ – both of which I played to death into my late teens. My office is full of old rules books for everything from Call of Cthulhu to Traveller 2000 to the original Warhammer, but I can’t quite bring myself to do any more with all this stuff than store it. While I would no longer go up to perfect strangers and ask them if they want to get a party together and come adventuring it certainly still gets me all misty eyed when I think back to my roleplaying days. My first professionally published piece of game related writing was actually an RQ adventure for White Dwarf back in 1984(WD88). 1984? 23 years? Where the hell did they go?

Anyway, Mongoose are releasing updated rules sets for both Traveller and Runequest. When they released a new Paranoia I bought it – sad admission – to read, rather than play. And I have a feeling I’ll do the same for both Traveller and RQ. I suppose I could scrape a game together from the game researchers, PhDs and teaching staff at work and tell them it is for research?

Edit -- A quick bit of maths works out that the date on the WD article must be wrong. It has to be 1987. Turns out that it was the second thing anyway, after a small piece on RQ magic systems in WD67 in July 1985. 22 years ago. So that's all right. For a moment there I thought I had been obsessed with games simply forever.

Shush, again

2007-08-06T02:11:00.000-07:00

Hey, someone liked the game. That’s nice, although it has also appeared on some Czech games dowload sites here and here (*coff* they might have asked *coff*) which I guess also means that someone in the Czech Republic liked it. To try and get some players I announced it on the Game Maker Community site where it was entered into a Cage Match without my knowing (I had no idea what that was...) and it got soundly thrashed by a tower defence game someone is selling. Ah well, that'll teach me to release things into the wild.

I am still not sure it works as a game, and I have a version I am still playing with that adds new elements (worms arriving from one and both sides, a whack-a-mole stage, a singleton greedy worm) but I am not sure I'll do anything more with it.

Finally, factories that only manufacture left shoes

2007-08-03T09:47:00.000-07:00

Via Kotaku there is a trailer up at GameTrailers for SimSity Societies that reminds me of something I wrote years ago about SimCity. Looks interesting, even if the claims for infinite possibilities make me smile. The soundbite version of what I am currently trying to write would be 'Videogames are caught in a promise of a public rhetoric of ever greater excess while constantly having to address the reality of forms of technological, economic, and player limit.' Ugly, but that is what editing is for.

DIY

2007-08-03T09:21:00.000-07:00

I spent yesterday pulling up the flimsy boards nailed firmly to the original floorboards in our front room prior to sanding and varnishing to get rid of that ‘please ignore the state of the carpet, we have two young kids’ look which has horrified the more houseproud of our guests. My cup truly runneth over with excitement. By the time everything was made safe for little pink feet I was too tired to play anything, so I turned to the TV for a bit of mindless wallpaper. The funny thing was I hopped all the freebie digital channels and repeatedly flew past Resident Evil : Apocalypse. I seem to remember having heard some OK things about the movie, the adverts I had seen looked competent enough (even if the film takes itself deeply, deeply seriously), and the survival horror games have a natural enough fit with cinema. But I think it would have taken wild horses to make me sit and watch it.

It can’t just be a case of many times bitten, now shy. So now I wonder why I have no desire to see any game-to-film adaptation? I enjoy the harmless pasttime of watching gamers turn up in other movies (In Over the Hedge it is game literacy that saves the day, again -- hurrah) and I have no problem watching mass culture popcorn movies, but there seems to be a substantial difference between what I want to watch rather than do, and my preferances (in terms of genre) in games and film. I was turned off Resident Evil even though I had heard it was an OK film. So the thought of Doom, the movie, excites me not every time I walk past it reduced in a supermarket although I am happy enough to blast my way through many an FPS. But while survival horror games have an attraction for me – with all their dependence on a language we are familliar with from film – I have almost no interest in the cinematic version. And, off the top of my head, I can’t work out why, as I am usually as much of a sucker for cross-media franchise works as anyone. Worse, I know I am (initially at least) tempted into trying games purely because of their external IP (anything Star Wars for example - which has proved something of a mixed blessing) while I wouldn't make the move in the opposite direction.

Small is beautiful, immature is good

2007-08-01T03:13:00.000-07:00

Michael Nitsche has an interesting piece up as part of the DiGRA Hardcore series of essays. Lots to chew on, particularly as he is really pitching the DiGRA SiG on Games and Film that is an unproblematically good idea. I have a paper to give in November at an event organised by Diane Carr, the other half of the Games and Film SiG, happily teach on our animation and film degrees, and have published a fair amount on games and film so I am a believer in the good things that can come out of careful use of film criticism applied to the very specific circumstances of games.

Something I find a little odd, however, is the rush to declare game studies an established and even mature field/discipline/whatever that this column seems to be contributing to. Yes, things are different now and we have lost something of the pioneering early excitement (I think Julian Kucklich made much the same point, albeit with extra sarcasm, in an earlier Hardcore column here), and yes, I suppose the acceptance of what we do has changed radically even over the last seven years I have been involved in this strange activity, but to shackle oneself to games as an academic is still to join a tiny bunch of people.

I am constantly surprised by how I seem to know (personally or through the work and/or reputation) so many of the people in game studies. In a previous life I used to have the job of tracking all the new research published in American literature 1900-1945 for Year’s Work in English Studies and even this tiny fragment of literature studies seems huge in comparison to game studies. Media effects stuff (or at least that bit that ‘proves’ that games turn you into a mindless killer) aside I think the only reason I haven’t read all the game studies literature that is out there is choice, rather than being overwhelmed by quantity. DiGRA, and the active and vocal online community, give the impression that we are bigger than we really are, I think, but I would love to know how many game studies academics there really are who think of themselves as first and foremost games scholars. Dozens? A hundred or more? A couple of hundred worldwide?

I like the fact we are small, and even a little ramshackle and even immature, and don’t have all the structures and controls of a larger discipline. I still think the curriculum should be, more or less, everything. There really isn’t that much work out there. There really aren’t that many books, in particular, and it is still possible to have a solid grasp of the literature. Knocking about the games sites while I should have been doing something else I happened on a post at Terra Nova where someone mentions that they are speaking at “the annual meeting of the American Accounting Association, which brings together over 3000 accounting professors from the US”. Now that is a lot of people working in an area. And I get the impression that is a subset of all the accounting professors in the States, which has to be part of a worldwide accounting discipline. I hope we never get that big so we get lost in the mass. Wow 3,000 people all talking about accounting in one place...

Amazon quite bright but also quite dumb

2007-07-26T14:59:00.000-07:00

Well it cheered me up after a day spent technically on leave but really on catch-up of that bit of the job that isn't about students and quality assurance regulations and recruitment.

At this rate I may actually get some research done soon, and even some new writing... Not exactly a real holiday, but it might restore some sanity.

Oh, and the last book is almost out after a period of gestation that I am sure has tested the patience of the contributors. Available on pre-order from all good booksellers.

Replaying Company of Heroes

2007-07-20T03:25:00.001-07:00

Hmmm. I am obviously still not up to speed on this blogger thing as I have just lost an extended post on this game that was full of wit, insight and carefully considered commentary. Ah well, I'll leave my little thumbnail here and try to return to why this game impressed me so much in a little while.

Must. Learn. How. To. Use. Technology.

Crates, Again.

2007-06-26T15:22:00.001-07:00

I feel strange pangs of guilt as well as nostalgia playing Tomb Raider: Anniversary. But most of all I just feel a bit irritated. Sure Lara moves better and looks better. But the crates... why has crate navigation become such a pain? They swing about all over the place. Lara I can move like a ballerina as she flips about in combat and hops from pole to pole and wall runs and grapple swings. Give her a crate to push or pull and she's swaying all over the place. I am an often incompetent player -- rubbish at twitch combat, rubbish at complex puzzles, rubbish at the fine timing needed for real fluid grace. But now I have to add incompetence with basic crate handling. Too much like the real world when I can't even lug around heavy objects efficiently.

The game looks good, though (although I am aware there are no crates in the screenshot above). They even paint the textures on the floor to tell me where to place my crates (although I swear that Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time did its visual signposting so much better with just light). I just feel a little let down by the crate management...

What Are Prototypes For?

2007-06-24T13:49:00.000-07:00

This is a memo to self. I once had a cute idea for an alternative control scheme for interaction in a game. Well, I thought it would be cute. In effect there would be 3x3 frame that reset as a pattern after every mouse click. Mousing over the frame would indicate a corresponding area of effect in a second 3x3 frame. Left click and the effect took place. The variables in the first frame would be set at 1-6 (ooh, like a standard dice, for example), whereas the second frame would be (almost entirely) an initially binary random distribution. The idea would be to clear the top frame by getting everything to match. I would also include dead spaces in the second frame that would be unaffected by any effect, bonus objects depending on matching the state of other objects, and instant death ‘don’t click here’ objects. Sounds confusing? That’s why visuals are so useful. This is what it looked like:

And it sort of worked. I kind of enjoyed it. It was different, and the whole card table baize, billiard ball and dice thing that were actually just quick placeholders also worked for me. But I knew there were problems. The random reset of the first frame made things too random, so that any sense of careful progression or the exercise of skill was undermined. Not always, but often enough. But did I throw it away and do something more useful? Nope. I did this:

More images at my Photobucket.

Which kind of works. It has got penguins in it and is a casual computer game – how could it fail? But it suffers from exactly the same problems that the prototype reveals. And yet I built it anyway. I keep twitching it and trying to get it to really work, but I am still left with the feeling that the only lesson I have really learned is that prototyping is supposed to get you to throw things away when they fail, not keep and keep worrying away at.

This is my crate. There are many like it, but this one is mine...

2007-06-14T09:24:00.000-07:00

PC only, of course, but available for fiddling with... [Update] And now with audio (after a fashion). Actually, I am quite proud of the script, if not of what happened to the voice acting of Microsoft Mike and Microsoft Mary after compression to keep the file size down. Microsoft Mary now sounds as if she has been on the Martinis for a while and has a disturbing simularity to Jodie Foster to my ear.

Crates, Barrels & Games Teaching About Games

2007-06-13T04:42:00.001-07:00

I was reminded recently about the joys of crates and barrels in games. The linked site has been one I have directed students towards for a couple of years with my tongue only partially in my cheek. Crates and Barrels are important, dammit. And are low poly space fillers and useful for a number of game purposes -- build stairways with crates, push and pull crates to reveal, smash crates with crowbar, hide behind crate, blow up barrel, roll barrel down hill -- ah, the ballet that is crates and barrels deserves its own PhD thesis.

Anyway, I thought I would post some screens from Super Crate Madness IV, a little game I built to demonstrate the basics of level design using crates and barrels as the primary assets. Its working title had been Antediluvian in some kind of conscious attempt to signal its knowing dependence on game cliches, and I have always thought of it as belonging to what should be a new genre -- Sarcastic Games.

Anyway, the idea was to build on basic find-key-open-lock structures to show how complexity is layered in game space:

If I get some time later I'll upload some bigger images to my Photobucket account. Actually, the whole thing is fully playable (although it has no audio beyond the SFX for events), and if I have a spare couple of hours I might get it into a polished state and release it into the wild.

Manchester Game Space

2007-06-09T04:14:00.000-07:00

And perhaps it isn't always such a good idea to look for reference in the real world. For shame -- I didn't realise I could have dropped back to Manc in Resistance: Fall of Man. Mind you, I am still in the wait and see camp for the PS3 at the minute. At least until Little Big Planet arrives.

The linked news story actually contains the phrase 'orgy of blood'. Nice to see cool calm and collected reporting. I bought Tomb Raider: Anniversary a few days ago and am still turning over in my mind why there is something intriguing about its warning label (at least in the UK) of 'Contains moderate fantasy violence.' I think 'Contains an orgy of blood' might actually shift more units.

Game Producers Say Good Things

2007-06-06T01:09:00.000-07:00

I am collecting as many sensible industry opinions as I can to support the way that we teach. I worry that it is too easy to confuse an education that prepares people for a long term future in the games industry (which isn't the norm, by any means) with the immediacy of software skills. So it is heartening to see Peter O'Brien, a producer at Bizarre Creations, talking much sense in a round table interview at gameproducer.net.

Two things that warmed my end of academic year shellshocked self were his general statement about where he came from and what was most valuable about his educational background:

I trained as a 3D designer; the aim was to create ‘real world’ Products such as furniture, social space, kitsch objects or sustainable products. However, the most valuable lessons formed around design thinking; the why, what, who and why again. [My emphasis]

And his summary of the softer skills needed for a role in design:

Designers: This is a tough one. Key components are communication skills, problem solving skills. An ability to express oneself clearly is crucial. How do you show how you think? You don’t need code to make a game. Knowledge of fundamental design rules/history/principals is essential.

Yay -- go Bizarre. He sounds like he could be teaching on our degree. Communication. Problem solving. Clarity of expression. Knowledge of fundamentals. I like this man.

I wonder if I ever met him and missed the opportunity to talk to him? I used to attend IGDA gatherings when I worked in Liverpool, and the Bizarre crowd made up a fair proportion of the throng. I would probably add communication, communication and communication to his list of necessary skills, but we have just emerged from the bloodbath of the big year two demo build projects.

Welsh Game Space

2007-06-04T10:42:00.000-07:00

I took this last time I actually got out to see some of the beautiful countryside we live in. Phone camera picture, unfortunately, but it really struck me that it was an arrangement of features that shouted ‘game’ to me. As far as I could work out the thing that looks like a huge overflow plug hole is… a huge overflow plug hole. Better than a Narnia wardrobe or a great big glowing gate to signal a possibility of an imminent somewhere else. Nice rickety steel gangway right over the top of the plug hole to the austere tower where something waits.

It may be too many WWII films and a childhood spent following my RAF father around the world from one military base to another, but dams always speak to me of moonlight and covert action. When they don’t have bouncing bombs skipping across the surface. Nice regular geometry as well in the main dam wall, which would allow you to pick out the areas of interest for the player quite easily. And the scale is nice for first or third person. Not a Hoover-clone, which is all about wowing a player with spectacle, but something far more discrete. And we got there on an old steam mountain railway, which is always a winner.

I do worry that I may border on the obsessed. I remember when I used to commute from Manchester to Liverpool and spent far too much time staring at the girders and glass of Lime Street Station trying to work out how I would model it in 3DSMax and what I would do with it when I got into engine.

Maybe I should get out (even) more.

Prime Minister in Titles Scandal

2007-06-02T23:29:00.000-07:00

So John Major, possibly one of the more human of Conservative Prime Ministers, publishes a book with the same title as my own. I thought I was doing well when More Than a Game got a feature piece on Radio 4’s Open Book, but he gets an entire serialisation. I am green. And he got a better cover. A much better cover. Everyone ever published got a better cover. Oh well.

The whole point of calling the first book More Than a Game was, in retrospect, always going to be a little lost on non-UK readers. It was meant to allude to the following widely mangled statement by Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly:

"Someone said 'football is more important than life and death to you' and I said 'Listen, it's more important than that'." [Source: Wikipedia]

It wasn’t meant to imply something like ‘other than game’, but an excessive state of superabundance in which narrative content takes a game to new, and interesting, places.

It's OK, I rarely talk about games and narrative any more.

I presume Major is making the same gesture towards Shankley, as are all the other authors who have used the formulation over the years. I wonder if the day will ever come when an ex-Prime Minister will retire to write a book about the influence Mario (or, terrifying thought, C&C or DefCon)has had on her or him that will be greeted with same warm British approval as Major has received for his book on Cricket?

Shush -- The Game

2007-05-29T23:02:00.000-07:00

Now with a link to the freebie file folder that comes with my Broadband account -- underneath the links to my books on the right. Some screenshots in the posts below. God knows what would happen if people actually downloaded it in any numbers. I don't know why, as it is a freestanding .exe (name of shush85.exe), but it downloads as a document file. Rename it once downloaded as Shush.exe and it should be ready to go.

So it is a falling blocks arcade puzzle game. I have tried to put some novelty into the control scheme, and some personality in the game as a whole, but its lineage is clear. Hello Tetris, I see you poking your head out there. It has sequential difficulty that isn't yet refined. What it needs is user testing. The plan is that I present a wide open version to my students who will then be able to see (and access) the process of game balancing and what it means to twitch variables, redraw the basic levels and add components. Very year one undergraduate and very introductory. If it doesn't work I will throw it away and rethink, or choose some other middleware. I might even have to see if I can still write proper lines of code.

The second year students get their hands dirty with Unreal 2004 and Source (and I really must try and get playable builds online of the projects from this year, or at least get some gameplay video together), but I think they could have benefitted from more than just Flash and Maya projects, as well as paper design exercises, at an earlier point.

There is a level skip cheat built in so that you can see most of the game without playing from scratch. Hit the Space Bar to go to the next screen. When there are nine coloured worms at the top, three dark grey ones hammering down and the timer bar is zipping at a fair old rate you have seen all there is to see and the game is asking you politely to pack it in.

Raison D'etre

2007-05-29T16:15:00.000-07:00

I am very aware of why I have been wary of blogs for so long (which might explain why comments are currently switched firmly off) so this is a very tentative toe in the waters. And I am nervous about more than the whole blogging thing -- I am busy enough, after all, with both young kids and a demanding job -- but with the exposure of practical games things to a wider audience.

So my initial list of disclaimers. This will not be updated as if I have a terminal caffeine twitch and need online adoration. It is a place where I intend to dump screenshots, links and other stuff that will be useful as I get more and more forgetful and my twitch reflexes fall away until I am fit only for Scrabble.

Although I am rather better at Scrabble than twitch games anyway.

The game prototypes I intend to describe are exactly that. I am not an artist. I am certainly not an audio expert. I am not a game designer, or a wannabe game designer who hankers after fame or fortune in a studio. I have no fantasy of creating a commercial game or sitting next to the game gods at a panel at GDC. I am not worthy, etc.. I know where my strengths lie, and they are with academic writing and thinking about games. I am a cultural critic and cultural theorist of games, who happens to teach some practice on an Art and Design degree.

Which then brings me to the things I have already posted and intend to post. I teach some very talented young designers. Most have a real art background and can make me embarrassed by their accomplished use of line and colour. But they haven't ever really encountered code, or the thinking behind variables and arrays and all the gritty ones and zeroes that make the technology of the game actually work. So I need to teach them the basics. And, while my beloved gosub and goto seem to have gone the way of the Dodo (which itself sounds like a Basic command), simple game models and structures seem attractive to me as a teaching resource, which means I need to knock out some games that I can't just talk about and explain but let them fiddle with.

And that is what I intend to do, starting with Shush, which should populate the preceding posts and should be filled out in coming posts as I make some free time. Hopefully it will all make sense as I go along.

Attract Screen

2007-05-29T15:47:00.001-07:00

If nothing else, the audio should get people wanting to fiddle with the game. The core mechanic is fully functional from the load, although without a score and if you leave it long enough it will clear all the birds to no effect, but it is kind of restful to watch. Which might defeat the point. I also like the transparency on the buttons a little too much, just as every screen throughout is loaded with particle effects just because I am at the kid with new toy phase of having learned how to do it. Some have a real point, mind, and particularly the sparkles on the buttons and landscape gems as the cursor moves over.

2007-05-29T15:38:00.000-07:00

A little way into the game, showing things getting a little more difficult for the poor player. I now notice how poor I am at taking game screenshots, however. Red worm on the right has its blink animation visible, sound is set to off, and the score is zero. Oh well.

2007-05-29T15:34:00.000-07:00

High Score Table. Definitely meant for single player, so no names or three letter tag input, but has some little touches to try and reflect player achievement.

Game Difficulty Screen

2007-05-29T15:20:00.000-07:00

So, this is what you see when you adjust the difficulty. Basically, it is a level skip that allows you to get over the top of the first few levels.

Test

2007-05-29T14:53:00.000-07:00

Just in case this actually works...