Less WIP

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

Contradictions

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

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

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.

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

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.