Home of New York’s Intellovisiongentsia
Yesterday two of our own, Charles Berkeley Miller and Bob Clark, presented their thesis projects to the Interactive Telecommunications Program of NYU.
Charles B presented on the educational board game he’s been working on called Political Capital and Bob talked about his project to fix dialogue in games. You can read their abstracts here and here.
Hopefully they’ll post video soon, for those of us that couldn’t make it!
Cracked did yet another list, but this time it actually brings up some interesting questions/complaints:
7 commandments all video games should obey
Thanks to Teo for bringing this article to my attention.
Outside, a decent but far from perfect game according to this review.
Moments after a horse named Big Brown accomplished a feat in the Kentucky Derby that only a great horse could accomplish (win from the 20th and last gate), the runner-up Eight Belles — a competitive filly — fell to the ground as she was ridden out long past the finish line. Two broken ankles. Within moments, she was euthanized before Big Brown had even reached the winner’s circle.
I was at the betting window when I had heard the news. I had just watched the race in person and screamed for joy as I saw the filly cross the finish line to complete my exacta. Trying to beat the rush of fans collecting their winnings, I stood in line and watched a monitor for the results to become official. The man behind me seemed frustrated and disappointed about something — and those are very rare feelings for anyone standing in line to receive their winnings. He then told me that the filly had just been put down. I told him it couldn’t be, that she finished 2nd. I was sure of it. The gutsy little horse that I had promised all of my betting friends that “she’s so competitive, she’ll die trying to win this race” had just ended her short life. Suddenly I too was a little less giddy about my winning ticket.
Continue reading ‘What Happens When the Magic Circle is Pulled From Beneath Your Feet’
Some of you may know that I’m a big fan of Final Fantasy from way back when the Big Three were still involved: Hironobu Sakaguchi, Nobuo Uematsu, and Yoshitaka Amano. Our friend Noah sent me a link to a great interview with Amano and I thought I would share it with you guys. Fluff, I know, but enjoy!
How do games create meaning?
This is the question that is at the core of some the most prevalent, heated, and often exhausting debates in the game development community. Arguments over the place of storytelling in games, or whether or not games can be considered ‘art’. I believe that the search for an answer partly fuels the popularity of games from Metal Gear Solid to Passage and is the primary cause of what Eric Zimmerman calls our “cinema-envy”.
Now, no one is questioning that games can be meaningful. There are plenty of games that produce highly emotional states, in both players and spectators. It’s also commonsense that all games foster certain types of behavior, from Football’s reliance on the division of labor to Starcraft’s multi-tasking.
In this case though, the question is less about psychology and more about semiotics. We’re very familiar with how words and pictures create meaning, how they signify a thing. If I show you a picture of an orange or the word ‘orange’, a signifier, depending on your level of literacy you’ll be able to figure out what I’m trying to communicate, the signified fruit.
However, is there a way a game can signify something without the aid of pictures or words?
Not all that.
As many of you know, I created a game called Political Capital to serve as my thesis at ITP. It’s a game about running for President — or more specifically, the game expresses the electoral system and the political election process at a surface level and plays something like Risk. Lately, because I will be presenting my thesis soon (May 6 at 12:20pm) and also because of the topsy-turvy nomination process the Democrats are serving up, I’ve been thinking a lot about our political election systems. I figured it was time to dedicate a post to them and begin a conversation among game designers of how we can improve what we’ve got. Lord knows there’s plenty of room for improvement.
Continue reading ‘Frontlines of the Non-digital: the Electoral & Democratic Delagate Systems’
I generally consider Tim Rogers to be the poor man’s Erik Wolpaw, but this is good:
The Blue Shell: . . . well.
The Blue Shell is a sign of the times; it’s the first nail in the coffin of game design. Know that I come from a proud heritage of people who play Virtua Fighter 5 and genuinely enjoy losing because it teaches you something.
If you’re in a losing position and have been for a good amount of time, an algorithm behind the scenes kicks in and awards you a Blue Shell. Use it, and it rushes to the head of the pack and crashes into the person in first place with absolute certainty. Other drivers in the general area will also be decimated.
I’m sure that the general idea of the Blue Shell when it first appeared, in Super Mario Kart 64, was that a person in last place would obtain it, shudder with joy, and then be filled with the turgid urge to claw their way to the head of the pack and use it when within strategic range of the leaders.
In the current “videogame industry”, though, things like the Blue Shell are communistic concessions thrown to the people who Aren’t Getting Better. If my little brother, say, spent twenty hours a day doing something other than playing videogames — that is to say, if he sucked at videogames — the Blue Shell would be his “Best Thing Ever”: something to use when bitter and bored, to ruin the chances of the person who’s just so happening to win. The Blue Shell, simply described, is an easy way to strike back at the person who’s beating everyone, when you are the one losing to everyone. If that’s not heady, frothy communism in action, I really don’t know what the hell is. How is this a more family-friendly experience than killing hookers in Grand Theft Auto? If anything, the sugar-coating just makes the arsenic more dangerous, and it can’t be too hard to prove, from here, that Nintendo fanboys — big, sweaty, mouth-breathing — are actually individuals of scarier morals than most self-mutilating suicide-bombing terrorists.
We previously posted that Jason Rohrer would be coming to speak at NYU tomorrow, Friday, April 11th. However, we have been informed that due to illness that talk has been postponed until a later date. When we find out when this later date is we’ll be sure to let you all know!
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