Home of New York’s Intellivisiongentsia
If you could design any game for the Wii, what would it be? The Wii seems to be at its best when people gather to play it, so I think the best ideas should incorporate this social aspect. But beyond that, I’d love to hear what people would like to see developed for the Wii.
For me: how about Wii Dodgeball where you velcro one remote to your head to dodge the balls, and have a second remote to throw the balls? But could this be social?
ITP had what I believe is a record year for game-related thesis projects (Frank, can you confirm this?). If you missed the live presentations here are some links to the archived videos.
Last night the issue of ‘gaming literacy’ came up once again. This is a recurring topic in our class, one that we continue to struggle with and argue about. To my mind we still have not settled on exactly what it means to be gaming literate. Does it mean the ability to navigate and manipulate systems quickly and easily? Does it mean having a base line understanding of the game making process to actually have the kind of conversations through the design that both Frank and I have talked about? Is it spotting inter-textuality as Bob says? Much discussion has taken place in the past semester and I feel that very little has been settled. That gives me hope actually, because it means that we have truly reached the real questions of game design, instead of mere engineering problems. May I suggest though, as the closing weeks of class approach, that we turn to engineering, to mechanics, and do what we all came here to do: design games.
On my last post, Oren brought up the notion that every game can be considered multi-player to a certain limited extent, because players are always playing against the games themselves, and by extension the designers who built them. I’m still not a hundred percent sold on the idea, but it got me thinking as to what kind of game could be designed with amplifying this experience as its goal. Can you have a game which truly mimics the player vs. designer aspect? Here’s my attempt to at the very least sketch out the basics of such a game:
This would be an online game for three players, based on the Greek myth of the labyrinth– in fact, let’s just go ahead and use “Labyrinth” as the title for now, even though there’s already a game/toy with that name.
Player one would play the role of Daedelus– the builder of the labyrinth– and would design a maze from a top-down blueprint view.
After finishing the maze, it would be navigated by player two, playing the role of Theseus– the hero sent to rescue youths from its dungeon– who would need to get from point A to point B while in first person view, with only a small mini-map in the corner which grows more detailed the more the player explores.
Finally, player three would play the Minotaur– the monstrous half-bull/half-man the King of Crete commissioned the Labyrinth to imprison– and would chase Theseus throughout the maze from a third-person bird’s eye view.
The game would end either when Theseus reaches the end or is caught by the Minotaur. Daedelus would continue designing a new maze after players 2 and 3 started an already completed one, making it a race to finish designing mazes in order to keep them trapped inside. The seqeuence would pretty much follow like this:
(1) Daedelus designs labyrinth.
(2) Theseus starts labyrinth after short delay.
(3) Minotaur starts labyrinth after short delay.
(4) Daedelus designs new labyrinth, etc. Repeat until Theseus finishes a navigating a labyrinth before Daedelus finishes designing new one, or until Minotaur catches Theseus.
Now, something tells me that this game has probably already been made. If not, I’ll just have to learn how to program it…
Indie Arcade Quick Concept
A venue for independently made, amateur quality games.
Kind of trying to compare it to a music scene - I want to provide a place to go to see your friend’s or maybe local new games. Not that I want to limit it to local games at all.
The cabinets are conceptualized as just PC boxes with joysticks and trackballs, so far. But they can be extended and specialized for anything ITP students dream up, for example.
They are not static - they are kind of curated if we take the gallery mentality, or booked if we go with the rock show analogy. So visiting the spot would mean checking out a lineup of new games , in general.
This is mostly because there are a lot of games online that I just want to play by downloading on my own. I loved a lot of the games in that 52 games in a year spree by whoever those people were. I think these very arcade like games shouldn’t be limited to being played alone on laptops, they can be part of a social life.
For this semester I’m going to make 3 cabinets and call it an arcade.
I will probably then contact Mike Rosenthal of the Tank and see if we could situate ourselves in his basement. He runs an active venue and is basically on my side in the world.
Finally, since this is the first sort of DIY gallery / exhibition space / venue for video games, I find I don’t have to conform to any standards. So I’ll be taking some liberties with the cabinet designs….
(I’m also just messing with wordpress and images, since I’ve never done it before)
Conceptual Sketch of a Game I’ll Never Make
I am inspired by Defcon to make games in which the play space is a quantified exaggeration of now or the near future. But while the play in Defcon is high level strategy, I’m more interested in exploring a citizen-scale playspace.
For example, a simple quanitifcation is a multiplayer online game set in a scenario in which a large corporation is dominating the landscape with a very simple goal to its behavior ; within its possibility, it rearranges its behavior continuously in order to maximize its own profit.
All the human players are left with the task to topple this pre-exscheme; and that is the entire narrative of the game. They are given a cohesive collection of tactics which they can enact singularly, they can collaborate on, they can combine, etc. And of course it somehow introduces factions on the play level - so there is an incentive to win the game with your own movement, which may corrupt the larger motive, while making the play fun. While there is a win state , there is no necessary guarantee that the players will reach it.
I just want this to be less boring than Tale in the Desert, but totally in homage to it.
And I’m exactly interested in how this kind of model might redefine the possibility space of the citizen players in our real world.
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