Home of New York’s Intellivisiongentsia
Check out the rankings for every table top game EVER (or nearly ever):
This list is updated regularly. My favorite part is the bottom of the list. As you guessed, coming in dead last at 5,342nd place is none other than Tic, Tac, Toe… barely beating out War and Bingo for that dubious honor. You can vote too!
This week in the Dispatches, it’s time to revisit the next best old-fashioned adventure game you’ve never played, not to mention a forgotten cult classic from a superstar auteur. Is it an overrated piece of trash or an overlooked gem? Read on, pleasant dreamers, for our first part of three…
Continue reading ‘Disnatches, Act One; Or: The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of’
Mackenzie Wark, who teaches at the New School and recently published the analog version of his book Gamer Theory, was recently interviewed on This Spartan Life, a machinima talk show conducted inside various Halo 2 multiplayer maps. Gamer Theory has been around for a while on the internet as an electronic book (I’m not sure that’s the right term). I got about halfway through it and realized that I just wasn’t absorbing anything. Call me old fashioned, but it’s just easier for me to comprehend what I’m reading when it’s on paper.
This Spartan Life with Mackenzie Wark
GAM3R 7H30RY by Mackenzie Wark
I think you need to get yourself on a list or something…
The next IGDA NYC chapter event will be held on Thursday, June 21st at the New School University, from 6:30 to 8:30 (with a networking after-party to follow). Please note that this is a new venue!
IGDA NYC Chapter and Writers Cabal present…
I’ve been meaning to post something about these two article for a few weeks now. I’ve finally decided to do so because I think that they’re somewhat pertinent to the discussion that has broken out over the subject of Oren’s timely post. Namely, the ongoing debate between Frank and David Sirlin over the way games express morals and ethics.
Well, pleasant dreamers, as Kyle Machlachlan said in Dune, “the sleeper has awakened.” In this case, the sleeper has been not only the titular hero of the Legend of Zelda franchise, but also the Wind Fish of Koholnit, besieged by mysterious nightmares and beguiled by a fantasy island inhabited by otherworldly denizens and peppered with secret underground lairs. After all has been said and done, all the buttons pressed, hatches opened and shadow monsters destroyed in puffs of smoke as black as oil, the game has been finished, the great Castanadian owl having fulfilled his role as spirit guide on the vision quest that this portable experience has been. In true handheld fashion, the point of completion was reached out in the open on the Metro-North, and while this time I’m not sure I have anything significant to say in the way of portable-versus-console gaming culture, I’m pretty certain I’ve cracked some of what’s important about this game itself, and how it makes me feel about games in general. At the heart of this is the question of something I have been during the course of this game, because it doesn’t quite fall under the term player, just as Link and the Wind Fish have both merely acted as sleepers, instead of something else.
I, like you, faithful readers, have been a dreamer.
It’s on like Donkey Kong!
That is what David Sirlin and Frank got in an argument about at some conference, probably at a bar. I think David has a good point, but he misses a huge part, how do people actually learn ethics? Frank brings up how he learned ethics, but is that really what Frank bases his ethical choices on? I hope not!
I see ethics as something that grows and changes with people. Everyone has their own beliefs on the big ethical conundrums; death penalty, abortion, euthanasia, etc. The question would be how do you teach these in gaming? Do you present them with the ethical dilemma and have one choice that is good, and one that is bad? The designer is making the ethical decision, the player is just unfolding it.
David presents the forging argument, which I think is quite useless, because people lie all the time. Present them with a real problem, not a kids question.
What if a NPC offers information if you kill them after? Or screams for you to shoot them already from the pain they are in?
What about taking a game like Aiyiti, and offering an abortion clinic in it? You can have an abortion and barely to continue to feed your family, or have the baby and watch everyone starve?
Or how about if they add the Death Penalty to SimCity of GTA? It could change things, and even make you think about things you might be scared to.
Those are the real ethical questions we can ask in games, and maybe gain a better idea of what motivates people towards their own ethical decisions.
I saw the third and final Pirates of the Caribbean movie last night, and I highly recommend it for anyone who has a little extra time. There were a couple of things in the movie that seemed like they could be allusions to two different video games. The place where the Pirate Lords meet looks an awful like the giant tree in Riven and the scene where the goddess Calypso is released is suspiciously similar to a cut-scene in God of War. Has anyone else seen it, could you spot any more?
You’ll never play the same game twice: that was how my mom sold me on trying Bridge. It might have been the same line when my dad talked me into Chess. And come to think of it, pretty much any great game of deep strategy shares this quality, digital or not. Yet Chess only maintains this quality through the game play of your opponent. Same with Bridge, but there it also depends on the cards you’re dealt. Now consider games and sports where you will never play the same game twice and the reason behind this is the altering of the context of the game. I’m talking playing surfaces, environments, and general pregame shenanigans.
I’m watching a Russian by the name of Federer, first name Roger, come from behind to win the first set of a tennis matches in the semifinals of the French Open. I love European championship tennis for two reasons: it’s really good, and it’s on live television in the morning. I’m talking Wimbledon along with this tourney, and watching Federer — perhaps the most dominating tennis player ever — can be a religious experience. Don’t take it from me, take it from David Foster Wallace. But since an article about Federer has already been done, I’ll write one about the second coolest thing in tennis: the surfaces.
There is something telling about the fact that after releasing Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake in 1990, Hideo Kojima didn’t make another Metal Gear for eight years. Between the first and second games in the series he had made Snatcher, an adventure game influenced heavily by Blade Runner. Because Snatcher was little more than text with still images, a choose-your-own-adventure picture book, it gave Kojima a great deal of control over the dramatic pacing of the game and how the plot unfolded. Solid Snake is a testament to Kojima’s then growing interest in making cinematic games. Featuring a more detailed plot, with more fleshed out characters than the first, Metal Gear 2 is heavily influenced by another film, Apocalypse Now. For all intents and purposes a young game designer, Kojima laid the foundation for what has become at this point his life’s work. Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake is documentation of a designer coming to grips with a genre, and slowly deciding what he wants to say.
Continue reading ‘Codec Moments Part 2: Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake’
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