Games: May 2007 Archive Page

Venus Redemption is a unique episodic casual game created for 30+ female gamers, with a rich plot written by a noted novelist. Unlike other casual games, it features powerful storylines, deep characters, emotion-based interactive conversations and exciting adventure gameplay. However, like traditional casual games, it's extremely easy to play, requiring only the ability to move and left-click a mouse, and it's playable in short bursts if you don't have much time.

Venus Redemption is written by award-winning author Kate Pullinger, who co-wrote the book, "The Piano" with director Jane Campion, and is one of the leading pioneers of interactive fiction. Additional storyline has been written by BAFTA nominated writer, Gordon Rennie, whilst a unique ambient-orchestral musical score has been composed by veteran musician Tim Wright, best known for his work on the Wipeout game series. --'Venus Redemption' (Worth Playing)

Interesting how this game is pitched at its target audience.

Playing a game may teach the player that he can optimize the game only in certain ways (or that the game is impossible to win, like Global Thermonuclear War); but it's open to question whether the optimal game strategy corresponds to an optimal real-life strategy.

As we see more of this kind of thing (and I think we will), we as consumers of educational and editorial games, are going to need to stay alert and savvy, conscious of the way a game's rules can look like they emulate real life constraints without actually doing so. A case in point is the way Electrocity lets me participate in a fuel market without experiencing any repercussions at all from the fossil fuel burning by the people in the next town over. Would it be better all around if I just kept it in the ground? Maybe, maybe not -- but within the game there's no incentive to think about that. --Emily Short --Educational and Editorial Games (Emily Short's Interactive Fiction)

Don Woods is acknowledged to have the Right Stuff. With long, stringy black hair and a bearish grin, he looks somewhat older than his twenty-nine years. He works at Xerox and wears a dark GAMES T-shirt that contrasts with his almost chalk-colored skin. Pinned next to the Xerox employee badge on his shirt is a button that reads question authority. Wood is known as a classic, or canonical, hacker. "Here's a quick hack I've been working on," he says. He types a few characters on his keyboard, and from the computer come the calliopelike sounds of a rousing, Sousa-style marching song. "I put it together in a couple of days," he says.

One of the results of Woods' epic hacks is Adventure, a collaboration with Will Crowther. Ostensibly a game, Adventure is a metaphor for hacking. When you begin Adventure, the computer tells you your location: at a stream, near a forest, within sight of a small brick building. From there you embark on a Tolkeinesque journey through the caverns and glens of a medieval land, encountering murderous midgets, poisonous snakes, treacherous rapids, thieving pirates and magazines written in dwarf language. By telling the computer the direction you wish to move (typing n for north or u for up, for example), the computer calculates where, on the unseen map created in Woods' imagination, you will wind up next, and displays a written description of your next location. You go deeper and deeper into this netherworld, hoping to emerge by the same path with treasure in hand. There are almost 200 rooms you pass through on your way to the treasure, many dotted with hazards, and the path crosses and intertwines in ways impossible to divine without hours of exploration. Adventure is the most popular game at LOTS, and indeed it is a national craze among those with access to computers. "I would show it to people on a Friday afternoon," Woods says, "and they wouldn't leave their terminals until they finished it, maybe on Monday."

Adventure is a kind of litmus test for hackers: if you can lose yourself in the gullies and misty caverns, you might be susceptible to computer addiction. Just as the plot of Adventure is a world unto itself, the vast memory and operating system of a mainframe computer is a gigantic landscape, seeming impenetrable but eventually accessible to the most devoted seekers. Just as everything in the physical world is constructed of atoms, everything a computer processes or reads is ultimately reduced to bits of either one or zero. Like treasure seekers in the subterranean Adventure world, hackers are electronic spelunkers who have developed the skill to burrow down from the more superficial programming languages to the bedrock machine language of digits. Woods call this "going down and doing the grudgies." To get involved this deeply, you must be able to think in dizzyingly abstract terms. Your mental concentration is so intense that your consciousness is subsumed by the computer. --Steven Levy --Hackers in ParadiseRolling Stone 1982)

Levy expanded the theme of this article into the excellent book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.

Take the role of the FDA inspectors in a world of increasingly numerous food imports and increasingly unmanagable risk. Your charge: try to protect the country from contaminants in foreign food imports using extremely limited resources.

The first in Persuasive Games newsgame publication relationship with The New York Times, in which our editorial games are published alongside all the other op-ed content on TimesSelect. --Food Import Folly (Persuasive Games)

I'd wondered when the rhetorical potential of a current-events game would be recognized as a vehicle for critical commentary, rather than the occasional subject of a column or other traditional form.

When I go to the link on the NYT website, I get a header and footer, but no content.

Modern interactive fiction, much more than its technically limited earlier counterparts, displays an incredible range of literary influences, tributes and styles. For Sherwin's part, science fiction is an inspiration, but the greater part of his text adventures' efficacy comes from the unique and anarchic style of his characters' dialogue. "I have been greatly influenced by the late George Alec Effinger," he says. "He was the first guy I read that was able to write science fiction chock-full of characters that I not only deeply cared about, but characters that drove the plot due to their strong wills and personalities." In text adventures, literary influences are naturally more evident; text game writers are free to attempt to emulate the same literary devices as the authors who perhaps inspired them, whether in their dialogue styles, plot development or written motifs.

Gamers in search of an edifying read could hope for nothing more than the surreal eloquence of Adam Cadre's Photopia, or the superbly idiosyncratic dialogue of Sherwin's own Fallacy Of Dawn. Sherwin cites Stephen Bond's Rameses as "the best character study in the history of videogames" -- outside the world of the text game, one would be hard pressed to find characters and situations as lovingly and artfully developed and described as they often are in interactive fiction.

However, text games enjoy a luxury not afforded to videogames in any other form; they communicate exclusively through the written word. Without needing to integrate visuals, sound or 3D gameplay, they are free to concentrate wholly upon their writing, and thus are able to achieve a focus that is usually beyond the reach of a medium as multi-disciplinary as videogames. Pacotti relates this coherence to that of books. "The novel, typically created by one person working exclusively in language, strives for a coherence only occasionally seen in film and almost never in games," he explains. "This coherence -- the integration of the smallest details into a single vision -- is the basis of good art." --PLAY-PEN: Games Due for a Lit Course (Next Generation)

This article gives the literary qualities of text adventure games some welcome attention, integrating canonical recent IF works with a discussion of good writing in recent mainstream PRGs, but I fear that it tips too far over onto the narratological side, with a good bit of cinema 101 thrown in for good measure.

Just because text games use prose instead of polygons doesn't erase the fact that, as a game, a text adventure requires coding.

Last night I found myself digging out a text-adventure work-in-progress, and I managed to squash a few bugs after I put my daughter to bed, but before my son was finished with his bath. And then after putting my son to bed, I fell asleep on the floor of his room, so I didn't get much done last night.

Though Ferguson couldn't figure out how to make his 1938 scenario work, there was a better expert who could: His 13-year-old son, who was a whiz at strategy games. Rather than rush out to attack Germany, his son carefully set up robust trade agreements with France first to make sure the country felt diplomatically obligated to go along with the fight. Presto: France fought, and Germany fell.

Ferguson became so delighted with Making History that he has joined forces with Muzzy Lane to design a new game. Due out in 2008, this one will model modern, real-world conflicts such as Iraq, Afghanistan and the nuclear confrontation with Iran.

It'll undoubtedly be controversial. But it will also, he expects, be humbling. The power of counterfactual thinking is that forces us to step outside of our comfort zones. When we think about historical events, we have 20/20 hindsight -- so we forget how confusing and uncertain they were at the time. In 1943, nobody really knew how strong Germany was, or what Stalin was thinking. In modern conflicts, we often have a similarly false sense of surety -- too much confidence in our ability to predict the outcome of major events.

When we play with sims, they knock us off our pedestals -- because crazy things usually happen we don't predict. Yet the chaos is useful, because we can run the same situation again and again, changing one little thing each time, until we've war-gamed it deeply and understand it better than ever. --Clive Thompson --Why a Famous Counterfactual Historian Loves Making History With Games (Wired)

Really, though, Xbox Live is just an online simulacrum of a middle-school cafeteria. The crudeness is coming from the kids, not being inflicted on them. If anything, the over-25s we met were an excellent influence. They tended to be polite and mellow and demonstrated good sportsmanship?like saying "good game" after they'd eviscerated me with various weapons.

[...]

I'm right at the fulcrum point of gaming popularity. Almost everyone five years older than me doesn't really "get" video games and has little interest in playing them. Almost everyone five years younger than me can't imagine life without an Xbox (or PS2 or whatever). -- Seth Stevenson and Chris Suellentrop --The Gaming Graybeards: Can two thirtysomethings survive on Xbox Live? (Slate)

I'm pushing 40 (and this very moment is the first time I have ever thought of myself in precisely that term) -- and the guy who wrote this is 30, so I found this statement very apt.

I would probably enjoy online multiplayer games if I had the time to play them... but quite frankly, if I did have more time, I'd probably spend it modding rather than playing. (I never did finish Half-Life 2.)

Using games to entice, entertain, and engage introductory programmers has been successful; many of the approaches, however, use graphical programming. This either requires a complex game engine or toolkit for students to program or a lot of additional effort for students to get the game looking the way they want. Taking a page from the game studies literature, the current paper reports on gaining the benefits of games without the graphics, of traveling back in time to the days of the great text adventure games. --Brian C. Ladd --XYZZY: Finding New Magic in Text Adventure Games (Microsoft Academic Days on Game Development in Computer Science Education)

I'm always glad to encounter new scholarship on text-based games, but the "back in time" rhetoric here is rather dismissive of the incredible artistic and programming advances that the post-commercial interactive fiction community has made.

This is a Microsoft-sponsored conference, held on the "Disney Wonder Cruise Ship."

And I, for one, welcome our new digital cultural overlords.

Seriously, though, engineering papers are a very, very different genre than the academic papers I've been writing lately. I actually presented at an engineering conference when I was a graduate student, presenting a method for sequencing writing assignments. This was nothing new so far as the rhet-comp field is concerned, but at the time the concept of writing across the curriculum was new to a lot of engineering teachers, and I did what I could to present it to them in a genre that they would find familiar.

This activity is set in a research group that is developing an antivenom for spider bites. In the opening scene, Nelson Pogline, a talented graduate student, dies unexpectedly at a university reception. As a detective, you must use chemistry concepts to determine if this was murder and if so, solve the case. You can interview suspects using Quicktime movies, investigate the crime scene for clues with Quicktime Virtual Reality images, and analyze the evidence from the crime lab. --Mixed Reception (chemcollective.org)

Haven't checked this one out yet.

--20 Sided Fuzzy Dice Danglers (Think Geek)

Now those are my kind of fuzzy dice.

--Atari Candleholder (Wonderland | Mixko)

Wonderland credits a designer called Mixko, but I couldn't find it on that site. (And even I did find it there, I couldn't link to it, because the site uses Flash in a horribly user-hostile way.)

Police arrested a college student Tuesday suspected of opening fire in an off-campus apartment during a dispute over a video game console, killing one man and wounding two others. --Calif. Student Arrested in Shooting (AP | MyWay (will expire))

But I should have expected that. The IF Comp, an annual contest to see who can write the best text-based game, offers a vast treasury of interactive fiction, and many of the entries over the past 13 years are truly fantastic. Some, like Vespers, are lit-geek works of art, putting the bulk of commercial games to shame. --Textual Pleasure: Parsing the Annual IF Competition (The Escapist)

--atari-and-controllers (jackrabbit.etsy.com)

Via join the dots.

A Chinese student was transferred from his high school to an "alternative education center" (?) after his parents found he had designed a Counterstrike mod with maps based on his school. Two parents learned of the map he made from their kids, and they informed his parents, who in turn reported him to the Fort Bend Independent School District administrators. --Fort Bend school trustees put off video game appeal (Houston Chronicle)

It's important to note that it wasn't just the fact that the student designed a game map that depicted the school, but that the investigation turned up swords. Further, the parents reported their own son and gave the police permission to search his room. Police found nothing worthy of a criminal charge, but without any evidence that this young man had any unusual (ore even typical) anti-social tendencies, I hope all parties can resolve this quickly.

The fact that this kid happens to be Asian wouldn't have anything at all to do with it, would it?

It does look like some members of the school board feel the body has overreacted. "He did it [designed the game level] at his house. Never took anything to school. Never wrote an ugly letter, never said anything strange to a student or a teacher, nothing," according to one board member. Other members stayed away from the meeting where the student was trying to get them to appeal the decision, so it seems that overreaction will stand for now.