Design: July 2007 Archive Page

Gamers are unequivocal: "Dying gives a game meaning", say posters on the PC Advisor forums. Markus Montola, a researcher at Tampere University in Finland, takes this further: "You have a motivation - to avoid being annoyed by dying. Motivation is what makes the game meaningful."

Pete Hines - vice-president at Bethesda, the developer behind the role-playing game Oblivion and its expansion pack, Shivering Isles - agrees. "Having your character die or fail is important because your actions have to have some meaning in the game, and to you."

But is the death of your character the right way to give a game meaning? Peter Molyneux of Lionhead, the developer of Fable, Black & White and The Movies, says: "A fight has to cost the player something, or it loses its meaning. Previously, that cost was time and tedium [in replaying a level]. But is that the right cost?" --Kate Bevan --Why do we have to die in games? (Guardian)

Now, I love black backgrounds more than anything else in the design business, and yet I was still very surprised to acknowledge how dark theatrical posters are and that, specifically, in this context, the top 25 grossing movies of all time across all ages didn't run a very wide gamut. Only at the tot level did color start to play a real role. And while the psychological and emotional explanations of what colors mean are too varied to take any which one as authoritative, it is nonetheless telling that black is the color of choice in movie posters. --Chris Eichman
--Dark and Fleshy: The Color of Top Grossing Movies  (Under Consideration)

The top of the image represents NC-17 posters, while the bottom represents G movies.

--Statetris (mapmsg.com)

Like Tetris, but with American states.

Here's a quick three-step photoshop tutorial to make coloring pages for your kids from any digital photo. Kids will love coloring pictures of themselves and their family (what could be more fun than giving grandpa spiky purple hair and a green beard). --coloring pages from your photos - 3 easy photoshop steps (fototiller)

Gamers never sit around and fondly recall games that were so ludicrous they circled back and arrived at greatness. There is no game analog to, say, Sid and Marty Kroft children's show, or Plan Nine From Outer Space. When a game is bad, it's just ... bad.

I think this tells us a lot about the nature of play. B games don't exist because a game isn't something you watch; it's something you do. It's impossible to distance yourself from the badness. It's not like chuckling while watching an actor screw things up; it's like being forced to screw up yourself. --Clive Thompson --These Games Are So Bad, It's Not Funny (Wired)

I used to think that things like rocks and buildings and my own skeleton were fairly solid. But they're made up of atoms, and atoms, as you can see here, contain so little actual material that they can barely be said to exist.

We are all phantoms. --Hydrogen Atom Scale Model (Phrenopolis)

The mission stencil story is an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure story that takes place on the sidewalks of the Mission district in San Francisco. It is told in a new medium of storytelling that uses spraypainted stencils connected to each other by arrows. The streetscape is used as sort of an illustration to accompany each piece of text. --Sidewalk stencil choose-your-own-adventure (Flickr)

Very cool concept.

--Lego White and Nerdy (YouTube)

Weird Al's awesome "White and Nerdy" has spawned not just one but several different Lego versions (of various quality levels).

We thought our "Pimp my Book Cart" contest was a funny idea that would spawn a dozen or so entries. But it seemed to spark something, and we started hearing from folks all over the country. It even spawned a "Pimp my Book Trolley" contest Down Under in Australia (we're judging that one too).

Still, by last week we figured all the fuss had been just that, and that it was still going to be just a few contenders. But then a few days before the deadline, in a display of procrastination that impressed Bill, they started pouring in. We ended up getting over 100. --Pimp My Bookcart Contest Winners (Unshelved)

If I'm working on a project, it's my dream. I'm not toiling away in a dank quarry, hauling blocks across miles of boiling sand to build someone else's pyramid. If you're going to grind your life away in a masochistic profession - and make no mistake, game development is unadulterated masochism - I say to you this: make it mean something. Spend your life making meaning. Create things that excite you, which get you out of bed early in the morning and keep you up late at night. Create experiences that will set minds on fire and inspire, in turn, to create experiences for others. We all have a reason for wanting to create games and, at some level, it boils down to an experience we had playing someone else's creation, their dream. What was that game for you? --Swink --The Teaching Game: Part One - Transitioning (Game Career Guide)

An interesting feature from a games industry professional who got tired of the grind and gave it up. I'm a little worried that Swink is romanticizing the teaching profession as much as he had previously romanticized the games industry, but this is still a good read.