Games: December 2007 Archive Page

1up:

Ten years ago, Westwood released its point-and-click adventure game adaptation of Blade Runner. Blade Runner was, if nothing else, a towering achievement in terms of evoking the original film's memorable aesthetic. The game's mo-cap sprites moved against dim, smoky noir backdrops; every exterior shot felt exhilaratingly accurate, while interior locations were ominous and claustrophobic. In 1997, Louis Castle -- then the executive vice president of Westwood Studios -- told PC Gamer, "This is not a game about the movie; it is a game about the movie's environment. It's about the tension and emotion of the movie."

A good overview, though it's not nearly as detailed or rigorous as if this topic were the subject of an academic study. Still, I'd rather see the glass as half full -- I'm glad to see such a weighty topic being considered by a mainstream gamer publication.  It's yet another sign of the critical sophistication of gamers who want to read about more than walkthroughs and cheat codes.

Video games didn't start with Pac-Man (1980), Space Invaders (1978), or Pong (1972).

Great 1972 Rolling Stone article about a foundational computer game.

Reliably, at any nighttime moment (i.e. non-business hours) in North America hundreds of computer technicians are effectively out of their bodies, locked in life-or-Death space combat computer-projected onto cathode ray tube display screens, for hours at a time, ruining their eyes, numbing their fingers in frenzied mashing of control buttons, joyously slaying their friend and wasting their employers' valuable computer time. Something basic is going on.

Rudimentary Spacewar consists of two humans, two sets of control buttons or joysticks, one TV-like display and one computer. Two spaceships are displayed in motion on the screen, controllable for thrust, yaw, pitch and the firing of torpedoes. Whenever a spaceship and torpedo meet, they disappear in an attractive explosion. That's the original version invented in 1962 at MIT by Steve Russell. (More on him in a moment.)

October, 1972, 8 PM, at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory, moonlit and remote in the foothills above Palo Alto, California. Two dozen of us are jammed in a semi-dark console room just off the main hall containing AI's PDP-10 computer.

Advice from GameCareerGuide.com resembles what I tell my English literature majors about why they are expected to study and benefit from literary works that they might not choose to read for their own pleasure. (The same goes for students in my Video Game Culture and Theory course.)

Before you begin down this path there is something you should know: playing games in order to study them is not what most people would consider "fun." This doesn't mean it isn't fun at all; it just means you have to think a different way. You have to find joy in discovering mechanics and watching their emergent properties unfold.

You have to be willing to endure a certain amount of tedium in order to glean clues about the inner workings of a game. Most of all, you have to be able to enjoy playing bad games as well as good.

Like the rest of game design "playing to learn" falls somewhere between a science and an art and contains all the joys of those two fields (though not many we traditionally associate with playing video games). If you can enjoy the eureka moments that happen when you finally discover how something is done, and the cascading flights of fancy that cause you to see the ramifications of a design that far exceed what's actually in the game, then this field is for you.

Anna L. Mallory (Roanoke Times):

The game, a takeoff on programs popular before the Internet and Nintendo, blends social-networking and choose-your-own adventure tools. It allows players to not only play games but also create and share their own adventures in user-submitted fictional lands.

Mallory also includes some quotes from former Infocom Imp Steve Meretzky on the heyday of text-adventures and the surprising rise of MySpace.

Adam Parrish:

The Frotzophone is an interface for making music with interactive fiction. The topography simulated in the game is used to generate sound, as is the player's path through the game. A Frotzophone "performance" looks just like playing a text adventure; but in addition to playing a game, you're also playing music. Here's a sample of the Frotzophone's audio output. This sample was generated from playing the first part of Zork I--up until I got killed by the troll. Download the full track here (2'12", 192kbps MP3).

While my daughter was (supposed to be) napping this afternoon, I downloaded Crystal Space, an open-source tool for creating 3D games. I made lightening-fast progress in the first couple of hours, but after that I was quickly lost. Maybe my expectations were unrealistic.

Over the last year or so, I have experimented with Half-Life 2 modding (making custom levels for a commercial first-person shooter game) and modeling with Blender 3D (a heavy-duty, free design tool).  I like the simplicity of Hammer, which is the tool that makes Half-Life 2 levels.  But getting Half-Life 2 to work on the school's computers was hell; I couldn't expect my students (mostly English majors) to go through all that effort to get Hammer to work on their own computers, which means that the students can only work on Hammer when they are in the computer lab.  (The next time I teach that course, I'm going to add a mandatory extra lab hour, so that I won't have to cut so deeply into class time in order to give students access to the tools they need for their assignments.  Yes, the students can come to the lab outside of class time, but that lab isn't open 24 hours, and sometimes other classes have booked it.)