Games: February 2008 Archive Page

H.H. Munro (SAKI)  Esme

"The hyena hailed our approach with unmistakable relief and demonstrations of friendliness. It had probably been accustomed to uniform kindness from humans, while its first experience of a pack of hounds had left a bad impression. The hounds looked more than ever embarrassed as their quarry paraded its sudden intimacy with us, and the faint toot of a horn in the distance was seized on as a welcome signal for unobtrusive departure. Constance and I and the hyena were left alone in the gathering twilight."

From the Short Story of the Day.

Grand Text Auto introduced me to the excellent indie mini-game Passage.  Play it. It takes a few minutes to download and about 5 minutes to play. I'm misty-eyed.

Play it!

Greg Costikyan on Play This Thing!

A review is a buyer's guide. It exists to tell you about some new product that you can buy, and whether you should or should not buy it. A good review goes beyond that, and suggests who should buy it, since not everyone enjoys everything. (E.g., A romance novel may be very fine of its kind, but is quite unlikely to appeal to me, since it is not a genre I enjoy.) 

Thus, Ebert is, ultimately, a reviewer; the net result of his discussion of a work is a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Mind you, he is also an informed and intelligent watcher of film, and his discussion of a movie frequently veers in the direction of criticism; but he is not being paid to write critical works. Pauline Kael was. 

Criticism is an informed discussion, by an intelligent and knowledgeable observer of a medium, of the merits and importance (or lack thereof) of a particular work. Criticism isn't intended to help the reader decide whether or not to plunk down money on something; some readers' purchase decisions may be influenced, but guiding their decisions is not the purpose of the critical work. Criticism is, in a sense merely "writing about" -- about art, about dance, about theater, about writing, about a game--about any particular work of art. How a critical piece addresses a work, and what approach it takes, may vary widely from critic to critic, and from work to work. There are, in fact, many valid critical approaches to a work, and at any given time, a critique may adopt only one, or several of them.

One of the first things I do in my Video Game Culture and Theory course is have students compare a games magazine review with a "new games journalism essay" (in order to get them to realize how much else there is to write about besides simply reviewing the game for a person who has never played it).  I then introduce games scholarship, and have students write their own academic research paper on games.  The first time I taught this course, in 2006, there was plenty of scholarship of the kind Costikyan calls for, and when I taught it again in 2008, there was so much that perhaps next year I will demote the importance of "new games journalism" and jump right into the criticism.

Retro Sabotage remixes Pac-Man.  Lots more where that came from.

Via MetaFilter.

Interactive fiction author Emily Short offers a thoughtful analysis of the function of designing puzzles that permit the player to come up with original solutions. She refers to her game Metamorphoses, which includes a complex physical world model that includes such concepts as size, shape, weight, etc.  For instance, you can beat down a door by enlarging a needle so that it is the size of a battering ram, and you can turn your simple clothing into a suit of armor by converting the material from natural fibers to metal.  I wish I had the time today to give her thoughts the attention they deserve...

Metamorphoses includes several in-game processes (resizing objects, breaking objects, changing the material substances of objects, piercing objects with a needle), and it's possible to string these together -- change an item to glass and then break it, say, or change an item to something that isn't too hard, then pierce it, then resize it so that the hole is large, then change the item into a heavier substance... But I did anticipate most of these sequences, in part because there weren't that many problems available to be solved. Emergent solutions tend to happen more often when there are a large number of puzzles, so that the world model developed to account for problem A can also be leveraged, unexpectedly, against problem B. So such games also probably need to be of a reasonable size.

So I hypothesize that a game allowing emergent solutions needs all of the following:

• attributes common to most game objects that affect interaction
• processes, effective on many game items, that allow the player to change attributes (or produce an item with new attributes out of an old item, as in the case of breaking the tail off the rat)
• a selection of processes that can be used in combination (freeze rat then smash it); one way to think about this at the design phase might be to draw a chart of attributes and processes, showing which processes convert which attributes into which others; the more long chains are possible, the more complex the plans the player can execute
  
• sufficient number of puzzles that the solution space becomes too large for the author to anticipate at the design phase 

Once we have all those features, though, we run into some other serious design problems.

Gettysburg College:

Students create text-based "interactive fiction" games that are rigorously derived from archaeological data and filled with references to Viking and other cultures. The games describe a scene or object in detail, then ask players to make a choice, such as "go east" or "take sword." Each decision leads to a new set of possibilities. "From an English professor's point of view, this is really creative writing," said Fee.

Don't forget the red lutkefish puzzle.