Games: July 2008 Archive Page

Jimmy Maher offers a provocative editorial in the latest issue of the Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games newsletter.

Galatea excites admiration, interest, even a certain amount of awe, and all of it richly deserved.  However, it seems to excite very little love.  Nor does it seem to inspire its player to grapple with anything more universal than the design of good IF conversation systems.

Is this a problem?  Not really, I think, when taken in isolation.  I think that Emily Short, whom I have immense respect for as a writer, creator, and tireless agent for positive change in IF, intended her work as an experiment and even possibly a bit of a provocation, an illustration of what might be possible.  But where is the game that takes Galatea's formal and technical innovations and uses them in the service of crackerjack story with a fascinating setting and compelling, believable characters?  Eric Eve's recent works come close, but how many others do?  Galatea sits out there in splendid isolation.  People play it, they tell themselves and each other how interesting it was, what potential for IF it demonstrates, and then they move on.  It's not up to Emily to build on Galatea's foundation; if she retires from IF tomorrow, she's done more for the form than I or 99% of you will ever manage.  It's up to us.  Where are we?

Some of us who are very, very good are writing games like the generally acknowledged best game of 2007: Lost Pig.  On the one hand, Lost Pig is nothing to disparage.  It's hilarious; it's great fun; it's honed and polished to the most beautiful shine.  Admiral Jota deserves tons of praise and respect for his creation.

Also of note, A Blind Man's Take on Interactive Fiction:

Most gaming opens worlds for people. Interacting with characters and role-playing a career or life that they do not have in the real world allows people to imagine themselves in certain situations, or challenges the person to make certain decisions.  It is that aspect of gaming, along with the writing,  descriptions of scenes and the possibility of interacting with characters that make interactive fiction so special. As a blind person, most mainstream role-playing games are unplayable. Interactive fiction is then the bridge that allows me as a blind person, who also would like to participate in the joys of relaxing with a role-playing computer game, to step into an imaginary world.

Does anybody today say -- without shame -- that their hobby is watching TV? Or listening to the radio? These media are so deeply entrenched in our society that we barely think of them. According to Ian Bogost, a time will come when the concept of "the gamer" is obsolete. Not because games will be obsolete, but because they will become so mainstream that the category will no longer be useful.

Videogames suffer under the weight of many misconceptions. Some of these are all too familiar: questions about whether games promote violent action or whether they make us fat through inactivity.

One that some people have tried to overturn is the idea that games are only for entertainment. So-called "serious games" claim to offer an alternative: games that can be used for serious purposes like education, healthcare, or corporate training.

But games, like photography, like writing, like any medium, shouldn't be shoehorned into one of two kinds of uses alone. Neither entertainment nor seriousness nor the two together should be a satisfactory account  for what videogames are capable of. After all, we don't distinguish between serious and entertainment books, or music, or photography, or film. Rather, we know intuitively that writing, sound, images, and moving images can all be put to many different uses.

How did WarGames become the geek-geist classic that legitimized hacker culture, minted the nerd hero -- and maybe even changed American defense policy? Related question: Shall we play a game? --Wired

On a listserv of which I'm a member, Jerome McDonough points out that Tennis for Two is an analog game, so not only does it not require a computer, the medium itself -- an oscilloscope -- is an analog, so the information being represented on the screen isn't digital at all.  An even earlier game, and the first game to use digital graphics, is Noughts and Crosses (1952).

This page lists the source code for the world[']s first computer game and incidentally the world[']s first computer based version of noughts and crosses (tic tac toe).

This is the original source code written by A.S. Douglas that was loaded from a punched paper tape and run on the EDSAC machine. It is written in an assembler. even for those of us who are unfamiliar with the EDSAC instruction set and it's assembly language some parts of the code look reasonably comprehensible. The most impressive feature is it's length - this very short piece of code manages a good game of noughts and crosses.

Keen to find out more? Then download the EDSAC simulator and the documentation from www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~edsac/ You can then follow this algorithm or try your hand at programming the worlds first programmable computer.

Modern recreation of the 1958 video game "Tennis for Two" (Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories)

I came across this brief article in Pocket Gamer. I don't have an iPhone, so I can't check out this version of the game.  The 1977 date for the Don Woods expansion is correct, but ("[s]ources that incorrectly date Crowther's original to 1972 or 1974... are sourced thinly if at all. The new evidence establishes that Crowther wrote the game during the 1975-76 academic year and probably abandoned it in early 1976." --DHQ )

Forget motion-sensing and touchscreen malarkey. What you want from a modern-day iPhone game is a proper text adventure, where you get to type GO NORTH, HIT TROLL WITH AXE, and LKHJ VSDJD.

(Okay, we're still having the odd problem with the iPhone's pop-up keyboard).

Anyway, iPhone has its first text adventure, and it's actually the first text adventure ever made.

It's listed as Advent on the App Store, but the screenshot calls it Adventure, and the product text points out that it's also known as Colossal Cave Adventure or just Colossal Cave. Hope that's clear.

Leigh Alexander makes some good points in this GameSetWatch article.

Most lifetime gamers, then, have a built-in bias engine, whether they acknowledge it or not. For some, it's much more conscious and overt - hence the "Fanboy" network of platform-specific sites, hence forum flamewars, hence almost frighteningly irrational ire over certain reviews. Most reviewers dread having to evaluate a new flagship Nintendo title of the Mario or Zelda heritage; while the PlayStation 3 struggled to gain traction in the market early on, every new release was viewed as a flashpoint as fans were desperate for a killer app, and detractors were eager to see it fail.

I'm conscious that some students who sign up for a course on video games may expect to get credit for their skill at videogames they already know and love, rather than experiencing new genres and at least sampling the classics that established conventions that echo through the years.

Rosemary sends me this link from PhillyBurbs.com:

About 600 students are enrolled at Pennsylvania Learners Online, a cyber charter school where online gym is a requirement, and 12 others are enrolled in a program called e-Cademy to make up a failed credit.

Rich Campsie, who teaches physical education at e-Cademy and at Pennsylvania Learners Online, said he works with students one-on-one through an online interface to teach them about concepts ranging from lifelong physical activities and exercise to team mascots and game strategies.

They report back to Campsie via worksheets and written reports. He acknowledges there is no way to know for sure if a student is completing the physical requirements of the course.

I'm not usually interested in sports, but this sounds fantastic: chess boxing.

Berlin is home to the world's biggest chess boxing club with some 40 members and it is in an old freight station here that the two men settled the matter early yesterday.

The match began over a chess board set up on a low table in the middle of a boxing ring.

Stripped to the waist, wearing towels around their shoulders and headphones playing the lulling sound of a moving train to drown out the baying crowd, the men played for four minutes.

Then off came their reading glasses and on went the gloves and the mouthguards.

For three minutes they beat each other and then, when the bell went, the chess board was back in the ring and they picked up the gentlemanly game where they had left off.

Beyond balancing difficulty is the simple question of whether it serves any purpose in the game at all. Back at the Pickford blog, another article goes into the various game design options that let a player break down the difficulty at their own pace. Although these games still utilize difficulty to a certain extent, there is always a way out. In some games, you can just level grind until your characters can overpower a boss. Interactive fiction or puzzles rarely maintain their difficulty because you can always check for hints online. The origin of such accommodations in these games was to make sure that someone who enjoyed the plot would always be able to get to the end. After all, as Pickford notes, when you're telling a story, getting to the conclusion is the reward, not overcoming a tricky boss fight. -- L.B. Jeffries (Moving Pixels)