Via Jay is Games

We are pleased to announce a very special Casual Gameplay Design Competition, one focused entirely on interactive fiction! For CGDC #7, we're calling on IF authors to craft one-room games incorporating the theme "escape". It's text-only this time around, so you can spend your time polishing puzzles instead of pixels. Full details are below, so fire up your Z-code compiler and get to writing!

• Design a one-room game of interactive fiction in Z-code that incorporates the theme: "escape".

• 1st place:
  • $1,000
• 2nd place:
  • $500
• 3rd place:
  • $250

The deadline for entries is
Sunday, January 31, 2010 at 11:59PM (GMT-5:00).

Sadly, I haven't had time to play any of the IF Comp games this year, but here are the winners.

Vote Summary
Place	Game	Avg.	Std. Dev.	No. Votes
1	Rover's Day Out	7.96	1.65	92
2	Broken Legs	7.39	1.72	92
3	Snowquest	7.37	1.41	101

While much of the talk covered well-known libraries (SDL, OpenAL), game engines (Ogre, Irrlicht), physics engines (Bullet, Tokamak), and content creation tools (Blender, GIMP), there were a few surprises. One was how many open source game-creation systems I found (4, more than the zero I expected). These are Game Editor (2d with export to some mobile devices), Construct (2d, some 3d), Novashell (2d), and Sandbox (3d). Another surprise was the game Yo Frankie! (pictured above), which has very high quality animation and artwork, and was produced using Blender. --Jim Whitehead

Peter Mawhorter offers up a reading list on games:

For anyone curious about what I've been reading, here's the list of what I've read to get an introduction to this area:

• "Why We Play Games: Four Keys to More Emotion Without Story" by Nicole Lazzaro.
• "GameFlow: A Model for Evalucating Player Enjoyment in Games" by Penelope Sweetser and Peta Wyeth.
• "An Experiment in Automatic Game Design" by Julian Togelius and Jürgen Schmidhuber.
• A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster.

One other thing that I've not yet read but am interested in is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. It's not targeted at games, and in fact looks at fun from a psychological perspective, but it's cited by most of what I've read so far, and is the product of some very thorough research.

I don't usually link to sites that collect a bunch of links and serve them up on a page full of ads, but this is a pretty good list from Squidoo.

Here you'll find the educational sites where my kids play online, and that are most often recommended by other parents who value fun learning games for their children.

1. Jumpstart Online Virtual World
2. PBSKids
3. Sesame Street
4. Disney Preschool
5. Nick Jr.
6. National Geographic Kids
7. Kaboose Funschool
8. FunBrain
9. Starfall
10. iKnowthat.com

Robin Burkinshaw has finished Alice and Kev, an interesting exercise in computer-assisted storytelling, using screen shots from The Sims 3 to tell the story of a homeless father and daughter.

Originally the story was told serially, with a few posts a week; then there were a few very long gaps, but the story is finished now, and you can read it all at once.

It's not a literary masterpiece, and I would have enjoyed it better if the story had progressed without interruptions. Nevertheless, it's worth a look.

This is Kev and his daughter Alice. They're living on a couple of park benches, surviving on free meals from work and school, and the occasional bucket of ice cream from a neighbour's fridge.

Walkthrough

pifie Errol

On Wednesday, a federal district court in Los Angeles dismissed Brown's claim against Electronic Arts for the use of his image in its Madden NFL series. Judge Florence Marie-Cooper essentially found that video games are "expressive works, akin to an expressive painting that depicts celebrity athletes of past and present in a realistic sporting environment." Such works are protected by the First Amendment. --Kotaku

>get text games

Videogames may be economically formidable, but they remain a byword for crass, shallow thrills. A game, it's understood, can look spectacular, but it will have little to offer its audience in the way of values, insights or craftsmanship. It's a curious and increasingly untenable situation, given that, to the increasingly large percentage of the population who play them, games are rapidly establishing themselves as the single most exciting and vigorous creative industry around: a sector able to boast not only booming revenues and growing audiences, but a melting pot of talents and new ideas that is increasingly attracting some of the biggest-hitting figures in film, television and the other arts. --Tom Chatfield, Guardian

Okay, I admit it, being known as the academic expert on a singe indie computer game from the 1970s is something like saying "I'm the handsomest one-eyed pirate on this particular ship, today," which might well be true, but doesn't exactly mean very much.

Still, I'm thrilled that I could be part of Jason Scott's forthcoming text adventure documentary.  I had a fever of 101 when he interviewed me a few years ago, and then a few months later he offered to fly me back to Mammoth Cave for a follow-up interview, but that semester I had missed three weeks of classes due to pneumonia, and I was barely on my feet again, and my systems were operating at about 40% capacity at that time, so I had to turn him down.

Anyway, it's great to see evidence that he's making progress on his movie.

Finishing off a first version of the Adventure portion of GET LAMP, I am reminded of some of the shortcomings of the documentary form - when there's a ton of information, an absolute pile of detail or aspects about a subject, you will be given a tantalizing amount of insight into a subject but crave more.

Or maybe you won't crave more. For some, the subject covered over a few minutes will be sufficient. But for some of us, a certain few, you want to find out every last thing. And not just find it out... find it out definitively, where observation and verification rule the day, and not best-guesses and what-is-saids polluting the landscape.

To that end, as regards the game Adventure and its roots in real caving, as well as exactly what parts the two authors played in the project, you will simply not do any better than Dennis G. Jerz' Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original "Adventure" in Code and in Kentucky. It is, very simply, the last word on the subject - I can't imagine anyone going further than this into the history and aspects of Adventure any of us might want an answer to. --Jason Scott

I'm looking for a current book that presents gaming theory at a level appropriate for a 200-level undergraduate course.  I have only scanned through the section of Tanja Sihvonen's work, Players Unleashed! Modding <i>The Sims</i> and the Culture of Gaming (PDF), that deals with Colossal Cave Adventure. I'm not too happy with what I found there, since it seems I disagree with a Wikipedia article. (See footnote 251.)

Yes, it is true that several of my sources claim a 1975-76 date, but the phrasing suggests that some of my sources might agree with the 1972 date.  In fact, except for people who were simply repeating what they had read about the creation of Colossal Cave Adventure, not a single one of the sources I interviewed specified a date before 1975, and the earliest digital evidence is dated 1977.  To put it another way, every single one of the sources who played Crowther's original game specified a date of 1975 or later.

Those "written sources, including the Wikipedia entry" that mention the 1972 date are wrong, as I explain in the article Sihvonen cites. (Why do I suddenly feel empathy for every B-movie mad scientist who shouts "Fools! I shall crush them all!"?)

I can, and do, regularly edit the Wikipedia entry to remove the factual errors, but what can I do to combat the errors that made it into print before I published what I found out about the timeline?

Of course, Sihvonen is right -- it is a fact that many sources have printed the 1972 date.  I listed several of these sources in the section of my article where I thoroughly debunk them.  And who am I to argue with ink on paper?  All I have on my side is thoroughly cross-checked oral testimony and e-mail messages from people who have first-hand knowledge of the events in question. How can that stand up against "many written sources"?  What was I thinking!

One day, perhaps I can spend months and years gathering primary information, carefully assemble it all in a coherent, insanely detailed package, get it peer reviewed by scholars who know what they are talking about, and then somehow, if fortune blesses my efforts, find a magic way that the full text of my findings could be available, for free, somewhere in an online digital network, so that I could direct interested readers to paragraphs 79-83 of a document located at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000009.html.

Interview with Stan Lee (comic guru, creator of Spider-Man)

If you were starting out now, do you think you would have started out in games rather than comics?
If I were young now and I wanted to do stories, I would very much want to get into the videogame business because it's the most exciting. Videogames and movies are the most exciting forms of entertainment. But a videogame in a way is more imaginative, it has more variety. In a movie you stick to the plotline, in a videogame you go in a million different directions. I have no idea how they're able to do that. It's like a miracle.

What advice would you give to a newcomer?
Well it's like anything else, if he or she wants to be a writer they should first study writing. Don't study comic writing, study writing - read literature, read the best writers you can find. Learn the language, learn how to use it. If you want to be an artist, you've got to study the best artists in the business and try to draw as well as they do. But too many people try to become artists in comics and they're not as good as the ones that are presently drawing the comics. --UK Guardian

I've been sitting on a particular interactive fiction work-in-progress for ten years. Ten years! Every so often I dust it off and add a little more, but I still haven't finished the chore of converting it from Inform 6 to Inform 7.  And while hiding from this project, I went and released a different project that hinted at a sequel that I haven't even started on, seven years later. Seven years!

Clearly I need a bit of help finishing some of the creative projects that I start. Even during the summer, when I kicked my Blender3D skills up a few notches, I never got the 8- or 4-hour blocks of uninterrupted time that I used to depend on in order to develop a complex project.

Anyway, IF designer and gaming maven Emily Short explains how her own creative efforts have developed. Here's where her essay winds up:

Write the through-line first: come up with your setting and any prototype coding you need to do, and maybe make a list of puzzles/elements that you'd like to see in the finished game. Then create a simple outline design of the game and implement it so that you have something you can play (even if very quickly) from a beginning to the end, and which contains the most critical turning points of the plot. With that skeleton in place, consider what you like and dislike about the structure; you complicate the game incrementally, fleshing pieces out with new puzzles or improving on the simple puzzles/conversations that you used to start with. You may be drawing on the list of puzzles or situations you'd had in mind to start with, but you don't have to commit to a whole structure at the outset.

What's great about this: by the end of the first week or so you have a complete playable game. It is always in some sense "finished" -- oh, not in a state you'd want to release, certainly, but it has a clear enough shape that there's not a horrible anxiety-producing mystery about what will go in any part of it. The ending gets as much attention as the introduction, and isn't likely to be fundamentally different in style, theme, or implementation quality.

At the same time, you've got a process with a lot of flexibility, because you can add new elements to address design flaws you see. Too steep a learning curve? Fine; add a few more intermediate puzzles to the opening of the game. Not enough motivation for a major NPC? Add another conversation scene that sheds some unexpected light on her background. (A weird thing about IF: it's generally easier to add stuff than to take it out. If you've implemented a major feature or a complex puzzle it may have implications here and there throughout the whole code. Editing it back out is like kudzu eradication and may leave you with bugs.)

Finally, this process offers the best odds for return on investment. At any given phase of development you'll have something that you could stop, beta-test, polish, and release. Doing that early might produce a bite-sized mini-game with little story complexity; doing it late might produce a 15-hour masterwork; but the process of getting from what you have to a game you can release is always clear.

Teale Fristoe reviews The Great Flu.

In the game, the player acts as the head of the World Pandemic Control during the outbreak of an unknown flu.  As the game progresses, the player must take actions, such as dispatching research teams, dispensing medication and face masks, and closing schools and airports, in an attempt to control and ultimately defeat the virus.  As the pandemic intensifies, the player is given information about the history and science of epidemics through a series of newspaper articles and videos.  Eventually, if the player is successful, the game ends with a count of the number of people infected and killed over the pandemic's life span, and the money spent containing the virus.

I think the game succeeds in presenting players with a lot of information through the multimedia featured in the game, and by including hints in it, giving players incentive to absorb it.  Furthermore, it nicely illustrates the dangers of our highly connected world: there's nothing more jarring than fighting a virus raging in Central and North America only to glance at Europe and find the epidemic exploding half way across the globe.  However, the game does suffer from a few common pitfalls, and going over them might shed some light on some of the challenges with using games for education.

I just noticed that Jason Scott has redesigned the home page for his film website. Good things are worth the wait. I'm content to wait.

Lunar Lander -- the game -- at 40.

Among the millions who watched the Apollo 11 landing was a 17 year old Massachusetts high school student named Jim Storer. In the fall of 1969, around the time of the Apollo 12 launch, Storer took his inspiration to class with him. There, he programmed a simple text-based simulation of humanity's greatest technological achievement on his school's Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-8 minicomputer system.

It might sound like a logical extension from the likes of Buzz and You Don't Know Jack, but you'll have to believe that this [Xbox Live] game is ringing the death knell for game shows as loudly and vigorously as it possibly can. Why watch a game show, when you can participate? Why shout at the TV, yelling at the idiot answering wrongly, when you can be playing instead? Why watch some person you have no emotional investiture in win a car, when you can win a car? This game expertly positions Microsoft at the forefront of "digital entertainment". -- Chris Lewis, Expressive Intelligence Studio

A great interview, on Adventure Classic Gaming.

Was something like Adventure inevitable? That's a tough question, but I think probably so. I'd say that the real wild-card here is not Adventure but rather Adventure's inspiration, Dungeons and Dragons. You just can't exaggerate the importance of D&D to all of the many storygames that have followed it. It really did revolutionize the way we look at stories and games and the combination of the two in a way totally out of proportion to the number of people who have ever actually played it. But then, we could make exactly the same statement about Adventure, couldn't we? Every story-oriented computer game today, including graphical adventures, can trace its roots straight back to Adventure -- and from Adventure, straight back to D&D.

I'm not omniscient, but yes, I think we'd have something like Adventure come along, probably sooner rather than later, absent Crowther and Wood. Would it have used such a flexible parser for interaction, though? I don't know, really. Certainly the many IF conventions that we still employ that have come down to us from Adventure would be a bit different. We can also say for sure that adventure games wouldn't be called adventure games -- that name is lifted straight from the original Adventure, which might perhaps begin to convey to your readers Adventure's importance in the scheme of things.

But what would the computer gaming landscape look like if Gygax and Arnenson had never invented D&D? Now that's an interesting question, and one I'm not even going to attempt to answer here! -- Jimmy Maher

I like Maher's answer.  A few years ago, David Thomas asked me the same question, and I blogged a tongue-in-cheek response that nevertheless laid out some of the impact of this particular game.

I have to make a conscious effort to say "Grand Theft Auto" when I'm talking about the game.

An excellent group blog begins its afterlife.

Grand Text Auto, for six years (May 2003-May 2009) a single blog with six co-authors (Mary Flanagan, Michael Mateas, your very own Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Andrew Stern, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin), is now back as an aggregator of four blogs by the original GTxA authors, including this one. Check it out.

At the recent Computers & Writing conference, I found myself, in the Q & A during several sessions, strongly advocating coding skills as a 21st-century core literacy.   (See Ian Bogost, Procedural Literacy. In the following reflection, I talk mostly about my use of Inform 7, but I also touch on Scratch.)

Here at Seton Hill, all students must fulfill a computer science requirement, but it's really set up as a "how to use Microsoft Office" course.  Students who can already use a spreadsheet or make a slideshow can pay to test out of the course, but I've heard from many students who don't want to pay for the test, preferring instead to take the course and get an easy A by being "taught" how to do stuff they already know.  (One faculty member has a special section of that course in which students learn how to program little table-top robots, but they still have to work in all the Office applications along the way.)

But even after students have taken this course, I regularly see evidence they have no idea what's happening when they click an icon or connect to a network drive.  They regularly lose files, saving their website projects onto thumb drives with pointers like "file://c:/Documents and Settings/My Documents/myphoto.png". They're mystified when I ask them to rename a text file with an ".htm" extension, because most have never even *seen* a file extension.

While it's good that the graphical user interface has brought the power of computing to the masses, at the same time, hiding all the working parts behind a streamlined interface turns coders into a priesthood of the elite, and that's not good for culture at large.

A few years ago it was enough for a game world to look realistic. Now, in its every action and reaction, it must behave realistically. Physics is what graphics was ten years ago - a yardstick to judge and compare games.--  Keith Suart, Guardian

The first article in a series.

A former Infocom beta-tester re-discovers interactive fiction (and enters the interactive fiction competition)

Back then in the mid-80s, the only (decent) interactive fiction was being produced by Infocom, the almost legendary, and now defunct, software company formed by a bunch of MIT grads.

After cutting my teeth on the Zork series, Enchanter, Infidel, and Witness on my old Apple II+, I somehow heard about the concept of "beta testing" and got the bright idea to apply to Infocom to test their games.  With the encouragement of my parents, I sent in a letter to them, and to my amazement I got accepted! -- Matt Wigdahl

The embedded preview of Evercracked! was very, very slow when I checked it just now, so I haven't watched it, but the UK Guardian article on videogame documentaries also includes some links to existing movies.

The King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters
A fascinating look at the bizarre rivalry between gamers Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell as they vie for dominance of Nintendo's Donkey Kong coin-op. Met with huge critical acclaim on its release two years ago.

Chasing Ghosts
Joyfully nostalgic ode to the arcades of the early eighties. Performed well in film festivals in 2007, but is hard to track down now.

8Bit
Described as, "a mélange of a rocumentary, art expose and a culture-critical investigation" this is a more cerebral approach to the subject matter, analysing the impact of game graphics on art and music, with a nod toward the chiptune scene.

Frag
Reasonably recent documentary on professional gaming circuit, considering the dedication of the players but also the corruption, money and drugs seemingly blighting the emerging sport.

I hope soon to see the forthcoming Get Lamp on this list.

The concept is simple: from the top of the screen a series of differently-shaped "blocks" fall slowly towards the bottom. The player can turn each block as it falls - making a line into a column, say - or move it sideways, but once it hits the lowest point, it stays. If the blocks fill a line without gaps, they disappear. Otherwise they pile up, giving the player less and less time before they hit the "bottom". Simple; but hugely addictive. A quarter of a century later, it has a legitimate claim to being the videogame that has truly conquered the world. -- Guardian

In Montfort and Bogost's case study platform studies also suggest a useful approach to media histories. Their work on the Atari VCS focuses on the role of creative individuals in the process of game development for the platform, and the book earmarks several important moments in videogame history. These moments are traced back to the particular groups and individuals involved, and the authors discussion is supported by interviews with the parties involved. Each chapter unfolds and examines a specific material programming challenge and how it was overcome by creative programming.-- Thomas Apperley, Digital Culture & Education

A good overview of a genre I've been following from the beginning. I sometimes wonder why references to political cartoons aren't more common in discussions of games about current events. At any rate, the article begins by mentioning the importance of Flash, the 9/11 attacks, and Gonzalo Frasca's thought-provoking response, September 12th.

Water Cooler Games, a website maintained by Frasca and Bogost, tracked the development of what they labelled "newsgames" (which we can now separate into the sub-genres of newsgames, "editorial games," "political games," and "documentary games" with the benefit of hindsight) from 2003 until today. The year 2004 saw the creation of Madrid--Frasca's follow-up to September 12th that we've covered elsewhere--an editorial game that simply asks one to remember a tragic event, an early entry into the documentary genre called John Kerry's Silver Star Mission by Kuma/War, and the controversial doc game JFK Reloaded, wherein one tries to mimic the exact shots fired on President Kennedy (supposedly) by Lee Harvey Oswald. Ed Halter notes the popularization of Osama bin Laden whack-a-mole games in the mid-2000s, but no other prominent editorial games appear to have popped up until early 2006.

Here begins a series of chronologically-ordered micro reviews, for which I will provide meta-commentary throughout and at the end of the article. For the most part, I will be embellishing on the notes made by Frasca and Bogost as they documented the editorial games made through the bulk of 2006. -- Simon Fefrari, News Games

Soon after, Mario entered into the Mushroom Kingdom and proceeded to steal from their banks and museums with his brother Luigi in Super Mario Thieves. Throughout the game he is chased by Bowser, chief of police at the M.K.P.D. (Mushroom Kingdom Police department) and the Goomba's and Koopa Troppers in blue.

[...]

Bowser's chase of Mario eventually led to the successful spin off, Super Mario Getaway Kart, in which you had to drive to the bank job/safe house and make sure you beat the M.K.P.D. police cars there. You could also get numerous items that would help you get through the tracks. What's more, the game had a popular multiplayer mode, where whoever stole from the most banks won.-- GameCareerGuide.com

Thanks for the suggestion, Geoff.

Photopia unceremoniously dumped the idea of a 'puzzle-based' narrative in favour of what it called a 'story-based' narrative, a linear progression (linear in terms of interactivity, not time) from beginning to end that throws seemingly random fragments of a story at the player, which slowly start to weave into one another and create a cohesive pattern as the game progresses. The effect is akin to a movie like 21 Grams, which chops its linear narrative into fragments that slowly start to coalesce.

The debate centred on the fact that Photopia required very little from the player in terms of actual 'gameplay'. There were no 'puzzles', some reviewers said, and the experience was akin to watching a long cutscene (Metal Gear Solid comes to mind) and occasionally pressing a key to move it along. Most of the sequences, like the one in the beginning of the game, are timed to two or three responses before moving on, irrespective of what they might be.

Commentators seemed to regard Photopia as almost dispensing with the need for the gamer. It had a story to tell, and that was that. -- Krish Raghav, Express Buzz

I have assigned Photopia in the past when I teach interactive fiction, though lately I have shifted away from assigning specific texts for class discussion, and more towards asking students to use the IFDB to research games they actually want to play.  After students have tried programming in I7, and they have a better sense of the medium, I assign a few texts for the class to discuss.

This past year, about half of the students in my introductory new media course chose to create text adventure games rather than make web pages.  In the advanced class, some students chose an IF project because they were intimidated by Flash, which is not exactly the best reason, but which does show that text-adventure gaming is an appealing way to introduce programming skills to word-centric English majors.  (These days, Flash is such an important part of new media production that I will very likely require students to take the Flash course offered by the art department, so that they won't be working in Flash for the first time when they take "New Media Projects.")    

Clever piece on a games-themed theater performance in Brooklyn next month.

One of the more unusual plays in this year's Antidepressant Festival is Adventure Quest, which mimics old-school computer adventure games, combining live action with vintage graphics and 8-bit music. For those too young to remember these strange, puzzle-intensive artifacts of the Reagan era, the creators of Adventure Quest have been kind enough to provide a brief "walk-through" that captures the genre's peculiar narrative conventions.

You are standing in the market square of the town of Despairington. There are several buildings here, including the potter's shop, the pie factory and the apothecary. Each appears to have been long abandoned. (Their owners were presumably among the many townspeople who joined the Octopus Cult last winter and killed themselves by drinking poisoned ink.) A large boomerang rests on a nearby crate of mangos.

You are currently holding: a portable cauldron, a pair of diamond cufflinks, a unicorn femur, an Octopus Cult pamphlet, a waterskin and a magnifying glass.

The marketing text is a parody, not a tribute. The text on the site reads like a text adventure, but it plays like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel with a single choice on each page.  The color scheme is flat enough. (Where does the color cyan exist, except in the 16 color home computer palette?) But the pixels are much too small. The detail on the roof is far too fine. 

Both the words and images are off-base just enough to make me doubt that the play itself will be anything more than a silly pastiche. Still, I found the site amusing. via