this puzzle totally defeated younger me:
>go east
As your feet touch the grass you sense a strange motion around you. Looking down, you watch with horror as the grass begins to ripple and writhe with vegetable indignance!
Angry green stalks whip around your legs, pull you to the ground and drag you, kicking and screaming, back to the paved surface of the Lancaster Walk.
A chorus of offended little voices subsides as you regain your footing.
(Source: escroto)
Did a bit of cleaning out my backlog of browser games. Some highlights: No-One Has to Die is a cute browser-based puzzle game by Stuart Madafiglio; its shallow branching story is neatly integrated into the puzzle. Ending is an abstracted puzzly roguelike by st33d; there’s intentionally no wait action, which might be the only way to keep it a puzzle? To me it just feels like arbitrary busywork replacing the wait, which isn’t awesome.
Less progress on my shooter backlog; I haven’t even got to Dishonored yet, to say nothing of Bioshock Infinite. But that hasn’t kept me from the commentary. Rab Florence says why are we so defensive all the time, that Infinite’s violence is more necessary & worthwhile than a hundred other games that weren’t being jumped all over last week (or was it the week before?); Tim Rogers says the violence gets in the way of having a nice look around, among half a dozen other things: the most interesting, to me, was when he went off on a whole tangent about how obviously they were trying for an American Ico but got scared off and just made Elizabeth invincible, but if they had, here’s how he would have done it. In great detail! I’m not sure why book or movie reviews that talk about the book or movie they wished they were reading or watching instead make me angry but when it comes to games it’s a useful and entertaining design exercise.
And I played a bit of Torchlight II; it was on sale, and they’ve just released their editing tools. I promised myself that before I make any more random dungeons I’ll look at how Torchlight does it, though I don’t think I’ll be doing any in the near future. They played up their traditional stats-and-skills system as a contrast to Diablo III’s streamlining, and it angries me up all over again. If only D3 hadn’t dropped the ball on the story and the auction house and maybe the servers! Torchlight’s pretty fun in all the moments when you aren’t spending skill and stat points; it’s a worthy Diabloalike. Bonus points for the pet alpaca.
… but why use a DC Metro train for a BART graphic … surely there are plenty of BART gifs in the world XD;
Because DC’s Metro is the best!
You know, I definitely did play Candyland as a child, but I don’t remember anything about the gameplay! All I remember was that it was candyland, and nothing about whether I won or was good or bad at the game. So maybe that is your point, ha.
So your argument, perhaps, is a descriptive (not sure that is the correct term…) one? These things are games because the people who play them are gamers and they arise from the culture of gaming? [Though arguably this is not necessary: what if a “non-game” is instead played by non-gamers?]
Unpacking your last paragraph: so what is it that they have in common with AAA games? Isn’t the debate that they *do* have something in common? (in other words, indie game-makers are arguing for the title of game, thus claiming commonality?) Or do you mean that AAA games are often story-heavy, or do sometimes use the same techniques used by the indie games? Meaning that the gameplay does not line up with the politics because they are in fact similar to the AAA games? Although perhaps that is foreordained because the toolbox you speak of was invented by mainstream gaming.
I’m fairly permissive when it comes to what is a game; basically, any interactive entertainment, even if it doesn’t have choices or a victory condition. I think descriptive is right: they’re games because gamers and non-gamers alike know what you’re talking about when you say the word.
I’m arguing the latter: that the new indies are like AAA games in promoting story and scripted experiences over gameplay. Things are muddied a little because there’s an older indie movement who defined themselves in opposition to the big publishers by making low-fi mechanics-heavy games—back to the roots, real games, etc—and so there’s confusion about who’s in the inside and who’s on the outside and who’s actually fighting whom.
Again, in practice everyone’s pretty chill and more focused on making awesome stuff than picking fights.
Raph Koster brings up the mechanics thing and makes Robert Yang really angry; he sees the whole “what is a game?” question as an move, perhaps unintentional, to keep people marginalized and step on their political message.
Andy Schatz, creator of Monaco, points out that indie games are all…
Ah, I recall Tadhg Kelly was talking about this too. I think zine is a terrible word for it, but while I don’t think people who play for the story and are ‘whatevs’ about the gameplay are as much of a minority as he believes they are, I have sympathy for his formalism. Maybe it’s because I’m a pretty marginal gamer (barely a gamer), who often doesn’t really play games for their gameplay or mechanics. If it makes me a non-gamer then so be it and bring me my non-games. (Interactive art seems to be a fine title for non-games? Software art? )
Yet the “non-games” actually seem to be parodying or working off the conventions of indisputable games, and might not “work” if the player was in fact not a gamer conversant with that ‘vocabulary.’
I suppose you could see this like the moment where the novel ceased to be solely a popular entertainment and capable of being the dominant art form, and started to have its self-conscious avant-garde, or you could see it as the difference between crafting things for function and as art (whereas if one uses the techniques of woodworking to make a sculpture, that does not make it really the same as furniture.) .
I read that Kelly article! There must be something going around; during GDC Mark Rosewater was arguing that Candyland isn’t, strictly speaking, a game. It feels like a game while you’re playing it. Not a very good game, but so much of the experience is in taking it out of the box and sitting around a table moving pieces in turn. If Howling Dogs came on a DVD in a green box and said PRESS START at the beginning, only game devs with turf to war over would say it’s not a game.
It feels like this distinction matters a lot more to the people making the games than the people playing them. When I’m playing games, what matters to me changes on a game-to-game basis: some games I skip all the cutscenes to get right back into the action, some games I slog through tedium (or use cheat codes? very occasionally) in order to see the story to the end. The fact that “non-games” use the vocabulary of games wouldn’t be a paradox to the people playing them; almost all of them have a foot in each world, if they even perceive separate worlds to begin with.
But when I’m making games… even then! It feels like there’s a toolbox full of pieces of games that have already been made, and you sort of choose the ones that best fit what you’re trying to do, customizing them or making new ones as necessary; whether a cutscene or a QTE or whatever makes your game less gamey is something you yell at each other during design meetings to justify aesthetic decisions you’ve already made, really.
So on this point, I think I have to agree with the zinesters! I agree that’s a horrible name.
I still have a nagging suspicion that low-interactivity story-heavy indie games have more in common with AAA games than they’d like to admit, and that maybe ‘not a game’ is an intentional troll to make their perceived gameplay line up with their politics. If anybody actually looked at gameplay through this weird lens.
Raph Koster brings up the mechanics thing and makes Robert Yang really angry; he sees the whole “what is a game?” question as an move, perhaps unintentional, to keep people marginalized and step on their political message.
Andy Schatz, creator of Monaco, points out that indie games are all growed up: “It’s not so much that indie culture has changed, but the industry has moved in the direction that we’ve been trying to push in. Which is really cool. Like I said in the IGF intro, we’re not The Clash anymore. We’re Green Day.”
I’m with them, temperamentally if not professionally. I was raised on Mario and computer games of the old old school, and yet by the time I was out of college and actually making games, the world of games was different. AAA games desparately wanted to be legitimate, and that meant being like movies. Regardless of brow height: critics and scholars knew how to deal with story, and would fudge their way around the actual experience of play in order to extract a narrative. Back then “but is it art?” was the tiresome and useless definitional question used to generate more heat than light. And so people turned to pixel art and cheap tools like Flash and Game Maker and made games that were about all the things they thought had been lost: jumping on heads and random dungeons, strict tests of reflexes and serendipitous interactions between independent objects.
But it wasn’t that long ago! Maybe the indies have won, or been coöpted—and Minecraft’s certainly done a lot—but it still informs a lot of my thinking about games. To the extent that people are defensive about mechanics and gaminess, I suspect that’s where it comes from.
[simultaneously, it seems, we’re having a critcal backlash vs. bioshock infinite; i’m not sure if or where that fits in to anything.]
[dan cook has his own take on the history, which feels oddly focused on how games have been professionalized]
Jan Chipchase talks about some of the research he and his firm have done about Glass-related issues, in particular around how people react to other people wearing them. It’s interesting, though there was a (slightly tangential) bullet point that surprised me:
In-ear or close-to-ear (inductive) audio changes the wearer’s enjoyment of food and drink — a problem for an otherwise prime use case: Watching movies at home, where snacks and beverages might naturally be consumed.
Is this really a thing? How does it change?
(Source: twitter.com)
I’m kind of torn on the whole Twine thing. Howling Dogs was admittedly pretty great, and text IS awesome. To the extent that people try to set up a twine-vs-parser IF dichotomy, they’re just coming at the NOT A GAME thing from the other direction, and fuck you?
I do appreciate the Hypercard shout-out. There was a time, a few years back, when I was convinced that Flash was the new Hypercard and that the same kind of DIY punk rock ethos that the Twine folks call for now could be found in places like Newgrounds.
For me personally: I love mechanics and simulation, and the power of parser games to do that simulation at a symbolic level is really, really cool. This Inform 7 sample warms my heart. (a turn later, it room temperatures my heart.) The fact that that kind of parser + world model—things resting on other things, and so on—has its roots in super early AI research is just icing on the cake.
I’ll also say: it has never been easier to make games, Twine or no Twine; choose the right tool for the game you want to make. “Learn to code!” is not good general life advice, but if you want to make games it’s absolutely worth doing. I complain that the code quality required to make a game is shamefully low, but that’s a snobby aesthetic objection; from a barrier to entry point of view, it’s awesome.
(Source: joystiq.com)
Yglesias does San Francisco (though folks on twitter point out a more elegant comparison); it’s basically another chance to ride his BUILD MORE HOUSE hobbyhorse, though I was struck by this:
For San Francisco to be as dense as Manhattan, it would have to house 3.2 million people instead of 805,000.
We talk about a good game about how we want to be New York, but that’s a lot of catching up to do.
(Source: twitter.com)
