I recently participated in a game of Pictionary. My team came second (or “first loser” as somebody described it), despite the fact that we had four arts degrees between us.
I was given a particularly challenging word to draw, and I thought I did a smashing job of it. My team disagreed. Travis kindly snapped a photo. My rendering is everything above my finger–we did multiple drawings on every sheet of paper. Can you guess the word? Click for super-sizing:
Hmm…in retrospect it’s not really that clear. Though, in my defense, two people from another team guessed what I was on about.
UPDATE: The correct answer is ‘taxidermy’. So maybe I failed. I did like an alternative suggestion I received by email: “Dance dance critter death edition”, which seems to be in the ballpark of correct.
I’m a longtime player of sports games on the PC, and a recovering technical writer. So I take an interest in the manuals that accompany the games I play. As most gamers will attest, game manuals are usually awful. They’re under-written, incomplete and, for narrative games, spend too much time on useless back story.
This problem is usually solved by the far-superior in-game tutorial. Learning by playing is much more effective than learning by reading. There are few tutorials, however, in sports games. That’s fine, because usually gamers know how to play the sport in question, but not always.
When I worked in Ireland, we often played PlayStation games around the office at lunch time (or, you know, other times). A favourite game (and I don’t think it was my Canadian influence) was EA Sports NHL 2002. Most of the Irish guys playing the game had never actually seen a hockey game, either live or on TV. Their understanding of the term “hockey” was strictly verbal. They had a vague idea what offside was from football (i.e. soccer), but no sense of what the icing rule was about. In any case, they mostly played with those rules turned off.
I was just glancing through the manual of a reasonably new soccer (i.e. football) game, and encountered this section:
These are team-wide tactics which you, as their godly overseer, can instruct them to execute. Though I’ve casually watched soccer for years, I only have the vaguest idea of what these are. Wing Play? Flat back? And ‘3rd Man Release’ sounds downright dirty. The manual doesn’t include an explanation of what these tactics are for, how they work or when you might use them. It assumes, like icing and offside, that I already understand them.
From talking to educators and influencers, we’ve learned that our videos are often used to introduce a subject - to get everyone on the same page at the beginning of a class, workshop, etc. Recently, as part of our planning for 2009, we came up with a model that helps tell this story. We call it the A-to-Z Scale.
The scale represents the path to learning a subject. On the left side are the basic, fundamental ideas. On the right, the details and applications of the ideas.
Thinking about sports games manuals, they’re really missing the Gs and the Hs of the games they’re simulating. Most players will understand that you throw the ball in the basket, or hit the ball into the hole with the stick. However, many casual players may not understand the nuances of the neutral-zone trap or the dreaded third man release.
Do we need to grasp these details to enjoy the game? Probably not (though the jargon in an American football game is pretty thick and commonplace), but all it would take is an extra couple of pages in the manual or a game tutorial to explain these concepts. I’d imagine that the developer looks at both of those as cost centres, though, so I’d expect they feel that less is more. What do you think?
I was watching some Olympics coverage yesterday, and started thinking about rituals of celebration:
In indoor volleyball, the team converges after every successful point. There’s a momentary huddle where, I assume, encouraging and congratulatory remarks are exchanged.
In gymnastics, the girls (for, yes, they’re mostly still girls) of the American team gave each other the most cursory of hugs after each routine.
Basketball seems to reflect what occurs in the NBA. There’s very little reaction after the average basket, and just some macho posturing after a particularly righteous slam dunk.
I didn’t see what happened in water polo, but I think it’s much like basketball.
In games where teams accrue points, there’s a correlation between the frequency of scoring and the amount of celebration. In hockey and football (that is, soccer), the entire team congregates around the scorer to congratulate them. At the other end of the scale, there’s very little reaction from teammates in basketball or doubles tennis.
Is there a threshold where the group-to-congratulate stops? Maybe it’s not that simple. There’s potentially 25 points in a volleyball game, though there’s easily 75 to 100 in a match. That’s actually more ’scores’ that the average basketball game, so I guess there’s no hard and fast rule.
Can you think of other high-scoring sports where the team celebrates after every point?
I first watched the trailer for Portal about a year and a half ago. It kind of blew my mind.
Last night I finally found some time to play it, and the game kept me up to 1:00am. It’s a wonderfully-crafted little short story of a game. If Samuel Beckett was a game designer, he might have made Portal.
The setting is a sparse, clinical testing facility evocative of THX 1138. You are only accompanied by the friendly voice of GLaDOS, a psychotic computer with a love of euphemisms. She guides you through 19 tests of increasing complexity. This all sounds pretty ordinary, and though all the details–the level design, the voice acting, the physics–are fantastic.
The first big difference between Portal and other games is that you have no real weapons. Though, of course, the only person to kill is yourself. You do have the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, which is the key to Portal’s extraordinary gameplay. From a review:
At heart, it’s a puzzle game built around the “portal” mechanic, which lets you blast a pair of holes onto any two surfaces and teleport between them—for example, to get across a room, or drop on top of a high platform, or blip around an insurmountable barrier. Portal adds this to the standard repertoire of sliding platforms, tripable switches, and near the end, robotic gun turrets that whisper playfully, “I see you!” (When you knock one down, it adds, “I don’t blame you.”)
To borrow a term from Douglas Adams, the result is mind-buggering. When I first saw the trailer, I thought that the portals would make the game very difficult. In fact, after a while, your brain adjusts to this new dimension of travel. Or dimensional travel, if you like.
Themes and Post-Modernism (and Beware, Half Life 2 Spoilers Ahead)
Video games are obviously evolving very rapidly. Increasingly, they’re reflecting more and more similarities with narrative art. The best new games have sophisticated plots, decent dialogue, more rounded characters and original and sometimes breath-taking aesthetics. Portal features a particularly creepy yet catchy ditty sung by GladOS over the closing credits (hear it sung by its composer).
However, Portal is one of the first games I’ve seen that reflects (for want of a degree in literary criticism) some more sophisticated aspects of art. For example, the game explores themes–the tyranny of mechanization, how corporations dehumanize us, the dubious ethics of scientific testing. They’re not examined in vast detail, but they’re present and feel reasonably fresh.
Additionally, Portal is the most post-modern game I’ve ever played. We see this in trivial ways. The whole game is vaguely reminiscent of Q*Bert. GladOS hilariously refers to “Aperture Science Weighted Storage Cubes” or a “Weighted Companion Cube”, sly nods to the crates and boxes that inexplicably populate many games (I think it’s partially because they had a low polygon count, but that’s just a guess).
But the game is self-aware in more profound ways. As you play, you begin to get peaks behind the curtain of the cold, white testing rooms. You discover debris and graffiti (hence the meme “the cake is a lie”) left by former test subjects. At the games’ mid-point, you avoid incineration after the 19th room and spend the rest of the game escaping the facility. You wend your way through rusty catwalks, grimy corridors and soulless offices. You are figuratively and actually inside the game, looking back into the test chambers. It’s the kind of radical (not to mention fun) shift in perspective that you find in novels.
Criticisms? Well, the kill-the-boss ending is ordinary, though comical. And the end game cinematic didn’t provide me with much explanation or satisfaction. Once again, it was very THX 1138.
Portal is a little masterpiece. It’s remarkable that’s it’s just one of five games that come in the Orange Box set of Valve projects. The two Half Life 2 chapters are more conventional, but still excellent (when was the last time you played a game that ended with a fade to black while a woman cried over her dead father?). I’m not a huge fan of Team Fortress 2’s gameplay, but its design is breathtaking.
You know, sometimes I don’t think we stop often enough to consider just how bizarre our world has become. The cutting edge of technology and culture races ahead of us so rapidly, we either exhaust ourselves in keeping up or get left behind. In either case, we rarely have time to contemplate the fresh new machine that is our world.
Let us pause, then, consider the oddity that is gold spamming in World of Warcraft.
World of Warcraft (WoW), as you may know, is the world’s most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game. It’s an immersive world of swords and sorcery where you slay monsters and complete quests, often playing with your friends. You are constantly rewarded with gold, the world’s currency. As you earn more gold, you can buy cooler weapons, armor and other doodads.
There’s a robust auction system inside the game, where players can buy and sell loot that they’ve found or manufactured. There’s also a bunchof auction sites for buying entire characters on the web. Virtual goods and characters were commonly available on eBay until they were banned last year.
There’s an arm’s race mentality to the game, where players are highly motivated to constantly upgrading their stuff. Additionally, many players aspire to produce particularly attractive outfits (I went looking for an example, but found this amusing t-shirt instead).
How do these gold sellers promote their wares? They follow an important rule of marketing: go to where your customers are (click for full size):
Gold spammers create characters, and then deploy them at busy intersections in major cities (where the most players congregate). Then these characters (dressed in rags, ironically, because they’re noobies) act like hawkers, spouting the same message over and over again. In the above screenshot, there are actually two rival companies spamming the same location. The problem is bad enough that WoW has posted about it in their forums, and there’s a player-made, uh, gold spam filter to eliminate the problem.
This isn’t news to anybody who plays WoW, and it probably happens in other popular MMPORGs as well. Still, it’s worth stopping to consider how crazy this notion is. Real players are paid small amounts of real money to farm virtual gold. That virtual gold is then marketed inside the game by a virtual salesman. It’s just plain nutty.
I just watched the eight extant episodes of The Guild (YouTube channel), a (what is the right term for this? Webisode?) comedy series about the lives and times of gamers. Here’s the first episode:
If you’re a World of Warcraft player, you’ll get all the jokes. If you’re any other kind of gamer, you’re probably get 80% of the jokes (”You like my helm? It’s +5 Sexterity”). Everybody else might get half the jokes.
The performances range from decent to marginal, but that’s pretty standard for any pro-am type project. The main creative force and best actor is Felicia Day, who’s done a lot of work (she was on Buffy in the final season, though I can’t specifically recall who she played–one of the new crop o’ slayers, I suspect).
The conceit of offline and online lives colliding feels fresh, though, and the writing is occasionally witty. In any case, there are worse ways to spend about 40 minutes (eight episodes times about five minutes).
I think this is probably the first piece of fictional video that I’ve watched consistently on YouTube. Do you have a favourite web-only show?
Zero Punctuation is, I gather, a series of video game reviews (that is, game reviews on video) by an angry Australian. I’ve seen a couple of them, and they’re pretty amusing. The latest pillories Turok, which happens to have been developed in Vancouver. Caution, the language is vulgar and decidedly not safe for work:
In the meantime, you and I can play the Flash version of the game. The graphics aren’t, uh, quite as slick, but it’s still fairly head-wrecking.
If you fancy something less brain-intensive, there’s always Euroball. I believe this is just quarter football, with slight variations. It’s a really nice implementation, though. I appreciate the nationalistic wrist bands.
Via Waxy, I read about a comedy troupe from Victoria, BC undertaking a rather unusual telethon. They’re playing Desert Bus, a hilarious anti-game that’s part of Penn & Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors, an unreleased video game from the mid-nineties. From Wikipedia:
The objective of the game is to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada in real time at a maximum speed of 45mph, a feat that would take the player 8 hours of continuous play to complete, as the game cannot be paused.
The bus contains no passengers, and there is no scenery or other cars on the road. The bus veers to the right slightly; as a result, it is impossible to tape down a button to go do something else and have the game end properly. If the bus veers off the road it will stall and be towed back to Tucson, also in real time.
Thus far, they’ve raised nearly US $15,000 for Child’s Play, a charity started by gamers that raises money for “toys, games, books and cash for sick kids in children’s hospitals across North America and the world”. I sent them $10 just for their tenacity.
