Category Archives: Culture

Culture Game Design

Why Mojang’s “Scrolls” Can Not Possibly Be Good

06/25/2012 – 11:51 pm

This article is addressed, largely, to those readers who are exclusively videogame-players, and haven’t entered the world of designer boardgames.  There really are two worlds, and each has their own understandings and knowledge and biases, a surprisingly small amount of which are shared among the two.

For instance, in the boardgame world, it’s pretty well-understood that Monopoly is a god-awful game (it’s ranked #8,009 / 8,025 currently on Boardgamegeek, which is basically the board-game Mecca).  You’ve probably noticed though, that with videogamers (and non-gamers), actually, the consensus on Monopoly is pretty mixed.  I’ve heard a bunch of people say they “love” Monopoly, despite the fact that there really isn’t anything there for an adult to love.

I’ve never heard a board-gamer say they “love” Monopoly.  The strongest defenses I’ve heard board-gamers give for Monopoly were things like “naw, it’s not *that* bad” or “it’s better than Candyland” or “the original version of it is actually pretty good” (which is silly, because that’s a different game).

Of course, it doesn’t matter how many people like or dislike something – but I think that people do have to be invited to question things, and if they’ve never met someone who feels a certain way about something, it can be difficult for them to wander down that path.  It’s even more difficult when all you’ve heard about “X” is that “X is awesome”, to come to any conclusion other than “X is awesome”.

 

Scrolls

So back to Scrolls.  Firstly, the gameplay itself looks pretty interesting – more interesting than 99% of any new videogames coming out I’ve seen.  Looks one part Heroes of Might & Magic, one part… well, Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes.  Both of which I like… ish.

Honestly though, gameplay wise, this could be better than either of those.  There appears to be some system where you’re trying to attack the other player’s stones, which seems really interesting and could have a lot of emergent complexity.  I would absolutely LOVE to get a nice tactical online multiplayer game, with a healthy playerbase.  Like a turn-based Starcraft, or something – that’d just be fantastic.

So… why can’t Scrolls be good?  Because it’s a collectible card game (or CCG).

 

read more »

Tags , , , | Comments (23)
Culture Game Design Hardware News

What I Want To See In Hardware

06/23/2012 – 10:01 pm

I’m not the only one who wasn’t excited by this year’s E3 presentations.  In terms of games, it was obviously bad.  Actually, it sort of feels like everyone just accepts that the software will all be bad every year, and it’s become this kind of meta-game of trying to come up with something to say about them.  Often, it will be some big discussion about something tangential to the actual software itself (like the recent hullabaloo over the latest Tomb Raider game).  Anything to keep our minds off of how our favorite hobby became a joke over a decade ago, was killed, and is now stuck to the bottom of our shoe like toilet paper.

But nevermind about the software.  Today I want to talk about the hardware.  Actually, though, I don’t want to talk about Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft’s hardware.  What is there to really say?  They’ve all missed the mark.  They’ve come nowhere near doing anything that would interest game-players (or game designers).

I may temper that a bit and say that Nintendo almost came close with the Wii U.  It was almost the right idea.

Oooh, SO close. Unfortunately the Wii U can barely support even two of these things

I’d like you to please imagine this very simple scenario…

Imagine you and three friends are sitting around in your living room, each with tablets in your laps.  Each tablet has its own controller attached to the bottom of it, and the screen is a large (slightly larger than an iPad, maybe) surface.  All four of you have one of these tablets in your lap.  They connect wirelessly with each other (just like a Nintendo DS does), and they can also be hooked up to your Wifi.

What’s so cool about this?  Mainly, two things:

 

Secret Information

When I first saw the Wii U’s separate screen, the first thing I thought was about the possibilities for secret information among players.  The idea that there could be one player who has game information that another doesn’t could usher in a whole new generation of actually new games.  People who play boardgames know exactly what I’m talking about.  Traitor games, simultaneous action games, Poker — really, any card game where you have a “hand” has an element of “he has some information that I don’t, and I have to try to figure out what that information is”.

This is an example of a hardware innovation that – unlike touchscreens and motion-waggle accoutrement and Sega Action Chairs – actually does invite incredible new kinds of gameplay.  Imagine playing a traitor game (for those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s a cooperative game that has one or more “traitors” whose identities are hidden), in real time, for example. read more »

Comments (17)
Culture Review

On “Indie Game: The Movie”

06/12/2012 – 9:23 pm

It’s clear that Indie Game: The Movie is not a movie that was made for me.  It was made not for developers, but instead for people who really have no idea what an “indie developer” is.  In other words, most people.  That’s fine – I have no problem with one of the purposes of this film being a public declaration of the existence of the indie developer.

It may be a bit of a problem, though, that that’s just about the only clear purpose of this film.

To those viewers that the movie was made for, I’m speaking to you, now.  There are some things that you need to know.  Mainly, the following two things:

1.  Not all “videogames” are actually puzzle platformers, and

2.  Not all indie game developers are spoiled, depressed and pretentious

 

Puzzle Platformers

You may be sad to learn that this bold new wave of indie developers are still basically just tweaking the same game that you remember playing back in the 1990s or even earlier.  All of the games shown in the movie are just clones of older games, with a new theme, and some gameplay gimmick.  Also, if you go and look around on the internet, you may find that it’s really true!  Wow, there really are nothing but puzzle platformers everywhere!  The number of puzzle platformers getting made every year is staggering.

However, there are some digital game developers out there who are doing new, interesting things.  Chris Hecker’s Spy Party, Rodain Joubert’s Desktop Dungeons, Tarn Adams’ Dwarf Fortress, just to name a few.  It would have been great to see a little of that in the film.  Now, I do think that the growth of digital gaming is extremely stunted (for a few reasons that I’ve gone on about many times over), but other than a fleeting shot of Minecraft, the viewer would have absolutely no idea that digital gaming has advanced at all.

Actually, for years I’ve wanted to write an article addressing the “puzzle platformer” plague, but I never did, partially because I thought “okay, well, it’s so bad now, it’s probably going to get better.”  But it hasn’t gotten better.  Right now eight out of ten of the top posts on reddit’s IndieGaming subreddit are about (directly or indirectly), puzzle platformers.  People are excited about a new Abe’s Odyssey?  Really?

Now, I might be a bit biased here, because I don’t like puzzles.  But seriously, even people who do like puzzles have got to be getting tired of this by now.

 

Most Developers Are Normal People

Of course, it’s a movie, and so I do take the presentation of these “characters” with a grain of salt.  In fact, I’ll preface everything by saying that it could be that the people in this film were presented in a completely unfair way that made the appear to be nothing at all like who they really are.  I am only addressing the characters that I was presented with. read more »

Comments (41)
Culture Game Design

The Subjective & Objective in Video Games

05/24/2012 – 12:19 am

Can we all agree that when we type things into the internet, that the purpose for doing so is that we hope that the stuff we typed is of some kind of value to others?  Slashdot has their “Insightful/Informative/Funny/Interesting”-based ratings system;  things which are none of those are buried.  One of the things that should always get “buried” is a comment that’s nothing but pure, subjective opinion.

A lot of people might find that strange coming from me, because a lot of people mistake me for “saying my opinion” a lot on the internet.  While I certainly do that from time to time, it will almost always be in passing, as a bit of an aside to a larger comment that’s actually about something of substance.  I have long understood that nobody cares what my, or anyone else’s opinion is.

The recent Diablo 3 situation is a good example.  I wrote my article on it months ago during the beta, but it recently got a lot of attention due to someone posting about it on reddit.  At about the same time I also was on a particularly critical episode of Roguelike Radio wherein Diablo 3 was thoroughly throttled.  In both cases, there was a predictable amount of backlash.  People were upset, thinking that I was saying Diablo 3 is “no good”.  Actually, I’ve never said that the program isn’t “good”.

What I have said is that it lacks ambiguous decision-making, that it lacks a loss condition, that there is far too much noise in the system for it to be balanced or meaningful.  These are not subjective statements, they are attempts at objective observations about the nature of that program. read more »

Comments (18)
Culture Game Design News

The Evidence of Game Shame

04/26/2012 – 11:06 pm

“Good games will get boring whenever another game one ups them, but good music is timeless.”  – reddit user

For five years, I wrote about game design over at my old blog, The Expensive Planetarium.  One of my most-recurring themes was that of “game shame“:  the idea that many or even most of us who play games don’t believe that they are a legitimate interest in the way that films or music are.  Game shame, like modern racism and sexism, is never overly spoken, and probably never even consciously thought.  Instead, it seeps in between the lines, but it still has a powerful negative effect on our entire world of games.  Games are for children, games are disposable, games are empty, games rot your brain.

Obviously, the premise of game shame is completely false, and many will be reading this article thinking that I’m just making something up so that I can complain about it.  So, before I go any further with explaining why we need to be rid of game shame, I will provide evidence to show that it is, indeed, a thing.

 

Games Are Cool When They are Unlike Games

For the past ten or fifteen years, the coolest thing a game could possibly do is look as much like a movie as possible.  Since films are the most popular visual media in our culture (other than games), it’s not surprising that some games would end up doing this.  First, we had the Metal Gear Solid thing, where there was this long intro with credits rolling over, and voice acting, and all of that.  It was quite a spectacle!  “Man, this looks so much like a movie”, we all said.

Oh I guess this is a game about looking at this guy?

read more »

Comments (97)
Auro Culture Kickstarter

Follow-up: Kickstarter Post

04/08/2012 – 8:26 am

Hi everyone!  I just wanted to write a small follow up to our previous post, and quickly make sure our feelings on the matter are entirely understood.  It’s clear to me now that I was not coming through as I intended to a lot of people.

  • We accept complete responsibility for the failure of our Auro‘s Kickstarter.  Actually, a lot of comments in the last 24 hours have been exceedingly helpful in terms of us learning the real reasons why it failed.  We really appreciate that.
  • We have no problems with someone not wanting to fund us; even a person who does fully get what Auro is, and still feels that way.  We don’t feel as though we’re entitled to people’s money, or any such thing.
  • The article’s main point was intended to simply be that there seemed to be an unfair hostility towards people even asking for money.  I now realize, however, that honestly… it’s the internet.  There are always going to be people saying stupid things like “wait are we paying for the game, or your living expenses?!”  We shouldn’t have taken this kind of absurdity as seriously as we did.
  • We’re super happy about the successes that Double Fine and inExile have found on Kickstarter, and very excited to see what they come up with.  Mostly, we just think it’s great that they’ve been able to tell the big publishers to go screw themselves — that’s something we can all agree on, I think.

Anyway, please let me know if you have any other questions regarding our positions on these matters in the comments.  In the meantime, we’re not sure if we’re going to do another Kickstarter at some point, or perhaps another alternative like Desura alpha-funding.  Thanks again for reading!

Comments (11)
Auro Culture Kickstarter

EA’s Madden ’13 Kickstarter Makes 8.5 Million in Five Hours

04/05/2012 – 6:58 pm

Edit:  Please note that we’ve written a follow-up to this article, which you should check out here!

The headline is  a joke, of course, and a bit of parody of what’s been going on recently with videogame Kickstarters. Successful and famous game developers have been running Kickstarter campaigns recently to make the next big sequel or new game that they have in mind.  That’s fine, of course, and I definitely understand the excitement;  I myself passed around the link for Wasteland 2′s Kickstarter.  If these people screw these games up, at least it will be a sincere, earnest screwup by a game designer who really wanted to make something great, instead of a cynical boardroom checklist screwup by a publisher who really wanted to increase profits from last quarter.  The headline of this article should suggest that I am indeed questioning where this is leading, and whether or not a company that just developed a game for Bethesda really was what Kickstarter was made for.

Now, some of our readers may remember that we attempted a Kickstarter ourselves a few months back, for Auro.  Sadly, It didn’t make it, and we accept total responsibility for that.  We started it off with a very unclear and somewhat “inside-baseball” video, as well as a character design that everyone seemed to hate.  When we realized that a lot of these complaints were absolutely correct, we scrambled to respond to it, and created a whole new illustrative video and character design, but it was too late.  Most of the people who were going to even take a look at our Kickstarter already had, and had simply been turned off.  That’s completely understandable.  We don’t blame anyone for not feeling super “donatey” for that Kickstarter.  Edit:  Some people seem to be not getting this, so before people read on, please read the following: this article is not about how we’re upset that our Kickstarter failed.  People not wanting to give us money is 100%, completely fine!

Auro is a game that’s being made by 3 people, on our off time.  It’s a game that, all told, will probably have ended up taking us a year to complete because we have to do it on our off time while doing other jobs.  Again, that’s fine, and that’s probably what we’ll end up doing, because we really love this game and believe in it strongly.

Double-Fine Double-Standard

So anyway, a lot of new Kickstarters run by large-size, AAA teams are popping up and making millions of dollars.  Wasteland 2 has made over two million so far and it still has 11 days to go as of this writing.  And everyone on the internet is just leading the charge.  Here are some comments from the many, many reddit posts supporting this kickstarter: read more »

Comments (91)
Culture Game Design Stories

False Choice: Bad for Stories, Bad for Games, Inevitable in Story-Games

03/02/2012 – 10:39 am

We at Dinofarm enjoy great things.  A screenplay is great when an empathic link is forged between audience and character through a seamless, delicately woven web of plot threads.  Eventually, a profound value is revealed after a surprising, yet inevitable climax.  Such a screenplay can change someone’s  life, or at the very least, lead to weeks of contemplation.

A great game can lead to the same kind of enrichment, but does so in its own ways.  After several matches of games like Go, Texas Hold ‘Em or Tetris, the mind is tickled in a way that only great games can tickle it.  They too cause contemplation, but not in the same way a narrative does.  Great games leave a person pondering over the deep possibility space they have only just begun to see.  A true lover of any great game will lay in bed and dream up new, lateral, creative ways to overcome the infinite challenges that lie in this ocean of a game space.

In thinking about it, I have come to the conclusion that both mediums, while inherently very different, do have a strong corollary, and that corollary is real, meaningful decisions. Again, since both mediums are so inherently different, this is going to mean something different for each, but just the same, it all comes down to choice.  Real choice.

I’m no expert in fiction, but I am an avid hobbyist, and have taken to considerable self-study.  In these pursuits, I have discovered some useful lenses through which I evaluate the stories I take in.  I became interested in learning why it is I like a character and why I care about what happens to him.

 

Character Development

I’ve observed that “character development” is a term thrown around by every moviegoer age 13 and upward, and every discussion I have on the matter seems to yield a different definition of the word.  To many, “Character Development” is simply a combination of backstory, physical descriptions and expository dialogue.  Many friends of mine through the years have complained, upon exiting the theater featuring the latest superhero movie, that the story was “okay, but lacked character development.”  If I were to ask them what they meant, they too would probably turn to backstory, description and more expository dialogue.  I argue that this does just as little, in many cases, to develop a character as the senseless action everyone complains about.

First I should point out what I believe the goal of character development to be.  I believe that it’s all about forging an empathic link with the character, so that when the climax arrives, we feel what they feel.  Whatever life-changing value they take away from that climax, we too must take.  If that is our goal for character development, then character development must lie in the character making ambiguous, tough, irreversible decisions under pressure, the outcome of which is surprising, yet inevitable.

Suprising, Yet Inevitable

This is the holy grail of storytelling.  Anyone could do surprising(“and then our heroes were….TELEPORTED BY A MAGICAL DOLPHINOID ALIEN”) which, on its own, is cheap.  Anyone could do inevitable(“She gets pulled over by a cop as she speeds to her son’s big game.  Her excuses don’t work until she decides to tell the TRUTH and the cop goes ‘i’ll let you off with a WARNING.’*cue 90s orchestra theme*”) which we buy out of because it satisfies our predictions 1 to 1.  It’s my belief that only when you get the audience to say “I can’t BELIEVE THAT JUST HAPPENED….but…it couldn’t have happened any other way…” do you have a great story.  It’s so… hard to do.  I certainly can’t do it!  And it only comes from real, ambiguous choice, or dilemma.

We’re all unconsciously familiar with the power of dilemma in our stories, and we’re also unconsciously offended by its opposite: FALSE CHOICE. Somewhere along the line, Hollywood headhunters hired to find great screenplays and spruce them up for blockbuster appeal must have read at some point that “The hero must have a choice to make at the climax.”  Apparently not understanding why this is so important to the art of story, they often shoehorn in these choices when there really isn’t a choice to make.  It’s the illusion of choice. All the dramatic music and earth-shattering deliveries of an A-lister cannot make the choice real.  And our brains know it deep down.

read more »

Comments (17)

Next Page »

Next Page »