I built a Portal 2 Test Chamber

I have been playing around with the Portal 2 level editor and it is very good for easy level building. The best test chambers on there at the moment seems to be by CaretCaret, but he has used Hammer (the big boys level editor) and I suspect the most popular levels will always be the ones built with Hammer, but I am still liking the in game editor. Here Is My Level, it took me a couple of hours and isn't amazing, but I think it is reasonable.

The World Is Being Gamified

New Scientist has a video about how the world is learning from the positive feedback loop in video games. This will cause everybody to be offered achievements and points for using products and services.

Planet M.U.L.E.

M.U.L.E was a Commodore 64 game where players where transported to a uncolonised planet to compete on the virgin ground for profit. You place farms to make food, solar stations to make power and mine metal and crystal out of the ground to earn the big bucks.

Now it is back as Planet M.U.L.E. and it is free, online enabled, has much better graphics and I know what I am doing because of the improved interface. I don't know what the developers have planned for it, but at the moment it is a very faithful recreation of the original.

M.U.L.E. is not a balanced game, whoever lands the sweet deposits at the start of the game will most likely win; so I would like to see a reworked version to make the gamplay more strategic.

Settlers Of Catan

Wired has an Article About Settlers Of Catan. It takes an honest view about one of the defining classics in boardgaming that hasn't sold as well as it should have in the American market.

Yet in the US, only a few types of games have really taken off. There are so-called lifestyle games, like Scrabble and chess, intellectual skill-based games whose devotees are interested in playing little else; party games like Trivial Pursuit and Jenga; and traditional strategy games like Risk and Monopoly, which are generally seen as child's play or possibly something to do while trapped in a snowstorm without power—just before you eat your own foot.

But part of the reason we don't play much Risk and Monopoly as adults is that those are actually poorly designed games, at least in the German sense. Derk Solko, a garrulous former Wall Streeter who cofounded the Web site BoardGameGeek.com in 2000 after discovering Settlers, explains it this way: "Monopoly has you grinding your opponents into dust. It's a very negative experience. It's all about cackling when your opponent lands on your space and you get to take all their money." Monopoly, in fact, is a classic example of what economists call a zero-sum game. For me to gain $100, you have to lose $100. For me to win, you have to be bankrupt. Gouging and exploiting may be perfect for humiliating your siblings, but they're not so great for relaxing with friends.

Learn To Fly

Learn To Fly is a distance objective flash game where it is your objective to throw a penguin as far as you can. Normally these games are over fairly quickly as you can only control the start angle of the object and clicking at the right time on a rapidly moving slider controls thrust, but Learn To Fly is quite different.

In LTF the game starts out with your penguin only being able to Bellyflop off the end of a ramp, but soon you can afford a glider that increases the range of movement, then a rocket and at that point a level of strategy is introduced as the player then starts to learn the interaction between speed, altitude, angle and air resistance.

My best time for completing the game was 25 game days.
5/5

Windosill

Windowsill is a very simple puzzle game come toy. It would be nice if it was longer, but it is a very well designed flash game.

[Jay Is Games]

99 Blocks Is An Interesting Take On Tetris

99 Blocks is a twist on the traditional block stacking game of Tetris. Instead of stacking blocks to clear lines your objective is to create the highest tower you can with just 99 blocks. The twist is that this is a Tetris variant with physics. So if you don't stack carefully, your tower will fall.

I myself have come back to 99 Blocks a few times after first playing it to try out different stacking strategies, but ultimately 99 Blocks remains a very casual experience with possibly a too steady pace of gameplay.

[Source Wired]

Mirrors Edge Developer Commentary Disappoints Me

There are a lot of games where I see some kind of preview of the game and from that little snippet I build-up a picture in my head on what the game will be like to play and how the mechanics will work etc. So I can run through my head what it will be like to play just from seeing a very small preview. Sometimes the finished game surprises me and I am delighted and other times the reality of playing the finished product falls short on my expectations. I am sure you too do this.

The concept of Mirrors edge is that of a very clean line art style set in a city where all communication is closely monitored by the state. Because of this runners are paid to carry sensitive information across the city by hand so that the authorities don't get their hands on it.

The game takes the concept and some of the style of Freerunning into itself. This combined with the Currier missions made me think that missions would be given very much like they where in Thief and Assassins Creed. Where you got missions by talking directly to hidden contacts or by finding clues and markers left for you. However for some reason Mirrors edge features a radio, which for me breaks the whole anti-surveillance thing as obviously the state could listen into the radio. They will probably have a plot point that says that the radio transmissions are encrypted, but to me this is nowhere anywhere even close to being as cool as getting a mission from a set of cryptic symbols on a hidden bit of paper, or getting a mission by meeting someone secretly hoping the authorities doesn't find out.

Plus as much as I love story being feed to me during a mission as I am playing through a level, the crackly radio doesn't fit the visual styling of the game.

Mirror's Edge is Looking Awesome

Mirrors Edge puts the player in a Tokyo looking future city where you freerun across skyscrapers. From a ludology perspective I love how the developers have used colour to communicate interactivity to the player. It is suttle, adds to the clean visual styling of the game and negates the need for a HUD or floating icons.

Problem Solving With Video Games

There is a Video Interview With Peter Molyneux where he talks about not being able to do much else but design games, and he wonders if he could apply his knowledge of gaming to other human pursuits and endeavours.

I thought this was an interesting idea, then I realised that I had meant to post about a project that does just that. So here we are.

There are some problem domains in the world where to solve a problem or improve something you have to understand a process completely. Programmers of Artificial Intelligences have been known to spend exorbitant amounts of time looking at quite simple issues so that they can create AIs that model intelligent behaviour. Good examples of this are anything that uses Fuzzy Logic. That is anything from Rice Cookers to Lifts, Thermostats and a huge amount of Control Systems.

There are some problems that are so difficult to understand that they can't yet be translated into software, because we don't fully understand what is going on. The problem I am referring to here is Protein Folding. We know what the acid code of the protein is, we know what it looks like in 3D when it has finished folding, but we don't know how it folds into it's final shape or how it moves, so we don't know what it does.

This is where Fold It! from the guys working on Rosetta@home comes in. It is a game where you as the player are tasked with folding a protein. Higher points are rewarded by finding a structure that requires the lest energy for the protein to fold into. The idea of this is that players will eventually discover general tactics that can be worked into protein folding algorithms and a rosetta method of protein folding be found. From this new drugs could be created in the lab fit for purpose artificially and our understanding of our own bodily processes greatly increases. We might even be able to find a cure for ageing.

Do Narratives Have A Place In Gaming?

I have heard this question over and over again. So let me try and put this one to bed right now with some recent examples.

Crackdown, Assassins Creed and GTAIV are all very similar games.

Crackdown was awesome, but the mission structure sucked because all you had to do was keep killing mission selected people over and over.

Assassins Creed was an awesome set of gaming building blocks with the roof jumping and wrist blade assassination time action, but sucked because all you did was the same killing of mission selected people.

GTAIV is awesome and doesn't suck even though all you do is the same killing of mission selected people, because there is a strong narrative. I have completed over seventy missions in the game and it doesn't yet feel repetitive at all.

To me anything that doesn't have a narrative should logically be considered an abstract game. Although even abstract puzzle games like Puzzle Quest are made better with a stronger narrative. Making a game with a weak narrative is like making chicken nuggets and then eating them with the cheapest/nastiest barbecue sauce you can find. It shouldn't be done and wrecks the whole experience.

Achievement Types

Not got much to say so here is a little soemthing I put together last week. It is categories for all the Achievements avalible for 360 games. This doesn't include a category for silly achievements, but each one of them based on their own merits can fit into one of these categories anyway so there isn't a need for another.

Be The Best
eg Become number one in the world

Time Will Tell
eg Get 1,000,000,000 kills with your left thumb

Fluke
eg Get a hole in one

Progress Marker
eg Compleate level three

In-human
eg Defeat the final boss on ultra mega death hard with only the pistol and without dieing

Baby steps
eg Watch the tutorial

Compleationist
eg Collect all the hidden flags

Architected Game Combat

Having internalised Jonathan Blow's viewpoint on architected gameplay rather than explored gameplay I realise I am so over exactly what Warhammer Online is doing with their combat system (see video). I know there are people that will watch this video and be excited about learning a new RPG combat system, but having learned and played several before, I am so over it all. I want something new and different, maybe even something that doesn't feel like work to play.

The Food and Drugs of Gamplay

Last Year at The Montreal International Games Summit, Jonathan Blow did a talk called Design Reboot where he talked about how we might enter a golden age of game design. He talks about how developers are conditioning players to expect predictable rewards thus turning them into reward junkies and that real rewards like a player achieving a personal goal in a game and deriving satisfaction from that, is being ignored because that is harder to architect.

His talk starts well-outside of current thinking, but he states all his points very well and then you will realise that all the best developers in the world have already been applying what he talks about.

I don't like being so cryptic with my writing, but if I cover what is in the talk. I will have written a very long post where I cover everything that is covered by his talk.

[Direct Link: montreal2007.zip ]

Mapping Game Categories With Analysis

A few US institutions have gotten together and done what all mental analysts have done before them, which is ask people to do a survey. But this time they are asking people to fill out a survey which will tell them what video games gamers think are similar to each other. And from this they will create a graph where similar games will be clustered together.

The results from this survey could open the door to new genre descriptors, instead of the ones we use today which are primarily named by what perspective players play the game from. The survey only takes ten minuets and can be found at Mapping The Mental Space Of Video Games or if you want to go direct to the survey click Here.

Professor of Catan Achievement (Win Single Player on Hard)

I was on the Achieve360Points.com forum and after reading a post titled Catan Achievements Guide by Justin Barrow I defeated the AI opponents on hard using Justin's strategy, this surprised me a little as they are indeed hard opponents to defeat, but his strategy works well. So if you too have been thwarted by the Hard AI's superior strategy you too might want to give this a try:

1. Setup a game with default settings, with the exception of setting the game on a fast victory condition so the winner is the first to reach seven points and not ten.



2. Set your opponents to Hard and make sure the only character type you are playing against is Cleopatra.



3. Once starting the game build your two start settlements to capitalise on Grain, Ore and Wood (remember that numbers six and eight are more commonly rolled by the dice).



4. Upgrade your two start settlements to cities.



5. Buy Development Cards and play as many Soldier Cards as you can from there.



6. Win!

From this strategy you should get seven points before the AI does by getting two points for your start settlements, another two points by upgrading the settlements to cities, two points for playing the most number of soldier cards and then one hopefully by getting a victory card.

This strategy wouldn't work on a ten point victory as getting one Victory Card is common, but getting three more would take so long that a better strategy would be to switch strategies after getting the Largest Army Bonus.

Why Guitar Hero is so Addictive

I was going to do this in a very different format (video), but what the hell. A few weeks ago I was reading about the Loci System as part of some research I am doing on Mentalism and realised where Guitar Hero achieved it's addictive qualities. So here is why I think Guitar Hero is addictive, and I would note that all these points come into play at the same time, even when the player isn't playing:

1. Audio Memory
   Players remember how their past performances sounded. This is not only a reminder of GH's existence when players aren't playing, but also if a track from GH is played back in the player's mind they will also hear any mistakes that they made the last time they played that track and this reminds them that they could have done better, but also there is a nature in people to have a dislike for broken audio. It is well known that given a choice between broken audio or broken video, people will always choose the broken video as the broken audio is almost painful for people to listen to.



2. Muscle Memory
   The memory of GH tracks is enforced by a memory of the muscle movements used while playing each track.



3. Visual Memory
   All notes played have different visual patterns and all songs all have very different visual queues. It would be possible to identify any track from the game simply by showing someone a screenshot of a track being played or even just by showing a diagram of the notes from just a section of a track. This together with the two previous points (Audio and Muscle) means that the memory of each track is remembered in more then one part of the brain and thus by the basis of the Loci system easier to remember than if each track was just audio.



4. Instant Feedback
   Just like any good game GH provides feedback on how the player is doing, but because mistakes are so immediately communicated to the player by way of broken audio the game has a disciplining effect on the player (almost like Aversion Therapy for playing wrong notes).



5. Rewards
   There is a store in GH where the player can buy items with money they have earned by playing well.
   The XBox360 version contains Achievements & Gamer Points which can be shown and compared with friends online.
   And there is a star system where each track has a star rating listed next to it on the track selection screen that the player sees before and after each track is played, that directly communicates to the player how successfully the player has played all the notes in that particular track. The star ratings are particularly rewarding in that they are clearly visible, directly related the player's performance on each individual track providing micro-feedback on game performance and once a player has completed a song with 100% accuracy, the stars will turn gold, which gives some added visual satisfaction as it makes the track standout on the track list and communicates to the player that they have mastered that track (and have heard the track played from start to finish without mistakes).



6. Satisfaction (Rewards Continued)
   Upon completing any track the crowed in the game cheers the player on with the player's avatar looking very rockstar on stage, this adds to the narrative of the game that the players has just successfully played a great performance for an audience. This is opposed to if the player had failed a track where the crowed will boo and the player will be pulled from the stage early, not being allowed to complete the track.



7. Encouragement
   Again with the monetary value of items in the game's Store that the player must save up for and the star reward system, the game encourages the player to improve their performances. There is even a practise mode that the player is encouraged to use to perfect songs with.



8. Difficulty Scaling
   Difficulty in GH increases gradually, this communicates to the player that they are getting better as they complete and re-complete tracks that where previously just outside of their skill level. This is opposed to allowing the player to play all tracks in the game at the very start of the game and this would mean that the player might not realise that they are improving, especially once they have played through all the tracks once. Plus GH has four basic difficulty settings that each has a track list with a list of star ratings that is all kept very separate from each other.

There might be other aspects of the game like the controller, the colour system and the player knowing some of the tracks before playing GH that makes the game addictive, but it is clear that GH has many elements that means players will keep coming back and the developers have done their best to capitalise all aspects of this.

Minor Vindication on Game Difficulty

Back in the early 90's I always believed that games where too hard and now with the released of Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting (that's the first version of SF that allowed special moves to be preformed in mid-air) on XBox Live Arcade the SF Forum on XBox.com if full of people complaining how difficult the game is. I played the trial version earlier, it is exactly as I remember it and I still barely get past the first opponent on easy.

Sometimes when playing games from that period I feel like it is only me that had a problem with them, but people complaining about SF being too difficult makes me feel a whole lot better.

It's funny how a lot of people complain how easy newer games are. Making a game very difficult was ok in the 80's where a game world consisted of just one level, but not now with large free roaming environments. The necessity of limiting a player's exploration no-longer exists so games can be made more fun by lowering the difficulty and allowing the player to explore the virtual environment that has been created for the game. Through this they can discover a lot of small nuances about the game and follow deep storylines.

This however makes old-school gamers feel somewhat frustrated because they aren't used to playing games where they aren't dieing every nine seconds. Well boo hoo to them, viva la revolution. No-longer do I have to play the same level day in and day out just to get my moneys worth from a title. I can actually sit down and follow the plot from start to finish and games actually HAVE plots now!
Ok difficulty balancing is a fine art, certainly the end boss in a game should be hard and the start of the game should be easy, but those days where everybody had three lives to complete a game with is dead, gone and good riddance.

half-Real by Jesper Juul

So a few weeks ago I finished reading half-Real and it took me a while to get around to writing about it because I had other stuff going on, but now I have finished reading it I can tell you that it is an excellent introduction to the field of video game theory. The book represents Jesper's Ph.D research into how the fictional and rule based elements of games exist as separate elements and then how they interact with each other to create the wonderful graphical gaming experience that we know and love today.

The title of the book half-Real, is a statement about game characters. The Queen character in chess is both a fictional character and part of the rules. So is not fully rule based (real) or fully fictional (not real).

A lot of what he talks about is very academic, but I didn't find fault in any of his arguments as he always backs-up his statements or discusses alternative viewpoints. Unlike A Theory of Fun where statements are made and then never discussed or where the reader is asked to make several big leaps of faith, half-Real has loads of references all the way through and I have since bought a few of the books Jesper references.

Normally when reading a book like this I will be writing notes and arguing points all the way though the book, but with this I only have about five markers, all highlighting very statements on Jasper's part which I found poinient.

Simply put, if you want to be able to talk about games on an academic level then you need to read this book. It covers the whole academic debate of what games are, and nicely defines, points out and discusses some of the sticking point of modern gaming debates around gameplay and narrative.
5/5