September 12
May 27, 2007
So I've recently taken on a small 'serious games' project, my first of the type. And I've started doing some research.
It all starts with... what the heck does 'serious games' mean, anyway?
Well from my very limited, outsider's perspective, I'm going to give it a try.
Ludemes
'Ludeme' is a pseudo-Latin word derived from "ludus" (Latin for "game"). This term has been coined and adopted by academics looking for a framework to study games, most notably Jesper Juul and Gonzalo Fresca. Using the Latin tradition, a "ludeme" would be a basic, core element of a game, such as how a "phoneme" is a basic element used to construct spoken language. Games are then constructed out of a variety and collection of ludemes (we often call this "game mechanics") to create the engaging, interactive experience.
Ludology, then, is the study of these ludemes, and how they come together to form a game, and to form the meaning that a game contains for its user. A direct contrast would be 'narratology' (another invented term), which is the study of meaning constructed from narrative. Much education in the humanities is focused on meaning derived from narrative, and rightly so. Narrative is unquestionably one of the most powerful and important ways the species has understood its world.
It's tempting I think, because narrative is usually the first and most powerful way we come to understand meaning, to apply narratological structures of understanding to any medium. Understanding musical "ideas" requires a study into unfamiliar territory, and the creation of a somewhat artificial language (which, interestingly, is a blend of narrative and mathematical languages) to describe the ideas. But we have become accustomed to the notion of "ideas" being present in music which have relevance and meaning, but no particular narrative content.
Especially since abstraction took real hold in visual arts, the same can be said for these disciplines. It's impossible to look with an open mind at a Pollock painting and not see meaning and ideas (as it turns out, Pollock's splatters were discovered many years after his death to be almost perfectly mathematically fractal). Yet, there is certainly no story to a Pollock painting, or a Kandinsky, or Jasper Johns...
So, we have ludemes to describe ideas in games outside of narrative.
This does not mean that narrative and games are necessarily a poor mix. Like music has opera, and painting has Broadway Boogie Woogie, games very frequently have engaging stories, and this is a good thing. But this is not the fundamental element of a game.
Serious Games are about Ludemes
Which leads me, in a roundabout way, to talk about what serious games are, or at least my simple understanding of what they might be. Serious games are using these ludemes to express or communicate ideas other than just entertainment.
Serious Games are not Simulators
I'm on a judging committee for an annual game design award, and this past year, the Microsoft Flight Simulator was submitted for consideration. After some discussion, we concluded that the flight sim, though immensely impressive in execution, is ultimately not a game. Though aspects were added to this year's version to make it more of a game, notably a 'mission' structure, it still didn't meet the threshold. Which I suppose begs the question, what is a game after all?
Games and simulators work on very different areas of the brain, and are distinct. An interesting point on this was made recently by a study by Dr. James Rosser who discovered that playing commercial videogames was actually a better predictor of good performance in laparoscopic surgery than even past experience. Clearly the games work in a special way on the brain.
I believe that games work in this way because of their encouragement of experimentation and risk-taking. Think for example of familiar board games like Monopoly or Chess. These games are abstract simulations of a capitalist economy, and a complex battlefield. But because they are played in the context of a game, the players can experiment and take risks in a way that is discouraged in a simulator.
Games and Bad Behavior
Games also allow the player to do things which would be considered inappropriate in real life, and even in a simulator environment. So though the excesses of Grand Theft Auto immediately come to mind, there is an opportunity as well to do things that are outside of the bounds in a different way.
A game I've been really impressed by is Defcon: Everybody Dies. In this game - not coincidentally similar to the old movie Wargames, the player engages in the remarkably bad behavior of planning for a nuclear annihilation. Attempting to get a high score at this game gives one an eerie sense of how seductive planning for an actual nuclear exchange must be.
More recently, I discovered September 12, which is pitched as a 'newsgame'. Though the game is four years old, it's certainly still relevant. This game plays something like an interactive political cartoon - it takes a strong point of view that belligerent response to terrorists tends to lead to destruction, death, and moreover, more terrorists. You might agree or disagree, but that's the whole point - it's a game which has a point of view, and this point of view is communicated via the ludemes of the game. Here are some examples:
- There is a substantial delay between the launch of the missile and its strike, allowing civilians to cross into the path of the missile. At first this causes you to curse the civilians, then you realize they're just wandering, going about their business. Very effective.
- I discovered that a good strategy is to level the buildings, so that you don't kill civilians who are occluded behind the buildings. Definitely a political point behind that ludeme.
- The latency between attacks (clearly communicated using a stopwatch metaphor) forces the player to listen to the disturbing crying woman audio, and to watch the generation of new terrorists.
- I found that another good strategy if you really wanted to kill terrorists was just to try to make the whole population terrorists. Then you could shoot away and pretty much only hit terrorists. Hmm.
Games are Still Entertainment
Like I said, this is all new to me, and I'm curious to learn more. But I find these examples fascinating, because they go far beyond just applying game technology to known simulator problems. It seems to me that the best way to understand the difference between simulators and serious games is to remember that games are entertainment, and that entertainment succeeds when it has a point of view... an author. And it turns out that games are surprisingly good at communicating certain ideas, especially raw sort of emotional ideas, that are unclouded by character or story or other narrative inclusions.
Good stuff.
It all starts with... what the heck does 'serious games' mean, anyway?
Well from my very limited, outsider's perspective, I'm going to give it a try.
Ludemes
'Ludeme' is a pseudo-Latin word derived from "ludus" (Latin for "game"). This term has been coined and adopted by academics looking for a framework to study games, most notably Jesper Juul and Gonzalo Fresca. Using the Latin tradition, a "ludeme" would be a basic, core element of a game, such as how a "phoneme" is a basic element used to construct spoken language. Games are then constructed out of a variety and collection of ludemes (we often call this "game mechanics") to create the engaging, interactive experience.
Ludology, then, is the study of these ludemes, and how they come together to form a game, and to form the meaning that a game contains for its user. A direct contrast would be 'narratology' (another invented term), which is the study of meaning constructed from narrative. Much education in the humanities is focused on meaning derived from narrative, and rightly so. Narrative is unquestionably one of the most powerful and important ways the species has understood its world.
It's tempting I think, because narrative is usually the first and most powerful way we come to understand meaning, to apply narratological structures of understanding to any medium. Understanding musical "ideas" requires a study into unfamiliar territory, and the creation of a somewhat artificial language (which, interestingly, is a blend of narrative and mathematical languages) to describe the ideas. But we have become accustomed to the notion of "ideas" being present in music which have relevance and meaning, but no particular narrative content.
Especially since abstraction took real hold in visual arts, the same can be said for these disciplines. It's impossible to look with an open mind at a Pollock painting and not see meaning and ideas (as it turns out, Pollock's splatters were discovered many years after his death to be almost perfectly mathematically fractal). Yet, there is certainly no story to a Pollock painting, or a Kandinsky, or Jasper Johns...
So, we have ludemes to describe ideas in games outside of narrative.
This does not mean that narrative and games are necessarily a poor mix. Like music has opera, and painting has Broadway Boogie Woogie, games very frequently have engaging stories, and this is a good thing. But this is not the fundamental element of a game.
Serious Games are about Ludemes
Which leads me, in a roundabout way, to talk about what serious games are, or at least my simple understanding of what they might be. Serious games are using these ludemes to express or communicate ideas other than just entertainment.
Serious Games are not Simulators
I'm on a judging committee for an annual game design award, and this past year, the Microsoft Flight Simulator was submitted for consideration. After some discussion, we concluded that the flight sim, though immensely impressive in execution, is ultimately not a game. Though aspects were added to this year's version to make it more of a game, notably a 'mission' structure, it still didn't meet the threshold. Which I suppose begs the question, what is a game after all?
Games and simulators work on very different areas of the brain, and are distinct. An interesting point on this was made recently by a study by Dr. James Rosser who discovered that playing commercial videogames was actually a better predictor of good performance in laparoscopic surgery than even past experience. Clearly the games work in a special way on the brain.
I believe that games work in this way because of their encouragement of experimentation and risk-taking. Think for example of familiar board games like Monopoly or Chess. These games are abstract simulations of a capitalist economy, and a complex battlefield. But because they are played in the context of a game, the players can experiment and take risks in a way that is discouraged in a simulator.
Games and Bad Behavior
Games also allow the player to do things which would be considered inappropriate in real life, and even in a simulator environment. So though the excesses of Grand Theft Auto immediately come to mind, there is an opportunity as well to do things that are outside of the bounds in a different way.
A game I've been really impressed by is Defcon: Everybody Dies. In this game - not coincidentally similar to the old movie Wargames, the player engages in the remarkably bad behavior of planning for a nuclear annihilation. Attempting to get a high score at this game gives one an eerie sense of how seductive planning for an actual nuclear exchange must be.
More recently, I discovered September 12, which is pitched as a 'newsgame'. Though the game is four years old, it's certainly still relevant. This game plays something like an interactive political cartoon - it takes a strong point of view that belligerent response to terrorists tends to lead to destruction, death, and moreover, more terrorists. You might agree or disagree, but that's the whole point - it's a game which has a point of view, and this point of view is communicated via the ludemes of the game. Here are some examples:
- There is a substantial delay between the launch of the missile and its strike, allowing civilians to cross into the path of the missile. At first this causes you to curse the civilians, then you realize they're just wandering, going about their business. Very effective.
- I discovered that a good strategy is to level the buildings, so that you don't kill civilians who are occluded behind the buildings. Definitely a political point behind that ludeme.
- The latency between attacks (clearly communicated using a stopwatch metaphor) forces the player to listen to the disturbing crying woman audio, and to watch the generation of new terrorists.
- I found that another good strategy if you really wanted to kill terrorists was just to try to make the whole population terrorists. Then you could shoot away and pretty much only hit terrorists. Hmm.
Games are Still Entertainment
Like I said, this is all new to me, and I'm curious to learn more. But I find these examples fascinating, because they go far beyond just applying game technology to known simulator problems. It seems to me that the best way to understand the difference between simulators and serious games is to remember that games are entertainment, and that entertainment succeeds when it has a point of view... an author. And it turns out that games are surprisingly good at communicating certain ideas, especially raw sort of emotional ideas, that are unclouded by character or story or other narrative inclusions.
Good stuff.
|
Loco Roco
Oct 11, 2006
Loco Roco
I Love Loco Roco
I love Loco Roco. I'm sure it will be overlooked for a wide variety of reasons - simplistic controls, 2D graphics, stuck on an unpopular handheld... but it's a very well-designed game. The controls are fantastic (the hysteresis on the world-tilt is perfect), and the use of the Loco Roco character is very well done. Camera zoom is used to excellent effect (the levels must be vector graphics!) I love the way secrets are placed, and the level design is rock solid and well-paced.
My complaint from a pure design standpoint is that the game tends to get myopic in its focus. There's not much layered gameplay; instead each level seems to have a mechanic which is beaten to death, then the next level moves on to an entirely new mechanic. For instance I would love to have re-used the little character that vacuums Loco up and spits him when the button is pressed, but it occurs only once in the whole first world! Crazy! And what about the enemies? It seems like we're getting into enemies, then they just disappear. How come it takes until the fifth or sixth level to actually get some switch puzzles? In short, the game was not well-designed fractally from a macro design point of view.
This game totally hooked my 4 year-old daughter. I originally let her play obviously because of the theming, and also because of the kid-friendly control scheme. But she had much more fun with it than I ever imagined - not least because she was able to have great success (though she got very few of the secrets). With her limited ability, she was still able to play, yet I also found it interesting and challenging. I think that's a nicely scaleable game.
Listen Up!
Loco Roco also must be considered in the area of sound design. I guess the music, you love or hate (I love it), but you have to respect how the effects are used, to indicate presence of various challenges, and how the music matches the feel of each level. And do you notice how Loco Roco sings along with the music? And how Loco's voice becomes polyphonic when split into pieces? That's just cool stuff, and in a way that really expands the feel of the game.
A Missed Opportunity
I think that Loco Roco's biggest problem is "what might have been." The macro design issues above handicap the game, and it just doesn't quite have the je ne sais quoi of Katamari Damacy (which combined ultimate quirkiness with what I view as one of my favorite examples of emergence in gaming). The meta 'loco house' game, which should have been a nice reward for finding secrets, is mostly exasperating, and the control applied to the analog stick for this activity is downright poor.
And it must be said, the Al Jolson - styled enemies do strike me as racist. This is just a shame.
Also, watch anybody play Loco Roco, and it immediately feels tragic that Sony put that motion sensing technology in the PS3 controller instead of in the PSP where it belongs. What a game Loco could have been, with sensors reading the player's tilt of the machine! What a machine that would be!
But Loco Roco's biggest missed opportunity is that it's sold as a full price UMD game, which is clearly the wrong way to sell this kind of game in an era of emerging digital distribution. It raises entirely the wrong expectations for the player - players don't pay the big bucks for a game that's fun and well-designed. Players pay the big bucks for a game that provides an engrossing, holistic experience. We need to learn this, and fast - that Katamari was the last of a dying breed (simple, quirky game sold on a disc at your local Gamestop), not the harbinger of something new to come. The future belongs more to Jenova Chen's Flow (http://intihuatani.usc.edu/cloud/flowing/): digitally distributed, cross-platform, and cheap (or even free) than it does to Loco Roco.
So, wait til Loco Roco comes out on 'greatest hits', or better yet is made part of Sony's digital download initiative (which, sadly, I fear may never come to PSP). Then, by all means, pick it up.
I Love Loco Roco
I love Loco Roco. I'm sure it will be overlooked for a wide variety of reasons - simplistic controls, 2D graphics, stuck on an unpopular handheld... but it's a very well-designed game. The controls are fantastic (the hysteresis on the world-tilt is perfect), and the use of the Loco Roco character is very well done. Camera zoom is used to excellent effect (the levels must be vector graphics!) I love the way secrets are placed, and the level design is rock solid and well-paced.
My complaint from a pure design standpoint is that the game tends to get myopic in its focus. There's not much layered gameplay; instead each level seems to have a mechanic which is beaten to death, then the next level moves on to an entirely new mechanic. For instance I would love to have re-used the little character that vacuums Loco up and spits him when the button is pressed, but it occurs only once in the whole first world! Crazy! And what about the enemies? It seems like we're getting into enemies, then they just disappear. How come it takes until the fifth or sixth level to actually get some switch puzzles? In short, the game was not well-designed fractally from a macro design point of view.
This game totally hooked my 4 year-old daughter. I originally let her play obviously because of the theming, and also because of the kid-friendly control scheme. But she had much more fun with it than I ever imagined - not least because she was able to have great success (though she got very few of the secrets). With her limited ability, she was still able to play, yet I also found it interesting and challenging. I think that's a nicely scaleable game.
Listen Up!
Loco Roco also must be considered in the area of sound design. I guess the music, you love or hate (I love it), but you have to respect how the effects are used, to indicate presence of various challenges, and how the music matches the feel of each level. And do you notice how Loco Roco sings along with the music? And how Loco's voice becomes polyphonic when split into pieces? That's just cool stuff, and in a way that really expands the feel of the game.
A Missed Opportunity
I think that Loco Roco's biggest problem is "what might have been." The macro design issues above handicap the game, and it just doesn't quite have the je ne sais quoi of Katamari Damacy (which combined ultimate quirkiness with what I view as one of my favorite examples of emergence in gaming). The meta 'loco house' game, which should have been a nice reward for finding secrets, is mostly exasperating, and the control applied to the analog stick for this activity is downright poor.
And it must be said, the Al Jolson - styled enemies do strike me as racist. This is just a shame.
Also, watch anybody play Loco Roco, and it immediately feels tragic that Sony put that motion sensing technology in the PS3 controller instead of in the PSP where it belongs. What a game Loco could have been, with sensors reading the player's tilt of the machine! What a machine that would be!
But Loco Roco's biggest missed opportunity is that it's sold as a full price UMD game, which is clearly the wrong way to sell this kind of game in an era of emerging digital distribution. It raises entirely the wrong expectations for the player - players don't pay the big bucks for a game that's fun and well-designed. Players pay the big bucks for a game that provides an engrossing, holistic experience. We need to learn this, and fast - that Katamari was the last of a dying breed (simple, quirky game sold on a disc at your local Gamestop), not the harbinger of something new to come. The future belongs more to Jenova Chen's Flow (http://intihuatani.usc.edu/cloud/flowing/): digitally distributed, cross-platform, and cheap (or even free) than it does to Loco Roco.
So, wait til Loco Roco comes out on 'greatest hits', or better yet is made part of Sony's digital download initiative (which, sadly, I fear may never come to PSP). Then, by all means, pick it up.
Fantasy Football
Sep 19, 2006
Oops, missed a week. Why? Fantasy Football, that's why.
Without question, Fantasy Football is the most enduring game in my life. I just kicked off season 13 of the Great and Mighty Yaks. Thirteen years, of mostly the same people, who see each other exactly once a year, doing this thing. It's kind of amazing.
The Sports MMO
Over the years I've been invited to play in leagues with people I didn't know, and a couple times I've done it, but it's never been very satisfying and I've never stuck with it. Fantasy Football for me is all about playing with people that I know, communicating with them regularly, and participating in this little community we have.
But there's more than that too. It's not like we just get together and set up some game and play it, like a game of Diplomacy would be for instance. There's this other wild card, which is the statistical backdrop for the game, the NFL. On any given weekend, my act of watching a game or two (I used to watch a lot more, but life has intervened...) allows me to track the progress of the Yaks, but in so doing unites me with every other player (close to 35 million, by some estimates!) who "plays" fantasy NFL.
In sort of a weird way, fantasy sports are overwhelmingly the biggest, most mainstream MMORPG going.
Fantasy Sports and the Internet (part one, History)
For anyone wondering whether online is an important part of the "next generation" equation, a hard look at the progress of fantasy sports would sure be instructive.
Fantasy sports predate the popularity of the internet by a wide margin. Depending on who you ask, fantasy sports date back as far as 1962, when several members of the Raiders football organization and local sports media created a league. "Rotisserie" baseball, a fantasy baseball scheme, was created in 1980 by a group of New York writers (sports and otherwise) who met weekly at a restaurant called La Rotisserie Francaise (thus the name - how's that for some trivia for ya?).
Regardless, fantasy sports were a fringe activity, restricted to the most hardcore of sports and/or simulation fans. Unsurprisingly, sportswriters were the core demographic. When fantasy football was first suggested to me back in 1993, I had never heard of it. But it sounded fun, so a group of friends gathered over a lunch hour, did a draft, and I was elected commissioner. The rest is history.
That first year, I did all the scoring using the box scores found in the Los Angeles Times. I did the scoring by hand, and wrote up the results on a sheet of paper that I then photocopied and distributed to the league members. It was primitive, but really fun. We were hooked. Among other things, it was our "little secret", because nobody we knew understood what the hell we were doing with all our little sheets of paper and lunchtime discussions.
A couple years on, I discovered that Compuserve had somehow gotten the rights to publish raw NFL stats as text files as part of their online service. Seeing opportunity, I started downloading these stats and running them through a filemaker database, which made my scoring faster and more accurate, and also allowed me to publish statistical analytics for the whole league - still on photocopied paper of course.
Then, the internet hit.
Fantasy Sports and the Internet (part two, The Explosion)
When I first registered the domain pmffl.org (the "Philips Memorial Fantasy Football League"), I just started throwing up html files. There were no online services - yet. Eventually I wrote a proper back-end suite of applications to run the site, but meanwhile, the likes of ESPN, Yahoo, and CBS Sportsline were catching on. The game was afoot.
The internet did two things to enable the explosion of fantasy sports.
Enabling of Community
With the ability to set up message boards, create team identities, and generally to do all the stuff we associate with online presence now in the age of myspace and blogs, players are able to really infuse their fantasy sports endeavours with personality and community. Trash talk is one of the longest standing and most important traditions of fantasy sports, and the message board is the perfect vehicle for this.
In our league, several teams have taken on entire identities, exploited through online postings. My team, the Great and Mighty Yaks, takes a spiritual approach, praising top performers for their excellence in meditation as well as touchdown catches. Team 180 is famous as a ruthless corporate entity. One team fired one of it's co-owners this season, and replaced him with HAL-9000. Perhaps most famously, the now-defunct Oscar Wilde Cardinals once dedicated its entire season to Peter Tork, the unfairly neglected member of The Monkees.
Community makes the league fun and enduring. Every summer, when I send out the obligatory "are you guys in?" email, I get responses like "fuck yeah I'm in" or "dude, don't insult me. of course I'm in." While we do meet in person once per year (for the draft), this group of guys is spread all over and has gone very different ways (one even works for the Fantasy Football program at Foxsports.com). The internet keeps us together.
Ease of Play and Participant Parity
That's us though. My league is filled with really hardcore players (we use a convoluted "keeper" rule system which forces players to use multi-year strategies). You don't get to tens of millions of players if the game is only appealing to the hardcore player. In this area, the internet has played an even more pivotal role.
It's So Easy
Unlike in 1993, players can now use interactive websites to do their roster management with a few simple clicks while waiting for a meeting at work, or before bed at night. Adjusting your roster, proposing a trade, or hunting the waiver wire are made ridiculously easy by connected databases with slick interfaces. I've struggled mightily to have the pmffl website keep up with this (pride prevents me from succumbing to the allure of the pay services). But it's been fun and worth it, and I've learned a lot about interface design (not to mention programming in four different languages, all self-taught for this project).
The pay services have live draft software now, so you don't even have to be present for a draft. With the incredible ease of use provided to modern fantasy sports players, it's not uncommon for players to participate in 2, 3 or more leagues all in the same season. And with the exception of arrogant masochists such as myself, it no longer requires much effort on the part of the "commissioner" either - most of the time the commissioner is now just the guy who invites the players, and the online service handles the rest.
The Field Has Been Leveled
Lastly though, and most importantly, the fantasy sports field has been leveled by the internet, and if you have any interest in reaching the casual enthusiast market for any game, this is a very important message. In the earlier days of fantasy sports, information imbalances were common between players, based on those who were able to do the most research or find out key statistics in a timely fashion. It wasn't inherently unfair, unless a player really had an inside source (one of our players had a brother who was a star linebacker on the 49ers, which wasn't maybe entirely fair). However, it meant that there was a linear relationship between a player's resourcefulness and investment of time, and his success. And this is the very definition of a "hardcore" game.
Let me state that again. It can't be said clearly enough.
If you want to limit your game to the hardcore, create a linear relationship between a player's effort and success.
The internet changed all that for fantasy sports.
Back in the 1990s, the Yaks had a dynasty. My team won three straight championships, and contended for two others. That's because, along with my partner Al Hastings, we were very hardcore players. We dredged stats, put them into spreadsheets, and geeked over them for hours. For instance we discovered that the most important predictor of a wide receiver or tight end's future success was catches, not yards or scores. Similarly for runningbacks it was carries. (Both of these statistics have subsequently been combined and improved to the concept of looks, which includes incomplete as well as complete passes thrown to a player.) We were hardcore, and we kicked ass.
The decline of the Yaks however coincided with the internet's movement into the fantasy sports realm. The availability of information on the internet made statistics less opaque, and our opponents could use statistics easily and readily to do their own analysis. Also a proliferation of "experts" found a voice on the internet, further fueling the player's capability to make clever, forward-looking decisions.
In my opinion, this freedom of information, this leveling of the playing field, is the single most important factor in the explosion of the popularity of fantasy sports. With all players now able to access statistics and analysis readily and easily (including the newest trend, the 'wisdom of the crowds' analysis of which players are most picked up or dropped), every player feels like he has a fair shake at the beginning of the season. And even more importantly, a player can have success without having to lose his job for spending so much time at his desk poring over statistics, or having his wife and kids disown him for painstakingly flipping through every single game all day on Sunday.
Bear that in mind. Sure World of Warcraft is outrageously popular. But its philosophy is still hardcore. This is not a criticism, but let's not kid ourselves - if reaching a real mainstream is important to you, fantasy football is a much better case study than WoW.
I'm Back Now
I've got pmffl.org back in good shape now, and since I'm not nearly the hardcore player I used to be, I have time to get back to my regularly scheduled Wednesday postings. Thanks for your patience.
And...
...All Hail the Great and Mighty Yaks!
Without question, Fantasy Football is the most enduring game in my life. I just kicked off season 13 of the Great and Mighty Yaks. Thirteen years, of mostly the same people, who see each other exactly once a year, doing this thing. It's kind of amazing.
The Sports MMO
Over the years I've been invited to play in leagues with people I didn't know, and a couple times I've done it, but it's never been very satisfying and I've never stuck with it. Fantasy Football for me is all about playing with people that I know, communicating with them regularly, and participating in this little community we have.
But there's more than that too. It's not like we just get together and set up some game and play it, like a game of Diplomacy would be for instance. There's this other wild card, which is the statistical backdrop for the game, the NFL. On any given weekend, my act of watching a game or two (I used to watch a lot more, but life has intervened...) allows me to track the progress of the Yaks, but in so doing unites me with every other player (close to 35 million, by some estimates!) who "plays" fantasy NFL.
In sort of a weird way, fantasy sports are overwhelmingly the biggest, most mainstream MMORPG going.
Fantasy Sports and the Internet (part one, History)
For anyone wondering whether online is an important part of the "next generation" equation, a hard look at the progress of fantasy sports would sure be instructive.
Fantasy sports predate the popularity of the internet by a wide margin. Depending on who you ask, fantasy sports date back as far as 1962, when several members of the Raiders football organization and local sports media created a league. "Rotisserie" baseball, a fantasy baseball scheme, was created in 1980 by a group of New York writers (sports and otherwise) who met weekly at a restaurant called La Rotisserie Francaise (thus the name - how's that for some trivia for ya?).
Regardless, fantasy sports were a fringe activity, restricted to the most hardcore of sports and/or simulation fans. Unsurprisingly, sportswriters were the core demographic. When fantasy football was first suggested to me back in 1993, I had never heard of it. But it sounded fun, so a group of friends gathered over a lunch hour, did a draft, and I was elected commissioner. The rest is history.
That first year, I did all the scoring using the box scores found in the Los Angeles Times. I did the scoring by hand, and wrote up the results on a sheet of paper that I then photocopied and distributed to the league members. It was primitive, but really fun. We were hooked. Among other things, it was our "little secret", because nobody we knew understood what the hell we were doing with all our little sheets of paper and lunchtime discussions.
A couple years on, I discovered that Compuserve had somehow gotten the rights to publish raw NFL stats as text files as part of their online service. Seeing opportunity, I started downloading these stats and running them through a filemaker database, which made my scoring faster and more accurate, and also allowed me to publish statistical analytics for the whole league - still on photocopied paper of course.
Then, the internet hit.
Fantasy Sports and the Internet (part two, The Explosion)
When I first registered the domain pmffl.org (the "Philips Memorial Fantasy Football League"), I just started throwing up html files. There were no online services - yet. Eventually I wrote a proper back-end suite of applications to run the site, but meanwhile, the likes of ESPN, Yahoo, and CBS Sportsline were catching on. The game was afoot.
The internet did two things to enable the explosion of fantasy sports.
Enabling of Community
With the ability to set up message boards, create team identities, and generally to do all the stuff we associate with online presence now in the age of myspace and blogs, players are able to really infuse their fantasy sports endeavours with personality and community. Trash talk is one of the longest standing and most important traditions of fantasy sports, and the message board is the perfect vehicle for this.
In our league, several teams have taken on entire identities, exploited through online postings. My team, the Great and Mighty Yaks, takes a spiritual approach, praising top performers for their excellence in meditation as well as touchdown catches. Team 180 is famous as a ruthless corporate entity. One team fired one of it's co-owners this season, and replaced him with HAL-9000. Perhaps most famously, the now-defunct Oscar Wilde Cardinals once dedicated its entire season to Peter Tork, the unfairly neglected member of The Monkees.
Community makes the league fun and enduring. Every summer, when I send out the obligatory "are you guys in?" email, I get responses like "fuck yeah I'm in" or "dude, don't insult me. of course I'm in." While we do meet in person once per year (for the draft), this group of guys is spread all over and has gone very different ways (one even works for the Fantasy Football program at Foxsports.com). The internet keeps us together.
Ease of Play and Participant Parity
That's us though. My league is filled with really hardcore players (we use a convoluted "keeper" rule system which forces players to use multi-year strategies). You don't get to tens of millions of players if the game is only appealing to the hardcore player. In this area, the internet has played an even more pivotal role.
It's So Easy
Unlike in 1993, players can now use interactive websites to do their roster management with a few simple clicks while waiting for a meeting at work, or before bed at night. Adjusting your roster, proposing a trade, or hunting the waiver wire are made ridiculously easy by connected databases with slick interfaces. I've struggled mightily to have the pmffl website keep up with this (pride prevents me from succumbing to the allure of the pay services). But it's been fun and worth it, and I've learned a lot about interface design (not to mention programming in four different languages, all self-taught for this project).
The pay services have live draft software now, so you don't even have to be present for a draft. With the incredible ease of use provided to modern fantasy sports players, it's not uncommon for players to participate in 2, 3 or more leagues all in the same season. And with the exception of arrogant masochists such as myself, it no longer requires much effort on the part of the "commissioner" either - most of the time the commissioner is now just the guy who invites the players, and the online service handles the rest.
The Field Has Been Leveled
Lastly though, and most importantly, the fantasy sports field has been leveled by the internet, and if you have any interest in reaching the casual enthusiast market for any game, this is a very important message. In the earlier days of fantasy sports, information imbalances were common between players, based on those who were able to do the most research or find out key statistics in a timely fashion. It wasn't inherently unfair, unless a player really had an inside source (one of our players had a brother who was a star linebacker on the 49ers, which wasn't maybe entirely fair). However, it meant that there was a linear relationship between a player's resourcefulness and investment of time, and his success. And this is the very definition of a "hardcore" game.
Let me state that again. It can't be said clearly enough.
If you want to limit your game to the hardcore, create a linear relationship between a player's effort and success.
The internet changed all that for fantasy sports.
Back in the 1990s, the Yaks had a dynasty. My team won three straight championships, and contended for two others. That's because, along with my partner Al Hastings, we were very hardcore players. We dredged stats, put them into spreadsheets, and geeked over them for hours. For instance we discovered that the most important predictor of a wide receiver or tight end's future success was catches, not yards or scores. Similarly for runningbacks it was carries. (Both of these statistics have subsequently been combined and improved to the concept of looks, which includes incomplete as well as complete passes thrown to a player.) We were hardcore, and we kicked ass.
The decline of the Yaks however coincided with the internet's movement into the fantasy sports realm. The availability of information on the internet made statistics less opaque, and our opponents could use statistics easily and readily to do their own analysis. Also a proliferation of "experts" found a voice on the internet, further fueling the player's capability to make clever, forward-looking decisions.
In my opinion, this freedom of information, this leveling of the playing field, is the single most important factor in the explosion of the popularity of fantasy sports. With all players now able to access statistics and analysis readily and easily (including the newest trend, the 'wisdom of the crowds' analysis of which players are most picked up or dropped), every player feels like he has a fair shake at the beginning of the season. And even more importantly, a player can have success without having to lose his job for spending so much time at his desk poring over statistics, or having his wife and kids disown him for painstakingly flipping through every single game all day on Sunday.
Bear that in mind. Sure World of Warcraft is outrageously popular. But its philosophy is still hardcore. This is not a criticism, but let's not kid ourselves - if reaching a real mainstream is important to you, fantasy football is a much better case study than WoW.
I'm Back Now
I've got pmffl.org back in good shape now, and since I'm not nearly the hardcore player I used to be, I have time to get back to my regularly scheduled Wednesday postings. Thanks for your patience.
And...
...All Hail the Great and Mighty Yaks!
More on Serious Games
Aug 30, 2006
OK I'm an idiot.
This is the third entry in my little 'serious games' obsession (the first two were about my Toyota Prius, and peeing on a target, respectively), and I've been focusing on this idea of the game itself actually modifying behavior in order to affect a good. In this pursuit I encountered a website called gamesforhealth.org, and amongst the comments, found numerous references to something called "DDR." I assumed this was some kind of academic acronym so I kept reading. Then it hit me.
"DDR" = "Dance Dance Revolution".
DUH!
It's pretty clear when you read the postings on gamesforhealth that Dance Dance Revolution is a gold standard for games that actually promote health through play. I remember reading about schools that actually installed DDR machines in their public areas, set on free play, in order to promote at least a bit of exercise among the student body.
Though the net effect of DDR is dead simple (expenditure of calories through exercise), that simplicity is probably the source of its power and effectiveness. It seems to me that the overwhelming majority of "serious games" are pedantic in nature, attempting to teach lessons slightly enhanced by the engaging aspects of interactivity. In my opinion this is only a little better than just producing a nice slick film, and probably not that cost-effective. But getting kids to actually exercise for 30 minutes a day while playing DDR... now that is real, genuine change for health.
I had a conversation about this recently with Noah Falstein, a freelance designer who has been getting a lot of work in the 'serious games' space. Noah is eager to point out that an awful lot of the medical profession is starting to "get it" very rapidly in terms of the power of well-designed interactivity not only for teaching, but also for training. This strikes me as a very interesting idea. Certainly simulators of various types have been around for many years, but combining a simulator with the understanding that a game designer brings in how to create an intuitive and effective teaching system... now that could be a very powerful combination indeed.
Geocaching
Meanwhile, in this month's issue of Horizon Air magazine (question: how pathetic is it to reference an airline magazine?) there is a long article about the extremely popular hobby of 'geocaching'.
If you don't know what geocaching is, it's an incredibly simple concept which is, apparently, quite a lot of fun. The tools are the internet (mostly via a website named, appropriately, geocaching.com), and a handheld GPS receiver. Players look up caches online, plug the cache coordinates into the GPS, and head out into the wilds to find the cache. Once you find it, you can sign a book, trade an item, or just brag to others that you found it.
How popular is geocaching? According to the article, there are 6,600 caches to be found, just in the area of Seattle Washington. Wow.
I certainly find geocaching to be a game. There are very strict rules (particularly in regard to where caches can be placed), there are procedures to be followed, and though it's usually done as a hobby, it is also done very competitively by a cadre of hardcore players who attempt to log the greatest number of cache finds via the websites associated with the sport.
Caches are also graded on difficulty, which takes into account how difficult they are to reach physically, and how diabolically they are hidden. Indeed, many caches provide only clues or puzzles at the published GPS coordinates... to bag the actual cache, the searcher must solve a riddle, puzzle, or other challenge. The best known and most respected cache designers even give names to their puzzles, such as "The Matrix", a difficult and highly anticipated cache documented in the magazine article.
While I'm quite convinced of the qualifications of geocaching as a game (and a game highly enabled by digital technology to boot), I'm not sure how well it passes muster as a "serious game". Especially in places where caching flourishes (the northwest and SF bay area), outdoor recreation is hardly unpopular. Still, it does get people off the sofa, and even out of the house exploring their world and often nature. I rate this a Good Thing.
There Must Be More
I really want to learn about more of this kind of thing. Please email me or comment if you know of any examples!
This is the third entry in my little 'serious games' obsession (the first two were about my Toyota Prius, and peeing on a target, respectively), and I've been focusing on this idea of the game itself actually modifying behavior in order to affect a good. In this pursuit I encountered a website called gamesforhealth.org, and amongst the comments, found numerous references to something called "DDR." I assumed this was some kind of academic acronym so I kept reading. Then it hit me.
"DDR" = "Dance Dance Revolution".
DUH!
It's pretty clear when you read the postings on gamesforhealth that Dance Dance Revolution is a gold standard for games that actually promote health through play. I remember reading about schools that actually installed DDR machines in their public areas, set on free play, in order to promote at least a bit of exercise among the student body.
Though the net effect of DDR is dead simple (expenditure of calories through exercise), that simplicity is probably the source of its power and effectiveness. It seems to me that the overwhelming majority of "serious games" are pedantic in nature, attempting to teach lessons slightly enhanced by the engaging aspects of interactivity. In my opinion this is only a little better than just producing a nice slick film, and probably not that cost-effective. But getting kids to actually exercise for 30 minutes a day while playing DDR... now that is real, genuine change for health.
I had a conversation about this recently with Noah Falstein, a freelance designer who has been getting a lot of work in the 'serious games' space. Noah is eager to point out that an awful lot of the medical profession is starting to "get it" very rapidly in terms of the power of well-designed interactivity not only for teaching, but also for training. This strikes me as a very interesting idea. Certainly simulators of various types have been around for many years, but combining a simulator with the understanding that a game designer brings in how to create an intuitive and effective teaching system... now that could be a very powerful combination indeed.
Geocaching
Meanwhile, in this month's issue of Horizon Air magazine (question: how pathetic is it to reference an airline magazine?) there is a long article about the extremely popular hobby of 'geocaching'.
If you don't know what geocaching is, it's an incredibly simple concept which is, apparently, quite a lot of fun. The tools are the internet (mostly via a website named, appropriately, geocaching.com), and a handheld GPS receiver. Players look up caches online, plug the cache coordinates into the GPS, and head out into the wilds to find the cache. Once you find it, you can sign a book, trade an item, or just brag to others that you found it.
How popular is geocaching? According to the article, there are 6,600 caches to be found, just in the area of Seattle Washington. Wow.
I certainly find geocaching to be a game. There are very strict rules (particularly in regard to where caches can be placed), there are procedures to be followed, and though it's usually done as a hobby, it is also done very competitively by a cadre of hardcore players who attempt to log the greatest number of cache finds via the websites associated with the sport.
Caches are also graded on difficulty, which takes into account how difficult they are to reach physically, and how diabolically they are hidden. Indeed, many caches provide only clues or puzzles at the published GPS coordinates... to bag the actual cache, the searcher must solve a riddle, puzzle, or other challenge. The best known and most respected cache designers even give names to their puzzles, such as "The Matrix", a difficult and highly anticipated cache documented in the magazine article.
While I'm quite convinced of the qualifications of geocaching as a game (and a game highly enabled by digital technology to boot), I'm not sure how well it passes muster as a "serious game". Especially in places where caching flourishes (the northwest and SF bay area), outdoor recreation is hardly unpopular. Still, it does get people off the sofa, and even out of the house exploring their world and often nature. I rate this a Good Thing.
There Must Be More
I really want to learn about more of this kind of thing. Please email me or comment if you know of any examples!
Why are Music Games So Big?
Jun 28, 2006
Something that's kind of been on my mind lately is, why are music-based games so popular and numerous?
As you can imagine this musing has its genesis in picking up Guitar Hero again. That game is just so damn fun.
The first music game I remember playing was a DJ simulator called Beat Mania. This game was first a coin-op in Japan, and eventually came out for the PS1 console. Like Guitar Hero it came with a special controller - this time it was a small keyboard and a rotating disc that was an emulator for scratching an LP record. In many ways, Beat Mania was extremely similar to Guitar Hero. It used a simple, custom plastic controller, notes scrolled up the screen and the player had to try to match it to succeed. The 'turntable' was very similar to the whammy bar and motion sensor in the Guitar Hero controller in usage - the player used it to gain special advantage and points.
Beat Mania was never a big hit here in the US - I had to buy the controller from Japan (and I later lost it - I sure wish I still had that controller), where it did much better, and became the genesis for what Konami has subsequently called the Bemani games.
The seminal music game for me though was definitely Parappa the Rapper. I don't know how this makes me look but I loved that game as I have loved few others. I beat it every possible way imaginable (including all the "freestyle" modes). Something really clicked for me with that game, and its blend of incredibly goofy characters, an almost inhumanly goofy story, and some very catchy music. But none of that would have mattered - I would have watched Parappa once, maybe twice at the most on my iPod Video (if they had had iPod videos back then). But the play of it, the chance for success or failure, the knowledge that my own impeccable sense of rhythm (you gotta believe!) was propelling Parappa toward romance with Sunny, and helping him befriend a rasta frog, pastry cook chicken and of course chop chop master onion, that made it so much fun.
Like I mentioned, I really beat the hell out of Parappa, including the 'freestyle' mode in which the player just tries to fit the rhythm and melody, without strictly following the prescribed sequence. It's hard to do, and there's no possible way to write a strategy guide for how it's done. You just have to really get to digging the tunes, and then it sort of happens.
Hip modern psychologists call this phenomenon "flow". It's a sort of transfer forward of the subconscious into actually controlling our actions. It's been well-demonstrated that "flow" occurs frequently for game players. This was first shown, unsurprisingly, with Tetris, but is now well-understood as a frequently occurring phenomenon in game play. And I'm completely certain that it is a big part of playing music as well. I played a lot of music as a younger person, and I remember having that feeling like it was practically effortless, and the the more effortless playing was, the better it became. It was sort of a superconductivity of expression.
So if games can produce flow, and music thrives on it, I find this marriage ultimately unsurprising.
Games have exploited this convergence in varying ways, and with varying degrees of success. I think the important thing to remember is that music games' popularity with gamers cleaves to much the same rules as ordinary games - the games must have great mechanics, and must also have compelling worlds or characters or other elements to pull the player in to the experience.
An example of a failure in this respect is Tetsuya Mizuguchi's Rez. I personally loved Rez, and it's one of the rare games that I've actually played through start to finish multiple times (three at last count) just for fun. But Rez bombed by sales standards...I think it was outsold even by Mizuguchi's rebelliously niche Space Channel 5 (another music game I beat...sensing a pattern here?). But for as much as I thought Rez ruled, I knew right away it wasn't going to hit a big audience. Mizuguchi was open about trying to create a sort of reverse of the synaesthesia supposedly experienced by painter Wassily Kandinsky (for what it's worth, Rez led me to become a big fan of Kandinsky's art). It's great, but awfully niche, and just being a music game with great mechanics was not going to push the game over the hump. Indeed, Mizuguchi-san refers to Rez as his greatest failure.
Guitar Hero meanwhile continues to sell great, and is now onto its sequel. Alex Rigopolous of developer Harmonix has said that Guitar Hero is not a guitar simulator - it's a rock star simulator. And this is a really key point. A rock star simulator is a great fantasy-fulfillment environment for the player, the same kind of motivation that leads us to play sports simulators, military games etc. It's a hit for this reason.
Anyway back to 'Ziggy Stardust' for me. Man I love music games.
As you can imagine this musing has its genesis in picking up Guitar Hero again. That game is just so damn fun.
The first music game I remember playing was a DJ simulator called Beat Mania. This game was first a coin-op in Japan, and eventually came out for the PS1 console. Like Guitar Hero it came with a special controller - this time it was a small keyboard and a rotating disc that was an emulator for scratching an LP record. In many ways, Beat Mania was extremely similar to Guitar Hero. It used a simple, custom plastic controller, notes scrolled up the screen and the player had to try to match it to succeed. The 'turntable' was very similar to the whammy bar and motion sensor in the Guitar Hero controller in usage - the player used it to gain special advantage and points.
Beat Mania was never a big hit here in the US - I had to buy the controller from Japan (and I later lost it - I sure wish I still had that controller), where it did much better, and became the genesis for what Konami has subsequently called the Bemani games.
The seminal music game for me though was definitely Parappa the Rapper. I don't know how this makes me look but I loved that game as I have loved few others. I beat it every possible way imaginable (including all the "freestyle" modes). Something really clicked for me with that game, and its blend of incredibly goofy characters, an almost inhumanly goofy story, and some very catchy music. But none of that would have mattered - I would have watched Parappa once, maybe twice at the most on my iPod Video (if they had had iPod videos back then). But the play of it, the chance for success or failure, the knowledge that my own impeccable sense of rhythm (you gotta believe!) was propelling Parappa toward romance with Sunny, and helping him befriend a rasta frog, pastry cook chicken and of course chop chop master onion, that made it so much fun.
Like I mentioned, I really beat the hell out of Parappa, including the 'freestyle' mode in which the player just tries to fit the rhythm and melody, without strictly following the prescribed sequence. It's hard to do, and there's no possible way to write a strategy guide for how it's done. You just have to really get to digging the tunes, and then it sort of happens.
Hip modern psychologists call this phenomenon "flow". It's a sort of transfer forward of the subconscious into actually controlling our actions. It's been well-demonstrated that "flow" occurs frequently for game players. This was first shown, unsurprisingly, with Tetris, but is now well-understood as a frequently occurring phenomenon in game play. And I'm completely certain that it is a big part of playing music as well. I played a lot of music as a younger person, and I remember having that feeling like it was practically effortless, and the the more effortless playing was, the better it became. It was sort of a superconductivity of expression.
So if games can produce flow, and music thrives on it, I find this marriage ultimately unsurprising.
Games have exploited this convergence in varying ways, and with varying degrees of success. I think the important thing to remember is that music games' popularity with gamers cleaves to much the same rules as ordinary games - the games must have great mechanics, and must also have compelling worlds or characters or other elements to pull the player in to the experience.
An example of a failure in this respect is Tetsuya Mizuguchi's Rez. I personally loved Rez, and it's one of the rare games that I've actually played through start to finish multiple times (three at last count) just for fun. But Rez bombed by sales standards...I think it was outsold even by Mizuguchi's rebelliously niche Space Channel 5 (another music game I beat...sensing a pattern here?). But for as much as I thought Rez ruled, I knew right away it wasn't going to hit a big audience. Mizuguchi was open about trying to create a sort of reverse of the synaesthesia supposedly experienced by painter Wassily Kandinsky (for what it's worth, Rez led me to become a big fan of Kandinsky's art). It's great, but awfully niche, and just being a music game with great mechanics was not going to push the game over the hump. Indeed, Mizuguchi-san refers to Rez as his greatest failure.
Guitar Hero meanwhile continues to sell great, and is now onto its sequel. Alex Rigopolous of developer Harmonix has said that Guitar Hero is not a guitar simulator - it's a rock star simulator. And this is a really key point. A rock star simulator is a great fantasy-fulfillment environment for the player, the same kind of motivation that leads us to play sports simulators, military games etc. It's a hit for this reason.
Anyway back to 'Ziggy Stardust' for me. Man I love music games.
My Favorite Serious Game: Prius
Jun 12, 2006
About a year ago, faced with a huge excess of driving, I traded in my Audi S4 on a Toyota Prius.
I was pretty bummed about this. The S4 was a very fast car; being able to touch 100MPH in one's daily commute is just plain fun. But it ate a lot of gas, and the green in me could no longer brook the amount of hydrocarbons that came out of the tailpipe. So I got on the waitlist, and picked up a Prius.
Now that I'm in the club of Prius drivers, I know that there is a secret handshake, which is to discuss what mode you like to use the touchscreen display in (or, whether you've rear-ended anyone yet because you were watching the display). This display is a central part of the Prius experience.
For the uninitiated, I'll describe what this is all about. The Prius is a "full hybrid", which means that it can run completely off the gas motor, completely off the electric motor, or any combination of the two. This balance is controlled by a computer running a sophisticated set of algorithms that take into account the current battery charge, the electrical load (from the air conditioner, for instance), current speed, position of the pedals, etc. When Toyota built the Prius, they decided to expose this computer process to the user, using a video display in the center of the dashboard. Along with showing the process, the display shows the current charge of the batteries, and constant real-time updates of fuel economy.
I'd be curious to know why Toyota decided to do this. It's arguably fairly dangerous; I know of at least one person who has had a collision at least in part because of this display. My best guess is that they did it because of the "because we can" factor, and also because they knew it would help push the nerd appeal for the early-adopter set (guilty as charged).
What we have though, is in essence a game. Or what we would call in the current parlance a "serious game".
I've actually been driving cars that had a fuel economy readout for years, starting with a Volkswagen Passat I bought in 1997. But that simple numerical display while amusing for a while didn't have anywhere near the appeal of The Prius Game. The Prius Game is waaay more fun.
First, Prius has a built-in advantage, which is the 'fuzzy' break between the gas and electric modes of transit, and the all-important feature called regenerative braking (how the battery is recharged when you decelerate). A straight gas or electric car would have only part of this functionality.
Second though, Prius has an excellent interface. When you first start driving a Prius, you'll probably find yourself staring at this display a lot:
With its colorful animating arrows and rotating wheels, this display is eye-catching, and also reveals the moment-to-moment decisions the computer is making regarding where to budget the various energy flowing around underneath the hood.
I call this "training mode".
After a few months though, you'll start to learn the computer's tricks, and begin the process of optimization. For optimization, you switch over to this screen:
This mode, which shows history as well as current status, I call "advanced mode."
Now I'd say this driver has a nice high score going. The fact that there's a limited number of little leaf cars present proves that this is not a simple downhill glide. And 88 degrees is pretty hot, meaning that most likely the AC was robbing a few horsepower off the top as well. We're looking at a driver with some skills here folks.
In fact, a quick google search comes up with some great quotes:
"I just ordered a fuel-economy computer that I can plug into my car's ECU. Soon I too will be able to turn driving into a real-life video game." (www.metrompg.com)
"The digital fuel consumption gauge is so prominent, you can't help but try to beat your previous trip's fuel consumption average. Somehow, we don't think Toyota did that by accident." (www.drive.com.au)
"Perhaps even better would be the ability to pull up the "high scores" right on the Prius' in-car display. Perhaps this would be the first actual reality-based driving game." (www.gearbits.com)
There can be little doubt: with its combination of robust gameplay and excellent interface, the Toyota Prius is one of the best designed games on the road today!
This is really important
So, why is this important?
It hit home for me the other day when I had the misfortune of having to drive my family's other car (a very nice Audi A6 wagon) on my normal commute. In my usual "coast spots", I started to decelerate, and realized that I wasn't going to have any chance at all at a high score. And with the Audi's poor gameplay and interface, I couldn't really be bothered to try even for a local high score. So I just said screw it, and drove home with no particular regard for economy.
As soon as I got back in the Prius, I was back on my game though, looking to bust my average above 47.5 (my current norm for an whole tank). And here's the crux of it. Games, with their powerful motivator of FUN, can directly influence behavior. As soon as the Prius made getting fuel economy FUN, I was all over it, and so are the majority of my fellow Prius jockeys.
Most of what I read about "serious games" is games whose ultimate goal is to educate, or provide insight. While this is laudable and probably effective, it's also perfectly achievable through other, non-interactive means. Games however, if designed correctly, can actually directly impact behavior in a manner that we can call a social good. Prius's "game", which has a powerful impact on user behavior in a positive direction (less fuel consumption, less pollution), skips right over the education element, straight to the social good. (This by the way is a lot of why I found Harvey Smith's "Peace Bomb" idea so appealing...it drew people directly to action rather than just trying to be pedantic.)
And I haven't even mentioned the fact that with this nifty entertainment literally right at my fingertips, the stress of commuting has dropped dramatically.
As computers and interactive interfaces are woven deeper and deeper into our surroundings, I think it behooves us to look at these devices frequently in terms of games. Can that electronically managed refrigerator use fun to motivate the diabetic toward a better diet? Can a house's electrical system use fun to encourage its residents to maximize efficiency? Can the phone give you skill points for calling mom a little more often? Sure some of these things are goofy, but I think it all bears consideration. And let's not forget the potential of linking online for an additional motivator, competition.
So yeah, my nomination for Serious Game of the Year: Prius.
I was pretty bummed about this. The S4 was a very fast car; being able to touch 100MPH in one's daily commute is just plain fun. But it ate a lot of gas, and the green in me could no longer brook the amount of hydrocarbons that came out of the tailpipe. So I got on the waitlist, and picked up a Prius.
Now that I'm in the club of Prius drivers, I know that there is a secret handshake, which is to discuss what mode you like to use the touchscreen display in (or, whether you've rear-ended anyone yet because you were watching the display). This display is a central part of the Prius experience.
For the uninitiated, I'll describe what this is all about. The Prius is a "full hybrid", which means that it can run completely off the gas motor, completely off the electric motor, or any combination of the two. This balance is controlled by a computer running a sophisticated set of algorithms that take into account the current battery charge, the electrical load (from the air conditioner, for instance), current speed, position of the pedals, etc. When Toyota built the Prius, they decided to expose this computer process to the user, using a video display in the center of the dashboard. Along with showing the process, the display shows the current charge of the batteries, and constant real-time updates of fuel economy.
I'd be curious to know why Toyota decided to do this. It's arguably fairly dangerous; I know of at least one person who has had a collision at least in part because of this display. My best guess is that they did it because of the "because we can" factor, and also because they knew it would help push the nerd appeal for the early-adopter set (guilty as charged).
What we have though, is in essence a game. Or what we would call in the current parlance a "serious game".
I've actually been driving cars that had a fuel economy readout for years, starting with a Volkswagen Passat I bought in 1997. But that simple numerical display while amusing for a while didn't have anywhere near the appeal of The Prius Game. The Prius Game is waaay more fun.
First, Prius has a built-in advantage, which is the 'fuzzy' break between the gas and electric modes of transit, and the all-important feature called regenerative braking (how the battery is recharged when you decelerate). A straight gas or electric car would have only part of this functionality.
Second though, Prius has an excellent interface. When you first start driving a Prius, you'll probably find yourself staring at this display a lot:
With its colorful animating arrows and rotating wheels, this display is eye-catching, and also reveals the moment-to-moment decisions the computer is making regarding where to budget the various energy flowing around underneath the hood.
I call this "training mode".
After a few months though, you'll start to learn the computer's tricks, and begin the process of optimization. For optimization, you switch over to this screen:
This mode, which shows history as well as current status, I call "advanced mode."
Now I'd say this driver has a nice high score going. The fact that there's a limited number of little leaf cars present proves that this is not a simple downhill glide. And 88 degrees is pretty hot, meaning that most likely the AC was robbing a few horsepower off the top as well. We're looking at a driver with some skills here folks.
In fact, a quick google search comes up with some great quotes:
"I just ordered a fuel-economy computer that I can plug into my car's ECU. Soon I too will be able to turn driving into a real-life video game." (www.metrompg.com)
"The digital fuel consumption gauge is so prominent, you can't help but try to beat your previous trip's fuel consumption average. Somehow, we don't think Toyota did that by accident." (www.drive.com.au)
"Perhaps even better would be the ability to pull up the "high scores" right on the Prius' in-car display. Perhaps this would be the first actual reality-based driving game." (www.gearbits.com)
There can be little doubt: with its combination of robust gameplay and excellent interface, the Toyota Prius is one of the best designed games on the road today!
This is really important
So, why is this important?
It hit home for me the other day when I had the misfortune of having to drive my family's other car (a very nice Audi A6 wagon) on my normal commute. In my usual "coast spots", I started to decelerate, and realized that I wasn't going to have any chance at all at a high score. And with the Audi's poor gameplay and interface, I couldn't really be bothered to try even for a local high score. So I just said screw it, and drove home with no particular regard for economy.
As soon as I got back in the Prius, I was back on my game though, looking to bust my average above 47.5 (my current norm for an whole tank). And here's the crux of it. Games, with their powerful motivator of FUN, can directly influence behavior. As soon as the Prius made getting fuel economy FUN, I was all over it, and so are the majority of my fellow Prius jockeys.
Most of what I read about "serious games" is games whose ultimate goal is to educate, or provide insight. While this is laudable and probably effective, it's also perfectly achievable through other, non-interactive means. Games however, if designed correctly, can actually directly impact behavior in a manner that we can call a social good. Prius's "game", which has a powerful impact on user behavior in a positive direction (less fuel consumption, less pollution), skips right over the education element, straight to the social good. (This by the way is a lot of why I found Harvey Smith's "Peace Bomb" idea so appealing...it drew people directly to action rather than just trying to be pedantic.)
And I haven't even mentioned the fact that with this nifty entertainment literally right at my fingertips, the stress of commuting has dropped dramatically.
As computers and interactive interfaces are woven deeper and deeper into our surroundings, I think it behooves us to look at these devices frequently in terms of games. Can that electronically managed refrigerator use fun to motivate the diabetic toward a better diet? Can a house's electrical system use fun to encourage its residents to maximize efficiency? Can the phone give you skill points for calling mom a little more often? Sure some of these things are goofy, but I think it all bears consideration. And let's not forget the potential of linking online for an additional motivator, competition.
So yeah, my nomination for Serious Game of the Year: Prius.
Brain Age, redux
Jun 01, 2006
A few weeks ago, I got the strangest phone call from my father.
"Do you know what kind of charger this damn Nintendo DS thing takes?"
This was strange for a number of reasons:
My parents, it turns out, are desperately hooked on Brain Age.
Over the Easter holiday, I had taken my DS and my copy of Brain Age with me when I visited my family in Oregon. I thought they might find it amusing, and indeed they did. So amusing in fact, that without my knowledge they went out and picked up an electric blue DS (they're still yet to boot the Animal Crossing pack-in), and a copy of the software.
Now they are so hooked, that when they found themselves on this trip without the charger, and the DS was going dead, they were in a near panic. I had to break the news to my dad that the DS takes a very proprietary adapter, that none of their cel phone or laptop chargers were of any use, and they'd just have to drive fast to get home and get their fix.
Last week I was in Oregon again, and got to see their game saves. Outside of the couple days in transit with no charger, they've got almost perfect red splotches all over their calendars. My dad can name exactly what happened on the days he's missed. They talk all the time about the differences between their performances (my dad does great at arithmetic, but my mom is the queen of low-to-high). They've opened up pretty much all the minigames that Brain Age has to offer.
They don't do the actual age tests very often. They find them annoyingly competitive and distracting from their "training".
I think it says a lot that my father has stopped doing Sudoku, and my mother has stopped crosswords. They've replaced these pastimes with Brain Age.
Here's a kicker - my 9 year-old niece is now into Brain Age too. She does terribly at it, but sticks with it, especially the puzzle type minigames. They're trying to get her into the arithmetic because she's behind in arithmetic in school. It just might work.
Mr. Iwata, my hat is off to you.
"Do you know what kind of charger this damn Nintendo DS thing takes?"
This was strange for a number of reasons:
- I had no idea my father knew what a Nintendo DS is.
- My parents were traveling, on the road between Colorado and their home in Oregon.
- My parents had none of their many grandchildren with them.
My parents, it turns out, are desperately hooked on Brain Age.
Over the Easter holiday, I had taken my DS and my copy of Brain Age with me when I visited my family in Oregon. I thought they might find it amusing, and indeed they did. So amusing in fact, that without my knowledge they went out and picked up an electric blue DS (they're still yet to boot the Animal Crossing pack-in), and a copy of the software.
Now they are so hooked, that when they found themselves on this trip without the charger, and the DS was going dead, they were in a near panic. I had to break the news to my dad that the DS takes a very proprietary adapter, that none of their cel phone or laptop chargers were of any use, and they'd just have to drive fast to get home and get their fix.
Last week I was in Oregon again, and got to see their game saves. Outside of the couple days in transit with no charger, they've got almost perfect red splotches all over their calendars. My dad can name exactly what happened on the days he's missed. They talk all the time about the differences between their performances (my dad does great at arithmetic, but my mom is the queen of low-to-high). They've opened up pretty much all the minigames that Brain Age has to offer.
They don't do the actual age tests very often. They find them annoyingly competitive and distracting from their "training".
I think it says a lot that my father has stopped doing Sudoku, and my mother has stopped crosswords. They've replaced these pastimes with Brain Age.
Here's a kicker - my 9 year-old niece is now into Brain Age too. She does terribly at it, but sticks with it, especially the puzzle type minigames. They're trying to get her into the arithmetic because she's behind in arithmetic in school. It just might work.
Mr. Iwata, my hat is off to you.
E3: Games I Found Interesting
May 13, 2006
Of course there's no way to even see all the games shown at E3, much less play them and get a firm impression of them. But here are the games that caught my eye at E3.
A couple of Notes:
1) I didn't get to see any of the Wii games. The line to get in there was just stupid. I don't know why Nintendo always does that.
2) I didn't see a couple of high profile games that were invite-only such as Gears of War or Assassin's Creed. I hate that crap too. In fact, Ubi didn't let you play hardly any of their stuff, which was just plain annoying.
Heavenly Sword
This was the game of the show for me. Mind you, I'm talking about "what was the coolest thing to play at the show". It doesn't mean "this will be the best game." But for a 10 minute play, nothing was close. Heavenly Sword represents the best example yet of stylized action, which is the most exciting trend I see emerging in the next generation of games (including the tail end of the current generation, best exemplified by God of War).
Heavenly Sword looks absolutely stunning, with fabulous rendering effects (the bloom is used to great effect), and very nice use of procedural animation on the lead character's clothing and lengthy hair. And the camera has got to be one of the best cameras I've ever seen. The E3 demo was limited to a small arena, but the camera seemed always to frame the action just perfectly for maximum effect. Wow.
There's some debate among some of my friends who have played it over whether the controls are good, or whether the latency in movement caused by the use of animation-driven movement is frustrating. My response is that for this game, it's just fine. If the game had a lot of jumping puzzles or other precise navigation tasks, I would feel differently, but as a combat piece, the game does much of the movement for the player, allowing for very stylized and smooth-flowing animation. Whether this works for the remainder of the game outside of the E3 demo remains to be seen.
That would be my main complaint about Heavenly Sword. As much as it's a freaking stunning playable E3 demo, there was a haunting sense that there's not much there, there. I was left to speculate on what the rest of the game will be. Hopefully it's as cool as the E3 demo.
99 Nights
I promise, I only discovered this came from Tetsuya Mizuguchi after I played it. (Indeed...I just found out!) I'm a big Mizuguchi fan, going all the way back to Sega Rally but definitely including Rez and even Space Channel 5. N3, as this game is sometimes called, is a big departure into the realtime battle genre, but man, is it fun.
N3 is yet another example of the stylized action trend, with some really exciting moves possible with relatively straightforward controller inputs. Unlike God of War or Heavenly Sword however, the player is battling dozens of enemies, put into a battlefield setting rather than a simple melee arena. There's some strategy to it: as most of the (AI-driven) soldiers hack back and forth against each other, you need to make good decisions regarding which group you're going to dive into and hack the living shit out of.
Strategy aside, it's another game where the core is very fun and filled with exciting action. The moves are very smooth to execute, especially combos. Indeed I was able to execute a combo of 200+ hits with only the little amount of practice I could get at E3. This is a game I would definitely buy. And it was one of those games that I really didn't want to politely give up to the next player…though I eventually did.
Mech games seem to be having a minor renaissance, with a Gundam game apparently being readied for PS3 launch, and a couple others on display. While not wholly a mech game, Lost Planet was a standout. Graphically, it was really cool – taking the 'next gen' tendency toward realistic rendering, but adding really interesting stylistic tweaks to it, particularly in the design of the enemies, which are quite beautiful while also being menacing, and a surprisingly interesting color palette (not all grays and browns!!).
The gameplay of Lost Planet is kind of interesting too. The actual challenges really could be thought of as quite old-school, including enemies that have specific vulnerability points (shooters) or do charging attacks at you (Spyro!). The net result is something that really plays quite well. Look for this one.
I wanted to LOVE Okami, but I think I just like it. The controls are kind of twitchy and the gameplay seems sparse and undirected. But graphically, I just love the game. The watercolor renderer is amazingly well-done, and the animation of the wolf is actually quite impressive as well. No matter how the game ends up, Okami will be a landmark in visual art.
EA's Superman game is outstanding for its remarkable awfulness. This game is just total crap. The graphics are terrible, dull and seemingly without any depth or lighting, and it all runs at 20 fps – when it's running fast. I wish I could tell you that the controls or gameplay made up for this fact, but EA in its wisdom was not letting anyone actually touch the controller.
Hmm, last time I saw this trick done on a high profile game at E3 was the perfectly abysmal Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness. Coincidence? Or maybe I'm cynical because of the last time a sports studio did a superhero game (the bloody-awful Spawn)? Or maybe because Superman games just always suck?
I know that EA probably has way too much sunk into this project to kill it now (the old 'sunk cost fallacy') but man. What a stinker. It (supposedly) ships in the Fall.
I love the freshness of the art style in Viva Piñata, but I hope it isn't ultimately off-putting. It is a little weird. I'm also curious to see how players take to the game style, since it's almost eerily similar to a game that I was working on a while ago (which, sadly, was cancelled). Viva Piñata was clearly very early, and pretty rough around the edges, but is a promising sign of creativity from Rare.
Like most everybody, I didn't know what to expect from the PS3 'tilt' controller, so my expectations were probably pretty low. But as soon as I got my hands on it with Warhawk, it really made sense.
Mind you, Warhawk is the perfect game for this controller, with a self-leveling aircraft and a very natural screen-to-controller correlation in 3D space. But I was extremely impressed by the controller's precision, something you don't expect from an accelerometer-based system (which I understand is what's inside). I played for quite a little while and enjoyed it thoroughly. I'm quite certain I would play Warhawk in this mode.
- I had fun testing out Ridge Racer emulated on the PSP. Boy, talk about a trip in the way-back machine. It's a spot-on perfect emulation, to the point that I was instantly back in the rhythm (I played a lot of Ridge Racer back in the day).
- Mark Cerny and I happened to pass by the Vivendi booth just as the Spyro: A New Beginning trailer came onscreen. My first reaction was revulsion – what were they doing with Spyro. Quickly though it changed, and Mark and I agreed, hey, at least they're actually trying to do something interesting. A New Beginning is quite unlike anything we tried, and that's a good thing. I hope that there isn't too much of a disconnect with the little purple dude and the heavy action that Krome is putting together, but I quite sincerely wish them the best.
- Loco Roco is good fun, but maybe a little simple for a full scale production. Maybe this will be a downloadable game?
A couple of Notes:
1) I didn't get to see any of the Wii games. The line to get in there was just stupid. I don't know why Nintendo always does that.
2) I didn't see a couple of high profile games that were invite-only such as Gears of War or Assassin's Creed. I hate that crap too. In fact, Ubi didn't let you play hardly any of their stuff, which was just plain annoying.
Heavenly Sword
This was the game of the show for me. Mind you, I'm talking about "what was the coolest thing to play at the show". It doesn't mean "this will be the best game." But for a 10 minute play, nothing was close. Heavenly Sword represents the best example yet of stylized action, which is the most exciting trend I see emerging in the next generation of games (including the tail end of the current generation, best exemplified by God of War).
Heavenly Sword looks absolutely stunning, with fabulous rendering effects (the bloom is used to great effect), and very nice use of procedural animation on the lead character's clothing and lengthy hair. And the camera has got to be one of the best cameras I've ever seen. The E3 demo was limited to a small arena, but the camera seemed always to frame the action just perfectly for maximum effect. Wow.
There's some debate among some of my friends who have played it over whether the controls are good, or whether the latency in movement caused by the use of animation-driven movement is frustrating. My response is that for this game, it's just fine. If the game had a lot of jumping puzzles or other precise navigation tasks, I would feel differently, but as a combat piece, the game does much of the movement for the player, allowing for very stylized and smooth-flowing animation. Whether this works for the remainder of the game outside of the E3 demo remains to be seen.
That would be my main complaint about Heavenly Sword. As much as it's a freaking stunning playable E3 demo, there was a haunting sense that there's not much there, there. I was left to speculate on what the rest of the game will be. Hopefully it's as cool as the E3 demo.
99 Nights
I promise, I only discovered this came from Tetsuya Mizuguchi after I played it. (Indeed...I just found out!) I'm a big Mizuguchi fan, going all the way back to Sega Rally but definitely including Rez and even Space Channel 5. N3, as this game is sometimes called, is a big departure into the realtime battle genre, but man, is it fun.
N3 is yet another example of the stylized action trend, with some really exciting moves possible with relatively straightforward controller inputs. Unlike God of War or Heavenly Sword however, the player is battling dozens of enemies, put into a battlefield setting rather than a simple melee arena. There's some strategy to it: as most of the (AI-driven) soldiers hack back and forth against each other, you need to make good decisions regarding which group you're going to dive into and hack the living shit out of.
Strategy aside, it's another game where the core is very fun and filled with exciting action. The moves are very smooth to execute, especially combos. Indeed I was able to execute a combo of 200+ hits with only the little amount of practice I could get at E3. This is a game I would definitely buy. And it was one of those games that I really didn't want to politely give up to the next player…though I eventually did.
Mech games seem to be having a minor renaissance, with a Gundam game apparently being readied for PS3 launch, and a couple others on display. While not wholly a mech game, Lost Planet was a standout. Graphically, it was really cool – taking the 'next gen' tendency toward realistic rendering, but adding really interesting stylistic tweaks to it, particularly in the design of the enemies, which are quite beautiful while also being menacing, and a surprisingly interesting color palette (not all grays and browns!!).
The gameplay of Lost Planet is kind of interesting too. The actual challenges really could be thought of as quite old-school, including enemies that have specific vulnerability points (shooters) or do charging attacks at you (Spyro!). The net result is something that really plays quite well. Look for this one.
I wanted to LOVE Okami, but I think I just like it. The controls are kind of twitchy and the gameplay seems sparse and undirected. But graphically, I just love the game. The watercolor renderer is amazingly well-done, and the animation of the wolf is actually quite impressive as well. No matter how the game ends up, Okami will be a landmark in visual art.
EA's Superman game is outstanding for its remarkable awfulness. This game is just total crap. The graphics are terrible, dull and seemingly without any depth or lighting, and it all runs at 20 fps – when it's running fast. I wish I could tell you that the controls or gameplay made up for this fact, but EA in its wisdom was not letting anyone actually touch the controller.
Hmm, last time I saw this trick done on a high profile game at E3 was the perfectly abysmal Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness. Coincidence? Or maybe I'm cynical because of the last time a sports studio did a superhero game (the bloody-awful Spawn)? Or maybe because Superman games just always suck?
I know that EA probably has way too much sunk into this project to kill it now (the old 'sunk cost fallacy') but man. What a stinker. It (supposedly) ships in the Fall.
I love the freshness of the art style in Viva Piñata, but I hope it isn't ultimately off-putting. It is a little weird. I'm also curious to see how players take to the game style, since it's almost eerily similar to a game that I was working on a while ago (which, sadly, was cancelled). Viva Piñata was clearly very early, and pretty rough around the edges, but is a promising sign of creativity from Rare.
Like most everybody, I didn't know what to expect from the PS3 'tilt' controller, so my expectations were probably pretty low. But as soon as I got my hands on it with Warhawk, it really made sense.
Mind you, Warhawk is the perfect game for this controller, with a self-leveling aircraft and a very natural screen-to-controller correlation in 3D space. But I was extremely impressed by the controller's precision, something you don't expect from an accelerometer-based system (which I understand is what's inside). I played for quite a little while and enjoyed it thoroughly. I'm quite certain I would play Warhawk in this mode.
- I had fun testing out Ridge Racer emulated on the PSP. Boy, talk about a trip in the way-back machine. It's a spot-on perfect emulation, to the point that I was instantly back in the rhythm (I played a lot of Ridge Racer back in the day).
- Mark Cerny and I happened to pass by the Vivendi booth just as the Spyro: A New Beginning trailer came onscreen. My first reaction was revulsion – what were they doing with Spyro. Quickly though it changed, and Mark and I agreed, hey, at least they're actually trying to do something interesting. A New Beginning is quite unlike anything we tried, and that's a good thing. I hope that there isn't too much of a disconnect with the little purple dude and the heavy action that Krome is putting together, but I quite sincerely wish them the best.
- Loco Roco is good fun, but maybe a little simple for a full scale production. Maybe this will be a downloadable game?
My Brain Age: 37
Apr 11, 2006
Yesterday I started playing Brain Age, the result of Mr. Iwata's clever largesse at his GDC keynote. Nearly everyone who saw Iwata-san's presentation was at least curious about this runaway success product and it was a stroke of genius for him to drop a fully localized beta (I hope it was a beta) on us upon exiting the keynote. No doubt capsule reviews of the product are popping up on blogs and email lists all over the game industry, and if Iwata-san's real goal is to get us as developers to "think different" (Nintendo is, after all, becoming the Apple of the games business), well it's working.
Here are some remarkable things about Brain Age:
Like so many games, it uses the full suite of the DS's capabilities, including both the microphone and complete use of the touchscreen.
The game's screen usage turns the DS from a game machine into a book - you turn it sideways to play. This simple choice no doubt has had a huge effect on the ease of acceptance by non-gamers.
The game's design has mastered viral marketing, with the 'quick play' feature. Kawashima gently encourages you from time to time to show your friends, using the quick play feature (this is the feature that Nintendo used in its GDC demonstrations).
The list goes on and on. It's just a brilliant game. I'm sure that makers of educational software, the math blasters of the world, will find it familiar, but the game itself was definitely put together by game designers, and hits key points like only a true designer knows how. The way it metes out success and failure for instance is all game. The way pressure is carefully applied through timers. I'm sure there's a lot of neuropsychology in there too, but the thing succeeds because it is a game.
There are a few things wrong with Brain Age, a couple of which I hope are a product of beta software. One is that the game definitely punishes anyone who is not a native speaker. Language localization is key on the game, especially in the area of speech recognition. I had my friend Klaus (whose native language is German) play the game, and it simply could not recognize him saying the word "blue". Also Brain Age's handwriting recognition, at least of my handwriting, is atrocious. I finally tried using lower-case letters and I seem to be having a little bit better luck, but not much. My first piece of advice is, if you use another device with handwriting recognition, such as a PalmOS device, start by forgetting everything you know.
This is easily counterbalanced however by the things that Brain Age does right. Just try doing the arithmetic challenges, and note how its number recognition (which is excellent BTW) will totally give you the benefit of the doubt between "7" and "1" because it knows the correct answer. Or how it will do a couple of carefully timed pauses before it finally allows you to fail. The designer is in total control here.
So far I'm two days in, I have two stamps, and Mr. Kawashima says I'm doing great (and politely commiserated with me over allergy season). And my brain age is a year below my real age! Wahoo!
Here are some remarkable things about Brain Age:
- It actively discourages addictive play. Once you've done your 'training' for the day, the game no longer allows you to progress.
- It uses some of the oldest tricks in the book as far as using the Kawashima character to connect the player to the game, revealing "little secrets" about the game and such. No doubt there were some of the same designers on
The list goes on and on. It's just a brilliant game. I'm sure that makers of educational software, the math blasters of the world, will find it familiar, but the game itself was definitely put together by game designers, and hits key points like only a true designer knows how. The way it metes out success and failure for instance is all game. The way pressure is carefully applied through timers. I'm sure there's a lot of neuropsychology in there too, but the thing succeeds because it is a game.
There are a few things wrong with Brain Age, a couple of which I hope are a product of beta software. One is that the game definitely punishes anyone who is not a native speaker. Language localization is key on the game, especially in the area of speech recognition. I had my friend Klaus (whose native language is German) play the game, and it simply could not recognize him saying the word "blue". Also Brain Age's handwriting recognition, at least of my handwriting, is atrocious. I finally tried using lower-case letters and I seem to be having a little bit better luck, but not much. My first piece of advice is, if you use another device with handwriting recognition, such as a PalmOS device, start by forgetting everything you know.
This is easily counterbalanced however by the things that Brain Age does right. Just try doing the arithmetic challenges, and note how its number recognition (which is excellent BTW) will totally give you the benefit of the doubt between "7" and "1" because it knows the correct answer. Or how it will do a couple of carefully timed pauses before it finally allows you to fail. The designer is in total control here.
So far I'm two days in, I have two stamps, and Mr. Kawashima says I'm doing great (and politely commiserated with me over allergy season). And my brain age is a year below my real age! Wahoo!
Independent Games
Apr 07, 2006
At this year's GDC I remedied a number of past sins (including finally attending the Game Design Challenge), but not least was finally taking the time to play the independent games on display as part of the Independent Games Festival.
Some of the games were not very interesting at all, and some were ambitious in ways that I didn't find that interesting (for instance there was a fighting game using characters built out of cubes which looked really neat and had some interesting visual ideas, but wasn't that interesting as a game). But there were some real gems in the bunch, and I give a big shout out to them, and an apology for missing so many of these games in the past.
My two favorites were called 'Ocular Ink' and 'Strange Attractors'.
'Ocular Ink' is a mouse-centric action game that is just clever as hell in both its concept and its execution. I was peripherally involved many years ago in a game whose theme was eyeballs (the codename for it was "Project Eyepopper") and it was a very conventional game idea (which never saw the light of day, so don't ask). I don't know if it would have had any better chance on the market if it was something as creative as [eyeball game], but at it sure would have been a lot more fun.
[The eyeball game] is really a perfect game for the stylus control of the Nintendo DS, and ironically the creators had hardly even played anything on the DS. Let's not kid ourselves here - the game as I saw it does not have a lot of commercial potential as anything approaching a full-price game...but if the business model is right...
I was particularly impressed by 'Strange Attractors', a 2D physics-based game set vaguely in space. The first thing you notice when watching someone play Strange Attractors is the deep intensity of the player. The first thing you notice when you step up to play it is that it uses only a single digital button as a controller. In the GDC implementation, Strange Attractor's sole human interface was the space bar on a PC keyboard. Your 'character', a small greenish sphere (circle, really, this is a 2D game after all), bounces around a moderately crowded playfield in which various objects drift around, almost Asteroids-style. There is a general gravitational pull to the bottom of the screen, and the player's goal is to escape through the top of the screen. All objects have a gravitational pull with one another, and the space bar switches on or off a dramatic multiplier in your orb's gravity.
That's it. So to get out, the player tries to perfectly time the button presses to send the orb in the correct direction, to cause carefully planned reflections off other objects, or, if you're really good, to loop around a large object NASA-style to gain momentum. It's difficult, engaging, and perfectly fair, and would have been a sure fire hit back in the heyday of coin-op gaming in the early 1980s. I don't know what the future now of a game like Strange Attractor is, but I sure admired and enjoyed it.
Particularly curious was the origin of Strange Attractor - the game was created as part of a competition to create games to entertain profoundly handicapped kids, and the guideline for entrants was that their games must use only a single button as input. Such a constraint is almost terrifyingly limiting for any game designer I know, but when I spoke to the game's creator he seemed to feel that it was liberating. There's a heck of a lesson in there somewhere.
Some of the games were not very interesting at all, and some were ambitious in ways that I didn't find that interesting (for instance there was a fighting game using characters built out of cubes which looked really neat and had some interesting visual ideas, but wasn't that interesting as a game). But there were some real gems in the bunch, and I give a big shout out to them, and an apology for missing so many of these games in the past.
My two favorites were called 'Ocular Ink' and 'Strange Attractors'.
'Ocular Ink' is a mouse-centric action game that is just clever as hell in both its concept and its execution. I was peripherally involved many years ago in a game whose theme was eyeballs (the codename for it was "Project Eyepopper") and it was a very conventional game idea (which never saw the light of day, so don't ask). I don't know if it would have had any better chance on the market if it was something as creative as [eyeball game], but at it sure would have been a lot more fun.
[The eyeball game] is really a perfect game for the stylus control of the Nintendo DS, and ironically the creators had hardly even played anything on the DS. Let's not kid ourselves here - the game as I saw it does not have a lot of commercial potential as anything approaching a full-price game...but if the business model is right...
I was particularly impressed by 'Strange Attractors', a 2D physics-based game set vaguely in space. The first thing you notice when watching someone play Strange Attractors is the deep intensity of the player. The first thing you notice when you step up to play it is that it uses only a single digital button as a controller. In the GDC implementation, Strange Attractor's sole human interface was the space bar on a PC keyboard. Your 'character', a small greenish sphere (circle, really, this is a 2D game after all), bounces around a moderately crowded playfield in which various objects drift around, almost Asteroids-style. There is a general gravitational pull to the bottom of the screen, and the player's goal is to escape through the top of the screen. All objects have a gravitational pull with one another, and the space bar switches on or off a dramatic multiplier in your orb's gravity.
That's it. So to get out, the player tries to perfectly time the button presses to send the orb in the correct direction, to cause carefully planned reflections off other objects, or, if you're really good, to loop around a large object NASA-style to gain momentum. It's difficult, engaging, and perfectly fair, and would have been a sure fire hit back in the heyday of coin-op gaming in the early 1980s. I don't know what the future now of a game like Strange Attractor is, but I sure admired and enjoyed it.
Particularly curious was the origin of Strange Attractor - the game was created as part of a competition to create games to entertain profoundly handicapped kids, and the guideline for entrants was that their games must use only a single button as input. Such a constraint is almost terrifyingly limiting for any game designer I know, but when I spoke to the game's creator he seemed to feel that it was liberating. There's a heck of a lesson in there somewhere.