actual games – Page 2 – The Ludologist

Global Game Jam Finished!

Back from the Global Game Jam at the GAMBIT offices.

This was a superbly productive weekend – I am happy about my team’s game, The Beat, which is really a two-player puzzle-rhythm game.

(The current download is little rough – I will post a new version with an installer in a few days.)

All the games can be tried from the Global Game Jam site. I am looking forward to seeing what teams came up with in the other locations around the world.

Thanks, and thanks to all the organizers!

Here’s a photo of the final playing of the games:

Global Game Jam Boston

Too Nice! PETA takes on Cooking Mama

I didn’t know Cooking Mama was sufficiently popular to merit a critical parody, but PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has made a game that emphasizes the more gory aspects of eating animals.

I do think it would be much more powerful if it started by giving players a more personal relation to the animals that they prepare and then made players kill them. (Meet the sweet little turkey … now kill it.)

I speculate that PETA faced the problem that they wanted to convince players that animals are treated cruelly – but on the other hand they did not want to make a game in which players could do just that. A shame really.

The Suicide Game: Player Perception of Self-destruction in a Game

I have put up a conference poster made in collaboration with Albert Dang and Kan Yang Li when I visited Design & Technology at Parson’s School of Design in the fall 0f 2006.

The poster documents an experiment in identifying a basic convention of video games, in this case that players always fight for their own survival, and exploring the ramifications of breaking the convention.

Albert Dang and Kan Yang Li built a two-player game in which the object of the players is to commit suicide by drinking poison and stabbing yourself.

Yes, it is somewhat uncomfortable and perhaps controversial, but we wanted to explore that space by way of a prototype and user testing. The poster was presented at the DiGRA conference in Tokyo September 2007.

Play the game here: http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/suicidegame/

Read the poster here: http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/suicidegame.pdf

From the poster:

Video games do not necessarily present the player with a positive role to play: The player character may be a villain, be morally corrupt. Yet it is almost universally the case that
video games make players fight for the survival of their character. In a discussion of tragedy in interactive media, Marie-Laure Ryan has noted the seeming impossibility of an
Anne Karenina game, a game where the player’s ultimate goal is to commit suicide by throwing herself in front of a train:

Interactors would have to be out of their mind-literally and metaphorically–to want to submit themselves to the fate of a heroine who commits suicide as the result of a love affair turned bad, like Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina. Any attempt to turn empathy, which relies on mental simulation, into first-person, genuinely felt emotion would in the vast majority of cases trespass the fragile boundary that separates pleasure from pain.
(Ryan 2001)

While Ryan identifies a clear game convention of players fighting for the survival of their character, we know little about what would happen were this convention to be broken:
How would players perceive the controversial or uncomfortable game content in a game where the player had to seek self-destruction?

The Suicide Game

Playtesters wanted

Thanks to everybody who wrote me. I will be doing a second call on Friday for those who are interested (or you can mail me already).

****

I am looking for playtesters for a game this Tuesday-Thursday (July 24-26). You will be given a download link (Windows only).

If you would like to spend 30-60 minutes playing a game and filling out a questionnaire, please send me a mail at

jesper (at) soupgames.net

Thanks!

Our New game: High Seas – The Family Fortune

High Seas – The Family Fortune
I am happy to announce my secret side project: High Seas – The Family Fortune.

It is our attempt at making a fairly innovative yet accessible casual game.

Get it here.

From the Press release:

“High Seas: The Family Fortune” brings players into the world of Tricia McDormand – a disenchanted young woman who has been trudging along at her father’s map company for years. That is, until one day, a long lost map of her late Grandmother – a legendary pirate – is found. With the map in hand, players join Tricia as she sails the seven seas in search of the mysterious family fortune. In order to power Tricia’s ship, players must drag rows of jewels and align them by shape or color – and receive big bonuses for aligning by shape and color. Players travel to 16 different island locales, and complete challenging puzzles to discover clues that reveal the great McDormand secret that has eluded historians for years!

Features

Yes! It is a matching tile game, but with some radical twists!
Physics model: You can interact with all tiles on the screen, all the time.
No waiting for tiles to fall. Free interaction without making matches.
Match on shape or color.
Developed story (!): Tricia travels the world following her grandma’s map in search of the Family Fortune.

Credits

Developed by Soup Games & The Planet. Published by GameTrust.
Game Design: Mads Rydahl and Jesper Juul.
Graphical and Model Design: Simon Sonnichsen.
Graphics & 3D: HappyFlyFish / Michael la-Cour and Jesper Fleng.
Additional Graphical design: Mads Rydahl.
Sound: K?v Gliemann.
Story writer: Heather Chaplin.
Programming: Jesper Juul.

Methods

I could write a lot about the methods we used, but some of the work was surveying the history of matching tile games as previously mentioned, and after that a long prototyping phase with lots of iterations and user testing. I may do a longer writeup, depending on how the game does, I suppose.

Play the game!

In the meantime, please try and buy the game!

Nordic Game Jam – The Sheep

This weekend saw the 2nd Nordic Game Jam held at the IT University in Copenhagen. In Danish, here is the press release and some pictures. With 80 participants, it seems to be the largest game jam in the world so far.

Since I wasn’t an organizer this year, I could focus on actually making a game. With the great team of Thomas Dougans, Rasmus Keldorff, Mike Sj?rslev Khamphoukeo, Tim Nielsen and myself, we created the two-player strategy game Baa-aah: The Lord is my Shepherd.

The core of the game is protecting your sheep from drowning in the rising water, while attacking your opponents’ sheep. To this end, you can terraform the land, building and breaking dams. Additionally, your sheep can be sacrificed to dramatically raise and lower a portion of the playing field. Here is a screenshot towards the end of a game:

Method-wise, we started by creating a level editor before making anything playable, and then we simply toyed around with making different levels, playing them, and refining the basic gameplay.

The game isn’t anywhere finished, but it’s actually playable and fairly fun, and I am quite proud that we did this in <48 hours.

Oh, and we were voted best game of the event by the participants ;)

(There’s a jury prize and an audience prize.)

Space Invaders Outtakes

With the E3 buzz over: I was watching the fake outtakes at the end of A Bug’s Life, where we see the mistakes made by the animated characters during the “shooting” of the movie.

So what would fake video game outtakes be like?

I bring you the hitherto unseen outtakes from Space Invaders:

Sorry, you need Java installed to play this game.

(Click on applet to play, move with cursor keys, shoot with Ctrl or Space.)

Legal: This game is a parody. All sounds and graphics copyright Taito 1978.

255,168 ways of playing Tic Tac Toe

Tic Tac Toe (noughts and crosses) is always such a nice example.

I was thinking about strategies and decided to implement a program that plays Tic Tac Toe according to John von Neumann’s minimax. This is a kind of meta-strategy that can be used for playing any game: Always chose the move that will minimize the maximum damage that your opponent can do to you.

The algorithm works recursively by looking for the move that will let an optimally playing opponent inflict the least damage. The opponent’s strategy is calculated by way of the same algorithm, and so on. This means that on the first move, the computer investigates the entire game tree – it considers every single possible Tic Tac Toe game and then choses randomly among the best (least dangerous) moves.

Have a go at http://www.half-real.net/tictactoe/

Here’s a document with every single game of Tic Tac Toe. It gives the following numbers.
255,168 unique games of Tic Tac Toe to be played. Of these, 131,184 are won by the first player, 77,904 are won by the second player, and 46,080 are drawn.
This supports the intuition that it is an advantage to begin the game.
These numbers do not take similar board positions into account – rotating the board, mirroring it and so on. It does not matter which corner you place the first piece in, but this is not taken into account here.
If neither player makes a mistake, the game is drawn (but we knew that already).

This is an exercise in examining the objective properties of a game. There are two interesting sides to this:
1) The objective properties of Tic Tac Toe really matter for our enjoyment of it: It is a boring game because there are so relatively few combinations.
2) On the other hand, humans clearly play the game in a different way than the computer. The computer’s playing style lets us make some observations about how humans play games.
To the computer, the first move is the most complicated (takes around a second on my 2ghz machine). This is unlike human players who seldomly have any problem deciding what to do on the first move.
The program assumes that the opponent does not make any mistakes. Humans do make mistakes, of course, so adding some amount of randomness in algorithm would probably make it a better player against human opponents.
The number of possible unique games is larger than I would have guessed, but this indicates how we humans are very good at identifying patterns. Faced with the huge number of variations in a game like this, we simply identify some general properties of Tic Tac Toe: Beginning in the middle is a good thing; if your opponent begins in the middle, you must pick the corner; a good way of winning is to threaten two squares simultaneously.
We think about games like this in fuzzy and chaotic ways – this gives us a lot of flexibility.
It is the same fuzziness that leads us into making stupid mistakes.
On some level, it is our fuzzy way of playing games that allows us to have fun. If we simply played with the unimaginative brute force strategy that the computer uses, it would definitely be work rather than play – and nobody would have any fun playing against us, for that matter.