Category: games

Beautiful little video of a lizard playing Ant Crusher.

Now, the lizard is playing a video game (this is the activity it is performing).

But is it playing a game? As in: does the lizard perceive this activity as  to be different from crushing/eating real ants?

Discuss. (I think the answer is no.)

Phew. Lots of work has lead up to this, but here at the New York University Game Center, we can finally announce that we are launching a 2-year MFA Degree in Game Design starting the Fall of 2012.

http://gamecenter.nyu.edu/academics/graduate

Full announcement below.

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NYU Game Center to Offer  MFA Degree in Game Design

Beginning Fall 2012

New York University has announced that the NYU Game Center, one of the world’s leading academic game programs, will offer a new Masters of Fine Arts degree beginning in Fall 2012.  MFA students will explore games as a creative art form as they design and develop games within a context of rigorous scholarly study in the two-year program at the NYU Game Center.

The curriculum includes game design, game programming, visual design for games, and game criticism. The program is distinctive in looking at games across a wide variety of media, from consoles and PCs to smartphones and social networks. Over the course of two years, students will find their voices as creative practitioners working on individual and group projects, as they study the theoretical and cultural aspects of games, all within the thriving community that is the NYU Game Center. For more detailed information, visit: http://gamecenter.nyu.edu/academics/graduate.

“Games are the defining cultural form of this century and the NYU Game Center MFA is dedicated to exploring their potential,” says Director Frank Lantz, “There are places to study the technical and business aspects of games, but the Game Center MFA has a unique creative focus on games for today’s platforms.”

The NYU Game Center features a roster of world-class faculty, including:

• Director Frank Lantz, well-known game designer and successful entrepreneur, an instructor at NYU for nearly two decades
• Katherine Isbister, acclaimed researcher whose work on players was cited in Forbes, Wired, Scientific American, and NPR’s Science Friday this year
• Jesper Juul, leading game scholar and theorist whose most recent book was selected by New Yorker magazine as one of the 5 essential books on games
• Eric Zimmerman, veteran game designer who recently exhibited work at MoMA and co-authored the most widely-used textbook on game design

The NYU Game Center houses one of the world’s largest collections of videogames, and offers a busy schedule of exhibitions, tournaments, and lectures, including the annual PRACTICE: Game Design in Detail conference.

The Game Center MFA was created by Tisch in close affiliation with NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, and NYU Poly. Together with efforts like the Games for Learning Institute and the NYU Poly Game Innovation Lab, the Game Center MFA makes NYU a global leader in games.

Apply now: http://gamecenter.nyu.edu/academics/graduate. Deadline March 1.

Interviewed for the PBS Off Book series, including my “very short history of video games” pitch.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=w0ERL20lr1U

In the soon-robots-will-take-over-everything department, Chinese robots playing ping-pong:

A pretty good showing, but frustrating when you think about how much work went into this. Identifying ball, trajectory, trajectory after bounce, arm movement etc…

Also – why does the future (the present, that is) look so much like the BBC spoof Look Around You?

I think I was overly optimistic when WiiWare was announced, imagining a future where consoles would be opened up to all developers, unleashing a wave of creativity.

But the question of control continues to be an important question, perhaps the most important for video games.

2d Boy Ron Carmel has posted a lengthy analysis of why he thinks XBLA is past its prime. Much of it comes down to the issue of control: the platform policies are built on centralized quality control, and individual contract negotiations, and Ron asks whether this really improves quality.

To boot, his data indicates that developers are slowly leaving XBLA.

Some of the more interesting suggestions:

• Create a fair contract that doesn’t require negotiation. Everyone I know who’s been handed Microsoft’s boilerplate distribution contract for XBLA was angered and offended. It’s the most exploitative, one-sided distribution contract I’ve seen. I suspect it’s a holdover from the days where Microsoft only dealt with large publishers/developers and contracts were handled by teams of lawyers on both sides. Lawyers are probably used to conducting this kind of adversarial negotiation that begins with an unreasonably one-sided version. Smaller developers that don’t have a legal department are not used to this sort of thing. We each waste months of our time and Microsoft’s time negotiating the same stuff out of the contract, over, and over again. All that time, and in some cases money, would be much better spent making the game better. Efficiency aside, it’s a terrible way to begin a business relationship.

• Solve the content discovery problem. This issue has three components. First, is bringing as many 360s online as possible. Microsoft is already doing a good job here. Last I heard the 360 has the highest online connectivity rate among consoles. Second, making it obvious to players that they can buy and download games. Too many people still don’t know what XBLA is, or that you can download games directly onto your 360. The dashboard should be designed in a way that makes it obvious that this is a possibility, and make it super easy to get into. Third, It’s important to put the best content in front of the player so that they have a positive experience purchasing games and would want to do it again. There are many approaches to this: Steam’s discounted promotions, the App Store’s Featured section, Kongregate’s top rated games list (top rated new games, all time top rated games, etc). The platform owner needs to make it SUPER easy for their users to buy software. This is how Apple, intentionally or not, solved the so called “piracy issue” (don’t get me started on how wrongheaded it is to think of those that download a game for free as “pirates”). The purchase process is so simple, smooth and painless that it’s easier to pay for an app than to “pirate” it.

• Drop the greenlight process and open up development to everyone. Is the quality of the average game on XBLA higher than the average game on the App Store? Probably. There’s a ton of crap on the App Store, but the App Store has hundreds of thousands of games, compared to mere hundreds on XBLA. There are many, many more great games on the App Store than there are on XBLA. If done right, the curated approach may result in higher average quality, but it definitely results in fewer good games because of the overhead involved with bringing in each game. Players judge the quality of a platform by the quality and quantity of the BEST games available on it, not by the AVERAGE quality of all games.

And I find myself agreeing with this line of thought. The existence of low-quality music does not prevent me from enjoying music, and the existence of low-quality iPhone or Android game does not bother me either. Has the walled garden approach run its course?