My former workplace, the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT lab at MIT is running a Video Game Completion Marathon this weekend.
Please donate or sponsor this event for Haiti to keep the games going!
Category: games
Variation over Time – The Transformation of Space in Single-Screen Action Games
Here is a paper I wrote a few years ago but never posted: Variation over Time – The Transformation of Space in Single-Screen Action Games was published in the Space Time Play anthology in 2007.
At that time, I was becoming interested in doing detailed analyses of specific video game designs. (Also evident in my Swap Adjacent paper.) I think it is important to paint the big picture, but I find it interesting to supplement this with more specific examinations of very focused topics. The big and the small pictures are then meant to supplement each other.
Variation over Time concerns the kind of early video game design where variation was provided by opening the playing field during the course of a level. Examples include Space Invaders, (Ms.) Pac-Man, Pengo, and Super Bomberman. From the paper:
My interest here is in a specific way of providing variation, the qualitative change of difficulty that is created by opening the playing field during a game level. This is a type of design where obstacles are gradually removed and the playing field becomes more open as a result. We can see this design in a number of board games (e.g. backgammon, chess, checkers), and it was a popular design in the non-scrolling action video game, most prominently in the 1980s. But for reasons I will discuss later, this design has become unusual in contemporary video games. Consider the early video game Space Invaders (Taito 1977) as a first example. (Figure 1.)
Figure 1. Space Invaders (Taito 1977)
More.
4:32 – the Life of a Conceptual Game
My conceptual game 4:32 from the 2010 Global Game Jam has taken on a pretty fascinating life of its own. (Blog announcement here.)
Here is Alec Meer’s post at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, where the game was presented under the heading of “PC Gaming In 2010”. A long flame war ensued on the site, showing that some people clearly felt cheated by the game. Which they were, of course, but that sort of is the game. One commenter compares 4:32 to rickrolling and is taking the whole thing personally:
… I bet there will be many other people disappointed or outright enraged by this. This has got nothing to do with “playground attitude” as it deserves to be called out for what it is. There are good and there a bad jokes, but this one is completely off the mark.
Part of the strong reactions at Rock, Paper, Shotgun seemed to come from people who felt that the game had crossed some line by forcing them to install and uninstall plugins.
Over at Play This Thing, Greg Costikyan’s post about the game immediately led to a flame war about PC vs. console gaming.
Petri Purho also blogged about it here.
I am pretty happy with the response, but it’s also interesting to see how players interpret the game in their own way. I didn’t think it was about PC vs. console gaming, and I didn’t think that a conceptual piece like this could get people that agitated. But then again, it’s a long-standing observation that some audiences will get angry if they feel a specific “work of art” breaks the conventions they expect – and the audience may even take it as a personal insult. That wasn’t intended, but it seems I did succeed in making something that played with player expectations!
Statistics: 13.000 games played. 513 games completed. (Cheating may have been involved, but I think that’s part of the game.)
Ten Million Sports
Inspired by Raymond Queneau’s 100 Thousands Billion Poems, Andrew McKenzie’s site Ten Million Sports randomly combines elements from football, polo, water polo, lacrosse, ice hockey, table tennis, basketball, rugby, the Kirkwall ba’ and beach volleyball … to generate new sports.
Here is one randomly generated sport (ice skates + ping-pong in Kirkwall).
Duration: 60 minutes, 3 periods of twenty minutes each.
Playing area: The town of Kirkwall in Orkney, Scotland.
Objective: To score more goals than the other side. The goals, located at both ends, are 3m wide x 0.9m high.
Players per side: 5
Attire: A helmet combo, shoulder pads, trousers, shirts, elbow pads, gloves, shin guards and ice-skates.
Ball: A polo ball: spherical, high compact plastic. Circumference: 23-27cm. Weight: 120-135g.
Method of play: The ball may only be hit with a ping-pong paddle.
This is a pretty great idea – could be interesting to try out in actuality if you managed to have all the equipment available. (We may have to renege on Kirkwall, Scotland.)
(Via Nick Montfort.)
Alex Galloway speaks at the NYU Game Center
On February 18th the NYU Game Center will be hosting a lecture by writer, programmer, and media theorist Alex Galloway on the long connection between philosophy and games.
For centuries philosophers have explored the concepts of “game” and “play,” from poet Friedrich Schiller’s notion of the “play-drive” to cultural historian Johan Huizinga’s image of “the human as player.” In this presentation we will explore the interplay between philosophy and games in these and other writers, ending with a quick introduction to the contemporary trend known as “object-oriented philosophy.”
Dr. Galloway will give a short lecture followed by an interview by Game Center Director Frank Lantz, and will then take questions from the audience.
Feb. 18, 6pm – 8pm
721 Broadway, Room 006, lower level
RSVP: gamecenter@nyu.edu
Refreshments will be served.
4:32, my conceptual Game from the Global Game Jam
The 2010 Global Game Jam took place this weekend at over 100 locations around the world.
I made a small conceptual game called 4:32.
The theme of the Global Game Jam 2010 was deception, and the constraint for the time zone of the NYU Game Jam was “Rain, Spain or Plain”. This game furthermore fulfills the achievement “instant gratification” by being playable in the browser.
Without giving too much away, 4:32 is a response to Petri Purho’s game 4:33, which in itself is a response to John Cage’s silent composition 4:33.
4:32 won the vote for “most innovative game” at the NYU game jam.
Update February 21, 2010: I have changed the game a little to prevent some of the more obvious ways of cheating. (Linking to the final page, for example.)
Kasparov on Human and Machine Chess
The New York Review of Books features a long piece by Garry Kasparov (it’s actually a book review) in which he discusses what it means to be an expert chess player and ponders the history of human vs. machine chess matches.
It was my luck (perhaps my bad luck) to be the world chess champion during the critical years in which computers challenged, then surpassed, human chess players. Before 1994 and after 2004 these duels held little interest. The computers quickly went from too weak to too strong. But for a span of ten years these contests were fascinating clashes between the computational power of the machines (and, lest we forget, the human wisdom of their programmers) and the intuition and knowledge of the grandmaster.
Modern Warfare 2 loses out to Dance Game
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that the video game market is changing, here is news from the UK that Modern Warfare 2 has been knocked from its #1 chart position by Just Dance (Feel the groove, Hit the move!).
Just Dance appears to be a dance game where the Wiimote tracks your dance moves. (A bit like ParaParaParadise I suppose.)
Now, this game wasn’t exactly a hit with the gamer press. Just Dance has a GameRanking of 53.6%. IGN rates it 2 out of 10:
I could try to talk about the visuals or the sound or sloppy way the game grades your dance moves, but I just don’t have the strength. It’s attention that the game, quite simply, doesn’t deserve. Do not buy this game. Do not rent this game, do not look at this game on the shelf, don’t even think about this game lest someone at Ubisoft find out and they prep a Just Dance 2. Such would be the end of all things, mark my words.
Sounds so bad it just might be good, doesn’t it? Amazon US users currently give it 4½ stars out of 5.
(Full disclosure: I got MW2 when it came out – and I really enjoy it. It’s just that I wouldn’t mind playing Just Dance as well. And that I enjoy watching the whole anti-casual posturing.)