Category: games

I am giving a talk at the IT University in Copenhagen today.

The Sun Always Shines in Casual Games:
Cloning and Innovation in a Brand New Field

Time and Place:
Thursday April 12th, 16:15-17:30. Auditorium 1, ITU. Rued Langgaards Vej 7, 2300 Copenhagen S.

About the talk:
During the past 5 or 6 years, casual games have emerged as an important factor within video games. These are small games, easily learned, and usually distributed over the internet. The corresponding appearance of a new casual game audience demonstrates that video games for a long time have failed to speak to a large part of the population. In this talk, I will discuss how casual games differentiate themselves from other game types, and in perspective, show how “hardcore games” have acquired a set of codes and conventions that requires a level of gaming literacy to navigate.

Consequently, the field of casual games put strong conflicting pressures on game developers: Innovate enough to differentiate, but make the game sufficiently like other games that players find it easy to pick up and play. By illustrating the history of matching tile games, and by discussing games likes Zuma, Bejeweled, and Diner Dash, I will show when and how innovation does happen in casual games, and how developers try to assert their original contribution in a field of clones.

I try to avoid nostalgic waxing about old games, but this Wired list of top 10 Amiga games does melt my heart.

If you ask me, the vast majority of old games are horrifically bad. For example, everybody loves Elite, yet who could be bothered playing Elite today?

But Lemmings, oooh:

So the GTA IV trailer? features music by Philip Glass and looks a lot like Koyaanisqatsi.

For a moment I am hoping that Rockstar is really thinking outside the box – after 80’s kitsch and Hip hop, the time has come to build a game around classical minimalist composers, with Terry Riley, John Cage, et al. as starring characters.

Probably not, but it would be outside the box.

To follow up on my previous post about the Metagame at GDC: It would have been out of line to openly brag.

“It was all about creating discussion”, but as a member of the losing blue team, I did see some smugness in the eyes of the winning red team (Jonathan Blow, Tracy Fullerton, Warren Spector).

And afterwards, I did keep returning to how we might have rephrased our final question. But I tried to hide it.

There you have it: a real-life negotiation of the border between what is in the game and what is outside the game.

I am on my way to the MetaGame session where we are to play a video game discussion game.

And I realize that I am in a position that I have written about theoretically: Since we haven’t played the game before, not with these people, and not in this context, I don’t know how much bragging is allowed. Can I sulk if we lose? Is it about discussion, or is about winning? What is the balance?

What is the lusory attitude of my own team? What is the attitude of the other team? What is the attitude of the audience?

In San Fransisco for the Game Developers Conference.

I wonder what the mood will be like this year. I think GDC ’05 was all about next-gen worries, ’06 was more about prototyping, and ’07 will be … what?

I guess most people will be happy about the Wii (innovation, smaller budgets), but that the big issue remains the platform holders controlling what games get in. Casual games and downloads in general remain the big hope, but how high can you go?

*

My session this year is the MetaGame: A Battle of Videogame Smarts, which is all about discussing games with a pretty cool group of people:

The Metagame: A Battle of Videogame Smarts
Speaker: Frank Lantz (Creative Director, area/code), Eric Zimmerman (CEO, Gamelab), Warren Spector (PRESIDENT, JUNCTION POINT STUDIOS), Marc LeBlanc, Jesper Juul (Video Game Theorist/Assistant Professor, IT University of Copenhagen), Clint Hocking (Creative Director, Ubisoft Divertissements Inc), Jonathan Blow, Tracy Fullerton (Professor, University of Southern California)
Date/Time: Friday (March 9, 2007) 9:00am ? 10:00am

Session Description
Which game is more beautiful: Asteroids or Virtua Fighter? Is Sim City more innovative than Super Mario 64? Does Grand Theft Auto tell a better story than Planetfall? If you have ever discussed, fought over, or even just thought about questions like these, then you are ready to experience The Metagame. Combining a game show format with boardgame strategy and lively debate, The Metagame pits two teams of game experts against each other to debate and discuss vital questions of game aesthetics.

In this contest of strategy and smarts, our teams of game developers, critics, and theorists have to decide which games are more elegant, more influential, a better way to waste 10 years, or a better way to waste 10 minutes than others. When disagreement erupts, teams will challenge each other to debate the best answer but the audience will make the final decision.

Gameology pointed me to Rosemarie Fiore’s long exposure shots of old arcade games.

By strange coincidence, I have been working on something similar lately. (For the sake of truth, not beauty.) Here are two time lapses from the beginning and the end of a level of Asteroids:

Here is the same for Defender:

The aim here was to illustrate how the spatial layout of each game changes during a level – this is part of a piece for the Space Time Play anthology.

Asteroids goes from few large rocks > many small rocks. The Defender images are not quire as revealing, but the radar shows how aliens are initially distributed throughout the world, but hone in on the player at the end of a level.