The Ludologist

I posted some time ago on the difference between playing and performing music, with Guitar Hero being an example of how you perform the role of being a guitar player rather than actually playing guitar. (Slash professes to not being that good at Guitar Hero).

In Rock Band things are a little different: Drumming is actual drumming (your physical actions map to being an actual drummer), singing is actual singing … but the guitar is still about performing the role of a guitar player.

Why is that?

It seems to boil down to the different parts to play – almost everybody can sing, if badly.

It is very simple to be a bad rock drummer (bass drum, snare drum, bass drum, snare…) that still fills the part of a drummer, if badly.

By comparison, guitars have pretty high barriers to entry – if the song has a fast riff, you can’t get away with only playing every other chord. And then even playing guitar chords takes a while to learn (and makes your fingers hurt).

It’s the instrument. (Perhaps that was obvious, I just needed to write it down.)

In my previous post on Half-Life 2: Episode Two stats, I had overlooked that the Episode One stats have been available for a long time.

The big question: What is the dominant way of experiencing this game? The answer is a bit convoluted:

 

Games Completed (38.84%)

Our data indicates that while 50.64% of the players have reached the final map (as noted in the Highest Map Played graph below), only roughly half of those players have completed the game. This leads us to believe that either players are quitting before they see the credits, or there is a bug in how we collect this data.

So we don’t really know.

The interesting definitional issue is this: When do we know that someone will not complete a game? Personally, I have given up on very few games, so I have hundreds or more likely thousands of games that I am still playing on some level, even if I haven’t touched them for decades. I will finish Elite as soon as I get the time, I promise!

So it continues: The brouhaha around Jeff Gerstmann’s firing from Gamespot, possibly due to him giving negative reviews to games from major Gamespot advertisers.

I’ll just point to Joystiq’s link collection of the day.

Or actually – whatever did happen, it’s not a bad thing that everybody is reminded of the potentially problematic relation between advertising revenue and game review scores – and the backlash this can inspire if not handled properly.

And one of the Joystiq links discusses how the Game Rankings average has become a benchmark – but while we can all agree how silly it is, it’s hard not to care about the numbers (80% being the lower threshold it seems). Isn’t it?

I am once again a judge at the Webby Awards.

What were the best game-related websites of 2007? (Can be actual game sites or sites about games.)

Post your suggestions here.

Update: Thanks for your time and comments everybody. The test is now closed. I will post results when I have processed the data!

Can you spare 10 minutes to [game] science?

I am working on some experimental games, and I am looking for testers.

The test consists of you playing a game in your browser and answering some questions. The test is anonymous and takes around 10 minutes to complete.

Thanks for your time!

-Jesper

Jeff Minter is more that a little dissatisfied with the Space Giraffe sales on Xbox Live Arcade:

not seeing a lot of reason to continue even trying to make games, at this point, when a remake of Frogger, one of the worst games in the history of old arcade games, can outsell Space Giraffe that we put so much love and effort into, by more than ten to one, in one week.

OK, we get the message. All you want on that channel is remakes of old, shite arcade games and crap you vaguely remember playing on your Amiga.

We’ll shut up trying to do anything new then.

Sorry for even trying.

In case you don’t know Jeff Minter, he is a legendary game designer for people like me who grew up playing home computer games in Europe. Such as the original lawn mowing game Hover Bover!

Jonathan Blow has even compared Space Giraffe to Ulysses.

Now, the tricky issue is that Space Giraffe is a remake of an old arcade game called Tempest. Not shite, but still. Some of you may even vaguely recall playing it on your Jaguar or Nuon.

Perhaps that is beside the point – I am anxiously awaiting the Hover Bover, Gridrunner++, Revenge of the Mutant Camels or Sheep in Space remakes.

Just started Super Mario Galaxy, and it is great – it’s the Mario 64 formula, familiar and new, with no small amount of vertigo and wonderful animations.

The cruelty of November is all the big titles launching in time for the holiday sales. How can you divide your time between Super Mario Galaxy, Rock Band, Guitar Hero III, Assassin’s Creed, Mass Effect, Orange Box, Crysis, Phantom Hourglass, all the little fun indie games, Chain Factor, and those obscure Japanese DS games that you brought home?

Valve has posted their data on how Half-Life 2: Episode Two is played. (Data collection quite reminiscent of Microsoft’s work on Halo 3.)

Excerpt:

• Average session time: 0h 27m
• Average total playtime: 4h 41m
• Average completion time : 6h 11m

This is wonderful because, hey, we actually had no idea what those numbers would be.

The one number they don’t write is what percentage of players completed the game? If we for a moment boldly assume that the majority of players got the game around launch and will not get any further, the bottom graph indicates that the number is <45%. Which means that … the most common experience of playing HL2EP2 is that of not finishing it.

That is a bit of a guess, of course. We would need to see what the data looks like in 6 months to know a more final figure.

Also interesting, data on where people die on specific levels (marked in blue):