The Ludologist

Ever noticed how a 10*10 pixel characters in Lemmings looks great, but that the 20k polygon players in Top Spin look really strange?
It’s called the uncanny valley: We have strong emotional response to things that are not terribly realistic, but when things look almost human, any minor discrepancy (such as weirdly bending fingers or odd-looking faces) is strongly disquieting. In other words, higher-resolution models may not look more real, but less real.

The concept comes from Masahiro Mori. Dave Bryant has a writeup on it here.

(Courtesy of Antifactory / somebody who mentioned it at the Imagina 2004 conference.)

Timothy Burke has posted two pieces on MMOs:
Rubicite Breastplate Priced to Move, Cheap: How Virtual Economies Become Real Simulations was presented at the 2001 Bristol conference (feels like it was 10 years ago). It discusses economy and players in MMOGs and I think it was the first time I saw Bartle’s player typology in action.

The newer piece is The Narrative-Nudge Model for Massively-Multiplayer Games. This one deplores current MMOGs for not being true virtual simulated worlds:

If all we want is games with no world component, no sense of world simulation, then I might suggest that developers would be wise to stick to the design philosophy of City of Heroes: a no-frills, combat-oriented design that is essentially a first-person shooter with persistent statistics. There’s nothing wrong with that: I like City of Heroes quite a lot, and play it regularly. But it’s not and will never be a virtual world. Nor will any MMOG which starts from the design foundations that all MMOGs to date have adopted.

Wired article on the current slate of MMOs being cancelled.

While it’s hard to guess how big the market can become, it’s been pretty clear from the outset that the market was becoming too crowded. The game industry just never seems to recover from the “me too” TLA syndrome. It was FPS, then RTS, and now it’s MMO.

In case you haven’t heard, Public Beta is a project for “creating and publishing better material about videogames and videogame culture”.
For the time being, Iain Simmons and James Newman are working on a book titled “Difficult Questions About Videogames”.

Here are a few questions they’ve been asking people:

Q. What is a videogame?
Q. What is gameplay?
Q. How can you tell if a videogame is rubbish?

For the last one I took the easy “enjoyment is subjective” way out, with a few modifications.

A game is rubbish when … it just is, you know.

From Scott Miller’s Game Matters: The Hollywood Reporter interviews Scott Miller on games and movies.

THR: When you say that of the 5,000-plus TV series and movies produced by Hollywood each year, only two or three have potential in the video game space, do you mean that literally?

Scott Miller: Yes. And often it’s only one — or none. In my opinion, the vast majority of games licensed from movies, TV, novels, and comic books that are aimed at older teens and adults are a waste of time for the games industry to pursue.

Look, movies and TV are storytelling media. And while games can be a storytelling medium, they are really about interactivity and gameplay. What makes a movie or a TV series successful may or may not make for a good interactive experience. For instance, “Gone With the Wind” has a great story, but I can’t think of any sort of gameplay element that would be unique to that story. That’s the hurdle that trips up 95% or more of all mass media licenses; they simply don’t have the hook that makes for unique or compelling gameplay.

THR: Give me an example of a “gameplay hook.”

Miller: Take “Spider-Man,” which makes for a brilliant license almost solely because it’s so perfectly suited for a unique and fun gameplay experience. He’s a character who can do something very unusual — shoot out webs and swing from buildings. And he can climb walls, which puts an entirely new twist on navigating game levels. Other than “Spider-Man,” I can name fewer than a dozen other Hollywood properties that have the genetic material that makes for great games.

It is a games and stories angle – these days I can only reaaally find it interesting if it relates to actual production, lots of good examples, but this interview fits the bill.

Marilyn Yalom has published a book called “Birth of the Chess Queen” where she traces the appearance of the powerful queen in modern European chess. Article on the book in The Boston Globe.

It sounds like an interesting book, even if it could be over-reliant on the idea that there just must be a connection between ideology, society, and small things like the movement of a piece in a semi-abstract game. But let’s see.

BBC news has a wonderful, if incredibly bitter, piece on the misfortunes of England in the world of sports, the Euro 2004 soccer loss to Portugal being among the recent highlights:

It takes years of practice and dedication which mere amateurs would have no idea about. Anyone can lose anonymously or unmemorably, but raising your game to lose spectacularly takes a sense of drama of which Shakespeare himself would be proud.

Cheer up, mate!