This is something of a continuation of my earlier post Why Games? I wrote this only to focus my own thoughts, and not so much to produce something intelligible to others, but I think it turned out quite nicely. See for yourself. :)
Do I love games? Really?
Do I right now? ...not especially.
Why did I say that I love games? Was it a simplification? It must be true, right, or else I wouldn't be focusing my entire life around working on games...
Writing this is hard. I am reluctant to do it. Remember I said that I want to just make stuff, not write or talk or argue about it. Once I make it, arguing will be silly - Are games art? Not right now they aren't, but I have faith that someday they will be, and there's no use arguing about it. Just wait and see. It will happen. Critique about something already made is okay. It's useful. But arguing back and forth, over and over, round and round about what the future might or should hold - it's useless. It's a waste of my time and effort.
What don't I like? There's a lot. I don't like reading magazines like EGM - the tiringly hardcore, guns'n'explosions, sarcastic, overwhelmingly male face of the traditional game industry today. It's useful to keep up with what games are out, what's popular, what's considered good, but it's tiring. It's obnoxious. It's not my kind of culture. It drains my energy.
I also read Game Developer - a magazine for creators, not players. It's better, but still, more of the same. Not so garish, more technical, intellectual, but still - standard industry. People all thinking the same way about games, following the trends, not making them - glimpses of popular visions of the future, nothing great, nothing outside the boundaries.
I got tired of reading amateur game design forums years ago. The same hypothetical questions, over and over, nothing amazing. The common denominator is too low to sustain any really serious inquiry into innovation.
There are some books I've been quite impressed with - Persuasive Games by Ian Bogost, Miniature Gardens & Magic Crayons by Chaim Gingold. They're fun to read, often eye-opening - I'm glad to have read them. But still, too much reading, and pretty soon another year has gone by without anything to show for it. You have to make something, or else it's just talk. There's so little out there, so little really good stuff, that it will get noticed. It will, if you make it. If you make it, they will come. And they'll spend way too much time talking about it. But that's how it is.
There's one blog and forum I do like, of the two-person development team Tale of Tales, with their Realtime Art Manifesto, and blog posts condemning the latest industry hits. I think they have the right idea, more so than most. And they're actually making stuff, according to their vision. But hanging around on their blog all the time isn't going to help me or them. If I can actually make something that embodies what I believe games should be, or at least points the way, that would help.
One thing I've heard a lot in game development is that you have to have an actual working game to show people, even if it's just an ugly prototype. If you want to get a job in games, you have to show something you've made. If you're already working in games and you want to convince people to work on your game idea, you have to show them. Game ideas are practically worthless on paper - they have to be made in order to judge their worth. And I think that's true for talking about games in general as well. You have to make them, and judge them by how the public receives them.
So, what do I want to make? What do I think is so good?
Well, explaining my various beliefs and thoughts and visions would be difficult, because as I've just mentioned, you can't really understand a game design just by reading about it. But it might be worth establishing. Or maybe not. I'm not trying to put forth my vision here, I'm just trying to explain the situation, why I have to do what I have to do, why I should just make things, why I have to gain prestige in the conventional system before what I make, or want to make, will be taken seriously.
But maybe I can try to explain a little - why do I care about this potential that I see in games?
First of all, games are what I'm good at, what I like making. If I am to express myself artistically, I'd like to do it through games. I like most every sort of art, but game development is extremely interdisciplinary, integrating visual art, music, sound design, spatial architecture, social architecture, education, programming, storytelling - probably more than that, even. Since I like pretty much all of those things, games are great because they let me think about all of them, instead of restricting myself to one. And as opposed to more or less linear storytelling through writing or film, games are more about creating spaces from which stories can emerge, and I've always been much better about thinking in terms of spaces and worlds than in stories. Creating an expression of a single viewpoint in time and space has never been natural for me, so I'll do what I do best - design entire systems, worlds, games.
Secondly, games are a young medium. More specifically, computer and video games are young, with only a few decades of history behind them. Most everyone would agree that games have yet to produce any artistic masterpieces which will be revered through the ages. Some people don't believe they ever will, though I am confident that it will happen. Since games are so young, their future is still very indeterminate. The current decade and the decade ahead will be pivotal in shaping the direction of all games to come, as it gathers momentum to become truly a mass phenomenon. I like having the power to shape the future. I'm at the right time to do it with games, and quite possibly the right place too. With luck I will be able to insert myself right at this pivot point, to nudge the future of an entire medium along a course that I consider healthy, one quite different from the decadent stagnation of its current state.
Third, there are some specific causes that I'd like to promote, certain things that I'd like to express, that I believe lend themselves particularly well to the medium of games. One thing I've been acutely and personally interested in changing, improving, since my first experience with a truly bad teacher in eighth grade is... the education system. Our education system. Pain and suffering, at least since the start of middle school, and onward. Yes, I know quite well that life is all about pain and suffering. It's an initiation. Should education teach anything different than reality?
I think that education can help change that reality for the better. This education system, throughout its various forms, has been my world for basically my entire conscious life. Most all the pain and suffering I know is within the context of this system. Not all of it, of course, but most. What this system teaches, both explicitly in its curriculum and implicitly in its structure, feeds right into the receiving system of adult work, profit, consumption, and all that good stuff - reality. Right. Part of reality. Part of one reality, maybe. But change the education system, and the system of adult life must respond with some change of its own. Maybe then you can change reality by changing the education system. At the least this contradiction will require some reevaluation and responding change, and I don't think it will be a change as simple as reverting education back to its previous state.
What do games have to do with education? Heh. I'm glad you asked. Games are education. Education is games. Play is learning. Learning is play. Many video game theorists, including Raph Koster of the book A Theory of Fun, and Daniel Cook of the blog Lost Garden, have argued that the fun of games is fundamentally about the brain's addiction to solving patterns. People like figuring things out, and when these challenges are paced in flowing progression of difficulty, densely layered, people will eat them up for hours. Like Pac-Man, eating up dots. Games are about managing, structuring challenge and reward. Some of these challenges are more reflexive, appealing to early instincts, some are more cerebral - from aiming, timing, matching to complex resource management and strategy. But there are patterns everywhere in life. Any of them can be made into games. The problem with current games is that they deal with such a limited subset of patterns, skills valued by protohuman hunter-gatherers perhaps but few if any that deal with the skills of living in an immensely complex human-built world, as well as an even more complex natural world becoming increasingly a subject to human influence. Games must expand to encompass these complexities, and in fact games among all other media are uniquely suited to accomplish this task. What else could convey an intuitive and embodied grasp of the systems that make up and sustain humanity but a dynamic, miniature world specially designed for human comprehension, miniature lives carefully structured to aid the bridging of connections within and across chosen domains? Games? The word is a silly one, I know, but it's what we've got. Games.
I've skipped right past education, haven't I. Well here's the obvious punchline: design education around games. Education as it is done now is more or less a bunch of poorly designed games. So design them better. Make it compelling for anyone to pick up inorganic chemistry, or proof by induction, or European history. It must be compelling for someone, some scientist, some professor, so use games to structure the experience of others so they too can experience that joy. Or at least have some chance of it. Maybe then people will be able to focus their attention to the content and purpose of the education system in general. Does the content matter, the curriculum? Should it matter? Why are we teaching what we are teaching, or what we say we are teaching? Why is this system structured the way that it is? Maybe then these questions will get some attention. And maybe games will have some solutions then, as well.
So that's three. Those are three reasons I care about games, and what they might become. There's more, but that's basically what it boils down to. I like games, games are young, games will save us. Salvation through games. Something like that. That's why I do what I do.
2008/02/07
2008/01/25
Environment Sketch 01 - Spring Rain
As you may have noticed, last week I added a new category of links on the right side of the page: Environment Sketches. What could those be, I wonder?Considering that "Environment Sketch" is a term I made up, I should probably explain. An Environment Sketch is neither an animation nor a game, but something in between. It is a scene that you observe. It's like a window into a world.
The idea is to take some piece of my environment that I appreciate, and put it out for other people to notice and appreciate. But it's not simply a photograph - the idea is to capture the mood and feel of a place as it moves through time, not doing anything, just being.
So with that in mind, I present to you my first Environment Sketch!
Spring Rain is my first Environment Sketch, a simple but evocative depiction of a scene or place.
This is not a graphic sketch but a procedural one, a viewpoint generated by code that describes how the scene is to be constructed and how it evolves over time.
Spring Rain is a tribute to plants and rain. Please enjoy.
It's all procedurally generated - different every time - and running a real-time physics simulation. The background is created from blurred particle trails, the plants are assemblages of particles connected by springs, arranged with some amount of randomness, and the background sounds are mixed randomly.
Spring Rain was made in Flash, so I actually ended up reusing a lot of the code from my earlier ragdoll games! :) I think Flash is the perfect medium for these Environment Sketches, because it is so easy to combine hand-drawn art with code-generated graphics, not to mention the huge audience that already exists for Flash content. With any luck, the Environment Sketch will someday become recognized as a legitimate genre alongside Animations and Games. I'll do my best to help it along. :)
I've had many sources of inspiration in defining the Environment Sketch concept and in making Spring Rain. Most significant was simply my appreciation of the world around me, finding beauty in bits of my surroundings which I felt compelled to share with the rest of the world. But there were also some Flash pieces I found across the web that have helped to point me in the direction of these procedural sketches as a way to share that appreciation.
The first one I found was perhaps Ferry Halim's Raindrops. It's nice to know that I'm not the only one out there who loves rain. :D But the biggest influence on me I think has been the Flash developer and artist IvoryDrive. The first time I mentioned my intention to make these procedural sketches in a comment on his excellent interactive piece City. His thought it was a great idea, and guess what - he also really liked Spring Rain! Wow! So I'm very grateful for IvoryDrive's encouragement. :) He's got a lot of other work you should check out too, including his latest, 5 Differences, which is basically a game wrapped around a bunch of little Environment Sketches.
Another nice example of what I would consider an Environment Sketch is this real-time Hogwarts scene. While it looks to me like almost all the graphics in that piece are made by hand rather than generated procedurally, I think the intention behind it is similar enough to qualify as an Environment Sketch. It depicts a place as it exists through time, and while it contains many hand-drawn and animated graphics, they are only used to reinforce a momentary feel rather than to push a story along.
One place that Environment Sketches might find a home is in website design. How about giving your site a more natural sense of place by putting in a virtual window into a dynamic scene? One person on the Fisix Engine forums had the same idea and I've given him permission to add Spring Rain to his site. Looks nice, don't you think? :)
If any of you out there are thinking of making something like these Environment Sketches, or think they might be cool to use on your site, let me know! It'd be great to hear from you. :)
2007/12/18
NEON Ramblings
No, I'm not rambling, Braids NEON is. Rambling across the web.
I was just checking my MochiBot dashboard to see how many views my Flash games have been getting lately, and I was surprised to see thirteen sites now hosting the game! But I've only submitted it to three... How did that happen?
Apparently, whenever you submit a half-decent game to Newgrounds, it immediately gets picked up (stolen) by a bunch of smaller game sites. That's not necessarily a bad thing - you just want to be prepared to take advantage of that sudden surge of attention. I have my name in the game, but not much else. Not that I'm looking for much else at this point.
I'd never even heard of any of these sites, but they've all managed to find my game.
The remaining hosts were those sites that let you get past content filters.
It's interesting to see the new descriptions and icons people have created for Braids NEON. Andkon Arcade, by far the most popular host for the game with over thirteen thousand views in four days, has come up with its own instructions, much more concise than mine:
"Click and hold the mouse to start. Then, use the mouse to smash into your opponent."
I thought it was kind of funny. Certainly it leaves out a lot of information, like the existence of keyboard controls, but it does get the point across. And I suppose that most people do end up playing it as a "smash into your opponent" sort of game anyway, though that's not how I would describe it.
Then there's another description on a few other sites:
"The game 'Braids Neon' is a stylish kind of rag doll fighting game. You can use your keyboard, your mouse or both together to let the pupas fight it out!"
I don't know what the word "pupas" means in this context. :p But I'm not complaining. Stylish is good.
The best place to play the game is still on Kongregate, probably, since it has high scores and there's the chance I could get some money if enough people play it there. And the version on deviantART is where I'm likely to experiment with new updates, in case you're interested in that.
Update:
It looks like more sites have found Braids NEON since the last time I checked. Like this one.
I was just checking my MochiBot dashboard to see how many views my Flash games have been getting lately, and I was surprised to see thirteen sites now hosting the game! But I've only submitted it to three... How did that happen?
Apparently, whenever you submit a half-decent game to Newgrounds, it immediately gets picked up (stolen) by a bunch of smaller game sites. That's not necessarily a bad thing - you just want to be prepared to take advantage of that sudden surge of attention. I have my name in the game, but not much else. Not that I'm looking for much else at this point.
I'd never even heard of any of these sites, but they've all managed to find my game.
The remaining hosts were those sites that let you get past content filters.
It's interesting to see the new descriptions and icons people have created for Braids NEON. Andkon Arcade, by far the most popular host for the game with over thirteen thousand views in four days, has come up with its own instructions, much more concise than mine:
"Click and hold the mouse to start. Then, use the mouse to smash into your opponent."
I thought it was kind of funny. Certainly it leaves out a lot of information, like the existence of keyboard controls, but it does get the point across. And I suppose that most people do end up playing it as a "smash into your opponent" sort of game anyway, though that's not how I would describe it.
Then there's another description on a few other sites:
"The game 'Braids Neon' is a stylish kind of rag doll fighting game. You can use your keyboard, your mouse or both together to let the pupas fight it out!"
I don't know what the word "pupas" means in this context. :p But I'm not complaining. Stylish is good.
The best place to play the game is still on Kongregate, probably, since it has high scores and there's the chance I could get some money if enough people play it there. And the version on deviantART is where I'm likely to experiment with new updates, in case you're interested in that.
Update:
It looks like more sites have found Braids NEON since the last time I checked. Like this one.
2007/12/15
NEON Renovations
I've been doing a lot of work lately on my game Braids NEON. Not just changing the game itself, but submitting it to new places, making screen shots, changing icons, stuff like that. It's been several days of intensive NEON for me, but now I'm done and I can get to new games and new posts.
So, I've made the interface much more user-friendly - the mouse cursor is now visible on every screen, you can actually click on a button to go back to the game from the menu, and it detects perfectly whether the cursor is inside the game window or not. The tutorial instructions have also been updated. These are all improvements that were long overdue, really, and well, now they're here. I'd actually consider Braids NEON to be a solid game now.
Solid enough, in fact, that I decided to submit it to Newgrounds, after some consultation with my potential audience. It's there, with a solid score of 3.44 / 5.00 after almost 300 votes. Better than on Kongregate.
And the Kongregate version is now integrated with the Kongregate High Scores API, which is not only more fun, but now I can track how many registered users are playing it there. Or more likely, how few, since it's been several days since anyone has showed up with a new score. Oh well.
I've also made a bunch of screen shots of Braids NEON and put them in my deviantART scraps. Take a look, they're pretty nice. There are a few other new things in my scraps, like my first digital animation, which you might appreciate if you're into Aikido.
And I've recently ventured onto YouTube. My account should be populated with a video or two fairly soon.
Reaction to The Present Confusion
I'd like to comment on a recent post on one of the blogs I watch. I will do it here since the author has disallowed comments on that post. Here is my comment:
:)
:)
2007/11/30
Say Hi to my Haida Hydralisk
I offer no apologies for the title of this blog post.Anyway, I've been learning to draw in the traditional Pacific Northwest Coast style. I've sketched art from museums and books, read Bill Holm's
Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form
, and now I've finished my first piece in that style:This is a picture of a Hydralisk, from the game StarCraft. It is depicted in a traditional Northwest Coast Native American style, closely approximating the formal Northern style of groups such as the Haida of the Queen Charlotte Islands. The Hydralisk is curled up inside an egg, waiting to hatch.
Thus, Haida-lisk Incubation.
I painted it in Photoshop, which, as it turns out, was a very poor tool for the job. This art style is extremely unforgiving of sloppiness - not good when all you have is a tiny tablet and a whole lot of pixels to push around. In the future I'll be using a vector-based program like Flash for my Northwest Coast art.
So look at it, save it, print it, show it to your friends, whatever.
I'm quite happy with it. In my opinion it's the first decent Northwest Coast design I've made, and I liked it enough to print it out and frame it on my wall! :D
Hope you like it too. ;)
Yes, it's a hydralisk from StarCraft, just like my origami hydralisk. Actually, I had originally planned to make a larger picture where the hydralisk is transforming into a lurker as it bursts out of its egg. I'd still like to do that - I can just use this basic design and add a big scary lurker to it. No promises though. :)
I've recently found an artist on deviantART, tarkheki, who does some really nice Northwest Coast art, including a couple rendition of characters from Pokemon in addition to more traditional subjects. I guess I'm not the first to draw a game character in this style then. :p
2007/11/05
Create-a-Cult
Yeah, not quite. But strange and scary and awesome enough to inspire the possibility.
What am I talking about?
You know how in my last post, I mentioned that there's a lot of people in the game industry who don't know what's going on, and a few who are looking in the right direction? Well, Dan Cook of Lost Garden is one of those few. Just read his latest article, Constructing Artificial Emotions: A Design Experiment.
The basic idea it proposes is that to incite a particular emotion in someone, you provoke in them some physiological change, like an elevated heart rate, and then provide symbols and environmental cues pointing to a particular emotion as the cause of the arousal.
Does that sound weird? Don't rely on me to convince you of the validity of the approach - read the article. I don't know whether it works or not, but it sure is intriguing. Have you ever heard anything like it being talked about in game design before? I haven't. There has been plenty of discussion about emotions in games, but Dan Cook's ideas on the subject are the first I've encountered that are weird and different and simple enough to have a chance at actually working.
You may not agree with everything in the article, but I assure you, reading it is a refreshingly thought-provoking experience. This guy knows what he's talking about - he touches on so many points, gets things (certainly understands social motivations)... Well, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
Not much more I can say. Check it out, it's worth your time.
Another guy who really knows what he's talking about is Ian Bogost, in his book Persuasive Games
. There are always tons of discussions cycling around forums and email lists about games as art, and serious games, and games for education and all that. But then once in a while someone comes out and just says it all, whose words rise far above the tangled mass of uninspired chatter, gleaming in their purity and truth, shining... soaring...
Yeah, anyway, well Ian Bogost is one of those people, and Persuasive Games is a book that says the right things. It's not exactly a thrilling read, and it can often ramble on, but man, those ideas... If you don't want to spend your time wading through stagnant forum discussions and you want to see the future of games, look no further than Persuasive Games.
What am I talking about?
You know how in my last post, I mentioned that there's a lot of people in the game industry who don't know what's going on, and a few who are looking in the right direction? Well, Dan Cook of Lost Garden is one of those few. Just read his latest article, Constructing Artificial Emotions: A Design Experiment.
The basic idea it proposes is that to incite a particular emotion in someone, you provoke in them some physiological change, like an elevated heart rate, and then provide symbols and environmental cues pointing to a particular emotion as the cause of the arousal.
Does that sound weird? Don't rely on me to convince you of the validity of the approach - read the article. I don't know whether it works or not, but it sure is intriguing. Have you ever heard anything like it being talked about in game design before? I haven't. There has been plenty of discussion about emotions in games, but Dan Cook's ideas on the subject are the first I've encountered that are weird and different and simple enough to have a chance at actually working.
You may not agree with everything in the article, but I assure you, reading it is a refreshingly thought-provoking experience. This guy knows what he's talking about - he touches on so many points, gets things (certainly understands social motivations)... Well, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
Not much more I can say. Check it out, it's worth your time.
Another guy who really knows what he's talking about is Ian Bogost, in his book Persuasive Games
. There are always tons of discussions cycling around forums and email lists about games as art, and serious games, and games for education and all that. But then once in a while someone comes out and just says it all, whose words rise far above the tangled mass of uninspired chatter, gleaming in their purity and truth, shining... soaring...Yeah, anyway, well Ian Bogost is one of those people, and Persuasive Games is a book that says the right things. It's not exactly a thrilling read, and it can often ramble on, but man, those ideas... If you don't want to spend your time wading through stagnant forum discussions and you want to see the future of games, look no further than Persuasive Games.
2007/10/24
MySpace, Miis, Motivation
Just as some background so you can see why I'm talking about this, I've done a bit of work trying to teach game programming to kids - teenagers, really - and it's not easy. Thinking of how to make education more effective is a consideration that's often in the back of my mind.
I think that if you want to motivate kids to work on creating games, or anything else really, it's essential to give the project meaning by having them publish their creations where their peers can see.
Social networking sites like MySpace are very popular - you might even say a ubiquitous phenomenon in schools (just my own observation) - and help provide meaning and motivation for other activities. So if a project fulfills a role in that social context, the kids will be happy to do it. If it will make them more popular, or special, or somehow feels like an accomplishment within the metagame of a social networking site, then they'll want to do it. Otherwise, it's just work.
Reading the excellent Miniature Gardens & Magic Crayons again, I realized that games like The Sims, as well as Nintendo's Mii Channel, might be compelling to non-gamers partly because they can be used to explore and make statements about social networks. Both the virtual doll house game The Sims and the feature of the Nintendo Wii that allows one to recreate people's likenesses as virtual Mii dolls are appealing to people who don't normally play video games. I would guess that these people are not playing for the same reasons that typical gamers do. Instead I imagine that for the average person, creating and playing with representations of their friends (or enemies, or celebrities, or whatever) is an activity motivated by social concerns - a subset of those activities involved with socializing, exploring where one stands in relation to other people, and making statements about how one views these relationships. The fact that these are video games is almost irrelevant
The game industry is very used to thinking about things in terms of games - game reviewers for the most part agree on what makes a good game, and they all basically think about games in the same way. But that way is not going to help them think about why people like The Sims or the Wii.
Fortunately, a few people are thinking differently, and the creators of Habbo Hotel are a good example. I'd really recommend reading this report of Sulka Haro's keynote about Habbo Hotel - I found it very interesting and inspiring. There was one quote in particular I found very interesting, about the fact that tons of the mostly-teenage players of Habbo Hotel spend their time playing make-believe, roleplaying activities and roles that the game itself doesn't support: "If you look, little kids will play for hours... but teenagers are reaching the age where that's not socially allowed anymore. We're providing an environment where that's OK."
As an example given by the article, there are people who pretend to be horses, and then other people pretend to pet them! That's crazy, I don't even know how that would work! But apparently people do it. And another thing that was mentioned was how the players are often very concerned with keeping Habbo Hotel a private place separate from their parents - it would be too embarrassing otherwise, I imagine. Again, my mind is flashing back to Miniature Gardens.
Well, I seem to have drifted far from my original topic, which was about how to motivate kids to work on projects in an educational context. But this is all good stuff, and I would have wanted to get to it in a blog post sooner or later. I don't really have any conclusions to make at this point, so consider this food for thought.
And about the one-blog-post-a-week thing, I've just been so busy with school that I can't spare the time, seriously. It has turned out to be more difficult than I expected to turn my quick notebook entries into interesting, coherent blog posts. I'll keep trying though. Thanks for reading.
I think that if you want to motivate kids to work on creating games, or anything else really, it's essential to give the project meaning by having them publish their creations where their peers can see.
Social networking sites like MySpace are very popular - you might even say a ubiquitous phenomenon in schools (just my own observation) - and help provide meaning and motivation for other activities. So if a project fulfills a role in that social context, the kids will be happy to do it. If it will make them more popular, or special, or somehow feels like an accomplishment within the metagame of a social networking site, then they'll want to do it. Otherwise, it's just work.
Reading the excellent Miniature Gardens & Magic Crayons again, I realized that games like The Sims, as well as Nintendo's Mii Channel, might be compelling to non-gamers partly because they can be used to explore and make statements about social networks. Both the virtual doll house game The Sims and the feature of the Nintendo Wii that allows one to recreate people's likenesses as virtual Mii dolls are appealing to people who don't normally play video games. I would guess that these people are not playing for the same reasons that typical gamers do. Instead I imagine that for the average person, creating and playing with representations of their friends (or enemies, or celebrities, or whatever) is an activity motivated by social concerns - a subset of those activities involved with socializing, exploring where one stands in relation to other people, and making statements about how one views these relationships. The fact that these are video games is almost irrelevant
The game industry is very used to thinking about things in terms of games - game reviewers for the most part agree on what makes a good game, and they all basically think about games in the same way. But that way is not going to help them think about why people like The Sims or the Wii.
Fortunately, a few people are thinking differently, and the creators of Habbo Hotel are a good example. I'd really recommend reading this report of Sulka Haro's keynote about Habbo Hotel - I found it very interesting and inspiring. There was one quote in particular I found very interesting, about the fact that tons of the mostly-teenage players of Habbo Hotel spend their time playing make-believe, roleplaying activities and roles that the game itself doesn't support: "If you look, little kids will play for hours... but teenagers are reaching the age where that's not socially allowed anymore. We're providing an environment where that's OK."
As an example given by the article, there are people who pretend to be horses, and then other people pretend to pet them! That's crazy, I don't even know how that would work! But apparently people do it. And another thing that was mentioned was how the players are often very concerned with keeping Habbo Hotel a private place separate from their parents - it would be too embarrassing otherwise, I imagine. Again, my mind is flashing back to Miniature Gardens.
Well, I seem to have drifted far from my original topic, which was about how to motivate kids to work on projects in an educational context. But this is all good stuff, and I would have wanted to get to it in a blog post sooner or later. I don't really have any conclusions to make at this point, so consider this food for thought.
And about the one-blog-post-a-week thing, I've just been so busy with school that I can't spare the time, seriously. It has turned out to be more difficult than I expected to turn my quick notebook entries into interesting, coherent blog posts. I'll keep trying though. Thanks for reading.
2007/10/03
A Real Blog Now?
If you've been to this blog a few times, you'll know that I rarely post anything. Every so often I add links to the side as I come across interesting blogs, but the last time I posted was, what, more than three weeks ago?
But that's really silly, since I make sure to write something in my idea notebook every day! So I've decided that at least once a week, I'll go through my past entries from my idea notebook, and write about them here. Maybe then I can link to this site without feeling ashamed. :p
Expect a new post within a couple days!
But that's really silly, since I make sure to write something in my idea notebook every day! So I've decided that at least once a week, I'll go through my past entries from my idea notebook, and write about them here. Maybe then I can link to this site without feeling ashamed. :p
Expect a new post within a couple days!
2007/09/09
How to make an origami hydralisk
Update:
I finally created a video tutorial for my origami hydralisk! :D
Guess what? You know those old origami hydralisk instructions I released last year - the ones that no one except maybe one or two people could figure out? Well, I finally managed to finish the fancy photo instructions that my frustrated fans have been begging for! Yes! :D Time to rejoice, I expect.
It goes by the simple title of How to make an origami hydralisk. Try it! In this interactive Flash package, there are almost a hundred photos detailing each step, and each intermediate fold as well. Plus there are several photos you can look at of the finished model, and an animation using all the images, so you can see a half an hour of folding condensed into about half a minute. There's a lot of good stuff to find in there.
To quote from the about page:
I came up with this origami hydralisk model in 2003. Eventually, in the summer of 2006, I finished drawing the instructions for it. In late October, I posted them on dA, and found that sadly, no one could decipher them. Darn. It was then suggested to me, repeatedly, that I release a new version of the instructions using photos instead. I got around to doing so on July 8, 2007, ending up with over a hundred photos to process. Over the summer, I added origami symbols and put this fancy Flash thing together. Now, on September 8, 2007, I am finally through with it!
Actually, make that 2:40 am on September 9, 2007. This has been something of a late-night project for me. :p
Before I go to bed, I'd like to thank the impatient people on deviantART for their constant nagging! They gave me the motivation I needed to struggle through this epic endeavor. ;)
I finally created a video tutorial for my origami hydralisk! :D
Guess what? You know those old origami hydralisk instructions I released last year - the ones that no one except maybe one or two people could figure out? Well, I finally managed to finish the fancy photo instructions that my frustrated fans have been begging for! Yes! :D Time to rejoice, I expect.
It goes by the simple title of How to make an origami hydralisk. Try it! In this interactive Flash package, there are almost a hundred photos detailing each step, and each intermediate fold as well. Plus there are several photos you can look at of the finished model, and an animation using all the images, so you can see a half an hour of folding condensed into about half a minute. There's a lot of good stuff to find in there.
To quote from the about page:
I came up with this origami hydralisk model in 2003. Eventually, in the summer of 2006, I finished drawing the instructions for it. In late October, I posted them on dA, and found that sadly, no one could decipher them. Darn. It was then suggested to me, repeatedly, that I release a new version of the instructions using photos instead. I got around to doing so on July 8, 2007, ending up with over a hundred photos to process. Over the summer, I added origami symbols and put this fancy Flash thing together. Now, on September 8, 2007, I am finally through with it!
Actually, make that 2:40 am on September 9, 2007. This has been something of a late-night project for me. :p
Before I go to bed, I'd like to thank the impatient people on deviantART for their constant nagging! They gave me the motivation I needed to struggle through this epic endeavor. ;)
2007/07/19
Art and Engineering
Some thoughts - something of a rant, but interesting:
Engineering is built around figuring out how to do things, around solving problems. It's about making progress by discovering as many wrong solutions as you need before you find the right way. You try something, and then you find out if it works. It may take minutes or hours or days or weeks to see the results, or even seconds, but that delay is what separates engineering from art.
In art, you experiment and discover not to find one solution, not to document your mistakes, but to build your own internal, intuitive knowledge, to become fluent in the space of a system. Then you have the potential to create. It's about bridging the gap between intention - directed from within the self, not by a person or institution - and manifestation. The painter studies and practices and learns the characteristics of paints and brushes and surfaces, not in order to compile a manual or to solve a problem, but so that when he wants to paint something, he'll be able to paint it.
It's the difference between a slide show and an animation. It allows for that spark to appear between the frames. Once you are there, once you are fluent and exploring a space, with all the technicalities subsumed by your mind so you are free to create rather than to simply solve, then you are in the realm of design and artistic expression.
Oh, and if Daniel Pink is right, then engineering is also what may become automated or outsourced. I'm sticking with art. :p
Engineering is built around figuring out how to do things, around solving problems. It's about making progress by discovering as many wrong solutions as you need before you find the right way. You try something, and then you find out if it works. It may take minutes or hours or days or weeks to see the results, or even seconds, but that delay is what separates engineering from art.
In art, you experiment and discover not to find one solution, not to document your mistakes, but to build your own internal, intuitive knowledge, to become fluent in the space of a system. Then you have the potential to create. It's about bridging the gap between intention - directed from within the self, not by a person or institution - and manifestation. The painter studies and practices and learns the characteristics of paints and brushes and surfaces, not in order to compile a manual or to solve a problem, but so that when he wants to paint something, he'll be able to paint it.
It's the difference between a slide show and an animation. It allows for that spark to appear between the frames. Once you are there, once you are fluent and exploring a space, with all the technicalities subsumed by your mind so you are free to create rather than to simply solve, then you are in the realm of design and artistic expression.
Oh, and if Daniel Pink is right, then engineering is also what may become automated or outsourced. I'm sticking with art. :p
2007/07/12
Delicious Books!
Every so often I come across a book that every few pages makes me want to jump around, sing out for joy, and hug people! I have just finished reading such a book: A Whole New Mind
, by Daniel Pink.
But there are plenty more I've read but haven't had a chance to really review or write about. Like these ones: (most recently read first)
I've started reading The Arts and the Creation of Mind, by Elliot Eisner. Hopefully that will be another joyful experience for me. :)
, by Daniel Pink.But there are plenty more I've read but haven't had a chance to really review or write about. Like these ones: (most recently read first)
- A Whole New Mind
- Making Comics
, by Scott McCloud
- Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
, by Betty Edwards
- Da Vinci Decoded
, by Michael Gelb
- Flow
, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
- On Intelligence
, by Jeff Hawkins
- Emotional Design
, by Donald Norman
- Understanding Comics
, by Scott McCloud
I've started reading The Arts and the Creation of Mind, by Elliot Eisner. Hopefully that will be another joyful experience for me. :)
2007/06/28
Why Hasn't Anyone Thought of This Yet?
Okay, this needs to happen: A marionette fighting game for the Nintendo Wii. The PS3 could work too, with its motion-sensing controller.
Admit it, this is a brilliantly obvious idea. Haven't you ever picked up a Wii Remote and wished there was a frightening, battle-ready puppet suspended beneath it? No? Well, neither have I, probably because I don't have a Wii, but still, I'm sure you can see the connection.
This idea arose as a possible solution to the problem of physics-based avatar control. In most games, you move around a character, like Mario, for example, who is represented by an animated image moving around on the screen. But there are some games where instead, your character is made up of many physically simulated parts. You then have a direct control over the movement of these parts, whether you are individually controlling each joint or moving a ragdoll's head around with the arrow keys. This freedom allows players to develop their own playing style within the physics of the game world, but also tends to result in games that are very difficult to learn.
As Matthew Wegner of Fun-Motion said in his review of Toribash,
"Other games have attempted to implement full body, physics-based control mechanisms. The problem lies in the complication of movement. As a designer, you either need to simplify the control mechanism, automate some aspect of the process, or rely on convoluted controls. It’s a very hard problem to solve for a real-time game."
That's the problem. If you want a game that lets players do realistic, physics-based kung fu, well those players are going to have to be real kung fu masters. Either that or you're going to have to take some control away from them or simplify the game until it isn't really like kung fu. The ability to distill a complex activity into something controlled by a few buttons, while still retaining that interesting complexity, is central to the art of designing physics games.
So anyway, how about taking a ragdoll and rather than strapping a jetpack to its head (basically what Ragdoll Masters does), try attaching virtual strings to its arms and legs? I originally envisioned this as a way to combine individual control of limbs with an analog input device like the mouse. But it would work even better with a 3D motion-sensing controller like that of the Wii.
Puppetry also provides a wealth of inspiration for the visual style of a game. Tons of different cultures around the world each have their own puppet traditions from which one can steal ideas. And they all look really freaky. It's quite relevant to games because puppetry is basically the oldest form of virtual reality. Puppets are not just pictures, they are virtual actors, not made for their own sake but as part of a larger production intended to convey a story, to create the illusion of an imagined world (yes, that did need to be italicized). As a result, they offer a long history of approaches to representing people and things within restrictive technical limitations. Puppets are not "photo-realistic" and neither are games. It might do us games people some good to take a look at how stylization has been done in the past. I think puppets make a better example than animation in this respect.
And yeah, that's my idea. I'm sorry for the lack of activity on my blog. There is much to write about, and little time or motivation with which to do it. Not that I'm just too lazy, necessarily, but when I get a great idea of what to write, I usually don't have the time, and once I do get the time, I'm just not feeling it anymore. But occasionally those two occurrences coincide, like now. Though this has taken way longer than I expected. Oh well. Thanks for reading. :)
Admit it, this is a brilliantly obvious idea. Haven't you ever picked up a Wii Remote and wished there was a frightening, battle-ready puppet suspended beneath it? No? Well, neither have I, probably because I don't have a Wii, but still, I'm sure you can see the connection.
This idea arose as a possible solution to the problem of physics-based avatar control. In most games, you move around a character, like Mario, for example, who is represented by an animated image moving around on the screen. But there are some games where instead, your character is made up of many physically simulated parts. You then have a direct control over the movement of these parts, whether you are individually controlling each joint or moving a ragdoll's head around with the arrow keys. This freedom allows players to develop their own playing style within the physics of the game world, but also tends to result in games that are very difficult to learn.
As Matthew Wegner of Fun-Motion said in his review of Toribash,
"Other games have attempted to implement full body, physics-based control mechanisms. The problem lies in the complication of movement. As a designer, you either need to simplify the control mechanism, automate some aspect of the process, or rely on convoluted controls. It’s a very hard problem to solve for a real-time game."
That's the problem. If you want a game that lets players do realistic, physics-based kung fu, well those players are going to have to be real kung fu masters. Either that or you're going to have to take some control away from them or simplify the game until it isn't really like kung fu. The ability to distill a complex activity into something controlled by a few buttons, while still retaining that interesting complexity, is central to the art of designing physics games.
So anyway, how about taking a ragdoll and rather than strapping a jetpack to its head (basically what Ragdoll Masters does), try attaching virtual strings to its arms and legs? I originally envisioned this as a way to combine individual control of limbs with an analog input device like the mouse. But it would work even better with a 3D motion-sensing controller like that of the Wii.
Puppetry also provides a wealth of inspiration for the visual style of a game. Tons of different cultures around the world each have their own puppet traditions from which one can steal ideas. And they all look really freaky. It's quite relevant to games because puppetry is basically the oldest form of virtual reality. Puppets are not just pictures, they are virtual actors, not made for their own sake but as part of a larger production intended to convey a story, to create the illusion of an imagined world (yes, that did need to be italicized). As a result, they offer a long history of approaches to representing people and things within restrictive technical limitations. Puppets are not "photo-realistic" and neither are games. It might do us games people some good to take a look at how stylization has been done in the past. I think puppets make a better example than animation in this respect.
And yeah, that's my idea. I'm sorry for the lack of activity on my blog. There is much to write about, and little time or motivation with which to do it. Not that I'm just too lazy, necessarily, but when I get a great idea of what to write, I usually don't have the time, and once I do get the time, I'm just not feeling it anymore. But occasionally those two occurrences coincide, like now. Though this has taken way longer than I expected. Oh well. Thanks for reading. :)
2007/03/13
Seeing Art as Games
For the first time in my life, I find myself acutely aware of the changing seasons. Having grown accustomed to the moods and aesthetic of winter, I was quite surprised to see green buds appearing around me. Now it seems that everywhere I look there are cherry blossoms blooming! And since I take much of my own mood and inspiration from my surroundings, this matters.
This enhanced artistic awareness in general is all thanks to deviantART, where I've been spending a lot of time building up my art appreciation skills over the last few months.
However, I notice that when looking at any new type of art, my first reaction is to think of it in terms of a game. Oh, that would be an interesting art style for a game. That looks like an interesting environment to explore in a game. That character would be an interesting one to encounter in a game.
Kinda pathetic, ain't it? Well, I know that the artists are able to see their art in a richer way than that. So I thought it would be a good idea for me to take some art classes in order to learn how to see the art the way the artists see it, and not just as a bunch of messy paint. Because I'm sure there is something there - tons of people consider their art worthwhile and fulfilling, even if it is not understandable to the average person.
Once I can see this art as the artists see it, maybe then I can turn this around and see new possibilities for games inspired by this new way of seeing - beyond the spatial and symbolic systems of existing games to explore other aspects of human experience.
On an unrelated note, I hear that Gish 2 is under development! Woohoo! I am tingling with anticipation and also making funny noises. Mmm... Gish 2. :D
This enhanced artistic awareness in general is all thanks to deviantART, where I've been spending a lot of time building up my art appreciation skills over the last few months.
However, I notice that when looking at any new type of art, my first reaction is to think of it in terms of a game. Oh, that would be an interesting art style for a game. That looks like an interesting environment to explore in a game. That character would be an interesting one to encounter in a game.
Kinda pathetic, ain't it? Well, I know that the artists are able to see their art in a richer way than that. So I thought it would be a good idea for me to take some art classes in order to learn how to see the art the way the artists see it, and not just as a bunch of messy paint. Because I'm sure there is something there - tons of people consider their art worthwhile and fulfilling, even if it is not understandable to the average person.
Once I can see this art as the artists see it, maybe then I can turn this around and see new possibilities for games inspired by this new way of seeing - beyond the spatial and symbolic systems of existing games to explore other aspects of human experience.
On an unrelated note, I hear that Gish 2 is under development! Woohoo! I am tingling with anticipation and also making funny noises. Mmm... Gish 2. :D
2007/01/31
Review of We Love Katamari
It's been a while since I last posted anything substantial, so I thought I'd share a review I wrote of the PS2 game We Love Katamari. It's about a year old. And long! :p
It's been two days since I last played We Love Katamari, and I'm already experiencing withdrawal symptoms. The theme song has been playing through my head constantly, and my hands ache for the touch of a virtual katamari. In my whole life, I've probably played the game for less than three hours, but We Love Katamari has still managed to leave its blocky, rainbow-colored mark imprinted on my brain.
First off, We Love Katamari is actually the sequel to the original Katamari Damacy, with much of the same graphics and gameplay. Katamari Damacy introduced the central idea of rolling a sticky katamari around to pick up miscellaneous objects and increase in size, beginning with a ball a few centimeters across and growing until you can pick up cars and buildings. The story in that game was that the King of All Cosmos had gotten drunk and destroyed all the stars in the universe, so he sends you, his son, to collect the raw materials for new stars. In a self-referential turn, the sequel We Love Katamari has it that the game Katamari Damacy is now so popular that now you have to appease your many fans by fulfilling their unusual katamari-related requests.
As you may have guessed, We Love Katamari is a very unusual game. The original game concept is very unique, and surprisingly fun. The blocky graphics and choppy, bright animation goes in a direction opposite the current trend in video games toward increasing graphical realism. The music, or at least the theme song, is annoying at first but really sticks in your head after a while. In fact, the whole game is kind of annoying at first. The first time I played it, I was quickly ready to move onto something more traditional. But now I can't get enough! I can assure you that I'd rather be playing We Love Katamari than any other game at this moment.
Okay, so let me start to get into the actual gameplay. Katamari is a very physical game. I have never played a video game that felt more like a real physical environment than this one. In fact, playing We Love Katamari feels a lot more real to me than does driving an actual car. The analog controls and the slight vibration when you bump over some obstacle, as well as the very dense spatial layout of the game world, all work together to produce a feeling of embodiment. It is a feeling I've missed in my life as a student, using my eyes always, but never reaching out and touching my surroundings and feeling them push back. (Actually, I am lucky to be training in Aikido, which unfortunately is only a few hours per week of concentrated tactile awareness.) For me, We Love Katamari brings back some of the feeling of integration with space, of rolling over and feeling the ground, using my hands to build with blocks and bricks.
At first, the game seems to involve little strategy, but in fact it is much deeper than it appears. When your katamari is small, you are restricted in what you can roll up. Bigger objects bounce you off, slowing you down and serving as obstacles. Later on, you may have accumulated a large enough clump to come back and pick up those former obstacles. Part of the game is about knowing what kinds of objects you can safely pick up and when, and then plotting the most efficient course through the area. Often your task will involve growing as large as possible in the shortest amount of time. Of course, in order to do all that, you must be coordinated enough to stick to your intended path, something which I am still working on. As I develop more confidence in my skill with the controls, I can keep my head up and look ahead for good routes to take in the future, and maybe attempt to get an idea of the layout of the entire space. However, the pace of the game is gradual enough that most of this knowledge will come intuitively just by playing over and over again.
One of the most interesting aspects of We Love Katamari is the continually changing scale. What at first might have been an obstacle to be avoided becomes a goody to by grabbed up. A house that once was your entire world is swallowed up in a few seconds as you roll through the neighborhood. I would guess that that was part of what made the original Katamari Damacy so appealing and interesting. It is very rare to see a game that has such a gradual but radical transformation of your playing space, but Katamari Damacy is a game that tells a story of the growth from a tiny ball picking up paperclips on top of a desk to a humongous, city-destroying monster. And all that without cutscenes in between!
Now We Love Katamari is not quite so epic. Many missions have you remain smaller than a house, depending on the strange desires of your rather ungrateful fans. This sequel provides more variety and structure into your tasks, only providing you with new missions once you have completed earlier ones. However, it is still fairly open-ended as there are usually a few different missions you may choose to attempt, and much of the game is spent playing on previous stages.
There are many incentives to replay an older area. For one thing, while the space stays the same every time you play, the individual objectives are switched around. (It is kind of like Super Mario 64, where each world has a number of different tasks to complete, which then give access to new worlds.) Also, there is a constant push to exceed the requirements of the task, because your spoiled fans express thinly veiled disappointment at the unimpressive size of your katamari or speed of your performance. The only way to gain total approval is to find the perfect, most efficient route through the space. Your pleased fans will give you presents of accessories with which to customize your character's appearance. This brings up another incentive for replaying: collection. The game keeps track of every single type of object you've picked up and allows you to browse through your collection and see pictures and amusing descriptions for each one. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of objects to find. So obsessive people might find themselves spending way too much time on this game.
I will now analyze We Love Katamari using Richard Garfield's framework. The game is mainly single-player, but there is also a two-player mode where you may compete with a friend in a race to complete the given objective first. Since both players are rolling around in the same space, there is some direct conflict between you and your opponent. The objects that you pick up are objects that your opponent doesn't get to pick up. Also, you may bump into or even roll up the other player directly. There is also a mode which involves two players, but they both work together to control one katamari. It is essentially a single-player mode with team dynamics.
Luck is an important part of the game even though all the play areas are the exact same every time, simply because much of the game is played while not knowing the complete location of every object. The outcome depends on whether you went here or there, if you took a plentiful route or not, and until you spend a long time replaying the mission to find the best paths, much of your success will depend on luck. On the other hand, skill is still important. The layouts are not so restrictive as to only allow a few effective routes; they are designed to let someone with a good practical understanding of the game do well on the first few tries. It does take some practice to get to that skill level though.
Part of the appeal of We Love Katamari is that the game heuristics are so clear. It is easy to tell how well you're doing - just see how big your katamari has grown, in qualitative or quantitative terms, as the diameter of the clump is displayed in meters besides being apparent on screen. As for what to do next, well just head for the nearest small object in range. You get immediate feedback on your actions as you roll up some object and hear a satisfying bloop and feel a buzz from the controller. Also, the heuristics do deepen as you gain more experience. You may learn that keeping your momentum going is more important than grabbing something just a little too far to the side, or start constructing plans beyond randomly wandering around and looking for goodies. However, assessing the game state becomes more complicated as well, since not only the size of your katamari but your position and configuration of the space around you also must be taken into account.
The length of a mission is usually only about five or ten minutes, since there is usually some time constraint involved in the task. This makes the game good for casual play when you want a quick diversion. However, the overall lifetime of the game can be quite long, especially when you take into account the collecting aspect and the competitive play mode. Also, the short length of missions means that a significant fraction of the time is spent as downtime, reading the inane dialogue preceding a mission or afterward. In the actual play of the game, however, there is practically no downtime at all.
There are other elements in Richard Garfield's framework, but they are not particularly interesting when applied to We Love Katamari, so I won't bother mentioning them.
It's been two days since I last played We Love Katamari, and I'm already experiencing withdrawal symptoms. The theme song has been playing through my head constantly, and my hands ache for the touch of a virtual katamari. In my whole life, I've probably played the game for less than three hours, but We Love Katamari has still managed to leave its blocky, rainbow-colored mark imprinted on my brain.
First off, We Love Katamari is actually the sequel to the original Katamari Damacy, with much of the same graphics and gameplay. Katamari Damacy introduced the central idea of rolling a sticky katamari around to pick up miscellaneous objects and increase in size, beginning with a ball a few centimeters across and growing until you can pick up cars and buildings. The story in that game was that the King of All Cosmos had gotten drunk and destroyed all the stars in the universe, so he sends you, his son, to collect the raw materials for new stars. In a self-referential turn, the sequel We Love Katamari has it that the game Katamari Damacy is now so popular that now you have to appease your many fans by fulfilling their unusual katamari-related requests.
As you may have guessed, We Love Katamari is a very unusual game. The original game concept is very unique, and surprisingly fun. The blocky graphics and choppy, bright animation goes in a direction opposite the current trend in video games toward increasing graphical realism. The music, or at least the theme song, is annoying at first but really sticks in your head after a while. In fact, the whole game is kind of annoying at first. The first time I played it, I was quickly ready to move onto something more traditional. But now I can't get enough! I can assure you that I'd rather be playing We Love Katamari than any other game at this moment.
Okay, so let me start to get into the actual gameplay. Katamari is a very physical game. I have never played a video game that felt more like a real physical environment than this one. In fact, playing We Love Katamari feels a lot more real to me than does driving an actual car. The analog controls and the slight vibration when you bump over some obstacle, as well as the very dense spatial layout of the game world, all work together to produce a feeling of embodiment. It is a feeling I've missed in my life as a student, using my eyes always, but never reaching out and touching my surroundings and feeling them push back. (Actually, I am lucky to be training in Aikido, which unfortunately is only a few hours per week of concentrated tactile awareness.) For me, We Love Katamari brings back some of the feeling of integration with space, of rolling over and feeling the ground, using my hands to build with blocks and bricks.
At first, the game seems to involve little strategy, but in fact it is much deeper than it appears. When your katamari is small, you are restricted in what you can roll up. Bigger objects bounce you off, slowing you down and serving as obstacles. Later on, you may have accumulated a large enough clump to come back and pick up those former obstacles. Part of the game is about knowing what kinds of objects you can safely pick up and when, and then plotting the most efficient course through the area. Often your task will involve growing as large as possible in the shortest amount of time. Of course, in order to do all that, you must be coordinated enough to stick to your intended path, something which I am still working on. As I develop more confidence in my skill with the controls, I can keep my head up and look ahead for good routes to take in the future, and maybe attempt to get an idea of the layout of the entire space. However, the pace of the game is gradual enough that most of this knowledge will come intuitively just by playing over and over again.
One of the most interesting aspects of We Love Katamari is the continually changing scale. What at first might have been an obstacle to be avoided becomes a goody to by grabbed up. A house that once was your entire world is swallowed up in a few seconds as you roll through the neighborhood. I would guess that that was part of what made the original Katamari Damacy so appealing and interesting. It is very rare to see a game that has such a gradual but radical transformation of your playing space, but Katamari Damacy is a game that tells a story of the growth from a tiny ball picking up paperclips on top of a desk to a humongous, city-destroying monster. And all that without cutscenes in between!
Now We Love Katamari is not quite so epic. Many missions have you remain smaller than a house, depending on the strange desires of your rather ungrateful fans. This sequel provides more variety and structure into your tasks, only providing you with new missions once you have completed earlier ones. However, it is still fairly open-ended as there are usually a few different missions you may choose to attempt, and much of the game is spent playing on previous stages.
There are many incentives to replay an older area. For one thing, while the space stays the same every time you play, the individual objectives are switched around. (It is kind of like Super Mario 64, where each world has a number of different tasks to complete, which then give access to new worlds.) Also, there is a constant push to exceed the requirements of the task, because your spoiled fans express thinly veiled disappointment at the unimpressive size of your katamari or speed of your performance. The only way to gain total approval is to find the perfect, most efficient route through the space. Your pleased fans will give you presents of accessories with which to customize your character's appearance. This brings up another incentive for replaying: collection. The game keeps track of every single type of object you've picked up and allows you to browse through your collection and see pictures and amusing descriptions for each one. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of objects to find. So obsessive people might find themselves spending way too much time on this game.
I will now analyze We Love Katamari using Richard Garfield's framework. The game is mainly single-player, but there is also a two-player mode where you may compete with a friend in a race to complete the given objective first. Since both players are rolling around in the same space, there is some direct conflict between you and your opponent. The objects that you pick up are objects that your opponent doesn't get to pick up. Also, you may bump into or even roll up the other player directly. There is also a mode which involves two players, but they both work together to control one katamari. It is essentially a single-player mode with team dynamics.
Luck is an important part of the game even though all the play areas are the exact same every time, simply because much of the game is played while not knowing the complete location of every object. The outcome depends on whether you went here or there, if you took a plentiful route or not, and until you spend a long time replaying the mission to find the best paths, much of your success will depend on luck. On the other hand, skill is still important. The layouts are not so restrictive as to only allow a few effective routes; they are designed to let someone with a good practical understanding of the game do well on the first few tries. It does take some practice to get to that skill level though.
Part of the appeal of We Love Katamari is that the game heuristics are so clear. It is easy to tell how well you're doing - just see how big your katamari has grown, in qualitative or quantitative terms, as the diameter of the clump is displayed in meters besides being apparent on screen. As for what to do next, well just head for the nearest small object in range. You get immediate feedback on your actions as you roll up some object and hear a satisfying bloop and feel a buzz from the controller. Also, the heuristics do deepen as you gain more experience. You may learn that keeping your momentum going is more important than grabbing something just a little too far to the side, or start constructing plans beyond randomly wandering around and looking for goodies. However, assessing the game state becomes more complicated as well, since not only the size of your katamari but your position and configuration of the space around you also must be taken into account.
The length of a mission is usually only about five or ten minutes, since there is usually some time constraint involved in the task. This makes the game good for casual play when you want a quick diversion. However, the overall lifetime of the game can be quite long, especially when you take into account the collecting aspect and the competitive play mode. Also, the short length of missions means that a significant fraction of the time is spent as downtime, reading the inane dialogue preceding a mission or afterward. In the actual play of the game, however, there is practically no downtime at all.
There are other elements in Richard Garfield's framework, but they are not particularly interesting when applied to We Love Katamari, so I won't bother mentioning them.
2007/01/15
The Fisix Engine
The Fisix Engine has been released! If you haven't heard of it before, it's a physics engine for Flash that lets you easily make games with ragdoll physics. It's not completely done yet, but you can still download it and try it out.
The cool thing about it is that it is so professionally done. It even has an API documentation page where you can browse through descriptions of all its packages and classes, just like Java does! The downside is that it is only for ActionScript 3.0, which is not completely done yet, and not integrated into Flash 8. You have to download some separate programs to get it all working, which is something I haven't gotten around to doing yet. And of course Flash programs you make with AS3 will not work for people who don't have the latest version of Flash Player.
That said, it is worth looking into, especially as AS3 becomes more widespread. I've registered on the forums, and have already made a few posts. I think it will be fun. :)
That reminds me, I still haven't gotten around to posting on the Tale of Tales forum. :/ Maybe I'll think of a good game design topic to post there. Sometime.
The cool thing about it is that it is so professionally done. It even has an API documentation page where you can browse through descriptions of all its packages and classes, just like Java does! The downside is that it is only for ActionScript 3.0, which is not completely done yet, and not integrated into Flash 8. You have to download some separate programs to get it all working, which is something I haven't gotten around to doing yet. And of course Flash programs you make with AS3 will not work for people who don't have the latest version of Flash Player.
That said, it is worth looking into, especially as AS3 becomes more widespread. I've registered on the forums, and have already made a few posts. I think it will be fun. :)
That reminds me, I still haven't gotten around to posting on the Tale of Tales forum. :/ Maybe I'll think of a good game design topic to post there. Sometime.
2006/11/28
Review of Cultivation
Cultivation is a game I've mentioned before, but in case you have not tried it yet, here's a description from the "press section" of the website:
"Cultivation explores the social interactions within a gardening community. You lead one family of gardeners, starting with a single individual, and wise choices can keep your genetic line from extinction. While breeding plants, eating, and mating, your actions impact your neighbors, and the social balance sways between conflict and compromise.
Cultivation features dynamic graphics that are procedurally-generated using genetic representations and cross-breeding. In other words, game objects are "grown" in real-time instead of being hand-painted or hard-coded. Each plant and gardener in the game is unique in terms of both its appearance and behavior."
So basically, you have this little circle creature, which you can direct around the map and plant seeds, water them, eat fruit, share fruit and stuff like that. A cool thing about it is that all the stats, the graphics, and even the music is all based around a genetic system and is different every time. However, the basic play experience is very similar each time, at least on the surface.
It's pretty interesting. I wouldn't really call it "fun" though. If I'm not misaken, it's still in development, so hopefully the author will continue to improve the game.
The main problem is that it doesn't seem to go anywhere. After the first time I tried it, figured out how to play, I wasn't really compelled to keep going. It just seemed like I would be repeating the same basic strategy I had figured out in the first few minutes. This is an issue of gameplay progression.
Most games use techniques such as levels and upgrades to structure their gameplay progression, as I've mentioned before. But it's my impression that Cultivation is meant to have a more freeform progression, where the player may uncover for themselves new complexity and strategy that already exists in the mechanics. It fits with the procedural approach to the rest of the game content.
Unfortunately, just having lots of depth hidden in your game doesn't mean that players will find it. I've struggled with this myself in my game Braids. It also has a lot of complexity and depth, and also fails to get that across to many people who try playing it. The time when it does manage to get people interested in it, is when they are playing against another person. Us humans are very social, and we learn socially as well. When you are playing with other people, you can learn by watching what they do, and by communicating.
With Cultivation, it's hard to learn socially like that. It's hard to learn by watching what the computer players do, partly because most of the time you can't see them on the screen, but also because the important actions of the game are not reflected strongly in the graphics. You pretty much just see some circular creatures gliding around, with things occasionally popping up and disappearing around them. It's hard to see what they're thinking, what strategies they are using in the game, how game events are influencing their behavior.
Right now the actions and graphics in the game are pretty distant from the interesting parts of the gameplay. Though I haven't really gotten to that level of play, I presume that the interesting parts of the game come from the social dynamics of the gardeners. But I haven't been able to see much beyond noticing that if I try to enroach onto their territory, they get mad, and if I give them food, they like me.
And the basic actions of the game, like planting, watering, harvesting, seem even further removed from the actual game. I know the basic sequence - plant, water, harvest, repeat - but it doesn't seem to really tie into the social dynamics in a significant way. From what I understand, you could cut it out completely and just have establishing territory and giving gifts, and the social part of it would be relatively unaffected. If that's true, then maybe it should be simplified in that way, or at least made more significant to the gameplay. And if I am mistaken in dismissing the connection, the connection should be made more clear through better feedback! Hopefully this is an issue that can be simply resolved by improving the user interface.
So if I'm lucky, the author of Cultivation will come read this and improve the game. :) But anyway, I think it could be fun for me to make my own game like this, expanding more on the cultivation side of things, with more interesting things you can do with the plants, and easier guidance of the evolution of your garden. I am eager to play with procedural generation of plants, and right now I don't have a clear idea of how the social aspect of Cultivation is supposed to work.
But something that could be fruitful to integrate into the game would be the dynamics of sexual selection. There is mating in Cultivation, but everyone is hermaphroditic and you don't really have much choice in the matter. When I played I couldn't help being pregnant constantly since the other creatures seem to exchange eggs at every opportunity. :p
I'll leave you with that thought. :D
"Cultivation explores the social interactions within a gardening community. You lead one family of gardeners, starting with a single individual, and wise choices can keep your genetic line from extinction. While breeding plants, eating, and mating, your actions impact your neighbors, and the social balance sways between conflict and compromise.
Cultivation features dynamic graphics that are procedurally-generated using genetic representations and cross-breeding. In other words, game objects are "grown" in real-time instead of being hand-painted or hard-coded. Each plant and gardener in the game is unique in terms of both its appearance and behavior."
So basically, you have this little circle creature, which you can direct around the map and plant seeds, water them, eat fruit, share fruit and stuff like that. A cool thing about it is that all the stats, the graphics, and even the music is all based around a genetic system and is different every time. However, the basic play experience is very similar each time, at least on the surface.
It's pretty interesting. I wouldn't really call it "fun" though. If I'm not misaken, it's still in development, so hopefully the author will continue to improve the game.
The main problem is that it doesn't seem to go anywhere. After the first time I tried it, figured out how to play, I wasn't really compelled to keep going. It just seemed like I would be repeating the same basic strategy I had figured out in the first few minutes. This is an issue of gameplay progression.
Most games use techniques such as levels and upgrades to structure their gameplay progression, as I've mentioned before. But it's my impression that Cultivation is meant to have a more freeform progression, where the player may uncover for themselves new complexity and strategy that already exists in the mechanics. It fits with the procedural approach to the rest of the game content.
Unfortunately, just having lots of depth hidden in your game doesn't mean that players will find it. I've struggled with this myself in my game Braids. It also has a lot of complexity and depth, and also fails to get that across to many people who try playing it. The time when it does manage to get people interested in it, is when they are playing against another person. Us humans are very social, and we learn socially as well. When you are playing with other people, you can learn by watching what they do, and by communicating.
With Cultivation, it's hard to learn socially like that. It's hard to learn by watching what the computer players do, partly because most of the time you can't see them on the screen, but also because the important actions of the game are not reflected strongly in the graphics. You pretty much just see some circular creatures gliding around, with things occasionally popping up and disappearing around them. It's hard to see what they're thinking, what strategies they are using in the game, how game events are influencing their behavior.
Right now the actions and graphics in the game are pretty distant from the interesting parts of the gameplay. Though I haven't really gotten to that level of play, I presume that the interesting parts of the game come from the social dynamics of the gardeners. But I haven't been able to see much beyond noticing that if I try to enroach onto their territory, they get mad, and if I give them food, they like me.
And the basic actions of the game, like planting, watering, harvesting, seem even further removed from the actual game. I know the basic sequence - plant, water, harvest, repeat - but it doesn't seem to really tie into the social dynamics in a significant way. From what I understand, you could cut it out completely and just have establishing territory and giving gifts, and the social part of it would be relatively unaffected. If that's true, then maybe it should be simplified in that way, or at least made more significant to the gameplay. And if I am mistaken in dismissing the connection, the connection should be made more clear through better feedback! Hopefully this is an issue that can be simply resolved by improving the user interface.
So if I'm lucky, the author of Cultivation will come read this and improve the game. :) But anyway, I think it could be fun for me to make my own game like this, expanding more on the cultivation side of things, with more interesting things you can do with the plants, and easier guidance of the evolution of your garden. I am eager to play with procedural generation of plants, and right now I don't have a clear idea of how the social aspect of Cultivation is supposed to work.
But something that could be fruitful to integrate into the game would be the dynamics of sexual selection. There is mating in Cultivation, but everyone is hermaphroditic and you don't really have much choice in the matter. When I played I couldn't help being pregnant constantly since the other creatures seem to exchange eggs at every opportunity. :p
I'll leave you with that thought. :D
Second Life Discussions
I've just been reading a very interesting discussion about a recent occurence in Second Life that is threatening to completely change the nature of SL's economy. It has many reflections onto real life issues.
On another note, I just came across a nice and unexpected little insight on Torley's blog.
On another note, I just came across a nice and unexpected little insight on Torley's blog.
2006/11/26
Motivation and Structure
I don't know about you, but I often have difficulty getting motivated to work on school assignments. Even moment-to-moment, I just don't have any clear idea of what I should be doing, of what exactly is the best action to take. The only place where it really flows is while playing a good game, or surfing forums on the web (or of course working on a project, which is not so much of an option during the school year). I suspect that this is true for many people, particularly the typical Flash games audience.
As I mentioned in a recent post, most Flash games are all about the reward structures, the path you take through the game, rather than the play itself. These games very overtly lead the player along with carefully (or not so carefully) spaced goals and rewards that create a continual sense of accomplishment and purpose.
This is just my speculation, but maybe for the general audience of Flash, these games are one of the few places they consistently get that feeling. They may be aimless in school and in trying to deal with the increasing responsibilities of adulthood. :p
In other words, in many aspects of real life the goals are just not clear, and the feedback is delayed or inadequate. This means flow is harder to achieve, and learning is more difficult. Obviously with much of life, this is appropriate, as it's not simple or easy to learn how to live life, but many of the subjects taught in schools could be effectively encapsulated in this way.
If you're trying to impart a body of knowledge, like inorganic chemistry for example, it would be possible to set up a learning experience that leads the player along with ample goals, feedback and rewards in order to create flow. I think most students would agree with me that most chemistry textbooks are insufficient in this respect. Instead, an electronic game would be better suited for this role.
But once you get to the real interesting stuff, where science takes place through pushing the rules, interaction with other players, and so forth, creating the smooth ride of a well-oiled game is not completely possible. However, there do exist games and communities around such boundary-pushing activities as well. Look at the communities that have built up around hacking or modding games, or even the many people exploring the Line Rider universe.
Here we are getting into motivation beyond the goals encapsulated inside a little game. Whether you are looking for social recognition or mastering the system or something else, the feedback, the reward structure, is less immediate and you must supply your own motivation to bridge that gap.
Scientific interest, and perhaps more significantly in the past, religion, has often supplied people with an overarching context to structure their motivations. I was just talking to a guy about this a few weeks ago and he noted that, contrary to popular belief, there are in fact interesting things to do outside. With the right mindset, you can apparently have a lot of fun observing patterns in nature and trying to explain why things are they way you see them: why these kinds of trees grow over here, while these grow over there; why the shoreline is shaped the way it is; stuff like that. Obviously, there is hardly any feedback to test your suppositions against, short of going through a lot of expense doing scientifically controlled experiments, but the right kind of mindset can bridge this shortcoming and find enjoyment.
More specifically, a scientist might enjoy trying to interpret natural phenomena in this sort of freeform way, because of the context for looking at life that science provides. On the other hand, I might like to imagine how one might navigate these trees and the shoreline in a game environment, because of my game-obsessed view of the world. And then the many other mythologies and religious interpretations lend their own unique ways of seeing things, of decision-making, motivations. Seeing a raven and understanding it not just as bird but also in the context of its role as Raven the trickster. Or seeing it in terms of its role in coastal forest ecosystems, whatever that is.
So, what I'm trying to do here with this post is to illustrate the significance of motivation and structure throughout all of life, and perhaps a dangerous lack of this kind of flow in modern culture. You wonder why kids play these stupid games so much? Yeah, most of these games are pretty stupid. But that's one of the few places they can get this experience. People aren't learning how to experience flow, how to bridge the gap with their own motivation.
Games, science, and religion. They are much more closely related than you might think, and will probably become more intertwined in the future. And that's a good thing.
As I mentioned in a recent post, most Flash games are all about the reward structures, the path you take through the game, rather than the play itself. These games very overtly lead the player along with carefully (or not so carefully) spaced goals and rewards that create a continual sense of accomplishment and purpose.
This is just my speculation, but maybe for the general audience of Flash, these games are one of the few places they consistently get that feeling. They may be aimless in school and in trying to deal with the increasing responsibilities of adulthood. :p
In other words, in many aspects of real life the goals are just not clear, and the feedback is delayed or inadequate. This means flow is harder to achieve, and learning is more difficult. Obviously with much of life, this is appropriate, as it's not simple or easy to learn how to live life, but many of the subjects taught in schools could be effectively encapsulated in this way.
If you're trying to impart a body of knowledge, like inorganic chemistry for example, it would be possible to set up a learning experience that leads the player along with ample goals, feedback and rewards in order to create flow. I think most students would agree with me that most chemistry textbooks are insufficient in this respect. Instead, an electronic game would be better suited for this role.
But once you get to the real interesting stuff, where science takes place through pushing the rules, interaction with other players, and so forth, creating the smooth ride of a well-oiled game is not completely possible. However, there do exist games and communities around such boundary-pushing activities as well. Look at the communities that have built up around hacking or modding games, or even the many people exploring the Line Rider universe.
Here we are getting into motivation beyond the goals encapsulated inside a little game. Whether you are looking for social recognition or mastering the system or something else, the feedback, the reward structure, is less immediate and you must supply your own motivation to bridge that gap.
Scientific interest, and perhaps more significantly in the past, religion, has often supplied people with an overarching context to structure their motivations. I was just talking to a guy about this a few weeks ago and he noted that, contrary to popular belief, there are in fact interesting things to do outside. With the right mindset, you can apparently have a lot of fun observing patterns in nature and trying to explain why things are they way you see them: why these kinds of trees grow over here, while these grow over there; why the shoreline is shaped the way it is; stuff like that. Obviously, there is hardly any feedback to test your suppositions against, short of going through a lot of expense doing scientifically controlled experiments, but the right kind of mindset can bridge this shortcoming and find enjoyment.
More specifically, a scientist might enjoy trying to interpret natural phenomena in this sort of freeform way, because of the context for looking at life that science provides. On the other hand, I might like to imagine how one might navigate these trees and the shoreline in a game environment, because of my game-obsessed view of the world. And then the many other mythologies and religious interpretations lend their own unique ways of seeing things, of decision-making, motivations. Seeing a raven and understanding it not just as bird but also in the context of its role as Raven the trickster. Or seeing it in terms of its role in coastal forest ecosystems, whatever that is.
So, what I'm trying to do here with this post is to illustrate the significance of motivation and structure throughout all of life, and perhaps a dangerous lack of this kind of flow in modern culture. You wonder why kids play these stupid games so much? Yeah, most of these games are pretty stupid. But that's one of the few places they can get this experience. People aren't learning how to experience flow, how to bridge the gap with their own motivation.
Games, science, and religion. They are much more closely related than you might think, and will probably become more intertwined in the future. And that's a good thing.
2006/11/25
Experimental Gameplay Goodness
I was just over at the Experimental Gameplay Project when I decided to finally download the intriguing Big Vine. Big Vine is a little software toy that, in the author's words, lets you "Grow a big scary tree." Indeed, though simple, the visuals and music together create a nicely spooky atmosphere. Go and try it now!
As you know, I don't come up with any original ideas, I just steal other people's and mix them together. So I thought I could probably turn this demo into a game. And I'm not alone in my conviction that this would make an interesting game. In the words of an anonymous commenter, "this is an awesome game if only it had a gole". In case you didn't know, a "gole" is a kind of small, hunchbacked squirrel-vole creature that I just made up. And I think Big Vine would indeed be an awesome game if only it had a gole.
So here's how it would work. You, the player, would take the role of a gole living on one of these big scary trees. You would be able to scurry around on the branches, and just like in Big Vine, cause the tree to grow or die on the spot you're at. Appropriately for a creepy tree, it eats birds. You help it snatch birds out of the sky by growing branches in the right place. But you have to be careful, because it would be just as happy to eat you instead. Maybe the birds can eat you too. And you have to eat the fruit that grows on the tree. Actually, let's say fungus. Fungus grows on the tree and you have to eat that. It fits the creepy, gothic theme better.
It would be a kind of cross between Big Vine and another interesting game called Cultivation. To expand more on the Cultivation aspect, there could be a whole forest of big scary trees and other goles that you can compete and mate with. And a tree life cycle so you could plant new trees and they would evolve over time...
Anyway, the author of Big Vine has quite a few other games in the Experimental Gameplay Project that you should check out. Attack of the Killer Swarm, which also happens to be the top rated game there, is quite amusing with some nice particle physics. Gravity Head is a very unique game with a similar dark style and of course, particle physics. The monkey sound effects are great too. :)
Another interesting thing about Gravity Head is the environment it creates with only a few simple objects. There's the water spout with water particles that are affected by your gravity, and particle smoke rising in the background. And the way the girl's head turns toward your position on the screen serves to tie things together. This is a lot like an idea I had of making little "environmental sketches" in Flash - not animations but dynamically generated environments. They could be interactive or they could just be little places that you watch. For example, one might be a bird bath where bees swarm around and drink from, and you could fill it up or spray them with a hose. Or there could be plants with rain dripping down and shaking the leaves, with the appropriate sound effects.
The last of these games I would recommend checking out is The Crowd. It's more of a toy, maybe even an "environmental sketch" :p but anyway, it's really atmospheric. The art, the music, the interaction, all work together to create this bizarre experience of controlling the lives of a strange and simple flock of followers. Just try it.
As you know, I don't come up with any original ideas, I just steal other people's and mix them together. So I thought I could probably turn this demo into a game. And I'm not alone in my conviction that this would make an interesting game. In the words of an anonymous commenter, "this is an awesome game if only it had a gole". In case you didn't know, a "gole" is a kind of small, hunchbacked squirrel-vole creature that I just made up. And I think Big Vine would indeed be an awesome game if only it had a gole.
So here's how it would work. You, the player, would take the role of a gole living on one of these big scary trees. You would be able to scurry around on the branches, and just like in Big Vine, cause the tree to grow or die on the spot you're at. Appropriately for a creepy tree, it eats birds. You help it snatch birds out of the sky by growing branches in the right place. But you have to be careful, because it would be just as happy to eat you instead. Maybe the birds can eat you too. And you have to eat the fruit that grows on the tree. Actually, let's say fungus. Fungus grows on the tree and you have to eat that. It fits the creepy, gothic theme better.
It would be a kind of cross between Big Vine and another interesting game called Cultivation. To expand more on the Cultivation aspect, there could be a whole forest of big scary trees and other goles that you can compete and mate with. And a tree life cycle so you could plant new trees and they would evolve over time...
Anyway, the author of Big Vine has quite a few other games in the Experimental Gameplay Project that you should check out. Attack of the Killer Swarm, which also happens to be the top rated game there, is quite amusing with some nice particle physics. Gravity Head is a very unique game with a similar dark style and of course, particle physics. The monkey sound effects are great too. :)
Another interesting thing about Gravity Head is the environment it creates with only a few simple objects. There's the water spout with water particles that are affected by your gravity, and particle smoke rising in the background. And the way the girl's head turns toward your position on the screen serves to tie things together. This is a lot like an idea I had of making little "environmental sketches" in Flash - not animations but dynamically generated environments. They could be interactive or they could just be little places that you watch. For example, one might be a bird bath where bees swarm around and drink from, and you could fill it up or spray them with a hose. Or there could be plants with rain dripping down and shaking the leaves, with the appropriate sound effects.
The last of these games I would recommend checking out is The Crowd. It's more of a toy, maybe even an "environmental sketch" :p but anyway, it's really atmospheric. The art, the music, the interaction, all work together to create this bizarre experience of controlling the lives of a strange and simple flock of followers. Just try it.
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