JT Blog

Catch-up session 2

August 22 was the big day for the US release of Nintendogs and Advance Wars: Dual Strike for the DS. I picked up both, but have only really been on Nintendogs to date. This game is not unlike a much more rudimentary pet game, but includes the crack-like ability to train and compete with your virtual dog. If you don't believe the crack analogy, witness the success of horse-racing games that include little more than 1995 graphics and 2 buttons. Anyway, I have a little Yorkie that has become a pretty serious frisbee catcher, but is often hungry because I usually pick up the game for only 10 minutes a day. It really is a must-have game for the DS, but I don't like the real-time clock tying me into starting up the game daily.

New stuff from BigHuge

Scottie tipped me off to the new changes at the BigHugeGames website. There are some screenshots, text, and concept art related to their new game Rise of Legends. They are hard at work getting something ready for E3. It may be time for me to start shopping for a PC capable of playing this game.

Living game worlds 2 - Spore!

Of course, the highlight of the symposium was Will Wright's talk yesterday morning, since the whole event was in honor of him. The title, "Content, compression, and creativity" was really just a thin wrapper around a lengthy demo of the new Maxis title Spore. At first, I was going to describe the demo in minute detail, but Gamespy has already written a pretty lengthy article about it. And even though we weren't supposed to take photos, others did when he gave the same demo at GDC last week, so you can see them here and here until EA's lawyers take them down.

Basically, the game is loosely inspired by Eames's short film "Powers of Ten", Drake's equation and the differing magnitudes of its terms, as well as numerous feature films in the sci-fi genre, like 2001, Close Encounters, etc. Wright himself presented a slide that showed how the game evolves from what is basically a Pac Man-like game to a Populous-like game, then a SimCity-like game, then a Civilization-like RTS, all the way to a galatic scope where you are in a sandbox of other players' planets and civilizations. So there are both goal-directed elements and exploratory elements.
I just want to mention a few things about the demo:

• The character creation tools for Spore are simply fantastic. Everything is done through direct manipulation, yet there is a high degree of flexibility in terms of what creatures you can create. Note that this flexibility is used in later stages of the game when you can establish your civilization's architectural styles.
• Much of Spore is procedural, meaning that less people needed to be on the development team for things like content creation. For example, potential building upgrades are generated automatically, then future options are recommended to players based on their previous choices.
• In addition, scenery and motion are procedural, meaning that no matter what kind of weird character you create, the game finds a way to make it walk, hunt, eat, etc. believably. This also means that you get a diverse range of possible terrains, planets, and indigenous creatures.
• Many people were blown away (excuse pun) by the ability to use a Death Star-like ray on planets, which made me wonder: if you're going to let people visit the societies created by other players, do you really want to ruin all their hard work by blowing it up?
• At the largest levels of scope (solar systems, the galaxy), your cursor acts as a radio telescope, so you can pick up audible "chatter" that corresponds to other players' civilizations.

He mentioned the difference between quality and volume of content, noting that both seem to increase the value of the game, whether it's high-quality/low volume (Pikmin) or vice versa (Katamari Darcy).

He wrapped up the talk by noting that while at one time there were programmers, designers, and artists, these jobs are intersecting in interesting ways, and as artists and designers learn to program, it's only going to improve gaming.

Living game worlds 1

Yesterday the Living Game Worlds symposium took place across the street from me at the Biltmore hotel. It featured a nice combination of both industry big-wigs who develop/ship games, and academic researchers who study them. I'll use the next few posts to transcribe the sessions I attended.

On Tuesday Ian Bogost (Georgia Tech), Celia Pearce (UC Irvine), Michael Mateas (Georgia Tech), and Will Wright (Maxis) sat on a panel discussing community and games.
Ian spoke of one role of games as progenitors of community that later has little or no reliance on the games that spawn them, using the analogy of soup as a decoction of its ingredients. An example would be guilds that jump between different MMORPGs. He brought up another interesting example called the grocery game that has spawned a whole community of people who want to save on groceries.
Celia presented some findings from her ethnographic study of Uru, the online Myst-based game. An interesting observation was the arc that communities take: First, there is simply playing the game. Over time players interact with others, then they begin to share personal details about themselves. At that point, the sense of community becomes more important and more interesting than the game itself.
Michael used the example of modding communities as a soapbox for demanding more expressive content creation tools for players. He suggested language as the key tool, given that it is able to handle the sharper, decision-oriented nature of human behavior rather than the smooth continuity afforded by knobs that control game parameters. After presenting Facade, he noted that the game used several different languages, each appropriate to different aspects of the game mechanics.
Finally, Will responded by noting that games seem to be like musical instruments in that after acquiring a certain skill with them, there is a desire to share this skill with others. In addition, there seemed to be too much of a gap between casual content creators and hard-core modders, with no smooth way to ramp from one to the other. When asked why communities are important, he gave 2 responses. As a commercial developer, it is nice to have a viral model of promoting your product. If people play your game twice as long, they will tell maybe five times more people about it. From a humanistic perspective, one of his motivations is to have people see things differently after playing his games, and community encourages this multitude of perspectives.