The Gameshelf

This post contains minor spoilers for Fez, but only if you deliberately decipher them.

Yesterday I asked this question on Twitter:

Fez hint request: Jbhyq vg or jbegu zl gvzr gb gel qrpvcurevat gur jevgvat (abg gur ahzoref) nf n fvzcyr pelcgbtenz? rot13.com

I have asked spoiler-class questions about games, films, or books in this format before, usually to little response. In retrospect, it’s clear that I assumed too much in expecting any friend or follower to see it as anything other than gobbledygook. In yesterday’s tweet, I tried an extra step with appending that URL, and to my delight received several nice replies on Twitter and Facebook — as well as a handful of retweets, which I read as compliments on my chosen encryption method.

Some of my correspondents on Twitter chose to adopt the same encoding. “Anu,” advised one reply. “Pbairefvba vf cerggl enaqbz.”

“V’z gbyq gung gur jevgvat vf n fbeg bs zrgn-chmmyr,” countered another, “fb lrf.”

After only a couple extra weeks of work (and non-work -- oh, PAX, you great distraction) I am declaring my iOS IF interpreter ready for beta-testing.

Again, this is not Hadean Lands. The first game I will distribute this way will be The Dreamhold, a tutorial IF game. It will be a free download. (Really, The Dreamhold is already a free download -- you can play it on my web site or in iPhone Frotz. I will be packaging it as a standalone IF app with my new interpreter code.)

As I said, I'm doing this for buzz, and to get feedback on the UI design. But as a bonus, this release of The Dreamhold will contain a brand-new dynamic map. I figure that mobile IF players don't want to draw their own maps. (I mapped all the IF I played when I was a kid... stacks of scrap paper all over the computer room. When you're standing on the subway in rush hour, it's not so simple.) So the game will track your progress, and fill in a map for you as you play.

I hope testing won't run too long, and The Dreamhold will be out by the end of April. (I know, last update I said "early April". Turns out that was wrong.)

I am pleased and proud to announce the first episode of Play of the Light, a new audio podcast presenting a conversation about videogames between myself and Matthew Weise (former design director of MIT’s GAMBIT Game Lab, now narrative designer for Harmonix).

My inspiration to give the pure-audio production medium a spin comes from the work of Dan Benjamin and company at 5by5, a podcast network that exploded into prominence rather recently and which hosts many of my favorite shows, including Back to Work and The Ihnatko Almanac. Over the last year I have observed and absorbed the values and techniques these shows employ to create highly listenable radio. While I didn’t quite realize it until I had finished cutting the first episode, I want Play of the Light to answer the question “If 5by5 hosted a videogame show, what would it sound like?”

The real answer to that question must remain a platonic model in my head, and I can only splice together my best imitation of it, especially since audio-only recording and editing is new turf for me. But I think I did all right — my video work experience proved at least partially transferrable — and I’ll only get better at it.

I also had a sort of counter-inspiration coming from nearly every other videogame-themed podcast I’ve heard. While I have sampled only a tiny slice of the full field — this is a very well-covered topic in podcast-land — I found most such shows difficult to enjoy. They tend to feature friends talking about new games they like or don’t like (as well as whatever else may spring to mind) until they feel done, and then they publish the result with little to no editing. Listening to the result, for me, feels like awkwardly trying to mingle with a group of strangers who all know each other and have their own language, and this overshadows the ostensible topic.

I wanted to create a show that demonstrated at least a little more care than that, from the topics chosen before recording to the style of editing performed afterwards. As I write in the new show’s About page, I really do consider videogames to play an increasingly central role in human culture, and desire to bring the topic more thoughtful and digestible discussion than the internet-audio medium typically delivers.

We have committed to creating an initial “season” of six biweekly episodes, starting this week. Many will be discussions of individual games or game series, but I hope to get into some wider cultural examination as well. I do hope you’ll listen along as it happens!

A very quick note, as Kevin has gone to bed:

The Apollo 18+20 IF album is now live. Most of the games are playable in your web browser; they can all be downloaded and played in your IF interpreter tool of choice.

This after ten minutes of work by me and three months by Kevin. So benificence upon him and all the album contributors. Also thanks to Ryan Veeder for the cover artwork.

As I have alluded in some blog post or other, I've been working on an iOS port of the board game Fealty, designed by R. Eric Reuss. For the project, I chose to use the "turn-based game" API which is built into iOS 5.

(This is part of the GameCenter toolkit, aka GameKit; but not the whole thing. The original GameKit, in iOS 4.1, supported achievements, leaderboards, and peer-to-peer games, but it didn't have a system for turn-taking games. That came along in iOS 5. Just to be clear about the background.)

Building a game using Apple's API was kind of an adventure, which I may document on this blog someday. But the thing is, Jmac and I spent 2005 and 2006 building a platform for these sorts of games, with servers and APIs and everything. It was called Volity; it was very clever. (We weren't nearly so clever about PR, which is why nobody used it, which is why we took it down a few years later, which is why I'm not linking to it.)

We are not Apple, but we are gamers, and our Volity system is more general than Apple's toolkit. It can be used for more kinds of games. This blog post is my attempt to rattle off the differences. Not for bragging rights (Volity is down today, GameCenter is up, end of story) but to point at features that GameKit will (I hope) adopt in future releases.

The new version of Philippe Keyaerts' Evo is out in stores. I picked it up in Pandemonium and read the box: "Evo is a game of conquest in a hostile setting."

I stopped cold. Evo is a game that simultaneously pokes fun at evolution while showing how vital change and growth are to a species. Games of Evo always involve people laughing. Games of Evo let you alternate between dressing your dinos, attacking your neighbors, and bluffing the other players while bidding for genes. Games of Evo mean people yell "Babies!" every turn. Evo has a little bit for everyone, with bright colors, intriguing pieces and cards. There isn't a hostile bone in Evo's body (except maybe if you play the egg-launching card).

This is no longer your grandmother's Evo and I think that's a shame. While the art for Evo might have been whimsical, the mechanic never was. Nor was it ever trivial or obvious.

I haven't opened the box but I'm guessing the core of Evo hasn't changed in the new edition. However, the marketing plan clearly addresses a different audience with this version of the game.

The word "hostile" takes a big step away from the previous version, which was subtitled "The Last Gasp of the Dinosaurs". I think it's too facile to make a gender comment about this particular point so I'm going to skip that—I'm sure you can all fill it in yourselves—and move on to the division this word creates in the potential pool of players. There are a lot of players, although probably not hard-core gamers, who are going to put down the box of a game described this way, independent of their biology and gender. Not everyone wants a war game and not every game needs to be one. The colorful, cartoon style of the old artwork makes it easy for you to want to try the game if you haven't already.

The new artwork is realistic, streamlined, aggressive. The front cover shows two dinos attacking each other. Fighting certainly is a component of the game mechanic but it is not the only mechanic. And I doubt most people are going to produce a mental image similar to that on the new box cover given the pink Tyrannosauras Rex chits and the hair drawn on each Dino Portrait card from the first edition. It frustrates me that the game is now being presented as a war game when it isn't (solely) and that anyone interested in the other facets of the game will have no way of knowing they exist.

I want to digress a little here because I can already hear the grumbling. Most games have boxes that are not representative of the mechanic or tenor of the game. I argue that the Evo box changed from representing the game well—a whimsical, mixed mechanic of bidding, fighting, and costuming—to representing a narrow portion of the game. And while I'm clearly sensitive to portrayals that exclude diversity, I argue that the older edition does not resort to stereotypes for color and ability, and therefore panders to neither gender. (The majority of pictures on Board Game Geek show males playing Evo, clearly undeterred by the lack of violence on the old box.)

Lastly, I'm surprised by the need to force a story onto the game, taking it from quasi-science into complete fantasy: "Millions of years ago, the Island of Keth sheltered great wandering tribes who were accompanied by strange creatures belonging to a race that is today extinct."

Everyone goes extinct at the end of a game of Evo. Some dinos, hopefully yours, are just the last ones standing before the comet hits. Evo is a great game and the new box does it a disservice by killing off potential players before they can learn the game's full potential.

I commented on Monday that I would get an update posted "in a couple of days". That wasn't procrastination; I wanted to be able to say I'd hit an interesting milestone before I headed off to a week of GDC. Didn't happen! Sorry. So, here's the somewhat-less-than-a-mile marker of progress I've got.

First, the game: the game is progressing. That is all I have to say about it. (Yes, there will be more detailed reports before the "It's done" report. But not right now.)

First and a half: Let's assume that if I had a release date to announce, I'd announce it, okay? (I wish I didn't have to explain that every time.)

But here is what I can say, because this is the open-source part: I have made great progress this month on the technical end of the project. That is to say, the iOS port of the IF interpreter.

by Miyuki Miyabe; translated to English by Alexander O. Smith

I suppose I should write two reviews here: one for folks who love Ico the videogame, and one for folks who have never heard of it. (If you're in between, flip a coin and read both.)

Ico was a 2001 videogame (for the Playstation). I loved it; I still love it. It remains a landmark in atmospheric, engaging videogame storytelling. Notably, it was almost entirely wordless. Everything was conveyed through architecture, lighting, the body language of the protagonists, and -- most important -- the physical struggle of the game's challenges. If you haven't played the game, this makes no sense to you. Let me put forth that the most important button on the game's controller, the one about which the story revolves, is "hold hands".

So how does this experience translate into a novel?

Today I dropped by MIT to see a demo of Spacewar, the Very First Videogame -- originally written for the PDP-1 in 1962; now reconstructed by GAMBIT for the Arduino.

My photos aren't terrifically clear, but you can see the two spaceships maneuvering around a central sun (and its gravity well). They shoot at each other, and that's a videogame. The starry background, famously, is based on actual star charts.

The original source code to Spacewar has long been available (here, for example) but it is minimally-commented PDP-1 assembly code and not very accessible. The GAMBIT folks have worked for several months to reverse-engineer the code and figure out what's going on. See their blog posts on the project.

GAMBIT has promised (nudge, nudge) to post their marked-up copy of the original assembly, to document what they've discovered. I'll add a link when that happens.

If you missed Spacewar today, you should drop by the MIT Museum this Friday evening (5:30 pm); the game will be demoed again.

More photos below the dotted line.

No long article from me this week; am setting up with a new client to earn money to buy more time to think about games for your pleasure, dear reader. But here a couple of small items nonetheless:

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Anna Anthropy’s book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters is coming out this spring, and she asked a bunch of folks to record very short videos for her to stitch together into a book-tour promotion. This was my contribution:

This is the essay I refer to in the video. It really is one of my favorite written works of game-design takeapart.

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There are still a few unclaimed songs in Kevin’s Apollo 18 IF Tribute Album project. It’s particularly needful of a short work of interactive fiction that would complement the song “Mammal”, but there are a bunch of one-move “Fingertips” games that need to be written as well.

The first-draft deadline remains set at February 12. Those who find themselves suddenly inspired to create a They Might Be Giants fan-game at tremendous velocity should feel free to claim a remaining slot and follow the instructions on the original post.