Results tagged “links” from The Gameshelf
If you’ll permit me a bit of silly personal nostalgia:
I came across this screencap, dating from the summer of 1994, while pawing through some old files. Apparently I managed to skunk my Mac at Cribbage — that is, I crossed the 121-point finish line before it hit 91 points, which my dad taught me counts as a double-win, especially if you’re playing for stakes — and was so thrilled with my achievement (and perhaps chagrined that the final scoreboard didn’t acknowledge the mustelid nature of my victory) that I took a screenshot and filed it away.
Please note that the size of this image was the size of my entire monitor at the time, at least in terms of resolution — when projected upon my screen via jet-age electron-gun technology, it measured 12 inches along the diagonal.
Incredibly, MacCribbage’s homepage still exists. Despite the page’s year-one webdesign (and, indeed, an on-page timestamp reading 3/14/95), you can still download the game there, though it’s been many years since any Macintosh computer has shipped with the means to run it.
Meanwhile, the game’s author, Mike Houser, has carried his work into the future with an iPhone version. My heart aches to see the stylistic differences in those two pages’ screenshots, comparing the pixel-perfect artwork of his 1990s work with the flat, anti-aliased color fills of the 21st century adaptation. Fortunately, he still sells a handful of Mac OS X-friendly solitaire games that make use of his charming original deck art, including those smileymac-visaged court cards.
OK, two of them are about dice.
Your Uncle Dudley’s Knucklebones appears to be the online gallery of a dice collector (with a casually Google-resistant identity). The mysterious blog contains only two posts, but the enormous latter entry contains many dozens of individual photographs.
The dice lay against a ruler on a white background, looking more like bullets in an autopsy, removed from their police report. The site offers no textual explanation of where any of the dice came from, or what purpose the more oddly specialized ones may have served. But if you’re like me, you’ll find delight in imagining the designs these little rolling-bones once played a part of. (Granted, the aim of the rather NSFW dice towards the end seem plain enough…)
I was interested to see that the first post, dedicated to the display of a single prototype 60-sided die design, mentions the fabbers at Shapeways.com. We’ve mentioned their contributions to the games-and-puzzles world before.
I have not read The Bones, but I probably should. It’s a collection of essays on dice edited by Will Hindmarch, and my fellow tabletop-game aficionados will recognize many of the collected author’s names — Costikyan, Kovalic, Selinker, the increasingly inevitable Wheaton, and many others. A print book is currently for sale, with an ebook edition in the works.
(Bonus aside: for a delightful coffee-table book about these most venerable gaming tools, Ricky Jay’s Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck, which pairs smart text on the history and culture of dice with truly beautiful and haunting photographs of our cubical friends by Rosamond Purcell. It’s still in print, and findable through the book-oracle of your choice.)
Finally, allow me to share with you the good news that God’s Number is 20.
With about 35 CPU-years of idle computer time donated by Google, a team of researchers has essentially solved every position of the Rubik’s Cube, and shown that no position requires more than twenty moves.
[ … ]
One may suppose God would use a much more efficient algorithm, one that always uses the shortest sequence of moves; this is known as God’s Algorithm. The number of moves this algorithm would take in the worst case is called God’s Number. At long last, God’s Number has been shown to be 20.
It took fifteen years after the introduction of the Cube to find the first position that provably requires twenty moves to solve; it is appropriate that fifteen years after that, we prove that twenty moves suffice for all positions.
I don’t pretend to fully understand exactly how this solution came about, despite the cogent explanations on that page, and its many interesting links to other Cube-fiends’ attempts at finding this elusive number, going all the way back to typewritten correspondence from 1981. But I am delighted to learn about such a vertiginous level of recreational puzzle solving — not solving the Cube, but solving a puzzle that’s made out of solutions to the Cube, a true meta-puzzle. All the better, I suppose, that I learn about it specifically because some folks have finally laid it safely to rest after nearly 30 years of shared effort. Less fundamentally frightening, that way.
Quite by accident, my last post reflecting on the trend away from difficult slogs in all kinds of games fell on the same day that several indie game developers banded together to blog in support of intentionally short videogames. My post and theirs drew inspiration from the same well, though; many of these posts pointed to the brilliant Limbo, which I wrote about on Monday, and the sniping it received from the enthusiast press for having a total play-length of less than ten hours.
As expected, Jon Blow writes a compelling (and short!) entry, after which he (like all the other writers in this exercise) compiles a list of links to the other participating game developers’ short-game essays (a list which, to my delight, includes Boston-based developers and Gameshelf friends Eitan Glinert and Scott MacMillan). Jamie Fristrom also caught my attention with a look back, with some regret, on decisions he took part in producing Schizoid and Spider Man 2, both long and difficult games which very few of their fans have played to completion. (In fact, I count myself among this impressed but unfulfilled majority in both games’ cases.)
My spur to finally write this acknowledgement came via Sean Murray’s “The Long Game”, in which he stands with the short-game fans, but then flips the argument onto its head in a defense of longer games (such as the one that his own studio develops). While I do appreciate the perspective, I can’t quite cross the bridge he builds there.
Arcade-style skill contests like Geometry Wars to one side, I’m very skeptical of any single-player videogame’s ability to “amaze and delight over weeks of play”, at least not with the unremitting intensity of novelty that defines the games on the Braid/Portal axis. Members of this family are short because they end when they’re empty, when they have no new things to show the player within their intentionally narrow play-domains. The tightest examples of the form establish their rules and spaces quickly, and then proceed to explore every interesting permutation of it, avoiding repetition in either game presentation or player activity. When the whole space is explored, the curtain closes (perhaps after a finale that ties up the frame story, if necessary).
At no point does the game suggest that it might be worth the player’s time to go tromp through a fifth procedurally generated dungeon, or scan an eighteenth planet for random-number “rare ores”, or what have you. They are not about escape, of spending as much time as you can away from reality before the game comes to a close (or becomes too boring to bear any further). Escape will always have a role in the world of videogames, but there is no good reason why new games should be judged in light of how expansive an escape they provide. Some games would rather try to enhance your life with brief and brilliant new patterns that will leave a mark on your mind than deliver a slow-drip soporific.
(Yes, there are always exceptions. Most multi-player games I hold almost entirely exempt from this line of reckoning, since I find them such fundamentally different experiences. Then again, I suppose I might want to label treadmill-based MMOs as exempt from my exemption. And where do half-breed board-gamey timesinks like Sid Meier’s Civilization fit into this? Well, perhaps that’s a column for another time.)
I can never resist the chance to follow up on two Gameshelf posts at once, so here you are:
The Silver Lining is a fan-made King’s Quest game that, as Kevin noted back in March, found itself cease-and-desisted earlier this year by the company that owns that IP. Rather than vanishing quietly, the project’s fans got the word out, bringing global attention not just to its legal plight but to the fact that the project existed at all. Certainly, the first I’d heard of Silver Lining was its “Sorry, we’re shutting down now” announcement page, concluding with a heartbreaking image of game-protagonist King Graham’s trademark cap lying abandoned in the dust. And somewhere nearby lay a link to a petition…
Today, I learn via a review by John Walker in Rock Paper Shotgun that the project has ridden the resulting wave of new fan support to overcome its legal disputes, and has also followed through and made its first episode available for play. It’s a short review, but then, it sounds like a very short game. It does make clear that the game attempts to pack a lot of narrative into tight quarters in novel ways:
Look at a vase in the halls of the castle and you won’t hear, “It’s a vase.” You’ll instead hear a tale about the Queen when she was young, playing in these hallways. Look at the floor and rather than being dismissed you’ll likely listen to lines and lines about how King Graham feels about the situation he’s in - his son and daughter-in-law’s wedding being interrupted by a mysterious, cloaked figure, who has put the pair into an undisturbable sleep.
(Rather reminds me of IF games like Bronze, actually, but that’s another rack of bells.)
I consider this news a twofer because Gameshelf reader JayDee offered up the site as a source of solid game reviews, one of several great responses I got to my previous post asking for exactly this.
I note with interest that the site seems to divide its reviews into two categories: “An Hour With”, providing initial impressions soon after a game is released, and (as is the case with this piece) “Wot I Think”, essays written after the reviewer has spent enough time with the game to fully digest it, perhaps weeks later. Many titles eventually get representation in both categories. I find this dichotomy an interesting tactic of dealing with the fact that games can often take a long time to absorb well enough to properly comment on, while acknowledging the reality of the pressures a review-based publication faces to react quickly to the appearance of new works.
As a palate cleanser after the previous eye-rolling meta-post, allow me to offer a link to Lore Sjöberg’s Speak with Monsters, a gameish webcomic I admire for its doing a lot with a narrow subject space. Specifically, Sjölberg wanders up and down the pages of 1977’s original Monster Manual from first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, adapting its uneven but unforgettable artwork and Gary Gygax’s far-out descriptive text and and rules into a series of four-panel comic strips.
It starts out on a high note with a cartoon starring that mustachioed dude from the original book’s “Rot Grubs” illustration (who quickly becomes a recurring character), and continues to explore other oddities of the Gygax era like Shambling Mounds, Bulettes, and, er, Herd Animals. If you’re like me (where “like me” might mean that you burned all the original Monster Manual illustrations to memory as a child), you’ll gulp down the whole mad menagerie in a sitting, and then subscribe for more.
Proving the notion that few things breed creativity like constraint, the TWIFcomp - a challenge to write a work of interactive fiction in 140 characters or fewer (modulo whitespace) - just posted its sixty-one (61) entries online. In contrast, this year's Spring Thing, a themeless IF contest meant to provide an antipodal counterweight to October's annual IFComp, was cancelled due to receiving zero entries.
Many of the TWIFcomp games (particularly those programmed in Inform 7) can be played online; just follow the links. Don't expect to get much joy out of these little games if you're not already well acquainted with the medium; 140 characters means all punch and no context.
Speaking of playing IF online, Andrew Plotkin has just made all his games playable in-browser. This is possible by way of a modified version of Parchment, complemented with layers of handrolled, game-appropriate CSS he wrote to make them pretty.
I am very happy to see this happen. Interactive fiction needs to ditch its reliance on downloads and confusing third-party interpreter programs in order to reach all the people who ought to experience it, and it's great to see a major author of modern IF get this boulder rolling.
We seem to be entering a nexus of documentaries about games. Far be it from me to do anything but encourage further flowering in this field! Witness:
Lorien Green has released a clip of Gone Cardboard, a film about board games -- particularly Eurogames, by the looks of it -- and the people who play them. She expects to release the final cut in early 2011. (Link via Kevin Jackson-Mead.)
The enigmatically named Spinach hopes to produce a doc about people who create digital games, called You Meet the Nicest People Making Videogames. That link leads to the project's Kickstarter fundraising page, which includes a teaser he filmed at GDC. Mr. Spinach approaches this endeavor from scratch, and needs help covering both equipment and travel costs, a position I can certainly appreciate. He's a quarter of the way to his goal, so far... (Link via Anna Anthropy.)
And of course, just 49 hours and 15 minutes after I type these words, I plan on attending the world premiere of Jason Scott's Get Lamp at PAX East. It is part of the interactive fiction track which is of course the real reason to attend the show, ho ho. Jason's been working on this film for years, and I was privileged to see a clip a few months ago at a Boston IF meetup. It's gonna be a goodie.
PAX is nigh, and therefore I expect to lose my ability to make coherent blog updates for a while. Before I stride boldly into the Hynes Convention Center to enjoy my 1.8 feet of personal space, I'd like to frame a question.
Despite my personal GDC takeaways, the big conversation that seems to have come out of the conference is all about "social games", a category that, while nebulous, seems to comprise half "Oh goddammit FarmVille" and forty-nine percent reaction to that. From what I can tell, a cynical-but-not-incorrect definition of "social gaming" is "the viral Skinner boxes acting as venture capitalists' flypaper du jour", and in that light I can't say it really captures my interest. And yet, I find myself thinking a lot about the potential of Facebook-based games, and wishing to challenge the common perception that player-abusive games are somehow intrinsic to the platform.
While I normally avoid dichotomies, I have to admit that I find Jesse Schell's model of "persuaders" versus "fulfillers" attractive and compelling; it strikes me not so much of a good-versus-evil simplification, but rather a Discordian-style Greyface-verus-Eris framing. It casts the games that exist for the shining, pure joy of play against a dark background of games that exist primarily to control and exploit their users. And certainly, where "social gaming" is concerned, that backdrop seems quite vast and dark indeed.
So my question is: Where are the Erisian games of Facebook? I assert that Facebook is ripe for interesting and fulfilling games built specifically for its unique features, and which exist only because the games' authors wish for us to experience them, not because they want to try hypnotizing users with candied progress bars while reaching around for their wallets. Games that people will want to drag their friends into in order to share the joy, and not merely because it makes their eggplants grow faster. More after-school club, less Amway.
My most recent Monday column, "The Silver Age", was reprinted (with my permission) on the popular video game fansite Kotaku. I extend my thanks to that site for the recognition, and welcome to the wave of Kotakans visiting The Gameshelf for the first time. Our taste in game studies runs a bit more eclectic here, but I hope that you'll find some interesting stuff regardless.
Meanwhile, longtime Gameshelf readers might be interested to learn about Kotaku's #syndicated tag, an apparently new effort by that site to gather and repeat the signal-strength from a variety of offsite sources, many of whom are very experienced and insightful voices in modern game criticism. I am humbled to have my dorky gum-flapping about Spider-Man appear in the same context as thoughtful columns from Ian Bogost, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and Brenda Brathwaite. Other topics include a Q-and-A about video game translation, and the use of syncopation in the Super Mario Bros. theme.
I am happy to see that the tag has its own full-text, ad-free RSS feed, too, making it an easy way to receive a regular dose of smart game commentary from a wide mix of writers. Check it out.
Thanks to Twitter, I found myself vicariously attending GDC this year. Allow me to recount some of the more interesting things I heard people talking about.
Anna Anthropy released REDDER, a puzzley explore-and-collect game, free to play on the Newgrounds portal. Unlike When Pigs Fly, her previous effort, the difficultly comes not from its demanding feats of digital dexterity, but rather from the large size of the world, and the things about the world you must learn and remember while you strive to collect the shiny treasures. Give it a try, and block out a couple of hours to play it through if you like it.
One reason why I like Anna's games in particular is the same reason I liked watching the latter-day Battlestar Galactica so much. Ron Moore, BSG's executive producer, took advantage of internet publishing to create and release commentary tracks, in podcast format, almost at the same time the shows aired. They felt less like a producer reminiscing about a past project, and more like lectures about the challenges and strategies of putting an episodic TV show together, spoken by someone who was still in the thick of it.
Similarly, Anna is at least as active in presenting lectures and articles on level design (which we've linked to before) as she is with releasing actual games. Soon after I started When Pigs Fly and saw the grassy turf three screens over from the start, I may have said "heh heh" out loud. I felt that I knew exactly why she put it there, even though it had no explicit in-game effect, and I probably wouldn't have if I hadn't been reading along with her exegetic work.
I'd been meaning for a long time to listen to Jon Blow's celebrated and controversial 2007 presentation, "Design Reboot", at the Montreal International Games Summit. It's been available for years as an audio file and (non-synchronized) slideshow from his own website, but only yesterday did I discover that Michael Camilleri transcribed it, editing it for readability. Which I appreciate, clearly, since I just read it.
The talk's most lurid (and therefore most virulent) meme is World of Warcraft is immoral!, and of course that's an oversimplification. A better summary is that Blow compares WoW to junk food or cigarettes. In small doses these things are fine, and can serve as an occasionally welcome and rewarding treat. Their mere existence is not intrinsically evil. But all three products, by their natures, are open for misuse, and what's more all three are couched in industries that intentionally promote this behavior.
That's where the immorality lay, argues Blow, who feels that junk-food games' propensity to burn up countless hours of their users' lives without offering much in return is real harm, just as clogged arteries or filthied lungs are. The remedy he suggests involves a call for game makers to study some examples of recent games that do offer to enrich their players' lives in a small amount of time - like a good film, or poem, or concert - and to think about how they can apply similar principles into their own work, whether they're indie devs or part of huge triple-A studio projects.
Anyway: required reading. Thanks to Doug Orleans for the pointer.
Gameshelf buddy Karl von Laudermann, who has shown up on the show a few times, has just released an iPhone/iPod Touch version of Zendomizer. This is a little web-based program that whips up declarations of "Buddha Nature" suitable for the game Zendo. He's had a version of this running on his website for several years, but an iPhone-optimized format seems perfect for Apple-toting Zendo masters.
Tech note: This was my first exposure to iWebKit, a framework that allows web-based applications to masquerade as iPhone-native programs, right down to hiding their Safari controls when launched from the home screen. That's pretty darn nifty.
Update: I've gotten the chance to play this game myself, now. Read the review here.
According to a press release I received this morning, a long-rumored game based on the classic extraplanetary economic game M.U.L.E. will be released within the next couple of weeks, from publisher Blue Systems and developer Turborilla:
This has been made possible by an agreement between Meldannic (former Ozark Softscape) and Blue Systems.I'd been in email communication earlier this year with Melanie Bunten Stark, daughter of M.U.L.E. designer Dan Bunten and one of the founders of Meldannic, so I know this is something she and her two co-founding siblings have been working on for a while. It's exciting to see it moving forward.Planet Mule is completely free and preferably played by four
players simultaneously. It is a peaceful game focusing on
economic strategies, in a world of crisp retro graphics.The game will be released on December 6th.
There is a countdown in progress on the Planet Mule web site.
Countdown and teaser concept art at http://www.PlanetMule.com/The game will be available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux.
While we here at the Gameshelf have a rocky relationship with countdown clocks, we wish the best of luck to the Buntens and the Planet M.U.L.E. team for a successful and prosperous launch. Definitely looking forward to playing this, myself.
See also the Gameshelf episode that featured a review of the original M.U.L.E., and a YouTube excerpt of just that review.
Another little bit of behind-the-scenesery for you: I had a great deal of fun raiding The Prelinger Archives, a collection of public domain films, to fill out the Diplomacy episode's visuals. I expect it to be a well I'll return to often for future episodes.
One film I borrowed from extensively was Conquer by the Clock, a jawdropping American propaganda film from the WWII era. Not only is its delirious visual motif of belligerent, floating clocks wonderful (and quite useful for recontextualizing), but its message is a fascinating window into the psychology of a nation completely mobilized for war. Of particular note is the lesson that every time you take a break from work, soldiers die (and/or go insane). Think of that, the next time you take a minute to screw around reading game blogs!
On another note, I've added Twitter and Facebook links to the bottom of every post on this site, as well as a few other small design changes. Feel free to let me know what you think of them!
I've been tidying up the place a bit. Please note, in our newly leaner left sidebar, that I've updated the blogroll ("Friends of the Shelf") section for the first time in more than a year, including several long-overdue links to people and places of interest to the game-studying reader. Explore and enjoy. (I also seem to have added more links to the "Ego Inflation" section, but I'll let those speak for themselves, ahem.)
Note also, in the same sidebar, the more obvious links to a page containing all the show's past episodes in an easy-to-watch format, as well as to another page that will instruct you in how to obtain copies of these same episodes on shiny, shiny DVDs.
The thing that finally had to get around to all this, in fact, was a kind viewer's purchase of a Gameshelf DVD set, despite my having done approximately nothing to promote them since my initial announcement months ago. This spurred me to, er, actually create the DVDs. And now that I've gone and made myself an inventory, it seemed prudent to sweep some of the cobwebs out of the storefront...
Derek Yu's jawdropping Spelunky, a mechanical mashup of Nethack with a 2D platformer, has finally hit version 1.0 and is celebrating with a real homepage (its homepage before now was a forum thread somewhere), and the news that it will show up on Xbox Live Arcade in 2010. Congratulations on your excellent work, Derek, and props to Microsoft for picking a winner, too!
The game runs on Windows, and, sadly, doesn't work under emulation on a Mac, at least not my MacBook running VMWare; it needs special graphics-card voodoo that doesn't pass through. But if you can run Windows natively, you really should give this game a spin. Or 20 spins. (It's short and you die a lot, but I guarantee you'll die in a new and thoroughly entertaining way each time.)
I was pleased to attend the second Boston GameLoop, and extend thanks and congratulations to Darius Kazemi and Scott MacMillan for organzing another fantastic event. Also thanks to Microsoft for the use of their lovely new NERD center (yes, that is what it's called) in Cambridge. The conference was doubly well attended over last year's, and I look forward to seeing how it continues to grow in future iterations.
This was the third self-organizing "unconference" I've attended, and the first one at which I got bold enough to host a talk. My topic was "Improving Game Journalism and Critique", and my starting point was this essay about game criticism from Greg Costikyan, from which I read some excerpts to get things rolling.
Among the dozen or so who showed up for the talk, a particularly challenging attendee was a hardened freelance journalist who hoped we'd talk about "outside-in" reporting about games for mainstream news consumers. He was very open with his skepticism about the value of the critique I described. While initially his boisterous disagreement resulted in a couple of walk-outs, those who remained helped pare it down to a valuable core question: Who is the real audience for critique?
Attempting to answer this led further into discussion about the transformative effect that more and better game criticism should have on the field of game-centric journalism: taking some space back from the fanboyish, review-and-anticipation-based press that is so prevalent now, and giving more voice to articles examining games the context of artistic work. This would let a game be held up for comparison with of other games, all that has come before - and, if examining a work from the past, all that came after. Fill the space of media-about-games more with material like this, counterweighting all the next-six-months-focused game reviews (a necessary but very well covered thank you genre), then the game-making community's perception of itself should further broaden and mature. Which would be a Good Thing.
The group also ended up talking about professional video-gaming-as-a-sport and its media coverage, both within and without the current game-enthusiast press. This was a subject I knew very little about, so I didn't discourage it, and we ended up being able to tie it back into the title topic by the time our 45 minutes were up.
I made a newbie mistake in not noting my contact information before the talk, so that people follow up electronically afterwards if they wished. I had some nice face-to-face conversations immediately after the talk, and I see that a few people have started following me on Twitter despite my unintentional stealth. If you've managed to find this post after attending my talk, welcome! Feel free to use the comments for followup discussion, if you wish.
Three more links I'd like to throw down here, because they're things I mentioned during other peoples' talks:
- Chess for Girls, a blistering SNL parody of how games (or anything else) is typically marketed at girls
- Mo's Movie Measure (aka The Bechdel Test), an acid test to determine whether a given movie manages to overcome a base level of sexism. (Most movies, even good ones, fail it miserably.)
Thinking about MMM in context of games is an interesting exercise!
- Intelligent Mistakes, a brilliant essay from the game designer Mick West on programming computerized opponents so that they purposefully but subtly screw up, so that fun for the human player is maximized.
Game critic, indie-game auteur, and friend-of-The-Gameshelf Anna Anthropy has just released her latest game, When Pigs Fly, via the Newgrounds game portal.
It's a flash game about a little piggy who falls into an underground labyrinth. The piggy is helped by a pair of wings which let it soar over any obstacle, but which will fail in a burst of feathers and squealing if they brush against anything other than air. And there's your game. You have infinite lives, and "dying" sets you back only a second or two.
Edit: Finished in 32:29, with 241 accidents. I enjoyed it, though it's surprisingly tough. The visual atmosphere reminded me of Knytt, though Pigs' linearity and difficulty put it in a separate class of gameplay.
Love this lecture from Anna Anthropy on good platformer level design, using a thin but rich slice of "Super Mario Land" (Satoru Okada, Game Boy, 1989) as an anatomical model.
I recently discovered through Twitter that Bram Cohen, best known as the creator of BitTorrent, is also an aficionado of three-dimensional construction puzzles (e.g. the Soma cube). He has lately taken to designing puzzles himself, and now sells several original designs through Shapeways, a web-based service that offers 3D-printed objects based on their creators' uploaded spec documents.
Doubly interesting to me: it's always a delight to learn that someone unexpected is into puzzles -- let alone a designer of them -- and I find the Shapeways business model surprising and intriguing, as well.
