Archive for September, 2006
Games Telling stories?
by Pedro Silva on September 25th, 2006
Star Wars (Atari 1983)
Introduction
As questions go, this is not a bad one: Do games tell stories? Answering this should tell us both how to study games and who should study them. The affirmative answer suggests that games are easily studied from within existing paradigms. The negative implies that we must start afresh.
But the answer depends, of course, on how you define any of the words involved. In this article, I will be examining some of the different ways to discuss this. Lest this turns into a battle of words (i.e. who has the right to define “narrative”), my agenda is not to save or protect any specific term, the basic point of this article is rather that we should allow ourselves to make distinctions.
The operation of framing something as something else works by taking some notions of the source domain (narratives) and applying them to the target domain (games). This is not neutral; it emphasises some traits and suppresses others. Unlike this, the act of comparing furthers the understanding of differences and similarities, and may bare hidden assumptions.
The article begins by examining some standard arguments for games being narrative. There are at least three common arguments:
1) We use narratives for everything.
2) Most games feature narrative introductions and back-stories.
3) Games share some traits with narratives.
The article then explores three important reasons for describing games as being non-narrative:
1) Games are not part of the narrative media ecology formed by movies, novels, and theatre.
2) Time in games works differently than in narratives.
3) The relation between the reader/viewer and the story world is different than the relation between the player and the game world.
The article works with fairly traditional definitions of stories and narratives, so as a final point I will consider whether various experimental narratives of the 20th century can in some reconcile games and narratives.
by Jesper Juul
Read all article in: www.gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts
The Semiotics of Time Structure in Ludic Space As a Foundation for Analysis and Design
by Pedro Silva on September 21st, 2006
The concept of a ludic systems encompasses a family of media forms and experiences involving elements of simulation, game play and narrative or story construction. These three elements can be regarded as different classes of semiotic systems, or systems of meaning, having their own structuring principles and methods of informing experience. For any particular ludic system, such as a computer game, time structure can be considered in terms of a number of distinct layers of meaning analogous to the levels of encoding identified in structuralist narrative theory: a generation level, a simulation level, a performance level and a discourse level. The simulation, performance and discourse levels correspond to the semiotic domains of simulations, games and narratives. For any specific ludic system, the overall design approach relating to how the designer intends the players’ experience to be structured, as the core of interactive engagement and immersion, can be based upon emphasizing one of these three primary forms, or integrating more than one form by various strategies. Adopting a structural semiotic approach to modeling these layers of meaning provides a foundation for more clearly integrating design choices within a coherent overall concept, as well as laying the foundations for a more systematic study of possible correlations between design features and player affects.
Introduction
The concept of ‘ludic space’ captures systems of experience incorporating concepts of game or game play and related experiences. This is rather broad, but the term captures many forms within the current scope of interest of academic ludology. The forms of interest include computer games that may range from computational versions of simple board games such as chess or checkers, through more complex interactive 3D productions like actions games, role-playing games, strategy games, etc., to flight simulators and even interactive movies having a hypertext structure connecting linear cinematic sequences1. Ludic space also includes highly diverse non-computational game forms, including simple table-top games, live-action and table-top role-playing games, reality games and sports games. Hybrid forms include augmented-reality games and pervasive games2. This is a very diverse range of forms, many of which only marginally seem to fit the term ‘games’, but the extremes can be regarded as limit cases in a broad field within which many design issues are globally relevant. These forms are here collectively referred to as ‘ludic systems’, and the imaginative space of all possible ludic systems is referred to as ‘ludic space’, in order to capture this diversity within which ‘a game’, ‘a simulation’ or ‘a narrative’ nevertheless has its own particular design principles and modes of creating meaning.
by Craig A. Lindley
Read all study in: www.gamestudies.org/0501/lindley/
Mobile Game Games
by Pedro Silva on September 21st, 2006
The International Mobile Gaming Awards, a yearly contest rewarding the most innovative and creative mobile games, has announced that the deadline for their 2006 contest entries is just days away on the 25th of September 2006.
While that might seem an impossible deadline to ready your greatest creation from start to finish, the twist of the IMGA is that entrants are considered and judged purely on concept alone, meaning anyone regardless of their programming and graphic design skills is as eligible as the next.
A $40,000 cash prize awaits the winners in the following categories: Best Interactive Experience Award, the Best Use of Connectivity, the Excellence in 3D Award, the Most Innovative Game Award, the Best Use of Flash Award, and an overall IMGA Grand Prix with the winner taking home $15,000 as well as the chance for their game to go public.
This year will also see a parallel student awards, with the top winner in that category receiving a trip to Barcelona to attend the February 2007 IMGA ceremony.
For your own chance to take the award, visit www.imgawards.com to enter.
Source: www.edge-online.co.uk
FeedBurner
by Pedro Silva on September 20th, 2006
Aos interessados disponibilizo o link para que de forma fácil e cómoda acedam a todos os novos conteúdos do blog no vosso agregador de notícias (NetNewsWire - download gratuíto, ou outro).
Assim, com o URL que disponibilizo abaixo e ainda no blogroll dos links no menu à esquerda, é fácil subscrever todos os seus feeds:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Ludologia
Desta forma, além de poderem receber todas as actualizações do blog e de todos os blogs do vosso interesse, sem ter de andar de URL em URL, canalizam toda esta informação para o vosso agregador de notícias e deste modo consultam todos os novos posts de todos os blogs de interesse.
Filosofia: Em vez de procurar a notícia, a notíca do seu interesse vem até vós.
Ergonightmare
by Pedro Silva on September 19th, 2006
At times, the issue of the recent generations’ over-complicated control systems alienating gaming newcomers might seem a recent problem. But anyone who thinks that we all started with a single button and a single stick might possibly, and perhaps with good reason, have forgotten this oddity from gaming’s past.
The scan-happy fellows at VintageComputing have dug up this ad for Coleco’s all-in-wonder approach to player control with its Colecovision Super Action Controller set. The punchline might be in the unhelpful illustration itself, indicating that maximal usage would require not just an extra pair of hands, but an additional third to handle the unit’s custom grip. Granted, there might not have ever been plans for a game to utilize all of the controller’s features at once, but even still, with the advertisement torturously exclaiming it could give players “individual control over 4 or more on-screen players,” someone was clearly thinking stratospheres away from inside the box, and starting down a failed path that, even up to now, it seems we’ve been able to avoid.
Source: www.edge-online.co.uk
Google Gets Games
by Pedro Silva on September 19th, 2006
Say ‘Google’ and ‘games’ and you’ll most likely think back to that first happy afternoon you spent googlewhacking. It’s a good few years since the simple pleasures of typing two words into its search box in the hope of finding a combination which produced just one solitary result seemed like worthwhile entertainment, and in those years a lot has changed – not least Google. A service which won the hearts of the world for its no-frills presentation of raw information, now has ambitions as a TV station (Google Video) and an office software maker (Google Calendar, Google Spreadsheets and through the recent acquisition of web-based word processor Writely). It powers millions of blogs through its ownership of Blogger, offers website traffic tracking services through Google Analytics, and makes millions each day from its Google Adsense advertising system. It wants to organise your photos (Picasa), manage your communications (Google Mail and Google Talk) and take up residence on your PC (Google Desktop). Combined, these efforts brought the company nearly $6 billion (£3.2 billion) in revenue in the first half of this year. And now, it also makes games.
That’s not, of course, to suggest that EA or Capcom should be looking over their shoulders, but as Google’s reach extends into more and more unexpected industries, its clear there’s a role it’s already playing within gaming. It starts with The Da Vinci Code Quest – a virtual paper-chase game produced to publicise the movie, created by Google in collaboration with Columbia Tristar. And these promotional Easter egg hunts are growing in popularity: you may not have followed up on the recent adverts exhorting you to find a buried Mazda CX-7, but if you had, it would have taken you on a search round Google Earth’s virtual globe. Adidas Australia has also signed up, running a football trivia-related quiz across Google’s vision of the world, and you can set sail for Captain Jack Sparrow’s Caribbean pirate island with a zoom of your mouse-wheel. Game developers have long seen the potential of Google’s treasury of interconnected information – it’s difficult to imagine playing In Memoriam without its help – but now Google itself is taking advantage of its playful potential.
And it turns out that the more you look for Google games, the more you find. Take the time to personalise your Google homepage, and you will find versions of Pac-Man and Bejewelled, as well as less familiar titles like Flood It and ColorJunction. Since Google’s philosophy makes nearly all of its software freely available, independent game creators have been quick to join the fray. Play Google Earth offers cash prizes for those quick enough to follow the clues, although like many amateur Google Earth-based games it’s only sporadically updated. A smart Risk clone, soon served with a cease and desist order from copyright holders Hasbro, led the way for elaborate strategy games like GEwar. Another board game classic blossomed into a prototype version of Battleships, played out on the real oceans.
Most popular however, has been Goggles, Mark Caswell-Daniels’ flight sim, which uses the data from Google Maps to provide a backdrop for a dinky biplane. However, Google can’t claim to be the inspiration for this one: “I thought of the idea quite a while ago, when I saw Streetmap,” recalls Caswell-Daniels, currently a designer and Flash game maker. “I thought it would be great to be able to fly over it – but I had other things to do, so I left it and came back to it.” Then, someone pointed out MSN Maps, but when he looked into it, “I couldn’t load those images into Flash, so I used Google’s.” The game leaked out, courtesy of an over-excited friend, and Caswell-Daniels soon found himself swamped. “He sent it to everyone he knew – Digg got hold of it and a few sites went mad. I was getting calls from my hosting company saying: ‘We’re going to have to move you to another server.’ Google called and asked for a CV – Yahoo! got in touch to ask why I hadn’t done it with Yahoo! Maps. It’s been phenomenal.”
But that enquiry from Yahoo! touches on a key point: the data contained in Google Maps and Google Earth isn’t Google’s, but licensed from a number of different providers, and that makes co-opting it for your own project a slightly sticky issue, as Google’s legal team is keen to make clear: “We’re delighted that Google Maps and Google Earth are inspiring users to create games. However, any developers working on games in this area should make sure that they carefully check the terms of service for the product or service concerned to make sure that their intended use is allowed. If there’s any doubt, it’s a good idea to contact Google in advance and discuss your plans.”
The response from the gaming community has been equally predictable. Although Caswell-Daniels has plans to expand the game – to put in “key buildings and create a sequential set of levels”, that’s not enough to sate the inevitable bloodlust. “I’m getting emails saying ‘we need nuclear weapons and rocket launchers!’” he reveals, wryly, “but I just wanted to make a toy plane.” It’s a laudable intention, but there’s no getting away from the fact that the games currently growing out of Google’s search and mapping services are far too rudimentary to compete with more accomplished game projects. Can they ever be more than a tinkerer’s hobby?
The answer comes in the form of Google’s 3D Warehouse, freely shared with other SketchUppers. This being Google, SketchUp is thoroughly integrated with Google Earth, meaning models can be uploaded and placed into the real world, letting you see how your dream house would look in situ, or create a parade of giant scissor people marching down Oxford Street.
The possibilities for ‘mash-up’ games drawn in SketchUp and situated within Google Earth is self-evidently enormous. Automatically networked, instantly recognisable, full of resonance and quickly customisable, Google Earth forms an amazingly adaptive canvas. And it plays well with another growing branch of gaming – the kind of mixed-reality game made famous by the Halo 2 promo I Love Bees. Easily able to process GPS co-ordinates, there are substantial possibilities for games where the movements of real-world people are represented by the progress of SketchUp-created avatars across Google Earth’s surface.
And the potential of these tools which are so simple to grasp (as well as free or extremely cheap to access) but far-reaching in their implications has been noted by the professional game design community. Staff at Real Time Worlds are happy to endorse it as the ‘ultimate level design tool’, Sai Ton Man, a designer at Ninja Theory, includes it on his list of software it’s worth budding game designers familiarising themselves with and Lionhead’s official blog reports how integral SketchUp is proving in mapping out Fable 2’s elaborate worlds. At a time when the importance of thorough pre-production is being more and more heavily emphasised as the costs, and risks, of game projects rise, its usefulness as a quick-fire prototyping tool is quickly becoming recognised. And, as teams become bigger, specialisations more precise and publishers more hands-on, its value as a communication tool is clear. From level design to producing a story-board for a cutscene, the SketchUp dream of ‘3D for everyone’ is just as relevant within a game studio as in the architect’s offices the software was originally designed for.
Nonetheless, Yilmaz recognises that it’s not a tool to compete with established 3D software, like Maya or 3DS Max, although the Pro version of SketchUp (which costs £315) can import and export files compatible with those programmes. “It’s not looking to displace either of those packages,” he affirms, “but to complement them. If you take 3D Studio Max, as a package, that’s very very strong , but SketchUp will allow a designer to visualise much, much quicker, and the flexibility of it means there’s a significant benefit in terms of costings and amount of time expended. SketchUp is rarely the beginning or the end – designers may start a model in SketchUp, then it may spend some time in Photoshop, then in 3ds Max, then back to SketchUp. So SketchUp, through the files that it supports, has become a thread that links the main visualisation programmes together.”
For many years, the games industry has talked with wide-eyed anticipation about a time when everyone has grown up with games, and everyone accepts and understands them. Visiting Google is a little like visiting that future utopia. Everyone you meet at their London HQ is a gamer of some sort or other, someone who has grown up with the idea of technology as a plaything as well as a tool. Just how far Google’s integration with games will go is still hard to predict – will 3D Warehouse become monetised, so modellers can make a living selling their creations? Will it evolve into the dream of a common pool of objects so each game doesn’t have to draw everything from scratch every time? Will Google’s expanding AdSense empire be drawn to the potentially rich pickings of in-game advertising? Will Google Video’s library of speed-runs and game trailers mange to outgrow its rivals and undermine the video vaults of IGN and GameSpot? It may be too early to say, but what’s already clear is that Google is here to play. And if you doubt that, then you didn’t have your eyes peeled when you downloaded the first release of Google Talk. Hidden in the credits was the following Easter egg: ‘play 23 21 13 16 21 19 . 7 1 13 5’. Break the code, ‘add wumpus.game’ to your friends list, and you accessed an online version of 1972’s seminal Hunt The Wumpus. Could there be a neater way for a company to establish its gamer credentials?
Source: Edge n.º 167 October_also available in www.edge-online.co.uk (set. 2006)
#6 Etiquetas
by Pedro Silva on September 18th, 2006
Aceitando o desafio proposto por Mouseland, venho assim contornar a questão com as 6 etiquetas que me rotulam. As escolhas neste meu caso foram direccionadas para 6 das minhas paixões e utilizar uma imagem para cada etiqueta.
Dando continuidade à corrente, os convidados à rotulagem são:
João Maio Pinto, Red 43, Debate ludico, Non games, Cerebro criativo, Mundo fantasma.
2007 Independent Games Festival Entries Revealed
by Pedro Silva on September 14th, 2006
The organizers of the Independent Games Festival (part of the CMP Game Group, as is Gamasutra) have announced that a record 141 entries have been entered into this year’s IGF Main Competition, which awards the best independent games created worldwide.
Some of the many diverse titles entered include undersea 2D adventure title Aquaria, Xbox 360 Live Arcade title Castle Crashers, physics puzzle game Armadillo Run, and space station simulator SpaceStationSim, and the Main Competition finalists picked from all entered titles will be announced on December 4th of this year.
In addition, the IGF’s judge list has been extensively overhauled and enhanced for this year, and includes mainstream and indie game professionals from companies such as Big Huge Games, Nihilistic, Sony, Red Storm, Metanet, Vicarious Visions, Reflexive Microsoft, and Crytek, as well as notable journalists and bloggers from Penny Arcade, Wired, Kotaku, Joystiq, Edge, Slashdot, and Wired News.
This year’s festival will award over $50,000 in total cash prizes (including Mod and Student Awards) at a ceremony during the Game Developers Conference 2007 in San Francisco next March, with the Main Competition giving out five major prizes for Excellence in Visual Art, Excellence in Audio, Technical Excellence, Best Web Browser Game, and the standout Innovation Award, chosen from a pool of finalists.
Additional honors will be presented for the $20,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize for Independent Game of the Year and the Audience Award, which is voted for online - previous winners of the Grand Prize have included Introversion’s Darwinia, Chronic Logic’s Gish, and Reflexive’s Wik & The Fable Of Souls.
All Independent Games Festival finalists will be playable in the IGF Pavilion at GDC from March 7th to 9th, 2007, and there will be IGF/indie gaming-themed lectures and roundtables held earlier in that week.
The next deadline for prospective entrants is October 13, 2006 at 11:59pm PDT for the IGF Mod Competition, which is allowing mods from any game to compete - from Thief to Half-Life 2 to Oblivion to The Sims and beyond, all mods are eligible. From the entrants, we will pick Best Singleplayer FPS Mod, Best Multiplayer FPS Mod, Best RPG Mod, and Best ‘Other’ Mod finalists (each a $500 prize), and those winners will show at the 2007 GDC, competing for an overall $5,000 Best Mod prize.
By Simon Carless
Source: www.gamasutra.com
Jogos, o futuro da Microsoft
by Pedro Silva on September 8th, 2006
Encurralada pelas Google Inc, MySpace e YouTube, a Microsoft teve uma saída airosa: os jogos de consola. O seu programa XNA vai revolucionar o mercado da mesma forma que o Blogger reinventou a edição pessoal: abrindo a produção de jogos aos próprios jogadores.
Se entrasse numa daqueles conversas sobre os «bons velhos tempos», os meus eram há 25 anos quando brincava com o meu primeiro computador pessoal, um Spectrum 48 K. Oh boy, aquilo é que era divertimento! – diria eu em seguida. E tinha conversa para umas horas, mas descanse o leitor pois será poupado (para mim os bons tempos são estes).
Isto para dizer que milhares de jovens e menos jovens tiraram grande gozo de um detalhe do Spectrum: não apenas podíamos alterar parcialmente o código de alguns jogos, como éramos livres de programar os nossos próprios. A linguagem era o BASIC… e os mais afoitos faziam-no.
Com efeito, a geração dourada de hackers europeus (hoje têm 30 anos e duas dioptrias, calvície prematura, um Clio artilhado, já pago, e um blogue) nasceu para a arte a dar cabo da saída RS232 do Spectrum do irmão mais velho. Nos EUA havia outros computadores, mas era a mesma coisa: divertiam-se não só a jogar, mas também a programar novos jogos (e a destruir os portos série).
As consolas e os PCs vieram estragar tudo. A era do sistema proprietário trouxe gráficos espantosos, realismo cinematográfico e pedais de Ferrari – mas duas gerações inteiras não conhecem o prazer de «partir» o jogo do vizinho e vê-lo à toa com o nosso.
A Microsoft promete mudar isto. A Microsoft, esse império mundial do software fechado, uma colossal fortuna a vender código proprietário, fabricante da Xbox que desafia milhares dos tais hackers que insistem em correr Linux na consola, tem em versão de teste o XNA Game Studio Express.
Trata-se de uma versão aberta da sua plataforma de desenvolvimento de jogos XNA, esta reservada aos arquitectos e programadores. A versão aberta está disponível para qualquer um puxar e começar a programar – não sendo imprescindíveis grandes conhecimentos de programação pois grande parte das rotinas vêm embutidas, é só colar «peças» tipo Lego e desenvolver os aspectos criativos, como a história do jogo e os cenários em que decorrerá.
Em Agosto, no lançamento, um executivo da Microsoft, Peter Moore, descreveu o XNA Game Studio Express como «o nosso primeiro passo para criar um YouTube para videojogos». Ambição não falta: o YouTube revolucionou o lazer e a relação com a televisão a muitos milhões de pessoas, que desataram furiosamente a filmarem-se umas às outras (e a prole e os cachorros) e a partilhar os seus vídeos de péssima qualidade ao lado dos piratas episódios das séries de culto como o Gato Fedorento.
As primeiras impressões são positivas. A adesão é grande, para já sobretudo nos campus americanos. Até ao Natal apenas se poderão elaborar jogos para o PC, mas está prometido um componente que permitirá transferi-los para jogar na Xbox 360 pessoal. Uma subscrição de 99 dólares anuais bastará depois para poder reproduzir os jogos noutras máquinas – rivalizando com as editoras de jogos.
Se realmente pegar, tem potencial para revolucionar uma das raras indústrias da informática de consumo que ainda permanece um feudo comercial. O modelo de subscrição não evitará que de um ano para o outro dispare a oferta de títulos disponíveis – e a preços muito baixos. Tal como aconteceu com a democratização dos sistemas editoriais através do Blogger. E a Microsoft respirará de alívio: não só mete uma lança na África da partilha, como abre um novo mercado com significativa dianteira. Mesmo que para tal tenha de queimar alguns parceiros ocasionais, no caso os fabricantes de jogos – mas aqui nada haverá de novo.
Por: Paulo Querido
O corpo próprio do jogador > Mouseland
by Pedro Silva on September 8th, 2006
Este post que tem o propósito de sublinhar mais uma de muitas e excelentes intervenções de Patrícia Gouveia publicada no seu blog em http://mouseland.blogs.ca.ua.pt.
O post refere os efeitos positivos e negativos dos jogos electrónicos sobre o corpo físico, manipulação de símbolos, efeitos cognitivos e psicológicos, literacia, etc. Visite.
O post acaba com uma referência a uma intervenção que quero destacar em www.painstation.de. Trata-se de uma espécie de versão de PONG onde o jogador é penalizado com dor física a cada ponto sofrido. Das cocegas às queimaduras, o jogador paga com o corpo os erros cometidos durante o jogo. Vale a pena visitar pois aparentemente e a avaliar pelas mazelas consequentes aos erros cometidos, nem a dor física acaba com a diversão que os jogadores demonstram ao jogar.