Archive for June, 2009
The Making Of: Pitfall!
by Pedro Silva on June 30th, 2009
Format: Atari 2600
Release: 1982
Publisher: Activision
Developer: David Crane
Pitfall Harry is stuck in the jungle. He’s racing through, swinging from vines, jumping on alligator heads, grabbing treasures and looking for shortcuts. For David Crane, the creator and programmer of Pitfall!, one of the first Activision games for the Atari 2600, the hardest part of the game wasn’t avoiding the scorpions or coiled snakes, it was trying to jam a lot of game into only 4K of memory.
“I loved the technical challenge of designing games on the 2600,” says Crane of Atari’s first console unit. He and his fellow game developers for the much-loved 2600 were more than aware of the restrictions they were dealing with. They would have to write an entire game, complete with graphics, gameplay, sound effects and all the scoring in just 4096 bytes. You could hardly let your imagination run wild with that kind of memory size. “A lot of the game features in those days were not what you could think of, but what you could actually achieve.” At that time, Crane’s complete design philosophy was to first think of a clever and original technical achievement and then to build a game around it.
“The ‘little running man’ was really the technical hurdle,” says Crane. “If you think back to the state-of-the-art videogames of the late-’70s, there were very few attempts at animated figures in games. You controlled tanks, jet planes, Pong paddles and so on because the limited number of display pixels severely restricted the creation of smooth animation. I had developed a realistic-looking human character in 1979 before I had a game idea that needed one. The difficulty was coming up with a game that made sense to have a little running man in it.” For three years, Crane tested the character in different scenarios such as a ‘cops and robbers’ game, but it didn’t work and was therefore shelved.
In 1982, while he was between games, Crane finally decided he would figure out a game for the ‘little running man.’ “I sat down with a blank sheet of paper and drew a stick figure in the centre. I said, ‘Okay, I have a little running man and let’s put him on a path’ (two more lines drawn on the paper). ‘Where is the path? Let’s put it in a jungle’ (draw some trees). ‘Why is he running?’ (draw treasures to collect, enemies to avoid and so on). And Pitfall! was born.” The man became known as Pitfall Harry. “This entire process took about ten minutes. About 1,000 hours of programming later, the game was complete. In that era we said we spent 90 per cent of our time writing the last ten per cent of the game.”
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Source: www.edge-online.com
Read all article here.
Future of Games: The Game of Life
by Pedro Silva on June 30th, 2009
Everyone complains about “e-mail overload” — getting so much stupid corporate e-mail that you miss out on important messages. But Byron Reeves has figured out a way to solve the problem.
How? By turning corporate e-mail into a game.
Reeves, a communications professor at Stanford, had studied the spectacularly popular online game World of Warcraft, and he knew that people inside the game place enormous value on the game’s artificial currency of gold pieces. They’ll go on quests and spend hours doing boring tasks just to earn it. That gave him an idea: Why not create a system where users earn virtual currency by intelligently using e-mail?
So Reeves’ firm, Seriosity, built a system — dubbed “Attent” — that does this. Every employee is given virtual tokens — say, 100 a week, — that they can attach to e-mail they write. If you really want someone to read a message now, you attach a lot of tokens, and the message pops up higher in your correspondent’s Outlook inbox. Reeves figured this would encourage people to send less e-mail: Those who are parsimonious would wind up with lots of tokens, which means when they really have something to say, they can load it up with tokens and make sure it’ll get through. Sure enough, that’s what happened. When a work group at IBM tried out Attent, messages with 20 tokens attached were 52 percent more likely to be quickly opened than normal. E-mail overload ceased to be a problem.
“What we’ve proven is that games can change behavior,” Reeves says.
We tend to think of videogames as frivolous activities — something we do to kill time, not to improve productivity. But a new generation of designers is taking a different tack: Like Reeves, they’re using the principles of videogame design to transform everyday activities — helping people work more efficiently, use less energy, and get healthier. Turn the world into a game, they argue, and it works better. Give people a competition, and it can transform a dull-but-important task into something exciting.
“Games create drama and excitement,” as Jane McGonigal, one of the leading thinkers in the field, told the crowd at this year’s O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. “We’ve done that for years with videogames, and now we can apply that thinking to the rest of life.”
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By Clive Thompson | Read here all article.