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Dead Rising: A Trope Down Memory Lane

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

In 1985, Shigeru Miyamoto came to down with a truckload of tropes, and they were so wonderful, they did such a great job at filling the creative vacuum of the time, that it took two decades for people to notice the limits to their application. Now, step by step, we’re kind of getting back our perspective. Under Satoru Iwata’s oversight, Nintendo – so long, so much to blame for the entrenchment – has painted a huge “EXIT?” sign in the air, with a wave and a sketch. Valve has suggested new ways to design and distribute software. Microsoft and Nintendo have tinkered with how videogames might fit into our busy, important lives. Blog culture is helping aging gamers to explore their need for games to enrich their lives, rather than just wile them away. And perhaps most importantly, the breach between the Japanese and Western schools of design is finally, rapidly closing.

( Continue reading at Game Career Guide )

Industry Vets Never Metagame They Didn’t Like

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

Two teams, split up amongst Eric Zimmerman of Gamelab, Warren Spector, Mark Leblanc of Mind Control, video game theorist Jesper Juul, Ubisoft’s Clint Hocking, Jonathan Blow, and USC Professor Tracey Fullerton, moved their virtual quarters around the board to make thematic comparisons between often highly-contrasting games.

Has World of Warcraft created a more intense subculture than Asteroids? Is Guitar Hero more culturally sophisticated than Parappa the Rapper? Is Wipeout more realistic than Nethack? Is Oregon Trail more emotionally rich than Virtua Fighter? (See below for answers.)

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

The Nose Before Your Face

  • Reading time:12 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part eight of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation, under the title “The Value of Simplicity”.

So lately we’ve been swinging back toward thinking about games as a medium of expression. It’s not a new concept; way back in the early ’80s, companies like Activision and EA put all their energy behind publicizing game designers like rock stars – or better yet, like book authors – and their games as unique works by your favorite authors. This all happened just after figures like Ed Logg and Toshihiro Nishikado started to extrapolate Pong and SpaceWar!, incorporating more overt narrative frameworks and exploring more elaborate ways of interacting with the gameworld. From this initial explosion of creativity came Steve Wozniak and the Apple II, providing an easy platform for all of the early Richard Garriotts and Roberta Williamses and Dan Buntens to come.

Then stuff happened, particularly though not specifically the crash; the industry changed in focus. On the one hand we had ultra-secretive Japanese companies that – like Atari before them – usually didn’t credit their staff for fear of sniping and for the benefit of greater brand identity; on the other, what US companies remained tended to inflate beyond the point where small, expressive, intimate games were economically feasible. And then there’s just the issue that, as technology grew more complex, design teams grew larger and larger, making it harder for any one voice to stand out, leading to more of a committee-driven approach.

And Then There Were None

  • Reading time:25 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part three of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation, under the title “Culture: Five that Fell”.

For all its immaturity, you can tell the videogame industry is getting on in years. With increasing, even alarming, frequency, the faces of our youth have begun to disappear – forced from the market, absorbed into conglomerates, restructured into oblivion, or simply retired from the grind.

The first big wave hit back in the mid ’90s, when increased development costs, the demise of the American arcade, and the shift from 2D development left dozens of small and mid-sized developers – from Toaplan to Technos – out in the cold. Those that didn’t die completely – Sunsoft, Vic Tokai – often pulled out of the US market, or even out of the videogame business. Western outfits braced for the storm by merging with larger and ever larger publishing conglomerates, rationalizing that it was the only way to survive in an uncertain market.

The second wave came only a few years ago, after the burst of the tech bubble. In effort to streamline costs, parent companies began to dump their holdings left and right, regardless of the legacy or talent involved. Those that didn’t often went bankrupt, pulling all of their precious acquisitions down with them. Sometimes the talent moved on and regrouped under a new game; still, when an era’s over, it’s over.

PAC NEEDS FOOD BADLY!

  • Reading time:1 mins read

There is an intrinsic difference between the Asteroids/Centipede model of game design, and the Space Invaders/Pac-Man one. It’s the latter, somewhat less flexible, design sensibility (through a Miyamoto filter) which has most directly evolved into our current ideas about console and arcade games. I’m not entirely sure if this is ideal, although it’s lent some mass appeal to the medium.

I wonder how things might’ve been different if the American model had continued to evolve into the modern era. If we’d gotten a chance to hone it as well as the Japanese model has been (up to the painfully entrenched form that it’s in now).

I’m too tired to illustrate. I might, later.

I’m sure some of you out there already are tracing my thought patterns, however.

I think it’s kind of interesting.

Again. Probably the solution is to combine the two sensibilities. Retro and Silicon Knights remain the test cases for a rather different kind of a merger (that being the quickly-tiring Miyamoto school and the modern Western PC-oriented mindset). I wonder what’d happen if we were to work back in some of the Ed Logg mentality.

Fungaloid worms

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I’ve been sitting here for over twelve hours, playing with MAME. It initially began as a quest to find and play the Castlevania arcade game. While it is pretty… not-good, I did get me-out a hefty basket of insight on Simon’s Quest.

I’ll let your imagination play with that for a while.

It only took a few plays to fill me as full of Haunted Castle as I wished to be filled. So, I took to seeing what else MAME happened to support. This was the first time that I’d really paid much attention to the program. It used to be a practical nuisance, last it was high on my radar.

Now, though, it… kind of works okay. It’s still not got some features that I’d like, but it makes up for them in how comprehensive it manages to be. You’ve got your Art of Fighting 3 right next to your Asteroids and your Rolling Thunder and your obscure Japanese porn Mahjong.

Through all of this business, something struck me.

I’ve… most recently spent an hour with Centipede when I could have been sleeping. This wasn’t in the plans. After about fifteen minutes, though, it occurred to me what was going on with the levels. Merely by playing the game, I was altering the level design. It couldn’t be helped.

When stage 2 came around, it wasn’t a different stage because of a pre-ordained set of obstacles. It didn’t even rely on a random generator. I made it different, albeit unintentionally. The randomness of my actions was translated, through various side effects, into the randomness of the mushroom field. All I had to do was be there. To exist.

It keeps going on like that. Perpetually. You get the same thing with Asteroids, although with all the moving pieces it’s not quite as evident.

…

Games aren’t quite so poetic anymore, are they.

Hmm, I say!

EDIT:

According to the KLOV, Centipede was the first arcade game to be designed by a woman (a certain Dona Bailey — sister to Justin, perhaps?).

Curious, curious.