Blogs

... is, apparently, something Tale of Tales are rather good at. Robert Yang has a neat timeline of the current events. And it is not the first time they make people angry.

Of course, you can debate the value of their provocations, you can debate their contribution to game culture –

Tale of Tales is important and interesting... but also kind of not. Their conception of video games seems really narrow, perhaps out of necessity in order to target it effectively in their crazy dogmatic manifestos.

– the thing is: there is a discussion about what games are and what not. People might consider them to be wrong. But people might also consider Blizzard to be wrong, inasmuch as they pretty much only polish up the games they did ten years ago.¹

No matter how aggravating/boring this argument may seem: It is important that it is discussed. Every game designer that plays a Tale of Tales game will either see how games could be made as well – or she or he will realise how games are not to be designed. Either way: everybody learns.

Here’s to the crazy ones, so to speak.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They’re not fond of rules.

... indeed.

I guess my plan is not so bad after all. At least this article at GameLife proves my point perfectly: first learn all the important stuff about producing a game at a big studio, probably failing miserably a few times along the way – and then actually founding your own little studio to produce the games you really want to do – just as Jamie Cheng (Shank), Jake Kazdal (Skulls of the Shogun) and Sean Murray (Joe Danger) did.

Choice quotes from the article:

The stereotypical image of an indie gamemaker is an iconoclast who prizes art over commerce, or perhaps a kid with no formal training working in his parents’ house, cobbling together a genius new game idea using pirated software and raw talent.

But that’s not what the new crop of indies are. They’re veterans of the triple-A game biz with decades of experience behind them. They’ve worked for the biggest companies and had a hand in some of the industry’s biggest blockbusters. They could work on anything, but they’ve found creative fulfillment splitting off into a tiny crew and doing their own thing. They’re using everything they’ve learned working on big-budget epics and applying it to small, downloadable games.

The good news for gamers is that, as the industry’s top talents depart the big studios and go into business for themselves, players are being treated to a new class of indie game. They’re smaller and carry cheaper price tags, but they’re produced by industry veterans instead of thrown together by B teams and interns. Most importantly, unlike big-budget games that need to appeal to the lowest common denominator to turn a profit, these indie gems reveal the undiluted creative vision of their makers.

I have not watched those yet, but they might be wort a look:

Kurt Reinhard from the Institut für Theorie, Zurich University of Applied Sciences and Arts, recently posted on Vimeo a fascinating series of short videos on the future of storytelling. The videos juxtapose the perspectives of some key thinkers in this space, including Clay Shirkey (NYU), Joshua Green (UCSB), Ian Condry and Nick Montfort (MIT), Dean Jansen from the Participatory Culture Foundation, Joe Lambert from the Center for Digital Storytelling, and, hmm, Henry Jenkins (USC), among others. Each video is between five and ten minutes long and tackles some of the ways that shifts in the media environment are changing the nature of stories and storytelling.

The complete series can be found on the blog of Henry Jenkins.

There was the conference about the Art History of Video Games, which was organized by Ian Bogost, one of my secret heroes.

Now all the non-attendants can watch the presentations as well – head over here and bask in the knowledge of people like Jesper Juul, John Romero or Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn.

The universe is pissed.

No, Human Gameplay Trailer from woodn on Vimeo.

Find more information about this Swiss iPhone game here.

Thanks to a game blog (Destructoid, or Kotaku, I do not remember) I came across the Border House Blog, a blog about questions of gender, feminism and LGBT in games. One of the articles is about WoW:

I suddenly saw social ideas writ large in the game’s concepts. The racial undertones that often gird roleplaying games where humans are coincidentally European and other real-world human cultures are given pigeon holed non-human races. The way even female heroes are shown wearing very revealing or skimpy “robes” and “armour,” or the occasionally poor writing for female characters. All of that analysis became impossible for me to ignore because something dramatic had shifted in my life. I was now well outside the target demographic of games like WoW.

I think we will have a course about females in games, but this blog shows nicely that it simply is not done with putting a generic female body into a game to address the issues.

Definitely a blog to keep an eye on, even more with my bachelor game coming up.

The first live-action trailer for Halo: Reach was great already (including all the eye candy), but it even gets better:

Awesome. This is how stories are supposed to be told.

Of course, it would be even better if those stories would be told in the game, and not just in the trailer for the game.

[via Kotaku]

Placing stuff in 3D space in Unity 3D is simple, right? Just use this.transform.position and you are all set – or so we have been taught in art school. Turns out there are a few pitfalls I happen to hit whenever I work with that stuff.

Reading and Writing Values of transform.position

Yes, you can access the x, y, and z-values of the transform.position. But you can not change them directly (at least in C#). You have to use a Vector3 object, as in:

this.transform.position = new Vector3(newX, newY, newZ);

Obviously, by feeding the original values in, you can change just one value at a time:

this.transform.position = new Vector3(this.transform.position.x,
                                      newY, 
                                      this.transform.position.y);

Global vs. Local

Also of note: transform.position actually refers to the position in global space, it is the absolute position.

In many cases, you want to calculate movement relative to the parent object. In order to do this, you need to use transform.localPosition, which works exactly as the other one, but is calculated relatively to the position of the parent object. If there is no parent object, localPosition is the same as position.

In my opinion, it is in many cases better to use localPosition instead of position, since most of the time, you want to have objects move with or along their parent objects. After all, also the editor shows you the local position.

Are games just mere entertainment? Or can they be more? Obviously, I strive for the second part – and here is why I might not be that wrong.

This year, for the first time, a video game will appear on the syllabus of a course required for all students at Wabash College, where I teach. For me - and for a traditional liberal arts college founded in 1832 - this is a big deal.

Alongside Gilgamesh, Aristotle's Politics, John Donne's poetry, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the Tao Te Ching, freshmen at Wabash will also encounter a video game called Portal.

This comes, of course, from the Brainy Gamer, Michael Abbott. And it is a logical consequence: games are becoming more and more mainstream. Practically all kids that are just a bit younger than I am (and a lot of my own generation) have grown up with games, they know the game's language, they can read those texts¹.

But most of the time, they can not analyse it. Just as you have to re-learn to read literature and watch films in university, you have to re-learn to play games.

Yes, I know I should be now checking my mail (which, as I already know, will contain some business regarding this blog, which in turn will involve you, my dear readers¹), but I just have to post this, because it now follows me for some days, and I find the idea both awesome and a bit intimidating.

So, there is this guy, Kelly Sutton, who got rid of most of his possessions, to "live out of the hard drive", as BBC put it:

About a year ago, I came to the conclusion that the most logical thing to be done was to rid myself of all (or most) of my possessions. After meticulously itemizing all of my stuff, I put almost all of it up for sale on a site I built in a weekend, Cult of Less. Yesterday, the BBC News ran an article about myself and a few other folks replacing their physical media with their digital analogs. There are many implications of selling everything, some great and some not so great.²

Well, after my own claims of "home is where my broadband internet connection is", getting rid of most of the physical stuff would be the next step, indeed.

The greatest thing gained from Cult of Less has been an unprecedented amount of physical freedom. A willingness to drop your stationary physical possessions and move is the greatest freedom I have found in this project. Sure, you could get by without a bed, furniture and a few other essentials, but you will be miserable. No one wants to sleep on a floor if they can help it.

A minor yet pleasurable consequence has been interacting with people from around the world.

Just a few games I stumbled over this morning.

Journey

Any serious game designer should know Jenova Chen – yes, the guy who made flOw, and since then has an uncanny ability to forge a single governing mechanic into hauntingly beautiful games.

Now, a new game called Journey is to be released. It features nothing more than one person and a huge desert one has to cross. And that is all. It has multiplayer capabilities through the fact that one other random player is added to the same game. The players cannot communicate with each other. But they may share the journey for a while.

Not only is this a combination of two of my own, as of yet unused ideas, it seems to have been beautifully and poetically executed as well.

This kind of reminds me that I should get some of those XBox Live Arcade / Playstation Store Points / Credits / Thingies so I get a chance to play Limbo and Flower, some of the other small but exceptional games that are simply a must-play.

This is the inspiration for my current game. Not that easy to get that level of minimalism and atmosphere. I try hard, though.

Watching that short film (a graduation project by Eran Hilleli) helps to get motivated again.

Source: Flickr

The lookout isn't too shabby, though. Now for some gameplay, please?

The spiky hair is a sure sign. And the ten invisible weapons in his invisible backpack.

Source: Flickr

Someone on lifehacker seems to be on a I-quit-coffee-spree, or he would not post these articles all the time.

Or maybe it is just me doing exactly the same thing and therefore noticing every new post containing the word caffeine. Either way, this is interesting:

The study I linked above found that caffeine withdrawal occurs in people who consume as little as 100 milligrams of caffeine per day. But how much is that? As nutrition blogger Colby Vorland pointed out last month, that’s not an easy question. Vorland cites two studies that attempted to measure the caffeine content of coffee. The researchers found that depending on where you get your coffee and how it’s prepared, the caffeine content in a serving can vary from 58 mg to 259 mg. Espresso shots in general had less caffeine than brewed coffee, ranging from 58 to 92 mg per shot; the 259 mg of caffeine was in a 16-ounce cup of Starbucks brewed coffee.

Meaning: I can get away with one espresso a day. Or not. Since one of the problems of caffeine is that no one seems to know how it really works. Does it give you energy immediately? Or much later, so you will not be able to sleep when you drink coffee after lunch? Are there actual withdrawal symptoms? Is it all just a placebo? Are you alert because of your coffee or because you do not have the withdrawal symptoms anymore?