And in art today:

Mapping your life by Christoph Niemann – and showing by the way how we are used to Google's way of creating maps these days. Very nicely done.

via Michael Freivogel

Wow – if the people behind GameLab (supposedly most of my teachers) can keep up at the current rate of posts, they would have produced the most successful relaunch of a blog ever. Even if it's just reposts as in this case.

The post deals with the current trend to monetize games – the so-called freemium model: People are allowed to download the game for free, the can play with it, but as soon as they want to become really good and advance faster, they have to pay (real money) in order to get boosts.

They author argues that this is breaking the magic circle of games; especially when it comes to their utopian properties. In contrast to a ludic world, where only luck and skill matter, the freemium model favours the same people that rule in the real world: the ones with the money.

In my opinion, (video) games have always dealt with the balance between utopia and realism: as a designer, you are torn between simulating the real world and breaking all the rules that confine you to your existence. Getting money into play is therefore just another rule taken over into the simulation.

The question is: do we, as players, want that? Do we prefer the simulation over the utopia? And how much are we willing to pay for such an utopia?

Just a bunch of links:

• Raph Koster has notes on Sporadic Play
• BoingBoing has the big pictures on the Indie Game Fund
• And a rant by Auntie Pixelante, also at the GDC10.

Seems like all those people have a lot of fun over there. Why am I not there as well? Damn.

(Articles tagged with "Developer's Diary" are more sketches – ideas and thought processes behind current projects, so that they can be assembled as documentation at a later date. Comments and further thoughts are highly encouraged.)

The exercise consists of creating an autonomous software agent that interacts on a 2D plane. Also, it has to work together with other available agents.

In order to let the agent choose an appropriate action, it should contain a stack with possible tasks with priorities. In every turn, the task with the highest priority is executed.

Every task contains different actions that have to be done. Those actions are universal and can be shared.

Possible actions may be:

• Finding the way to an object
• Moving
• Avoiding obstacles

Possible task could be:

• Finding and absorbing food

The stack is used in order to allow for interruptions to happen. The agent will be able to answer to the interruption and take up the interrupted task afterwards. Given the assigned priority, the agent can also choose to ignore some interruptions and continue the started task.

American McGee (personal hero) in a piece on Gamasutra on how his process developing games works – totally crunch-free:

You discussed the idea of small innovations. Rather than push forward with large things, it's better to do small innovations. What taught you that lesson, or where did that come from as a philosophy?

AM: Well, you understand, it's more about the taking the less risky innovation. It doesn't necessarily mean that we're always doing small ones but when we do a big one, it's one that we're very comfortable with, right? So, we may innovate a lot in terms of an art style but then that's because we're really comfortable with making that new art style.

Whereas we wouldn't take our current [Unreal Engine 3] technology and really build a new engine and try to suddenly start innovating that. I mean, that's what people would call it -- trying to change that to be something that's going to make a big, massive open world game, right?

Well, one thing you talked about is that you don't crunch, which is exceedingly rare. And how did you arrive at that?

AM: Just process. It's crazy. I mean, I wish more people knew about Grimm, because for us it was a phenomenal success, but because of GameTap and their distribution and monetization model, no one really ever heard of it, and it never made a dime for them, or for us.

But what it did do was build us into a studio capable of really rock solid, on-time production, because we had such unbelievably short timelines. I mean, when I came to China, we signed the deal.