I’m ramping up for a summer of conventions, and I hope to get some interviews in with artists and game designers. In previous years, I was able to meet such amazing artists as Andy Hopp, Charles Urbach, and Larry Elmore.
The current schedule looks like this:
Origins: June 23rd-27th
Gen-Con: August 5th-8th
Wizard World Chicago Comic Con: August 19th-22nd
Penny Arcade Expo: September 3rd-5th
These conventions are an excellent opportunity to congregate with other gamers, network within the industry, expand your metagame, and to learn a lot about gaming culture. If you have the time, check the side bar for the links to these events (if the links are no longer in the sidebar, then the events have long passed).
As I entered my 5-year-old son’s room, I saw the following:
“It’s called “Kickle Colorful.” Apparently, the little yellow block is Kickle Colorful, and the Mega-blocks form the island that Kickle Colorful must clear.
Now, I’m not posting this to fill the stereotype of the parent that boasts about every little thing that his child does. The thing that pleased me most about this encounter was the fact that he was already seeing games as something to create, rather than just play. The thought of this didn’t occur to me until much later in life.
In related news, I just received my prize for the Kickle signature contest held at NoobToob earlier this year. It’s a Famicom version of Kickle Cubicle, complete with a box and instructions. The instructions are actually a small comic book that teaches you to play the game as you read through the story. Spiffy.
Just as each generation of free-thinking scientists, artists, authors, and philosophers must pass the baton of innovation to the next generation, so too must they receive the baton of crotchetiness from geezers past. One would think that, in the information age, such cliches would be actively avoided.
Last month Roger Ebert reaffirmed his arguments that games are not art. Many other sites have already torn into him, with some vivisecting his arguments independently and others crushing them on simpler terms. Not much can be added here; his arguments are built on ill-formed – or nonexistent – definitions and red herrings.
Barker: “We should be stretching the imaginations of our players and ourselves. Let’s invent a world where the player gets to go through every emotional journey available. That is art. Offering that to people is art.”
Ebert: If you can go through “every emotional journey available,” doesn’t that devalue each and every one of them? Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices.
This “storyline inflation” (or is it “creative marginal utility?”) that Ebert describes is inconsistent with his own film reviews. How can one seriously argue that a story is devalued with each variation after giving 3-star reviews for both Groundhog Day and Run Lola Run, and a 4-star review for The Last Temptation of Christ?
Ebert, on Groundhog Day: In another sense, tomorrow will never come. Groundhog Day will repeat itself over and over and over again, apparently until the end of time, and Phil will be permanently condemned to cover it. He’s trapped in some kind of time warp.
As Phil figures out the rules of his dilemma, we do, too.
His world is inhabited by the same people every day, but they don’t know that Groundhog Day is repeating itself. He is the only one who can remember what happened yesterday. That gives him a certain advantage: He can, for example, find out what a woman is looking for in a man, and then the “next” day he can behave in exactly the right way to impress her.
This sounds like nearly every game I have ever played. The other characters are unaware that the story is being repeated; only you experience the growth from variation to variation. With each new attempt, the lesson is learned, but the consequences are wiped away.
Ebert, on Run Lola Run: And the story of Lola’s 20-minute run is told three times, each time with small differences that affect the outcome and the fate of the characters.Film is ideal for showing alternate and parallel time lines. It’s literal; we see Lola running, and so we accept her reality, even though the streets she runs through and the people she meets are altered in each story. The message is that the smallest events can have enormous consequences. A butterfly flaps its wings in Malaysia, causing a hurricane in Trinidad. You know the drill.
Yes, we know the drill. Mr. Ebert argues very well that multiple variations on a story is acceptable. The question is where the line must be drawn; does the story cease to be art when a controller is placed into the viewers hand?
Ebert, on The Last Temptation of Christ: And in the hallucination itself, in the film’s most absorbing scene, an elderly Jesus is reproached by his aging Apostles for having abandoned his mission. Through this imaginary conversation, Jesus finds the strength to shake off his temptation and return to consciousness to accept his suffering, death and resurrection.
Ebert clearly argues in this review that the alternate story presented in The Last Temptation of Christ makes the regular story stronger. That is, knowing the alternative adds value to the original.
To be fair about this, Ebert did give a two star review to the 1998 film Sliding Doors, a story with two parallel time lines. He explains why.
Ebert, on Sliding Doors: I submit that there is a simple test to determine whether this plot can work: Is either time-line interesting in itself? If not, then no amount of shifting back and forth between them can help. And I fear they are not.
I agree with the Roger Ebert that wrote this in 1998; I only wish that Roger Ebert in 2010 could do the same.
I just finished Warhammer 40,000: Squad Command for the PSP. While I loved the game, I was reminded of The Oregon Trail toward the end of the single player campaign. Of course, the graphics, sound, and gameplay were head, shoulders, knees, and ankles above the Apple IIe classic. The specific parallels that I saw were (1) the infinite ammo loop given to the player, and (2) the ability of the player to use time as a resource.
In Oregon Trail, you guide your family on the journey from Independence, Missouri to Oregon’s Willamette Valley. As you faced harsh weather, dangerous rivers, bandits, and dysentery, you had to set your pace, hunt, and trade to survive. You could leave between the months of March and August, but you had to take the weather into consideration. If you leave too early, you face tough, cold weather on the front end; if you leave too late (or rest too often) you face a harsh winter toward the end. If you played as the farmer, you received the least initial resources, but were awarded a 3x multiplier on your final score.
When I was permitted to play this game in school, I faced an artificial time constraint imposed by my teachers. That is, we only had 45 minutes to complete the game. This required a grueling pace, and limited time for preparation. Needless to say, we usually lost, and we never achieved a good score.
Years later, when I had the opportunity to play the game at my own pace, I discovered two things. First, there actually was no time limit in the game. That is, there is nothing that says you have to complete the trail in the first year. Second, there was a recursive element to the game. Food and bullets traded at about 1 bullet/pound, but hunting brought about about 30-50 pounds/bullet. These two elements broke the game.
My strategy was to choose the farmer, and establish the largest family possible. I bought few supplies: 2 oxen, no spare parts, a few clothes, about 100 lbs of food, and LOT of bullets. As soon as I left the fort, I stopped, set up camp, and hunted until my food supply was maxed out. I then traded, traded, traded for nothing but clothing and more bullets. Once my food supply was low, I hunted again, and repeated this several times. Usually, if I started in April, I could have enough clothing to get through the first winter. After hunting and trading for about three to four years of game time, I had at least 3 of each of the spare parts, a large team of oxen, etc. When I was comfortably equipped, I took a nice leisurely pace through the trail, eating well along the way.
Now, why did Warhammer 40,000: Squad Command remind me of Oregon Trail?
As I played, the difficulty progressed through the first 13 missions. In the last two missions, however, the game gives you a “Whirlwind Tank” with unlimited missiles. If you hide your men around the corner of a door, you can cover that door fairly easily. The AI is programmed to avoid such traps, so a well covered bottleneck can hold the enemy units off indefinitely. Since your missiles do not require line-of-site aiming, you can lob them at the enemy from the safety of your side of the bottleneck. The problem is that the AI is smart enough to avoid your trap, but not smart enough to run away from repeated missile blasts. Unlimited ammunition, the ability to turtle up, and the lack of a time limit makes for an easy win.
Once again, the Mighty Doug learned how to bore a video game’s AI to death.
On the whole, this is an enjoyable game, but I have one recommendation to game designers: when you make a turn-based game like this, always put time limits on the players. Take a lesson from Laser Squad Nemesis. Pain and fear are essential here; the more fear you instill with the challenges, the more satisfaction you deliver with the victories.
If I am going to start a new web page, I suppose my first post should explain my reasoning for creating it. As many of you know, I’ve had two shows in the past. The first was about bad games, and the second was about budget games. While these were fun, I realized that I needed to move on to something a little bigger.
The “Gaming On A Budget” show consisted of two parts. The first was a commentary on game design, game flavor, and social aspects of gaming. The second was a review of a budget game title.
As the show progressed, I ran into four problems:
1) Development Time: I found the process for developing the videos was getting too long. In addition to working full time, I was providing sprite support for the Kickle Cubicle project, developing a tabletop card game, and working on several personal video projects. When I decided to go back to school, I knew that something had to give.
2) Relevance: At PAX, I had a discussion with Yuzo about press badges, and the topic of show relevance came up. I realized, in time, that one of the big problems with the show was that most of the budget games out there have become budget games because enough time has passed. If I continue to review only these games, my show will never be relevant to today’s market. This would limit my accessibility at various game conventions and shows, and would stifle the quality of interviews that I could provide to the community.
3) Constraints: Many of the games I wanted to discuss couldn’t fall into the “budget” category, even after a considerable amount of time has passed. Ico, Mario Kart Wii, Agricola, and Professor Layton are all outstanding games, but their sustained price tags make them out of bounds for the show.
4) Copyrighted Content: Much of the content that I initially used on the show was copyrighted. This includes music for closing credits, cut scenes, video clips, and so on. I won’t even try to argue fair use. When it was a weekend hobby, I was a bit too liberal with the content. I want the show to be something more now, but if I want to get a director’s account on YouTube I need to have content that can stand before the increased scrutiny those accounts receive. I don’t want to take down the original videos, so I’m probably going to need to open a new channel.
The first problem I tried to tackle was the excessive development times. I knew that I wanted to cut the show in half. The question was, which half should I remove? If I cut out the commentary, I would be removing the one element that made the show universally relevant. If I removed the game reviews, it would no longer make sense to call the show “Gaming on a Budget.”
The End of Gaming On A Budget
Initially, and mistakenly, I tried to drop the commentary and continue with the reviews. I really liked the show name, and I wanted to preserve it if possible. My subscribers enjoyed the reviews, but I received a LOT of negative feedback for dropping the commentaries. They were very clear that they preferred the commentary to the reviews. The fans are more important to me than the title of the show, so I decided to bring back the commentary and remove the reviews.
The question now was, what should I call the show?
I knew that I wanted to change the show, but was unsure how. I would soon learn.
It was about that time that I saw this video about the problems of violence in video games.
I wrote to the noobtoob modcast about it:
Hello, Modcast.
I recently saw a video posted on noobtoob about how games cause violence, corrupt the youth, etc. I was frustrated by the gentlemen arguing for the games; he didn’t seem to be selling the message in a way that was meaningful to the mainstream media.
This got me thinking; it seems that most of the game advocates out there (Penny Arcade, Yuzo and Tobin, etc) are preaching to the choir. I think the thing that we are missing is an advocate that can explain why games matter to the mainstream public. This is a problem because all of the gaming opponents (Jack Thompson, Dave Grossman, etc) tend to communicate well with the mainstream media. Yes, any gamer can counter their arguments in terms that other gamers will understand, but who do we have defending and justifying the art form to the non-gaming public?
So my question is: Who, if anyone, are our evangelists/missionaries/ambassadors to the outside world? Who is getting the word out to non-gamers about the artistic, educational, cultural, and social value of games?
Their answer can be found here, toward the end of the show.
The answer was discouraging because it re-affirmed what I already feared: there are few major mainstream advocates for games. At the same time, it was a strong motivator because it identified a gap that needed to be filled. Based on this, I now know what I need to do: my new show must be about why games matter.
From the Ashes: Why Games Matter
This is the reason why Gaming on a Budget must come to an end, and why I haven’t been active over the last few weeks. I have started this blog, and my new YouTube channel is WhyGamesMatter, with each first letter capitalized. If you go to that channel now, you will see my first video.
Thank you to everyone that has supported the show. I may occasionally produce game reviews and personal videos on my personal channel, but most of my work is going to be on WhyGamesMatter. I look forward to seeing you there.
