gameslol

Remember when you were a kid and your parents went to IKEA and they put you in the ball pool and then you were like “oh man, there’s a million colored balls! And I can swim in them! Wheeeeeeee!”. Personally I don’t remember that at all, because I have never in my life been in a ball pool. But I imagine the experience to be similar to being at GDC, where you can marvel at amazing indie games and roll around in them all starry-eyed. By which I mean, roll around in them mentally. With your mind.

Sorry, that was really the best intro I could come up with. This is what happens when you don’t post for several months.

What I’m trying to say is that if you’re still somehow jaded about gaming, even after the spectacular video games parade that was the year 2007, then the indie games shown at GDC will definitely cheer you up. (A special shout-out goes to Toblix, the resident grumpy man of the Idle Thumbs forums. This post is for you!)

So let me tell you about those games. For a look at some brand new gameplay ideas, you can always rely on the Experimental Gameplay Sessions. Katamari Damacy was famously first presented there in prototype form in 2004, as well as several other games that have since risen to indie stardom. The Experimental Gameplay Sessions again delivered a fantastic aggregation of innovative games this year.

You owe it to yourself to check out all of the featured games. Play them. Really do. Of course, some of them are a bit rough around the edges, but they are all driven by interesting ideas.

It’s great how all these games lovingly embrace the abstract possibilities of gaming. What if you play an invisible monster that you literally cannot see? What if you could co-op with yourself from the past? What if the world was black and white and you had to constantly shift color in order to get anywhere? (Dude, I think about that all the time.)

You might actually know some of these games already. It’s striking how many of them were made in Flash, and indeed some of them have already been viral intercloud sensations. It wouldn’t be surprising if expanded versions of some of them show up on XBLA, WiiWare, PSN, Steam or elsewhere. If I’m not mistaken, the excellent Crayon Physics Deluxe is already being ported to Nintendo DS, which is clearly the right platform for a game that involves drawing. 

Some of these games — particularly the ones involving time-manipulation or playing two levels at once — can quite boggle the mind. But once you start playing, you will quickly and intuitively understand the rules of the game world, and they turn out to be a lot more manageable than you expected. If you’ve played Portal you are quite familiar with how that goes.

Shadow by Alex Austin (Gish co-creator) had the most impressive gameplay mechanics shown at the Experimental Gameplay Sessions, at least to my mind. It’s not yet available for public consumption, as it’s really just a very early prototype, but maybe its ideas will be further fleshed out in a full game someday. In Shadow, you have to navigate your way to seemingly unreachable areas in a 3D environment by occasionally shifting to a 2D environment that consists of the shadows cast by all the objects. That makes it possible to, for instance, hop from the shadow of a block that is cast on the floor onto the shadow on the same floor of a block high in the sky, then shift back to 3D, et voila; you are on top of the unreachable block in the sky. It’s like Crush on crack. 

Then there’s of course the Independent Games Festival and awards, which had a phenomenal line-up this year.

Audiosurf gives you a whole new way to experience the music that’s on your harddrive. Fret Nice uses the Guitar Hero controller in a platformer. Fez puts its own unique spin on the 3D/2D shifting mechanic from Crush and Super Paper Mario, and also looks delicious. Crayon Physics Deluxe will make you smile. Ookibloks will also make you smile (hooray for dynamic music). On the other hand, experimental horror-adventure The Path will probably creep you out a little, although that depends on the decisions you make. And take a look at Flipside. That’s made with the Source engine. Yeah.

Let’s also not forget World of Goo, which grabbed the Design Innovation Award this year. It takes the basic gameplay of Tower of Goo and expands on it in really cool ways.

Which reminds me: Kyle Gabler, the designer of World of Goo, gave a rather insightful and entertaining presentation called “A Tale of Two Kyles” at the Indie Games Summit together with Kyle Gray. Both Kyles worked at EA for some time until they got bored with sequels and license-based games. Both took very different approaches to getting their own projects started. While Gabler decided to fly out on his own to make Tower of Goo, Gray decided to work from within the belly of the corporate beast. He somehow convinced EA to give him a small budget to make a small game, which eventually evolved into an unannounced Nintendo DS title.

Gray showed some prototypes of the game, which involved a Brittish explorer platforming his way through the jungle, killing monkeys, and occasionally transforming into a Mecha Big Ben with mechanical arms and lasers.

Oh man. I… I think I have something in my eye. 

You know what? Games are awesome. Like I’ve said before, it feels like the industry has entered a (mini?) golden age, and for a large part the super-talented men and women from the indie scene are to thank for it.

At the Game Designers Rant, Jane McGonigal held an inspiring rant about the need for game designers to approach real-life experiences with a game design mindset. The real world, she argued, is often boring and/or broken, and there’s a lot that game designers can do to make people more engaged and happy in everyday life.

The broader developer community is probably not that eager to think about such issues yet. Aren’t we still trying to figure out how to make good video games? But as gaming continues on its course of becoming a prominent (perhaps dominant?) means of engagement in the 21st century, I think Jane McGonigal’s message will make more and more sense. See: notes and slides on Jane’s blog, and TerraNova’s transcript.

Reality is broken, and we’re not fixing it, we’re offering alternatives to it. We offer better experiences, better socialization, in virtual experiences. That needs to start changing. If reality is broken, why aren’t game designers trying to fix it? It’s our responsibility to design systems that make us happy and successful and powerful in real life? We have the power and the responsibility.

Jane offered examples of real-life experiences that could benefit from game design, such as running, being on a plane, playing fetch with your dog or commuting. “Why don’t I level up when I go running? Make a Nike iPod MMO!”.

It’s probably no coincidence that Jane mentioned playing fetch with your dog as an activity that game designers could make more interesting. This year’s Game Design Challenge was to come up with an inter-species game, and contestant Brenda Brathwaite suggested an idea for an ARG that could be played by dog owners together with their dogs. Instead of just taking your dog for a walk, you would also be participating in an elaborate community-driven real-life game. Woof.

Applied game design soon emerged as a recurring theme for me at the conference. At a Dutch game developers gathering I had a nice chat with the course leader of the HKU (where I got my master’s degree a few years ago), who is trying to apply game design theory to musea and libraries. Libraries in particular are becoming increasingly irrelevant in today’s society, but what if you were to look at it from an interactivity/gameplay/community point of view? Could game design make libraries more relevant and less, well, boring? I don’t really know, but it’s fun to think about.

Gabe Zichermann’s talk at the Worlds in Motion Summit also dealt with “the use of gaming design in non-gaming contexts”, though he focused on the web instead of real-life. After pointing out different game-like elements in eBay and Facebook, he argued that game design could “fix” various experiences on the web, including shopping, travel, financial services, and so on. “There’s no upper limit. Everything can be made more fun.”

It’s true that even the simplest game elements can add value to certain websites. The progress bar on LinkedIn immediately comes to mind. It makes it more fun to fill out your profile, invite contacts and gather testimonials. There are no rewards whatsoever for filling that progress bar, yet it somehow compells you to ‘play’ the social networking game.

The notion of applied game design was not without some criticism, however. Going back to Jane’s rant, Jonathan Blow offered a response in which he pointed to a game-like system in real-life that did not increase his happiness. He talked about Air Miles and other airline reward programs, which give you points for flying with a certain airline. This unnecessarily complicates things, Jon argued, and probably even increases the average price of tickets. Jane responded that the intentions behind this system (as a marketing device) were different, and that her rant was about game designers approaching mundane everyday activities from a game design perspective.

It’s definitely interesting to think about game design in a real-world context. In what unexpected places could we see game design making a difference in the coming years?

After being stuck in Texas for a while due to a delayed flight, as well as enduring more than the usual amount of jetlag, I’m finally back and ready to reflect on this year’s Game Developers Conference.

The mood at GDC 2008 was very positive, perhaps even elated. It feels as though video games have entered a golden age, though that was already fairly obvious from the excellent games that came out in 2007.

Even the Game Designers Rant, normally a place for passionate complaints about the industry, dealt primarily with exploring future opportunities. (Daniel James decided not to rant at all, instead celebrating the gaming medium with a short talk that can be accurately summarized as “wheeeeeeeeeeee! video games ^_^”, while Jon Mak apparently just wanted us to play with balloons.)

On a personal note, it was great to again meet so many people this year. It was an honor and a pleasure.

Unfortunately, due to a cold (not due to partying!) I lost my voice for much of Tuesday and Wednesday, which according to one witness made me sound “like an evil swamp creature”. This sadly meant having to cut some conversations short, but hopefully we can continue those online. Losing your voice at a conference is truly a nightmare and I hope you will never have to experience the same.

In the coming days I will be blogging my thoughts about some of the lectures. In the meantime, check out such blogs as BrainyGamer, Hit Self Destruct or Remowned for some post-GDC reports.

Can games ever reach a cultural impact on par with other media like books or film? Steve Gaynor believes they won’t. On his blog he wagers that games will never become a significant form of cultural discourse and, like comic books, will forever “stay marginalized and juvenile”.

I think I’ll take that bet. I believe gaming will break out of its niche and into mainstream cultural consciousness.

Although Steve’s view is pretty bleak and pessimistic, I do see where he is coming from. I can strongly relate to his sentiments about the overwhelming majority of “adolescent male fantasy or cheap cash-ins” in gaming. I just don’t think those kinds of games are likely to stay dominant forever. Let me give some arguments in support of a more positive outlook. (Now is probably a good idea to read Steve’s post, if you haven’t already.)

Read the rest of this entry »

If you buy games online a lot it’s possible to forget all the horrors of retail. Last weekend I went downtown on a game buying binge but was sadly reminded how depressing actual stores can be, not to mention their customers.

I set out to buy Zack & Wiki and Singstar (with microphones). You’d think that would be an easy mission, but after visiting five different stores I was still empty-handed. To my huge surprise I couldn’t even find a Singstar microphone bundle at any Free Record Shop (the main DVD/CD/game chain store in The Netherlands; think HMV or Virgin Megastore). I did find two stand-alone editions of SingStar in a bargain bin, but that was all.

I will accept that Zack & Wiki can be hard to find, but if I can’t find FREAKIN’ SINGSTAR at a Free Record Shop, there’s something terribly wrong. Isn’t Singstar just about the most mainstream game you can think of? Of course, I had forgotten that you should never go to any of these stores for a pre-meditated purchase. These stores expect you to go there and impulse buy whatever they happen to have in stock.

I overheard three teenage kids trying to decide whether to buy Super Mario Galaxy or Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games. They were going for the latter because one of them said “it looks like a sports game, and I like sports games!”. I should have pointed my finger in the air and said “I’ll take the case!” and told these kids about the huge mistake they were about to make, but of course I didn’t.

Later I overheard two customers trying to decide whether to buy The Orange Box. One guy said he’d heard some good things about it. Then the other one said he “already owned Half-Life 2″ and “didn’t want to pay for it again”. Sigh. Who will teach them?

I’m not at all grumpy, by the way. No grumpiness…

Fortunately I remembered a small independent game store, so I went there and was greeted by the store owner, a happy middle-aged guy. I found what I wanted and also picked up a copy of ICO for good measure, as I never actually completed that game. While I was browsing, a man asked the store owner to advise him on what to buy for his two sons. The store owner happily guided him away from licensed crap and recommended him three really good games, The Orange Box among them.

Meanwhile, a kid was standing hunched over the counter with a PS2 controller in his hands playing Bully on a monitor behind the counter. He was trying to decide whether to buy it, and talked to his dad and the store owner about the controls and how the game had some “typical Rockstar” elements. I have no idea what he meant, but it somehow sounded a lot better than “I like sports games so I’ll buy Mario & Sonic”.

The only mic bundle for Singstar is apparently the Disney High-School Musical edition which… umm… yeah. Fortunately, the store owner took the microphone box, cut it open with a knife and switched out the cd case with Singstar Rocks. I’m not sure if he’s supposed to do that, but nice service. We chatted briefly about ICO and then I was on my way with a smile on my face and my faith in retail and humanity slightly restored.

If you’re in Amsterdam and you’re going to buy games, go to Powerplay in the Van Woustraat.

Update: picked a new template and did some housecleaning! This is so exciting!

Yes, Gameslol was down for… probably a few weeks. Sorry about that. One of my WordPress plugins got some kind of spasm attack, but I killed it and got a new one so no worries. I hope you like horses though, because upgrading WordPress caused my template to revert back to its default header picture of a horse race. Woo.

Hopefully I’ll have the time to write something here again soon and restore some of the template customizations I had made. Happy new year!

Just wanted to quickly point out that AdventureGamers.com now runs a partnership with Lezard Electronic to offer digital downloads of many popular adventure games. It’s called Adventure Shop and it launched with a catalog of 23 titles. New games will be added regularly going forward.

I worked on this partnership over the past two months (in conjunction with Jack Allin and various people at Lezard Electronic). The response from the adventure community has been enormously positive, which definitely feels very rewarding after all the work we put into it.

If you follow the adventure genre you might want to check out the Adventure Shop once in a while. It already has some titles that are hard to find elsewhere. Sherlock Holmes vs. Arsène Lupin won’t be in stores until sometime in 2008, but it can already be downloaded from the Adventure Shop.

Idle Thumbs (gaming site, age 3, presumed dead since February), unexpectedly spasmed itself back into activity last week as Ben Andac and Alex Ashby posted three new articles that are much worth reading:

Getting The Short End
Alex observes that while Portal was greeted with universal praise this year, almost every media outlet commented on its shortness as a bad thing. And that, he says, is a bad thing. A great rant against people who complain about games that aren’t a billion hours long.
She Blinded Me with Aperture Science
Speaking of Portal, Alex wrote a whole article about it, taking a note on its Huge Success. Why did the world fall in love with this sleeper hit almost overnight in ways not seen since Katamari Damacy?

Every Extend Extra Extreme: It’s in the Game
When I tried Every Extend Extra Extreme on XBLA, the magic didn’t really happen for me. That made it all the more fascinating to read Ben’s analysis of EEEE. That’s because Ben loves it. He really loves it, and dives deep into what makes this game tick. At the end, it makes me want to go back to the game with a different eye.

Anyway, all that and more on the Zombie Thumb.

While you are at it, be sure to visit the blogs of former Thumb writers Bob, Steve, Spaff and Duncan. They all have great new posts. A recent favorite blog of mine is also Rock, Paper, Shotgun. It has nothing at all to do with Idle Thumbs (it is in fact by Kieron Gillen, John Walker and other prestigious UK game journalists) but it is excellent and deserves a shout-out.