No Time To Play

So, earlier today Nightwrath shows me this video tutorial for Unity 3D (on YouTube). It’s not my thing at all, but I watch a little out of curiosity. Wait… this bloke sounds like a twelve-year-old. That picks my interest, and I click through to his profile, then his blog. Which is full of game and console reviews, and more video tutorials. To top it all, he makes music as well. And what do you know… he actually is twelve! How cool is that?

No, I won’t give you an “in the old days” speech. Things were different back then. But I’m thrilled to live in an age when so many people can make a contribution to the world’s culture, without having to ask anyone for permission. As Michael Masnick put it recently, We’re Living In the Most Creative Time In History, and that’s not a given. Be grateful for this freedom. Fight for it.

And don’t forget to check out Computoguy’s blog.

How cool is that?! by Felix Pleșoianu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

While there is a continuing trend to market games to a larger audience by basing them primarily on gameplay that is quickly learned and satisfying, there remains something to be said for interesting storylines in interactive media. How a storyline is presented, however, is as important as the story itself. Bad cut scenes that keep a player from playing the game might as well be loading screens.

There has been a tendency, historically, for games to try to emulate movies in the story telling department. Games will pause, a short video advancing the story will be played, and then the gameplay continues. There are a number of problems this creates in a gaming medium.
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Playing cards are popular both in the real world and on the computer. In the former case, because the components are cheap and compact (at least when stored), and the games themselves can often be played in confined spaces, such as on the train. In the latter case, because they require only static pictures for art, and little computing power.

I suspect everybody knows at least a few of the several hundred games you can play with a standard 52-card deck. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Magic: The Gathering — a single game — has thousands of cards and counting. It is also a considerable money investment. But what lays between these extremes, and how do tabletop card cames inform their computer counterparts?

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What would you consider a decent screen resolution for gaming? 1280×1024? 1600×1200? Or maybe 1920×1080, if you’re a console owner?

My mobile port of Buzz Grid runs just fine on a screen as small as the one on the left:

That’s 176×220, a common resolution for cellphones around 2005. Seems limited? Nintendo Gameboy, possibly the absolute best-selling gaming console ever, had a screen no bigger than the one on the right: only 160×144! And four shades of gray for variety.

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I’ve been reading this book titled Tabletop: Analog Game Design. It’s a must read for anyone who dabbles in this field. But the one passage that made me jump is not about game design. It’s about game success:

In 1995, the game that would become Klaus Teuber’s masterpiece was shipped in Germany by distributor Kosmos. A few German-language copies trickled to the hobby market in the U.S., fueling demand that
allowed Mayfair to produce an English-language version the following year. To date, it has sold more copies worldwide each year than in the previous, a trend that is the reversal of the sell-millions-in-two-weeks-or-bust sales model of big-budget videogames. To put things in perspective for any videogame fan in the audience, there are about as many copies of Settlers of Catan in circulation as there are copies of Grand Theft Auto 3 and World of Warcraft combined.

– Ian Schreiber, How Settlers of Catan Created an American Boardgame Revolution (page 85).

I’ve addressed the issue of short-term versus long-lived success before, in the context of movies, but it’s the same for games. And if you’re wondering how a board game can sell more than the biggest, flashiest computer games out there, consider that ZZT, a shareware title from 1991, was still selling the occasional copy two years ago. And it’s a text-based DOS game.

I should add that the book is available under a CC-NC-ND license, so you have no excuse. Go get it.

I’ve wasted the past week getting back into an older hobby of mine, namely retrocomputing (and -gaming).

So far I found:

• a BASIC compiler for the ZX Spectrum, a more convenient alternative to the z88dk cross-compiler. Not that I plan to do any development for the good old Speccy. (Insert shifty eyes here.)

• a modern, open source 8-bit console, roughly comparable to the Nintendo Entertainment System, except simpler and more powerful. In a genius move, they designed it to use the same controllers, which are plentiful due to a thriving NES clone market.

• a publisher selling new games for old machines, and I mean on casette tape, boxed and everything. What are you going to play them on? Why, an original micro, of course!

Then again, that’s about all you can do with a Spectrum, whereas a Commodore 64 can accomodate modern hardware and a modern operating system, and actually serve web pages. Which doesn’t cease to amaze me, pointless as it may be.

Why bother with these ancient, ridiculously underpowered machines? Aside from the nostalgia factor, I think any modern software developer has much to learn from the sheer variety and quality of available titles. Nowadays, we have millions of times more resources, yet all too often we don’t know what to do with them. And there’s too much waste in the world as it is.

(Illustration: Computer Museum: assorted microcomputers, by cmnit; CC-BY-SA)

Retro diversions by Felix Pleșoianu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Gamebooks were developed roughly in parallel with text adventures, and became fairly popular during the 1980es and 1990es; I remember reading quite a few of them before getting my first computer. (I would have continued, but lost access to my source.)

One would have expected the genre to migrate naturally to computers and especially the Web. But when I got on the Internet, there was little to be found apart from whimsical, quickly abandoned addventures and the high-brow experimental stuff typically promoted by the Electronic Literature Organization. And then there was the modern interactive fiction community, which I discovered around 2004. But the IF community had little love lost for the genre.

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I took a break from my world domination plans for a new game in order to hack together a little toy. Ramus is a lightweight system for creating self-contained hypertext documents. In less pompous words, you can have a whole mini-website in a single HTML file, and a small one at that. Ramus runs on less than 15K of Javascript (of which only about 40 lines of code are absolutely essential), and you get to write your story in plain old HTML.

Now, while these qualities are relatively unique, the concept is not. So why make yet another such tool?

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One advantage of not being in the market for mainstream A-list games is that I’m sheltered from this sort of incident. In fact, I only heard about it more than ten days later, when another incident caused some people to remember the previous one. Which in turn promptly reminded me of yet another — unlike the others, this one did affect me.

It’s easy to call us alarmists when we rant and rave about the dangers of the “cloud”. But reality proves again and again that technology is inherently unreliable, and corporations doubly so. Whether you are a consumer or a service provider, depending on the continued availability of something that could go offline at the first storm or the whim of an executive (whichever comes first) is simply reckless. Never mind the issue of DRM; relying on a centralized source for anything at all pretty much misses the whole point of having an Internet.

Don’t get me wrong: a central meeting point has its uses. That’s why I still use identi.ca instead of setting up my own Status.net server. But at least I have the option. One day, Battle.net will go down, possibly for good, and a million Minecraft players will be all, “I told you so”. But then it will be too late.

Relying on the unreliable by Felix Pleșoianu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

What’s the most low-tech computer game you can imagine? Rogue? Space War? Pong? Tennis for Two? Zork?

I vote for Hamurabi, a strategy game reduced to a dialogue between player and computer, where three numeric inputs is all you get. And yet it is remarkably immersive, not least because it requires serious thinking. That, and the evocative setting. Yes, evocative. You’re a king in ancient times, struggling to feed your people and grow the kingdom against various hardships. What more do you need?

See, that is the nature of text. A tiny bit of it goes a long way.

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