The iPhone.
Ring and TXT your friends -- It's a phone! Listen to your music on the go -- It's an MP3 player! Stick it in your car -- It becomes a GPS! Download applications, each a fraction of the cost of a standalone device that would provide similar functionality -- and your iPhone does it all.
But the thing that concerns me is open standards. There's nothing open about the iPhone -- Apple crack down on awry app-makers. The block certain functionality that the iPhone could provide, if you weren't limited by local laws. The onboard music player only plays Apple-approved formats.
The myth of technological convergance is that these technologies provide an open forum, a way for every format, type of media, program, and so on -- free reign of the hardware.
The truth of the matter is that these devices are produced by corporations -- and corporations are only interested in a device that will continue to provide revenue to them.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Machinima and its Limits
Machinima.
The first machinima I watched was done in the Quake engine, one of the first truly 3D game engines on the PC (that didn't look like shit). One could record "demo's" -- basically, replays of games that could be watched through the video game interface. Soon, "mods" (modifications) of the game allowed people to insert voice acting, subtitles, use different camera angles, and so on. I remember checking these machinima videos in the late 90's.
Machinima has come a long way. Red and Blue, machinima done using the Halo engine, brought this art form into the spotlight and gave it credence. As games grow more complex, more and more of the nuances of real-life movie productions can be recreated "in-game".
And the machinima machine keeps on rolling as video games become more "real".
The first machinima I watched was done in the Quake engine, one of the first truly 3D game engines on the PC (that didn't look like shit). One could record "demo's" -- basically, replays of games that could be watched through the video game interface. Soon, "mods" (modifications) of the game allowed people to insert voice acting, subtitles, use different camera angles, and so on. I remember checking these machinima videos in the late 90's.
Machinima has come a long way. Red and Blue, machinima done using the Halo engine, brought this art form into the spotlight and gave it credence. As games grow more complex, more and more of the nuances of real-life movie productions can be recreated "in-game".
And the machinima machine keeps on rolling as video games become more "real".
Selling Your Soul
Hello.
My name is Bob, age 25.
This is my game for Nintendo DS, a 20-hour-long retail-size,
retail-quality adventure title by a single human being-
the largest game ever made by one person.
"bob's game" is a simple 2D adventure game, with focus on
story, puzzles, item collection, and communication instead
of repetitive battles with palette-swapped enemies.
Many characters (over 200 completely unique characters!)
have deep personalities that evolve, and many things
depend on the in-game time, day and weather.
It's the game I wanted to play when I was younger,
a vision I've been following since then.
http://www.bobsgame.com/
Now, how are you gonna pitch it?
It depends on your market audience. A casual game, or a game with general all-ages appeal might sit well in a TV spot. However, something for the more hardcore gamers out there might best be sold online -- the proving grounds of the gamer elite.
You can set up your own website and pitch it that way, if you'd like (like Bob did). Advertising might consist of buying up web banners or Google advertisement space that point to your web site.
For Bob, it's really worked out:
2008-10-03:
The WiiDS Podcast is up!
I've done another short QA with gaming blog E2EntertainmentExplosion.
Talks are progressing rapidly- there's something big in the works. ;)
Along with normal carts, I might be one of the first downloadable titles on the DSi!
A bigger company needs only to send one of their PR guys to a gaming entertainment expo to espouse their new title. Or they might simply choose to fly a few gaming reporters in to their labs, and show them their newest product close-up.
I think my product would benefit from the "Bob" approach -- make something fantastic (a "tech demo" or proof of concept), whip up a series of short (>1 minute) flick that shows all the fantastic features and revolutionary ideas being poured into my game, upload to YouTube, and enjoy success! A lot of small "indie" developers are finding success with this method, and with my game concept being marketed to indie development studios, I think this is the logical conclusion for marketing our concept to either the public or game distributors and producers.
This sort of "underground" YouTube-based approach is often helped when grouped with other word-of-mouth processes -- talking it up in your favourite forums, buying online advertisment space, offering a shareware demo to rally interest (even when you've barely begun development of the full game!). In the book Masters of Doom, John Romero and John Carmack, the god-like heads of iD software and developers of Doom and Quake, are described subverted the early-nineties culture of submitting your assets and rights to a publishing house. They did this by releasing the shareware demo to Doom online through univeristy internet servers.
So the online approach is three-pronged: advertising, both through word-of-mouth and official services such as Google's AdWords, having a central website that houses development discussion and resources, and releasing free stuff to the public (everything from proof-of-concept tech demos, all the way up to full-blown playable shareware demos).
Thursday, September 25, 2008
The Problems with Interactive TV
The biggest problem with social and interactive TV is that the computer already fills that niche, and effectively.
The conventional way of interacting with a television is through the remote control. This is the first and major impediment. Introducing a new controller would add the complexity of an additional interactive layer, as well as costs incurred. This would also just pave the way for the conversion of a television into a game console, which is not what we want.
If we just use a typical television remote control, any relatively deep interactive experience ends up getting lost under a maze of menus and dozens of "screens" of information. Remember the trials often associated with setting up a brand new TV?
Currently, interactive television's (iTV/Foxtel) approach is to present viewers with a single screen. The user moving a "box" around selectable options and occasionally hitting "OK".
A recent invention is the "Media Centre PC", a small computer that plugs into your PC. This Media Centre PC has a DVD drive, so you can use it for video playback, but it also has a hard drive (to store movies and music for quick playback), and can often save a television signal into its storage for later playback.
The Media Centre TV is as close as we are likely to get to a bridging between the PC and the TV. If someone wants to fiddle with their Facebook, the only reason they would use a television would be as a big screen to see the website on!
Current video game consoles such as the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 double as media centre computers. And this is likely as far as the bridging between currently computer centric concepts (such as interactivity) and the conventionally non-interactive medium of the television are likely to get, at least in any significant sense.
Only time will tell, really.
The conventional way of interacting with a television is through the remote control. This is the first and major impediment. Introducing a new controller would add the complexity of an additional interactive layer, as well as costs incurred. This would also just pave the way for the conversion of a television into a game console, which is not what we want.
If we just use a typical television remote control, any relatively deep interactive experience ends up getting lost under a maze of menus and dozens of "screens" of information. Remember the trials often associated with setting up a brand new TV?
Currently, interactive television's (iTV/Foxtel) approach is to present viewers with a single screen. The user moving a "box" around selectable options and occasionally hitting "OK".
A recent invention is the "Media Centre PC", a small computer that plugs into your PC. This Media Centre PC has a DVD drive, so you can use it for video playback, but it also has a hard drive (to store movies and music for quick playback), and can often save a television signal into its storage for later playback.
The Media Centre TV is as close as we are likely to get to a bridging between the PC and the TV. If someone wants to fiddle with their Facebook, the only reason they would use a television would be as a big screen to see the website on!
Current video game consoles such as the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 double as media centre computers. And this is likely as far as the bridging between currently computer centric concepts (such as interactivity) and the conventionally non-interactive medium of the television are likely to get, at least in any significant sense.
Only time will tell, really.
Bad Twinkies
If Hollywood is to be believed, a Twinkie never goes bad. Kinda like a McDonald's hamburger. Must be all the preservatives.
In this blog entry I hope to talk about bad/clichéd game design and narrative decisions.
There are two sides to the Twinkie coin:
The first is easy-way-out writing and design.
Computer games are often designed from the ground up, in a predictable fashion: start with genre.
-Are we producing a first-person shooter? (ie. do we, as developers, want to play a game where characters, creatures and sets get shot to bits by the player?)
-A strategy game? (Does our target gamer want to command armies? Make "strategic", "thoughtful" decisions?)
-An adventure game? (Static sets, low budget, indie production for the "elite" gamer?)
Yes, I make a lot of assumptions about how both production companies and "generic/cliched" players operate. But this is how many game designers think. They are gamers, first and foremost, and they want to produce something that is fun for them to play...And they want to play games like what they grew up playing. The problem is this sort of conceptual inbreeding.
Cliches are a problem for all writers and designers. They are there, always in your field of view, begging you to take the easy way out -- "Just grab onto me and you'll never need to be original again! I'm proven! I'm entertaining!" Clichés prey on those of us with writers block.
The other sort of clichés that game developers employ are those of juvenile content, often for marketing purposes (however misguided). This affects both well-thinking developers who want to target a particular audience, and bottom-line-comes-first-thinking executives and shareholders (Electronic Arts!).
These sort of considerations include: Dumbing down for the sake of it (as an example: removing the possibility of the protagonist to die, or otherwise be in any properly precarious situation), and of course, big tits (though this final one is, thankfully, dying out).
Most other Twinkie problems come down to lack of funding, lack of quality control, lack of proper adherence to proven UI/design conventions (Let's think outside the box! For no reason!), and lack of after-production support (patches).
In this blog entry I hope to talk about bad/clichéd game design and narrative decisions.
There are two sides to the Twinkie coin:
The first is easy-way-out writing and design.
Computer games are often designed from the ground up, in a predictable fashion: start with genre.
-Are we producing a first-person shooter? (ie. do we, as developers, want to play a game where characters, creatures and sets get shot to bits by the player?)
-A strategy game? (Does our target gamer want to command armies? Make "strategic", "thoughtful" decisions?)
-An adventure game? (Static sets, low budget, indie production for the "elite" gamer?)
Yes, I make a lot of assumptions about how both production companies and "generic/cliched" players operate. But this is how many game designers think. They are gamers, first and foremost, and they want to produce something that is fun for them to play...And they want to play games like what they grew up playing. The problem is this sort of conceptual inbreeding.
Cliches are a problem for all writers and designers. They are there, always in your field of view, begging you to take the easy way out -- "Just grab onto me and you'll never need to be original again! I'm proven! I'm entertaining!" Clichés prey on those of us with writers block.
The other sort of clichés that game developers employ are those of juvenile content, often for marketing purposes (however misguided). This affects both well-thinking developers who want to target a particular audience, and bottom-line-comes-first-thinking executives and shareholders (Electronic Arts!).
These sort of considerations include: Dumbing down for the sake of it (as an example: removing the possibility of the protagonist to die, or otherwise be in any properly precarious situation), and of course, big tits (though this final one is, thankfully, dying out).
Most other Twinkie problems come down to lack of funding, lack of quality control, lack of proper adherence to proven UI/design conventions (Let's think outside the box! For no reason!), and lack of after-production support (patches).
Thursday, August 21, 2008
"Facade" -- An Electronic Narrative
Facade is an interactive story-turned-videogame. The story goes that you have been invited to the flat of two married friends under false pretenses. As soon as you are in the door you realize that they are having marital issues, and that they wish you to help them sort these issues out.
The game is played from a first person perspective. You can both interact with your environment by way of the mouse cursor, walk around the flat, and, most importantly, talk to the characters -- type in whatever you like, and the characters respond with pre-recorded lines of dialogue.
But what makes this title significant is that the couple, Grace and Trip, are represented as real, breathing, interactive characters. You can change their emotional state with your actions and words. You can solve their "couple problems", or make things much worse (just tell Grace you love her!).
I'd played this game before it was mentioned last week. The game is still significant, though -- nothing new or significant in this vein has yet emerged. The developers of Facade are still working on getting funding for a sequel title, one that is going to be just as revolutionary if they are to be believed.
The game is played from a first person perspective. You can both interact with your environment by way of the mouse cursor, walk around the flat, and, most importantly, talk to the characters -- type in whatever you like, and the characters respond with pre-recorded lines of dialogue.
But what makes this title significant is that the couple, Grace and Trip, are represented as real, breathing, interactive characters. You can change their emotional state with your actions and words. You can solve their "couple problems", or make things much worse (just tell Grace you love her!).
I'd played this game before it was mentioned last week. The game is still significant, though -- nothing new or significant in this vein has yet emerged. The developers of Facade are still working on getting funding for a sequel title, one that is going to be just as revolutionary if they are to be believed.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
How are characters handled in video games?
In movies, character is everything. Plot is secondary, or another way to look at it, is that plot is character.
But in games, things are a little different. The goal of a game is to produce, first and foremost, something fun. An entertaining form of escapism that is also interactive.
Movies are not interactive.
There are different genres of video games, just like there are different genres of movies. And just like movies, each genre of video game has its own conventions of storytelling associated with each. My focus for this blog entry will be the first-person-shooter genre (or FPS).
A first person shooter is exactly what it sounds like -- we control a character from a first person perspective, a weapon visible at the bottom right of the screen and pointing forwards. The game I hope to outline in the coming weeks as part of my proposal/script is a FPS (so stay tuned on that front!).
First we had Wolfenstein 3D -- the initial FPS game. Its World War 2. You are an Allied POW trapped in a Nazi prison facility. The story? You are escaping! The plot? Blast the Nazis! The character you are in control of does nothing except grunt. The game occasionally presents snippets of text on screen in-between chapters, narrating your escape attempt. The game is completely and definitively linear.
W3D was released in 1992. It would be in 1998 that we would have any significant development on the narrative front regarding FPS titles.
In 1998, Half Life was released. The developers, Valve software, hired a novel writer as part of their design team. Games had come before, of course, with properly written scripts, intriguing dialogue, and decently-realised characters. But it would be Half Life that would both bring these developments to the FPS genre proper, while simultaneously advancing the state of narrative in the video game world.
The protagonist, the man you are in control of -- Gordon Freeman -- is a mute. Characters talk to him. Instead of delegating important plot points to pre-rendered cutscenes, the game develops right in front of your eyes. You fight your way through guarded checkpoints, pulling levers, travelling around, making things happen.
Ten years on, and the state of the interactive FPS have not come much further. Games like Half Life 2 and Bioshock continue the trend of well-written narrative, but have not challenged existing paradigms.
Who knows? Maybe my FPS title will. Maybe.
But in games, things are a little different. The goal of a game is to produce, first and foremost, something fun. An entertaining form of escapism that is also interactive.
Movies are not interactive.
There are different genres of video games, just like there are different genres of movies. And just like movies, each genre of video game has its own conventions of storytelling associated with each. My focus for this blog entry will be the first-person-shooter genre (or FPS).
A first person shooter is exactly what it sounds like -- we control a character from a first person perspective, a weapon visible at the bottom right of the screen and pointing forwards. The game I hope to outline in the coming weeks as part of my proposal/script is a FPS (so stay tuned on that front!).
First we had Wolfenstein 3D -- the initial FPS game. Its World War 2. You are an Allied POW trapped in a Nazi prison facility. The story? You are escaping! The plot? Blast the Nazis! The character you are in control of does nothing except grunt. The game occasionally presents snippets of text on screen in-between chapters, narrating your escape attempt. The game is completely and definitively linear.
W3D was released in 1992. It would be in 1998 that we would have any significant development on the narrative front regarding FPS titles.
In 1998, Half Life was released. The developers, Valve software, hired a novel writer as part of their design team. Games had come before, of course, with properly written scripts, intriguing dialogue, and decently-realised characters. But it would be Half Life that would both bring these developments to the FPS genre proper, while simultaneously advancing the state of narrative in the video game world.
The protagonist, the man you are in control of -- Gordon Freeman -- is a mute. Characters talk to him. Instead of delegating important plot points to pre-rendered cutscenes, the game develops right in front of your eyes. You fight your way through guarded checkpoints, pulling levers, travelling around, making things happen.
Ten years on, and the state of the interactive FPS have not come much further. Games like Half Life 2 and Bioshock continue the trend of well-written narrative, but have not challenged existing paradigms.
Who knows? Maybe my FPS title will. Maybe.
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