Memory Loss

I seem to have little luck with memory devices recently. My trusty 256 meg MP3 player/ storage device has finally gone up to that computer shop in the sky after having broken. It now will not switch on and play any music, nor will my computer recognise it.

I also managed to break a 2 gig memory stick a few months ago that a friend gave to me to transport my flash game to and from college. It corrupted itself and managed to mangle half of the files on it.
Not to mention that around the same time when I was transferring stuff onto this PC from the home PC half of it managed to disappear despite me KNOWING I transferred it. *sigh*

Perhaps I have a terrible power over memory sticks that I can't yet control. I fear for my shiny new digital camera's life.

Week 8: Storytelling in Games

Plot to me is pretty important in games that seem like they should have them. Obviously many games just dump you in a situation and expect you to go for it, but games which attempt a plot I think should strive to do it well.
Emotional engagement in a story can be a powerful tool. I really loved Final Fantasy 10 because I got so attached to the characters. I almost felt like I was playing a soap opera, with snippets of cut scenes and information emerging at different points of the story. When I got to the end game content I really missed the cutscenes and felt like I didn't know my party as well as I did before.
I don't think that all games have a story. I think some games have a setting, or a backstory and the player is then left to their own devices. Call of Duty is not a war story, in my opinion, it is a war setting. Capturing a flag is hardly relevant to the course of a war and has always seemed strangely out of place to me. Of course I may be biased as I haven't played the single player mode.

Unless there is true choice and alternate paths in a game, I believe story happens to a player. In Ratchet and Clank 2, a linear plot game, the characters mock the player's inability to control the action when yet again they arrive at an area too late and the person they are chasing has got away.
Ratchet: Damn! He got away again! We always seem to be too late.
Clank: Why is that?
*Both characters stare directly at the screen*

I know that putting variable narratives in a plot is difficult, I looked at this for my final project at art college. I basically made a book starring Mark the office worker who gets to make choices on what he does during the course of a day. By creating 15 pages I was able to generate something like 32 different courses that the story could follow.
I also tried to get away from the idea of 'good' and 'bad' endings. There are positive and negative endings, but it ultimately depends on how much you like Mark as to whether these are good or bad. In a game it's a different situation as the main character is an avatar of yourself, and so affects you more.
Maintaining continuity in a story which twists around itself is a tricky thing, and you also have to have consequences for every action or the entire thing becomes sheer randomness. Plotholes in games with multiple paths are a problem, and I've heard stories from people who've played Baldur's Gate 2 where they've walked into a room and had people simply explode because they were supposed to have died in an alternate pathway and the game didn't know what to do with them.

Art Direction.

The closest experience I have to an art director style role is being head of scenery in a drama contest at school. The year after I was head of scenery I became head of the entire production and I found that hugely stressful and full of politics.

As head of scenery I was responsible for identifying props and scenery needed for the play, similar to identifying all assets that need to be created for a game. I also had to either delegate the creation of these things to other people or do them myself. I had to remain in constant contact with both the heads of production and the other departments, for example choreography, to make sure people didn't want to dance through a huge piece of scenery.

Whilst obviously on a far smaller scale than that of an art director, I feel that the role has a lot of parallels. I enjoyed feeling that I was contributing important aspects to the play and also getting other people involved in the artwork, and I imagine these feelings would be magnified for a professional art director.

The role seems to be extremely creative. Art directors get to manage the look of a game and provide guidelines to help the rest of the team achieve their vision. They need to be good, clear communicators and have good people skills to get their ideas across and also to encourage and help the rest of the art team.
Art directors have great responsibility in that they are responsible for the performance of their team and keeping them to deadlines. They are answerable to the producers and any delays coming from the art side of the game can have knock-on effects on other areas such as programming. Therefore the art director has to be able to manage time effectively.

Art director seems to be the highest you can reach in the industry whilst still being a hands on artist. It does involve a lot of responsibility and management skills but it seems like it would be a very rewarding area to work in.

I've realised that there are no pictures in my blog and also that there are questions I need to explain, mostly about melon cheesecake.
Melon cheesecake is more of a concept than an actual thing. It is a reference to the ultimate question. Would you prefer: melon inside a cheesecake inside a melon OR cheesecake inside a melon inside a cheesecake.
Choose wisely. It says a lot about what sort of person you are... but mostly about whether you like melon more or cheesecake more. I personally would go for the former. This whole business came about in summer 2005 when I went on a girly holiday to Turkey with my friends and we found ourselves very amused by the fact that they had entire trucks filled with watermelons. No other fruit or vegetable, just watermelons. I have no idea where the cheesecake came in.

Here is a photo of the holiday in question. We were on a jeep safari where we saw exciting things such as a tortoise, a wild shoe and some 'things that go kwaak kwaak' basically some kind of wild chickens.

Games Design

What do I enjoy in a game? I enjoy something that clearly has a goal and then sets out to achieve it in its gameplay. Gameplay is really the core of a game, the idea that's left if you strip a game down to its bare bones, without shiny graphics or controls. It's the experience. I've enjoyed being an incredibly agile thief in the Sly Cooper games, being able to use practically anything around me to get to different part of the level. Training a team of monsters in Pokemon and being able to choose from whatever monsters I can find. Being a scientist trapped in a situation much larger than myself and trying to make sense of it with my trusty crowbar in Half Life. The genre of game is almost secondary to what the game is actually about.

One of the important issues that emerged from the articles I read this week was that of repetition and lack of originality. The quote database in particular seemed to be full of people complaining of games copying each other, reworking themselves only to change the graphics or using the same tired ideas.
A thing I am particularly sick of is the repetition of races in MMORPGs or even standard RPGS. Human, elf, dwarf, orc. Sometimes cat people. For goodness sake, it is really not hard to come up with something different. Even tauren in World of Warcraft are a refreshing change and they're just more animal people. Just sitting here thinking about it now I've come up with about 3 different ideas. Actual animals. Why not have a MMORPG where you can just be an animal? You eat stuff smaller than you, you run away from stuff bigger than you. I think it could work.
You could have an inanimate object RPG. You could be a lamp or a book and whenever a human shows up you have to freeze or some kind of trouble occurs.

Enough of that. I doubt those will happen because they're not tried and tested. Games design seems to fall to an individual who implements the design document after the idea has been discussed and finalised with senior design and business personnel. The sites disagree on whether or not the original designer should stay involved in the project. Some say that the idea should be strong enough for production to continue without the original designer, whereas some say that the designer should keep a check on their idea to make sure it is being realised as they imagined.

New Games Journalism

Strangely enough I had read a couple of those reviews on one of the websites before without realising they were a radical new style of journalism. Whilst the fanboyish, over-personal reviews on websites such as gamefaqs annoys me, clinical and completely objective review styles are perhaps not entirely relevant to games articles.

When I play a game - especially an online multiplayer game - I will have a completely different experience playing the game to someone else. You do become personally involved in a game, despite how silly or meaningless it may seem as explored by some of the article. If someone slags you off on battle.net, you do get annoyed. And although the ignorance and sexism of random 15 year olds across the globe shouldn't bother you, after many hours of gaming it begins to grate. So therefore if I were reviewing a game and certain issues or experiences arose which were either unique to me or unique to the game, it would make sense to include them in a review, to show the various possibilities of the game.

Damn I just got carried away and ended up reading a ton of Penny Arcade comics. Which is of course very relevant. Webcomic artists often have comments within or after their comics about companies, reviewers and games themselves. High profile comics like Penny Arcade can often be very influential and powerful about showing the views of gamers themselves.

Perhaps the current system of reviewing and having various scores out of ten for games is demeaning. Ranking games on graphics, sound, controls, replayability or multiplayer options seems to punish games for not relying on technical aspects. Video games should strive further to be more of an artistic medium, and therefore be reviewed in a more artisitic manner rather than being broken down into chunks. If I read a review of an art exhibition, the artist is not punished for choosing not to include sound in their exhibition, as sound may not be relevant to what they are trying to convey.

Videogames should be reviewed as a personal experience relating to what the videogame is trying to achieve and also what the reviewer views as important. Whilst not in the style of new games journalism, www.womengamers.com manages to incorporate issues important to the reviewers into their articles without seeming to push an agenda. After the review is concluded will be a section entitled 'Making efforts towards women' and the reviewer will discuss how the game fares on this particular issue.

To the FUTURE!

I have to say that the lack of Wii in those articles I've just read was very disappointing. Only one of them seemed to acknowledge the fact that the Wii even existed. In the others it was just glossed over as if it wasn't a serious competitor.

Anyway, enough of the complaining. It seems the video games industry is becoming a lot more slick, a lot more professional and a lot harder to find your way into if you're a new developer. Money now makes the videogames industry go round and unfortunately that suppresses creativity. Publishers don't want the next innovative game, they want one that will sell. Much like Hollywood films, games are subscribing to a certain formula.

Guns or Cars + Scantily Clad women + Explosions = Financial success!

That's very very generalised. But unfortunately I've seen it happen to some of my favourite developers. Insomniac broke my heart with Ratchet and Clank 4, Ratchet: Gladiator. All the quirky humour from the third game was gone and instead replaced with dark, gritty situations. The weapons were beefed up even further and you had to play through repetitive Unreal tournament style bouts. Hard to believe that this was from the same people who created the wonderful world inhabitted by Spyro the Dragon.

So are games losing their soul? Unfortunately it seems like it. But hopefully Nintendo and the Wii will partially come to the rescue. If innovations in games themselves are being muted, Nintendo's innovation in their hardware might help by forcing developers to think differently about how people will play their games.

Innovations are coming from Sony and Microsoft too. Both are competing to be an all in one entertainment system, allowing you to play media other than games. New technology will hopefully continue to improve games and ensure that people are always interested in new consoles. The capabilities of the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3 are major selling points for many gamers, and the PS3 especially is pushing blu- ray, hoping to attract consumers with the promise of higher quality graphics and environments.

So, what am I looking forward to in all this? Obviously boosted graphics are exciting, but not really the reason I play. I look forward to following my favourite developers from one generation to the next, as well as seeing exactly how the Wii's simplicity and interactivity will be absorbed into games. I think that if Nintendo's gamble pays off we'll see a lot more research into involving the entire person in a game, rather than just their hands and eyes. Who knows, it could even stretch into virtual reality or biotechnology as mentioned in one of the articles.

I miss central London. :(

I really like Leicester, it has a lot of variety and it really makes a change to be able to walk 5 minutes to a decent shopping centre, but I really miss all the little things about London that only spending a year with a travelcard let you appreciate.

I miss cybercandy http://www.cybercandy.co.uk/ , a nifty little sweet shop cunningly hidden in Covent Garden which does crazy import sweets and sweets from days of yore (they have Nerds! and Flipz!).

I miss Camden with all its crazy shops with massive sculpture things on the front. If you're a goth, skater, emo, hippy, punk, or just a weirdo you can find what you want in Camden.

I miss the space invaders, little mosaics you can find hidden all over the place by a French artist who put them in cities all over the world. I miss the stencil art of Banksy. I miss just heading off in a random direction and knowing that no matter how lost you get, you won't be far from an underground station.

I even miss the underground. That hot, smelly, dirty transport system is something you manage to get used to. I loved the DLR. You feel just like you're on the transit system from Half Life. Perhaps more about that at a later time....

Video games 80s to 90s.

I don't really remember many games from the 80s, but I remember a lot more from the 90s. Like I said before I played on my friend's NES, and the VNES website has reminded me of a lot of games I used to play around other people's houses or had a PC version of (Puzzle Bobble being one). VNES has lots of NES games you can play in your browser by the way, I've been singing its praises on the message boards. http://www.vnes.thatsanderskid.com/

The 80s seems like it was a time for experimentation. Pushing the boundaries and trying out new formats to see what was most effective and easy for the player to pick up. Wikipedia game examples in RTSs of the unit production menus which emerged from early games and were then copied by many more. It seems like game developers could afford to take more risks and weren't worried about being shoehorned into a category.

One of the most obvious and important developments to emerge from this era is real time 3D gaming. Pioneered by games like Doom they allowed greater exploration and interaction with the environment, as well as being more immersive. The 80s and 90s also gave rise to new formats for video games thanks to home PC gaming. No longer defined by a joypad, games moved to genres such as point and click and text adventures. I really need to get hold of some more LucasArts point and clicks, they're fantastic. I've played Monkey Island 3 and Sam and Max hit the road and they were both absolutely hilarious. Proof here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-9my0tsutw&search=A%20Pirate%20I%20was%20Mean%27t%20to%20Be

I first became really interested in games when my brother got a Playstation. It'd been out for maybe a year or two so we knew there were good games out there. We had Spyro, Tekken, GTA, Mechwarrior, Crash Bandicoot. A good mixture of games, I can't remember them all. We had friends with N64s and we used to swap sometimes so they could play the Playstation and we could play their N64. I loved playing Pokemon Stadium and I still love the franchise, as pathetic as that makes me.

I have that pirate song in my head now.

And now for something completely relevant.

Well here I am, responding to the articles I've just read and I have to say they were very interesting. The fact that at least 4 'inventors' of the video game have emerged from the various articles is telling in itself. What exactly is a video game? Is it noughts and crosses but with lights? Is it a missile trajectory simulator? Does it have to involve a console or a TV? I doubt there's really a definitive answer to that.
The articles did however agree that video games were originally approached from a very intellectual, and sometimes military angle. Many of the first games were designed as a result of people testing what they could do with their code, or to graphically represent something like tennis ball physics in the 50s.

The fact that the first people to decide to use games for fun are academics is interesting. It explains why the games are approached with specific goals or with advanced physics. Perhaps if games had emerged from a more art based background you would have had more focus on a mood or an experience. Perhaps 'arty' games like Shadow of the Colossus would be far more the norm if things had emerged differently. But I guess games have gradually moved away from what the original creators indended for them anyway, much like television gradually changed from being an educational medium into being a dustbin for rubbish reality TV shows.



The first video game I really remember playing is Super Mario Brothers 3, which I used to play round a friend's house. As I could only play it when I was visiting them, I ended up playing the first world over and over again, and became quite a master at the first level. However the first console we actually owned as a family was an Atari, not sure what model. It had blocky graphics to represent tanks or planes that you could use to attack another player. We used to get it out from the cupboard sometimes and sit around playing it as a family. Not sure when the console is actually from though.

The most recent game I've played is Oblivion, and I've only really been on that for five minutes. The graphics are stunning though. I suppose what's kept me playing is that games are fun, and who doesn't like fun?
Games allow a great social experience. Either having someone solving the puzzles with you on a single player mode, or arguing with a strange person you just met on online chat, or gaining a victory over your friends in a multiplayer mode, games offer something for everyone.
Games also provide you with an immersive world. I love books, but sometimes your imagination can't fully immerse you in a fantasy world the way that creating it on a screen can.

Living in a flat full of girls

Don't get me wrong, most of the time it's great. But occassionally....

“AAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE SPIDER!!!!!”

A general panic has been created throughout the entire flat because of….. A SPIDER. The poor thing was about as big as a ten pence piece and has now been bludgeoned to death by a bedsheet, a shoe and a chair. It was also apparently of the undead variety of spider as it came back to life after its many beatings.

The alarm was raised by Jo pelting down the corridor to the kitchen screeching like a banshee. Everyone else then ran down to Jo’s room hiding behind Julia, who had nominated herself as the slayer of spiders. Then the beatings began. Seven girls versus one spider is hardly fair I think.

Everyone is now avoiding Jo’s room as if it was a plague pit. I don’t know how the dead spider will be removed.