[shinygerbil]

shinygerbil   seems to be determined to take the lead and direct votes away from ... his fellow werewolves?!?!
 

[shinygerbil]

I'll be gone tomorrow, don't really know who to vote for so I'll just say shinygerbil since he seems to be awfully eager to be the first one to point votes towards people.  (And because he voted for me so therefore he's a big meanie.)
 :D

It is pitch dark.  You are likely to be eaten by a grue. A sexy grue with machine guns and explosions, that is!

[The essential properties of interactive media is that they are:]

The essential properties of interactive media is that they are:

this is what we mean when we talk about interactivity:

• procedural
• participatory

and this is what we mean when we talk about immersion:

• spatial
• encyclopedic

It's been a while since I've read Hamlet on the Holodeck, but I kinda remember the immersion thing as she describes it being something I've heard convincing arguments against.  The bit I'm thinking of is something that's been described as the Immersion Fallacy - the idea that increased immersion makes for a better game, and the way to increase immersion is to make a game so realistic that the player can no longer tell the difference between the game and the real world.  The reason it's called a fallacy is that immersion has very little to do with sensory realism, and much more to do with the experience of play.  eg. You can be totally immersed in the experience of playing Bejeweled or Tetris despite the fact that neither of them even attempt to simulate a plausible reality.  They simply facilitate engaging play experiences, and that experience is what we are drawn to.

The big example of this fallacy is the mindset of (for example) FPS developers whose idea of creating the "perfect game" is photorealism.  Once we achieve photorealism, they think, we've created the perfect game world because players won't be able to tell the difference between the game and real life.  The counterpoint to that is the huge mess of us shouting "GAMEPLAY MATTERS" and walking away completely unimpressed by Crysis' shiny jungle renderings.

4. All games are stories. Obviously as some people up the thread mentioned not all games are stories as we normally talk about them and nor do they have to be.

I vaguely remember Murray saying that all games construct stories because we can relate our gameplay experiences afterwards by telling a story.  The problem with this is kind of obvious - that doesn't mean the game itself is a story, it just means you can tell a story *about* a game.  By that definition, pretty much anything in the world is "a story".

6. The means of narrative include dialogue, back story text in introductions, transitions, and manuals, cut scenes and scripted events, and in-game artifacts (diaries, books, emails, etc.).

I read a great essay by Henry Jenkins that went even further on the "in-game artifacts" concept.  Rather than limiting it to textual artifacts like diaries and books, he describes how narrative can be conveyed by the whole game world.  eg. You can walk past a bombed-out building and know that a battle took place here.  Or for that matter, this Retro Sabotage is a great example: http://www.retrosabotage.com/xevious/autopsy.html


Dang, I am so overtalkative when it comes to game studies stuff like this.  You wouldn't believe how much junk I had to delete before hitting Post and this is still friggin' huge.

Quickie recommendations: 'Rules of Play' by Zimmerman and Salen, and 'First Person' which is online here.  The cool essay by Henry Jenkins is over here.
Murray's book is still worth reading, but it's a good idea to follow up with some more recent work that challenge a few of her ideas (while recognizing her excellent contribution).

I'm a big hockey fan and so I want to make an extreme hockey game.  I decided to go with an "Underworld" theme (demons, skeletons, all that).  You can see a video of the beta here:

.

Hey Digitalghost, welcome here!  That hockey idea looks and sounds hilarious - I'm totally imagining flaming skulls and lots of cheesy heavy metal to go with the finished product.  :D

Very awesome!

Oh, it's original all right.

That does look sweet, I'm downloading it now!  I seriously used to think voxels would have overtaken polygon-based 3D by now ... where did we go wrong?
 :D

There have been a LOT of GameMaker games played and talked about here - heck, Cactus won an IGF nomination with his GM-created shmup "Clean Asia!".

RPGMaker hasn't gotten as much attention, I guess, although "Barkely, Shut Up And Jam: Gaiden" was pretty hilarious.

Most of these games were freeware, but I don't think it's impossible to sell a game made with RPGMaker.  It'll probably be niche enough that making a living off of it wouldn't happen, but who knows, if the game itself is awesome enough then maybe.

[joshg]

Jeez, that sucks. Well, joshg eagerly jumped on the Lazer bandwagon, so he'll have to go.

Weren't you the one who started that bandwagon? 

Trademarks are for things like calling a hamburger a whopper, not for titles of games, movies, etc.  There is no law stopping you from naming your game Zelda, if it has nothing to do with Nintendo's game of the same title.

Nitpicking when one has no real expertise on the subject is what the internet is for, right?

IP law is all about lawsuits and the judge's discretion, and I am not a lawyer... but I am still sure you are 100% wrong about that.  If you released a game called Zelda (especially if it was a commercial release) Nintendo would send a cease and desist followed by a bloodthirsty pack of lawyers ready to beat you senseless with Wiimotes.

But since it's all about lawsuits, if you use the name of a game that's 20 years old and hasn't been marketed since, there's not much basis for a trademark lawsuit.  The product has to be actually on the market still AFAIK IANAL HTH HAND THX BYE BBQPEWPEW

Aw crap, that's a lousy start.

[whether or not this was good advertising.]

It may seem silly to the young and hip members of our generation that there are any people anywhere who aren't as familiar with the five resident evil games as they are with hundreds of years of western history, but such people do exist. ... They're the people who aren't going to see zombies, even after you explain it to them. In their first impression of the trailer they're just going to see a bunch of creepy black people getting shot by a rampaging white guy.

Is there a reason Capcom should care about these obvious misguided/irrational and delusional people? The answer is of course no, aside from perhaps hurting their own bottom line, there isn't.

Wow, so anyone who hasn't played the Resident Evil series (or anyone who isn't a hardcore gamer) is irrational and delusional?

Game trailers are getting played in non-gamer targeted settings all the time these days.  TV spots, pre-movie ads, it's happening all the time.  Saying that everyone who matters will see this and immediately place it into the game series' context is ludicrous.

Plus, I just looked at the trailer again, and unless you recognize the name Resident Evil there is *nothing* to indicate that this is even a video game setting until the final XBox 360 screen (other than shit CGI graphics, I guess).  (For that matter, since 'Resident Evil' has also been the name of two movies, the name alone isn't really enough to give it away to the casual non-gamer observer.)

It isn't foolish to see 'racist imagery' in the trailer, but it is foolish to still consider it 'racist' after understanding the context and even more foolish to say "Well I don't find it racist, but some people might. So they shouldn't have made it."

Which is what I find so disturbing about the whole debate. The constant undertone to the original article, that it is wrong to not alter your actions based on the most ridiculous and offensive prejudices of others.

Okay, keep in mind that we're talking about a piece of advertising here.  This is not a game itself, or a novel, or a movie.  We aren't talking about people coming with pitchforks and censors trying to stifle free speech because it pushes somebody's racism buttons.

N'Gai analyzed this from the perspective of whether or not this was good advertising.  And as advertising, the only thing that matters is whether this trailer is effective advertising for Capcom.  That means not only "Does it sell RE5?", but "Does it help Capcom's image?"

If this trailer pushes people's buttons by seeming racist at first glance, it is not going to be effective at selling RE5 to those people.  It's reducing the potential audience.  It also makes Capcom look bad.

This is advertising - the bottom line is all that matters.  And N'Gai wasn't saying, "They should not release this, it is immoral."  He was acting as a games journalist analyzing the trailer for what it is - poor advertising.

That imagery still has a history that has to be engaged, that has to be understood. … If you’re going to engage imagery that has that potential, the onus is on the creator to be aware of that because there will be repercussions in the marketplace. - N'Gai Croal

I'll be grabbing it for the PC, but that's because I sold my Wii to my in-laws.  It just wasn't getting enough attention from me, and it seemed silly to let a Wii go to waste when I could put those fundages towards getting more indie PC games and still visit it now and then.

Crap, that is fantastic Russ.  Now whatever I post will look like total cheez.  :D

I had been messing around with a demo of the tracker Renoise, and then realized that I can't export in any useful format from the demo anyway - whoops.  So I'm switching to Musagi for that old-skool chiptunes feel.  Not sure yet if I'll end up getting something fire-inspired made on time, right now I'm just trying to get the hang of it with some random little funky-beat thing I had in my head.

So we all know ROM CHECK FAIL has made some game blog headlines already.  But when I saw this in my RSS reader I figured I had to post it here.

You don’t need to be a videogame fan or being a teenager in the seventies / eighties to know videogame classics like Space Invaders, Pacman or Tetris. Their iconic power is still intact in the public imagination, also thanks to many reinterpretations and updates. Their patterns are often used by game artists as metaphors to create new connected sense...

...the most radical experiment in this tradition is probably Rom Check Fail, a sort of psychedelic remix of a dozen classic arcades. Graphic, enemies, scenes and their respective dynamics are randomly remixed by a software gone crazy. Every game is a frantic zapping among unpredictable situations but oddly playable. Remix culture, contaminated the video and now invades videogames. With astonishing achievements.

from Neural, a new media art magazine / blog based in Italy (thus the slightly broken English).  This also got picked up by another new media blog, Networked Performance.

[Lazer]

Well since jstckr renounced his sexist vote, I guess I'll jump on the Lazer bandwagon instead.

(Are vote changes like this okay?  Do I need to edit my previous post?)

> put dynamite on censors and light the fuse

[EPIC DRAMA]

i use FLstudio.  its a common misconception that you need like big fancy programs to use VSTs.  As long as its in the plugins directory of FLstudio you can just import it as a channel, configure it to a chosen 'port' and then set up midi-out channels to make use of the multi-channel VSTs, or if its just a single-channel, then you can assign a piano roll to it directly. 

the tricky part is finding the worthwhile VSTs T^T

Cool, thanks.  I had heard of FLstudio but I didn't realize how affordable it was.  (I just heard "commercial DAW" and assumed Big Dollar Signs.)

haha you didnt like the second half?

i thought it was fun, cause it was more of a detour from the stuff i normally try to make with music.

I didn't say I didn't like it!  It was just a weird shift from the initial EPIC DRAMA feel of the beginning.  I could totally picture that fitting a game, but I think it'd have to be matched up with a specific in-game event - like there's some epic battle but then halfway through some wacky character comes out and confuses people or something.

PS: I've found out that a pretty cool language I wanted to create already exists.
I wanted to make a powerful, fast, flexible, deep programming language without no useless knick-knack. Unfortunately someone already created it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B

Oh don't worry, C++ has useless knick-knacks all over the place. 

For what it's worth, while I think it's cool to just wing it and make the language you want, I think in the end it'll have to be simply because it's what you want to use.  Arguing that it's better or worse for non-programmers is, well iffy.  I've seen a class full of people who have never touched programming before learn how to handle functions, Java-style syntax and the like with a very simple introduction.

(Of course, it was Processing, which is basically the Best Language/IDE Ever for learning how to program for the first time.)

If your syntax ideas have a history from TI/Basic or whatever, though, and you want to use them, go for it.  Also, post some source code here once it's working!  All of us "real programmers" will be better off having to stretch our code-linguistics by trying to understand something radically different than the usual C-style syntax.