05.22.12 |
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Gamespot writer Hilary Goldstein argues how Microsoft should shape the Xbox successor to remain competitive. I’m not so hot on her arguments for “Kinect integration for all games” (many games are better addressed with a standard controller) or to bundle an HD Kinect on every system (guaranteed to push system costs up by at least $50-100, which would hurt Microsoft against its competition). Still, many make a lot of sense: throw in Blu-ray, raise the bottom end system setup, and branch off into new first party gaming franchises.
05.17.12 |
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Tracey Lien for Polygon on the indie gaming studio Capybara:
Vella says that the main thing they got out of their film school education was the ability to critique their own work – a skill that has played a crucial role in shaping their award-winning games.
“We’re a ruthlessly self-critical studio,” he says. “Our studio culture is: If you have an opinion, say it. Don’t be afraid to critique yourself. One of my favorite things is sitting in a meeting with programmers and artists and sound designers and producers, and going from visuals to audio and having meaningful conversations from every discipline, rather than just saying ‘OK, you’re an artist so you just do art and that’s it.’
Tight collaboration and T-shaped employees make all the difference. I still haven’t gotten around to Sword & Sworcery, but Capybara’s Critter Crunch is a great game.
05.14.12 |
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Michael Lopp, writing for Rands in Response:
Great design makes learning frictionless. The brilliance of the iPhone and iPad is how little time you spend learning. Designers’ livelihood is based on how quickly and cleverly they can introduce to and teach a user how a particular tool works in a particular universe. In one universe, you sport a handheld Portal gun that cleverly allows you to interrupt physics. In a slightly different universe, you have this tool called a cloning stamp that empowers you to sample and copy any part of a photo.
Awesome article. If you love design, this is an really smart read, illustrating how the goals of game and application designers have so much in common.
05.10.12 |
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About an hour after reading that Taylor Clark opinion in Kotaku, I saw a recommend over at Giant Bomb to check out this counterpoint. It’s also quite eloquent:
The very second you try to wrap actions like those in a “good story” that does not somehow address what happens during the mechanical part of the experience is the second you fail to write a good story. The dissonance of the Uncharted series is a famous example: the experience implies two completely different worlds. One is where Nathan Drake is an affable hero, and the other is where Drake murders hundreds of fellow human beings and feels nothing. Though the developers took care to paint over the seams where they could, even the cleverest narrative design couldn’t change how completely incongruous that really is, on a basic, fundamental level.
At that point— with the model already broken, what can you do as a writer? Make your main character a sensitive man and he falls flat: he obviously isn’t sensitive to the fact that he just killed dozens of people. Make him a dangerous psychopath and he’s impossible to like, unless, maybe, he’s out for some lazily justified revenge (oh, look, we just stumbled on the plot of so many games!).
05.10.12 |
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I had a lot of problems with the Jonathan Blow article I cited last week. Yet Taylor Clark, the Atlantic author who wrote the piece, wrote an opinion article on Kotaku clarifying his stance. I find it much more agreeable, especially with this point:
My issue, then, is with what we might call the intellectual maturity level of mainstream games. It’s not the design mechanics under the hood that I find almost excruciatingly sophomoric at this point; it’s the elements of these games that bear on human emotion and intellectual sophistication, from narrative and dialogue right on down to their core thematic concepts.
05.09.12 |
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Leave it to someone on Reddit to post shots of awesome 8-bit gaming mug. Clever.
05.08.12 |
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There’s a lot of discussion on tech and gaming circles regarding Microsoft’s subsidized XBox 360, and I liked Ars Technica’s breakdown the most. I’m disappointed and puzzled by Microsoft’s shift; if you want really want to move console economics, you’ve got to do better than this.
05.04.12 |
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Gamers With Jobs‘ Cory Banks dives through analysis on GameStop’s used game market. It’s clearly huge; Gamestop sold $2.6 billion of used inventory during fiscal year 2011.
Having seen many indie game stores close in the past few years, I found Banks’ conclusion sobering:
No matter what, used games aren’t going away anytime soon. Gamers will continue to trade in old titles, while publishers will continue to develop more reasons to buy new. You’ll think of GameStop as the place next to the Orange Julius in the mall. EA will think of them as the big brother with the baseball bat and a bad attitude.
And either way, GameStop wins.
05.01.12 |
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Giles Richards for The Guardian:
At eight, Jann [Mardenborough] thought he might have a chance of making it as a racing driver. Steve, an ex-professional footballer, had taken him to a kart circuit, and before long the owner took notice and told Steve his son was a natural. But finance proved the stumbling block. The local track closed down and the nearest alternative was in Bristol. “I stopped when I was 11,” says Jann, “because it got too expensive.”..
In the middle of 2011, Mardenborough had entered an online competition on Gran Turismo 5 that offered one final shot at the real thing. Out of 90,000 other virtual racers, he made it into the top eight in Europe and won the chance to test himself against other gamers in a real car at Brands Hatch. That he had kept it to himself for so long was entirely in character for a boy who did not like to make a fuss. “At that point we had no idea what it was,” admits Steve.
Seven months later, in January this year, Mardenborough, who’d never set foot in a racing car, was at the wheel of a serious piece of kit in the Dubai 24 Hour race – and at the beginning of what appears to be a very exciting career.
Wow.
05.01.12 |
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This Atlantic piece on famed Braid creator Jonathan Blow has been passed around heavily online, but I finally got around to reading it this weekend. I’d recommend it, if nothing more for seeing author Taylor Clark – someone who’s clearly not a gamer – try to assess the “hard core” gaming scene from a fresh journalistic angle.
That said, Jonathan Blow comes off as pretty unpleasant. The guy clearly has a near messianic view of his own importance in gaming; he knocked out an “objectively better game than Pac-Man” on his Commodore 64 as a teenager? Total illusions of grandeur.
Also Clark makes too many generalizations of the industry. He’ll start out with something semi-reasonable:
Even the industry’s staunchest defenders acknowledge the chronic dumbness of contemporary video games, usually with a helpless shrug—because, hey, the most ridiculous games can also be the most fun. (After all, the fact that the Super Mario games are about a pudgy plumber with a thick Italian accent who jumps on sinister bipedal mushrooms doesn’t make them less enjoyable to play.)
But then he goes onto a whopper:
But this situation puts video-game advocates in a bind. It’s tough to demand respect for a creative medium when you have to struggle to name anything it has produced in the past 30 years that could be called artistic or intellectually sophisticated.
I’d be as fast to chime in about the general intellectual laziness about the current gaming industry as Clark. But 30 years of lack of artistry or intellectual sophistication? Completely false.