Worlds Without Worlds

With all the hype about the new Grand Theft Auto release (GTA IV), I found a great article in the New York Times. Of course the NYT always does great stories, so the big hit for me was that they had decided to publish such a detailed and thoughtful review of a computer game. Here're some interesting reflections:

"... much of Liberty City’s map is made up of direct analogues of real New York neighborhoods and locations... It seemed a perfectly logical and human impulse, to prove to myself that I was somewhere recognizable by finding the one place in it that was most recognizable to me. Yet there was no way that the game could satisfy this impulse...

... the proportions of this version of Manhattan were an optical illusion. The parts that everybody would notice were blown up larger than life; the parts that virtually no one would care about were shrunk to nothingness. Faced with this catastrophic revelation, I turned to a life of crime...

Unlike the missions, objectives and narrative elements of a traditional video game, which constitute the game itself — the things you’re supposed to be participating in and following along with in order to actually play — these same aspects of G.T.A. are more like sophisticated distractions to keep you from immersing yourself too deeply in its fictional city environment."

A Role Player Game (RPG) normally uses "missions, objectives and narrative elements" to help you explore the game's detail areas. As XX's unmet desires exemplify, game worlds modelled by a centralised design group will likely always lack good tangential detail areas. And though a game can put you in the driver's seat, more often than not you're just taking someone else's directions - or at least trying to discover ways to reach goals which someone else has established. Does this define/constitute escapism?

If it were a Serious Game for education, it might have missions based on learning particular skills, so the ends are met by the means. If it were a web 2.0 game with mash-up incentives, you might be designing missions and expanding environments, in the process learning new skills and mirroring the real-life process of building civic character.


Grand Theft Auto is MAD for NYC [New York Times]

Waay Waay Retro Mash

Microsoft has announced a game mashup tool, aimed at making simple 2D games like space shooters, tetris and the like. That sounds like fun on its own, but of course the real aim of all this is introducing new groups to complex content creation - programming. According to one of the leads in the project at Microsoft,

"So we're kind of going after a customer who is anywhere from the 8- to 14-year-old kid might be interested in playing around to somebody who's maybe a little older and is bored with the games on a site like MSN Game Zone and is actually interested in building his own."

This project is only one in a widespread move to make programming accessible. In fact, Microsoft is really a late comer in this area. Years ago, MIT was developing a simple programming language for kids in elementary school. A few years ago, Ben Fry and Casey Reas (also at MIT) launched Processing to get artists and designers in on the action. Google's got mashup tools too, and on other levels there are things like WYSIWYG web page editors and even this blogging tool I'm using.

The idea is to enable complex activities without much prior knowledge, and provide a stepping stone to more technical modes of creating with computers. The gaming platform that we're using in this studio, Unreal Tournament 3 (UT3), has a similar tool in its Unreal Editor (UE). Kismet, UE's visual programming interface, is one of the most intuitive I've seen. It shows that there's a lot of innovation in terms of rethinking programming language itself, not just what you can do with that programming language. But all of this is part of a larger move: enlivening traditional products through web 2.0

From online gaming to social networking, the best way to promote a platform's success seems to be helping users to create their own content. Conveniently enough, it also means that as a platform producer you can get away with scripting less content. Facebook, for example, has only a handful of default applications. Much of the fun of Facebook is in fact trying new apps (from games to cross-platform portals), seeing what your friends can do with them, and then moving on to the next app. I simply don't think you could get the same depth of experience if all apps had to be made by Facebook itself.



Microsoft launches Popfly [Information Week]

Seriously Unreal Games

Since we've decided to go down the route of UT3 for our studio modelling engine, here's a lead on the Unreal Engine's use in serious games:

"Virtual Heroes will integrate the Unreal® Engine 3 into its own Advanced Learning Technology (A.L.T.) platform for simulation learning and serious games based learning. That combination will enable the company to offer even more scalable, cost effective, best-in-class products and solutions to its growing number of federal systems, healthcare and commercial clients."

Virtual Heroes to Advance Serious Games with Unreal Engine [Virtualheroes.com]

What kinds of games does Oprah play?

Apparently, she plays games to lose weight. I don't watch her show. But I wonder what would happen if you used the mesh-learning model of OLPC to bridge the activities of users in Wii Fit with users in Facebook and WoW.

Wii Fit, an exercise game due next month, is expected to receive more marketing dollars than any game in Nintendo’s history, Mr. Pachter said — and the money will not be spent wooing young men. “Wii Fit is just not aimed at hard-core gamers,” Mr. Pachter said. “It’s definitely aimed at the Oprah crowd. I bet they sell a million units a week for every pound that Oprah says she lost on it.”

New Wii Games Find a Big (but stingy) Audience [New York Times]

Experiment 2

ARCHITECTURAL CHALLENGE: To Document how the site lives through Montage and Texture.
(as stated on the project brief)

3x montages, 36x texture tiles.


All graphics were either created by me, or made from downloaded elements. The vast majority are photographs taken by me, and most of the downloaded elements relate to either Super Mario or the Sydney City Roosters. Downloaded elements were found on a wide array of websites, using Google Image. All of the text was written by me.

It's Virtually Graffiti

It seems that no matter what the medium or forum, people will always find a way to comment on the status quo. In a virtual environment, maybe graffiti doesn't have to be flat, but it does need to maintain a relationship with whatever it's trying to "own". Graffiti without context ceases to be.

It also needs to be identifiable as comment, possibly even be identifiable to the particular author, if only recognisable to a select few... It could even be something along the lines of an inside joke.

And it needs to be remembered: either by staying put, or by getting recorded.

Second Life graffiti [LOL Architects]

Light Resistance

Anyone else interested in graffiti might be fascinated - and entertained - by this. What is Graffiti? Is it someone's name or some cartoon character tattooed on a wall? Or is it the process of making an alienating part of the built environment yours? If you separate graffiti from spray cans, maybe it'll be easier to understand what it's on about.

The Graffiti Research Lab (GRL) takes control of corporate art