Commuters are Like Sheep

This is a little random, but I believe right on topic. The Sheep Market is a project paid for by Amazon and made using Processing (P5). I was involved in the Processing community a while back, when P5 was still in alpha release.

In the Sheep Market, there are so many sheep that the cumulative effect is awesome. Each sheep was created by a different random person through a webpage, and when you click on one you can see an animation of the sheep being drawn. Everyone draws a sheep differently. There are 10,000 sheep in all, each a mini story. After watching a couple of sheep being drawn, that cumulative effect becomes even more awesome because all of a sudden you're staring at a huge library of human character studies instead of a huge library of crude drawings.

When you approach the project site, the cumulative effect of all the cars is also awesome - though in a different way. The stream of cars is alienating, for a variety of reasons. And because you can't pick one up and see the character in each, you can't really deal with the reasons you're being alienated. There's no way to see the value in all those people and machines. It's just too random.

10,000 sheep at $0.02 each [The Sheep Market]
Processing, initiated by Ben Fry and Casey Reas [processing.org]

Unreal Reference

I've been on the hunt lately for good, thorough UT3 reference manuals. Here are a couple good sites which I've had a quick look through. It seems obvious that there is editing, and then there is editing:


A complete kismet reference by the makers of the platform [EpicGames]
Details of something which I very much want to get into: UnrealScript [utwente.nl]
Unreal Wiki [beyondUnreal]
Unreal Developers Forum [beyondUnreal]
A pretty huge list of tutorials all over the web [IceCreamYou]
Player-specific kismet [Epic Forum thread]
Exporting from Max [PlanetUnreal] [waylon-art]


Btw Russell, we were talking about the ability to pull stuff into and out of the internet while in gameplay... At a glance, it looks like the LibHTTP library in UnrealScript might enable it.

This post on the forum looks very interesting, particularly in light of architectural workflow. Imagine if you could meet an engineer in the UT3 model of a building you're designing, while inside the VM collaboratively modify the building's elements, and then have that communicated back to your drawings or BIM.

Serious Non-Games for Girls

Ok, it doesn't shock me that women are alienated by most of the games out there. Women in game development are probably like women in architecture - sorely and bizarrely lacking, for the most part. And yet... I cant bring myself to take seriously a game called "Coolest Girl in School". Apparently it was however nominated for 4 awards at an Australian industry association event.

"Coolest Girl in School is the world's first mobile role-playing game made specifically for girls and the potential audience is huge... Well over half (60%) of casual mobile gamers are women but very few games are made specifically for female audiences."

I think this links in with my post on game mashups:

"until we (women) start making games ourselves there is no way we will be able to see representations on screen that we can recognise and identify with. We need to start making a generation of games that women want to play and get them excited about creating their own content"

Game Girls [Sydney Morning Herald]

Grand Sale Audio

Web 2.0 is all about using the wide web of user created content to create fine grain. Well, this may seem obvious but big production companies have been doing something very similar for decades: integrating the wide catalog of other produced stuff out there to create fine grain.

Movies used soundtracks way before games ever did, but now the interactivity of games, and permeability of platforms, is allowing more than just media to merge. Entire business strategies, such as retailing and game platforms, are merging; and what you get is sale at the point of use.

And when that happens, the game becomes the marketplace.

Grand Theft Auto and selling Audio [Reuters]

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]