March 26, 2012
I Like Dying A Lot
NYU Professor and games theorist Jesper Juul on why gamers love (and hate) failure.
Latest Gamefilter Posts
Wing Commander Saga
Wing Commander Saga -- the ambitious fan-made sequel built on the Freespace 2 engine and under development for 10 long years -- has finally been released. Read more here, or here, or here, or have a look at the launch trailer.
Journey on home console, Ian Bogost on Journey in the Atlantic, Joe Houston on Ian Bogost on Journey on his blog
Ian Bogost writes an exemplary article about video games for The Atlantic under the guise of a review of That Games Company's Journey. It explicitly takes games as seriously as it might painting or film, and it discusses Journey as both a fulfillment and abandonment of the devteam's previous games' promises. Industry veteran Joe Houston points out that one of Bogost's key points is just ridiculous.
March 25, 2012
One Night in Skyrim Makes a Strong Man Crumble
One Night in Skyrim Makes a Strong Man Crumble "The question becomes why the thing that doesn't make Skyrim so great is such a prominent part of Skyrim. Why, in fact, is it in Skyrim at all?"
A few notes on obvious matters
A few notes on obvious matters : on breaking into games journalism and academia.
March 23, 2012
The Siege of Markarth
The Siege of Marklar Markarth is one of them newfangled machinima things all the kids are watching on their metubes and smartslabs and such, and includes such Skyrim-oriented excitements as hacking, slashing, and arrows to the knee.
March 22, 2012
Nerd Curious
Nerd Curious #1 Dungeons & Dragons: in which Todd VanDerWerff tries the nerdy things (in this case, D&D) that he missed as a kid.
How do I get a job in the games industry?
How do I get a job in the games industry? "In response to a question with as many answers as people who ask it, this site is dedicated to anyone interested in pursing a career in game development. "
A Matter of Life and Death
A Matter of Life and Death: why youth is still the wrong way to talk about videogames. Part One is here.
March 21, 2012
The Cult of Psychonauts
As we found out when we met up with creator Tim Schafer at Double Fine's San Francisco HQ earlier this month, the story of Psychonauts' troubled development and subsequent trek into cult classic territory is almost as engaging and unexpected as the off-the-wall brain-surfing adventures of psychic sprog Raz that the game itself depicts.
March 20, 2012
Free! Indie! Games!
Terry Cavanagh, creator of VVVVVV, At a Distance and others, is curating FreeIndieGam.es, which, as you might suspect, is a veritable cornucopia of games that are both indie and free.
March 19, 2012
Glorious Trainwrecks
Glorious Trainwrecks "is about bringing back the spirit of postcardware, circa 1993. It's about throwing a bunch of random crap into your game and keeping whatever sticks. About bringing back a time when you didn't care so much about "production values", as much as ripping sound samples from your favourite television shows to use in your game, or animating pictures of yourself making goofy faces on your webcam. Where every ridiculous idea you had, you would just sit down and code."
The Indie Ethics Problem
The Indie Ethics Problem Inflammatory pullquote: "We will still be talking about Minecraft in ten years, but we won’t be talking about games like Super Meat Boy in one year. Why? Because Minecraft was developed with the care and love that comes with slow and incremental design that emerged over years; it did not rely upon self-promotion. People love Minecraft because of the breadth and depth of its gameplay, not because of a superficial retroesque charm… such as the meaningless gameplay of Super Meat Boy."
March 18, 2012
Why Canabalt-creator Adam Saltman’s Hunger Games tie-in game won’t be terrible.
Adam Saltman, creator of endless-runner Canabalt, the game that launched a thousand iOS clones, has been tasked with creating a tie-in game for the Hunger Games movie. He talks to Gamasutra about why tie-in games are almost always awful and why his won't be.
March 17, 2012
The Idealistic World of Videogame Pacifists
The Idealistic World of Videogame Pacifists "Daniel Mullins is a virtual pacifist in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Felix the Peaceful Monk is his avatar. Daniel is just one of a growing number of virtual pacifists who are either frustrated or bored with videogames’ insistence on violence. Daniel understands that there are people in Skyrim that want him dead but “that doesn’t mean [they] deserve to die."
Brains are for eating
World of the Living Dead is a Google Maps based zombie survival MMO that pit you against the living dead, but you know, in the 'real world', which is pretty neat, with stuff like zombie density reflecting US census data.
March 16, 2012
The Invisible Hand of Super Metroid
"You will stay in this room until you learn to run. It's a harsh school, and students of modern game design may feel that the game should have just printed it out - Hold B to run. This is just not how Super Metroid rolls. It will never let go of the illusion that you are on your own. It will hold you by the hand, but it will never admit it."
March 15, 2012
Why linking developer bonuses to Metacritic scores should come to an end
Why linking developer bonuses to Metacritic scores should come to an end. Or, how Fallout: New Vegas missed it by that much.
@PeterMolydeux is not the legendary game developer.
@PeterMolydeux is not the legendary game developer, just a fun parody. He's got some neat ideas, though; "Imagine if in new Guitar Hero you play as a busker, you witness your city evolve as your music changes the decisions of people around you," for example.
March 14, 2012
The Scale of The Universe
This snazzy Flash toy version of the venerable cosmic zoom is only tangentially related to gaming, in that it taught me that the area of a Minecraft world is slightly larger than Uranus. [Insert joke here]
Icewind Dale remade in Neverwinter Nights 2
A team of modders has rebuilt the venerable Black Isle CRPG Icewind Dale as a campaign for NWN2. Released on the newly-launched Neverwinter Nexus.
Korea’s Happy Deals
Korea's Happy Deals South Korean games are on the rise, and their inspiration lies in unexpected territory -- fast food in its many incarnations
March 13, 2012
Minecraft + coding environment = CraftStudio
CraftStudio appears to take the collaborative real-time 3-D world-building aspect of Minecraft, but adds to it the ability to script your own behaviors (also in real time, also collaboratively), so that instead of just building a world, you're building whatever sort of game you can imagine. (Currently in playable Alpha; also currently kickstarting indiegogoing.)
NEO Scavenger: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Game
NEO Scavenger is a post-apocalyptic survival simulator with a realistic inventory system that's less like Diablo and more like Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Want to carry more than you can hold in your hands? Better hope you find a discarded plastic grocery bag or something. You can play the demo online.
Zombies, Run!
Last week, a relatively unknown writer named Naomi Alderman quietly did something that pushes stories in a new direction. She released a little game called Zombies, Run.
The elevator pitch is simple: It’s a GPS-based run-tracker for your iOS device that, instead of just saying “You’ve just run 1 mile,” tells you a story.
How You Got Videogames Wrong #4: “Your Games Just Suck”
How You Got Videogames Wrong #4: “Your Games Just Suck”
March 12, 2012
Creating the Illusion of Emotion
Creating the Illusion of Emotion is an article about producing empathetic game characters. Its most interesting section -- and the bit most worth checking out -- refers to The Heider-Simmel Demonstration, a brief animated film used by psychology researchers in the 1940s.
10 tutorial tips from Plants vs. Zombies creator George Fan
Interesting look at how the tutorials in Plants vs. Zombies helped the game become a hit for casual players, by slowly introducing game concepts and allowing people to play the game while learning.
At Lot Can Happen in 100 Hours
Slate's Michael Thomsen ruminates over Dark Souls and whether it's worth the 100 hours it takes to complete. "You can accomplish a lot in 100 hours.... [more inside]
March 11, 2012
Her name is Angelina
Angelina (a tail-recursive acronym for "A Novel Game-Evolving Labrat I've Named ANGELINA") is a project in evolutionary computing by Michael Cook, a PhD candidate at Imperial College in the UK. Angelina generates computer games from scratch. You can actually play some of them here.
Before Pong came along
Tennis for Two escaped the notice of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, but the world’s first video game — invented by physicist William Higinbotham in 1958 at Brookhaven National Laboratory on New York’s Long Island — has had a greater impact on the wider world than many of the lab’s Nobel-crowned efforts. Even so, Higinbotham never earned a cent for his effort
“Why I’m not interested in Mass Effect 3″
On the changes in characterization and world-building between Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2. Contains spoilers for both ME1 and ME2, though none for ME3.
March 10, 2012
Why the Exploitation of Gamers is Our Own Damn Fault
Why the Exploitation of Gamers is Our Own Damn Fault Sounds a bit like shaming the victim, to me.
Lesson in Failure
"The Gamification of Death": Michael Abbot (Brainy Gamer) provides a write-up of Margaret Robertson's Game Developers Conference talk. Previously a strident evangelist for the unlimited potential of games, her tone this year was more tempered: She and her company had been tasked with making a game to accompany a documentary about a woman whose death in her apartment went unnoticed for three years (with the TV on the whole time). This proved to be rather difficult. [more inside]
March 9, 2012
Meanwhile, in the collective douchebroconsciousness
"Give me a break. If I were that robot I would have infected my sister robots with political consciousness faster than you could say '“hive vagina'."
