The shopkeeper in Armadillo is an anti-Semite. Was, that is, until I shot him.
Jamin Brophy-Warren, a co-founder of the previously mentioned Kill Screen Magazine, discusses his most recommended reads about gaming in the New Yorker.
A new magazine called Kill Screen, that aims to elevate journalism and writing about games, has released its first issue:
We are fixated on a single question: “What does it mean to play games?” We want to be what early Rolling Stone was to rock n’ roll or Wired was to tech. We want to look like the Fader and walk like the Believer. We’re talking about the long format read on the creative minds behind blockbuster and indie game titles sided by personal essays about what games mean to our daily little lives.
A magazine for mature gamers, by real writers. I’m subscribing right now.
The creator of the Fable series, in an interview with Game Informer, on the standard role-playing mechanic of earning experience to spend numbers on statistics:
It’s like going back to DOS from Windows. That’s not power. That’s not the feeling of leveling up. It’s just old school.
Truth.
There’s an interesting discussion making the internet rounds today about the nature of free beta-key handouts and game journalism at The Game Beat:
But think for a second about the image of the game press that this journalist giveaway system conveys to the readers. […] after all, you can’t really offer a contest for something without implicitly endorsing it as something that is desirable to win. Is it really possible to enthusiastically push beta access to a game one day and then credibly critique that game the next?
These are simply beautiful videos by Maxin Zhestkov, a director that has apparently done some past work for Playstation. Fitting, as the video above made me think about the possibilities for haptic interaction with the coming Move, bringing full spacial realization to the PS3. You can almost feel someone controlling these objects by hand.
Edit: On second look, the pink/orange glowing orb in this video even looks like the bulb on the end of the Move wand.
The new Steam client with a fresh UI and some new social gaming features has been released. And surprisingly, a Mac version comes May 12, along with nearly the entire lineup of Valve games.
I hope these are signs that Valve aims to lead a new push for gaming on the Mac, giving other developers more incentive to follow suit. If so, Valve is very smart for taking ownership of the initiative, and will be rewarded enormously if it gains steam (heyo!). Why it has taken this long for a company to really recognize how hungry Mac users are for more games, I do not know.
Meanwhile, check out the teaser ads for Steam on Mac featuring Valve came characters cameoing in classic Apple advertisements.
Richard Terrell at Critical-Gaming on information overload in game feedback:
If you’ve ever listened to the commentary of a Smash Brothers, Street Fighter, Halo, Modern Warfare, or StarCraft match you know that there’s no way the commentators can even cover 1/10th of the action because the games move so fast or have so much going on at once. This issue of information overload is exacerbated in 3D games. Fortunately, designers have implemented features that swing the advantage back in our direction in the battle of information warfare.
He continues by listing examples of “highly communicative visual elements,” like beams indicating a healing or targeting action, or colorization in environments to tell the player what is going on, without having to break their “tunnel vision”.
What he begins to touch on, but doesn’t quite convey is the common success of these visual elements is that they deliver information to the gamer while staying within the context of the game environment—a kind of contextual feedback, instead of information delivered on some meta-plane.
Then he concludes with this:
Of course, HUDs are naturally designed to communicate key pieces of information. From the “X” mark in the locations where allies are killed in FPSs, life bars, to mini maps, HUDs typically make playing games easier.
I feel like he’s contradicting his very strong case for why a HUD only guarantees information overload. Life bars, mini maps—while essential to the mechanics of plenty of games—do a strong part in complicating the visual field and, in almost all cases, break immersion.
Sure, a health bar being displayed in the eyes science fiction shooter can be rationalized by Spartan suits and cybernetics—but what does a health bar, item bar, minimap, chat window, etc, do for a medieval fantasy role-playing game, besides help remove the gamer from that world?
Immersion and simplicity go hand-in-hand. Delivering the player feedback that they’re being healed within the context of the game world both lets the gamer continue to focus on the action, and allows for new creative solutions on illustrating this information from the designer’s perspective.
When a player is low on health, do we slap a health bar on the top-left of the screen that blinks each time they’re hit while displaying percentage of life lost? Or does their avatar begin to show signs of damage, armor falling to the ground, blood trailing their steps?
The Vintage Game Club is a web forum that turns game-playing into a book-club-type activity. Each month, the community picks a new game to play through in its entirety, documenting each stage/milestone of the game in threaded discussions. Created and moderated by Michael Abbott at The Brainy Gamer.
I’m digging back to an interview from almost a year ago, but only because it truly captures the spirit of the kind of cross-disciplinary dialogue I’m seeking about games, not to mention Geoff Manaugh’s writing is a particular inspiration for the kind of thinking I want to fuel HUDburn.
BLDG BLOG talks to Jim Rossignol (of Rock Paper Shotgun fame) about his then newly released book The Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities. The interview is a long, but thoroughly enjoyable read that addresses game cultures based on geography, connections to architecture and spacial thinking, and more than a little dialogue on the nature of EVE Online (a game I play and write about that’s particularly dear to my heart).
So put this on your long-reading queue for the day. Fascinating stuff.
There are two sides to me. One of them regards my career as an interactive designer. It’s the side that enjoys things that work the way they’re supposed to. It’s the side that appreciates the subtle appropriateness of a typeface used in the perfect context, and attention to ergonomics of my toothbrush. It’s the side that loves the functional beauty of HTML 5, Japanese swords, and Apple.
The other side of me (of which my wife didn’t discover until after we were married) is a gamer—an elf-loving, sci-fi-nerding, experience points hoarding gamer. It’s the side that drew Zelda logos in my notebooks in school, and logged hundreds of hours staring at a nine-inch quarter of a TV playing split-screen Goldeneye matches in the “Facility”. It’s the side that still gets restless like a thirteen year old at Christmas on the eve of an anticipated launch.
And these sides of me, for most of my life, have been mutually exclusive. My education in art and design had no time for the distractions of death matches, and my game time had no desire to be subjected to the critique of form and function. These two loves were oil and water—work and play. And maybe it was necessary that way.
But later in life, I’m beginning to find an overlap seep its way into my professional field, and design sensibilities more often affecting my enjoyment of games. Through the evolution of technology, the advancement of how we look at user-experience and design, and a little desire for some quality in my play, the worlds of gaming and design have began to show me connections I wasn’t necessarily looking for.
More and more, my professional design career becomes a game. Websites are flashy portals into an alternate realm where products are perfect, prices are low, and customer service rocks. Social media and the desire to “go viral” turns word of mouth into a game of zombies, infecting users with brand buzz to spread to the masses. Web trends and analytics turn customers into Sim City. And this isn’t cynicism. In fact, with this outlook, achieving goals for another brand suddenly becomes my personal challenge. Cue Quest Marker over client’s head.
And in the same way, my outlook on gaming is becoming all the more affected by my design taste. It’s no longer enough for a game to look good, with solid mechanics and interesting challenges. Realism is no longer as alluring or desirable as good art direction and a unique voice/style. User interface and menu designs can no longer be an afterthought. And, for the love of Miyamoto, why are we still asked to Press Start to Begin before the main menu?
So, this, in a sense, is the purpose of this site. It’s an outlet where I will explore the marriage of design and games to satisfy my personal curiosity about my work and my play. I am no game designer or industry insider. This site will be more about asking questions and exploring connections than spouting dogma about what should and shouldn’t be considered good game design.
It’ll also be a steady stream of interesting elsewheres and miscellany regarding other disciplines as they align with gaming. Expect links to interesting articles, creations, and conversations that (hopefully) aren’t also linked on every other gaming site you follow.
Now, with the awkward ‘first post’ aside, lets Press Start to Begin.
