Entries tagged “games”

A lot of folks seemed to like the Little Red Riding Hood video I linked to the other day, so I thought I'd reach way back into the archives (anybody still hanging around who was reading this site in 2000?) and dig out an old favorite.

Behold, "Video Computer System" by Brazil's own Golden Shower. (Don't blame me — I didn't name the band.) One of the first chiptunes tracks to really take off online, the song was pretty good on its own merits, but was bolstered immeasurably by having a flawlessly-executed montage of Atari imagery as its accompanying video.

Delightfully, after nearly a decade, the original video is still online. It seems, though, that the quality of those old quicktimes clips is a little bit lower than what used to be downloadable from the site ages ago, so I've uploaded a higher-resolution copy of the video to YouTube and embedded it here. The original credits for the film are still online, listing Carlos Bêla, Guilherme Marcondes, Mateus de Paula Santos and Mario Sader as the creators of the clip, for which they won an MTV Brazil VMA for Best Electronica Video. There's a special credit for Alfredo Hisa, who created the video's signature moment, a Matrix homage that is all the more impressive when you remember that the film that was being referenced was only about a year old at the time.

Golden Shower also offers a pretty interesting behind-the-scenes look at how the video was created. It's worth a look just for the time capsule effect of seeing a bunch of old-school iMacs running OS 9 and now-vintage versions of applications. Most entertaining to me was the still-extant blog that the team kept, listing mentions of the video across the web.

There's something to be said for web content that holds up well, even almost a decade later.

There's a principle in game design that's referred to variously as rubber band or elastic artificial intelligence. While descriptions of the concept refer to it as "cheating", and discussions of the technique can sometimes devolve into a litany of frustrated complaints, the idea clearly works. Put simply, an elastic artificial intelligence helps a game adapt to the varying skill levels of players, keeping a game competitive when it might otherwise simply let one player profit from an advantage to the degree that the game would become boring, frustrating, or simply unwinnable for all other players.

In a system like Mario Kart, which uses an elastic intelligence, computer-controlled opponents can vary their skill levels, and human-controlled opponents get advantages that make them better competitors. Adversaries get more adept as your own skill level rises, and in general, gameplay gets more balanced and more satisfying for most players, with the exception of the person in the lead. The leading player is merely kept from running away with the game every single time in a well-balanced game, or in a poorly-designed one, they're punished for being good at the game.

This principle of balancing strengths in a game is pretty important for any system to remain engaging and entertaining for all players; The same idea of balanced gameplay is seen in any kind of multiplayer game. A recent Wired article on board game phenomenon The Settlers of Catan describes its analog implementation of a rubber band AI:

[T]he game is designed to restore balance when someone pulls ahead. If one player gets a clear lead, that person is suddenly the prime candidate for frequent attacks by the Robber, a neat hack that Teuber installed. Roll a seven—the most likely outcome of a two-dice roll, as any craps player knows—and those with more than seven resource cards in their hand lose half their stash, while the person who rolled gets to place a small figure called the Robber on a resource tile, shutting down production of resources for every settlement on that tile. Not surprisingly, players often target the settler with the most points.

In addition to deploying the Robber, players will usually stop trading with any clear leader. In tandem, these two lines of attack can reduce a front-runner's progress to a crawl. Meanwhile, lagging opponents have multiple avenues for catching up.

The interesting thing is that, while a generation has grown up familiar with the idea of elastic balancing, it's still a relatively controversial idea. In games like the Madden football series, where its effect is heavy-handed and obvious, it makes sense that players would balk. But some part of me feels like a lot of the people who complain about these features are the sort of people who object to letting their nephew win at Mario Kart sometimes, just so the game is more fun for everybody.

Interestingly, the "rubber band" analogy for this kind of game balancing is more apt than it might seem at first, when you consider the effect it has on keeping a game fun and lighthearted for a group of players. Rubber bands actually heat up when they're stretched, but cool down when they're restored to their natural state. So an elastic AI really is trying to function as a system that "cools down" a crowd of people who are playing a game.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to extrapolate on the political impacts we'll see from a generation growing up seeing elastic artificial intelligence as an important part of keeping harmony in a community of people playing the same game. For the record, I'm a very good Mario Kart player, but I'm still strongly in favor of its use of elastic artificial intelligence.

Please (re-)visit Dan Cook's seminal Nintendo's Genre Innovation Strategy essay from 2005. It's chock-full of his signature revelatory insights, in this case inspired by the excitement and skepticism surrounding the announcement of the controller for the Nintendo Wii (then known as the Revolution).

Among many other inspired moments, Dan offers up, early in the piece, two key points.

• The increasingly hardcore nature of the game industry is causing a contraction of the industry.
• New intuitive controller options will result in innovative game play that will bring new gamers into the fold.

He goes on to describe the evolution of individual genres within the gaming industry, reaching a conclusion that was surprising to me, but that intuitively felt correct upon re-reading:

As the less hardcore players burn out on the game mechanics of their favorite genres, they too are at risk of leaving the game market. The result is a steady erosion of the genre’s population.

What is left is a very peculiar group of highly purified hardcore players. They demand rigorous standardization of game mechanics and have highly refined criteria for judging the quality of their titles. With each generation of titles in the genre, they weed out a few more of the weaker players.

This made me think of the recent innovations around the iPhone and, particularly, the games that have been created for the iPhone app store. Prior to the iPhone's release, high-end mobile phones had, essentially, become a really specific gaming genre, catering to hardcore "players", consisting of tech reviewers and industry analysts whose tastes had evolved as all genres must. "They demand rigorous standardization of game mechanics and have highly refined criteria for judging the quality of their titles. With each generation of titles in the genre, they weed out a few more of the weaker players."

The iPhone was about Nintendo-style innovation, applying the same rules that Nintendo has, and achieving a quite Nintendo-like result of producing a device that is fun, satisfying, and very inexpensive to develop innovative games for. As Dan says about Nintendo's history of innovating in controllers:

One of the easiest ways of creating a new genre is to invent a new series of verbs (or risk mechanics as I called them in my Genre Life Cycle articles). One of the easiest ways of inventing new verbs is to create new input opportunities. Nintendo controls their hardware and they leverage this control to suit their particular business model.

And this is exactly what Nintendo has done historically. The original Dpad, the analog stick, the shoulder buttons, the C-stick, the DS touch pad, link capabilities, the tilt controller, the bongo drums … the list goes on and on.

The touchscreen and tilt sensor in the iPhone are just another in the series of controller innovations, and they've yielded the results that these inventions always do. Only, instead of Mario being the brand that benefits from this new set of verbs, Apple is the brand that benefits.

And all of this confirms my suspicion that the iPod and iPhone are not only designed to be subscription hardware that you repurchase constantly, but that Apple is deliberately creating their devices so that the only way you can level up in this game is by buying a new iPod or iPhone.

It's worth concluding with one of Dan's final points:

Nintendo’s strategy of pursuing innovation benefits the entire industry. It brings in new audiences and creates new genres that provide innovative and exciting experiences. The radical new controller is a great example of this strategy in action.

Surprisingly, this also benefits Microsoft and it benefits Sony. As the years pass, the hard core publishers that serve mature genres will adopt previously innovative genres and commoditize them. Their profits will be less, but they’ll keep a lot of genre addicts very happy. Everybody wins when a game company successfully innovates.

I see both of these strategies as a necessary and expected part of a vibrant and growing industry. Industries need balance and Nintendo is a major force of much needed innovation that prevents industry erosion and decline.

According to Amazon's account of holiday bestsellers, "Nintendo Wii dominated the top sellers in video games and hardware including the Wii console, the Wii remote controller and the Wii nunchuk controller." Worldwide sales of the Wii are nearly equal to sales of the Microsoft XBox 360 and Sony Playstation 3 combined.

Many of my nerd friends are all excited about Portal, Valve's brilliant reworking of Narbacular Drop. I've only played about five minutes of the game myself, but have had a lot of thoughts about it, so at the urging of some friends, here's a couple of quick thoughts:

• Talking to Jesse and Rebecca about Portal, they both described it as a "perfect short story". That's a fantastic compliment to the game, and a rather damning indictment of the ego of traditional game development (or the constraints of traditional game distribution), where everyone feels compelled to try to create the Great American Novel every time out. (Incidentally, Bioshock was praised as being as much of a leap over Half Life and its ilk as Half Life was over previous first-person shooters: Half Life introduced real narrative to the genre, and Bioshock demonstrated that the narrative could be truly literary.)
• The fundamental element of Portal's gameplay, the ability to move from disconnected parts of a level, is essentially similar to abilities that were considered bugs in early first-person shooters. Anyone who's ever messed around with making FPS levels is familiar with clipping errors and the hall-of-mirrors effect, and there were a lot of ways in games like Doom and Quake to be able to see "through" parts of a level if it was improperly constructed. Instead of seeing this as a bug, Portal sees it as a feature.
  

• Pac-Man's side exits and Mario's pipes are both really just portals, aren't they? (Think of Mario Bros.-era pipes, not the 2D platfomers.)
• It's kind of astounding that the Portal gameplay didn't come from Nintendo. The fundamental idea of transforming an environment and fighting enemies without having a traditional weapon seems right up their alley.
• I can't imagine anyone would have seen the Narbacular Drop homepage and imagined that someday this would be reimagined as a polished, professional XBox and PC game. It's kind of the best example I've ever seen in the video game world of an indie band breaking out as a mainstream pop act. There's more in this interview with the team, which features some spoilers.
• By naming it "Weighted Companion Cube" and giving it a heart, the humble crate has been taken from being a trite, thoughless staple of first-person shooters into actually being a character. That's subversion of convention at its finest. See also: Crate and Barrel - Not Just a Store! from earlier this year.
• Someone's going to make a killing finding a way to combine Portal's gameplay with Katamari-style mechanics. Just let me know when you get that game done.
• It's criminal that Portal's theme song "Still Alive" (Warning: The whole song is essentially a spoiler.) isn't getting radio airplay. Find out all about the song on MetaFilter, check out MTV with a view of the song's place in video game history, read Jonathan Coulter's own words on the making of the song, and then close with this interview with Ellen McLain, the voice of GLaDOS and the singer of "Still Alive".