Boat Model

I finally got around to making a model of the Gypsy last weekend. I did it very simply and in an afternoon, not trying to be too exact. I wanted to see the thing come together more than I wanted something for the mantelpiece. It's just poster board, glue, and lots of tape, but I still got that "wow" moment when the hull took shape from those flat pieces of paper. I can only imagine how wonderful the same moment will be with the real thing.

As you can see from the picture I only bothered with the central frame mold, mostly because my girlfriend was bothering me to put it down and eat dinner, but I'm still very pleased with the results. I can't wait to get back to work this weekend. I'm trying to decide if I should go ahead and get the wood, or order full patterns for the pieces. Either way it's probably still several months before I have any chance of getting on the water, but for now I'm letting my imagination do the work. And shopping for a pirate hat.

Analog Temptations

I mostly post here about the digital side of my work and play, but recently I've been preoccupied with analog pastimes. I'm gearing up for the boat project as the weather slowly gets better and better, and to do that I've been trying to get some practice in with a few other projects. My attempt at shelves has stalled at one step past what you see below. Or one step past what you would see if my phone hadn't just died.

(photo update coming...swearsville)

The idea is to drill holes and run plumbing pipe through them to form a pretty interesting blend of industrial material and bare wood. You can see a successful example here. I got hung up because once I drilled the holes I found they were a hairsbreadth too narrow for my pipe. Also, since I'm not using a drill press, they seem to be slightly canted, and not necessarily in the same direction. You can see where this is going, and it's called failure. But my plan is to get a larger bit and drill over-sized holes. I don't think it will be too much of a problem.

The above gadget arrived in the mail today as well. Its a key chain sized bottle opener basically, but with the added benefit of having a two sided bit in it with a #4 phillips head and a flat head screwdriver. The website claims the hole where the bit goes in can also be used as a hex tool, but that sounds like a bit of a stretch to me. Anyway, at $4.95 who's complaining? I ordered four (you can order up to five before the shipping jumps up) to have three to give away as small gifts.

Gamer

I watched Gamer last night. You know, the one where game players control real flesh-and-blood humans in a gory death match, broadcast on live TV? If you haven't heard of the movie I'm not surprised, considering it vanished about as quickly as a movie can. If watching it is at the top of your to-do list though, run away, as this post will spoil you silly.

The movie takes place in a not-too-distant future where The Guy From Dexter has invented a thingy that replicates the cells of your brain to...he invented mind control. What he does with this awesome power is get people to pay to watch death row inmates shoot each other, and give players the chance to control them in combat.

I knew from previews that this wasn't gonna be great, but I wanted to see it anyway, as the movie is based on a pretty common fear of the effects of increased realism of games and the implications of sex and violence in a realistic system. While the movie focuses on the "Slayers" death match game, the far more interesting "Society" is what raised the most questions. "Society" is like Second Life, but people can choose to play an avatar in the game or be an avatar, giving up complete control to whoever is playing you. Like Second Life, "Society" consists mainly of fucking and doing drugs in silly costumes (if that's not cultural commentary I don't know what is!). But of course, the avatars are real people made into puppets. There's plenty here that a different movie could have sunk it's teeth into; it's almost a shame they wasted it on an action movie.

Ultimately the movie falls flat because rather than confront the idea of a society engrossed in these pastimes, the movie portrays the players as what folks would like to believe they are, douche-bag teens and fat people, even "deviants" with (gasp!) tongue peircings. And of course it all boils down to The Guy From Dexter's evil plot to extend his mind control to everyone, allowing him to control what they buy, watch, and do. This final reveal seemed particularly unnecessary, not to mention ignorant of the far more terrifying implications of the humankind portrayed by the film: that controlling the consumer tastes of the globe doesn't require anything nearly as fancy as biological mind control, and that, in many ways, we've already surrendered control to Google, Microsoft, Pfizer, and on and on and on.

Polar Bear Payback

We launched a new game yesterday at AS. Polar Bear Payback chronicles one pissed off bear's mad dash for revenge against humanity for trashing the world and shrinking the polar regions. Is it brilliant? No, but it's got a healthy dose of blood, so who cares really? It's also a nice long game, which always impresses me with flash content. And it's pretty fun. Take a break from Robot Unicorn Attack for a few minutes and give it a shot.

Teleport-Tac-Toe

I hatched another business card board game idea today. It's Tic-Tac-Toe with an inter-dimensional twist. The mock-up above shows what would be the back of the business card. One player plays dimes, the other pennies. Each turn the player can either play a new piece or move an existing one. Pieces can only be played on white squares. The goal is to get three in a row, but one of those three has to be on the center square.

The teleportation element is that the board acts like a Pac-Man screen, wrapping around. A piece can thus be moved from the top left to the top right, or from the top left to the bottom left, and so on. I'm imagining two possibilities for gameplay: first, that teleporting into a blank space could capture enemy pieces if they are surrounded on at least two sides. This would remove the piece from play (though the player could play it back in a new empty space). The other option is that you could teleport into occupied spaces, but only if you could slide the occupying piece into a blank space in the same direction of travel. That sounds confusing, but I'll illustrate it once I've played it out a few times. Also, until testing, I have no idea if this is going to be fun or not. It may be too solvable, just like regular tic-tac-toe. We'll see.

Last but not least, if this game makes the cut, I'll definitely want to re-brand it in a way that removes the tic-tac-toe references. When I think of that game I think solvable, impossible to win, uninteresting. It'll be "Space Cargo Embargo" or something.

Down in the Valley

I didn't play Burnout Paradise when it first came out for the 360 in 2008. Those were my early days of “next gen” gaming, when I was still indignant about having to pay $60 for a video game. But with with 2009 coming to a close I put it on my Christmas list and the 'rents picked it up for a steal. It is, as all the reviews said, very cool. I am not a fan of racing games in general, but I am a fan of sparks and metal rent asunder, and Burnout Paradise delivers. For those not in the know, the racing series has been around for a while, but what has always set it apart is the focus on crashing. When you crash, the game slows down, the camera zooms in, sparks fly. And you drive on real roads, with traffic. Previous games even included modes where you earned points for each successive car that crashed when you started an accident, allowing you to cause massive chaos. It's awesome.

So Burnout Paradise brings open-world driving to the formula, and the result is Paradise City: miles of road spanning city and countryside, and dozens and dozens of events. The seamless environment is great, because you can run a race from the beach to the county, and then just pick up a new event out there and do something else. Instead of levels or courses, everything is connected. But there's something that bothers me about the game. There are no people. Miles of beach front sidewalks go untouched, crosswalks are left barren. Most bizarre of all, not a single one of the thousands of cars that populate the city has a driver.

The lack of people in a game about glorifying horrible crashes is not so hard to understand. There are the technical considerations of modeling people and animating them, mostly so they can try to jump out of the way, and figuring out what happens to them when the car they were cruising in is compressed into a small pile of scrap. There is the rating consideration too, as adding people inadvertently adds a great deal of violence to a game that has none. Most of all the decision was probably about focus and design. Adding people means crashes have a kill count and pedestrians live in fear of every 12-year-old player with a desire to chase them, and that's just not what the Burnout series is about. So people were a problem, and they left them out.

The lack of people creates another problem, however. For myself at least, driving my driver-less car through the active-yet-uninhabited city is off-putting at best, mildly terrifying at worst. The game's visuals stress realism in all aspects of the driving and the environment, but the game comes off like a strange dream. I am reminded of that episode of The Twilight Zone where the guy wakes up without any context and walks into an abandoned town, where breakfast is cooking on the stove but there's no one to eat it. In Paradise City I can almost see the kids skating around the corner far ahead of me, but no, they aren't really there.

A roboticist in 1970 coined the term “Uncanny Valley” when describing the nature of human and robot interactions. It goes like this: If you were to measure a person's emotional reaction to a robot (or a CGI character, or puppet, etc.), you would see that reaction become more and more favorable as the robot looked more and more human. But there comes a point at which the robot looks almost human, but not quite, and the emotional reaction becomes strongly negative. That's the valley. If the robot continues to look more and more human, you can eventually pull out of it, at which point you should use the robot to replace you and do the menial chores of everyday life while you live la vida loca.

There are a number of explanations as to why the valley exists. My favorite is that by looking so human, the “being” creates a connection between its human elements and the inhuman ones, and basically it's terrifying. A classic example is the movie The Polar Express. Back in school my professor told me he had heard it described “as either a horrible children's movie, or a pretty good horror movie.” One of the sited reasons that The Polar Express was so revolting is that the characters don't have tongues inside their mouths. When they open, they reveal a bottomless maw of black soul-sucking darkness. Yeah, its scary.

To bring the discussion back to video games, my point is this: the theory of the “Uncanny Valley” highlights the problem with disconnects between what we perceive and what we expect. The fundamental idea behind the valley applies broadly, especially in video games, which are all about created worlds, characters, and spaces. I hit on this point in my critique of Assassin's Creed II, which you should read here. The short version is that ACII suffers from a disconnect between the narrative, in which you play a hero seeking revenge, and the gameplay, in which you play a murderous psychopath whose crimes go unpunished. If, as in Assassin's Creed II, the game casts the player as a hero narratively, but then encourages un-hero-like play, you're in the valley. If you create a visually rich world filled with sun-drenched ocean drives, promenades, highways, and country roads, and then leave it with no people, it becomes oddly terrifying.

I mentioned earlier that the case of Burnout Paradise was likely a design choice, but many of the gaps that appear in the presentation of modern games stem directly from the unfortunate use of graphics as the yardstick for achievement. The industry business model seems to be to use graphics to sell the game, and make the gameplay just good enough not to piss everyone off for buying it. But the more convincing the the game environment, the less I'm willing to forgive the rough edges. Burnout looks beautiful, even real, but that means the lack of population sticks out even more.

Another example is Dragon Age: Origins. The game builds off of the Bioware predecessors, and is the best looking yet (minus Mass Effect II maybe, which I haven't played yet), but that becomes one of it's biggest flaws. The game looks beautiful, but plays almost identically to KOTOR, a game I played six years ago. I really hit a wall when I realized that the environments, which look very organic and interesting, play as if you're on a flat 2D map. And there are countless other recent examples of these valley-like disconnects in modern games. Moreover, there will be countless more. Not all areas of game creation advance at the same pace, due to budget, time, priorities, laziness, and on and on. Where two of these areas don't match up, there lies a possible “Uncanny Valley” for players.

Games have just barely been around long enough to begin the “art” discussion, and one of the common, and worst, arguments in favor of calling games art is just how pretty they've gotten. I've got plenty to say about that one, but that's for another time. For today, I'll say this: games have nearly run out of mileage in pushing toward hyper-realistic graphics, physics, etc. The farther you push one element, the more disconnected it becomes from the rest of the experience. To truly go the distance in delivering an immersive experience, the game elements need to match. A less technically impressive, but well matched experience will win over a fancy mismatched one any day, at least on my screen.

More on that to come.

Game Design Challenge

I've been out of town, hence the blog neglect, and I'm working on a long piece that's taken more work than I thought. In the meantime I thought I would go ahead and propose a game design challenge, both for myself and for anyone who wants to join in. The challenge is this: design a game that fits on a business card. Why? Plenty of reasons. The size will require minimalism, and the games will be easily portable. They will be cheap to make with professional or at home printing, and thus easy to share. And restrictions are fun!

This all began when I was designing my first business card about six months ago. I thought it would be nifty for a game designer's business card to have a tiny game on the back. At the time, the card was for a conference for my job at Cartoon Network, so I ended up creating some pixel CN characters and identifying myself as a production coordinator (which, at the time, was more accurate anyway), but the idea stuck. Plus there's real appeal for me in non-digital games. They can be prototyped faster and played more easily, and are a good way to "practice" without the investment video games require.

The rules for this challenge are very flexible. I'm imagining a board game, where the card serves as a tiny board, but you don't have to look at it that way. The card could simply hold tables, numbers, dots, whatever. Perhaps placing multiple cards next to each other creates a flexibly sized game board? The game can use both sides of the card, and does not have to be a business card, it just has to fit on one. The design needs to be tailored to the small scale of the card, not simply shrunk to fit. Both single-player and multiplayer games are great. Perhaps the perfect game would include instructions on the card space as well (allowing you to leave them around to be discovered by strangers), but for multiplayer games the owner could always just explain the rules.

For pieces, the games should not require anything that can't be accommodated with spare change or something similar. Pennies could be counters, a dime heads up could be player one, tails player two, etc. I'm willing to allow the rules to call for a die, but nothing beyond a regular d6. Better yet would be for all game related decisions to be determinable with a coin flip.

Above is a quick mock-up of my first idea, hatched this afternoon: LifeRPG. In the game the player starts at the blue shield in the upper left. To move, the player has to complete a task in real life. It could be going to the gym, dodging an impulse buy, or speaking up in class. It could be cutting down your debt by a certain amount or skipping desert. It's the player's choice, but the object is to make a game out of real life. Players get one square per accomplishment, marked by X-ing out the square.

To win, players simply escape the maze, but if they choose to head for the red circles they get a chance to win treasure (determined by a coin toss or die roll). Treasure won is marked in the empty boxes, and can be redeemed by the player for a treat. If the player is cutting down on their debt, the treasure could equal a meal out, guilt free. If they're trying to exercise more it could be a free day off from the gym. The point is the treasure should be a sweet reward, but not something that will derail the purpose of playing the game.

The larger box would determine how treasure was won, but I haven't entirely worked that out yet. Maybe there are numbers 1-6, with two numbers winning treasure, two giving you a free move, and two giving nothing. Maybe treasure is won by a coin toss, and this area could be used for flavor text: "You've found some pirate's gold!" The final box is for marking your level. You level up every time to complete a card, plus one for every treasure you choose not to redeem.

Last but not least, this mock-up is only one of many in the complete set. There could be multiple floorplans for each type, and types could include dungeons, snow caves, lava fields, etc. Players would be encouraged to keep the game going, and maybe they could even relate the stories of their adventurers online and share their accomplishments. How many levels can you achieve?

So that's it, a challenge and a first idea. I'm hoping to generate a whole bunch more. Don't get too caught up in mine though; there are many ways to approach business card board gaming. No reason why there couldn't be a business card eight-player war game. Surprise me. If you hatch an idea, email me a concept or mock-up. Better yet, make the thing and send a picture. I'll post everything I get. There's no time limit, as I'm treating this as an ongoing personal project. Let's see what happens!