Tiny Subversions

Except this is an update for IGJ2, oddly enough. It seems that the inimitable Brian Sharp has posted an update to the IGJ2 yoga game in his blog. The game is excellent, and this is an exciting phenomenon because while he hasn't changed the game itself, he's added mouse control. So now, all you folks without a PS2-controller-clone for your PC can actually play the game, too. It's worth checking out; even the visuals are neat, which is a rarity for an IGJ game.

I implore you to check out Spheres of Chaos. This is a game from 1992 that's been (thankfully) ported to run on modern computers. This game has been called "asteroids on LSD". For its time, it made brilliant psychedelic use of 2d particle effects and amazing sound. This ends up being a very Rez-like experience. Download the demo!

For a much better synopsis of the game, see Idle Thumbs' review. Hey Jeff--you thinking this is 'zine material?

So it looks like the media is once again blaming a school shooting on video games. But unlike other games bloggers, who will vehemently defend any content whatsoever and accept absolutely no blame, I do think the arguments hold some merit.

A hugely disproportionate number of video games are about killing. Why do we love to model killing in our games? I tend to agree with Chris Crawford, who says that (a) violence sells, and (b) killing is incredibly easy to model. Killing is largely deterministic; that's something we already know how to do in games. Killing is a solved problem.

Of interest are the games that were made at Indie Game Jam 2, which used physics to model something other than bodies flopping around (though Mahk did his share of that, too). Also of interest are the games produced by some of my friends at Carnegie Mellon's ETC, these are rapidly developed experimental games that do a brilliant job of using physics and other deterministic conventions to make wonderful games that are (mostly) not about killing.

Here's a crazy question I'm trying to answer: what do you think were the historical prerequisites that led up to the creation of the video game as we know it today? Obviously, the computer was a technological/historical prerequisite. But technological prereqs are easy to think about. What about our Western cultural situation? Or hell, our Eastern cultural situation, since Japan had a lot to do with it, too (although to my knowledge the real pioneers, SpaceWar and Pong dudes, were in the USA). Did the post-WWII situation have anything to do with it? Questions, questions... I'm interested in hearing some answers, dammit!

Here's a question: what kinds of games could run on the Google OS? I'm not talking about play-by-Gmail or anything like that. Wrap your head around the Google OS idea first (I'm still working on that), and then think about the gaming possibilities. Something like I Love Bees sort of resonates, but I'm not sure how just yet...

I was just listening to one of my favorite songs of all time, and I said, "Hey! This song mentions video games. Huh." So when I come across songs with references to video games, I'll put them here. And so I give you two!

"Guitar and Video Games" by Sunny Day Real Estate
"Never again, my dear, shall we come dancing here /
We'll play guitar and video games."
Not actually about games so much as referencing video games in general.

"Change the Beat" by Viktor Vaughn (aka MF DOOM)
"You don't watch her, he might house 'er like Doogie /
Just to cut her loosie like [swoosh!] Mitsurugi!"
A shout-out to Soul Calibur/Blade.

So today was kind of a low-key day in terms of my actual job here. Most people are settled in, have network and the software they need, and so on, so there's not too much I can do. I did take pictures and cut out the heads of all the jammers so we can graft their faces ontosome models in one of the games (it's an Indie Game Jam tradition).

Robin implored that I mess around with the engine in my spare time, so I did. I'm not a great coder, unless you count 5 flavors of assembly. Then I'm "1337," so to speak. So I was only able to get the example application up and running, make my own map, and change some of the meshes and animations, making Sims with yeti heads and that kind of stuff. I was unable to figure out pathfinding and behavioral AI stuff, because I am a pretty lame coder. But it's okay; I did learn a lot about the basic engine stucture and level editing, so I'm able to help other peoplediagnose their problems.

In other news, I bought Blokus at the game store across the street, and just played it with my roommate Vincent, of Insert Credit fame.

Vincent and Chris (another Chris) have been doing sound, and man are they good. Chris is an audio contractor who mostly works with EA--in case you didn't know, a good part of the Jam attendees come from the EA/Maxis nexus. So Chris did the audio for Sims 2. Anyway, he and Vincent are great, you just tell them "give me a laugh track, salsa music, and people being murdered," and they whip up the sounds in no time. They're also really good at working with the programmers, getting feedback from them as to the sounds they're looking for. Just damned awesome.

The games are coming along really well. Jesper is doing "emtional Chu-Chu Rocket," which if you don't know the reference, I won't explain it. Ike, from Big Huge Games, is doing a dance game, where you're walking around a club and you dance with groups of people. First you dance with uncool people, and by successfully "dancing" (read "beat-matching") you learn a new move from them, which you can then use to impress progressively cooler and larger groups of people. Jordan is doing this amazing murder mystery game, all in black and white, where you first watch different people in the house reenact what their version of the night's events were. Then you switch to a crime scene mode, where you search for clues in the house. You collect the clues, and then move to solver mode, where you compare your evidence against their stories and try to guess who's lying to you. Brilliant, and the sound work on the game is unbelievable. Those are just a few of the cool games that are being made.

So yesterday was awesome. The Jam itself is going pretty well. While
some of the folks who wrote the engine are really pessimistic (as in,
"This is going to be a total failure. Oh well"), most are in good
spirits and getting to know the engine, working on their designs.
Probably the highlight of my day was sitting in on a design session
with Randy and Chris, and not only being priviledged to watch them
work, but also actually getting to contribute to their design. (The
design in question is a game about high school girls where you are the
only girl in high school who can lie; your job is to use your
advantage to pit girls against other girls and climb the social
ladder.) I also got to sit in on Randy and Robin's session, too, which
was about a game where you're in the Fairmont lobby at GDC trying to
get famous game developers to dinner, but they're constantly being
swarmed by admirers.

I am in awe of the artists. We have several professional
artists/modelers/animators here at the Jam, and oh man, to watch them
shape a box and a sphere into a human being or a couch or whatever is
just amazing. They work so fast. No offense to the coders, who are
brilliant, but even though I suck at coding, I personally can
comprehend what it is like to be a brilliant coder. But I can't wrap
my brain around these guys to whom you can just say, "Give me a
Charlie Chaplin animation," and they just build it for you.

It's interesting to see where different people are right now. One guy
is building the game world first and tackling design later. Other
folks are just working out their design pretty fully and then getting
down to programming. Another one has no idea what game he wants to
make, and is just playing with the engine to see if any compelling
behaviors sort of magically manifest themselves from the natural
engine code.

And, courtesy of Darren's camera which he so kindly lent me, here is
one of many pictures: Chris and Randy working on the truthful high school design

Looks like my Treo is cutting off my posts. I'll fix that.

So the Jam is coming along. We finally did The Talk around 12:30 where everyone introduced themselves and so on. People seemed to like a recent game design idea I had: a game where you're in a foreign country, you don't speak the language, and you're trying to find the bathroom.

We've got about 25 people here including the G4 camera crew. Everyone here is really really nice., and I'll be going out to lunch with a few folks in a bit.

I finallygot all the computers set up this morning, and even got everything networked. We still don't have DSL, which blows, but it's even worse for the hotel staff, who can't check anyone in or process credit cards. Yikes.

We're still smoothing out the engine; turning animations are a little rough.

The Jam starts in 90 minutes. Because I fell asleep last night (I couldn't stay awake), I have no idea how ready we actually are for when developers finally show up. We don't even have any art tools installed on the machines yet. We'll see what happens when Robin wakes up soon.

So I've got a few minutes of downtime here at the Indie Game Jam--I actually got in to the hotel at noon today, and 20 minutes later I was put to work setting up what amounts to a b ig LAN party. Some of these computers are pretty cool, I'll post pictures later.

So we're going to be doing the last minute coding of the engine tonight (by 'we' I mean everyone but me; I'd rather be writing help documentation). The Jam starts tomorrow at around 10am. So we have 14 hours to make the engine actually somewhat developer-friendly. Right now it's a real hack. Not lik0

(This post is from my phone, so sorry if there's typos.) In 9 hours I'll be on a plane to California, where for the next 4 days I will be participating as an intern in the Indie Game Jam. I'm really excited to be working with a bunch of way cool people to make a whole lot of innovative little games. This year we have a theme (instead of a technology prompt). That theme is "human interaction." This is a high-risk Jam theme with potentially high payoff if we do something cool. I must say there have been some pretty neat ideas for Jam games thrown about so far, but I'm keeping my mouth shut until after we present at GDC (or until Chris Hecker says otherwise!).

I will say that I've been toying with a nonviolent protest game idea, but I'm not sure what the actual gameplay will be. I was thinking of maybe a blockade-style protest, though something tells me that there's a game to be had in "nonviolently resisting arrest," as well. Jeremiah suggested that I look into a user interface of indirect control over the characters, so something more tactical rather than strategic. Oh well--I'll mull this over on the plane.

Stay tuned for updates on the Game Jam after I get there. Also stay tuned for my report on the Game Developers Conference, which starts Monday in San Francisco. I've been attending GDC since 2003, and it's consistently my favorite week of the year. I can't wait to see what happens this year!