Tiny Subversions

From an article on Nolan Bushnell's new game bistro business:

To back track a bit, Bushnell noted that before the big crash in 1982, the video game industry, mostly through the arcade business, had reached something like 44 million players. Today, the hardcore gamers are more like 18 million.

Wow. Then again, Bushnell is implying that the 44 million players in 1982 were hardcore. That's simply not true. I know for a fact that my mother used to play the occasional game of Pac-Man, and she was certainly a casual gamer at the time.

Of course, statistics at the ESA say that 50% of Americans play video games. I have no idea where these stats come from, or what they count as a video game (Minesweeper?). And of course, there's the incomparable Chris Crawford's take on the whole thing.

I'm thinking of enabling word verification for comments (where you have to type in letters from the swirly picture). This has the advantage of foiling most spambots, or so I hear. This also has the disadvantage of making it a little harder for you guys to comment. Does anyone here who isn't a spambot have any strong objections?

Holy cow. What a neat idea:

The bad player is the one who tries to calculate and play with the odds, as if his game, his life, were one of a large number of games. To do so is at best to succumb to another necessity, the necessity of the law of large numbers. The good player does not fool himself, and accepts that ther [sic] is exactly one chance, which produces by chance the necessity and even the purpose that he experiences. [Via Roll the Bones]

Sounds vaguely intelligent design, but it's certainly poetic. Which in turn reminds me of a concept from J.L. Borges' Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius: the idea of a civilization wherein the practice of philosophy is not the search for truth, but rather the search for the most beautiful and astounding of ideas.

I have a question for my intrepid readers.

I was a passenger on a long car trip this weekend, and so, at Darren's suggestion, I purchased Shining Force for my GBA to soften the impact of the trip. Needless to say, as a huge fan of strategy RPGs (SRPGs) like Final Fantasy: Tactics and Jagged Alliance 2, I am enormously pleased with this game.

One thing that struck me as peculiar about the game is its narrative structure. Like any SRPG, you have your hero, and you go around amassing a party of warriors whose unique skills you then utilize in battle. The narrative is divided into "chapters"; each chapter is roughly 5 battles or so. Every time you win a battle, you get more story. Pretty straightforward.

But at the end of each chapter is an "epilogue". This epilogue involves the story of a princess trying to meet up with your hero. You actually play as the princess through some short battles, and at this point I'm assuming she eventually meets you and joins your party. I suspected that these epilogues were not present in the original Sega Genesis version of the game, and were added on for the GBA version. After asking Darren, it turns out that I was right.

I feel like this kind of parallel narrative would have been way ahead of its time in 1992, when the game was originally released. Does anyone have any memories of this kind of narrative (where you play two separate parallel stories) present in a game from that era or earlier?

My friend Coray was recently lengthily profiled on Gamasutra. Which reminds me of a story.

I first met Coray at the Game Developers Conference in 2003 (my first one ever). He was a student (or had just ceased being a student) and was trying to break in. I was a student and just checking things out. Anyway, I met him through Jeff who knew him through the NJ IGDA Chapter.

That year was the big nVidia vs. ATI graphics card war. It was full-on Radeon vs. GeForce back then. As a result, both companies were attempting to woo developers. nVidia had chartered a bus painted green with the big nVidia fairy on the side, and was shuttling developers from bar to bar in downtown San Jose.

One night, Jeff, Coray, and a few other student types decided to go on the bus. We couldn't actually enter the bars because we weren't 21 at the time. So we hung out on the bus. They gave us free Bawls, and there were TVs playing nVidia graphics demos on continuous loop. It was pretty fun, but there were a few problems.

For one, nVidia had hired models to chat with us. For $15 an hour, they pretended to be nice to our sorry asses. I was pretty well infuriated with this, and even more infuriated when some of my friends (we were a group of all males) actually bought into this and believed that the models geniunely enjoyed talking to them. However, the models did seem to be actually pretty nice, and I felt sorry for them when the redneck who was hired by nVidia to actually manage the bus got drunker and drunker and started sexually harrassing the girls.

At one point, around 12:30am, he got so drunk that he ordered the driver of the bus (who was not drinking, thankfully) to take us all to a strip club. Before we knew it, we were no longer downtown. We were on the freeway. A half an hour later, we were at a strip club. At this point, we were pissed off, because we had 9am sessions to attend the next day! The manager redneck came to his senses and realized that he could get so so fired for what he did. He even yelled at the driver, "Why did you follow my orders?!"

A few of us stepped into the club to go to the bathroom, and then we went back to San Jose. But by the time we got back, the light rail had stopped running, so I had to take a cab back to my hotel.

So when people ask me why I choose ATI over nVidia, I tell them: I like ATI because they never put me on a bus to a strip club at 1am, costing me my valuable sleep and a $15 cab fare.

Labels: memories

So Darren has alerted me to the fact that Rag Doll Kung Fu is going to be available via Steam (Valve's online game distribution system) very soon. Huzzah!

Robin says in a recent post that

You know how people always talk about the potential games have to make people learn? Explore new worlds, experience different roles, play around with new systems and ideas? I agree with all of that crap. But there’s something that we don’t spend a ton of time talking about, when it comes to evangelizing the benefits of gaming - and that’s joy.

Reading that, I was reminded of a great quote from Brian Sutton-Smith's The Ambiguity of Play, which was a book I read while writing my thesis. He says that

belief in play as progress [in developing skills] is something that most Westerners cherish, but its relevance to play has been more often assumed than demonstrated. Most educators over the past two hundred years seem to have so needed to represent playful imitation as a form of children's socialization and moral, social, and cognitive growth that they have seen play as being primarily about development rather than enjoyment. (9-10)

So yep. Just wanted to share that quote. The next time you're trying to justify why we should play games to someone who just doesn't get it, maybe you should mention the sheer joy of play.