Double Fine Productions’ next game has been announced. It’s called Brütal Legend, and it’s an action game set in a heavy metal world (hence the umlaut). So you get a little Guitar Hero vibe, a little Tenacious D influence (since the main character is based on Jack Black), plus a good helping of Tim Schafer goodness.
Check out the press release, which doesn’t mention Jack Black’s involvement at all, and the official site.
The king of Saudi Arabia recently visited the UK, which was a historic occasion. Guess what music was played to welcome him? Watch the first 40 seconds of this video.
(Via James and the Blue Cat.)
Tell me I’m wrong.
*) Except for my current clients ;)
Falko Löffler has posted a mini-rant about the lost genre of submarine simulations. In German. Basically, he doesn’t see the point of simulating a submarine.
I do. I don’t like them or play them, but I do see the point. They have one quality which is fairly rare, and it has to do with immersion.
There is a very basic assumption in computer games, which is that the more immersed a player is, the better. (It is so basic it tends to be forgotten, and this has caused an industry blind spot that is having interesting consequences right now… but that’s another blog post.)
The more immersed a player is, the more the player feels he or she is ‘there’, and the stronger the emotions that can be evoked.
A lot of time and money and effort is invested in photorealistic graphics in order to facilitate immersion. But rather than pushing the player towards immersion, it is much more important to remove obstacles that keep the player from immersing herself. Consistency is much more important than photorealism, and much harder to achieve (because everything needs to be consistent, not just the graphics).
A single element that is ‘off’ can break the player’s suspension of disbelief and thus reduce immersion, and photorealism actually makes this problem harder. Realistic-looking characters create expectations of realistic physics and realistic behavior, and before you know it you’ve fallen into the Uncanny Valley.
But back to submarine sims. The most basic obstacle to immersion is the physical interface between player and game. You are holding an odd piece of plastic in your hand while staring at your TV, but we are asking you to forget all that (on some level) and believe you are a secret agent sneaking around a building. That’s a pretty large leap.
(Luckily, over time people manage to forget things like this. The physical interface becomes a part of the conventions of the medium. Holding a bunch of paper sheets glued together or sitting in a dark room staring at a glowing rectangle are no longer inhibiting people from immersing themselves. By now, seeing glowy, floating icons in otherwise realistic surroundings no longer confuses people either - consider the interfaces of GTA versus The Getaway. People ‘get’ glowy, floating icons now, and it’s starting to flow back into the world outside of games. I fully expect augmented reality to use game iconography.)
Now as it happens, a lot of the work of controlling a submarine involves sitting in the dark behind a screen, pushing buttons and listening to sounds. Sure, the captain is standing around shouting orders and looking through periscopes, but typically submarine sims simulate the various positions under the captain and the captain role is implicit.
So submarine sims, in their heyday, had an interesting advantage: they were able to provide much deeper immersion than most other genres. After all, it’s not hard to simulate sitting in the dark behind a screen, pushing buttons and listening to sounds. The entire physical interface barrier drops down to almost nothing. Assuming you are fascinated enough by submarines to want to pretend to control one, very little is going to spoil your illusion that you’re in a narrow metal tube, deep under water, hunting the enemy - or being hunted. This was pointed out to me years ago by my friend Mark Barrett.
The only genres I can think of that do this better than submarine sims (and air-traffic controller sims), are games like Hacker and Alternate Reality Games (ARGs). I would even go so far as to argue that Hacker is a proto-ARG. (If you like pondering this kind of stuff, consider the basic premise of the Dot Hack series. The player of these single-player console games is pretending to be the player of a massively-multiplayer online game… I haven’t played any of them, but I find it fascinating.)
The relationship between the player, as a physical person, and the fictional world of most computer games is quite complex and absolutely central to how games evoke emotions.
I just came across a ton of videos of Ricky Jay performances on YouTube. Ricky Jay is one of the world’s great sleight-of-hand artists, as well as an expert on the history of magic and author of several books. I highly recommend this New Yorker article. A small excerpt:
Deborah Baron, a screenwriter in Los Angeles, where Jay lives, once invited him to a New Year’s Eve dinner party at her home. About a dozen other people attended. Well past midnight, everyone gathered around a coffee table as Jay, at Baron’s request, did closeup card magic. When he had performed several daz- zling illusions and seemed ready to retire, a guest named Mort said, “Come on, Ricky. Why don’t you do something truly amazing?”
Baron recalls that at that moment “the look in Ricky’s eyes was, like, `Mort- you have just fucked with the wrong person.’ ”
Jay told Mort to name a card, any card. Mort said, “The three of hearts.” After shuffling, Jay gripped the deck in the palm of his right hand and sprung it, cascading all fifty-two cards so that they travelled the length of the table and pelted an open wine bottle.
“O.K., Mort, what was your card again?”
“The three of hearts.”
“Look inside the bottle.”
Mort discovered, curled inside the neck, the three of hearts. The party broke up immediately.
Confused by all the changes Sony has been making to their Playstation 3 model line?
Chris Kohler made a handy Venn diagram of the PlayStation 3 models and their feature sets. Although I think he left out HDMI? Wasn’t there something retarded where the cheaper PS3s don’t have HDMI out? Because my new TV has two HDMI inputs gathering dust here. (Yes, I know there are now Xbox 360s with HDMI out.) Apart from that, it looks like the ‘old’ 20GB PS3 would be the ideal model for me.
You know, if I wanted one.
Remember LOLCode? There’s now a functioning .Net LOLCode compiler. Debug “IM IN YR LOOP” right inside Visual Studio.
(Via Boing Boing Blog.)
Update: Craigslist ad for LOLCode developers here.
YOU CAN HAS CHEEZEBURGER?
YOU HAS A FLAVUR?If so, you may be the right fit for this Midtown Manhattan Web Design Startup! We are a small company looking for a Senior LOLCode Developer, preferably with at least 1 month experience developing LOLapps. Please send a resume, along with links to any web-based LOLapps you have developed.
KTHXBYE
(Also via BoingBoing.)
John Scalzi has an amusing (and profanity-laced) post about how not to increase traffic to your blog. It is a response to some blog post with ‘5 Ways To Get More Traffic To Your Blog’ or some ridiculous title like that.
I find this interesting for two reasons. One has to do with this quote:
I go to conventions and writers’ events, as most of you know. And invariably the most annoying person there is the aspiring writer or neo-pro who is simply there to network, and does so in a graspingly obvious fashion: the guy who goes from group to group, looking for the right people who will eventually let him trade up to standing in a conversational circle with, oh, let’s say, Neil Gaiman, so he can ever-so-casually drop the name of his latest book/story/whatever into Gaiman’s ear.
I know people like this, and although they are annoying, I do find it fascinating that there is such a strong disconnect between how these people perceive themselves, and how others perceive them. Because as Scalzi says:
There’s nothing wrong with networking; there’s nothing wrong with talking about your book with Neil Gaiman (or whomever) either, should you get a chance. But it’s all in how it’s done. To repeat: People aren’t stupid. They know the difference between someone who is engaged in a conversation for the pleasure of the conversation itself, and someone who is marking time in the conversation until they can once again open their mouths and talk about them.
(Boy, he has it easy if he only meets people that wait for others to stop talking.)
I can’t think of anything that demonstrates as clearly and quickly that civilized society is based on unspoken rules than someone completely and blithely ignoring those rules. You end up in this confusing situation where your strategies for dealing with life stop working. Having to explain that one cannot do X or Y (obviously) is simply too embarassing, and might offend. What do you do? (When you figure it out, go hang out with Borat and spoil his jokes.)
(more…)
I’m sure you’ve heard that J.K. Rowling has outed Dumbledore as gay.
I find it amusing, but beyond that I have no strong opinion on the subject. However, there are people over at Making Light who do. The comments there are a good read (to read the ROT13-encrypted comments, try this bookmarklet) and highly informative, as always. I now know more about slash fiction that I knew before.
The question of the relevance of an author’s statements outside of the text is not an easy one to answer, but I tend towards considering it relevant. I am not saying I find it completely uninteresting to think about what one can or cannot read out of a text, but it typically has little to do with the story. The things people tend to want to find or not find in the subtext inevitably are political, and to me that quickly gets, well, boring. But then I would say that as a straight white male, wouldn’t I.
And perhaps I am slightly contradicting myself but adding that I am much less amused by Rowling allegedly saying Harry Potter is a Christian allegory. I am glad I finished the Potter books before hearing about that. I’ve never read the Narnia books, but the movie was pretty much spoiled for me because all the hullabaloo over the Christian allegoricness. Part of my brain kept trying to decode what was going on as potential Christian propaganda.
Anyway. At the time I write this, none of the commenters in the Making Light thread seem to have considered this possibility: What if the work of Harry Potter is more than just the text of the 7 Harry Potter novels? What it if it is not just expressed in the medium of the novel? Wouldn’t Rowling’s remark then become canon? What if the ambiguity is part of the work? Where does the work end? I admit that this doesn’t sound like something J.K. Rowling would do, but still, I find it an interesting set of questions to ponder.
A reader asked me if I knew of any games that can be used to treat ADHD (Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder - it is called TDA/H in some other countries).
A quick Google turned up this USA Today article that discusses the issue (and amusingly mentions players ’slaying Spyro the Dragon’).
It seems far from clear that this is a proven, effective technique to treat ADHD. But then, the impression I get is that ADHD in general is a very thorny issue.
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