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Off the Grid reviews RoboRally
Filed under: Reviews, Strategy
Every other week Scott Jon Siegel contributes Off the Grid, a column on gaming away from the television screen or monitor.
In 1992, Richard Garfield met with a new company called Wizards of the Coast in order to get them to publish a board game he designed with Mike Davis. They liked what they saw, but at the time they weren’t interested in board games; they wanted something more portable, a game that “would go over well at conventions.” For this, Garfield revisited a card game he’d first designed in the early 80’s.
The card game became the phenomenally successful Magic: The Gathering, but we’re not dealing with that right now. A year after Magic first hit the shelves of hobby stores, Wizards of the Coast published Garfield’s clever board game about robots: RoboRally.
The premise is simple enough to be appealing. A factory’s computer reprograms its robotic workers during after-hours to have a little fun. Robots compete against each other to capture flags placed around the factory, while avoiding hazards like pits and lasers, and each other. Sounds like fun? Well, it is. Eventually.
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Off the Grid: I was a student scholar
Every other week Scott Jon Siegel contributes Off the Grid, a column on gaming away from the television screen or monitor.
Since I couldn’t find anyone to play Robo Rally with me this week, I thought I’d take this opportunity to instead discuss my experience as one of the IGDA’s Student Scholars at this year’s Game Developers Conference.
For the past seven years, the International Game Developers Association has been sending students interested in a future career in video games to GDC. A panel of professional game developers judges all the submitted applications, and each year 25 students are selected to receive free passes to the event. Each student is also paired with an industry mentor, and all the scholars are given an orientation session for the conference, and a tour of a local studio. I was honored to have been chosen as one of this year’s student scholars, and found my first GDC experience to be all the more worthwhile as a result.
The three-day conference started on Wednesday, so Tuesday morning we met as a group for a special orientation session. A few of the scholars had already met up the previous night, as part of an unofficial pre-GDC get-together. Some of the student scholars were undergrads, but others were graduate students, and the group ranged widely in age. The disciplines and interests of the students varied widely as well, with artists, designers, coders, and audiophiles all equally represented. Part of our orientation had to do with simply meeting each other, exchanging business cards and conversing with peers who might very well be industry bigwigs in a few years; some of them just give off that vibe.
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Off the Grid: The Metagame at GDC
Every other week Scott Jon Siegel contributes Off the Grid, a column on gaming away from the television screen or monitor.
On the final day of the 2007 Game Developers Conference, Gamelab’s Eric Zimmerman and area/code’s Frank Lantz organized a one-hour presentation on a unique game concept they’d been developing. Dubbed “a battle of videogame smarts,” the Metagame challenged both its participants and the audience to engage in discussion revolving around their favorite games of the last thirty years.
Two teams, comprised of well-established industry personalities, made their way around the virtual game board, attempting to qualify statements such as “Lemmings is more strategic than Civilization 3,” and “Guitar Hero is more culturally sophisticated than Parappa the Rapper.”
The red team consisted of game designer Jonathan Blow, industry veteran Warren Spector, and Tracy Fullerton, currently an assistant professor at the university of Southern California’s Interactive Media Division. The blue team was made up of ludologist and videogame theorist Jesper Juul, Ubisoft lead designer Clint Hocking, and game designer and industry veteran Marc LeBlanc.
During a turn, each team moves its piece on a projected board; a web of classic games like Doom, Zork, Myst, and more contemporary titles like Rez and World of Warcraft. Each space represents a particular game, and the space that the one team lands on creates a comparative statement with the second team’s space, formed by cards like “has better audio than” and “is more violent than” on a second projected screen.
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Off the Grid interviews Brian Reynolds of Big Huge Games
Filed under: Microsoft Xbox 360, Online, Strategy, Interviews
Every other week Scott Jon Siegel contributes Off the Grid, a column on gaming away from the television screen or monitor.
Big Huge Games, the developer behind the acclaimed Rise of Nations series, recently made a splash on the internet with the announcement that they were bringing the board game Settlers of Catan to Xbox Live Arcade. It’s news that even palpitated the steel heart of Penny Arcade’s Tycho, and for damn good reason.
I recently had a chance to discuss Catan with Brian Reynolds, CEO and creative director of Big Huge Games. Reynolds talks at length about the difficult process of adapting such an esteemed title, touching upon issues like designing challenging computer opponents, mapping moves and menus to the 360 controller, and tweaking Catan’s refined rules for ranked and non-ranked matches on Xbox Live. It’s all here. And we’ve got photos too!
Let’s talk about how Catan Live was born. Who went to who with the idea? Did Big Huge Games want to make Catan for XBLA, or did Microsoft want Big Huge Games to make Catan?
It was actually Microsoft who approached us - last spring I had no idea the project possibility even existed, but Microsoft was looking for developers to bring “Euro” board games to XBLA, and they came to us early in the process. Obviously once we knew about the project we were very excited.
So you were tasked with porting a renowned analog title to a digital platform. Where do you begin? What was the absolute first step in designing?
Wow, the very first step? In the rulebook for the board game, there are some black-and-white diagrams of the mapboard. I took one of those and xeroxed it up to the size of a full page, and then used it to create a system for numbering the hex tiles, the corners of the tiles, and the edges of the tiles that would be easy for the computer to deal with. Because one of my two initial concerns was whether we’d be able to make a decent A.I. for the computer player, so I started right in on some basic A.I. and rules coding, since I didn’t need much graphics work to be done to start working on that.
The word is that Klaus Teuber had a hand in the project. What did he bring to the development process?
Yes, he was instrumental in helping us create the A.I. for the game. It turns out that over the years since designing the original board game, Klaus Teuber has always wanted to have a strong computer player, and so he had put a lot of thought into what the proper strategies and tactics were, and formulas that would be useful for helping a computer player evaluate choices. Of course he’d never had a chance to bring these into play, because the developers of previous versions of the game either didn’t have time to do a full treatment of his ideas, or else decided to try their own approach altogether. So he had these Excel spreadsheets full of formulae, plus a nice write-up he’d done. Being an old-time A.I. guy, I looked at these and saw gold: here was somebody (the designer of the game no less) who’d already done the legwork of collecting the tactical situations and strategies, and even done some of the work of creating algorithms to choose between them. So I was able to blast through all of that stuff in a few weeks, and use most of my time refining the really high-end game for the expert players. The result… a much stronger opponent at the top level!
Gallery: Catan Live development photos
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Off the Grid reviews Pink Godzilla Dev Kit
Filed under: Features, Reviews, Simulations, Strategy
Every other week Scott Jon Siegel contributes Off the Grid, a column on gaming away from the television screen or monitor.
This game was clearly made for me. An analog game about developing digital games? It’s like they were listening to my dreams.
The “they” in this case is Pink Godzilla Games, a hip little video game store based in Seattle. Although their current claim to fame is a ping pong tournament against the Penny Arcade boys, they’ve also recently gotten into the analog game business. At PAX 2006, they debuted the beta version of the Pink Godzilla Dev Kit, a full-color card game designed by attorney(!) Christopher Rao. It’s all about creating video games, and the creators have certainly done their homework when it comes to appealing to the gamer crowd. In-jokes and references abound in this strategy title about everyone’s favorite fantasy job.
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Playing Dirty: The queer hero
This week, Scott Jon Siegel contributes Playing Dirty, Bonnie Ruberg’s column on sex and gender in video games:
In her last several columns, Bonnie has talked about the role of effeminate men as protagonists in video games. In her examples, she’s discussed threats to the heterosexual male archetype, and, I believe, has hinted at the possibility for an even more potent figure: the queer hero.
In my mind, the queer hero is almost a challenge to the industry, which so often writes archetypal characters for the sake of easy identification by their audience. Homosexuality has been present in video games for years, but often as a farce — at best, a flamboyant frog in Rare’s Banjo-Tooie but, at worst, figures to be ridiculed, as amusing as a minstrel show.
The queer hero is not merely “gay for gay’s sake.” Rather, I define the queer hero as a protagonist whose orientation is arguably less-than-normative, but which ultimately plays no part in the telling of his or her story. This automatically discredits the lipstick lesbians of Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix, whose “taboo” romance played an overt role in the game’s marketing to a young male audience. No, the queer hero is, to put it simply, “cool,” and seen as “cool” neither because of his/her sexuality, nor in spite of it.
Assuming this character couldn’t possibly already exist, I’ve fantasized for years about the making of a truly great game, with a protagonist who just happens to be gay. But one random, crude webcomic made me double back on my assumption, and take a closer look at one of gaming’s most popular franchises. In Resident Evil 4, Leon S. Kennedy, the once-rookie cop from RE2, returns to the series wearing blue-jeans and a bomber jacket — dressed for success. I played through the entire game without giving it a thought, but looking back, I think I found my queer hero.
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Off the Grid: Hacking LCR
Every other week Scott Jon Siegel contributes Off the Grid, a column on gaming away from the television screen or monitor.
Don’t be surprised if you haven’t heard of LCR. My exposure to the game came from my brother, who was presented with a copy — along with everyone else in the studio audience — as part of Rachel Ray’s Thanksgiving special a few weeks back. It was one of four token gifts handed out to audience members before the über-surprise — brand new cellphones for everyone! — was announced. Having no need for what he quickly dismissed as “Dreidel with dice,” my brother passed the game along to me.
LCR comes packaged in a clear plastic tube, containing two-dozen red plastic chips, three special LCR dice, and a small one-sided sheet of paper with the rules. The packaging describes it as “the new game that everyone’s getting hooked on.” It looked modest enough, but its purported popularity certainly piqued my interest.
Am I endorsing LCR? It’s certainly not on par with classics like Settlers of Catan, or even cultural mainstays like Life or Monopoly. But no game is without potential. By itself, LCR may be dull, but the smallest twist, tweak, or hack can breathe life into even the stalest gameplay experience.
The rules for LCR are basic enough, calling for a minimum of three players to be seated in a circle. Each player is given three chips to start. During his/her turn, a player rolls all three LCR dice. For every ‘L’ rolled, the player passes a chip to the left. For every ‘R,’ a chip to the right. For each ‘C,’ a player adds a chip to the center pot. The three sides of the dice with dots on them do nothing. Play continues in one direction until only one player has any chips left. If a player has no chips left, that player is still in the game, but does not roll dice during his/her turn. A player with two chips rolls only two dice, and a player with only one chip rolls one die. The last player with chips remaining wins the game.
The notable upside to these rules is that nobody in the game gets eliminated. Even if you’re out of chips, you could be back in the game easily if the adjacent players roll an ‘L’ or ‘R’ in your favor. The downside, however, is that gameplay is completely based on chance, and skill has no part in it whatsoever. The unpredictability might make LCR fun for the first few rounds, but where do you go from there?
Well, for starters, you turn to gambling and booze.
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Off the Grid: Thanksgiving edition (or industry favorites)
Filed under: Culture, Features
Every other week Scott Jon Siegel contributes Off the Grid, a column on gaming away from the television screen or monitor.
Between the launches of the PS3 and the Nintendo Wii, we’re just about up to our ears in digital game coverage. So I’ve taken it upon myself to balance things out a bit with some analog lovin’. Fail to secure the hottest consoles on their launch dates? Looking for something a little less expensive to get you through the week? Or are you just jonesing for something other than Zelda? No need to worry; Off the Grid’s got you covered.
This week, in honor of Thanksgiving in the States (ok, not really), I’ve asked a few developers and industry personalities what their favorite non-digital games are. Like a great big turkey dinner with your relatives, let’s dispense with the formalities and just dive right in.
At present, it’s probably Alan Moon’s TICKET TO RIDE, a railroad game. Multiplayer, simple rules set but with surprising strategic complexity, playable in less than an hour, and sufficient randomness that games are not monotonously similar, but not so much that luck overwhelms the better players. I first played it in a wood-stove-heated country house in the depths of a Finnish winter night, but these days play it more often with my kids.
– Greg Costikyan, Manifesto Games
My GO anecdote is actually stolen from Mahk LeBlanc, ex-Looking Glass guy. Mahk said that when the aliens finally land, and we learn to communicate with them, and then we describe Go, they’ll reply, “oh yeah, we have that game”. It’s the uber game. Most complexity and subtlety and beauty from fewest rules. It will never be bested.
After that, it’s a long way down, but maybe Sid Sackson’s DOMINATION?
– Chris Hecker, EA/Maxis
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Joystiq interviews Spore’s Chaim Gingold and Chris Hecker
Filed under: PC, Simulations, Interviews
On the first day of the Montreal International Game Summit, Chaim Gingold and Chris Hecker presented a keynote on the topic of “advanced prototyping,” specifically as to how it pertains to Spore, the game that currently occupies their time over at EA/Maxis. The same talk, given at the 2006 Game Developers Conference, was rated higher than any other presentation, including Will Wright’s, their boss’s. Before the keynote, Joystiq had a chance to chat with both Chaim and Chris, and discuss their impetus for joining Maxis, the evolution of Spore, and the relationship between Maxis and EA.
You’re both at Maxis now. How did each of you get there?
CHRIS HECKER: We both started full-time the same day, actually.
CHAIM GINGOLD: Yeah. I was at Georgia Tech doing a masters program in integration design and technology, and there was a required internship over the summer. My advisor asked me “where are you going to work?” And I was like “I don’t know.” She was like “Didn’t you have an interest in working with games?” and I was like “It would be fun to work with Will Wright, not that that would ever happen. That would be totally crazy.” And then one day I got an e-mail from him, saying “We’re looking for interns.” And then an hour later I got an email back saying “You got it.” And so I got the internship, and at the time there were like four or five people working on Spore. That sort of really small team, and I spent the summer working on that. Everyone was crunching on TSO [The Sims Online], and when I got done they asked me back, so I came back.
When was that?
CG: I’ve been there four, five years now.
CH: So, I was working in indie games for, like, eight years, and my wife was basically paying the mortgage. She kinda had the high-powered, executive job. And then, we had a baby, and she decided: “Well, I’m quitting. It’s your turn to actually work.” And I was like “Uh-oh! I guess I’m going to have to make some money.” Indie games don’t pay that well.
So, I knew Will from GDC stuff, I’m on the advisory board of the GDC. And I was like “Hey Will, what’re you working on now?” So I went out there, and we talked about what to do, and I started working as a contractor there the same day Chaim came in from his full-time job, and they didn’t have enough desk space for us, and we were basically sitting *right* next to each other (laughs). So it’s been close ever since. And I contracted there for a year and a couple months, and they wanted me to go full-time, so I said “Sure. I’m having a really good time. The teams are great, and the project is innovative and cool.” So now we’re both there, cranking on Spore.
You’ve both been there for a while working on Spore?
CH: Yeah, like three years now.
Which is a pretty long development period.
CH: And it was in development before that, too. Like, a couple years before that. I mean, Chaim was there a year before with his internship.
CG: Jason was there.
CH: Jason was already there for two years working on it.
CG: Yeah, it’s been incubating for a very long time.
How much has it evolved since you’ve been there?
CG: It’s changed a lot. Like, the summer I was there, there was no actual game to it. It was very much like what you’d expect if you could go into Will Wright’s secret underground lair, and see all of the, like, think about Sim-Earth, and what are all the crazy prototypes you wrote for Sim-Earth? That summer, it was like crazy science projects, and there was no game. It was like, crazy fluid simulations, and space colonization simulations, and little games and prototypes, just searching out this huge space. By the time I came back there a much more coherent, “this is a game. I’m going to go from here to here.” And the player creativity wasn’t even a big component then. It was much more of this geeky thing. So that was, coming in, a way to make the game more accessible and appealing.
CH: Yeah, now we’re clearly out of pre-production and into production and headed towards ship, and now we have a really clear idea of what the game is, and we’re just trying to get it done. Which is not to say that there aren’t still cool and innovative things happening, but there’s 80 people or whatever all cranking in the same direction. So, back from the free-wheeling days of crazy prototypes.
CG: If you think about it like making a cathedral. Back then, everyone was drawing, like, crazy sketches on maps and “Oh! what if we made it really tall, and made it out of glass, you know, and it was like metal, and we made the foundation out of tinfoil?” Whereas now, it’s like “We have a big blueprint for the whole thing. And we’re 3/4 of the way through construction. And it’s like “This window isn’t quite working out right, and what color should the glass be?”
CH: So the amplitude of the changes gets way smaller. Like, it’s a big deal to make a change about whether that button is over here or over there now, whereas before it was like “I don’t think we’re gonna have creatures! And we’re instead gonna have UFO’s!”
Was there a definite turnover period where the project shifted?
CH: Pre-production to production, is basically what we call that. In fact, EA has actually broken out pre-production into two parts now. Cuing off of what film does, there’s this concept of “discovery,” and there’s concept of “pre-production,” and then there’s “production,” and “post,” and then “ship.” Discovery is kinda where you’re trying to figure out what you’re going to build. Pre-production is where you’re figuring out how you’re going to build it. And then production is like “Okay, we know how we’re doing it, now we just need to actually do it.” I guess it’s not quite as simple as that, since you actually loop back a couple times, hopefully in smaller and smaller increments.
CG: It’s actually been quite a lot of soft transitions for us, or that’s how it felt to me. But there’s been more pressure coming down. Over time, there’s more and more resistance to change. It’s kinda like a forcing factor, like we really have to finish this thing. If you make a decision, you have to stick with it, and if you need to change something, you need to have a really good reason for it. That knob has been slowly turned up over time, with the very, very awesome goal of actually getting this to be a product that’s put into stores.
CH: Being in production, the cost of change goes way up. That’s why pre-production and discovery are about trying to figure all those things out, and trying to eliminate the risk, so you can just grind it out. It’s not quite as clean as that, because nothing with humans ever works out quite that clean, but that’s the goal and we try and keep to that.
Talking about EA’s role, how has their push-and-pull affected the game’s development?
CH: When I first started, I asked Will “How do you like working for EA?” because I didn’t know. And he was like “Oh, I love it.” Back when Maxis was trying to be its own publisher, they were trying to kill The Sims, whereas the executives from EA came in, and saw The Sims, and were like “This is money. We have to make this.” The conventional wisdom is like “Oh, EA: giant overlord,” but actually from Will’s standpoint, talking to him, it’s actually been really really great. And he stays there. Obviously he doesn’t need the job, but he’s there because he gets to do what he wants to do.
Will definitely creates a giant umbrella for us. There’s this umbrella of protection over random influences, which is totally awesome. At the same time, some of EA’s corporate goals now are to create more innovative products. They realize that the whole “sequel-itis” thing is not going to get you to where we need to be in ten or fifteen years, as an industry and an art form. So Spore, being one of the “new IP’s,” we’ve been given a lot of leeway.
At the same time, like Chaim said, a certain amount of that pressure is really good. If you don’t have any kind of pressure, you know, from the people whose money you’re spending, you’ll often spin off into randomness. Having that kind of feedback loop where people are going “You know, that doesn’t seem to be making your game more compelling; how can we focus that down to get it to ship?” I mean, the reason we work on games is we want people to play. We want real, normal people to be able to buy our games and go play them. And if you don’t focus down, you’ll never get to do that.
CG: And there’s sort of this interesting thing, you know, because it’s Will Wright working for EA — there’s sort of an interesting confluence here. You have arguably the most influential American game designer in the whole world working for the biggest game publisher in the whole world. So he has an awesome amount of independence times the awesome resources of EA. I don’t think anyone could be making this game right now anywhere else.
What are your roles at Maxis?
CG: I’m the designer for the in-game editors, and I’ve done a bunch of programming across the whole project. I spent years working on the editor UI, and making sure it was really good, trying to solve the 3-D UI problems. Now I’m focusing a lot of my time on the first level of the game, the cell game. I’m working with the development team to make it really good and fun.
CH: I have a bunch of different roles as well. I guess wearing multiple hats is like a blessing and a curse. I lead two teams. The procedural animation team, which is how the creatures move, so there’s a bunch of technology and design work that goes into that. And then there’s the creature level, which is the level after Cell. Designer Alex Hutchinson and I design and lead that team. That’s where the creatures first come into the game, the ones that you make in the editor that Chaim’s working on.
The thing about Spore, and this is what Chaim was hinting at, is that there’s tendrils out everywhere. So decisions we make on the procedural animation affect the tribe level, and the city, and the UFO’s, and the cell game. It’s one of the amazing and coolest things about Spore, but it’s also one of the most difficult to get your head around. So, anybody who works on Spore really ends up wearing multiple hats. We have this mantra, which is “think across the game.” So there’s five games that make up Spore. Or five or six, I’ve lost count at this point. But we’re trying to ship one coherent game, and it’s sometimes hard, because we’re each working on our games, but we have to always be talking. It makes it difficult, but the payoff is huge.
CG: By the time we come out of development, we’ll hopefully have one integrated, organic, whole product. 
You mentioned that Spore is one of EA’s “new IP’s.” After Spore, what direction do you think Maxis is going in?
CH: It’s interesting, the whole Maxis absorption by EA, and creating brands within the EA, Redwood Shores studio and all that. It’s really interesting to watch. Like The Sims now has its own division, which is separate within EA. It’s not even part of Redwood Shores. It’s this entire division that reports directly to the CEO of the company. Anytime EA invests this much, it’s clear they’re going to try to make an entire franchise out of it.
And then there’s this question of EA’s forward-looking roadmap, which shows how to create new IP’s. So we’re really interested in a lot of those aspects of EA moving forward. It seems like EA’s finally getting the clue that they can’t just sequel products endlessly. Or license them. Well, obviously Madden makes an immense pile of money. But you have to have a mix. Just like the movie industry, and literature, and music, you have to have this churn of new talent and new ideas. It’s great that a super-mega, Fortune-500 corporation understands that they have to be moving in that direction. Not everyone in EA will be able to do their own giant, new product, but you want to start innovating at all levels.
Chaim and I are passionate about the games industry as an art form, hoping that games in the 21st century can be what film was in the 20th century. And it’s possible that EA will be at the forefront of that. It doesn’t necessarily have to come from indies, although there’s a ton of indie stuff going on, which is great too, but you want it to come from all directions. So it’s cool that the bigger companies are realizing that innovation is important, and that we’re going to ghetto-ize ourselves if we don’t keep innovating and bringing in new people.
Have you seen Maxis.com recently? *
CH: What’s actually there now?
It just sends you to The Sims website. It doesn’t even look like Maxis exists anymore. So if someone asks you who you work for, what do you say?
CH: I say Maxis, but that’s probably because, well, I was indie for eight years. I’ve only worked in two real companies my entire life. One is Microsoft, and the other is Electronic Arts. When I worked at Microsoft it was for three years in the early nineties — it was already huge at that point but it wasn’t as huge as it is now — it was fun and energetic, and it was just a bunch of young, smart kids with bad attitudes. I was so clueless, it didn’t really count, so I was indie for eight years. So when I finally “sold out to the man,” I was like “Okay, I’ll sell out to Maxis — that’s at least the smaller ‘man.’”
The reality is, EA pays my paycheck, and I actually have a great job. I love my job. The people I work with, and everything I’ve seen so far is totally amazing. So I can totally see staying there. When I first took the job, I thought “Okay, until I can convince my wife to take her executive job back I’ll just do this contracting thing,” but it’s actually a really satisfying experience. EA, or at least our part of EA, is really an amazing place to work. So I say I work at Maxis, but I actually don’t have any problem saying I work at EA, given the experience I’ve had so far.
And Chaim?
CG: The same. It’s sort of the state of our personal identities.
Some people seem to think that Maxis doesn’t even exist anymore, especially considering the status of the website. Is it anything more than a brand at this point?
CG: For all intents and purposes, there’s one big company called EA, and it’s got a bunch of studios, and the question of Maxis at this point is almost just a branding thing.
CH: A lot of players associate Maxis with The Sims, and Sim-City, and things like that. So my guess is that they would keep it around, but I don’t know. The studio-based model within EA is actually pretty strong, and you end up identifying with the studio you’re working for. So we’re working on Spore, and we identify with that team. It’s hard to say from a marketing standpoint, since we’re not marketing people, so what they’ll actually end up with on the box, we don’t know.
* NOTE: Prior to conducting this interview, the maxis.com website redirected to thesims.ea.com. Sometime after this interview was conducted, however, Maxis.com was re-branded as the official Maxis website, containing links to official Maxis games, and a timeline of the company and its releases. Coincidence?
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MIGS06: Insights into Wii Prince of Persia controls, thanks to Ubisoft CEO
On the Friday after the Montreal International Game Summit, Joystiq had an opportunity to visit several of Montreal’s largest game studios along with a small group of other journalists, thanks to investment firm Investissement Quebec. While touring the Ubisoft Montreal studio, we sat down with CEO Yannis Mallat, who mentioned casually that a Prince of Persia game for the Wii was already in development, and coming along nicely.
M. Mallat said that he had an opportunity to play an early build, and that the controls were fun and intuitive. According to him, the Wii remote could be manipulated to make the prince perform jumps and other moves, while the nun-chuk could be used to throw out the prince’s chain.
While a CEO could hardly be expected to say anything bad about his studio’s game, it’s good to know that the title is still in development, as we haven’t heard anything from it in a while. Of course, it’s also nice to have some ideas as to the control schemes being considered for the game.
To keep this in perspective, however, let us remember that it was a passing comment regarding a game that is still very much in production. Any or all of the control details could change between now and the title’s (eventual) launch. That said, it sounds like it could be fun to fling the prince around using the Wii remote. Thoughts?
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MIGS06: Ken Perlin on “the illusion of life”
Ken Perlin, director of NYU’s Media Lab, spoke at the Montreal International Game Summit on Wednesday on the topic of “revisiting the illusion of life.” Who’s Ken Perlin, you ask? Well, for starters, he’s awesome.
Perlin won an Academy Award in 1997 for his work in procedural textures. He’s had a hand in a large number of CG movies (including TRON), and is getting more and more involved in the video game industry.
“The illusion of life” is a term that Walt Disney first used 60 years ago, and Perlin evokes it to ask the same question. Just as Disney hoped to do in animation, can games achieve “the illusion of life?”
Perlin has been focused recently on emotion in real-time interaction. He believes that the videogame industry is in a unique position; unlike the film industry, it has the potential to direct its digital “actors” in real-time. The industry, however, can no longer rely on animators to generate emotion in characters, and it’s becoming more and more important for the code to carry the brunt of the work. His first example of this is a real-time render of a face, based on his observations of a then-girlfriend. “My actual girlfriend had a higher polygon count,” he admits.
Perlin uses different interface switchers to move around parts of her face, and then shows that by conjoining movements, a programmer can create emotional “chords.” He illustrates this by tightening her lips, half-closing her eyes, and cocking her head back in one direction. The effect is convincing: she looks displeased. Perlin’s work on emotional chords has played a large part in the emotive facial responses of characters in Valve’s Half-Life 2. In fact, his real-time model is almost a dead-ringer for Alyx.
Perlin goes on to discuss the increasing importance of emotion in games. He cites the example of Facade, which he says “takes the level of psychological violence much further than shooter games… I kept saying to myself ‘I’m so glad this isn’t a real dinner party.’”
Perlin then shows the audience the simplest character that can be made to portray emotion. Her name is Polly, and she’s only five polygons. Polly displays emotion with limited movement, like scampering, swaggering, prowling, lumbering, feeling dejected, hotfeet, sprinting, and hopping. According to Perlin, we should refer more to people’s own “database of emotional knowledge,” playing into expectations and letting the brain do the rest. The anithesis of this is Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. “Don’t get me started on Polar Express,” he says, shuddering. He asks us to contrast this hyper-realism with a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Bugs Bunny, as a character, is believable, but “that’s not the same as realism. If Bugs Bunny walked through that door, people would freak out.”
He shows some more demos, the next one of two emotive virtual actors, with full-body awareness of actions. When Perlin grabs the actor’s hand, the actor’s entire body reacts: the feet move, the hips swivel, etcetera. Perlin considers this “full-body awareness” important to in-game animation: “the reason that all game characters are unbelievable… is because of what happens from the waist down.”
His response to this is several experiments in footsteps. One applet is designed to make “smart feet.” Perlin says that “we are, in our minds, magical floating heads and hands.” We don’t often think about the rest of our bodies, he explains, so it’s hard for us to animate convincing people. In each example he shows, he focuses on creating convincing foot movements.
After a few more examples, Perlins begins to wrap up his keynote. In closing, he explains that “people care about the emotions of people… We can do things they can’t do in the film world; we can go beyond film, but our techniques are much younger.”
“The Graduate is a mindfuck,” he says, then stops and asks “am I allowed to say that?” The audience laughs, encouragingly. “Well, anyway,” he goes on, “we want [games] to be that, interactively.”
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Off the Grid: Carcassonne review
Filed under: Reviews, Strategy
Every other week Scott Jon Siegel contributes Off the Grid, a column on gaming away from the television screen or monitor. 
From time to time, I’ll be reviewing analog games here on Joystiq. I’m starting with Klaus-Jürgen Wrede’s Carcassonne, a German board game which came out in 2000 and is already considered a classic of the genre.
If you’re already a fan of Carcassonne, there’s not going to be any new information here for you. You already know that it’s a deceptively simple game, and great fun to play with a few of your friends. This review’s more for the unenlightened, and maybe even those few souls who remain unconvinced that board games can be fun … even ones that are coming to Xbox Live Arcade.
Carcassonne takes its name from the fortified city in southern France, famous for its strategic location and oft-conquered land. The game focuses on developing the land around Carcassonne, as each player vies for control of roads, farms, cities and cloisters.
At its core, Carcassonne is a tile-laying game, challenging players to build the land to their advantage, and deploy their followers strategically. During a turn, a player draws a land tile, and places it down on the ever-growing map of the area. Each tile played must connect logically to the tiles surrounding it — roads must continue, as must city walls and fields. Once the player places a tile, he or she then has the option of placing one of four kinds of followers on the land: a knight, a monk, a thief, or a farmer.
There’s only one generic type of follower piece in Carcassonne, affectionately nicknamed a “meeple.” Rather than having defining characteristics like helmets and straw hats, the role of a specific meeple is determined by its placement. A knight is a meeple placed within a city; a monk is one placed within a cloister; a thief is deployed on a road, while a farmer is played onto an open field.
Players score points by placing their meeples strategically. Meeples earn more points for players when they control more land. A knight meeple, for instance, earns two points for each tile of city it controls. The challenge for a player is to then build a city as large as possible, in order to earn the most points.
Each player only has seven meeples to deploy, so a great deal of the game’s strategy entails the effective management of limited meeple resources (can you tell that I like saying meeple?). The game ends once all 72 land tiles have been played.
On average, the game takes around 45 minutes to an hour. Up to five people can play, but I can only vouch for the two-player experience. A few nights ago I played Carcassonne with my fiancée as a break from work. With no new Netflix movies to watch and nothing good on television, we sat across from each other on the hardwood floor, taking turns developing the land around the ancient city. Although neither of us had played before, we picked it up the rules quickly.
At the end of the game, the scores were fairly even, but one cleverly-placed farmer tipped the scales drastically. The final score was 140 to 116, in her favor. It’s okay, though. I’ll get her next time.
Scott Jon Siegel is a fledgling game designer, and fancies himself a bit of a writer on the topic as well. His words and games can be found at numberless, which is almost always a work in progress.
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MIGS06: Swag verdict is so-so
Filed under: Culture
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MIGS06: Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s keynote liveblogged (sorta)
Filed under: Culture
Tetsuya Mizuguchi, lead designer of Q Entertainment and the brain behind games like Rez and Lumines, started things off at the Montreal International Game Summit with his keynote presentation. A frustrating lack of WiFi kept me from liveblogging the event, so consider this a liveblog with a several-hour lag. The transcript of Mizuguchi’s keynote follows:
9:15 - At that time, Mizuguchi talks about being inspired by architecture, and “call and response” communication. He saw the musical STOMP around that time, remarking: “this is a great musical, with the music, dance.” After that, he went to many musicals, and thought about why musicals are so fun. “How can we design that kind of feeling in the interactive process?” he asks. This led to Space Channel 5.
As a side note, Mizuguchi mentions that during development of Space Channel 5 Part 2, he received a call from an executive producer in America, saying “Michael wants to appear in your game.” Mizuguchi tells us that he had responded “Who’s Michael?” As a result of that conversation, Michael Jackson makes a cameo appearance in the game, as Mizuguchi considers MJ to be a “pioneer of combined music and dance.” His cameo in Space Channel 5 is “Kind of an homage to him.”
Mizuguchi talks about his next inspiration: the art of Kandinsky, raves, and sensorama. He tells us that Kandinsky painted while listening to music, and worked with the concept of synaethesia, or a mixture of the senses. He also discusses a poster he once saw for Sensorama, which advertised “the revolutionary motion picture system that takes you into another world with 3-D, wide vision, motion, color, stereo-sound, aromas, wind, vibrations.”
“The product” Mizuguchi says, “wasn’t successful, but what a concept.” Around this time, Mizuguchi also visited Zurich, and attended his first rave party. He was blown away by the colors and lights changing with the music. He saw “People dancing. Not dancing, but almost jumping, and I thought ‘what is this?’ How can I design this kind of experience in the interactive process?”
Mizuguchi then rolls some footage of Rez. As the audience watches, he slyly pulls out a digital camera, and takes a few photos of the audience’s reactions. The camera is away by the end of the video.
9:30 - He mentions that all the sound and action of the game is pushed into the “light score,” into the game’s inherent rhythm. “So if you don’t have rhythm skill, that is okay.” He shows the trance vibrator peripheral for the game, and can’t help but crack a smile. He calls his experience working on Rez “a long journey to find what is the fun element in this process… I learned a lot from this project”
“People of any language,” Mizuguchi says, “any culture, identify with music.” His next inspiration: Sony’s PSP, the walkman, cities, and African musical instruments. Mizuguchi refers to the PSP as “an interactive walkman,” and discusses the intersection of puzzle game and music. This, of course, leads him into Lumines.
9:45 - Mizuguchi talks about more inspiration: the iPod, and iTunes music store. “iPod and iTunes changed the style of music,” he says. “Customization, edit: this is the new concept.” He shows a Lumines II demo, with Beck’s “Black Tambourine” being played.
For his next inspiration, Mizuguchi shows more Kandinsky, and A-ha’s “Take on Me” music video. “I wanted to make the music in the music video itself,” he says. “Let’s make a very happy thing.” He then plays the music video for “Heavenly Star,” which he created himself. The song is featured in Lumines II, and is a cool pop song, with A-ha-ish animation in the video. “I love music,” Mizuguchi remarks, “and music videos, and games too.”
Mizuguchi then shows his last inspiration, and it is of a decidedly darker tone: war and the media, post 9-11 news stories, and Kurosawa’s Rashomon. “I don’t talk about ‘the war is good or bad,’” Mizuguchi remarks, “and as a professional, how do you watch this kind of time?”
“Everybody has a point of view of justice,” he says. He talks about different perspectives, and the question of “what is truth?” He then shows video of N3: Ninety Nine Nights, a trailer from the perspectives of the human fighters, defeating the evil monsters heroically. He then talks about how you can play as the monsters, too. A new video is shown, this time from the monster’s perspective, as human soldiers wreak havoc on a town, attacking (monster) women and children. The perspective of the story changes, and humans are drawn as the “bad guys.” This is the perspective of justice he was talking about.
10:00 - Mizuguchi ends his talk with a photo of a sponge, labeled 9″sponge.” “The industry allows us to connect, absorb,” he says, “sucking many things.” “I’m retiring soon…” he announces, and the audience reacts as expected.
“…not soon, but, we should work on young talent, as inspiration to the industry.” Phew.
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Montreal International Game Summit starts this Wednesday
Filed under: Culture, Business
It’s not E3, and it’s not the Game Developers Conference, but maybe that’s a good thing.
Now in its third year, the Montreal International Game Summit brings together a diverse group of the industry’s finest to showcase innovations, and talk about issues old and new to the business.
It’s a small event when compared to the likes of GDC, but MIGS focuses almost entirely on industry-oriented workshops and speakers, and always features an impressive lineup of personalities. This year, Nintendo’s Reggie Fils-Aimé is scheduled to give a keynote, as is Q Entertainment’s Tetsuya Mizuguchi, best known for trance-inspired titles like Lumines and Rez.
Joystiq will be there, covering the best of the presentations, workshops, and speakers. With any luck, we might even get in a few extra-special interviews (so keep your fingers crossed for us).
More in Montreal: For a more consumer-oriented gaming event, check out the Arcadia Gaming Festival, which starts later this week.
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Barnes and Noble celebrates National Games Week (for like a whole month)
In honor of National Games Week, Barnes and Noble has expanded their normally paltry collection of board games to include seminal classics like Carcassonne, Settlers of Catan, Robo-Rally, and more.
National Games Week officially starts on November 19 (hey, that’s when the Wii launches!), but Barnes and Noble has decided to start the party a little early. While a lot of the games can be easily found at specialty stores, it’s good to see them getting mainstream exposure. And if you don’t live near any specialty gaming stores, but have a local B&N, this might be a great opportunity to pick up a terrific addition to your collection, or make a special holiday request.
What? Didn’t you hear that analog games are back in style?
A more complete list of available games after the break.
In case you’re looking for a particular title, here’s a list of games which Barnes & Noble is now carrying (not all-inclusive):
- Axis and Allies
- Blokus
- Carcassonne
- Hey! That’s My Fish
- I’m the Boss
- Knights of Charlemagne
- Niagara
- Puerto Rico
- Robo-Rally
- Settlers of Catan
- Shear Panic
- Tsuro
I personally wish they were carrying Reiner Knizia’s Lord of the Rings board game, and maybe a few of James Ernest’s Cheapass games, like Kill Doctor Lucky. Anything else you feel should be included?
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We (don’t) wait for the Wii (Kingston, NY edition)
Filed under: Culture, Nintendo Wii
I don’t normally do the launch day thing, but I figured I’d give it a go this time. My plan was to hit up my local Toys R Us before it opened on Sunday morning, secure my preorder for the Wii, and essentially be done with the stressful portion of the process.
Of course, I just had to stop by TRU the night before, just to see if anyone was silly enough to camp out. Sure enough, at 11pm on Saturday, there were already ten people in line, setting up tents and prepping a grill for the long night ahead.
I could have made my stand right there. I had the option of gathering supplies at home, and returning in under an hour, bundled up with my DS and a nice comfy stool to sit on. I also knew someone staying at the hotel across the street, and even had the option of crashing at their place, waking up early Sunday morning to drag my weary bones over to the store at some ungodly hour.
But why bother?
At that point the absurdity of the whole thing far outweighed the fun of it. I can understand camping out for the console itself: At the end of a long waiting period, you would go into the store, be handed the big, shiny box, and you would know that you’re going to be playing it as soon as you get it home.
But with preorders, you do the same amount of waiting, and all it leaves you with is a receipt. You’re cold, run-down, deprived of sleep, and all you have to show for it is a slip of paper saying “come back in three weeks.” Where’s the fun in that?
This post is for all those who didn’t wait out in the cold. You might camp out on the actual launch day, or you might not. Maybe you’re not an early adopter; maybe you’re still saving your pennies; or maybe you’re just waiting for Brawl. Whatever the case may be, you spent Saturday night indoors, and you’re no worse the wear for it. Kudos.
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Wired reports on Gizmondo’s high-speed crash-up
Filed under: Culture, Portable, Business
Clocking in at over 6,000 words, Sullivan’s piece delves deeply into the seedy history of both Gizmondo and Erikkson. The bizarre tale — involving Erikkson’s history as a drug dealer, and the company’s close affiliations with Sweden’s Uppsala Mafia — has never been this extensively investigated, and the article covers a lot of ground in order to shed some light on a remarkable story which only gets stranger the deeper you dig.
Also worth noting are the story’s outstanding accompanying illustrations, as seen above, done by comic book artist Jae Lee.
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Times Square tourists learn that it’s “Cruel 2 B Kind”
Filed under: Culture, Strategy
When the masterminds behind I love bees and Disaffected! band together to design a game, you know it’s going to be good. This past weekend, Jane McGonigal (42 Entertainment) and Ian Bogost (Persuasive Games) premiered Cruel 2 B Kind, a self-described game of “benevolent assassination,R