Games: A Big Name in Video Games

Every area of human endeavour has its big names. Those people who have made a big impact. The personalities run the gamut. From giants and heroes on one end of the spectrum to the quiet unassuming types on the other.

In the world of video games one such quiet name is Shigeru Miyamoto. Miyamoto may not be a household name but some of the video game franchises he has created certainly are. You may have heard of Zelda. You've probably heard of Donkey Kong. You most certainly have heard of Mario. All those and more are his creations.

Considering the impact his games have had on generations of players it's amazing how little is widely known about the man. Last year Nick Paumgarten took a look at Miyamoto in the New Yorker. Master of Play is a delightful look inside the mind of the man who's creations have entertained so many for so long.

We should all be so lucky to spend out time recreating the joyful parts of our childhoods as part of our job. Even if we can't do that ourselves we have the work of Miyamoto as he takes us to the best part of his own.

Language: A Letter Long Since Lost

I like reading a lot of books and other texts about history. One interesting side effect of reading a lot of history is that I see snippets of old manuscripts. Usually short quotations and excerpts used to show how times once were. If you see enough of these old snippets of English you realize that we don't seem to use the same alphabet we once did.

One seemingly odd part of the English language was the long S. That slender letter that looks like a normal s that has been stretched vertically. In case you wish to use the long S Andrew West's BabelStone has a detailed post on The Rules for Long S. If knowing when to use it isn't enough he also has The Long and the Short of the Letter S. And if that isn't enough he also has R Rotunda part 1 and part 2.

If that isn't enough it turns out all of BabelStone is a true wonder of the Longer Web. Posts are infrequent but then they'd have to be. They are so thorough and comprehensive that it's hard to imagine the amount of work and effort that goes into each one. The most recent post is part 4 of a series on the ancient Chinese game of Liubo.

From the proper usage of long lost letters to information about a long lost board game. What's not to like? Didn't I say I like to read about history?

Games: Oh What An Adventure We Shall Have!

No, this post isn't about the original Adventure nor is it about the recently released Get Lamp. Interactive fiction will have to wait for another day.

No, this is about adventure games on computers. Why they work and why they don't. Recently a couple of the best of the adventure style games were rereleased for yet another generation of platforms. Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2 have been updated for the most modern gaming consoles and yet they are still the same adventure style games at heart.

(As a pure aside... if you want to have fun understanding how far computer games have come and how primitive early home computers were by today's standards then watch this video of the evolution of PC sound technology illustrated through the music for Monkey Island. I think I owned most of the sound cards and technologies listed. I think I still have my Gravis Ultrasound somewhere. It's amazing how far we've come from bleeps and bloops to full orchestral scores.)

Replaying Monkey Island had me plunging through my bookmarks to find an article by Ron Gilbert called Why Adventures Games Suck. As the designer behind Monkey Island he should know why adventure games suck and what to do about it. After all Monkey Island, and several other LucasArts games, are considered classics of the genre.

Which then lead me to remember a much more recent article Sierra vs. Lucasarts by L.B. Jeffries in Popmatters. The difference in approach symbolized by those two companies really does help capture some of the basic problems and issues in designing and writing good adventure games.

Those two resources won't help you design the next great adventure game but they should help you understand what can make a good game work well. Sadly the genre seems half dead. Sure many other genres include lots of the elements of adventure games but as a stand alone genre the adventure game seems to have fallen out of favour. For now. There will always be stories to tell, games to play through them, and designers who want to do more than just give us wave after wave of enemies to mow down. There will be other adventures to play through we just may have to wait a little while.

Games: Video Game Critiques

It used to be so simple. You munched around a maze avoiding ghosts. The invaders were moving back and forth and getting lower and you shot at them and hid behind little crumbling fortresses. You killed the bad thing. Or you just aligned blocks or found the way out of mazes. Games were simple. If they stood for anything or had any deep significance it was usually in the mind of the beholder and not the mind of the creator.

In simpler times there were simple reviews. Was it worth buying? Were the graphics good? Was the gameplay challenging enough without being impossible?

Things are different now. Games have huge budgets. There are complex stories. There are themes and ideas woven into the fabric of games even when the game seems to be nothing more than "shoot the bad things and survive". Which leads to longer reviews and deeper critiques of games.

Good writers with good ideas and a good understanding of what's being presented in video games now have a chance to show us what's good and not so good about games. And I'm not talking about whether the graphics are up to par or not.

Case in point is Metroid: Other M - The Elephant in the Room by MenTaLguY and Tuvia Dulin. It may have started life as a simple review but it changed into something bigger and deeper. A critique of some of the underlying issues inherent in the story of this particular Metroid game.

Metroid is a series of video games in which the hero turned out to be a heroine. The main character is Samus Aran who goes around protecting the galaxy. Metroid: Other M takes that simple formula... and... well... let's say the writing isn't up to scratch and the new take on the character is a feminist's nightmare.

What's interesting is that this particular critique goes beyond taking aim at the bad writing and occasionally painfully bad scene and looks at the story in it's entirety. It's a worthy piece of literary criticism in it's own right.

It's nice to see well thought out and well written critiques of video games. It's nice to know the medium can deserve such treatment. It's just makes me sad that this particular criticism of the mishandling of a story and a character is even required.

Games: Changing the Rules of a Classic

I never got very good at chess. Sure I learned the rules and a little strategy but I never went far beyond that. I didn't put in the time and the effort to become even remotely competent at chess.

Where I did put some effort into chess was in problems. The idea that people could put together puzzles to be solved caught my attention for a little while longer than chess itself did. Trying to work which moves to make to force checkmate focused my attention.

What really caught my attention was fairy chess and fairy chess problems. My copy of Five Classics of Fairy Chess by T.R. Dawson is well worn and well read. Somehow it really helps that chess problems be presented in a barely post-victorian manner.

What is fairy chess you ask? Well... chess is a game played by a set of rules. Some so basic we take them for granted.

• There is a board of a certain size. 64 squares in a square with 8 rows and 8 columns.
• There are certain number of certain pieces that move in certain specific ways with specific abilities and limitations. The knight is the only piece that can jump over other pieces.
• The moves themselves alternate between white and black. Each player moves one piece on their turn. (With the exception of castling).
• Capturing is performed by moving one of your pieces on top of one of your opponent's pieces.
• There is a fixed goal - to win and not to lose. This forces the rule that kings can't be moved into mate.

All of these rules are well known and well understood. This is what chess is. But what if you decided to change one or more of those basic rules? After all they are just conventions and rules of the official game of chess.

That's where fairy chess comes in. The term fairy is meant as in whimsical or a flight of fancy. Chess problems with altered rules and expectations are sometimes just called fairies. Fairy chess tends to focus on chess problems in which the rules have been changed. What changes can be made? Pretty much take the list above and tweak it.

• Change the size of the board. Limit the squares that can be used in the problem.
• Add new pieces with new moves and abilities. From grasshoppers to nightriders, from generalized leapers to all sorts of exotica.
• There are problems called helpmates where your goal is to help your opponent put you in mate as soon as possible.

And the list goes on and on. As I mentioned fairy chess was, and still is, interested in chess problems. Altering chess itself to give a slightly new game also has a long history. The two seem to overlap a great deal. What one person calls a variant another may call a form of fairy chess.

If you want to explore many variants with new boards, pieces, and rules, the best place to go is The Chess Variant Pages. Start at the main index page and start exploring. There is 3D chess, one dimensional chess, recognized variants, and so much more. I apologize in advance if you end up spending hours looking into and then trying variant after variant. Have fun.

Games: Who Has That Much Time?

I'd like to call your attention to the quaint game of Line Rider. A simple online game in which one draws lines for a little guy on a sled to follow.

Well... not so simple. There are three kinds of lines. Those on which the sled just slides, those on which the sled accelerates or decelerates. and those which are just there for decoration. Skilled people spend hours getting all the little line segments lined up so that the little sled does all sorts of amazing tricks. To get a sense of what can be accomplished watch Millenium by DaPoe, Transcendental by TechDawg, or Line Rider Die at the Slopes by D4N3Train. If you want some idea of how the tracks are put together watch a short tutorial on track making.

If that doesn't blow your mind then may I present The Line Rider Community Collaboration's Evolution of Line Rider. Give people a creative tools and it's amazing what they'll come up with.

And while I don't have the time, energy, patience, or ability to make Line Rider do amazing tricks and stunts (nor the creative ability to fill in interesting backgrounds) I'm very glad that some people do. And that those people get to share with the rest of us.

Follow Up: I'd Like to Solve the Puzzle

Guessing the exact amount of a Price is Right showcase is difficult. Use a combination of known prices for some items and good rules of thumb to estimate the price of others and mix in a little luck that put the last few digits in place and you may just be able to guess it correctly. It may not be likely but we can imagine we could do it.

The one letter Wheel of Fortune solve is another matter. Guess a phrase with just a single letter? I don't know how to do it. Even more amazing, as Chris Jones (who wrote the article about the Price is Right) relates in his article Was the Wheel of Fortune One-Letter Solve Really a Miracle?, it turns out that Caitlin Burke didn't even need that single letter.

She knew the solution before she spun the wheel. In fact she was worried the contestant spinning before her would solve it first.

Myself... I'm going back to something simple and easy that is completely built on chance like Deal or No Deal.

Games: The Making of a Game That Kept Me Up Nights

Long before cheat codes and walkthroughs there were video games that you could spend a long time playing and figuring out. One that kept me up for hours on end was DMA Design's Lemmings.

If you want a taste of the original Amiga version of the game there are online videos available. The game had a simple premise. Lemmings fell from a trap door onto the field of play and then walked directly and unflinchingly to their impending doom. Instead of walking to a door to freedom they would simply walk in one direction until they hit a wall. When they hit the wall they'd turn around and keep walking. On some levels they would just be stuck walking back and forth between two walls. In others they'd walk into traps or fall into water or lava.

You had to give some lemmings commands and others abilities in order to save as many lemmings as possible. Each level had a time limit and a certain number of all the lemmings that you had to save. Save to few or take too long and it was all over.

The puzzles started simple but soon became very difficult. Fiendishly so. I'd often look up after finally solving a level to see the sun rising and a new day starting. It also helped that the sound effects were cute Even making lemmings blow up when required was cute. I still love the "oh no!" just before a lemming would blow up into a bunch of pixels. However the sound effects were one thing. The music was another completely. It was wonderfully additive.

How addictive? Well... people are still performing the music today. On piano, keyboard, piano, guitar, and even electric guitar. Myself I prefer mp3'd version of the original Amiga mod files (ftp of the mod soundtrack and ftp of the mod extras) or rips of the CD versions of the tunes from The Lemmings Chronicles. Both of which are on my iPod and other music players.

For more history of the actual game I suggest Mike Dailly's The Complete History of Lemmings which is part of his The Complete History of DMA Design. There you will find the backstory to one of the games that kept me up at night.

Oh... and don't think you're safe because the Amiga is no more. Lemmings has been ported to quite a few computers and consoles with more versions to come in the future. Sooner or later you might find yourself trying over and over to save those little lemmings from destruction.

Games: Living The Experience Without Playing the Game

It started on Something Awful. People would play through a video game while taking notes and pictures and post the results in the forums. Known as Let's Play these are not walkthroughs in the traditional sense.

A traditional walkthrough, as exemplified by Game FAQs, is a document that tells you step by step how to complete a video game. It tells you the tricks, points out the traps, and is told from the point of view of one gamer helping another. Want to know how to get past a tricky section? Read the walkthrough. Want to know how to get the ultimate magic sword? Read the walkthrough.

Want to be told the story of the video game instead of the steps needed to beat it outright? Potentially with running commentary by the author? Then a Let's Play is for you.

Since the Something Awful forums have a reputation for holding on to precious historic content with all tends to suggest the admins would hav brought matches to the Library of Alexandria others have taken on the job of archiving and maintaining the list of "Let's Plays". Thus the Let's Play Archive was born. Collected here are text Let's Plays and video Let's Plays. Yes... you not only can read along but in some cases watch as someone plays a video game for you.

Don't let that fool you though. Yes... some of them are pretty bland descriptions of playing the game. Many do explore the game and its world in detail. There can be interesting running commentary while the game is being described.

There is also a few places where the Let's Play has a life of its own and becomes a truly memorable event above and beyond the game in question. Case in point is the tale of horror that is The Terrible Secret of Animal Crossing. You'll never look at a fun little game quite the same way ever again.

Games: From the Gridiron to a Video Game

I remember when I first saw John Madden's face on a video game. Though I didn't own a John Madden football game until the sequel. Now it's hard to remember a time when his face and name hasn't graced the cover of a video game.

How he managed to become the face of football for millions of gamers and how the games themselves turned into a franchise is quite the story. A story told by ESPN in The Franchise. Don't think you won't learn anything along the way. There are some secrets about the early days of video game consoles that I didn't know and the truth about Joe Montana Football was a revelation to me.

Who knows who will be the next unlikely person to become the face of a video game franchise. After all if it can happen to John Madden it could happen to anyone.

Games: Solving The Petals Around The Rose

I'm going to invite you in to a secret club. It isn't like fight club. You can talk about the club. What you can't do is explain the club's secret outright. Instead you have to let people figure out the secret themselves.

To join the club you need to figure out the secret of the game called Petals Around the Rose. Then you have to prove you know the answer without explaining your answer. After all the answer is a secret.

A person who knows the answer takes 5 regular dice. They tell you that every time you roll the 5 dice there is an answer. All they will tell you is the name of the game - Petals Around the Rose, that the answer is zero or an even number, and that they will tell you the answer for any roll of the dice. You have to figure out what the secret is.

You can't say the secret out loud. That's part of being in the club. So to prove you know the secret you have to give the correct answer to six rolls of the dice. If you can do it six times in a row then you've figured it out.

Want to become a member of the club? Then read Bill Gates and Petals Around the Rose. There's more then enough examples in the article to allow you to figure out the secret that you will then never mention to anyone directly.

Let me know if you become a member of the club. Without telling me the secret of course.

Games: The Story of an Early 3D Game

In the late 80's I played a game called The Colony. Long before Wolfenstein 3D or Doom a lone developer named David Alan Smith created a game in which you help the survivors of a remote space colony.

For a look at what one of the first 3d action games looked like just watch David A. Smith demo the game on youtube (part 1) (part 2). I have many memories of moving slowly down hallways and wondering where the next alien might be. There were many immersive worlds and environments to come but The Colony was my first taste of what games would be like.

If you're interested in the story behind The Colony, and some of the technical details that made it very advanced for its time, David A Smith has written My Colony Memoir. It's hard to imagine a single person working on a computer that didn't even have complete development tools building a complete game from scratch. Especially since we live in the era of huge budget games created by huge teams of specialists. Sometimes it's good to remember what can be done on a small machine by one person.

Games: The Original Gratuitous Space Battle

Now I haven't played it yet... but there's a computer game I want to buy if only to reward the independent developer that came up with the name. It's called Gratuitous Space Battles. It's a homage to the tradition of large fleets of spaceships shooting advanced weapons at each other in glorious space battles. For all the explosions and carnage it's a strategy game and not an action game. It's a strategy game in that you equip hulls to create your own type of ship, you place a fleet to attack the enemy, you give your fleet orders, and then you sit back and watch the carnage unfold.

In an action game you'd be at the controls. In the midst of the fray. Navigating and shooting and being directly involved.

Now there are many games that do put you in the fray at the controls of a spaceship. Ones with incredible graphics and intense gameplay. But they all owe their existence to the original space fighting game - Space War. Not only is it the original computer game of space battling but it was also recognized as important at the time. Stewart Brand, of the Whole Earth Catalog and The Long Now fame, wrote a wonderful piece for Rolling Stone back in 1972. All you wanted to know about Space War and it's history.

Games: Philosophical Musings on the Meaning of Tetris?

Okay... I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry or take this seriously. No Truth In Game Design: An Argument For Idolatry by Jason Johnson is either a brilliant satire of how to be a post-modern deconstructionist or... or... I should start to get worried about how seriously scholarly attempts are at "reading" the world around us. To which I have only two things to point out.

First - The first comment to the article is actually quite profound. Tim Carter points out that "Symbolism isn't idolatry. Idolatry is when you forget a symbolic object is a symbol".

And second - the comments reminded me of one of my favourite stories and tutorials on how to understand and perform a post-modern deconstruction of almost anything. How to Deconstruct Almost Anything -- My Postmodern Adventure by Chip Morningstar is well worth a read. Whether or not Jason Johnson meant to be funny or satirical, or even whether he meant to be deconstructionist, he certainly fell into that mode easily.

I'm going back to just blowing up pixels for a while. Or maybe I'll just enjoy a video or two or three about Tetris.

Games: Be Aggravating and Challenging Enough

Video games seem easier than they used to be. Sit an old gamer down and ask them about the games in the arcades and the early home consoles and you'll be subjected to war stories as heartfelt as those from any veteran of real wars.

Certainly there are games that are very easy and those that are incredibly difficult. The difficult games are frustrating and the easy ones are boring. I don't mean that games with simple mechanics and rules are boring. Tetris is a perfect example of a game with simple rules that gets very challenging. No. I'm talking about games that don't provide enough of a challenge.

It's not just a matter of making a game challenging. The player like to feel good enough to move forward and keep going. Barely being able to cope is challenging but not very satisfying. A good way of looking at challenge is an article from Pixel Poppers called Real Games Have Curves: Welcome to the Competence Zone.

Next time you find yourself unable to leave the computer because "there's just one more level" or "this time I'll get it perfect" blame game designers who managed to get the balance and challenge right.

Games: Drive Fast and Turn to the Left

Sports seem to have internal hierarchies. The World Cup is more important than any other football tournament and some football leagues are more prestigious than others. Within every sport there is this hierarchy. Sometimes it's based on the amount of money the league has, the glory to be found, the attention paid by the public, or by some other almost inexplicable biases.

The world of motor sports has a larger internal hierarchy than most sports. After all everything from motocross to formula one is covered under that rather large umbrella term. Within this huge umbrella there certainly is an informal hierarchy in place. The ranking of importance is different around the world. For example most of the world looks down on NASCAR with some disdain. The reason seems simple. Just look at this video news piece from The Onion.

That's what it looks like. A bunch of cars driving around a circular (sorry... oval) track just going as fast as they can until someone wins.  Like many things that seem simple it isn't as simple as it appears.

For one thing there is the physics of drafting. The car in the front of a long line is plowing through the air for the cars behind him but he's not doing all the work. A train of cars running around the track is faster than any one car on its own. The car at the front of the line may be pushing through the air but the disturbed air at the end of the train is slowing down a different car. They split the work. 

If a line of cars is faster than any single car then you have to travel in packs to be efficient and fast. So how do you move up the line? How do you pass? You convince others to pass with you. If you pull out into clear air without help you'll just slow down and go to the back of the line. So to get ahead you need help. Drivers need to cooperate. All while going over 100 miles an hour just inches from each other. 

What's amazing is that some drivers can win consistently. Do you help a driver with a winning record because he's more likely to win or do you punish a winning driver by not helping him because he's already won? How do you get people from other teams and driving for other owners to help you?

Some of the answers and background are in Social Science at 190 MPH on NASCAR's Biggest Superspeedways from First Monday. 

Maybe NASCAR deserves a bit more respect. It's a multi-person mind game while driving inches from each other. Makes me want to sit down and watch the gamesmanship on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Games: Pac-Man

If you're old enough to remember when video games first started showing up in arcades alongside pinball machines I have a question. What original arcade game was the one you first played over and over?

Space Invaders? Q-Bert? Galaga? Or maybe one of the first huge hits - Pac-Man?

Recently a Dutch blog post made the rounds. Toru Iwatani was visiting the Netherlands for the NLGD Festival of Games and he brought with him some rather historic documents. His original design documents and ideas for Pac-Man.

Which got me thinking about Pac-Man. The game has more depth than you think. It may seem as simple as a face running around a maze after dots while ghosts just blindly chase the player but it isn't. There is much more to Pac-Man than that. Don't believe me? Take a look at The Pac-Man Dossier by Jamey Pittman. It's truly the most comprehensive exploration of Pac-Man I've ever seen.

If you ever stumble across an original Pac-Man game and get a chance to put in a few quarters just remember it's deeper and more complicated than you ever thought.

Games: A Player Who Makes His Teammates Better

Quick... name the most important and valuable player on your local sports team. Now... tell me why he's valuable.

Scores the most points/goals/baskets/touchdowns? Intimidating and a presence on the field/diamond/court/ice?

What if the most valuable player on a team didn't score often and was one of the smallest people in the league? You would't believe it would you?

Believe it. In the NBA Shane Battier is one of the most valuable players on the court. Dollar for dollar he does more for his team than anyone else. Not because he scores or gets great stats. It's because when he's on the court all his teammates perform better. Let me introduce the The No-Stats All-Star.

Shane Battier is an example of what happens when stats and numbers are looked at carefully. Conventional wisdom can be proven wrong. The results may change how the NBA owners, and then owners and managers in other leagues, look at choosing players.

Players like Shane may help win games and championships but they make water cooler conversation much more challenging. Intangibles are harder to discuss.

What if the Price is Too Right?

Maybe you've seen the video. The one in which Drew Carey is hosting the Price is Right and announces that the first contestant guessed the amount of their showcase to $494 and then moves on the second contestant who.... hits the amount right on the head. $23,743 exactly. You haven't seen it? Give it a quick look.

If you think Drew Carey looks a little lackluster and doesn't seem too enthused you'd be right. The whole story is a little more complicated. I'll let Chris Jones explain in his article TV's Crowning Moment of Awesome in Esquire.

It's more fun when you know the whole story. Certainly the whole additional story of Ted Slauson adds several layers. For me the sad part is that apparently the Price is Right ended up changing the very game to help avoid further perfect guesses.

The producers no longer rely on Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup; now they have different soups. They have different everything. They've built more luck into the games, dumb luck, and they've started doing sneaky things like changing the options on the cars — adding floor mats, taking away the stereo system — to mess with the prices.

It's just not the same anymore.