Tempest Trailer!

The following is the trailer for our gaming showing the games progression in development

The Motion controller

When designing the controller we wanted the players to feel a good sense of control over the ball, this gave us the idea of making the controller also in the shape of a ball. We believe this would give the player a grater interaction with the ball because they are using the ball in their hand to control the ball in the game, making connections between witch way u want the ball to roll and witch way you should turn your controller is easy as the player just tilts the ball in their hand in the direction they want the ball on screen to go.

Orther people such as my house mates have played using the controller and they say they enjoyed using it.

Here is a picture of how i made the controller:

Here is a game play video showing the game being played with that controller (it is very hard to play the game and hold a camera!)

Guest Speakers John Wagland from BBFC and Johnnie Ingram on Machinima

Last Wednesday I attended two different talks from two different guest speakers. Below I will recount my experience of listening to the talks, and discuss the issues they raised.

Intro on the British Board of Film Classification Talk

The first talk was from John Wagland one of the examiners from the British Board Film Classification (BBFC), and was about their purpose, methods and how they classify films and video games. The BBFC have been around a very long time, the organisation was set up in 1912 under the original name of the British Board of Film Censors.

The talk focussed mainly on film classification, but did briefly talk about games.

The BBFC is composed of 16 examiners from wide ranging backgrounds. These are split into two separate teams, one team examines films, and the other examines video games.

Film Classification

Near the end of the talk, Wagland showed us clips from various films, and asked us what age rating we would classify them as, based solely on the clip.

One such film clip was from Disney’s Rocketman film, which was aimed at all audiences (U rating). The clip we were shown was the original intro to the film, in this intro a child is pretending to be an astronaut… using a washing machine as a fake spacecraft. The washing machine starts and the child gets slightly knocked around before it opens. His parents seem to think it’s perfectly normal for him to be doing this.

The BBFC felt that this scene could be harmful to children if they copied the actions from the film. Some of the examiners felt it might have been suitable if the parents had reprimanded the child for the behaviour, since children watching would realise it was a “bad” thing to do. Part of the problem then was that the parents treat the incident so normally, barely even commenting on the child’s dangerous behaviour.

The BBFC ordered Disney to remove the footage, in order for the film to be re-assessed and later re-classified as a U rating. I wholeheartedly agree that child safety must come first, but I also think its a shame they had to cut such a humorous scene. Almost every person in the room seemed to be laughing at this particular clip, which shows that the humour did in fact appeal to all ages.

Game Classification

John Wagland also talked about games and how they are classified.

When examiners play through any game, they are given access to cheats/save states that allow them to easily and quickly experience everything the game has to offer. In this way, they do not play through the entire game from start to finish; instead they sample the mechanics of the game being examined.

Wagland admitted that games sometimes seem to receive harsher examination than film. He attributed this to parents being very concerned with the interactive nature of games. He also cited the repetitive nature of games, since this allows the player to freely repeat violent or offensive sections of the game, whereas in a film, a specific violent action will likely only be seen once in a single sitting.

Interestingly, the BBFC will lose their authority and ability to classify games on April 1st 2011. This change was prompted by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, after they ruled in favour of solely using the PEGI (Pan European Game Information) system to rate games and other types of software.

Intro on the Machinima Talk

The second talk was from Johnnie Ingram and focussed on machinima.

The word machinima stems from, machine & cinema. machinima uses games as a tool to tell a story, in this way machinima is essentially the act of making a film within a game world.

Sometimes machinima is created directly within a game engine, with game players acting out different characters in the film in real time. An alternative is for machinima to be created using developer tools such as Half Life 2's model viewer, to view and manipulate character models. A limitation of this method in the case of the HL2 model viewer, is that anyone that has played the game will know all the original HL2 characters being used in the machinima, and so it may feel odd when they see the same character models, acting completely differently to the role they played in HL2.

Brief History of Machinima

The initial machinima videos took the form of recorded instructions within a game, such as a replay. This greatly limited the potential audience for initial machinima, since only those people who owned the game the machinima was made in, could recall the recorded instructions and thus view the film. The very first machinima movie was Diary of a Camper. http://machiniplex.net/classics.php?id=6

In the present day machinima is usually saved as an ordinary video file such as a AVI file. This allows any computer user to view the file as long as they have downloaded the latest media plug ins for their chosen video playing software.

Examples of Machinima

After explaining what machinima was, Ingram showed us two lengthy examples of it in practise.

Firstly we watched "A Warriors Dream", which according to Ingram, was filmed entirely using in-game footage from World of Warcraft (WOW). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5JuypAbBH8

The films premise is that a WOW warrior character falls asleep and has a dream that they are in fact, a shape shifting shaman character. The shaman travels across the world, shape shifting each time he meets a new enemy. Eventually the dream ends, and the warrior wakes up and continues his day to day business of killing monsters.

The second example we watched was a film called Clockwork, which was created using the HL2 model viewer and HL2 assets. http://machiniplex.net/?id=22

Clockwork was made in the style of old black and white films, this really gave it a film noir vibe. The film focuses on a group of gangsters and how one particular gangster decides to attempt to redeem himself as a human being after sinking so low. To say much more would spoil the plot of this excellent piece of machinima.

Moviestorm

Machinima can also be created using specialist software such ash, Moviestorm, Iclone, Muviu, Voovees, Xtranormal and Zencub3d.

Ingram gave us a quick demo of his Moviestorm software. Firstly he loaded up a basic park-like scene, and then created a quick character to be the 'star' of the film. Next he used a microphone to record a basic sentence for his character to say in the software. When Ingram tested the sentence, he demonstrated that Moviestorm featured automatic lip syncing of recorded voice lines. Next Ingram used the Moviestorm interface to make the character give some simple gestures such as waving. Finally Ingram modified the camera settings to create two shots, the first shot shows the character from a distance, the second shot is a close up and allowed us to see the character speaking.

This brief demo showed us that basic scenes could be created very quickly and easily using Moviestorm.

Career of Johnnie Ingram

The final part of the talk focussed on Ingram's career. By his own admission, Ingram has had a very interesting career path. He began by studying Drama and English, dropped English, and then abandoned drama and decided to study films and media. Eventually he applied to a local company via email, and worked with them for a number of years, before applying to Moviestorm. He joined Moviestorm as a software tester, and ultimately he worked his way up the company to a very senior position. One of his new duties is to give talks about; machinima, his career and Moviestorm to universities and students.

Conclusion

I'm glad I attended both events. Each event offered something different, the BBFC talk taught me a lot of interesting information about movies, games and how and why they are rated.

The machinima talk was also very entertaining. Ingram's method of timekeeping was amusing; since he kept overrunning the set period of time each segment of the talk was supposed to last.

Before attending the talk I knew almost nothing about machinima. I'd watched a few episodes of Red vs. Blue a Halo machinima, and a few other random videos online, but that was my entire experience of it. I left the talk with more knowledge than when I entered it, realising that some videos I've watched in the past were actually machinima without me realising it.

This concludes my recount of both talks. Thanks for reading. :)

Films Referenced

Rocketman (Walt Disney Pictures, Caravan Pictures).

Machninema Referenced

Diary of a Camper (United Ranger Films).
Available online at: http://machiniplex.net/classics.php?id=6

A Warriors Dream (Slashdance).
Available online at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5JuypAbBH8

Clockwork (Amorphous Blob Productions).
Available online at: http://machiniplex.net/?id=22

Red Vs Blue (Rooster Teeth Productions).
Available online at: http://redvsblue.com/archive/?id=88&v=trending

Tech Feature: Terrain textures

I have finally finished the part of the terrain rendering that I spent most time researching and thinking about: texturing. This is a quite big problem, with many methods available, each having its own pros and cons.

I was looking for something that gave a lot of freedom for the artists, that was fast and that allowed that the same algorithm could be used in both game and editor. The last point was especially important since we had much success with our WYSIWYG-editor for Amnesia, and we did not want terrain to break this by requiring some complicated creation process.

Even once I started working on the textures, I was unsure on the exact approach to take. I had at least decided to use some form of texture splatting as the base. However there is a lot of ways to go about this, the two major directions being to either do it all in real-time or to rendering to cache textures in some manner.

Before doing any proper work on the texturing algorithm I wanted to see how the texturing looked on some test terrain. In the image below I am simply project a tiling texture along the y-axis.


Although I had checked other games, I was not sure how good this the y-axis projection would look. What I was worried of was that there would be a lot of stretching at slopes. It turned out that it was not that bad though and the worst case looks something like this:

While visible it was not as bad as I first thought it would be. Seeing this made me more confident that I could project along the y-axis for all textures, something that allowed for the cached texture approach. If I did all blending in real-time I would have been able to have a special uv-mapping for slopes, but now that y-axis projection worked, this was no longer essential. However, before I could start on testing texture caching, I need to implement the blending.

The plain-vanilla way to do is, is to have an alpha texture for each texture layer and then draw one texture layer after another. Instead of having many render passes, I wanted to do as much blending in a single draw call. By using a an RGBA texture for the alpha I could do a maximum of 4 at the same time. I first considered this, but then I saw a paper by Martin Mittring from Crytek called "Advanced virtual texture topics" where an interesting approach was suggested. By using an RGB texture up to 8 textures could be blended, by letting each corner of an rbg-cube be a texture. A problem with this approach is that each texture can only be nicely blended with 3 other corners (textures), restricting artists a bit. See below how texture layers are connected (a quick sketch by me):

Side note: Yes, it would be possible to use an RGBA texture with this technique and let the corners of a hyper cube represent all of the textures. This would allow each texture type to have 4 textures it could blend with and a maximum of 16 texture layers. However, it would make life quite hard for artists when having to think in 4D...

When implemented it looks like this (note he rgb texture in the upper right corner):


However, I got into a few problems with this approach, that I first thought where graphics card problems, but later turned out to be my fault. During this I switch to using several layers of RGBA textures instead, blending 4 textures at each pass. When I discovered that is was my own error (doh!), I had already decided on using cache textures (more on that in a jiffy), which put less focus on render speed of the blending. Also this approach seemed nicer for artists. So I decided on a pretty much plain-vanilla approach, meaning some work in vain, but perhaps I can have use for it later on instead.

Now for texture caching. This method basically works as the mega texture method using in Quake Wars and others. But instead of loading pieces of a gigantic texture at run-time, pieces of the gigantic texture is generated at run-time. To do this I have a several render textures in memory that are updated with the content depending on what is in view. Also, depending on the geometry LOD I use, I vary the texture resolution rendered to and make it cover a larger area. So texture close to the view use large textures and far away have much lower.

I first thought had to do some special fading between the levels and was a bit concerned on how to do this. However, it turned out that this was taken care of the trilinear texture filtering quite nicely (especially when generating mipmaps for each rendered texture). When implemented the algorithm proved very fast as the texture does not have to be updated very often and I got very high levels of detail in the terrain.

Side note: The algorithm is actually used in Halo Wars and is mentioned in a nice lecture that you can see here. Seeing this also made me confident that it was a viable approach.

The algorithm was not without problems though, for example the filtering between patches (different texture caches) created seams, as can be seen below:

(click to enlarge, else it will not be seen)

The way I fixed this was simply to let each texture have a border that mimicked all of the surrounding textures. While the idea was simple, it was actually non-trivial to implement. For example, I started out with a 1 pixel border, but had to have a 8 pixel border for the highest 1024x1024 textures to be able to shrink it. Anyhow, I did get it working, making it look like this:

(Again, click image to see full size!)

Next up was improving the blending. The normal blending for texture splatting can be quite boring and instead of just using a linear blend I wanted to spice it up a bit. I found a very nice technique for this on Max McGuire's blog, which you can see here. Basically each material gets an alpha that determines how fast each part of it fades. The algorithm I ended up with was a bit different from the one outlined in Max's blog and looks like this:

final_alpha = clamp( (dissolve_alpha- (1.0 - blend_alpha ) / (dissolve_alpha * (1-fade_start), 0.0, 1.0);

Where final_alpha is used to blend the color for a texture and fade_start determines at which alpha value the fade starts (this allows the texture to disappear piece by piece). blend_alpha is gotten from the blend texture, and dissolve_alpha is in the texture, telling when parts of the texture fades out.

So instead of having to have blending like this:


It can look like this:


Now next step for me was to allow just not diffuse textures, but also normal mapping and specular. This was done by simply rendering to more render targets, so each type had a separate texture. This would not have been possible to do if I had blended in real-time as I would have reached the normal limit of 16 texture limits quite fast. But now I rendered them separately, and when rendering the final real-time texture I only need to use a texture for each type (taken from the cache textures). Here is how all this combined look:

You can see small version of each cache texture at the top.

Now for a final thing. Since the texture cached are not rendered very often I can do quite a lot of heavy stuff in them. And one thing I was sure we needed was decals. What I did was simply to render a lot of quads to the textures which are blended with the existing texture. This can be used to add all sorts of extra detail to map and almost require no extra power. Here is an example:


I am pretty happy with these features for now although there are some stuff to add. One thing I need to do is some kind of real-time conversion to DXT texture for the caches. This would save quite a lot of memory (4 - 8 times less would be used by terrain) and this would also speed up rendering. Another thing I want to investigate is to add shadows, SSAO and other effects when rendering each cache texture. Added to this are also some bad visual popping when levels are changed (this only happens when zooming out a steep angle though) that I probably need to fix later on.

Now my next task will be to add generated undergrowth! So expect to see some swaying grass in the next tech feature!

How the player becomes the protagonist

Introduction
In Amnesia one of the main goals was for the player to become the protagonist. We wanted the player to think "I am" instead of "Daniel is" and in that way make it a very personal experience. The main motivation for this was of course to make the game scary, but also for the memories that were revealed to feel more personal for the player.

In this post I will go through some of the design thinking we used, problems it caused and how it eventually turned out. I will also briefly discuss the future of this sort of design.


Playing a role
First of all, it is not required that the protagonist matches the player character in order for the player to "become" him/her. As an extreme example, I see no problem with a game featuring an animal as lead character to have the player become the protagonist. The idea is not that the player should match the physical / mental protagonist, but rather that he/she should be able to roleplay him/her and to feel like really being him/her.

There is of course limits to this kind of roleplaying and certain characteristics might make it impossible for a player to feel a connection. This is the same for works in other media where the reader/viewer is meant to feel empathy toward one or more characters. Sometimes there is some mismatch that removes this feeling, and much of the work's power is lost. Note that this sort of friction is more likely to happen because of the personality of the character and not so much because the physical appearance. A simple example of this would be that protagonists in Disney movies are often very easy to relate to despite being animals.

Considering this, the general rule that we used was not to force emotions and actions that players were unlikely to accept. When the protagonist is displayed as doing or feeling something, we had to make sure that player could agree to this.


Getting into the act
In film or literature it is possible for the audience to not like the protagonist at the start, but then make them feel a connection over the course of the work. This is not possible to do in a videogame, as players must start acting out their role as soon as the game starts. If the situation does not feel comfortable at the start, then it will be very hard to connect.

Because of this, videogames need to have a tutorial of some sort where the player gets used to the idea of playing a certain character. During this phase it is also important that the player learns how to act as the protagonist, so they later act accordingly. I do not think this can be done solely on a mechanics basis, as the trial and error involved will most likely just frustrate. This is largely dependent on the space of actions available though and sometimes players will quickly realize the role they are meant to play.

In Amnesia we made the choice to be very upfront on what is expected by the player. This is accomplished by displaying messages before the game starts, telling the player what to do. The main message was a rather simple one, simply saying that the player should not try and fight any monsters. As this is pretty close to what most people would do in real-life, we basically just had to tell players that the game was not a first-person-shooter and the rest came naturally. If the game would have required more specific behavior from the player, more info might have been needed.

Once the player accepts this role and is ready to play, the next step is to provide an interface between the player and world. Here a bunch of problems arises and it becomes less clear what is the right thing to do.


What emotions to hide?
First of all, we decided to remove any form of cut-scene from the game. Upon entering a cut-scene, there is a large distinction between the kind of control a player has during normal play, creating a discrepancy that weakens the player-protagonist connection. In our previous effort, Penumbra, we had little of these, but there were still places when control was taken from the player for longer periods. In Amnesia, we only used very short "view hijacks" to display points of interest. These were not very frequent and were meant to be seen as reflexes, which seemed to be accepted for most players. Some were a bit annoyed by them though and we are not sure they were that necessary.

Next thing we decided on was that, unlike Penumbra, Daniel (the protagonist) should never comment on the situation. In Penumbra the most obvious place this happens is when a spider is spotted and the text "A spider! I do not like spiders" appear. This sort of interface where the protagonist make subjective remarks on the game world can very easily break the connection between player-and-protagonist.

We tried to skip descriptive texts completely, but this caused problems when dealing with puzzles. If players start thinking about a puzzle "incorrectly", then it is imperative that they get on the right track. In these cases, the easiest (and many times only) way to communicate this to the player is by using texts. We tried to add as many solutions to avoid having texts, but it only works so far, and eventually some kind of explanatory / hinting text was needed. If not the player would have gotten stuck instead and we thought this would be worse than having the texts. In order to keep the player-protagonist connection, we kept all of this texts very objective and impersonal, careful to not force emotions on the player.

Side note: A problem we had when removing subjective comments was the hints were much harder to write. Not being able to let the protagonist guess, use insights or personal knowledge proved quite tricky at times.

We did not remove all of the subjective protagonist emotions though. We kept the more autonomous physical actions such as panting and heart beats, a choice that proved slightly controversial. After releasing the teaser video some people argued that having these sort of reactions pulled them out of the experience. Others felt that it just heightened the experience. Once the game was released, the main complaint came at a very specific feature, namely the "sanity damage"-reaction (that happens whenever the player witnesses something frightening). In the end, we estimate that something like 15-30% of the players disliked these kind of effects.

For the people that did not dislike these effects, many felt it increased the connection to the protagonist. For example feeling as if their own heart beat faster when the protagonist's did or becoming startled when a "sanity damage"-effect told them to. This is a really interesting subject and while using these kind of effects might detract the experience for some, I think it might be worth taking the risk. So far we have mostly tried this for very simple situations, but I believe it can used to evoke much more complex emotions.


Bringing back memories
An important part of Amnesia is that players slowly learn the background of the character they are playing. As the name suggest, the game starts out with the protagonist having amnesia that sets the player and protagonist on equal footing. By progressing through the game both the player and the protagonist gain access to increasingly more lost memories, slowly getting an idea of how Daniel ended up in the situation he currently is in.

The main mechanic we used to deliver these lost memories was through diary entries scattered throughout the game. We decided to voice these in order for them to be more interesting, but I think this backfired a bit. What many players seem to have experienced was that Daniel was reading the entries aloud. Thus this proved to be a large distraction and must have weakened the player-protagonist bond for many. What we intended was for the player to hear Daniel's voice as the voice of their old self. This was probably way too obscure though and it might have been better to just had them as pure text.

Added to this was the fact that Daniel actually spoke at some points. Some lines are spoken during the start of the game and some during gameplay if sanity is too low. Again, this was intended to be lost memories, but many players did not perceive it as such and instead thought it was strange to hear Daniel talking.

As mentioned earlier, we wanted the player to feel as if the lost memories were their own. But because of the way the memory content was delivered I think the effect was not what it could have been.


Dialog
A major obstacle when trying to create strong a player-protagonist connection is that one often end up with the so called "silent protagonist". The reason for this is simply that that whenever spoken words are required, the lines spoken by the protagonist must be predetermined and chosen for the player. Either, the character simply speaks a scripted line or the player chooses from a list canned responses. Using the first type allows for more fluent conversation but removes any interaction. The second choice provides some interaction but makes conversations stiff (as other actions are only possible when in "dialog mode") and might lack options the player finds appropriate to say. Some hybrid solutions exist (like in Blade Runner where the player just sets an attitude) but the problem still remains.

Side note: Interestingly, the problem is quite opposite in Interactive Fiction. Instead of lacking options for the player, the characters one speaks to lack the intelligence to understand all possible (and fitting) sentences.

So how to solve this? Well, first of all it is worth noting that the systems mentioned above can still be used if applied carefully. If the player's emotions are in line with the protagonist's then simply having short scripted lines could work very fine. To make this work I also think it is important that the protagonist's voice is a recurring element of the game to get the player used to it. If it just pops up on rare occasions, the illusion is easily broken. Call of Cthulhu and the Thief series use this to some success (I think it is at its best when short, in-game and the player is free to do other actions at the same time).

The multiple choice system is also possible to use, but I think it comes with more problems. The biggest is that since the player gets a choice it is more obvious when the game does supply the wanted action. With other actions such as walking and fighting, it is easier to set up rules for the player on what is allowed and not. Conversations have a much wider scope and it is much harder to keep it consistent. It is also much harder to display the options in a way that feels okay. Unless they entire game is controlled with a menu-like system, having a menu pop up for a specific action is very distracting.

In Amnesia we chose to avoid conversations as much as possible and there are only two occasions when you meet another character face-to-face. And in only one of these were there any real opportunity for a conversation (with a tortured man called Agrippa). The way we went about it was for Daniel to be silent, but for Agrippa to respond as if Daniel had spoken. This gave the dialogs (or rather monologue) more flow but many players found this quite disconnecting. They found it strange that Daniel silently spoke back, especially as many was sure they had heard him speak before when reading diaries. On the other hand, it might have been even more strange if Agrippa had never asked Daniel anything and simply just spoken in direct orders or in a lecturing manner. Agrippa was put into game pretty late in development and we did not gave it as much thought as we should have, so this might have been solved better.

When creating a videogame with a strong player-protagonist connection, the best option is probably to fit the game world around a protagonist that does not require none or very simple (as in yes-no or simple vocabulary) speech. This way, the player-protagonist connections is more easily kept and consistency is maintained. An example of this is System shock where all characters are dead or talking through a one-way radio. Another example is BioShock 2 where the protagonist is a dumb robot that is not expected to speak. This of course put limits on what kind of experiences that can be made, but might be the only way to create a strong player-protagonist experience.


Problems to overcome
It is not only dialog that is a large problem when trying to make player and protagonist one and the same. Since we are trying to craft an experience where the players themselves are a central ingredient, much pressure is put on them.

A major problem is that it is hard to let the protagonist have any special knowledge. This is a reason why stories starring amnesiacs, outsiders or cannon-fodder are so common; things becomes very complicated if players need to have a deeper understanding of their surroundings. A way to solve this is to force the player into learning things before starting the game. But since reading a novel before starting the game is not really possible, the amount of information that can be given is quite limited. Another way to solve this is to have some sort of tutorial texts popping up, but this is of course very distracting.

Another issue, is that the player and protagonist might not share the same goals. For instance the protagonist might be out for revenge, but the player might not be interested in this. This makes games of this type end up with fairly simplistic motivations. It might be possible to give some kind of instructions before the game starts, but that does not seem very good to me. Better would be to provide an experience at start that sets up the player's mood to match the protagonist's. This is easier said than done though.


Why bother?
So why go into all of this trouble of making blurring the line between player and protagonist? For one thing, I think it is something that is extremely interesting to explore. So far games that try to create strong player-protagonist bonds are mostly about killings things and exploration into other themes is pretty much uncharted.

Secondly, it is something that that is unique to the medium. In no other media can the audience step into works of art themselves. And just because of this I think it demands to be experimented with. Instead of looking too much to film or other art as inspiration, we should try and do things in ways that only videogames can.


Your thoughts?
We would be very interested in hearing your thoughts on this. How did you feel like you connected with the protagonist in Amnesia? Was there any especially large obstacles for you to have a strong connection?

Also, in case you are interested in more discussions on this, check out the previous post on self-location in games:
http://frictionalgames.blogspot.com/2010/09/where-is-your-self-in-game.html

Thomas Hulvershorn: I-Play, Oberon Media

Position: Lead Game Tester
Worked on: Women’s Murder Club 4, Bubble Town

Thomas’s lecture focused on the testing side of the game development process. He explained what the tester’s job is, and how they go about testing games. As Q&A is the most common first job of students leaving university, the advice and explanations he gave were very helpful.

He also talked about Facebook games and how they functioned, particularly about how they attract customers and keep them playing. I found this very interesting, as getting customers to buy your game is pretty much the reason for the industry.

Formula 1 Sportswheel GUI Mock-ups & Adobe Illustrator Practise

I am now halfway through the development time period for my Formula 1 sportshweel re-design.

At this stage I am required to have started creating some basic mock-ups for my re-design. Below I have posted images showing each mock-up, and explained how the interface elements are positioned.

Mock-up 1 - as you can see, the track is positioned at the bottom of the screen. All other interface elements, the betting chips, the grand stand and the traffic light, are positioned above the track.

Mock-up 2 - this is the only design where the track is placed on the upper portion of the screen. I thought this would be something interesting to try in my design. I positioned the betting chips around the bottom left edge of the track.

Mock-up 3 - in this design I have positioned the track in the centre of the screen. I like this design since the various elements fill most of the screen-space which stops the game screen feeling empty. Visually I like the position of the betting chips, but the spread out nature, might make the game difficult to play.

Mock-up 4 - in this design I decided to try something different. I decided to move all of the interactive elements in my game, betting chips, traffic light play, reset and quit buttons, onto a single horizontal row. I think this will facilitate the making of bets, when players play the game.

Colour Scheme Grid - this is the colour scheme grid I created. I chose red, yellow and orange to be the predominant colours in my game. I feel that these colours complement each other well and lend the game a "warm" feeling.

 

Adobe Illustrator Practise

This Thursday Phil gave us a quick introduction to Adobe Illustrator. The interface of Illustrator is very similar to Photoshop, many of the same tools and options are in both programs.

The biggest difference between the software is Photoshop is a bitmap program, while Illustrator is vector based. Vector based images can be resized infinitely without 'pixelation' occurring and blurring the details of the image. Similarly lines don't become jagged when enlarged.

I spent the majority of Thursdays lesson having a play around with Illustrator since I had never used it before. Andre challenged me to draw a video game character, and eventually I decided to try and draw Nintendo's Kirby character, since design-wise he is fairly simplistic.

Needless to say, drawing Kirby proved to be much more challenging that I'd have imagined. I didn't realise how much effort went into even a simple character design such as Kirby before trying to draw him.

Eventually, with a little bit of help from both Andre and David, I was able to create the below image. Mainly I used the pen tool, combined with ellipses to form Kirby's body, feet and hands. I used the convert anchor point tool to move the various sections of the ellipse to create the shapes I wanted.

Kirby - This is my attempt at Kirby. I'm pretty proud of it. I might edit it sometime to add light and shadow to the image, this should make Kirby look much more 3D.

 

Kirby Reference Image - I based my attempt on this picture of Kirby.

It's not perfect but I think it's pretty good considering I'd never used Illustrator until earlier that day.

Overall it was a very enjoyable lesson. I learnt about the program while doing something that interested me, creating a video game character using various tools in the program. Thanks for reading. :)

Natural Funativity

This week we were asked to read an article titled ' Natural Funativity', an interesting title to be sure. (The title is a pun on natural selection). In this blog post I will summarise and discuss what I think are the important points of this article.

Intro

Fun in itself is not a useful term when critically analysing a game, the term 'fun' is too subjective and not specific enough. This article written by Noah Falstein attempts to remedy this by looking back at the past of our human existence to determine why we like to partake in certain activities and find them 'fun'.

In the article fun is broken down into 4 distinct types these are; physical fun, social fun, mental fun and blended fun. Below I will describe what each type of fun involves and where it likely evolved from. The article also mentions something the author calls, refined sugar syndrome, below I will explain what this means, and how it relates to the different types of fun.

RSS - stands for Refined Sugar Syndrome. It is the act of wanting more of something, even though we know it is bad for us. It is the act of refining something to make it more extreme, e.g. a person’s love of fast cars may date back to when we needed to move faster and faster to escape hungry predators. The modern car can be seen as a more refined version of that original love of speed, which helped us to survive. It's the same principle, but taken to a much greater extreme.

Physical Fun - is very likely to be linked back to the pure survival skills, such as hunting and gathering that our ancestors possessed. Hunting skills can be seen in a large variety of games, including but not limited to; racing games (chasing down the 'prey', or escaping from the 'prey'), FPS games, where the player physically runs after the enemy player in an effort to destroy them, or conversely, when low on health, attempts to escape from the enemy player. Physical fun is not just limited to tool use. The mere act of interacting with the game itself; whether it's by using a game controller, mouse and keyboard combination, or one of the various new motion sensing technologies, (Wii, Kinnect and Playstation Move), this interaction and manipulation of the input peripheral is in itself an act of physical fun.

Gathering skills can also be seen in many different types of games. This type of skill likely dates back to our time as berry and cherry pickers, once again an essential part of our survival. Here are some examples of collectibles from a variety of different video games; Pacman - dots, Mario - coins, stars, Zelda – heart-pieces, weapons, tools, Final Fantasy - different weapons, potions, etc. Collecting is also a large part of MMORPG's (massively multiplayer online role playing games). In most MMORPG's the player must acquire better items in the form of progressively better 'loot' as they continue to fight monsters which get increasingly more difficult. The new loot keeps the player powerful throughout their time playing the game. The Pokemon video games were entirely based around the idea of fighting and catching hundreds of different monsters, as the games catch phrase, "Gotta catch em' all!" states. As you can see, the act of collecting is crucial to many video games.

Social Fun - can be traced back to our need to survive as a species, via reproduction and living as part of a larger tribe or clan. Just as important is our development as a species with our love of storytelling. The earliest form of story was a way of imparting information and lessons to future generations. Stories can impart knowledge even if the author of the story has long since passed away. Stories then, are one way we record events throughout the ages.

In games social fun can take many forms, here are a few of the most common ones; in most MMO's; especially those that discourage or disable player vs player killing, the impulse to help out other players especially if they are new to the game, exists. Players often travel around the world in clans, to complement each other's individual skills, and stand a better chance against the majority of monsters and quests throughout the game. This type of play is very reminiscent to how we as human beings behaved back thousands of years ago when we lived as part of a larger tribe, in order to stand a better chance of surviving.

Mental Fun - can be traced back as an alternative to always hunting. Instead of instantly going outside again after returning from a successful hunt, one of our ancestors could have taken a break from hunting, and played a simple game using a piece of wood and stones. The single piece of wood would be balanced on a stone, and the ancestor would throw other stones at the wood to try and overbalance it. In this fashion the ancestor is improving his mental abilities, whilst in a safe environment. This also has the added benefit of helping his muscle tone, since he is getting a miniature workout by throwing the stones, even when not actively hunting for food.

Intelligence itself is sometimes defined as the ability to find and manipulate patterns. Imagine if you will the importance of our ancestors recognising the difference between a normal field of grass and a field of grass occupied by a Sabre-tooth tiger, lying in wait. It's not difficult then to see how mental fun would have been essential to our ancestor’s survival.

In games mental fun can take many forms, puzzle games such as Bejeweled, are perhaps the most obvious example in video games.. Jigsaw puzzles and the ever popular Rubix Cube are two common examples of non-digital mental fun. I imagine most people will at some point in their lives, have completed a jigsaw puzzle or grappled against a Rubix Cube.

Blended Fun - Most modern entertainment is made up of a mixture of the above categories.

A common sport such as football for example, uses elements of; physical fun - kicking, throwing and catching the ball, social fun - team work, communication throughout the game, and mental fun - the actual overall game-plan and tactics throughout each minute of the game, e.g. when to put more of an emphasis on attacking, when to shift that emphasis largely to defence etc.

Rayman Gold

Video games also use a blend of the different types of fun listed above. Consider the 2D platforming game Rayman Gold. Rayman contains a large element of collecting. In Rayman the player must collect all 100 'tings' (balls of light), in order for the exit to the next level to appear. To accomplish this, the player must practise playing the game, learning the controls as they go, along with learning how to execute certain moves effectively. This is another aspect of physical fun.

Rayman Gold also contains mental fun. As the player plays through the game they will encounter a variety of different enemies, based on each environment in the game world. Many of these enemies use specific attack patterns which need to be memorised, in order to effectively defeat them. This mechanic is most prevalent in the many Boss stages throughout the game. The player must fight each boss several times before they will be able to effectively recognise and exploit the weaknesses in the attack patterns that each boss utilises. Only then will the player be able to triumph and move onto the next environment of the game.

Rayman Gold: Mr Skops Boss Battle

Rayman Mapper

It could also be argued that Rayman Gold contains social fun through the use of the built in Mapper. The Mapper program allows the user to create complex, 2D single player levels, much like those that were included in the game. The player is, in fact, given the exact same tools that the Developer (Ubisoft) used to make the levels in the game, and so can create levels nearing or even surpassing the quality of the Ubisoft levels.

The learning curve of the level editor is almost non existent, I should know since I was able to make fairly complex levels back when I was only around age 7-8. The level editor is comprised of two main screens; the first screen is the 'level' being constructed itself; this will start of as a completely blank background.

The second screen is a 2D template image containing all the individual elements of one of the 'themes' from the game. The themes are, Dream Forest, Band Land, Candy Chateau, Picture City, Blue Mountains and The Caves of Skops.. To start creating a level, the play simply needs to drag a box around an element from their chosen template that they want in their level and then use the ‘Ctrl C’ and ‘Ctrl V’ hotkeys to copy and paste the element onto the other screen. (Fun fact: The Rayman Gold level editor taught me those two extremely common hotkeys. Before playing the game, I didn't know of them).

Rayman Mapper Dream Forest Template

Anyway, back to how it could be classified as social fun. After a level has been created, it can be uploaded to the internet to allow other Rayman Gold players to experience it. Sometimes the players may give the level author feedback, thus communicating with them. This is a simple form of social fun. The author can use this feedback to improve their level, and then re-upload it to get more feedback. This iterative process of improving the level may overtime produce something of great quality that many people will enjoy playing.

Conclusion

In conclusion I thoroughly enjoyed reading this article. The possibility that fun can be linked back to our evolution as a species, and can then be broken down into four sub-categories is an intriguing one.

Bibliography

Falstein Noah, "Natural Funativity", 2004.

Available online at: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2160/natural_funativity.php

Games Referenced

Rayman Gold (PC, Playstation) Ubisoft

The Controls

This layout will be typical of a FPS game style game play with the RPG controls incorporated.

The reasons behide choosing such a layout is because the WASD style layout is used through PC gaming and making radical changes will confuse gamer already used to this style. And also it works plain and simiple, it feel more natural then using the arrow key(for example) to move.

The Xbox360 controller layout is also a FPS style layout, I choose to very a layout similar to whats in COD:MW for a couple of reasons. The first is that again this style layout works very well, the buttons you use most are the most accessible. Also the COD Franchise is one of the best selling game out there, millions of people play it on xbox360. Therefore millions of people are already used to this layout, making it easy for people to pick up the controller and start playing straight away. There are also the Buttons used for the power/skills, that blend easily into the FPS sytle controls.

The Review

My Game Enviroment I believe worked out very well. The enviroment was meant to be a desert Oasis in the blitz of a sand storm. I came up with the game idea from watch and playing alot of SciFi theme entertainment. The desert oasis came about from watching a movie called "The Objective", in which these specials are hiking through a desert on a mission and find a desert oasis. From all this I wrote the story, thumbnailing ideas and concepts as i went. The SandStorm is was something i created to show a hostil desert enviroment.

From the thumbnail stage i started on the blueprint and asset list. Creating these helped me flesh out the level into the bricks i needed to bring it to life. The Genre and target audience was important to get sorted early on, as these would influince the game in many ways. I also added the Objectives(primary and secondary) into the blueprint.

Controls, Interface, and Gameplay mechanics was also an important stage to get down early. The way in which the game is played can have huge effects of the models and textures of the end work. The modelling then began, I started with the High Priority assets as the game had no hope of working without them, finialy finishing with the Low Priority assets. The UVW unwrapping was a long process but I completed them with only minor problems that are now sorted. Texturing was good fun, seeing all the hours apon hours of work coming togather was a great feeling.

Putting everything into Unity was the next step. I made the terrian and textured it next, adding sand dunes and mountains. I placed all the Assets in there spots according to my blueprint. The SandStorm created with the partial effects looks great ingame and dont chew too much resources. Infact the game itself doesnt chew too much for a large level, which was part too optimizing the enviroment to work on computers with lesser specs.

It came from an Idea and now its a full Unity Game Level Enviroment, the Desert Oasis being hammered by a SandStorm.

The HUD

This HUD is very much what is required for the player to play the game properly. The HUD features a health bar easily recognizable by the red cross used as a symble of medicine & health around the world. The Selected weapon is also onscreen as are the amount of ammo. A compass is also onscreen to help with finding missions, weapons and ammo/health. The ActionPoints bar on the side is for specials skills/powers collected through the game.

The TitleScreen

This TitleScreen for my game, the picture choosen isn't my own but its a good representation of what i wanted. Since this story begins in space i think the TitleScreen fits it into the theme very well.

Video Game Journalism Old and New Styles and the Differences Between Them

Last Thursday I received a lecture on journalism, primarily games journalism, and the differences between old games journalism (OGJ) and new games journalism. (NGJ).

For many years now I have followed the video game world, mostly by using the internet to read articles, reviews, previews etc about the latest games. Until Thursday I never really knew the difference between each type of journalism, and what effect that had on each review/article I had read.

I will now define OGJ and NGJ and discuss specific examples of each type of journalism which I have read.

OGJ - In this type of journalism the author seeks to evaluate the different elements which make up a game, typically: graphics, gameplay, sound, presentation, and replayability are all graded, or at least mentioned in the review.

Pros of OGJ:

• Often gives the reader an in-depth analysis of the game and it's strong and weak points. This allows the reader to do research by reading reviews before purchasing a game. (It's worth noting that although most reviews give each game an overall 'score' out of 10, this is really just a summary, and a much better impression of the game is gained by reading the entire review).

Cons of OGJ:

• Ultimately, it's only the article authors personal opinion on whether the game is good or not. When a reader plays the same game, they may have a very different experience and like or dislike the game for different reasons.

NGJ - In this type of journalism the author writes an article about their personal experience with a game. The purpose here is to tell the reader a story about the game. Sometimes a specific event is recounted in great detail.

Pros of NGJ:

• Allows the reader to sympathise with the author.
• Well thought out examples of NGJ can make the reader actually think about the article they just read and it's implications on them and the world.
• May prove to be more entertaining to read, especially for people who like fiction.

Cons of NGJ:

• Often doesn't give the reader much information about the game itself.
• Some people may find NGJ articles long winded, case in point, the people who run the 'UK Resistance' website.

Now I have defined NGJ, OGJ and the pros and cons of each, I will discuss specific examples of each type of journalism below.

Examples of OGJ

The UK Resistance website has helpfully provided me with 10 examples of OGJ. Sadly the link to the 'Project Rub' review is broken, so I was only able to read 9 of the examples. I have chosen to discuss the Half Life 2 review, and the Die Hard Trilogy review.

Half Life 2 Review (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/r_half-life2_pc)

I decided to discuss this review, because,

a. I believe it to be well written

and

b. I recently played through and completed Half Life 2 (hereafter referred to as HL2), and HL2 Episode 1, so I should have a good understanding of the game itself.

This review is in effect, two reviews in one article, since each of the two pages of the review is written by a different person, thus the reader gets two entirely different perspectives of the same game. (Albeit the second page is shorter).

Page one of the review is split into 8 separate sections, these range all the way from, the validation issues the game had with Steam upon release, up to the different elements that make the game unique in its genre, e.g. the attention to detail, the body and facial animations of the characters in the world, etc.

I felt that these sections successfully broke HL2 down into manageable segments, allowing the author to discuss all the major parts that make up HL2.

As I re-read the review I tried to put myself in the mindset of someone who has never played HL2 before. As I did this I realised that although the game being reviewed is very complex and multifaceted, that the author talks about almost anything the reader could wish to know about the game including: weapons, sounds, AI, characters, mission structure, the overall feel of the game, puzzle elements, physics, the game story, the combat and voice-work. All of this information is covered without giving the reader major spoilers about the game or its story. There is one spoiler warning in the article itself, which briefly talks about the Gravity Gun weapon and the effect it can have on the game world. The spoiler warning allows the reader to skip the rest of the paragraph and continue at the beginning of the next, if they wish to discover all the weapons in the game as they play through it themselves.

Overall I believe this was an excellent review for UK Resistance to cite in their '10 Best Examples of OGJ' list, since it covers all the important aspects of the game, gives the player an idea of what they actually do in the game, and does a good job of persuading people to actually play the game.

Die Hard Trilogy Review (http://www.ukresistance.co.uk/saturn/dhtrilog.htm)

I decided to discuss about this review because I was intrigued that the website, UK Resistance, decided to link to one of their own reviews to show the benefits of OGJ. To me this seemed like an unprofessional path to take, unless the quality of the review was very high...

After reading this short review through several times, I am puzzled as to why UK Resistance chose to include this on their list of '10 best examples of OGJ'.

Before we begin, it's worth noting that I've never played any of the Die Hard games, or even seen any of the movies, so my perception of the game is based entirely on this single review.

The review itself is broken down into 5 short sections; Graphics, Sound, Control, Gameplay, and Overall.

The main issue I have with this example of OGJ is that it doesn't tell the reader enough about the game itself. The information contained in each category is short and tells the reader next to nothing about the game. At no point does the review actually explain the overall objective of the game, and what the player does throughout the game experience.

The only information I was able to gather from this review was that the player has to shoot people, using the lightgun as the game's controller. The review mentions one weapon, a machine gun, references a driving section several times, and very briefly refers to "villains" in the game. the review also touches upon, again briefly, the games music and voices.

In all honesty this is the kind of review where I finish reading it, and end up with more questions about the game than I started with. Here are some of my burning questions: Are there multiple enemy types?, different weapons?, does the game use an objective based level structure, are the levels well designed?, is Die Hard Trilogy an on-rails-game, or does the player have the ability to freely move around the environment?

I sincerely believe that I could have learnt more about Die Hard Trilogy by reading the back of the game box, at least that would give me a vague idea of what the player actually does throughout their time playing the game.

Another issue I have with this review is the repeated and constant use of words such as; COOL!, SUCKS!, ACE, fairly crap and fun. When the author of the review uses these words he never backs up his point with actual evidence. Here are some examples taken from the review:

"Just make sure you set gore levels to max, as the blood splats on the windscreen are COOL!"

"Despite all the shortcomings listed above, this is still an ACE game"

"DH2 is fairly crap really, but I guess it does give you something else to do with your Light gun."

The overall impression I got after reading this article, was that the reviewer should have spent more time expanding the information contained in each section of the review.

In conclusion I honestly think this is one of the worst game reviews I have ever read, it barely tells the reader any information about the game, and since I've never actually played the game, it makes the review almost entirely pointless. After reading the entire review, I know next to nothing about the setting, characters, or mechanics in the game.

The thing that strikes me the most is that the UK Resistance website cited this, this, abomination of a review as one of the "10 best examples of OGJ". Granted it's a review on their own website, but if they actually wanted to sway peoples opinions and make them think, then they wouldn't have linked to this particular 'review'.

Examples of NGJ

The Guardian Gamblog has helpfully provided me with 10 outstanding examples of NGJ. Sadly only 7/8? of the these articles work, the rest are broken links. I have chosen to discuss the, Bow N*****, Possessing Barbie, and Dreaming in an Empty Room articles.

Bow N***** Article (http://www.alwaysblack.com/blackbox/bownigger.html)

BN is an article recounting the authors experience playing the FPS/action game Jedi Knight: Jedi Outcast 2. JK JO2 is an unusual game since it mixes first person shooting with 3rd person lightsabre based combat. Since the BN article focuses on the lightsabre based dual mode, I shall do likewise.

The rules of dual mode are simple, two players take it in turns to fight to the death using lightsabres. The winner stays on and fights the next opponent, and the next, until eventually, he is defeated, and then joins the other players at the back of the 'queue' of people waiting to dual.

The article itself was enjoyable to read; a classic tale of good, the article author, vs evil, the swearing, racist opponent. I've played enough online games to partially understand the authors situation, unless a player is extremely lucky then after a few years of online play, they are likely to encounter a similar situation in the online world.

The last such incident I can currently remember is far less dramatic. As far as I can recall, I was playing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare with a friend on Xbox Live, probably playing either Team Deathmatch, or HQ, (moving king of the hill). Me and my friend were chatting casually, about the game itself, which points to capture next and which points to defend, and occasionally about other random topics. Eventually either, one of our team mates or possibly an enemy, started to speak to us, mainly me over voice chat. The conversation went something like this:

"Hey there are some damn brits in the game!" - Some Guy

"Yeah we're from the UK, so what?" - Me

"Damn, you've got a posh accent" - Some Guy

"Just because I don't pronounce 'water' as 'warer' doesn't mean I've got a posh accent." - Me

"I bet you know the queen" - Some Guy

At this point I was getting irritated by the chat, just because I try to pronounce things properly, doesn't mean I have a posh accent. I don't think I sound like some sort of cartoon British Jeeves butler character. So I decided to try a bit of sarcasm to vent my irritation at the speaker.

"Indeed, I often have tea and crumpets with the queen, old chap" (Sarcastic voice).

- Me

That's about all of the conversation I can remember in detail. After that, my friend replied defending my accent/the UK in general, the other person started properly insulting us, and then the game ended and we joined a different server.

It is a sad fact of the internet and online games, that being anonymous seems to give people the courage to act differently than they likely would in real life in a face to face conversation. In real life, people give each other respect, whereas online people hide behind their avatar/alias and hurl insults at one another without fear of retaliation.

This is particularly common on internet forums, especially if the forum is too large and has too many members to be moderated effectively.

Possessing Barbie (http://www.alwaysblack.com/blackbox/possessingbarbie.html)

I found this to be a fascinating article. It recounts the authors experiences in an online chat room, mainly focussing on a one on one encounter with a woman, and how the real life experiences of both parties impact on the online experience.

Halfway through the article the woman, nicknamed Babydoll, asks the author if "You wanna to see something crazy wild?" He replies "Always", and prepares to follow her...

She led the way through the little house, up a flight of stairs to a closed door. I plodded along behind curiously and just for instant I had the faintest glimmer of a memory of another woman who bade me follow her through her real house a long, long time ago.

As the author follows Babydoll through the house, it recalls a faint memory somewhere in the depths of his mind...

Behind the door was a bedroom, neatly decorated and furnished, the bed a detailed custom model I hadn’t seen before. There allows a talented player to create their own assets to sell for Therebucks, providing an additional way to… Jesus Christ, what is she doing?!

BabyDoll has changed her outfit. The catsuit is gone to be replaced by a plunging open-fronted camisole, barely pinned in front. Lacy French knickers complete the transformation. 
“Sit there.” she says. My heartbeat quickened and my face flushed

At this point the game has become something much more real to the author. Playing the game is evoking involuntary actions, quickened heartbeat, flushed face, that would also occur in the real life equivalent of this situation.

And in the hallowed halls of my Inner Court of Morals all fucking hell broke loose. My perception cracked neatly into three separate and mutually exclusive shards. In one, I was engaged in a consensual act of intimacy with a woman I'd only just met and hardly knew. I was alone with this woman in her bedroom while she stripped for seduction. The verdict was announced with the hollow boom of a giant gavel. Guilty! 

In the second, my advocate jumped to his feet bawling 'Objection!’ frantically quoting legal technicalities. "It's not real!" he yelled, "It's only a game!"

In the third, in the real world, my ears pricked straight into raw, primitive survival mode, straining for the ominous tread of my girlfriend’s foot on the stairs. A wave of panic shot down my spine, my bowels turned to water and I alt-tabbed like a sonofabitch to something harmless.

By this point the feeling of guilt finally hits the author. He is experiencing the exact same emotions that he would display in real life if he was in the same situation. The guilt turns into panic and he temporarily escapes the moral dilemma by alt tabbing away from the game.

It’s been a long time since I struggled with the difference between basic ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. The filing cabinet of my mind fluttered with fragments of memories as I desperately searched for a previous experience with which to compare the event unfolding in front of me. The results were pretty grim, reminding me remorselessly that I haven't always been a paragon of virtue. It took an effort of will to push the comparisons out of my mind, to quash them with self-reassurances based on the words I had typed just a few moments earlier; that this wasn't real, that I wasn't responsible. I returned cautiously to the There screen.

"Sit there, on the bed." said BabyDoll and I sat wordlessly, pushing the moment along, feeling for the precipice where my conscience would call a halt.

"Not there," she said, "There's another spot further down." I found the hidden place and sat. Some shadow moved at the back of my memory, ghostly and ill-defined, an echo of another bedroom long ago and gentle instructions whispered in the dark. "Now lean forward." she said and I laid my head on her breast.

Once again the game evokes another long forgotten memory of the author, which makes the game scenario seem much more real.

"Tea!" my girlfriend shouted from the foot of the stairs.
I fucking jumped, I admit it. Electricity in my spinal column and then a whole new hand of paradoxical emotions were dealt. Now I had to make my excuses and leave the little virtual bedroom. Right now.

When his girlfriend calls to him, the reality of the game situation finally hits home, and the author is struck with an entire gamut of different conflicting emotions. He realises that he's overstepped his moral boundaries and most leave the situation immediately.

“I have to go.” I typed.
“LOL!” said BabyDoll and I realised she thought I was running away. And I realised that I probably was. 

“No really,” I protested. “I have to go and eat.” I wanted to convince her that I wasn’t chickening out of this encounter because there it was again, an overlay of emotional reality onto crudely rendered image. I didn’t want her to question my nerve; I didn’t want her to question my worldliness. My virility.

Now the author is trying to convince Babydoll that he is not "running away' from the intimate situation due to a lack of nerve, a lack of worldly experience. The author is in fact, "Possessing Barbie" that is to say, projecting his real life image, his experiences throughout the world, throughout life, onto his avatar.

A little while later after finishing tea, the author chooses to return to the game to talk to Babydoll about the situation.

“Well what do you think, now that you've seen the alternative seating arrangements?” She said.
“I think I’m confused.” I replied.
“About what?” she said.
“Before,” I said, “When you showed me the bedroom… That was a little weird for me.”
“Of course, it was!” She said, “You hardly knew me!”
“It caught me off guard…” I said.
“It was a li’l thrill though, huh?”
“Well, yes… but it was more the shock. I think… I mean… I dunno.”
“But it’s ‘just a game’ LOL!” she said and that animation kicked it again, knee slapping riotous laughter, mocking.
“No, well I dunno now.” I said. Because I didn’t, I really didn’t have a clue.
“See?” said BabyDoll.
I’m smarter than this, I thought, work it out and make a fucking point or something. Say something.
“Out there,” I said. “In front of all my friends, it was just manipulating animations for laughs but before, in the bedroom, it wasn’t.”
“Exactly. Dear god, I think you've got it.” she said.
“So what’s the difference?”
“The difference is because we were alone and you were beginning to know my mind. I wasn’t just an avatar.” she said. “I was a person.”
“I think it reminded me of something that happened for real once.” I said. “It’s the only way I can explain having real physiological responses. I mean, like embarrassment and heart rate and god, the guilt.”

The author finally comes to terms with what was happening, he was automatically projecting his real life experiences, onto his avatar, so when he entered into being in a situation in the game he would he uncomfortable in, in real life, he experienced the real emotions and reactions he would experience if it happened for real. This is where the title of the article, Possessing Barbie, stems from.

“Ha, I win!” she typed.

From this sentence, it seems that Babydoll was trying to prove a point to the author, I'd say she succeeded.

“But you can only win if it's a game.” I said.
“Yes, that’s true.” said BabyDoll. “It’s both. It’s a game but it’s also real. People are affected by other minds, it’s unavoidable. You bring your own morals with you and you set the limits.
“Kids can’t do that. They have fewer warning systems, because they have been hurt less and they are more open. But they want to explore and there are people who will take advantage of that innocence and curiosity.”

And that was just the final answer. I didn’t have any way to argue, embroiled in my own moral quagmire how could I deny the point she had made? I left the house a little later and headed elsewhere. As I surfed my hoverboard across the green hills I wondered, if There is not a ‘game’ then why did I feel like I’d just been comprehensively owned?
And in the distance I thought I heard the sound of a tree falling in the woods. Maybe I imagined it.

And so in the end, Babydoll won the debate against the author, about how real life experiences affect how the user plays the game online.

Dreaming in an Empty Room (http://www.insertcredit.com/features/dreaming2/)

Now I must confess that I got a bit lost while reading this article. Partially this is because I have never actually played MGS2 (I never owned the original MGS and only played it a few years ago, whenever I next buy a Sony console I'll purchase and play all the MGS titles, I feel I owe it to myself as a game design student to experience a series so beloved by fans, anyway back on topic).

But mainly I think I got lost in the deeper implications of the article, and how the author seems to think that Hideo Kojima, created the world and setting of MGS2 after being inspired by how dreams work, e.g. some elements of dreams are completely normal, while others make no sense at all, and within the dream world, these can exist simultaneously. Even though I haven't played the game, I still know a bit about the over-arching story of the MGS series since I'm a keen gamer,  and I've heard that MGS2 has a reputation for being 'wacky' compared to it's predecessor, MGS1.

I found this to be a deeply philosophical article, since it talks about the nature of dreams, how they work, and how they are different from real life.

It also talks about MGS2 being one of the worlds first post-modern games that is, a game that moves boundaries, does the unexpected, and doesn't necessarily make sense, or have to make sense. Here is an extract from the article.

MGS is not easy to understand. It gets downright bizarre. It’ll make you throw up your hands and scream, "What the hell?" 

Metal Gear Solid 2 in the beginning: A lone vigilante spy jumping off a bridge, boarding an ocean liner, and beginning a mission. 

Metal Gear Solid 2 in the end: A giant robot, a super spy in chains, a guy with a sword, Doctor Octopus, a lady with an enormous gun, all standing on the deck of a ship within viewing distance of the New York City skyline. 

As you can see, this isn't a typical game.

The author then goes on to define what he calls, a 'dream' and an 'empty room'.

By this model:
Metal Gear Solid 2 is a "dream."
Ico is an "empty room."

They are both postmodern masterpieces in their own right.
Now, if your dreams are more like Ico than Metal Gear Solid 2, well, more power to you. The term "dream" doesn't apply to your dreams, or anyone's dreams, in particular. When using a term to describe something postmodern, expect the term to be used postmodernly. 

The empty room is a clean slate. You can put anything in the empty room.
Even a horned boy leading a princess through a castle. Even a language that doesn’t exist.
A dream, however, is always grounded in reality. Dreams have . . . well, not rules. Not constructs. Not even "logic." All they need to keep us from waking up is a sense of the real.
Dreams have terrorists. Dreams have presidents, hostage situations.
Ever dreamed you witnessed a bank robbery? I have. 

Dreams, sometimes, even have terrorist/hostage situations involving vampires.
Dreams mix the real, and the unreal. Dreams mix whatever is in our minds. We can drift off to sleep in a recliner while half-reading the Lord of the Rings and half-listening to the NBC nightly news. Tom Brokaw can be talking about a hostage situation in Israel one second, and a breakthrough in health care the next. We can fall asleep, and hear his voice say: "Ninjas officially kidnapped the president at six o'clock this morning." That happened to me, once. (Except I wasn't actually reading Lord of the Rings.) 

Do your dreams resolve, without fail, before you wake up?
Mine don’t. 

This part of the article got me thinking about my own dreams. When I was much, much younger I remember having a dream or more likely a nightmare, about musical notes. It was a very odd dream as far as I can recall, I think I was a musical note watching all the other musical notes being carried away by a train. I suppose I was left behind. As you can see, this dream isn't really grounded in reality at all, okay, I suppose the train was realistic, but I'd still classify that under the 'empty room' category, e.g. absolutely anything can happen, without reality intruding.

That's the exception though, most if not all of my dreams in recent memory have taken place in real places, with real people, and so contain many elements of reality, thus being classified in the model above as a 'dream'. I used to have the ability to realise I was in a dream and then 'force' myself to wake up getting characters within the dream to throw things at me. Having control over the dream itself and it's characters, meant I could wake up when I wanted to. A few times I have experienced a dream within a dream, that is, thinking I've woken up, while in 'reality' still being in a dream. I find this to be a very weird and not overall pleasant feeling.

Games are a young form of entertainment. The children who grew up with games are now adults. Many of them are as blind to the idea of the artistic videogame as our parents are to Eminem, as our parents' parents were to The Beatles, as The Beatles' fans were blind to the conceptuality of Yoko Ono. God bless the children of today, for seeing the genius of Pokémon. One of them is the first Tolstoy of videogames. 

That, however, is for another day's installment.
Here, at the end of this ridiculous, postmodern "editorial," I’d like to take a stance: I am a strong advocate of New School Gaming. Yes, I can beat Gradius III in one life. Yes, my favorite game is Super Mario Bros. 3. Yes, I do play Street Fighter II Turbo Hyperfighting and Gunstar Heroes at least twice a week. Yes, I like Landstalker more than Final Fantasy X. That doesn’t matter. I have hope for the future. Maybe more hope than you have. 

Or maybe I just have a thing for the Colonel. 

TURN THE GAME CONSOLE OFF NOW! 

Finally the author discusses that games are still a young form of entertainment, so its likely that in the future, their will be more game developers who are willing to push the envelope, to create more post-modern games. Games which challenge peoples perception of what a game should be, should contain, and how it should play.

This concludes my blog entry on OGJ and NGJ. I thoroughly enjoyed reading all of the examples provided, and discussing the examples I chose. Thanks for reading. :)


Bibliograpy

Church, Doug, "Formal Abstract Design Tools", 1999. Available online at: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3357/formal_abstract_design_tools.php 

Kristan Reed, "Half Life 2 Review", 2004. Available online at: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/r_half-life2_pc

Pete Edward, "Die Hard Trilogy Review", Pre 2000. Available online at: http://www.ukresistance.co.uk/saturn/dhtrilog.htm 

Always Black, "Bow N*****", Post 2000. Available online at: http://www.alwaysblack.com/blackbox/bownigger.html

Always Black, "Possessing Barbie", 2004. Available online at: http://www.alwaysblack.com/blackbox/possessingbarbie.html

Tim Rogers, "Dreaming in an Empty Room", 2002, edited 2004. Available online at:http://www.insertcredit.com/features/dreaming2/


Games Referenced 

Half Life 2 (PC) Valve

Die Hard Trilogy (Playstation) Probe Entertainment

Star Wars Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast (PC, Gamecube, Xbox, Playstation 2)  Raven Software

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of the Patriots (Playstation 2) Konami Computer Entertainment Japan

Ico (Playstation 2) Team Ico