More on NGJ, JC Does GT4!!!

Happened to be watching Top Gear the other day when to my delight, JC decided, after comments by Lewis Hamilton that he practised the F1 circuits from his bedroom, to review GT4 as a means of getting used to a particular Indie track (can't remember which one). After that he went out to try the track in a Honda NSX (the same car he used in the simulation) to see if the simulation was accurate. There was mention of feedback on the corners, and his time round the lap, but no mention of graphics, or cardboard cutout spectators, or anything else except the experience of driving the car round a very demanding circuit. Two things: One; my point is proved, JC did the review true to form; and two, he's a wimp! He bottled it in the corkscrew!

It's a Bibliography!!!!!

Yes, that's what it says on the tin.
Course requirements are that we have one of these even if it has little relevance to the module content. Anyway, here it is.


Books

Hamelmann, S., Implementing CAPP using artificial intelligence (AIAI-PR) , Edinburgh,
Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute, University of Edinburgh (1989)

Millingtom, M., Artificial Intelligence for Games (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive 3D Technology), San Francisco, Morgan Kaufman Publishers (2006)

Contributions to Books

Liden, C., 'Strategic and Tactical Reasoning with Waypoints' in Rabin, S. Ed , AI Game Programming Wisdom, Hingham, Charles River Media, (2002)

Engelfriet, J., 'Monotonicity and Persistence in Preferential Logics' in Wellman, M. Ed, The Journal of Artificial Intelleigence Research, Volume 8 January 1998 - June 1998, San Francisco, Morgan Kaufman Publishers (1999)

Journal Contributions

Poland, J. and Hutter, M., 'Universal Learning of Reported Matrix Games' in Arxiv Computer Science e-prints -CS/10508073 (2005) (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005CS.....8073P)

Gershenson, C. and Heylighen, F., 'Protocol Requirements for Self-Organising Artifacts; Towards an Ambient Intelligence' in Arxiv Non Linear Sciences e-prints nlin/0404004 (2004) (http://adsabs/harvard.edu/abs/2004lin....4004G)




That ought to do it!

Games collections and communities.

I said I would chuck a few useless pieces of information on here in case they were relevant to someone. So, for those who are looking to buy used and old games there is Play and Exchange, a small shop in the precinct in Felixstowe, you can also buy all sorts of other stuff there from plastic swords, card games, old videos ..... something of a collector's paradise. Of course, you could traipse round the local car boot sales instead :-)
I spent an hour or so watching X-League TV (Sky channel 279, or http://www.x-league.tv/Portal/home.aspx ) A place where you can either watch or take part in these prize competition shootems, like Quake etc. There was also a review of new developments, like the motion capture that is being used in one of the new Playstation3 games ( I forget which one, lost interest in the interviews quite quickly) It all looks very pretty, probably costs a fortune to make and will be priced accordingly. Thing is, I don't think the gameplay will be improved by that much by it. Maybe I'm wrong, we'll see. As an exercise in what can be achieved it was quite good though. the rest of the program basically focussed on various events which had taken place recently, like the latest EA gamefest in London (didn't take much notice of that one either, so couldn't tell you which one. Had lots of live bands that I'd never heard of and even more interviews. :-) )

New Games Journalism and the trip to ..... somewhere?

So I'm hiding, hoping I'll get through the next assault and survive, having been beaten ten times and thankful for game saves. Anyway, I've read the walkthrough and the trick is to hide behind some barrels and use the grav-gun to manipulate the turrets when they fall over . Here they come, from all directions. The turrets take care of the squaddies, but what about those flying circular saw things? Then I realise that I can use the grav gun to grab them and throw them at someone. Oh yes!! Now we're cooking!! ..... Ok, I am not a game journalist, new or old but, given the choice, I prefer to read the new stuff. Like Ian Shanahan's Bow Nigger (no date given), which describes the experiences of a duellist in Jedi Knight 2 . Another piece by the same author is Possessing Barbie (December 2004), which describes the player's experiences while online in Second Life. Both of these pieces are more focussed on the interaction between the author and another online player of the game, rather than the technical aspects of the game itself. In fact, in the Possessing Barbie piece there is no actual mention of the game itself at all, with the exception of one reference to a the more adult-themed version which is due for release.
I read a few other pieces for comparison.
Tom Chick, in Saving Private Donny, ( November 2004) discribes the interaction between a group of friends trying to play Manhunt while protecting the youngest of the group from it's more violent effects. (Turns out to be a waste of time as the kid is better at the game than they are, which is useful when they go up against other teams.)
Miyuki Jane Pinkard, in Sex in Games: Rez + Vibrator ( July 2002) describes the experiences of a female player holding a vibrating control while her boyfriend plays the game, complete with pictures!!!! I have no idea what the game was about but I imagine it became popular with female readers of the piece!
The thing about all of these examples is that they all give a first person-view of a players experiences while playing the games, while not actually focussing on the games themselves.
The journalist Kieron Gillen first coined the phrase New Games journalism in his blog in March 2004, in which he describes the writers as "travel journalists to imaginary places". well, certainly two of the above pieces fit that description. The other two I'm not sure, since the authors aren't really anywhere except their apartments, and the interaction is between people in the same room.
For small difference I read A Rape in Cyberspace by Julian Dibble ( December 1993), which refers to a series of events that took place on an online text-based game called LambdaMOO. Here, the style was that of a passive observer who took no part in the events themselves, but merely recorded them. There is also a piece called A Corporate Murder which reviews Eve-Online, but I could't find any more information on where it came from. Pity, because it is a good piece.
Some things I note about the examples of NGJ that I read:
1: they are all subjective.
2: choice of language in some is er.... choice!
3: there are no screenshots!
4: they don't tell you that you need a Crays2 to run the games, in fact they tell you no technical stuff at all.
5: they don't give marks out of ten!
6: they don't try to sell the game, but end up doing so.
7: they are written with the emphasis on the player, not the game.

Political Games?? (Ok, so I missed a couple of entries here but I'll catch up).

Having heard the lecture and watched the video, it's curious to note that in a couple of places the term 'globalisation' was replaced by 'Americanisation'. As far as media is concerned, whether the Japanese culture is spreading across the globe via the games market is open to debate. The film made note of the global impact of the Pokemon phenomenon on the world, but 5 or 6 years down the road it doesn't have the same effect. It was also noted that the later versions of Final Fantasy (Squaresoft) featured characters which were more westernised in appearance.
The video also made much of the Playstation2 as a platform which would be the leader in the console gaming market. This proved to be an accurate reflection. However, with the new, third generation of consoles, the winner has proven (so far) to be Nintendo's Wii, which took gaming to a completely new level by having motion sensors in the controllers.
Reading the ELSPA release ('The Games Industry: A UK success Story) I noted that the number of employees in the gaming industry fell, while the actual industry is still expanding. One of the factors given was the rise of the cost of making AAA games, basically making development unviable for all but the best financed companies.
The trouble is, that the large companies are traditionally conservative in the styles of game they produce, relying on continued franchises rather than risk a completely new venture. Hence Tomb Raider has 2 or 3 sequels, why spoil a good thing. The same could be said for the film industry, it's easier to make Die Hard X rather than invent a new character.
I played the two games we were required to try out. The first, www.mcvideogame.com , put you in the role of a fast food producer. The thing about this game, as it's designer Paolo Pedercini intended, is that it is balanced in such a way that the only way to succeed in playing it is by use of practises which are not politically correct. But if that is the message that the game tries to convey. as a game it definitely succeeds, as a political message I am not so sure. Most people I know don't play games to get some kind of message from them. They play games because the games are playable. the idea that a message can be transmitted in such a fashion doesn't work. good game, though. :-)
The other game was http://www.peterpacket.org/ a game which was supposed to educate the player about global issues of poverty and lack of education. Well, there was a lot of cut-scene style animation , which is easy to skip, and then there is the game. Frankly, this game doesn't work. as a game it is too easy, and as a means of getting the message across it just doesn't work as the message can be skipped altogether.
The point is, can games be used as a vehicle for ideas to be got across to a wider audience. Can they be used to make people aware of, and think about, the issues that the designers are trying to publicise? This is something that the film industry has tried, and for the most part failed - though not completely, to do for years. That's with a 'captive audience'. Normally I would expect a gamer to be concentrating on the game, not the political message behind it.

Types of games??

Firstly, the paidea/ludus bit. Kind of strange this, since all games are, by their nature, played for pleasure. If Ludens describes a game as ' a subset of play' (Salem and Zimmerman, 2004: 71-83), and play as 'an activity with no material interest'(cited in Salem and Zimmerman, 2004: 75), then what about sport, music and gambling, to name three activities which are pleasurable, but have a definite material interest; professional sports, gambling (obvious), and the music/arts industry. Then there is the bit about rules, which, according to Ludens, are fixed; so a kickaround in the park could not be described as play - no rules - but is a 'free activity standing quite conciously outside ordinary life' (cited in Salem and Zimmerman, 2004: 75).
So I am not sure that paidea/ludus, as types of game, mean very much.
As far as videogames are concerned, the only type of videogame that could be described as Ludus would be online gambling. Any other genre could only be described a paidea. (Ok, in some countries there are competitions with monetary prizes for winning a game of, say Unreal Tournament but these are not the norm).

Then there is the Agon/Alea/llinx/Mimicry bit. Again the lines are blurred. A Mimicry kind of game, such as RollerCoaster Tycoon or SimCity, could be said to be Agon if there is a particular
population or monetary target to be met. Some of the flight sims could be labelled the same way,
since targets could be assigned to be destroyed in order for the game to progress. X-Wing (LucasArts) is such an example. Actually, X-Wing, like a lot of other fighter pilot sims, combine all of the attributes, movement of the controls, and chance being the random nature of the enemies. (That last part depends on the age of the game, since most enemies in early games were scripted in their behaviour).
I am curious about these labels, though. For instance, how do you define God games, or strategy games. In some cases, such as the Tycoon series, they could be seen as a type of mimicry, but what about Civilisation (Firaxis), Empire Earth (Sierra) or Age of Empires (Microsoft). All of these examples have elements of all the types so there seems little point in labelling them at all.
And maybe that's the point. Should games be classed according to type, or as seems to be more popular, genre. I mean a shoot'em like Unreal Tournament has all of the types, but is still just that. A shoot'em.

Personal experiences, the bit I missed last week

What first drew me into gaming was a mixture of curiosity and boredom. I remember playing elite at work when I was working at a money broker in 1989. My boss introduced me to the game, and we would play occasionally. Things took off in 1994 when I bought my first pc, a Pentium60, for £2000!
I went through the shootem games, like Hexen, Doom etc., and got bored with them, so now I play strategy God games, such as the Anno series, Civilisation, etc. Firstly, because I can play for any length of time, 10mins, an hour or two, get up and just pause and leave the game and then come back and pick up where I left off. Now you can do the same in action type games but then you have to try remembering where the hazards/enemies are.
I spend most time playing alone, except when at Uni where there is a shared environment. I rarely play online because to do so requires you to be able to have sufficient time to complete a game or you end up disappointing the other player. The only exceptions would be a turn-based online game such as Astronest, sadly defunct.
Ideal game? Not sure there is one. All games have good and bad points, some have goals that are too difficult, or take too long to attain. Others are too limited in that there don't seem to be any goals at all, bar just playing the game. SimCity is one. the first version of Cossacks came with a bunch of maps but no scenarios or campaigns, so apart from playing out loads of battles the whole thing seemed pointless.
Currently I have just the pc at home, other consoles I have bought for the children include most of the Gameboy series, Gamecube, Xbox, Xbox2, and a Wii. Unfortunately they do not live with me so I rarely use any of them. My wife says I spend too much time playing but the time is actually divided between me, my wife and my four year old daughter, who will spend as many hours playing online games from Nickjunior and CBeebies as possible.
I don't know how many games I have but a rough guess would be around a hundred. Many are not playable on new operating systems so they mostly sit gathering dust.