[Stardock is partnering with Random House on its upcoming strategy RPG Elemental, and Brad Wardell talks to our own Chris Remo about how the collaboration has played out -- and how it led to him writing his first novel.]

In an era when a constantly-expanding menu of entertainment options has put the book industry in dire straits, publishers are looking to adapt to new markets and formats -- including video games.

Earlier this year, renowned book publisher Random House entered a "transmedia agreement" centered on independent publisher/developer Stardock's upcoming fantasy strategy-RPG, Elemental: War of Magic, set to release for PC this fall. At the time, the terms of the deal were somewhat vaguely-worded, with the two companies collaborating in some way on the game's fiction.

Gamasutra caught up with Stardock founder, Galactic Civilizations creator and CEO Brad Wardell to discuss the partnership in more depth.

He explained that not only has Random House provided significant amounts of lore for the game, but Wardell himself authored the novel Elemental: Destiny's Embers, which will go on sale when the game is released:

Did you approach Random House or did they approach you?

Brad Wardell: They approached us.

What prompted that? They had just seen that the game was in development?

BW: They were already aware of Galactic Civilizations, and they liked that we had a whole universe around it, so they asked, "What is your next game?" We told them about Elemental, and they told us that, rather than make books based on games, they wanted to collaborate on a world in which books and games and other media could be set.

That's where the book, Elemental: Destiny's Embers, came from, and they let me write it. It's 600 pages, which turned out to be way more than I thought. I got really lucky in that the editors there had been scheduled to work on George R.R. Martin's new book, so they could give a lot of editorial help building up the lore of the universe to draw on for the book.

Had you done much fiction writing before?

BW: I was only a technical writer. I had written [in-game] manuscripts for Galactic Civilizations and so on, with all the story, but I had never written a 160,000-word book before. It took over a year to write, and there was a lot to do.

It seems odd that you wrote the external book, and then Random House editors wrote the in-game fiction. Isn't that the opposite of what you would expect?

BW: It turned out that it was a lot harder to do the game than to do the book, because the game has so much lore -- every city, every monster, every character needs background. I'm not as strong at that.

The whole book has maybe ten characters, whereas the game has a hundred characters, and all the various [fictional] technology you run into. If you ever played Galactic Civilizations, you know the kind of stuff I come up with there -- "Laser 4." They can come up with stuff that's a lot richer.

The book was more of an arc -- ten or so characters, things happen to them. [Random House] provided a heck of a lot of editorial help to keep me away from hackneyed cliches. You know, "Be careful here -- what you think is subtle is not as subtle as you may think." My idea of foreshadowing tended to be, "Boom!" Right over the head. In chapter two, you'd already figured out what a particular character is all about. They helped with that kind of structure.

That must have been a huge learning experience.

BW: Oh, it was. At the beginning, I had no idea how much rewriting is involved in writing a book. Writing a book is actually like writing a book eight times. I'd submit a manuscript, and it would come back with red all over it, and we'd go back and forth over and over and over again.

Isn't that somewhat analagous to game design, though? You start with the prototype, you add content, you iterate, and so on.

BW: It is and it isn't. When I'm iterating [on a game], I'm not having to read the same stuff. By the end of the book, I'm thinking, "I've already read this passage five hundred times." By the end, you're making very...tiny...tweaks. I understand why some books have continuity errors, because you're trying to think, "Is this plot point still there, or was it only in draft 19...?"

But in terms of the game experience, it's been wonderful. It just makes the game feel a lot classier and a lot richer than it would have.

How does that work? They have actual writers on staff who can just do fiction?

BW: Correct. We're talking constantly. Here. [Wardell launches Skype on his laptop and is immediately contacted by Random House editors offering suggestions and asking questions about the game world's history.]

[Random House publishing and creative development director] Keith [Clayton] is the main guy. He's in charge of Star Wars novels, and he was involved in [LucasArts' 2008 game] The Force Unleashed. We go back on forth and stuff, and then come up with what to incorporate in the game, and it shows up in the single-player campaign.

There must have been a lot of interplay between the manuscript you wrote for the book, and what ended up in the game itself, for consistency's sake.

BW: Exactly. And when I read through the final draft [of the book], it's very difficult to tell where my writing ends and where their contributions start. It's so integrated together. For marketing benefit, I've called lots of things collaborations in the past, but this really was collaborative. It's been a big part of this game.

They're really interested in seeing how much this impacts the success of the game, as well as how the book ends up doing. I've learned the typical book doesn't actually sell a lot of units.

Maybe if it does well, I can finally quit my damn day job. [laughs] If there are negative reviews, I'll cry. So write that in your article: "Don't write any negative reviews." I'll cry like a baby. There will be tears.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Every week, IndieGames.com: The Weblog co-editor Tim W. will be summing up some of the top free-to-download and commercial indie games from the last seven days on his sister 'state of indie' weblog.]

This week on 'Best Of Indie Games', we take a look at some of the top independent PC Flash/downloadable titles released over this last week.

The delights in this edition include a remake of an Action 52 game, a pair of RTS games, a short story-driven game, and a satirical take on casual restaurant management sims.

Here's the highlights from the last seven days:

Game Pick: 'Jigsaw' (Miles Drummond, freeware)
"Jigsaw is a puzzle platformer made for Arthur Lee's Action 52 cart-themed game development jam, featuring two worlds to explore and a healthy number of checkpoints that automatically saves your progress up to that point. The playable character in this remake has a gun that fires nails, which is mainly used for defeating the enemies he encounters and building small steps for him to scale walls with."

Game Pick: 'Revenge of the Titans' (Puppy Games, commercial indie - demo available)
"Revenge of the Titans has entered open beta, and is available to download from the Puppy Games site. It's an RTS-cum-Tower Defence game, with an alien invasion setting. The Titans are attacking Earth, and your job is to place a variety of guns and structures to fend them off."

Game Pick: 'Pixel Legions' (Pixelante, browser)
"Pixel Legions is a real-time strategy game that features multi-coloured pixels as units, which are automatically generated by your mobile base when it's not under attack by your enemies. Numbers will always win the day, although you can also turn the tide of the battle in your favor by flanking enemy units on either side."

Game Pick: 'Blind' (block0man, freeware)
"Blind is a short story-driven game that is divided into two halves, with the first part consisting of walking around and exploring your environment using standard first-person controls. This Game Maker project features no sound at all, although it does have six possible endings to discover."

Game Pick: 'Death Row Diner' (Adult Swim, browser)
"Death Row Diner is a satirical take on Diner Dash set inside a prison cafeteria, where you're placed in control of a lunchlady who has to serve inmates their meal and clean up their mess afterwards. Prisoners will start a fight if the service is too slow, and if that happens you'll have to break them up before it ends in bloddshed."

Posted by timw at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

PlayStation Museum, which has done an amazing job spotlighting a cancelled PS1 game each month with post-mortems and developer interviews since last December, recently published a piece on Infogrames' Test Drive Cycles, a nice supplement to all the recent press about Test Drive Unlimited 2's upcoming release for Xbox 360/PS3/PC).

Developed by Accolade's San Jose studio around 2000, Test Drive Cycles was a motorcycle racer with over 35 real bikes from Harley Davidson, BMW, and others. PSM praises, "There's more than enough in this title to engross even the most cynical racing fan. This game is so well designed that it should be considered the Gran Turismo of motorcycle racing games."

As for why the PS1 version was cancelled, PSM suggests that the studio suffered a major setback when its lead programmer left the team, which was compounded by Infogrames' desire to shut down the studio. It looks like the Game Boy color version of Test Drive Cycles, which was developed by Xantera, made it to stores, though.

PSM posted a couple gameplay videos from the PS1 version to show off the famous landmarks in the game's tracks based on real-world locations, as well as the developer's attention to detail with those stages: around 3:35 in the above video, which takes you trough the streets of Amsterdam’s red light district, you can even spot the silhouettes of women waiting for customers by the windows!

Posted by Eric Caoili at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As part of a "Literary Remix Contest" hosted at GalleyCat, GSW contributor and Octopus Motor's Sparky (who may or may not have had some involvement in Schadenfreude Interactive) created this mash-up of Oregon Trail and a page from Horatio Alger's 1913 novel Joe's Luck --- presumably one of those "orphan pulls himself up by his bootstraps" books Alger was famous for.

GalleyCat will combine her interpretation of the page with 149 other contributed remixed pages and publish it as a free digital book, which sounds like a really fun idea, especially if the other submissions are even half as fun as this one.

Sparky explains her page: "I've remixed my bit in the style of Oregon Trail, the classic Apple II game. Like Joe Mason, your Oregon Trail team has to make their way through a rough-and-tumble land with adversity at every turn. But unlike an Alger tale, the Oregon Trail usually ends with everyone dying of dysentery."

You can see more screenshots from Sparky's remix at GalleyCat.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[In this editorial, Gamezebo founder Joel Brodie examines the effects of a vicious price war on PC downloadable casual games, suggesting that the segment is in "dire shape", and may only get worse without major changes.]

Over the past couple of months, it has become painfully clear to me and many of the users at our [digital game review, rating, and community] website, Gamezebo that the quality and quantity of the PC downloadable casual games that we see is dropping. There are less download games being released each week, and of those that are released, many are just not good.

The state of download games is in dire shape. And, unless changes do not happen soon, things will only get worse.

Before I talk about what’s going wrong, let me tell you what is going right in download games.

The answer is, you, the game player.

There are more people playing download casual games than ever before, which is quite a feat during a worldwide recession.

The growth in demand for download games is driven by lower prices, improved broadband speeds, and the fact that the primary audience that loves to play download casual games, Baby Boomers, is the largest demographic in the US right now.

So what’s the problem? While demand is growing (albeit slowly), the supply side is out of whack, moving the market out of equilibrium. Here’s the problem:

- The price of download games has dropped in the past year from an average of $20 to $7 per game. That’s a 65% drop in price, meaning developers need to sell 2.5 more per game to make as much as before. The demand for casual download games is growing, but at a much slower rate to offset the drop in price (my guess is 10 – 15% yearly growth).

- There are less channels for games developers to sell their casual games, both offline and online. Retailers, like Walmart or Target, noticed the price drop online and either dropped their prices or stopped selling casual games altogether. There has been consolidation online. For example, PlayFirst has partnered with Big Fish Games to sell games and Reflexive is closing their Arcade product. Whereas there used to be hundreds of web sites retail for developers to sell their games, now there are only a few.

- While the price per game has dropped, the amount developers earned per game has either stayed the same or in some cases, decreased as margins get squeezed.

It does not take an economics degree to understand the numbers simply do not add up. If developers are making 2/3 less per game and the amount of games sold is not offsetting that drop, the only way for game developers to earn their return on investment is to spend less time and money producing each game.

Whereas a game developer would have been willing to invest $300,000 and 6 months to develop a game in the past, now they can only afford to spend $100,00 and 3 months just to break even. The result is more derivative content (especially among hidden object games), less game play, and poorly tested games with bad English grammar (I had to throw that last one in there).

Moreover, many highly talented game developers are leaving the download space altogether to focus on iPhone and Facebook games. With iPhone, the cost of development is much lower and Apple only takes 30% of the sale. With Facebook, a decent trafficked game can make up to $50,000 – $100,000 per month. Game developers are not moving to the “hot” iPhone and Facebook businesses to make a quick buck; they are leaving Downloads to stay in business.

And that’s a shame, really, because download games are more popular now than ever before. Gamezebo started as an editorial web site devoted to casual download games and even though we have expanded to cover casual games across all platforms, download games remain our top passion. No one wants the download games market to survive and thrive as much as we do.

In a way, the recent drop in quality has given us here at Gamezebo an even greater purpose in our coverage of download games. We understand that game players do not have money to throw away on bad games, and we strive to give our non-biased reviews on games and provide the online tools for our users to share your opinions on whether a game is worth buying or not.

However, we’d prefer to review more good games and give out 5 stars than to rate games with 2 stars or less for being buggy, derivative, too short, or just sucking. And lately, the 2 stars or less have been flying in our Downloads channel.

Fortunately, not all is dire in the world of download games. Companies are starting to re-introduce the concept of higher tiered pricing with Collections and Premium edition games. There are game developers that continue to develop high quality download games (especially those with strong franchises).

New distribution channels and premium services are popping up to offer developers new ways to make money. And, with less competition, this is the perfect opportunity for game developers to jump back into the Downloads business, assuming they can make the math work.

Still, the fundamentals behind the download games market are flawed and we can no longer stay silent. The first step in solving a problem is to admit that a problem exists and for some reason, the entire casual game downloads industry is too scared to speak the truth.

The games need to get better or game players will stop playing. Game developers need to make enough money in order to invest the time and money to create better games as we’ve enjoyed in the past. And yes, game players need to be willing to pay more than $7 to play higher quality games.

I’m not saying it’s possible to get the average price back to $20 per game. There are too many cheap and free games online, on Facebook and the iPhone (that’s a reason why we are covering them more). But, $7 does not work. A desk for $1,000 made by craftsmen is higher in quality than a $200 desk you buy at Walmart made of particle wood. It’s the same with download games.

If the status quo does not change, we’re going to enter a vicious cycle, where lower quality games lead to less game sales, which leads to less developers creating download games, which lead to even less sales, and so on.

And once the big fans of download games get fed up, bored, and stop playing --- well, then that is when it truly is game over.

[Joel Brodie is the President and Founder of Gamezebo, a leading editorial and community web site for casual games across multiple platforms. Gamezebo features reviews, previews, and walkthroughs for games on the PC, Mac, iPhone, and Facebook. Previously, Joel was head of business development at Yahoo! Games.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In an exciting week for new job postings, Gamasutra's jobs board plays host to roles across the world and in every major discipline, including opportunities at BioWare Austin, Junction Point Studios and more.

Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.

It will also be cross-posted for free across its network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on online worlds, cellphone games, 'serious games', independent games and more.

Some of the notable jobs posted this week include:

BioWare Austin: Director Of Studio Operations
"BioWare is hard at work on Star Wars: The Old Republic, our massively multiplayer online game being developed at BioWare Austin. The Director of Operations will develop, manage and drive the operational groups of the BioWare Austin studio (Finance, HR, IT and Facilities) within the BioWare Group of Electronic Arts. You will partner with and support the studio General Manager and Group Operations Officer by providing financial strategies, resource and staffing allocations, growth plans and IT initiatives to ensure that all employees experience a high Quality of Workplace environment."

Disney Interactive Studios/Junction Point Studios: Game Director
DIMG core businesses include Disney Interactive Studios, which self publishes and distributes a broad portfolio of multi-platform video games, mobile games and interactive entertainment worldwide; and Disney Online, which produces the No. 1 Community-Family & Parenting Web site and an industry-leading suite of online virtual worlds for kids and families. We are currently looking for a Game Director to work full-time hours in our Austin, Texas studio."

THQ Montreal: Executive Art Director
"With our recent releases of Darksiders, UFC and Red Faction, we are well on our way to rebuilding THQ as a high quality, craft driven developer of world class games and transmedia properties. A key to this is our recent announcement to build a new 400 person studio in Montreal where we will develop new IP and partner with our existing studios THQ Studio Montreal is a very unique opportunity to get in at the ground floor and help us build a new and successful culture of creativity, innovation and fun."

Armature Studio: Senior Game Designer
"Armature Studio is located in Austin, Texas and was founded by the key developers of the Metroid Prime franchise. We aim to keep the creative flexibiity of an independent studio while partnering with publishers to create compelling, high quality games. Working closely with the Game Director, the Senior Designer will be responsible for creating and building gameplay systems and scenarios for our upcoming projects. This role will also include managing and directing other designers."

Silicon Knights: Level Designer
"Silicon Knights is a guild of talented individuals dedicated to creating groundbreaking video games. Located in St.Catharines, ON Canada, silicon Knights proudly ranks as one of the top independent development studios and has a reputation for creating superior original content Best known for Eternal Darkness, Metal Gear Solid: the Twin Snakes and Too Human. We have exciting unannounced projects in development. If you're talented and passionate to create great games, we invite you to apply!"

Sony Online Entertainment: Senior Online Game Engineer
"Support PlayStation Online Games by developing and supporting in production a high complexity, service oriented application that offers online functionality for PS3, PSP, and PS2 games. The application handles online features such as player login, stats, matchmaking, community features, and chat. It is written in Ruby on Rails and makes use of leading-edge technologies such as Redis and Resque."

To browse hundreds of similar jobs, and for more information on searching, responding to, or posting game industry-relevant jobs to the top source for jobs in the business, please visit Gamasutra's job board now.

Posted by Leigh Alexander at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hydorah, that rad-looking Gradius-style PC shoot'em up we featured several months ago when its challenging but impressive single-stage demo released, is now out with 16 bullet-filled levels. Though it's only been out for a day, it's already getting a lot of praise from shoot'em up fans for its polish, difficulty, and catchy music.

For those who are terrible at shmups (like me) but want to play a great shooter anyway, there's an option in Hydorah that lets you save your state three times during your playthrough, which should be useful for practicing particularly difficult stages or exploring different paths to find secrets. That leaves you with one less excuse to skip the game!

Spanish indie developer Locomalito, who worked on the title for two and a half years, has posted the game for free, along with posters, DVD cover art, and a PDF user manual on his site.

[Via IndieGames.com]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sega posted this wicked trailer its upcoming Xbox 360 port of its mecha-battling arcade game Cyber Troopers Virtual-On Force. I'm sure those of you that paid some $300 to pick up Hori's Twin Stick EX controller for Virtual On Oratorio Tangram will be pleased to see another game compatible with the joysticks.

Developed by Hitmaker and released only in Japan back in 2001, Force is distinct from other Virtual-On releases in its emphasis on four-player, 2-vs-2 matches. The Xbox 360 version will feature new HD visuals, four-player splitscreen play (for local games), online battles, a co-op boss fight mode, and more.

Sega intends to release Virtual-On Force in Japan this Winter. It hasn't revealed plans to ship the game Stateside, but it did put out Virtual On Oratorio Tangram in the West through XBLA, so don't lose hope on that just yet!

[Via Mecha Damashii]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

NanaOn-Sha's Masaya Matsuura showed off WINtA, his iPhone/iPad project for industry-supported Charity One Big Game charity, at NLGD Festival of Games 2010 this morning, and revealed that the rhythm action title will feature music from soul legend Marvin Gaye.

That seems obvious in hindsight, seeing as WINtA is an acronym for "war is not the answer", a line ripped from Gaye's famous hit "What's Going On". The PaRappa the Rapper creator demonstrated the game's mechanics, which are similar to Ouendan/Elite Beat Agents, in that you tap markers to Gaye's music.

Matsuura, who's working on the project with Dutch developer Triangle Studios, says he hopes to create a platform that is a great standalone music game but will allow other artists and musicians to contribute content after its launch, according to a report from GamesIndustry.biz.

WINtA is expected to release for iPhone in a few months. You can watch a short clip of Matsuura demonstrating an early version of the game last November after the break:

[Via @cornevandelft]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[We're partnering with game criticism site Critical Distance to present some of the week's most inspiring writing about the art and design of video games from commentators worldwide. This week, Ben Abraham looks at the history of social games, the tyranny of the player, and why Demon's Souls is like Groundhog Day.]

First up, a quick pair of posts from the tail end of the week-before-last: remember the new series from the LittleBoBeep blog, “How Board Games Explain Everything”? Well between writing last week’s post and its publication the author Julian followed up with a sequel on Jacques Derrida and Poststructuralism as explained through (board) games.

And while we’re on the subject of French writers, Eric Viennot is a French blogger who, in the same week, wrote about Red Dead Redemption and who suggests that given the Western genre’s emphasis on place and space there’s perhaps no better media for the Western than video games. Think of it as an opportunity to brush up on your French.

David Wong, editor of comedy website Cracked.com, lists 5 no-nonsense reasons why it’s still not cool to admit you’re a gamer, and it’s hard to disagree.

Elswhere, Jon Radoff has a brief pictorial & narrative history of social games on his blog this week, locating social games like FarmVille in a broader social context.

“You say apocalypse, I say retro chic” by G. Christopher Williams of PopMatters is a comparative look at the worlds of Fallout 3 and Bioshock that notes:“Both games seem to revel in [the] juxtaposition of an idealized American age with the ruin of society. The soundtracks of both games jarringly counterpoint the brutal actions of scavengers in the Capital Wasteland and Rapture...That both soundtracks are comprised of songs, which almost exclusively belong to a time associated with values, decency, and decorum, is, of course, intended to be ironic and also serves as a means of emphasizing just how rotten the world has become...”

This week Maher Sagrillo wrote about Alan Wake for his blog ‘Cosmic Maher’, and looked at the nature of darkness and ‘The Real’: “Horror is, as Alan Wake points out, a kind of darkness. A mental, reality darkness, something that confounds us with its illogicality.”

Randy Smith talks about procedural content for his Edge Online blog, arguing that the nature of the simulation is the source of its attraction: “What makes a procedurally generated level superior to a hand-crafted one? The question contains the answer. It is precisely that the level is nothing special that makes Rogue more dynamic experience than static narrative. You hurl yourself into a teleportation trap to escape the wraith that attacked while you were passed out from hunger, a cliffhanger of your own creation, not a cutscene. If these moments of excitement are scarce punctuation in long paragraphs of flatness, that is to be expected from an honest simulation.”

Amanda Lange at the Second Truth blog asks, ‘Why can’t we make another Shadow of the Colossus?’ and she’s not talking about just another sequel: “Games are not art, says Roger Ebert, but we beg to disagree because dammit, we have Shadow of the Colossus. So... why don't we rip it off more?”

Jonathan McCalmont is back with a vengeance in his column at Futurismic this week, and tears into a deep reading of the 2008 game Dead Space as a critique of neoliberal economics.

Yes, you read that right. McCalmont says that, “...while the game is ostensibly yet another title all about collecting money and killing monsters, Dead Space is a fiercely left wing game whose narrative constitutes a vicious critique of neoliberalism and the monetarist policies of Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys.”

To add emphasis to this point he notes that, “Dead Space happily asserts the universal power of the market — it does not matter how many lives are at stake, how dangerous the situation is or the extent to which the world is falling apart — you still have to pay money for the big guns. The logic and the power of the market always transcend human needs.” It’s a detailed and thoughtful reading, and despite the fact that some may find McCalmont overreaches in places, I think it’s a terrifically valuable piece of criticism.

Jun Shen Chia considers whether videogame journalists hold games to too high a standard since “After all, game devs put a lot of effort into their craft. Why should we criticize if we only consume and not contribute?” Personally I come down on the side of the critic over the creator nearly every time, since, as I noted on Twitter the other day to Manveer Heir, “true criticism comes from a place of love”. We criticize because we can’t stand to see games stay the same.

Gerard Delany of the Binary Swan explores the ‘Tyranny of the Player’ this week, talking around Red Dead Redemption and issues of player control. Speaking of Red Dead Redemption, Mike Abbott’s ‘I’m your Huckleberry’ is a humorous and revealing anecdote about a certain racist storekeep in the game and the interesting dance that Abbott performs with this infinitely respawning NPC.

Proving the old adage that good things come in threes, or at least they do from GamerMelodico, Dan Apczynski leads a trio of posts this week with ‘I want to box Peter Molyneux’. I think there’s probably a market for that game. David Tracy also asks in ‘Homer Tracy’s Road Show’, “Have you ever heard of baseball great Homer Tracy? No? That's probably because Homer Tracy is the character that I play in MLB 10: The Show and he is not very good.”

And lastly from the GamerMelodico posse, Kirk Hamilton brigs home to the ranch an excellent entry on ‘Red Dead Redemption’s excellent sound design’. Speaking from what I can only assume is intimate experience, Hamilton notes that, “I don't know whose gig it was to go and record a bunch of armadillos running in the wild, but whoever it was did his job right.”

Our final piece for the week is Jason Killingsworth’s “Groundhobbit Day” in which he notes of the game Demon’s Souls that, “Despite the game’s Tolkien-inspired milieu and bevy of fantasy-RPG videogame conventions, Demon’s Souls’ most suitable movie analog is not Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Rather, Demon’s Souls is the unlikely fraternal twin of Harold Ramis’s 1993 comedy Groundhog Day.” Killingsworth gets extra credit for photoshopping the head of Bill Murray into Demon's Souls for his post.

Posted by Ben Abraham at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Coder Mick Farrow released this swank looking PC remake for Nintendo's classic Donkey Kong arcade game (it's actually based on Ocean Software's CPC or C64 port, I think, but I doubt you care!), updating its visuals and swapping out the kidnapped brunette Pauline with a blonde damsel-in-distress. There's new music and sound effects, too!

The remake isn't without its issues, as players are reporting a few bugs and some even say jumping -- an essential component of the game of the game, obviously -- is slower than it should be. I imagine Farrow will eventually address those problems, but in the meantime, you can grab this attractive Donkey Kong update for free from the Retro Remakes forum.

[Via Trulsrohk]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

"Is art playable? Are video games cinematic? Is Machinima theatrical? Are smartphones a stage? Is there an architecture that connects these diverse media forms? What boundaries can be broken within (and without) the walls of an Off-Off Broadway Theater to change your view? With the increasing maturity of the modern video game, the possibilities for multi-media cross-over artworks cry out to be explored."

Brooklyn's Brick Theater, the same venue that put on last year's Adventure Quest, will bring back its "Game Play: A Celebration of Video Game Performance" event next month (July 7-25) with a variety of "party nights", installations, and performances all inspired by video games.

The game parties will include an opening night preview cabaret and party on July 9th featuring Kurt Bigenho's "Real World Instant Messaging", a chance to dance-with/play/wear arcade suits displaying titles designed by local game designers and provided by Babycastles, a Rock Band Karaoke Night, and a chiptunes dance party.

As for the video game performances, Eddie Kim will present Grand Theft Ovid, which offers tales from Ovid’s Metamorphoses acted out with digital puppetry:

"Characters from World of Warcraft, Halo 3, and Grand Theft Auto 4, among other games, will be projected on a large screen in front of an audience and manipulated by gamers. They will be linked to each other and to others over the internet to play out Ovid’s stories, including 'Niobe'; 'Daedalus and Icarus'; and 'Apollo and Daphne.'

With a new translation of stories by Carrie Thomas and featuring music by Oxygenstar, Eddie Kim’s newest machinima piece uses more game systems and more games. Watch as classical stories are fleshed out in pixels and given life in worlds usually inhabited by night elves, aliens, and dirty cops."

New media artist Jon Rafman will give attendees a guided tour of Linden Lab's virtual world with Kewl-Aid Man in Second Life: "The audience decides what user-generated realms the tour visits -— furry sex clubs, a psychedelic jungle world, or a Blade Runner–esque megacity. Live critical commentary and a discussion of the implications of virtual worlds for modern society accompany the tour, followed by a Q&A."

I came across a video of this once without knowing about any of this, and the experience was mind-blowingly vulgar. In fact, you can watch that bit in the tail-end of this trailer at Kewl-Aid Man in Second Life's official site.

Other performances you might want to investigate: Modal Kombat, a "guitar-controlled video game battle"; A Short Lecture of a Different Time, which combines NES graphics, Game Boy music, and theoretical physics to tell "the story of the OLDVERSE: the universe before this one, long dead and gone"; and Theater of the Arcade, a collection of arcade-themed short plays.

You can find more details on the performances, read about the creative installations (Erik Sanner's Chess and Knifeandfork’s The Wrench), and buy your tickets to Game Play at Brick Theater's dedicated page for the July event.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['The Magic Resolution' is a regular GameSetWatch column by UK-based writer Lewis Denby, examining all facets of the experience of playing video games. And reading about them, it would seem, as this week, he's been considering a feminist approach to Zombie Cow's new game.]

I'm still not quite sure what I make of this article, posted on Hoyden About Town. It's a blog, according to its header image, about "life, laughs, science, progressive politics and foiling diabolical masterminds." What that roughly translates as is: a feminist blog which touches on several other topics, one that's nicely written and picks up on some decent issues.

It's by no means a blog about games. But one author, going by the name of Lauredhel, noticed something untoward in a press release for Zombie Cow's new sex education game, Privates. From it, she deduced that "no matter how much we try to make excuses for them and work to find the positive aspects of this sort of game, the developers are dead set on regaling us with their hatred of women."

I feel it's important to establish something rather firmly before I go any further. While I wasn't previously familiar with Hoyden About Town, I have browsed the archives, and it appears to be smart stuff. The comments thread on the article in question, while scattered with nastiness from both sides of the arguments for the first 50-or-so comments, eventually developed into an interesting discussion. The author herself has been largely absent throughout the aftermath, but other writers on the blog have been keen to engage in debate. And, most importantly, I absolutely agree with the core message that emerges from the discussion: that certain language, whether intentionally misogynistic or not, can subtly perpetuate sexist ideas that have become engrained within our society.

So, Privates. It's an upcoming game from Zombie Cow, of Ben There, Dan That and Time Gentlemen, Please! fame. Both games are absolutely offensive and equally hilarious. Privates is the result of a commission from UK media outlet Channel 4, who have spoken at a number of conferences recently about their desire to reach teenage boys as part of their education remit. The game itself features an elite squad of condom-hatted commandos who invade the unmentionable areas of various STI-infected characters, attempting to stamp out those infections. In other words: it's a game promoting safe sex to teenagers who'd usually tune out during scientific and impersonal sex education lessons. That can only be a good thing, right?

Disembodied Genitals

Well, Hoyden About Town's Lauredhel disagrees. "Could a sex ed game based on STD shoot-em-up be useful?" she initially muses, before concluding that, if so, this isn't the right way to go about it.

"This videogame sure is a good example of disembodied genitals," she notes -- "Genitals presented as 'hostile territory' at that, and with invading military forces not, apparently, bothering to gain any sort of consent."

The crux of her argument is that, in its attempt to appeal to teenage boys, Privates has taken an egregious route of positioning sexual partners as nothing more than a set of genitals to conquer, and that the game displays women as filthy and disease-ridden in the process -- not, one would expect, the angle Zombie Cow were aiming for.

But that's the first thing that nags me about the article: Lauredhel does indeed seem to think that's exactly what they were going for. "The authors make a stab at promoting this as a sex ed game," she says, pointing at the press release, which begins with a tabloid-aping "Britain. Land of Hope and Glory-holes. Where pregnant, waddling teenagers take up the full width of the pavement with their oversized triplet pushchairs, unaware that their rampant, perpetual humping has filled them to the brim with all manner of grotty infections."

At its most callous, the article struck me as tremendously bad reporting. No attempt was made to contact the developer -- nor, it would seem, to position the game within its important context. To suggest Zombie Cow were "making a stab" at promoting Privates as a sex education game seems to somewhat understate the fact that it was comissioned for exactly that purpose. Readers arriving at the article from Rock, Paper, Shotgun's 'The Sunday Papers' links roundup were quick to pounce, also suggesting that the author missed the parody of the press release, which offers a sly wink at the British tabloid press' obsession with teen pregnancy rates in the country.

Déjà Vu

And that's when something struck me. As the debate raged on, I thought back to something I wrote last year in this very column. Having read an article in The Telegraph, I penned a fuming rebuttal to what, at the time, I felt was an entirely horrible article about women's boyfriends being unceremoniously stolen by an addiction to Modern Warfare 2. Read it here, and try not to cringe as much as I did when you realise what's going on.

Because, indeed, I was later informed by a friend of mine who writes for The Telegraph that Hannah Betts' piece was -- you guessed it -- intended as a parody of the videogame-fearing tabloid press. The same tabloid press that Zombie Cow lay into in their press release -- and I was quick enough off the mark with that one.

Oops.

And yet, while I'm all too aware that I might have made a bit of a blunder there, in a way I stand by what I wrote all those months ago. Joke or no joke, certain language does have the potential to perpetuate nasty ideas. "It's just a gag" doesn't cut it. I know this having studied language and gender at university; if you've thrown your life into feminist theory, press releases like Zombie Cow's are always going to stir up some rage inside you.

And it's a shame. It's absolutely a shame, because as it turns out, neither Hannah Bets nor Zombie Cow intended any offense whatsoever with what they wrote. Instead, they both attempted to address a very specific audience, while subtly mocking those who do not share their ideals. And in both cases, someone got offended -- in the first case it was me; in the second, Lauredhel.

I think Privates is a great idea. I think it's bang on target in terms of promoting safe sex to adolescent males -- and unless things have changed dramatically in the last seven years, goodness knows the UK's National Curriculum isn't doing so well in that respect. But now, I re-read the press release, and while a part of me still cracks a smile, another part cringes.

I don't think Hoyden About Town's reporting was strong. I do think that both sides of the debate in the comments thread went alarmingly overboard, often refusing to listen to the opposing point of view. But I do think the author has a point. If you're making a sex education game, you're dealing with serious issues -- and unless you take that absolutely seriously, you're always at risk of dropping the ball.

You have no idea how strong the urge was to make a gag about that last line.

[Lewis Denby is editor of Resolution Magazine and general freelance busybody for anyone that'll have him. He's clean, last time he checked.]

Posted by Lewis Denby at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Swedish developer Paradox Interactive, known for its excellent historical strategy PC games like its Europa Universalis and Hearts of Iron series, released this new trailer showcasing the features of it next title, Victoria 2, due August 13th, 2010.

In this "grand strategy game", players take control of a country during the colonial era of the 19th century, guiding it through "industrialisation, political reforms, military conquest and colonisation". Victoria 2 offers more than 200 playable countries, dozens of government types, thousands of inventions, an economy with over 50 kinds of goods/production factories, and more.

Much more than just a wargame, Victoria 2 promises an in-depth political simulation where you'll see the consequences of your decisions not just in the game world, but in your population's reactions based on their "political awareness, social class, as well as their willingness to accept or revolt against their government."

You can watch another trailer for Victoria 2 after the break, and find more information on the game at Paradox Interactive's site.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dutch artist Varun Vachhar created this neat "consolefont" poster for a graphic design assignment at the Royal Academy of Art's Interactive/ Media/ Design program.

It isn't perfect -- the PS3 Boomerang seems out of place, the N64 controller is used much too often, and Vachhar hopes someone will suggest better ideas for the "G" and "5" -- but there are some creative controller uses, like the Virtual Boy "M", the Atari joystick "Q", and Wii Nunchuk "R".

You can the rest of the consolefont alphabet, numbers, and punctuation marks after the break. Vachhar still needs to release this as an actual typeface we can install on our computers, though!

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Along with Frog Bog (Intellivision), Missile Command (Arcade), Skiing (Atari 2600), and Video Pinball (Atari 2600), this week's Game Room update includes a surprising arcade title: Konami's Mr. Kabuki, or Mr. Goemon -- full name Ganbare Goemon of the Legend of the Mystical Ninja series.

This 1986 title predates the Famicom and SNES releases the blue-haired ninja is best known for, and is actually the first game from the Konami series. Several sources indicate this never appeared in arcades in the West, and even if it was, I doubt many in the States had a chance to play it.

So, what's Mr. Kabuki all about? Hardcore Gaming 101 has an informative summary:

The graphic style emulates the ukyo-e style paintings seen on the covers of the other titles, and for a game made in 1986, the squat character sprites exude a tremendous amount of personality.

The game is pretty simple - just right to the right and avoid the guards. You can either bash them with your pipe or jump on top of them, although you can pick up random items (fans, cat statues, masks) to toss at them.

If the guards catch you, you have to wiggle the controller to break free, or else you'll lose a life. It's a pretty short game, but since it's based in the arcade, it's also very hard. You only get three lives and you have to start from scratch when you run out.

If you have any interest in the Legend of the Mystical Ninja series and are curious to try out the release that started it all, grab this game pack! (Also, is that a tanuki in the above screenshot?)

[Via GamerBytes]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Developers aim to make games more accessible, but Torfi Olafsson, senior producer on notoriously inaccessible MMORPG EVE Online, tells our own Jeff Fleming that a steep learning curve is a "necessary evil" for deep games.]

CCP's space-faring MMORPG EVE Online is known for what some may term mildly as "accessibility issues." But while many game developers are clamoring to attract a wide base of users through better accessibility, CCP is focused more on nurturing an existing hardcore fanbase.

By doing this, Reykjavik, Iceland-based CCP has been able to maintain an EVE subscriber base of around 300,000. MMORPG released in 2003 and has had several expansions to give players a reason to keep subscribing month after month.

The company has taken steps to make the game a bit more appealing to new players, but at its heart, EVE Online is an unabashed hardcore MMORPG in a world where the buzz word is "accessibility."

Here, the CCP senior producer Torfi Olafsson talks about the importance of nurturing that hardcore fanbase, and how the game's "learning curve is a necessary evil if you want to provide the game that delivers such a broad range of experience."

He also comments on CCP's fight against real money trading in EVE -- an operation CCP called "Unholy Rage":

EVE Online' learning curve has been described as "vertical." Was that a debate or concern? Or were you guys saying, "Look. That's just the way it's going to be."

Torfi Olafsson: Well, we always knew that the game would be hardcore. The majority of the players are players that immigrate from other MMOs then say, "Okay. I've reached the level cap. That was great. Now, I want something that's really challenging."

So, we surely want to bring more people to the game, and we have taken great strides in bringing people into the game, improving our new player experience through metrics, through observing behavior, analyzing our players, and building better tutorials, etcetera.

But truth be told, it is impossible for a player to learn all the intricacies of such a deep and wide game -- we are now developing our 13th expansion pack for it. So, it's grown and deepened a lot since the launch in May 2003.

We took strides in trying to improve it, but I think that as well is a necessary evil. The challenge and learning curve is a necessary evil if you want to provide the game that delivers such a broad range of experience.

And you feel that if you made it too accessible, you would lose that.

That's the thing. The crisis... I'm not going to dumb it down and paint it pink. Not on my watch. We are constantly trying to make the outer sphere or the outer layer or outer atmosphere of EVE more accessible.

Nurturing those hardcore players is very important to us, and we maintain a really good relationship with our community through our fanfest, through our forums, through our democratically elected Council of Stellar Management.

A large majority of our game designers are actually previous EVE players that have just a passion for the games and left their family and friends to move to Reykjavik and work on the game that they love. So, catering to the core is highly important to us, but we realize that the core alone won't pay the rent, so to speak. And also, there are a lot of gamers out there that are hardcore players but just don't know it yet. So, we're trying to attract those.

In the end, I would love everybody to be hardcore players. But then again, people's situations perhaps don't allow for it. People don't have the time required to really dig into the game.

So, with the actions against the real money traders, what was that operation called?

Torfi Olafsson: It was called "Unholy Rage."

What a great name. [laughs]

And we took a very strong effort in throwing out real money traders. It's hard to know who was the same person [under different accounts], but we threw out between 10,000 and 20,000 for real money trading.

What effects does real money trading have? What are the negative that you guys were looking at and saying, "We need to cut these people out?" I'm assuming that to them, they were just trying to play the game to whatever edge that they could.

Right. For one, they use macros and hacked clients regularly for speeding up making money. So, they were causing a very large amount of server load. Once we threw them out, we saw our server load drop significantly. Because they were causing server load, they were actually making the player experience for other players worse.

They were essentially slowing down the server, because a classic macro is very often trying to press a button even if it's not there. It's firehosing the server with commands and requests, eating up bandwidth and CPU cycles. So, that's one problem.

Second, we found that very often, real money traders would be operating out of countries that were out of our jurisdiction and hard to reach, and they were using scamming and kind of illegal methods to just get their accounts. So, even if they were listed as paying accounts, very often, they were being paid for using illegal, stolen credit card numbers, etcetera.

So, there's a heavy amount of fraud, which goes with real money trading. And dealing with fraud is time consuming. It's expensive, and it just takes our focus away from other things that we would like to be doing for players. So, we did see fraud drop significantly as a result [of banning accounts].

What were some of the methods for rooting them out? How were you able to identify who was taking part in real money transactions?

I don't want to go too deeply into it because we don't comment on security. It's a bit like the casinos in Vegas, maintaining their blacklist and figuring out who's cheating.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Product designer Adi Marom created this prototype of a slingshot controller, which uses a rubber band/stretch sensor attached to a Y-shaped tree branch, and allows users who're stretching the band to control a virtual slingshot in a game.

She explains the concept: "The elastic energy generated by the 'shooter' stretching the rubber is determined by the serial analog values from the stretch sensor and stored in the elastic digital band as the stone is drawn back. After the slingshot is released, the stored elastic energy is transferred to the digital stone as kinetic energy. "

Rather than coding something violent like a Duck Hunt clone or a game with Bart Simpson terrorizing Springfield, Marom wanted to create something environmentally friendly for the interactive component. In this prototype, the goal is to fight CO2 emissions bubbles.

"This small game aims to educate players through a physical and playful interaction about the need to reduce greenhouse gas emission," says the product designer. "The users would interact with the sling-shot to remove CO2 emission icons from the virtual sky."

Now, we just need to see someone mass-produce and sell a commercial version of the slingshot controller and game!

Posted by Eric Caoili at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Don "No Carrier" Miller, creator of awesome NES homebrew applications like galleryNES and VegaPlay, has put out an open source multicart ROM that lets you create a loader for multiple NES games like Active Enterprise's Action 52 or those random pirated carts you see littering Asian electronic shops/stands.

Though it's called "9999-in-1", the program only lets you combine four simple 40k-size ROMs (including the menu ROM). No Carrier says that the title is a joke referring to "the old pirate multicarts that often advertised inflated numbers of games on each cart."

9999-in-1 should work on an NES flashcart like the PowerPak or in an emulator. You can download it for free on the programmer's site.

[Via @nocarrier]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Crunch has long been a hot-button topic in the industry, becoming of the most sensitive quality of life issues for game developers. This year for the first time, Game Developer Research asked developers to quantify how much time they spend on crunch, in terms of both weeks per year and hours per week.

On average, according to research made available exclusively to GSW sister site Gamasutra, developers said they work 39.7 hours per week when not in crunch, putting game developer working hours right in line with the widespread 40-hour standard.

Of course, that changes when crunch time is in effect. During those periods, developers said they spent 55.3 hours per week at work during crunch time, an increase of 15.6 hours per week.

That 55.3-hour week is equivalent to roughly a seven-day calendar week of eight-hour days, or a five-day business week of 11-hour days. Furthermore, developers said they spend 13.2 weeks per year, on average, in crunch mode, out of a standard 52-week calendar year.

That means that, on average, developers are working the equivalent of about five extra eight-hour, five-day work weeks per year as a result of crunch -- meaning the average game developer's year is effectively comprised of 57 work weeks rather than 52.

GSW sister division Game Developer Research recently published top-level highlights from the salary study, including news of an overall 4 percent drop in mainstream game industry salaries to $75,573. Since then, it has publicly released earnings data on indie developers and contractors, developer opinions on the state of the industry, and data on developer ages and experience levels.

The full Game Developer Salary Survey 2005-2010 is now available for purchase from the official Game Developer Research site. (The sample for the data contained in this excerpt was a group of 2,630 game developers across all disciplines and demographics.)

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Every week, we sum up sister iPhone site FingerGaming's top news and reviews for Apple's nascent -- and increasingly exciting -- portable games platform, as written by editor in chief Danny Cowan and authors Tucker Dean, Jason Johnson, Ryan Hibbeler, and Mike Rose.]

This week, FingerGaming covers Capcom's Phoenix Wright, the kart racing sequel Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 2, and Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction.

Also within are the lists for top-grossing, most-downloaded free and paid Apps from Apple's store, as well as reviews for 100 Rogues, Zombie Infection, Denki Blocks and Linkin Park 8-Bit Rebellion.

Here are the top stories from the last seven days:

- Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction Infiltrates App Store
"Sam Fisher makes his iPhone debut with Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction, a Gameloft-developed adaptation of the latest entry in Ubisoft's Splinter Cell stealth-action series."

- Chocobo Panic: Square Enix's iPad Debut
"Chocobo Panic detects up to six screen presses simultaneously, making the experience something like a game of Twister for your fingers. A two-player, single-device cooperative mode is also included."

- Review: 100 Rogues
"From the looks of it, this already great game has nowhere to go but up. If RPGs and strategy are even remotely interesting to you, you cannot go wrong with 100 Rogues."

- Top-Grossing Game Apps: Pac-Man's 30th Anniversary Brings Big Sales
"Clickgamer's Angry Birds remains the App Store's biggest-selling app across all categories. Namco's Pac-Man takes second place following a weekend-long anniversary sale, as a price-dropped Ms. Pac-Man finishes ninth."

- Review: Zombie Infection
"The game wrangles you into submission in the later levels, overwhelming you with rapidly respawning fiends, zealots toting machine guns, and giant submarine mollusks that drop I-beams on you at five second intervals."

- Top iPhone Game Apps: Bowmaster, Ms. Pac-Man See Weekend Success
"iOccam's archery sim Bowmaster takes second place this week, rivaling Clickgamer's Angry Birds, which keeps the top spot in today's results."

- Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 2 Now Available in App Store
"One of the App Store's biggest-selling titles to date has received a long-awaited sequel. Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 2 includes new power-ups, 12 unique tracks, and an all-new multiplayer mode."

- Review: Denki Blocks!
"The sign that Denki Blocks truly succeeds as a puzzle game isn't its imaginative, artisan-made levels nor its strange, snakelike pieces. It lies in how these two elements come together to make us think outside the box."

- Ubisoft Launches 99-Cent Prince of Persia Retro for iPhone and iPad
"Prince of Persia Retro adapts the 1992 Macintosh version of Prince of Persia to Apple's touch screen devices, complete with all original levels and content."

- Top iPad Game Apps: Hotel Mogul HD, Pac-Man Lead Paid Charts
"Alawar Entertainment's hotel management sim Hotel Mogul HD is this week's biggest-selling iPad game, following an impressive App Store debut. Namco's iPad version of Pac-Man takes second place after a weekend-long sale."

- Review: Linkin Park 8-Bit Rebellion
"Every single loading screen / (Takes me one step closer to the edge) / (And I'm about to break) / Every brain-dead enemy / (Takes me one step closer to the edge) / (And I'm about to break)"

- Capcom Brings Phoenix Wright to iPhone
"The iPhone version of Phoenix Wright offers a faithful translation of Capcom's courtroom drama, and includes all five cases from the Nintendo DS version of the game."

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Seattle-based indie developer Spiderweb Software, famous for delivering rich stories and old-school, isometric-view RPGs with its long-running Geneforge and Avernum franchises, announced the first chapter in a fantasy series: Avadon: The Black Fortress, releasing to Macs and Windows in early 2011.

In Avadon: The Black Fortress, gamers can play as four character classes (with dozens of unique spells/abilities), discover hundreds of magical items, use crystals to enhance their magic artifacts, explore dozens of side quests and hidden dungeons, and unlock many different endings.

Spiderweb Software explains the setting and plot:

You are a servant of Avadon. The Black Fortress. Your job is to protect the Pact, five nations that have banded together in a fragile alliance. The purpose of the Pact: To hold back the waves of invaders that seek to destroy you.

Outside the lands of the Pact, there are limitless threats. Barbarians. Fading, jealous empires. Titans and unspeakable horrors. The warriors and spies of Avadon are charged to keep them at bay, weak and divided. You fight in the shadows, rooting out small threats before they have the chance to grow. Your resources are unlimited, and your word is law.

But a dark time is coming. Assassins are killing Avadon's warriors, and a hidden enemy plots to unite all of your homeland's foes. If you cannot discover and destroy this conspiracy, and soon, your people face total destruction. But beware. The defenders of Avadon are being picked off, one by one, and you are the next target.

You can read more about Avadon: The Black Fortress at Spiderweb Software's official page for the RPG.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Activision Publishing, typically known for its big budget releases like the Call of Duty and and Guitar Hero franchises, announced the Activision Independent Games Competition.

This inaugural edition of the competition will comprise of two phases, the first of which invites individuals and teams in the United States to submit their projects. Activision will accept entries, which can be completed or in-development games (as well as concepts and proposals), starting today through August 31st 2010.

The publisher will then announce a first- and second-place winner, bestowing $175,000 to the former and $75,000 to the latter to fund further development of their games, in October 2010. The second phase of the competition will begin at a later date, with details on that round forthcoming.

By the end of the competition, Activision expects to have awarded $500,000 to support independent game developers and their projects. You can read the official rules for the Activision Independent Games Competition and submit your title at Activision's Sweepstakes page.

"This competition underscores our commitment to supporting the creative spirit and innovation of developers," says Activision's EVP of Studios Dave Stohl. "I started my career as a software developer, so this opportunity is something I'm personally very proud to offer to the industry's young visionaries."

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Snoopy Flying Ace, an aerial dogfighting game (literally, hurhur) I've kept a close watch on since Smart Bomb Interactive revealed the project more than a year ago, comes out today on Xbox Live Arcade for 800 Microsoft Points -- unfortunately, it seems the Wii version that was in the works fell by the wayside.

So, why should you care about yet another licensed Snoopy game from a studio whose claim to fame is Pacman World Rally and Bee Movie Game? Well, look at that trailer! Also, this is likely the closest you'll get to a sequel for Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge.

The game includes 16 customizable planes (including a flying doghouse), 15 different weapons, 10 battlefields from Snoopy's imagination, nine online game modes offering matches for up to 16 players, and the ability to play as either your Xbox Live Avatar or one of the 12 classic members from the Peanuts gang, including Charlie Brown or Lucy.

You can see more screenshots and download a free trial for Snoopy Flying Ace on the Xbox Live Marketplace.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Continuing his regular GameSetWatch column, psychologist and gamer Jamie Madigan explains some psychological reasons why those big bundles from Steam and other digital distribution platforms are so hard to resist.]

Steam, the digital game distribution platform owned by Valve, often has these weird bundles for sale where they cram together, for example, every id Software or every Rockstar game or every game featuring squirrels into one package. One message board I frequent has a mega thread dedicated to gaming bargains, and doing a search for "Damn you, Steam" produces results like these:

"Damn... maybe I want Colonization. Have CIV IV & BTS on Disc. Should I just get Colonization @ $10.19 or just get them all and have on Steam for a wee bit more. Damn you Steam."

"Got $170 sitting my cart. Staring at it trying to figure out how to cut it down some. Damn you, Steam."

People are talking like Steam is forcing them to pounce on such deals when they happen even though they already have a huge backlog and may actually already own physical versions of half the games included.

What makes these plainly ridiculous bundles so attractive? I'm glad you asked, because I can think of at least three psychological principles at play here.

Scarcity

First, In marketing there's a well worn principal called "the scarcity effect." When something is scarce, it automatically becomes more desirable to us than it would be if it were available everywhere we looked. This "available in limited number" trick shows up everywhere from collectible trading cards to special "limited" editions of new game releases (which usually aren't all that limited in all actuality). Ever noticed a store front that had a "going out of business!" sign in the window for months on end? That's the owners trying to capitalize on the scarcity effect. Buy now, sucker, or it'll be gone!

Consider a simple 1975 experiment by psychologist Stephen Worchel to provide an illustration of this concept involving baked goods. Posing as a consumer products survey, the experimenters offered subjects a chocolate chip cookie from one of two jars. One of the jars had many cookies in it. The other had only a few. Of course, people reported the cookies from the mostly empty jars as more delicious, more desirable, and more expensive. This despite that the cookies in both jars WERE THE SAME COOKIES.

But Steam and similar download services like Direct to Drive sells digital games, right? They're not cookies that are about to disappear, there is literally an UNLIMITED SUPPLY of the 1s and 0s that comprise these digitally distributed games. True, but the scarcity effect still applies, because it's not so much the scarcity of the physical product that we react to, but the opportunity to buy it. Often these bundles are put up a limited time sales and people HATE losing opportunities to do things once they think they're within reach.

Obscuring True Value

The second psychological principle at play here is the fact that it's hard for shoppers to look at a bundle like that and understand what its true value is. William Poundstone, author of Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (And How to Take Advantage of It) calls this the "value meal" strategy when describing the psychology of restaurant menu design. How much cheaper is it to get the bundle? What about if I super size it? With curly fries? Oh, forget it. Just give me the #3 with an ice tea.

Likewise, we look at a massive bundle of digitally distributed games and think about how much could I get those older games for elsewhere? Could I find them for sale used, and for how much? Could I rent or borrow any of them? For the games I already own, how much is it worth to me to have them available through Steam so that I don't have to dig out my old boxes and CD keys? It's a psychological truism that we have limited cognitive processing power at any one time, and when our brains are tied up considering these questions, we've got fewer cycles to devote to thinking about other stuff, like how much we want to actually PLAY the games.

Not that this keeps the folks who run Steam from telling us exactly how much the bundle is worth, though, which brings me to the third psychological factor in play: anchoring.

Anchoring

In the context of the psychology of prices, anchoring refers to presenting shoppers with a number in order to get them to "anchor" their perceptions of value on either a high or low absolute. The "low ball" offer is the classic example --open a negotiation over price with a really low number and you'll set the stage so that what you're actually willing to pay looks higher in comparison.

As a simple but elegant example, consider an experiment done by psychological wizards Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. The researchers asked one group of subjects to estimate the product of these numbers:

8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1

And then they asked another group to estimate this product:

1x2x3x4x5x6x7x8

Those of you with a grade school education may know that because of how multiplication works these products are equal (40,320 if you were wondering). Yet the average estimate for the group that was given the problem starting with "8" was 2,250 while those who saw a "1" at the beginning of the problem had an average estimate of just 512. Why? Because one group anchored on a high number and the other anchored on a low number.

Similarly, behavioral economist Dan Ariely and his collegues conducted a study where he used anchoring in an auction simply by having bidders write down the last two digits of their social security number at the top of their bid sheets. Those whose numbers ended in the 80s and above actually were willing to pay up to 346% more for things like wine and chocolates than were those whose social security numbers ended in the 20s or below. CRAZY.

How does this relate to those Steam bundles? Well, look closely at one of those promotions and you'll see that the marketing gurus for the service readily list the retail value of the bundle if you paid full price for all games individually. That's your anchor; seeing that number will cause many people to set their perceptions of the bundle's value much higher than if they had seen the sale price alone. In addition, the difference between the "unbundled" and sale prices can trigger the contrast effect, which could be considered a fourth psychological principle at play.

So there you have it: you're broke and have way too many games to play because you don't want to loose opportunities to buy something, you're befuddled by pricing, and your perceptions are anchored by arbitrary "normally sells for..." prices. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go play Commander Keen, Doom, Final Doom, Doom II, Doom 3, Hexen, Hexen II, Heretic, Quake, Quake II, Quake III Arena, Wolfenstein 3D, Spear of Destiny, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and more mission packs than I want to think of.

[Jamie Madigan, Ph.D. is a psychologist and gamer who explores why players and developers do what they do by studying the overlap between psychology and video games at The Psychology of Games website. He can be reached at jamie@psychologyofgames.com.]

References:

Ariely, D., Loewenstein, G., & Prelec, D. (2003). Coherent arbitrariness: Stable demand curves without stable preference. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118, 73-105.

Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Science, 185, 1124-1131.

Worchel, S., Lee, J., & Adewole, A. (1975). Effects of supply and demand on rating of object value. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 906-914.

Posted by Jamie Madigan at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As promised by the Humble Indie Bundle, Cryptic Sea has released the source code for Gish, the winner of the Independent Games Festival's Grand Prize and Innovation in Game Design awards in 2005. This 2D platformer stars a ball of tar named Gish that can climb up walls, squeeze through pipes, and more, thanks to his gelatinous structure.

Cryptic Sea's Alex Austin admits, "Most of this code was hacked in in the last 3 or 4 months of development, so it's not very clean." Still, it's great that you can hack around with the Gish engine now and create whatever mods you want

The Humble Indie Bundle, which was a charity event (for Child's Play and the EFF) that was held last month and raised $1.27 million, offered to make several titles open source if enough contributors purchased a package of six indie PC games for however much they were willing to pay.

So far, the source code for Frictional Games' Penumbra Overture, Wolfire Games' Lugaru HD, and Cryptic Sea's Gish have been posted. Bit Blot (Mossmouth's Derek Yu and Infinite Ammo's Alec Holowka) plans to release the source for IGF 2007's Grand Prize award winner Aquaria soon, too.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Interested in contributing to GameSetWatch's education-focused sister site, GameCareerGuide? Students, faculty, and developers are invited to submit ideas for features immediately.

GameCareerGuide acts as a clearinghouse of information for aspiring game developers -- particularly sudents, but in general those with an eye toward becoming professional developers.

As part of its mission, it publishes feature articles sourced from students (coursework and original pieces), faculty, and developers who wish to speak to this audience.

Recently, the site has published Shaylyn Hamm's SMU Guildhall masters project The Aesthetics of Unique Video Game Characters, and SCAD MFA student Michael Prinke's Ten Survival Tips for Aspiring Game Development Students.

Other notable recent articles include USC student Ethan Kennerly's postmortem of his Korean-teaching game Runesinger, and an excerpt from Dave Perry and Russel De Maria's David Perry On Game Design, among many others.

Despite this great content, right now, GameCareerGuide needs more submissions for features. If you're interested in contributing an article to the site, please contact its editor-in-chief, Christian Nutt with anything from an idea to a full submission. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask.

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Avatar Days is a short documentary about World of Warcraft players and their avatars, with four gamers sharing their thoughts about the characters they play as their virtual counterparts roam the dreary streets of Dublin on an overcast day. It was produced by animation studio Piranha Bar's Cormac Kelly, John O’ Connel, Will Sharkey and director Gavin Kelly.

The studio explains, "Avatar Days is a portrait of four online gamers in Dublin whose daily lives contrast with their virtual identities. Advanced 3D technologies and motion capture animation were used to insert the players' in-game characters in place of their real selves against the backdrop of the banal urban landscape which they inhabit."

The near seamless melding of the World of Warcraft online personas with the real world is ambitious enough, but it's even more impressive when you consider that the team shot, animated, and edited this in less than four days! According to Kelly, Avatar Days has already picked up a few awards along the film festival circuit, too!

[Via @SimonParkin]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[Independent Australian developer Firemint (Flight Control, Real Racing) has built a strong presence on iPhone and iPad, and our own Christian Nutt talks to the studio's Alexandra Peters about its success and philosophies.]

After establishing itself as one of the most successful independent iPhone game developers, Firemint gained a strong early foothold on the young iPad platform with HD versions of its major iPhone hits Flight Control and Real Racing.

Those games have been regular presences in the iPad best-sellers charts since their launch, cementing the Melbourne, Australia-based studio as one of the premiere developers on Apple's App Store.

Notably, touch-based plane landing casual title Flight Control on the iPhone had sold 2 million copies as of January 2010, and a DSiWare version recently debuted, in addition to the iPad version's success.

Much more complex 3D motion/touch-based racing title Real Racing has also seen major success at higher price points than Flight Control, both on the iPhone/iPod Touch and more recently on the iPad.

Gamasutra caught up with Firemint community manager Alexandra Peters to discuss the company's quick rise to success, its current development and marketing strategies, and the deceptive simplicity of casual game design.

Prior to your iPhone success, you had a history of working heavily with publishers like EA. Is that in the past for you, now that you have a direct channel to your customers?

Alexandra Peters: We haven't stopped entirely. We're still doing a bit of publisher work. We're not going out and looking for it anymore, so this is the first year you see [at developer shows] where we haven't had anyone meeting with publishers trying to sign up new work. We're being asked to do more work than we're really wanting to do.

I would say we've gone from 20 percent doing our own stuff to the other way around. We're doing 80 percent our own and 20 percent on a few publisher projects. We've been able to be more selective about the publisher projects that we do, so if something really interesting comes along that we're keen to work on, that's a win-win for everybody.

I've heard you have a strategy of developing at least one full-scale game and one smaller, cheaper game simultaneously, so you have acccess to different avenues. Is that an ongoing strategy?

AP: I'm not sure I would call it a strategy. It's more about wanting to make good games. When we have an idea for a game that we think is going to work really well, we'll make that game.

There's nothing to say that we wouldn't do two casual games at the same time or three hardcore high-end 3D games at the same time. This is why we go for great big long stretches of time not really having much to talk about in terms of what's coming up.

Having said that, we've seen the advantages of what that strategy will do for you. You don't get pigeonholed for one thing. People know that, yes, we did Flight Control, but we also did Real Racing. Similarly, you're talking about different audiences and different ways of marketing these games, so it's always good to have a mix, so you can be quite diversified.

It's always better to have a few irons in the fire rather than all your eggs in one basket.

As long as you don't get your eggs in the fire.

AP: Scrambled eggs!

Do you think the audiences of your games have awareness of "Firemint" as a brand? Especially on these platform, it's so crowded.

AP: We're certainly working really hard to build Firemint as a brand. The reason we're so concerned with making a really good game experience every time you play is that we want to keep building the Firemint brand.

So in the future, when you see another Firemint game coming out, it might not be a game franchise you've heard of, but you recognize "Firemint." You remember the games you played before and you think, "I'll give that a go, because I've had really good fun with those games in the past."

On the other hand, we don't want anything to overwhelm the game itself. Again, for us, the game drives everything. We wouldn't want to plaster Firemint in front of people at the expense of the game. We're seeing a lot of people saying, "Oh that's another game from Firemint, who made Flight Control." It's working to a certain extent, but we haven't done any research. It's certainly not hurting us.

As you mentioned earlier, you're taking a fair amount of time to move to your various projects. That seems really uncommon on the iPhone.

AP: That's one of our really big and important mantras. We're not interested in just turning out heaps of average or sub-average games.

We want to make sure when a Firemint game comes out that it's really awesome, and good games take more time to make. There aren't many shortcuts you can take. We're in a great position at the moment where we can afford to take our time.

People often say that the simplicity of casual game mechanics actually makes them more difficult to create, because so much of the game rests on them.

AP: [Firemint CEO] Rob [Murray] likes to talk at length about the crazy math that's going on behind getting the Flight Control line so smooth and beautiful, and making it feel so effortless and easy.

And one of the really interesting things about Flight Control is that it's been one of the few games that have been really commercially successful but also really highly regarded by the development community. And, really, that was driven by the device, by the platform, and by Rob sitting down and thinking, "What do I really want to do on this device? I want to draw. Drawing's fun."

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Korean augmented reality firm Zenitum recently demonstrated this neat Space InvadAR project for Android devices, in which you play from the perspective of an "extra-orbital fighter pilot", moving around your handset (an HTC Desire in this video) to aim at invading Zengi aliens who are trying to destroy the Earth, or at least a printed photo of the Earth that serves as the AR marker.

Zenitum plan to put out the game on Android Market for $25, which seems a bit expensive (and it's fairly simple compared to some other titles like Georgia Tech SCAD's augmented reality zombie shooter ARhrrrr). The company expects most of Space InvadAR's buyers will be "augmented reality junkies", though.

[Via TechCrunch]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Omni Systems has announced that its "ambient real-time strategy game" Eufloria (formerly Dyson), which was a finalist for the Vision and Grand Prize awards at the 2009 Independent Games Festival, will release on PlayStation Network some time in early 2011. The studio intends to self-publish the title.

Eufloria is already available for PC through download services like Steam, but this edition will feature improvements and additions to the indie game's mechanics, interface, and graphics, as well as new content. The developer comments that with all the enhancements in the PSN version, it would be more accurate to describe the new edition as "Eufloria ++".

Presented with minimalist-style visuals meant to recall illustrations of children's books like The Little Prince, Eufloria has you managing trees and seedlings on an asteroid, which you can expand to other asteroids while fending off rival seedlings that are after the same resources and real estate. I've included a trailer for the game after the break.

The studio says this reboot of the game will also come out as a free update to current and future owners of Eufloria for PC. You can also expect new tracks from composer Brian "Milieu" Grainger, who worked on the "ambient landscapes" in the game's original release.

"During original development we had many really nice ideas that could not be implemented due to scope considerations," says Omni Systems' Rudolf Kremers. "Core development was down to only two people after all. This PSN release gives us a marvelous opportunity to put several of them into the game after all, which is very exciting to us."

You can learn more about Eufloria or purchase the PC game at Omni Systems' official site.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Video game comedy skit group Mega64 have released a two-disc DVD set for the third season of its series, with six new episodes about the fictional console that gave the crew its name. Those of you who bought the Season 2 DVD back in 2006 have waited a long time for new episodes!

Each episode comes with commentary from the Mega64 team and documentaries comprised of "uncut, raw, untouched behind-the-scenes footage". The region-free DVDs also include deleted scenes, another documentary on the creation of Version 3, "an additional secret documentary", "secret surprises" and more.

The group is also selling a $5 poster version of the DVD's cover art (by Mariel Cartwright), which depicts "an optimistic view of the world of tomorrow". You can buy 11×17″ prints featuring classy portraits of the individuals who make Mega64 possible for $5 apiece or $15 to buy all four posters. You can the DVD cover and prints after the break:

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Phantom Fingers is a new GameSetWatch-exclusive column on 'the growth and curious development of that relationship between the gameworld and the player' by writer and game theorist Eric-Jon Rössel Tairne [aka Eric-Jon Waugh]. Following the introductory column, this installment moves forward in time to look at Atari's classic 1976 title Breakout ...]

Though Pong, which we covered last time, opened the window to a new world, that world was a void. You had some basic physical rules, and you had a packet of information bouncing around in a box.

The bulk of communication was supplied by a second player. Pong exists in a weird medium that offers the player the vaguest hint of another reality -- a persistent, active set of laws that react upon the player’s every stimulus -- then anchors that experience back in reality. It’s sort of like shaking hands through a curtain of water.

You pass through, and get a fleeting sense of, this alternative medium. That’s nice, and it gives you a sense of the basic laws of water. But compare to snorkeling along a coral reef, and the whole alien world that water opens up by virtue of those laws.

For about four years, no one significantly built on Pong. You saw things like four-player Pong, and Pong with two paddles, and a vertically-oriented Pong that passed itself off as a Volleyball sim.

Atari did experiment a bit with Gran Trak 10 and Tank!, but somehow it took until 1976 for Bushnell and Bristow to hit on a one-player version of Pong. And that pretty much was the missing piece that gave us two distinct schools of design, the home PC, and thereby the information revolution that allows a person to research articles such as this.

As these things go, Breakout was pretty well-named.

Breakout (1976)

You know Breakout. You’ve the single Pong paddle at the bottom; up above you have several rows of tiles. Hit the tiles with your ball to break them. Break all the tiles to move on. The original Breakout has just two levels; clear the bricks twice, and you’ve won. Or at least, you’ve earned the highest possible score and there’s nothing more for you to do except bat your ball around an empty room. Which, I suppose, is no less entertaining than Pong.

The main thing that Breakout does is that it defines a tangible world, and then shifts the burden of narrative from a second player to the gameworld itself. This sounds simple and obvious, but it’s a profound move. Breakout changes the whole premise of a videogame from an empty medium or catalyst for competition to a persistent system for an individual to explore.

It’s not just Solitaire, as the game’s laws are automated. This casts the player in the role of explorer, free within narrow limitations to act and to study the game’s reactions. And unlike the earlier Gran Trak 10, the world and the rules that define it are dynamic. When you break a tile, it’s not a matter of success or failure; rather, what you’ve done is changed the world, which in turn significantly redefines your situation in respect to that world. And this, here, is the basic premise of a videogame.

Basically, without particularly changing the setup from Pong, Breakout gives the player something to touch. Something to meaningfully affect, and change. This in turn creates a distinct, if simple, narrative. It’s still fairly indirect contact, of course; all you’re doing is reflecting a ping back against that ocean floor. Yet every positive movement you make, every reflection, asserts your involvement. Your mere presence in the gameworld is significant. The act of playing changes the course of events, introducing chaos to what had been a static, stable system.

As with Pong, the player involvement is kept to an absolute minimum: twiddle a knob left and right. Given the simplicity of the targets, that lingering indirectness may be the game’s main appeal. The task, the goal, is to successfully make contact despite a lack of direct control over the situation. There's a certain friction here similar to a game of pinball; although you don't really have control over the ball or where it goes, you are responsible for guiding and protecting the ball, and the lack of control only enhances your determination to hit those targets.

The driving compulsion is to hit every tile there is to hit, to explore all there is to explore, to clear the board. There is a distinct end condition here, lending an object to the narrative. A personal impetus, inspired by the gameworld. Fundamental as it is, you can take this same framework and apply it to Pac-Man or Zelda, or Myst or Half-Life 2. It's all the same relationship; it's just the details that differ. Breakout is where the bond between the player and the gameworld really begins.

Breakdown

Breakout’s influence was immediate and enormous, in three distinct areas: technology, logistics, and experience. On the technology end, I’m sure you know about Woz’s involvement, and how the development of Breakout led to his Apple II. It also gives an early glimpse at Steve Jobs’ mindset, if you look up the term “$5000 bonus”.

I’m also sure you know how the microprocessor-based remake, Super Breakout, was Ed Logg’s first major contribution to Atari. From there we get Asteroids (to SpaceWar! as Breakout is to Pong), Centipede, and Gauntlet, and the open-ended, proto-sandbox style of design traditionally favored by Western developers: giving the player a canvas for making decisions and bathing in their consequences. This is more or less a pure extrapolation of videogame theory, as first illustrated in Breakout.

And then there’s Tomohiro Nishikado, who felt inspired to reach out and directly touch those tiles. How, though, can you keep the game interesting without the random element of a bouncing ball? The key word: scenario.

Next time on Phantom Fingers: The Series: Space Invaders

[Eric-Jon Rössel Tairne is a writer most recently hailing from Brooklyn, New York. When he manages to detach his brain from his keyboard, he spends his hours concocting bagels and exploring the deep places of the Earth. You can sponge up more of his work at gloaming.aderack.com. ]

Posted by Eric-Jon Waugh at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Created as part of his "Abra.Macabra" series, this BioShock digital art piece by Patricio Betteo reduces a Big Daddy and Little Sister to squares and rectangles that still manage to capture the game's dark and foreboding tone (and even some of the art deco elements!).

Betteo admits that this isn't pure "pixel art", as he added textures, glowing effects, and color adjustments, and also rounded the pixels, but I don't think that takes much away from this scene. The artist comments, "BioShock deserves the phrase: 'Gore can be retro. Gore can be beautiful.'"

[Via Rampaged Reality]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[We're delighted to continue to put out free video streams of GDC 2010 lectures via GDC Vault, and here's the latest two, both intelligent, well thought-out, and - particularly in the case of Bob Bates' piece - truly heartfelt, which is to be appreciated. Check them out...]

Continuing their Game Developers Conference 2010 free video lecture series, organizers have debuted well-received lectures from Amy Jo Kim (on meta-game design) and Bob Bates (on 'living a creative life' in games.)

The two new lectures, both highly rated by GDC attendees, are part of a free update published at the GDC Vault website, and feature video technology that allows users to simultaneously view a presenter's slides alongside video and audio of their presentation.

The first talk to be made freely available in this set is 'Meta-Game Design: Reward Systems that Drive Engagement', originally presented at the Social & Online Games Summit by Shufflebrain co-founder and veteran social game/community designer Amy Jo Kim.

Kim, whose clients have included Electronic Arts, Sony, Disney, eBay, MTV, Square Enix and Harmonix, presents an in-depth look at 'metagame design', that is, "the practice of applying game-like reward and feedback systems to non-game applications for the purpose of driving loyalty and engagement".

In the 30 minute talk, the designer and consultant examines games like FarmVille and websites like Stack Overflow to see how clever incentivizing can make -- or break -- your product, whether it sits in the game space, web space, or somewhere in between.

The second lecture available for free is 'The Belly of the Whale: Living a Creative Life in the Game Industry' from 25-year industry veteran Bob Bates (Infocom, Legend Entertainment). The designer, who has worked on dozens of games since he started at seminal adventure game creator Infocom in 1986, explains his talk as follows: "Every year, thousands of people enter the games industry, believing they have found their 'dream job.' Five years later, half of them are gone."

As Bates goes on to explain of the inspirational bit practical hour-long lecture: "This talk addresses the problems of leading a creative life in our business, identifying traps and pitfalls, but also offering specific solutions to the challenges we all face."

In addition to these lectures, GDC Vault's free videos section includes talks from Zynga, Ernest Adams, and NCsoft, plus highly rated lectures featuring 2D Boy's Ron Carmel and Bungie's Brian Sharp, Brenda Brathwaite and geoDefense creator Doug Whatley, plus social game experts Neil Young (Ngmoco) and Michael Acton Smith (Moshi Monsters).

The free recordings available are a fraction of the content currently being flowed into the GDC Vault. Full GDC Vault access, including synchronized video recordings for over 200 of GDC 2010's sessions and hundreds of historical video and audio recordings, is available to GDC 2010 All-Access Pass holders, as well as All-Access Pass holders for other GDC events during the year.

In addition, development studios and schools who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company. More information on this option is available by contacting Suzanne Cunningham or viewing an online demonstration. Individual Vault subscriptions not tied to All-Access passes are being considered for a 2011 launch.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Artist Nick Edwards has posted a wonderful illustrated guide to LARPing, or live-action role-playing, that oft-mocked practice of dressing up and physically playing/acting out fantasy campaigns and battles in the real world.

This introduction covers the basics of LARPing, such as the different genres, reasons why someone would take an interest in this kind of role-playing, and tips on costumes. It also discusses some of the dangers of LARPing and how it can affect real-world relationships.

The best part of the short guide, though, is Edwards' art, brimming with muscly minotaurs, burning cyclopes, and a green cube thing. I've included a couple more pages below, but you can see the entire thing online at the artist's LiveJournal.

[Via i09]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Further demonstrating the versatility of Starcraft II's Galaxy Map Editor is (check out this Touhou-style shoot'em up clone!), YouTube user SkriK posted this video from his Final Fantasy mod project, showing a typical turn-based JRPG battle played out with the Starcraft II engine.

SkriK says he plans to post the mod for others to download once he's completed the project, which will feature a story unrelated to the Final Fantasy universe despite its gameplay similarities. Right now, he's working on adding summons, inventory, quests, a world map, and more!

[Via Exophase]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We actually missed a week due to technical problems - so here's a megalength story putting together the top full-length features of the last fortnight on big sister 'art and business of gaming' site Gamasutra, plus some other GameCareerGuide pieces we haven't mentioned.

Some of the notable pieces from the last fortnight include a great retrospective on a decade of PopCap Games, a paean to EVE Online from spymaster The Mittani, a look at how indie developers can exhibit at events, a discussion of ethics in games with some smart interviewees, talks with Sony, Ubisoft Toronto and Capy, and rather more besides.

Ten Years Of PopCap: The Interview
"Two of PopCap's founders look back on the early days of the company through the present, taking in the circumstances behind its founding and its development philosophy -- casual and beyond."

Action Adventure Level Design: Pacing, Content, and Mood
"Toby Gard continues with his case study of fictional game Ken Kong Zombie Killer, looking at how the game's pacing ties into its content and mood -- tying development processes together."

Ethics 101: Designing Morality in Games
"Bethesda's Emil Pagliarulo and 2K Marin's Jordan Thomas discuss the importance of building challenging, satisfying ethical gameplay -- both in their games and in the work of others."

Building On Conviction: Inside Ubisoft Toronto
"Announced last year but quiet since then, Ubisoft's Toronto studio finally lifts its veil, revealing its next project (Splinter Cell) and its role within Ubisoft and the larger industry."

The Rise Of Capy Games
"A chat with the co-founders of the Toronto-based indie (Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes, Critter Crunch) about their development style, the local scene, their future, and more."

The Sony Situation: SCEA's Rob Dyer Speaks
"SCEA SVP Rob Dyer talks exclusive DLC deals, publisher relations, how he views the motion controller marketplace, and the state of the troublesome PSP."

Center of Mass: Tools and Techniques for Animating Natural Human Movement
"In this Game Developer magazine reprint, a gymnast and UFC developer dives into how the center of mass of a character is the basis for all realistic motion -- and delivers the technical know-how to achieve it."

The Icelandic Model of MMO Development
"While most MMOs concentrate on developing linear content, EVE Online follows a systems-based design which allows for sandbox gameplay and player agency -- and this article, from EVE expert player/spymaster 'The Mittani', outlines why he believes its subscriber base continues to rise."

Indie Exhibitor Lessons Learned: Mommy's Best Games' PAX Story
"Indie developer and Insomniac alum Nathan Fouts writes a detailed report about his experiences promoting his Xbox Indie Games titles Shoot 1UP and Grapple Buggy at PAX East, with a detailed breakdown of costs and caveats."

NPD: Behind the Numbers, April 2010
"Gamasutra analyst Matt Matthews goes behind April's NPD U.S. console retail numbers -- why the surprising 26 percent drop, and what does it mean for the months ahead?"

GCG: Developing iPhone Games: Peeking Inside the iPhone Toolbox
"A primer for those interested in iPhone development, this excerpt from new Apress book Beginning iPhone Games Development should get you acquainted with the relevant aspects of developing for iPhone OS."

GCG: The Aesthetics of Unique Video Game Characters
"SMU Guildhall masters student Shaylyn Hamm creates female Team Fortress 2 characters with broad appeal -- eschewing stereotypes and working with survey data for the final result in this thesis."

GCG: Game Design So Good, Even Dad Would Use It
"TheGameProdigy.com's Brice Morrison delivers a rumination on how to correctly teach the player to play your game -- inspired by an encounter with his dad and a bike tire."

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

GameSetWatch sister site GameCareerGuide has published the results of its latest Game Design Challenge on inappropriate titles, revealing its next contest: explore the implications of a gender change to a video game character.

Inappropriate Title

GCG's most recent, completed challenge asked readers to deliver a new games for existing game titles, with designs that fit existing game titles better than their actual games do:

Best Entries

Aniol Alcaraz, Master en Disseny i Creacio de Videojocs UPC, Syphon Filter
Sony's Syphon Filter is a third-person shooter with a seemingly nonsensical title. Aniol Alcaraz presents a puzzle game based on the concept of filtering fluids using the syphon principle.

Time for Change

The new challenge, which will accept entries through Wednesday, June 9, invites aspiring designers to submit ideas for how a particular video game would be profoundly altered by switching the gender of its main character.

The initial inspiration for the challenge was the work of artists David Stonecipher and Shaylyn Hamm, who explored how female versions of characters from God of War and Team Fortress 2 could look. What challenges would a female Kratos face that the God of War hero wouldn't otherwise? It would change the story of the original game -- maybe make parts of it impossible.

The challenge asks entrants to answer that question, using the pre-existing title of their choice.

Full details on this challenge are available at GameCareerGuide now.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Here's an interview by our own Leigh Alexander with Drew Crecente on the very worthy Jennifer Ann's Group, which just announced its competition winners for this year's 'serious games' contest on teen dating violence.]

A unique game design competition aimed at teen violence prevention has announced its winners, revealing that Grace's Diary is taking home the top prize.

The annual contest is sponsored by Jennifer Ann's Group, a non-profit organization focused on teen violence education and prevention since its founding in 2006. The game design competition, the "Life. Love. Game Design Contest," challenges entrants to design a game about the issue -- without using violence itself.

This year's competition saw 12 entrants, and it was Bangkok-based Hima's Grace's Diary, an animated interactive story-format title with beautiful watercolor pencil art, that took home the $2500 grand prize.

In second place was Thomas Liu's A Decision Of Paramount Importance, a sidescrolling and well-animated pixel adventure game, and in third, Batty Media's Jellia's Friends, a cute action title starring cartoon jellybeans. Both the second and third prize winners receive a $100 prize.

Judges included Judges included Dr. Ian Bogost (Co-Founder, Persuasive Games), Simon Carless (former IGF chairman and publisher of this website), Brian Crecente (Managing Editor, Kotaku), Dr. Elizabeth Richeson (Advisory Board Director, Jennifer Ann's Group), and me, Leigh Alexander, news director of Gamasutra.

I found the opportunity to be a judge both educational and touching, and decided to speak to Drew Crecente, founder of Jennifer Ann's Group, to learn more about the group's goals with the contest and the use of game design in social issues:

Can you give us some background on Jennifer Ann's Group and the work it does?

Jennifer Ann's Group is a non-profit charity that was formed in 2006 to address the issue of teen dating violence. As time has passed we've expanded the focus of our group from teenagers to also address dating violence in "tweens" (11 & 12 year-olds) as well as college-aged students (up to 25).

As seen by the recent tragedy at the University of Virginia, this is an issue that can affect almost anybody and we're hoping to educate everybody about the very real dangers of dating violence.

44 percent of all students will have been in an abusive relationship by the time they graduate from college (source: The Journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine - July, 2008).

What's the goal of the game design contest in particular?

The primary goal is to educate people about the issue of dating violence and associated warning signs that one may be in an unhealthy relationship. A fundamental issue affecting young people in dating relationships is that they often have no baseline with which to compare dating behavior.

When a 15-year-old is told to not spend as much time with their friends he or she could be convinced that it's because the person they're dating just wants to spend more time with them; if a 30-something is told the same thing he or she would recognize it as controlling behavior. Sharing these "warning sign" behaviors is a key component of our efforts.

Who can participate, and what are the requirements?

Anybody age 18 and up can enter. The entries cannot have a violent theme or content and should be age-appropriate for ages 13 and up. Contestants can be from anywhere -- last year one of our winners was from Mexico; this year our first-place winning entry is from Bangkok and another winning entry is from Belgium.

Why video games, specifically? What do you think it is about game design that is well-suited to address this issue and the group's goals?

When the contest was developed I was looking for alternative channels to reach the demographic of our primary focus and thought that online flash-based games would be a great fit. One of the great things about games (in general) is that they're a fantastic way to share information in a way that's enjoyable and therefore less likely to feel "preachy."

This is a topic that is unlikely to be received as well if the information is coming from somebody's parents (or other authority figures) so allowing the players to self-teach through games feels like a better approach. Originally I was thinking that I would create a game myself and then I remembered that I have no idea how -- so a contest seemed like a better idea.

While we've been very pleased with the response and the number of people who have learned from these games, a great ancillary benefit has been the impact on the game developers themselves. I've received numerous emails over the years from developers who had no idea that this was such a serious issue; by going through the process of learning about the topic they have become "issue evangelists" in their own right.

What do the games you've seen over the years do well, and what could they do better to be more effective?

The thing that I've most enjoyed (and was really hoping for) has been the incredible diversity. I knew that given the opportunity that game developers would come up with a variety of innovative approaches and they've not let me down. Winning entries have encompassed adventure, room escape, tower defense, platform, and more esoteric themes.

One thing that I've not seen addressed sufficiently is the fact that dating violence is not just an issue for females; males are abused as well both at the hands of females as well as by other males in same-sex relationships.

While our group strives to make very clear that this is not a male-on-female problem, the games don't necessarily reflect that. This sometimes has the unfortunate effect on some game players of them focusing more on this inequity than on the educational information that we're trying to share.

What are your thoughts on this year's winning title, and what traits put it ahead of its competition?

The judges really had their work cut out for them this year. Every year it seems that the entries are more and more impressive and this year is no exception. The winning entry is a really beautiful game -- very professionally done -- with great real-world examples of situations that are warning signs of a potentially abusive relationship.

It's really an honor that so many talented, creative developers have applied their considerable skills to this issue and we're so pleased that we have the opportunity to share their fantastic efforts.

Interested parties should visit the official website for Jennifer Ann's Group. The contest winners are currently playable here.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)