November 22, 2011
I’m alive!

I’m still alive! I’ve been busy with graduate school applications and publishing the latest issue of my school’s student news-magazine. If you haven’t had any experience with self-publishing, it’s quite tedious and not that exciting. (At least we have a new printer that can staple and fold; we used to fold and staple by hand.) The result, however, can be quite satisfying.

As a student, I haven’t written for myself as much as I have written for my professors. There’s a certain sense of freedom that comes with freeing yourself of direct association to a rubric or grade. Of course, someone always evaluates your work, even if you only imagine that person, but the experience of writing is different when the evaluation doesn’t arrive in the form of an A-, an A, or a B-. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I read a passage in the GRE about diary writing that argued the same.

The rigors of standardized testing perfectly illustrate an immersive experience, for better or worse. Three and a half hours of pure immersive test-taking! But wait, there’s more. Did you ever wonder what it would be like to be a subject of the panopticon? Look no further than ETS sanctioned testing facilities cum prison cells, replete with web-cam optimized inmate observation!

Taking the GRE was wierd, to say the least.

In other news, there’s another Humble Bundle, and this time the games come from Introversion. DEFCON, Darwinia, Multiwinia, Uplink, and bonus games? My mouth is watering already.

Also, I might write a research paper about the applications of videogames in education. I ran into this post from Preloaded that explains what they mean by making games “about” something and how they integrate the educational mission of their games into their design.


Have a turkeyful Thanksgiving, everyone. I’ll return after the break (if my upcoming application deadlines don’t overwhelm me.)

-AF

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Filed under: writing graduate school panopticon humble bundle 
November 1, 2011
What I’m playing

Another Humble Bundle is out, about, and gleefully eating all of our money. Think of it like Humble Bundle goes UNICEF. Is it just me, or are they releasing these bundles with ever increasing frequency? But who cares, it’s for charity!  (They recently added Blocks that Matter and The Binding of Isaac to the bundle, as well.)


Voxatron is a blast, by the way. I’ve been sneaking in a couple levels in between work and studying, and if I had more time to play it, I definitely would.

The controls are a little tricky to get accustomed to, even though they’re extremely simple. Move, jump, and shoot. You can shoot only in the direction you’re facing, and once you start shooting, you can’t change until you release the fire key and move in the direction you would like to fire. I would prefer to be able to change the direction I fire in without having to move in that direction. A minor detail that makes a difference, even though you get used to it.

Spry Fox, the design studio that brought us SteamBirds, has released a multiplayer word game called Panda Poet. The gist of it is that you spell words from the letter tiles available on the board in order to claim territory and score points. It’s a bit like scrabble combined with boggle, if that combination makes any sense. For multiplayer, Panda Poet opts for a “play by mail” style that doesn’t require immediate responses, rather, you play your turns when you can, be it seconds or days or months.

Daniel Cook, Chief Creative Officer at Spry Fox, posted about how they designed the social mechanics of the game. Although the game may not be as complicated as, say, an MMORPG, the decisions that must be made about the social design of a game remains the same: facilitating meaningful and satisfying relationships between players. He writes:
I see immense potential in this style of game and I’ll be using similar multiplayer structures in future games.  When you design a game with real social play, ask “What is the intrinsic rhythm of back and forth conversation between participants?”  If this key pattern has no space to exist, then perhaps you aren’t creating a social game after all.
 Mull that around in your head for a while. There’s a difference between a social game and a multiplayer game; just because a game has multiple participants doesn’t mean that it is automatically social. I’m trying to think of a good example, but I can’t. Any suggestions? (This distinction could also be incorrect.)

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(Notes: 4)
  
Filed under: indie games voxatron game design panda poet humble bundle spry fox social 
October 6, 2011
Pentafecta

The Humble Bundle. Check it out if you haven’t, already. It’s a wonderful deal and you can support great charities at the same time. I played Trine over the summer, and it was quite fun. It also looked gorgeous, even on my six-year-old desktop.

SpaceChem
SpaceChem is a cool puzzle game about fake chemistry, and I’m quite enjoying the soundtrack. Frozen Synapse is a turn-based strategy game done in a simplistic style. I haven’t spent much time with the last two, so I can’t give much more insight. However, I was thinking about purchasing both over the summer, before they wound up in the Humble Bundle.

Anyways, about this “Pentad” thing.

I hadn’t encountered Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic pentad before reading an article from the September 2011 issue of Digital Creativity, but I’m now quite interested in examining it, and perhaps using it, in my thesis. Basically, the pentad, as the name suggests, uses five criteria to analyze a text. These criteria are: act, agency, scene, agent, and purpose. Or, in other words: what?, why?, where?, who?, and how?

The authors apply the pentad to Bioshock, and they come up with some interesting results. As they explain, one of the core mechanics of the game is the choice between saving the little girls you find throughout your adventure, or “harvesting” them. The choice you make affects the amount of ADAM you receive, the game’s currency.




At first glance, this mechanic seems to offer the player a moral choice between saving or killing a child. In terms of the pentad, the authors explain that this is a “purpose-act ratio,” or a struggle between the outcomes of an action and the act itself. They included a very interesting perspective from a priest who explained how he couldn’t bring himself to “harvest” any of the children, since he believed that it was immoral in any situation. This perspective seems bizarre, especially to any veteran gamer, since these children are not really children. This is especially true in a game like Bioshock that operates almost entirely on metaphor. 

The authors pick up on this peculiarity, as well, and they offer another perspective from the procedural level. At the level of game mechanics, the choice between killing or saving the children does not involve any moral dilemma at all, but merely a choice of weaponry, since the game ties the decision to a currency exchange. The authors refer to this situation as an “agency-act ratio,” or a potential restriction of your choices in-game by game mechanics. Finally, the authors alter the perspective one more time, to that of the player and their “real-world scene.” Here, they ultimately find that the players’ choice boils down to whatever allows them to have more fun.

This is a really quick gloss of an article that was already a quick gloss of a research project, but hopefully you see the potential of this kind of analysis. It seems especially useful for interpreting the so-called moral choices that appear in most FPS and RPG in recent years.

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Filed under: morality fps humble bundle violence spacechem trine digital creativity frozen synapse pentad rpg choice bioshock 
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