Handy Vandal's Almanac

“Games are an art form. I proudly wear my scarlet letter — A for art!”

– Warren Spector, keynote speaker at PAX 2010

Warren Spector is lead developer of Epic Mickey, a videogame that is “part of an effort by The Walt Disney Company to re-brand the Mickey Mouse character by moving away from his current squeaky clean image and reintroducing the mischievous side of his personality.”

Screenshots from the opening sequence: the sorceror retires for the night …

Mickey faces the consequences of his actions:

I was fascinated by Fantasia — especially The Sorceror’s Apprentice — at an early age. So yes, I’m curious what Epic Mickey has to offer.

The upcoming Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions promises four different Dimensions (distinctive game modes). I love the above screenshot from the Noir mode!

… The second dimension takes place in Marvel’s “Noir” universe, and is a slightly darker (both figuratively and literally) take on Spider-Man, using a style commonly found in pulp crime novels. The gameplay falls in line with this darker approach as there’s an emphasis on stealth, with slower and more methodical gameplay elements incorporated to encourage you to stay in the shadows as often as possible. You’ll still have access to the core Spider-Man abilities, so he’ll still be able to handle himself in a fight, but the developers tell us that sometimes it pays to remain unseen.

– Eduardo Vasconcellos @ GamePro

See Activision investor news.

“Generally speaking, there are three types of bosses that appear in games, the cute-type, abominable-type and fantasy-type.”
– Ying Shi

Multiplayer Online Games Directory recently published an interview with Ying Shi, an illustrator working for ChangYou on such projects as Tian Long Ba Bu (”The most powerful martial arts experience of your MMO life.”)

MPOGD: How many concepts do you go through to get to the right one when developing the characters?

YS: We can use our own ideas to create an image, but if we want the person or player to like what they see, then we need to take some time to think about what it is we want to design. Generally speaking, there are three types of bosses that appear in games, the cute-type, abominable-type and fantasy-type. These are factors to think about when designing and, at the same time, we need to consider the story of the boss life, where does he/she come from, whats the background, the reason the boss is an enemy and how/why they became the way they are.

MPOGD: TLBB is widely known for its authenticity to the book (Tian Long Ba Bu). What key ideas and features did you take from the book in order to create what we see today?

YS: Its important to bear in mind that the game has a genuine ancient Chinese martial arts feel to it and so highlighted areas such as the 9 nine different classes, the cities, the skills etc. are very influential. Weve tried to maintain a genuine feel to the book also, hence why the NPCs are named after characters in the original work of Louis Cha.

- Multiplayer Online Games Directory

For more about the classes:
http://tlbb.eu.changyou.com/gameguide/Classes.shtml

Take Initiative recently posted an article on the use of color in games:

Pink

Pink has also been used more in games over the past ten years. Pink has mostly been associated with fun and baby girls but recently more people especially men have been adopting more pink products. Games companies have even used this colour to their advantage by colouring their consoles in a variety of shades of pink to help widen their market and sell their products to young girls who previously would not have touched consoles. So pink is definitely having a bigger impact on the world.

Within actual games pink, like white has been used to make certain objects stand out to players and show that they are not a part of the norm. In Halo 2 and 3 pink (and other exotic colours) are used to signify aliens weapons like the Needler.

- Colour within Game Design: Colours with Meaning @ TakeInitiative.com

Speaking of pink:

Philip K. Dick wrote about “pink laser beams” and other pink light phenomena as a means of beaming huge quantities of information into a man’s head … a man such as Philip K. Dick himself.

Perhaps the world is ready for a Philip K. Dick videogame?

Left: VALIS cover art, which I absolutely love. Beautiful and relevant.

German Tower by Pxbeetle

Pxbeetle makes some of the most beautiful maps I’ve ever seen. This guy knows that he’s doing!

See his Facebook album for more pix.

Dan Griliopoulos, a lifelong gamer who suffers from deuteranopia, a form of red-green colourblindness, has written a very interesting essay about colour and game design. In this excerpt he’s playing Bioshock 2:

I have a clever hacking dart gun, which requires my simply pressing a button when a needle on its meter passes through a certain colour. I shoot, I score … and get a mild electric shock. I repeat. Again and again. There’s an endless supply of darts so I keep shooting until I die of Electron Overdose and respawn, humiliated, at a Vitachamber. Yet again, someone on the art team has thoughtlessly swallowed the Manichean standard that red is bad and green is good, and decided he should use a primary palette to distinguish between these opposites — which means poor old colour-blind me gets killed.

In my case, both red and green appear as a murky yellow. Or so I’m told -– it’s not as though I’ve ever seen what green, red or yellow looks like to everyone else. Eventually, through trial and error, I worked out there are just-detectable contrast and location differences in the puzzle, and that if I focus really hard and fast, I can just work out which is which before the timer runs out. Bioshock 2 just got challenging.

… Here’s some tips for developers.

… How can a firm the size of Activision or EA consistently ignore what could be 8-12% of their paying customers? That could be a million of the people who bought Modern Warfare 2, for example.

~ Dan Griliopoulos @ Rock Paper Shotgun

The Photoshopped image below demonstrates roughly what the Bioshock 2 hacking dial looks like to someone with deuteranopia — you don’t see red, and you don’t see green, both look like dull gold:

Image borrowed from What BioShock 2’s Hacking Looks Like if You’re Colour Blind at Negative Gamer, which has more images simulating other types of color blindness.

The subject of color blindness and information systems is of interest to me professionally: I’ve recently done some research into web site accessibility, such as Section 508 requirements and the target.com lawsuit.

If you are doing business with the federal government, this is a big legal deal.

And in any case, we should be designing information systems (and everything else) to work as well as possible for as many different people as possible.

I have been saying for years that games are — or ought to be — Art with a capital A.

For a long time, I seemed to be the only one; but happily that’s changing ….

Game (Life): Video Games in Contemporary Art
December 18, 2009 – February 13, 2010
Firehouse Center for the Visual Arts
Burlington, Vermont

Featured Artists:
JASON ROHRER, JONATHAN BLOW, RANDY SMITH, PAOLO PEDERCINI, JENOVA CHEN, PETRI PURHO, JAKUB DVORSKY, HEATHER KELLEY, AURIEA HARVEY, MARK ESSEN AND MICHAEL SAMYN

Video games have emerged as our culture’s dominant form of popular entertainment, eclipsing both music and cinema. Lacking structured narratives, morally ambiguous, and oblivious to geo-political boundaries, the rise of video game culture is set to transform our notions of identity and location, blurring boundaries between the real and the un-real. Game(Life) transforms the gallery into a functioning video arcade. More than a dozen provocative and reflective works by contemporary artists and independent game designers from around the world engage visitors in play, exploration and confront questions of political activism, pacifism, violence, emotional resonance and beauty in gaming environments.

In collaboration with Champlain College’s Game Design program.

- Firehouse Gallery @ Burlington City Arts

Via Burlington Free Press.

See also Game Design @ Champlain College

Salome, as interpreted by artist Takayoshi Sato for Fatale, “an interactive vignette in realtime 3D based on the story of Salome, particularly the play by Oscar Wilde.”

Beautiful work, very much to my taste.

Via Offworld; see also Femme Fatale: Graveyard, Path creators taking on Wilde’s Salomé.

It’s got art — it’s got sex — it’s got death — what more do you want in a game??

Also to my taste, the work of Gustav Klimt.

Right: Salome (with the head of John the Baptist) by Klimt.

Salome has been widely interpreted, in various media — painting, sculpture, drama, literature, dance, film, and now interactive computer games — for … how long now? Two millenia, three?

Such is the power of Eternal She!

The eternal things change forms, but the underlying substance remains the same.

Or perhaps the reverse is true …?

See also Deus Ex meets Icarus.