Handy Vandal's Almanac

David Jaffe delivered the PAX Prime 2011 keynote address, recounting some of his experiences and sharing lessons learned in the game design industry.

He began gearing up for his next big thing, which was called Heartland. He described the game as Red Dawn meets Saving Private Ryan, and Jaffe said that he wanted it to serve as a political allegory while also achieving “the Holy Grail of game design,” which is to make players cry upon completion for the right reasons.

The problem with this game, Jaffe said, was that he was making it in order to chase after the next big thing, instead of following his passion. The game was eventually given the green light, but it didn’t take long for members of the team to be reassigned to work on Sony’s reboot of the Warhawk franchise. Jaffe said that if he were honestly in love with Heartland, he would have never let this happen to his team.

– Tom Magrino @ GameSpot

“Your life is going by so quick, the only thing you can do is the thing you have to do.”

– David Jaffe

The 2011 Game Design Challenge: “Games as Religion”.

And Jason Rohrer said:

Let There Be Chain World.

And Lo! There was Chain World — !

Rohrer turned out to be the only one of the three competitors who really addressed the theme [of religion] head-on.

How do you make a videogame that, in some sense, is a religion, especially if you’re an atheist? Rohrer began by defining the sort of spiritual practice that interested him, which had to do with the physical mysteries of everyday human experience. Rohrer spoke about his late grandfather, a colorful man who served as mayor of a small town in Ohio and left behind a legacy that soon turned into legends — the house he had built and the interstate whose path he had altered, forcing it to swerve around his town. (”It’s like my grandfather’s dogleg,” Rohrer said, putting up a slide of a bend in I-77.) In Rohrer’s family, these physical places had been turned into shrines of a sort. “We become like gods to those who come after us,” Rohrer told the crowd.

He wanted his game to encourage players to contemplate the monuments of those gods, which meant that he needed an environment where you could build things for future players to stumble across and ponder. He put up a slide of Minecraft, which is like an adventure game crossed with an inexhaustible virtual Lego set …. Chain World, Rohrer explained, was a mod, a customized version of Minecraft and a set of scripts that govern how it’s played. And here was the cool part: It all lived on a single USB memory stick.

Rohrer then dug the hand-painted stick out of his jeans pocket. “This is the only one in the world!” he said. “And here are the rules, the canon law of Chain World.” He outlined his commandments. Erect no signs — your creations must speak for themselves. Play until you die exactly once –no do-overs or restarts. (Zombies and spiders occasionally blink into existence to harry players as they build and explore.) Never talk about what you saw or did. Then pass the memory stick on to “someone who expresses interest.” Rohrer said that he had been player one, the first to leave a mark on Chain World …. “So, someone in the audience is going to get to be player … two,” Rohrer said, holding the stick out …

– Chain World Videogame Was Supposed to be a Religion — not a Holy War by Jason Fagone @ Wired magazine

Via Slashdot.

“Countless start-ups are incorporating game-design strategies, hoping to eventually grow revenue off of consumer data, or by using a combination of data plus game-mechanics to influence consumer behaviors.”

Your customers hoard airline miles and covet their status-symbol black American Express. What was once called “consumer incentives” is now known as “gamification”—and here’s how to integrate it into your company and win consumers’ hearts and minds while you’re at it.

– Christine Lagorio @ Inc.com

Quintin Smith really, really wants you to play Ace of Spades:

10 Reasons You Need To Play Ace Of Spades

Have I got your attention? Then I’ll begin. Ace of Spades is a freeware, multiplayer Minecraft-alike that takes Minecraft’s cuboid building mechanics and drapes a World War 1 setting on top of it, with the end result being a huge, immersive, dynamic game of capture the flag.

On the one hand, you’ve got two teams of sixteen exchanging rifle fire and grenades, trying to push forward and outflank one another. On the other hand, both teams are trying to improve their position by building bunkers, bridges and tunnels. If you want to give it a shot you’ll find the game here and a guide to playing it here. If not, then I’ve assembled ten reasons why you should reconsider your position ….

(1) It quietly one-ups Minecraft by having rudimentary physics.

(2) Building is flexible without being open to abuse.

(3) The tunnels are nauseatingly claustrophobic.

…

– Quintin Smith @ Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The New Cultural Form: Perfection versus Mortality in Games and Simulation at Rensselaer

Willy Nilly’s Surf Shack offers a cure for the idealized virtual world of Second Life. The online shop, a project of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Associate Professor of Arts Ben Chang and collaborators, endows otherwise flawless avatars with real-world foils like clumsiness. A project allowing avatars to visibly age over time is in the works.

The shop is one of several projects Chang uses to explore humanity in technology. Chang, an electronic artist and recently appointed co-director of the Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences program at Rensselaer, sees the dialogue between perfection and mortality as an important influence in the growing world of games and simulation.

“There’s this transcendence that technology promises us. At its extreme is the notion of immortality that — with artificial intelligence, robotics, and virtual reality — you could download your consciousness and take yourself out of the limitations of the physical body,” said Chang. “But at the same time, that’s what makes us human: our frailty and our mortality.”

– Link @ Rensselaer

Jeff Koons Must Die!!! The Video Game from Hunter Jonakin.

– Tip of the hat to Agent 99 for the link

Via Boing Boing.

I don’t know these guys, but I’m happy for their win:

Eight students from The Guildhall at SMU’s Master’s degree program in video game design won the grand prize Friday in the non-professional category at the second annual D.I.C.E. Indie Game Challenge in Las Vegas for their game, Inertia.

The recognition comes with a $100,000 cash prize, and the Hermes crew also won a $15,000 EEDAR DesignMetrics prize, and a $2,500 prize for technical achievement, as well as another $2,500 prize for achievement in gameplay.

Inertia features an innovative mechanic that allows players to suspend gravity and use inertia to bounce off walls, float through space, and move through the game’s environment – a decaying space station on the brink of collapse.

– Victor Godinez @ dallasnews.com

Team Hermes had an idea.

The team worked hard to make the idea real

The effort paid off like a pair of Winged Sandals. Go team!

Social networking is changing more than games: it’s changing game design.

For years, “classically trained” game designers in the industry have relied on their gut instincts to make decisions as to what players want. Much of this was based on intuition, imagining that yes, of course players would enjoy attacking other spaceships more than building and upgrading their own. Or a whiteboard discussion revolving around how long an average session is -– a few minutes, for an hour, or for hours at a time. Or maybe an argument about player’s play styles -– do they prefer to level up in order to improve stats, or do they like to spend money on items?

In the past, discussions and arguments like this are usually resolved by whichever designer can make the best points and steer the conversation towards their personal conclusion. While this approach is often effective if the development team is a talented one, it is often faulty and can produce decisions that don’t reflect player’s actual behavior.

By being able to pull live data from a game, arguments like this can be resolved almost instantly. In the middle of a shouting match on whether or not players like to upgrade their buildings every time they log in, someone can say, “Hey, guys, I looked it up, and yes, actually players level 1-30 upgrade 4 buildings on average every time they log in.” Everyone nods their head, makes the decision, and moves on. Or in a heated discussion of whether or not players need to be given more money in the game, someone can say, “Hey everyone, here is a graph showing the amounts of soft currency that people have right now. You can see that actually, most players have three times too much.” Income is slashed, expensive items are put on the market, and the job is done.

– Brice Morrison @ Inside Social Games

Brice Morrison is a former CrowdStar designer and editor of The Game Prodigy

Beholder by Coop

Via Boing Boing.

I played many hours of Dungeons & Dragons back in my youth — enough that I feel qualified to answer the question, “Is the Beholder the coolest monster in the game?”

Yes. Yes it is. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice ….