Another Castle Episode 20: End of Season One

Posted by Charles J Pratt on 21 Jul 2010 | Category: Another Castle

Another Castle is taking a couple of months off!

Noah and I sit down to thank all the people who have made the first season of Another Castle possible, including our incredible guests and Ariyoshi, the Japanese restaurant where (almost) all the episodes have been recorded. We also talk about our favorite episodes, why we started the podcast, and potential guests for the next season.

Thanks to everyone who’s been listening!

The episode is up on iTunes but you can also download it here:

Another Castle Episode 20 – End of Season

The episode has also been added to our Podcast page, where you can download older episodes of Another Castle.

We’re always looking for feedback on how to improve the podcast so if you have any thoughts feel free to comment on this post or email me here.

Another Castle Episode 19 – Richard Lemarchand

Posted by Charles J Pratt on 21 Jun 2010 | Category: Another Castle

Industry veteran and lead game designer on Uncharted and Uncharted 2, Richard Lemarchand, sat down with us to talk about his career and his thoughts on the art of making games. Recounting his rise through the game industry Lemarchand touches on a number of other topics, including storytelling and the challenges of designing a multi-player cart racer. We also talk about indie and art games and whether he would ever consider leaving AAA development to work on more personal projects.

The episode is up on iTunes but you can also download it here:

Another Castle Episode 19 – A Conversation with Richard Lemarchand

The episode has also been added to our Podcast page, where you can download older episodes of Another Castle.

We’re always looking for feedback on how to improve the podcast so if you have any thoughts feel free to comment on this post or email me here.

Make More Tennis Balls

Posted by Charles J Pratt on 10 Jun 2010 | Category: Opinion

Preface – Below is the text from a four minute talk I delivered at the Games for Change Festival in New York a few weeks ago. It was one in a series of talks organized by Colleen Macklin and Richard LeMarchand.

*

So there were a lot of games, a lot of big games, released last year, some which I didn’t play and some of which I did, but what I played the most of, by far, is a little game called Shadow Complex.

When Shadow Complex was released it was compared mostly to Super Metroid, and this is a pretty fair comparison; they’re both side-scrolling action games with ‘lock and key’ style progression and large worlds to explore.

The thing is, the reason I played so much of Shadow Complex was not primarily for the ways it was mechanically similar to Metroid, which was the explanation for many people that praised the game. Instead I was drawn to one of the particular ways that the game could be played.

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Another Castle Episode 18 – Adam Saltsman

Posted by Charles J Pratt on 28 May 2010 | Category: Another Castle

Adam Saltsman, co-founder of Semi Secret, developer behind Canabalt, and creator of Flixel, sits down to talk about his career and his different projects. We talk about how and why he got into game development as well as his thoughts on game design and the long slow process of creating Flixel. We also spend a little time talking about the genius of Super Street Fighter IV.

The episode is up on iTunes but you can also download it here:

Another Castle Episode 18 – A Conversation with Adam Saltsman

The episode has also been added to our Podcast page, where you can download older episodes of Another Castle.

We’re always looking for feedback on how to improve the podcast so if you have any thoughts feel free to comment on this post or email me here.

Another Castle Episode 17 – Naomi Clark

Posted by Charles J Pratt on 04 May 2010 | Category: Another Castle

Sitting down with us this week is Naomi Clark, a game designer and producer and a veteran of the New York City development scene. We talk about he career as a game developer, including some stories about her former work at GameLab. We also discuss her opinions of Farmville and her idea of the ‘Fantasy of Labor‘ that she says is the reason for the game’s popularity. Finally she gives some brief advice for those thinking about working on game in New York.

Note: There were some audio problems with my mic that caused me to sound very quiet (which is perhaps for the best), but you can hear Naomi very clearly!

The episode is up on iTunes but you can also download it here:

Another Castle Episode 17 – A Conversation with Naomi Clark

The episode has also been added to our Podcast page, where you can download older episodes of Another Castle.

We’re always looking for feedback on how to improve the podcast so if you have any thoughts feel free to comment on this post or email me here.

300 Word Review – Train

Posted by Charles J Pratt on 22 Apr 2010 | Category: 300 Word Reviews

Train is a game that almost no one can say much about.

One of the few things you can say about Train is that it is a racing board game where players roll dice in order to load cargo onto their train and beat the other players down the track (or not). Players can also use cards to impede other players and quicken their own pace (or the other way around). However, that’s about as much as you can say about Train, because you’ll only be able to play it once or twice, if you’re lucky.

Train is a game that you aren’t allowed to look at too closely. The game’s creator has thus far refused to release the ruleset, meaning that no one can create a copy of the game themselves. As a result most people’s impression of Train is based on what they’ve read. Unfortunately, Train has only been exhibited at few places, often in public, so those who are writing about it haven’t gotten to spend any real time with the game. The trap is that the experience from a single session of play is probably more indicative of that individual instance than of the game in its entirety.

Perhaps it’s best to see Train not as a game, but as a move in a larger game played between the cultural forces of ‘fine art’ and ‘games’. Games have always been non-terminal acts of creation, and this is anathema to an art world that was born in the worship of sacred objects. In disavowing its promiscuous nature as a game Train is granted an ‘aura’ and entrance into the white cube.

Train is a successful piece of conceptual art. Whether or not it’s a successful game design no one can say, but that seems beside the point.

Another Castle Episode 16 –
Kevin Cancienne

Posted by Charles J Pratt on 14 Apr 2010 | Category: Another Castle

This week our old friend, Kevin Cancienne, who’s the Director of Game Development at area/code, dropped by to talk about his career as a game developer in New York City. In the process we get the story behind their hit game Drop7, as well as advice for aspiring game designers who also know how to program. Finally, we talk about Kevin’s experiment with league level play in Valve’s Team Fortress 2.

The episode is up on iTunes but you can also download it here:

Another Castle Episode 16 – A Conversation with Kevin Cancienne

The episode has also been added to our Podcast page, where you can download older episodes of Another Castle.

We’re always looking for feedback on how to improve the podcast so if you have any thoughts feel free to comment on this post or email me here.

Another Castle Episode 15 –
McKenzie Wark

Posted by Charles J Pratt on 02 Apr 2010 | Category: Another Castle

McKenzie Wark, media theorist and all around brilliant guy, sits down with us this week to talk about his book Gamer Theory. Wark talks about what place games have in the contemporary condition, and how we can use them to understand and critique the world in which we’re living. We also get into a discussion of the 50s and 60s group the Situationist International, and the board game, Kriegspiel, that was designed by one of its key member, Guy Debord.

The episode is up on iTunes but you can also download it here:

Another Castle Episode 15 – A Conversation with McKenzie Wark

The episode has also been added to our Podcast page, where you can download older episodes of Another Castle.

We’re always looking for feedback on how to improve the podcast so if you have any thoughts feel free to comment on this post or email me here.

In Praise of Spoilsports

Posted by Charles J Pratt on 30 Mar 2010 | Category: Opinion

Preface: This was written for a seminar that Jesper Juul was hosting at the NYU Game Center on the ‘ludic contract’, and was done mostly with the idea of simply presenting some of the ideas I’ve had knocking around in my head about the nature of games. As such it’s not terribly persuasive and is somewhat scattershot (especially at the end), so I’m not really happy with the structure overall. Nevertheless I decided to post it because I think that there are good ideas presented and I’m always interested in getting people’s responses. I also think the piece goes some way in explaining the thought behind some of my tendencies; for instance, the hope is that after reading this one might better understand my being somewhat dismissive of the importance of some thematic elements in some games, my skepticism about ‘meaning’ in games, and my belief that video games are not fundamentally different from other types of games.

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The Truth in Game Design

Posted by Frank Lantz on 25 Mar 2010 | Category: Opinion

Jonathan Blow gave a talk recently at Champlain College. The subject of the talk was a game design philosophy in which you ask questions of the universe and then are open and attentive to the answers. In Jon’s view, game systems are like scientific instruments that can reveal complex and fascinating truths about the world. It’s a terrific talk, and you can download the whole thing here.

Jon’s talk made me think of what a couple of brilliant game designers said at GDC.

In two separate talks Sid Meier and Rob Pardo talked about how players consistently misunderstood, and were frustrated by, randomness. For example players, like most people, tend to subscribe to the “gambler’s fallacy”, the mistaken intuition that random events are spread evenly over time instead of clumping, well, randomly as they actually do. This is the fallacy that leads people to expect a flipped coin to be less likely to land heads after a run of heads.

Pardo and Meier both described the same solution to this problem, which was to alter the behavior of the game to correspond more closely to the player’s intuition about how randomness should behave. For example, if you have an event that is 50% likely to occur, and it doesn’t occur, then you make it 60% likely on the next attempt, 70% likely after that, and so on until it is certain. Voilà! A coin that is less likely to come up heads twice in a row, and never has a run of more than 6 heads.

Now, Rob Pardo and Sid Meier are amazing game designers and it’s a privilege to hear them speak. Both talks were full of invaluable insights from practitioners at the top of their profession. But this particular detail really stuck in my head, and rolled around there with Margaret Robertson’s microtalk about behavioral economics and Chris Hecker’s talk about external reward systems, and the numerous discussions of Zynga’s quantitative, behaviorist, social-game design methodology that loomed over the whole conference like Chernabog glaring down from Bald Mountain.

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