Game Design Advance

Designing the New Slot Machine

I meant to post this a while back but have been swamped. The article is basically about how slot machines are the money makers for casino but are mainly played by older generations (think Baby Boomers). So the dilemma is how do you make the slots more appealing to younger people? Well, that’s where video games come in.

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Ian Bogost recently called for more Christmas-themed games, I wonder if this is what he meant:

The Nutcracker

Happy Holidays everyone!

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This semester, I wrote, designed and built a number of dialogue-driven games in my Inclusive Games Design class, headed by Amit Pitaru, here at ITP. I’ve mostly been proud of the results, but I must admit that most of them didn’t really meet the needs of our target audience– namely handicapped children. While one of my games has managed to reach the children, and was on display as part of our class’ presentation at the ITP Winter Show, some of the games I’m proudest of have remained largely class-only affairs. I’m changing that right now. While I continue to work on other, longer works over the break, I’ll post my games here, so that they reach an audience of some kind.

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Games, and video games in particular, have enjoyed a cultural ascendancy since the turn of the millennium. More people talk, think, and care about games than at any other time in history. While it’s true that sport has always been an important part of any society, what is happening now is an elevation of games as a genre of human activity. People no longer talk just about the subtleties and eccentricities of Chess, or Baseball, but about the psychological ramifications of play, and the responsibilities of game developers to their players and the world. It’s only natural that as games have risen in social capital, the dominant forms of art have made efforts to domesticate their wooly cousin. Games have at different times been compared to film, television, novels, poetry, and even abstract art. Yet none of these projects have served any great utility in understanding ‘the heart of gameness’¹.

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There’s an interesting conversation going on at the Slate Magazine website. A discussion between Stephen Totilo, Chris Sullentrop, Seth Schiesel, and N’Gai Croal. While most of what they’re talking about is a little obvious to anyone that’s actually turned a sharp eye to the gaming situation in the past year, what’s makes it worth reading is that none of the writers are members of the enthusiast press. They all write for publications that cover topics other than games (MTV News, Slate, The New York Times, and Newsweek respectively). Is this the beginning of genuine games criticism?

Link

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A couple of great things came out of Montreal recently.

The first is a talk by Jonathan Blow, developer of the upcoming XBox Live title Braid, at the Montreal International Games Summit. The talk covers his concerns about the state of game design, its methods and conceits, and different possibilities for maturing the discipline in general. In making his argument he uses the common ‘design bias’ that most people (Ian Bogost being the worst offender) fall into when trying to suggest solutions to this problem, but overall I have to say that I agree with almost everything he says.

Next is the game Passage which was created by Jason Rohrer for the Montreal-based art-game collective Kokoromi’s Gamma 256 show. After playing the game for only a few minutes I knew that it would stick firmly in my heart next to Knytt as a game that invokes enormous emotions considering its scope.

You can download the audio recording of Jonathan Blow’s talk from his blog here and download Jason Rohrer’s game here.

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Assassin’s Creed is the new game from the development team that brought us Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.

The gameplay is generally a muddled experience. Your assassin, who has the agility enough to fly across rooftops and climb the faces of buildings, somehow loses his acrobatic skills in combat, where he stands in the center of his assailants and slowly exchanges blows with them. On top of this, you’re presented huge, detailed cities that call out to be explored, but have large portions of them blocked off for most of the game for no particular reason (other than to hide the fact that there’s nothing to do in them).

The story of Assassin’s Creed is similarly schizophrenic, featuring what could have been a unique period piece wrapped in a silly and predictable sci-fi plot. After a while you begin to wonder if the sci-fi conceit is there just to justify the fact that this middle-eastern assassin has the accent and appearance of a modern-day American. After all, it probably wouldn’t have done to have a game where the player took on the role of a Muslim warrior stealthily murdering political figures in an occupied Middle Eastern city.

At it’s high points Assassin’s Creed shows the elegance and possibilities of what context-sensitive controls can be when they are done well. Assassin’s Creed is at it’s worst when it seems confused about what it wants to be, compromised in what it could have been, or, as is sometimes the case, quite simply empty.

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