I saw these gorgeous pie wedge images this morning, allegedly made by someone in the Ukraine for a travel agency. Immediately, I felt a powerful tug for the old game Populous. If I remember correctly, I played Populous on my Atari 1040ST originally, while living in Germany.
A great game, but specifically it carried a particular identity…a feeling I experienced while playing that is hard to put into words. We’re still an up-and-coming medium and there are feelings I have as I’m interacting with a game system beyond the traditional elements related to art, fiction and sound. I wish we had a word for this. (Hell, maybe we do; I never claimed to have the world’s greatest vocabulary.)
The ‘play’ component of Populous gave me a unique feeling tied to that game alone. And like a new color or unnamed flavor it’s hard to talk about and impossible to share with someone who hasn’t played the game. Even worse, it’s hard for me to experience any more, since I don’t have a way to play the game, currently.
Once in a while, I go through the effort to re-install some older game. Not always the greatest games, but something I’m craving. Recent examples: Chaos Overlord, Chron-X, X-com. I’ve heard gamers talk about the ‘vibe’ in Deus Ex and I hope this is what they’re talking about…a feeling created maybe in part by the hollistic effect of the traditional elements but also certainly by the interactive/play component.
For some reason, the god/goddess of media decided that a number of things would arrive today. I got three books in addition to a History Channel 360 game (which is probably not great, but I want to try when I’m not playing Bully: Scholarship Edition or Burnout Paradise) and an old Bauhaus album I finally replaced (…one I owned originally on cassette).
The books:
1) A collection of short plays by Samuel Beckett: I never read Krapp’s Last Tape and recently–during a conversation about the Graveyard–someone mentioned that it was moving.
2) Game Design Workshop, by Tracy Fullerton, comes highly recommend. I’m working on two projects with Arkane: One with a very short development cycle, and one that’ll be much longer term. For the short-term project, I just hit a milestone that will make the Fullerton book very useful in terms of iterating. (Being at an independent, passion-driven company again is fantastic…Arkane is very agile, social and fun.)
3) Universal Principles of Design, also highly recommended, is a great book that the title describes perfectly.
A couple of years back, as part of my minimalist trend, I got rid of (I’d say) 4/5ths of my books. I like having some on the shelf, but I’d be happier if I could get them all in digi format, on a multi-use device that wasn’t just for reading (like the iTouch).
A friend just sent me a link to a new indie game called the Graveyard.
Huge praise goes out to the creators of this interactive work that touches on the ways in which death moves us. This interests me in part because I’ve talked off and on about “a game about death.” Talking to MTV on a panel with Will Wright, Cliffy Blezinski and David Jaffe, I mentioned that I’d be fascinated for personal reasons with a game depicting a human character at successive stages of life, dealing at each stage with a death and with the ongoing ravages of physical deterioration (altering the player-character’s movement model). But while I was wanking about, the creators of the Graveyard created something interesting.
Today I played around with the trial version of the Graveyard, then bought the full version for $5. Hopefully, others will check it out.
The Graveyard has great presentation, in terms of graphics and audio (including the music). I did walk off screen once and couldn’t recover. And while I appreciate the approach of not over-informing the player, I’d have liked more info on the controls. (It took me a while to figure out how to exit even.) The biggest critique of this (brilliant) indie work is the lack of interactivity; it’s not quite “a series of interesting decisions.” But I find it completely heartening that the game industry is rapidly broadening to allow for creative works like this, along with Facade, the Marriage, Passage, Braid and the like.
In my dreamworld, there’d be an expanded version of the game, wherein the player’s goal was to die with contentment. Imagine a faintly saturate bubble around the main character, with a little color…the last shreds of her vitality. Full exploration of the graveyard would reveal similarly hued areas in an otherwise black and white world; each colored spot would mark the grave of someone lost to the old woman, with whom she had an unresolved conflict. Each of these graves would represent a pocket world, a window into her past that would allow her to try, in her mind, to resolve the conflict she had with someone now gone. Imagine a room in the 1920’s, where she argued with a lover for the final time. Imagine her sitting on a boardwalk bench, fighting with her best friend over someone they both wanted to date. In another spot, she remembers a bitter fight with her youngest child who was never happy. The core game loop would, of course, be a challenge, but I would love to see her success in her last hour on the planet be driven by how successfully she came to terms with these past conflicts. With the passage of time and the emotional exertion of dealing with each memory, she’d get closer to death; with the successful resolution of each past conflict, she’d get closer to contentment. The game could then end with a discontent or content death.
In any case, I love the Graveyard and wanted to pass this along. Kudos to the team.
http://tale-of-tales.com/TheGraveyard/index.html
After missing our flight and spending the night in New Jersey, Raph and I finally made it back yesterday. Now I’m trying to recover from jetlag and exhaustion.
What a great trip to Lyon. We had some meetings and worked on some creative stuff, but also spent a lot of time socializing with the guys from the Lyon office. Here are a few more pics:
This is the bar we haunted on several nights. Romu took us there the first time, then later Marco took a group of us.
On the final night, we had dinner with Raph’s family and friends. Fantastic food and great company.
This is an archive to interviews done for Warren’s UT classes on comparative media/games.
http://rtf.utexas.edu/rtf343/media.html
I was in Manhattan yesterday for a meeting. Afterward, with 7 hours to kill, I went by the Gamelab studio to hang out with Eric Zimmerman. (I had “vegtarian duck” at a Thai place.) I walked a lot, got to hang out with another friend over coffee, went to a great used book store called The Strand, and had some of the best sushi I’ve had in years. Great trip. I read the book The Cement Garden cover to cover on the trip home. (Most recent books, The Cement Garden and Blood Meridian. Both amazing in different ways.)
Images from the breakroom window at Gamelab:
Traveling back from Florida, my Very Clever Girlfriend(tm) noticed a great Portal photo op. (Portal is another Game of the Year contender…way to go Valve and the Narbacular Drop/Portal team. The gamplay is great, but the fiction and atmosphere are equally impressive.)
My costume this year…a version of the Killer from Wanted (the graphic novel, rather than the movie). Note the abs.
Leah as a Little Sister from (this year’s brilliant) Bioshock. (Games can only be as good as the people funding them will allow…congrats to Take 2 for having the discipline to let the team finish the game then polish the game. Bioshock is one of the best games in years as a result of the team’s talent and the publisher’s savvy.)
Starr Long apparently meditating…Euginie and Snowflake looking delightful. (Starr’s game Tabula Rosa just went live. Way to go, Starr and NCSoft.)
Note how Oge is trying to crush Starr Long’s head.
Had a great time carving pumpkins. Resulting Jack-o’-lanterns. Mine this year (far right) was two eyes and the ‘mouth’ was the hole in the top…for a jack-o’-lantern howling up at the sky.
The trip to Manhattan went well. We demoed Blacksite for Maxim, Playboy, CNet, Fangoria and some others. People responded very positively to the high concept, the story, the graphics, the discussions around morale, the evidence of breakables in the Mosque, and the levels we demoed. One of the most popular things we showed was downtown Rachel, in the rain. Lots of respect for the mood and familar setting.
The trip was one night only, so the travel was rough. On the way back my flight got delayed 3 times, so I sat at the gate for 5 hours and got home at 330am last night. On the way there, a lady brought a canvas bag full of frozen seafood and several bags full of “something else.” Halfway through the flight, the seafood melted and drained down out of the overhead bin. The plane smelled like dead fish. Just as we were about to land, I looked down and saw something monstrous creeping toward my foot. My arachnophobia kicked in and I shrieked. Seeing that it was only a crawfish, I said, “Omg, I thought that was a tarantula.” All the people for 4 rows in any direction heard was, “Omg…tarantula.” Mass panic ensued. Some guy kicked the poor crawfish into the center aisle. I experienced cognitive dissonance as the vegetarian in my cried out for the crawfish, while the arachnophobe was screaming in my mind, “Genocide the entire species!” Turns out the woman with the seafood was carrying several plastic bags full of live crawfish. Everyone hated her. I thought they were going to beat her to death. Best lines I heard as we were disembarking:
“I’m allergic to shellfish…I think it touched me.”
“What has 12 legs and flies?” (Me.)
“They took my lotion but she gets to keep her crawfish?”
To make up for this, my room at the Bryant Park hotel was an 1100 square foot penthouse that looked out onto the Empire State Building. The suite had two bathrooms. There was a $300 cigar in the snack cabinet. (And a bunch of “toys” in something called “the Pleasure Chest.” I’ve never stayed in a hotel with “the Rabbit” and similar devices on the room service menu.) It was insane.
