Month: August 2005

The Lack of an Indie Aesthetic

Greg Costikyan presents a new rant at the Escapist.

The problem is that once something becomes technically feasible, the market demands it. Gamers themselves are partly to blame: Indie rock fans may prefer somewhat muddy sound over some lushly-orchestrated, producer-massaged score; indie film fans may prefer quirky, low-budget titles over big-budget special FX extravaganzas; but in gaming, we have no indie aesthetic, no group of people (of any size at least) who prize independent vision and creativity over production values.

And this I think is true – consumers share the blame … The game audience must mature in order for the game industry to mature.

No More WOW for you Today

Word is that the Chinese government is working on regulating MMOGs so anybody playing more than three hours in a row will be punished in-game.

BBC story.

The server administrators will be happy (less server load).

The scary thing is that because MMOGs are managed at central servers, they are also the ideal cultural form for any totalitarian state: The committee has decided that you will only play three hours per day, young one.

Imagine if the authorities could set time limits on your reading, listening to music, or anything else …

Windows Vista and OSX Intel: Threats to Gaming History

A sizable portion of video game history is going to be rendered inaccessible to the average user within the next few years:

According to Eweek, Windows Vista will not be able to run 16-bit programs, so Windows 3.1 programs, and many DOS programs (most? all?) will cease to work once you install upgrade to Vista.

Apple’s switch to Intel chips also means the end of OS 9 support, so all your pre-2001 Mac games are not going to work anymore.

We will still be able to play old games in the future by running various emulators and virtual machines, but it will be out of reach for most users.

11 years from the release of Windows’95 to not supporting Windows 3.1 is a very short time in culture, but 5 years from the release of OSX to not supporting OS9 is the blink of an eye.

These are corporate decisions that could be reversed. Somebody should stage a campaign. Any takers?

The Message is Paper-Thin

Slate has a short article on Islamist video games.

If you ignore the titles of the Ummah Defense games and the occasional in-game messages?”Alhamdulillah, You Destroyed the Command Ship!”?it’s impossible to tell that you’re playing an “Islamic game.” When I destroyed the third of the four command ships controlling the “Flying Evil Robot Armada” in the first Ummah Defense, I didn’t ruminate on whether my real-life allegiance should be with the robots. I just thought, only one more ship to go!

Same old problem: It’s hard to place or identify a clear message in the game mechanics, but in many game forms, the player eventually only really cares about the game mechanics.

Programming as a Game: Google Code Jam & Topcoder

Registration for the Google Code Jam 2005 ends August 22nd.

The event is hosted by Topcoder, who has done impressive work creating automated online multiuser programming competitions.

The basic format is this:

  • You register and download the Topcoder client program.
  • The actual competition is in real time. You are placed in a group with perhaps 25-50 other users and are given three programming tasks of varying difficulty (make a program that given this input, returns this output etc…) which you can then solve in a number of different programming languages.
  • After having submitted your programs, there is a brief pause where you can go over the programming of your competitors and find flaws for extra points.
  • The Topcoder system then runs your program with a number of test cases. If your program fails, you get 0 points, otherwise your score depends on how quickly you solved the task.

The actual challenges seem to be mostly standard computer science “hard problems” – problems that are easy to solve if you have an infinitely big computer, but very hard if they have to be run in a few seconds. Find the shortest path through a changing graph, that sort of thing. (Which certainly favors people who have actually studied computer science.)

Programming is a strange activity, but kudos to Topcoder for using it as a game.