In most games, there’s a specific role to play. In Serious Sam, I control a wise cracking uber muscled super soldier with absurd amounts of ammunition. In GTA, I’m a city dweller only interested in cars, and perhaps an aspiring criminal lowlife.

When I play FFVI, what am I playing exactly? On the one hand, I’m an explorer, flying around a continent, discovering caves and towns and places, and solving the errant puzzle. I’m also one of a rotating cast of characters, each with their own motivations and personalities, an actor in a vast, world-transforming narrative. On top of that, I’m also playing a mini-tactical combat simulator every 30 seconds.

I’ll bet that most people playing a JRPG play it somewhat more holistically than that. We don’t separate the different parts of the experience unless they break immersion (the Bioshock hacking minigame comes to mind). The trouble with JRPGs is that they’re often so well made that the seams don’t show, but they’re still there. (Now that I think about it, Myst, for all its foibles, is remarkably cohesive for a story game…)

Exercise: What if you actually broke all the different pieces apart? What if there was a game that was completely wandering around a map picking up things and making dialogue choices? And another game that was nothing but fighting through a big arena?

It seems, at least superficially, that both of these games would be much worse than FFVI, but it could just be that we don’t imagine those games polished on the level that FFVI is.

One of the best ways to force people to review games correctly is to make it in their best economic interests to do so.

For fun, I’m creating a role playing game. But in this game, you won’t be a sword fighter. You’ll be a programmer.

Working for a company making a role playing game.

Basically you’ll get to play a number of classes: sales, marketing, product management, engineer. With each, you’ll be able to upgrade the same skills, but some of them will go up quicker than others. (Though it’s true that in Morrowind, this sort of excessive flexibility was criticized for not giving a player a good focus, I’ll make sure that your role is more dictated by your job than your skills).

The first criticism you might have–this is total garbage. Why would you play a game that doesn’t involve killing anyone? I think I can provide an appropriate response in the form of this. Everquest also has crafting, where you put together items to produce a greater whole. We’ll expand on this concept.

The difficulty will be how to make this a challenge like in real life. I think this is a matter of pitting people against each other or together with each other, so we can leverage human AI instead of coding our own, first of all. Then we have to make the RPG a useful creative experience. One thing that we might do is have competing organizations, and a customer base. Basically, you’ll have customers if you have good sales, but you’ll have to work together with good engineers, because engineers can produce useful gadgets. Oh, and you won’t be able to do it all; upgrading some skills will push the others down automatically.

Anyways, the prototype will be based on the following:

• Sales: You need to be able to sell things well, which may not involve being realistic. It also involves being a good communicator, and finding contacts.
• Product Management: You need to be able to manage timelines and put things together. This involves being organized, and being able to empathize with two groups. The more you empathize with engineering the faster and better things may get produced, but the more you empathize with the customer the more likely they’ll be to approve of the product.
• Engineering: Basically, the better you are the better you are. I think Gas will know more about this.
• Testing

OK, so my new game is gonna be about music.

Everyone is excited about the newest generation of consoles. Microsoft is going all out with XBox 360, and Playstation 3 will doubtless be amazing. The underdog, in this generation of consoles, will be the Nintendo Revolution. Or will it?

XBox 360 costs $399 (The core system doesnt exist, so dont talk to me about that). Rumor has it that PS3 will cost upwards of $499 (Although I think a price point of $399 will make it much more competitive with XBox). And how much does the Revolution cost? Probably around $150. It’s no secret that Nintendo doesn’t want to compete with Sony or Microsoft. Who can blame them? Nintendo follows no one’s rules but their own. Nintendo is not getting sucked into the console arm’s race for the most spectacular graphics. It’s fairly likely that the Nintendo Revolution will have graphics only marginally better than the original XBox.

I still put my money on Nintendo. In fact, I don’t know for sure whether PS3 will win over 360, or vice versa, but I do know that Nintendo Revolution will do just fine, regardless of what happens to the other consoles.

Nintendo has always been an innovator. This has been the key to their success, and has also been the cause of many laughable failures. They have a philsophy that seems to be willing to try anything. Products such as Virtual Boy, Nintendo DS

I can’t decide if I was psychic, good at picking up industry activity, or if this was obvious. To this day, it’s hard to find a Wii because every console is sold out.

1. Graphics – Make some windows! (google “windowing toolkit”)

Usually operating systems will offer some sort of programming library so you don’t have to reinvent the window. This varies from Windows to Mac to Linux. Additionally, there are windowing toolkits – downloadable libraries that let you make windows that work anywhere.
GTK, the GIMP toolkit, is best known for being used in many open source programs, like the GIMP (of course), GAIM, and DIA are built in. There is a tutorial, though it’s not entirely transparent.

Possibly preferable are Qt, a partially-open-source toolkit [tutorial], and wxWidgets [tutorial].

2. Web Browsing (google “C++ http library”)

One of the simpler ways of pulling web pages is through the use of http-fetcher, a portable library for making HTTP requests.

If you’re willing to stick to Windows-only (and .NET only in particular), this shows how. .NET has a fat library though, so if you’re using it you won’t need the rest of this.

3. File Manipulation

C++ has built in file handling (and more importantly, a good C++ tutorial will typically document this). Reading a file line by line is pretty straightforward [tutorial].

4. System calls

Use system() to make calls to other command line programs. [reference]

5. Redistributables

Fortunately, native compilability is C++’s h2 suit. In general, using a standard C++ compiler (the Microsoft compiler or G++, for instance), you get a binary file that can be run on any other computer (using the same operating system, of course).

—-

The Boost library is one of the most important C++ library collections, as well as one that will have a major impact on the next version of C++ (as Bjarne Sjourstrup, the creator of C++, said at a recent talk). It’s available at http://www.boost.org/. Most of it is lower level than what we’re talking about here, though.

—-

The updating version is available at http://canadia.strafenet.com/index.php?title=Programmer%27s_Thesaurus

First of all, we should be clear: most games aren’t about killing people. The first and third best selling PC games of all time had nothing to do with violence. (Neither do almost all of the top selling console games) From the perspective of a game company, it makes much more sense, sales-wise, not to fall into the pattern of making just another shooter, as the best selling games are typically the ones most accessible to the widest audiences. (Girls, for example, are generally not well served by the game industry)

What is unusual about the game industry, though, is that it does produce a large number of games that are violent. It’s hard to plow through, but if you look at the 2006 list of recent movie releases, you’ll find a few about fighting and violence, but those are the exception. On the other hand, there’s a major subset of video games that are all about fighting. (2003 list) Jedi Knight, GTA, Prince of Persia, Warcraft, Soul Caliber, Battlefield 1942…added all together, they form a majority of the gaming market. And they’re all about shooting, fighting, armies, running around, reloading, and killing. If half of the movies sold in theaters were war movies, we would have probably noticed.

1. Genre conversion (comedy vs. strategy/simulation)

One of the problems with video games is that they’re a participatory art form. If you want to do comedy in a movie or book, it’s simple. But comedy is typically one-way interaction. Even comedians are one way (mostly); they talk and the audience laughs.

The same goes for things that aren’t comedy. When it comes to building interactive worlds, fighting is a standard form of interaction, as are racing, puzzle solving, strategy, and simulation. Movies and books aren’t “limited by interactivity;” that’s why bookstores don’t typically shelve their books as racing/puzzle solving/arcade books.

2. Modus operandi

Does comedy have to be one way? No, watch people in a group; funny things happen all the time. The problem is turning that interaction into an art form.

Traditional art is used to segregating people into two groups: the producers of art and the audiences. (Sometimes producers will be split further into performers and composers, but there’s still a wall between both and the audience.

Since the idea of political activism through art has become more common, and since modern artists are more apt to connect divisions between artists and the audience to political oppression, they are also more likely to actively challenge it. This may sound farfetched, but it is not infeasible; scholars have, for example, critiqued the orchestra as authoritarian and ruled by the conductor. Many modern works also seek to make each performer an active participant in the act of composing. Terry Riley’s In C, for example, gives individual performers freedom to choose when to play what parts. [1]

In general, however, most composers stick to composing pieces where the music is controlled from one center. One reason is obvious; it’s easier to make things sound good if only one person decides how the piece should go!

3. Changes

One way around this problem is to discover new modes of interaction. Your average RPG contains elements of buying and selling. This non violent interaction–commerce–is taken further in most games, where you can act as both a trader and a craftsman–Everquest and The Elder Scrolls series (Morrowind, Oblivion) both have signs of this.

If you talk to someone like Will Wright, creator of the Sims and the Simcity series, you might also think of open ended interactions. While even new modes of game interaction (selling, trading, negotiation with the computer, etc.) focus on achieving some sort of goal (typically finishing some quest or taking over the world), it is also possible to create a world without defined goals. While this may sound unrewarding and aimless, Wright has generally proven that such simulations can be far more interesting than games that restrict the players focus to a specific goal.

Finally, another way to build new interactions is through community. Not many online games are built on the premise of social interactions, but the fact that we can cram thousands of people onto one server, in one game is pointing us in a positive direction. [2]

4. Inconclusions

Violence is still a simple and easily accessible form of interaction; at least for boys, shooting and hunting are relatively adaptable concepts to the human mind, and simple ones for games. But that probably doesn’t mean that most games will end up filling this narrow niche.

This system essentially changes the game from one of player vs. computer to one of player vs. designer. In my opinion, this is more interesting and more challenging; can you outsmart the person who built the game?

Uppie traps often come from deeper principles that are more generally applicable to other games. For example, in Baldur’s Gate II, one very useful strategy is to launch area attacks before you see the enemy. In general, monsters won’t acknowledge your existence until they’re in your site range. While this would seem to be specific to this game (it wouldn’t work in Diablo, for instance (update: actually, it does sometimes)), it does extend to a general idea. Each individual enemy does not have its own intelligence; the programmer has to compromise and decide what gets processing time. Thus, in any game, there is always the possibility of discovering blind spots; areas where processing has been avoided. In future entries we’ll cross apply this principle.

In other news, my GPA just went inthe corner and shot itself.

-Tim

Also of note: Nintendo Insider [1], [2]; Fanboy Intervention – this article is great [1]

[00:18] TubaGas: www.urbandead.com
[00:23] Chris: lmao
[00:23] Chris: i think the designer to game barrier has been destroyed*
[00:24] TubaGas: yeah
[00:24] TubaGas: possibly
[00:25] Chris: that’s great news

So, what is the Designer-Game barrier, and why is it great if it’s destroyed?

(*and why don’t i think it’s been completely destroyed anymore)

The Death of the DGB

The Designer-Game barrier is the collection of technical obstacles that separate the concept a game designer comes up with from its actual implementation.

The majority of past video games (90s and earlier especially) have been limited by the capabilities of the hardware they were written for. While they often tried to represent parts of a physical world (i.e., dungeons, outer space, etc.) they would have to resort to gross simplifications. A person’s health would become a number, the world would be reduced to two dimensions, etc.

While some of these simplifications existed so that the game player wouldn’t be hopelessly overwhelmed by uninteresting information, some of them (the graphic simplifications especially) existed just because computers couldn’t do any better. One obvious example is Half-Life and Half-Life 2. The graphics aren’t better in HL2 because the designer decided they should be; they simply reflect the improvement in the ability of computers to reach the designer’s expectations.

There are two main parts to this barrier. What we have been talking about with Half-Life and Half-Life 2 has to do with the limits of the technology–one half of the barrier. Half-Life 2 pushed the edge of graphics capabilities available on computers to create a greater sense of realism. This part of the barrier comes from technology–the fact that computers couldn’t create anything half as realistic as what’s in HL2 until very recently (no wordplay intended).

Why Urban Dead?

You may ask, why did I mention Urban Dead in the beginning of this article? It’s not, after all, a game that is pushing any graphical limits whatsoever. If the Designer-Game Barrier is preventing the designer from designing a good game here, it’s not because computers are incapable of drawing the graphics the designer wants.

Rather, this is the second half of the barrier; the part that prevents amateur and independent designers from creating a good game. Most professional game builders have the advantage of working with amazing programming staffs; the people who produce games like Oblivion and Half-Life 2 are extraordinarily talented coders. Independent designers, on the other hand, don’t have the resources to create such things. As a result, toolkits that help these designers build games have been springing up like hotcakes.

The fact that a regular individual can now, without the need of a super skilled programming staff, produce something we call a game, is a great thing indeed. It means that to some extent, the barriers to enter the game creating business have fallen. Much as the Internet and personal computers allow musicians to produce and distribute music without going through large record companies (though they can only do this to a small extent), modern tools that make it easier to program and design are enabling designers* to begin to participate in the gaming market.

Here we should add that we are not yet at the point where anyone can enter the market. Certainly, PHP helps create games in a way that wasn’t available when graphics had to be handled with the hardware, and editors for modern-day games often make it much easier to create mods and create entirely new games out of old products. However, while this is easier, it’s not easy; the barrier hasn’t fallen yet, but the availability of new game creating tools that are easier to use means that we will see the creative outputs of many people who formerly could not apply their talents to video game design.

(*Amateur/hobbyist programmers have long had the ability to create games; in fact, the video game industry began not as the creation of big companies, but of programmers. If, however, say a comic book artist wanted to use their talents in story writing and art to produce a game, they would have much more limited options in, say, the 80s and early 90s.)