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I sort of research in this area (only sorta, but enough to keep up and know about half the people in it). So I can't help but throw out some additional resources, which you can interpret as "stuff I like".

FWIW, the general idea is usually referred to as "serious games", with a bunch of terms like "persuasive games", "games for change", "games with a purpose", "political games", "news games", etc. having more specific meanings.

I personally rather like Ian Bogost's book on the subject, which, contrary to a lot of stuff in this space, is more measured in talking about both the possible benefits and likely pitfalls. Although I love the idea and think it has a lot of promise, I've got to admit most attempts to make "serious" or "political" or "world-changing" games fall flat. Anyone played McCain's 2004 campaign game, "John Kerry Tax Invaders"? It's exactly what you think it is: a space-invaders clone with John Kerry tax bills coming down at you, in place of aliens. Hilarious, but kind of stupid. So I think it's important to not be fan-boyish about it, and figure out what would make the medium actually flourish for these sorts of purposes. (FWIW, Bogost also has a former blog on "games with an agenda", and a interesting Colbert appearance).

An interesting precursor is Chris Crawford's 1980s games, which tackled subjects like the Cold War and the environment in interesting ways. He's now giving away a .txt of a book describing the design behind Balance of Power (1986), still something of a high-water mark in combining the simulation genre with attempts to really make people think about the real world.

For more recent games, specifically in response to news events, some of which have activist content and some of which are just commentary, there's also a newsgame index. In addition, there's a recent paper discussing whether and how newsgames might become the 21st century's equivalent of political cartoons.

Even games that have accurate summarizations of history in their story rarely use it to much good effect beyond a sort of flavorful seasoning. It's not really playable history that makes you think about it, in the way good historical fiction helps you understand and imagine aspects of history. If anything, the use of history in educational games like Oregon Trail is the closest to that, and even there it's a little superficial. (The article does correctly point out that alternate history has been dealt with pretty well in games... but oddly, real history, not so much.)

We do, for whatever reason, have that more with current events to some extent. In the mid-1980s, Chris Crawford released the excellent Balance of Power, which attempted to use gameplay to interactively illustrate some aspects of the Cold War. More recently, there's been a flurry of interest in "newsgames" and "persuasive games", using games as a sort of editorial-cartoon-style take on smallish current issues, like tainted spinach outbreaks.

But where's playable history in any real fashion? It doesn't have to be pedantically boring, designed by Professors of Roman History to illustrate some sort of minutiae of interest to their field. Even semi-accurate, dramatized history of the History Channel variety would be interesting if it were playable in some significant sense, not just "you're playing an RTS that has Roman legions as units". Or something as good as the alternate-history games, but with actual history. Lack of interest? Too hard to figure out how to make it work? I mean this as a serious question, fwiw, not as berating game designers. It seems there's a lot of popular interest in at least some kinds of history, as evidenced by things like the History Channel, and yet in games we've gotten only really superficial elements. It may just be inherently impossible / really really hard, but somehow it seems to me that it ought to be doable.

The Lisa could also be used for Macintosh development.

During this time I had been designing without programming. I had a Macintosh but no development system for the Mac. In those days, the only way to develop serious Macintosh programs was on a Lisa computer. I had ordered a Lisa from Apple in May, 1984, but I did not receive the machine until August 1. So I spent the first three months of the project doing "paper design."
Without a development system, all I could do was read the manuals, study my references, and write proposals. As it happens, this can be a good thing...If it does not go on for too long. Too many games are hacked together at the keyboard rather than designed from the ground up. In this case, however, three months of paper design was too long because during the process I needed to test some ideas on the computer before I could proceed with other aspects of the design. It was with great relief that I took delivery of my Lisa and set to work on learning the system.

Chris Crawford BALANCE OF POWER International Politics as the Ultimate Global Game

Chris Crawford, the game designer, is organizing a project to build a three-dimensional map of the Augrid meteor shower, by combining the observations of many amateurs.

Details are here in his website.

Why the hell isn't the parent modded insightful?

Chris Crawford defines interaction as a form of conversation - http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/JCGD_Volume_7/Fu ndamentals.html

Computers are getting pretty good at their end of the conversation, and this IBM work suggests the thinking about a response part is improving. But they still really suck at listening to us.

Just a simple way of telling a computer good/bad when it does something "automatically" would help immensely. It's how we train a computer to recognise spam, for example, and they're getting pretty good at that these days. Should easy enough to extend with a little thought.

How is anything /ever/ meant to learn if it can't tell what is wrong and what is right?

>>When somebody comes up with a way to generate good dialog, story and gameplay via procedural algorithms, then maybe,
>>but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Chris Crawford has a patent on generating stories on the fly...or something similar anyways.

http://www.erasmatazz.com/patent.html

Activision was founded primarily so that individual devs could get credit for their games

Arguably, that's because they weren't getting any money for their work. If the devs were paid what they were worth, I can assure you that they wouldn't have complained as much.

What's funny is that Todd Frye (the creator of Atari Pacman for the 2600) got both money in the form of royalties AND fame for his work on PacMan! Even more amusing is that it was a rushed translation, and Mr. Frye didn't like PacMan! Some people have all the luck.

Go Figure.

The art of interactive design by Chris Crawfod

There is also a game out there that's a Final-Fantasy-esque RPG--I really wish I could remember what it's called--where the idea was that it was meant to teach you Japanese. The story starts out in English, and in combat you have to correctly identify kanji, and as the game progresses it switches to Japanese.

http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/Lilan/artists.ht ml

Not everyone holds the "role" argument.

http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/JCGD_Volume_8/Tw o_Cultures_War.html

"Manifested in the Western idea of "two different cultures".

http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/Lilan/artists.ht ml

Not everyone holds the "role" argument.

http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/JCGD_Volume_8/Tw o_Cultures_War.html

"Manifested in the Western idea of "two different cultures".

http://www.erasmatazz.com/Library.html

"This section is devoted to a description of my literary output, consisting of six books:

The Art of Computer Game Design (1982)
Balance of Power (1985)
You Should Learn to Program (1988)
The Art of Interactivity Design (2001)
Chris Crawford on Game Design (2003)
Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling (2004)"

plus

"The Art of Computer Game Design (1982) {link to Washington State University at Vancouver}
The Art of Computer Game Design (1982) {link to downloadable pdf by Mario Croteau}
You Should Learn to Program (1985)
The Journal of Computer Game Design Volume 1 (1987 - 1988)
The Journal of Computer Game Design Volume 2 (1988 - 1989)
The Journal of Computer Game Design Volume 3 (1989 - 1990)
The Journal of Computer Game Design Volume 4 (1990 - 1991)
The Journal of Computer Game Design Volume 5 (1991 - 1992)
The Journal of Computer Game Design Volume 6 (1992 - 1993)
Interactive Entertainment Design Volume 7 (1993 - 1994)
Interactive Entertainment Design Volume 8 (1994 - 1995)
Interactive Entertainment Design Volume 9 (1995 - 1996)"

I haven't played with it much, but Chris Crawford's Siboot has an icon language similar to Bluddian that forms the basis of the game.

A lot of this is due to an abysmal understanding of science in the general public. Without a grounding in real science and intellectual speculation, "Sci-Fi" just becomes another genre -- "Space Opry" as opposed to "Horse Opry." [misspelling deliberate] The heart of worthwhile Sci-Fi is intellectual, but we live in a technological society where it is cool to be anti-intellectual. Even on a "geek" discussion site like Slashdot! Make no mistake, "My OS is cooler than yours" pissing matches are anti-intellectual. (Intellectual Integrity) When you really care about the truth, you devote a lot of effort to trying to prove *yourself* wrong.

It's not so much that the genre is dead, but that much of the potential audience is brain-dead. Now waiting to be modded down to "Troll."

No one has looked into /why/ pacman was so popular...

No one? Try reading Scott Miller's The Genius of Pac Man

There has been no formal study of games beyond their technical specifications.

No formal study, perhaps, but there have been several important game designers who have a lot to say on games beyond the technical specs (in fact, just about every book on Game Design -- about 8 have been published in the last two years alone -- only give lip service to technical specifications). Chris Crawford, in particular, has pretty much made a career giving lectures throughout the world on this very subject. You can read some of it here, or read his books.

His game design book actually went into the psychology of creativity, and he even had a chapter that listed the books he suggested to open your mind and give you enough of a creative background to draw from (including history books, myths, a book on "how things work", etc.)

There's a lot of discussion out here on the internet involving the non-technical aspects of game design, and if you know the right places to look, even amongst established game developers. They might not qualify as formal studies, but I'd give more weight on their analyses than "formal studies" anyway. Besides, if you want formal studies on what works in video games, start researching psychology, particularly behaviorism. There's a wealth of information in that field alone which would help game design tremendously.

here Does lying make you waste brainpower that would otherwise be spent doing something useful?

Good luck! -Joel

Sure, there's one from 1990 available for free download on the original programmer (Chris Crawford)'s website but it's for Macs only, so that doesn't help me play along.

You know what's really cool? He's a programmer who realizes that some of his older games are more-or-less worthless as a viable money-earning product as technology has moved ahead, so he has posted these old programs on his website for download, stating "For all you collectors of Macintosh antiquities, here is some old software from the dim past". I wish more programmers would do this, as there are tons of old programs that I'd like to see/try/reinstall if only I could find a relatively clean version from a reliable source... like the creator or publisher.

As for the first request, the lore goes that story is refered to as "the S-word"[*] inside ID...

[*] (Search for it on the page linked.)

He's also written extensively on game design.

I have never heard any studies claim that a signifant portion of the "older" world population plays video games.

I found interesting the author's link to Chris Crawford, who ran his own small survey on gaming habits, after being suspicious of another published survey's results on gamers and age ranges:

http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/Game%20Design/Ga meStatistics.html

and his conclusion is that you can make anything you want of survey statistics.

I would think that most older people wouldn't play video games initially because they came from a generation where entertainment didn't have a computer understanding requirement.

However, I see more older people play video games these days. I encourage my older mother to play rather simple games online on her computer, which she enjoys. I'll be moving her up from card and match games to SimThemePark and perhaps Starcraft or Warcraft once I upgrade her system.

I'm in my 30's, and I will be playing video games as long as I can physically and mentally function to do so, so I imagine that there are others like me and we will see more older game players in the future.

I look forward to Counter-Strike 6, and I will continue to school the 13-year olds in that game, too!

The degree of hand-holding by the brand owner varies, in some cases a developer is allowed to run and get quite creative with a character-based license (like the earlier mentioned Goldeneye with James Bond) while in the case of Enter the Matrix the game was apparently co-directed by the Wachowski brothers themselves. And truly, it is a fitting story in the Matrix universe.

One of the major differences in games vs. movies is the ownership of the experience; games try to give you some illusion of free will to allow you feel like it is you choosing to fight the bad guys and you on the screen kicking ass.

Enter the Matrix was built to tell the Wachowski story, and while an interesting one in the multi-threaded Matrix universe (like the great Animatrix shorts) and tied to the rest of the legacy, it does not leave many open-ended choices to the player. While not the basis for very deep or varied gameplay, this ironically fits with the Matrix universe and the question of free will in human life. You are ultimately on rails, and you will either ride to the finish, or you will perish along the way. That has not stopped the game from selling more than 2.5 million copies, which means they must have done something right.

Chris Crawford and many others have debated the depth of the story tree and mechanisms to create interesting and playable content inside multi-threaded story trees. I have yet to find a massively multiplayer game that was able to carry a coherent story (except about the story of the player himself exploiting a strange world full of rats and squirrels to get "exp" and "eq") and have grown too jaded to enjoy pseudo-random generator worlds like Morrowind. However, I find a lot of pleasure in visiting the grandfathers of 16- and 32-bit roleplaying, Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross, with a dozen or more possible endings each.

An ideal game gives you a strong illusion of ownership over the evolution and direction of the story while filling all the possible branches of gameplay with interesting content. Spector's Deus Ex 2 is very ambitious in this aspect, and everyone is hoping it turns out as good or better as the first one. However, like The Sims have shown you can also create enjoyable environments with no story at all besides the one you create in your head. Even the Sim-speak is an abstraction that allows you to fill in your own words.

Interestingly for those of us in the business of making games, the financial details of Larry Wachowski's involvement in The Matrix are detailed on The Smoking Gun archives because of his divorce battle with his ex-wife. Fair? I don't know, but educational to the rest of us. Life is a game too, the ultimate license property... :-)

Jouni

Balance of Power apparently sold some 250,000 copies. Back in those days that wasn't too shabby, even if it wasn't record numbers.

This is his company site. Several of the games he has written are available for download for free, and he has essays and information about the ones that aren't there.

The site also has lots of information about his latest work, which seems very interesting but so far hasn't really taken off. Not because of lack of promise, but because it's simply breaking too new ground.

As for why we should believe he knows what he's talking about, he manages to make a decent living out of writing games, and some of his strategy games are really good and were groundbreaking when they came out. And you could always read the published excerpt and see if you agree with what he says.

It's nothing new. Check out his Erasmatron. Actually, don't check it out. Why? Because it sucks. And Liquid Narrative probably sucks too.

Tod Frye was assigned the task of converting the smash hit arcade game, Pac-Man, to the VCS. This was before programmers were paid royalties. It was an immensely important assignment. Towards the end of the project, the Atari Marketing people made the mistake of emphasizing just how many millions of dollars were riding on his timely completion of the game. Realizing his once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Tod put a gun to the head of his managers: pay me royalties of ten cents per cartridge for this, or I walk. You'll have to start all over with a new programmer, and the game will be delayed by months, costing you millions in wasted marketing expenses. Atari was caught in a terrible position. They had presumed that, having agreed to take the project, Tod would finish it in good faith. Now they were caught in a trap. They had no recourse -- they had to cave in to Tod's demands. His ploy gained him several million dollars.

Nothing any of us could type would be more eloquently written than the essays of Chris Crawford, designer of some fine games in the past such as Eastern Front. Please check out the link below.

The Art of Computer Game Design WSU Vancouver

Mr. Crawford currently works for his company Erasmatazz, which has much neat stuff, and some good essays on Erasmus.

The documentation he provides is interesting. However, one thing really irritated me as I browsed the site, and that was the following paragraph from his overview under "Why is the Erasmatron better?":

Better than what? There simply isn't anything out there that lets you create interactive storytelling. (And if there were, they'd have to work around my comprehensive patent.)

My emphasis.

I have no problem with defensive patents, but he's basically saying that he wants to make sure no one else can use similar technology to write even better games (which would benefit players/human kind).

At the risk of drawing hasty conclusions on how he will use his patent(s); I just cannot respect that.

(I actually considered buying his book, but that will not happen now).

Erasmotron happy slashdotting!

Chris Crawford published a book in 1982 called The Art of Computer Game Design (html, pdf). This is, in my opinion, the definitive statement of the computer game medium as an art form. Although the book is somewhat dated and Chris' career seems to be in a Strange Place (Erasmatazz?), it is still a very worthwhile read. A classic, IMHO.

Chris Crawford published a book in 1982 called The Art of Computer Game Design (html, pdf). This is, in my opinion, the definitive statement of the computer game medium as an art form. Although the book is somewhat dated and Chris' career seems to be in a Strange Place (Erasmatazz?), it is still a very worthwhile read. A classic, IMHO.

You might not be able to buy BOP (except a used copy), but you might be able to download a Mac version from Chris Crawford's company.

Some of the traps included writing in an off-by-one error in the program so it'd run out of memory and crash at some undefined point in the future, etc.

The problem with some of the ridiculously complex ideas (race conditions in self modifying code) are that they only work on one processor, and only one model of that. Things that worked in the 486 days won't fly now...

I remember a friend writing self modifying code that wrote *just* in front of the instruction fetch. Sometimes when he reached the end of the loop he'd patch the code *after* the instruction fetch so that next time the loop wouldn't even be tested for. This was automatic because his extra few cycles testing for this let that location be passed by the instruction fetch.

The code was very clever and incredibly fast. With good caching algorithms it was even faster because what he wrote to was guaranteed to be loaded into L2 from the instruction fetch, so it just required another read to copy it into the data L1 cache as well as the instruction L1 cache.

But, the coming of Pentiums broke the code. We looked at it and determined that it could be made to work but it'd have problems in the future, every new processor was changing the prefetch depth and the caching schemes...

Had that been used in a game, it wouldn't work anymore. In our litigious society, that's a class action lawsuit waiting to happen.

Even id Software's fairly basic CD Keys are open to a lot of problems. They're open to DNS problems... You specify the server by IP and connect but you can't get an IP from the master server's name and can't connect, etc..

If a bug existed in your protection schemes, think how hard it'd be to find if it could take a week before it triggered. That game'd be in Q&A forever.

And it's still no guarantee of stopping a hacker... in fact, the only thing it guarantees is to attract *more* hackers. And in today's script kiddy world, if one person cracks it, everyone can use it.

So, you're right in one sense. Writing for a specific CPU on a specific platform, you can write insanely complex code that is nearly impossible to break, especially when only developers know what the machine is doing and when hackers have to reverse engineer the hardware and the software at the same time. On the other hand, on a PC, or rather, on a million different PCs, you'll never manage any of the impossible tricks.

checkout for example PayPal, and Just Web It.

PayPal is a way to send money over the internet, it is a nice little operation, and convenient.

Just Web It is a free ecommerce/estore site, just right for the entry band selling some albums and an occasional t-shirt, etc.

These may not be the best options, but they help someone who doesn't have coding expertise to set up a web page.

Now we get to the morons who do not see what their little misstep does on the broader scale. I am reminded of the apocryphal story of Atari Computer. Supposedly, they ultimately went under in part because the games for the Atari computer were so popular that everyone hacked them, and the developers ultimately went broke, throwing in the towel. (Anyone remember copy protection?)

of course the hackers were pissed that the company went broke, and didn't connect what they did to the fate of the company.

ultimately, the company got sold and resold many times (history here, and here), and now is a subsidiary of Hasbro.

Officially, there were other market forces at work. But I can not help wondering if these wise fools contributed to the downfall.