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Got Game?
Hylton Jolliffe writes "Hey, thought you might like a new blog we've just launched on gaming by RIT professor Andrew Phelps. He's going to be writing about a whole host of things: the gaming industry, the rapidly expanding user base, the role of gaming in the entertainment/media spectrum, the technology and standards that undergird today's games, the emerging social phenomena surrounding them, the future of wireless gaming, the study of gaming in academia, blah, blah, blah. Neat stuff and Andy's already in full stride - see this as a possible starting point."
...the emerging social phenomena surrounding them, the future of wireless gaming, the study of gaming in academia, blah, blah, blah
Welcome to slashdot.
Soko
(back to alt.sysadmin.recovery. And my Segrams V.O. bottle.)
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
...can be found here.
gamegirladvance has been kicking around for some time now, and has provided a great combination of gaming news, personal stories, and theoretical discusisons.
Oh... right, you are talking about E.A. ... go on please ...
------- The last Sig. got fired.
I am continually encouraged to see how gaming is getting serious treatment in areas of academia and business.
While there are downsides to this attention, for the most part it is legitimizing the industry and will hopefully result in gaming have equal or greater importance than television and movies (and god, what a relief it would be to minimize the power and influence of those morons).
-Michael
Threshold RPG
Take everything from, like, 5 years ago and replace all instances of 'web' or 'internet' with 'blog'
hence:
We plan to leverage the power of the internet to transform our b2b infrastructure into a whole new paradigm...
transforms into:
We plan to blog the blog of the blog to blog our blog-2-blog blog into a whole new blog.
Which makes about as much sense.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
There is a growing number of other sites that have the same goals in mind. here are a few of the one's I visit pretty regularly:
Probably my favorite is Gonzalo Frasca's Ludology.org.
Also occasionally of interest is Lars Konzack's Ludologica
Greg Costikyan's Games * Design * Art * Culture has gotten a fairly good amount of press.
and to toot my own horn, there is my blog Popular Culture Gaming.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
It's so refreshing to have someone talk about games in relation to reality
I'm sorry, this is related to academia, reality has nothing to do with it!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
A real world example to look at is in professional sports. There are many examples of teams that "look good on paper" with many star players who individually have the potential to do well, but often these groups of talented people end up losing games because they never gel as a team.
In the gaming industry, at least viewed from the outside via the media and hearing from game designers themselves via interviews, teams are either built at the corporate level or are formed in the gathering particular people with particular skill sets by a lead designer (the chief inventor, so to speak) and designed to service his or her ideas. While I'm sure that individual ideas on enhancing the game are accepted and encouraged, the fundamentals of the game are already laid out and the team mainly executes those fundamentals while tweaking them. That's overly simplistic, but based on what I've read it seems true in the main.
I know I haven't hit my subject line yet, but it's coming.
In the past, games could be conceived, designed, built and even distributed to an extent by individuals. Whatever some might think of Richard Garriott these days, Ultima 1&2 were good, inventive games produced by one person. SimCity came from one Will Wright. Sid Meier, David Crane, and the list goes on.
So why were individuals able to develop compelling games in the past. Mostly, it comes down to their relative simplicity. Making a bunch of 30x30 sprites (and that would have been LARGE back "in the day") doesn't require the intervention of an artist. Making a world displayed at a maximum of 320x240 doesn't take a graphic designer. Filling a 170k disc (again, a rather large game in the early 80s) with code could be done with relative ease by one person.
So the question to my mind is how do we put more power into the hands of the really inventive people again who might not know how to write every kind of code and provide advanced 3D art/animation?
One way is to build better teams and keep them together. Microprose was a company I was a great fan of and even by the time they had huge teams producing games, the same names would pop up with every game as lead designer, lead programmer, lead QA, etc. - this went on for years and they produced some amazing games. It seems these days that talented people who produce a great game are often off to another company before their product even hits store shelves - more money, more creative control, etc. drive them to other opportunities. You can't blame them for wanting to improve their situation, but I think you can blame their employers for not recognizing the value of a good team and giving them incentive to stay together.
The other way to give more control to fewer people (the KEY people) is with better tools. There are so many disciplines that have to be combined to make a modern game that it's impossible for any one team member to have a grasp on much beyond their own small piece of the puzzle. John Carmack has gone a long way in this area by providing engines which simplify constructing a first-person shooter but I wonder if this can be extended to other genres, both the ones in existence and the ones so far unimagined? Quake/Half-Life in particular have proven that given the tools, small groups of people can produce amazing results - TFC, CS, DoD, etc., etc. (deserving at least two "et cetera"s).
Again, I'm not an expert in game development as the professor here in this case. But I think the focus needs to be less on
Making a bunch of 30x30 sprites (and that would have been LARGE back "in the day") doesn't require the intervention of an artist.
Whoah! I have to disagree with you there. Artists entered the industry in the 8 bit days and were very much needed. "Programmer graphics" is a well-used insult. We may be able to draw 8*8 monochrome characters (e.g. text) but when you get up to 16*16 by 4 colours, you really need an artist, or an artist/programmer, not a straight "i can't draw for toffee" programmer like myself.
Even for icons in tools, artists make an improvement in looks (a specialist graphic designer might be even more useful).