A great video of the Brighton Mini Maker Faire last year by Andrew Sleigh showing the making of You’re The Boss 2. Applications for this year’s Maker Faire are now open and I can’t wait to see what everyone comes up with this year!
A couple of years ago, Aleks Krotoski and a group of friends spanning the web, games and technology fields decided to bring the FOOCamp and BarCamp model of unconferences to the world of games and invited me along. I had a great time at the original GameCamp and missed it last year, so when I heard about the return of GameCamp a couple of months ago I jumped on a ticket and eagerly got on the train early on Saturday morning to participate in another inspiring mind expanding day. I wasn’t disappointed.
The cultural differences between the worlds of games and the web we touched on in a couple of sessions. “The PC Is Dead, Long Live The PC” quickly turned in to a discussion of open platforms like the PC versus closed, console like channels. While the long term view was that in 50 years open will prevail, the present sees controlled channels like XBLA, the various Apple stores and Steam in the ascendant. Some people will wait until titles are available on a particular channel, suggesting that they offer some advantages in terms of convenience, support or peace of mind. While this may be OK where there is competition between channels, games cannot be as easily distributed via multiple channels, with platforms like Steam requiring relatively invasive changes to be made to allow things like overlay menus to be displayed over game UIs. Where choices between channels is not possible the whims of platform controllers can make development extremely risky when policy changes or simply under staffing can delay or scupper a release.
Steven Goodwin asked why open source can build Linux, but not games. While the first answer is that Linux is a platform that can be shared by anyone whereas games are more individual expressions of creativity, that still begs the question why aren’t there more open source game platforms? Games seem to slowly be moving towards more shared and open infrastructure, but still lack the equivalent of the LAMP stack, HTML, CSS and JavaScript provide a shared web platform that allows web developers to share tips and tricks at BarCamps.
Luckily, the inability for game developers to give talks on the equivalent of squid configuration leaves room for lots of interesting talks on higher level game design concepts. 2 of the most interesting were hosted by Margaret Robertson, the first was on Curiosity — an urge which is hard to explain in classical or behavioral economics, and which is more powerful when the unknown is close and definite, a closed box on a table that must be opened, than when the unknown is distant and amorphous. The session turned in to an interesting comparison between risk, where outcomes are known and curiosity when the outcome is unknown, how both can be manipulated to make games more compelling and whether that manipulation could be a force for good as well as evil. The second of Margaret’s talks was about a forthcoming audio only binaural iPhone game and the challenges of navigating a world without light, which sounds fascinating, if hard.
Tom Armitage hosted a session which asked “What Do Cows Call Thermodynamics?”. The answer is, probably nothing, but it still affects them. So it is with games, which are ultimately defined by their rules and mechanics which can be used very creatively. The rule that Yorda is afraid if you don’t hold her hand dramatically shapes your relationship with her, the rule that you aim better while doing a stunt is what turns action quake in to a John Woo simulator.
Another arc that ran through GameCamp 2 was a discussion about creativity. Pictionary and Scrabble were used as examples of games that foster creativity while players of World of Warcraft show amazing creativity despite the game in a session that had many echos of the Playfish talk at Develop last year. At the other end of the spectrum, a session on procedurally generated content asked could algorithms create good content and if they could, how would they know?
My “Social Music Composition Games?” session at the end of the day continued this arc. I first played Rock Band at the first GameCamp and since have played it so much that I ended up starting 100 robots with Max. Since then I’ve been playing with tools like Ableton that have very game like interfaces and games like Lumines that have very sequencer like interfaces. Could you use interfaces like these to build games that do for music composition what Rock Band does for music performance? If so, how would you judge the compositions? Something that combined the interface of Lumines or the Tenori-On and Digg like filtering and tagging might be very interesting here…
Last week I took some time off to spend with Luke and Natty during half term and we spent Wednesday having a lovely time finishing off a game we started a couple of months ago: Bouncaline.
Luke has been interested in making games for a while: he made a level for the You’re The Boss game at the Radiator festival in Nottingham in 2006 — when he was 3!
More recently Luke started designing a game that I was helping him put together in Game Maker. He drew lots of backgrounds and characters that we scanned in and there were vague ideas about treasure hunting game play, but it felt a bit like Luke was biting off more than he could chew.
So, when Luke and Natty inherited a trampoline over the summer I suggested that we build a bouncing game and we started building it with Scratch, an educational programming environment that I’d been meaning to experiment with since seeing that it had been ported to Second Life.
Scratch has a very simple model based on plugging together blocks that is similar to the Lego Mindstorms environment. Luke quickly got the hang of it and built a significant portion of the logic with just a few leading questions. Like Mindstorms and LSL it uses multiple flows of control within the same scripted object for complex behaviour, which can take some getting used to when making an object that simultaneously waits to be touched and for a timer, for example.
In some respects I wish Scratch was a little purer — although message passing concurrency is possible, it’s very easy to share state between objects — something we shouldn’t be encouraging the programmers of tomorrow to do. It’s also harder to do multiple levels or screens than with Game Maker, but given Luke’s propensity to lose himself in Zelda style epics, the tight focus might help learn the basics of logic.
Overall it’s a delightfully easy and rewarding environment to use. After spending a couple of hours finishing the logic, we went in to the garden to take pictures of the trampoline and Luke and Natty striking poses for the animations and quickly got them imported in to Scratch along with some very cute drawings and sound effects by Luke.
Scratch also makes it very easy to share your work on the web, allowing Luke to proudly show off his handy work to his Grandparents over the weekend and for me to proudly share the game with you here. I hope you enjoy Bouncaline!
Use the left and right arrow keys to move and try to collect the food.Learn more about this project
At the recommendation of John and [Alice] (http://www.wonderlandblog.com/ “Wonderland”) I took a break from [Develop Online] (http://www.develop-conference.com/developconference/develop_online.shtml?x “Develop Online”) to listen to Jon Blow‘s talk at Games:Edu this week and was totally blown away.
Jon talked about whether games are poised to enter a golden age similar to films in the ‘30s, when they transitioned from visual spectacle to an art form capable of touching people emotionally. Currently many games are broken by the conflicts between the game play rewards and the needs of the story. The canonical example is Metal Gear Solid, which pauses all interactivity to deliver exposition, but even more nuanced games suffer from the lack of control over the framing of the story. A narrative is likely to be much less powerful if the protagonist is jumping around while another character opens their heart. Equally the illusion of interactivity is completely broken by a character that refuses to acknowledge the player’s actions by simply reeling off scripted dialog.
I wonder whether games too often sacrifice interactivity in the pursuit of realism. When you can simulate a city full of cars, the desire to populate it with people is almost overwhelming, but without solving the hard AI problem the only way to add people that say anything nuanced is to script them. The world seems more real, but adding scripted people to the center of the world compromises the interactivity that should be fundamental to a game. When we read a book we accept a lack of agency as we are empathizing with a character and following their journey through the narrative. When we’re in a game the story should be ours and the world should respond to our actions. There will be limits to our freedom, but placing scripted characters in the world rubs those limits in our face. Many forms of art touch us without having to realistically represent people. No one would mistake the people in Guernica for real people, but the work touches us and the image could be interpreted as a game environment without solving the hard AI problem. Maybe games should spend more time trying to be Guernica and less time trying to be The Godfather.