While goofing around asking UK indie game developers for their top 5 games of all time at World of Love, I was very pleased to hear that the amazing ZX spectrum strategy game Chaos featured in multiple lists.
I love Chaos so much that I developed Law, a Chaos remake at university as a way to learn Java. It turns out that a bunch of other people love Chaos too: a year or so ago one of the administrators of the Chaos Remakes Wiki got in touch with me to say that he’d been able to pull a copy of my original web site from an archive and wondered if I still had a copy of the game itself. The reminiscing at World of Love was enough for me to finally wade through decade old backups looking for a copy of Law and I’m happy to say that I found a copy and that it still runs on modern Java runtimes.
If you remember the original Chaos, head over to the Chaos Remakes Wiki and indulge in some retro gaming nostalgia. If you’d like to tinker with it (please fix the yellow text on grey dialogs and add AI wizards!) the code is available under the GPL license from BitBucket.
Thanks to a tip off from David Hayward, I managed to snag a last minute ticket for the World Of Love independent games conference organized by Pixel Lab, sponsored by Preloaded and hosted by Channel 4. I’m glad I did.
The day kicked off with Chris Delay from introversion demonstrating Subversion, a typically minimal game inspired by Mission Impossible (the TV show, not the movies). It ticked a huge number of boxes for me as a game, but the most interesting thing about the demo is that the game is nowhere near finished and it’s not often you get to see a game this early in production. I suggested to Chris that the game should feature Sporty Spy, Posh Spy, Ginger Spy and Scary Spy. Look out for those in the final version.
Possibly the most inspiring session of the day was Terry Cavanagh’s talk on game jams. Setting the scene with a description of his stalled over ambitious uber project, Terry the rattled off an amazing list of games he made at game jams like Sinewave Ninja which ultimately morphed in to the amazing v six times. I’ve had a ton of fun building mashups at Hack Days so I can imagine adding games to the mix would be amazing. I predict game jams will be coming to Brighton in the very near future…
Definitely the most amazing talk of the day was by Eskil Steenberg who was delighted to be talking at the first conference dedicated to his game, Love. After a brief tour around a beautiful procedurally generated and fully dynamic world, Eskil showed off the amazing tools that have allowed him to build an on line game on his own. A suite of networked art tools allowed him to model then procedurally UV map and texture a 3D model and then demonstrate how altering the model would result in updated UV maps and procedural textures in real time. It was like being given a tour of the future and when Eskil ran out of time I fully expected him to pull out a time machine to allow him to keep going.
The rest of the day included lots of really useful advice for indie game development including talks on business, finance, law and marketing which ended with the Frozen Synapse developers bursting in to blast the attendees with water pistols to demonstrate Kieron Gillen’s last marketing rule — you’re creative, so be creative with marketing.
Overall I prefer the many tracks and everyone gets involved format of GameCamp and at times the talks devolved in to extended biographies, but mostly it was a fun, thought provoking and inspiring day. I spent the evening asking the attendees for their top 5 games (it felt like it was that kind of event) and was very pleased to hear Chaos featured in multiple lists (it’s one of my favourites too, I developed a remake at university. On the strength of the UK indie scene demonstrated at World of Love I’m sure we’ll be seeing more indie games in top 5 lists in the near future.
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…
As usual I headed down to the Metropole on the sea front last week to attend the annual Develop conference in Brighton. Unusually, this time I was attending the Evolve day which shifts the focus from console development to online, mobile and social games, which I had helped create as part of the steering commitee. I was very impressed.
The first talk I attended was not strictly part of the evolve day: I switched over to the Games:Edu track to listen to Alice Taylor talk about her work building games for Channel 4. In a previous era, Channel 4 spent £6 million a year on public service programming for young people which ended up being shown in the mornings when the only young people at home were off sick. In order to reach a wider audience all of that money was switched to online programming and, because 14-19 year olds love them, games. Since then, Alice and Matt Locke have toured the country commisioning small developers to develop games like Sneeze, Routes, 1066 and future games battling STIs in privates and making science fun for girls with Ada Lovelace. It all sounds like loads of fun and a great fit for Second Life (which already has a fair amount of sex and science adventures of its own), but the key here is availability. Alice is going where the kids are. Millions of people play the Channel 4 games using technologies like Flash which are ubiquitous: an order of magnitude more people than use Second Life regularly or used to watch the telly from their sick beds.
Next up was “Browser Based Games Past Present Future” which sounded perfect: which of the competing technologies is going to win the battle for the 3D browser canvas, which should we use to make Second Life more accessible to some of Alice’s teens? Unfortunately the retrospective and predictive parts of the talk were extremely limited and the talk was mostly a plug for Pirate Galaxy: an online Java based Eve. Luckily it looks incredibly well done. In particular the in world economy which allows either time or money to be converted in to energy and from their in to experience and eventually space ships looks very slick: to begin with energy is plentiful and little is needed. Slowly the screw is turned making the urge to invest in energy ever more inticing. There are also limits on the amount of short cutting that can be done by investing money, with game play still required to gain experience which is needed to buy the best ships. It’s all a long step forward from the experiments with economies and mudflation we grappled with at AGC, SIGGRAPH and on Terra Nova.
The highlight of the day for me was the talk by Kristian Segerstrale, CEO and co-founder of Playfish who make some of the most successful games on Facebook, including Pet Society: a game which allows you to collect rainbow poos and is as popular on Facebook as Rhianna and the Simpsons. Kristian talked about how social games are different: no longer focused on creating paths for solitary players to experience fear, horror, wonder and suspense, social games are toolkits for cooperation, competition and expression for friends. Social games have been responsible for most of the growth in the games industry over the last year and while the Wii and Rock Band have let friends gather and play together, games on social networks let friends play together online. Where traditional games spend years and millions in development and then launch with marketing splurges and shelf space negitiated with retailers, social games might intially be developed for 10s of thousands, sit on an infinite shelf and are marketed virally through recommendations from friends. Where traditional games rely on the intuition of a games designer who hopes to get it right, social games rely on feedback. After launch social games are deluged with information. Marketing is driven by numbers, buy buttons are A/B tested with users, designers analyse play, further investment and development desisions are based on usage, the skill is not in intuitively knowing what players will like, but by mining and filtering a slew of data to find out. Kristian’s talk felt a lot like Raph Koster’s dinosaurs talk from a few years back: it even used a similar meteor strike slide, however, this time around the small mammals weren’t micro user generated virtual worlds but pets doing rainbow poos and restaurant sims where you can hire your mum as chef.
It will be interesting to see how the small furry mammals evolve over the coming years.
Christian Renaud gave the opening keynote on the first day and started with the observation that traveling to conferences sucks, predicting that virtual worlds conferencing will see a huge expansion in the near future due to concerns over climate change, the economic downturn, fuel prices and the inconvenience of real travel when virtual worlds can provide the same serendipitous meeting and networking. The Serious Virtual Worlds conference itself is a great example of mixed reality conferencing, with every session streamed in to Second Life, questions taken from Second Life after every session and a number of sessions given from a variety of virtual worlds. It’s also great to hear people besides epredator, the Dopplr crew and myself talking about serendipity in social software. It’s a huge, but not obvious benefit.
A large part of the conference was given over to demonstrating serious uses of virtual worlds. Dave Taylor gave a great demonstration of Second Health, but the most amazing technical demo was by Henrik Ekeus from Edinburgh University who showed his mixed reality dancing with avatars work. It was good to see this come out of the VUE project which I’d first heard about at Eduserv a couple of years ago. At the time they didn’t seem very clear on what they were going to do in SL, it’s good to see that they’ve allowed Henrik’s experimentation to take place.
The theme for this years conference was interoperability and it became much more apparent on day 2. Analyst Rob Edmonds gave a great enumeration of the possibilities for interoperability ranging from the grand unified interoperable virtual worlds, through islands of interoperability to incompatible virtual worlds connected to a common bus like the web which he judged as more important, wondering whether talk of the grand unified vision was supply lead rather than demand driven. John Burwell from Forterra wrote off the grand unified vision of virtual worlds and open source being important in virtual worlds, focussing on the terrain, collada 3d model and SCORM interoperability that Olive provides. Rohan Freeman provided the counterpoint to John’s views, highlighting the successes of the OpenSim open source platform and it’s use to business. Bernard Horan also presented Wonderland, another open source virtual world platform built on Java.
It was great to see a number of promising virtual world platforms on display at Serious Virtual Worlds, but a quick walk around the exhibition showed that Second Life is that platform that people are building successful serious virtual world applications on right now. The exhibition also highlighted the most valuable aspect of the conference: the meetings between virtual world solution providers and those interested in building and commissioning the next wave of serious virtual worlds that we’ll be seeing in the years to come.
