The Hands of Timediygamer
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Peter Molyneux's Top 10 GDC Proclamationsgamasutra.com.
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Nintendo Reveals Wii Pay-For-Online Play, WiiWare Compressiongamasutra.com.
Jam Together — Thinking Inside the Boxdiygamer.
The Changing Face of Casual Gamesgamasutra.com.
Crime of a Mâché Nation: The Condescension of Viva Piñatagamecareerguide.com.
Hearts of Iron IIIparadox.
Baer, Alcorn Talk 'Brown Box' Beginnings, Industry Birthgamasutra.com.
Dead Mountaineer's Hotellighthouse interactive.
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by Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh
Check out the comments section on the original article. Seriously.
On Thursday Aonuma candidly, and with self-effacing humor, spoke of his period of aimlessness and mistakes that began with the release of The Legend Of Zelda: Wind Waker, the way in which they reflected the Japanese industry as a whole, and how they led to Nintendo’s shift of focus over the last few years.
by Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh
Though on the one hand it is comforting to be able to save and load at will, continually loading – thereby undoing events, and making consequences irrelevant – tends to diminish a player’s belief in the game world, making it all the harder for the game to affect the player in a meaningful capacity.
The situation is kind of damned if you do, damned if you don’t, in that allowing free saving tends to lead to abuse yet disallowing it leads to player complaints.
EALA game designer Randy Smith gave a brief speech on the psychological factors that tend to result in save abuse, and how potentially to avoid or undermine those triggers, such that players are tempted to save and load far less often, thereby allowed to take their in-game experiences at face value.
by Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh
Video games are all about exploration – about living in someone else’s world for a while, learning the rules, learning the territory, and maybe taking something home with you. Ubisoft’s Clint Hocking has his ideas about what that means for the medium and anyone who might set out to explore it.
Although the virtual space of a game world is perhaps most obvious, the most fundamental aspect of a game is its underlying systems – the physical laws and properties that govern that space. Exploring those systems is in a sense the scientific method in fast forward, a series of experiments in cause and effect that forms the substance of game play.
The more immediate and tangible the results to the player’s experiments, the more readily the player feels progress, so the more rewarding the system feels. “It’s supposed to be beautiful,” Hocking said. “If you get this part wrong, the rest doesn’t even matter.”
by Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh
Two teams, split up amongst Eric Zimmerman of Gamelab, Warren Spector, Mark Leblanc of Mind Control, video game theorist Jesper Juul, Ubisoft’s Clint Hocking, Jonathan Blow, and USC Professor Tracey Fullerton, moved their virtual quarters around the board to make thematic comparisons between often highly-contrasting games.
Has World of Warcraft created a more intense subculture than Asteroids? Is Guitar Hero more culturally sophisticated than Parappa the Rapper? Is Wipeout more realistic than Nethack? Is Oregon Trail more emotionally rich than Virtua Fighter? (See below for answers.)
by Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh
Whereas last year’s Experimental Gameplay Sessions were crammed into a standing-room-only meeting room, resulting in a nightmare for the fire marshal yet a powerful experience for the audience, this year’s sessions were moved to a huge, dark presentation hall.
Although the audience turnout was larger than ever, and host Jon Blow had more participants to introduce, the meeting somehow felt less intimate and more low-key than last year’s.
As before, the event sprawled over two and a half hours with a short break in the middle. Where last year’s sessions had a general theme of interpreting complex emotions and ideas through familiar game models – evidenced in games like flOw, Cloud, Braid, and Everyday Shooter – this year’s entries tended toward novel uses of sound and perspective. Perhaps half of the event was devoted to various game festivals, while several of the remaining presentations were of high-profile commercial games.
