GDC day one: games education summit
Posted on | March 10, 2010 | 5 Comments
GDC has now actually started, with the first two days dedicated to ‘summits’ and ‘tutorials’. I had a great deal of difficulty deciding what to attend to day as there was a lot of cool stuff on – the serious games summit, a tutorial on game writing and the games education summit (that is, teaching people how to make games as opposed to using games to teach people).
The booths and so forth are not set up yet – there is a hive of activity in the main hall and forklift trucks whizzing about everywhere.
In the end I felt duty bound to go to the games education summit and did so with very low expectation -I expected a bit of a talking shop in which people told me, in very long winded style, things I knew already. I was thinking I would drop in for ten minutes, judge the thing to be a waste of time and then rush off to find something worthwhile, feeling I had done my lectury duty by at least checking out the session that was supposed to teach me how to teach better. I guess my expectations were shaped were generally mediocre experiences of ‘teacher training’ in higher education, which from my experience has been cramped by its need to be a box ticking exercise.
So, I entered the room and surveyed the (not huge) audience to see if I knew anyone. A young lady -who I later found out was Nikki Graham - said I could sit next to her and that she did not have cooties, which immediately endeared her to me.
My low expectations were totally wrong. The speaker, Jessica Hammer, was addressing the issue of teaching creativity. She is also a PHD candidate on the same subject, and she really knew her stuff. As well as being a charismatic and engaging presenter, who involved the audience without patronising them, she evoked hard core theory and applied to practice. This is a tricky thing to do, as the theory can come out very thin or the practice very vague. A lot of what she said validated the way we do things on both games courses at Brunel, but there was also a host of other ideas and ways to make things better which I intend to use to tweak my own practice. There was a lot of talk about how to manage students working in groups which I found very useful, and some radical solutions from the audience (nearly all games design teachers of one form or another) to some of the problems of group work. The two most striking (which are actually used in various places I believe) are letting the students mark each other in group work and that mark forming part of the grade and allowing student groups to sack members of their teams, who then fail. However, there was also a lot of more moderate approaches and ideas, both from Jessica and the groups she organised us into to discuss these things. All in all, totally profitable day and while it will not totally revolutionise my teaching practice, it will certainly inform it.
Via copious grovelling, I got an invite to the Paradox party (or rather, chill out between conference and party time) which I am off to right now. I shall try not to be too Johnny Fan Boy (I am a real Paradox fan).
You can find Jessica here.
Uploading photos is currently totally failing on the hotel wireless. I will try again later.
San Franciso
Posted on | March 9, 2010 | 1 Comment
I am in San Franciso. No terrorist organisations have taken over Alcatraz and nothing – I repeat nothing at all- has happened to the Golden Gate bridge. At least I assume not: I have not actually seen the thing yet.
So far, though nothing much has happened, its all been great. Experiences so far have included the largest plate of nachos ever seen, shared with Steve Jackson(I want to go and tell my 14 year old self that I sat and ate nachos and discussed games with Steve Jackson in San Francisco. I would have some sort of geek out fit from the excitement).
Last night, when we got here, after registering for GDC and wandering we planned to retire -I stepped outside to stretch my legs, but ended up seeing this tempting tram and jumped on, ending up riding around town, getting lost and ending up getting a cab driver to bring me home. I did find a book shop where I could drink coffee and browse at 9PM though -heaven.
The streets are almost empty: really weird, it has all the trappings of London, Tokyo or any other big city, but you do not need to force your way through a mass of people. Bliss. Wonderfully bohom, too: Brightonesque is many ways.
Off for ham and eggs breakfast and thence to GDC. There are numerous 1 day summits and tutorials on today, and I want to go to all of them, but can only pick one. Still have not decided which.
I shall post something a little more substantial later.
Games I have worked on.
Posted on | March 7, 2010 | 2 Comments
I keep getting asked, by all sorts of people (students and industry) what games I may have worked on in the past. I have done a huge amount of amateur stuff (in the sense that it was not paid for by anyone), and if I listed it all we would still be here next year.
So, there follows a breakdown of all the commercial games I have worked on. I define commercial here as something which somebody paid me for in some way at some point.
I am, to be honest, a little hazy(well, a lot hazy, I am very bad with dates and names) on some of the timing issues as I have never been keen on keeping a diary. Corrections from anyone that remembers would be appreciated.
Marjus World(1980?) – this was a Play By Mail game I designed(if what we did could be given such a grand title) with Mark Wright (Pug to those who know him), when I was at school. It was all hand moderated – people sent in turns in a certain format, hand written, and they got hand written replies. This was in the heady, early days of White Dwarf magazine and we got about 200 replies to our one paragraph advert. I still have a copy of the magazine somewhere - I will dig it out and scan it in at some point.
This being the days before personal printers, it was run using a stencil machine – a horrible thing which involved writing or typing with a stylus on special paper, then spreading ink over it and working it through this wooden framed machine. The difficulty of doing this caused this rather weak fantasy game to collapse in about 3-4 months(perhaps six turns), and Mark had given up long before then. Still, we were young teenagers, so I guess we did not do so bad.
Tower of Babel(1982?) is the only single player computer game I have ever produced commercially -programmed in BASIC on the ZX Spectrum. I sold about 100 copies at conventions at a fiver a pop, which was rather a lot of money for me at the time (I was 15). Tower of Babel was a game in which you sought to build a tower to heaven and kill God. I had issues. There were some twists in it, though, which I am not going to give away as I keep planning to remake it for old time’s sake. The big problem here was having to make every copy by tape to tape copying, then verifying it, on a dodgy old cassette player. Eventually, my master got corrupted and I did not have a working copy -if anyone out there has one(small chance) I would really love it!
Labyrinthe(1983-1989?) – I might well have the dates wrong on this one. I got lured into live role-playing and gave up on making computer games. My error, as far as career goes, but not in regard to sheer pleasure. I wrote and ran many hundreds of larp events during this time and was paid very well before finally leaving to go to university. During this time(near the end), I wrote the rules supplement for the system, which I never got any official credit for(moan). Some of the stuff I wrote and rules I concocted is still in print to this day, though it has been massively (and mostly well) revised.
Beyond the Stellar Empire (1992-1994) – working for KJC games in Cleveleys (near Blackpool) pretty much all I did was moderate/update Beyond the Stellar Empire, which is still running to this day and now called Pheonix. Astoundingly, the weekly updates and waffle I wrote for players are online at http://www.phoenixbse.com/index.php?a=home&sa=lib&tid=15990 . Given that these sort of games, where turns go out to players and are not permanently recorded, it is nice to see some sort of record of my actually having been there – I announce I have been running the game for a couple of weeks there, and talk about games conventions I might be at, which is wonderful nostalgia material. These write ups were never online when I wrote them(which was done without the aid of a spell checker, straight into a text field) -they appeared at the end of the turns, which were printed and posted(originally on a dot matrix printer which made my teeth ache all day). I coined the title ‘subspace static’ for them, which is still I think is one of my better names for something, and added a vast amount of new content to what was a rather pedestrian game setting, most of which seems still to be in use to this day. Now that’s what I call a persistent world! Eve online can kiss my ass, and the asses of the people who have kept it running long after I was gone.
Arkus Brode(1994) – really unsure about the dates on this one. Short lived larp(well, about thirty one day games, which is a load for most larp games) run at an abandoned lace factory in London(someone else’s site). I also wrote the rules(bad ones it must be said) for the guys who owned the site. I stopped it when I ran out of time: the play by mail was taking up all my waking hours and making much more money. The world setting went on to be used as the basis for the Absolute Fantasy game.
From out of Aeons Gone(1994) – was a play by mail game run using an amiga and a laser printer which costs me a fortune in ink. It was moderated using word for the most part. I liked the idea of it, and still do: wizards trapped in towers during a war with the destructive powers of entropy awake into a world they know nothing of. The game itself ran a couple of years, Alan Crump taking over after a while, and was moderately successful. I made numerous mistakes with this: I had detailed the setting pretty well, but had an absence of plot, I controlled and limited player action too much. I also did not let players be powerful, when the setting called for them to be.
Absolute Power(1995?) was a huge hit, the first in the Absolute series. Well, a huge hit in PBM terms, which never had that large an audience when compared with multiplayer games nowadays. It paid for my house, though. It was a power/politics/resource game. I made a lot of mistakes in its implementation and running, but it was still really popular. In setting it was reminiscent of Dune, with player running noble houses in a weird science fantasy universe – though it soon took on a life of its own and diverged radically from any original source material. In fact, to be honest, the link to Dune was mostly cosmetic, and only there to lure people in: it was then I realised that people need to be able to indentify something they know before they are likely to be willing to try a new game. John Davies, of Jade Enterprises, took this over once I was done, and it eventually folded after about four years. There was a brief, abortive, attempt to bring it back to life by Alan Crump. Presently, there is a developedr working on recreating it for the web generation, though when and whether that will actually happen remains a mystery: neither of us is giving it our full attention.
Absolute Power (AP to its friends) was run using a combination of word and excel, which ended up incredibly complex.
Under Different Suns (1996?) – was a really bad game in which players made up a starship crew. I did masses of things wrong in this design, which at some point I might write about.
Absolute Fantasy (1997) -used the Absolute system in a fantasy setting. It lured in loads of players and was very effectively run for me by Alan Crump for many years. There are some things about this of which I am very proud: I managed to take a stock fantasy setting and warp it to create a holistic, engaging world that was, in fact, very much unlike most fantasy gaming. Alan then brought all this to life.
Absolute Conspiracy (1999?) was a short lived Absolute Game in which the players were in control of their own secret society in a futuristic, post apocalypse world. The setting was great, the mechanics sucked somewhat. It was short lived because I had a complete nervous breakdown after working 6 and a half days a week for three years. Oddly, over the years I have had four separate offers to buy this game, all of which I have had to turn down as there is not really anything extant to buy: I would have to recreate it from memory. The moral of this story is always to keep your work, even if it is defunct: one day it may be of value to someone.
Labyrinthe again (1999-2005ish) – I started running events for Labyrinthe again about now, notably a couple of week long events, as well as a smattering of others. The County of Ash weeklong event stands out – based on a one act play by Yeats, the Countess Cathleen(albeit loosely) it was talked about for years afterwards and I have many fond memories of it. As is always the case with larp, it worked so well because I had such wonderful people playing parts for me and a marvellously engaged group of players. One of the people who played parts for me was Bertie Carvel, now a professional actor, but most everyone there was just super.
It is a stretch including this period as ‘commercial’, it really being a labour of love, but I guess I got paid.
Dungeonworld(2000-2002?) – I worked around now for Madhouse games, mostly creating content for Dungeonworld, though on a few other projects also, including Riddle of the Sands, which I completely cocked up. Madhouse can be found at http://www.madcentral.com/ and that site serves as an explanation of what PBM(which now tends to be called Turn Based Gaming, or TBG) is all about.
Absolute Heroes(2000ish) -very hazy on the date for this one. I did some primary development on it, and it used the Absolute system, but it was really the brought to wonderful life by John Davies of Jade Enterprises, who ran it for many years with no input from me (in fact, I played it). Players controlled a superhero(or villain) team, and the game used pretty much every trope of the genre there is. It folded only recently – 2009 I think.
Aspects of Might(2002-– this used the Madhouse nexus engine to create a post apocalypse fantasy world (it had undergone a thing called The Penance) in which everyone was associated with an Aspect -which were based on the Tarot(and provided me with lots of cheap and lovely art). This was very successful, and being ‘properly’ computer moderated it was quick to process turns. My biggest mistake here was in failing to update the world as much as I should have, but it still kept many players entranced and there was some pretty sophisticated plotting going on and well drawn characters. I kept adding new, funky, stuff rather than honing what was there, which was a mistake(I should have worked harder and done both). I folded this game when I got a full time job offer from a mainstream computer games company -a company that then went bust. This then led me into doing my MA, as well as being somewhat annoyed.
Absolute Terror(2003)- Buffy meets the Da Vinci code, where players are a lodge in a huge, ancient, mystical conspiracy. This was less a power game and more a role playing game than my previous Absolute games and, because of that, took a lot of time to process and was really a labour of love. It is on hiatus while I get some computer moderated structure together before resurrecting it. The game world is very strong indeed, and most deep. Most of all, I like it. It is a challenging game though, which takes no prisoners, and this has put people off over the years it ran for – but it was a game that I always ran the way I wanted to run it.
Frail Realities(2004) - Live role play which Chris Cox and I run, which has run about monthly for years. Events are mostly Friday-Sunday, but we have done some longer ones. It is on a short hiatus and will resume later this year. www.frailrealities.com explains it in detail.
Phew, that’s it. Mostly -I know I have missed a few games here and there, and some freelance work that I was paid for but which was never published, but I reckon this list will do. Many lessons learnt along the way: some of these I will blog about, some will no doubt find their way into more academic work and, you never know, some of them might be applied to some actual game design when the PHD gets finished(or perhaps before).
Richard Bartle and ‘Better’ Games
Posted on | February 25, 2010 | 6 Comments
We had Richard Bartle come to visit at Brunel today. Richard is a Doctor/Professor/God Emperor with a willingness to be outspoken and a serious claim to fame: he essentially invented MMO’s with the creation of MUD in the late seventies. I believe he took development of it over from Roy Trubshaw, but I do not know the exact details. MUD is the direct precursor of modern MMOs – Everquest was called a Graphical MUD back in the day, before the term MMO (and its variants) caught on. All this happened really early -before even play by mail had really caught on as a big hobby (well, a big hobby for a fringe hobby, if you see what I mean).
Now, if Richard had not brought MUDs/MMOs to the world, someone else would have -but the truth is that someone else didn’t: he did, and that makes him a gaming legend, as well as an amusing speaker.
Enough of buttering Richard up both sides (well, perhaps it was only one side), and on to the point.
The free-wheeling discussion after the lecture ended up focussing on what makes a ‘better’ game and whether game studies helps contribute to making games better and if so, how. This conversation (which happens a lot) always seems to come down to a widely held belief that better and commercial success are the same thing. Personally, I blame Thatcher, but then I often do. This automatic assumption that popular=profitable=good really winds me up.
Don’t get me wrong: I am not an enemy of commercial success and making piles of money, and have had some of both at one time or another (mostly by luck, it must be said, and only comparatively small piles pile of money. Not enough to wallow in.).
There a whole lot of barriers to equating ‘commercial success’ with ‘better’. Firstly, I am sure everyone reading can think of something (not necessarily a game) that is both hugely successful and utter rubbish. People often like rubbish. Rubbish is not challenging. Does that make it ‘better’? Well, by some criteria, yes -but better here, like everywhere else, is in the eye of the beholder.
The second obvious barrier is that things sell well if they are marketed well and all sorts of products, even very ‘good’ ones, can vanish without trace if badly marketed. Anyone out there got a Betamax? In games this is as prevalent as everywhere else: big advertisers get better metacritic scores, the ‘top ten games’ at stores are there not because of sales or a quality judgement, but because a marketing deal has been done -the publishers have paid for them to be there.
Now, it might be that something does very well because it is well constructed – a lot easier to market something ‘good’ that something that is not. Quality does matter. Taking World of Warcraft as an example for a moment, we could say that it is ‘better’ than Everquest(or anything else in the same vein) because so many people play it. On one level, perhaps it is. But, to me, Lord of the Rings Online is better quality than WoW. Champions Online is better quality than WoW. I can say that because I personally like those two games more than WoW, and I play them a fair bit because of that. Subjectively, that means a fair bit but objectively it’s just my opinion.
So could we say that a game is ‘better’ based purely on how many people think it is better? In the betterness wars do I lose because I like LOTRO more than WoW?
How about A Tale in the Desert? It is fantastic in numerous ways: innovative, thoughtful, social. It uses the tools available to online game developers in ways unseen anywhere else. In my book, that makes it fantastic. It makes it ‘better’ because it has sought to change the paradigm. I sometimes flirt with playing it but, while I can admire it for what it is, there is too much about it that irritates me, with the result that I don’t want to commit my time to it. It’s great though. Is it better? Is it worse than WoW because it has a smaller player base? If ATITD has 2,000 players and WoW 11 million (rough figures) does that mean ATITD is only 1/5500th as ‘good’ as WoW? Of course it does not: better=good=popular=money=bollocks.
If we go all Frankfurt school and avant-garde briefly, I could say that ‘better’ things challenge us and, by definition, they are thus not very popular. I know that is a horrible sweeping statement, and a bad paraphrase of some extensive theory, and I hope hordes of Frankfurters do not descend on me and …I don’t know…do unpleasant things to me with sausages.
The upshot is I do not think it is possible to say what ‘better’ is and because of that we cannot say how, when or where Games Studies might make games ‘better’. There are things that can be said, though, which I think are more useful.
Game Studies can help tell if a game is fit for purpose, or not. It can suggest purposes for games. It can suggest how a purpose might be realised. It can widen the purview of games. It can help games take themselves more seriously(if they want) as art as good as any other kind of art and entertainment as good as any other kind of entertainment. In short, it can add a whole host of tools to the designer’s collection, which they can then use as they will. That will change games. Better? I don’t know – but I don’t think it is possible to know or possible to judge, even after something has changed.
Of course, there are plenty of theorists who just do not care. They are not trying to improve games they are trying to understand them.
Testing, Testing 123
Posted on | February 22, 2010 | No Comments
Me. I am the small one.
Why you ask? Well, I am trying to get the hang of how to size and display pictures with Wordpress, and this is a photo I had to hand. Plus, my mother looks lovely in it.
Why Pericopes?
Posted on | February 22, 2010 | No Comments
So, there are two questions there: why have a blog at all and why call it Pericopes?.
I have created the blog for a couple of reasons. Firstly, for someone who works with digital media I have almost no web presence. Google me and what is most likely to come up is a whole lot of posts on the blog of a friend of mine, Steve Tierney, the owner of Madhouse Games and a nice guy I used to work for. He has, however, crossed over to the dark side and become a Tory councillor and blogs about such things as teachers not needing degrees and global warming being a big con. I thus find myself almost never in agreement with him, which leads me to posting long, sometimes rambling, often typo ridden replies to whatever crazy thing he has claimed most recently.
This is all well and good, but as I have posted these things under my own name, a google search will show them up. Mixed in with those search results would be an odd review, an interview or two and so on, but overall someone is liable to Google me and mostly find those posts. I do not mind that: I am not ashamed of anything I have said there, but those posts are a very small part of who I am.
This was only brought home to me as a result of creating an account at academia.edu -which emails you if you are Googled, which has happened about ten times in the last week. If people are starting to Google me, I want them to find something a bit more representative of me and my work than anti-conservative ranting.
I am also starting to build up more and more teaching resources for the games design courses I teach at Brunel, and I want students to have some place to find these (and anyone else who is interested). I want somewhere were interested academics can find a list of my papers and/or the various games I have worked on over the years. When I have a little more free time (writing up my PHD eats into it somewhat) I am going to offer up some simple games for download -and I need a place to do that from.
However, what caused me to do this now is that I am shortly heading off to GDC in San Franciso, and I want to blog it, upload some pictures and so on.
So why call it Pericopes? Well, to be honest, it was the first word that popped into my head when wordpress asked me what my blog was going to be called. Pericope means ‘cut around’. It is pronounced something like pe-rick-oh-pee. You can hear a rather Perky American guy pronounce it like he has just come in his trousers if you click on the link. It is mostly used in biblical scholarship to talk about a small piece of text that makes sense on its own. Some religions have a tradition of selecting and reading them at services – when someone reads out a short bit of the bible they are reading a Pericope. More profoundly for my purposes some texts can be seen as being made up from pericopes and they can be rearranged and still make sense – like the gospels, which do not always make sense chronologically but do make sense as a whole. I have been using this concept to write about the way that some games tell stories – Dragon Age, for instance, can be said to be partially made up out of a load of Pericopes, hung on a linear spine. This is not the place to go into the theory, but it explains why the word was on my mind.
It also fits the idea of the blog – a whole load of little bits of text which can be viewed in any order and make sense as a whole in as much as they are all things that I find interesting. That mostly means games, from the perspective of academic, player and designer, but also may well include just about anything else that excites me enough to write about it, history and UK politics being two likely candidates.