http://kotaku.com/5230207/dantes-inferno...-like-hell

Here's an interesting sneak peak.

I gotta say, it's about what I expected going in. Noting "it rips off God of War" kinda misses one obvious point that God of War "ripped off" Devil May Cry. Not that that's a bad thing necessarily.

I will say this. I don't think a DMC style game is the best fit for Dante's Inferno. Firstly, why are we Dante instead of Virgil? Sure Dante's in the name of the game but so was Zelda and I never minded not playing as her. Of the two, I would expect Virgil to be the one capable of fighting demons.

However, that brings me to my second issue, which is why the heck are we fighting all the time for this? They've clearly had to change large parts of the story and just use the poem as a rough guideline already. It's likely to only get worse.

Personally I say that, if they had to have fighting, it should have been a Zelda style adventure game. Then you'd have a lot more character interaction and exploring with some puzzle solving. Heck, it would probably have worked best as a pure adventure game without fighting. I think doing various tasks for lost souls would be very engaging. Of course I'm sorta the sort who thinks puzzle game interfaces should sorta go back to not highlighting interactable objects and giving you a list of possible ways to interact with things (touch, look, talk) instead of the do-all clicker so I'd end up going that way, but at any rate I think that of all the ways to travel through Dante's Inferno that'd be the most satisfying.

Opinion: The Breadth Of Game Design
by Jean-Paul LeBreton



April 27, 2009

Opinion: The Breadth Of Game Design

[In this fascinating opinion piece, BioShock 2 lead level designer Jean-Paul LeBreton looks to the past, present and future of gameplay mechanics, and how designers may use them to adequately reflect true human experience.]

---

As of 2009, the game industry seems to want two fairly contradictory1 things:

- Make games, using proven mechanics from the last 20 years, that sell millions of copies.
- Give people a broad range of experiences that affect them as powerfully as those found in other forms of art.

We can debate whether encompassing a broader range of human experience is indeed a goal of importance, but if even a God of War game feels the need to have scenes that evoke strong emotions, you might at least concede that it’s something many developers seem interested in furthering.

To cut right to the heart of the conflict I see here, I don’t think we as developers can continue holding our breath and waiting for games that revolve around shooting, driving, running and jumping to someday make a great leap into expressing all kinds of things they were heretofore incapable of.

The problem is that the better versed you are in game conventions, the easier it is to separate the core mechanics of a game from its fiction and theme, and thus say that a game like BioShock is a meditation on free will, the dangers of ideological extremes, and whatever else… despite the fact that you spend about 90 percent of it shooting people in the face.

The world can see this disparity more clearly, ironically by virtue of being less game-literate. For many among the gaming literate, that sort of insight hits pretty close to home.

For a perspective from the other end, I was struck by this comment on io9, a non-gamer blog, from this post about BioShock 2:

I can see how a first-person shooter would be interesting and entertaining, but I would have to fall short of “compelling” when you have to spend that much time, er, shooting.


This person wasn’t being an unreasonable jerk, or advocating the censorship of games. Shooting lots of insane people in a dark, weird place probably just isn’t their idea of a good time.

The common response to this from developers has been things like, “We just need to hire better writers”, “We need better technology”, “We need better artists”, “We need to spend more time planning out our stories”. However, we’ve been doing this for more than 10 years. Whereas if you look at the points where this medium has made the most progress, whenever the expressive capabilities of games have expanded significantly, it’s actually been because new mechanics, or significant developments upon existing ones [3], have emerged that enable new aesthetics. Those other things are quite important, but we seem to have them covered.

One problem is that, deep down, many designers view game mechanics more as structure (or “form”, if you prefer) than as content, when in fact they are both. If you treat them exclusively as structure when designing, you get all manner of unintended message and context… in a nutshell, ludonarrative dissonance. Which in 2009 means mashing the circle button to overcome an emotional inner conflict. Another designer’s analysis accepts this completely at face value, which if anything demonstrates that this issue transcends our usual valuations of craft and art. It’s almost invisible to us, but quite apparent to outsiders.

So as developers, we need to deal more honestly with the disparity between our reach and our grasp - which is to say, what we tell ourselves our games are about, versus what they are actually about. History will see this decade as the period when games struggled with their destiny in this way.

I’m optimistic though, both because of the progress we’ve made in the first three decades or so of our medium, and because the solutions are right under our noses, deep in the fabric of all games. We must search out, and in some cases rediscover, core mechanics that engender new types of experiences - rediscover, because many have already been done at the fringes, promising yet underexplored. Here are some examples I find especially interesting:

AI Companionship: Holding hands in Ico
You reach out to a non-player character and become connected to them. Suddenly you’re no longer a lone entity; you must account and take responsibility for an Other. Sometimes they’re a hindrance, sometimes a help. Whether or not you buy into the designers’ attempts to make you sympathize, you have a real connection to something that’s reinforced by strong kinesthetics. In Ico, there was plenty of platformy adventuring to go along with this, but it seems inevitable that someday a game will make this its primary emphasis.

Victory via Self-Enrichment: Culture in Civilization
Sometimes you can triumph over an adversary simply by being better than them. Rivals come to view your achievements as an example to be followed. Each accomplishment that enriches you internally affords you expansion and encroachment via indirect force. Tend to your own garden and you will become powerful and influential without firing a shot.

Social Reasoning: Diplomacy
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Many wargames have a diplomacy component, which gets especially interesting when other humans are in the mix. However in a game where direct force isn’t possible, social standing would be its own capital. This is a large part of why character-driven TV shows are popular; humans enjoy exploring the workings and permutation spaces of social networks.

Hopefully this gives an idea of the breadth of directions available to us as designers. It’s equally fruitful to look to the past, at how certain ideas bubbled up from nowhere to expand the expressive range of games.

Circa 1997, before Thief and Metal Gear Solid, Stealth was one of those underexplored mechanics. Suddenly, as it caught on, there were new play sensations we’d never had before - being some combination of sneaky, clever, afraid, transgressive. It transformed players’ perspectives on familiar game environments. It even brought some new people into the medium.

These are basic changes that everyone feels deeply, from a jaded critic to someone completely new to games. They are interactively “true” in ways that a change in setting can only rarely be, no matter how beautifully realized.

As a medium, we’ve proven we can seek out novel settings, themes, art styles, characters and tropes. We have other media to learn from, after all. New mechanics, however, are uniquely difficult. The only inspiration we can find for them is human experience itself, and then comes the struggle of synthesizing, systematizing and iterating. This is the central challenge of working in this medium, and it’s never been more important that we embrace it.


[1] While some of this could be explained as the disparity between what game publishers want and what developers want, that might be giving too little credit to the former and too much to the latter. If there were more proven game mechanics and styles that enabled new experiences, publishers would probably sell them. Past a certain point, the burden of proof is on us.

[2] I want to make it clear that I’m not disparaging GoW:CoO, or speaking in any sense other than constructive criticism. I haven’t played it; in all likelihood it’s a great action game. I’m simply holding it up as an unwitting example of a much more existential crisis in game design today, much as other designers have held up stuff I’ve worked on in a similar light.

[3] Movement is something that gets re-discovered every so often; Mirror’s Edge being the recent example. Flaws in execution aside, players recognized there was something unique there.

----

So just ...so I understand, a game-story where the main character kills enemies cant be viewed as a compelling insight in to humanity or a richly story driven experience?

Thoughts?

In Steam of course. Eh, probably worth it I guess.

(There's a few hours left, if anyone else actually doesn't have it yet...)

We were never able to craft an actual Wikipedia article because of their stupid rules about relevance.

So I made one that we can do with whatever we please.

SLAM YOU SOME TENDO CITY WIKI!

Of course, everyone can edit anything (though I think in this case you have to get an account), but I encourage everyone to play around with it as time permits.

http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.j...0425043700

Quote:Does Pakistan pose a global threat?

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said Pakistan poses a "mortal threat" to world security. Do you agree?

Mrs Clinton said Pakistan has abdicated power to the Taleban by allowing them to control parts of the country, such as the Swat Valley in north-western Pakistan.

Earlier this month Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari signed a law implementing Sharia Law in the Swat Valley region as part of a two-year deal to end the Taleban insurgency.

The area, situated 100km (62 miles) from Islamabad, was formerly one of Pakistan's most popular holiday destinations.

Are Pakistan's actions jeopardising world security? Should nations consider the international impact when resolving disputes within their national boundaries? What pressure can or should the rest of the world bring to bear on Pakistan?

Read the full story

Published: Thursday, 23 April, 2009, 10:30 GMT 11:30 UK

http://www.newsweek.com/id/194495

Shot in the head, with an exit wound, and she doesn't even notice.

Whoever notices it first, gets the biggest fucking cookie ever.

Happy birthday, Game Boy... you're still probably the best Nintendo handheld. :) Well, not for RPGs and strategy games, but for other stuff. :)

The original GB also has the best battery life of any Nintendo handheld... 40 hours on 4 AA batteries! Amazing...



Nintendo's two first-party games out on launch day were Super Mario Land and Alleyway; Tetris was slightly later (and remember, Japanese systems never came with pack-in games). I have both of those games... Alleyway is pretty good, for a simple Breakout clone. Mario Land of course everyone knows. And it just got better from there...

Toven = 30 today.

happy vaginal passing day

Meant to post this a few days ago, but here it is... interesting article, for sure! I hope Youtube can make it, it's a great site...

http://www.slate.com/id/2216162/

Quote:Do You Think Bandwidth Grows on Trees?User-generated content may have changed the Internet, but sites like YouTube are suffocating under the costs of storing it.
By Farhad ManjooPosted Tuesday, April 14, 2009, at 6:17 PM ET

YouTube home page.YouTube's losses are unsustainableEveryone knows that print newspapers are our generation's horse-and-buggy; in the most wired cities, they've been pummeled by competition from the Web. But it might surprise you to learn that one of the largest and most-celebrated new-media ventures is burning through cash at a rate that makes newspapers look like wise investments. It's called YouTube: According a recent report by analysts at the financial-services company Credit Suisse, Google will lose $470 million on the video-sharing site this year alone. To put it another way, the Boston Globe, which is on track to lose $85 million in 2009, is five times more profitable—or, rather, less unprofitable—than YouTube. All so you can watch this helium-voiced oddball whenever you want.

YouTube's troubles are surprisingly similar to those faced by newspapers. Just like your local daily, the company is struggling to sell enough in advertising to cover the enormous costs of storing and distributing its content. Newspapers have to pay to publish and deliver dead trees; YouTube has to pay for a gargantuan Internet connection to send videos to your computer and the millions of others who are demanding the most recent Dramatic Chipmunk mash-up. Google doesn't break out YouTube's profits and losses on its earnings statements, and of course it's possible that Credit Suisse's estimates are off. But if the analysts are at all close, YouTube, which Google bought in 2006, is in big trouble. As Benjamin Wayne, the CEO of the rival video-streaming company Fliqz, pointed out in a recent article for Silicon Alley Insider, not even Google can long sustain a company that's losing close to half a billion dollars a year.

But YouTube's problems point to a larger difficulty for many Web startups: "User-generated content" is proving to be a financial albatross. Two years ago, Time magazine named "you" its Person of the Year for doing your small part in fueling the Web 2.0 revolution. The magazine argued that by collecting and distributing the creations of millions of individuals, the Web is upending the way we learn about what's going on in the world around us. There's no doubt this is true; you experienced the presidential inauguration through millions of pictures captured by ordinary people, and a lot of what you learn these days comes from articles put together by the anonymous hordes who power Wikipedia. Yet even though they've changed the way we live, sites that collect and share content produced by all of us haven't done the one thing many tech evangelists said they'd do—make a ton of money. Or, in many cases, any money.

There's a simple reason for this: Advertisers don't like paying very much to support homemade photos and videos. As a result, the economics of user-generated sites are even more crushing than those of the newspaper business. At least newspapers see a proportional relationship between circulation and revenues—when the paper publishes great stories, it attracts more readers, and, in time, more advertisers. At YouTube, the relationship can be backward: The videos that get the most clicks—and are thus most expensive for YouTube to carry—trend toward the sort of lewd or random flavor that doesn't sit well with advertisers. Look at some of the site's hits over the last few days: a clip of a guest fainting on Glenn Beck's show filched from Fox News; a video of a Brazilian soccer coach punching a referee, also recorded from TV; a cell phone capture showing Britney Spears misidentify the city she's performing in; and a shot of a "boob grab" among spectators at the Masters golf tournament. Would you pay to stick your product's logo under any of them?

Probably not—YouTube sells ads on fewer than 10 percent of its videos. Credit Suisse estimates that 375 million people around the world will play about 75 billion YouTube videos this year. To serve up all these streams, the company has to pay for a broadband connection capable of hurtling data at the equivalent of 30 million megabits-per-second—about 6 million times as fast as your home Internet connection. All this bandwidth costs Google $360 million a year, the analysts estimate. Then there's the cost of the videos themselves: Even though many of the site's most popular content is uploaded for free from users, Credit Suisse says YouTube spends about $250 million a year to acquire licenses to broadcast professionally produced videos. Add in all other expenses, and the cost of running YouTube for one year exceeds $700 million. But the company makes only a fraction of that back in advertising—about $240 million in revenues for 2009, according to the report.

Quote:YouTube isn't alone in Poor House 2.0. Yahoo bought the popular photo-sharing site Flickr in 2005, and though the service might be marginally profitable, it certainly hasn't added appreciably to Yahoo's bottom line. (Yahoo similarly doesn't break out Flickr's financials.) Facebook provides an even better example. The social network is running up a huge tab to store and serve up all the photos, videos, and other junk you stuff into your profile. Last year, TechCrunch reported that Facebook spends $1 million a month on electricity, $500,000 a month on bandwidth, and up to $2 million per week on new servers to keep up with its users' insatiable photo-uploading needs. (Members post nearly a billion photos every month.) But Facebook gets relatively little in return for storing all your memories. Ad rates on its network are terribly low, the company doesn't make a profit, and it hasn't shed any light on how it will make good on investments that valued the company at $15 billion.

For all the frenzy surrounding citizen-produced media, the content that seems to do best online is the same stuff that did well offline—content produced by professionals. My colleague Jack Shafer recently listed the many services that people are willing to pay for online. They include music from iTunes, game videos from MLB.TV, reviews from Consumer Reports, and articles from the Wall Street Journal—and nothing made on some dude's cell phone. Or look at Hulu, the video site that shows TV shows and movies. It attracts far less traffic than YouTube does (and thus pays far less for bandwidth). But because advertisers are willing to pay much more to be featured on its videos, Hulu is on track to match YouTube's revenues and with much lower overhead.

YouTube has been trying to catch up to Hulu in the non-user-generated video business. It has signed content-licensing deals with several Hollywood studios and recording companies in the hopes that it can attract an audience—and advertisers—for the kind of quality programming we now run to Hulu for. But as Benjamin Wayne points out, those deals won't solve YouTube's fundamental problem; even if it does begin to make respectable profits from, say, showing old feature films, it'll still have to keep paying huge infrastructure costs to host the world's home videos. It's possible that over the next few years, Google's engineers could find a way to reduce dramatically the costs of hosting such a service. (They're capable of amazing things.) But that proposition is iffy. As Wayne argues, there's a very real possibility that YouTube as we know it is doomed. The company may have to institute restrictions to keep its bandwidth in check, or it could unveil any number of pay-per-use schemes (as some other video sites have done). Then the video free-for-all that we've grown to love will come to an end.