Mario Mashups
A couple interesting game universe mashups – Mario & Halo and Mario & MegaMan. Both of the games were done with Game Maker.
Archive for games
Pacifist WOW Player
I’m just catching up on reading and found a great piece at Gamepolitics about a World of Warcraft player who reached the highest level in the game as a pacifist, never intentionally attacking or killing another player. He found real-life examples of pacifism that related to his character class and based his role-playing and character names after them: Franz Reinisch (link in German) and Noor Inayat Kahn.
Videogames in Education
I’m interested in the use of games and play in education, from the design and creation of games to the use of games to teach concepts in the classroom. This video is about the latter and features interviews with influential people like Henry Jenkins and James Paul Gee. Even though it’s ancient by blog/videogame/internet standards (it’s really just a couple years old), it still features relevant discussion. There is some filler including a section that seems like a plug for a World War 2 simulation and the company that created it, but the interviews, especially with Gee and Jenkins, are really great. Learning through play seems to be a main point, and my extension of that argument is to reorient many of the things we do towards play.
Featured in Water Cooler Games
Ian Bogost is one of my favorite writers/theorists/makers on games, and we’ve had some group conversations over email along with several people in the games network in Denver and elsewhere. He was in Denver earlier this year and came to give a talk to the Colorado Game Developers Association meeting. The email conversations are often started by Devin Monnens (a fellow eMAD student) and we usually get some interesting back and forth discussion from them. I recently found that a couple of these conversations made Water Cooler Games, Ian and Gonzalo Frasca’s game-related blog. First, a reaction to a game used to test the racial bias of Denver Police Department officers. Second, a comment I made about the similarity of disaster attacks you can invoke in SimCity to real-life terrorist disasters.
Ian’s new book, Persuasive Games, is partly a discussion of the rhetorical qualities of the games (and their rule systems).
Finally, he’s the only game designer that I know of (besides Will Wright) to have appeared as a guest on Colbert Report (video here).
Monday’s Presentation
I’m presenting my project plan for this quarter in class tomorrow and wanted to post a rough outline and collection of links to guide me, and to let everyone know what I’m up to.
The video piece (available here and embedded in the previous post) is a combination of machinima (footage from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath, and Shadow of the Colossus) and live-action, public domain US Military footage. I’m really concerned with the propagation of the message that war is simulation, and with recruitment based on this premise. The US Army and Navy both promote games on their websites, and both actually have a dedicated videogame (America’s Army being far more popular and robust than the Navy’s Strike & Retrieve Navy Training Exercise).
Where does “the other” fit into the stories told by America’s Army, and by the media construction of war in general? One project, Dead in Iraq, is one response to this question (for which “the other” is actually the dead US soldier, whose face and body has become invisible). Joseph DeLappe logs onto the game and simply reads the names of US Soldiers killed in the current war in Iraq, to various reactions from players in the game.
For those who don’t seek out the games, there is always recruiting. Here’s a story about the Air Force recruiting with the popular first-person shooter Halo 2. Halo 3 is being used to recruit for an entirely different army.
The piece is called Layers in order to address the visual layers of indirection involved in modern, distance, “smart” warfare. Other questions I’d like to address with the final piece:
- What is Machinima? Is it simply re-enactment of movies in a virtual environment? Here’s one example, in which the military re-enactment simply refers to “the enemy” as he is comically killed in the game engine.
- Who controls the images captured from videogames? What are the “fair use” rights of producers?
- Can part of play be a critique when it comes to videogames?
- Finally, where is the propaganda to recruit volunteers for local, humanitarian service to those who need it? How can games be used for these ends?
I would like to make a series of video pieces along similar formal lines and exhibit them together in a show, as well as online. That’s as far as I’ve gotten, so any feedback here would be very helpful.
Music of Guitar Hero, Part 1
[audio:guitarHeroMusic1.mp3]
Here’s an audio piece that I recorded and mixed as a meme. On a previous post I tried to identify my meme and came up with this: “my meme really has to do with the feedback between critical and cultural reception of games as rhetoric and the creation of intentionally rhetorical (through the rules of their systems) games.” While this piece doesn’t exactly do that, it does deal with another of my interests, which is to find ways to engage creatively with the environments, interfaces, and rules that make up the games we play.
I stumbled upon an idea that I had been discussing with a friend that represented this and took it a step further by critiquing so-called “rhythm” games. This genre of videogames usually involves trying to match visual cues on the screen that correspond to the beat or melodic parts of a song. It is impossible to play the game Guitar Hero without hearing the clickity-click of the specialized guitar controller that comes with the game, but most of the time you don’t listen to it. It occurred to me that it is making it’s own music; this is my first attempt at recording and arranging this sound.
Brainstorm on Board Game Conventions
Thinking about conventions for board games caused me to check out the Wikipedia entry for them. There they are defined as games “played with counters or pieces that are placed on, removed from, or moved across a “board” (a premarked surface, usually specific to that game).” It goes on to define games as either simulating aspects of real life (e.g. Monopoly, Clue, Risk) or not simulating any real life event (e.g. Chess, Checkers, and Scrabble). It’s interesting that this distinction doesn’t take into account the player’s relationship to the board or the relationship of the pieces to each other. I would like to develop a language that addresses the formal relationships of players to the tokens, as well as tokens to each other, in the space of gameplay. For example, what does it mean when a game allows two or more tokens to occupy the same space? Often the narrative of the game forces players to keep one piece on each designated space, but sometimes there is only physical room for one piece in a space. How are these different? How does the narrative enforce the physical design of the board?
Power Struggle Game Update
The Monopoly board game is pretty iconic and commonplace at this point, but I gave it a reworking for DU that is coming along. I haven’t made changes to the board since last year, but I’ve been readying it for a board game exhibition that has apparently been cancelled. Oh well…the work goes on.
I met with Ryan Johnston, the campus energy manager at DU, on Friday to get accurate historical power usage data for all of the buildings on my game board (which you can see below). The next steps are redefining the rules, creating some cards and play pieces, and printing out a copy to begin playtesting. I am not sure what the appropriate venue is for this project when it’s done, but that’s partially what I’m in the eMAD program to learn. My hope for the game is that it plays like a reverse Monopoly in which players manage their buildings and gain ground in the game by conserving more power (and thus have more “money” to spend).
