Education in Games

Can games be used to educate? I’m not just talking about educational games here. This aspect spans to all games. Games require mastery, and mastery of a game requires learning about its game world. Therefore, anything we learn about a game is only limited by what is included in that game world.

Let’s take a game like Bookworm Adventures. Your attack power is based on the complexity and length of the words you are able to spell. So within Bookworm Adventures’ game world, we are learning not only proper spelling but we are also expanding our vocabulary. When we play historically accurate strategy games, we are learning about historical civilizations and battles. America’s Army teaches us what it is like to be an American Soldier through its punishment systems and tight focus on disciplined play. Bioshock exposes us to 1930’s art deco and architecture. The Game of Life gives us an exaggerated look at what’s in store for us, but even exaggeration is based on truth.

How, then, do we adjust game design to be educational but remain fun? Most adults don’t enjoy educational games (unless they’re nostalgic like Number Munchers) and the core gaming audience is aged 18-35. If you are designing a game for kids, why make it so it’s not fun for adults too? Obviously the kids are going to be playing with their parents or guardians, so a well designed game (especially a board game) should theoretically be fun for all ages, much like how a lot of kid’s comedy has jokes that kids wouldn’t understand but would make parents laugh hysterically (naughty jokes in Animaniacs, for example).

The key is to focus on gameplay first, educational factors second. If a game is played, it is educating the players in the ways of its game world. If the game world has educational aspects, the gamer will pick up on them. Focus your game around a specific lesson, and make that lesson your core statement. For example, “The purpose of this game is to  reenact the water cycle.” The core says that the water cycle is reenacted, or simulated, not taught. If you flat out say “When clouds form and humidity reaches 100%, it rains!” everyone gets turned off. Nobody likes school, especially in their games. Make the game strictly water cycle based, make the player interact with the different states of water, show the differences between drizzles and thunderstorms, etc. There are other ways to teach than just by saying what you want to. Games are, by their very nature, interactive. Use that interaction to your advantage.

Games are a hands-on experience. Therefore, whatever they choose to teach has to be a hands-on experience. If the lessons the game teaches are not through immersion in the game, the immersion is broken and the game has not been a successful teacher. Games are great at showing causality, so show us the actions and reactions, don’t tell us about them.

Graduated

I am now back home in Boston and have successfully graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design. It’s been a very long four years and I’m happy to just be able to sit down, make some games, and have some fun with what I’ve learned.

Thinking of exploring new platforms to develop for has got my programming hands shaking. On top of being a year or so away from the announcement of next-gen consoles, the Palm Pre is coming out on Saturday and, yes, I am getting one, mainly because my current phone gets 5 minutes of battery life while talking, and also because it’s a touch-based mobile platform I can develop for without buying a Mac and purchasing a yearly SDK license. Whatever I make for it I will most likely port to the iPhone, sure, but I’ll have to be able to afford a Mac first. In the meantime I’ll be able to make games for a less congested app store, and that’s an exciting notion.

Also tempted to make a new board game, something cheaper to develop but just as fun as, if not more fun than Stalin’s Stash. Don’t ask me what I’ve got in mind because, honestly, I don’t have anything in mind. It’s just something I’d like to do.

Now that I am home I will be updating here more regularly. Going to try to get back to my “one post per week” deal. Daily is too much work. That’s what Twitter is for.

Me On Tweetworks TV

Early this afternoon I got the chance to do an interview on Tweetworks TV, talking with Tweetworks founder Mike Langford about game development, schooling down here in Savannah, as well as current and possible future uses of Twitter. My webcam phased out a bit near the end there, but otherwise it came out pretty good. It’s long though, like 22 minutes, so make sure you have nothing to do and a beer in hand. Enjoy!

Also, if you are on Twitter, make sure to check out Tweetworks. If you ever took part in an old school message board, you’ll feel right at home.

Now Available

The Longest Night is now available. Download it today at www.deviatesoft.com.

Announcements about tomorrow… as presented by ME!

Leaving The Realm of the Third Dimension

3D Realms was an industry innovator. THE industry innovator I should say. Without them, the idea of episodic gaming and downloadable content wouldn’t even exist. There would be no Wolfenstein, no Duke Nukem… no Dopefish. The games that Apogee/3D Realms published in the early-mid 1990’s is responsible for a period I refer to as the “gaming renaissance.” Some may disagree with me on the term, but this was a period after the PC started to become more than a viable option for gaming; it became a gaming POWERHOUSE. This was the period when graphics, sound and gameplay all started blending together to create the truly immersive experiences that today allow us to classify videogames as a legitimate artform. The PC had sidescrollers, RPGs, First Person Shooters (DOOM clones in those days), adventure games… you name it, the PC had it, and thanks to the technology it looked and sounded better than anything the SNES or Genesis could ever offer. So while the two sides feuded over who had a better console, I went with the only console that still remains a powerhouse of gaming capabilities to this day. I’ve always been and always will be a PC gamer and developer.

And so was 3D Realms. They hung in there as a PC publisher in their later days, giving us games like Max Payne and Prey, not to mention a handful of Duke titles for consoles and PC. However, when you think of 3D Realms, you think of the most ironic title ever given to a game.

Duke Nukem Forever.

It’s a shame, really, because if they had made the game using Quake I or II like was the original plan, it’d probably be out. Would it be great? Who knows, but we certainly still wouldn’t be talking about it. We would have moved on to bigger and better games instead of being stuck on this for 12, nearly 13 years, all culminating in the end of one of the greatest game studios ever known to mankind.

Luckily, the Apogee name was renewed a few months ago and it is unaffected by the closure. Unfortunately, they are working on the Duke Nukem Trilogy, once again a project that is destined to end in failure. Three games based on a gaming icon of old that everybody sees as a joke. If Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard had done what it was supposed to do and parodied Duke directly, it could have ended the misery and we’d see some awesome, original IPs or revival of other, old IPs coming out of Apogee. Games like Raptor/Stargunner, Hocus Pocus, Rise of the Triad, and Commander Keen. Or hell, stop beating around the bush and give the Dopefish his own damn game. In these rough economic times, I wouldn’t doubt that the guys at id would love to get in on some small, cheap games to help keep cash flowing around the office.

We’re losing great studios on a near daily basis. Big Huge, Black Isle, NCSoft, 3D Realms, etc. Yet, each of these studios has spun off multiple, smaller indie studios. That’s what Apogee was in the first place. Now that it has spun back off from 3D Realms, let’s see them do what they do best.

In closing, it’s time to kick ass and chew gum. And guess what? I’m all out of ass.

You Really Need to Shut Up

Angry gamer language is like listening to someone with tourette’s syndrome screaming at a losing horse. It’s unfortunate. The anonymity factor allows gamers to get away with saying anything they want. However, that does not stop the fact that gay isn’t actually a derogatory word, and if we were in England, that other word you just called me would only mean cigarette.

The biggest issue is that when people use these words – in games, on forums – in a derogatory way, the people who run the game and or forum are then held responsible when somebody takes major offense and contacts a legal organization. So steps are taken to prevent such language from happening so that they don’t have to deal with the hubub, but this prevents any serious conversation about the topics from arising, such as homosexual relationships in the Star Wars universe or announcing a Gay/Lesbian Guild in World of Warcraft. Thus, the company that was trying to protect these demographics from harrassment is in trouble for trying to do the right thing.

The issue is that companies do not want the individuals responsible for this kind of harrassment to get in trouble. They may not be able to afford the lawsuits, or they may not have the constitution to apologize for their actions. If they ban the users from their forums, they get attacked for not allowing freedom of speech. If they censor the words, they get attacked for not allowing discussion about homosexuality. Basically, if a company has gone through the trouble of developing a community for their game, they’re going to get in trouble.

It’s the black ice conundrum. If I slip and fall on black ice on the sidewalk outside your house, the government says it’s your fault. In reality, it’s my own damn fault for not going into the street and walking around it, saving everybody the hassle. What am I suggesting then? I am suggesting an adjustment to user agreements, be it for games, communities, screen names, everything, that basically states that it is the individual’s responsibility to treat others with respect, and if they choose to use ignorant or hateful language that they themselves must suffer the burden of responsibility for their actions and not the company in charge or anyone affiliated with said company.

I don’t believe in censorship.

I do, however, believe that sometimes people really need to shut up.

Afterthoughts of Gaming

There is a tendency to simply port games to PC after or alongside their major console release. Often this is when a game is being pushed onto as many consoles as possible. Take the upcoming (and dare I say awesome-looking) Ghostbusters game for XBox 360, Playstation 3, Wii, Playstation 2, and PC. That’s a lot of resources to spread around, especially considering the unique art style of the Wii and PS2 versions (at least there is no DS or PSP version announced… yet). The issue is that console games HAVE to be game-killing-bug free and usually won’t be published if said bugs exist. PC games do not come with this restriction as they can be patched willy nilly. What ends up happening, then, is that if developers have to focus on putting their game on multiple platforms, the PC version ends up getting ignored in favor of patching it later.

Once in a while, though, we see the PC version of a game come out later instead of at the same time to make it all around compatible with every possible setup. Mirror’s Edge is a decent example of this, however there is the issue that single-player games tend to phase out of people’s minds after 2-3 months. Multiplayer and DLC keeps a game alive. Mirror’s Edge had no multiplayer, the DLC wasn’t out yet, the PC version came out 2 months after its console release, and besides the added bonus of PhysX, didn’t bring anything else to the table.

Then there’s Braid. It got off to a rough start with the Steam version being delayed by around 7 hours, but at least it finally came out and I’m having so much fun with it. To have waited this long for it to arrive on PC has been torture to say the least, as I do not own a 360 and only got the chance to fiddle around with it, not actually sit down and play it through. The PC version does come with a level editor, technically, but there is no documentation or easy way to load custom levels. Done correctly, a level editor can give a game an INCREDIBLY long lifespan as communities develop which are devoted entirely to creating custom content for the game, which is why Epic always ships their games with an editor.

A community devoted to creating Braid levels, new stories for Tim, and possibly even new time-shifting mechanics would be fantastic, although I do not personally know the capabilities of the editor. Should it be powerful enough, though, I would say there would need to be some easier way to access custom levels, either that we made or downloaded. The editor is there, we just need to know how to use it and we need to be able to access our content.

The Suspense is Killing Me

Hurry up already!

We Have Wasted the Wii

EA claims that the Wii Motion Plus is incredibly accurate, so accurate that they’ve had to tone down the controls of the character on screen. Am I the only one who can’t help but ask, why wasn’t this implemented in the original Wii Remote?

Over the last two years, the Wii library has been filled with party games that range in quality from terrible to mediocre and games that ripoff Wii Fit usually with bad results. As for games that more resemble what is on the PS3/360, i.e. third party titles, they range from mediocre to good, and it is only Nintendo’s first party titles that have ended up as masterpieces. It has gotten to the point where there is so much filler in the Wii library that it resembles the days of the Atari 2600/5200, with so little information on the individual titles, that the market has been flooded with shovelware and Gamespot/IGN refuse to review most of what comes out for Nintendo’s little-experimental-console-that-could.

So now the Wii Motion Plus is on the way. It promises true “one to one” movement, meaning whatever you do, your avatar on screen can do. No, for real, in all three dimensions. So theoretically, we could see more than an updated version of the Atari’s lightsaber battling game for the 2600, now named “Clone Wars: Lightsaber Battles.” Hell, maybe we’ll have the best Jedi simulation since “Jedi Outcast.” Will we though? No. “Force Unleashed” could have been that. So then will we see a realstic sword fighting mechanic in the next Zelda? Probably, but I would guess that Zelda will be on the next Nintendo console and not on the Wii. Improved swing mechanics for tennis games? Definitely, if EA has anything to say about it, though hardcore tennis games feel a bit like a niche market if you ask me.  Tighter aiming in first person shooters? Yet to be seen, though it’s possible.

Unfortunately, the Wii has already left its mark as this generation’s base for shovelware. When Nintendo got rid of the Seal of Quality, they got rid of the one thing that separated them from the competition: a strive for quality over quantity. I guess quantity is key this time around. That, however, is not the point. The point is that when we saw the Wii remote for the first time, we thought it would be capable of true 3D movement at launch, and what nintendo delivered boiled down to a mouse in the air, capable of working on only one plane and just barely being able to detect if the infrared sensor was getting closer to the source. That’s not what we wanted, but we accepted the waggle with glee. Now the Wii is about to see a major overhaul in control design, which will hopefully improve such games as “SSX Blur,” which seemed to have been designed with the Wii Motion Plus in mind long before it was announced. But with the first announcement of the next generation of consoles only about a year away (based on 5 year cycles), is the Wii Motion Plus too late to make any difference in the quality of Wii games?