Author: Jesper

I have been researching the first use of the term “casual game” and thought I had struck unexpected gold when this August 17, 1885 article from the New York Times came up in the search results: “Provisions for an Ocean Steamer”. I was awaiting the description of the game-playing habits of the passengers, enjoying, probably, a casual session of some card game en vogue at the time.

But the casual game in question is the other meaning of game, as in “hunted, non-domesticated animal”. Not sure what makes it casual though? Small amounts?

(The first use of “casual game” relating to game as in “rule-based pastime” is either 1919 or 1936, depending on how you interpret the 1919 article.)

I was fortunate to attend the Boston Post Mortem [game developer meeting] this Wednesday for which I had heard that Steve Meretzky (of Infocom fame) would be talking about Portal. I was looking forward to hearing his insight and analysis.

Now, I would come up with a clever comment, but I cannot top the talk itself. Here it is:

I wanted to share my two game reviews from the Space Time Play anthology: Defender and Asteroids.

This was two attempts at writing more theoretical and media-historical reviews where each game is considered from a specific angle. I.e. reviews with a little more reflection that your usual game review.

I also experimented with using time lapse images to illustrate how the games change character from the beginning to the end of each level.

To give away the conclusion, I think that Asteroids ultimately does not work, but that Defender is wonderful. Conversely, I think the Asteroids review is the most successful review.

Some quotes:

Defender: “… Defender is an exaggerated version of the early 1980s arcade game in all its virtues: a large number of possible ways to fail, extremely unforgiving and no rewards beyond a high score and a few smart bombs. The purest arcade game.”

Asteroids: “… Asteroids is a nostalgic game of the future, but the actual future has better games.”

From Magical Wasteland via GameSetWatch, this funnily and unfairly entirely sums up all game industry keynotes of 2007:

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1. Let’s think about the future for a second. You probably don’t understand the kids that make up the bulk of our audience, but I do. I call them the network MySpace remix 3.0 social generation. Unlike any other people before them, young people today like to interact with each other. They also like music. YouTube is the perfect example of whatever point it is I’m making. Everything should be online and customizable.

2. Iteration is the key. Everything is about iteration. How many times can I use iteration in this talk? Iteration, iteration, iteration. This is how you make good games: by iterating.

The more you iterate, it doesn’t matter what direction you’re going in or what you actually do, as long as you get the number of iterations up. This process (iteration) is what turns all the bad stuff into the good stuff. Here’s a graph showing game quality and number of iterations approaching infinity together. This graph proves my point.

3. For our last project we used Scrum, and boy, are we glad we did. There is no way anything we did would have been possible without it. What is Scrum, you ask? It’s a set of new terminology for things that already happen when groups of people work together. For example, instead of a “meeting,” you have a “Scrum,” and so on.

You should use Scrum too, since it will solve all your problems. If I’ve piqued your interest, sign-up sheets for my specially discounted seminars on Scrum can be found clipped to the bottom of your conference program.

4. The game we made was great – because we’re great. We are just a group of awesome people. We never crunch, and we go to the beach every other Friday to play volleyball. Even those times when we did crunch, we had delicious catered meals. And there was one time we got a masseuse in the office. Awesome. Yes, our studio’s amazing array of perks and benefits keep us happy and doing our best work all the time.

We have a ton of open positions we need to fill very quickly so please send us your resume as soon as you can.

5. The game industry is in trouble. We can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing before. We need to do this other thing, which is the thing that I’m doing. I said this last year but none of you came with me. Well, this time I really mean it.

The Hypermedialab in Tampere, Finland has put out an amazingly thorough report on Finnish gaming habits.

• Solitaire is the most popular digital game.
• “During the last month 66 % of the respondents reported playing traditional games, 59 % money games, 31 % digital games and 4 % engrossment games [LARPs etc].”

And lots more.

I guess the cliché is that winter is so dark in the Nordic region that we have nothing to do but play games or code. I would really love to see comparable data from other countries.