Category: games

Finished Half-Life 2 Wednesday, and I really haven’t felt such an intense urge to finish a game in a long time.

What works:

• Variation, pacing and length. Where Half-Life was an internimable collection of corridors and silly platform sequences, HL2 manages to get it just right. When I am bored with driving around in the buggy, the game changes into something else. When I can’t be bothered commanding the ant-lions, they disappear. This is games growing up: you instantly know that the film director is a novice or that the band has no clue when they prolong a shot or repeat the riff long after you’ve lost interest. It’s easy to fall in love with your own creation and forget the user/viewer/listener. Getting the pacing right is sooo important.
• People. There is a lot of genuinely interesting interaction with the NPCs. I still don’t for a second feel that they’re more than mechanical dolls, but a good feeling of shared goals. The revelation of betrayal could be a bit more interesting though.
• Physics. The physics add so much to the game in terms of gameplay and accessibility. Things you expect to work generally do work. When you want to make a ramp for jumping with your buggy, the puzzle is not “ramp goes up when player has placed object x on the far end”, but actual simulated physics where you can use whatever combination of heavy objects you want.
• Box-less distribution. I bought it via Steam when it came out, and it simply worked. I don’t know what cut Valve eventually gets from this, but I prefer paying the developer to paying the truck drivers and retailers who added nothing to the game. If Valve begins using Steam for selling other developer’s games, things could be great. But it’s still a problem that you need a physical box to give a Christmas present.

What doesn’t work:

• I have no body. As the Riddick developers, Starbreeze, have talked about, you are still the classic FPS floating gun with no body. You have no idea about the size of your body, and you can’t see your legs. Riddick really solved this nicely by letting you see your body and providing an external view for climbing ladders and so on.
• Quick-saves. F6 to quick-save, F9 to quick-load. My fingers remembered this even years after playing Half-life. I thought we had moved on to checkpoint saves?
• Lack of people. Every time you meet up with your pals in the resistance, they suddenly seem to disappear again.
• Bad in-organization communication. It’s hard to ensure a good information flow within a big organization, but the enemy soldiers patiently wait behind a thin door while you fight with their colleagues on the outside.
• Medikits in crates. Really. After all these years, the world is still littered with wooden crates containing medikits. Couldn’t we do this in a better way?

But IMO the best game right now, and infinitely better than Doom 3.

Congratulations to my old sidekick and co-worker Mads Rydahl of The Planet who has just won Billboard’s award Web/Downloadable Game of the Year for the game Shroomz!

Since the EA Spouse story and the Randy Pausch document on Electronic Arts, the subject of game developer Quality of Life has come up a lot. News.com.
What’s usually missing in the discussion is that hard work with lots of overtime and no compensation is by no means restricted to Electronic Arts. As Tim Burke writes, it’s also quite common in non-profit organizations.
My worst overtime experiences have been working for a small Danish game development shop, working in my own company, and as an academic. It’s not just big companies and it’s not just the private sector. At universities, we all have contracts stating that we work 37,5 hours a week. This is just written in the contract for the fun of it – nobody pretends that this is true.

An important issue, but it’s no use believing that unpaid overtime only happens at EA – or that it will suddenly go away.

And just where are those interesting jobs with no overtime?

Public Beta book is out.

There’s a writeup on a talk I have in Graz at fm4.orf.at (Austrian radio).

Did Heidegger say that German was the only language in which you could do philosophy? It certainly adds something.

Um zu zeigen, wie stark unsere emotionale Bindung zu Spielen ist, spielt Jesper Juul mit dem Publikum das “Kopf oder Zahl”-Spiel. Das Auditorium setzt auf Kopf. Juul wirft eine 2 Euro M?nze in die Luft. Als sie am Boden liegt, zeigt die Zwei nach oben – 1:0 f?r den Ludologen.

I’ve just sent of the book manuscript today, so should have more time to post – there were some interesting things at the conference in Graz.

Should you be in Copenhagen next Friday, Gitte Stald has arranged a seminar on death & violence in video games. Flyer.

Friday November 12, 2004
Conference Room 5.2.29a, University of Copenhagen, Njalsgade 80

PROGRAMME:
09.15-09.25: Welcome
09.25-10.05: Gitte Stald – Perspectives on Fascination of Death and Violence in Games
10.05-10.45: Kjetil Sandvik – Game Characters with Scruples?
11.00-11.40: Susana Tosca – To Kill or not to Kill: the Butterfly Effect in Blade Runner
11.40-12.20: Troels Degn-Johansson – On Death and Destruction in Strategy Games

13.15-13.55: Jesper Juul – What the Game Means: About Grand Theft Auto 3
14.10-14.50: Charlie Breindahl – Racing Games
14.50-15.30: Jonas Heide Smith – Games, Peacocks, and the Theory of Conflict

So it happened, Red Sox won the world series.
Again, the idea of winning and losing streaks, curses just always seem to find its way into games.

On my desk is a paper, Heuristics as beliefs and behaviors: The adaptiveness of the ‘hot hand’ (Bruce D. Burns) which discusses the belief in a player having a “hot hand” (likely to score) in a game of basketball.

Update: And at MIT they did their part.