This Developer's Life: Entertainment

This Developer’s Life: Entertainment

Dear Reader:

Last week I received this letter:

Dear Mr. Portnow

I like a lot of your thoughts on design, what games do you play?

Curious in Chicago

(I’m assuming your name isn’t really Curious since that wasn’t the name associated with the email address…but if so, apologies for putting it in print)

So this week we’re going to be talking about games.   After all, we make ‘em, we’d better play ‘em (more on this statement later).

Today I Die

By the time you read this you’ll probably already have heard of Today I Die…hurrah for the mainstream press!  Today I Die is four solid minutes of fantastic art game: seeing it get any attention at all is unbelievable.

I’ll talk about The Path in a minute, but Today I Die is really what I’m looking for in an art game.  It’s accessible, it’s moving, it deals with very basic, but genuinely human ideas.   It also demonstrates the power of the medium: the same experience played out on youtube is utterly unmoving.

I’ll refrain from saying too much about Today I Die because it would take you less time to play through it than read this article (if you’re going to do one of the two I highly recommend you not pick reading me).  Today I Die can be found here:

http://ludomancy.com/games/today.html

Also, you should check out Darius Kazemi’s discussion of the funding behind this one.  It’s certainly food for thought.

The Path

I’ll be honest, I don’t get this one.  Maybe I have to play further and get more into it, but it just seems like a hearty dose of Belgian nihilism to me.  It sort of reminds me of Eastern European art house cinema…

The Path does an excellent job of setting up an atmosphere and mood.  Anyone working on a survival horror game should play it thoroughly; in fact I encourage all game designers to play it because I feel like they’re on the verge of something amazing (though in this case missing by an inch might be as bad as missing by a mile). 

They did an interesting job of keeping their interactor engaged with almost no action and a very limited set of commands.  I just feel like their game was too soul crushing…too much art for art’s sake.  I guess I believe that art is something that improves the human experience and an art game is one that leaves the interactor with something that they can take away when they walk away from the machine.  So far I haven’t gotten that from Path (though I have gotten it from titles like Silent Hill).

(Y’all who know me probably cracked up when reading that... I’ve been told that my soul is black, like my shirt, which is black…)

Dawn of War 2

This shit be broke!

At least I think so.  We’ve been doing some in house research on the Dawn of War 2 Trueskill system.  For those of you playing the multiplayer, see if you can confirm something for me: see if you can get two different Trueskills.

Our results:

A group of people at the office have been playing the game since launch.  From the outset (even while learning the game) they played multiplayer.  All of them eventually evened out at some particular Trueskill and their rating stopped moving very much.  We then had them create new Windows Live tags and start playing again.  Universally people’s Trueskill went up, everyone end up evening out at a higher value than they had had before.

If anyone can confirm they replicated this as well please email me ([email protected]). 

Other than this I think Dawn of War 2 is interesting and innovative, by the way…

Plants vs Zombies

WHOOOOOOOO!!! Tower Defense for your Mom!!!!! You know you love it!11eleventy-one!!!

Sorry.  I couldn’t contain my excitement over PvZ. 

Really though, the game is pretty good.  It’s interesting to see how much they did with so little.  For the hardcore player it’s a bit on the easy side and certainly not as deep as some of the free games available in this genre, but I’ve been enjoying it.  It’s clearly well crafted to bring PopCap’s traditional audience into the tower defense genre.

Star Trek

Though not a game, I have to throw this one in there.  I went to see an early showing of Star Trek with the majority of the Seattle hobby game industry (thanks to Dan Tibbles, CEO of Bucephalus Games).  It was fantastic and fun (though in my opinion not as good a reboot as the first Christian Bale Batman), and was a truly ridiculous experience when seen in a theater crowded with RPG and board game designers.

I won’t spoil anything, but was anyone else horribly disappointed with the Kobayashi Maru sequence?  I mean after all that build up throughout the years (no…I did not just expose my secret Star Trek fandom….)

Sudoku

I guess this goes on the confession list: I try to play one difficult board of Sudoku a day.  Rarely do I actually get the time to, but I try.  I sorta bought into the Nintendo marketing, “It keeps the mind young”.

FC3 Plus

This thing is the coolest thing ever.  For 50 bucks I picked up an FC3Plus, it’s a device that plays Nintendo, Super Nintendo and Genesis games.  I’m recently been found trying to power through Shadowgate without a FAQ.  If I ever get that task accomplished I’m onto some Shining Force.

All Good Things

(Bonus points if you got the Star Trek reference)

So there, you have the list of most of the games I’ve been playing of late: Today I Die, Path, Dawn of War 2, Plants Versus Zombies, Shadowgate and some Sudoku (I’ve also been playing some Elven Legacy recently), but I really wanted to wrap this up with a rant. 

I run into game developers all the time who “don’t play videogames”.  Call me old fashioned, but to me this is unacceptable.  I don’t even understand it, no matter what discipline you’re in this industry doesn’t pay well given the time and effort required to do this job, so why do it if you don’t love the medium? 

But it’s more than that: I tend to find employees who don’t play games lack reference that make communication easier and, more importantly, they don’t have as sizable a repository of examples to draw from when tackling unforeseen problems.  Thismeans less interesting, less polished games.

Play games with an eye to your discipline, but, for god sakes, play games!

Write me:

[email protected]

[If you want to catch up with my latest adventure...or just read another cool site about everything games related...check out gameculture.com.]