I also spoke with Games For Change about my recent title “Passing the Ball.” They asked some interesting questions about mood and interactive storytelling. You can read the interview on their blog. I understand they’ll be posting a part 2 soon with an interview with some of the GDC Online folks who commissioned the game!

Nico Bellic was drawn to America by his cousin’s stories of wealth and comfort. A life without killing or pain, where things were easy and nothing hurt.

The main characters and relationships in the game are endearing in a dark way. The graphics were quite nice, especially when compared to the previous game in the series, GTA: San Andreas, which my wife is playing right now. The amount of detail in the city and the number of things one can do are amazing.

In reality, life in Liberty City was a struggle. It was the same cycle of steal, kill, flee as before, except in an unfamiliar place where everything is harder and everyone is a stranger. No respect and no opportunities. And always the need for money.

But the game isn’t interesting. The gameplay is the same as previous games, with clumsier driving and walking and slightly better shooting. The missions are more restrictive than ever. In GTA III, you could cleverly solve missions by blocking an escape route with a car or planting a bomb in a target’s truck. In most of GTAIV‘s missions, you must use this car and go here, and then the guy will escape in a cutscene that removes any obstacles, and then you must chase him across the city and he’s impossible to catch and then he flees on foot and you confront him in another cutscene. And if you screw up at any point, you need to start the mission over because we don’t have any checkpoints.

Nico slowly learned something about America. America had a vision of itself: rich, easy, luxurious. And it forced you to pursue that vision. Everyone pursued that vision. Even if you wanted to do something else, be someone else, you couldn’t. You needed money. And you had certain talents that were valued, even when you weren’t valued as a person.

This is one of those games where the developers have crafted this world and this game that they’re incredibly (and rightfully!) proud of, and then realize with dismay that some grubby player is going to get her grubby fingerprints all over it. So they do their damnedest to make sure the player can’t interfere with their lovely work. Any place that the player could screw up the game with her insistence on cleverness, they stop that shit.

And when you got money, it corrupted you. It hurt you. Money made you crazy, bought you drugs that tear you apart, got you in debt, got everything you love set on fire. You needed the money, but the money ruined you.

In the end, once I moved on to the game’s second safehouse, I gradually lost interest. The mission structure sprawls out and the characters are less interesting, and I became less invested in Nico Bellic’s “I’m a man full of guilt who wants a different life yet I don’t even blink when you tell me to kill folks” routine. I simply realized that I didn’t want to play any more. So I stopped.

And so Nico walked away. Got on a boat, a bus, a plane, and went somewhere else where he didn’t need to kill for money. Nico just stopped.

The good folks behind GDC Online, a professional conference for connected gaming, commissioned me to create a game for Web Wise Kids. Web Wise Kids is a really cool non-profit that provides curriculum materials and classroom video games for parents and teachers that focus on teaching kids to be their own first lines of defense against digital threats. They help prepare kids to avoid online bullying, viruses, and dangerous adults by teaching them how to safely surf the web and use other digital technologies. They use their own games to educate kids and encourage safe behavior without a lot of fear-mongering. You can donate to Web Wise Kids here.

I tried to make this game communicate a concept about how to protect kids by using game mechanics. I’m usually a story-focused person, but game rules are a great way to make a statement about the way the world works. I hope that you’ll play the game until you win, get the message I was trying to convey, and maybe even donate to Web Wise Kids!

Play “Passing the Ball” at GDC Online.

Are you using Tweensy for easy programmatic Flash tweening? You should be.

Did you know that when Flixel loses focus and pauses, Tweensy doesn’t automatically pause? You should. It can cause some weird behavior.

I’ve figured out a simple fix that pauses Tweensy when Flixel doesn’t have focus. I just did it, so be aware that there may be some unexpected consequences of this that I don’t know about.

Put the following in your main class that extends FlxGame:

override protected function onFocus(FlashEvent:Event = null):void
{
    super.onFocus(FlashEvent);
    Tweensy.resume();
}

override protected function onFocusLost(FlashEvent:Event = null):void
{
    super.onFocusLost(FlashEvent);
    Tweensy.pause();
}

And that’s that. When Flixel pauses due to lost focus, Tweensy will as well, and when Flixel resumes, so will Tweensy. Just make sure you don’t get the “pause” and “resume” flipped; I did at first, and I couldn’t figure out what the hell was wrong.

I also have “Games I’ve Played” (but not finished) and “Games I Probably Won’t Finish” on that page. Looking at them tells a lot about my game preferences. For example, I’m reluctant to stick with very hard or very long games, especially if they’re older console titles (Super Mario Bros.). And I generally don’t care for “real-time strategy” games. I don’t like having to plan and out-think an opponent while also managing low-level real-time play. I’m lousy enough at strategizing as it is; I don’t need added distractions.

This list also feels very short. It seems like there should be many, many more games on it. I’ve certainly left out a lot of games I’ve played emulated (Final Fantasy VI) and many games that I’ve only played demos of (Rocket Jockey, to pick one totally at random). There are a lot of games out there, and I’ve played a lot of them. But still nowhere near a majority.

If Babies Dream was, alchemically-speaking, a chunk of carbon, Looming is Weir’s lapis noster. Visually, it is perhaps the simplest of his achievements… Oddly enough, the monotony of the presentation, alongside the soundtrack of howling winds and weird, croaking wildlife, helps to evoke exactly the sense of loneliness and isolation that the name of this realm, “Looming,” suggests. And with no fancy textures to distract the eye, Looming’s colossal broken gears and Apatosaurus-sized rib bones can’t help but arouse a fundamental awe… and fear.

I recommend you check it out.

An awkward play on words, ladies and gentlemen. I do like how I had characterized Brynne enough to know her vocal fillers. And I suppose the Featureless White Void is as good a place as any to discuss relationships with your roommate.

Everyone who’s lived with roommates knows what an extra pair of shoes outside the door means. In some cultures, it’s a sock on the doorknob, but that’s a bit of a stretch for a simple message.

Some backstory on the universe. The bombs fell in 2077, in a world themed around the paleofuture of the 1950s. The original Fallout starts in 2161, 84 years after the War. At this point, the US Southwest is in ruins with most people living in fortified farming, trading, or raiding communities. Fallout 2 takes place in 2241. Most settlements in the US Southwest have been rebuilt from a combination of scraps and new materials. There’s a shiny place called Vault City with trees and clean buildings, a democratic republic in California, and two different organizations with advanced technology.

What Bethesda Did

Fallout 3 takes place across the country in the ruins of Washington, DC in 2277. 200 years after the bombs fell, many DC buildings are still standing. People live in filthy, makeshift towns made entirely of ruins and rusty scrap with litter on the floors of their houses. There are no farms in the game. The only sources of food seem to be some cave fungus, a single experimental hydroponics lab, mutant animal meat, and whatever gets scavenged from the ruins. And yet the ruins are simply full of food. Mashed potatoes, snack cakes, and canned meat sit on shelves and are no more irradiated than the water people drink.

This is hard to believe.

Read the rest of How Fallout 3 Should Have Been...

[Narrative creates] a form of interactive storytelling that I would say constitutes gameplay as much as anything else in games does. In some games, you click on the enemy soldier and the enemy soldier dies, removing an obstacle to victory. In my games, you click on an object and it gives you a description, removing an obstacle to understanding.

This is a very important point, and it deserves further exploration. Most games have a structure composed of a cycle of actions and rewards. You do something you’re supposed to do, and the game rewards you. Classic positive reinforcement. These rewards can be in the form of points (or money, etc.) but they’re most effective in the form of content. If you beat this boss, you get to see the next level. If you pass this test, you get to advance to the next grade. If you explore a side path, you get to see a cool room. If you examine this object, you get a cute joke.

These things are all analogous. There’s different scales to the rewards, but the 3XP you get for killing a rat is analogous to the 20 gamer points you get for an achievement is analogous to the ending cinematic you get for defeating the final puzzle. The challenge may vary, and the reward may vary, but the mechanism is exactly the same. Most games are machines that dispense rewards (i.e. pleasure) when you press the right button.

Kyratzes’s games (especially The Book of Living Magic and Desert Bridge) tend to have a ton of side content like object descriptions that aren’t part of the main beat-the-game path to the end. They have a collection of trickier critical-path puzzles or challenges, and then a lot of incidental rewards that are provided in response to easy actions. This is just like, say, Diablo, which has a set of tricky battles punctuated by a lot of walking around, killing minor monsters, and smashing barrels. In games like Kyratzes’s, you click on the right thing and instead of a spray of gold coins you get a joke or an insight into the world.

I go back and forth on pixel art. A lot of people regard it as amateurish: a way to compensate for lack of drawing ability. Others dismiss it as nostalgia for childhood games. I think that there’s bad pixel art and amazing pixel art, and while there’s definitely nostalgia there, that very nostalgia can be useful for artistic purposes. My own pixel art isn’t anywhere close to the quality that many artists achieve, of course, but I think it’s passable for my purposes.

Pixel art is visual video game shorthand for an array of things: childishness, simplicity, or even a sort of wisdom born from history. It’s also the video game equivalent of cartooning. Pixel art stylizes and pointillizes, making its subjects more universal and accessible. It’s also a deliberate acknowledgement of the artificiality of the device being used. In a time where the iPhone’s Retina display resolution is at the upper limits of the human eye, pixel art exposes the underlying structure of the screen.

Anyway, enough rambling. Check out the interview, and read some of the other stuff on the site; there are a lot of cool things there! He also included some previously-unseen pieces of concept art and miscellany behind a link at the end of the article, if you’re interested.

I think this would have been after the break between winter and spring semesters, sometime in February. The Thorn was published on Friday mornings, so Brynn would have missed at least four days of classes.

Not much to say about this one.

One of the interesting aspects of this game is that it’s really not about the story. Most of Kyratzes’s games are heavily storied; either you’re participating in or uncovering story (usually both). In this, however, you’re just exploring the world. The puzzles are simple and rather oddball, and your player character doesn’t make her personality very known. Instead, you’re meeting strange creatures (like Provatica the Unhefted, sheep adventurer) and visiting strange locales (like the Forest of Eyeballs). As one of Kyratzes’s games set in the Land of Dream, everything is appropriately surreal and dreamlike.

There are bits of darkness that pop out, though. Something happened to change Raven Locks Smith’s parents from dreamers to boring people, and it must be related to Mr. Urizen, Mayor of Dull, a recurring entity in Kyratzes’s works. A robot you meet is on the run from a government determined to turn him into a soldier. And the countryside around the town of Oddness Standing clearly has a long and often-solemn history that’s only hinted at in the game.

Play it. It’s short, it’s funny in a way that few games are, and it comes from the heart.

In some ways, it’s a historical aberration. If Gygax and Arneson had made some war-focused game instead of Counts and Courtship, or Will Crowther had decided to entertain his kids with his obscure caving hobby instead of an exploration of his childhood friendships, perhaps the focus of our games would be different. Doom wouldn’t have been an oddball niche title if there were a hundred other games at the time about shooting aliens with guns.

But I think there’s a more fundamental issue at work here: violence and action are really difficult to simulate, unlike simple relationships.

Read the rest of Why So Few Violent Games?...

While we’re waiting, a bit of background: The Stanley Parable is a game by Davey Wreden made in the Source Engine. It requires some form of the Source 2007 engine to play, which you have if you own Half-Life 2.

The Stanley Parable, for all its exploration of interactivity and choice and video games, isn’t actually interactive at all when you get right down to it. Yes, it has six endings and branching and all that. But as with many games with multiple endings, as soon as you tell the player that they exist, she wants to view them all. And especially with Stanley‘s left-or-right, red-or-blue choice structure, trying out the choices exhaustively is trivial.

Read the rest of The Non-Interactive Stanley Parable...

Some tests were just rough for everyone involved. There was also this weird phenomenon where tests would have typos noted on the board. Sometimes these were major issues!

This comic was done for our April Fools issue, the Thron. It was done by one of the humor writers. I have no comment.

There’s a club fair at the beginning of each school year, of course, to recruit members for various campus organizations. Junior year, the SGA had a great idea: do a winter club fair too, to recruit people who discovered they had extra time or were looking to check out new groups. Unfortunately, they did a better job of informing the clubs than informing the students at large. As a result, despite free candy, no one really came. It was a sad room full of dejected people sitting around foamboard displays, like a science fair where the judges decided not to show.

Continuity error in panel 3.

I think the winter snowball fight comics are my favorites.

Brynne doesn’t snowball-fight, I think. And Cassie’s never been good at telling when people would rather not have frozen water thrown at their face. Cthulhu can tell, of course; he just doesn’t care.

Personal projects were common at Rose; I had a roommate that would build complex Lego robots that performed tasks that strained the bonding forces of the bricks themselves. Another roommate built his own server rack and coded up a service that provided a browser homepage full of quick links. I played around with game development and coded some interactive fiction. I’m a bit distrustful of a computer scientist or engineer who’s never worked on a side project.

I make an all-too-easy mistake in this comic. It doesn’t make any sense that Brynne is surprised by Cassie’s spider legs. Just because the reader can’t see them doesn’t mean Brynne can’t, and it’s hard to believe that she’d miss it. I should have put Cassie in the bathroom or behind a closed door or something.

Sam’s Club was a mainstay for many college students. By junior year, I’d already become familiar enough with Wal-Mart’s business and employee practices to choose not to shop at either of the corporation’s brands. Still, it was a very popular store, and resulted in students coming home with tubs of cheese puffs the size of a freshman.

In retrospect, it might have been funnier to have Brynne be the one who bought the pig’s blood.

And two months in, the new cast finally meets the old cast. The junior-year transition was a bit of a Wizard of Id moment for the strip, when it became sort of divorced from its foundational concept. Id is named after its wizard, which became less of a focus of the strip over the years. In a similar way, The Absolute Sum of All Evil‘s title refers to Cthulhu, who is quite evil. Neither Brynne nor Cassie is really evil, despite Brynne’s growing desire for revenge. I think I figured out a decent balance of the two casts by the end of the strip.

It’s also worth noting that Cthulhu is evil, but not always malicious. His is a distant, uncaring evil, where given the option between helping you and hurting you he will choose harm, but doesn’t care enough about you to choose a particularly painful sort of harm. Human-type people are less fundamentally evil, but are capable of far more acute bouts of malice.

When there’s something you dislike, the last thing you want is to be reminded of it, over and over and over. In an environment where people tend to have a bit of trouble reading social cues (and you probably have a bit of trouble giving them those cues), it can be even worse.

Bathing was often an issue at Rose. Students who tend to be geeky, less socially-adjusted, and stressed don’t put as high of a priority on hygiene.

Sometimes I didn’t plan speech balloons too well.

Fantasy races are kind of preposterous when you think about them. There’s the short people, the pretty people, and the people who are dragons. Of course, Brynne must know about elves and dwarves and such; you don’t become Wiccan or major in Black Magic without a healthy childhood obsession with fantasy literature. Let’s just assume she’s screwing with Cassie here.

Rose-Hulman’s first co-ed class of freshmen enrolled in 1995. Sexism was as rampant as it was on many campuses; girls were evidently only there to get married, or maybe the school used different standards for women, or she must be sleeping with the professor because she can’t be that smart. It was perhaps worse that most of these things were said jokingly. Few men seriously accused women of being lesser students, but the jokes and remarks were incessant and pervasive.

On the occasion of the 10-year anniversary celebration of this event, the Flipside was co-ed themed. In addition to cartooning, I edited the Flipside, the humor page of the Thorn. I had the difficult job that issue of making jokes about coeducation and sexism without the jokes themselves being sexist. Every issue had a Top Ten List, always full of ridiculous or satirical items. That issue’s was the “Top Ten Reasons Coeducation Was a Bad Idea.” It was intended to satirize the ridiculous arguments against coeducation and included items like “Women always getting pregnant, menstruating” or “Female upper-body strength insufficient to carry bookbags.” We got a letter to the editor about that one.

Family Circus is one of my least favorite comics. It’s aggressively inoffensive, and it’s one of the tragic examples of a work being passed on from parent to child as if it were some sort of sequential art dynasty. The comic never had more to it than “aren’t childish malapropisms cute?” Its only redeeming feature is the occasional Sunday comic depicting Billy’s dotted-line path of mayhem through the neighborhood.

From time to time, I would half-jokingly tear a particularly bad Family Circus from the paper I was reading, to prevent any heirs of that particular newspaper from having to read it.

Baur-Sames-Bogart Hall, or BSB, is a three-story residence hall on campus. For two years, I (and Cthulhu) lived in the basement next to the radio station. The top three floors were used to house freshmen; the third floor was women-only, while the other two were for men. BSB and the other freshman dorms had a lot of wall paintings in the hallways; it was traditional to paint something and leave it behind for posterity. I have no idea what that painting there is, but it kind of looks like the Screw Attack powerup from Metroid.

A lot of people are upset about this.

At first I was really confused about how angry people were acting, even accounting for the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Valve had put together a cool set of puzzles, offered a bunch of indie games for cheap, and then actually gave players a real-world reward for playing. However, I’ve realized that the displeasure the ARG created is due to a classic problem in game design: miscommunication leading to false expectations.

Read the rest of PO(r)TA(l)T(w)O...

The game asks you to follow a character from infancy to old age, making choices along the way. Infancy makes you crawl around your house as a baby getting toys before your sibling, in an odd exploration platformy way. Adulthood has you balancing love and work; I’m glad that they didn’t make this drag on too long. Shades of “Every Day the Same Dream” here. Old age, at least in the ending I got, was more of a little vignette to cap off the choices made in the rest of the game.

Looking up at my description, this game sounds like a mixing-together of various art games, and it’s definitely inspired by the work others have done before, but the polish and design in “Convergence” makes it feel fresh. Definitely something to check out for fans of blocky pixel games about life and choices.

There was a ghastly rule for pet ownership in the dorms at Rose: the pet had to be “flushable.” In other words, if it died, it needed to be possible to dispose of it down the toilet. I’m sure the official rule was gentler: “small pets only,” say. Very few people had pets, though. It’s a bit rude to keep a pet with a roommate unless it’s something like a fish that’s silent and rather odorless.

Don’t ask me what’s up with the perspective on the background. Let’s just pretend that Tony’s fell aura is distorting the very laws of space and time.

And the new year begins. This comic would have appeared in the Freshman Issue of the Thorn. Freshmen got an abbreviated issue of the paper in their orientation packets, which presented an interesting problem for my comic; I had to introduce readers to the comic without leaving anything out for non-Freshmen. Additionally, I was shifting the focus of the comic this year, which made it trickier. Finally, I just went for a quick cast intro. At this point, I evidently decided that the Civil Chick (Cthulhu’s name, not mine) was a major character. Absent are Cthulhu’s former roommates: the hapless guy and the grumpy Christian.

Cassie and Brynne are the first named characters in the strip. Cassie’s hairdo got simplified from this design; it was too overwrought. A triple major was not unheard of; more than one student in my year pursued such a feat. CS/EE/ME is a decent way to go. I don’t think you were allowed to do Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Electrical Engineering. Too much overlap there for them to justify awarding three separate Bachelor’s.

There was no Black Magic degree program at Rose. It was strictly a minor. I took some artistic license.

F.E.A.R. was an odd game for me. The shooting part was fun and pretty and it was just the right amount of difficulty (or sometimes a bit too hard), but the rest of the game was… not very interesting. The horror elements rarely grabbed me, the story was almost pastiche, and the dramatic twists were clear to me after the first level. That’s not even bringing up one of the most offensive video game characters in recent memory. Hey, it’s a fat guy! And he’ll get bumbling clown music! And you’ll know that you’re about to meet him again when you see food wrappers scattered around. Seriously.

So while F.E.A.R. is technically advanced for its time and well-designed from a gameplay perspective, I was ready for it to be over about halfway through. And that’s never a situation you want a player to be in.

Cthulhu eats/exploits people. Featureless White Void. And an end to my sophomore year.

When I returned to cartooning in the fall, I realized that I’d hit a bit of a rut with the comic. Year 3 will start with a rather drastic shift in focus.

Read the rest of TASOAE: 049...

I loved you once, split-toed dirt-swimmer. These idols are the bones of wonders. Why should the sun claim the land any more than the sea?

Play Beneath the Waves at Armor Games.

Read the rest of Beneath the Waves Released...

• 15 puzzles done out of a projected 30
• 49 NPCs; the final game may have over 75
• 248 lines of dialogue out of perhaps 400 or more

This is sort of what I was talking about a month and a half ago with respect to the cost of content. I’ve done very little in-depth programming on this game. Most of the time has been spent writing dialogue and hooking up the logic between the various NPCs. To be sure, this is still coding, and it can be interesting and tricky, but it feels a bit daunting.

“Ossuary” has no procedural content, so every minute of playtime the player experiences is the result of ten or thirty or sixty minutes of my development time. There’s a concept in film called cutting ratio that measures how much footage is filmed compared to how much ends up in the final movie. A cutting ratio of ten-to-one is perfectly acceptable. In game development, even if you never discard any code, there’s still an incredible concentration of developer time into player time.

Campus beautification was the event where clubs and other campus groups were encouraged to help out with planting flowers, trimming bushes, and other activities.

I’m not sure the joke in this comic comes across. Cthulhu’s idea of “beauty” is to install something the human mind cannot comprehend.

Games discussed:
• Alan Wake by Remedy Entertainment
• “Babies Dream of Dead Worlds” by Gregory Weir
• Perfect Cell by Mobigame

The music for this episode is “The Temple” by Out of Orion and is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike License.

This podcast is certainly not a complete discussion of the topic, so please leave any input or feedback in the comments section.

Assassin(s) (also called Killer or Paranoia, according to Wikipedia) is a game that the Residence Hall Association organized every year. It’s sort of a complicated version of Tag. Participants were assigned a “victim,” and had to then “kill” that victim by tagging them and saying a code phrase (I believe it was “RHA Assassination!”). Apparently, this sort of game has become more popular over the years (this comic was drawn in 2005), with a current variant being Humans vs. Zombies, which turns the game team-based and has an interesting escalation-of-danger mechanic. I can just imagine how stressful it would be to be one of the last humans “alive.”

2. Fortitude

2.1: Joining the Knights of the Five-Sided Temple

In order to gain access to the temple, you will need to get past the outer gate. Speak to the outer gatekeeper and tell him you are a FRIEND. He will let you through.

Speak to the Recruitment Officer in the western tower and ask him about himself (“ABOUT YOU”). He will mention that he doesn’t want to be greedy about getting a better position. Sounds like a way in, but we’re not yet corrupted by Greed.

Speak to the inner gatekeeper. He doesn’t want to let you in, but it sounds like he’s a bit overworked. Corrupt him with the sin of Sloth. He’ll sit down to rest and let you in.

Speak to the Lieutenant on the west side of the keep. He’ll say he’s happy, but keep asking him “REALLY?” until he confesses that he wants the commander’s position. You’re now corrupted with the sin of Greed. Go back to the Recruitment Officer and corrupt him with Greed. He’ll admit that he’s always wanted to be a drill sergeant, and ask you to speak with the commander on his behalf.

The commander is in the center of the south wall of the keep. Talk to him about the RECRUITER, and he’ll ask that you check with the Temple Clerk about the recruiter’s experience. Go to the Temple Clerk and talk to him. He sure doesn’t seem to appreciate the effort that the Recruitment Officer puts in! If only you had a sin that made people understand the viewpoints of others.

Corrupt the Temple Clerk with the sin of Envy. He’ll admit that he’s envious of the Recruitment Officer’s experience in his job, and that he deserves a promotion. Inform the Commander, who will ask you to inform the Recruitment Officer. Return to him, and he’ll enlist you as his final act in his old job.

What do you think? Too convoluted? Not convoluted enough? Any suggestions?

Burnout Paradise

Recently, I’ve resumed playing Criterion Games’s Burnout Paradise, an open-world car stunt and racing game. When you start a game of Burnout Paradise, you’re greeted at the pre-menu loading screen with the opening bars of Guns N’ Roses’s song “Paradise City.” This song plays through the menu experience, and continues to play even when you start the game. The song always plays once when you start, and then the game’s background music proceeds to whatever selection it’s picking from.

“Paradise City” serves as a theme song, marking the transition from the “real world” to “game space.” Because you hear the song every time you play, it serves as an almost Pavlovian trigger. The song becomes associated with the fun and the action of the game, so it helps to put you in the mood for the game as soon as you start it up.

Alan Wake

Remedy Entertainment’s Alan Wake has a structure that also lends itself to a transition into the game space. Instead of levels or sections, Alan Wake is divided into “episodes.” Each episode ends with a large “end of episode” message, a credits song, and usually a cliffhanger. The next episode then starts with a “last time on Alan Wake” montage, reviewing the story so far. This helps keep the player up-to-date on the (somewhat convoluted) plot and helps to break up the game.

This technique would be even more effective if it were incorporated into the game’s start-up experience. When an episode ends, it presents a natural stopping point, but the player is instead sent directly into the next episode. Instead, the developers should have returned the player to the main menu, to view the new episode-related main menu background and manually start the next episode. This way, the end of an episode would encourage the player to transition back to the real world, and it would be more natural to resume the game before the review montage instead of just afterward.

Tales of Monkey Island

It would be especially effective if Alan Wake dynamically generated a review montage every time the game started, showing the current episode’s intro and then short clips of what had been accomplished so far. Telltale Games’s Tales of Monkey Island episodic game series does this in text form; the game greets you with a short review of the story so far to welcome you to the game experience. With Alan Wake‘s greater development time and budget, it could have contained a video form of the same idea.

Too often, games make the start-up process and menu system an afterthought. While a game might be stylistically excellent, the initial user experience is frequently marred by long unskippable sponsor logos or simple, dull menus. It can be jarring to move from a spartan main menu into a rich game world. Instead, games should take a lesson from Burnout Paradise, Tales of Monkey Island, and Alan Wake: welcome the player into the game space from the moment the application starts, and make the menu experience one that facilitates the transition into the world of the game.

Rose had a series of mailing lists for e-mail, based on each dorm, each major, each class year, and so on. The most dangerous of these was all.campus. All.campus was delivered to all of campus. Faculty, staff, students, maybe even people who lived nearby. I believe there were rudimentary posting restrictions, but I’m pretty sure that any faculty or staff could post to the list without moderation required.

So when someone announced on all.campus that there were free kittens in the Japanese Garden, and then quickly retracted the offer (were the kittens too young to be separated from their mother? I forget.), it was sent to everyone. When they sent a second message to make sure, it was sent to everyone. And when a professor replied in order to tell the original sender not to send an e-mail to everyone, it was sent to everyone.

The list probably should have been more heavily moderated.

This was a problem at Rose, for me and other students. It was an insular environment, and it was entirely too easy to never leave campus except to replenish your supplies of ramen, soda, and snack food. The city of Terre Haute didn’t make it much easier; it wasn’t the sort of place that had a lot of date options, especially for socially-inexperienced geeks. Often, the most culturally-interesting performances took place at the big auditorium on campus, and it lacked a certain romantic quality to take a date to a classical concert a stone’s throw from your dorm room and then on a walk down the mosquito-infested path to the second, lousier baseball diamond.

I am a geek: a person inclined to get excited over the minutia of a topic or topics. One of the ways I manifest this is by being a foodie. I enjoy the history, science, and craft of food preparation and consumption. Food has more in common with games than one might think. In fact, everything about food can be appreciated in the same way as a game.

The first-world way we approach food fundamentally a luxury. We need to eat, but our basic needs can be taken care of by any number of inexpensive and simple foods. The countless choices available at a grocery store and the multitude of preparations are frivolous from the perspective of our pre-technological ancestors or even from the perspective of a less-well-off third- or second-world citizen.

That means that my grocery experience was only a short hop away from being a game.

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We had some sort of sportball tournament against a school named DePauw my sophomore year. Someone — the SGA? a fraternity? — had the bright idea to craft shirts that said “DePauw Sucks.” You know, for the school spirit and sportsmanship. This bothered a lot of the faculty.

There’s a generational divide here, I think. For people my age, saying something “sucks” is generally a harmless insult. I try not to use it anymore, because it’s rooted in some unpleasant homophobic and sex-negative concepts, but it doesn’t cause a strong reaction in me. However, for people who are old enough, I get the impression that “sucks” is strongly associated with its roots; that is, every time a person of a certain age hears “sucks,” they think “sucks cock.” For my generation, “sucks” is a casual insult. For someone sufficiently older, it’s irredeemably vulgar.

So someone — the faculty? parents? a passing DePauw alumnus? — objected, as they probably should have. In response, the Powers That Be offered a deal: they would provide, free of charge, a shirt that said “Beat DePauw” in exchange for the “DePauw Sucks” shirts.

If you know anything about the obstinacy, rebelliousness, and willful vulgarity of college students, you can guess how well that was received.

I’ve had a shift in my gaming tastes over the years. There was a time when I most wanted story from my games; that is to say, a narrative, an interesting series of events that needed not be too interactive. These days, however, I’m most interested in character and setting; I want to be an interesting person and/or explore an interesting world. Oh, I still want a good story, but it’s now third on my list of priorities instead of first.

“Fine-Tuned” does an amazing job of letting you roleplay its characters. Miss Melody Sweet, the opera singer, is proper and polite yet independent and practical, and playing her is a pleasant joy. However, it’s Troy Sterling, a daredevil-for-hire(-in-training) and all-around likeable guy, who steals the show. There’s an early sequence where Sterling, controlled by the player, drives to town, pausing only to clean up litter, rescue a baby bird, and wave to a passerby. It’s a joy playing the cheery and friendly Sterling. Read along in this edited transcript:

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