GLS #5: Doing Development-Led Research in Games from itucph on Vimeo.
"Four years of counting barrels in 'Doom'"... an interesting First Person Gaming talk by Daniel Pinchbeck. He clearly loves his subject, and challenges the notion that you can't be a fan and an academic (and Senior Lecturer in Creative Technologies at Portsmouth University). I'm finding just studying Games to be getting harder. I would never spend four years counting barrels (and other details in a game), but that's what it feels like. And if I'm already writing about them, how can I get further into them?
I now see several Games innovators that I feel are well worth following up, so I will try to play their games AND write them up in the next blogs... just don't expect them to be Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Games...
I intended to attach a screen-shot here of the top rated games on a MMORPG gameslist, but since it gets updated all the time, check it yourself. All but one in the top ten is fantasy or SciFi... there is another category that crops up occasionally: 'Real Life', but it isn't...
For me, the list made for grim reading... I had to chose one and didn't want to spend night after night dithering about just starting... The stuff on there is offering no credible narrative or real difference except to dedicated genre freaks. So pick one at random and engage... Fail! Mac users aren't so well served even reading the FAQs it wasn't good news. The pic below was 40 minutes in (3%) and still going nowhere...
I logged in and began more than three, just because I seemed to get something wrong at a really basic stage... and in typing in the details I already felt like a trespasser.
Plus, the only game I wanted to play is in development (an MMORPG version of Battlestar Galactica), and maybe I was to honest with my details in the application for testers!! Hmmm...
The chat between players is constant, but for an outsider pure drivel, and in code, I began as a trespasser, now I was feeling like something far more sinister. They had things to say - but I had nothing to show for my three hours and my inadequacy was pretty unappealing to the World. I was a wallflower, and I didn't want to be patronised. I regretted all my choices and fancied getting into a time-based arts mindset. Build a random wall and face a chair in front of it and watch the clear sky whoosh above it. (I wandered off for a while and read about actual examples of this abstraction.. and if I wasn't wasting bandwidth here in the land of Elves I could be exploring them on Half Life).
The quality and flexiblity of play are of a far higher standard than I would have guessed at, but most of these high-end graphics are wasted on hackneyed old rubbish. I really hated it! Mind you, I had to "come down" with a puzzle game to decompress so maybe I was just hopeless at the stupid game I chose. Besides, I'm an only child, I'm used to playing on my own.
The other issue I had (and this goes to the heart of all digital content) is who pays and how? This isn't the time for me to engage in the free/not free debate, unfortunately. This is about how paying for stuff takes up too great a percentage of the playing experience. I'm happy to pay for content in many areas (and put up with banners and sponsors logos without too much of a moan) but some of this experience is like entering a cinema and being asked for a strip search. And once inside, having the projectionist pausing the film at key moments while the usher shakes a money box in my face. You simply can't have a complex relationship with the game or with any other players unless you invest huge amounts of time, and I guess, money. You can't build your pretty castle or your army on day one, or day two, or day three (I made day one), and for that reason I'm not coming back. This doesn't prevent millions of others building castles and armies and paying and playing on, but I was left fuming at the chiseling.
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