Why GDC’s Parties May Be More Important Than the Talks [Well Played]

Last week San Francisco transformed, turning into something like the Hollywood Canteen, but for gamers. More

The Silicon Valley Canteen [Well Played]

Last week San Francisco transformed, turning into something like the Hollywood Canteen, but for gamers. More

Motion Control in Gaming: Rationalizing a New Dissonance [Well Played]

Everything changed in 2001 , the year Nintendo decided that the future of gaming didn’t lie in faster processors and photorealistic images, but in interaction. Years later, when the Wii hit stores, it brought gaming and motion control to the masses, showing grandparents, gamers and soccer moms that video games didn’t have to be high-def to be fun and that controlling your games without buttons could be as amusing as it looked. The Wii’s success with motion control kick-started efforts by both Microsoft and Sony to make better, more realistic motion controls for the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. But something happened the first time I tried out Microsoft’s high definition motion control system, Project Natal . Instead of waving a remote around wildly to smack a tennis ball or knock an in-game foe down with a digital sword, I found myself feeling disconnected from Microsoft’s controller-free experience. I realized, as I played around with the Project Natal prototype, due to hit stores this year, that I was spending more time examining the game’s reaction to my motions than I was having fun. I had stumbled upon a kinetic dissonance in motion control gaming. This disconnect between the game and the player was made worse, not better, by Project Natal’s more responsive controls. Until motion control is perfected, I realized, the pursuit to make it more precise in video games will result in titles that are less fun to play, not more. This concept of an uncomfortable disconnect, a foreign familiarity, isn’t new. In fact, Sigmund Freud had a word for it: Uncanny. And Roboticist Masahiro Mori used the term uncanny valley to describe the disconcerting reaction people had to robots as they became more human-like in their appearance. The uncanny valley, ironically, became one of the chief stumbling blocks for game developers trying to make games that approached the threshold of photorealism. The idea is that as a game becomes more realistic the emotional response people have to it dives, leaving people slightly repulsed, until the game finally delivers graphics that are perfectly realistic. To get around this, a game developer has to shoot for games that hit the peaks of either side of that uncanny valley, either by creating games that feature caricatures or completely realistic people. Now, it seems, developers escaping the unavoidable graphics journey through the uncanny valley have stumbled upon a new uncanny valley, one marked not by appearance, but by motion. And this kinetic dissonance isn’t just an issue for Microsoft and Sony, both of which promise technology that will deliver more precise, more realistic, motion gaming. Last year, Nintendo released an add-on for their motion-sensing remote designed to make the peripheral better at detecting movement. While more than a dozen games have already shipped for the new device, March will see the release of Ubisoft’s Red Steel 2 , a game that will likely define the potential of MotionPlus. Roman Campos Oriola, the game’s lead designer, says the team is well aware of the issues motion control faces in terms of quasi realism. “With motion a game is much more accessible for players” Oriola said. “The problem with motion is that you can quickly fall into the issue of having too much repetition or too much of a simulation.” If, he explains, they had decided to make the gun-shooting, sword-wielding gameplay of Red Steel 2 a perfect motion simulator it wouldn’t have felt right. “If you give too much to the player they might start to wonder why you don’t feel the weight of the sword or the knock back when you hit something,” he said. In other words, as the motion approaches realism, gamers began to pay more attention to the dissimilarities than the similarities. So Oriola and his team decided to design the game around that first peak approaching the uncanny valley of motion, instead of risking a journey through it. While Red Steel 2 has moments of one-to-one control, like when a player pulls out the sword while not in battle, the meat of the game, the action moments, instead rely on a caricature of motion. When a player slashes with the sword in combat, the game recognizes the direction and speed, but instead of using the exact pathway of the motion, it uses that data to trigger a pre-rendered animation. It’s not the sort of thing that a player will likely notice, but the result is a sort of cartoonish movement as opposed to a realistic one. “We have the technology to do one-to-one motion, but then you have that strange feeling of being too precise,” he said. Oriola says that Microsoft’s Project Natal, and Sony’s motion controller, which he called the Arc , offer a much wider variety of motion capturing than does the Wii. But he says he isn’t sure yet if that means that those two systems could deliver true motion that doesn’t feel uncanny. “So far I can’t tell, but for the Wii, going to a full, exact replication of movement is not the right way to do it,” he said. Aaron Greenberg, director of product management for Xbox 360 and Xbox Live, believes that Project Natal’s ability to see and track your entire body and then translate that into in-game movement lands their motion control safely on the other side of the uncanny valley. “I haven’t felt” a disconnect,” he said. “The types of experiences the team is focused on creating, the accuracy of them is pretty amazing. “If you really reall think about it, the beauty of this is that the technology disappears. We’ve been spending so many years, trying to teach more and more people how to use technology. Now we are teaching the technology how to learn humans.” But the best way to use motion control, Oriola believes, is for it to highlight whatever the “fantasy of your game” is. In Red Steel 2, that means the fantasy of being a samurai, of using a sword with broad, strong, quick slashes. If the team were to make a game about, say, fencing, it would be the precise wrist motions that deliver parries, counters and quick attacks. “In that game all of the stuff about power wouldn’t be interesting,” he said. ” They key is figuring out the line between the simulation and the fantasy.” The biggest risk motion control faces is that the paradoxical nature of that uncanny disconnect may lead gamers and developers to believe that the basic concept is flawed. In other words, if game developers get it wrong enough, people won’t want it anymore, no matter how good it eventually gets. Well Played is a weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

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Motion Control in Gaming: Rationalizing a New Dissonance [Well Played]

Love In Hell: Dante’s Inferno’s Take on Romance [Well Played]

While religion and an allegorical journey through a medieval hell remain the central themes of the video game adaption of Dante’s Inferno, an exploration of love and lust and what separates the two is nearly as important in the game. In both works, Dante Alighieri comes across different relationships in hell that ended poorly, from the lustful Cleopatra and Mark Antony, to the adulterous Francesca and Paolo; even Helen of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships, has her spot in hell. But in transforming the 14th century poem into a mainstream Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 title , developer Visceral Games overlaid a straightforward tale of love lost and a woman in distress upon the original work’s gruesome descriptions of hell’s seven circles. In the video game, Alighieri finds his way into hell not while contemplating suicide, but in search for the soul of Beatrice Portinari, Alighieri’s real-world love, who in the game he finds dead upon his return from the crusades. “Love is very much the primary motivation for the hero,” said executive producer Jonathan Knight. “He is morally bankrupt in so many ways, he has made a slew of bad choices. His love for Beatrice is possibly the only good he now finds within himself, and it’s what guides him on his quest. Without her, he is nothing.” Beatrice, gamers discover early on, has given her soul to Satan, depicted through most of the game as shifting gray smoke in the form of a nude man. And it is through Dante’s journey into hell, his visits to each of the underworld’s representations of seven carnal sins, that the poet warrior learns how his love came to hell and what part he had in her fall. The outcome of this secondary tale, told through animated flashbacks and conversations in hell with his forever fleeing Beatrice and Satan, paints a picture of the positive side of love: Romance, measured self-sacrifice, commitment and loyalty. But Dante’s journeys, and the decisions he made that lead to Beatrice’s sacrifice, give gamers a glimpse of love’s negative side. The game’s strongest cautionary tales about misguided love seem to be drawn from the classic poem and its depictions of the ring of hell destined for the lustful. As the hero wanders into this level of the game the architecture shifts from the hellish to blatant sexual imagery. Lust’s level is festooned with phallic columns and lewd carvings . The manifestation of this sin is depicted by lascivious female demons who mesmerize with red clouds that can envelope and hypnotize the hero, and attack with vulgar hip-thrusts. Lust’s final gate keeper, the level’s “boss” in video game parlance, is a building-sized, topless Cleopatra, whose obscene attacks end only after she calls upon her fallen lover Mark Antony to take out Alighieri. Antony is depicted as an absurdly broad-shouldered warrior, whose armor includes golden hands that tear the flesh away from the roman warrior’s eyes, blinding him. While not subtle, these manifestations of the worst bits of love do a good job of underscoring the subtleties of the game’s secondary Beatrice plot, which deals with many of the same problems of love. “We tried to tell a personal story of love, rescue, betrayal, and redemption,” Knight said. “And in doing so, I suppose we naturally hit on the ups and downs of Dante’s relationship to Beatrice and his family.” Ultimately the story of Dante’s Inferno becomes less about a cautionary journey through hell and more of a traditional tale of personal redemption, of love lost and the fight to regain it. Despite the sharp break from the source material that entails, Knight argues that the love story is fitting with Alighieri’s life and his unrequited love for Portinari. “I honestly don’t believe The Divine Comedy would have been as impactful as it was, if not for Beatrice and her role – both in the poem as his spiritual/romantic/feminine ideal, and also in real life as his muse,” Knight said. “She (along with Virgil) elevates the poem to something more than a treatise by Thomas Aquinas, which it might have otherwise been. She is the preamble to medieval courtly love. “Now obviously we have done the ‘action game’ version of that story, but it’s very much in the spirit of the real Dante story. ” Well Played is a weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

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Love In Hell: Dante’s Inferno’s Take on Romance [Well Played]

Game Developers See Potential, Not Gold Rush in Apple’s iPad [Well Played]

On its surface, Apple’s iPad may seem like a glorified e-book reader, but developers working on games for the system say they see within its extra-large screen and faster processor, great gaming potential . “Our creative teams are really just digging in and brainstorming ideas that the power and specs of the iPad might bring to life,” said Andrew Stein, director of mobile platforms for PopCap games , maker of Bejeweled and Peggle. “Nobody could have anticipated the huge blossoming of creativity engendered by the iPhone and iPod Touch and I think the iPad could easily take this to the next level.” The iPad is essentially an over-sized iPod Touch . The device features a 9.7-inch re-engineered multi-touch screen , a 1Ghz processor and 16GB to 64GB of storage. The device will be available either with WiFi only support or with the ability to connect to the Internet through a 3G AT&T cell service. The iPad, which hits this March, will sell for $500 to $830. Game developers looking to support the new device have two ways of doing so. Because the iPad will run the same sort of operating system as the iPhone and iPod Touch, it can also run the same apps built for those devices. But those apps will either have to run at their original, smaller size, or lose a bit of fidelity when they are artificially enlarged . Developers could also decide to develop games specifically for the device or to develop a higher-resolution version of their iPhone or iPod Touch games for the iPad. Firemint, which has a community of 6 million people playing their games Flight Control and Real Racing GTI, say they are already working on an “enhanced for iPad” version of Flight Control. “We want to do more than just up-size the art assets to the higher resolution,” said Alexandra Peters, Firemint’s community manager. “When we design a game we always think about the fundamental and unique qualities of the platform and how we can best work with those.” But, Peters says, they can’t forget that there are 75 million people with the iPhone and iPod Touch and currently zero with the iPad. “We wouldn’t be surprised if people line up at Apple stores around the world on the day iPad is released but even so, there’s a logistical limit to how quickly devices can be manufactured and sold, so it will take a while for the iPad installed base to ramp up,” he said. PopCap, despite its exuberance for the iPad and successes with the iPhone and iPod Touch, haven’t yet announced any games for Apple’s latest bit of gadgetry . “Apple has a tough act to follow in the iPhone and iPod touch – they really rewrote the book on portable gaming with those devices,” Stein said. “From a technical spec, the iPad looks like it could be a phenomenal gaming machine and I would expect games to be the leading revenue category of apps. Commercially, the iPad is in an interesting niche and we’ll have to see if Apple has hit another home run a la iPod and iPhone.” The team behind one of the iPhone’s most talked about gaming success, Trism, have no such doubts about the success of the iPad, they’re already at work on two titles for the device. Trism 2, a sequel to their best selling puzzle title, is being developed for both the iPhone and iPad and Trism Spinoff is being developed exclusively for the iPad, said Demiforce founder Steve Demeter. “Trism Spinoff is intended for a larger footprint device because of certain characteristics such as a higher count of trisms as well as an onscreen metagame,” Demeter said. “Trism 2 was originally going to be exclusively for iPhone and iPod Touch. However, when we realized it would be so easy to cross-compile apps for the iPad, we decided to do Trism 2 for it as well. It will look more resolute on the iPad, but other than that, it’ll be the same game.” Namco Networks were already thinking of what they would do with more screen real estate before the iPad was announced, now they’re moving forward on a number of their “concepts and plans,” said Jon Kromrey, general manager of Namco Networks Apple Games division. That includes updates to existing titles like Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man, which will get new capabilities and have social gaming features added, he said. And, Kromrey adds, Namco has a “big announcement” planned for March’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. iPhone game publisher Ngmoco think the device will push developers to make more substantial games for the iTunes Store. “It is easy to imagine that gamers will be more engaged and less snacky on the iPad,” said Simon Jeffery, Ngmoco chief publishing officer. “Games like Eliminate which are perhaps more time and focus intensive will benefit from couch play. We envisage that the iPad will take game time away from the frontline videogame consoles, and drive the usage of those devices to be yet more hardcore.” While more processing and screen space could mean more complex games, the feature developers seem most excited about is the iPad’s ability to allow the portable device to become a platform for multiplayer gaming. “It’s the perfect device to have in the lounge room,” Firemints’ Peters said. “There’s something very satisfying about a group of people sitting in a circle with a single shared focus point, whether it’s gathering around a camp fire, around the kitchen table or around an iPad. At the moment multiplayer games are physically distancing, either because you’re in completely different places as with (massively multiplayer online games), or because you are all facing a large screen instead of each other, as with lounge room consoles. Once a family has gathered around an iPad to play a board game, they are far more likely to try other kinds of games as well, so it could open up yet another huge new audience for all game developers.” Demiforce’s Demeter, Ngmoco’s Jeffery and Namco’s Kromrey also see the potential for single-device multiplayer gaming as the iPad’s biggest addition to the realm of portable gaming. “We are looking closely at extending the Mobile gaming experience to the couch in a transparent, frictionless way,” Jeffery said. “It’s important that one of our customers can get off the bus after playing an iPhone game and then pick it up again seamlessly on the couch.” Much of the iPhone’s surprising gaming success was driven by its ability to tap into a group of people who had never played or even considered playing games. Rather than cannibalize those customers, the iPad could achieve that a second time because the audience picking up this e-reader and video and music playing tablet are likely to be made up mostly of an entirely new audience. But Apple’s past successes have almost always been driven by its ability to stay focused on a single message, a single device. The iPad’s launch though, diffuses that message, coming at a time when the iPhone still enjoys rocketing success and the potential market needs convincing that they need a device that fits awkwardly between laptop and iPhone.

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Game Developers See Potential, Not Gold Rush in Apple’s iPad [Well Played]

CES 2010 Aims to Resurrect 3D [Well Played]

Las Vegas is a city of smoke and mirrors. It’s appropriate then that the biggest new innovation of sin city’s Consumer Electronics Show this year is itself a bit of visual slight of hand: 3D. Giving images a sense of substance and heft have long been a goal in video gaming. More than once, that has meant playing around with the idea of pumping graphics at gamers through glasses or peripherals meant to deliver an extra dimension. But there’s a reason they’ve never taken off. Often the 3D tech required wearing glasses to work, putting one more barrier between a gamer and the experience. What’s different this time around? Very little. Speaking to a gathering of media at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show, Sir Howard Stringer, Chairman, CEO and president of Sony Corporation, detailed the interest the multi-faceted company has in 3D, spending an hour pitching the technology and new Sony 3D TVs to the crowd. He showed us a Jimi Hendrix concert in 3D, sea turtles swimming in 3D and even brought singer Taylor Swift up to sing and be recorded and instantly rebroadcast in 3D. The heads of IMAX and Discovery promised us that the time was right for 3D on TV. The head of ESPN took to the stage to explain how FIFA and PGA were getting the 3D treatment. And it will be Sony’s  video game console, the PlayStation 3, that will bolster these efforts.  “The PlayStation 3 will be our foothold for bringing more 3D into the home,” Stringer said. “All of our existing PS3 units will be firmware upgradeable.” One upgrade to the console will allow the PS3 to display video games in 3D on supported TVs, another will upgrade the Blu-ray player to support 3D, he said. The mammoth CES Sony booth included playable versions of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue and Super Stardust HD. While Gran Turismo’s 3D visual added a bit of flair to the game, when seen in 3D, the high-speed racing title seemed to have a few visual issues. Super Stardust HD, on the other hand, used the 3D tech to give a sense of surprising depth to the Asteroids-like space shooter. The ship and the planet it floated over rotated in layers of graphics that appeared to drop away from the screen. But neither of the games playable in Sony’s booth was built from the ground up for the new technology. That is coming, though. “We are going to announce a [3D game] lineup soon,” said Sony hardware marketing director John Koller. “The first and third-party lineup is going to be substantial, it’s a pretty robust list of games…new IP, new franchises but also existing franchises [that] really kind of place the player in the game.” Sony may have been the only game maker at CES with so direct an interest in 3D gaming, but they weren’t the only ones showing off 3D video games.  Computer games have been chasing the 3D dream for decades using an odd collection of video cards, peripherals and special glasses.  This year’s CES included a new offering from graphics card maker NVIDIA that can be used by game developers to add 3D to a game. Capcom’s CES showing included a PC version of upcoming third-person shooter Dark Void. In the game, players zip through an alternate dimension shooting robotic aliens. Adding 3D to the mix gives the game an almost nausea-inducing level of realism.  Many of the television manufacturers packed into the Las Vegas Convention Center also used video games to show off their television’s ability to deliver 3D video. There were TVs showing off Gears of War 2, Batman Arkham Asylum and a video game based on Avatar. Some TVs used polarization, some used alternate-frame sequencing, some could add 3D to any video. But every one of them from LG’s to Panasonic’s to Sony’s technology, television or computer, have at least one similarity: They all require the viewer to wear glasses. Over the course of the week I tried on a dozen different 3D glasses. While some were more comfortable than others, I can’t imagine wanting to wear any of them on a regular bases. More importantly I can’t imagine that my wife and my son would be willing to pop on a pair of glasses every time they sit down to watch television.  It’s one thing to wear glasses while sitting still for a two-and-a-half hour movie at a theater, but introducing such an unreasonable bit of technology into the home seems like a bad idea. It seems like an even worse idea when you consider that the 2010 3D televisions could become obsolete in 2011 when Phillips hopes to introduce 3D televisions that don’t require glasses. Die hard early adopter that I am, I think I’ll be sitting this one out. Well Played is a weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.  

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CES 2010 Aims to Resurrect 3D [Well Played]

Oh What A Year [Well Played]

Staggering layoffs, a slew of delays, console price drops, promising new technology and two new gaming platforms: For fans of video games, 2009 was one heck of a roller coaster ride. Looking back over the past year in video games it’s surprising that so much good and so much bad happened in just 12 months. Perhaps the biggest news of the last year was that despite the teeth-gritting optimism of industry leaders, 2009 proved that video games are not actually recession proof . Console makers Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo all saw drops in sales and both Sony and Microsoft cut expenses and staff to deal with the losses. Electronic Arts, Activision and THQ all had deep cuts. Midway Games, founded in 1958 and once the U.S. distributor of Space Invaders, was shuttered. Other victims of the recession included Eidos, Atomic, GRIN and Microsoft Flight Sim makers ACES. The recession also lead to price cuts for all three major consoles, with the Playstation 3 , Wii and Xbox 360 all dropping in price. And not everything was doom and gloom for the industry in 2009. Apple finally got into gaming, realizing the potential of their iPhone and iPod Touch and seemingly single-handedly reinvigorated the mobile game market. Early in the year Nintendo released their DSi portable console . While the DSi includes two cameras and a microphone, the biggest change is its ability to download games directly to the device from an online Nintendo store. Sony’s PSPgo took that concept and ran with it, doing away with the disc drive entirely and making their latest portable a download-only device with gamers using the Sony store to purchase and install their games, television, comics and movies. While the Playstation 3, Wii and Xbox 360 all have the ability to purchase games online and download them directly to the console, Sony’s decision to go 100 percent download offered an interesting peek into what will surely one day be the norm. What that peek showed was an online system entirely too slow to handle quick purchase and playability and savvy retailers either reluctant or out right refusing to carry a device that could one day make them obsolete. Nintendo’s DSi, with only its toe in the water of downloadable content, managed to fare better than the PSPgo, though the download offerings for 2009 consisted mostly of previously released content broken up into smaller chunks and re-purposed. Fortunately for Nintendo, the company spent much of 2009 riding high on the Wii’s ability to grab the interest of non-gamers and get them to pick up a console. The Japanese developer’s Wii Fit fused exercise with gaming when it hit in 2008, and continued to garner attention last year. The second best selling video game in history, it wasn’t much of a surprise when Nintendo announced a sequel in 2009. While the release of Wii Fit Plus didn’t have the splash and sizzle of games like Modern Warfare 2 or Uncharted 2: Among Thieves , it did well enough to draw the attention of some major new retailers. In November, Sports Authority, the largest sports good retailer in the country, started selling the exercise game and the Wii console in a special section of their store. The Wii’s ability to attract an audience outside the norm seemed to have convinced both Sony and Microsoft that there was something to motion controls. Both companies announced projects they were working on to deliver motion-control gaming to their consoles. Sony’s still-unnamed motion controller uses a microphone-like wand and a camera to track movement, while Microsoft’s Project Natal will use just a camera and no controller to allow gamers to play titles without anything in their hands. Nintendo, meanwhile, concentrated on its lucrative portable market, announcing an over-sized version of their DSi called the DSi XL . The portable, which hit Japan in November but won’t be here until later this year, comes with an oversized stylus and larger screen with bigger type. Nintendo says the device is bigger so a group of people can gather around a game and play , but it looks more like something designed for an older audience. Not all of Nintendo’s efforts at innovation in 2009 involved their portables, Nintendo also unveiled a new help system. The Super Guide ’s ability to take over different difficult portions of a game and offer video tutorials could lead to a whole new way of gaming for casual gamers. Its appearance in New Super Mario Bros. Wii was met with some skepticism and apprehension , but the potential long-term impact of the concept can’t be argued. Now just a week into 2010 and the slate of last year’s titles pushed into this year are already starting to hit stores. The Consumer Electronics Show is preparing to kick-off, perhaps with some new gaming news, and developers seems eager to embrace a new year full of potential. Well Played is a weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

Continued here:
Oh What A Year [Well Played]

Terror at 30,000 Feet: Game-Free Transcontinental Flights? [Well Played]

I found myself doing something strange as I prepared for a 14 hour flight back to the United States this week: Buying games. While games have long been my time-waster of choice for the frequent international flights I take, it’s usually video games I stock up on. Not so for my Sydney to San Francisco flight. This time around I was hunting for pocket chess, little wooden brain teasers and magnetic backgammon. With the attempted bombing of a U.S.-bound Christmas Day flight and the heightened security that surrounded it, rumor quickly spread that one of the new rules for international flights bound for the United States might ban the use of all electronics. The very thought of not being able to access the library of books and video games stored on my iPhone, my DSi, my PSPgo put me in a near panic. So on the eve of my flight, my wife, son and I headed to an oddity in the Blue Mountains’ town of Hazlebrook west of Sydney. Selwood Science & Puzzles is housed in the Selwood House, an 1865 cottage wrapped in a garden of ferns and eucalyptus. The many rooms inside the old home are packed with the sorts of diversions and toys most familiar to children born before the rising popularity of video games and electronics. One room is dedicated to puzzles of metal and wood, board games big and small and a cornucopia of games featuring bits of plastic, dice, and magnets. There were pocket versions of chess, checkers and backgammon; bent nails nested in devious designs; decks upon decks of cards for games I had grown up playing and some I had never heard of. And not one of the hundreds, thousands of these games required a battery or electrical outlet to play. Other rooms were packed with science kits and experiments, books of brain teasers, IQ tests and short mysteries. If electronics, long the opiate for the masses of nervous fliers, find themselves device non grata for the near future, could these non-digital diversions be their replacements? Will flights start to resemble coffee shops with passengers hunkered around chess boards, games of Hearts and Dominoes raging in the back rows? Probably not, but it’s a reminder of how dependent some of us have become on the products of the digital age. Arriving at Sydney International Airport on Sunday I discovered little had changed in the wake of the latest attempted attack. I was assured, repeatedly, that electronics could be used during the upcoming flight. Not quite believing the reassurances I ducked into a bookstore to load up on the printed word, in case the digital one wasn’t available to me. The lines in the bookstore, the crowds milling through rows of paperbacks, made me think I wasn’t the only one fearing a last-minute, in-air electronics ban. For now I’ll keep the paperback and pocket chess at hand, just in case. Well Played is a weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

Originally posted here:
Terror at 30,000 Feet: Game-Free Transcontinental Flights? [Well Played]

Terror at 30,000 Feet: Game-Free Transcontinental Flights? [Well Played]

I found myself doing something strange as I prepared for a 14 hour flight back to the United States this week: Buying games. While games have long been my time-waster of choice for the frequent international flights I take, it’s usually video games I stock up on. Not so for my Sydney to San Francisco flight. This time around I was hunting for pocket chess, little wooden brain teasers and magnetic backgammon. With the attempted bombing of a U.S.-bound Christmas Day flight and the heightened security that surrounded it, rumor quickly spread that one of the new rules for international flights bound for the United States might ban the use of all electronics. The very thought of not being able to access the library of books and video games stored on my iPhone, my DSi, my PSPgo put me in a near panic. So on the eve of my flight, my wife, son and I headed to an oddity in the Blue Mountains’ town of Hazlebrook west of Sydney. Selwood Science & Puzzles is housed in the Selwood House, an 1865 cottage wrapped in a garden of ferns and eucalyptus. The many rooms inside the old home are packed with the sorts of diversions and toys most familiar to children born before the rising popularity of video games and electronics. One room is dedicated to puzzles of metal and wood, board games big and small and a cornucopia of games featuring bits of plastic, dice, and magnets. There were pocket versions of chess, checkers and backgammon; bent nails nested in devious designs; decks upon decks of cards for games I had grown up playing and some I had never heard of. And not one of the hundreds, thousands of these games required a battery or electrical outlet to play. Other rooms were packed with science kits and experiments, books of brain teasers, IQ tests and short mysteries. If electronics, long the opiate for the masses of nervous fliers, find themselves device non grata for the near future, could these non-digital diversions be their replacements? Will flights start to resemble coffee shops with passengers hunkered around chess boards, games of Hearts and Dominoes raging in the back rows? Probably not, but it’s a reminder of how dependent some of us have become on the products of the digital age. Arriving at Sydney International Airport on Sunday I discovered little had changed in the wake of the latest attempted attack. I was assured, repeatedly, that electronics could be used during the upcoming flight. Not quite believing the reassurances I ducked into a bookstore to load up on the printed word, in case the digital one wasn’t available to me. The lines in the bookstore, the crowds milling through rows of paperbacks, made me think I wasn’t the only one fearing a last-minute, in-air electronics ban. For now I’ll keep the paperback and pocket chess at hand, just in case. Well Played is a weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

The rest is here:
Terror at 30,000 Feet: Game-Free Transcontinental Flights? [Well Played]

A Surprise Education [Well Played]

Where many video games have you hone your reaction time and eye-hand coordination to excel, a mastery of spelling and a deep vocabulary are key to succeeding in Jeremiah Slaczka’s DS title. But despite the seemingly obvious educational bent of Slaczka’s game, Scribblenauts’ potential to teach through fun didn’t dawn on the game makers until well into development. Slaczka said the team at studio 5th Cell didn’t discuss the educational possibilities of the mainstream Warner Bros.-published game until they realized the “impact it had on increasing vocabulary, helping with spelling, teaching words in a new language and also creative and critical thinking.” “The game sort of became education through an organic process all on its own.” In Scribblenauts players solve lateral thinking puzzles by writing or typing a word into the DS. If the word is part of the game’s more than 22,800-word dictionary, it appears as an interactive objective, creature or person in the game. If a player spells the word incorrectly, the game suggests possible proper spellings. But knowing what object to summon through typing to make a fireman happy, or break into a safe or distract a zombie is key to solving the puzzles. A player’s vocabulary and imagination deeply impact their experience, Slaczka says: “The more words you know the more crazy stuff you can do.” Game creator Slaczka isn’t comfortable calling the game an educational title. “It has inherent educational potential, but it was never designed with an educational slant in mind,” he said. “It was a positive byproduct more than anything else. ” There are also good business reasons to not call Scribblenauts an outright educational game. Traditionally, educational games don’t attract mainstream gamers and don’t do big mainstream sales. But Scribblenauts sold 194,000 copies in North America alone in September, the first month it was available and was well-received by reviewers. While the game isn’t marketed as educational, that hasn’t stopped some parents and teachers from using the title to help educate. Slaczka says he’s heard anecdotally from parents and teachers who have been using the game to positive effect. One mother emailed the developer to tell how she bought the game for her son who was having difficulty in school learning to read and write. The woman gave the child a game along with a cheat sheet of ten words for him to try out in the game. “He learned how to spell those words,” he said, “and now she said he’s up to two full pages of words that he can spell and understand which I thought was a really awesome story. ” Junior high history teacher Kevin Roughton was most interested in the game’s potential to increase a student’s ability to think critically. Roughton writes that in the future he hopes to use the game to study different periods in history by limiting the objects they can summon to historically accurate ones. Writing in his blog, Roughton described how he used the game in his classroom, having the students break into groups to come up with creative ways to solve the problems presented by the game. “We do not do enough… encouragement of creativity and critical thinking in schools today,” he writes. “This forces it!” Well Played is a weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

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A Surprise Education [Well Played]

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