Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Game Design Meeting, Wednesday, February 29

Hi Luigites,

Welcome to 9th week! Normal meetings on Wednesday. If I can manage my time correctly, I'll bring in a baked good of some kind for leap day. 

In gaming news, we totally forgot to give a shout-out to the PlayStation Vita that came out last Wednesday.  Pokemon: Black and White 2 was recently announced. Brian showed me about a really cool game Dear Esther that came out on the 14th.  Mass Effect 3 comes out next Tuesday.  I'm going to try to get in the loop about these things and include them in these weekly announcements.  Maybe I get also upcoming game sales and stuff too. Feel free to send info my way if you want it included.

Wednesday, February 29
Harper 135 - 6-7pm: 
Project: Van Gogh's Ear - Rabbit Holes
We'll spend today brainstorming rabbit holes and listing out some groups/RSO's we should consider making contact with. We'll also draw up some symbols and continue discussion on structure.

Harper 145 - 7-8pm: 
Discussion: An Intro to Flixel
If you're like me, you have a lot of interest in making digital games but don't actually know how to start. Well that time is over! I want to make games for two final projects, so it's time to get coding and I'm bringing you guys along with me. This week, we'll begin looking at the Flixel game-making library developed by the amazing Adam "Atomic" Saltsman. Feel free to bring your computer along with you to follow along during the tutorial, but download the library and a development environment first. Also, if you are willing to let me use your computer to use and hook up to the projector (especially if you have Adobe FlashBuilder), I would be very grateful. We're also starting a thread on the message board about it, which you can find here.

Additionally, we have a bit of administrative stuff to talk about for a few minutes at the beginning of the meeting, primarily about next quarter. Think up some possible events, game night themes, or meeting discussion topics so we can have the best Spring quarter ever.

Best,
Nicholas

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Game Night, Thursday, February 23: Familiar Games, Unorthodox Controls

LUIGI's game nights are social events designed to provide an opportunity for undergraduates, grad students, and faculty to come together, play, and discuss games.  Game nights consist of hands-on demonstrations of games, accompanied sometimes with formal presentations, and always with discussion.  They provide outlets for scholars in the U Chicago community to present ideas concerning the socio-cultural, aesthetic, political, and technological dimensions of games, opportunities for designers and players to get together and discuss the medium, and spaces for both seasoned gamers and the uninitiated to come together and play games both beloved and overlooked.


Please join us for the final LUIGI game night of the quarter, held this Thursday, February 23, from 7-9 pm in Cobb 115. A multi-screen event, we will be playing a number of games with control schemes and on platforms for which they were not originally designed.

With half of the space, we will be using both traditional controls and DDR Dance Pads to play games such as SoulCalibur II, Street Fighter II Turbo, and Super Mario Kart, highlighting issues of virtuosity, physicality, and performance in video game culture. The rest of the space will be devoted to playing Nintendo 64 games such as Super Mario 64, GoldenEye 007, Starfox 64, and Banjo-Kazooie on multiple platforms - including the original N64, the Nintendo DS, and the MacBook. This will allow us to consider the instability of the video game text resulting from industry repackaging, video game preservation, and emulation.

Come to experience these games for the first time, to challenge your friends to old favorites with a twist, or watch people dance their way through a racing game!

Suggestions for topics and/or games to be covered in future game nights can be made on this thread of LUIGI's forums (login required).

Hope to see you this Thursday!

- Chris

Game Design Meeting, Wednesday, February 22

Hey Gamers!

Game Design Meetings:

Wednesday, February 22:
Harper 135 - 6-7pm:  
Project:  Van Gogh's Ear - We'll continue talking about the narrative arc, final event, and rabbit holes

Harper 145 - 7-8pm:  
Discussion: Educational Games - We'll talk about educational and persuasive games, whether they suck, and how to make them better if they do

Spring Classes:

Remember to sign up for classes this week! I always try to remind my friends because I've forgotten twice and it is no fun. Need suggestions? Digital Imaging (ARTV 22500) with Jason Salavon is great--I'm in it now and I've actually made games for two projects. Plus, he used to do graphics for the N64 or something. He's also teaching Data and Algorithm in Art (ARTV 22502) which might also interest some of you. If you're into macabre stuff like me, Hauntology: Ghosts, Specters and Other Paranormal Phenomena in Contemporary Art and Beyond (ARTV 26213) also exists. TAPS is offering a course called Story Through Music and Sound (TAPS 27800), which may be helpful if you think audio is important in games (PS: It is). Also consider Issues in Film Music (CMST 28100). Intro to World Wide Web 2 (CMSC 10200) probably wins the title for the least descriptive class (the CompSci department is really good at that). I think it's focused on building web apps--you'll be learning JavaScript and PHP and stuff, plus, I think it fills the math requirement. Probably very useful if you're into Internet. The other CompSci classes all have prereqs, and if you're in the major you already know about all the classes so I won't bother listing them. Still, for what it's worth, I really enjoyed Intro to Computer Systems(CMSC 15400). That was a solid class. 

Little Red Schoolhouse (ENGL 10300) will be one of the most useful courses you will take here, and Lines of Transmission: Comics and Autobiography (ENGL 25944) seems like it might have a cool reading list. Good luck!

Sorry for the long one,
Nicholas

Monday, February 6, 2012

Game Night, Thursday, February 9: Landscape and Videogames

LUIGI's game nights are social events designed to provide an opportunity for undergraduates, grad students, and faculty to come together, play, and discuss games.  Game nights consist of hands-on demonstrations of games, accompanied sometimes with formal presentations, and always with discussion.  They provide outlets for scholars in the U Chicago community to present ideas concerning the socio-cultural, aesthetic, political, and technological dimensions of games, opportunities for designers and players to get together and discuss the medium, and spaces for both seasoned gamers and the uninitiated to come together and play games both beloved and overlooked.

The theme of this week's game night is "Landscape and Videogames."  Notes on games to be played, and general themes that will organize the night, follow below.

The open expanse & the guided tour: 
Staging in Red Dead Redemption and Resistance 3


In many game genres, the handling of space design by developers comes down to finely-tuned issues of game mechanics.  Especially in the age of the online FPS--in which knowledge of any map design imbalance will spread just as quickly as knowledge of any other type of exploit, quickly breaking the game as informed players attempt to eke out the slightest competitive advantage--developers' consideration of space often boils down to a hard look at the placement of spawn points, choke points, and pickups.  Extensive playtesting, as well as more specialized tools such as heatmaps, are essential here.

Games with more specific narrative ambitions require additional considerations when it comes to the designing of spaces.  Certain games, for instance, are required to engender a very specific sense of place in order to claim their generic inheritance.  Although it would be technically accurate to describe Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar North/Rockstar San Diego, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, 2010) simply as an open-world sandbox action-adventure game, any full description of the game would require noting that it is also a late-period Western, set in 1911 along a fictional stretch of the border between the U.S. and Mexico.  Likewise, one could serviceably describe Resistance 3 (Insomniac, PlayStation 3, 2011) as a first-person shooter, but it would do the game a disservice to not also mention that it is a post-apocalyptic alternate-history road trip, set in a 1950s U.S. devastated by an alien invasion and terraforming project rather than enjoying postwar prosperity.  In games such as these, so dependent upon landscape design not only to set mood, but more fundamentally to establish genre, the dividing line between the successes of art direction and those of map design is harder to pinpoint than in a game such as, say, Counter-Strike (Valve, PC, 2000).


At this LUIGI game night, we'll be playing sections of each of these games, specifically looking at the strategies each uses to guide the player's attention to events and objects salient to gameplay, plot development, or both.  Red Dead Redemption sells itself on the strength of its open world; in many ways the primary joys of the game consist of little more than the desert, the sky, and a horse.  How does the player's relationship to this landscape change once they are in the middle of the more directed action of specific missions?  How does Rockstar handle the shift between landscape-as-sensual-pleasure and landscape-as-level-design?  And how do the strengths and weaknesses of Rockstar's approach to these elements compare to the more linear approach taken by Insomniac in Resistance 3, which restricts players' access to several of the game's landscapes via on-rail sequences?  What is gained and what is lost in each of these two approaches to introducing the player to a place, and to the actions that occur within it?

Urban spaces as sites of investigation: 
L.A. Noire and Shenue


Following a focus on the desert and rural Americana in Red Dead Redemption and Resistance 3, we'll next be looking at the depiction of urban space in games, specifically in L.A. Noire (Team Bondi, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC, 2011) and Shenmue (Sega AM2, Dreamcast, 1999).  These games share multiple surface similarities:  Both are set in simulated depictions of actual cities (Los Angeles in L.A. Noire, Yokosuka in Shenmue).  Both are primarily structured around detective work (Cole Phelps investigating multiple crimes as he climbs the ranks as a detective in L.A. Noire, vs. Ryo Hazuki engaging in amateur detective work to discover more about his father's murderer in Shenmue).  Both feature long sections without combat, in which each game's unabashed adventure game roots show through--players are required spend long hours engaging in conversation, examining items, and following leads recorded by the player's avatar in a notebook.


However, it is perhaps the differences between these two games' use of urban space in their respective investigations that are the most illuminating.  In one, the city exists primarily as a commute, as a delaying tactic spacing out closed, narratively-salient encounters with select individuals (with the additional possibility of an occasional chase scene).  In the other, the city is fully inhabited, though an excess of interactive possibility tends to sap the momentum of both the gameplay and the narrative.  What can these games tell us about the proper balance between robust simulation and engaging gameplay?  What sorts of antagonisms exist between these two possibilities, and how might they be used productively rather than disjointedly?  And sort of image of the city and its inhabitants does each game promote?

"Landscape and Videogames" Game Night
Thursday, February 9th
Cobb 145 - 7pm-9pm

Suggestions for topics and/or games to be covered in future game nights can be made on this thread of LUIGI's forums (login required).

Ian

Game Design Meeting, Wednesday, February 8

Here's what LUIGI is looking like 6th week!!

Wednesday, February 8
Harper 135 :: 6-7pm
Project: Van Gogh's Ear - We'll try finalize the structure of the game/players and be ready to discuss specific plot and puzzles next week

Harper 145 :: 7-8pm
Discussion: Bad Games - We'll be talking about "bad games," what made them so bad, and what we can learn from them. We will also talk about good games and the flaws that could have made them perfect.

Best of luck to you all!!
Nicholas