First, the always-fun Gamesetwatch has a new piece from Leigh Alexander up – ‘The Aberrant Gamer – Completion Anxiety Disorder’ is a thorough look at the paradox of why, when so many people demand next-gen games be longer to justify their price tags, so many of us rarely finish them. She runs the gamut of most likely suspects, including the time sucks that come with adulthood and one of the worst offenders: poor game balance. I can’t count the number of games I’ve run through at an easy clip only to smash into a wall of difficulty at the very end. Difficulty spikes can be fun, but there are so many factors to consider when using them (how much harder the game is getting, is the player immersed enough in the game to want to push through any frustration the spike causes and get to the end, etc.) that the smart choice is often to avoid them entirely. It’s a great piece, one that should be read as much by players as it should be by developers. (via Gamesetwatch)

Last week, Link Roundup favorites Rock Paper Shotgun posted links to videos of Warren Spector interviewing some of the bigger names in game development as part of his Master Class in Video Games and Digital Media at the University of Texas. I completely neglected to include them in last week’s post, as I’m a bit dense, and now the videos have all vanished. Luckily for human society in general, the magical interwubs have thrown them back up in the form a 3 GB torrent. While I imagine things are going to get a bit on the technical side, they’re well worth watching if you’ve any interest in seeing one of the more innovative game designers the medium has ever seen pick the brains of other really smart guys (including Ultima creator and daddy of the MMO, Richard Garriot). You can grab the torrent here. (via RPS)

And now for the more obscure stuff, the purpose of which I promise to explain at some point: First, the excellent Come Out & Play festival returns to New York City this year for another weekend of turning large chunks of Manhattan into a playground. Registration isn’t up yet – they’re still taking applications for games to play – but you can join their mailing list and be notified of when they’re accepting players. If memory serves, it’s a free event and well worth your time.

Spinning out from that is Jane McGonigal and Ian Bogost’s Cruel 2 Be Kind, the big hit of CO&P ’06. It’s a self described “game of benevolent assassination” played outdoors in a wide space with natural boundaries (for instance, half of Central Park). Based on the popular game Assassin (usually played on college campuses), players set out alone or in teams to hunt down other players and kill them with a particular act of kindness from a list distributed a few days before the game begins. An interesting twist is added in that you don’t know who else is playing, meaning you’ll spend a good bit of time being nice to complete strangers in hopes that they’ll fall over dead. There are lots of good ideas here – I particularly like the one about assassinated players joining up with the ones that killed them – and I’m really hoping they play again this year.

One of the most interesting details regarding the forthcoming PC-version of Assassin’s Creed was the promise of new pre-kill missions you could perform. The utter lack of variety in these missions (which make up the vast majority of gameplay) were one of several problems I mentioned a while back, and there was a slight glimmer of hope that these missions would be diverse enough to spice things up a bit. According to an IGN interview with Ubisoft’s Tech Lead, I shouldn’t have bothered:

“…we are talking about 4 new investigation missions: archer assassination, rooftop race challenge, merchant stand destruction challenge and escort challenge. The archer assassination requires the player to assassinate the archers in a dedicated zone without being seen. In the rooftop race challenge, the player will meet an informer and will have a set amount of time to reach a second informer. In the merchant stand destruction, some merchants have ties to the assassination target and their activities must be stopped by Altaïr. Finally, in the escort challenge, the player needs to securely escort a fellow Assassin from point A to point B.”

A rooftop race and destroying merchant stands? How very exciting and assassin-y! And thank god that laziest, most annoying of game mechanics, the escort mission, is finding its way to a game ostensibly about sneaking about on rooftops and turning the city into your jungle gym. The archer assassination mission sounds interesting, as it involves actually assassinating people, but no. There’s no word yet as to whether any of this additional content will ever come to the 360 or PS3 versions via download, but I think I can live without. (via Joystiq)

Elsewhere, Ste Curran of The Triforce posts about the perilous nature of the creator/audience relationship and how it can very nearly ruin everything. It’s a good post, bouncing back and forth between reaction to Passage creator Jason Rohrer’s follow-up game Gravitron and his own experience at Edge during one of the peaks of its respectable life as games’ leading magazine thing. His final message regarding both positive and negative feedback from the teeming anonymous masses seems like it should be obvious to anybody making things for a reason, but it’s so easily forgotten that it’s nice to have it repeated from time to time. (via a href=”http://www.kierongillen.com”>Gillen)

Also from the world of nice things, freelance journalist Evan Narcisse brings us “Don’t Bogart That Controller”, an article on the fun of turning a single player game into a co-op experience. This is hardly a new phenomenon – the first time I beat Super Mario Bros. was with my dad and a friend of his, trading the controller between us with each level. The same thing happened with Super Metroid over a long summer with my cousin Bill, where we’d replay the game over and over again in search of all its secrets. It’s great to see a common occurrence discussed in public like this, however, and would love to see more games use this kind approach to multiplayer. (via a href=”http://www.blog.newsweek.com/blogs/levelup/”>Level Up)

In sadder news, Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons and Dragons died last Tuesday, as you’ve no doubt heard. While not necessarily new, the internet has produced a number of nice tributes, such as James Wallis’ post about how one moment of genius, the Old Board Gamers Blog thanks for the chance to create so many memories, and Order of the Stick’s sweet webcomic tribute. And then of course there’s Penny Arcade, memorializing the man in their own unique way. It’s hard to measure the sheer magnitude of Gygax’s influence on gaming (from a design perspective, I can’t imagine what the landscape would look like without his contributions – I mean, he invented leveling up. How do you just do that?) so it’s probably best to leave it at an understated “nothing would be the same without D&D.” Having played my first-ever game last night in an adventure lead by some veteran coworkers based on the new Fourth Edition coming this summer, the weight of that is more apparent than ever. (via the internets)

And finally, anybody in need of a final boss for their game need look no further than Russia’s bucket-wheel excavator:

(via the always-fun Astronomy Picture of the Day)

First, Andy Biao of waxy.org has an interview up with Robin Ward, creator of new online game Forum Warz. Actually, “online game” may not be entirely appropriate – in Forum Warz, online is the game. You create a character (you can be a camwhore, emo kid, or troll) and then set off into the mystical land of the internet, earning in-game cash and experience points for nerd baiting, trolling, spamming, and generally behaving like the sort of person who ruins the whole thing for everybody else. It’s an inspired idea, and plays into one of my pet obsessions by building a game around something people do every day. It could also very well be the downfall of mankind. Not for the weak of heart, the easily offended, or the sincere. (via Wonderland)

Elsewhere, degenerate writer Clive Thompson has a look at a recent study by Niklas Ravaja of MIND Labs who’s recent finding indicate that players experience “relief from engagement” when killed in a multiplayer FPS game. I’ve certainly experienced the sort of sensation he describes here in Team Fortress 2: no matter how well I’m playing, the longer I stay alive the more paranoid I get about somebody killing me, up to the point that rounding a corner to come face to face with a Heavy/Medic combo is almost a welcome event. The pause between dying and respawning is exactly the sort of mental reset I need – it let’s me calm down, collect my thoughts, see how my team mates are doing and, above all, remember it’s just a game. Of course, you don’t need to look at videogames to see players get this same sense of relief – consider that murder simulator of old, Hide-and-Seek. While it might have been frustrating when you’re cousin caught up with you, it was also nice to take a break and watch the rest of the game play out before jumping back in with the next round. (via Level Up)

And finally, an older piece I’ve just not gotten around to reading: Jim Rossignol talks a bit about Love, a procedurally generated bite-sized MMO built by one man band Eskil Steenberg. His method of creating the content necessary for running the world and populating it with things to interact with are fascinating, as is his somewhat laid-back attitude towards taking on what should be a staggering amount of work all on his lonesome. Love is still in development, but early screenshots show that it sometimes looks like this:

At Microsoft’s keynote address on Wednesday, the company unveiled their plans for fostering the sort of indie development community enjoyed by the PC. The Community Arcade is a place for users to upload and share games built with XNA, a suite of simple (yet versatile and powerful) development tools custom tuned for creating downloadable content for the 360. For a yearly subscription, console owners can download the full versions of any and everything uploaded to the Community Arcade and then rate their favorites. It’s a fantastic idea, and the exact sort of thing I want a home gaming system to be able to do in 2008. The first batch of demos are up to give people a free taste of what to expect, which I’ll probably be talking about more later. (Via Joystiq)

This gets a bit turned around, so bear with me: Games site Kotaku did an interview with Ken Levine, Creative Director on Bioshock, in which the somewhat disappointing ending of the game came up. Levine said he underestimated how the Big Moment just before that would effect people, a statement that Kotaku in their infinite wisdom (and want for click-throughs) decided to interpret as him admitting it “failed”. This week, Levine talked at GDC about storytelling in games and how the best approach was to keep things simple (quote: “The bad news for storytellers is that nobody cares about your stupid story.”), which stuck in Rock Paper Shotgun’s John Walker’s head as a bit of a contradiction to other statements on narrative in games, leading to a nice little piece wondering which Levine was the real one. Alec Meer responded with a longer, also nice bit of disambiguation, which unfortunately lead things to their natural conclusion. Despite all this being born out of a bit of needless site hits mongering, it’s nice to see Bioshock is still the sort of game to generate such debate. And pictures of Ken Levine’s lack of eyes.

Both the Independent Games Festival and Game Developer’s Choice Awards have announced their winners, and it’s hard to thing of more deserving choices. IGF results here, Choice Award winners here. (via GameSetWatch)

Jane McGonigal, general smart person and the designer behind several ARGs (Alternate Reality Games) and other games involving lots of people running around being silly, has written a paper entitled Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming (link opens PDF file). In it, she discusses the tendency for collective intelligence spontaneously happening among ARG players. I took part in The Beast, the first truly successful, world-wide ARG built around the film A.I, and have seen the events she discusses here happen first hand. It’s an amazing thing, seeing thousands of players from around the world pooling their experience, knowledge, and resources to solve a puzzle that reacts to their progress and changes in real-time. Not GDC related, but fascinating all the same. (via Boing Boing)

And finally, LEGO are using GDC as an excuse to leak a few details about their upcoming MMO, LEGO Universe.. While information is scant, what there is sounds extremely fun, potentially offering the sort of fun and creative freedom needed to draw in those put off by the level grinding stats-game of World of Warcraft and its imitators. Concept art ripped directly from my dreams and one particularly cool idea await you at the link. (via Game|Life)

Stephen Totilo encounters an moral dilemma in an unexpected place: Nintendo’s turn-based strategy game Fire Emblem for the Wii. I haven’t played this latest installment yet – the earlier portable games for the GBA were fun, but sort of paled next to Advance Wars – but I may need to look into getting it. The idea of having you to fight not only former allies but allies you’ve spent time playing as is intriguing; it’s the sort of thing that can either elevate a game into something truly special or become immensely frustrating. Totilo’s way of handling it is rather inspired, and kudos to the designers for leaving room for it too happen in.

Bill Harris on his typically great blog, Dubious Quality, lays out his ideas for saving the text sim. Despite fantastic recent entries like Dwarf Fortress, the text sim is a dying genre, with the once-proud herds of fans that roamed the prairies reduced to a mere handful of diehards. While the blame is largely (and to a degree, fairly) placed at the feet of the rise of graphical games, a large portion of the lack of interest comes from the things being so damn hard to use. As interest continues to die down, the only people left developing text sims are the same people playing them. This sort of design-by-Orosboros causes a number of problems, the chief of which being the lack of consideration for new players. The result is control interfaces requiring a Rosetta stone to make sense of and gobs of important data that has to be hunted for with no easy way of accessing it. Harris’ ideas for simplifying things will most likely fall on deaf ears, but they’re well worth reading. I still have no idea what the guy does for a living other than running an awesome blog, but his notes here point to a keen understanding of interface design.

Speaking of potential problems involving fans turned developers, Rock Paper Shotgun interviewed indie-dev Vince D. Weller on his soon-to-be-released game The Age of Decadence. Weller is clearly angry about a great number of things, particularly what he considers the dumbing down of games since the glory days of Fallout and, erm, other turn-based RPGs that behave exactly like the game he’s working on. While he gets points for enthusiasm, his oft-stated position of anybody not wanting to play the sort of games he enjoys being a mouth-breathing idiot of the highest order gets tired very, very quickly. I’m all for people taking the initiative to create the sort of games they see as lacking in the market, but Weller’s approach appears so introverted (and again, angry) that it’s hard to imagine Decadence leading a resurgence of stat-heavy RPGs. But then, as his game sounds a bit more complex than what I’m interested in playing, I’m clearly a gibbering moron. So what do I know?

And lastly, Lara Crigger’s piece for Gamers With Jobs entitled “Coming Home” is a genuinely lovely walk down a memory lane paved in memory cards. Any one with a history of gaming probably has their own memories and moments they connect with certain games – one of the clearest I have is an inability to hear ‘For No One’ by the Beatles without thinking of Psychonauts, and vice versa. What are yours?

Mauvais Rôle (“Bad Role”) is a short French film detailing the trials and tribulations of a videogame villain who decides he’s tired of being the bad guy and sets off to find something more. Well made and filled with more riffs familiar videogame moments than you can shake a large war hammer at, it’s an extremely endearing little story about a gigantic devil creature finding his place in the world. There is also dancing. (via Boing Boing)

EA’s Jim Preston wades into the “Are games art” discussion over at Gamasutra in an article called ”The Arty Party” with perhaps one of the more reasonable responses to Roger Ebert’s occasional diatribes against the medium: “Who cares?” He makes a number of good points, particularly focusing on capital-A Art (pronounced “Awt”, naturally) being a perception more than anything else – the idea of an agreed upon definition of what art is or isn’t is ridiculous, so why does Ebert’s opinion matter? While it’s hardly going to settle the debate, it does provide a nice breather from the usual frothiness this discussion generates. Perhaps if enough read it and stop worrying if what they’re creating is art, they can get around to making some.And from the makers of Velociraptor Safari comes this teaser image of their next project, via Kotaku:

Brenda Brathwaite, game designer and professor of game development at SCAD, has seen the future of gaming on Facebook. And it’s a bit shit. Her post on looks at the four new titles from H&R Block to appear on the popular social network and paints a grim picture of what could be waiting down the road. There’s a lot of talk about Facebook and the ease with which developers can create applications for it being a new frontier for gaming, and I think that’s true – just look at the immensely successful and fun Scrabulous, or the simpler Warbook, or the flood of invites in my Facebook mailbox to play the interconnected games of Slayers, Vampires, Werewolves, and Zombies, despite my already having an army of damned. Advergames can work just as well as any of these on the service, but dreck like H&R Block have thrown up there is only contributing to the application spam already threatening to render Facebook completely useless. Brathwaite’s dissection of each title is superb, isolating the simple yet fundamental flaws that result in the creating a massive unplayable mess. Favorite line: “All they had to do was take Jetman and reskin it, or any of the other games that follow the old Helicopter dynamic. Maybe it’s more artful to reinvent the wheel wrong.”

Now for a pallette cleanser: Kieron Gillen has written a rather ace round up of this year’s Independent Games Festival finalists, including the remarkable looking World of Goo and Audiosurf. This year’s crop of titles are the best bunch I’ve seen in a while, with each game offering not only a unique experience from its fellow nominees but from pretty much any other games you can think of. While most of these games aren’t readily available, there are playable demos for most and gameplay videos of others. I briefly mentioned the IGF finalists last week, but Gillen’s piece on them is one of the best breakdowns of what makes each game special I’ve seen so far.

Personal favorite site Rock Paper Shotgun has both the press release and an explanation of what could potentially be huge news for PC gaming from Valve: the publisher/developer/generally lovely people have announced the release of Steamworks, a “complete suite of publishing and developing tools” that gives anybody who wants it access to the powerful resources of Steam, Valve’s digital distribution system. With Steamworks, publishers and developers can take advantage of Valve’s unparalleled piracy protection, voice chat, stat tracking, and automatic updating. And all for free. This could very well be A Big Deal, as Steam is pretty much already the de facto leader in digitally distributed games and this can only see the service showing up on more machines.

Gamasutura featured this week an opinion piece by Nayan Ramachandran titled Controls, Simplicity, Focal Interest, and Contextual Sensitivity. It’s a nice breakdown of what developers take into account – or rather, should take into account – when it comes to determining how the player will interact with their games. While not quite as deep as I’d like (but then, player interaction is one of those things I’m sorta-kinda obsessed with), it covers ground you don’t often see discussed when it comes to player interaction, including the importance of control sets that match the mood of their game. Regular readers might have noticed that accessibility in games is something of a minor crusade for me, and Ramachandran’s article is thoughtful look at the first and most important point of entry for every player – what to do with their hands.

And this last one’s more for me than anybody else. It’s a fantastic analysis of an idea put forth by game designer Ralf Koster in both his book A Theory of Fun and a lecture given at GDC in ’05. Here, his grammar on soccer is used to break the game down to a series of causal chains. It’s a fantastic way of planning out a game – determine your objective, and then work out what has to happen to achieve it. Livejournal poster Psysal’s breakdown of its merits is simple and elegant, much like Koster’s book itself. Definitely the sort of thing that needs to infect my thinking more regularly.

I don’t have time to do a regularly updated news site about games, as I’m often too busy making them to stop and talk about interesting bits of news as much as I’d like to. So the idea is at the end of each week (probably on Fridays, if this catches on), I’ll post links to stories by people who not only have time to go into the finer points of a story but do so with more ability than I could probably manage. We’ll see how it goes.

One of the bigger stories of the last week involves Mass Effect, the frothier bits of the far right, and the death of intelligent debate in general. Several of the more fundamentalist members of the religious right have spent the last few weeks up in arms over the sex scenes in Mass Effect, blowing moments that would appear tame compared to a Lifetime movie into (to quote one article) “the most realistic sex acts ever conceived. One can custom design the shape, form, bodies, race, hair style, breast size of the images they wish to “engage” and then watch in crystal clear, LCD, 54 inch screen, HD clarity as the video game ‘persons’ hump in every form, format, multiple, gender-oriented possibility they can think of”. While the original article was (sort of) corrected for it’s glaring inaccuracies, the imagined uproar of it eventually wormed it’s way to that bastion of truth and reason, FOX News. Geoff Keighley, long-time journalist and host of Spike TV’s Game Head, was invited on to the network to discuss the apparent rampant sex in the game. A video of the segment can be found here, but it doesn’t take much to imagine how things went – Keighley was of course ambushed, bombarded with out right lies and misunderstandings of the game by both the host and an “expert”, and hardly allowed to get a word in edgewise. That said, he still managed to hold his own, offering up a number of good counter points for those actually listening. EA, parent company of Mass Effect developer Bioware and publisher of the title, sent a fantastic letter to the network requesting – not demanding – an apology and correction to the hundreds of people who worked on the game and have had to see something they’re deservedly proud of slandered in front of the whole world. Since then, Fox has refused a correction, instead asking EA to send a representative back in front of the firing squad to “set the record straight”. EA have taken the quite reasonable position of not being interested in walking into an ambush, and would not be willing to appear without a correction being issued first. And so the cycle continues. (Thanks Kotaku for the links)

Somewhat related to all that mess, Meagan VanBurkleo, a graphic design student with aspirations of working in the videogame industry, has created Beyond The Hype, a site dedicated to tracking the various attempts at restricting videogame sales and distribution through legislation and attempting to educate people on the many, many misconceptions surrounding the ESRB and sale of violent videogames to minors. It’s something that’s long past due, particularly as violence in videogames becomes more and more of an issue in the forthcoming election (sure, it’s no impending recession or war in Iraq, but still) and far too many of the candidates are perfectly happy to support unnecessary and restrictive laws if it means not telling their constituency they’re poor parents. The ESRB works just fine without being turned into an official government body – it fails when mom or dad drag into the store to by their kid that M-rated game the clerk said they were too young for in the interest of an afternoon to themselves.

Enough with the soap boxing, though. Via Boing-Boing, a directory of wonderfully tiresome anti-DRM rants and misunderstandings of what “steampunk” means, comes this genuinely cool video from the alternate universe that is Japan. Two guys mashed an old hand-recognition system with Super Mario Bros., creating a version of the game that’s played by nudging Mario along with your fingers and sending him flying with a flip of your hand. The truly awesome bit comes towards the end, when they create an unstoppable flood of Marios and send them pouring over world 1-1. If there’s a hell for Goombas, this is it.

Tom Francis of PC Gamer UK has journeyed into the hallowed halls of Valve’s base of operations in Washington, as has emerged with stories of treasure. Talk has circulated for a while of “major changes” coming to Team Fortress 2, but until now we had no idea just how major they meant. Starting “soon” (and in Valve-speak, “soon” could mean anything from next week to just in time for the heat-death of the universe) with the Medic, each class is getting two alternate versions of their current weapons load outs that are earned by getting half and then all of that Class’ in-game achievements. While the new weapons will remain in keeping with the role of each class (no Medics running around with rocket launchers, then), the effect these new toys stand to have on gameplay is unimaginable and very, very exciting. Valve being Valve, they’re proceeding with great caution, with the plan calling for new weapons to be rolled out slowly to allow a better gauge of the reaction from players. The changes are only confirmed for the PC version of the game, but given Valve’s new approach to console support I can’t imagine they’ll stay that way for long. Please oh please oh please give something involving napalm to the Pyro. It’s only fitting. (Thanks, RPS for the Wednesday morning present)

Clive Thompson of Games Without Frontiers has declared his yearly “Best Of” column for Indy games dead, as there’s just too damn many of them. It’s a shame, as I love year-end lists, but he’s also got a fair point. The explosion of excellent independent games for the PC in the last few years has produced some truly amazing experiences, to the point that keeping track of them all is nearly impossible. In many ways this surge in small, cheaper to produce and digitally distributed games could well be the ideal future for the platform, particularly as super expensive, super high profile titles like Crysis and Unreal Tournament are failing to make back even a fraction of their development cost and any MMORPG that isn’t WoW has to fight tooth and nail just to survive it’s first year. One look at the IGF finalists for this year is enough to see the sort of diversity and pure creativity that’s out there, just waiting to be tapped. In the future, there’s a game for every one, and it’s starting right now.

And finally, XBLA portfolio planer David Ederly discusses the value of creating a strong downloadable demo for your game. I’ve thought a lot about this lately, particularly in light of the confusing and frustrating demo for Burnout Paradise discussed earlier and the fun but constantly interrupted by cut scenes one put up this week for Devil May Cry 4. He doesn’t mention it by name, but the demo for Crackdown is still one of the best sales pitches for a game I’ve seen in a long time – after its hour of play, all I could think about was getting my hands on the full version of the game. Valuable reading for anybody trying to sell anything, particularly games.