The iPhone, Casual Game Heaven?

Jesper Juul discusses “casual games” in his article “A Casual Revolution” and he lays out the basic elements of what makes a game casual:

I. Fiction

2. Usability

3. Interruptibility

4. Difficulty and punishment

5. Juiciness

As I was reading the article I was immediately struck by the thought that the iPhone has, in some ways, become the ultimate casual gaming platform. Because of its inherent structure and limits, like battery life, touch interface and so on, it is set up to play these types of games perfectly. The control interface of the touch screen makes the usability very simple and intuitive, and excludes the possibility of any complex “hard-core game” type of controls. Also, since the phone is very limited in battery life, the games must be easily interrupted.

These factors, among others, seem have led the iPhone to be the platform of choice for many casual game developers. Some of the games Juul mentioned in his article such as Bejeweled and Peggle have made their way from their original downloadable forms to iPhone application format, and there has been an explosion of new games created just for the iPhone. I think it will be interesting to see how the market for casual games continues to grow as the iPhone and other similar devices continue to put these games in the spotlight of the mainstream. I wonder if some developers are also interested in subverting the simple characterstics of casual games to convey more interesting ideas, and if we will see “casual counter games for the iPhone” in the near future.

Roger Ebert on Videogames and Art

Roger Ebert has long maintained that videogames should not be considered art, and he’s recently posted an elaboration of this argument on his blog. Video Games Can Never Be Art is worth the read, especially given our discussion on that subject. It’s also worth looking at the 500 or so comments he’s gotten (some of the comments are actually thoughtful).

Wrong Message Through Offensive Games

Games to me are always a medium of entertainment that we can use to distract ourselves from the reality. Its just like watching TV, playing sports, or taking a nap. With just about anything, games should and must have limits and boundaries. When a game developer push the boundary but does not overcome it, the game has the potential to be successful but with controversy. However, when the boundary is crossed to a critical level, the game becomes more of a art form. Crossing the limit depicts the game to be more of a cultural message or political message than a simple game. The game played in class “September 11th and September 12th” are purely wrong games in different ways. Events such as September 11th should be left alone by game developers since it can offend so many people around the world. September 12th on the other hand is also wrong, since it depicts that a loss of a loved one causes someone to become a terrorist in the middle east. This kind of game would cause people to get the wrong idea about what exactly is going on around the world. Contrary to many beliefs, no one is brought up to be a terrorist anywhere. Instead, its the culture influences, economical background, misunderstanding of religious messages and years of political abuse cause people to behave the way they do toward the west. Most of the time we are limited to modern thoughts that limit us from understanding people of other cultures, ethnicity, and religion. And gamers and other artists takes advantages of this limited mindset to produce games and art to depict their own beliefs and ideas. For example, here is a game about specifically targeting a religion. This game targets not only the followers of the religion, but the prophets and the God as well. To me, thats going too far. If a non-western Muslim were to hear about this game they would be severely offended. If kids were to get their hands on this, what ideas and theories would get gain from this? I doubt that they will gain anything positive out of it. There is another game called Ethnic Cleansing, where the player must kill Ariel Sharon, the former Prime Minister of Israel, in order to prevent him from the dominating the world. During the game, the player must kill blacks, Latinos, and Jews to progress through the game. To me the idea of targeting specific race is a horrendous idea. This kind of development in a game crosses any emotional barrier people have and offend anyone playing it. Again, what would a preteen, teen or any young adult would obtain out of a game like this? The situation would be worse if the player had limited view on the world. Therefore, game developers should stop putting out ideas and views that are only shared by a minute fraction of this world. Instead, they should develop games that could entertain as well as put positive ideas into our communities.

A Hurricane Katrina Game?

While attempting to find some intriguing socially conscious games, I came across Hurricane Katrina: Tempest in Crescent City. After starting off with a comic book-like introduction, it throws you into the world of a young girl who has been displaced from her original home in New Orleans. She falls asleep and then dreams about how she could have helped her mother when the Hurricane hit. I was impressed to see that this game had been sponsored by Microsoft and AMD, two huge technology companies. I’m interested to see where our talks go in the upcoming classes, as this is a type of game that I had never previously paid any attention to, but clearly is important enough to be well supported by major companies.

3rd world farmer

While searching for social simulation games similar to the ones that we played I discovered 3rd world farmer.  I played the game for a little bit and soon discovered the point of the game; to lose.  Even if you are great at playing this particular game you will eventually lose some way or another.  It wasn’t a pleasant game to play either there are decisions that you make that may kill one family member of all of them.  It is extremely frustrating game that tries to put you in the shoes of a poor farming family.  That being said I don’t exactly agree with the methods of the designers.  I think that they are victimizing a faceless family that lives in some generic third world country.  While the intent was good I still think the generalizations made in the game take away from the message because not all third world countries are like the game depiction.

Israeli-Palestine Conflict Videogame

When looking for a link for the week, I first googled “socially conscious video games” which brought me to this article http://www.springfieldnewssun.com/e/content/shared/living/stories/2006/09/SERIOUS_GAMES_0906_COX.html

which is actually a very interesting comment of social video games. He mentioned a wide variety of topics covered by the video games and one of them was the Israeli-Palestine conflict. I was somewhat surprised by this, but suppose that I shouldn’t be; after all video games are made about controversial topics all the time. So I searched for the game and found “Peace Maker” whose slogan is “Play the News. Solve the Puzzle.” The object is to play through the game as the Israeli Prime Minister or the Palestinian President and try to bring peace to the nations before your term is over. The game incorporates actual news stories into it in an attempt to make it more real. Actions the player can take include giving speeches and listening to your advisors. You can also choose what level you want to play: calm, tense, or violent. In the game you can either win by achieve a two-state solution or you can lose.

Here is a link to the video for the trailer:

Peace Maker

Great in Theory, Could be Better in Practice…

So I after playing the socially conscious games, I was intrigued but a bit confused still. I found the Darfur game to be the most confusing. I don’t know if it was just me, but I ran, and ran, and ran, and ran, and ran, and ran. But there was no where to run to? Maybe it was because after four minutes of running in one direction with no change of scenery/landscape other than outpacing the janjaweed’s car I decided to change direction and ended up being caught. But who’s to say. I felt like there was no way to get to the water. No one told me where the water was or showed me how to collect it. And when I did try to hide, the Janjaweed found me hiding behind my barrel that I was supposed to put water in. I understand that this may be very close to the situation in Darfur. You are a sitting duck if caught by the Janjaweed while away from your family out collecting water, but there was no sort of explanation to go with it so I wasn’t sure if I was even playing it right or if I was just terrible at the game. A game with a social impact needs to have a message attached. I didn’t play until the end of the game, I’m not even certain there is any one particular ending, but I found it interesting none-the-less. The second game, Stop Disasters,  had more of a sim city feel to it. I found I was frustrated with this game because I have no knowledge of floods and don’t know how to protect against them. I put up enough housing for all the people in my town, yet 4 of them died anyway. I think if maybe there was a little information prior to the game play, people would learn something about their own preparation for themselves and their communities. That could be a valuable asset to any community.

I think the socially conscious games have a good idea, but need to be better implemented or executed. If there is more of an explaination it would go a lot farther for the cause. I understand it’s still a game. But Carmen Sandiago NEEDS the information in order to be as successful as it is. Make it a learning game like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiago and you’re set.

The Simulator

I found a game called The Simulator which is essentially a highly negative life simulator. I didn’t play past day 1, so I don’t know if there are any impacts to your actions (as there are in The Sims), but, well, it’s painfully realistic. Wake up, get ready, go to work (at McDonald’s, no less), actually do the work (only one choice once you get to work, as opposed to elsewhere), come home, eat dinner, go to sleep. If my assumption is correct, you do the same the next day too, with no changes (in contrast to the somewhat similar Everyday The Same Dream). Its almost complete lack of gameplay and its general character make it seem somewhat like an anti-game and somewhat like a conscious simulator. It also seems like the kind of thing that could be more easily modified than more complicated games and so might serve well as a forum game.

Maybe it’s just me, but…

I know my blog post is a couple days late, but I still thought I’d go ahead and give my take on Nelson’s anti-games.  In class on Tuesday, Professor Sample mentioned that Nelson’s background and education was in poetry, and I was able to call it from a mile away – I found the games to be very interesting from a gaming perspective, but moreso from the perspective of poetry.  In my inquiry assignment I talked about how through his anti-games, Nelson has created a new way to “win” a game.  Unlike traditional, mainstream video games (or any type of game for that matter), winning in these anti-games isn’t based on scoring points, defeating an opponent, or accomplishing a set goal as instructed by the game itself.  I think that Nelson’s games are designed to be an experience – more specifically, an exploration of poetry (this is at least true of the game I focused on, I Made This. You Play This. We Are Enemies.) Instead of publishing his poems in the traditional form of, say, a book, Nelson has tried a more experimental medium.  After playing the game I felt like I had just finished reading a book of poetry, not that I had just won a game.

When I played this game, it took me FOREVER because I decided to slow down and read all the little snippits of poetry Nelson had patched on to each level.  I was actually excited to advance to the next level and see what he was going to include next. The joy of this game definitely came more from the aesthetic elements than the gameplay itself.  In fact, I think the whole point of the game is to focus on the aesthetic elements – the poetry, the videos, the screenshots, etc.  And if you’re the kind of person who enjoys that type of stuff, you’ll probably come out enjoying the game, and you probably accomplished exactly what Nelson wanted you to.  If you’re not, you’ll probably be frustrated and say you “didn’t get it”…and you lost the game.

This game reminded me a lot of my previous gaming experiences outside of this class.  It’s kind of pathetic to think about how many hours I spent as a kid playing Grand Theft Auto 3, but not actually “playing” it as the game intended, but driving around the streets of Liberty City listening to the radio stations.  I did the same thing with Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3, just skating endlessly around the parks and button mashing because I didn’t really care about the points, I just wanted to listen to the sick soundtrack.  With Nelson’s games, I got a similar experience.  I didn’t have to worry about any complicated gameplay, I just had to focus on the aesthetics. Unfortunately for me, there aren’t more games like this, so I have to make do with my own modifications of mainstream games such as Tony Hawk and GTA.

Anti-Pacman

While searching for countergames online (which google did not cooperate with very well unfortunately) I came across a game entitled “Anti-Pacman” (Google responded slightly better to me searching under anti-games than it did to me searching under countergames). In the game, instead of controlling pacman, the player actually controls the four ghosts. The objective is to corner pacman with the ghosts before he can complete the level. This is a lot harder than it sounds since the player can only control where one ghost is headed at a time, and therefore needs to switch between ghosts quite frequently. To this point, the game seems like it is just a role reversal remake of the game, but there is one more catch: if pacman eats one of the ghosts (after turning them blue obviously) that the player is controlling, it does not respawn until one beats the level. This makes things extremely difficult, as one must always keep at least two ghosts alive in order to be able to corner pacman. While this game does not appear to be a true mod of another game, it is definitely a mod of the original idea of the game, and therefore is a countergame in some senses. Here is the url of the game if you would like to try it (for some reason it wouldn’t let me create a link to it, so you’ll have to copy and paste it into you browser window):

http://www.playzgame.com/online-flash-games/AntiPacman.php#

The game gets significantly harder after the first few levels (the speed of the game gets to be quite rediculous), so let me know if how far you’re able to get if you choose to play it.

Games for Change

I stumbled across this looking for games similar to those we’re discussing in class.  It’s a big archive of social realist games, specifically those designed for a certain real-world effect…hence the name.

http://www.gamesforchange.org/play

Some of them are playable online, some aren’t, but they all have little summaries that give you an idea the sort of complex social subjects people are modeling.  It’s amazing the huge variety of nuanced subjects people feel capable of simulating; there’s everything from conflict and environmental disaster to poverty and public policy.

“This is a song about FOUR pencils and TWO scissors…”

If you made it the end of EoEE, you will recognize the poetic line above from the song in the ending video.  In fact, the song, although (in my opinion) lacking relevance and preparation, was quite catchy and has stuck in my head for awhile.

Rather than focusing on one game in my blog post, I thought I would discuss some of the characteristics all the games share.  With Transparency vs. Foregrounding, Nelson’s games didn’t exactly “reveal the code” like some of Galloway’s examples.  They did “break the fourth wall” in the film-sense of the term, with Nelson making it quite obvious you were playing a game.  Aestheticism certainly overshadowed Gameplay in the four games, as the player sometimes didn’t have to utilize much skill to reach another level; in This Is How You Will Die, the player only clicks in a slot-machine manner.  Nelson certainly focused on the visual aspects of the game in order to convey his artistic message/social commentary.  Accordingly, I found that the games leaned heavily towards the Diegetic Machine quadrant of Galloway’s gamic actions.

As for his Diegetic focus, read ‘artistic message/social commentary’, was (to put it quite frankly) over my head.  I didn’t really understand what he was trying to convey most of the time.  I found that a lot of his ‘poetry’ (or what I am guessing was his poetry) was grammatically confusing and/or surprisingly uncalculated.  Many of the videos were unrehearsed and the home videos seemed disjoint from the game’s message as well.  Unless one of the artistic messages of the game was to satirize the way we consistently try to find messages in things that aren’t really there, Nelson has failed to convey his message to me.

Evidence of Everything Exploding

At the risk of giving away the content of my inquiry #3…

I was pleasantly surprised while playing Jason Nelson’s Evidence of Everything Exploding (EoEE) – in fact, I was even having fun(!) Since the game-play followed generally accepted 2-D videogame rules (for example, the goal is to reach the end of the level) and physics (pressing the up arrow causes the player-character to travel up on the screen), there was no exploitation of pixelation or glitches in the game engine, and player actions follow what is promised by the instructions on the game’s homepage, I found EoEE more similar to conventional games than Galloway’s “countergames.” The only countergamic aspects I found in EoEE were a foregrounding of the artist’s picture in level nine, his voice and hands in the matchbook videos and final level video, directly asking the players to email the artist in the “anti-intermission,” and Nelson’s attempt to make an artistic statement through his “art creature/digital poem” (what I see as a sign of Galloway’s “radical action”).

I enjoyed how the levels increased in difficulty and that each level had a unique background image, enemies, “harmless” enemies, and music. I though the matchbook videos at the completion of each level had an interesting similarity to traditional “cutscenes,” although the matchbook videos had no impact whatsoever on the narrative structure of the game. My only big complaint is that, as an artistic message, I felt Nelson missed the mark. He may have been trying to convey a statement on our culture’s obsession with conspiracy and tendency to force connections between disparate ideas or documents, but if he wants his message to be effective he needs to make it more accessible to the average person. The juxtaposition of images, video, and text without a clear, coherent thread or meaning may make for an interesting game-experience but does not leave the player with a satisfied feeling/learned moral upon completion of the game.

Well..

Although I’m not in the Links group this week (and I think even first readers are supposed to wait until Wednesday/Thursday to post) I thought I would share this game called Tetris Hell that a friend of mine showed me when I told him about countergames (and how bizarre the Nelson games are).  I’m pretty sure it qualifies.  I found it quite funny, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some people in the class have seen it already..

On ‘i made this. you play this. we are enemies.’

I think Nelson is a pretty weird guy. Out of the four games I played ‘I made this. You play this. We are enemies’ the most extensively. I found the experience a little bit depressing and fruitless. I know that the purpose of Nelson’s game was for it to act as a piece of media-art, so I tried to appreciate it in that way- but I found the experience not enjoyable. Nelson stated that the game includes “scribbles and ideas from the back of my brain, way-way back in the storage room for contextual whims.”

I guess that was Nelson’s point though – one of them at least. The very title of the game suggests that there will be conflict between the player of the game and the developer of the game. After I played through the first time and went back to the home screen I noticed a button in the upper left corner labeled “game?” I placed my cursor over the button and a kind of artist statement dropped down. It included the following: “There is a conflict, an Appalachian-style battle between the game-maker and the player, the artist and those wanky enough to like art, the poet and those who sing-song themselves through bittery selfish sexual what-nots.” So that much is clear- Nelson purposefully made this game frustrating.

I understand this whole idea- Nelson wants to explore the relationship between the developer and the player. However, this annoys me. Nelson wants us to explore his ideas, his poetry, the imagery he created in the game- and then he makes the player struggle for it? He purposefully makes the experience frustrating? How conceited is that? Why does he think he is so special that would make anyone want to struggle to understand the inner workings of his brain?

Oh, I’m sorry. We aren’t supposed to understand. As Nelson says, “figuring out is for control centered hedonists and sharks with bees for hair, such fast stinging chomping machines.” So, how am I supposed to take anything from this game? Nelson’s game is clearly trying to be an art piece, and using Professor Sample’s suggestion for a definition of art – something that changes/affects you in some way that you have not experienced before – how can this game succeed?

Let me get this straight. Play the game. Struggle against the developer to get some sort of meaning out of the experience. Don’t try and understand the meaning. Sweet game.