Marijuana in the USA

Boston’s where one of the top game studios lives, 2K Boston (née Irrational Games).

What with Obama being voted in, and a recent relaxation in the law around marijuana (similar to the situation in South Australia when I lived there, incidentally), it’s suddenly an interesting place to live.

Now if only they’d sort this out for Washington (Microsoft, Valve) and California (Blizzard, everyone else?!) too.

Fit, Sexy, Geeky Chicks!

In an article called “The Virtual Battle of the Sexes“, the BBC report on research by Dmitri Williams (University of Southern California) Mia Consalvo (Ohio University), Scott Caplan (University of Delaware ) and Nick Yee (Palo Alto Research Center).

In particular they highlight analyses which suggests EQ2 players tend to be healthier than the general population, and that 40% of them are female and 5 times more likely to be bisexual.

Williams also posts about this paper on Terranova in an article called “Gender differences: New findings, new paper“

You can get the original 44 page manuscript from his publications list,

Williams, D., M. Consalvo, S. Caplan & N. Yee. (2009, in press). Looking for gender (LFG): Gender roles and behaviors among online gamers. Journal of Communication.

Here’s the abstract,

“Gender role theory was used to examine differences among male and female players of a large online game. Several hypotheses regarding the importance of gender and relationships were tested by combining a large survey dataset with unobtrusive behavioral data from a year of play. Consistent with expectations, males played for achievement-oriented reasons and were more aggressive, especially within romantic relationships where both partners played. Female players in such relationships had higher general life happiness than their male counterparts. Female players were more likely to play for social reasons. Contrary to popular stereotypes and current hypotheses, it was the female players who played the most. Female players were also healthier than male players or females in the general population. The several findings have implications for gender theory and communication-oriented methods in games and online research—most notably for the use of self-reported time spent, which was systematically incorrect and different by gender.”

Paper, Scissors, Stone

After a long day of study I finally posted this Tweet at around 01:50 in the morning,

“About to give up and let sleep beat work once again. If only I knew the third part of this Paper/Scissors/Stone-like triad…”

It couldn’t be easier: the final part is Play.

• Sleep beats Work
• Work beats Play
• Play beats Sleep

Not Playing…

Games I’m not playing yet because I’m too busy and too poor:

• Left 4 Dead
• Dead Space
• Fallout 3
• Guitar Hero IV
• Mirror’s Edge

This Ph.D in video games is really getting in the way of my game playing.

Graphics Card Upgrade

I’ve been thinking about upgrading my gfx card at uni.

First of all I needed to identify which bus my PC uses. CPU-Z is a useful little diagnostic utility which says I have PCI-E x-16

This means that I could go all the way to an NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+. Tempting!

Actually, given the price I’ve ordered a 512MB NVIDIA 8800GT for £89.29 inc. VAT and delivery from Overclockers.

Open / Shared Source Games for Research

I’ve been considering trying out my usability / user testing on open / shared source games.
Any recommendations for good games that I could modify in an attempt to improve the user experience?

There are some lists of Open Source and Commercial games on Wikipedia.

A quick search made me think of the following,

Frets on Fire / Unsigned / StepMania / UltraStar
Flight Gear
Homeworld (HW: Game of the Year torrent, HW+HW2 torrent)

Dope Wars
FreeCiv / FreeCol (Sourceforge rank 4) / OpenCity
Sauerbraten (Sourceforge rank 55) / Nexuiz / Aleph One / OpenArena / Tremulous / Doom / Duke Nukem 3D / Heretic / Hexen / Hexen II / Quake / Quake II / Quake II Arena
The Battle for Wesnoth
Nethack / Colossal Cave Adventure
UFO Alien Invasion (Sourceforge rank 45)
SuperTuxKart (Sourceforge rank 124)
BZFlag
OOLite
Osu!
PokerTH
Scorched 3D
Spring
Star Control: Famous Battles of the Ur-Quan Conflict
KAsteroids
PlaneShift
Marathon 2
Mech Commander 2

Some kind of Tetris / Space Invaders / Missile Command / Pinball clone

It would be good to get candidates from a broad range of styles, eg,

Windows / Web / Console games (such as homebrew on Wii or Xbox 360)

Bemani
Card / Board Games
First Person Shooters (single / multiplayer)
Multi-User Dungeons (MUD) / MMO
Puzzle Games
Real Time / Turn-Based Strategy
Role-Playing
Side-Scrolling / Shoot / Beat-em-up / Arcade Games
Simulation

A game that’s missing, that I’d love to make, would be a VI tutor a la Typing of the Dead (which, incidentally, is available on GameTap Gold and The Pirate Bay along with a NoCD crack.)

If I were to make my own game I’d need content assets, for which TurboSquid, CreativeCommons, and ShareCG might be useful.
This brings up an important issue: usability only relates to functionality, while user experience takes in the aesthetics – particularly the audio and visual aspects are something that I won’t ever have much input on (as I have no artistic skills!)

Console Ambivalence

Why I haven’t bought a 360:

• The free GTA4 bundles aren’t available any more.
• No compelling 360 exclusive games.
• RROD.
• Rubbish backwards-compatibility.
• Too noisy.

Why I haven’t bought a PS3:

• Too expensive.
• Patchy backwards-compatibility.
• Sceptical about Home.

So the news about a 360 SKU adjustment (60GB for the same price as 20GB) isn’t such a big deal to me (assuming it’ll eventually come to Europe).

PS3 needs to drop £100 before I’m going to move. For now I think I’ll just stick with my Wii (now playing: Okami) and PC (now playing: Psychonauts; Bioshock, CoD IV, GTA IV and maybe Assassins’ Creed when I upgrade my GFX card, and also looking forward to: Spore and Diablo III).

Who says PC gaming’s dead? It’s just available after the consoles and for the unit cost is lower.

Games Podcasts

Are there any good games industry / tech / research podcasts out there?

The closest I’ve found is Game Theory Show but despite the name there’s almost no theory in that show.

Although there are lots of other games podcasts out there they usually just describe what they dis/liked about recent games, which is less interesting than reading reviews.

 

[EDIT: 2008-12-22] I haven’t listened to any of these yet, but Industry Broadcast sounds like it might be interesting.

Wii Homebrew

I’ve just installed the Homebrew Channel, which lets you run homebrew apps on your Wii.

So using WiiLoad (actually WiiLoadGUIInstaller) I uploaded and played Snake2.

Crap game.

Great homebrew potential!

Important links include GX.h (for hardware accelerated 3D) in libOGC (examples, forum) on devkitPro (PPC Mailing list, Windows Installer, Getting Started Windows, Getting Started Linux, USB Gecko, Debugging, Insight apt-get insight), WiiReleases, SDK, WiiBrew (forum), Linux: (WiiLi Proof of concept, Segher’s patches)

FTPii is really useful for getting apps onto your Wii quickly, though I’ve had some problems with my clients. First of all Cyberduck didn’t display the directory listing (which I am lead to believe is due to my firewall or network config). I’ve now changed to Classic FTP which seems slow, but OneButton works well. The Homebrew Browser sounds interesting but I haven’t tried it yet.

SDExplorer is good for moving things around when the SD card’s in the Wii, but why won’t FTPii let me delete or rename files anyway?

I’ve just uploaded Poker but it looks really ugly too.

Quake’s alright too, though really ugly looking! I’m also not sure about the mouselook control mechanism – if your pointer is in the middle of the screen then you get to target like a mouse, but if you move it a little bit further out then you the camera starts to rotate in that direction. So you get a normal pointer reticule but continuous rotation of your camera until you move the pointer back into the centre. Maybe it’s just me, but I think I’d prefer a bigger deadzone.

If you’re using The Homebrew Channel then you can upload these (missing) files into

/apps/quake/meta.xml

/apps/quake/icon.png

Yahtzee on Narrative, Embodiment and AI

The World Ends With You.

A major thing that turns me off from JRPGs and a lot of games in general is when I don’t feel that I as a player am contributing anything to the story. All I seem to do is wheel the characters from one whingy, boring dialog to the next; events are driven by their actions, not mine, and all I am is little angry id who takes over for the combat, spending the rest of the time jumping up and down in the back of the main character’s mind, yanking on nerve endings, trying to make him stop acting like a pillock.