taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Patents: in a recent discussion about games and patents, it emerged that these common elements are patented:

• streamed loading
• minigames during a loading screen
• ghost cars in racing games

Looks like software patenting is coming to computer games in a big way. I’m not sure how any game on a modern platform can avoid the ’streamed loading’ patent.

Naturally, I can remember playing games on the Commodore 64 in the 1980s that included these…

Tags: computer, discussion, game, ghost, loading, looks, patents, platform, screen, software, way

Games: Katamari Damacy (roughly translated as ‘Clumpsoul’) is a game where you roll around various landscapes, making a giant ball of ’stuff’.
Here’s a review. It looks like sheer genius; here’s hoping it gets a US/Euro release!

Tags: ball, clumpsoul, damacy, euro, game, games, genius, katamari, release, review, stuff

Games: Anti-Monopoly: ‘A professor and a freelance writer are determined to set history straight on the origin and theft of a favorite American pastime’.

Details how Monopoly(R) is very similar — and allegedly based on – The Landlord’s Game, a socialist educational game from 1904, which was introduced as follows: ‘the object of this game is not only to afford amusement to players, but to illustrate to them how, under the present or prevailing system to land tenure, the landlord has an advantage over other enterprisers, and also how the single tax would discourage speculation’.

Apparently, once Monopoly(R) was set to succeed, this original was bought out and buried for $500. Here’s some more links that seem to back that up…

MonopolyCollector.com says ‘the Landlord’s Game was very similar to Monopoly(R), with the purchase of properties, utilities, a public park square, and a ‘Go to jail’ square. Many feel Darrow just added items to this game and improved some features.’

This article and its second part provide lots more detail.

Here’s a description of ‘The Landlord’s Game’, and another.

Tags: anti, freelance, game, games, history, landlord, monopoly, origin, professor, theft, writer

Quickies: I like Thanksgiving! A holiday based around a roast fowl and some booze; can’t go too far wrong with that. Thumbs up.

FrodoPalm — run C=64 games on your Palm handheld. Insanely cool. (via /.) I wonder what the controls are like, though — that can totally kill a game’s playability.

Escape From Woomera — nice press-grabbing idea, but I can’t imagine that the game will be too hot, though. (via Boing Boing)

The Bearer of This Card is a Genuine and Authorized Tsar, via Blather Shitegeist.

ABC.net.au: push for ‘open source’ biotech. I was just thinking about this last week; interesting to see this happening.

‘Biotechnology, the way it is right now, is needed in the developing world like a screen door on a submarine,’ said Jefferson. ‘What it really needs is what good science can do in biology, in biotechnology. And that means a different agenda and a different group of innovators.’

‘He added such tools could also help us understand and improve agricultural management systems such as organic approaches. An example of this would be the development of new ‘bioindicator’ plant varieties that would tell farmers about their soil nitrogen levels.’

Fantastic idea. I hope this takes off…

Tags: biotechnology, boing, booze, fowl, game, holiday, idea, quickies, roast, thanksgiving, thumbs

Games: Commodore 64 old-timers may remember Andrew Braybrook’s classic Paradroid, easily one of the best games for that platform, and a classic by any standards. Here’s a copy of the Zzap! 64 review from 1986. Many thumbs up, and the bottom line was that Paradroid ranked as ‘THE classic shoot-em-up’.

Paradroid trivia: in the days before .plan files, Zzap! 64 published a development diary by AB! Here’s the birth of one of the game’s key mechanisms, the ‘transfer game’:

Tuesday May 21: An average morning’s contemplation until …ZAP WHIZ POW ! An idea for a game within the main one, fighting for control of a new robot. Instead of just a graphical sequence showing the takeover of a new robot, why not have to play for it, you against the robot’s brain? Base it on logic circuits and use some existing routines. A whole new game segment in a small space!

Cool.

The authors’ company, Graftgold, has a website, detailing its history. Sadly, it maps the decline of the 80’s-style small games company, and ends on this note: ‘I would recommend the games industry to anyone wanting an exciting career buts its certainly not an easy ride. Most publishers we worked with either went bust, sold out or simply did not publish the game to our expections despite tight contracts. The trouble is the developer does their bit first then the publisher can choose the level to do their bit. Unless you can get real commitment by way of big advances you cannot rely on a publisher.’

Shame. Anyway. I’m not the only Paradroid fan out there — it seems a bunch of fellow enthusiasts have come up with FreeDroid, a homage to Paradroid which seems to be evolving into an RPG! It’s quite impressive – the gameplay is virtually identical to the original. Fedora Linux users can install it using apt-get install freedroid.

BTW, related: here’s two attempts at a canon for computer gamers, at costik.com and the Ludologist (of which I’ve played 121). What I find interesting about them is how clearly one is American and Apple-II-based and the other European and Commodore-64/Amiga-based. Stay tuned for the third, Spectrum-based canon. ;)

Tags: bit, commodore, company, freedroid, game, games, paradroid, platform, publisher, robot, zzap

Science: A lab rat writes up a report on his participation in two psychology studies on ‘Video Game Violence’ and ‘Violence In the Media.’

Sadly, it seems clear that the video-game violence study will return biased results due to flawed test conditions.

Of the three games played, the most violent — a first-person shooter – was modified, either through incompetence or deliberate tweaking, to use frustrating control settings and a high level of difficulty; whereas the least violent — a sim game — was set up with all the defaults and automatic help enabled.

In my experience, frustration, in any task, has a direct correlation with anger levels. So a frustrating game, violent or not, will probably give more aggressive responses in a violence measurement — hence the FPS game above will almost definitely be cited as ‘inciting violent emotions’.

Bad scientists! No doctorate!

PS: hmm, I wonder if the paper will document the exact configuration
of the games?

Linux: Happy birthday, KDE! I love it. Most recent discovery: the excellent support for printing in KDE 3.1 using the kprinter GUI.

Tags: game, kde, lab, media, participation, psychology, rat, report, science, video, violence

Tom Coates on search engine optimisation. Summary: they don’t work; smart search engines realise you’re trying to game them, and will ignore or penalise your site as a result. The correct answer is to provide interesting/good/linkworthy textual information, and keep superfluous eye candy at a sensible level. I agree with his essay, FWIW.

Personally, I reckon Google deserve a lot of credit for turning the web around, from a flashy, Flash-laden animated DHTML blinky-blink medium, back into one where text is king. Once it got recognized that Google used titles, h1 tags, and other semantic markup as key metadata, and that the gimmicky stuff is unindexable, the never-ending slide into flashy blinky-blink land was halted. Phew!

Aside: Labour MP Tom Watson has a weblog?! Wow. He’d get my vote straight away, no matter what his policies were — that’s transparency ;)

Interesting — so does Liberal Democrats MP Richard Allen. This is really amazing. He even links to SpamAssassin as part of a discussion on the All-Party Internet Group’s spam summit to be held on July 1st!

It’s worth noting that his comment here notes that the APIG concept seems to be leaning towards prosecution of spamvertised products; advertise via spam (sent by you or by a ’spam outsourcing’ company), and you’re liable. A very sensible approach, as long as they can avoid the danger of malicious spammers spamvertising a product without that company’s permission — a la what happens regularly to SpamCop and SpamHaus.

Tags: company, engine, game, google, optimisation, penalise, realise, search, spam, summary

Horror as maggots bore into game farmer’s eye (Saturday Star, South Africa):

‘I was in the veld hunting with a group of foreign tourists when I felt something flick into my eye. I thought it was just a miggie but that evening my whole face started to swell,’ he said.

Spangenberg went to his doctor and was given eye drops but the swelling got worse. ‘I started getting terrible migraines and at times I could see nothing but dark and light shadows out of my eye.’

His doctor sent him to eye specialist Bruce Staples in Bethlehem who suspected that the Bot fly was responsible but initially couldn’t spot the larvae - so he treated the inflammation.

When Spangenberg came in again, Staples spotted the worms in the retina and managed to hunt them down with the laser. Staples said by that stage they had begun to pupate and started to run and hide when he went after them with the laser.

This story notes that, in Africa at least, they generally attempt to infect sheep eyes rather than those of humans; but snopes has pictures (warning: extremely gross) from an earlier infestation in Honduras.

Botfly larvae are horrible, horrible little creatures. Urgh. This combines two of my pet neuroses — maggots and things happening to eyes — I think I’m going to get sick…

Tags: doctor, eye, farmer, game, horror, larvae, laser, saturday, spangenberg, star

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City has been nominated for the Designer of the Year award in London:

‘We will be highlighting the reason why it is worthy for this prize,’ (the curator) added, noting the game’s attention to detail in costuming, music and atmosphere.

‘I’ve never been so excited to just watch a video game, never mind playing it,’ said Sellers. ‘It is really great to see all the details and feel the nuances. Playing it is even better.’

I must say, I have to agree. It’s easily one of the best games I’ve ever played; insanely playable and full of amazing attention to detail. The content’s a bit strong in places, but the same can be said of Mean Streets or Scarface, and I’m sure they may have picked up an award or two themselves, along the way. It’s just (interactive) fiction.

Tags: attention, auto, award, designer, detail, game, grand, reason, theft, year

Torture A Spammer, a nifty Flash game from “white hat” email-marketing firm, emailSherpa.

Tags: emailsherpa, firm, flash, game, hat, spammer, torture

Gamasutra reports from GDC Europe. It’s good to see Systemic Game Design is getting a lot more attention these days as CPU power increases on consoles, instead of the random 3D graphics tweakery that predominates on the PC platform. Systemic game design is defined here as follows:

“Instead of hard-coding lots of features into the game .. the systemic paradigm tries to create global patterns which provide emergent gameplay, and the ability to create alternative strategies using the level’s resources. … In this way a player can come up with new ideas to solve problems by combining items in ways that perhaps even the level designers hadn’t considered. This improves the sense of immersion and freedom, while emphasizing player’s self-expression capabilities through the game. … An example of a systemic game is GTA3, where each mission can be solved in dozens of ways, as compared to old lock-and-key adventure games, where player expression and alternative strategies were basically non-existent. In a systemic game world, the player can use different methods to solve a problem. In a non-systemic game world, you must guess how the game designer wanted you to solve the problem, even if that way does not feel very intuitive, nor fun.”

Mmm. Grand Theft Auto 3. PS: GTA3 can also be found on my Amazon wishlist ;)

Tags: design, gamasutra, game, gta, level, player, problem, systemic, way, world

From Memepool: The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Clichés.

1. Thinking With The Wrong Head (Hiro Rule) No matter what she’s accused of doing or how mysterious her origins are, the hero will always be ready to fight to the death for any girl he met three seconds ago.

Tags: clichs, console, game, grand, head, hiro, list, memepool, role, thinking