Caine’s Arcade is just the best video you’ll watch on the internet today.
Currently browsing Posts Tagged “games”
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The New York Times Magazine on the rise of casual gaming.
Game-studies scholars (there are such things) like to point out that games tend to reflect the societies in which they are created and played. Monopoly, for instance, makes perfect sense as a product of the 1930s — it allowed anyone, in the middle of the Depression, to play at being a tycoon. Risk, released in the 1950s, is a stunningly literal expression of cold-war realpolitik. Twister is the translation, onto a game board, of the mid-1960s sexual revolution. One critic called it “sex in a box.”
Scrabble: Typography Edition. You know, I have a birthday coming up next month, people. Just sayin’.
The story of how Billy Baker’s wife became a Tetris record holder is pretty great. [via]
“It’s funny,” I told Flewin. “We have an old Nintendo Game Boy floating around the house, and Tetris is the only game we own. My wife will sometimes dig it out to play on airplanes and long car rides. She’s weirdly good at it. She can get 500 or 600 lines, no problem.”
What Flewin said next I will never forget.
“Oh, my!”
Chasing Ghosts is on Netflix.
At the unassuming Twin Galaxies arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa, early gamers fought for bragging rights at the 1982 Video Game World Championships. See how competitive gaming started, and meet arcade owner Walter Day, who still oversees scoring.
Modding Colonization (a game I’ve played the shit out of) to make Native Americans playable opens a rather sizeable can of worms.
Natives were created by consciously turning off individual characteristics of standard peoples in Civilization IV. That is to say, Native peoples are not a different kind of entity in the game; they are quite literally another kind of people. We’re not really sure what exactly to make of this.
A Google designer visits the Stern Pinball factory, takes cool pictures. (This also marks the first time I’ve linked to Google+.) [via]
Behold the insanity that is Risk: Legacy. [via]
Here’s the hook: as you play Risk: Legacy, the game changes. I don’t mean in the conventional sense of gameplay evolving as players become more experienced; I mean the game literally, physically changes. The components include an assortment of stickers, which players use to irrevocably alter play: stickers affixed to the board forever enhance or mar the topography, stickers added to cards permanently revise their value and utility, and so forth.
But wait, as they say: there’s more. The rules frequently ask–demand!–that players take up Sharpies and annotate the board, to name continents, record events, and immortalize victories by scrawling their John Hancock on the “Winner’s List”.
Some events require that cards be removed from the game. This is not uncommon–many games ask you to “take cards out of play” by setting them aside or returning them to the box; only in Risk: Legacy are you told to do so by ripping them into confetti and then tossing them in the trash. The horror.
Andy Baio on humans pretending to be videogames:
It’s a clever solution to complex problems that have plagued game designers for decades. How do we understand the player’s intent? Can we make AI characters act human, instead of like idiot robots? Is it possible to handle every edge case the player thinks of without working on this game for the next 10 years?
Making computers think and react like us is hard. So instead of making software more human, some game developers are trying to make humans more like software.
Ten life lessons learned from playing Minesweeper. Understanding things conceptually is important, b
Ten life lessons learned from playing Minesweeper.
Understanding things conceptually is important, but it is no substitute for experience. I could sit with someone and discuss strategy for various minesweeper scenarios for hours on end. I could explain how a 1-2-1 on a straight edge will always indicate split mines, or how a 1-2-2-1 always indicates a cluster, but the best way for someone to learn minesweeper is to sit down and actually play. Sometimes we get too wrapped up in training or trying to complete our knowledge of a particular area rather than just jumping in and learning as we go. There is value in training and knowledge, but understanding “why” is fruitless if we do not understand “how.”
Also coming to the Kindle, classic text adventure games.
Gamification is bullshit. And how. Gamification is reassuring. It gives Vice Presidents and Brand Ma
Gamification is bullshit. And how.
Gamification is reassuring. It gives Vice Presidents and Brand Managers comfort: they’re doing everything right, and they can do even better by adding “a games strategy” to their existing products, slathering on “gaminess” like aioli on ciabatta at the consultant’s indulgent sales lunch.
Gamification is easy. It offers simple, repeatable approaches in which benefit, honor, and aesthetics are less important than facility. For the consultants and the startups, that means selling the same bullshit in book, workshop, platform, or API form over and over again, at limited incremental cost. It ticks a box. Social media strategy? Check. Games strategy? Check.
The campaign for real Monopoly. [via]
You can’t remember, can you? We’ve all played it sometime, when we were kids; but never recently, and why?
Because it’s crap. It takes ages to play, suffering long action-free periods in which the players endlessly circle the board in search of the streets they need to complete a set, and lacks the interaction between players that we look for in a game. In short, it’s boring and lacks skill.
Except that it isn’t crap. Actually. You just have to play it the way it was designed to be played. You just have to read the fucking rules.
And from Marco Arment:
Common house rules, like getting money for landing on Free Parking, make the game significantly worse. People have added them over time to make the game more “fun”, I guess, but almost all of them artificially inject more money into the game and therefore make it take much longer — and then the same people complain that it takes forever.
The strangely compelling game mechanic powering Google+.
It’s hard to know why this game works so well, but the genius of Zuma or Tetris or Angry Birds inheres in the smallest details. There’s something brilliant in the way objects teeter in Angry Birds or the way the frog ball shooter thing rotates in Zuma. The way the 1 floats up in Google isn’t quite in that league, but it’s still great — and a hell of a lot more useful.
An existentialist moment with the bird from the iPhone game Tiny Wings. We will never outrun the nig
An existentialist moment with the bird from the iPhone game Tiny Wings.
We will never outrun the night, my feathered friends, and we were fools to try for this long. We must accept this inevitable fact, just as we have accepted our eventual deaths and an understanding that our tiny wings will never grant us the true flight we’d need to escape this relentless archipelago prison.
As my wife will confirm, I’m very much addicted to Tiny Wings. And yet, I fucking hate Tiny Wings… I hate it so much. Garrett Murray agrees in hilarious fashion. [via]
I hate this game. I hate it so much. Every time I open it, I tense up. I dread touching for sunrise. I hate the night. It’s a fucking bastard, the night. And what about the sun? The sun is a lazy bitch who only helps you out in the beginning and then no matter how well you fly it just sits up there, heavy in the sky, ready to fall at your first minor setback.
(Side note: I have NO friends on Game Center. At all. None. It turns out, I don’t actually have anyone’s email address memorized or care to look it up, and I’ve become dependent on the “Find Your Friends On Twitter/Facebook” feature of other apps. Why doesn’t Game Center have that? This, of course, means that my obsession with Tiny Wings is far more deeply rooted in my own psyche to the point of being unhealthy.)
The New Yorker talks to Shigeru Miyamoto, the guy behind some of the biggest video games ever made.
Fishermen have a saying, in reference to the addictive sensation of a fish hitting your line: “The tug is the drug.” Gamers, as video-game players are known, thrill to “the pull,” that mysterious ability that good games have of making you want to play them, and keep playing them. The pull used to extract quarters from your pockets. Then it became a force that pinned you to a couch. Later, it got your entire family to shadowbox in the living room. Whatever the interface, a great game invites and rewards obsession, and Miyamoto’s games are widely considered to be among the greatest.
Paste lists the 20 best videogames of 2010, of which I played exactly zero.
An exhaustingly detailed study of Pac-Man ghost behavior. [via] The key to understanding ghost behav
An exhaustingly detailed study of Pac-Man ghost behavior. [via]
The key to understanding ghost behavior is the concept of a target tile. The large majority of the time, each ghost has a specific tile that it is trying to reach, and its behavior revolves around trying to get to that tile from its current one. All of the ghosts use identical methods to travel towards their targets, but the different ghost personalities come about due to the individual way each ghost has of selecting its target tile. Note that there are no restrictions that a target tile must actually be possible to reach, they can (and often are) located on an inaccessible tile, and many of the common ghost behaviors are a direct result of this possibility. Target tiles will be discussed in more detail in upcoming sections, but for now just keep in mind that the ghosts are almost always motivated by trying to reach a particular tile.
Looking back on the gloriousness that was Blades of Steel.
Blades of Steel wasn’t a hockey game as much as it was a theater of everything awesome about the NES. It was a cart that said its name when you turned it on. “Blades… of STEEL!” It didn’t take crap from anyone. In a time before the difference between the arcade and simulation wasn’t as important, Blades of Steel fell into a new category: badass.
Pinheads is a short documentary about the Pacific Pinball Museum. [via]
Posted by Tyler in Daily Links
Pinheads is a short documentary about the Pacific Pinball Museum. [via]
