Nintendo executives are rarely seen in public these days without mentioning their “Touch Generations” series of products, which aim to get non-gamers playing (and buying) more games. Nintendogs is the most prominent member on both sides of the world, but the other major standard bearer of the series, Brain Training, has yet to see a release in either America or Europe. Brain Training’s precise nature has remained something of a mystery to me, so I enjoyed reading this writeup on the game.
Knowing more about the nature of the game, I’m really eager to see whether it plays out the same success when transplanted from its native habitat to the west, early this year. It’s intriguing to watch how Nintendo handle the novel marketing and retail challenges the game poses.
Monthly Archive for January, 2006
“Make you happy tonight” by Aussie comedy group Tripod. Painfully accurate. (via)
In my previous post, I mentioned that I have been toying with some ideas for new directions in which to take my writing. This is the first product of those thoughts: I have decided to create a diary of the project I am building (which I’m currently calling just ‘Resistance’), as a series of posts here on The Ant Nest. I’m already a fair way into things, but I think I have enough archeological evidence to piece things together from the beginning, so that’s where I’ll start. This post and any future posts in this diary can be found collectively via this link.
Where to begin then? The initial starting point was easy for me to pin down. “Choose a medium you enjoy working with” and all that: I’m a big fan of the first-person perspective because of the immediacy and sense of direct engagement it gives a player. Knowing that I wanted to build a first-person experience, from a practical perspective, the Source engine was then the most natural choice for me. Valve have built a great set of tools that I was already pretty familiar with from building maps on the HL1 engine and a solid community has been nurtured around Valve’s products, which is sure to help out if I get stuck. Additionally, I don’t have the resources to start wildly creating huge quantities of new game assets, so whatever I make has to fall fairly close to what I can achieve with the existing Half-Life 2 assets and code.
So far, so simple, so boring: I’m making an FPS ‘mission’. But Quake 4 isn’t the same as Half-Life 1, which isn’t the same as Metroid Prime: there’s more decisions to be made before I have my basics laid down.
“What, you want twenty more buttons? A nunchuck? A sleeve that turns the controller into a vorpal sword? Here, have them. Go wild. Play your first person punching whatevers. Just know that whatever you tack on, it’s no more than an expansion to the basic design – just as every other controller you’ve touched was to our first pad.”
Eric-Jon Rossel Waugh looks at the Revolution controller and its peers from the perspective that interactive controls should be understood as discrete action abstractions (button presses that equate to “do-this” results), arguing that successful control schemes break down that abstraction by tying virtual and real actions together. Consequentially, the ease with which it can bridge this abstraction is the true strength of the Revolution controller, rather than allowing all sorts of non-discrete interaction, as represented by the clichéd sword-fighting/arm-swinging example. Only time can prove his latter point right or wrong, but it’s certainly an insightful take on things.
David Braben reckons gaming is on the cusp of a golden age. I think it will perhaps depend on what lessons publishers take from GTA’s success this generation - does emergent gameplay pay off, or is it just gangsters and hiphop that bring in the punters?
He points to a transition from spectacle to story as key, but a glance at this year’s 11 biggest films suggest that spectacle is alive and well - for six of them (by my count), most of the audience will have already known what happens before they bought their tickets. Is story dead, or is it merely that audiences are bored of being told stories?
As others have noted, there’s a huge paradox inherent in the unprecedented creative options available to us as a generation and our incredibly uncreative consumer habits in spite of that. Games seem perfectly placed to resolve this by creating a middle ground of joint authorship, so my instinct is that Braben is right and I hope we don’t screw it up.