Games

March 2012 update

March 19, 2012
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Wow, a lot has happened in a month.

Finished replaying Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords: How Many Subtitles Can We Add. I played TSL with the Restored Content Mod (1.7), and, because of it, the game was amazingly good–better than the first one, even. I played these to remind myself of the references that I’d been seeing in Star Wars: The Old Republic back in Dec/Jan, but since finishing those two games, I haven’t really had much time to hop back into SWtOR.

Instead, I went to the Digital Media and Learning conference, March 1-3 in San Francisco. It was good, but the most progressive and interesting stuff came from panel talks and hallway conversations, imho, not the keynote or plenary sessions. I think this has to do with who I am, as the main events were a lot of proselytizing to teachers and policy makers. While the conference was happening, I started a Google doc to take DML 2012 collaborative notes (like the previous two years and at other conferences I attend). This year, we got some pretty good coverage (thanks to Cathy Tran and Kat Schenke).

Hung out in San Francisco *during* Game Developers Conference, March 5-9, and, as luck would have it, someone gave me their pass on Wednesday since they were leaving early. I totally squandered it and mainly went to the expo, but I did see a really great talk by Rich Lemarchand. The energy at GDC put DML to shame, and surprisingly, the innovative game play and talks that I did go to I felt were better and more substantial than those at DML. Too bad, it costs 17 times more to go to GDC than DML.

Was introduced to Draw Something, the mobile game where you and a friend guess what each other are drawing, kind of like Pictionary. I love how it’s encouraging a lot of people who don’t normally “do art” draw and be creative. It’s pretty much taken over as my idle activity of choice, leaving my twitter feed languishing.

Played Mass Effect 3, March 11-18. (Massive) spoiler warning!!!

 

 

Spoilerz aheadz!

 

 

There’s a bit of controversy over the ending. I thought the ending took away player agency in a way that was dissatisfactory, not letting me make choices that I thought Commander Shepard would make. (The most awesome rewrite of the ending is, by contrast, very satisfactory, and I’ll pretend that’s how it ended.) The synthesis ending is completely bizarrely space magic. And when I think about the whole game, I am a little disappointed that so much of if felt like I was just hitting a button to continue to watch the cutscenes play out. In many cases, there wasn’t really a choice to make, and most of the cutscenes felt like Bioware was just dotting Is and crossing Ts, methodically tying up loose ends from the previous two games.

These activities and events have basically prevented me from attending to my inbox, and it will take me a while to go through everything I marked with a star to check out later.

 

more thoughts about KotOR

February 13, 2012
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It’s pretty amazing how much I’d forgotten. I remembered the CCG mini-game Pazaak, but I’d forgotten the first Knights of the Old Republic had podracing. For some reason I thought that was part of the sequel. And, man, I gotta say… the podracing line of quests on the first planet, Taris, so that you can win Bastila, the Jedi-turned-slave, is so freakin ridiculous. That sentence is freakin ridiculous. Podracing. Slavegirl. Taris (and rakghouls). All of that.

Plus, during it, the crazy wookiee, Zaalbar, swears a life oath to you because you unlocked a door. And it wasn’t even your character who unlocked it; it was his bff, Mission Vao. But noooo… he sees you like he swallowed some Love Potion #9 and swears to stay by your side forever. That must have been some door.

Zaalbar: Oh, yes, I had a life, full of hopes and dreams, but then that door came along and I fell into deep despair. I was just about to kill myself by repeatedly Ram Manning that door. Then you came along. Then you came along, and I will never leave your side. I hereby swear a life oath to you, having no idea if you’re an upstanding guy or not, knowing NOTHING about you, I swear a life oath to you.

Zaalbar (4 seconds later): Wait a sec, Mission. Where did you come from? Oh, you’re the one who unlocked that door? DAMMIT!!!

Actually, this reminds me about something in SWTOR. During certain cutscenes in the trooper storyline, various NPCs say, “you did it all by yourself!” and you reply “I’m a one-woman army!” all the while… hello? your companion is standing *right* *there*!

Anyway, KotOR. There’s also a man-the-turrets mini-game when you first get on the Millenium Ebon Hawk. Clearly Bioware was taking iconic scenes from the movies and threw them in the game with podracing and the turrets and the fastest ship in the galaxy knock off. No idea where Pazaak came from, but that’s really the only mini-game I like.

So, this game was a great game. It got about 94% on gamerankings. It had a lot of stuff in it that was amazing. Yet I’m encountering stuff I think is crazy ridiculous. Maybe if it didn’t have these inclusions, it would have been closer to 98%. Or maybe back then these things didn’t irk like they do now. Or maybe the main story (despite the Taris beginnings) is just as awesome as I remember. And maybe I’ll actually finish this play through, so I can answer that question!

thoughts about Knights of the Old Republic

February 10, 2012
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Yes, that’s the original Knights of the Old Republic (KotOR), not the new MMO, The Old Republic (SWTOR).

From Games

Some of you may know that KotOR was an influential game in steering me to become a PhD student looking at cooperation collaboration and teamwork in (online) games. Anyway, I decided to reinstall it, throw in some mods, and check it out, now that I’ve played SWTOR for a while. Here’s some really brief notes:

  • Low poly count and textures. The extent of this surprised me. I remembered it being much more detailed, but that was back then… It’s not as bad as playing Deus Ex these days, at least.
  • Sparsely populated, so… no change, really.
  • You can actually talk to everyone and get a line of banter, it seems. There’s even just people who’ll engage in a one-line dialog with you. Nice flavor.
  • I like that it isn’t clear who are quest givers.
  • I love how NPCs appear as recurring characters who you just sort of chance upon at first, like Cordo, the bountyhunter, or Mission Vao. You see them in a scene but then have hardly any interaction with them until later in the game. Lots of foreshadowing or “here’s some info and set-ups, which we won’t tell you when they come together for something bigger or if they’re just flavor.” I like the unpredictable nature of it… uncertain nature of it.

 

Leet Noobs: a new book for a new year!

January 3, 2012
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Two weeks ago, my book came out on Amazon!

Leet Noobs: The Life and Death of an Expert Player Group in World of Warcraft

Leet Noobs cover

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Penny Arcade Expo PAX11, Aug 26-28, 2011

August 29, 2011
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So, like last year, I was in a panel this year at the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX)!

It was me, Chris Paul (Seattle U), Roger Altizer (U of Utah), Nathan Dutton (Ohio U), Todd Harper (MIT GAMBIT), and Shawna Kelly (USC/Intel).

While last year we presented a general overview and introduction to games studies/games research in academia to people who may be interested in games as a career but don’t want to go into the games industry, this year we each had five minutes to share where we’re at and what we do and then share the work of someone else in the field that we like.

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Two iPhone game ideas

April 11, 2011
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Woke up with two iPhone game ideas. Very, very simple:

  1. Ultimate Gamification. Player earns points while the app is on. Random awards once in a while with bigger rewards happening to greater fanfare, bigger badges, etc. Nice confetti showers or fireworks or emblems or whatever. The description will hint that some rewards are tied to activity, using the accelerometer, gps, gyroscope, or compass. This is untrue, but hopefully players will link coincidences to ritual. (Or maybe it’s actually true… :) )
  2. Phone Killer. Player continually accrues points while their phone’s screen is off. The points continually increase exponentially, encouraging people to keep their phone screens off for as long as possible. Long idle times = bigger payoffs. Additionally, a large lump sum payoff is given when turning the screen off after the phone is active, though, if someone chain-turned on and off the phone, they’d get points at about the same rate as if they just left the phone idle while the screen was off. The idea is subversive in that it rewards players for not using their phone. Oh, while the phone is charging, player receives no points. If the battery is lower than 25% player receives double points.

Now that I think about it, I’m not sure these games are even possible on the iPhone. How is it with background apps or apps running while the phone isn’t actually active?

RPS’s review of the first 8 hours of Dragon Age 2

March 14, 2011
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WIT: The Opening Hours Of Dragon Age II by John Walker

An excerpt:

Clearly influenced by the enormous success of Mass Effect II, and the excellent ways that game was executed, DA2 seems determined to try to be as accessible, without compromising on its combat. But in the compromise appears to be lost another crucial aspect of such an RPG: dialogue.

My character, The Female Hawke, is utterly unlikeable. Smug, smarmy, and needlessly rude, her having been given a voice means her identity has little to do with my own influence. Good old Grey Warden Simon was mute, but immensely likeable. And helped by being offered nuance in his responses.

Hawke has Mass Effect’s three options. While they occasionally vary, they boil down to, “Good”, “flippant” or “evil”. The latter two are always rude, the first one only sometimes. And with no conversation skills apparent in the game, that’s your lot. Creating a character whose gift of the gab can talk their way out of situations appears to have been completely eradicated – something that’s really shocked me in a BioWare game. If it appears later, it appears far too late.

I desperately miss the range of possible responses, none so crudely labeled. Here, I was able to flirt, or agitate, in a way that felt nuanced, even subtle. Now I can sometimes choose the conversation option with the heart by it, where Hawke will then say something barely related to the words I’d clicked on, often so crawlingly crude that I’m surprised my companions don’t file a sexual harassment complaint.

 

Fallout New Vegas replay with mods

February 27, 2011
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So my dissertation’s main argument is that gamers become good gamers as they learn how to assemble in-game and out-of-game resources (both human and nonhuman) into their network of play so they can do what they need to do to succeed in the game and draw deeper meanings from their gaming. I thought I’d write about an example.

Fallout New Vegas with mods, screenshot of Bison Steve's in Primm, the main character and two companions

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6-8 word game reviews (spoilerish)

March 17, 2010
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Mass Effect 2

March 1, 2010
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Major spoilers follow:

Last month I played the original Mass Effect again and completed every side-mission so that I could export the save game for Mass Effect 2. Mass Effect 2 features a ton of little nods to your decisions in the original, but, in the end, I’m not sure if it’s really all that well implemented. The problem is that I bonded or bought into the role-play of my projected identity (Gee, 2003) of my version of Shepard in how the commander became emotionally attached with various party members that when I met up with those party members in the sequel, I was disappointed with how interactions with them were treated.

For example, in my version of Mass Effect, Ashley Williams started out relatively xenophobic but loosened up towards the end as I explored her feelings with her through dialog. When I met her in ME2, though, it just seemed like she reverted to her old self, as if we didn’t become close friends at all. Most glaringly, though, was the way my Shepard interacted with her lover from the first game, Liara T’Soni. In ME2, they exchanged maybe two lines that referred to their past relationship, kissed once, and then that’s it. The rest, I assume was just scripted for any Shepard incarnation, based off of Liara’s dealings with the Shadow Broker. I know there’s a comic book prequel to ME2 that details what Liara was doing between the events in the two games, so maybe her experiences while Shepard was away were traumatic enough to warrant her distanced emotion, but *Shepard* doesn’t know anything about those details (even if I did via reading the comics), so it would make sense for them to at least spend a couple of more sentences on how the events affect their relationship.

Disappointment in how ME ties into ME2 aside, there’s a bigger problem I had with Mass Effect 2. (I should say, right off, though, that I did like ME2; I just thought it could’ve been better.) The bigger problem is that there’s not really much of an epic plot going on. Things don’t lead to other things. Piecing together a mystery was a great plot in the first game; it’s barely there in the second game. Instead, the majority of the game is spent recruiting more and more party members and then going on unique missions for each one to unlock their special ability, presumably a reflection of their augmented loyalty to Shepard. There’s no sense of urgency, really. You don’t meet party members along your desperate journey to fight the bad guys (which worked really well for almost all the previous BioWare games such as Baldur’s Gate, Knights of the Old Republic, and the first Mass Effect). Instead the game is about recruiting them and getting them set-up the way you want before eventually going through a mass relay to fight the bad guys. It just didn’t feel like there was a point to it, especially since you can only take two party members with you on a mission. Getting more than half a dozen seemed superfluous.

A funny thing I noticed: it’s actually very similar to Dragon Age: Origin‘s plot, though DA:O seemed less linear than ME2. You have to get the Dwarves to join you, for example, but before that you have to resolve an internal conflict they’re having, and you have many options for how that conflict is resolved. In ME2, you recruit NPCs by helping them with whatever they’re currently working on, but you don’t get much of a say in how it’s done. What tied Dragon Age together really, really well, was the betrayal theme underlying the whole game. ME2 doesn’t have a one-word theme that resonates as strongly, I don’t think…

Other things about the game:

  • I liked how the relationship between Joker and EDI evolved to the point where they started having some pretty good chemistry and banter between them.
  • I liked most of the new party members pretty well, especially Jack, Miranda Lawson, and Mordin Solis. The DLC party member Zaeed Massani was alright but not really a fully realized NPC as the others are. No dialog with him at all, really, though he does have some interesting one-liners in various situations.
  • The opening prologue was extremely effective and moving. The rest of the game, not so much.
  • Finally, oh man, the scanning planets for resources part of the game sucked ass. I think I even like roaming around barren landscapes in the bouncy, bouncy Mako better.

Still, this was the second in a planned trilogy of games. Arguably, it’s the lull before the climactic finale, building up anticipation for something big. I suppose I’ll hold onto my save game until then.

Gee, J. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy.