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?

PC

• Torchlight - level 35 or so, finished main quest. Fun Diablo clone with great art. Not sure it has legs, but it’s good for when you need a 30 min wind-down diversion.
• Dragon Age: Origins – twice, on third iteration now. Google for reviews. I can’t really add anything more other than to say that it has very strong introductory chapters for the different origin stories you can choose for your character, drags a little in the middle (massing an army can be tedious), and has a relatively short end-game (what we’d get that army for again?), but all in all, classic Bioware and a triumphant return of deep(ish) party dialog. Looking forward to community mods.
• Broken Sword 3: The Sleeping Dragon – I bought this game years ago but it never installed on my various computers I’ve owned over the last few years. Buggy install is a bitch. I saw it on Steam 2 weeks ago and figured I’d give it another shot. It worked! and it’s a pretty good game. Odd Tomb Raider-esque ledge climbing given its pedigree (the first two were point-n-click 2D adventure games), but they didn’t really bother me. The art did take a turn backwards though when they moved to blocky 3D. I played Broken Sword 4 a couple of years ago and remember it being much prettier.
• Nancy Drew: Warnings at Waverly Academy - Yes, I’m a sucker for Nancy Drew games. They’re all generally the same with not much innovation between iterations, but that lets them pound out… what two dozen games? in the last few years. Kinda like trashy romance novels.
• Nancy Drew: Ransom of the Seven Ships - Sailing and driving around was pretty fun, I have to admit. That was new.
• Mirror’s Edge - the first-person pakour game that came out a year or so ago. Most games I play are at least a year old so I can afford them… But anyway, yes, this game was fun. Shortish. Captivating music. The cutscenes were done in cool Samurai Jack-esque cutout-esque artwork. It was frustrating a few times, but overall good. Racing game combined with platformer combined with FPS. Neat.

DS

• Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes – Best DS game of 2009 for me. Though, admittedly, I haven’t played GTA or the new Zelda. Essentially, a puzzle game with RPG elements. Engaged me more than Puzzle Quest did.
• Broken Sword 1: Shadow of the Templars – haven’t quite finished it yet. Just as good as I remember from playing it years ago when it first came out and then replaying it a couple of years ago on the PC. For some reason, Nico’s apartment as a sort of home base works really well and is missing from the later games in the series. Also, being able to talk about everything to everyone and get (mostly) unique dialog is pretty cool. The DS version adds some nice 2nd-screen portrait close-ups when talking with NPCs but the small main screen makes seeing the various environment elements a little harder, though they tried to make up for it by making things highlight when you touch the screen with your stylus. I bet the Wii version is great, so go buy it if you have a Wii!

Xbox 360

• Fable II – Got this pretty much right after I (finally) bought an Xbox 360 in November. I think I liked the original Fable more. The morality system was pretty meaningless since it didn’t affect the story at all, just your character’s visuals.
• Lego Batman - Playing with Robin. We aren’t done, yet. It’s fun. :)
• various incarnations of Rock Band – Fun as always. The main reason we got an Xbox 360, actually. Well, that and the fact that it hooks up nicely to my home network and Windows Media Center.
• Forza Motorsport 3 – When we get a house and a dedicated home theater room some day (I want to take you to a monster-free city), I’ll be getting a racing chair and a wheel to go with whatever version of Forza exists then… It is sooo beautiful. Damage modeling, too!

Wii

• New Super Mario Bros. - Haven’t actually gotten to play it much, but I like it. The kids we sometimes hang out with like it.
• Wii Sports Resort – borrowed from Steve. I spent a few hours just flying around. :) Sword fighting is fun.
• Wii Fit Plus – We had to rearrange our office to make enough room between the couch and TV for the Wii balance board. Now that we’ve set it up, we’ve used it maybe once a week, which is better than sitting on our asses all the time. Pretty fun so far, actually.

The thing is, I’ve been replaying some older games and realizing how much of them I’ve forgotten, and then I have a tiny moment of panic about how ephemeral my experiences with these games are–a tiny existential crisis ensues. Do I play the games because life is nihilistic and I should just fill it with personally engaging experiences, or do I try to contribute something to the societal world–games culture and academic progress? And then I figure, well, it won’t take much time to write at least a one-line review of the things I’m playing.

Part of the hesitation, though, is also the fact that I play *a lot* of games. A LOT. It’s kind of frightening, actually, given that I’m trying to finish the dissertation and apply for jobs and do academic stuff at the same time. So, there’s a bit of shame or guilt involved, too.

But talking with Theresa, another student at the college of ed who also studies games and learning, has convinced me that knowledge about games is part of my academic identity. I’ve come to be known as “the games guy” in my department, and that label or position has definitely given me some cultural capital that I’ve been able to ply into various opportunities within academia, if only by giving me confidence in myself by seeing that others value my knowledge.

The positioning, though, is kind of strange since I don’t think I’ve done all that much to cultivate it. It seems like I can contribute to it and make it productive while also justifying all the game playing if only I shared my thoughts about these games, and thus, my new year’s resolution is to write about each game I play.

Or maybe I’m just trying to make an obsession have some sort of extrinsic value…

(All images from Wikipedia!)

The collector’s edition headstart for Warhammer Online started yesterday. I’ll start playing on Tuesday, probably. Same servers as Michael Zenke [Edit 18-9-2008: for some reason I thought it was Mike Sellers' blog, but I am wrong... unless Zenke and Sellers are the same people]:

• Destruction: Volkmar
• Order: Averheim

Except that he chose regular servers and since I’m partial to RP servers, I also started on an RP server, Ostermark – Order. [Edit (Tuesday): Lucas Gillispie sent me a note that his RP guild is starting on Phoenix Throne, so I started there instead. Order side.]

Spore came out over the weekend to some crazy low reviews on Amazon and other user-based review sites due to its onerous (draconian) DRM. I tried it out yesterday and decided that it was not for me. I mean, it’s kind of fun for a while, but it gets rather tedious. And it seems unbalanced in that the first few stages go by quick and then the last space stage is humongous. Like way too detailed. The first stage is almost a clone of but not as good as the Flash game flow. The other stages remind me of other games, too. Namely Populous in the tribal stage. [Edit: At first I thought this made sense since I thought Populous was made by Maxis and Will Wright, the person behind Spore, but it turns out that it was made by Bullfrog and Peter Molyneux. We'll see how his game Fable 2 plays in a few...]

While everyone else has been hyping about Spore, I’ve been more interested in Mercenaries 2. It’s fun so far. Blowing shit up is always fun I guess. Basically, think GTA but you start with an arsenal from the get-go, and your missions involve making money for destroying stuff for various factions. You get the missions GTA style by going to a contact’s location as marked by a little circle beam of light.  :)

And finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that I’ve been playing World of Warcraft (in prep for the expansion due out in a couple of months) using two accounts at the same time! Basically, on the first day I had my laptop open next to me with one character following my main guy on my desktop. But then I read that you can actually run two (or more) copies of WoW at the same time, and since I got a new monitor last month, I decided to do that with each monitor showing a different WoW window. Then I installed an app (HotKeyNet) that lets me send keystrokes to both windows at the same time. So on one screen I hit 2 for Sinister Strike and on the other screen, 2 triggers a macro that targets my main’s target and casts Sinister Strike (yes, two rogues :p) Check out wowwiki and dual-boxing for helpful details.

We’re going to try to play at least these games:

• Long Live the King
• Game of Thrones
• Arkham Horror
• Grand Theft Auto IV
• Dungeon Twister
• Pandemic

And we’re going to the Seattle Art Museum‘s Roman exhibit (with a slew of Reedies–”slew?”  gaggle?  grouping? an anarchy of Reedies maybe?).

I’ll post game write-ups and photos if I have time.

This comes at a time when I’m trying to write a game review on The Witcher and morality in games.  I’m also going to submit something for a pre-conference on games ethnography happening as part of AoIR 9 in Copenhagen in October.  Due in one week!  But if I don’t get in, there’s also a doc consortium happening there and the deadline to submit for that is in 3 weeks.  :)

One day back from New York and I see this post.  :)

Grumpy Gamer Kracken

I am way more excited about this than GTAIV. :p

[Edit May 2: Oh, boo... it's not in English yet.  Damn my lack of multilingualism.]

As an aside, once I got the full version, I quickly discovered that the onerous copy protection scheme was not compatible with my system until I uninstalled virtual drive software that I use so I don’t have to swap DVDs/CDs around all the time. That was a pain because I have a bunch of ISOs on my system that I am now unable to mount. (heheh, I said “mount”)

Anyway, I saw from the demo that The Witcher had promise, but the demo wasn’t super polished. After the intro tutorial but before the whole intro story could play out, the demo jumped over to another chapter of the game, presumably so that I could suss out the leveling/XP system and get a feel for how the game works.

This jump was rather disorienting. The cutscene after the jump was poorly put together and didn’t make any sense. I saw some kid named Alvin and a woman flee towards a walled town to escape some hellhounds. The kid made it in the walls before the guards shut the gate, but the woman didn’t. Then came a cut where Geralt (me) was being asked by some other woman named Shani to save the outside woman before she’s mauled. (How the hell did I get there? Who the hell is this woman Shani? Why are we just standing out in the street?) But then when the game gave me back control of Geralt, the scenario changed such that the hellhounds were now in the town walls and I was fighting them alongside the guards. Woman stuck outside promptly forgotten. Once the fight was over, Alvin’s lying on the ground writhing in pain while I calmly talked with Shani and went through her conversation tree. (“Shut up kid, can’t you see some adults are talking here?”)

So, I figured the full version of the game probably filled in the gaps of the story. Well, it didn’t. I still think that cutscene, which starts off Chapter 1, was confusing as hell.

The game overall, though, is good. There are indeed many different decisions to make in the game about which path to follow, who to side with, etc. none of which are easily mapped as good or evil. I wish more games were like this. Force me to think about what I care about. The Bioware games let players choose between Light or Dark (KotOR), Open Hand or Closed Fist (Jade Empire), and Up or Down (Mass Effect :p ). It’s pretty clear which choices are which. The Witcher presents two different factions both using variously questionable means to reach their ends. By trying to do “good” does one end up a pawn for the greater “evil?” Interesting situation. Meanwhile, the player also has to ask “are monsters judged by their natural appearance or should Geralt go after humans who behave as monsters and leave the scrupulous vampires and ghouls alone?”

What’s ironic maybe is that while choices are morally ambiguous, almost everything involves combat and death. What’s missing that the Bioware games have are persuasive kinds resolutions to problems. No Charisma or Intelligence modifiers to dialog trees in The Witcher. Also, unlike Fallout, Arcanum, Deus Ex, etc. there’s no sneaking about in The Witcher either. Everything is resolved by the point of a blade.

On another note, there’s a few mini-games at work, too. Similar to Knights of the Old Republic’s Pazaak card game, The Witcher has a poker dice game built-in. There’s also a fist fighting game (parallel to KotOR’s pod racing I guess). And finally, there’s this odd card collecting game where Geralt tries to sleep with as many women NPCs as possible, receiving a card in the game’s journal as a token of his conquest. You can read more about the different mini-games on the spoiler page of The Witcher’s Wikia wiki.

Overall, I think the shortcomings (some weak cutscenes, completely stupid poker dice AI, wretched copy protection, periodic crashes, and some gaping holes in the story) are far outweighed by The Witcher’s strong points. The story is engrossing even if some of the loose-ends don’t get tied up at the end. Some of the cutscenes are pretty good (inconsistency is bad though!). The plot twist at the end rivals that of Knights of the Old Republic. This is one of those games where I think about what’s happened, what I caused to happen, for a while after finishing the game. It lingers like a good book or movie.

The Witcher is a perfect example of the kind of agency good computer games can provide players. I did that. I had an effect on the world. I can’t say the same about World of Warcraft, which is precisely why my true passion has always been single-player games. Makes me wonder if I should be writing about them more. Later perhaps. After the dissertation.

Amanita Design

Love their art style!