Magick has always been a paradox. It's a science of the supernatural, a consistent manipulation of inconsistencies, a simulation of a fantasy. Often game designs dealing with the magickal err on the side of suspension of disbelief in being a mage while neglecting the visceral side of becoming a mage -- how exciting is memorizing spells every night only to exhaust them in the heat of the moment, or to pick spells off a menu in expense of MP? Arrowhead Game Studio is composed of a bunch of folks from Skelleftea in northern Sweden, at a latitude on par with Macbeth's weird sisters or The Once and Future King's Orkney Isles from whence hailed Morgan le Fay. Apparently, the further north you go, the more magickal things get, Dustin can fill in the details. These people said, hey, forget all the nonsense, we're going to pull the magick of creating game dev jobs in a place where none have existed since initial settlement 8000 years ago, and then we're going to make a game with production values on par with a AAA game circa 2003, and we're going to do a completely fresh spell-casting system that will do what no fantasy game has ever done before in terms of blasting the player with a sense of imminent empowerment.
Submitted by TheDustin on Wed, 02/09/2011 - 16:24.
I hereby implore everyone in attendance to make some RPG Maker games. I mean, this and Space Funeral prove there certainly are metric fuck-tons of untapped potential to be mined, conventions to be toppled over, all that jazz. I would make a Minecraft reference here but I haven't played it yet -- I know an addiction when I see one. In fact...
*ramble about myself for a good couple of paragraphs*
Oh yeah! Game Journo Story! Fun times, for sure. It is a delicious and tart Ninja-Turtle-phallus-esque pickle to be savored and devoured by you, hearty consumer. Wait a sec, that inane analogy is certainly missing some gratuitous vulgarity. Just imagine a bunch of 'fucks' and 'shits' strewn about casually and thoughtlessly. Where was I? Oh yeah, this song is pretty awesome.
In the tradition of Linear RPG and You Have To Burn The Rope comes another sardonic yet giddy examination of the coddling, performance-focused design that has systematically mutilated the minds of 3 generations since the inception of one-size-crushes-all public schooling, and continues to seep into our lives through every possible medial angle in order to render us complacent consumers brave enough to take the blue pill every morning.
Ian Bogost was on the Colbert Report, if you didn't see it, you can tell because his Facebook portrait says so. Bogost has long been using gameplay for dry satire, the variety best tasted with a spot of mustard on a cool day, but his latest work takes it to another level of meta-referentiality. It's a social game criticizing social games. To that effect, I'm going to meta-referentially explain my choice for a title for this review of this meta-referential social game about social games: it's a play on a typical phrase that adolescents use to summarize their eager capitulation with human sexuality which at once juxtaposes a very complex, nuanced and deeply social interaction with the most basic, one-dimension interaction of clicking; this summarizes how complex decisions have been reduced to context-senstive clicks, the whole becomes a mere unit, or perhaps, a unit operation. There's also this bestiality thing in there if you have enough neighbors to unlock it.
It's a platform game about a bunny and all you can do is beat him to death by hopping into the waiting arms of bats.
How deep or shallow this seems to you depends what you see when you look in the mirror. If you screen is particularly shiny, you may actually see your face against the black background.
Arthur Lee (a.k.a. "Mr. Podunkian") is a man of words, pixel art, and satire. And here I mean satire in the sense of: "What did Doug do? - He used... sarcasm! ...and, satire." He runs an infrequently updated but excellent blog called PIGScene, where he makes fun of TIG and Derek Yu, for some reason. His best known games, besides a Rogue-like series he's working on, are the Merry Gear Solid games, which send-up Hideo Kojima's watershed series and takes it out back to another kind of shed for ritualistic defilement.
Quicksand Games, creators of We Want You bring us another politically charged masterpiece, inspired by J.G. Ballard's 1968 short story, Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan, it serves to transplant the political machinations of hyper-personalized political celebrity to the mechanics of puzzle-by-proxy AI manipulation games -- or, it's Lemmings with Barack.
It's been awhile since we heard from Agustin Fernandez a.k.a. "Tembac" - he's apparently suffered from what I call "developer's curse" where you spend so much time and energy making games for an employer that you lose all capacity to develop games for yourself, an afflication which only Rod Humble in his Vice Presidential focus could overcome, and that only for a couple of weekends. Since then he's been free, not in the since of "free beer" but in the since of "hey, I'm fucking free!". He brewed up a poppy dish for Gamma IV, and now he gives us the exegesis of 48 hours worth of jamming. Polygamic Pac-Man poses the question: "what if Pac-man was no mere glutton, but a sex fiend?"
Turn-Based Battle isn't as satirically perfect as Upgrade Complete or Achievement Unlocked, two games from the same developer with the same snarky metacommentary on common game tropes. But it's still pretty amusing.
My boardgame Megacorps was released last week. It would, of course, be otiose for me to review my own work, so these are more along the line of design notes:
When Zev "Z-Man" Schlesinger called after playing Megacorps, he said "It reminded us of an old Avalon Hill/West End game." Which startled me, because I thought I was designing a Eurogame. But on reflection, he has a point; Megacorps owes something to the Eurostyle, but also something to the Anglo-American hobby boardgame tradition -- not surprisingly, since that's what I cut my eyeteeth on.
When I started work on the game, I wanted it to require 3-6 players, take an hour or less to play, have a limited set of mechanics, and have very tight rules. To place it square in the middle of the Eurostyle, in other words.
And I did achieve those objectives -- but did not achieve another salient characteristic of the Eurostyle: theme irrelevance.
For most Eurogames, the theme is essentially arbitrary. Designers of such games are concerned mainly with devising interesting and original game mechanics, with the theme just an overlay, a bit of marketing fluff to dress the game up and perhaps inspire some attractive graphics. In other words, you could take the game, reskin it with a different theme, and no essential changes to the game would be required. The designer begins with mechanics and moves to theme.
In saying this, I want to make clear that I am not offering a criticism; a game like, say, Medici may actually have nothing to do with Renaissance-era trade, but that doesn't matter; it's a fine piece of work and an excellent game. Rather, I'm remarking instead on an aesthetic difference between the Eurostyle and the Anglo-American hobby game tradition, and I could quite as easily make a countervailing statement on the aesthetic flaws of the latter kind of game in light of the Eurogame aesthetic: E.g., too much dependence on randomness, the sacrifice of strategy to the simulationist impulse, and excessively long and often tedious play times.
But in this regard, I did almost the reverse of a typical Eurogame designer: Rather than starting with mechanics and moving to theme, I started with the theme. The mechanics of Megacorps almost fell out of the theme.
The original idea for the game came from Kevin Maroney, who, when we worked together at Crossover Technologies, proposed an online-only multiplayer game, with the same title and basic theme -- large multinationals competing and waging war with each other in a future world where nationality is essentially irrelevant. Nothing came of the idea, but later, looking for a boardgame idea, I recalled the title, and thought that there could be an interesting Eurostyle boardgame in it.
Clearly, the players must represent megacorps, the game must be economically-driven in nature, and there must be governments for the megacorps to manipulate. It must also clearly be set in the not-too-distant future rather than there here-and-now, since this is not how the real world works today. (Today, when governments want to take down even very powerful companies, they can do so with amazing speed and thoroughness -- vide Drexel Burnham, Enron, Lukoil, and Lehman Brothers.)
For manipulating governments to be meaningful, governments need to have an impact on the economic game, so we come to the idea of individual companies located within countries and the ability of governments to affect them, if not the megacorps directly. And to make that interesting, we need ways for megacorps to take control of countries from each other.
In a way, the basic mechanics of Megacorps almost designed themselves, falling out of the basic premise of the game. Or so it felt like; I realize that's an illusion. Years ago, I designed a space-trading game called Trailblazer, and after I had finished it but before it was published heard that Nick Karp was working on a game called Star Trader. I worried that the two games would be too similar; it was hard for me to conceive of a way to do a space trading game other than the way I'd done it, that is, as a microeconomics simulation with variable supply and demand curves.
No need to worry; his game was totally different. Trailblazer, too, had seemed almost to design itself; and doubtless another designer starting from the same theme as Megacorps would come up with an entirely different game. Yet the point remains: the theme of Megacorps informed and infused the design in a way that seems alien to the Eurostyle as a general rule.
Secondly, most Eurostyle games can be, somewhat unjustly, characterized as "simultaneous single-player games." That is, in a game such as Puerto Rico, the only real interaction with other players is a mild level of competition for some scarce resources; by contrast, most Anglo-American hobby games pit players directly against one another, with ways for them to directly assist or injure each other. In this regard, Megacorps is somewhere between the two: Most of the time you are acting purely to improve your own position, but the war and government intervention rules do give you a way to attack another player's position indirectly, and at least in the end-game, the use (or misuse) of this capability can be critical to the final score.
The fiddliness of some of the game's rules fall partly out of the same quasi-simulationist impulse, and partly out of a need to break symmetry. Thus, some of the Megacorps begin in control of countries with which the corporations I'm mocking are connected -- Mokia with the European Union, for instance -- and the event cards, too, try to have a game impact that actually has something to do with their name and theme. But symmetry breaking is also important; by that I mean that any game which begins with players in identical positions runs the risk that all players adopt identical strategies, which is often a recipe for dullness. By giving players starting event cards that offer potentially useful options, and by allocating some countries to players initially, the game begins in an asymmetric landscape, encouraging players to take different tacks. The risk of this kind of approach is, of course, that the asymmetry gives some players clear advantages or disadvantages relative to the others, unbalancing the game; I think I've managed to balance the positions reasonably well, but went through quite a few iterations to get to this point.
I'm aware that what I've semi-accidentally hit on with Megacorps -- a sort of synthesis of the Euro- and Anglo-style -- is not unique; 1960 and Pandemic, notably also by American game designers, have some of the same characteristics. But it occurs to me that this may be a fruitful synthesis, something that provides both the strategic purity of the Eurostyle and the color that only a meaningful connection to theme can provide. I look forward to working further in this vein.
e7 is a moody little Flash game that I call a platformer in the tags above, but if it is one, it's an unusual one. You play a little half-disc in a blue-and-black landscape in a sidescrolling view, and your objective is to get to the end of the level, which in typical sidescroller fashion is always to your right. The ground level deforms oddly as you move, which you do with left-and-right arrows; and while you cannot jump in the conventional platformer sense, you can (in most locations) create a pit where you are located by pressing down-arrow, then release the key to bounce yourself upwards as the terrain recoils.
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