Wonderland

Good Serious Games interview

Pre-reading for the Serious Games Summit at GDC in - hyperventilates - two weeks! Rar!

DW: Yeah, we've made a major push into healthcare, and we've done stuff               outside of the military as well. I think the military has just been ahead of its time in terms of the large budgets and everything. We're just now starting to see Fortune 500 companies that will spend five to ten million dollars on a training game, whereas the military has been willing to do that for years.

GS: As far as multi-use IP, who's using your Crate product?

DW: There are several different groups. The Navy's using it, but we're also using it in healthcare, interestingly enough. We're working with a group that is doing a study to prove that virtual reality can minimize the awareness of pain, especially in children. So we're working with a group that works with a lot of kids that have leukemia or cancer, and have to get chemotherapy treatments once a week. And so by putting them into a virtual environment where they can do something while they're getting the treatment, which is fairly painful, they notice the pain less.                         

Fucking AWESOME. And it looks fantastic too. Now THAT'S more like it.

Blinkenlights.de

I just mailed Blinkenlights to see if they have any updates on Arcade or similar projects. Looks amazing: players can play giant (on BUILDINGS) light-installation versions of Pong, Tetris and Pac-Man, using a mobile as a controller:

- and immediately dated the project by the mobile phone featured in the explanation:

Yes. Old. Oh well.

Beating online casinos at their own game

I don't normally talk about gambling, but this entertaining article caught my eye.

Playing blackjack is one of the few games in a casino where if you play strategically, the house’s odds are only slightly over half. Knowing this, if you bet the absolute minimum, and you play exactly as the blackjack guide states, you can play until you meet the wage requirement, and only sacrifice a very small portion of the bonus if any at all. There is an extremely slight chance that you could bust out, but the possibility of that is around 0.1 percent. Given these odds, it’s safe to say that there’s so small of a risk that it’s well worth cashing in on this opportunity. Just keep in mind that you’re only going to be able to cash in on these bonuses once and they’re not going to make you rich – but they’re a sure-fire way to put some extra change in your pocket.

I've always wanted to know how to actually gamble on Blackjack, as I do love me Vegas, me. Unfortunately I'm crap at maths, and I bet you're not allowed to whip one of these out, as featured on G4 there:

Pity.

OMFG

Murdoch buys Eidos? I mean, we knew he was sniffing around, and even eyeing EA (peanuts to him). Expect big things out of this.

Sources at UK publisher Eidos have confirmed that the company is about to be sold to Rupert Murdoch's media empire News Corporation, with the deal expected to be announced within the coming week.

"We're just really glad the News Corp thing is out in the open now," a source at the company told GamesIndustry.biz in the wake of our report yesterday which linked News Corp to the Eidos sale.

Cobblers.

The BBC is currently running a short and shallow piece on whether online gaming is bad for you. Two opinions are presented, one from a counsellor and one from a player.

Unfortunately, no balanced view is given and some fairly wild claims are made. My hackles particularly went up to a number of silly statements.

They leave their real lives and join others in a fantasy land, and they can't leave. They no longer bathe, clean house, interact with family and friends, or go outside.

Clearly not normal behviour from a normal person then. Much like the famous Man Chops Off Balls As Bet During Rugby Game article, which isn't news. Since when was reporting that a person with a history of mental illness (yes, he did) has done a crazy thing, news? People who become addicted to games must be in a tiny minority. Raah.

But I do know, however, that some of the game manufacturers do require their game developers to have degrees in psychology to make them even more addictive.

Brilliant! And finally:

It can rob you of your spare time - not so bad - but it can also rob you of time you should be spending with friends and family.

Games are usually played in spare time, no? If it's time you should spend with friends and family, then do so. The player is talking to people she assumes whose friends and family aren't already in-game (unlike herself, she plays alongside her husband), of course, which is in fact very common with teenagers. Being online is not anti-social, or timewasting, but usually sociable and entertaining. 

The BBC is normally fair and balanced, and this bizarre and ill-researched "article" is very out of character. Shoddy work, tut tut. No dinner for you.

Fanfare: My views are my own and not that of my employer. Obviously.

Not long now

A PC running something like an X800 card can really produce magic; cliche I know (hey look! Graphics got better!), but if you want to know what the next-gen consoles are going to be capable of, just look at today's £1000 quid PC.

TV people are very interested in realism, so I'm looking forward to showing them this:

Update: lovely ole Gribbley gives me a verbal kicking over this particular example.

[13:24] Gribbley: Sorry hon, I couldn't let this one pass, much as I tried. In the last generation, it was generally a good idea of the power of the console to look at a ~1k PC of the time. In this generation, there is _nothing_ out there that will give you a working idea of how powerful Xbox2 and PS3 are going to be
[13:24] Gribbley: They're going to blow any and all existing hardware benchmarks out of the water
[13:25] Crystaltips: heh
[13:25] Gribbley: CPU-wise, you can maybe look at a dual CPU grunt workstation or server but that'll likely still fall short for things like PS3/Cell if it's written for correctly.
[13:29] Gribbley: You might also want to consider exactly how graphics are going to step up from this generation and though that's down to speculation, you can make some fairly good guesses; they'll be pushing native HDTV rendering and FSAA a lot more to make graphics look less aliased and more like telly pictures, and they'll be doing a lot with cunning lighting, texturing and post rendering effects to try and trick the eye into thinking stuff isn't CGI in the traditional sense. Stuff like soft shadowing, soft lighting. It's going to be a subtle revolution.

I believe him too. "Realism" in games seems to be working so far (e.g. Half Life 2) and interestingly, while I'm very critical of almost-real CG characters in film (no! ugh!), they work far better in games, for me at least. Perhaps because games have always been digital and animated, the expectation of real humans has never been present?

WoW

I fell down the rabbit hole. Elves! I said, no, I'm not really into elves, even though I love Tolkien, the number of MMORPGs that have a Tolkienesque world is really numbering into the Far Too Many, no? When is someone going to make a MMOG that isn't about bikinis and trolls?

Well. World of Warcraft has trolls in bikinis.  So that's where I've been, as Crystaltips (a delectable orc with a short nose and lumpy legs) on the RuneTotem server.

Meanwhile, if you want a taste of the game, watch this. It's too long, and too slow, but stick with it, the stuff at the end is hilarious.

(BTW. 380,000 copies sold across Europe in the first weekend (last weekend, in fact). That's income of approx 11.5 million quid, and monthly revenue of something like 3.5 million quid. What a business!)

Brick Lane (Hoxton) cafe, a few hours ago...

Hum.

I finished Katamari Damacy already. I spent the entire night dreaming of rolling over things.

Hurry up Katamari Damacy 2. Hurry UP.

Fantastic politico games

More of this please. The British e-government has commissioned some games around teaching kids about democracy and basic politics; the launch bash is at the Science Museum, to the deputy PM and everything. Bloody marvellous.

Just yesterday I was saying how I would love a game that taught British history; I swapped history out for more art at school because it was so BORING. Consequently I have no idea whether Georgian houses are older than Victorian or Edwardian, or why the Home Counties are called the Home Counties. Or in fact, where the hell the Welsh came from. How can history be boring? How on earth can standard teaching make the wildest collection of stories on earth boring?

Weird isn't it?