Brenda Braithwaite recently made some comments that I consider controversial, and I responded. If you're interested in interactive fiction, you might be interested in this.
Continue reading "New Post at Softcore Gamer: Greatly Exaggerated" »
I was a little at a loss as to what to do for this assignment. I came up with half an idea for something recombinant based on Jane Austen Unscripted, but I didn't have time to develop it. So I opted for lots of particles. Particles make everything better.
For a CTWR518 assignment from last week, here is my slideshow presentation on HanakoLand, a theme park based on the properties of Hanako Games.
A CTWR518 assignment from a couple weeks back. My randomly-generated prompt called for a wealthy person for a protagonist, a ship at sea for a setting, and a murder for an inciting incident.
One note: I didn't intend to name the main character after Jack Nicholson's character in The Shining. It seemed like a good name in my head and I didn't realize why it sounded so familiar until after the story was turned in. I'll retcon that, though, and suggest that in the future it becomes popular practice to name children after the villain in old movies.
For a CTIN544 assignment, this program demonstrates use of the networking library built into Processing.
UPDATED: Fixed a bug in the server and extensively commented the code. No longer including compiled builds, but leave a comment if you need one. You can compile it yourself on any system using Processing.
I just posted a new entry, Getting in Trouble, over at my blog Softcore Gamer. It contains a brief review of Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble, recently nominated by the WGA for best writing in a video game in 2008, and a long digression about grinding as a necessary feature in RPGs.
I just posted a new entry, Learning Curve, over at my blog Softcore Gamer. It might be of interest.
My Xbox is out of commission and I'm so burned out on my 534/541 final that I can't even make my brain think about it, so instead I spent the evening making a digital prototype for the casual game I wrote a treatment of earlier this semester, Butterfly Garden: Capture. There was some amount of skepticism that the idea would actually make a workable game, and I figured there's only one way to know for sure. So you can check out the rough prototype here, if you like.
(For a CTCS505 assignment.)
The concept of boundaries is fundamental to the design of games. Traditionally, games have explicit and unequivocal demarcations that separate the space of the game-world from the larger world around it. The spacial boundaries of a game like tennis are clearly marked by the court; games like chess and go are likewise bounded by the edges of the game board. But even more important than spacial boundaries are the ideal conditions that determine when a game is being played and who is a participant in it. Participants are always clearly differentiated from non-participants, even when the two groups occupy the same space.
The act of participation, which extends from the moment of invitation to play until the conclusion of the game, is an implicit social agreement between parties that a game is taking place within the agreed-upon spacial, temporal and conceptual boundaries, and that the actions they take within the context of that agreed-upon game have a different meaning than they would have outside the game. In Rules of Play, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman say that within the boundaries of the game, "special meanings accrue and cluster around objects and behaviors. In effect, a new reality is created, defined by the rules of the game and inhabited by its players."1
Continue reading "Boundary Conditions: Trust and Consequence in Negotiation Games" »
(For a CTCS505 assignment... uh, a while ago.)
(Note: I highly recommend that you play Photopia, and that you do so before reading this, as the following will contain some spoilers for the game. Photopia is one of the defining works of interactive fiction and, in addition to that, it is relatively short (around forty minutes) and accessible to newcomers to the medium. If you haven't yet played the game, you can find an online version here, or download the script and interpreter from here.)