Fostering brilliance

In the spirit of my call for more innovative independent games, I’d like to second David Kushner’s suggestion in The Sandbox that students get access to cutting edge development tools.

Games that come packaged with level-building tools have fostered some real contributors to the gaming industry, and many of the great innovations in gaming have come from new outsiders who see things differently and are willing—and free—to take risks.

Kushner’s comparison of the future of video game design to YouTube is, I think, very insightful. Content development has shifted. Anyone can create a periodical, share a movie with the world, or publish a novel. And anyone can do these things cheaply. If it becomes easier for fancy games to be done inexpensively, we may well discover the next great type of game on some form of social network.

Sure, 99% will be crap, but the social networks already have tools in place to sift through silt to find the nuggets of gold.

1 comment July 25th, 2007

The Search for Bourne: Who’s having fun?

This post contains no spoilers (unlike my other posts on the game). Instead, as in my first post about the advertising vehicle that is The Ultimate Search for Bourne, I thought I’d put the big question out there.

Is the game fun?

I have to answer, “Yes.” I enjoy solving the puzzles, poking around the web sites, and writing up quick blog posts about each challenge.

But it’s not huge fun. I don’t need this advertisement. I’m already a big-time fan of most Google products, and I’ll probably see The Bourne Ultimatum eventually.

And as a game, the Ultimate Search for Bourne has a few little problems:

• It’s too easy. Once you “get” how a day is likely to go, you can resolve the challenge in a minute or two.
• Camera placement may be random. This is an ongoing question, and today’s game may have the most obvious clues to camera placement so far . . . or it may prove that there’s nothing but luck behind it.
• The interface is buggy. On my Macintosh with Firefox at home, bits of the interface keep reloading. For the last two days, my wife has been unable to place cameras on her Mac or on my work PC laptop
• The game feels less and less like a spy drama every day. This is party because it’s basically the same game every day. The fact that, with almost no practice, it gets very easy also removes a lot of the cloak-and-dagger feel. And finally because the willing suspension of disbelief is harder to maintain the more I realize how the places and mysteries are calculated to create another day of play and advertise another tool or service, rather than to help a story unfold.

But I did say the game was fun, right? It is! I still believe, passionately, this could be the seed for a very exciting and innovative form of massively multiplayer roleplaying game. It has moments that do still feel delightfully cyber-spyish. And I still like solving puzzles that at least pretend to be tied into adventure and story, rather than just arbitrary rules resolutions.

And any chance at a free iPhone is hard to resist.

So what do you think? Are you having fun? What do you like, and what do you hate?

5 comments July 25th, 2007

My daughter’s very first game

When I (finally!) cleaned out my garage this weekend, I unearthed a fairly cruddy croquet set. We last had it out at my daughters second birthday party, two months ago, as something for the adult guests to play with. She recognized it. “That’s from my birthday!” she squealed.

I’m not surprised it appeals to her. Brightly colored balls and, especially, colorful giant hammers are bound to delight a toddler. I offered to show her a game, and she eagerly agreed. I grabbed one wicket, one ball (orange, one of her favorite colors), and two mallets, and gave her a quick lesson in noncompetitive croquet.

Since she recognized the mallet as a hammer, she tried to deliver a vertical blow on the ball. The mallet—as tall as she is—struck on its side, knocking the ball toward her feet. She liked this quite a bit, taking a step back and hitting the ball toward herself over and over again.

When she realized the ball wasn’t heading toward the wicket, she tried to adopt my side swing. The mallet was really just too unwieldy for her, though, and she finally got frustrated enough that she demanded “a different game!”

I figured I could design something that would be more fun for a two year old, so I drew three concentric circles with sidewalk chalk on the driveway and my daughter, my wife, and I each took a pebble. The goal was simply to drop the pebble so it stayed within the outer circle. Each person had a different line to stand at.

Again, this game was a big hit. My daughter’s first drop (from all of twenty inches or so) landed pretty near the middle. My wife and I didn’t have as much luck, as our pebbles tended to bounce right out.

My daughter started gaming the system. She considered it fair to “drop” her pebble by squatting down and placing it in the middle, so we changed the rules: you have to keep your knees straight. She still managed to beat us, and finally she gave up hope that her parents would get the hang of the game. She collected up all the pebbles and, one at a time, played them. But she still wanted everyone to have a turn.

“Now it’s your turn, Mommy,” she said, dropping my wife’s pebble. “Now it’s your turn, Daddy,” and mine landed right near the middle.

As she closed her eyes to sleep, she told me, “I want to play a game with you tomorrow.” I promised her we would.

This kids version of Mumblety peg won’t win any awards, but it’s the very first time my daughter has engaged in an activity circumscribed by (admittedly loose) arbitrary rules with a mild competitive element.

In other words, I think it’s the first time she’s every really played a game!

Add comment July 25th, 2007

Search for Bourne—Day 8

Arg! Not one of my cameras caught a shot of Jason Bourne. No matter, though. It’s time for a complete spoiler for Day 8 of the Ultimate Search for Bourne. Stop reading if you don’t want to be spoiled.

Looks like we may finally be through with Dater Notes. The contact today, Simon Ross (British, apparently, in keeping with yesterday’s clue), prefers to communicate through www.priceless.com, and our mission briefing tells us we need to go there to find Simon Ross’s handle and pass phrase.

Unfortunately, this is a MasterCard ad site with a very annoying and loud voice over when you first load it. If you click the link in the Communication panel (or click here) instead of typing in the URL, though, you can skip the message and go straight to Simon Ross’s profile.

Our mission briefing has told us to look for official identification. A thumbnail under the image of the train opens a shot of Simon’s passport. No need to use the Image Filter in the Decryption panel (unlike yesterday’s challenge). You can read the information right on the image.

Printed in red ink is Simon’s handle: CRUYFF74. Handwritten on the right is his passphrase: don’t silence the truth.

Entering these in the instant messenger, we get:

You are one of the agents looking for Bourne? I may have some information. Contact me again tomorrow.

Submit this text in response to the daily briefing, and you’re done!

I think I have a better idea of camera placement, today. Simon mentions the Imperial War Museum in his “Priceless Pick,” and a quick Google search reveals that this is right near Waterloo Station, a choice for camera placement today. I went with that, and we’ll see if I do better than I did yesterday.

2 comments July 25th, 2007