Gaming
In which I explain why motorcycling video games are, and always will be, rubbish.
I’d never been particularly interested in cars, until a friend of mine showed me how fun driving simulation games can be when you remove all the driver assists. Modern driving games, such as Forza Motorsport or Gran Turismo have wonderfully accurate physics simulations in them, and so become suitably challenging when you expose the underlying car. At that point I saw the joy of the challenge of driving well. It’s a skill that I find rewarding on a motorbike, that hitherto I’d not seen in cars. I’m still not interested in cars as objects in themselves, but I am now interested in them as a tool to enable me to drive.
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After a year and a half, the original M&L minecraft server has seen most of us burnout a little (amazed that it took that long), so Laura and I thought we’d mix things up, and run a second server that has monsters on, and is running the Tekkit mod, which includes all manner of engineering/magical based goodies. For an idea of what to expect, you could watch this informative documentary series on building a jaffa cake factory.
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Very saddened today to hear that the peeps over at Inside Xbox have been given the boot. For those without an Xbox, Inside Xbox was essentially their own mini TV channel on the Xbox dashboard, with review shows, Q&A shows, etc.
What always amazed me about Inside Xbox UK was how consistently good it was – managing to be a good mix of content and humour (weird humour, but good :). What also amazed me was that it showed someone in Microsoft got it. Here was content produced for the Xbox audience, not for the typical Microsoft audience. I readily looked forward to tuning in each week to see what Dan and Andy and co would be up to this week. It only amounted to five or ten minutes of content a week, but it was good content. And it clearly wasn’t just me – they seemed to regularly win awards for IX shows.
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Laura and I have been running a Minecraft server for over a year now, with a small group of friends, and we recently all took to documenting all the stuff we’ve been making over on tumblr. It’s nice to see how our world has evolved over that time. The name comes from one of the early roads we made, which defined a lot of the pattern of growth over time.
It’s been really lovely to see what a small group of friends have built both individually and as a group. When I set the server up for Christmas 2010 I didn’t imagine it’d be still going today and the wealth of things we’d have produced: as big a replica of the Eiffel Tower as Minecraft will let you produce, a scale version of the Tyne Bridge, the starlings of a city made up of tens of sky scrapers. You can see the world as it stands today on this map.
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In amongst all the wonderful talks at this year’s Playful was one that touched upon something that’s been bugging me recently – that despite all the open data that’s happening from the real world, there’s not enough coming from the play world.
Paul Rissen’s talk was about the lack of linked/semantic data from the video games world – why couldn’t he get references to scenes in Red Dead Redemption to link them against the scenes in western films from which they draw inspiration, letting you hop back and forth. But I think Paul’s covering a very specific instance of a more general problem – we generate lots of data when we play games, that we should be able to own, but instead is locked away from us.
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Video games tend to show you driving from the third person, and even if you get the option for first person, I’d wager a majority (outside Forza/Gran Tarismo) still use third person. So why don’t we drive real cars that way? Thankfully those fine scientists over at Rooster Teeth have done a little research in this area on our behalf:
The Observer ran a very nice piece at the weekend on video game design and the psychology thereof, which I recommend you go read. One of the people they have discussing games and how people relate to them is extremely talented Margaret Roberston of Hide & Seek, where I have the good fortune to work on occasion.
One such occasion was last week when a photographer from the Observer turned up to take Margaret’s photo, and she was asked to wear a bunch of the wonderful props that occupy the Hide & Seek office. Alas no picture made it into the online version of the article, but fortunately I was armed and ready to capture the moment:
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For a bit of fun over xmas, instead of augmenting reality with virtual stuff, I’ve done the inverse, and augmented a virtual reality environment, Minecraft, with real world stuff.
I like the idea of ambient devices showing us information from the digital world without need for computers, and I like the idea in Minecraft that there’s a logic system you can use to build up control circuits, and this is a kinda mashup of both those ideas.
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After over 6 months of working away I’m pleased to finally announce the first release of PlaceWhisper, a fun little app that lets you leave and discover virtual messages in physical locations. You can think of it as geocaching, but without the Tupperware :)
PlaceWhisper is one of those apps I’ve wanted to use for ages, but no one else had written it. After being inspired by things like last years Hide & Seek festival, and the Playful conference (in particular Russell Davies’ talk), I decided I wanted to create something that let people have fun, so I finally decided to go make this app that no one else had got around to.
...Last year Laura and I went to an amazing event on the South Bank in London called the Hide & Seek Weekender – a weekend festival of games for all ages, where you basically played lots of fun, and often silly, games with random people and generally had a very good time. Laura blogged about it here, and I put up some photos here.
This coming weekend sees this year’s Hide & Seek event, again on London’s South Bank. It promises to be lots of fun, with some great looking games, and I really do encourage you to come along. What makes it particularly exciting for me is that this year, I’m on the other side of the fence, running one of the games!
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If you don’t read Light blue touchpaper, the blog by the Computer Lab’s Security Group, you probably should. The Security Group are well known for having a different view on the world that enables them to see the flaws in supposedly secure systems that even otherwise smart people would miss.
Appropriately for xmas though, they’ve posted an interesting analysis of fairness in online games. The nub of the argument is that for online games that rely on very finely tuned maps and character metrics, any small variation in the players set up can have a large implication in their likely success. The challenge for game designers is that not only do they need to get the game dynamics right, they need to consider all the possible play configurations of computer, and internet links, and so on, which is next to impossible.
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Neil and I (and a friend of Neil’s) went along to Salute yesterday, a quite large wargaming event in London. Basically 4 floors of stalls and demo games for you to wander about. If you wanted to spot dumpy men with large beards, this would have been heaven to you ;) Having only ever played Warhammer 40K it was interesting to see some of the other games, and I picked up a few bits and bobs that I’d not have seen otherwise. Afterwards Neil and I had a quick trip down Tottenham Court Road to stare at computer goods, and then went to the pub for a few beers. All in all quite a reasonable way to spend ones Saturday :)
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