Straylight will be at the Animfx conference this weekend taking place in the Wellington Convention Centre 14th – 16th of November.

Visit our booth to have a play round with 3 of our games, included a first time look at our brand new title. I cant tell you what it is just yet, but I can say that if you’re into Meaningful Play as a way to spread the word on climate change, then you should definitely go out of our way to pay us a visit.

I’ll be taking part in an online symposium later in the week tackling the challenges that face virtual retail.

October 29-31 2008
An online symposium to discuss future possibilities for retail in Web 3D and Virtual Worlds, and the impacts these may have on our lives.
Free Event.

Having developed a number of online retail solutions we’ve had a real mixed bag of experience ranging from straight-up, flat web retail environments through to highly dynamic spatial navigation structures.

My theme (which wont be a surprise to anyone that reads this blog regularly) is “Where’s the Value”. We have to ask ourselves this question every single day. It can be so easy to get excited by the cool factor of a new technology and be completely distracted from the reality of whether new technology is actually going to enhance the user experience of your target demographic.

For more info checkout the The Future Telco Network

Thanks to John Eyles of Telecom New Zealand for organising this.

Just had this book and page pointed out to me called Changing the Game by David Edery and Ethan Mollick. After reading through the synopsis I ordered a copy right away,

Changing the Game

From the preface:

“Games can make it fun for employees to learn how to manage a supply chain. Games can encourage customers to voluntarily spend hours learning about the features of a product. Games can encompass massive economies of virtual goods and services that are worth billions of real-world dollars. All of this, and much more, is happening right now at the intersection of business and games, and the forward-thinking companies at that junction have already begun to reap the great rewards of their effort. There are so many ways in which games are transforming the nature of work and play, that whether you work in a business, a governmental organization, or a non-profit, there is almost certainly a way to take advantage of games to better accomplish your goals.

So, are you ready to play?”

They’ve also put together a great page with links to quick fire examples of how game mechanics have been used in various forms to promote, education, and entertain, from the Google Image Labeler through to Americas Army.

Games for Non-Gamers 101

Brian Crecente over at Kotaku took the initiative to hit up the big three console makers as to the future of educational content on their system.

You can see the full interview here

Here’s a distilled version of what they said:

• They’re already doing it, and have had wild success with Brain Age, Wii Fit, etc
• Taking a broader approach to what “educational” means. It doesn’t need to be a curriculum thing, more like personal development / expression (see: Wii Music, My Spanish Coach), and games like Mystery Case Files that require more mental activity and focus, but are still primarily entertainment products
• Nice quote around how games in general can be a positive influence “Games can open up the imagination, just like a good book or movie can”

• Very committed to it as a driver in expanding the mass market relevance of the 360
• Focusing on development tools (XNA) and distribution models (XBLA Community Marketplace) that lower the cost of development for consoles, hence making consoles a more accessible platform for smaller educational projects
• While both Nintendo and Sony pointed to their links with charities as their commitment to social responsibility, it seems Microsoft are the only ones invested to pushing forward the field of developing games which specifically address an educational or social problem

• Agrees consoles are a good platform for delivery of educational content, as the Gen Y demographic are fluent with their interfaces
• Have already had some success with putting the PSP into schools
• Educational games are a “secondary” (maybe tertiary, after casual entertainment?) focus for the console, and as such will become more relevant as the PS3’s 10 year lifecycle plays out
• They see Buzz as having meaningful elements through development of general knowledge
• Sights LittleBigPlanet as “exactly the type of game with the potential to be held up as providing a positive influence”

In short, Nintendo are happy they’re doing their bit, Microsoft are investing in the progression of game design as an educational medium, and Sony seem focused on extending the value proposition of entertainment titles through meaningful content such as user-created content.

In partnership with “Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Parsons, Polytechnic Institute of NYU, and other colleges”, Microsoft are launching a Games for Learning Institute at NYU, specifically focused on creating educational games to teach maths, science, and engineering.

Microsoft chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie said that “The Games for Learning Institute at NYU is a great example of how technology can change how students learn, making it far more natural and intuitive.”

It’s a great time for Meaningful Play. As the financial market continues to crumble along with educational standards, its becoming very clear that a brute force “throw more money at it” approach is not an effective solution for effectively engaging with Gen Y.

We need to be working smarter not harder to revitalize curriculum and teaching tools so they are relevant to todays students. Gen Y’s demand participation, personalization, interactivity, and community. Traditional teaching methods just cant compete with the engagement these kids experience through social networks and gaming. And what’s more, games aren’t just cool, but a superior method for understanding and experimenting with concepts and principles.

There is clearly huge opportunity in games based learning through Meaningful Play.

P.S. Over at Straylight we put up a couple of new pages explaining our approach to the utilization of Meaningful Play, in particular it’s application across the three “genres” we see, one of which is Education. Keen for everyone’s thoughts

So I was playing a game the other day that made me think.

In this case it was Square Enix’s Final Fantasy IV for the DS. Which, incidentally, is a very much better game than it’s predecessor on the same console.

The mechanic in the game that stuck with me is a very simple thing, but nonetheless was a striking contrast to the norm in the majority of games. Role-Playing Games), they’re called. They give you a number of characters that go from absurdly weak at the start of the game, to fantastically world-breakingly strong at the end of the game. It’s the accepted norm that as time passes (in-game) characters get stronger.

Your strength, stamina, vitality, wisdom, charisma etc… all get better.

sub-images may be ©Square Enix, displayed under fair use.

As I was leveling up to defeat the next huge boss under a large waterfall, I noticed that a character in my party, Tellah, was getting weaker. In the gaming sense, Tellah was still gaining from experience, his intellect and spirit were increasing, but his strength, speed and stamina were decreasing.

He is an old character, getting older.

The fact that he wasn’t in quite the same shape as his team members subtly conveys themes of aging not usually seen in video games. Not having yet played the latest in the Metal Gear series), I can’t comment on how it treats aging, and the issues that it brings. But it was great to be confronted with this in the context of play…

It almost was enough to make me not want to level up, to stall the progression of time. It gave me the feeling that time is slipping through your fingers, not wanting to confront the reality that we will all face… eventually.

There are many games (and movies for that matter) that deal with issues of death and loss, but the subtlety in this mechanic made for a particularly poignant moment for me, small and quiet in the context of the bigger story and themes passing by in the rest of the game, but nonetheless there.

The experience of FF-IV is much better off for this.

One of our programmers passed on a quote to me this morning with resonates with our Meaningful Play message:

“If you tell me, I will listen.
If you show me, I will see.
If you let me experience, I will learn.”
– Lao Tzu (6th Century B.C.)

People have little patience these days for inefficient, passive learning environments. They demand customisation, personalisation, interactivity, and engagement. Ultimately, the best way to truly understand a concept or system is to experience it , to experiment with it, discover its limits, break it, play with it. Games are the perfect medium for providing a space in which this sort of Meaningful Play can occur. Whether it be a metaphor or direct simulation of a real-world environment, this truly is a hark back to the classical student-mentor style of one-on-one learning, and a welcome departure from static, cookie cutter style “push” teaching methods.

This reminds me, I finally got around to reading The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Neat stuff, and actually a great bedtime read as something to settle and clear the mind before drifting off.

One of the cooler possibilities about an immersive, interactive game is that it’s one of the best ways to teach empathy. A game can put you in someone else’s shoes, and can make you feel for the character. It gives you a view of why people make the decisions that they do.

I was in Te Papa National Museum the other day, in an exhibition about the colonisation of New Zealand.
The impact it’s had on the plants and animals is quite large: more than 75% of the country used to be covered by forest (15% now), and many species have become extinct.

There was a game there for kids called “Survivor”. Basically, your character was an Alien that had to leave your home planet and live on earth (An analogy to the colonists coming to NZ from England). In the game you pick various species of animals and plants to take with you to.
The possibilities here are huge, not to preach about the evils of humanity, but to help the kids understand why the colonists (Maori & European) brought “useful” species with them.

Unfortunately, the only possible outcomes were:
1. The species you took with you didn’t survive in the different climates, forcing you to leave…
2. They struggled, and you went mostly hungry…
3. Or they thrived, but killed off the native animals or plants.

It’s not possible for a kid to pick species that do fine alongside the native species (like sheep do), so it comes across as a little preachy.

However, great work to them for coming up with a fun way to explain the complexities of bringing new species when colonising.

Board games were always a great way to bring the family together. The early consoles and arcades were very much billed as family entertainment. With the rise of the PlayStation era, games got more focused on the core demographic and radically changed the public opinion of gaming, pigeonholing it as a pastime reserved for the solitary geeky young male.

Nintendo have started to break away from this trend with the Wii, and it appears Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, thinks the world is ready again for more public, social gaming:
Nolan Bushnell Looks to Social Gaming Holodeck Come True via Kotaku

Love the idea, hope it gets traction. The key issue will be breaking the public’s perception of what a gaming centre looks like these days

Not personally crazy about the name UWink. But hey, I think I’m still in denial over Nintendo naming their latest console the Wii, and it’s gone on to sell a couple of units.

The Guardian have a nice interview with Will Wright up that discusses his approach to game design, in particular the empowerment of the player through the provision of tool-sets and simulations that act as a platform for expressive play.

Unlocking the power of parallel play

He says of his experience designing Sim City:

“I had this little guinea pig city which I could do experiments on, which made the subject so much more interesting than reading a book. So the process of discovery, and getting other people to enjoy discovery has always been a part of it.”

I think we could probably consider all of Wright’s games Meaningful Play to varying degrees. I’m certainly keen to see whether his new Spore game can capture the imagination of the masses through its ambitious attempt to simulate ”...life from a single cell to a solar empire.”

Brenda Brathwaite has a great article over at The Escapist that aims to uncover the source of widespread disdain for videogames amongst “non-gamers”

Myth of the Media Myth via The Escapist

A really frustrating aspect of this debate is no matter how reasonable the game advocates seem to be, the debate too often falls prey to the Fox News effect. Ultimately I think the industry is still largely to blame for giving these people far too much ammunition. The increasing costs of game development in the PlayStation era have forced a cheap focus on the core male demographic that will effect the industry for years to come.

We will continue to see comments like ‘There is no redeeming value to be found in gaming’ until we can give more concrete counter examples. Ultimately people need to be given more reasons to actually respect the medium, more examples of that “redeeming value” being represented through Meaningful Play.

Yahtzee really has emerged as the reviewer of the people, unreservedly tearing apart the industry’s biggest titles with a unmatched honesty and brutality.

The great thing about his reviews is that not only are they incredibly entertaining (as long as you’re not easily offended), but littered with concise insights into some of the glaring flaws in the games’ core mechanics. He really does a great job of making the industry seem quite infantile, setting a challenge to all developers to take note of our past mistakes, and get on with evolving as game designers as opposed to loosing ourselves in the war for prettier visuals.

This week he deconstructs Burnout: Paradise to brilliant effect, but I’m posting the video here to reference one of his opening lines: “One of my measures of a good game is one that teaches me something.” Quite relevant I thought.

P.S. I saw the guy at GDC while coming out of a session and he looked positively terrified. I would be too if I was suddenly surrounded by all the people I’d been tearing to pieces behind the safety of the internet for the last 6 months.

Cool stuff from GDC:
– More thinking is being done around the interaction between games and serialized content (e.g. TV programs and comic books). In particular, Larian Studios have a really cool online world for kids in Belgium which interacts with a TV program and shows off kid-created content.

– Microsoft are using a game called “Bug Hunter” to increase productivity and reduce bugs in its Windows Defect Prevention team

– Games in academia, in particular the adoption of tools such as XNA in the Computer Science classroom, are proving fruitful in attracting and retaining students, as well as pushing up grades

– “Emotiv Systems”:http://www.emotiv.com/ unveiled the next generation of human-computer interaction with their headset controller that allows you to play games with your mind! While it seems the hardware needs a little tweaking before being released to the public late 08, their demo successfully showcased the ability to move objects through 3D space just by thinking about it (support for The Force Unleashed must surely be round the corner)

– Havok are releasing the binary version of their physics suite for free, allowing unprecedented access to an industrial strength physics solution for the independent game dev community

– Portal rightly took home top honors at the Game Developers Choice Awards. The line for their postmortem on the game engulfed North Hall at 4pm on Friday, which was novel considering the final sessions of the conference are usually quite a docile affair

So we’re here at GDC and its kicking off brilliantly with the Serious Games summit in West Hall. I’ll try to give updates on talks, people, and general discoveries that have relevance to the Meaningful Play message throughout the conference.

I was really looking forward to the opening talk for the Summit by Ben Sawyer and Peter Smith that aimed to look at the current state of the Serious Games industry, and the way we define the scope of the field. While they gave quite a nice overview of where games are being used for applications other than pure entertainment, they didn’t actually make much progress as to whether “Serious Games” is in fact the best definition for what we’re trying to do. For anyone that’s read our paper on the issue, you’ll know that we’ve put that definition on our blacklist for bringing up way too many negative connotations when presented anyone outside the industry.

On a lighter note, it’s not even lunchtime yet and I’ve already seen what is sure to be one of the coolest things at the show. Katie Salen (Parsons School of Design) and Greg Tretry (GameLab) presented their quite stunning game about making games: Game Star Mechanic.
Aimed at children in the 10 – 15 age group (I think), the game is presented through a beautifully rendered stream-punk-esque Anime World, drawing in any kids who might even be slightly interested in the YuGiOh or Pokemon franchises (which I think must make up around 70-80% of American kids). The story revolves around warring factions of Mechanics, who each think they know how to design the best game (each represents a different style or genre). The player is tasked with exploring these worlds, and fixing broken games. As they use subsets of the tools to make broken games playable again, they’re introduced to new elements of the game construction system. Before they know it, they have all the skills to start making their own games, without a single piece of code, and all playable by simply flicking a big EDIT / PLAY button always present at the top right of the screen.
Unlike other “simple to use” game creation tools (like Game Maker) this game doesn’t require a single piece of code to be written, and is all driven by and drag-and-drop, slider based interface.

Really quite amazing, and from the videos they showed us of the game’s in use in the classroom, the kids absolutely love it as well.
Other interesting developments of the day include Submarine training simulations, an open critique for a redistricting game, and a meditation game that you play with your heart rate!
Neat stuff. More soon.

Happy New Year! We’re back and set for our biggest year yet.

As a really interesting start to the year, I thought it would be worthwhile sharing an experience quite unlike anything I’ve seen before.

The following link is to a game called Passage. Before you read the rest of this post, play the game, and make sure you read the developers guidelines on how to play it before loading it up.

Passage: a video game by Jason Rohrer

... played it? ... Okay good, pretty interesting huh?

There’s been a huge amount of commentary about this round the net (which is all linked to from Jason’s site), so I won’t go in too deep, but I will say one thing slightly profound: This is the first game that I have ever felt comfortable calling art. While thousands of years have still not provided a literal definition of what art is exactly, I think we all have a feel for what we individually see as art. While some would argue that all games are art, I’m personally in the camp which says that most games are shallow as the paddling pools in drought stricken Australia. I got the same feeling playing this game as I did when I first walked into a display of modern art. It challenges you, it’s not immediate, you have to work your head around, try opening up to what it has to say.

And then when suddenly you get it, the emotion present in this game is quite intense. I personally wanted to undo all the stupid things I’d done having not read the instructions. It’s weird that something so simple, so quaint, could be some disturbing.

This definitely qualifies as Meaningful Play. In fact I think it’s the epitome of the Perspectives level. We really need more of these things coming out. Maybe if our government funded creative agencies would actually start classifying games in the same category as Short Film and Sculpture, then we might get some more traction.

P.S. Reading more about Jason is quite insightful in terms of “getting” the mind that made the game. We need more of these people pumping out sprites.

P.P.S This game could have been made on the NES. So why did it take us 20 years to even start realising the potential of that pixilated medium!