Results tagged “metapost” from Softcore Gamer

I apologize for my absence. Grad school has been keeping me somewhat busy.

I'm on break, now - home for the holidays - and still recovering from the semester, but hoping to make some substantive entries before the next few weeks are past. This is not one of them, however. Today, I merely want to link you to a story that made me smile. Hopefully, it will do the same for you.

Perhaps you heard, a couple weeks back, about the data released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project? I'm talking about the study showing that more than half of American adults play video games. Culture is sometimes slow to shift, but it's only a matter of time.

Gosh, it's been a while since I wrote anything here, hasn't it?

I haven't been writing because I've been busy working on other projects, including a number of interesting games that are now in various stages of the development process. Hopefully I will be talking about some of them in greater detail soon, although I'm well aware of my track record when it comes to making promises about future posts.

I do plan to pick up on the writing schedule here on Softcore Gamer, though. Among other things, I am beginning classes at USC in a couple weeks and I have been given a new blog over at the Interactive Media Division. For the time being, I plan on cross-posting relevant content on both blogs, but regardless of how things shape up I will continue to post here on an extremely irregular schedule, just as you're used to.

In sadly related news, I've heard nothing out of HardCasual in quite a while. Hopefully those guys are going through a similar period of productive non-writing and will eventually return, because I really enjoyed their take on game culture and the industry.

I've got a couple good posts planned to follow up on Photopia, but in the meantime, I just want to point out a couple of things that you may or may not have seen floating around the Internet.

• An animated (in Yahtzee-esque fashion) video about sexual content in games, or rather, the lack thereof. The argument, which is basically the same one I would make, is that the seeming inability of game developers to incorporate sexual themes in a mature and artistic manner is detrimental to the medium. Honestly, there's nothing here that I found groundbreaking, but Daniel Floyd does a great job of summing up the issues in a clear and entertaining way.
• A fantastic post by Emily Short about the structure and process of writing IF by breaking a story down into scenes of distinct types and intents. If you have any interest in interactive fiction, as I increasingly do, this is definitely worth a read.
• A very funny post by Leigh Alexander that lays out what Hillary Clinton needs to do if she still wants to win the nomination. (Hint: Agents are go.)

Hope you enjoy those links; sorry there's not more by way of analysis here. I just needed to break back into writing a little bit, because it's been so long. Hopefully the first Photopia post will be coming shortly.

Alright, usually I have no compunctions about spoiling a game when I attempt to dissect, analyze, or even just comment on it. Especially if the game, like Photopia, is ten years old. But this situation is different, because I know there are people out there who don't get as much vitamin IF as they should, and because the game in question is so overwhelmingly about narrative experience that spoilers would ruin it completely. That said, Adam Cadre's Photopia does touch on a number of themes that I'd like to talk about in greater depth. Which makes for a dilemma.

So here's what I'm going to do: today, I'm going to recommend that you go play Photopia. If that's not enough to make you actually do it, then let me mention that the game comes well recommended. It won the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition and has recently been favorably reviewed by both Play This Thing! and Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Go ahead and read those reviews if you need convincing, they won't spoil anything either.

Photopia is interactive fiction, light on the interactive. The story is extremely linear, and although it does contain a couple puzzles, they're simple and pretty straightforward. There should be little of the adventure-game-style frustration that often accompanies this kind of game, although it is text-based so you will have to work with a parser. The other thing I'll say about it is that it's only about forty-five minutes long, and it's worthwhile to find yourself a little block of time to play through the whole thing. I played it over the course of two days, and I wish now that the experience had been uninterrupted. Oh, and also, I want to repeat RPS's advice: when the time comes, for God's sake, talk to Alley about astrophysics.

After you've had a chance to play the game, I'll talk some more about the specific things it sparked for me. So here's your warning: sometime in the future, subsequent entries on this blog will contain Photopia spoilers. And you will be much better off, as a reader of this blog and as a human being, if you've played the game before that time comes. You have been warned!

ETA: PTT! has links to the game and relevant interpreters, so go there for the download.

Unlike some others around here, I'm still having trouble with this whole blogging thing. I love having a place to comment on, respond to, and analyze gaming news, but I seem to have a recurring Pascalian problem with writing long and rambling entries. It's a tricky form, it turns out. Not to worry - I'm past the busy weekend and ready to get back to writing, and I'll get the hang of this whole thing eventually. In the meantime, here's a bit of a link dump.

• Happy Halloween! Here's a vegetable representation of our favorite little obsession.
• And even more impressive, a life-sized example done in foam board and looking damn beautiful. [ETA: For the impatient, an unofficial cuddly version.]
  
• Funny and I-swear-to-God-not-Portal-related bit of satire over at Sexy Videogameland. If you've ever played an RPG - well, pretty much any game, really - then you'll recognize this game cliche. [ETA: The saga continues.]
  
• Yahtzee Crowshaw is absolutely brilliant, and his sarcastic reviews over at The Escapist are a new favorite stop on the web.
• Keita Takahashi's in the news because he wants people to have a life outside of videogames, but mostly I want to point out his awesome hat.

Befitting the tossed-together nature of this post, something completely unrelated: Guitar Hero III came out yesterday and I'm trying to figure out if I should spring for the new Les Paul, or if I'm good with my old X-Plorers. Any advice?

Just an administrative post to set up an account with Technorati. Nothing to see here, folks; please move along.

Technorati Profile

I just learned that people have been having trouble registering for an account to allow them to comment. My sincerest apologies - I'm new to this system and I'm attempting to make a lot of changes to customize the site in the coming weeks, which no doubt will cause more of these sorts of problems. In the meantime, I believe I've corrected the issue at hand, so you should be able to register, sign in, and comment in a sensible manner.

The Softcore Gamer blog is something I've been wanting to start for a while now. I got the idea when I realized that the games industry is broken.

Many people will acknowledge it, even if they love games and have trouble describing precisely what's wrong. I'm not claiming that I have a solution to the problem, or even that I can fully illuminate the problem. But I do have some ideas, and I'd like to share them with you.

The gamer has evolved over the past twenty-five years, and the industry as a whole has struggled to keep up. The population of gamers in the United States is greater than it's ever been before. The mean age of gamers is increasing, the number of gamers over 50 is increasing, and the number of women playing games is increasing. But at the same time, soaring development costs have led to shorter games, reduced emphasis on story and gameplay, and a zero-tolerance attitude toward failure that necessitates a minimization of risk.

These hi-def, low-risk games are targeted toward the "core gamer" demographic. Core gamers are typically young and male. They want action, they want violence, and they want competition. They play a lot of first-person shooters and sports titles, and they've demonstrated that they don't mind repetitive content. They're willing to pay a high premium for incremental advances in graphics and interface. They also grow up to be game designers.

This is the audience that the games industry is courting, as well it should. The core gamer demographic is a lucrative market. But where's the long tail of video games? The current culture, which tends to invest heavily in proven franchises or genres, discourages the production of lower-cost niche titles or unconventional games that are unlikely to capture the core gamer demographic.

According to the ESA, 38% of gamers are women. But that figure is misleading. If you limit yourself to mainstream games - games targeted to core gamers, with high production quality and wide release on physical media - the percentage of female gamers decreases significantly. On the other hand, if you look to the major players in the industry - well-known design teams, console manufacturers publishing first-party titles, and publishers with a long history in games - and examine the number of games they release outside the mainstream, the figure is similarly low.

This doesn't apply just to women, but to any group that finds itself primarily outside the core gamer demographic. The people who are serious about making games aren't making games for us.

In the follow-up, I'll talk about what it means to be a softcore gamer, and what significance it has to the games industry. I'll also mention some of the industry's current trends away from a traditional core gamer audience, and how that may impact the industry in the future.