The Sandbox

Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh has an excellent article on gamecareerguide.com on Animal Crossing, one of my favorite games. "Ambition and Compulsory Design in Animal Crossing" deals with games, goals, the motivations for play, and the platform context of a game. Well worth a read.

He calls Animal Crossing "the anti-game": there is no punishment for inaction, there is no real conflict, there is no major obstacle to collecting the widgets that, in most games, require serious effort to earn. This game should make everyone question their definition of what a game is, and what is necessary for a compelling game experience.

Why have I spent an embarrassing number of hours with Animal Crossing? Don't answer that. At least, I don't want to know the awful truth until after I finally get the lunar carpeting for my house, to go with all my other space macguffins.

Someone told me that Halo 3 has hit the stores. I've been too busy playing Team Fortress 2 to notice...

Halo 3 has such hype, and such an economic swirl around it, that one would be forgiven if one thought that it represents the apex of action gaming. But I'm one of those folks that can't get past the fact that handheld-controller FPS gamers are dilettantes compared to mouse-and-keyboard FPS gamers. Maybe I'm an uninformed fogey, but from the brouhaha I heard about the ethical ramifications of the XCM XFPS adapter on the XBox online FPS community, I'm guessing that the FPS community at large thinks the same thing.

TF2 is my new game for the next little while.

It's a nice idea, episodic games: developers love the notion of low-investment, fast-turnaround, high-upside games. Crank something small and polished out every 3-4 months, and it will eventually be an unstoppable juggernaut of cash that keeps building, as you keep churning out small highly-polished little gems, without killing yourselves with crunch-schedules and Mountain Dew.

Why doesn't it work out that way?

Gametap.com has Daikatana available to play for free until December 31st, which I discovered reading this retrospective linked from CNN. (I hope having Daikatana FOR FREE isn't indicative of the quality of Gametap, which I haven't tried. If Daikatana, in 2007, is supposed to be a draw, there's another fiasco in the offing, here.) Released in 2000 with expectations and press that really didn't get equalled until perhaps Halo 3, it did nothing close to the business it was required to do. Which everyone who was part of the industry knew, at the time.

Game companies are filled with people who are good at math, and when a game is delayed for as long as Daikatana was, with as many people employed by Ion Storm, in the most expensive office space in Dallas,... it was an obvious disaster, awaiting realization. That fiasco assessment doesn't even begin to address what was already known about the game prior to release: its design was supposed to be revolutionary and amazing, but "Superfly Johnson"? Really? What possible interest could there be in a design where "Superfly Johnson" is not an ironic character?

A sad, cautionary lesson, Ion Storm.

You are, if you like, able to download a teaser trailer for Duke Nukem Forever. iD has released Quakes 1, 2, 3, and 4, and Doom 3, in the time it has taken for this Duke Nukem sequel to generate something that might be a trailer with some game assets. The first version of Battlefield came along several years into the DNF vigil, and it has several sequels. And of course, no release year is given: just "Stay Tuned". For a game that will be a first-person shooter, which is a well-solved game genre, it's just mystifying what could possibly be at issue preventing release, aside from, "No one has actually been working on it, at all."

I'm sort of at a loss. I mean, picking on DNF as "vaporware" is the gaming industry's equivalent of jokes about airline food: there's absolutely nothing worth saying about it anymore. So why do I post? I'm just weirded out by the release of a trailer that does absolutely nothing to suggest that anything has changed about DNF. Nothing is imminent, that I can tell, nothing is clearer. It's just silly.

Found on Kotaku, Disbarment with Extreme Prejudice, that's the recommendation by the Florida Bar, for Jack Thompson. OK, "enhanced disbarment" is the term, but whatever, I'm a violent game designer, and I am trying to immolate your very soul with my overtly destructive vocabulary. Rawr!

So it goes to the Florida Supreme Court, for review on September 2nd: mark your calendars, I'm sure it will be a colorful countdown come late August. It doesn't look good for Thompson, who declared that the reviewing judge did not have the authority to rule over him and walked out on the hearing. "Do too," she said, unecclesiastically.