http://www.magicalwasteland.com/ en Copyright 2010 Thu, 26 Aug 2010 07:36:11 -0800 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss the hippyish Shadegrown Games development process. There are no new screenshots of Planck v.1 just yet, but exciting things are on the way. If you read Magical Wasteland regularly, you are probably already aware of Kill Screen Magazine. I contributed a piece to issue #1, the No Fun Issue. It is called “Winner” and is about how overly competitive situations can drive out the fun of games. There is a lot of good writing in this publication. Please check it out. I recently decided I did not have enough going on and started a Tumblr blog dedicated to interesting examples of video game music, with occasional wanderings into non-game territory. Finally, due to completely genuine popular demand, you can now purchase an official Magical Wasteland t-shirt. They are not marked up, for I have forgone material wealth in favor of spiritual riches. At least in this case.]]> http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2010/08/the_update_above_novelty.htm http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2010/08/the_update_above_novelty.htm Notes in Brief Thu, 26 Aug 2010 07:36:11 -0800 Final Fantasy VII. What follows is our discussion. Final Fantasy VII makes it seem like selling flowers is kind of a tough job– like most people aren’t interested in beauty at all. Is that true in real life, too? Sure, to an extent. Most of my customers don’t care about or contemplate the beauty inherent to a flower in bloom, because they aren’t buying them because they like them. They’re buying them to function as symbols or gestures. That’s not to say that quality isn’t important, of course– you’re sending the message that you don’t really care if you just go to the supermarket for the cheap kind. Speaking of quality, Aeris gets her flowers from the floor of an abandoned church. Does that strike you as a good place? It’s a terrible place. Most serious florists don’t grow their stock on site because there’s basically no comparison to the kind that can be shipped in from dedicated growers– even considering the time they spend in transit. There’s no sun in Midgar, and the soil quality in the Sector 5 slums is probably abysmal. Plus, there’s a good chance the flowers would wilt in the time it takes her to bring them from the church to the street, since there’s no refrigeration provided by her wicker basket. She could at least get a little cooler or something. I suppose you could argue that flowers growing in such terrible conditions is purposely meant to indicate some kind of miracle. Maybe if the miracle is that she gets any business at all. I mean if she wanted to demonstrate the miracle of life flourishing despite being next to a Mako reactor, I could think of better ways than hacking it off at the roots and hawking it for a gil a stem.]]> http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2010/08/what_final_fantasy_vii_gets_wr.htm http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2010/08/what_final_fantasy_vii_gets_wr.htm Levity Mon, 02 Aug 2010 08:03:15 -0800 Extra Lives. While he was here, we got into a discussion about Alan Wake, a recent game that casts a writer as a hero. I was curious to know if the game successfully evoked anything about actually being writer– or if his occupation is about as relevant to the game as Gordon Freeman being a physicist in Half-Life. What follows is our discussion. A lot of non-adolescent video game heroes tend towards military men or criminals. Were you heartened at all to see a writer as a major video game protagonist? Do you think that makes sense? I can’t tell you how excited I was to hear about a video game whose protagonist was a fiction writer. Then I read that this fiction writer protagonist could sprint for only about ten feet or so, and I thought, “Yes! They’ve done their research!” For a horror game– sorry, a “psychological thriller,” or whatever the hell Remedy wound up calling it– to have as its hero a horror writer sounded really, really intriguing to me. And it is a great idea. Then I learned that the game was about light and darkness, and that the hero’s name was Alan Wake. That sounded kind of hokey, a little too on-the-nose. It’d be like having a game set in a prison, with a warden as its hero, and naming him Steele Bars. Or a renegade cop game in which the hero goes around renegading while rifling through medicine cabinets for health items, and naming that hero Max Payne. Oh, wait. Remedy already did that.]]> http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2010/07/what_alan_wake_gets_wrong_and.htm http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2010/07/what_alan_wake_gets_wrong_and.htm Levity Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:22:10 -0800 Space Invaders, don’t they? Maybe sometimes Pac-Man, or the occasional dalliance with Donkey Kong. But no game has ever represented “video games” in the consciousness of the larger culture like Space Invaders has. The space invaders have invaded art galleries, music videos, public spaces, magazine pages, and book covers. The invaders are, to borrow an overused term, iconic. At some point, there’s frustration with their near-total dominance over people’s assumptions about the medium. There is more to video games than this, you want to shout. We can make them look like anything we want to now: like hyperreal fantasy matte paintings or spare sumi-e brushtrokes or totally abstract fields of light and color. ]]> http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2010/07/pixels_at_an_exhibition.htm http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2010/07/pixels_at_an_exhibition.htm Commentary Tue, 20 Jul 2010 09:49:52 -0800 Good dialogue is a rare experience in games. For one, even if it is well-written and acted, you can often undermine the weight of someone’s words by running away or swinging your sword or throwing a grenade while they are being spoken, unless all control is taken away during the scene. You will see developers stuff you into a tram or some other kind of apparatus that provides a fictional basis for restricting your freedom of moment and action for the duration of the conversation while, at the same time, providing at least a token sense of interactivity (perhaps you can look around, for example). But this solution isn’t all that ideal; besides feeling artificial, it often bores people. Watch someone play during these sections and they’re moving their camera in little circles or zooming in on a guy’s nose or getting a snack. Secondly, spoken lines in games are often saddled with not just story exposition, which can be clunky in even the best films, but gameplay instruction, too. Imagine a movie that contained not just the background of its fictional premise but tried to work in some hints on how to operate your television as well. No matter how cleverly it is disguised as something happening in the game’s fiction (calibrating your sensors, or whatever) it does not actually fool anyone. http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2010/06/the_least_mysterious_of_all_cr.htm http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2010/06/the_least_mysterious_of_all_cr.htm Commentary Sat, 19 Jun 2010 10:14:49 -0800 I had to get the generator running. A power cable plugged into the switch led me to a dilapidated shack over by a rocky outcropping. I noticed that someone had left a pack of fresh Energizer® batteries and two signal flares inside. I picked them up. I pulled on the generator cord several times and the machine sputtered to life. With the power restored, I turned back towards the gate again, noticing that light on the switch had turned from red to green. But a shrill noise signaled that my journey back would not be without an enemy encounter. The Taken came at me as they usually did: in a group of three, with two weaker ones to the sides and a larger tank charging at me head-on. As I strafed to the left and right to avoid their ranged attacks, I nearly expended all of the batteries I had just picked up trying to shine away the darkness in their bodies. But it was fine because I still had seventeen more. http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2010/06/an_excerpt_from_the_novel_depa.htm http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2010/06/an_excerpt_from_the_novel_depa.htm Levity Wed, 02 Jun 2010 09:15:48 -0800 Imagine writing a novel like this: every two weeks, you gather thirty people into a room and ask them to read your draft. When they’re done, they fill out a series of questions. “Did you understand what was going on at all times? Did you understand the protagonist’s motivations? Did you feel compelled to read more? On a scale of one to five, would you recommend this novel to your friends?” Imagine it doesn’t stop there. While the readers are reading, you watch them the entire time. How long does the average page take to finish? When does their pace slow? When do they skim? Imagine a camera on these readers’ faces constantly, tracking their eye movements across each page, data that is then aggregated and mined for trends. Imagine their brains wired, too, looking for activity related to rational reasoning, emotional response, excitement, imagination. The data you gather feeds back into the revisions, and, two weeks later, you are testing your novel again. http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2010/04/get_a_feedback_loop_and_listen.htm http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2010/04/get_a_feedback_loop_and_listen.htm Commentary Tue, 20 Apr 2010 18:57:19 -0800 Fallout 3 I was too busy to pay the scenery much attention or think about what it meant. I picked my way across the rubble towards my missions and glanced only cursorily at the structures around me, more worried about patrolling Super Mutants than exactly what ground I was traversing. It was during some non-directed exploration of these ruins when it finally struck me: coming around a corner to see a skeletal Washington Monument silhouetted against a blazing orange sky, a stark reminder– or evocation– of the idea that powers rise and fall inexorably with the flow of history. It’s not that a little has gone wrong, or that one big thing has gone wrong, but everything we can think of has gone horribly, impossibly wrong in Fallout 3. The game has its share of silliness and humor, but ultimately the weight of its utter devastation is crushing. The original Fallout was pessimistic about humanity, but still tempered by its own self-regarding goofiness. Created and taking place in Southern California, what player couldn’t sense the existential absurdity and the surreal black humor of that post-apocalyptic wasteland? Fallout took us to a place where simply striving to scrape by in a horrible, incomprehensible world could be darkly funny.]]> http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2010/03/four_capital_cities_of_the_uni.htm http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2010/03/four_capital_cities_of_the_uni.htm Commentary Sun, 28 Mar 2010 23:12:20 -0800 Part I. EVE Online. The BART. Part II. Press pass. Jenova Chen. Part III. The Metreon. Infinity Ward. Part IV. Workflows. Fluency. Part V. Baiyon. Incandescence. Part VI. Parade. Trauma. Part VII. Trends. Video Games.]]> http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2010/03/the_fantasy_of_control_dispatc.htm http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2010/03/the_fantasy_of_control_dispatc.htm Writings Elsewhere Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:19:29 -0800 The Tester prepares to make its dramatic PlayStation Network debut, I offer a personal story of entering the game industry through the ranks of Quality Assurance on Edge Online. It is sectioned into four parts. Part One. The call; the journey. Part Two. The people. Part Three. The atmosphere. Part Four. The meaning, or lack thereof. Please enjoy.]]> http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2010/02/in_the_dungeon.htm http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2010/02/in_the_dungeon.htm Writings Elsewhere Fri, 12 Feb 2010 08:49:55 -0800 can games be both ert and fon at the same time? Many further symposiums, blog posts and ert-fon diagrams will be necessary to answer the question definitively.]]> http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2010/02/the_new_debate_on_games_as_ert.htm http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2010/02/the_new_debate_on_games_as_ert.htm Levity Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:18:34 -0800 Ghost in the Shell and The Matrix, which in turn affected the way we think about computers and the Internet. Though I am not really equipped here to discuss the real implications of the possibility of a brain in a vat, I thought that another interesting area of inquiry might be how some (evil?) demiurge might construct such a mechanism using what we currently know about real-time virtual reality– or, in other words, video games.]]> http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2010/01/coining_the_faceless_wind.htm http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2010/01/coining_the_faceless_wind.htm Commentary Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:01:08 -0800 der Zweite Weltkrieg can be like experiencing an unsettling alternate reality: all the Nazi symbology and slogans are gone– effaced completely. The vertical crimson banners still hang but are emblazoned with the iron cross or another innocuous symbol in the center, and those dual lightning bolts of the SS, so ubiquitous on your reference material, have been totally scrubbed away.]]> http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2010/01/dont_mention_the_war.htm http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2010/01/dont_mention_the_war.htm Notes in Brief Mon, 04 Jan 2010 09:07:43 -0800 suppose so? Have you ever seen a well-endowed woman’s breasts? I mean in real life, like right in front of you. Not in a porno.” “Sure– now and then.” “Don’t lie. I can tell when you’re lying.” Kazu had the controller in his hands, making the girl crouch over and over. Hiro took his glasses off and rubbed his face. Delineate deformable regions, grab acceleration data from the bone in the torso. “I can implement that, sure. You want it on all of the female characters?” “Put it on the characters that make sense to you. I’ll review it later.” After Kazu had gone Mayuko crept up behind him. “What was that about breasts?” she said conspiratorially.]]> http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2009/12/soft_body_dynamics.htm http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2009/12/soft_body_dynamics.htm Fictions Thu, 10 Dec 2009 19:45:24 -0800 World News with Charles Gibson and declared Nintendo’s Metroid Prime trilogy “the Citizen Kane of video games”. The segment was not particularly persuasive, being a collision of film history, video games, and the evening news– we see quick cuts between Kane’s bold swaths of shadow and three-dimensional laser combat with space aliens, while Thomsen says something about loneliness– but the piece struck a chord in the video game community, which emitted a loud and derisive collective snort. The reaction of Anthony Burch at Destructoid was typical: he wrote “are you fucking kidding me?”]]> http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2009/11/he_was_always_trying_to_prove.htm http://www.magicalwasteland.com/2009/11/he_was_always_trying_to_prove.htm Commentary Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:57:47 -0800