On "Gaymercon"

The main perpetrators behind pushing "video game players as a political identity," or the existence of "gamers," are the industries and companies who seek to profit from it. I have no objection to corporations interacting with politics as long as those interactions are visible and transparent -- but the "gamer" was invented, and is still largely owned, as a marketing ploy ("Buying Call of Duty is a form of personal expression!") and if you believe otherwise then you're fooling yourself at the behest of whoever makes these incredibly patronizing ads.

However, I'm content to let that discourse exist, far from the indie / academic / game design scenes where I frequent, where no one uses the word "gamer" unironically and if you do then it marks you as an outsider and you feel awkward as the room visibly chills around you and you resolve to never use the word again. (Okay some academics like the word and use it for explanatory power, my bad, I guess it's just personal revulsion on my part, then.) People who readily identify as "gamers" don't directly hurt others, so I don't really care, so do and believe what you want.

But when that word poisons something that I actually value, like a conversation about being non-straight in society -- that's when I'm not so sure about this.

The Best Unity3D Tutorial Writer In The World

I hate video tutorials; they're slow, you have to consume them linearly / it's hard to skip around, and frankly I just don't think they add much unless cursor movements really matter, as in a ZBrush DVD or something. Textbooks (like, made out of paper) also suck because you can't click on the words.

Jasper Flick's Unity coding tutorials, then, are a revelation: a short essay, written in plain language, rendered on a clean webpage with non-patronizing glossary, just enough screenshots, and code snippets that link you to the relevant documentation. Wow.

You'll learn a lot about C# concepts / syntax too, which is what makes this series especially great, a focus on general fundamentals. So many tutorials hinge on a structure like "use rigidbodies to make enemies die" but Flick is more about "make enemies die to learn how to use rigidbodies."

The impeccable structure comes at a significant time-cost to Flick, so he's soliciting donations to add more tutorials, using a pretty novel timer mechanism.

Maybe I'll chip in. I just read his tutorial on mesh generation and custom inspectors and I feel like I can take on the world now.

"Mission Improbable" by Magnar Jenssen and Rick D

It's fascinating how two of the most polished Half-Life 2 single player campaigns (Magnar and Rick's newly released Mission Improbable and Adam Foster's MINERVA: Metastasis) totally ignore the gravity gun and dispense with the most iconic piece of the original game.

The implied argument, then, is that the gravity gun can't replace the sheer killing power of the AR2. The gravity gun is a gimmick, it only gets used as a last resort -- after hordes of zombies in Ravenholm eat up all your ammo.

Or maybe we, as designers, avoid the gravity gun because we can't control it. There's no "gravity gun ammo" to ration out. We have to contrive really specific puzzle-like situations to overcome how much players loathe using it: here, pick up these mines and shoot them at the chopper, or here, pick up these sawblades, or here, pick up these strider-busters.

Some last remarks: the brushwork and custom assets in Mission Improbable are meticulous. The setpieces are large and involving. There's some strong Robert Briscoe influence in the pair's interpretation of Combine architecture. Good variation of encounters and effective use of manhacks. The car still feels like an afterthought, but there wasn't much room to expand the car portion anyway, I suppose.

Anyway. It's very pretty and very playable, so give it a go.

(DISCLOSURE: I beta-tested this mod.)

Thief 1's "Assassins" and environmental storytelling.

Thief 1 and 2 didn't have an "open world" structure. They got around this constraint (and arguably, surpassed the "open world" as an organizing principle) by inventing their own level design conventions and expectations.

From the very first mission of Thief ("Lord Bafford's Manor"), there's always a safe "outside" area and then the actual "interior" you must infiltrate and mercilessly loot. The outside is usually an open space with a skybox, the public space where you can roam outside mansion walls or in city streets with little danger or penalty -- your first task is to figure out what to infiltrate and how to do it.

By the fourth mission of Thief 1 (and, what I argue, the best mission of the game) you are pretty well accustomed to this design pattern. And that's when Looking Glass flips the script a bit.

"Lighting Design for Level Designers" @ GDC Europe 2012 / 1st Annual Radiator European Tour

I'll be speaking at GDC Europe this year on "Lighting Design for Level Designers" at 5:30 PM on Tuesday, August 14th. That's in about 3 weeks! Yikes.

The session will focus on lighting patterns and light fixtures as ludonarrative / ludodiegetic devices, and describe some useful lighting design terminology I learned from a lighting design course I took at Parsons, how I've applied it to games, while mixing in some of the relevant bits from Randy Smith's seminal GDC 2006 talk.

Radiator readers: I'll be in London the weekends before and after GDC Europe. Feel free to hit me up, in London or Cologne, to drink beer and argue about games or something. (Tweet at me??? That's what the kids do, right?) Also, if there's some sort of RPS Social Club thing going on, I'll try to swing by that too.

"March" by Mindful XP

"March" is a first person art-platformer in your browser (never thought I'd type that) about a relationship by some students at Carnegie Mellon.

Brief spoilery review after the jump.

Zobeide at Lunarcade Sydney, August 3-9

Zobeide will have its public debut in Lunarcade at Serial Space, running from August 3rd - 9th. The Facebook thing is here if you're into that. Here's the scoop:

Exploration is a universal subtext in games. The ‘fog of war’ and line of sight are emblematic tropes of exploration as well as a persistent motif of video games – almost every game involves the implicit mapping of uncharted virtual or representational territory. However, interpreting exploration has a second approach: we can explore uncharted, artificial territory within a game as well as explore the meaning of a work as situated within the real world – we can explore the video game itself as an artifact for the communication of meaning.

Bientôt l’été – Tale of Tales
Dear Esther – Dan Pinchbeck
J.S. Joust – Die Gute Fabrik
Lifeless Planet – Stage 2 Studios
Memory of a Broken Dimension – XRA
Thirty Flights of Loving – Brendon Chung
TRIP – Axel Shokk
Zobeide – Robert Yang

Opening: August 3rd, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition Hours: August 4th & 5th, 12 – 6 pm, August 6th-9th, 12 – 8 pm
J.S. Joust events – daily at 7 PM

I'm also really honored to be mentioned in the same breath as some of these fantastic games and designers! Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it to the opening -- I'll likely be locked inside my Brooklyn apartment, frantically putting together my GDC Europe talk together at the last minute -- but have a blast and enjoy some JS Joust, Australians!

Also: Thirty Flights of Loving is one of the most important games made in the last decade, so make sure you play it at some point.

Also: LONG LIVE NARRATIVE, DEATH TO "MECHANICS" AND "GAMEPLAY"! BURN IT ALL!

Return to Zobeide.

To tell the truth, I had kind of forgotten about Zobeide. My Twine / Unity interface experiment, instead of being my own version of Unmanned's interface, was strange and broken. People kept forgetting the text was there. But after conferring with some interactive fiction people at No Show -- where one had an interpretation of the game that made it sound much more fascinating than it really was -- I think I know what to do with this.

Expect another announcement in a few days (or weeks?)...