|
History > 2008 > Japan, USA > Video games (II)
http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t280/left4dead411/wallpapers/witch-francis-2560.jpg
http://www.left4dead411.com/media/wallpapers/
added 13 December 2008
Video Game Review | Left 4 Dead
Traditions of the Zombie Hunt,
Maintained for a New Generation
of Prey
December 13, 2008
The New York Times
By SETH SCHIESEL
I live alone these days, but my favorite memento of my old roommate is the
2005 headline from The Onion that is still stuck to my refrigerator three years
after she put it there: “Study Reveals Pittsburgh Unprepared for Full-Scale
Zombie Attack.”
The line makes me smile every day because the concept of zombie apocalypse is so
elemental and yet subtly humorous in its repugnance. And where else but a stolid
middle-American city like Pittsburgh (or Cleveland or Detroit) would you want to
set down your pack of former insurance clerks and housewives turned ravening
undead to hunt down a ragged band of survivors?
It’s difficult to imagine that some developer at Turtle Rock Studios (now part
of Valve) hasn’t had the same Onion headline pasted by his desk since work began
on Left 4 Dead, also in 2005. Left 4 Dead nails just about every part of the
classic George A. Romero “Living Dead” zombie genre in what amounts to a glossy
and frenetic homage to every shotgun shell that has ever been pumped into the
pustulent maw of the ghoul next door.
Naturally, Left 4 Dead appears to be set in Pennsylvania, just like the original
“Night of the Living Dead” and the headline in my kitchen. The other requisite
pieces are all present and rendered with the clarity of vision and design that
is Valve’s trademark.
There is, of course, the mostly unexplained outbreak of disease and mutation
that has consumed the population. There is the fractious band of holdouts, a
Benetton advertisement of B-movie archetypes: buff leading actor, scrappy girl
in a windbreaker, grizzled old white dude and black guy in untucked dress shirt
and undone tie. (Who has time to take off his tie when he’s fleeing an undead
horde?) There are the shotguns, the submachine guns, the assault rifles and the
always popular dual-wielded pistols.
And then of course there are the zombies. Lots of zombies. As in hundreds and
thousands of zombies. In fact, over the last few weeks I have killed more than
11,000 zombies in Left 4 Dead, which has to be some kind of personal record.
But these are the right kind of zombies for this setting. These are not the
“lurking in a dark corner, I know it’s there, but I’m scared waiting for it to
jump out at me” zombies. If you want those, play Dead Space or even one of the
games in the Resident Evil series. Instead, Left 4 Dead is infested with
leaping, scrambling, climbing-through-windows zombies.
The basic campaign in Left 4 Dead doesn’t take more than a single afternoon to
get through on the normal-difficulty setting. You can play alone offline, and
the other three members of your party will be controlled by the program. The
campaign’s four acts are actually set up as four hourlong mini-movies with the
same basic concept: get through the hospital or the airport or the wooded,
mist-shrouded town to a safe house or extraction point.
The taglines for each adventure are pitch-perfect cheese: “Curing the Infection
... One Bullet at a Time,” “Hell Came to Earth. These Four Are Gonna Send It
Back,” “No Hope. No Cure. No Problem,” and my favorite: “Their Flight Just Got
Delayed. Permanently.”
Keep in mind, though, that Left 4 Dead is not really about its single-player
mode. “Monotonous” was the word one friend used as she watched me mow down wave
after wave of the undead menace in one single-player episode. Instead, Left 4
Dead is by far this year’s best online multiplayer shooter. And that is because
the game makes cooperation and teamwork absolutely essential to survive. Just as
in the zombie movies, there is always the one person who does something stupid
that threatens to kill the whole group. Sometimes you’re even that person (even
if you resolutely refuse to admit it).
Online, you can end up playing as either the zombies or as the survivors, and I
have to admit I usually prefer being one of the mutants helping wipe out those
pesky, juicy humans. It is a good thing that Left 4 Dead, which is available for
PCs and the Xbox 360, is rated M for Mature, because the hilarious obscenity of
players screaming at one another in your typical public online match is not for
the faint of heart.
Then again, online gaming rarely is. But if you can stand the heat, Left 4 Dead
is the class of the field among first-person shooters this year and one of the
best zombie games yet. Just call The Onion prescient.
Traditions of the Zombie
Hunt, Maintained for a New Generation of Prey,
NYT,
13.12.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/13/arts/television/13dead.html
Video Games
Gift-Giving Ideas
for Buying Video Games
November 28, 2008
The NewYork Times
By SETH SCHIESEL
In these challenging economic times, it may come as a surprise that a
well-chosen video game can be one of the most cost-effective gifts possible.
Sure, the $60 price tag on some top games can be daunting, but when you realize
that the right one can wrangle dozens or even hundreds of hours out of the right
player, games can start to look like the smart entertainment investments they
are.
But nongamers can get it totally wrong when buying for friends and family. Bad
gift-giving usually stems from one basic misconception: If it’s a video game, it
must be for children.
Every year, parents who would never dream of buying their children a DVD of
“Scarface,” “Platoon” or one of the “Saw” torture movies blithely buy them
violent gangster games, bloody war games and gross-out horror games. Then
they’re horrified when little Johnny or Jenny ends up spending Saturday
afternoon trading expletives with drug dealers and discussing the relative
merits of shotguns and flamethrowers. So please, if you would not allow your
children to watch R-rated films without supervision, do not buy them M-rated
games. Federal studies have shown that the game industry is at least as vigilant
as Hollywood in labeling products that are inappropriate for children. But the
system breaks down when parents ignore it.
That misconception cuts the other way as well. The average gamer is now about
30; the first generation to grow up playing games is now around 40. And your
35-year-old boyfriend is not going to be impressed when you show up with the
latest Pokémon or the new “Price Is Right” game. The best work being done in
games these days is in interactive narratives for and about adults. Engaging
with a current top-end game involves much more cognitive processing (a k a
brainpower) than merely watching hour upon hour of prime-time television. So
show some respect; your favorite gamer will adore you for it.
Here are some of the best games of the year, each of which could be the perfect
gift for the right person. The shrewd will notice no sports or music games on
this list. That is because those are easier to shop for: pick the desired sport
or tunes and go.
GRAND THEFT AUTO IV Ideal audience: well-adjusted adults who want to explore a
rich, intelligent, politically incorrect digital rendition of New York City. As
long as you can accept that a great work of modern entertainment can revolve
around criminals — something long assumed in television and films — then it is
almost impossible to deny that G.T.A. IV is one of the most compelling games in
recent years. The driving and shooting is fun, but the real star of the game is
the city itself, rendered with a loving sense of decay and populated with
perhaps the best cast of dysfunctional characters to grace a pixel. For Xbox 360
and Playstation 3 (PC version coming in December). Rating: M for Mature.
SID MEIER’S CIVILIZATION REVOLUTION Ideal audience: families interested in
fostering an appreciation of both global history and strategic thinking; also,
commuters looking to upgrade from Tetris. Civilization is the top strategy
franchise in the history of video games. With Revolution the series moves beyond
PCs and arrives on consoles and the hand-held Nintendo DS. The premise remains
the same: guide a historical culture from the dawn of history to the space age.
Nothing feels better than dominating Genghis Khan and Napoleon at the same time.
For Xbox 360, PS3 and DS. Rating: E10+ for Everyone 10 and older.
Warhammer Online Ideal audience: massively multiplayer online gamers who cannot
satisfy their bloodlust in World of Warcraft. Don’t get me wrong; like more than
10 million other people, I love World of Warcraft. But great games can stand
some competition, and Warhammer Online, the new online version of the
decades-old British fantasy universe, provides it. Warhammer employs many
conventions from Warcraft but gives them a new twist in a game that focuses
largely on player-versus-player combat, rather than on battling
computer-controlled foes. For PC. Rating: T for Teen.
Wii Fit Ideal audience: couch produce of all ages. Nintendo’s best game of the
year is not really a game. It’s a light exercise system meant to take just a few
calories off. The most surprising thing: it works. For Wii. Rating: E for
Everyone.
LITTLEBIGPLANET Ideal audience: aspiring game designers and anyone else with
excellent eye-hand coordination. The breakout title this year for Sony’s
PlayStation 3, LittleBigPlanet is in some ways as close to YouTube as games have
come. In its essence it is merely a “platformer”: you navigate your little
beanbag character mostly by running and jumping. The secret sauce is that the
game allows users to create their own levels and share them easily with other
players online. Rating: E.
DEAD SPACE Ideal audience: people who like being scared. Dead Space is a
straight-ahead science fiction survival-horror experience. You, the player, are
trapped on a spooky spaceship with a horde of space zombies who want to eat you,
or turn you into one of them, or something. You wade through them while engaging
in what is charmingly referred to as “strategic dismemberment.” For what it is,
though, Dead Space is both conceived and executed at a high level. For Xbox 360,
PS3 and PC. Rating: M.
FALLOUT 3 Ideal audience: old-school role-playing gamers and anyone who wants to
see Washington in ashes. The return of the classic Fallout series is a sprawling
re-creation of the Capitol area after a nuclear war. The tone is darker and less
slyly humorous than previous Fallout games, but the sheer size and ambition of
the game impress. For Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. Rating: M.
PROFESSOR LAYTON AND THE CURIOUS VILLAGE Ideal audience: puzzle fans. One of the
sleepers of 2008, Professor Layton ties together more than 100 beautifully
designed brainteasers with an endearing anime-style story. The puzzles
themselves are perfectly intelligible to nongamers. For Nintendo DS. Rating: E.
GEARS OF WAR 2 Ideal audience: testosterone-fueled core gamers who like chain
saws. When you think about the stereotypical video game, this is what you’re
thinking about: big guns, voracious alien bad guys, great graphics, huge
explosions, cardboard-cutout characters, silly dialogue and cheap thrills all
around. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. For Xbox 360. Rating: M.
FABLE II Ideal audience: emotionally mature children and most fans of delicate
entertainment design. This game is rated M not because it is especially violent
or profane. It is rated M because in between casting spells and swinging swords
you can have children, you can get married (and have affairs if you choose), and
you can buy condoms. Shocking, I know. For children who are comfortable with the
basic facts of life, there is no reason not to share Fable II. It’s a wonderful
game on its own, and it beats handing a child a virtual machine gun. For Xbox
360.
Gift-Giving Ideas for
Buying Video Games, NYT, 28.11.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/28/arts/television/28vide.html
Master of the universe
He turned town planning into an art form with SimCity and housework into a
teenage obsession with The Sims.
Now California's most innovative game designer, Will Wright, has turned his
attention to evolution and the universe. Ajesh Partalay tries to pin him down
Sunday September 14 2008
The Observer
Ajesh Partalay
This article appeared in the Observer on Sunday September 14 2008 on p52 of the
Comment & features section.
It was last updated at 00:05 on September 14 2008.
In Thailand last month an 18-year-old high-school student stabbed a taxi
driver to death. When asked why, he replied that it was to see if it was as easy
to rob a taxi in real life as it was in his favourite video game, Grand Theft
Auto. The Thai government banned the game amid talk of a 'ticking time bomb'.
Just the latest in a long-running argument about the damaging effects of violent
video games.
To objections from the gaming industry, the UK government has just introduced
plans for a strict film-style classification system, which may allay parents'
fears about violence but seems unlikely to address their concerns about video
games in general: that they stifle creativity, hinder social skills and reduce
their children to gawping couch potatoes. Video games are back in the firing
line.
Last Friday saw the release of Spore, one of the industry's most eagerly awaited
games. But parents can breathe a sigh of relief, because this isn't some
ultra-violent gun-toting gore fest. It's the brainchild of designer Will Wright,
which means, in all likelihood, that it will totally rewrite the rules on what
we can expect from a video game and prove as popular with parents as it is with
kids. Through his games Wright has revolutionised the industry and more than
once salvaged its reputation. With his latest he may well do so again.
Wright, now 48, is regarded with awe by his peers (even his company Maxis, I'm
told, is seen as 'mysterious', squirrelled away in Orinda, California for so
long when everyone else was in Silicon Valley), because he has developed an
entirely new type of video game. And out of the most unlikely material.
SimCity, his breakthrough, is about nothing more elaborate than building a city
and following the principles of good town planning. This in a market dominated
by fantasy and sci-fi role-play games, sports simulations and first-person
shooters. Released in 1989, SimCity (and its spin-offs) have gone on to sell a
staggering 17m copies worldwide. But this is nothing compared with his
follow-up, The Sims. Probably best described as an interactive doll's house, in
which you look after the inhabitants, The Sims boasts sales of more than 100m
copies, making it the bestselling PC game of all time.
His latest game, Spore, is as ambitious in scope as its predecessors ('How do we
deconstruct the universe?' Wright asked by way of introduction at a recent
conference). Spore is based loosely on the theory of evolution. Each player
starts off as a microbial cell which gradually evolves, through feeding on other
organisms and picking up 'DNA points', until it wriggles out of water on to dry
land. This creature then hunts and reproduces, eventually banding together to
make a tribe, which in turn grows in size and then either by conquering or
allying with surrounding settlements turns into a civilisation.
Finally you advance far enough to be able to send a rocket up into space for the
final stage, in which you jet about the universe in search of planets to
colonise and aliens to pester. From single-cell organism to intergalactic empire
in one game.
With his slightly nerdy haircut and glasses, Wright certainly looks the part.
Sitting in his office overlooking San Francisco Bay, he has one leg draped
jauntily over the armrest of his chair. Glancing round, there are pointers to
Spore everywhere. Pinned to his walls are images from the Hubble Space Telescope
(used to recreate star clusters in the game); over his bookshelf a poster of his
favourite film, 2001 (by way of homage, when players reach the final space
stage, they can drop a black monolith down to the surface of other planets to
freak out aliens); on his desk an entomology microscope. 'I've got one at home,
too. They're much more interesting than a telescope.' What does he look at?
'Anything. You could put your hand under there and spend an hour looking at it.
Fascinating.' In the corridor outside sits a battered doll's house, presumably a
leftover from The Sims.
Wright is telling me at great speed (he talks with considerable velocity) about
the inspirations behind Spore. What follows is typically recondite. 'It's
actually an idea you see repeated over and over,' he says. 'The idea of Powers
of Ten.' This is a short film by Charles and Ray Eames from 1977 that looks at
the universe on various scales, gradually zooming in from the galactic (a view
of the entire Milky Way) to the microscopic (quark particles in the nucleus of a
carbon atom). 'In fact, Powers of Ten wasn't the first one I discovered. The
original idea came from a Dutch schoolteacher named Kees Boeke. He wrote a book
in 1957 called Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps. Boeke's version was
amazingly accurate for the time ...' On which he leaps up and snatches down a
copy of Boeke's book from the shelf.
Wright goes on: 'I remember explaining Spore to the execs at Electronic Arts
[EA, the software company that finances and publishes the game] before we had
anything to show. I was trying to explain the content, Powers of Ten and all
this. It was pretty clear they had no idea what I was talking about. But they
were like: "Sure, do it."'
Whether they understood or not, Electronic Arts has invested a considerable
amount in the game (reportedly $20m). This is not insignificant at a time when
the industry, though still thriving, is beginning to question the value of
spending millions on one game (a new title, too, not a sequel), particularly
given the growing popularity of cheaper, so-called 'casual games'.
Casual games include the lucrative field of internet and mobile-phone games as
well as PC and console games typified by Guitar Hero (a karaoke-style game) and
Dr Kawashima's Brain Training (in which you solve various puzzles to help
sharpen your mind). They are simpler in design, shorter in duration, and aimed
at a more mainstream audience. The Nintendo Wii console (with its
motion-sensitive remote) has been a particular hit, attracting a broad new
fanbase with its range of family-friendly titles. I ask Wright how important it
is to court this new type of player. 'It's probably the most important thing
happening in the gaming industry. We're seeing that with the Nintendo Wii. That
pressure to start serving the whole market rather than this little section.'
Does he mean appealing to more women? 'That's a big part, but also the
intergenerational market. Families. With Wii, you see kids, parents and even
grandparents playing together.' Wright already has a good record on this.
According to EA, 20 per cent of Sims players are over 35 and 50 per cent are
female.
For EA, there's a lot riding on Spore (particularly since the company reported
losses of $95m earlier this year). At the same time, EA clearly has faith in
Wright and has granted him considerable leeway. A great position to be in, I
say. 'Yeah. Kind of,' Wright shrugs. 'For The Sims it was very different. I was
always having to convince people it would be fun. That was almost more
satisfying – as opposed to whatever stupid thing you say, everybody says: "Great
idea, go do it."' It has been six years in development; the big question now is
whether Spore can meet those expectations.
At this year's Comic-Con in San Diego, a conference for comic-book nerds, video
gamers and hardcore Trekkies, Wright gave a speech in which he said he believed
video games had a role in helping people understand sciences. Spore, he said,
would make science 'accessible and not academic'. It's a recurring theme in the
way he talks about his work: games as semi-educational.
How important is it that his games teach as well as entertain? 'I'm not sure
teach is the right word,' he says. 'Computer games and simulations are much more
powerful [as an aid] to motivate than to teach. I'd rather have a game that got
a person interested in the subject than tried to put a lot of facts into their
head. It's not a matter of sugarcoating education. Education when done right is
inherently fun. There shouldn't be a difference between the two. Our culture has
disconnected the ideas of education and fun – and if anything, I'm trying to
reconnect those two things.'
It goes back to the way Wright himself was taught. Raised in Atlanta, Georgia,
the son of a plastics engineer and an actress, Wright attended a Montessori
school up to the age of nine (his 'high point of education'). 'The basis was
that you wanted kids to discover principles on their own. Montessori designed
toys so kids could discover aspects of maths or geometry just from playing. The
kid made the discovery, and it was much more effective than the teacher coming
over and saying, "Here's Pythagorean theory," or whatever.' Wright has likened
his own games to 'modern Montessori toys'.
As a child, he'd immerse himself in pet subjects for months, reading everything
he could. Space exploration was a passion. Another was Harry Houdini (a rub-off
from his mother, who was an amateur magician. 'I learned how to pick locks,' he
says). The Second World War was an obsession, too. 'I had a friend down the
street – we were both into World War Two history and used to play these
elaborate historical video games recreating the Battle of Kursk or whatever.' He
also built a lot of models: 'ships, cars, planes, mostly from kits'.
When Wright was nine his father died of leukaemia and he moved with his mother
and younger sister to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. There he enrolled in the Episcopal
High School and duly became an atheist. After graduating he took off to
Louisiana State University to study architecture, transferred a few years later
to Louisiana Tech for mechanical engineering, dropped out, drove a bulldozer for
a summer and in 1980 landed up at New School, New York, studying robotics.
Robots then led to computers: 'I got fascinated, totally dived in and learned
how to programme.' Video games were taking off at the time. 'I thought: people
are actually making money from these games. I'll try it. More as an intellectual
challenge; I didn't expect to make money.' Wright's first game, programmed on
his Commodore 64, was Raid on Bungeling Bay ('this stupid helicopter shoot 'em
up') which Broderbund, a small software company, brought out in 1984. It was a
fair success, earning Wright enough to live on for a couple of years. That same
year, Wright married Joell Jones, the older sister of one of his friends, and
two years later they had a daughter, Cassidy. (The couple have recently
separated.)
While developing Bungeling Bay, Wright became fascinated by a tangential aspect
to the game. 'Underneath was a fairly elaborate simulation of factories and
towns, a whole infrastructure that wasn't apparent to the player. I was having a
lot more fun building that world than bombing it.' How about a game based on
that, he thought, where you build your own urban environment. He threw himself
into background reading. 'I uncovered the work of Jay Forrester, who wrote a
book called Urban Dynamics in 1969,' Wright tells me, before citing other
sources, including John Conway's 1970 Game of Life and the 'cell automata' work
of a little-known scientist named Liman Wang.
The prototype game Wright came up with was a radical departure in gaming terms.
In it the player would oversee the development of an entire city, laying roads,
building schools and hospitals, installing infrastructure, all the time
balancing a long list of interdependent variables (crime rates, population
levels, popularity ratings, taxes). Persuading software company Broderbund to
back it was no breeze. 'When I first showed them SimCity they were a little
confused. I got to this stage where I thought it was done, but they kept
expecting it to have this win/lose element. I kept saying: "No. This is the way
it is."' Broderbund ended up not publishing, and it sat on Wright's shelf for a
few years.
Enter Jeff Braun, Wright's future business partner. They met in 1987 at a
friend's pizza party in Alameda, California. When Wright showed him his demo,
Braun got very excited. Having previously developed fonts for the computer firm
Atari, Braun was keen to get into games. Here was the perfect vehicle. 'He's a
very bubbly guy,' Wright says of Braun. 'He said: "I want to play this – this is
great" and persuaded me to start this company with him to develop it.' Which
they did. Two years later Maxis published SimCity. Though not an instant hit, it
went on to earn $230m worldwide.
The idea for Wright's next game came when his house burned down in an Oakland
Hills fire in 1991. Forced to replace all his possessions – everything from
kitchen utensils to furniture, which he hated doing – Wright got thinking about
the value of all this stuff. Which sparked an idea: a game about running a
household. But how to make it work? Wright read extensively on human behaviour
and systems design: books like A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, A
Theory of Human Motivation by Abraham Maslow and Maps of the Mind by Charles
Hampden-Turner, which provided guiding principles for scoring the happiness of
players in the game he came up with.
The Sims, based in a suburban home, required that players tend to the various
needs – from dietary to social – of its family of inhabitants. That meant
everything from taking them to the bathroom and getting them to clean, to
cooking them dinner. Arguably Wright's greatest achievement was making housework
fun. Launched in 2000, The Sims was an instant hit.
Three years earlier, Maxis had been bought out by Electronic Arts for $125m.
Wright walked away from the deal with a reported $17m in EA stock. The Sims and
its spin-offs have since gone on to earn EA in the region of $4bn.
A month now before Spore ships, the pressure on the team at Spore HQ is easing
up. The main office – airy, wood-beamed and half empty today – is covered with
Spore flowcharts, storyboards and brainstorming sessions. For Wright, there's
time to pause, too, though not for long – an exhaustive promotional world tour
kicks off in a few weeks. 'I prefer to be making the game than talking about
it,' he says.
Does it bother him that video games are looked down on by so many? 'There are
two ways of looking at that. Yeah, this bias against this form of media causes
tension. But at the same time, there's some value in being a renegade. Like
rock'n'roll. Something that parents don't like, kids are much more into it.' But
if video games are rock'n'roll, I say, his games are more like the Beatles than,
say ... 'Metallica?' he chimes in. 'Probably. My games tend to be more
cross-generational. More accessible. I think parents would rather see their kids
play The Sims than Counter-Strike.' No wonder. The first is about family life,
the second a violent terrorist-based first-person shooter.
But Wright is quick to defend games like Counter-Strike. 'It's funny,' he says.
'If [parents] are just observing the game and not playing it themselves, they're
just seeing a surface representation: the pixels on the screen, the explosions,
the gunshots. But if you look at kids playing Counter-Strike or [another
first-person shooter] Quake, it's really more of a sport. They're very social
experiences; they're not antisocial at all. It's all about working together as a
team, getting their friends together – sometimes it's more like playing a game
of basketball. If parents could see what the kids were seeing on the screen in a
social sense, they would have a totally different perspective on it.'
Agree or not, it's Wright in a nutshell. The Montessori defence, you might say:
nothing beats playing the game yourself – and every game, violent or not, has
something to teach us. Providing we have a go.
· Spore is on sale now
Master of the universe,
O, 14.9.2008,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/14/games
Video Game Review
Playing God, the Home Game
September 5, 2008
The New York Times
By SETH SCHIESEL
What is the difference between a game and a toy? Does a game that feels more
like a toy — even a scintillating, empowering toy — fall short on its own terms?
Or is it enough just to be a great toy?
Those questions came to mind again and again as I spent more than 60 hours
recently with Spore, the almost impossibly ambitious new brainchild of Will
Wright. Best known for his popular evocations of urban sprawl (SimCity) and
suburban Americana (The Sims), Mr. Wright has spent the last eight years trying
to figure out how to convey the vast sweep of evolution from a single cell to
the exploration of the galaxy as an interactive entertainment experience. His
answer, Spore, is being released in stores and online for PCs and Macs in Europe
on Friday and in North America this weekend.
As an intelligent romp through the sometimes contradictory realms of science,
mythology, religion and hope about the universe around us, Spore both provokes
and amuses. And as an agent of creativity it is a landmark. Never before have
everyday people been given such extensive tools to create their digital alter
ego.
Beginning with all manner of outlandish creatures — want to make a seven-legged
purple cephalopod that looks like it just crawled out of somewhere between the
River Styx and your brother-in-law’s basement? — and proceeding through various
buildings and vehicles, Spore gives users unprecedented freedom to bring their
imaginations to some semblance of digital life. In that sense Spore is probably
the coolest, most interesting toy I have ever experienced.
But it’s not a great game, and that is something quite different.
The quintessential toys, like a ball or toy soldier, captivate with their
versatility. Children can see in a toy what they wish, and are content. Adults,
however, tend to lose interest in toys after a little while. Instead they can
find deep intellectual and sometimes emotional engagement in the games that
emerge around those simple toys, like soccer and chess. Those games are eternal
not because I can make my rook look like a slavering alien or because David
Beckham occasionally sprouts wings, but because their basic dynamics and rules
are perfectly tuned to foster an almost infinitely interesting variety of
tactics, strategies and results.
Spore does not have that magic, at least not at the world-beating level it so
clearly could have. People who are more interested in playing Spore than in
playing with Spore — that is, people who are more interested in a game than a
toy — are likely to come away feeling a bit let down.
Yes, Spore is undeniably gorgeous; Mr. Wright and his development team at Maxis
have accomplished a prodigious technical feat with the programming that allows
members of Spore’s interstellar menagerie variously to walk, stalk, flop and fly
as they befriend and devour one another. For that matter, Mr. Wright and his
publishers at Electronic Arts deserve all the credit they have received from
some scientists merely for making a game about evolution (though it will be
fascinating to see how the game fares among people who do not believe evolution
is real). And yes, millions of people will surely spend countless hours, and
dollars, on the fabulous computer toy that is Spore. And they should.
Yet like me, many players will end up crestfallen that the genius bestowed on
Spore’s creative facilities was clearly not matched by similar inspiration for
deeply engaging gameplay. Beneath all the eye candy, most of the basic core play
dynamics in Spore are unfortunately rather thin.
At some level that seems by design. As perhaps befits its subject matter, Spore
is not one game but a collection of five discrete mini-games, each reflecting a
different stage of biological and social evolution and a different archetypal
game style.
Life begins in the cell stage, basically a simple prologue. Think of Pac-Man but
more colorful. Drifting in the primordial soup, your cell eats pellets (plants
or prey) and avoids ghosts (bigger organisms). After maybe 30 minutes (if you
survive), you evolve onto land and into the creature stage.
That stage is where Mr. Wright’s team seems to have spent the most effort, and
for me it has been by far the most enjoyable and interesting part of the game.
The entire Spore project might have been better handled if the cell and creature
levels had been released together a couple years ago at a lower price (Spore now
costs $49.95), allowing the more pedestrian later phases to receive a comparable
level of time and attention as expansions.
Keep in mind that Spore includes no real-time multiplayer; that bizarre monster
on the horizon is not being directly controlled by another player. Yet if you
are connected to the Internet, that monster may have been made by another player
in his own single-player universe and then used to populate your planet.
And so the creature stage rules Spore, because only there can you fully
appreciate the range of expression possible using Spore’s tool set. As you
explore the planet and meet other players’ progeny, the DNA you collect allows
you to customize your creature with any of dozens of different body parts.
Various mouths, hands, feet and wings convey different abilities, perhaps
singing or dancing (for making allies of other species) or biting or clawing
(for fighting).
But Spore goes a bit off the track as it reaches the tribal phase and beyond.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that all that time you spent lovingly fine-tuning
your otherworldly avatar in the creature phase basically doesn’t matter anymore.
After the creature phase the cosmetic appearance of your species is locked in,
but the abilities it developed are largely meaningless. Instead, in the tribal
stage, you get just a few choices of different weapons and clothing. In the
civilization phase you devise airplanes, land vehicles and ships, and in the
space phase you obviously make spacecraft. But as Spore goes along, those
choices matter less and less in shaping how you can actually play the game.
Progressing out of the tribe and civilization stages requires either conquering
or co-opting all the neighboring tribes or cities. These “conquer the world”
stories are classic computer game styles, and Spore borrows heavily from the
basic mechanics of some of the best strategy games ever made, like Command &
Conquer, StarCraft and Civilization. (For example, send peasants to gather
supplies while you deploy forces against your rivals.)
Once you leap to the space stage, Spore’s strategic gameplay becomes a bit of a
hash reminiscent of games like Master of Orion and Galactic Civilizations, only
with horrendous, almost carpal-tunnel-syndrome-inducing interface controls and
insufficient tools for managing what is meant to be a galaxy-spanning empire.
The exploration and planet-shaping functions of this phase are enjoyable, but
they are largely obscured by a gratuitous amount of low-level tasks like warding
off pirate invasions and manually moving trade goods from one system to another,
over and over. In none of its later stages does the depth of Spore’s play come
close to matching the best-of-genre games available in each of the categories it
derives from. (And then there are the inexplicable lapses in basic
functionality, like the absence of an auto-save feature. The first time the
program crashes, probably in the space phase, and you realize that hours of
effort have been lost, you’ll be mad. The second time, you may quit forever.)
In fairness, one could also note a similar lack of depth in the basic play
systems of The Sims, which has proven enduringly popular. But there are some
intersecting design reasons why that works better in The Sims than in Spore.
Most important, The Sims is profoundly noncompetitive and open ended. The Sims
is structured so you can help your family putter around the house forever. There
are other families in the neighborhood to interact with, but they aren’t trying
to eat your children or burn your house down.
Spore, like real life, is largely about the survival of the fittest. In each
stage your species either becomes dominant and evolves, or it becomes extinct
(meaning you try over and over again until you “win”). In The Sims making a
family dysfunctional is half the fun. In Spore a dysfunctional species basically
loses the game. That competitive nature is one reason why, despite its cutesy
looks, Spore is aimed both at adults and children. And that competitive aspect
is why a relative dearth of rich and interesting play mechanics hurts Spore more
than The Sims.
The real frustration with Spore is that the team behind it was capable of such
high achievement in the areas it focused on, while other parts languished. As
reflected in its prodigious creation tools, it succeeds on so many of the most
important levels for media these days. Like Facebook, YouTube and the Internet
itself, Spore is about giving people both the tools to express themselves and a
group to share with. The fun of trading creatures with friends and family and
exploring new worlds in Spore will probably never get old.
Now if Mr. Wright and the Maxis team just take another few passes through
Spore’s later stages and release a big revision patch next year, they may
finally end up with a game to match the stellar toy they have already unleashed.
Playing God, the Home
Game, NYT, 5.9.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/05/arts/television/05spor.html
At ESPN, Play-by-Play Goes Virtual
September 5, 2008
The New York Times
By BROOKS BARNES
LOS ANGELES — ESPN, the cable powerhouse that calls itself “Worldwide Leader
in Sports,” is looking to extend its domain in virtual worlds by merging video
game graphics with real-life sports anchors.
The network, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, has spent the last year
working on a new technology with Electronic Arts, the leading game publisher,
that would allow ESPN commentators to interact live with realistic-looking,
three-dimensional virtual players as they pontificate about coming matches
during broadcasts.
“It’s a way for us to remain relevant,” said John Skipper, ESPN’s executive vice
president for content. “We want to make sure we remain connected to lots and
lots of fans, and using the language that gamers understand is one way.”
Boiled down, the complex technology, which will make its debut this Sunday on
ESPN’s popular “NFL Countdown” program, involves using an Electronic Arts’ title
— say Madden NFL 09 — with specialized digital camera equipment in the studio.
Presto: Both real and virtual people move around the ESPN set to demonstrate
plays and possible situations.
And the sports behemoth has more ambitious plans down the road. Instead of using
the technology, called EA Sports Virtual Playbook, to tell viewers what to look
for before games, ESPN wants to use it in reverse to play the ultimate Monday
morning quarterback.
Using real information from a game, ESPN anchors could reprogram an actual
sequence to show, for example, what would have happened had Peyton Manning
thrown right instead of left.
Much is made about how various forms of media — television, the Internet, radio
— are all moving toward one another. And while television content has converged
into video games, Virtual Playbook offers an example of convergence moving in
the opposite direction. ESPN is bringing the look and feel of a video game to
television for the sake of interactivity, flexibility and visual aid.
Television and movie executives have struggled for years to attract young
consumers who play video games to more traditional forms of entertainment. At
the same time, ESPN is on a mission to tap new areas of growth as it faces
challenges in its core operations.
ESPN, three decades old, remains one of the media industry’s biggest gold mines,
with successful magazine and Internet operations to complement its suite of
cable channels. Analysts estimate that ESPN represents about a quarter of
Disney’s annual operating income.
But ESPN must also battle the ever-increasing number of Web sites offering
sports video and maintain growth as cable operators resist paying higher
subscription fees to carry its programming. ESPN charges cable companies about
$3.50 a month for each subscriber; the vast majority of cable channels charge
well under $1.
So far this year, ESPN’s household rating is up a modest 10 percent compared
with the same period last year, largely because of more interest in basketball
and the X Games. But household ratings for “Sunday NFL Countdown” have stagnated
over the last two years. Ratings for “Monday Night Football” dropped 13 percent
in 2007 over the year earlier, according to Nielsen Media Research data.
Among ESPN’s programming improvements are an expansion of “SportsCenter,” the
network’s flagship program, into daytime and an ambitious push into
high-definition programming. But the network is also banking on technological
advancements like Virtual Playbook.
“We think this will wow our viewers,” said Stephanie Druley, a senior ESPN
producer who oversees N.F.L. studio programming. “No one has seen this before.”
EA Sports, a division of Electronic Arts, had a business goal of its own in
developing the technology. The unit is actively moving toward a broader sports
and entertainment enterprise to speed up growth. Licensing technology is a main
part of the strategy.
There is also the matter of increasing sales for the division’s bread-and-butter
products. Its longtime strategy of churning out annual sequels for its Madden
football game — the series is in its 20th sequel — is showing strain. With heavy
promotion on ESPN via Virtual Playbook, sales might improve.
“We’ve got to keep swimming,” said Peter Moore, president of EA Sports. “Part of
that effort is to bring the consumer more into our world. Virtual Playbook is
going to give us a lot of opportunity to talk to football fans.”
ESPN will also showcase Virtual Playbook on programs like “Monday Night
Countdown,” “NFL Live,” and, occasionally, “SportsCenter.” The network hopes to
expand the feature to analysis of other sports like basketball and soccer, said
Anthony Bailey, vice president for emerging technology at ESPN.
In 2005, Electronic Arts reached a 15-year deal with ESPN to publish sports
games that use the ESPN brand name and content. Analysts value the agreement at
$850 million to ESPN over the contract’s duration.
Neither ESPN nor EA Sports would say whether Virtual Playbook was part of the
15-year contract or if the two companies reached a new licensing agreement. An
ESPN spokesman said current contracts with the National Football League allow it
to use the likenesses of players to enhance its programming.
Integrating human anchors with virtual-reality players might be new, but Virtual
Playbook is likely to look familiar to avid ESPN viewers. The network has
sometimes shown video game simulations of match-ups that look similar.
Still, new media analysts gave ESPN early praise for the effort.
“If ESPN wants to gain more exposure to the gamer audience, this seems like a
smart way to go about it,” said Michael Dowling, the chief executive of
Interpret, a new media consultancy based in Santa Monica, Calif. “It adds an
element of coolness and realism that gamers really want.”
At ESPN, Play-by-Play
Goes Virtual, NYT, 5.9.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/05/business/media/05espn.html
Gaming Evolves
September 2, 2008
The New York Times
By CARL ZIMMER
Correction Appended
NEW HAVEN — By day, Thomas Near studies the evolution of fish, wading through
streams in Kentucky and Mississippi in search of new species. By night, Dr.
Near, an assistant professor at Yale, is a heavy-duty gamer, steering tanks or
playing football on his computer. This afternoon his two lives have come
together.
On his laptop swims a strange fishlike creature, with a jaw that snaps sideways
and skin the color of green sea glass. As Dr. Near taps the keyboard, it wiggles
and twists its way through a busy virtual ocean. It tries to eat other creatures
and turns its quills toward predators that would make it a meal.
The chairman of Dr. Near’s department, Richard Prum, watches him play and
worries about his reckless lunges.
“You’re just attacking them?” he asks as Dr. Near tries to eat a fat purple worm
that looks too dangerous to bother.
“If you kill them, you unlock their parts,” Dr. Near explains. But then the
purple worm sticks its syringelike mouth into Dr. Near’s beast and begins to
drain its innards. “Uh-oh, I’m about to die,” he says. The screen fades to
black.
The next time, Dr. Near’s luck changes. He gains enough points to move to the
next level of the game. His creature grows a brain. “Oh man, it’s like I
graduated college,” he says. Dr. Near can now alter his creature. He stretches
the body to give it a neck. He adds a pair of kangaroolike legs.
His creature — or, rather, a swarm of his creatures — charge out of the ocean
and onto land. Dr. Near pushes back the laptop as his creatures find a place to
make their nest and lay eggs. “So that’s pretty cool,” he says with a grin not
often seen on a professor.
Dr. Near and Dr. Prum have spent a few evenings testing out Spore, one of the
most eagerly anticipated video games in the history of the industry. After years
of rumors, the game goes on sale Friday. Spore’s designer, Will Wright, is best
known for creating a game called the Sims in 2000. That game, which let players
run the lives of a virtual family, has sold 100 million copies. It is the
best-selling computer game franchise of all time.
Spore, produced by Electronic Arts, promises much more than the day-to-day
adventures of simulated people. It starts with single-cell microbes and follows
them through their evolution into intelligent multicellular creatures that can
build civilizations, colonize the galaxy and populate new planets.
Unlike the typical shoot-them-till-they’re-all-dead video game, Spore was
strongly influenced by science, and in particular by evolutionary biology. Mr.
Wright will appear in a documentary next Tuesday on the National Geographic
Channel, sharing his new game with leading evolutionary biologists and talking
with them about the evolution of complex life.
Evolutionary biologists like Dr. Near and Dr. Prum, who have had a chance to try
the game, like it a great deal. But they also have some serious reservations.
The step-by-step process by which Spore’s creatures change does not have much to
do with real evolution. “The mechanism is severely messed up,” Dr. Prum said.
Nevertheless, Dr. Prum admires the way Spore touches on some of the big
questions that evolutionary biologists ask. What is the origin of complexity?
How contingent is evolution on flukes and quirks? “If it compels people to ask
these questions, that would be great,” he said.
Evolution may seem impossible to capture in a computer. It is a hugely
complicated process by which millions of individuals change over millions of
years, as thousands of genes mutate and are spread by natural selection and
other forces. Yet scientists have managed to distill some of the most important
features of evolution into the language of mathematics.
In the early 1900s, mathematicians figured out how to represent a population of
organisms in simple equations. They used those equations to show how natural
selection can spread some genes from one generation to the next. Their work
transformed the study of evolution into a modern, rigorous science.
Today, mathematicians use far more sophisticated equations to analyze evolution.
And some of their most important insights have come from treating evolution like
a giant game. Organisms can evolve different strategies to survive, in the same
way game players can choose different strategies to win the most points in a
game. Using a branch of mathematics called game theory, scientists can figure
out if natural selection will favor a strategy over all others, or if it brings
them into a stable balance. Game-theory models have shed light on the evolution
of things like human cooperation and the deadly relationship of parasites and
their hosts.
Today’s computers make it vastly easier for scientists to build these models.
They have also allowed researchers to study evolution by building digital
organisms. Scientists at Michigan State University and the California Institute
of Technology, for example, have developed software called Avida that allows
tiny computer programs to behave like real organisms. They make copies of
themselves and mutate (randomly changing lines of programming code).
As the programs process more information in more powerful ways, the mutations
are favored by a digital version of natural selection. The Avida team has
published a string of papers in leading scientific journals on their
experiments, testing ideas about complexity, mass extinctions and even the
evolutionary benefits of sex.
Computers have also made it possible for scientists to build simple simulations
to help people understand the principles of evolution. This year, for instance,
Ralph Haygood, a postdoctoral researcher at Duke University, built a Facebook
application called Evarium that lets users watch flowerlike creatures drift
around a box, attracting one another with their colors. They mate and shuffle
traits in their offspring, which then go through the same cycle. Players can
control how quickly traits mutate and how strongly the organisms are attracted
to some traits and not others. Or they can just watch the creatures change each
time they open their Facebook page.
Mr. Wright came to the challenge of an evolution game with a long track record
of simplifying complex systems without losing the feel of reality. He first came
to fame in 1989 with SimCity, a game that allowed players to build and oversee a
city. He simplified the workings of cities so that the slow personal computer of
the late 1980s could simulate them. But he included enough feedback loops
between elements of cities — like tax rates, incomes and traffic jams — to give
SimCity the unpredictable complexity of real cities.
Mr. Wright followed the success of SimCity with a string of open-ended games,
like SimAnt (a simulated ant colony) and SimMars (a simulated Red Planet players
could make habitable). Around the time he released the Sims, he began to
contemplate an all-encompassing game. At first, he called it SimEverything.
The game, which he eventually renamed Spore, would give players an experience of
life and the universe across billions of years, from microscopic creatures to
interstellar civilizations. “There were deep motivations in the early phase from
the work of a lot of evolutionary biologists, like Richard Dawkins and Edward
Wilson,” Mr. Wright said in a telephone interview.
Mr. Wright wanted Spore to communicate some of the grand patterns of evolution.
But he did not want players to spend a million years waiting for something
interesting to happen. He also did not want the game to look like an abstract
cloud of drifting spots.
“I spent a fair amount of time going around to talk to scientists here and
there,” Mr. Wright said. “You have to explore a huge amount to figure what 20
percent will be cool and fun for a game.”
One thing Mr. Wright and his colleagues decided Spore should reflect was
evolution’s ability to produce life’s staggering diversity. “We wanted to convey
the sense that evolution can bring up a surprising diversity of weird,
interesting, strange things,” he said.
The game begins with a meteorite crashing into a planet, sowing its oceans with
life and organic matter. Players control a simple creature that gobbles up bits
of debris. They can choose to eat other creatures or eat vegetation or both. As
the creature eats and grows, it gains DNA points, which the player can use to
add parts like tails for swimming or spikes for defense. Once the creature has
gotten big and complex enough, it is ready for the transition to land.
On land, the creatures can grow legs, wings and other new parts. And it is at
this point that some of Spore’s features really shine. Mr. Wright’s team has
written software that can rapidly transform creatures in an infinite number of
ways, as players add parts and alter their size, shape and position.
This summer, as part of the buildup before the release of Spore, Electronic Arts
offered software for building new creatures on its Web site. So far, people have
built more than three million creatures. Electronic Arts uses that growing zoo
to populate each player’s planets with life.
Neil Shubin, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago, was enchanted when
Mr. Wright came to show off Spore to him. Dr. Shubin’s own research has helped
reveal how real evolution recycles and modifies pre-existing biology to produce
different body plans. In 2006 Dr. Shubin and his colleagues reported the
discovery of a 370-million-year-old fossil called Tiktaalik that illuminates our
ancestors’ transition from sea to land. It offers clues to how our hands and
feet evolved from swimming fins.
Dr. Shubin found that Spore gave players a feel for how evolution uses the same
basic tool kit to produce different body plans. “Playing the game,” he said,
“you can’t help but feel amazed how, from a few simple rules and instructions,
you can get a complex functioning world with bodies, behaviors and whole
ecosystems.”
Spore also mimicked evolution in another way that pleased Dr. Shubin. “Will
asked me, ‘Why did creatures evolve to walk on land?’ ” he recalled. “I
mentioned that the freshwater ecosystems of the Late Devonian were pretty
predator-intensive. He smirked.”
Mr. Wright built a Tiktaalik with Dr. Shubin’s help. “We let him swim around in
a Spore Devonian world. And every time our little silicon Tiktaalik went in the
deep water, a huge creature ate him in one bite. Tiktaalik crawled on land and
thrived,” Dr. Shubin said.
Spore embodies another major theme of evolutionary biology: evolution is not a
simple kill-or-be-killed affair. If a Spore player ends up with a carnivorous
creature, it will certainly do its fair share of killing. But it will not make
it very far unless it makes alliances. In Spore, creatures bond by dancing,
wiggling and singing. Taking the time to bond allows players to move in packs
and herds, which do a better job of fighting off predators and attacking prey.
“You always wonder why life tends to become more complex over time,” Mr. Wright
said. “If you look at this balance between cooperation and competition, at
almost every level it explains it neatly. You have agents competing at some
level. The agents might be cells. At some point the cells can group together and
work collectively and outcompete the other ones that are not cooperating. Then
competition jumps to the next level. At every level you have to have the right
balance between co-op and comp. That balance is driving the organizational
complexity.”
Even as scientists praise Spore, they voice concerns about how the game does not
match evolution. In the real world, new traits evolve as mutations arise and
spread gradually through entire populations. Winning Spore’s DNA points does not
work even as a remote metaphor.
“I do hope that it doesn’t confuse people as to what evolution is all about,”
said Charles Ofria, a computer scientist at Michigan State University and a
creator of Avida.
Spore may also mislead players with the way it is set up as a one-dimensional
march of progress from single-cell life to intelligence. Evolution is more like
a tree than a line, with species branching in millions of directions. Sometimes
species become more complex, and sometimes they become less so. And sometimes
they do not change at all. “There’s no progressive arrow that dominates nature,”
Dr. Prum said.
These caveats notwithstanding, Dr. Near hopes that Spore prompts people to think
about the evolutionary process. “This may be totally off about how evolution
works, but I’d much rather be dealing with a student who says, ‘O.K., I have no
problem with evolution; I think about it the same way I think about gravity.’ If
it does that, it’ll be great.”
Mr. Wright said he had been hearing similar reactions from other scientists. “I
find that scientists are incredibly open and excited that we can portray this
stuff in games, even if it’s not perfectly accurate,” he said. “It’s manure to
seed future scientists.”
Dr. Shubin said: “The differences between Spore and nature do not bother me. I
see Spore for what it is: a game. And it is a game in the best sense of the
word. It is not identical to nature, but it is a world that evolves, that
changes and where the players are part of those processes.”
This article has been revised
to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 4, 2008
An article on Tuesday about a new computer game, Spore, referred incorrectly to
the popularity of The Sims, an earlier game from the same designer. The Sims is
the best-selling computer game franchise ever, not the best-selling video game
franchise.
Gaming Evolves, NYT,
2.9.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/02/science/02spor.html
|
