General

I’m almost crying right now… because of this shocking little game called Passage. I wholeheartedly recomend you play it. I almost didn’t, partly because it wasn’t flash based and I hate running random .EXEs off the internet, and partly because it seemed to me it was just a junky nostalgia piece of the pixel art era, something with little content not worht my time. I warmly recomend it: it may seem super boring, but it ends in 5 minutes, try to figure out as much as possible by then, and maybe the revelation will hit you too as strongly as it hit me forcing me to play it several times until my heart accepted and dealt with the pain. Ironically the little content gets the message through much more powerfully and I may very well think it was a design decision. Imagine the same message, with compelx artwork, a gameplay of 40h … and the message is still the same as it is with our 70 year lives…

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I’m happy to report the delightful sighting of yet another thought provoking game related article over on Kotaku by Brian Crecente. It talks about objectivism in Bioshock. Hadn’t heard the concept before but after a bit of reading there and some wikipedia help seems to me like an interesting point of view. The article is wonderfully lengthy & well documented, even with alternative points of view. For the quotation of the article I’ll pick out one thats a bit contrarian simply because while I haven’t played the game yet I’m afraid like many such things it may have a moralistic attitude, my point being that just because in the game the utopian society becomes self destructive it doesn’t mean that the principles behind it are flawed, rather more likely as I see with these things often times good founding principles are corrupted over time by their not taking into accoutn basic "flaws" in human nature:

"It seems to me that he’s misrepresented what Ayn Rand believes and her ideals beyond objectivism," he said. "He’s setting it up to fail. He believes , based on what I’ve read, that any system that is absolutist is ultimately going to lead to disastrous effect. Any system of black and white, any system of ultimate morality.

However the game’s creative director seems to me to have taken a quite nice approach:

Levine was careful how he presented to his team the idea of injecting philosophy into what was meant to be a mainstream game.

"The game doesn’t lead with objectivism," he said. "I didn’t pitch it to the team that way. If you pitch it that way to the team you’re going to get the wrong game."

So initially, the team concentrated on capturing a time period. They studied furniture from the pre and post-war period. Levine went out and took pictures of New York architecture. They brought in Jack Beatty, senior editor of The Atlantic Monthly, to talk about the time period. Levine also brought in a few copies of Rand’s books.

I’m going to take this oportunity to spread the word of the happy fact that they’ve got an artbook released for download. The image here is one of the enclosed pieces on which I did some coloring. The other thing I wanted to say is: I was hoping so much more out of Bioshock. Unfortunatelly from the little I’ve seen of it it seems to me to be a shooter with an artistic spicing, instead of being the true artistic exploratory experience I was hoping fore with "shooter" being just a means of expression. I understand it’s a necessary comercial compromise, but I was really hoping this would be a lot more based on some of the art direction I’ve seen. As it is it seems to me to be too much of a "shooter" with all it’s cliches and frenzy eating away at the feeling of artistic awe that it could have been. However, like I was saying, I have yet to finish the game so hoping I’ll be proven wrong.

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I was watching this video review of Endless Ocean quite happy to see that such a game exists, thinking that I would be interesting in such a learning & exploration of the world tool, if only they put in more work, and the hardware would be better so I could focus and see tiny details, weather it is on the skins of the fish or the underwater environment… so as I was making a little "bet with myself" if the review would, as Wii games tend to from what i’ve seen, say something a along the lines of "the graphics is okay… for the Wii" I was a bit surprised to indeed hear a veiled hint at this… and something more exciting: it attracted my attention to something I had overlooked: a inwork title for the PS3, Aqua.

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   I’ve just read through this interesting article on next-gen.biz:  AdventureLand. I’m very much into pen & paper rpg, not because of the rules & dice, but on the contrary because the books meant for that focus a lot on story and content and leave a lot of room for improvisation and choices. In the end I think like the author expresses: it’s not the numbers that are important, on the contrary they can be a bad thing, but I am afraid that in this transition to realtime developers may forget one crucial thing: choices are the ones that are important. The reasons we loved the character sheet and stats were because it allowed us to make our own experience, our own game. We couldn’t really change the story, we couldn’t add more subtle options, but at least we could decide to play with a character with high strength or high charisma…
   I’m perfectly fine with character sheets and inventory management going away, actually I’m happy, but there should be character development and meaningful choices!

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