When I lived in China, I often ate shou la mien, those noodles that are stretched by the cook’s hands. Shou la mian (手拉面) literally means Hand Pulled Noodles. (I am excellent at Mandarin words for food I like.)
I can’t wait for the ChinesePod lesson on ordering Robot Cut Noodles.
(Video of noodle-cutting robot army is from LaughingSquid)
I’ve been spending more time in Brooklyn since I no longer have to go into Manhattan everyday, and it’s been pretty great. I love Brooklyn, and I’ve been enjoying visiting all the hipster coffeeshops and seeing my neighborhood during daylight hours. At the beginning of the summer, once day when it was unexpectedly windy at Coney Island, I bought a Brooklyn zippered hoodie, and I wear it non-ironically.
The other day, I went to Manhattan for a tech demo at the Time-Life building. I caught the C, at the time of day when the subway cars are bringing skinny jeans and giant headphones (playing cooler music than I’ve ever heard. I’m sure), to their midtown jobs at companies with self-consciously unique compound words for names. I love the subway anyway, even though I’ve been told that August is perhaps not New York’s best month.
And I love Manhattan too. I even love the tourists in Manhattan. Ok, maybe I don’t love the ones that think that the bottom of an escalator, or in front of the subway turnstile is a good place to stand around and look confused, but I love that people come from all over the world to visit and take pictures, and I live here.
I remember driving with Figment once, and being amazed by how much he loves Los Angeles, and thinking how much I would like to live someplace I loved like that. And I guess now I do.
Of course, the player doesn’t actually need to follow that backstory to gathers materials, and create valuable resources from them, and progress through the game’s levels.
Oddly, your first tasks are not so much gathering materials for a bed, building shelter, or improvising a lemon battery, but boiling gulls’ eggs and powdering them in a powdered-egg machine…. Still, collecting island resources like shrimp and coconuts, fighting off crabs, collecting fresh water, and so forth was sufficiently island-y. And the time-management system, as found in G5’s other Youda games, is a perfect level of challenge, satisfying to complete without ever becoming too difficult.
Players will also use island magic, doing rain dances to create freshwater or mixing potions for health and stamina. This is a nice layer on the time management mechanic, especially the potion recipes. I’m not terribly motivated by unlocking achievements or by cosmetic rewards in a single-player game, but I enjoyed crafting potions for my power-ups.
I played the Kindle Fire version, and it’s worth noting that it froze and required a restart several times. (It did not stop me from playing, or from getting it for my dad, who loves island games as much as I do.)
Could I sell you my kidney for this position?
— Things I did not actually say when asked if I had any further questions for the interviewer.
(I’m too polite to ask who I need to sleep with to get the job. Or at least I’m too polite to blog about it.)
Your magazine has 80 Twitter followers? Man, you can double that by tweeting “naked” and then “iphone”.
—Things I did not actually say today.
(I did not take the offered position, even though the “magazine” in question offered to handle all of my “advertising, social media, promotions, outreach, and marketing”, and only take 50% of ad revenue…)
One of my first Casual Connect meetings was with a developer who talked about writing up docs, several years ago, of an interactive gameworld made up of cubes, like cubic water and cubic plants and cubic minerals. Players would collect the cubes for building and crafting. He shelved the project, and all but forgot about it, until he started playing MineCraft. Oh, he thought, my ideas were great! This game is awesome!
After that, I attended a session from Arkadium, which discussed (among other things) the ways to optimize a game based on player feedback. Modifying the game to respond to how players actually engage the game doesn’t mean the original design was “wrong” or that a creative director has lost face, but that players could like the game even more. Players would like to play for longer sessions, engage new parts of the gameworld, bring in friends, and ultimately want to give you more money. Not every single piece of player feedback is valuable, for obvious reasons, and a good community manager needs to triage valid, useful feedback. After “No one cares what seven Calypso ubers think, Meg.”, it felt good to hear that it is not a failure of design to listen to the players.
I listened to Perfect World on what casual can learn from MMOs, but the focus for me was on building in-world economies, and creating interdependency between different types of players. I don’t know for sure that I could have done this, but it feels good just knowing that what I was working towards was valid.
I heard Hidden Variables on using an ensemble cast to make games sticky. Like I said on IGM:
This was fascinating for me, because I’ve often responded to this style in fiction without giving a lot of thought to how this can be applied to games. With an ensemble cast, players pick a favorite (or an un-favorite), almost without thinking about it, and connect to that character’s narrative, and therefore, to the game. Think comic fans arguing over the best X-Man, to see just how effective this is. (It’s Rogue, in case you were wondering.)
Finally, I went to a session from Gaslamp Games on using humor in game text. I knew this was going to be the one of the best sessions going in. It was great to hear Gaslamp Games’ Nicholas Vining saying explicitly that rape jokes are never funny and don’t belong in games, and it was even better see how a roomful of games industry professionals responded to this assertion. Sad that it needs to be said.
It’s been argued that a couple of rape-joke losers in the industry are outliers, and that it hardly needs to be said that most game developers aren’t at all like this.
Most guys in the industry aren’t dickwolves, but don’t feel the need to explicitly say that they respect women and don’t find sexual abuse funny, so it usually falls to the ladies to say unfunny things like “Hey, are you going to PAX?” “No, because I don’t support rape culture in my industry.”
We often talk about what can be done to bring more women into game development. Explicitly saying that you don’t find a sexual “joke” funny, whether you hear it in a game or a game studio, is something any individual can do to make games a better place for women.
Added 9/16: Calling out a sexist “joke” is exactly what this forum mod at the awesome Gaslamp Games did. Well done. Bonus points for the follow-up where the posters uses the “just kidding” defense, and is squashed again.
Yesterday at Dreamit day, when Winston was described as an audio assistant to present stories from social networks like Facebook, I picked up my phone to play games until the presentation was over. I could not have been less interested. Really? An app so that I can find out that one friend hates his commute and that another friend had a great weekend, without all that tedious mouse scrolling of my Facebook feed?
(Also, whenever developers say their new product is “Siri-like” I immediately picture Harold, talking into his phone and scowling in frustration.)
But.
Then the Winston app narrated Facebook news in an Alfred butler voice, beginning with good morning, and listing off the major events that were due to happen that day. The weather is lovely today! You’ve got an event at seven! It was kind of amazing, because Winston was exactly like the MeChip butler I installed in Heroes Rise! We live in the future!
Winston is still in alpha, but the finished version promises to have algorithms to detect the most significant stories of a social network, so you’d hear updates from close connections, major news from connections, breaking industry news, local weather and relevant headlines. It’s easy to see this replacing the early-morning scroll of social sites and news blogs.
Still, it was not hard to imagine Winston glitching and reciting, over and over, Your close friend shared George Takei’s photo. Another friend shared George Takei’s photo. Some guy you used to work with shared George Takei’s photo. Or maybe Good morning, Meg! You have 307 farms to water, 148 horses to groom, 204 Unstable Iso-8 to send back, 37 cows to receive, 87 hammers due to Sim friends, 43 energies to send back, and Stick is ahead of you in Words With Friends.
I kind of love living in the future.
I have a new review up on IGM:
Heroes Rise: The Prodigy
is an interactive fiction game for PC, Kindle, iOS, Android, and Linux.
You play as a young would-be hero, in the Powered world of Millennia
City, but when the game opens, you are an underpaid, part-time videogame
tester, so low-level the execs don’t even know your name. (I’ve
actually been in that position, and I loved the industry nod from author
Zachary Sergi.) Since your famous Powered parents were jailed after a
botched operation, you’ve been living quietly with your gardening
Grandma, under an assumed name. But all that will change when you get
your hero’s license….The game is a text-based adventure, using ChoiceScript, in the vein of Choice of Romance, and Choice of the Vampire.
I love interactive fiction games. I’ve played a lot of Adventure, Zork,
and similar text-only games, so I’ve spend a lot of time trying to open
doors with Use Key, Turn Key, Unlock Door, and Use Key With Lock where
Use Key In Door was required. ChoiceScript, though, avoids the most
frustrating part of IF games by providing multiple choice options
instead of asking users to enter text.
Green Space is a new Facebook game from RocketOwl Inc, in which players are presented with futuristic environmental challenges and an environmental message. I became interested in Green Space because I think the social connections through Facebook have the potential to spread messages and information very quickly, and so linking a social game to a social cause has the ability to bring issues onto thousands of Facebook feeds. Sure, I usually associate “raising awareness” with those slactivist memes like posting your bra color for breast cancer, but I also think a good social game could share information (and, yes, awareness) in a palatable way.
Instead of presenting users with a surprising stat or a video to share, RocketOwl envisions a sci-fi world where empty cartons and wrappers completely cover the ground. The player takes on the role of a Space Janitor, a low-level employee with the GreenSpace Corps, who’s been sent to clear away years of trash and find a viable, green planet underneath. The game drops a sci-fi world and a message of environmentalism over the usual Facebook game mechanics: Instead of plowing land, players need to clear trash to reclaim it. Reclaimed areas can be decorated, and gathered trash can be processed into usable materials like Oil or Metal. Larger pieces of trash require more energy to clean up, but reward with more usable materials when it’s processed. Then, the reclaimed materials are used to build upgrades and spacey decor, improving your Space Janitor’s efficiency, and bringing the dirty planet to life.
Most of the space technology relies on power from the planet’s power grid. To gain more energy, spam all your friends with endless requests for gifts. JUST KIDDING! Build power nodes to harvest sustainable energy like Solar or Wind power.
The trash-gathering is hardly the subtlest metaphor ever, and with the slogan The Future is Tidy!, players won’t forget this is an edu game. Still, slowly watching your gamespace changes from trash heap to futuristic paradise is very effective. Like every other Facebook social game, players are rewarded for inviting friends, and need more friends for higher-level missions. GreenSpace is RocketOwl’s first offering, coming out of beta this week, so we’ll soon see if GreenSpace can harness friend requests and feed posts for a cause.
I’d planned to go to Casual Connect as a writer, but after I lost my job, I had a new second agenda. That’s why I was forcing myself to attend mixers, swap business cards, mention what I do, and ask about possible work.
Mixers aren’t exactly my strong suit, but most people at the show were so very supportive, telling me stories about their projects going pear-shaped, asking for writing samples to have on hand in case of a dialogue-writing emergency, or suggesting friends of friends who might be looking for my skills.
But not everyone was awesome.
“So, you just make up the dialogue for an MMO?” I was asked. “That must be so easy. Doesn’t it ever bother you that everyone just hits ok and no one cares about the words?”
I gave him my card (PR agency! I’m sure he’s got loads of contacts! Hopefully he doesn’t lead in like that with everyone… ) and then I walked away and got another free beer. Because I’m a writer, and that’s what we do.
