All Articles
Chore Gaming
— 8 September 2007I attended the Develop Conference in Brighton this year and there were some interesting sessions. One of them was called “Emerging Issues in Game Design” and featured four very different presentations. Mark Eyles from the University of Portsmouth did, for example, talk about a genre of gaming that he calls “Ambient Games”. He browsed through a gazillion of slides (the man was bursting with energy) and ended up with a short demonstration of his research game “Ambient Quest”.
Out of Body Gaming
— 25 August 2007Yesterday, news reported of scientists artificially creating out of body exeriences. This is extremely cool! One interesting thing is that the newscast I watched approached the news from the gaming side. “A discovery that may revolutionize the gaming industry,” they called it.
Persuasive Dr. Kawashima
— 17 July 2007Persuasive games receives quite a lot of attention, and rightly so. The videogame “platform” is in many respects ideal for conveying messages in a powerful way. The idea, as I understand it, is this: if you could turn your message into an interactive experience, that will make your message more contagious. This is because games add interactivity to the power of ordinary video (sound and moving images) and interactivity done right engages us. This seems to be what people are doing with games such as “Fatworld” and “Airport Security”.
Okami
— 16 July 2007I played about four hours into “Okami” this weekend and boy is the game cool! Some initial impressions:
Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition
— 1 July 2007I picked up the Wii version of RE4 two days ago. I have only spent some 4 hours with the game so far, but I am extremely pleased with how the port turned out. It looks exactly like the GC version (which was beautiful), but plays much better. The Wiimote is spot on for aiming and shooting and although the controls are not as good as mouselook for look and aim it is definitely blowing two-stick controls to pieces.
Machines are inherently Evil
— 22 May 2007...Or maybe I’m just the guy with the least luck in the room. This is what usually happens:
A Life of Videogaming
— 10 May 2007Yesterday I went downtown and finally bought myself a Wii. The night was spent with Wii Sports and Rayman: Raving Rabbids and today I am a bit sore in my arms – throwing cows in Rayman can be exhausting…
New Adventures
— 9 May 2007This spring has turned out to be a period of change. I resigned from Starbreeze at the end of February and spent Mars and April trying to get going as a freelance contractor. The Darkness turned out to need more from me so I have spent some time in Uppsala, but mostly I have been really busy with other things.
Towards a Theory of Game Narrative
— 30 November 2006How can we tell more compelling and moving stories in games? This is a question that I guess many of us in the industry are thinking a lot about. There are a number of books out there that tell us all about story arcs, characterization and so forth. Most of these ideas come from the theater and movie writing and there has been attempts to transfer this knowledge into the domain of games. And whereas the skills of characterization, dialog and story structure are as crucial in games as in movies or theater, there are problems and differences that need to be addressed. There are technical problems that arise with the addition to player interaction, multiple choices and so forth and there are content problems that arise with branching story lines. Some of those issues, I have written about in the past, trying to point to means of keeping consistency, controlling damage and hiding the seams in a game. This article tries a more basic take on the fundamentals of game narrative.
Bears of War
— 20 November 2006Starbreeze concept artist and friend Mattias Snygg has written a review of Gears of War that really gets to the primal core of the game – sort of. I’m sure he’s gonna piss the heck out of a number of readers, but that’s what usually happens when you rip the veil from the eyes of the innocent and they get to squeeze the muscles of truth.
The Split Personality of Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy)
— 15 November 2006The game Fahrenheit is old news, I know. I played through the demo when the game was released and never got to playing through the full game. However, the last few days I have been home with the flu, lying in my couch unable to work. “What an excellent opportunity to get through one of those unplayed games,” I thought and dropped the Fahrenheit disc into my Playstation, took a sip of hot tea and grabbed the controller.
Death Rewinds the Time
— 9 November 2006Imagine that you are reading a book. You are a few dozen pages into the story when suddenly the book flips back a couple of pages and you are forced to re-read the last chapter.
Once again on the move...
— 5 November 2006So it was time to move the page to a new server. Unfortunately I was more or less forced to do this (the bastards on my old server charges way to much) and an unpleasant side-effect was that my own content-management system (written in Perl with a SQLite backend) does not work – at all. So it’s either rewrite or charge up a ready-made CMS. I tried MovableType before and absolutely detested it. This time I’m gonna try Textpattern. It looks kind of nice and has Textile built in right from the start (I used it for my system) so I hope I won’t choke…
It's a Mad, Scary World
— 26 October 2006Gears of War, the upcoming Xbox 360 flagship game has a few new trailers out and I was truly amazed. First of all, this is a huge game project, possibly costing more than 10 million dollars to produce, and sure do it look neat. The graphics are at the very frontier (technically) and animations and sound effects seems to be good.
50 Books For Everyone In the Game Industry
— 11 October 2006Ernest Adams has collected a quite comprehensive list of books “from which everyone in the game industry could learn something.” I have read a few of them, some are still on my shelf, unread and I have some other books I think should be on that list.
Blame the gamers
— 11 October 2006“It’s hard to look at what the hard-core gamer asks for from the world and not come to the conclusion that if indeed they are being oppressed, it’s because they were asking for it.“
Writing in a "maturing" industry
— 2 October 2006Some of you might say that the videogame industry is really starting to mature. The signs can be seen all over. Game production budgets are sky-rocketing, Hollywood is looking into the games industry with hungry eyes, script writers line up to get a share of the work and money. Today you have guys like Dave Freeman riding along and (probably) making a good living out of regurgitating really old truths about scriptwriting, selling them as his own ideas (and yet adding very little about “gameplay” integration to his theories.) Furthermore, Peter Jackson recently stated that he want to develop games and is said to have described the Xbox 360 and Live as “an amazing living canvas … which allows the storytellers of our time to express themselves in a new medium.”
Spank the Monkey
— 7 June 2006In an earlier article, I spoke a bit about tactile communication between game and player. Now after E3 the gaming world is buzzing with the sound of Wii, Nintendo’s upcoming innovative console. I can bet my hat (if I had one) that right now there are hordes of people thinking about what can be accomplished with the nunchuck and remote controller for the Wii (“Wow, how about an Errol Flynn fencing game?”). I also bet some of the people dreaming have thoughts along the line: “How I wish the controller also had the X functionality, ‘cause then I would be able to make the coolest game ever, where the player would be able to do Y.” Chances are also that the ideas you are having are fairly obvious and that there will be 10 games based on “your idea” out within short.
The HD Window
— 5 June 2006If you haven’t been living under a low-poly rock the last couple of years, you know that there is transition going on in the media industries. The DVD format is soon to be superseded by HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. These are new formats that utilize the HD capable television sets that are sold everywhere. In many countries, HDTV has been broadcasted for years. This change is also very present in the videogame industry and has the effect that the content problem is increasing further: rendering HD requires much higher quality content than rendering for stone-age PAL or NTSC television sets.
Feel-good is Pay-off
— 21 May 2006When you design a game, one of the cornerstones is the idea that games need to give players some kind of pay-off. In an action game, a good idea is to try to find and work with “memorable moments”, events or situations that the player will remember at given points in the game after finished. A good game leaves you with many moments that will stick to your memory and over the years get wrapped in a pink cloud of nostalgia-fluff.
Public Licensed Content
— 16 May 2006I have previously talked about how bizarre the videogame industry is. We produce games that has extremely short longevity (in comparison to other media like film and literature) and that by technological progress becomes hard to access. We see that the Xbox 360 “backwards compatibility” towards the Xbox means that there are tons of games that cannot be played on the new console. Now Sony has declared that they are going to solve compatibility with the PS1 and PS2 on the PS3 (sic!) in software – just like Microsoft did on the Xbox 360 – so let’s all prepare for limited backwards compatibility on the PS3 – at least for a while. Luckily, there is a large emulation-scene that works hard to keep old games playable and we should all be forever thankful to these technological wizards.
Rebuilding the Site
— 13 May 2006My site was moved to a new server a week ago and suddenly my Movable Type installation stopped working like before. I never really liked MT so I am taking the opportunity to rebuild the whole site like I want it to be. So bear with me during the near future. All of the game design articles has been migrated, but there’s still lots of things to do.
The Game Content Dodge
— 24 April 2006There are a number of forums on the net where people from and around the game dev industry ventilate thoughts and ideas about game production issues. If you hang on any of those and read the “Game Design” threads (there are usually one dedicated to that) you will quite quickly notice a few things. One of them is the frequent posting of new game ideas where someone have thought up a nifty idea for a game and now requests feedback. Sometimes these ideas are really good and interesting, but ever so often you get kind of crappy versions of already made games (it should be like “Oblivion”, but in space!)
Probability Drama
— 21 April 2006One interesting and fundamental difference between traditional games and videogames is the videogames’ ability to meddle with information in a powerful way. Take an ordinary card game, one with hidden cards in a stack and a good deal of luck involved. In such a game, the shuffling of the deck sort of sets the premises for the game. The shuffle can be bad or good for you and you will never know until it’s too late (and you can’t do anything about it). In games of perfect information, where all information is available to all players at all time, this is not an issue. But wait a minute… “not an issue?” How is the randomness of a shuffled card-deck an issue at all?
HUD's Up
— 6 April 2006“This, as it turns out, is a new revolution in games: the anti-HUD movement.“
The weird nature of videogames
— 2 February 2006Videogames are a strange breed of artform. And making videogames is just plain bizarre, if you think about it. We spend at least 2 years producing a game, which will provide the consumer with some 10-15 hours of fun (hopefully). That’s kind of weird in itself, but not that different from a big movie production. But when a movie is done, the production company has a strip of celluloid that lasts. It can be run in projectors and be transferred into other media (TV, DVD, videotape etc) and enjoyed almost forever. We watch movies that were made 20 or 80 years ago and there’s no problem doing that…
Tactile Communication
— 22 December 2005I am currently thinking about “force-feedback” and how that affects the gameplay experience. I have a sense that there is much left to do with this simple controller mechanism. I mean, there are things you can do that causes tactile feedback without rumble so, come on! And what in God’s name is that, you ask?
Samorost 2
— 14 December 2005For all you guys that (like me) loved the original Samorost game, a follow up was recently released. This is extremely well done, beautiful and bizarre puzzle-solving that really hooks. The guys at Amanita Design has done it several times before, and not only the original Samorost. For example, check out the cool The Quest for the Rest, made for The Polyphonic Spree.
Blue Sky and Clouds
— 9 December 2005The Blue Sky in Games Campaign is a fun and refreshing initiative that deserves attention. I wholeheartedly support their ideas about games. I will always prefer Zelda before GTA – Always.
Wakeup for Adventure Games?
— 2 December 2005Don’t you have a sense that Adventure games are crawling back up to the gaming surface again? For a number of years, the industry has deemed Adventure games (in the classical sense) stone-dead. Sure, there are tons of games with adventuring/puzzle elements, like “Beyond Good and Evil” and our own “Riddick”, but the traditional adventure game gets little or no publisher money since many years back…
Roger Ebert and David's butt
— 1 December 2005Roger Ebert, noted movie critic, talks on his web page about games and their artistic merit. In his column Answer Man, a reader responds to an earlier quote from Ebert in which he states that he believes games to be an inferior medium to literature and film. Ebert elaborates a bit in his answer and writes:
Game Developers' Bill of Rights
— 27 November 2005Eric Zimmerman has put together A Game Developers’ Bill of Rights. (It is loosely based on a similar document, A Bill of Rights for Comics Creators.)
Empathy and the emotional impact of games
— 17 November 2005In the survey Videogames: The Impact of Emotion, Bowen Research asked a bunch of gamers to rank the emotional impact on a number of art forms. The art forms were ranked from 1 to 6 and here’s the result:
IF Comp 2005 Results are in
— 16 November 2005The annual Interactive Fiction Competition results are here. The winner game is “Vespers” by Jason Devlin. All games, interpreters and full results can be downloaded from the competition homepage. The page also includes archives of previous competition games.
How technology matters
— 8 November 2005I recently read an article on Gamesindustry that caught my attention. Nintendo has gone public with a statement about the next-gen console battle. Their position is that specifications does not matter and they even seem to go as far as to never officially release any specs for the Revolution console. Critics will probably ridicule them and say that Nintendo is doing this because they are getting behind in the performance-battle with Sony and Microsoft, and perhaps Nintendo are losing that battle. Or perhaps they never intended to fight it in the first place? I sincerely hope so. I also hope and believe that Nintendo is trying to point us into a new direction…
"Ladders" - A card game for two players
— 4 November 2005A couple of years ago I was on Sicily with my former girlfriend. We spent some evenings indoors due to bad weather, drinking tea with rum and chatting. We also designed a card game which we played a lot. This is what we ended up with…
Emotioneering fluff
— 3 November 2005I just finished a rather quick read-through of David Freeman’s “Creating Emotions in Games” since I have heard and read people talk about it for some time now. The opinions differ greatly about it so I felt I had to read it…
Character Impersonation
— 11 September 2005When you play a game that involves a main character – a protagonist, you are often faced with one of two different approaches. The first and most common one is that you will take the role of a pre-defined hero with a set of special traits, abilities and a personality. There are tons of games that do just that and they prove the model to work fairly well (“Jak and Daxter”, “Max Payne” and “Beyond Good and Evil” are good examples).
Notes on Façade
— 4 August 2005After having played Façade a dozen times, I feel that I have enough experience with the product to put together a piece of text with my impressions and thoughts.
Interactive cinematics in Resident Evil 4
— 19 July 2005I have been enjoying Resident Evil 4 for a few days now and it is a pure joy to play. The mood, visuals and gameplay is nearly perfect. So, what about the storytelling then? I am not entirely sure yet. I have played up to the encounter with the gigant cave-troll-like fellow so there’s still a long way to go. However…
Façade has been released
— 15 July 2005According to Grand Text Auto, the much talked about interactive drama Façade has been released. Unfortunately it does not come in a Mac version (yet) so I have to wait to play it until I get back to work in about two weeks. I’ll return with impressions and thoughts on the game as soon as I’ve had the time to try it out properly.
Vacation
— 9 July 2005Yesterday was my last working day for the three upcoming weeks. So, I’m pretty much busy with having my vacation right now, which is very nice. I live close to a couple of excellent little lakes where swimming is good. I just returned from one of them. The water is warm and the sun is nice in the evening…
Narrative in games
— 8 July 2005The last few years has been extremely interesting and stimulating. We released “Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay” for the Xbox about a year ago and it got splendid reviews. A few months later we released the “Developers Cut” version of the game for the PC and it contains a commentary function that runs in-game. I think it is a pretty cool thing and as far as we know it has never been done in a game before (but I think we’ll see a lot more like that in the future).
New website
— 7 July 2005Okay, so it’s time for a major overhaul of my site. I decided to switch to a CMS-driven solution and is currently testing Movable Type for the whole shebang.