What Mobile Games Should Be: A Sugar Rush!
Sony’s Chris Mahoney has been talking about what makes a good mobile game – and I agree with him on the core idea here – that you are not replicating a console experience:
Beyond all of those reasons, though, Mahoney said the appeal of mobile games is “We all have these little moments of downtime, like when you’re at an airport or waiting at the DMV.” It’s gaming as a snack, a comparison that others have made as well. “When you look at mobile gaming today, it feels a lot like eating a Twinkie. A Twinkie is something where you have a craving, and you eat it, and it gives you a little sugar rush, and you feel great, but immediately afterwards you feel like that wasn’t a meal,” Mahoney said. “Consumers are starting to tell us some of that.”
In a nationwide survey Sony conducted of all kinds of mobile gamers, 89 per cent said mobile games are fun to play; 78 per cent said they are relaxing, and 76 per cent said they are replayable. But consumers are dissatisfied with mobile games, too; 36 percent said they are low quality, 49 per cent said they are bad graphically or narratively, and 76 per cent said they are mostly a waste of time.
One of the reasons by I wanted to do Call of Cthulhu:The Wasted Land as turn-based is I feel the genre suits the mobile arena well. So you have some moments free, where you can enjoy the game but you can easily stop and look up and not loose as a result. Games like Temple Run might not have the same thing going on as they are real time, but again it is not the end of the world if you look up and die – indeed they are designed that way. Short sharp slices of fun – like a sugar rush!
More Discussion of Apple’s App Store Policy
The release of Endgame:Syria certainly stirred up debate about how companies with platforms (like Apple) handle content. Given the size and scope and therefore cultural power they now wield, it is natural that this debate would become intense. Jonathan Blow, designer of the excellent Braid, weighed in on the debate with an interesting take on it, suggesting that perhaps game developers need to look more that the work they make:
I think this is the wrong attitude about games, but look, ultimately it is game developers’ fault, not Apple’s. Apple is treating games as shallow commercial entertainment experiences because they have been taught by game developers that that is what games are.
If we had built a world where games routinely work with serious issues in ways that people care about, Apple would not be able to take this stance, because it would not make any sense.
Which is a very interesting point. Indiestatik also wrote about the game and I was pleased to see, got totally what we were trying to do:
Every action you make here will have a big impact on each of these topics and your endgame will take into account everything you do. Ultimately, though, things may be out of your control as you learn the power of the world’s media to swing interest in and out of your favor. It’s a powerful message that emerges in reality. Replaying does have different outcomes but the results contain similar teachings about how politics work.
The whole article is well worth a read and is a good discussion of games, politics and the publishing rights and wrongs of Apple. There is also another couple of articles about the game on nachrichten.at (German) and youphil.com (French, but mainly about Climate Defense but Syria gets a nod). Also there is an article about a classroom session where the students were playing the game, here.
(There are more responses to the game here, here, here and finally here.)
Endgame:Syria Military Phase
The Design Ethos of the Game ‘Climate Defense’
So we recently released another GameTheNews title (with guest developer Ashley Gwinnell) entitled ‘Climate Defense‘. The seed of this game came from the fact that the Kyoto protocol recently expired with nothing to replace it. Basically Co2 emissions are going up and up and collectively not much is happening to bring them down. We’d like to think that reality works the way we’d imagine it should but it doesn’t always. Nature does not really care about our perceptions of reality; it just is:
“We’re talking about a fight between human beings and physics. And physics is entirely uninterested in human timetables. Physics couldn’t care less if precipitous action raises gas prices, or damages the coal industry in swing states. It could care less whether putting a price on carbon slowed the pace of development in China, or made agribusiness less profitable. … It’s implacable. It takes the carbon dioxide we produce and translates it into heat, which means into melting ice and rising oceans and gathering storms.” (Bill McKibben)
So that then lead to me thinking about how in most games we tend to engineer the stats of the game to maximize the gameplay. What if we didn’t? What if a game tried to deliver the unvarnished truth? Well, there is a problem with this statement in that by simulating reality in a game what is created is already not going to be less than real. However what I could do is give the player two options for playing the game: real(er) or fun:
Climate Defense options: play real(er) or play for fun?
So what this means is that in the real(er) version of the game I’ve done my best to recreate numbers that reflect reality. So this version of the game is not very fun and the climate impacts soon mount up. In the fun version I’ve altered the stats to make the game more enjoyable to play and to can ‘win’ too. The challenge is to play both versions, compare them and see how you feel then. So enjoy (or don’t) the free game of Climate Defense!
Fade – Our Entry into Global Games Jam 2013
This global games jam I hooked up with Lukas, Peter and Edwardo along with input from Barbara (a producer at the BBC) to explore the theme, which was an audio file of a heartbeat. We pondered a number of ideas around this and went for a German expressionist film inspired tale of a Vampyr who has no heartbeat and so continually needs to kill others and eat their hearts to gain their beats to live. Here is the game in action:
–
Here is some of Edwardo’s brilliant and haunting music from the game:
Plus here is some of Peter’s amazing art for it:
Fade (main screen)
Fade (difficulty screen)
Fade (consume animation)
Thanks to Lukas, Peter, Edwardo and Barbara for working with me, it’s been fun (as ever!)
PS. The Global Game Jam site is down, so I’ll post links to the game and videos when I’m able too!
An Update on Games and Science
A couple of article that I found of interest related to games and science…
Violent Games – The Evidence…
The Guardian had a good article getting into the evidence for around games and violence and the actual evidence is often surprising and patchy:
This may come as a surprise if you read much of the popular press, which is often obsessed with technological scare stories. Scientific evidence has been less media-friendly but considerably more convincing. We now have numerous studies on how playing action computer games, as opposed to puzzle or strategy titles such as The Sims or Tetris, leads to an improvement in how well we pay attention, how quickly we react, how sensitive we are to images and how accurately we sort information. Crucially, these studies are not just focused on people who already play a lot of video games, but are testing whether action video game training genuinely leads to improvements.
Games and Age
The BBC has an interesting report on how older gamers’s numbers are on the rise. This is not surprising really as the games industry offers an ever broader range of titles. As the generations who grew up with gaming gets older (like me!) this will only grow…
It is predicted that by the end of this year, female gamers will outnumber men for the first time. However computer games are also increasingly being seen as a way for older people to keep mentally active.
The Scientist
The Scientist has a very long (and interesting) article looking at the many growing linkages between games and science…
Alborg, Denmark, plays an online video game in which he arranges colored discs into two-dimensional chain-link shapes. It’s addictive, and he plays for hours on end. But EteRNA is not your typical Internet time suck: the discs represent nucleotides, and the patterns they form are blueprints for RNA molecules. Every 2 weeks, the best designs—voted for by the players themselves—are synthesized in the lab by the Stanford University scientists who helped to create the game, and observations about how the resulting molecules behave are relayed to the players. That feedback informs the development of new playing strategies, which in turn help the scientists to better understand the rules of RNA folding and function. Although there’s no PhD after his name, Fisker, one of the best of the game’s 40,000 registered players, is helping to unravel a fundamental aspect of biochemistry that has long eluded the world’s brightest scientists—and even helping to design novel RNAs that encode proteins to fix carbon or fight disease.
HIVe from Wellcome/ExPlay Games Jam
More Responses to Endgame:Syria
The global interest in Endgame:Syria continues… and this particular response from an AP/Yahoo News report caught my eye…
Andrea Stanton, a religious studies professor at the University of Denver who studies Syria, said she responded emotionally to the game.
“It isn’t really a fun game to play,” she said, noting that she was angry when she lost and felt dread when the frequency of deadly regime airstrikes went up as the game progressed – as it has in the real conflict.
“This a very sobering game in that you sense how quickly the military stakes escalate and how little the political phase has to do with actual Syrians,” she said.She is organizing a campus activity for students to play and discuss the game.
“I think it is very valuable for teaching and getting people to experience a sense of the limited options the rebels face,” she said.
Endgame:Syria Screenshot
Jonathan Blow, designer of the excellent Braid, weighed in on the debate with an interesting take on it, suggesting that perhaps game developers need to look more that the work they make:
I think this is the wrong attitude about games, but look, ultimately it is game developers’ fault, not Apple’s. Apple is treating games as shallow commercial entertainment experiences because they have been taught by game developers that that is what games are.
If we had built a world where games routinely work with serious issues in ways that people care about, Apple would not be able to take this stance, because it would not make any sense.
Which is a very interesting point. Indiestatik also wrote about the game and I was pleased to see, got totally what we were trying to do:
Every action you make here will have a big impact on each of these topics and your endgame will take into account everything you do. Ultimately, though, things may be out of your control as you learn the power of the world’s media to swing interest in and out of your favor. It’s a powerful message that emerges in reality. Replaying does have different outcomes but the results contain similar teachings about how politics work.
The whole article is well worth a read and is a good discussion of games, politics and the publishing rights and wrongs.
Monday Morning Gamification: Cell Slider
This is a great idea – a game where you help identify and classify cancer cells:
Cell Slider Game Screenshot
Goodbye 2012 Hello 2013…
It was a great surprise to switch on my computer today to find out that Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land was awarded the ‘2012 Grimmy Best Mobile Game‘ over at HorribleNight.com – so huge thanks for that. (That is the second award we’ve won for the game, also getting the Best Smart Phone or Tablet Award 2012 from DigitallyDownloaded.net) It really makes your day when you are part of a team that wins an award, make all the long days and nights of development worthwhile!
So what of 2013? We’ve got more to come from GameTheNews.net and other projects in the pipeline.
Also what am I looking forward to in 2013? Here’s a few things…
- Crysis 3 – Just instabuy.
- Dead Space 3 – Two was amazing so this is going to be one to watch.
- A documentary called ‘The Dark Matter of Love‘ about the science of love and applying it to adoption. (I was one of the many supporters of this on Kickstarter)
- New developer Force of Habit’s Toast Time (looks amazing!) and their update to Dysbiosis too!
Toast Time (Force of Habit)
2012: The Year I’ve Been Involved in Making 61 Games!
I’m off now for a couple of weeks for Christmas. It’s been a crazy year in games for me, personally:
At the start of 2012 we (Red Wasp Design) released Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land and am really proud of how it has done in both sales and reviews. That was followed up by the DLC, Kaul’s Diary.
We (Auroch Digital) also have also run four major game jams (Global, Gamify Your PhD, ExPlay-Wellcome & XX Game Jam) as well as a host of other events and consultancy. We also started our news news-gaming project, GameTheNews.net – phew! Counting that all up it means I’ve directly been involved in the creation of:
- Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land (plus Kaul’s Diary)
- The Mini-games on Game Design and Science (for Gamify Your PhD, developed by Mobile Pie and Wired)
- 14 games for GameTheNews.net (11 of them are public) including the first ever attempt to cover an ongoing war in the form of a game, Endgame:Syria.
Then indirectly I’ve been involved in more, via the facilitation of game james:
- Bristol’s part in the Global Games Jam (about 15 games?)
- Gamify Your PhD (6 games, plus the mini-games noted above)
- The Wellcome Trust-ExPlay Games Jam (20 games)
- XX Game Jam (4 games I think?)
Woah, that is like 61(ish) games on 2012! A good year, I think!
So if you’d like a bit of reading over the holidays, a couple of older posts I was very pleased with are:
- How We Evolve Fun
- Brink & Climate Change
- The Biology of Cthulhu & Lovecraft’s Fiction
- The Making of Call of Cthulhu (via Game Dev Story)
And if you want to play some games, then we’ve got a host of free mobile ones, including seasonal ones at GameTheNews.net (also plenty on HTML5 too!)
And finally, thanks to all who’ve work with me/us over 2012 and supported me/us and I look forward to more great work and games in 2013!
Tomas (;,;)
A Great Becoming... 