Cthulhu Thursday: Images of the Horror
This week I thought I’d share a few images that I’ve come across while on a Old Ones trip through the net..
This cover for Call of Cthulhu is amazing:
Call of Cthulhu Cover
(Hat-tip to MissDeWorde)
Now I love cats (lol) and so this image was a joy to see. It’s the man himself, Lovecraft, plus spooky looking cat:
Lovecraft Plus Spooky Cat
(Hat-tip to dianagill)
I love the recasting of the viceral evil of flesh into this Cthulhu-esque image (Great work from whostolemybike)…
My flesh shall weep
All great stuff! Happy Cthulursday!
(Cthulhu Thursday is a dose of Mythos to brighten darken your week. More on the idea can be found here and a list of posts thus far, here. Also for more Cthulhu news, sign up to the cthulhuHQ twitter feed. Enjoy!)
Gameful Games Ideas…
Here’s some ideas in need of a game doing the rounds at Gameful…
I’m currently doing some marking for the UWE Games Technology course – I wonder if a game about marking games would be fun or meta-fun?
I was talking about how much marking I had on at the moment to a fellow developer and he remarked; “It’s a games course; just roll 2d10 for the mark.” Lol!
Or how about making the dull job of greeting people as they enter a store fun? Persoanly I don’t like the idea of ‘greeters’ – perhaps its my English reserve or that it seems a soul-crushing job to me (but then I’ve never done it) however the game version does seem a challenge!
Being a Greeter in a store like Walmart may not sound to difficult, but it is hard to enthusiastic greeting thousands of people each day. So much boredom. Howdy Stranger! flips this boring job on its head. Greeters would greet people entering the store, and would enter each unique reply on the Howdy Stranger! site. Players have to find new ways to greet people in order to receive strange, new answers.
Social Issue Games Can also be Commercial Games
This article and interview caught my eye. It’s with Red Redemption, makers of the global warming game Fate of the World. They state that serious games (i.e. games that tackle serious issues) can be commercially successful projects:
[Those games] that tackle real-world issues and aim to educate as well as entertain – can be done on a commercial scale, making them a viable business for publishers that are becoming increasingly risk averse.
However, as with all game development it’s a struggle to realise the final product. Red Redemption spent as much as £200,000 raising £1 million from investors, faced death threats over the subject matter and had to work the system in order to score more finance through the R&D tax credits offered by the UK government, according to CEO Klaude Thomas.
“I just felt that there was there was a market here, and it was actually feasible to develop serious games commercially,” said Thomas, of his decision to leave big budget games development and enter the serious games market.
I’ve played Fate of the World at beta and its a fun game. Serious topic, fun game. Which brings me to this point of ‘Serious Games’ – a tag I’m not happy with. Why is the topic of Fate of the World (climate change) classed as serious when that of Call of Duty (war) is not? Both are serious topics and fun games. So I agree with the concept of ‘serious games’ but just not with the tag. However I’ve not yet thought of a clever one to suggest as a replacement, ‘Social Issue Games’? (It’s a bit…well…serious…)
Virtual Games Get into the Real World
This is a interesting story that I’d file under ‘Games Grow Up’:
From Kurt in Glee to Captain Jack in Torchwood, from Thirteen in House to Naomi in Skins, recent years have given us a glut of gay and bisexual characters on TV.
Surprisingly, given its macho image, the same has also been true in videogaming. The 2010 game Mass Effect 2 gave the option of a lesbian relationship for those who played the main character as a woman (though not a gay relationship if they played the character as a man). Grand Theft Auto IV produced the downloadable content The Ballad of Gay Tony. And while Hollywood still seems to have a problem hiring gay actors to play gay characters, British-made hit game series Fable has cast Stephen Fry as the louche bisexual character Reaver in all three games.
Now, BioWare, creator of Mass Effect, has robustly defended its decision to include gay relationships in its new role-playing game Dragon Age II.
Players who choose to be a man will be flirted with by another male character, as well as by several female characters. But receiving a male flirt, as well as the lack of “exotic” heterosexual romance choices, disturbed one player who posted angrily on a forum that BioWare was neglecting its “main demographic: the straight male gamer”.
While citing a lone forum post is not more evidence of anger at homosexuality in Dragon Age II that a lone forum post is evidence of faked moon landings. However there is a point raised – who are games for? The straight male gamer? No. Games are games and anyone can make games and enjoy games. To try to box them in by some pre-conceived notion of that the players may want (or not) is silly. Games represent the worlds in which we live – real or otherwise and as the demographics of those who enjoy games grows, so does the subject matter they cover…
And given that Dragon Age II is selling well, it appears there are no shortage of people, male, straight or otherwise, happy to enjoy all it has to offer.
Can Games Be Art? Yes and Stop Asking…
This is an interesting take on the question, can video games be art?
What I do know is that if we believe that video games are art, it is vitally important that we immediately cease discussion of this topic.
Games are art, and the sky is blue, and Austria is a country in Europe, and koalas have a vegetarian diet, and pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. To debate games as art is to suggest that the question is worthy of debate. It is not.
The people who claim that games are not art have not played games that have spoken to them as art. Their opinions stem from a lack of experience with games. It is not our job to refute them!
I like the approach. By asking the questions you open the door for the answer to be now. By just getting on which it and focusing on making amazing games, we can make art in the process. So there.
Friday – How Not to Do Social Media, And Dinosaurs…
Ah Friday. A day when your body is in work and your mind is getting ready to relax for the weekend. So here are two links for you to pick from – serious or fluff. You pick! Here’s a great article on how not to do social media…
Many traditional media entities have embraced social-media services like Twitter and Facebook and blogs — at least to some extent — as tools for reporting and journalism, using them to publish and curate news reports. But newspapers in particular seem to have a hard time accepting the “social” part of these tools, at least when it comes to letting their journalists engage with readers as human beings. A case in point is the new social-media policy introduced at a major newspaper in Canada, which tells its staff not to express personal opinions — even on their personal accounts or pages — and not to engage with readers in the comments.
Or Fluff…
Eldar and Dinosaurs!!! Woo.
Or if Warhammer fluff is not your thing…
Ah. I see.
More on Crysis 2 – Having a Barrel!
This is another post about Crysis 2 – Its on my mind because I’m playing it a lot at the moment. Its a really impressive 1st Person Shooter (FPS). It’s currently no.1 in the UK charts and deservedly so. Its always good when good games are rewarded with good popularity.
The gameplay dynamic between the different modes of play is great fun – although they do put in the obligatory vehicle missions. I’ve yet to see this vehicle mission stuff work well in a FPS. In Black Ops the chopper bit was the least fun part of the game and I just wanted it over. Vehicles are fun to have in to break up the gameplay, but too much of it just shows up that the engine is not designed for such gameplay.
Anyhow another facet of the game that is fun is throwing stuff – you can kick objects into people, push cars along in front of you like a shield and throw items to distract enemies when going for the stealth option. The following video shows what I mean – where you can throw an explosive barrel then shoot it. Woo!
Source: rockpapershotgun.com.
Dying in Video Games
Death. The great leveller. We’re all going to die. Then eventually the whole universe will. As a player of games, we sort-of die all the time. Its the game’s way of saying – epic fail:
Death is everywhere in videogames, a colloquial representation of failure. From the earliest days, you were given three “lives” to try and best the patterns of enemies and obstacles between you and the goal. Every lapse in reflex, memory, or reason led to death in the form of an obliterated pixel cloud radiating outwards. You did something wrong, it says. Pac-Man dies, Mario dies, Marcus Fenix dies, Gordon Freeman dies, Cloud dies, and even Sims can die.
This video says it all really:
Monday Morning Gamification: Doctor Kinect
We’ve gone through many of the best modified uses of Kinect in the past. Cool as many of them may be, holding a stick so it shows up on-screen as a lightsaber isn’t the most practical use of this technology. A professor at the University of Minnesota has found a new potential use for Kinect that Microsoft may not have ever imagined, and it’s one “that could change medicine.”
After laughing at the prospect of purchasing a Kinect for research, in so doing, Professor Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos has saved researchers more than $100,000, The Minnesota Daily reports. Several Kinect devices are being used as a video monitoring system to keep an eye on children playing with toys as part of a collaboration to diagnose mental disorders such as OCD and ADD. Data from the cameras is tweaked and then given to doctors.
“As a doctor, you don’t have tangible data,” Papanikolopoulos explained. “We try to provide the tools in order to back up claims of a mental disorder.”
A Great Becoming... 