Fate of the World – The Global Warming Game (Beta)
I had blogged about ‘Fate of the World‘, a game putting you in the role of trying to stop climate change. I purchased the Beta version and the aim is to get to 2100 with enough of a planet left to maintain a reasonable standard of living for humanity. I’ve not had enough time to play it enough to muse about the game here…
Its a simple to play (and I mean that in a good way) and has plenty of depth. Essentially you are a kind of global UN type figure – and not a dictator figure: This is a key aspect of the gameplay as you have to bring each region along with you by balancing important steps such as limiting emissions with poipular measures such as investment insentives. If a region gets unhappy with you, they can (and do) ban you from the region and its only after you’ve proven yourself in other areas that you can re-earn thier trust and they let you in.
Fate of the World Screenshot
So each turn consists of recruiting ‘agents’ for each region to promote and enact your policies and projects for that region. Once you’ve set the policies and projects for that date cycle (most projects run over 5 years) based on the income you have then you get summary of how its going globally – the emissions for each region, the total emissions, your office’s popularity. You can also see where wars, strife, specis extinction and famine break out. As the game progresses and more projects are implemented then you get more options to apply from Black Ops to the Developemnt of AI systems. It’s a fun game and I’ve been able to play it trying different strategies – not limiting emissions but pushing new and renewable technologies, yes (and no) to nuclear and so on.
Overall the beta is fun, and with some more features and refining it could be really good.
Cthulhu Thursday: That Most Ancient Tome of Evil, The Necronomicon
I think that lots of the power of the Cthulhu Mythos stems from the palpable sense of mystery Lovecraft and others created. From the names of dark Gods being deliberately unpronounceable. (Try rapping R’lyeh?) But also the sense that at various points in human history we have uncovered insights into the true formless horror of the universe, but it does not exist as a coherent body of work but as fragments of text, often by half-mad authors. Nothing captures that sense more than the Necronomicon! The quote below is from Lovecraft’s own biography of the book that has become central to his unholy canon of the darkness..
Composed by Abdul Alhazred, a mad poet of Sanaá, in Yemen, who is said to have flourished during the period of the Ommiade caliphs, circa 700 A.D. He visited the ruins of Babylon and the subterranean secrets of Memphis and spent ten years alone in the great southern desert of Arabia — the Roba el Khaliyeh or “Empty Space” of the ancients — and “Dahna” or “Crimson” desert of the modern Arabs, which is held to be inhabited by protective evil spirits and monsters of death. Of this desert many strange and unbelievable marvels are told by those who pretend to have penetrated it. In his last years Alhazred dwelt in Damascus, where the Necronomicon (Al Azif) was written, and of his final death or disappearance (738 A.D.) many terrible and conflicting things are told. …
So powerful is the idea, that it has become a meme in it’s own right – weaving into and out of history. We see the real figure of Doctor John Dee translating it into English, we have published versions of the text that could unleash the end-times in paperback, Tarrot cards, films, games and so on. The Necronomicon has taken a life of it’s own so much so that I have met people who think it is a real book, hidden under lock and key in certain national libraries… but then perhaps that is it’s joy (and horror) that we kind of want to think it is real…
Necronomicon Tarot Card (from stealthisknowledge.liber.us)
(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!)
I’m doing a talk at Goldsmiths about games today. Not just games as we tend to find them now, but how the impact of the networking of our technology is going to change the design, development and support of gaming. Below are my notes to accompany the session…
A Bit of Theory
I’m coming at media from the angle of Media Ecology, a new(ish) term that you might see bandied about, that I think indicates an approach that offers us new ways of viewing the world. Once you start to see media as networked – connected – then the realisation of this confluence changes how you approach design. This also brings to mind Fuller (2005) and his illuminating discussion of why he uses the term ‘ecology’ in his book ‘Media Ecologies‘;
The term ‘ecology’ is used here because it is one of the most expressive language currently has to indicate the massive and dynamic interrelation of processes and objects, beings and things, patterns and matter….The term ‘media ecology’ is used and in circulation in a number of ways. The term is chosen here because this multiple use turns it into a crossroads: Putting these two words next to each other produces a conjunction of two variables that are always busy with meaning. Their dynamism, however, always arises out of concrete conditions. The virtuality of such conditions, their possible reinvention or alternative state, their pregnancy with change and interrelation, is as deeply implied in this concreteness as much as it can be said to be subject to definition. (Fuller 2005:2-3)
Parikka’s (2007) study of computer viruses, suffuse with biological terminology, firmly stating the position of life and the biological as within the realm of media ecology;
The coupling of biology and technology, which, of course, has longer roots beyond digital culture, finds alive and kicking within the media ecology of digital culture. These types of couplings can also provide vectors of becoming for a novel understanding of digital culture. Life does not remain a mere metaphor but also becomes an implication of autopoiesis, of self-moving, of acting and force.” (Parikka 2007:26)
So why go all ecological? Ecology is all about relationships of energy. It’s about understanding the complex web that life weaves. When you look at ecology, you are looking at context. We don’t look at an individual organism, we look at how it relates to it’s fellow organisms – whether in competition, co-operation, predation, symbiosis, parasitism and so on.
Ecological Food Web
The Physics of Media are changing
Its all up in the air now. The safe certainty of buying a physical product (VHS, DVD, cartridge…) that has a contained, non-networked media artefact are fading rapidly. We are moving from a world of discrete non-relational media to one based on physical products to one based on virtual products. This means it is easy to distribute, modify, copy and paste. It means the barriers to entry and distribution are much, much lower. The problem that will be faced by future digital projects is getting noticed. Lets take video as the example…
“In mid-2007, six hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute. Then it grew to eight hours per minute, then 10, then 13. In January of this year, it became 15 hours of video uploaded every minute, the equivalent of Hollywood releasing over 86,000 new full-length movies into theaters each week.” (link)
The biggest problem we will face in creating new media artefacts is getting noticed. So a number of people are looking to the idea of media as a service (or happening) and not a product…..
Games as a Service
What this means is that the user is not so much buying a game as buying into a world. The job of the developers is to create and maintain that world and it’s integrity. The user is paying for the maintenance that the developer is undertaking.
Examples of Games as service include subscription MMOs, for example World of Warcraft – 12 million subscribers that pay to buy the game and pay to play. Blizzard (who develop the game) has earned $1.1 billion in income this year alone. There are also free to play MMOs (where you pay for time-shortcuts!) – an example is Darkorbit by Big Point (where you can save time by purchasing Uridium).
Game Feedback Loops
This is where the system running the game has within it the capacity to create feedback and more importantly, feed-forward loops. So the activity of players encourages more players to join in. An example of this is the iPhone chart, where many people buy new games based on what’s popular – which in turn fuels what is popular. It also used to be the case that the rating system, where players deleting an app were asked to rate it, was slightly bias to the negative, and hence a feedback loop. So building into the development process the expectation of iteration is a good thing. Also listening to the user feedback and where possible, acting on it can also help to build that feed-forward loop.
Control Systems (from Wikipedia)
Quality & Value Added
Savage Moon as a tower-defence game on Playstation Network. It cost £5 when you could play loads of different games of the same type for free online. So why would anyone bother to play it? I’m happy to say lots and lots did. Because when you pay £5 there is an expectation of a curatorial process, a higher standard of graphics, gameplay and testing. (This is the same idea as used by Arduino, the open source hardware company that allows other manufacturers to make it’s circuit boards knowing many users gravitate towards them as they are the best at making them…)
So in summary – we’re into new territory here for games, but I think one thing is certain – that the idea of designing and building a small one-off experience is over. An example that draws all of these in is the user-generated content (UGC) and a great game, is LittleBigPlanet where the users make the content and the developers build the platform. It still has a box purchase but the costs of maintaining the ongoing 1.5 million levels is met by a roll-out of additional value-added objects that players can (and do, by the million!) buy.
So in summary (again) – we’re into new territory but I think one thing is certain – is that the idea of designing and building a small one-off experience is over…. the physics of media have changed… except where they haven’t….
Witch-house bands go even further: they put their music up for free on places like SoundCloud, but remove the files after a certain number of listens or downloads, creating scheduling and scarcity in a system that’s otherwise about abundance and time-shifting. Aside from the fact that some of these bands are really good, witch house is interesting to follow because it’s a sort of ad hoc Darknet — the places where you can hear this music move around. One week, it’s a private group on Last.fm. The next week, it’s a public message board. The week after, they’re all living on a blog entry’s comment thread. To keep finding this stuff, you’ve really got to want it. Modern networking tools are mobilised in pursuit of an atemporal way of gathering a fan base.
Crowdsourcing Game Development Funding
This is an interesting article on the idea of getting lots of people to each put in a little money to allow game development to happen:
Pay $5 to help fund development of new indie project Cardinal Quest and you’ll get a free copy of the game when it’s finished. Pay $10, however, and your name will also appear in the game’s end credits.
A donation of $100, meanwhile, will also get you a Cardinal Quest t-shirt and the chance to design one of the game’s characters.
Those putting forward $500 will get 5 per cent of the game’s profits as well. Pay up $1000 and the developer will visit you personally to say thanks, on top of a ten per cent profit slice, and a credit on the game’s intro screen as “The Patron Saint of Cardinal Quest”.
This innovative pay and reward system has led to Cardinal Quest’s developer, Tametick, accumulate $2,310 in investment from dozens of fans in just a few days. The studio now has about a month to reach its $6,000 target.
If successful, it could open the industry’s eyes to a new kind of investment initiative – crowdfunding.
Introducing the Venerable Doctor John Dee, Scientist & Occultist
I’ve always been fascinated with the figure of Dr John Dee. He was both a scientist and occultism at a time when chemistry was still part of alchemy, and astrology was part of astronomy (or vica-versa). He wrote on science and communed with the angels. Fortunately we still have lots of his writings so we can get a real insight into a man who was looking a scrying mirrors and triganometry! Below is an image of the man in action showing his skills to Queen Elizabeth I. I took this image in the foyer the of Wellcome Trust…
Doctor John Dee shows magic/chemistry to Queen Elizabeth I (from foyer at Wellcome Trust)
For further reading I’d recommended:
– There is a biography of the man here.
– Links to lots of his writings and texts.
– There is a a good write up on him at Wikipedia. Also quotes by him on WikiQuote.
Plus the novel by Peter Ackroyd, The House of Doctor Dee – which is a odd novel (in a good way) and does a great job of giving voice to the man.
Oh, and you can follow him on Twitter, @doctorjohndee!
There is also quite a good documentary on him online (with contributions from Alan Moore!!):
And now an opera too by Damon Albarn:
Using Games to Explain Science (and Complexity)
Here is my proposition – that games are a great way to explain science. Why? Because games are an interactive experience and true science is too. No I’m not saying that by playing a game you negate the need to read about that subject, not at all. Nor am I saying that games would replace real-world experiments, because it wont. I did all these, learning science myself and think they are important.
But science requires an understanding of concepts that are dynamic – and what better medium to help explain these than a dynamic one. Let me give you an example. Say you wanted to a group of students to understand the complicity of a microchip. You could tell them how complex it is. Or you can let them see for themsevles. The video below is from a LittleBigPlanet level called ‘Little Big Calculator’ (which runs of Playstation 3) and shows Sackboy (the game’s cute character) moving a few levers to perform a simple calculation. Then comes the reveal; Sackboy dons his jetpack and flies up to show the huge number of linked ‘switches’ that have been used to power this most simple of calculations…
This demonstrates the complexity of a microchip, by showing a virtual difference engine. But it also shows the simple units that are aggregated to build the complexity. It’s an elegant way to make the point. You can also see the ‘innards’ of the level to ferther explore how this was created.
LittleBigPlanet is based on User Generated Content (UGC) – so it is easy to make your own levels to illustrate whatever aspect of science you wish. All you need is a Playstatrion 3, a copy of the game and Intrernet access. Not only that but you can share your creations with other users! And we’ve not event got into the additional creative power of LittleBigPlanet 2 yet…
LittleBigPlanet is not the only game help explain science – far from it, but it is an example of how we can get creative in explaining science…
Navigating Nonspace, Game Spaces and Virtual Worlds (and a bit of Superstring Theory)
Following on from my last post on Neuromancer, I wanted to take a little more time to look at the idea of virtual spaces. The novel describes this new anti-ecludian world as “Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and consolations of data.” However when you read the novel, the description of this virtual world is still strongly rooted in a mirrored geography of the real world. To enter the data-network of a set location, there is a mixture of physical and virtual travel required. This is not to critique Gibson for this, far from it, but to point to how our own perception of space is rooted in our perception of the real. It’s not just Neuromancer you find this in – think of the Matrix Reloaded, once Neo has mastery of this world, he still navigates it in a physical manner having to fly from location to location. If you can master the system to override it’s gravity, why stop there?
There is a roleplaying game heavily inspired by Neuromancer, Shadowrun, which envisioned the dsytopian future Gibson was mashed-up with a fantasy scnario. It was a fun world to play in. But I was always unhappy with its section of hacking (I’m talking first edition here) which had descriptions of networks and virtual spaces combined with the characters power to navigate within but it was heavily tied to the physical locations. In short hacking was hamstrung; if you can control the system to let you in, why does it matter from where it lets you in?
Not to be unfair to the people who wrote the game. I’m writing with hindsight and that gives me post-20-20 vision. My point is more that our envisioning of virtual spaces is well, a little to physical. I’m thinking for example of Second Life – personal I can’t see the attraction with replicating the real world in the virtual as a fun space. So where have we started to mess with the virtual spaces in a manner that starts to melt the geographic? The game Braid is one example. At first glance it is a platform game, but it’s manipulation of time renders a world that is at odds with ours and so is amazing fun to navigate and play in.
Why does this matter? It would appear that current scientific thinking on the essential nature of the universe means that the 3 dimensions we perceive are just the tip of the iceberg. That matter is a much, much more complex thing that we ever thought – and I thinks games, that envisioning of nonspaces that you can explore, might be a great way to explain these ideas…
The many dimensions of Superstring Theory...
Boom! Sony Announces PSP2 and Looks to Mobile Gaming
It’s been a long time coming and has often been called “the worse kept secret in games” but finally the PSP2 is unveiled. Now there is much about this I can’t say, so my comment is going to be mainly based around the public announcements on this. So first off there’s the PSP2 – aka NGP or Next Generation Portable:
Sony has unveiled the successor to the PSP, codenamed the Next Generation Portable.
The console boasts dual analogue sticks, front and rear touchpads, Sixaxis motion control, a three axis compass and 3G and wifi support.
It also features a physical media slot for a card format and the familiar Dpad and PlayStation buttons, a 5 inch OLED display claimed to be four times the resolution of the PSP and front and rear cameras.
The system is due for release during the Christmas holiday season this year, according to Sony.
“Our goal is to transform every aspect of your everyday life into entertainment,” said Sony’s Kaz Hirai during the PlayStation Meeting in Tokyo today.
Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida demonstrated a number of games for the system including Golf Next, Gravity Daze and Killzone, augmented reality software, and a title in the Uncharted series, highlighting the use of touchpads and motion control.
Now Sony were always going to do a new handheld. The question was just when and what. The thinking is good; lots of Augmented Reality systems, touchscreens and Sony’s now trademark feature – a powerful visual engine. They are looking to sell it for around $300. Another positive is that this device is now looking to the networked world, rather than trying to build an enclave within. So Sony are embracing Android (though not running the PSP2 as I understand it) but also looking to allow greater portability and connectivity. This is a good step and a shot across the bows to the growing gaming behemoth of Apple (thanks to iPad and iPhone).
As ever with such things, the devil is in the detail – how good the games are, how connected it is, how easy the shop/app system is to use and the ease of access for both developers and gamers. The response so far from developers is reportedly positive, so that is a big plus. It’s going to be an interesting gaming world with the PSP2 in…
Cthulhu Thursday: Cthulhu Rising
I love sci-fi. I love Call of Cthulhu. Some imagine how cool it was to find that the two were co-existing in the awesome form of Cthulhu Rising – Call of Cthulhu in the 23rd Century (which is also when Star Trek is set!)!
It is the year 2271. The future is a dark and dangerous place. Outer space is the new frontier, and humanity has left Earth to exploit the galaxy for its own ends. It is over a century and a half since the United Earth Federation (UEF) first began to colonise the solar system and beyond.
…
Space is vast. Just how vast is hard for us humans to visualize intuitively. An interstellar society like that in Cthulhu Rising exists under many unique restrictions as a direct result of this vastness. The most notable restriction is that this interstellar community consists of many island-planets scattered across an ocean of deep space, separated by unavoidable communication and travel delays. Even with technological marvels like the Foscolo Interstellar Drive and FTL communications, travel between these star systems takes weeks, if not months, and communications suffer delays of days if not weeks. Interplanetary and interstellar travel is still an expensive business. Most people who travel are either company employees, military personnel or government staff.
Life is not unique to Earth. It thrives in the oceans of Europa, and on planets orbiting stars other than our own. Intelligent life is another matter though. As humanity pushes further and further out into space, contact with another intelligent space-faring civilisation has not yet occurred, yet still seems inevitable. It is only a matter of time before one of these craft stumbles upon some remote, alien edifice, a cosmic mausoleum of the Great Old Ones. But who is to say this has not already taken place..?
Players take the roles of the Investigators of the future. Those enlightened and oft unlucky individuals who know something of the true nature of the universe. Be they fools or heroes, they take the fight against the Great Old Ones to the stars themselves.
Cthulhu Rising!
(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!)
More Musing on William Gibson’s Talk
So, a few weeks ago I went to see the seminal Sci-fi writer William Gibson talk. He read a little from his latest novel Then he took questions from the audience. His talk was a fascinating insight into his creative process. For example he talked about how his novels reflect his place in life. So the characters in his earlier books, reflecting his youth, don’t have any family or complex relationships. Now his characters have friends and family an d struggle and enjoy that which such relationships bring.
He also noted that the future is always odder than you think it will be. So he is cited as being a prescient writer, especially on technology. (I re-read Neuromancer over Christmas and it is still takes your breath away how close the text is to what we see growing around us in connect networks. If you’ve not read Neuromancer, I strongly recommend it. In the book Gibson envisions a dystopian future where corporations run rampant over failed nation-states. A new world has arrisen, a virtual world that lives in parallel with our own called Cyberspace. People equipped with interfaces can connect directly into this shadow world to navigate its data-highways and byways.) But his future still had the cold war going strong, not imagining that only a few years after the book was published the USSR would crumble. Indeed with hindsight we now around the mid-80s it was a crumbling edifice waiting to fall. But while Neuromancer envisions a polluted world, it misses the massive impact that climate change is, and will continue to have. Again, in the mid-80s it was not common in popular culture, but within the scientific community alarm was growing over the issue.
During the talk Gibson did say one thing I wrote down verbatim; “Science fiction is the dreamtime of industrialism civilisation.” Nuff said!
A Great Becoming... 