metadigital

"

Here's a very good article for beginners: Art of Diplomacy. It is in the order of several powers of ten easier to read than the rule book. (But then again, maybe that's the point; after all until Machiavelli turned up, there were no guide books for diplomacy ...

King Emmanuel III, and his entire household, died suddenly in tragic accidental food poisoning incident. The incident happenned whilst the royal family were enjoying their stay at the Winter Palace, when an entire batch of Pezzetti di Cavallo, which is rumoured to have come from the Esteemed French boucheries chevalines. "We will leave no stone unturned in our devotion to the cause of rooting out any foul play," a spokesman for the Royal family, Metadigital, said. "Meanwhile, during the interregnum, I shall of course offer my humble services as interrex, for the purely ceremonial and clerical duties required to keep our great nation working as a well oiled machine." "It is troubled times ahead in Europe, I feel," said the shy ruler. "Considering this, I have given our country a new heraldric emblem to identify with, until the temporarily, of course." Long Live the Kingdom of Italy!

Less than one day to go: 21 hours! (And still, the overwelming majority of you have not posted even tentative orders ... you do know that there is no penalty for changing orders, don't you? )

It looks like Russia is winning by a mile on the coloured map, but Italy is just behind ... I wonder who will really win this game ..? "

The thing is, you have to basically be psychotically devoted to gather up the amount crap that the scammed player had (and his likely hundreds of associates who were also taken). I would liken it to taking months or years out of your life to make a 1:1 scale sand castle and then someone pretending to be your friend knocking it down (that analogy is much weirder on the page than I thought it would be). ... <{POST_SNAPBACK}> That's just dedication to quality! Micro-managing the details, with the overall goal in mind. Sure it takes control-freaks of rare sociopathic dimensions to actually carry out such virtual operations, but then again, these people already exist: the game didn't create them! Not much of a fun community, though, I agree. I certainly won't be running out to buy the game. "

... But games are pratice for RL.

If I reaad you correctly, I agree. Some of my thoughts: 1. How is this any different from every single group attempting to establish a secure channel for intelligence? The WW2 Germans and their Enigma code machines: were they meta-gaming? I think it is not so unacceptable to have secure channels; after all, if the characters were of the virtual world, there would be other means to facilitate their communications, such as scraps of paper under the counter of the local greasy spoon, or a want ad in the local newspaper. 2. Isn't this just garden-variety espionage? Nowhere near as clever as Harold Adrian Russell (Kim) Philby (Aside: ...In 1988 Philby consented to a week-long interview with The Sunday Times, in which he justified his treachery to his native country by saying that when he made his commitment to the KGB, he believed that the western democracies were too weak to resist the rise of Fascism in Europe and that only the Soviet Union would be able to defeat it. ...) 3. I don't find it morally reprehensible. And I would go further with your example: how do we really differentiate between the "meta-gamer" and the "role-playing double agent" ...

Apparently the game's biggest fault is it is too short. And the biggest cry after completing it was for the producers to create a Lego Star Wars game for the OT ..! (w00t)

Of course you do realise that Kreia was the One True Prophet, and that the Truth shall prevail; the Anti-Force Force, the Force of Anti-Force-Sensitives, shall rise up and smite the Force, restoring free will to the universe, and fulfilling the Force's own self-destructive destiny ..!

I thought it was clearly a case of pragmatism over art; there were several mandatory plot devices that were needed to be inserted in critical points on the plot, and they werre inserted with as much explanation as the creatives could be bothered to dream up, so that no prior art was invalidated (e.g. Revan) and there was enough ambiguity to allow for any future art.

Well, that's an... interesting design philosophy. Yes, it really makes sense to have a very imprecise and barely fleshed story, so you won't find yourself restricted in future installments. The paradigm of innovative storytelling. That's probably why I can't stand a large part of what passes for art these days. Come again? HL2 is supposed to be a scary game? Please, don't make me go on an AvP2 rant again. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I thought you'd appreciate those quotes. :D But you didn't mention the Chef Vortigaunts! And, they are just following a true gnostic tradition; ther must always be another mystery to replace the ones solved. You can't have a conspiracy theory that everyone knows about, then it's not a conspiracy! ... BVB It never occurred to us to stop and put some kind of expository section in the game, that we couldn't actually support without the player experiencing it. That's what we are always trying to support, to keep you in the world.[1] I think part of the fun is telling the story with the environment. ..." ... ML Dhabih did the most amazing models you've never seen. We were watching him building the stuff, putting so much detail into something no one will ever see.[2] But he's so excited to be doing it. Even like[3] a curmudgeon would look at it, and say "Normally, I'd say we shouldn't be doing this. But this is so cool we have to keep it in the game." Then we try not to draw attention to it, we just leave it there for people to discover.[4]" ... 1. Note Bene LA (and you too, OE, after K2): no more stupid "Where are they now" dialogue-only epilogues! 2. So not much in the way of project management going on with the creatives, then. 3. Speech patterns identify Mark Laidlaw as definitely a US citizen, from the Friends generation. 4. This almost makes up for all sins, though.

... 'We have calculated for average crowds of around 15,000 per match and are also targeting at least a third place finish in the league this season. That might put some pressure on the club, but you need pressure if you want to succeed.' ... It's a pity they didn't spend a fraction of that time calculating a name. ... Working to a budget of about 8.5 million Swiss francs -- surpassed in Swiss football only by FC Basel's estimated 30 million -- Zaugg made eight pre-season signings. The most notable coup was convincing Switzerland midfielder and former Basel hero Hakan Yakin to join the club. ... 'The building of the new stadium certainly played a part in my coming here,' Yakin told Reuters on Saturday. ... ['But not the naming of it; I've got my bags packed and I'm on my way ..!']

Makes me feel re-assured that maybe I won't need to run out and upgrade my system to run the new High Dynamic Range lighting of The Lost Coast and Aftermath ... :D

So the skills you need to work on so far : Spelling Imagination <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Imagination is more important than knowledge. Albert Einstein The ability to learn new things by analysis is a brilliant skill; that alone sets you on the right path. Spelling, although not an obvious skill, is essential: good communication skills have been streesed many times for all types of jobs; there is no point being the best widget-maker if you can't tell anyone else about it, or worse, you can't take instruction. There area already a couple of topics on this page (one is stickied

That could make you quite an asset to the game ...! "

We could have a super-speed game, where the turns are sent in every hour ...

Re-thinking my earlier post, I would not be so hard on the character sketches. After all, I think there is a degree of enjoyment that we seem to derive from clich

Yes. If you played Half-Life 2, last year's blockbuster first-person shooter, then you know that the game ended in a cliff-hanger that left more questions than answers. The good news is that Valve is in the final stages of prepping Half-Life 2: Aftermath, the first expansion for Half-Life 2, due out later this year. ... And, from that interview in PC Gamer: ... One of the interesting quirks of Half-Life is that you never actually complete the story. You never get to explain everything to the player. Why is that? ML Part of it is that we're always creating the world ... Because the technology changes all the time, and we want to take advantage of that, we don't want to limit ourselves to hard statements about the world that, maybe a year down the road, we're suddenly able to make playable, but we've screwed ourselves out of doing that because we cut ourselves off a year ago. ... The Seven Hour War, for instance, why show that when, say, in the future we could actually put you through the experience[?] In a sense, the world extends beyond the narrow limits of the game. ... I thought you didn't finish the world out of deliberate choice. That you wanted to preserve an air of mystery. ML More so with Half-Life than Half-Life 2. There is definitely a desire to make the game play out inside people's heads when they leave the computer. ... If we're going to answer any question, we have to make sure we're raising even more questions that are even more interesting. ... and previously, to a similar question on pre-visualisation: ... ML ... We're not just building the game because you have to go from Point A to Point B. We're building it because there's fun little things you get to do along the way. The details, the non-essential stuff, is actually half the fun. Things we think would be cool, but we wouldn't put them on the box. That's the kind of thing I look for in a game. What's the extra bit they did, that they didn't have to do. That's where you really see the personality behind the whole thing. ... BVB ... Do you remember coming down into Eli's lab, seeing the Vortigaunt chefs? That's an idea Dhabih Eng [One of Valve's Senior Artists] had. That wouldn't have made it into the game at any other company. It's silly, our game's supposed to be a scary game, but somehow, we have Vortigaunts in chef hats. ... PC Gamer[/i], issue 151, August 2005, pp75, 74

Fixed. (The squeaky wheel ...) You can always turn your resolution down, or use LARGE FONTS, or use Firefox with scaleable text, if your eyesight is failing ...

Another article in (now last month's) PC Gamer, a preview of SiN 2 (utilising Valve's Source engine, and due out on Steam shortly, in episodic format). Some highlights: ... Wheel-Time Strategy The driving sections aren't scripted, so while you take pot-shots out of the window, Jessica uses her skills to steer you out of trouble. Ritual have heavily modified Valve's Source engine so that everything Jessica does-in-car is a reaction to the road conditions. So she can cruise around corners, reverse out of pile-ups and flip off anyone who cuts her up. (OK, that last one's a joke, but not a bad idea, eh, Ritual?) ... You can lean out of any window you choose in a car, and swap from passenger's to driver's seat. ... By exploiting Source's interactive capabilities and borrowing ideas from the adventure genre [1], Ritual intend to create a more intelligent shooter. Tom Mustaine again: "We have a system called the Contexxt Look System, where if I walk into a room with NPCs or Jessica and JC, and look around, they'll go 'Hey, that's the laptop,' etc. So they're aware pf what you're looking at and we've got dialogue for everything. ... You can do two things in a shooter: you can shoot and look, and I've never really seen anyone take advantage of looking." Source's AI is also being reworked. Developers acknowledge the quality of Valve's squad AI, but Half-Life 2 didn't take full advantage of it. Ritual's upgrade is impressive, and will hopefully be used in more dramatic circumstances. Shoot an NPC in the shin or leg and they'll drop to the floor in pain, but they can still fire, and will take potshots at you from the floor. Any nearby buddy NPCs will attempt to drag the wounded back to their feet. In fact, grabbing at things, whether characters or objects, is an NPC speciality. Ritual are making sure that enemies interact with the world as much as you do. NPCs will take hostages, and grab any of your team-mates for the purpose. The AI will also hurl anything they can find right at you, much like Half-Life 2's head crab zombies. ... Sin Episodes will utilise the X-Files story-telling style of multiple plot threads that intertwine under the central story arc. While most episodes will follow the main plot, some chapters will explore smaller, self-contained stories with other characters that fit like jigsaw pieces into the larger puzzle. Chapter-ending cliffhangers are a certainty, and there is plenty of scope to play with the timeline as episodes don't have to be linear. [2] The episodic nature means this is a game that will be built in full view of everyone. ... Ritual can draw the PC community into their plans. they've already spent months gathering feedback on their fansite, http://www.ritualistic.com. Now they're going one step further. ... Robert Atkins ... the creative director ... "Right now it's a concept we're going to implement, but we don't know to what level yet. ... It's a cool feature: the fans helped us sculpt the content and now they're going to decide what goes into it by their own actions." For the solo gamer there will be an opt-out button for any community-directed content.[3] ... PC Gamer, issue 151, August 2005, pp64-71 1. Proof-positive that gaming industry is alive and cross-polinating. 2. I am concerned by the large deus ex machina possibilites of this ... 3. Hey! A Top of the Pops remix of the game!

I just finished reading an article in (now last month's) PC Gamer, an interview with Bill Van Buren (Producer/Designer), Marc Laidlaw (writer) and Bill Fletcher (Animator). It was remarkable for the insight into the issues that some of us were discussing recently, right here, about building a fun universe. Marc Laidlaw was asked: ... Marc, you wre a published author before you came to Valve. Did you have to adapt your writing style to work in games? ML From a writing perspective, everything you want to reveal about characters should come through dialogue. It's not like there was a bunch of backstory about the characters we wanted to deliver. We knew the characgers, we knew a bit about their history, we wanted to make sure that when they were talking, they were referring to this whole backlog of things that have gone before, that they don't have to explain to one another, just like if you walk into a room where two people who've known each other for a long time are talking. They wouldn't spend any time at all talking about the stuff they already know. But you'd pick up a lot about their relationship just by watching them interact. That was the dramatic thing we wanted to aim for. But that's not different to how the scene would be laid out in a movie or a book. But surely the demands are different. You're going to be writing to fit them the game, aren't you? ML Yeah. Things change in the course of building the game. We'd cut a level, and that would alter a relationship. Is it always that direction? Are you always writing the story to service the level design? Are you just fitting the story together? ML Yeah. That's part of my job. We're all independent. They might make a decision from a level design point of view, and it's more like a fun challenge. "How can we do without the plot point? What does that afford us? Now that we don't have to do this piece, what can we do instead?" ... So now you have a script. What happens next? ML The script represents things we want to accomplish with the story, and the stuff that the animators, that Bill, wants to get across and spend time animating. This is really abstract, but while the level is being built, we have to roll it out. We have this problem of making a scene come about in a space in the game. That's pure choreography. BVB We actually have a choreography team, that's what we call them internally, who deal with a character's audio, animation, acting and scene design. the more information you get into it, whether it's the script, the acting sessions, the effects or the animation, the better it is. ... How do your voice actors react to giving 'game' performances[?] Are you after something different from what they're used to? ML I think it's probably like radio. It all has to be there in the voice. We do a bunch of alternate takes

Well, there are (at least) two schools of thought: start with interesting characters and build a story around them, or start with a plot and add some characters. Interesting characters: let's try and avoid the rogue-with-a-heart-of-gold, the prince-in-pauper's clothing, the drow/orc orphan (equivalent) brought up by elves/humans and wants revenge on all their evil kind ... Positive characters. Hmm. Well, they should be interesting and different. How about a murderer, who is forced to help people he (because 98% of violent human criminals are male) doesn't like in order to achieve a personal goal (i.e. save his own skin)? Nah, that's been done before, too. It's not easy! Good writing is just like any sort of invention: 2% inspiration and 98% perspiration. How about plots? Hook up with a bunch of different people to kill some big baddie, seems natural enough. The more that you meet and cajole into your effort, the easier the final battle is (but the more that can betray you ...) and there should be a time limit, some remorseless timer (not too short, just enough to ensure that some of us *ahem me* don't explore every virtual square micrometer) so that there is a palpable sense of urgency. How's that for a start? We need some good characters to hook the narrative on.

I was going to post some disparaging comment about getting what you pay for ("), but instead I will be adult and submit that I certainly don't mind what the cost of an item (within reason, of course) as long as it is good value.

:D Which post?