According to popular technology news blog GigaOM, the most popular MMO behind World Of Warcraft is the shockwave-enabled Habbo Hotel. I know that for a long time now Director has played second fiddle to Flash, but this shows that Adobe Director is still a great choice for games.

The Java-powered dungeon game Runescape comes in at number 3, the Flash-enabled Club Penguin comes in at #4, and PR-savvy SecondLife ranks at a lowly 10. It’s quite an eye-opening list for those who believe MMOs are all swords and dragons *. Check out the entire list over at GigaOM.com

Other Director news: Director Survey

There’s a semi-official Director survey that’s been put together by Charles Parcell. The results will be collected and given to Adobe, who is currently hard at work on Director 11.

Take the Director Survey now

*: If you’re got the hardcore-mindset that a game can’t be an MMO without 3d dragons and swords, check out the excellent free Shockwave game Sherwood Dungeon, and my interview with it’s creator.

I’m worried that DRM phobia is going to have a negative impact on gaming. Specifically indie games and casual games. Because contrary to what a lot of popular consumer-friendly websites want you to believe, not all DRM is bad.

I’m talking about DRM that enables try-before-you-buy, pay-as-you-go, and rental models. Try before you buy is an absolute boon to the user. Things absolutely sucked for games before it. TBYB allows a person to actually play a game (or a tool, or a service) without having to shell out money for it, to see if they like it. Read the rest of this entry

For some contxtext, this is a comment I posted to Chuck’s blog post about Story in games on SpectreCollie.com.

I believe there’s a lot of mix-up between story and storytelling in games. The story is one thing, but how it is told is another. You can have a great story and shoddy storytelling. Think Death of A Salesman dinner theater. I think a lot of gamer’s complaints about story in games is actually about the Storytelling method in games.

I think the cutscene is the least innovative way to convey a story in game. It is the opposite of everything a video game is about. Yes, it gets the point across, and yes it uses a method that is very Hollywood-like, but in the end it’s a non-interactive bit you feel obligated to sit through lest you miss the one line that actually tells you how to solve the next level; paranoid to touch the controller for fear you might abort it.

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time had voice-over narration that happened while you were still free to roam and explore the world, and to me that was a really innovative way to further a story without making me antsy for interaction. It’s story AND game at the same time. They were delivering important context without wrestling control away from me. I’m sure that’s been done in other games, but I thought the execution of it in Sands of Time was genius. What makes it great has nothing to do with the story itself, just that they had hit on a great way to pace out the storytelling without bogging down the gameplay.

And I think this stems from the fact that the only thing that video games has over movies as far as storytelling goes is interactivity. It’s about control and freedom. And the cutscene has none of that. It often isn’t even in the same format at the rest of the game.

Just as early cinema developed new ways of communicating story to the viewer outside of sheer exposition, I think video games need to try harder at integrating storytelling into gameplay without the binary switch of “Now you’re playing/now you’re watching”. I think this is actually why the story-in-games debate is as common as it is -- because too many developers lean on the least-interactive ways to deliver their story, as if story and game were not to be mixed. I know LucasArts designers of the 90s tossed them around like footballs.

So, the full mea culpa on this is that the very “Meanwhile…” scene in Monkey Island in which Chuck speaks of was the very moment I got hooked on adventure games and where I discovered how engrossing games could be. SCUMM games were all about those moments for me and I think the cutscene works best in Adventure games.

Random, unfinished notes

• I tried reading Warren Spector’s four part series about storytelling but it couldn’t hold my attention. I will force myself to read it at some point.
  
• Chuck mentioned that he couldn’t think of a game where the story was good but the storytelling was bad. I can’t either. Can anyone?
  
• Regarding the above point, I wonder if that means that good storytelling can make a weak story more palatable?
  
• If I renamed my blog “unfinished thoughts” I’d have about two dozen more blog drafts like this one I could immediately post.

I’m trying hard to enjoy Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Wii, but I’m having a hard time. Here’s why:

The camera is annoying. Not being able to control the camera is a serious flaw of the single stick control (nunchuck) system that the Wii has. I am constantly fighting Link to get the proper view. I am pressing the C button constantly to re-center my view, but it simply is not enough. It makes jumping puzzles where you need to align Link with the platform needlessly difficult. For the mini-bosses they should have taken a tip from Psychonauts and had the camera lock on the boss, even when you’re not targeting.

The game is super-linear. So far, anyway. I do enjoy linear games, but Twilight Princess is frustratingly so. Several times it makes you retread old ground while at the same time arbitrarily locking you out of new locations, and special-case closed locations and cutscene triggers that interrupt gameplay and move you to a new location are heavily relied upon to tell us the story. For a world that is as big as it is, TP ends up feeling incredibly small and closed.

Rookie UI mistakes So they have this new pointing device that’s relatively new, and pretty sensitive. Why oh why, when you die, do they stick small “Yes” and “No” buttons up in the upper right corner of the screen, with perhaps a 5 pixel gap between them? I just ended up quitting instead of restarting because my Wii aim is not quite up to par.

No save-anywhere. Actually, you can save anywhere, you just actually won’t be there when you reload your game, and you’ll have to work your way back through a location re-solving the puzzles you already solved just to pick up from where you left off. Come on Nintendo, this is 2007! Why the $@! can I not save where I want to and be able to be there again when I return?!

I sure hope the Phantom Hourglass is better. It looking like it’s got ten times the charm and style of the Twilight Princess.

Another GDC is over and done with. Here’s some highlights:

• Running into Jedi Knight Alumni Justin Chin, Ray Gresko, and Chris Ross.
  
• Day 3: Seeing Richard Garriott (Ultima), Alexey Pajitnov (Tetris) and Shigeru Miyamoto (Donkey Kong/Super Mario Bros/Legend of Zelda) all in 1 hour time period at the IGF/Gamer’s Choice awards.
  
• Just about every session at the Indie Game Summit but especially Russell Carroll’s insightful session on indie marketing, which I believe was the most valuable discussion there.
  
• Meeting Gene Endrody (Sherwood Dungeon ), Jim Greer (kongregate), Derek Yu (Tigsource.com) and Dave Grossman (Sam & Max) face-to-face after only emailing them for so long …
  
• Raph Koster’s talk on “Where Game Meets the Web”. Nothing too insightful for me, but it was interesting to hear his assertion that the Game Industry more or less is (again, sigh) not paying attention to how the web innovates and evolves.
  
• Discussing the finer points of game design, UI, and “high-art” with the MawSoft crew.
  

The week provides me with more than enough creative energy to get me through another 360 days until the next one. Thanks to everyone mentioned here, and also those I didn’t mention.

Creating Casual Games For Profit and Fun is a new book by Allen Partridge. Looks like a cool book, Allen contributes to the various Director mailing lists, has programmed a bunch of games, and for the book he interviewed lots of casual game developers. Here’s the description, from Amazon.com:

Thousands of game enthusiasts and would-be developers are searching habitually for an opportunity to expand their knowledge of games. Whether they’re clicking through Amazon or browsing Barnes and Noble, they are all looking for a path to their dream, a secret door into the games industry. The Casual Games Market is that secret passage. The industry, featuring online downloadable games generally delivered through distributors like Real-One Arcade, Shockwave.com and Oberon Media (via MSN Games and Pogo) has exploded over the past five years into a multi-billion dollar annual marketplace. Independent developers have rapidly discovered the field as one of the last remaining venues to break into the public eye. It is now the single most attractive opportunity available to anyone who wants to become a game developer. Casual Games for Profit and Fun introduces and defines casual games, explains the current state and scope of the industry, and describes the various genres, formats, conventions, and business models that define the industry today. It also teaches the basic casual game development techniques in Flash for the web, PC, and PDA’s and cell phones. Throughout the book users will learn how to create a variety of games that they can use for their own fun or sell commercially.

About the Author
Dr. Allen Partridge is Director of the Applied Media and Simulation Games Center at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Partridge owns Insight Interactive games and has developed a myriad of interactive 3D games. Partridge’s games are featured on Reflexive Arcade and in international publications. He has written several articles and a book on Shockwave 3D games and was the technical editor for Paul Catanese’s Director’s Third Dimension. Partridge is the host of the popular dirGames-l and dir3d-l mailing lists. See attached resume for more information.

Check it out on Amazon.com

If there’s two things I learned in 2006, I’d sum it up by saying:

• Santa and laser whips don’t mix
• If a video game has a location called Smuggler’s Cove, there better be more than 30 gold coins there

I’m talking about Oblivion (not regarding the laser whip, that was in The Polar Express). I really enjoyed Oblivion, and I’m actually still in the process of enjoying it. But the first cracks I ever saw in it’s otherwise perfect armor was when I finally jimmied the five-pin (hard) lock on the entrance to Smuggler’s Cove. Now that Bethesda has announced the Shivering Isles expansion pack for it, I’ll take some time to talk about the minor complaints I hope the fix, and why it was a problem.

Read the rest of this entry

I just updated my Wii and the new Wii News Channel was available.

The pros

• Resizable text. It uses an animated word wrapping system that makes the iPhone jealous, no less.
• Interactive Globe UI that shows news stories by location. Not sure how useful it is, but it’s got an element of coolness to it.
• Once it’s loaded there’s zero wait.

The cons

• Man, does it take forever to load
• The articles occasionally feature URLs, but they’re not clickable.
• Pretty much just standard associated press articles with the occasional photo sprinkled in. It didn’t appear to have anything in-depth.
• Did I mention it was slow to load?

Overall it’s a cool little piece of technology, a great working demonstration of what the Wii can do outside of gaming, and it may appeal to the non-gamer that Nintendo has been chasing with the Wii. But with the exception of their interactive globe, the Internet is a faster and more interactive way to get the same news, hands down. I hope Nintendo isn’t putting effort into these types of channels at the expensive of games. The news channel is not going to convert anyone.

UPDATE: subsequent uses of it have been pretty peppy, and it seems to occasionally download news even when the unit is off, which enables its speed.

I purchased my pass for this year’s Game Developer’s Conference, being held in San Francisco March 5-9. If you purchase tickets before the end of January, you get a substantial discount. And if you can’t afford a pass, you can probably volunteer and get a free Giga pass (they’ve done that previous years). Check their website for details.

I find the GDC a real creative energizer for me, and I look forward to it every year. If you read my blog and you’ll be going to GDC, drop me a line. I’m always looking to meet up with fellow gamers (indie or otherwise) and old friends. Hope to see you there.

On Sunday I woke up at 7:45 to get a Wii. My plan was to head over to Best Buy (which opens at 11:00) because they advertised having at least twenty in stock. On the drive over I decided to stop in and see if Target had any in stock because they open at 8:00. When I pulled into the parking lot, I was pretty shocked to see there was a huge line. They had eighty Wiis, and gave out vouchers to eighty people, I was told.

I figured if Target had eighty, then Best Buy must have hundreds. I was wrong. When I got there, there was one person in line, but there were signs saying they had already handed out vouchers for their twenty units. Defeated, I headed on home, but stopped by Gamestop just in case. I saw a small group of people outside, and decided to park the car and head on over. Read the rest of this entry