Sim Plant

would be a depressingly boring game.

I was a bit mistaken on my last post about G4. The channel is still there, its schedule has just undergone a major revamp. Still, only a few shows remain, but E! has control of what gets aired. So far, however, they've done a good job, airing huge blocks of old Fox shows like Star Trek the Next Generation and Arrested Development (I think I watched half a season last night). So kudos to E! for not turning G4 into E!!(!)

When I code I feel like a sorceror, pouring through books of symbols that I invoke to make my devices come alive. It's all very exciting.

It's funny how, when playing games, our minds must work within pre-existing systems. Games are necessarily bound by numbers in the sense that they must run off of the interaction between resources on a computer. Games display "pwnership" by numbers, who can collect the most or the least or stay the longest or get out the quickest. It's all about comparing "how many" of this or that the player is able to accumulate. Even in a game like "Apples to Apples" in which a player calls out a category and other players have to present their cards and have the original player pick the one that fits best, there is a count up of who has the most wins at the end.

I reflect then on this "winning" condition that there must be some value to compare underlying all games. Life, for instance, has a winning condition of reproduction. Generally, while the quantity of offspring plays as a factor of "winning", the quality of offspring is important as well. I think this is the root of the problem, because even here the win condition is whichever race/gene pool survives longest. It's almost like in the beginning ten gods got together and said to one another "I bet I can create a better race of humans than you." And they all said "You're on!" and all created one woman and one man and let them go at it. But of course, this isn't true, because there are plenty of other creatures besides humans and, while they all follow the number win condition, they are very much dissimilar in their approaches.

MMOGs are pretty open. You can't actually "win" them, and in this respect I believe they are a special breed of game. The "Sims" series also gets props on achieving the "unwinnable, yet fun, game". I think a fun game might be this: a game in which players take turns drawing. Not drawing tickets, but actually drawing lines. So you have a base shape and each player gets ten seconds to draw something extending from that shape. Players cannot cross lines. At the end of the game (let's say, ten turns), everyone gets to see what they have collectively drawn. Funny, no win condition, and yet the "excercise" still sounds kind of fun. Just wait till the adult version of the game is released.

Blog this

Entropia doesn't compare in my mind to the Ephemeris project. Perhaps that's because one is a game and the other is a tool. And who would bother making Ephemeris and for what purpose? To map every star in the galaxy and then predict the rotations of the Earth? Just to implement a detailed virtual sky? That's just whoa.

And on Joystiq.com they are having a feast of entries from the recent (this morning) Nintendo Wii preorder happening. Strangely enough the Wii got a lot of fanfare from my little part of this big country, the "Bible Belt".

http://www.joystiq.com/2006/10/13/we-wait-for-wii-bible-belt-edition/

As with everything in the Bible Belt, however, things were pretty lame. Only 6 preorders were available at a mall in Athens. That compared to 32 in Philly, 19 in Maryland, and 33 in Boston. I'm sure other places had even higher turnouts.

The next generation systems are close at hand, and it seems every time the "next generation" systems come out there are more and more people excited about it. Which is good. It means the industry is growing and that video games, as a form of entertainment, are becoming more respectable. Unfortunately, however, they aren't respectable enough, as the G4 channel was recently taken over by E! and only its better shows still remain intact.

So while the industry is getting high tech, I am still left mastering the basics. In Zombie Pawns yesterday I restructured the Worldstate to have it contain the level size. I then came up with a template for parsing levels that I will implement this afternoon. Development is moving along slowly because I'm not getting much free time.

As for the original game idea of the day, I was toying with the idea of a game where you play as a tribesman in a head hunter's tribe. Nothing original here really, except I've never played a game in which I was one of several in a tribe competing to chop off important people's heads. I guess it's sort've a hitman knockoff, only less story line and more head rolling.