Hyper Magazine
Game Theory 001: “Thinking Inside the Box – Possibility space and ball games” (Hyper 208 February 2011, print only)
A small possibility space is a definite advantage for turning your sport into a videogame, as the success of soccer videogames illustrates. The more restricting the rules, the easier it is to simulate. The more open your sport is to improvisation, the harder it is to make it fun to play with a controller, especially, as with AFL, you’re also required to switch between 18 players with lightening efficiency.
Game Theory 002: “Ezio Owed To Turing – Parsing the human in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood” (Hyper 209 March 2011, print only)
Tasked with finding the human assassin in a crowd of sometimes physically identical AI controlled assassins, I can’t help but call for the AI. Despite the help of Brotherhood’s target compass, I often mistake the halting, directionless movement of the AI for the real deal. As I remove my blade from the wrong target and rue my lost matches, I can’t help but think of one man: Alan Turing.
Game Theory 003: “Invisible Interfaces – When too much reality gets in the way” (Hyper 210 April 2011, print only)
Almost the entire videogame industry is based on the idea that the ultimate purpose of meda is to transfer an experience from one person to another as exactly and unobtrusively as possible. This is wrong.
ABC The Drum Unleashed
“Art Videogames Art? It’s hardly worth debating”
Away from the eyes of those who would deny this new medium entry to their elite club, videogames are a normal part of cultural life. They bring joy, exuberance, shock and frustration to innumerable people around the globe. These are people who wouldn’t hesitate to place them on the same plane as film, literature and music, regardless of what name we give the category.
RedKingsDream
“IKEA, and the logic of videogame design”
What is the IKEA showroom but a piece of videogame level design? The path for the player is clearly mapped. If you put your trust in the designer’s hands, you will be lead through the key stages of progression: Living Room, Kitchen, Bathroom; or Enemy Ambush, re-arming point, and dialogue sequence. It makes little difference.
“Arkham Asylum, and the space of traumatic memory”
This is why Arkham Asylum works. For an unforgettable instant, it embeds the themes of the game in your own life, reaching past the controllable, dismissible space inside your widescreen television and into the room you play in. By using the cultural signs and symbols common to videogames in 2009, Arkham Asylum steps beyond simple restatement to thematic experience.
PALGN
Videogames are not impartial documents, bare under the surface. They are the products of human designers who live in real cities, who lead real lives, and who have opinions and beliefs. It might not be possible to create an overtly Australian mainstream game at the present, and it might never be. But clearly, Australian games do exist, and in more ways than one.
“Violence, War, and Call of Duty 4”
Call of Duty 4 implements a modern lexicon of mentally hard-wired images of middle-eastern warfare to great, and challenging effect. Executions are videotaped, unarmed hostages are tortured, night-vision sights gun down distant men. But there are little twists on all these familiar images. You are the executed, gazing down the lens of the camera. You are complicit in the execution of a hostage. The normally silent images of night-vision lit explosions are set to the startlingly gung-ho cheers and whoops of a helicopter pilot.
Subject Navigator
“How Guy Debord can help us understand videogames”
What would playing Portal like we were trying to play Super Mario Galaxy tell us about design? What would setting up a computer bot to play through Super Mario Galaxy in the fastest possible time, tell us about design?
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