Co-Ops, Where are you?
We are in the golden chase for a fun, cool co-op game. We’ve been trying a bunch of games that claimed themselves as co-op. There is a mix of positive and negative experiences.
Our list includes: Resident Evil 5, Halo 3, Lego Start Wars II: The Original Trilogy, Fable 2, Beautiful Katamari, Tales of Vesperia.
One of the feature decisions with co-ops games is to split or not split the screen. In Resident Evil 5 and Halo 3 the screen is split so each player gets a part from their own view. Although you have full mobility and camera control, the sub-screen is small and it’s harder to see things around. Even if your console is hook-upped to a big screen, if you want to play comfy from the couch it doesn’t feel really good. In Lego Start Wars II, Fable 2 and Tales of Vesperia, you shared the screen with the other avatar, so coordinating where you’re heading is important. Specially in Lego Start Wars II where you can accidentally push your partner to a pit and kill him over and over again. In Beautiful Katamari, both players simultaneously control the katamari, as you imagine a lot of coordination is required.
I’m concerned about how publishers stamp ‘co-op’ on their games just because is a buzz word but zero support in the gameplay. In some games it seems to be not distinction between a ‘multiplayer’ and a ‘co-op’. It’s like just the mere presence of a second player allows them to say ‘co-op’. This is rather disturbing and a source of frustration because they offer an gaming experience of cooperation between players that is not fulfill. For instance in Resident Evil 5, the glimpse of cooperation is that if your buddy is grabbed by a zombie you press a button to help him and then just keep shooting around. Now (with your best sarcastic voice) that is co-op :P
In Fable 2, a game that has a lot of (other) good features, player 2 instead of embodying the older sister gets into a second kid. Ok, I understand that Rose might need to say and do things that would be too much for putting that baggage to the player. But there is no adaptation in the ‘co-op’ version for this second Hero! He is never acknowledged in the dialogues. Please, just say children instead of kid. Please, use a plural noun instead of singular. On top of that, the second player is pretty much a ghost, it’s not possible to interact with the objects, like knocking on a door. Player 1 has to do everything. Player 2 comes to live when it’s time to fight. What a bummer for player 2! For such rich character driven game, not recognizing the second player makes the whole experience dreadful. This is pretty much the same that happens in Tales of Vesperia as well.
Simpler games like Beautiful Katamari and Lego Start Wars II have done a better job for playing together. In Beautiful Katamari you need to talk to your partner to optimize rolling up your katamari, you need to agree to keep moving in a certain direction otherwise you can’t control smoothly. It does indeed create synergy between the players and promotes cooperation. When they say co-op they do mean co-op.
Lego Star Wars II is pretty good in the co-op mode. Since you share the screen you have to agree about where to go, you also need your partner to stand strategically for instance to give enough space for a jump or for avoiding to accidentally push you to your death in a pit. What’s further supporting cooperation is that each avatar that the player controls has different abilities and can resolve specific parts to keep going, for example Obi-Wan can use the force to move blocks and build a bridge, R2-D2 can hack doors.
The social factor in games is really important. It can promote people to play a game, it’s also investing time with your friend, you’ll recall when you were playing together the other day, and what a good time with your buddy you had. If developers are looking into this, they need to be more careful about what they promise and what kind of experiences they want to promote. Not because a second player can log in means that they cooperating or playing together. I’d love to see more co-op games out there, and have fun with them.
User Experience in Gaming grant Announcement
Dr. Magy Seif El-Nasr (SIAT Assistant Professor) along with her future PhD student Veronica Zammitto (currently SIAT Master’s student) have received funding from MITACS in the amount of $15,000 to support Veronica working as an intern at Electronic Arts Canada (EA). The overall goal of the study is to look at user experience methods for evaluating sports games. Different techniques will be explored in terms of their efficiency, ability to automate them, and their value to the EA team.
Pure Game
We tried Pure on the Xbox 360, produced by Black Rock Studio and published by Disney Interactive Studios. Pure is an off-road racing ATV video game where you do a lot of tricks.
The tutorial is pretty short and straight forward. You have to proof that you can do four things:
- Complete a lap
- Preload, prepare yourself to make a jump.
- Trick
- Boost, get speed for getting more room for longer tricks.
The voice-off tells you what to press, waits for you, and if you fail it’ll repeat the instructions again. If you suck, it’ll start annoying you by pausing the pausing the game. In fact this will happen a lot during the game as well, you know what you have to do, you’re working on that but that voice is going to drill your head.
A really nice detail is the aesthetic for depicting the controller when showing the buttons, it is covered with dirt, as if you’d been riding on it.
You can build your own ATV, selecting the parts that you want, getting one for speeding or other for tricks. The customization is pretty good. The in-game advertising is in full here, you have a lot of brands to choose from, for instance Elka, Fox, Ohlins, Maxxis, DG, ITP, just to name a few. You can put decals of them when stylising your vehicle. After all those decisions, the tougher one is to name your ATV.
Although you have a lot of choices for your ATV, it doesn’t happen the same when choosing your avatar. You can’t be you, you have to choose from a predefine selection that points to generic populations, a California boy and girl, a latino/a, UK, Japanese. I believe that the stronger connection that you can get is through the ATV rather than the avatar but, only Lord knows why, your avatar is quite intrusive will riding. S/he will turn back to yell something to you, I’ve found that pretty disruptive, breaking my immersion. I prefer when it just cheers or says something when facing forward, and ideally less often.
The sweet part of this game is doing tricks. That’s the game element that makes it different from just a racing game. You’re going fast on those versatile vehicles, you hit slopes to jump and while in the air you show up your awesome skills by doing trick, such as from stretching a leg to the side to a sequence of contortions in a dance with your ATV. This is the challenge. When you do tricks, you get “Thrill”, more thrill you get, cooler trick you can do. As you fill up the thrill bar, it enables from basic jumps (A button) to intermediate (B) and expert (Y). Expert tricks require more time hence your jump has to leave enough space for kicking around.
Time is another element that takes place, your ‘thrill bar’ will start going down if you don’t keep doing tricks. Another way of consuming ‘thrill’ is by boosting to get more speed and consequently higher jumps, so it makes a balance of boost-jumps.
Performing different tricks is better but is not clear which tricks you’ve done so far, the system could offer a way of remembering what’s been done or prompting for certain tricks to do. Since the tricks are related to the left stick position, I try to do the mental note of going clockwise.
Foundations of Digital Games – (and the Great Idea of Having a Game Conference on a Cruise)
I attended Fourth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG’09). In a nutshell, it was great, and it fulfilled the crossover between academics and industry, covering topics from both social and computer sciences.
FGD’09 had a nice variety of type of session and topics. There were panels on game curriculum and grant opportunities, stressing how important is to create archives of successful and unsuccessful applications. There were tutorials for programming. There were presentations on both technical aspects and social aspects. It’s definitely a conference that worth going.
One of the features of this conference that I’d like to highlight was the fact that the conference happened on a cruise. Yes, one of those massive boats soaring the ocean. It departed from Port Canaveral and one of the ports of call was Nassau (Bahamas).
The FDG'09 Venue
Beside how exotic this could sound, I have to emphasize the convenience of having a conference on a cruise: you don’t have the hassle of having to find a hotel near the venue (but not out of budget) because your room it’s at the venue! You don’t have the problems of ‘where-to-eat’ or not having time to eat because it’s all inclusive! This also simplifies numbers if you have a per diem arrangement with your organization. You won’t be late, you won’t mind staying late, your room is just on the other floor! It provides more chances to comingle with other attendees, helping to establish a camaraderie spirit for the conference. You can have breakfast, dinner, coffee or a drink with your network really easily!
After all these reason, I strongly advocate for having more conference on cruises.
Global Game Jam – The 48 hours @ Vancouver
The Global Game Jam had a total of 53 locations around the world! From Friday January 30th to February 1st we were in the Jam, having a blast. The venue for the Vancouver location was SFU Harbor Center.
In Vancouver, we had a total of 27 participants, one of them actually drove from Seattle to be part of the event. Just to give you a glimpse of the great spirit and motivation that reigned.
At 5:00 pm on Friday the constrains were unveiled:
1) A complete play session has to last 5 minutes or less.
2) The Theme of the game should be: “As long as we have each other, we will never run out of problems”
3) To choose one of the following adjectives to incorporate in the game: thin, evolved, or rotating.
People pitched their ideas, discuss about them and got into groups. Five teams were conformed: Blobboy, Need Artists Inc., One Tonne Punch, Scorched Physics, and Treelings. There were also mentors who were at the Jam during the whole development process, helping with tips and supporting them, such us Mitch Lagran and Dan Taylor.
Saturday went pretty smooth. Everyone was working really hard to get their game.
On Sunday, the effort of 2 days was starting to notice, but always with a great atmosphere. At 3:00 pm, they had to stop working and upload their games to the Global Game Jam website, and then everyone was trying the games, including the judges that arrived.
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| Doing critiques of the games produced at the Vancouver Game Jam |
We closed the event with every team presenting their game on the big screen, telling about how their idea evolved, some of them showing their prototypes as well. Judges gave their feedback, pointing out strength and weaknesses of those creations made in just 48 hours. We gave prizes to every team. Smiles, handshakes, and eagerness of coming next year for more Global Game Jam.
I’m proud of having been part of the organization, happy with the results, and thrill to the human factor of the event local and globally.
Vancouver Game Jam – Announcement
Vancouver will be holding one of 52 Game Jams held simultaneously in 22 countries around the world. These Game Jams will all occur during the same 48 hours, January 30th – February 1st, 2009, as part of the Global Game Jam event coordinated by the IGDA (International Game Developers Association).
A Game Jam is usually a 48 hour event where artists, programmers, and designers come together to make games. Each participant works in a small team to develop a game from concept to final product under specific constraints established by the Game Jam event coordinators.
The Vancouver Game Jam will be at Harbor Center (515 West Hastings Street), Simon Fraser University, Downtown Vancouver, BC.
For more information check: http://emiie.iat.sfu.ca/gamejam/index.html
Call for Participation:
We hope to have 40 participants in the event. Participants can be a mix of industry professionals, students, and faculty. Through rigorous evaluation of applications of potential participants, we hope to get a good combination of skills and experiences to harness and promote learning and creativity among groups. We will also invite faculty and industry professionals for mentorship and judging.
You must apply through the process below by Jan 25th in order to participate.
There is a $25.00 participation fee, it will be used to cover costs of coffee and snacks that will be provided during the event.
To participate, please submit the following:
• Your resume.
• A cover letter indicating your current position and the role you would like to take: designer, manager, artists, or programmer.
Send these materials by email to magy @ sfu.ca
Application deadline is Jan 25th 2009.
The application materials will be evaluated by the program committee for the Game Jam to ensure the right number of participants for each role as well as the number of participants fits the limit established (40 participants). We hope to get a good combination of skills and experiences and a good number of both students and industry professionals to harness and promote learning and creativity among groups.
A decision will be emailed to participants Jan 27th 2009.
At this time, successful participants will be asked to register through email and the registration fee of $25.00 for participation. Deadline for registering for the event will be Jan 29th 2009. Failure to register will disqualify the participant and the next participant in our ‘accepted but no space’ pile will be asked to register.
If you have any questions or comments please send them to Dr. Seif El-Nasr at (magy @ sfu. ca).
Looking forward to your participation!
1st World Mind Sports Games
I’m really glad to say that I participated in the 1st World Mind Sports Games, held in Beijing, China. The event lasted from October 3rd to October 18th. The venue was the Beijing Convention Center, located in the Olympic Villa which also has a complex of hotels where we, the mental athletes, stayed.
There were 5 mind sport games: Go, Chess, Draughts, Xiangqi, and Bridge. I play go, and was representing Argentina in the Women’s Individual, and Women’s Team. It was such a great time! There were people from all over the world, and different strength in playing level. For instance, something that was significant was that there were professional go players playing in the tournament. That was a huge thrill for the amateurs! Lucky me, I played with professional go player, Cai Bihan, from China. See the photo!
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| From World Mind Sports Games – October 2008 |
It was an excellent opportunity for sharing, and shaping playing skills. It was also great chance to put this ‘mental sports’ on the big billboard.
Hope the organization makes the effort to keep this event alive.
Looking forward to playing in the 2nd WMSG in London 2012!!!
Canadian Game Studies Association Workshop
During September 19-21 2008, the Canadian Game Studies Association (CGSA) held an Invitational Workshop, fund for it came from a grant of the Canadian agency Social Science and Humanities Research (SSHRC). The format was quite singular and awesome. There were about 35 researchers, and they were divided into smaller groups according their research interest, also general research discussions, keynotes’ presentation, and planning how to continue game research in Canada.
Every single person who was invited to the workshop had to present his/her ongoing research to the small group that responded with comments, questions, suggestions, that is a great atmosphere for discussion. I was lucky to be in a group with Bernard Perron (University of Montreal – Canada), Guillaume Roux-Girard (University of Montreal – Canada), and Magy Seif El-Nasr (Simon Fraser University – Canada). There were two international key speakers: Helen Kennedy (University of the West of England – UK) and Espen Aarseth (Center for Computer Games Research @ IT University of Copenhagen – Denmark) who, besides presenting a lecture, help to coordinate the general discussions.
As part of the Workshop, we (as CATGames) held a lab-tour, gaming session, and a dinner reception at the School of Interactive Art and Technology (SIAT), displaying among other things our ongoing projects: Gesture and Tangible Prototyping Tool, Intelligent Interactive Virtual Characters, and Narrativised and Embodied Interface. We were really happy for the whole event, and for the great feedback we got for the projects.
I want to specially thank Jennifer Jenson and Suzanne de Castell for their work towards the game research community in Canada.
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| Bart Simon, Bernard Perron, and Guillaume Roux-Girard |
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| Bernard Perron, Espen Aarseth, Guillaume Roux-Girard, Jim Bizzocchi, and Bart Simon, |
Women in Games International – Event
Last Thursday night I went to the Women in Games International event. It was a nice socializing evening. The game developer community in Vancouver is open and friendly, that really values companies that allow creativity, self-motivation from their employees. Big Fish was co-hosting this event (aka Yaletown Fusion Mixer). You could recognize their people by their nice jackets with logo. Folks from the Seattle office were there. Peter did tours to the brand new office, answering as many questions as he could.
I want my NDA next time! :)
Thank you WIGI and Big Fish!!!
KRAZY!
Yesterday KRAZY! exhibition closed at the Vancouver Art Gallery. I apologize to those of you that I’m letting you know too late. It was great.
The exhibition featured comics, manga, anime, and videogames. Several walls were installed to create kind of maze walking in the gallery. I really like the work done for the installations; specially, the anime section where some projectors were aiming skewed in a delightful way.
One of the funniest feelings was having been intimately consuming ‘art’ from my childhood. Those hours in from of a screen from early times are paying off. And those recently too :) For instance, Rick Hunter fighting against the Zentraedi in “Super Dimension Fortress Macross”. Yep, “Robotech”. While you could here someone crying “Akiiiiiiraaaaa” in the back. Then, on another wall something more recent like “Paprika”. Sweet.
Going towards to the gaming part now, Will Wright was the curator. It was explained that the games were selected by their groundbreaking-ness:
- Pac-man
- Super Mario World
- Sid Meier’s Civilization
- Quake
- The Legend of Zelda
- Grand Theft Auto
- The Sims
- Spore
Yes, I noticed that “The Sims” and “Spore” are in the short-list, but it’s undeniable that they’ve marked game history. Although, he could have waited a little bit more for “Spore”.
These games were displayed in original arcade cabinet cocktail type (“Pac-Man”) that people could actually play it, ink-jet prints (“Sid Meir’s”, “Zelda”), other games were running in a console plugged to a monitor (“Super Mario World”) that you could play as well. Several monitors showing excerpt of games. There was a huge projection on wall composed by several by several squares of Quake videos. Like a big collage alive.
Overall KRAZY! was a great exhibition. I’m looking forward to a KRAZY! 2 exhibition that could show other angles of the new media art.
