Last Wednesday, we were lucky enough to have Eric Wills of the computer science department come and talk about the fascinating world of computer graphics. During his talk, Eric broke down bloom lighting.

See how the light from the window seems to melt onto the surrounding frame? That bright blue is the bloom.

It was interesting to see how the algorithm records pixel data but does it in a non-linear fashion so that we humans cannot detect patterns which would make the lighting effect seem forged.

Eric also had some company along for the ride. Shelby Wills, a producer at Pipeworks studio, and their son Finley. Shelby talked about her role as a producer in the changing landscape of the video-game industry. Personally, it was fascinating to hear about how consoles are not the way of the future, and how other game platforms such as mobile phones and the web are taking charge.

Is this the future of the video game industry?

Even after Eric, Shelby, and Finley departed, the Think.Play crew hung out and digested topics of the night for another hour or so. Now that is a sign of a great event.

In other news, Retro Night was last night! Unfortunately, I did not make it, but there should be a post going up sometime to detail all the wonders of the 8-bit era gaming session. Until next time.

Hello all. Thank you all for the patience in waiting for new content on the blog. This term has been a busy one! Luckily for Think.Play, it has been a term filled with successful events and great dialogue. What I want to do in this post is recap this term’s happenings. Let’s jump right in.

Week 1 – Fight Night

We kicked off the term with a few of our favorite fighting games: Guilty Gear, Dragonball Z: Budokai 3, and Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Guilty Gear and Budokai 3 were open play, while Smash Bros. was the stage for tournament style fighting. Jacob took the gold with Ness in the Smash tournament. Fun times were had, and many butts were kicked.

Week 2 – Gentrification, Gender, and Dance Central with Bryce Peake

Bryce Peak, Ph.D. candidate in UO’s School of Journalism and Communication came to dance the night away with Dance Central. Not really, but a lot of dancing happened that evening. Bryce talked with us about how Dance Central transformed hip-hop music to be ‘safe’ for its target audience (white domesticity). Because Bryce’s background is in music, he gave a detailed breakdown of a few songs by comparing the structure of the original version to the Dance Central version, and boy were the results interesting!

Week 3 – Rock Band Night

Classic fun was had by all when Eder busted out Rock Band. It was really fun hearing everyone take a shot at singing. That is all.

Week 4 – Fandom and Harry Potter/Pottermore with Mara Williams

Mara Williams led a discussion on fandom in Harry Potter, and how that fandom was channeled into a new game called Pottermore. This was a fantastically interesting talk for me personally because I see fandom everywhere, and I am even a participant of it, but when it comes to understanding it, fandom is enigmatic to me. Delving into the very real example of Harry Potter fandom and how it sparked the creation of an online game was great times.

Week 5 – Field Trip: Level Up Arcade

Week 5 will forever be known as the greatest idea of all time. Why wouldn’t it be fun to go to an arcade and play pinball? Why wouldn’t it be fun to pay 4 quarters to wield giant light-guns and shot dinosaurs like they are NOTHING? These questions are ridiculous, because everyone thought it would be fun, and it was. Four words people: Need. More. Field. Trips.

Week 6 – A Primer on Starcraft II Strategy and Tactics with Chris Thomson

Last week Chris sat down and scratched the surface of the complex world of Starcraft II. Seriously, there was so much covered, and I feel like I would be able give a regular player a decent game. Just talking about the many different tactics you need to employ to not get blown out immediately was mind-boggling. Remember kids, scout the enemy right away, and always remember to hf (Starcraft lingo for have fun).

Week 7 – Co-op Night

Co-op Night was just last night, and went well. Minecraft on the Xbox 360 is, in my opinion, generally inferior to the PC version for many reasons which I will not go over here, but being able to play with up to 4 players split-screen is some classic fun that translates well to the Minecraft experience. We had one person in the mines digging for minerals, one person setting up farmland for harvest, one person gathering materials topside, and our last compatriot building sand castles. Sin and Punishment made an appearance, while New Super Mario Bros. Wii rounded out the night. That game is hilarious to play with four people because you never know if it will be a koopa that is going to kill you, or a teammate.

That has been the term so far, and it’s easy to see that things are going great. Feel free to post some comments of your favorite moments from the term, and we can all reflect back. Join us next Wednesday (5/23) at 7pm in Knight 101 where Eric Wills of the computer science department will be talking about bloom lighting in modern games.

Hello everyone! I am writing today to inform you all of some good news; I have finished cutting up another audio file for your listening pleasure. Cut up is a term I like to throw around I guess because this is still a beast of an audio file weighing in at around 40 minutes long. Inside, you will hear about the wonders of the game industry and its financial inner workings.

I also want to note that very soon, I will be implementing a rotating system for the audio on the blog. I’ll try and keep the most recent audio up for streaming, but as new talks are recorded and uploaded, they will take priority for streaming. Don’t fret though! What I will do is change the older streams to a download link, so you can still listen to the older discussions. Now, without further ado, here is the audio.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/39829927″ iframe=”true” /]

P.S.

Since finals week is essentially upon us, I want to wish everyone a restful spring break! See you all in a few weeks.

Hey All, I just finished splicing out the crap portions of the audio recording of Iris’ talk that happened way back in August. You may be thinking, “Ok, that’s great Jon, but that talk is also really freaking old. Where are all the recordings of more recent talks?”

I have some good news:

They’re coming.

Until then, feast your ears on the following audio tracks. The first one is an extended conversation about graphics and how they connect (or don’t) to the emotions that are felt while playing games, and whether or not graphics help immerse us in games. We finish up that recording with some talk of Super Meat Boy. Some of it is really funny if you’ve ever played the game. The second file is the actual talk that Iris gave about the existential gamer and Minecraft. Enjoy.

This is before the talk:
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/36801420″ iframe=”true” /]

This is the actual talk:
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/36802068″ iframe=”true” /]

Winter term is in full swing, and we’re back to the nasty business of playing video games. Somebody has got to do it! (Oh also: it’s raining in Eugene, the kind of rain that feels like it will never stop.)

We gathered for our first meeting of the term last Wednesday, Jan. 18th, to talk about what we played over the break. Predictably, there was a good bit of Skyrim played, as well as some Skyward Sword and Minecraft. Secret of Mana got an unexpected mention (the phrase “refined liquid joy” may have been deployed), as well as (and I find this truly astonishing) a playthrough of the Metal Gear series.

Your pixels. Give me them.

As conversation continued, we turned our focus to different concepts and aspects of user interface, specifically using Skyrim and Skyward Sword as focal points. User interface (UI) is sometimes thought of as a primarily graphic concept. Often when the term is used, what is actually being discussed is the Graphic User Interface (GUI). Examining GUIs is great, but it tends to exclude other important UI elements such as control hardware, button mapping, audio cues, & etc. My thesis in the discussion basically revolved around the position that privileging one element over another (whether by a designer or a user) should be done only with great care and understanding of how all the elements of UI function in tandem. The safest, quickest way to approach UI is to pay attention to each element.

At its heart, UI is about communication between the game and the player. (For now we’ll leave aside the more philosophical position that UI situates communication between designers and players.) UI dictates the ways in which a player can communicate with a game, and the ways in which a game communicates with a player. In this formulation, UI includes visuals (which can be further divided into diegetic (images that represent objects that exist within the game world) and non-diegetic (everything else: text, status bars, menus, etc.)), controller hardware (keyboard, Dualshock, Kinect sensor, etc.), controller software (the program(s) that handle instructions received from and sent to the controller. Controller software includes the assignment of a game function (jump, fire, pause) to a button, key, movement, or voice command, and may exist to a greater or lesser degree in both the OS/firmware layer and the software of the game itself, depending on the context.), and game audio (which can be divided into diegetic and non-diegetic categories similar to visuals).

Would you like to see multiple pictures of the controllers that you're holding?

Each of these elements is an avenue of communication between the player and the game. The strength or weakness of a particular UI hinges on whether or not it effectively communicates with the player in a manner appropriate to the specific game in question. And so we looked at Skyrim and Skyward Sword, two functionally similar games with drastically different approaches to UI. In Skyward Sword, it’s difficult to do anything without the game stopping to tell you, “Hey, you just did something!” In Skyrim, it’s totally possible to be debilitatingly sick without realizing it, and without any idea how to check if, at any given moment, you are or are not feeling well. These examples are extremes, and obviously cases in which the UI does a poor job of communicating with the player. There are, of course, many other examples of extremes in design philosophy here. Playing the two games side-by-side was hugely instructive.

Here, you get a compass. Everything else is buried in unsortable menus.

Next meeting is Wednesday, 1/25, 7p-9p, location TBA. Stay tuned here or on our Facebook page for details as soon as they’re available.

Hey all! Before I start, I wanted to thank everyone who came out last Wednesday to good old Knight Library 41 for a night of thinking and playing. I am very happy with the the way the night unfolded. Much was said about good game design, and a surprising amount was discussed about game development concepts.

That is what my portion of the night was devoted to: Game development. Specifically, I wanted to pound the point home that video games are simply the combination of assets and code. I was worried that my “talk” was going to turn into some sort of terrible lecture on the basics of computer program design, but I was proven very wrong as the night progressed by everyone’s zealous input on everything from spawning algorithms to the game cycle.

At the conclusion of what I like to call the development portion of the evening, we decided to break into play. Super Meat Boy was up, the idea being that we would all think about design while we were playing; What is good design, what feels good/bad, ect. I figured SMB was a perfect candidate for good design because the controls are so tight and the game is runs so smooth. Afterwards, we played VVVVVV  and Limbo. Much was said about the super-interesting art style of Limbo; My favorite was the discussion of the very narrow range of focus that gives Limbo that old time movie feel.

Plenty of platformer goodness to go around!

A great night was had by all. If anyone wants to talk more about game development, design, or even a game idea, please leave a comment and I would love hear from you. Oh, and did I mention we had some tasty cup cakes at our meeting? Please join us tomorrow at 7pm in Knight 41 as Iris takes us to the cuboid world of Minecraft to craft items, mines, and lively discussion.

Gaijin Games’ superb Bit.Trip series of games has established itself as a pixelated chip-tuned pillar of the indie universe. Splitting time between the PC and Wii platforms, Bit.Trip reminds us that good design makes good games with or without photorealistic graphics, complex artificial intelligence, complicated control schemes, and many other of the systems that we may associate with modern video games.

Don't even trip: rainbow in full effect

Gaijin programmer Mike Gonzales recently wrote an interesting post about prototyping gameplay for the upcoming Bit.Trip Runner2. Mike specifically writes about the concept of the state machine and its usefulness (or lack thereof) with regard to different game design concepts. From the post:

For those interested in gameplay mechanics (and don’t already have a degree in Computer Science), a state graph like above is a way to formally codify behaviors in such a way that it is easy to add lots of them without having them stomp all over each other or otherwise get messy.

Mike’s short explanation is helpful, and the whiteboard picture is fascinating. It still leaves some concepts unexplained: behaviors, frames, contextual legibility, moveset, qualitative description, and so forth. It’s not quite entry-level stuff, but very much worth a read.

Michael O’Reilly (often known by the handle Kayin) has released the source code of his seminal masocore masterpiece I Wanna Be The Guy. Check this post in which he explains the poor state of the code, gives a few guidelines for use, and provides a link to the download.

Yeah, but where do you keep the BIG bosses?

Requirements for use are based in common sense, including:

• You may release variants/rom hacks THAT ARE PROPERLY LABELED.
• You may yank out engines and code and use them freely.
• You may take credit for any work you do, just exercise good taste. Do not do a few changes to IWBTG and act like it’s your own work. If you use and borrow code, just credit me for that — the rest of the work is clearly yours though.
• You, as a COMMUNITY, may (and should) try and band together to fix up the main game for a new, bugfixed release.

Very cool! Of course, you can find a love letter to IWBTG on our Game Now page. Coders, get tinkering!

OK, here’s the thing: I’m WAY behind deadline on TWO (!) posts. I’m working on write-ups to go along with our two most recent events: War Games and Sports Culture (from 10/19), and Manufacturing Horror (which was on 10/25). I led the discussion for the former, so that’s pretty straightforward; and Anthony Hayt, who presented the latter, was kind enough to send along the text of his talk, which makes my job considerably easier.

So now I have to tell you why I’ll remain behind on my deadline. I’m currently in Portland for the NWACC roundtable, and yes folks I managed to leave the necessary critical texts at the office. Virilio’s War and Cinema, Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, and a handful of others are sitting quietly, waiting to be mined for quotations and citations to describe and build on the discussions we had so recently. . . and they’re going to wait a little longer.

I'd like to write a blog post, but I have an after-show party to attend.

BUT still here we are, and there are still interesting things happening! ETC Press just released the first issue of its new journal, Well Played. Obligatory (and awesome) text from website here: “The Well Played Journal is a forum for in-depth close readings of video games that parse out the various meanings to be found in the experience of playing a game.” The essays in this inaugural issue look great, and the whole thing is freely available online. Just click the download button to crack open a giant PDF!

While we’re talking about ETC Press, take a moment to look at the other awesome (free) things they’ve published. The bottom line is that anyone interested in Game Studies should pay close attention to the publications coming from ETC.

Finally, we’ll see you at our NEXT EVENT: Development Basics for Non-Developers, Wednesday Nov. 9th, 6p-8p, Knight Library rm. 41. Our own Jon Paull is leading the discussion, you and I are playing the games, it’s going to be stupendous. I’m not yet sure what we’ll be playing, but if it’s a Soul Calibur game and I’m playing Voldo, don’t even bother picking up the controller.

My, what an interesting hat!

More to come!

It’s official. Think.Play’s first event of the academic year went off without a hitch and was fantastic. Plenty of people showed up to watch the game on the big screen in the LLC, and many people who did also decided to throw it down in a Smash Bros. game or show their gun-slinging skills in Call of Duty: Black Ops. Here are some pictures that were snapped from a phone onsite as evidence of our success.

The view from outside. COD on the left, Smash on the right.

Look at all those people!

There was also a subtle undercurrent of Minecraft present, as played on a laptop. I have a feeling Minecraft will be a constant presence as the year moves forward. There was even a group of rag-tag freedom fighters who were trying formulate a feasible way to do a U of O  Minecraft server (please share your thoughts as well). Wouldn’t that be just awesome? Moving on from the large and in charge Gaming at the U of O, we’ve got an event tentatively slated for week 3. Once we firm up the time and place, we’ll let you all know when and where to come for more gaming exploration and fun-time merriment. Until next time folks!