Author: Jason

Mechwarrior 4 Free

Gaming

Yes, you can get Mechwarrior 4 for Free.

Anyway… almost two years ago I wrote a post about how I would design a Mechwarrior MMO.  Part of this whole release of MW4 for free is that a company called Smith & Tinker bought the Mechwarrior rights three years ago, then last year they got $29 million in funding, which sounds to me like someone is trying to make a game, and given S&T’s other ventures into online stuff an MMO seems likely.  Or perhaps at the very least a Global Agenda style game with MMO elements.

Obviously, I’d love to see a Mechwarrior MMO.  I just hope they don’t screw it up.

Script Frenzy 2010 – Results

Writing

Pretty much as I expected, I didn’t make the 100 pages.  However, I more than doubled my attempt from 2009.  I have, what I consider, 28 very solid pages.  I really enjoyed working on this and am going to continue because I want to see it through.

One thing I’ve heard of other people doing that I have decided to start myself is what is called “Morning Pages”.  Essentially, most people are better at planning in the early part of the day before conflicts and new items can screw up your plans, so you write three pages a day in the early morning to get them done.  Seeing as how these days I tend to get up at 6 A.M. but don’t go to work until 8 A.M. I’ve got time I currently spend reading message boards and watching TV.  Writing would be a better use of my time.

If I had done this throughout April, I might have been able to hit the 100 page mark.  There’s always next year.

Movie Round-Up: April 30th, 2010

Reviews

Furry Vengeance:

I have to admit, since I’m a Brendan Fraser fan, I have a slight inclination to see this film.  But seriously, unless I had a gaggle of kids to entertain, there is just no way I’m paying to see this in the theater.  One day when it shows up on Netflix Instant, I’ll watch it, and it’ll probably be funny as long as I don’t think too hard about what is going on.

A Nightmare on Elm Street:

In 1984, slasher flicks were nothing new.  Jason was making abandoned summer camps unsafe, and Michael was making Halloween a little scarier, but with Wes Craven’s Freddy Krueger even sleeping in your own bed became a place you couldn’t hide.  And since Jason and Michael both got a reboot in recent years, giving Freddy a new start was a no-brainer.  Thanks to 43kixAtlanta, I got to see a screening of the new Nightmare this week.  What they’ve done here is to take the original film, push the characters around a little (just nudges, nothing huge), clean up Freddy’s make up (it looks like burns now and not pizza) and excise most of the one-liners.  The new film is darker and more serious.  Freddy’s origins are altered a little, and I think with good effect.  Overall, the new film is fun and scary.  It lives in the same neighborhood as the original, but under a broken street light.  If you like horror films, and you aren’t so in love with the original that you plan on hating a remake just on principle, I recommend going out to see it.

Games as Art

Gaming

Oh God, I think I’m going to crash the Internet with all these links.  And that’s just from searching for “Ebert” in my Google Reader.  You should probably read this one too.  All of those are worth clicking on and reading.  The comments also.  I think I even made a comment or two in there somewhere.  On the subject at hand, I’m not certain I’m decided.  Though if pressed, I might have to say that games are not art, or at the very least that the majority of games are not art.

One of the nice things about most forms of traditional art is that they don’t change.  The Mona Lisa is The Mona Lisa still.  Casablanca is Casablanca.  The text of Hamlet remains.  That last example begins to get to my line of thinking.  No one would argue that Hamlet is a work of literary art, but individual productions of Hamlet will be heavily debated.  In fact, in the artistic world, a production of Hamlet would be considered performance art, not simply art.

When you go to a museum and look at a painting on the wall, that painting will be exactly the same every time you go to see it.  What changes from viewing to viewing is YOU.  The same can be said for books and films and most of the traditional art forms.  If I were to load up World of Warcraft or Crysis or even a game like Flower (which many people consider to be art) and just watch it, it might be art but it wouldn’t be a game.  If I go to YouTube and watch videos of people playing games, it might be art, the video, and it might be a game for the person who made it, but for me it wouldn’t be a game.

A game is like Schrödinger’s cat, it is a collection of potentials that are, in actual terms, useless until we open the box and see if the cat is alive or dead.  A game isn’t a game until we play it.  To me, it seems that video games are more like sports than they are like paintings or books or movies.  A baseball player might have a beautiful swing, and there may be many artful things in a game of baseball, but I don’t believe that anyone would call a baseball game “art”.  Unlike most art, not only do you change between visits to a game, but the game changes too.  Sure, some games are so simple that they don’t change much at all, but those aren’t usually the games people claim are art.  Saying a video game is a single piece of art is like saying that all the productions of Hamlet are a single piece of art.  A game is ephemeral.  Unless someone video tapes it, you can’t return to the game exactly as it was before, and if you do it through video the subsequent times you return they are movies, which might be art but aren’t games.

As I said, a game isn’t a game until we play it, so the gamer is part of the game since we can’t have one without the other.  Many people bristle at the idea of video games being a sport.  Face it, many people who play video games do so to get away from sports.  (I kid, I kid!) (Not really.)  So perhaps we should stray back towards plays.  From the audience, a play is performance art, a performance of art.  But what is a play for the performers?  Is the act of acting “art” from the perspective of the actor?  Or is the performer the artist? A painting, completed, is art, but is the act of creating the painting art?  I don’t believe it is.  From that view, game developers aren’t creating art, they are creating paints and brushes and easels, production notes and outlines, tools from which art can be created by the gamer.  A game, completed, might be art, but again if you are experiencing a completed game you are probably watching a movie, not playing a game.

All of this talking around in circles leads me to believe that since I find it so hard to define a game as being art there are only two options.  Either the words and terms and methods to define a game as art don’t yet exist or at least are not known to me, or that games are not art but might just be a medium through which art can be created.  In the end, I’m liking that second option better because if games are art that make me an art consumer (or connoisseur if I’m fluffing my ego), but if games are a medium then I am an artist.

Bags of Money

Gaming

I wish I was posting to tell you I won the lottery and would from this point forward be wiping my ass with hundred dollar bills, but I didn’t and I’m not.  Besides, I’d pay someone else to wipe my ass with hundred dollar bills.  Duh!

Anyway… One thing people often complain about in the design of games is the over emphasis on the monsters you fight in an MMO of being “floating bags of experience and loot”.  Seriously.  Think about it.  In a game that is a grinding exp-fest, you track down monsters and then beat them until they break and gift you with progress.  In some games, like WoW, they try to wave a hand over to the side to get you to forget about the bags of exp by hiding them behind quests.  It’s still the same thing though, to the point that when a player enters town and sees a sea of quest icons floating over the heads of NPC, there is often a rush of excitement at all the exp and loot you’ll be earning.  Any time a player focuses too much on the bags, they usually experience a decrease in “fun” while “progress” speeds up.  This leads to many players grinding the bags until they reach the “end” where, I’ve been told, the game really begins.

So, Darren, who has been outspoken in his opinion on $10 and $25 horses has written a little diatribe about how companies view players.  To be honest, for a “for profit” business, players are bags of money, just like the monsters in games are bags of experience.  The trick is for companies to get money out of the bags without the bags ever realizing that they are, in fact, bags of money.  So different companies toe different lines.  In the case of WoW, they’ve made their game “fun” enough that a whole bunch of bags people don’t mind $15 a month being taken from their wallet, and the recent foray into vanity pets and the sparkle pony is them sketching out another line in the sand, see if they can get a little more money from some bags people without losing too many of the bags people that are at their limit with $15 a month.

Obviously, there are many examples of games that have crossed lines and caused players to notice their bag-ness and they leave, and there are many examples of games where despite practically labeling their players as bags of money a segment of their players don’t mind at all (see: Zynga) to great profit.

I don’t really have anything to add to this, I just thought it was an interesting thing to notice.

My turn at the wheel

Dragon*Con

As I said before, I’m helping out with the MMO Track at Dragon*Con this year and part of that is every couple of weeks I post videos on the blog.  This week is my turn, and here is my entry.

Mostly, I point this out because, A) I’d like to drive what little traffic I have over there because every little bit helps, and B) I had a particularly clever turn of phrase in today’s entry.

“And now you MMO, and MMOing is half the battle.”

Sometimes I kill me! Ha!

Movie Round-Up: April 23rd, 2010

Reviews

Oceans:

What would Earth Day be without a documentary about the planet or animals or both?  These movies always look impressive, but not a single one has actually gotten me in the theater to see them.  I’m not exactly sure why.  I like nature.  It just seems odd to spend $10 to watch something I could see on TV.  Is this in 3D?  It probably should be in 3D.  That might get me there, but still unlikely.

The Back-up Plan:

I feel a little bad for Alex O’Loughlin.  He’s featured prominently on the poster, but he didn’t get above the title billing with J.Lo.  Sure, he’s not as big of a super-duper-mega-star, but still, he is the male lead in this romantic comedy.  Which I happened to see thanks to GoFoBo.  So this is a movie about a woman who has decided to go ahead and get pregnant using a sperm donor and within an hour of being inseminated meets the perfect guy.  First she doesn’t tell him, then she does, then they decide to give it a shot, then things don’t work out, then they do, and so on.  You don’t go to these sorts of films for shocking twists and turns, you go for the funny.  And surprisingly I found this movie to be pretty funny.  Also, the most graphic, wince inducing, yet hilarious birthing scene I’ve ever watched.  If the premise of this movie sounds good to you, then it’s probably worth your money to go see it.

The Losers:

It was a busy week, with The Back-up Plan, a movie that doesn’t drop until mid-May, and this one.  (Thanks again GoFoBo!)  Like last week’s Kick-Ass, this film is based on a comic book.  I’ve never read the comic, but I saw the movie and it feels like a comic.  The action is way over the top.  Despite the large amount of violence in the movie it keeps its PG-13 rating by keeping that violence as clean as possible.  That doesn’t really hurt the film, and in fact helps keep it lighter and fun.  All in all, I enjoyed this movie a lot and I’d say it’s worth seeing on the big screen.

Another Slope To Slip On

Gaming

Continuing this week’s theme of these two posts…

Another slope the alarmists warn about is the “now they are selling content that should be given to everyone” argument.  First off, games already have expansions where they charge you $50 for content.  And yeah, while the steed here is half the price of an expansion for probably 1/1000th the content, the steed isn’t required to play the game.  So, the idea that they would just “give” people a sparkly pony is inane.  At best it would be a feature of the next expansion.

I’m actually a fan of cash shop games.  Not because I like buying things, but because I like playing for free.  See, Puzzle Pirates is awesome because I can do everything I want in the game and never pay a single dime to do it, all because someone else is dropping their dimes on doubloons which they sell to me for pieces of eight.  Yes, I do have to play harder to earn the PoE to make that trade, but it also doesn’t cost me any money to play, and I enjoy playing.  Another player is rewarding me for playing more than they are willing to play.

Now, I don’t expect Blizzard to give up their money hats and reduce their subscription rate, but what this has done is show (again) that a subscription game can have a shop that sells vanity items.  Most new games can’t compete with World of Warcraft on a polish and content size level at this point.  Any game with a $15 monthly sub automatically has to compare to WoW, but if a game were to launch that looked interesting with a $4.95 a month subscription and a vanity item cash shop, I’d absolutely be willing to give it a shot and willing to accept that it won’t be at WoW’s level.  I’m paying a third less for it!

And guess what?  All those “free” content updates people say are going to vanish?  They aren’t free!  You pay a monthly fee for them!  The only reason that you get them “free” (really, the word should be “included” but much like using the word “social” to describe games which aren’t, that ship has sailed) is that the subscription fee is making enough profit that they don’t feel a need to charge you extra to cover the development of that small bit of content.  If the game was making less money, you’d get less “free” things.

While we are on the topic of “free” content… if a game releases a completely optional non-impacting piece of “content” like the pets or the sparkle pony of WoW and earns a nice chunk of cash on something that was probably a couple weeks work of a small team at worst (or just a few days of one person at best), it actually allows them to design more “free” content.

As with the post from two days ago, there is a ghost of a slippery slope here, but were aren’t there yet.  Wake me when Blizzard puts gear or a new dungeon in the cash shop.  You know, real content, not vanity items.

Earth Day 2010

Random Thoughts

Reduce, reuse, recycle.

This is the mantra of the efforts to “save the planet”.  Now, while I’m the first to deride people over that particular turn of phrase (I mean, seriously, the planet is not really in danger – the ecosystem humans require to live in is, but until a comet lines us up in its cross hairs the planet is doing just fine), I do actually agree with many of the methods and goals of environmentalism.

I’ve blogged numerous times about reducing junk mail, and I’m about to do it again.  I simply cannot say enough about the program that was called Green Dimes, then Mail Stopper and is now called Precycle.  Back when I first bought my house we were getting a mailbox full of junk nearly every day.  There was so much wasted paper that it was a pain in the ass to bother dragging it to a place that would recycle it.  It seemed like such a no-brainer that better than recycling junk mail was to stop it from coming at all.  Combining the use of this service plus switching over to eBilling for nearly all my bills, I have an empty mailbox three or more days a week.  The junk is just gone.  So, not only do I not have to deal with it coming in, I also don’t feel guilty about throwing it out because I’m too lazy to recycle it.  Win-win.

We’ve switched over almost entirely to drinking water (or Crystal Light which is just water with some powder mixed in), so this means less cans and bottles.  Much like the Precycle above, not having things to recycle is better than recycling.

We also tend to buy in bulk when we can, which reduces the amount of packing materials.  Combined with the stopping of junk mail, I almost feel ripped off paying for weekly trash service because we only cart the can to the street once a month (more often if it’s stinky).  I say almost because driving to a dump and paying per bag ends up costing about the same, and since a few dozen of my neighbors use the same trash service (and more often than us) I wouldn’t be saving anything by cancelling our curb pickup.

Over the winter, the wife an I experimented with a space heater.  Rather than heat up the whole house we kept the thermostat relatively low and then just heated up the room we were in.  It worked out fairly well and we managed to save a little money.  It’s a plan we are going to try this summer as well with the use of fans.  Though while a heater is a heater, a fan isn’t an air-conditioner, so we may be met with limited success.

All in all, I really do feel like I’m doing my part.  I encourage everyone to take a look at their lives and see where they can make changes, not just for “the planet” but for themselves and their own pocket books.  Saving the environment is good.  Saving money is great.  When you can do both at the same time, that’s awesome.

The Passing

Gaming

I haven’t been playing much Left 4 Dead or Left 4 Dead 2 lately, but that is about to change.  Tomorrow, Valve is releasing a new add-on called “The Passing” for Left 4 Dead 2.

The story behind this is you are playing the usual 4 people from Left 4 Dead 2, but the original Left 4 Dead gang shows up.  Three of them alive and one of them… well, not so alive.  The dead one is part of the mystery we’ll learn tomorrow.  This add-on also offers a bunch of new game play elements and achievements, all of which looks fantastic and fun.

If all the stories are to be believed, Left 4 Dead will be getting an add-on itself that will let players play out the sacrifice of the fallen survivor, and it will be following in some measure of Valve Time.

Sadly, I won’t be able to play tomorrow as I have plans, but I’m working hard to clear my schedule for the weekend.  Feel like playing with me?  My Gamertag is Jhaer.