Feedback Loop: Long Live the Shooter, the Shooter is Dead

The dispatches from E3 seem to indicate that the shooter remains the same. How long can its dominance last? What comes next?

Is it High Noon for shooters? In his latest post on Brainy Gamer, Michael Abbott seems to think so. He compares the current generation of shooter games to Westerns in 1959, the last year before they started to disappear.

From Rockband to Monsters and Why These Devs are Happier for It

Bryn Bennett and Steven Kimura started working in the videogame industry around 1998 and have a history with notable companies (Irrational, Harmonix) and big games (Bioshock, Rockband). Now, more than 10 years later they’ve struck out on their own as an independent studio called Eerie Canal with their first new project: Dreadline. Joined by “sound ...

Size Does Matter: What “Indie” Really Means in Videogames

In June of 1992 the Journal of Human Evolution published an article by R.I.M Dunbar entitled, “Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates.” Jargon-filled but widely cited, the scholarship established what is now known as Dunbar’s Number: the amount of people on average that a person can maintain strong social relationships with. ...

Feedback Loop: Many choices, or none, make a game.

Is just one choice all it takes to turn a novel into a video game? Before you say yes, consider when a game is created out of many choices and when we are left with none.

Richard Eisenbeis looks at Katawa Shoujo in an April 24 Kotaku article. Eisenbeis holds up the dating sim/visual novel as proof that one choice is all it takes to turn a novel into a game. It is a shallow analysis and the implication that one can stick a choice in a novel and have a game is just false.

If we step away from the screen with only Eisenbeis’s assertion, we lose out on understanding what developers have to do to take a story and turn it interactive.

Creating a good game means understanding the times when a million choices create an interactive work and the instances where no choices are required.

Fixing Reviews: The Lying Score

Review scores are tricky; they are not for everybody. For a scoring system to have any worth, it must have consistency. Not everybody is ready for that. You can’t call a game a master-piece only to call it a disappointment at the end of the year. Review scores must also be honest and, believe it or not, even less people are ready for that. Here, I’m not talking about the flawed notion some outlets have that the average between 0 and 10 is 8. That’s just being mathematically deprived. Instead, I’m talking about Metacritic, Amazon, App Stores and whatever other place that aggregates scores from users in order to present a single information: that the cosmos has voted and decided that game X is a 8.6 out of 10.

Guess what? They are all lying.

They are lying because they encourage users to lie in their reviews. Yes, that means the liar is ultimately you, Mr. User.

Why The Tomb Raider Franchise Isn’t Beyond Saving

After the disappointing sales of Tomb Raider Underworld, the Crystal Dynamics team realized that Lara Croft was in trouble. They took a hard look at the video game landscape and came to the conclusion that they needed to re-work and re-imagine every aspect of the franchise or risk becoming irrelevant. The developers chose to destroy ...

Video Game Characters Will Be Running Amok In Milwaukee Today

If you live in Wisconsin and have a Bomberman costume lying in your closet, then you are in for a treat. In an attempt to break the world record set by 376 people in London in 2009, Buyseasons Inc is assembling the largest collection of people gathered in video game costumes ever. The Chicago Tribune ...

Whoever wrote the ending to Red Dead Redemption is one dumb cowpoke

In which Rockstar chooses to whistle Dixie. I finished Red Dead Redemption and it was a fairly fun game. Despite excessive horse riding, I enjoyed myself. Then I got to the end and I never wanted anything to do with the game again. This is why. Below are spoilers, so if you intend to play ...

Dead Space 2 and the value of multiple simultaneous perspectives

By integrating choice and multiple user-controlled view-points into the game, Dead Space 2 provides a refreshing alternative to traditional video game cutscenes. In the extraordinarily crowded field of video games, many seek attention through cutscenes of increasing complexity or realism. I found it somewhat ironic then that Dead Space’s particular unique treatment of cutscenes was ...