The personal blog 2-Bit Wasteland takes a sometimes irreverent, sometimes idealized look at the grunts of gaming's enemy forces. They're different that a boss and his motivation exists in a game either "to build sympathy for the protagonist and encourage the player to rally behind him," or "to flesh out the enemy and make him a more three dimensional character, often furthering the player's understanding of the hero's ordeal."

Waves of grunts? A different story. Or non-story. 2-Bit Wasteland seems to indicate they represent an opportunity - more characters through which a game may extend the narrative. In many games, I could see how integrating everyone into the story would make it prohibitively dense. But if only for the humor, let us consider what might motivate anonymous, ubiquitous cannon fodder like the goomba.

The Life of a Goomba: A Grunt's Motivation? [2-Bit Wasteland, Dec. 18]
This raises a lot of questions, for example why are Goombas working for Bowser? Do they simply obey out of fear? Does Bowser have some kind of mind control? Or does he offer a great BUPA health insurance plan with benefits? Here lies the major flaw with games today: bog standard enemies have no motivation for their actions, and players disregard this flaw as if it's ok. Perhaps it seems trivial to consider this when talking about Super Mario Bros but the fact is very few games have evolved from this extremely basic premise. If you stop to actually think about it does anyone else consider that Mario might be the bad guy? Almost every single creature in several different worlds seems to pit themselves against Mario and put their lives on the line. Nobody stops to deliberate that he might be the evil one. Just because Bowser looks a bit nasty everyone thinks he's a baddie. Maybe he was just trying to overthrow the monarchy, Perhaps Peach raised the taxes too far. Perhaps she sent all the Koopa peasants to live in the lava world whilst she got the nice castle off their hard working backs. Doesn't seem so unreasonable now does it? Perhaps Bowser was a freedom fighter and maybe Mario was a puppet knight of the monarchy who mercilessly went world to world slaughtering all who passed him. Maybe not, the point is we don't know.

Some people just never admit when they're in the wrong

There are games that do this right, Gears of War pits you against the fearsome Locust race who rise from beneath the earth to lay waste to humanity. The genius of this race is that whilst you don't agree with their motivation you can understand it. Humanity landed and ravaged the surface of their planet and then destroyed a large portion of their species when they emerged from beneath. Furthermore the race design paints them as some giant mutated insects - they all obey a "Queen" and think as a single mind. In a twist the bosses in Gears tend to have less motivation and are more often larger creatures often who The Locust cant control themselves e.g. The Berserker, a blind charging beast, who thinks of nothing else other than tearing you limb from limb. The genius of this and Gear's story is that it gives you just enough information leaving the player to speculate. This becomes particularly effective in the 'Sires' section of the second game. So why don't other games do it? Laziness? Probably not, it's more likely the design and time constraints of game creation naturally result in shortcomings such as these.

Worth note is Shadow of the Colossus which pits the player against large roaming beasts that traverse the land. The brilliance of these creatures is that they pose no direct threat to you and are simply there for you to kill for your own selfish deeds. Its a unique dynamic where the player's motivation takes a back seat as Wanderer destroys these creatures to restore life to his love. The complete lack of 'grunt' enemies gives the game a sparse feel which results in a lonely journey that is accompanied with a constant feeling of dread. A brilliance not paralleled in any game since. Anyway back to the task in hand.

Evolution is required. No longer can we face off against meaningless enemies without reason. And I know games are fundamentally about the gameplay and that is the most important factor but I feel insulted by constantly being fed character development that is surpassed in every conceivable way by The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Imagine a game where every enemy had an agenda, a back story, where no two were the same, perhaps they have a family. What if you came across a Goomba with a wife and kids? Would that make you think twice before so carelessly jumping on their head and crushing their skull into the pavement?

- 2-Bit Wasteland

Weekend Reader is Kotaku's look at the critical thinking in, and of video games. It appears Saturdays at noon. Please take the time to read the full article cited before getting involved in the debate here.

The blog One Dimensional Man deconstructs this kind of design, and comes up with another illusion - the illusion that the game isn't linear, and how the stage may be skillfully set for that. "Pseudo non-linearity," is the term the writer coins, and an expert example of it can be found in the opening sequences of Half-Life 2.

I agree that hamfisted mechanisms such as invisible walls sort of break the third wall, and at minimum are things working against immersion. But I'm not sure I ever felt that my freedom to explore anywhere in an FPS was part of the bargain in the first place. Hell, it's not completely part of the bargain in an open world RPG like Fallout 3. In Grayditch, an entire town, only a few buildings have doors that may be opened. The others have the kind of locked facades the writer calls a design flaw.

But we can't have everything. The key for a designer is knowing what we can have, and then how to discourage or prevent us from needlessly pursuing what we can't.

Freedom Is Dead, And Why It Doesn't Matter
[One Dimensional Man, Dec. 17, 2009]

The introduction to Half-Life 2 is a particularly useful archetype. The player (as Gordon Freeman), finds themselves trapped in the dystopian City 17, a living and breathing hell house of fascistic undertones (and a not so subtle reference to the dissolution of the Jewish ghettos in Nazi Germany). After a brief encounter with an old friend (Barney, undercover as one of the faceless Combines) it soon becomes clear that the mission is one of escape. As Gordon Freeman makes his way around the spatially imposing City 17, navigating its various alleys, back roads, and crumbling apartments, the sense of a genuine, living and breathing world is certainly palpable. Other ‘evacuees' offer small talk, ‘Combine' guardsman patrol the streets, while sinister public service announcements play on giant, dominating screens. The world conveys a sense of it pre-existing the player's arrival there, which is really, for all titles that strive for immersion, one of the apogees of virtual design.

What one may not be consciously aware of however as they navigate through this dystopian sprawl is that Gordon's escape route is quite immaculately linear; an effective straight line in the figurative sense. And yet one could be entirely forgiven for thinking this virtual City as fully, spatially unfastened, naked to the whims of electronic exploration.

This is due to the creative design principle of pseudo-nonlinearity.

City 17 employs several techniques to psychologically re-orientate the player in this way, all operating generally around this one principle. Perhaps most psychologically effective, are the Combine guardsman who ‘dynamically' operate to cordon off certain parts of City 17's various stairwells and pathways as Gordon attempts his escape. They are dynamic in the sense that they allow for a passing glimpse of the virtual world outside the player's immediate field of view, before finally forcing them back en-route (often by way of a hard whack from an electro-truncheon) to be left with only the tantalizing suggestion planted into their own imagination; that of a fluid world that only marginally pre-empts subjectivity. Simultaneously, a colossal barrier to immersion is shattered as the familiar constrictive sense of the ‘developer behind the curtain' ruthlessly chopping and cutting parts of the world from view is countered by effectively showing the world behind that curtain – if only briefly. This is sufficient however, as in the process an illusion of freedom, or rather of non-linearity, is actively cultivated in the player's mind; the world becomes actualized, feels more three dimensional, as the artificial barriers to exploration are, in turn, naturalized, effectively reshaped into actors of the story operating against the player. In the process, they are absolved of their essential artifice as agents of linearity.

Pseudo-nonlinearity may also be achieved without the aid of such dynamic tools (which, it is worth stating, cannot always be relied upon – owing to the context of plot or narrative) and this is certainly a more common approach to environmental design that one finds. In practice, the fundamentals remain largely unchanged as the principle barrier to exploration must still undergo the same process of naturalization; that is, it must be configured so as to maintain consonance to the inherited semiotic array of both narrative and environment. For instance, in introducing an obstruction into a particular environment, the environment must also be able to passively disclose the ‘story' of why that obstruction is present there. The closer fidelity is able to be maintained between the obstruction to individual progression and the dynamic motivation to progress (i.e. the narrative) the greater the linearity ‘deficit' is reduced. To use a common example from modern FPS design: a wrecked car or coach laying across a road or landscape forces the player onto a different path, effectively manipulating them into the appropriate, pre-determined direction. While this form of static obstruction may appear a rather brash imposition and unconscionable artifice, this hinges upon how effectively it is naturalized in respect to its narrative and environmental arrays. By ensuring that it conforms to the animus of these two factors, its symbolic charge as both artifice and bearer of linearity can be effectively neutralized.

To put it simply, the narrative should, either directly or indirectly, be able account for why the obstruction is there, while the environment (by means of inference) discloses how it got there.

These two environmental operators (static and dynamic) form the basis of environmental design from the principle of pseudo non-linearity. By deploying them, developers are able to mitigate the lingering problems associated with this shift toward a narrowing of exploration in favour of greater control. Of course, the ever-critical gamer will often be able to penetrate the façade, and readily deduce the reality of linearity on display. However, awareness, or pre-awareness should not detract from the overall effect, which like a magic trick, is able to retain much of its prestige despite knowledge of this basic deception.

- One Dimensional Man

Weekend Reader is Kotaku's look at the critical thinking in, and of video games. It appears Saturdays at noon. Please take the time to read the full article cited before getting involved in the debate here.

Perruchon didn't own a PS3 until the cheaper and slimmer model hit and had been spending the last few years playing his Xbox 360. The PS3 reminded him how much he liked the DualShock design, which inspired this table.

No word whether this will actually go into production, Perruchon's DualShock table uses controllers to buttress glass surfaces. The design is for the black DualShock and the white one. Another concept image below.

Table basse design Sony dualshock ... [Stephane Perruchon via Born Rich]

From a design perspective, Coruscant is a planet with zero percent terrain, which poses its own challenge. The city also has an enormous vertical dimension to incorporate, with skyscrapers soaring overhead, and unruly, bombed-out subterranean areas underneath.

The Making of Corsuscant [swtor.com]

In Seattle, last month, I talked to Mac Walters about this. He's writing next year's Mass Effect 2 from BioWare. The studio he works for is known for telling long, detailed stories through its video games. The Mass Effect and Jade Empire, to name a pair of recent releases, are crammed with optional, explanatory text. The games' characters are often ready to provide richer detail about their lives, their tribes, or their home planets than the plot requires.

"A lot of the reason that stuff is in there is because we have players who want to know everything and love that," Walters said. He believes that the details BioWare provide bring some of their players back to "the days they picked up their Dungeons and Dragons [source]books and read about every character in there."

That deep level of extra narrative detail may be a BioWare signature, but it's not a BioWare exclusive.

Consider this sampling of late 2009 games: If you find hidden treasures in Naughty Dog's Uncharted 2, you'll be prompted to press a button to learn background information about them. Snoop through the spaceship Ishimura in EA's Dead Space Extraction and you can find text and audio logs that elaborate on the events that preceded your arrival. Rocksteady's Batman: Arkham Asylum overflows with dozens of discoverable recordings of its colorful secondary characters revealing their deranged states of mind.

It is so common for games to provide all these extra details that I had begun to look at Fumito Ueda as the most unusual of game creators.

The Sony developer's games, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, explain almost nothing. Their heroes are ciphers, their side-characters almost mute. They include no scrolls, no tablets and no scannable objects.

They let you wonder. Or, to put it another way, Ueda's games seldom explain anything.

I talked to Ueda about the propensity of other developers to include a lot of background detail. They do it differently than you, I said. They explain the backgrounds of every character and every sword.

"But I think what it's trying to achieve is the same goal [as me,]" Ueda said. "I think having information about the sword or the character history is trying to add realism to the game as much as possible. And that's just one method of doing it, to have text and characters speaking. But that's not the way I chose to go with my games. I'm focusing on realism of the image itself." His realism, as he put in the context of developing his team's next game, The Last Guardian, comes from a style of graphics and animation that can convey emotion and a sense of presence in an imaginary world.

Back in Seattle earlier in the month, Walters from BioWare had advocated a sense of mystery but explained the challenges of not explaining things. "It's always a balancing act between what can be mysterious and what can't be," he said. "If it's something the player has to know, we need to find a way to make sure a player knows it. Sometimes that even involves repetition because, if the player misses it, then they're just confused and frustrated. But there are things we can sort of leave hanging. That's something I'm personally a fan of. If I see it in my work or the writer's work, I'm fine with leaving it in there. As long as we resolve it at some point or there's a plan to resolve it at some point."

Explain the key stuff, he said. Leave the rest of it optional.

Pulsipher analogizes video games to chess. Not only do the masters play a great deal of it, they study it. When the game became too much work, Pulsipher gave it up.

I felt the same way when I lost momentum in Batman: Arkham Asylum. There was something I wasn't getting about the Bane fight, sure, and realizing I'd have to study, wait for a FAQ or just trial-and-error it for another hour was so unappealing I put the controller down. And more than that, I resented knowing that I was worse at, or poorly prepared for, a brawling game challenge that most gamers could tackle in their sleep.

In these excerpts, Pulsipher argues that game development should move in a direction of inclusive accommodation. That rather than build titles that are either/or, core or casual, innovations that manage one's state in a game would allow more skilled gamers the challenges and fulfillment they seek, while allowing players less invested in that to still experience the title and its story.

Are Games Too Much Like Work? [Gamasutra, Sept. 4, 2009.]

Movies that resemble video games are often panned by film critics, but recently the well-known critic Roger Ebert said, about the movie Terminator Salvation, "It gives you all the pleasure of a video game without the bother of having to play it." (He gave it three stars out of four, quite a bit better than the Metacritic average — this was not a criticism.)

Is a future of video games actually movies like this? Or can we enable video games to challenge those who like to be challenged, but accommodate those who just want to ride along?

This requires us to find some way to either remove the disadvantage of failure from the game, or make failure less likely.

[...] Games can do something like Photoshop and 3ds Max: Let a player hit the "undo" key (usually Control-Z) when he gets in trouble or fails, and go back a few actions, or a minute, or five minutes, whatever interval he chooses, to resume the game at a point before the failure.

Yes, it'll take a lot of computing power. Initially, the "constant undo" capability might extend back only to the second-newest save. Nonetheless, if a game can record a movie of everything that is happening, as some games can, a player should be able to, in effect, rewind that movie to where you want to restart. And we've removed some of the work.

"Undo" will help reduce the tedium of game playing, but doesn't do anything for the people who just aren't interested in being strongly challenged by a game. For them we need an "autopilot" mode — like Nintendo's upcoming Demo Play feature.

[...] So we remove work from games, we remove "failure" from games. The hardcore will be disgusted at such wimpiness, but we've been working toward this in video games for decades, why not finish what we started? After all, they're games, not tests of manhood (or womanhood).
- Lewis Pulsipher

Weekend Reader is Kotaku's look at the critical thinking in, and of video games. It appears Saturdays at noon. Please take the time to read the full article cited before getting involved in the debate here.

It was in 1948 when Steve Kordek revolutionized pinball. Asked to design a new pinball at the last minute for the upcoming pinball trade show, Kordek decided to add flippers to his design. Competitors were using six, he decided to reduce the number to two, and amp up the power.

It was a decision based on minimalism, both in design and costs. Its impact changed the face of pinball permanently. He went on to introduce both drop targets and multiballs to pinballing.

Kordek, an outsider to the industry when he walked into his first job to literally seek shelter from the rain, says that the secret to designing a good game is to attract the player. Not the other way round.

In other words anticipate, instead of create, your audience.

It's a surprisingly simple notion that Nintendo has been tapping into recently with the advent of the Wii and it's TV-remote like controller as well as games like Wii Fit and perhaps the recently announced Vitality sensor.

Chicago's 98-year-old pinball wizard has the magic touch for game design [Chicago Tribune, thanks Kevin]

Held by German firm International Forum Design, WiiSpray was one of 377 finalists in the prestigious awards, from a total 1,368 entires coming in from 24 countries. So for it to win one (it picked up a "product interface" gong) was pretty damn impressive!

So to WiiSpray's creators, Martin Lihs and Frank Matuse: congratulations! Maybe the award is enough to convince somebody at Sega tha ta Jet Set Radio remake would be a good idea.

To see what WiiSpray looks like in action, you can watch the below vid.

» Wii Spray honered with iF design award [WiiSpray, via GameSpot]

On the Mass Effect forums, Christina Norman, lead system designer, said that Insanity difficulty was made unlockable, because it was so difficult a player needed the experience of already playing through the game in order to complete it.

If we give access to insanity on the first playthrough, we need to show that it is possible to beat the game with all classes without any bonuses from achievements. We can't release a difficulty level where it's impossible to complete.

Effectively this means insanity would need to be easier. If we can assume you've already done a playthrough, we can assume you've acquired some bonuses, in addition to getting the experience of beating it on a lower difficulty level which will help you beat it on insanity.

So for ME1 at least, we were able to make Insanity harder because we limited it to people who'd already completed a playthrough.

So, what about the top difficulty level for Mass Effect 2? Norman said the team is considering "additional dimensions" to the difficulty system in Mass Effect 2, details that will make the game harder in the sense that it is more challenging, not simply "tougher."

We want insanity to feel like a smart experience, where you don't die because a rocket hits you and you're one-shot killed. You die because you face an overwhelming, deadly, force. You play extremely well, but not well enough, and on a subsequent try you're able to be victorious because you play better.

Once Bioware has its difficulty levels built out, then they will consider whether the top difficulty should be an unlockable. Norman said that decision has not been made yet. She is "totally open" to having insanity available from the get-go, "unless it means we have to make it 'easier'.

Ultimately if I have to choose between those options, I will choose a harder insanity difficulty, because I believe that's what's important to our players. Overall insanity in ME2 will be harder than ME1. That's a heads up for everyone! Beating insanity on ME2 is going to be a real "achievement", a badge of honor, get ready.

Regardless of how you feel about unlockable difficulty, Norman's reasoning makes plenty of sense, and gamers should really appreciate such transparency in their design process. This is a great example of meaningful gamer outreach. Hats off to her and to Bioware.

Will Difficulty Levels be Arbitrarily Locked in Mass Effect 2? [Mass Effect Forums, via The Save Points, thanks Meredith B.!]

The Architect's Journal have posted a list of what they feel are the top 10 examples of architecture in video games. The list itself is partly tongue-in-cheek, so we can forgive its alarming lack of knowledge of gaming environments (no Ico?), but its point is not to authoritatively catalogue the best buildings.

The point is more likely to simply get you thinking about architecture. To stop thinking of the environment in a game as a level, and appreciate it as a building. Its design, the materials used in its construction, that sort of thing.

May sound a bit naff to many of you, but you want games to be considered art, this is part of the deal.

Top 10: The architecture of computer games (part I) [AJ, thanks Greg!]

"All of us are gamers, we all play video games all of the time," said Davin Sufer, chief technology officer of WowWee. "It's definitely a big part of our culture."

WowWee was formed in 1982 by brothers Richard and Peter Yanofsky, but it wasn't until 2004 that the company become known for their robot toys.

With more than 5 million units sold worldwide, Robosapian, released in 2004, was the first commercially-available biomorphic robot. In 2005, WowWee released their second version of the remote-controlled robot. In 2006, WowWee added a robotic reptile to their toys.

The company currently has a full line of robots, robocreatures and bugbots. Many of those creations, Sufer said, were conceived while playing games.

"All of our favorite video games have something in them that sparks an idea," he said.

The flying drones found in a lot of video games led WowWee to develop a line of flying toys, including the Bladestar. The helicopter-like Bladestar is an indoor flying machine that can dogfight by blasting infrared signals out of the remote. If the signal hits the toy it drops to the ground.

"We like that sort of gameplay," Sufer said.

WowWee is working on other toys that may make use of similar ideas, like shooting at one another. One, which Sufer couldn't go into much detail about yet, would be a ground toy that could fire off shots.

"We have some products inspired by fast-moving vehicles (that we are working on)," he said. "Grand Theft Auto-style, fast moving vehicles that will interact with each other."

The controls for WowWee robots also look toward gaming for inspiration. When initially released, the remotes used to control most of their robot toys looked like something you would use to turn on a TV or VCR. But more recent iterations include remotes that look more like video game controllers.

"We've definitely looked at video games for that," Sufer said. "We took some cues from video games to figure out how you would control a robot with multiple limbs."

WowWee's Tribot even uses tilt controls, allowing you to move the robot around as if you were playing a Wii game. There's also an iPhone app that allows you to control one of their robots.

"We're always looking at the latest technology," Sufer said. "Like controlling a robot by moving your hands, a lot of gesture based controls are happening right now."

But the company's biggest gaming effort hasn't yet come to fruition.

WowWee hoped to introduce a robot that used augmented reality to turn everyday spaces into a video game like world, but they backed away from the notion because they thought it might be too complex for the average consumer to understand and enjoy.

Rovio is a robotic wifi-enabled webcam. The dog-like device rolls around on three wheels and has a head-mounted camera and microphone. The device is controlled via a web browser.

"Initially the idea behind that product was more for gaming applications," Sufer said. "You play a game through a robot, by driving it around."

The idea was that you would place markers in a room in your house and then drive the robot around, controlling and watching it through a web browser, he said. When the robot saw and recognized those markers the software would replace the markers with gaming icons.

"We're still working on that angle," he said. "We thought it was a little too much for the market. People had to get used to robots first and then tack on gaming."

WowWee hasn't dropped the idea though, they hope to either release the software to support augmented reality with Rovio or perhaps release a new version of the three-wheeled bot with the game built into it.

"I think something like Rovio could be used as a gaming platform," Sufer said. "We are looking at it as a platform."

"I think that video games are getting more and more immersive and more and more interesting," Sufer said. "But there is always room for physical games and video games sometimes drive that need for real life objects."

Calling the zeal for innovation in games an idea he used to promote but now considers "a little bit misdirected," Braid designer Jonathan Blow recently described a possibly superior design goal:

In a recent interview with The Independent Gaming Source, he said:

"I think gameplay innovation can result in things that are interesting, but at the same time it doesn't automatically result in something that is deep-often it's a gimmick. I am interested in deepness and richness of game design. You can get that with deliberate innovation or without; I think the issues are orthogonal. At the same time, I think if a designer is working on something he really cares about, and is really exploring some ideas in his own style, bringing his own particular insight to the table, then he will automatically come up with something different than most other games; furthermore, this will be a deeper, more-compelling kind of innovation.

There's plenty more on that idea — including specifics — from the ever-interesting Blow in the interview. Also in the full piece are details about some scuttled ideas that were once planned for Braid.

TIGInterview: Jonathan Blow

Again, like with the MotionPlus, if you were hoping for a radical evolution from batshit crazy design to the current models, you'll be disappointed. They're all fairly similar. All, that is, except for my favourite of the bunch, which adds the GameCube's analogue stick to the surface of the Wii Remote, no doubt negating the need for the nunchuk.

There's also a few different versions of the Classic Controller, and a couple of nunchuk variants as well.

Prototypes Of The Wii Remote, Nunchuk, And Classic Controller [Siliconera]

The Game Design Challenge, a staple of the conference, brings in top designers to grapple with a quirky challenge posed by the forum's host, Eric Zimmerman. In this case, make a game that captures the goofiness, romance and good ol' horny nostalgia of losing one's virginity. CNET attended and reported on the challenge in great detail.

Two women, Heather Kelley and Erin Robinson, won for their concept, essentially a series of minigames from a young woman's perspective. They only had 36 hours to get their ideas in place. They included.

• A date-outfit selection game, in which the goal is to pick one that isn't so complicated it klutzes up the eventual disrobing. "Nothing with zippers that get stuck, or too many buttons or ties."
• Leg-shaving - definitely making use of the Wiimote.
• Dinner - Selecting items that don't have garlic and getting the clueless boyfriend to order them.
• After-dinner music. Protip: Smooth jazz!
• Buying condoms at a drugstore.
• Making the first move.
• Then, correctly dialing your best friend to gab about it, making sure not to accidentally dial Mom or Grandmom on speed dial instead.

They beat out defending 2008 champ, and creator of Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Steve Meretzsky. His concepts began with the usual array of puns and double entendres - "Hump Hump Revolution," "Where's Dildo," and "Call of Booty." He thought about "Zack & Miri Make a Portal," but "my business people tell me paying licenses for two different (intellectual properties) is a non-starter."

In the end, Meretzsky opted for something a little more sweet and a lot more mature, a Second-Life type of game, oriented to teens, called "Wait, time passes."

"No matter how picked on you are," Meretzsky said, "this too shall pass. Your time will come, and you will find happiness and your place in the world."

Tough Task: Designing a Game About Your 'First Time' [CNET News]

Racing the Beam sets up the Atari Video Computer System (later 2600) as a console that profoundly shaped game design because its limitations forced programmers to come up with new efficiencies and tricks to deliver more complex games. The book also points out that it was an unusually long-lived platform - going into 1992 - despite its lightweight computing power.

The VCS' big setback, according to the book, is that the console had a tiny 128 bytes (yes bytes) of RAM, which could not accommodate a frame buffer - in other words the portion of RAM that stores the image data for each successive screen displayed by the game. So VCS programmers had to generate graphics purely in real time. For those who complain about how difficult it is to program for the PlayStation 3, this is the equivalent of "In my day, I walked six miles to school in the snow, uphill both ways."

By "racing the beam," programmers came up with a few tricks. The information space inside three blank spots that the electron gun didn't have to render was rededicated to things like joystick inputs, scoring and other processes. In some cases they shrank the playing screen more to give themselves more programming space. Pitfall!, one of the deepest games of its generation, made use of this.

Further, the VCS could only display two sprites on the screen at any given moment. How they compensated for that is a technical challenge that I can't intelligently describe. But suffice to say, in Pac-Man - a disappointing port partially blamed for the early 1980s video game crash - every time you ate a dot, the game redrew the screen. This manic redrawing accounted for the ghosts' flicker, which, of course, was justified because THEY GHOSTS after all.

The book's authors, Nick Monfort and Ian Bogost, say that arcade ports to the 2600 lay the foundation for future practices in bringing arcade games home. Says Bogost:

"The porting of arcade games to home systems was first really worked through on the VCS. It was because of this VCS development that developers were able to figure out what to try to carry over and what to leave behind, and how to adapt the arcade experience for more limited consoles that would be played at home."

The authors say Racing the Beam is the first in a series of "platform studies" that will probe how gaming platforms affect how games are created.

Racing the Beam: How Atari 2600's Crazy Hardware Changed Game Design [Wired]

In the more than 15 years since the introduction of the first-person shooter genre, and nearly 10 since tactical shooters came on the scene, the progressive immersion in one's environment has represented the cutting edge of these games.

Designers, artists and staff of three shooter developers - Guerrilla Games, which just put out Killzone 2; Gearbox Software, of the Brothers in Arms franchise, and Call of Duty's Infinity Ward - were gracious enough to speak with Kotaku about the increasingly complex set design and art direction of these kinds of combat-based first-person shooters. There's an art to war, after all, and this is theirs.

Setting the Table

Set design for a battlefield, whether for a film or a video game, presents a unique demand - the scene must make sense. It can't conflict with or present inconsistencies in the story at large. And in the case of a video game, it will need to advance the story. Building all that in to a combat scene is a tall order, because the environment is typically one that has seen action and destruction before the player's arrival.

"We did heavy research to bring the battles from the history books to the Brothers in Arms games," said Dorian Gorski, a level design director for Gearbox Software, which developed the Brothers in Arms tactical shooter franchise. War diaries and after action reports from World War II, along with period photographs, especially aerial shots if they were available, formed a basis for the designers' understanding of what had already taken place in the world they were depicting. Where they had missing information, modern photographs and first-hand visits to the battlefield helped fill in the gaps.

But "once you have completed the research, building the world presents its own set of challenges," says Gearbox's Erik Doescher, a level design producer. "Historical accuracy does not always translate into good gameplay. The scale and the scope of an area are often the first things that need to be changed. At this point, ‘research' transitions into ‘inspiration,' and we draw in this knowledge to enhance the game spaces, rather than the other way around.

But for a combat FPS not based in history, it requires a deeper understanding of times and events the developer already is making out of whole cloth. Being freed from historical constraints can help simplify a level's critical path - but it also requires a developer to build a foundation that makes sense.
"You have a lot more creative freedom to do whatever you want - as long as it fits," said Jan-Bart Van Beek, the art and animation director of Guerrilla Games, developer of Killzone and the just-released Killzone 2. "At the same time, nothing comes for free. We can't just go into a war book and pick out weapons."

For science-fiction combat FPSes, even placing "something as simple as a bucket of sand" in the corner of a room requires a designer to ask and answer - even if it's a simple answer - how and why the object got there, and why it looks the way it does. But, apply those questions to a weapon and the level of complexity is "enormous," Van Beek said.

"For each weapon in Killzone 2, it went through three or four iterations at the paper design stage," Van Beek said. "That's two months of work. Add in modeling and animation, and in total it's about four months per weapon." There are 60 "gun-based" weapons in Killzone 2, and all of them required this level of effort, Van Beek said.

Robert Bowling of Infinity Ward, which developed Call of Duty (and sequels 2 and Modern Warfare) agrees that building a combat FPS, even in a setting that isn't literally correct, is easier than inventing an entirely new landscape. Reference photos are plentiful and help lay a quick foundation.

However, futuristic FPSes have an advantage over historical ones: identifying the enemy. There's no disputing the look of the Helghast, for example.. Call of Duty, of course, features all-human combatants. that, if rendered with full historical accuracy, could be difficult to distinguish from friendlies, especially at longer ranges.

"We put a lot of focus on color and silhouettes of the characters' design, giving them very distinct weapon loadouts and gear that will change the way they appear," Bowling said. "For example, you can easily identify an enemy as a combatant when a rocket-propelled grenade is on their back, or is wearing a specific headgear." The design accounts for distinguishing characteristics that are identifiable from scale distances of 100 to 300 yards away.

"This is just an evolution of character design," Bowling said. "Whereas Mario wore overalls to distinguish his body, legs, and arms from his head, and his mustache was used to distinguish his noce fro his face, we use these details to distinguish characters from their environments and from friendly AI."

But even one's own continuity can create artistic design problems. Killzone's original story had the Helghast - essentially mutated humans - fighting offworld, outside of the toxic environment to which they had adapted. That condition was ostensibly the reason for the fascist, mechanized look of their combat armor, which made them readily identifiable. The story said they wore the breathing apparatus to replicate their native atmosphere, poisonous though it was.

Flash forward to Killzone 2. The story calls for a human invasion of Helghan, their homeworld. And yet with the game so unmistakably marked by the Helghast's breathing masks and yellow eyes, Guerrilla had to figure out a way to make that look make sense in an environment where, according to the original, it would be unnecessary.

"They were the icon and the brand identity of this game," Van Beek said. "But, we never directly explained why they wear the masks, so as you go along, you have to change your own canon. The current universe lore is that the gas masks carry combat drugs, adrenaline boosters, that type of thing. It's more of a feeding mechanism."

Coloring it In

Each leap forward in technology and graphic and gameplay capabilities has delivered a new set of expectations - from both a game's players and in its designers. The result has been increasing complexity of design, increasing budgets, team size and development cycles and an increasing specialization in the artists and designers who render these environments.

"During the prototype phase we found that developers found different ways to make the best use of the new tools, extra memory and processor power (made available by the next generation of consoles," said Mike Wardwell, a director at Gearbox. "Almost naturally, people found their niche, and the result was heavier specialization. For the last generation one level designer could handle a map from start to finish - including art placement, lighting and scripting. Now there is more art to be made, the tools are more complex, and the quality bar is higher."

In other words, each succeeding generation is providing games with their closeup, and they had best be ready for it.

"A lot of the focus is on how we can use other elements, and not just high poly counts, to add detail and realism to the look of our characters and environments," said Infinity Ward's Bowling. "That's where a lot of focus on the lighting of your game comes into play - that's the quickest way from going to a good looking game to a photorealistic game."

That's lighting and contrast. The criticism of color in an FPS has lately almost become cliché, but it does have a point - that the depiction of devastation and depletion on a battlefield trends toward dead colors, earthtones, or desaturated, monochromatic themes.

"There is a certain amount of armchair observation there," said Guerrilla's Van Beek. "The color palette has to fit the game and the tone and the atmosphere you're trying to create. We wanted to go for a grimy and somber palette (in Killzone 2) because we felt it was a little more cinematic. But if you look at war movies, they also depict the world in a less saturated way. It's not necessarily about getting realism in there, it's really what sort of image you're trying to convey."

Jeramy Cooke, a director at Gearbox, thinks the monochromatic criticism is more a reaction to "design-by-copying" in a saturated FPS market. That said, bringing in an object of a vibrant primary color with an engine that doesn't represent it well is going to be a poor choice, because it'll be perceived as poor graphics. Conversely, a scene filled with shades of a similar color will make players less likely to perceive small flaws in the lighting. Whatever the case, "Simply 'doing what you saw in a movie' will always feel a bit empty," he said, "because it has no real purpose other than to copy."

Stil, in the end, the key to a game's art, and color, and design and direction is much like that of a film. It's sorting out the most important elements, without getting sucked into conceptualizing, justifying and then finally creating details that don't advance the story. "If you put enough time into these things you really can do anything," Van Beek said. "Ultimately you have to make choices about what you want. You have to pick your battles."

The results are as you'd expect. It's Pong, except there are Ikaruga ships in the middle of the screen to blow up, and the ball changes colour between black and white, forcing you to - like Ikaruga - change the colour of your paddle to survive.

There's even an authentic Ikaruga soundtrack and menu screen in there to keep things faithful. You can download and play the game from the link below if you're interested. Though why you wouldn't be interested is a mystery to us.

Pong-Karuga [Odd Man Out, via Dtoid]

While Grid/plane's ideas obviously centred around a new menu system, they also "dreamt up an immersive 3D environment for users to explore the latest games, events and online activity within the XBOX Live community". Sounds familiar...

Anyway, if you're interested in checking out an alternate history, one where the "new" Xbox experience looks a lot like the "old" one, only with avatars, hit the link below.

Grid/plane Xbox [Grid/plane, via Joystiq]

Mostly because he takes everything the haters hate and breaks it down, then points out the game's most endearing legacy may not even be its stance on death and difficulty; it may be your easy-on-the-eye sidekick, Elika.

Sure, superficially she's a lot like Ico's Yorda. Clad in white, there to help you overcome otherwise insurmountable platforming obstacles...but there's a relationship there that, while stifled at times by the inappropriate choice of voice actor for the Prince, is still doing well at something most other games won't even attempt.

Column: 'Diamond in the Rough' : Caring About The Prince [GameSetWatch]

Kyle Cherry is the man behind this gaming laptop concept, and we like it because it just does not fuck around. No sleek lines or compact form to be found here; instead, Kyle has thrown three folding OLED screens (that combine to form a 26" display) atop a base that, with handle, is about the size of a vanilla Macbook.

As of today, this just can't be done, and at that size probably won't ever be done, but if you're going to dream (and put those dreams to paper), you may as well dream big.

Three-OLED-Screened, 28-Inch Gaming Laptop Sure is a Nice Idea [Gizmodo]