oh yeah

Pretty much decided to move to tumblr.

http://news.wetgenes.com/ should take you there or where ever it is I end up in the futures.

Bitch and whine like a gamer?

So I saw this link on joystick,
http://www.joystiq.com/2008/11/17/blood-of-bahamut-ds-debut-trailer/


Looks like it might be interesting, obviously has some shadow of the colossus inspiration but is also obviously not the same game. I'd pick god of war if I was going to describe what I saw. Anyway I take a mental note to keep an eye out for the game but before I move on I make the mistake of scrolling down to see what the "Gamers" think.

Yet again I have to ask myself the question, do these morons even like games?

Above all I would like to know how comparing a game to another game is an insult, when that other game is actually an excellent game?

That makes no sense whatsoever.

First off this does not look like just an exact copy.

But if it was?

If you told me I could buy another 10 levels of colossus, the exact same game just some new levels.

I'd be over the moon with joy.

If only the gamers liked games as much as developers like games you might find the world was full of better games.

WetVille : How to grow a speed balloon

An informative video, showing how to use the new gardening system in WetVille to grow a very special balloon.

You may only get this balloon by growing it, so watch carefully if you want one.

The growing time in this video is sped up, normally it would take much longer to go from planted to harvest.

In defence of science and WOW

Braid's marketing rubs me the wrong way, I understand why it is necessary, I understand exactly what it is. Still it makes me feel icky, all I'm doing here is attempting to put my finger on exactly why.

Mr blow is well known for the opinion that World of Warcraft is an evil drug-like substance and Braid is presumably intended not to be an evil drug-like substance.

However, things are often not that simple. When dealing with a large complex system such as a group of people, strange results are the norm.

Warcraft has a social game, it is a "What is the fastest way of grinding?", "What is the best way to get this super drop?". All simple questions that give complex answers.

Braid also includes an intended social game of sorts, it's a "What the fuck is this pseudo intellectual emo fag story?". This is intended to increase the reach of the game by encouraging discussion. We all know that the emo fags (many are useless games journalists) sure do like to talk.

There is some evidence that suggests that braids social game encourages superstition and WOWs social game actually encourages science.

Braids design encourages people to look at say the list of control keys and believe that they are being shown an important secret that will unlock the meaning of the universe. Construct elaborate theories that fit all the "facts" perfectly and therefore must be true. Then to launch on a religious crusade, demanding that people understand that their interpretation of an intentionally vague text is the right one and that all heretics must die.

OK, a little extreme but really, braids meta game is intended to produce the start of that behavior. Once that ball is rolling its hard to get it to stop.

WOW on the other hand is a godless grind, but, it is still primarily a game, part of braid is also a game, I have no problem with that part. It is the other part that irks me. The meta game of WOW is largely comprised with building up scientific data about the underlying game and then attempting to use this data to gain a better understanding of the hidden mechanics of the game world, experimenting and learning. This is called the scientific method.

Which puts us in an interesting place, WOW may be an evil grind but is superstition really a better thing to encourage than science?

Superstition holds us back far more than peoples addiction to grinding video games. Again I feel that there is a failing to understand exactly how dumb the audience is and that we have here an actual net gain from WOW and a net loss from braid.

Even you tube comments are a step up from watching daytime TV.

Any game, with any complex challenge encourages this sort of smart behavior. Games that distance themselves from being games and smother themselves in bullshit, well I for one am certain that they are the greater problem.

a test wetville video

It is no secret that I do not like ratings

Mining the wisdom out of crowds is not easy, it is however easy to find false wisdom and pretend that it is real wisdom.

At the most basic level of many failed attempts is the following problem.

Collapsing the positive and negative parts of any experience down into a single number between 1 and 5 is fucking retarded and impossible.

Displaying that number to others and then asking them to do the same is even more retarded and just creates a feedback loop.

This doesn't matter to the content aggregator, they win whatever content ends up on top as long as they are the one aggregatng it. But for the content creator this is a mess that only succeeds in devaluing all content.

Here is a link to a link to some research that shows a huge problem with everybodys mind. Any random statistics displayed next to content will drown out the content. This works, you have seen it work, you know that it works.

When I say everybody I include myself, it can of course be combated on a conscious level but only if you notice it happening. That's the problem, it is somewhat similar to some visual illusions, you will continue to see the false image no matter how sure you are that it is false. When you talk in terms of website users and include feedback loops, this sort of thing is highly effective, more effective than anything else anyway.

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/10/false_advertising_st.html


Remember if one is to understand the audience one must first understand this zen koan.

"Participants were given a choice between a short proofreading task that would award 60 points and a longer proofreading task that would award 100 points and were told that 60 points would entitle them to a serving of vanilla ice cream and 100 points would entitle them to an equally large serving of pistachio ice cream. Most participants opted for the longer task. But when asked later which flavor they would enjoy more, most favored the vanilla ice cream."

World of goo is pretty damn sweet.

World of Goo Trailer 2 Director's Cut
by 2dboy

You have no excuse not to go play the demo right now.

That link seems to be the best one, after clicking on download there is a I don't want to have to log in option unlike all the other links I can find. http://2dboy.com/ is their main site, but doesn't have any better download links.

I really don't understand, 32meg is only slightly bigger than many flash games and every site you hit a login and pay for bandwidth wall. A very horrible user download experience.

A simple amazon s3 download page + google ads would probably come out at a profit guys, go make one :)

Anyhow, go play the demo, nicest game to come along in quite a while.

Apparently placing ads inside games is evil.

in response to gameshelf bitching about ads in flash games.

you missed the developer side of course

once upon a time people made flash games

then along came sites that hosted games and put ads around the games and made money (the developers did not make money)

Some such as ebaumsworld, branded other peoples content as their own without permission and in the end made millions of dollars off of doing so.
Go read the legalise on ebaums upload page for an example of how evil they still are, 3 years exclusivity WTF?

now, with the new in game ads the developers are scraping up some loose change, generally this isn't much. Some kids think they are making money, thats about it. However its still better than the alternative. For in game ads to really pay off, you need to get 100 thousand or more hits a day every day. This gets you around 50 bux a day and is of course very unlikely to happen.

Obviously this is the time for the gamers to get angry and stop these lazy profiteering developers.

well done

The main gain from in game advertising is being able to then negotiate a price for its removal before your game can be included on some of the bigger sites. That it is still there on the smaller sites means at least you might cover some expenses.

Today people such as spill group, (agame.com and ever expanding to more sites) demand the removal of developers ads so they can replace them with their own without paying the developer anything. They have also recently been making noises about stopping developers from even linking out to their own sites from within flash games.

This attempts to cut off developers from the gamer, making it harder to even build up an audience for your work. Which is not an easy act at the best of times.

Maybe the gamers like to get angry about that sort of thing instead?

nah

didn't think so

Gamers mostly play flash games to waste time, putting adverts in means you are just wasting more of their time whilst collecting up a tiny little pay back.

Personally I'd like to remove all advertising, however it's a very important leverage point and right now its just about covering hosting fees whilst my development work cause me to spiral further into debt.

I'll tell you things that you already know. So you can say I really identify with you, so much.

Always on the look out for alternative points of view I came across this http://www.ludomancy.com/blog/2008/09/29/the-kongregate-experiment/

Believe it or not, my initial response was a feeling of joy, you mean the kongretards are becoming less retarded. Oh look Some pixely art work, Hurrah!

Sadly this didn't last long as a small amount of investigation showed that it was the same old same old.

Obviously its important to suck up to a dumb audience, it pats them on the back and keeps them dumb and docile. It's exactly the tactics that rich leaders, who wish more than anything to stay rich and leaders use and it works perfectly. Vote for me, I'm not a terrorist, look at the color of my skin.

So what we actually have here is a dress up toy designed as bait to aim firmly at pseudo intellectual emo fag gamers that wish for their great intelligence to be recognized.

Well that sucks, then.

A dumb dumb dumb audience is a huge problem, not one thats unique to games but lets try and fix that, lets try and make them just that little bit smarter. Games are the perfect medium to achieve that, they make wonderful teaching aids.

Above all, people who tell the morons how great they are for being morons, primarily for personal gain, are evil.

Go play top hat villa instead, it's much less retarded and has a story and everything.

"Congratulations, here is a rainbow."

I have just reminded myself that if I type too much crap into a comment box anywhere I should also just chuck it out here as well.

So congratulations here is another small observation on that obese beast I like to call, The Moronity.

Moron: A person of mild mental retardation having a mental age of from 7 to 12 years and generally having communication and social skills enabling some degree of academic or vocational education.

originally commented on a brainy gamer post here.

This game is pointless or whats the point of this game is a comment I've hit a number of times from gamers.

It took me a while before I understood exactly what they where really complaining about. Initially I simply tried responding with it's a game it contains it's own point, you're pointless and a towel.

What they want is some sort of reward, a payment for playing so to speak, adjust the games to give out a small amount of virtual currency. It doesn't even have to be currency of any actual use, just a number you can show off.

Then suddenly the game has, as far as they are concerned, a point. The less skill and more time it takes to achieve this reward the better.

This all reminds an AI / semantic web guy, Push Singh, who killed himself after trying to harness the crowd and bashing against The Moronity for a while. I think he made the mistake of describing his plans as contributing to human achievement. When he should have said "Click here to win a free iPod!!!!"

Also the episode of the Simpsons which has a focus group about improving itchy and scratchy. One of the things the kids request is "and we should win prizes just for watching."

On that note you wouldn't believe how much venom and hate we consider to be contained in the phrase.

"Congratulations, here is a rainbow."

But, it's not just games. I'm sure the same people feel the same thing about reading books. "What ya reading for" being the start of a bill hicks routine. Books are just an older medium so have attracted a bit more age based respect is all. The verb play will wear out its stigma in a few decades.

Game Ws Grind

Ignoring toys, it seems to me that there is a fairly simple divide amongst modern games, not every game fits firmly on one side or the other but the two sides which I'm going to name as game and grind are very obvious. I shall explain myself by defining the two types below and their main differences.

#1 Story: Story is normally attached to grind, not always but it is a good starting guide. RPG style games are usually more grind than game.

#2 Player Levels: These are a big giveaway that it's grindplay not gameplay. If the player just gets more powerful over time without doing anything different then it's a grind. Keeping player powers until later is not quite the same thing, starting off simple and slowly introducing more complex elements is a standard game progression. These more complex rules are simply absent from the initial game and are slowly added, grind doesn't add more rules, grind just increase the size of your phallus.

#3: If the first level of a game starts off with a highly powerful player who manages to lose this power and be reset back to powerless at the end and then the real game begins. Well thats a good sign of grind, the first taste is free the rest requires hard grinding.

#4 Repetition. Both grind and game are repetitive, the difference is that grind pretends not to be and that game is proud of its repetition. Grind says just keep playing for another 8 hours while we change the scenery and this will all be over. Game says go back and try again from the beginning, maybe you will get further next time.

#5: The main difference between grind and game can be seen in what reward is given to a skillful player. With game a skillful player has a longer experience, their reward for playing well. They will discover parts of the game that other players can only dream of. In grind the only thing standing between the player and the end is time, a good player will simply progress faster, the only way to really lose is to get bored and stop.

#6 The reward for grinding well is to experience less grind, the reward for gaming well is to experience more game. Yes I am repeating myself and yes I am proud of it.

#7 Account selling, if you see someone selling an account for a game on ebay, then that game contains grind. Grind is the only thing that can be sold as a game account. Some games have grind, let's call them achievements or badges attached to them like rotting barnacles but still remain games. There is no value in selling a game where the first 50% is missing but people will happily spend money to never have to experience 50% of a grind.

#8 If while playing a game you think to yourself that maybe you could train a monkey or possibly even a chicken to do this while you sleep. Then its a grind.

Not all games are "good" and not all grind is "bad" but I certainly appreciate game more than I appreciate grind. The problem is I don't think todays gamer even likes games, I'm pretty sure they just want grind and a badge collection.

spore scores for review

There are two interesting points about spore and its "review" scores. The first is the anti DRM amazon user review issue. I think this really exposes how gamers consider low review scores to be a slap on the wrist rather than any objective indicator of the content.

Don't get me wrong I agree that DRM is retarded, useless and only hurts the ones you love.

However, deciding to give an otherwise perfectly good game a low score over something that the developers have no power over is dumb. Let me say that again, the people who made the game have no power to change this, it's a publisher decision, driven by publisher brains, it is a decision made simply because they believe doing so will net them more money. It doesn't actually mater if it does or doesnt, they believe in it and that is what is important.

Publishers love the idea of DRM, it makes them feel empowered.

This response is however the same mentality that decides a game is worth 20% less because you where expecting techno or only like games with cars or cowboys in them. This is what review scores represent to the fanboys. A vindication of their continual love for yet another sequel in their favorite JRPG or a slap on the wrist to developers who didn't suck up to the gamer press enough and had the hordes of morons unleashed upon them.

Most developers understand that at best DRM is pointless and at worst counter productive. If you want to get that message across to publishers you need to empower the developers. All that is being proven with the Amazon backlash is that review scores are bullshit random numbers that people arrive at for all sorts of wrong reasons.

Next we have the professional review scores, some people are upset that spore is scoring "low" in reviews with the comment being that it lacks depth.

Well yes, it lacks depth, it's designed to be accessible to the average gaming moron, the sims player if you will. Do you have any idea just how dumb this person is? I really wish there was some hidden game play depth to spore rather than the simple grind it is but I've met the audience and I agree. This is all they can understand, it is probably already too much and needs to be dumbed down even more.

I say spore is not dumbed down enough :)

So armed with the understanding that the grindplay is mediocre some reviewers decide its an 80% sort of game rather than a 90% sort of game. This number is of course meaningless and as random as any other number reviewers are expected to give a game.
So again, we hit another prime example of how a final review score is pointless useless information.

It seems unfashionable to suggest that games, just like all other forms of media can be designed for different audiences but this is a perfect example of just that.

So there we have it, two different issues, both exposing the same underlying problem of review scores not really meaning anything, to anyone.

PS I still suspect spore will not generate the revenue that EA needs it to generate to be considered a success. Remember we are talking replacing the sims as a cash cow here. The result being a pulling back by EA of this sort of funding. Maybe pulling back is the wrong word, as it indicates an existence of funding in the first place :)

story time in a platform world

Platform style games that tell a story

trapdoor
another world ( out of this world )
flashback
heart of darkness
ico
shadow of the colossus

Platforms style games that do not tell a story

braid

If braid was anywhere near the first list I would be bending over backwards to let it take me roughly in every orifice.

Unfortunately it isn't and it doesn't even make up the shortfall with game play. The problem with attacking the integrity of all other developers is when it comes time to slap your own cock on the table and get the tape measure out.

Also fuck journalists, they are part of the problem.

It's not even Jonathon Blows braid its David Hellmans braid, without the art the game would be awful. Thats the problem and it's also why indie doesn't mean shit, creator owned which is to say anyone that worked on the game still owns their work is the only definition that means anything and as far as I can see braid is not that.

Most developers try hard to do the best they can, very few are in the industry to make money, largely since becoming a developer to make money is an incredibly retarded thing to do.

However making games is expensive, it takes a lot of time/effort/skills/tools and therefore money. Funding this sort of behavior is where the problems arise. I have met many people capable of creating games of wonder, they are of course working hard on sponge bob square pants tie ins. This is the problem with the games industry and it is the fault of the audience.

Creating a good game will kill you, and the better it is, the more soul you put into it, the more money it will lose you and the more the audience will tell you to eat shit and die for the greedy act of just trying to break even. Giving it away for free will also get you hate mail.

Not only is it more socially acceptable to develop a major drug addiction than a game but it also provides far more opportunities for profit.

Some people will like it though, yeah sure, unfortunatly as far as I can see, whatever you do, and I mean anything you do, some people will like it. It's just random noise, any actual response to your creation will be drowned out totally by the sea of morons. This segment of the audience, that "likes it", will also turn on you in an instant.

I don't hate braid, its OK but just not for my tastes. A lot of what Mr blow says isn't that bad and some of it is even correct but I don't perceive him as having the talent or ability to back it up but at least he is trying. He is, as far as I can tell, just a frustrated writer who is good at self promotion.

This is all the standard problem of having to over hype something for 3-4 years to stand even a small chance of not losing money.

I blame the audience and I am right.

post op pussy

First the short animation, behold, MOAR available at http://4lfa.com/ where it lives



Second all the files that build it. Yup thats right the souce for the above animation is available here.

http://4lfa.com/work/004-pussy

I figure I want to keep that in svn anyway it might as well appear on the webby webby woo.

So some production notes, the animation is built in blender, lip syncing although retarted is handled by papagayo and a little custom script to apply it to the scene.

After a few tests and since I wanted some nice motion blur on the kitty as its supposed to be moving quite fast I am using a combination of motion blur and fake motion blur via blenders compositor. Nothing special but it looks to me like a combination of both gives you the best results for your render time. Just using motion blur doesn't give enough blur and the fake velocity motion blur filter goes wrong too easily. Together they cancel out each others flaws.

Again mostly fake lighting from the ambient occlusion, the lighting model may not be real but it certainly looks more real than real and thats all I care about :)

"your plastic pal who's fun to be with is more human than human"

There are two scenes in the blender file, one for rendering and one to composite the images that I get back from respower into the final result. Mixing images fades and sound.

If you pull down the work directory you will find .ogg files, blender doesn't read .oggs they need to be converted to .wav before the blender scene can use them. They are just checked in as oggs to save space.

Problem wise there are also some old wav references in that file that shouldn't be there. I have no idea how to delete them, they seem to be referenced from somewhere but I know not where.

Unhappy with the voices still, really need to get some kind of decent recording gear and work out a plan of attack for this but hey fuck it, it doesn't have to be perfect and we will get better.

But I do like the bouncing cat and the 3d cat itself which like the other characters went from original 2d to 3d perfectly.

the problem with interactive storytelling

A little statement that is prompted by this brainy gamer blog post and is in no way an attack. I'm Just pointing out exactly where the real problem is.

For films to tell a story they require an audience prepared to shut the fuck up and sit in a dark room for an hour or two.

For games to tell a story they require an audience comprised of rational humans to interpret and react with skill to an ongoing situation of unknown length.

Do you perhaps see where the weak link in interactive storytelling lies?

:)

moar rendermosity : ass fro

which should now be available inside the 4lfa poop stream here

http://4lfa.com/page.php/20080730/054139/VIDEOPollyMorfs_Ass_Fro


on jewpube here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU82vMmAz4o


or, well, embedded right here



yay, I'm happier with the lighting on this one which is using blender internal+AO rather than yafray. AO is a "cheap" trick that really does seem to work well.

3dvideovision

4lfa.com now available in 3d and audio and video and pictures and words and everything in an extravaganza of full sensory entertainment

pull my finger for added smellovision

behold

ItsaCoop Beta

Final beta preview of ItsaCoop!!!

Multiplayer and cookie scoring should all now be working...

OK, giving up with inserting flash into this blog, its all just icky ick ick...

so instead

the power of linking...

Click here to play beta version of

ItsaCoop

oh yes

feel that power

it's a link you know

bill has left the building

Lots of places posting articles relevant to bill leaving microsoft, full of insight into the past and future of the company.

But when I close my eyes all I see is this.

So this rails thing sux then?

I stumbled across an interesting list just now, I suspect that it has solved a mystery that I have been curious about for some time.

My curiosity was first piqued by penny arcade, a popular gaming comic site. The thing that bothered me was how it managed to be somewhat broken and slow on occasion. I mean yeah traffic can kill a site, but penny-arcade is or should be mostly static content, we are not talking about running an application at most its serving static content that gets updated occasionally. Thats an easy to solve problem no matter what traffic you throw at it provided you have the cash and PA seems to have the advertising cash since well it also seems to have all the traffic. Yeah its got a forum but I don't frequent the forum so thats not the bit I'm talking about and the forum should really be running on separate machines anyhow. So how can this be borked? its a mystery so it is.

But today it all became clear when I discovered that kongregate was running on ruby on rails. Now I dont know anything about ruby or rails apart from noticing something of a fine rant about the fact that it doesnt really work. Not working is actually kinda normal with software, most of it doesn't really work but we do the best we can and mostly things get fixed and work out in the end but the blame here is pointed at the community developing rails. That's something of a unfixable problem, a nice schizim and name change is about the only thing that can sort that out.

Anyway, kong on rails, why that could explain why the site has this sort of not really working very well feel to it. Maybe, just maybe, rails really is a big problem here I wonder what else runs on rails. (Thinks jokingly: I bet twitter does, that thing is up and down like a whores knickers)

So then I find this http://rails100.pbwiki.com/Alexa+Rankings what an interesting list, oh look see theres twitter and there penny arcade. Why this may explain everything, it is in fact like a list containing every "web 2.0" site that doesn't really work very well. All the sites on there that I recognise and use have been chock full of technofail in my personal user experience.

So this rails thing sux then?

Sure some of these sites may work well, but good coders can make anything work well, that's how you know you have good people. There certainly seems to be some correlation here between rails and sites with issues and I'm always suspicious of peoples overly emotional attachments to such things as ruby on rails.

Yay, another mystery solved.

/me puts the kettle on.