Quest to Nowhere

With so much talk about FarmVille, I felt like it was something that I needed to play to understand why it was popular. I had my own theories for why people played FarmVille, especially after reading A. J. Partick Liszkiewicz article a few months back, but figured that I probably wouldn’t understand it without actually trying it out. So about two months ago I started playing, and recently I started playing Zynga’s new Facebook game FrontierVille, and I think I’ve got an understanding now of what gets people to play these games.

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Playing Red Dead Redemption I found myself thinking a lot about the story, specifically within the context of the objective vs. subjective storytelling (which I discussed in a previous post.) The one thing that I kept coming back to was that within the game it seemed that there were two John Marstons, the one that Rockstar created for the game, and the one that the players create for themselves as they play the game. The players’ John Marston exists between the cut-scenes and in-game dialogues between characters, while the Rockstar John Marston exists in those scripted moments.

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I have spent more time then I care to imagine playing videogames, a lot of that has been playing multiplayer shooter games like Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament, Perfect Dark, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, and the like. As such, over that time I’ve come to some derive some theories on how multiplayer levels should be designed, based on my experiences.

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While I was at GDC this past year I went to a lecture called “Get Your Game out of my Movie! Interactive Storytelling in Mass Effect 2,” which was being given by Armando Troisi of BioWare. The one thing he said that has been stuck in my head since then was this idea of objective and subjective storytelling.

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For my capstone project proposal I’ve been reading a lot of interactive comics, and from reading them I’ve found that a lot of them I wouldn’t categorize as interactive comics. Or seem to have interactivity for the sake of it, rather then actually using it to support what they are trying to do in the comic.

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I never finished Mass Effect 1, at least until the day Mass Effect 2 was released. I picked up ME1 on PC during Steam’s holiday sale intending to finish it so I would have a save to import into ME2. I played ME1 on 360 originally but never finished it, so the Steam sale provided a nice way to play the game over again, and get the save to import.

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Inspired by my friend Jess’s lists of the seven best and worst female cartoon characters, I decided to make similar lists but looking at female characters in videogames. I already posted my worst female videogame characters post, so you might want to read that first before continuing to read this post.

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Inspired by my friend Jess’s lists of the seven best and worst female cartoon characters, I decided to make similar lists but looking at female characters in videogames. My original intent while making the lists was to construct them much as she did, listing the character and then discussing why they are or aren’t a good female character.

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I’ve been having trouble getting into Brutal Legend, not that I’m having trouble in the difficulty level of the game, but rather that I’m not really wanting to play it. I haven’t been able to figure out why, I figured that perhaps playing it after Uncharted 2 was clouding my judgement of games. I mean everyone I know has been raving on it, and I feel like I should really like it, but for whatever reason I couldn’t figure out my problem with it. Then I watched Yahtzee’s review of the game, and it all sort of gelled together … Continue Reading

I saw Transformers 2 Wednesday night, and as I write this I still sort of feel like I have a echoing headache from that movie. Now I enjoyed it, in sort of a mindless way that there were cool explosions, and interesting bits of story here and there with the humans (also Soundwave was epic.) But generally I find that reading Ebert’s review of the movie I can’t really disagree with him all that much.

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