Year in review

As the year is coming to an natural end, it’s time to look back at the books I’ve read, the movies I’ve seen, the music I’ve heard and the games I’ve played and sort out the weed and look at what really rocked my boat in 2008.

Bear in mind that these are just what I read, saw, heard and played in 2008, not necessarily what came out in 2008.

Books

I’ve keept tap of all the books I’ve read in 2008 on my LibraryThing account and have up until now read 60 books in 2008. That might sound like a lot but some of these where movie screenplays and graphic novels and they read a lot faster than regular books. But still 60 books is quite a number.

Best book of 2008: Hands down it gotta be Michael Chabon’s perfect (and I mean perfect) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. It’s been a long time since I’ve laughed so much, cried so hard and became so angry from reading a book. A true masterpiece.

Best comic of 2008: Again, a no-brainer for me; Brian Vaughan’s intelligent take on politics and superheroes Ex Machina.

Biggest waste of time in 2008: Lee Child’s Killing Floor came recommended to me from a bookstore clerk. Remind me never to take advice from him again. What a waste of good paper.

Movies

This was the year when I took my son to the movies for the first time, so in more than one way it was a very special year. He picked the movie; the new feature length Lucky Luke and it was such a success that the following four weekends afterwards we went to the cinema again to watch Lucky Luke again and Carsten & Gittes Filmbalade.

But all in all, I watched 99 movies either in the cinema or on DVD… and the award goes to… (couldn’t help it, sorry).

Best movie of 2008: Paul Thomas Anderson’s tour-de-force There Will Be Blood. It was grotesquely overlooked at the Oscars this year, even though Daniel Day-Lewis managed to grab the Best Actor award, I seriously think that in the years and decades to come we’ll look back a Anderson’s movie and give it the masterpiece status it deserves.

Biggest “What the fuck?!?”-moment of 2008: Halfway through the semi-funny Hancock, the movie completely changes into something it wasn’t suppose to be. Avoid this movie like the plague. All the funny scenes are in the trailer and that is only a couple of minutes long, so watch that instead.

Music

According to Last.fm my music taste didn’t change so much this year. But there are a couple of albums that I want to single out nonetheless.

Best album of 2008: Ryan Adams’ Gold. Barebones, simple melodic classic rock that just kicks ass. I can listen to this all day and still find nuances in it that I’ve somehow missed before.

Best jazz albums of 2008 that just keeps getting better: Also know as the BJAO08TJKGB Award. Ballads by John Coltrane and Kind of Blue by Miles David have, again, been on heavy rotation this year. Timeless albums that just keeps on giving.

Games

This was also the year when I finally shelled out for a Xbox 360 and I must say that I’m more than impressed with the system. The New Xbox Experience also added a modern and very nice interface.

Most fun game of 2008: That got to be Fable II. Extreme freedom, fun side quests, lush world to explore and nice rewards for being evil. What’s not to like?

Most awesome game of 2008: Grand Theft Auto 4. That game is just huge. HUGE I tell you. And the characters a great, the story is superb and very mature of a game. The size of this game and the content within it is just mindboggling. Kudos to Rockstar for setting the bar high again.

Biggest disappointment of 2008: Halo 3. What the fuck was all the hype about? I mean the game is extremely linear, the FPS aspect are “classic” (and that is not a compliment) and the story is just terrible and seems like it’s written by a 10-year old. The multiplayer is alright, but the singleplayer portion of the game was a huge disappointment.

The End

So there you have it, 2008 in review. What a year it’s been and I seriously hope that 2009 will offer just as many fine moments as this one did.

Here’s looking at you 2008.

Writing about Grand Theft Auto

In light of the recent release of Grand Theft Auto IV, let me blatantly do a self promoting plug about two articles I’ve written about the Grand Theft Auto games.

The first one “To be or not to be in Liberty City” is a synopsis I wrote together with Henrik Bennetsen about the narrative structure and the impact of this on the gameplaying experience in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

And the other one “Please do not walk on the grass” is a more magazine article version of the former. This one got some big time attention at the time of publishing as it was part of the first ever Carnival of Gamers.

Man those where the days… playing games all day and just turn out a small synopsis now and then about what I thought about them, spiced up with some highbrow references to other peoples’ work on narrative and immersion in games.

I sure miss those days.

Scaling geometry difficulty

The last few days I’ve been playing a lot of God of War II and thoroughly enjoying every last moment of it. That is, up until now.
I’ve just gotten to some of the last levels I presume as the story arc is nearing its end (the Phoenix Champers) and the difficulty have just risen so steeply in the last few levels that the game is becoming more frustrating than fun to play.

Let me explain. In the last few years I’ve steadily gone from being a hard-core gamer to a somewhat ex-core gamer due to high level of time consuming elements of my life (such as university studies, wife and son). And that has some clear effects on my timing and aiming skills. These skills only stay good if honed continuously, and I simply don’t have the time for that.
And in the case of God of War II many of the later sequences of the game requires just these skills. As I’ve become an ex-core gamer I tend to play on the easy setting just so that I have time to complete the game without using too much time on it and still see the parts of the game that everyone is talking about. The problem is just that the geometry don’t scale. The difficulty of making a jump in a 3D environment is just as hard on extreme difficulty as it is on easy. And that’s no good.

When games moved into 3D, however, the jumping puzzle became a more difficult task. In addition to requiring the player to control their jumps in an extra dimension, the problem of viewpoint reared its ugly head. Games with fixed cameras sometimes made it quite difficult for the players to see where they were landing, while manual control added another control to juggle. #

I would really like to see that if I choose to play on easy setting that the jumping and timing puzzles gets scaled accordingly, else I’ll end up in the position I’m at with God of War II currently; I’ll just stop playing and all the hard work and godly greatness being purred into the levels to come will forever be lost on me.

Level Design Patterns

Today I handed in a paper on design patterns for level design. It’s a paper I’ve been working on on the side in the last 12 weeks. As this is a side project the scope is rather small, but it might very well be a topic that I’ll explorer further in future projects or in my master thesis.

I have made an analysis of these multiplayer levels from popular first-person shooters (FPS):

From Day of Defeat: Source:

• Kalt
• Donner
• Anzio
• Flash
• Avalanche

From Unreal Tournament 2004:

• Maul
• Two Tombs
• Grassy Knoll
• Double Damage
• Absolute Zero
• Bridge of Faith
• Electric Field

From Battlefield 1942

• Tobruk
• El Alamein
• Iwo Jima

And have from that analysis compiled what I believe to be common practices of development and have formalized these in Level Design Patterns:

1. Multiple paths
2. Local fights
3. Collision points
4. Reference points
5. Defense areas
6. Risk Incentive

Read much more about these patterns in the paper itself.

Download the entire paper here (PDF ~ 2.01 MB)

Ghost Recon vs. Ghost Recon

For some time now I’ve been considering if I should spend some money on a Xbox 360 or not. My current PCs (both desktop and laptop) are not even close to meeting the minimum spec. required to run the new games that are being release.

And now with Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is out and looking great, so it might very well get me to buy one.

But what is the world happened to Ghost Recon: Advance Warfighter (or GRAW as they call it)? On Xbox 360 i a superb game according to GameSpot.com. They gave it a 9.2 score and ends their review with:

If you like shooters or action games, and you own an Xbox 360, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter is a must-own for your library. A solid and challenging campaign and a unique, online-co-op mode combine with an unmatched presentation in what is arguably the best game yet on the Xbox 360. Even those who don’t necessarily like shooters may want to at least try the game out, as GRAW represents the best of what a tactical shooter can offer and can serve as a useful graphical benchmark to judge other games on the console by.

(also see the MetaCritic rating)

That sounds like a pretty good game to me, right?

But then read GameSpot.com’s review of the PS2 version of the same game (they gave it a 4.4 score, and again the MetaCritic rating):

Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter for the PlayStation 2 makes too many compromises in the gameplay design for us to recommend it to anyone. Tiny levels that feel more like a series of corridors than a true city, excessive graphical slowdowns, and neutered multiplayer options are just a few of the reasons to avoid this game.

That sound like a very bad game, right?

So what is it? It bears the exact same name, so it must be similar in some way, but after reading the reviews I have some very strong doubts about that. Ubisoft (the publishers) have, as many other publishers do, before handed the development of different version of the same game to different development houses around the world. But the different versions of the games have always had some similarity and only minor hardware specific differences.

But in this case something very serious seems to have gone wrong.

No man is an Island

As mentioned earlier, just before Christmas I handed in a paper about a study we did of World of Warcraft.

We were looking for the dynamic relationship between the behavior of the individual player and the behavior of the groups they participate in, and how they mutually influence each other.
We used Bartle’s player types and two theories from the field of Organizational Theory; Richard Daft’s Life cycle Model and H.J. Leavit’s Open System Model.

Our problem statement:

• When playing World of Warcraft, what are the key factors of the relationship between the player and the group?

To understand why players make certain choices regarding group structures, we will initially have to clarify how the game facilitates group structures and what types of players it is dealing with. We will therefore use the following questions as means to answer the before-mentioned statement.

• How are groups structured within World of Warcraft?
• Which type of players takes part in these structures?

Get the entire report here (PDF format)

Please do not walk on the grass

On how role-playing in “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” can be difficult

By Simon Larsen

Before you starting spamming the comment function with enlightening comments such as “GTA is not a RPG you idiot!”, let me explain what I mean with role-playing in a game like Grand Theft Auto (GTA);

It is correct that GTA is not marketed as a RPG, but in it you play the role of Carl Johnson¹ in his quest for correcting all the wrongdoings that has come upon him and his family. This, in it self, does not really constitute GTA as a RPG, since then all games would more or less be RPGs, but the sheer size of the game world and the freedom to roam around in this, creates a narrative vacuum that the player has to fill out by him/her self, very similar to “normal” RPGs. Furthermore you, as a player, are free to dress up Carl in more or less any way you find suitable and “pimp his ride” in various ways. On top of that you have the element of the fitness and sex appeal of CJ. These elements are clearly added into the game in order for the players to identify more with CJ, e.g. that they share the same goals and behave in a way you would prefer etc.

The overall story arc of the game is very well constructed but in some cases the narrative that the player is creating (though his/her (inter)actions) clashes very hard with the narrative that Rockstar Games has put into the game.

When I first loaded the game on my PS2, I was expecting the grandeur of the two previous games in the series, GTA III and GTA: Vice City, and Rockstar delivered. The game is bigger, prettier, sounds better and driving around in the game is just a fun as it was in the others. It has a great and better written story than the previous game. But this is also where GTA: SA goes down an unfamiliar path for the series.

In GTA III the protagonist was an unnamed guy with a gritty past, the plot was familiar in sense of “Goodfellas” kind of way. And again with GTA: VC the setting was instantly recognizable, everything from the Miami Vice inspired intro, the Don Johnson and “that other Guy“, the pink flamingos and every thing in between.

These two games worked perfectly, because the story was lose and the setting geared towards only one kind of storyline, so there was little difference in the story that Rockstar had put into the game and the story that the player developed while playing.

I would argue that the focus on a better and stronger story proved to be San Andreas’ Achilles’ heel. As I said, the story is better, no need to argue about that, but it is also tighter and more confined, therefore limiting in the way the players act out their “inner criminal”.

An example of this is in the first part of the game. Here you take on the “Doberman” mission, a mission that involves taking over some gang territory from competing gangs in Los Santos². The game explain very clearly how the game mechanics works in connection with this and before long you and your recruited gang members are out cruising in pimped-up lowriders looking for drive-by action³. Within minutes full-blown gang war is happening in downtown Los Santos.

The gang war game play element of SA is a nice little (mini) game in it self, but wear out after some time. And this is where the real trouble kicks in.

After I’d have taken over more or less the entire city of Los Santos and in the process developed my own story of CJ as being this “don’t-you-look-at-me-or-I?ll-shoot-you” kind of guy, that doesn’t take any crap from anyone (yes, really living out my inner criminal here) I decided to take on a mission I was more or less certain that would progress the story line of the game. And the mission did indeed progress the story, but in a whole other direction than the one I wanted.

The mission starts with a cut-scene where a crocket cop named Tenpenny⁴ back-stabs CJ. Since it was a cut-scene there was nothing I could do, even though my view of CJ had now become this before mentioned hard-boiled gangster that would blow the head of anyone trying to cheat him, even cops.

So there I was, thrown out of town, with no guns, no homies to protect me, no nothing. Just seconds ago I was the king of town, I was the guy with homies on every street corner looking out for me, I was the one everyone feared and few had live to tell the tale of.
Me and CJ where one, but no more. The bond between me, as the player of the game, and Carl Johnson was lost the minute he sat foot in the hillbilly town of Angle Pine… never to be found again.

I kept on playing the game, but CJ was no longer an important part of the game for me, now I was just looking for quick ways to complete the missions, earn money to buy property and scouting for nice cars to drive around.

After this “incident” I played the game in the way Rockstar properly wanted me to play it. The problem was that they had open up this huge game world for me and told me that I could do anything I wanted in. But in really they wanted me to act in a very specific way in it, and not walk on the pretty grass even though I could.

1. or just plain CJ among friends [↩]
2. the first of three cities in the state of San Andreas [↩]
3. note the deliberate use of “you” and “your” [↩]
4. brilliantly voice-acted by Samuel L. Jackson [↩]

Postmortem of the postmortem analysis

This is a postmortem article of my postmortem analysis. This is almost as much meta as you can get.

Since this website re-launched and is now in English I’ve been writing some small articles on games and this is the first of the series.

It is as most postmortem articles from Gamasutra.com it is very intra prospective and very self criticizing, both positive and negative. But I leave the comments field open and any feedback is more than welcome.

First and foremost, this article is meant to humour you. You should not read this as serious academic writing. For that, look elsewhere on this website or on the internet.

So now we got that covered, I give you without further ado ;
Postmortem: The Gamasutra.com Postmortem Analysis

What went right

1. Took advice from people that where smarter than me
   I owe a huge thanks to Jacob Busk from InterActive Vision (and founder of the Danish IGDA Chapter), for convincing me to translate the analysis into English. If he hadn’t encouraged me to do so, I’ve properly newer would have.

2. Good debate on newsgroup
   When I first started researching for the thesis I started a debate on comp.games.development.design with the title “What’s wrong with game development today?”. The thread geared more than 150 replies from industry people around the world. Their responds and criticism became a great source of information.

3. Translated the analysis to English early on and putting in online
   Shortly after I finished my exams I translated the analysis of the postmortem articles into English. If I had waited longer it properly never would have gotten so much response as it did. The people that had discussed it on the newsgroup could still clearly remember the debate.
   It was never really a question if I wanted to put the translated analysis online or not, but I glad that I did. It generated a ton of response from around the world. The University of Jerusalem had it on their curriculum for a semester back in the fall of 2001, and companies from Spain, Czechoslovakia, Germany, South Korea, Australia, UK, and US e-mailed me back and thanked me for it.
   It really made the hard work worthwhile.

4. Making it free
   Before I did put it online, I toyed with the idea for charging 1 or 2 dollars for it. It was great that I decided not to. It would never have spread as fast and wide if I had. Even though 1 dollar seems as a small amount it would without doubt have hindered the spread of it.

5. Hitting a nerve
   At the time I wrote the analysis and the thesis, not much was written about the problems in the game development. The rising cost of productions and publishing was an emerging topic that was being discussed a lot. And it seemed that my analysis really hit a nerve, which i always great.

What went wrong

1. Phoned up a developer
   After I’ve had the thesis online for about a month or so, I looked at the log files from my website and could see that one specific developer (which name will remain undisclosed) had downloaded the thesis a lot of times. They had downloaded it so many times that they where outranking the second place by 30%.
   So I though I phone them out and ask for their opinion about it. That turned out to be a mistake. The man in charge was at first puzzled of how I’ve gotten this information and then angered by it. Even though I ensured him that this information would never be publish. So I never really got around asking him about the analysis and the thesis, I was just trying to control this fire that I accidently started. I’m sure that somewhere in the developer’s phonebook there is a black dot next to my name.

2. Released a version with a ton of typos
   When I re leached the English translation of the entire thesis in contained a ton of typos. There really is no good excuse for this other than I was working against a deadline (on another project) and wanted to get the translation out of the way. Unfortunately, when I finally discovered all the typos and corrected them it had already been downloaded over 6.000 times. Those people who read the first version, would properly never return for the corrected 1.1 version.

3. Not capitalizing more on the 15 kb of fame
   At the time when the analysis was first released (august 2001), it was mentioned on some of the major gaming websites in the world (GameDev.net and of course Gamasutra.com). What I didn’t realized back then was that I should have capitalized more on the 15 kb of fame that followed. My website was, at the time, very poor (and mostly in Danish) and I didn’t use the actuality of the news to knock on doors of game developers in Copenhagen asking for jobs.
   Maybe I should have.

4. Not translating the entire thesis to English right away
   It took over a entire year before I finally took / found the time to translate, not only the analysis, but the entire thesis into English. That was way too long. In the meantime a lot had happen in the game development world and some of my advice for easing up development problems was more or less out-of-date.

5. Not expanding / updating the analysis continually
   Another big mistake was, or is, that I’ve never expanded the analysis further. Thankfully Noel Llopis did. In his article from april 2004, he further reminisce on the points originally stated in my thesis.

Project data:

Publisher: Self publication.

Number of full-time developers: 1

Number of part-time developers: none.

Length of development: 4 months. And 1? month for localization to English.

Release Date: August 1, 2001 from the analysis and October 1, 2002 for the thesis

Development Hardware: Pentium III 450 MHz machines with 512MB RAM, GeForce 3 video card

Development Software: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook, Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Flash, Macromedia FireWorks.

Project Size: Around 50 text files, and 50 image files.