The Complex Universe of Games and Puzzles, Simplified, claims Wired. I think I disagree mightily with many many of the links and clusters (code and math are way more tightly related than that! And I can’t tell why they see Board Games and Games as separate nodes. And…
But it’s a cool visualization, and there are lots of cool gems hidden away. Ah, look, there’s Sprouts, a game I always forget the rules to.
Add one more competitor to the race to create the standard for web-delivered 3d. This time, it’s Google, with a new API called O3D.
The O3D plugin leverages hardware accelerated rendering, which means that it is powered by the GPU and can deliver strong rendering performance. The API supports loading 3D models, much like Mozilla’s high-level C3DL library. Google has published several open source demos which show how the API can be used to build interactive 3D Web applications with JavaScript. One of the demos even features a JavaScript physics engine.
— Google joins effort for 3D Web standard with new plugin, API – Ars Technica.
It’s not compatible with Mozilla’s Khronos effort, but Google says they intend it to converge over the course of a few years. And yes, it is fully cross-platform. There’s a shader language (again, non-standard, doesn’t match HLSL or Cg), and of course it supports loading SketchUp as well as from Max and Maya. It also can run inside an OpenSocial gadget, or run offline in Gears.
It’s a developer release only, found here. But it’s very worth keeping an eye on. Google has to get it adopted, of course, and that will take using powerful distribution leverage, the way that Flash uses YouTube and Microsoft uses NetFlix and Windows Update to push Silverlight.
Here’s a video.
A Model of Play is a fascinating poster (available as a PDF or as images) that takes what seems like a very game-grammar point of view on the concept of play — even freeform play.
In play, one of the primary goals is to have fun — to continue engaging in the conversation that creates fun. Individuals choose the means for achieving that goal; they choose the topic of conversation, for example, which game to play. Within a topic, they choose different strategies and pursue a series of sub-goals, adjusting means according to their effectiveness. Goals and sub-goals and associated means form a tree (or web) of possibilities for action.
Among the grammar principles that are mentioned is the notion that play always requires two, even if the second person is a “virtual person.” The notion that interactivity is inherently a conversation can be traced back to at least Chris Crawford, of course.
Also cool is the “step by step” logic version found here, which builds the poster argument by argument.
Just briefly noting that the Open Screen Initiative, which I have mentioned before (1, 2), seems to be moving into higher gear.
The company will on Monday announce its latest version of its Flash multimedia platform that will essentially put its technology in Internet connected TVs, set-top boxes, Blu-ray players, and other digital home devices. The main purpose of the TV and consumer electronics optimized Flash is to allow viewers to see high-definition video, interactive applications and new user interfaces right on their TVs.
As part of the announcement, the company revealed a number of partners that plan to use the technology, including, Intel, Comcast, Disney Interactive, Netflix, Atlantic Records, and the New York Times Company.
…Developers will also be able to create “widgets” for TVs to help bring Web content onto the TV screen. Widgets are specially designed Web applications that can easily be added to consumer electronics devices.
— Adobe’s Flash comes to TVs, set-top boxes | Digital Media – CNET News.
It still happens — I get into a conversation with someone, and they say ‘but, surely user-created content can’t work on the Internet? Won’t most of it be bad?”
Then you get a story like this, wherein we learn that the users of City of Heroes, given 24 hours, made more missions than the entire dev since the game was first started — and what’s more, around 10% of them got rated as 5-star by the other users.
In a letter to the community posted on the official City of Heroes website, Matt “Positron” Miller revealed that within the first 24 hours of the new updates’ existence, players in both hero and villain factions had created more than 3800 story arcs, each consisting of five missions a piece – more content than the development team had created during the game’s entire existence.
Really, the quintessential challenge here isn’t going to be volume of high-quality content. It’s going to be filtering, bubbling the good stuff up to the top. But this is a largely known problem these days on the web. So it’s about time that the skepticism stop. Yes, users can be just as good at game design as pros — what they usually need is tools with a low enough barrier to entry, and the context within which to create.
