039;s year-end gaming club. (2) - By Leigh Alexander, Jamin Brophy-Warren, Mitch Krpata, and Chris Suellentrop If someone else wants to be Puck, I can volunteer to be Kevin Powell. Or better yet, we could all cast ourselves in Jersey Shore (which I guarantee Ubisoft has in development). I would like to channel the spirit and flair of Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino. (Also, is Nolan North, who voiced Drake, the video-game industry's Will Smith? I love my other favorite game of 2009 for the exact opposite reasons. With almost nothing but a simple game mechanic and some evocative details (the fluttering doves a la John Woo, the pitter-patter of his black loafers), Canabalt made me feel desperation, longing, and sadness when my character inevitably fell to his death. Chris, I completely agree with you about the length of games. Before I go, I want to mention one more game. Chris, I really want to tackle your Modern Warfare 2 comments, but I think they'll be best served by another post.
The psychology of... Avatars Our appearance changes every day. When we get up each morning, we decide what clothes and jewellery to wear, which hairs to shave and which to style. All of this varies by occasion, and some of us make more radical alterations as well, such as getting tattoos, piercings or cosmetic surgery. In real life, though, we’re often limited in the changes we can make to appear taller, say, or more prosperous. Researchers have been studying the reactions to our real appearance in others for a long time, but they’ve also started to seriously study the psychology of our avatars. Explaining why we adopt some the avatars we do is easy: it’s down to the demands of the game. “Studies have shown that, in general, people create slightly idealised avatars based on their actual selves,” says Nick Yee, a research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center. Palo Alto Research Center research scientist Nick Yee and Boston College assistant professor Seung-A Jin
What Games Are Games Tagged with 'mobile-monday' - Jay is Games Games Featured: • RunMan: Pronto • Glorkian Warrior • Color Tale Time to add a little color to your life. Both literally and figuratively! Colorful games with colorful characters and possibly even direct coloring gameplay additions dominate this edition of Mobile Monday. Games Featured: • Harry Likes Plums • Clobbr • Super Sanctum TD Get to demolishing things! Games Featured: • Droid Arcade • Pixel Room • Final Fantasy VI A little nostalgia to start your week? Games Featured: • Faif • Devils • Death off the Cuff The devils made us do it! Games Featured: • Stealth Inc. • LYNE • Inexistence Since everyone's already gone calender shopping for the new year (you remember printed calendars, right?) Games Featured: • Dungelot 2 • Trexels • Vacation Vexation As the mobile marketplaces wake up from their holiday slumber, new games start emerging like little flowers in the snow. Games Featured: • Angry Birds Star Wars II • Tengami Free games and the year's best games. Sonic's back! So many sales! Quick!
The Psychology Of: free-to-play Currently, free-to-play games are making quite the killing in the marketplace, although it’s death by a thousand microtransactions. The idea, as the name suggests, is that you can play for free, but you can also pay for in-game conveniences, such as new content and time savers. It’s been a massive success, and the model is now something of an industry darling, much to the chagrin of certain developers. In 2010, game creator and noted essayist Ian Bogost reacted to the rise of free-to-play principles by reducing them to their essence in his tongue-in-cheek Cow Clicker. Cow Clicker wasn’t a fluke. From left: David Edery, CEO of game developer Spry Fox; Ron Faber, professor of mass communication at the University Of Minnesota; and Uber Entertainment creative director John Comes who also worked as a game designer at Gas Powered Games, EA and Westwood Studios So what’s driving the model’s success? It’s a way for games to stay profitable as well.
Goodbye Effect Games Friends, The time has come to shut the doors on Effect Games, so we can move onto other projects. But we've preserved some of our old games and demos for you to play with: We've also open sourced the entire Effect Games engine, as well as the web IDE. The source is MIT licensed, so you may use it in both personal and commercial projects. Deepest thanks to everyone who tried Effect Games and provided such awesome feedback. Baseball Advance (GBA) FAQ by King_Lueshi BASEBALL ADVANCE (GBA) FAQ/Guide by King_Lueshi Sooo... This is an FAQ/Guide for Baseball Advance for the Game Boy Advance. Baseball Advance is a suprisingly good baseball game developed by Smilebit and published by Sega. Even though it is basically universally considered to be the best baseball game on the GBA, there was sadly only one version ever made, while inferior series like High Heat and All-Star Baseball lived on. How'd you like my attempt at an introduction? Yeah, I didn't think it was too great either.
The psychology of... Genres Genres, and debate surrounding them, are nothing new. When gamers disagree on these labels, it can result in diatribes, appeals to dogma, and even existential crises in extreme cases. To which genre do the Deus Ex games belong? Is thirdperson shooter a full genre or merely a sub-genre? With today’s complex range of games, wouldn’t it be easier to eschew genres and rise above petty distinctions? Well, no: we need genres and we use them in ways you may not have thought of. The first reason we need genres is that they facilitate a type of decision making that psychologists call ‘elimination by alternative’. But think about a far more complex situation, such as renting a flat. This is a decision-making process that businesses and marketers are eager to hijack, sometimes in ingenious and even helpful ways. Professor C Whan Park (left) and associate professor of communication John L Sherry
The Art & Business of Making Games the Web Genius The psychology of... Nostalgia Do you remember Odysseus, the protagonist of Homer’s 2,800-year-old epic poem The Odyssey? Well, he’s more relevant than you might think to all these modern reboots of older franchises, such as XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition. As researcher Tim Wildschut and his colleagues note in Nostalgia: Content, Triggers, Functions (published in the Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology), Odysseus’s ordeal is a good illustration of nostalgia as it was originally conceived. The word itself derives from the Greek words ‘nostos’, meaning ‘returning’, and ‘algos’, or ‘suffering’. Thus The Odyssey’s 10-year span can be seen as our hero experiencing a huge bout of nostalgia as he struggles to return to the way things were and get back to his wife in Ithaca. Much later, in the 1600s, a few Swiss physicians and fans of neologism coined the term ‘nostalgia’ in reference to a certain kind of homesickness. It’s a state of affairs that isn’t lost on developers and publishers.
Metagames: Games About Games Abusive Games Penn & Teller's Smoke & Mirrors (Sega CD, 1995). Download. Like their earlier Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends video from 1987 — see Vidi Kopy or Super Kleener for meta-VHS examples — Smoke and Mirrors was a collection of small pranks that used unique aspects of the medium to let buyers play tricks on their friends. In Desert Bus, the most notorious of the mini-games, players drive a tour bus on a mind-numbing eight-hour trip from Tucson to Las Vegas. Driving off-road gets you towed back to Tucson in real-time, making it difficult to cheat. Bastet: Bastard Tetris (Windows/Linux, 2005). I Wanna Be The Guy: The Movie: The Game (Windows, 2007). The Unfair Platformer (Flash, 2008). Steamshovel Harry (Flash, 2009). Tetris HD (Flash, 2009). Minimalist Games The flipside of abusive games — games so obvious that they're barely games at all. Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die (Z-code, 1996). Progress Quest (Windows/Linux/Web, 2002). Quest for the Crown (Flash, 2003). Mr. Violent Games
Continuity The psychology of... High scores During the heyday of the coin-operated videogame arcade, there was little better than seeing our name – well, our initials at least – in lights on a game’s high score list. And it was agonising to see it fall off the bottom, replaced by smug strings of characters representing those who had often accrued mere handfuls of points more. Friendly rivalries led us to feed coin after coin into machines such as Dig Dug , Donkey Kong and Pole Position just so that we could provide incontrovertible evidence that our skills trumped those of our friends. The proof was right there on the screen – at least until the arcade attendant unplugged the cabinet at the end of the night. Games have evolved a lot since then, but the concept of comparing our performance against others has remained. In other words, not all comparisons are equal. The answer lies with what has become known as ‘social comparison theory’. Firstly, in many ways it’s who you’re comparing yourself to that matters the most.