The Frip And The Dead The Webtender: Drinking Games. Have fun with The Webtender's collection of drinking games, but be extremely careful if you play any these games, especially the ones with high buzz factors. The collection was created as an aid to responsible adults who know their limits (and not to cross them) when it comes to drinking, and not to promote this kind of drinking behavior. You should of course be of legal drinking age if you want to play these games with beer or drinks, but anyone can play these games with non-alcoholic beverages as well. For more fun, visit the Web Site Index and go to one of the sites listed there. You should also take a look at 'The Complete Book of Beer Drinking Games'. Home · Drink Recipes · Forums · Bookstore · Barstore · Web Index · Feedback
GDC 10: Theme is Not Meaning Soren Johnson spent five years working on the Civilization series for Firaxis, eventually landing the job of lead designer for Civilization IV. He also did work on Spore, amongst many other things. He also gave the keynote address of the 2010 Serious Games Summit. Johnson's talk, "Theme is Not Meaning," opened with a simple question: who decides the meaning of a game? Hit the jump for the answer to that question, and a summary of Johnson's keynote. It's the player. The designer might want a mechanic or a story to mean one thing, but the player is the one intimately dealing with that game, and so his decision as to what the overall theme is will always be the correct one. When comparing a game's theme versus a game's mechanics, though, what defines that game's ultimate meaning? So, thinking about theme, which is the true successor to Warcraft: World of Warcraft, or Starcraft? The actual mechanics, however, don't jibe with this. So, who decides what Ticket to Ride is about?
Coffee Chinese Chess Written by Pham Hong Nguyen, Coffee Chinese Chess is a customizable freeware Java applet for playing Chinese Chess. It is also good for displaying games and practicing with an openingbook. At his own website for this applet, he gives permission for others to include it on their own websites. To use a different piece set, click on one of the piece sets shown below. You may customize this applet as much as you want by entering parameters in the URL Query String. Coffee Chinese Chess Note that this page changes some of the defaults of Coffee Chinese Chess. Written by Fergus Duniho WWW Page Created: 28 September 2003. /home1/chessvar/public_html/play/coffeecc/index.php Credits Author: Fergus Duniho. See also xiangqidiag. Comments List all comments and ratings for this item. Add a comment or rating for this item.
Butchering Pathologic – Part 3: The Soul By Quintin Smith on April 12th, 2008 at 9:49 am. [Following on from the first two parts, this is the grand finale of Quinns' evisceration of the game Walker described as "Oblivion with Cancer". As a compliment. Lots of spoilers, but you should read it anyway.] Butchering Pathologic Part III: The Soul There are two themes that run through Pathologic like a couple of sharks lurking in a swimming pool. In the case of Pathologic, the two themes are meat and theater. Subsequently, when you start playing the game proper it’s difficult to see yourself as anything other than an actor fretting upon a stage. The easiest way to describe the Executors is as the game’s stage hands, or maybe directors. And this is, by the way, what happens when you fail to complete a day’s quests. But all these dramatic devices feel a little unfinished and fluffy. Or maybe I’m being unfair. The town you’re trying to save isn’t built on hot slaughter, or cold execution, but something in between. Okay. An awesome game.
Butchering Pathologic – Part 2: The Mind By Quintin Smith on April 11th, 2008 at 12:24 pm. [Following on from yesterday's installment, Quinns continues his examination of the award winning Russian obscurity Pathologic. Spoilers abound. Butchering Pathologic Part II: The Mind In a single word, Pathologic is dark. And yet as distant as morals seem to be, Pathologic still manages to feel like the most impossibly vibrant battle of good versus evil as you defend this wretched place, simply because of the sheer horror of your antagonist. Ultimately, every obstacle you face in the game is caused by the virus. Now, when you first end a day in Pathologic a message comes up on screen. Now, to begin with this is comforting. Then, on one tired night midway through the game as your character staggers to bed, you find yourself thinking. “After seven days, the game ends.” After seven days, it ends. What ends? This nightmare is over. What ends? Maybe the town ends. Or maybe you end. And then you start wondering if the disease can be beaten at all.
Butchering Pathologic – Part 1: The Body By Quintin Smith on April 10th, 2008 at 7:42 pm. [Wandering RPS-associate Quinns went native in a Russian art-videogame called Pathologic and has been exciting us with rants about it ever since. It's an enthralling game that, when I reviewed it, felt compelled to give a mark in the low fifties ("This will be someone's favourite game of the year. Okay. …okay. I’m going to explain, right now, why a Russian FPS/RPG called Pathologic is the single best and most important game that you’ve never played. But enough is enough. This article will be in three parts. Which is a bit pretentious, but it can’t be helped, as it’s the only way to show you what this game showed me. You ready? Butchering Pathologic Part I: The Body Pathologic is a game about disease. The game begins with three healers arriving in a town, a backwards settlement built on a meat industry out in the barren earth of the Russian steppes. But things are wrong. And that’s the set-up. First, the three characters do not work together.
The 6 Most Ominous Trends in Video Games Our generation will be remembered for our video games. Every generation is remembered by its popular art; when you think of the 60s you think of Woodstock and hippie music. When you think of the 80s, you think of Miami Vice and the birth of music video. So when your grandchildren think of the 2010s, what will they picture in their minds? Let's put it this way: Seriously. Regular readers know I made a similar graphic based on last year's games. The problems with gaming go beyond the fact that every major blockbuster game coming in the next year seems to involve looking through glass sights at a terrorist or zombie. (We're worried that you might not see our new Star Wars mini-series. The Technology is Going Backward I remember a time when I had absolutely no worries about the future of gaming. Via Nintendo.com"Gaming is saved, and the global economy ain't never gonna collapse, baby!" But more than four years later, nothing on the Wii has equaled it. "Waaaaait a second! "Kill me next!" A. B.
Features - The Deaths Of Game Narrative It's been quite a year for epic, narrative-driven games -- titles vast in scope, grand in ambition, and gorgeous in execution -- and I have fought my way through a few of the best. In recent months I have transformed into an exiled Florentine nobleman thirsty for vengeance in Renaissance Italy; I masqueraded as a continent-hopping, chiseled chunk of vainglorious derring-do in search of lost treasure; and I traveled the western wilds of the United States as a battle-scarred loner fighting to restore his dignity and return to his family. To the ear of an outsider, this might sound like a pretty diverse scrapbook of experiences, and I'd say this was half right. Perhaps this is an unfair choice of words. They have murdered dozens, if not hundreds, more people than they have befriended. Take a quick survey of most game mechanics based on real-life activities and you'll find this same criterion in effect in almost all cases: the conditions for success are always clear and decisive.
Jesse Schell: Visions of the Gamepocalypse ALEXANDER ROSE:I'm Alexander Rose; I'm the Director of the Long Now Foundation. As some of you know who come to these talks every month we do a little short film before each talk which we call a "long short". This is a shortterm film that exemplifies longterm thinking. 5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted So, the headlines say somebody else has died due to video game addiction. Yes, it's Korea again. What the hell? Look, I'm not saying video games are heroin. I totally get that the victims had other shit going on in their lives. Oh, hell yes. #5. If you've ever been addicted to a game or known someone who was, this article is really freaking disturbing. "Each contingency is an arrangement of time, activity, and reward, and there are an infinite number of ways these elements can be combined to produce the pattern of activity you want from your players." Notice his article does not contain the words "fun" or "enjoyment." "...at this point, younger gamers will raise their arms above their head, leaving them vulnerable." His theories are based around the work of BF Skinner, who discovered you could control behavior by training subjects with simple stimulus and reward. This sort of thing caused games researcher Nick Yee to once call Everquest a "Virtual Skinner Box." So What's The Problem? #4.
Pixel Poppers: Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement When I was old enough to care whether I won or lost at games, but still too young to be any good at them, I decided RPGs were better than action games. After all, I could play Contra for hours and still be terrible at it - while if I played Dragon Warrior III for the same amount of time, my characters would gain levels and be much more capable of standing up to whatever threats they encountered. As I grew older, this conclusion lay dormant and unexamined in my mind. , again in Lufia II , then again in Chrono Trigger Then, one day in a Child Psychology course, I learned something interesting. It turns out there are two different ways people respond to challenges. Say you take a person with a performance orientation ("Paul") and a person with a mastery orientation ("Matt"). Now give them each a difficult puzzle. While a performance orientation improves motivation for easy challenges, it drastically reduces it for difficult ones. What does this have to do with videogames? , of Skies of Arcadia
Cultivated Play: Farmville [This essay was given as a talk at SUNY Buffalo, 28 January 2010, the day after Howard Zinn’s death. I have left the text unaltered, to better reflect the spirit of the talk.] “I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel - let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing.” — Howard Zinn The great social historian Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, died yesterday of a heart attack. At such times, and at such speeds, the task of educating ourselves becomes all the more urgent. Perhaps it seems a waste of time to discuss video games at a moment like this. If games are essential to citizenship, then this could be a promising time for our democracy. Much has been made of President Obama’s sophisticated use of new media technologies. With this in mind, it seems appropriate to examine the most popular video game in America. Farmville is not a good game.
Crap Shoot: The You Testament Richard Cobbett has a deeply bizarre religious experience with one man's attempt to bring The Greatest Story Ever Told to life via the medium of... a hacked up wrestling game engine. Yes. Really. Everything went wrong when I accidentally kicked Jesus in the balls. "Hey, what's your problem?" The You Testament is the best worst game ever. Dan Brown must never, ever find out about this. Where to begin... where to begin? Oh, and it's a game where you can opt to play an integral part in the Gospels as an effeminate disciple called Lucifer. (It also quotes Jay-Z. Manage to get started without doing what the Pharisees could only dream of and the craziness really starts to unfold. For the world is crappy, and I have touched the sky... But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Making your way to Galilee to be initiated, and quite probably with a fight going on around you, Jesus agrees to teach you to become 'a perfect vessel through which divinity flows' via meditation. Here's another great example.