Why in the growing field of game and media studies do we rely on old formats and procedures for submitting conference papers? Having common formats for printing is one thing but coming from a design perspective this seems restrictive.

I was in a project meeting today where my team members and I were discussing a paper we are writing for a conference. For my section I’m reviewing a list of games and their mechanics. Each game is rated as to how best they fit a certain player type that we are presenting in the paper. As a note to myself, and to my other team members, in the title header for each game I place a key showing which player types the game provided for the most. We have been producing a lot of documents for this project and I have been trying to work in more visually oriented note-taking because I think it helps make sense of large written documents. For this latest document another team member liked the ranking notes I made so we are going to try to add a small visual element in each game section to show how each game relates to our player types.

This paper is for a new game conference so we will have an easier time working with the formatting. But I could see other conferences going nuts because we are using images without subtext or as part of the main header. That’s what I don’t understand why is the academic conference world still text heavy? Is it because we have other venues like poster or demo sessions that can be more visually oriented? (Though CS posters might as well be papers) Perhaps people feel they must rely on text to get more of their ideas across? Or are we just stuck using systems that were created for the hard sciences and us soft sciences just have to follow along if we want to be treated with respect?

It is ironic that the project I am working on is looking at the different ways that people learn and tries to alter games in order to fit those needs. Yet the conferences where this project will be published rely on text-based means for getting information across to others, instead of a more visual one that I, personally, would prefer.

Saw this over at the information aesthetics blog: wordle. It’s a website that takes a text document or a users del.icio.us tags and creates a tag cloud. These clouds are customizable: you can remove common words, choose different fonts (~20 available), change the color scheme, and set the layout of the words (the Any Which Way options is sweet). What is really neat is that another word can fill any open space within another word. I made my picture from my del.icio.us tags, which I have not used in a long time but apparently I was very into social networks (the SN tag), Web 2.0, and conferences. The creator Jonathan Feinberg cannot release the code because IBM owns it, which kinda stinks. One thing I would like to see is an RSS option so I could take my blog and output a picture of my most common words.

This also reminded me of Chris Harrison’s work on word visualization. He has a lot of great projects over at his website.

Cross posted at The Digital Tabletop Blog.

Summary

This quick card game is for 2 to 4 players. The premise of the game is that each player is a goblin mechanic (because goblins are obviously mechanically inclined). Each player starts with the same amount of cards that are placed in a draw pile. These cards allow the player to create a Machine, basically a series of cards that cause actions which affect their own cards and the cards of other players. The purpose of these machines is to force other players to exhaust their draw pile before you. Once a player’s draw pile is depleted they lose the game. So the last player with cards in their draw pile wins.

I found it to be a fun and easy game to play, except you need to understand what cards are available in the game. I’ll go through the major rules of the game and the card types next.

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I’m currently reading Thomas Barnett’s book entitled “The Pentagon’s New Map.” The premise of the book is that after the cold war ended the pentagon and defense department did not fully understand that there were no more large wars to fight. So for the last two decades the pentagon has been acting like World War 3 is about to happen but end up fighting smaller battles all over the world. The main problem with this is that when we did fight a nation to nation war (the Iraq war) we were so swift and efficient that we had no idea what to do after we won, hence all the turmoil that has happened since the end of the major assault. Dr. Barnett gives a wonderful talk on the TED website where he explains how the pentagon should be split into two forces, a kick-ass fighting force and a peaceful humanitarian force.

Recently, I have been looking into the concept of conflict theory and how people begin, maintain and end conflicts. I’ve been using this knowledge to better understand how conflicts can be modeled within games, since games are basically safe places to have conflicts. In Dr. Barnett’s book he outlines something called a Post-Cold War Horizontal Scenario that describe conflicts. These scenarios look at conflict from multiple perspectives, Barnett believes that to understand conflict one must have a multi-disciplinary mind-set, not just from a war perspective. With this I whole heartily agree and find it funny that we also say the same about games. Barnett defines what makes a PCWH Scenario in his book and I went through each characteristics to see how they map onto how conflicts work within game environments.
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I’m presenting a paper at the SIGGRAPH Sandbox symposium about neutrality in games. As I was touching the paper up for the final submission I re-read through a section I wrote about alignment mechanics. These mechanics are used in games where players can choose how to align themselves with other players, factions, etc. For instance morality is used in games to give players the option of playing the game as a good or evil character, Kotor is one example. Another example would be faction status, used in MMO games like WoW, which records how an in-game faction perceives a player (is the character friendly or unfriendly towards the faction?). These alignment mechanics reward players that reach the highest limits of these alignment scales, whether positive or negative, by giving them different content or bonuses. In the paper I talk about how players who do not choose to reach these limits get left out but this reminded me of something almost completely different from a game called Munchkin.

Munchkin is a satirical card game based around the common game concept of raiding a dungeon for treasure. The game is very comical and the gameplay can be summed up with “Everybody For Themselves!” Now in Munckin a user has a class and a race card and each user can only have one class and race at any point in time. Each class and race card give the player special bonuses such as a new spell or attack. However, these cards have negative effects that they carry as well such as being weak against certain monsters. WoW and other games have similar effects: Undead characters do not have to breath underwater, Orcs get an attack bonus when using an axe, etc. This is what I was reminded of when I was re-reading that alignment section. A user’s class and race is their alignment within the game and each alignment carries pros and cons.

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Last month Gamasutra had an article about the top 20 most underutilized licenses. Obviously the 20 licenses picked were just the opinions of those responsible for contributing to the article with no real justification besides “hey this would be cool.” But regardless it’s always fun to think about new concepts and worlds that could be turned into games. One that I have been thinking about for a long time and just have never done anything about is turning the 80s toy franchise Dino Riders into a game.

Technically this has already happened, if you head over to dinoriders.com a demo can be downloaded of a Dino Riders FPS game. I couldn’t get the game to work on Vista but from the screen shots it looks comparable to the first Quake game. I think the Dino Riders story offers so much more than just building a typical FPS.

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The first of three weddings this summer What an excellent time and the next two should be just as fun. I mean look at these guys, who could not have fun with them.

Sorry Lindsay I stole these photos from your Facebook, I’ll have my photos up there soon.

I’m in Michigan for a week visiting my parents and attending a friend’s wedding. Reaching Michigan from Atlanta, Ga. (where I live) takes only an hour and a half of flight time. If you add on the time it takes me to get to the airport (30 minutes) and the amount of buffer time you are supposed to arrive at the airport (90 minutes) then the grand total takes four and a half hours. Alright, when compared to the 18 hour trip it would take me to drive to Michigan flying is really nice. I can read while I wait for the plane, and while I’m on the plane, as opposed to having to keep my eyes on the road for 18 hours (or if I took a bus or train I would get to read but it would still take a long time).

Now, when I was watching CNN today, something I don’t normally do and this is a post about why I don’t, I saw a story about how the airline industry has cost this country $41 billion in delays. One figure stated that for every passenger that went through Atlanta’s airport (one of the busiest, though I believe the busiest, airports in the world) was delayed an average of 16 minutes. The largest per passenger delay was 55 minutes. Adding up all of these delays the report said that passengers have lost $12 billion worth of time that could have been spent working or playing.

And all I can say is What the Frak?

Flying saved me around 13-14 hours of time to get to Michigan. Plus I’m not the one responsible for operating the vehicle I’m traveling in so I was able to get stuff done while I traveled. The plane could have been delayed at least 8 hours more and it would still have been more productive for me to fly rather than drive. This is what I don’t get, these reports come out and state that the country has lost $X because of a flaw in Y. But they do not state that Y saves the country $Z which is probably 10, 100, 1000 times greater than $X. Sure the airline industry is in trouble, we know that, but don’t start spouting out numbers saying that we are hemorrhaging money because they are in trouble.

Flying has opened the world to travel like never before and people get mad when they have to sit for an hour to get to Tokyo from New York. True the airline industry does need an upgrade but that is not going to come by consistently screaming at them for delays. Really the big problem I see is that the government will enact procedures that force passengers to stand in a security line for an hour (where you cannot easily read or be even mildly productive) but will not give money to upgrade the flight control systems.

So CNN reporters play on the anger people feel at the airport when they have to wait AN EXTRA 16 MINUTES (omg) and I die a little inside.

I’m both impatient and a non-time wasting freak. Okay those over-simplify me a little but those are two reasons why I enjoy trying to cram in anything I can into my waking life. Which is why, when I’m at home working, I watch videos while I eat. I figure if I try to work I either spend all my time eating or working (which then I have cold food *smiley face here* ) Thus I have a whole slew of video websites that I have at my disposal whenever I have to fill my tummy. And I am not talking about YouTube either, I have not gotten into the whole search for videos to watch phase yet. Right now I’m relying on specific content websites. Here is a list and short descriptions of videos websites that I have watched in the past (cause I ate up all their videos *pun INtendend*) or ones that I currently watch.

TED – I cannot say enough good words about the Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) conference. It’s where the greatest minds get together and give small presentation about their passions and their work. While most presentations are about 20 minutes long they are great to watch when eating a meal, especially since most will give you more ideas than you know what to do with.

Homestar Runner – Probably do not need to describe this to anyone but Homestar Runner is a flash animation series that has been going on for years. The humor is a little bit zany, along with it’s huge crew of characters that can be drawn upon. Some of my constituents have moved on but I still find it funny.

Space tree the space tree in space – A series of short flash animations that are a little less P.C. than Homestar Runner and I would say funnier. The title gives you the plot but I would compare the humor to that of ‘Home Movies’, another great animated show.

Zero Punctuation – A series of game reviews done as flash animated shorts. Another non-P.C. series, these game reviews are hilarious.

Ask a Ninja – Another website that needs no introductions. It’s a ninja sitting in-front of a camera talking about being a ninja, all edited together with fast, off-centered transition jumps. Funny, Funny, Funny.

Alan Watts Theater – These videos take speeches by Alan Watts and create animations around them. There are only six but Matt Stone and Trey Parker were the producers.

Afterworld – I recently started watching this series. The story begins when 99% of the people on the Earth go missing and technology goes bye-bye. The main character Russ was on a business trip in New York and sets out to get back to Seattle to find his family. There are 130 episodes each about 3-4 minutes long. I like it because it has a little ‘Fallout’ feel to it, I miss that game’s storyline.

Red vs. Blue – Though the old series is done the production group, Roster Teeth, always has new content coming out, and a new Red vs. Blue series is starting soon. These are machinima shorts so each series takes place inside a video game environment. Red vs. Blue is shot within the various Halo games from Bungie. The plot is about two teams of very bored soldiers stuck in an endless war and after five seasons things get a little weird.

Pure Pwnage - I have to admit I have not watched this series in awhile. The first half of season one was hilarious and I have been meaning to watch the rest. It’s a live action series about a pro-gamer just trying to live his life. Lots of game and gamer related humor.

If all else fails then I rely on Comedy Central, South Park, NBC.com and Adult Swim for online videos of regular TV shows.

If anyone has their own video websites that they enjoy leave a comment.

First off let me say that I really enjoyed this game. I thought Budget Hero took a very complicated problem, the federal budget, and simplified it in a way that is understandable. Plus they give extra insight into the different spending options, giving information on both sides of every issue, and provide a way for people to find more information about budget related subjects. With that said let me move on to the review.

Overview

The game allows players to drag and drop spending/cutting cards into their overall budget area on the right side of the screen. Each card has a value that will add to the budget or take away from it. The player inherits the current US budget so the cards values are based on the current budget (the game cites resources for all of its value assumptions).

When players choose cards they affect the following areas:

1. Badges – Players choose three “badges” that represent their policy. I chose energy independent, health and competitive advantage (for America). Other badges include national security, being Green, efficient government and safety net. Certain cards in the game will contribute to a player’s badge score. From what I can tell there are three cards that help each badge. If a player places these three cards in their budget then they get awarded that badge.
2. Deficit/Surplus – How much is a player’s budget is taking in verses spending (max is $600 billion).
3. Size of government – Is the player’s budget a big or small government budget (based on percentage of GDP) (min is 12% and max is 24%).
4. Budget Bust – When will the player’s budget go bust or fails (max is 2070)
5. Debt – What is the country’s debt based on % of GDP (min is 20% and max is 40%).

The player can choose cards from 8 government departments, the country’s taxes, and the I.O.U. does not have any cards (only showing the interests that occurs on the overall debt). Each department has its own set of cards related to that department and the tax cards obviously have to do with how the government taxes its citizens. There are a lot of cards so I will not go through them but each provide more information beyond their title. Double clicking a card will give you an expanded card screen with the total budget effect for the next 10 years, a general overview of the card, the pros and cons of the card, the impact of the card and the real world source that corresponds to how the card was balanced.

The player gathers cards on the right side of the screen, I ended up with 27 cards. A player then can see how their budget will play out and get a summary screen. Here the player is given the following information:

1. The player is matched against the current budget: Did the countries debt change, when will the budget fail, and how did the size of the government shift.
2. What badges the player was awarded.
3. A player’s biggest cards.

A player can compare their budget with others that have submitted their budgets or a player can print out their budget (which I thought was a really nice feature). Comparing goes by US residency, zip code, year of birth, gender, income level and political affiliation. A player can also go back and alter their budget if they wish, which is also nice so a player can go back and shift around a few things to see the difference.

That is basically the overview for the game. Now for some of my insights.

My Strategy

I took away a bunch of Bush’s tax cuts (I started taxing the rich though) and I was able to put every spending card in my budget from the smaller departments: education, science, home, misc., and infrastructure (though I took out the ‘pork barrel’ spending in the misc.). I cut some of the bigger things from the military (cutting the spending by 10%) but I kept foreign aid and created new military units so in the end I didn’t take away that much from the military. I was able to give health care to everyone (I think that was the largest single spending card in the game) and I even increased Social Security spending.

My surplus was over 600B, the size of the government was under the middle range, and budget wouldn’t bust until after 2070. My budget print out can be found here. It really can’t be this easy, just by cutting those tax breaks and taxing the rich, can it? Plus I met 2 out of three my badges or health and competitive advantage. I didn’t get energy independence because I refused to drill in Alaska (kinda BS if you ask me). The other cards ‘increase mass transit funds’ and ‘fund congestion study’ were the other two major energy independent cards which I did fund. If there was a ‘give money to research alternative fuel programs’ I would have gladly went for that.

Card Woes

If cards depend on one another I would like to know why? Some are a little more obvious, e.g eliminate ‘pork barrel project’ means you cannot cut ‘pork barrel spending if half’. Some of the tax stuff however was weird since there were a couple different configurations for the same tax decision. Maybe each card could have extended options that could expand down or cards that can’t be used should be taken away.

Technically the whole middle section of the screen is under used when working with the cards since players do not need to check the overall budget for each department often (each building allows the player to scroll over the building and see the overall spending of that department). Making the card area bigger and turning the card area transparent when a new card is selected or having an option for the player to turn the transparency on when they wish to view the overall budgets would be other ways of using the middle space more efficiently.

+ and – for the budget numbers are used differently for the tax cards (+ gives you money) and the department spending (+ takes away money). A little confusing at first.

Last, the game needs more cards. Being an academic I wanted to see a “Give lots of money to NSF” card

Summary Stuff

The game allows a player to print out their budget but the print out is not in color. This makes it hard to see which policies go to which department within the game.

Comparing the budget to other people was great however the data needs to be put into proper visualization software because the game screen is too limited.

Although one flaw of the compare data is that it is not screened. I forgot to take a screenshot of the compare screen so I quickly reloaded the game and did a no card budget. Meaning I didn’t change the budget or play the game at all. Not thinking I typed in my real information again into the compare screen. There were only 2, male, age 20-29, in Georgia people (really only 2 from Georgia in all) when I got to the compare screen. I take it the first one was me and then the second one was from me again ( in the screen shot), where I didn’t play the game. Thus the “average” score was then in-between my previous score and the one without playing the game. Obviously this doesn’t help when comparing across people because you can’t tell how long people played for or if they are telling the truth when they put in their demographic information. Kinda stinks cause I liked my first score.

GUI errors/concerns/annoyances

These are just things that I have to say about the GUI in general.

1. The cards cutting off on the top of the screen while players cycle through them seems weird. Should have put a border around the area.
2. The badges take up space and could be tighter.
3. The badges get filled as a player picks cards but this should be more explicit. Players should know how much more they need within each badge to achieve the badge, especially stating which cards work towards which badges.
4. The textbox size for the card cost is just a little too small at the top of expanded card view. The bottom of the numbers get clipped ever so slightly (I believe on the 1,000 and over numbers only)
5. The ‘Impact’ box in the expanded card view should be placed under the pros and cons list or in a tab since the text is too squished together.
6. The sources that are quoted in each expanded card view are nice but should be click-able and linked to the source material (if possible).
7. When clicking on a building the left arrow for the card cycling flashes on the screen but disappears because the player cannot move the cards to the left. This is extremely picky but I hate it when GUI elements draw themselves on the screen when they should not appear.

Conclusion

All in all Budget Hero is a great game. I agree with Ben Sawyer, who sent out an email about this game on the serious games email list, that more budget games like this should be created. Since games usually teach players how to manage resources anyways I don’t see why this cannot be achieved.