Maxis pushes the social gaming boundary again come June.
The Sims 3, which drops on June 2nd, will have greater social connection features for players and an in-game town to buy/sell items. This means players can not only share their creations, as they have been doing in Sims 2, but they will have an easier time sharing their personal stories from their game. Maxis will provide players with a Movie Mash up tool for players to create their own videos in the game (which I assume will be more robust then the video capture capabilities in The Sims 2); another machinima friendly tool I hope. Players can embed those videos on social network sites or blogs and it looks like other content will be available to share too.
The in-game town for buying and selling items will be a place for players to show off their creations. A Gamer Daily article says the “downloadables, including updates, patches, community content, exchange content and other media will be accessible via the easy to cruise Game Launcher.” Maxis is also building some search and filter features into the game, with some recommendations features to top it all off (W00T).
The Sims is the biggest selling series of all time so having these social features is to their benefit. Though, I’m wondering if the reason that The Sims series is so popular is due to their social features. It is not even an MMO (well not anymore), these are players who are playing a single player game. Maybe some other game developers should start looking into building integrated social features into their next game … just a suggestion.
Got pushed two stories today on Twitter. Well a story and a trailer. The trailer is for Battlestations: Pacific, a war tactics game set in the pacific theater (think battlefield and such). The story is about the game “Six Days in Fallujah,” a survival-horror game set during the Battle of Fallujah during the Iraqi War (think full spectrum meets resident evil … no zombies).
Now the trailer pissed me off. It opens up with dramatic music as a Japanese squadron of planes fly over an island. It then displays the message “On October 25, 1944” [some more plane and now ship shots] “During the Battle of the Leyte Gulf” [some more shots] “The war changed forever.” The trailer then follows a plane, through the pilot’s perspective, down as it flies directly into a battleship. October 25, 1944 was the first major kamikaze strike on U.S. forces during WWII.
That’s it, the trailer is about kamikaze strikes, that is what pisses me off. The rest of the trailer shows other kamikaze pilots flying into ships. The trailer goes on to display “In desperate times, There are no rules.” They even end with a Bonzai just for good measure.
Jason Rohrer came to Georgia Tech last Wednesday and I was able to record his talk.
Jason asks the question where the line that separates games from other media art forms is located. He presents a number of examples trying to find the artistic properties that make games enjoyable and allow them to produce impressionable experiences. Are games art? Jason says not yet but you can decide for yourself.
Does anyone want to contribute their Flash game for some player research?
Beginning this Summer I will be conducting user tests with Flash games and will be gathering gameplay data with the metric system I have been building. The purpose of this study is to understand what it takes to gather extensive metrics in online Flash games and how the gameplay data collected can be used in novel ways for design, visualization and artistic purposes.
If anyone is willing to provide me with any Flash games (both AS2 and AS3 coded games will work), ones that I can hook my metric software into, this would help my research greatly. I will need access to the actual code in the game and can offer NDAs for any person/company that wishes to keep their code secret. I will hopefully be able to share most of my findings with the developers that send me there Flash games and to the public at large. If anyone needs more details about how the provided games will be used I would be happy to speak with you. My email address is on the side link page, About.
And just to give you a glimpse as to how fantastic it would be to visualize and explore metric data in games, check out JoAnn Kuchera-Morin TED video below. She presents the Allosphere, a 3D immersive visualization room. She only discusses the visualization of scientific data but what if this was used with game data? How incredible would it be to explore game metric data gathered from 3D MMOs and display the data inside the 3D game world as you zoom around learning what players are up to.
Giant Bomb, a game news/wiki website that is focused on user generated content, released their API awhile ago allowing users to tap into their unique game data. Also, I recently got my hands on a copy of the data visualization software program Tableau. Add one tablespoon of PHP and you have some nice graphics.
I’ve only been working on this today but I was able to grab all of the user review data that Giant Bomb offers. There are almost 8000 reviews total which was good because I don’t think my laptop could take much more data. The Giant Bomb API is one of the easiest I have ever worked with, you just ping URLs which is great. Their user reviews consist of mainly a time, score, text review, name of reviewer and the game reviewed.
Now I ran into a problem with Tableau, it has nothing to compare large amounts of text data. I wanted to do word counts and searches on the user review text but Tableau doesn’t have that functionality. It was even truncating the reviews and not showing them at full length. I’ll have to look into getting around that maybe I’ll find my python parser to do some string manipulations.
Anyways, I was able to run the numbers and get some nice looking graphs. In the future, once I download more of their data, I can combine different tables and make more elaborate visualization. For now I focused on user review scores in respect to length of review, date published, the most frequent reviewers and the games with the most reviews. I’ll step through each of these after the fold.
