Category: Games

Categories
Game Development Games Geek / Technical

Out of Touch with Games

I’ve been meaning to post about how I am out of the loop when it comes to mainstream games these days. Wario Ware? I still haven’t seen it, but apparently it is huge. I didn’t see the Nintendo DS in action until a few weeks ago. In fact, I haven’t seen the PSP. Lumines? Wipeout? I haven’t seen the Game Boy Advance SP except in other people’s hands.

I wanted to check out Prince of Persia: Sands of Time a few months ago, but it was sold out. I ended up getting Metroid Prime, which is definitely a fun game, but my keyboard/mouse hands can’t remember how I used to play Goldeneye 64 with a passion. I bought Civilization III months ago because it was at impulse-buy range (under $15). I still haven’t pulled the cellophane off of it. I’m only now considering purchasing Unreal Tournament 2004, which got to the top of me and my friends’ want lists because it was available for Linux out of the box (thank you, Epic! I’ll thank you with my dollars soon).

In the meantime, there has been new a Metroid game, a new SimCity(how did THAT escape my attention?!) and an expansion pack for Doom 3. Nintendogs was out. Nintendo was announcing a new game console. All of these things were news to me way after they should have been.

I used to be on top of Nintendo-related news since I had a subscription to Nintendo Power. Last year I realized that I wasn’t playing Nintendo games as much so I gave it up, but now I find myself surprised that other people know about things before I do. I used to be the GOTO guy for Nintendo trivia and knowledge!

And regarding PC games: I just don’t have the time to play all the games I currently have, let alone buy new ones. I loved Homeworld Cataclysm, but I wasn’t going to buy Homeworld 2 since the demo didn’t impress me that much. Dungeon Siege? Sounded cool, but I wasn’t really compelled to play it. Black & White’s expansion didn’t end up in my collection even though I loved the original.

Am I really capable of making good games if I don’t even play many of the existing games? You can’t become a good writer without reading a lot of books, and I think you can’t make good games without playing a lot of games. The good games will inspire, and the bad ones will acts as sign posts, warning the intrepid developer about what not to do and where not to go.

Clearly, I have some improving to do.

Categories
Games Politics/Government

Senior Advisor to Governor Responds to My Concerns

Awhile back I had sent a letter to Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. I received a generic form letter that didn’t address any of my concerns. I sent a second email to Safe Games Illinois asking someone to answer my questions. I figured I would receive a response from someone other than the Governor, but not the Senior Advisor!

Anyway, here’s the content of the letter (misspellings or other typos are likely mine):

Mr. Berardi:

Thank you for your two letters concerning the Governor’s Safe Games Illinois initiative. Although this administration may disagree with many of the arguments in your letters, we appreciate your interest in the issue.

You outline four broad concerns in your letter and I will try to address them one at a time.

Your first question deals with existing laws that limit minors’ access to materials such as books or movies with violent or sexually explicit content. Illinois law already restricts minors’ access to certain harmful material, as dictated by the state’s Harmful Material Statute (720 ILCS 5/11-21). This law prohibits minors from buying a broad range of sexually explicit material – materials such as pornographic books or magazines. So laws do in fact exist that prohibit children’s access to media other than video games.

Your second concern questions why the Blagojevich administration is singling out violent and sexually explicit material in video games and not in other media that may be potentially harmful to children. It has become painfully apparent that video game retailers are not self-regulating and that they continue to sell adult-rated video games to minors. In October of 2003 the Federal Trade Commission released a study which found that underage teens were able to purchase M-Rated games 69% of the times they tried. A press release for this study is available on the web http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2003/10/shopper.htm. Last January State Representative Paul Froehlich (R-Shaumburg) sent a 15-year-old boy to 15 retail stores in the Northwest Suburbs and found that this boy was able to purchase M-rated games at 11 stores. Whether such inappropriate purchases are part of a widespread problem or not, this administration thinks that no child should be able to purchase these types of video games without his or her parents’ supervision.

Your third concern is regarding the administration’s efforts to educate parents about inappropriate video game content. One of the critical components of the Safe Games Illinois initiative is to educate parents about the harmful effects that violent of sexually explicit video games have on children. A large portion of the Safe Games Illinois website is dedicated to providing parents with information on particularly violent or sexually explicit video games as well as with links to organizations that consistently monitor and rate the various video games that are arriving on the market. Here are three Safe Games links that you might find useful:

Also, one of the mandates of the Safe Games Illinois Task Force, a body comprised of many individuals who are parents, is to educate parents on the harmful effects that violent or sexually explicit video games have on children. It is the opinion of this administration that if parents are educated about the dangers of these video games and their children cannot legally buy these games without parental permission, then violent video games are less likely to be played by an inappropriate audience.

Your final concern dealt with the wording of the propose Safe Games Illinois legislation and the legislation’s definition of violent. The legislation’s current definition of “violent” video games include those games with:

Depictions of or simulations of human-on-human violence in which the player kills, seriously injures, or otherwise causes serious physical harm to another human, including but not limited to depictions of death, dismemberment, amputation, decapitation, maiming, disfigurement, mutilation of body parts, or rape.

I don’t think any reasonable interpreation of this definition would exclude children from purchasing age-appropriate games – such as Super Mario Bros or Donkey Kong.

If you have further questions about the bill, I strongly encourage you to take a look at the web site for House Bill 4023, maintained by the Illinois Legislature:

http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/billstatus.asp?DocNum=4023&GAID=8&GA=94&DocTypeID=HB&LegID=20889&SessionID=50

Thank you again for your letter.

Sincerely,
Sheila Nix
Senior Advisor to the Governor
State of Illinois

I’ll admit that I am ignorant of the laws regarding materials deemed harmful for children. According to Sheila, this law prohibits children from being sold pornographic books or magazines. So, where’s the analogous violent content law that does the same, which is what I was mainly concerned about?

The statistics they were using were presented in a way to insinuate that children are buying violent video games in droves or that it is an epidemic. For example, in this letter “underage teens were able to purchase M-Rated games 69% of the times they tried”. Ok, but how about commenting on studies that say that it isn’t happening that often in real life? That children DO tend to get their parents’ permission or have their parents present when they buy these games?

Another choice quote: “Whether such inappropriate purchases are part of a widespread problem or not, this administration thinks that no child should be able to purchase these types of video games without his or her parents’ supervision.” Ok, and because the motion picture industry is so effective at self-regulation, we won’t pass a similar law to stop the one or two instances when a child CAN get into an R-rated movie? I mean, even if it isn’t part of a widespread problem, doesn’t this administration think that no child should be able to view such movies? Perhaps I’m being petty, but I think the example is analogous.

And regarding the wording of the law in question, I’ve played games where the main character dies as a result of non-human characters or where the main character isn’t human. Are those allowed to depict death or dismemberment without falling under this law?

Someone in the ASP games newsgroup pointed out that if a law like this is passed, who pays for the rating system? How much would it cost to get a rating on a game to sell it in Illinois? How long will it take to get the rating? A mainstream game might have a million dollar budget and so the publisher might consider the cost to be a drop in the bucket, but an indie title does not usually have the means. Whatever the cost is, it will be significant to the indie. In any case, such a requirement would be harmful to the industry while having only dubious arguments to support it at the most.

Looks like I have another letter to write.

Categories
Games Geek / Technical

LAN Par-tay! or Stupid Processor…

This past weekend I went to a LAN party at my friend’s dorm. For those of you new to the term, you basically take your PC to this party and everyone connects to a Local Area Network (hence the LAN part) to play games for hours on end. This party was in the basement of the dormitory, and it started at 2PM on Saturday and ended at 12PM on Sunday. I think. It was a long night. B-)

While my Debian GNU/Linux system has a new video card and has a slightly faster processor than my Windows system, the fact was that we were playing games, and a lot of them aren’t available for GNU/Linux yet. So I took my Windows machine.

I had problems right away. My Windows machine didn’t have as complete a cooling system as my Debian system. I barely use it, so there was never a need. And I have played games on it before. Yet this weekend of all weekends, games would crash to the desktop. At first I thought that it was possibly Windows 98. I’ve refused to install Windows XP for reasons I may go into another day, but at the urging of others, I installed WIndows XP. Luckily I had brought the CD that I got for free for attending some Microsoft seminar on .NET. Still crashed to the desktop when playing games. So rule out the OS.

I opened the system and found that the ATI Radeon 8500 video card was really, really hot. I think the ribbon cables were blocking airflow. Someone had a spare GeForce 2 MX, so I installed that. I still had crashes, so I opened the case to find that the video card was hot after only a few moments in the system. Was it overheating?

My friend let me use his fan to cool my system. It was funny seeing the case opened and a giant fan blowing into the system, but it kept it quite cool. Unfortunately, games would still crash to the desktop. So rule out overheating.

Someone else insisted I should lower the clock speed on my processor. I had a motherboard that allowed me to flip switches to lower the speed, and I didn’t want to do it at first. I paid money for an AMD XP 2100+, so why lower it? Well, it did the trick. Games stopped crashing, and it still ran quite fast to handle games like Alien vs Predator 2 and Unreal Tournament 2004. I’m still upset that I had to lower the speed, but apparently the processor is overheating otherwise. Perhaps the CPU fan isn’t working well anymore.

Me and my computer woes, eh? Two other people had some issues, but we all eventually got to play.

I haven’t been to a LAN party in a long time, and these days it is less likely since I work 40 hour weeks. It was a completely different situation when I just had school to worry about. It was a good time. I think everyone should attend a LAN party. Besides reminding you that playing games is important if you are going to make good games, it also reminds us that gaming is every bit as social an activity as any other. The next time someone tells you to “put down the controller, go outside, and get a life” remind them that playing video games with friends is a bit more healthy than getting overly drunk at bars and smoking. And arguably more fun.

Categories
Game Development Games

I’m Making teh Best MMORPG/FPS/RTS Game Ever!

I’m going to be making the greatest MMO game ever! It will be cross-genre, so people who like first-person shooters, real-time strategy games, and role-playing games will all enjoy it.

It will have an amazing story that spans many arcs, but it won’t be linear at all. The entire world will be highly reactive to how you play, just like a paper-and-pencil RPG.

It will also span time, so you can play from prehistoric times using rocks as weapons all the way up to the future where there will be lasers and mechs!

So here’s where you come in. I need someone to help me build this game. I need programmers, artists, musicians (a full orchestral score!), and writers. I can’t pay you since I am doing this for free, but once we get it out there, we can paid based on royalties. Or maybe a publisher might pick us up.

What do you think?

Anyway, thanks for your time. This is going to be so cool.
Perhaps we can discuss this in a private forum? I
remember trying to do something similar in QBasic.
I got pretty far, too, but then I stopped and
looked at it and thought that I could do better.

Fun and cool with cool ideas! Maybe the main character can have
ocular implants, so you can see in the dark or through walls?
Oops, I’m saying too much in public. I don’t want someone
looking here and stealing my ideas.
So long!

Categories
Games Politics/Government

Governor Blagojavich’s Video Game Censorship Laws

I recently got a letter from the IGDA regarding Illinois Governor Blagojavich’s proposal to censor video games.

I have to say: it’s about damn time the IGDA said something.

I sent a letter to Blagojavich months ago regarding this issue. Weeks later I received a form letter that did not address my concerns or questions, and I suppose that’s expected, but why ask people for their opinions and then not do anything about them? So I went to the Safe Games Illinois website and submitted a comment where they explicitly ask for comments. The form didn’t appear to work since I got database errors when I tried to submit it. Apparently it did work, as I received an email from them, but they could not read my letter since the URL was malformed by their stupid form. I responded, so I hope to hear a response that actually addresses my concerns.

Anyway, the IGDA letter points out that the Illinois House passed the bill last week, and the Illinois Senate will receive it in early April. I decided to write to my Illinois State Senator Don Harmon:

Dear Senator Don Harmon,

Recently the Illinois House passed HB 4023 by an overwhelming majority.

Governor Blagojavich claims that these laws are necessary to protect the children. I sent him a letter asking for clarification on just how children can be protected, but I received a generic form letter that did not address my concerns. You can read my letter to the Governor on my website: https://www.gbgames.com/gov_letter.html

I urge you to oppose this bill when it arrives in the Senate in early April.

I do not believe these laws will be effective at protecting children from violent or sexually explicit games. Children get access to games because a parent or other adult already buys the games for them. Just because a child can buy a violent game, as demonstrated by a crime task force in recent months, it does not mean that they ARE buying games. My letter has a link at the bottom that cites a study that finds a majority of children get access to games through their parents.

I do believe that the games industry is being unfairly targeted. Even Governor Blagojavich cites claims that it is not just video games but any media that can have an effect on children. Why make a law that targets James Bond-themed video games while ignoring the James Bond-themed books and movies?

The laws will also require labels to be placed on games, yet the games industry already has a rating system in place. The MPAA has a motion picture rating system in place that has been used for years, and no one has needed a government enforced rating system for that industry. I believe that a second video game rating system will only serve to confuse the people it was meant to serve. Imagine going to a movie that is both rated PG-13 and rated I.G.E.T. or something similar. You would not know whether or not it was appropriate anymore.

Video games are being treated differently than other forms of media. Is there a reason for such treatment? No studies cited by Blagojavich claim that video games are alone in their impact on children, and yet no other media is being targeted by these proposals.

I urge you to oppose Governor Blagojavich’s laws on the basis that they are unfair and would actually hurt the public more than they would help.

Thank you for your time, and I look forward to your response.

Gianfranco Berardi

Now, I personally think that violent video games aren’t the scourge that Blagojavich and others claim. If they’re so horrible, why is it that people don’t kill others more often? Statistically, with millions of video games having been played over the past two decades, why aren’t there more incedents of people killing others if video games affect them so?

It’s because they don’t. I am not sure what to think about these laws. Is Blagojavich just trying to get a quick approval jump from families who are afraid of something they don’t understand? Is this a strategic move, where he knows he doesn’t have to actually DO anything to make said families think he is? Does he actually believe in what he is doing and is just misinformed?

I don’t know. What I do know is that video games have always had a bad rap. The following may be a bit off-topic, but I want to get it out there. Even before they were considered an evil that promotes killing, video games were unfairly associated with the antisocial. How many of you gamers have ever been told, “Why don’t you just put down the stupid games, go out, and get a life?” Last I heard, even the earliest video game consoles had two controllers at least. Why is a board game or a card game (or for that matter going to a bar to drink and smoke) considered healthy and social, but playing Super Mario Bros or Quake 3 Arena considered antisocial behavior?

Movies. Books. Those are ok. Being a bookworm used to be insulting, but it really isn’t. Neither of those mediums promote interaction with others much, and that’s fine. But play a video game, and besides being considered antisocial, you’re now promoting murder simulators. It’s absurd, and yet people have no problem making this leap in logic.

If you live in Illinois, please urge your Illinois State Senator (in your Senate District, not the Federal Senate) to oppose Governor Blagojavich’s video game censorship laws. I also plan on contacting my State Representative and ask her why she voted yes.

Categories
Game Development Games

Postmortem: GBTTT-CLI

Awhile back, I gave myself a goal of trying to create a simple Tic-Tac-Toe game within a week. I didn’t want to just copy the ubiquitous code out of a book, though. I wanted to take a project from intial design to implementation on my own. This project was not meant to be something commercial quality, nor is it meant for public consumption. It was just a way for me to test my rusty programming skills as well as practice using some of the tools I was experimenting with before, such as Subversion.

I did it. I called it GBTTT_CLI, which stands for GBGames Tic-Tac-Toe Command Line Interface. No graphics. No sounds. Just a simple Tic-Tac-Toe game. You decide who goes first, and each player will select one of the spots to place his/her piece, either an X or an O. At the end, the game will tell you who has won. Simple. B-)

What Went Right:

  1. It was not made with just one code file.

    Tic-Tac-Toe is a very simple game. It doesn’t need to be object-oriented, nor does it need much in the way of content. Still, I wanted to separate elements, such as Players and the Board. For the most part I succeeded. I could replace the Player with an AIPlayer at a later time easily. I could probably change the implementation of the TicTacToe game class so it can be done over a network without changing much of the other code, if any.

  2. Development went along fairly quickly.

    GBTTT_CLI was the first project I have worked on while using a safety net. Revision control tools are amazing and I wish I would have known about them years ago. I used Subversion, and while I rarely needed to backtrack, especially in a small project like this one, it was useful to go through my log to see what changes I made before. There was also a time when I made a LOT of changes only to get nowhere with them. It was easy to revert all the code back to the way it was before the changes were made. It saved a LOT of time for me when I could have otherwise just been trying to make changes to get back to a stable state. With a single command, I was there.

    Another thing that helped was the ease I had with actually coding. I underestimated my coding abilities because I thought I was starting from scratch with C++. The truth was, I could program, and I just needed to learn C++’s syntax correctly. There were a few things that I got tripped up on, such as NULL instead of null as in Java, but a quick look at my reference material showed me where I was going wrong.

  3. The game got completed.

    It was a project that I was able to finish. It may not be much, but it is more than what I had before, and I am proud of that fact. It’s also shows that I have the ability to work on my own designs.

What Went Wrong:

  1. It took me too long to get here.

    My goal was to get this program done in a week, and in total programming time, I did way better than that. Unfortunately if you count the days from when I first posed this goal to myself until I finished it, it was way longer. When I started coding, I got a lot done within a few hours. Then nothing for days until I tried to work with it again. Then I got some strange error. Nothing for weeks. Then finally I finished it. So I had a few hour spurts of productivity followed by long periods of nothing. To be fair, it was not like I was just avoiding the project. I had other responsibilities in my life, such as homework. But to be brutally honest, I wasn’t making the time for this project either.

  2. I overdesigned the classes.

    It is Tic-Tac-Toe. How do you overdesign it? I did. I thought that if I created the classes first, they would be useful as tools to build the actual game. I still think that it would be good to design the project this way, but my problem was in designing in specific features. The Player class has a Record member. The Record class holds the Win/Lose/Tie records of that Player. I wrote the classes in this way because I originally envisioned a single game session letting you play multiple rounds. In the end, I decided not to implement that since it did not need to be done to accomplish my goals. So now a Round is useless in the project. I didn’t spend too much time making it, but there are other elements that were made but not used. For instance, I also thought this would be a great way to learn network programming, so I tried to anticipate it by making Boards unique. I could have saved time and effort by deciding to add such things later or in a new project.

  3. The code is ugly.

    When I originally programmed in QBasic, I had no concept of code structure and variable naming. When I learned C++, I thought it made sense to follow what C++ did: variable and function names would look_like_this. Then I learned Java. Java programming practices are clean looking. A class name looks like: ClassName. A variable looks like: variableName. When I went back to C++, I got it in my head that I probably should keep it looking like C++, where standard library naming conventions have the underscores as mentioned above. That is when I started the project.

    Then I found a C++ coding convention guideline. Apparently Java-like style has its place in C++, too. Well, I did not want to go back and rename everything, so when I continued to work on the game, I kept using the same style rather than confuse everything, me included. The end result is commented, cleanly separated, but somewhat hard to read. A sample:

    // switch to next player
    game.next_player();
    // keep asking for input until value is legal
    int move = player_current->get_move(board);
    bool is_legal_move;
    is_legal_move = board.isLegal(move);

    Huh. Well as you can see, I did not succeed in keeping the style uniform. Board::isLegal() should be changed to Board::is_legal() to accomplish that. Still, it’s hard to read because of the style.

I know there is normally 5 of each in a postmortem, but come on, it’s Tic-Tac-Toe!

What I Learned

  1. Practicing programming is important. I should treat it as such and make the time for it rather than hoping I have an opening in my schedule. There won’t be one if I leave it up to everything else.
  2. Iterative programming is useful because I can avoid overdesigning something that won’t get used
  3. Programming is still fun, just like I remember it.

Even though I am disappointed in how some things turned out, I am satisfied. It’s a completed project! I was originally going to leave it in a state of incompleteness and start working on a more attractive project idea, but I decided to be “great” rather than “good enough”. If I keep that attitude with these smaller projects, it will be a good habit to have when I tackle larger ones.

I think I will post the code at a later time. I originally did not think it would be something I would publish, but I figure it has to help someone besides me. I’ll need to add a proper README and installation/compilation instructions first.

EDIT: Hey, I delivered. B-) And in two forms:
gbttt.tar.gz
gbttt.zip

Categories
Game Development Games Geek / Technical

I’m Live not-at-the-GDC!!

The big news in game development these days has been surrounding the Game Developers Conference. A number of indie developers have covered the event, including David “RM” Michael, Saralah, Xemu, and Thomas Warfield. I’ve had to read about it and see pictures of people I’ve met in person or online, missing out on the fun.

I’ve read a few of the writeups that David Michael wrote for GameDev.net, and I intend to read the rest. I’ve also been reading Game Tunnel’s IGF coverage, including interviews and day-by-day news. It’s just like being there…only not.

Congratulations go out to those who made it to IGF finals! Some amazing games have been made by indie game developers, and they serve as an inspiration to the rest of us. This time next year, I hope to attend.

Categories
Games Geek / Technical General

1UP.com presents The Essential 50

The Essential 50 is 1UP.com’s compilation of the 50 most influential games in video game history. I feel bad because some of the games I’ve only read about, such as Battlezone or Prince of Persia. Others bring back good memories, such as Super Mario Bros and Pac-man. I am making a point to go back and play the games I own that I haven’t gotten a chance to play yet, such as Final Fantasy 7. I was a Nintendo fanboy when it came out so I refused to touch it, but sometime last year I saw a PC version of it for under $20. I still haven’t played it.

It’s sad when you look back on the highlights of gaming and realize that you weren’t there for even half of it. Still, I have some good memories of some good gaming, and there is no reason for me to miss out on what’s to come. B-)

Categories
Game Development Games Linux Game Development

How I Want to Make Games

I want to make games. I don’t want to make them just as a hobby, but I also want to have fun while I do this. What’s the point of going into business for yourself if you aren’t having fun?

I want to use Free and Open Source Software. People tend to get confused about the concept of Free Software. To make sure you, the reader, understands, I suggest you read some articles about it:

Regarding that last article: people think “Software Should Be Free” means giving away your hard work for no compensation. It doesn’t. If up until now you thought this was the case, I again urge you to read those articles. Free Software is about Freedom, not about getting a free lunch. You may be surprised to find that Free Software isn’t the evil you heard it was. If you don’t care to actually learn about the Free Software concept, that’s fine, but please don’t start arguing against it because you can’t be taken seriously. How can you argue against something you don’t know or understand? Question it, be skeptical about it, but don’t presume you are an authority on it when you aren’t.

I also want to focus on making games for the Gnu/Linux system. I understand that it is likely my main revenue streams will not come from it, so I also want ports to the Win32 and Mac platforms. But I’m tired of seeing games ported to Gnu/Linux months after the fact. So when I say I am focusing on Gnu/Linux, I mean that it won’t be an afterthought. Ideally, using open standards and a solid code base, I can release for the three platforms at the same time, with minor tweaking at the most.

Some people think that there is no money here. I don’t believe that is the case. For example, I read that A Tale in the Desert 2 does very well among Gnu/Linux users. The conversion rate is incredibly higher than for Windows or Mac users. Granted, it is a MMO game, but still. Loki apparently didn’t go out of business for lack of sales so much as bad management. There are no stats that say that Gnu/Linux games will sell well, but no stats that suggest they won’t either. I’m willing to find out how well sales could be for the platform.