A rather interesting breakdown of play styles can be found in A New Taxonomy of Gamers, an 11 part series from 2008 on Insult Swordfighting.

An excerpt from the first part:

Why are online game discussions so contentious? … I think the rancor stems from a lack of understanding. Playing a game, even a multiplayer game, is a singular and subjective experience. No two players will experience a game the same way, even one as rigorously linear as, say, Half-Life 2. It’s not simply a matter of interpreting the events differently, as it might be when discussing a movie. As a participant, your unpredictable actions and style of play are what determine the end product.

… Your proclivities determine equally how you respond to a game, and how you affect the game. We may be talking about a particular title, but in a very real sense, we’re not talking about the same thing at all.

(Hat tip: GGlick.)

As mentioned in Part I of this series, FFXIV introduced Guildleves in part to offer “meaningful advancement for those with limited time to dedicate to playing” (citation).

The system, which allows players to choose up to 8 quests for their battle/gathering disciplines and 8 quests for their crafting ones every 36 hours, is a definite improvement over the grind-only based FFXI system. The leves present a challenge for players by encouraging them to push the limits of their discipline’s rank with the only real risk being failing the leve and not being able to retry it until the leves reset. In that way, players can advance faster doing leves — even solo leves — than they would just grinding alone or with a party.

While the system creates fun through challenge (by encouraging players to push their limits) and through reward (via XP and gil), it also creates pressure and stress via the limits of the system. This, in of itself, is not necessarily a bad thing — almost all game mechanics have a trade-off between fun and stress, not to mention that a little bit of pressure and stress can increase the sense of challenge and excitement, thereby increasing the sense of achievement when one succeeds. However, I believe that the system as it is now creates unnecessary stress that can be off-putting to players who play outside of the way the FFXIV dev team expects them to. (more…)

I am, by the necessity of my lifestyle, a casual gamer. Perhaps I am a bit of an unusual casual gamer, as I have hardcore roots and would engage in more hardcore style play if my life allowed it. But both experiences put me in a unique position to understand several aspects of both “casual” and “hardcore” play and, more importantly, the similarities and differences between those play styles.

Unfortunately, most mainstream developers don’t understand the intricacy, and diversity, of play styles and so when they attempt to make a game that’s casual friendly (or casual accessible, if you prefer) they only end up punishing both hardcore players and casual players who don’t fit the “casual gamer” archetype that the devs have created the game for. Final Fantasy XIV is a perfect example of this, especially in the way that they have chosen to structure their fatigue system, their leve system, and their lack of content that isn’t tied to level gains.

In this series I will be exploring some of the pitfalls that FFXIV has fallen into in a well-intentioned but misguided attempt to make the game more accessible to casual players, as well as offering some potential solutions to help the actual mechanics match the concept behind the system. But before that I would like to look at casual play, what it is and isn’t, and how Square Enix, like most mainstream game companies (not to mention hardcore gamers), have an overly simplified view of casual gamers and casual play. (more…)

When I was younger I loved the game Master of Magic. I still love it — to the point that I have DosBox installed on my machine solely for the reason of being able to continue playing MoM. So, you can imagine my squee when, several years ago, my mother’s partner told me about a game Stardock was working on that was being heralded as the “spiritual heir” to MOM. That game was Elemental: War of Magic and it was finally released a week ago. I had been following the dev posts almost religiously for six months at that point, constantly agonizing on whether or not to join the beta testing when it opened (I opted for not because of lack of time).

So, after purchasing the game (which took a full week of back and forth with customer service, but that’s a story for another time) I immediately started playing the campaign. The campaign, like almost all campaigns in the history of strategy games, is A Story About A Manly Man Having Adventures With His Manly Friends. Well, whatever, I thought to myself, I didn’t buy the game for the campaign story, and anyway as soon as I build my first city I can balance the rampant manliness with female units. I should note that, customization — especially unit customization — had been a frequent topic on the dev posts and I was so excited that finally, after years of dealing with 99.9% of strategy games being-male only or male-heavy (with the female units being healing and other support and/or sexy sexy danger) I could design female units to my specifications!

Except, it turns out, not. (more…)

The above video humorously illustrates the unique barriers that women face in the working world. Transcript below the cut. (more…)

So, in response to my ranting on Twitter about Ruby hating VC++ and me I had the following conversation with luislavena:

luislavena @tekanji That is kind of old and completely uninformed. You can find better results using RubyInstaller and the DevKit: http://bit.ly/bIrSP7

tekanji @luislavena My installation was done with the RubyInstaller and I’ll check out the DevKit, but I have a feeling it won’t help with VC++?

tekanji @luislavena To clarify, Ruby is installed just fine, but I want to extend my C++ programs using Ruby (which I compile using VC++’s compiler)

luislavena @tekanji No, mixing of ABI: http://bit.ly/aXEEi4 but also the mixing of CRT is a huge problem. http://bit.ly/aPuZWy

Which doesn’t solve my problem, but does make me less mad at Ruby (and its developers) and more annoyed at the nebulous group of “People In Charge” who are uninterested in learning from the awesomeness of the OSI model and prefer to let things — like operating systems, compilers, web browsers (seriously, people, WC3 IS YOUR FRIEND) — be made without standards (or by ignoring proposed standards *cough*IE*cough*) that would make them cross compatible. I’m sure there is a Super Serious Reason of Reasonness to explain why this is so (capitalism being sucky and hating cooperation comes to mind), but, seriously, everyone doing things their own way makes it hard for newbs like me to use things we need to learn (like Ruby) in the way we need to use them (game scripting using C++ as a base program).

Oops, this was supposed to be less ranty than my previous post. Sorry.

Anyway. Ultimately, I am the “Joe” from Luis’s Ruby for Windows – Part 1 post who, frustrated with ruby’s inability to work with his version of VC++, ” decides to drop Ruby for another language.”

In my case, I’m going with Lua whose documentation (at least for what I need) is so much more awesome than Ruby’s that I’ve already found a tutorial, made it work, and translated the salient parts into Japanese which I will give to my teachers and classmates once I finish the README.txt for installing Lua itself using the English compiler for Windows. All that’s left is to actually learn Lua and make more tutorials to give to my classmates to help them understand what scripting is and why it is so very awesome. Seriously, my Game Algorithms class needs more materials (it’s heavy on theory and quite lacking in practical application).

Which is not to say that I’m dropping Ruby entirely. I can’t, really, since it’s used more than Lua is here in Japan. I plan on continuing read up on it (my teacher has put some books on order which should come in this week) and, at the very least, write some tutorials for making Ruby programs that run on MRI so that people can get a feel for Ruby syntax even if we can’t use it in our game programs.

Still, it would be nice if Ruby could integrate into C++ and compile under VC++ as easy as Lua did…

I spent wasted the entire day trying to get a simple Ruby extension program in C++ by trying several tutorials (all of which had basically the same unhelpful instructions). SWIG was also recommended in many places, so I tried it out — only to find that it’s not compatible with Ruby 1.9.1 and that the sample .dsp files don’t convert properly in Visual Studio Express 2010. After wasting several hours scouring the internet fruitlessly for solutions for the problem, I finally realized that Ruby hates Windows (and especially VC++) users. Great. Since all my school projects (ie. the reason I want to learn how to embed Ruby in C++) are done using Visual C++, it means I’m basically screwed unless my teachers (none of whom have ever used Ruby) can help me figure out a non-broken way to get things working.

Oh, and, regarding my problem, the path for the config.h specified in the ruby.h is wrong; for reasons I can’t fathom, that is actually intentional architecture. I’m not the only one who finds the choice dubious, either. I was complaining about it on Twitter and 01d55 responded:

@tekanji Just read that bug report thread, not impressed. Include should be <> if they aren’t going to put the files in the same dir.

[ETA 2010/06/15: 01d55 talks more in-depth about the include syntax over at the forums]

While I came across this semi-helpful guide for building Ruby 1.9 on Windows, it seems to “fix” the config.h path problem by manually copying it to where it “should” be. Not really a solution I’m comfortable with.

So, here I am 10+ hours after I’ve started, with nothing to show for it. I don’t know Ruby any better, I’m no closer to being able to get anything to compile. I should have spent the day making graphics instead. Sigh.

So, I was reading a post by Deirdra over at the Border House called We Need More Women in Indie Games (I recommend going over there and reading it in full before reading this article). It raises many good questions regarding why women aren’t better represented in the indie game community, since there are no hoops related to “breaking in” and as long as you “make something cool and post it online” you’re in.

In her post, Deirdra discusses some possible barriers: lack of interest (in games and/or in making games as a hobby), trouble getting into STEM fields in general, lack of information/knowledge about indie communities, sexism in said communities, lack of women in said communities, lack of role models due to lack of proper promotion of games made by women. Although I’m not familiar with indie communities in particular, the kinds of barriers that Deirdra describes are pretty common for any male dominated field.

Although the focus of the post is more on identifying problems than proposing solutions, Deirdra’s flippant proposal to “[j]ust write a game. How hard can it be, right?” and the ensuing discussion piqued my interest. Particularly because, as someone whose life has been consumed by learning the ins and outs of game development for the past three years, I have to say that making a game is pretty damn hard. And I think that the complicated process of game development itself can be a barrier to women entering the field. (more…)

For those in the four year game studies program at HAL, the third year is when students are divided into the programming track and the planning track. For those interested in the general curriculum for third year planning students, I’ve detailed my core classes (each with a brief description) in the table provided below.

Class Name	Description
Game Planning I & II	The Game Planning classes cover the ABC’s of planning: from the “big picture” stuff like writing proposals to writing specifications and guidelines to be used by programmers and graphic designers.
Level Design I	The Level Design class focuses on teaching how to put together all of the elements outlined in the proposal and specification documents (such as enemy number, movement style, etc) into a fun to play game/level.
Visual Design	The Visual Design class uses Photoshop and Illustrator to teach design basics that can be applied to proposals and other documents.
Game Algorithms Wii Programming	Game Algorithms and Wii Programming are programming-focused classes.

All third years also take a Business Training course and have an elective class where they can choose between studying for the bi-annual standardized tests or mobile Java (I’ve chosen mobile Java).

Candy Heist a simple whack-a-mole style game I made for my Flash class last term. It’s a little bit buggy and certainly not anything special, but it’s an example of my work that I can easily share online. Enjoy!

The object is to whack as many moles with your hammer as possible. This is accomplished by moving your mouse (represented by a hammer) over to moles when they appear and then whacking them by left-clicking.