What do the years 1996 and 2010 have in common?

I didn't buy much from them. I'll explain in a bit, but first, news about myself:

I graduated from Full Sail. I was also the Advanced Achiever for my class, which is a combination of honor roll and class president (neither of which the school officially has). So now I am, quite literally, a Master of Game Design - I'll even get a shiny piece of paper that says so in six-to-eight weeks.

So, with my newfound post-school free time and official mastery, I've begun gearing up for my NAWTS project over the past few days - organizing my games and doublechecking the spreadsheet for missed entries (of which there were a few). Since I was mucking about in the spreadsheet anyhow, I decided to do a little more statistics with it.



The video games I own, grouped by year of release, with a best-fit second-polynomial line overlayed.

 In general, this graph's best-fit curve - and thus, its general trend - follows the curve I expected it to: it goes up every year, and begins to approach a steady asymptote (which appears to be about 17-18 games per year). I start out not buying many games, and as I grow up (remember, I was born in 1986), I acquire more and more resources that I put towards video games - but at some point, I'll hit satiation, which is why the best-fit curve levels off instead of flying straight up into infinity.

For the record, the best-fit line is a second-polynomial curve - I just wanted to observe the most general trend; I can see the ups and downs from here, thanks.

Speaking of those ups and downs, it's pretty clear to see that the graph doesn't actually 'fit' this best-fit line very well. The most important thing to remember in dealing with those lines is that this data regards the release dates of the games I own, not the date I purchased them: if I buy a used video game in the year 2006, but the game itself was first released in 2003, then it goes in the 2003 column. Another thing to note is that the whole of the data comes from my own memory, and as such may well be incomplete, especially when it comes to earlier games for less popular systems.

Still, that's probably not enough to account for everything in the chart. Perhap the biggest, most glaring issue is the year 1996. Seriously, what happened there? Even if I was just buying used games throughout that year - which I'm pretty sure I wasn't, since at the time I would have been a Electronics Boutique shopper and not a Gamestop or Funcoland shopper - that doesn't explain why I didn't go on in later years to buy used games that were released in 1996. In fact, the only video game I own that was released in 1996 is Super Mario 64! I'll grant that it's an impressive, sprawling game, and that it could well have occupied me completely, but it only came out in the fall of that year alongside the Nintendo 64 itself.

As with all questions in life, my first step is to turn to Wikipedia. Sure enough, they've got a lot of info ready for me already on video games in 1996. Apparently, that year was a big one for new consoles - the Playstation and Sega Saturn had just launched, and the N64 was about to drop. It's not that notable games weren't released - Crash Bandicoot, Tomb Raider, Diablo - but they just weren't games I was interested in at the time. I remember a number of games from that year, too, like Super Mario RPG and Mega Man X3, but these were games that I rented multiple times instead of purchasing.

The next biggest dip is, surprisingly, this year - 2010. This also probably has similar explanations, mainly being that I was deeply involved with school for the vast majority of the year. Even though I did buy a few games upon graduation, they were all older titles, either used or on Steam. Also, because games released this year haven't had much of a chance to be turned in used or find their way to the clearance bin, I haven't had the extra oomph of a really low price to push me to buy more of them. Additionally, I didn't have many of the consoles of this era: I only just picked up an XBox 360 on Black Friday (really Saturday), I still don't own a PS3, and my Wii is back at my parent's home. Obviously, without the consoles to play freshly-released games on, I'm not going to buy many games.

Finally, what's up with 2003? It's a huge spike, especially over the best-fit line. It's likely explained by the fact that a number of systems hit that I picked up very quickly: the Game Boy Advance, the GameCube, and the Playstation 2. Between buying titles at launch and buying used titles later on, for three prolific systems, it's easy to see why I got so many games from that year.

Still, it's cool to see some reflection of my game-buying habits in graph form - and remember, this is a reflection, not a direct measurement, because it looks at a game's release date instead of the date of my purchase.

Some thoughts on the NAWTS Spreadsheet

I got bored, so I figured I'd take a look at the NAWTS spreadsheet, and maybe play with statistics a little. The first thing I looked at was the ESRB ratings for the games I have listed, and below are the percentages of my total gaming library for each ESRB rating.

% Games rated E 45.06%
% Games rated E10+ 8.70%
% Games rated K-A 7.91%
% Games rated T 18.97%
% Games rated M 6.32%
% Games lacking rating ("-") 13.04%

The first thing that jumps out at me is the large number of E-rated titles I've experienced. 45%, really? If you include the K-A and E10+ games in that category, it jumps to 61.67%. Almost two-thirds of my gaming history have been appropriate for small children to play!

"T", being the equivalent of the movie industry's favorite rating PG-13, makes up the next-largest category, about 19% of my gaming history. Of course, I've been gaming longer than there's been an ESRB, and that's part of why the "lacking rating" is the third-largest category, making up roughly 13% of the population of my gaming history. Finally, no matter how you slice it, "M" is the least populous category on my shelf, with only about 6% of my gaming history devoted to it.

So, that's interesting and all, but where does it stack up in terms of all games ever? Unfortunately, I can't find data on all ESRB ratings ever. But I did find data on all ESRB ratings for the year 2009, from the ESRB's own website, which I've borred wholesale, below.

Taken from http://www.esrb.org/about/categories.jsp

Surprisingly enough, I match up pretty closely. Six percent of all games were M-rated, 18% T-rated, 60% E rated... Now, the 16% E10+-rated doesn't match up, though that rating only came into existence in 2005, so that may explain why it's underrepresented in my collection. Assuming 2009 is a representative year, and assuming the 13% of unrated games would have been rated according to this representation (which would give about another 7% to my "E" category), then my gaming colection is, statistically, in ESRB terms, completely average.

This is a long way of saying that my gaming history is, statistically speaking, pretty normal and average. I don't know if that's upsetting or invigorating...

For a much deeper look into how ESRB ratings are spread out across different platforms, this article serves quite nicely.

To Repurpose th' Bard in Iambic, and then for One to Ponder its Meaning

All the world's a game,
And all the men and women player-char'cters:
They have their spawn-points and their weaknesses;
And one man in his time is many-class'd.

...

As much as I would love to continue the quote repurposed, I'm tired and my mood ill-suited to creativity. I actually do feel that the world is game-like; rather, my favorite construct for dealing with the world is to consider it in video-game terms.

Take social situations, for example: A person has a Charisma ("CHA") score, which can be modified up and down by various factors, like self-grooming, fashion, even the room's lighting. One person (the player) has an objective; say, to sway a person to his point of view and to take action based on that view. There's some manner of chance involved: no matter how good or bad the situation is, the end result can still surprise you, and this is represented by a Random Number Generator ("RNG"). The other person has some level of social inertia against this idea, representing a modifier to whatever number the RNG comes up with. Finally, the player's goal has a certain innate difficulty to it, represented by the number to best.

Now, so far, that's not video-gaming, that's D&D. Fair enough. But video games feature one thing that D&D does not: strict, pre-programmed dialog options. Every dialog can be represented by a 'tree' of things the player can say, the other person's reaction to it, and what the player can say in return, as far as any programmer or script-writer cares to take it. When confronted with a social situation, attempting to look down the dialog tree beyond your current branch or node is useful. So, too, is the idea that there are only a few real choices in a given social situation in a given moment: while you could, in reality, say anything, generally you only have a few reasonable options, and immediately cutting those potentially infinite options down to a small subset of reasonable ones can help to process them quickly, since, like in many games, there is a time limit to this.

The construct of life-as-video-games is useful elsewhere, but I'll leave this example on its own for tonight. I bring it up now, however, because I feel that it helped me make a bad situation survivable for myself and a few others tonight, and in the long run.

All the Games I've Ever Owned (I Think)

http://bit.ly/nawts_spreadsheet

That up there is a spreadsheet I made last week, with all the games I've ever owned, sorted in order of their release dates, with as good a critical review score for each as I could find. I think it's complete, but I wouldn't be surprised if I missed a few games that I just don't remember - even so, it's got about 250 or so games in it.

I made this spreadsheet for two reasons:
1. Someday, I want to go back to the beginning and play through each game, in order, and blog about it. If each game took 20 hours to play, I'm looking at 5,000 hours of playtime ahead of me!
2. I wanted to see how 'good' my opinion was when it came to purchasing games (thus the critical review for each). On average, my score was about 83%, which isn't bad - of course, for some systems, I had a more discerning opinion, and for some, less.

I hope to do more statistical analysis of my gaming habits in the future using this sheet, too - how many games for what systems I bought in what years, how good the games I bought in a given year were, etcetera. But for now, it's enough to see the general run of my gaming history, and to know that it was pretty good.

Tsel do Bahn, Part 2

My Final Project has been kicking into high gear - we have Alpha turn-in on Tuesday, and as the QA Producer, I've been busy helping the programmers and artists hammer out bugs left and right - but I've still had some time to work on my own personal project, Tsel do Bahn. I've basically made two big pushes: Improving the player's ability to impact himself (and his awareness of it), and the player's ability to impact the environment.



Above: The improved HUD, with status indicators and the Sheathed Weapon.

The first thing I'll mention are potions, and their statuses. You can see those statuses indicated in the HUD on the image above; from left to right, they are Armor Up, Attack Up, Speed Up, and Invincibility (star sprite courtesy of Super Mario All-Stars). Each of those statuses are currently granted by a potion, used from the hero's inventory in the Pause screen as a (stackable) one-shot item. Drinking multiple potions of the same type will combine the durations of the potions, but will only use the value (effectiveness, or strength of the status granted) of the weakest potion.

The 'Sheathed' weapon is my interpretation on Zelda's classic "have more than one tool accessible at a time" mechanic; here, you select the Sheathed weapon on the Pause screen using the Talk key (defaulting to Left Alt), and switch between them using the Tab key. This still allows you to have more than one tool at your disposal without going back into the menu, but keeps me from having to worry about that tool's effect happening if you talk to someone, and from having to get away from the number of buttons on a Game Boy - if Weapon is B, and Talk is A, and Tab is Select, with Enter as Start/Pause and the Arrow Keys as the D-Pad, then I'm set on buttons for the game.



Above: The Fosse Grim weapon, about to break a breakable block.

The other push I've made, allowing the player to interact with the environment, has focused on a set of three tools: the Cane of Somaria (idea from Nintendo); the Fragarach, or as I misspell it, the Fargarach; and the Fosse Grim - tools of Earth, Wind, and Sea, respectively.

Tsel do Bahn already had the Sokoban functionality in it; namely, you can push blocks into pits to turn the pit into passable terrain. Using the Cane of Somaria, you can create a block of your own, wherever you like, and push it into a pit. If you use the Cane again, though, the old block will be unsummoned, and the pit will un-fill, becoming untraversable again.

The Fargarach is a sword that, when charged up - ohr, yes, I've implemented hold-the-button-down charge attacks, by the way - creates a gust of wind that pulls enemies towards you, or pulls you towards its endpoint, much like a conveyor belt. There are, of course, other gusts of wind that can exist without being summoned by the Fargarach's help. A stream of wind can be stopped by pushing a block in its path, including a Somaria-summoned block. A stream of wind (including a Fargarach-summoned one) can also turn a windmill, visible in the image above, middle-bottom; this acts much like a switch or a button, causing things to happen when activated by wind, or when deactivated by stopping a wind with a block.

Finally, the Fosse Grim is a violin that acts as a ranged weapon, shown in the image above. When its charged-up attack is used, its musical note will create a temporary waterspout on impact, which can harm enemies further. This waterspout will also destroy breakable objects, including cracked blocks - which, yes, can be pushed around to block wind or fill pits.

The three tools above are going to form the backbone of puzzle-solving elements in Tsel do Bahn - I may implement more tools, but I can now say that there are enough in there to form enough non-boring, non-repetitive puzzles that the game will be alright if I don't add any more tools. Combined with the ability to switch to a second tool without pausing, and the ability to boost one's combat potential for a limited time and at a cost of resources, I can fairly say that Tsel do Bahn is now transitioning from "Tech Demo" to being an actual - dare I say it? - game.

But, it won't be a real, full-fledged game until it has a few other things... Like, say, music and sound effects, or maybe a plot and some dungeons. The latter two will come when I try to make this a Real Game for NaNoWriMo, but the former two... Maybe that'll be what I tackle next. Who knows? I just hope I have the time to, with Final Project kicking into a higher gear for me.

Pokewalkin'

I got my girlfriend Pokemon SoulSilver a few days ago, as an early birthday present. She's played one of the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games, thinks Pokemon in general are adorable, and loves old-school RPGs, so I figured it'd be a good fit for her. I forgot about the Pokewalker accessory that comes with it, though I remembered, after purchasing it and seeing it in the box, that I had thought it kinda silly when a friend showed it to me back when HeartGold and SoulSilver first came out. (If you weren't aware, the Pokewalker is a pedometer that you can load a Pokemon from your actual game into in order to level it up, 1 EXP per step; you can also catch additional kinds of Pokemon and find a wide variety of items on it, both of which would be difficult to do in the early parts of the game.)

So it's a little surprising to me that it's been so fun to mess around with it.

Now, a caveat: I enjoy going out for a walk. Yes, I live in Florida right now, and it's incredibly hot and muggy and unpleasant outside, but even so, I enjoy a good stroll. So, when I use my girlfriend's Pokewalker, I'm actually walking with it. As an additional caveat, I was a big Pokemon fan back in the day - in fact, the original Pokemon Gold is my favorite version, hands-down. So, in retrospect, I'm basically a big ol' mile-wide-bullseye for Nintendo here.

But this isn't my copy of HeartGold, or my Pokewalker, it's my girlfriend's. And that actually made it more fun. Not just in the sense of, "it's someone else's toy," but because I can use it to help my girlfriend out. By catching Pokemon she couldn't catch for many hours of gametime, and finding useful items for her, I'm helping her playthrough without disturbing the sanctity of her saved game; for any couple, this is an amazing arrangement and one that should be much more commonplace.

Also: The Pokewalker reflects a growing trend, reflected in the video below, by Jesse Schell.

http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-box-presentation/#video-48439

He talks about how games are encroaching on reality, and how eventually, every game will have a portion in reality that translates into increased power or access within the game. While I think he goes a little bit far in his end-game scenario, mostly for reasons of balance and inter-corporation co-operation (though his presentation is hilarious and well worth the watching), he is, basically, describing exactly what the Pokewalker does: By doing things in the real world, you become more powerful in the game world.

Not only does the Pokewalker allow you to interface reality with fiction, but it also encourages 'good' behavior - in this case, walking and getting exercise, although the Pokewalker's instructions say that it won't work well if you're jogging or doing other non-walking activity. It's as if the game is actually encouraging kids, subtly, to go outside and play; something parents have been wishing video games would do effectively for the past 25 years, if not longer.

Because of this, and Nintendo's overall goal to tie their game systems to the idea of healthy lifestyles (see: Wii Fit, Boktai, among others), I would not be surprised to see a similar accessory become standard issue for whatever comes after the 3DS or the Wii - something similar to every gaming snob's prized cause, the VMU. A little pedometer that can have game mechanics loaded on to it from a specific game, then wiped and re-mechanic'd for a different game, but always able to read your daily step count, or heart rate, or BMI, or galvanic skin response... You get the idea.

And given how much fun it was for me to play with the Pokewalker, I hope the console manufacturers do, too. I wouldn't mind walking around and collecting Star Bits, or Missile Upgrades, or gold pieces, or whatever else the games I play would want to give me for being a good, fit person.

Tsel do Bahn, Part 1

I'm in Final Project now - a team of Internal Producers, Developers, and Artists making a game over the course of five months. We've finished the documentation stage, and the group has started on making the prototype: tough work for the developers, lots of back and forth with the artists... and nothing for the internal producers to QA test yet. While there's always a need to edit documentation, that work requires only one IP, not all four that I have in my team.

Since I'm also not allowed to program alongside the developers (for good reasons, admittedly), I've resumed a personal coding project that I started almost six months ago, and have worked on on-and-off as school allows. It's a Zelda-style game, with text-file scripts creating the rooms and interesting features (people, pits, blocks, treasure chests, and enemies). I'm using sprites from The Legend of Zelda GameBoy games, as well as Final Fantasy Adventure, so don't think I did the spriting work too.


The game in action - the hero, on the left-hand side, is about to push a block into a pit in order to travel beyond it.

My original goal was to create a simple Zelda-style game with Sokoban-style puzzles, where you push a block into a pit to turn it into passable ground, and that's where the name comes from (a portmandeu of "Zelda" and "Sokoban"). I've coded that entire functionality in this month, and I'm pretty happy with it, though I can already see how I can improve it a little.

I've gotten a few other things into it, too, as our documentation phase has wound down: multiple, switchable weapons with different stats and animations; a (rudimentary but functional) pause screen where you can choose between those weapons; tons of new functions for the scripting engine, like 'place actor', 'change sprite', 'change solidity', and 'change layer'; and map-specific dungeon keys, with a HUD ticker to keep track of them.


The rudimentary pause screen, with three weapons selectable in the corner.

Mostly, Tsel do Bahn is an exercise in me programming and designing a game with no constraints - there's no due date, no budget, no documentation. It's also an effort to keep my programming skills sharp, and to learn more about a reasonably common API (PyGame - though Tsel do Bahn also uses BuzHug for its databases). But, honestly, it's also an attempt to make the kind of game I want to play - an old-school top-down action-adventure, with puzzle elements, open to others to create their own quests.

It's also something I plan to continue with - I'm hoping to have enough tools, enemies, and interesting bits to make it a viably playable experience. My ultimate pie-in-the-sky goal would be to use Tsel do Bahn to complete NaNoWriMo; instead of writing 50,000 words of fiction, maybe I'd make 50 rooms of dungeon-puzzle action.