Media Consumed Today

Media consumed today:

Sunrise, Channel 7: best news and light entertainment over breakfast, still heavily Michael Jackson focussed. World Watch live cameras and classical music in the ad breaks.

Madden 98 on Mega Drive emulator on PSP - must grab 97 or 96 - 98 was horrible with a pretend 3d camera. Can never remember if it was the even or the odd years that were better.

Foo Fighters singles on way in to work, collection of covers (mainly punk of 80s hits) on way home.

TWG online for Confed Cup highlights

UEFA.com for Euro U21 highlights

Top ten in-game dunks of all time (NBA): http://thehoopdoctors.com/online2/2009/06/top-10-in-game-dunks-of-all-time/

Kotaku, Rock Paper Shotgun, Fidgit, Gamasutra, Sexyvideogameland for games news and views

Facebook, Twitter, MSN Messenger (using the excellent Digsby)

Trine demo from Steam: great fun in single player, controlling a wizard, a thief and a knight sequentially to solve physics puzzles in a gorgeous platformer environment, but reached even greater heights in hilarious and frantic 3 player simultaneous co-op.

Shadowrun demo from Steam: the full game is free if you pre-order Trine, so had a quick look. I remember this top down atmospheric WASD/mouse shooter from a few years ago and it has held up well, with atmospheric real time light based visuals and tight shooter gameplay.

Two and a Half Men: Incredibly tall and hot French chick, and Charlie reveals that hot girls are the loneliest cause all guys are too scared to talk to them.

Flicked into a Big Bang Theory I'd already seen - Sheldon has a three strikes rule. That's a sports metaphor. Baseball.

Top Gear Australia: nostalgic drive of a Phase 3, pointlessness of luxury cars and Porsche Cayennes confirmed and fastest ever Top Gear Aus lap by an Underbelly actor. Too much time spent talking about best bits of the season.

Peeked at Top Gear UK Season 13 eps 1 and 2, and snowboard movie of 2008 "That's It, That's All" as well as 2 parts of James May on the Moon. Will watch them later this week.

Game Mechanics and Meaning

This post was like reading some text that someone transcribed out of a daydream of mine. Not the one with the pillowfights, but a more game focussed daydream. Anyways, it's about how the mechanics of gameplay are divorced from the meaning of games. Excellent stuff by Jean-Paul LeBreton, Bioshock designer.

"The problem is that the better versed you are in game conventions, the easier it is to separate the core mechanics of a game from its fiction and theme, and thus say that a game like BioShock is a meditation on free will, the dangers of ideological extremes, and whatever else… despite the fact that you spend about 90% of it shooting people in the face."
...
"One problem is that, deep down, many designers view game mechanics more as structure (or “form”, if you prefer) than as content, when in fact they are both. If you treat them exclusively as structure when designing, you get all manner of unintended message and context… in a nutshell, ludonarrative dissonance. Which in 2009 means mashing the circle button to overcome an emotional inner conflict. Another designer’s analysis accepts this completely at face value, which if anything demonstrates that this issue transcends our usual valuations of craft and art. It’s almost invisible to us, but quite apparent to outsiders.

So as developers, we need to deal more honestly with the disparity between our reach and our grasp - which is to say, what we tell ourselves our games are about, versus what they are actually about."

The technical aspects of film all usually support the artistic goals. The choice of film stock, colour filters, camera lenses and lighting design all help to re-inforce meaning (or subvert it!). Our medium of games has the interactive element that sets it apart, and this feature is what most outsiders look to first for meaning. So far we have not given them much to find. The games we want to place on a pedestal as Art, or at least possessing some qualities that separate them from the pack of 'just' entertainment are still about running and jumping and shooting before they are about relationships or the value of 1 life vs 1,000 or the human condition.

Omegle fun

http://omegle.com/

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Cricket priorities

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Financial news from the UK

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In New Years Eve party news

Paris knows how to make it bigger.

As Tatiana and Kostya

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