Digital Cream

I’ve been playing BioShock on the 360 for a few weeks now, often in the evenings when my brain is too puddly to code but not ready for sleep. My son Dylan has been watching me and he has been playing it himself. I will likely write a few posts about it. In this post I want to extol the game’s overall mood of imposing, sinister breakdown and corruption. I was a great admirer of its ancestor System Shock which had a similar mood. (continued »)

It’s unlike me, multiplayer enthusiast that I am, to play a solo game. But Oblivion (to which I am at long last getting) is a delightful change. For one thing, it’s a beautiful game, with some genuinely artful visual compositions and decent attempts at an epic story full of moral questions. But it also makes me think about how my sense of being heroic in Oblivion is a nice change from the MMOs I usually go for.

There are some great things you can do and feel in a world that revolves around *you* that you can’t do in a multiplayer-oriented world, no matter how much the latter tries to make you feel like The Hero. I wonder if there will be a bit of a pendulum swing the other way now that so many gamers are so heavily into World of Warcraft, that within a few years there will be a big hunger for a game that makes the individual player feel central and unique and big and strong.

In design as well, I astonish myself by sometimes thinking of game ideas which are solo in nature. Most of my ideas remain multiplayer focused, sometimes in an asynchronous and casual way where I think some real gold waits to be discovered, but I do get the odd solo-oriented idea now.

I’m playing Guitar Hero 2 on the Xbox 360. I will pwn you medium. That is all.

I liked this story about a guy who got a good job at Yahoo because of his leadership of a WoW guild. I’m no more prone to believe in a causal link between game playing and good behavior than I am between game playing and bad behavior, but at least the perception of same got this guy a job!

I really like playing World of Warcraft in Warsong Gulch. Between that and the latest Battlefield 1942 demo, I’m convinced that these big team-vs-team games have a big future– with plenty of room to grow. WoW is not really built for PvP so all this is just a start…

I am trying to work out a way to make dance a fun, good-looking, not overly challenging activity in my new project. It’s fun to work out, a nice balance of various things I’ve learned. I find myself watching dance a lot more, in person and on videos and such, and I’ve been thinking about what makes me move the way I do when I hear music. I’m amazed at how complex it is. How do I make this work?