In principle I would prefer it to hold back on the TRAUMA reviews until it gets released. On the other hand some pre-release hype isn’t wrong either and The Design Prodogy did a very nice job with their article on TRAUMA. They took 3 very simple, basics lessons from the game. Here are some of my remarks:

• Want to Look Real? Take Images from Real Life I actually love that takeway. I thought exactly the same thing when developing the game. The entire games industry seems to be obsessed with a very particular and quite convoluted way of generating imagery. It’s no wonder many games look essentially the same. This is also a great opportunity to break and and do something unique.

• Eliminating Distractions While this is an excellent point, I wanted to add that the beta version of the website is not necessarily how I will present the game when it gets released. However, that doesn’t invalidate the point at all.

• There’s No Music In Real Life Again, I love this takeaway because it perfectly mirrors the discussion I have been having with the game’s musician Martin Straka. We were experimenting with different approaches and it took a lot of work to arrive at the style of “music” we have. I must imagine that drifting so far away from a traditional understanding of music is very difficult for a musician. I think Martin did a great job there.

Molleindustria has released a a new game: Leaky World. Subtitled “Playable Theory” it is a very simple and well-made flash game that puts the main arguments of an essay by Julian Assange into a game mechanic.

Click here to play the game.

I have read the essay previously so I was pleasantly surprised to see it being adapted as a gameplay rhetoric. The game conveys the core idea if the essay quite effectively. The player’s task is to create a global conspiracy network by linking nodes to each other. As the number of connections increases, some of the nodes begin to leak which can end the game. The only way to stop leaks is to isolate the affected nodes. This in turn basically undoes the player’s work and sets them back at reaching the goal. The game shows how leaks prevent conspiracy networks from forming.

It’s a great game and you should try it out. It’s especially refreshing to see a Molleindustria game with a more serious tone for a change.

There is something I noticed while playing it. It occurred to me also when playing other serious games previously. There seems to be an inherent contradiction in the very idea of some gameplay rhetorics. It’s the fact that participation in games often depends on the existence of a chance to win the game. For example, Leaky World is supposed to show that leaks prevent conspiracies. But the game only makes this argument when the player loses. This is Ok because most players will lose at first anyway. But after some practice I won the game – I was able to establish my conspiracy network in spite of the many leaks that occurred. This is something that shouldn’t be happening according to Assange’s essay. So the argument of the game is actually a different one. Leaks don’t prevent conspiracies, the just make them a little bit harder

A different example would be a game about life in the 3rd world such as Ayiti. Such games often depict the dilemmas and hardships that make living in a 3rd world so difficult. This rhetoric is effective as long as players struggle with succeeding at the game. But playing games means to learn the systems they model and to exploit them to your advantage. So after some practice, many players will be actually able to succeed at those games and make a descent living in the simulated 3rd worlds. For those players the rhetoric of the game becomes that it’s your own fault if you suffer in a 3rd world country. Because if you just take a while to think things trough, you should be able to game the system to attain a decent quality of life after all.

A solution to the problem is to skew the game’s system so there is no way to win, no matter how skilled the player is (The Lanlord’s Game). However, this in turn takes away agency from players and destroys the game itself. As soon as players realize they can’t affect the outcome of the game, their motivation in continuing playing the game decreases dramatically. They can still appreciate the game and it’s rhetoric, but their interest engaging the game is diminished.

Stangely, it seems like this dilemma mirrors the problems game designers face when integrating a narrative into gameplay. Sadly, I can only offer this observation. I have no solution for this dilemma yet. How do you think can we overcome it?

The other day, I totally hacked my Wii. You see, I ordered the US version of Monster Hunter Tri in order to finally play with my podcast comrades online. The shipment took almost a month and it barely arrived in time for our planned podcast episode (oops, spoilers) so you can imagine my disappointment when I realized the Wii wasn’t region-free. Oh…

So it came down to either ordering an entire US console or hacking my existing one. Besides of being quite expensive, I wasn’t even sure if a US console would work with my European cables and everything. On the other hand hacking my existing console could potentially lead to having to buy a new one anyway.

So it came down to hacking. Things weren’t really looking good as I already had the 4.3 upgrade installed. It seems like this upgrade introduced some functions that prevented most hacks from working. I found a comprehensive guide on how to deal with it anyway. But it contained a lot of warnings that ended with “… or you will brick your Wii.”. Gulp. You know, bricking my Wii would also mean I would lose every savegame (including the +200h Monster Hunter Tri one) and every Wii Ware game I’ve bought.

On the other hand, I had the advantage of having some of the hacks already installed. Back in the early days I used the Twilight Hack (relax, it has nothing to do with Vampires) to get the Homebrew Channel installed. And indeed, this made the procedure slightly less dramatic. I could just re-install the Homebrew Channel, add some more hacks on top of it and finally downgrade my Wii to 4.1. There were two heart-stopping moments where the Wii froze but everything turned out ok in the end.

Going through the process gave me an update on the developments in the Wii Homebrew community. The quality and richness of the availible tool and apps is quite astonishing to say the least. I mean, just take a loot at BootMii!

The future of hacking: it just works.

BootMii is a software you can install at a very fundamental level of your Wii. You can use it to do things like backing up your entire Wii as a security measure if anything goes wrong. Apart from the pretty sweet functionality, it certainly looks quite stunning. Of course, this is just a skin in the end. The menu is still controlled by pressing the power and reset button. And among the other tools there are also quite bare-bone looking ones. Nevertheless, it’s obvious that this a couple of steps above the awkward experiments I saw previously. These tools are slowly becoming solid apps you can rely on.

I got my first glimpse of that when I ported my European Monster Hunter Tri savegame to the US version. I launched the Homebrew Channel. There, I started the Homebrew Browser. It’s basically an App Store for Wii Homebrew. There, I found an app called the Savegame Manager. The Homebrew Browser automatically downloaded the App and installed it for me. I used it to do something the Wii wouldn’t allow me to do: to backup my Monster Hunter Tri save on an SD card. Having the savegames of both versions on an SD card it was only a matter of copying a few files from one folder to another. And lo and behold, the character I invested over 200 hours in was reborn on the US servers.

It was a nerve-wracking but quite rewarding experience in the end. I’m looking forward to see what this community comes up with next. It’s just a shame that the Homebrew idea always comes with the stigma of piracy.

It is finished. Red Letter Media finally completed their review trilogy of the Star Wars prequels. The masterpiece is complete. Now the healing can begin.

If you don’t know what this is about, you need to watch the review of The Phantom Menace. This was the review that got Red Letter Media known and it’s still a great lesson on how not to do storytelling.

The Red Letter Media reviews are what I would call the new generation of criticism. It differs from the criticism in traditional media in a couple of points. First, it’s longer, more exhaustive and much more niche. The Red Letter Media reviews take the movies apart scene by scene, even commenting individual lines. That’s something that until now would have been possible only in form of secondary literature.

But the new form of criticism doesn’t follow an academic agenda. Yes it does teach a lot but it is aimed at a much wider, causal audience. And so in also includes a LOT of quite aggressive humor. It even includes something almost unthinkable in old-school criticism: fiction. Many Internet critics take on a persona in their reviews. The reviews themselves often even include a story in themselves. The Red Letter Media reviews are a fabulous example. Even with the trilogy over, I do want to know how the story of Mr. Plinkett continues. Thankfully, there seems to be a follow-up coming up.

But until then we have a perfect treatment of the Star Wars prequels. The reviews go straight to where it hurts. They point out why the movies failed to resonate with the Star Wars audience. I found it quite cathartic how the most recent review put into words the exactly the same thoughts I had at the beginning of Return of the Sith. It is truly a great finale of the review trilogy as it finally exposes the most fundamental flaws of the prequels – their over-indulgence in the not very interesting story of Darth Vader.

So with the prequels being written off, I guess it’s time somebody else takes over and re-makes them how they should have been. Move over Lucas. It’s time Plinkett takes over.

The beta reviews are coming in. Thank you everybody. Instead of rushing in to fix all the problems I decided to wait a few days to see which are the issues most people comment on. I use the time to clean up desk an generally take care of some things I have been neglecting.

One of them was to finally build a few LEGO Technic models that have been piling up on my desk. Actually, there were only two sets but there are instructions for two models in each set. Technic models have been a moderate hobby of mine in the recent few years. I have built at least 15 of them. I may have written already about it here but there are two insights I got from doing so.

1. Less is More. I had the most fun with the smallest sets. Yes, the huge flagship sets do look awesome in the store. And yes, building them is an epic experience. But then that’s it. I build them once and it takes away half of my day. Then I salvage them for parts or they stay on my exhibition shelf and collect dust because I don’t have the time to do something else with them. On the other hand, the smaller sets can be assembled in 20 minutes or so. Which means I can build and re-build them over and over again. And that’s what I actually sometimes do. It’s very relaxing. Sometimes I follow the instructions, then change them and freestyle something horribly disfigured. I remember once when my old friend Daniel Renkel came over. We made a competition of trying to assemble Mindstorms rovers using only the parts from the tiniest Technic set available, the 8290 Forklift. The results were hilarious and it was an incredibly enjoyable exercise in creativity and economy. It’s an philosophy that gets lost as the number of parts increases.

   

   I called this one the “Squashed Kitten”.

2. Turning Radius. The other thing is perhaps more specific. Generally, the desk-life (the timespan I keep a particular model at my desk to play with it) of a model is dramatically increased when it’s a vehicle with a steering. I will race it around my desk making turns around obstacles. But in order to do so, the vehicle needs a descent turning radius. It needs to be able to make tight turns around the obstacles. Making a 10-point turn at every step is just not fun. But oddly, this is something LEGO designers often fail to consider. For example, the 8262 Quad Bike has a particularly bad turning radius. It’s a beautiful set with some really cool suspension and very dramatic building sequence. But with a turning radius of at least half a meter it won’t stay long on my desk. Luckily, it has some pretty cool parts I can use for other inventions. Sets that enjoyed a plentiful desk-life were the 8296 Dune Buggy (one of my first sets after the Dark Ages) or even the unseemingly small and cheap 8261 Power Truck.

   I have no idea what the lesson from that is. I guess sometimes a small technical detail can have a huge impact on user experience. And also, when you design a product you need to pay attention to the environment the product will be used in. So nothing new, I guess.

So do you guys have any LEGO you still build or am I the only one outing himself as an AFOL.