Here is something cool I have stumbled across recently. It turns out that an active community of enthusiasts managed to completely re-create the old strategy game Transport Tycoon Deluxe. And by re-create I mean re-create and improve beyond belief. The project is called Open TTD.

Open TTD

It’s a weird when you think about it. Transport Tycoon Deluxe was made by Chris Sawyer way back in the 90ies. Chris later made the super-popular Rollercoaster Tycoon series. Afterwards, he returned to Transport Tycoon. The new sequel was called Locomotion but it didn’t really catch on. Chris adopted many interface concepts from Rollercoaster Tycoon. As a result, building train tracks was very complicated. The tracks ended up looking impossibly convoluted, resembling roller coasters instead of real train tracks. Additionally, there was a very clear focus on trains. Other means of transportation played a minor role. I’m guessing that because of all these reasons, the Transport Tycoon fan community didn’t move on to Locomotion.

Instead they have created their own version of Transport Tycoon. And indeed, being a Transport Tycoon veteran myself, Open TTD is like all my dreams coming true. The advanced version has bigger maps, trams, articulated road vehicles, more airports, updated train signs, time schedules, a multi-player mode over the internet and hundreds of tiny but incredibly time-saving interface tweaks. The game is made specifically for modding. There are plenty of additional packs available that introduce new vehicles, scenery or simply adjust some gamelay-relevant values. They even re-created all the graphics so they can offer the game for free.

I especially enjoy running the game in full resolution on my 27″ is nothing short of breath taking. All graphics are hand-pixeled and made for much lower resolutions so the screen becomes incredibly detailed and dense with information. I can totally understand that the group is now working on a graphics set in a higher resolution. However, looking at the preliminary results, I’m skeptical. They use 3D packages so it’s much more difficult to maintain a consistent style. Also, the unrealistic proportions of the game become apparent. In the end, the game just loses it’s hand-crafted appeal. I would stick to the original graphics for now.

But otherwise, it’s an amazing project and worth checking out! (WARNING: Highy Addictive)

As I already mentioned, I got the Kindle some time ago. I was interested in the idea of an E-Book reader ever since the first Kindle was released. However, the early technical issues and the high price prevented me from getting one. Also, it wasn’t available in Germany anyway. So I decided to let it slide for a while until it’s safer to do experiments. With the recent price drop and the 3rd generation being out it occurred to me that it’s a good time to resurrect that project.

We can make them better. We have the technology.

It seems like it might have been a bit premature still. The biggest problem with the Kindle is the fact that it doesn’t really work in Germany. Doing it the legit way, you end up with a laughably small selection of books. In order to enjoy the full offer you need to jump through a lot of hoops. That spoils the entire experience. For example, I can’t really buy books on the Kindle itself anymore. And even then, there are still a lot of books that didn’t make it to Kindle yet – for example Harry Potter or The Catcher in the Rye (you figure out how the two are connected). Especially inconvenient is the fact that there are actually almost no German books on the Kindle. I expected that part at least but it will prevent me from getting one for my parents.

That quite unfortunate as the device itself is QUITE amazing.

For starters, the E-ink display messes up my brain. It’s just such a different display technology. It doesn’t look quite like paper but it is certainly very close to the experience of reading printed material. Maintaining the screen content doesn’t cost energy. So there is something on the screen all the time – even when the device is off. When I first got the Kindle there were some instructions on the screen. I thought that was one of those transparent stickers they sometimes put on devices. I tried to peel it off until I realized that it’s the device already displaying something. I never really bought into the “reading screen is like staring on a lightbulb”-argument. But it’s immediately obvious that the E-ink display is simply made for reading.

Not quite paper. But good for reading anyway.

The form-factor is quite remarkable too. The first thing I noticed about the iPad was that it was surprisingly thick and heavy. The Kindle is the exact opposite. And now the iPad feels even more awkward. The funny thing is that it’s one of the things I didn’t care about at first. I read in in the ads and in other reviews but I disregarded it like a minor point. It turned out to be an essential part of the experience. The Kindle is lighter and thinner than a novel. It’s literally just a thin, feathery sheet of plastic. And once you hold it, it makes all the difference.

The Kindle might look like an weird, complicated way to do the same things books can do since hundreds of years. But once you start reading it all comes together. I didn’t think you couldn’t improve the reading experience of a book. I stand corrected. The Kindle is lighter and thinner than a book. You don’t even need to hold it open. The text is just there. It’s incredibly comfortable. It’s flexible too. You know that problem when you read in bed lying on your side? You can put the book on the bed when you are reading the right page. But when you read the left page you somehow need to hold the book in the air and force it open at the same time. Especially annoying with thick paperbacks. No such problem with the Kindle.

Also, I never realized how turning the pages and simply feeling the length of a book distracts from the reading experience. The fact that you can turn a page with the simple press of a button combined with the flawless handling creates this amazingly fluid, streamlined reading experience. I found myself eating up pages like hardly ever before.

Try this with a book.

Of course there are still a lot of little problems. The keyboard is a little awkward. It’s very difficult to share the Kindle with another person. You can put down bookmarks but you can’t label which bookmark belongs to which person and accessing them is way too complicated. To add insult to injury, bookmarks appear in the same list as notes so when one person starts putting a lot of annotations in, the bookmark system becomes almost useless. And of course there is the problem of accessing the content I mentioned before.

But those are technical problems which can be solved. I pretty sure they will be solved with time. For me, the far more important realization is that E-Book can surpass the paper book in regard to the reading experience alone.

Here is an idea. Recently I have been thinking about what makes things popular. There is this wide-spread belief that for a piece of work to be popular, it needs to be somehow streamlined. It needs to appeal to a wide audience. It needs to be reduced to the lowest common denominator. Usually this is mentioned together with concepts like sex, violence, explosions and bubble wrap. On the other hand subjects like art, science or philosophy are supposedly only for a very small, specific audience. And fair enough, you always imagine the football jock who watches something like Transformers 2 and the literature professor who watches something like The Fountain.

“Hey Megan, sign my PhD diploma!” “No, sign mine first!”

I would like to question this belief. My colleague Yu-Chung once mentioned an idea he got from a book (which one, Yu?). People tend to imagine the psyche of other people much more simplified than their own. People are comfortable to maintain very contradictory beliefs because they understand them as the subtle nuances of their complex personality. “Sure, I like Alanis Morissette and Rammstein” they would say. “It may seem weird at first but here is the thing…” On the other hand, when they construct a model of the psyche of a different person, they paint them in the broadest strokes, ignoring nuances and not expecting hidden depths. Like that one relative everybody had that somehow got the idea that you are fond of a particular thing – chocolate for example. They would continue to give you chocolate as presents over and over again. Not that you don’t like chocolate but you like other things too. In TV Tropes, this effect is called never living it down.

It’s the same thing with an audience. Just because the football jock watches Transformers, it doesn’t mean that he won’t enjoy American Beauty. Just because the literature professor watches The Fountain doesn’t mean he won’t enjoy Zoolander. People can have more than one interest. But even more importantly, people are flexible. They can see what kind of mindset is necessary to enjoy a piece of work and they can quickly acquire that mindset.

So when an audience watches a comedy it will be able to appreciate the humor. The same audience might watch a thriller and ignore humor completely, focusing on the suspense instead. It’s seems obvious. We aren’t robots after all. It’s a strategy to get the most from our entertainment. The result is that a piece of work will magically always have the audience it implies. So when a director makes a streamlined, shallow movie it’s no wonder that people that do show up seem to enjoy it BECAUSE it is shallow. That’s not the movie catering to their tastes. That’s the director superimposing a mindset on the audience.

I think that the flexibility of the audience is constantly underestimated. As I mentioned in my Kill Screen interview, I have the impression that especially game designers often make that mistake. In this case, the unrecognized flexibility of the audience reinforces that fallacy among game designers and obscures untapped potential. Let’s have more faith in our audience and explore how flexible they can be.

There was an interesting discussion recently at Cologne Game Lab. It was about why games are/will be the main cultural medium of the digital era. There is an interesting analogy to movies being the main cultural medium of the industrial era. Walter Benjamin noticed in his famous “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that movies mirror much better the reality of industrial life than theater does. In movies, a machine (the projector) dictates the speed and rhythm of perception. The audience is asked to follow along. Movies use techniques like montage to quickly cross time and space. Also, movies are produced industrially, for the masses. These are literally the characteristics of the industrial age – the industrial assembly line mass production and ability to travel much more rapidly. Benjamin argues that these characteristics make the medium of movies a much more adequate way to address the reality of life in the industrial age.

Applying the same idea to games seems to work out quite well. No matter if we work or play – both is often done at a computer. It’s often funny how people are calling one computer activity entertainment while calling a very similar activity work. With WoW gold farmers there are even real jobs you can perform in game worlds. The increasing interconnectivity of everyday lives also taps into games. We have our Facebook friends in our games and games that have their own social networks built-in.

I watched some pro-level StarCraft II matches recently. I was amazed by the incredible abilities of those players. Perhaps the most impressive one is their ability to multi-task. It’s something our brains are not really well adopted to and it’s something that may be the most useful skill in the digital age. On a daily basis we are bombarded with thousands of tasks and problems that all demand our attention seemingly at the same time. The skills the players train are exactly the skills the digital culture requires from us – just taken to the extreme and focused on a very specific system.

The only problem is that moves used this similarity to actually make statements about life and the modern times. Except from some notable exceptions, games didn’t manage to seize this opportunity yet.

On this episode of the Monster Hunter Podcast: Listener Emails Return Again. We continue answering listener E-Mails, re-consider switchaxes and drool about Monster Hunter 3rd.

Get the Episode here.
The RSS Feed is here.
Get us in iTunes here.

The Tumblr Blog here.

Enjoy!