Ayiti:The Cost of Life

This week, our assigned game was to pick anything from the website Games for Change. Games for change is a non-profit group that works towards the goal of creating "socially responsible games." Ok, I hear people groaning about "socially responsible"..."politically correct"..."WTF"..."Who's going to play that"...and so on.

Here's why these games are important and need to exist:
Remember playing Oregon Trail in grade school? Ok, maybe you don't, but I'm guessing that at some point in your K-12 experience you played some kind of game that was supposed to teach you something. These games about life in developing countries are a NECESSITY for teaching bored suburban kids about places in this world where you don't get three meals a day or Christmas presents or even antibiotics when you are sick. Games like this give us perspective on why someone would risk their life and travel to this country illegally in order to keep their family alive.

That said, this was a sobering game to play. The goal is to keep the parents of a family of 5 people alive through 4 years. You have to decide who goes to school, who stays home and who goes to work. There are certain obstacles for making choices such as the amount of money or education you have. If you want the mom to have a job as a secretary, she needs to have some education, but sending her to school means that there will be less money for food. There are hurricanes, and it's very easy for people to get sick. This game has very few happy endings, but shows the player the trade offs that must be made if you are trying to raise a family in Haiti.

I found the game strangely addicting. I so wanted to keep the children alive, and they died every time I played. Technically, I did win the game one time, but it was a hollow victory. Only the parents were alive and even they were in poor health. I knew that the game was going to be depressing, but what I wasn't expecting was just how much I would want the family to survive. This game, whether intentionally or not, does a terrific job of exploiting a player's hope that they will win.

If I were a social studies teacher or a history teacher, I would require students to play this game just to give them perspective. In my experience, kids will laugh and say something is really stupid, but in the end it does make a difference and they do learn the lesson whether they are willing to admit it or not.

Because of the nature of the game I've reviewed here, I'm including a few web-sites for charities that provide aid to developing countries:
The International Rescue Committee
Unicef
Friends of the World Food Program...had problems with the tag for this so here is the url: http://www.friendsofwfp.org

...

The World Ends With You for Nintendo DS

Image via Wikipedia

The World Ends with You is currently a very popular game on the Nintendo DS console. It is an action RPG, and its plot centers around the Japanese youth culture typified by the Shibuya District in Tokyo. The main character, Neku, is a headphones-wearing kid who inadvertantly finds himself playing "The Reapers Game." In this game, the player must stay alive for 7 days while performing different tasks. During each task, a countdown timer appears on Neku's hand. The tasks involve using powers that are tapped by wearing different types of pins. Neku also has a trusty sidekick in the form of Shiki. Shiki is a young girl who has also been sucked into the game.

This game is fascinating for me in its presentation of Japanese culture. I'm sure there are a lot of insider references that I didn't get, but despite that, it's always fun to try on a different culture especially in the context of a game. This is one of the reasons why I was so obsessed with Shenmui when it came out in the late 90's.

The game play was fairly easy. Since it's on the DS, there's no need to remember which button to press. The different powers are unleashed by using different types of strokes with the stylus. This is similar to drawing the different shapes in Okami. It also appeared that players could possibly control Shiki and Neku at the sametime on the different screens, but I didn't really explore this capability.

There was one problem with the gameplay that deserves mention. The game introduces how to use the different pins by having the player use them to fight some monsters. Unfortunately, The screen explaining how to use the pin appears simultaneously with the screen where you fight the monsters. This means you have take some hits while you are reading about how you are supposed to fight them. There should be some delay between the explanation of how to use the pin and the actual fighting. Maybe there's a pause button that I missed. This would easily fix the problem.

There was a lot of dialog in the game, but I was able to click through it at a fairly rapid pace. Dialog always seems to be a challenge in these games, and I don't see why. It's not like this is a movie. I'm not expecting "scenes." It all goes back to high school writing classes. (Notice that I didn't say "English" because good writing is the same no matter what the language.) Is the dialog moving the plot forward? If it's a game, the gameplay should move the plot forward. Otherwise, dialog is used to develop a character or a relationship between characters. There was a lot of bickering between Shiki and Neku that seemed redundant to me. As I said, I was able to click through fairly rapidly which I did because the dialog had very little substance to it.

On the whole, The World Ends With You is a very interesting and fun game with a great combination of Japanese culture and easy Nintendo DS gameplay. I can see myself playing this on Marta for the next couple of weeks. The promise of games like this is why I bought the DS when it first came out. The fact that you have to draw to win a game is so refreshing. This game and Okami are quite similar to me because of the way you play the game and that the game itself is so based in Japanese culture. The difference is in the parts of Japanese culture which are examined. These games, to me, are somewhat anthropological in the way they bring the world home to the player. The next game that I will review, Ayiti: The Cost of Life, also falls under this umbrella, but in a very different way.

Alchemy

Image via WikipediaAlchemy is a game made by Popcap Games, the same creator as one of my favorites, Bejeweled. It is a casual game that can be played online or can be downloaded for a fee. The game is played on a grid of squares and the goal is to turn all of the squares gold. Squares turn to gold when the player places a "rune" on a square. Runes are letters of the greek alphabet in a particular color. Runes must be place next to squares of either a similar shape or similar color. Points are scored when runes are placed on a board. When a column or row is completely filled, it disappears. This gives the player more space for placing runes. There are wildcard runes, and every now and then, a skull. The skulls must be placed on top of a rune and they destroy whichever rune they are placed on top of. If a rune will not fit anywhere, it can be discarded. A player can discard up to 4 runes. After that the game is lost.

This was a fun casual game to play. I enjoyed the fact that there was no clock involved and that the challenge in the game did not involve pushing arrow keys within a certain amount of times. Games with a visceral quality such as Alchemy hold my attention much longer than games where I must push sequences of buttons within a certain period of time.

Alchemy is similar to Bejeweled in that the player is working with pieces on a grid, and the player must recognize similar shapes. I like working with magical themes and with symbols like the greek Alphabet. I guess its sumbliminal programming from all of those Calculus classes. I was intrigued by the fact that the goal for winning the game was somewhat separated from winning points. I guess the points could be used if you were trying to compete against people. If that were the case, the winner would probably play for longer just so that they could earn points. Isn't that a twist.

I've been reading that these types of games are highly appealing to women and older players. It's not difficult to see why. This is the game you play for 15 minutes at work when it's 3:00 on Friday, and you just can't look at another line of code.

This is off-topic, but Popcap games is really taking a Web 2.0 approach to gaming. Games are offered on several platforms: pc, mac, online, offline, mobile. The games appear to be written in Flash. Finally, Popcap has its own freely available API allowing developers to make their own games. This last feature is a very smart move on their part, because players who are rabidly into their games and have some programming expertise will probably want to try their own hand at making a game.

I'm going to play around with their api and see if I can't make something "fun" with it. I've been having real trouble with Gamemaker, not because it isn't a good application, but because I think the types of games that can be made with gamemaker are so incredibly boring. I'll post a later update about whether or not I was able to use it. Since I have to create a game for a final project, I'm hoping that the Popcap framework will pan out.

Zon: A Chinese Learning Game

What a disappointment this game was. I’m going to China in a year or two, and will need to know some Chinese in order to navigate myself. For this reason, I have a vested interest in learning Chinese and was very excited about this assignment. It looks like the game is partly research project, partly community service and partly game class assignment. I noticed that it is distributed by a University. Let me just take this opportunity to say, IT SHOWS. Some pieces of the game are really cool and other pieces are amazingly bad. Through it all, there’s no real sense of a goal that the player is trying to accomplish or how the player can move on to the next level.

I never got a really great sense of how to use the learning features of the game, and actually found myself wishing I was back at Runescape. At least Runescape made sure players knew how to accomplish the tasks in the game. I was able to listen to a dialog in Zon, but it went really quickly, and I was unable to get at the individual words or phrases that were being used.

There was an arcade game segment of Zon that seemed really promising, but the games were really hard to understand. These seemed like they were part of a class project with some games more polished than others.

When Chris saw that I was playing a game about learning Chinese he too was very, very interested, but lost interested when he saw me trying to play.

The makers of Zon should have started out with something much more simple than a baggage claim area. In fact, if they had just stuck to the arcade games and made them really good arcade games, I would keep playing them outside of our class. As it is, I might look for another game to learn Chinese.

Mario Kart for Nintendo Wii

Mario Kart is a racing game involving many of the characters from previous Mario games. I was playing in team mode with Chris. Players can choose from many different tracks that are categorized by competition. We raced on several of the tracks including Shy Guy Beach, Peach Beach, and WaLuigi Stadium.

Since neither Chris nor myself had played this game before, we consistently found ourselves in last place, but the game was amusing nonetheless. On each track there are cubes hovering above the track. The cubes can contain a power up or, alternatively, an obstacle. Some of the boxes are marked with what they contain, and others are marked with a question mark.

There were also different types of monsters on each of the tracks. Peach Beach had these giant crabs that can see players coming and will move towards them. Another track had Ghosts hovering above the racers.

The track that was the most fun for me was the WaLuigi Stadium. The track had lots of curves and dips with opportunities for jumps. This meant that even if I was going slow, it was still exciting. It’s also lots of fun to bump the other players, and it seems to slow people down when you collide with them.

The graphics in the game are very impressive as is the fact that even the machine generated players make mistakes. The machine generated player is no longer perfect at the game. This makes it more fun for a casual gamer such as myself, because it makes the competition a bit more fair. Another difference between this game and the other few games that I’ve played is that there are some objects in the game with which players are supposed to collide.

Mario Kart was very easy to pick up play without any real training. After all the stories that I’ve clicked through recently for Nintendo games, this was very refreshing. Racing games are fairly obvious anyway…steer and accelerate the car. The game came with a steering wheel that is supposed to be used with the WiiMote sitting inside. The wheel is easy to use, but made it more difficult to choose the character I wanted to play or point at anything else with the WiiMote.

I would recommend this game to other people to play. It was easy to have fun, and no trouble at all to learn. When a seasoned player and a casual gamer can play a game together, and enjoy it, it speaks to the game’s universal appeal.

Senior Games: A New Genre

One of the most underserved markets in gaming is senior citizens. I predict that over the next 10 years, as the baby boomers start to retire and are looking for ways to fill up their free time, they will start playing more video games. Let's face it, those of us taking this class will probably be playing games when we hit the retirement home.

What types of games will the seniors of the next 10 years want to play? I predict that games successfully penetrating the seniors market will require wisdom and the unique historical perspective that we all accumulate over time. What if you could recreate your own memories in a virtual environment? Yeah, I mean a holodeck, but not as a physical recreation, I mean as something on your computer. If we could recreate shared memories, this would allow for social networks where people create shared memories of events like baseball games or parties or even shared memories of other people like my sixth grade math teach...um...maybe someone else. This genre will also include games that recreate parts of daily life in which seniors can no longer participate in their real lives, such as cooking or gardening.

The user interface required for these types of games will have to be completely different from the interfaces we have today. Seniors do not have good reflexes or agility of movement. Even the WiiMote will be troublesome for seniors who are somewhat frail. When I think of the type of interface that will be useful for seniors, I think of devices such as the "Jitterbug" cell phone or even the "clapper."

I feel that this is a stand alone genre because of what I have observed when I have visited my grandmother in her nursing home. I see lots of men and women doing whatever they can to keep themselves amused. If games could be designed to give them back some of their favorite experiences, maybe there would there would be fewer seniors suffering from depression.

This genre may not be "trendy" but will make a lot of money for anyone developing these games. I hope that when I am older something like this exists. We will all be in the market for this at some point.

Blues Brothers

As an example of an older platform game, I decided to try one from the list of old Nintendo games that are available on the link provided by Dr. K.

Blues Brothers is a platform title from 1991. It has little Jake and little Elwood running around with all of the kitschy tunes from the movie rendered into synth tunes. This was not an easy game to play. The character does not jump high enough to make it onto the next level of platforms. Chris tried it and was also unsuccessful.