5 more minutes

I’ve been told, with varying degrees of vitriol, that games are addictive.

Indeed.

This is a subject that comes up every so often, usually spurred by a soft piece spewed forth by a local news network or “brand new” study, and it’s a topic that I can’t say I fully understand.

That isn’t to say I don’t agree that games are addictive, chances are every gamer knows at least one person whose time and effort spent on playing would be comparable to an addiction, indeed I’ve known several. Rather, addiction is one of those things that I can’t say I’ve ever fully grasped, because I’ve never been intensely addicted to anything.

The times are a changin’

The oddest day in any gamer’s life, is when you find out your mother plays more games than you do.

Not in volume mind, but rather in the amount of time actually spent playing games, my own Mum has surpassed me. She made the casual observation over the Saturday breakfast table, much to the delight of my brother and Dad, that she spent more time playing Super Mario on my DS than I have on any of my shiny new purchases (sitting on a pile next to my couch, slowly gathering dust) and that perhaps she’s the hardcore gamer and I’m the casual one in the house. We laughed and moved on, but something about the statement stuck in my mind, I thought about the amount of time I actually spend playing games as opposed to a couple of years ago, the more I thought about it the more I realised I’m not alone.

Freeplay 2009

Just a small update to say, that I’m on the advisory board for Freeplay 2009 and I’m also speaking on a panel! I hope to see you there, (you being the four google tracker bots that read my page)

More details at www[dot]freeplay[dot]net[dot]au

Shades of black and white

As gaming enters a plateau of technological advances, designers are looking for more ways to further immerse the player into their worlds beyond the superficialities of realistic graphics. It seems the “idea du jour” is moralistic decisions and, as evidenced by the glut of titles extolling this virtue, it seems on the surface to be rather successful.

This isn’t a new idea by any stretch of the means, the older amongst us will remember fondly the dilemmas poised to us by titles like Ultima and Planescape: Torment but where titles like these had subtlety and a great understanding of the intricate nature of creating a truly memorable player conflict, it seems that in the current market as long as you give the player a choice of how terrible or upstanding they are you can effectively call that a moral choice and give yourself a pat on the back.

Too harsh?

In Memoriam…

It’s official, Duke Nukem Forever is dead.

For those not in the loop, last Wednesday the gaming world was informed that long running development house 3D Realms would be shutting down and after 12 years and 9 days so would development on the longest running joke in the games industry.

Face to Face

So I’m reading the preview for the up coming Army of Two sequel (that is, somewhat disappointingly, not named Army of Two:2) and a particular new feature jumped out at me, when the protagonists are alone in a non-combat zone they’ll remove their masks. Now for those that haven’t played the original, this may appear as a mundane footnote of the new features, but I for one consider this as a positive step toward making the characters more affable than they were in the previous outing where you played as masked, un-flinching and, aside from moments of gross inappropriateness, unemotional robots who paused from killing only to “chug brews”.