Blog - Artificial Life and Games

Friday, February 22, 2008

Artificial life is a topic that interests me greatly. I'm a huge fan of the Creatures a game series that pioneered the use of A-life technology as a game, and have been part of the series' fan community for almost 10 years now. The use of artificial life technology for games has interested me because I feel very strongly that it could revolutionize games someday. It also helps that the remaining developers were the first contacts I've ever made in the industry, whom I'd like to maintain as a potential future employer.

I once wrote an essay for one of Brenda's classes on artificial life and games, and she encouraged me to get it published as an article for Game Career Guide. I ended up publishing the machinima one instead, although I've certainly considered at some point writing up the A-life one as an article as well. In any case, as just a taste of what I mean when I say that artificial life technology has great potential for gaming, consider the following:

One of my friends in the fan community had a website devoted to torturing and killing the game's "artificially alive" creatures. He received hundreds of death threats a day for this site over a pretty large span of time. He was even mentioned in a Wired magazine article at the time about the game, where he was quoted as saying something along the lines of "Many players care more about these virtual creatures than my real human life."

Think about that. Hundreds of fans wrote in death threats to my friend because he was torturing and murdering video game characters, whom those fans believed so strongly were actually alive.
And arguably, the norns of Creatures actually are alive, at least according to many definitions of life. Still, how many other game characters can claim to have that many players caring that much about the character's mental and physical health?

Not even film, or novels can claim that. Artificial life only works in software, and thus has the potential to take games to an emotional plateau way beyond what any other media could possibly produce. If only we research it more, that is.


In any case, I recently stumbled upon an old documentary someone put up on youtube about artificial life.
You can find it in a search for "BBC Horizon: Signs of Life [Artificial Life]".
It's broken into 5 parts.

If you know nothing of what artificial life is about, it gives a pretty decent (if highly outdated) summary of at least some of the basics.

I bring it up though for another reason. It has a large section on Conway's The Game of Life, and it provided an interesting new fact about the "game" that I didn't know about before:
It was non-digitally prototyped!
It seems Conway invented the game using dinner plates on his tiled floor.


However, it wasn't until it was later made as a computer application, therefore fast enough to witness more complex phenomena like the invention of the glider-guns, etc., that the real potential of The Game of Life was seen.

Even so, one should never underestimate the power of dinner plates as a gaming platform, I suppose...

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 5:06 PM  0 Comments Links to this post



Blog - Considering Aesthetics

Saturday, February 9, 2008

So this weekend I'm working with another team of students to develop a board game. We're trying to develop a game under the MDA design framework, using paranoia as the aesthetic. In other words, making a game that makes the players feel paranoid. I'll post more on this game when I can.

In any case, the previous weekend, I made a quick and dirty little prototype board game with a different group of students. Brenda suggested we try a board game based on a video game. Our group settled on the Metroid series of games (although not any one game from the series in particular.) Obviously as we don't have rights to the IP, this is not a commercial venture, this was just merely a way to build up our game design skills, and hell, just for fun.



To create the game, we defined what we thought was the core mechanic of the series, which we determined to be exploration. You explore to find items which in turn help you explore more. Thus, in our board game you did that too, with a series of randomly-placed face-down tiles on specific room-squares on the map. Get to a room, flip it over and see what was in the room inside - often it was an item you needed, which also gave you enhanced abilities when exploring the map. For example, acquiring your morph ball let you use certain tunnels as shortcuts around the map, etc.

But I bring this game up because I can relate it back to the MDA framework. Although we captured the core of the video game series it was based on, we didn't capture the aesthetic. The aesthetic of the Metroid series is creepiness and isolation; one that doesn't really transfer well to a multiplayer board game. Our game was incredibly fun because it's pretty much the opposite aesthetic: a fast-paced, competitive race between players. This is not to say that the aesthetic of the video game series is not fun. It's just a completely different kind of game.

I thought it was interesting that now that I'm looking at the MDA framework for this upcoming game, it provides the clue as to why my previous game didn't quite feel like the game it was designed to emulate. Does it matter? Not really, as I see it, because we still had a blast designing and playing our board game, and I'm betting that matters a lot more. ;)

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 4:38 PM  0 Comments Links to this post