…and gathered about two handfuls of flower
   unconnected
   In twenty years or more

‘N now he’s silent, he is dead.
   acoustician
   flu
   And they went to sea in a Sieve

Did not fall into the little hand
   appearing
   Sleep in your little bed

The anger, we all have it
   beseeches 
   And the Orient Calf from the Land of Tute

Far and few, far and few
   Alabama Holding
   fast upon his shell

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The idea is to make something that’s a hybrid of “Oregon Trail” (on Mars) with a small MMO-like environment.

and which
you were probably
hoping
I would click

Forgive me
they were outrageous
so fleet
and so bold

This time we are meeting at the OSU New Media Communications Game Lab, which is located in Strand Agricultural Hall, room 400.  Strand is between the MU and the Library, right off the bookstore parking lot.  Basically, climb all the stairs to the fourth floor, then head to the north end of the building.

For more information on the group, see our Google Group page.

I’ll be handing these out in class, but here is a link to the assignment sheet for the first project.  The basic goal is to design then create a small and tight game level that essentially makes sense.   Makes sense as in it’s not just a random collection of “stuff” on an island.  Note that levels will be limited to no more than 256×256 meters in size, and won’t have any AI, NPCs or other entities.  The only exception is that the student may add one boat or one buggy.  However the vehicle must make sense in the level.  No buggy in the middle of a jungle clearing with no roads, or no boats with no place to land the boat and a reason to land the boat at that point.

I am teaching a Special Topics course at Oregon State University this term.  It is a 4 credit hour Special Topics course that will cover some of the basics of game design and development via FarCry modding. 

A course overview is online at http://perludus.com/wordpress/?page_id=555

Students, keep an eye out for additional posts on the site for course updates, handy reading material and so forth.

I was recently going through some old file archives, and discovered a complete copy of a website I started in 1993 to host information on OSU Oceanography’s research ship R/V Wecoma.  It ran on a Solaris box on my desk at Oregon State University and used the NCSA HTTPd server. Think pre-Linux, pre-Apache, pre-PHP and pre-Perl.  Think when Yahoo’s address was at Stanford and hosted on Akebono.

I set up the site to check out this “web thing”, and decided to put the ship’s cruise planning manual on the site.  Previously, the manual was only available in printed form and on request.  Any scientists thinking of or planning to use the ship got a copy.  Of course putting it on the web made it far more accessable to the public.

What’s interesting to me is the structure (or lack therein) of the site as well as the graphics.  Following around the hypertextification does lead to a bit of the “You are in a maze of twisty little passages all the same” feeling.  The icons I must say though have held their own in an interesting retro way.  I recall using some kind of pixel paint program running under Solaris at the time.  Any photos were scanned on a hard to get to scanner that was locked away in a lab across campus.

Alas the “Finger the Ship” system no longer functions.  I had put the ship on the net while it was in port, and then had a script running on the ship that could capture local water temperature, winds, salinity and a few other numbers. If you fingered the ship you’d get the latest ship stats.

Anyway, here is the site.  Ah and for comparison, here is the ship’s current website.

Great conference. Was pretty nice to sit in a small room and hear the likes of Raph Koster, Richard Bartle, Brian “Psychochild” Green, Randy Farmer and Ian Bogost. Lots of interesting talks from the practical to the, “Woah you people are OUT there!” My own short bit about spontaneous collaborative play in shooter games was I think a bit different than some - far more about a game-game as opposed to Second Life.

One really great presentation was the “Pioneers” panel - Richard Bartle (co-inventor of the MUD), Pavel Curtis (creator of LambdaMOO), Brian Green (Meridian 59), and Randy Farmer (Lucasfilm’s Habitat). All of these guys had great little comments and insights into what it was like in the early days. One question they got that amused me was, “What was your business model?” For Bartle and Curtis, the answers were both, “We didn’t have one, we were just doing something cool!”

Randy Farmer also mentioned a whitepaper that he and Chip Morningstar wrote, titled The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat He specifically said that even though it is about an old C64 game played over dialup, it still has good information and is worth the read.

Raph Koster also did a great talk about the need for more smaller and approachable games.  He used the analogy of opera versus banjoes - where opera is big, expensive, rare, and outside the realm of the average person to create.  Banjoes on the otherhand are easy to get, and it’s not that hard to at least plunk out a tune that others will recognize.  So… more banjoes!

I’m traveling to Atlanta tomorrow to attend the Living Game Worlds conference at Georgia Tech.  I’m on a panel on Tuesday to talk about Collaboration in Virtual Worlds and Games.  I thought rather than get all academicky I’d talk about the kind of collaborative fun behavior I’ve seen in Day of Defeat, a FPS shooter multiplayer game I helped develop with Valve.

The game in a nutshell is a team based multiplayer shooter centered on territory capture.  The players can be either “Axis” (German) or “Allies” (US).  The team that captures all the flags in the game map wins.  The game maps are relatively small recreations of typical WW2 settings (French towns, Italian towns, etc.) and are pretty richly filled with detail.  They also include a lot of “physics objects” - small and large props such as tin cans, chairs, potted plants and even pianos that are movable if hit.

So here’s the curious bit of spontaneous and emergent gameplay that I have seen happen once in a while…

Sometimes, people will join a game server and find it empty - they are the only one there.  Rather than just quit, they decide they are going to “herd” all the physics objects to some central place in the game world.  It takes a lot of work and is pretty slow, but somehow fun to have this huge stack of potted plants, tables, pianos, barrels and more in the town square.

What inevitably happens is someone else randomly joins the game server, and asks “what’s up?”.  Once they see what’s going on, they join in and also help start moving objects.  Pretty soon a few more
people join and THEY join in.  Now keep in mind that this is a shooting game - you get points for killing other players.  But nobody is shooting, everyone (Axis and Allies) are working together to get everything together.  Sometimes someone will join in and start shooting, and everyone will yell at the new player to stop.

In the end, once pretty much everything has been moved, sometimes people gather for a screenshot.  Then often everyone will on the count of 3 toss all their grenades into the pile at once, and it all blows up (as do the players), everyone laughs, and then the game is on for real.

It’s a really curious and fun thing to watch (and do).  People really get into it and have a lot of fun out of it.  And I think it’s fascinating that these complete strangers are collaborating, laughing, chatting, etc. in a game where really they should be shooting at each other.  They are all running around with virtual loaded guns, but all of them are working together and not shooting each other. As if by some unspoken agreement, everyone has fun in a way contrary to the game’s goals.  And also by unspoken agreement, everyone knows when it’s over and time to get on with the game.

Here is a gallery of players participating in this kind of activity…

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