You can find the full article here.

My assertion is that games are actually better-suited for this than any other art form, but for some reason this potential is under-utilized in the industry. (I also talk about zombie sensitivity training and making a game starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman, if that makes the article sound more interesting.)

I’m really happy with this particular post; especially because it’s sparked a renewed interest for me in a side project that I’ve been working on for a while.

To prove my incredible skills in this arena, I thought I’d share some concept art that I just whipped together for one of Deep Plaid Games’ upcoming titles.

Believe it or not, I managed to put this creation together in less than 5 hours. Yeah… I know. Sorry, I don’t do work-for-hire.

Richard: “Rent? What is that? Some sort of tribute to the mystical forces that control The Apartment?”

Miles: “Ummm… no. It’s money. Money to keep living here. We all have to pay it, remember?”

Richard: “Oh right right, money. Well… I’m working on that.”

Miles: “So you still haven’t found a job?”

Richard: “Well… I’m almost done with my resume. Tell me how this sounds… ‘August 1860-May 1867: Farmer, Canary Islands. Engaged in farming.’ Then after that, ‘April 1867-June 2007: Caretaker of Mystical Island, No Fixed Address. Assisted in protection of mystical island – and through it, the entire world – for over 230 years. Managed hiring and vision execution.’”

Miles: “Uh…”

Richard: “And then under ‘Skills’ I have: ‘Fluent in Spanish and English. Some experience with Microsoft Word. Immortal.’”

Miles: “Okay, Richard, they’re going to think you’re lying.”

Richard: “You’re right… I’ll take out the part about Word. I’m still learning the typewriter, after all! Also, I’m not quite happy with that ‘Caretaker’ title… hey, which do you think sounds more impressive: ‘Executive Vice President of Island’, or ‘Assistant God’?”

I actually intended for this article to be larger in scope and talk about failure in general; but I thought that the article was getting too long and decided to leave it as ruminations about the size of “setbacks” (i.e. progress loss upon gameplay “death”); the fact that significant setbacks are increasingly out-of-vogue in game design; and the fact that there are some interesting psychological dynamics that are lost when large setbacks are lost.

Most of it feels tautological for anyone who’s thought about game design before… not exactly groundbreaking. But I reference a few interesting/obscure examples, and hopefully it’s still interesting to students and so on who haven’t thought much about the subject before.

Since I first learned Actionscript 3, I’ve been frustrated that when you try to run code like the following inside a class (as opposed to on the stage)…

myMC.gotoAndStop('FINISHED_SCREEN');
myMC.result_txt.text = "You won!";

Then often (but not always!) you will get the familiar error:

TypeError: Error #1009: Cannot access a property or method of a null object reference.

(To clarify: in this context, result_txt is the name of a TextField that exists on the stage, and only exists on the frame with the label “FINISHED_SCREEN”. If you haven’t previously displayed this frame, and you run the code above, then sometimes you will find that the result_txt TextField object hasn’t been properly instantiated by Flash yet when the second line is run – therefore myMC.result_txt will resolve to null, and you’ll get the error above.)

I’ve wrestled with this bug (and I do regard it as a bug in Flash/AS3) for a couple of years now, and have looked into the behavior in some depth. (One of the strange things you’ll find is that after running gotoAndStop(“FINISHED_SCREEN”), myMC.numChildren might be, say, 3… yet when you actually manually iterate over myMC’s children, you will find there to be less than 3. Yikes.)

This bug has been talked about before. Senocular posted about it here on the Kirupa forums. (And while I love every single other post senocular has made on that forums or elsewhere, the fact that he pretends that it is something other than a bug, and basically ends up recommending that people not use frames for the one purpose in which frames are useful – acting as a UI state machine – is head-asplodingly incomprehensible to me.) In that post senocular described a possible workaround; later, Richard Leggett blogged about this issue here, and ended with an ominous note that Event.ADDED_TO_STAGE and Event.RENDER both have bugs in certain contexts. Then, in the comments to that Richard Legget blog, Bryce Branson provided a link to his implementation of Senocular’s method above: Utils.as.

Which is very nice and practical and has only one downside, which is that [b]it doesn’t work.[/b] Take it from me, I used that Utils.as method in two different projects, and though it reduced the occurrence of this issue, it did not eliminate it by any means.

Well, I haven’t fully cleaned-up this solution yet, and I haven’t implemented it for gotoAndPlay (should be a simple search-and-replace of “stop” for “play”)… but here’s a function that I’ve begun using to take care of this, and which provides a watertight implementation. First, here’s a code example of the function in action:

	Utility.gotoAndStopAndThen( myMC, "FINISHED_SCREEN", ["result_txt"],
			function(...args)
			{
				myMC.result_txt.text = "You won!";

				// ...Any additional code that should run afterwards goes here.

			} );

As you can see it’s as simple as providing a movieclip and a frame ID, and then a callback function to be run.

And here’s the function (actually two functions are included here):

/**
* Method for reliably moving to a new frame and then accessing elements that should be on the stage on that frame.
*
* @param mc		MovieClip which we wish to navigate between frames in.
* @param frameID	 Name or number of the frame we're moving to
* @param elementNames Names of elements on the timeline that we wish to interact with. This will also be used to build a cooresponding list of parameters for the "callbackFunc" function.
* @param callbackFunc Function to call once we've entered the new frame and the elements specified in elementNames definitely exist. This function will be passed parameters, a series of DisplayObjects - the elements specified by elementNames.
* @param callbackParams (Optional) Additional parameters to pass to the callbackFunc function. These will be passed after the elements specified by elementNames.
*
*/
public static function gotoAndStopAndThen(mc:MovieClip,frameID:*,elementNames:Array,callbackFunc:Function,callbackParams:Array=null,callbackThis:Object=null)
{
	mc.gotoAndStop(frameID);
	mc.addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME,
			function(evt:Event)
			{
				// Confirm that the elements requested exist, and use them if so.
				var elems:Array = new Array();

				for each( var elemName:String in elementNames )
				{
					var elem:DisplayObject = mc.getChildByName(elemName);

					if ( elem != null )
					{
						elems.push(elem);
					}

				}

				if ( elems.length == elementNames.length )
				{
					// Remove this function as an enter-frame listener so it never goes off again.
					evt.currentTarget.removeEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, arguments.callee);

					// All of the elements were successfully found and put into the elems array. Call the callback function, with the elements and
					// any other parameters we were given.
					doCallbackFunc( callbackFunc, elems, callbackParams, callbackThis );

				}

			} );
}

/**
* Reusable method for calling a function pointer, with two optional arrays of parameters that can be automatically merged.
*	This is useful for various patterns of asynchronous-but-readable programming.
*
* @param func	 (Optional) The callback function that is being called. If none is provided, this function will do nothing.
* @param firstParams	(Optional) An array of parameters for the function call.
* @param secondParams (Optional) An additional array of parameters for the function call. Will be concatenated onto the end of firstParams to generate the array of parameters.
* @param thisObj	 (Optional) An Object to treat as the "this" object in the function call context.
*
*/
public static function doCallbackFunc(func:Function = null, firstParams:Array = null, secondParams:Array = null, thisObj:*=null)
{
	if ( func != null )
	{
		var params:Array = new Array();
		if ( firstParams != null )
		{
			params = params.concat( firstParams );
		}

		if ( secondParams != null )
		{
			params = params.concat( secondParams );
		}

		func.apply(thisObj, params);

	}
}

Here’s one more use case of the code

	Utility.gotoAndStopAndThen( myMC, "FINISHED_SCREEN", ["result_txt","icon_container_mc"],
			function(resultTextField:TextField,iconContainer:MovieClip,resultTextToDisplay:String,iconAlpha:Number)
			{
				myMC.result_txt.text = resultTextToDisplay;
				iconContainer.alpha = iconAlpha;
				// ...Any additional code that should run afterwards goes here.

			},
			["You won!!!", .5] );

The thing to notice in this example is that there are two names passed in for the third array parameter (“result_txt”,”icon_container_mc”), and that these align to the FIRST TWO parameters that the callback function accepts: the names specify a TextField and a MovieClip on the stage, and those objects are what the function will be passed, in that order.

But the callback function can also be passed additional “custom” parameters – in this case, a display string for the textfield, and an alpha value for the MovieClip. These are provided in the fourth parameter to the function, another array (“You won!!!”, .5).

In other words, the parameters to the function are first going to be a series of DisplayObjects from the stage corresponding to the elements named in the elementNames paramater; and THEN the contents of the callbackParams parameter.

And if you don’t want to worry about parameters at all, just do what I do in the first example and have the callback function accept (…params) for it parameters; you don’t need to worry about what params the function will be called with. The params functionality is only provided if you want to use it; if you don’t care about it or understand it, just follow the first example.

http://forum.developers.facebook.com/viewtopic.php?id=1799

There seem to be a lot of Facebook developers who don’t speak English well. Like, the majority of the posts on the FB developer forums. I’m not sure what this means.

Anyway this thread features my pet peeve, most-hated dysfunctional tech post answer: “Just use [something else]!” The person saying this always seems to believe that they are absolutely brilliant and clever. “Just use Firefox!” “Just use a Mac!” In this case the response is “Just don’t use PNG!”

Grrr.

I was happy to see someone come back right after that comment with:

OR

don’t use images at all…
use only black and white colors in your web page…
turn off your computer…

That made me smile.

Then the developers start lamenting that they couldn’t use animated GIFs on Facebook… and the same moron as before came back and asked “Why would you use PNG rather than GIF on the internet?”

And I decided maybe I should just turn off my computer. Forever. Ugh.

Here are the games that constitute my “personal gaming canon.” Perhaps the term I should use is “ludologic canon”? That makes me feel super pretentious though.

All right so here’s the games. First of all, a list of games that I think should be in anyone’s gaming canon. In other words, they are both very high-quality games, and very important games (at least for their time). And of course, I love them. In no particular order:

• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
• Silent Hill 2
• Myst
• Riven [Myst 2]
• Fallout 1
• Fallout 2
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
• Tetris
• The Sims 2
• Braid
• Super Mario Bros.
• Super Mario Bros. 3
• Super Mario World
• Half-Life
• Half-Life 2
• Portal
• Team Fortress 2
• Counter-Strike
• Goldeneye: 007
• Deus Ex
• Grand Theft Auto 4
• Starcraft
• Shadow of the Colossus
• Flight Control [iPhone]

And now here are some more which are solidly in my personal gaming canon… but which I’d understand not being on someone else’s list.

• TIE Fighter
• Dr. Mario
• Super Mario RPG
• Super Mario Kart
• The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
• Torchlight
• World of Warcraft
• Master of Orion
• Urban Dead [browser-based MMO]
• Mega Man 2

And that’s it. I’ve finished every game on this list (of the ones that are “finishable”) except for Deus Ex and Fallout 2 (I got to 90% on these and never finished them for some reason); GTA4 (which I’m still playing, albeit very slowly); Torchlight (also still playing, intermittently). Also, I never hit max level in WoW, though I did pass level 60.

Of course, this list probably says a lot about my own glaring blind spots in gaming. I’ve never played a Civilization, or a Metal Gear Solid… I never played a Diablo game (despite getting the Battlechest for free when I started at Blizzard) – I decided to play Torchlight instead to educate myself on the genre, and ended up loving it.

My award for “Most Perfect Game” goes to Zelda: Ocarina of Time; no game has ever achieved what it set out to do more completely or consistently (though Braid and GTA4 are close contenders on that one). My personal, subjective, biased favorite (i.e. I fell in love with it during my personal “golden age of gaming”, and may love it more than it deserves) is definitely TIE Fighter (with Goldeneye hot on its heels).

For those wondering why Fallout 3 isn’t on here, it’s because I haven’t played very much of it (and the fact that it hasn’t sucked me in the way the first ones did might be a sign that it doesn’t belong on here, or just a sign that I have very little time to actually play games anymore).

That is all. Maybe I’ll write posts in the future elaborating why I love some of these games so much…?

In this case I also get to prove what I’ve long complained about: I come up with every good idea about 5 days before someone else does.

It was around August of 2007 that I was walking my dogs and I said: to myself “Lego MMO.” Then, I burped. Then, the design below sprung into my head. It was kinda painful.

5 days later, NetDevil announced that they were making that game. When I heard about it, I fell to my knees and cursed the heavens – which got me some odd looks at work.

But of course I was frustrated – they weren’t doing the most interesting part of my design, which so far as I can tell is substantially different from theirs (and of course, infinitely more awesome)!

Here Is My Awesome Design

The elevator pitch: “Webkinz meets ‘Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts’ meets MMO meets Lego”. Here’s the design that makes that sound less like a train wreck of unrelated ideas:

1. Special (physical) Lego bricks would be manufactured. They would have tiny microchips inside them; these microchips would hold an identifier of what kind of brick it was, and could also be able to connect to other such microchips. The bricks would have tiny electric connections on all the places on the piece where that piece could connect with other pieces (e.g. on the pegs of a brick, and on the slots on the bottom of a brick where pegs fit in).
2. A special piece of equipment would be packaged with the game: a USB connector that had a standard Lego peg on it, and could thereby be connected onto any Lego piece.
3. So. Let’s say you buy these special Lego pieces, and you then build a spaceship out of them. Then you buy our game; you can simply set that spaceship next to your computer and plug the USB piece onto it, and the other end into your computer. Special software then sends a signal to the USB piece, which queries the microchip on the piece you plug it into, which then queries all of the pieces that it’s connected to, and so on, recursively building a data tree of every single piece type used in the spaceship and where they are connected to each other!
4. This information is sent to the computer, which recreates the spaceship on the screen with virtual bricks! Every piece is replicated, and in its proper place, in your software. You can view the spaceship in 3D, perhaps even modifying its color (charging for ‘paint buckets’ seems it might be good Microtransaction material).
5. And now, here’s the part that’s so awesome it will blow your eyeballs clean out of your face. Some of the pieces (say, a spaceship engine piece) are functional in the game world! If it has an engine piece on it, then the spaceship can actually fly around. If it has a laser piece on it, then you can actually fire lasers. And it’s all in a true physics engine – the weight of the pieces, the center-of-gravity, etc. will all have a huge impact on the movement and handling of your ship! All very similar to Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts – if that game was an MMO, and let you actually have a physical copy of your creations!

It looks like the actual Lego MMO might be doing some of #5, though I’m skeptical. As Jesse Schell pointed out in his Dice 2010 talk (which I finally watched yesterday, and found that it was very interesting up until the very end, which was oddly the part everyone talked about), people are currently extremely “into” virtual elements that have a solid real-world connection: WebKinz, the physical guitars in Guitar Hero, etc. This game has that in spades. I played with Legos a ton as a kid – and there’s nothing I would have enjoyed more than finishing my awesome little creation, walking over to my computer, plugging it in, and actually playing with it in a game world, where suddenly it could fly around, the lasers actually fired, etc.

And of course financially speaking, this design is incredible because there are about a billion ways to make money from it. Don’t have a piece in the real-world? Buy it in-game. Making people pay for individual virtual Lego bricks is like a corporate wet-dream, right?

Oh, of course I’m a little sketchy on what you can actually do with this stuff in-game. Actually upon reflection the game doesn’t even need to be an MMO, though I would say that making it multiplayer in some way that allows you to play with your friends is incredibly important. (That would also help with “time to cock” issue that would be so prevalent in a kids’ game with user-created content.) In fact, this could actually be a Wii game that used friend codes… can you imagine flying your self-created spaceship around by holding up your Wiimote like a paper airplane and tilting it this way and that? That’s even more of the kinetic, real-world element that kids would love.

As you can see this design is a bit “hazy at the edges” and starting to become a bit vague – because I’m not going to take the time to think it all out, because it will never be made. But though the edges are hazy, the core is solid – I’m sure a great game could be made around this core idea. It’s a game I would have killed to play as a kid, or even now for that matter. Too bad it will never be made!

Of course they tried getting into something very close to game – virtual worlds – with Google Lively. But it seems like they considered that a failed experiment. Perhaps the ultimate answer is simply, “What does this have to do with Google’s core business – organizing all of the world’s information and making it accessible?”

Perhaps there’s still some impulse for game development within Google, and it’s expressed in different ways. For instance, I just discovered “Google Reader Play.” It looks to be an interesting way of taking your Google Reader behavior and “game-ifying it”, i.e. using the reward structures and idioms of gaming to make an activity more fun and encourage certain types of behavior.

Of course this isn’t the first time that there have been efforts to do that. Apparently Target has created a “game” for their cashiers to play: the faster they check people out, the more points they get.

Also I think that Jesse Schell gave a speech at DICE 2010 that talked about talking everything in the world into achievements and game reward structures that manipulate your every motivation and action and turns the entire world into a Skinner Box, though I haven’t found the time to actually watch that speech (since frankly the entire idea/prediction sounds depressing if correct, and stupid whether or not it’s correct). Here’s a link to that video, for people who actually have time to watch things.

And of course then there’s Dan Cook of the wonderful Lost Garden game design blog, who was tapped by Microsoft’s Office Labs to help design Ribbon Hero, a way of game-ifying the experience of learning Office. I’ve recently read Raph Koster’s book “A Theory of Fun for Game Design” and find its core assertion – that the real core of the “fun” we experience from playing games is the experience of learning – to be irrefutable.

I would criticize the rest of that book as being more of a way for Koster to explore a bunch of other barely-related ideas that interest him and spew out lots of cool/nerdy tidbits of information. But that criticism is probably pretty hypocritical, since I just wrote a blog post that was me doing that kind of spewing. THE ONE YOU’RE READING RIGHT NOW. :O

Caveat: every thread will inevitably degenerate into ridiculous, shameless flirting attempts. Especially if you encourage it.