The Quixotic Engineer

Newer readers might not know that The Musical Box was once a proud monthly tradition on this blog. For better or for worse, I’ve been trying to move away from the general mishmash of subjects I used to cover and instead concentrate on exploring video games. However, rules are meant to be broken; here’s some recommended Summer listening.

When I first listened to Future Of The Left‘s “The Hope That House Built”, my first thought was: “that’s the filthiest guitar I’ve ever heard!” Their latest album Travels With Myself and Another is dirty, hungry and excellent throughout. With indie rock tending toward dreamy Pet Sounds pop these days, their heavier sound is both refreshing and distinctive.

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In light of all the indie goodness I’ve been enjoying lately, I decided to expand on my original post and make Indie Gaming Gallery a regular feature on this blog. Here are four independent titles that you should definitely be playing.

Little Wheel [Flash]

Many game bloggers have tackled the subject of adventure games and their unfortunate fall from grace in mainstream gaming. It’s quite possible that the golden age of Lucasarts was the artistic peak for traditional adventures. However, enterprising developers are breathing new life into the genre by switching to a shorter format. While some companies are exploring this new niche by releasing episodically, indie developers such as Vector Park, Amanita Design and OneClickDog are creating short self-contained adventure stories.

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Moving games into the third dimension introduced a new challenge for game designers: player-controlled perspective, and the host of problems associated with it. One of those problems is guiding the player’s eye. How can you direct them toward the next objective? How can you make them notice special events and clues? How can you ensure that they’re facing the right direction at the right time?

Michel McBride-Charpentier explored some of these methods in a post entitled How Designers Turn Heads. The most naive solution is to “simply temporarily remove camera control from the player and send it off somewhere with a script”, a blunt method which sacrifices player immersion and denies the interactive nature of games. A step above this is the Gears of War approach, where “the camera can be focused on a special event at the press of a button.” This offers the player a simple binary choice: look at the event or ignore it. This method is still artificial and inelegant, as it relies on a “giant blinking controller button prompt” to indicate that something is happening.

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Last month, head editor Ben Abraham and his crew of bloggers launched Critical Distance, a game criticism archive and compilation blog. They’ve been doing a terrific job, linking out to fascinating new sites and really expanding the conversation.

With exams over, I recently had a chance to contribute something: a post wherein I attempt to connect my love of indie games with my interest in music history. A quick note about the unusual format: it’s not intended to be an in-depth comparison, just a light exploration of the concept via various game bloggers.

Critical Distance – Punk & Indie Games

If you’re looking for fresh perspectives in video game criticism, then Critical Distance is definitely a website to watch.

Last month, Tom Armitage wrote an excellent post about consensual play. The term denotes a subset of emergent gameplay¹ which relies on both players agreeing to rules of conduct that are not enforced by the game itself.

Tom’s post was also my first exposure to Grifball, a sport-like player-created game mode in Halo 3. Robust mapmaking tools and heavy official support now make it a poor fit for the consensual model², but Grifball remains interesting both as a case study for emergent gameplay and as a unique well-balanced game mode.

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