A Mirrors Edge demo is available on PSN today and on XBLA tomorrow. Has anyone played it yet?

Mirrors Edge is interesting from many game mechanical aspects as well as the different playstyle of running away from firefights instead of engadging in them.

I’ll post my thoughts on this very different game tomorrow.

The Playstation 3 is far behind in this console generations sales figures. In the next two months we’ll see if the PS3 will start to catch up or if it’s doomed to end up third.

Why this year? Because if the release of games such as LBP and resistance 2, motorstorm 2 can’t shift the PS3 nothing ever will. It’s up against hard competition with the Xbox360′s new interface experience and video streaming functionality.

Personally I think this holiday season will see the climax of the playstation 3′s sales, I don’t think Sony will be able to beat Microsoft this generation but they might pull even.

How can I be so sure Little Big Planet will sell consoles? Well, besides analysts predictions and the millions of people who’ve still not upgraded from PS2 I just bought my own PS3, because no games until LBP were incentive enough for me to buy such an expensive machine.

How about you?

I’m a game designer and that means all other media are secondary interest at best. But music is ever present and a great help during the workday and daily commute. Now I’ve never been an iPod owner but I have owned a few mp3 players and a truck load of Sony Ericsson walkman phones, but none of them have ever been good enough to continue using.

So with my new paycheck in hand I thought I’d hit two birds with one stone and buy an iPod touch, hopefully it will solve my music issues and allow me to play iPhone games as well!

Of I went to the local store and purchased the 8GB version (I’m cheap, let’s say no more about it). Immediatly I was blown away by the packaging and ease of use. The interface is brilliant and the interaction with my PC at work was simples then most USB drives. Itunes is a terrible program to work with but the iTunes store worked well and I has my first music, video podcasts and games up and running in a few minutes.

The sound was excellent and the video fantastic, wifi surfing was awesome and applications were plentiful even though I find myself lacking offline support for things like rememberthemilk and google calendar… Why should I need to use apples software when there are better products available? From partners in other software genres nonetheless.

I was enjoying myself on the way home, interaction with my iPod was fun and simple and the video and music kept me going strong. The simple 3d racer I’d downloaded worked great and was actually kinda fun. Probably mostly from control novalty but hey, Wii right?

It’s when I got I was annoyed. I could sync with iTunes at home because I already had synced at work… That means all my music that I’ve collected over the past 10 years is forfeit… Or I could delete everything on my iPod and start again… Why apple, would you build such stupid limitation into your device? I’m using the same damn iTunes account on both machines so security or licensing issues don’t come into it at all. This is just plain dumb.

Well, I’ve no deleted my iPod and started over.

The experiment continues…

I’ve just played World of Goo, the indie title by developer 2D boy that does everything right!

The mechanics of World of Goo have more in common with building sand castles then any other computer game and as such is more of a toy then a game. But this is not a bad thing. To be accurate I have to say that I’ve only just finished the first chapter of the “story campaign” but so far this game does everything right as far as game design is concerned.

It’s accessible, simply and easy yet engaging and engrossing. You can jump in to play for a few minutes or play levels of increasing complexity for hours. It’s also a feast for the eyes and ears and has a lot of humor.

My only issue with the game is that it’s fullscreen, it wants to take up all of my attention while playing. And though this might be most effective and certainly the first choice of most players it’s quite odd to play such a light title without the ability to keep IMing on the side. I do that in WoW, why not in WoG?

Watch a video of the gameplay, if you find it even mildly interesting or seemingly fun you’ll really enjoy the title. And please, BUY this game. It’s cheap, it’s indie and it doesn’t use DRM. Support a just cause by getting your money’s worth.

In the particular case: my own.

I was on my way home Saturday night when I started chatting to a young lady next to me on the bus. it turned out she lived near me and was giving me her number when I stopped her and insisted on getting her address instead. 

I have absolutely no idea why I thought this was such a grand idea at the time, but somewhat reluctantly and surprised she gave me her address, we hugged and went our separate ways. Now of course, there is no way for me to find this girls number, I could simply spam her front door but that’s not really something you want to do in this age of communication.

Why did I think this was a good idea? I have no idea. It was certainly a strange thing to do judging from her confused expression when she gave me her address.

This leads me to believe that trying to find new ways to look at the world have somehow gone to my head and I am now to far gone to return to earth. Or even more probably: I’m just ranting and will post something serious later on.

A colleague of mine presented me with a philosophical question at lunch yesterday. She said that since humans can never experience each others emotions because our experiences are subjective, created by our brains, based on out previous experiences. But this is only partly true.

Her example has using as an example that we can never be sure that one persons red is the same as another persons perception of red. Your red might well be the color I perceive as blue, but I might still call it red.

Well here’s my take on the problem:

The question is a bit stupid from the start. Colors as we know them are constructed by our minds from the wavelengths of light that is bounced of different surfaces. This means that the same wavelengths hit all of us. This doesn’t prove that we experience the same thing though.

In certain fields colors are used to give people a certain emotion, in art, design, marketing, this is a very powerful tool. And it works for all people, with different values given to different colors depending on cultural status.

Now here’s the twist:

Color has an evolutionary function. We use color to distinguish what is good and what is bad (green is attractive to all people, as is red, while yellow and black stripes usually mean bad things). This means that our emotional response to color is not random and far from incidental. It is a part of the natural selection that created humankind.

So in my opinion color is really the judgement of our emotional response to a certain wavelength. We don’t need to perceive the same red, because we do perceive the same emotion. Color could therefore be added by the mind afterwords. Or in other words: After you see a color the mind gives you feeling to each color, that feeling is your perceived color, and that feeling is measurable to some extent, and known to be alike for most people.

Hard to follow? Am I wrong? Then shoot me down in the comments, I’ll respond to all serious comments.

The latest craze among developers is talking about accessibility. As a poor gamer I take great interest in this field as a developer and I’m getting a bit flustered about the complete lack of knowledge about this important paradigm shift in game development.

Most arguments against accessibly designed games are based on the assumption that the games will in some way have to be dumbed down. This is just not true. Anyone claiming this as an argument against accessibility or casual design simply has no clue what the hell accessibility is.

Let me illustrate what it is with a simple example: Paperboy.

The classic game paperboy is hard as hell and was a hardcore crowd pleaser on the original gameboy and earlier devices. Very few people would argue that paperboy is a dumbed down game. But Paperboy is accessible as hell.

The game starts quickly, has basically no learning curve, and is easily recognizable for anyone. The game is still hard as hell. But it is fast and simple to jump into and out of. It also takes no effort at all to start playing.

Compare this to Halo: is it quick to start? No, it takes about 10 to 15 minutes of badly made science fiction story, loading times and menus. This is discouraging to say the least.

Does the game have a required learning curve? Well lets see, after moving around corridors for about a minute, during which you learn to steer and look around, you are pitted against enemies. Easy enemies but they’ll still kill you if you don’t know what to do. Oh, and thematically the enemies, surroundings and weapons are weird as hell. A lot of people would never pick up the controller again after this short opening sequence.

Is the gameplay easily recognizable? Not even remotely. The controlling mechanism requires a high degree of spatial awareness only trained in 3D virtual spaces. So if your not a gamer you wont be able to walk around.
The basic gameplay mechanic is action packed and punishes players (kills them) for doing things wrong. Well if you don’t even know what to do this punishment probably wont be much fun will it?
Oh, and let’s remember that the graphics are stylized to be recognizable only for sci-fi freaks and gamers, so people without previous experience of these kind of worlds will probably not recognize anything.

See my point?

No, I’m not urging all developers to stop making hardcore games. But making games that are easier to recognize and to pick up wont require breaking most of them. On the contrary it will only make them easier and quicker to enjoy for us gamers.

The world foremost kind of entertainment, beyond any doubt. Can be enjoyed for a second or for hours.

For about two years now I’ve been sketching on a racing game that has no enemies, it has cooperation by other players but never competition. How would that work?

Actually, it’s quite easy, and also quite fun if the racing experience is done well enough. That probably why other developers have also thought about this.

Noby Noby Boy is a long way from release and unnecessarily ugly in my oppinion, but it’s interesting to see games that don’t follow the classic patterns. As I’ve ranted about before, copying patterns from other games causes diminishing return in the amount of fun they will be to play. That’s why innovation is so important.

I love to talk and I love games. So naturally I often talk about games with my friends. The debates often circle points about game design and one of the usual sticking points is my belief that habits, or possibly the security of the known, affect our play and our game design.

My idea is that the things we are used to always seem like good things, things to be fought for if challenged. We’re always slightly against doing something other then what we’re used to because it doesn’t feel right, mostly because of nostalgia. This is a slightly odd notion but I’ve just noticed the supreme example of this behavior in game developers:

Hello Kitty Online. HK online is the social MMO based on the famous character and world of Hello Kitty. It’s awesomely cute and looks fun and easy. When I was invited to the beta I was excited and happy, albeit a bit ashamed about my own reaction.

I downloaded the huge client, wondered a bit about why such a game needs GB’s of data and booted it up.

Hello Kitty online is a World of Warcraft clone. Seriously.  It even has kill-collect quest grinding. It handles the same way, has the same systems… Why?

Yes, WoW is the most successful MMO of all time and making your systems at least as good as WoWs should be every MMO developers intent. But nothing in the Hello Kitty universe lends itself to the fiction the game play systems of WoW builds up, surely there are some systems we can copy and others we can leave out. For instance, killing in HK online seems a bit awkward. When did Hello Kitty become Dexter Morgan, hiding a serial killer under the cute & fluffy shell of a small rabbit.

I have no idea why the developers chose to copy WoW to this extent but I think most of them didn’t even realize they were doing it. They thought this is what an MMO is. No, it isn’t. That’s what World of Warcraft is. We can make almost anything into an MMO.

That’s how powerful habit is, we tend to stop thinking why? and instead think this is how it works. Designers need to watch out for this behavior, because it’s an artificial boundary that impeded game development. What if we could make HK online with game play systems that give exact same results for the players as the game play systems of WoW but don’t seem even moderately alike. We can do that, if we don’t fall pray to the power of habit.