Hey everyone! As you all know we haven’t necessarily been able to shake the technical hurdles that the show faces on the current 4 year old MacBook Pro rig. We hear you loud and clear! Mid January, I’m upgrading to a new quad core iMac with 8GB of ram in hopes we’ll be able to drastically improve our current performance. This should also give us the necessary power boost to start live streaming again! In preparation of that event, I spiffed up our Livestream Page to accommodate the new video broadcast of the show! I was pretty happy with how it turned out, so I entered into Livestream’s “Custom Channel Page Design Contest”. Turns out we made the top 10 and voting is going on right now!

Please support the show and vote for us! The top 3 finalists of the contest get a free year of Premium streaming which runs 350 extra dollars a month that we don’t have. We would really appreciate your support!

A heads up to this week’s upcoming show, we’re running our first annual year end awards show special on Thursday. Have a happy holidays everyone, and we hope you enjoy whats coming next year!

Hey guys!  Big news! As I’m sure you’ve heard over the last 2 weeks, we’ve been unofficially promoting the MacHeist bundle, leading up to the unlock of some very special software.  Earlier today the $400k for charity threshold was passed, unlocking the tool we’re going to use to put out a new video podcast edition of Crunch Time, Boinx TV!

It didn’t take much customization to come up with something that looked good enough for us to put up on the web.  You can see an artist’s rendition of the scene below.  Who is imitating who?

Our goal is to share visually, through pretty pictures and video, what you often hear about in the audio version (which we will still offer).  This new format will also allow us to share video of our guests if they have a camera connected.   As you can see, a nifty scrolling ticker of news as it comes in is displayed above our heads, so if we ever get boring, feel free to read the latest in the gaming world.

So you may be asking yourself, “Hey Jeremy, how will we get this news fresh if we’re downloading a recording?”.  Good question reader/listener/soon-to-be-watcher!  WE’LL DO IT LIVE! That’s right!  We’ll be live streaming all our episodes on UStream.tv at the following page: Crunch Time Live , so follow us there and stay tuned to our Twitter pages (Brendan & I) as we do dry runs of this thing before a full fledged launch.  With us being live, we’ll be able to take your feedback and questions live during the show, which I’m really excited about!

All of this is going to be uncharted territory for us, so bear with us as we work out the kinks!  Trust me, having to work through 6 applications is going to be tricky.

We’re looking to do the first full video show in 2 weeks.

As the superintendant might say, pardon my dust! It has been too long since my last Crunch Time post, but with the relaunch of the blog onto WordPress 2.7 with the help of Caleb White, I can finally post without the boundaries that RapidWeaver had imposed. This week I plan to deconstruct reinforcement in games.

The Carrot

By definition, positive reinforcement is an increase in a behavior’s frequency due to the addition of a stimulus.  While many games feature portions of positive reinforcement, most are lacking when in comparison to their negative counterparts, and very few choose to equally balance the two.  The casual games market excels in this balance.  ThatGameCompany’s Fl0w was centered around the concept of progression.  As a 2D creature you eat to grow, and the bigger you get and the deeper you go the closer you are to evolution.  The carrot in this case is continued growth.  When an enemy creature stops your growth by removing your energy, the cycle is broken.  The key to the end of this cycle is that not only is your progression saved in a state where you can recollect your past levels of growth, but the fact that death in the video game sense does not occur.  The player’s deterrent is merely the stop of flow, rather than an action which forces a restart. 

“Gamer Masochism”

There is no other explanation for the amount of negative reinforcement found in games up to now than the perceived notion of “gamer masochism.”  The concept that the only thing that will keep gamers playing is the threat of failure isn’t a new one.  Since the days of the arcade, players have been conditioned to end gameplay with failure.  Before the advent of coherent story in games, mastery of an arcade game’s mechanics were all players had as a reward for their progress.  Players would advance to their level of play, and fail, having to restart and attempt to go farther.  Even in what became known as the kill screen, players met an inevitable death at the conclusion of an arcade classic.  As the years went on and the concept of a campaign was introduced, player death and the end of progression was carried over from generations past.  Whether it be a first person shooter or a real time strategy game, players have consistently faced the threat of failure.

External Reinforcement

Microsoft’s Achievements and Sony’s Trophies provide a new layer of reinforcement to games on their respective platforms.  They add a new meta level of interaction with a game by applying task completion and score as an overlay to existing titles.  From here you can branch off to how you view these “achievements” should reward players; should they be for completing the main quest, or to encourage action which may not otherwise have been attempted?  A balance is required to both insert additional positive reinforcement to existing game set pieces, while encouraging new exploration and game longevity.  Achievements and Trophies should never replace in game reinforcement, but rather supplement it, or we will find ourselves in a time where most games are not merely played on their own merits, but on the merits of a 3rd party add on.  

Adapting Negative Reinforcement and a Study of Prince of Persia

The adaptation of negative reinforcement can occur when a game attempts to forego a consistent gameplay frustration of its genre/series and inevitably lacks consequence, becoming easy.  There is no better recent example than the new re-imagined Prince of Persia from UbiSoft Montreal.  The gameplay mechanic of Elika and the removal of death made the game a straight shot.  Frustration really could only arise after abrupt placement on solid ground after making a misstep during a prolonged free running sequence, or in the ill conceived combat system.  No checkpoints were required, no extra lives, just patience.  

This mammoth shift in the idea of how action games or platformers could be made will be felt for years to come and have proponents on both sides of the fence.  On the one hand, the game became significantly less difficult than it could have been, removing a layer of negative reinforcement and opening it up to a larger audience.  On the other hand, the lower difficulty level, paired with design choices for combat, made for a very strange game experience that was not only easy, but shared the frustration that the game would have had without the use of Elika’s persistent saving throw, even if to a lesser extent.  What the team at UbiSoft had achieved was a casual game design ideology applied to an action platformer.  You can take direct examples from Fl0w and apply them to PoP.  Continuous movement rather than growth is your carrot.  When a misstep occurs, you don’t restart the entire level, you merely teleport back to your last time on solid ground to recover your progress.  Again, the player’s deterrent is merely the stop of flow, rather than an action which forces a restart.  

When it all boils down to brass tax, reinforcement dictates a game’s flow.  So…what is flow?  Flow is the pattern of give and take a game uses to keep you hooked.  Without consistent player reinforcement of both types, a game could suffer from periods of intense engagement, followed by boredom.  It’s this balance of give and take that game developers strive to perfect and apply to their concepts.  

Crunch Time: Reinforcement is in the can! Hope you liked it! There is so much more to elaborate on, so feel free to leave a comment by clicking on the article title to get to the permalink page, or follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/jeremybogdan and send me a message starting with @jeremybogdan and I’ll be sure to write back!  

Hello folks, and welcome to this inaugural post of Crunch Time, the in’s and outs of gaming news, reviews and analysis. This time I’ll be taking a look at control schemes in games, and how crucial good controls can be to a game concept. Lets dive right in!

I got the inspiration for this post after a chat with Dylan Cuthbert of Q Games fame, the folks behind the stellar Pixel Junk series. As someone who likes the spirit of invention and tinkering with game concepts, I thought who better to ask for thoughts on game controls than the man behind Pixel Junk Eden? I’ve got a few main points to cover here and I’ll go into depth about how each is crucial to a game’s underlying presence.

Context
Good controls breathe life into games, and their players, on every platform available. However, it is the concept of context which is now more than ever, lost in translation. Large developers, more times than not, have aired on the side of ports to maximize profits, attempting to morph what might have worked with the PSP nub, to the Wii-mote’s motion sensing capabilities. In Dylan’s words: “a lot of games these days don’t implement anything interesting…they just shove some simple acceleration here and there, with some trigger buttons, and that’s it.” It would appear that everyone seems to be out there looking for a gimmick, rather than studying the basic motions available to them on these controllers.

Now, context doesn’t only apply to what platform you’re on, but also what game you’re trying to make. “Action games need control schemes which have layers of depth”, said Dylan. In the case of the action genre, depth and scaling in control is key when conveying actions on screen as the player progresses. With most games, the player needs to feel that what you’re doing on screen will easily adapt previously learned control mechanisms to new gameplay, rather than pairing a new game mechanic with new controls at every defining instance. A very good (or damn near perfect) example of this in my eyes is Braid by Jonathan Blow & David Hellman. For the uninitiated, Braid is a game in which the protagonist traverses his dreams, utilizing time mechanics and old school platforming, in an attempt to rescue his princess. Rather than factoring in a new button or button combination into the equation at every change in the time mechanic, the game kept the same controls throughout, and lets the player gauge how the world had changed, and what new abilities were available.

Collision Detection and Physics
Credit on this one goes to Dylan, who pushed this point home. Controls without the visual response fail. You could have the greatest game concept in the world involving water manipulation (totally hypothetical), in which a player generates waves to counter natural waves which are crashing into a rocky cove, and it could fail miserably without a direct correlation of action to visuals. Lets say it’s control scheme was the following on the 360/PS3:

• The left stick’s rotation (clockwise/counter clockwise) would control the wave’s undercurrent direction
• The speed at which it was rotated, would alter how much force the wave would have behind it prior to release

• The more time the player held the wave, the more momentum and power they would build

• To release the wave, the player would hit the A or X button on the controller

If at the end of all that player motion and involvement, the player nailed the biggest wave on record (as is indicated by the game’s UI), and the response on screen was the equivalent to that of an impeccably rendered 1ft wave hitting another impeccably rendered 1ft wave and fizzling out quickly (and accurately), the player would feel disengaged from the experience.

Now, lets replay this scenario, but add a visual buildup of dust and debris on the sea floor where the player is fueling his wave, with visual abnormalities in surface tension as the intensity increases, finally climaxing to a release of a wave, with momentum that feels approximate to the effort put into the controller by the player, crashing into another wave, with the white cap of the user generated wave barreling over the oncoming wave. What has the potential to be a great and engaging control mechanism can amount to nothing if the visuals don’t back up the intended emulated sensations.

Destroying the Archetype
If the line between gaming genre archetypes (and their obvious and rehashed control schemes) isn’t somewhat dissolved within a few years, we may be left with a system permanently stuck in the rut of today’s industry; an industry with some who look at the few games doing something totally new, but with the vast majority looking back at something to shine up with a design gimmick. Now I will be the first to admit that many concepts waver on the fine boundary that separates a gimmick and a completely new gameplay style, however it is an arbitrary boundary, dependent on your concept, style and timing. A game which sticks to a genre but redefines the bar of quality, with a concept that is top notch, will neither find itself in the category of totally new or tacked on design gimmick. It will join a median group that many developers should strive for until that next groundbreaking idea; the group of solid concepts with excellent executions, a group that’s at the top of their game in their respective classes.

It’s easy to want to wish away all the underdeveloped and archaic concepts, but common sense knows that they will continue on. At this point we can only strive to be less like everyone else, and come up with original ideas rather than turning into an industry built on key franchises with set ideologies. It might take new hardware to get folks to think out of the box with regards to control scheme, but with so many tools already prevalent, it really shouldn’t.

So….thats a wrap on Crunch Time: Control Schemes! My brain is telling me that there is more that I can add to this article, and I will be doing so when/if I get the chance over the next few days. Hope you liked it! Feel free to leave a comment by clicking on the article title to get to the permalink page, or follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/jeremybogdan

This week I wanted to dissect fanboyism at its core. I’ll be taking a look at a few aspects that I’ve seen directly produce or fuel fanboys.

Roots

Entrenchment

Early adopters succumb to fanboyism in the gaming world due to a misappropriation of funds in
correlation to actual thought process. With Microsoft having something to prove after going into the red on the Xbox, they made the brilliantly flawed decision to get the 360 on store shelves as fast as possible. Being a year ahead of any competition wrought both the birth of a substantial base of
diehard Xbox fanboys and the test which would strain their loyalty. Such a large period prior to
competition getting product to market left plenty of time for early adopters to invest a good deal of funds into games and accessories on the system. It is the amount of commitment at this stage which would come to dictate the level of fandom during the impending Wii & PlayStation 3 launches.

For those not born into this console wave, the process of brand entrenchment often occurs over many hardware generations and is routinely transferred to subsequent launches. The early adopter has a level of tolerance at this stage, in that there will always be an urge to own something first which will overpower past positions. However, for those already loyal to a specific brand, their level of
commitment is often unmatched, in that it gaps multiple hardware launches and company shifts.

Personal Justification

Consumers interested in a console inevitably have to decide on which horse to pick. It’s a gamble with many variables in play, and sometimes you bet on the wrong horse. Those who choose to accept their fault are rationalists. They have the capacity to understand that the lack of software coupled with an exorbitant price sparked a decision that was made in poor judgement. The rest who choose to apologize for the system’s shortcomings and build a mental stigma against the comparable competition are fanboys. Unfortunately for human kind, the majority of us will find denial much easier to cope with than rational thought. It is this underlying need to appear in the right that fuels many fanboys on a path to brand entrenchment.

Causations

Stubbornness

It’s funny how much strife is caused just by mere stubbornness alone. Fanboys will willingly venture into enemy territory with blinders on, to gather just enough intel to launch a scrutiny laden response. Once they find themselves stuck in a mindset where their one fixation shall go unchallenged, it’s hard to get that person to accept any competition as legitimate. While it doesn’t seem like a hard thing to ask, having a fanboy budge to try something new with an open mind can prove to be near impossible.

Rivalries

When competitors launch titles within the same genre, things can get ugly. So ugly in fact, that long standing rivalries can emerge that span many years of long fought forum diatribe. This is what often motivates the friendly neighborhood troll to rear its head to instigate argument, so that it may protect what it holds dear. When fanboys become too attached to any specific brand or series, this is when the false sense of company attachment takes hold. The thought that they somehow represent the hardware manufacturer or developer through their fandom is what often gets them in trouble, and makes for some extremely ironic conversation.

Middle Ground

Having your Cake & Eating it Too

The inner fan in us all knows that it’s fun to be a fanboy. To be so enthralled with a series or product that you want to educate yourself on the latest in that front is a fantastic urge to have. However, if I may quote Spiderman’s Ben Parker, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Unfortunately the power we bear can drive us down the abusive and discourteous path that has come to define behavior on the net. The lesson to be learned is to always have an open mind, so that you may benefit from something that may otherwise go unnoticed merely due to petty attachments.

That’s it on Crunch Time: Fanboyism! Again, my brain is telling me that there is more that I can add to this article, and I will be doing so when/if I get the chance over the next few days. Hope you liked it! Feel free to leave a comment by clicking on the article title to get to the permalink page, or follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/jeremybogdan