Social Gaming for the Antisocial gamer

Welcome to SuperMonkeyCube's magical circus of broad generalizations.

"FarmVille is a giant waste of time and seems like work. "

See how easy that was? I will admit that that generalization is only true for some groups of people.

For my next trick, I will now lump everyone that reads these words into three categories. Watch carefully, as my fingers do not leave my hands. The first category is people who are reading this on my blog page, and with whom I do not interact with on Facebook. These people probably don't play FarmVille. They may not even know about it, or have only gotten sketchy information. The second category is people who are reading this on Facebook and may or may not know that they could read this somewhere else, but they are very aware of FarmVille because every third update on their Facebook home page is "'#FriendName' has just '#event' in FarmVille!". The third category are the people who are generating all those FarmVille updates on everyone else's pages and only stopped to read this because I put 'FarmVille' in the title.

At the Game Developer's Conference this past weekend in San Francisco, the two Facebook games that were mentioned the most were FarmVille and Bejeweled Blitz. Both games are doing something similar to a game model that is practically the standard in South Korea. The game is free to play. If you want cooler stuff for the game, you can either play the game a lot and get in-game rewards, or you can spend real money to reap the benefits right away. Typically, the numbers quoted for this sort of game is that 10 percent of the players actually fund the game for the other 90 percent that just play for free. (I'm sure it's another broad generalization.) Most of the reason that they were mentioned is that they are standout success stories, especially in light of the fact that they're free to play, and developers are talking about what it takes to make games in this space that are successful.

Bejeweled Blitz is a one-minute version of Popcap's game Bejeweled, a puzzle game where you swap two adjacent pieces in a large grid to get 3, 4, or 5 or the same kind of piece in a row. Unlike the regular Bejeweled, there is no fear of not having an available move. One is always available, so the trick is just to rack up score as fast as possible in the allotted time. In addition to your score, some pieces when cleared off the board yield coins that can then be used for power-ups in subsequent games. It is also possible to purchase coins with real money to get the same power-ups. This game, I like. Each game is self-contained. If I don't play it for a week, nothing bad happens in-game. I have noticed that among my friends, a surprising number of women are playing it, and they tend to be better than the men. I'm sure that has a lot to do with a self-selecting population - women who might only be mediocre at it may not tend to play as much or at all and would rather play something like Farmville where there isn't a score or a ranking ladder. Alternately, it might have something to do with the part of the brain that does pattern recognition being different in women, but I'm in no position to start funding a clinical trial.

FarmVille, on the other hand is structured around planting, raising, and harvesting crops, animal husbandry, and real estate improvement. If you neglect crops, they go bad. If you don't work on your field, it doesn't do anything for you. It does have the advantage of letting your virtual neighbors help you out, and a great deal of bartering and cooperation happens between people. The only console video games that this reminds me of are the Harvest Moon games, with a touch of Animal Crossing thrown in. After seeing what this was about, I opted not to play it. I didn't play it long enough to find out what you can do with real money. I can attest to the fact that easily 10 percent of my Facebook friends have played it at some point, and most of those people are not people that I would consider traditional gamers. Clearly it's more popular than something like Street Fighter - even though it's a flagship Capcom fighting game that just released a new version, I think I have a better chance at walking up to a random person under 40 that has played FarmVille than I do finding a person that's played Street Fighter IV.

This is not to say that people really want farming games. I don't think that's the driving force here. FarmVille is simple to operate, inherently networked, and easy to understand the concepts of. The last thing I want to see is the XBox and Playstation teams feeling like they need to get a farming simulator by fourth quarter this year, because that's wrong on so many levels. Nintendo has tried to make this work, since they have a fairly recent release of Animal Crossing for the Wii which includes a "Wii Speak" accessory - but Nintendo's online system is cumbersome for most. Connecting on most Nintendo games online involves having to obtain a "Friend Code" from your friends so you can connect to them, except that this code is different for every single game. Only the most dedicated Animal Crossing players will involve themselves. The "Wii Speak" allows people playing Animal Crossing online together to talk to each other over the Nintendo WFC connection. I don't think that this will help foster the same sense of cooperation that Facebook lends itself so easily to.

As usual, what I think that people that don't normally play games look for in games is a new experience. People that involve themselves in 'gaming culture' already have their preferences, and gravitate towards genres that they're already familiar with. Amongst those people, it takes a really standout game to get them out of their comfort zone. On the other hand, the novice gamer has fewer expectations, and has less reservation about throwing themselves in a new experience. Framed that way, it makes perfect sense that I would play Bejeweled Blitz over FarmVille - if I had wanted a farming game, I would have already played Harvest Moon and might even have thought FarmVille was inferior and not bothered with it. On the other hand, having played Tetris, Bust-A-Move, Chainz, and Collapse!, Bejeweled Blitz makes perfect sense and meshes well with my existing genre preferences.

So after writing this, I've decided to go easy on my Facebook friends that are playing FarmVille. While I've seen a bunch of people joining groups that sound like "I don't care about your farm, your mafia, or your cafe", I'm going to give that a pass. Besides, what's happening is that they're becoming social gamers.

(Is that like social consumption of adult beverages?)

Motion Sickness, or, Controlling Interest

I had the most horrible dream Saturday night.

It is years in the future. I am in the upstairs press room in an old movie theater, typing up a movie review on a thin black laptop. It used to be the projection booth, but digital movie projection has gotten so small that the new projection booth is a closet in the press room with a rack full of servers . There are a few folding chairs and tables, a low ceiling, a great wireless internet connection, and a projectionist who is babysitting the press, the data rack, and a couple of security monitors. The projectionist answers a knock on the door, and greets someone presumably familiar to him and tells him to go to theater seven. After he shuts the door again, he tells me that it was the EA sales rep and the newest Madden football game has been released for press events. I'm supposed to go down to theater seven and play against one of the sports writers from my media group's website. Not only are we going to have the game projected onto the screen, but the new game comes with a new controller. When I get down to theater seven, I am relieved that no one is wearing 3-D glasses. The EA rep greets me and hands me a pair of clear polycarbonate glasses, and I get worried again.

"Don't worry. They're just safety glasses."

Why the crap do I need safety glasses to get my butt handed to me on a football video game?

"In case you're wondering, here's why you need safety glasses. Legal said if there are flying objects, you gotta wear 'em." He tosses me a foam football, which feels like it's got a controller embedded inside the foam.

The game isn't too bad, but I end up sticking to a running game after a few plays because pass plays require me to be able to throw the controller at the correct speed and direction. If I don't throw a perfect spiral, I get a wobbly football on the screen. Lucky for me, the sportswriter is having just as hard a time.

This is not the part where I tell you that the future is now, although most of the things in my dream were possible technologically. This is only a possible outcome in a world where game design sometimes gets driven by the marketing department.

This is what I fear - when virtual reality is embedded into video games so far that they become too much actual work. Don't get me wrong - the right kind of feedback is helpful. A force feedback steering wheel is a lot more helpful to drive with than the plastic Wii wheel, where you're just driving with the tilt sensor. I just don't want to get knocked out of my chair if I have to nudge the car next to me. I don't want my ability to make free throws in real life to impair my ability to make free throws in the next NBA Jam, NBA Street, or whatever it is that they might call it in the future.

I guess the thing that set me off on this rant is that there is a new Sony motion controller available for the PS3 called the Move. Since it uses the PlayStation Eye camera, it does a better job of locating the controller in space than the Wii does. It has a big lighted sphere on the end of the controller that alters its color to maintain contrast from its surroundings. It also has the advantage of recharging the same way that the PS3 controllers do, via a USB cable. But, I don't know if this was something that Sony needed to do, and it's not like that this has replaced the standard controller in any way. I fear that the Move has a real risk of becoming another marginalized product along with the DJ Hero turntable controller and the Tony Hawk Ride virtual skateboard. Not only is it an optional accessory, but it itself has its own optional accessory called the sub-controller that looks surprisingly like the Nunchuck for the Wiimote and serves a similar, if not identical, purpose. And, unlike the DJ Hero controller or the Ride skateboard, $100 bucks only gets you an Eye, a controller and a demo disk. (Sub-controller is extra.) At least DJ Hero and Ride are supposed to be full-game experiences at that price point.

Microsoft has gone one more step past Sony - with their Natal system, they're allowing an infrared camera to watch the player's movements and forgo a traditional controller entirely. If you are at the correct distance from the camera, it is able to determine independent position of each of your fingers. You could be typing in the air like Officer John Anderton of the Precrime division before you know it. (Philip K. Dick? "Minority Report"? Some crazy-pants couch-jumper played him in the movie version?)

I appreciate that Sony and Microsoft are trying to capture some of what has made the Wii a big success, but this will be an uphill battle for them. Right now, they are both presumably getting software lined up that will take advantage of the new controllers. Neither of them has been able to make much of a dent in the casual gaming demographic so far, even with the XBox 360 being as cheap as the Wii. Even if one of their software titles turns out to be better than sliced bread or hotcakes or whatever it is that will announce the second wave of new casual gaming that's not on Facebook, it still isn't going to gain ground against the Wii this generation. Once you add all the costs of the new motion controllers to a console bundle, it's not at the Wii's price point any more. I also don't think that too many families that have a XBox360 or a PS3 already are using it as their main, family friendly, game night console. I'd hazard a guess that the Wii leads in that regard, followed with the PS2!

So, in case I haven't said it enough - Move and Natal are capable tech, but run a very real risk of being another overpriced peripheral with little software to take advantage of it. If you want waggle, that's what your Wii is for.

Tatsunoko vs Capcom review (Wii, US version)

While other people may have reviewed Capcom's Wii fighting game "Tatsunoko vs Capcom:Ultimate All-Stars", I feel like they glossed over some things. So, you may see me nitpick about the controls a little. I may gloss over other things, though. I am not going to explain the Capcom or Tatsunoko characters very much since the characters and their respective movesets could take up tons of space on their own but I might mention a few notable ones. If you are not a Wii owner, you may be lost by some of the minute details that I pick over but I will try my best to make it understandable. I may abbreviate the game's giant title as TvC, also.

PRECONCEPTIONS

The things that I knew about coming into the game was that it was a fighting game using a 2 vs 2 system, where each person picks two characters to use, the characters can be switched at anytime, and the match is lost when both characters are defeated. The health gauge of the character off screen refills slightly, similar to the previous "vs" game, "Marvel vs Capcom 2".

In an effort to accommodate the Wii, the buttons have been reduced to 4. The four buttons are Light, Medium, Heavy, and Partner. Since I recently had been playing "Samurai Shodown Collection" on the Wii, I was OK with the idea that there would be four buttons to manage, since most of the SNK games are 4-button, and "Samurai Shodown" did not seem tough to control. They have you attach the Nunchuck peripheral, and the four attack buttons are mapped by default to A (on the face of the Wiimote), B (on the back of the Wiimote), C, and Z (both on the Nunchuck), and the character movement is controlled by the Nunchuck's analog stick. It was my assumption that Capcom would do something similar.

DAY ONE (Friday)

It is my intent to see if I can make this game go without reading the manual. I toss the game into the Wii, pick the giant robot PTX-40A from "Lost Planet" who's too big for a partner and has to play by himself, and I am mystified by the fact that only A and B seem to do anything attack-wise. The analog stick on the Nunchuck does move the character, though. I also figured out that the minus button taunts. That was what I expected, at least. I got as far as the second stage of some giant spherical boss-like character without continuing. I opt not to continue further, and go get the manual to figure out where the attack buttons are mapped. I read the manual and lose my mind a little. After months of defending Capcom's decision to make a different game for the Wii instead of porting Street Fighter 4 with simplified controls, it turns out that if you play the game with the Wiimote or the Wiimote+Nunchuck combinations, you get simplified controls, and whether you want them or not. I look at the next two pages of the manual, where they show the layouts for the Classic Controller and the Gamecube controller. This is what I expected here. There are more than enough buttons, and the default option is logically laid out.

For those of you new to Nintendo, the Gamecube was Nintendo's previous game machine. Despite its small size and awesomeness, it never sold as many units as the Playstation 2. The
controller, while quite responsive and well made, has an odball layout and is not cordless.

Nintendo designed the Wii so that Gamecube controllers are directly supported - there are four controller ports under the side panel on the Wii. I go to bed feeling a little annoyed, and drop the manual between my side of the bed and the dresser partly by accident and partly because I'm too sleepy to care.

DAY TWO (Saturday)

After getting some of the house cleaned and some laundry folded in the morning, I tell my older son that we're going to play in 'Versus' mode on TvC. I have grabbed a Gamecube controller for myself, and I let him play with the Wiimote/Nunchuck combination. The only thing I tell him about the controls are that A attacks, B is for special moves, and to change players you hold away on the analog stick and shake the Nunchuck. Even with me picking Ryu on my team every time (or maybe because of it) we are pretty evenly matched. It's very easy to dish out the super moves in the simplified control scheme. Once #1 son had a team that he feels OK with (Tekkaman and Karas), I set him loose on single player. He had to continue a couple of times, but he was able to get to the end.

DAY THREE (Sunday)

I am busy doing chores and herding #2 son - I suggest that #1 son finish TvC with a Capcom character so we can unlock Frank West. He manages to finish with PTX-40A. Frank West seems fun, but he seems like he'd be more fun with the real controls. He manages to finish with Frank by himself using the simplified controls.

We managed to play sporadically after that, and the game doesn't seem broken. The special moves, while different for each character if you're not using the simple controls, aren't too hard to pull off. It's still simpler than a regular Street Fighter game. So let's go back and talk about the game overall.

Visuals

The characters and backgrounds are all 3D models, like the current Street Fighter 4. All of the previous Street Fighter and VS games were all 2D characters with either parallax scrolling multi-layer 2D backgrounds (SFA, SF2, SF3) or 2D characters against 3D backgrounds (CvS2, MvC2). The 3D character models aren't quite as detailed as their SF4 counterparts, but they still do a good job of looking enough like the 2D characters that they came from to know which previous game a particular character was taken from. The visual effects are done quite well
and don't seem to cause much slowdown except possibly during a couple of the super moves, but at the point that the slowdown might occur it doesn't affect gameplay. The character icon art(the 2D graphic art that displays the characters while the match loads) seems very similar in style to Capcom Fighting Evolution, and looks very sharp and clean on the TV.

Sound

I hate to say this, but other than breifly noticing that some of the background music seemed to be remixed versions of existing Street Fighter stage music, I didn't notice the music much. I don't think that it was because it was bad, I suspect that it was because we were too busy trying to play the game. The announcer voice over is better enunciated and a little more Western-sounding than the Capcom Fighting Evolution. The character voices seemed like a lot of them were different actors than usual, but everything was a lot more cleanly enunciated here as well. Even the Japanese dialogue was easier to understand, even though that's not much of a priority for a Western audience.

Gameplay

Despite my initial negative reaction to how the controls were done, the simple controls were easy enough for someone familiar with the simple controls of Super Smash Bros., and the more precise control scheme with the Gamecube controller was well implemented for seasoned "Vs" players. Even the wacky Tatsunoko characters were fun to play with. The boss is beatable, but not a pushover on regular difficulty.

In closing, I felt that this game did a great job of representing Capcom fighing games. If you are new to fighting games and are looking for somewhere to start, this is a great place to do it.

Two Quick things...

I am working on a review of Capcom and Eighting's "Tatsunoko vs CAPCOM" fighting game for Wii, expect to see that posted sometime over the weekend. The short version - game is good, get your Gamecube controller out of storage to play it.

The other thing that I need to mention now is that all users of the Open Office productivity suite should update to version 3.2 at their earliest convenience, and if you haven't tried Open Office yet, it's a good time to do it.

People just don't understand English.

...And I don't mean American English, in this case - I mean that American English speakers don't understand other-side-of-the-Atlantic English as spoken by regular people.

In support of my position, I give as examples:

1) The 1968 movie "Yellow Submarine" had non-Beatles playing the Beatles so their spoken dialogue would be understood by the audience.

2) Guy Ritchie's 1998 film "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" needs subtitles in at least one scene when shown to an American audience.

3) In the Dreamworks animated feature Monsters vs Aliens, dozens of people on the internet have to misquote Gallaxhar's best fake swear word as "Flagnog" or "Flagnnon" because they don't correct for the slightly upper-class fake English accent and spell it "Flagnard" like they should.

OK, so I checked the subtitles. I'm like that.

Now that I think of it, maybe Americans don't even understand regular American English. On the DVD of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, after you hit "play" but before the feature starts, there is a screen where they have two different stills of the movie that you pick one of. There's no explanation, just the two pictures that you choose one of. If you're watching the DVD on an old standard TV, you will probably think that you're choosing between full frame and widescreen. If you're watching the DVD on a widescreen TV, it looks like you're choosing between 1.78:1 and 2.35:1. As it turns out, it's the second one. Are we really there yet? Is everybody watching movies on widescreen TV's now? Are movie watchers afraid of math? Would have killed them to put a little bit of explanatory text on the screen, or does every interface have to be only pictures now? Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?

Am I Trying to Ruin Christmas?

I overheard a presumably uninvolved mom in the video game aisle at Walmart this morning, asking one of the older, more seasoned employees about the various video game systems. I heard the employee giving vague, noncommittal answers - but really what he should be trying to do (in my opinion) is to ask some questions that will allow her to make a clear choice so she can get what she wants and be on her way.

For a moment, let's forget the fact that Mom should have done her homework before she ever set foot in Walmart. Wait! The peanut gallery argues. Mom can't know what to get their kids, that's why they're asking the Walmart employee! That Walmart employee isn't any more of a gamer than that Mom is, even if he does work in the electronics section. He knows what he's been told, but he doesn't know much firsthand - or he'd been able to give more compelling, specific answers and guide her to a solution.

After I got involved, and came over to explain about friend codes for Nintendo multiplayer games, and how she shouldn't worry about her kid(s?) playing against random people on the internet, she expressed her concern about "Is it going to be fast enough? My son is always complaining about that on the computer."

After asking if they had other console gaming systems at home, I tried to reassure her that there was less of that to worry about on a console because he couldn't fill up a Nintendo DS with random programs like he had presumably done to the computer at home. After Mom explains that no, his computer is clean, but he screwed up our computer once, et cetera, then she mentions the other thing that she wants to get him. Xbox. (Which, at this point, is the XBox 360 - the second iteration of Microsoft's console.)

I almost never go much farther with anybody in this conversation without the following:

1) How old is the child in question?
2) What games do they want to play?

and sometimes a third followup question that's based around the answers to the first two. In this case, the answers were "twelve" and "Modern Warfare 2 and Halo". So, based on that, I asked

3) Would you let your kid watch "Saving Private Ryan"?

but not before I had said "Grossly Inappropriate" at least once. If the answers had been "twelve" and "Forza and Burnout", I might have been more encouraging. Perhaps if her child was older, or she said something about he did a big report on WWII for school and was really into the tactics of the eastern theater, I might have been more encouraging.

So, I discouraged her from Xbox360 , touted Nintendo's kid-friendly lineup, and ran away knowing that I was just going to keep saying "Grossly Inappropriate".

Don't get me wrong - the Xbox360 is a very capable piece of hardware, and there are a lot of family friendly titles for it - but if "Modern Warfare 2" is where you're headed, "Lego Indiana Jones" and "Rock Band 2" are just going to be little bumps on the road on the way to the M-Rated titles.

Don't you play a lot of M-Rated games? Aren't you afraid that your kids will be desensitized to violence?

Yes, I play a lot of M-Rated games. I also play a lot of other games, too. What does #2 son want to watch the most? "Pikmin". #2 son can say "zombies", and he is scared of scary music. When he wants to watch me play something, it's pretty pastoral by comparison to what he's aware of. On top of that - Pikmin is a really great game with lots of depth.

#1 son has been playing "Lego Batman", "Wii Play", and "Billy Hatcher". Sure, sometimes #1 son watches me play violent games, but not for very long. If he thinks that he is scared, he doesn't watch anymore and goes to do something else. We also talk about the scary stuff, and I feel that he has a good handle on what is real and what isn't - especially when we've talked about it. Inexplicably, he takes great delight in watching me play Wii Fit - maybe it's fun to watch someone else struggle foolishly with the pushup/side plank exercise.

So, now that I'm done rambling, and ranting, I can't help thinking that I might have ruined Christmas for some kid even though I tried to play by the guidelines and encourage industry sanctioned age-appropriate games. Alternately, I might have gotten his mother to be more involved in what he's doing.

Yep, ruined.

Tips for salesmen

Here's some pointers for people new to sales or purchasing.

1) If you walk into the front door, asking about what used vehicles we might have for sale, and you portray yourself as being in that line of work, maybe you should know things like 'blown head gasket' + 'no compression' = 'not driveable' instead of asking the same question three times. Correspondingly, whatever it is that you sell, try to learn your product, and not get schooled on it by the person you're trying to sell to.

2) If you walk in the front door asking about one thing, and then feeling like you can't get what you want from that, start asking about seven other unrelated things, be prepared to be treated like a) an idiot b) a miscreant or c) both. If you don't like the vehicle we might be able to sell you, and you start asking about pallets and breakers and scrap wire - I might think that you're a junk dealer instead of a vehicle broker. If you pursue the issue further, I might think you're just a criminal casing the place instead of a junk dealer.

3) If you want people to think you're sincere, dress the part. I'm not saying business suits and ties are mandatory, because I wouldn't wish that on other people. A shirt with a collar goes a long way towards sincerety. A business card with real contact information wouldn't hurt, either.

4) Be straightforward. Saying you're in "the export business" in a vague manner may sound impressive to the guys at the bar, but it sounds like "I'm trying to be a tax dodger" to someone with some accounting knowledge.

5) Drive a sensible car to a business call. If you roll up in a luxury SUV with gold trim and fancy wheels it says "I milk everyone for so much money that I can drive an empty land yacht and don't care about gas mileage."

In the interest of disclosure - this is basically me ranting about someone who showed up where I work and proceeded to waste my time. I don't know if he really was a broker, or he was just a hoodlum, but now I don't care and will be letting less of them rob any time from me at all.

If we sell anything used direct to the public, we'll use craigslist like everybody else.