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Are Current Movies and Games Going to Feel Dated Soon?

You turn on Netflix. You see the opening scenes. There’s a hustle-and-bustle going on with the crowd but not a main character to be identifiable yet. The shooting feels clunky. The music has a heavy synth sound in its tones. There’s not a black person in sight, unless it’s the main character or a homeless person in the movie. You have the suspicion that you’re watching an 80s movie or an early 90s movie.

We can pull what movies feel like a period-movie with only a few moments of watching a scene. For the current generation of young adults, it’s almost instinctual to know when many movies were created because of the tropes that these movies execute. Group of misfits learns to come together? Is it in a high school or outside of it? Is the hair outrageous? What about the Clothing? If you answer yes to all but the clothing, then the movie is probably a John Hughes movie and you’re probably watching the Breakfast Club, let’s be honest. The point is that what are the tropes that will define the movies that we watch today?

The_Breakfast_Club

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Game Idea: Draw your enemies away – RTS (Controller: Wii U Pad)

Game Idea: Draw your enemies away – RTS (Wii U Pad)

The Game:

The idea is this: you’re doing the standard “make + build + kill” deployable units thing that Real-Time-Strategy games do (RTS) or even TTS (Turn-based Strategy games. To make things interesting you have a “draw”-ability that is limited use per game, but it allows you to set the stage in your favor when you’re on the offense or defense.

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Let’s Talk about: Crypt of the Necrodancer

The game came out about a month ago on Early Access Steam (7/30) and I didn’t know how I wanted to approach the game at first. The game is fun, the music is addicting but I found myself turning away from playing it from time to time. For a rogue-like, it does its job of creating a high-replayability by having generated dungeons for all stages, daily challenges, and different playthrough experiences because of the randomized weapons, power-ups and enemies.

Good music, hard learning experience.
Good music, hard learning experience.

What I was shying away from was the other part of rogue-like games, the “keep you on your toes” part. The game’s mechanics are simple. You move to the beat. You attack to the beat. You create paths through walls to the beat. But this also means that you learn about your enemies to the beat. Once you get past the first few enemies learned through the tutorial, you quickly find enemies where you don’t know their attack patterns and movements. Normally, when you come across something that you’ve not experienced prior, you can take your time to figure out how to approach these kinds of enemies, but with the restrictions of actions per beat, timed length of the song/stages and other enemies trying to eat your face by throwing their heads in your direction, it makes it difficult to learn and understand an enemy. It makes it even more frustrating when you die to that enemy and you haven’t learned a gosh-dern thing about how or why you died.

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PAX Prime 2014 Goal – Story

The theme of this year’s PAX for me is…Story.

Creating a well crafted story and conveying differences in perspectives across your audience, or across a mass audience. As much as I want to join in on the more technical Game Development panels, or the Data Analytics panels like “Games User Research” or “Awesome Video Game Data”, I want there to be a growth in my abilities at this years PAX. There are plenty of great panels to go to, plenty of amazing games to try ( Indie and Triple-A), plenty of cool people to meet and greet, but there needs to be some cohesion in the experience.

Yum yum in my thumb thumb.
Yum yum in my thumb thumb.

You go to these trade-shows, tech conferences and celebratory events and you need to come out of it with something that wasn’t in your arsenal beforehand. Knowledge, skill, a developed social circle. There should be growth somewhere to make these things worthwhile. Else-wise, you’re just blowing a few hundred dollars to go up to Seattle for a few days. This isn’t a bad plan, but there’s plenty else to do in Seattle than be in a mass of sweat and vested fedoras (sorry Yahtzee, don’t hate me) overflowing through a few thousand square feet of convention room hallway.

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Game Idea: Ico (if Yorda was a dog that needed to poop)

Game Idea: Ico (but if Yorda was a dog that needed to poop really badly)

This isn’t really a completely original game mechanic per-se, because the description of the game is completely within the header. For completeness-sake, let’s go about describing this, though.

You know that look a dog gets as they are pooping. That pathetic, helpless, protect me face? There’s a reason for it.

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Taking Yourself Too Seriously, Gaming.

The gap between gaming as a medium to be taken seriously and lightly has been narrowing in many storytelling genres. We can find well scripted humor in the midst in contextual-placement of the player in games like Portal or The Stanley Parable, drama in actions that we choose to do or are helpless in preventing in The Last of Us or Bioshock Infinite, or walk through the blackness of our paranoia in Amnesia or Slender Man. What’s interesting though is that other mediums like movies had an extremely rough time getting the average story in a game to not feel forced or that the campiness from genre films hasn’t particularly translated well in gaming as of yet.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a difference between campiness and cliché, and it’s easy to spot one over the other. Cliché is taking what we’re used to and regurgitating it back to us in a form that we are already used to seeing. Campy is taking what we’re used to and being almost self-referential to it by exaggerating the parts that make it campy. I don’t mean self-referential like some side-character saying “Do you think this is a game?” or “What kind of game do you think this it?” because this is already a cliché and completely un-original. The idea of the campy-self-referential is that you make the cliché feel original. Being campy isn’t a bad thing either. Campiness worked in the reboot of 21/22 Jump Street, Hot Tub Time Machine and the more recent Guardians of the Galaxy.

Oh you two. Never the dissapointment
Oh you two. Never the disappointment

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Game Idea: Suspense with Oculus + A Rentable Room

Game Idea: Suspense-Horror with Oculus with Tactile Information via physical objects

The Mechanic

Oculus game again. You and your Oculus are in a small room, 10 x 10, or the standard living space in downtown San Francisco for your month’s paycheck. But the room is set up with hundreds of tiny jets, like the ones from Jacuzzis and jets are laced throughout all planes of the room. The floor, the walls, the room. Maybe there are obstacles around the room, with air jets on them as well. But here’s the fun part, it’s a chase game, e.g. SlenderMan or If Only.

Maybe this many is a bit overboard, but you get the idea.
Maybe this many is a bit overboard, but you get the idea.

I talked about different controller types lending itself to the birth of different gameplay mechanics here, well the new interactive medium will be the room itself. Suspense/thriller games get you to jump by two main means, jump scares and creep-factor. But now you have a new set of mediums in the room to mess with your adrenal-glands.

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10 Seconds of Gaming (gaming stats)

In the amount of time it takes to write this sentence, how many people are gaming at this time?

(10 seconds. It took me awhile to think of phrasing…)

 

PC

There are currently 5 million users logged into steam, 300 thousand of which are playing DOTA 2, 150 thousand of which playing Counter-Strike: GO and 56 thousand of which playing Team Fortress 2, and 16.6 thousand still playing Counter-Strike Source. Doing a bit of math, we roughly have 500k players across just 4 games and mainly in just DOTA 2 and CS:GO. So, 10% of the Steam-PC gaming population is playing DOTA 2 and CS:GO at this moment.

You mean I don't even need to scrape the data to visualize it, but you do it for me? Thanks STEAM!
You mean I don’t even need to scrape the data to visualize it, but you do it for me? Thanks STEAM!

Steam thankfully gave us a nice graph of the daily log-ins so we can do a bit more fun math at the moment. With a peak of ~6.5 million and a valley of ~3.75 million, that leaves 2.75 million users in flux on Steam daily. That means that there’s always the population of Los Angeles (3.85 million) always logged into Steam, or that computer’s being left on throughout Los Angeles can be tracked through Steam. “Hi, Rolling-Blackouts! Nice to see you again, you forget something?”

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Game Idea: Star Wars via Oculus Rift and Wii-mote Combo. Extra expansion using the same combo

Game Idea: Star Wars via Oculus Rift and Wii mote

The Game: Star Wars Jedis mutha-fucka. Do I have to keep typin’

The Mechanic:

The combo mechanic I had is kinda simple, but can add a bit of depth to the game. The idea is we’re going no HUD for the game, much like how Metal Gear Solid 5 is changing their approach to keep the focus on the visuals around you rather than the patrol map and vision cones from its previous games.

The changes help the designer re-evaluate what should be important to the player, and that's ok by me
The changes help the designer re-evaluate what should be important to the player, and that’s ok by me

 

Continue reading “Game Idea: Star Wars via Oculus Rift and Wii-mote Combo. Extra expansion using the same combo” →

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