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Our lives on a Hard Drive

Just how much of our life can fit on a hard drive? (2 TB)

If you’re a writer, then your hard drive will fail long before you ever fill it up. At 1000 words per hour, with each word being on average 6 letters, and chugging mouth loads of caffeine trying to write until your fingers whither and die,  that means you’ll fill up a drive in roughly 3e8 hours or 38000 years. Considering the average lifespan of a hard drive is roughly 10 years, good luck writing. Thankfully, you don’t have to pass your Hard Drive off to the next 600 generations of offspring as their birthright to fill up the family hard drive with some sort of writing. Since they can’t actually go out and experience anything because of their need to type, it’s probably better off that they don’t write all day and night.

You see this? This is what you'll be doing when I die.
You see this, son? This is what you’ll be doing when I die.

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Gaming Experiences: Bonding over Single Player

Every one should check out Zac Gormon at http://magicalgametime.com/ His work hits so many feels buttons, it's not even fair
Every one should check out Zac Gormon at http://magicalgametime.com/ His work hits so many feels buttons, it’s not even fair

Sitting down in front of the couch, friends by your side. One of you pops in a game and everyone’s voice gets hoarse as the chatter escalates to yells and cheers because someone just got a clutch head-shot from across the map just as the countdown reaches 0. There are games design for multiplayer and those designed for single player. Goldeneye, Halo, Mario Party, Unreal Tournament, League of Legends. Many games and franchises build their fan base around single player experiences and multiplayer experiences, but that doesn’t mean that those socializing bonding moments can’t be found in single player games.

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New Controllers Brings New Interactions in Games

Yes, yes. Bad, we get it. Christ, that joke is older than the internet.
Yes, yes. Bad, we get it. Christ, that joke is older than the internet.

Remember when the Powerglove was supposed to be revolutionary? A kids imagination running wild with fantasies about moving Link or Mario around with just a flick of the wrist , an attack with a finger twitch, and a jump with a twist it. But this was still not as intuitive partly because the Powerglove was an elephant’s turd, but also because the games weren’t built for controls other than the native controller. This is also why the gimmicks of the Wii and all of its peripherals seemed like gimmicks, because they felt like after-thoughts to the game instead of being involved in the initial inspiration of the game.

Arcade games had a better potential with these kinds of non-directional pad controllers because they had a game in mind where non-d-pad interaction was part of the core design. Light-gun games where you shoot the screen, punching games where you hit a physical pad, dancing games where you mash buttons on the floor. Having the space for peripherals outside of the d-pad helped inspire completely different genres of games or, at the very least, re-interpret the genre in a different way to help spawn different types of games.

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Game Idea: Computer-Pandemic

Game Idea: Computer Anti-Rx (Computer Virus Pandemic)

Game:

The game pandemic is about creating a type of infection (bacteria, fungal or viral) and designing it in a way that will cause the world’s population to become infected and die from it. As your infection spreads through more of the population, you can upgrade the infection to be more resilient to the weather, easier to spread, or more severe symptoms and side-effects after caught. The more people you infect and the easier the symptoms are to notice, the quicker people start to find treatments for and treat the symptoms. So the upgrades need to start moving towards defenses against antivirals (and the like).

Compu-geddon takes a similar approach, but instead you engineer a computer exploit (worm, virus, web-hack) to infect as many computers as possible. As the exploit becomes more permissive throughout the ecosystem, the easier it might be discovered. But the more people who you can infect, the more valuable your exploit becomes.

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Game Idea: Blindfolded (e.g. Blind Unfinished Swan)

Game Idea: Blindfolded (Blind Unfinished Swan)

Game:

What Unfinished Swan did was create a world devoid of color where it was the player’s job to put color back into the world to navigate through it.

The idea for Blindfolded is that instead of adding color to navigate through the world, the sound that you generate by moving through it paints the world in front of the player for a short time. Like the image perception that bats have with their echo location, Ben Affleck from that horrible Daredevil movie or Toph has in Avatar: The Last Airbender.

And with great sight comes things your can't un-see.
And with great sight comes things your can’t un-see.

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Forever a Fan: A game’s constant reprise to mind

A funny thing happens when I walk by an arcade. My neck cranes, scanning the room and if I gaze on a series of the flashing arrows scrolling up a screen my eyes lock onto the machine and my body tries to move towards the machine on instinct. The feeling intensifies if the machine happens to be part of the few generations that had the best track list, but regardless of the version there is always an urge and a rush of the good brain chemicals that get me feeling excited and anxious to hop on the machine and give it another round for old times sake. The machine, if you hadn’t guessed was a DDR machine. If you talked to 13-year-old me and told him that I’d be working at a place where there were several DDR machines in the area with easy access to, he’d be ecstatic because what 13-year-old me thought was that I’d be a fan of the series for life. Maybe that was immature thinking, but the more places that I pass where there’s a DDR machine there or the disappointment that I find when there isn’t when I’d thought there would be, the more I believe I had it right back then, though my reasoning was wrong for it.

You can call it nostalgia or not being able to let go of past experiences, but there are many groups among the community that live with their game of choice and have become “Forever Fans” of their game.

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Game Idea: Server Admin Simulator

Game Idea: Server Farm Simulator Tycooninator

Pitch

The backend of game dev tycoon, where the player maintains and fixes issues that occur when a web site or video game becomes too popular.

They grow up and obsolete, so fast. Time for the garbage dump
They grow up and obsolete, so fast. Time for the garbage dump

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Game Idea: Fun Evolution Spore

Game Idea: Fun Physics Evolution (Think Spore with less realistic evolutionary history)

What spore tried to create was a game about a single celled organism, following its biological descendants as it tries to follow the same evolutionary track as humans. The interesting parts of this were the evolutionary choices that the player presided over the creature that it created, e.g. long legs but stubby arms emphasizing defense over aggression, eyes predominantly higher on the creature to see objects and other creatures at a distance, no mouth making communication and “making friends” with other creatures next to impossible, these are all fun and biologically interesting aspects about the game. It takes real life animal psychology, animal biology and evolutionary postulation and tries to convey and teach these aspects in the most passive of ways, where the player isn’t reading text and trying to absorb information in order to progress (i.e. Edutainment games) but where the player sees their failures in their creature creation because they forgot to put eyes on so it can’t see it’s environment making surviving, or even simply navigating, a difficult task.

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Game Design: Color Design and Palette Choice

What makes a room easier to navigate, items easy to discover, paths easily discerned? Intricately crafted scenes, artistic renditions of the imagination to a tangibly-cognizant interact-able space are all important, but how is the player going to be interacting with the scene created?

  • Contrast to the surrounding environmenthuecontrast

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