GameCity5 - Day Three - Kinecting with people

The subject of new Microsoft hardware brings me to the afternoon session, in which Nick Burton (Executive Producer of Technology and Communications) demonstrates Kinect Sports and discusses some of Kinect's potential.

I have to say up-front that huge question marks still hang over the viability of Kinect in my own mind. In spite of Nick's assertion that Kinect can allow for coffee tables obscuring feet and smaller living spaces, by their own admission Rare re-modelled their entire office space from cubicles to open plan in order to make working on Kinect more feasible. The stage used for the presentation was enormous and I wonder how many people live in homes in which the Kinect will work (especially given the casual market Microsoft are targeting with this product).

Nick introduces the Sports package with enthusiasm and it is clear that some considerable though has gone into translating these sports into meaningful actions. Football is distilled into a series of passing choices across the field culminating in a final shot at the goal. Discus seems intuitive and even javelin affords the player a convincing run-up and launch.

What is immediately apparent however is that there are two unexpected and fascinating emergent behaviours created by Kinect's approach. The first nice touch is that, because Kinect is capable of tracking multiple individuals, you have to raise your hand at the beginning of each game to indicate that you wish to take part. This is a lovely child-like form of interaction that will have most people giggling the first time they play.

The second and more important emergent element that comes out of Kinect's continuous tracking is that ALL of your body motion is mapped to the player avatar. It's immediately obvious, now that you see a motion-captured avatar standing next to the AI figures just how different and distinct human movement is. Witnessing a game character slouch, or favour balancing weight on one leg or brushing a spec from clothing is all reproduced by the game system. This leads on to an important emergent behaviour:playing with and showing off through the avatar. All the players who took part in the Kinect demonstration instinctively put their avatars through victory celebrations after scoring, through arms in the air, dancing and air guitaring (no pelvic thrusts though, in spite of the amount of 3rd person shooters that offer this as a victory salute). In fact it became more noticeable when players wanted to make their characters display behaviour at a time when the game didn't seem to want to track their actions. This may lead to developers forcing games to map player movement to avatars at all times.

I did ask Nick Burton about how this very different control system might inform new kinds of game and new interactions within games rather than sports or other more traditional/existing genres. He was fairly reluctant to share many of Rare's prototype ideas, as you can imagine, but he did insist that a lot of crazy suggestions had been put forward and even prototyped. He discussed a kind of alternative reality, because the Kinect camera makes a 3D model of your living space and is more than capable of identifying individual objects like sofas, tables etc and can even render your space with different lighting, as the base lighting can be derived from the image. He talked about ideas like turning the floor of your room to lava, forcing players to climb on an available seat.

He also talked about Kinect "enhanced" features which support traditional gaming more readily. The instinctive tilt of the head when steering a racing game or peering around a corner in an FPS can now be read by Kinect and fed into the game. Combined with voice recognition there is a good potential for Kinect to provide supporting functionality for games, freeing-up the primary controller for main actions.

In summary, Kinect represents a remarkable piece of technology, implemented very simply and transparently. It's undeniable the potential is there for some remarkable changes in gaming, but my personal opinion is that it is in danger of a cautious market and difficult local (environment) conditions which may cause it to fall into the sports and casual market to which the Wii has largely succumbed.

Also, because of the need to keep looking at the screen, actions such as turning or looking around have to be faked, which is counter intuitive.

For me, if you could combine the body tracking of Kinect with a decent VR headset... now there's a killer app! Given that Kinect has a flawless understanding of your position in 3D space, imagine being able to view a 3D immersive scene and reach out to grab an in-game item. In short I still feel that Kinect combined with a fixed screen is a dead end. The workarounds that have to be achieved as a results of needing to keep facing the display screen are obvious with almost every gesture. Combine this with my already negative views on 3D TV (how can it be 3D when the scene is bounded by the frame of the screen?) However it does give clues about a future path to more immersive gameplay. Now I just need to install the Jamiroquai moving floor so I can walk around while remaining still...

After this session, my GameCity became about connecting for real with some people I've only ever met digitally. I met some of the lovely folks from Game People and found a huge amount of common heritage (always nice to meet other people who spent the 90's cherishing the Amiga!) and also got to meet Rebecca Mayes after her marathon 8-hour game creating session with Adam Saltsman. It was nice to be there to see the culmination of their efforts as it happened and witness the unveiling!

All photos courtesy of GameCity with thanks.

GameCity5 - Day Three - Old games and new faces

This morning's Guardian breakfast posed some interesting food for thought: what are the games that marked the most significant milestones in gaming history. Clearly a contentious topic and I won't go in to the list here; I think that most people, when faced with the list, would come up with alternative games that they feel are more significant for different reasons.

It rings true though, that there are certain games which simply change something in your mind about how games work or the potential for games to work. In part of today I saw a group of graduates discussion their first commercial venture, QUBE. As the game is a first-person-puzzler (for want of a better term) it draws comparison to Portal, although there appears to be no desire to add plot or implied narrative to the puzzles.

These two things coming together reminded me what is so startling about Portal. In terms of gameplay it is an extremely clever way to frame a puzzle game. What is more remarkable is the way in which a rich narrative is told without any secondary characters (apart from the voice), cutscenes or story events. As a distinction from, say, Myst - which is an adventure game with puzzles inserted - Portal is a puzzle game with a rich, hidden narrative. It's like being presented with a wordsearch in which the shape of the lines form words across consecutive pages to read "HELP ME IAM HELD PRIS ONER".

All of which mental wanderings bring me to the second of Jonathan Blow's presentations which I attended about his new game The Witness. Loved by many for creative the 2D time-shifting platform-puzzler Braid, many were, perhaps, surprised to find that his new project is set in a 3D environment with first-person controls. Chris Hecker (Spy Party) was in the position, as friend of Jonathan, to ask the inevitable cheeky question: "So what do you say to the young developers we are always telling to avoid 3D and make 2D games?"

Jonathan laughs, caught out. "We always say," he tells the audience, "the worst mistake is to make a 2D indie game ... make a decent amount of money to fund future development and then try something ambitious and obscure in 3D that no-one wants to play and lose all your money ... I'd never recommend to anyone to do what I'm doing."

But the reason for this departure is a deep love of adventure games, or a least a deep love of what adventure games should be. Speaking on the death of adventure games, Jonathan says "other games evolved to be more playable - adventure games never figured out how to do that." Frustrated by a genre which mostly revolved around hoarding inventory items, randomly combining objects and failing to interact with scenery, Jonathan has set out to make a true adventure game which combines the joy of exploration with environment based puzzles which play by a fair set of rules.

He demonstrates a good set of the opening of the game and it is clear that the player is taught how to understand the puzzles in the game a little at a time, without any text displays or audio prompts. Simple line puzzles build into basic mazes and then evolve into complex mazes with pathing rules. Basic levers are identified early as well as active and inactive switches and through an elegant opening puzzles players are taught how power lines from nearby puzzle stations to environmental objects allow passage.

The game itself was subjective to a blind playtest at Pax, without the gamers being told it was by the Braid creator. "I don't really like feedback," he causes the audience to laugh, "[the pax playtest] was more of a reality check."

There is an obvious disconnect between the puzzles and the setting. Jonathan insists that this is in keeping with the fiction of the story as well as providing a fair interface for players. "In a game like Myst each machine is disguised to go with the scenery so the player spends ages just trying to figure out how the buttons move or if its a screen or whatever."

Following this I had the honour of being invited to a presentation by some students and ex-students from Newport Uni's games design course. Having now witnessed Jonathan Blow describe twice the process of educating a player about the rules of a game it's encouraging to see that these less-experienced graduates have taken on board the same skills. The beta level for Qube (available here at the time of writing) demonstrates this same, structured, non-narrative tutorial guiding the player through the individual rules and behaviours before attempting to combine them and looks very polished indeed at this stage.

There were a range of games displayed by the students. Hannah and Harry's ColourRunners (which I talked about on Wednesday) were there again and another group of students who are turning their final year project into a commercial product. It's encouraging to hear how much support Microsoft have provided to these under-graduates, providing access to hardware and dev kits for the at-the-time unreleased Windows 7 Mobiles.

Speaking of new Microsoft hardware...

GameCity5 - Day Two - The Big Thing

Today - for me at least - was all about Spy Party. It was no longer even Thursday anymore: it was Spy Party day.

Okay, in fairness I did enjoy the Guardian Breakfast session. If there's one thing I will say about how well the GameCity days appear to be structured, it's that themes appear to tie together - I don't know if that's planned or whether the delegates and attendees subconsciously come back to common themes together. The Guardian Breakfast neatly discussed the potential for video games to mature as a medium and some discussion about the sought-after 'emotional response' to video games.

Players and indie developers seemed to be in some agreement that the more interesting responses to a game come out of emergent game-play, rather than relying on the writer of a cut-scene or the direction of plot to elicit a reaction in the same way in which film or television achieves it.

I suggested that some of the best reactions I have had to games has been down to an attachment to the characters. I cited Cannon Fodder as a case in point. Squaddies arrive with a unique name and for as long as they survive, they progress through the ranks and their skills improve. A kind of attachment is made with these figures which means that when they take an injury and begin bleeding to death a genuine dilemma is faced as to whether to relieve them of their misery. Other gamers, too, cited the naming of squads in UFO as a key part of the attachment. There is no 'writing' emotion into these attachments (much as that pains someone like me!); it is a case of providing the space in which these attachments can be formed and then providing the catalyst for a drama in microcosm.

So the theme in my head for the day was: response to games and characters on a psychological and instinctive level, rather than a utilitarian approach to characters and avatars as 'resource.' This ties in very neatly with The Big Thing, namely Spy Party.

As suggested my day pretty much ran like this, for the most part:

• Attend Chris Hecker talk in which he introduces Spy Party
• Go to Working Lunch to hear Chris Hecker (and others) talk about being an indie (and therefore Spy Party)
• Queue for Spy Party hands-on alpha
• Interview Chris Hecker about Spy Party while queueing for Spy Party
  
• Play Spy Party hands-on alpha
• Think about Spy Party
• Go to find a toilet and then somehow get knackered trying out EA Sports Active 2
• Think about Spy Party
  

The premise which Chris Hecker gives us for Spy Party is that most games about spies revolve around shooting and action whereas culturally what we associate with spies and great spy fiction is "they're acting cool and hiding in plain sight."

He describes a game in which he wants the action and the source of the drama to revolve around players exercising "perception versus deception and performance". He first identifies what we consider to be main gamer skills as: "map navigation, aiming & shooting, micro-management and combat strategy" whereas he wants to create a game in which the player is challenged in "behaviour perception, subtle performance, playing it cool and social pattern matching."

Chris Hecker is clearly an excited evangelist of his game. Watching him speak he gives the impression that not only is he convinced he has created a game which fulfills these aims but that he is only beginning to scratch the surface of how cool these things will eventually be in the final game. "I want people with limited gaming experience but people skills to totally own traditional game players."

The dynamic of the game as it currently stands has one player as the spy at a party full of recognisable spy-movie characters. The player is one of these random characters and must complete a series of objectives: bug the ambassador, steal a statue, move a microfilm and signal a double agent.

The second player? Sniper. Sole aim is to identify and assassinate the other player, by identifying their behaviour in a room crowded with AI.

"Spy Party uses violence in a filmic way. It's the threat of violence, really ... used to add drama or tension to the scene." The threat of assassination, visible to the spy player as the floating laser beam of the sniper's scope not only provides the player with clues as to where the sniper is looking at that moment, but is also an ever-present reminder of failure.

Hecker describes the game as a "reverse Turing test." The famous Turing is designed to see if an AI program can fool a human into thinking that they are talking to a person. In this game the model is turned on its head to see if a human player can emulate the actions of the Non-player characters.

After the session I managed to grab Chris' attention for a quick question. Given that human beings are very adept at pattern recognition and spotting human-like movements, how is it that the player's movements are not immediately distinguishable from that of the AI? "They use the same pathing," he explains. The player controls the character directly, but it moves along the same routes available to the AI.

As stated, we were in familiar company for the Working Lunch discussion with Chris Hecker, among others, talking about the drive to make games from an Indie perspective.

What came across from the panel was a deep desire to make truly personal games and to have the creative freedom to hold onto a game until it has been crafted into the 'right' shape, rather than having to meet deadlines for a company.

When the afternoon came with the chance to get hands-on with Spy Party a huge queue demonstrated the massive interest this game has already generated:

The queue was very painful, although the pain was lessened once in sight of the monitors as it became a real pleasure to watch players trying their hand at both the sniper and spy roles and seeing how people took to this different type of gaming.

It was a great opportunity and a real honour to be able to play the game at such an early stage, especially given how protectively indie creators can feel over their personal projects and was definitely worth the play. I confess totally to failing as both the spy and the sniper.

Big thanks to Chris Hecker for all of this and also or providing me with an interview so good I'm going to have to write a separate article once the festival is finished in order to do it justice!

Photos used courtesy of GameCity and Spy Party screenshot from developer website. Images used with big thanks and permission.

GameCity5 - Day One - The Braid Director's Commentary

I have to start by being completely up-front about the fact that I haven't played Braid. I had assumed it had only been released on XBox 360 and PC but in searching to read about it in advance of GameCity, I find that it is out for PSN. Oh dear.

Nevertheless this session with the creator of the game, Jonathon Blow, in which he presents the game live via a project and talks the audience through elements of creating the game was absolutely fascinating and compelling from start to finish.

What is eminently clear from the presentation and the Q&A is that Jonathon is an enormously smart individual. From the way he tells it, the technology of the game was comparatively simple to put together but working out the laws of the universe in the game, how time travels through it and how this impacts upon the puzzles was of prime importance. At times, the discussion bordered on the philosophical. "There's been more focus on the text than the game design," he explains, "so I'm going to take about the design."

The assembled crowd is clearly in awe of the achievement represented by this game and the audience hangs on every word. It's clear that Jonathan is among like-minded people; there's a lovely moment where the Braid process hangs and he sheepishly calls up Task Manager to kill the process, muttering sarcastically when Windows asks if he is sure. This is followed by a knowing ripple of laughter from the audience and a recognition that even a feted indie developer is beset by the same problems as the rest of us.

I'll present some of my highlights of the presentation, because it was really great to be there and I really felt this session deserved its own blog entry:

A "Mario clone with crappy graphics"?

Jonathan started by presenting his original prototype - produced in 9 days. He described it as looking like "a Mario clone with crappy graphics" and highlighted that one of its failings was that the USP of the time-manipulation wasn't introduced until world 2, meaning that only the most enthusiastic player would make it past the initial levels to the really interesting features. This was why the final Braid would introduce the time-control from early on.

It interested me that he highlighted how quickly the player is in control. The opening title screen has the player able to move the character around and take part. Jonathan felt it was essential that the player would be straight in. This echoed, to me, what Jonathan Smith (Travellers' Tales) has said earlier about Lego Star Wars, that one of the key features was getting the players in and messing about as soon as possible - are people put off games by the layers of introduction, menus and tutorials that front so many games as standard?

He also showed how puzzles were framed, in the sense that he wanted to try and make sure all puzzle elements were on-screen at the same time and that where they were not, this was a deliberate choice. In fact, he said that with three years polishing, "everything" in the game that was present or not present was for a definite reason. (although he debunked any theories about the cloud in the final screen representing some kind of secret, saying "I just wanted a vantage point to look down on my castle".

The presenter is pleasantly candid about mistakes, pointing out sections of the game where a particular puzzle design or enemy placement did not sit well with him and that he would remove if given the chance to do the game over. Although, he defends some of the more controversial levels that he describes as "not fun" for a lot of players, saying that the "not fun" levels were kept that way for a purpose and to provide the game with depth and make it a more complete experience.

And how does a game like this get created? There's a clue when Jonathan is asked "at what point did you know you were committing to the game for three years" and he answers "I didn't ... honestly two years in I was convinced i was always 6 weeks away from completion." As each new element got refined and improved it provided inspiration for new ideas and possibilities and the game kept growing. Many game elements came from studying the code itself, for example time-insensitive objects.

In conclusion...

The opening day of GameCity 5 was, for me, packed with content, interesting discussions and chances to meet people as enthusiastic about games as me.

Now it's late. My writing is probably deteriorating by the word and I shall be doing it all again tomorrow. See you then!

Photo used courtesy of GameCity with thanks

GameCity5 - Day One - Working Lunch and Remakes

Sadly events took a turn for the confusing and frustrating. I arrived at the Tonic venue for a session entitled "Who should save video games?" This was to be a debate around if and how we should preserve gaming's heritage, in the face of changing technology, quickly obsolescent hardware and games makers with neither the time nor the remit to store cultural product for future generations of historians.

However before I could get into the venue I was blocked by door stewards who had a clipboard full of names. It turns out that the session required a sign-up beforehand. There were probably about 10 or 15 of us outside who were a little bemused, as the website had not indicated that any kind of sign-up was required.

This reared its head again at the Braid discussion, although this time I found (much to my bemusement) that I was actually on the sign-up sheet, despite having had no memory of doing so.

It turns out that the 'my event' part of the GameCity website was in fact being used to create attendance lists for the venues. Most users seem to think that this was simply a Web 2.0-style calendar app to help attendees plan their day but it seems it is actually being used to determine numbers. However, people signing up on the website and adding events to a calendar is certainly no guarantee they are actually planning on attending GameCity, let alone a specific event. Surely enough, when only about 20 of the people on the stewards' check-sheet actually turned up for the discussion the rest of the stragglers were let in.

This was a minor flaw in the organisation of what was otherwise a very well co-ordinated day.

Anyway a good discussion was had around the issue of archiving and preserving with an excellent panel:

From left: Jonathan Smith - Travellers' Tales/Time Warner, Tom Woolly - National Media Museum, Spencer Neal - New Statesman, Michael Rawlinson - UKIE

If I'm honest my opinion got a little turned around as a result of the debate. I've always been a strong advocate that games from the past should be emulated on current formats so that the history of gaming is always accessible, in the same way that if I want to watch a film from 1926 there is nothing stopping me, as long as the film has been transferred to a modern format.

However the debate really brought to my mind the fact that gaming has come from such a basic infancy that many of the games we used to play are simply not valid for a modern audience. James, from the National Media Museum, pointed out that what is more interesting is to try and capture the experiences of the players who were there at the time.

This struck a chord with me as I am aware that many old films really mean little to a modern audience without first gaining some knowledge of the context of the film. In the same way my own experiences with "retro" gaming have been mixed. Games I used to play I can re-play with a certain fondness, although I am often surprised at how frustrating the experience is; old games with which I have no nostalgia actually provide very little as a result of playing them myself.

There was a consensus (well, totally majority) in the room that the public purse should be funding an organisation to maintain gaming's cultural history, in the same way that the British Museum legally requires a copy of every published print work to be delivered to them for storage. Having said that, given that the room was populated by either gamers, industry figures and anyone else interested in the subject it's probably not a representative cut of the population, but still...

Problematically, this raises a whole raft of questions around what should be archived and how it should be stored. I did ask the panel whether they though the current generation of games posed more of a problem than older games as so much of today's content requires online activation, patches. And what of World of Warcraft? With so much of the experience based around the user experience of a multi-million player community?

Ultimately more questions posed than answered, I think and certainly this is a topic which requires an article all of its own, so for now I will move on.

After a brief chat with the panel afterwards, including a great chance to chinwag with Jonathan Smith from Travellers' Tales (who I learned was sadly not at the company during its Leander days). Following this session he took up residence in one of the pods and encouraged a couple of gamers to play through the PS2 version of Lego Star Wars II, using it as an opportunity to highlight some differences between how games were made - even 5 years ago - compared to today (I confess I hadn't even noticed that Language-selection screens had disappeared from games!). Really nice to get to spend a bit of time chatting to a thoroughly nice chap from a company that makes decent games. At least I didn't have to be diplomatic about their output...

Following this I headed into the beautifully ornate Council House for a discussion about the re-making of games. With Martin Hollis, creator of the original Goldeneye, on the panel it was inevitable that a certain amount of time was going to be given over to that topic but other things were covered, too. The other members of the panel were Paul Carruthers (creator of Archipeligos on the Amiga!), Rob Fearon from Retro Remakes and Tom Woolley from the National Media Museum.

The most interesting aspect of the discussion, for me at least, was that it gave a real and rare insight into the attachments that game creators feel for their work. In the modern marketplace we expect game producers to view their work as so much product or ephemeral projects. It's refreshing, then, to hear Paul Carruthers describe the experience of discovering that one's own work has been 'remade' without his knowledge as "weird... I felt like I'd been burgled". Tom Hollis agreed and said "if you create something [artistic] you feel you have a right to control it forever and ever".

In spite of all this there was a general feeling that the panel wish re-makers the best of luck with their projects, although they did express that, given the ease of contacting industry figures via the Internet, it is at least polite to contact the originators and ask for permission.

As for the Goldeneye remake, Tom Hollis is only too aware of the mountain to be climbed and the weight of expectation fans and those who have heard the legends surrounding the original will bring to bear. Tom was asked if he had wanted to be involved in the remake: "Actually I've been asked to be involved and it's a tough project - I'm not really up for it!"

All pictures in this post courtesy of GameCity with thanks

GameCity5 - Day One - Guardian Breakfast and The GameCity Lounge

And so it came to pass that I arrived not only to GameCity, but also Nottingham for the first time.

I shall use this as my primary excuse for missing most of the first session I had intended to join - Guardian Breakfast. It was shame to come into this late as there seemed to be some reasonable topics being proposed by the compere and the assembled crowd either had little to offer or were nervous speaking out loud in public.

It was tricky from this to "gauge the temperature" of the gathered representative's of society's gamers. It was particularly interesting that when the question was posed "who has had any stand-out moments in gaming the last 12 months?" there was very little response and almost as little to the question "which games are you particularly looking forward to in the next few months." I wasn't sure whether to be worried about the state of gaming that there was so little affecting the most core group of players. As I say, perhaps it was that most people were a little nervous to speak out on the first morning (or maybe didn't want to admit in front of the hardcore that their most anticipated game is Pokepark Wii:Pikachu's Adventure).

Still, having got my bearings - and had a cup of tea - I headed off into the unfamiliar streets to find the GameCity lounge. Sadly, without camera on this first day I cannot share with you the GameCity tent, but suffice it to say there is a gleaming Bedouin palace in which the GameCity organisers have gathered gaming pods, a huge screen, music and a colouring-in and writing table for Saltsman's Ideas Bucket: from which videogame creator Adam Saltsman and musician Rebecca Mayes will attempt to craft a game during Friday's event.

The games being played on the big screen had two things in common: chaos and carnage. I managed to get in a few games of Sky Kids - A 25 player air race to the finish. It took most new players the first two rounds to figure out which avatar they were controlling and then a further few rounds to fathom the controls. Once this phase had passed I applied myself and managed to climb the scoreboard, finally reaching 1st place and then deciding to retire as champion in my own consideration!

There were a number of indie and university graduate games on display. Here are some of the highlights with which I managed to get hands-on:

Yours truly snapped while trying out ColourRunners

ColourRunners (this is the best link I can find) is an inventive final-year games design course project by Hannah Payne and Harry Corr. The game requires the player to traverse a monochrome town, able to walk only on painted surfaces . The player paints their own path in search of hidden 'tags'. Visually the stark monochrome aesthetic and clean building lines are reminiscent of Mirror's Edge. Hannah told me "we wanted to do something simple with lots of visual feedback." I did try to talk to Hannah and Harry about how it reminded me of Wizball on the Speccy, but when I saw their blank, young, young, young faces I realised this was probably not a reference that would get me far. The game is very attractive looking indeed and I think could find an audience among players, if developed, although in its current form the lack of distinctive colour means that the opening scene showing the locations of the markers for the hidden tags is largely unhelpful once the player is on the ground and searching for familiar landmarks.

I also spoke to Ben Bradley, creator of Substream. The game is a 3d flying shooter with a couple of nice twists. The first is that the whole game world is repeated to the left and right of the player, meaning that some enemies can only be destroyed by attacking a parallel version of itself to the left or right of the player, creating some interesting strategies in the game-play. The second is a relationship between the shooting action and the soundtrack. Although this was difficult to hear in the noisy atmosphere of the GameCity Lounge, Ben spoke of his enthusiasm for the games relationship between the atmosphere and setting and the soundtrack. The final version is said to contain all kinds of tracks even venturing into Tango territory...

I also managed to get a brief hands-on of Avoid, to be the first game from small games developer Nerf Games. This is closest to capture the flag taken to its most pure form. 4 players each try to avoid floating squares on a colourful geometric grid. When a shining white light appears, each player must try to grab the object and bring it back to their goal. General feedback was that some form of tackling move is really needed and the guys from Nerf Games were all on hand, enthusiastically taking on board all comments and promising to look into the suggestions made. It's a game that's great fun with 4 players on screen - sadly I didn't get the chance to try it with less players, such was the popularity of the game at the time.

I also managed to have a look at Lego Universe but didn't get much time with it. I'm hoping to get a second look because my first impression was that the game compared very poorly to the excellent standard of platform games produced by Travellers' Tales. This is being produced by an entirely different company and is being pitched as a Lego-based MMO for young players. Graphically, however, it seems to bear a heritage more akin to Playstation Home and the controls were awkward - although it could be that I am less familiar with claw-shaping my hand around a PC keyboard for gaming these days. The game has been clearly designed with protection of young minds as a foremost concern. Player names are chosen from a pre-defined menu and the chat window restricts the player to a predefined dictionary of words. One player next to me was unable to explain that he was playing at Game City because "City" was not in the allowed words list. Sadly then I shall not be able to discuss my experiences in Scribblenauts of dressing the player in stockings, handcuffs and a blindfold. *sigh*

All pictures in this post courtesy of GameCity with thanks

Review of "The Curfew" (Free Web Game)

Without wanting to start on a self-referential note, it's strange for me to be starting this blog with a review of a game which is so difficult to debate from a purely gaming perspective.

Certainly any technical or game-play criticisms I could highlight (and there are a few) would probably be considered as a minor issue for its creators, for whom the message of the piece appears to be the main intent.

The game itself, as presented via the web browser, is circled - not by the usual up-selling or advertisers logos - but with links to Liberty, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission. At this point you know to expect that things will be a little different.

I'm not going to get drawn in to the content, except to say that the discussion of the social and political scene in the game is a fascinating debate and reaction to the security culture of the last 10 years. Regardless of how you feel about the game element after reading this review, go and play it anyway and see what it has to say.

Similar in style to the old CD-ROM interactive-movies, it features live actors filmed largely against CG backgrounds. There are a enough familiar faces from British TV to lend it production weight and this includes a wonderfully understated performance by Derek Riddell.

The game-play is mixed between familiar point-and-click adventuring, puzzle-solving and branching dialogue and it is the last of these that the game finds its real strength. Branching dialogue trees in games are often beset by obvious signposting in the dialogue: There's the “inflammatory choice”, the “chaotic evil” choice and then the “right” choice. Through good quality writing, this game manages to place you in a conversation in which you must win the interviewee's trust but there is no magic formula to deducing the right answer. Little clues in their own back-stories and using what you know of their character you have to make a gut reaction. Until now the finest exponent of this approach I have seen is Hotel Dusk but The Curfew provides a far more through-provoking and less random series of actions and reactions.

Having been commissioned by Channel 4, the writing is of a generally higher standard than the games market usually enjoys and there are some nice touches hidden away for those that like to search the environments.

Technically I found the game to be a disappointing. I suffered a fair amount of audio and video slip which detracted from the actor's performances and thereby some of the emotional weight. Similarly, the subtitles (which some may rely on) seemed to disappear partway through the game and could not be recovered.

Also, given the down-to-earth setting of the game certain "gaming" tropes still managed to sneak their way in, somewhat inconsistently; there was a moment where the character picks up a discarded piece of wire (before knowing she needed it) and says something along the lines of "I saw the discarded wire and picked it up. Why shouldn't I?" Cast in this context many adventure-gaming habits we are used to appear odd and inappropriate.

Overall, The Curfew is a compelling piece of entertainment with a gripping message. It takes about 2-3 hours to play the whole thing through and is a worthy alternative to an evening's broadcast television.

In the same way as Heavy Rain it's nice to see an interactive story which plays to the player's psychology and personal reactions to a situation than relying on the usual hand-eye demands which most games place upon their audience. This is a solid demonstration of how even a simple adventure game can be elevated by some good quality writing and a story that is worth telling.

The Curfew can be found at http://www.thecurfewgame.com/