“Wikipedia User: Ulillilla. Brief History:

During 1988 until about 2003, I was heavily involved with video games, one of the categories I contribute to Wikipedia on.

Coincidentally, however, I end up studying game mechanics to very fine details, right down to the mathematical formulas and algorithms.”

Ulillillia is an internet gem. A young man with Aspergers and a knack for disarmingly simple and beautiful prose, his website is a treasure trove of precious insights into his intriguing mind.

In his posts he details his perspective on life, fear and videogames – a better remit for a website you’d struggle to find. You should read it now.

Today I found (6 months late) that Ulillillia has posted some Youtube videos of some of the ways he explores/ messes with videogame worlds after he’s completed the main game.

Most worryingly (or ‘the best’ according to Ste Curran) is one in which he drowns Sonic the Hedgehog’s sidekick Tails in five different ways.

“Drowning Tails is my top favorite thing to do in Sonic,” he writes. “It has kept me at the game for more than twice as long as every other reason combined, including debug.”

Beyond that piece of dark videogame performance art is a detailed breakdown of five secrets (a.k.a. bugs) he’s uncovered in the second level of obscure (and terrible) PlayStation platformer, Bubsy 3D (see below).

I love the way he approaches and dissects the game with such care and attention (he claims in the Youtube write up that he played the level for 500 cumulative hours). It’s so different but also perfectly logical, methodical and childlike. He would be the very best of the testers.

The Japanese obsession with pachinko, pinball’s curious and seemingly ruleless cousin, seems inexplicable to most westerners.

A tourist’s curiosity, these bright, clattering machines are inscrutably foreign in both form and function, sharing few of the rules, risks and rewards of traditional videogames.

The same could perhaps be said of Peggle, a game that also sees its players’ success or failure resting on a curious balance of chance and design.

It’s not an unfair comparison, as the game’s producer and PopCap studio director, Sukhbir Sidhu, admits: “I played an imported pachinko game back in the late 1990s and became very addicted. Following this I wanted to try and create a videogame based upon similar principals that elicited similar emotions. But pachinko is purely luck-based and so it doesn’t translate well to a PC-based videogame. As a result the idea got pushed to the back of my mind. It wasn’t until I came to PopCap and saw that one of the coders, Brian Rothstein, had created a 2D physics engine that was perfect for this style of game, that the vision was rekindled.”

For the first five months of development Sidhu and Rothstein worked alone on the game. Later in the project’s two-year lifespan, lead artist Walter Wilson, background artist Marcia Broderick and finally a second coder, Eric Tams, bolstered the team.

…

“Initially all of the levels we created were either too fast-paced – using the typical non-stop ball shooting that you would see in pachinko – or too demanding. So we started simplifying. Brian made a level that had 100 rotating crosses, which all had to be hit with the ball and cleared. This seemed to be the right direction – it was a lot of fun, addictive and replayable but was ultimately still too frustrating. Over the following weeks or so this idea was distilled down to a field of static round pegs. This allowed for a more predictable bounce which worked so well we finally decided to just use a subset of randomly selected orange target pegs in amongst all of the others to help balance levels and ease some of the frustration of getting the last peg.”

Indeed, in the early days of Peggle’s development, others at the company didn’t share Sidhu’s unflinching belief in the concept. “Once we had the core idea in place we came under a lot of scrutiny from the rest of the studio,” he explains. “In the game the player just aims the ball and clicks to unleash it before sitting back to watch the consequences of their actions; there isn’t really any interaction beyond that. Some people didn’t like that, so we were constantly defending against requests for more interaction. But by then we were confident enough in our vision for the game that we weren’t tempted to change it.”

(The full article appears in this month’s Edge magazine or can be read online at Next-Gen here. If you’ve not played Peggle you absolutely must. You can download it to your PC or, if that’s too much hassle or if you own a Mac, there’s a Flash version here).

Over at Tom Chick’s US-centric videogames journo forum, Quarter to Three, one of the ‘gameplay programmers’ for Ubisoft’s latest big-hitter Assassin’s Creed answers a few criticisms of the game.

It’s all very good-natured and generously spoken but one section in particular is interesting. In responding to the criticism that the guards’ actions in the game are inconsistent (i.e. they will attack your character with swords if you bump into them but leave you alone if you start beating up a suspect for information right in front of them) he argues that some of these problems were introduced by the game’s intensive focus-testing.

“The idea is that as long as you don’t draw attention to yourself in a given situation, guards won’t notice you,” he explains in the post. “If they don’t notice you, they won’t figure out you are an assassin. Doing things like sprinting, or galloping flat out, is guaranteed to draw people’s attention, thus they will notice you are an assassin. And ultimately, being an assassin is pretty much a kill on sight offense.

”Now, the problem, as I see it, is that we nerfed the living shit out of guards before we shipped, because of focus tests. Guards were a lot more consistent before, because if they reacted to you in any fashion (i.e. noticed you), they would attack. If you bumped them, or jumped around in their presence, or punched someone in front of them, they’d attack.

”Playing the game now, it’s easy to see the holes that were opened by those changes (like the fact you can just start beating the shit out of an interrogation target in front of guards and they won’t care).”

It’s interesting how responding to focus-testing (whereby players of varying abilities, experience and demographics are invited to play a game and leave feedback for various aspects of the build) can frequently spoil the systems deliberately created by a design team who have already carefully weighed all of the options already. I know of several games that have faltered and even completely imploded at the focus-testing stage (usually titles that enjoy a US publisher who seem to place heavy stock in the process) because they didn’t score well with certain audiences in key areas.

It’s an interesting tension (between a game’s management who want the game to appeal instantly to the kids brought in to play test and the design team who, while wanting constructive test data, probably don’t take too kindly to fully-fledged game design direction from non-professionals. Indeed, take a look at David Jaffe’s furious live-blogging of a focus test session for PS3 title ‘Calling All Cars’ for an uncensored view of one designer’s reaction to the process.

There’s probably a happy medium in all this but, while everybody’s entitled to an opinion, publishers would do well to remember that not all opinions should be valued equally.

Guitar Hero 3 was finally released in the UK last Friday. It’s mostly more of the same, which means it’s mostly more of the good (apart from where Neversoft introduce their new ideas, which are mostly ill-advised but, which are also used infrequently).

The look and style of the game is still a weird American, cover band clichéd view of the live music world that doesn’t seem to bear much resemblance to reality outside of the 1980s: all very Spinal Tap, with skull and bone guitars and devil-horned, big-thighed women dancing in cages in the backgrounds.

Parody isn’t such a bad visual starting point when you’re asking people to strap on a plastic guitar and strum it in time to music in their living room so I understand why it takes that approach, but it doesn’t stop me being embarrassed by what’s going on behind the music lanes. Is it too much to ask for a SingStar-style, design-conscious alternative with environments enjoying single colour lighting, sparse stages and interesting locations?

One thing that’s noticeable is quite how much more sponsorship and endorsement there is in the game. Monitors on the front of the stage are ‘made by’ Mackie, cymbals by Zildjian, amps by Line 6, and, for the first time, a great many of the songs featured are original tracks (rather than the often excellent cover versions provided by WaveGroup – a company so good at their job that The Romantics (who?) are suing them in a idiotic and short-sighted move that reflects badly on them and wonderfully on the talents of WaveGroup.).

The Guitar Hero games have been a huge success for music publishers, getting their writers’ songs in front a gigantic and new global audience. According to a report on Ars Technica, featured acts The Strokes, Sleeping and Sonic Youth all enjoyed increased popularity after the game launched in the US at the end of October. With songs packs from the Foo Fighters and even a track from the notoriously protective Metallica in the game it’s clear that bands and management are starting to wake up to the selling opportunities this new platform offers.

In fact, for getting a new artist out there (or even extending the name and reputation of an established one) rhythm action games like Guitar Hero are a more effective tool than anyone might have yet realized. When you repeatedly play along with a piece of music you absorb its melody and structure in a quicker way than passive listening allows.

A canny record company would do this: issue their next guitar band’s album both as a dual CD and Guitar Hero release. The cost of creating a Guitar Hero version of the album would not be prohibitive (new and accurate 3D models for your band members but most other assets could be reused from the main games and, other than that, it’s simply a case of writing up four difficulty levels of sequencing data per song).

The ‘game’ could be released as a download for Xbox 360 and bundled in as physical media for PS2 in a special edition CD release ensuring much greater volumes of CD sales to boot (not to mention the acres of ‘In Rainbows’-style press coverage).

Whether the increased corporate pressure on the whole Guitar hero project will taint it (or, at least dissuade its creators from tampering with the formula and trying some new ideas) remains to be seen but, in terms of a Guitar Hero album version, surely it’s only a matter of time?

Ebay, Flickr, Facebook, Youtube and Amazon Marketplace: the internet’s most successful websites are always those which encourage user contribution and, crucially, give ‘experience points’ to those who do.

For Myspace and, latterly, Facebook, the number of friends you have collected works as a kind of high score – encouraging users to compete amongst themselves for who can get the most. For Ebay and Amazon Marketplace, it’s the number of successful sales you’ve made (represented by an actual number next to your username) that’s the key indicator to your current rank.

These are the kinds of systems that videogames routinely use to get players quickly invested in their worlds in order to keep them playing. In the case of ebay, as other users can leave feedback about you and a rating for a transaction, there’s even a sort of morality system inbuilt – kind of like in a Bioware game where you can choose to be cruel or kind as you build up a persona (except here the result is people are less likely to do business with you rather than, for example, your being able to rule the universe with a cruel and unyielding fist).

The longer you play and interact with these sites, the higher your ‘rank’ within the community goes and the deeper and more committed to the community you become. In this way, the most successful websites are often the ones which have RPG elements at their very core. People like to watch their numbers get higher, basically.

The concept is something the online charity sector is starting to wake up to. At the simplest end there are examples like Free Rice: an English language vocabulary game which presents players with a word and then asks them to pick the synonym from a list of four that most closely matches its meaning.

The game gives you a vocab ‘ranking’ between one and fifty (this rises as you get more answers right and falls as you make mistakes) and feeds you words according to your ability.

Here’s where it gets interesting: for each word you get right, the site donates 10 grains of rice through the United Nations to help end world hunger. You don’t have to do anything other than play a game to be a card-carrying philanthropist. In the process of feeding the poor you’re expanding your vocabulary and, crucially, trying to up your best ‘score’ in the form of raising your rank.

Another example of RPG-like online charity is the beautiful Kiva.org – an idea so perfect and well-executed it’s almost too good to be true.

Kiva find poor entrepreneurs around the world who have an idea or a small business they want to set-up or expand but need a loan to really get things off the ground. You log into the site to search through all of the entrepreneurs currently looking for money (searching by region or industry sector).

You can read about the prospective entrepreneurs’ history, what their business does and exactly what they want the money for (for example, to buy a scooter to allow them to take their dresses to the local city on market day etc).

When you find a business you’d like to support you can lend them increments of $25 (around £12). Once enough people have loaned their money to that business to pay for the loan, Kiva releases the funds and, over the next 6, 12 or 18 months the entrepreneur pays you back bit by bit through their business. Once the loan is repaid you can reinvest it into another entrepreneur and the redemptive cycle continues.

Why not just give them the money outright? The loan system is designed to empower the entrepreneurs and give them self-esteem and self-belief. These things are harder to achieve with straightforward hand-outs.

The site allows you to manage your profile, read up about your various businesses’ progress and track everything that’s happening with all of your loans. Your friends can check your portfolio and there’s even a stats page to obsess over. It’s a glorious philanthropic business management sim except, of course, it has wonderful real world consequences.

The single-player campaign in Infinity Ward’s latest entry to the Call of Duty series is, at once, excellent and disastrous.

Before you bitch and tantrum I can say this with some authority because I’ve completed the game on the toughest difficulty, Veteran, which is more than you’ve done, so hush up for a moment.

I imagine that most First Person Shooters are coded with standard difficulty in mind: this is where the majority of players will encounter the game’s mechanics, set-pieces, AI and enemy behaviours so it makes sense for a developer to ensure that this is the level at which the game’s most approachable, robust and balanced in order to satisfy the widest possible audience.

As a result you can tell a lot about the way in which a videogame’s fundamentals are constructed from how the developers achieve increased difficulty from this starting point (i.e. do they simply swamp by numbers/ infinite re-spawning enemies/ prescient enemy knowledge about the player’s whereabouts, movements etc) or do they use more internally consistent and believable solutions.

Particularly with FPS games, any shortfalls or weak AI constructs/ rule-sets become a lot more visible once you scale the difficulty up – something that is true for Call of Duty 4 where the broken elements of the game are far less perceptible at lower difficulties.

For example, in Halo 3, if you watch theatre mode after a campaign mission, you can fly the camera across to the other end of the level during the replay and see all of the enemies mooching about awaiting Master Chief’s arrival on the scene. It’s proof that the world is internally consistent: enemies don’t just spawn into existence.

In CoD4 there are sections where enemies just keep re-spawning until you pass an invisible trigger point. In one night-time escape mission from a crashed helicopter I took out the gunner in an enemy gunship stalking my team – at great risk – only for a new one to appear ten seconds later. I did this six or seven times to see if there actually were a bunch of spare gunners waiting in the back of the helicopter or if they were just spawning there to artificially keep the difficulty up. It is, regrettably, the latter.

This approach makes the player resent the game at hard difficulties because it undermines any careful planning and tactics: what’s the point in approaching a firefight in a sensible and thoughtful manner, carefully taking out targets one by one until it’s safe to move forward if every other threat is replaced as soon as it’s eliminated? Far easier to rush forward in search of that trigger point.

In this respect, CoD4 is cheaply coded or, at least, coded like an old arcade shooter. In some places you have to learn the enemy patterns, behaviours and trigger points and devise a meticulous plan of where to stand, at what point to look to achieve success. It’s stupid and ridiculous and nobody should bother with it but trying to pass these stages reminded me of trying to one credit a shoot ‘em up so appealed to some obsessive compulsive and stubborn part of my brain which kept me playing.

The aesthetics are the main reason the game can get away with the shoddy AI and implementation of challenge: the excellent visuals, set-pieces and scenarios carry you along even when the sheer injustice of the enemy would otherwise have you snapping the disc in two.

For many players, who will play through the game without too much trouble at the normal difficulty, these issues will be largely irrelevant but, I thought I’d write them up anyway as it’s empirical reasoning for how Halo 3′s AI construction is so good and why Call of Duty 4 should be applauded but certainly not revered in the future.

One of my favourite and most-viewed pieces of competitive videogame footage is the legendary fight between Street Fighter 3: Third Strike experts Daigo Umehara and Justin Wong at the 2004 Evolution tournament held at Cal Poly University in Southern California.

At fifty-seven seconds it’s short but burns delightfully brightly, revealing in visual shorthand the intricacies and complexities of one of 2D gaming’s greatest fighters.

Edge asked me to write a Time Extend on the game in this month’s edition of the magazine and, after much deliberation, we decided to focus the piece around this footage as a kind of macrocosmic breakdown of what makes the wider game so brilliant.

The reason for this is simple: SF3:3S is one of the most ‘hardcore’ videogames with a lively and dedicated professional and amateur following that is, nevertheless, niche in the extreme. Using the video as a filter helps to communicate to people who would never wade through 1600 words of specialist terminology and impenetrable exposition of difficult to understand techniques what’s interesting and special about the game.

Of course, the article has drawn some criticism from those niche fans (why talk about a video win a piece about a game?) but the response from other readers has been fantastic. So, a divisive article then but one of which I’m nevertheless proud of. Thanks to the Edge team for taking a gamble on the format.

Incidentally, it’s a great issue and worth checking out for the excellent and informative piece on the current state of the Japanese gaming industry.

UPDATE: The piece has just appeared on the internet where you can read it in full.

‘We are gathered here, friends,’ he said, ‘to honour children dead, all dead, all murdered in war. It is customary on days like this to call such lost children men. I am unable to call them men for this simple reason: that my own son died in war.

‘My soul insists that I mourn not a man but a child.

‘I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honour and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays.

‘But they are murdered children all the same.

‘And I propose to you that if we are to pay our sincere respects to these lost children, that we might best spend the day despising what killed them; which is to say, the stupidity and viciousness of all mankind.

‘Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.

‘I do not mean to be ungrateful for the fine, martial show we are about to see – and a thrilling show it really will be…’

He looked each of us in the eye, and then he commented very softly, throwing it away, ‘And hooray say I for thrilling shows.’

We had to strain our ears to hear what Minton said next.

‘But if today is really in honour of children murdered in war,’ he said, ‘is today a day for a thrilling show?’

‘The answer is yes, on one condition: that we, the celebrants, are working consciously and tirelessly to reduce the stupidity and viciousness of ourselves and all makind.’

Kurt Vonnegut

The internet + discussion about God is a sum guaranteed to result in torn fur, blood, tears and really cross smileys.

Occasionally though, if you’re talking to friends with openness, understanding and honesty, good can come of broaching the deadly and forbidden talking point.

Here’s an extract from a discussion where I defended the pursuit of theology as a means to understanding our world in a conversation about Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion vs. Alister McGrath’s The Dawkins Delusion. As it touches upon videogames I thought I’d present it here as it might be of interest. Please chip in below if you’ve something to add.

(Note: I know of at least two readers who are vastly more able and learned in this area than me. Please excuse my gross over-simplifications or gaps in understanding/ reasoning: hopefully I don’t embarrass myself too much here).

There are basically two ways to view the world, talking in the broadest possible terms.

Either there was a person behind the creation of the universe (and here I don’t mean as in someone who made the world with his hands in seven days, rather someone who brought about the big bang or whatever natural physical mechanism brought the world into existence) or there wasn’t. We can’t empirically know one way or the other (a point on which Dawkins et al would agree) and so, in this sense, whichever way you lean is something of a faith decision.

Because humans are logical beings we like to stack the odds the right way and make an informed decision when there isn’t empirical proof and so, the former camp in particular (those who say the creation of the world was a natural physical accident) try to work which way the weight of evidence sides.

The latter group are less concerned with that biological weight of evidence because, after all, there will always be a significant stretch of doubt either way. So, theologians instead say: let’s suppose there is a person behind the universe.

From that supposition, ten brazillion fascinating questions about what the world is, what humans’ purpose is and who this person behind it all might be tumble out: What is he/ she /it? What are they like? Are they still involved with the world or do they sit back and watch as it all outplays? If there is a person behind the world then do they have a purpose for the world? Can we learn what they might be like from drawing conclusion or theories from the thing that they made (much like you might draw conclusions about an artist’s character and meaning from their painting)?

The understanding of who or what God is based upon looking at the way the world functions around us (good and evil, logic etc) are actually more limited than you might think and that’s where theology is mesmerising.

I think that’s part of why I find videogames so fascinating. In many cases they are the result of humans trying to build small worlds.

In looking at the way in which we construct our virtual worlds (which are, in the vast majority of cases built upon the same – or variations of – physical and logical rules and laws as our own world) you can learn something about the way in which our world has been put together (in a philosophical sense as well as in a physical sense).

Of course, you also learn things about the creators of those worlds (e.g. contrast a Nintendo universe to one created by Rockstar) by drawing conclusions from the creation, which is a theological sort of pursuit.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Incidentally, Dawkins and McGrath are contemporaries at Oxford (McGrath’s Professor of Historical Theology) and, I think, friends. This video, where Dawkins interviews McGrath is excellent and I warmed to Dawkins a lot through watching it simply because the way in which he’s talking to McGrath is respectful, gracious and balanced in a way he rarely seems to be – both come across very well.

It’s worth watching because Dawkins rarely enters discussions with theologians (because, ultimately, each viewpoint has a very different set of questions based upon their own suppositions which makes dialogue difficult).

It’s a massive shame they chose to cut this footage from Dawkins’ The Root of All Evil TV programme (which seemed horribly unbalanced in terms of those he spoke to) but, sadly and cynically, I totally understand why the programme makers did…

‘This is how the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper’. So ends T. S. Eliot’s 1925 poem, The Hollow Men, a sentence also chosen to start and conclude the Halo trilogy’s overarching marketing campaign.

Except, of course, climactic whimpers and blockbusting action epics are uneasy bedfellows; who’d collapse their bombastic trilogy with a timid snivel when they could detonate it in a sea of apocalyptic pixel fire and awful noise? And so, to escape the confines of the poem’s story but borrow its classy whiff of literary respectability, the line was cut in two, the second part discarded and the noisy drama of the trilogy’s conclusion left to resound un-tempered.

But while the way in which Halo’s world ends might have outplayed without much understatement or surprise, the series’ soundtrack defies videogame convention, mostly underlining the action not with heavy metal bangs and testosterone but with the melancholy aahs of a pensive choir. First Person Shooters are about distorted guitars, guttural screams, double kick drum pedals and air-punching marines, not the ebb and swell of a minor key melody. In this sense, the game grasps some of the expectation-confounding surprise Eliot spoke of.

“Juxtaposition is a very powerful tool for the composer, one that’s woefully underused in videogames,” explains Marty O’Donnell, the bearded and kindly man behind this, one of videogaming’s most memorable soundtracks. “When writing for an action game I think it’s important not to take what is happening on screen for granted from a musical perspective. One must try something unexpected, something fresh and imaginative; something to interest the listeners without distracting them.”

You can read the rest over at Eurogamer here.