I’ve been going over the slides from Raph Koster’s recent GDC talk, “Where Game Meets the Web”. It’s great stuff (I wish I had the audio), and he has some great quotes to pique your interest:

“Single player games are an aberration.”

He goes on to clarify:

“Very soon, all single-player gaming will happen within a multiplayer context of connectivity, persistent and publicly visible profiles, and awareness of other users.”

I think he’s dead on, and I think this has tremendous and complex implications for the future of gaming.

I’m thinking about story in games. Not the linear, Valve will have it solved any day now, Hollywood blazed the trail for us sort of story. Rather, I’m just trying to get a handle on the massive space outside of linear stories.

My first question is: do sandbox games have a story?  Do they provide a context, and the player fills in the blanks with his or her imagination?  Tycho got me thinking about this:

Eventually, I came to view the criminal element as chores: something my mother might yell from the top of the stairs, to be put off until another time. What I need to do right now, what’s best for the city, is to set up a huge ramp and then jump over the highway in a stolen car. It’s critical that this get done today. If you have a problem with that, I suggest you keep it to yourself. I can lift a garbage truck and I’m immune from prosecution.

Does that “count” as story?  How elaborate does your own internal narration get?  How elaborate does it have to get, in order to be satisfying in the way a crafted story is?  When we (as developers) write crafted stories for games, are we getting in the way of a more satisfying activity the players could be performing on their own?  Should we focus on providing context, and then just getting out of the way?  Or do we need more than that?

I’d love to hear any player-generated stories, mini-stories, narratives, what have you.  Do you make up context and motive while you play?  Do you have fond memories of any non-developer-crafted stories?

Like shooters? Like free shooters? While “shmups” are essentially over commercially, there’s a thriving homebrew scene making games that rival or best the top shooters of years past. The Independent Gaming Source has a top 10 list of their favorite ways to fill the screen with hundreds or thousands of bullets.

For those of you who have dabbled in the scene, TIGSource still has plenty to move you beyond Kenta Cho’s masterpieces.

The IGF Awards had some pretty great games this year, so I’ll cut to the chase. Unfortunately, none of these games is yet ready for consumption: but I eagerly look forward to them coming out later this year!
The Sponsor award gave a $10,000 advance to Everyday Shooter, which is looking hot.

The Audience Award went to Castle Crashers, a sweet brawler that’ll be coming out on XBLA later this year.

The Seamus McNally Grand Prize went to Aquaria, a beautiful looking game that seems like some kind of cross between Ecco, Metroid, and a shooter.

You can be sure I’ll post about them when they come out.

This is a screenshot of a program that plays movies: not just from a DVD in the drive, but from any supported movie file on your computer. Can you find the button to select a file? Hint: it’s not the play button, which (if there’s no video DVD in the drive) spins the drive for a bit then throws an error message.

If you’re a hard core gamer, you’re probably familiar with High Dynamic Range rendering. In short, pre-HDR rendering clamps all colors between 0 and 1, black and white. There’s no allowance for things that are “really bright”, so you often end up with lights not reflecting brightly enough, or sunlight becoming too dim when it filters through a stained glass window. HDR allows for a larger range of brightness, allowing for scenes to have better contrast and color, or for the “bloom” that occurs when an object is in front of a very bright light. Wikipedia has a good writeup.

What I was unaware of is that people have been applying high dynamic range techniques to photography. The principle is similar: you take photographs of the scene at different exposures. One photograph will use a long exposure, getting lots of detail from the dark areas, while the bright areas will be washed out. Another photograph will use a short exposure, getting all the detail from those bright areas. When you combine several photos, you get a final image that gives good color range and detail in all parts.

Note that HDR photography isn’t necessarily more or less “realistic”. It’s true that computer monitors can’t really display HDR: they display from black to white. On the other hand, when you view a scene, your eye travels over it and compensates for brighter and darker portions as it scans. If you browse HDR photos, though, you’ll definitely notice the difference from conventional photography.

I was turned onto all of this by a post in a friend’s blog. Here’s his latest shot:

Check out his original post on the subject, or his followup with a larger version of the thumbnail I’ve included here..

It looks like the TinyMCE editor (the default editor for Wordpress) doesn’t support specifying multiple stylesheets for edited content. This is particularly common, since you’ll generally want to use your site’s CSS, plus a CSS full of overrides for the editor.

There are some helpful tips on the TinyMCE forums, but I’ll sum up the simplest hack here: simply write a PHP file that includes all the stylesheets you want.  My file here (copied from forum user “unfold”):

Filename: editor-styles.css.php
$includeme = $_SERVER[’DOCUMENT_ROOT’].”/sitesubdir/site-style.css”; if (file_exists($includeme)) {include($includeme);}
$includeme = $_SERVER[’DOCUMENT_ROOT’].”/sitesubdir/editor-overrides.css”; if (file_exists($includeme)) {include($includeme);}
?>

I still feel like TinyMCE should offer the option by default, since it’s so common, but I won’t argue with such a quick solution!