Review of LEGO: The Hobbit

Taking advantage of Steam's weekend deal, I bought LEGO: The Hobbit for less than EUR4 and gave it a test run. Having seen the trilogy, I wanted to see how it felt. The game begins telling the story of how the dwarfs lost the Mountain to Smaug the Fire Dragon, so it extends the story a bit by giving us an idea of what happened before. It is also a co-op play with two players, making use of the different characters' unique abilities and also co-operating in overcoming and solving puzzles together. But I got stuck at the first door. I am a first time LEGO player (video game, physical blocks I've played with aplenty) and I had no idea what I was supposed to do. Smashing things up didn't seem a good idea (hey, the dwarfs live here, how can they be vandals in their own home??) although while testing out the controls (WASD and UHJK) I did accidentally smash some ornaments. My son was playing the other character and he was getting edgy not knowing what to do. I ended up looking for walkthroughs to get an idea of what I had to do: I DID have to SMASH things.. and then build them back up. I smashed some, but could not figure out how to build. That is until I restarted the game (this time with my daughter as my son went off to play something else), smashed the statues and got rewarded with a jumping ? tile that told me how to build. Eventually I finished the first chapter with my daughter but i have some feedback to share. The game sacrifices consistency with the story for the sake of the LEGO World game mechanics: having Thorin smashing up his kingdom felt really out of place and was afraid that the guards would get me. Indeed, the guards were so off-putting. I'm the King's son for Balin's sake, how dare you point those blades at me? Anyway, the LEGO feel is nice, it's a nice remediation of the real world feel of the trilogy, but the game mechanics... they're too Lego focused: you're smashing things up to gain LEGO pieces that you can rebuild and re-use to solve the puzzles. The mini-games bring the LEGO brick playing back into the game, but only to sacrifice consistency with the story... I look at this as another themed game that sticks to the gameplay while sacrificing narrative consistency.. watch this space for a paper about that :P

Journal Papers and Conferences galore!

This blog seems to be a hit and miss! It's been so long since I've posted here... I feel so bad :(

Anyway, I bring good news. Since my last post, I've graduated with Distinction from my MA in Games Design with UCLAN, publishing two papers in the process.

I've focused my MA on finding a cross-media User Experience (UX) tool that can be used to compare between video games and board games, and I was able to provide results that show that the Games Experience Questionnaire (GEQ) can be used to measure UX as a result of both game mechanics (see paper here) and social presence (see paper here).

Meanwhile, I've revived my work carried out on game level design described in my previous post and I am presenting it as a poster at the Second ACM SIGCHI Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY) being held in London this October (see link here).

Moreover, I wrote a position paper regarding the consistency aspect of UX when dealing with games as part of a transmedial production, and it was accepted for the Games User Research workshop being held on the eve of the above conference (paper available here).

Finally, I have another paper on the consistency aspect of game mechanics accepted for the ICIDS conference in Copenhagen this December (see link here).

As you can see, much has happened since the last post and there's more coming! Watch this space, I'll try not to keep you THAT long for the next post :P

Christmas Recess

Over the Christmas recess I managed to keep active on the Game Design path through the following:

• I added more of the DOOM Board Game mechanics to the Machinations framework here by including the Invader play.
• I managed to play Settlers of Catan with my newly found American cousin and her husband over at PlayCatan followed by a video tutorial by the husband explaining the board game and the pieces involved as they have one.
• Having never played World of Warcraft much, I managed to get a free month of play thanks to Blizzard rewarding my Diablo III play, and thus got first hand experience of questing and raids, leveling my human Paladin character Ludus up to Level 31.
• Spawning off from the paper researched for the assignment, I developed a level generator for the DOOM Board Game which is limited by the finite number of board pieces available. This includes a level visualiser (see screenshots below) and will now be considering axis-aligned bounding boxes (AABBs) algorithms to detect overlaps.

First Semester

The first semester has gone by and with it the first Module which focused on Game Design history and e-learning techniques. The initial task of identifying which questions I had on Game Design were paramount to give a direction to my studies which mainly involved game mechanics and board games. Indeed for my assignments I chose to focus on the work in the area of game mechanics by Joris Dormans, whom I had met at the DIGRA Conference in Utrecht, Netherlands in Sept 2011.

In the meantime I also managed to acquire four board games each of which were built upon a native digital game: DOOM, Warcraft, World of Warcraft and Starcraft. In order to get acquainted with the Machinations framework developed by Dormans I attempted to implement the game mechanics of the Board Game using Dormans' online Machinations tool. Here's what it looks like.

For my assignment I decided to tackle Dormans' PhD thesis, particularly Chapter 7 which addresses game  generation techniques using formal grammars and rewrite rules. It was quite a challenge to not only summarise 12500 words into 1500, but also to make it accessible!

Online Game Learner

Finally I've begun my Masters degree!

Not the MSc in Computer Games and Entertainment, but an MA in Games Design by distance learning from UCLan.

So I've changed from an Online Gamer to an Online Game Learner - thus the change in blog title!

Hopefully will be posting updates here regularly - or at least more regularly than the past 4 years!

The Rise of the Console

It's been some time since I've posted. I've been very busy delivering lectures to UOL students at St Martin's Institute of IT reading the Creative Computing Diploma and Degree subjects.

This is a degree which aims to marry the artistic and computing skills to produce a workforce for the gaming, advertising and filming arenas.

To supplement this job I am aiming to read for the Masters Degree in Gaming and Entertainment, hopefully starting next September.

To this aim I wanted to start practising and since the Masters includes exposure to consoles, and since I never wanted to play on a console, I made sure to buy one: for now I bought the Sony PlayStation Portable and I have to say I am impressed by the graphics and speed that such a small console can deliver. I liked very much its wireless internet connection and even posted a forum post through it, just for kicks.

So far I have only one game, MediEvil, which is proving to be quite challenging on the puzzles level. I am happy to say I got to grips with the navigation mechanism (something my wife is still having trouble with). I also downloaded a number of game demos - Warhammer 40,000 Squad Command looks sweet and I found Loco Roco a cute and creative idea.

Watch this space for more posts on PSP.

SideKick

A SideKick?

Whilst thinking of what is lacking in our clan, after watching Tae Guk Ge (Brotherhood of War), I decided that each player in our clan has his/her own idea of what to do, and we find it difficult to stick to our duties. For example a medic should be there to support engies and give the necessary revives. This example is the first to come to mind as being an engineer is my primary role. Thus I decided that to improve we need to set up and train on buddy tactics. Then again, when I came to think about who to sign up as my buddy, who to watch my back, there were very few options...

EU Soldiers and Heller

In the evening there was nobody around to play against and I couldn't connect to the PlayReaction public server. Thus I connected to EU Soldiers public server.

The first couple of maps saw me being killed at the turn of spawn time thus I played very little. The third map to come up was Sea Wall Battery and we were defending. I was field ops for a while but my air strike made little damage. Then I noticed that the machine gun at the back wasn't built so I spawned as Engineer and went up to build it, but I got spotted by the enemy. Not one to lose faith so easily, I built the machine gun guarding the entrance to the building and sprayed some gunfire from there. Within moments I was hit badly and needing a medic. Within an instant a medic came from behind the corner to give me the revive. I returned to the mg and killed a couple more. I was killed again. Within split seconds I was revived and back at the mg. Another kill and I was down again but back up again in a second. Intrigued, I looked behind the corner and saw a Medic with the nickname of Heller waiting there to revive me. This went on for a while until they realized what was going on and attacked Heller from the back.

When I respawned I thought I'd be asking too much for him to come again to support me, but there he was waiting for me. The mg was blasted to oblivion but proning I managed to fix it and we resumed our attack.

When at a point in time they managed to plant a dyna at the gun controls we ran off, Heller clearing the path and throwing me medpacks. Alas, we didn't make it in time.

Caen

The next map was Caen, and again Heller was a perfect example of a supporting Medic. I switched to Field Ops and we had a great time giving each other presents :) I learnt that he was from Hungary. I tried to get his MSN but he said we'd finish the game first. Pity that he lost connection before the end...

I hope to catch him on EU Soldiers soon, maybe I can interest him into joining us and showing us what it means to play as a supportive Medic.

Some New Feats

Just to brag about a couple of feats I achieved, after having boasted about my initial ones (see A Great Day below)...

A Monsterkill of 5 kills with an air strike in Radar thrown out the door whilst the enemy was planting at the door...

7 revives in one room on two team mates (yes they died 3 times each and I revived them each time). This was in the crane room of supply depot during the Extigy Competition in Winter 2005 and was instrumental in fixing the crane and taking the gold.

...and I've been regularly taking the Highest Accuracy award on public games and in-clan training.

Clan Rename, New Recruits and Competition

SWAT renamed to AEF

The clan, having grown in number due to new recruits coming in, has had its name changed. There were various suggestions to the name but the winner was AEF. Originally standing for Allied Expeditionary Force, which landed on the Normandy shores on D-Day on the 6th of June 1944, it was chosen to mean Army of Elite Fraggers (after truder jokingly said it stands for Army of Elderly Fraggers since the then members were all "old" by the Maltese ET Gaming Community standards).

This name, as I might have mentioned earlier, had been used a little by me and my students while playing on COD. Back then we had used nicknames representing the names used for the Normandy Landings - Utah, Omaha, and Juno. But now each had his own nickname already so ...

We have set up a website for our clan at http://www.aefclan.com

New Recruits

The first new recruits were T.N.T. and The Rock, a couple of players who had not been playing it for long. They turned out to be colleagues at school and in fact more of their colleagues joined our lines. At a point my friend Brokklu joined the clan too (he's the one who had been using the nickname Juno in COD) as well as my workmate Lockhart. In time, quite a number left us for another fun clan (which had been created by one of our clan leaders as his fun clan) seeking more professionalism, but a number came back to us wanting to rejoin us after they were disappointed. A number of them were refused re-entry as they had been warned that once they leave they cannot join back.

We were also blessed by the joining of veteran members such as Equinox who have skill to show and to teach.

Competition

AEF joined the November Extigy ET 3v3 Competition spread over a number of weeks. Clearly the underdogs, AEF showed improvements from week to week. It was during this competition that many new recruits left us for other clans - we see this as our filtering phase.

Yes a filtering phase because clearly, AEF is not aiming at having highly professional players - though we aim to improve - but at having a tightly bound team of friends. Thus, when a new recruit wants to join us, it is not the 1v1 test which counts mostly, but rather his Ventrilo communication skills and his friendliness and respect towards other members of the team. The lack of such skills in Prof Kucho/Kumbo and his younger brother are a perfect example of what we don't want in our clan. Good riddance.