Good computer games should come in three parts. I don’t mean in terms of gameplay, I mean in terms of architecture. Well designed business client-server applications have three main parts, database, business rules and front end client, but many games are driven mainly by the graphical front end, and munge up the other two parts any old way. This is a bad thing, and one which computer game designers need to fix. Continue reading Games in Three Parts
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Are elements of those silly Facebook quizzes and games potentially useful for teaching, at some level? I tend to ignore them, but a comment just now started me thinking about the possibilties. Sam, one of my students, took “What mode of production are are you?” and came out as Feudalism (which some people would think is apt for him!). Like all FB quizzes, it is an extended multi-choice quiz, with a series of questions to match you to something. The games – or at least the one I joined before I discovered the ‘ignore’ button, are repetative quest games in which you churn through oppnents to gain experience and unlock new abilities. While I find them boring, they are addictive, people play them a lot and you could adapt the basic model from grinding monsters/enemies/whatever to grinding useful skills. Continue reading Facebookedu? There is no doubt that Hasbro owns the IP on Scrabble, and are within their rights to force Scrabulous off Facebook, but legal rights don’t always make things right. If I ever create something worth loadsamoney, I would like my childern and probably grandchildren to enjoy some of the windfall, but I’m not impressed with the way suits who’ve never invented anything use IP law to make money out of other peoples ideas. Continue reading Scrabulous and intellectual “Property Rights” For game that does so much well at the tactical level, Medieval Total War on mobile phones is very disappointing as a strategic game. Clearly, the team who ported the PC game to the J2ME platform have a very good hexmap based, IGUO engine for fighting pre-modern battles, but the strategy and diplomacy end is no more than a device for stringing the individual battles together. At that level, it compares very poorly with Civ3, which I have had on my cellphone for over a year now. I will still be using it in my class on the Infantry Revolution next year though. Continue reading Medieval Mobile Boring? “That bad, huh?” the brother said when I slapped down Phil Sabin’s Lost Battles on the table in the campus Starbucks as he joined me for coffee yesterday. Actually, it is not bad at all – far from it. It is a good book, the product of many years of careful scholarship, and a useful contribution to both military history and game design and cliometrics. Unfortunately, I know enough about these to have opinions which differ from Sabin’s and which make me want to argue with the book and I’m going be annoyed that I will never have enough time to run down enough sufficient evidence to test my ideas properly against his. Obviously, this is not going to be a proper review, but more of a first impression. So far (and I accept that I may be proved embarrassingly wrong later in the book) I think he is wrong to ignore articulation and wrong (in the polite academic sense, not the football namecalling sense) about hordes of cavalry.
The news that the old gaming society in DCU, STOCS, is to be merged with the computer games society because of falling membership is disappointing – as people have pointed out, college societies often suffer periods of decline. Coincidentally, this merger is almost exactly what is happening to the gaming group in Alex’ school, which was a warhammer/magic orientated group and is now, for purely admin reasons, merging with a newer video-gaming ‘club’ as a survival strategy. I wonder, however, if console and PC based gaming poses a serious problem for old fashioned DnD gaming? The 2008 Diplomacy national were held at Leprecon XXIX last weekend, with Emmanuel Du Pontavice and Troy O’Donoghue coming out as deserving winners by virtue of a rock solid alliance in the game on Saturday. Diplomacy, for those who don’t know it, is a classic boardgame of international diplomacy starting in 1900. The rules are very simple, but gameplay focuses on negotiation and backstabbing, and requires fine judgment. As a simulation, is very solidly anchored in the realist school of international relations.
Continue reading Everything I know about Astrophysics I learned from gaming…
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Copyright © 2010 Mike Cosgrave - All Rights Reserved |
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