Would you kill it?

I was reading a blog post earlier today about how gamers have a tendency to know a bit too much about guns compared to how often they have actually used/touched/seen one in real life. The post sort of got me thinking about my own experiences on the subject and I suddenly had a strange revelation. If something is cute in a game I am playing, I simply need to kill it if possible…

The realization hit me this evening while playing my Warhammer Online dark elf character. The dark elves are a group of sadistic, narcissistic, and pure evil dudes who run around torturing the good elf’s in the game. However I constantly found myself spending time (a few seconds at most) killing random level 1 “scenery” creatures…..creatures like harmless deer’s, small rabbits, or cute kittens (see picture). Killing these creatures doesn´t result in any sort of bonus or XP gain, and the only function they have is making the forests and cities feel alive.

So why do I get such a kick out of killing them?

In ordinary life I am quite fond of animals – I even own a bunch of them myself, and really enjoy spending time on them. So what is it that makes me tick when I am playing games?

I think it’s a combination of the overall feeling in games – I am the protagonist, I am in charge, and I am more powerful than anything around me. When I am playing, I am in effect the God of the game, the game is there to cater to my tastes and it is only there because I decided to spend money on it. This sort of feeling is of course not the dominant feeling in the game, in fact most often what I get excited about in games is as far from violence as possible. But still I can´t shake this feeling of being the one in charge, the one who knows all the rules, and knows how to bend them. So when a hapless little kitten comes wandering by the side of the road, I simply can´t help going old testament on them.

So is this a universal feeling? People like to set things on fire with their flamethrower in first-person-shooters, drive their car through pedestrians in GTA, or perhaps kill kittens in Warhammer Online? I don´t know the answer, but I think it might just be. Perhaps it is just some sort of passive-aggressive behaviour we all have, and in computer games we can get rid of it? Or perhaps, it´s because we like to feel like gods who know the rules of the game in a ludological sense? Or perhaps there is a more simple and less scientific explanation.

Perhaps it’s just because we think its good old fashioned gaming fun….

Me after a night on the town

When I was a child I collected tabletop fantasy models which I painted and then used to play RPG’s. The hobby was something that me, and all my friends did, and it was actually a very relaxing hobby. That´s why I went back to it a couple of years ago – the main difference being that this time around I had a lot more money in my bank account than I did as a 12 year old. After having to move a couple of times the hobby ended up in a moving box in the basement, and I sort of left it behind me….until this week when I accidentally found all my gear again – and for some reason….the EXACT same thing happened to my friend and partner in crime Dr.M (i´m leaving his name out of the blog…).

It took us about 4 milliseconds before we had headed off to the local Games Workshop store, and used what little money our wife’s and girlfriends let us, resulting in our childhood memories of paint on our fingers and the smell of super glue being relived once more….

Having spend all this money on little plastic models and a pile of rulebooks got me thinking – I need to justify this in some way to make me feel better – I need to blog about it

(Oh – and also the game is actually really good!)

The Warhammer Fantasy battle rules have received a well deserved update. The changes are small, but they are exactly what the game needed. It seems that Games Workshop is riding the wave that most other RPG and tabletop game manufacturers are riding at the moment – MAKE THE GAMES BALANCED AND SIMPLER. Games like Dungeons & Dragons 4^th edition, Call of Cthulhu, the entire World of Darkness system by White-Wolf, and the whole indie game movement has already done it. So I guess it was about time that Games Workshop did it too.

All the Warhammer armies have received a updated armybook, resulting in all those unfair rules (like Chaos always winning in melee combat, or wood elves always winning by bow) have been hammered out. The armies are now a lot more streamlined, resulting in a better gaming experience. The theory is that no-longer will you auto-lose a game if you picked the “wrong” army – and in my opinion that is definitely a good thing!

Now the only problem I have is that hellish collector gene I have in me. If I had the money I would immediately go out and spend hundreds of dollars on models, paint, and scenery. I would build the biggest baddest undead army out there, and because of it I wouldn´t be able to afford Christmas presents for anyone, and would probably forego eating on some days……

For some reason Warhammer has that effect on people. Because I know that I am not alone. Dr.M is getting the exact same addiction at the moment – and I actually spoke with several of the Games Workshop employees about it….and it turns out that the addiction actually has a name.

“Hello, my name is Rasmus Boserup, I´m a game designer, and I suffer from Warhammer new army syndrome.”

I might post some pictures of my new army and write some more about the design of Warhammer Fantasy Battle sometime in the near future….I just can´t help it.

The picture says it all…

I will be writing here on the blog about several of these indie games, but this post is about the general concept of indie gaming.

Here is what Wikipedia define indie role-playing games:

“An indie role-playing game is a role-playing game published outside of traditional, “mainstream” means. Varying definitions require that commercial, design, or conceptual elements of the game stay under the control of the creator, or that the game should just be produced outside of a corporate environment. The validity and exact definition of the “indie” label is disputed as discussed below.”

On top of this definition I would like to add a few things.

First of all the indie games I have so far encountered have VERY strict rule systems. Usually the normal role-player would say that rules are made to be broken, bend, or ignored in a roleplaying system. And I would tend to agree with this in regards to some games – like D&D 3.5 or older. But in indie games you don´t put rules into the game unless they have been tested AND have a very specific use. An example could be rules that carry on the story of the game, makes the players narrate their characters actions more, or rules that lets you handle conflicts. The rules (the ones I have read so far) tend to be very well tested, and even though some of them sounds a bit weird, as soon as you try them out it just makes sense. I am constantly amazed about the level of thought that has been put into these games, and it has actually made me believe that roleplaying systems CAN be used to tell a great story and create drama, and not just tell you if you succeed or fail an action.

The next thing that fascinates me about these games is that they make the players, and game master(s) think about subjects they never even considered before. As an example I can mention the game “Dogs in the Vineyard”. A western/religion game, about young people being forced into making fanatical and adult decisions, in a world that looks to them as the true guides of mankind. It presents moral dilemmas to players in a way that leads the game to entirely new heights and I haven´t gone through a game session without getting the feeling of having obtained a better understanding of myself. The game rocks….

This leads me to my conclusion…. Having experienced such well thought-through games gives me hope that video games can one day obtain the same level of personal involvement and growth, without being cheesy or having a Hollywood morale… I hope the day for better video games is coming soon; perhaps I should just make the games myself…

The game takes place in the massively franchised fantasy world of Warhammer. This means that there has been an immediate interest for the game by all the Warhammer tabletop gamers, the Warhammer computer gamers (from games like Mark of Chaos, or Warhammer 40K), as well as the Warhammer roleplaying crowd. The enormous fanbase should give the game a good starting point in its long haul to beat World of Warcraft off the MMO throne. But does it succeed?

I will be making a few posts in the coming week about the game, but in this first one I will be looking at one of the ways Mythic is trying to separate the game from World of Warcraft – the so called “Public Quests”.

When the game was first announced it was also quickly announced that there would be a new type of quest system in the game. It would let players wander about and SUDDENLY get involved in a random quests spawning in random locations on the map. The quests would involve all players in the area and only via corporation would players be able to succeed in them.

But that was the hype… now for the reality.

A public quest in Warhammer Online is a special area of the different maps where a quest is running in a loop. This means that as a player you will be able to wander into an area and participate in the quest, as well as leave as soon as you want to. You won´t really have any significant influence on the quest, since it will run regardless of you (or other players) participating. All of the public quests I have so far encountered are separated into 3 events. The first event is what I call the “Go kill the weak ones…”. Here you go and kill XX amount of creatures/enemies of some sort, enemies which are easy to beat up. When you have killed XX amount of enemies a group of something a bit bigger will spawn. When you have killed those you something big will spawn, you will kill it, and you will get a reward. Event 2 and 3 are often so difficult that you will need to be at least 4-5 players to get through it.

So if we compare the initial statements about public quests to reality, we see that this is actually just as ANY OTHER MMO QUEST out there. The only difference is that you don´t need to go and click on a quest giver before you can start up the quest.

As a result of this the quests are done in the exact same way as other quests get done. You decide to visit the quest, defeat it, and get your reward before you move on. In other words, the original idea of “getting randomly involved” is completely nonexistent.

The game doesn’t suffer greatly from having public quests really being…ordinary quests. But it COULD have been so much better. I was expecting guards suddenly coming to help me in the middle of the forest, princesses needing rescue at random locations, and enemy forces trying to invade the area. Instead I got an alternative take on a standard World of Warcraft quest.

This all leads me to wonder – is MMO quest building being done so poorly because the game designers are unoriginal in their thinking? Is it because of financial concerns? Or is it just because you have to give the World of Warcraft players what they´ve gotten used to and come to expect before you start changing things up? I don´t know the answer, but I do sincerely hope that SOMEONE will change the face of MMO’ing soon, cause I am getting tired of horrible mission design, because I know it COULD be so much better…

One of my Microsoft Student Partner friends is one of the first people to get a game published here in Denmark. The game is called Atomic Subattle and is incredibly fun. Also it’s possible to download the game as a starter kit, giving everyone a unique insight into how to make a game like this.

The possibility to distribute games across messenger is, in my mind, yet another incredible initiative from Microsoft. Even though the “big money” in the game industry lies in the big blockbuster productions, the casual market is also making incredible revenue. Being able to publish your games on messenger – even though you won´t get paid for it – will be able to increase publicity for small-time game production companies and indie developers. Hopefully we will eventually be able to earn some sort of revenue from releasing games on Messenger, but until then, I for one am pretty psyched about being able to distribute my games to a million users with a few clicks….

So what does this mean?

Well first of all you should go and visit my company website at http://www.razumasu.dk – its not much at the moment, since I´ve been prioritising my client websites higher than my own. Hopefully i will soon be able to set it up properly.

The second thing you should do is visit my OTHER blog. Yes I´ve started another blog, which means I am now running two. The new blog is entirely in Danish and is about media, the future, and me. You can visit that on http://www.rasmusboserup.dk.

Finally all of this also means that this blog has gotten a little kick in the butt. I´m dropping writing about technology as such, and i will now only write in English here. Basically I went from having 40 blog subscribers to having 6 when i switched to Danish, and the blog subject also got a bit watered down. Therefore i will only be writing about game design, game theory, RPG’s and other stuff i consider myself an “expert” on

Hopefully you will stick around the next few weeks since i have a bunch of posts coming along. Also as you might have noticed i did a little re-design of the site, simplifying it, and for the first time making my very own Wordpress theme. The little guys in the banner is a couple of Rhodactylus Ciliatus – a type of gecko lizard that i will hopefully soon be able to breed in my terrarium and sell for a ludicrous amount of money…

Anyways i encourage you all to stick around. I have a bunch of nice articles coming along about narrative design in games, and MMO analyses (don´t tell anyone, but i am currently writing my BA thesis on that exact subject….)

Until then – enjoy yourself with all my old articles which have now been re-categorized so you can get easier access to all my brilliant stuff

Enjoy.

Oplægget til Steve var at han skulle fortælle om i hvilken retning han ser fremtidens web, samt hvordan Microsoft vil udnytte dette.

Jeg kan på ingen måde gengive Steve’s entusiasme og quirky måde at fortælle tingene på her, men basalt omhandlede Microsofts vision for Internettet, at alting skal være virtuelt (via cloud computing), samt have en utrolig god integration imellem alle platforme. Det vil sige at der f.eks. skal være fuld integration imellem mobiltelefoner, desktops, laptops, servere, og clouds.

Én ting som Steve meget kort nævnte var at der åbenbart arbejdes på en integration imellem Silverlight og XNA. Desværre uddybede han ikke præcist hvad han mente, men det er noget som jeg personligt har stor interesse i. Forhåbentligt kommer der noget mere info om dét inden længe.

Da Steve forlod scenen overtog Tim Frank Andersen fra firmaet Brandzation.

Tim var, i mine øjne, næsten lige så spændende at høre på som Steve. Han fortalte nemlig om user experiences, og om hvordan medier (og de medfølgende reklamepenge) for tiden spredes til nettet i stedet for igennem traditionelle mediekanaler. Det er interessant for mig, netop fordi jeg for tiden sidder og skriver opgave om præcist den problemstilling.

Alt i alt var det et super fedt event - og jeg håber da at kunne møde Steve Ballmer in-person engang, for han var godt nok interessant

It´s been a while since I last updated my blog. I have been very busy the last few weeks, so my blogging has been a bit random. I have several projects going on (soon to be revealed) and have been brushing up on my ASP.Net skills. So you will soon find a couple of posts about that here.

But on a completely other note - tomorrow I will be going, as one of the select few, to see Steve Ballmer himself. I am looking forward to it, since the man is not only a brilliant business man, but also amazing on a stage!

I will write a post about how it went tomorrow when I get home from the event. Until then - stay fresh!

DreamSpark er en ordning hvor du som studerende kan downloade en masse gode programmer, her i blandt Microsoft Expression til video redigering og webproduktion. Det kan KLART anbefales!

I forbindelse med den danske lancering søger Martin Esmann en håndfuld studerende til at afprøve systemet, og som belønning får man et gratis WunderCard som giver rabat på en masse gode ting – blandt andet togbilletter (!!!).

Du kan læse om hvordan du tilmelder dig som testperson ovre på hans blog, på følgende link:

http://blogs.msdn.com/mesmann/archive/2008/09/02/dreamspark-kommer-til-danmark.aspx

So now i own an iPhone.

With the chance of givivg into the hype,i must say that it really IS that good :-/

It does have a few downsides as well though. It is not a phone made with sms’ing in mind,and the fact that you need to own your own exchange server, or use the very bad “mobileme” system from apple to use push email annoys me like hell. Hopefully hotmail or gmail will soon offer push mail for free.

I will do another post or two about the phone a in the coming weeks to let you know if i am still happy about it

And finally you should know that this blogpost was written entirely on the iPhone… I had to try it.

From what I have seen it looks a lot like a Lovecraftian game, with evil being trying to control the world, and madness around every corner.

The story is about a young horror writer who has lost his one true love, and now seeks some kind of peace for his soul….however I am guessing he won´t get it

There is not much info about the game yet, but it looks like another try to make videogames into a storytelling medium at the same level as movies and theater – and I am all for that!

And now for your viewing pleasure – the Alan Wake (A.Wake) trailers.

The first game I am very hyped about is the Playstation 3 exclusive game Heavy Rain. The fact that it’s a Playstation 3 game means that I will never play it, since I don´t own (and never will own) a Playstation 3.

However the game has stirred my interest both because of its incredible visual style, but also because of its game design.

The game is written by David Cage, a designer with a pretty interesting take on how to make video games. He is one of those designers who want to develop video games into a storytelling medium as advanced as the film medium is now. He was the guy behind the (sadly little known) game, Fahrenheit. In this game he not only completely broke with conventions by actually putting himself into the start of the game, explaining that this was an interactive movie and the proceeding to teaching the player how to move the camera, and editing it all together…. It was a very weird experience as a gamer to be instructed in such a way. In fact it was nothing more than a standard tutorial, but in an Alfred Hitchcock way (“Tonight we are going to present you with a story so horrifying that….”)

Fahrenheit was in itself a very interesting way to make an adventure game, with several protagonists.

Enter Heavy Rain.

Heavy Rain was one of the ways that Sony tried to pitch their Playstation 3 when it came out. The tech in the game is absolutely amazing. The motion capturing is absolutely amazing, and the way the character (in the techdemo) portrays emotion is absolutely amazing. I will put a link to the video in the bottom of this post.

Even though the techdemo was released as a way to show off the Playstation 3, the game is still in development (so no need to buy a PS3 yet).

But the really interesting thing about this game is the way it supposedly will structure its narrative.

The game will have a main story backbone, but the way the story is told is up to the player. It will depend on how the player interacts in the different game encounters, as well as depend on which of the main characters die…. Again David Cage has apparently added several protagonists to the game, and apparently you can die with them, and then have to complete the game with the rest.

To sum it up – this game sounds really amazing, and I am looking forward to reading reviews about it. But I will probably never get to play it, unless Microsoft gets it for the Xbox360 at some point….

Here are two techdemos for Heavy Rain. The first is the original one, and the second shows the texture and lighting the game uses today (remember that the trailer is already a few years old, so the game looks better today than it did then).

This last year I have also become interested in Alternate Reality Games. The way they incorporate the normal life of people, into a game….

So yesterday I had an epiphany.

How about doing a game where you combine RP with ARG elements?

I imagine it would be a normal RP game where the players play their characters and the game progresses with dice roll and everything else needed for such a game.

However some clues will be left out, and the players will have to find these clues out in the real world between RP playing sessions.

An example could be a game where the players play FBI agents. Between the game session they need to find a couple of clues the Game master has put out there in the real world. This could be a website, videos on YouTube, or perhaps even a paper note hidden in a specific book at the library.

The players would then take the info they find and put it to use during the next tabletop RP session.

Such a game would provide loads of possibility of getting contaminated by the real world (when the players find stuff in the real world that the game master didn’t plan). But I think it could also have the potential to become great fun – it would however require a very specific type of tabletop role-player, and not the standard Dungeon Crawling type…

On the weekend program I have:

Finish a Silverlight book.
Finish a WPF book.
Finish an ASP.NET book
Read a book about the design and social interaction in EverQuest.
Read a book about the economics of a virtual world.

Hopefully I will get through it all – I might not, but for now I am off to make a bunch of coffee and start reading…

(And yes I couldn´t remember all the book titles when I wrote this. So you got to guess the titles for yourself)

However I am already seeing an annoying tendency. First of all, the CMS’s always seem to require special rights on the web server, either during installation, or during normal operation. This can be an incredible pain when you don´t run your own web server, but use a webhost. A lot of the webhosts here in Denmark won´t let the users get full access to change the different file rights – which apparently makes it a huge problem to run anything ASP.NET related.

The second problem is that some of the CMS’s need special components installed, and again, not all webhosts will have these installed.

This is something that really annoys me. I prefer doing ASP.NET compared to PHP, but I just haven´t been able to find any hosts that will give me the access I need.

But anyway here is a list of some of the systems I have been looking at, and they really do look great…

BlogEngine.Net – a very simple blog system, with nice features and a nice template system. Should be able to run on most webhosts, but I couldn´t get it working at one.com because they won´t let me set the correct permissions on one of the folders…

Umbraco – a fully fledged CMS, with a very cool system for designing templates. Has some steep requirements to server rights, and has been known to give problems on a bunch of the Danish hosts…it does however look very good….

Plus some others which I won´t mention here yet….

But I guess the point of this post is to ask – why is PHP so popular compared to ASP.NET?

I really don´t understand it. I see so many advantages of using ASP.NET compared to PHP. I see better development tools, easier coding, and better DB integration (Okay, this is my personal opinion…and I am biased…)

Until I find the answer I guess I will have to keep on using PHP for my blog…. (Until it gets too much and I just sit down and do my own blog system….but that will take a while… )

Having made 100 posts I now feel I can relax today, and instead of actually writing something good here, I will just refer you to the other Microsoft Student Partner blogs that you will definitely find interesting!

Allan Petersen
Claus Nielsen
Jacob Korsgaard
Jan N. Thomsen
Martin Esmann – Microsoft Academic Developer Evangelist
Morten Sneftrup
Niels L.Beck

Enjoy!

You just need to take the following steps, and then you will be booting at max Vista speed:

1. Press start and type “msconfig” and then hit enter.
2. Click on “boot”
3. Click on “advanced options”
4. And then put a tick in “number of processors” and select the number you want to use.
5. Click “Ok” twice, and then boot and witness your new booting power.

It really IS as simple as that.

Enjoy.

If you haven´t guessed it from the names of the programs, Powersuite is a couple of programs that help speed up your PC - and yes, it works!

The RegistryBooster scanned my registry and found 600 Registry errors, fixed them, and then defragged my registry. Then SpeedUpMyPC cleaned out a bunch of useless files (thumbnails and such), as well as tuned my RAM and Processor…and….now my PC actually feels like it runs at optimal speed. I went from having to spend 2 minutes on booting, to now spending 30 seconds on it… it´s really crazy how clutter can slow down your PC.

So if your PC is beginning to feel slow, I suggest you give these programs a try. They are really worth the money!

Oh…I did try SpyEraser, but Windows Defender apparently does its job fine, since there really wasn’t anything for SpyEraser to take care of…but it’s in the package….

You can buy the program here:

http://www.windowsmarketplace.com/details.aspx?itemid=3420483

And find out more here:

http://www.liutilities.com/products/powersuite/

Jeg har rodet både med Linux servere og Windows Server 2008, og har, for at det ikke skal være løgn, kørt det hele på min laptop.

Jeg har ikke lavet nogle deciderede performance tests men min laptop har præsteret at køre en Ubuntu Linux server, og en Windows 2008 server samtidigt med sit eget Windows Vista Ultimate – det synes jeg egentligt er ret godt gået….

Men hvor om alting er så skal man bruge noget virtualiserings software for at kunne have en virtuel server kørende.

Jeg har afprøvet to forskellige, nemlig Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 (som er gratis) og VMware Workstation (som ikke er gratis).

Desværre må jeg indrømme at Microsofts Virtual PC 2007 klart må siges at være den dårligste af de to. Min laptop bliver voldsomt sløv når Virtual PC kører en Windows 2008 server, og man kan virkeligt mærke at systemet bliver trukket helt i knæ. Derudover er brugervenligheden heller ikke helt optimal – f.eks. har jeg endnu ikke fundet ud af hvordan man kommer ud af Virtual PC 2007 når man har det i fullscreen? – indrømmet, jeg har heller ikke gjort en kæmpe indsats for at finde ud af det, men jeg synes bare at det burde være en utrolig simpel ting at gøre. Som den sidste negative ting ved dette program, så har jeg ikke kunne få den til at acceptere en Linux installation – og jeg er faktisk ret sikker på at det slet ikke understøttes.

VMware er derimod et stykke software der virkeligt har sparket min laptop op i gear. Jeg ved ikke hvor forskellen i systemdriften ligger. Men med VMware kan jeg uden problemer have en linux server, en Windows 2008 server (som endda ikke er understøttet endnu), og min egen Vista Ultimate kørende uden at jeg kan mærke nogen som helst performance reduktion noget sted. Derudover synes jeg personligt at de har ramt lidt mere rigtigt med deres brugervenlighed – men de har stadig et stykke igen. Mit største problem med VMware har simpelthen været deres VMware tools under Linux. Når jeg installerer VMware tools så forsvinder min netforbindelse og Linux fortæller mig at mine netkorts drivere ikke virker…. Det underlige er bare at før jeg installerer VMware tools virker det fint…. Da jeg på ingen måde er linux haj, kunne jeg ikke selv rette fejlen, og endte faktisk med at slette og ominstallere den virtuelle Linux maskine.

VMware Workstation koster desværre penge (men kan afprøves i en gratis version i 30 dage), men hvis man vil arbejde seriøst med virtuelle systemer tror jeg ikke det er et helt dårligt køb. Den store fordel som Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 til gengæld har, er at det er gratis! Så det er et super sted at starte hvis du vil afprøve lidt virtuelle maskiner. Personligt håber jeg at der kommer et par ændringer til programmet (jeg er jo så kræsen hvad design og brugervenlighed angår) – men af et gratis program at være er det faktisk rimeligt godt.

Hvis du evt. har haft nogle erfaringer med performance på Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 vil jeg gerne høre om det. For jeg har en svag anelse om at det måske er mig der har gjort noget galt, og at dét er grunden til at jeg føler at programmet er sløvere end VMware….

Hvis du vil have fingrene i Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, så kan det downloades gratis her:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/downloads/virtualpc/default.mspx