When I was very young, I was given a small book called The Flying Sandbox. Briefly told, the sandbox becomes airborne as the result of a wish and magically soars aloft, giving Kerry and Chris a bird’s eye view of their friends and neighborhood. Even as a child, I knew that sandboxes couldn’t fly, but my imagination could and it did. It might not be great children’s literature, but The Flying Sandbox achieved what every good children’s book should: it […]
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Food, Fashion, Florence, and Fooling Around
Here’s a little story about how foreign travel is the kind of play that keeps you on your toes.
Many years ago, my wife and I traveled with friends to Venice, Florence, and Rome. The middle destination, Florence, has a thousand-year tradition of entertaining tourists and, to put it mildly, they’re pretty good at it. Sightseeing made us hungry and we chose one of Florence’s many fine restaurants for a meal, unaware that this restaurant had a different sort of tradition. […]
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Video Games and the Cute Factor
In the 2006 New York Times article “The Cute Factor,” Natalie Angier investigated how cuteness affects society. She wrote “scientists who study the evolution of visual signaling have identified a wide and still expanding assortment of features and behaviors that make something look cute.” Cute cues include roundness, floppy limbs, a side-to-side gait, vulnerability, and need, among others. After reading Angier’s article, I realized cute factors affect my game selections.
Sackboy from Geek Crafts
Mark Healey and Dave Smith’s Little Big Planet […]
Paper to Video: A Puzzling Game
Recently, as I competed in a group online challenge, a player presented me with the following puzzle:
Blank Picross Puzzle
I had no concept or instructions of how the puzzle worked, so I turned to my husband and asked if he had any idea. He exclaimed, “It’s Picross!”
Picross, short for picture crossword, is a Japanese logic puzzle game known also as a griddler or nonogram. Each puzzle contains a hidden picture revealed only after the player fills in squares based on […]
More Video Game Museums in Europe
Following the blog I wrote recently on video game preservation in Europe, readers sent me emails about a couple of other museums there. One is at the Musée des Arts et Métiers, which currently has a temporary exhibit on the history of video games. The other is the Museum of Soviet Arcade Games in Moscow. Let us know about your experiences with these or any other video game museums.
Age-Appropriate Play
Part of a recent conversation with a friend focused on his concerns about which video games his daughter is currently interested in. Are these the right games at her age? Do they contain violent material that isn’t implied by the title? Will she be able to get online through the game console and chat with people she doesn’t know? As both a curator and a parent of young children, I share his concerns and have given them a great deal […]
Creating MMORPGs: The Neverwinter Nights Story
Veteran game designer Don Daglow recently gave the International Center for the History of Electronic Games a collection of design documents, early drafts of code, play test reports, and other papers that document the development of his games, including Neverwinter Nights (1991), one of the most important games in the history of the industry.
Daglow’s team had to overcome numerous technical hurdles to produce the game. Dial-up modems operated at speeds one-hundredth or one-thousandth of the rates of modems today. Game instructions […]
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Killer Video Game Apps
Space Invaders. Tetris. Mario Brothers. Sonic the Hedgehog. Final Fantasy VII. Halo.
Whether you’ve played these games or not, you recognize them as some of the most influential titles ever released. They are killer applications—the type that lead gamers to shell out big bucks for a brand new system just for the opportunity to play one game. A killer app can provide stability to a fledging game publisher for years or cause a new video game console to excel.
Space Invaders proved […]
Taking Video Games Outdoors
As legendary game designers David Crane, Steven Cartright, and Garry Kitchen spoke at the recent Classic Gaming Expo, I couldn’t help but reminisce about some of my favorite Activision titles from the early 80s. As the first third-party developer in the video game industry, Activision released fascinating titles, such as Barnstorming, Keystone Kapers, and Kaboom!, for the Atari VCS. Crane’s classic platformer Pitfall! came to dominate my play experiences—both on the screen and off.
Pitfall image from GameFAQs
Our building efforts began […]