So maybe it is because I’ve been preying on the bank accounts of the parents of [umm…] designing for young children lately that Smart Girl’s Playhouse caught my eye. For those who don’t know (so everyone), Smart Girl’s Playhouse is a collection on casual games for girls ages 3 and up.

What absolutely convinced me to put my $15 on the counter was the branding on the back of the package:

As my rather snarky younger brother phrased it, “Starting them on the road to Bejeweled a wee bit early these days, are we?”

One of my ongoing pursuits is being a Jane Goodall of sorts in relation to mobile gaming (phone-type devices, not Gameboys or PSPs). A facet of this design anthropology that I find particularly interesting is examining how larger/more complex games are adapted/devolved to work with mobile’s affordances and limitations. Recently I’ve come across two mobile adaptations of existing game experiences that share a common strategy.

For lack of a better term, I will call this the “Always On” strategy- meaning that a core function of gameplay, which the player controls in other versions of the game, is simply always on in the mobile version. The reasoning behind this strategy is if players are doing Action X most of the time in the console version of the game, given the limited interface of mobile devices, it should be ok for them to being doing Action X all of the time in the mobile version.

First of all, a poor implementation:

Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved Mobile is the Xbox Live Arcade’s smash hit faithfully brought to mobile devices. A modern arcade-style game in the spirit of Robotron: 2084, Asteroids, and Tempest, the player controls a “ship” that must annihilate an onslaught of circles, squares, and diamonds. This is the most intense action ever created for cell phones - deep gameplay and simple pick-up-and-play controls combine for the ideal mobile game experience. Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved Mobile brings gamers the addictive action of the original, anywhere and anytime. (src)

In Geometry War: REM, the “always on action” is the firing of your weapon. I’m guessing that the designers thought that by always having your blasters blazing, you would be free to do things like fly around. Well flying around is kind of pointless because if you continually rotate your ship in a 360 degree cardinality, you are pretty much invincible. In fact as soon as I figured out how to do this (the first time I played GW: REM), I couldn’t go back to playing the way that the designers intended. The 360 degree exploit isn’t fun, but the way the designers intended isn’t exactly riveting gameplay either.

Secondly, a decent implementation:

To be honest, I don’t know the full story with this game. It might be a complete fan creation or it might be a cracked/modded version of a licensed commercial game. Regardless, Antone Samy’s Super Mario Planet  (also here) is a good first draft of a mobile Mario game.

Super Mario Planet’s “always on action” is running- Mario is always running forward. What makes this different than other ‘on rails’ games is that, to a certain degree, players can accelerate and decelerate within the frame of the advancing screen. For the most part, this works. I’ve played a straight Symbian port of the original Super Mario Bros, and it didn’t play well. Trying to run and jump at the same time was just too much for the 1 or 2 button control scheme so not having to worry about running as much was a refreshing change of pace. That being said, Super Mario Planet’s level design isn’t great. I’ve actually cleared every level, but all too often I felt that I got lucky rather than being good.

So in adapting an existing game for mobile, or developing an original title, maybe designers should consider defaulting to an “always on action.” The only problem is that it can break your game as much as it can make it.

Pretty cool link this morning. Daniel Gump has developed and released custom Javascript libraries that allow designers to make meaningful web games for the Nintendo Wii. What do I mean by meaningful? Well Wii web games I’ve played in the past have basically recognized the Wiimote as a mouse, so gameplay was limited to point and click ventures that in no way took advantage of the array of sensorspacked into the Wiimote.

Enter Mr. Gump.

Daniel’s SDK parses and returns data for all of the Wiimote functionality (X, Y, Z [distance], roll). In addition to the Wiimote library, libraries for drawing, online communication between players, 3D math, and a FPS-optimized 3D math.

I have no idea when I’m going to have time to play with these, but I’m beginning to wish that I was back in the Experimental Game Lab and able to see what other people do with these.

I’m really starting to enjoy revisiting & reentering items into the Avant Game List. Analogously it has been like taking a picture of something, and then forgetting that that thing continues to live/evolve after the picture was taken.

In that light, it has been interesting to see how Cory Arcangel’s I Shot Andy Warhol changed since I last took a look at it. The game itself hasn’t changed, but the popular knowledge of the game has. It has garnered a decent number of blog posts over the last year- most likely precipitated by a YouTube video showing game footage.

What I find most interesting is that I Shot Andy Warhol now seems to be totally absent from Cory Arcangel’s website. I wonder what caused this- I believe that it used to be there, but I might be wrong.

Regardless, I Shot Andy Warhol has been added to the Avant Gaming List.

I’ve been intending to repopulate the Avant Game List for like forever (Clone High anyone?). So without further excuse:

Augmented Coliseum:

…a game environment using augmented reality (AR) technology that enables virtual functions for playing a game using small robots is proposed. Similar to how children can use their imaginations to make a normal room into the air for playing games with toy airplane, we propose a way to embody such imaginations virtually by superimposing computer graphics onto toys in the real world.

Augmented Coliseum has been added to the Avant Game List.