He played spectacularly for us, and answered many questions about improvisation, fame, and music. I’ll always remember one question in particular, though.  A student was called upon, and asked,

“What’s your advice on becoming a better jazz player?”

“Become a better person,” he said.

Right now, I’ve traveled to the other side of the planet to do just that.

At the moment, my activity on this site has diminished because I’ve been in Australia. Did my trip have something to do with video games? Not really. I had a different objective in mind – my growth as a human being.  However, I don’t think the two are all that unrelated.  In fact, I think they are inseparable.

As a game designer, it is your job to bring an experience from your mind to someone else’s through a tangible medium.  You must take something that gives you joy, and try to translate that joy into its most refined, easily swallowed form.  But where do these things, these experiences, come from?  Perhaps the most common answer would be your imagination. That is correct – in a sense.  Your mind can take the basic building blocks of your reality, and put them together in ways only you could ever think of.  Make enough things out of those blocks, though, and they start to look the same.

If you are building with pieces of your reality and you want new buildings, you have to expand your reality.

In this case, the reality I’m referring to is the sum of what you know to exist, and what you can imagine existing (even if it may only exist in fiction).  What the jazz player was suggesting, and what I’m suggesting here, is that the best way expand your reality – and your design repertoire – is by living as much as possible.

Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s revered game designer, does this all the time.  Zelda was the result of his expeditions into the woods behind his house as a child.  Pikmin was taken from his gardening efforts.  Mario was invented from the concept of “a character who bounces” and loads of elements from “Alice in Wonderland.”

Another widely-worshiped designer, Will Wright’s creations are famously based on his love of science and macro-interaction.  Lately, this has been more obvious than ever.

If you want an idea for a new video game, then by all means play plenty of games.  But if you want to invent the next groundbreaking video game experience, start allowing yourself to look in the more untapped realms of human endeavor.  Learn a musical instrument.  Travel.  Have a child.  Grow a plant.  Learn philosophy.  Go skydiving.  It won’t just make you a better game designer, it’ll make you a better person for having tasted what life has to offer.

As we undertake these new endeavors, they become not only part of ourselves, but part of our craft.  Don’t ever be afraid to set the controller down for a while and learn about something new.  Chances are, you’ll become a better game designer for your effort.

…Plus, it couldn’t hurt your jazz playing.

www.trentinoz.com

bzr branch lp:mirthkit

Cheers!

Mike Hibbert’s Minigolf includes 4 levels with par scores. Its good for a quick 10 to 20 minutes of entertainment, and has all of the code and assets to make more levels yourself. Browsing through Mike’s source, you can find a number of cool collision functions, and the beginnings of an editor. Mike also took the time to make some nice graphics for the levels, which appear to be from an svg source.

Score:
Design 4
Polish 5
Theme 5
Total 14/15

Congrats to Mike for winning. Mike has chosen the open source project isoccer to receive the $500 donation prize.

Mike Hibbert’s Minigolf is freely available on MirthKit.

Despite the fact that our contestant, Mike Hibbert, put together quite a showing with his entry, an excellent micro-sized minigolf game, he has won by default anyway! Congrats Mike!

Mike’s game is already up on the arcade for your playing pleasure. Go check it out and report any problems/feedback here.

• A fix for an error caused by very long windows user names
• An installer which installs MirthKit onto Vista with higher privileges (hopefully no more right-click run-as-admin)

Last night my band played to a crowd of about 6,500, opening for the hit band Panic at the Disco.  I was lead guitarist.

…But I don’t play guitar.

Not real guitar, at least.  In front of the six-thousand-strong crowd, I was playing the video game Rock Band after winning a Rock Band Live Tour competition.  If you think that’s cool – well, you’re absolutely right – but what’s really cool is what it means for video games as a medium.

As movie stereotypes frequently remind us, video games were once seen as the purview of geeky, unsocial types.  Last night’s concert proves that the mold is starting to crack.  Games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero sing to us that a game can not only be fun for gamers, but embraced by non-gamers as a socially positive experience.  But why isn’t this true for all games?  Why don’t I get more high fives for my recent completion of Dead Space?

Let’s face it, sociality of gameplay affects how a game is taken in by the public.  Before anyone jumps to conclusions about the injustice of otherwise good games not impressing their girlfriend (or boyfriend), it’s important to realize why that’s the case.  Doesn’t it makes sense that a game’s social reception is based on how social the gameplay is?  Any game that requires you to “leave the crowd” to play will be judged correctly as unsocial, no matter how good.  After all, if sociality means to interact with people, leaving those people behind to play a game is the definition of unsocial.  Take a “game” with several very un-gamely elements like Mario Party, where an enormous amount of outcome is based on chance the player cannot affect.  In a traditional sense the gameplay may lack, but the game’s multiplayer focus (read:  “Party” is in the name) makes it much more accepted by the non-gamer crowd.  Some games manage well on both gameplay and social fronts:  Ask any non-gamer what games they have played; two out of three will include some form of Mario Kart, a great game by any judgment.

But Rock Band and Guitar Hero take one step further.  Not only is it socially acceptable to play Rock Band, it’s even marginally cool.  Someone off the street may not stop to congratulate you for beating “Carry On My Wayward Son” on Expert difficulty, but ripping through the song at a party is bound to get a little recognition.  That being the case, why don’t other games garner this attention?  Why aren’t people as impressed when you put down an impressive lap time in Mario Kart?  I think the answer lies in several factors.

When considering Rock Band’s social success, it’s important that we take the perspective not as a player, but as an onlooker.  This is because even with all four positions occupied in the game, most of the people at a large gathering will be the ones not playing.  Keeping that in mind, how does a non-player experience the game?  I think it’s worth noting that we’ve already moved outside the realm of traditional games, who concern themselves only with the people sitting in front of the television.

Like any good game, Rock Band has many indicators to let a player know how they are doing.  Scores go up, bars go down, and the screen flashes to tell the pseudo-band how their performance is coming.  But in this case, that isn’t the most important feedback.  Non-players rarely care what the score is.  What they do care about, however, is that when the players in Rock Band start doing poorly, the music stops. And nobody likes that.  In fact, it’s probably the most important piece of feedback the game gives, and it doubles as a form of reward.  Because nothing breaks up a party like bad music, there is game-created motivation for non-players to encourage players. That is the basis for the game’s social acceptance.

Of course, it would be inaccurate to say that Rock Band or Guitar Hero’s success as a socially accepted game is based completely on this single mechanic.  In reality, several factors came together.  First, listening to music – especially rock music – was already an established social norm.  Having controllers shaped like instruments also did an enormous part, informing the non-players that players were performing their parts, and should be thusly acclaimed.  Personally, I think that having a guitar strapped on also makes me more likely to power slide across the room, drop to my knees during an intense solo, and stick my tongue out while shredding an intense riff.  At the very least it makes me more likely to stand up, which is more interesting to an onlooker than just sitting.

Can we expect more games to knock a brick off the wall between socialites and gamers?  Expectation may not be necessary; many of these games have already arrived.  While it may carry some social stigma for its player’s addictive behavior, World of Warcraft is a social phenomenon;  even if its method of gaining social ground is less in gameplay strategy, and more in sheer player volume.  Games like Scene It? and Buzz use a similar social involvement principle to Rock Band.  And, while they are typically created for a casual crowd, the market is ripe for a developer to come up with a socially encouraging game that will also appeal to more hardcore gamers.  With enough of these games, we may even see a day where gaming is truly accepted as a public equal to other forms of entertainment.  Until then, I’ve got to practice.

…I’ve got Rock Band concerts to prepare for.

In a world of increasingly volatile theft countermeasures, Fight Back represents an interesting development for gaming. It represents the possibility of future game creation being viewed as a service, rather than games being viewed as information property. Fight Back is a proof of concept for this new view, presenting the idea that because gaming is a media, the people will always want more and more. Additionally, being open has the benefit of increasing the amount of developer information publicly available, which in turn improves the techniques of the game developer community as a whole.

Finity Flight: Fight Back

Finity Flight: Fight Back takes place shortly after the events of the original Finity Flight. All alone, you’ve repelled the invaders of earth, but instead of simply waiting for them to come back in greater numbers, you are taking the fight to their home turf.

Fight Back takes place in space, and adds to the original game with 15 new levels, a four new boss levels, four new enemy variations, and new unlockables.

Finity Flight: Fight Back is now available for $11.99 on MirthKit.

About MirthKit

MirthKit is a multi-platform online game arcade which provides a complete game-making and publishing package available to all for free. With MirthKit, it is easy to find new games, modify games you love, and sell any of your creations.

About Curved Infinity Games

Curved Infinity Games is a game technology company based in Ashburn, Virginia, which is focused on improving the sustainability of independent game development. Founded in 2007, CIG is giving the world of gaming a breath of fresh air with MirthKit. Curved Infinity Games makes revenue from MirthKit with the sales of its own game productions and by reselling third party productions.

We are proud to present not only the first commercial game available on MirthKit, but the first commercial game ever to be released with full source code.

Available on Ubuntu, Windows, and soon OSX, Fight Back is the expansion to our August release, Finity Flight, and represents a path yet-untraveled for gaming. It is the first direct hybridization of commerce and the open source philosophy. However, Finity Flight: Fight Back is not open source software, and this distinction is important.

First, some background. MirthKit, which is the online arcade Fight Back is published on, is the endeavor of a group of friends who want to change the way games are made. We are tired of the current game industry, and we aim to bring more power directly to the individuals who are passionate about making games.

That said, Finity Flight: Fight Back is a proof of concept for our efforts. With it, we are boldly proclaiming, “Yes, the passionate game creator does hold the power to be successful.”

Finity Flight: Fight Back is not open source, but it comes close. When you buy Fight Back for $11.99, you automatically receive all of its code and assets. You are free to modify the game as much as you please.

The reason it is not justifiable to say Fight Back is open source is because you are only allowed to be redistribute changes through MirthKit’s arcade. To reiterate, you are always free to publish your changes through MirthKit (you can even sell them), but users will have to gain access to your work by first purchasing the original game. This policy makes it possible to explore the inner workings of a game like never before, while still allowing the original creator to be rewarded for their work.

We believe this is a fair sacrifice, and we hope it enables more people who care about openness to make games as a living, as opposed to just as a hobby.

Finity Flight: Fight Back

Finity Flight: Fight Back takes place shortly after the events of the original Finity Flight. All alone, you’ve repelled the invaders of earth, but instead of simply waiting for them to come back in greater numbers, you are taking the fight to their home turf.

Fight Back takes place in space, and adds to the original game with 15 new levels, a four new boss levels, four new enemy variations, and new unlockables.

Finity Flight: Fight Back is now available for $11.99 on MirthKit.

So, you’ve defeated the alien fleet. It’s time to fight them on their own turf.

Finity Flight: Fight Back takes place shortly after the events of the original Finity Flight. All alone, you’ve repelled the invaders of earth, but instead of simply waiting for them to come back in greater numbers, you are taking the fight to their home turf.

Fight Back takes place in space, and adds to the original game with 15 exciting new levels, four new boss levels, four new enemy variations, and new unlockables.

Finity Flight: Fight Back is now available for $11.99 on MirthKit.