Prisoner's Dilemma

Okay so those horrible grey windows (click image for larger version) are my implementation of Game Theory's Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma.
The idea is to have players understand the strategies - the dominant strategy in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) is to consistently co-operate. Note that this is only the dominant strategy if the number of rounds is unknown. I feel the IPD game has the best moral implications, as it proves that cooperation is sustainable. The game reflects on reasoning and rational decision making.

This program features networking - it should work over a LAN or the net, as it is important that players cannot see the decision made by the other player before making their own.

Portfolio

Download My CV/Resume

Organized by descending relevance.

Warm, dull, angry water

 

Completed for a Digital Media Studio project part of a Bachelor of Visual Communication Design at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand.

I aimed to reflect and communicate a mood in the context of a film.

Simulated with RealFlow, modeled in Maya and rendered with Mental Ray, cut in After Effects.

Watch it in HD

Little nausicaa

 

A short animation designed for a Massey University paper, completed as a personal project. Created with Maya 2009 and Photoshop CS3.

dod_vigilance

DoD_Vigilance is a custom map made by myself for the HL1 & HL2 mod Day Of Defeat.

This map was in development for ~3 years, and was completed in 2007 as part of the Community Assembled Map Pack (CAMP) . CAMP1 achieved over 40,000 confirmed downloads, it was advertised on Steam's News and dod_vigilance made it to #5 and stayed in the Top10 for several months.

A map that was made from blood, sweat and tears.

For a bit of trivia, it was originally made for DoD:Gold Source but ported to DoD:Source before release. It was also approximately completely re-textured 3-4 times.

For download and discussion, see the CAMP1 Thread here: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums...

Watch it in HD

Tommy and Simon

 

This a short sequential art piece. Made from cut paper composted with Photoshop. Below is the entire book, click on the images to enlarge

Debate for an art game

I was reading Serious Games by Ritterfeld, Cody, and Vorderer and was think about motivation to play a game. Why play a game with a 'message'? I came up with 3 ways to market it.

• Ninja the message in.
• Declare this is a serious game.
• Call it an art game.

Ninja the message in:  For this to work, the game would have to stand on its own as a good, solid game. While a great way to get a message 'out there', it requires a very solid game, well polished and marketed. And this simply isn't what my project is about, its too much of a detour.
Declare this is a serious game: Again, the game would have to be a solid game, well polished. On top of that, the 'message' would have to be iron-clad, here-is-my-message kind of thing. Again not really what I want to do.
Call it an Art Game: This means it is not commercialized, does not have to sell itself as a game for masses to pick up. It does not required masses of polish and can be far more ambiguous. This method would allow me to concentrate on the design of the mechanics and gameplay, rather than spending all the time creating cutesy graphics to just get someone to pick the game up in the first place.
Now the question arises, am I allowed to do an art game? It is a Bachelor of Design, after all - not fine arts. I suppose the argument would lead to 'designing of mechanics'.
:D

SRK framework

This is in response to an article on GameCareerGuide.com over here.

The article is on the application of the SRK framework to Game Mechanics. SRK means Skills, Rules, and Knowledge based behaviors.The SRK framework is a method for separating tasks into categories to find any problems within a system of people. Skill-based behaviors are those that are subconscious, such as driving a car, or at a video game level - moving, aiming, selecting etc. Core mechanics are repeated tasks within a game that should not require any thought to process, and should be skill-based behaviors.
Rule-based behaviors are mostly skill-based behaviors with a conscious cognitive overlay, a planning and thinking of how and what skills to apply to a situation. Such as changing lanes, or aiming a gun with iron-sights ingame.
Knowledge-based behaviors is conscious-level thought and used to problem solve. They are slow and taxing but are used to learn new behaviors.

In relation to my project, it seems from observations that skill-based behaviors should not be spatially-based as these require much practice and are difficult for new players. I noticed a female friend of mine having trouble with the platform movement in Braid (skill-based), but had no problem with the selection and placement skills required in Plants vs. Zombies. She excelled at the rule-based level of choosing and placing good plants, and also at the knowledge-based level of learning and ranking the contextual use of each plant's attributes. A computer requires good mouse use, so all users already have this skill and it would be a benefit to bring that into a game to lessen the learning curve.

How puzzeling..

I was given this puzzle recently. The object is to take the pieces apart, and put them back together again. Simple? Well it turns out the pieces only fit together in one direction (the slots are angled), and each piece fits into any other, some fit better than others. The first thing I think when playing with these puzzles is about their physical nature. Can I break it if I'm not careful? What if this was incorrectly manufactured and doesn't actually work? That last one was on my mind the whole time while solving it, and proved to be my weakness. While some fit better than others, it is intentional rather than a mistake.

There seems to be a major, and a minor difficulty in this puzzle. The major is that the slots only fit one direction. This is a base of the puzzle - how do they fit together? In which order?
This by itself would lead to a good puzzle, but then there's the extra layer added - the minor difficulty of having some fit better than others. While playing with it, it is hard to tell if it is just a manufacturing problem.
But having solved it, I realise it is not. It creates a solution that can only be solved with the pieces in a certain order - made even more difficult in that none of the pieces are uniquely marked (save for the copy-write mark on one)

It is a good puzzle, the major difficulty is a good one, while the minor is a basic way to make it harder - I would say that the minor difficulty seems like a cheap shot, except that it creates all sorts of solving problems that make the puzzle more intriguing. Why does it fit this way? Is it a trick? Did I miss something? It's magic!
I must also add the physicality of it is beautiful, it feels like knocklebones - and makes the same sound when it pieces. It's just nice to hold even - giving it use even after it has been solved.

Water rendering project

While not strictly game related, here's a project I worked on recently.

NZ Herald : Violent video games are 'a learning tool'

An article on video games. link

• On FPS: "People that play these fast-paced games have better vision, better attention and better cognition," said Daphne Bavelier.

• "People do learn from games," said J. Dexter Fletcher of the Institute for Defence Analyses.

• President Barack Obama recently identified the creation of good educational software as one of the "grand challenges for American innovation,"

• He added that students who played "pro-social" games that promote cooperation were more likely than others to help out in real-life situations like intervening when someone is being harassed.

• Opposition: "You are not just passively watching Scarface blow away people," McKiernan said. "You are actually participating. Doing these things over and over again is going to have an effect."

It's great that there is recognition of the validity of video games as teaching tools, but the study presented focuses solely on popular video games that portray violence. The teaching from these games are things like "better vision" and "better attention". I personally find all the video games I've played (many of them FPS) very helpful while driving a car or being around cars (skills applicable: Attention, peripheral vision, spatial awareness, trajectory prediction). But besides that, the games listed offer little else. "Shallow" as many game designers have described them as.

Firstly to address the issue at hand, sensible parental decisions, and everything in moderation. Simply: do not give R18 games to children, and do not play games (or any one type of game) too much. Solved.

I want more (quantity and quality) meaningful games.

The Game of Life

Another board game I found in a closet. The box tells me it's A Milton Bradley game from 1960,;Ages 9+; "Key to Fun and learning". I've heard much of this game and always wanted to have a game of it.

It's a simple roll-the-die-and-follow-the-path game. The premise is about going through life and the unexpected things that occur. The player earns money by chance as they progress, but also can loose it by chance. Realistically, there's not all that much choice in the game. 'Fate' is the decider of victory. However there are points in which a player are able to purchase insurance if they decide to (on their first turn everyone is given this chance). I decided not to, and quickly regretted not trading $500 for car insurance at the beginning when I landed on a square resulting in a $10,000 loss. Twice. Good lessons to be learnt about insurance here.
The Game of Life is all about money, suggesting that life is all about money. Landing on a square that tells me I've discovered uranium deposits and $100,000 feels damned good. As you can see, winners end up in the Millionaire Acres while losers end up at the Poor Farm. Right there is one of those mental models I've been thinking about.
Children is another interesting thing in this game too, you'll notice the pins in the cars. They represent children that you pick up on the way. Without the rules, I can only assume the victory condition rewards for children, as it seems no squares seem to mention anything else.

Gamasutra article on morality on games

Ethics 101: Designing Morality in Games

"I think gamers get tired of doing the same thing over and over," says Pagliarulo. "We've slain dragons, beat up super villains, and shot at space marines over and over again. There's a level of burnout there. So when you throw in something like a morality system, it forces the player to stop running on autopilot, and think about their actions a bit more carefully. 'Shooting the bad guy' becomes 'shooting the guy who may or may not be bad,' and that in itself adds a unique twist to the gameplay.

Bloggin' about a blog: Game experience as foundation for knowledge

I wouldn't normally put some random blogger's opinion here, but this has a great point:

TomorrowToday

 This post-modern world is one where traditional views are challenged and authoritative statements are doubted.
Why should I believe you? Who says you are right?
It is in a world like this one where a social constructivist approach becomes critical. An approach where people develop their own meaning from experiences and from interacting with each other. Using experiences. Based on relationships.

 It's the postmodern way to oppose constructed messages for the public (as Roland Barthes would say), simply because we distrust them - without considering the plausibility of the information. Games reveal the true nature of themselves. Through the experience, tests, trails, experiments, players learn what the game is about and its true nature themselves. This practical way is a good example of the power of communication that games posses.