Personally I am a bigger fan of BMW than Volkswagon, but my girlfriend has a VW right now so I’m becoming comfortable with this car. I’m really happy with how it drives and the interior looks nice. In most cases I was able to find the controls and functions I needed when I needed them, but these are a few of the cases where things went awry.
The Sideview Mirror Adjustment
This little knob eluded me at first, but I found it after a moment. You turn it to choose between controlling the left or right mirrors. Pushing it up down left or right tilts the mirror like using a joystick.
What’s wrong with it
It looks like a knob, but is extra long so you can push it around like a joystick. This was lost on me at first since I’m used to either a 4 way arrow pad or a slender rod with a nub on the end like a joystick. Because of this I glazed over it a few times before realizing what it’s for. Also it is positioned on the door just above the lock and window controls which just ‘seemed’ too far away from the driver’s sideview mirror to be associated with it. Lastly, the label is a bit confusing, since it looks very similar to the rear window defrost. As for using the control, it feels more uncomfortable for it to be oriented perpendicular to the mirror the way it is on the door. It would feel better on the dash facing the driver so that the left/right/up/down directions are naturally mapped to the direction the mirror moves.
The Lock/Unlock Door Toggle
This is the one that really got me. I was going through a security checkpoint when I needed to exit the car and open all the doors so they could inspect it. I was borrowing the car and I had never used the toggle before. I usually use the lock/unlock buttons on the car key and only needed to use it at that moment since the car was still running. I wasn’t really panicked per-se, but I was rushing and it just didn’t occur to me that this was it. Once I got out, the security guard pointed the button out, and I immediately commenced feeling like an idiot.
What’s wrong with it
The conventional symbol of an open or closed padlock is completely natural to me now, and anything else almost seems silly. The funny part of it is that the buttons on the car key happen to use the padlock symbol! This makes me think that the key design is naturalized to America, while the door ajar and key symbol is from the original design. I could be wrong here but it seems like the only explanation.
The Vents
In the front you can open and close the vents with a dial right next to each one. It’s pretty obvious what this does, and I didn’t have any trouble using it at all.
What’s wrong with it
There are two symbols to indicate the state of the vent, a circle to represent the closed state and a picture of the front seat with an arrow pointing at the head to represent the open state. First of all, circles tend to represent an open state while a line or the letter “I” represent closed, so this label doesn’t make any sense. Secondly, the symbol of the seat with an arrow at the head seems a little out of place. Yes, the vent will blow air at my head, but could it ever blow at my feet? No, because it’s mounted near my head. I know because of the position where it’s going to point. I can see also that the symbol is a direct copy of the symbol on the A/C selector knob in the center of the console.
This control just seems like it was labeled terrible. In the end I can not call it a bad control. The control is so intuitively placed you don’t even need the labeling to know what it’s for or how to use it. Super high points for intuitive here, but then vent dials have been mostly the same for decades.
Some Physics: Water Prism
Review: The Saboteur
Go over and read my review for The Saboteur at GamersInfo.net. Author credit is listed as Full Sail Student. Be sure to check out all the great game reviews by Full Sail students like me!
If you have multiple levels of enumerated controls (ie. Repeaters, ListViews) that need to be databound to properties of a bound DataItem, use the below DataSource property on the nested control…
DataSource='<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "Tags")%>'
This can be required if you have some sort of hierarchical data. My example came up while loading article posts that contained a list of tags.
It took a while to finally pop in the disk for Mad World on the Nintendo Wii. I bought it off of Amazon for quite a steal, the price has dropped like a rock since it’s release.
So what do I hear after a few minutes of play in this title? A really familar voice! Hmmm. well I could tell right away that it sounded like the pod race announcer from Star wars: Episode I. So a few searches later I tracked it all down. The voice of both characters was played by none other than Greg Proops of the popular improv show ‘Who’s Line is it Anyway?”
It’s a small, mad world!
Two years ago I picked up the pre-acclaimed PC game, Spore. This was after downloading the sample Creature Creator, listening to over a year of evangelizing from Electronic Arts, and dealing with their intrusive DRM. When I finally inserted the disk and got my hands dirty, I was underwhelmed. As a long-time gamer, I could easily point out the product’s influences. In fact, I often felt my time could be better spent playing it’s inspiring works; flOw, World of Warcraft, Age of Empires and Civilization to name a few. It found it’s way into a box of loose disks where it sits as we speak.
Despite my experience, to hear Will Wright talk about his creation is quite an eye opener. Having grown up in a Montessori school, Will expresses a game development philosophy based loosely on the Montessori method. This approach unlocks the potential of the audience by providing them with ‘high-leverage tools’ to allow the player to be ‘building this world in their imagination and extract it from them with the least amount of pain’. He is presenting the game as a toy which the player can play with, and be empowered by.
Hearing his justification, I feel like I’m a little more connected to the game and I can experience it the way it was intended. He created a game that does not drive the player, but let’s the player drive themselves through curiosity. Moreover his use of the term ‘high-leverage’ tools is something I appreciate and agree with. The interface should be intuitive and empowering.
Still, I felt after a few days of playing that I was not engaged. Inversely to Spore’s ideal, other games may introduce a protagonist, or some relatable character that the player can empathize with. This is something the game lacks. Spore creates investment by allowing the player to personalize many, many details of the organisms they represent. But there’s always a level of separation provided by the ‘God’ complex granted by the game. Without a compelling goal paired with a sense of mortal investment, you’re left with the very feeling Mr. Wright was pursuing… the feeling of playing with a toy.
I can’t whole-heartedly condemn his philosophy, especially since I have an invigorated desire to play with Will Wright’s bright and well-intentioned toy once again. On the other hand, as a consumer I often seek an empathy and connectedness. To me, it is very important to give a game the staying power to live on in my memory, and I think this is the sort of thing that comes to mind for many gamers.
The Art of Launch Day
The defining moment of a first-party video game company is when their brand new system hits the shelves. Years of research go into developing a vessel of the hottest technology; a platform to drive half a decade or more of revenue.
It’s easy to look at a piece of hardware like the Sega Genesis and judge it as a sum of it’s parts, but far more decides the console’s validity in the market. This system in particular had a complete plan of attack devised by Sega to knock the incumbent game baron Nintendo out of the top spot. It had a two-pronged marketing strategy, obtain licenses with popular sports personalities and break down Nintendo in a slash campaign, painting the Genesis as the mature gaming system.
Morality comes into play when you look at Sega here, was it right for them to take such an aggressive position? There was some truth in Sega’s ‘mature’ platform, since Nintendo’s review process at the time really cracked down hard on mature content. However, big name sports licenses do not ensure good games. In fact, in recent years expensive licenses have been a detractor. This helped grow an audience for the system, but I question if the ends justified the means. The trend of celebrity-endorsed video games could be attributed to this moment and I don’t know if it is a good thing.
Thereafter the Genesis enjoyed a slow boom, and it is in no small part to negligence on the part of Nintendo. They never really took the Genesis seriously, and allowed Sega the room to correct another mistake they made with the system, create a killer app and a mascot that fans will love. In 1991 Sega released a game, and a personality, named Sonic the Hedgehog. To that point, Genesis’s stable of games had amounted to experimental titles, endorsed sports games and a select few arcade ports. But with that release, the Genesis had a face and a reason to buy the system.
The same year, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System hit the market with Super Mario World as a pack-in. So then did the brutal battle truly begin between Nintendo and Sega, but this is a battle that may never have been fought. Nintendo gave them a head start on the 16-bit market, and this afforded Sega a great many things. Genesis had a two-year head start, a 50-dollar difference in price, and a killer app that was still fresh from a release earlier that year by the time SNES saw light on store shelves. Objectively, I’m glad Nintendo dropped the ball, because it created a spirit of competition that birthed great games.
In 1980, Ralph Baer, inventor of the Magnavox Odyssey, birthed an invention to personalize video games – a camera that could shoot pictures of players’ faces, digitize them, and load the images into games. He thought that arcade manufacturers could place the camera in the marquee of their cabinets and paste player’s faces on characters in their games. The camera could also snap a photograph of a high-scoring player and post it next to his score.
- The Ultimate History of Video Games, Page 173
Amazing that such a concept was available before many of today’s gamers were even a twinkle in their daddy’s eye. Today we take for granted the ability to publish our accomplishments on our blogs via achievements and trophies. To link our high scores into our Facebook profiles and query top leaderboards from players across the world. Players can even be rewarded for their exploits, gaining prizes and recognition from the developers or special content for the games themselves.
Of course back in the 70s and 80s the most one could boast of is a three-digit set of initials emblazoned into the high-scores list of your favorite arcade machine. This lacked credibility as many people could have the same initial, and many machines dump their high scores when the machine is rebooted, erasing your achievement till you can return. The idea of the camera to immortalize players was fantastic, since while the high score might still be reset when unplugged, real concrete validation of your high score would be possible. Heck, random patrons of the local pizza joint might even recognize you on the street!
This did not come to pass though; the idea was tossed out after a single test run. The reason? Obvious, the second day of the test a high scoring player ‘flashed’ the camera. Done.
This issue still plagues modern games, as on many platforms players can use cameras to see other players or take their personal profile photos, with explicit content being a possibility in both. With time, the restrictions on such features have loosened up, allowing some lewd content. In other cases, the content must pass a review process before being ‘approved’ for the public. Had Baer added a feature to allow arcade owners to review the photos before being attached to their high score and released for the general public, this idea might have caught hold much sooner in the history of games. One thing Baer did not take into account; you can never underestimate the ability of players to find ways to abuse your technology. It is, in fact, a game of it’s own!
Where’s Your IP?
Securing your intellectual property is an important yet ambiguous aspect of being a fledgling creator. It’s hard enough developing your skills and finding inspiration, the last thing on your mind is making sure that you’ve meticulously filed away the legal rights to your own, barely existing creative notions.
In June of 1972, Nolan Bushnell founded the company which would come to be a household name, Atari. By September, he would begin marketing the game Pong. After a shockingly positive test run of the game in a local bar named Andy Capps’s Tavern, Nolan was ready to take the country by storm and begin mass producing the game. But being a free spirit, he ignored some of the finer points of securing his intellectual property… namely all of them.
The first speed-bump came immediately, when Atari was taken to court by Magnavox. Magnavox had created a gaming system for the home named Odyssey, which played a game extremely similar to Pong. The matter was settled out of court, and involved Atari paying a hefty license sum to keep Pong on it’s path to greatness. Part of this interaction could just be chalked up to an industry leader kicking a small start-up, but the facts came down to Magnavox’s attention to the ownership and patents surrounding their product. Bushnell, a driven and talented creator/entrepreneur, was focused more on the creating. In the time following the launch of the game, he overlook filing patents for Pong. By the time the patents were validated, over two-thirds of the market was saturated with Pong imitators.
Was Nolan well off? Yes. Was Atari a successful company despite the missteps? Absolutely. But Nolan was in a lucky position, the market was non-existent. While competitors could pirate his innovations, Atari’s ideas were a step ahead of the curve. They would have the next big idea in the works by the time the market was oversaturated with the last. This approach was effective for the time, and you could even say that the knockoffs were good to the industry, as it increased the visibility. Also, arcade machines were sold in an era of more personal communication, will sales representatives approaching reputable brick-and-mortar locations to sell their machines with a handshake.
In this time, of an established games industry however, it’s not advisable to go in so haphazardly. As you put effort into divining inspiration and honing your skills, you should research what you can do to protect your work. In the digital age where ‘page views’ and total downloads are valued, it’s easy to watch your bottom line disappear. A consumer can just as easily get your product from a competitor that is only a click away. Marketing your work to become the most prevalent and connected, and challenging imitators will keep your inspired creations attached to you and allow your passion and creativity to continue unhindered.