coin

There’s no such thing as a portable console

by Federico Fasce on 24 May 2011

Gameboy

Well, the iPhone, maybe. But I’m not sure.

The point is, when I was a high school student, I bought a Gameboy. Yep, the original one. Big, warm grey plastic, crappy screen. And yet I was constantly mocking friends with Lynx or GameGear. Actually, I got a GameGear myself, so I was the subject of my own mockery. The other consoles were boasting those full color backlit LCD Screen, and their batteries lasted for about fifteen minutes. You couldn’t even finish a game of Sonic and it was over. Unless have brought with you this huge power adapter and finding a power outlet, of course. Which was pretty difficult on the bus, you know. Gameboy batteries, on the contrary, lasted thirty hours. Plus, Tetris, one of the most addictive game ever, was included with the console. A lot of games were fast and immediately fun, perfect for the small gaming sessions which happen on the road. It makes a lot of sense. I brought my Gameboy everywhere, and it was just perfect, despite being so clunky.

Fast forward to the next-gen era. The handheld market is pretty dynamic. Nintendo alone released four versions of its DS franchise, plus the new 3DS. Sony is trying to put PS games on their phones, has the PSP and the Go (a big failure, but still) let alone the incoming NGP. None of these are really hand-held consoles.

Sony tried to bring the home console entertainment to the hand-held world. Pretty good if you travel a lot, during long trips, or when in hotel with nothing to do. But terrible, really terrible for short burst of gaming.

Nintendo DS, however, has a more Gameboy-like approach. A lot of games are quite playable in the space of a bus ride, but unfortunately the touch screen and the stylus are not that compatible with a crowded and bumpy ride through the town (have you ever tried to draw a line while on the bus? Then you know what I mean). 3DS is even worse: the 3D screen only works if you stand quite still, since even the slight movement can make you lose the effect. And the batteries? 3 hours, which for sure are not the Game Gear’s fifteen minutes, but still force you to bring a power cord pretty much wherever you go.

Mobile phones are only slightly better: when I play games on my iPhone I drastically reduce the life of my battery, and you don’t want to drain it too much, since that is your phone also.

So, basically, I feel the need of a true handheld console. Too bad my old Gameboy died a while ago.

0 comments

A matter of language

by Federico Fasce on 2 May 2011

Gonzalo Frasca's September 12

When speaking about serious games and stuff a lot of people come out with the objection “shouldn’t a game be fun? What’s the point in making it serious?”. The problem here is always the same. Almost ten years have passed since the first instance of the brilliant Greg Costikyan’s piece “I have no word and I must design”, but we still lack a shared vocabulary to even understand ourselves. It’s obvious: can you define fun?

Probably my Anglo-Saxon colleagues are luckier than us. Raph Koster wrote a great book trying (and I think managing) to define fun from a scientific point of view. Plus, the word fun lacks the hidden meaning the italian word – divertimento – has. This word bears evidently the concept of aversion and escapism (from latin di-vertere, to turn elsewhere).

But escapism is not exactly fun. Is not even the only motivation we have to play. As Koster puts it, is the inner neurobiological satisfaction we get when we decode a pattern, the aha moment when we solve some problem or we learn a skill, that is the zero-grade of fun. And that could be experienced even if the game is disturbing, controversial, or openly not a source of escapism.

So, when people argue “shouldn’t a game be fun?” I guess the only possible answer is that yes, it should. But fun is not escapism, and is not necessary for a game to make you evade from reality. That’s about it.

2 comments

Oh, noes.

by Federico Fasce on 1 May 2011

So, Sony fucked up. Big time. The personal data of millions of PSN users are now leaked. It’s still unclear what it’s the situation of their credit card numbers, though it seems a few people have had problems (but that could be just a coincidence) and there is a rumor about cc numbers lists being sold on the internet (and this could be a hoax). Meanwhile even the FBI is looking into the matter. PSN users are obviously concerned about their data and their credit cards, but Sony doesn’t seem to care so much. They just put up a not-so-reassuring post in their blog, and then emailed it to all the PSN subscribers. A week after the attack. Sure, they are now trying to promise that they will make up with their users, but the feeling from outside is that they don’t have a clue on how to deal with this disaster. Plus, they now appear as those not enough concerned with security and for sure they’re going to lose an awful lot of clients.

Today one of the most used hosting service in Italy, Aruba, went down, due to a fire in their server farm. Now Aruba us a low-cost service, probably aimed to the prosumer rather than to a professional firm. And yet I was surprised to see even important Italian websites go down with them. Sure, a fire is an unpredictable event. But come on, no redundancy at all?

I guess security is going to be the next buzzword. Finally.

0 comments

Still here

by Federico Fasce on 27 April 2011

Lunarcade

Well, I guess this post should have been written, at some point. I’m being horribly discontinuous in keeping this blog, but I really need to make it running. That said, it’s a pretty busy time of my life. Plus, I’m now officially the IGDA Italian chapter leader, and I really want to keep this thing running the best way I can.

Recently I have been at Lunarcade event in Milan, met a lot of cool guys and jammed for two crazy days. These kind of events are exactly what Italian game dev community needs. Too bad there wasn’t so many people attending, but I guess this could change just doing more events. That’s why I hope I could help the great guys at Santa Ragione with their project.

The good news is that Italian indie scene is alive and kicking. We need just a little more commitment.

0 comments

Declaration of Independence

by Federico Fasce on 6 February 2011

Post image for Declaration of Independence

Dan Cook has this great post about game design. I’m always arguing with people stating that game design is worth nothing, because to make a good game just a programmer is enough. You don’t need a game designer. But that simply ain’t true. Games exist as long as mankind. And people made games just with what they have. Some of them, like Tenet or the Mancala family are still played these days. Game design is not about technology. It’s about making games. Simple as that.

0 comments

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →