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A numerical history, and future, of flOw dev That Game Company
On the first floor of Moscone's North hall last Friday, flOw developer That Game Company presented their storied origins. Co-founders Jenova Chen, who took a brief recess from the company to help on the DS version of Will Wright's Spore, and Kellee Santiago, met at the University of Southern California. "I don't see [video games] as being any different [than other interactive media], it's all story telling," Santiago said. Chen, who affirms that his proudest work is flOw and Cloud, explained their place in gaming with an ever-popular culinary allegory. Think of Gears of War as steak and World of Warcraft as chicken. Let's give lettuce a relation to Nintendogs and fish can be Brain Age. "Let's say you focus on chicken, but somehow you find a way to make it accessible and customizable," said Chen. The according Power Point slide shows the chicken transition into a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. "That also expands the audience or customers. How can you make existing games more accessible to wider audiences?" Does that mean flOw is a bowl of cereal? All we know now is that we're quite famished.
A better way to die?
Blogger Tuebit over at WorldIV riffs on a great thread going on at the MMO Round Table forum. The central question: how to handle death in massively multiplayer games? Using Tolkien's universe as a template, Tuebit argues that death should come rarely (if at all). Maybe. The discussion feels too narrow. Have ludologists compiled a comprehensive list of all of the different ways that a player can die (or be set back) in video games (and RPGs in particular)? Has consensus emerged on the best and worst ways to punish player mistakes? With the 60th anniversary of the invention of video games approaching, isn't it just a little bit embarrassing that many of today's most commercially successful games use such rudimentary "death" mechanisms to communicate failure? [Image source]
Picture it: top secret game design manual found in dumpster outside big game publisher's HQ
A: Lara Croft Tomb Raider B: Ridge Racer C: Auto Assault D: $mad profit$
