Blips: A Zap of Nostalgia

Source: Gaming's Greatest Forgotten Technical Innovation
Author: Joel Boyce
Site: Unwinnable

This video of NES/Famicom title screens combined with Joel Boyce's explanation of the technology behind the NES Zapper over on Unwinnable, have set me upon a strong nostalgia trip. While that video is certainly cool, understanding how the Zapper works is kind of incredible. If you're unfamiliar with the Zapper, it's a gun peripheral for the NES, most notably used with the game Duck Hunt, wherein you shoot ducks and a maniacal dog retrieves them. The Zapper simply plugs into the NES and you aim it at the targets on screen an pull the trigger to use it; no sensor bars or motion controls or accelerometers present.

I remember playing Duck Hunt as a kid and being filled with an unanswered curiosity about how the Zapper functions. The most common misconception was that it used some kind of laser targeting; it was called a "light gun" after all. Boyce's explanation is much simpler though, but perhaps more impressive for its simplicity. The Zapper contains a directional light sensor, and when you pull the trigger, the screen flashes black and then a white box flashes wherever the targets are positioned. The light sensor understands high fluctuations in a light reading as a hit. If you're not aimed at the target, the sensors won't pick up the white box, meaning it won't see the light fluctuation necessary to register a hit.

It all seems so simple now, but for a device that has multiple decades on the motion control fad, it deserves recognition for its forward-thinking technological achievements.

Blips: Photographic Memory

Source: The Great and Secret Gaming Photographer
Author: Evan Amos
Site: Unwinnable

You're probably familiar with Evan Amos' photography, but you're probably never heard his name before. Amos' current passion project is documenting video game hardware with clean, high resolution images, and making them publicly accessible and royalty-free. He's already taken quite a few pictures and uploaded them to Wikimedia's database, replacing the small, low-quality images that were there before. Because of their immaculate quality and the ease of access to them, Amos' images show up everywhere. I myself used them when I was putting images together to make joking comparisons between consoles and characters from Game of Thrones. Amos' photos are hands-down the best images of video game hardware available online, and the exciting news is that he's looking to expand his collection.

I'm not in the habit of promoting Kickstarter projects, but this one is different; it's educational. Amos is documenting historical objects and releasing his work for free, and he's even donating all of the consoles he buys to NYU's Game Center after he's finished taking pictures of them. At a time when video game companies themselves seem to be dismissing their own past when it comes to preservation, it's great to see someone stepping up to tackle at least one archival aspect of gaming history. My only regret is that I didn't know about this Kickstarter before I used Amos' photos, otherwise all the people who saw that post would have known about the story behind the pictures. Even if you don't want to donate to the project, it's worth knowing that someone has taken up this task. Kudos to you, Evan Amos, and best of luck!

Blips: Speak Up

Source: Nathan Drake talks too much
Author: Brian Taylor
Site: Unwinnable

In a new piece for Unwinnable, Brian Taylor talks about the silent protagonist, and the misguided thinking behind its continued implementation in video games. He frames the silent protagonist through its most easily recognizable pop culture figure: the silent cowboy. The silent cowboy, as we remember him today, is a character born out of cinema that says more with a cold stare or a squint that he ever could with words. Of course the social context of wartime and post-war cinema was using the silent cowboy to reinforce societal norms with regard to masculinity, which makes carrying over silent protagonists into video games ironically appropriate, given how they've largely been implemented.

The conceit of the silent protagonist is supposedly that it allows the player to immerse themselves in the character, making them their own, but Taylor rightly calls BS on this. It's a theory that has since been disproved, except in cases where full customization is at your disposal. I love the analogy of games with silent protagonists as puppet shows: you don't become the characters, you just pull the strings of puppets that have no personality built into them.

The only reason I might prefer silent protagonists is when I don't have confidence in the writing ability of the game development team. However, now that more devs seem to be hiring dedicated writers and including them as part of the process early on, let's allow them to write dynamic characters instead of forcing them to write around archaic conventions.

Blips: Distant Boundaries

Source: Far Lands
Author: Timothy Hughes
Site: Unwinnable

Timothy Hughes' first piece for Unwinnable is a fascinating examination of the physical boundaries of virtual worlds, particularly focused on Minecraft's Far Lands. As someone who's never really touched Minecraft, but enjoys hearing the stories about all the crazy stuff that happens there, the Far Lands might be my new favorite. Basically, the world of Minecraft is procedurally generated as you move around the environment, making the horizon ostensibly infinite. Apparently there is a hard limitation of around 7 times the surface of the Earth, which is, well, stupid huge. Anyway, the Far Lands supposedly exist a 35-day walk from a given spawn point, and are an area where the game's code becomes unstable and visually glitchy. As someone who really appreciates a good glitch, I'm way into this.

For the rest of the article, Hughes talks about the outer reaches of games and why so many people set out to find them. I'm totally guilty of this too having walked out to sea in Proteus, and scoured the far corners of Xenoblade Chronicles' gigantic world. As Hughes lists, there are a number of different reasons for doing this, but where he sees a childlike petulance to go against the games rules, I see play and the game's code placing restrictions on what kind of play is acceptable. Not that all developers should build infinite landscapes for their games, but whether a world continues on forever, builds in a natural barrier, or puts up an invisible wall will change the player's perception of that world differently. In all cases, the discovery of physical barriers in games is disappointing to players. They thought they could do something a moment before, and then the game authoritatively says "no." I think it's worth it to make the collateral damage of that discovery as minimal as possible.

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Blips: No Need

Source: It's a Little Bit Sad
Author: Jordan Mammo
Site: Unwinnable

In his recent post for Unwinnable, Jordan Mammo wonders why we're on the verge of a new console generation when this year's E3 failed to provide any justification. I found myself thinking the same in the wake of both Microsoft and Sony's big press conference unveilings. Both companies trotted out the typical talking points about how their latest luxury devices would beget innovation, more dynamic gameplay, and, inexplicably, better storytelling. While Sony at least showed a range of games that seemed interesting, neither made a convincing argument for new hardware.

A comment on Mammo's post notes that E3 is always a bunch of ceo-speak and that the games shown at press conferences aren't necessarily evocative of the best games the console will offer. Beyond that, launch games have a reputation for underwhelming, focusing instead on proof of concepts for new ideas or simply updating existing models with a new coat of paint. This is all true, but it's also the job of companies at events like this to prove that their product is worth buying at launch. With the turbulent, unpredictable console market on the verge of a massive saturation point, that "the good games will come," doesn't feel like as much of a guarantee. I'd buy a PS4 before I got an Xbox One, but I really just hope that Sony's corral of indie games are also playable on PS3 since they don't seem to require the more advanced hardware.

Still, I would love to be surprised. I would love to be excited by a console launch, to feel like I'd be missing out to not have one. That's not the case right now, but hey, both companies still have a few months to convince me otherwise.

Blips: Shameless Plug

Source: Completely Hands-On
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Unwinnable

No one ever said I couldn't use this blog to promote my own work. Heck, that's pretty much what it's for anyway. So, I'd like to draw your attention to my first piece for Unwinnable, a look at the video game controllers installed as part of the Applied Design exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The controllers aren't the subject of the show, the games are, but the museum made some interesting curatorial decisions with the controllers in an attempt to amplify viewer focus on "interaction design."

The results are a bit experimental, but largely successful. MoMA strikes a balance between staying true to how you would expect the games to control and altering interfaces to meet the needs of the exhibition. Of course, if you want to full details, I'm just going to direct you to the link above. Don't worry, I'll return to talking about other people's work tomorrow.