Butterfly Garden

Top Down Resource Gathering Game

Butterfly Garden prototype can be played at: www.josephclaymiller.com/shelf/butterfly.swf

Important note: Flash Player is needed to play this game: (http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer)

Alternate Directions in User Interface
The top down view makes it difficult show depth.  I wondered if I might get a more picturesque feel to the game by using a different view and bitmap images.  Below is a screenshot of that prototype

Side Scrolling Resource Gathering Game

The conclusion I came to was that an isometric view might be best for this game.

The UI is also lacking a health bar indicating the avatar's health which would decrease with time and refill when the player collected food.

Directions in Design

The game would start the player off as an egg from which the player would hatch as a caterpillar and begin collecting the resources available to it. The player's choice of resources to gather would determine which attributes their avatar could unlock in the adult butterfly stage.  As a butterfly, the player can lay eggs which act as save points for the attributes the butterfly has collected.  If the player dies, they can re spawn at an egg they have laid.

Pros and Cons of free browser based MMORPGs

Cons

Spyware

Many free browser based MMORPG can actually be spy-ware.

Plug Ins

Many browser based MMORPGs required you first download a plug-in to play. This is fine if you have your own computer, but if you are using a public computer, you may not be able to download the necessary plug in.

Betas

Many of the free browser based MMORPGs are just betas, and after the beta closes, the only way to play is to pay.

Cyber Attack

Browser based MMORPG are vunerable to cyber attacks. I found Free Realms, hosted by Sony Online Entertainment, had fallen victim to cyber attack and had shut down when I attempted to play.

Pros

MMORPGs are a fun way to play online with other people. A game that worked for me was zOMG! It was cute and you could start playing without giving away your personal information such as your name and e-mail first.  However if you did not provide this you could not customize your avatar.

Design Practice QUESTIONS

1. How do you plan to deal with the issue of new players arriving in the middle of a long game? Get rid of the victory condition, or find a way to make sure that players are matched with those of similar ability?

New players can come in at any time.  There is no victory condition, the play is all expressive. Players don't directly compete with each other, but can make changes in the environment that other players can see.  The new players arriving continually change the environment for all players to enjoy.  There is no game mechanic for killing or stealing from other players.

2. What will happen to the game play when a player vanishes? How will it affect the other players’ experience of the game (what they see and hear)? Does it disrupt the balance of the game? Will it make the challenges easier or harder? Is the game even meaningful anymore?

The player avatar would vanish if the player leaves the game. The game continually saves its state so changes the player has made in the environment persist. The game also continually saves the player' character's attributes and possessions, so they will be available the next time the player logs in.

3. What happens to the game’s score when a player vanishes? Is the game still fair?

The player's score would be stored on the players computer and is persistent for that player on that computer.

4. Does your game offer a player an advantage of some kind for intentionally disconnecting himself (whether by preventing himself from losing or by sealing his own victory)? Is there any way to minimize this without penalizing players who are disconnected accidentally?

The advantage to intentionally disconnecting oneself would be to avoid the penalty of death. This would require disconnecting when an enemy was near before the enemy reaches the character. When the player logs back on, the enemy would probably be gone. This advantage is minimized by adding safe spots where a player can leave their character at any time to avoid getting killed, necessitating the need to leave the game.

5. In a turn-based game, what mechanism will you use to prevent a player from stalling play for the other players? Set a time limit? Allow simultaneous turns? Implement a reasonable default if the player does nothing?

Players would not be able to interfere with other players, all the players turns would be simultaneous.

6. If you offer a chat mechanism, what features will you implement to keep it civil? Filters? A complaint system? An ignore system? Or will your game require moderated chat spaces?

Profanity filters and a game admin to monitor the chat room would cut down on the inappropriate chat. Players would also be able to block other players chat.

7. Is your game designed to prevent (or alleviate) collusion? Because you can’t prevent players from talking to each other on the phone as they play, how will you address this? Or can you design your game in such a way that collusion is part of the gameplay, as in "Diplomacy"?

Players would each interact in the game space in their own way and any interaction between players would not hinder the play of other players since there is no direct competition.

Sexism of Video Games

Sexism has been predominant in video games for as long as characters and violence have been a part of video games.  The earliest games were too restricted in pixels to develop the avatar into a real character. The player controlled a dot on the screen directly, or indirectly with a joystick and buttons. This type of avatar was generic and void of sexism. When the arcade game Pong was released it was popular among all genders.

As technology progressed, games were able to incorporate more detail.  Game avatars morphed from primitive shapes to gendered characters, thus beginning the long history of sexism in video games.  The new character avatars such as Mario and Pac-Man were all male. Only on occasion would the avatar be female, such as in the sequel to Pac-Man which featured Ms. Pac-Man. Most of the female characters were like Princess Peach; a prize for the avatar character for defeating the evil character. The inability to play the female character gendered video games towards men.

As the graphics in video games continued to improve the focus of video games shifted more towards characters and story.  Unfortunately the player characters remained male, and their stories continued to revolve around violence. An poignant example of sexism in video games is the grand theft auto series. The player's character is male and has the ability to kill any other character in the game.  There are prostitutes in game, all of which are female. One mechanic of the game is the ability of the player character to solicit these women on the street, have them enter the car and replenish the player character's health for money. This mechanics combined with the predominant killing mechanic favored a rape strategy many players would employ to raise their health without losing money: The player would drive to a secluded alley where they wouldn't be seen by other characters, and then when the woman left the car after raising the players health all the way, the player would beat them and take back the money they had just paid for that service and anything else the woman had on her.

Video game have been and continue to be marketed predominantly to males. Games and advertisements for these games are targeted so heavily towards 18-35 year old men, they alienate female players. One recent advertisement on TV for a new First Person Shooter did not show clips from their game in the advertisement, instead they showed clips of woman after woman being appalled at the game they were selling and suggesting it was too violent, too vulgar, and not at all appropriate for anyone.  A spokesman concluded the advertisement claiming the game was not for your mother, but you would love it.  The attitude the advertisement conveys is that men and women like different things, and what they are selling is everything men like that women don't.  This blatant disregard for female preferences in entertainment discourages many women from playing video games at all.

A more famous example of sexism in video games perhaps, was the release of Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball in 2003. The game did not feature any of the fighting that the series is know for.  Instead, it was a series of mini-games featuring the female characters from the series wearing only bikinis.  These bikinis could be upgraded with money to be more revealing.  The goal was to form a team and compete in the volleyball competitions.  In the place of a fighting engine, they had a physics engine to calculate the bounce of the breasts of the characters as they jumped up and down on the beach playing volleyball.  The game artists used more polygons in the creation of these characters breasts than technology had been previously capable of, ensuring their characters had the roundest boobs in all video games to date, and a complex physics engine to jiggle them perfectly.

With the rise of casual gaming on the internet, things are starting to change. Game producers are realizing the potential market of non-core gamers and developers are producing games for women.  Many women are making an impact as game developers and producers in the male dominated industry, but the industry continues to be overwhelmingly male dominated and marketing their games mostly towards male gamers.  This is because of the sexism in our sociey and the gender wage gap.  Men have more money to spend, so games are marketed towards men.

Game Map RPG Persidio

Interactive Map

The map is of the Persidio for an RPG scenario where the military base has been privatized, and it is your job to manage the resources of the Persidio, rent out the buildings, run busses and other services for the new inhabitants.