Art 380: History and Theory of Games

Neal McDonald mcdo@umbc.edu

Seventh Lecture

Schedule

1.  Test 2.  Chess 3.  Word Fu 4.  Chapter 8

Test

•  Not this week! •  On Wednesday, Oct 2 – 9 days from now. •  20% of your grade •  Mostly short-answer •  If it’s in the notes, it could be on there!

•  More next time. •  Post-Mortems: Bioshock and Word Fu

Sinistar •  Noah Falstein and John Newcomer, 1982 •  youtube.com/watch?v=xcyBtVwAsfg •  Advance in use of digitized sound

Q*Bert •  Warren Davis (shown) and Jeff Lee, 1981 •  for Gottlieb, another former pinball

machine maker •  youtube.com/watch?v=karPYs22ACc

Dig-Dug

•  Unknowns at Namco, 1982 •  youtube.com/watch?v=7no4Kilk5BY

Ms Pac-Man

•  “Programmers at the General Computer Corporation”, 1982

•  Doug McCrae, Kevin Curran, .. ? •  Made “Crazy Otto,” showed it to Midway,

who changed the sprites and renamed it Ms. Pac-Man –  long, long legal... squinting – but Pac-Man II didn’t work, so Namco let them

ship with licensing.

Dragon’s Lair

•  Rick Dyer, 1983, for Cinematronics •  Don Bluth, animations •  Combined “Laserdisc” with CPU

– mean 650 hours per laser– about a year – http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=znO_m00s8II •  “Space Ace” used the same team, tech •  As a game? Just an awful game •  Standard 80’s/50’s sexist tropes

others

•  Okay, now we have a body of work to discuss –  lets get back to game studies

Legal Issues •  Unless you pay $200-$2000 for each arcade machine, or buy

officially licensed copies of these games, for EACH AND EVERY PLATFORM on which you play the games, you are STEALING from the faceless multinational billionaire corporations who bought or otherwise somehow acquired these games from the faceless multinational corporations who bought or otherwise somehow acquired the games from the electronics hardware factory owners who paid the authors of these world-famous games (most of whom have been unable to stay in the industry for financial reasons, and whose names are still not included in the packaging for some reason) 3 or 4 months of their factory-worker scale wages FAIR and SQUARE in exchange for all the rights to these games ten years before you were born!

•  According to how these multinationals define stealing. •  And stealing is EVIL! Totally evil. Really, super freakin’ naughty. •  Sort of.

Chess

History

•  Many false claims about Greeks, Russians, Charlemagne playing chess in the stone age-- no.

•  My history of Chess is from Richard Eales’s Chess: The History of a Game

Cultural Importance

•  Chess was everywhere in Europe by 1150

•  A class signifier – one of many!

•  Chess was for snobs when painting was interior decor.

History of Chess

•  Antecedent game, Chaturanga, comes from India – Chaturanga is lost –  It is mentioned 4 times in all pre-1000AD

Indian literature –  "Indian Chess", with 4 players and dice

History of Chess

•  The first recorded games are from the Court in Baghdad of the Abassid Caliphs-- ~800 AD

•  These are known only from 12th-century manuscripts.

•  There are statements about earlier games, among Arab kings, but they seem to be fictional.

History of Chess

•  We don't know where it comes from, but it's either India or Persia, probably India.

•  Probably ~600AD •  By 750AD, it had spread throughout the

Muslim world •  Around 1000AD, it goes to Europe •  Piece names come from Arabic.

A transformation!

•  Before 800, Chess/Chaturanga is a standard war game, similar to checkers. –  remember all the standard moves?

•  ~800, the Caliphate’s Courts start to study it, recording games and publishing analysis.

•  This activity transformed Chess from a fussy Indian board game into what it is.

Continuing history

•  Invention of new attacks, new strategies, is ongoing.

•  Part of mastery is knowledge of classic games.

•  Chess masters of today play better than those of the past.

Levels of Chess Mastery

1.  Know how the pieces move 2.  Know the scoring system & phases of

play 3.  Know strategy fundamentals 4.  Play 50 games

Guess what? You are going to learn Chess now

–  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_chess

–  Buddy up with someone who does not know chess –  There is a Flash chessboard online

•  userpages.umbc.edu/~mcdo/boards/chess/index.html

An incomplete description

•  A board game for two players •  Played slowly, and once you touch a

piece, you must move it •  No take-backs! •  Capture an opponent’s marker by moving

to that marker’s spot •  Goal: capture your opponent’s king

Chess Equipment •  an 8x8 checkerboard, note the numbers

and letters •  for each player: one king, one queen, two

knights, bishops and rooks, and 8 pawns

Players take turns moving

Knight’s moves

•  Knights may jump over other pieces

En passant

•  Extremely rare pawn captures •  Only on pawns, only on the next move. •  Pawns reaching the other side may be

traded for any other piece.

Concept: Check!

•  When the king is threatened, if the threat cannot be blocked in the next move, the king is lost and the game is over

•  When you threaten the king, you say “check”

•  When you’re sure that the king cannot be saved, you say “checkmate”

Castling

•  Move the king two spaces left or right, move the rook to the other side.

•  Neither may have moved before, and the king may not be in check.

Scoring in Chess

Piece Points

King -

Queen 9

Rook 5

Knight 3

Bishop 3

Pawn 1

Concept: Blocking

•  only the knight can jump over other pieces •  here, the queen’s threat to the king is

blocked by the pawn.

Concept: Protection

•  Here, if black takes the pawn with his queen, white will take the queen on the next move!

•  Queen is worth 9, pawn is worth 1

•  Black won’t do that •  White has protected the

pawn

Concept: the Pin

•  Threats change when pieces are moved

•  A piece that can’t be moved is said to be pinned

•  If white moves the pawn, it puts the king in check; the pawn can’t be moved.

Concept: the Fork

•  Like a pin, but not in one line •  Black moves the queen– check! •  But it also threatens the rook •  White has to move the king; the rook is

lost.

Those crazy knights!

•  Knights can’t be blocked, but pieces can be protected from them

•  Here, they were not.

Concept: Pile o’ Pawn

•  The one in front is protected by the two on each side.

•  And they’re protected by the next ones back.

•  Getting through is a bloodbath, and disadvantageous.

Basic Strategy

•  Maximize your score throughout •  The game has 3 phases

– Opening game-- getting untangled from the pawns

– Middle game-- exchange of pieces, fight for control of the middle 4 squares

– End game-- few pieces left, try not to stalemate, try to promote a pawn

Concept: Initiative

•  You are either thinking about what to do next, or you are responding to what was just done –  If you are driving the game, you have the

initiative – A move can both respond and demand a

response

Initiative

•  On the left, white moved to take the knight. •  On the right, white now must move the

king.

Subject

•  Say you and your opponent are contesting control over a space

•  You could change the subject: when it’s your turn, attack something else!

•  Use the initiative to keep the game’s focus on the subject of your choosing.

Concept: Openings

•  A collection of moves used at the beginning of a game.

•  Here, the “English” opening.

•  Get the knights busy right away

•  Move pawns to open up bishops.

Concept: the Center

•  The center 4 squares are important; they’re hard to go around.

•  Moving a piece twice to go around loses the initiative!

•  Control the center!

A Thing to Avoid!

•  “I dunno, I guess I’ll move that pawn.”

•  Initiative lost •  Disrupts pawn pile •  Protecting pawns with

rooks? No. •  This is a failure to

make a plan.

Postmortem– WordFu

•  WordFu, an iPhone game •  you roll dice to get a set of letters with

which to make words •  comparable to Boggle (Alan Turoff/

Hasbro), but you can reroll individual dice

small game, small project

•  3-developer teams •  mostly 2D art, no levels, animations were

physics-based – no animating, no data pipeline – much easier

•  Demiurge Studios – made a level for Bioshock – consulted for or contributed to many AAA

games

their business models

•  work for larger studios to help with specific aspects of a large project –  lets the company be smaller – makes jobs smaller; more controllable

crunch? – no need to make a sale to a publisher

•  income is project-based, brief, uncertain

a new business model!

•  ngmoco is an App “publisher” – ngmoco doesn’t control the means of

production: Apple does – ngmoco funds production and takes care of

publicity •  Many games; frequent updates •  Publicity is important!

– Sales revenue goes through ngmoco. – They are the boss.

Art pipelines

•  Artist: you can make Maya files, or JPG’s, or whatever.

•  Usually, the game wants something else.

•  The steps you have to go through to convert data from a standard format to one your game likes is a “content pipeline”

Content Pipeline Example

•  The project is a iPhone dice game. •  Assets: textures, sounds •  Some textures are for menu buttons

– Use Interface Builder to apply textures to buttons

– Resolutions and treatments must harmonize •  Some textures are for dice •  You must rebuild the project to see the

everything working together.

Many updates

•  Demanded by a “publisher”– ngmoco – not Apple! – ngmoco “publishes” iPhone apps – helps with publicity, helps with salaries?

•  App Store makes this easy •  “Feature Creep”

– Adding features not in the original plan – Makes a mess of your software design

App updates

•  An App usually does not last very long – Average is 2 weeks– every two weeks, your

user base is cut in half – Word of mouth is cut in the same way!

•  Unless!! there is new content, or new capabilities

App marketing evolution •  First: apps were $100; quickly fell to $1 •  Then, free but with ads

– everyone hated that; it lasted two months •  Now: “Free To Play”

– Give away the app, and sell “bonus content” – Better weapons, new levels.

•  FTP, well-implemented, lets you add new content regularly.

“Feature Creep”

•  If someone adds features to your program after everything is designed/implemented, they are inflicting “feature creep” on your project.

•  Engineers hate it! –  It is the way now.

•  What they’re calling “feature creep” was crucial to the game’s success

Artists: did you notice?

•  “With four different artists having worked on the project, maintaining a consistent style was a challenge.”

•  Being a competent artist means being able to duplicate another artist’s style.

Localization

•  Most games ship to many countries •  Differ by

– Language •  change menu text •  change spoken dialog •  change lip-sync?

– Law •  no Nazis in Germany

– Standards of decency •  no red blood in Germany

Localization with IB

•  Interface Builder is Apple’s UI kit •  It lets you put labels on buttons

– But you have to use their fonts •  Or, you can use image files •  WordFu used images

– but this greatly added to project complexity

This was several years ago

•  The App Store’s “updates” functionality is much less prominent

•  App store looks more like the rest of the market now. – Use of expensive features to differentiate – Payola analogues

•  Other business models: free-to-play looms

For next time

•  Chapters 8&9