Videogames With Less Brawn And More Brains By Lee Gomes Wall Street Journal
July 23, 2008; Page B6 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121675694354674571.html?mod=hps_us_inside_today If you knew computer games only from the likes of Grand Theft Auto IV, you'd have the wrong idea about them. Yes, there are grim armies of violent, soulless, but technically astounding games waiting to swallow you whole and spit you out a few weeks later, with only dead brain cells to show for the experience. But there also are lots of games out there that make you think, or at least, figure. Thanks to a global population of programmers who were playing Minesweeper almost before they were walking or talking, puzzle games are having a heyday as much as anything involving thuggish street life or zombie invasions. Puzzle games don't involve eye-hand coordination, much less the spilling of blood. Most have a small number of simple components, laid out in a progressively more vexing manner -- down a path, in fact, that can lead to madness. While they often have capable graphics, the essence of a puzzle game is a problem of logic that exists independent of anything visual. You can almost play some puzzle games with your eyes closed. Their descriptions never do them justice. Who would want to spend any time "connecting pairs of colored squares on three sides of a Rubik-like cube." But fire up 3D Logic and you marvel at how quickly it moves from the absurdly simple to the seemingly impossible. That game, and thousands of others, are available on free sites: ArmorGames.com, AddictingGames.com, NewGrounds.com, Kongregate.com, to name just a few of the growing number. Most of these sites are sensible enough to leave you alone to trudge along slowly from one game level to the next. Some, though, insist on inflicting on you annoying Web 2.0 features, such as social networks that allow you to see what games your "friends" are playing. The quotation marks are necessary because real friends -- true pals -- are much too polite ever to presume to ask how much time you've been wasting with Bloxorz. To appreciate the provenance of these games, meet Ozzie Mercado, a 22-year-old college student from East Bangor, Pa., a typical puzzlepreneur in that by his own admission he spends all day thinking about new games he can write. One cold day this past February, Mr. Mercado was walking through a doorway in his apartment, when suddenly he was gripped with the idea for a puzzle game involving ... doors! Not regular doors, of course, but puzzle doors; doors that open only in one direction, and that stand between you and the other end of a maze. The first thing he did was to do a Google search to make sure no one else had done something similar. Then, he spent a few hours working up a rough prototype. After that, he devoted two weeks to thinking up the 15 maze levels that would make up the game, getting friends to help sort them from easy to hard. Some of his best thinking, he says, was done sitting in class. Open Doors was released in March and has since been played nearly six million times, making it, as these things go, a modest hit. Game sites often give developers a small cut of the revenues the videogames bring in, and those, combined with some sponsorship arrangements, have meant a payday of $1,500 to date for Mr. Mercado. But the real payoff, he says, is that Open Doors has, well, opened doors at gaming companies. He's talking to some about a full-time job writing games, which in this world is about as good as it gets. It's better than what will happen to the vast majority of game developers -- i.e., nothing. Most of these games use a programming language called Flash, which is exceptionally easy to learn. Competitors, thus, appear out of nowhere. Hey, that could be a game! I called Mr. Mercado because I am a fan of Open Doors. I am also in the thrall of Hoshisaga (tinyurl.com/3944cq), which in Japanese means "Star Hunt" and which is also a good description of the game. Actually, Hoshisaga isn't so much a game as it is a series of variations on a game theme. You're presented with dozens of squares, each of which contains a hidden star. Sometimes, finding the star involves something as banal as clicking on the right part of the square. Other times, though, you practically need to figure out an entire system of physics. Most of the time, the actual unveiling of the star is a moment of remarkable beauty, the sort most Westerners would regard as distinctly Japanese. Enjoy the sequel, too, at tinyurl.com/2mtklw. I don't want to fall into the trap of romanticizing these puzzle games, or claiming that compared with, say, first-person shooters, they will make us better or smarter people. After all, at the end of two hours with Bloxorz, in which you move a domino along a path, you will have no more read a book, helped a homeless person, or learned to make puff pastry than if you had spent the same amount of time playing Doom. I just fret about the decline of civilization less when playing a puzzle game. Go ahead and try one. If your boss walks in and wants an explanation, just say you're following up on something you saw in The Wall Street Journal. ================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 antunes at uh dot edu ******************************* * POST TO [EMAIL PROTECTED] * ******************************* Medianews mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
