A Kinder, Gentler Approach to Item-Finds

There’s been a recent shift in the way developers approach games.  In the days of the arcades and the early consoles, gaming felt like a war against the developers.  They would make games as mind-numbingly, quarter-stealingly difficult as possible, and gamers would do their best to not cry.  This was a relatively simple way to make games.  Traditionally, developers had just increased the speed or difficulty of a game’s early levels, drastically limiting the actual amount of content that had to be coded.  This was fine when it was only 25 cents to play, but with the advent of pricey home consoles, this practice just wouldn’t fly.  As a result, developers had to start making more complex, content-rich games.  And thus was born the item-find.

GamerTraits™

Us gamers, we’re a sort of subculture, are we not? Sure, we may not have a distinct style, but after a long day (or if you’re lucky, this is your long day) we all flock to our platform of choice, and that right there is what groups us together. So, as any good anthropologist would tell you, if we are in fact a subculture, well, we should probably be classified further. Please, dear reader, don’t be afraid, it’s going to be much less scientific than it sounds. Hit the jump and take a look at ‘GamerTraits™: A Gamer Classification System.’

Open Letter to Video Game Journalists

Dear Video Game Journalists,

Enough is enough.  I need to kindly ask you to stop toying with my heart.

Over the years, we’ve had something of a love-hate relationship.  Mainly, you love to lie to me and I hate you for it.  You’ve broken my heart so many times and in so many ways, there’s not enough health kits or healing potions to put it back together again.  And yet I keep coming back.  Why?  Because I can’t quit you.

So we’re both clear, I want to explain to you exactly what it is that you’ve done to make me this broken shell of a man.  I want you to know just how deep you cut me.

Save the Gaming Magazines!

The word on the street is that print media is dying.  Supposedly newspapers are collapsing, popular periodicals are reducing content, and the specialty publication market has all but imploded. But if you walk through the magazine section of your local chain supermarket or bookstore everything looks more or less normal.  Most of the monthly knitting and fly fishing magazines are gone, but there’s still the same selection of bright pink covers featuring diet tips and sex secrets, lots of car mags, and a carload of oiled up guys promising better abs in just 6 weeks.  Look a little closer, though.  Go on…we’ll wait.  What did you find?  That’s right, virtually NO gaming magazines.  What’s going on?

Love is in the Virtual Air

February 14th. You know, Valentine’s Day. The one day a year when fighting couples suddenly fall in love again, and all decide there’s no better time to buy candy and flowers, go out to for a romantic dinner, and, erm. . . well, you get the point. And yes, it is in fact a terrible day for gaming. However, since we here at Fragmatica aren’t around to tell you whether or not you should be celebrating a holiday, we’ve decided to keep in the spirit of things and talk a little bit about something not often associated with video games. Yep, that’s right. Today, we’re going to discuss the role love has played in video games.

Industry Progression: Moving Beyond Good Graphics

Ok, I know this here is the interwebz, but let’s put our boycotts, petty complaints, and flamewars aside for a second and talk about something we can all agree on. We live in a completely awesome era for gaming, am I right? In just the last twenty or so years, we’ve seen graphic engines go from spitting out fuzzy 2D images to creating ‘wait-is-that-real-life?’ renderings that are the cause for some major jaw-dropping gaming moments. On top of that, we’ve also watched gameplay evolve immensely and the immersion factor shoot way up. If you’re not convinced these are good things, try wandering around fully realized worlds in games like Fallout 3 and participating in the functioning society of World of Warcraft and get back to me.

Unfortunately, the industry can’t keep up this level of progression forever. In fact, we’re already beginning to see it start to level out. Sure, we’ve still got motion sensing technology like the Wii and Project Natal trying to raise the bar, but these just aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. So what’s next? Will we keep moving forward, or will our favorite industry quickly become stagnant? Luckily, that’s a big no, but instead of seeing major jumps in technology like we’re used to, we’re going to have to rely on smaller, more developer-specific innovations to keep us on our feet. One of these advancements that has already began to catch on is a little thing I like to call ‘inter-game communication.’

Microsoft, Fans, and the Death of Xbox Originals Online Play

Well, it’s official.  The Xbox 1 is about to die.  This April 15th (Tax Day for all of us Yankees!), Microsoft will be shutting down the online servers for all Xbox 1 multiplayer games.  Halo 2, Counter-Strike, Battlefield 2: Modern Combat, Star Wars: Battlefront 2, and a host of other servers will be closing.  While it’s true that die-hard Xboxers will still be able to play local and single-player games, this shutdown indicates the end of the Xbox 1.  After all, most gamers still playing Xbox 1 games have their favorite single-player campaigns down by heart with the only challenge coming from small online community.  Given the communities which have formed over yeas of camping and corpse-humping, is Microsoft crossing any boundaries with this announcement?

Game Platforms as Media for Poetry

Video games and art are not always perceived as synonymous. Many in our society would claim games are nothing more than playthings for recreational activity (there is a whole debate between how to study games, ludologically as sets of rules, narrativistically as stories or something else, but that post is for another day… next Tuesday). As Broken Luck pointed out in his post Video Game Development: Hope for Change in the New Decade, we are seeing intellectual properties pumping out of the development cracks that raise the standard of our gaming experience. They give us new challenges that make us think in a new way (Braid) and provide us with stunning environments (Bioshock) that set the audio and visual feel of an interactive gaming experience. Whether the art is in the gameplay or setting, though, we still aren’t talking about a game created for the purpose of artistic expression.

There are independent developers exploring and utilizing game platforms to create art in its purest form, you just have to look a little harder for them.

Video Game Development: Hope for Change in the New Decade

The little corner of the web inhabited by gamers is cluttered with recaps of 2009 and release predictions for 2010. Everywhere we look, there’s a Top 10 list of last year’s gaming successes and failures. Here at Fragmatica, we’re doing something a little different. We’re focusing on what we hope the industry has learned in the last few years and where that’s going to take us in the new decade.

The Cerberus Network and the Future of Downloadable Content

With the imminent release of the hugely anticipated Mass Effect 2 and it’s recently announced DLC pipeline ‘The Cerberus Network’, we here at Fragmatica thought it would be the perfect opportunity to take some time to discuss downloadable content. Particularly, we’ll talk about some of the recently emerging trends of DLC, and the path we anticipate it taking in the future. So, read on to see exactly how you’ll be spending your money in the coming years of gaming.