Players take on the role of a young Doctor doing their residency. (I’ve been watching Scrubs lately.) I’m having trouble envisioning the gameplay for this one, but I’m thinking it has to revolve around resource management, especially time management.

Gameplay and graphics are similar to The Sims, but with the player controlling only one of the residents in the hospital. Other residents could be controlled by the computer for offline play, or by other players, adding a social dimension to the game. Players may cooperate with each other or sabotage one another in order to curry favor with the hospital administration.

The game is interspersed with mini-games which represent many of the tasks the young doctors face. Performing surgery, basic medical maneuvers, and diagnosing patients’ problems are all examples.

At the beginning of the game, players decisions are guided by the attending physicians. As the game progresses, players receive less and less guidance, until they are entirely on their own. The game culminates with the doctors graduation from their residency.

I finally finished my graduate school application last week and submitted it to the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy. I’m really nervous about whether I’ll get accepted. I’ve always been a bit of a pessimist.

I think this is the coolest blog I’ve yet found in this wide world of teh intarweb. It’s written by a homeless man, living in Greensboro, NC, and it is about what it’s like to live as a homeless person in America.

“We were taken from the Day Center to a large local church. The volunteer staff had already prepared rollaway beds for each of us and had a meal prepared. The volunteers are some of the nicest people I ever met, so nice in fact, I actually felt guilty about them having to stay and deal with us. It’s always bugged me having to ask for help, and even more so now that I think of these good people spending time away from their own friends and families to be with us. Still, they seem to have no problem with it, and I would observe, have even come to expect it.

“Pay attention, boys and girls; these people are what being Christians are all about. Not Pat Robertson’s political abortions or Jerry Falwell’s overly-smug social dictums, but people helping people as commanded by God. “Out of their works will you know them” I think is how it goes.”

My mother volunteers often at the local homeless shelter, and I’ve gone and helped out a couple times. One of the thoughts I had was that there should be a way for these people to tell their stories. I even thought of a blog, but I wasn’t sure how you might initiate that. The web can only support so many me-too technocrat blogs and full-of-hot-air politicrat blogs. I wish more people would blog because they have an interesting story to tell.

This man’s blog, “View from the Sidewalk,” has also been covered by the Greensboro News-Record.

I have been falling behind on doing the Game Ideas of the Week, but I’ve been jotting down my inspirations when I have them, so I can crank out a few of these over the next few days.

The game this week is a genre hybrid of massive proportions. It combines elements of MMORPG, RTS, and FPS games.

Players have a persistent avatar who participates in FPS battles that are heavy on vehicles. (Think Battlefield 2.) As the player gains experience he unlocks new weapons and special class related abilities, as well as moving up the military command structure. The catch is, experience is only gained for completing objectives on the battlefield, which are handed down by the commander.

The commander is another player, who is playing the game from a RTS point of view. The commander assigns tasks to groups or individuals on the battlefield and experience is assigned to those tasks based on their difficulty. Moving to a forward position may be a simple task and would be rewarded with little experience, while assassinating the enemy commander would be worth a great deal more experience. Commanders receive experience based on the success of their troops on the battlefield. As commanders gain more experience, they can move up the command structure.

Higher level commanders have increasingly more control over the logistics and grand strategy of the war. They can view the map from further out and move supplies and troops to different locations on the globe, to counter the movements of their enemies. To put the game in terms of a MMORPG, each battlefield would be like an instance, to which the commanders could commit troops and other, lower level, commanders. The globe would be one server, with hundreds or thousands of players logged in at one time.

The setting of the game is the year 2072. The game presents a somewhat bleak picture of the future, with World War IV in full swing. There are five factions that players can commit themselves to:

The high tech, but economically weak, United States of America. The USA uses a lot of mechs/powersuits and aircraft on the battlefield.

The powerful-in-numbers Islamic Crescent. The Crescent stretches from Morrocco to Malaysia and is the only faction with petroleum-based technology. On the battlefield they often use explosives and heavy armor.

The People’s Empire of China has the strongest economy and thus can field lots of very expensive technology. Short-range personal nuclear weapons are a favorite.

Europe fields small lightweight vehicles and use predominantly laser weaponry.

Russia has a powerful, if technologically dated, military. Russia’s miltary only fields their own armies if the motherland is invaded. Russian troops are often loaned out as large mercenary forces to the other powers.

Additionally, players may form their own smaller organizations, to represent mercenaries, pirates, or even a smaller independent nation.

Players would shape their server through strategic conquest, and potentially one faction could “win” the server by conquering the entire globe, at which point players in that server would be allowed to reconfigure their characters and starting locations would be reset.

The game presents a number of game balance difficulties, resulting from the kitchen sink mentality and from the inherent difficulty of designing an all-PvP MMO, but it is a truly epic game where players can feel like they are affecting the game world in meaningful ways. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more RTS and RPG features sneaking into the Battlefield series with the inevitable next iteration.

This one is a bit different. It is an educational game, designed to teach the players about foreign policy and international relations. It takes place in meatspace as much as it does in cyberspace. It is run over the course of one or more days and requires a large number of students (70+).

Students are placed into groups that range in size from 1 to 6. Each group represents a different player in international politics. For example, the United States may be represented by a team of six students, while the Red Cross may be a single student. Possible groups include nations, NGOs, the UN, NATO, International Corporations, News Organizations, etc.

Within each team, individual students have their own role to play. (Queen, Homeland Security Director, Foreign Minister, CEO, etc.) Gameplay also happens within teams, as there may be members of a team who have contrary goals to the team as a whole. For example, the Iraqi team may contain a player representing the Kurdish minority, who has a personal goal of establishing an independent Kurdish state.

The game is coordinated through a central website where teams can submit actions and communicate with each other either publicly or secretly. In addition, the website allows countries to issue press releases and is where the news organizations publish their scoops.

Before the game begins teams meet to discuss strategy and set goals for themselves to accomplish during the game. Gamemasters assign point values to each of the goals students want to accomplish, and the students’ performance in the game is based on how many of their goals they accomplished and how difficult the goals were to accomplish. Meeting with each member of the EU would not be worth many points, but establishing a Palestinian state would. In addition, each teams loses or gains points based on the strength of their economy at the end of the game, which is determined by in-game factors like trade agreements.

In addition to the players, the game requires a number of GMs to coordinate actions. Gameplay is very free-form, with almost any action being possible. To take an action teams must complete a simple web form detailing what the action will entail. Examples include moving troops, signing an international agreement, launching nuclear weapons, holding peace talks, conducting a terrorist attack, or anything else the players can dream up. Once a GM has approved the action it is posted to a page that is constantly updated with everything that is happening. Actions may succeed or fail based on random chance or based on the whim of the GM. Actions happen on a FIFO basis.

Some organizations may want to conduct secret actions, such as terrorist activities or espionage. Many countries have a spy masquerading as a member of another country. Indeed there may be entire organizations in the game that are a secret to everyone but their members and the GMs.

The game represents the culmination of a series of lectures or perhaps even a whole class about international politics. Players also conduct independent research on the role they play in the game. The game gives the students a chance to apply the theories learned in class and in their own research in a fun interactive setting.

Looking back in ten or twenty years Will Wright is going to be remembered as the most important figure in the nascent field of interactive entertainment. The Orson Welles of games. He recently gave a talk at Georgia Tech about… well… everything. The state of the industry, where it’s headed, relationships with other fields, Japanese Zen Gardens, etc. You can read Raph Koster’s notes on the talk at his blog.

A couple of quotes:

“When picturing game devleoper job roles, we think of artists, programmers, designers, producers. But he’s seeing more value in programmers with design skills, artists with programming skills (particularly for procedural art), and designers doing more programming, which a lot to do with prototyping. Designers need to be fluent in process. That’s our medium. Also producers more fluent in design, understanding iteration and process, which helps them manage better. Basically, looking at more interdisciplinary teams.”

“Simplicity: the [Zen] garden is not complete unless there is nothing else you can remove. In games we often do the kitchen sink.”

World of Warcraft is the new golf. Amusing.

I’ve only been playing Warcrack for a few days now and already it’s sucking up all my free time. All day at work I browse Allakhazam and Thottbot while I daydream about the (fake!) acheivements I will have in Azeroth when I get home. Sometimes, when I’m playing, I feel like a rat in a Skinner box.

I am ridiculously excited to see what developers can do with the Nintendo Revolution controller. There’s an article on Gamasutra right now where developers weigh in on what they want to see from the Revolution controller. Some excerpts:

“I thought up ideas like kayaking and being a matador as a joke, but I then realized that I would love those games!”

“Much like the analog thumb stick was added to the Playstation controller I expect within two years of the launch of the Revolution, both Sony and Microsoft will be packaging controllers with similar functionality with their consoles–and if Sony manages to really nail the functionality of the EyeToy, the combination of a spatially aware controller and the camera will be one that people will wonder how we ever lived without.”

“samurai sword-slashing”

I close with my personal favorite:

“As much as I’m excited about the possibilities of new genres, I’m also very excited about playing existing genres in new, and possibly better, ways. Here’s an obvious example: A Harry Potter adventure game. Yeah, you can wave the wand around and cast spells, everybody’s said that, but that alone is boring. What I want to see is this: You walk and turn with the thumb stick attachment, using the buttons for actions and to lock onto targets and circle them like in Metroid Prime (no aiming with the wand in this game, Harry Potter isn’t about head shots). The wand is used to case spells - in conjunction with a microphone attachment!
Imagine having to speak the spell you want to cast, and using different wand movements to create variations on the spell (maybe the closer you are to a ‘correct’ movement the more powerful it is, or maybe you can flick it in different directions to throw people about). This would add a whole new level of immersion to the game. No more lame button pressing or cycling through a spell list, just speak and cast like a real wizard! And learning spells would be much more fun to, having to recite the incantation (so that you match the preset words while at the same time the game recognizes the uniqueness of your voice).
Finally, let people create their characters and spend a year at Hogwarts – the kids would go nuts over it – and hell, even I’d buy it.”

Anyone who reads this playing World of Warcraft? If so, what realm? I picked it up over the weekend and I’m looking for some people I actually know to play with.

Raph Koster thinks so. It’s an interesting read. He makes a good case.