Otherwise, Tannhauser seems interesting

And I am working on a XBOX360 conversion. Some news in the French boards.

Congratulations for your website.

Bogost comments on the greater ease of sports to games adaptation than film to games adaptation, since the former adaptation can be based on a set of rules rather than the latter being based on narrative. This could also imply that a sports game adaptation would be easier to design and develop since there is already a sound set of rules and mechanics for play. This is truer for digital games than non-digital games. Since non-digital games do not have the luxury of a 3D graphic display capable of presenting realistic characters running around on a realistic baseball diamond, non-digital game designers must think of extremely innovative ways of bringing the basic rules of baseball to a board game. Zimmer’s game cleverly used metal hooks to represent fielders, which would “catch” the ball if it has been hit toward them, signifying an out. If the ball passes through the fielders, a single, double, triple, home run, or foul ball would be awarded to the batter depending on the location and size of gap which the ball passed through. The game I would play as a kid had a crude LCD scoreboard but the mechanics of the game were very similar to Zimmer’s ingenious design.

This is a great example of the difficulties that designers of non-digital games have to endure when creating a new game. Even if the rules and/or narrative by which the non-digital game is to be based, another full set of clever mechanics must be designed in order to bring the board game to life. My hat’s off to all non-digital game designers who lack the visual luxuries that digital game designers have.

Another interesting thing that Bogost pointed out was the endorsement of games by athletes. What I first saw the Zimmer game, I immediately thought of the Tiger Woods game franchise and his face being plastered on every aspect of the games. It is interesting, but not surprising, that we have always used the same methods in order to increase the respect of our products. Charles Louis Zimmer….paving the way for Tiger Woods, Tony Hawk, John Madden, Dave Mira, Ken Griffey Jr……

I think the real change, where contrapting could be used, would be in higher-end item crafting after all the main ingredients have already been used. Every MMO relies on resources: wood, stone, cloth, etc., to work as ingredients items but they do not allow users to connect created items together in an elaborate fashion. The main hump that game developers would face when trying to adding contrapting to a game would be how do they get past just having every item add +5 attack that is connected to a weapon. For instance, you can make scopes in WoW and attach them to guns. Those scopes just add a tiny percentage to overall guns strength.
What would be interesting is if you combined that scope with some contraption that allows a Hunter class to use is far-seeing power (don’t remember the actual name but allows you to move the camera a fair distance away from your character, it’s for spying) and be able to shoot their gun at targets they find at a much longer distance. Sorta like that gun that could shoot through walls in GoldenEye (actually I think that was called the farseer, or the farsight). Obviously the game would have to be balanced differently too so that’s another huddle to get over.

I did like your idea for using it as a avatar customizer too. It would be interesting to see how players would react to having to find upgrades and other cards instead of having all the powers just available to them. I often worry if games are turning into “impression manager” games (to use Carrie’s word), because game designers are just giving everything to the player, they just have to work for it (which means it’s not for explorer type players).

And for the battling I could defiantly see a game like Dofus taking this battle mechanic. In Dofus you enter a separate battle field where you do turn based attacks anyways, so just changing that to do IC battles would be easy.

I liked how you related the game to crafting in MMO games because the actions required for building your mechanism in IC could lend themselves nicely to create a more elaborate and customizable crafting system in not only MMO games but any role-playing digital game. The discussion that must begin would be how to implement this system without it being repetitive or overly complicated. Would the act of building your IC mechanism (I will call this “contrapting”) be used as the mechanic for ALL item crafting, or would contrapting simply be used for one specific form of crafting?

Contrapting could not only be used as a crafting system, cut it could also be used as an interesting constraint on the leveling up and customization of a player’s avatar in role-playing games. Players skills/abilities could represent the contraption cards, proper “mana charges” could represent the power sources, battle specific buffs could represent the consumable and upgrade cards. Contrapting as a leveling skill/ability mechanism would create an interesting constraint in digital role-playing games and could be likened to (and/or replace) thelinear hierarchical progression trees that currently exist in some games.

Another mechanic that IC contains that would make battles in digital games more interesting is selecting one specific player to target in a battle with multiple foes. This creates a unique sense of teamwork and allegiance with other players in an all-vs.-all battle. I have not been able to play IC with more than one player, so I cannot comment on this mechanic much more, but it deserves further investigation.

Check out IC and become a Goblin Bodger…

Will this blog be updating regularly again?

Yehuda

I completely agree that the use of humor is used in computer games far far too infrequently. I mean, there’s Worms….some adventure games…..and….um…….

The meta-commentary in the cards is definitely fun. This is not too dissimilar to the “messing with the player” content in the Gamecube’s “Eternal Darkness,” which was a main reason that game was so amazing.

Ben brought an interesting issue that this was essentially a “competitive party” - which is pretty rare. You definitely have PvP situations across groups, but we couldn’t think of an example of being in a party with people who tried to keep you from succeeding (or allying with you).

I was talking with Brian M. some more and I was just worried that since we are looking at games (board) and comparing to games (digital) wont it seem kind of redundant. Of course they share mechanics and of course some game designers have been influenced by them. But overall if this piece is made just to inform those game designers that do not know the current state of the board game world then it would be enough to write the paper.

But I think with some good examples that it can be said that board games do have mechanics that digital games have not used, or incapable of making, yet.

And I think it would be interesting to look into the whole tangible part of board games compared to digital games. I assume there is already some research done on that for mixed reality or tactile gameplay.