Author Archives: Jason "Zeeblee" Leonard

“Roleplaying” Games and the Misused RPG Label

Posted on by Jason "Zeeblee" Leonard

Zeeblee

I have written a few reviews for digital roleplaying games (RPGs), but in many cases I find the label is completely inappropriate.  When I think of a “roleplaying” game, I think of a game in which I take control and can make important narrative choices.  But most digital RPGs don’t let you make narrative choices at all.  For that reason I would say that the label of RPG has come to be associated with a mechanic which is common to most RPGs, but isn’t the attribute that makes them RPGs.  The mechanic in question is that of leveling up, and I hate it*.

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Giving Players More: Strategies for Padding Your Game

Posted on by Jason "Zeeblee" Leonard

Zeeblee

Today we are going to play pretend.  We will pretend to be in the process of developing a game with the goal of being worth a particular price tag.  Since we are ambitious, we want to be just like the AAAs and charge a hefty $60 for our game.  But we are also familiar with the hours-to-dollars assessment people use to judge if the game provided enough entertainment to be worth the pricetag.  If we use the price of a new DVD as a measuring stick we can guess that our players will want their entertainment on a 10:1 ratio ($20 = 2 hours of entertainment), so for our $60 price we’ll need to provide six hours of game time.  That can be a lofty task for a single player game, so today’s article will be delving into the wonderful world of design mechanics/strategies to extend game time (for better or for worse).

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In Response to Romero’s Musings on Tidiness Theory

Posted on by Jason "Zeeblee" Leonard

Zeeblee

John Romero recently posted an article in which he discussed the strength of Tidiness Theory in game design, the human desire to build, and the potential ramifications these behaviors in games have for evolution.  While I think his closing paragraph is rather misinformed (evolution just don’t work that way), the rest of his article paints a good outline of how Tidiness Theory rears its head across multiple genres.  I find I both agree and disagree with Romero’s assessment that Tidiness Theory is why players continue to play certain games.

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Who Did it Better: Elysium vs Johnny Mnemonic

Posted on by Jason "Zeeblee" Leonard

Zeeblee

I just saw Elysium, and in discussing it with a coworker we determined that it was indeed a cyberpunk film.  Our fellow coworkers weren’t familiar with the genre, and in introducing them to it we remembered the 1995 film Johnny Mnemonic.  We then realized that Elysium shares many aspects of the classic William Gibson story.  From this point on there will be spoilers, and unlike previous posts I won’t be whiting them out, so if you don’t want either film’s secrets to be revealed, you should stop reading.

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Movie Review: World War Z

Posted on by Jason "Zeeblee" Leonard

Zeeblee

I recently saw World War Z at a local Carmike theater, and while it was fun I ended up feeling like I had just watched a generic zombie film, and not a World War Z film.  Where the book is one of the greatest pieces of zombie media ever made, the film instead missed the mark on what makes the whole zombie genre interesting.  In a way this will be a double review as I will discuss what features made the book special, and how the loss of those features made the film feel generic.

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An Apartment and Fruit Flies

Posted on by Jason "Zeeblee" Leonard

Zeeblee

This article is not actually an article.  It’s an excuse as well as a minor insight into the dude-being who is Jason (or Zeeblee if you prefer).  There is no real article because I have been busy.  I have been busy dealing with an apartment and fruit flies.

The real cause for the lack of article is the apartment.  I am in the process of moving out of my old one, and that process is nearly complete.  My stuff is boxed in the worst way possible (I am awful at packing) and piled away Tetris style (I’m good at that part).  Unfortunately, because I am so awful at packing almost all of my clothes are tucked away in a mysterious place, and I only managed to keep a day or two’s worth out of the boxes (laundry all the time!).  There really isn’t anything entertaining in this story except for the part where after attending dinner with a friend I decided to walk from my apartment to my new residence carrying my motorized-bike bag containing a gas can late at night.  Nefarious.

The other venture keeping me busy is my neuroscience fellowship researching octopamine in fruit flies.  Over the last month I have been learning my way around the lab and gaining more and more fly colonies to manage as well as getting more and more brain dissections to perform as well as getting more and more behavior assays to run.  The dissections seem to be going well despite how slow I am.  The behavior assays have barely gotten off the ground, and have the potential to come to a screeching halt due to complications (death).  Colony management has gotten a bit crazy compared to when I started as I am now monitoring the status of at least eight genetic crosses, each of which have multiple vials in multiple stages of development, of which the residents need to be sorted in various ways to match the part of the experiment which they are for.  Good news on that front:  I’m getting damn good at spotting male pupae, and I’m now an expert at putting small dots of paint on the backs of fruit flies.

Next week the lab should calm down and I will be all settled in, so I can successfully post something fun/cool.  Until then, just imagine me smooshing fly brains together until they are the size of a human brain, and then placing said brain within the cranium of a human subject to create the ultimate multi-brained flyman.

Games Are Art

Posted on by Jason "Zeeblee" Leonard

Zeeblee

As the title says, games are art.  I begin with this because I have gone through multiple false starts in getting this argument going.  While I believe most other gamers would agree with me, making this topic seem rather pointless, I have also noticed that a good deal of the rest of the world still does not acknowledge games as an artistic medium.  The debate over the artistic merit of games was quite loud years ago when Roger Ebert declared, “Games can never be art.” and since it has quieted down.  Unfortunately I think the quiet only really occurred because the only people speaking were gamers.  Well, that’s still going to be true today, but perhaps I can at least outline my argument well enough that if a non-gamer comes across it they can begin to understand what this medium means to us.

To begin I think it would actually be valuable for everyone to first watch Kellee Santiago’s TED Talk to which Ebert’s article responds to, and then to read Ebert’s article.

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Character of the Week: Jason’s Jackmerius

Posted on by Jason "Zeeblee" Leonard

Zeeblee

I’m piggybacking off of Mattias’ article because in our discussions before he published it, certain parts of his character caught my fancy, and it inspired me to try my hand at my own iteration.  The core of the idea at the time in our discussions was:  Demon hunter who uses magic.  After more discussion Mattias mentioned how he was playing around with the idea of multiple personalities and the He Who Fights Monsters trope.  My thought:  What if this were literal?

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Game Analysis: Diablo 3

Posted on by Jason "Zeeblee" Leonard

Zeeblee

Since I took a look at a spiritual successor to Diablo 2 I figured I might as well take a look at the actual successor.  Unlike Path of Exile however, I really can’t think of too much that draws me to Diablo 3.  This makes me especially sad since I waited in great anticipation for its release, playing Diablo 2 over and over again in the meantime.  I paid full price for it.  I paid for a copy for a friend to play with me!  That is how much I wanted to continue my Diablo 2 fun in Diablo 3, but I ended up losing interest and dropping the game extremely quickly.  You can maybe discount my analysis because I haven’t gotten much actual game time in, but I would argue that it isn’t my job to persist at playing a game until it is fun, it is instead the game’s job to keep me interested in playing.

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Game Analysis: Path of Exile

Posted on by Jason "Zeeblee" Leonard

Zeeblee

I like Path of Exile and I hate Path of Exile.  This game is everything I loved about Diablo 2, but it also amps up the parts of Diablo 2 that I was not a fan of.  It is an action-RPG title that experiments with excess, and by doing so has given me all sorts of mixed feelings.

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