Malik Dellidj made this awesome pseudo-midi keyboard on codepen that plays clips from Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. Dvorak not supported. Qwerty and Azerty are good to go. Here’s the video for inspiration while you music.
Our work is never over. When it is I need to go watch Interstella 5555.
Wesley Yin-Poole followed up on the Godus fiasco by interviewing the winner of Peter Molyneux’s Curiosity, the game where you tap on things and then win what we now know to be utter disappointment:
During the early afternoon of 26th May 2013, 18-year-old Scot Bryan Henderson tapped on Peter Molyneux’s Curiosity cube for the last time. He had won the game.
A tiny message appeared on the screen of his smartphone. It contained an email address for someone at 22Cans, the Guildford studio Molyneux had founded after leaving Microsoft and traditional game development behind.
Bryan, confused but intrigued, followed the instructions. Have I really won, he asked?
At the time Bryan was promised fame, fortune, and some level of control of the Godus world, and you won’t believe how big an ass Molyneux has been. Incredible.
Evan Narcisse of Kotaku interviewed Michael Lambert about his explorations into hidden and incomplete portions of Team ICO’s games. Makes me miss Shadow of the Colossus. What an amazing game.
Starting today with our review of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D, Eurogamer is making the biggest change we’ve ever made to the way we review games. From now on, we will no longer be scoring games out of ten.
In place of scores, we’ll have one-line summaries for every review, and a new recommendation system whereby some, but not all games will be considered Recommended, Essential or Avoid. As a result of these changes, we will no longer be listed on the review-aggregation site Metacritic.
Review scores are important to four groups of people: People making purchasing decisions; people who want their purchasing decisions justified; those who write about games; and developers who want their games reviewed well and scored highly.
Unfortunately for journalists writing about games, review scores have been overvalued by people who play games, and they’ve had too much influence on the careers of the people who develop them.
I spoke with an anonymous game developer about this and he confirmed that there are still some situations where studios receive bonuses based on the review scores the games they work on receive. However, he also elaborated it would be unusual for a specific individual’s contract to include mention of review scores with the exception of an executive like a studio president.
Terrible games have scored poorly in critic reviews and still sell well based on marketing and other pre-release hype. Great games have scored well and not done well enough to warrant sequels, HD remakes, and marketing hype.
It’s good news that Eurogamer, like the dearly-departed joystiq, are trying new things but I still believe that review scores offer something valuable to people who are looking for recommendations. Joystiq attempted to solve that with a short summary at the bottom of the review and awards on an ongoing basis. Eurogamer is doing something similar with awards and other signage to indicate games to look into or avoid.
I think they’re onto something good, but just like everyone else I look at the score first and then go back and read the review. It’s a bad habit, but it’s one that isn’t going away with my generation. Younger people seem to be watching pre-recorded (youtube) and live streaming (twitch) videos instead of reading anything. I definitely watch and listen more these days than I read.
This is a shame for everyone who has lost the opportunity to express themselves with more nuance than you can get on a podcast or in a video. Some games, and some opinions, just don’t get represented well enough on either.
What I’ve seen again and again is that a hardcore knot of the community become hyperactive on the board, and this begins to inhibit new users from posting. A classic example, from the Points Of View boards, would be that someone would post saying they think Bruno was being a bit harsh on Strictly with his judging. A regular would immediately reply along the lines of ‘yes we’ve done this topic to death, there’s a thread from the last series here.’ It’s not a welcome. It’s an intimidating conversation killer.
If you ever start saying that to the community, they immediately accuse you of lying, and say that no they welcome people with open arms. It doesn’t matter that you can see the metrics on new registrations and new posters. It doesn’t matter that you’ve done user-testing sessions where you’ve shown people the boards and they’ve told you that they’d quite like to post but they wouldn’t because it feels unfriendly. The community can’t see it.
The headline to this article is “Why I’ve found that online communities on media sites always seem doomed to fail.”
I don’t agree with Martin’s doom & gloom about online communities. Even if they’re on sites owned and operated by large media businesses, there is hope if there is good moderation & leadership.
However, Martin is right about people in communities being an insular & minority voice, compared to the whole audience. Sometimes business-folk need to take the consensus advice with a grain of salt, and publicly admit that they’re doing so.
If it doesn’t make business sense, or design sense, or for whatever the reason is. Just be honest with people about why you’re doing what you’re doing, and don’t use weaselly biz-speak to get out of it. The community is representative of your audience, even if they aren’t always right, and they deserve a straight answer about why you’re doing whatever you’re doing that pissed them off.
