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Storytelling via roller coaster

There are people who review theme park rides. Did you know this? I didn’t, until a recent trip to Universal Studios.

Here are some general things I learned on this trip:

— Rides are getting more narrative than I remember from childhood; though possibly I just don’t remember very well. I suppose I recall the Pinocchio and Peter Pan rides at Disneyland as trying to tell or at least illustrate a story, with ride events corresponding to the major parts of the movies, but others were simply about immersing the rider in a certain kind of environment. All the Universal Studios rides tried to present a cohesive story, even if it was a very short one.

— Spitting water at the audience in judicious quantities is the cutting edge of awesome. Bonus points if it’s because someone in the story just sneezed.

— Blowing air on the back of the neck is also big.

Three particular cases of story-ride:

Continue reading “Storytelling via roller coaster”

Homer in Silicon

On Home and The Graveyard.

Recent Playing

I’m applying for jobs in the game industry for the spring, and that’s meant, among other things, giving myself a crash course in commercial games over the holiday season. I’ve also been playing Stuff People Sent Me. Here’s my recent playing list:

Continue reading “Recent Playing”

Another interesting event

The Story is a one-day event about stories and storytelling (London, February 19). It’s going to include Aleks Krotoski, who spearheaded The Guardian’s collaborative IF game Spaceship!, among others.

Homer in Silicon and other Casual Stuff

On Delicious Emily’s Holiday Season, a time-management game with a romantic subplot in which you can actually make choices for the character. I can see this may have set them up for some problems about sequels down the road, but I was pleased with it, and it made a good occasion to talk some more about the interplay of gameplay and romance.

Speaking of casual games with developed plots, I am seriously disappointed by Jojo’s Fashion Show: World Tour. I’m guessing someone else took over the franchise after the tragic dissolution of Gamelab. But the dialogue doesn’t snap, the characters are dull, the fashions are less attractively drawn, and the gameplay is neither as challenging nor as interesting. There’s a portion where you can create your own items of clothing to go into the show, which sounded like it might be another attempt at the product-mixing concepts in Chocolatier: Decadence by Design and Passport to Perfume. But once again, this isn’t actually as interesting a mechanic as it could be. You’re always creating clothing to match a specific style, applying colors and patterns to a very limited selection of silhouettes: the result is that it’s hard to make an outfit that is a resounding failure, and fairly easy to come up with something worth a large number of points; and the process of doing this is all about experimenting with the colors and patterns until you’ve hit as many of the style features as you can. Perhaps this is an attempt to keep the game from being too difficult, but the results are (in my opinion) kind of limp. I’m still waiting for a tycoon or time management game where you design your own products but the gameplay on both sides really crackles. (This is — or could be — basically a deck-building problem.)

Holiday

Dear people-that-send-me-email,

Sorry I’ve been uncommunicative the last couple of days, and here’s fair warning that I will probably continue to be so through the first of the year or so. It’s down to a combination of computer problems, academic year wind-up, and other features of Real Life. I wish everyone the best, and will catch up in January.