The 1928 film "Un Chien Andalou," directed by Luis Bunuel and co-written with Salvador Dali. Image courtesy Film Reference. 

For the May installment of our Edge column, "Playing In the Dark," we tackled the sometimes thorny issue of game previews. What got us thinking about this was a flashback to our much-discussed post of last year, titled "Now Who's Being Naive, Kay? Or, Reflections on the Fundamental Contempt In Which the Enthusiast Press Is Held By Publishers--And Its Own Employers." Here's what we said about it in our Edge column:

In the wake of the GameSpot/Jeff Gerstmann scandal of last year, I examined the various elements that had led the enthusiast press to this point in a blog post. I wrote that one of the contributing factors was ‘the fundamentally broken nature of the preview-feature- review process, in which historically previews and features have almost invariably been positive--or optimistic, if we're being more charitable--before the truth, good or bad, was finally revealed in the text and scoring of the review'.

And while I stand by that point, it's not the entire truth--it's not as simple as saying that videogame previews have been too optimistic and should now become pessimistic instead. There's more to it.

What's the "more" that we're referring to? It is:

 Spore, developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts 

Last month, as part of our ongoing obsession with Media Molecule's upcoming Playstation 3 game LittleBigPlanet, we threw out the idea of the developers turning their 2-D prototype Craftworld into a full-on game, while allowing levels to be exchanged between the two games using a common extensible markup language, or XML. We wrote:

Here's how it would work. Media Molecule would produce 2-D Craftworld versions of all of LBP's art assets, each tailored technically and aesthetically to both the the capabilities of the specific platform and the visual style of Craftworld. Marry that to our theoretical Media Molecule Markup Language (MMML for short), and we now have a system by which a level created in LBP could be exported as a small data file to Craftworld and vice versa, just as easily as a Web page can be authored once and read in various browsers....

Games like Echochrome and Spore are, like LBP, partially or entirely built around user-generated content. In the case of Echochrome and Spore, they're also multiplatform, as we're suggesting Media Molecule should do with LBP/Craftworld. Some of those platforms have similar technical specs, like Spore's support for PC and Mac. Others are radically different, as with Echochrome (PS3 and PSP) and Spore (PC, Wii, iPhone, DS). As more developers build games that support user-generated content across multiple asymmetric platforms, it only makes sense to design their file structures in such a way that much, if not all of that user-generated content can be shared across each and every target platform.

At the end of our post, we promised to reach out to the teams behind Echochrome, Spore and LittleBigPlanet to find out how XML-ized each of their titles had become. According to our previous reporting on the upcoming game Spore, we knew that the PC and Mac versions could exchange data, while the owners of the iPhone, mobile phone and DS versions could share only share levels with users of the same specific platform. We conducted an email interview with Spore senior development director Eric Todd to get some more insight into the XML-ization of Spore; here's what he had to say:

 Echochrome, developed and published by Sony Computer Entertainment

Last month, as part of our ongoing obsession with Media Molecule's upcoming Playstation 3 game LittleBigPlanet, we threw out the idea of the developers turning their 2-D prototype Craftworld into a full-on game, while allowing levels to be exchanged between the two games using a common extensible markup language, or XML. We wrote:

Here's how it would work. Media Molecule would produce 2-D Craftworld versions of all of LBP's art assets, each tailored technically and aesthetically to both the the capabilities of the specific platform and the visual style of Craftworld. Marry that to our theoretical Media Molecule Markup Language (MMML for short), and we now have a system by which a level created in LBP could be exported as a small data file to Craftworld and vice versa, just as easily as a Web page can be authored once and read in various browsers....

Games like Echochrome and Spore are, like LBP, partially or entirely built around user-generated content. In the case of Echochrome and Spore, they're also multiplatform, as we're suggesting Media Molecule should do with LBP/Craftworld. Some of those platforms have similar technical specs, like Spore's support for PC and Mac. Others are radically different, as with Echochrome (PS3 and PSP) and Spore (PC, Wii, iPhone, DS). As more developers build games that support user-generated content across multiple asymmetric platforms, it only makes sense to design their file structures in such a way that much, if not all of that user-generated content can be shared across each and every target platform.

At the end of our post, we promised to reach out to the teams behind Echochrome, Spore and LittleBigPlanet to find out how XML-ized each of their titles had become. First up is Echochrome associate producer Kumi Yuasa, who's based at Sony's Santa Monica Studio (the game itself was built at Sony's Japan Studio). As it turns out, PS3 users can share the Echchrome levels they create with other PS3 users, but not with PSP users. Similarly, PSP users can share created levels with each other, but not with their PS3 counterparts. We asked Yuasa about this; here's what she told us via email:

 Craftworld, the 2-D prototype for LittleBigPlanet 

Two months ago, we used our second "Playing in the Dark' column for the U.K. magazine Edge, which appeared under the title "Halo 3.0: From Bungie's Lips to Phil Harrison's Ears," as a jumping off point to examine how LittleBigPlanet could become the ultimate 2-D gameplay creation tool for amateur console developers. Today, we explore how Media Molecule could extend the power of their underlying concept to PlayStation Portable, Web browsers and even mobile phones.

In a previous post, we revealed the developers' coy response when we asked them whether they had any future plans for Craftworld, the equally charming flat 2-D prototype which evolved into the 2.5-D game that is LittleBigPlanet. We also reported their explanation that the same physics engine that powered Craftworld was also driving LittleBigPlanet. This got us thinking about whether Craftworld could have a life beyond that of a cute demo. Obviously, as the flat implementation of LBP--so described because the graphics in Craftworld are 2-D, while LBP's are 3-D--Media Molecule's prototype could find a home on a slew of less-powerful platforms: mobile phones, Web browsers and, of course, Sony's PSP. Even the just-shy-of-ubiquitous PS2 could be a candidate. But something was still missing. Why not go one step further and create a shared description language among LBP and various versions of a commercially released Craftworld?

Here's how it would work.

In our second "Playing in the Dark' column for the U.K. magazine Edge, which appeared under the title "Halo 3.0: From Bungie's Lips to Phil Harrison's Ears," we explored the parallels between the approaches to user-created content in Halo 3 and LittleBigPlanet. Of the latter, we wrote:

The slogan for LittleBigPlanet is 'Play, Create, Share', and it captures not only precisely the right elements of where games must go in the future, it lists them in the correct evolutionary order. Because if the act of creation itself isn’t playful, if it isn’t entertaining, then only the most motivated of people will bother to actually make anything....From Media Molecule, I’m hoping that the company will release expansions that offer two other perspectives--top-down and isometric--thereby turning LittleBigPlanet into the complete 2-D game creation tool.

From the first moment we laid eyes on LittleBigPlanet, we've been mildly obsessed about where Media Molecule could and should take its inspired game. So when the developers let journalists go hands on at the E3 Media Festival and we got to see how easy, intuitive and powerful their tools were--right down to its bolt-based system for adding simple physics to the various objects that users could build--it dawned on us that Media Molecule was in the process of building the ultimate side-scrolling construction kit, a belief that was furthered when rumors began to circulate that the creators were also developing a system for enemy behaviors that users could integrate into their level designs. So we said to ourselves, if LittleBigPlanet can do all of this for side-scrollers, how difficult would it be for Media Molecule's engine to support the two other 2-D game perspectives: top-down and isometric?

 

In mid-October, we announced that the Level Up staff had taken its talent across the pond to the respected U.K. gaming magazine Edge, in the form of a monthly column titled "Playing in the Dark." It had always been our intent to expand on the topics raised in those columns here on Level Up under the rubric The Edge of Reason, but you know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men. Our other favorite cliché is "better late than never," so with that, today's installment will tackle our very first Edge column, which ran in the November 2007 edition of the magazine under the title "Why It Feels Good to Be Bad" (click here to read the column in its entirety). In it, we pointed out that while videogames have become fairly accomplished at making us feel good about what we're doing, there's a whole lot more they could explore by making us feel bad about our actions. Here's an excerpt of our additional thoughts on whether developers should consider incorporating the concept of social sanction into videogames:

Certain other bloggers have already begun to discuss the issues that our column raises. As we'd written previously in our Vs. Mode exchange on BioShock and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, the very first presentation of the Little Sister Harvest-or-Rescue dilemma had us so conflicted that we actually called family and friends for guidance. Yet as our playthrough continued, each subsequent harvesting became much less emotionally fraught, making us wonder whether there wasn't more that 2K Boston/Australia could have done to keep us feeling just as tormented upon the sixth Harvesting as the first, if not more so.

Part of the reason most people don't kill or murder in real life is that there are real life consequences: social sanction, ostracism, retaliation, incarceration, capital punishment. In games, there are no real life consequences to in-game decisions made regarding AI characters. You won't be labeled, shunned, jailed or executed. Even the in-game consequences are minor; for all of our whining legitimate complaints about 2K Boston/Australia privileging Rescuers over Harvesters by exclusively bestowing upon them the Hypnotize Big Daddy plasmid, it wasn't what we'd consider a hefty punishment.

To read our post in its entirety, click on the link below.