My inbox is filling up with the same email every other day from DIG London. “DIG” stands for “Digital Interactive Gaming”, while London is a Southern Ontario town. The DIG London group is running two separate rackets - a conference, and a design competition.

Hit up their site for an exercise in vagueness. After staring at the web page for a good long time, here’s what i’ve figured out:

1. There is a competition with cash prizes.
2. You must enter individually as either an artist or a programmer.
3. You’ll have one week to complete the project.

Aaaaand … that’s about it. What are you expected to build? No idea. Using which programming language or drawing software? No clue. What proficiency level is required? Dunno. Will/where will the final submissions be showcased? Shrug.

From the site:

This competition was created to allow industry professionals, students and others to show off their gaming art and programming skills.. Digital game industry professional will judge all submissions and help us award great prizes including cash!

“Digital game industry professional” ? Is that like “Annual Gift-Giving Man” ?

Elsewhere:

“…we expect that the projects will take between 2 and 4 days to complete depending on the project.”

“Depending on the project”? Do the organizers even know what the projects are? Or are they just taking orders from different companies for a bunch of stuff that needs building and sending it out to people in the guise of a contest? It reeks to me of those “logo competitions” that i rail against.

Or maybe i’m just cranky, and it’s a perfectly above-board, enjoyable competition promoted with a terrible website. If anyone out there holds the keys to the mystery, please let me know.

i don’t mean to TOTALLY BLOW YOUR MINDS or anything, but apparently “flash games” - ie “games that have flash in them” - are sweeping the nation.

The child heart lurking inside you feels great satisfaction when playing new and exciting flash games full of immense animations and sound effects.

i’m impressed with the liberties the author has taken with the English language (and/or Alta Vista Translator). He has truly raised the bar for prose in my mother tongue. Never before have i heard of a child being described as “lurking.”

No, really - go back and re-read that quotation, and ask yourself if you could string a more subtly perverse sequence of words together.

Anyway, i’ve decided that quote is going on our new business cards.

Thanks to Gavin for the link.

As someone who cares a great deal about spelling and grammar, i often feel like i’m clinging to a sinking, burning ship. i feel like one of the last sages on Earth desperately clutching some sacred book, into which were written language rules such as the difference between “its” and “it’s”, “your” and “you’re”, etc.

Apostrophic abuses are commonplace by now, and i can see “you’re” and “your” blending into the bite-sized “YOR” in the near future to serve our fast-paced lifestyle and mounting idiocy. But i’ve noticed a more subtle infraction creeping its way into advertisements lately: everyday.

For example, i’d see a poster advertising “Fantastic Everyday Savings!” or “Our coffee: an everyday luxury!” Of course, the copywriters meant to convey that the savings continued on a daily basis. The coffee was meant to be purchased every day.

The difference between “every[SPACE]day” and “everyday” is that the former means “on a daily basis”, while the latter means “COMMONPLACE”. Did the copywriter really mean to call the coffee ordinary? Doubtful.

Dictionary.com permits “everyday” to describe something happening on a daily basis, but i think it’s just a nervous concession so that there building doesn’t get burned down by an angry, ignorant mob on it’s way too torch the liberry.

Fellow grammarians, each clutching their own scraps of withering English, can be found here:

http://kjcw.blogspot.com/2006/07/everyday-irritation-that-bugs-me-every.html

http://thegrammarvandal.wordpress.com/2007/10/09/this-is-ridiculous-and-deserves-a-post-of-its-own/

Brain-dead copywriters caught in the act:

http://thegrammarvandal.wordpress.com/2007/10/08/a-bit-of-vandalism/

And the follow-up:

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-difference-between-everyday-and-every-day.htm

It’s a week of fail, as Disney announces the closure of its Virtual Magic Kingdom casual kids’ MMO (as reported over at Worlds in Motion).

i got to peer into the crystal ball a year ago at the 2007 Game Developers’ Conference, where i shot the breeze with someone working on the project. He said that VMK had no trouble attracting kids who lived outside and frequently visited America’s two Disney theme parks in California and Florida, due to the virtual-to-real-world ties the game offered. The real challenge was attracting everyone else. He also said that Finland was a sunless Hellhole and that he couldn’t wait to escape.

There you have it. Many factors at work. But if Disney’s career booth at GDC 08 was any indication, the company is making good on its promise to invest in virtual worlds - lots and lots of virtual worlds. It’s almost like they’re throwing virtual world spaghetti at the wall to see what will stick, because that one sticky piece is so gosh darned profitable.

In other news, Euro Disney somehow remains viable.

i met Grant Shonkwiler at GDC 08, while daring him to beat my Yars Revenge score on an inflatable couch at the Autodesk party. Grant was a Full Sail student in Florida. We started talking about our favourite documentaries. His favourite was Invisible Children, about child soldiers in Uganda. My favourite was The Devil’s Miner, following two young boys who work a silver mine in Bolivia. Hmm. Not your usual Tuesday night fare. Something was clearly up with Grant Shonkwiler. It wasn’t too tricky to spot that Grant was a Christian.

A week after the show ended, Grant asked me if i’d be attending the Christian Game Developers’ Conference in Portland. My answer came freely and easily: Hell no.

There are many great philosophical questions that come part and parcel with Christianity, chief among them being the problem of pain (how can an infinitely good God allow needless suffering?), and the problem of video games (how can an infinitely good God allow crappy Christian video games, which cause needless suffering?) i’ve been stewing over this last problem for most of my professional life, and i haven’t come any closer to the answer than anyone else.

Full Spectrum Messiah

The first question i should ask is this: “Can there even be such a thing as a good Christian video game?” Or does this form of entertainment inherently excuse itself from Christification? Is creating a Christian video game like creating Christian porno? i’m not sure. There’s a whole lot of evil done in video games, evidenced by the likes of Grand Theft Auto and Superman 64. But there’s a whole lot of good too: helping a frog cross a busy highway, defeating the spectral forces of Satan by eating Power Pellets, and rolling people up into a big ball of garbage so that the King of the Universe can shoot it into the air and set it on fire to replace the stars he broke during a drunken bender.

Most RPGs and adventure-derived games have you travelling around doing heroic things, from the classic “defeat the dragon that’s terrorizing our village” scenario to the simple fetch quest - “bring me item A and i’ll give you item B”. These acts are not accomplished out of the goodness of the player’s heart by any means. Most often, they’re required to advance through the game. Aside from that, any Protestant worth his salt (and light) will tell you that Christianity is not about doing good deeds. It’s about salvation through Christ, who defeated death. And salvation, naturally, begets good deeds.

Christ’s defeat of death is one parallel i see between Christianity and video games: Super Mario has that resurrection thing down to a science.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

You could argue that Christianity in video games can only exist alongside depictions of evil, and that a Christian game must give the player the choice between the two. i disagree. This type of thing has been tried in secular video games, and i think it paves the road to failure.

In Bioware’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, there are two possible outcomes for the player: the dark Jedi path or the light Jedi path. Ditto Peter Molyneaux’s Fable. You can become either the virtuous, radiating hero, or the horned evildoer. To pursue either of these paths, you’re presented with a series of moral choices throughout the game:

Oh no! This little girl’s kitten is stuck up in that tree! Do you:

a) Climb the tree and rescue the kitten
b) Kick the little girl in the face and set the tree on fire

Really? Is that the best we can do? i remember how the marketing machine was in full force around the launch of Fable, touting its revolutionary and sophisticated decision tree that forced the player into making tough moral decisions. Ahem.

The reason why this approach wouldn’t work in a Christian video game is that if you know you’re playing a Christian video game, and you know that the best possible outcome results from making all the “correct” Christian choices, then these moral crossroads become pointless and boring. Maybe it’s more fun to kick the little girl in the face? You’ll never know, because this is a Christian game, and Christians don’t kick little girls in the face unless they absolutely deserve it. You’ll robotically opt for the morally right choice in all instances if you want to see the game’s best ending or the most compelling content.

So do you throw in more difficult moral decisions for which most people don’t immediately know the Christian solution? The trouble with that is most Christians don’t know the Christian solution to certain so-called grey areas, and they wildly disagree amongst themselves when it comes down to these minutiae of the faith. One need only look to the scads of Protestant denominations for evidence of this.

One problem here is that to create a Christian game where the player is choosing between good and evil, your game must include evil. That means that, as a developer, you have to cook up all sorts of different ways for the player to sin. And to keep the moral decisions more interesting, you would actually have to tempt the player to sin in your game. The player must feel that there’s some salacious content he’ll be missing out on if he chooses not to kick the little girl in the face, or not to gamble his family’s savings away at virtual poke, or not to get it on with the attractive female alien character. So a Christian game developer would himself be sinning, both by developing this alternative content and by tempting the player to virtually sin.

What Would Jesus Frag?

Another approach i’ve seen is what i call the “Christian Veneer” tack. That’s where you take a derivative secular game and give it a Christian coat of paint. This is the approach taken by the Left Behind crew in their first game, which was essentially a violent real-time strategy game set during the chaos of the (not necessarily Biblical) Rapture.

We saw a little more of this in the early days of console gaming with Wisdom Tree, who took side-scrolling jump-and-avoid games and inserted Biblical sprites. In one game, the player controls Moses’ mother Jochobed as she protects baby Moses from Pharoah’s baby-hunting soldiers. (a side note: Jochobed is also my favourite German candy bar.)

i see Christian music groups doing this too. They’ll write what is ostensibly a love song and insert a bridge where they sing “God” or “Jesus” or “Hallelujah” a few times. This structure allows them to remove the Jesusy bridge for secular radio play.

i question the value of a so-called Christian game that pays lip service to the faith. How much Christianing are you getting done by playing a game like Bible Adventures? Do these games inspire or incite you to live out the tenets of the faith? My answer is “no”. The Christian Veneer approach is just a method of shoehorning Biblical elements into an established form of entertainment to make a buck while gamers ease their guilt from enjoying an otherwise God-free hobby.

Overboard Like Jonah

Another ill-advised attempt at creating Christian games is the Ridiculous Allegory approach. That’s where, instead of applying a Christian coat of paint, the developer steeps the game in Biblical nonsense, infiltrating every nook and cranny with references to the Good Book until it reeks of holiness. Examples of these games include The Bibleman Videogame Adventure: A Fight for Faith, in which Bibleman must stop the Wacky Protestor, and ‘Ominous Horizons: A Paladin’s Calling’ and Catechumen, both of which have you taking up the Sword of the Spirit and slaying evil demons in a maze.

i’ve never felt good about this approach. This is laying it on too thick. i don’t even like it this thick when i voluntarily go to church to be preached to. i mean, i like peanut butter and all, but not if you’re going to slather the whole jar onto one slice of bread.

I’ll take “God” for 500 Alex

The final approach, and the most promising one in my opinion, is Christian trivia, but it’s not without some obvious problems:

1) Trivia is boring.
2) Educational games are boring.
3) Please can i just play Madden already?

i’ve found a way to solve all three of these problems, which i’ll detail in a future post. After many years of careful thought, the game that i’ve arrived at teaches Christian concepts, encourages righteous living, includes fun and mystery, and basically rocks the socks off of Christian games that have come before it. i don’t dare produce the thing without sufficient funding, though. If i have one beef with Christians in the entertainment world, it’s that they scrimp on production values and embarrass the rest of us.

On that note, i’ll leave you with some more quality Bibleman viewing, and some further reading.

Further Reading

MrNasty asks What’s a good Christian FPS?

bishuseDec replies:
technically you can play through Deus Ex and its lesser sequel without killing or raping anything.

Doom 3 Gets Religion

I will explain why Doom 3 is one the most overtly Christian video games ever made.

Playstations of the Cross

A great many people of faith believe the video-game business is so irredeemable that the best response is simply to bar the door.

i’m not sure why i woke up this morning feeling driven to write a Wikipedia entry on fictional beverages. A similar page already existed, but it was bare-bones and poorly organized. i tooled up a nicer looking entry, borrowing code from the excellent List of fictional music groups, and redirected the original entry.

There are, of course, hundreds more fictional beverages to mention in the entry. Instead of donating time and money to your local community organization or favourite charity, why don’t you help stall humankind by sinking your attention into this pointless effort?

PROBLEM: Bolded or italicized text doesn’t appear in my dynamic text box, even though i’ve included the font outlines.

SOLUTION: This is a pitfall that’s existed in many versions of Flash, and it doesn’t necessarily have to do with your code. Flash treats bolded and italicized letters as separate outlines. If you have a a chunk of dynamic text, and have used htmltext or style sheets to bold and italicize certain words, you need to make sure the entire italicized font and the entire bolded font are included in your project.

One fast, lo-fi way to do this is to create two more dynamic text fields and include the bolded and italicized outlines, one set of outlines on each field. Throw those text fields off the stage, making sure they exist on a frame on or before the frame that holds your important dynamic field - this way, you can be sure the font outlines are loaded into memory. If your fonts show up the way you expected, you can work out a more elegant solution.

i just received a friendly note from D’Accord Music Software:

Dear Folks of Untold,

We´ve seen the post about iChords and Sheet Happens! Thanks for the nice words about our software.

We just released a gadget called iChords Gadget, you might find it useful.

Find chord fingerings quickly with iChords Gadget - Ed.

If you’re instereted in learning more about music software, we have an open source project, Free Clef (www.freeclef.org), a multiplatform notation editor.

Freeclef - Free music notation software. Take that, Cakewalk. - Ed.

Thanks,

Américo Amorim

Getting this email was like being beaten fair and square in a wrestling match, and after shaking hands, my opponent comes back and gives me a few kicks to the ribs. Oh well … all’s fair in love and software development.

Subject: (company name)
Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2007 09:56:50 -0500
From: (headhunter address)
To:

Dear Resource

(Headhunter company name) presently has a Flash Developer opportunity that is in sync with the skills outlined in your resume. If you are suitable, available and interested in applying for this opportunity you may do so directly by sending your resume to (email address) or by applying on our website at (website address). Please ensure that the job is first added to your cart, then you may respond to all the jobs in your cart.

Take care

(headhunter name)

——————————————

From: Ryan Henson Creighton [mailto:ryan at untoldentertainment.com]
Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2007 10:08 AM
To: (headhunter address)
Subject: Re: (company name)

“Dear Resource”? Are you serious?

——————————————

From: (headhunter address)
Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2007 10:12 AM
To:
Subject: Re: (company name)

Hi Ryan

Sorry about that it is a automated response to all candidates in our database with the Flash skill set. We just got a new requirement it is perm position what is your current situation?

(Headhunter name)

Resource Manager
(company name)

——————————————

From: Ryan Henson Creighton [mailto:ryan at untoldentertainment.com]
Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2007 10:14 AM
To: (headhunter address)
Subject: Re: (company name)

My current situation is a desperate desire to distance myself from anyone addressing me as “Dear Resource.”

i turned on OMNI 2 today during my lunch break. You can usually expect a wild and woolly assortment of programming from the OMNI family of stations. Today, after enjoying a swing-style steel drum rendition of Amazing Grace, i stuck around for Merv Griffin’s Crosswords.

My first though, of course, was “Merv Griffin? Isn’t he dead?” i expected either a re-run of an old gameshow, which would work well with OMNI’s style, or some macabre presentation with old Merv propped up in the corner a la Weekend at Bernie’s.

(okay - i actually only expected the re-run. )

What i got was a syndicated game show with a generic front-man who studied from Guy Smiley’s School for Game Show Hosts. He was very definitely not Merv.

The show is the typical fare for bored work-from-home moms and dads who aren’t interested in watching Guiding Light. So imagine my amazement when THIS happened:

Brought to you by WHO?? i nearly did a spit-take.

All this talk of Microsoft trying to expand the audience for their console is evident. Their latest bids to put grandma onto the video game machine include last week’s Word Puzzle, Viva Pinata: Party Animals, the upcoming family-friendly Scene It, and now a Merv Griffin’s Crosswords game if Wikipedia can be believed:

“Advertisements during recent shows have announced that a new Crosswords game will be available on Xbox Live in the near future.”

Still, this small dabbling in audience expansion is nothing compared to Nintendo’s aggressive marketing juggernaut, which seeks to replace granddad’s daily medication with a Wiimote. If Microsoft hopes to compete, they have to find ways to match the value of the Wii. Uncle Rumply is not going to be swayed by the system’s graphics capabilities. He wants to know how many crosswords it has, and whether buying a system will convince his grandchildren to love him.