Making small games for promotional material is pretty common these days: Simple Flash games seem to accompany almost every major movie whose budget allows it. Being that Flash games are an easy and cheap means for engaging viral marketing, they’re a practical part of the promotion engines of many upcoming releases. Obviously, elementary Flash games won’t have much appeal for hardcore gamers, especially since they’re games promoting another game. But would something with more substance do the trick?

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In 1982, Activision programmer David Crane made a masterpiece known as Pitfall, a simple sidescrolling adventure game with the object of collecting all the treasure within a time limit(twenty minutes). The enemies were mostly static, except for a menacing white scorpion which lurked in the underground caves and followed ‘Harry’s every move whether he was above or below ground(Psychic scorpions, anybody?). The game was very popular and raised the bar for video games of the future. Two most notable games which readily used and expanded upon elements from Pitfall are Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog. A sequel to Pitfall would introduce several other features, some of them good, some bad, and at least one that would leave you bald from sheer aggravation.

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With the market for video games growing, Atari decided to capitalize on a growing demographic of gamers: young children. Unfortunately, these games did not always give the buyers their money’s worth. In this article, two childrens’ games, Strawberry Shortcake and Big Bird’s Egg Catch, will be compared for design and replayability.

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The newest — yet, the oldest — psychological need in video games, as stated by the PENS model, is relatedness. All three needs (competence, autonomy, and relatedness) arguably had a place in all games, long before we were playing Pac-man or Asteroids.

Multiplayer wasn’t always a top priority in game design. We should thank arcades (which are now a dying tradition) for pioneering the idea of playing a game not by yourself, but with some company.

In a way, it’s strange to think that despite years of arcade get-togethers, multiplayer didn’t truly thrive until it could be done in the convenience of our own homes…alone. We interact together virtually, never knowing the faces of our teammates and opponents.

So, through services like Xbox Live, The Playstation Network, Wii’s online services, and Kaillera, we have the easiest ways to meet and play, and less socialization than when we hovered around the machines at the arcades. Arcade or not, anybody who’s played a game with friends in the same room can attest to one thing: internet multiplayer lacks a little something that no online service will ever be able to simulate.

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First a brief history of the Atari 2600 and early games:

In the late 1970’s, home video game systems were beginning to flood the market, and one company, Atari, capitalized on it by taking games to the next level: removable cartridges. This enabled the buyer to purchase a console and games separately, instead of buying several bulky consoles which often had at the most five or six preloaded games. The old machines, notably Video Pinball and the great, great granddaddy Pong, made way for a sleeker, more compact system, and cartridges which held around three to maybe six or seven kilobytes of information. The resolution improved as well, as the simple squares of the paddles, walls, and balls were replaced by sprites made by multiple pixels, forming space ships, bugs, ghosts, frogs, robots, men, and other types of characters. This incarnation was dubbed the Atari 2600, an innovation when video games were still in their infancy.

Now for the review.

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We, the Players is about learning from the people who do more with games than play them. In our first interview of hopefully many more, we talk with esteemed modder and map-maker WadaHolic about Doom, his history of mods, and his take on console gaming.

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Today’s video games rely so heavily on graphics, sound, and fan-service, that they lose sight of what matters most in gaming: the gameplay. Over twenty years ago, technology was still new, and there was very little space and memory to work with. Thousands of games from that era could all fit on the dinosaur floppy disk, and still have room left over. These constraints meant that one would have to balance graphics, sound, and gameplay with the five to six kilobytes of space they could store on a chip which was protected by a box known as a cartridge. Those cartridges were similar to the jump-drives often used today, and were bulky compared to the six or seven kilobytes they could store. Despite those limitations, many great and addictive games came from that era.

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The second psychological need termed by the PENS model is autonomy. When I first read about this, I thought I knew exactly what it was talking about. Autonomy is described as the quality of the game which controls freedom in choices and influence on forthcoming experiences. However, Immersyve named simulation games, particularly Sim City 4, as “the pinnacle of open-ended gameplay and the degrees of freedom that can maximally satisfy the player’s need for autonomy.” After reading that, I’m thinking maybe we had two different ideas…

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While I was looking around randomly on the internet a website by the name of “Art of Manliness” caught my eye.  Recently they asked a question about whether video games are manly.  Call me crazy, but doesn’t this sound like asking if movies are manly?  Are there not movies that cater to particular types of individuals?  Why, yes there are.  The same (as has been explored in previous posts) is true for games.  Some gamers like a challenge, others want to lose themselves in an adventure.

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According to the PENS model, one of three psychological needs satisfied by games is competence. The desire to feel capable is present in any challenge, so games are probably the purest arena for this need. For many people, a lack of skill is a lack of fun. It’s understandable that if you exert more effort for a game, you expect to see better results.

The most important requirement of the PENS model is that all of this be measurable, predictable. Talking about this stuff in theory may spark ideas, but if it can’t measure completed games or game features, there’s no practical use. So, here’s where it gets interesting…

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