Original blog post featured at Gamasutra.

The weapons system in Deadspace 3 is actually pretty solid. By introducing crafting and customization they managed to both retain the existing depth and strategy of the staple Deadspace weapons and upgrades AND add a new layer of customization depth. Most importantly, they’ve eliminated the annoyance of a multitude of ammo types and streamlined the inventory experience by having all their weapons share one type of ammo. It feels both more powerful and more elegant.

The old system already had hints of this unity and customization in the form of Power Nodes: a powerful item that could be used to both upgrade equipment and unlock loot-filled rooms. Power Nodes were mostly found around the world and could also be bought with game credits that Isaac would find by stomping on dead necromorph torsos. Which made no sense. Which is why an economy based on a crafting system makes much more sense for a game where the protagonist is an engineer.

To keep the balancing sane, though, something had to take the place of the Power Nodes. All crafting resources in Deadspace 3 serve a specific purpose and are thematically tied to the items they can be mixed to produce – yet no resource is as special as Tungsten. Like the Power Nodes of yore, Tungsten is tightly tied to the production of pretty much any key item that is worth crafting. Extremely rare to find, Tungsten is a strategic resource that drives most meaningful crafting choices. By rationing the reward rate of Tungsten, developers can effectively balance the main upgrade path for Isaac’s weapons and armor. Tungsten is Power Nodes is premium currency.

And like most premium virtual currency, Tungsten can be bought with some of your finest real-world dollars.

Tungsten is an ugly pimple on the awkward face of a teenager in the developing industry of microtransactions. It sticks out and is quite hard to look at. It lurks in a corner of the Deadspace 3 resource shop, waving its $ flag shyly but resolutely. Tungsten vandalized the fourth wall by graffitiing a dollar sign onto it. And the other three walls, by definition, could only watch.

I can understand the arguments for Tungsten. I get that spending $$ is not critical path in the game and so I don’t need to worry about it as a player. Yet it’s there, staring at me, and so I worry about it. I get that nobody is forcing me to spend my $$. And yet the resource I can buy with real money is the one resource I can use to craft all the items I want. And I super-get that we are living in a time of microtransactions and so we should welcome our new $$ overlords. But there’s a time and place for everything, and this hardly seems like the right time and place for Tungsten.

I grew to love the Deadspace franchise because of its atmosphere. While playing Deadspace you never feel safe – anything can happen at any time. Necromorphs attack you at save points, while unarmed, in elevators, in rooms too small for two people, while you’re wearing a straitjacket… you name it, Deadspace has it. This game is frickin’ creepy, and it keeps you on edge because, at the end of the day, you’re role-playing a regular dude who is impaling and mutilating zombies with a line of mining tools that he has fashioned into weaponry. Weaponry that functions with a limited amount of resources that must be carefully rationed.

But here, take my $$ and give me a fully loaded Monster Impaler 3000 please.

I don’t (just) have a gripe against Tungsten because it’s asking me to leave a 50% tip on an expensive meal. I have a gripe with it because in a game where I give myself into the atmosphere, it’s asking me to suspend my belief and take out my credit card. But yes, just as I value immersion, I also value respect for my spent dollars. And so Tungsten offends me because we have grown used to a way of crafting these experiences that doesn’t involve any monetary contract other than the one we sign up front. And so when the waiter asks if I want to add extra cheese for $2 I respond that no, that I paid for the carefully crafted 5-course chef’s tasting and so why would I even consider adding cheese? Just bring me what I paid for.

The truth is that Tungsten, more than angry, makes me sad. Because out of all the potentially great things that are currently happening in gaming, microtransactions are the one that make me feel most icky. I am literally on record saying that “if Deadspace 2, at the end of a chapter, asked me if I want to send ammo to a friend, I would say yes”. But instead it asked me to buy Tungsten. And I said no.

I’m happy to announce that the piece I wrote about Mario 64, titled “Mario 64: an exercise on freedom and style” is now published as part of the Well Played 2.0 book!

Well Played 2.0 in the second book in the Well Played series, edited by Drew Davidson. In these series, different authors analyze the experience of playing different games. I chose Mario 64 because it is a game that opened my eyes to the magic of 3D adventures. In the piece I attempt to explain why the game feels so timeless and reflect on the reasons why it holds a special place in my heart. Hope you enjoy it!

Read it here.

Zuma Blitz is a game of skill, speed and precision in which players must shoot balls at other like-colored balls with the objective of making clusters, thus making them disappear. Sometimes these balls will have bonuses on them, and eliminating them nets you the specified bonus.

Quick! Get those multipliers!

These bonuses disappear rather fast, which means that you have to act quick if you want to get those extra points. It also means that sometimes you spot a bonus, shoot a ball at it and watch it disappear before the shot reaches it.

So unfair!

Except it’s not. The game has the incredibly good sense of letting the bonus linger invisibly on the ball for a small period of time, so that the player will still get the bonus if it disappears while the shot is in mid-air – or if even if it it disappears just before the player takes the shot. The bonus might not be visible, but the audio and visual feedback remain.

No doubt that the spirit behind this mechanic is to be extremely forgiving with players in the social space. PopCap knows that there is no room in that space for unforgiving mechanics, and they clearly design their games (especially the Facebook versions) with that in mind. In turn the player, instead of feeling cheated, feels a sense of accomplishment for making the shot in the last possible second.

It happens to me way too often. You know the feeling, right? It’s that “have I actually been here, or was that in a dream?”. Tycho puts it into words, except for him it happens with games. Like so:

Speaking specifically to the Lairs, there were moments where the obvious “structure” of the levels you’re supposed to traverse in game terms melted away into completely organic environments, which I could then navigate intuitively. That happened in Uncharted 2 quite often, and it alters your brain function. i think that if I try to recall these places in the future, I might recall them as places I’ve been.

Let’s pretend for a minute that we’re not scared of the picture of the future that Facebook is painting for us.

Pretend that you don’t mind the privacy issues or the fact that Facebook is easily one of the world’s biggest repositories of personal information.

Pretend that the Facebook future isn’t creepy. It’s exciting.

And then embrace the Facebook Card. Wait, the what?

The Facebook Card is surely coming. It needs to be in the works as we speak. I demand that its existence be more than merely a product of my imagination. The premise is simple: Facebook Credits have a potential of becoming an equivalent of PayPal. Everybody uses Facebook, so we are all only one click away from using Facebook Credits. If the point of sale at your local Starbucks is wired to the Facebook system, all you need to do is swipe your Facebook Card and pay with FB Credits. It’s no more complicated than using a gift card or a debit card.

First step toward the FB Card is then its approximation to the PayPal model. The Internet is quickly adopting Facebook Connect, linking your profile to comments on blogs and letting you “like” news stories all over the web. It would only make sense then that a checkout option for online purchases became Facebook Credits. Recharge the credits from your Facebook page and use them to pay for goods all over the web.

But, you might think, PayPal already does this and it has not managed to get widespread implementation on the “real” world – the physical world. However, Facebook is more than just the credits – it is already a very real, tangible part of our everyday life.

The number one reason to believe that Facebook could succeed in creating the new form of real-world payment is that, as I mentioned before, we already have a Facebook account. Give any user $5 in FB credits just for making their first purchase and you already have a big enough incentive for a big chunk of your user base to adopt, or at least try out, the payment system. Some companies, for example, are already  offering deals that grant Facebook Credits in exchange for follows and re-tweets.

Next up is Facebook Places. This feature is already integrated enough with mobile such that it is quite simple to “check in” to a location and reap a reward in the form of a discount or a recurring visitor deal. If my Facebook Card is linked to Places, then it can auto-check me in when I pay with it, give me the discount automatically and even tag me in a post in the process – granted that I gave it all of these permissions in advance. In turn the Facebook Places database will become much richer and its user base largely increased. Tasti D lite already does this with their rewards card, which automatically checks you in to Foursquare and Tweets on your behalf when you make a purchase.

After that come the marketing opportunities. As a customer, the targeted offers you encounter online will become exponentially more relevant. Retailers will be able to ask Facebook to target their ads at people who shop at specific locations or specific times, who spend an amount of money in a specified range, who travel a lot, have spent money on several US states, are tagged in pictures in specific European cities, have at least X friends in a determined age range, have children, are married, have been in a specific number of relationships, held their current relationship for at least a year of have spent at least 6 months without entering a relationship, users who log in mostly on weekends or that tend to drink draft beer in bars. You name it.

In other words, Facebook will be able to correlate your personal information, shopping data, location data, personal connections, close and not-so-close friends, page and article likes, tagged pictures and posts, games you play and much more and offer deals and ads that are relevant to one or more of these experiences.

I see the Facebook Card as the logical next step – the enabler for this outbreak. It is the perfect coming-together of Facebook’s latest initiatives: Credits and Places. It is also a platform to greatly enrich their databases with relevant user information that can be leveraged into revenue. And, on top of that, it is a direct line into becoming a solidified constant in our lives.

Can you see it coming?

Embrace it! Isn’t it exciting?

¡Quiero y tu mamá en pantaletas!

Let’s start with an exercise: imagine a game. It’s a card game. A card game you’re supposed to play in teams of 2 vs. 2, where points are wagered and each match, which consists of several independent games, is played to 24 points. A match can end in one game just as likely as it can end in 5, 8 or 15. It’s a game where cheating is allowed, and getting caught costs you points. It’s a game where you’re supposed to shout, where you’re allowed to curse your opponent’s whole ancestry, question his intelligence and mock his inability to beat you, bang your hands on the table and throw your cards face up when you’ve won a hand. It’s a game where the winner is the toughest, the smartest, the quickest and wisest. If you’re actually attempting this exercise, then most probably your imagination has imploded by now. Unless you’re from Venezuela or some other Latin American country – because in that case you know very well that I’m talking about Truco.

Continue Reading »

I would potentially shed a tear of joy if I got an official-looking letter from Hogwarts in the mail and, after opening it, it contained an invitation to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

Even if I still have to pay for the ticket, if there is no deal or discount attached, if all it is is a letter with the announcement that the park is now open – I would still get the chills. Because a lot of us once upon a time wondered what it would be like to get a letter like that – what it would be like to set foot in the Hogwarts castle.

Universal – get on it!

A letter from Hogwarts

Spoiler Alert: Probably not safe if you care about the character development in Dragon Age: Origins and, to a smaller degree, in Chrono Trigger. Although, to be fair, the whole point of the article is that you shouldn’t care.

Bow in hand, my super hot archer-chick was standing there, looking at her adventuring party. A mix of races, classes and personalities. These weren’t just any characters, these were the dudes and girls that had stood by her as she kicked butts across all corners of a an entire continent. Her friends, her allies. And I could not care less about most of them. Continue Reading »

A recent 4-month stay in Barcelona has made me think a lot about designing for different markets. Different cultures demand different designs and it is not rare to find that some things are done completely different in Europe than in America. However, even though designs are different, they each make perfect sense for the culture they were designed for.

A place where a lot of these cultural differences become evident are theme parks. I knew from a visit to Disneyland Paris some years back that European theme parks were not the same as American ones – and I commented that to my friends on our way to Port Aventura, which is about an hour drive from Barcelona.

Some of the things that stand out the most. You’re not supposed to smoke in most of the park’s spaces, though everyone still does and nobody cares. They sell beer to guests and don’t ask for ID if you look like you’re old enough. Staff is extremely relaxed and not too concerned with everyone staying properly in line or standing exactly where they should.

Oh, and the Cookie Monster does not hesitate to pose with a beer glass.

Cookie Monster shares a drink with my friends.

Balli Plastici will be presented in Washington DC at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura this coming Friday, February 26th, as part of the Fortunato Depero 50 exhibit.

The project was originally presented at the Museum of Art and Design in New York as part of the Performa 09 festival and has since obtained positive reviews from New York Magazine and the Art in America magazine.

You can learn more about the software we created and used to craft the performance here. You can learn more about the semester-long project here.

Be sure to check it out if you’re in the DC area!