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The highlight of yesterday’s GDC Serious Game Summit panels focused on an appropriately consequential topic: How games can help protect children from the commonplace dangers they face from predators, both online and off. The panel was led by Child Safety Research and Innovation Center president Allan McCullough — a man who’s strived to develop games which teach young people how to identify and avoid dangerous situations.

The two Flash-based games which represent the fruits of McCullough’s two decades of labor look deceptively simple on the surface. They are, after all, hand-illustrated, poorly animated educational games geared towards children, with budgets too small to allow the hiring of professional voice actors and experienced gaming professionals. However, beneath the crude surface of these games lie clever methods of imparting crucial information to their young players which could ostensibly help them avoid encounters with people who mean them harm.

Continue reading GDC: Making games to prevent violence against children

GDC: Making games to prevent violence against children originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The president of Infinity Ward is out, and employees of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare developer are “freaked out,” G4 reported Monday evening.

According to the report, Jason West (pictured above left), longtime president of the development studio and director of the juggernaut 2009 hit Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is no longer with Infinity Ward, which is owned by Activision Blizzard. G4 quotes from West’s LinkedIn profile and his Facebook page, which now features the update: “Jason West is drinking. Also, unemployed.”

G4 also points to an SEC filing made by Activision Blizzard earlier today in which the company discloses that it was investigating “breaches of contract and insubordination by two senior employees at Infinity Ward.”

Modern Warfare 2 is one of the biggest videogame hits of all time, earning over $1 billion in its first few months on sale.

Two weeks ago, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick delivered a speech at the DICE Summit titled “How Creative Talent Drives the Video Game Industry.”

Security Appears Unannounced at Infinity Ward [G4]

Blizzard hopes to have StarCraft II on store shelves in the first half of 2010.

Chris Sigaty, production director of StarCraft II, revealed the game’s targeted launch window in an interview for Blizzcast, an official podcast focusing on games created by Blizzard. Sigaty also stated in the interview that the current beta test of the game should last for around three months.

StarCraft II is the sequel to a 1998 real-time strategy game that puts players in control of one of three science fiction-themed factions.

A full transcript of the interview, which offers insight into Blizzard’s testing process as the game comes to completion, is worth reading for both casual fans of the game and those looking for some high-end discussion of the way the game will play.

Image courtesy Blizzard Entertainment

See Also:

• Hands-On: Overhauled StarCraft II Welcomes Strategy Noobs
• StarCraft 2 Delayed to 2010
• Q&A: Making Starcraft II More Accessible
• Analyst Predicts Starcraft 2 Delay
• Fans Demand LAN Support in Starcraft II

SAN FRANCISCO — High-quality Wii games from third parties may be few and far between, but Guilty Party could buck that trend.

Guilty Party, unveiled Wednesday at a Nintendo media briefing, is best thought of as a more complex version of the murder-mystery board game Clue. It’s the first collaboration between Stubbs the Zombie creator Wideload Games and its new corporate overlords at Disney. From all appearances, it’s a match made in heaven: Wideload’s penchant for comedy and family-friendly party games blends well with Disney’s aesthetic and target market.

I laughed out loud quite a bit while taking Guilty Party for a spin. The cast of detective characters shows up at the beginning and end of each mystery in the story mode, in story sequences that are genuinely funny, with great dialogue and comedy timing. While the game can create an unlimited amount of random cases for you to solve, in much the same manner as Clue’s card-shuffling, it seems as if you’ll want to play the story mode first for all the well-paced humor and the plot that runs through all the cases.

Everyone’s a witness — and a suspect — in Disney’s Guilty Party for Wii.
Images courtesy Nintendo

The story mode features drop-in, drop-out cooperative gameplay, so parents can pick up a controller and help kids with the cases if they’re struggling, for example. Players take turns moving about the different locations (a mansion and a cruise ship, just to name two) and investigating question mark icons — these might indicate a person to interrogate or a clue that’s been left on the ground.

Every such investigation brings up a Mario Party-style minigame — you might need to bribe a witness by placing money into their hands, or stare them in the eyes by moving the pointer around.

Occasionally, you’ll have to play cooperative mini-games — in the one we tried, I had to pick up boards and hold them against a hole in a wall while the other player nailed them in. It all seems like pretty solid stuff.

Every time you successfully complete a challenge, you’ll get another clue. In your notebook, you can build a profile of the suspect, as shown above, based on the clues you’ve collected. In the early stages, the clues will be pretty direct — a witness might just say flat-out that the culprit was tall, for example. But later in the game, they’ll get a bit more convoluted: You might have to infer that a suspect was tall based on him bumping his head on the ceiling in another room, for example.

Once you’ve got everything in place, you can accuse a suspect, but you’ll have to illustrate that you had all of the clues necessary and didn’t just guess.

Guilty Party will be available in the second half of 2010.

See Also:

• Hands On: Diggin' Holes, Ridin' Yoshis in Mario Galaxy 2
• Hands-On: The Many Layers of Metroid: Other M
• Hands On: X-Scape, Metal Torrent Bring Classic Shooter Action to DSiWare
• Hands On: Smashing, Flinging in FlingSmash Wii

SAN FRANCISCO — Oh, if ever a game were summarized by its title, it would be FlingSmash.

If you play one game from Nintendo this summer, make it Super Mario Galaxy 2; if you play two, the other would be Metroid: Other M. If you play three… Sin and Punishment. But, okay, if you really do need four Wii games in the next four months, then you may consider FlingSmash. Set for release this summer, it’s a MotionPlus-exclusive action game in which you fling a ferocious cute yellow blob around a series of automatically side-scrolling levels. Using the MotionPlus to aim accurately, you fling him into bricks, enemies, and all sorts of other things with flicks of your wrist.

You can aim your flinging quite accurately with MotionPlus — there’s a little compass in the lower-right hand corner of the screen that shows you exactly how the controller is oriented in space.

It’s fun, if a little tiring. You might smash into a line of enemies, getting extra points for killing the whole group with a perfectly-placed fling. You’re hunting for medals in the level, and as you collect them, you unlock new levels and set high scores. There are tons of ways to increase your score, from finding hidden gewgaws to killing things to smashing bricks, so you’re constantly encouraged to complete each level as thoroughly and accurately as possible.

Your little guy will get tired if you fling him hither and yon without a care in the world. So if you want to really smash up the bricks with precision and power, you wait between each fling. When he turns red and starts growling at the world around him, that’s when your brave little man is ready to smash some things with force.

There will be eight worlds, each with three levels and a boss fight. The boss fight in world 1 is against a giant balloon-like monster with a big unbreakable mask on his face. So you have to fling at an angle, bouncing off the walls, to hit him in the sides and the back to do damage. Nintendo promises that the game gets significantly more difficult, requiring more precise aim, after the first carefree worlds.

In addition, if a left-handed player takes on the game, the levels will actually be mirrored, the screen scrolling left to right, instead of right to left, to accommodate the lefties’ sinister nature.

Images courtesy Nintendo

Literacy expert James Gee says that teachers and schools could learn a thing or two from videogames.

Gee spoke Friday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting, using his time to forward the notion that teachers should take a hard look at the way games teach. “We tend to teach science,” he said, “by telling you a lot of stuff and then letting you do science. Games teach the other way. They have you do stuff, and then as you need to know information, they tell it to you.”

Gee is the author of multiple books on the subject, including What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy and Women and Gaming: The Sims and 21st Century Learning, which comes out in May. He first floated the notion that games make good teachers in Wired magazine back in 2003.

Videogames are all about learning, he says. “Commercial video games,” he says, “are nothing but problem-solving spaces.” Gee isn’t saying that teachers should sit the kids down in front of Modern Warfare 2 and call it a day, but rather look at the techniques that games use to drill home ideas and find ways to integrate them into the lesson plan.

By integrating educating and testing, Gee argues, games like World of Warcraft do a better job of communicating lessons. And Blizzard, who is always gathering data on its players, has constant feedback regarding how well their lessons are going over. Gee thinks standardized testing, held independent from the learning process may not be as efficient or effective.

Image courtesy Blizzard

See Also:

• Educators Turn to Games for Help
• Sandra Day O'Connor: Game Designer
• U.S. Spies Use Custom Videogames to Learn How to Think
• Ridiculous Life Lessons From New Girl Games

For the second year in a row, employees from Electronic Arts’ Tiburon studio in Orlando stopped by the Florida Hospital for Children to deliver games and swag to sick kids.

The Orlando Sentinel reported Monday that EA art director Tony Stanley, among others, donated thirty games including Madden NFL 10 and Boom Blox.

“I’ve never met anyone who made the games,” said patient Raymond Ortiz, a 14-year-old with juvenile diabetes. Ortiz and friends had the chance to chat up game designers and learn a bit more about how games are made. And, of course, the kids got to play plenty of games.

For more warm fuzzies, read the entire account. A reminder that videogames have the power to make kids happy is fine way to come back from a three-day weekend.

Image courtesy Electronic Arts

EA Sports brings fun, games to Florida Hospital for Children [Orlando Sentinel]

See Also:

• Save Money on Black Friday? Donate It to Child's Play
• Child's Play Raises More Than $1 Million for Sick Kids
• Penny Arcade Recognized for Charity Work
• Charity Puzzle Game Chime Rings a Familiar Bell

I’m going to level with you: This is going to be a boring installment of Weekend Thrifting.

It’s not my fault, I swear. These pictures represent the sum total of everything I was able to dig up over a whole month of trawling the thrift stores. Why has the supply dried up? Have I indeed just been writing too damn many of these articles, thus causing everybody else in San Francisco to go out and buy stuff before I do? If so, stop that! But it might just be that people are hibernating for the rainy winter and don’t feel like doing any spring cleaning.

Anyway, here are the meager scrapings that I have found.

I wouldn’t have bought that whole stack of NES games, but they were all in a plastic bag together for $5.50. And I’m pretty sure I didn’t have a copy of Snake’s Revenge, the ersatz sequel to Metal Gear that was only released outside Japan. Digital Press says it’s worth $4.

In addition, we’ve got Captain Skyhawk ($2), Cyber Stadium Series: Base Wars ($5), The Chessmaster ($8) and Baseball Stars ($10). Would never have guessed which ones were worth the most in that pile, not that anything here would even be considered uncommon.

To the right, three PlayStation 1 puzzle games that were marked $1.50 but rang up at a mere 50 cents each: Puzzle Star Sweep, Super Bubble Pop and Tall: Infinity. These, too, are not rare, listing for $5, $10 and $7 respectively.

And now we get a bit more obscure. Twice in the last two weeks, I’ve had this experience in a thrift store: I see something out of the corner of my eye, and I think to myself, “That couldn’t possibly be a…”

“…Odyssey voice cartridge?” Sure, they came in blue cardboard boxes, but no way the blank edge of a blue cardboard box I was staring at was a lone Odyssey2 game in the wild. But it was. The color indicated that it works with The Voice, an add-on module that added voice synthesis to Magnavox’s ill-fated game machine. It was kind of like the Xbox 360 HD-DVD player of its day.

And talk about your killer apps: Talk and Tell! let you type things, which the system would then say back to you. I’d pay about $1 for that, which is what this cost. It’s actually in great condition, which is not always the case for boxed Odyssey2 games: The fold-out cardboard boxes are fragile and usually get beat up, but this one is great. Unfortunately, since approximately no one likes the Odyssey2, it’s still not worth anything. Digital Press says the loose cart is worth $4; a complete copy just sold on eBay for $2. No, I did not accidentally transpose those numbers.

“…Fairchild Channel F game?” The games for the Channel F, the first cartridge-based game machine, were on bright yellow cartridges. So when I saw a bright yellow cartridge sitting in a bin at a Goodwill, I thought that’s what it might be — but I dismissed that thought because it was sitting next to a green Leapster cartridge and I assumed it was just some module for a kids’ toy.

So imagine my surprise when it actually was a lone Channel F cartridge. I’ve never, ever seen one of these out in the wild. Unfortunately, since nobody cares about the Channel F either, it isn’t worth much. Video Blackjack is worth about $10, although this one is missing the end label, which would knock the value down. I paid $3.50.

And finally, a couple of Genesis games. Of course! Can’t have a thrifting piece in San Francisco without Genesis games, as we all know. World of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck is the star here, a well-regarded classic Disney platformer that’s one of the rarer Sega first-party releases. Side-scrolling shooter Thunder Force II isn’t that bad either. Paid $3.50 each, worth $8 and $10.

And… that’s it. Lots of legwork for very little return this month. But I won’t get discouraged, I promise!

Images: Chris Kohler/Wired.com

See Also:

• Weekend Thrifting: A Symphony, a Soldier Blade
• Weekend Thrifting: Hitting the Vectrex Jackpot
• Weekend Thrifting: The Perils of Vintage Piracy
• Weekend Thrifting: It's Yard Sale Season
• Weekend Thrifting: 'New' Super Mario Bros.
• Weekend Thrifting: Spinning Bird Kick

A group of pupils at Yale University recently received a grant from the (deep breath) Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which will help fund development of a video game which teaches youngsters how to avoid contracting HIV. The game, Retro-Warriors, will be designed with a multicultural focus, so that it can be used to teach young people across the globe how to identify and eschew risky behaviors.

It’s not the first time someone’s proposed such a project — however, considering the aforementioned grant was for $3.9 million, it might be the most well-funded educational game of all time. We’re fully expecting top-of-the-line graphics, a score by Hans Zimmer and some measure of involvement from Nolan North. For more information on what the game will actually be like, check out this CNS News article.

[Via GamePolitics]

Yale gets $4 million grant for HIV avoidance game originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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