Saturday, November 22, 2008

Hurricane Katrina: Tempest in Crescent City Review



Created by Global Kids youth leaders at Canarsie High School in Brooklyn, Hurricane Katrina: Tempest in Crescent City is a side scrolling game that focuses on the heroism of a young girl named Vivica Water during the flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Although the Vivica's heroic rescue efforts are only played out in her dreams, the situations she and her neighbors overcame were definitely real.

According to Tempest's website, the three main goals for the game were
1) Teach players about how everyday residents of New Orleans acted heroically to help each other.
2) Emphasize what are perhaps the two most important priorities in any disaster: communication and use of local resources, needs, and knowledge.
3) Draw attention to the continuing struggle in New Orleans as residents fight for housing in 2008.

Tempest did a good job at 1) and 2), highlighting how many residents helped each other during the rescue efforts by sharing food, shelter, medicine, tools and hope. I appreciate the game's positive portrayal of the survival efforts during the disaster because at the time it seemed like all the mainstream press wanted to focus on stories of "looting", "pillaging", "general chaos" perputrated by people of color. Although Tempest was created in 2007 after the Katrina converage had ended, I believe the positive portrayal of all Louisiana citizens both white and people of color sends a subtle, yet very powerful message to players that everyone can be a hero.

Unfortunately in terms of 3), the focus on the continuing struggle for housing, I didn't get the sense that the game raised that issue other than the fact that Vivica is not living back home in Louisiana even one year after being evacuated. A whole new game to focus on the contining struggle for housing and infrastructure could be useful because it's a multifaceted issue facing many communities both in the US and internationally.

General Critique Disclaimer: I understand that the socially conscious games that I'm reviewing are independently developed usually with very limited manpower and funding. I also understand that these games have been created with a target audience in mind (which usually doesn't include hard core gamers). The critiques that I make are not intended to be jabs at the game designers and developers because I respect the time, effort and heart that went in to creating their game. However I believe that providing feedback is a good way for both game developers and the game community as a whole to learn what improvements can be made in future projects.

Now with that out of the way, let's get down to reviewing.



Gameplay
Gameplay consist of standard side scrolling elements such as running, jumping, swimming, collecting and delivering items and interacting with NPCs. Since the game only consist of 5 levels and can be beaten in about 10 minutes, the gameplay remains fresh with the first level focusing on jumping and ducking and the remaining levels focused on running, jumping and swimming. For a 10 minute game, I was pretty impressed with the variety in Vivica's move set because many similar sized games only have a run and jump gameplay.

Sound
Each level has a different background beat with a similar unifying theme. A small set of sound FX covers all of Vivica's moves as well as environment interactions like smashing roofs, opening doors, taking damage from sharp debris, etc.

Controls
Controls are intuitive and should be familiar to anyone who has ever played any post-Mario Bros era side scrolling platformers. As a gamer who was raised in the console style of using my left hand to control player movement, it would have been cool to have the option of using the WASD keys first person shooter style.

Social Conscious Content
The socially conscious aspects of the Tempest are much more subtle than other games like Molleindustria's McDonald's Videogame, but are powerful none the less because they come across so naturally. Here's what I observed.
1) The main character Vivica is a young African American female - These three facts are important because they break with video game convention which primarily features main characters who are male, either racially white or Asian and range between 18 to 30 years old.

2) The game's story involves child's dream of finding her mother who in reality is most likely dead. Most games, especially those targeted at a younger audience usually don't cover serious issues such as mortality and parental separation or death. Although the game never explicitly mentions whether Vivica's mother is alive, I would assume that since Vivica hasn't heard from her mother even after a year, Vivica's mother didn't survive. I commend Tempest for raising such a mature issue.

3) There is no mention of Vivica's other parental figure, which I would assume either means he or she passed away or was not a part of Vivica's life either by choice or not. I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, but I am glad that the game touches upon the point that single parent households are becoming more common place.

4) In the last level, I found it impossible to save all the residents in trouble becase I ran out of daylight. I'm not sure if this was intentional or perhaps I just wasn't good enough to time every thing correctly. I interpretted the failure to save everyone in the last level as a statement about the futility of trying to save every person in need even if you do everything perfectly and try your hardest. The thought of having to leave people behind in order to save yourself and others is an unfortunate and disturbing concept, but I think it touches on the grim reality that decisions made in diaster and life or death situations have very serious outcomes some unavoidable.

Overall
Hurricane Katrina: Tempest in Crescent City is a solid, yet short side scrolling platformer that will appeal to a younger audience with its bright graphics, intuitive controls, young herione and message of youth empowerment, community heroism and diaster preparedness. More experienced gamers will have no problem finishing the game in under 10 minutes or may tire of the simple gameplay before completing the five levels, but all gamers will walk away with a better understanding of the situtation many faced in 2005 and are continuing to face in the aftermath Hurricane Katrina. In terms of socially conscious content, Tempest touches upon several serious and mature issues that are important to players of all ages and to people of all cultures.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

MacGyver "The Game"

Wouldn't that be pretty freaking bad ass. I'm envisioning it as a puzzle adventure game where you're put into situations where you have to figure out how to make useful contraptions out of seemingly random stuff. The Monkey Island series was pretty good about using seemingly random items, but it would be cool to inject some real life physics and science into the mix. Obviously the laws of physics and science would have to be bent a little (or a lot), but it would be cool to give the players information on what principles of physics, chemistry and engineering are working behind the scenes. I guess for a science head like myself, I would love to hear explanations about the chemical reactions being used when Macgyver creates his taco shell pen rocket launcher.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Financial Advisor Game for Gamers

I just met with a college friend today who's a financial adviser and he really gave me some important reminders about what things to start considering for my financial future. I think this information would be really useful to pack into a video game that was able to show users the effects of their decisions.

It could be a virtual human game similar to the Sims except that when certain events happen the virtual humans would be confronted with the same decisions and outcomes that we'll probably encounter in real life. As an example situation, your human could receive a huge inheritance from a recently deceased family member like mom or dad, but instead of just wallowing in the money, you would have to figure out how to pay the inheritance taxes, most likely requiring you to sell off a bunch of your stuff immediate or take out a loan while the paper work is taken care of.

The game sounds dry, but I think that many of the situations can be presented in an entertaining way because the game itself doesn't have to be about finances, it can just present financial facts that could come up in certain common events like character death, housing purchases, amassing large amounts of money, marriage and having kids.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Game Reviewing For Change

Since I think that constructive game reviews can be useful for future game development, I've started reviewing some of socially conscious games starting with Hurricane Katrina: Tempest in Crescent City. I'll be posting the reviews both here and in the Community Reviews section at GamersOfAction.org once I'm done. Hopefully other community members will also contribute their own reviews and we can really start contributing to the development of future serious and socially conscious games.

I still need to figure out what else we can do until we get some more video game street cred so we can get some serious considerations from game publisher when it comes to focus/game testing. I really need to start looking for a larger base of active conscious gamers, maybe through Facebook, ECA, Games For Change and Gamers in Action.

Saturday, November 1, 2008

DoppelGanger - Gamers In Action

After doing a google search for Gamers Of Action and finding us actually listed (Hurray!), I couldn't help but notice that it looks like we have a doppelganger in another site called GamersInAction.org.

That's actually really awesome to hear since Gamers In Action is doing something similar to what we want to do although it looks like for now they are focusing exclusively on hosting game tournaments to raise money for charities. Right now it looks like they're working together with Child's Play, an non-profit org that helps raise money and donations to get games into the hands of children at the hospital which is really cool.

I'll have to contact the people over at Gamers In Action to see if they'd like to work together in the future since it seems like our orgs would be good complements for each other. Perhaps Gamers Of Action can drop the tournament missions and focus more on progressive game playing/reviewing/creation.

Shameless Self Promotion

If you're interested in checking out a edutainment game that I created a couple of years ago check out Keyalaga - a typing tutor shoot em up game combining the look of Galaga with the typing mechanics of Typing of the Dead. I'm shooting to port the game over into the XNA and PSN engines so I can get a polished version out to consoles. Don't expect it anytime soon though unless I somehow get a team together to work on it because working on this project alone is gonna take a while. Let me know what you think though if you get a chance to try out Keyalaga.

http://www.cs.lmu.edu/~timberoth/keyalaga

Feast your eyes on the masterpiece known as Keyalaga...............................

Web Site Design Guru?

Nope. I'm not sure I'd really even consider myself an average web site designer. Then again I'm a computer scientist first and foremost so I doubt I'll ever get out of the realm of programmer art. For now I'll focus on the organization's content and web site tech like Javascript, XML and SQL databases. We still need a website front page though, so I think I'll have to create a better under construction site for now to at least put some information up.

Logo of Action

It took a few tries but we finally have a logo for Gamers of Action. It's a combination of the controller design I created with the spirally design Kat created. The controller obviously symbolizes gaming both current and future, while the spirals represent continuous progressive movement and action.

Take a look and let us know what you think.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

It's Alive, It's ALIVE!!!!!!!!

The gamersofaction.org site is now live, although it's obviously under construction. Now that we have a site, we'll be adding to it over time since we don't have a lot of time to focus on it right now. If you want to help out let us know since we could always use any web design support.

Friday, October 10, 2008

Finding a Web Host is Hard :(

Didn’t realize finding a good web hosting company was going to be so hard.  I’ve been wallowing through reviews for hours last night, but I’m still not sure exactly who I’m going to go through to set up GamersOfAction.org, although I’m leaning toward InMotion.  I’m looking to get this all sorted out this weekend so hopefully they’ll be a website up and running by tomorrow night.  Wish me luck.

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Quick Note to Self

Game marathon fundraisers and large scale drive to play existing positive impact games like GWAPs (Games With A Purpose) and that Rice for Definitions game.

Saturday, September 27, 2008

The ULTIMATE Goal...goal....goal...goal........

I was able to get into email contact with Suzanne Seggerman, the co-founder and president of Games for Change (gamesforchange.org) today which was pretty damn cool.

As I was typing an email response to her, I think I articulated my ultimate goal fairly well so I'm going to copy and paste that into the blog since I don't really feel like retyping the whole thing again.

So here it goes:

My ultimate goal is to create a non-profit game company that develops AAA progressive socially conscious games that will appeal to both casual and hard core gamers. I know this sounds like an impossible task, but I know that progressive thought, video games and commercial success do not have to be mutually exclusive.

Since my end goal is not something that can be easily achieved right now with my current experience level, we (Kathy and I) were planning on starting small with a non-profit called Gamers Of Action that would allow gamers to use their skills to enact positive social change namely through the raising of money to fund the development of socially conscious games. If we raised enough money we could start a small community based foundation that could help fund other young game non-profits.

In terms of fundraising we brainstormed multiple ideas (the viability of each of these options still needs to be researched)
- Find temporary game testing/ focus testing opportunities and have participants donate a portion of their earnings. This setup would be similar to the way that TV taping fundraisers are conducted. Basically groups sign up with audience agencies and go to a TV taping and are paid a certain amount for each person they bring, usually about $14-$20 a head.
- Run a Game Tournaments to raise money
- Partner with existing game tournaments and professional leagues to raise money

Since the mission of Gamers Of Action is to allow gamers to use their gaming skills for positive change, there are other non-money related options that we could pursue as well such as
- Creating socially conscious game design classes to help inspire future generations of progressive game designers
- Create a progressive game developer mentorship program to connect young progressive game developers with more experienced ones.

Of course a lot of this will change over time, but I think it's a good start. Now I can start looking to more research and heckling other companies to find out how charitable they really are.

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Not Being Lazy is Hard

Even pushing myself to get this blog started wasn't easy so I'm hoping that this blog will force me to make advances toward my ultimate goal of starting a video game non-profit that produces AAA socially conscious games. Sound like a crazy idea? Makes me sad that even I answer that question with a "Yes" most of the time. I gotta keep reminding myself though that everything starts off small and crazy sounding. Even the name "Wii" sounded ridiculous when it was first announced (still does in my opinion), but now people don't give it a second thought, hell even embrace the name.

I'm just so lazy, I wished the socially conscious game genre was already established so I could easily apply for a game programming position. I enjoy working at my current job as a game programmer for an entertainment game company, but working at a socially conscious game company would be ideal. Guess I might just have to start one sometime in the future if I can't find one. Easier said than done though...I'm lazy.

Blogging for Change?

I finally got around to creating a blog that I'm going to use to document the challenges that I'll most likely be facing trying to get GamersOfAction.org off the ground. It'll also be a good way to document some of the questions banging around in my head that I'd probably forget otherwise. Who knows maybe there are others out there that might be facing the same challenges I am and if not, now perhaps in the future. Even if no one every finds this blog (except for Kathy :) ), at least it'll help me stay organized and focused.