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Five years after reimagining the arcade as a venue for independent games, Babycastles is taking on a new challenge: reinventing the licensed movie game. We’ll be teaming up with distributor Oscilloscope Laboratories to make a game based on their upcoming film, Buzzard.

The dominance of licensed film games, spanning a decade from the late 90’s to the late 00’s, saw video games shift from all-ages mascot games, like Mario, Sonic or Bubsy the Bobcat, to mass-market entertainment aimed at older audiences, such as James Bond, The Lord of the Rings, or The Chronicles of Riddick. This was the era that gave birth to the “games make more money than movies” claim, the ESRB and PEGI with their content warnings and rating systems, and the beginnings of a wider acceptance that videogames could be “art” for “grown-ups.” Licensed film games also financed the massive profits of the companies that would become the large third-party AAA publishers that dominated the industry by the mid 00’s.

It was not to last, however. Film studios saw how much money games were making and started charging more for film licenses, and then the mobile market exploded and AAA studios were left clinging for dear life by duplicating only the most successful gameplay models. The age of the licensed film game was over…

… until now!

At Babycastles, we focus on encouraging collaborations between game developers and artists from other mediums. A collaboration between indie filmmakers and indie gamedevs feels natural. And just as we discovered that bringing a D.I.Y. spirit to an arcade brings out the best features of both, we’re looking forward to seeing what can happen when we bring that same D.I.Y. spirit to this mostly abandoned creative partnership.

We’re hoping that this project might inspire those of you out there who work in film to try experimenting with game developers, and vice versa.

As GamerGate continues to peter out, I got to thinking. The #GamerGate hashtag on Twitter continues to enjoy a fair amount of popularity (it’s in the low 30,000’s if you include retweets, and around 7,000 uses per day if you filter out retweets, as I have in the graph above). However, since the advent of Randi Harper’s GG-Autoblocker, I basically never see actual GamerGate supporters in my feed, so all uses of the hashtag I see now are by people who are mocking GamerGate.

How much, I wondered, of #GamerGate’s usage is actually people ridiculing it?

I was waiting on a work task, so I decided to do some research and analysis. Using Topsy, I looked at the last month in uses of the #GamerGate hashtag, filtering out retweets, and then I looked at the top tweet for each day and determined whether it was pro-, anti-, or neutral. The results surprised me.

For the month of December, the most popular #GamerGate tweets are more likely to oppose GamerGate than support it. And when the most popular tweet does oppose GamerGate, it is ~15% more popular than if it supports GamerGate. Furthermore, pro-GG tweets were, in this sample, of equivalent popularity as tweets that reported on GamerGate neutrally.

It does not seem to matter whether overall web traffic is high or low. Anti-GG tweets were just as likely to end up as top tweet at the beginning of the month when overall scores were high, as at the end of the month when Christmas lowered overall tweet scores by about 50%.

Because there were a handful of days where Topsy did not report a top tweet for the #GamerGate hashtag, it is possible that the data is skewed, and that the GamerGate movement still controls its own hashtag, however, even if every day that lacked data is assumed to have been pro, we find that #GamerGate shifts from being 4:3 opposed to GamerGate to being 5:4 in favor.

We are at a tipping point, either just before, or just after. If this data is representative of reality, those who wish #GamerGate was finally done are now, or will soon be the ones most responsible for the continued popularity of the hashtag. Although I do not have enough data to know for sure, I would not be surprised if there have already been days when the primary traffic under #GamerGate has been opposed to it.

Summary

Days in sample: 30

Days with no data: 6

Days where top tweet supported GG: 9

Average GG top score: 6589.1

Days where top tweet was anti-GG: 12

Average anti top score: 7637.5

Days where top tweet was neutral or ambiguous: 3

Average neutral score: 6505.3

(Wall of data after the jump.)

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The PixelTron is a project Liz and I created for the 2012 Northern Spark outdoor lighting festival in Minneapolis. Originally called the PixelTron150, it is a 15 x 10 grid of pixels, each measuring 6" on a side, leading to an overall screen size of 7.5’ x 5’ x 8", housed in a custom-built arcade cabinet that stood 8’ tall and 8’ wide, with a total depth of about 4’.

Each pixel is lit from behind by a single color-changing LED, similar to the kind used for the lights on the Bay Bridge connecting San Francisco and Oakland.

The PixelTron accepts an arbitrary video signal and can be used to show absolutely any image, game, or video imaginable. However I created a custom game for the festival, a 3-player racing game called Low-Rez Racer that was designed specifically for a resolution of 15 pixels by 10 pixels.

As part of Northern Spark, the game was installed on the Minneapolis Riverwalk near the Stone Arch Bridge between sundown and sunup, and was played near-constantly the entire time by people aged 5 to 65 and of varying levels of sobriety, totaling about 2000 players in one night. We received kind words from many passers-by, including Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, representatives of the Walker Art Center, and The Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

I’ve been playing a couple of games that have gotten me thinking about maximalism in video game design recently, Blizzard’s Hearthstone beta, which is a collectable card game, and the iPad port of Full Control Studios’ Space Hulk, an adaption of the Games Workshop board game.

Both of these games are obviously influenced by AAA videogame aesthetics. On top of a base of a fairly well established gameplay tradition (Magic: the Gathering, and Space Hulk / skirmish miniatures, respectively) they layer on 3D animation, character voices, and lots visual effects. These are, of course, unnecessary for gameplay, since both games could comfortably be played with cards, dice and paper. They’re entirely spectacle.

In particular, my experience with Hearthstone was to install, play for about 2 hours until I thought I had a pretty good sense of the game in my head (Magic: the Gathering, but built for speed, and with slightly larger numbers), and then uninstall. I uninstalled not because I wasn’t having a good time, but because it didn’t seem to be doing anything to resolve the basic tension of collectable card game design: the promise of putting together a strategy only to be surprised when it is undone by playing against someone with cards you’d never seen before, versus the reality of dominant strategies evolving and being available to anyone willing to spend the effort to put a dominant deck together.

I think back to times in my life when I was more interested in spectacle: mostly when I was a teenager. I don’t think it was so much that I was easily distracted by shiny objects and now I’m somehow more resolute, but rather that a lot of gameplay was still brand new to me, and given the option to explore a new idea a couple of ways, I’m happy to pick the pretty one. These days, I’m less interested in spending time on something that seems new, but really isn’t, and so I’ve developed an attraction to sparer aesthetics that make it easier to tell whether I’m dealing with something new or not before I spend a lot of time with it. Maybe that’s because I’m a game designer, and so finding clever things in games is a big part of my life, or maybe it’s because I’m just older and more aware of my own mortality.

In any case, I can understand why the sort of maximalist design choices that make me and a lot of my jaded game-literate peers roll our eyes are still so effective at pulling in new players, even if they turn folks like us off.