Vex Appeal is a weblog and collection of projects by Guy Parsons, a game designer, online community and digital strategy dude in London, England. Read more about the saucy butcher boy here.
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projects:
law 37 / sleeper cell / lets change the game
101 things in 1001 days
psychopatch
LOLgod
elsewhere on the internets:
flickr
myspace
zoominfo
linkedin
facebook
guy.lewis.parsons@gmail.com
vexy young things:
jey biddulph
mike jewell
roo reynolds
dan hon
adrian hon
naomi alderman
steve peters
previously on vexappeal:
Back soon... Free Moshi Monsters Codes Spokeo... or spookeo, more like I'm Prove Very Where J.C Leyendecker and Team Fortress 2 Train of thought "Love Is Like A Bottle Of Gin..." Links for FAME people They Tell Stories Ffffudging it slightly
J.C Leyendecker and Team Fortress 2
Friday, March 14, 2008
At FAME I talked a bit about drawing inspiration from new sources and one of the things I touched on was TF2's art originating from old school commercial illustration. Alas I couldn't find very good examples from trusty Google Image Search, but now (a day late) I've found Valve's slide deck about the design process (PDF), which is worth checking out. Although the second half gets crazy and algorithmic. Anyway, PICS - click to see full size.
Labels: design, games, team fortress 2
Links for FAME people
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Here is some of the stuff I talked about today:
Crysis Barrels, Toblo, making games in Excel, Gamasutra, Team Fortress 2's art, J.C Leyendecker, Portal and Narbacular Drop, Starry Night in Second Life, M.C Escher and Echochrome, Chorewars, 3001 from Come Out And Play, Audiosurf, 300 Game Mechanics (and other game design blogs), DEFCON, Desktop Tower Defense, Scrabulous (you know where to find it, son), Line Rider, Kingdom Of Loathing, Perplex City and Alternate Reality Games...
...and Sleeper Cell.
Heckle me virtually - my email is guy.lewis.parsons@gmail.com.
Labels: arg, fame, games, links, presentation
People will see me and cry
Sunday, March 09, 2008
Fame!
Which is the backronym of "Fashion, Arts, Media Eastmidlands" (points for effort), an event at De Montfort Uni on Wednesday, where I am speaking about games and specifically games outside the traditional developer->publisher->PC/console framework. And maybe I will get around to putting something online about it too.
Labels: games, presentation, work
The Games, as in plurals of "The Game"
Saturday, November 03, 2007
Just a bunch of links to games that are big, intense, competitive, urban, cross-disciplinary:
- Challenger World - big-ass 4-day running, kayaking, puzzle solving, team based, charitable events, but out in the country, innit
- Rat Race is a cross-discipline urban chase, mostly physical stuff
- The Go Game is way more lighthearted and creative
- Area/Code make Big Urban Games but do more mobile stuff now
- Journey To The End Of The Night is basically a race with an added stealthy "avoiding the catchers" element.
- Game Control compiles some of the big ambitious 24-hour games in American cities, very much by-geeks-for-geeks, big entry fees, super hard puzzles, but massive WOW factor, especially Shelby Logan's Run, though no updates since 2002....
- Wow, lots more of the above on Wikipedia and here
- Also, Microsoft Puzzle Hunt
- City Chase is a big 4 to 6 hour urban race with puzzley elements
Labels: arg, games, live events
Game face
Saturday, November 03, 2007
A quick little game that challenges you to identify the facial expressions that appear for a few milliseconds. I did surprisingly well - 9/10 - so I'm not sure what that means! It's based around the work of "that guy from Blink" who can read people's emotions amazingly well by focusing on the expressions that flash across their face very quickly.
Incidentally, this article may have crossed your feedreader recently:
One exercise shows a grid of faces, with 15 of them frowning and one smiling. The player must find the smiling face as quickly as possible... the group that played the "find the smile" exercise reported feeling less stressed, had higher self esteem, made more sales, and were rated as being more confident in their phone calls. Most remarkably, said Balwin, they had 17 percent lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol.But you can actually play it online at Mindhabits.com! I mean the presentation is pretty meh and it's too big for my browser window and won't let me scroll and so on and so forth, but hey, check it out. I'd like to say I'm approaching a Zen state after 15 minutes of playing earlier, but at this exact moment I'm feeling more like carving out my eyeballs with rusty teaspoons, so best check back with me in another six days - unless I've become a Buddhist monk by then. Or actually have done the rusty teaspoons thing.
Labels: cognition, emotion, games, psychology
News from the front
Friday, October 26, 2007
Hello! It's been a busy week!
I've been at the London Games Festival Fringe Playtime Lab (try saying that five times fast) in deepest darkest Soho. The first few days saw ideas aplenty as we came up with game concepts for buses, big screens, the Olympics, fairytales and more besides, and then I spent the last few days working with some ace people on a kind of resistance/anti-totalitarian game that takes (in my mind, anyway) stylistic cues from V for Vendetta and Children of Men.
(Playtimers, including me looking grumpy. Photo from Frank Boyd.)
It's been a funny week, because it's usually the case that you sit about thinking "man, I just need to have a really good idea." The outcome of this week for me has been to show that ideas are, in fact, dime-a-dozen... and inspired me to get on and actually make stuff. Anyway, I met lots of lovely people and I look forward to seeing them all again soon at a reunion in, err, two weeks time.
I'm also proud to be working with some fantastic minds on a Let's Change The Game pitch who got in touch after my call for help. We're assessing the various mechanics that influence the game and batting lots of ideas back and forth, and I'm excited to see what the judges make of it. (Although, other people are still welcome to get involved! Artists and illustrators especially, right now.)
Then it was off to the Gamer Geeks Quiz, surely the hardest yet most erudite quiz on gaming there has ever been, challenging players' knowledge on everything from typography to voice acting and the C64 to the Wii. Here are the esteemed organisers taking charge:
(thanks to the most gracious Thayer Driver for the photo!)
Fear their wrath! I know I do.
Hurtling onwards, I'm at Gamecity in Nottingham tomorrow (as in Saturday 27th of October) pretending to be Dan Hon and talking about alternate reality games at the thing he was meant to be speaking at, but isn't speaking at, because (long story short) Royal Mail are fuckwits. But it does mean I'm speaking at 4pm, Saturday, at the Broadway Cinema. I'll also be around Nottingham for some of the day (afterwards, mostly) exploring some of the other stuff going on, so if you wanna come make friends then get in touch by twitter or text - deets here.
More soon, and less hurried "more" at that.
Labels: arg, gamecity, games, playtime labs, quiz
Modular gaming
Thursday, October 18, 2007
So, you know how the idea of 'episodic gaming' is to break up your usual 20+ hour frag-fests into smaller, more digestible chunks? Well, I'm thinking a bit about modular gaming, which is the opposite - coalescing small chunks of game into a coherent and satisfying whole, primarily using narrative as an intra-game glue.
So, to take the recent Half-Life 2, Episode 2, (Manchester United nil) as an example, it's really a mix of different games tied together through plot:
- combat
- physics puzzles
- driving games
- throwing/accuracy challenges
- and a few more besides
Likewise, people are very excited about dem new-fangled "casual games" - you know, your Bejeweled and iSketch and that kind of thing. I wonder if you could glue these kind of casual games together, though, to become more than the sum of their parts. Some people might say that this would take the "casual" out of "casual game", but I'm not so sure - I think using this style of gameplay in the context of something like Kingdom Of Lothing (basically just a going-places-and-killing-monsters-grind, albeit an hilarious one) could be deeply awesome.
So yes, making a light-but-lengthy web/browser-based game, consisting of a variety of minigames, all tied together with plot and elements that persist for the duration? This, I think, would be worth trying - maybe we'll see Miniclip or Kongregate try it soon...
Labels: arg, casual, games, modular
Play And Out Come
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
I've been meaning to blog about Come Out & Play, the urban gaming festival in Amsterdam (immediately following the unfeasibly expensive PICNIC) I went to a few weeks ago with Mind Candies Jey and Mike, and Laura.
(photos from lhall)
It was a bit of a dismal weekend in the 'dam weather-wise (not ideal for street games) but very chilled out and fun. We stayed on an awesome houseboat called The Friendship, hosted by an incredibly wired yet wholly loveable dude whose name I've already forgotten. He tried to take us out on his little boat, which promptly failed to start, so he flagged down a friend in a passing water-taxi and took us through the canals right to the PICNIC site itself - deeply cool.
Anyway, the games! Like any festival, we had noble intentions of playing loads of games, but a combination of laziness, drizzle, and a slight grumpiness at getting all our games rejected meant we often forwent participation in favour of lasagna and wine.
Yet, we managed to play two games.
First we played People Watching by Annette Mees, which was a really sweet game - it involved wandering around the local market square trying to identify the stooges (described succinctly on an accompanying document) loitering amongst the civillians busy shopping in the square. And , of course, we won. Here's out heathery trophy:
(photo from lhall)
The whole game was designed to be an exercise in loveliness - even erroneous identifications only resulted in timidly giving a stranger a lucky token and wishing them all the best, which was generally well received :-)
The other game we played at the closing party (because obviously we went to the party) was OMMRPG, although actually it's nothing like the description on that page - two teams each with a laser-shooter on a balcony, four people with mirrors and three people with blocking gloves. The aim is for the laser pointer to find an unmarked mirrorman who can than reflect the beam into the goal to score a point. It was great, basketball style twitch gaming, with rarely a minute passing between a goal from one team or the other.
(photo from Kevan)
These two very different games got me thinking about a basic duality in "games" as we think of them. OMMRPG is in a very real sense a sport - it's just set of rules, and it'd be playable by any group of people with the requisite array of laser pointers and mirrors. People Watching on the other hand is an authored experience - you need someone running it, putting actors in place, coming up with clues, and all that sort of thing.
I guess a lot of games are a mixture of the two. Where's the sport and where's the story in Half-Life? Is a cliff you can't climb up equivalent to, say, the offside rule? In Monopoly, it seems like the layout of the board is a rule, but the names of the places are clearly part of a story.
And for now, I'm too antsy to take this thought much further. I guess what I'm suggesting is that sports are, in a sense, cloneable.
Labels: amsterdam, come out and play, games, ommrpg, people watching, stories
Play/Time Labs
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Woo, yay and hoopla - I'm going to be attending the Play/Time Labs workshop in London later this month. Sounds like it should be a productive few days:
The thing is, it's somehow entwined with this bizzare Soho Stories thing, which is completely and frustratingly impenetrable. Someone was even telling me about it at the Werewolf night the t'uther night, which was OK until halfway through the conversation they said "Well, talking out-of-game..." and I was all like, "What?" So, I have no idea what's really going on, and of what little information I've gleaned, I'm clueless as to what aspects of it are actually real - which is just a bit annoying. Hopefully it'll end up being something cool though!Over four days between October 22nd and 26th, twenty creative professionals - artists, writers, developers and producers from backgrounds in theatre, video-games, animation, web design, TV and radio - will collaborate and compete to develop original ideas for new games across a range of platforms.
The Play/Time Lab will comprise a blend of masterclass, presentations, workshop, screenings and of course, play. Participants will have a unique opportunity to explore and experiment with game forms and digitally mediated play; working as individuals and in teams they will also brainstorm, develop and prototype ideas for new ones.
Play/Time will focus on digitally mediated play but not specifically on the console games market. We are interested in exploring new forms of interactive narrative, location based games, social and casual games, games that involve live events and performance, augmented or alternate reality games, games with emotional depth, games that appeal to 'non-gamers', games that play out across a range of platforms including radio and televsion.
Update: I've been asked to provide a "fictional identity" for the Soho Project. So I went with Angry Soups. It was either that or Pussy Organ. Still not the foggiest idea what it's all about, though...
Labels: arg, games, playtime labs, soho stories, wtf
Playing with money
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
You see a lot of game-type mechanics in web apps these days. Here's a good example from LinkedIn:
In fact there's a whole really-quite-good presentation on this sort of thing, if you're interested. Another thing: you see a lot of heated discussion on the internet about credit scores - what they are, what they should be, how to improve them, all that sort of thing. Shouldn't they be more readily accessible to consumers? It'd be useful and motivating.
There's tons of other data that companies and organisations hold on people, and that's the sort of thing that people have classically regarded with suspicion. But the success of companies like Amazon shows that users don't give a damn about their data if it's given back to them in interesting ways. What if Ocado guessed what sort of meals you'd been eating recently and suggested other potential recipies? Or mentioned that other people who order passionfruit also like guava? Or that the amount of salt in your average weekly shop is dangerously high?
If you're a company and know something about someone, try telling them about it. Chances are, they'll find it interesting - people love hearing about themselves, right?
Labels: credit score, games, linkedin, ocado, web apps
Bricking it
Sunday, January 21, 2007
If you used to have as much fun destroying your Lego castles as you did making them, you should check out Toblo, which is an awesome Capture The Flag-style game. You and a surprisingly intelligent group of AI friends face off against an opposing team, using the bricks that make up the game's scenery as chuckable weapons. Download the file here.
This Is Not (Letting Me Play) A Game
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Can I just rant that online PC gaming is a total nightmare? I downloaded America's Army (which of course took quite a while) and I can't complete the Weapons Training (stupid rocket launchers!) so I can't play the proper multiplayer, but when I join the "trying it out" version of multiplayer (of which there seem to be only 2 servers, with nobody on) I'm instantly kicked for what seems to be some kind of PunkBuster problem. I say "seems" because of course the message displays for around 0.1 seconds before I'm taken back to the menu screen.
Then I tried downloading F.E.A.R which was again a bit complicated as all the sites offering the game wanted me to have a paid subscription in order to get at the file in question. Eventually I had to install a widget called xFire and get the file that way. It then happily installed until the last moment, whereupon a file fails to install. Of course, I can't see what file, because the installation path is too long to display in the error message box... so that's a write off too.
Then I've finally found KumaWar, which has been working nicely for a while, apart from now my connections to all Team games drop after about 90 seconds, one map has misinstalled itself horribly so instead of any terrain I just see big objects saying "ERROR", my PC no longer seems able to change monitor settings without being restarted, and oh yeah, my computer has stopped being able to play video properly. Including DVDs. Awesome.
And finally, there's Defcon, which is otherwise fantastic, won't let me host my own server. Or join half of the games that are on offer, at random. Sigh... there must be a better way, right?
Labels: games, thisisbroken