ACME "black spot"

A recent game release that has been in the works and has been extensively previewed prior to its release, Portal, I feel challenges the classic ideas of space and toys with the idea of genre. Portal, for those who do not know, is a game that plays like it is a first person shooter, where the perspective is from the “character’s” point of view, and you see everything they would see, and there is a gun that you control. However, Portal is a game that is not based on shooting someone before they shoot you, or team work to capture a flag. Instead portal is a puzzle game. The premise of the game is that a gun is invented that opens portals that will transport a person from the entrance of one "window" to where-ever the other "window" exit is. This becomes the only tool in the game, requiring you to stretch your use of the Portals to solve different problems. This really expands the ideas of “space” in the game because there are several small things you can play with inside the game itself.

One example, placing a portal on the ceiling and the floor, results in an endless loop of falling. Similarly, placing two portals nearly facing each other results in you running through one portal to come out the other portal seeing yourself run through the initial portal, which can result in a common dog like activity of chasing your own tail. So you can see that the ideas of space are the very things that are being played with in order to create environment of meaningful play.

The very interaction with the space you occupy and the portals that distort the space create a very intense sort of interaction. These interactions with the portals and how they behave soon becomes discernible and your involvement with the game more profound, encouraging the player to develop theories about what you can accomplish. The actions you make are almost immediately integrated with the game on a lager context as a decision to place a portal in a poor location can result in your death or a dead end that halts progress in the game.

Thus we can see that Portal fits the requirements that the game provides Meaningful Play. “Meaningful Play occurs when the relationships between actions and outcomes in a game are both discernible and integrated into the larger context of the game. Creating meaningful play is the goal of a successful game design.” (Handbook of Computer Game Studies. Chap. 4 pg. 61). These very interactions and outcomes that define meaningful play are almost exclusively what Portal is about. This innovative game incorporates and encourages interaction with the environment. As a very old “educational cartoon”, Magic School Bus would say “Take chances, get messy and make mistakes.” Portal gives you this world and theoretical capability and says the same thing, go out there and find out what happens when you explore new opportunities, what they lead to and what new ways of thinking can you create, all simplified into one word, “play.”

Games, games and war games.

Gaming for me has, for the most part, always been around and available. The first games I played were on the computer, Dos games like Frogger, and Gorillas, games who's concept are still seen today. Worms, Gunbound and the like are all just advanced versions of the original Gorillas. Some time after computer gaming, my family got a Nintendo Entertainment System, or as they call it in Japan, a Famicon. Making my first console game Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt. I, of course, was terrible at Duck Hunt, if we had bought it new, I would have been essentially 1 year old. I don't quite recall how old I was, but when playing Duck Hunt having the gun directly on the screen was a given. I think probably the first game I got really excited about when I was younger was Super Mario Bros. 3. So we must have had the console starting somewhere just before 1990.

We survived for a long time on the NES and our next console would be the N64, quite a leap considering Super Nintendo and a large number of Sega consoles were out. N64 was new and interesting, particularly because of the 3D graphics capabilities. I don't really recall too much from the N64 with the exception of the image of my father attempting to play my uncle in wave race 64, Bango Kazooie, and the ever important and popular Golden Eye.

Flash forward to the present and my gaming habits are heavily rooted in multi-player first person shooters (who needs story mode?) like Halo 2, Unreal Tournament 2004 (PC), and some others so long as they aren't from EA and aren't historical shooters. With continued examination, I put a  A LOT of hours into racing games. This is a bit different from what I would have told you not all that long ago. I used to hate racing games, felt like they were dull and repetitive. That's also how I used to feel about techno music and it's staple in most things I listen to. I'd have to thank my good friend Thor for racing games. With the release of Project Gotham Racing 2 we would play it nonstop for hours. After getting good at Project Gotham it was a no brainer to pick up Forza when it came out. It was a really exciting title. Got hooked, obsessed, and it continued with Forza 2. I guess at least I can say I don't just spend all my time with virtual cars since I'm pretty involved in motor sports out in the real world as well. My third and probably best love is for a good Role Playing Game. Oddly enough my first complete play through wasn't the one that I committed the most time to, but it was the first that I owned. Final Fantasy X. For anyone who has played you'd find it amusing that at the time I was playing, I was a very tan, very blonde water polo player. Anyway, love for rpg's continue, only problem is that I'm really picky about them.

It seems like I've talked a lot, but haven't really covered much. Bottom line, I wouldn't be the same person I am today without video games. I grew up and now that I have careers in front of me, one of the things that just makes sense is a video game maker, and since I'm a competent artist and I'm very critical of video game art, it seems like that's what I'm going to be doing. Video games are how i socialize, how I express myself, how I de-stress, and part of my introspective process.

In the beginning

There wasn't much around. In fact there was roughly an entire universe of nothing.