[This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Ben Abraham on topics including Tiny Tower, the history of an average gamer, De Blob's themes of freedom, and more.] Hello dear readers! Did you miss me? The UK treated me just fine, so I'm back and alive and raring to go. First! Some slightly older things I missed while away – Chris Dahlen at Save The Robot has a 'History of an Average Gamer', and he really is the epitome of the 'average gamer' so his gaming history is like a small slice of gaming history. LB Jeffries at Banana Pepper Martinis posts his essay on 'Gamification and Law, part 3': "The goal of this post is to discuss the potential benefits that come with a society who is accustomed to playing video games beyond marketing techniques." Okay then. And I almost can't believe this, we've never linked to anything on the incredible indie programming-puzzler Space Chem! But now I can point you towards Matthew Gallant of The Quixotic Engineer and his post 'Programming in Space Chem':
"If grabbed molecules are like data in registers, then molecules left on the grid are cached. The cache is a larger, cheaper form of memory, but it is slower to read and write. Data must be written from the cache to a register in order to be manipulated directly by the CPU. The amount of memory in SpaceChem's "cache" is governed by the area of the grid (8 x 10). Each coordinate on the grid can therefore be considered a unique memory address. This analogy is enforced mechanically: a factory "crashes" if two atoms collide on the grid, since you can't store two values in the same memory address."
So, with the catch-up hopefully now out of the way, onto this week's blogging. Firstly, Michael Abbott at The Brainy Gamer has a pair of posts – 'Tiny Tower: FAIL' which deploys Tom Francis's criteria for 'What makes a game fun' and grades Tiny Tower accordingly. Secondly, Abbott writes about the digital/interactive book 'The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore' for the iPad, which he experiences with his young daughter:
"She's engaged in a kind of reading that encourages her to think about why the books talk, and why it's important to help them find their way home. This is far more compelling than the "touch the monkey to make him jump" routine that passes for interactivity in most of the e-books I've seen."
Destructoid blogger 'Wolfey-Boey' looks at De Blob 2 in 'Freedom: A 7 Year Old's Perspective':
"…the game makes no attempt to be subtle about the themes it's trying to tackle. It's quite obvious that the game deals with freedom of expression, censorship and urbanisation culture. Many may even see its analysis on these topics as juvenile and maybe even short sighted, but honestly that's why I find De Blob's handling of the subject so intriguing."
Robert Yang returns with Part 4 of this 'Dark Past' series on the future of the immersive sim, this time looking at 'Randy Smith's "valence theory" of level design'. It's about the delicious in-between state in Thief games where you are neither completely succeeding (sneaking around completely unnoticed) nor completely losing (being killed and restarting), and the importance of the in-between space is highlighted by the questions it asks of the player:
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