And Yet It Moves Comments

October 10th, 2010

The clip above quite succinctly demonstrates the core premise of And Yet it Moves, but to put it into words: you’re a crudely-drawn paper man who travels a bizarre mish-mash world of 2D textures that resemble a natural environment, the entire world can be rotated at will left or right, sending the paper man tumbling in the appropriate direction.

The trick to AYIM is the rotation mechanic which steers paper man (and the objects and structures which support him) into areas otherwise out of reach. Such a mechanic could make a platformer like this disorderly, but the levels are smart and well thought out, ensuring that players aren’t ever asked to do anything too extreme. Judging by the credits too, AYIM was heavily playtested during development. What really saves AYIM though is the fragility of paper man and the way momentum isn’t broken by the rotations of the screen. These limitations on the player transform the levels into a series of spatial puzzles. It’s tricky to judge the exact amount of inertia necessary to topple paperman, so you’ll constantly be trying to push the boundaries of what you can do with him. This part of the players behaviour fosters an addictive quality played on by the frequent and rather convenient checkpoints that spur you on for another go.

And Yet It Moves tells narrative through two means, the first is the transition of environments every few levels or so, starting within a cave, leading into the jungle and then into a surreal wonderland. The order of levels also makes sense from a difficulty standpoint as well, with the interiors of a cave providing less bottomless holes and openings than the jungle (with its sky and so on). The surreal wonderland is then an excuse to take the design in a much more crazy and realised direction. The second means is through the gimmicks punctuating the later halves of the levels. These gimmicks include sending a banana through to an angry ape without squashing it, moving yourself and a duplicate through a flipped, symmetrical maze and moving an army of bats through a cramped cavern. Each of these instances take advantage of the rotation mechanics to great effect while adding a nice bit of context to the levels.

The simplistic charm of these interesting elements is also present in the kooky music arrangements, stock image textures and the “bocha-chicka-wock” sound effect punctuating paper man’s walk. And Yet It Moves may be considered short for the few hours it will take you to complete, but it’s not really considering that not a minute is wasted on superfluous fluff. The rotation mechanic teamed with the physics and frailty of paper man and the well-crafted levels create a harmoniously-designed, smart puzzle-platformer that with a suitably trim play length.

Official Website

The Role of Video Games in Chinese Youth Culture

September 30th, 2010

We’re all aware of the role video games have within a US and European cultures, but rarely do we know or hear very much about the importance of video games in other countries. In China, where I live, video games play a huge role in modern culture, particularly youth culture, and much of its effects I’ve noticed first-hand at the school I work. Video games are an outlet in a life otherwise full of great social pressure and hard work. In this regard video games take on a completely different form than what we may be comfortably use to.

In my school, we have an area with roughly 22 dedicated computers for students to use in their breaks or for parents who want to kill time while their child is in class. In a recent staff meeting, one of my colleagues complained about the negative influence the “computer lab” has over students. The teacher griped that many students would rush upstairs to play games on the computers during the 15 minute down time punctuating each hour of study and then subsequently loose track of time and arrive late to the second period. Obviously this is a real problem for our classes when students arrive 5 minutes to even half an hour late as they have done, and in fact regularly do, in some of my classes. (The half an hour example was, however, a once-off instance). Other teachers chimed in to the discussion, citing video games as a negative influence upon the children. The discussion moved away from the lab and into how every male student invariably uses the phrase “game over” instead of “die”, how video games seem to instil a violent tendency in some of the boys or how students could surprisingly reference a rich English vocabulary for firearms and weapons.

These are in fact real problems and as a teacher, they impede on my role as an educator. Never mind the irritation caused from comments like “teacher you’re game over”. However, video games, just like alcohol, film, junk food, pornography and literature are largely innocent on their own and further, it as not as though we can simply remove them from society. It is how society prevents possible issues that may arise from these things that is of larger importance. In which case, these issue is more of an indictment of China’s wider social problems as opposed to an intrinsic harm of the video game medium*.

*It should be noted that, equally, there are some issues on the other side of the fence too, regarding the design of maliciously addictive games.

In order to deal with the massive amount of children being educated in schools across China, the Chinese government employs heavy standardisation largely through the means of traditional examinations. Examinations play such an important role in Chinese education, culminating in what is called the gaokao 高考 (high test). The gaokao is the end-of-high-school/university-entrance examination sat around the nation every June. In the Chinese education system, your score in the gaokao represents your entire academic worth and ultimately acts to place you somewhere within China’s hierarchy of tertiary institutions. Get a good score in the gaokao and you may be accepted into one of the country’s better universities, giving you major advantage when lined up against the innumerable number of applicants gunning for the same job come 4 years times. Get a bad score and your prospects in life are all but shattered.

So obviously tests, and particularly the gaokao, are a big deal. Fail at the gaokao and your fate at the bottom of the ladder is partially sealed. Mass population and a system of standardisation built around examination and thereby ROTE learning are of great detriment to the development of critical and creative thinking, the arts as well as quality of life. And this is where video games come in.

In this world that I’ve just painted, escapism is a precious commodity. And in this modern world, nothing does escapism quite as well as video games (or the internet for that matter). With such an imbalance between work and pleasure, it’s no wonder my students are so memorised by video games. They desperately need an outlet and when they finally get it, the worth is invaluable. In this light, we can somewhat empathise with the reports we hear about Chinese people and video game/internet addiction.

The imbalances between work and relaxation are perfectly viewable from within the classroom. The majority of my students enter the class tired and exhausted. We have classes for kids that are 7-8 years-old which run until 9pm at night. With an open-minded foreign teacher replacing their unruly Chinese teacher, they treat our school like a social club, a reprieve from hard work. This is perhaps the reason why they’re so reluctant to knuckle down in our classes.

Another side of this social issue is the lack of moderation over what children play. If you thought the generation gap between you and your parents was a big deal, consider the changes that have occurred throughout China over the past 30 years. Parents of Chinese children today grew up in the decade Chairman Mao died, the Gang of Four were imprisoned and Deng Xiao Ping introduced sweeping economic reform. Thirty years later and their children are growing up in a world of mass population and accelerated capitalism on a scale the world has never seen where the rich are enormously wealthy and the poverty-stricken incredibly poor. The generation gap is massive and a significant part of that is the digital divide. Chinese parents, unlike their western counterparts, have had so little background experience with technology, that monitoring their children’s consumption habits of digital media is a challenge entirely new to them. When you have the combination of the parents unfamiliarity and the children’s almost religious like worship for video games, given that they can get access, the potential consequences for abuse are quite serious. Moderating children’s play time and actively engaging with a game together with a child is an important social responsibility threatened by the wide digital divide.

In our world, video games are a form of escapism from life’s troubles. In China, where the youth face enormous pressure in academic life due to overwhelming importance of the Gaokao and the immense amount of competition as a result of the large population, escapism is all the more precious and thereby so too are video games. Since video games are a means to escapism, they are often pinpointed as the reason behind social unrest. However, video games highlight the lack of reprieve from work in Chinese culture, bringing to light social issues such as the need for mediation between work and pleasure, the enormous digital divide and the phenomena of media addiction.

Visual Connection – Flipnote (DSi)

September 25th, 2010

I don’t have, nor do I intend on buying a DSi (I guess I’ll just wait for the 3DS and backwards functionality), but after reading the Iwata Asks interviews (here and here) on the free animation application Flipnote which comes with DSi units, I sure was super intrigued. For a basic overview you can watch a trailer here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0jhPoMhHm0

I believe that if you give people easy-to-use tools and a medium to publish then a lot of amazing things will happen. For Flipnote, the publishing medium is Flipnote Hatena and as you can see the animated shorts are largely impressive. I’ve handpicked a few favourite shorts from Youtube. More can be found at Flipnote Hatena, however, originally I used Youtube to find my videos, so I’ll just stick with that, please enjoy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfoFq-3IdhE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apB2enGTTOs

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Tags: flipnote

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