Frank+L's+Kongregate

1/28/10 - Frank Leung
Okay, so tonight I just created my Kongregate page. I haven't done much with it, but I will very soon. I wanted to create my username to be FrankyFrankndaFunkyLunch, but the site would only accept 16 characters at most. Instead I opted for FrankyFlank, which unfortunately does not have the same punch, but oh well.

So unfortunately I haven't really taken the time to get to know Kongregate and the world within (sorry Germaine), but now I'm officially getting down to business.
 * 2/16/10 9:00 pm**

As you can see, I've updated my profile page to tell more about myself. I'm especially happy with my new avatar of Naoto from FLCL.

I also just noticed my "point level" in the upper right hand of the screen. Apparently, I am on level 1 with 15 points. Within Kongregate, you can earn points from uploading games, rating games, completing achievements, and inviting friends to the site. Unfortunately, these are kind of useless since they haven't determined what they can be used for.

In typical noob fashioned I asked a basic, stupid question and got moderately insulted (called an "old man" *womp womp*). Usually on console or more advanced computer games, if you asked a dumb question or said something stupid you'd get flamed so hard you'd cry. But surprisingly that didn't happen. In fact, the level 25 player and moderator Takamatsu politely answered my question. I'll try to friend him to see if he'll "take me under his wing" so to speak.
 * 10:05**

Anyway, I played this pretty in depth, turn-based strategy game called Battalion Vengeance, which was featured on the homepage. Basically, you are given a variety of infantry, air, and sea units with the main objective being annihilating your computer AI-ed enemy. Different units had different attacks, but you mainly had to attack up close and personal. Because I was just beginning, I started a tutorial called "Boot Camp." I progressed through 4 tutorial stages before the game froze and made me frustrated enough to quit. I suppose this game was decent, but there wasn't that x-factor to it.


 * 10:30pm**

Moving on, I played another featured game called I Remain. It's basically a point and click survival horror game. Since it got good reviews, I ASSUMED it was good, but it's not. Although I liked to be challenged when playing a game, this game was kind of ridiculous in that you practically had to explore every nook and cranny. Unfortunately, I was forced to use the dreaded walkthrough, which another member of the community handily created for noobs like me. It took me forever to kill my first zombie and it all hinged on just one stupid little detail I missed (sigh).



And now since it's 11pm and I still haven't finished this blasted game, I quit. After briefly browsing a few pages, it seems that there's a lot more to this site than just games.


 * 2/20/10 - 10:30pm**

Alright, let's do some work with Kongregate on a Saturday night...yay? Okay, maybe not, but anyways, I stumbled across this game called Toss the Turtle. It's exactly how it sounds - except for the tossing, because it's actually LAUNCHING. So maybe they should call it Launch the Turtle, but I digress. Basically, the main goal of the game is to launch this sorry turtle through the air as high and as far as you can while you try to keep him in the air through the matter of sling shot rocks (upgraded to machine guns), better cannons, bombs, rocket packs, chainsaw-welding maniacs, etc. Here's a shot of the turtle flying to its impending doom of bone-shattering earth:

What's interesting about this game is not only the sadistic pain you can impose on a harmless animal, but a reward system like many other games on the site. In the achievement system, there are a range of point rewards (which I discussed earlier as being useless for now) for easy, medium, and hard achievements. These achievements are in a way very similar to the ones you can get on Xbox 360 or PS3. However, like I said, you can't trade them in for anything special.

In addition to the point system, there are kreds. Apparently, you can use these kreds to purchase bonuses and other cool game-related stuff. The thing is these kreds are actual money with 1 kred = 1 dollar. So you actually have to pay for this bonus stuff, but the huge kicker is the tip jar. The tip jar is where you tip the game developer. You can tip 5, 10, 25, or "other" kreds by credit card to the developer which will be deposited to their account. After $25 in kreds, this will be cashed out to the developer as a small profit, maybe even a way of earning a living (as they say in the FAQ). So maybe I can get paid by designing a game...

Stupid turtle game didn't give me 5 points for my beginner's achievement! Well, it's actually 11:35pm now. The library's closing down so I guess I'm done for now.


 * 2/24/10** - **10:00pm**

Hello again world, I'm back on Kongregate and I'm exploring the forums. Something weird happened yesterday though. I went on just to briefly look at the forums and I posted my first post on the off-topic channel. I posted about the Hurt Locker since it's oscar season again, but I got a lot of no replies for some reason. One person posts telling me to post in another forum for better effect, but the only other forum that's better is the Serious Topics one, which to me doesn't suit talk for a movie. But I guess I'll give it a try and see what happens.

I probably should have done this, but there is apparently a guidelines you "need" to read before posting. Here's a snippet:

After taking a couple of minutes to read this, their basic rule is to not be an ass and not to spam. I also found out that there are different chat rooms on the site like role-playing chats (which are similar to MUDs, are they not?). However, it seems that to get into the chat you need to be playing a game. So it seems like when it all comes down to it, the site encourages game playing and creation. You can see this kind of encouragement on the forums as well: As far as non-topics about gaming go, these are your only options. From what I've seen there's no sub-threads within these channels. The majority of the threads are dedicated to - you guessed it - gaming.

During my snack I played this enthralling puzzle game called The Company of Myself. It's a little narrative about a magacian who now lives in solitude and gets through puzzles by using his disappearing self. It's weird concept, but works brilliantly...until the 18th level. I think I must have spent more than a half hour trying to crack that level, but screw it. It's a difficult game obviously. I forgot to speak on this, but games are categorized as the following: Action, Shooter, Adventure & RPG, Sports & Racing, Multiplayer, Strategy & Defense, Puzzle, and a miscellaneous category. You can sort the categories in a way to see what kind of games you'd like to try out. For example, I chose to play the "highest rated games" since I wanted to play something that was established on the site.

As a result, I ran into this music game called Super Crazy Guitar Man. It's basically Guitar Hero with your keyboard, which is definitely not as fun.

Sooooo I went back and actually finished the Company of Myself game. Took me a lot less time and it's actually quite satisfying. Sad ending though. As much as I explored the site so far, I'm having trouble coming up with a research topic to really delve into. In the "About us," the site calls itself one for the gaming community, which I found interesting given our discussions on internet community, phish.net, etc.

I went to the Kreds section and I found out that besides actually paying for Kreds, you can actually earn them albeit shady methods. The shady method I'm talking about are those stupid surveys you take from third-party vendors. It's basically all spam and perplexes me as to why Kongregate would even consider that as a viable method.

I explored more of the site and found out that points can be used for something. Well that can't be "used," but their accompanying levels give players access to a wide variety of things. For example, in the news section, players can apparently get beta access to a game called Remnants of Skystone if they are level 10. This really rewards people and is a clear motivating factor to playing the games. Wow, it's 1:07am now. These games really kill a lot of time. I'll have to look into kreds and game creations more later. Until then.


 * 2/27/10 - 5:00pm**

Alright, time to get to work. So I played this puzzle game called Portal. What you need to do is get through each level by using your portal gun to shoot 2 portals: a blue and a yellow one. By doing this, you transport yourself through either portal onto another platform where you try to reach your goal of moving through the next door. The first 5 levels were fairly easy, but I got pretty tired of this game pretty quick. At least I earned the beginner's achievement. I think I'm about 50 points away from reaching level 4.

So I'm starting on another game called Little Wheel. The backstory is that all the robots in the town have fallen asleep because their power supply is gone. Only one robot remains and the character has to restore power to save the world! Typical right? Well, yes, but what makes this game pretty awesome is the environment. It has a pretty quirky, cool tone to it. Also, the animation is top notch. While playing this game, I started chatting to others in the Chinese room. Like I explained earlier, chat rooms within Kongregate vary greatly and there are many subchannels, such as game-specific or language specific rooms.

The chat room is a pretty strange place. I'm talking right to a couple of people and they all seem just like every other nerd in America, which isn't bad (I'm a nerd too, you could say), but it seems like their country of origin really doesn't matter. Right now our conversation is pretty random. We're talking about the space-time continuum and blackholes. And now we're on religion and time travel. It's very stream of consciousness type lingo. I guess you can't really find anything else to talk about however. This isn't an exactly subject specific form.

Another thing I noticed about the chat was the presence of a troll/spammer. This person, decided to flood the chat with meaningless symbols and spewed racial epithets. Everybody else in the room that was chatting, cracked down on this person. One person in particular, kayakishi, claimed he was a mini-mod (a second-grade moderator perhaps?) and kicked the person out of the chat. Other people told him to stop or threatened to get an actual mod (moderator) into the room. This event reminded me of the internet community article in which many people were apt to shut down annoying or hateful chatters.

While playing my game and the chat room conversation switched all over the place. Our next topic was a zombie apocalypse. I'm not sure if the chat will be good for an ethnography however. I think the chat is more for just having someone to hang out with while you all play games, but I will still need to explore other aspects of the site. For now, I need to get dinner.

So I just played this incredibly enthralling game just now called ImmorTall. Your character, an unnamed/unknown alien, crashes down on earth. A little girl picks it up and feeds it. The alien then grows incredibly tall. Throughout the game all you do is move left and right with the mouse or A and D keys trying to protect a family from bullets and bombs. Now this can be incredibly boring to people who want to play a game, but exciting to people looking for an interactive experience. This "game" can be described as the latter. You don't win points, there's no ending, no checkpoints, or anything like that. Instead, this game is something that you make of it. It's made pretty clear in the description too:
 * 7:10pm**

"Take a poignant walk through the life of an alien caught in the midst of humanity. This is a game that you may not consider to be a game. It won’t tell you if you’ve won or lost. You won’t level up or defeat the final boss. It’s short. It’s simple. You might get nothing out of it at all.

That’s fine. Just try and be respectful to those who do."

Screenshot:

This kind of reminds me of a game that's on PS3 where you move through the world as a flower petal (or something like that) pollinating the world. In that game, there's no kind of achievement or reward. It just looks really pretty. There seems to be a new kind of genre emerging for videogames in which games are basically interactive art seeking to communicate a message or provide a visually and mentally stimulating experience.

The next game I played was called Infectonator: World Dominator. With the click of a mouse and using some handy upgrades, you could single handedly bring along the next zombie apocalypse. Obviously, this is the more traditional type of game that most people play. I played it since it was one of the highest rated games, plus because I was talking about zombies earlier. The way the game is strucutred encourages long-time play. You won't bring along the apocaplypse in just a couple of minutes. Instead, there is an auto-save feature that saves your progess as you play. In addition, achievements are another motivating factor besides completing the game.

Well, I think I'm going to sign off now.


 * 3/7/10 - 6:23pm**

So I think I decided what my research topic should be: the creation and playing of "art" games. This is kind of a hard concept to define, but I consider art games to be something which do not follow the norm. They have to be not about achievements or rewards, but an overall interactive experience which evokes emotional response and/or intellectual curiosity. But who can decide what is art and what is not? Do all art games have to contain this kind of criteria? Why couldn't a traditional game be considered an art game?

With these questions in mind, I think I will try to ask the game developers themselves. I will also try to gauge other people's opinions on this topic by using the chats and the forums.

As of now, I noticed a certain structure to these games. Most of them tend to be puzzle or action oriented, they have simple controls, production values trump game play, and most of them try to tell a narrative. 3 games I noticed so far that fit this criteria are The Company of Myself (in the puzzle genre), ImmorTall(action genre), and Little Wheel (puzzle genre).

Today, I played 2 more art games that I found: Loondon and the Majesty of Colors.

The story is about a hunchbacked man name Jonah who decides to leave his home at the fairgrounds for the city. The controls are very easy in that it's just a click-to-move puzzle game. The puzzles, few that they are, in the game are also very simple. It seems like the developers just wanted to craft a greater narrative with fairytale-like environments. In the game, Jonah's adventure into the city turns out to be a costly one as he is hanged after being wrongly accused of murder. This art game fits much of the criteria I stated earlier in this post. In addition, I looked at the comment board, which were pretty split with people who loved the game because of its narrative or hated it because it was an art game.

The Majesty of Colors is categorized in the adventure/RPG category, different from my usual criteria of art games. Within this game, you use your mouse to pick up or drop objects (simple controls). Your primary motivation to completing this game is obtaining the 5 different endings (so it concentrates on narrative). The premise of the story is that you are an alien, squid-like creature who falls in love with the color of balloons that humans made. Humans pop up through the area and you can either choose to help them or destroy them. Overall, it is pretty fun to see what your different actions will yield which ending.

Okay, well, I think I'll get started on trying to contact the developers tomorrow sometime. It's 8pm and I should probably do some internship stuff.

Now I just have to think what types of questions I should be asking the game developers.
 * 3/8/10 - 8:00pm**

In the meantime, I played this game called Valthirian Arc, an RPG. The basic premise is to train combat students, go on quests, and then graduate them to attain "fame." I wasn't really sure how fame played a role in the game, other than to satisfy a certain limit at the king's request. The style of RPG is a click to attack kind of control. Otherwise, it's not too complicated. Unfortunately, I found it repetitive and quite time consuming. Here's a screenshot of the combat:

I think these are going to be my preliminary set of questions:

- Why did you decide to make this game? - What was the concept behind it? - Would you consider your game an art game? If so, why? If not, why? - What criteria would require a game to be considered an art game?

I think this could be a strong basis for the questions. I'll adjust accordingly to each game.

Oh wow, I received 3 replies from the developers I contacted so far. That was surprisingly quick. I suppose I'll ask them the questions now so I don't appear flaky.
 * 8:45pm**

Here are my questions for Flip-n-tale, the developer for Loondon: 1. Why did you decide to make this game? 2. What was the concept behind it? 3. Would you consider your game an art game? If so, why? If not, why? 4. Under what criteria would a game be considered an art game? 5. How did the narrative you wanted to tell tie into the art direction? How did the narrative tie into gameplay? 6. How many people did you work with and how long did it take to develop Loondon?

Now that I look at these questions, I think I'll also use them for the other games. But for Majesty of Colors I also added:

7. Why did you decide to have multiple endings? 8. How do achievements change the way your game is played?

I used almost the same questions for asking about The Company of Myself.

And it's already 9:45pm. Hopefully I'll get these within the week, but it's still awhile before my presentation. See ya.


 * 3/11/10 - 10:15**

Alright, so I just logged on to Kongregate and I'm playing this game called Straw Hat Samurai 2. I definitely don't consider this an art game. In the game you play as a samurai who slashes bad guys in gory Kill Bill style by marking targets with your mouse. It's actually quite difficult and gets a little frustrating at times. Here's a shot:

Moving on, as you know I asked 5 people about their 'art' games. I only received 4 replies so far with 2 answering questions. Their names are oneclickdog.com, Gregory Weir, 2Darray, flipntale, and Pixelante. I believe flipntale and oneclickdog are actually from foreign countries. So you can really get a sense of how vast game developing is. I just emailed flipntale back with my questionnaire. Hopefully he'll answer soon, but I've got plenty of time.

While browsing the forums looking for people who brought up art games as topics, I discovered the ImmorTall thread. The first poster claimed that a person named Ludomancy was a popular art game developer so I decided to check him out. I played one of his games called "I wish I were the Moon." This isn't a game moreso than an interactive experience like many other art games. In this you try to achieve all 7 endings, including a secret one by simply moving the characters with a snapshot. Think automatically teleporting your character from one location to another. I thought it was a very interesting concept, but it didn't seem fun in any way to me. Regardless, I needed a little help from the comment section and I achieved the endings.

There are some great explanations of what makes ImmorTall such a great experience. Here's one of them by DyranLK: "//I would say that it would be, in defined terms, not classified as a game, of course. Nevertheless, I thought it was more like an interactive adventure; while it is open to far more implementations of gameplay, it is, like, a short clip of the complete life of a lost, supine alien whose background has been kept a mystery from us. I mean, if you think about it, if it was entirely just a flash movie that you watched while eating a slice of pepperoni pizza (though that sounds pretty good right now :P) without any interaction at all, it would probably be a pretty lame animation, at the very least.// // BUT, with the addition of spanning the alien’s life with a single touch of the arrow buttons, it would, like, make the player a piece of the art as well; thus becoming more connected to the story and its characterization. So I can honestly say that I thought it was a brilliant “game”, and while the ending(s) probably could’ve been tweaked to leave a rather stronger effect/impression, it was still really impacting. True, it may have no real point, or story; rather, it gives you the paint and the brush, and you end up being the one painting your own masterpiece.//"

I think this post is a great example of my thoughts on the game. However, many people in the comments and on the board bashed the game for its lack of complexity, it's lack of difficulty, preachy-ness, and vague ending. To me it seems like any time these types of games are posted, they will ultimately be criticized for lacking one of the traditional fundamentals of game development. Take for example "Company of Myself." Although it can represent an art game in its tone, environment, and focus on narration, it ultimately develops narration through the complexity of its puzzles. Furthermore, people on the board touted that because of its complex puzzles and fun gameplay, they could actually call it a game instead of just being art. But is that all really bad? Like DyranLK said, if you stripped away the interactivity, it would just be animation. So by providing manual interaction, it automatically turns the "animation" into something more.

Well, my brain hurts, and I probably should've spent more time chatting to others, so I think I'll do that next time. It's 12:30am and I should probably go home.

So it's actually been quite awhile since I've last logged on. However, I've been playing the games on and off in my free time or to procrastinate for other classes. I've always tried to keep my questions on this project in mind.
 * 4/18/10** - **6:00pm**

Now that it's time for the presentation, I looked through my emails and have received responses from 4 of 5 game developers I contacted.

I think I mentioned this in an earlier post, but it seems that people who played ImmorTall had a real love it or hate it vibe towards the game. This could be attributed to the game's minimalist approach to design and the unclear goal of "how to beat the game." While some people thought it had a good artistic vision and was fun, others thought that the game was one-sided, was not that greatly designed, and as a result, wasn't that fun to begin with. One of the biggest gripes with it being an artsy game was it's story. Some people argued that the ending (which was the same no matter how someone played it) sucked and should have had multiple ones or a better story. It seems that with most art games, either it's gameplay is creative and original, or the story is usually the main focal point. Another gripe people had with the game was whether or not it was challenging enough. There are those who said it was hard, and those who said it was so easy it was stupid. It seems that there will always be a split dichotomy, and no in-betweens.

I think, from what I've read, the overwhelming majority want either one of two things, preferably both though: a kick-ass story or some kick-ass gameplay. However, if the developer wants to concentrate on story, the art design must serve to promote the story and themes. ubuntar12 says: "Is it a game? No. Is it art? Maybe. Is it emotionally engaging? Depends on your outlook (it’s really hard for me to connect on a deep level with stick figures whose only actions are to walk alongside your PC and bob up and down occasionally). The only problem I see with this effort is that it tries to be art without being fun or engaging. Like Pokerhappy said, you only have to hold the right button down; that’s not enough interactivity. The best games – like Braid or The Company of Myself – can be both artsy and fun at the same time." In this case, it seems that ubuntar12 can't really take this game seriously because he doesn't feel an attachment to mere stick figures. But I guess this must be different for everybody. Regardless, game developers must design their games to fit within their message Okay, well it's about 7pm, I should work on the presentation since I'm not really sure what to talk about.