K.Adam White

I achieved 100% completion in Red Dead Redemption in just over 43 hours, and nothing else I’ve played this year has come close to equalling that gaming experience. I normally avoid 100% completion—I would like to think I have better things to do, and I believe my friends and family tend to agree. In this case, however, the experience was enjoyable, motivated, and most importantly the tasks made sense within the gameworld. One of my complaints about Grand Theft Auto IV‘s completion stats is that there are many things in that game that I do not believe Niko would normally do—the online dating side-missions in particular run at odds with the Kate McReary subplot. That was not the case in RDR.

I made it to Mexico last night. I could write some thoughts here, but look, Chris Dahlen did it for me. He has written an interesting piece about the cynicism of RDR’s storyline within the constraints of a world that was designed to be “badass.”

Red Dead Redemption was the most exciting game I didn’t get to play at PAX East. I’d barely heard of it prior to the convention, and I certainly wasn’t going to wait in that line to try a brief demo, but I left PAX craving old western films and quietly counting down the days until the game’s release.

Now that the game is finally out, I am having a blast. After some initial issues with the horse controls the game quickly dragged me in, and hasn’t let me go. In fact, the only reason I’m  writing about it and not playing it right now is that I’m once again stuck on a bus. I haven’t progressed very far in the story due to work obligations, but the writing is solid, and after two years of Grand Theft Auto 4 the thing that most surprised me was how likable I found the characters. The world generally holds together, and the sheer variety of events and emergent situations I’ve encountered in the first few hours of play boggles my mind. Unfortunately, at this point in the game a few narrative elements are still bothering me, and the game’s Western setting prevents me from brushing these minor flaws away.

During SOS last weekend I opened up my space at the Little House gallery, located off Summer street between Union Square and Davis Square. As I build a gallery page to display the work I exhibited, I thought I would share a panorama of the studio space I share with Emily Garfield. More thoughts and another photo after the jump.

Thanks to everybody who dropped by the Little House this weekend to see my work. I’ll have a gallery with shots of my sculptures & pastels up by the end of the week, so check back soon!

There have been many posts written by people searching for the “Citizen Kane” of video games, some masterpiece that will bring artistic acceptance* to the entire medium. There have been many responses, from the knee-jerk to the articulate, but Sean Sands has finally written a response that I can agree with. In So Long Orson Wells, Sands says, “I didn’t really want to play the Mona Lisa anyway. I have a better question – Where is video gaming’s Chess?” (emphasis added)

However engaging a movie or a painting can be, it doesn’t depend on interaction. Though Sands defends himself from accusations of Chess snobbery, it is reasonably accepted that Chess is one of the most perfect games ever invented. A child can learn it, but a lifetime can be spent in search of mastery—no video game is so finely balanced. Chess is the standard to which games should be held, not a narrative, cinematic experience like “Citizen Kane.” I don’t mean to fall into the Narratology vs Ludology war, I just believe we should celebrate games for those elements that make them unique—and which make them last.

They say the best camera is the one you have with you, and I believe the same can be said for game consoles. I own a DS and a PSP, but now that I actually have a daily commute that could finally provide a good outlet for my portable gaming habits, I have found that I rarely game on anything but my iPhone. It doesn’t have the best games and it has significant drawbacks versus dedicated gaming hardware, but it wins out purely because it is the most portable of the portables. I always have my phone on me, and all the games are stored internally—not having to carry around additional game cartridges, however small they have gotten, is a big plus. When the T stops on Longfellow bridge, I don’t think “Oh, I wish I’d brought my DS,” I just fire up Canabalt.

There are a couple of games I have been playing lately that I have particularly reacted to, and as I am currently stuck on a bus in deepest Connecticut I thought I might take a break from replaying Spider to reflect a little on a handful of iPhone ports that have most interested me: Tale of Tales’ The Graveyard, Popcap’s Plants vs Zombies, and Lazy 8 Studios’ Cogs.

This weekend I participated in another Game Jam, this one organized by Darius Kazemi and Emily Daniels and hosted at the DINO/Sprout space near Davis in Somerville between Saturday morning and Sunday evening evening. I teamed up with Michael Carriere to make a fun little platformer, and to try my hand at some new kinds of pixel art. The game we came up with is called Run around and jump on cars but don’t fall off the left side of the screen!,* created in roughly 36 hour by Michael and myself with some great environment assets contributed by Emily Garfield.

The project is built in a flash framework called Flixel, so you can try RAAJOCBDFOTLSOTS online: just click on the image. As somebody (possibly Darius) put it, Game Jams aren’t the place for win states, so just do as the title tells you and enjoy the game!**

*Our development process, while highly democratic, took a decidedly dictatorial turn when Michael came up with this name. I wasn’t about to argue!

**If there aren’t any cars on the screen, use the arrows to run and jump to the right until they respawn.

Update 2/23/09: Emily Daniels has posted a complete list of the projects created at the Dino jam. Everybody had something awesome to show by the end of the weekend, so check out the rest of the games!

This blog was intended to be about games, art and animation, not music, but with no disrespect meant to Bioshock II, Massive Attack’s Heligoland is my most anticipated sequel of the week and I would like to devote a few words to the album.

Introduced to the band through “Dissolved Girl’s” brief appearance in The Matrix, I backtracked from Mezzanine to Blue Lines, eagerly awaited 100^th Window in 2003, and somewhere along the way acquired their limited edition Singles ’90/’98 collection. I have gone to see movies purely because this band recorded the score. Nowhere along the way would I have necessarily have claimed they were one of my favorite bands, but I have been a devoted listener for over a decade and I somehow own their complete discography. Suffice it to say that I was pretty excited to hear they had a new album coming out, especially after seven years of silence.

My good friend and erstwhile employer, Goose Rock Design, has rolled out a Goose-themed URL shortener service: goos.es

You can now find this blog at http://goos.es/kaw. It doesn’t actually shorten it much, only about 4 characters, but I needed something to test their (very slick) interface.