Game Geek: Wiicade.com, a Trespasser in Nintendo's Walled Garden

Earlier this month I posted about the ability to surf the web on the Nintendo Wii with the Opera Browser. Last week, at the GDC, I overheard a bunch of programmers geeking out about wiicade.com, a site that let's you play web-based flash games with your Wii.

Since the birth of the videogame industry, console manufacturers (Atari, Sega, Nintendo) have extracted enormous licensing fees from game developers in exchange for being allowed to produce games for their console. It's called controlling the channel, and smart companies understand that if you control the channel, then you can demand nearly any sum from others who want to use that channel to reach their audience. It's why Microsoft and Sony don't care if they lose money on every console they sell. They want to own the living room.

Of all the console companies, Nintendo is most strict about licensing. They are obsessed with controlling their console and what content is put on it.

So they must be a bit frothy about wiicade.com, a site that enables developers to create and show off flash games for the Wii. To play the games, you have to install the Opera Web Browser on the Wii, which is relatively easy. Once you have the browser installed you can play any game you like...

...using you wiimote!

I figured I needed to yell so that you would realize how cool that is.

Now, anyone can create a game to be played on the Wii, and they don't need to get Nintendo's permission. That's huge. It's as if the owners of Wrigley Field opened up their baseball stadium for anyone to play on. And I hate baseball, but even I'd like to play on Wrigley Field.

Wiicade is the first crack in the garden wall. Hopefully, the wrecking ball is just around the corner.

Game Geek: I Like It Hard and Long, so Kill Me.

Hard, as in difficult. Long, as in...well...long.

Nowadays, a lot of games, especially console games, can be beaten in ten to twelve hours. They're designed that way. The games industry believes that people don't want to play long games. I think that's true...if the game sucks.

MMOs, like World of Warcraft prove that people want to play a game for months. Once a player is engaged in a satisfying gaming experience, they want it to go on forever. Or at least, as long as it's still fun. The fun part is tricky. It's so tricky, Raph Koster wrote a whole book to explain to people what makes games fun.

Last night, I had fun. I spent about six hours playing Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. I'd been craving it since I read the article in Gamasutra about the golden age of computer role-playing games that I mentioned in a previous post. I never beat Wizardry when I was a kid, so I figured now with all my extensive gaming experience, and the help of the internet, it should be pretty easy. Um, well..no. It's still really hard.

For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Wizardry is the standard "party of six heroes descend (slowly) through a dungeon of monsters to defeat an evil wizard" game. Except, I'm pretty sure, Wizardry is the game that created the standard.

By the time I went to sleep at 3AM, all my characters were level 8. Only level 8. After six hours of play. For comparison, if you play World of Warcraft for six hours you will probably have reached level 30. I shouldn't say probably. That's a solid number based on research from Xerox Parc. In fact, in WOW, you can reach level 60, the highest level, in twenty hours.

I'll be honest, if it wasn't for the save state function on my emulator, I wouldn't even be that far. In Wizardry, when one of your characters is killed, they are dead. That's it. Roll a new character. I, of course, cheated, just like I did back in the eighties by making copies of the save file so that if one of my characters died I could just restore the game.

But I kinda wish I wouldn't have. Accepting that your character can die forever, is a completely different way of thinking about role-playing. You can't get emotionally attached to your characters. They die. You punch your computer. You create a new character and add them to the party. You become more cautious about encountering powerful monsters. You run away more often. You don't bully through the game, you assess risks, you think strategically. You learn to accept losses.

Modern gamers never have to accept losses, they just hit restore.

Character death is a game dynamic that I'd like to see return to games. Right now, RPGs are focused on process, i.e. building up character's experience, rather then the ultimate goal, defeating the game. That makes perfect sense for neverending MMOs. But in a standalone title, refocusing the player on achieving the goal and having then make the necessary sacrifices, such as the death of your super-awesome archmage, to achieve that goal would be refreshing, and IMHO, truer to life.

Ooh! I just came up with a name for a game of this type: Dungeon Fodder. I claim it, it's mine, so all you greasy handed, grabby game developers better back off, or I'll have to kill your Night Elf.