HEY ICE KING: Why'd you steal our garbage? Review

I've been anticipating this game with much excitement! I played through it yesterday and this morning and it is excellent (if a bit short)! The Adventure Time DS/3DS game is fun for any fan of the series. My husband who is not as big of a fan said it looked fun too. It's a 2D action/adventure game, and I think an old-school game deserves an old-school review. So here we go!

THE GAMEPLAY: People have been saying it's a lot like Zelda II. The enemy encounters and walking everywhere on the minimap are like Zelda II, but the difficulty is not. It was easy enough for me to beat, and I suck at Zelda games. For those who like more challenge, supposedly the New Game+ is a little more difficult. You hit enemies with one of several moves to do damage; if you can't avoid them you take a hit.

Food lying around gets you health back, as do the numerous save points. You can combine condiments with food to make it better, but only if you find the right combination (I put wildberry jam on a royal tart and it actually hurt me when I ate it). Oh, and I think apple pies are probably the best healing thing in the game.

There were lots and lots of items to give you temporary powers. I tended to save them up instead of using them... the only ones I was glad I saved was a bomb for a boss, and some wings to get to a certain area sooner. The others I think I should have used as soon as I got them so I could have had more room in my inventory for food.

I loved the save points in this game. They were always there when I needed one, and since they give you full health, they cut down on the need to constantly chomp down on hamburgers.

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THE STORY: You're running around on fetch quests trying to find the Ice King, who stole your garbage. You get to interact with many characters from the TV show, and it's hilarious. I laughed out loud several times.

A few times I was feeling stuck and almost stopped playing, but I thought "I'll just go back here or explore this next area" and that always worked. Like I said, the game wasn't very long, but I'm actually glad it didn't get much harder. It might have been cool to have one more area in outer space or something, but the arc of the game felt good, and I wasn't sick of playing when it ended.

THE MUSIC: I loved it. I think my favorite was the little remix of the theme song for the victory music. I didn't care for the song playing on the title (the theme only covered by a different band), but the rest matched my expectations for zelda and megaman-themed music. The final boss theme song was also hilarious and awesome.

THE GRAPHICS: Cute and perfect.

THE COLLECTOR'S EDITION: The map was the map from the game and... not all that cute, although I guess they were going for a retro feel, which I understand. The little monster guide booklet had some cute copy in it. The sword stylus is cool, but this game doesn't use the stylus that much, so I might have to use it for some other game. The Enchiridion case is awesome, and since I'm a big fan it was worth the extra $10 to get some goodies. Otherwise it's probably not worth it (like most collector's editions).

PERFECT FOR: Children with a 3DS who are old enough to read and understand information (it's all text), and fans of Adventure Time.

Play Therapy and Asperger's Syndrome

A while back I wrote a post about "ludotherapy," or using videogames as a springboard for discussion in psychotherapy. Kevin Hull, who wrote the dissertation I discussed there, e-mailed me and mentioned he wrote a book related to his dissertation, and I asked him for a copy in exchange for writing about it. My bachelor's is in psychology, and I worked with children in high-conflict divorces for a brief time, which often included playing with them. This was my first time reading an entire book about play therapy, and it makes me want to read more.

The structure of Play Therapy and Asperger's Syndrome is highly organized with specific play therapies recommended for the problems children with Asperger's typically encounter. Hull's approach is anecdotal (with a few citations where needed), and he stresses the need to adapt techniques to each individual. There's no one chapter on videogames, but rather, the book is organized by problem type with videogames as a resource for addressing several different problems. I was struck by Hull's high level of respect for children and teens with Asperger's, which seems fitting of a child therapist. My own eye-rolling to the constant reference to "these remarkable young people," made me think I should stop being such a cynical reductionist about certain types of people.

So what is play therapy? It's more than a way for a child to feel comfortable talking with the strange adult who is their therapist. It's also a safe, nonverbal space for them to express their fears and insecurities. With videogames, it often becomes a way to teach children that they can transfer their skills of persistence and problem-solving to the real world.

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Reading about play therapy made me excited to see children and try out some of the techniques myself—things like telling a child what they're doing to let them know you're watching them, or with older children (and adults), talking about how the themes from a videogame can help us cope with our anxieties and other problems. With videogames specifically, the "game as metaphor" technique was the most common Hull mentioned. Here's an example:

The "clones" from Lego Star Wars that constantly try to attack the player and thwart progress can illustrate bullies. Challenges that have to be completed to get to the next level can be used as metaphors for conquering fears and getting through situations that the child diagnosed with AS views as unpleasant. When a metaphor presents itself, I push the pause button on the controller to stop the action to explain the metaphor.

Merely playing a videogame is usually not enough to be therapeutic. It's the discussion of the game and how it applies to real life that makes the experience meaningful to a child. Hitting the pause button and saying "there, right there, you were brave."

Hull has another technique where he has the child play Tetris on a very high level, with the intent of frustrating the child. The frustrating experience provides a setting to learn and apply principles of relaxation and controlling your emotions that is a real test of those skills! I find these examples of teaching and practicing coping skills to be an excellent example of what applied psychology/psychotherapy should do well. I wonder if teaching adolescents to think about game design (why a level was made the way it is) could help them think more about how other people think and feel.

As adults, we are in a similar situation with videogames. We can play them "just" for fun, though some games are positioned to teach specific lessons. But I would argue that for any game, discussing the experience will make it more meaningful and applicable to our daily lives. I think that's why I feel passionate about videogame criticism; it's not just that I love videogames, but that thinking about them makes my own life richer. It's a way for me to contemplate life while still focusing on an experience in itself (playing a game).

In short, play therapy sounds like an excellent way for children and teens (and I would argue, adults) to express themselves. If you are a parent, I would encourage you to take a little time to play with your children, even if it seems awkward or you don't have a lot of time (children are impressed when you play with them! Even once a week can make a difference). I highly recommend this book to any child psychologist who deals with clients with Asperger's, and also parents of children with Asperger's and anyone interested in play therapy. It's a little on the expensive side to read on a whim, but if you're in college you can probably get the book on ILL. Next time a child asks "can you play with me?" think of it as an opportunity to enter their imaginative world! :-)

Traditional Halloween means more ghosts

In true hipster fashion I have been ruminating on the true meaning of Halloween. I read up on some old
customs, and I was struck by what has changed and what hasn't.

Things that haven't changed:
-dressing up
-trick-or-treating
-bobbing for apples/eating donuts on a string
-drinking cider
-jack-o-lanterns (granted, some were made with huge turnips, but same idea)

Things we don't do anymore:
-we don't go door-to-door for flowers to put on the graves of our ancestors so they won't haunt us
-we don't make cakes with objects that indicate our future luck (one tradition baked a key, ring, and thimble into a cake. If you got one in your piece, they represented a journey, marriage, and spinsterhood respectively).
-we don't do weird stuff with mirrors/apples to find out the initials of the person we'll marry
-tell ghost stories

In short, I wish our Halloween traditions were more superstitious!

One tradition gamers have is playing horror games (because duh!). I generally dislike horror--it's full of surprising, gruesome, and inexplicable things. And sometimes they're really scary, although I have yet to play a game that has me scared like books or films I've seen. What I would really like to play during Halloween times are games that deal with the supernatural.

Ghosts figure prominently in Blackwell Deception (still available for cheap at the Fall Indie Royale bundle). It's startling to see a ghost, because it means that person has died, but they aren't out to get you, necessarily. The ghosts act like regular people who don't know they're dead yet, for the most part. I also love the rumors in Persona 2 (well, I would love them if I could get anywhere in that game) and how the devils have little personalities. Less scary, more weird!

(my information on Halloween traditions came from The Halloween Book, which you can download for free from Forgotten Books. Or you could buy it on Amazon. The image is from the concept art for Guild War 2's Halloween update coming up on the 23rd.)

Academic Interlude: Videogames as therapy for mental disorders

Last month I blurbed a study that made a videogame that senses various physical states and treated anger and anxiety. This game has been haunting me with how revolutionary it is. It's not just detecting brain waves like those cool moving cat-ear headbands. The game is connected to a system that measures sweat, blood oxygen levels, heart rate, skin temperature, and breathing. From these data, the game can tell what mood you're in (I think there are also facial and speech recognition tools in the software, but that's an even bigger piece to chew).

The researchers used a system called MobiHealth Mobile. This is what it looks like:

It's a lot less bulky than some biofeedback devices I've seen. Those little sensors probably go on your fingers. 

Okay, so you have data about what the player's mood is. What can you do with that data? Well, you can tell when they're getting frustrated, and send them to meditate until they physically calm down. 

When high undesired emotional and/or physiological reactions (e.g. anger feelings, impulsiveness, non-relaxed reactions, frustration, quick and unplanned responses) are detected by the video game, the game immediately directs the avatar to a relaxed area with the goal to calm down. During the whole game session, higher undesired emotional and/or physiological reactions are coupled with greater difficulty to reach the end goals of the video game (e.g. while diving the fishes are more difficult to catch, more obstacles appear in the mini-games). More relaxed and self-controlled reactions are positively reinforced by the game, making the situations easier to handle and the end goals easier to reach.

In their game PlayMancer, the frustrating minigame is trying to collect things underwater while maintaining their oxygen level. In the calming game, more stars appear based on how relaxed you are.

Now, what if there were a game that undermined these goals? You could make a boss get tougher and tougher based on how frustrated (or how calm) the player was. Or a game where you don't die until your palms are sweating with anger. Or a dating sim that only gives you the suave lines if you're really calm. THINK OF THE POSSIBILITIES. Think of how immersive this would be combined with the Oculus Rift.

Here's a short gameplay video of Playmancer, which looks like some kind of a college senior project, but the impressive part about this game is the inputs, which unfortunately you can't see.


Source: "Video games as a complementary therapy tool in mental disorders: PlayMancer, a European multicentre study" by Fernando Fernandez-Aranda et al.

Orson Scott Card on writing in videogames.

The Orson Scott Card writing in videogames workshop was today! It went from 8:30-5:30... so it was a long day. Luckily Card is funny and engaging. The workshop was made possible from a grant a UVU faculty member applied for... so good on him!

Highlights: Card is so amazingly fun to brainstorm with. I found myself being critical of other people's ideas, whereas he ran with them to make some really interesting scenarios (see the notes for details). Maybe I need to work on brainstorming more, since turning my critical mode off would really be useful once in a while.

I'm a fan of the Ender series, so hearing an author I like talk for a while was kind of mind-blowing (authors are real people!). I admire that he's done so much on his own and how he tries to show both sides of issues, and how there isn't always a right and a wrong to a situation, which I think videogames could really use (thanks, Bioware). But then again, since combat is such a big part of so many genres, there's kind of a need for an everlasting, ever-spawning enemy, which limits the kinds of stories you can tell.

Drawbacks: Card kept complaining that he hadn't seen any awesome SF/Fantasy writing in videogames... but he's not all that into videogames. He's content to play Civilization II, which is fine, but he made a lot of generalizations about the industry that I felt weren't as accurate as they might have been ten years ago (he hadn't heard of Skyrim or Minecraft... just sayin'). He was aware of Kickstarter though, and how the publishing model is dying, so he's not completely behind the times. 

Card is a writer and as such, was pretty focused on linear storytelling in games. It's what he does best! But I'm also interested in how story and gameplay can merge. 

I've scanned in my notes below in the interest of archival-ness and maximalism. 

Proof that this actually happened

Making a videogame is... really fun.

I participated in Adventure Time Game Jam! I made a game called When Sneezles Attack. I used the engine Twine, which was really easy to work with. If you'd like to make a game in Twine, Anna Anthropy/Auntie Pixelante made an excellent tutorial (and look my game is totes on her list of sample twine games I am proud/flattered).

Writing the story was really fun. I had some ideas about how I wanted the story to go--I wanted to be able to visit parts of Ooo, I wanted to include some of the regular characters, and I wanted it to have the same kind of bizarre but sometimes logical humor I love in Adventure Time. It's much easier to imitate a style and use someone else's characters than to make my own, and that helped me write it all the faster. At first I wanted you to be Neptr and not realize it right away, and then have to find Finn and then start your quest, but I felt like that would be kind of frustrating. I liked the idea of undermining the expectation that you were playing as Finn though. Adam helped me design the story so you have a goal right away (at first it was just nebulous exploring), and he helped brainstorm a few things with me too.

After I wrote the initial story, I worked on the variables. Basically, if you ever pick up an item or return to a location, I wanted it to make a difference in the story. So the third time you visit Princess Bubblegum, she'll ask how Jake is doing (that one was actually pretty hard... but I found a way for it to work by ordering the text a non-chronological way). Whenever you get an item, the game remembers, so you can use it later on. It was my first time programming a complete game with variables, but this was an excellent place to practice that. It's like magic!

Working on the code was kind of strange... like, after I had read through the game so much I couldn't tell if it was funny or not anymore. It also felt like my brain changed from creative to complete bug-squasher. Coding also reminded me that I'm not a robot (if I were, writing <<endif>> [correct] instead of <<end if>> [incorrect, but a very common error of mine] would have been so much easier).

I feel really excited when people tell me they have played it! Especially if it made them laugh. Like, kind of giddy... is this how all game developers feel about their games? No wonder they keep making them.

I guess making this game, and seeing people enjoy it, reminded me that I can write pretty well, and given the right circumstances I can be funny too! I found it really satisfying. I recommend this experience. :-)

Things games haven't touched: how to get pregnant, mysterious illnesses, and housekeeping.

Blogs of the Round Table, or BoRT, is back. Part of the topic this month is about what subjects games haven't explored and what they should focus on.

One thing games do well is simulation. I can grow a garden in Cultivation and maintain a dam in The Best Dam Simulation Ever. These are complex situations with multiple variables. I think the same technology could be applied to help women learn about their fertility cycles.

This sounds weird, but stick with me. I've been trying to get pregnant for a year and finally stumbled upon the book Taking Charge of Your Fertility, which discusses how a woman's waking temperature and cervical mucus can indicate if she's fertile or not (I discuss it in gruesome detail over on my non-gaming blog). There are a couple of different hormones that contribute to things. And knowing about how these variables are connected can help women understand when they can get pregnant or if they have emotional patterns associated with these variables. Do you see where I'm going with this? It seems like the perfect setup for a simulation! Easy mode could have completely typical hormone levels and simple goals like conception or avoiding conception, while more difficult ones could involve weird illnesses or thyroid disorders.

There are a lot of other topics I find would be good subjects for videogames. The game TRAUMA looks at a woman's experience with some kind of, well, trauma. It's one thing to have a sickness that doctors can identify and treat, but quite another to have real symptoms but no diagnoses. Wouldn't it be interesting to play a game in the shoes of someone who suffers from Fibromyalgia, and feel the frustration of not knowing what your body will throw at you next? I suppose that doesn't sound very fun, but I feel like games have such a potential for us to understand minority or simply unusual circumstances that I'm surprised there aren't more autobiographical games like dys4ia.

Another type of simulation I'd love to see is a relationship simulation with a significant other--someone your character is committed to and has already courted, and preferably they live in the same space. It could even be a roommate I guess. And then figuring out how to resolve various conflicts, like whether or not you want to kill the invading mice or who does the dishes or what kind of budget you have (basically housekeeping things). It just seems like the logical continuation after Princess Maker 2 or any game that ends with your character getting married.

I keep dreaming of a simulation game that involves all these things, but I recognize that I don't yet have the skill to implement it. I know game journalists wanting to make games is kind of cliche, but I'm definitely curious. And studying Python. :-)