Last Baby Standing is a game/sim/toy for Facebook, made during last weekend’s Global Game Jam. The game generates statistics for your Facebook friends, then lets you “mate” any two together, producing statistics and a unique biography for each “child.” The game tied for first place in the “Wild Card” category in NYU Game Center’s chapter of the jam. I was part of the extremely talented crew that made this game—here’s the GGJ page for the game, which includes full credits. And here’s the Game Center’s write-up of the event, which includes a full list of winners and links to the all of the games.

Oh, and here’s the github repository.

The theme of this year’s jam was “extinction,” which we found a bit difficult to work with. For the first few hours on Friday night, we worked on an abstract puzzle/gambling game based on the definition of “extinction” in psychology. (The initial prototype of that game is still in the repository as mimetree.py.) We couldn’t figure out how to make that fun, so we searched for alternative ideas; Last Baby Standing is the result. I’m extremely happy with how we were able to corral all of our technical and creative talents to make something interesting and fun that (mostly!) works great.

Things I learned (mostly technical):

• FQL is a finicky playmate. Queries that work fine for 200 friends time out with 400. (We used LIMIT clauses and ORDER BY RAND() to get around this limitation. I didn’t know FQL even supported those clauses!)
• Tornado‘s Facebook Graph authentication mixin doesn’t work right out-of-the-box. I needed to make some changes to the example code and also use the version fresh from the repository (rather than the currently released version).
• If the whole comedy writing thing doesn’t pan out for him, Rob Dubbin has a real future in generative baby biographies.
• All you need to produce satisfying portmanteaunomastics is about ten lines of Python code and a regular expression.
• It is possible to get a decent amount of sleep during the Global Game Jam. You just need to feel confident in the talents and time management skills of your teammates.

I hope everyone enjoys the game! Thanks to the NYU Game Center for hosting, and to Matt Parker in particular for keeping everything running smoothly.

Gamerscore and achievements serve a similar purpose. They give you feedback on your play; they give you acknowledgment when you do something noteworthy; they let you know (in broad terms) how much of a game’s content you’ve completed; they let you compare the way you’re playing the game to the way your friends are playing it. Achievements are one of the reasons I prefer playing games on the 360 to playing games on (for example) the Wii: more feedback, more context, makes for a more fun gaming experience.

With a few notable exceptions, no one plays games just for the achievements. They’re not a goal in and of themselves. Likewise, no one “plays” Foursquare just to get the badges. Both badges and achievements are there to let you know that your activities follow a particular pattern. As an added benefit, badges and achievements you haven’t earned yet suggest what other patterns are possible.

I wrote this before I read Sirlin’s response to Jesse Schell’s lecture, in which we are urged “to be vigilant against external rewards” (such as achievements). “How resistant are you to letting others manipulate you with hollow external rewards?” asks Sirlin. Obviously, I am much more sanguine about achievements—I think that people like them because they are useful and fun—and hope to argue for this more effectively in a future post.

The former is a matrix of arbitrary values intended to produce convenience. The latter is a matrix of arbitrary values intended to produce fun. In my experience, neither achieves its goal. But both follow an arbitrary logic, strangely twisted through history and culture, that might someday make a good subject for a Ph.D. thesis. (Why does a non-empty string equate with integer zero? Why is Psychic strong against Poison?)

Subwoofer Tactics from Anderson Miller on Vimeo.

The Nintendo Entertainment System has a limited palette: of fifty-odd possible colors, only twenty-five can appear at any one time, and only four of those can be used in a single sprite. Games produced for the NES made careful use of this palette, expressing as much information through color as possible. This is famously the case in the Mega Man games for the NES, in which Mega Man (our hero) changes colors to indicate which weapon he’s using.

In printmaking (and I’m a novice at this, so let me know if I’m getting something wrong), multicolor prints are often made by overlaying a number of blocks with complementary negative spaces, producing a number of interlocking monochromatic fields. Look at it sideways, and that’s a lot like how color works on the Nintendo.

As a means of investigating this parallelism (and making some fan art in the process) I made these blocks for a basic Mega Man sprite (his shooting stance). There are four blocks: one for the background, one for Mega Man’s outline, and the two colors to indicate which weapon he’s using. The blocks were made by drawing a 32×24 grid on the linoleum, then drawing an outline around the pixels that belonged to each color area. I scored the edges of the areas with an exacto knife to ensure neatness, and then went at the thing with my linoleum cutter. That was how I spent the majority of the day.

Once you’ve got your blocks, inking and printing a bunch of Mega Men is easy. My first test print is at the beginning of this entry. I think the ragged (“hand pulled” or whatever) registration served the subject matter, so I stuck with it for the rest of the day. Here’s a larger composition I’ve been working on, in various stages of completion:

(detail from center top)