GRG's Miscellany

I recently bought Ninjatown for the DS, and I'm enjoying it immensely. It's an RTS, very similar in mechanics to Desktop Tower Defence but it's far more than just a re-skin. The basic idea is that wee devils (the bad guys) have invaded Ninja Town in order to steal the secret recipe for ninja cookies. You play a series of levels, each with entry points where the bad guys spawn, and exit points they'll try and reach (or an objective they'll try and attack). Your job is to stop them - let too many through and you fail the level. You stop them by placing and upgrading different types of ninja huts, each of which spawns two ninjas appropriate to the type of hut. Each type of ninja has different abilities (slow and powerful, faster and weedier, ranged attack, etc.), and will automatically attack any wee devil that comes near. Building and upgrading huts costs currency (ninja cookies), so you have to choose your combinations carefully. There doesn't appear t...

I've decided to open my blog with a response to an article which I took exception to. I urge you to read it before continuing, but at the risk of misrepresenting it, I shall summarise here. The article extols the virtues of shared experiences in MMOs, where players use their experience of playing the game to enhance their enjoyment of the social aspects of it. Indeed, I think it shows convincingly that experiences common to sizeable groups of players are quite essential to MMOs. However, it also contrasts shared experiences with algorithmic content as if it's some kind of opposite. Now, the author may be talking about a specific type of algorithmic content, but that's not made clear. It's not shown how algorithmic content supposedly undermines shared experience - it's just asserted that it does. Game flaws which are the result of bad design are attributed to algorithmic content itself, rather than the designers of that content. I think this displays a lac...