Sid Meier and the 48-Hour Game 58
MMBK writes "Sid Meier is possibly the most influential game designer ever, having developed the Civilization series, among others. This video documentary looks at his past while he travels to the University of Michigan for the 48-hour game design competition, which was hosted by his son."
these are pretty common, aren't they? (Score:2)
These one-to-four-day game-making events are usually called "game jams". I believe the idea originates with Chris Hecker [wikipedia.org] circa 2002.
Not that it won't be cool to see what Sid Meier makes, but the idea of a 48-hour video game isn't some insane thing nobody's tried before!
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Deadlines (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:Deadlines (Score:5, Insightful)
I've boycotted cookie-cutter games like that. Same with movies. Do you know how few filmmakers bother designing their own quarks and leptons and stuff? The lazy bastards think they can just fill an existing engine with art.
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Wish I had Mod points. Love that post. Hard to pick between Funny and Insightful. Made me laugh first, but after that it's the latter.
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Ohh, 48 hours to make a game. This being Sid Meier I thought it was 48 hours to complete the game.
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These days it feels like all games are being made within 48-hours.
Counter point: Duke Nukem Forever
Hi Everyone (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm one of the three co-coordinators of the contest. You can find out more information about it on our webpage:
http://wolverinesoft.org/event/contest/48hourcontest7/ [wolverinesoft.org]
If you have any questions, I'd be happy to try to answer them.
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I see from your link that you have to use approved libraries. But it says, "In the case of a MOD, a copy of the original game must be available to install.".
This raises some questions for me. Co you can bring in any game you want and make a "mod" for it? What's the reasoning behind restricting users to approved libraries, if they can use any existing game? If you're making a mod, you would usually have access to the original game's sound/music/graphics. Does the music, sou
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Anyone is allowed to write their own library before the contest and submit their code for approval.
1. We need to verify that any such library doesn't contain 99% of a game, just waiting for them to make a few tweaks to fit the theme.
2. We need to verify that the library's license allows anyone to use it for free, and allows us to distribute the games produced for free.
3. We need to give others time to learn how to use the custom libraries, or it doesn't matter that the licensing is permissive.
4. If we know
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Not commercially meaningful? (Score:3, Interesting)
While it's an intellectual challenge, and appeals to geek curiosity, how many really meaningful, influential games were written in one of these contests?
I mean, Sid's famous for writing games that required incredible amounts of research, iterative design, playtesting and balance. Those are what most grognards are interested in... not the next casual twitchfest, nor even another NP Hard gem no matter how elegant.
Sid, if your reading this, give us a modern, multiplayer version of NetHack (and not a click orgy like Diablo, but a "the dev team thinks of everything" masterpiece), or an updated turn-based strategy game like Fantasy General... I'm waiting for another trend of well balanced, challenging games to come along. Desperately.
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if your reading this
[mimes shooting self in head]
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now why would a mime do that?
Despite being trapped in a glass box, a painfully high wind inevitably rises up, and no amount of invisible rope is going to save you from a pummeling. I mean, you're trapped in a box made of glass! Many of them can't take the pressure and mime shooting themselves in the head. A lot of them miss -- with an invisible gun and bullets, this is perhaps inevitable -- but many hit their mark all too well, causing a great red flower to burst from their temples.
Mimes are a truly misunderstood underclass, deserving
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Anyway... back to your regularly scheduled program.
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Re:Not commercially meaningful? (Score:4, Insightful)
While it's an intellectual challenge, and appeals to geek curiosity, how many really meaningful, influential games were written in one of these contests?
This is supposed to be news for nerds, please hand in your /. userid. The correct nerd response to a 48 hour game competition is "that would be fun" and not "what is the point". Some people do actually program for their own fun and not just to give you an updated version of NetHack. Anyone playing the games that result from these competitions are not doing so to find the next big classic game, but to see what people can achieve in a short time.
Sorry to sound confrontational, but I can't understand why anyone could even think that this sort of competition should end up with some meaningful and influential game. This is the epitime of the original, true geek. The goal of the geek is the same as a mountaineer: you climb a mountain or solve a problem because it is there.
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Yep yep.
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I think they haven't updated it because the former is more catchy.
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A lot of you have said I'm "missing" the obvious aspect of this exercise.
No, I didn't miss it. When I hit reply, all of the other replies to the main article addressed it. So I chose to open another line of discussion.
Also you seem to have misinferred my comment into, simply, "what is the point of this contest?"
I'm not questioning the point of the contest. If I'm questioning anything, I'm questioning the sensationalism of the news that Sid Meier will be there, when he is famous for an entirely different
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The purpose of these sort of contests isn't to come up with a REAL game, but it is more about the encouragement of being creative in game design and implementation. Remember, those who compete will probably end up working in the industry if they are lucky, and the more they focus on game design and implementation, the better they will be when the time comes for them to make a commercially viable game. The game industry really has been suffering from a shortage of NEW games that are not just a modern c
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To make a game as hard as nethack is easy. Here is some pseudocode:
If playeraction and rand(10)==2 then playerdie
Based on my experience anyway. ;-)
48-Hour Game (Score:2)
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Starcraft? Cerebral? It's a massive clickfest. The amount of micro you have to do to be competitive is mind-boggling.
I'm not saying it doesn't take brains to be good at Starcraft, its like saying basketball is cerebral. Sure, smarts let you make better decisions, but if you are fast and strong, that probably makes a much bigger difference than "smart" basketball.
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I once thought as you did (Score:3, Insightful)
I once thought as you did about Starcraft. I thought it was basically real time tactics and click speed contests. Then I watched some pro replays on Youtube, and realized how wrong I was.
The Starcraft community refers to strategy as macro, and tactics as micro, and it's widely understood that both are essential ingredients to play well. You can see games where someone micro's masterfully, but they don't have a big enough picture view of the game and get absolutely slaughtered.
Re:48-Hour Game (Score:4, Funny)
When I read the headline I was certain it was referring to the time required to complete a single game of Civilization. I just concluded a single-player civ4 game on standard speed and spent around that amount of play time. It's certainly a change of pace from games like Starcraft where 2 hours is epically long.
Ha - Hahaha!
Man, I know I've spent Well over 48 hours in a single player civ game - and multiplayer has taken over 100 hours of game time to even reach a level nearing climax.
As for Starcraft, 2 hours isn't epic. I'd say 2 hours is breaching what one might call a long-ish game. A quick game is about 20 minutes. A regular game is about an hour. An Epically long game, which is to say, 3 players on an 8 player Map, goes from 9 pm till 6 am, with all players remaining till the last 20 minutes.
Yes its happened, and yes I have the replay.
Major SEO (Score:1)
Whoa... (Score:1)
LD48 (Score:1)
48 hours? (Score:2)
Influence (Score:2)
Sid Meier is possibly the most influential game designer ever
What? How could anybody say that with a straight face? Granted, I love his games, but that statement is just silly. For one thing, Civilization was designed as a macro-level version of SimCity. Will Wright would be a better candidate: SimCity, The Sims, Sim.*, Spore...
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as I was going to put it, there's another guy with the initials SM who might have something to say about it :)
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You didn't "fix" anything, but you're right. Both Wright and Miyamoto would be better candidates. Miyamoto could have made a quarter of his contribution to video games and would still have been one of the greatest designers ever.
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For one thing, Civilization was designed as a macro-level version of SimCity.
It was also designed 20 years after the first turn-based strategy game, curiously also called Civilization (also Empire), and years after the first graphical game of this type. And Civilization copied liberally from a board game of the same name.
Irony (Score:2)
Am I the only one that sees irony in the fact Sid Meier, a guy who takes 3 years to make games that take 30 hours to play being mentioned in the same sentence as 48 hour game making session...?
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Am I the only one that sees irony in the fact Sid Meier, a guy who takes 3 years to make games that take 30 hours to play being mentioned in the same sentence as 48 hour game making session...?
Yes, because that isn't irony. Also, his son is hosting the contest, the article is about a documentary about Sid Meier.
I find you to be particularly lazy to not read 2 sentences with enough reading comprehension to get the point.
dull (Score:2, Insightful)
I found the Civ games to be pretty dull derivatives of various UNIX simulation games, including some world and space conquest games. I don't think Sid Meier really deserves that much credit.
why does Sid Meier get so much credit? (Score:2)
Empire was first developed in 1971, and in 1973 renamed Civilization. There were numerous other versions afterwards.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_Classic_(computer_game) [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Empire_(computer_game) [wikipedia.org]
xconq was a clone of Empire, later extended, and first released in 1987, and with a graphical user interface.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xconq [wikipedia.org]
Civilization was first released in 1991, 15 years after the Empire game. It was neither the first computer-based turn-based strategy
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Hey, thanks for mentioning Xconq! I didn't know about that yet. It looks really interesting!