Druids used to be pretty important in England. Their influence faded long ago, but things might have turned out differently if they’d possessed the ability to turn into animals and do battle on floating islands. Then again, would the legions of the Roman Empire really have been bothered by a few eagles ineffectually pecking at chainmail? I suppose not, but dropping a floating island would probably have the desired effect.

We may never learn the truth of that entirely stupid scenario, but in the meantime it’s possible to pit druid versus druid in bloody turn-based combat thanks to A Druid’s Duel [official site], which was released this week. Peer through this ornate torc and a trailer you shall see.

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We Happy Few [official site] brings The Prisoner> to mind. It’s set in an odd, colourful urban area where everyone is behaving strangely and some weird omniscient character sure is trying to keep you eye on you. While nonconformity in the classic English spy-fi show mostly got Patrick McGoohan a good gassing or drugging, it looks like We Happy Few’s protagonist will be met with a little more violence. I’d rather be bopped with a nice big ballon than be twatted with a shovel.

It’s the next game from Contrast developers Compulsion Games, the one they’d teased with talk of masks, drugs, and memory loss. Here, tell me this trailer it’s not Prisoner-ish:

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Hearts of Iron [official site] is the one Paradox grand strategy series that I’ve been unable to befriend. Partly that’s because it’s a more guided experience, a game about a specific war rather than a historical sandbox and it’s partly because of the micromanagement involved in production and resource chains. Hearts of Iron IV might change that, with its cleverly streamlined factory operations and improved minor nations. More on that later this week.

First of all, I wanted to discuss the difficulty of playing the bad guys.>

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Poking about on the Guild Wars 2 website yesterday I found their repository of concept art. I say “found” as if that was hard. It’s literally right there in a link on a menu. Whatever, I hadn’t seen it before. That’s because the release date for Guild Wars 2 was just before a fashion week and so my time was being monopolised by imminent catwalks. I remember Quinns talking enthusiastically about plant people and how he had made TOAST! Imagine, Pip – toast! while I was trying to work out how to get back from Bletchley Park in time to fish my high heels from my office drawer before an obligatory show. ANYWAY. Here are my favourites. No, this isn’t about the game nor its upcoming expansion. It’s entirely because I’m interested in concept art and how it can evoke a mood and a sense of place or character even when it’s not the style the game ends up taking.

In short there are a bunch of fantastic images I’d missed and I wanted to share them in case you’d missed them too:

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In two days, I will be on a plane for 36 hours. I am going to be very sad. Shortly after that, I will be doing my first exhibition at PAX East. Which is alternately both terrifying and kind of amazing. (I think.) So, just a short column this week because my brain is steaming like the air vents in Alien: Isolation. But I will see all of you soon. Not next week, unfortunately. But the week after that. (Apologies for the week before. Chinese New Year is murderous.) This week’s repost plushie is from dosbox!

(Wish me luck surviving the next week.)

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Good morning, readers. Grab yourself a cup of tea, consider doing up your dressing gown so its slightly less obvious that you’re sat around in your underwear, and steel yourself for another weekend of gaming. … [visit site to read more]

“Did you gonna piss?”

My character, a Mexican outlaw, asks the question of a dead man in a privy. I stabbed him before he could whip his shooter out. Felled him before he could cock his revolver. The demo for 12 Is Better Than 6 contains a tutorial, some shooty bits and some stealthy bits. The shooty bits are great and the stealth bits are slightly tedious. The whole thing hangs together thanks to an eye-enslaving art style and the delightful tension that awaits between the revolutions of the cylinder.

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Ten years ago, you’d struggle to find fifteen retail PC games released in any given month – and fourteen of them would launch with bugs, never be patched, and sink without trace. Compare and contrast with today, where Brewsters’ Millions could be spent in the time it took to load the Steam store. The existence of Steam isn’t entirely the cause for our videogame abundance, but it’s certainly a large factor – along with an influence, for good and ill, on almost every other part of PC games culture.

But what if it had never existed? You be Jimmy Stewart-playing-Gabe Newell and I’ll be Clarence, your guardian angel and guide to this alternate reality.

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“There’s an undiscovered country of possibilities out there that we need to explore and create.”

It’s Monday morning on the first day of Dagstuhl Seminar 15051: “Artificial and Computational Intelligence in Games: Integration” and Michael Mateas is talking about impossible games. You might remember Mateas from the first Electric Dreams article – he was one of the scientific researchers behind Facade, a groundbreaking games experiment in interactive drama and artificial intelligence. Nowadays he runs the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz, a nexus of the world’s best and soon-to-be-best games researchers. This January around fifty games researchers, including Michael and myself, came together in Germany for a week to talk about the future of our field and to work together to discuss some of the biggest research questions we’re facing right now.

Last time on Electric Dreams we talked about the history of artificial intelligence in the games industry. In this second part I want to talk about the present day, and what scientific research has to do with all of this. I m going to try to shed some light on why I think games research is broken and not benefitting games as well as it could be – but I also want to end on a positive note, and introduce you to the wonderful people and research that is going on right now around the world.

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