Click, Click, BOOM! History of Minesweeper

Noted as having celebrity players from Bill Gates to J.K. Rowling, often blamed for dips in office workers' productivity, and bundled by default with every version of the Windows OS until Windows 8, the history of Minesweeper is a long and storied one. On the occasion of the game's 21st anniversary, Eurogamer has released a detailed retrospective on the game's history in "Every Step You Take- The Story of Minesweeper":

After making its debut in the Windows Entertainment Pack, Minesweeper was given away with Windows 3.11, the breakthrough version of Windows. It's been a staple ever since, and Windows 8 is the first Microsoft OS since 3.11 that hasn't included it by default. And the men who made that version of Minesweeper were Curt Johnson and Robert Donner. Over the phone, Johnson's voice is slow. It's so soft and hesitant I keep thinking he's finished speaking mid-sentence, so I start talking before the transatlantic lag reveals he was just taking a long, long moment to sieve his thoughts.

The retrospective really gets into the nuts and bolts of the game's development, programming, and even delves into things like competitive Minesweeper, the Dreamboard and even a Minesweeper MMO! Give it a read!

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Whether it's blog posts on social justice or articles on the gaming industry, Shawn Struck's writing shows the attention to and respect for his craft -- and for people -- that make his work so appealing. His writing is smart without being pretentious and he seems genuinely uninterested in resorting to the sort of lowest-common-denominator copy that the geekblogging world is rife with. What a breath of fresh air!-- Marissa Sammy, writer & former Copy Editrix of Sequential Tart

I update The Code by myself, three times a day, five days a week. I focus not just on geek culture, but aim to make geek culture more inclusive, to shine a spotlight on problems that marginalized groups face and signal boost their efforts.

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Telltale Games' Devs Eager To Kill Disabled Character

Note: This post has spoilers for Season 2 of The Walking Dead Game.

Telltale Games have had a successful run with spinning great episodic adventure games from licensed franchises while managing to stay true to the source material, from the goofy absurdity of Homestar Runner in the "Strong Bad's Cool Game For Awesome People" to the sci-fi adventures of the Back to the Future series. The praise has continued for its adaptation of a video game based on the best-selling comic book series and cable TV show, The Walking Dead.

The Walking Dead video game has also been given kudos in particular for its diverse cast. Women characters are well-represented and well written. There are a wide range of characters in a wide range of backgrounds, ethnicity and even body types.

The second season of Telltale Games' Walking Dead game introduced a new original character as part of that season's group of cabin survivors: Sarah, a Hispanic teenager girl presented as neuro-divergent and implied to have some sort of anxiety disorder, complete with disassociation and panic attacks. Her father Carlos is shown to be overbearing and over-protective.

While there were the usual complaints from gamer dudebros about women characters followed discussion of Sarah in the game, there was also a grimy patina of ableism. Players talked about Sarah being a liability or bringing the group down. Slurs used against people with disabilities were used to describe the character, and gamers took to Facebook and Telltale's official forums to talk about how they had the chance to kill Sarah, how they would be happy to get the chance.They uploaded videos to Youtube titled "I HATE SARAH" or videos about how the suggested she could die.

But this was all asshole gamer dudebros, right? Not like this gross language was being echoed by actual Telltale developers, right?

Sadly, it actually was, in a recent episode of the web series "Playing Dead" with the team behind The Walking Dead Game where they echoed all this gross language... and worse. Marissa has the details:

Greg Miller spent the entire segment on Sarah putting her down. 

 

 

(“Was it really a choice if I was gonna save Sarah? Fuck Sarah, man. I’ve been looking to get out of the Sarah business for quite some time.” “Why?” “Cause she sucks!”)He talked about how glad he was to be able to leave her behind, and how happy he was to watch her get eaten. 

 

(“I saw her get torn apart. I was like, ‘Yes. Excellent.’”)Now, this would be bad enough. But we know Greg Miller is an asshole to female characters. He has been since Season 1. Where this went wrong, was this part: 

(“…there’s just so many people like in the office, on the internet who were just like y’know, ‘Sarah, Sarah, Sarah, I can’t wait to get rid of her.’”) 

The two Telltale employees publicly stated that people at Telltale were excited to kill Sarah. That they were waiting for a chance to do so. And that they listened to the ableist casual fandom who hated her and used that to go forward with her eventual pointless death.  

They then go on to make a joke about the fact that, in order to save Sarah, the player has to physically assault her while she’s in the middle of a shut-down. They joke that people who hated her wanted to slap her, but that would mean saving her, something they didn't want to do. 

(“So it’s just like, ‘Oh so you wanted to slap her, but in order to do that you had to want her to be around at the same time.’ [Mark laughs]”The final nail in the coffin... came from this part of the interview: 

 

(“We meet her for the first time in Episode, I guess at the end of Episode 1, right?” ”Yeah.” “Where [Clementine] gets to talk to her. Something’s off about her.” “Something’s off. Yeah.” “This isn’t right.”"And I thought at first it was that Carlos [Sarah’s father] was just sheltering her, right? And it was going to turn out that ‘Oh, she’s a normal child.’”"And then it’s like, ‘Oh, you’re still not normal.’”"I was like, ‘Well, I hate you even more now.’ ‘Right.’ ‘And the time has come.’”)He tells the Telltale employees how he feels about Sarah “not being normal” and that he wants her to die for it - and they agree! 

This is unacceptable. It is disgusting and unprofessional for a studio to speak openly about how much they were looking forward to killing a disabled character, and to let shitpiles like Greg Miller speak in such an ableist way about her without saying a word in her defense - even agreeing with him.  

Disabled and neurodivergent players all over the internet are hurt by this. Several have tried to contact Telltale, to try to get some sort of apology or acknowledgment out of them, to no avail. So many players, myself included, are disappointed that this company - known for diversity and well-handled diverse characters - has botched the treatment of a disabled WoC so badly.

As Anna Anthropy said on twitter:

witch upon the stars ‏@auntiepixelante  20m

"yeah, i'm glad we could cater to your fantasies of wanting to watch a disabled girl of color die" ~two dudes who still have jobs somehow

Seriously, "not normal"? We need to make them aware that this is unacceptable. If you agree you can send an email to feedback@telltalegames.com or tweet them @telltalegames and let them know this is unprofessional, unacceptable, and hurts actual people with disabilities too.

Kid Gets Secret Treasure Room For 4th Birthday

At ghghghgh, they detail how they turned an unused storage room adjacent to their 4 year old's room from a dusty, unused and unfurnished room into a space so wondrous that their son called it a "secret treasure room".

They hid the door to the storage room behind a kid-size dresser for two years, and when his fourth birthday drew near, the set to re-flooring the room, putting up and painting new walls, and stocking the room with furniture and drawing supplies and stickers and a world map that wouldn't have fit on the wall of his other room.



This is an awesome project, and pretty unique gift to give to a kid-- how many of us have daydreamed of dressers or bookshelves in a home leading to secret rooms? These folks worked together and gave him one. You can read how they did it, complete with pictures, here at Goer.org.

Is "Social Gaming" A Misnomer?

 

Leigh Alexander has a great article in The Guardian that delves into multi-player games as a social activity in general, and the recent beta of Bungie latest game, Destiny, in particular. An excerpt:

I watched a colleague of mine play through the beta of Bungie’s latest game, Destiny. It has all the beauty and heft of a massive, futuristic space opera, it has a gorgeous user interface, and it will be a high-end online game where friends can do missions together forever. It is a genius way to do business: create a game where the mode of participation is endless investment. As Destiny is a cutting-edge product you feel almost peer-pressured to participate. 

It is social in that business sense: you must collaborate with and keep up with your friends, ensure that your statistics and equipment – your fitness for competition – are ever increasing. You participate excitedly in this capitalistic metaphor.
Yet are people really playing “together”?

Jenn Frank tackles the idea of socialization-- or the lack thereof-- that happened between her and Ted (her fiance), and how utterly alien it felt for her (she was traditionally the sole "gamer" in a relationship) to feel like a so-called "game widow", especially when Destiny seemed to designed to be a constant, always-on experience:

Later, Ted tells me there is no “pause,” not in the sense where games often have a “pause.” He isn’t even playing multiplayer; he is on a solo mission. “I can’t put the game down,” he explains to me, helplessly. 

This, I do understand. 

I am not angry with Ted. I am furious with Destiny, however. Due to a design flaw—in this case, the flaw is with a game that cannot be paused—I am finally experiencing true relationship strife.

And while this phenomenon may sound most familiar to those who play MMORPGS like World of Warcraft and its ilk, Jason McIntosh wrote about a similar strain on his relation with another game that has no pause feature even though it's not always a multi-player game: Dark Souls. As he explains in "Dark Souls: Pain Without Pause":

But for most of the game your character is strictly alone in their world; you often see the flickering shadows of other players rushing past, but cannot interact with them in any way. And indeed, I never reached any true multi-player segment, so as far as my own experience is concerned, the lack of a pause button serves only as another tool the game uses to mold the player into the correct mindset for disciplined play... 

Whether it was bad for me just then or completely unworkable for me at all remains to be seen. I can offer none of this contextualization as an excuse for my behavior; I became an unpleasant jerk while playing this game, and that was awful and I never want to have that happen again.

Personally, while I've been on both sides of the divide over the years, I've seen a shift recently in that many AAA game companies try to design it so that they capture as much your your attention and investment of time and money that it can often end up having a detrimental effect on one's social life and relationships. Of course, moderation is the key, but a system like Destiny seems to be working very hard to upend that part of the equation.

What do you think, readers?

Hottest Dance Game... For the Commodore 64?

Feast your eyes on the game-play of Hardsync, the hottest dance-pad based music game for the Commodore 64 in the video below. It's a pretty impressive feat of interface engineering and programming!

Japanese Professor Solves Anime's Greatest Mystery With SCIENCE

A Japnese girl pop group named NMB has a weekly show called NMB to Manabu-kun wherein the pop group invites a lecturer on various subjects every week to give a talk on an area of expertise, along with a Q&A segment from the group and various comedians.

The theme of one episode this year was "The Science of Science Fiction" with professor Yanagita Rikao. The question pretty much anyone who's ever watched a single episode of Sailor Moon or the like has probably wondered about: How come nobody ever attacks the heroines during the lengthy transformation sequences?

The answer is both illuminating and entertaining.

 
Question: The transformation scenes in Pretty Cure are very long, so why don’t the bad guys attack the girls in the meantime?


"Even when I was little, I was thinking ‘Hey! Attack them now!’ "
I found this odd as well, so I watched the transformation scene many times. And what I noticed is, when the Pretty Cures yell ‘Dual Aurora Wave!’ and transform, a rainbow-colored column of light shoots up from the ground, going BOOM!"

"And then the Pretty Cures levitate, and go up into the air. Based on this, I believe the protagonists of Pretty Cure are being held up in the air by the power of light.


"When we think of light, we usually think it heats up things or lights up things. But in reality, light has the power to hold up things as well."
"When the sun is beating down on us in the summer, the human body is being pressed downwards by the sun beams with a force of 2/100,000g.”
"But this is only about a one-hundred of the weight of a mosquito, so no matter how hot it is, we don’t feel that sunlight is heavy."
 
"So that means the light holding them up must be extremely strong. If we assume that the two Pretty Cures each weigh about 45kg and do some calculations…”
"It means the light during the transformation must have the energy of 2,100,000,000 kiloWatts per square mile
.
"While the entirety of power that Japan is capable of generating is only 100,000,000 kiloWatts.”
"So they’re using 21 TIMES the amount of energy the whole of Japan can generate.”
"So what would happen if a bad guy jumped in to try to sabotage their transformation?"
"He would EVAPORATE INSTANTLY.”
“DEATH AWAITS ANYONE WHO DARES TO DISRUPT A PRETTY CURE TRANSFORMATION."

"So this means the best thing to do would be to transform close to any bad guys."

"Yes. They are the strongest while they transform, and are practically invincible.”



I know, Jack Swagger. My mind was blown, too.

A huge thank you to Alicia for the screenshots and Japanese translation, and QueenBella for the tip.

Blog Note: "Retro Reposts"

For a period of several years, I wrote articles for Associated Content, and in 2010, I was made a paid Featured Contributor to the Video Games section. Associated Content was later purchased by Yahoo! Yahoo! eventually re-branded Associated Content as Yahoo! Voices, and the Yahoo! Voices program finally ended last month. This also means that my work there will no longer be able to be veiwed at the original web address.

To keep a continuing record of my previous writing and save it from vanishing into the ether, I'm going to be reposting my work here for Associated Content/Yahoo under the label "Retro Repost", which you can browse the articles tagged as such here.

There may be the occasional publishing hiccup as I migrate these articles to The Code. I thank you all in advance for your patience.

Where Are The Women Video Characters?

Over 90 percent of kids play video games regularly, according to the most recent study from the NPD group. And according to the ESRB, over 65 percent of US households own at least one video game console.

A study by Children Now and Dr. David Leonard of Washington State University this year that the images above reference showed that 17 percent of video games characters were female, 19 percent of characters were women and 64 percent of characters in video games were male. Even more distressing, the study found that found what little black women characters there were had a distressingly narrowed role: 90 percent of black female characters were either props, bystanders or victims. So with there being more non-human characters in video games than women characters in video games... how does that affect boys' views of women and what they can do? How does that affect girls' view of themselves? How many of the women characters are just motivation for the hero to start a quest, or a damsel in distress, or otherwise a periphery in a game?

As I've said often, representation matters. Two years ago, a study conducted by Commuunication Research showed that watching TV shows increased the self esteem of  white boys, but noticeably undercut the confidence and self esteem of girls no matter what the race.

One outlet that will be dedicated to tackling this issues is an upcoming podcast called The Smash Survey. The about page describes The Smash Survey as "... an upcoming podcast project that will critically explore the representation of race, gender, and queer identity in media and pop culture in a fun and engaging format. Through interviews, games, critiques, and panels TTS will try and answer the three primary questions of representation and media portrayals: Why are they the way they are, why are they wrong and what can we do to fix them?" You can follow the tumblr of the same name here.

What say you, readers?

Video: Adorable Kids Cosplaying At SDCC

One of the most entertaining parts of any large comic convention is admiring all the incredible costumes on display. One of the most smile-inducing things to capture on video is seeing kids being absolutely adorable. This recent video combines both of these things as Kendra Pettis of Racialicious is the guest interviewer for Bleeding Cool News, and her subjects are a number of kids (and their families) that are all dressed up and attended this year's Sand Diego Comic-Con.

Watch the video below for 4 minutes of incredibly awesome and incredibly cute kids waxing enthusiastic about costumes both home-made and those done with help from Mom or Dad.

Tech's Gender Gap Is Real, Pervasive, Worse Than Men Realize

For all the idealism behind the idea that technology knows no borders, that data and the market-place of ideas offer equal access to meritous ideas, free from gender bias or that women have achieved parity with men in the technology field, the actual lived experience of scores of women in the tech industry, from app development to tech investments is rife with stories that tell otherwise. Last week, Wired published an eye-opening and unflinching look at the gender gap between men and women in the tech industry entitled "This Is What Tech’s Ugly Gender Problem Really Looks Like". An excerpt:

Shortly after Kathryn Tucker started RedRover, an app that showcases local events for kids, she pitched the idea to an angel investor at a New York tech event. But it didn’t go over well. When she finished her pitch, the investor said he didn’t invest in women. When she asked why, he told her. “I don’t like the way women think,” he said. “They haven’t mastered linear thinking.” To prove his point, he explained that his wife could never prioritize her to-do lists properly. And then, as if he was trying to compliment her, he told Tucker she was different. “You’re more male,” he said. Tucker didn’t need to hear any more. “I said, ‘Thanks very much,’ walked out, and never spoke to him again,” she recalled earlier this year, as part of a panel discussion on “fundraising while female” at the annual Internet Week conference in New York. 

It was one of many stories shared during a panel that painted the tech world as a place that—for all its efforts to push into the future with apps and gadgets and online services—is still very much stuck in the past when it comes to attitudes involving gender...  

But there’s another truth to remember: For every story you hear about investors behaving badly, there are far worse stories that many women wouldn’t dare to tell. “The most common thing I hear from other women is: ‘Oh the stories I’ll tell once I’m far enough along that I don’t have to worry about being shamed,’” says Kathryn Minshew, co-founder of the job search and career advice site The Muse. For women who have experienced this bias—and there are many—the simple act of talking about it is taboo... And yet, it’s only through these stories that we can begin to understand that the statistics aren’t the result of some fluke or mass oversight, but a very real problem that needs to be solved.

The entire article is worth a thorough read, and hopefully serves as a decent wake-up call. A word of advice, though: Don't read the comments on the article. They're particularly loathsome.

Twitch.tv Is Digging Its Own Grave

base image courtesy of the Oregon Trail Tombstone Generator

Twitch.tv was spun off from its parent site, justin.tv when the company noticed that live streams of video games and e-sports were one of the fastest growing video categories in both content and viewers. Eventually twitch.tv became so popular, according to the Wall Street Journal  streaming of twitch.tv video accounted for 2 percent of all internet traffic used in the US and was the fourth most popular source of internet traffic during peak usage hours. Twitch.tv outlasted not just its only real direct competion (the site own3d.tv, which went out of business last year), but even outlasted its parent site-- justin.tv shut down operations this month.

In the same month that the Wall Street Journal published the article pointing out twitch.tv's success, the interactive experiment "Twitch Plays Pokemon" became a runaway hit, amassing millions of views and praise from Twitch's vice president of marketing, Matthew DiPietro. DiPietro told Gamespot that the original stream was an example of “how video games have become a platform for entertainment and creativity that extends WAY beyond the original intent of the game creator.” It was also announced this year that twitch.tv would be the official streaming video provider for E3.

But just a short time after it was reported that Google purchased twitch.tv for 1 billion dollars, it seems that new content restrictions and fundamental changes to how the site works are alienating long-time users and angering developers. In official blog posts from the twitch dev team, it was announced that previously saved and archived broadcasts were slated for deletion. Certain highlight videos would be saved, but only up to a maximum of two hours. Many twitch channels have archived broadcasts going back years, which are now going to vanish soon.

In another unwelcome change, if your broadcasts use anything twitch decided was copyrighted audio (including in-game music), and you saved it for later, the ENTIRE half hour segment would have its audio muted. Thais has resulted in broadcasts that have no other audio but the in-game music as someone plays being muted entirely, and even developers showing their own game off via twitch have had the audio muted!



Was the audio muted thanks to the game's composer, maybe? Nope.



Alright, then maybe audio tracks are flagged for being muted because the creator might have registered them with some sort of content service?


That's odd. Well, there has to be some way the developers can clear music track beforehand, right?


Oh. That's really not good. As tumblr user khoroshocrossing put it:

Think of your favorite youtuber. Imagine if all their old videos were suddenly deleted, and you could only view their uploads in meaty chunks that split up their full recording. Now, imagine if these meaty chunks are censored because of copyright restraints on audio usage and short audio clips. So huge portions of their library are restricted and permanently erased because they used a copyrighted clip. It would be an enormous pain in the ass and it would strongly stifle what content creators can upload to their channel, right? Well, just apply all of the above to video game streaming, and now you've got a massive problem. 

There's already been a lot of push-back from both twitch users and game developers, but twitch doesn't seem to want to budge. Can a company founded on the backs of its community engagement last for long when it takes steps to alienate the same userbase that made it ripe for Google's billions in the first place?

(Thanks to tumblr user flatluigi for the twitter screencaps.)

Update: Wow, this article has blown up! If you like what I do here, please consider chipping in via patreon-- you get something back from me for as little as a dollar-- or hitting the donate button on the right sidebar. Thanks for reading!

Free Game Site ForestAmbassador Shows Gaming's True Potential

Merrit Kopas runs Forest Ambassador, a site that has the mission to introduce video games to wider audiences. According to Kopas, all games that appear on Forest Ambassador are

• free 
• demand relatively little investment of time 
• require little familiarity with game conventions 
• need no specialized equipment

Forest Ambassador is more than just a site that posts three games that are free, short, and easy to start playing. The games also runs the gamut of subjects from false police confessions, feeding ducks, urban zoning policy, shaving your legs, capitalism, and hugging cats-- stuff you wouldn't expect to see video games cover.

The featured games are also more often than not made by marginalized authors. In a welcome touch, you can also browse the over 100 games featured so far by mood! What are you waiting for? Check it out!

Pixar Exec At Heart Of Industry-Wide Pay Scandal

Photo illustration via Cartoon Brew

Cartoon Brew explains:

Pixar and Disney Animation president Ed Catmull has always had a reputation as a decent person, but newly revealed court documents show that he’s been working against the interests of Pixar’s employees for years, as well as trying to hurt other animation studios who didn’t play by his rules... Catmull’s deposition and emails from the lawsuit confirm that he was instrumental in operating a secret wage-theft cartel that violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. But it’s even worse than you think. The cartel orchestrated in large part by Catmull robbed potential wages and job opportunities from thousands of animation industry workers at other studios, including DreamWorks, Lucasfilm, Robert Zemeckis’ ImageMovers, the now-defunct Orphanage, and Walt Disney Animation Studios... 

...As Catmull and other Pixar honchos and Disney got richer and richer during the CG feature animation boom, the employees’ salaries at Pixar and beyond were being artificially controlled through illegal means. With these documents, we now know that DreamWorks and Disney also undermined free market principles by colluding to restrict their employees’ wages and job opportunities. These revelations extend beyond the scope of the class-action suit, which is in the process of being settled with a paltry $9 million slap on the wrist for Pixar and Lucasfilm.

Interestingly enough, the comments section of the article has exploded with anonymous industry members coming forward and contributing a number of horror stories. They've been screen-capped, just in case they later "disappear mysteriously":

Walking Dead Star Still Struggles For Auditions, Blazing Own Trail

In a recent interview with The Wrap, Steven Yeun, better known as The Walking Dead's "Glenn", talked about how even though he has a role on one of the most popular shows on cable TV, he is struggling to find more auditions, and that it's part of a systematic (and sadly, still unsurprising) bias against Asian-American actors:

“People ask, ‘So, how are the roles now? You must be getting so many.’ And it’s like, I don’t know if you know, but I’m Asian still,” Yeun told The Wrap earlier in July, laughing. “It’s not a complaint, that’s just how it is now, and I have to forge my own path through it and see that through. I think that if I had not been Asian, I probably would have a whole plethora of roles, at least to audition for, but it’s just not what has been written.”

Looking to change the way Hollywood directors and casting companies choose their talents, Yeun announced that he will producing and write his own feature films in order to support, and increase the visibility of, Asian actors.

Hollywood has continuously taken roles that were originally written with Asian characters and then cast white actors in the roles instead-- The Last Airbender, Oldboy, even Dragonball Z! Even 21, which was based on the story of real life MIT Blackjack Team that was completely Asian-American, had most of the principal characters recast as white people. So taking matters into their own hands might be the only real way to make any real and lasting changes in the entertainment industry

Meet Your New Favorite Superhero, Spark

Ted Anderson and Alex Law, the team behind the awesome blog "Little Girls Are Better At Designing Superheroes Than You", have teamed up again to bring another awesome superhero to life: Sparks, the secret identity of 9 year old Lucia Marquez-Miller. She's a budding engineer with telekinetic powers that she calls her "spark".

Her creators are making an open pitch to gauge interest. If there's enough interest, the want to make the comic on ongoing, published series. Here's the pitch:

As Spark, the world’s youngest superhero, she’s a junior member of a superhero team while also trying to live a normal life. Can Lucia juggle her friends and family while also saving the world from super villains? We’re posting a 15-page standalone comic here to give readers an idea of what the book would be like.

Take a gander:




Want to see the rest? It's available in full size here.