Game Development

Game Violence

Felipe Martino Gagno Ceotto — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 10:43:15 GMT

I've been trying not to get into this subject because it's just like discussing football or religion but reading this article today I couldn't help myself. The UK government is doing (another) study about the effects of violent computer games on children and young people. My guess is that the results will be either inconclusive or presented in a way that allows people to doubt them because one of the interested parts was responsible for them as well.

While reading the opinions I give here, please take into consideration that I know nothing about psychology and I don't have children. But I do know games and I've played them since I was a kid. I've even studied them and learned how to make them, although I can't call myself a game designer or a game developer (not yet, anyway).

Let's take the case of Stefan Pakeerah who was horribly murdered by a friend with a claw hammer. I am very sorry for this kid and for his parents and friends and of course I don't support whoever it was that committed the murder but what strikes me as odd is that Stefan Pakeerah's mother "called for violent video games to be banned" because the kid who confessed to the murder played Manhunt.

That is odd to me because we all should know better: unfortunately or not (and I'm not here to discuss that) violence is everywhere and it has always been. We can see it on TV, we can see it in Nature, and we can see it in people's acts, art, video games, cinema, pretty much everywhere. If you don't agree with that statement, no problem - I'm not even sure if I agree -, but I'm sure you will agree that violence is present in a lot of different places and that people in general (including children) have access to demonstrations of violence from time to time. That doesn't mean that everybody that is exposed to a demonstration of violence will be violent too. Otherwise everybody would have violent behaviour and that is definitely not true. A lot of kids played Manhunt all over the world and they didn't went out to commit murder, so I'm guessing there must be something else wrong with that kid that confessed to the murder besides playing a violent game, wouldn't you agree? So the trigger could have been the game, a movie, or nothing at all... right?

I have played my share of violent games including some that I shouldn't have, according to their classification. When I was 17 I played Carmageddon, a very violent race game which was banned for minors, and I've played all the Grand Theft Auto games that were released for PC, for instance. These are pretty violent games and you could say that they encourage questionable (not to say worse) behaviour inside the game. The point is that I didn't go out after playing these games to commit crimes and I didn't take my car and started running people on the streets. I didn't even feel that it would be something I'd want to do: it is a lot of fun in the game and I loved all those games but it has nothing to do with my "real life". I've been playing Need For Speed: Most Wanted for a while now, and I go out from home after playing it to drive my car but I don't feel the need to race with it. Got my point?

Blaming a violent game (a movie, book, TV show, music or whatever) for a murder is in my opinion a lame excuse. I'm not denying that they can trigger violent behaviour in some people, but they are not to blame. Anything can trigger violent behaviour in the wrong person. I'm all for classifying correctly the games and making sure that kids don't have access to material they shouldn't but banning a game completely because it is violent is unnecessary. Several studies were already done on the subject of if a game can provoke violent behaviour but a recent journal was published with a meta-analysis of these studies and it basically demonstrated that no current study was reliable enough to provide definite results to one side or the other. To quote an article written about this journal, "the overall conclusion is that there does appear to be a connection between violent games and violent thoughts in a laboratory setting. But the connections between such thoughts and violent behaviour in the lab or elsewhere are tenuous at best. The studies that try to address those questions currently suffer from a lack of a standardized measure of violent behaviour and a lack of sufficient background on other potential influences on the test subjects' tendencies towards violence, such as family environment".

So, since we live in a society where, very intelligently, everybody (and everything) is innocent until proven guilty, until someone actually proves that violent games are a direct path to actual violence, let's not condemn the games, ok?! They are fun and they are cool. :) And I hope my prediction of the results of the new study requested by the UK government is wrong and that this study gets to conclusive results so we can end the discussion.

Wanna play Manhunt 2? :D

Update (2007-10-11 15:02): Please read the article "Playing games with freedom" as well which is much better than mine and with the same point of view (almost). :)

Mono, GTK#, Glade#

Felipe Martino Gagno Ceotto — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 15:42:00 GMT

Lately I've been dedicating some of my time trying to work with MONO, the free .NET Framework project.
The effort began when I first tryed to compile Another Block in Mono for Linux, just for fun, to see how much work I would have to put on it to make it compile successfully. Of course I knew that the first problem would be the access to the registry that I make, to keep configs and high score. Linux has no registry, so I removed everything related to the registry from the source code, and made a note to myself to change everything to XML (which by the way I still haven't done). After that, I had some problem with the audio library I use (nBASS), but I was interested in playing the game, so I removed that too, to check later, and compiled it. It compiled and ran, but the game itself didn't work.
So I went to check it out, and see why it didn't work. If it was something related to the graphics, and so on. The problem was the graphic components. MONO doesn't implement the namespace System.Windows.Forms completly yet, and this part is still under heavy development.

That made me give up porting Another Block for Linux for a while, but I started studying other possibilities of implementing graphical interfaces with MONO. The most obvious way is to use GTK+. There is a package called GTK# that integrates GTK+ with MONO, and it works both in Windows and Linux. I think that GTK applications are not very beautiful, and QT would be much better, but the QT# project is "dead" because of "lack of interest", they said. There are several GUI possibilities for MONO listed here, but GTK# is the best implemented until now.

So, I'm wondering how would I design an interface for GTK#... Glade# is the answer. Glade is a GUI designer for GTK+, and Glade# is its biding for GTK#. Another disapointment: it's not at all easy to draw the simplest interface using Glade, inspite of its usability being similar to any GUI designer application I've used. The positioning of the components is somehow complex. Anyway... That wouldn't stop me, so I design my "Hello World" window, and following this tutorial, I make it work.
Note: I'm using SharpDevelop, compiling everything with MONO, but still in Windows.

Well, it worked very nicely, and now all I have to do is try to design things a little better using Glade, and then try to compile all this in Linux to see if it works. I suppose it will. It's easy to port MS .NET Framework to MONO, since MONO is a very well done project (at least the current version is). Still, one would have to program every aspect of the interface, like making the references to the GTK objects, creating the events, and all, manually. That bothered me, since when you program using Windows.Forms, the IDE (VS.NET or SharpDevelop) does everything for you. I searched the net for a solution, but I couldn't find one, so I began doing my own. Now I have an application that gets a glade file and generates a SharpDevelop project with the class that will use the glade file as a resource for creating the GUI. It's getting pretty nice, and I'll post it soon.

Well, that it! I'm getting really excited about this... Finally, a way of easily making good software for Linux that really works (or so I think). I'm posting all this to basically tell people the way of searching how to use MONO, I guess. As soon as I polish the application that generates the class to use the Glade interface, I'll post it! Bye!

Status of game development

Felipe Martino Gagno Ceotto — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 15:07:00 GMT

Well, my game development has been paused for a while, since I've been dedicating a long time to work. But I'll not stop or give up, that's for sure. Tempo is now a true company, but one of our dear friends, that helped us in every step of the game development and not only is not a partner with us. Gianfranco has moved to another city, but he promissed he would keep doing the art work for our games. He is not a partner of Tempo as we thought we would be, but we'll find out a way for the game development part to still be released under Tempo name, and for Gian to still gets what he deserves.

Meanwhile, I've been trying to finish writting the articles for Another Block, and I've been also trying to port Another Block for MONO, but MONO doesn't have a very good System.Windows.Forms implemented, so I will probably have to write the interface again in GTK or QT. We are also thinking about starting the next game in our series... or, maybe, start something more wild. :) Who knows. I'll let you people know, as soon as I find out.

Another Block articles have moved!

Felipe Martino Gagno Ceotto — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 16:56:00 GMT

I've moved the Another Block articles to the SourceForge website, due to advantages like version control, and other stuff. I've also updated the current articles, as I told I would.

The articles are now here: http://anotherblock.sourceforge.net/articles

Back, Changes and SharpDevelop

Felipe Martino Gagno Ceotto — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 13:31:00 GMT

Hello everyone. It's been quite a while since I've posted, but now I'm back at my blogging activities, and my game development activities too.

Lots have changed in my professional life, and I'll detail that in my next post. Meanwhile, let me tell you all that I will revise the Another Block articles, specially the "Tools and Other Stuff" one, because I had the time to check out many free and good tools. SharpDevelop was one of these tools, and I must say that it is a very good tool, and it's worth taking a look at it. If you can't afford paying for the very expensive Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, try it: http://www.sharpdevelop.net/OpenSource/SD/Default.aspx. It does almost everything VS.NET does, for free.

The "Project" article will be revised too, because I've finally had the time to make the whole project diagrams for Another Block, and even describing the use cases and all. That should get everything to a point where I can finish the articles in no time, and with good quality.

I guess that's it... Scenes from the next post: I'll talk about Tempo (my company) and its merge with CASE (another company), and also, me leaving Fluxwire (my other company). :) Lots of companies... See yah!

Another Article is out.

Felipe Martino Gagno Ceotto — Fri, 06 May 2005 18:47:00 GMT

Hey.

Just wanted to say that another article for developing a Tetris® clone is out. Check it here: http://anotherblock.sourceforge.net/articles

New version of Another Block

Felipe Martino Gagno Ceotto — Fri, 06 May 2005 15:28:00 GMT

I'm very excited about this. :) My precious little game, Another Block, has a new version.
The interface is much better, with colorful blocks (thanks to Gianfranco), sounds (thanks to me. ;)) and some small features that, after playing for a while, we found out that some things were better, some weren't, and some things were needed (thanks to Hervan).

Anyway, here is the link to download its setup file: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/anotherblock/AnotherBlockSetup-1.0.1952.exe?download
If you want to download it with the source code, here it is: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/anotherblock/AnotherBlock-1.0.1952.zip?download

If you want to check out other stuff about Another Block, its SouceForge page is: http://sourceforge.net/projects/anotherblock.

There is also a complete code comment report of its code, here: http://anotherblock.sourceforge.net/CodeCommentReport-1.0.1952/

The articles about how you can do a Tetris® clone like Another Block (still not complete) are here: http://anotherblock.sourceforge.net/articles

See you all on monday!

XNA Studio

Felipe Martino Gagno Ceotto — Wed, 04 May 2005 17:09:00 GMT

I just found out that Microsoft will release what it seems to be a very powerful tool for game developers: XNA Studio. They have announced it at the Game Developers Conference in March (so, maybe I'm a little late telling you people this "news").

I'm just posting this here because I got really excited about it! It seems that it will be an awesome tool. I read that it is based on the Visual Studio 2005 Team System, and for what I've checked in the beta version of VS 2005, that is a great tool. Anyway, just so you know about it. :)

Felipe Martino Gagno Ceotto — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 14:06:00 GMT

Well, I've managed to post two more articles for developing a Tetris® clone. Check this link the series index here.
I hope everybody can read and understand them. Next couple of articles coming next week.

Please feel free to give me some feedback on the articles.

Thanks!

First article is out!

Felipe Martino Gagno Ceotto — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 16:33:00 GMT

Howdy people!

The first article on how to develop a Tetris® clone is out. In the index, there's other two articles previewed, but they have not been posted yet. They will, soon. You can check the articles here: http://geekswithblogs.com/felipe/articles/38576.aspx

That is the link you can always check to see if there was any update in the articles. Of course, I'll always add a post here in the blog too, as a notice for updates. That's it!

---

Update (2005-07-12): The articles have been moved to http://anotherblock.sourceforge.net/articles/