JMoe: The Mastermind

During class recently, someone mentioned an article they read on Gamasutra about how Real Time Strategy games should really be called something else, like Real Time Tactics games. Being a big RTS fan, which should probably be apparent from my past writings, I decided to dig up the article and take a look. You can find the article here.

While an interesting article, I think that the premise is rather fundamentally flawed, for a variety of reasons. One is a misappreciation for the depth and complexity of strategy, and the other is a misappreciation for the depth and complexity of strategy games themselves. I’m going up against some tough competition here, since I can’t cite people like Clausewitz or Sun-Tzu, and I’m going on memory for my primary strategy source, which is the book Strategy by B.H. Liddell Hart. It’s an excellent book, and I recommend you check it out if you happen to be interested in strategy (now would be a good time to have an Amazon referrals account, but I don’t, so buying it won’t give me any money).

The rest of the argument after the cut.
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While browsing around the C&C community for interesting news, I happened across an article which includes a design for the “perfect” C&C game mode for Tiberium. For those who many not know, Tiberium is a first person shooter set in the Tiberium universe (created by the original Command and Conquer, along with Tiberian Sun, and Tiberium Wars). It’s not part of the C&C franchise, it instead shares the same universe setting-wise, but is a separate branch. This allows a lot more freedom.

While the game mode in the article is interesting, it has two major flaws.
1. It doesn’t fit with what the apparent design goals of Tiberium are.
2. It sounds an awful lot like Renegade.
For some people, #2 isn’t really so much a problem as a great thing, but Tiberium isn’t Renegade. Renegade was an attempt to create an FPS that was a C&C game. Tiberium is an FPS that happens to be in the same universe as the C&C games. They’re not really the same at all.

My own design for a team based multiplayer mode for Tiberium comes after the cut.
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About a year ago I said I would make a post about LinQ. Now that Visual Studio 2008 is out, and LinQ is a released technology, I think I can get around to it. I still haven’t built a project that makes a good use of LinQ, but I’ve got a fairly good understanding of it, and found some interesting ways to use it.

Now, you may be wonder what LinQ is, and what it stands for. The answer is that it stands for Language INtegrated Query. It is an extension to C# and VB.NET that allows you to use a SQL-like syntax for constructing queries against a wide variety of data sources. The most obvious example is XML, but you can also use most of the built in data structures in the .NET framework as well.

With that out of the way, on to an example or two of how I’ve managed to use LinQ, and what the challenges that I’ve run into are.
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During my work at the GAMBIT Games Lab, the topic of educational games came up. The question was whether or not educational games were a valid genre. That got me thinking, which led to this. My conclusion is that in fact, all games are educational. Some have a more explicit purpose, teaching concepts which are applicable outside the game realm (whether this be games like Number Munchers, Word Munchers, or Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing), but any time you are playing a game, you’re learning.
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