Quick Start
Tom McDonald has been covering games for countless magazines and
newspapers for 11 years. He lives in the New Jersey Pine Barrens.Gaming Auteur?
I Don’t Think So
+GAME THEORY BY^ THOMAS L. McDONALD
Games have had an uneasy time
adapting to the “auteur” theory of
fi lm, a dubious but widely held belief that a director
is the single guiding visionary, or “author,” of a fi lm.
The notion that a collaborative work which calls
upon the unique contributions of many different
departments and people, each adding their singular
vision, can legitimately be credited to a single
creative force is tenuous. There are few directors
(Stanley Kubrick was one) who leave their unique
mark on every aspect of their work.
The same applies to gaming, where few
designers have risen to the level of marquee names.
The name-in-the-title club membership is small:
Sid Meier, Roberta Williams, Trevor Chan ... and
American McGee. The list of designers who didn’t
make the cut is pretty surprising: Peter Molyneux,
Richard Garriott, John Carmack, Warren Spector;
well, you get the idea. In most cases, the use of a
marquee name tells us something. Certainly a game
called Sid Meier’s Pirates! says much more about
what to expect than a game named merely Pirates!
Because Meier designs in code, writing large
chunks of the game himself, each project is uniquely
his. He is, clearly, a Kubrick fi gure in gaming.
But what exactly does American McGee
Presents Scrapland tell us, other than a guy with a
pretty cool-sounding name is somehow involved? I
don’t know American McGee, but from all accounts
he’s a nice guy. I’m not here to kick him around. But
his leap from id Software level designer to marquee
name with his fi rst solo outing ( American McGee’s
Alice ) had everything to do with the sound of his
name and nothing to do with his talent.
This may all sound perfectly trivial, but there’s
something else at work here. Much of Scrapland
was done by Spanish developer Mercury Steam,
with McGee coming into the project late in the
game. The same day Scrapland landed on my desk,
I also got Relic’s Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War ,
which has the unique handprint of designer Alex
Garden all over it. (For the review, turn to page 107.)
Since Homeworld , Garden’s strategy games have
blended rich tactical elements with remarkably
manageable and effective interfaces. He’s one of
the best designers in the business, but his name is
known to few and unlikely to wind up in a title any
time soon.
Most games are made by too many diverse hands
to lay claim to any sort of auteur status. Games are
a synthesis of many visions—art, music, sound,
writing, programming, design, even testing—and
few people have enough mastery of all these
aspects to lay authorial claim to a game.MA XIMUMPC DECEMBER 2004
JazzMutant’s
LEMUR
A futuristic “multitouch” panel
that plays and displaysBecause the standard keyboard-
and-mouse combo doesn’t cut it for
improvisation or live performances,
electronic musicians and DJs rely on
external hardware controllers that
let them spin knobs, push sliders,
and hammer buttons to shape their
sounds in real time. Of course, hard-
ware controllers have fixed layouts,
and if you wish you’d bought one
with three modulation wheels instead
of two, or six sliders instead of four,
you’re out of luck. There’s no such
threat o’ regret with JazzMutant’s
LEMUR, however. It’s an endlessly
configurable touch-sensitive display
surface that lets you drag and drop
any combination of “control objects”
such as faders, switches, and knobs
into any pattern that strikes your
fancy. And unlike traditional touch-
screen displays, the “multitouch”
LEMUR allows you to interact with upto 10 of these objects at once!
JazzMutant expects to begin ship-
ping the LEMUR MultiTouch Control
Surface early this year (no suggested
retail price has been set as of press
time; check http://www.jazzmutant.com ). While
it’s initially being developed spe-
cifically for audio applications, we’re
already wondering how we can hack
this bad boy to manage our inventory
of weapons in Half-Life 2.Not only does the LEMUR display
allow you to interact with up to 10
objects at once (who’s got 11 fingers,
anyway?), but you can also adjust
the “physical rules” that govern each
object; a scroll wheel, for example,
can be set to “spring back” upon
release, or remain at the position it’s
at when you lift your finger.Plugging a USB device into the
dusty rump of a PC ranks second
only to cesarean childbirth in
national polls of “least fun activi-
ties.” Luckily, help is on the way
in the form of a new wireless
specification for USB devices. This
emerging specification—cleverly
named Wireless USB (WUSB)—will
let you create what is basically a
wireless USB network that extends
30 feet from your PC, allowing any
wireless USB device within range
to connect just like a laptop in a
hotspot.
According to published white
papers, wireless USB will work in a
similar fashion to Wi-Fi networks,with a USB host device sending
packets of data via a radio signal
to wireless clients. Though explicit
details of the specification have
not been nailed down, the group
promoting the specification has
settled on a target bandwidth of
480Mbps, the full bandwidth of
today’s USB 2.0 and 480 times
that of Bluetooth. An arrival date
for this technology has not been
announced, so it’s safe to assume
it’ll arrive “when it’s done,” which
can’t possibly be too soon.
Our bet: By this time next year,
WUSB will be putting the squeeze
on Bluetooth.And when it does, will Bluetooth
be pulled?Wireless USB
Gears up for Launch