Black and White

Black & White
God $%*# this is an amazing game!
by IGN Staff
March 27, 2001 - I'm going crazy. No really, I'm completely insane now. I've just spent the past five days chained to my computer, only taking breaks to scrounge whatever leftover pizza I can find in my room, a little bit of sleep, and of course to catch the latest episode of the Alf of my generation: Happily Ever After. I'm extremely tired, a bit delirious, and mildly dehydrated. Undulating red rings are burned into my eyesight from casting thousands of miracles, playing havoc with my peripheral vision and leaving trails whenever I scan my eyes over a light surface. I'm suffering from the peculiar feeling that I'm looking down on everything from high above at a 60-degree angle, and it's making me slightly nauseous. All of this may sound pretty ghastly, but it's not like I've been suffering. I've been playing one of the most highly anticipated PC games of the past two years: Black & White. Unless you've been living in a cave in highlands of Tibet for the past five years, you've probably heard of Black & White, the latest God-sim from PC sage and minor-deity himself Peter Molyneux, one of the brains behind such innovative and creative games as Populous, Dungeon Keeper and Magic Carpet. Because of its lofty promises, Black & White has been getting major media coverage for months now...but now I can finally say that yes, it does live up to the hype.

The question has been raised several times, "What exactly is Black & White?" And rightfully so. Before we got our hands on the game, even we weren't sure exactly how the game would play. We knew you played the role of a rookie god complete with cool powers and miracles, we knew you had a pet avatar creature that you could teach through your actions, and we knew that there would a strategy element to the game with you trying to gain influence over the villages controlled by rival gods. But what we didn't know was how all of these parts fit together.
Now we know, and after playing Black & White for almost a solid week, I can say it's a truly miraculous "game." I call it a "game" because it's more of an experience -- a living world that you have influence over yet still don't have total control over.

Not surprisingly, the strategy portion of Black & White is a lot like Populous, only in an entirely 3D world. Like Populous, you play as a god who's trying to convert as many followers as possible. There are eight different tribes in Black & White: Aztec, Celtic, Egyptian, Greek, Indian, Japanese, Norse, and Tibetan. Influencing the tribes to join your side will afford you different miracles specific to that tribe. For example, the Celts specialize in natural and healing powers, while the Aztecs offer more offensive, warlike miracles. While you don't have total control over your villagers, you can suggest roles to them, such as foresters, farmers, breeders, builders, and pure worshippers. The more villagers who believe in you, the more miracle-casting power you have, but of course the less people you have gathering resources, constructing buildings, and making sweet, sweet love.

The many islands in the game are populated with several tribes, some who owe allegiance to no one, while others may worship another higher being. So how do you get these little buggers to look to you as their supreme being? By performing miracles and acts only a god could, of course. Produce food for them when they're hungry or heal a sick elderly villager and you'll convert a few to your side through acts of godly kindness. But showing off your more violent powers will work as well. Burn their villages with sizzling fireballs or reign down an electrifying lighting storm on their town center and they will worship you out of sheer terror.

That's where one of the important facets of Black & White really comes into play. Like the name implies, you can be either a kind and gentle god or a livid, vengeful god -- with shades of gray in between. The concepts of good and evil are handled very elegantly in the game. Just because you have to toss a fireball into the village store every now and again doesn't mean the villagers don't notice all of the bountiful forests you've provided them with and your charitable healing work at the old villagers' home. No, no -- it's an overall combination of your actions that you'll be remembered for. Rain fire down on your followers and your area of influence will slowly turn into a dark, foreboding land. Be kind and your realm will sparkle with wholesome purity. But remember, you're not in this alone. Not only will your actions affect your land and villagers, but they'll also affect your creature as well.

Amidst all of this RTS gameplay, you'll have a pet to look after as well. Your pet is the physical embodiment of godly power, and (s)he can perform almost any task you can, like casting miracles and impressing villagers. The creature AI in the game is simply brilliant. AI is Molyneux's forte, and he always surrounds himself with master AI programmers, so this didn't come as much of a surprise. Watching your creature learn -- and I do mean actually "learn" -- is an amazing thing to witness. By rewarding your creature with a gentle rub, you can encourage your pet to continue doing that action, while slapping him around shows him your disapproval. The learning process even goes to the extreme of teaching your creature where to use the bathroom. Your villagers won't be too happy if your 200-foot behemoth of a monkey poops right in the middle of the town square, but by leashing him to a rock and setting him next to a field when he's young and rewarding him when he poops in the meadow and you've got yourself a gigantic source of free fertilizer.

Your creature is also the vehicle that you'll use to fight other rival creatures. While the fighting system isn't nearly as complex as a console fighter, you can attack, block, and you can even throw a few special moves into the mix when you're going up against a rival avatar.

As if all this weren't enough, there are plenty of story-based quests in the game to complete as well. While you don't have to do these quests, you're often rewarded with a new miracle power or the like, so it behooves you to at least try a few quests if you're not too busy managing villages and teaching your creature how to breakdance.

All of this wouldn't work without a finely crafted control system, and Black & White certainly shines with its complex yet graceful interface. Although you can assign hotkeys for most of the actions, the entire game can be controlled with the mouse as well, with the left mouse button controlling movement and the right mouse button in charge of your actions, such as smacking around your pet or interacting with objects on the landscape. You can even cast any of the miracles in the game by using the oft-touted "gesture" system. For example, you draw a counterclockwise spiral on the landscape and then a "W" to create a water miracle. The gesture system is a great concept and, for the most part, it worked extremely well. For some reason though I was never able to successfully cast the healing miracle, which is a heart-shaped gesture, while I was in the field. I would invariably get a completely different miracle every time I tried to cast heal, so I was relegated to zooming back to my temple (which I always set a waypoint at) any time I wanted to cast heal.

I also wasn't a big fan of using the mouse for controlling the camera, but that was easily mapped to a standard first person shooter setup. I mapped the movement controls to the AWSD buttons, set Q and E for camera rotation, and R and F to change pitch. This made controlling my god hand quick and easy, and made moving around in the game world much more straightforward for me. While learning the game will take some time, and it will take some time, the included tutorial does a good job of teaching you the basics while you're actually playing the game, so it's not like you have to sit through a boring, drawn-out interface lesson before you actually jump into Black & White.

As you all know by the screenshots and movies by now, Black & White is a visual masterpiece. The technology behind the game is the best of the best, and this game will really show off that new, high-powered graphics cards you just spent $400 on. Zooming from high over the island right into the face of a villager twenty miles below is a breathtaking journey, and although the villager models aren't as detailed as models from other games, there can literally be thousands of villagers running around on the same island. There are some texture pops as you fly around the terrain, but this is easily forgivable for a game with this level of detail. The creature models all look incredibly sharp and are easily recognizable for the animals they represent, although the cow does look rather awkward standing on it's hind legs...just as you would expect from a bipedal bovine. The charm and personality of each creature is displayed through incredibly realistic facial and body animations that give you the impression that your pet is actually alive. I felt genuine guilt every time I would spank my monkey...it must be the Catholic in me. All of this graphical acuity is complemented by stunning lighting and particle effects, and the little touches like fluttering butterflies and a full weather system all add to the sense that you're in a genuine, living world. Hell, the game will even log onto the Internet to check your local weather so you can play with your current conditions if you so wish. Now that's detail!

The sound design in Black & White is as finely crafted as the rest of the game. The music hangs in the background, where it should be, and never get repetitive, annoying, or overbearing. These are the tunes I would listen to if I were a god. The environmental sounds are apparent only when you get close to an animal, villager, or object. For example, zoom close to a stream and you'll hear it babbling, or scroll over a village and your followers will tell you what they need to be happy. Produce a storm and you'll hear the loud crash of thunder. Throw a fireball into the middle of a town and villagers will scream and cry in terror while engulfed in flames. The natural creature sounds are just as impressive and realistic sounding. Tigers growl, bears roar, and you'll hear a bevy of "eeps" and "oops" from monkeys. Sound cues will also give you an indication of how to complete some of the quests in the game. In one quest I had to find a shepherd's lost flock. I knew one of the sheep was on a nearby mountain, I just couldn't spot it by eye, so I scanned over the mountain at a tight zoom. Sure enough, I heard a bleat to the right. All I had to do was strafe over and there was my wooly little friend.

So there you have it...the single player game is un-freaking-believable. Unfortunately, the multiplayer side isn't nearly as in-depth as the single-player game, and it really feels tacked on to an otherwise brilliant single-player package. There's a pitiful assortment of three multiplayer maps in the game, and you can play those out in a good day of extended gaming. Also, because you can bring your single-player creature into the multiplayer fray, and since some creatures have matured further than others, it's often hard to find a balanced opponent of equal strength to play against. While it's kind of neat bringing your creature online to fight against others, cooperating as a cohesive clan, or wresting a rival village from a living God on the other side of the modem line, this is definitely not the focus of Black & White, and you'll find more enjoyment from the solo game than you will in multiplay.

With that said, the epic single player side of Black & White is wildly imaginative, elegant, charming, and a lot more action-packed than I thought it would be. Words like "ground-breaking" and "revolutionary" are sure to be attached to this title, and I can already state with confidence that Black & White is assured "classic" status in the annals of PC gaming. While micromanaging the shear number of things to do may be overwhelming for some players, Black & White is like stepping into a breathing, living world, and although it took a lot of patience for the release, the final creation was certainly worth the wait.

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Oral Presentation Advice

Oral Presentation Advice
Mark D. Hill

Computer Sciences Department
University of Wisconsin-Madison

April 1992; Revised January 1997

Things to Think About
A Generic Conference Talk Outline
Academic Interview Talks
Other Talks
How to Give a Bad Talk by David Patterson

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Things to Think About

Oral Communication is different from written communication
Listeners have one chance to hear your talk and can't "re-read" when they get confused. In many situations, they have or will hear several talks on the same day. Being clear is particularly important if the audience can't ask questions during the talk. There are two well-know ways to communicate your points effectively. The first is to K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid). Focus on getting one to three key points across. Think about how much you remember from a talk last week. Second, repeat key insights: tell them what you're going to tell them (Forecast), tell them, and tell them what you told them (Summary).

Think about your audience
Most audiences should be addressed in layers: some are experts in your sub-area, some are experts in the general area, and others know little or nothing. Who is most important to you? Can you still leave others with something? For example, pitch the body to experts, but make the forecast and summary accessible to all.

Think about your rhetorical goals
For conference talks, for example, I recommend two rhetorical goals: leave your audience with a clear picture of the gist of your contribution, and make them want to read your paper. Your presentation should not replace your paper, but rather whet the audience appetite for it. Thus, it is commonly useful to allude to information in the paper that can't be covered adequately in the presentation. Below I consider goals for academic interview talks and class presentations.

Practice in public
It is hard distilling work down to 20 or 30 minutes.

Prepare
See David Patterson's How to Give a Bad Talk

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A Generic Conference Talk Outline
This conference talk outline is a starting point, not a rigid template. Most good speakers average two minutes per slide (not counting title and outline slides), and thus use about a dozen slides for a twenty minute presentation.

Title/author/affiliation (1 slide)
Forecast (1 slide)
Give gist of problem attacked and insight found (What is the one idea you want people to leave with? This is the "abstract" of an oral presentation.)
Outline (1 slide)
Give talk structure. Some speakers prefer to put this at the bottom of their title slide. (Audiences like predictability.)
Background
Motivation and Problem Statement (1-2 slides)
(Why should anyone care? Most researchers overestimate how much the audience knows about the problem they are attacking.)
Related Work (0-1 slides)
Cover superficially or omit; refer people to your paper.
Methods (1 slide)
Cover quickly in short talks; refer people to your paper.
Results (4-6 slides)
Present key results and key insights. This is main body of the talk. Its internal structure varies greatly as a function of the researcher's contribution. (Do not superficially cover all results; cover key result well. Do not just present numbers; interpret them to give insights. Do not put up large tables of numbers.)
Summary (1 slide)
Future Work (0-1 slides)
Optionally give problems this research opens up.
Backup Slides (0-3 slides)
Optionally have a few slides ready (not counted in your talk total) to answer expected questions. (Likely question areas: ideas glossed over, shortcomings of methods or results, and future work.)
Academic Interview Talks
The rhetorical goal for any interview talk is very different than a conference talk. The goal of a conference talk is to get people interested in your paper and your work. The goal of an interview talk is to get a job, for which interest in your work is one part.

There are two key audiences for an academic interview talk, and you have to reach both. One is the people in your sub-area, who you must impress with the depth of your contribution. The other is the rest of the department, who you must get to understand your problem, why it is important, and a hand-wave at what you did. Both audiences will evaluate how well you speak as an approximation of how well you can teach.

An algorithm:

Take a 20-minute conference talk.
Expand the 5 minute introduction to 20 minutes to drive home the problem, why it's important, and the gist of what you've done.
Do the rest of the conference talk, minus the summary and future work.
Add 10 minutes of deeper stuff from your thesis (to show your depth). It is okay lose people outside of your sub-area (as long as you get them back in the next bullet).
Do the summary and future work from the conference talk in a manner accessible to all.
Add 10 ten minutes to survey all the other stuff you have done (to show your breadth).
Save 5 minutes for questions (to show that you are organized).
Other Talks
Other talks should be prepared using the same principles of considering audience and rhetorical purpose. A presentation on a project in a graduate class, for example, seeks to reach the professor first and fellow students second. Its purpose is to get a good grade by impressing people that a quality project was done. Thus, methods should be described in must more detail than for a conference talk.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Jim Goodman, Jim Larus, and David Patterson for their useful comments. The current on-line version of this document appears at URL "http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~markhill/conference-talk.html".

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How to Give a Bad Talk
David A. Patterson

Computer Science Division
University of California-Berkeley

Circa 1983

Ten commandments (with annotations gleaned from Patterson's talk by Mark D. Hill):

Thou shalt not be neat
Why waste research time preparing slides? Ignore spelling, grammar and legibility. Who cares what 50 people think?

Thou shalt not waste space
Transparencies are expensive. If you can save five slides in each of four talks per year, you save $7.00/year!

Thou shalt not covet brevity
Do you want to continue the stereotype that engineers can't write? Always use complete sentences, never just key words. If possible, use whole paragraphs and read every word.

Thou shalt cover thy naked slides
You need the suspense! Overlays are too flashy.

Thou shalt not write large
Be humble -- use a small font. Important people sit in front. Who cares about the riff-raff?

Thou shalt not use color
Flagrant use of color indicates uncareful research. It's also unfair to emphasize some words over others.

Thou shalt not illustrate
Confucius says ``A picture = 10K words,'' but Dijkstra says ``Pictures are for weak minds.'' Who are you going to believe? Wisdom from the ages or the person who first counted goto's?

Thou shalt not make eye contact
You should avert eyes to show respect. Blocking screen can also add mystery.

Thou shalt not skip slides in a long talk
You prepared the slides; people came for your whole talk; so just talk faster. Skip your summary and conclusions if necessary.

Thou shalt not practice
Why waste research time practicing a talk? It could take several hours out of your two years of research. How can you appear spontaneous if you practice? If you do practice, argue with any suggestions you get and make sure your talk is longer than the time you have to present it.

Commandment X is most important. Even if you break the other nine, this one can save you.

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Video Games

A computer game is a computer-controlled game that players may interact with. A video game is a computer game where a video display such as a monitor or television is the primary feedback device. These terms are not always interchangeable as some games, particularly older games, do not use a video display. Usually there are rules and goals, but in more open-ended games the player may be free to do whatever they like within the confines of the virtual universe.

The phrase interactive entertainment is the formal reference to computer and video games. To avoid ambiguity, this game software is referred to as "computer and video games" throughout this article, which explores things common to both types of game.

In common usage, "computer game" or "PC game" refers specifically to games played on a personal computer, "console game" refers to games played on specifically-designed set top box, that play through a TV and "video game" (or "videogame") refers to any game played on a device that plays through your TV but also includes PC, Console, Mobile Phone or PDA or other handheld device.
The popularity of computer and video games, as a whole, has been increasing steadily ever since the 1984-1987 drop-off caused by the video game crash of 1983, and the popularity appears to be continuing to increase. The average age of the video game player is now 30 [2], belying the myth that video games are largely a diversion for teenagers. Today there are many different devices, or platforms, on which games may be played. Personal computers, consoles, handheld systems, and arcade machines are all common. Games are not interchangeable between platforms so, for example, Xbox games will not work in your PC. The 3 main home video game platform companies are Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony, who between them have created seven of the eight home platforms most commonly used today. The final home platform is the PC.

Many games intended for PCs are now just as prevalent on consoles, with many developers creating versions for more than one platform. During the last generation of gaming, most major PC game releases have coincided with the release of console versions, and titles initially developed for a single platform are often ported to others if they prove to be successful.

Games, like most other forms of media, may be categorized into genres based on gameplay, atmosphere, and various other factors.

The most common genres in use today include platformer, adventure, role-playing game (RPG), first person shooter (FPS), third person shooter (both these are sometimes refered to as shoot-'em-ups), sports, racing, fighting, action (note that this term is abused often), puzzle, simulation, and real time strategy (RTS). Most games nowadays are a combination of two or more genres (e.g action/RPG).

The increase in the popularity of online gaming has also resulted in sub-genres being formed, such as massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).

Computer and video games have been the subject of frequent controversy and censorship, due to the depiction of graphic violence, sexual themes, advertising, consumption of illegal drugs, consumption of alcohol or tobacco, propaganda or profanity in some games. Among others, critics of video games sometimes include parents' groups, politicians, organized religion groups, and other special interest groups, even though all these can be found in all forms of entertainment and media.

Video game censorship is defined as the use of state or group power to control the playing, distribution, purchase, or sale of video games or computer games. Video game controversy comes in many forms, and censorship is a controversial subject, as well as a popular topic of debate. Proponents and opponents of censorship are often very passionate about their individual views.

Historically, this type of controversy and criticism is not unique to video games. The same situation has been applied to Comic books, music, and motion pictures. Moreover, it appears to be a question of age. Since these art forms have been around longer, the backlash against them occurred farther in the past, beyond the remembrance of today's youth. In both cases, the attempts at censorship in the United States were struck down as a violation of First Amendment rights, and they have gone on to become fully integrated facets of society.

Computer and videogames differ from other forms of entertainment in that the person experiencing them is in control, one way or another. In order to experience the game, the player must first determine the objective(s), as well as how to complete them. S/he must then learn the game controls and how the human-machine interface works, including menus and HUDs. An experienced player will be able to do all this in a very short period of time upon first discovering a new game- such quick learning skills can easily be transferred to other areas of mental application.

To win at a game, the player may devote his/her entire attention to it, and utilise newly-learnt skills or tactics. It could be said that when players stare at a screen with a blank expression, it isn't one of hopeless mesmerization, but one of intense concentration.

More obvious benefits to the player is education on the game's subject matter. For example an RTS game set in the past may require use of ancient armies or outwitting a famous world leader of the time.

Games which encourage strategic thinking have well-honed rule sets that the player needs to thoroughly grasp. A well-designed game will be easy to pick up but difficult to master, like chess. Development of techniques are tested against an advanced computer player or online against other human players.

Extracts from Wikipedia

To see full article:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game

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