The Problem With the Trophy System on the PS3

Posted on January 15, 2010 by John Pencola

I’m a big fan of the PS3, but it’s not without its “flaws”. Two of which irk me relate to how Trophies are perceived and awarded.

The first is that you cannot delete trophy information from your PSN account. This means that even if you put a fresh new hard-drive in your PS3, as soon as you sync back up to the network on your account, all that trophy data will be re-inserted. The only workaround I know of, which sucks, is to create a new account. So, why would anyone in their right mind want to delete those precious trophies? I’ll get to that after I explain irk número dos.

The second thing that fundamentally bothers me, is that game completeness is based off of collecting all the trophies for that particular game. Which would be fine if trophies were 1-1 with every completable action within the game, but they aren’t. The game developers dictate what is worthy of a trophy (and type of trophy) but there are usually lots of other additional completion points within the game that do not award trophies. IMHO those should all count towards the 0-100% value of completing a game.

The reason why issue #1 is related to issue #2 is because trophy collecting is competitive and goal oriented. Its just half-baked though. For it to really work, beyond just “Compare Trophies”, then there are some more rules that need to be implemented. Take for example when a friend drops by to play a new game with you; the first thing I want to be prompted with is a confirmation to enable/disable stats from being gathered and analyzed for that game on my account. I don’t want my stats (Gamer Score and Trophy collection) to be updated because I may never play that game again but its permanently on my “record” with an irrelevant trophy score.

Why does this matter? Because if you really want to make trophy collecting an incentive to the player then they have to feel that the trophies really matter. Platinum trophies should only really be granted if the game has been completely beaten. Right now it appears that is the case, but there are plenty of other in-game easter-eggs and tasks that never count towards those platinum trophies. I think they should.

Ideas? Well, maybe adding a new “tier” above the current trophy system would be enough. Sort of like, I completed tier #1 which is all the game developer trophies, but I also completed tier #2 which is every possible bonus that the game had to offer. Or maybe making the trophy types be those tiers, where platinum trophies equate to actually totally exhausting all a game has to offer. Make the Gamer Score count towards more tangible benefits beyond bragging rights and make it harder to level-up by adding a more sophisticated reward system. That would be cool. Thoughts?

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How To: Communicate Over Serial With Flash and Arduino

Posted on January 10, 2010 by John Pencola

Hi there! Back from the holidays with an update on getting started with Arduino and serial communication. In this case communication with the Adobe Flash player. For all the details please watch both Flash videos linked below. You can refer back to this post with the links for the dependencies below as well. Also, there is serial debugging built into the Arduino IDE – as a separate project I will look at how to integrate that into the process, for now the external monitor ( serproxy ) is what I used. Enjoy!

The Environment:

Environment: Mac OS X Snow Leopard ( 10.6.2 )
Arduino: Arduino Duemilanove 328
Flash: CS4, ActionScript 3, Debug Player 10.0.42.34
Arduino IDE: 0017
FTDI Drivers: 2.2.14
AS3 Glue: v2_beta2
Firmata: Firmata-2.1 beta7
Serial Proxy: SerProxy-0.1.3

The Dependencies:

Serial Proxy Config:

# Config file for serproxy
# See serproxy's README file for documentation

# Transform newlines coming from the serial port into nils
# true (e.g. if using Flash) or false
newlines_to_nils=true

# Serial Devices on each port
serial_device1=/dev/cu.usbserial-A9007Vp3

# Comm ports used
comm_ports=1,2,3,4

# Default settings
comm_baud=57600
comm_databits=8
comm_stopbits=1
comm_parity=none

# Idle time out in seconds
timeout=300

# Port 1 settings (ttyS0)
net_port1=5331

# Port 2 settings (ttyS1)
net_port2=5332

# Port 3 settings (ttyS2)
net_port3=5333

# Port 4 settings (ttyS3)
net_port4=5334

The Example:

* Make sure to change the publish settings in the demo Flash file to point to your classpath of where you extract/download the AS3 Glue library.
Compressed Flash CS4 example (download and unzip)

The Screen-Casts:

* Apologies for the rushed ending of the 2nd part of the walkthroughs… I had to wrap up before the 5 minute time limit on the trial version and didn’t want to push it to a 3 part series!

Part 1: ( Dependencies & Setup )
Watch It
Part 2: ( Configuration & Demo )
Watch It

Posted in ActionScript 3, Arduino, How-To | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Dynamically Controlling Mature Content In Video Games

Posted on December 24, 2009 by John Pencola

Throughout my time as a gamer I have welcomed the presence of “adult-oriented” content in video games. I like my “Mature” rated games and all the ingredients that come with them – profanity, excessive violence, etc, etc. But, as I’ve become a father I started to think about sharing the gaming experience with my son and how that would all play out with what I consider to be epic-must-play games and the content they depict. It led me to think about how the mature content ( and subsequently the rating ) on games vs. the configuration I have as the player to finely tweak them have become less inter-twined. For example, although I still see some games where you can toggle “gore”… in the good ol’ days I remember that setting to be much more configurable.
Ie:

  • - No blood
  • . Some blood
  • . Lots o’ blood
  • . Heads explode
  • + Alien blood

On that note, what if I see fit as a parent to allow my child to play & or watch me play “Kill Zone 2″… but in order for it to pass my parental guidelines the only thing I’m concerned about blocking is the excessive profanity in that game. How can I do that? Currently I don’t know of a way ( short of muting the audio ). What I’m proposing is that the video game companies ( or maybe even digital media companies as a whole? ) standardize a way in which, at least, profanity can be completely toggled. Ultimately it would be great if the platform could control that setting globally via the parental controls, but I imagine that would be a much larger change architecturally on both sides. Maybe subtitles and caption information could be “tagged” to various levels of profanity, cut-scenes that contained mature content could as well and then the ESRB would be describing what the highest level of those configurations would allow in the game, but not what it could be throttled back to. Granted some games are doing this — but not at the level in which I am suggesting and obviously there are limitations and it would potentially require more work. But, I think starting with profanity toggling may reveal more avenues of what could be possible.

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