You recall how I rented Fable II yesterday? Well, I’ve just finished it. Yeah. It took me about two days to complete the storyline. Sure, I’m still going to be able to go around the world, doing side quests and killing monsters/bandits/peasants, but that’s going to get boring by the end of the week.

Which brings me to the question of why anyone would ever pay full price for this game. It can be finished in two days. Yes, it has replayability, with three different endings, but that’s only going to take you a couple of weeks of casual play to do. And after that, what is there left to do? Murder. And after that gets boring? Well, there’s not a lot. So, for $120, you get about 4 weeks of gaming before the game gets boring.

Why are games so short these days? I finished the Campaign of Halo 3 within a two days of getting it. Sure, that has multiplayer and the campaign has a fair amount of replayability in it, so I’m not concerned about how much I spent on buying it, but it’s still very short. The same goes for nearly every other game I find myself playing. When I’m  paying a ridiculous amount of money for a very short game, I begin to feel shortchanged.

A lot of game developers justify their short single player games by saying the Multiplayer makes up for it. Well, not everyone can play online. Some people (or countries) have such crappy internet that they are just large, laggy bullet magnets whenever they try to play online. No, I’m not bitter, why do you ask?

This is the reason I love games like Oblivion and the Total War series so much. I’ve yet to become bored with any of those games, because they’re huge, expansive, engaging and fun over a long period of time. More games need to be like these. Take note, developers who I’m sure read this blog. Ahem.

And also, the Bunnybeating is back up. Enjoy it.

Happy holidays – you can drag the shapes around to make your own!

http://www.danzen.com/snowflake

Dan Zen

Cool – just reached 10,000 views…

~08~

Came back from one of my finals kinda angry. I worked it off with the short visual novel Cimsoness.

Protip: Don’t go to the gym first.

Agency Zen has launched its second facebook application.  Stick Aliens lets you use the Oracle to determine your alien tendencies.  To use the Oracle just drag the eye or any of its icons around and then the Oracle will provide a Stick Alien vision on your profile page.

Stick Aliens on facebook: http://apps.facebook.com/stickaliens/

The plan is also to launch Stick Aliens through Open Social and one day enhance the feature to solve mystical puzzles based on which aliens your friends have.  Enjoy!

Group Games is a new concept that in a sense hacks the facebook groups to create games where the leaders are those with the most group members or pictures or wall posts of a certain type, etc. Here is a link to the Group Game group on facebook. Note, that anybody can make a group game and it does not require coding. If you are interested, please consider adding it to the group game page and be part of the collective.

Nano Race! Is the first group game where you join one of the groups that are working towards being shrunk to nano size to gain great speed, strength and riches. How exactly that works is up to the players to role play. The group with the most explorers is winning the race!

The game hearkens back to early Dan Zen social networking games of Blimp Race and Shrink Ray. Please see the post on Social Networking, Social Media and Social Gaming.

The groups are pictured below but do not link through to the game. It is best if you join the overall game group for nano race by clicking the Join Group link at right. Then pick one of the groups by clicking the link to the group and then JOINING the colony group. Then invite friends and write on walls to role play the game.

1. Join the nano race group
2. Join the colony group of your choice
3. Invite friends to join your colony group
4. Write on the walls to role play the game

Have fun!

Pccchooooooo! What speed! What Serenity! The two do not usually go together but then again it is not every day that you get to fly a jet pack through peaceful puffy clouds.

There are a million clouds on which you can sit and look up or down, drink tea, read a book and of course think deep thoughts.

But like anything, there are environmental concerns. Will the clouds last forever? How do we fill our jet pack? A bit of a twisted take on non-renewable resources. We will let you discover the answer if you have not already.

Thanks go to Steve Mazza whose jet men on clouds was overwhelmingly inspirational! As soon as I got home from his exhibit (see the picture below), I had to seek therapy in constructing this feature in time for the upcoming Iron Man boom and of course building on our fascination from early James Bond, Rocket Robin Hood, etc.

Steve Mazza work from Future Tense show at Transit Gallery, Hamilton Canada

-08-

Jason Evangelinos has won the Chat Nap challenge at http://www.chatnap.com. He had 53 wins narrowly beating out the second place player who was at 49! Jason, pictured here on his motorcycle with the iPod 2 gig Nano prize, is a master of speed and response!

Chat Nap is the new game from inventor Dan Zen where you try and catch your friends away from their instant messenger when they say they are there! There are over 500 players in the first few months ~ keep spreading the word!

Be the first person to reach 50 wins and win an iPod 2G Nano!
Chat Nap is the game where you try and catch your friends away from their instant messenger!

Chat Nap Contest Rules:

1. To play, click START at Chat Nap: http://www.chatnap.com – current players and their wins are eligible.

2. A win shows up on your Chat Nap SCORES page as a Win (W).

3. For this contest there is a maximum of 5 wins per day. Any wins over 5 per day will not be counted for the contest but note that they will still show up in your Chat Nap SCORES page.

4. You must win against at least 3 different players.

5. E-mail garden@danzen.com with the subject "Chat Nap Contest" once you think you have won and include your mailing address and if you want a black or white iPod.

6. Once verified, the winner will be announced and will receive an iPod 2G Nano delivered from Amazon.

Chat Nap Rules:

1. Players sign up through the START link
2. To challenge another player click CHALLENGE
3. Message the resulting link to the other player
4. If they click the link in time they score
5. If they do not click the link in time you score
6. View player scores through the SCORES link
7. subscribe to the rss 2.0 feed to watch scores

DISPUTES
No score is given until a player clicks a link
If a link is not clicked in 12 hours it is disputed
This catches requesting a link and not messaging it
This also catches receiving a link and not clicking it
Players can dispute the time of the link
This catches a delay in messaging the link
Disputed scores are marked as a tie on both players
Disputed scores are not desirable

Chatnap is the Instant Messenger chat game where you challenge friends who have left their instant messenger on but are gone!

http://www.chatnap.com

You use Chatnap to create a URL that you paste into a friend’s instant messenger window. If the friend clicks the URL within five minutes they win a point and you lose a point. If they do not click within five minutes then they have been caught chat napping and they lose a point and you win a point.

Sign in under START then under CHALLENGE you can create a friends list and challenge your friends. Under SCORE you can see your score and your friends’ scores. Even sign up for an RSS feed to keep track of whenever they score or lose a point.

Have fun!

WannaGet is the collecting game for a collection of collectors . And it is designed specifically for content creators – like site owners and Bloggers – to offer their viewers something fun.

You can collect items in a number of topics (like Harry Potter, Narnia, James Bond) and as more providers create sites, there will be more items to collect. You get points for collecting – click to read the rules and play!

Zen Motto is an attempt to pierce the physical world. One of the most viewed yet empty spaces in our society is the border around the computer monitor. Zen Motto is set up so that you can print a motivational motto and tape it on your monitor.

You can use an existing motto or submit your own. The mottos are two words which often leads to multiple interpretations in a Zen sense. Almost 3% of the views have led to a printing. Perhaps you should try it!

Zen Motto also showcases the Flash grid component for sortable tabular data. It makes use of a full e-mail publishing system where people’s mottos are submitted, an e-mail is sent to the editor who can accept, modify or decline at which point the motto is processed and may show up on the site.

The most addictive game on earth – well, for some people. Password Paradox lets you guess people’s passwords as you attempt to gain access to a secret worth a Billion Dollars!

Hundreds of players have guessed the 21 passwords and entered the Billionaire’s Den – some arriving there dozens of times.

The game is self modifying – the passwords are different each time a new Billionaire succeeds. See if you can surmise how it is done.

Prediction Train lets you make predictions in different categories and vote on whether you think other predictions will come true. You can track when votes were made as the predicted date approaches. This potentially would give an indication of the social climate.

Some interesting things have occurred – Dan Zen predicted Bill Gates would step down as head of Microsoft and in a sense he did.

The game is self-modifying in that viewers can vote to remove certain predictions.

Salamander was first played as an offline game where a number of Dan Zen’s 80 hats and various accessories were dispersed around the house. Under each was a clue and party goers went around trying to match their clues to player’s disguises.

The online game works well because it just keeps going. As soon as the Salamander is caught, he slips away and the park builds again. The Salamander has been caught 230 times with over 11,000 players.

The online game also provides for light role playing and multiuser feel.

Strategies are available to catch the Salamander – two hints: watch the dots and sit on the stones.

YesUmNo is a voting game where you click on the logo to vote yes, um or no. Polls or voting is one of the most basic forms of communication.

Many find the collapsing menu to be odd and the interface is a little exploratory. But it can be played – just type in a question and then everyone takes turns clicking their opinion and finally hit the equals sign to tally the votes.

This game harkens to board games played with family or friends. To accommodate multiple players around the computer, multiple mouses are envisioned. The mouses plug into a hub which then goes to the regular mouse port. The person moving the mouse has control until the mouse is stationary and then the next person to move gets control.

The hub would of course take the form of Swiss Cheese with the holes being where the cords plug in. Mind you, infrared would probably make more sense.

An off-line version of YesUmNo has been made with three pouches in an apron. Beads, buttons or pennies are used as the voting chips at a party. This version is depicted by the Kirputnik Cam

Web Ouija makes use of an interesting property in Shockwave – the Macromedia Director plugin. That is, the mouse can be tracked even when not over the application. So it can be tracked around the rest of the Browser window and even on the desktop. For instance, you can hover over your garbage can and Web Ouija will always give you the same message.

People can make their own lists of links and put Web Ouija on their page somewhere and their visitors will be able to roll over the links and have the Web Ouija profess its wisdom.

The wisdom is of course provided for by the Webmaster but the answer is provided by the mysterious forces of randomness.

The Tower of Babel is an embodiment of the idea that ideas can come from unusual combinations of words. A story, metaphor or reason was created as to when one might come across these words.

The result was that people would whisper words that have never been said and the words are captured by the wind and taken to the tower of babel.

The feature is self modifying as you can vote on which words you like and which ones you do not like. The words people vote for most rise to the top and the others sink into the ground and are no longer shown. Over ten thousand words have been whispered into the tower.

Utopia was created based on the combination, “Sasquatch Seeds”, found in the Tower of Babel.

Teaching at Sheridan, Dan Zen uses the power of combinations in creative exercises and has also made an offline game called STRETCH that plays with this concept.

The first online interactive crossword was created by Dan Zen and a license sold to Websters (for a CD ROM) for $14,000.

At the time, the limit to the number of layers in Director was forty, yet, there were hundreds of squares that needed to be controlled. Dan Zen applied a unique way of tiling or stamping the squares by discretely moving one single layer and setting the trace function to leave a trail. The crossword could read in external text files and dynamically adjust to display the clues, the numbers, and the tiles. Hints and solutions were provided. As you moved around the crossword the appropriate clue would be highlighted and conversely, as you clicked a clue the crossword would highlight.

Dan Zen attended the Macromedia Conference (dressed in Guru robes with name card hanging on a flower lei) in San Francisco when Shockwave was first publicly demonstrated. Right after, Word Warp, was put online. Word Warp is a tile dragging anagram game. This was perhaps the first online content to make use of dragging. This was well before JavaScript and even animated gifs were relatively new.