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Kevin Cornell has been working on a graphic novel adapatation of "The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button".
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Hell yes.
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"I am a fan of Ruby, and when I saw Red the framework that allows you to write Ruby and get JavaScript out the other end I was excited." By contrast, when I saw this, I wanted to punch somebody. Seriously guys, don't cross the streams.
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"Michael Abrash's classic Graphics Programming Black Book is a compilation of Michael's writings on assembly language and graphics programming (including from his "Graphics Programming" column in Dr. Dobb's Journal)."
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"Every inch of Braid is a painting; every game dynamic makes music. Unlike most platformers, Braid is forgiving; when you miss a jump, you simply back up time, and the visuals and audio cues associated with this mechanic are pleasing of themselves, aesthetically, while also supporting the underlying fiction." Harvey Smith on Braid.
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Some really nice code to make decent sliders in jQuery without compromising the underlying HTML.
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"That’s almost an entire day spent fighting one boss. And they still didn’t beat him. I feel physically ill just thinking about it. How did anyone ever think that’s good game design?" Scary.
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"You read a lot (in incandescent threads devoted to the topic) about how ten dollars is the "sweet spot" for Live Arcade titles, and that may be the case, but we should entertain the idea that its creator wasn't trying to make an "Xbox Live Arcade Game." Perhaps he was trying to make a good game, the best game he could, and Microsoft's Broadening Initiative For Digital Content was the last thing on his mind." Tycho is pretty much right; the whole Braid-pricing issue isn't just a non-issue, it's maddeningly stupid, and people – including Microsoft – need to get over it.
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"Narrative, like play, is one of the most basic tools we posses as human beings for coping with experience. And just as play can be fundamentally empowering, there is something distinctly empowering about using the tools of narrative to throw a net of meaning over our lives."
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"The idea of there being these two separate things has to be forced away from our thinking. They are one team, which produce one product. Stick their desks together and see what happens." Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
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"The Tombs of Asciiroth is a free, open source game you can play right now in your browser. It has arcade, puzzle and exploration-style game play in an extensive world of font-based abstraction. If it looks a little old school, it's only because I've been trying to make this game since 1980. But other things kept getting in the way. Hope you have some fun with it."
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Leigh Alexander publishes some conversations about Braid, and opens up the floor. Some good discussion here.
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"an alternative way to represent time schedule tracking by stacking different lengths of Lego blocks as a way to convey different sequential time periods. stacking hourly rows on top of each other builds up the whole day, while color represents the different projects at hand. a whole week of time tracking is created by setting up a series of rainbow-colored days." Awesome.
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"MadWorld will "spoil the family fun image" of the console, according to Mediawatch-UK, a British organisation hat campaigns for decency in television, games and films… "It seems a shame that the game's manufacturer have decided to exclusively release this game on the Wii," said Beyer. "I believe it will spoil the family fun image of the Wii."" And this has *what*, precisely, to do with banning the game? The fact it differs from other titles on the machine? Once again, pressure-groups jump the shark.
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Looks nice.
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"the comic books that are mature and have adult themes and are about emotional issues and are really powerful, those are underground? Those are the ones that should be the most mainstream because they apply to all people… I feel comics is a medium that hasn't found its whole potential because it got locked into a limited corner of popular culture. Games could be teetering on the edge of that." This is exactly the kind of thing I'm scared of right now.
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"Finally Taking Over The World is interactive fiction programmed in brainfuck. It is completely written by hand without the use of any compiler or the like." IF written in brainfuck. Blimey.
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"Kars does a lot of prototyping, which he explains in some detail. He also said some pretty interesting, and uncoventional, things about the relationship between design and understanding of, and involvement in, the technologies of implementation."
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"Despite all this growth, however, Deering warns that current development costs, currently in excess of $10 million for major titles, are unsustainable, given that less than 3 out of 10 games actually recover their costs." I knew it was bad, but I'd never thought of it like that.
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"Chatroom is a short game designed to simulate an IRC chatroom… The story is set in the year 2097, where your character is holed in an underground military bunker with only a working computer to use as means of contact with the outside world."
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"[Titanic] was one of the worst experiences of my former life. Since I stepped into the shadows of the Hell House, things had been pretty easy. Then I found Chrono Trigger." Not the SNES RPG; no, a Chinese-knock-off NES version. Full of horrific brokenness, Derrick plays through it for us. It feels like pulling teeth.
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"Titanic 1912, the RPG, made me cry blood, pluck my arm hairs, contemplate suicide and mumble incoherently in my cubicle as I held the fast-forward key." Chinese NES RPG based on Titanic. Great writeup; awful game.
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"We’ve forgotten that our ability to engage with something is a gift inherent to human perception, and instead we’ve attempted to replace that form of engagement with a derivative technological form of interaction."
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"This [plugin] is called Craken. In a nutshell it manages and installs rake-centric cron jobs. Coupled with Capistrano goodness it is the answer to your recurring task needs in Rails."
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Wizwow makes a light-meter out of a length of string, which helps to learn how to estimate the power output of your small flash.
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Race For The Galaxy gets reviewed on Play This Thing. This is probably next on my list of boardgames to get.
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"Diaroogle helps you find quality public toilets from your mobile phone. It's for the discerning, on-the-go defecator who is brave enough to use a public bathroom, but still demands a hygienic and private bathroom experience. It is also a community authored database of New York toilets."
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Matthew Kumar writing up Damián Isla's session from Develop, on the evolution of Halo's AI. It was excellent: technical and experiential enough all at once.
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"Nintendo's staked its empire on the joys of mere motion a few times already, and won. Now, it's funny to remember how we doubted that this was a winning proposition." Pliskin on games-out-of-worlds versus worlds-out-of-play.
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"if the player identifies with the protagonist and is motivated by the desire for the protagonist to "win" or "succeed", how can satisfying interactive tragedy exist? Won't the player always be trying to avoid actions that propel the story to an unhappy conclusion? What can an interactive tragedy offer to the player in place of traditional metrics of success?" Emily Short on making tragedy playable.
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"Rmagick. It sucks, I know. We all hate it. But you have apps that depend on it and haven't changed that yet. So you need it installed for development. And you hate installing it." But, of course, there's a shortcut. It is linked here.
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Pliskin on WarioWare as a pinnacle of "pure gaming" – stripping away gameplay and interaction to the rawer level of "what are the rules"?
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Lovely little linkpost from Music Thing about the drum machine with the big boom.
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How had I never seen this before? Beautiful little puzzle game: find the star in the level. Each level has a different mechanic. Each makes me smile.
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Lovely little machinima about what happens when RED and BLU go out of business, and their somewhat psychotic employees have to go and get real jobs. "I am serious actor!"
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"Fuelly is a site that lets you track, share, and compare your gas mileage. Simply sign up, add a car, and begin tracking your mileage." Looks interesting.
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"Trance has brainwashed people into thinking it has the best DJs in the world". Entertaining Jack Chick parody. Stop DJ worship now!
Stories built around core mechanics
07 August 2008
or: “what games story can learn from Stephen Moffat”
So Braid finally came out. I was in shock when I saw the release date; wonderful as it was, I was never sure I was going to get a chance to play it. I shouldn’t have worried. It’s out, I’ve got it, and so far, it’s been very, very special.
And it’s had me thinking, because with all the coverage of Braid in the past few weeks – not to mention Jonathan Blow’s excellent keynote at Games:EDU last week – I’ve been thinking about games, and stories, and narrative, and writing (which is a special interest of mine if only because it’s one of the few things I know about that I actually studied). To understand what stories that can only be told in games look like, you need to know what stories that can only be told in other mediums look like. And that was when I realised I had some really good, mainstream examples to hand, and that I should explain this on the internet.
Now, to do that, I’m going to have to talk about Doctor Who.
Stephen Moffat wrote easily the best episode of new Who, Blink (from Season 3), and probably the best episodes of the most recent season – Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead.
His episodes have received critical praise (ie: praise from adults); at the same time, they haven’t deviated from the core premise of the show: exciting sci-fi adventure aimed at the family market, which is basically 8-12-year-olds. This is a good thing. I’m very much with Mark Kermode when he points out that there’s far too much of an onus right now for entertainment targeting children to have “something for adults too”. If it’s good, it should appeal to everybody.
Stephen Moffat’s episodes are classic family entertainment; at the same time, they demonstrate very clearly that he understands the medium he’s working in – TV – explicitly, and he’s capable of writing stories that can only be told in TV and film.
Moffat’s episodes are designed around mechanics of fear. Specifically, the very things that most children are afraid of, or have been afraid of at some point in their life.
Blink is about creepy statues (which turn out to be aliens) that only move when you’re not looking at them. It taps into a fear of the uncanny, the ancient, and the inexplicable.
Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead are about many things, but at the core of them is the primal fear of the dark. In it, shadows turn out not to be an effect of light, but creatures – the Vashta Nerada, vast clouds of tiny creatures that eat people.
Who hasn’t been afraid of the dark?
Both are great plot devices. Neither requires much in the way of complex effects. But the most important thing about them – certainly in terms of this article – is that they are plot devices that are entirely native to television and film.
Blink is an entire drama made possible by the fact that whilst TV is a linear medium, the audience understands editing. Editing as an artform has evolved over time; it was developed after the initial invention of film, and it was only a reasonable period after film’s creation that it was understood not only as a technique, but also as an art in its own right. (For a great example, look at the first five minutes of Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now – a very important sequence in that film, where it’s important that the editing shows how the characters are perceiving events as much as how they’re happening).
Anyhow, Blink and editing. The audience understands (even implicitly) that the statues aren’t moving in a blink of our eye; they’re moving in a blink of the characters’ eyes. This means they move in that simplest of scary-movie techniques, the jump-cut.
Because this jump-cut takes us by surprise, the creatures scare us like they scare the characters – even if we know that they’re not really moving when we don’t look. This particular kind of delivery of shocks isn’t possible (or at least as effective) in, eg, written fiction, because there is no possibility for edits, for jumpcuts. Prose flows in a linear manner forward, and whilst the writing may contain careful pacing, the act of reading is paced fairly consistantly.
The two-part story in Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead is a drama all about light and dark. The Vashta Nerada, as mentioned, are clouds of creatures that look exactly like shadows – and are, of course, represented as shadows on screen. There are a few important effects shots where characters are seen to have multiple shadows, but most of the time, there’s no need for trickery.
All the “magic” is in set and lighting design, and script: dark corners, nooks and crannies, and the characters telling us they’re afraid of the dark. When the Doctor says “stay out of the shadows,” he reminds the audience that they too were afraid of the dark once. And, of course, as a child, when you say you’re afraid of the dark, an adult tells you there’s nothing there. The Doctor has told us to be afraid of the dark because the dark really is a monster. He’s contradicted our parents and made us even more afraid. It’s terrifying.
We need to find stories that we can only tell in games. We need to find play mechanics that tell us things about the world.
Both of these stories are natively filmic: a story that can only be told when you understand editing; a story built around the visual representation of light. These are, of course, not the only things the story is about – far from it; their richness and brilliance is the real reason Moffat has been so admired. But it’s important to appreciate that these two storylines stem from an individual technique or aesthetic that’s uniquely represented by the medium (TV/film).
Or, to put it more simply (and I think more effectively):
something everyone is afraid of when they’re eight + a plot device that can be satisfactorily represented on television/film without being too expensive or convoluted.
So what has this got to do with games?
The notion of telling stories appropriate to a medium is one response to what Braid developer Jonathan Blow is getting at in his Games:EDU keynote. Rather than resolving the conflict between ludic and narrative elements by wrapping gameplay around the story, why not write stories that can only be told through gameplay?
Braid is a game about trying to reverse the past; its time-control mechanic is an important commentary on the central character’s predicament. Moffat’s Blink would make a poor videogame, simply because it’s unfair; the Weeping Angels essentially have a cheatcode to the world, and their movement patterns wouldn’t make for fun.
But a game built around shadows – genuine light and dark area – as a foe might work. It’s very gamelike – and it’s that that set me thinking on this whole endeavour. We have spent so much money on lighting technologies and graphics cards and we can now make beautiful light and dark – both realistic and expressive. Why can’t that be a game – or at least, the starting point for a game – in its own right? Just because at the moment it just a neat visual effect doesn’t mean we can’t put it front and centre. This is something that, for a while, James Cameron did very effectively. The Terminator, T2, The Abyss, even Titanic; these are all movies that require sophisticated visual effects to tell a key part of the story – the T-800, the T-1000, the underwater creature, the ship; without convincing, cutting edge effects technology, these movies fall apart. But Cameron is interested primarily in his characters: once he has his core, visual-effect oriented premise in place, he turns his camera to the characters. He wants to tell human stories; he just happens to have found stories about that need remarkable visual effects to play out.
We need to find stories that we can only tell in games. We need to find play mechanics that tell us things about the world. And if we’re stuck for inspiration, it’s worth considering how other mediums have approached this issue. Above, there are a few examples; there are many more, when it comes to literature, and film, and radio drama, and theatre (and especially those last two). But when it comes to games, there aren’t enough.
We need to start considering what they might look like. Stories about shadows and lighting. Stories about physical worlds told through physics engines. Stories about direct control, or the lack of it.
Some of these exist; more need to. That’s the challenge facing games right now. If you’re looking for an example, download Braid and savour it. It really does succeed at the things Blow hints at. It tells a story you need to experience, and you need to experience the mechanic at the core of it to appreciate the game’s message. It’s remarkable.
Back from Develop
01 August 2008
So that was Develop.
To put it in a nutshell – or at least, what I remember that can be bounded by a nutshell:
strong ideas, building bands, Kirks and Picards, theatre, cultural studies, mise en scène, horror through constraint, good individuals versus great teams, cultural studies, importing the wrong ideas about movies, rather good chocolate cakes, putting many names to faces, impromptu One Life Left appearance, listening to children, being a good teacher, nuArgs, still needing to play Chain Factor, developers’ main hatred of Flash being its lack of IDE (and static typing), all games are alternate realities, feelies, importance of good user-testing, importance of realistic user-testing, input-behaviour-control, cybernetics as model for AI, de-emphasising behaviour in favour of farming out to concepts, fish and chips in a Hove park, sea air, 2K Boston’s virgin-hiring practices, Kotaku-headline meme, lists of fantasy movies, The Final Countdown on four-player Band Brothers DX, raspberry coffee.
As for my talk, it seemed to go pretty well and people were positive. I’ll try to get it up within the week. I’ve also got some notes from a few sessions I’d like to write up, because my web and design readers might enjoy them. Doing that might make sense of some of those notes.
Thanks to everybody who made it so memorable: it was a pleasure to meet you all.
A Game Is…
31 July 2008
Lots of brain-food and notes to come from Develop, but in the meantime, this cracker from Matt Southern’s session:
“a game is an exercise of voluntary control systems in which there is an opposition between forces, confined by a procedure and rules in order to produce a disequilbrial outcome“
(Elliott Avedon and Brian Sutton Smith; emphasis mine.)