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"Robert Downey Jr really sells the idea of being a design engineer. To be fair, the Iron Man script does him the great service of having him have to build himself a new heart in a cave in Afghanistan, thus having to make imperfect things and fettle them to fit. That feeling gets slightly lost later in his super-engineer pad where apparently nothing needs filing when it comes back from the rapid prototyping machine. But he still manages to exude a kind of mad joy at making things, a fundamental character trait in the way that having nice breasts is not." Sophie on the emotional truths of storytelling.
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"I'm not going to lie to you; fugitive.vim may very well be the best Git wrapper of all time."
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"These are clearly black market frankenproducts – made from a combination of surplus mobile phone components and car alarm key rings. I wonder how much they actually cost to manufacture. I wonder if the bits are stolen." Ben Bashford on the magic of Shanzai. And, of course, when a video camera is eight pounds, it's no longer precious, and you start doing weird things with it: Youtube is full of examples.
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"Curveship is an interactive fiction system that provides a world model (of characters, objects, locations, and things that happen) while also modeling the narrative discourse, so that the narration and description of the simulated world can change. Curveship can tell events out of order, using flashback and other techniques, and can tell the story from the standpoint of particular characters and their perceptions and understandings." This looks both bonkers and brilliant.
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"Data combined with narrative creates personality. It can be used to construct a larger and richer history around a subject.
The world is already divided in to two camps: People who are going to watch the Super Ball and those who aren't. This is an opportunity to delight the former and reach the latter, by providing a larger and more playful cast of characters to describe the events during the game." Nice!
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"The nature of an interactive medium should be the feedback loop between the player and the game; to not explore (or, at least, consider) the expression space of this cycle seems to be a missed opportunity." Trent raises some good points about the relationship between narratives and the systems that tell them.
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"Books become clouds, raining events and built forms onto the city." This is marvellous
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Simon Reynolds' list of records from 2010. It is long and deserves returning to, which, at some point, I shall.
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"…in the end, adulthood isn't a single decision you make, but a long series of decisions you make every day for the rest of your life. And the best reason to grow up isn't because it is expected or required, but because it means moving forwards. Because while it may also involve incredibly tedious things like mortgages and car payments, growing up is a natural function of seeking a life that is more dynamic than static, of choosing ambition and hope over avoidance and fear, of wanting to know who you're going to be and not just who you were, even if that takes you away from the things you used to love." A lovely reading of Scott Pilgrim #6.
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"Too many times proponents of interactive fiction talk as if it’s a new thing, as if interactivity were never part of the reading experience. How many of us has written in the margin of a book, turned down a corner of a page or smoothed the book back at a particular passage, felt our attention wander as we gaze out the window? We each interpret a story in different ways; it’s how we can re-read a book without getting bored, or watch the same film twice." This is cracking stuff from Kat; I am glad she's written it down.
Narrative Exoskeletons (or, “why I like Game Dev Story”)
04 November 2010
There was a reason I wrote a piece of fanfiction based on a game that boils down to a spreadsheet.
Game Dev Story is interesting, for me, because, when you take it apart: there’s almost no Story within the game. It’s just a mechanical engine for simulating a games company (and not even that sophisticated an engine). People work; numbers go up; games either sell or don’t, with sales figures rarely correlating to review scores.
But where’s the story?
There’s a loose theme, sure, with a defined arc: start small, grow into a bigger company by selling more games. There’s almost no writing; what there is is weakly translated, rammed into a line or two of the lazy port. There’s a lot of Devving of Games, but, in the code that executes, there’s relatively little Story to speak of. Just numbers, going up, or down.
Every now and then, the game asks you to type something in: the name of your company, the name of a game. And that’s where the magic begins.
In that little flight of creativity, the game opens up: the player starts writing their own story. The player isn’t just typing names into boxes. They’re saying the words aloud in your head – and that conjures images of box-art, screengrabs, scathing magazine reviews; cardboard standees packed full of buggy, terrible, detective puzzle games, waiting to be flogged.
Sometimes, the companies we invent ring true. Gnarly Games, though named as a pastiche of Visceral, turned out to become a strange mix of From Software and Konami, through their constant return to dour mecha-games and campy vampire nonsense. Their greatest success was, essentially, a Castlevania MMO. Or rather: that’s what I saw in my head. A goofy name, combined with two drop-down fields defining the type of game, led to a moment of wishful, what-if? thinking.
Sometimes, we just give things rude names for the fun of it. But so often that’s a joke that keeps on giving. As the eager secretary tells you again of the wild sales figures for Buggy Shit!! 3, it’s hard not to raise a smile.
The stories you end up telling yourself are surprisingly complex, too. The rise and fall of little companies, kept down by absurd devkit costs and the inability to shift enough units on consoles with dwindling popularity; the companies that held on to founding staff as totems too long, rather than hiring the staff they need; the companies that failed to diversify out of the genre they first found success in. All that is in your head; all the game presents is numbers and loose encouragement.
Game Dev Story exemplifies a kind of mechanical storytelling: stories told not through text or voice-acting, but through coherent systems that cannot help but generate stories. I’m not waving my hands in my air here and making an excuse – “Oh, it has emergent narrative“; my point is that, in good mechanical storytelling, narrative cannot help but emerge. It’s designed into the system.
Such systems are shaped to tell tales of lower-tier football teams, or the survivors of a zombie apocalypse, or mercenaries in Africa, or little companies trying to make videogames. Experiences you play, and feel, and believe, because you’re as much a part of the telling as the machine throwing its myriad D20s.
And, for all its lazy porting, weak writing, and repetitive formula, that is something Game Dev Story does remarkably well. It turns out that it’s not a story in itself. It’s a tool to help players tell thousands of stories. Telling your own stories about running a games company – through the medium of tapping on icons, and waiting – is far more compelling than any description could make out.
It’s a tool to help you do something. That notion led to the thought that mechanically-realised stories – the kind that movies can’t really ever tell, and the kind that games are invariably best at – are a kind of narrative exoskeleton.
Exoskeletons can do two things. Firstly, they can enhance your own abilities: they make you better at something you can already do – faster at running, stronger at lifting. And secondly, they can give you superpowers: things you could never do yourself – such as flying, or breathing in a vacuum, or surviving intense heat.
The best narrative exoskeletons do a bit of both. Off the top of my head: Left 4 Dead; Far Cry 2; Championship Manager; MUD; Acquire; Illuminati!; Werewolf; almost any tabletop RPG. Stories are baked into systems, but told through the by – and through – the players operating within them. Sometimes, we bring our own stories and personalities to the table, and the system amplifies them – the individual relationships between each player in a Left 4 Dead game add as much to their realisation as the characterisation in the script. Sometimes, those systems allow us to do things we could never do: they kill off characters we were too fond of; they force us to move out of our comfort zones; they have a grace of language or performance that we might be unable to attain.
I’m fed up of talking about stories in games (and I say that as someone who has loved many narrative-heavy, densely-plotted titles). Games are much more effective – and interesting – as tools for delivering stories, and, given that players will find their own stories anyway, why not build interesting systems that will shape their tales in exciting and unexpected ways?
Why not build story-telling engines, and narrative exoskeletons?
And that’s why I like Game Dev Story so much: for a game with so little of what most games would call “story” in it, it turns out to live up to the promise of its name in so many ways.
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"The point is that making one-click tools that force the entire web to play catchup, whilst putting people at risk, just isn’t a sensible way of talking about security. There’s a reason we (most of us, anyway) don’t secure our houses with turret guns and dogs, and that’s because most of the time, a lock and key is good enough. We want just enough security to feel safe at night, and not to cause us too much hassle. And that’s why this tool makes me sad. Because it’s a symbol of an arms race – a fight to the death over unimportant things, when really, I’d rather not have to remember to lock my windows at night." Yes.
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"Today's video is 'Boys vs Girls', showing the relative points and badges etc. accumulated by boys vs. girls over the course of the day. It ends with a "get running, girls!" message, and I love that data visualization is being used as a way for a brand to tell a story, in something close to real time, in a specific way tailored to the events on the ground."
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"One succeeds because it leverages the player's motivated, explorative, self-driven experience; the other fails because it relies on a hackneyed, disjointed "epic" plotting (told in 3 separate plot-lines via cutscenes) with incongruous settings and 2-dimensional characters. One succeeds because its formal systems directly feed the player's connection to the world and characters; the other fails because its formal systems bear no discernible relationship to the stories the game wants to tell." This is strong stuff from Michael; I am increasingly fed up of the focus on (poorly-told) stories in games.
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"Know that there are no "accidents" in this game design. Everything you notice about the game, and every subtle interaction that you experience, is intentionally packed with meaning." (Gravitation, still, being my favourite of Rohrer's games, I think).
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"Crucially, Goodrich entreats the public to note the following: "this change should not directly affect gamers, as it does not fundamentally alter the gameplay." This one statement should cause considerable distress, as it suggests a troubling conclusion about Medal of Honor as a work of public speech.<br />
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To wit: it suggests that the Taliban never had any meaningful representation in the game anyway. If a historically, culturally, and geographically specific enemy can simply be recast in the generic cloth of "opposition," then why was it was called "Taliban" in the first place?<br />
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And if the Afghan war in which the new Medal of Honor is set was one explicitly meant to drive the Taliban from their strongholds in Afghanistan, why should it matter that the game is set in that nation in the present day at all? In short, how was this Medal of Honor title meant to be a game about this war in particular?" This is a marvellous, critical piece of writing from Bogost. -
Nice post on Awk basics – most of which I knew, but the examples are still great, especially those involving variables. The links out to the Hacker News and Reddit threads are also full of good stuff.
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"By enabling the brain to manipulate with virtual systems, to engage with simulation, it creates systems than span the mental and the virtual, the biological and the electrical. Also, even more significantly to my point, our imagination is not a description as a book is a textual description, or a film is a visual description. It is, instead, a model." This is good, and the links are great, too.
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"Reach, on the other hand, without its player, is an epic waiting to happen, a set of ludics waiting to be given enactment. More than any other comparison I could make, I think this one points out the value of thinking about games like Reach in the light of epics like the Iliad: these two kinds of practomime share the enormously important characteristic of living through re-performance, of gaining their meaning through iteration according to the rules laid down by the practomime." This is good: game as structure, the core loop as enacted by the player being what brings it to life, structures it according to its audience.
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"Far Cry 2 invites fatalism, pessimism, and near-suicidal tactics because optimism and strategy went on holiday to Leboa-Sako and got murdered just like everything else. Hoping for the best doesn’t work. Being clever doesn’t work. Nothing good will ever happen to you in Far Cry 2′s Africa, and none of your carefully-designed plans will ever bear fruit."
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"The optical future of architectural ornament: light with content. <br />
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That is, you get home with your digital camera and you click back through to see what you've photographed—and there are words, shapes, and objects hovering there in the street, or inside the buildings you once stood within, visual data only revealed through long-exposures." Brilliant. -
"After seeing there is a turing complete language in game, I felt like I should do something interesting with redstone in Minecraft. People already have done clocks and adders so I wanted to do something a little different while also be potentially useful. As a result, I designed out a ticker display." At least as crazy as those LittleBigPlanet calculators.
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"Nelson, as described by IDEO in the video above, does so much work for you. It throws multiple perspectives into the equation, killing the unreliable narrator with the gifts of foresight and hindsight. It does away with the unexplainable appeal of a surprising hit novel giving you a league table of books to pick from according to their “impact on popular opinion and debate.” You’ll struggle to form your own opinion as you jump through the layers that Nelson offers you, given a perspective like a student browbeaten by an overbearing A-Level tutor." I similarly disliked their attempts to not only redesign the book, but to try to redesign narrative, in "Alice" – as if people hadn't tried, and as if what narrative _really_ needed was just a good design firm to take a crack at it.