my notes from 10/27 class
Much of our discussion centered on what Tracy means by adding more EXPRESSION to games. Like movies? But Tracy also observed that GRANULARITY is important (i.e., lots of choices and options). "Interactive Movies" require pre-filming everything. May have high PRODUCTION VALUES, and EXPRESSION, but low GRANULARITY. "Video Games" are generally based on realtime computer models: high GRANULARITY but "cartoon-like" rather than camera-based. But everybody knows this, and that these technologies are converging.
We speculated on what would happen when a game designer had a $100 million budget. Common answer: give it to game designer friends to make many games rather than "over-produce" a game. Many in the games/computer world want granularity and think that production value does more harm than good. Many in the film/cinema world believe the opposite.
Turns out the "$100M" is currently being spent addressing all these issues by the Army. Please continue to look around the USC Institute for Creative Technologies website. I'll make sure to arrange a class field trip probably in the Spring.
Comments
Sorry I'm a week late. The powerpoint slides for this presentation can be found in the attached link (eg: click my name).
Posted by: Josh | November 3, 2004 05:11 PM
As I'm thinking of: Interactive Movie-to be clearer, interactive recorded film medium(rather than the to-be-recorded realness)-can't do without something which has already happened, which by the term "Interactive movie" could always mean people play with the pre-filmed footages. Accordingly, branched-granular, as Mike says-structure is basically only ready for the fictional, which is the mere "entertaining" function of film medium(being capable of recording the performance) to tell a story. It's easy to imagine how an ontologic people who are sticking to documentary extreme will be against to a branched documentary work, just as for them, even flashback & flashforward are the second(sometimes intolerable) choice because they can only be counted as the recorded nevertheless imaginary and fictional parts.
However, game, as abstract as it has long been and continue to tend to be, which employs as many expressive elements as it can, is totally free from that.
I think that's why it turns out to be more a dilemma for "real-person-game" than a RIGHT one all the time: to be as real as possible or to be as opposite as possible, that's a problem.
Posted by: yuechuan | November 6, 2004 03:04 AM