First off, apologies are in order re: the blog and my schedule... I got some unexpected (good) news early this week, and it's taken up a bunch of my mental real estate. All the entries I mentioned (with the possible exception of the Charles Barkley... does ANYONE know anything about running RPG Maker games???) will be up soon.
I haven't talked much about The Cache in this space recently, but that's not because nothing's been going on. In fact, I'd say it's quite the opposite... TOO MUCH has happened in the last month, and I haven't really had time to process it, much less force it into sentences. I'm going to try to rectify that now.
To do that, I need to take you a month back in time, and offer up one more post about GDC.
Most of my references to GDC have been impressions of the event itself, what I learned about it, it's high and low points. I haven't talked much about the effect the whole conference/hurricane had on my work.
I've been working with Matt and Paul on P.B. Winterbottom since last April. Being there as they turned P.B. from a vague idea to a polished prototype, watching the way they managed an expanding (and shrinking) team, and, finally, marveling at how skillfully they worked the floor of the IGF... it was quite a ride. I didn't particularly ASK to be inspired by these Odd Gentlemen, but in the end, I couldn't help it.
The fact of the matter is, up until our San Francisco I'd been developing The Cache with blatant disregard for the tropes of the games industry, or ANY industry. I'd been imagining the Cache, in its final form, as something slightly different than a traditional game, a sort of amalgam entertainment form that can be "driven" instead of "played". In the service of this long-term goal, Sean and I have been working on a prototype for a two dimensional Cache... but I've always seen that prototype as a sort of "interactive script" that could simply be used to pre-visualize the final three-dimensional content.
I hoped this interactive script form could be appreciated out of context, and I believed it had a lot of interesting applications, but I hadn't given much consideration to how fun it would be on it's own merits.
As I was walking the show floor, making first contact with scores of new products and ideas, each spring-loaded from the minds of their respective students and mad scientists and industrials, I had to admit the flaw in my approach. I want to PRESENT what I'm doing. That realization illuminated several flaws in my approach:
1) It is REALLY presumptuous to work towards a "final form" of something that's both completely untested and several years off.
2) If my thesis doesn't stand on it's own, instead of standing as a component of a theoretical system, the people experiencing it will have no point of reference from which to judge it. Put another way, a tool for improving the accuracy of time machines is useless until someone invents a time machine.
3) There's a thriving, growing community surrounding independent games... it's community I can understand and speak to. Ultimately, I want The Cache to speak to this community: I should try to make my prototype speak to them as well.
I decided that my next iteration "The Cache" needs to be more than an experiment... it needs to be a proper interactive work. It needs to have PLAY.
With that in mind, I decided to strip my prototype assignment for thesis class of all the narrative elements I'd been developing for The Cache. I busted out the old tools of the 488 trade: dice, tokens and playing cards. I wanted to find out, on a fundamental level, what the most interesting form of "play" would be for this project.
Allright, now that I've explained WHY I took a new direction, I can get into the details. Next up on the design journal: the gameplay prototype, and how Sean and I used it to restructure the entire design.