Here's Laxdaela, a spatial narrative project I did for Andreas Kratky's "Experiments in Interactivity" class. I'm really pleased that I was able to get the art done myself, and I think the title system has the seeds of an interesting game hidden in it.
Just wanted to get this posted before I forgot about it, since this blog's been silent for so long. I'm working on that!
Arrow keys move around. Press the space bar to drop or gift any salmon you might catch.
For the third Immersive Moviemaking class, we were asked to come with ten questions (five technical and five production-related). I ended up with eleven.
Continue reading "Ten (Eleven) Questions on Immersive Moviemaking" »
Here are some resources I assembled for CTIN499 ("Immersive Moviemaking"), a class on using gestural input systems to shock us into revising assumptions about the preproduction/production/postproduction distinction. As a computer programmer, I am most sympathetic to this goal. The combined approach has been implemented in the CS world for some time now: Smalltalk (by coding in the debugger), Max/MSP, and other "live" languages distinguish between "programmer" environment and "user" environment either barely or not at all; Ruby and LISP problems are often worked out in an interactive prompt before they are copied into source code (this is sort of like previs in movies, I believe). Unfortunately, even though these solutions have been around for decades, most programming still takes place in dead source code files which are then compiled, linked into a binary, run as an application, and then shut down to start over again.
The most eye-catching aspect of the Pocket Etch-a-Sketch is its bright red front panel, replete with a rectangular viewing area and two white knobs in adjacent corners. The device gives the overall impression of a television set (or at least, a television from the days of the Etch-a-Sketch’s invention). The knobs cry out to be fiddled with, and the tiny icons above each knob—left- and right-facing triangles above the left knob, up- and down-facing triangles above the right knob—suggest the probable results of exploratory twisting.
Continue reading "541 - Simple System Analysis - Pocket Etch-a-Sketch" »
Any critical model for games must be predicated on a concept of how games "work". For a model concerned with mechanical balance, economic game theory is often taken as the foundation. For a model concerned with how a game teaches concepts, behavioral psychology is one of many starting points. When it comes to examining the playing of games as a narrative experience, there is an important distinction to make: is a game a story, or does it help create a story? Though much argument has been directed from and against the former premise (e.g. Murray's "From Game-Story to Cyberdrama", Costikyan's "Where Stories End and Games Begin" and Juul's "Games Telling Stories?"), I feel that the latter offers a much more powerful framework for understanding the semiosis (meaning-making) of games. In this post I hope to explain what I mean by this, and why I feel that this model of semiosis is so useful.
Continue reading "Critical Perspectives 2 - How Games Work" »
In Monday's inaugural 541 course, we opened a market for skill exchange. Visual arts and computer programming seemed to be the skills in highest demand. As somebody who is interested in (among other things) the former and capable of providing the latter, I think it would be valuable to set up some extra-curricular workshops for us to teach each other in a group setting. This would be separate from the 541 class, and would involve no graded deliverable. Later on, these workshops could expand to include writing, music, or even group playthroughs of games.
In particular, I believe that by getting together a group of subject experts (artists or programmers) and a group of people who want to learn those subjects, we can bond more strongly as a class as well as pick up some new abilities. The rough outline I imagine for these workshops could be brief lectures to set the tone and establish techniques followed by a big block of time spent working, with the subject experts available for question and answer. This structure isn't set in stone; subject experts would obviously determine the flow of their workshop. When not working as a group, participants could be expected to practice on their own and bring in questions. For people who are "officially" teaching or learning these subjects, the workshops could also serve as valuable supplementary resources.
As for the scheduling, I think the ZML is the natural place for this if it's available; otherwise, we could work out a different location. Timing-wise, I think they could work very well one after another, perhaps twice a week; at the same time on alternating days could also be effective (e.g. art on Monday/Wednesday, programming on Tuesday/Thursday). We're fortunate in that our schedules are quite similar, so finding a good time slot shouldn't be too difficult.
So, if this idea is interesting to anyone, please leave a comment saying whether you'd like to give or receive instruction in either topic, and a suggestion for a time slot.
The ecosystem of game critique is vibrant and thriving. It clamors beautifully with voices (from industry figures, indies, academics, and journalists) examining games from their own perspectives. There are critical lenses oriented towards music, game mechanics, personal experience, and everything at once. There is no shortage of critical languages nor of their speakers, and the writing ranges from esoteric academic works to articles ready for mainstream publication. So, why should I start to gibber this meta-jabber about game criticism?
Most importantly, the proliferation of critical frameworks, perspectives, and approaches is a very good thing for games. Different styles of critique are appropriate for different games, different writers, different readers, and different goals. For example, Roger Travis's "Living Epic" perspective might not be the best tool for improving the level design in a 2D platformer; by the same token, David Sirlin's concepts of yomi and mechanical balance could only apply with difficulty to a player-centric discussion of the growth of Ico's relationship with Yorda. Note that none of these authors claim a one-size-fits-all critical method; I just wish to illustrate here that game design is a multi-layered thing.
I come from a background in programming, so I would like to attempt a (very!) loose taxonomy of the origins and uses of game critique. It seems to me that game criticism is written primarily to serve, to varying extents, three purposes: first, as a form of reflection to direct the current or future development of some aspect of the game (such as mechanical balance or adherence to theme); second, to form a community of appreciation or practice around some aspect of the game and its play; and third, to help an individual or community understand their experiences of a played game. These critiques can be written by developers or players, and they can be written before, during, or after the development of the game—they can even be written long after the game has been played, since many play experiences take on lives of their own in players' minds. Developers or players will often gather multiple critiques with different perspectives to attempt to triangulate their own feelings on an issue.
With this justification in mind, I would like to spend the next few posts developing a few critical models for interrogating games. My specific interest is in the critique of games as story-generating machines. A few of the questions I'd like to consider include:
Some of these are extremely large questions that I can't hope to adequately answer; of course, the pursuit of the unreachable answer could reveal some valuable insights. I'm quite interested in feedback on the ideas I'll be presenting, since many of them cut to the heart of what I think games are about and what they are capable of as tools for clever players. Certainly, the artistry of a Stradivarius is admirable; but the real value of the instrument lies in what can be done with it. I'm looking forward to considering these issues with you all.
On Saturday (July 25th), I participated in a USC summer program seminar entitled "How to Put the Character Back in Character—Creating Characters that Soar (& Sell)". The speakers were Devorah Cutler-Rubenstein (Real Women Have Curves) and Marilyn Atlas (manager). I was the only IMD student present, so some words on why I attended are probably in order.
First, I have no interest in screenwriting and very little interest in writing cutscenes or long, uninterrupted narrative dumps (the content of this blog notwithstanding!). I see the value of bits of dialogue here and there, but in the interest of avoiding repetition, I think it's best to write a lot of similar, contextually-activated, circumstantial dialogue and then get the character off the map before it can repeat itself. Combat barks and other incidental writing and voiceover demands represent an area of writing that has been explored quite well by Patrick Redding's recent GDC presentation (PowerPoint at bottom of linked page). No, it wasn't an interest in the mechanics of writing that drew me to this seminar. Rather, I feel that character-centric games work by placing characters in situations, and then asking the player to take the reins. In this way, attracting a player is much like attracting "bankable actors" or a studio "green light". Without giving the player some traction, some kind of interesting character to inhabit and then personalize, it becomes much harder to build interest. Just as actors get bored of playing clichéd characters, players may tire of being asked to play Yet Another Grizzled Space Marine. For this reason, I hoped to understand more about what makes characters "sticky" or otherwise compelling.
My overall impression of the seminar is that it started very well, but lost momentum after the break in the middle. After a brief listing of the negatives of the seminar, I'll move on to the lessons I learned and the notes I took. The inclusion of improvisational exercises helped to lighten the mood, but I felt that the presenters' strengths were greater in lecture than they were in discussion (they often interrupted students or misunderstood them). The presenters were also fairly disorganized, with missing pages in the handouts and several typos in the materials, and they spoke over each other frequently.
The main theme of the seminar was that characters should be recognizable and archetypical, but not merely typical. Animators, actors, and all other creative professionals need subtext and texture to work with and be creative. Producers especially enjoy seeing the universal in the exotic, as do audiences and critics. Sometimes a project must wait for the right time, given its particular diversities and cultural characteristics, and it's up to the writer to understand the craft concerns as well as the art behind film production. This was a recurring concept throughout the seminar.
For some examples of atypical characters that are still universal, the presenters provided, among others:
As for techniques for developing these characters, it seemed as if both top-down ("In order for the character to be this way, what must she have experienced/felt in the past? How would she feel in such and such a situation? How can you understand her through her backstory?") and bottom-up ("This is a character who has these quirks and idiosyncracies. How do they combine to form a full person? What are his macro-level motivations?") approaches were advocated. The way these characters develop throughout a (character-centric) story dictate whether the mood of the story is tragic or comic: a character with a flaw who returns to his flaw, or never escapes it, is tragic; a character who overcomes her flaw is comic. Additionally, when a character acts in contravention to his underlying personality, it's jarring and unpleasant—just as it is in games when the player is forced via cutscene or other means to do something foolish or out-of-character, or when the player is unable to live up to the promise of the character (e.g. Sherlock Holmes getting lost in the streets around his own home). In a talk at GDC Austin last year, Andrew Stern suggested that writers would have to author processes, not text; to take the living characters in their heads and express the rules by which they operate so that a computer could handle the execution. Even in the absence of environments for programming up these rules, it can be helpful for writers to understand the guts of their characters abstractly as well as intuitively. This helps guarantee consistency for a character's actions and emotions.
Another valuable source of characterization is the external environment of a character. This can be done by occluding part of the character in shadow or behind an obstacle to indicate a mood, using color to suggest an emotion, or situating the character in an archetypal pose (Last Supper, Pieta, or other physical referents), or other stimuli such as music. Furthermore, when a character himself expresses emotion, it should be through external signifiers. Give characters "actable (playable) actions" for moments of internal interest (and I don't mean Quick-Time Events). Vulnerable and personal moments can serve very well as believable contexts for these moments. Situations can also be used for characterization, including the exchange of control between two parties, the assumption of a role by a character, and the introduction of the character to the scene. The characters can also be paired with psychological, sociological, and physiological identifiers to help provide a rough outline of their characters, or provide a stereotype to violate. Another good "hook" is seeing someone make a decision outside of everyday experience, or of making that decision in an unusual way or with unusual motives (e.g. the inability of the bomb-defusing protagonist of Hurt Locker to pick a breakfast cereal from the many on display). In general, it's always valuable to ask "Why?" and include a "Because..." with each character description or behavior.
It wasn't covered in the talk, but I do feel it's possible to go too far in the search for uniqueness and end up with characters who are unconventional for their own sake, which can be tiring. It's also important not to give a whole character away immediately; make the hook accessible, but don't reveal the entire form until necessary and appropriate. Another vital concern is to give the actors (players) some white space in the script—some personal freedom in the characterization.
One of my favorite points from the talk was the concept that in many great films (such as American Beauty or Little Miss Sunshine), each major cast member explores the same theme as the protagonist in their own way. For example, in Final Fantasy VI, each important character has an arc from feelings of insecurity and inadequacy to confronting and owning the parts of themselves or their pasts that torment them. Each grows as a character with the support of the other party members. The relationships between Locke and Celes, Edgar and Sabin, Relm and Shadow, and Terra, Locke, and Edgar all help those characters mature; there are many other such combinations in the game. This may be an important key to the game's lasting appeal and fervent fanbase—the universality of its theme of personal acceptance within a social safety net.
A final set of exercises for texturing a character involved asking additional questions:
Additional lists of questions and starting points were provided in the handouts, the best of which I have scanned and provide here.
I'm Joe Osborn, an incoming IMD MFA student with a B.S. in Software Engineering (Computer Science double-major, Economics minor). I spent one year working as a designer/scripter on Spider-Man 3 PS2/PSP/Wii at Vicarious Visions, an Activision studio. My responsibilities there mainly concerned the dynamic mission system and other non-story content.
Now that the facts are out of the way, I'm free to talk about my interests. Outside of designing, programming, and writing about games, I harbor deep affections for chiptune music (composed for obsolete computer and game hardware), pixel art, and related offshoots and repurposings of the game culture of the early 90s in which I was thoroughly immersed. (These early JRPGS and platformers shaped the language of my fantasy in those days; before I knew what fanfic was, I re-enacted their plots and explored their characters in new situations.) Despite my fledgling and clumsy efforts in composing such music and creating visual art, I remain very much a rank amateur in those fields. I expend most of my energy on games. While I feel I have reached a kind of saturation point as far as the playing of games goes — only a rare few can keep my attention longer than a couple of hours — my enjoyment at designing and programming them has increased dramatically in the past few years. (My appreciation of Japanese animation has ebbed in the same way; the last series I deeply enjoyed was the space opera Legend of the Galactic Heroes.)
My initial plan upon entering university, distant though it seems now, was to become an application developer and software project manager. While any programming offers the possibility of creating transformative works, games are a much livelier art. Furthermore, the importance of good development tools (my original passion as a programmer) is undeniable in the craft of games and in the refinement of their designs. With these rationalizations, and the experience (enjoyable though draining) of working at Vicarious Visions, I set upon the path of the designer/programmer, familiarized myself with the independent games movement, and read deeply and broadly of the emerging population of game critics at all levels, from the hyper-academic to the gut-feeling. My views on how games made meaning shifted and changed daily.
My feelings as of the beginning of the summer are expressed fairly well by this essay on game criticism and this presentation on semiosis. Neither really stands on its own now, and the lamentation in the former on the dearth of game criticism was basically unnecessary (the ecology of critique is very healthy indeed at this time). In the next post, I will summarize my views on the semiosis of games and on the kind of criticism I'm interested in writing — not out of any perceived need, but out of a personal interest in refining my critical faculty. This blog may also feature game designs and prototypes, bleepy and unlistenable songs, and inscrutable jumbles of pixels masquerading as visual art.