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Showing posts with label FYP. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FYP. Show all posts
Realism vs Believability
(Quoted from Artful Gamer: Interactive Storytelling: What Heavy Rain Didn’t Learn from Edutainment?)
I think Michael puts it best when he writes, “The game is at odds with itself from beginning to end. It persistently reminds me that neither I nor my avatar possess consequential autonomy. In Heavy Rain, the game itself controls the game, and that doesn’t feel much like interactive drama to me.”
When a game attempts to “simulate” rather than “express” an experience, it loses its ability to artistically exaggerate or highlight some aspects of the experience over others.
Not only that – but Heavy Rain tries to go one step further – it does not only want realistic visuals, but realistic kinesthetics. Instead of having the player direct the character at emotionally important moments crucial to the development of the story, the player is required to puppeteer every banal minutiae of everyday life, from pulling out a wallet to checking a watch. None of these micro-actions express anything important about the character’s personality or her/his plight. As a result, I cannot distinguish between what’s important and what’s window-dressing.
Stephen Biesty accomplishes a feat of artistic consistency that any comic book artist could hope for: when I’m standing on the orlop deck watching the deckmates go about their business, I look at the mast and think, “Hey, that mast goes way down into the ship!” My imagination makes the transition between each deck of the ship for me; Biesty completes the image by showing me the next section of the mast, just as my imagination hoped. Stowaway! gives me a sense of agency by allowing me to help imagine parts of the scene for myself.
The surgeon’s amputation feels more real to me than any murder scene in Heavy Rain, because Stowaway! boils the experience down to its essential elements.
Imagining Makes It Real
That’s all to say – Stowaway succeeds where Heavy Rain fails because it makes some space for the player’s imagination to complete the experience. Representational realism – whether it is an attempt at puppeteering the character through the controls, or an attempt at photorealism – cannot itself make a game worth playing or a story worth following. What we experience as real in a game has much more to do with the aesthetic exaggerations the developer makes in order to give a scene a certain flavor. The Uncharted series is a perfect example of how talented voice acting can turn a boring and hackneyed character into a lovable rogue. Without stylization that highlights certain features of the character/scene over others, and allows the player to complete the rest of the image, your game will be profoundly tedious at best – and totally unbelievable at worst.
--- From the Comments
[ Guttertalk ]
Whether or not “Calvin and Hobbes” is real is a banal question, one not worth asking. The fact is that we connect with it in a way that is not real yet still terribly meaningful. Yet, I think that some game developers are too focused on experience as the real rather than as the meaningful. Part of that stems from an obsession on immersion in gaming. Yet, identification is more important than immersion and doesn’t require as much overhead and extraneous detail.
IMO, control is a more meaningful differentiation for games than immersion–to control what a character does, looks like, and behaves, to control a story.
In a sense, then, games that emphasize realistic details have a harder time creating a game that gamers can identify with. It might be counter-intuitive to some, that an emphasis on realism makes immersion and identification more difficult to experience.
[ Chris ]
Identification – to me – happens through affective (feelingful) dialogue and memorable characters – that’s a quickly disappearing art.
[To clarify one thing - I am tempted to quibble over language (ie. I think that anything meaningful is experienced as 'real' to us) but that won't get us much of anywhere. The fact is that simulation is no replacement for good storytelling!]
That is pretty much the same argument that I’m making: a good artist knows what to accentuate/exaggerate and what to drop completely.
[ Andrew ]
... besides the fact that most of these interactions are not required, they do connect us to the character. I have a sneaking suspicion that when I drink some coffee with Jayden it actually helps him battle the addiction, and I’m quite certain that avoiding taking any drinks as Shelby is the best approach. I even tried to show caring for Ethan by having him wash up a bit and look out over the motel railing in between trials, just to keep some sanity. Did that matter? Probably not, but I enjoyed my ability to bring some pensiveness and consideration to the characters if I so chose.
I think Michael puts it best when he writes, “The game is at odds with itself from beginning to end. It persistently reminds me that neither I nor my avatar possess consequential autonomy. In Heavy Rain, the game itself controls the game, and that doesn’t feel much like interactive drama to me.”
When a game attempts to “simulate” rather than “express” an experience, it loses its ability to artistically exaggerate or highlight some aspects of the experience over others.
Not only that – but Heavy Rain tries to go one step further – it does not only want realistic visuals, but realistic kinesthetics. Instead of having the player direct the character at emotionally important moments crucial to the development of the story, the player is required to puppeteer every banal minutiae of everyday life, from pulling out a wallet to checking a watch. None of these micro-actions express anything important about the character’s personality or her/his plight. As a result, I cannot distinguish between what’s important and what’s window-dressing.
Stephen Biesty accomplishes a feat of artistic consistency that any comic book artist could hope for: when I’m standing on the orlop deck watching the deckmates go about their business, I look at the mast and think, “Hey, that mast goes way down into the ship!” My imagination makes the transition between each deck of the ship for me; Biesty completes the image by showing me the next section of the mast, just as my imagination hoped. Stowaway! gives me a sense of agency by allowing me to help imagine parts of the scene for myself.
The surgeon’s amputation feels more real to me than any murder scene in Heavy Rain, because Stowaway! boils the experience down to its essential elements.
Imagining Makes It Real
That’s all to say – Stowaway succeeds where Heavy Rain fails because it makes some space for the player’s imagination to complete the experience. Representational realism – whether it is an attempt at puppeteering the character through the controls, or an attempt at photorealism – cannot itself make a game worth playing or a story worth following. What we experience as real in a game has much more to do with the aesthetic exaggerations the developer makes in order to give a scene a certain flavor. The Uncharted series is a perfect example of how talented voice acting can turn a boring and hackneyed character into a lovable rogue. Without stylization that highlights certain features of the character/scene over others, and allows the player to complete the rest of the image, your game will be profoundly tedious at best – and totally unbelievable at worst.
--- From the Comments
[ Guttertalk ]
Whether or not “Calvin and Hobbes” is real is a banal question, one not worth asking. The fact is that we connect with it in a way that is not real yet still terribly meaningful. Yet, I think that some game developers are too focused on experience as the real rather than as the meaningful. Part of that stems from an obsession on immersion in gaming. Yet, identification is more important than immersion and doesn’t require as much overhead and extraneous detail.
IMO, control is a more meaningful differentiation for games than immersion–to control what a character does, looks like, and behaves, to control a story.
In a sense, then, games that emphasize realistic details have a harder time creating a game that gamers can identify with. It might be counter-intuitive to some, that an emphasis on realism makes immersion and identification more difficult to experience.
[ Chris ]
Identification – to me – happens through affective (feelingful) dialogue and memorable characters – that’s a quickly disappearing art.
[To clarify one thing - I am tempted to quibble over language (ie. I think that anything meaningful is experienced as 'real' to us) but that won't get us much of anywhere. The fact is that simulation is no replacement for good storytelling!]
That is pretty much the same argument that I’m making: a good artist knows what to accentuate/exaggerate and what to drop completely.
[ Andrew ]
... besides the fact that most of these interactions are not required, they do connect us to the character. I have a sneaking suspicion that when I drink some coffee with Jayden it actually helps him battle the addiction, and I’m quite certain that avoiding taking any drinks as Shelby is the best approach. I even tried to show caring for Ethan by having him wash up a bit and look out over the motel railing in between trials, just to keep some sanity. Did that matter? Probably not, but I enjoyed my ability to bring some pensiveness and consideration to the characters if I so chose.
Morality in Games
(Quoted from Artful Gamer: The Humble and Valiant (ie. Filthy Rich/Powerful) Hero )
What I’ve been trying to get at in this article is that despite our appreciation that games are meaningful, they often celebrate the worst aspects of our humanity (selfishness, the desire to dominate others) with the guise of moral righteousness. Worse, games like Arcanum, the Final Fantasy series, and Fallout 3 make it completely impossible to complete a game without needing to max out the protagonist’s attributes and inventory and in doing so celebrate adolescent power fantasies. The original spiritual quest, despite it being the entire point of the game as acknowledged by the story, is totally maligned by the underlying gameplay. If developers want to genuinely acknowledge our desire for meaning and self-transformation, they will have to develop a better sense for what is involved in a “moral choice”… it is certainly not a case of hoarding guns’n'ammo and picking the ethical alternative in a conversation.
What I’ve been trying to get at in this article is that despite our appreciation that games are meaningful, they often celebrate the worst aspects of our humanity (selfishness, the desire to dominate others) with the guise of moral righteousness. Worse, games like Arcanum, the Final Fantasy series, and Fallout 3 make it completely impossible to complete a game without needing to max out the protagonist’s attributes and inventory and in doing so celebrate adolescent power fantasies. The original spiritual quest, despite it being the entire point of the game as acknowledged by the story, is totally maligned by the underlying gameplay. If developers want to genuinely acknowledge our desire for meaning and self-transformation, they will have to develop a better sense for what is involved in a “moral choice”… it is certainly not a case of hoarding guns’n'ammo and picking the ethical alternative in a conversation.
When do you call a game a Game?
(Quoted from Artful Gamer)
In his fantastic article (please, read it first!), When Do You Call a Comic a Comic?, Kenton Smith reasons out the essence of comic books. Kenton laboriously works through all of the usual options: it is an expression of the imagination through illustration, a “juxtaposition of words and pictures”, a non-linear narrative medium, a dynamic moment expressed in a static frame?
I think Kenton’s original question sets us off in the right direction. The question isn’t “what is a game?” (that leads straight into the territory of the confusion I mentioned earlier), but rather, when we’re doing some activity – when do we know that activity is called gaming?
Developers no longer should focus on trying to get “the right mechanic” – but rather to try setting up a certain kind of experience for the player. If you want the player to play an adventure game, do not introduce control schemes that draw out an FPS experience. If you want the player to experience your game as an RTS, create a space in which their eyes are drawn in all four cardinal directions of the screen, waiting for the ensuing invasion. If you want your game to be experienced as an RPG, you better be able to draw the player into a world they experience as real and meaningful. In the end, the designer has to know a lot more about how players experience a game than what the rules of the game are. That’s why playing your game over and over again – and allowing other people to play it – turns a mediocre game into one worth talking about.
In his fantastic article (please, read it first!), When Do You Call a Comic a Comic?, Kenton Smith reasons out the essence of comic books. Kenton laboriously works through all of the usual options: it is an expression of the imagination through illustration, a “juxtaposition of words and pictures”, a non-linear narrative medium, a dynamic moment expressed in a static frame?
I think Kenton’s original question sets us off in the right direction. The question isn’t “what is a game?” (that leads straight into the territory of the confusion I mentioned earlier), but rather, when we’re doing some activity – when do we know that activity is called gaming?
Developers no longer should focus on trying to get “the right mechanic” – but rather to try setting up a certain kind of experience for the player. If you want the player to play an adventure game, do not introduce control schemes that draw out an FPS experience. If you want the player to experience your game as an RTS, create a space in which their eyes are drawn in all four cardinal directions of the screen, waiting for the ensuing invasion. If you want your game to be experienced as an RPG, you better be able to draw the player into a world they experience as real and meaningful. In the end, the designer has to know a lot more about how players experience a game than what the rules of the game are. That’s why playing your game over and over again – and allowing other people to play it – turns a mediocre game into one worth talking about.
The Lost Art of Game Packaging...
(Quoted from Artful Gamer)
Our tacit attachment to in-box artifacts is thus something deeper than nostalgia for games that use the artifacts as active parts of the game. Artifacts don’t just draw players into the game world – they also draw the game world into the player’s life.
What I’m trying to say here is that whether a mass-market game is digital-download-only, or if the game is released as a trinket-packed collector’s edition, the options don’t matter anymore: in-box materials no longer mean anything because developers have forgotten their personal, meaningful, value. Developers no longer recognize the way that artifact and game constitute one another. They’re called “collector’s editions” for a reason – they’re made for people who like to collect things.
--- From the comments
[ L.B. Jeffries ]
I remember maps were always my favorite things to receive in old games. Quest for Glory 2 and Spirit of Excalibur both required you have the maps to play. Like you say, it generated a curious cross-over from the real and unreal because I could hold something that existed in both worlds.
Our tacit attachment to in-box artifacts is thus something deeper than nostalgia for games that use the artifacts as active parts of the game. Artifacts don’t just draw players into the game world – they also draw the game world into the player’s life.
What I’m trying to say here is that whether a mass-market game is digital-download-only, or if the game is released as a trinket-packed collector’s edition, the options don’t matter anymore: in-box materials no longer mean anything because developers have forgotten their personal, meaningful, value. Developers no longer recognize the way that artifact and game constitute one another. They’re called “collector’s editions” for a reason – they’re made for people who like to collect things.
--- From the comments
[ L.B. Jeffries ]
I remember maps were always my favorite things to receive in old games. Quest for Glory 2 and Spirit of Excalibur both required you have the maps to play. Like you say, it generated a curious cross-over from the real and unreal because I could hold something that existed in both worlds.
Cover Art
(Quoted from Artful Gamer)
Wölfflin wanted to distinguish between artistic styles based on a handful of objective principles. The most important, to me, is his distinction between linear and painterly. Wölfflin himself writes, in a linear style, ”stress is laid on the limits of things; in the other the work tends to look limitless. Seeing by volumes and outlines isolates objects: for the painterly eye, they merge. In [a linear painting] interest lies more in the perception of individual material objects as solid, tangible bodies; in [a painterly painting], in the apprehension of the world as a shifting semblance.” In my own words: linear styles tend to define sharp separations between objects, while painterly styles tend to allow things in the scene to flow into one another. Linear paintings also tend to have “flat” surfaces, make use of photorealism, and are often seen in comic-book style artwork. Painterly works rely upon visible brush strokes that give the piece a “textured” appearance, usually use wider brushes, and mix together uniform colours in the same region for expressive effect.
--- From the comments:
I too appreciated the old illustrated boxes/covers – while they were obviously made to market the game and make it appear flashy, I now realize that they also served to invite the player into the world via rich illustration... While the in-game graphics were of course a different story, the cover always gave me that “wow! I want to live in that world!” feeling.
Today game designers (and players) value “representational realism” or pure representation over emotional or aesthetic realism. We see the cover/box art as a representation of what’s inside (perhaps gamers have always been like this), rather than an expression or idealization of the game’s meaning. The end result is that many games have moved toward a representational/photorealistic realism that values high res pixels over emotional expression.
If I play with the terms a bit, the move from painterly (literally: ‘paint!’) to linear (pixels) has been accompanied by a move from the imagination (all those old abstract blocks/symbols in Atari games) to representational realism (the perfect skin and lighting of Heavy Rain). Computer artists tend to use pixels to “represent” things rather than express things, and I think part of the reason is because gamers demand games that push their new video card hardware to the limit. But that’s a whole other conversation – I just found it interesting that you noticed the link between linear and representational, which is another strong part of modern aesthetic theory.
You bring up something I had not thought of much: what does ‘box art’ mean when it’s just another cover in your iTunes folder? I doubt people spend much time looking at covers when they’re digital. I remember staring (for minutes) at my boxes when I first bought boxed games. That is no longer done, I suspect.
---
My afterthoughts:
The stylistic choice of any game illustration (or cover art) should be done with full consideration of the content of the game. It can be either a complementary representation or a direct representation of one game. It’s equally essential, however, to treat a game cover art as a piece of art, carefully designed so that it should be able to tell a story clearly by itself.
Maybe I should create a "downloadable DIY box art" for my games too? Lol.
Wölfflin wanted to distinguish between artistic styles based on a handful of objective principles. The most important, to me, is his distinction between linear and painterly. Wölfflin himself writes, in a linear style, ”stress is laid on the limits of things; in the other the work tends to look limitless. Seeing by volumes and outlines isolates objects: for the painterly eye, they merge. In [a linear painting] interest lies more in the perception of individual material objects as solid, tangible bodies; in [a painterly painting], in the apprehension of the world as a shifting semblance.” In my own words: linear styles tend to define sharp separations between objects, while painterly styles tend to allow things in the scene to flow into one another. Linear paintings also tend to have “flat” surfaces, make use of photorealism, and are often seen in comic-book style artwork. Painterly works rely upon visible brush strokes that give the piece a “textured” appearance, usually use wider brushes, and mix together uniform colours in the same region for expressive effect.
--- From the comments:
I too appreciated the old illustrated boxes/covers – while they were obviously made to market the game and make it appear flashy, I now realize that they also served to invite the player into the world via rich illustration... While the in-game graphics were of course a different story, the cover always gave me that “wow! I want to live in that world!” feeling.
Today game designers (and players) value “representational realism” or pure representation over emotional or aesthetic realism. We see the cover/box art as a representation of what’s inside (perhaps gamers have always been like this), rather than an expression or idealization of the game’s meaning. The end result is that many games have moved toward a representational/photorealistic realism that values high res pixels over emotional expression.
If I play with the terms a bit, the move from painterly (literally: ‘paint!’) to linear (pixels) has been accompanied by a move from the imagination (all those old abstract blocks/symbols in Atari games) to representational realism (the perfect skin and lighting of Heavy Rain). Computer artists tend to use pixels to “represent” things rather than express things, and I think part of the reason is because gamers demand games that push their new video card hardware to the limit. But that’s a whole other conversation – I just found it interesting that you noticed the link between linear and representational, which is another strong part of modern aesthetic theory.
You bring up something I had not thought of much: what does ‘box art’ mean when it’s just another cover in your iTunes folder? I doubt people spend much time looking at covers when they’re digital. I remember staring (for minutes) at my boxes when I first bought boxed games. That is no longer done, I suspect.
---
My afterthoughts:
The stylistic choice of any game illustration (or cover art) should be done with full consideration of the content of the game. It can be either a complementary representation or a direct representation of one game. It’s equally essential, however, to treat a game cover art as a piece of art, carefully designed so that it should be able to tell a story clearly by itself.
Maybe I should create a "downloadable DIY box art" for my games too? Lol.
The Changing Nature of Game Interface
(Quoted from Artful Gamer)
When I play any game, using a standard NES/PS2/PS3/Xbox/GameCube controller layout — my fingers and thumbs find their places... As soon as I settle down to play the game, my fingers are no longer fingers to me. They are a part of the game — my fingers become something like my mouth when I am speaking — they spring into action when Mario needs to bound over a Chain Chomp or needs to go down a green pipe... My fingers never become a part of my foreground or focal experience — in other words, my fingers become repressed parts of my bodily experience.
... There is something very focal in interacting with touch-based devices, because my finger does not fall into the background as easily.
Returning to my anecdote: does my friend’s 2 1/2 year old son experience his favourite iPod Touch game as a ‘real’ world? Or is his experience like mine — somewhat disembodied and self-conscious? Is this an inherent problem with touch-based interfaces, or do some of us already experience bodily repression that allows us to ignore our fingertips when we touch the display?
When I play any game, using a standard NES/PS2/PS3/Xbox/GameCube controller layout — my fingers and thumbs find their places... As soon as I settle down to play the game, my fingers are no longer fingers to me. They are a part of the game — my fingers become something like my mouth when I am speaking — they spring into action when Mario needs to bound over a Chain Chomp or needs to go down a green pipe... My fingers never become a part of my foreground or focal experience — in other words, my fingers become repressed parts of my bodily experience.
... There is something very focal in interacting with touch-based devices, because my finger does not fall into the background as easily.
Returning to my anecdote: does my friend’s 2 1/2 year old son experience his favourite iPod Touch game as a ‘real’ world? Or is his experience like mine — somewhat disembodied and self-conscious? Is this an inherent problem with touch-based interfaces, or do some of us already experience bodily repression that allows us to ignore our fingertips when we touch the display?
Toy Story 3
image from Wikipedia
Stories are to be experienced.
Stories create conversation.
Stories touch and move people's hearts.
But what is a story without characters?
For characters live on beyond stories.
Pixar, you guys really understand storytelling inside out!
[ INSPIRATION LEVEL UP! ]
pre-FYP (2)
Question to self:
Lol. It's not as easy as I thought.
What Would Jesus Do
if He's a Game Designer?
Lol. It's not as easy as I thought.
Why Can't Video Games Make You Remember The Dead?
What made it real, though, was the fact they could die. One stray bullet, whether by accident or some careless command from you, the player, and they were dead. And not video game dead, where you could magically revive them, or they'd be "unconscious" and would return for the next mission. Actually dead. They'd be stricken from the game, their progress lost, and to replace them, you'd need to get a fresh young soldier and do it all again.
To lose a player like that is heart-breaking. And because of that, you remember it. You remember the characters you liked most, the ones who helped you out in the most important missions. And each time you enter a new battle, those old characters are still with you, their loss serving as an example, making you more aware, more cautious of what's around each corner.
...
As games seem so intent on conjuring all kinds of other emotions, from excitement to humour to fear, it'd be nice if they could look past the act of pulling a trigger and deal with some less pleasant, but no less important emotions as well. Like remorse. Regret. And remembrance.
To lose a player like that is heart-breaking. And because of that, you remember it. You remember the characters you liked most, the ones who helped you out in the most important missions. And each time you enter a new battle, those old characters are still with you, their loss serving as an example, making you more aware, more cautious of what's around each corner.
...
As games seem so intent on conjuring all kinds of other emotions, from excitement to humour to fear, it'd be nice if they could look past the act of pulling a trigger and deal with some less pleasant, but no less important emotions as well. Like remorse. Regret. And remembrance.
Quoted from Kotaku
Religion in Games
Read article here.
Games and religion are unsuitable for one another because of that value: Entertainment. It's not to say games can never have a redeeming message. It's not to say a faith has no thrilling tales to tell. But one's purpose is supposed to make you live better, while the other's purpose is to make life better, without putting too fine a point on it.
Games and religion are unsuitable for one another because of that value: Entertainment. It's not to say games can never have a redeeming message. It's not to say a faith has no thrilling tales to tell. But one's purpose is supposed to make you live better, while the other's purpose is to make life better, without putting too fine a point on it.
Time to Face Hard Reality, Not Fantasy
I can't stand your religious meetings.
I'm fed up with your conferences and conventions.
I want nothing to do with your religion projects,
your pretentious slogans and goals.
I'm sick of your fund-raising schemes,
your public relations and image making.
I've had all I can take of your noisy ego-music.
When was the last time you sang to me?
I'm fed up with your conferences and conventions.
I want nothing to do with your religion projects,
your pretentious slogans and goals.
I'm sick of your fund-raising schemes,
your public relations and image making.
I've had all I can take of your noisy ego-music.
When was the last time you sang to me?
[ Amos 5:21-23 (MSG) ]
