Aja on 11/8/2009 at 08:36
Quote Posted by Chade
EDIT: A large part of the second problem is probably due to the first problem: artistic games usually aren't very good at being *games*. Aja, I'd like to know hear you elaborate on why you think "The Marriage" is pretentious. I can appreciate "not very good", but why go the extra step and call it pretentious? Why the extra cynicism?
I guess because it's aggressively, deliberately un-fun, on top of it providing little artistic statement, since the statement itself is rather dependent on players actually playing the game, which the game seems to actively discourage by being so obtuse. Unless he wanted me to think, "marriage is frustrating, ugly, confusing and stubbornly abstract", in which case it's brilliant.
Chade on 11/8/2009 at 11:10
Quote Posted by Aja
I guess because it's aggressively, deliberately un-fun, on top of it providing little artistic statement, since the statement itself is rather dependent on players actually playing the game, which the game seems to actively discourage by being so obtuse. Unless he wanted me to think, "marriage is frustrating, ugly, confusing and stubbornly abstract", in which case it's brilliant.
Well ... AFAIK his primary goal was to find out how much he could say through dynamics alone, rather then making the best game possible. So you have to see the game in that light. He isn't using the least amount of artwork possible just to be obtuse. He is being as clear as he possibly can, under the self imposed constraint that he will avoid using artwork to tell the story (beyond a bare minimum). I don't think this is pretentious at all. I think it is an interesting challenge.
Now, I might be jumping to unwarranted conclusions here, but it seems to me that your reaction is typical of gaming culture in general. Gamers regularly dismiss games like marriage, without bothering to properly engage with the ideas behind his work. The attitude seems to be that if the game is not good, then it's not worthy of further consideration.
Chade on 11/8/2009 at 15:03
Hence why I said "beyond a bare minimum".
I don't see how you can say that none of the message is in the dynamics. The colours and title introduce the subject matter, but everything apart from that is pure dynamics.
Chade on 11/8/2009 at 15:39
Crap, conversation going too fast, can't keep up ...
In response to the second part of your earlier post (I replied before you edited that in):
Quote:
Yes, how dare those philistines not spend their time on things that are admittedly not good.
Yeah, I don't expect everyone to be into this stuff. But there are two problems with gaming culture. Firstly, most gamers are actively biased against this stuff. Secondly and more importantly, I am not aware of any subset of gaming culture which is interested in games which endevour to give meaning to formal systems. The only people I know of who talk about this stuff seriously are developers and academics, with a scattered handfull of gamers hanging onto their coat-tails. So if you do any work in this area, you get serious feedback from a handfull of other developers and academics, and that's about it. Compare this to movies, for instance, where every pseudo intellect and his/her cat thinks about the meaning of whatever they last saw. The only games which do get talked about seriously (DX, for instance), construct meaning using familiar linear storytelling techniques.
Quote:
But the mechanics themselves can't actually convey meaning. The only reason people don't think something like, "shape getting bigger = a person getting fatter" is because the title makes that idea seem silly. Yet, from a purely mechanical standpoint, that is just as valid as any other interpretation.
No shit. Abstract mathematics needs a context before it starts to take on meaning. The fact remains that it is certainly possible to create meaning by specifying relationships between other meaningfull object. Are you seriously disputing this?
demagogue on 11/8/2009 at 17:28
Quote:
If you can completely change people's interpretations of the work just by changing the title of the work, then the work itself doesn't really have any content.
Well, technically this is ignoring the fact that the title is
part of the work and very intentionally is exactly trying to prime people's pattern-sensing experience, so the experience involved with that priming can't really be considered entirely "outside" its intended content. It's still a work meant for human consumption, where "outside" meanings are always leaked in, and intended to be (when they can expect the priming), and not for a calculator where they wouldn't and so shouldn't be taken into account, which is what your post makes it sound like.
That presumably wouldn't change your attitude if you think that, anyway, that's a stupid way to go about packaging a game's mechanics, leaving it to cognitive priming to carry your meaning... Surrealists did it all the time, BTW; their abstract blobs would be wildly suggestive,
especially if they primed it with a clever title. I guess a big difference is that the surrealists did it really
well, and this ... is ok.
Well, you could think about the collapse of Dadism into Surrealism; Dadism was
too abstract, they just threw random images together and got a laugh when funny combinations popped up, but it did leave the same kind of deflating feeling, like in the end what sense it did make was killed by its own arbitrariness. Surrealism solved that by always bringing the "seemingly random" combinations back to very real cognitive primings simmering under the surface; they would aggressively push just those buttons to kick some life into their images, and were much more successful.
......................................................
BUT ANYWAY ... his main point wasn't really about the Marriage anyway, so I wouldn't get caught up on the tangent. It was about the dominant gaming culture, which isn't really that debateable if you follow it.
As for how willing one is to give the gaming public a break... That IMO is something of a red herring. In a discussion about
what developments in gaming mechanics could games really benefit from in uniting interactivity and narrative-structure ... The question about how such developments would be received is 2ndary. The first priority is to just get the ideas on paper and start getting them into games until you refine it, you let the idea do the leading and let gamers care about what they want to. Nobody is going to stop them from having a second of fun by this discussion going on backstage.
I don't know; I think about something like Einsenstein developing dynamic cuts for editing film so he could control the pacing of the narrative directly into the medium ... Kurosawa picked up on it 20 years later, and Hollywood about 30 (now you watch Transformers and it's to the point of parody). The one thing Einsenstein and Kurosawa weren't doing (I don't think) was asking what the public thought. The idea took the lead; there was a clear limitation with static cuts that suggested its own answer, but that still had to be worked out. It's true that they were in a sort of fortunate circumstances to work out their ideas and make a living; but with games being so cheap to develop these days I don't think the economics of game-making should be an reason not to have the discussion.
With games, we have limitations with typical narrative-structure devices (cutscenes, conversations, the occasional readable, and "visual storytelling", arranged or scripted sequences) meshing with typical gameplay devices (free movement, player-initiated progression...). I guess framing it like that, the problem does suggest its own answer: integrating narrative-structure directly into, or make a part of, player-initiated progression. That's Aja's suggestion LSD-like ... you act in the world at your will, the world lets you carry yourself through it by that will. But it needs to be developed. For one, it's missing meaningful "events" that at least give some sign-posts to your own progression. You sometimes had an idea in LSD that you were "going" somewhere, but you didn't know exactly what might get you farther than you were before (even though "farther" is a bit of a misnomer since the plot isn't linear; maybe "deeper", but you get the idea). Thinking about how to solve that kind of problem would lead to some interesting answers to this topic, I think. I have my own ideas I brought up in the "Your Crazy Gaming Ideas" (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1847349#post1847349) thread with my
Sound & The Fury concept.
Taffer36 on 11/8/2009 at 18:45
The question the article first proposes seems a bit ridiculous to me. All you have to do is look at ANY game currently on the market. How many of them have stories?
Yup. The answer is all of them. Regardless of whether or not you believe these stories are good, they all have them because narrative is ESSENTIAL to a good game. I suppose you could argue that good narrative is not essential to a good game, but some sort of narrative IS.
Aside from that, though, video games have a lot of potential that they're already using. On the basic level, you have the cut-scene, which is the most traditional and obvious form of narrative, but I'm a lot more interested in in-game scripted events, ala Call of Duty 4 or Half-life 2. I'm not going to say it's "the future of narrative", because I actually don't see the forms in which narrative is conveyed changing at all in games, possibly forever.
What I DO think should be more explored is the concept of evoking emotion in the player thru setting. It's very simplistic, but nothing has EVER reached evoking a similar level of emotion to the feeling that you get riding thru a desolate wasteland in Shadow of the Colossus.
Tonamel on 11/8/2009 at 19:14
Quote Posted by Taffer36
All you have to do is look at ANY game currently on the market. How many of them have stories?
Yup. The answer is all of them. Regardless of whether or not you believe these stories are good, they all have them because narrative is ESSENTIAL to a good game.
Yeah, I always get misty-eyed at that one part of Bejeweled where
You've got to be kidding. If there's one thing games DON'T need to be fun and awesome, it's a story. Sure, a good story can help, but it's the furthest thing from ESSENTIAL.
Taffer36 on 11/8/2009 at 19:44
Yes, because I'm clearly talking about arcade games.
What was the last shooter you played without a story? How about the last RPG? The last RTS? Fine, if you want to pull that up then I'll clarify.
Every genre EXCEPT FOR ARCADE requires a story.
Tonamel on 11/8/2009 at 20:15
Quote Posted by Taffer36
Yes, because I'm clearly talking about arcade games.
You were talking about "ANY game currently on the market." Emphasis yours.
The last shooter I played with no story was Team Fortress 2 (which theoretically has a backstory, but it's never mentioned in the game itself).
Last RPG - Shiren the Wanderer, probably. I don't play too many RPGs.
Last RTS - Whatever the last tower defense game I played was. I couldn't get the Demigod demo to work properly.
Taffer36 on 11/8/2009 at 20:33
Alright, point taken :(
