Shakey-Lo on 26/10/2008 at 12:12
Quote Posted by Fingernail
You see, to me this isn't the end of the story at all. Or at least, it's as bold as saying "films are about making the most beautiful sequence of images". Yes, there's certainly imagery in every film, but not every film exists for that purpose.
This is getting closer to what I'm getting at.
I guess I am overstating my argument a bit, it's not necessarily the equivalent of arguing "films are about making the most beautiful sequence of images" but rather, as you say, "there is imagery in every film". Films are defined as a medium by being a temporally linear sequence of images.
It might seem silly, but games/computer simulations are still young as a medium and academic theory is still very much about deciding upon just what it is that defines them as a medium. I guess my argument on the matter is not "games are about manipulating space in the most creative manner possible" but simply "all games manipulate space". Does that make sense? Then, if you accept that argument, it makes sense to ask why more games aren't experimenting with the opportunities this offers.
It wasn't until over half a century after the first feature film that anything resembling "film studies" started making headway, so the field of "game studies" is still very much in its infancy. (I sometimes get the feeling gamer academics are pushing for it simply because they feel left out, not because the medium is ready for it)
This thread was mostly intended to be discussing good examples of creative use of space in games but I guess I kind of derailed my own thread as I always do. It's been an interesting discussion so far though and at least helps me sort out my argument. I won't reply any more for today though, I should be getting work done, but look forward to reading more opinions.
demagogue on 27/10/2008 at 07:28
Being philosophically-minded as I am, I have a lot of ideas about this topic. One big starting-point for you might be how games interact with the phenomenology of space, a la Husserl and Heidegger.
One basic punchline in that school (that applies to what you're thinking about) is that our experience of "space" isn't just a neutral x-feet-by-y-feet area, but that space (like time) is in part constructed according to what we use it for. In technical terms, space is "intentional" (i.e., directed towards a goal). So to take a basic example, e.g, a destination that you are very anxious about may feel soooo far away, you can't move fast enough! (a trip to the hospital to see your dying mother), but a distant destination that you are excited about (meeting your lover whom you haven't seen in 2 months in Paris) can feel very near. Or 100 yards of miserable swamp or wasteland might seem miles long to a guy lost, but the same 100 yards of a football field to a running back making the game winning touchdown might seem like just a backyard-sized sprint. There's a lot more nuance to it, as the interaction between space and goal is nuanced, of course, but this helps get out the idea.
But I think you can already feel how use of space in games is very different from use of space in, e.g., art, photography or cinema. If you want to get to the very core of what a game is, it's essence, (in critical terms), it's a platform for pure intentionality or goal-directedness ("interactive" in crude terms), so every piece gets "intentionalized" ... time, space, interface, objects, "others" (AI), that is, it only has significance in terms of how it interfaces with whatever goal/MO the PC is after. (A useful exercise would be understanding each piece in phenomenological terms ... space=being-in-the-world, time=being-in-time, objects=at-handedness, AI=being-with-others...) The key here, the insight I think you're itching after, is that the phenomenological edge only exists in an intentional context. Put into English: "space" only exists for a person as a living, breathing entity that "surrounds" them insofar as it is something within which a person can pursue a goal. Since a passive viewer of a movie isn't himself pursuing a goal "within" the movie space, he isn't actually "in" that space. At most he can only empathize with the protag; he "sees" the space, but he's not "in" the space. In games, a player is "in" a space, quite literally as far as your pure experience is concerned. I think this is one point you want to make. It's not for nothing that philosophers spend so much energy on the meaning of a simple word like "in" ... to a non-philosopher it must seem silly, but it's a very big deal once you get into the technical details of it. I have a lot more thoughts about "in" that I could mention, but I don't want to write a book here.
Ok, so that's one starting point (at least, if I were writing a paper on this). Then I'd want to apply that thinking as it applies to use of space for a variety of gameplay categories, like you're thinking ... interactive fiction, point-and-click adventure, FPSs, RPG's, RTS's, etc, etc, etc... For each one I'd think you'd want to get clear on the critical connection between MO and space ... What about the goal-directedness of the game (the MO) puts the PC "in" the space within which he engages with that MO?
It's interesting you brought up interactive fiction (IF), because that's probably a good way to bring out what's special about intentional space in games as distinct from the reported space of cinema ... Intuitively it feels like the
least spatial of games, so it makes the point more forcefully when you point out its spatial elements (in the same sort of way people talk about the spatial awareness of blind people). So I'll talk about that...
What I'd recommend is you first really get into the nuts-and-bots of how IF games are constructed ... Read a tutorial of a good IF engine like TADS 3 (from (
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~manc0049/TADSGuide/intro.htm) here, from the "Learning TADS 3" link). When I was going through this tutorial I was having very similar thoughts from what you were mentioning ... It's relatively object oriented as far as the code goes, and the basic level of organization is the "room". So right off, the "places" are sort of floating in the code, but they are connected by functional parameters. And I thought to myself, that's actually really interesting, how space is really constructed in an IF game, it isn't so much "sequentially" connected, like a physicist might simulate space, but more literally functionally connected. So, e.g., it takes some functional/logical parameter to get from A to B ... It's not automatic but something constructed in goal-directed terms. It's the difference between "mechanically cycling your legs 150 times" versus functionally "N", or "enter room", where you can imagine that means much different things for each different room (always a different distance, different method of "entering", etc).
Or think about how space is actually divided up in IF. It is usually by the "room", but what is a "room" ... sometimes it is a small 8x8 cell, other times it is a cavernous 40x200 hall, and in the same game they can be the "same" basic unit of space. How the author divides up "rooms" impacts the pacing of the game. One "turn" through space is not equally divided into "1 turn=10 meters", but more like "1 turn=a 'standard' chunk of progress through the world", which is a much much different way of conceiving the space.
What's nice about going through the tutorial is you can think about how each element of how an IF engine creates the world is related to this way of thinking ... the connectors between rooms (moving from room-A to room-B), how objects in rooms are handled, how rooms within rooms are handled (e.g., sitting on a chair or climbing a tree is, functionally speaking, entering a room within a room that the chair or tree is in), how rooms are "changed" after events .... for that matter, the relationship between "room" and "event"; in IF the relationship is critical. All events are organized by the basic unit of "room" where they occur, even for events that have effects far "removed" in space.
For an alternative perspective, consider how FPS engines like Dromed (sorry, it's the one I have the most experience with) handle events through markers (fnords) in space, and what about "blue rooms", space that doesn't exist for the player, space not meant to be "played in", but still have impacts in the space he plays in. The metaphysics is actually close to a medieval way of thinking about "space", where there is a "mirror-space" behind real space (basically heaven), where God is pulling levers to make events happen in "real space", and the metaphysics is much more top-down (space is there to "hold" events; think Descartes and Newton) rather than bottom-up like reality actually is (events like atoms bumping create space; think Einstein).
All of this is just scratching the surface, but this is the sort of thinking I'd get into if I were working on a project like this. It sounds very interesting; I'd be interested in seeing how it turns out. :)
Edit: sorry, I didn't want to sound like I was lecturing, especially if you've been reading on this topic for a while probably, I'm sure you're much more up on the theory than I am ... Maybe it's just my knee-jerk way of talking when I'm explaining this stuff to people hearing it for the first time, and I'm not watching my audience here.
I realize too that it wasn't getting into what you were asking about how games can manipulate space towards various ends, artistic or humanistic or whatever. But I still think the phenomenological school is a good starting point for that too, fortified by a little cognitive science to give it some teeth (e.g., the phenomenology of space has certain rules it has to follow to be congizable, not necessarily the rules of physics, more like folk physics, so e.g., "above" is a certain ratio of an object over another one, too much and it's now "over there"; "in" is a certain % of enclosed space, any less and it would just be like an arbor; the transitivity of space (if A < B and B < C then A < C) that if you mess up, the mind rebels, although to varying degrees, that is, some rules are more breakable than others). Also, I think you have to always keep in mind the bottom-line, which is that all of this was "designed" by evolution to align with certain purposes, at least it's enlightening to understand it that way (cf David Marr & Glimcher) because it gives you a reason
why space is intentional the way it is, why x% enclosed is "in" and not y%, etc, or at least a better way to think about it.
Anyway, I can think of lots of good examples for games that play with space in interesting ways, too. For IF, look at Emily Short's blog sections on (
http://emshort.wordpress.com/reading-if/setting/) setting and (
http://emshort.wordpress.com/reading-if/world-model/) world model.
I was thinking recently about LSD (the Playstation game where the PC is in a dream world that discloses parts of itself, but never resolves itself entirely coherently, and things like touching walls makes the PC teleport to new parts), and brainstormed a form of storytelling using an LSD-like mechanic for a story like Sound and the Fury, where the PC is first an retarded individual (Benjy) where time blurs so that memories of 10 years ago sit right along side real-time events, and then the next chapter is a person (Quentin) who is so desperately sad and haunted by memories that the seams of his reality crack around him in a similar but more schizophrenic way. The stream-of-cns narrative style wonderfully gets it out, and I thought gaming is maybe the one platform that could give it justice in an audio-visual context.
