I had a pass to E for All this weekend, but it looks like I forgot it at work… I also wanted to check out the Grand Text Auto exhibit at UC Irvine. Faced with the dillema of going back to the office or driving an hour to Irvine, you can see which one I chose.
No, no, wait, hear me out.
I too, a while back (like in this 2005 Gamasutra soapbox – why did they change from calling them “soapboxes” to “opinions” anyway?) would often try to rally the cry for innovation in games. Much like Juan Gril does in his article last week.
Looking at this year’s IGF entrants, there’s definitely some innovative stuff there. And I’m really happy that there’s now more of an environment in the industry that those games can get made, find their audience, and be successful in some fashion. Most of them are never gonna get huge sales, but they should hopefully find enough people who like their uniqueness to keep their creators going. And that is a truly wonderful thing.
BUT. Let’s not get carried away jumping and screaming for innovation, yeah? Innovation without a purpose is a gimmick. Gimmicks are fine, they are often the start of or hook to something much more meaningful in a game. But it’s still a gimmick. Let’s call gimmicky duck a gimmicky duck, ya know?
Innovation is a means to an end. If you want to make someone feel something they’ve never felt from a game before, you have to innovate, obviously. But innovation for innovation’s sake doesn’t actually advance any of our understanding of the medium as an art, nor does it, more importantly, show the player some truth – truth about the world, about human nature, or about themselves. It does not necessarily open their perceptions in any way.
Hey, you can make control a character made out of jelly/peanut butter/sandwiches/whatever, but it’s only meaningful if there’s some truth to be found in being those things. (And to clarify, I’m not saying there’s not. In fact, it presents quite an interesting design challenge. How does playing peanut butter and/or jelly give oneself better understanding of one’s own nature? I, seriously, digress.)
The important thing is the end result. The feelings or thoughts you engender in your audience. Whatever those are, if those are not in the forefront of your mind at all times while making a game, however large or small, it will indoubtably fail to engender those thoughts & feelings.
Now for lunch! PB&J, naturally.
No, I’m not talking about EA’s purchase of Bioware+Pandemic (although while I was at Radical the CEO always talked of Radical’s relationship with Viviendi in terms of dating and marriage metaphors, so maybe there’s something to that, who knows). I’m talking about the fact that I’ve 3 weddings to go to from now until March – just got back from the first one this weekend.
As Patrick quite validly pointed out in my last post, there’s still a lot of emotional places to go that games haven’t quite yet. Weddings, and the feelings involved, would certainly be one of them.
Phantasy Star 3 had that whole generational thing going on, which was kind of cool but ended up being a little soap-opera-y, if I recall correctly. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. (Then again, I remember listening to a lot of radio while I was playing it, and Amy Grant was very popular at the time – could’ve colored my perceptions, I dunno).
There’s The Marriage and Façade, which both deal with marriage (on a very wild spectrum between the abstract and concrete), but I’m talking weddings. Now, granted, I’ve never played a single Final Fantasy game for a wide ranging complex number of reasons, so I’m suspecting they might have some, but generally speaking the field is pretty bare.
There’s the classic romantic comedy version of the wedding, wherein the bride or groom is getting married to the wrong person - hijinks ensue. Or the tragic version thereof – death ensues. Shakespeare made a bundle off of both of those.
Can anybody recall any other game-story weddings? Maybe it’s time I finally broke down and played some hentai games (I blame Leigh Alexander and her coverage of such).
Via the blogroll on Emily Short’s excellent blog, Josh Giesbrecht at faithgames looks at the topic of moral choice by way of some of Clint Hocking’s thoughts on the matter.
Which I’m not going to talk about, that’s all just context for you, because that’s what brought me to what is my little hotbutton phrase – authorship in games.
Specifically, he and Hocking both compare moral choice in games to the moral journey of a character in a novel – the writer of a novel can always express the character’s regret at an early decision through the rest of the novel. Giesbrecht writes:
“Yes, the novel chooses what the character believes about the consequences of their actions – the regret is authored.”
Lost my wallet this weekend (I prefer to think of it this way over the more insidious option, that it was stolen). No cash, can’t go out to get breakfast (and I prefer this term over the less manly brunch). So I figure, Hey, let’s go for a bike ride! Flat tire. The world does not want me to leave the goddamn apartment.
Thankfully, Andrew has provided some morning reading material. Lots of good stuff, but what I’ll write about in particular today is gonna be Ian Horswill’s position paper on modeling psychopathology in AI. He argues that we should have more AI models for with characters that have the same failings/weaknesses in other narrative mediums.
Now, I’m a fan of this line of thinking fer sure (and the general thought that we should be trying to simulate characters, and not people). But, this paper only argues for half of that – what about the modeling of character strengths? To make a character compelling they can’t be a total loser (all weaknesses), or perfect (all strengths).
Most interesting to me, though, are those characters whose strengths also serve as weaknesses, but in different situations. Take Adama from Battlestar Galactica (the new one, naturally). He’s incredibly loyal, but but his loyalty to Tigh gets him in trouble because of all of Tigh’s problems & bad decision making. You see the characteristic in times of strength, and then you understand the character better when it becomes a weakness – in other words, they can do something incredibly stupid and that might actually increase your connection to them. While if they did something stupid and you didn’t understand why, your interest in the story would drop dramatically.
Wow, so you mean a character can do something dumb and you *enjoy* this? Compare that to most AI in game’s today - generally speaking, that’s hard to find. It is a problem you come across, though, even the most basic button mashing brawler. Take, for instance, the mad goblin bomber. We’ve seen him in any number of fantasy games. You know his deal, he runs at you with a bomb, and explodes.
Now, strictly speaking, this is about the stupidest thing any character could conceivably do, in terms of trying to defeat someone who has slain hundreds of their kinsmen. Yet I’ve never once heard anyone say, “Goddamn, that’s some stupid AI!” He runs right at you and explodes! Into little bitty bits! C’mon, people!
But we forgive this – why? Because he wildly gesticulates his hands in the air, screams unintelligibly, and probably dresses in wild colors compared to his saner goblin friends. We understand his character (as such), is not prioritizing a rational attempt to deal with you as a threat in a strategic fashion. This is a character that is fascinated with blowing shit up. This is often a strength, mind you; in this case, not so much. But we can understand his priorities in decision making, even if they are weaknesses (as they need to be for the player to complete the game) and so we understand his character, which in turns makes the AI not look stupid.
Slowly, ever so slowly, this will hopefully evolve past the mad goblin, as Horswill suggests.