Hello, and welcome to the first day of GDC feedback extravaganza!
The morning was kicked off very indie-ly as I attended the opening of the IGS where Ron Carmel explained a little further what the Indie Fund was about and how it came to be. The talk in itself was interesting, although it remains to see if the experiment in funding works out (it would be awesome that it did, so fingers crossed). What was nice is that the presentation was illustrated by Braid’s artist, so as nice to hear as it was to watch.
The follow-up was a rather quirky presentation by Cactus, regarding the techniques by which one could punish and disorient the player. Actually I think he got short on time because the talk never really seemed to take off: we were treated to a list of his favorite David Lynch movies, some fellow game-tortionists’s work and ended with a short list of techniques he used. You’ll have to come back later for actual content, if you’re lucky. Was this actually a very clever exercise in disorienting and punishing the conference attendees disguised as a talk about punishing players instead? We’ll probably never know.
I then managed to catch Soren Johnson’s very inspiring keynote at the Serious Games Summit, about the relationships between themes and mechanics. For me, the keynote nailed one of the biggest problems facing the serious games movement/market actually, which is over-reliance on theme to carry a message. Of course, the mechanics are the message, not the theme. You can read more about it here.
Lunch.
I kicked off post-lunch with a quiet talk at the IGDA education summit. The title was “Happy together” and the talk delved into ways educators and people in the industry could better collaborate to bnenefit both. Amongst the speakers was Prof. Stephane Natkin, director of ENJMIN, who revealed to us his plan to take over the world. Also, a sort of brainstorm session was organised and teams were tasked in finding new ways in which they could collaborate together in order to boost the student’s education.
Then followed by a short reminder (I refuse to call it a lesson) of good marketing tactics for indie studios on behalf of Wolfire Studios, makers of Overgrowth.
After that, I walked in into what was probably the weirdest talk at GDC ever, at the Serious Game Summit. Basically it was some guy talking about this idea to teach kids not to go along with sexual predators. The WTF moment was wen you followed the dates he gave us, you realised the game had spend 20+ years in development, even more than DNF. The kicker? It’s a FLASH game. FLASH. Also, the guy got totally paranoid in the 90’s that someone would “steal his idea”, so he got a lawyer he ended up marrying in the 00’s. Bonus stage: all of the voices in the game were provided by said guy and said lawyer wife. This presentation was probably indiest than any other IGS feature, COMBINED. The guy was so indie that before working on his game, he was a friggin sailor. Yes, the kind that goes on boats. Again, Indieness. But seriously WTF.
The conference day closed with a rather interesting IGS keynote about Immediacy and Depth. The talk was actually more interesting by what it told about the Indie movement than for it’s actual content. Basically this came through as “hey, mainstream does this pretty well, so we should steal their methods”. The key here is that this shows that now, there are more people who have always been indie than people who were working for The Man and quit (this was the norm some years ago). Visibly lots of students are attracted to indie games nowadays, which is wowsome. Global domination is just at the turn of the road. (In itself the talk was pretty basic stuff, so I won’t go into it).
And that’s it! More tomorrow if the beers allow it.
I am currently in San Francisco, resting my weary feet in my hostel dorm. I collected my pass for the 2010 GDC today and then dedicated the day to some serious sightseeing. Weather was erratic, but very nice overall, and provided some very nice photo opportunities. I am becoming mildly obsessed with the bay bridge.
Tomorrow the real conferencing begins, so I shall attempt to post my impressions of the talks I attend. Don’t expect nothing fancy, but if something really gets me going, you’ll find my rant here.
I’m currently on the last stages of judging the IGF finalists… I have a lot to tell you about that, just not now… you’ll probably have to wait until I’m done. So…
Everything else is just dandy fine, just very busy. More on that when appropriate too. Damn NDAs.
I received this mail today, if you’re an IGDA member you should have too:
Dear Members,
Recently an email went out that appeared to have originated from IGDA. The return address of this email appeared as: “Concerned_Members_of_the_IGDA@IGDA.org.”
That email address was spoofed and the communication was not an official IGDA communication. We are currently reviewing the methods by which it was sent to see if this was sent out by people ignorant of proper use of the IGDA website or if there was malicious actions involved. We are also reviewing the method by which your email addresses were obtained and if that was done ethically or not. It is my hope that this was done by someone simply overzealous about their cause and not for destructive reasons.
Please be aware IGDA was not responsible for this email and does not have anything to do with the content or the links provided. You should read and use such links at your own risk.
We will investigate this issue and provide you with information on our findings as they are confirmed.
Thank you,
Joshua Caulfield
Executive Director
IGDA
This is a follow-up to an email from an address coming from @IGDA.org pointing to a simple online survey asking if the member agreed on asking for an extraordinary meeting to force Tim Langdell out which, strangely enough, asked for your membership number along with your name and a simple yes/no radio button.
Is this really an act of vigilantism to remove Langdell from the association or were we just victims of a phishing hack? Time will tell…
The full text of the original e-mail is reproduced below.
Snooping around the web for some home-dev organisation technique, I’ve stumbled upon David Seah’s Printable CEO Series. At first glance it looks like just another GTD-oriented series of charts, but closer inspection reveals that the series draws inspirations from techniques used in video games. (more…)
I’ve recently spotted on GameSetWatch a note about ThumbStadium, a ultra-minimalist gaming console. With an interface composed only of three leds (green, green/red and red) and two buttons, we’re far from the “now-gen”, and yet this proves once again that you don’t really need so many bells and whistles to create a fun experience.
Picture this: after having graduated from a fairly prestigious public game school with a heavily academic and independent-development-oriented curriculum, you immediately land a job at a big-name publisheloper (publisher + developer) as a designer on a top seller, yearly released license.
As usual with that kind of gig, the pay is nice, you have lots of good workplace relationships, you have vast resources at your disposal and the overall quality of life is better than average. On the other hand, you also need to learn how to cope with the -sometimes Escheresque- logics of HR, Business and Editorial services. You also need to deal with yourself-from-two-years-ago constantly whispering you’re sometimes just reinventing the wheel and treading familiar paths.
Is there a way to reconcile what you were taught to do and what you are doing now? Let’s find out together.
While working on games, I’ve come to notice how often the games industry borrows vocabulary to other media; mainly from movies and literature due to their shared strong narrative component.
I was thinking about game interfaces and HUDs and I remembered a word I had heard associated to film music. The example was a scene from Casablanca (1942) where Sam is asked to play “As time goes by”:
What you need to look out for are the two pieces of music in this scene: “As time goes by” heard when Sam plays the piano, and the ambient strings heard when Mr. Bogart appears and everyone starts chatting.
The difference between these two pieces of music is that, for “As time goes by” we can see Sam performing the tune, whereas the other piece of music comes from an invisible, intangible orchestra the characters can’t hear. Film people say Sam’s tune is diegetic, while the nondescript orchestral piece is non-diegetic (or extradiegetic).
The Wikipedia page for “diegesis” sheds more light on the matter:
Diegesis may concern elements, such as characters, events and things within the main or primary narrative. However, the author may include elements which are not intended for the primary narrative, such as stories within stories; characters and events that may be referred to elsewhere or in historical contexts and that are therefore outside the main story and are thus presented in an extradiegetic situation.
The concept of diegesis is embedded in Narration, as it was defined by Greek philosophers in opposition with mimesis, and permeates most narrative art forms. Moreover, since the Narratology vs. Ludology debate cooled down a few years ago, it has become widely accepted that narration (in its broadest sense) is present in most games, which leads to acknowledging the validity of the existence of diegesis/mimesis in a game.
But how does all of this translates to real-world game development and design? A simpler, more utilitarian definition given by Étienne Souriau (and mangled by me) goes like this:
Diegesis: all that is supposed to occur, according to the fiction which the [narration] presents; all that this fiction would imply if it were supposed true.
What this simpler, easier to handle definition allows us to do is to give some examples of diegetic and extradiegetic elements in existing games, which might give you (the reader) a better way to express what you mean when designing, criticising or just playing games. That’s the beauty of accurate vocabulary!
Game interfaces are the element that would most benefit from a better understanding of diegesis. Since they are used to convey most information related to the game state, they are instrumental in how the player relates to the fiction evoked by the game. Non-digital games tend to have interfaces (boards, cards or figurines) that symbolize game elements without being integrated in its fiction. Card and dice games often have evocative names, but they are mostly abstract activities with little to none fictional elements, which might explain why their interface (cards) has derivated towards the purely mathematical. Their function can be thought of as mimetic, i.e. as a direct expression of the game system with no fictional component. Board games, however, have stronger fictional components and many try to let players develop a narrative. This led to their interfaces becoming highly specialised objects displaying different levels of diegesis. For example, let’s compare these two boards:
Diplomacy board
Chess board
Both games are fairly cerebral, turn based strategy games built upon the same theme (war), and yet their boards show large differences, both in appearance and their diegetic levels. Chess is an old, old game and probably lost much of its narrative elements throughout his history. Its current form is fairly abstract and doesn’t reinforce the original theme, which remains only in the standardised shape of the pieces. Diplomacy’s board, on the other hand, goes well with the fiction its designer intended for the players to play in. By mimicking the look of a WWI political map, the players are encouraged in buying into the game’s fictional world in which they are world power leaders plotting with or against each other. This leads us to say that Diplomacy’s interface is diegetic, while Chess ’s is almost entirely non-diegetic (or almost mimetic, if you want to see it that way).
As games become larger and more complex, their interface starts integrating objects of different diegetic levels. This might be because complex systems are easier to be understood via narrative (sequential) methods rather than by symbolic (simultaneous) ones. Modern non-digital games often feature cards, figurines, boards, books or any other material, some being used to reinforce the narrative while others are there just to help the player keep track of the game state. For example, in pen-and-paper roleplaying games, the rulebooks, character sheets and the dice are extradiegetic interfaces just because medieval -or space- heroes dont walk around with sheets of paper describing what they can or can’t do. But when the GM takes the role of a shopkeeper or hands them a map the players have been given, he or the map become diegetic interfaces to the game being played.
Video game interfaces are very interesting case studies. They can be roughly approximated as a combination of two elements: a display and an input method. The displays shows the state of some game objects (or all of them in simpler games) using a given perspective the player is able to modify (or not) by using the input method. This input method is also used to modify the state of game objects using predefined rules, which are very often opaque to the player (in opposition to non digital games). Both the display and the input method can have different diegetic levels. A good example for a diegetic input method is using a joystick as an input method for controlling a flight simulator. The associated display can also be diegetic if it simulates being in a plane cockpit, but not if it allows the player to see his plane from afar. First-person cameras are often diegetic while third-person cameras are often extradiegetic, with one notable exception:
Lakitu, from Super Mario 64 (1996)
The reason why I’m okay with calling a tortoise-that-floats-on-a-cloud-holding-a-camera-on-a-perch a diegetic third-person display is because he is embedded in the fictional Mario world through a variety of cheap tricks (refer to the game’s introduction, or the mirror room). Strange at it would seem, thanks to these pirouettes the player just accepts the presence of a floating camera as something coherent with the game world he moves in.
Although interfaces are the most easily observable objects, it is important to point out that diegesis can also apply for game mechanics, if you think of them as narrative ressources. To remain with my previous example, the fact that Mario has an arbitrary amount of lives is extra-diegetic: we were never told why Mario was able to come back from the dead a limited number of times, nor why did he gain one extra life when he collected a certain amount of coins. Mind you, I’m not judging the quality of “n lives” as a game mechanic, I’m just saying that the designers of the game didn’t think necessary for that particular mechanic to be diegetic.
A recent counter-example to this is the new Prince of Persia (2008). Some have argued that this game heralded the “death of death” in videogames, but I believe that isn’t very accurate. You “die” a lot in that game, and you still get that old tinge of failure when you miss that platform and plummet into the void. The only difference is that your death is presented in a diegetic manner: When you fall, Elika’s superpowers (which have been properly introduced earlier as of divine and benevolent source) kick in and she rescues you at the last moment. The mechanic’s almost the same, it’s only it’s diegetic levels that vary.
Again, I could give many of different examples, but that would only lenghten this (already quite tedious) post.
If you had to take something away from this article (it’s okay if you skipped the above), let it be this:
Diegesis is applicable to all kinds of games, but there’s a simple tradeoff: an object with a high level of diegesis has more sense (narratively) and works towards the overall coherence of your game world. However, diegetic elements are harder to “read” and do not convey information in a clear and concise way.
Having precise and inambiguous names for our tools is half of the battle won. A designer aware of this property will be able to fine-tune the levels of diegesis of his game elements to strike a perfect balance between immersion and accessibility.
One pixel games are a little pet experiment of mine in which I try to find “gameness” or ludicity in minimal systems, namely “pixels” – squares whose only function is to display color. You can check out other instances of these pixels here.
Following up from the simple alphabetical proximity, I’ve decided to try another method for key search, this time based upon the physical arrangement of your keyboard keys. Proximity is now dependent upon whether a key is physically adjacent to another key. Of course, the limit of this approach is that it’s limited by the many different models of keyboards. For the sake of simplicity, I’ve limited myself to the standard qwerty and azerty key arrangements
My hypothesis is that linking the virtual system (the pixel) to a physical representation (your keyboard) makes it a lot easier. The alphabetical proximity referenced an abstract arrangement of values, whereas the physical proximity is direct and obvious. The difficulty in the alphabetical prototypes came from your knowledge of the alphabet, and now it rests solely on your spatial perception skills, which are innate.
A similar mechanism is used in most current music games: the on-screen representation matches the physical arrangement of the buttons you need to press, instead of resting on an abstract system, like musical notation. This is the source of their accessibility and success: the immediacy of the stimuli-input system shortcuts complex brain functions, giving the player the impression they are “feeling” the music rather than “reading” it.
Posted: December 5th, 2008
Categories: English
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