Posted by Michael on November 14th, 2006, in Books
I have just started reading this book.
I’m a bit annoyed by the school book tone of it. Not just because that way everything gets said twice. But also because it all comes out sounding like fixed rules and facts while a lot that is being said is highly disputable given the young age of the medium. The generalizing observations of the differences between cultures -which is where I’m at now- are on the edge of my ethical tolerance, but perhaps this is a good way to talk about them in the context of game design. After all, I’m all for using clichés. They help communication.
Note from 20 November 2006
I’m stuck on a 30 (sic!) page interview with two Japanese business men discussing the finer details of the thickness of the eyebrows of Ratchet as it pertains to the appeal of the character to the Japanese market, after having disqualified any of their own arguments with the example of a colleague predicting the failure of Pokémon in the US, illustrating the open-mindedness of Japanese kids to any type of character design and a fascination with how conservatism grows with age in humans. But I won’t be victimized by the writer’s My-First-Foreign-Culture (though-not-too-foreign-since-Japan-was-colonized-after-World-War-II-by-my-own-culture-just-like-Iraq-who-will-soon-be-our-friends-too) experience no longer and I’ll skip over this part. That’ll teach them. 😈
Note from 11 December 2006
I just learned everything about girls in the chapter on gender! 🙂 Apparently, when it comes to games, there is only one gender. It’s called female. I had hoped to learn about differences between genders in terms of character design but instead this chapter was a plea to design more games for girls.
I’m getting a bit tired of this constant nagging of female writers about games. It’s very simple to provide for games that appeal to women: make them! Games should be made by women -at least partially. Not just on a design level but also deep in the icky guts of the machine: we need female programmers, female animators, female modellers, etc. Get to work, girls!
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Posted by Michael on November 14th, 2006, in Books
This is a very fun book 😀 with alternating text and illustration pages, both executed in a witty entertaining style. Probably quite on purpose given the title of the book.
Raph Koster is a game designer (he worked on Ultima Online and other MMOs). So he knows what he’s talking about. The premise of the whole book is an attempt to convince his grandfather that being a game designer is a worthy profession.
The book makes two important statements, in my opinion. First that fun is all about learning. And second that for games to become a mature and respected medium, they need to produce art.
Mr. Koster speaks of learning is pattern recognition: we enjoy finding patterns in the things that we perceive. When we have discovered the pattern, we get bored and desire new challenges. A game that can offer a continuous stream of such challenges, is fun. It is fun because it teaches us things. As a (in my opinion profound) side note, he suggest a definition of beauty as something that is just a little bit off of being completely recognizable. I do think, however, that he underestimates the severity of an aesthetic experience, defining it as something fleeting, something we always ultimately get bored with.
But while he defines the core of games as being their structure of rules and challenges, he does realize that this core alone is not sufficient for an entertaining experience. This is where he sees the role of narrative, comparing games to dance where the choreography is nothing without dancers and a stage, or music that requires musicians who interpret and play the piece.
When it comes to art and expressiveness, he doesn’t really see a problem with the fact that most games are only about violence, claiming that most art, at its core, is about violence and sex. So all games need to do to become art, is to be a bit more subtle about these topics. He does seem to believe that this subtlety can be achieved by creating smart game structures, in other words by manipulating what he sees as the core of games. He makes an interesting comparison between art and a trellis with plants: humans and their experience are the plants that grow on the trellis, while the trellis itself is the artwork.
No need to say that I don’t agree with this. First of all, I don’t like reducing everything to its base components. Sure, all art is about sex and violence. As much is life is about cells and electricity. But at that level, nothing is meaningful! Depth of experience situates itself in much higher regions. I believe that the core of just about everything is nothing. What matters, what truly matters, is the layer around that core, the skin. This is where meaning happens, where humans can become more than organic machines. Truth is completely irrelevant.
And, as you may know, I have my doubts about the potential of game structures as well. I would love to see these expressive games. But if in the thousands of years that games have existed, no one has succeeded in producing a single art piece, why would they suddenly be able to do so now? There is definitely artistic potential in the the new digital technologies but I believe that we need to create much wider and diverse interactive experiences to get there, and drop the requirement of a game structure.
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Posted by Michael on June 28th, 2006, in Books
The most recent part in the series.
I immediately jumped into the Architecture section and found 2 gems already. Sergio Garces’ “Flexible Object-Composition Architecture” is a more or less exact description of the method we’ve been using for Quest3D programming since a few years already (introduced to us by Ronald Jones). So it’s reassuring to read an expert’s opinion on this.
And Elizabeth Gordon’s description of behaviours as ordered lists of rules in “A Goal-Based, Multitasking Agent Architecture” is very inspiring.
“A behavior is a list of rules for achieving a goal, where each rule consists of a condition and then one or more actions to be executed if the condition is satisfied. The rules are evaluated in order from top to bottom during each game loop, and the first rule that matches is executed. The ordering of the rules should be such that the first step in the behavior is at the bottom, the second step is just above that, and so on, with the topmost rule checking whether the goal has been successfully achieved. When read from bottom to top, the rules shold thus form a complete plan. It should be clear that this structure is essentially a function containing only an if-then statement. (…) A behavior encoded in this way gives game characters important flexibility: if an action fails, the character will simply try again. If the chaacter can no longer perform the action, it will drop down to an earlier step in the plan, and if a step can be skipped, the character will skip it automatically.”
Beautiful… Elegant… Let’s steal it! 👿
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Posted by Michael on June 19th, 2006, in Books
Auriea read this book. It was interesting enough but is very dated by now. We remember sharing many of the same dreams back in the nineties. The future was quite different then.
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Posted by Michael on June 19th, 2006, in Books
I have only just started reading this book. It seems to be about the way in which humans interact with computers in general, not necessarily in games or interactive drama. It’s ancient in computer terms. Being published first in 1991, it talks about the Macintosh interface as something new. 🙂
“Psychology is devoted to the end of explaining human behavior, while drama attempts to represent it in a form that provides intellectual and emotional closure.” (p. 6)
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Posted by Michael on June 13th, 2006, in Books
read in a Dutch translation by Saskia Tijsma
This is sort of a self-help book that teaches how to read and produce body language in order to be socially succesful. Its subtitle is “a manual for non-verbal communication”. So it’s not very academic and most of what’s in the book is very obvious (“women’s magazine style” 😉 ). But here and there, a few interesting things are mentioned.
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Posted by Michael on June 5th, 2006, in Books
read in Dutch translation by Thomas Nicolaas
I guess I chose to read this book in the context of this project to find out more about the historical biological roots of some of humans’ behaviour. But the historical context of this book itself prevents me from taking it seriously or even finishing it. After explaining the evolution of the human species as a Darwinian wet dream that could only be accepted as truth if you present it in a time frame that cannot be comprehended by the feeble human mind, it reads as such a blatant celebration and justification of the “succesful American male in the nineteen sixties” that I can’t bare to continue.
Sorry Mr. Morris, you may have been meaningful to the longhaired monkeys of your own era, but present-day naked apes don’t fall for that stuff so easily anymore. We have evolved. 😉
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Posted by Michael on June 4th, 2006, in Books
read in Dutch original:
“De acteur, atleet van het hart : Meyerhold, Decroux, Lecoq en Grotowski, pioniers van de fysieke acteur”
This is a book about the origins of “physical acting”, i.e. acting through the body. I have only read the introduction and the first chapter about Meyerhold. It’s a fascinating book that is a lot of fun to read but I couldn’t feel how it would help our project any further and I have many other things to read first.
Le Cocu Magnifique, Moscow, 1922
Meyerhold is an interesting character. He was a pupil of Stanislawski who inspired the famous American school of Method Acting. As you may know, Method Acting is all about the actor trying to really feel the emotions he needs to express on stage or film set. Despite of being life long friends, Meyerhold’s approach is completely opposite and much more related to Diderot’s theory.
Meyerhold took Diderot to its ultimate conclusion by abstracting the motions of the actors into some form of physical constructivism, in part inspired by the more folkloristic arts of Commedia dell’Arte, the circus and Elizabethan theater.
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Posted by Michael on May 26th, 2006, in Books
read in Dutch translation by Gemma Pappot from French original (1773)
Written in the Rococo period, this pamphlet argues that the best actors rely entirely on imitation skills for their performance. If they do not feel a thing themselves, they will be much more capable of moving the audience. This links the act of acting to that of writing or drawing, where observation is one half of the work and reproduction is the other.
It reminded me of our desire to build the Drama Princess system “from the outside” rather than designing the emotion first and then hoping for the proper behaviour to emerge from that.
Diderot’s concept is not very popular amongst actors. And probably never has been. Perhaps this is because they feel that he is giving their tricks away. Or perhaps because they can’t meet his high expectations. Diderot makes it very clear that what he says only applies to the best of actors, the geniuses. For mediocre actors, he admits that it may be better to really feel the emotion when playing it on stage.
Obviously, in the mean time, modern theater has developed quite different goals than imitation or even moving the audience. So perhaps these ideas apply more to movies nowadays than to the stage.
He also makes a big distinction between acting “in the Salon”, amongst friends, for fun, and acting on stage. The latter is never even based on real life, but on a text that was written by somebody else. That way, the actor is even further removed from real life. Standing on the shoulders of the poet, who was standing on those of a person in nature, the actor becomes larger than life.
I don’t know if Diderot was ultimately in favour of a very stylised, symbolic way of acting or if he thought that imitation performed by a genius actor would look naturalistic.
Here’s a quote that sounds oddly similar to things said previously in this journal:
So what defines true talent? Knowing very well the external symptoms of the soul that one borrows, directing oneself to the sentiment of our audience and deceiving them by mimicking these symptoms in an imitation that makes everything look bigger in their imagination and that shapes their judgement permanently; because another way to judge what happens inside ourselves does not exist. And what does it matter whether they do or do not play from their emotions, if we don’t notice?
(from page 99 translated from Dutch by me)
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Posted by Michael on May 16th, 2006, in Books
This book is partially an attack on the traditional games industry (in which the writer was extremely active about a decade ago) and an introduction to the technology that Mr. Crawford has been developing since he turned his back on it. Chris Crawford considers contemporary games to make extremely primitive use of the interactive medium and he argues for an approach that will allow for a lot more variety in the stories that can be told with it. He considers interactivity to be the core of the computer’s innovative potential and the algorythm to be the essential means of expression. He measures interactivity by counting verbs, by counting the amount of things that a player can do. True enough, contemporary games contain very little verbs (run, jump, shoot).
Given the current success of computer games, Mr. Crawford does not believe that any significant storytelling medium can grow out of games. Interactive Storytelling will become an art form on its own that will one day completely overshadow games.
The biggest gift to humanity in this book is a definition of interactivity that puts an end to all confusion and fuzziness that surrounds this term:
A cyclic process between two or more active agents in which each agent alternately listen, thinks and speaks.
Beautiful. Thank you, Chris.
There’s no denying that this book has been very inspiring. Mostly because I disagree with almost all of the solutions that Mr. Crawford offers. 🙂
There’s somewhat of a rant here about how I dislike the concept of a drama manager and in general the obsession with plot found in most people who are interested in stories.
Apart from that, I have an intuitive aversion of the way in which Chris Crawford attempts to express story events in semi-mathematical formulas. It’s as if he’s trying to tell a story to a computer, rather than using a computer to tell a story to a human. It’s the type of thing of which I suspect that it can only relate the essence of an event but non of the little details that make the event meaningful and emotionally interesting. The kind of cutting up into little pieces that causes the soul of an event to slip through the cracks.
But this could be a huge prejudice from my side and maybe his “algebraic approach” does pay off in the end, when his technology will be used by artists clever enough the wield the brush he is creating.
He is well on his way to actually releasing software that will enable artists to create interactive fiction according to his vision. I will be looking into Storytron more closely soon.
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