Driekoningen

Manetgna: Three Magi
“The Adoration of the Magi” by Andrea Mantegna

Drie koningen found on Flickr
Photograph by Sint-Katelijne-Waver, found on Flickr.

Happy to see some children are still enjoying the celebration of the Three Kings. It’s a tradition that is slowly being replaced here by the better marketed Halloween. I used to do it as a kid: on January 6th, three friends would dress up as the wise men, we’d make a turning star on a stick and go from door to door, singing a song. People would give us money or candy. There’s also a special pie with a bean in it. And the kid who gets the piece with the bean, gets to be the black king. We’d hold a wine cork in a flame and rub it on his or her face, making it black.

The Kiss available for download

The Kiss: Incorporator

We have made the remake of our 2001 project “The Kiss: Incorporator” available for download. This version was made for an exhibition in the Flemish Parliament, curated by Muhka’s Edwin Carels.

“The Kiss: Incorporator” is made with a 3D scan of our naked bodies, kissing. The errors produced by the scanning technology expecting to find a single body, form an essential part of the piece. The result is a single mesh of two painfully stitched together naked human bodies, welded together in an eternal, devouring kiss. “The Kiss-Incorporator” allows you to navigate the cavernous “ocean of blood” inside of this mesh, through a threedimensial soundscape of industrial and natural sound loops and towards the single eternally beating machine-heart, shared by both bodies.

This project was conceived before we had even thought about making games. It was very much a part of our romantic net.art episode with Entropy8Zuper! The body scans that were the basis for the mesh in the piece, were part of a session we did for another piece, entitled Eden.Garden, which was commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and is now gathering dust on their server. It featured Auriea and I in the roles of Eve and Adam, hence the attire, or lack thereof.

Get The Kiss here!

Hardcore journalists & the other games

As the audience for games is become bigger and more diverse, criticism of the hardcore games press is getting louder. We’ve complained about this issue concerning artistic games, but apparent it’s a problem for casual games as well.

On GameSetWatch, Simon Carless discusses the situation with Joel Reed Parker, realizing that perfectly fine casual games sink to the depths of mediocrity on sites like Metacritic, simply because they are not appreciated by hardcore game journalists:

Who can I trust to tell me whether my mother would like specific Wii games, other than me? And what if I don’t know anything about Wii games? This is a major problem.

Jay Barnson argues on Tales of the Rampant Coyote that it’s fine for game journalists to have a bias. But that they shouldn’t all have the same bias:

The real issue is this – who is the audience for these games? I get really tired of reading damning comments by hardcore gaming reviewers for games that were really never intended for them.

The problem seems to be similar to the one pointed out by Kellee in the comments of a Grand Text Auto post, talking about getting innovative games selected in the Independent Games Festival:

Those are the games that typically polarize people. A game will receive either high mark or low marks, and so its final score will be average.

In the games press, the situation seems to be lot more straightforward, though. It seems like games are graded in an almost objective way. Much like teachers in schools, the journalists seem to already know all the answers to the test. And then it is up to the game to deliver. It’s like a checklist of features and the more boxes you check, the more points you get. As a result, perfectly fine casual games cannot possible get a high score because they don’t have explosions, HDR lighting, bumpy monsters, character classes, complicated sphere grids, etc. This checklist attitude also means that journalists are absolutely incapable of dealing with features that are not in their list, or in the school test analogy, answers to questions that they didn’t ask (aka creativity).

On Lost Garden, Danc complains about Super Mario Galaxy, which was praised to the high heavens by the press but ultimately turns out to be much too difficult for the unsuspecting Wii player:

Each player has their own distinct playing style and many of these preferences are rarely captured by the hardcore journalists who review most games.

I disagree with Simon Carless that

this may be the moment in the history of games where the reviewers start diverging from the mainstream in a major fashion

as happened in movies some time ago. Simply because I don’t consider hardcore games to be on par with art films, culturally. But I am glad that we are starting to notice the discrepancies between the rhetoric of the games industry and the reasons why many people are actually playing games.

2008!


(click for a huge-ish version of this ;))

Happy new year to all who may be reading our blog! Thank you for your thoughts and comments, here and in the forums, over the last year! And big love to all who play The Endless Forest, you’ve made it a wonderful adventure to work on and play in!

An 8 themed card for 2008. I’m hoping that this will be a portend, may we get that project back on track this year!

Tales of Tale of Tales of 2007

2007 has been a very full year, here at Tale of Tales.

Game Developers Conference Museo Tamayo

We crossed the Atlantic Ocean twice. After over 5 years of personal boycott against traveling to the USA, we flew over “for business” to participate in the Game Developers Conference in San Francsico. We showed The Endless Forest and a teaser for The Path in the BGIn booth on the exhibition floor. It was the first time we attended the American GDC. In August we crossed the ocean again, but this time with the much more pleasant destination of Mexico City, where we helped set up our first ever solo exhibition in Museo Tamayo. On the way back, we met with Jarboe, The Path’s music composer, in her black crow’s nest in Atlanta.

The Path demo prototype alpha 1 The Path demo alpha 2

The Path was our main focus this year. In January we implemented Drama Princess in the prototype of what was then still called 144. This marked the beginning of the real preproduction period. In May we had a first playable prototype for internal evaluation. And in October we submitted a second one with revised interaction design to the Independent Games Festival. In December The Path was selected in the “Excellence in Visual Art” category of the festival.
In November, CultuurInvest granted us a loan for the production of The Path. Realizing that there was this large chunk of money that we have to pay back, forced us to take the commercial aspect of the project a lot more seriously. This lead to the decision to release The Path via retail as well, and not just through digital download.

This very blog was started in February 2007. It was a big step for us because it signified our official acceptance, if reluctantly, of “web 2.0” after extensive nostalgia for the good old web of the 1990s that we still miss dearly to this very day. But the blog has been good to us. It allowed us to share our ideas about game design with the world and doubled the amount of visits to our website. In August, 36,000 people vistited this website, a personal record.
The most popular blog posts were Good games, bad games, ugly games, Games journalists and The New Games, Player-created gameplay, our interview with American McGee and the controversial Ten reasons why computer games are not games.

The Endless Forest Phase Three Day of the Dead in The Endless Forest

The Endless Forest continued to grow as well. We proudly crossed the 10,000 players mark in January, only to cross the 20,000 players mark in October, after releasing Phase Three of the project in September (almost exactly 2 years after the release of Phase One). There were several days when over 300 registered players visited the forest, one day even over 500. In November, the Forest turned dark and misty in celebration of Halloween.
Throughout the year, The Endless Forest was also on display in several art exhibitions around the world. There was the big Gameworld exhibition in Spain, curated by Carl Goodman and Daphne Dragona. And there was Rasa’s traveling Pixel Me exhibition for teenagers. There was the show in Mexico city, another one in Novi Sad, Serbia, one in Lleida in Spain, and in Lancaster, UK. We even showed the game in our home city of Gent, Belgium, at the birthday party of Vooruit.

2007 was also the year of Indiecade, with shows in US and the UK where 8 and The Endless Forest were on display.

The Kiss: Incorporator Vernanimalcula

In November, we remade a 2001 piece entitled The Kiss:Incorporator for a Muhka-curated exhibition in the Flemish Parliament (right in the middle of that funny Belgian government crisis). And in the beginning of the year, we released our first piece of corporate art: a screensaver called Vernanimalcula for the National Bank of Belgium.

The Path in Edge magazine Game Connection 2007

In 2007, we had several interesting contacts with the games industry. The double spread feature about The Path in Edge magazine is certainly a highlight. But our personal conversations with people from Steam, Sony, Nintendo and Ubisoft made a big impression as well. Not to mention the marathon meetings at the Game Connection in Lyon with Electronic Arts, Microsoft, THQ, DTP, Buka, 1C, Playlogic and many more.

All of this setting us up for a wild ride through 2008!…

Happy New Year!

Noir games?

What we’ve got left is a huge gulf between popular, full-experience 3D action/adventure games that need to be financial blockbusters to survive, and marginalized casual/handheld/movie licensed games that don’t register on the mass consciousness radar.

We need our B films. We need that freedom to explore truly meaningful new avenues of interaction, quickly and nimbly, without the pressure of an eight-figure budget and multi-year dev schedule weighing down on the whole enterprise. Noir already scouted this territory for us.

Noir begs game developers to reign in the scope of their production budgets, and the conflicts they depict. The noir approach promises games wherein the player isn’t saving the kingdom, world or galaxy; wherein the ubermensch doesn’t mow down a thousand men; wherein we can experience familiar settings in a new way, and infuse the everyday with the extraordinary.

Steve Gaynor on Gamasutra

I’m glad the writer isn’t satisfied with what somebody in the comments calls “indie/mini/flash/casual (whatever) games” but is calling for a kind of game design that is still ambitious while finding budget-friendly ways of using the technology. I also like his suggestion of certain themes, popular in film noir, that are easier to portray than epic, massive war stories. And I share his belief that this type of production can lead to revitalizing the medium and lifting it up to a higher artistic standard.

More resources for prototypes

Senior producer at Sony Computer Entertainment America Santa Monica, Rusty Buchert, in an article about game pitching by Brendan Sinclair, GameSpot on Gamespot:

The biggest change [Mr. Buchert would] like to see is more resources given to developers to create functional prototypes for their game ideas.

“That’s where we’re hurting,” Buchert said. “Somebody needs the time to test out this new idea and see if it pans out without committing to a full development process and discovering halfway in that it isn’t going to work.”
[…]
Such an outcome is bad for the industry, Buchert believes, because it winds up producing bad games that don’t deliver on their early promises. This hurts gamers because it both produces a game that isn’t as good as it could have been and makes them more apprehensive about buying games in the future because they don’t want to get stung twice.

Makes sense to me. And it seems that Sony is taking a leading role in this, especially via the Playstation Network. We’ve talked with Sony people over here ourselves, and they seemed quite interested in investing in prototyping.

I can sympathize with publishers being uncomfortable with taking big risks. Developing and marketing a game can be very expensive. Greenlighting the entire project in one go, based on an idea, a design document or even a preliminary demo, would make me quite nervous as well. Taking one step at a time seems like a much more sensible approach.
Greenlighting every step of the process separately, starting with the prototype, makes the initial investment much smaller. As a result, publishers will be much more comfortable with taking risks. And they also won’t run the risk of missing out on an opportunity that they didn’t recognize in a first round. The developer, working through the process with a publisher, will also understand much better why a game is ultimately considered a good investment or not.
Developers also would get burnt a lot less frequently if the greenlighting process was more gradual. Now we are expected to be enthusiastic and passionate about our ideas from the onset. And while that’s easy from an artistic point of view, it’s quite difficult from a commercial one (since developers obviously know less about about the market than publishers do).
A tight collaboration between publisher and developer in the production of a commercial game, sounds like a good idea to me.

The editing of games

When looking for the essence of a medium in order to exploit it and create the best possible work with that medium, it’s easy to make mistakes. When movies came about, I’m sure people considered the fact that the image moved to be the one thing that defined the medium, its tool that should be used for expression. Now we know that this is incorrect: the real crucial aspect of film making is editing. Editing the flow of a film is unique to the medium and is the ultimate tool for expressing its content.

Film editing, by definition, is the only art that is unique to cinema and which defines and separates filmmaking from almost all other art forms. The job of an editor isn’t merely to mechanically put pieces of a film together, nor to just cut off the film slates, nor merely to edit dialogue scenes. Film editing is an art form which can either make or break a film. (Wikipedia)

I bet nobody saw that coming in the early days of film. It was something that needed to be discovered through trial and error and inspiration.

Games may face a similar problem. We are all very quick to assume that interactivity is the most important aspect of this new medium. But is this correct? Is designing interactivity to games what editing is to film?