by Raymond Queneau
99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style
by Matt Madden
These two books both belong firmly in the “Secret Books” category. Neither book has anything explicit to say about games and you’d probably be hard pressed to find anything immediately useful in either one, but they tend to appear on the bookshelves of game designers with surprising frequency.
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Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardruip-Fruin (Eds).
When we come to discuss writing fiction for games it is common to focus on ’story’ or ‘plot’, which leads to the inevitable debate about whether an interactive game can tell an authored story, or whether the two are wholly inimicable. While this may be an interesting debate, it overlooks much of the craft of writing fiction. The plot is only part of what makes a good story; characterisation plays an equal role, as does the construction of a believable setting.
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Six Walks in the Fictional Woods
by Umberto Eco.
In my recent review of Peter Rabbit I spoke about the dangers of “AI Arrogance” and the embarrassment of Narrative AI research that is done without an up-to-date understanding of narrative theory. Now I must confess that I am not as well informed in this area as I might be. I have attempted on several occasions to read some of the canonical books in this area (Booth, Genette, Brooks) and found them rather dry and hard going. Perhaps it is true of any creative discipline: there are those who are engaging authors and those who are skilled theoreticians.
Umberto Eco is the rare exception, (more…)
Jespel Juul and Marleigh Norton presented a paper at the recent Foundations of Digital Games conference in which they questioned the popular wisdom that games should have “easy to use interfaces, but … provide difficult gameplay challenges”. To quote from the abstract:
this paper argues that it is rare to find a clear-cut border between interface and gameplay and that the fluidity of this border characterizes games in general. While this border is unclear, we also analyze a number of games where the challenge is unambiguously located in the interface, thereby demonstrating that “easy interface and challenging gameplay” is neither universal nor a requirement for game quality. Finally, the paper argues, the lack of a clear distinction between easy interface and challenging gameplay is due to the fact that games are fundamentally designed not to accomplish something through an activity, but to provide an activity that is pleasurable in itself.
I argue that they are wrong and the reason for their error is that they are regarding games from the point of view of the player, not of the designer. I will be so bold as to claim that it is of critical importance that the designer makes a very clear distinction between the gameplay and the interface and tries to always abide be the “easy to use, challenging to play” maxim.
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All of us who have been struggling to work out how to make meaningful games and interactive narratives can rest easy. The problem has been solved.
Elliot McGucken has applied for a patent for a system which, in his words, is: (more…)
Dan Ariely has given another TED talk this time addressing our everyday irrational behaviour.
I have volunteered to hold the Australasian Interactive Entertainment Conference (IE2009) at UNSW this December. Here is the Call for Papers:
[Please forward to your networks as appropriate.
Apologies if you receive multiple copies.]
========== IE2009: CALL FOR PAPERS ==========
IE2009: The 6th Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment
14-16 December 2009, Sydney, Australia
http://ieconference.org/ie2009/
*** Important Dates ***
Paper Submission: 21 Aug 2009
Short Papers/Demo Submission: 1 Sep 2009
Author Notification: 1 Oct 2009
Camera Ready Papers: 1 Nov 2009
Conference: 14-16 Dec 2009
The Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment, in its sixth year, is a cross-disciplinary conference that brings together researchers from artificial intelligence, audio, cognitive science, cultural studies, drama, HCI, interactive media, media studies, psychology, computer graphics, as well as researchers from other disciplines working on new interactive entertainment specific technologies or providing critical analysis of games and interactive environments.
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As a CS academic getting into games, I am of course concerned with publishing legitimate research and having it recognised by the academic community. Every discipline has its established conferences and journals with their own protocols for publication and standards for what constitutes valid research. As the academic study of games is still relatively new, I have found that we are still trying to find out feet in this area. Games researchers come from a variety of different backgrounds — computer science, critical theory, psychology, education — and the expectations of one group may not be the same as those of another.
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Even if we agree that we want to make art of some variety, there is a very real question as to whether games can do the things we want to do. Jason Rohrer says he wants to make games with depth, which continue to speak to the audience over many playings and many years, in the same way that a significant piece of literature, theatre or visual art can. Even the best ‘art games’ do not achieve this; they generally don’t offer many different interpretations and replaying the game doesn’t often yield much in the way of additional insight (beyond, perhaps, a second playing).
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I’ve been to several talks recently at GDC, GDX and various universities about games as “art”. Some say that games are already art, or have always been art; some say that games aren’t yet art and maybe can never be; and there are many views in between. There is a push for game designers to better understand art history and their position within it.
To me the whole term “art” is problematic. (more…)
, by James Paul Gee.
