Ludeus Maximus

“What I am illustrating here is that in film, the film director is in total control of everything you see. In games you are in control and that is really immersive. I love films like ‘The Fast & The Furious’ but I want to be in control, so games like the awesome ‘Burnout,’ allows me to control a fast car and race through streets of traffic at breakneck speeds and crash with the car splintering and crumpling on impact, in the safety of my lounge. ”

From: http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=4243

I’m taking this quote out of context because he’s a talent scout for the industry and obviously trying to burnish it’s image, but it illustrates a common fallacy that people make when talking about games. I’d like to name this the Freedom Fallacy in honor of our great nation’s founding principles (oh wait, it took us nearly 100 years to abolish slavery). This one is right up there with the Immersion Fallacy in my list of fallacies that even people in the industry make. There’s the sentiment in the game industry that we should be giving the players what they want all the time and that what they want is more control and more choices. That the game space has no place for games that are like films.

It take a second of looking at what’s on shelves to prove this wrong. JRPGs are extremely popular and up until a few years ago didn’t even change character art when equipped with a new piece of armor. Most games have extensive cutscenes, which, get this, are little non-interactive breaks in the interactive action. Metal Gear Solid is a 3 hour long movie interspersed with game sections. And hand most average consumers Garry’s Mod and they’ll quit out of boredom or confusion in an hour or two. Consumers don’t want freedom so much as they want their tastes pandered to in a way that guides them along. Most games fall into this middle segment between the extreme of Garry’s Mod at one end and an interactive movie at the other. There is a lot of room in interactive entertainment for things that aren’t very gamey; interactive movies with good and slightly deep interaction involved should be one locus of industry expansion (see Indigo Prophecy, any old school adventure game, etc.).

I also find that this mindset is the reason the industry panders to the lowest common denominator. ‘We’ll just give them what they want’ results in games like BMXXX. And it’s ironic that he distances games from film when the industry borrows so much from Hollywood. I think the industry needs director-types (or auteurs, however much its a BS concept) making games just as much as teams of collaborators. Suda51 and others remain the exception rather than the norm despite their outstanding successes.While I think it will be a while before things (technology, economics, preconceptions) even out, I’d hope that people would believe in the power of authorship in the games space given how well it works in other mediums.

Arguably you can’t make games’ version of Citizen Kanewithout the game industry’s version of Orson Welles.

Addictively hard, surprisingly deep, humorous though trying a bit too hard to be wacky. Much more fun that God of War even though its production values are rather horrible. Great pick for a primary camera angle. Being thrown off the deep end was fun in terms of the difficulty of the first fights, but I still would’ve enjoyed a tutorial to explain exactly how certain things work. Only Clover could make a game like this.

I submitted a paper and a scholarship app for the Foundations of Digital Games conference on a Disney cruise ship. My paper is part of my larger ideas about how games work as a medium, but it basically says that to have effective emotion, games mechanical structure must mirror the narrative structure. This explains, in my opinion, both a lot of the limitations of the medium people talk about as well as giving an idea of how to combat the problem. Right now the technology of games isn’t being used to create mechanical depth as much as it could be; advances in graphics and AI don’t necessarily mean deeper interaction. And the deeper interaction needed for emotion is not what consumers want, partly because of the difficulty of learning deep mechanics that aren’t natural and partly because movies and books serve the narrative niche video game makers all say they want to expand into. So, to avoid the problem altogether, people make cutscenes to partition game from narrative. Half-life was an important shift in attitude, but noone has really capitalized on it to create a deeply narrative game rather than one that is simply atmospheric.

I use horror games as my example because the connection is obvious: a scary monster in a movie appears scary and threatens the main character (whom we have empathy/sympathy/identification for/with) to create effective tension, whereas in a game the monster must both appear scary and be scary in game mechanical terms. A zombie with 1 hit point will not create fear in the player.

When I talk about limitations in the  interactive medium I mean how do you describe love in game mechanical terms. The very nature of games is dependent on the fact that we know what is happening isn’t real (read Rules of Play if you haven’t already), but the model we have to work with is. Since interaction is a property of real life shared with games, and games always hang on their unreality, game interactions have to hit a narrow sweet spot to generate emotion. Games are too concrete to be metaphorical. More realistic graphics can make this problem worse. It’s kind of ironic that fantasy and science fiction have so dominated the medium when it is the medium most true to life in many ways. Of course escapism is the reason we play games rather than live life, but there’s room for documentary, real drama, and real meaning once we open up the play space and explore the multitude of possible interactions.

I just read a very interesting conference book called Bioapparatus about the future of virtual worlds. A lot of it, even according to the final responses, devolved into misunderstanding between the artists, feminists, art theorists, and techies who attended, but it provided some interesting insight into the current state of gaming. Looking at virtual reality as an interactive medium in its infancy led them to a lot of interesting conclusions about what to do with it, many of which could serve as models for developing current interactive experiences regardless of the game industry’s lack of a fancy interface. A lot of their musings have already come true, especially one about the use of sound in virtual reality which has numerous parallels to the way sound is used in games today. I found a lot of the feminist participants who were uncomfortable with technology silly; they seemed to be saying that since technology like this is controlled by men it is evil. Obviously we need more female participation in the games industry, but them making a binary male/female, rational/intuition, technology/nature distinction is really dumb. What I really took from the book was a fresh insight into the possibilities of the medium (because its limitations weren’t discussed very much) as well as cautionary urgings not to misuse it or allow it to be misused by corporations, military, and government.