alias_sqbr (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
alias_sqbr) wrote2014-09-24 07:02 pm
alias_sqbr) wrote2014-09-24 07:02 pm
Entry tags:
- australia,
- computer games,
- lecture notes,
- links,
- list,
- me,
- perth,
- rec
Deep Games
These are the notes I took at Christy Dena's lecture and workshop on Deep Games. Overall it was a really great experience! I've added links for things I mean to check out later myself.
First everyone introduced themselves.
Christy's done a wide range of games and game-like things: installations, ARGs, transmedia. She's used sound as a cross platform way to communicate.
The rest of the participants were like 60% software engineers who thought making games sounded like more fun, 15% indie game makers from other backgrounds (like me), 20% arts and transmedia majors who thought the lecture sounded educational, 5% random bored people who didn't know anyone was going to ask them to introduce themselves.
Christy started by talking about her own games, including AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS. She made the game "Magister Ludi" ("Master of the Game") as an art installation subverting the "room escape": instead each room is a vicious cycle like an abusive relationship. She asked us to brainstorm how WE would implement that, then told us how she did: you place objects which make it harder to leave, like a phone which when placed says "You have successfully deleted all your friends" and gets you positive feedback from your abusive partner.
Quality games have a continuity of mechanics and message. You have to find the core of your game and remove anything that takes away from that core.
In most AAA games the mechanic is killing things. There are only so many stories you can tell which make sense with that mechanic. Far Cry 3 and Spec Ops subvert this a little by having you kill "bad guys" then having the protagonist question if they're the good guy after all.
First person character arc: the monomyth/heroes journey.
"Journey" set in a hilly desert which evokes the "Savannah Bias". Like the green rolling hills of Teletubbies. It creates the emotional beats of the monomyth with changes in colour, difficulty, freedom. You are always striving towards a mountain, an effective internal drive. The only "NPC" is another player with very limited ability to communicate.
Dear Esther and Gone Home use a "thin plane" of (gameplay?), vastly limiting your choices to emphasise the environment and story.
Pixar have a theme to each story and every character in the story reflects that theme. Try and do the same thing.
The questions you should ask about any character (game related or otherwise):
What do they want? What do they need? What is their Strength? What is their weakness? what do they fear? What do they love? How does the character generally see the world and vice versa?
In one of Christy's games her theme is something like learning to know yourself, and she has the answers to these questions for each character reflect different facets and steps along the journey towards self knowledge.
Book rec: "David Perry on Game Design: A Brainstorming Toolbox". Creating Emotional Complexity in games:
Sample shots from the movie Blue Velvet as an example of incongruity: Shiny suburbia with green grass, then the gross insects crawling in the dirt below.
30 Flights of Loving is a short free game which plays around with sudden cuts, flashbacks and metaphorical scenes with no warning or explanation.
Valiant Hearts has you play through the same period of WWI from the POV of three different people on different sides with different challenges and even game mechanics.
The Walking Dead offers choices, including a timer that moves on if you're too slow, and the choice to say nothing. Creates tension and makes you think quickly. This approach was made popular by Mask. (Of course then there's the accessibility concerns...)
One Chance: You can work on saving the world, or spend time with your family.
Every choice should have gains and losses. The player/character has to decide what they value more. There should be no unambiguously "best" choice.
Choice Modifiers:
Murasaki Baby on the Vita uses the touch screen to have you pull a little girl by the hand through a platformer of dangers.
Immortall and Lim use very simple mechanics to make you very quickly MISERABLE AS ALL HELL. If a character helps you, you feel attached to them and want to protect them.
Christy Dena on Pinterest has a long list of interesting games.
War on Terror: a boardgame where you wear a balaclava saying "Evil".
A Night in Ferguson uses a regular pack of cards as a metaphor about black people and white people.
Dominique Pamplemousse is exlicitely ambiguous about the player character's gender
Places which host and curate intetresting games:
Newgrounds, walkdrive (?), forest ambassador
Airport Security is a simple game where you are an increasingly overwhelmed security guard with bizarre rules to follow. Papers Please takes a similar concept and makes you empathise with the patrons too, and includes external pressures like a sick family.
Blowtooth: in a real airport you have to get close enough to ping the wifi of a random stranger who is "carrying your (imaginary) contraband through customs" and find them after the security check. Supposed to make players question things but I think it'll just get you arrested.
The UK department of transport commissioned an MMORPG which used metaphorical "roads" of spirit energy to successfully teach road safety.
Book rec: "Metaphors We Live By" by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Schema are structures we use to organise how we see the world. Construct a one to one correspondence between schema to create a powerful and effective metaphor.
Here are the parts of a schema, using the example of cleaning:
Personal Growth Game for your character: come up with a coherent "superhero identity": name, greatest power, kryptonite, greatest fear, what they believe in/are fighting for, allies, all matching the same theme.
Some games set up simple but carefully chosen rules to create emergent structures and creativity from the players: Minecraft, Sims, Rust, Dwarf Fortress, EVE Online
Guild Wars 2 has rules chosen to encourage collaboration and friendliness, apparently has a different vibe to otherwise similar MMORPGs like WoW.
The lecture:workshop ratio didn't match the provided timetable which was probably annoying for those who'd only planned/paid for one. We only had time for her to start workshopping one person's ideas right at the end: as it happens, mine, since I mentioned I had a character from an existing game to discuss. I've never had a story idea workshopped before and it was FREAKING INTENSE, I had to stop myself doing the typical "STOP CRITICISNG MY BABY" thing. Also I felt self conscious describing a plot involving lesbian vampires >.> We went through the superhero exercise above. We didn't entirely succeed, partly because I was getting tired and didn't understand all her criticisms. Also people kept making suggestions with unfortunate subtexts, like "metaphorical blindness". NOT IN MY GAME THANKS.
Misc recs of interesting games:
Road Not Taken
Social Caterpillar
Ichiyo
Other resources:
GDC Online
GameCloud.net.au Perth Gaming site, had a guy there taking notes for an article
Meaningful Games Conference (I think?)
Critical Proximity
Games for Change
Escape Hunt Perth (Don't go to Mystic room in Cannington)
The FTI lab in the WA State Libray was perfectly accessible for my wheelchair, and the woman assisting was very nice about offering me help if I needed it. The nearby disabled toilets required a bit more heavy pushing than seems acessible. But skimming the magazines while I waited I came across the spinal injuries australia magazine, which had an interview with that paraplegic guy who gets reblogged a lot on tumblr.
First everyone introduced themselves.
Christy's done a wide range of games and game-like things: installations, ARGs, transmedia. She's used sound as a cross platform way to communicate.
The rest of the participants were like 60% software engineers who thought making games sounded like more fun, 15% indie game makers from other backgrounds (like me), 20% arts and transmedia majors who thought the lecture sounded educational, 5% random bored people who didn't know anyone was going to ask them to introduce themselves.
Christy started by talking about her own games, including AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS. She made the game "Magister Ludi" ("Master of the Game") as an art installation subverting the "room escape": instead each room is a vicious cycle like an abusive relationship. She asked us to brainstorm how WE would implement that, then told us how she did: you place objects which make it harder to leave, like a phone which when placed says "You have successfully deleted all your friends" and gets you positive feedback from your abusive partner.
Quality games have a continuity of mechanics and message. You have to find the core of your game and remove anything that takes away from that core.
In most AAA games the mechanic is killing things. There are only so many stories you can tell which make sense with that mechanic. Far Cry 3 and Spec Ops subvert this a little by having you kill "bad guys" then having the protagonist question if they're the good guy after all.
First person character arc: the monomyth/heroes journey.
"Journey" set in a hilly desert which evokes the "Savannah Bias". Like the green rolling hills of Teletubbies. It creates the emotional beats of the monomyth with changes in colour, difficulty, freedom. You are always striving towards a mountain, an effective internal drive. The only "NPC" is another player with very limited ability to communicate.
Dear Esther and Gone Home use a "thin plane" of (gameplay?), vastly limiting your choices to emphasise the environment and story.
Pixar have a theme to each story and every character in the story reflects that theme. Try and do the same thing.
The questions you should ask about any character (game related or otherwise):
What do they want? What do they need? What is their Strength? What is their weakness? what do they fear? What do they love? How does the character generally see the world and vice versa?
In one of Christy's games her theme is something like learning to know yourself, and she has the answers to these questions for each character reflect different facets and steps along the journey towards self knowledge.
Book rec: "David Perry on Game Design: A Brainstorming Toolbox". Creating Emotional Complexity in games:
- Player is forced to do evil
- We see the POV of an NPC we are ambivalent about
- Feel more positively towards someone we felt negative about and vice versa
- Player finds out they've been tricked or used
- Player is helpless to aid a loved one
- Good and Evil isn't the same as White and Black
- Force the player to violate their integrity
- Ingrongruity: positive and negative feelings at the same time about the same thing or person
Sample shots from the movie Blue Velvet as an example of incongruity: Shiny suburbia with green grass, then the gross insects crawling in the dirt below.
30 Flights of Loving is a short free game which plays around with sudden cuts, flashbacks and metaphorical scenes with no warning or explanation.
Valiant Hearts has you play through the same period of WWI from the POV of three different people on different sides with different challenges and even game mechanics.
The Walking Dead offers choices, including a timer that moves on if you're too slow, and the choice to say nothing. Creates tension and makes you think quickly. This approach was made popular by Mask. (Of course then there's the accessibility concerns...)
One Chance: You can work on saving the world, or spend time with your family.
Every choice should have gains and losses. The player/character has to decide what they value more. There should be no unambiguously "best" choice.
Choice Modifiers:
- Balance: gains and losses
- Urgency: Timed responses
- Interpersonal consequences: characters think less of you etc
- Satistical consequences eg you gain Charisma
Murasaki Baby on the Vita uses the touch screen to have you pull a little girl by the hand through a platformer of dangers.
Immortall and Lim use very simple mechanics to make you very quickly MISERABLE AS ALL HELL. If a character helps you, you feel attached to them and want to protect them.
Christy Dena on Pinterest has a long list of interesting games.
War on Terror: a boardgame where you wear a balaclava saying "Evil".
A Night in Ferguson uses a regular pack of cards as a metaphor about black people and white people.
Dominique Pamplemousse is exlicitely ambiguous about the player character's gender
Places which host and curate intetresting games:
Newgrounds, walkdrive (?), forest ambassador
Airport Security is a simple game where you are an increasingly overwhelmed security guard with bizarre rules to follow. Papers Please takes a similar concept and makes you empathise with the patrons too, and includes external pressures like a sick family.
Blowtooth: in a real airport you have to get close enough to ping the wifi of a random stranger who is "carrying your (imaginary) contraband through customs" and find them after the security check. Supposed to make players question things but I think it'll just get you arrested.
The UK department of transport commissioned an MMORPG which used metaphorical "roads" of spirit energy to successfully teach road safety.
Book rec: "Metaphors We Live By" by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Schema are structures we use to organise how we see the world. Construct a one to one correspondence between schema to create a powerful and effective metaphor.
Here are the parts of a schema, using the example of cleaning:
- Participants: cleaner
- Parts: Bucket, sponges, things to be cleaned etc
- Stages: Preparation, doing the dishes, vacuuming, packing away, etc
- Linear Stages: water has to go into the sink before you can wash the dishes
- Purpose: to convert dirty things to clean things
Personal Growth Game for your character: come up with a coherent "superhero identity": name, greatest power, kryptonite, greatest fear, what they believe in/are fighting for, allies, all matching the same theme.
Some games set up simple but carefully chosen rules to create emergent structures and creativity from the players: Minecraft, Sims, Rust, Dwarf Fortress, EVE Online
Guild Wars 2 has rules chosen to encourage collaboration and friendliness, apparently has a different vibe to otherwise similar MMORPGs like WoW.
The lecture:workshop ratio didn't match the provided timetable which was probably annoying for those who'd only planned/paid for one. We only had time for her to start workshopping one person's ideas right at the end: as it happens, mine, since I mentioned I had a character from an existing game to discuss. I've never had a story idea workshopped before and it was FREAKING INTENSE, I had to stop myself doing the typical "STOP CRITICISNG MY BABY" thing. Also I felt self conscious describing a plot involving lesbian vampires >.> We went through the superhero exercise above. We didn't entirely succeed, partly because I was getting tired and didn't understand all her criticisms. Also people kept making suggestions with unfortunate subtexts, like "metaphorical blindness". NOT IN MY GAME THANKS.
Misc recs of interesting games:
Road Not Taken
Social Caterpillar
Ichiyo
Other resources:
GDC Online
GameCloud.net.au Perth Gaming site, had a guy there taking notes for an article
Meaningful Games Conference (I think?)
Critical Proximity
Games for Change
Escape Hunt Perth (Don't go to Mystic room in Cannington)
The FTI lab in the WA State Libray was perfectly accessible for my wheelchair, and the woman assisting was very nice about offering me help if I needed it. The nearby disabled toilets required a bit more heavy pushing than seems acessible. But skimming the magazines while I waited I came across the spinal injuries australia magazine, which had an interview with that paraplegic guy who gets reblogged a lot on tumblr.