Everkvetch

Parenting moment for the day

I was walking around the block with my daughter on my shoulders.  On the street behind our house I was overtaken by a mother carrying a small dog and her little seven or eight year old son proudly carrying a dvd or game box.  As they passed I noticed that it was a copy of Grand Theft Auto 4 that she had just purchased for him.

What can you do?  We try to police ourselves....

PS3 feeling embattled?

Ok, so maybe this is overstating it a bit.  Sony has recently released a PS3 commercial showing clips of released and soon to be released games.  The voice over was a segment of the St. Crispian day's speech from Henry V ("We happy few, we band of brothers...")

http://youtube.com/watch?v=P9fa3HFR02E

Somehow I don't equate the console wars with the importance of the Battle of Agincourt, but it does give some interesting insight into Sony's current mindset regarding to their market position.  Of course, it will be interesting to see if Sony is able to pull off a Prince Hal.  No word yet if Ballmer has sent a case of tennis balls to the Sony executive team.

Can a game make you cry?

I don't know how I missed this one, but I learned about a quirky little game called Passage while reading Clint Hocking's blog.  Now I know I'm more emotional than the average male gamer and I seek out games that resonate emotionally.  I didn't expect to tear up at the end of a little 5 minute, 8bit art game.

But I did.

And I'm not at all ashamed of it.

Why don't more games find interesting ways to play with our emotions?

GDC08 - Hecker v. Hocking v. Taylor v. Wolpaw v. Koster(?) (sort of)

OK - this takes some explaining.

I was watching a show about pre-code movies on TCM and I started thinking about Hocking's rant that we don't have enough emotional depth in our games. ("Why can't medal of Honor be about HONOR? "  [great quote]).  This led me to consider what elements of classic movies might we find games in. 

Since the show was talking pre-code, which meant that studios showed as much as they could and more.  Sex was huge pre-code.  This led to Taylor's comment from the are games trivial panel that he was really looking forward to moving past violence and getting to the point where we could make games based on sex because sex is fun. [i'm mangling the exact quote, but the gist is there.]

In classic movies more time was devoted to developing character and relationships, and there were  idiosyncratic characters that provided color but who were also developed as entities on their own.  So even post code, there are probably things that are worth mining from the movies in the TCM vaults and beyond.

Back to Hocking - why is it that the most meaningful relationship in a game this past year was with a f***in' cube?

To Wolpaw - because they leveraged the narrative of Portal with its feeling of isolation toward a real-world psychosis exhibited by individuals placed in extended periods of actual isolation.  It was brilliant.

Oh, tand it really works because the minute we try to do something that smacks of a real human connection we fall into Mori's uncanny valley.  We know what interacting with humans is like, so when we encounter something that is close, but not quite right, we are unable to appreciate how it is close to correct, instead fixating on (and being weirded out by) the chasm that is exposed by the imperfection.

Which brings me to Hecker's structure versus style talk.  Hecker draws analogies between other fields that have benefited by separating content from display and posits that AI will have a solution that falls in to this pattern as well, that there will be a 'photoshop of AI' someday.  He states that this is necessary because academic AI work results in neural nets that are opaque and exceedingly difficult to reason about.  Game AI is not designed to make really believable characters yet, instead focusing on believable or at least reasonable behaviors to challenge players as they try to achieve a goal, but not being reasonable actors in a more general world (this may be my misinterpretation...)

So to sum up so far.  We want to have more meaningful interactions in games.  There are a lot of interesting interactions that come from interpersonal relationships.  Some of these relationships might not involve killing large quantities of {androids|stormtroopers|aliens|demons|flood|terrorists|blobs...etc.}  But we don't do people particularly well, and it may be some time before we can regardless of Hocking's "It's f***ing code, we can do anything.".  Therefore at present we need to rely on psychological tricks to make us invest more in the absence of character than if there were really a character present.

Which brings me to Koster's participation in the Luminaries Luncheon during which it was stated that next gen is not about graphics or raw processing power, but about forming communities around your game or platform and the meta games that get played on them (ie achievements and creating great Mii's).

And this is where I get stuck...  What's next?  There are all of these little pieces and thousands more fighting to coalesce into something useful.  I need to give this more thought.