Always the same emotion.

I agree that that's a problem.
And definitely a point where such games differ from art.

To draw upon Robert McKee's ideas about story (as I described briefly here), what these games provide is not "emotion" - it is a bunch of emotionally neutral changes in value, positive (with success) and negative (with failure).

In order to be "emotion" (by this definition), the neutral value changes would have to be tied to an emotionally resonant "mood" that provides context. Kind of like a wind instrument - the value change is the vibration created in the mouthpiece, and the mood is the resonating chamber that locks and amplifies the initial vibration into a pitched note. The better aligned the gameplay (neutral value changes), mood, story, and setting, the more likely that the player will experience emotion beyond the bland sweetness of virtual coins and levels.

This is not easy, but I believe it is possible. Lately I've been encouraged in this direction by the apparent success of my little (not)game The Love Letter. This article has a great discussion of how these elements align in The Love Letter to create an experience that is more than the typical neutral pleasure of gameplay:
http://www.slowdown.vg/2012/02/25/on-the-love-letter/

Nice find! I'm looking forward to reading this...

Nice! I liked it - some interesting points about nets, linearity, exploration and rebellion.

Anyway, something caught my eye skimming over it, she claims every girl winds up dead with their broken body shown at the end. I don't remember any broken bodies. It's implied that a few of the girls die but it seems far from certain for all of them.

I'm pretty sure the article is referring to the 2D images that flash briefly at the end of the grandmother's house sequence for each girl.

Thanks for the link. I'm reading through it now.

God at play, this is looking really good! I want more!

Yes! I just left a comment on TIGSource - I think it's so great that you're actually going ahead with trying to put the Ladder of Abstraction approach into practice. Wow!

I always think of Dear Esther as the future of landscape paintings.

Yes. Something like that, at least.

That is a good point... Perhaps 'competitive action' is the right word.

I still get a 'hidden in plain sight' sensation out of this. Strangely, it feels like the industry is cheating by using competitive action (which mostly is violent action ) to make their experiences more interesting. I think I think of 'cheating' because in interviews you hear talk of engaging experiences as-if they could do them without the competitive action. Yet if you took away the violence from nearly any title most players would have the art game complaints that it 'has no purpose' or that you 'cannot do anything', so these 'engaging experiences' with characters are partly faux.

Hidden in plain sight? Reminds me of this:
http://ludusnovus.net/2011/08/15/why-so-few-violent-games/

Also, would The Love Letter count as competitive action? Maybe it would.

Actually, I've heard several players say that it feels strangely like playing a FPS because of the focus on cover and line-of-sight, so who knows...

On the other hand it uses music, sound and voice acting to create a very defined atmosphere and with great effect.

I've been reading the book Story by Robert McKee, and I just came across an idea that may have relevance here.

In the chapter on "Scene Design", McKee differentiates between emotion and mood. Mood is that stuff that games are pretty good at - it's atmosphere, it creates the context, shapes the emotional expectations of the viewer (or player), but it is not emotion in itself.

Emotion is the product of a positive or negative change in value (which in a game context might be collecting a coin, or jumping across a chasm, or killing an enemy, or conversely, getting killed), and mood. Without the action, the change in value, the mood remains inert, disembodied potential. With the action, the mood focuses the positive or negative twinge into a specific emotion.

Here's a quote from the book:

The arc of the scene, sequence, or act determines the basic emotion. Mood makes it specific. But mood will not substitute for emotion. When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller. It does the writer no good to write an exposition-filled scene in which nothing changes, then set it in a garden at sundown, thinking that a golden mood will carry the day.

I think this hits at a common failing (or at least, a common criticism) of many "art" games - just like movies or books, mood is not enough to create strong emotional engagement. You need story (or gameplay) to create positive and negative "value" that the audience will care strongly about.

I think we are just beginning to learn how to do that. I'm looking forward to it.

I finally watched Bret Victor's talk. Awesome.

I'm not going to wait and hope for him to release his see-what-the-code-is-doing-as-you-type-it tool, even though it looks really cool. As Michael said, I think it's a step in the right direction but what we need is visual on the code side too. These examples help give my brain some more concrete ideas to work with, and hopefully something good will bubble up eventually.

I just played through this little notgame by Molleindustria, same people who did Everyday the Same Dream:

Unmanned by Molleindustria

Basically an interactive story where you play the role of a character. The game-y part of it are the medals between each scene, like achievements. I didn't pay much attention to them, but I guess they're there to appeal to the more traditional gamer crowd...

Worth playing.

Kjell, I also wrote some blog posts on the subject that might help you understand why we care about this.

http://evolutionlive.blogspot.com/2007/07/art-and-engineering.html
http://evolutionlive.blogspot.com/2009/03/google-is-future-of-games.html
http://evolutionlive.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-artists-want-to-make-games.html

I find that lately I've been leaning toward the direction of becoming an expert programmer (though I am far from it, now), rather than focusing on design. Which is interesting. My ultimate goal, however, is to make a tool like this such that I no longer need to become an expert programmer.

Gah! I can't wait to watch this video!

It's like he's already onto everything we've been discussing about how great it would be to make games without programming.
http://evolutionlive.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-artists-want-to-make-games.html
http://notgames.org/forum/index.php?topic=308.0

Anyway, yeah, I'm jealous...

In fact, I have not mentioned much about this publicly because my intention was to hide in a cave, apply the concept to a game tool, and then unveil it to the public like a hero (giving credit where due of course). A dumb idea, but once you understand the vision and its implications when taken a couple steps further, you’d be tempted, too.

I know what you mean. But maybe we can work together! I know this will be a very difficult challenge, and I'm sure it could benefit from some teamwork... Even if that means working on separate attempts and just sharing progress and problems and insights along the way.

Meanwhile, I found this:

http://player.vimeo.com/video/36414371

The space is scanned with lasers by ScanLAB

It's beautiful!
I love the artifacts and the transparency. It definitely gets away from the cleanliness of 3D space.

Wow, I really like the electronic, Matrix-y grittiness of this virtual 3D space. The "vibrating" artifact that sometimes happens is pretty disturbing to me on a visceral level, but if that were a lot more infrequent I would really enjoy trying this approach.

Are there any point-cloud rendering engines or content-creation tools available that could be used for games?

"Active Art" could be a good start.

When I was trying to think of good names for the procedural or interactive prototypes I'd make to test out pieces of a potential game, I settled on the name "Active Sketch", as you can see here:
http://axcho.deviantart.com/gallery/12467959

The "Sketch" part wouldn't apply to finished artwork, of course, so I don't mean to suggest "Active Sketch" as a possible name for notgames, but I do like the "Active" part.

I think by "chaos" the writer really means "the divine" or "the truth of the cosmos". "Chaos" is her word for "everything that exists", I think. I think her recognition of that as being far beyond our human tolerance is astute. When I stand in front of a Botticelli, crying, I know that this is about as far as my emotions can take me. I feel connected to the "chaos" that is "all" but I am not equipped to directly touch it. That would be the death of me. So art becomes a filter that shows us small fragments of the divine beauty and incomprehensible immensity of the universe.

A disciplined way of art creation, such as the classical method, seems appropriate here. Because we cannot simply unleash the chaos, the truth, the cosmos. It would just look like gibberish to us. (This is probably where modernist art has failed.) The artist is standing in front of a closed door and needs to open it only slightly, while immense forces are pushing from the other side. He should not give in to the temptation of exposing the spectator to the bright light behind the door. Because it is death. Instead, he should show, by example, through metaphor, a glimpse of the beauty behind the door, so it may inspire us to feel this connection with the cosmos, truth, chaos (without the need to understand it -which is beyond our capabilities; we are simply too small, all we have is our sensations).

I like this clarification, it helps me make sense of the idea much better. Very poetic. And yeah, I like that perspective on what art is. Maybe art can be other things as well, but that is an interesting way to look at it, and it helps me understand what I find beautiful about certain things, and how that feeling might come across in a game.

Thanks for the clarification, God at Play. Nice.