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31  General / Check this out! / Re: An impression of Fallout 3 on: June 18, 2010, 09:44:11 AM
The funny thing is that they are often still baffled when they enjoy something interactive that isn't a game per se. I recently read a comment on Erik Svedäng's Kometen from a person who had finished the game and then complained about how it wasn't a game. But he had finished the entire game. This takes hours! You can't tell me that somebody who spends hours with something doesn't like it in some way. It feels like, to some extent, gamers may have become blind, or at least under-appreciative, to the simple pleasures of aesthetics, narrative and mood.

Here's another thought, of course without having read the comment you're referring to. What if that player in fact didn't really like Kometen that much? What if the player kept playing because he expected there to be some kind of symbolic reward - points, highscore, a congratulations screen, achievement badges, anything - because that's how games tend to work? And he became utterly disappointed because he didn't get that symbolic satisfaction, which he was craving for?

I mean, in most games, you actually don't get any useful reward because you perform well. Sure in some games you can win money or other actual, tangible benefits, but in most you can't. No matter how tired I am personally of mindlessly gathering points and scores, isn't it extremely interesting to see how those completely symbolic rewards can mean so much? Friendships can end because of a game of Risk! I wouldn't be surprised if there are examples of people who have been beaten up or even killed because they won some game.

These symbolic rewards are apparently a very strong drive in most humans, so it's not strange that almost all games rely on them. You can make people do almost anything by giving them points. What's interesting about Kometen is that it's almost a game in the traditional sense - you do get a symbolic reward for each painting you visit (they light up on the map). I guess the lack of obstacles and genuine challanges disqualifies it though.

I had some more thoughts on this, how to replace points with something more interesting, but I think that would be better as a separate thread...

By the way, it's funny though that someone would use "it's not a game" as a complaint. It reminds me of something I read the other day:

Quote from: Daring Fireball
Used to be, back in the early days of DF, that those complaining about the lack of comments simply were under the impression that a site without comments was not truly a “weblog”. (My stock answer at the time: “OK, then it’s not a weblog.”)
32  General / Everything / Re: Chess vs machine vs chess vs humans on: June 10, 2010, 08:28:16 PM
I think faking intelligent and emotional behavior is one of the things computer game creators will keep being limited by for a pretty long time (I think real machine intelligence is possible, but it's far away and making better computer games is probably not the main reason to strive for it...).

Wouldn't it be interesting, by the way, to create a game that combined chess AI with Eliza-style conversations? It shouldn't be that hard to fake a conversation about such narrow a topic as chess. It could taunt you ("You better watch your rook!") and even "accidentally" reveal its strategy, depending on difficulty setting (are chess algorithms even strategy based, by the way, or are they based completely on statistics and brute force calculations?).
33  General / Everything / Re: Article Worth Reading on: June 04, 2010, 01:42:08 PM
Board games and computer games are usually very different. You couldn't do a game like PacMan in board game format. The rules and mechanics of PacMan are closer to sports than board games. Board games, card games and so on are typically about strategy, slyness, planning etc, while games like PacMan, Pong and Mario are all about reaction, timing, adrenalin...

I don't think that those types of simple computer games will ever be rejected completely, although they may be dressed up in new clothes. They are enjoyable games because of their simplicity in gameplay. As multimedia experiences they may be pretty uninteresting though.

In my opinion, the problem with computer games isn't the products that exist - it's the stuff that don't exist. There is no point or reason to decry computer games, it's much better to try and develop good alternatives and complements.
34  General / Introductions / Re: Hate to start another thread on "H". on: June 04, 2010, 09:15:21 AM
Thanks for the OS X build - certainly an interesting effect! How many individual panoramas are there in this version?

You'd likely end up with way too much data (as well as way too long rendering times) if you tried to do something like this with hi-res, full color graphics though. And then there's the additional problem of adding in animation - you would need to render the same movie again for every single one of these panoramas, so you'd end up with a huge amount of data just to get away with that.

These guys have some interesting stuff going on - www.areograph.com. Their technology also makes it possible to turn a photographed or prerendered scene into a live 3d world. They seem to have the same problems with animation and moving lights etc though...
35  General / Introductions / Re: Hate to start another thread on "H". on: June 03, 2010, 09:58:08 PM
Sounds very interesting, I'd love an OS X build!  Smiley
36  General / Introductions / Re: Hate to start another thread on "H". on: June 03, 2010, 04:35:30 PM
( Windows )
Shucks, I wish I could've tried it.

I'm not sure I understand what it is though, in what way is it different from the style of Exile and Revelation?
37  General / Introductions / Re: Hate to start another thread on "H". on: June 02, 2010, 08:53:06 AM
Uru got me into the Myst series, the opposite of most Myst fans. I can't play the old 2d versions. People go on and on about how amazing Riven was. I remember running across a forum thread about how real-time 3d couldn't possibly look as good as Riven (this was only a few years ago). Um, what? Are they playing the same game I played? It's looks terrible - grainy, poor quality video and washed out colors and a complete lack of detail. I think their memory is bumping up the quality quite a bit. CryEngine can easily pump out graphics that blow away anything you think you saw in Riven. In fact most modern 3d engines can. I really like realMYST though! If it isn't obvious, I think real-time 3d is far more immersive than Quicktime videos. I like to explore an environment, not be locked down in one view, especially in a game like Myst where exploration is everything.

Indeed, Riven is grainy, low-res and has terrible video compression at times. The textures are occasionally very blurry by today's standards, and if I want to be picky I can find all kinds of technical glitches in the modelling, rendering and compositing. The lighting might be better than most real-time lighting, but in some places it still looks crappy. The real-time water animation post processing is laughable.

You could argue that at the time, Riven was an astonishing feat in sheer technical terms, and that the stills largely look very good by today's standards too, despite the stuff mentioned above.

But it's also interesting to compare it with Revelation for instance, the fourth game in the Myst series, the last to be based on prerendered graphics. Revelation might be much more advanced technologically, but in my eyes it's still not as realistic as Riven. On the other hand, the Revelation team (Revelation was not developed by Cyan) probably weren't going for the highest possible realism, so it's hard to compare. I'm not a 3d artist so I'm not really the right person to say exactly what it is that gives Riven and Revelation there respective looks, in technical terms. Apples and oranges.

But my position is that while the technological advancements will keep making the games of yesterday pale in comparison for a good few years more, the designs themselves can be timeless and high quality enough to outlive that. I think Riven by far does this better than any other game in the Myst series. To me, that's what it's really about. That's what I mean when I say that Riven is the most photorealistic game in the series. It's more about the designs themselves, rather than the execution of those designs. Making something believable requires many things to work together, and the presentation is only part of it.
38  General / Introductions / Re: Hate to start another thread on "H". on: June 01, 2010, 09:18:12 AM
Fantastic series! I wonder what the general consent is regarding QTVR versus real-time 3D .. the visuals of Revelation are absolutely stunning at times, but the sense of freedom in realMyst is truly liberating for the genre.

+ There's also a Playstation ( and Saturn ) port of Riven for those who prefer their couch Wink

I think the difference between real-time and prerendered (slideshow/panorama) is pretty profound actually. And I'm not thinking about the visual quality, more the way you explore and experience the surroundings.

A nice analogy here is that of a motion pictures versus still images. We usually only watch a movie once or twice, even if we really like it. But if we like a painting or photograph a lot, we might hang it on the wall and watch it almost every day for the rest of our lives, and still not grow tired of it. That's one single image satisfying you for a lifetime, compared to maybe two hours of twentyfour images per second, which combined keep your interest up only for that time. We're occupied with following the dialogue, story and atmosphere, and couldn't possibly observe every single thing that happens somewhere far in the background in a few frames. But these details would certainly be an important aspect of the experience of a painting or still photograph.

I think there is a similar difference between the fluid, completely navigable realtime 3d worlds, and the more static prerendered environment of the first couple of Myst games. In a prerendered game, a small room might be represented in its entirety as a handful of images, or maybe a single panorama. This is all you get, and as a player you essentially have to assume that everything you need to see will be there, and the opposite - everything that's there will be meaningful to see. I can find myself looking at one single image in a game like Riven for a minute or more at a time, simply because that's the only way for me to really get a feeling for the environment, to scrutinize it.

In a real-time 3d game though, we might treat the environments more like we treat movies. We're less likely to stand still for a minute to look at the world - instead we will move closer to whatever it is that we want to see. Our brains simply have to do a lot more sorting out to cope with the information stream. We get a bit more impatient, we're forced to focus on the whole picture rather than the details, and we may miss some interesting observations.

I'm not saying that one of the experiences is better or more valuable than the other, just that they are different. Obviously, there are all kinds of merits to real-time 3d. But I think it's important to keep these differences in mind when designing the worlds. I think that generally, the prerendered format might work better for very condensed, detailed and information rich enviroments, while the real-time style works best in larger, more open worlds, where doing is more important than observing.

In light of this realMyst becomes interesting, since it is a real-time adaptation of a prerendered slideshow game. I agree with you that there is something very liberating about the free movement, but maybe something is lost as well. The pace is different.
39  Creation / Technology / Re: Combining live-action with interaction? on: May 28, 2010, 04:16:22 PM
Actually i read something about it a while ago, the site is translated from Swedish so maybe it wont make sense, i dunno.  Wink
Interactive horror movie


Fortunately, I'm Swedish... hadn't seen that article, looks like an interesting concept but am I a bore if I assume it may not work perfectly in reality...?
40  Creation / Technology / Combining live-action with interaction? on: May 28, 2010, 01:46:36 PM
Live actors and photography is fairly rare in interactive entertainment. We're more used to seeing various types of animation, simply because it's much easier to combine with interaction. This means that by default, games and other interactive media are more useful to tell stories about things other than the real world. If we want to tell a story about the real world, the developer has to spend a lot of time and money hunting for photorealism.

But how difficult would it be to combine live-action and complex interaction? Not necessarily an "interactive movie", but just some way of using real people but still keep it interactive. I'm not really sure what I'm looking for here, but I just thought it could be an interesting starting point for further consideration...
41  General / Introductions / Re: Hate to start another thread on "H". on: May 28, 2010, 10:09:34 AM
Thank you for your welcomes.

Welcome Utforska!

Curious regarding your recommendation of Riven: have you played all the games in the Myst series? Most people seem to agree that Riven was the strongest in any case, but I'm just wondering (I myself have only played Myst).

I've played all the games in the "core" series (Myst/realMyst, Riven, Exile, Revelation, End of Ages) but not the separate Uru series. I think Riven is the one with the strongest, most solid designs. The gameworld is believable as a real place with a real culture - you'd have a hard time finding anything that is there just to look cool or beautiful, pretty much everything is coloured by the backstory in some way. This is not true to the same extent for the other games. For the time (1997), the graphics of Riven were also just breathtaking, and in my opinion that level of photorealism is unparalleled by any of the later games. It also has the best acting in the series.

Then there are the puzzles, which are all very well-designed, if hard. The majority of them are about manipulating machinery that has a real purpose in the gameworld, so there's a lot less of the arbitrary puzzle-for-the-sake-of-being-a-puzzle stuff that you find in Myst. You probably spend about as much time exploring and understanding the story and culture of the world as you spend solving puzzles.

I think it can still be played on recent versions of Windows - there is also an open source project that lets you run it on Mac OS X (http://www.devklog.net/rivenx/) plus I think they're working on a version for iPhone OS, so if you're curious you should try it out.
42  Creation / Notgames design / Re: Are most gamedevelopers hardcore gamers? on: May 28, 2010, 09:45:07 AM
One of the problems of having outsiders create games, is that the technology is so specialized and new. As such, outsiders often come up with very conservative ideas, actually. As far as I have seen, the best ideas come from people with experience. I regret this, though. I wish it were different. It will be in the future, I think, when the technology becomes more accessible and our knowledge of the medium has grown.

I'm not sure I agree. I think there are people who have an intrinsic talent for spotting quality, but of course it's extremely hard to find them, and you wont know if you got the right person until the work is finished and you can take a look at the result.

And of course they might still end up grabbing a lot of ideas from what little they know about how computer games are "supposed" to work, but I still think there's a great opportunity for fresh ideas and perspectives if you do something like this. A bit like when people who don't know much about music theory try to write music. They stumble around and come up with all kinds of strange chord progressions that an experienced songwriter might spontaneously think of as a "mistake", but of course they don't know that they're making mistakes, so they build their whole piece around that... the result is often highly original and personal in a very un-contrived way, and often colored by the possibilities of their instrument of choice. They don't know how to imitate anyone elses musical expression, so by definition they will creating something personal.
43  Creation / Notgames design / Re: Are most gamedevelopers hardcore gamers? on: May 27, 2010, 07:55:11 PM
It would be interesting to put together a team of people who have never created computer games, aren't gamers by any stretch, but are proven outstanding creatives/experts in something tangential to games. Like, a novelist, an architect, a painter, an actor, a psychologist, a sculptor, a musician, a... well okay, not that many people, but you get the idea. A few people who have thought a lot about creativity, expression, storytelling, the author-audience relationship, and other related things. Then put them together with a small team of coders, artists, animators, and sound designers and let them brainstorm and experiment with creating something interactive. It might become a game of some kind, but it could just as well become something completely new and... notgamey.
44  General / Everything / Re: No More Sweden on: May 27, 2010, 06:54:10 PM
Seems interesting, I'm in the right country at least. It's free to go? What kinds of attendees are typically there - mostly Swedish indie game developers, or other people too? Would someone who isn't a game developer feel lost?
45  Creation / Notgames design / Exploration... in its widest sense. on: May 27, 2010, 05:00:21 PM
Exploration, to me that's one of the most compelling possibilities of games/notgames.

When I think of it, I realize that this is often the thing that attracts me most about computer games. I mean, almost all computer games have some kind of exploration in them. But there's always that pesky gameplay in-between. Mostly things to kill and avoid being killed by. That's not my cup of tea. I would enjoy just jumping into an interesting world, and explore it as I desire. I do realize however that unless there's a lot to explore, or the world is well designed enough to be interesting even when explored slowly, the interest might wear off. So there's a problem of content - it takes time to create, it takes skill to make it interesting.

But there are also other ways to explore. It doesn't have to be about navigating a landscape. Vanitas, for instance, is built on a type of exploration - exploring objects. Exploration could also be to explore a mechanic, similar to mastering a game mechanic but with out an explicit goal in mind. And what about creativity? Music for instance. When a musician say they're jamming, they're infact exploring music. Exploring what can be done with music, considering how they're affected by it, trying out new combinations, etc. Essentially, the building blocks are twelve notes, time, and a choice of timbres. And with that, you can entertain yourself for hours, days, years... same thing could be said of painting, writing, etc...

Could we achieve that feeling in a notgame? Give the notgamer some fundamental building blocks and mechanics to explore and combine in different ways, encourage creativity and curiosity, and see the creativity as a reward in itself.
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