Nice to have you back

Oh. Well I find him to be incredibly imaginative. But he's just one guy, and moving things around seems like a good first step before logic. I just hope there are other people out there building off his ideas. IMO they're too good to just leave alone.

I really hope there's some people implementing his research in the field of videogames.

Also, it's important to note that he has a great system for programmatic animation, but he hasn't really figured out logic yet. Right now his solution is choosing pre-made actions with sentence syntax. It'd be great to see someone taking his approach and going after logic.

Yeah it seems the BBC is getting more in-depth about videogames lately, which is really interesting. For example, they featured us and interviewed Ryan not too long ago in a segment related to more serious subject matter for Click: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23552381

This is awesome! Thanks for sharing. 

I think they went for structure because the game was meant to represent an archetype. It was trying to be every kind of story, instead of one very specific story. I see it as a tribute to the structure of the story in an archetypal sense.

While creating something that results in a strong emotional reaction is difficult just by itself, I think you raise a valid concern, Henrik.

One way we've been able to avoid being manipulative in our game is by creating something based on an intense life experience. Even toning the game down a lot and reducing our prototype from a real-life 6 hours to a game-time 10 minutes still leaves us with an emotionally intense experience. One could argue we are doing the opposite of making something seem more emotional than it is by being manipulative. We've taken several steps to try to make it less emotional, and in one case we failed: http://www.blackjacketstudios.com/gdc/gdc-2013/

And actually we have a situation of extreme emotional flux as well, but again it's based on what happened in real life. That's just how it works sometimes; laughter comes in the midst of pain. I think as long as the flux is believable, you're fine using that.

I see. Well then I'd strongly suggest that your world is aware of this struggle and needed determination and communicates that well to the player. If you can do that, you should be good.

Otherwise you'll have the problem of the puzzles taking the player out of the experience. And if immersion of part of your goal, you don't want that. >_<

Live as in for free? I would love to see that talk.

In terms of "listening to your design", our design has basically told us to go in this direction. Interesting!

Also Thomas is probably my favorite game design blogger. So good 

I've just returned from GDC. There are enough experiences recently released and in development that are amazing players that we can probably stop worrying about "that's not a game" comments.

The only defense remaining was immature gamers and threatened game developers, but I saw all sorts of praise for things this year that had no game elements whatsoever. I'd say your defense is good and we can move on to the next step.

Cool project! Just curious, what's your intention behind using puzzles? Just following tradition, or something deeper? (either answer is valid, just curious)

Yeah, I know you weren't evaluating the term as such, you were just going with it for the time being. I do the same thing, too. ^_^

Never said hi, here, so...hi

I love your analysis of dys4ia. I don't think I buy the usage of the phrase "procedural diegesis," though. I'm trying to formulate why that is...maybe this will turn into a blog post, I dunno.

Anyway, welcome.

Hey Zak, welcome, and nice work on your site