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Author Topic: The essence of stories  (Read 28022 times)
Michaël Samyn

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« Reply #15 on: October 23, 2010, 10:50:12 AM »

I have been thinking about making a game about pure joy

The Endless Forest has been called exactly that. Smiley

But we didn't set out with the intention to "make a game about pure joy".
No, we wanted to make a game in which you play a deer in an endless forest and where players could not hurt each other. That's all. The rest was painting.
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Michaël Samyn

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« Reply #16 on: October 23, 2010, 10:55:12 AM »

Oh, and in conclusion: Fuck Hamlet!  Cheesy

We can do much much better than that.
But not by imitating or repurposing other media. We need to find and use our own strengths.
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Thomas

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« Reply #17 on: October 23, 2010, 05:48:42 PM »

Quote
We can do much much better than that.
But not by imitating or repurposing other media. We need to find and use our own strengths.

The problem is that it is so easy to lean back on past experiences and think "I want to achieve that!", often think of a movie or book. I find myself into this line of thinking all the time, and I think the problem is because of good role models. For many of the things I want to achieve I know no videogame that have come close to this, and so instead think of books or movies. This is very hurtful, because then one might get stuck into thinking that is not working or get goals that are unrealistic. So I think having an open mind is very important here and also thinking out of the box. But I guess that is one of the difficulties that one face when trying to evolve a medium Smiley
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Jeroen D. Stout

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« Reply #18 on: October 23, 2010, 09:02:38 PM »

For all of this to exist within an open game world means that there has to be an incredible amount of luck for all of this to occur.

That's because you're doing it wrong.  Tongue

If you already know what the outcome of the experience of your game will be, write a book instead or make a movie. Procedurality is about creating opportunities. It's not for expressing opinions or sending messages.

[...]

I want that pride of a fully functional moral system. And for that to occur, some elements just cannot be up to the player.

Again, this is not a good medium for that kind of "indoctrination".
The moral system you need to work with is the one of the player. Your work should hook into that. You can make some assumptions about what this moral system will be. But you have to accept that you could be wrong. And then accept that people are going to have a very different experience. Or simply not get it.

It's not about information.
And it's not about triggering an emotion (like "pride"). It's fine to have that as a goal, to guide the design process, much like telling a story can be a fine guide. But if all you do is express your own ideas and tell your own story, then you're not using the medium to its best capacity. And you will not achieve the sublime.

There we disagree.

I am not the provider of a playground, I am a thinker and an author. I wish to create stories about things on which I have an opinion and see in a certain way. If I think 'achieving knowledge' is noble I will make a game in which the feat of achieving knowledge is shown as the ideal the heroes of the story have. And why - because I myself enjoy reading works in which heroes have traits I find noble and where their struggle is shown in a way which allows me to consider the world in a more complex way. This is not 'indoctrination' as you call it, it is the romantic-realistic ideal of art: to show concepts relevant to people's life, present a moral system in which these concepts lie, and display in artful way the manner in which things occur. This can be as abstract as the depiction of the hardened beauty of gypsies in the work of Bougereau or as fine-grained as the twists and turns of Les Misérables. It can even be the study and glorification of the tension of attraction, shyness and coercion as in the heart of Swan Lake.

I will not argue this is at all contradictory to interaction. But your assertion that I should work with the moral system of the player and should not express messages is completely contradictory to what art is: showing an implementation. If you do not implement any values and just hand the player a playground where he can have things you did not expect or intend then I would say your work is art as much as chess is art, organizing a role playing summer camp is art or, indeed, designing a card game is art.

But here I think you yourself are not being fair. Because if you create a playground where things happen you will invariably express cause and effect. Even Sim City is a clear expression of how cities are built in America as your citizens will respond to cultural principles and Monopoly before it meant to illustrate how unguided capitalism will lead to a big monopoly and the rules are slanted in such a way this will always happen. By engaging with those games you learn values. So you can build a world with certain rules and values and have them expressed through causal events. This is expressing values too. If you honestly intend not to express any values then you are not an artist but a provider. But I do not think you do not express any values - for all its abstractions The Path expresses something. You may say it is open for interpretation and indeed it is - but a game in which you learn to break the big rule, explore a strange new world and invariably make a mistake causing you loose your life; such a game already says something.

To make this clear: I think you say you want to work with the moral system of the player but despite this (thankfully, in my view) are still operating as an artist rather than a provider because you express vales and thereby gave some moral system. And I have no problem with you being abstract in the manner you are, I have no intention of finding a problem with this. I may not be fulfilled with abstraction and desire to read detailed values - bien, that is a difference.

You are telling me to either be the provider of a playground or, bizarrely, to be surreptitious about my intentions and display a moral system while feigning a free world. The former is not art, the later is being corrupt in your claimed intentions as an artist. This you describe as 'the sublime'. I am going to be harsh and say you say that to strive towards this ideal you will need to say this:

Oh, and in conclusion: Fuck Hamlet!  Cheesy

Rather than:

We can do much much better than that.
But not by imitating or repurposing other media. We need to find and use our own strengths.

I agree with the later. Yes, we need to find our strength, for games of any kind. My games will be more closed and your games may be more open. I will use interaction to make sensations of characters more purposeful, you will use interaction to show how choices play out. But to find our strength we need to look at philosophy of games and art in general and examples of games and art in general.

I would need to find a way to make an wonderful complex series of events such as Crime and Punishment into a game - I will have to see that doing Raskolnikov's actions and being part of his mental conflict is the experience I found interesting about it and that to show this I do not allow the player to give himself in. You would sooner make a game in which you can give yourself in (if I may be so bold as to imagine what you would do); my game shows what it feels like not to be capable of handing yourself in, your game what it feels like to have the choice of handing yourself in. Depending on what one intends to express one of our methods will invariably be better. But both are valid means for expressing something. Only if you argue I should not express anything your way becomes superior and indeed, fuck Hamlet, we will give the player the means to express something. But that will always be dull to me - yet from my view of expressing content both our ways have interesting consequences.

I need to be judged by the standards of classical literature because I want to create similarly fine-grained experiences. And those experiences require things which are not up to the player - therefore the opportunity for me is to make the other things playable.

Quote
We can do much much better than that.
But not by imitating or repurposing other media. We need to find and use our own strengths.

The problem is that it is so easy to lean back on past experiences and think "I want to achieve that!", often think of a movie or book. I find myself into this line of thinking all the time, and I think the problem is because of good role models. For many of the things I want to achieve I know no videogame that have come close to this, and so instead think of books or movies. This is very hurtful, because then one might get stuck into thinking that is not working or get goals that are unrealistic. So I think having an open mind is very important here and also thinking out of the box. But I guess that is one of the difficulties that one face when trying to evolve a medium Smiley

I think we need to find ways to 'dissect' elements from books and films... You can see it when a film is made from a script rather than with a director who knows how to make a film, I always think - there is something in the camera and the rhythm. In that sense copying a cutscene from a film would be being a bad director... making a scene playable would be a good film-like director.

Perhaps you can tell what makes you reach for books and film... I keep thinking of it as 'fine grain', a level of detail I cannot find in games. Thinking on how to express the complex relations and character traits in Deadwood in a game.. remains impossibly tempting.
« Last Edit: October 23, 2010, 09:06:06 PM by Jeroen D. Stout » Logged
Michaël Samyn

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« Reply #19 on: October 25, 2010, 09:40:06 AM »

I am not the provider of a playground, I am a thinker and an author.

I'm not denying you that at all. On the contrary!
My remarks were technical, not philosophical.

I'm not against people making statements and having opinions or telling stories. I just feel that there are better media for that than the interactive one. This medium is perfect for authors who want to deal with "the postmodern condition". It's a medium for author who accept that their own opinions are the fruit of their cultural context. For authors who want to play with their audience, and explore and discover things with them. I believe there is great depth in this and that we can go further than anywhere modernism has been able to go.

I believe there's a lot of authorship involved with this. It's just a new kind of authorship.
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Michaël Samyn

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« Reply #20 on: October 25, 2010, 09:56:03 AM »

But your assertion that I should work with the moral system of the player and should not express messages is completely contradictory to what art is: showing an implementation. If you do not implement any values and just hand the player a playground where he can have things you did not expect or intend then I would say your work is art as much as chess is art, organizing a role playing summer camp is art or, indeed, designing a card game is art.

I think you underestimate the new authorship that I am proposing. But I can't express it. I can only hope that people get it. And maybe you do. Even if, intellectually, you are resisting.

My point is not to give the player "freedom to do whatever they want". My desire is more for creating a sort of laboratory context in which both players and creators can discover things. With this, I'm completely accepting, and even celebrating, the manipulative nature of such a context. But that doesn't mean that I'm only looking for a single outcome of this "research".

Perhaps you can compare it to different interpretations of the same sculpture. For some a pieta might look like a picture of a mother's sadness, for others its an expression of the soul of christian love and yet others will find it an erotically charged scene of a naked man lying on the knees of a fully dressed woman. For some, all of these interpretations may co-exist. I think it is this wealth of interpretations that gets us close to the sublime. And the interactive medium lends itself so much better to dealing with this wealth as authors rather than simply as audience. By creating living mechanisms, we can continue the conversation with our audience, long after we stopped programming.
« Last Edit: October 25, 2010, 10:08:36 AM by Michaël Samyn » Logged
Michaël Samyn

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« Reply #21 on: October 25, 2010, 10:03:55 AM »

To make this clear: I think you say you want to work with the moral system of the player but despite this (thankfully, in my view) are still operating as an artist rather than a provider because you express vales and thereby gave some moral system.

You're right. But these values are not dogmas. They are part of the material of the work, that is open to investigation. Ultimately a player's response to our work says more about themselves than about us, or the work. And that's where I want to be, as an artist.

Maybe the only difference is that, yes I'm offering a moral system or a value judgment, but I'm not doing this in order to convince anyone. I'm just offering it as a suggestion, for people to do something with. A challenge if you want. As such, even the values are artistic material. And it's perfectly possible that I put values in our work that I do not agree with personally. But I just want to give the audience (and myself) a chance to be confronted with them and think about them.

For me, art is very much about asking questions. Not about giving answers.

And very often the question starts with "What if".

But I'm probably wrong in trying to generalize my own artistic attitude to be the only one for using this medium properly. I apologize for that. I'm just so happy with this medium. It's so perfect for where I am as an artist (in doubt, curious, asking questions, wanting to experiment with emotions, etc) that I sometimes forget how flexible it is and how it can allow for many different types of art. And when I see people struggling, I just want to share some of my joy. Where other experience problems, I see opportunities. It's hard not to share that when it's so obvious to me that the problems are caused by trying to do things with this medium that it doesn't seem ideal for. But I shouldn't forget that dealing with hard problems and doing what may seem inappropriate can also lead to great art.

I'm also glad to find someone working with this medium who is even more "traditional" and romantic than I am. Smiley
« Last Edit: October 25, 2010, 10:18:23 AM by Michaël Samyn » Logged
Michaël Samyn

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« Reply #22 on: October 25, 2010, 10:26:39 AM »

The problem is that it is so easy to lean back on past experiences and think "I want to achieve that!", often think of a movie or book.

I know. It's tricky.

In my experience, it's good to start with very few expectations.
Only with the desire to create a great piece.
I think for me this is made easier by collaborating so closely with another human. Trust is a big part of our creative process. We never know what the other person will come up with next. Or what they really mean with this or that thing they did. But we have learned to accept this, and work with a certain level of uncertainty. As a result, the outcome of our work is often very different from our initial ideas. But I think that's a good thing, especially when working with a new medium.

I think the "fine grain" that Jeroen is talking about, is better developed during the production, in the game world, when you see and feel your material, rather than in concept in advance. Then creating videogames becomes a process of responding to opportunities rather than solving problems.

It does require you to keep your "author" cap on at all times! As the distinction between conception and production ceases to exist.
« Last Edit: October 25, 2010, 10:28:22 AM by Michaël Samyn » Logged
Jeroen D. Stout

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« Reply #23 on: October 28, 2010, 01:55:52 AM »

Michaël,

I just wanted to say that I have not stormed out of this thread - in fact, I am very happy to have read this and I appreciate our different methods.

I look forward to discussing this subject further and wish I could do so now... but I am sure that present company will excuse me for looking at the big calendar on my wall, the one with all the tight release deadlines! No weekend for me - dotting every 'i' indeed.

Smiley
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Michaël Samyn

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« Reply #24 on: October 30, 2010, 11:42:46 PM »

Good luck, Jeroen! Smiley
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God at play

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« Reply #25 on: November 13, 2010, 01:26:00 AM »

Quote
Maybe the only difference is that, yes I'm offering a moral system or a value judgment, but I'm not doing this in order to convince anyone. I'm just offering it as a suggestion, for people to do something with. A challenge if you want. As such, even the values are artistic material. And it's perfectly possible that I put values in our work that I do not agree with personally. But I just want to give the audience (and myself) a chance to be confronted with them and think about them.

Maybe you will know what I mean when I say this Michaël, but this reminds me of the book of Ecclesiastes.  The man being referenced by the teacher sometimes seems to be arguing with himself, offering up a series of different philosophies about life, before the teacher concludes.

From what I've learned, this was a common practice for philosophical debate in ancient times.  To dance around the issue from multiple angles.
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Michaël Samyn

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« Reply #26 on: November 13, 2010, 08:11:01 PM »

I see it as an essential part of art creation and appreciation.
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David

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« Reply #27 on: November 14, 2010, 07:53:32 PM »

I just have read Thomas article and i like the example of the campfire story. Details change each time the story is told, but the heart of the story is always the same. Video games allow us to tell nearly "campfire stories", through randomness, non-linearity and the player's actions. They change each time we play it. Just as life is never the same.

And video games are fine to tell stories, i agree.
« Last Edit: November 14, 2010, 07:59:14 PM by David Rasorogiev » Logged
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