Looking at the nominees,

"The Stanley Parable", is pretty much a not game

"Dreams of Your Life", at least has some aspiration to be a mature game. I tried playing it though, but were not in the mood

"Botanicula", is not that gamey, but more playing around? Or perhaps I misunderstood it.

"Analogue: A Hate Story", is more of a visual novel. (not played it, but have it on the play-list).

So not that bad?

Hey! I was just gonna post this!

Loved it and I think it is a great example of what is possible by sticking to a notgames attitude. The creator could have so easily added combat and ruined everything. Would have been interesting to know what his inspirations were.

I would have liked some more interaction to just increase the belivability of the world a bit. But then in a way the game works very well as is. In any case, of interest to note that all interactions in game serve no gameplay purpose and are just there to engage. At the beginning I was sure picking up ammo, etc would be used but it never is and I think that is fantastic.

Also, it is 15 minutes long and has zero fillers. More games like this please!

[challenge]

Browsing the net I stumbling on the on this:
http://www.raphkoster.com/2012/07/06/two-cultures-and-games/

It is basically a Raph defending that trying to figure out a theory that truly describe games is a worthy effort and not something that excludes things. For instance the comparing of certain games to power-point slides pop up again. I do not really agree with this at all and even think this hardcore "Games is X" is harmful. However that is not really what I want to discuss.

Further down Jonas Kyratzes makes reply to this with views that I pretty much share. However, and this is my point here, he always says that he hates notgames. Which seems so weird to me, because Jonas have been doing notgamey like stuff for 10 years or so now (many of his stuff resemble what people on these forums having been doing). He writes:

Ah, but you see, I find the idea of “notgames” infinitely idiotic and completely alien to everything I’ve ever wanted to achieve as an artist working in the interactive medium. It’s not like film and theatre, it’s like pseudo-artistic European directors (fictional in this case, but such types exist) claiming that their movies are “notfilms” because they are unlike what Hollywood produces.

What I find most striking of this is that "notgame" is referred to (at least in my mind), as genre. Raph Koster also makes a similar statement:

But people in games ARE engaged in a process of understanding games better, and many of the things they are learning are outright absent in notgames. Notgames do not have NP-hard problems or common brain hacks at their central core. Games do. Notgames do not involve the mastery of abstract systems of relationships. Games do.

He even uses the term to make a case for his own beliefs. He also suddenly seem to know a lot about Notgames...

I think this is a bit bad and might be miss-communication and/or wanting it to be what they believe. Notgames has from the start always been a challenge, a movement. Did it not even say so on the front page of notgames.org (not seeing it now)? The intention has never been to be a label for the public, but something for designers of videogames to rally up behind. At least I never expect online stores to have a "notegame" label. Or am I alone in thinking like this?

I do not really care if anybody hates with the notgames initiative or think it is a sucky idea. I am just a bit worried that it might for some reason alienate people that actually agree with the movement. I am also a bit afraid that notgames will become a genre, because the word is so exclusive. I mean I see no problem with making a notgame that does contain the mastery of NP-hard problems*, and I hate for it to be used as specific as Raph does. As I see it, all of us are simply gathered with the idea that games can be made without having many of "essential" elements that is such a widespread wisdom in the industry.

So, should be think about changing something or am I just worrying over nothing?

*In simple terms: problems that are hard to solve, but easy to see when the correct solution is reached. Making music a sort of np-hard problem for instance, very hard to come up with a good tune, but when you do, you know you got it. Basically any creative endavour is np-hard, difficult to produce but easy to enjoy.

GDC EU will most likely not work for me, as it seems like the week there will be fully packed for me. Do not let that stop the rest of you to fix something though

For my part, perhaps later in the fall?  Also it does not has to coincide with any major event either? Since most of us seem up for it, it should just take someone to be will to pull the strings and set it up

Anyway, it's a great idea. Can you organize this? Should we ask Cologne Game Lab to help?

Unsure I time to organize since I will have to spend quite a bit of time with my talk. If Cologne Game Lab could set something up, then that would be really nice. I guess the biggest problem with these sort of things is to get someone to take charge.

Just read blog post by Jon Blow on their recent Depth Jam and thought it might be interesting to try something similar ourselves.

The format would of course not be the same and just essentially having something similar as we had in Cologne last year would be great. Only thing that I would see is to have a full day and that everyone attending had a game in progress to show up and had some more specific problems to discuss.

I have not really thought much about it, so just wanted to start by checking what all else think?

I think early 2000 generally is a time where a lot of great stuff was taking place. We have other interesting horror games such as Fatal Frame and Forbidden Siren, and there are games such as Fallout, Planescape, etc being made.

I think the explanation that games got more expensive after this seem highly plausible. This was probably a time where games could look mature enough, but were cheap enough for a single/few artistic lead(s). This have some flaws though since Xbox360 (and the next generation) did not come until 2005 and that many ps2 games came out after SH2 (not least two sequels). Another issue I think is that many designers settled down (family,etc) and then did not want to risk with experimentation (leading to the admin drift Krystian mentioned above). And then when fresh blood got to design games, we were in the next-gen area and companies wanted more control on the products.

But still. SH2 is a huge favorite in the indie scene, and there has been very few attempts to recreate it. As seen with the recent Lost Survivor, you can get most of the silent hill atmosphere with snes-like graphics. But for some reasons, the indie scene has been mostly about puzzles games and SH2-like experiences behind. Worth noting that this was the case before the indie boom with Cave Story, World of Goo, etc... When I was making games in 2000 (pre SH2) and was inspired by Resident Evil and SH1, all other people I knew were making platformers, etc. So even in the stort of mainstream "golden age", indie has the same kind of direction it has today, over 10 years later.

I guess that sort of explains why there was few indie trying to pick where SH2 left. Also I have gotten the feeling that people who got into gamedev at that time often had the idea that you simply could not make any complex mature games be yourself, but had to settle with arcade-like experience or join a company (this attitude is still common).

So the way out of this would be convince new designers (or even older ones) that you can actually make mature, high quality experiences with a small team. And even more important, it is financially viable to do so.

We're trying with the next Splinter Cell that we're developing at Ubisoft to try to have some statements about certain things built in there,"

Because that is how you do it...

and has a bit more depth for those who care to pay more attention to that. I think we can deliver those things in a way that the people who don't care won't notice.

Yeah, lets just put that depth as side thing, that works fine

Well, this just makes me more sure that I will never ever join a big game company if things turn to worse for FG.

Also this makes me kind of inspired. It would be so great to put out something that obviously show how shallow other games are. Not that any of these people quoted in the article would notice/care, but just for personal pleasure

You can still pay all c64 games (although it takes some effort) and they are 30 years old There are games that are even older still, for instnace the original Adventure (father of all adventure games) is still possible to play, and it was released in 1977 (35 years old!).

The biggest problem I think is not the games themselves, but the input. For instance playing any N64 game is hard because available controllers are not that appropriate. It will be even harder for wii games, guitar hero etc. I think that 50 years from now, there will still be many games of today available, especially PC Games, although they might not be super easy to run.

While games as a medium is special in hardness to preserve, other media such as music and movies are not all that different. For instance many early movies have been lost due to the films being very inflammable.

I think it's really dumb to think "we're stuck with spatiality, let's add some meaning to moving".

I agree, but yet is that not what Dear Ester, Journey and The Path are all about But then, the dumb thing is (and I guess what you mean) is to just think of this in a strict rigid sense.

Still, cannot shake the feel that there might some kind of insight to gain by focusing on the spatial interaction. I have never thought of it so directly before, but it has come more as a consequence. But perhaps it just meaning giving your self tunnel vision.

As can be seen, I am not sure what to think

But if you give an artist access to this medium, they will approach it from a completely different angle. And what they might come up with is not necessarily complicated. Art is very often about reduction, about stylization, etc. Art is about making choices, about focus.

A thinking that I have grown more affected to is to simply acknowledge that out underlying systems are simplistic. Your goal with design is then to make sure that players interact in such away that they never notice this but can believe there is a rich world behind it all. I mean painters do not calculate scattered light or whatnot, they just do tricks to make you think there is a lot going on.
That also takes us away from the Crawfordian tasks of sort of formalizing human interaction on the atomic level (which is what storytron is). Better is to take Crawfords very early designs for interaction (that he implemented in the 80s) and to dress it up with art.

This video give s good overview on why videogames are so much about spatial movement:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSBn77_h_6Q&feature=uploademail

I think we have brought up this before, but never really discussed in a topic like this. Most of us all make games about moving in a space, only game that I can come up with now is Dinner Date. Actually, revecent high profile not games (Dear Esther, Journey?) are all about moving in space, that is there 100% focus. So question is if this is something to embrace or if it is something that we should try and move away from.

For my part I think that I am more on the side of embracing it, at least judging from the output I have been involved in so far The problem then becomes how to make this spatial movement deeper (in terms of theme) and how to do it in more interesting ways. But at the same time, I do not feel really contend with this, it feels like there should be some other way to go, but then I feel one is moving toward what Chris Crawford is doing, something I am unsure will ever be possible.

I'm actually rather critical of it. But I will probably never dare to ever express this in public. I'll talk to Jenova about at some point. Maybe

Oh, you tease Now you got me intrigued!

Played it last night and it was great. It is really inline with the notgames movement. I think Jenova and Kelly should join these forums;) (I recall there being some reason for them not doing so, but cannot really recall)

An interesting bit is that it is a 2 hour game sold for 10 Euros and people find it okay! This is very encouraging indeed, because Journey would have been awful stretched to 6-8 hours and lowering price makes it harder to recoup costs. Since the same is true for Dear Esther, I find it great that we have  a large amount of customers who value quality over quantity.

There are a ton of good stuff in Journey so I urge all to play it. Will perhaps post again with some further thoughts.

The Wire is an interesting case of music usage, where all music diegetic ("real"). But then there is instead a lot of emphasis on background noise. So you still need to have other stimuli instead.

That video games would be purer without music (or any other asset) in any sense is something I really disagree with.

I do agree that using music can be cheap at times, but that is true for all things and it does not mean one has to use it in cheap way.

Oh, and I'm assuming then that the "less scary, more intellectual" stuff that Thomas has been mentioning is what Frictional is doing with the bulk of their time? No need to answer that. 

Oh I can answer: Yeah the other thingie is what we are spending most of our time on. That project is very slowly started though (mainly because there is a huge amount of assets needed to get anything testable), so having a project like this "on the side" where there already is a lot of ground work is done is very nice for motivation. Feels like more stuff is happening, even though we are not doing much of it