Sounds like our Girl in White from The Path and 8. Originally we considered her deaf mute. And she still doesn't talk. She also wears a white dress. And of course she's always been very autonomous. We developed a pseudo-AI engine called Drama Princess for her.

Good luck withe the development!
When do you plan to release?

Notgames is not a category. Notgames do not exist. 

I've played an early alpha. Liked the experience but wasn't too impressed with the story, or it's delivery. Will try the full game as soon as people stop raving.

Indeed. Bret Victor always strikes me as someone with good intentions but too little imagination (or too shallow awareness of what makes visually inclined creators most productive; let alone of what they might want or be able to make).

how cool it would be if videogames allowed us to explore this scenarios without having to game

!

(Sidenote: There is a lot of brilliant stuff in The Path, that I wished had gotten more attention, perhaps time for blog post on it )

Thanks! Looking forward to that! :-)

Failure in The Path is not just a specific way of dealing with the problem of failure in games. To a large extent, failure, or what can be perceived as failure in the narrative (but probably isn't in its meaning) is at the very core of our interpretation of Little Red Ridinghood. It is an attempt to "emancipate" failure, to embrace is as part of life.

That being said, I do think that the idea of switching the tone of the narrative before the threat becomes transparent is a good technique. Surely even in horror stories there is room for a moment of relief, a moment away from threats, to then engage with them with renewed suspension of disbelief.

Backed! Good luck!

I would like to share the programming workload of our current project with somebody who has some experience with programming (Javascript) in Unity. Experience with Antares Universe would be nice as well but is not required. You need to have Unity 4, preferably with Asset Server/Team License, so we can collaborate easily.

This is for an Android/iOS game that we want to release in summer. So you could start right now.

We will pay you a modest fee for your freelance efforts.

Most of the software isn't very complicated (I am a graphic designer and artist myself). It's just a bit much for me to handle with respect to the desired release date.

Please send an email to reception (at) tale-of-tales.com if you're interested.

In videogames, the fourth wall is behind the player, since the player is an actor.

Now, to be fair, we should let the other actors in on this too. Given their limited talents, this will certainly improve the quality of the play. And it will allow the player to treat them as equals.

I guess this topic continues here.

There's good and bad artists, of course. Being an artist is no guarantee for success. But artistic problems should be solved in artistic ways. Otherwise failure is virtually guaranteed.

Another note: even in film and theatre, a lot of our enjoyment comes from the observation of the bodies of the actors and their particular way of moving and talking, and not just from the fiction they are enacting. If we think of videogames as theatre performed by robots, we should consider it a major task to make the player empathise with and enjoy the robots-as-robots, and not merely the role they perform in the fiction.

How can we seriously consider a fourth wall when we allow players to control things on stage?

The problem is that the entire world does not feel like a real place. It feels like an animated diorama.

http://www.theastronauts.com/2013/05/the-trouble-with-immersion-or-the-opening-of-metro-last-light/

Adrian Chmielarz describes his experience with not being immersed into the high budget spectacle of the beginning of a new blockbuster game with recognisable accuracy. I understand the problem. But I think solving this problem is besides the point. I think these sorts of spectacles don't understand the nature of this medium, or respect it. And as such, they will never be able to realise its potential.

The trick is not to convince the player that the characters in a game are real. The trick is to make the player accept that they are not, and accept them for what they are: automatons, possibly very sophisticated automatons. And the areas where the automatons differ from organic creatures are exactly the places where art can happen. It's no coincidence that art and artifice and artificial are related words.

The way in which digital creatures differ from real ones is how we express ourselves in this medium. A painting of an ugly person can be beautiful.

Adrian's suggestion of a sort of contract between spectator and creator is a good one. But shouldn't his contract already exist? We use it in all other art, don't we? The trouble is that game developers are not following their end of the contract by not accepting that the world they are creating is a fabrication. Instead they think it is a representation, in the way that photography and film can represent existing organic life. And by doing so they miss the wonderful opportunities that this medium offers for making art that is far more interesting than most cinema.

This is a problem, as so many in games development, that can be solved by artists. It is not an engineering problem, it is not an AI problem or a budget problem. It's an aesthetic problem of the kind that artists solve several dozens every day. As ever, the solution is to simply put artists in charge of art creation. But when that will happen in games, or if at all, is the question.

I think we only feel manipulated when the content of a piece doesn't match up with the level of emotional manipulation. I feel a lot less manipulated by a Tarkovsky film than by a romantic comedy.

Journey felt quite empty to me. It's all structure and no content.
The fact that it still gives so many people an experience they consider deep and meaningful is something to think about.