Afraid I cannot remember the town nor where I read about it so cannot look it up either.

Small rant:
I was tempted to buy the game during a steam weekend sale, since I liked some aspects of the first fallout. However, after reading reviews and such it seems like they just focused on making the killing better and not improving other aspects. The first game had some really engaging moments, for example you could give advice to farmers so they grew better crops, tell local authorities about a guy selling bad food, getting evidence against mafia boss by wearing a wire and convince an AI to let you do stuff. All of these where choices and made the world feel very living because of it. The problem is that the I tried really hard to play the role of a clever scientist guy in the first game, but the game soon forced me into fighting, which mostly was boring (battles where turn based and could be reaaaallly drawn out). The first game also had all kind of annoying stuff present in older games (dead-ends, time limits). I was hoping that this game would improve upon the non-violent stuff from the old one, but it seems like they just put even more emphasis on killing stuff. It is just annoying how games cannot focus on this stuff that was present in older games, but instead even less time seems to be devoted to it. It feels as if games from 10 years ago or more contained these really glimpse of a new line for the medium, but then nobody has really put any real focus on em and just spent time on cheap and additive thrills.

Nice write-up!

A question: I have heard that there is a town you can visiit in the game where there has been a plague or something. According to what I read somewhere players found it very emotional to just walk around talking to the inhabitants and explore the surroundings. Was this a location you came across and if so what was your impression of it? It just seems like a bit of notgamey moment to me.

I do think we need to have any true AI to make the kind of experiences that Michael talks about. I think that when dealing with a very narrow subject it should be possible design an opponent to a "fun" player instead of just the best possible decision maker.

It is not really the same, kinda related though, but when I am programming AI for creatures in our game I am not trying to make them is as deadly as possible and that is a totally different task. Part of that is to add the appearance of personality or at least some kind of intent. This is hard stuff and I have way to little time I can spend on it, but often very small stuff can add to the behaviour. Many times just having some random stuff happening can give the appearance of some deeper intelligence, when in reality the AI is very shallow. For example, just small tweaks in the manner a creature tries to find the player after loosing track can have a huge difference.

This brings me to the topic of "AI Stupidity", which I think is what should have more research devoted to it. For a computer to act convincingly stupid is something that is needed to make it a engaging component and it is always what would make it closer to a playmate than some expert system.

Utforska: I like that taunting idea! It feels like someone ought to have tried that by now?

I just saw some very strange videos from Red Dead Redemption where the game apprently bugs out, with some hillarious/strange/disturbing results.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVVXyKP1FVk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFoMvLmfFEY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q7v4F8r9Og

What makes these so interesting is that these chance encounters makes the game feel kind of special. You notice how the player feel a special attachment to these characters. Also upon meeting them, there is a lot of engagement without any gameplay. Just exploring and interacting with these weird characters is enough to keep the experience interesting.

Seeing this, I am really tempted to create (and play!) some kinda of game that is built upon these kind of random encounters. Not sure how that would work out, but it seems like an interesting experiment.

Also worth considering how much the randomness plays a role in these encounters. Would it be as fun if the designer had added similar creatures by choice? (perhaps these are added by choice though, as the glitches all seem to work too well almost)

Good stuff!

Same guy that wrote the "How games get you addicted" article.

Well, the main goal in is to evoke certain emotions in the player using whatever means necessary. We tried classical game-rule ways of doing this and it as failed many times. For me it is not really a "vs"-thingie. The experience is the key thing and main goal. Everything else is secondary.

Actually we made a game (an expansion called Requiem) where put the game part as a primary thing. Many people ended up hating it as it did not deliver what they wanted.

During the making of our upcoming game Amnesia, we several times bumped into situations where gameplay has lessened/hindered the intended feel of the game. This is what has really started my exploration of not-games and I just thought I would share these experiences. My point is, kinda, that wanting to do notgames has simple come from the will to create certain experiences and not some general desire to just do games differently. This is not a bad reason btw, for from it, I just wanted to share some design issues that has come up that might be of interested:

When we first started out making the game, we thought about having some super marioesque design, where the player would need to avoid traps, and such in order to reach a goal. We did some quick tests and quickly found out that this put severe limits on what kind of environments we could do, and did not work well with either the atmosphere we wanted to create.

We also thought about doing some kinda of light-based game rule system, where the player was supposed to avoid light and thereby fear it. Again, this put a lot of straint on the type of locations we could create and espeically when trying to light the levels in approiate manners. It also had a kind of opposite effect of making the dangers with dakrness abstract, pulling the player out of the experience and a lot of the atmosphere was lost. After we scrapped this design another game, Lit for the Wii, was released with a similar mechanic and one can clearly see how the rules force the graphics to look in certain ways. The system with light and shadow lives on in the game, but in a very different form, and along the road we have just scrapped more and more rules, until it lost almost all of its mechanical and abstracy game-rule meaning.

For a level late in the game the player was supposed to face an enemy, which could only be defeated by tearing down the environment in a certain manner. The idea sounded good at first, but upon closer study, cracks flaws started to appear. In order to reach certain parts, the design would have to become quite convoluted and once again the rules of the game would destroy much of the intended atmosphere in the level. The end solution was to make the gameplay simpler so that more freedom was given to the things that matter: creating an engaging scene and evoking emotions.

Long story short: Time and time again, I have seen how traditional gameplay has forced us limit what worlds we could build and as sort of consequence what kind of emotions that could be conveyed.

Would be very interesting to hear if anybody had similar experiences!

Worth noting is that it is not only a hardware problem, but also a software one of making intuitive and powerful tools for artists, and also making engines that are intelligent and can figure out how to best render the art. So that the computer figures out the techy stuff and lets humans be creative.

Bit shocked that there is so little love for the craft. When a artist hammers into his sculpture causing it to break, should he complain that marble isn't strong enough .. or get some more practice?

I think the big difference is how obscure the limitations are and an artist cannot evaluate it as simply as a when sculpting or painting. These constraints are not put on the creation process, but much later and this makes all the difference. When the artist has learned all the tools and starts experimenting, the limit is not what can be creating, but what actually is actually useable. It would be like saying to a painter that certain combinations of paint where not allowed, even though it would be perfectly possible for the painter to use them. Or for certain shapes to not be allowed by a sculptor, even though it was possible to create them.

I agree that it is a very worthwhile craft and interesting problem in keeping these techy constraints, but I fail to see how they can improve artistic qualities of the medium.

Note This was meant as a reply the "Kometen" thread, but become kinda long so I made a separate topic.

Just have to say a few words about the "we need 1000 times faster computers" that Michael said. I totally agree with this and I think that the current state of 3D graphics is horrible and feels very much like high rez graphics was early 90s. In Penumbra we used very little spice on the graphics and tried to keep it plain and simple, yet an enormous amount of work as gone into making the game look decent and work on as many systems as possible. However, with almost every driver update the games stop working for some and we have to make new patches, etc. Unless you use the most basic 3D stuff (like Torchlight) you will run into trouble.

Now that is just the techie part. Even worse is that the power of people's systems vary A LOT so you have to have all of these different settings to make sure as many people can play it as possible. This makes it hard for devs and I spend countless of hours on these sort of issues. It also makes it harder for users who have to configure their rigs to runs as smoothly as possible. This problem is not that hard to consoles, where hardware is the same, but usually games have to support several platforms and the problem is there again.

Another problem is that even if u have the same sort of hardware, you have to be very careful when making art so that it does not eat up too much resources. I spend countless of hours nagging on artists who fail to understand my lessons in how to make a map efficient. The bottom line is: Artist should not care about this! They should only focus on making the art look nice, end of story. Once you put limits on how to do the art, especially with the vague, very techie instructions that come along with making 3D graphics, the quality of art will suffer. This is huge problem when developing games, and while new techniques do lower the amount of thinking needed, we have a LONG way to go.

Compare to where 2D games are today, where you can pretty much do the art in whatever way you like and it will work. You do not have to put objects so the effectively block visibility, etc and can just focus on one thing: To explore the medium and let your imagination be the limit.

I would like 3D graphics to first of all become so fast and efficient that it handles anything an artist throws at it. To create digital art is to leave boundaries of physical reality behind, and that should be strived for in the creation process as well. Further more I would also like to see it all run on Virtual Machines and not be specific to hardware, exactly like flash is to day. Once you get something running on your computer, everybody should be able to run it and, most importantly, see it they way you intended too (and not fiddle with some settings to make it work). Just see the explosion in 2D games since simple work environments like flash and GameMaker has come out. This vastly different from when I started out 15 years ago, when just having a scrolling screen imposed limit on what art could be done.

Even more important, without some kind of virtual machine system that runs everything, it will be harder and harder to keep the amount of emulators needed to work and I fear that many things created today will not be able to experience 20-30 years from now. This by itself would be a hinder from videogames to be a really powerful medium, it is simply very volatile and gets quickly lost as hardware / software evolve.

This article touch the subject a bit.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4412/persuasive_games_the_picnic_.php

His well-known "Kuleshov Effect" seemed to prove the point: in the experiment, Kuleshov cut between the expressionless shot of a famous Russian silent film actor (Ivan Mozzhukhin) and a variety of other shots: a young woman reposed on a chaise, a child in a coffin, a bowl of soup.

Even though the shot of Mozzhukhin's face remained identical with each cut, the audience made different assumptions about the meaning of his expression.

After reading Curt Purcell's responses on closure I started to think if games perhaps is lacking this at a basic level?
Because you follow every motion of the character's journey, you lack this kind of mind-made closure found in other media and that this might perhaps lessen the impact?

From experience I know that the best horror moments from our games have always been when we leave a lot of information unknown and for the player to imagine. I think this could be true for any other emotion as well and perhaps more exploration into this direction might be fruitful. What we (Frictional Games) have made so far in our games, is very simple stuff with noises from unseen sources, notes telling of events and very simple (and wide spread) stuff. But perhaps this can be used on more fundamental level? I mean that actions taken all involve some kind of gap that leaves open for interpretation. The question is if this might be harmful for interaction though?

This idea of interactive closure sounds quite interesting! Need to have it in mind!

However, it is needed that the player knows what B is and this can sometimes be hard get across. It might also force the game to be very linear. I guess one can have more fuzzy goals, like "become happy", but the fuzzier B gets, the harder it will be do focus on closure (since the future actions will be harder to know). Any thoughts on this?

Nice trailer!

Too bad I do not own an iphone