Notgames Forum

I was just reading this article, Exploring Emotion and Aesthetics with A Boy and His Blob and Lucidity  (http://www.necessarygames.com/exploring-emotion-and-aesthetics-boy-and-his-blob-and-lucidity), and had an interesting thought. Incomplete, but it might go somewhere.

I wrote in the comments:

What do you think?

Could you explain what Mr McCloud means by closure? I'm not familiar with his work.

I like how the writer of this article (a game developer) honestly analyzes his personal response to an experience with games and realizes that the things he responds the most to are things that have nothing to do with games. Welcome to the club!  ;)

With regards to his question if the games are "better than a pretty picture", I have a counter-question every game creator should ask themselves:
"Is my game as good as a pretty picture?"!
Because pretty pictures can be very striking, emotionally. And if your game is not as striking with all the benefits your medium offers of interactivity, procedurality and non-linearity, well, frankly, you're doing it wrong.

I also like how he concludes that a game's interaction needs to serve its aesthetics, that it shouldn't "draw attention to itself". The next step is, of course, to start your project from these aesthetics and design gameplay for the sake of these aesthetics.

:D

Here's a good description of the concept of "closure" in comics:
http://blogs.lubbockonline.com/hero/2009/08/14/friday-night-fights-gutter-analysis/

Closure means filling in the gaps between panels, inferring the transition from point A to point B in your mind.

The connection to (not)games that I saw was that being at point A, and imagining point B and then actually performing the actions that will get the game from point A to point B is similar to the act of closure in comics. But requiring even more extensive involvement.

And the point is, that most games do their best to make this "interactive closure" challenging and mechanically interesting, while perhaps they could instead, as notgames, try to make it aesthetically and narrative-ly (is that a word?) resonant instead.

One more piece of the puzzle. ;)


Good idea. :)

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?

Man, it has been awhile since I heard anything about Scott McCloud. The  last  (http://scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/mi/mi-26/mi-26.html) of his morning improv comics (http://scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/mi/index.html) was a really good example of how interactive storytelling can end and branch in different places, and the rest are worth a look as well.

Thanks  :)

I absolutely 100% agree with this. I was using "better" there in the since of offering something "beyond," which I do think that an interactive experience should do (otherwise it simply IS a pretty picture), and I think I was almost hoping that someone might jump on it like this ;).

I also agree with you here (which I guess makes sense, since you're basically agreeing with what I wrote :)), though I think there's still some issue of people confusing aesthetic with graphics and sound, and I don't think gameplay/interactivity should serve graphics and sound: I think all three should serve the developer's vision for the game's aesthetic. The problem with most contemporary games, I think (and what I was trying to say in my article) is that most game developers only believe that graphics and sound need to serve the aesthetic, and that gameplay is this other "dimension", of puzzles and point scoring, that you tack on, on top.

Good questions. No answers off the top of my head, but I think there's room for a working theory here.


Finally, just wanted to say that I've been looking around the notgames forums and blog, and I love what I see here :). Best wishes to everyone.

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?

Imagination is a powerful ingredient in the experience of videogames. I think we should include it in our design practice much more actively. Because imagination allows our work to enter the head of the player, and that's where we want it to be.
(imagination can also be used to reduce programming complexity and asset creation because you basically make the player a co-creator)


It doesn't matter. Interaction is a tool. Use it to make your work better. If interaction does not make your work better, don't use it.

This confusion probably comes from the fact that videogames have been mostly created by engineers and programmers. And when computers got fast enough to show pretty pictures, they were forced to hire artists to make those pictures. Most game development studios still work in this way.

In projects where artists are leading the production, this issue does not exist. Sadly (and ironically in view of the game industry's recent rejection of Ebert's criticism) such projects are very rare.

One of the practical problems is that there are not many authoring tools that allow artists to create software systems. Most programming environments require the analytical mind of an engineer. Sometimes an engineer also has a sense of aesthetics. And sometimes this sense extends to the aesthetics of the algorithms. But again, this is rare. Aesthetics are the domain of the artist. If we find a way to make this technology accessible to artists, we will see a boom on "holistically aesthetic" experiences.

The problem you describe is the problem with designing any nonlinear interactive experience. :)

B doesn't have to be a particular situation. Unless you want your game to be linear, of course. If you're talking about a puzzle game, B might be easy to predict and plan ahead of time. But if you're talking about a strategy game, say, then there are way more possible options for what B is at any point in time.

But you can make predictions about B more easily when you know what the player is trying to do - and this is much easier if you give the player goals, and reward them for making progress toward them like a typical game. For a notgame, though, you can't necessarily depend on that and instead you have to think more about the motivation that comes with experiencing a story.


Interesting point. Because there is a difference between imagining the gaps in the present (comics closure) and imagining and closing the gap to the future (interactive closure). I'm not sure what the answer is here.

Do keep in mind that closure doesn't work when interpretation is completely open-ended - the gap can be wide, but you need solid ground on both sides or it's not a gap. Don't push the player off a cliff. ;)


Good point. This is part of why pixel art is appealing, by the way. You get to imagine the details. ;)


Yes. I really want to accomplish this someday. Game Maker is not enough! :P

Creating an artist-accessible game development technology could be an interesting offshoot of the notgames project. How would it fit in?

So can procedural generation, although programming an artist might be more painful than just hiring one  ;)

I completely agree about the power imagination has in games. This kind of reminds me of the art revolution in the twentieth century - the camera made representational art pretty pointless, so artists turned to more abstract works. In gaming, today's technology allows one to create realistic worlds and simulations (light, physics, particles, etc.), so to move forward as a medium game mechanics and graphics need to become more inspirational than representational.

 ;D

I'm not sure if I fully understand the concept of closure. But one interesting design tool is to play with people's expectations. Maybe they imagine "state B" to be one thing and then they find something else. The confrontation between their expectations and what they actually found, can trigger inspiration and interpretation.

Now, the next step is to allow "state B" to be many different things. In our Drama Princess project, we even experimented with randomness. Instead of making sense "on purpose", we rely on the imagination of the player to make sense of the connection between "state A" and "state B". I think a certain artistic sensitivity during creation can prevent this from feeling completely random. When the connection feels right, even if you don't have a rational explanation for them.

Yes, this is totally what interactive closure is about, as I understand it so far. B can be many different things. And I really like how your Drama Princess project uses the player's ability to "close the gap" with imagination instead of trying to force a certain predetermined relationship.

Good thoughts. To me, the difference between closure in videogames vs. closure in, say, comic books, is that in videogames the player is constantly in the process of determining what "frame B" might be, as well as then attempting to fill in the gutter between frames A and B.

Comic book:

1. "Oh, there's a dude with an axe chasing another dude in frame A"

2. "Okay, in frame B somebody that I can't see is yelling out"

3. "What happened between the frames?" [filling in the gutter]


Videogame (or notgame):

1. "Okay, here's a dude in a virtual space-time continuum (frame A)"

2. "What do I want to do with this dude? What can I do with this dude? Where is this dude going? What's his motivation? What's my motivation? How are we connected?" etc. Player takes all this into account, and imagines some kind of frame B in their mind (whether that's destroying a castle, or jumping over a chasm, or whatever).

3. "Now, how do I bring about this idea for frame B?" Player comes up with some sort of plan, whether that's "build tanks" or "press space bar to jump." [filling in the gutter]

4. Player tries to carry out plan. It will most likely succeed in some regards, and fail in some regards--both from the standpoint of "I jumped to soon" and also from the standpoint of "hm... it appears that you can't jump in this game."

5. Player then returns to the start of the loop, with new information to help them continue their journey.


Point to note: there is certainly no less imagination going on (inherently) in videogame closure than in comic book closure... in fact, I think there's room for a great deal more.

The fact that this dynamic closing process is so incredibly intricate and rich when it comes to interactive art is basically what makes me so excited about it.




P.S. Would it be possible to get html lists working on these forums? Currently the css is not very useful there... not a big deal.

Thank you for illustrating the details of closure in comics versus games! I think it will really help. I probably should have done that earlier, but I was too lazy. ;)

I agree with you about games having lots of room for imagination. It is true that some games try to squeeze out this imagination and leave the player with no opportunity to have a different experience than that intended by the designer, but not all games have to be this way. :)

This article touch the subject a bit.

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

Yeah, nice link.  I just wrote a post inspired by that article: http://www.godatplay.com/2010/05/on-what-makes-videogames-distinct/

I don't think there's any inherent limitation with breaking up continuity for videogames, although because the medium uses computers and computers are good at simulation, videogames naturally tend toward that and therefore tend more toward continuity.  In the same way, film tends toward the breaking up of continuity because film is composed of sequences of images cut and assembled.

Ian is suggesting that because film is about editing, it is about fast editing.  I think that's going too far.  With videogames, the parallel would be simulation (or procedure to put it in another way).  That only suggests continuity, and in the case of a simulation, the continuity doesn't even have to be visual.  It could be continuity of input.

What I got out of Ian's article was that the interactive medium could explore the mundane much better than film could. Film is about seeing, videogames can be about being. Though my favourite films (Parajanov, Godard, Bergman, etc) are much closer to being and the mundane than most videogames (which are mostly just spectacles of the extraordinary)...

Maybe the difference is that videogames can deal with the mundane and still be entertaining, while such films are often hard to stay awake on (which I have defined as a norm for me: if I fall asleep on a film, it must be good! :) ; come to think of it, I do a similar thing with games: I scan for the word "boring" in reviews, when I find it, I buy the game instantly -but that probably says more about game journalists than anything else).

In videogames, I think it's the exploration that makes the difference. Which I guess is served by continuity better than editing.

Haha, that's great Michaël.  If you fall asleep, you know it's good.  I guess I'm more of an active film watcher; I have this ability to very intensely focus on watching a film.

I really like how you explain this, though.  Very articulate. :)

I love those directors as well, and I'm very interested with the idea of exploring the "mundane" with videogames/notgames.

This quote really jumps out at me. I'm quite fond of the existential philosophers, and this idea excites me, I guess.

We often think of the games we make as a kind of landscape paintings that you can step into. Being another person in another situation. There's no other medium that can do this so well. Many videogames already offer this. But most of them disrupt the experience by demanding that you play their game. Sometimes this play supports that experience of being in a world. But often it doesn't. And even when it does, it's usually because this world was created to fit the game format and so it's a world riddled with conflict and challenge and often violence and war. Not exactly the most pleasant of situations to be in, or the most inspiring.

Yes, I very much agree. Especially with:
I'm trying to think of a commercial game that I've played for which this has not been true, and I'm pretty much coming up blank. The forced gameplay always interferes with the experience at some point.

Just watched Once, another great film about "being." Damn, I wish I could make a game that would convey something of what comes through in that movie.

Just saw Once (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_(film)) yesterday, as per your implicit recommendation. :D

I can see how that could be a good source of inspiration for an interactive (not)game - especially the music sections, just replace those with interactive segments. ;) Plus the character interaction and plot and all that could be an emergent story rather than something predetermined.

Did you have any further thoughts about it?