Notgames Forum

This notgame:

http://www.dreamsofyourlife.com/

And this background:

http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2012/03/hitting-the-game-design-wall.html

"Robertson began thinking about systems and how she might identify something concrete upon which to build a game. "How can we boil this down to elements we can deal with that form structures?" The problem, which reflects the dominant theme of the film, is that Joyce's story is a lesson "that all sorts of systems failed. There was no system here, and that's the real story of Joyce's demise."

Studying the events that led to Joyce's death , says Robertson, reveals "imperceptible, longitudinal, tiny details" that add up to Joyce's story. When you try to apply a playable system to this, you impose a reductive structure to something that resists it. "You diminish it in insulting ways," says Robertson."


One thing I've struggled with is that what games seem to do best is explore systems with lots of interacting thingies, lots of numbers, or relations of some sort, abstract and impersonal, meaning coming from going through these systems, replaying, trying out, etc. But what about more personal stories, with a different kind of reduction? I've been wanting to do games and use game mechanics also to tell of these stories, yet it seems like trying to fit something into a too small suit indeed. So the choice would be to change format (into movie, book, notgame), or tell a different story. Yet I want to take on the challenge of ludology sometimes, as if it's the holy grail of gaming to tell through mechanics. But what are the limitations, and what could have been done differently in this specific case?

Thanks for sharing, I've been wanting to check this out for a while now. Hope I get a chance soon...


This challenge is precisely one of the reasons I started an initiative called Meaningful Gameplay: http://www.meaningfulgameplay.com The concept is to explore multiple versions of a small element of a game or videogame and then compare & contrast them to learn how meaning is generated.

The 2nd game jam is happening in 3 weeks, the weekend of May 25th-27th; feel free to join in remotely. :)