Hello everybody, I´ve been away from this forum (and from making games) for about a year but I´m slowly coming back.

So I just read this article:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-08-02-polite-games-for-polite-people

Nice games for nice people, basically - and surely that's a venture worth getting behind. Against a backdrop of stabbed throats and grim violence, it's no wonder that Excalibur continues to do well by continuing to source, publish and produce very agreeable games.

The thought that maybe these simulation games share something fundamental with what we are looking for here made me smile. Should we perhaps have a closer look at what they are doing right? All these simulators of mundane and unsofisticated tasks feel pretty notgamey to me, even if they are goal or score-oriented.

I don´t think repetition equals boredom.

I´m very interested in repetition in fact. Repetition is rhythm, hypnosis, trance. As human beings we enjoy our little traditions, rituals and habits. There are some things that are just pleasurable to be done over and over again in the exact same way and we feel somehow dissapointed if we are forced to change.

In fact, we probably start thinking that this universe can be captured by rules somehow, that it must be a game, that we only need to figure out its rules and then we can master it.

I think that as humans, we desperatedly seek to order this nonsensical world that surround us. We cannot stand the idea that this has no meaning, no purpose and no sense. We need to be constantly reassured that we are important, that we are here for something and that things happen for some reason. That´s one of the reasons why fiction exists, because it allows us to order the world, to give it a meaning. Games are a particularly powerful medium to depict an ordered world, they can actually build living worlds ruled with sense and meaning. That´s probably what makes them so attractive.

But because a game is so efficient at representing that I would love to see it to doing the opposite. That´s my personal ambition with "Landscape", to depict a world ruled by so many nonsensical rules that it escapes the control and understanding of the player.

I´m trying to make a list of nice games designed by people who came from other domains, with no formal training as game designers or programmers.


So far I got:

-Tale of Tales´s games (obviously)

-"Cart Life" by Richard Hoffmeier

-"Ulitsa Dimitrova" and "Ute" by Léa Schönfelder

-"Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet" by Michel Gagné

-"Windowsill" by Vectorpark

-"Deep Sea" by Wraughk

EDIT:

-"EMC" by Christian Etter


There have to be more, let me know if you have any ideas!

As in the case of videogames that mimic film: they look real to us not because they remind of reality, but because they remind us of the photographic depiction of reality.

Oh, never thought it that way, but that may actually explain why so called "cinematic" games bother me so much. A depiction of a depiction of reality, it does feel silly.

This is fantastic material!

Thanks György.

I´m totally blown away by this talk, I really hope for this to be the future of programming and creation tools:

http://vimeo.com/36579366


So glad to see there are smart engineers on our side!

Krystian Majewski wrote about all the problems he had with Vimeo:

http://gamedesignreviews.com/scrapbook/how-vimeo-lost-me/


It seems that if you do anything remotely related to videogames you should better avoid it.

hmm... maybe we could rescue the old manuals that went together with games so we can leave the game itself instruction-free? Like what Chris Crawford did in "Trust and Betrayal", which had in the title screen written something like "Don´t play this game if you haven´t read the manual, you are wasting your time".

I think simply because we are "relatives", maybe not the closest ones but still, our work will always be related to his becuse he gained the status of being "the art games designer". Like it or not, whoever tries to push video games into the art domain will be compared to his achievements.

And anyway, maybe he has a different approach but we share interests. I personally think that "Sleep Is Death" is a brilliant notgame.

Gamecenter already gives the option to put different description texts before and after you unlock un achievement. So it´s really easy to make it so it dosen´t look like a to-do list.

Personally I find that achievements can be interesting. I like the way they are used in Team Fortress 2, as you just get them for random things happening in the game that you don´t even know that can happen. There are achievements that you cannot even try to get, so in a way these achievements feel like a celebration of randomness.

I did put achievements for Loop Raccord and most of them require no skill, they just happen as interesting or funny combinations of videos appear in the game. They are there to remember the player to look at the relationships that are created between the videos and not just the game system.

Thought this was relevant, somehow:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/13/charlie-brooker-modern-warfare-3

Maybe a game in which the goal is to stay in character?

If you are not the hero, but just one of many characters in the story. If you play your role you help the story evolve and get richer, if you don´t, the story just keeps playing without you.

This also reminds me this idea I had some time ago: a shooter in which shooting other players or getting shot does nothing, except that you have a button to pretend getting shot.

Is Jason Rohrer after all taking the opposite path to the one we are pursuing here?

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/38330/MIGS_2011_Redefining_Challenge_In_Games_Can_Push_Artistic_Boundaries_Says_Rohrer.php

I´m not quite convienced by his point so far.

You recentrly met Richard Lemarchand for a talk, right?

How was it?