Hi Thomas et al .,
Thanks for the link  --


[ X ]

However perhaps focusing on spatial movement { & violence } is somewhat a case of not seeing the wood for the trees? Whether it's movement / shooting / or the paucity of gestures in general these are fundamentally just different ways of encapsulating the mechanics of collision or "hit detection". I hazard that it's something that came to the fore: first as the most basic of interactions that can be computationally performed in 3D space by drawing a line to a point, then checking for whether it intersects. Perhaps somebody more versed in game history can come up with the origins of "hit detection" but I my rough guess that those techniques came from WW2 missile guidance systems.

Quite remarkable then that the last 30 years of video game culture has come from this small grain. Re -worked again & again from "Spacewar" through to "Night Driver" and then contemporary FPS games. You see collision in game space creates the rules, form and the "direction" of play much like how sports have fields with demarcations and timed periods to establish the structure for interesting things to happen. Put up 2 -walls and you have a race game, 2 -more and you have a maze game. Now extrude that into 3D space and do some hit -scanning and you essentially have the core mechanics of MW3.

As game developers much mileage comes from factoring in movement speed x collision. This seems to be enough as we can express tone or emotion running the gamut from "Desert Bus" to "Burnout Paradise" which are the same basic construct but running at different speeds. However I feel this can only work to increase or reduce the players perception of "intensity" as it borrows from ideas of cinematic montage that have already been internalised by the audience. That game space -time maps somehow onto real -time cause & effect with a kind of integrity, or enough so that we can "extrapolate" consequences of our actions.



[ Y ]

How to make spatial movement more interesting? Well the first thing is to delve into the phenomenology { or perception } of motion. Namely: time _ that wonderful stuff which begets memory, which begets forgetting. Possibly the most notable thing about "Dear Esther" is how it affords players the spacing in between events through the mechanic of traversal; which in turn becomes the cadence of the narrative as it's assimilated. Replete with gaps _ and stops. Once again though it's Eisenstein's theory of "montage" or Bruce Lee's "broken rhythm" at work. Both share the same essential idea that you can manipulate people's apprehension or interpretation of motion to great effect. And that should be exciting because it considers perception + cognition to be as important as the event!

However modern game design, for lack of understanding forgoes the cognitive side of the equation for mapping emotion through an intensity graph as the thread to which a player's experience should hew. It's an odd decision though and one which is worth questioning as one of the inherent pleasures is in the exploration. From a narrative perspective it might be plausible but when you explore it with any depth the concept of "intensity" itself is narrow and one -dimensional much like the choices in games which seek to have strong resolution on those terms. There's literally a fork in the road ahead with one direction being an enormous rollercoaster of epic proportions and the other somewhat leading to the house with the mailbox.

Spatial movement in most games is used to corral players into progression. What this neglects however is a complete sense of being, because you are always seeking out the other { re: checkpoint or narrative continuity }. It's a bloody good way to keep bums on seats I suppose as proven from Greek antiquity onwards. If we're to get a bit meta as well I think the movement of knowledge and awareness of the various techniques and devices to portray it in game are also interesting to think about.

Go visit some gameplay or engine programmers in a studio it's most likely that they have a volume of Mark De Loura's "Game Programming Gems" sitting beside their monitor. And if you get an early version of this book from around '00 you will see the guts of contemporary gaming laid bare. Splatiomancy of a sort -- early attempts at 3D camera frustrums, convex hull collisions and more. It's a bit sad to me that we don't have the same "computer science" approach to making game experiences that the pioneers did, or even just the time & intent to think things through from 1st principles.



[ Z ]

The genius & tragedy of Chris Crawford is that like Cassandra he was able to see all of this in the early 90s and it's what he tried so hard to impart to his fellow developers with the now infamous "GDC Dragon Speech". That there was no future for just iterating games on simple mechanics like "hit detection" and that other systems needed to be invented to assimilate other mental processes into the form. "Storytron" was the attempt to open up n -space and a sense of internal dialogue and I think what we might be able to take from that is the idea of the spatial not only in a cartesian fashion { after Descartes } but also from cognition and psychology. To consider the "being" in space -time and things about human nature which might resonate in a non -literal sense.

It's what people like Resnais, Robbe-Grillet and of course Godard were trying to achieve with film and literature last century where those forms already had an established structure or expectations. Disruption of the flow with a view to mindful -ness or breaking the vase to see the flowers. Personally, I've starting to look more at dance and how it's pretty much cinema but without the elements of manipulation and what we might learn from such focused feeling and constraints. For a more direct and hands -on experience I recommend you check out Alex Bruce's "Hazard / Anti -Chamber" as it's a brilliant take on the mental conditioning of FPS space and how to present motion as integrated w/ philosophy.



-- CH

Twitter: chuan_l