I think that "found text" and other elements within a game can be very effective; some of the best stories I've seen in games were ones where the vast majority of the narrative was conveyed through found text or other media (Marathon and Silent Hill 2, for instance).  It's true that the text itself is not a game in this case, but I think there is still an important distinction between found text and a cutscene, namely: the text must be *discovered*.  The text itself isn't a game, but finding it is.  In games like SH2 and Marathon, this simple act of discovery makes all the difference.

Another thing that I have been thinking about on this subject is if game text and dialog should not be viewed more as lyrics and poetry. Meaning that the actual content is not what is most important, but how it goes along with the "flow" of the game.

Yes!  This is exactly what I feel is being done in the above games; the narrative does not feel like an interruption because it is integrated into the natural flow of the game: the process of advancement and discovery.  Remember the blue and red pages from Myst?  They did the same thing with video: instead of interrupting the gameplay with cutscenes, they augmented the gameplay by allowing you to discover more content.

I had a very similar experience recently in designing a game for an undergraduate research project.  I wanted to inspire a specific emotion in the player, but I didn't want the message to be too blunt or obvious and I didn't want a lot of excess "clutter" getting in the way, so I focused on making it as abstract as possible and tried to do away with all "gamey" elements such as rules and goals.  Unfortunately, without an objective, my test players were unable to relate to their avatar and the message got lost.  The problem wasn't that players weren't able to identify with their avatar, the problem was that they had no *reason* for doing so.  I think this is a property of all media, not just games: the more abstract the work is, the more open it is to interpretation, and if the "intended" reading is too specific then too many players will fall outside of the intended reaction.

Great video, I like these guys.  It's not true, however, that there are no games that explore themes of motherhood: the author of this article makes a good argument for why Super Metroid explores themes of motherhood and puts the player in the role of a mother figure.  He over-analyzes some aspects of the game, I think, but he makes a pretty convincing case in other areas.  There are also links to several other good articles about femininity in games.

This is another article on the subject of feminism and games that I found particularly intriguing; it argues that Bayonetta is actually a feminist game because it demonstrates that women don't have to reject gendered stereotypes to be strong, independent characters--in fact, there can be something empowering about using gender roles to transcend the boundaries imposed by those roles.  This is kind of along the same lines as the discussion in the video of the way in which normal human beings often accept some gender roles while rejecting others, and often the interaction between the two is what makes for interesting characters.

I saw this talk (my writeup of it is in this post, though I wrote mostly about my reaction to the game and hardly any about the talk itself).  I haven't played Heavy Rain (no PS3), but it didn't surprise me that his talk was essentially a notgames manifesto.  Heavy Rain was a notgame from the beginning.

The write-up I linked above is admittedly anemic (it was really late when I wrote it ^^;), but I still have all my notes, so if you have any questions about the talk I can probably answer them.

I just had an even more skewed thought: Apple as the benevolent dictator of the UI design field, happily pruning all the redundant or unnecessary language from their designs to create a procedural Newspeak.  What's really scary about that thought is, I love Apple!  I think their UI design is second to none--but placing the emphasis on usability and efficiency certainly does have that dark side of eliminating the expressive power of the language.  Have you ever thought about making a game that plays on some of the UI conventions that we've become familiar with?  What would the UI equivalent of a pun look like?

[Myst]

Hello everybody, this is my first post here.  I wanted to reply to this topic, but decided to restart it because it's a little old, and because my question is actually a bit different.  Let me know if you think it should be moved somewhere else.  What I want to know is, what games (or notgames) inspire you?  What games do you find yourself emulating, consciously or unconsciously, when making your own?  What do these games share in common that has had such a strong influence on you?

Many of my strongest influences were already mentioned in the previous thread, but I was surprised that Myst wasn't one of them.  Myst and Riven have probably had a stronger influence on me than any other game I've yet played.

Another game no one mentioned is Super Metroid.  Ironically, what I like most about it are its least game-like qualities.  The most memorable moments for me weren't the boss fights, powerups or minimal narrative, they were feelings--the feeling of being lost, for instance, or the feeling of finding hidden treasure, or the exquisite and irreproducible feeling you get when you finally figure out how to enter Maridia.  It is exactly those sorts of feelings that all my favorite games share in common, from Silent Hill 2 to Braid to Don't Look Back, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, I Wish I Were the Moon, Pikmin, The Path, Dear Esther, etc.: that moment of discovery, of finding something new, or of being lost, on the verge of finding something new.  To me, that's what games are about.  Does anyone else feel that way?

I enjoy pleasant UI design as much as anyone else. But to think of it as a language goes a bit too far too me. That seems to imply that it's just about straight communication. And that has always bothered me. When I was going to school to become a graphic designer, my course was called "functional graphics". I had issues with that name because my teachers seemed to know exactly what "function" these "graphics" are supposed to have: to be readable, send a clear message, etc. While I found that graphic design can have so many more functions and layers. It could entertain and tell stories, it could subvert its own message and make you think, it could simply be spectacular and completely unreadable, etc. And the more recent wave of Usability Experts also rubs me  the wrong way. All these assumptions that there is only a single goal to everything -speed and efficiency- really narrow things down far too much for me.

I don't think it's fair to talk about any form of communication as "straight" communication.  All natural languages are tools for communication, and they have an infinite range of subtlety, complexity, and depth.  I agree with ghostwheel--my father, a teacher, likes to talk about how he's pretty good with computers, but he'll never be as good as his students because computers are a second language to him, while for most of his students it's their native tongue.  I think any tool used for communicating ideas (rather than, say, algorithms) will have elements of a natural language, and any natural language has the capacity for subtlety and complexity, and will evolve over time.

I wouldn't say that "rewards are an inherent part of interaction design", rather I would say that interaction is inherently rewarding.  Interaction is, in essence, a process of exploration and discovery.  Exploration, conversation, discovery, and the scientific method are all just different ways of saying "learning": a process of question, response, idea, question, etc.  The human brain is wired to find this process inherently enjoyable; we like discovering new things for their own sake, we enjoy solving puzzles for the simple satisfaction of having solved them.  Rather than worrying about rewarding the player, I would suggest you ask instead whether the rewards you're giving them are intrinsic (valuable for their own sake, because the player likes finding new things and solving problems) or extrinsic (valuable because they allow the player access to something else they find valuable).  Without knowing more about your game, I can't really say anything intelligent about which it is, but maybe this is helpful to you.