While the plugin doesn't interest me too much (I'm not really willing to put up with the sacrifice in flexibility you usually have to when using graphical programming) the 'nom' demo under showcase on that website is pretty nice. There's something very lovely about it

I've actually upgraded it to 2.3.3 using their official updater thing so it's not that (at least it shouldn't be).

I tried manually installing that package, but it crashed when I tried to open it so presumably the market did know what it was doing.

The app store says no for me and won't even let me download it. I'd guess it's because my phone's not powerful enough, but I'm not really sure.

The box of my phone says it's a Samsung Galaxy Ace, though I assume you know this phone can't run it if I'm being rejected outright.

I liked this interview, it was a really good read. It was also good to see positive comments under it (at least when I read it).

I also have comments on the video itself.

The first thing that seems off is that he claims (in the writing under the video) that he's trying to find fault with the half-life series. Nothing's perfect, so you can find fault with anything if you try. The faults not being noticable is as good as it's going to get so if they have to be looked for then they probably don't matter too much.

His whole Gordon Freeman being designed to seem godly and to make the player feel good is also not a fault with half-life, it's actually probably one of its strengths. Contrary to what he says, it isn't particularly overbearing (at least, I didn't find it so) and it's a perfectly valid design choice (one that's done very well in this instance). On the other hand, the fact that pretty much all games do this is somewhat of a problem, not so much with the games themselves, more with the people who create and consume them for not demanding variety. It's not a fault with half-life, but with video game culture.


His issues with alex vance are also not that great. She comes across as being quite nice to everyone, little is said about her past relationships to my knowledge, contrary to the assumptions made in the video, and if you knew someone had singlehandedly fought off an alien invaision and saved loads of scientists, I think you might look up to them and perhaps even be a little smitten. It's true that she's not an amazing character, but I've never seen anyone argue that she is (perhaps I just don't read enough attempts to glorify the half-life universe).


Complaining about variety is complete nonsense.


And complaining about having no effect and that "I didn't cause these events, I have no choice in how the world is saved"* is somewhat contradictory to the fist part which is full of clips of people revering you and aknowledging your existence. That's quite a bit of effect. And then lots of what you do is destroy things that no one else does. In the video itself there's a clip of some soldiers saying that now you're here they can finally make some headway. How is that not making a difference?


I do quite like the analagy of valve being the gman though, and the linear train tracks metaphor thing.


*quoted from memory

The "Show, don't tell" thing (or do, don't show) is a good idea, but I'd say that the important thing isn't to show as much as you can, it's to be selective over what you show (//do) and to show whatever fits most with the effect you're going for. For example, if you were to follow it strongly, (the no telling one, that is) then everytime someone remembered something you would show it explicitly. But often it would be more effective to show the person telling about their experiences since, while you may be telling the information, you get to hear their interpretation of it which can be loaded with their emotion and coloured by their memory, and you can see how they react to thinking about it and hearing themselves say it. This could be much more powerful, depending on what you're trying to achieve. As this applies to videogames, it doesn't matter if some things are shown to you rather than you doing them, as long as what you're doing is more powerful and interesting than what you're shown (which is is the part most videogames fail at). Also, it's probably desireable for what you're shown to relate to what you're doing (which videogames are a little better at).

I didn't read all the previous posts before writing this and it appears what I've said is similar to what Chris and Hugo said. Oh well.

I'd definitely agree with this. You have to be much more aware of the user and what they may do, because they can (and probably will) do anything and everything that's allowed (and then some). Which means that everything has to be there, even that weird corner no one was ever supposed to look at, and all of this has to be consciously done by whoever creates it. I guess the fact that everything's there and we have most of the senses that we'd usually use to examine things in the real world (I'm assuming people generally don't go around smelling and tasting random objects) makes it close enough to real that we can believe it, even if only for a short while.

Video-games can create a situation.
Other media can only suggest it.

I agree with this idea. It's definitely worth making a distinction between video games and other mediums here since the ability to experience a situation in a manner and way of your choosing makes a huge difference.

I'm not sure about the rest of it though. As far as I understand (I'm just trying to put it in a way that makes more sense to me), your point is along the lines of that with videogames:

Everything is defined so there exists an atmosphere that is in some way immuatable, it exists in the creation more so than the user.

But every aspect that is defined could, on their own, be part of some other medium which is merely evoking the atmosphere. Thus their conflation merely creates a stronger evokation of the atmosphere (assuming it's done right) rather than giving it some sense of existance.

Unless perhaps for existance it is both sufficient and necessary to have all the aspects that are present in videogames, but of which only some are present in other media.

[THAT]

I can see what you mean when you say that doing isn't the whole picture (it's sometimes even a very small part) but I don't think that video games are necessarily more atmospheric that other mediums. I'd say that it's easier to find videogames atmospheric and that there's less room for misinterpretation of atmosphere since the author gives more about the piece away, but that other mediums can be just as atmospheric, though they require a bit more work on the player's part. This probably does make videogames the "best" at creating/representing atmosphere, but I don't think it really means it enables it. (Though perhaps I'm just being too pedantic with words here.)

Actually, lately i've been feeling that maybe the doing part is not THAT important for this medium. Of course it plays a central role to interact with the creation, but I feel that allot of things regarding "making meaningful choices" and to be able to interact with allot of stuff is somewhat overrated. So I would rather see that its about being rather then doing.

I don't know. There are games with minimal interaction that I like, but when there is lots of interaction, no matter how trivial, I tend to enjoy the interactivity. For example at the start of half-life 2 I found running around picking stuff up and throwing it as well as "talking" to people quite enjoyable, even though it had no effect on anything. And I can't really think of many games with "meaningful" choices, since generally there's a pretty rigid story to tell which means choices can't be big enough to cause deviation from that. I'm not sure it really matters if there are choices or interactivity, since it can work both ways.

As Nuprahtor said, most mediums have a sense of atmosphere. I would have said it's perhaps more that it enables a sense of being, since nothing really happens in them without your input. Though that isn't always the case such as in the path, given no input the girls wander around and interact with stuff. It seems obvious when I write it, but since computers are interactive, surely what they enable is a representation of doing?

I'd agree that when you're not relying on gameplay mechanics to hold your game up atmosphere becomes very important (it could be important even if you are relying on that), but it isn't really unique to the medium. I guess the atmosphere is more explicitly spelt out for the user in videogames though.

It looks interesting, but steam tells me that crysis would take 1 day and 6 hours to download, so I may have to wait until I have access to faster internet.

It's probably worth noting that the only reason the "shoot laser" and "destroy object" things worked (at least based on my experience using the Games Factory) is that they were considered standard things to do by the editor. All the assets that came with it had their own death/explosion animation and I think you may even have been able to assign "shoot" from the right-click context menu (or I could just be misremembering that). Doing anything other than shoot/destroy/change variable essentially required you to program it yourself (admittedly in words).

Also, all the programming logic for a given level was just stored as one big list and I'm not sure how well something like this would translate to a more structured context, e.g if you implemented something similar in Unity where would the logic go? You could probably make something like that work, but it's not quite as good as it sounds (though I haven't used it for years so I may not be remembering it very well).

I've finally found my first puzzle that I had to look up online, the one with the different shaped things (I forget what they were specifically, there was a square one and a triangle one and another one) and the lift. I hadn't actually realised it was a puzzle, I'd looked over the text, seen no immediate clues as to a puzzle and assumed I'd just missed something else out. Perhaps this was just a result of me being conditioned to not expect to have to do any form of abstract thinking in video games whatsoever.

I see. Then yeah, I guess mouse would be better, though lack of the rumble does put it down quite a bit compared to gamepads in certain cases. (I think I was amalgamating ideas in my head and got lost as to the purpose along the way.)

So it's more of a failing of the judges than the categories then  ?

I'd personally see design of rules and mechanics as essentially gameplay. So good rules and mechanics = good gameplay (essentially). Though it could probably be quite beneficial to separate aesthetics into a separate category if it's not getting the attention it deserves at the moment.

I think humans often underestimate how many of our decisions and preferences are based on aesthetics of some kind.

Definitely. I'd guess that the majority of decisions made that can't be justified rationally are based on some subconscious sense of aesthetic.