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Chris Crawford is always very quick to point out how storytelling in games is primitive because it's not dramatic. I'm a big admirer of Mr Crawford but I'm starting to doubt if this is the best approach. I usually enjoy the non-dramatic realtime existence in games the most. Just being in a virtual world not doing much of anything, and not much of anything happening, is by far my favourite thing in games. Maybe we should just reject drama, and story, and simply embrace realtimeness, Just deliver a scene, a situation, nothing more.

That the depiction of human life is dominant in a medium like cinema makes sense. Cameras are very good at capturing reality. It's the easiest thing to do with that technology! But in videogames, it seems rather strange to have the same focus. There is nothing in this technology that makes it particularly good at capturing reality. With the possible exception of motion capture (but even that's far from easy). The depiction of humans in games is one of the hardest things to do. Maybe we should not be so quick to default to it.

Acknowledging the progress already made is a good thing

Thank you for the reminder. In my impatience I too am guilty of forgetting this sometimes.

[both]

I do think we have to make games that are better than existing games in every way.
...
I'm long resolved to doing it all, alone if I must.

In the last 4 years since this conversation took place, a bunch of interesting videogames were released that heavily featured a notgames design mindset, and some of those released games went on to be commercially successful (most notably selling Minecraft to MS for an under-priced $2.5 billion). I think it really is true that all we needed was to create and keep creating experiences that were interesting enough, and the rest of videogame culture could help build them up. So you're right in the sense that the largest piece of the puzzle is making the right videogame.

I think where you're wrong is that much progress has already been made, and it was by some indie developers who were often working toward this non-deliberately and as a broader community more so than as one collaboration. They talked to each other at conferences and shared ideas and gave each other feedback, as artists do. And they built upon years of evolving previous work in their medium, along with adding some of their own new ideas here and there, as artists do.

Was it about making better videogames? Yes. Is it possible to single-handedly accomplish the task and do it yourself? Certainly not. They've already accomplished so much and have paved so many roads, there's no way you can accomplish anything without standing on their shoulders, unless you both never release your games (which prevents your effort from being proven) and have no prior knowledge of the medium.

Your enthusiasm is inspiring! Thank you. But I think it's impossible to create in a vacuum in 2015 and emerge later as a hero from outer space. Acknowledging the progress already made is a good thing, hopefully it can encourage you as you move forward.

I think my idea of success is much less narrow than this. Minecraft is probably the only classic video game for a decade. And whenever I try to remember how much MS bought it out for I think $25B because $2.5B does seem ridiculous. I see something now called Minecraft Story Mode, or something like this, which is maybe getting closer to what I'd call a form of success if it shakes out. Minecraft does put a tool in the hands of lots of people, but it's more like a proof of concept, since you can't make anything except block worlds out of it.

The next step is to get something like Minecraft in the hands of everyone, only instead of block worlds, real worlds that look like classic video games. That's what I do, virtually single-handedly. I don't think a few small outfits making a few games with tools like Unity that are super time intensive will change the face of games the way I need it changed personally. There's also that Unity games tend to be unattractive, but I'm sure there are less often used ways to use it. What are you using for TDC?

(I think would-be game makers need a firmer hand to guide them than Unity. High-level tools like RPG Maker are the wave of the future.)

Thank you for elaborating! I was asking not because I disagreed, but because I sincerely did not understand your language.

And now I can see that we are very much in agreement.

I came here because there were interesting people, conversations, thought experiments, and critique to be had. It wasn't to join a militia. Some people here are more militant than others. I can tolerate it, but I think it drove many others away, most notably Stephen Lavelle, although that case was also due to explicit rudeness.

To answer your question about TDC, Ryan and I started the project together back when it was an interactive art installation in 2012. So I lead the studio with him as his business partner and have collaborated as an artist early on when we were establishing the art direction, and now more as a programmer and designer as we have grown the team. Being busy with That Dragon, Cancer is the primary reason why I stopped being active here, ha.

I like the art direction of TDC. I feel like we should just beat people over the head with this kind of looking game until they learn to appreciate it, and only then let them have something different

When I asked in another post if we see ourselves as artists or insurgents (revolutionaries) I don't mean in the militant sense, and I know that's not what you mean, but I just want to be clear to readers, that I think if you argue for change, you have to approach it like a coordinated battle, really a movement, and just making games privately doesn't cut it and isn't going to change anything. That's magical thinking more or less.


I'm kind of sad to find my way to this forum in a state of decline. We really need new blood, and this seems like a good historical place to gather to discuss things in general. It's a little bit like finding the motherload when it seemed like there was nothing out there but crickets. It's depressing really, because the Internet hasn't shaken out as a two-way street, I think just because of sheer numbers; the impulse isn't to have the two-way conversation because no one seems to be willing to bother to post comments and talk back, so it seems like everywhere you go about games is "0 comments" until you wonder if there is really anyone out there, or if it's all just hype. It's as if we've all become broadcasters without enough time to be active listeners, and I worry that has created a real vacuum of solidarity.

Michael's Patreon of late is especially depressing for me. It should be more abuzz (edited: the players Michael would call asocial immature I forgets have a lot more than "0 comments" to spare/spread around. We are failing at this level, I wonder if ToT's Beautiful Art Program's suggestion to work fewer hours would help people find more time to talk about things at the end of the day (I know from my own experience that after 6hrs you're doing more harm than good.))

[both]

I do think we have to make games that are better than existing games in every way.
...
I'm long resolved to doing it all, alone if I must.

In the last 4 years since this conversation took place, a bunch of interesting videogames were released that heavily featured a notgames design mindset, and some of those released games went on to be commercially successful (most notably selling Minecraft to MS for an under-priced $2.5 billion). I think it really is true that all we needed was to create and keep creating experiences that were interesting enough, and the rest of videogame culture could help build them up. So you're right in the sense that the largest piece of the puzzle is making the right videogame.

I think where you're wrong is that much progress has already been made, and it was by some indie developers who were often working toward this non-deliberately and as a broader community more so than as one collaboration. They talked to each other at conferences and shared ideas and gave each other feedback, as artists do. And they built upon years of evolving previous work in their medium, along with adding some of their own new ideas here and there, as artists do.

Was it about making better videogames? Yes. Is it possible to single-handedly accomplish the task and do it yourself? Certainly not. They've already accomplished so much and have paved so many roads, there's no way you can accomplish anything without standing on their shoulders, unless you both never release your games (which prevents your effort from being proven) and have no prior knowledge of the medium.

Your enthusiasm is inspiring! Thank you. But I think it's impossible to create in a vacuum in 2015 and emerge later as a hero from outer space. Acknowledging the progress already made is a good thing, hopefully it can encourage you as you move forward.

Thank you for elaborating! I was asking not because I disagreed, but because I sincerely did not understand your language.

And now I can see that we are very much in agreement.

I came here because there were interesting people, conversations, thought experiments, and critique to be had. It wasn't to join a militia. Some people here are more militant than others. I can tolerate it, but I think it drove many others away, most notably Stephen Lavelle, although that case was also due to explicit rudeness.

To answer your question about TDC, Ryan and I started the project together back when it was an interactive art installation in 2012. So I lead the studio with him as his business partner and have collaborated as an artist early on when we were establishing the art direction, and now more as a programmer and designer as we have grown the team. Being busy with That Dragon, Cancer is the primary reason why I stopped being active here, ha.

In the same way, people have now made their choice on what they think video games are. I do not think it is possible to lure these people in. I think the only way is to make games that are so damn interesting to them that they simply cannot ignore. And the scary part is that this might be impossible for many.

I do think we have to make games that are better than existing games in every way. And I know that the only way that can be done is deliberately and collectively, and I know if it's not done no one else is going to do it ever. So someone does it, or it doesn't happen...

Unfortunately in our culture I feel like nothing happens collectively ever. One person must do it all, maybe two people if they are a lucky couple, up to a point, about 90% of the way, and then everyone will jump onto that bandwagon. It's just the nature of our species. I'm long resolved to doing it all, alone if I must.


EDITED: I read this thread backward from a quote link. I'm a little worried how often WASD appears in this forum. I don't think most people can even use WASD and when they say it what they really mean is pressing the W key with one finger while using the mouse for everything else. The keyboard should be taken out back and shot. There are no magic bullets in video games but there is at least the certainty that the keyboard is doomed (sorry keyboard )

I don't know what the answer is, but there's no reason that a game controller should be a second class peripheral. If you have a mouse, then why not a game controller? They are on equal footing, or should be.

I find games to be bizarre for the most part. Maybe that means I'm getting old. But the appeal to me of making games more like movies is you don't see bizarre movies, and you don't see movies that simulate being a trucker or anything like that.

If movies were anything like video game or simulator products they would be radically different. So a lot of the appeal of getting away from traditional games to me is to have more games I can identify with. All of the Tale of Tales games except for maybe the Endless Forest are pretty straightforward things that you can imagine as movies. Nothing bizarre at all. I find that comforting.

This is a response to a blog post Michael put on Gamasutra. This may not be the original:

http://gamasutra.com/blogs/MichaelSamyn/20150612/245971/Infinite_machinations.php

Incidentally I found this link because lately Michael decided to upend his new Patreon page (I'm never quite sure what to call these) and lamented that he was swiftly brow beaten upon publishing his first short article ... which seemed very tame to me. Time will tell what will become of his Patreon, but if anyone saw evidence of a real backlash, please PM me (The links that is. I couldn't find anything that would cow me in his position.)


I develop a "platform" called Sword of Moonlight. It lets inexperienced people make games as easily as possible. It's on course to be the 3D equivalent of "RPG Maker" only I think the level of quality it represents will outshine the video game industry itself.

In Michael's post he wants graph based visual programming. 3D design tool suites have always provided something like this. I've worked on things like this more than once in my life. Not with them (I've done that too) but on such systems. They may be of some modest use to highly experimental game developers. But I think it's almost too soon for real "experimental games". And I don't think these kinds of systems are what we should be striving for.


I make immortal software. I want to share how SOM (Sword of Moonlight) works, and invite everyone to propose other/better/counter ideas in the same vein, without getting too deep into gory details. SOM was originally a product of From Software, but I guess it is abandon-ware... still I wouldn't be surprised if it is the most beloved thing to come out of From Software to many of the people who worked there... especially in the 90s. From Software is presently well-known for "Dark Souls". So expect a kind of mainstream crossover to come out of it. We have a strong opening game for it, made by an artist that I have difficulty communicating with, but it looks very good, and plays amazingly, both thanks to myself and his strong artwork (it looks like Ico/SOTC, which looks a lot like King's Field IV, except for the eyes are like in Etruscan frescoes, whether intentional or not. It's set in ancient Scotland; historically accurate customs wise but with added fantasy elements. Maybe I can get him to make a game set in an Etruscan fresco world next!)


How SOM originally worked is dead simple. I've added some conceptual layers to it. It has a 3D world of course, conceptually built out of 2D tiles. I don't think it has to be that way (using the same proprietary file formats) but that is so simple for people to use that I'm very fond of this approach. I intend to add a way to link the worlds so the tiles can be built up vertically in layers, but not as a 3D cube-grid, just arbitrary layers of interwoven 2D grids. The tiles can rise and fall...

And on the tiles that have landscape/architecture like models built into them you can place interactive elements, and then associate one or more programmable "event" with an element (it's also possible to not associate an event, and I've added the ability to setup worldwide (trans-tile-grid) events, which was kind of a glaring omission from its original repertoire.)


This is fairly bog standard. Each event can be activated in any number of ways. This is a high-level system, so these rules are built into the software itself and you need only select them from a menu. An event has multiple loops, and inside the loop the event can switch to a different loop, or it can switch another event to a different loop...

The basic unit of the loop is a program. It can contain IF/ELSE style branches, but that's all. There is a battery of numbers that can be modified inside the loops and represent the state of the game's scenario. How this may be different from a graph based visual programming system is the "events" are embedded in the world, and the system is essentially flat. It has to be welcoming to newcomers who are afraid to death of programming!


Here is where things get interesting. The program is built up by dropping modules into a sequential stack. There is no way to jump around the stack, only to advance to another stack by the event switching to one of its other loops (a loop can be a character that repeats themselves for instance)

Originally all of these modules were specialized to perform predetermined functions. However this approach doesn't scale well. So what I've done is to take the first two modules, which are used to output text, and to output slightly more customized text, and said that from hereon out a loop just outputs text, and the secondary text module is used by macros (ie. a template) which is text that you can define drop in inputs for, that are defined/imported as needed on a macro definition screen (so that the original instruction set can be emulated by macros)


Best practice now is to not output text, but to output a link instead, just like a WWW hyperlink only just any text will do. Although not any, because the link system works around a legacy condition, namely that the link-text has to be Shift-JIS, which is a kind of text that was used by the Japanese WWW for a long time.


The link text can be a simple description of a scene, like in a screenplay. But like a hyperlink it needs to be permanent. Even if it has typos it isn't a big deal, because it's a link into a transcript, or what I call a gameplay (think screenplay) which is a gettext MO file, that is the standard for translation used on Linux and by most websites on the WWW. How gettext works is it takes a bit of text and uses that as a key to look up the translated text. So this way your short description of what the scene is about, or what the text is supposed to do, is expanded to reveal the real text that appears in-game.


Late last year I began work on what is really just an elaborate gettext MO file editor. I won't get into the details, but it's now the core/main tool of Sword of Moonlight, and it has a heavy focus on literature and translation. It organizes the MO file like an outline, like we are taught in the United States, how to plan an essay or story...

It also optimizes the MO file for memory-mapped-file access, which is a nonstandard feature, and makes it so that users only have to work with one file instead of the PO->compiler->MO file approach promoted by gettext. PO remains an exchange format.

In fact, every step of the way I've based my systems to help people make games on things that we are taught in primary school, so that everyone who graduates high school in the United States should already have all of the skills they require. This breaks down in three basic ways:


1) you have the outline layout. The built-in hierarchy is very loose, so you can decided how to best organize for yourself. The editor also functions a lot like Windows Explorer so you can attach dates and names to individual items in the outline, any kind of meta data you can think of, and collate the items that way like the details view in Explorer. You can even use this as a planner and way for collaborators to communicate since it's a lot like an email client as well.

2) the text is actually XML. Which is like HTML, which I assume people at least have the option to learn in high school. If children are given any exposure to programming, I'm assuming it's in the form of HTML, which is really more markup than programming. Because of the confederated nature of a MO file, the XML is actually called EXML, or Embedded XML (Ex is used to denote extensions for SOM, so this is an in joke) which is optimized for having lots of micro-XML documents instead of one big EXML document owing to how each micro-document is pulled up by one of the links initially embedded within the 3D world itself. Like HTML there is both text and markup, and so its possible to make a pure-program block of text by simply only including markup, so that no text is emitted, and so no text appears in the game, just as how text works in HTML/on webpages.

EDITED: The meta data goes into the head of the XML and doesn't appear in the editor. I just want to stress that inserting/defining meta data isn't the body of the text that is edited. Although there is markup for inserting figures, pronouns, names, etc. into the item body.

3) like HTML has JavaScript, I've developed a much simpler system better suited to high-level game development that works like a calculator. It's a purely functional programming language making it ideal for game software, and keeping the games in order (I'm always thinking about how to tie the authors' hands so they can't make something broken even if they try to.) Of course we're all taught how to use a calculator in school. This form of programming lets authors define complex mathematical functions (everything a calculator can do is there, so even complex numbers, and it uses calculator syntax.) Just like the basic single dimensional bank of numbers used by the event system, the calculator system lets you define banks of numbers/functions, so that a lot of the time it's best to think in terms of "lookup tables" and it exposes the game scenarios internal state as one such table (SOM calls these "counters" based on the description of the simple computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter_machine)

The calculator like formulas are defined inside the extension files, which are INI files, in the [Number] sections or directly within the HTML like parts of the game script like embedded JavaScript. HTML isn't used for text formatting since it's really bad at that. Microsoft's Rich Text (RTF file) is (think like Wordpad.)


I believe this is the ideal context for artists programming game scenarios. The problem is this is all very high-level, and it needs a basis that is high-level to strap onto. Much more high-level than Unity or Game Maker or anything like that. Every kind of game really needs its own high-level framework (or at least one to choose from) although there's probably no reason you couldn't use Unity or Game Maker to make a higher-level platform than they themselves are. Either way the core MO editor I described is completely independent of everything else Sword of Moonlight does (that's kind of the point, to be language neutral text-wise) and I'd recommend it to anyone making a literary game... although fair warning: I've pumped six months into it, and it can probably use another round of upgrades before it's ready for everyone to adopt it wholesale (ie. it's PO-edit on steroids. Source code for using the MO file in-game is tiny.)


In conclusion, a flow chart might look alright, but simple markup embedded within a literary structure is probably much easier to work with, especially for novices. Lines flowing everywhere like a circuit board isn't anymore intrinsically human than a corpus of written code (I'd wager it's less so, which is why programmers mainly work like book writers, even though it doesn't appear that way from the outside to non-programmers)


EDITED: For what it's worth, the text editor provides a text-server, so the text can be edited without closing out the game play session. Changing the events in the level-designer (not the script) requires a game restart, but I think just reloading the current map/level should also work (it would be an improvement to have something always on like Quest3D.) Using links, if some text appears more than once throughout the game world, the link can take its place in all instances so the real text only appears in the script in one place (this was another problem with the original system, as well as arbitrary limits on text lengths.)

The same text is reinterpreted every time it appears/is accessed by the game. There's no real overhead to that. The calculator like formulas are compiled/reduced (so that only variable terms remain. Extensions also use these to change themselves on the fly, for custom game-y formulas, or changing fundamental parameters like the dimensions of the avatar Alice in Wonderland style.)

(The MO file not only translates the game, but the entire project itself, so that combined with language packages for the stock text that tools use, even the text that doesn't appear in the game gets translated, so that there can be collaboration between people without a common language, or people who prefer different languages/jargon/writing styles--not limited to teammates since players/would-be-authors are also encouraged to pick up and run with the projects themselves (SOM is neither commercial nor non-commercial. It's just there and you can do anything you want with it whoever you are.))