Worlds colliding

[Michaël Samyn]

Video clip of Hawken, a game by Adhesive Games

I've seldom seen a more painful discrepancy between the looks of a game and its gameplay. I had to stop watching the clip. It's so sad.

The landscape painting in this game is incredible (of course it helps that the footage is shot through the always-flattering lens of a video camera). It almost looks like concept art. And then the stupid robot avatars appear, tumbling around like rubber balls, jumping and flying and pretend-shooting like kids, completely ruining the atmosphere and the effort that went into this aesthetic creation.

Here we have it: 21st century artwork being tortured by 20th century concepts of "fun" interaction. It's a crime!

Especially in the midst of all the crying and moaning about games as art. You have your art, right here right now. All you need to do is to let it exist. And you don't do that. You purposely destroy aspiration for the the sublime for the sake of a little bit of childish fun. A crime, I say, a crime!

[God at play]

Word. Once the steam evaporates over there, you should post about it on the blog or on Gamasutra or something

[Thomas]

It is like they do not know what to do with the art.

This type of game summarizes what the main gist that I got from the indie sessions at GDC: To create games that are "fun" straight away and then all development is just about keeping and extending this fun core mechanic. What this means is basically some kind of multi player sports-like game or a single player equivalent. With the success of Minecraft, that does just this, I think we will see more and more of this kind of games in favor of more holistic experiences.

[ghostwheel]

What a waste.

[Michaël Samyn]

So we'll have to rely on the AAA developers for "breaking through the art barrier"?

It's funny. It really feels like we're so immensely close. All the technology is in place, a lot of the craft has been developed. Sometimes it feels like all it takes now is a little push, a little courage. And once it happens, nothing will be the same.
But it's been like that for a decade now, with a little bit of ebb and flow. But no breakthrough. We'll see. Our little group here may turn out to be the "real" indies...

[Erik Svedäng]

Holy macaroni, they must be extremely good at their stuff. We're making a game in 3D right now but we're using simpler shapes and a stylized look to make it not take forever (we have only two people making the 3D-models). Even though I think the look of the trailer is quite boring it's still amazing how much shit they've put together.

[ghostwheel]

Our little group here may turn out to be the "real" indies...[/i]

Funny you should say that - I've pretty much given up on the indie game scene. So many of them are hostile to anything that doesn't fit the "indie" mould. You know, pixel graphics, chiptunes, 2d side-scrolling and all that retro bullshit - endlessly remaking and remixing the same handful of 8 and 16 bit games. They are no better than and no more open to new ideas than the big AAA developers. Less even. It's all very programmer-centric and unimaginative.

For a while, I wasn't sure I belonged here. But I do. I'm not interested in wallowing in the past.

[Max Nilsson]

We are soon starting a project in UDK and we were all really inspired by the first minute or so of the trailer. Then we all agreed on that the rest of it was repulsive and now we know how our game shouldn't be.

[Thomas]

Funny you should say that - I've pretty much given up on the indie game scene. So many of them are hostile to anything that doesn't fit the "indie" mould. You know, pixel graphics, chiptunes, 2d side-scrolling and all that retro bullshit - endlessly remaking and remixing the same handful of 8 and 16 bit games. They are no better than and no more open to new ideas than the big AAA developers. Less even. It's all very programmer-centric and unimaginative.

With this in mind, why did Nidhogg get a nuovo award? I have not played it myself, just watched a bit, it looked like fun and seemed like a great spectator game judging from the constant crowd at GDC. But I have a hard time seeing how it advances the medium? I have not seen a statement from the jury about this, perhaps Michael has some inside info?

[Michaël Samyn]

As far as I can tell, Nidhogg won the award because of the reasons you mention. It's well designed to be fun. Many of the Nuovo jury members were hardcore ludologists (Eric Zimmerman himself was one of them -you know, the man who defines a game as a system in which players engage in artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome, next to Frank Lantz, the most extreme pro-game theorist I know, next to Jason Rohrer, "Mr Art Game" (i.e. leader of the pack of those who believe that game rules can and should express everything), next to Rod Humble, his patron saint (who, I must admit, was a lot more open minded than the rest of them). Few of them had an artistic background.

We should be lucky that Chris "God" Hecker's Spy Party didn't win. Luckily the fact that it wasn't finished was used against it.

If it wasn't for us, I doubt Dinner Date would have been selected. Or Bohm, or The Cat and the Coup for that matter. But our influence was limited to selecting the finalists. After that, we all had to post our nominee(s) for a winner in a private email to Brandon Boyer and I guess he tallied everything up and Nidhogg appeared as a winner.

I think some members of the jury think that Nidhogg is somehow "edgy" or even "punk". I think they see the retro style is ironic and "raw" and thus the game must be revolutionary. There was also a tendency in this jury to reward "good design". So much so that there was a concern that there might be too much overlap with the main prize category.

I hereby repeat my suggestion that you should all email Brandon Boyer and Simon Carless to offer your services as a jury member next year. It's all a lottery anyway, and we might as well be the ones influencing it. At least when we do, perhaps something will start moving in the industry.

[Thomas]

I hereby repeat my suggestion that you should all email Brandon Boyer and Simon Carless to offer your services as a jury member next year. It's all a lottery anyway, and we might as well be the ones influencing it. At least when we do, perhaps something will start moving in the industry.

Oh, missed that thread. Too much to check after getting home I guess.

I was not aware that emailing and asking to be on jury was possible. I was under the impression that the organizers of the IGF would simply contact you if they found you fitting to be in the jury? Was this how you got on? I will certainly consider applying in any case.

EDIT: Read thread and saw that this was the case indeed. Please ignore my question

[Michaël Samyn]

Yep. It's weird like that. Maybe they invite certain people as well. Not us, though. We had to push ourselves. We knew to do so because when we complained about the jury in the past (not enough women, too many technologists, etc), they just said that we should become jury members ourselves. So we did. As soon as there was a year when we didn't want to enter a game ourselves.

[Booger]

I honestly think if they made the movements of the mecha more graceful and less "Oh look I'm spectating on a multiplayer deathmatch" the jarring effect might have been mitigated.

Especially when they had these scenes of the lone warrior perched on top of a building -- that's just such an iconic cut that's been used in sci-fi and anime where it means 'I'm a cut above the rest'.

If I were the devs I'd make all the mechas take on female curves like Zone of the Enders, seriously.  I mean, the whole industrial Asian megalopolis feel is taken right out of Ghost in the Shell.

[God at play]

[With this in mind, why did Nidhogg get a nuovo award? I have not played it myself, just watched a bit, it looked like fun and seemed like a great spectator game judging from the constant crowd at GDC. But I have a hard time seeing how it advances the medium? I have not seen a statement from the jury about this, perhaps Michael has some inside info?

I played an early version of Nidhogg, but it was quite a bit earlier than what was submitted to the IGF. It was pretty interesting, I'm not sure you guys should be quick to discredit it. I guess I haven't played too many of Mark's games, but they're the kind of games that you have to play to truly understand, which IMO suggests it should be a contender for Nuovo purely based on that alone. His games are pretty visceral and touch your brain in a specific way. It's much different than simply watching a video.  Again though, I did not play the IGF version, so maybe it wasn't on the same level as other nominees, I can't say.

Cactus winning Nuovo last year was perfectly OK with me because his game was exactly the same way. It was 3D, and yet threw standard depictions of Euclidean space out the window. This created one of the most unique 3D games I've ever played, and you completely miss the experience just by watching a video.

ghostwheel, I would suggest you check out thegamescollective.org, but it appears to have died... There was interesting work going on there. Some of the more "experimental" indies from TIGSource were there.

[Michaël Samyn]

Well, needless to say that as jury members for Nuovo, Auriea and I did play Nidhogg. It's fun, it has good music, the animations are interesting (but not more interesting than the original 2D Prince of Persia -released 20 years ago), it's a little bit clever.

I guess I wouldn't be so annoyed with these retro-style (parody?) games winning these awards if they were less common. Harking back to The Olden Days in terms of gameplay and graphics is just the default for indie developers. I'm sure there's a lot of merit in that but a competition, and especially an innovation award, should focus on remarkable works, works that stand out, not just works that happen to be at the top of the largest mountain in the landscape.