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Interaction accomplishes the browsing of information, just like scanning a picture or looking through a card catalog. And when folks make broad appeals to inte

by chipsy 11y ago

Interaction accomplishes the browsing of information, just like scanning a picture or looking through a card catalog. And when folks make broad appeals to interactivity, they are saying that somehow the interaction of the gamepad is fundamentally different from turning the page of a book. But that isn't what we are thinking about as we get immersed in a game experience - we soon forget that the controls are there. It is the simulation that people turn to next - a believable world that responds to your actions in complex ways. But again, there is a problem - more than one problem. If the simulation is as chaotic as reality, people lose track of the hooks that kept them involved - they no longer have the ability to make extensive plans or strategies, neither are there any puzzles to solve cleanly and gracefully. And if the simulation adds detail without purpose, it dilutes any designed intent. The small differences in situations are vastly overwhelmed by a few key elements that control the real outcomes - leading to a noisy experience. Only a few kinds of games can survive the extensive sim treatment - the kinds of games that you play with the intent of telling a story about later. Put to this purpose the details rise back to the surface as important story elements. If not those two things, what is it that is grabbing you about Starcraft? Here I would pause to consider what unifies chess, science, and literature. It is the conversation of being posed problems and arguing your case and proving your points, given a factual situation involving arbitrary rules. There are different interactions involved in each case, different skills and levels of execution needed. But it is this thing of being posed interesting problems with variety, one after another, that drives both the best liked games and stories. They don't have to be hard or deep problems - "who will the main character hook up with" drives countless stories and "which team will get the most points" drives most sports - but they give you something to chew on. And so a writing focus is, in this light, an equal partner to a mechanics focus - either could be taking the lead role. The writing could pose a question that the player solves mechanically - that's a very typical model. Or the writing could usher you in one direction, only to reach a mechanical contradiction, leading the player to a critique of the system, a desire to escape the rules. What we don't ask people to do in games is to design, from scratch, large parts of the experience. That takes us out of the realm of immersion, browsing, and strategizing, and into "hard" creativity where an intentional vision drives large bodies of work.

padobson 11y ago
The novel parallel is a great one. Novels, like games, are not passive art or entertainment. The reader has to keep turning the page, moving left-to-right through the world the author has created. I can certainly agree with you that writing can have a meaningful impact on a game, but it's not the reason a game becomes art, as this Polygon piece would have us believe about StarCraft. StarCraft is absolutely an example of how interaction is the core of the experience, and writing only helps construct a narrative to draw you into the experience, providing a cohesive metaphor to describe the experience - both during and afterward. Like Mario saving the Princess or Donkey Kong collecting his bananas or Terran defeating the Zerg, whatever goal the game designer creates to propel you into the narrative is orthogonal to what ultimately makes the experience meaningful. The first Goomba in Super Mario Brothers is far more important to the experience than the Princess at the end of the game. Hell, the first question mark block is even more meaningful than that. But you're right, that without the eyes on the Goomba or the question mark on the block or Mario raising a flag at the end of the level, there's no narrative to be drawn into, there's no way to describe what you're experiencing. And you put it so perfectly: But that isn't what we are thinking about as we get immersed in a game experience - we soon forget that the controls are there. In a great novel, the words fade away and the book disappears and all that remains is the dream world the author has written for you. A game does almost exactly the same thing, but through action and feedback. The feedback can be text, voice over, artwork, animation, or any of the thousands of possibilities digital multimedia has opened up for us, but it should never try to be meaningful unto itself. This is where game designers get bogged down in trying to be like other mediums. Feedback is about rewarding the gamer's action and pushing into the next action, looking for greater reward. A mushroom comes out the question block, the old man gives you a sword, your wave of zerglings wash over a gas refinery. You might argue that writing is key to creating this experience, and I won't disagree, but the Polygon piece absolutely fails to illustrate this, and so another wave of English majors says to themselves, "Well, if I can't get my novel published, there's always video games"

by chipsy 11y ago

padobson 11y ago

The novel parallel is a great one. Novels, like games, are not passive art or entertainment. The reader has to keep turning the page, moving left-to-right through the world the author has created. I can certainly agree with you that writing can have a meaningful impact on a game, but it's not the reason a game becomes art, as this Polygon piece would have us believe about StarCraft. StarCraft is absolutely an example of how interaction is the core of the experience, and writing only helps construct a narrative to draw you into the experience, providing a cohesive metaphor to describe the experience - both during and afterward. Like Mario saving the Princess or Donkey Kong collecting his bananas or Terran defeating the Zerg, whatever goal the game designer creates to propel you into the narrative is orthogonal to what ultimately makes the experience meaningful. The first Goomba in Super Mario Brothers is far more important to the experience than the Princess at the end of the game. Hell, the first question mark block is even more meaningful than that. But you're right, that without the eyes on the Goomba or the question mark on the block or Mario raising a flag at the end of the level, there's no narrative to be drawn into, there's no way to describe what you're experiencing. And you put it so perfectly: But that isn't what we are thinking about as we get immersed in a game experience - we soon forget that the controls are there. In a great novel, the words fade away and the book disappears and all that remains is the dream world the author has written for you. A game does almost exactly the same thing, but through action and feedback. The feedback can be text, voice over, artwork, animation, or any of the thousands of possibilities digital multimedia has opened up for us, but it should never try to be meaningful unto itself. This is where game designers get bogged down in trying to be like other mediums. Feedback is about rewarding the gamer's action and pushing into the next action, looking for greater reward. A mushroom comes out the question block, the old man gives you a sword, your wave of zerglings wash over a gas refinery. You might argue that writing is key to creating this experience, and I won't disagree, but the Polygon piece absolutely fails to illustrate this, and so another wave of English majors says to themselves, "Well, if I can't get my novel published, there's always video games"