5 ms·

Defining Environment Language for Video Games

77 points by okket 9y ago

falsedan 9y ago
For more along these lines (specifically about The Last of Us), I cannot recommend James Howell's in-progress critical analysis The Rootwork Bulding[0] highly enough. It discusses the affordances of the level design, and how the game advances the the Joel-Ellie relationship via gameplay. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7vAeDYh8SvShredLiTbOX7optQMNN39m https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7vAeDYh8SvShredLiTbO...
kmill 9y ago
I noticed in the buffer example's image the text ...et '*weapons-pistol-upgrade-only*] That looks Lisp-inspired to me. Does anyone know if Naughty Dog still uses something Lispy to compile game data? (I'm not talking about writing the game engine itself in a Lisp.)
- tedajax 9y ago
  Yes, Naughty Dog's internal scripting language has always been their own Lisp flavor and I imagine that they use the same scripting language to define game data.
  - pandaman 9y ago
    Racket http://cufp.org/2011/functional-mzscheme-dsls-game-development.html http://cufp.org/2011/functional-mzscheme-dsls-game-developme...
munificent 9y ago
Great article. I want to call out one point: > The more life-like a space appears to be, the more we begin to expect it > to allow for the affordances we have in real life. But games only enable > players the actions developers explicitly allow for and implement. > Unfortunately, that aspect of game development doesn’t scale with > computing power in the way art has. This is one of the reasons I got out of the game industry. Schatz (and many game devs I've worked with) seem to take this as an immutable fact when, really, it is a choice developers have made. They decided to make games with realistic artwork and limited interaction. The realistic art is nice, but when everything is a polygonal shell with baked in lighting, then the set of things you can do with it becomes very small. The computer doesn't force you to build games that way. The best counter-example I know is Minecraft. In Minecraft, the art is decidedly unrealistic, bordering on abstract. But, in return for that, the world is incredibly interactive. The entire world can be generated procedurally and freely remolded by the player. When you play many games today, you will never ever do anything a level designer and game programmer didn't explicitly implement support for. You may fail to advance to the next scene if you don't push the right buttons at the right time, but the overall play experience is not too far removed from a film (and so many game designers out there have deep film envy). That's fine, but it's not super appealing to me. In contrast, when I play Minecraft, I play in a world no one on Earth has ever seen, and I build things no one has ever built. But many game developers, and especially producers, don't like games like that. One problem is that, like the film industry, big game companies are making bigger and bigger budget games. The main problem becomes controlling risk. A realistic on-rails game where the player works through a single scripted narrative is a controllable experience. You can reliably estimate how much players will like it. With emergent and procedural gameplay, it's really hard to predict if the end result will be fun or not. For every Minecraft, there's a million sandbox games that don't have everything balanced just so to get it to hang together in that magical way (see: Spore, No Man's Sky). That's a risky bet for a producer deciding what kind of game to make next.
- pasquinelli 9y ago
  Mostly I'm just commenting to underline how much I agree with you, but I'll also add that a lot of people, when they're thinking about the experience of a game, are thinking about it just as if it were a movie-- such and such happens and the player has this or that reaction. This, I think, is generally useless, whatever the medium. You're just getting all enamored with talking to yourself about how great your work will be rather than working with what's actually there. But leaving that aside, it's particularly limiting with games, which are interesting for their possibilities and in which the audience has real agency within the work itself.
  - munificent 9y ago
    > a lot of people, when they're thinking about the experience of a game, are thinking about it just as if it were a movie-- such and such happens and the player has this or that reaction. Yes! I look at it like this: If you're telling a story about how you played some game, for many games, the story you tell is just the narrative within the game itself. The games I care about are the ones where the stories I tell about it are my stories.
- __david__ 9y ago
  > In Minecraft, the art is decidedly unrealistic, bordering on abstract. But, in return for that, the world is incredibly interactive. Absolutely. But the flipside of this is that Minecraft has no story. It's sort of up to you as a player to do what you want and make your own adventure. Naughty Dog, on the other hand, is famous for their games' stories. I suspect interactivity and story are at odds. I also agree that the more sandbox-y a game is, the harder it is to make it compelling for a long amount of time. I personally don't think one end of the spectrum is better or worse than the other. There are games with extremely limited interactivity (walking simulators) that I've had a blast "playing". I've also sunk a ton of hours into Minecraft.
  - jdkuuuu 9y ago
    “story“ only conflicts with game possibilities when you don't accept player created stories. Players will stumble through movie-like stories handed to them, but the stories they tell friends are more often about dynamic interactions within a framework (“i made my first house in minecraft over a period of weeks and then accidentally blew it up“).
LeicaLatte 9y ago
Like a HIG for 3d worlds and games. Very nice!

77 points by okket 9y ago

For more along these lines (specifically about The Last of Us), I cannot recommend James Howell's in-progress critical analysis The Rootwork Bulding[0] highly enough. It discusses the affordances of the level design, and how the game advances the the Joel-Ellie relationship via gameplay. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7vAeDYh8SvShredLiTbOX7optQMNN39m https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7vAeDYh8SvShredLiTbO...

kmill 9y ago

I noticed in the buffer example's image the text ...et '*weapons-pistol-upgrade-only*] That looks Lisp-inspired to me. Does anyone know if Naughty Dog still uses something Lispy to compile game data? (I'm not talking about writing the game engine itself in a Lisp.)

tedajax 9y ago
Yes, Naughty Dog's internal scripting language has always been their own Lisp flavor and I imagine that they use the same scripting language to define game data.
- pandaman 9y ago
  Racket http://cufp.org/2011/functional-mzscheme-dsls-game-development.html http://cufp.org/2011/functional-mzscheme-dsls-game-developme...

munificent 9y ago

Great article. I want to call out one point: > The more life-like a space appears to be, the more we begin to expect it > to allow for the affordances we have in real life. But games only enable > players the actions developers explicitly allow for and implement. > Unfortunately, that aspect of game development doesn’t scale with > computing power in the way art has. This is one of the reasons I got out of the game industry. Schatz (and many game devs I've worked with) seem to take this as an immutable fact when, really, it is a choice developers have made. They decided to make games with realistic artwork and limited interaction. The realistic art is nice, but when everything is a polygonal shell with baked in lighting, then the set of things you can do with it becomes very small. The computer doesn't force you to build games that way. The best counter-example I know is Minecraft. In Minecraft, the art is decidedly unrealistic, bordering on abstract. But, in return for that, the world is incredibly interactive. The entire world can be generated procedurally and freely remolded by the player. When you play many games today, you will never ever do anything a level designer and game programmer didn't explicitly implement support for. You may fail to advance to the next scene if you don't push the right buttons at the right time, but the overall play experience is not too far removed from a film (and so many game designers out there have deep film envy). That's fine, but it's not super appealing to me. In contrast, when I play Minecraft, I play in a world no one on Earth has ever seen, and I build things no one has ever built. But many game developers, and especially producers, don't like games like that. One problem is that, like the film industry, big game companies are making bigger and bigger budget games. The main problem becomes controlling risk. A realistic on-rails game where the player works through a single scripted narrative is a controllable experience. You can reliably estimate how much players will like it. With emergent and procedural gameplay, it's really hard to predict if the end result will be fun or not. For every Minecraft, there's a million sandbox games that don't have everything balanced just so to get it to hang together in that magical way (see: Spore, No Man's Sky). That's a risky bet for a producer deciding what kind of game to make next.

pasquinelli 9y ago
Mostly I'm just commenting to underline how much I agree with you, but I'll also add that a lot of people, when they're thinking about the experience of a game, are thinking about it just as if it were a movie-- such and such happens and the player has this or that reaction. This, I think, is generally useless, whatever the medium. You're just getting all enamored with talking to yourself about how great your work will be rather than working with what's actually there. But leaving that aside, it's particularly limiting with games, which are interesting for their possibilities and in which the audience has real agency within the work itself.
- munificent 9y ago
  > a lot of people, when they're thinking about the experience of a game, are thinking about it just as if it were a movie-- such and such happens and the player has this or that reaction. Yes! I look at it like this: If you're telling a story about how you played some game, for many games, the story you tell is just the narrative within the game itself. The games I care about are the ones where the stories I tell about it are my stories.
__david__ 9y ago
> In Minecraft, the art is decidedly unrealistic, bordering on abstract. But, in return for that, the world is incredibly interactive. Absolutely. But the flipside of this is that Minecraft has no story. It's sort of up to you as a player to do what you want and make your own adventure. Naughty Dog, on the other hand, is famous for their games' stories. I suspect interactivity and story are at odds. I also agree that the more sandbox-y a game is, the harder it is to make it compelling for a long amount of time. I personally don't think one end of the spectrum is better or worse than the other. There are games with extremely limited interactivity (walking simulators) that I've had a blast "playing". I've also sunk a ton of hours into Minecraft.
- jdkuuuu 9y ago
  “story“ only conflicts with game possibilities when you don't accept player created stories. Players will stumble through movie-like stories handed to them, but the stories they tell friends are more often about dynamic interactions within a framework (“i made my first house in minecraft over a period of weeks and then accidentally blew it up“).

LeicaLatte 9y ago

Like a HIG for 3d worlds and games. Very nice!