4 ms·

The article is not good. It is true that games tend to be overly simplistic in this way, but it is really a design problem, not a technical problem. Technical

by jblow 12y ago

The article is not good. It is true that games tend to be overly simplistic in this way, but it is really a design problem, not a technical problem. Technically, we can litter the ground with stuff and have plenty of permanent-world changes. Design-wise, it is usually unclear how to make that a playable game. Using someone's middleware is not going to help this. The premise of this article is another example of what Frank Lantz calls the Immersive Fallacy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JzNt1bSk_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JzNt1bSk_U

AndrewKemendo 12y ago
>The premise of this article is another example of what Frank Lantz calls the Immersive Fallacy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JzNt1bSk_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JzNt1bSk_U That's an interesting talk and is really asking: what is the existential endpoint of gaming? I think the answer for me is the world as it is now, minus the things that are cumbersome or harmful and with unlimited options. So that means if you fall out of a plane and hit the ground you don't die, but it also means if you happen to like eating then you can sit and eat for days without getting obese. So yes, lets build in eating and shitting (If the internet is right then apparently some people like shitting on other people) as options for people.
Animats 12y ago
Right. Such a world would need huge numbers of semi-intelligent NPCs cleaning up after the players. In GTA, after you bashed a car or knocked over a sign, tow trucks, ambulances, fire trucks, and repair crews would show up. NPC firefighters and EMTs would extracted injured drivers from the wrecked cars and put them in ambulances, which then drive away to hospitals. Tow trucks tow away the damaged cars to impound lots or scrapyards. Repair crews show up and replace poles, restring wires, replace signs. Damage to buildings brings out owners, then insurance adjusters, then contractors, then construction crews with all their equipment. Like Sim City, but with more detail. Running the world where nobody's watching uses a lot of compute power. Game design has traditionally avoided that. It might be affordable today. Once the NPCs get good enough at running realistic simulated worlds, they can start taking jobs in the real world.
- ovi256 12y ago
  >Running the world where nobody's watching uses a lot of compute power. That should not be true with proper design. The game would just store "car accident of type X and severity Y at time Z" until someone comes to watch. Then it would show the appropriate cleanup efforts that the watcher would witness.
  - Animats 12y ago
    That's what games do now. Switching between levels of detail like that tends to create artifacts, and requires lots of special casing.
- stcredzero 12y ago
  Such a world would need huge numbers of semi-intelligent NPCs cleaning up after the players. Not really. You can make many things evaporate magically after about three hours. The attention span of modern people gives you about an order of magnitude margin with that amount.
- Cybernetic 12y ago
  "NPC firefighters and EMTs would extracted injured drivers from the wrecked cars and put them in ambulances, which then drive away to hospitals." That happens to a small degree in Grand Theft Auto games. It tends to be more for comic effect than simulation, but it's a nice detail nonetheless. I hope one day games reach the fidelity you describe. It would be a fun world to wreak havoc in.
- Lawtonfogle 12y ago
  The amount of data per item can degrade over time. During a wreck you have full details. Once the clean up crew leaves, you just need to record that 'NPC is hosptalized' and 'blue car (model 123) has 35% damage'. Later on, NPC goes by a mechanics, you can query the list of damaged vehicles, maybe load one being worked on in the garage, and if so remove it from the list. After a few hours items roll off the list (representing them being taken care of outside of the NPCs knowledge). The real trick is getting it to happen enough to be noticed but not enough to be seriously investigated so you can increase immersion without breaking it. I've done a variant of this in a D&D campaign to simulate the world around the PCs, increasing detail only as it became more relevant to the PCs. Not something I recommend doing by hand w/ dice rolls.
Zikes 12y ago
What this software is trying to propose is to get rid of the curated game experience and replace it with an algorithm. That works for some games, but I don't see how it could possibly be used to drive a consistent plot.
- stcredzero 12y ago
  You don't necessarily need a consistent plot, or at least very much of one. There does have to be some careful and subtle design around an overarching goal, however. In Eve Online several years ago, many of the more serious players didn't give a ___ about any of the curated stuff, other than as a source of munitions and resources for the alliance power struggle. Forces fight for dominance: that's not very much "plot" but many people definitely cared. (I would agree that you need something to structure the experience, however, otherwise you wind up with Second Life, then people's brains go right up the Maslow Need Hierarchy and wind up at sex.) Also, in my work at the MADE museum in Oakland, I find that people might talk about notable stories and art direction in award winning past games, but do you know what they actually do? They play Smash, Mario Kart, or Super Mario. Judging by actions, it's the gameplay/interaction that most strongly draws people back to a re-experience. In a way, assuming the need for plot in games would be like assuming the need for music/sound in cinema. It clearly can enhance the core experience, and you'd almost never have a modern commercial release without it. However, it's synergistic to and not absolutely essential to the core experience.
  - Zikes 12y ago
    I think that's a good point, however some counterexamples I would give are Dragon Age, Deus Ex, and Mass Effect. They are massively curated and plot-driven games which many gamers will replay a great deal to re-experience the plot rather than the gameplay. In some cases they will replay them to re-experience the plot in spite of the gameplay.
    - stcredzero 12y ago
      > They are massively curated and plot-driven games which many gamers will replay a great deal to re-experience the plot rather than the gameplay. In some cases they will replay them to re-experience the plot in spite of the gameplay. But in those cases, do we have a story supporting a game, or a game as the substrate/presentation medium for a story? I think we are actually talking about two vastly different things mashed under the same overall label of "game." These two things can even exist in the same piece of software we would call a "game." You can have a very plot/story/roleplaying based experience in Eve Online. You can also basically ignore all of the above and just go for a fairly sandboxy/emergent experience. (I will also note that the two player populations in Eve Online were somewhat distinct, and even when people were in both, they tended to do this by "switching modes.") Clearly, there are many kinds of computer games where plot can be mostly, if not completely nonexistent. There is also clearly a subset of story-centric games that use the interactive medium to primarily tell a story. They are clearly not the same thing. (There's a good analogy with movies, in which some are very focused on the music/soundtrack and others are more focused on action and visual spectacle or the story/plot.) (EDIT: To determine how "core" something is, ask yourself: Could the same "thing" exist as a movie, book, or in some other kind of medium without drastically changing? I would say that the overall experience of Mass Effect would drastically change were it to become a TV miniseries. However, you could conceivably create a TV miniseries with nearly the identical plot of Mass Effect.)
malkia 12y ago
It's also not QA testable. That's very important part of game development. A linear game (or multi-linear) has a way of testing, anything else would require the entire team to dedicate one or two days from their week to play the game and report problems. This also means your QA have to be all the time with you, rather than borrow small QA for the begining, then increase 10fold year or 6 months before shipping.
agumonkey 12y ago
I felt this a while back doing CGI. My mind tries to recompute the world, so my models would aim toward simulation, endlessly precise, physics worth models. Whereas people actually working in the industry (Disney, Dreamworks, etc) followed the opposite philosophy, coming from traditional movies and animations where reality is so far from reach that you don't even think about trying. They just think about a minimal set of artefacts fitting a field of view that would tell what need to be told. Doesn't matter if you only create half a builing, the left side of a face, it's irrelevant as long as it helps incarnating the experience. Now I've seen this in video games, since the PS3, games are more and more 'real' but the gameplay isn't better, only the magazine reviews are, with these 1080 8xAA Global Lit glamorous shots. And as with movies, I now take great delight seeing how far people could make you feel and travel with limited means. You couldn't represent much, you had to pick and organize things in a way to tickle the mind of the viewer/player.
- Retra 12y ago
  Crysis 2 takes place in downtown Manhattan? Can't enter a single building... That's not what gets me excited about games. I want to go exploring. If I just wanted a fancy story and nice visuals, I'd watch a movie.
  - agumonkey 12y ago
    Tiny but nicely world crafted vs dull but gigantic place ?
angersock 12y ago
Ten years ago some friends and I did some preliminary design on an MMO game. Size and scope was basically the continental US, with thousands of players and hundreds of thousands of NPCs. The data involved, we estimated, would fit comfortably into less than 10 TB. It's not a technical problem, even at that time. It's strictly a design problem--once you've built such a thing, how do you populate it? What do you do to make it interesting? And as I've gotten older, sadly, the appeal of creating virtual worlds has gotten less and less. I don't want people spending time frantically toggling state in a row in a database, even one I operate and get revenue from. :(

by jblow 12y ago

AndrewKemendo 12y ago

>The premise of this article is another example of what Frank Lantz calls the Immersive Fallacy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JzNt1bSk_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JzNt1bSk_U That's an interesting talk and is really asking: what is the existential endpoint of gaming? I think the answer for me is the world as it is now, minus the things that are cumbersome or harmful and with unlimited options. So that means if you fall out of a plane and hit the ground you don't die, but it also means if you happen to like eating then you can sit and eat for days without getting obese. So yes, lets build in eating and shitting (If the internet is right then apparently some people like shitting on other people) as options for people.

Animats 12y ago

Right. Such a world would need huge numbers of semi-intelligent NPCs cleaning up after the players. In GTA, after you bashed a car or knocked over a sign, tow trucks, ambulances, fire trucks, and repair crews would show up. NPC firefighters and EMTs would extracted injured drivers from the wrecked cars and put them in ambulances, which then drive away to hospitals. Tow trucks tow away the damaged cars to impound lots or scrapyards. Repair crews show up and replace poles, restring wires, replace signs. Damage to buildings brings out owners, then insurance adjusters, then contractors, then construction crews with all their equipment. Like Sim City, but with more detail. Running the world where nobody's watching uses a lot of compute power. Game design has traditionally avoided that. It might be affordable today. Once the NPCs get good enough at running realistic simulated worlds, they can start taking jobs in the real world.

ovi256 12y ago
>Running the world where nobody's watching uses a lot of compute power. That should not be true with proper design. The game would just store "car accident of type X and severity Y at time Z" until someone comes to watch. Then it would show the appropriate cleanup efforts that the watcher would witness.
- Animats 12y ago
  That's what games do now. Switching between levels of detail like that tends to create artifacts, and requires lots of special casing.
stcredzero 12y ago
Such a world would need huge numbers of semi-intelligent NPCs cleaning up after the players. Not really. You can make many things evaporate magically after about three hours. The attention span of modern people gives you about an order of magnitude margin with that amount.
Cybernetic 12y ago
"NPC firefighters and EMTs would extracted injured drivers from the wrecked cars and put them in ambulances, which then drive away to hospitals." That happens to a small degree in Grand Theft Auto games. It tends to be more for comic effect than simulation, but it's a nice detail nonetheless. I hope one day games reach the fidelity you describe. It would be a fun world to wreak havoc in.
Lawtonfogle 12y ago
The amount of data per item can degrade over time. During a wreck you have full details. Once the clean up crew leaves, you just need to record that 'NPC is hosptalized' and 'blue car (model 123) has 35% damage'. Later on, NPC goes by a mechanics, you can query the list of damaged vehicles, maybe load one being worked on in the garage, and if so remove it from the list. After a few hours items roll off the list (representing them being taken care of outside of the NPCs knowledge). The real trick is getting it to happen enough to be noticed but not enough to be seriously investigated so you can increase immersion without breaking it. I've done a variant of this in a D&D campaign to simulate the world around the PCs, increasing detail only as it became more relevant to the PCs. Not something I recommend doing by hand w/ dice rolls.

Zikes 12y ago

What this software is trying to propose is to get rid of the curated game experience and replace it with an algorithm. That works for some games, but I don't see how it could possibly be used to drive a consistent plot.

stcredzero 12y ago
You don't necessarily need a consistent plot, or at least very much of one. There does have to be some careful and subtle design around an overarching goal, however. In Eve Online several years ago, many of the more serious players didn't give a ___ about any of the curated stuff, other than as a source of munitions and resources for the alliance power struggle. Forces fight for dominance: that's not very much "plot" but many people definitely cared. (I would agree that you need something to structure the experience, however, otherwise you wind up with Second Life, then people's brains go right up the Maslow Need Hierarchy and wind up at sex.) Also, in my work at the MADE museum in Oakland, I find that people might talk about notable stories and art direction in award winning past games, but do you know what they actually do? They play Smash, Mario Kart, or Super Mario. Judging by actions, it's the gameplay/interaction that most strongly draws people back to a re-experience. In a way, assuming the need for plot in games would be like assuming the need for music/sound in cinema. It clearly can enhance the core experience, and you'd almost never have a modern commercial release without it. However, it's synergistic to and not absolutely essential to the core experience.
- Zikes 12y ago
  I think that's a good point, however some counterexamples I would give are Dragon Age, Deus Ex, and Mass Effect. They are massively curated and plot-driven games which many gamers will replay a great deal to re-experience the plot rather than the gameplay. In some cases they will replay them to re-experience the plot in spite of the gameplay.
  - stcredzero 12y ago
    > They are massively curated and plot-driven games which many gamers will replay a great deal to re-experience the plot rather than the gameplay. In some cases they will replay them to re-experience the plot in spite of the gameplay. But in those cases, do we have a story supporting a game, or a game as the substrate/presentation medium for a story? I think we are actually talking about two vastly different things mashed under the same overall label of "game." These two things can even exist in the same piece of software we would call a "game." You can have a very plot/story/roleplaying based experience in Eve Online. You can also basically ignore all of the above and just go for a fairly sandboxy/emergent experience. (I will also note that the two player populations in Eve Online were somewhat distinct, and even when people were in both, they tended to do this by "switching modes.") Clearly, there are many kinds of computer games where plot can be mostly, if not completely nonexistent. There is also clearly a subset of story-centric games that use the interactive medium to primarily tell a story. They are clearly not the same thing. (There's a good analogy with movies, in which some are very focused on the music/soundtrack and others are more focused on action and visual spectacle or the story/plot.) (EDIT: To determine how "core" something is, ask yourself: Could the same "thing" exist as a movie, book, or in some other kind of medium without drastically changing? I would say that the overall experience of Mass Effect would drastically change were it to become a TV miniseries. However, you could conceivably create a TV miniseries with nearly the identical plot of Mass Effect.)

malkia 12y ago

It's also not QA testable. That's very important part of game development. A linear game (or multi-linear) has a way of testing, anything else would require the entire team to dedicate one or two days from their week to play the game and report problems. This also means your QA have to be all the time with you, rather than borrow small QA for the begining, then increase 10fold year or 6 months before shipping.

agumonkey 12y ago

I felt this a while back doing CGI. My mind tries to recompute the world, so my models would aim toward simulation, endlessly precise, physics worth models. Whereas people actually working in the industry (Disney, Dreamworks, etc) followed the opposite philosophy, coming from traditional movies and animations where reality is so far from reach that you don't even think about trying. They just think about a minimal set of artefacts fitting a field of view that would tell what need to be told. Doesn't matter if you only create half a builing, the left side of a face, it's irrelevant as long as it helps incarnating the experience. Now I've seen this in video games, since the PS3, games are more and more 'real' but the gameplay isn't better, only the magazine reviews are, with these 1080 8xAA Global Lit glamorous shots. And as with movies, I now take great delight seeing how far people could make you feel and travel with limited means. You couldn't represent much, you had to pick and organize things in a way to tickle the mind of the viewer/player.

Retra 12y ago
Crysis 2 takes place in downtown Manhattan? Can't enter a single building... That's not what gets me excited about games. I want to go exploring. If I just wanted a fancy story and nice visuals, I'd watch a movie.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  Tiny but nicely world crafted vs dull but gigantic place ?

angersock 12y ago

Ten years ago some friends and I did some preliminary design on an MMO game. Size and scope was basically the continental US, with thousands of players and hundreds of thousands of NPCs. The data involved, we estimated, would fit comfortably into less than 10 TB. It's not a technical problem, even at that time. It's strictly a design problem--once you've built such a thing, how do you populate it? What do you do to make it interesting? And as I've gotten older, sadly, the appeal of creating virtual worlds has gotten less and less. I don't want people spending time frantically toggling state in a row in a database, even one I operate and get revenue from. :(