Lee Sheldon on the Emotional Divide

I don't know if this is old news, but I was linked to a Lee Sheldon PDF at work (Lee's site here). He covers, in an easy to understand way, how I've felt about storytelling in games for a long time.

To be sure, there's a lot of unanswered questions: How can mainstream development possibly be converted to this almost totally philosophically polar approach to storytelling in games? We tend to love to stick to fragile, film-aping storylines, just as television stuck to radio style plays, and then theater before finding its own legs.

We rarely attempt anything like systemic characterization or mission design, because it's so under explored. And it's under explored because there are so few good exemplars of the approach. It's a catch 22 which I feel can only be fixed by the indie scene and academia, or developers trying experiments in their own time*. Far Cry 2 seems to be promising a hearty stab in this direction, too, so I shouldn't entirely discount the mainstream's ability to push this issue. Ahk, what am I saying? Anyone and everyone can contribute to this direction in games. Heck, even Mercenaries 2 sounds like it's philosophically aligned with this attitude (in that they refused, from the start, to make "fragile" tasks which result in "Fission Mailed"). It's just that there's going to be a lot of trial and error before we even begin to settle on something cool, and I hope that won't dissuade people from the idea - from continuing to try this stuff out.

Personally, I feel like this approach (or something like it) is one of the more natural uses of the medium - certainly more natural than gameplay book ended by cut scenes, or trying to manipulate a player's emotion when you could simply react to the emotion they express.

I can certainly feel the shift in outlook amongst developers, but ultimately, many of them may not be in a position to do this approach justice any time soon. There are lots of growing pains to go through before we get there, and a lumbering risk averse mainstream to convert before anything big budget comes out with this approach (with notable exceptions, obviously).

I think we also have to accept that whatever comes out of this approach probably won't feel like whatever ideas the phrase "Interactive Movies" conjure up. It'll be its own thing, like like TV is a different feeling thing to books, or dance. I think we have to respect that, and not fault games for not being interactive versions of other mediums - let them be what they naturally want to be.

*Not to blow my own trumpet, but K2 will eventually go in this direction, after decent core gameplay is established - assuming I can expend the effort outside of my day job, which feels less and less likely.

Mind Mapping: Succinct Ideas made Incomprehensible

I haven't worked on K2 for a while, mainly because I really wasn't sure where I was going with it. It's hard to get excited about an idea which doesn't get you motivated. As a result, I decided that today's work would be about defining what I wanted from the game, which in turn might bring me to a better understanding of the actual tasks I'm facing.

Friend Leigh Ashton introduced me to the concept of Mind Mapping. Through this process, you essentially unload your thoughts onto the page. By starting at a root, and filling outwards, you eventually get a more and more detail picture than you ever would if you kept it in your noggin all at once. The human mind can only deal with 5-7 concepts at once, so this mind map becomes a kind of augmented RAM as you channel the ideas onto the page.

It occurs to me that since a lot of the time, developers don't like to read high level design documents*, the act of writing the design document is often far more important than creating the artifact for others to read.

While ideas remain in your mind, they are unreal - indisctinct platonic ideals. The gulfs of reality that they must cross are vast, but your brain always seems agile enough to distort reality, and make you feel like the idea is a coherent one. The act forces you to think these ideas through - to birth them into something which isn't using reality distortion as a crutch. In other words, writing documentation is just a tool which will hopefully hold up a mirror to your ideas, and show their flaws early on.

Here's the results of my Mind Mapping for K2. I've used a program called "FreeMind" which is nice and easy to use to generate this kind of brain-dump.

I doubt it is anything close to coherent upon first viewing, but the process has certainly helped me understand what I want from this game, and has made me super excited to get started.

It's a completely over ambitious project, but my hope is that by working outward from the core gameplay, toward the lofty goal of Social Mechanics and self harmonizing persistant universes, I'll be able to tackle the project bite by bite.

I'm inspired by Mount & Blade who seem to be doing the same thing. Each new release results in deeper gameplay, giving the core mechanics more and more context and depth.

*Obviously, a well written technical design is worth its weight in gold. But high level bluesky wishywashiness? Not as useful to the dev in the trenches.

Don't Vote For K2 if you don't like it!

There's zero chance in a hell snowball wrapped in petrol flames that I'm winning this TIGSource thing, so I'm not going to beg for votes. However, I do insist that you give a few entries a try, and vote on it.

As far as K2's progression goes... well... I've been having to build my flexi-time back up at work recently, so I've been a bit too tired in the evenings to continue. This is because I had to go to the dentist and have a filling on my birthday, last week. Plus, I deserve a bit of down time after pulling a few late-nighters, right?

Last weekend, I got a stub program running OpenGL using the Tao framework, but I still have a lot of work ahead, porting over what I already have (need replacements for XNA's pretty fantastic Vector Math libraries). It might even be worth starting it from scratch, and just copying the more choice pieces of code over from the prototype... after all, prototypes are there to be learned from, and thrown away.

I've set up a TIGSource thread for it. First post is just a look back in time at the original K, though I'll probably be returning to a similar aesthetic (the prototype is just a multicolour mess at the moment). Yuss. I think that this K could be special.

I've also been trying to help JP with his home brew project, Purity. We had about an hour long knock-around online, but our distance, and my wifi connection hardly gave me the best latency to appreciate it properly. It's going in the right direction, and a lot of the core game play is already in. The biggest issue to fix for this kind of "naked" abstract game is clear feedback. When there's no naturally limiting real-world metaphor to work within, you're completely free to express mechanics in any way you like, and thus, your approach to feedback simply becomes "What's the most informative and intuitive way to get this idea across?", rather than "What's believable?". Gots to watch out for information overload, though.

Oh, and my new company interviewed me for their website. I always get self-conscious about photos, and this one is not exactly catching my MySpace angles.

I saw American McGee putting forward his wishes for a mind interface. I think I have a rant brewing about that. Nothing nasty, just some issues I think we'll probably see with the early attempts.

K2 Prototype

It's one day before the TIGSource Procedural Generation contest ends.

You can get my entry from this thread.

I'll add another post for the complete version.

K2

Some homebrew I've been working on (for just a couple of weeks in my spare time) for the TIGSource Procedural Generation Competition. It's a sequel to K in that it will also, probably, never be released.


K2 Early Footage from Aubrey Hesselgren on Vimeo.