There’s an interesting thread here about how it appears that Lucasarts, for their new trailer for Force Unleashed, have essentially stolen a random artist’s mesh for the giant star destroyer that’s the centerpiece of the trailer.
Poor form. Even if it’s technically “legal,” it’s really … repulsive behaviour, to me. I haven’t been psyched about a Star Wars game in ages, and this wasn’t changing my mind, but it’s just really distasteful, and I hope they come clean.
So, right now, I weigh 215.2 lbs. That’s down from the beginning of the year at 233, but it’s up from my low weight of the year at 212. The new job, and finding a sustainable schedule for working out/eating right has been tricky, but the consequences haven’t been as dire as I’d suspected.
Still, I’m definitely in worse shape than I was, and I’d like to correct that. So, starting today, I’m focusing again on eating better and getting regular exercise with the goal of being down to 200 by the end of the year.
I’ve found that when I weigh myself every day and log it, I can actually watch what I eat because I don’t want the number to go up. When I don’t, I don’t care all that much. It’s a small switch, but a critical one for me. Without a strong external motivation (beating Klay is *excellent* motivation), it’s also hard to stay focused. It’s just a matter of willpower, and the desire to change. On the plus side, it’s clear that once I hit my target weight, I can actually eat a reasonable amount without gaining that weight back.
Ah, well. Time to focus.
Scott Adams on careers.
His premise is that most successful people are good (top 25% of the populace) at three things that put them into high demand. At the end of the article, he asks, “What are your three?”
Lessee:
So, I think those are my three things. If you’d asked me 10 years ago what I thought my three things were, they’d have been totally, totally different. *shrugs*
Roger Ebert has written a bit about whether or not games can be art – his conclusion is that they can’t be. Of course, I disagree.
His most recent entry into the debate is a response to Clive Barker’s comments here.
Barker: “I think that Roger Ebert’s problem is that he thinks you can’t have art if there is that amount of malleability in the narrative. In other words, Shakespeare could not have written ‘Romeo and Juliet’ as a game because it could have had a happy ending, you know? If only she hadn’t taken the damn poison. If only he’d have gotten there quicker.”
Ebert: He is right again about me. I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist. Would “Romeo and Juliet” have been better with a different ending? Rewritten versions of the play were actually produced with happy endings. “King Lear” was also subjected to rewrites; it’s such a downer. At this point, taste comes into play. Which version of “Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare’s or Barker’s, is superior, deeper, more moving, more “artistic”?
While games are rarely created by a single person anymore, many of the best games are the vision of one person, brought into reality by a group of people who share similar goals. I think you can say that they are collaborative in a way that is similar to movies. The lead designer of a game, let’s say, is the director. The actors, cameramen, effects artists, director of photography, etc. are the various people who work to make the director’s vision come to life. In games, you have modelers, texture artists, level designers, system designers, and programmers who all help you bring your vision to life.
The collaborative process is no different. So, it’s not that it’s a *single* person’s vision. But there is an “artist” at work.
In a movie, the “artist” presents the viewer with a linear narrative, which the viewer then interprets. Because it’s a linear narrative, you can usually be pretty sure of the viewer’s response, but there’s often differences in how people interpret things based on what they bring to the viewing – each viewer has perspective, experiences, and expectations that the other viewers do not. While I wouldn’t say it’s an ‘interactive’ experience, there is definitely some back-and-forth between the viewer and the artist to arrive at the final perception of what the experience actually *was* in the end.
In a game, the exact same thing occurs. The difference is while the movie delivers a single path through the experience, a game presents a “possibility space,” to use Will Wright’s term, where the player has options to shape the experience. In some games, the possibility space is very large (the Sims), while in others, it is very nearly linear (Final Fantasy). In the Sims, there is almost no prescripted narrative. I can do anything, and put my characters in nearly any situation. In Final Fantasy, while I can affect the mechanics of the game, the narrative is relentlessly linear, and there is almost nothing I can do to change the course of events other than die or not die.
Here’s the thing – if I make a movie about ‘the human experience,’ and my ‘human experience’ differs from yours, you may not get it. You may not be able to relate to the experience, no matter how universal I’ve intended it to be if our perspectives are substantially different.
In a game, let’s take the Sims again, you can create something that’s a statement about the ‘human experience,’ or make a statement about consumerism in modern society, and in the game, people can bring those different perspectives to bear, interact with the game in a very different way, and still reach the same sort of conclusions about the experience, because they’ve “solved” the mechanics of the game in a different way.
To hit another quote from the article:
Ebert: …the real question is, do we as their consumers become more or less complex, thoughtful, insightful, witty, empathetic, intelligent, philosophical (and so on) by experiencing them? Something may be excellent as itself, and yet be ultimately worthless.
Yes.
This has been another installment of Simple Answers to Simple Questions.
To be more precise, though, yes, of course:
Those are but a few examples. The point being, to someone who’s grown up with games, that’s a question that doesn’t even need to be asked. The mere fact of his asking shows that he lacks an understanding of the medium’s potential. That’s no slight against Ebert. For someone of his generation, I’d bet he has far *more* understanding of games than most. That he believes games have more in common with sports isn’t all that far off. Many games, the Maddens, Counterstrikes and Starcrafts of the world certainly are more sport than not.
But the point is that the medium has tremendous flexibility, and the “sport”like games are merely one instance of a tremendously vast and varied medium. I would never say a game like Grim Fandango is anything like a sport. It’s a linear, self-contained narrative that happens to have some interactive elements. Half Life 2 is not a sport, but if it doesn’t evoke the same bleak dystopia that Children of Men does, I don’t know what else even comes close.
I’m glad Roger Ebert’s talking about games. Hopefully, our medium will find its own voice – it’s own Roger Ebert to have the same kind of lasting impact that he’s had on movies.
Still – doesn’t mean he’s *right*.
I think that was about all I could muster for the news that Tammy Faye Whatsername had died. Why is her death headline news, exactly? Because a decade and some ago, she bilked thousands of people out of millions of dollars? You’ll pardon me if I can’t really muster up a lot of sympathy for her.
I’m sorry, this is just more of America’s bullshit obsession with people who are famous for no good reason. Why do we pay attention to these sorts of people? What is it about our culture that draws us to what are basically utterly worthless, and often *vile* people, and causes us, as a culture – certainly not me, with fame and as an inevitable result, money?
Why can we just ignore these people and have them go about supporting themselves legitimately, or self-destructing by themselves? I’m talking Paris Hilton, Jack Thompson, et. al. Let’s just stop paying attention to them, *please*. There’s a war on. Our government is the most corrupt, most incompetent in my lifetime, and I’d guess the most corrupt *ever*, to be perfectly direct. Why does all that get swept aside because some con-artist kicked the bucket?
So, in an earlier post, I gave my definition of what a “game” is – it’s a series of choices presented to the player in a way that they can make informed decisions that allow them to make further choices. As with any definition of an art, it’s hard to say whether something’s ‘right’ or not – is there even a ‘right’ answer?
But the more and more time I spend with this definition, the more and more useful it reveals itself to be. The keys are the concept of “informed decisions” and “further choices,” and the thing that’s tested the definition’s mettle is the constant exposure I have to ‘game designs’ written by people who simply have no concept of what ‘game design’ actually *is*.
Digression: If you had to make a decision who should fly a 747 full of passengers – a trained, experienced pilot, or a twelve year old high school student with no flight training or experience, why would you ever choose the twelve year old? Yet, this happens all the time in the game industry. Game design is a learned skill. There are reasons that decisions are made the way they are, and if you don’t understand the basic mechanics, psychology, and theory at work, you are not a game designer and you shouldn’t be flying goddamned airplanes. Just because I can make my job look easy doesn’t mean it *is*.
Maybe I can end another paragraph with asterisks around the word *is*?
Anyway – back to the definition of what a game is. (ooh – missed opportunity) Informed decisions are key. And it’s not “If you go left, you will be eaten by bears, if you go right, you’ll be eaten by zombies.” If I present you with a choice to go right or left, and both corridors look the same, and you have no additional information, I haven’t given you a choice that has any significance. Maybe you’ll go left, maybe you’ll go right. It doesn’t matter, because you have no way of knowing what the consequences of making that decision are.
If I give you the same choice, but one corridor is lit, and the other one is covered in blood, now you have some information. Sure, it’s really heavy-handed and stupid, but you can actually make a decision based on some sort of reasoning. Honestly, you’d be surprised by how many people in the game industry – designers, even – don’t seem to understand this point. And no, I’m not talking about an art-house game that’s about the pointlessness of choice, or predestiny, or some cop-out excuse about how my example sucks, okay?
Information and consequence. The choice has to have both, or it’s not a real choice. Now, that’s not to say that every time the player is presented with an option that they have to be given a real choice. Sometimes, you can give the player interaction for the sake of pacing. In Brooktown, for the PSP, I’d give certain characters dialog that required the player to choose between similar responses that would end up at the same NPC response. The different responses would have an almost insignificant impact on the game (+1,-1 to confidence, maybe), but the issue was that conversation needed to flow like real people speaking, and this person was pausing to see if the listener was actually paying attention.
But if you’re talking about *gameplay*, that choice has to have consequence, or there’s no point in giving the choice to the player. If you want someone to choose one path or another, it’s a risk-reward calculation the player should be able to make. Short path, but more enemies? Are they under a time limit? How can they tell one path is shorter? Maybe they can see their destination is closer that way, maybe they can see a bigger cluster of enemies, maybe they have a map, blah blah blah. Lots of ways to communicate that information, but again, a lot of times people seem to overlook the fact that the player needs information. The choice, similarly, shoudl have consequence – if the player takes the harder path, the fact that it’s shorter should make a difference. Maybe they’ve got a time limit, maybe they need more “experience points,” maybe there’s a powerup hidden in there somewhere. If you don’t give the player a reason to challenge themselves, they’ll take the path of least resistance. In this case, they take a long, unchallenging path that’s less interesting, and wonder why the game sucks.
So, as a razor, the definition is remarkably effective. For any mechanic, whether it’s a gameplay or a narrative device, is the player informed enough to make a real decision, and does that decision have a consequence? If the answer to either of those is “no,” it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
Bomberman Live came out this morning, and since I was up at 7 for some ludicrous reason, I picked it up and gave it a whirl. It’s a completely competent iteration of Bomberman. Almost nothing that deviates from the formula, as far as I can tell, with up to 8-player Live support.
I picked it up, because Bomberman’s a great little party game, and 8-player Live sounds awesome. Hopefully we can get some TGF games going.
I’m not one for balance for balance’s sake, but this actually seems to be an interview with Kaz Hirai and Jack Tretton where neither of them says anything completely outlandish or ridiculous. It’s like they actually have respect for the people they’re addressing. More like this, please, and less of the crazy.
Peter Dille: “With the Xbox 360 you’ve got an inconsistent design, some have a hard drive, some don’t, and none of them have Blu-Ray, and the HD-DVD will be out of business in a matter of months. Is this a 10 year product?”
He then goes on to rail on MS’s current quality control issues. Hey, Peter – people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. You remember the PS2 and its quality control issues? Doesn’t seem so.
But re: “inconsistent design” – at least people understand the difference between buying a hard drive or not. That’s reasonably clear. I think it was a stupid decision to not standardize the presence of a hard drive, sure. But the PS3’s some-units-have-hardware-backwards-compatibility-some don’t is a lot more “inconsistent,” and a lot harder for consumers to grasp.
Your notion of a “10 year product cycle” has rested pretty heavily on the concept of backwards compatibility. Kaz Hirai, in numerous older interviews talks about the fact that your library extends to the next Playstation console as being part of their 10 year plan. Not so much anymore, eh?
Oh – and from A_B’s comment in the last “Some Idiot From Sony Said Something Stupid” post, dropping the price on the 60 gig then phasing it out is just poor.