Author Archives: Colleen

About Colleen

I love Jesus. I also like Calvin and Hobbes, mixing paint colors, and muffins.

Save the Cat

The time: 12:30pm, April 17th

The place: Writing for Games Conference- Dramatic Storytelling in Games

The hero: Seamus Sullivan.

Seamus wants to impart his knowledge of dramatic character development to the next generation.  He may not be tall or have Superman’s strength and good looks, but he wants to make the world a better place by eliminating weak characters and bad storytelling.

But it is an uphill battle.  On his Journey, Seamus must face the mighty Powerpoint Demon and outsmart the cunning YouTube Siren.  With Skill and Grace he overcomes these foes and delivers his message of hope for game narratives everywhere.

That was my attempt at using Seamus Sullivan’s tips to create a more dramatic narrative.  Maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t.  But one thing I’ll be sure to remember is to have my heroes save the cat.  Three cheers for tips that sound funny enough to remember! Saving the cat means that early in your narrative, your characters should all be allowed to do something minor but distinctive, to clue the audience in as to which characters are the good guys (and which ones are the bad guys). Don’t stick to the Super Objective religiously- give your characters chances to show who they are (or even the player a chance to decide who their character will be?)  For instance, the bad guy might spend his free time kicking cats.  And the hero might volunteer at the SPCA.

While discussing this type of character development, all I can think of is the old Dudley Do-Right cartoons.  The cat rescue was the whole plot, and the character development was quick-and-dirty, but it uses a lot of showing and smart dialogue and only a little telling.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q83Jqd2h0Yg&w=420&h=315]

texture of games

While reading Ian Bogost’s chapter on texture in videogames, I was trying to think of ways that texture has not yet been incorporated in games.  Bogost outlines the basics of game texture:

What I’ll call visual texture is the texture mapping in the programming of a game to make surfaces look as though they’re more than just television screen.  In any game, different pieces will show different textures, in an effort to either depict the game world as close to reality as possible or just to differentiate between elements.  Hair is different from wooden floorboards is different from that leather pouch your hero carries.

Then there’s “simulated properties,” like traction, friction, and the way a character struggles to move through a swamp (these are just a few properties mentioned by Bogost).  It seems to me that this all contributes to the realism of a game, but doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with texture.

Although I see how Bogost relates these things to the overall texture of the game world- the look and feel, if you will- that’s just the thing.  To me, texture means touch. Whether it’s at our fingertips or in our mouth, a texture is something for which we don’t need our eyes to sense it. And in these games, every sensory input is coming from our eyes and occasionally ears.  The closest games get to the touch version of texture is the rumble- but even that is just a substitute for the ‘real’ thing, an abstraction away from what the character is supposed to be feeling.

Can we someday create a video game that effectively communicates texture as touch sense, without leaving behind the video aspect and returning to classic games? Should we bother trying? Perhaps it would be better to embrace that video games are VIDEO games.  And with the increasing presence of the touch screen over the last couple of years: these screens have their own texture, but is there a way to incorporate different textures into the games we play on our phones and tablets? I guess I’ll leave it to the programmers and engineers.

Stereotypes don’t fit anymore

Reading through ekurzik’s post, I can’t help but agree that gamers cannot be divided into two simple classes of ‘casual’ and ‘hardcore,’ by what games they play, and I’d like to expand on this a little.

Whether someone is a casual or hardcore gamer has much more to do with their attitude towards gaming and the way they play than which section of Gamestop they shop in.

At first, with arcade games and the Atari, it seemed like most games would probably have been classified as casual.  Maybe you didn’t know how long you would play, but for the most part, they were light, easy to use, uncomplicated as to story, and had pretty simple graphics.  With the introduction of Mario Brothers and especially Zelda, the landscape of gaming changed.  The stories were more important, the levels were different, the boss battles were hard, and the games were longer.  They took skill and time to master, and I think this is probably when the trend began towards today’s gamer stereotype of a post-grad living off beer and cheetos in their mom’s dark basement.  But then with Myst, Tetris, and Bejeweled, casual games came back, and they have flooded the market.  Video gaming is now so pervasive in our culture and gamers have thousands of games available to play, that our classifications may need to change.

It is possible to imagine a gamer who prefers ‘casual’ online games, but spends hours a day playing them, spends money on the upgrades and extras, and becomes engrossed in and even obsessed with a game… like world of warcraft? or even… farmville?

On the other hand, we can also imagine a gamer who doesn’t have much time or money for games, but still enjoys playing the big-name, big-story games.  this person may sit down for ten minutes at a time, once or twice a week, and work on the game as if it’s a long-term project.

We could call the first person hardcore, and the second casual, despite the reversal in the game types.  But our classification is still complicated by attitudes.  What f the online gamer doesn’t take time to develop skill, but simply pours hours into an imaginary world? what if the casual gamer is really proud of getting better at the battle sequences? what if they’ll go all night on a weekend?

Classifications can be helpful, but that’s all they are: a tool.  They can give us clues, but they are not the end-all destination.

Bugs Bunnying

Ok, so what we’ve got here is a fairly long clip of a looney tunes episode (and if you have time, I suggest watching it, because I was cracking in up in Starbucks over it).

The point is, however, that this is a nice illustration of Mickey Mousing, and just generally what we were talking about in class. First, notice how sound effects (foley) are used to accentuate and bring to our attention the kinesthetic movements of the characters.  It’s nothing abstract, like how they’re growing as characters (hint: they don’t), but just physicality. If they take a step, there’s a jingle and a thump. Second, notice that the background music is unconnected to the foley, but they still go together.  All the action takes place within the rhythm of the background music.

 [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFrUY2kMlfA?rel=0&w=420&h=315]

The Creativity Factor

When I read this week’s reading by Stephen Kline, what struck me most was the moment of transition from Military to Hacker.  I wish he had spent more probing the circumstances that caused a military study of main-frame computers and the Programmable Data Processor-1, the purpose of which was to beat the Soviets in an arms race, to produce Spacewar (Kline 84-85).

However, though I would have loved a whole chapter about just that moment, Kline did a pretty good job describing the shift: “Hacking was a way of dealing with the tedium of long hours spent in the presence of unforgiving machines and the mind-numbing programming problems of massive main frame computers (87).”  Hacking was born from putting intelligent, creative people together and telling them to solve really, really hard problems.  They solved the problems, but they also started exploring the machines.  This is where Steven Levy’s “Hand-On Imperative” was created- taking things apart and putting them back together in new ways (87).  And as this physically led to new products like video games, it was also the birth of a Hacker Culture, and they had their own code of ethics. (http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/hacker_ethics.html)

  1. Access to computers – and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works – should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On imperative!
  2. All information should be free.
  3. Mistrust authority – promote decentralization.
  4. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.
  5. You can create art and beauty on a computer.
  6. Computers can change your life for the better.

Kline says the most famous of these is number 2- All information should be free (86).  And a paragraph later Kline says this: “It is in fact the promotion of creativity and the ‘play ethic’ that engineering designers now celebrate when they promote ‘divergent thinking’ as a means of accelerating radical innovation through creativity (87).”

We would never have gotten Spacewar if it wasn’t for that ‘play ethic’- if the problem solvers hadn’t become intensely fascinated with their work and their materials and the possibilities therein, or if they hadn’t been allowed to play.  I think this is why Levy believed that all information should be free.  Essentially, innovation, creativity, and the free flow of ideas go hand in hand in hand.  A flow of ideas will always lead to innovation, and innovation won’t be true without a flow of ideas at its root.  Suppress any of these, and the others will suffer.

We can see the negative effects of restricting creativity at the end of the article, where it describes the period of time where the game industry was in the hands of “the suits” who didn’t fully understand the creative process and pushed for a product- any product- which they then introduced into the market before it was really good. This was the singular cause of the video game crash in 1983 and 1984.  There wasn’t time for new ideas or the “play” that leads to innovation.  The market was flooded with about 200 versions of the same four games, and consumers stopped paying money for them (105).

This leads to me throw out a couple things that I’ve been wanting to discuss in class, although perhaps they’re not as relevant as I think: SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA, and this whole idea of internet pirating, if it should really be illegal, and what the limiting of information sharing might lead to.