Author Archives: edang

Dramatic Storytelling in Games

Seamus Sullivan provided many general tips for storytellers.  He centered many of his examples on videogames, but it was clear that his tips could also be used in any other storytelling medium including movies, books, and speeches.  Sullivan gave us tips on how to develop characters, how to facilitate dialogue, and how to create worlds that highlight the characters’ background and history.  By using these tips (found in another blog post), players will have a much higher chance of remembering and relating to the main character, such as Master Chief or Sonic, in the videogame.

I wonder what Sullivan would say about casual videogames.  Sullivan highlighted many of his examples from ‘hardcore’ videogames (Ex. videogames that take long sittings and many hours to beat), but only cited one ‘casual’ videogame, Tetris.  I can see why casual videogames would have a much harder time telling a dramatic story, but even Sullivan said that Tetris could employ some kind of drama.  Actually, I believe Sullivan even said that any videogame has some level of drama to it.  Would his tips still apply to these casual videogames?  Casual videogames have a very limited time to immerse players; can casual videogame storytellers really emotionally pull players in that quickly?

I know that Sullivan had an emphasis on how cut scenes could tell so much about a character in a small amount of time, yet many casual videogames don’t employ this idea.  As casual gamers, do we not look for a story when we play our casual games?  Is an implied story (a story that players are just thrown into) just better for casual games?

Super Columbine Massacre RPG!

http://kotaku.com/171966/columbine-survivor-talks-about-columbine-rpg

“I think that ultimately a videogame is just another medium for artistic expression,” says Brian Crecente, a victim who was paralyzed from the chest down after being shot by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine.

Super Columbine Massacre RPG! offers a retelling of the Columbine Massacre by using what Bogost calls an ‘operational reality’.  The videogame recreates the Columbine shooting in a 16-bit world, holding onto the historical record as tightly as possible (including even the dialogue about God in the library), and forces its players to take the role and perspective of the gunmen.  As controversial as it initially sounds, however, the videogame offers a lot of insight on the Columbine shootings.  It allows its players to not only learn more about the event, but also about why it happened and why Eric and Dylan felt the way they did—a perspective that is hard to sympathize in other mediums.

Brian Crecente agrees, Brian talks about how the game can get people talking about the Columbine shooting again without ‘glamourizing’ the tragic event (questionable).  My favorite idea from Brian is, “You play as these cartoonish characters doing horrible things but the impact gets sort of lost after a while.  Until of course, you actually see what really happened.”  Brian talks about how the game introduces real life photographs after the gunmen killed themselves in the game; the player is taken out of a fictional realm and put into an exactly similar realistic realm—effectively showing the players what their cartoon characters have actually done in real life.  Brian lists many other interesting perspectives on the game that I did not expect from a Columbine victim, especially after seeing the responses from a similar game, JFK Reloaded.

Art and Music

In a previous Honors course, we were told not to ask what art ‘is’, but rather what art ‘does’.  Applied to videogames (a new material for artists to work with), they are not the graphics or the aesthetics themselves that make up the artwork, but rather the actions and gameplay that must be performed by the players.  Ian Bogost refers to this as procedural rhetoric, a term that we are familiar with, to emphasize that in videogames, ‘how’ the player does an action in the game is what causes this new artwork to speak to us, to tell us something new, or to force us to think differently.  Let’s talk about Braid.  Braid is a game about time and regret and forces its players to explore these motifs through innovative and challenging puzzles.   These puzzles build on these themes to force its players to think about a bigger picture outside the game and to make each player paint their own interpretations in their minds.  That is, the videogame causes the player to think less of what the game is actually about and more of the player’s own life based on his/her own personal experiences.  It sounds confusing, but if you’ve played Braid then you might understand.  At first, the game feels like it has a solid, yet mysterious plot that only needs to be solved.  [Spoiler alert]At the end, however, you realize that there is no plot; you realize that your interpretations of the storyline and gameplay all came from your own personal experiences [/Spoiler alert].  As my previous Honors professor would then say is: We do not ask what Braid is; we ask what Braid does.

I wanted to talk about the music chapter but I’ve run out of words.  I would like to just point out the line on page 34: “Playing a song… at higher and higher levels and toward greater and greater mastery does not lead the player to a greater state of mastery as a musician, but to a greater depth of understanding as a listener.”  Just had to quote this for its truth about listening to music.

A Musical Experience

Music and sound effects are what make or break videogames for me.  If I don’t feel like I’m a part of the videogame’s diegetic world, then I just don’t get that “experience” that I look for in videogames.  I’m amazed that there was a term for rhythmic worlds—mickey mousing—where the environment or characters act to the music.  This reminded me so much of an indie game called Rez HD that I played on the Xbox 360.  I absolutely loved this game almost 3 years ago and even ‘til today, I can still hear all of the electronic pieces played in each level.  Games like Katamari Damacy, Braid, Chime, Lumines, Groove Coaster, and Bit Trip Beat infuse songs and sounds that I can’t get out of my head.  They remind me of the experience I had when I first played the game and honestly, I think these sounds will be with me forever.

My ‘musical nostalgia’ doesn’t go alone either; our classmates were almost unanimously able to remember all of their favorite games through sounds.  Music just has this power to evoke emotions and memories.  It has this power to make everyone feel happy, no matter where they were from or how they were raised (nature perspective).  In my opinion, this art combines with other arts in videogames, including the graphics and the mechanics, and creates this experience that all humans just know how to relate to.  I believe that videogames are just a type of interactive art that combines with many other art forms in order to give humans a memorable experience—I mean, ultimately, it’s the experience we’re all looking in the end… isn’t it? (A little off topic, but…) Could videogames just be a modern perspective of what we call art?

Foxconn: Relativity and Choice

http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-02-02/news/31019111_1_foxconn-iphone-labor-agency

Following our discussion on Tuesday regarding the iPhone and Foxconn’s 17 suicides, I decided to look for articles that took the opposing point of view.  I looked for articles that supported Foxconn for their work and one article I liked in particular was “Apple, Foxconn and your iPhone” by Joshua Greenman.  Greenman takes a global perspective on the issue by basically saying economics are relative.  The standards we have here in the United States are very different than those in China.  Working conditions, from our perspective, may be very poor, but that doesn’t stop Foxconn from being able to easily employ almost a million workers.  Also, Greenman emphasizes the simple yet complicated word of ‘choice’.  I can’t help but agree with him when he concludes his article with the idea that Chinese men and women choose to work at Foxconn because it is what’s best for themselves and their families.  Although Foxconn does not provide the best working conditions, what Foxconn does provide is opportunity.  As tragic as the suicides were at Foxconn, I believe that Foxconn is doing a good job in providing its million workers with food and homes, for as long as the workers choose to work there.

Video Games and Play

Galloway introduces its readers with the idea that video games are actions.  In order to play the video game, users must cooperate with a machine in order to achieve a goal that exists in a world of its own.  Although users may not always be ‘playing’ the game according to authors Huizinga and Caillois, Galloway suggests that video games are different and that they must be interpreted differently from traditional games.  There is this separate factor, the machine, who introduces the idea that a game can be played even when users are not actively interacting with the game.  The machine can create gaming elements, such as those creatively pointed out in Upgrade Complete, that immerse intrinsically motivated players into a virtual world of gamic actions (p. 38).

It is interesting to see how Galloway attempts to interpret several definitions of ‘play’ into video game culture.  “To arrive at a definition of video games, then, one must take Huizinga and Caillois’s concept of play and view it as it is actually embedded inside algorithmic game machines” (p. 21).  Does Galloway mean to say that ‘play’ is programmed into video games and that any video game user is implied to be a player?  The definition of play has evolved concurrently with culture (in my opinion), so would this just be the next step in our (the world’s?) definition of play?

And what gets me the most is Galloway’s idea of diegetic machine.  Even when a user is not there, the game continues to ‘play’.  Although no operator actions are occurring, do machine actions constitute play?  Galloway doesn’t answer the question when he brings up the idea of cut scenes and only suggests a different interpretation, but I’m curious as to what he would say if he were to give a direct answer.