Life gets in the way, especially when it involves things like graduation, conference planning, and dissertation writing. This post slipped from being a couple of few weeks late to being more like a month late, but I’m going to leave the part that was written previously as is so I can at least get it posted.
We didn't even get into metanarrative or transmedia narrative, maybe next time. Image borrowed from and linked to kotaku.com.
Prior to the work flow hurricane which is the AERA conference, I relayed the majority of ideas we played around with in a game narrative jam a couple weeks ago in this post. I’d promised this follow up post sooner, but you know how it goes with the backlog and what not. In this post I’ll relay some odds and ends around played narrative conflict in games without a big narrative, some awesome ideas Laura and Ian are tossing around for a library science game, and offer a few thoughts for anyone interested in doing this sort of thing in the privacy of your own classroom, office, or home (for the power geeks among you). Find all this and . . . actually just all of that after the jump.
Since I get The Escapist in my feed reader, I always have the opportunity to brighten my day with Shamus Young’s Stolen Pixels. He recently started a hilarious series in the aftermath of Ebert’s “games will never be art” piece starring Max Payne. Obviously, this is an issue I’m close to having blogged about it here previously. Strip #191 featuring “Big Pete” Molyneux is particularly awesome. If you’d rather start with part 1 of the series, click here first.
Last Friday I was invited by Caro Williams to run a game narrative jam with the game design crew she started facilitating here in Madison a few months ago. Turn out was a little small probably owing to the fact that we’re at the end of the semester and AERA is around the corner (getting back to work on my poster as soon as I finish up this post), so I had to augment the activity I had in mind. That said, I think we floated some really cool ideas in the conversation that ensued, and as I’d promised in proposing the session I’m re-posting those ideas here.
Even games as abstract as the Bit.Trip series have a core narrative conflict lurking around somewhere . . . not that we talked about those games at all, but I like this image anyway.
Writing this post took longer than expected, so what you have here is part 1 (expect part 2 later this week after I’ve got a finished poster for AERA). Something about in-game moral systems and narratives of loss after the jump.
I was reading in the Escapist about Roger Ebert’s most recent rant on how games aren’t art. Oh wait, I mean how games “can never be art.” I’ve made my own thoughts on the matter at least moderately clear. Under the circumstances I think I’ll just link to this post from Love’s creator Eskil Steenberg and drop in this image from Dear Esther as a sort of minimalist rebuttal.
A screen shot from Dear Esther, I still need to play it
Last week’s post marked the first in my proposed copy left series. Today I’m going to continue giving away ideas while clearing out some backlog in the process. You see, I had this notion a while back that developers were being rather limited in their thinking about what could be done with Guitar Hero controllers. Yahtzee posted about this issue as well about a year after I started babbling about it to my colleagues (my friends and colleagues have to put up with a lot of this sort of thing).
I picked this largely unrelated (but otherwise irresistible) image out of Blossom_Morphine's photobucket (click to go there).
More about why Croshaw and I stumbled across the same general idea, and a few specifics after the jump.
Before there were services on the internet where single male gamers could purchase online escorts to game with, I too had the notion that it might be possible to fuse powerful forces like online classifieds and gamer networks. Of course, I was thinking something more like OK Cupid meets Battle.Net, but I suppose I was being a bit optimistic. At any rate, this post is part of a new copy left series I’m doing because I’m tired of the ways people talk about IP in relation to games (among other things). I’m giving away ideas!!!
A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to give a guest lecture in Roxana Hadad’s online course on game design. The topic was genre in video games, and the (arguably) ambitious title of my presentation was Exploding Genre in Games. I’ve attached the presentation (as a .ppt) below.
Click to download in .ppt. The exploding head came out of a Google image search, apologies for not having a better cite.
I should mention two things about it:
The fonts and chalkboard are borrowed from TF2. I’m not sure if that’s entirely legal, but if Valve takes notice of it for some reason at least I’ll have made an impression before asking them for a job
I used Dan Kline’s taxonomy in this talk and took a pass at modifying it based on some issues I had around classifying some games. In the process, I kind of butchered the placement of the games Roxana’s students are currently playing and a core feature of the chart (Platformers are misplaced), apologies Dan.
I’d love to talk through the core ideas from the lecture here and I’ve also had a bunch of other thoughts on the matter that deserve mention, but I’m going to post on them at a later date. If I start trying to write them down now I’ll never get this post up, and it’s almost two weeks late as is.
