The Ephemeral Notebook

Source: Matter Feast

• 3 Source – Silicon, Germanium, Diamond, Supercarbons, Rare Crystals and Metals (1cm2)
• 2 Source – Carbon-based Life, Petrocarbons, Fossils, Ferrous Metals, Graphite, Coal, Soot (10cm2)
• 1 Source – Anything Else (100cm2)

Abilities

Differential 3

Synthesize

Consume

Kinesis

Sculpt

The Mujin are also called Void Samurai – they do not fear death and instead flirt with it in order to achieve wu wei – actions without a master. Mujin use weaponry and specialize in one and two handed melee weapons, thrown weapons, flex weapons and one handed ranged weapons, the most common being katanas, armknives, claws, pistols, blasters, spears, staves, cutters, heatwhips, sectional staves, kama, scythes, and various implant weapons.  There is a story of one even using a Bow.  However, they pretend weapons that are up close and personal, and ones that aren’t too hampered when there are multiple attackers.   They favor fluid movements and weapons that can become part of the body’s kinetics – they train endless katas and tactical subroutines so that during battle it can be as close to pure reflex memory as possible.  Mujin are often employed as guardians or assassins.

Source: Wu Wei

Abilities:

Shadowstep 5

Imbalance

Disrupt

Divide Heaven

Phantom Recourse

Empty Mind

Preview post of the concepts chapter for Tatha

http://docs.google.com/View?id=dhpn5xkg_44g9fpxwsj

Look forward to a big announcement soon – my project and company are about to go into alpha and out of stealth.

I’ve been playing a lot of Little King’s story lately and I can’t help but notice one major design curiosity:

The game becomes more usable and coherent as you go along.

Normally it makes sense to introduce concepts to the player in a nice smooth logarithmic/sigmoid fashion to optimize learning.  A game begins as simple as it can and adds complexity after enough time to digest the previous mechanics has passed, limiting the amount of instantaneous new mechanics.  However, with Little King’s story, nearly every time a new feature was added (especially in the early stages of the game)… I felt like it was a convenience issue or it was long overdue.

Each time a feature was added it didn’t feel so much like a new thing to learn, but a shortcut to a boring or frustratingly impossible task previously.  It feels as if they started with the final game and removed interface and features until they arrived at the beginning.  Some may feel this is a sound design methodology, but I do not.  The beginning experience is the most cruicial to the game – it can be looked at as a subtractive version of the game’s concepts, but it should be just as compelling as later play.  On examining this I noticed even I noticed some conflicting viewpoints on this issue, even within myself.

On one side, the beginning should be representative of the gameplay, pure and enjoyable in its own right.  This is especially true of casual games and seems to come from the casual game part of my brain.  The idea is that there is no immediate ‘end’ which you are going to, you are enjoying the gameplay as it is and as it progresses.  To me, this is the very zen-like concept that attracts me to more mechanics-based and casual games to begin with.

On the flip side, if you’ve designed a game that has a degree of complexity to it, you can’t give it all up at once.  So, like any good school – you introduce a problem, then a skill, and then test for application (designers take note: it’s more effective to introduce the problem before the skill than the other way around).  This method leads to a very ‘tutorialish’ beginning, especially if condensed together (skill-skill-skill-game vs skill-game-game-skill-game-game).

Neither side is wrong, but there’s definitely some nuances in the approach that make it worth exploring further.  As much as I do truly enjoy Little King’s Story, I did feel like I was playing through about 5 hours of a mediocre / frustrating / aimless game to get to a more polished, enjoyable game later – and I didn’t even know that was going to pan out that way through the first 5 hours (not quite like begrudgingly sitting through tutorials).

Regardless of the design method with respect to the beginning (additive or subtractive), one should never skip polishing the beginning and examining it from a ‘what if this were all it was’ viewpoint.

• Thin List Of Strategies For Fat Princess –
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• Interview: Sidhe’s Wynands Talks PSN, Details Shatter Sales –
• Best Of Indie Games: Falling Head Over Heels For Art Games –
• In-Depth: Wright Talks Perception And ‘Entertaining The Hive Mind’ –
• Zynga Acquires MyMiniLife –

Normally whenever the question “Are video games art?”  is raised, I have to force myself to avoid it, as I feel that describing my take on the subject will take far longer to type than the given blog/tweet post’s comments will be active for.  However, recently having read Damion Schubert’s take on it and having seen the subject bounce around on #gamedesign a lot, I decided I should give this a shot, so here goes.

The biggest difficulty I tend to find in discussions on this subject is that people aren’t always aware of what it is they are asking nor do they come to the discussion table with a shared set of definitions.  I am going to attempt to clean up this mess a bit with some simple logical statements and metrics, peppered with just a bit of subjective thought process.  So first off:

What is Art?

Perhaps the biggest culprit is a unclear definition of Art.  If only this were a problem limited to those discussing it as it applies to video games.  The true definition of art has been argued for quite some time (see also Aesthetics).  I’m going to try to pluck off the relevant issues.

Art can mean a reference to a field of study, a technique related to creative skill as relates to aesthetics, a product or work of art, or more colloquially ‘fine art’.  We’re going to need to pick or build a definition.  How about the first line in the Wikipedia entry – it’s gotta be the most relevant, right?

“Art is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions“.

Yup, games definitely do this!  We’re done!  The answer is yes!   Not so fast.

There is much debate about this subject so it can’t possibly be that simple… Let’s try another definition.  How about Britannica Online’s defintion:

“the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others.” [my italics]

Well that one seems to fit with games pretty easily.  I don’t seem to be getting very far with this, so I’m going to work on my own definition.   I’ll use existing things that we readily call art as a way of removing away that which it is NOT, leaving that which it is.  Likewise, if the definition excludes things we conventionally call art, then the definition itself will be invalidated.

Is art a physical object?  No, or else music or performance would not be art.  Is it creative skill or technique?  No.  It cannot be simply a technique.  If you go a gallery to appreciate art, this definition works (appreciating the technique), but if you then buy the art, you are not buying the technique.  So clearly it is neither the sum of its materials nor the sum of its techniques – it is neither simply artwork or artistry.  What ties the two together but is wholly neither?  Well a concept does.  Concepts can be equated to thoughts and words.  Are words alone art?  Just a series of words strung together?  No, we do not call this art.  However, words written down or spoken can be poetry, which is definitely art.  So what is the difference between the intrinsic set of concepts floating along and that which we call art?

Well, both written and spoken word have the potential to communicate the concept from one individual to another.  So if I walk up to you and say something, is this art?  The problem here is that the communication is direct.  What if I yell the same words to a crowd, indirectly?  Now this is could be either performance art or the actions of a crazy person (or both).  We are now very close to the great writer Leo Tolstoy’s definition of art:

“a use of indirect means to communicate from one person to another”.

I like to call this ‘proxy communication’.  Or in diagrammatic form:

Artist -> Medium -> Audience

Does it really need an audience?  Must a work of art be shown to one other than the original artist?  If an artist paints a work and it is left in their attic, and their house is bulldozed, did the work of art exist?  This is doubly ponderous if the artist is also a mime. Well, here we can satisfy that formula to say that perhaps the artist was also the audience.  But is this cheating?   Well, consider a person talking to themselves (casually like assurances into the mirror, not schizophrenia).  That is direct communication from yourself to yourself.  However, if that same person wrote a diary, and perhaps drew a sketch in a diary to try to express their feelings (to be later read by themselves again long after they do not recall the original feeling), then that is indirect communication and as such we can call it art.

Continue reading ‘On Defining Art and Video Games’

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A couple quick links on the brain happened close together so I thought I’d group them here:

Disorderly genius: How chaos drives the brain
A great discussion about back channel and multitasked learning
A bunch of links about games and neuroanthropology

and because no post is complete without cats:
House cats and psychological purring

• Two great Flash-related posts –
• Analysis: Asynchronicity In Game Design –