Sometimes Science Fiction doesn’t have to be a story.
Sometimes it can just be an object:
Archive for the 'Game Design' Category
11
Jun
Gina the Concept Car
Far more shocking to me than a failed blockbuster, is the idea that anything with that many people working on it, and that much attention, could ever be creatively cohesive and successful. Like a military campaign, it takes a unique kind of leadership to not only have the vision, but to execute it in a way that makes sure that a team of incredibly talented people are all working together to bring the dream into reality.
This New York Times article on the making of The Dark Night Returns, is an interesting one. Spoiler free, it focuses on the method to the madness, and provides what I think is some genuine insight into the film-making process.
But if Mr. Nolan was feeling any stress on the set in Chicago last year, his easygoing reserve concealed it. Dressed, as always, in his own somewhat formal uniform — dark blazer, waistcoat, French cuffs; a thermos of tea in hand; a wireless video monitor around his neck — he also seemed a bit of a throwback. While many filmmakers watch in seclusion on television screens, he stood next to the camera, always on his feet unless he was kneeling to whisper in someone’s ear. “Acting is such a vulnerable thing, you don’t want to be told in front of others that you’ve made a mistake, or ‘Try this,’ ” said Aaron Eckhart, who plays Harvey Dent, a district attorney. “Chris understands that.”
This is one film that I’m definitely looking forward to. Good superhero stuff is always about echoing the characters internal conflicts into giant external conflicts, and I thought the first film did a great job of that.
Watching Gangs of New York last night, I was struck just by how much our fiction is primarily about superhuman characters. Like ancient mythology, we need larger than life heroes who can completely heal from terrible mutilation, or overcome any obstacle if it lies in the way of their dramatic goals. And certainly there’s no amount of branding that can be done to the pretty face of Leonardo Di Caprio that he won’t be able to shrug off in a matter of minutes of screen time. Even the “terrible scars” from his brutal childhood are rather pretty and cinematic.
And I’m not saying that like it’s a bad thing. But when the video game industry constantly gets dinged for being too based around fantastic themes, and placing the characters into unrealistic situations it really is the pot calling the kettle black. Just like the characters in film, video game heroes they don’t really get those powers and abilities until they’ve become part of some great quest or event.
They’re formed by their circumstances, and their powers remain for as long as they stay in that world of quest and vision.
Hanging out in dorm room, listening to Dark Side of the Moon is a rite of passage, or at least it used to be. It was easy to get lost in those psychedelic riffs, spacey hooks, and mind-blowing jams while doing nothing more than chilling out and starting at a tie-died sheet on the ceiling. And while his name and face are gone forever I can still remember the dude who harshed my mellow, “Man, that’s totally easy to play! I could do that on my guitar!”
Often in life you’ll miss the opportunity to say the perfect thing at the right time, but this wasn’t one of those moments. The words came out of my mouth almost instantly, “Yeah, but did you do it first?”
People have a bad habit of using words like “obvious” or “simple” as a way to put something down. But if you can come up with an idea that’s so simple and straightforward that people’s first reaction is “I could have thought of that myself,” it’s usually a good thing. Creating something that people can “get” instantly is hard to do, and making something that feels so perfect that it’s part of the natural order of the universe is even harder.
Ideas like that can turn the world on it’s head, and if you look at what makes a big hit big there’s usually an underlying simplicity to the idea. Steve Jobs is the master of the “obvious idea” (usually coupled with incredible product design). He’s managed to sell society the simple over and over again. How about Harry Potter? A “Wizard’s School” seems like a good concept no matter how you slice it.
Sure there’s more work to be done once the concept has been discovered, but just because something is obvious doesn’t mean that it isn’t time to make some money.
There’s an interesting article in Gamasutra that discusses game “feel” using the Mario series for its examples. It’s a little pedantic in parts, but I think it does manage to lay out some of the difficult issues that a designer can face when trying bring a character to life, and then hand control of it over to an anonymous player.
However you describe it, it?s hard to deny that the sensation of controlling a digital object is one of the most powerful — and overlooked — phenomena ever to emerge from the intersection of people and computers.
There are lots reasons for this, but the main one is that game feel is slippery. It?s mostly subconscious, a combination of sights, sounds, and instant response to action. It?s one of those ?know it when you feel it? kinds of things. If it?s off by just a little bit, a game?s goose is cooked. If it?s ?responsive?, ?tight?, and ?deep?, it can be magical.
A good action games lets us connect to the game in a way that almost feels as if its us inside that world. It’s more than just the imagination. On some level you’re looping and flipping with the character. This column does a pretty good job of teasing out some of the ways that games allow that to happen.
One thing that I think it does overlook is animation. Even if you’re looking at classic “non-interactive” cartoons, there’s something about the clear animation that gives an audience the feeling of being there. It’s the same vicarious experience that draws people into a sporting event, or an action sequence. If you can’t capture the right details in your drawings the audience isn’t going to get what you’re going for no matter how powerful the engine is under the hood.
It’s not as hard as you might think to get it to work right either. The Xiao Xiao series started out as a series of short animations that manage to really capture the fluid feeling of a Hong Kong action film using only stick figures. Later on some actual games were created using the animation techniques, and it’s pretty obvious they were weaker than the animations themselves in terms of communicating with the audience. Finding that delicate balance between feedback and attention is where the real mastery often lies.
In his response over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Jim Rossignol adds a little more depth to that part of the discussion:
I can?t help thinking that what people are talking about when they refer to the ?feel? of a game is its capacity to get us into a flow state. We reject games with a poor feel because we aren?t able to get into that state. It?s somehow analogous to listening to music: we?re just able to enter the pattern completion of certain types of music, while our tastes seem to reject others. Games with bad feel can still be played, but they irk us, like dancing to music we don?t enjoy.
Feel and flow are one of those topics that we’ll probably never reach the bottom of, like music or dance, but it’s certainly a worthwhile discussion.
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