Sometimes Science Fiction doesn’t have to be a story.
Sometimes it can just be an object:
Archive for the 'Think Like a Designer' 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.
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.
I’m not sure if I totally get this article in the Escapist on How to Become a Game Designer.
Parsing the article, the idea is, as best as I can tell, in two parts:
1) Study and read a lot of things about game design and/or take classes.
2) Put your nose to the grindstone and one day your talent will be recognized.
While it’s good advice for moving up in the industry, I think there’s an important step which is once you understand what design is, actually make sure design is what you want to do. I’d hazard a guess and say that ninety percent of people who think they want to do the job don’t really understand what the job is. Of the remaining ten percent only one percent of those people really have the talent to do the job well.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t get into the industry, but I’ve seen many people who couldn’t design their way out of a box* desperately cling to the idea that a designer is what they want to be. Or worse yet, get the job and the proceed to do it poorly for years.
* Did you remember to add the box cutter specs into the design document?
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