"Level with Me", my level design interview series at RPS

Quote from arhurt

You are saying that the message and narrative of a game are solely based on the game play actions of the player?

As in, Shadow of the Colossus's message is that you should climb and murder the biggest animals you can find?

It's like saying that the message of every book to date is that you gain knowledge by turning square paper pieces bound to a hard cover over and over again while looking at the printed ink markings. That's what you do 99% of the time.

[Blocked Image: http://i43.tower.com/images/mm100798129/critique-judgement-immanuel-kant-paperback-cover-art.jpg]

I stopped reading at page 20 lol

What's your favorite not fun game? Mine's Pathologic.

Quote from Jetsetlemming

What's your favorite not fun game? Mine's Pathologic.

If its not fun, its a chore not a game.

Quote from Jetsetlemming

What's your favorite not fun game? Mine's Pathologic.

Passage

I'm a very self-tempered and joyful person. It's really hard to get me upset, or sad.

That being said. Passage really made me feel melancholic and sad for a couple of days. And it left a bad taste in my mouth the instant I was done with it.

I still play it from time to time.

The gameplay is shallow and unrewarding. The message, for me, was very intense.

But that's only because it's so personal. Bioshock and Half Life still deeply amaze me in the complexity and peculiarities of their universes in a similar manner as 1984 or Lord of the Rings. Another game that had a deep impact for me was Shadow of the Colossus

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when Agro fell down the ravine

: It was personal. Or when

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the advisor killed dr. Vance

at the end of episode two.

The difference from the episodes I described above about HL2:ep2 and SotC is that their gameplay is stellar compared to Passage. Just because a game "wants to be a message" does not imply that gameplay comes secondary.

Gameplay is paramount to games. Good gameplay will inevitably lead to fun. Games stripped of gameplay are not games. Games that aren't fun aren't games. They may as well be "interactive experiences", but are not games. If their objective is to convey a message, they are a medium, as much as the toilet used by Duchamp was simply a medium for the message of Duchamp's fountain. But you wouldn't say that Duchamp's fountain is a sculpture, much like I would not call Passage a game.

word arhurt, i basically came to the same conclusion. i don't have a favorite among interactive experiences, i think it's mostly because since none have given me the option to immerse myself in them, as to really understand their message. passage and graveyard are very explicit with their message/intent, and it makes (in my opinion) shallow works of art.

something that really made an impact on me when i was younger was

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the fall

in rune (the game). it was so simply made, yet for me the experience of it was amazing... possibly because i had immersed myself in the game. maybe the entire game wasn't art, but that right there was art for me.

my favourite not fun game is whatever game anybody else other than me is working on.

OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Maybe i'll say something that will come up very simple, but yeah

As some writer said : we are as virgin from horror as we are from voluptuousness

Most of the time games are a way to experience horror without its consequences : Win, Quest for power, fighting an oppression or become the oppression;

To me the main characteristic of video games if you compare them to movies for example, is that they are games, that means you have an influence; and to enjoy this influence they have to resist; for you to "beat them" leaving appart on how they achieve to do this well or not

All games are build around the concept of adversity; which is something people need like they would need water, either in their personal of professional life. ( which is funny because to me the videogame industry seems to evolve around this very concept; it made me chuckles when i heard that blizzard employees win a customised sword after some years of experience in the company )

But will you for example, say that a chess game has some artistic value ? If it is made by a kid out from toilet paper maybe not, but if it's really well worked piece all of expensive wood maybe it will

Could you ever convey a "message" when people just want to play chess ?

What actually annoys people about art games is that the descriptor ‘art game’ puts them on a level above other games, their favourite games, by insinuating that they are mere games. Which is enforced by the sheer pretentiousness of many art games and

I agree with Taylor.

If your game moves away from ironsights and explosions, I think that the term "experimental" or something similar can be used IMHO.

You go on countering my arguments saying that gameplay = message, and ask "why would you argue a game is about something that you do only 1% of the time". But you fail to realize is that the player does much more than simply stay on the defined boundaries of the gameplay and input/output channels the game offers.

When I play SoT, sure my only choice is to murder, as that's what the gameplay limits me. But my mind, and the relationships I make with the game, go way beyond what the gameplay allows. I'm constantly wondering who are these characters and what they mean. When I play the initial sequence of Batman: Arkham Asylum, my only gameplay option is to walk around and zoom in and out, those are the bounds of the character. Me as a player, however, am absorbing, observing, questioning and being entertained by what is presented on the screen as well as all the other meanings that come attached to it: In that moment I'm Batman, bringing the Joker to confinement, my mind is already wondering how I came to capture him and the fight that we had prior to me bringing him here.

What I'm trying to say is that games, as any other work of art, can have as much meaning as you put in them. What games need in order to become games, however, is gameplay, otherwise they are not games, such as a painting is a painting because it uses paint on a canvas. Sure, you can push the boundaries sometimes... how about a painting with no canvas, or no paint? Yes, you can push the boundaries, and sometimes you will push it so hard that you become something else: a painting becomes a sculpture, a game becomes a movie.

In order to properly analyze a subject, we need to define those boundaries, and for me games need gameplay, ergo they need to be "fun" as in: they must engage the player in an interactive fashion that challenges and rewards mastery of the mechanics according to his own expectations.

If a work of art of any kind has that gameplay, then it is a game. Whatever else comes along with it (narrative, music, plot, characters) are complimentary to the core gameplay experience, and give it further ways to deepen meaning.

That is my main gripe with the so called art games, in that they many times push the boundaries of the classification of a game so far out that they stop being games and become something else.

You may think that I'm against art games by these definitions, but it's exactly the opposite, since taking them out of the category of "games" frees them up from the necessity of having good gameplay, and thus become able to be analyzed by their stronger aspects, such as meaning, narrative, execution, awe factor... you name it. But you must be very clear that they are not games if they don't have good gameplay, as much as most games don't have good plots because they are not novels.

Quote from KoKo5oVaR

Could you ever convey a "message" when people just want to play chess ?

i don't think so, but chess is a competitive game. so the focus of the player is to eliminate the other player. most arcade games are competitive in their nature (eliminate the other player, get the highest score), which makes them hard to contain or even show a message. it's just not what they were designed for.

single player experiences on the other hand, is where players play to get an experience that is something in itself, akin to reading a good book or watching a good movie. experiences are by nature subjective, and so it's going to be hard to force the same experience down different players' throats. still, whatever the experience may be, it may be lasting depending on how much effort into immersion the creators used. silent hill 2, for instance, is a game where everything is presumably going on in the head of the protagonist. the enemies and everything represent the dark journey inside yourself, the pyramid head symbolizing your anxieties and fears. not everyone will bother with this analysis after playing the game, but you can give the player the same experience if you show the player how it works rather than telling him.

yesterday i found this comic panel and it gripped me. so i studied it as to understand why it gripped me. try for yourself: http://d24w6bsrhbeh9d.cloudfront.net/ph ... 9_460s.jpg

i think this thing is very similar to what is necessary for immersion in games.

very nice post arhurt

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RY: But Ico is so frustrating!BC: [laughs] Why is it frustrating?

RY: The narrative, to me, is about this girl who’s an utter liability.

BC: But the point is that she’s not just some NPC who stares at a wall. She plays with the little birds and stuff.

RY: Okay, I’ll rant more later

please don't.

Ico is about a girl losing her innocence, represented by Yorda being impaled on Ico’s horns and bleeding everywhere. Ico is definitely an art.

Quote from Taylor

Ico is about a girl losing her innocence, represented by Yorda being impaled on Ico’s horns and bleeding everywhere. Ico is definitely an art.

Girl, innocence, blood. Mmm.. I've seen this story before.

Why do people always point to SotC as the prime example of games as art?

And honestly, who gives a flying fuck at the end of the day? Games are entertainment. They don't need to be anything more than that.

Quote from Serenius

Why do people always point to SotC as the prime example of games as art?

It's easy.

The plot is incomplete and not obvious: basically, everyone wonders if killing the Collosi is the right thing to do after you kill the very first one and the hero is taken over by the dark powder of dark powers that comes out of the thing. The gameplay itself is quite different from the normal and the rewards are not as recognizable as a a big shiny new sword. The single moment towards the end when

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Agro (the horse) falls in a chasm

has made many players feel a sentiment of loss and almost regret having to make

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that jump

in order to finish the game.

It's so easy to make tangents and create analogies with SoTC, coupled with the fact that it was a somewhat widely acclaimed game with very good graphics and technology.

I bet we could make the same points using Deus Ex:HR, Zelda or Burnout, but it would require a significant bigger commitment to writing and reading.

Since we are lazy, that's what we do.

The prime example for me as a very artsy game is Mirror's Edge.