Campaignjunkie

BEFORE: pirates2.jpg[/attachment] - I think you need character portraits, because usually the player model is standing right in front of them and I can't see who's talking. - Use fewer words. Use colored text. Do what Zelda does, basically.

Great production values and I love the lushness of all the environments. Still feels a bit floaty from being a Unity platformer. That said, you guys really need to get a writer on-board to do a pass on your dialogue and sign text. This could all be so much more charming if you had someone workshop your words. All the characters talk the same, and in general it's just way too many words. She doesn't talk like a teenager. The talking cat professor kinda talks like a professor -- well, a bad professor whose class everyone skips.

We could just latch onto the Polycount one, given so many of us are there too... have a little "MapCore" table :\

SO WHERE AND WHEN IS THE MAPCORE MEETUP GOING TO BE

Just finished it. Really stupendous work. Still trying to figure out how you did all the terrain and overlay tricks. I wanna make custom Dear Esther levels!

I'll be there. Hopefully presenting at the Experimental Games Workshop; otherwise, just attending on the indie pass.

FOUR IGF NOMINATIONS WHAT (congrats!)

If I can spoil the end of the Portal 2 mod I made for RPS, it has the test chamber of all test chambers in it. Not sure how much it's changed since I've left. Someone else made the AMS model before, so I had to make my own substitute out of brushes / PhilipK's cool textures. (and I asked Carlos if it was cool if I used my stuff, so no worries there) ... funny story: I couldn't find my backups, so I actually had to download the leaked alpha off pirate bay, which had an extremely old version of my VMFs but still good enough for me to update it. C'mon, BMS! Don't die, if only to stick it to the skeptics!

enlighten me!

Last part is up: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/12 ... rd-perrin/ Mod is up too, download and play at your leisure: http://www.moddb.com/mods/level-with-me

In practice, I'd recommend just copying the assets over. Valve isn't going to hunt you down for this, and if they do, it'll look really bad for them. Move on from this issue and focus on game / level design instead.

(the mod's been delayed for 2 weeks, fortunately no one's noticed)

If we're talking about a commercial context, I'd say "artistic achievement" means the art direction: if the look is novel and influential (e.g. TF2 has started its own cartoony FPS genre, and single-handedly revitalized discourse about character design and readability in the game industry), if it has a consistent look, the assets do what they need to do, and the total effect is greater then the sum of its parts. Some assets in TF2 are flat colors or simple primitives with an AO baked into the diffuse, or cgtextures.com with the cutout filter -- but that's all they had to be, so who cares? But BAFTAs have to go to UK people right? Just give the award to Rob Briscoe and the Dear Esther folks, just for the crazy technical tricks he's doing with material proxies and detail props. Judging is done.

Buy buy buy buy

Rick_D: You have no idea.

We talked more than a month ago, before I had to talk to any of you rubes, I assure you.

I agree with a lot of your reasoning, but then your conclusions are totally unrelated. Here's September 12th. You can argue whether this is an art game or a bad game or whatever -- but it's a game, and the message comes from interacting with the system and understanding how the system works. The graphics matter and the sounds matter, yes, and they're there to help contextualize the action as you say. At it's core, if you couldn't actually click to do anything, the game would be much less interesting. Gameplay is message. Music is not a game. An MP3 doesn't care whether I listen to it or not, it is dead data sitting on a hard drive. In contrast, games have processes. Games are alive. Or are you arguing that games don't have messages at all?

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/11 ... ey-wreden/ The commentary is currently focused on whether "authenticity" is relevant to talk about in game development. I suspect you'll all be against me on this point, so here's a pre-emptive defense: Yes, authenticity is important. You can call it another name if you want -- "entitlement, respect" -- but to appear "authentic" is what young men crave and thus, that's what games crave, as the product of young men. Even the argument that I'm too artsy or pretentious is, itself, an argument that I'm inauthentic in some way. Sentura: Honestly I don't care to watch the video either. Can you tell me the point, briefly?

I agree that "art game" and "serious game" is a bad thing to call these games, but unfortunately those are the labels that have stuck. Though a segment of "serious games" today is getting re-branded into "games for change." The other "serious games" like work training simulators are so boring and banal that ideally they should be called "boring games" or something. See, I don't think that's input. Arkham Asylum cannot read your mind and access variables in it. The real input is how you move Batman, how you dive bomb / glide kick / jump from gargoyle to gargoyle. That's what you're doing 99% of the time, thinking, "oh that NPC is going to attack me, I better counter him" or "where can I fire my grappling hook" Okay, so anything that has "gameplay" is a game? Well according to you, "thinking about the Joker" counts as input / interaction, or even transcends input, so watching a cutscene and thinking about the Joker, that counts as gameplay? I think you need to explain what you mean by "mechanics" because I thought I knew what you meant, but I don't think it fits with what you say above -- that thinking = interacting with the game? I disagree. Competition can be meaningful because at it's core, competition is a kind of conversation. If you watch really high-level Starcraft or Street Fighter play, suddenly a fireball can be a taunt, because that might be Daigo's way of saying "I knew what you were going to do before you knew, so don't even try those tricks with me, play more seriously." Read Frank Lantz's "Go, Poker and the Sublime" (http://www.third-helix.com/blog/?p=1169) which talks about 2 very competitive, but very deep games that are so meaningful they're akin to meditation. I sort of agree, but here are two questions addressed to anyone here: (a) Assuming you agree with what arhurt said before, can you explain how Pathologic meets your definition of "fun"? Or if it doesn't, why is it better than something similarly confusing and complicated and unorthodox, e.g. The Path. (b) Is it bad if the apex of an art form is totally inscrutable and takes 20 hours to play and multiple playthroughs? Take James Joyce's Ulysses. It's very important, but at the same time, I'm pretty sure only a handful of people in the world might read it and genuinely like it. If it were a game, we would say that's bad game design because it's too confusing.

I wouldn't say "solely," but yes, gameplay = message. Otherwise, why would you argue a game is about something that you do only 1% of the time? In SoTC, you have no choice but to murder. Maybe you'll feel bad about it. Maybe you won't. Re: your weird book example, good thing books aren't video games, huh? Every piece of art / piece of culture / game says something, whether you intended it to say anything or not. The player makes meaning just by playing. The question is whether some messages are better than others. I argue that some are. Art games are just an experiment to see if we can make games that say things other than "murdering middle eastern people is awesome" -- and some art games end up being awful, but some end up being great. It's also important to note that art games don't exist alone. Super Columbine RPG requires you to know JRPG tropes. Braid requires you to know Mario. And as I suggested earlier, the industry is poaching ideas from art games as well. Again, this "great divide" is only in your heads and has no real basis. A chess set, made out of toilet paper, would be interesting because (a) if a piece gets wet, you wouldn't want to touch it, (b) the pieces might dissolve once they're wet and interfere with the game in interesting ways -- what if you strategically sneezed? © toilet paper is a cheap material, so that suggests anyone can play chess and you shouldn't need enough money to buy an expensive wood set. On a formal level, the mechanics of chess says this: war is complicated. When you mobilize troops, they need cover. Beware of traps, beware of distractions. Think about what your opponent will do and have a counter-counter attack ready. And yes, every game of chess has meaning. Maybe you expanded too early and left your base vulnerable: "don't be greedy." Maybe your opponent sacrificed their queen to put you in checkmate, "don't assume so much." etc. If you watch eSports or play SC2 or DOTA, guess what, you're making meaning from these video games using the same ideas that power art games. That meaning may or may not be "a story," but it will be an idea, a memory / understanding of what happened and why. Art games want to try to harness that power in a different way, so that your mom can understand it without spending 10 years training in DOTA.

those sound like very pretentious questions to be honest, do you really think like that? It all trickles down. So very occasionally when the CEOs let the game industry experiment with form (e.g. gunship level in MW, No Russian, etc.) are you going to say this all came out of nowhere? Of course not. Super Columbine preceded No Russian, The Path precedes what will probably be a rape level in MW4, etc. So no, I don't think it's pretentious at all, to wonder "what's okay to talk about with games, and how?" Six Days in Fallujah got blacklisted for reasons that had nothing to do with level design or gun balance or bad voice acting. Everyone else in society pretty clearly sees games as pieces of culture that make statements, even if the games don't intend to. Why do we insist that games can't ask questions? They're both entertaining and pretty games, but as art, they fail. The message of Bioshock is that you should murder people with weapons and magic powers, then kill a puppy or save a puppy for the same reward, then kill a big blue guy at the end. The message of HL2 is that you should kill soldiers and monsters, and use the gravity gun to hit people with toilets. You're a violent mute sociopath in all these games -- that is the narrative because that is what you're doing for 99% of the time, and that's the only thought process required to play. There's nothing wrong with that, but don't insult art by suggesting those games function as art (or better than art) because they don't. Thanks. Brendon Chung's one of my heroes so it was fun to do. Next week is with the guy behind The Stanley Parable, so the discussions get pretty crazy.

Fun like grinding for XP? Fun like going to a bar with your friends? Fun like finger painting? I know you said "you don't want to get too much into this" but basing any value claim on an unexplained definition of fun is... lazy. indie games != art games. Peri's procedural FPS is definitely indie, but I doubt he'd call it an art game. And you think the mechanics in Braid are poorly designed? Are you kidding? I can't even tell when you're not trolling anymore... The puzzle design is fantastic. The last level is genius. The way he reuses level layouts is even more genius. No one defends the books or the text narrative though, I agree that aspect was lame. But generally when people talk about the narrative in Braid, they're talking about the level design, I think. So no one should even try? There is literally no space for experimentation in this direction? And be honest, when was the last time a painting moved you? I'll confess: Portal 2 entertained me, but didn't move me. The plot structure was too transparent for me. "This is Act 1. This is exposition." But when I played The Path? There's no gameplay, so what do I do? Okay, I'll just click on random stuff... oh crap, did I just get my character raped? My god. What the hell just happened. Was that even my fault? But the game wanted me to get raped? But that's a stupid thing for a game to want. Can a game "want" me to do something in that way? How can the game blame me for making a choice I didn't know I was making?, etc. and I find all those questions "FUN" to think about, "meaningful and deep like a painting" After Portal 2, I had no such questions about what games are or what games could be. Therefore, Portal 2 wasn't fun or engaging. QED.

e-freak: I think discussing what PlanetPhillip "should" include, if anything at all, is important to the main point that emerged from the interview -- why are games separated into "normal" and "weird art game" when both can be interesting in their own ways? Are we just so set in these divisions? Why aren't we more inclusive and understanding of both? I disagree with your comparison. It's more like asking a death metal magazine to cover prog metal.

I hope insta didn't think I was trolling him. I just wanted him to say interesting stuff and sound smart, so I came up with (what I thought) were interesting topics that he had some authority on. I was softballing compared to what hardball could've been -- like "People say GRAW2 sucks, why do you think that was?" or "Tell everyone at RPS why Square Enix killed GRIN." Would you rather have had me ask him how many weapons are in GRAW2, or ask him what his favorite level in MW2 is? How many polygons are in Whoopservatory? Some dumb game journalism / press release stuff? "How great is it, to work at Avalanche? How awesome is E3?" I actually thought I kept praising him too much.