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Theater and illusion in games

O Fair Enuff

While we're on the subject of analogues between lowbudget plays and nilbudget games: I've been to a few plays that just used a small number of props, lighting, and dialogue cues to suggest actions and locations without bothering with things like scene backdrops or elaborate stage design. Sometimes it's awkward but it can work susprisingly well: a stepladder becomes an enormous mountain, a fake window hug on a backdrop becomes a house or a street at night, some sound effects and a chair become a car ride. There's an initial moment of adjustment when you're watching and then you take it in your stride. It's not so much that you're deliberately imagining these things to be something else as that you're recognising them as symbols for larger structural elements. I guess the immediate analogue here would be in stuff like early Commodore 64 games and so on, where a careful deployment of sprites against a featureless black background could suggest anything from a cabin or a church to a solar system or the bottom of the sea. Sometimes this felt jarring, especially since the sprites used could be weirdly ambiguous, but at best I think it could be more effective than some of the huge hi-res environments in something like recent Final Fantasy games just because since you had to decipher them for what they represented you automatically felt more connected to them than you would if you were just staring at a prerendered mountain. They became evocative through their abstract nature, while sometimes more detailed stuff leaves no room for the imagination.
Cactus's game "Life/Death/Island" plays around with this a lil bit and I thought it worked really well:




Basically I guess that nowadays even indie devs don't have to worry as much about brevity in graphics but it's always interesting to see people manage to suggest a lot with just a little, and how a few carefully chosen tiles can suggest an entire world with little effort while the sense of place generated by detailed ripped graphics etc can fall apart at the first misplaced tile.

Theater and illusion in games

what about brechtian epic theatre though, where the entire point is to distance the audience from whats going on through exposure of artificial mechanisms so that they take a critical attitude to what's happening rather than just passively absorb experience like a sponge.....

Seriously, thinking about games in terms of overall coherency in theme/structure/aesthetics is probably important but I do wish that any kind of "breaking the spell" weren't automatically treated as a bad thing. One of the things I liked most about stuff like Earthbound and Mother 3 were the ways they were both very suspicious of the kind of "immersive" game design that can easily tip over into addiction and manipulation. In Earthbound your dad phoned you up if you played for long stretches continuously to tell you to spend a while away from the game. Mother 3 rendered generic RPG mechanics like save points and healing spots in ridiculous and arbitrary ways and also used things like sudden shifts between playable characters and points where you had to enter your reallife name: I'm fairly sure the point here was to make people aware that it was a game, that instead of being immersed into a particular role you stayed at a certain distance which allowed you to enjoy and appreciate what was happening in a broader context. I think it's particularly telling that the final battle of Earthbound can only be won by essentially opting out of the usual battle mechanics in favour of a blatantly artificial deus ex machina mechanic. It's also interesting how both games embraced stuff like DATA INPUT SYSTEMS and MENU SYSTEMS and all the other ways in which games have traditionally broken immersion in order to focus on the larger structural context.

One of the things I like most about games is this kind of playful abstraction, the way that you're encouraged not to experience them as an unbroken flow but to step outside this flow and think critically about whats happening: can I make this jump, do I have enough items for this boss, what's involved in this puzzle, is there another route through the dungeon, and also how all this information is represented and processed. The way that RPGs play around with strange formalist representations of experience where battles and such are determined by blatantly artificial statistics like STR and DEF, weird items and commands used for interacting with the world. I think this is where another analogue for the theatre could come in: the "suspension of disbelief" among the audience isn't something which has been grudgingly extorted from them, it's a gesture of good faith which says that the audience is prepared to meet you halfway and honestly listen to what you have to say. It's a willing collaboration between both parties. Treating the audience for anything you have to make - a game, a play, a book, a movie - as imbeciles who need to be tricked and prodded into enjoying your carefully planned experience is not only pretty arrogant but also a renunciation of the good faith and respect for the audience which is necessary for anything to be worthwhile art rather than carnival hucksterism. I don't think it's an accident that most of the AAA games and movies that seem to take this attitude tend to be completely devoid of any imagination and even fun, preferring to force the player/audience down predetermined corridors while painstakingly explaining the boring plot and why she should care than actually allowing them to explore the work and have an honest reaction to it. I've seen good plays that were performed by untrained community theatre amateurs against pasteboard backdrops and still managed to engage an audience who were willing to overlook the flaws to hear what those involved were trying to say. This strikes me as a much better model for making and playing games than an attitude of mutual contempt.

RMN Snews - Issue #22

Keep an open mind

...and not only just to let new ideas in, but to let old ideas fall out.

Doing unique, random, different, and ridiculous things is a good way to exercise the mind and promote new ways of thinking about the world around us. As for RMN and games in general, try playing games outside of your typical preffered genre, or try exploring new game design ideas, or experiment with a new maker or engine (even geodude is trying out Construct!).

On the flipside, try to let go of the prejudices, preconceived notions of what makes a game "good" or "fun", old affliations to cliques, and instead just try to soak in some new experiences. An open mind is comfortable with differences.

Try different music you haven't tried before. Go to an arts fair or indie art gallery. Read about a different culture on Wikipedia. Let your mind wander. Play (different) board games. Learn to write backwards. Draw with your left hand (or attempt to draw at all). Read backwards. Build things with lego. Eat new foods. Exercise. Juggle. Take a whole day without ever checking what time it is. Approach the world like an inquisitive child!

(Now go forth and tranlate an "experience" into a game!)


hell yeahhhh

Five Strategies for Better Game-Making

I agree with all this but especially #1. The only generic RM2k3 game I actually enjoyed playing and found memorable was one called I think Love And War. It was all RTP iirc and there was nothing groundbreaking in terms of writing or design or whatever but the creator had an obvious affection for the game and the characters in it which I found charming. One of the things that popped out at me from watching those Let's Try videos is how bombastic some of the games were. They'd hit you over the head with dramatic cutscenes and mountain fights and portentious text and I guess hope you were impressed enough to follow up on it. I think trying to charm the player is much more effective than trying to awe them (and easier, for amateur game designers working with ripped materials etc). I realise that talking about the importance of charm makes me sound like an aging gigolo but you know what I mean.

I think the second one is important mainly because of the RPG Maker message box system. Like uh movies and comics and books and so on can get away with more "fluff"/mood-setting/digressive stuff because I think they have a lot more room to differentiate between the digressive conversations and the important ones. In RM games all the information, important or not, is given the same way through little default text boxes and sprite things walking around. The example I'm thinking of is that Let's Try game with the uh scientists in the lab going
"Press button"
"button pressed"
"increase leg pump x200"
"pump imcreased"
etc. which in a movie or something could just be background noise to show these guys mean business but in a game means clicking through a stack of boxes with absolutely no actual information. So I guess it does demand brevity in a way.

Beginner's Guide to Adventure Game Studio - Part One

I'm nearly done with Part 2 right now, where you can import your own wolf and make him shout whatever cryptic threats you want!

RMN Snews - Issue #18

don't worry kentona i had a tuxedo shirt as a pyjama top a while ago and it looked p stylin but it ripped. LiFe Is PaIN

RMN Snews - Issue #17

molasses meow rules

edchuy's Release Something! X marks the spot! Wrap-Up

Yeah 28 crits is insane dude. It is really cool that you did this. This is a good overview on the entries too!

Incidentally if you're interested in trying to make games then I think RMN has another short contest coming up this month, which is a really good way to make something short and toss ideas around or just get to grips with an engine.

Applying Auteur Theory to Amateur Games (Part I)

I thought it was pretty good, mainly because I think the whole auteur thing (or just the idea of a distinctive authorial viewpoint because i fucking hate the word 'auteur') is something I'd like to see a lot more of in amateur games. It's pretty much their main appeal to me, in fact. I don't care so much about polish or even fun etc so much as I do playing games that felt like they were made by an actual human being who put something of themself into the work, instead of churning out some derivative committee-designed garbage. It is, uh, a kind of dangerous approach in some ways since being an auteur doesn't mean someone is any GOOD (cf. the infamous argument that Michael Bay is an auteur). Pretty much the biggest and most obvious one I could name in the rpg maker community is fucking Mister Big T. But if that's the price to pay for valuing uniqueness and personality then so be it *bravely opens vault door, drowns in flood of anime dragon semen*
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