Author: Nadreck

Links for the Moment

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods, discovered via Chris Pelsor’s snogblog. For those of you who dig on this sort of stuff, it’s totally a good find, lots of good information.

How To Be Friends With Your Ex is a good read, kind of relevant to me personally. There’s a lot to the whole notion of staying friends with an ex. My own personal philosophy stems from the idea that just because a relationship is ending, it doesn’t mean you suddenly stop loving someone. I still love all my exes, there’s no doubt in my mind about that. My opinion is that it’s a heck of a lot easier to process the loss of the relationship if you’re not trying to also suddenly “un-love” someone. Acknowledge that you still love them, and that they still love you, but that the relationship wasn’t working out. Something to consider is that you started dating this person because you felt they were good people. I won’t say that there aren’t some wolves masquerading as sheep so to speak, but generally, if you trust your judge of character elsewhere, you should trust it in this as well. If you trust your judge of character and believe that they’re good people, then why should that abruptly change because they’ve decided the relationship wasn’t working out? If you can accept that they’re still good people, but simply couldn’t remain in the relationship (for any number of reasons), then it becomes a LOT easier to become friends again a hell of a lot sooner. It’s a lot better in the long run, in my opinion, to change the nature of your love (from more eros to an agape-centric love), than to try and kill all feelings for someone and then maybe become friends at some distant future point.

There’s a lot more to all that than I’m really writing down, but for now that will have to do. It’s already a kind of cluttered explanation, but until I sit down and let it percolate for a while, I don’t think I’m going to do better.

Night Photography

Setting Your Night Photography Goals: I found this blog through my father, and have been enjoying the photography and writing he posts. While he’s primarily focused on the topic of night photography (as fits the topic of the blog, and a subject near my own heart), what he talks about with keeping yourself motivated and on track by setting yourself good, clear, reasonable goals is really worthwhile no matter what sort of creative work you’re endeavoring to do.

“For Fun” Indeed

To say that games cannot do whatever other media can do, that they are “just for fun” and have no other purpose, is to betray a profound contempt for games. (Raph Koster in response to a comment that games are played for nothing more than fun)

Very succinctly stated and in my opinion spot on.  As is evidenced by the nature of the appeal in Minnesota, there are still quite a few ill-informed and misconceived notions about the medium that need to be addressed.  While there is a fair bit of understanding that video games are the “political tool du jour” in this election year, that doesn’t make their attempts to restrict the rights and freedoms of a fledgling medium any less dangerous.

I’ve discussed this in the past, but I’ll say it again: comics sadly let themselves be pigeonholed back when they first became popular, and have now had to spend decades fighting that image because they didn’t fight it then.  Regardless of whether you like graphic, violent video games, I hope that we can all agree that in order to defend our rights as a whole, we need to defend these now.

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all. (H.L. Mencken)

Democratized Literacy

Raph Koster has an excellent post up right now discussing the notion of democratized literacy that is well worth the time to read. I’d have to say that I largely agree with him, and feel that he makes an important implicit point: the entire notion of literacy and literature is constantly evolving, and should not be assumed as a static and limited definition. The structure and limits of a definition can change and expand, as long as the idea remains.

There will be more substantial content “soon.” In the meantime, I hope readers are finding these links useful.

RPGs at Gestural Narrative

While I may go back and expand on this in the future, I wanted to mention this post about games, in particular role playing games, as a form of gestural narrative, which I found over at Roll the Bones. Rather than reinventing or reiterating the wheel, I would instead suggest you swing by the site and read it for yourself.

On an unrelated note, please be patient; we’ll be doing more with this site soon.

Improving the Middleware Licensing Model

[Before I get into the specifics of what I’m talking about, I’d like to preface all this by saying that I am not a business analyst, nor an economist. I don’t know the realities of how feasible this is, as I have not run any numbers to check that feasibility. More than anything, I am putting this out there as an idea, in the hopes that someone with the requisite expertise can actually run the numbers and (hopefully) put them into practice. — Nabil]

As I’m sure most of you are already aware, games are generally no longer made in someone’s basement on a shoestring budget. They are developed by teams ranging in size but rarely under a dozen at this point, and for budgets that are quickly rivalling the most expensive Hollywood blockbusters. While the size and scope of game development is now on par with that of movie development, we haven’t bothered to adopt many of the business models that are used within this sister entertainment industry, and not because they couldn’t be successful, but simply because those holding the purse strings are leery of trying something new on a $20 million game. This is only going to become worse as budgets continue to escalate into the $100 million and even $200 million game. Put simply, the financiers of the industry are becoming more risk-averse, and are going to become more conservative as time continues. If we’re going to find alternative models for game development, it needs to be done now if at all. Personally, one avenue I’d like to see pursued is a royalties-based licensing model.
Continue reading “Improving the Middleware Licensing Model”

Virtual Home

This may perhaps be a post better suited for my other blog, but for some reason, I felt it better suited to talk in this one about the notion of virtual spaces as a home, which is a topic recently touched upon over at Terra Nova in Bonnie Ruberg’s recent post: Grounded in Virtual Spaces. Her post broaches the topic that in many ways, blogs serve as a surrogate home on the internet.

But what exactly is “home”? Several Native American tribes believe that home is where you are born (in a geographical sense — I somehow doubt they were referring to the hospital room specifically), and that there is a spiritual connection tied to that area from then onward. This doesn’t mean you have to live there your whole life, but it will still have an effect on you in often subtle ways. Personally, I’m a big fan of this idea, and feel it works well to define a virtual home as well. Blogs (whether it’s a myspace page, friendster, facebook, blogger, or a stand alone site like this one) are often our first real forays into being a creator or participant in the virtual arena. It provides an anchor point where they are free to express themselves however they want (to let their guards down, figuratively speaking). People may move on or away from these blogs or pages, but their time spent with their own space to create and express themselves will continue to have an effect on them throughout their other endeavors.

Forums, however, serve a complementary but separate role, more similar to third spaces (Bowling alleys, pubs, places people gather that are neither home nor work), where it is a peer gathering of people collaborating to form a dialogue. It does not qualify as a home, per se, in that no matter how freeform the structure of the forum is, it is still ultimately governed by someone else. We may even end up spending more time in that third space than we do in our homes (even more true on the internet, where “home” serves as a place to toss links and thoughts before heading back out into browsing, with only the occasional extended period spent cleaning up or redesigning the site), but that does not alter the distinction between the two spaces.

I’m not really going anywhere with this in revelatory terms, but I did want to share. I may expand it later.

Design Metaphors and Philosophies

Much like every other medium, there are really no hard and fast rules to making a good game. “Add nice graphics,” or “Make sure the gameplay is fun” is hardly a schematic for making a good game, and could be roughly equated with back seat driving, telling someone to be sure to remember to use their turn signal when their turn signal is already on. That said, there have certainly been some attempts to give a basic grounding in what design principles work or don’t work in game design, by a great many individuals. There are a fair number of similarities between these authors (which is unsurprising, since they all read each other and come from similar backgrounds in the industry), but what I personally find more interesting is the differences between different authors, and what metaphors different designers have found most effective for them.

One of the earliest books I read this semester was A Theory of Fun by Raph Koster. While not explicitly about game design per se so much as a discussion about the fundamental concepts of fun and play, Koster does also explore the method he finds most effective for game design. His metaphor is based around his theory that games are fun because the brain is constantly seeking patterns to process. With that in mind, he tries to find new patterns for the brain to process by thinking of a verb that would encapsulate an action or series of actions, and then designs the game mechanic around that verb (or if the game is expansive enough, verbs). From a ludological perspective, this is a very appealing method of design, since the game mechanic quite literally designs itself. This does not leave much room for a narrative-centric game, however.
Continue reading “Design Metaphors and Philosophies”

Narratology vs Ludology; Pictorialism Revisited

Video games are currently facing a slew of legislation attempting to ban or criminalize the representation or discussion of some topics within video games — effectively censoring what can be made in games, or even what can be defined as a game. This is hardly the first time this sort of action has come up, however, if you look back to other contemporary forms of media. In the early 20th century, photography had split into factions on the nature of photography as an art form. The division was between a style known as pictorialism, which allowed and encouraged image manipulation and pre-composition, and straight photography, which disallowed any pre or post-processing manipulation of the image. About the extent that was allowed in straight photography was some dodging and burning applied during the printing process. These two factions each had an advocate in the public fora, notably William Mortensen on the side of pictorialism, and Ansel Adams on the side of straight photography. The debates often became heated between the two, with Adams becoming the winner by default after Mortensen passed away. There was also some dirty pool played on the part of the straight photographers, who deliberately removed any but the most cursory mention of pictorialism as a photographic movement in Beaumont Newhall’s work, The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present.

My personal contention is that this turn of events has significantly marred the public view of photography as an artform, encouraging the mindset that photography is simply an objective view of what is or was (which is not the case even within straight photography). It has taken decades and a fundamental paradigm shift in the realm of photography (ie digital manipulation; Photoshop, Painter, et cetera) to even make a dent in this perception, with considerable inroads still needing to be made. This denial of the more expressive, authorial form of the medium encourages the public view of the medium as a sort of stepchild to more accepted forms of art.
Continue reading “Narratology vs Ludology; Pictorialism Revisited”

A Wii Little Bandwagon

There has been a considerable uproar about Nintendo’s choice of name for their new system in the days following its announcement. I’m not going to get too much into the reasoning or opinions about the name, since those topics have already been addressed ad nauseam by most of the web. Instead, let’s look at some of the facts surrounding ‘Wii’. First of all, love it or hate it, everyone is talking about this new system, which is a marketing coup that is hard to ignore or downplay. This buzz is also mere days before the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), where they have scheduled a major press conference to announce further details about the console, meaning additional time in the media spotlight.

What’s particularly interesting, however, is that they also used this buzz to gloss over their announced release date, which is apparently not until Q4 of 2006, which was covered by only one major gaming news outlet. This will be confirmed and properly announced at the E3 press conference, but it’s still interesting. It is also worth noting that even amid all this attention, Nintendo has still remained tightlipped about the technical specifications of the system. They are, in essence, generating an unprecedented media buzz over a system that no one knows much about — we know that it uses an innnovative new controller, and that they’ve opted not to pursue High Definition with this console generation. That’s about it. There’s been no gameplay footage to speak of, though there have been several high profile companies signing on to develop for the Wii, and they even had a prototype mockup in a locked display case at their booth at the Game Developer’s Conference this past March. There has been a not insignificant amount of speculation about the specifications of the machine, but Nintendo themselves have been quite tightlipped about it.

I must say, I’m rather impressed by this little gambit. Satoru Iwata gave a keynote at the Game Developer’s Conference about disrupting the industry, and from the looks of things, that’s exactly what they’re aiming to do. My vote is more power to them: we need to shake things up a bit, and show that there is more breadth and depth to games and what games are than is commonly accepted today. There’s more to that than simply deconstructing what came before, just as there must be more than just a new marketing campaign. To borrow a trendy slogan, it is not enough to Think Different. We must also Do Different. Nintendo is certainly showing signs of putting deeds to their words, and I only hope that it proves to be true.