All arts and crafts rely on an individual + a minimum tool to use for the craft. I dont care about quality, just the ability to create within a medium.

writing = writer’s language + writing utensil (pencil, pen, typewriter, computer, etc)
Music = person + instrument
Acting = actor + body performance
Painting = person + colors + surface
Game design = designer + ???

??? = programming || crafting skillz!

It’s on between Rev vs Jaffee…

Imagine that games contained advertising such as this:

The ESRB promisses the following listed “moments” are The guaranteed universal psychologically emotional reactions (GUPERS) for this game:

• 2 heartbreaking moments
• 5 hilarious punchlines
• 10 arousing moments
  • 2 hard-ons (for males)
• 3 I-fucking-hate-this
• 7 moments of Enlightenment/Clarity
• 2 possible moments of closure

…

Just heard destructoids Anthony Burch and David Jaffee’s discussion. I’m used to listening to David Jaffe in a ranty/bloggy mode; him not making too much sense while still appealing to my emotional side (Dude, you curse a lot and I LOVE that) in regards to games. In this case, his arguments were very solid, and I feel I agree with his stance, not his conclusions necessarily (though, if his conclusions were reduced to his games, then I’d just have to agree… for the most part). I understand What Rev Rant says, I agree with him too… I even approach students with Jenova Chen’s Ideology on emotions and games (a very similar stance to Rev’s), still, Occam’s razor tends to win. Fun is the simplest explanation to why we play games; therefore, it’s the easiest reason to present games to others, “cause it’s fun” vs, “cause it’ll make you feel like when you first had your heart broken”!

Us, as a human beings capable of understanding other peoples drama, conflict, pain, life, etc. I’d like to pride myself with the ability to understand how “fun” is pleasant, but so is “growth”; an aspect that has to do (somewhat) with understanding one’s place in the world, and one’s relationship with life; an aspect that is very much explored when “pain” – an opposite of fun – is felt.

I wouldn’t tell people, “it’s awesome to fall in love, especially when you get heartbroken!”.

I would share that being in love feels accomplished, not fun; mostly, because fun gets taken away when the first tears leave your eyes. In retrospect, it’s ok to share with others how you felt great when falling in love, but you’d be a bad story teller, a bad human being, and a liar if you were to tell that person, “heartbreak… it ain’t no big thing”.

So sure, knowing that certain things to feel are pleasant… and fun, is great! Learning how to soften a blow for the brokenhearted feels altruistic… a feeling many humans don’t commonly seek.

Fall in love, go ahead, it’s fun… be careful, though! heartbreak is karma auditing your tax return.

In other words, Jaffee says,

• don’t pretend what we have doesn’t deliver.
• Be true to the axioms we’ve found so far.
• If what we have works… expand it!

Burch says:

• Seek more than Occam’s razor
• Learn to live with non winning conditions (an aspect of life)
• expand from what we have, it’ll (probably) work.

I couldn’t agree more with either. Here is where you make your own conclusions.

Please go here.

If you’ve come back from there… good!

Purumus

• E would be the central character of the english language.

I’m making a program to help my amada learn how to listen to and pronounce Spanish syllables. It’s fairly straight forward to put together the rules set for Spanish’s phonetic constructions; disregarding grammar and aesthetic academic pursuits, of course. I’m only basing it on the knowledge of the language I’m acquainted with, which is not a scholar’s – Yet, in contrast to her knowledge base, is comparatively infinite (larger than she would care to know or think possible at the moment). Fortunately for her, my vocabulary is that of a native speaker.

Based on a simple matching schematic, here are some of the rules, that excluding Proper Nouns, which span ALL languages (McCarthy for example) seem to apply to most of spanish

• Only 2 letters, ‘r’ and ‘l’ are ever repeated next to each other.
• The letters ‘r’ and ‘l’ also are the only letters used in a 3 letter syllable where 2 consonants are next to each other, e.g. “bra”, “bla”
• ‘H’ is always silent unless preceded by only two letters {’c', and ’s’}
• Most dual letter combinations in Spanish form phonemes.
  • There are some redundant graphenes (unique sounds from letter combinations that form a phoneme)
    • Anyone that starts with ‘w’, ‘x’, ‘q’ are found from other graphemes.
    • Anything with ‘h’ is just like the sound of the single vowel.
• There are special cases for syllable brakeup. 
• In words, there are no single consonant syllables. except for y = “and” and is phonetically equal to “i”
• Syllables are broken up in groups of 2 or 3 letters… any larger are extremely uncommon
• R has the most special consideration for placement within a word. sounding differently if starting a word than if in the middle of it
• etc.

I decided to make the program have a bottom up approach because I would like her to learn like a kid learns to read spanish. I cant afford Berlitz either… There are tricks that people should practice in order to acquire a more natural accent. Kids are taught to say the vowels over and over with a little limerick “a, e, i, o, u, mas sabe el burro que tu”. Additionally, rolling the tongue is actually done in english quite commonly. The common misconception is that every ‘r’ sounds like a woodpecker pecking away; machine gun like. the majority of the ‘r’s use can be summed up in the way the ‘t’ is pronounced in english when the following phrase is said quickly, “Cut away”. The machine gun?… I haven’t come up with an analogue for that one – YET!

Another observation:

Sequoia is a beautiful word in spanish and english. It sounds exactly the same in both languages, especially when pronounced carefully. The cool thing about that word, it has every vowel… and in case english speaking people forget how a vowel is supposed to sound ALWAYS in spanish, saying “sequoia” should point them in the right direction.

I’ll have a demo of the word “banana” pretty soon. Ba-ná-na using pitch shifting to create the correct enunciation of the middle “na” phoneme.

More later…

Posting once a month and plug software not games… pathetic human!

So getting on with it… I’ve found that MS One Note is amazing for keeping game designs more organized.

Benefits:

• Main organizing group: The notebook
  • great for keeping track of those scratch notes!
• OCR + Voice recognition search
  • keep notes, and SEARCH throughout even graphics with text pertaining to the topic
• Keeps perfect Word Formating
• Publishes to PDF, which is where many docs are kept anyway.
• Hyperlinks within itself
• Main hierarchy: Notebook -> Section Tabs -> pages
• Cheap ~$50~ bucks for student… part of Home/student office for $140… pretty good deal.
• MS will continue to support it
• Tablet PC and wacom tablet ready

Could need improvement:

• Does not publish self referencial hyperlinks
• No embedable content
  • It would be brilliant if it were to embed flash, even silverlight, making it able to access prototypes.
  • Video would be great!
• Does not publish multiple pages
  • I’m basically asking for a wysiwyg frontpage for dummies, but a man can dream!
• Not available on mac which does not allow it to be crossplatform

here’s a link for you to try it… it’s a very good option to using word, whose tools options are limited for all the Random Access game design docs should have:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/default.aspx

I’ll keep adding benefits/improvements as i find them…

Purum

Pay attention:

The three stooges, laurel and hardy, some cartoons, Cantinflas, old movies, I was one of the last generations to see these types of shows on network TV on Sunday mornings… TV land may show it today in cable, but that’s not the point… I watched them because my dad showed them to me, and because there just wasn’t anything else on Sunday mid-mornings; that or church shows, and that just really wasn’t an option.

I remember asking dad if those shows were old, and he’d say “Si”. And i remember asking him why they didn’t have color? he’d say because those were old cameras. but that wasn’t sufficiently explicit for my infant mind. It made more sense to think that color was new, since i knew I wasn’t old, so therefore in those first attempts at a logical argument, the conclusion was obvious: color wasn’t available in the olden days; in the grandpa days. I thought that only recently the world invented color. During the time, Kodak also had tv ads that talked about how they had “blue” and “yellow” and the remaining cast of the rainbow, in their cameras (though they didn’t specify film) as if it were a modern accomplishment.

Since, I’ve come to the conclusion that black and white cameras were a bit better “Cadillacs”… they looked more like what i remember from a film. Now, film makers use black and white as an artistic style; employing it when necessary to enhance a movies storytelling needs. Think about the great films that didn’t NEED color to be great. Why are they so amazing? Is it because we cut em some slack because they’re technically “challenged”? Is Nostalgia assisting the subject matter? I can see how the acting has gotten more real, but the magic of those movies diminishes when anything is “fixed”; it seems. I remember when i thought pan and scan was better because i lacked information about what gets projected (more like what what didn’t get cut) onto my TV pixels… I used to think that the whole screen was MORE. Come to think about it… old movies weren’t wide-screen aspect ratio… another topic i guess.

I remember being a kid and learning to want black and white movies to get colorized. But then i learned about the process, about how directors think ahead about what they’re getting from their cameras; about how the “mastering” process touches up the film grain, how the film itself decays, and how the awareness of that finalization process is involved in the choices and decision directors and the rest of the crew make… colorizing never took into consideration those things. The crew were aware how a blue dress would translate into black and white, maybe that deterred them from using a blue dress… just so that the coloring process paints a characters dress blue without the film makers blessing. Touching up movies like that seems like a sin against most art. Art needs to ship, and artists (even though they’re “never done”) build respect into their artistry by showing the world how they learn to let go of their creations or let IT go on how it will, always moving on to the next project. So, coloring? no, i can take the original vision and i can try to understand it; yet, if i somehow “miss the point”, that’s OK… always more stuff to understand.

George Lucas and Steven Spielberg have proven to be the ultimate control freaks by showing others how they need to manipulated everything and even change things from their movies because “newer audiences”, blah, blah… ET was fine with shotguns, Han Shot first.

Megaman9 just came out, brand new game done in an old, 8bit style… used to enhance a games style and im sure, to help the new and “modern” audience understand the style of gameplay, while also “justifying” the “hardcoreness” difficulty the old games had… all that only through a visual art style… amazing.

but im not here to talk about that really. After all, that’s not what the title of this post hints at. I wondered, what would my kids think is “new” to their world from looking at the movies from my generation. Here are a couple of things, some societal, some topical, some technological, and then onto the one about this post:

• the lack of cellphones seen as a plot device to insert conflict into the story.
  • The plot of “reservoir Dogs” is destroyed if it were though about it occurring today. as it stands, the movie is dated to that era (before the ubiquity of cellphones) and therefore could not be remade or updated in the future.
• Characters ignorant of a broader sense of world history and world culture.
  • Since our society is up for globalization, everyone will have some details about all corners of the world; unless the writers want to risk portraying their characters as “ignorant Americans”. Therefore, even the ignorant American in the future will know where Estonia is located… Ignorant American will be antiquated and a new laundry list of ignorant things to think and say will need to be issued, one for a people that is more aware of itself… mind you, im not saying everyone will be intelligent, just less self centered about their ignorance, just a bit more global
• Availability of personal Transportation continues to fluctuate, and with it change through out the decades the viewers understanding of the people’s social class.
  • 50’s everyone had their muscle car… then people live in new york (big city that implies richness) and they dont need cars… I think more cities are going in the way of the big metro city and therefore, kids wont see having personal transportation promoted as luxurious (depends where they’re from, of course) from movies
• Movie projection unavailable in 3D or + interactivity or + sense enhancement
  • “you mean, you have to use your hands?” Elijah Wood in Back to the Future II. Displays will continue to get bigger, but megaplexes, in order to entice dwindling audiences, will make the movie experience more life like, and impossible (for a little while) to reproduce at home
• Actors being used instead of Computer Manipulated actors (for example, though it’s not a good movie “SimOne”)
  • Final Fantasy spirits within, The polar Express, Beowulf, it will continue to get better, that’s almost guaranteed. Video Games will influence this (see the next bullet) and the Uncanny Valley will be crossed within the next 10 years… I’m not hoping, I’m just sure.
• Inability to customize the actors to the viewers liking.
  • Kids will be able to say, i want to watch blues clues with me as one of the protagonists. Sesame Street will teach you the numbers with you IN the show, inserting a “dummy” 3d model of yourself with some basic AI for kids to see themselves learning the numbers in front of the count in what im coining as “4th person self juxtaposition”<- i don’t know if that makes any sense, but i have personal memories of being a kid, seeing myself in 3rd person, no mirrors around.

and the main suggestion of the post… Lots of old/aging people

I think that’s the one that might shock people/kids some years from now. Not that elders wont be around, but that they wont be so “wrinkly” (think Paris Hilton saying wrinkly). I think kids will wonder why people look old some day, and perhaps think that being and looking old is “old”. I don’t think we’re all going to mix into one race… that’s maybe tooooo many years from what this post “postulates” (couldn’t resist the alliteration, sorry). But I’ve always wondered why movies from the 30’s have women that look from the 30s, and no matter how much they try to make “modern” women look like older generations in contemporary movies, they fail miserably.

Even the accents are crucial. Everything actors did has changed; mannerisms, accents, syntax, expletives, empathy, crying, etc. Go to an elderly home of people from a particular generation, it’s like a museum… kids will see that even more. no wonder they say 30 is the new 20. We’re lasting longer, it will be documented in movies and kids will wonder and ask you, why do those people look like that, what’s with their skin and hair and posture? They were old human models, kid

THE MUSEUM and social play…

I’ve never been a very social person when playing games, and although when socializing, going out and about, I’ve come to enjoy moments where i get to be a loner in a crowd… I’ll go to the museum in a group, and quickly find myself separating from the group, off to the exhibit i want to see by myself, ALONE, meeting up with them whenever I like; “playing hide and seek with my mom in the mall when im five” almost giving her a heart attack. Yes, i’m not such the “loner”, OMG look at him and his independence bs… I’ll gather back, meet up again, go do things in a group, but i, like many, like to be untethered…

I wonder,  will a person watching a video of a game play-through absorb the story the same way as playing it?

There are game design problems that i have a hard time trying to discuss with coworkers. Perhaps the problem with games is similar to the situation I sense from the literature world. To many people, literature is perfect; it needs no improvement. A writer writes something, a reader reads it, repeat… and it’s been like that for a while now, why would it change and why would it need to?

well, in the case of the written word, it’s simply because more people are able to have their written word read by readers today than ever before in history; hence, this blog… I remember the first blog entry that i read like a book was The Darth Side to cure the pain I felt from episode 3 after the “NOOOoooooooo!”.

It seems to me that a big problem with games is trying to narrow down its core strength as a medium. If we put aside the question of games being art for a bit, we’re left with games being a medium that like literature, music, theatre, etc, is used for commerce. However, one thing is clear, each one of those mediums have a strength that people use to better deliver an information payload.

I suggest that language and the printing process is the technology of literature, and that its STRENGTH is narrative; one that can be delivered and crafted from and into language by a writer.

I;ve always wondered how writers feel about the cliffs notes versions of their books. Upon the inception of cliff notes; something Susan Capozza shared with me that might address this is the reader response theory. Here’s my conundrum: If i read any Shakespeare play, as long as I’m intelligent enough, i can read between the lines and deliver to my subconscious the “message” that the work speaks of, which usually, ends up addressing something about the human condition. This in turn forms the experience that Sir William intended. If not, well, at least Shakespeare had enough “pop sensibility” when writing a deep play such as hamlet, to write in it enough “action” to keep my “dumass” entertained; i may even tell others to read it because it is action packed, not because of its soliloquy.

True, there have always been book clubs that agree with their perhaps elite version of the REAL message, but the problem with Cliff Notes lies in the cementing of that or any consensus, making the experience way more rigid than an art medium really cares about solidifying any message. Is there a benefit to that concensus? Sure, but it becomes dangerous to the reader when it presents itself as an authority, depriving the reader from the ability to learn to draw his or her own conclusions. In other words, give a man a fish he’ll eat for a day, teach him how to fish, he’ll eat forever.

Are there some artists out there that are control freaks? Oh yeah! Yet, having an institution represent that, forces the message to be static, and thus, any book’s audience is fatally corralled into two camps, you’re too dumb to not get it on the first read (in which case it feels like they provide the message for dummies edition cliffs notes)  henceforth excluded from THE club… or the kool-aid drinking elite. There are ranges as with anything, true, but the majority of cliffs notes purchasers are those who NEED to up their reading comprehension through practice, not lecture.

Having a solid message is alright. Many painters had to actively fight to make sure that some kings didn’t get away with a “commissioned” painting. Some, lie Goya kept their integrity by placing hints of how awful the rulers were with new symbols depicting cruelty or by simply painting without beautifying them… go check out Francisco Goya’s stuff (he’s awesome).

Not drawn by goya, but anyway, we’ve all seen this picture.

Once people arrive at a defined consensus, people may keep further exploration from discussion; where further discussion may have been beneficial to everyone. In this drawing, showing both the old lady and the young one becomes important for the whole drawing. Now, different people see different things initially, some Old, some Young, but once somebody shows the one that’s missing from their perception, it virtually becomes impossible to remove from ones awareness. Sometimes people insert that perspective into the human condition and aid the art work and thus, its artistic merit grows. Just think about the “better” writers, who manage to deliver the message perfectly, to everyone! most of the time. They probably write simpler topics to convey to everyone. Topics such as sitcom, family oriented themes, basic instincts play to a larger majority because it’s easier to experience those feelings that are global to the human community. In contrast, the super writers that only book experts “get”, usually become important within that circle of (some would say) snobs, but are surely important nonetheless. James Joyce’s Ulysses is surely a book that i may never get to read, but i can respect what others say about it. To go even further, I may try to read, and may try to understand, and may finish it, but it doesn’t guarantee that I have the required intelligence to understand what others receive from it.

What about games then? Maybe games have such difficulty establishing themselves as self important to the global community because of this lack of layering, or obfuscations as mentioned @ GDC this year. Titles like “the marriage” play with this. I would say that the ones David Hellman brought in are not examples of this blog entry because he uses only the visuals as the duality layer. Jason Rohrer has 2 (Gravitation, Passage), Braid may be another… these are games that act like priests marrying gameplay to story… Are there others worth while? In other words, which games have “captured” an action, assimilated it into its interactive vocabulary, attached symbolism to its assisting assets connected to the “story” (if present) thus helping the player act/think/feel/grok in the same language, reinforcing in them the higher concept the developers (may or may not have) imbued into one of the games layers? The only reason that “the marriage” makes “connects” the story of Rod Humble’s marriage and immerses the player into his experience of what marriage is, is because it is CALLED the marriage. If it were titled “twin siblings” with the same mechanics, (yes, there may be incongruencies in the emergent tale), but i would not (perhaps) see the circles floating around as “affairs”, I may perhaps see it as beer, who knows… one things for sure, i cant see that game as anything else because of the words that cement the idea.

In essence, what if I somehow derrived a story or a message from Minesweeper? would we all arrive at the same story goal?