Showing posts with label dan pinchbeck. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dan pinchbeck. Show all posts

Friday, November 17, 2017

Level With Me: Dear Esther (2012), complete!


Last week I finished a Level With Me run through Dear Esther (2012, Source Engine) with level design commentary -- I spent roughly 30-50 minutes on each of the four chapters / levels. Some of the moments were ruined by my deletion of all the voice over (I didn't want to talk over the narrator) but most of the game survived intact, I think. (Sorry.)

You can watch the whole playlist (all 4 videos) archived on YouTube. But here's some general patterns / trends / takeaways from this series:

Friday, January 25, 2013

More talk, more rock: on algorithmic game narratives, speculative narrative design futures, and "Shakespeare."

by Nexus

Last time, I wrote about procedural narrative in the context of "process intensity." Here, I expand more on designing the procedural / process part.

Back in an expertly-conducted 2011 Rock Paper Shotgun interview, Dan Pinchbeck argued that game development culture unnecessarily separates narrative from the rest of a video game:

"I just want story to be talked about as a gameplay element that sometimes isn’t there. It’s part of the set of tools that a game designer uses to create an experience – and it should be thought of along the same lines, as physics or AI or something more mechanical."

We have physics engines or texture libraries, so why don't we think of narrative as a modular "asset" or "engine" or "library" to be swapped around as well? Why can't narrative be more "mechanical." Where's all the narrative middleware? (Storybricks doesn't seem to be doing too well, unfortunately. I also don't agree with them, that proc narrative is mainly an AI problem...)

Sunday, July 22, 2012

Zobeide at Lunarcade Sydney, August 3-9

Zobeide will have its public debut in Lunarcade at Serial Space, running from August 3rd - 9th. The Facebook thing is here if you're into that. Here's the scoop:
Exploration is a universal subtext in games. The ‘fog of war’ and line of sight are emblematic tropes of exploration as well as a persistent motif of video games – almost every game involves the implicit mapping of uncharted virtual or representational territory. However, interpreting exploration has a second approach: we can explore uncharted, artificial territory within a game as well as explore the meaning of a work as situated within the real world – we can explore the video game itself as an artifact for the communication of meaning.

Bientôt l’été – Tale of Tales
Dear Esther – Dan Pinchbeck
J.S. Joust – Die Gute Fabrik
Lifeless Planet – Stage 2 Studios
Memory of a Broken Dimension – XRA
Thirty Flights of Loving – Brendon Chung
TRIP – Axel Shokk
Zobeide – Robert Yang

Opening: August 3rd, 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition Hours: August 4th & 5th, 12 – 6 pm, August 6th-9th, 12 – 8 pm
J.S. Joust events – daily at 7 PM
I'm also really honored to be mentioned in the same breath as some of these fantastic games and designers! Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it to the opening -- I'll likely be locked inside my Brooklyn apartment, frantically putting together my GDC Europe talk together at the last minute -- but have a blast and enjoy some JS Joust, Australians!

Also: Thirty Flights of Loving is one of the most important games made in the last decade, so make sure you play it at some point.

Also: LONG LIVE NARRATIVE, DEATH TO "MECHANICS" AND "GAMEPLAY"! BURN IT ALL!

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Dear Esther


From the Wikipedia article on "cut-up technique," emphasis mine:

A precedent of the technique occurred during a Dadaist rally in the 1920s in which Tristan Tzara offered to create a poem on the spot by pulling words at random from a hat. [...] Gysin introduced Burroughs to the technique at the Beat Hotel. The pair later applied the technique to printed media and audio recordings in an effort to decode the material's implicit content, hypothesizing that such a technique could be used to discover the true meaning of a given text. Burroughs also suggested cut-ups may be effective as a form of divination saying, "When you cut into the present the future leaks out."

See also "unreliable narrator," "lyrical poetry," and "ludodiegesis." Though some people would rather argue that poetry is supposed to be straightforward and accessible and worth $10 of some arbitrary unit of entertainment?

I imagine it'd be fairly easy to rig Hammer to make custom Dear Esther levels. Coming soon: "Dearer Esther."

Monday, April 18, 2011

Ludodiegesis, or Pinchbeck's unified field theory of FPS games, or "please pee on my leg and tell me it's raining."

photo by National Media Museum, "You want a piece of me?!"
I'm reading (fellow frontiersman of modding) Dan "Dear Esther" Pinchbeck's PhD dissertation / unified field theory of FPS games. Contrary to what my inflammatory post title implies, I actually really like it and think it's valuable.

I've also kind of fact-checked my summary with him too, so let this post serve as a Wikipedia article of sorts for piquing your interest in reading the real thing...

“Story as a function of gameplay in First Person Shooters: an analysis of FPS diegetic content 1998-2007.” 

Central to his conceptual framework is the idea of "ludodiegesis" -- ludo meaning "play" and diegesis referring to "the fictive reality of the game." (If you're gagging at these words: remember that part about games being a legitimate form of art and culture? Well, we need to invent new words to effectively talk about this new media. So learn this word.)

It's his elegant way of growing something from the rotting corpse that is the narratology vs. ludology non-debate, mainly by shifting what "game narrative" means:

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Holy shit.


http://www.moddb.com/mods/dear-esther/news/a-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel1

What do you get when you have a professional artist / designer pour a year into building something? Nothing short of "I can't believe that's the Source Engine."

The art and actual level design of Dear Esther was always its weakest attribute. But now... yowza. I can't even figure out how he achieved some of these effects -- the water caustics on the cave walls are probably an animated detail texture, and there's a crap-load of particles going on with the waterfalls -- but how did he get the water running down the rocks like that? It's definitely not a particle system. Is it some kind of refracting overlay, or did he model a prop_static and slap on a refraction shader onto that?

It's really pretty. The craftsmanship is superb. Don't get me wrong.

But it's the same game, more or less, with roughly the same narrative, more or less.

I can't help but wish he instead worked with Pinchbeck on something new.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Exhibition: "Vida Interior" at Intermediae

Handle With Care (or should I say, "Cuidado, Frágil"?) is part of a super-way-cool-gee-whiz "alt games" exhibition (if we start calling ourselves "alt games" instead, will that bypass all the pointless debate about our label? Probably not...) called "Vida Interior" (Inner Life) at Intermediae in Madrid, Spain, alongside cool indie game devs like Dan Pinchbeck, Stephen Lavelle, the people behind Windosill and Osmos... Hurray! We're important and relevant, see? We're in a museum!

So if you happen to be in the area, go there and see it. I think there's gonna be a DJ and free booze too; or is my Spanish really that rusty? Anyway, sounds like a good time to me.

There's also some cool interviews with all the artists in the exhibition program (PDF), so check that out. (Though I'm a little disappointed by how content-less Stephen Lavelle's answers were, but I guess a lady's got to have her secrets.)

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

I am a frontiersman.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/alt-mod-scene-article

As much as I love / fiendishly crave attention and praise, I still feel weird about being placed in some sort of "movement" or "scene" and having people tell me my work is significant; when I look at my mods, all I see are flaws and weaknesses that I hope people don't notice. I guess that's a good thing?

Part of it is, I think, that I'm afraid people are getting tired of what me and Dan Pinchbeck have to say. (We're almost always paired up in these kinds of features.) Part of me is also afraid that we genuinely don't have much to say, that we're broken records who are already irrelevant and too stupid to see it.

Part of me also doesn't want to put my sexuality on a pedestal -- sometimes I feel like I'm exploiting that as my M.O. or something -- but then it's an important undercurrent in my mods, so I feel compelled to talk about it. As I say in the article, I definitely don't aim to preach, "hey start being nice to gay people" because that's boring and intellectually lazy.

So I've decided that after I finish Radiator Vol. 1... I think Volume 2 will be a hyper-violent trilogy with no mention of sexuality whatsoever. Kill people and then kill more people. Just to show that I can swing with the big boys.

Oh, and start being nice to gay people!!!11