Radiator 1-3 trailer up + thoughts on NPCs

I hate the "media release" practice endemic to the mod community -- periodic spurts of weapon renders and half-baked concept art. Yes, it's what the big professionals do, with ShackNews copy-and-pasting press releases and screenshots. But a mod has more important things to worry about -- like releasing something playable. That said, I guess I'm somewhat of a hypocrite, because here's a trailer for the upcoming episode of Radiator:



My intention with the trailer was three-fold: to show that this is a Different Kind of Mod, yet also to warn people that if they didn't like the trailer then they probably won't like the mod. And lastly, to introduce and emphasize the two main characters -- James and Dylan.

The style is derived (almost directly) from the technical limitations of recording movies in Source on my computer: the sound almost always de-syncs drastically when I record, so I never use the in-game sound. Instead, I fool around with the FOV and record short clips in the maps. It's interesting what happens when you just let the camera film an NPC for a minute, they do things you wouldn't really expect. For instance, the brief shot of the therapists' office when they're both looking out the window and then they look at each other? Totally unscripted and weird. I wonder if the AI is programmed to do that in its idle routines? Or was it just a happy coincidence?

People will always cite the robustness of the physics implementation as Half-Life 2's main strength and innovation, but I think it's actually the dramatic capacity of the NPCs. We treat them less as blocks with guns and a health value, but rather as an actual actor: where they look, we look. Much like how we assume in most FPS games that shooting at the ground won't deform it, we expect NPCs not to react to our playing. But Alyx covers her eyes as you shine the flashlight at her -- that makes so much sense, yet I don't think any other FPS game (with a flashlight) did that at the time.

What if shooting a gun near Alyx makes her cover her ears? What if Alyx avoids walking through puddles? There's an entire universe of human expression, untapped right there. Okay, we might bridge the visual uncanny valley in our lifetime, yes -- but what about the uncanny valley of behavior? It's about 5.98 billion miles wide.

What is Design? (Level Design Course, Week 1)

(This is taken from the first day lecture notes for my "Video Game Level Design" course. The goal was to introduce level design as merely a subset of larger field of design, emphasizing that people have shaped the clothes / packaging / built environment around us and how level design reflects our world.)

What is design?

You hear the word thrown around a lot: fashion design, web design, interior design, graphic design, urban design, industrial design... and game design. What do all these fields have in common? They all focus on users, their behavior and how to influence that behavior -- whether it's to get more clicks or to reduce crime or to get you to buy another cheeseburger. People will use a thing depending on how we make it work.

At the supermarket, where are the daily staples -- stuff like milk and eggs -- usually found? In the back of the store, right? But to get to that delicious quart of low-fat white gold, you'll have to walk through another aisle -- oh, look, cereal! Cookies! Did I mention you brought your kid with you? Your kid wants some of that Killing Floor Krunch or Chocolate Zombies or whatever. It'd go great with your milk. By putting your goal in a distant area, supermarkets entice you with all this other crap and influence your purchasing and spending habits.

So... What Does a Non-Interactive Video Game Look Like?

I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? Hypertext.

But first, let's back up here: Lewis Denby issued his response in what Kieron Gillen termed an "experimental modder knife fight" -- and now, by virtue of being American and having been indoctrinated by a national myth that idolizes the "underdog," I too am also interested in side-stepping the debate of who's better because I've already won, so now I'm wondering about the same question that Denby's wondering: how can you have video game-like elements without incurring all those pesky expectations of a video game?

In discussing Increpare's "Home" and Tale of Tales' "The Graveyard," the always eloquent Emily Short analyzes such "non-interactive" art games...

The Implied Player

So while complaining about "Post Script" and the like, it struck me that these mods heavily rely on a certain notion of an "implied player" -- the ideal player, the one who won't mind walking across long stretches of terrain and who will listen to every voice over and read every note and ponder the deep meaning of everything. (I wish I could do this, but usually when I play I'm trying to pick everything apart.)

The closest comparison that I can think of is how literary criticism has held the notion of an "implied author" and "implied reader" for some time now...

The Game Industry is Dangerously Misunderstood

I was linked to a recent fluff piece by NPR in which they catalog the entire state of the video game industry by (a) profiling one of the largest, most successful developers, (b) taking some misleading stats from a press kit at the ESA, and (c) getting a 10 word sound bite from a professor at CMU. Riiiight.

Mod Auteurs: Adam Foster (Cargo Cult)

Adam "Cargo Cult" Foster. The man behind MINERVA: Metastasis. If modders were celebrities, he'd be the most famous. Men want to be him and women... uh, and men want to be him! His work is smart, literary, and quite playable. He was courted by Valve to go work for them. He has intelligent things to say about everything.

First, the man made some Doom 2 WADs or something. I think? Whatever. It's not important. (Just kidding; everything he does is important. I just don't know anything about them.)

Then in the years 19XX-2001, he started working on Parallax for Half-Life 1, of which we have 2 beta maps floating around the internet somewhere. Even though it's only 2 BSPs, you can already see Adam's emerging style: giant sprawling maps with sizable outdoor areas, interconnected, neatly constructed...

Interactive = Choice

I've already told Lewis Denby: I think that his mods (and stuff like "Dear Esther"), these types of "walkthrough gallery" mods are kinda boring. It's not out of any spite, and I think he's a good writer - but I think it'll be useful to open up a larger dialogue on this type of game design when I complain about it. (If anything, it'll give his mods more of the attention that they deserve, yes?)

His main claim is that there exists an interesting, as of yet unexplored space between cinema and interactive media - and his implementation, as with Dear Esther, is to walk around an environment as you read notes / listen to dialogue. He thinks something compelled you to "press W" and explore an environment, and that "something" was a narrative unfolding in real-time before your eyes. I disagree with this, and here's why:

"What happened?" vs. "What is happening?" I would argue that gameplay and interactivity is about the present, about player-centric plot; these other types of gallery mods are about the past, about what happened already. Dear Esther is largely a passive narration of what already happened, as is Post Script. And to me, that's a much less interesting question and narrative hook.

Why doesn't the player have any narrative agency? Why isn't the plot about me? Note that this isn't an argument for nonlinear game narrative because linear games focus on the player too: In Half-Life 2, the Combine signal an alarm and start searching the city because of what you did. In Ico, Yorda follows and moves because you beckon her. The world and the characters are reacting to you because in this virtual world, you matter.

Vague narrative design theory. What compelled me to explore the environment wasn't necessarily an interest in the narrative; among other reasons, it was the simple desire to "finish" the game and make sure I didn't miss anything, the completionist streak that today's ubiquitous achievement systems exploit. And specifically, as a fellow modder, I also want to see what others are doing and analyze it so I can steal their ideas and make them my own.

For example, what I got out of Dear Esther wasn't that bunny-hopping across sparsely decorated terrain is emotionally meaningful -- instead, what I realized is that I too could randomize bits of narrative and let the player generate their own meaning out of it. (Something I did with my own mod "Handle with Care," where the engine generates a random montage of scenes at a point in the game.)

It goes against where most people are heading with games. Most interactive fiction, or "IF," has moved away from focusing on environment and plot -- instead focusing on characters as autonomous agents, systems of interaction, and depictions of consciousness. Marc LeBlanc's influential MDA framework and today's hottest indie "Art games with a capital A" celebrity designers, like Jonathan Blow or Jason Rohrer, emphasize game mechanics as the message. Compelling game rules reveal the authorial intent, whether it's a moral / social commentary / whatever.

And lastly, what I consider the greatest flaw of this approach and the main reason why I think it's a "dead end"...

Mod Auteurs: Razorclaw X

First a brief history: like many modding communities, the Starcraft modding community was fragmented across several sites -- Infoceptor, Starcraft.org, the Star Alliance, etc. -- but perhaps the most prominent / controversial site (though certainly the most productive) was Campaign Creations.

There at CC, Razorclaw X came to Starcraft modding from a "fan fiction" perspective -- which would explain why his characters and universe were such an utterly impenetrable fog unless you played all four campaigns in order -- and went out of his way to create an epic mythology involving the cast of the anime Ranma 1/2. The "Vision of the Future" series was four huge campaigns, spread across 84+ maps, with a new playable race called the "Zeji Armada," all done by one man.