Tag Archive for 'Technology'

Where is Gaming’s ‘Citizen Kane’?

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on October 24, 2008
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In this month’s edition of Game Couch’s Blog Banter series, five bloggers answered the question: Does gaming have a Citizen Kane?

Orson Welles’ classic film was a technically innovative, personally deep and infinitely enjoyable masterpiece still watched again and again six decades after it was made.

“Are there any video games that possess a timeless appeal?” asked Lou Chou of Lou vs Video Games: Fight! “Games that, despite constant advances in technology, retain a game engine or narrative that will forever be relevant. If so, why?”

In answering his own question, Chou said that there are no timeless games, only revolutionary “artifacts” which developed concepts and gameplay elements that are then adapted by later titles. BioShock and Dead Space are better than their predecessors, System Shock and Resident Evil.

The bloggers at Game Couch said old games cannot be replayed like old films. People discover films like Citizen Kane through television, theaters and re-releases, said Game Couch, but “if you want to play Ico, you need the game disk and you need a PlayStation 2… Ico is a magnificent game — a work of art — but it’s essentially undiscoverable.”

Both dismissals are flawed, but not incorrect.

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Award-Winning Developer Says Storytelling On the Rise

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on September 28, 2008
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Developer Dave Ellis sees a bright future for storytelling in gaming, he said in a Joystiq interview.

“Game writing is only going to get better as time goes on. Players are getting used to good writing, and soon they won’t settle for less,” said Ellis, the 2008 recipient of the WGA award for video game writing.

Ellis is a designer with Vicious Cycle, and his most recent project, Dead Head Fred for the PSP, earned him the Writer’s Guild of America award. He will be the keynote speaker at a Writer’s Guild Foundation workshop on game writing next month.

“Today, we’re looking at a couple of exciting developments. First, story-driven games are becoming more popular. Developers are realizing that writing needs just as much attention as the graphics and other gameplay elements, especially when the story and characters play a key role in the game,” Ellis said.

“Second, technology has reached the point where truly interactive storytelling is emerging. The story can evolve through the gameplay, and it can be affected by the player’s actions — at least to a certain extent.”

Ellis recognized the limitations of current storytelling techniques, which limit the player to established choices even in open world games.

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BioWare Writers Discuss Their Craft

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on April 20, 2008
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BioWare writers Mike Laidlaw and Drew Karpyshyn discussed dialog, working with user-created characters, and world-building in an interesting interview with CVG.

“Getting to the same level of quality as film is good,” says Laidlaw, “but just trying to make a film isn’t the right direction. Interactivity gives us something no other medium has.”

Karpyshyn agrees: “We’re finding that the technology is finally reaching the point where it’s starting to feel very realistic - we can actually have interactive conversation where you talk with people rather than them just talking at you.

“I like to use the analogy that we’re at the point where Hollywood was in the early ’30s where they’re just starting to add sound, they’re starting to get the technology locked in place. It’s all about our skill set, coming up with our own conventions, our own language of telling stories, something film has developed over the last century.”

Not surprisingly, writing an open-ended narrative is extremely tough. “Fortunately at BioWare,” said Karpyshyn, “we’ve kinda got used to it, but that’s why it requires a full team of four or five writers for one of our games.”

There’s a lot of fascinating tidbits in here. The BioWare writers reveal how they create characters, from the protagonists to the quirky barkeep, and how they develop their appearance alongside their dialog.

One of the most interesting things they reveal is that the team spent nine months planning out the details of the “Mass Effect” galaxy before deciding on characters or plot. Hopefully that means the sequel will get here sooner.

Mad Max-creator George Miller Turns to Gaming

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on March 14, 2008
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When I first heard that George Miller is working on a fourth Mad Max film, titled “Fury Road,” my first thought was, “Awesome.” When I learned that Miller was teaming up with God of War II director Cory Barlog to produce a Mad Max game for concurrent release with the film, I thought, “Even better.”

Prominent filmmakers, including Miller and Steven Spielberg, are flocking to the game industry, where cinematic products are becoming increasingly viable.

In a two part interview with Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal, Miller talked about his attraction to games.

“I realized that the kind of filmmaker that I am, I unconsciously try to make films that are as immersive as possible,” said Miller. “My cutting patterns and compositions try to exaggerate–well, not exaggerate, but try to enhance a kind of three-dimensionality and an immersive quality to my storytelling. That of course is what games do so well.”

Miller sees games as a more open way to explore a narrative. “Film is a pretty closed narrative–it moves along at 24 frames a second, it’s extremely linear, and in that sense rigid, whereas games bust that open. So in a way, with games being more exploratory, it’s closer to what a novelist can do in many way,” he said.

“It’s just another way to tell stories,” added Miller. “If you’re much more interested in games than movies, then you might enter the story through the game. Or you might enter the story through the film and move towards the game. It’s still the same story. It’s still the same characters. It’s still the same world. It’s just that you can approach the characters and the world from different angles.”

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GDC: Panels Discuss Story in Game Design

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on February 22, 2008
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Two panels discussed the importance and state of storytelling in video games at this week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The first covered the place of story in the developing medium of games, and the second looked at examples of good storytelling in games.

The Future of Story in Game Design

A panel Thursday discussed the future of story in video game development, reported Gamasutra. Deborah Todd led the panel, which included Denis Dyack of Silicon Knights and Saber 3D’s Matthew Karch, as well as Tim Willits from iD Software and Matt Costello from Polar Productions.

“I think story should serve the gameplay, and not the other way,” said Karch. “In the shooter genre, which I’m in, I don’t think anyone really cares about the story. I don’t think in some genres it’s especially important.” Karch’s team recently released “Timeshift.”

“In 5 to 10 years I don’t think there’s going to be a shooter genre. It’s going to be more literary,” argued Dyack. “A shooter would just be ‘action’.”

Dyack said story will become the dominant element in game design. “Games are the eighth art form: the glue is interactivity, and that aspect is something that makes our industry unique and there’s a huge misconception at this industry is that gameplay is everything. These people are going to be mistaken,” he said. “And as this industry matures content and story, as it did in the 30s and 40s with cinema, will become dominant.”

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‘The Outsider’ Takes New Approach to Storytelling

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on October 29, 2007
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At last week’s GameCity event, David Braben of Frontier Developments hosted a panel on storytelling in games, Gamasutra reported.

Braben’s The Outsider uses a contextual plot and conversation system in which the player, accused of murdering the President, plays off rival factions. Your reputation with these factions allows unique options in different situations.

Braben showed a short segment of the game in which a policeman bursts through a door to discover the player and immediately shouts at the fugitive main character to freeze for an arrest. At the same time, a rival faction comes in through another point in the room and pins both down with gun fire.

Using the contextual system, which gives players a quick choice of words snippets and phrases, Braben convinced the policeman to help fight the rival group. Now, because the encounter has made him friendlier with the police, they might, in later sections of the game, be persuaded to let the character slip by, or help him chase down other fleeing enemies.

Braben hopes that this realistic behavior, combined with the realistic physics that only motion sensors can provide, will draw the player deeper into the experience and relate him more with the characters and story.

Adding to the great “games as art” debate, Braben commented that games continue to be second-classed by mainstream media, under film and literature and alongside “action figures and cuddly toys.”

Braben called for a genius of this generation to move the industry forward in creative areas outside of graphics, adding, “We have a much more interesting medium for getting a story across.”

REVIEW: BioShock (Pt 2)

Published
on September 4, 2007
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Once immersed in Rapture, BioShock’s underwater city, the plot unfolds and twists in a way rarely seen in games.

The game reveals how things went wrong in the utopian Rapture primarily through the recorded comments of its residents. More convenient versions of the diaries commonly employed by games, these recordings provide background and insight into some of the more obscure plot points, such as the little sisters, without breaking the immersion of the first-person perspective.

This device works well in the complex locale of Rapture, but raises an interesting question: Doesn’t new technology allow for more creative plot devices than somewhat contrived journals and dialogue, so ubiquitous in games?

It’s unfair to bring this up in discussing BioShock, which takes many steps forward. The game’s scripted scenes are well choreographed and acted. The flashbacks and ghosts which pass through certain areas are a particularly clever ways of getting around the narrative limitations of first-person games.

I’d like to say more, but hate spoilers. Remaining as ambiguous as possible, BioShock does a near-perfect job of conveying a complicated plot and should serve as an example for game developers of how storytelling can be handled and improved.