View Part 1 here.
View Part 2 here.
Below are a few articles that I shared with work, twitter or direct to friends and colleagues from last year (that may or may not be from 2010). They contain some great insights into the state of the industry, design theories, developer mentalities and approaches.
Part 3
| Company of Myself – Flash Game http://www.gamesfree.com/game/company_of_myself.html If you ever played Time Donkey, then you’ll recognise similar mechanics in this Flash platformer. The later levels start becoming really quite involved and challenging, additionally, the story delivering the tutorials is also quite well done. |
| The State of the Games Industry – Doug Church http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2168/the_s… I stumbled upon Church’s 6 year old interview whilst learning of LMNO’s cancellation last year and then reading further into what the project was aiming to achieve. Rather disheartening to see that it’s been six years and that the industry is still in the same state as it was back then. If not more intensely aligned with his fears. His comments on vocabulary, in our unconscious fall back to other entertainment mediums to describe what players will experience is significantly valid, as are his points on assigning games to genres, crippling our capability of truly defining “play”. These are two points that are having serious impacts in our ability to really achieve the goal of differentiating ourselves from other forms of entertainment. It’s a really interesting read and one that makes the fate of the early LMNO a little sadder. A couple quotes: “You start trying to figure out how we get to a bigger space of non-enthusiasts: people less steeped in the culture and the language. Which is fair enough, the more people that get to play stuff, the better. I’m certainly not against that. But until we can communicate more clearly what experience they’re getting I think the entertainment angle is going to continue to dominate, because it’s the thing that’s easier to explain in two sentences.” “I do think if we continue to find it impossible to explain play, and continue to rely on movie notions of entertainment in particular and fail to develop any identity or vocabulary of our own, then we miss the chance to be what we probably should be. Because as the interactive media, not the passive media, if the only way we can talk about ourselves is borrowing the language of a non-interactive media, that strikes me as a bad sign.” |
| Podcast – “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter”. http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2010/06/brainy-gamer-podcast-episode-29.html ~1hr long podcast with Tim Bissell, author of “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter”. Highly recommend getting the book, the interview itself is a great back-and-forth on its subjects, touching primarily on story design and implementation in games, the reception of story, how players interact and manipulate them into their own experiences. If you haven’t listened to any of Michaels other podcasts, there are also quite a few gems in there. |
| Interview with Clint Hocking – Creative Director @ Lucas Arts http://www.nomorelives.com/Features/clint-hocking-click-nothing-tour-2009-interview It’s a shame that I never really took advantage of my time whilst working with Clint. It wasn’t until I’d left Ubisoft that my interest in where we’re taking this industry really started to find its footing. Clint is just one of many influences when it comes to this, but perhaps the most prominent for me as he was right there, his direction was right there – but I missed it. None the less, linked here is brief interview with Clint from 2009 discussing points from his Click Nothing Tour: “You’ve talked in the past about how film, in its early stage, [borrowed heavily from] plays, and used that as an example of how each artistic medium has to find its own footing outside of the influence of other artistic mediums. This new Generation Y model almost sounds like your way of moving towards that goal. What to you is the purest state of what a game medium can be?” I think it’s fundamentally ludic. I think one of the main points I’m trying to make that I never said explicitly in the talk is that games fundamentally are something that you play WITH, not something that you play IN. I think we really have tried for too long to force them to be something that you play in, to try and get ride of the notion that the game itself is something that can be manipulated by the player. But it can’t be gotten rid of. No matter how immersive a game is people WILL stop and play WITH it. They may switch back and forth between playing WITH it and playing IN it, but when that’s the case it’s always the case they are still playing WITH it. So I think we’re better off acknowledging that, and getting on with it. To me it almost feels like Generation X is ashamed of that. It’s like we need to make our games more immersive so people will start taking them more seriously and stop playing with them like they’re toys. And start playing IN them in these things that we have created. I think we should stop taking ourselves so seriously and let people play WITH [the games] the way they seem to want to.” |


