gewgaw

Greetings from Nottingham – host of GameCity 09!

This year’s festival has been a fantastic blend of talents – wonderful animators, artists, game designers, hackers and academics from around the world. Even tho we are mid-festival, I wanted to take a break and report on its fantastic events!

This is in no small part due to the blend of talking and performance that permeates the festival. Today, for example, I attended a panel on creating media about/for games which featured a live performance of GameBoy synth, and showcased the festival’s “mega=mix” of pixel-art tribute animations:

These were created for the festival by the same amazing team behind the Oxfam “Face the Music” spot – which takes basic game concepts and blends them with a message about climate change to create something truly remarkable:

But that’s just the beginning! Other performances included live playthroughs of Crysis (!!!), karaoke, the passionate singing of game reviews, and the especially cool paper folding session (plus artful arrangement) that culminated in a session about the glory of Elite.

And – as part of my visit, I conducted a live performance of Flower, which was truly wonderful. Not only was the game projected on lovely gauze screens in a beautiful old building… but as I played, flower petals were dropped from above, floating down into the atrium.

My favorite part of the experience was definitely the sound – which filled the hall, reverberating and mixing with the voices of spectators. That was really spectacular. Post-performance, we had a few questions about our new game (sorry – it’s still under wraps!), requests for more Flower content (maybe, someday!) and many lovely compliments.

Many thanks everyone who worked so hard to create Flower (you guys just ROCK!), the team that helped set up the performance (it worked!!) – and of course, to all who attended (you were fantastic)! It was such a pleasure to play for everyone and I think it’s definitely something we should do more often, with all sorts of games.

Finally – three cheers to the organizers of GameCity! Congratulations on creating a wonderful mix of discussion, debate, performance and play!

This just in – there is a super comic from our friend Gabo over a Treee – all about what it’s like to play Flower! A super special gift, made for Jenova’s birthday!!!

So…. click the picture if you don’t mind a little spoiler….

*YAY GABOTRON*

Kellee went to GDC Europe last week – where discussion of TGC’s Flower began with the David Cage’s keynote talk on meaning in games:

Cage said, baldly: “Most games have no meaning”, and games don’t generally have anything to say — “you just spend some time getting excited shooting and jumping”, most of the time.

The Quantic Dream head added that he believed that games’ narrative structure is broken. As opposed to simultaneous narration and action in movies and books, cut-scenes split up the action in games. So, Cage concluded: “No-one cares about the story because nobody is there for the story.”

He added that most game characters must be close to caricature — to look like what they are. They also tend to need a simple goal, and need to look good for a teenager. In contrast, many movie characters have a background, a motivation, have relationships, and are created to generate empathy.

In further controversy, Cage suggested that, most of the time, game art is mediocre compared to other art forms. But some games can compare because they have “developed the emotional side”, he said, citing Ico, Shadow Of The Colossus, Rez, Katamari Damacy, and Flower.

So, said Cage, we have some decisions to make. Shouldn’t we start thinking about social emotions, if we want to evolve? “Do we want to be toys, or art?”, he asked provocatively. “Maybe there are books that you’ve read that have changed who you are.” Shouldn’t games do similarly?

How about the sandbox versus the rollercoaster? Contrasting with CCP’s EVE Online talk earlier in the day, Cage feels that, since “nobody conceived this experience for you,” it may fall flat. Whereas, in the rollercoaster, you can’t go wherever you want, but “someone designed the experience for you to be optimal.”

These are two different approaches, and Cage believes that the rollercoaster is the one he tends towards. Why? Because people want to play for just 20 minutes at a time, not necessarily for many hours or to find there’s nobody in the sandbox to play with.

How about journey vs. achievement? Cage said he believes many adults care more about the journey, with emotional highs and lows carefully mapped out, and cited Flower as a great example of that.

Kellee continued this discussion in her own talk – a postmortem of the Flower development process that highlighted the team’s search for meaningful gameplay that provides players emotional shelter – instead of the typical frustration/reward cycles in many game designs:

Santiago said that what the team found out is that “sometimes, hard fun is the enemy”, and going towards known mechanics can actually be a handicap. She said that fun is just a small subset of possible mechanics, and that Flower was carefully tuned to give the player an engaging journey.

This in-game journey that players took in the downloadable PlayStation 3 game wasn’t necessarily a conventional one, but was carefully managed to heighten emotional intensity by the game’s end.

The conclusion was that extremely rapid iteration and playtesting — whether in Processing, Flash, XNA, or PS3 — was what really helped to hone PSN standout Flower.

Great to see that the team’s efforts at pushing through a variety of mechanics to find the ones that supported their aesthetic goal has paid off – as it did with other games Cage mentioned in his talk (all personal favorites, as regular readers know). Three cheers for iteration, subtractive design, and the focus on player experiences! Here’s to continued efforts and new adventures!

:)

Way to rock the slick, live performance, John!

I might just marry the reverend.

:)

This response is also interesting… kind of like ‘Yeah, art games that are good are hard’ – which we all know is true. My take might be that ‘I look forward to seeing them evolve’ rather than ‘Most of the pitches out there suck’…. but at least the dialog is happening!!

Great to hear people discussing the value of games-as-art up on Destructoid! Go go go!

… from his trip to Develop – where he spent some time talking to folks about the benifits of “soft fun” and emotional gameplay:

“Most games provide only primal feelings—and in general, power fantasies,” said Chen. “I loved these feelings when I was younger, but as I get older, I start to wonder about the other feelings I can have.”

The evolution of games experimenting in a larger emotional spectrum was something Chen hoped would be analogous to the early film industry. Originally fixated on thrilling the audience with footage of speeding trains, as the audience grew it became necessary to offer more involved and subtle productions.

“This is a time when user experience innovation has much more potential to develop video games than technical,” explained Chen. “If the feelings that you provide in your game are unique, then your game will be unique.”

As advice, Chen offered some lessons he had learned from the development of Flower, such as the discovery that in the attempt to make a “fun” game, the team had blunted the emotional impact.

“Sometimes hard fun is your enemy,” said Chen, “but it’s too easy to try and make a hard, fun game, as it’s almost all we know.”

Instead, developers are going to have to look at games as art if they want them to be treated as such, he said. Though Chen admitted that this was a topic about which many in the industry are “jaded,” he concluded that it was important that designers think as deeply about “what they wish to share with the audience,” as an artist would.

“Artists draw on their life and time, and reflect on that,” he said. “As designers, we have to think about what we want to share with our audience, what we want to tell them, otherwise we’re only wasting their time.”

Jenova also acknowledged our new project, which continues to develop these ideas – and gave a special shout-out to Sony for all their support and encouragement. Yay!