Comments on: How To Stop Writing A Fucking Book

By: Jazmeister549803

Jazmeister549803 — Wed, 13 May 2009 21:42:48 +0000

Great Job Website Owner! Also, wtf is with the guy?

By: Am i first?

Am i first? — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 21:52:30 +0000

MASQ won't run for me, it does a C++ error. Halp?

By: DoctorDisaster

DoctorDisaster — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:29:45 +0000

Isn't that the song the Police sang about GLaDOS?

Every little thing she does is ludological
Everything she do is just a game
Even though my loves before were biological
Now I know my love for her's the same

By: Ludo

Ludo — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 09:10:38 +0000

Everything I do is Ludological.

By: 01d55

01d55 — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 22:28:37 +0000

What Portal loses if you turn it into a movie is the stuff that you don't necessarily have to find in order to beat the game. The hidden rooms with messages from "the Ratman" wouldn't been the same in a movie. A movie either shoves what it's showing you into your face or shows it only so briefly you have to pause the DVD to have a chance to see it on your own. A game allows you exactly as much time as you need to find whatever hidden details you're going to find (unless a mechanic is forcing you forward, but it's easy to leave details out of those sections).

By: DoctorDisaster

DoctorDisaster — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 18:01:28 +0000

Yeah, Ludo really hit the nail on the head, but Bret and Dante are right, too. Another issue is that portals themselves would be simply inexplicable without the interactive element. Notice that in the game they barely bother to describe them at all: they just start throwing you through them as quickly as possible so that you can figure out how they work through experimentation.

Imagine trying to follow the character through a portal. She walks through the wall and suddenly gravity is pulling her in a different direction and you can't tell where she is. Even a totally steady shot of a room with a portal in the wall and the floor would be weird: Chell drops through the floor and then simultaneously comes flying out of the wall sideways. You'd have to be watching in two places at once to actually track the action, and even a few such shots would leave the audience with a headache.

Just as baffling for the audience would be the utter disconnect between the action and the story. They're watching this girl make her way through puzzles and listening to a psychotic robot chatter about it. If the story is all in the chatter, what's the point of the puzzles? Really, if you think about it, what IS the plot of Portal? There's barely a kernel of story in the entire game: robot torments girl, girl kills robot. The omg buzzword LUDOLOGICAL NARRATIVE is all expressed through exploring the details of the world and the relationships between, say, crates and turrets -- which wouldn't translate well to the screen.

By: Jazmeister

Jazmeister — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 07:16:22 +0000

The game Portal as a film, not a film inspired by/Uwe Bollsed into a film, should preserve that Chell Vs GlaDos thing that powers the whole experience. Some things it can't preserve, like the bulk of the puzzles (although it'd be a fun, trippy spectacle to see in a film). Chell needn't talk, I don't think, if the acting was good enough. GlaDos could experiment more emotionally or tantalise her with freedom more, as that'd come with the change in medium. I don't know, if you really picture it, it'd be almost the same thrill as any film where someone solves a puzzle. Like that bit in The Pursuit of Tons of Cashyness with the Rubik's cube, you see him doing it and it's amazing. From watching her cautiously test the portal, to trying the jumps through right-angled portals, having the camera pitch with her to convey the stomach-churning, then the hilarious Cube section... it could work, actually. It's not like HL2 where it'd be twenty hours of shooting galleries. Still, I feel it deserves to just be a game. I think it's fine to let something be a roaring success on just one medium. They'll make films out of songs next, amirite? I hope Zack Snyder doesn't read that. You never know with this blog.

By: Bret

Bret — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 02:31:56 +0000

Three characters.

You seem to have forgotten the guy with all the witty one liners. Sure he threatens to stab you once or twice...

(The cube also wouldn't work as well in the film, really. Would lose the personal touch and just be another Wilson.)

By: Ludo

Ludo — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 23:53:01 +0000

Glodos's evolution as a character relies on your dependance on her as a tutorial in the early stages. You're literally trapped in her world in a way that you would never be in a film, and her evolution into an agnostic force that you're eventually competing with for survival draws its potency from your dependance on her guidance in the early stages. Having two characters, in which one is one is completely silent, and the other is a robot that goes slowly mad, wouldn't work at all in a film, the point is that Glados is manipulating YOU. That's the only way the story matters. If Chell was played by Angelina Jolie it just wouldn't work.

By: Dante

Dante — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 23:44:59 +0000

Film's typically need more interaction than games, you need more than one person to drive the plot in order to come up with interesting interactions. As such you'll eventually end up with a group of people proceeding through a series of arbitrary death-traps.

So Cube. But with Glados.

By: Roadrunner

Roadrunner — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 22:34:25 +0000

The mouse clicking bit is the first thing which springs to mind.

By: Pentadact

Pentadact — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 22:17:15 +0000

What would you lose from Portal's story if it was, say, a film?

By: DoctorDisaster

DoctorDisaster — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:36:23 +0000

Portal is probably the best example of storytelling in a way that could only work in games, but I can't imagine something like that working in a sandbox setting or, god forbid, an MMO. Part of the problem is that "story" is inherently linear. It's a sequence of events that build and release tension. If you muddle up the order, screw up the pacing, or do one of a million other things a player is apt to do if given the option, your story falls apart. There's such a thing as emergent story, which often happens in serial media like comics and TV, where you gradually start to pick up on the nuances of the relationships between the characters, but to be honest, that stuff just doesn't work in a front-loaded product like a game. The emergent qualities come from layers and layers of writing being applied to the same core setting; as an audience, the writers notice things about their characters that they then write into the next installment. Probably the closest I've seen in a game would be the TF2 updates, believe it or not, because they are serial in a way. In response to the way players loved pitting scouts against heavies, Valve wrote the sandvich rivalry into the mechanics and dialogue. Hell, even that hilarious barrage of new taunts probably came up because of something they didn't fully realize at the initial release: scouts are ANNOYING, and scout players love to annoy other players. "NEED A DISPENSER HERE!"

By: Chris Evans

Chris Evans — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 17:19:56 +0000

I must say I love Masq, it really is one of those classic games that doesn't get enough recognition. I would love to see more games in that vein.

By: Pentadact

Pentadact — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 14:57:12 +0000

GalCiv and Dwarf Fortress are great examples of uniquely gamey story generation, but perhaps not exemplary story telling. GalCiv creates a good story and tells it through a series of slightly muddled, irrational dialogue boxes, and Dwarf Fortress creates a great story but tells it really, really badly. If it told it at all well, it would be a phenomenally successful game.

My guess was Kaplan is talking about a situation where the developer creates the story, but allows the player to discover and steer it in a more interactive way. There's probably not a hard line between the two, but in an interactive story the author knows the possible outcomes, whereas in a player-generated story they might surprise even someone who knows the game's code inside out.

By: Jazmeister

Jazmeister — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 14:25:45 +0000

I guess what I'm being someone presumptive about here is that:

Modelling little emotional/circumstantial flags, feeding them into a complex-ish decision gate, and turning it into written speech and eventually into spoken words...

...is as complex a process as the one that has led us to where graphics are today. With a reasonably believable model that would stand up to the limited standard of, for example, online PvP interaction we have now, it might even help the goodbadbar problem, too.

I hope all those developers still have the idea-collecting robot trained on James.

By: Chijts

Chijts — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 13:49:13 +0000

This is a very interesting read guys, good stuff.

By: 01d55

01d55 — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 11:31:51 +0000

This conversation was at the heart of a class I just took (Interactive Narrative at UCSC - they've got a Computer Game Design major here).

DnD is the holy grail of interactive narrative but fully simulating it with just a computer and a human player is "AI complete" i.e. tantamount to creating at least one recognizably human artificial intelligence, and at that point even I have to admit that your talents are kind of wasted on game design.

Procedurally generating stories, and then representing those stories with procedurally generated text, is somewhat more realistic but so far the best we've come up with are context-free grammars with simulation-restricted generators and you still have to manually author the text, with some variable substitution.

P.S. Tom where is your DoW2 review? It's been weeks.

By: BrokenJPG

BrokenJPG — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 03:37:50 +0000

I'd say the problem actually lies in the belief that a story needs to be told in a linear fashion at all. I played D&D back in the "paper and pencil" days, and the experience regularly achieved what everyone is talking about here: a story told through gameplay. It was rarely linear, and no one (including the DM) ever knew how the tale would end, but when all was said and done it was about the story crafted along the way. I think what we're all complaining about is the rift between our ability to control a character's physical actions in-game, and the constant feeling that every major decision that character "makes" is on rails.

By: Jazmeister

Jazmeister — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 00:51:36 +0000

Know what I always wanted? Since, like, Ultima 8, all the way to Oblivion? For time to pass while you read books. You know? It'd be part of the game. People would walk around, birds would sing, and you might even have to move to a quieter place. You might get attacked!

It's frustrating that we can accurately model the way light falls and how objects trade speed to conserve momentum, but lack even mediocre models for emotional response or personal decision making. Or verbal structure - paraphrasing, communication with entities.

While I think scripting everything is a solid, time-tested way of ensuring the experience you desire, it's like using animated stills (or sprites) instead of rendered scenes (or polygonal models); while fundamentally ridiculous and uninteresting in its multitude of weird information, Dwarf Fortress is a good step in a great direction. If only you could ignore even for a moment the awful, awful repitition and standardised structure.

It menaces with spikes of turtle. Why always menaces? Can't the game know what 'menaces' means, if MS Word can vaguely know?

The main problem is that DF really isn't about generating books to read, it's about survival and base-building, in a wonderful chimera of The Sims and Dungeon Keeper. They're working on letting you send armies around the map, not how to teach a computer to rehash dwarven tweets.