We're doomed, Happy Christmas

Exquisite corpse (second appearance of)

Not strictly Game blogging, but... I mentioned this in my post yesterday, and today The Guardian is featuring a piece on just that term! It's features Tim Burton and his Twitter blog 'Tim Burton Story'. The Corpse can be viewed by non-Twitter folk too. The Rules (of course there are rules!), are simply:

• This story telling experiment runs November 22 - December 6, 2010
• Tweet as often as you like
• The best Tweets of the day will be selected to build the story
• All selected Tweets can be viewed under "All Submissions"
• Follow the story as it unfolds on the "Read the Story" tab
• Inappropriate submissions will be blocked

Who am I? (makes me Xyzzy thinking about it)

this post is about who I am, or, really what type am I? I have just four types to choose: Killer; Explorer; Socialiser; and Achiever. My hope is that I am an Explorer...

However, Magnus (and Richard A Bartle in 'Players Who Suit MUDs') have loaded the dice. It all depends on how I interact with MUDs (Multi User Dungeon!) If I play them like games, (ie Chess, tennis, D&D?) then I am an ACHIEVER. Or are they pastimes (ie reading, gardening, cooking?), then I'm an EXPLORER. Maybe like sports? (huntin', shooting', fishin'), then KILLER.. Or else MUDs are entertainments? (like nightclubs, TV, concerts). Then it's SOCIALISER. Er, then I'm none of the above.... maybe more explorer than the other three... and using the four following details seems to be closest to getting me into one of the four.

To summarize Bartle: EXPLORERS will be interested in having the game surprise them; the sense of wonder which the virtual world imbues that they crave for; other players add depth to the game, but they aren't essential components of it, except perhaps as sources of new areas to visit; scoring points all the time is a worthless occupation, because it defies the very open-endedness that makes a world live and breathe; most accomplished explorers could easily rack up sufficient points to reach the top, but such one-dimensional behaviour is the sign of a limited intellect. I think Explorers are a bit smug too, perfect.

However, there appears a caveat from this rigid hierarchy: "Other types could conceivably exist, but they are very rare if they do. The dynamics model is, however, imprecise: it takes no account of outside factors which may influence player types or the relationships between then. It is thus possible that some of the more regimented MUDs (eg. role-playing MUDs, educational MUDs, group therapy MUDs) have an external dynamic (eg. fandom interest in a subject, instructions from a teacher/trainer.)"

"Instructions from a teacher"...Bingo.

Interestingly, (or not) I was in this domain years ago. As a younger version of me, eleven years old or so... My cousin was a Wargamer, and he and his friends would be serious Napoleonic battlers. They wound up outgrowing the living room table and booked a function room in a big pub near an abbatoir in Liverpool. The heady aromas of beer, fags and slaughtering mingled with Humbrol painted lead soldiers on a battle field half filling the room. The whole thing looked amazing. I was fascinated too by their dedication, but not enough to want to do more than roll the dice when asked to. Or help them to locate the correct page in their rigid rule book. Maybe I'd get to pass them a ruler, to allow one to carefully move their infantry down the perfectly modeled valley - though I never actually moved them! It all took forever... week after week after their work/my school. I never saw an outcome, always missing that late night victory/defeat, they would pick another vintage clash to mimic and off they went... three, four, five weeks onwards.

A couple of them went onto playing Dungeons & Dragons and I'd bump into them in the more quality real-ale pubs downtown. They would remember me and tell me the latest news of developments and championships from around the world. It seemed a shame they stopped the Wargaming, it was seriously impressive and a proper spectacle for a young boy. But they dreaded the endless painting and the limited nature of the battle reanactments of their old hobby.

I got D&D as a concept and as a social force, but like the new MUDs I'm not going into a dungeon willingly... I haven't see the old Wargamers for years (my cousin no longer plays, but collects the ephemera), I wonder if they moved with technology. They met to socialise and wargamed out of real passion for their favourite subject. I bet they are connecting with the wider world and playing in a larger domain than the back room in the old pub (which was levelled a few years back) most evenings. I can easily imagine their avatars!...

A bit of history...

 

This text illustrates the real start of MUD gaming and the huge development from board to computer: 'Colossal Cave Adventure' (1975) by Will Crowther  - which ran on PDP-10 mainframe computers. It is - get this - graphics free, or was from the beginning. 

Imagine that! Well you would wouldn't you... I was a bit taken by this (belatedly) when we discussed them in class. Natalia recalled playing non graphical MMORPGs in Poland and it was like writing an enormous Exquisite corpse. Her story and its charming denouement touched us all, but she loved it for the specific genre of its imaginary and ever evolving world. Pure Fantasy and from the Dungeons and Dragons, Collossal Cave lineage. This is I know still the most popular genre in MUDs and MMORPGs - the exact stuff that put me off. Just looking at the language of the early Crowther game, I know this to be something I really wouldn't have liked! 

"Rubbing the electric lamp is not particularly rewarding. Anyway, nothing exciting happens" You know! 

Now if it was being sent to discover the North West Passage... I'd be there! Explorer!*

Explorer! *

"At this moment of history when the task is posed, in the most unfavourable conditions, of reinventing culture and the revolutionary movement on an entirely new basis the Situationist International can only be a Conspiracy of Equals, a general staff that does not want troops. It is a matter of finding, of opening up, the 'Northwest Passage' towards a new revolution that cannot tolerate masses of performers, a revolution that must surge over that central terrain which has until now been sheltered from revolutionary upheavals: the conquest of everyday life. We will only organise the detonation: the free explosion must escape us and any other control forever."
('The Counter-Situationist Operation in Various Countries', S.I. No.8, January 1963)

I'm good, I'm good, I'm so freakin' good...

 

This is my HIGHEST Primrose score... EVER!

Gonna Paypal a payment to designer Jason Rohrer (see earlier blogs) NOW!

"Playing Games Can Be a Research Method"

Interesting Narratives outside First Person Shooters... which I watched instead of playing MMORPGs!


GLS #5: Doing Development-Led Research in Games from itucph on Vimeo.

"Four years of counting barrels in 'Doom'"... an interesting First Person Gaming talk by Daniel Pinchbeck. He clearly loves his subject, and challenges the notion that you can't be a fan and an academic (and Senior Lecturer in Creative Technologies at Portsmouth University). I'm finding just studying Games to be getting harder. I would never spend four years counting barrels (and other details in a game), but that's what it feels like. And if I'm already writing about them, how can I get further into them?

I now see several Games innovators that I feel are well worth following up, so I will try to play their games AND write them up in the next blogs... just don't expect them to be Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Games...

I intended to attach a screen-shot here of the top rated games on a MMORPG gameslist, but since it gets updated all the time, check it yourself. All but one in the top ten is fantasy or SciFi... there is another category that crops up occasionally: 'Real Life', but it isn't...

For me, the list made for grim reading... I had to chose one and didn't want to spend night after night dithering about just starting...  The stuff on there is offering no credible narrative or real difference except to dedicated genre freaks. So pick one at random and engage... Fail! Mac users aren't so well served even reading the FAQs it wasn't good news. The pic below was 40 minutes in (3%) and still going nowhere...

I logged in and began more than three, just because I seemed to get something wrong at a really basic stage... and in typing in the details I already felt like a trespasser.

Plus, the only game I wanted to play is in development (an MMORPG version of Battlestar Galactica), and maybe I was to honest with my details in the application for testers!! Hmmm...

The chat between players is constant, but for an outsider pure drivel, and in code, I began as a trespasser, now I was feeling like something far more sinister. They had things to say - but I had nothing to show for my three hours and my inadequacy was pretty unappealing to the World. I was a wallflower, and I didn't want to be patronised. I regretted all my choices and fancied getting into a time-based arts mindset. Build a random wall and face a chair in front of it and watch the clear sky whoosh above it. (I wandered off for a while and read about actual examples of this abstraction.. and if I wasn't wasting bandwidth here in the land of Elves I could be exploring them on Half Life).

The quality and flexiblity of play are of a far higher standard than I would have guessed at, but most of these high-end graphics are wasted on hackneyed old rubbish. I really hated it! Mind you, I had to "come down" with a puzzle game to decompress so maybe I was just hopeless at the stupid game I chose. Besides, I'm an only child, I'm used to playing on my own.

The other issue I had (and this goes to the heart of all digital content) is who pays and how? This isn't the time for me to engage in the free/not free debate, unfortunately. This is about how paying for stuff takes up too great a percentage of the playing experience. I'm happy to pay for content in many areas (and put up with banners and sponsors logos without too much of a moan) but some of this experience is like entering a cinema and being asked for a strip search. And once inside, having the projectionist pausing the film at key moments while the usher shakes a money box in my face. You simply can't have a complex relationship with the game or with any other players unless you invest huge amounts of time, and I guess, money. You can't build your pretty castle or your army on day one, or day two, or day three (I made day one), and for that reason I'm not coming back. This doesn't prevent millions of others building castles and armies and paying and playing on, but I was left fuming at the chiseling.

When Microsoft tell you they're working for you

Hey gamers: "why can't we be friends"?

This is the avatar you, the gamers of the Internet have decided is most applicable for me. Chosen after my fumbling, complaining and hating on the MMORPG community has spread and grown malignant. The feeling is mutual.

Notes: Chris Crawford 'Why We Play Games'

Some notes after reading of Chris Crawford’s 1982 ‘Art of Games Design’.

I’m just beginning to get a handle on this stuff. I am not a gamer, I have bought several games (plus a Playstation, or two, and a Nintendo something or other, and maybe something else…) as presents but never played them. In that regard I have contributed to their popularity but never been drawn in as a participant. I remain skeptical about ‘entering the zone’ but am becoming actively interested in the medium because I am finding interesting personalities within it. I will document both this enquiry and any gaming I undertake.

Firstly I wanted to know more about Chris Crawford, and there seems a lot to know. He was a physicist who liked to stretch out playing strategic, intelligent board games.

“In 1966, a friend showed me a paper wargame, "Blitzkrieg". We played it, I became an avid wargamer, and from there started thinking of my own designs. When computers became available, I built one and programmed it with a wargame. In 1979, I got a job at Atari”

So there he is at the epicenter, but sees the writing on the wall:

“I very much doubt that games will ever evolve into anything like books or movies. The games industry had the opportunity to do so in the mid to late 80s, and it consciously rejected that opportunity in favour of short-term success. It has now worked itself into a small but profitable hole from which it can never extricate itself.

Its audience is precisely defined, both in the positive sense AND the negative sense. We know exactly who our customers are: young males. We also know exactly who our customers AREN'T: everybody else. Worse, everybody else knows it, too.”

He then embarks on a two-decade crusade for Interactive Storytelling as the Next Thing. His reputation and his financial future are at stake. I won’t make any comments on this enterprise, but I see he has become somewhat embittered by the massive industry that have supplanted his hopes and wishes for a better, more inquisitive, open-ended and more dignified gaming culture.

“Everything is derivative” he laughs as he tours an enormous gaming convention in an interview between Chris and the contemporary games designer, Jason Rohrer.

What intrigued me further is how incomplete their picture is. The uncertainty expressed was really stimulating and left me wondering about the possibilities for the future.

I am linking the first (of 5) of this filmed interview from 2009, please watch them all! I even downloaded two of Jason’s games and find their ‘smallness’ an absolute joy. Kim and I played them last night and had fun. I aim to write and thank him…

Notes: Why Games can save us

 “2,500 years ago the Greek Historian, Herodotus, claims that games, particularly dice games were invented in the kingdom of Lydia during a time of famine.

There was such a severe famine, that the king of Lydia decided that they had to do something crazy. People were suffering. People were fighting. It was an extreme situation. They needed an extreme solution. So, according to Herodotus, they invented dice games and they set up a kingdom-wide policy.

On one day, everybody would eat. And on the next day, everybody would play games. And they would be so immersed in playing the dice games because games are so engaging, and immerse us in such satisfying blissful productivity, for 18 years.

However, after 18 years the famine wasn't getting better, So, the king decided they would play one final dice game. They divided the entire kingdom in half. They played one dice game, and the winners of that game got to go on an epic adventure. They would leave Lydia, and they would go out in search of a new place to live, leaving behind just enough people to survive on the resources that were available, and hopefully to take the civilization somewhere else where they could thrive.

Now, this sounds crazy, right? But recently, DNA evidence has shown that the Etruscans, who lead to the Roman empire, actually share the same DNA as the ancient Lydians. And so, recently, scientists have suggested that Herodotus's crazy story is actually true. And geologists have found evidence of a global cooling that lasted for nearly 20 years that could have explained the famine. So, this crazy story might be true. They might have actually saved their culture by playing games, escaping to games for 18 years and then been so inspired, and knew so much about how to come together with games, that they actually saved the entire civilization that way.”

This is from a lecture by Jane McGonigal, delivered at The School of Life on October 24th 2010.

"Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before"

... joining 'Wilhelm's Scream' and the 'Red Tail Hawk' in being used and re-used by sound designers, directors and other obsessives for decades... "please, please, please" (second Morrissey reference in this post!) don't forget 'Castle Thunder'... first used in Frankenstein (1931) and onwards: from the great 'Citizen Kane'; to the greater 'Pee Wee's Great Adventure' and to the greatest 'The Sound of Music' and all points in between... Here's a compilation from some lame rubbish recently broadcast x: 



"phew, that was close"

Did I say I finished the project?

I did...



Some think it isn't as sad as they expected, er, I said "bittersweet"... "bitter", "sweet"... I think I hit that x

This valley, man, it's uncanny...

What's wrong with this picture? Go with your first instinct (this isn't a Health and safety questionnaire), yes, the real wrong is the wrong-ness of the way the kid looks... Someone spent a lot of time on their computer generating him, and he's neither "lifelike" or "cute", he's just wrong. He's creepy. When you see a good CGI film, ie any Pixar* except 'Cars', they have funny looking people... but they're funny in a good way... even in the magnificent 'Toys Story 3,' the human are the characters you wouldn't pay to see, but they are at least good enough. Robert Zemeckis however, thought he could do humans, see below... that's "Tom Hanks" in both pics. First, wearing his Motion Tracking get-up and, lower, in Zemeckis's "Polar Express'. They showed the film on TV last Christmas. I watched it for a handful of minutes and wondered why the hell they bothered... probably took them years too!

This wrongness I just thought was called bad art, but the Japanese roboticist Doctor Masahiro Mori has stepped in and labelled it 'The Uncanny Valley'. His observation is applicable to interactions with nearly any non-human entity (and this is why I'm blogging about it!)

If one were to plot emotional response against similarity to human appearance and movement, the curve is not a sure, steady upward trend, instead, there is a peak shortly before one reaches a completely human “look” . . . but then a deep chasm plunges below neutrality into a strongly negative response before rebounding to a second peak where resemblance to humanity is complete. Here's a graph!

For me Tom Hanks represents a point at the lowest place on the deepest chasm and a great lesson in how not to animate. Mind you, "unhealthy person" being that high doesn't seem right...

 * I have read even the Pixar gods had a skirmish with the Uncanny Valley with their early short 'Tin Toy'. Sure that baby is fugly, but it was an experiment, and they never made that mistake again. Compare it with Big Baby from Toy Story 3!

Graph courtesy: http://www.arclight.net/~pdb/nonfiction/uncanny-valley.html

Last night I happily Survived Life

 

Went to see Jan Švankmajer's new film 'Surviving Life' last night. It's the only film I've seen in the London Film Festival this year (oh dear)...  I sat eating ice cream and had a great night in the company of an old hero. Seeing his stuff on the young Channel 4 may have made as big an impression on me as Oliver Postgate's stuff from childhood. And that's part of why I'm here at Middlesex doing this course...

Sadly he wasn't there in person, but he appeared on screen to introduce it and apologise it's only an animated film! After consulting a stop watch his head split in two, his skull rolled out and fell down an open sewer cover...  I guess it's another meditation on dream and reality / consciousness and unconsciousness, but billed as a mid-life crisis. It has a narrative, and he refered to it as his Psychoanalytical Comedy, but I had already jumped into the same sewer cover and took whatever came my way. At times both Freud AND Jung covered their eyes and ears...

It's made with cut outs (see pic), stop motion and some live action. There is the strong indication that this will be his last feature (he's maybe 76, no-one seemed to be sure)... I don't like to think that is the case, because he still inspires me and I don't want him to ever stop. But he has left us with another classic. Thank you for the ticket Middlesex, and thank you Mr Švankmajer xxx

The name of this project is 'When Worlds Collide'

Update from the "another monday, another project" post...


...here's the animatic: created to see if people get the story (they seemed to) and whether my tutor, Robert, liked the timing/style (he seemed to). Yay! I combined the three postcards to get the story, character, style etc. I have two more weeks to complete the 30 second piece. I'll post the final piece then... wish me luck

Nudge, nudge..

No, I don't play Video games... and I never have. Apart from House of the Dead with my son in an arcade or two... but not at home, not with my bloody thumbs. Which may or not help me with the written side of my course. I assumed it'd be more 'Animation as Art Form', or 'I Hate Walt Disney because he disnay' kind of thing. No no, the subject I have to wrestle with is "Animating for Video Games vs. Animating for Movies".. Apparently "they're united by a single common cause: the desire to captivate the user or viewer and involve them, in one way or another, in the story that unfolds"... shouldn't be toooooooo hard then... I still feel like like the Python (Terry Jones) holding his pint... "do you mind not bothering me, you crass horror, I don't like you and I never will like you. Now cock off".

Another monday, another project...

What have these three pics got in common? We were told to collect one postcard (face down) from three tables, and NO CHANGING! Then a brainstorm and a mad dash to the library. To figure up a plot for a 30 second film based on them... My story seems a bit downbeat at the moment, I aim to give it at least a bitter sweetness. I'll be posting how it goes x

Chair: 4 Techniques animation excercise

   Green Screen

   Hand drawn (plus some paint)

    Flick book

   Stop motion

As I look around...

Welcome to my blog... As an intro, I've thoughtfully led with a little pic of me... This is the first pic I found in Documents of me... It's actually a photo of a photo of me on a bookshelf. To make this even more Meta, the bookshelf is above my head as I type this first Blog. I will probably use this seat to blog from, under this shelf... I won't always make a feature of where I am, or what's above me... but these are the early days.