I know this point has been made so many times in the past, but music really does evoke such complex and wondrous emotions. Those moments where you simply drift off and reach a state where your brain is desperately trying to understand whatever it is your experiencing, all the while your just trying to feel lost in this indescribable yet intoxicating thing.

For those of you interested the music that inspired me to make this post is the stuff by ‘Driftless Pony Club’. One song of theirs in particular I have quite a fondness for, link here if you want to check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKYVedZCnIw

So now I want to know, what music evokes complex emotions in you? I would love to know.

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A friend of mine from university Lauren Ferro (http://laurenferro.tumblr.com/), recently reblogged an article that talked about Solitude within an interactive experience and what kind of an effect it can have upon the player. I’d like to expand upon this by talking a little bit about how these moments come about within an interactive experience.

In the article, Jorge(the author) references a moment of solitude in Red Dead Redemption where he stood atop a moving train contemplating the world around him as it flew past. User generated solitude such as this is obviously hard to capture from a designers perspective. It’s emergent, and as such these moments can really only be teased out of the player by building the potential for these moments within the experience. You also have games such as Limbo, where solitude is not just a singular moment within the experience but an overarching theme built and expressed through the context of the world itself. Other games express solitude through contrast, indulging the player in moments of companionship and familiarity, only to take them away at points where they want the player to feel the weight of what they have lost.

Can you think of any moments within a game where you felt alone? How did you feel about it? Did you feel at peace? Scared? Contemplative? Powerless?

hyrulechozo:

This peaceful little article discusses recent games (Red Dead Redemption, Skyrim, and Dear Esther) that allow for or create great moments of isolation and solitude, and how those moments add depth to the game, and are good for the player even outside of the game.

So I recently procured a copy of Rayman Origins for the PC the other week, and after playing it thus far I find myself trying to pick out the many things that make it so great. The obvious being it’s construction of context. Everything from the art, the animation, the music, the sound effect; all create and reinforce such a colorful and wonderful context for the game to take place in (I’d almost say it’s as good as building context as the Katamari Damacy series).

Yet when I got the hang of the controls and made my way through some of the levels, I couldn’t help but feel like there was more to it. The controls are certainly tight; I rarely found myself dying because of it, and Rayman Origin’s way of simply starting you at the beginning of the current sub section in the level without a moments hesitation definitely made the experience a lot less frustrating than it could have been.

It wasn’t too long ago that I started to realize what it was. Rhythm. Rhythm is that almost zen-like state an experience can put you in, a sense that you and the game are in sync, where you perform tasks within the experience without even thinking. As you can image this is incredibly difficult to design into an experience, and while Rayman Origins doesn’t exactly create a coherent sense of rhythm all the time, I definitely found myself getting into a rhythm more than in many other game.

In keeping with making these things short I’ll leave it at that, I’ll probably do another article speaking more in depth, but for now I will ask this of you. Did you ever play a game where you felt a sense of rhythm? I’d love to hear your answer. ?

laurenferro:

Audiences do need protection because with the way commodities are being marketed, the lines between morality, status and economic turnover are becoming extremely blurred. “They fail to recognise the social differentiation that still exists between wearers of “really” old torn jeans and Macy’s…

Very interesting read. Makes you wonder what other social-standards are being projected upon us as consumers by the larger companies. Whether that be intentional or not.

So I recently downloaded the PC demo for Rayman Origins and gave it a shot, and while I was playing it I couldn’t help but smile. The entire experience was just packed with charm and character; with everything from the music, art style, animation (ahhh the animation…) all working towards conveying this strong vibrant context.

I can’t remember if I mentioned in a previous post, that almost any game will focus on a core aspect of play. Facebook games for example will most always revolve around the idea of social interaction; of playing with other people in order to become an engaging form of play.

Rayman Origins is one of the games that I put into the same category as the Katamari series; games that use Context as a means of driving home an enjoyable interactive experience. Don’t get me wrong, this is not to say that these games have bad mechanics, and really any game will focus on multiple aspects of play rather than just one.

Yet take a step back and think. Would Katamari Damacy be as good if you stripped away all the music, art style and colorful characters? Let me know what you think as a reblog or a reply, would love to hear what you think! ?

A little while ago I read an article by one of my favorite web critics Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-punctuation/9276-Context-Challenge-and-Gratification), and in the article he talked about how the model he had used to judge a good game, had changed. He stipulated how his old perception was that a good game is a seamless mixture of both gameplay and storytelling, and that he instead adopted the idea of a game being made up of 3 parts: Challenge, Context and Gratification.

For a while I pondered what the article was truly stating. I think we can all agree that games are quite complex in their design, and that saying ALL games fall into these categories is a little bit of a blanketing statement. Enjoyment of a game can come from many different avenues, and while I definitely I agree with at least two of the 3 conveyances of play Yahtzee has put forward, I do have my gripes with his use of ‘Gratification’ (as well as the aforementioned shortness of the list).

To pick apart the definition of ‘Gratification’ that Yahtzee has used; he defines it as

‘… the pure visceral fun one has entirely outside of both context and challenge.’.

I have a couple of problems with this. Firstly I find the word ‘Gratification’ to be a little too broad a term to be used at this level of analysis; at face value you could really say that gratification is born from any one of these categories. I also have issue with the idea of ‘Gratification’ being completely void of Context and Challenge. If you take say Katamari Damacy and you look at the act of rolling up random things to make your katamari bigger as a form of ‘Gratification’ gameplay, and then strip away all the quirky characters, artstyle, dialogue and any other hint of context, do you really think it would be as fun?

I asked a lot of my friends who are into game design what they thought, and at the end of it we still couldn’t really pin down a better definition for ‘Gratification’. After flipping through ‘The Rules of Play’ (An awesome book if you want to get into game design) I stumbled across many potential definitions that all seemed to point towards ‘Gratification’ simply being the purest act of Play, which I still find to be a little too loose a definition.

I’d be interested to hear what you guys think, can you come up with a better definition, perhaps the definition is one that can be rolled into some other definition of play? Can you also think of other forms of enjoyment through play? Another one that I think Yahtzee grossly overlooked was Social Interaction. Hope you guys are having a good week, thanks for reading ;)

Thank you to everyone who posted responses the other day regarding my Skyward Sword post, I thought I’d make a whole new post to address some of the things brought up in your answers.

One of the first things I found infuriating about the game, was the controls. I know that may not be a huge surprise to some people, as many titles on the Wii have been known to handle motion controls poorly. Really my anger towards the controls in particular is probably born from hearing the review sites calling Skyward Sword the best Wii game to utilize motion controls, but really more often than not I would find myself killing an enemy thanks to link swinging his sword in a direction I didn’t actually intend him to swing in.

Another big problem I have with the game is the idea of flying through the sky. To me the very act just doesn’t really feel as open and exciting as it should be, and it really just makes me think of Wind Waker and how expansive and epic that world felt as you were sailing through this massive ocean.

I do have more minor problems with the game but really I don’t think any of you want to hear my loud mouth rant any longer. I guess I can’t help but compare this game to some of my favorite Zelda games such as Wind Waker and Majora’s Mask. That feeling of endless freedom as I was sailing through the ocean, the deep emotional connection I felt as I stood over a father and his daughter as they embrace through emotional hardship (Ikana Valley, music box house, I hope most of you know what I’m talking about), I find myself desperately looking for such experiences in Skyward Sword.

Leave any comments below, I would love to hear more of what you guys think.?

Okay so I recently starting playing Skyward Sword the other week, and I have to say that so far I am severely disappointed by the experience. Now I know many of you may say that I should give the game more of a chance, that I should play through the entire game before giving it a final judgement, and to a certain extent I would agree. I really can’t say for certain that the whole game is terrible when I’ve only just finished the first dungeon, but to that I say this. Should we really excuse a game that forces a player to overcome boring/frustrating content to get to the good bits? For me the answer is a flat out no.

I think Skyward Sword is a perfect example of how a good chunk of our industry’s consumers have begun to become complacent as to the quality of content. All over the internet I see review sites giving Skyward Sword close to perfect scores (and in the case of IGN an actual perfect score?!?), a problem which we all know isn’t too uncommon, but never have I seen it so grossly misplaced.

It just boggles my mind that people are calling this the best Zelda game of all time!

I’m curious, does anyone else feel the same way?

I was recently working on an iPhone game the other week, and during that time leading up to it being submitted onto the app store my designer wanted me to implement a Metric system. For those of you not familiar with the term within the context of games; metrics represent the data regarding players actions within a particular game. An example of a metric could be how long on average players complete a certain level, or even something as simple as how many times a particular button was pressed.

The reason I bring this up is because after implementing and testing out the system that would collect this data, we eventually started discovering the many implications that came with using such a system. For instance the fact that we would be using the player’s internet connection for our own uses. It was from this realization that we began to discuss the many avenues we could take, like asking the player beforehand whether they would be okay with the system being used during their play sessions and then simply disabling it if they chose otherwise.

In the end we decided to leave it out, mostly because of how uncertain we were of how players would respond to such a system. I found the whole ordeal to be rather interesting. Being a very young game developer I never expected to begin running into such issues so early in my career, and on what is quite a small project. Having graduated nary a few days ago I’m beginning to realize that it is never too earlier to begin pondering the many problems and issues I will come across, especially if I ever wish to accomplish my goal of creating a truly evocative interactive experience. 

I’ve been in a few game developments over the past few years and while I wouldn’t call myself a god given expert, there have been a couple of recurring patterns using the development process that I can’t help but feel isn’t a coincidence. When you break it down a game is essentially the culmination of team of people from multiple disciplines all working towards the same goal, which in itself is not that uncommon of a setup.

It’s within game development however that I’ve found huge gulfs between the disciplines, and it’s here where communication is absolutely vital. I talked a couple of weeks ago about how taking someone else’s idea and making it real is a ridculously long and albeit difficult process, and it’s in trying to accomplish this that communication is paramount.

For me the gulf is the most prevalent between the programmer (me), and everyone else and this can be attributed to a few things. Firstly a lack of knowledge regarding the opposing discipline, and I find that if you really want to do game development you need to at least have a basic understanding in all of aspects that go into making a game. Secondly I also think that many game developers, including myself of course, lack basic communication skills and when you get right down to it, communication is a vital skill that corsses the paths of practically any profession.

So what do you guys think? Is communication important? Is it perhaps not as important as I make it out to be? Let me know in reblogs or response, I always love seeing em :P?