vimes

One thing that's uber-cool is the facial expressions of the elder in the Myst V demo... I really had the impression I had a living guy in front of me.

Because poeple can't stop talking about how wonderful the experience is once they were allowed to enter their first convention, I'm trying to find a way to attend a gaming convention or exposition normal people can enter for a price that doesn't imply to restrain myself from buying food during a whole month of the year. I'm currently trying to fully understand the 'student contract' of GDC so if any of you guys could indicate me some worthy conventions that would help me a lot. Thx.

Well, I don't know .. I'm supposed to work abroad for 3/4 months from May 2006, and the convention might weight in the choice of the land I'll be going to. Yeah, I was trying to find something that would give me the opportunity to put my greedy hands on exclusive stuff but, more importantly, allow me attend to conferences and lectures. But the DiGRA isn't supposed to happen again until 2007:deranged: .. if I got that right.I've found this page which lists a lot of 'events' related to games taking place until.. April 2006 and decriptions are in french.

Maybe. I've been following a Computer Science cursus for 4 years, I've worked on a few game projects but I don't pretend to be an expert. Do you ? Isn't Deus Ex, like, the best game he ever made? I also believe there are standards of development -I got a design doc template from Chris Taylor dated of 1999- the problem is that a lot of team fail to apply them [cf DoubleFine issues or the 50 french game studios which died in the past year]. A clue of the standardization - good or bad - is that investors trust their money into video games more and more. One way or the other, we're not talking about the same thing : you say that technology needs to mature while I say that it's mature enough to make more elaborate games in terms of content. So, it's not like we disagree. On the whole, I would back up Treesus when he says that games could be more meaningful while avoiding to teach the player a lesson; they could be as subtle as any other media. I 've just finished reading Lord of the Flies and clearly, the purpose of the writer isn't to teach the reader a lesson : he just tells a story of a bunch of kids going through adventure on an deserted island. But you go away with something else about society, human nature, etc... That being said "Spa(n)kster minus Marek" is righteous in its/his/her fascit attitude : games are, at core, entertaining/fun and games that just fit this expectation perfectly need to remain. But there again, let me quote Je -er .. -Treesus "We don't want it to stop there, and then have more ico's etc, we want to go further." and I'm concerned because it seems the market isn't going to diversify. ... and I really can't imagine what kind of enlightment someone can get during an ER episode.

Yeah, that would be great and KOTOR explored this a bit even though, the system was so rigid and the thing seemed so off the topic of the game that it wasn't really appealing to spend minutes trying to get information on your comrades' background who were anyway ALWAYS reluctant about it. What would be even better would be to choose the characters you want to be friend with. Imagine a Harry potter game in which you could decide that Draco Malfoy what the guy you had to hang with... and not those Weasley freaks I think that would be fun.

Yes, after a few minutes of reflexion, I admit you're totally right : the best way for games to find their own "way" without being influenced by a particular medium is to take inspiration from all of them. That makes sense.I mean Woody Allen said something quite similar to what you said and he can't be wrong And to Pulpo : The Last Laugh by Friedrich Murnau was made in 1924, this is the oldest piece of art in movie I can remember and I'm not the type to remember those things; so.. I don't think art waits for technology to become stainless, it just need it to have matured. And frankly, Video game technologies have reached maturity for 3/4 year now .. it's the publishers and manufacturers who haven't...

I was browsing information on Delphine Software and I ended up reading an interview of Mike Wilson, former CEO of Gathering od Developers which published Darkstone... and then, it came back to me : it was this company that attend to E3 1999 or E3 2k but stayed outside the main building and demoedn its games on the parking lot.... Yea, the company which , rather than creating games in-house, supported small development houses allowing each group to retain much of their freedom but connecting them to resources and a publishing network that they wouldn't otherwise have. They even published great games between 1998 and their by Take2 in 2001 Heavy Metal : F.A.K.K. 2, Fly !, Max Payne, Myth III, Rune,Darkstone, , Railroad Tycoon II and Stronghold... then it was completely eaten by Take2 and lost its original purpose. It's funny that a structure like United Artists founded by four stars (Chaplin,Fairbanks,Pickford and Griffith) could exist and stay true to its initial purpose during 60 years in the movie industry whereas a game company which gained the trust of high profiled developers such as 3D Realms, Third Law Interactive, Epic Megagames, Edge of Reality, Human Head Studios, PopTop Software, Ritual Entertainment, Remedy Entertainment, Delphine Software and Terminal Reality couldn't even reach its third birthday. It's sad for the artist(s) who enjoyed the activity mentionned in the title.

That's true but what's peculiar with video games is that they went from being a totally different medium to mimicing the most successful ones. When technology was archaic, games had to be simple and were nearly abstract entertainment... but the more technology progressed the more designers refered to other media :first, they raid litterature (text based adventure games) then paper based RPG (Ishar, Eyes of the Beholder) and now movies(CoD,Doom III).In a way, we're still in the time of engineer-creator witnessed in the 50's-60's by the movie industry when the art was led forward by cinemascope, 3D glasses and panavision. I know that...and it's . I'd like someone to come to the Video game industry and break the rules of storytelling like Myst did in its own time. What I mean is that with people like David Cage who are in games because they couldn't find their place in the movie industry the craft of video games might stay still for a long time. In a sense, only a few games went as far as Myst in making game a new medium. I'm not a fan of those games but it's undeniable that you couldn't get what you get from playing Myst V in any other medium.

I'd been lying if I say I'm not relieved. So.. erm.. thanks.

I agree, they should make a headline of this!

I can't download the movies cause each link redirects me to fileplanet... is that normal, doctor ?

Yeah.. but it's difficult to foresee something that you're not expecting cause it would be ... new. "You can't second-guess ineffability" as they say.

I hate those kind of post 'cause I can't seem to summarize what I want to say in a short post ... anyway... about the games not conveying messages and what stops them from doing so : Games are to be fun and are to be wish fulfilment: it’s kinda seen as a genetic feature that Video game is an entertainment thus must be enjoyable, must be fun and must put the player in a situation he could wish he’d be. But relevant messages don’t emerge from (dull) point of view taken the sunny side of the street: Kafka, Orwell, Wells, Zola, Maupassant, Palahniuk … none of them ever wrote success stories. In that way, current video games are very limited in what they can say. Max Payne and Grim Fandango gives a good glimpse at what games could be if the main characters would reach success through multiple failure. Proper Video game grammar doesn’t exist yet: Nowadays, video games take ideas from here and there but failed to invent its own grammar. In fact, the gaming community has lost the lot of hints of its particularity in that matter when the gaming industry finally reached the mainstream market publishers had wished for years. In reaction, the publishers felt they had to meet the main public where it stood and so, they went for the recipes of movie making. What nobody really realized at that time is that experiencing a movie is totally different from playing a game : watching a movie is merely accepting to be told a story filtered through the eyes of its creator; as a spectator, you’re taken by the hand (or not, in the case of a Lynch movie) and brought to a certain point… the only thing that is required from you is an open mind and the will to sort out what you’re shown. If developers apply that technique to games – and Call of Duty and its lot did that – they end up restraining the player in its freedom, the core of a Video game experience. They recipe can be successful once, not twice and conveying a message without frustrating the player is nearly impossible In other media the creator is the centre of his work, in games the player is the centre of the creator’s work. Most of the time, catharsis in games can’t be achieve because the quality of a game depends on the player’s investment… and it’s difficult to integrate subtle underlying discourse when the player – in a good game - is free to interrupt things and leaving the scene at any time. However there are also games conveying messages. Yeah, more than often, their storyline hammers this message so hard that the gamer must be blind, retarded and socialist not to get it. In those games, a message is conveyed but it is not the core of the game…. I mean, MGS sucks in every way in terms of storytelling; at least for the dialogs and cutscenes I saw.*shivers while reminiscing* Still, being the elitist gamer bitches Idle Forumers are, we know that some games adopt points of view with subtlety using the few tricks acknowledged (or not) by the industry: Meaningful supporting characters: Psychonauts is astonishing in terms of supporting cast adding depth to the game. Raz’ story as great as it is, the heart of the game truly lies the composed fates of the misfits, the monsters and the madmen…children included. The game excels in giving the player hints about character’s story whatever its investment is. The first time I finished the game, I didn’t witnessed a single scene in the Summer Camp and didn’t get that many Memory Vaults but I had lot of clues about Milla, Edgar and the others that were built in the level design. The second time around, I had the whole ride... it was impressive and moving to see what the creators really wanted me to see. Focusing on the world rather than on the characters : this is the field of fantasy and SF games that really enjoyed to get rid of the characters by making the population a bunch brainwashed consumer following the established order or a extinguished race. Then, the enlightenment comes from understanding how the humanity came to that situation given history clues and huge background. Myst, Riven and Uru are great examples. Anyway, I think that one of the experiment would be to work on what the player has to bring and doesn’t bring to its character: most games are stuck between a dull empty character and a filled character you can’t modify and, in both cases, developing interesting thematic around the main character that would interest the player is difficult. Pfff that must have been boring

Does it bother anyone if I post a fucking long answer?

What is really strange about the new generations of consoles is that : - it seemed really rushed to me : we first began to expect Playstation 3 and Xbox 2 since March of this year and official announcements came in May . Apparently, for these two consoles, a final and stable Development Kit has only been dispatched quite recently... and their final shipment, as well as their firsts games, are due to the end of the year! - nobody seems to be really excited about it : if you count out Epic which demoed their engine in realtime at last E3, I'm still waiting for the demos of titles that will only be released in next gen console. What I mean is that there wasn't this big boom of announcement that everybody witnessed for the GC or PS2 announcement. More supriising is that Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo didn't come with a "fer de lance" title, a title that would represent their upcoming console... for the XBox it was Malice and for the GC it was Mario Sunshine but there is no such title for the next-gen...it is quite disturbing. So, I think that the next-gen is a big example of a consumption society where mass products feature built-in obsolescence : I don't think that developers exploited the current generation of console to their limits - and the recent God of War is a proof -... but the gaming industry is an ever growing monster which craves for its frequent fix of buy frenziness; and the next gen has been designed for that. The upside of this situation is what Rodi highlighted : the current gen is gonna be far more affordable and I might get one thoes Xbox, PS2 or gameCube thingy in a not-so-distant future. PS : on a related note, is it possible to wire those consoles to a CRT monitor ?

Countless .. indy movies ?! Countless might not be the word you were looking for... but Vin Diesel isn't a bad actor; he and The Rock have as much potential - if not more - as any SNL guy who went to the big screen. Anyway, the news of the making of 'Halo -The Movie' has make a lot of questions popped in my underused mind: Will the screenwriter Alex Garland - who did a great job on both 28 Days Later and The Beach, the latter having been bloody raped by the screenplay writer John Lodge - will he be able to pull off a movie with a faceless main character ? Will this movie allow me to never play the games by sucking the scenario out of the first two opus and stuffing it into a single screenplay ? Will Das Magnificient Uwe Boll direct this movie, thus making it an indeniable masterpiece ? Once again, will there be a "Halo - the Movie : The Game" ? Right now, this confuses me a lot. But not that much.

I think that the first game I ever played was Pong on one of those antique console that only featured one game.Then, the next memory linked to video games is Double Dragon which I played with at friend's house I only saw once a year in Corsica. I think he game that made me a gamer is "Carmen San Diego"... it is also the game that convinced my parents that Video game could be intelligent. I also fantasized years on an article about Monkey Island, without having the computer to run it... and I remember that getting Jedi Knight and Curse of Monkey Island were... you know, I was really moved when I first opened their box and smelled the wonderful of 'brand-new-game'.

The problem I personnaly encountered with a lot of forums is that nobody react to someone with a balanced or a complex opinion; what you have to do is ... and when people begin to respond to that with bitter anger, you can counter attack by developing your original ideas. It's Macchiavel to the use of educated people.

I have a problem with the catch phrase " Welcome to the site for Video game intellectuals". That doesn't make me want to read the content of the site.

Am I the only one to deeply think that making a film based on Doom is the second worst idea of all time just after ' Sunglasses are "cool" ' ? Am I the only to wonder if they are going to make "Doom - The Movie - The Game" ?

That already exists in a very archaic form in a norvegian institue : theyr created an application that display a toolset of very simple primitives [ box, sphere, pyramid] that you can stuck together to create a general shape. Then you can use a 'pick' that allows you to sculpt this shape. It's quite interesting but there - as in many VR application - the main problem is that it lacks the physical feedback of the touch which I understand is very important in sculpture. Yes, but there is still a great limitation which is that, by printing VR object on real environment, there's no way you can define background object, foreground objet etc : for example you can't say that this VR objets will disappear behing that element from the real picture. Arf, I wasn't very clear on that point. Crisis of boulimia or any phobia in fact, are triggered by the mere suggestions of the object of phobia; so, so we didn't have to create nausea or tap into the nervous system 'cause even if the graphs weren't realistic the fact that it represented the object of fear triggered the anxiety. VR was just a mid-point between total suggestion and dirrect confrontation.

Didn't we recently come to the conclusion that preordering was "Teh D3vil" ?

Graphics suck [that's not that important but well], 2-4 hours of play per episode and a whole game costing 120 $ [and you don't get a box or anything]... I don't anticipate this title.

One of the first thing that we realized is that for one to use a dataglove, a VR helmet or a giant screen is needed. Why ? Because the things you act on must be at the same scale as the device you interact with... what I'm trying to meant is that using a dataglove with a screen - even if 30 inches wide one - couldn't work because the movment of the user wouldn't be in the same frame as the user. We tested it... it sucks. That is the first limitation. The second one is that if moving a virtual hand around in a virtual world is easy and very efficient.. interacting with the world is a different thing. Here, I'm not talking about physics (grapsing an object releasing it or the effect of the user's move on the dynamic objects)... that's easy stuff, once you have the appropriate technology. What I'm saying is that if you want to grab a file, then going in its properties and messing with them.. or open it with a specific program.... you have tu use either hand-sign identification or buttons. If you use the latter, you end up with a system similar to the mouse device but that brought forward other problem : where to put the button is the greatest. The location must be one that must at the same time guaranty : 1- that the user won't have to search for it 2- the user won't have to move his gloved hand to reach it [i.e. by doing so changing the state of the virtualhand within the virtual world] If you use hand-sign, it might sounds cool at first, but in the end, it's less efficient than the mouse system. It's cool, and I'd like it to work but from what I've experienced that's not worth it. But there is other problems : - browsing menu (or doing precise pointing) menu with a dataglove is a pain in the ass - representing the virtualhand is problematic because it more or less hide 1/4 of the content you're pointing at. Yeah, of course! So, in the 2nd year of my boring generalist engineer school, we have to lead a project with a team on a topic of our choice. The highlight of the school is mainly on team managment....meaning, they focus on you're ability to meet official deadlines rather than the final product or the way you evolved during the 6 month of the project... anyway, I had done this year once already and had participate in a project called JediOSE. This was a geeky concept of a lightsaber simulation: we would put a 3D captor on a handmade woodstick so that the movements would be reproduced in 3D and we would had drones that would fire laser and the player had to deflect them by moving the lightsaber in the right direction. And the drone would explose of they were hot by a reflected laser. I promess, we had an empty environment, we hadn't worked that much on the 3D model but it was AWESOME! The end of the story is that I failed at my final exam in Physics so I had to do it all over again... Doing VR was fucking interesting and i decided that I would try to recruit some people to work on a non-gaming VR application... 3 guys were interested and we went through all the stuff that was made with a glove : the project of nintendo, chirurgical operation, VR training for people suffering from trauma after having an accident at work...and we ended up watching a show on the very good french-deutsch channel ARTE about several nordic Universities that were developing VR applications to treat physical symptoms of phobias. The goal of those therapies is not to search for the source of the trauma : why you hate spider, why you can't stand porcelain... that sort of thing, that 's the job of the therapist called 'psychanalystes" in french[freud and such]. The goal of those sessions is to make the patient bear with the fear or the nausea he's feeling while exposed to a anxigene situtation. That helps him/her to live with his/her problem. So, because we wanted to use the dataglove we went for arachnophobia because if patient's crisis are triggerred by such simple things as 'thinking there is a spider in the room".. the final stage of confrontation is making the patient take a spider in is hand without feeling the anxiety anymore. The main problem was that we needed medical backup to make our project sound serious and, as we went from clinic to clinic we would find people that were very interested in our approach but didn't have time to give us and feedback. The only ones clearly motivated were therapists from a addictology clinic that were dealing with patient suffering from anorexia and drg addictio... and they wanted us to design a program for the boulimia group. As they were the only one kind enough to support us, we went that way. The thing is that they didn't want to work with us on the design doc , on the analysis and they didn't deven bother sending us back the we sent them... because they mainly wanted to correct us on errors related to medical approach (Them:" You should simulate, like, I don't know.... puking!" Us: " Really, that's... hummm.. disgusting but, well, if that helps..." Them: " Yeah, do it and then we'll see if it works!" Us: "We are students, it's not like we have the time to develop useless feature" Them :" Cooome-oooon! Puking!.. it will be fun!"). They didn't have the time to give us a main orientation. So, how the project failed, that's an interesting story, but quite related to that.

Mmm, those are quite extraordinary... and it's impressive that this is running on the current generation of consoles. It's a shame that console - and hardware on the whole - are replaced by new technologies even before creators could used them to their maximum. The rest is here