OssK

Even on huuuuuuge deals, I try not to do any business with guys of that affiliation that don't respect other people's rights. Also, what is the censored word ?

It is said that the Mimish cap is one of the best zeldas ? Anyway I haven't played any Zelda on DS so yeah, I'd like to play that one, but why ask might I ask ?

Well… No. Maybe I want to state first that to me there is not really "sides" here but I might not get that across enough. There is such a thing as cinematography and what is called "the cinematic language / grammar" but that is one with the actors, the camera movements, the lighting, and the music. In games, the story is most often told with huge chunks of "I stop that media to impose another one". Video game's way of telling a story is, for example, The last Express, in which you can witness the world living and breathing in front of you. Farcry 2 does some of that but in a dynamic way which is harder. Again, no. the designer does not declare anything, he proposes, he lets the player choose and reflect on that. There is authorial control but a branching undynamic story is likely to be very visible in today's state of the art so you will eventually be tempted to play again trying the other path. But if you have valid examples of that assertion, I'm more than willing to reconsider my position which, as a game designer, saddens me a bit.

Those examples are more of an example of instanciation. All that said, I don't either. Maybe because there of course is a way for games to reveal things to us but they very much depend on us to do that. So when you craft your game as a big company does, to widen the audience, if there is any message you would like to pass, you'd better have it written down plus said by a narrator and at a moment where the player is concentrating (Yes, I was very dissapointed at the end of HL2 when doctor something something speaks to us on screens and you have to stay there and watch him talk rather than having the ability to move around and play while listening to him). What I am defending here is games cannot talk, they can contain amazing messages, enlightening perspectives, but as far as game game is concerned (as in, the player has control over what is happening). What is said here is games can contain movies or books of music that would fit what you desire but they could also hold things that are not in that order of magnitude, that are on another scale, more or less talking to you. The example given by GDF Is him taking a distanced look, realizing not the story that just happened, but what a state of war or urgency (if immersed) or fun (as it is fun to click on people and see them react) or even systemic purpose (because he fears that the enemy will not crawl to safety as a normal human being would do when wounded but would pick a gun and start firing at him again so he's a potential danger, I kill him) made him do. Well, they could do two things to enlighten you : Drive you through a series of events to have your mind in a certain spot and then try to have you think about what you want to do just as in a car you do not think "where do I want my car to go" but "do I want to turn left or right". Or let you live in a special world that has different rules and laws and hope (or craft the world in such a way that it is likely to occur) that you would experience enlightenment by doing things you did not think possible. Because I think it is the way of an adventure and we don't find it in games, to wander and ask "is it going to be possible ?" Just as you talked about The Shivah and said it asked of you to remember the names of people and actually pretend to be a detective. I think these cases of not assisting the player in every conceivable way are the routes to success, to you feeling like a fucking detective or an adventurer. Yes, because when you do, something unexpected happens, that is learning is it not ? That is exactly what it is to me, something new emerges, something you didn't already knew. And that, I think we can agree on that, can perfectly happen in games. He does, but what is he saying ? Is he talking to you ? Not really, he is putting you on an edge™ to see what way you will go. In that scene ? I doubt it, if the execution were to be perfect, I would certainly believe myself to try and do something. If I did and of course if it was made in such a way that the game would give an echo to that (what you did has consequences within the gameworld) I would probably not learn anything. Because I did what I believed to be right and have already been presented with that situation before. In that situation, I did not do anything, call me a coward because you'd be right to do so, but I did not put myself at risk for the well being of another person I do not know (thankfully, I did that in other occasions). That was me weighting what I could do and what I risked to get in return. It was a public protest so I had all the chances to get tazed to for the fun of it and nothing would have changed. He He He… Does that not happen in every game you ever played ? People do like being patronized. Not every people but the "gamers" we have been talking about all thread long do.

In point and shoot you could not really make much analogies outside shooting, but it could actually be such a small part of a game that you would not mind, think about Ocarina of time and the slingshot / bow, nobody would call that game a shooter, yet it uses this mechanic when needed. Thing is, you can only capture ghost when they appear on the camera, and that only happens when they jump at you so yes, this game is probably made by Jumpscare-the-fuck-out-of-ya inc. Well, that doesn't really happen because there is only so much you can manage but I would easily picture a game in which you have to micro your units to build things (go fetch wood, now assemble sturcture and here is the plan and if you don't tell them the next step they just don't do anything and your building is just a wood structure with properties : defense against beasts/monsters : 0 defense agains weather : 0 defense against thieves : 0) Well, the sims is pretty much that. Not really, the urgency provided by a timer displayed and a bunch of people chasing you with guns is not the same in my opinion, and however well made the DLC levels were, I doubt that it could rival the pure thrill of doing that in a "known" environment. That is exactly what I thought and I would play it…*Oh wait, mix that with the above and you have Beyond Good and Evil 2 FPS I think Nope, it's not really the same for targets do not "respond" to our actions, because that's what happens in real life, people might not even notice that you're taking their picture, whereas I think you do know when a bullet penetrates your chest. So you could make a shooter with not lethal weapons like a everyday cop shooter with rubber bullets and tasers but I think the message you would convey is "hey, look, it's fun to shoot protestors, go get hired in the police" which is pretty lame… Oh… Man…*Cupid, the game... of Love. That would so be awesome, different arrows for different types of peoples and try to match them together with their personalities... You'd make a believable little park in which people do stuff, they would have invisible stats that draw them towards activities and you try to guess by looking at them which and which would go together… Oh, I'm so onto something there !

That is very true indeed and is a obligation by law in the U.S. What is being said is summed up as follow: Chris wants games to talk to him like books and movies and music do. I say games do not talk and that is why no-one has made a talking game despite all the very intelligent people working on them Why is that ? Because we are used to being told and to tell things by stories. There is a beginning, an end and when it stops, you can think about it as an object that you witnessed. But, in games, you do not witness, you act, therefore, your do not analyze it as something from the outside, you just accept the fact that it is you in the screen (Etienne-Armand Amato calls that instanciation). For instance I don't know if you've ever driven a car but it is basically the same. When you drive, you do not think about it, you just are the car and you move on a road. You think of the car as your body, you act through it and pressing the gas pedal is a bit like breathing, you don't think about it that much, you just do it. So in the car example, you are not driving per-se, you are moving. In video games, you are not playing the game, you are moving in the game. Therfore Therefore, Chris says "I want games to tell me something" my answer is, very simply put "you would have to say it yourself". It is very simplified obviously, and the bold and list is to try and make it a simple read. Post-disclaiming nonsense : If it sounds put in a strange way with bulletpoints it's because I value your point of view and want you to understand what I'm trying to say. Obviously not because I think you're a moron :s

Oops, sorry I skipped that, I would gladly elaborate but I'm not sure what is it that you don't get or what is ambiguous in the point of view I propose ? Well, you can call that bunch "people" as in "the majority of humans in the "North"" that, no matter what they consume, do not give a fuck You're not being a douche there, it's pretty true in my experience that some game designers / level designers don't even have to be forced to make the same game, they would do it on their own. I feel there is no real obligation… You could make any game really and sell it to people,if it's good, it'll sell, I'm sure Mirror's Edge 2 would (I don't know if it's been cancel in the EA meltdown) oversell it's predecessor as is the case with AC2. You just need time. Well, I don't see how that stands in the way of developping better games I laughed there. They want not only money but SURE and GUARANTEED and BIG money, so no matter if the benefits are different (I feel that Braid made 2 billion times it's cost and MW2 or AC2 having huuuuge teams working on them made less in terms of profitability but I don't have solid numbers on that) Or they are the leftovers from 2 for some Nope, not fun in game's definition The most accepted in the theory fields I work with is An activity that is Free as in chosen Separated from space and time Uncertain, the issue is not knowable in advance Improductive Ruled Fictional

Well, more freedom seems like a way advocated by many to move video games forward. So removing one of the possible interactions with the world would seem kind of pointless to me. Now you would like to replace combat with another interaction ? Again, it depends on the context. Combat in video games is mechanically the action of overcoming an obstacle. First it was dots and you could launch little pixels at them, "oh man, fire on this one, faster" yes, throwing things around, even abstract things calls for a metaphor to describe it. And we came up with firing. Spacewar, one of the first video games of all time is that, you are a dot shooting dots, the metaphor is just there, it is the most evident way to overcome an animated obstacle, kill it. So what you are asking is to be subdivided in my opinion : 1)Do you want to remove combat but still eliminate things 2)What is your game about, what stands between the player and his goal ? Again, I am all but helpful but if you ask "will combats ever disappear from games" the answer is no, maybe the wave will go another way and there will be less of it but in essence, the most basic instinct of men being survival as in "killing if necessary" games will put you "in the skin" of someone "with a mission for the greater good". Oh, and a game about assassination without combat ? I'll probably be the one to call that bullshit ;P

Well, you can go either way. If you have a lot of time on your hands, please be my guest and make a game that is, as Heavy Rain is and as a lot of adventure games are, entirely context-sensitive. But, on the other hand, you could look at Farcry2, a game lead by some pretty intelligent people and ask, how much of that is context-based ? How much of what I am doing, seeing happens once in the game, and it's now. I think what we said in the other thread is pretty true, try to think of what you want players to feel, experience, go through, reflect on, but not on a literal level, just emotions, subjects that matter to you, things you would like to say to the world. Now think about how you could make them feel that, how do you feel that, in what situations, what made you think of that, how did you come up with the idea you're trying to get through ? We're now going somewhere, try and make a story around it, how would it happen, to whom. Then come back to this thread, unload all of it in a post and the combined intelligence of the idle people will tell you what they think. Because if you start by saying "how can I make an original game" I bet not many people will be able / willing to tell you how

I feel there are three behaviors towards progress: •Those who encourage it and don't mind feeling uneasy while accomplishing or trying something new. •Those who openly encourage it but would not put themselves on the line for it, some probably because they feel progress is the intelligent way to go, some because they want to pretend. •Those who try to demonstrate that progress is evil, in a sense they have a perfectly valid point to defend there, sadly most of them are complete retards. So I'd guess you could find people in the two first categories on this forum, mostly in the first one. People willing to pay (agreed, it's a small risk) for game that are trying things. In Limoges last year I was at a game theory conference and I was talking with Bernard Perron, a very smart person girl whose name I sadly don't remember and Sébastien Genvo about just that, is it better to have little personality into the character to make room for the player to narrate or is it better on the contrary to have a character with strong motives to make it easier for the player to get into the story. Both points were argued and well defended, I was on the "more player" side. According to the instanciation models of Etienne Armand Amato, either is valid as long as the lubricant between "more player" or "more game" is there (ie the Gameplay). Thank you very much.

I was thinking of saliva

That my friend is called progress. On one hand you can stay where you are and perfect and practice the things you know, on the other you can try to move forward. Most indie game designers try to move forward, that is how drawings on a wall became art, how accounting tablets became litterature and how filmed theatre became movies. On the piece itself, I would be interested to know what game you're talking about Chris Because I think that games have a different way to talk to us. My opinion is it's because you cannot think of a game as a different entity while playing, the whole Ebert reflection is about that. Games are lived through and not read about, therefore you are the narrator, the writer and in a way, the author of your playthrough. That means, when games try to talk to us, they do so during cutscenes, to talk to us through a game, one would have to consider talking to himself while designing. You would like games to "talk" to you, well they can't, they can only make you talk to yourself while playing. In that sense, even Braid failed to talk to me because it was talking and I was listening. Yes, it was books and not cutscenes, but I did not hear myself. As you are one with the narration, either the game makes you step out of it or it makes you say something you did not know was in you. For that, it'd have to be a game in which you don't care about the world as a system but are immersed in it. That is my take on things right now.

Oh my, you were talking about blood as in "essential fluids" were you knot ?

No, really, you got to use the kid to cock the gun, because the other way round would sound gross.

I don't understand, aren't guns supposed to fire bullets ?

I had an awefuly long dream tonight and it was about… drop7. Just *Pop* *pop* man, why am I even dreaming about this when I could be fighting fucking monsters and saving the wor… *pop* *pop* *zwiiiing* more of a nightmare of sorts…

I don't know much about aesthetics ('cause it's for pussies) but thematically I wouldn't call it original even if I wouldn't burn anyone for it's lack of the aforementioned quality.

You gotta use the kid to check if the gun is cocked

Nuf said, Pandemic studio (the guys making "Sabotour") are closing and being all fired. http://www.edge-online.com/news/pandemic-studios-closure-confirmed

About The Saboteur "If this game were a stereotype, it would be a drunk irish dude." - IGN.com

But letting a french taking care of the war ? you gotta be kidding, Let's bring in someone who is not a all suspect by default like…*An Irish man for instance and as at least an english speaking (as in "decent") person solve it. Now take Pariss, wait, this city sucks, let's add sniper towers everywhere, an Eiffel tower the size of the moon and dirigeables flying around in the sky at ridiculously low altitude. Oh and nazis, but not like one or two, like a billion nazis. Call of duty 2 meets GTA meets Flower (yeah, colors coming back to the world y'know…)

Like any sane man, I kept it to know when I can screw around with a client for graphic work : when he writes his emails in Comic Sans, don't waste your time on good work, it'll thrown away.

"Nazis have killed people" declares expert

Bought machinarium and finished it in 5 hours non stop, pretty rad little thing, beautiful also. Very well worth my money. Don't know about yours but check out the demo.

"Dantey!" "You will never traverse the circles of hell"