Praxis

I confirm there is no difference between the Frenc...

2010-12-04T12:43:15.001-05:00

I confirm there is no difference between the French and English meanings of the term "interaction". Your analize is pretty good ! I'm surprised to see that someone interprets my game with so much details ! Thanks for that.

Grown frustrated with Blogger? Mmmhh, unless Blogg...

2010-04-29T14:13:23.325-04:00

Grown frustrated with Blogger? Mmmhh, unless Blogger changed a whole lot in the last few years, I can't see why.
I myself had a Blogger blog for a year and have updated a Wordpress blog for the last two years, and I have to say, wordpress.com blogs lack some key features, namely the ability to use html inside blogposts and direct access to the site's css. Granted, the commenting system in Blogger is absolutely horrible no matter the template and if google finds that you (accidentaly or not) link to an unsafe site then say goodbye to your blog. Yes, that last part happenned to me and no ammount of (polite) bitching from my part got me my blog back. Or even a "Sorry" or "Ooops" email for that matter.

Oh, and wordpress.com's dashboard is infinitely better.

...

Now that I think about it, yeah, I can see why you might be fed up with Blogger, though you might get fed up with wordpress.com too eventually, but for different reasons.

Frankly, Façade is the only exception that comes t...

2010-04-24T04:50:57.209-04:00

Frankly, Façade is the only exception that comes to mind, and that wasn't exactly a game were you could have fluid conversations. Or conversations that went anywhere 50% of the time for that matter.

If you look at the issue as a data structure problem, then one could come up with a graph structure for a conversation, considering stats such as charm and the like to make options available or not... but then again, something like that is a gargantuan task when considering only text-based conversations. I can't even fathom how expensive a voice-acted conversation system like this would be.

At the end of the day, you're only going to spend that much amount of money and effort into something that is fundamental to the game... so you'd need a game based around conversations for that to happen. And last time I checked, there are only a handful games that do that, and most of them are Interactive Fiction.

Well, now, if we try to simplify the problem, or rather, to tackle it in a whole different way, you could do something like this:
1 - The player character can do only 4 or 5 possible phrases/gestures through the whole game. Those are the only things he can say.
2 - "Conversations" are basically an exchange of gestures between two or more characters.
3 - The "conversation" interface is not separated from the rest of the game. If the player wants to say something, even if there's nobody there, he will be able to do so.

And that's it. Sure, you can have than 4 or 5 gestures, but that then turns into an interfase issue: You can't assign a gesture to one button, you now have to have a menu of gestures.

But anyway, that's something that I've always wanted to do: abstracting the process of conversation and then making it the core mechanic of a game. However, this system is only feasible in a somewhat short game.... bah, I guess it depends on the polish, with the right gestures and characters, then maybe one could get away with it without boring the player by the half-way point.
[/rambling]

In my experience it leads to further divide contex...

2010-04-19T21:19:55.947-04:00

In my experience it leads to further divide context and gameplay on the part of the player: They either like the "story", or the "gameplay", but never both. They're playing just to get to the next cutscene (any Final Fantasy game of the last decade) or they're completely disregarding the context of their actions (any Mario game).

I do wonder if this general divide also contributes to the whole "It's just a game" mentality.

Haha, a little pretentious is always welcome here,...

2010-04-19T20:03:04.842-04:00

Haha, a little pretentious is always welcome here, friend! I like the point about the non-mechanical aspects of a game providing a context that gives the mechanics meaning; I'll have to think about that more. What happens when a game's mechanics and context aren't compatible - when the context is just tacked on, as you say? Does that lead players to make weird interpretations about the meaning of a game, or just to view it as meaningless?

(Mmmhh, I think I'm going to repost this comme...

2010-04-19T01:20:52.677-04:00

(Mmmhh, I think I'm going to repost this comment on my blog, I think I haven't talked about this subject in there so far.)

I think that the question of "Are games art?" can be translated into "Do mechanics comunicate meaning in and off themselves?" since that's what art is supposed to be about as far as I know: to comunicate a message, an emotion, an idea through a medium. And that second question I can answer with a resounding "YES". Granted, mechanics need context in order to gain the power to communicate something, or in other words, in order to be art. Some might question if this context is all the message the player captures, and that's true most of the time since typical game design revolves around making the mechanics fun and then attaching a story to them as if it were something you can just add to it and then pretend that it all makes sense/tries to express something profound.
But that doesn't mean that there aren't any games that fuse together mechanics and context (gameplay and story, if you will) well enough to be considered better than the sum of it's parts. Passage, Braid and The Marriage are the first games that come to mind when thinking about mechanics interwoven with the context, one feeding off of the other in a simbiotic dance that welcomes player input and makes the whole experience a story told by the designer and the player in equal parts.
[/mmhh, sorry if that came off as a little bit pretentious]