Cosmic Friends Forever

I'm trying to work something out in my head, and this seemed like as a good a place as any to explore it.  For my thesis I have been contemplating the role of game mechanics in narrative.  It seems obvious that any event that takes place in a videogame should impact the story within the game.  However, quite often, even in well-crafted videogames, gameplay elements are either completely irrelevant to or in open conflict with the narrative.  I've been struggling to grasp the causes of this problem, and I think perhaps the use of hit points (HP) and player character deaths in videogames can help to illuminate the issue.  Spoilers ahead for Superbrother's Sword & Sworcery EP.

The general idea with HP is that a character starts off with a particular amount of HP, and taking damage reduces their HP, when zero HP is reached, the player must start over.  In most games the characters gain more HP throughout the game.  This mechanic predates videogames, and is commonly used in videogames to provide the player with feedback.  Sometimes the HP is explicitly displayed to the player, such as in the Final Fantasy games' character statistics, and sometimes it is hidden, such as in the Uncharted games where the player's view is obscured by red vignetting when Nathan Drake loses health.  HP can also be illustrated with icons, such as The Legend of Zelda's heart containers or Sword & Sworcery's stars.

In the Legend of Zelda games HP does not conflict with the narrative, but neither does HP serve any narrative purpose.  When Link is hit, part of a heart container is emptied.  When a boss battle is completed, the player is rewarded with a new heart container which adds to the overall number of hits Link can take.  The story is actually about Link's quest to find the Triforce, so why is the collection of heart containers even included?  The heart containers serve two gameplay purposes.  One, increasing the number of hearts makes the low level enemies seem easier and allows the game designers to make later enemies harder.  This helps the player maintain a flow state.  Two, this provides the player with important feedback.  The more heart containers the player has collected, the better they are doing, and the closer to the end of the game they are.

Sword & Sworcery uses an inverted HP system in order to communicate to the player what the Scythian is going through.  The Scythian's HP is illustrated with star containers which empty when she is hit.  When all the containers are emptied, she is knocked out and the player must wake her up and start the battle over.  After each boss battle, the Scythian loses one star container.  At the end of the third session of Sword & Sworcery, I realized that there was only one more boss battle, and the Scythian had only one more star container.  Other characters had noted that the Scythian wasn't looking so good, and the Scythian herself referred to her quest as a woeful errand, but it was the game rules that made me realize what was happening to the Scythian.  If 0/1 stars is alive but damaged, then 0/0 stars must be dead.

I look back at my argument here, and it seems solid.  The rules of the game world communicate information (narrative or not) to the player.  But my writing is hollow and cold.  I've written about how I read the games, not what those readings meant.

When I saw what was happening to the Scythian, I was devastated.  Like many other players, I was inconsolable.  I walked away from the game for a month or two.  I wasn't sure that I would go back to finish it.  I wasn't sure that I wanted to finish it, if it ended the way I now expected.  When I did go back to finish the game, it was because I felt I owed it to the Scythian to see her through her woeful errand.  I felt a responsibility to a collection pixels.  That is the power of a strong narrative supported by the language videogames.

6400 Final - Recollection

Recollection from Sheri Larrimer on Vimeo.

We are now at the end of the semester.  My final project, which I have decided to call Recollection, is more or less complete.  A few of the items the player can collect are still placeholders.  I plan on replacing them with the final objects in the week or so after finals, at which point I will make the playable game available online.  Until then, there is the above video which is the deliverable for the class.  

This project began with Neil Gaiman's poem which outlines what to do if one finds oneself in a fairy tale.  I was particularly interested in the end, when the fairy tale is over, and the hero(ine) returns home to find it is now smaller somehow.  I decided to set my game in the backyard of my childhood home.  The story is based off my own memories of walking through a gap in the hedge behind my neighbor's house to get to my friend's backyard.  Along the way, the player find various objects that I remember owning; things that were important to my child-self.  With each object, the player's view changes.  When the player returns home, they will find it seems much smaller.

Other games that have provided inspiration for me include Antichamber, Gone Home, and oddly enough Assassin's Creed.  Antichamber is an excellent example of using a simplified visual style, and creating unreal spaces as a metaphor for life and thought.  Although not yet released, Gone Home is shifting the focus in first person games away from combat and towards exploration.  The story in Gone Home is told entirely through the artifacts left in the virtual space.  The player must sift through those artifacts and piece the story together themselves.  As I worked on Recollection, the game became more and more about my own process of reconstructing memories.  Although it is not all that obvious, Assassin's Creed is, in many ways, about reconstructing memories (in this case, ancestral memories).  I was particularly interested in the memory walls which cut the player off from parts of the game world.  This was one of the influences on how I chose to deal with the edges of the world in Recollection.

I hope that when I finally post the game online some of you will play it.  It is frustrating to be only able to show the documentation.  Videogames cannot be reduced to cinematic shots without a great deal of loss.

When you're born in the Bayou...

1927 - The Animals and Children took to the Streets from British Council on Vimeo.

I was initially interested in 1927's The Animals and Children took to the Streets because the animated portions have a visual style that is similar to Machinarium.  The environments are all rendered with shaky line-work, muted colors that almost look like stains, and beautifully incorrect perspective.  So, when two of my professors, and my dad and step-mom recommended I go see this play, I figured I probably should take the time to do so.  I was most certainly not disappointed.

The Animals and Children took to the Streets uses a mix of live theatrical performances and projected animation.  Mixing live theater performances with animation is not a new idea.  It is in fact a very old idea.  Many of the early animators were popular Vaudeville performers, and it was not unusual for them to include their animations with their acts.  Winsor McKay's early animation Gertie the Dinosaur was specifically animated to be part of a theatrical performance.  From what I understand, stand alone animations won out as Vaudeville began to disappear and animators realized it was more financially sound to make a film they could copy and sell rather than to do repeated live performances.  The use of projection and animation is of course, much more sophisticated now.  The mixture of performance and animation had the interesting effect of making the play seem to be somewhere between theater and narrative dance.  The actor's movements needed to be precisely timed in order to match up with the animated projections; thus the movements became dance-like.

The Animals and Children took to the Streets focuses on poverty and the systemic structures that prevent people from improving their lot in life.  The children who terrify the adults are reacting to legitimate injustices. The children know there is something wrong with their living situation, but they don't fully understand what it is or why it is.  So they do the only thing they can think of to do; they act out aggressively.  The adults in the slum known as the Bayou understand the problems that keep them in their miserable conditions, but they also understand their own powerlessness.  Agnes Eaves is the one exception.  She naively thinks that she can change the Bayou for the better, but she is not from there and does not truly understand the problems and doesn't have the power to facilitate improvement.  The Mayor arguably does have the power needed to help the people of the Bayou.  However from his point of view, the only real problem is that the children in the Bayou have yet to learn their place.  The problem with the society in The Animals and Children took to the Streets is that the people who have the power to create positive change don't care to do so, and those who do care, lack the ability to cause change. 

Near the ending of the play, the lone male protagonist stands at a cross roads.  To one side is an idealistic ending, and the other is a realistic ending.  Audience participation is called for as the protagonist contemplates his paths.  In the performance I attended, the audience cheered most loudly for the idealistic ending, but the actor took a perfect 'why bother' posture just before walking down the idealistic path then ran down the realistic path.  I suspect there is only one ending to the play.  The moment is about asking the audience to consider what they want and expect out of the story rather than actually offering a choice to the audience. 

I mentioned at the beginning of this post that the visual style of The Animals and Children Took to the Streets reminded me of the game Machinarium.  It may seem surprising, but the stories are actually quite thematically similar as well.  The main character in Machinarium is so far down on the social ladder that he is literally treated like trash (and I do mean literally - the game starts with him being thrown in the town dump).  The game itself is a find-the-object puzzle game.  The player spend the entire game scrounging around for any discarded object that can help the protagonist get the better of the three bullies who personify the social forces keeping him powerless.  However the endings differ between Machinarium and The Animals and Children Took to the Streets. Machinarium has a happy and unsatisfying ending.  It feels as though Amanita Design didn't really know how to end the game, and as a result the ending was unrealistic.  As much as I may have preferred an idealistic ending in The Animals and Children Took to the Streets, the realistic ending was obviously, and unfortunately, more realistic.

Ohio Shorts

My short animation, Tale Type 510A, has been selected to be shown at Ohio Shorts. The screening will be at 7PM, Saturday April 20th at the Wexner Center.  I'm looking forward to seeing all the great work included in the show, especially the film produced as part of a new class at CCAD, where I completed my undergraduate studies.

Jobs and Opportunities

Many of the opportunities for conferences/festivals center around the Game Developer's Conference (GDC), which takes place in March.  Since we are supposed to focus on up-coming opportunities for this assignment,  there are a limited number of game-related conferences I can write about.  However there are a few such as the following:

IndieCade - an "International Festival of Independent Games" IndieCade takes place in early October.  The deadline for the call for submissions is May 31st.  In addition to the showcased games, IndieCade features workshops, master classes, keynotes and more.

TWO5SIX - gaming culture group Kill Screen has recently organized their first conference.  The one-day conference is "devoted to the spaces between games, play, interaction and creativity."  Although it is not always convenient to make a trip down to New York for one day, a live stream of the conference is available to people who purchase a livestream ticket.


Twofivesix: A Videogame Arts + Culture Conference from Kill Screen on Vimeo.

As for distribution of my work, the obvious answer is the internet.  It is fairly easy to get short-form games out into the world.  The ideal situation for someone to play a videogame is on their home computer, which makes online distribution perfect, particularly if the designer is not all that concerned with earning money.  Steam Greenlight makes the steam online distribution platform more available to independent developers, although it seems to mainly be appropriate for fairly well-established designers with a motivated fan-base.  iOS and Android market places offer another avenue for game designers, although designers will need to be able to navigate the approval processes and the curation of mobile markets does limit the issues a game can address on mobile platforms.

Narrative weaknesses in videogame endings

Writing about intrinsic and extrinsic ludus rules as they relate to the ending of Prince of Persia, has caused me to think about how the typical structure of videogames weakens some aspects of storytelling.  Ludus games typically present clear cut ending conditions to the player at or near the beginning of the game.  This is of course a fair way to structure non-narrative games, particularly between two opposing players.  Imagine how difficult it would be to play Chess if you didn't know that the objective is to achieve checkmate.  However, in a narrative videogame, these explicitly stated extrinsic ludus rules have a tendency to give away the ending.

I'm sure absolutely no one is shocked to learn that at the end of just about every game, the big bad is defeated and peace returns to the place where the game is set.  Some of the details may vary, but generally speaking the player sets out to defeat something, and they do.  Game designer and philosopher Chris Bateman tweeted recently:

"the essence of both games and stories is not conflict but uncertainty.  Conflict is only one kind of uncertainty, albeit a powerful one."

Although videogames are rife with conflict, we have mostly managed to remove the uncertainty from that conflict.   Typical non-digital games involve conflict between two or more players of which only one can win.  The heart of that experience, the thing that keeps us interested in the game, is the uncertainty of who will win.  However when we create a single player narrative videogame, that uncertainty is diminished by the fact that game designers do not make impossible games, and player failure is generally understood to not count in any meaningful sense.  The videogame may be very hard, and it may take many tries for the player to win, but the player can be reasonably certain that it is possible to win.  This may be one reason why the player vs. player modes in First Person Shooters tend to be more popular than the campaign story modes.  The PvP gameplay reintroduces the possibility of actual permanent failure, which means the game now has uncertainty.

It may be fair to ask at this point if games just aren't a good medium for story-telling.  Stories need to have endings, and games with endings need to have extrinsic ludus rules.  Stories are considered predictable and poorly told if the ending is too obvious ahead of time, while games are unfair if players don't know what the end-goal is.  This may be one of the reasons why some of the best games tend to tell fairy-tale-like stories.  We all know how fairy-tales end, but after hundreds of years we're still telling them.  It is possible for a story to have an appeal beyond uncertainty.

Amanita Design's Machinarium

Having said that, there are some ways in which games can navigate the conflict between narrative's need for uncertainty and the ludic need for clear objectives.  One method is to not explicitly state end goals.  Typically this works well with 2D games where players generally understand that a major intrinsic ludus rule is to move from one screen to the next. Curiosity about where the game is going can lead the player to take each next step, even when they don't know the overall trajectory of the game.  However there is a danger that too little reveal will cause the ending to feel abrupt.  Machinarium unfortunately runs into this problem (although is well worth playing).  Superbrothers Sword & Sworcery: EP manages to strike a better balance between alluding to the end goal and avoiding explicit statements regarding it.

Another way game designers can deal with this conflict is to have a clear and obvious end goal, but to obscure the narrative meaning of that goal.  Both Dear Esther and Journey start by visually defining the end goal as a spatial location, but neither videogame explains up front why the player is going there or what it means to get there.  It is only by playing through the game that the player will unravel the meaning of the clearly defined end goal.

Ludus Rules in Prince of Persia

I've recently read a paper titled Rules, gameplay, and narratives in video games* by Chee Sian Ang that breaks down the types of rules that a game can have into two categories: ludus and paidea.  Ludus rules establish winners and losers in a game, whereas paidea rules establish game actions.  Games themselves are also divided into two categories with the same names; ludus games define winners and losers while paidea games do not.  As I have written about before, I'm not terribly fond of the thinking that a videogame must be winnable in order to be a videogame, but that actually doesn't mean I'm only or even primarily interested in paidea games.  If we shift our definition of ludus games from a game that has winners and/or losers to one that has an ending (a point past which the game cannot be played), we can expand our view of ludus games while still making a meaningful distinction between ludus and paidea games.  The Sims is a well known paidea game because there are no ending scenarios imposed by the game designers.  This makes it fundamentally different from Dear Esther, which has an ending, but doesn't have win conditions.

In the paper, Ang further breaks down ludus rules into intrinsic ludus rules which indirectly relate to winning the game, and extrinsic ludus rules which establish the win conditions.  Again, this still works if we replace win conditions with ending conditions.  The 2008 reboot of Prince of Persia (confusingly titled simply Prince of Persia) uses intrinsic and extrinsic ludus rules to create an interesting and unexpected ending.  There will be spoilers ahead, if you care about that sort of thing.  Although really, I'm talking about a game that came out five years ago; if you were going to play it, you should have done so by now.

Concept art from Ubisoft's 2008 Prince of Persia

The majority of Prince of Persia's story is pretty standard 3D platformer fare.  The story is loosely based off Zoroastrianism's mythos.  The god of darkness, Ahriman, has been sealed in a tree by his brother, the god of light, Ormazd.  At the start of the game, the seal on Ahriman has been weakened, and Elika, the last guardian of the tree, sets out to heal sacred spaces in order to fix the seal on Ahriman.  The player takes the role of the Prince, who does not actually seem to be a prince in this version.  The Prince happens across the tree and decides to help Elika in her quest.  A darkness has fallen over the land, and we must bring it back to life.  We have seen this story many, many times before.

Generally speaking, a game of this type has as it's extrinsic ludus rule: defeat (sometimes seal) the evil force.  This is pretty much always the overall end goal for the game, quite often this end goal is explicitly stated.  True to form, the player is explicitly told that they must assist in sealing Ahriman back in his tree, and the game progresses pretty much as expected.  However, an interesting thing happens after the final boss battle. Ahriman is safely sealed away, and the player has won, but the game doesn't seem to be over.  "Seal Ahriman" turns out to be an intrinsic ludus rule; it's something the player needs to do in order to create the conditions needed to make fulfilling the extrinisic ludus rule possible.  The game actually ends when the player releases the seals on the temple.  This ending does not feel like a win.  Releasing the seal involves betraying Elika, the character whom you've been assisting.  It also means undoing the work you have just spent most of the game doing.

Screenshot of the Prince fighting one of Ahriman's servants

When Prince of Persia was released, there was some debate over whether or not the game designers were giving players a choice of endings.  The part of the game immediately after the final boss battle does have the feel of an ending.  Credits roll while the player walks out of the temple, and there's nothing obvious to do.  This acts as a kind of Snicket warning.  The player can turn off the game and pretend the story ended with Ahriman sealed safely away, just as the reader can put down The Bad Beginning when it looks like the Series of Unfortunate Events isn't going to end all that poorly after all.  The audience's rejection of a story's ending and refusal to participate further in the story telling is not the same thing as the audience taking control of the authored story, even when the audience has the author's encouragement.

*Published in Simulation & Gaming, 37, no. 3 (2006).

Teri Rueb - Artist Visit

Teri Rueb gave a presentation here at ACCAD last week.  Rueb creates interactive soundscapes using GPS headsets.  In her work the landscape becomes the interface for the interactivity.

In order to experience Rueb's work, participants must visit particular sites, and wander while wearing headphones.  While wandering, the participant will encounter a sound zone.  In Drift, the sounds played are randomly generated and the triggering zones drift in and out with the tides along the site.

During the talk something about the role of the headphones bothered me.  Wearing headphones in public is a common occurrence these days, however it is typically a way for people to cut themselves off from their surroundings, particularly the surrounding people.  Rueb's work seems to be about trying to heighten the experience of place and culture, but it is doing so by using technology which cuts the individual off from their surroundings.  Perhaps for this reason I felt Rueb's Elsewhere : Anderswo was the most interesting.  Because the piece itself is about alienation, the meaning of wearing headphones in public does not conflict with the meaning of the work.

Rueb's work and the technology used have evolved together over the years.  In earlier projects, Rueb had control over the hardware (GPS/computer and headphones), but as GPS devices have become more ubiquitous, the work has shifted to apps which participants can download and use with their own various devices.  This shift has meant Rueb faces a loss of control over how participants experience her work.  She expressed ambivalence regarding how participants interact with apps as opposed to the earlier devices.  She was particularly concerned about participant's fickle attentions when using an app on a multi-function device.

In game design we have an idea called the magic circle, which denotes the in-game world as distinct from the rest of the world.  The magic circle is more of a mindset than an actual space.  It can be identified in aspects of life other than games, particularly within rituals.  When Rueb talked about the mindset she wants to inspire in her participants, I believe she was referring to a form of the magic circle.  While it's true that taking phone calls and such does mean leaving the magic circle, people tend to leave and re-enter the magic circle easily.  I can't help but to think of how easily players move between in-character and out-of-character dialogue when playing games like Dungeons and Dragons.

One of the problems with discussing Rueb's work here, is that I have no first-hand experience with it.  In her talk, she was somewhat apologetic that we could only see her documentation and not experience the work itself.  This is a problem that I have been struggling with quite a lot lately.  The documentation of an interactive work is always a pale shadow of the work itself, and yet we often need to advocate for our work with only the documentation.  In the videogame community a system has been worked out where designers release a trailer to get people interested, then a free demo to allow them to experience a bit of the game without too much commitment, and that will hopefully allow your audience to find your game.  This, however, does not necessarily work well with the academic structure.  Unfortunately, the more typical method of documentation for installations doesn't particularly make sense for documenting videogames.

Columbus Moving Image Art Review

On Friday I attended the 14th Columbus Moving Image Art Review. The review showcases moving image works created by local filmmakers. The works ranged from abstract to narrative. The artists and work were as follows:

Matt Swift -- City Lights 
Lindsay LaPointe -- Rainboxes 
Vita Berezina-Blackburn -- Walker in the Field 
Nikki Swift -- City Walks -- 22 -- Boston 
Sean McHenry -- My Quiet Day 
Eric Homan -- Life-Lapse 2013 
Kevin Harkness -- Self Portrait Liz Roberts -- Flesh Suitcase 
Shannon McLoon - Bodyscape 
Franz Ross & Chris Wittum -- Spaceman 
Eric Hanson -- Writer & Red 
Andrew Ina -- Pastime 

The first two pieces featured hypnotic visuals set to music. City Lights wove together abstracted footage of the city to create patterns of light. Rainboxes explored the rhythm of falling rain.

Vita Berezina-Blackburn's piece, Walker in the Field, was especially interesting to me because I am currently taking a motion capture class taught by the artist.  Walker in the Field shows a ghostly figure walking among plant-like forms that represent places the walker has been and will be.  It is an interesting and thoughtful visualization of how the body moves through space.  

Several of the short pieces explored the rhythms and beauty in mundane life.  Life-Lapse 2013 by Eric Homan (who, incidentally, was my first 3D animation teacher) consists of time-lapse footage of every-day scenes from his life, including domestic scenes and his working life as a filmmaker and a teacher.  By compressing the day to day experience of life into a few minutes, we are invited to contemplate the actions we take over and over again in our own lives.  

Flesh Suitcase and Bodyscape were both meditations on the human body as object.  Flesh Suitcase offered many uncomfortable images.  As a vegetarian, I found the ending scene, which focused on human feet stepping on raw ground meat, to be particularly disquieting.  Bodyscape took a more glorifying stance to the human body.  This imagery in this film depicted the human body as an object for aesthetic contemplation.

Eric Hanson's Writer & Red explored the creative impulses that drive storytellers and the distractions which hinder them.  The Writer finds himself haunted by a story character he has created in his mind, but has not given form to in his writing.  Although the Writer is working towards his goal of being a creator, he has allowed the work he feels he should be doing to distract him from the work he wants to be doing.  The story is about the Writer reconnecting with his original reasons for being a writer and beginning the work he truly believes in.  

Tale Type 510A

Tale Type 510A from Sheri Larrimer on Vimeo.

The title of my animation refers to the Aarne-Thompson-Uther folktale type associated with Cinderella.  Some of the dialogue is quoted from D.L. Ashliman's translation of the Cinderella variation collected by the brothers Grimm.  Much of my retelling of Cinderella is based on the German version.  This means that my audience may be unfamiliar with some aspects of the story due to the fact that most American audiences are more familiar with Charles Perrault's French variation and Cinderella stories based off that version.  In the battle sequence, I reference the French version by showing two possible summons Cinderella can use, the pigeons and the more familiar Fairy-Godmother.  However, the Fairy-Godmother is grayed out, and a negative sound plays to show the "player" is trying to select it but cannot.  Including the grayed out Fairy-Godmother option serves as a nod to both the multiple variations of folktales and the potential for variations in a single videogame narrative.

In my animation I make many references to videogames from the 1990s.  The character name screen is modeled off of the Final Fantasy games, and most of the third person scenes are referencing the Final Fantasy games, Dragon Warrior, and The Legend of Zelda.  Even the odd text break in the step-mother's dialogue is an intentional nod to 1990s videogames which were often translated from Japanese to English by people who were either not paying attention to text breaks or could do nothing about awkward text breaks due to technical limitations.  The lentil sorting scene is designed to directly reference the battle sequences in Dragon Warrior.  I am interested in how game mechanics can mapped to unusual meanings, and here I have mapped the heavily text based battle mechanics from Dragon Warrior onto a dull domestic task from the Cinderella story.

The design of my characters has a decidedly more contemporary influence.  The character style is inspired by the 8-bit work of the artist known as Superbrothers.  While I was contemplating the use of gradients in Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP to denote the supernatural, I decided to break the illusion of a true 8-bit game by depicting Cinderella's mother as ghost which fades smoothly into and out of existence (an impossibility with 1990s videogame technology).

The style of the simulated gameplay changes for the ball sequence.  At this point the "game" becomes a side-scroller with a timer which counts up to Midnight.  With this re-imagining, the prince becomes an obstacle for the imagined player.  The prince slows the player down thus potentially causing her to run out of time.  In this animation, the imagined player also makes the mistake of picking up the dropped shoe, which disrupts the typical Cinderella narrative.  One of the issues we frequently confront when dealing with narrative in videogames is the problem of what to do when the player does something that ruins the sequence of events in the story.  One option is to simply give the player a game over screen and make them try again, which is the point at which I end this animation.  Careful viewers may notice that the cursor in the game over screen lingers on quit before going back to save and quit.  I wanted that action to show that the imagined player is considering leaving the game and never coming back (which would make saving the game unimportant), but ultimately decides that she will return to the saved game.  Although the animation does not end well for Cinderella, the actions on the menu screen indicate that the player intends return and bring about the happily ever after we all expect.

For the music I used three songs off of the 8-bit album Risistor Anthems created by Eric Skiff.  The album has been released under the creative commons attribution license.  The three songs are Digital Native, Arpanauts, and Come and Find Me.  I generated the sound effects using as3sfxr, an online 8-bit and 16-bit sound generator.

Project 2 Proposal

For my second project in this class, I propose to create an interactive piece.  This will be a videogame focused on giving the player a sense of exploration and of leaving the ordinary.

In my post about Superbrother's Sword and Sworcery EP, I talked about the idea of center/periphery in Legends.  One of the reasons I am fascinated by this idea is that the center/periphery structure is similar to the structure of certain types of games, specifically 3rd Person Adventure games (i.e. The Legend of Zelda) and Role Playing games (i.e. the Final Fantasy games).  Quite often these games begin the main character's home, and frequently in the character's bedroom.  Some event or another prompts the character to leave home and venture in to the world.  The farther from home the main character travels, the more he or she encounters strange and dangerous creatures.  At the end of the game the main character usually returns home and resolve whatever prompted his or her journey.  I would like to explore this journey into the unfamiliar in videogames.

I found inspiration for this project from Neil Gaiman's poem Instructions.  The poem lays out what to do if you find yourself in a fairy tale.  It mentions several ways to travel away from the familiar world to another world, and in the end, you can return home only to find it has changed.  I plan on setting my project in a space that is familiar to me: the backyard in my childhood home.  My backyard had a pathway through some overgrowth.  There was just enough room for a child to climb under it, and it lead to my friend's house.  Our parents did not like us to go through this path, in large part because it meant cutting through a neighbor's garden.  But we did travel through it quite often, and it always felt like a daring journey.  In my videogame I would like this path to lead to a strange place with its own odd rules.

I am also inspired by the First Person Puzzle game Antichamber.  This game similarly has a safe beginning space, from which the player ventures into a bizarre world governed by unique logic.  Throughout the game the player frequently returns to the beginning space, which is changed slightly by what the player uncovered in the main part of the game.

The Problem of the Combat Metaphor

It would be a bit odd to talk about reading books or watching films in terms of combat.  For example, at least in our society, we never use phrases like "I finally beat that book" or "I just won that new movie" unless we are being literal (perhaps we won a book in a contest).  However it is not especially odd to describe our experiences with videogames in these terms.  To prove this claim, I did a quick experiment   A google search for "I beat the Legend of Zelda" returns 105,000 results, whereas a search for "I beat Life of Pi" returns zero results.  In case that was simply too high brow of a film, I also did a search for "I beat Taken 2", which also returned nothing.

So, why does it matter that we talk about videogames as though they are combat?  For my thesis research I've been reading Metaphors We Live By.  In this book, Lakoff discusses how our every-day metaphors shape our perceptions by emphasizing certain aspects of a concept and deemphasizing others.  When we consider videogames in terms of combat we emphasize the competitive aspects of gaming, and privilege difficulty over artistry and mechanical challenge over emotional or intellectual stimulation.  This limits our imaginations in regards to what videogames are and can be.

What's more, there are a growing number of games that do not fit the combat metaphor.  Dear Esther is an especially good example of a game where the combat metaphor fails us, and as a result we don't know what to make of it.  Both supporters and detractors are unsure if Dear Esther is a game or not.  There is no challenge of any kind, and the end does not evoke the feelings of triumph we associate with winning.

If we can manage to put aside our VIDEOGAMES ARE COMBAT metaphor for a moment and look at Dear Esther with fresh eyes we may see that the style of interaction in Dear Esther is the same as interactions in first person shooter videogames.  First person shooter interactions typically consist of the following: 1. first person viewpoint (looking through the player character's eyes), 2. an inability to directly manipulate the environment, 3. inability to climb in the environment except for possibly ladders, 4. small and largely unimportant jumping, 5. narration from either disembodied recordings or nearby nonplayer characters, and of course 6. Shooting.  There are occasionally other mechanics such as taking cover or crouching, but many first person shooters do not include those.  Dear Esther contains the majority of these interactions.  I contend that Dear Esther is in fact a videogame in the tradition of first person shooters.  If we weren't so hung up on the fact that players do not shoot anything over the course of the game, more of us would see the parallels and understand that a videogame can be more than our combat metaphor suggests.

The Witness

I've been following the production blog for The Witness.  This morning I was surprised and happy to see that they've finally released a trailer.  On the production blog it is suggested to watch the trailer fullscreen in HD, and I would also recommend that.  This game is exceedingly pretty. You'll want to see every pixel that you can.

Supernatural Pixels

Superbrother's Sword and Sworcery EP

Superbrother's Sword and Sworcery EP deals heavily with the supernatural. We are introduced to the game world by a Jungian Archetype who explains that we are entering a mythopoetic experiment. We guide the Scythian on her woeful errand through a strange land. The game makes it very clear that the player is not the Scythian, but rather a divine influence over her. We accept that we are to the Scythian as the Fates are to us. The jagged pixelated graphics come to indicate all that is Earthly and natural.

One of my classes this semester is focused on legends. A concept we have been discussing is that of center/periphery. The center is your home, and the farther into the periphery you go the more likely you are to encounter the supernatural, and the stranger things get. Sword and Sworcery uses this idea of center/periphery in two ways. The fact that the Scythian is referred to by where she is from (Scythia) and not her name (which we never learn) indicates that she has already journeyed far away from her center. Within the game itself there is also a center/periphery relationship between where the Caucus mountain people live, and Mingi Taw where the Scythian must venture to complete her errand.

In Mingi Taw the Scythian encounters a deathless spectre known as the Gogolithic Mass. The Gogolithic Mass is drawn as a smooth black gradient with blocky pixel hands and horned skull. The smooth gradient looks out of place in the otherwise 8-bit world, but it is hardly the only high resolution graphic in the game. The sky, and especially the moon are rendered with gradients, as are the Sylvan Sprites that the Scythian releases.  Even the shine on the Scythian's sword (shown above) uses a gradient. At first I did not much care for this mix of pixel graphics and gradients, but as I played the game I came to realize that just as the pixel graphics represent the natural, the gradients represent the supernatural. Let us then consider the Gogolithic Mass.  The deathless spectre is a liminal being, neither completely natural nor fully supernatural. The Gogolithic Mass haunts the Scythian throughout her errand, and serves as a constant reminder of the threshold between the Earthly and the supernatural through which she travels.

I've been reassessing my relationship to the supernatural lately. I was brought up in a secular household and have always held scientific reasoning as a value. I generally don't believe in ghosts or Bigfoot (then again, who am I to contradict Jane Goodall), but I am beginning to think that the literal existence of the supernatural is entirely beside the point. Believing in supernatural beings has an importance beyond objective scientifically provable reality. There is a truth to Bigfoot, even if he's not coming to a zoo near you.

Ghost in the Game

This weekend I went through a pile of papers that had been collecting on my desk.  Among the old bills and flyers I found a program note from Evan Meaney's Epilogue: The Well of Representation that I saw at the Wexner Center's the Box last semester.  Epilogue was probably the only piece I've seen in the Box that both drew an audience and that the audience seemed to actually enjoy.  People were even dragging their friends in to see it; usually telling them that "it's like a game".

Given that the Wexner Center describes Epilogue as elegiac, and the film does center on death and decay, it may seem a bit odd that the audience seemed to have fun watching it.  I believe the enjoyment comes from the fact that it is very much like a game, and has a dark humor element to it.  The program note compares the film to the classic adventure game The Legend of Zelda, but it actually bears a closer resemblance to Japanese role playing games such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior.  At one point the "player" character dies, and the "game" is restarted.  The "game" restarts with the character rising as a ghost at his funeral, although we would expect the character to simply restart at the point before death.  The film plays with our expectations of how a game should progress.


A Better Ghost [interview w/ Evan Meaney] from Nick Briz on Vimeo.

At several points the "game" crashes, and we spend what feels like a rather long time watching the screen glitch out.  I suspect these glitches are meant to be the heart of the work, but it never became clear to me why the glitches matter.  They tended to be tedious, and felt oddly staged.  In interviews Meaney likens his work with glitches to seances.  Seances are, in fact, staged events created through the use of explainable techniques.  To an extent, the contrivance spoils the mystery.  Glitches can be interesting.  The click and drag on the floor glitch from one of my first interactive experiments was the most interesting aspect of that project.   However, something about actively creating glitches and overly dwelling on them, feels false to me.  This falseness is similar to seances which present stage magician's tricks as supernatural.

When I was watching Epilogue, I couldn't shake the sense that I was watching someone play an interesting game.  The problem with that is that a game is always more interesting to play than it is to watch.  I'm finding it difficult to be motivated about my current project despite my interest in the style and subject matter.  I'm afraid I feel the same way about my project as I felt about Epilogue.  It could be a good game; unfortunately it's a film.

Pixel Art & Animatic

I've begun creating the pixel sprites for the animation, and reading about <a href="http://www.squidoo.com/how-to-make-8-bit-music">chiptune (8-bit) music</a>.  I'm not terribly musically inclined, so I'm not sure if I'm going to make music for the film or just use sound effects.  Either way I would like to create some custom audio.

For the pixel art I'm focusing on getting the major character sprites and basic outlines for the backgrounds.  I'm not sure at this point if any of the scenes are going to fully animate.  Although I've created pixel art before, I don't have a lot of experience with pixel animations.  Creating the actual animations could easily become very time consuming.  For most of the scenes limited animation will be appropriate, however the fireplace scene and a few others would be more interesting with full animation.  I have put together a preliminary animatic; currently it has no sound.

I've been debating how to deal with moving sprites around the scene.  AfterEffects does sliding animation well, however the sprites move in smaller increments than the enlarged pixels.  This results in an inconsistency in the pixel art style.  This inconsistency doesn't necessarily bother me, however an appropriated balance will need to be struck between the limitations of traditional pixel art and the freedoms of modern high resolution imagery.  Superbrothers Sword & Sworcery EP strikes a similar balance by combining pixel art with smooth gradients.

Project 1 Proposal

Concept:
Tale type 510a - Cinderella told through motion graphics.

Narrative Arc:
Although the details of the story of Cinderella vary, each version is recognizable as the same story.  Below is a quote detailing the plot that Cinderella stories share, with some notes on places were variation exists:

"A young woman is mistreated by her stepmother and stepsisters, forced to work as their servant, and usually called by a name associated with ashes or dirty labor. When the stepsisters and the stepmother are invited to a ball (or leave to attend church), they assign an impossible task to Cinderella to prevent her attendance. Usually animals complete the task for her while she receives beautiful clothes from a fairy godmother or other magical helper. She attends the ball (or church) incognito where the prince falls in love with her. She must leave early before her magical accoutrements disappear or her identity is discovered. The same occurs a second and third time with Cinderella losing a shoe as she runs away the third night. The prince acquires the shoe and declares he will wed the woman it fits. Everyone unsuccessfully tries the shoe, including the stepsisters who mangle their feet trying to make it fit, until Cinderella is finally discovered and compelled to try on the shoe. When it fits, she and the prince are married." - SurLaLune Fairy Tales: History of Cinderella

In a talk on the shape of stories, Kurt Vonnegut graphed out the basic Cinderella story, shown below:

The shape of the Cinderella Story - adapted from Kurt Vonnegut's "The Shape of Stories" talk.

The narrative arc I am proposing will stay fairly close to the German variation on Cinderella.  The story will begin with introducing Cinderella's family situation, the middle will consist of her visit to the ball, and the story will climax with the search for the woman who fits the shoe.

Technique:
The animation will be created in a pixel style.  Pixel style graphics are associated with the early days of computer and video games when the technology could only support extremely low resolution images.  Although the technological limitation has been lifted, pixel styles persist in part due to the nostalgic appeal of pixelated images.  Because contemporary pixel artists do not have the same technical limits as they did in the past, pixel art has changed, and can be combined with other styles as in Superbrothers' Sword and Sworcery EP.

Part of the appeal of fairy tales is also based in nostalgia.  However, when a fairy tale is re-told it is inevitably changed to appeal to contemporary audiences.  The story may be based in the past, but it is also of the present day.  This dual existence is mirrored by the pixel technique which is based in the past, and important to present.

Sketches/Images:

Storyboard:

Model for this project:  

DOT MATRIX REVOLUTION from superbrothers on Vimeo.

I've also been looking at Lotte Reiniger's Cinderella, although it is not particularly informing the style of the project I am proposing.

Timetable:
Week 1:

• Animatic 
• First draft of sound 
• Begin creating sprites

Week 2:

• Create essential sprites and simplified backgrounds

Week 3:

• 2nd draft animatic using sprites and simplified backgrounds 
• Identify if any additional sprites or backgrounds are needed

Week 4:

• Finalize sound
• Created any additionally needed sprite animations

Week 5:

• Complete final animation using final sprites/backgrounds

Distribution or Exhibition:
The internet/Vimeo
Ohio Shorts Festival