Friday, March 9, 2012
Game Project
Your second project is an original game, which can be based on the fairy or folk tale you've been working with for your interactive fiction project, or something new.
Make a game with one of the recommended programs, such as GameSalad, Stencyl, Scratch, or one of the others on the lists of resources. You could use your fairy tale as a basis, or take an element from one of the games we played in class as a starting point (but you cannot make a GameSalad version of the board game). Consider the formal and dramatic game elements and system dynamics covered in the chapters 3,4, & 5 of the Game Design Workshop as you design your game (every game will not include every possible element).
Your goal is to make a playable game.
Your project will also have a written component in which you connect theory and practice. In the first paragraph, state the "X" of your game. Then in the rest of the 1-2 well-written pages, focus on analysis (posing and answering how and why questions, and considering the signficance or greater meaning, rather than describing or summarizing), and discuss how your game illustrates or confounds (or however it relates to) at least one concept from one of the readings. Suggestion: Discuss your game in terms of Roger Caillois's categories of games, and also consider agency as the third axis, like in my 3D model that revises Caillois's chart. Where would your game belong on the play rubric? Why and what is the significance of its position there?
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Games, Film, 3D Environments: Where Aesthetics Meet and Diverge
Games, Film, 3D Environments: Where Aesthetics Meet and Diverge
From film techniques in games, as so eloquently illustrated by Chris Solis in his analysis of Super Mario 64 to the very different kinds of camera angles and spectatorship that can occur in games, it is instructive to explore these two cultural forms in relationship to each other, and to consider how they have been mutually informing, first with film's influence on games, and now with games' influence on film. We also can include the human-computer interface.
Opening shot of Welles's Touch of Evil that Solis discusses in his blog post:
Solis writes, "So why do we introduce the camera before we introduce the main character? Simply the camera is more important then Mario in this title." Does Welles's film also introduce the camera before the character?
How has this evolved in games? In film? Why?
What does it mean to be able to navigate 3D space? To be able to control the camera? To split camera point of view and the character that you control?
In this frame from my film, Avatar with a Kino-Eye, made with machinima--animation captured in real time in a virtual world or other 3D game environment--the top and bottom shots show the two characters' points of view, with the scripted eye moving around to show where one of them is looking.
It is a visualization, a dramatization, of visionary Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov's 1923 ideas about the "kino-eye" (cinema-eye):
As the camera has become ubiquitous in everyday life, we've seen people using the "kino-eye" more and more as another way they can see (and remember, and communicate). With the advent of the virtual camera in 3D environments, the filmmaker or the player has unprecedented control, and the camera can go even farther afield than Vertov ever imagined as he exulted in the possibilities in the early 1920s:The kino-eye lives and moves in time and space; it gathers and records impression in a manner wholly different from that of the human eye. The position of our bodies while observing our perception of a certain number of features of a visual phenomenon in a given instant are by no means obligatory limitations for the camera, which, since it is perfected, perceives more and better.
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