Dodo Blog

I’ve been meaning to write a post about this for a while.

Stories are fragile things. One false note can easily pull apart that carefully constructed illusion and your audience, once you’ve lost them, are lost forever.

Sometimes you can’t help but wonder what possessed someone to make such baffling story-choices. I’m going to use movies as examples here, but mostly these are issues cinema shares with narrative games, though they have problems of their own (see a previous post, or two).

It goes without saying this will be a trip to SPOILER-town… You have been warned.

INTERNAL CONSISTENCY

No matter how fantastical, every universe has rules. When you tell a story you make a deal with your audience to accept that these are the things that can happen in this place. If you break those rules, they tune out.

For example, if someone is dead, they should probably stay dead.

At the end of Pirates of the Caribbean, Captain Barbossa dies holding that apple he so would have liked to taste. This was a good death for an interesting character.

At the end of Pirates 2 he is suddenly resurrected with zero explanation, rendering his previous demise utterly meaningless. In the third film there is some vague attempt at explaining why he could be (and needed to be) brought back, while Jack (who at this point is also sort of dead) cannot be brought back the same way for entirely arbitrary reasons (but can be brought back another, more complicated way)…

You lost me.

Given that the first film featured undead skeletons, there is a certain amount of leeway granted here, but when characters that are not understood to be immortal are brought back to life with little to no justification, it rather destroys all credibility and any sense that our heroes are ever in danger…

Cause hey… they can just be resurrected, right?

Indie games have really moved into the public consciousness in the last year or two. Free from publishers and market focus-testing they offer a uniquely personal take on the interactive medium.

There is a never-ending torrent of so many wonderful games: inventive, elaborate, beautiful, smart, moving, funny and all of the above…

Some are short one-off experiences that make you think or explore something new while others you can keep coming back to… These are some favourites:

Dinorun – I never quite got over my childhood fascination with dinosaurs. Run before you go extinct!

The Art of Theft – gentlemanly stealth-platforming in 2D.

Nikujin – skill-based ninja platforming and a distinct lack of clothes.

Rescue the Beagles – strangely compelling cuteness: rescue puppies and shoot evil doctors in the face with owls.

ROM CHECK FAIL! – what would happen if all your favourite retro games had a baby.

Gish – first indie game I played and still one of the best: throw your weight around as an overly excited ball of tar.

Mount & Blade – medieval (non-fantasy) action-RPG with tactical elements. Great cavalry combat.

RunMan: Race Around the World – I’ve just started playing this so maybe it’s a little early to call it a favourite, but this game is all kinds of wonderful.

Still, only so much you can fit into one blog-post… the excellent TIGSource is your best bet for more.

I agree with this.

I’ve just started a job at Ubisoft in Paris! So I’ve been rather busy moving and all that. For obvious reasons I won’t be talking much about work here, but I should be back to regularly scheduled blogging soon…

It’s been a while since I posted a random selection of links:

A look at the progression of colour through Pixar’s UP,

Better Off Undead: a wonderful short film by Bobby Pontillas,

a short piece on subtractive game design as seen in Ico and Portal

… and stylish mockups of collectors edition game cover art.

I especially like the Donkey Kong Country and Grim Fandango ones. And Atari Tennis is pretty funny…

Great article at RPS on why so many “open world”-games fall short.

I just got an article published on Gamasutra!

Just came back from the excellent Annecy 09 animation festival, and a short stop in Paris for the AIgamedev conference, the latter marking my first attempt at public speaking as a game developer.

I was invited to participate in a panel on how animation combines with AI to create interesting character behaviour, which has been a pet-subject of mine for a long time…

I think it went well.

At Annecy, I saw Coraline (which was amazing) and a loooot of short films. Also met a bunch of cool people, both there and in Paris.

There seems to be this notion in some circles that videogames are descended exclusively from traditional board- and card games and any influence from other sources is diluting the medium at best, or frustrated novel/movie-making at worst…

If you ask me, no one source is inherently more worthy than any other to serve as inspiration for this new medium. We should draw from whatever merits exploration, whether it be the mechanics of Monopoly, or the visual spectacle and character empathy of cinema, the introspection of literature, or the spatial exploration of architecture…

Certainly interactivity is the ingredient that makes games what they are, but the conclusion that any other medium that is interactive should therefore be our one guiding light is as flawed as assuming that any medium that is also visual must be our sole inspiration.

Surely there is room for more than one school of thought?

From the Experimental Gameplay Sessions: I couldn’t make it out to GDC but I wish I could’ve seen this:

Spy Party: This game, developed by Chris Hecker (”Spore“) has a character doing suave and subtle things in a cocktail party, trying not to get spotted. One player is the spy, whose animations are a little different from everyone else’s, and who has to complete a few stealthy missions like bugging an ambassador. The other player just watches, looking for subtle animation tip-offs. They are the sniper. Their one move: to shoot the spy. The game looked like a cocktail part of characters from “The Sims.” (from MTV Multiplayer)

This is exactly the kind of thing we should be doing more of…