Month: April 2013

It’s frustrating to see something in your mind without being able to express it properly.

I tweeted that melodies are like the QTEs of music and now I’m in trouble, trying to explain how or from what point of view.

I thought about this analogy because melodies are traditionally what people listening to music, play with. By playing with the music while listening to it I mean letting your mind decipher and enjoy it. Usually, melody is the first thing we get our brains on. People need to be able to connect to a song and for non musicians, non rhythmic people it happens with the melody (and yes, it’s totally a social construct from Great Westernia; melody isn’t that big in Africa for instance).

So, playing with the melody. You just have to follow a series of tones (hence the QTE reference). It’s the easiest way to make that music playing your own. It’s like you are creating a path at the same time that the engine -the body of the music, chords, rhythm, texture- creates this space for you.

If you can harmonize over music instead of following the lead, it means that you virtualize and play in a wider space than when singing a melody. Same way, if you can improvise notes in between a soft melody, it’s more interesting and playful than exclusively follow even a complex series of notes. Same with rhythm that you have to feel and keep, a slightly more complex task than following a melody.

So I thought about melody as a series of QTE, kind of a cool thing to do on top of all the rest of the music’s mechanics. I heard that it’s a game in bars and it’s called karaoke.

With music like jazz though, where there’s virtually no melody, creating one is no QTE anymore.

I’m interested in expression, freedom and creating a space for them. God I’m a sucker for those.

Speaking of racism,

that’s what i find so fucking offensive about bioshock infinite, is that it makes black people props in a storyline in which white people get to revise white history through all kinds of fanciful sci fi wizardry in order to make themselves feel better while STILL excluding and marginalizing black people, and we’re supposed to be happy about it.

Fuck no, we’re not. Great article, you can feel the anger at the end.

To see people like Cliff Bleszinski claim it to be “true art” really goes to show how much the violent, racist oppression of other people sidelined for the sake of white-centric science fiction is nothing but entertainment to the white-dominated games subculture.

(via Jeff Kunzler)

It’s so embarrassing. Maybe it’s anecdotal but making music for games, I’m never saying the letters “R&B” because culturally I’ve seen white people go nuts and angry just by saying those words, like saying “rock” would make you think that this entire genre fucking sucks to oblivion and that really, you’re right. Meanwhile J-pop -popular in the games subculture- is Asian R&B but then, it’s different.

A shame.

Regardless of racism, Bioshock has flaws even in its core mechanics as Jonathan describes it perfectly:

You need to read the next one from bottom to top, though sorry.

How do you call a situation where a game is full of flaws but is widely acclaimed as what the game industry can really do? Shit.

Jaw-dropping graphics don’t fucking cut it and never will. And you game journalists I don’t even, ugh.

Speaking of players,

Well, they don’t disappoint.

Everything kind of started with Raph’s letter to Leigh, but it’s a debate that’s been on for a while. What games are. Robert Yang answered some stuff and then Tadhg Kelly wrote some stuff and by stuff I mean high intellectual shit with strong arguments in favor of “both parties”. And then it blew up on Twitter, I can’t find the storify, whatever.

My first feeling is that it’s funny how we can’t be satisfy with loose notions. It’s OK if we just have a vague definition of what games are, let’s just make them. Or like Ian Bogost said ask ourselves what they can do, what they’re good at, what hasn’t been done with them.

But I’m avoiding the debate this way though.

I don’t care about labels but I certainly enjoyed Raph’s work dissecting in a very accessible way “some” of the things that matter with games. Eye-opening, like having a microscope and see atoms of fun.

I personally love systems and simulations and feel that people need more of that, that is what I kind of want to bring to the table, and it’s totally connected to the kind of life I had. It’s pretty simple, at the end.

Little story: I played Anna’s Triad game. The theme is fresh. The sound is great, it’s original whimsical and cute. I’m playing, failing over and over. But it’s a game, it’s a system with rules.

To win, I stripped the game off its graphics and mentally brute force positions while in the shower. Somehow the story I could imagine about these three characters when I was moving them around was blocking me from pure puzzle solving. Anyway, I had already enjoyed the game before winning.

What does it say? I don’t know that was my take on it, some people will hate it some will find it challenging. Sometimes the challenge itself will not matter.

Players will always enjoy any kind of (nicely done) games, don’t worry.

Once again, I wasn’t there. I don’t know when it will happen but I hope it will one day.

Of course, it’s becoming very predictable now. I haven’t even covered it last year. I feel like we’re avoiding the same issues, making the same mistakes and pushing the same “realistic” goal over and over. It was the last game design challenge and I hope it will reborn somewhere else, it was very inspiring. /sad face

It looks like the industry is now paying attention to more personal and small projects -thanks Minecraft- which is good but obvious as this is where the most exciting things are coming from since 1845. Indie doesn’t mean anything now, that’s good too. Names, people, faces, regardless of your contract or platform where you release on, that’s much better.

A lot of discussion about free to play but nothing changed: sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I think developers shouldn’t focus so much on it. If they can afford to make a free to play game fine but to me it looks like you need to eat too. I want to educate people on how the small-transaction-between-you-and-me thing is the fairest business, make them learn that it’s worth it to help me out making this awesome shit. Really on the Chris Hecker wagon on this one.

I’m concerned about the total lack of noise around the app store problem and censorship. It’s amazing how “brand loyalty” can block people from opening their mouths. Imagine Microsoft leading the store paradigm, censoring games. OMFG the GDC would have been all about leaving the platform. It is once again the kind of stuff where I see how immature we are.

The problem at the end is that we’re barely starting to benefit from digital distribution and we’re already giving all its power to middle men. It’s not that distribution is everything but yes, it kind of is business-wise. We have this window to keep things in control and this window is closing up.

Layoffs en masse were not in the conversation either like it’s not connected to what’s going on, like if there was a barrier between big publishers and developers (which doesn’t exist, it’s the same people going in and out and now more out than in). People are still amazed at how the AAA business doesn’t work anymore, when it’s not news. Gotta connect the dots, yo.

Oh game development frustration, you are a bitch.

I had demos.

As a result, I learned to play games a bit differently. Being limited so severely meant that I began thinking of games as smaller, bite-sized experiences—miniature worlds to poke and prod until I’d seen everything they had to offer. As I played, over and over and over yet again, I got better. Satisfaction came from mastery over a situation—from becoming so good with the tools at my disposal that any situation became a cakewalk—rather than constant newness or endless repetition. Discovery and exploration were all-important, but instead of discovering new abilities while exploring new maps, I discovered new ways to tackle old challenges. I’d try to do things in ways the designers had never intended.

This is me, pretty much. I played hundreds of demos in the 90s and it definitely helped me get a sense of taste that I think, you don’t really get as well by playing much less games for a much longer time. Testing new things, new gameplay, all the time.

I don’t much like difficulty. I don’t really see the point. If I fail repeatedly, I get bored. Sure, I might beat a section one time after a dozen attempts, but it’s not as if I want to go back, and it’s rare that the difficulty actually helped me become a better player.

I could almost write a full post called “Dark Souls, you guys” with people LOVING its difficulty. To me spending dozens of hours of painful enjoyment is like doing crack all night and being like “that shit ain’t so bad after all”. Of course everything you spend time on is going to feel valuable, but like the author I get bored if I fail repeatedly because the designer made it this way. I have always questioned their decisions.

So the fact that we design games this way -remember, that was to make money through arcades- always has been a problem to me. The sweet spot for the perfectly balanced challenge is so rare and so personal. The technology that allows following of your play style, raising the challenges you want is going to become huge, critical tech.

This is where games are so close to music and that between what you want from it, the difficulty of entering it and what it actually does to you is different for everyone. Fascinating. Hard.