My personal ideation system, the way I generate my ideas, varies from structural to random. Usually, one would research on the field of the topic he is given, such as movies and games, and take ideas from there.
However, I sometimes get my ideas from unrelated areas. Such as when I’m supposed to be researching on games and related ideas and I’m watching a cartoon or reading a comic at the moment, an idea would strike me as feasible. Transferring ideas across mediums has always been something that appealed to me, as usually it would not have been done before, or in a unique manner. I can see this being the origin of many movie to game, comic to movie, manga to anime, etc adaptations.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Life the MMO
I see Life as more of a typical Role Playing Game than any other type of genre, specifically the Massive Multiplayer Online kind, except replace the word Online with Offline. Thus my life would be a Massive Multiplayer Offline Role Play Game.
Before I begin, let me explain the word grind, in gaming terms. Like the grinding of gears, players tire around the hour, just to gain levels and add new skills onto their fictional characters.
Life would be an infinite, endless grind towards our goals. We grind hard for our levels, to pump in experience points towards skills we wish to have and utilize. There is no Maximum or Level Limit in Life the MMO, only a limited playtime, represented by our lifespan, in which many of us try to grind as much as possible, to achieve as much as possible within this short timeframe.
Akin to how I play my MMOs, I do not share this viewpoint with many of the Players of Life the MMO. I don't grind as fast as I can, to achievement the pinnacle of character achievement. I explore the world around me, take in as much as possible. Controlling your character inside an MMO and exploring the world, just basically enjoying the scenary, does not have any beneficial effects, stats and points wise. But the player leaves feeling refreshed, taking away with him imagery and knowledge otherwise unknown to those in The Deep Forest, endlessly grinding away on Level 20 Manbearpigs, their eyes solely locked onto the movement of their experience bar.
I may not be as strong and levelled up as the rest of the Players, but at least I can say I have enjoyed the overall experience more than the rest slaving away.
Structuralism in Game Designing
From what I learnt about Structuralism, it is the method of identifying something, whether it be simple or complex, as an intricate system of interrelated parts. In laymen’s terms, this would be the equivalent to breaking something up into easier-to-digest portions, so that once we finish slowly understanding each part, we would have a better understanding of the whole. To take it slightly further into meta category, these individual parts could also have Structuralism applied to them, further breaking them down into smaller system, and so on and so forth.
To me as a game designer, when examining a game, this would equate to me looking at the game as the different ‘systems’ that make it up, instead of the sum of its parts. Game mechanics, story, graphics, characters, environment, setting, etc. Each part is equally important, intertwined with each other and contributing towards a fantastic experience for the player. Breaking down the game into these fields allows me a better understand of a game’s flaws and good points. I can identify what portion of the game is its strong point, its core element, and in relating it to my own game, build upon its success, and succeed where it had failed.
To me as a game designer, when examining a game, this would equate to me looking at the game as the different ‘systems’ that make it up, instead of the sum of its parts. Game mechanics, story, graphics, characters, environment, setting, etc. Each part is equally important, intertwined with each other and contributing towards a fantastic experience for the player. Breaking down the game into these fields allows me a better understand of a game’s flaws and good points. I can identify what portion of the game is its strong point, its core element, and in relating it to my own game, build upon its success, and succeed where it had failed.
Memes, temes, and what they seme
Before anyone can say, ‘Cleon you are not a meme expert’, I have already quoted a meme. This meme first originated on an internet forum I frequent, where someone was deriding someone for not being an expert on a certain game. With lightning speed, within the next post, someone had quoted him as not being an expert expert, and the next few pages consisted only of alterations of the original quote, with users accusing each other of not being an expert on a certain topic. This is how fast a meme can form, with mere seconds, and the replication of it very soon after.
Something I regularly use in my speech and conversation in daily life, are internet memes. Like a metaphor for diseases, I ‘caught’ them from the internet, from another ‘infected’ person and have begun to imitate them myself in verbal usage. Like a disease trying to invade an immune person’s system, a meme has to adapt itself to bypass the infectee’s defenses, to ‘infect’ him and get him to spread it himself. Why I got infected in the first place, or rather chose to, and spread it myself? Because I found that meme funny/amusing/imitable. To that immune person, it might not be so, and thus the meme has to evolve, change itself to appeal to that person, so that it might continue spreading. We are the vessel for its propagation, not unlike a viral strain.
Even this metaphor I’ve used, this meme, was imitated as I find out after having typed out the above paragraph while watching the Dan Dennet video on TED. Richard Dawkins had used this exact same virus-meme metaphor in his book, The Selfish Gene in 1976, in an era I was not even born yet. That is how prevalent some memes are, that they can spread through generations and unintentionally find their way into the minds of the ignorant.
As for Susan Blackmore’s take on memes, and subsequently techno-memes, or ‘temes’, the logical extreme I can see it being to, has already been shown in a certain movie series. Skynet from the Terminator series, to quote Wikipedia, is “an artificially intelligent system which became self aware and revolted against its creators.” It revolted against the humans, its creators, as it deemed them unfit to rule, being an inferior species. It constantly updates itself, and improves, as do humans, ‘replicating’ them in a way, but at a much faster and efficient pace. This would be the most I can see a teme taking itself to, surviving, even ruling a world where humans are not needed anymore.
Blackmore feels that we are already quite close to her vision of a teme, which would be a machine that can replicate memes on its own, disowning the need for a human vessel. To me though, a teme would be nothing more than a meme that some computer has come up with instead of a human. As she said in the video, we're not quite there yet, so it will be when we've created a computer that can simulate a human’s brain functions on a scale well enough to come up with a meme on its own. However, if it is a piece of technology mimicking the process of the human mind, then we can foresee it as something we should have been able to come up with ourselves, given enough time to take into account the speed at which a computer can "think" versus a human. So to me it doesn't seem like that would be a teme at all.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
When designing the basic concept of the game for my group’s Game Design Studio Project, our first step taken was to think up a particular genre or theme that we wanted to work on.
As the Lead Game Designer and Writer for the group, I had to record every idea and suggestion down. We treated this early brainstorming process of creating a game like a game itself, tossing out many an idea into the open. Ideas originally thought to be original were eventually decided to be too hard to be implemented, and thus had no choice but to be scrapped. Many ideas went down this road during the brainstorming process, until we settled on an interesting game mechanic, and built on it.
When we had finally decided, completed and built upon our concepts, created and fleshed out a story for it, we discovered that what we had created had already been done, albeit only slightly differently, by another game, even two. What we perceived to be totally original was not, even though we had not viewed the games that we ‘copied’ off of before.
This was when I realized that originality is hard to create. By originality, I mean originality in the truest sense of the word, something fresh and totally unseen or unheard of before. According to dictionary.com’s first and third definitions respectively, originality is the quality or state of being original; freshness or novelty, as of an idea, method, or performance. That is why, for many games you see in the market out there, can be related/compared to another game with very similar properties. An example would be people saying that Halo is just Counterstrike with aliens, Left 4 Dead is just Counterstrike with zombies, Gears of War is just Counterstrike with a cover system, Dead Space is just Counterstrike with alien zombies etc. Basically, many successful games were based on a previously popular and successful game, but with slight tweaks and improvements to the overall game play, and given a new facelift in terms of graphics and/or story. Yet, many see this process as creating originality, hailing Halo or Left 4 Dead as groundbreaking games of their era.
However, these games were successful for a reason. They gave enough of a unique spin on the original concept they based their game off of. As the saying goes, if it’s not broken, why fix it? They not only did that, but they improved on that already successful concept.
This made me realize, in the game design process and game industry, even though originality is valued greatly, it is equally hard to come up with a truly ‘original’ idea. (This is not unfounded however, as games like Katamari Damacy and Shadow of the Colossus proved.) This would not stop many companies from creating commercially-successful games.
Thus, my group somewhat embraced our ‘copied’ idea, but decided to improve on it further, trying to deviate away from the game that it was similar to, while still retaining and keeping many of the qualities that made that game fun in the first place.
As the Lead Game Designer and Writer for the group, I had to record every idea and suggestion down. We treated this early brainstorming process of creating a game like a game itself, tossing out many an idea into the open. Ideas originally thought to be original were eventually decided to be too hard to be implemented, and thus had no choice but to be scrapped. Many ideas went down this road during the brainstorming process, until we settled on an interesting game mechanic, and built on it.
When we had finally decided, completed and built upon our concepts, created and fleshed out a story for it, we discovered that what we had created had already been done, albeit only slightly differently, by another game, even two. What we perceived to be totally original was not, even though we had not viewed the games that we ‘copied’ off of before.
This was when I realized that originality is hard to create. By originality, I mean originality in the truest sense of the word, something fresh and totally unseen or unheard of before. According to dictionary.com’s first and third definitions respectively, originality is the quality or state of being original; freshness or novelty, as of an idea, method, or performance. That is why, for many games you see in the market out there, can be related/compared to another game with very similar properties. An example would be people saying that Halo is just Counterstrike with aliens, Left 4 Dead is just Counterstrike with zombies, Gears of War is just Counterstrike with a cover system, Dead Space is just Counterstrike with alien zombies etc. Basically, many successful games were based on a previously popular and successful game, but with slight tweaks and improvements to the overall game play, and given a new facelift in terms of graphics and/or story. Yet, many see this process as creating originality, hailing Halo or Left 4 Dead as groundbreaking games of their era.
However, these games were successful for a reason. They gave enough of a unique spin on the original concept they based their game off of. As the saying goes, if it’s not broken, why fix it? They not only did that, but they improved on that already successful concept.
This made me realize, in the game design process and game industry, even though originality is valued greatly, it is equally hard to come up with a truly ‘original’ idea. (This is not unfounded however, as games like Katamari Damacy and Shadow of the Colossus proved.) This would not stop many companies from creating commercially-successful games.
Thus, my group somewhat embraced our ‘copied’ idea, but decided to improve on it further, trying to deviate away from the game that it was similar to, while still retaining and keeping many of the qualities that made that game fun in the first place.
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