Pets

So my friend Stephanie and I were discussing about why Pacman doesn't cry. There's no rules for him to cry. It kinda reminds me a bit of that Tom Hanks line
"There's no crying in baseball"
Anyways, it's true. There's no rules set up by the game that allows you to cry. Try as you may, scream yell, jump up and down, kick the TV, Pacman will not shed a single tear. He'll just sit there, until the ghosts gobble him up.

This proves my point really, games are all about rules. Games are all about what you can and can't do, and the enjoyment really comes out of the exploration of the rules. Pacman works because the rules are finely tuned to allow an addictively fun experience.

I guess in this way, I'm a bit of a ludologist. However, I've been reading a bit of Hamlet on the Holodeck. Do not dismiss narativists.

Games aren't story, that's for sure. But stories can be very important. Why? Stories give MEANING to the game, the rules, the action that takes place. Stories create the environment, which gives the player a reason to affect this environment.

This came up a couple weeks ago when I went to Eat N'Park with my friend Bill. We were talking about the game I'm currently working on, Bandit's Adventure, and how the story and the gameplay doesn't fit.

This led to a discussion about how the story should always fit the game, not vice versa. Now I'm not sure ALWAYS is appropriate, but I believe there's some truth in the matter.

This led me to come up with the meaning of story in a game. I thought I was original, but looking back at some of my notes from the GDC, it seems that Nate Fox from Sly Cooper planted the seed in my head, because his ideas are almost verbatim what I just said.

Anyways, I think anyone who's interested in the Narrativists vs. Ludologist issue read some Hamlet on the Holodeck. I think it shows a great middle ground between the two.

So back to the Pacman issue, it led me to think about how it would be cool if emotions were the primary verbs. So I thought up of an idea for a game, there are many games out there where you have to take care of a pet, but what about a game where you ARE the pet, and the computer has to take care of you? think about it.

Watch, in two years, there's going to be a game that comes out like that and sues me for my idea.

the museum

I went to the art museum this week with my friend Huiming. Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum is really nice, and one of the perks of being a student at the University of Pittsburgh, is that the admission is free.

I've been to the museum often in my time here in Pittsburgh, but given my increasing shift towards my inquisitiveness of new art forms, this time around it was more engaging. I think part of it was that there was a particular purpose for our visit. I'm not speaking about the romantic purpose behind me wanting to spend time with her, but rather the reason why she chose the museum.

She had an assignment for an art history class, that revolved around a sort of "treasure hunt" in the museum. She was given a set of descriptions for particular works of art, and she had to find them and write about them. I do very well when given a purpose, and surprised myself greatly when I began to explain a lot about each particular artwork. Given that I am American, and she is Chinese, I have a greater level of familiarity behind the culture and mythology of European art, but I also believe my open-mindedness concerning learning subjects other than computer-related really came in handy.

The provocation of this knowledge, however, deepened the effect that exposure to the art forms gave to me. I started feeling a connection with the artists, envisioning myself in their place, trying to understand what exactly the artist was trying to say, trying to give, with their particular representation of their world.

I will tie this in with the book I am currently reading. Janet Murray's "Hamlet on the Holodeck." It came highly recommended from a colleague of mine. I kept pushing off the reading of it, protesting about "not having enough time." But I find that it gives me an opportunity to step away from my obligations for a short time, and explore more of my interests without too much time involvement (as opposed to game programming).

The unfortunate thing about reading this book, is that it seems my ideas are not that original. I assure you, a lot of the ideas I have come up with, I developed without much outside influence. But I guess it's not a contest of who got there first, and it's encouraging to read that there are others who believe the same way I do.

I agree with the fact that games are still in their incubatory form. There is a constant fight between the limits that technology places on the form, and the developers utilizing new technology to create greater limits. I understand that there are some who would disagree with my viewpoint of games as in incubatory state. But this mainly stems from the easy comparison of games to film.

However, take a walk through your local art museum and look at the progression of painting. The technology relatively stayed the same, but the techniques and practices, evolved over thousands of years. In comparisons, yes, games are relatively new.

Costikan would disagree. And to a point, I contradict myself as well. Games are more immersed in our being than language. Animals don't write poems, but the do play games. He believes that games are the cultural elaboration of play. I agree.

Wait a minute, you just said that games are new?

Ok, let me put it in this light. Games have been around probably since the existence of man. I wrote in a paper before that play is a necessary part of development, it builds our temporal and spatial reasoning. Competition and cooperation are ingrained into our psyche, and sports become a smaller scale of wars and civilizations. The majority of games before the computer games, usually took the form of either sports, cards, or board games. But each has a core element of restricted play, and the restrictions and representations create the myriad of each of these games that exist today.

But when the inevitable idea of using the computer, which is the most fluid machine created by man, to allow the playing of games, this was nothing short of a revolution. The combinations of representation and restrictions now gained the power to reach outstanding proportions, giving the game's creators and players much more freedom and power. Seriously, I wish I could make an analogy of the jump, but nothing comes to mind.

After Huiming and I finished up the last artwork, we talked a bit. She's a PhD student in Computer Science, so I am a bit interested in why she chose the particular path. Then it came my turn to speak. Of course, I spoke a lot about my ideas, the power inherent in games to create the next art form. The potential power to effect people in positive ways, to enact social change and better understanding of our world. I tried to keep it a bit low key, because I know to the uninitiated, I can sound a bit mad. I talked about how I like the art museum because it lets me think more about representation. She commented on how games are much like art because of the increasingly amazing power of graphics. To this I replied my theory about games as a language, and how the graphics become the adjective and adverbs.

"The power of games lies in their ability to be a language. The graphics, sound, etc, are the adjectives and adverbs. They specify on how things happen and what they look like, they describe the action and the subject. But the power lies in the sentence. If I say the fox walks across a room, the fact that the fox is brown or black, and the room is big or small, adds to the sentence, but in reality, the sentence is about foxes and rooms.

Let me say it this way. In a game, I give you a noun. Let's say it is Pacman. It doesn't matter how well Pacman is described, it is still a noun that boils down to the representation of you, the participant, in some form. I give you a set of verbs, Up, Down, Left, Right. That is now my language. You can't laugh, you can't cry."

To this, she replied "Why not?"

This has stuck with me, for the entire week, replying over and over in my mind.

Why can't Pacman cry?