Really what you seem to be saying is that European classical music before the Romantic era, uninfluenced by anything else, is less complex rhythmically. The increased complexity of counterpoint, both in terms of harmony and rhythm, as well as the decreased reliance on formal structure, influence of non-European music, etc. changes the way that later compositions are analyzed.

The classical recording world is interesting from the perspective of the sheer number of remasters that end up being done, over time, from the original masters (typically analog masters). The audio engineering approaches vary quite dramatically, particularly when noise-reduction techniques are also applied. I end up having, in my collection, multiple versions of the same historic recordings, as a result. (Performances end up being prized for their interpretive qualities, I think; ideally the sonics will be there, as well, but for collectors, performance tends to trump recording quality.)

I still need to read that site in its entirety… interesting stuff.

[...] Last, Raph points out “Think Like a Player”, a bunch of design tips for Interactive Fiction that are also illuminating for those making commercial endeavors. • • • [...]

The atoms don’t change if you’re talking about the actions available to players, it’s just that some player input (like moving the crosshair up and down) becomes redundant. It’s still a possible input by the player, but it’s of little or no use due to the change in the graphical presentation. So the only change is the visualisation of the Q3A information in this example.

Quite often a videogame is criticised for lacking a coherent graphical presentation. As I said before, the graphics of a game consist of both informative and decorative graphics, and some graphics meet both definitions, especially if adding to immersion that might suggest particular action a la J.J. Gibson’s Affordance Theory http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/affordances-and-design.html and http://www.tech.purdue.edu/cg/courses/cgt112/lectures/gibson_affordance_theory.htm

I’m talking about game design existing as theory that needs to be applied in the form of code. I agree with you, and people like Chris Hecker and Chris Crawford have also mentioned game designers should at least be aware of coding issues so their enthusiasm for a particular ground-breaking type of gameplay can be somewhat grounded by what’s possible in terms of technology. However, much of the literature out there to do with game design doesn’t suggest a bridge between a particular set of rules for what a game is, and how those rules can be applied as algorithms. It’s up to the “multi-class” designer-programmers to create that bridge for better game design discourse. You’ve attempted to do it symbolically with your “Grammar of Gameplay”, and I’m attempting to do it conceptually in terms of an object-oriented framework or game-graphic mapping.

1) I would argue that by making that change to Quake, you are definitely changing a LOT more than just the information conveyed to players. The actual physical movements you do are altered; the challenges involved in shooting a target all change; the nature of navigation itself changes. If you do an atomic diagram of the game, most of the lower-level actions will be different. Don’t get too caught up in the information change (which is there, don’t get me wrong)–you’re changing things on multiple axes at once.

2) Tufte (and info visualization in general) is generally interested in maximum transparency; a game is not. Nor is all relevant info for making decisions the sole useful graphic content in games; presentation also carries the metaphor. Of course games these days pay too much attention to presentation — and simultaneously, they often pay not enough attention too. A typical flaw is good graphics tech and poor art direction.

3) Lastly, statements like

game design is theoretical anyway, until it’s realised as code. The only limitations are the imagination of the designer, the ability of the programmer, and how they communicate — how readily the design becomes the artifact.

are why it’s good for game designers to learn to program — because I have to say this statement is just wrong. Game design almost never operates purely in the realm of theory, any more than any other craft operates within the realm of theory. The limitations of code are very real, for all that they are virtual, and it’s not all driven by the limitations of the programmer.

I wont hesitate to agree with the statement that lack of dynamic contrast makes for a less stimulating musical experience. A basic problem with modern music is however the length of the experience when consumed through the medium which promote them. (TV and Radio.)

The image of the perfect mix as a “wall of sound” has probably gotten somewhat out of hand, but with radio and TV double-compressing everything to fit their own audio profile a nice and dynamic mix often gets compressed to swing backward unless mastered to a non-dynamic volume level.

I’m not saying a top-down version of Q3A is better, just different, and this difference can be expressed in terms of existing concepts in Mathematical Game Theory. Something like perfect/imperfect information is not high-level either — it’s one of the fundamentals of Game Theory, as illustrated by the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma example.

An aside: anyone reading “game theory” and thinking “ludology” — we’re talking about Mathematical Game Theory, not the critique of videogames from a socialogical/philosophical perspective. I agree with Chris Crawford that ludology is “a body of insightful work that avoids mentioning anything of utility to game designers” — see http://www.igda.org/columns/ivorytower/ivory_May04.php

I don’t regard all decorative graphics as extraneous, but in terms of Tufte’s data-ink principle, most decorative graphics aren’t necessary for player decisions as they don’t inform the player of anything pertaining to their next move. I believe decorative graphics are necessary because they assist with immersion, and perhaps in that case they are conducive to players being more focussed when making gameplay decisions, but again, it’s oft-cried that videogames have become graphical showcases and the gameplay side of things has been somewhat drowned. As Doug Church said, genre has become the new shorthand for game design. Genre that’s heavily determined by decorative graphics. Remember how the old classic videogames gave you enough information using only coloured squares? The rest of the game was a visualisation — but then it mostly resided in the player’s mind instead of the screen.

As for thinking virtual resources are infinite is a mistake, and that videogames only theoretically take away limitations, I’d point out that game design is theoretical anyway, until it’s realised as code. The only limitations are the imagination of the designer, the ability of the programmer, and how they communicate — how readily the design becomes the artifact. That’s the path I’m on, developing a framework for videogame design that is an extension of Game Theory and Visualisation. The glue, and ingredient that will hopefully enable the transition from design to code are the Design Patterns of Gamma et al. Anyway, back to atoms and such, I think they’re good, great, wonderful, but perhaps a focus on a distinction between game and graphic might be of some benefit.

When analyzing a piece of classical music, you generally look for a few things — the harmonic progression and the basic rhythmic statement of the piece. Something like the famous opening of Beethoven’s 9th, for example, has a rhythmic unit that is varied in length and tempo, but is still recognizable throughout the first movement. Compared to the rhythms found in be-bop, it’s pretty basic. There doesn’t tend to be much use of polyrhythms, for example, until later. IMHO, anyway. YMMV.

I think the audio engineer would point out that while much of the dynamic contrast is determined by the orchestration, a lot of it is also in the recording and the conducting, in the case of classical. That’s probably part of why certain recordings of familiar pieces are more prized than others… when you read his articles, he’s emphasizing dynamic contrast on levels most listeners don’t even think about, and beyond the usual layman’s (or even musician’s) use of the term “dynamics,” discussing stuff like RMS, transient 40hz impacts, and natural overtones.

Very interesting article on music, though. I’m struck by the fact that the high level of dynamic contrast really characterizes one classical composer that practically everyone likes, even if they “don’t like classical music” — Beethoven. His music’s practically defined by it. Much the same could be said of the sturm-und-drang composers — a good chunk of Haydn and some Mozart, say.

“Taste” is interestingly subjective. People love the Three Tenors recordings, for instance, even though they’re largely in awful taste, and the superstar tenors involved would almost certainly not get away with singing like that in any situation with a conductor in control.

I think it’s all about mental stimuli without exaustion. We enjoy background complexity that we can focus on for short periods, but we like to have simplicity and repetition as a crutch to lean on. Simple rules, things you can learn to follow without pressure and complex designs to unfold in order to keep you preoccupied.

I think your Quake analogy is flawed, because upon analyzing the atoms that make up the top-down versus the 1st person version, you find that the core challenges are significantly different. By changing the perspective, you have done far more than change the access to information, you have also changed the action of firing from “clicking on a point in 2d space” to “orienting a vector of force along a plan perpendicular to view.” Similarly, the basic actions for movement are likewise different.

For your analogy to hold up, you’d have to propose as aspect of graphical change that does not affect the core atoms. Changing imperfect to perfect information could be accomplished by being able to see through walls, for example. Of course, in my atoms, available topology is intrinsic to an atom, so you’d be changing that in my model, thus still effecting an atomic change… Hmm.

As regards info-vis, one of the classic examples is the tic-tac-toe game seen as magic square puzzle… obviously, the metaphor is important to the ultimate player experience, as you point out. But we also know that players see through metaphor and focus in the end on the mechanics. The magic square example becomes problematic because it is bad info-vis — it imposes an additional metaphor on top of a space that really didn’t need it.

But I also think it’s a mistake to regard the decorative borders as being extraneous. These too have impact on the user/player, and there’s plenty to draw on in the field of graphic design that can help inform the design of these types of elements.

Any developer will tell you that regarding physical resources as infinite in the process of making a videogame is a mistake too. Videogames only theoretically take away those limitations — they’re still a lot of work, and the fact that you can manifest a large array of what you might want via code (not, by a long stretch, “everything” that you might want) does not mean that you actually have infinite materials to interface with players.