[...] Hmmm…http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/02/16/living-game-worlds-2006-will-wrights-keynote/ [...]

[...] Raph covers Will Wright’s speech at a conference. I love the subtext to Will Wright’s speeches: if you haven’t noticed, he more or less skips anything he knows inside and out. He’ll go into great detail on a lot of interesting things, but as soon as he comes to a concept he’s already applied on a mass scale, he just says a few quick sentences. I like that: it says he’s doing this as much for himself as for anyone else.Anyhow, I think that having different ways of looking at game design is very beneficial. However, in the end, looking at games in terms of cinema, car racing, biology, or stage magic is going to be replaced with looking at games as games. After all, cinema was first looked at as photography or thrill rides. It wasn’t until the idea of cinematic timing came in and turned cinema into its own art.Looking at games in terms of other types of systems is fine. But, in the end, games are games. They have a unique methodology. And the true challenge is not to figure out what they are most like, but what piece of them is unlike anything else. Then, master that piece.The problem with that is that we’re calling lots of things “games”. Real-world car racing is a game. Gambling on yak fights is a game. Seeing how long you can hop on one leg is a game.Similarly, I make quite a lot of games. 95% of them are not computer games! They are role-playing games, or card games, or board games, or anything else under the sun. Do all of these “games” have one, connecting thing which isn’t shared in other systems?Originally, I wrote a long essay about the various things that it could be, but that took up a lot of space. Let me spill it for you: it isn’t interactivity. It isn’t “fun”. It isn’t complex systems. It’s weighted feedback loops.All games, from the stock market to yak racing to poker all have feedback loops. But more than that, these are loops with high-grain rewards. You can win or lose in a wide variety of intensities. “Oh, man, Wonder Yak lost by just a spittle’s length! I was so close!”The stock market, by this definition, is a game. You can win or lose in a wide variety of ways and intensities.But it’s only a game if you’re playing on those rewards. Many people who have been playing the market for a long time start to get jaded. They set other rewards, such as “continue making at least 12%”. The feedback is no longer “won by 11.3%” or “lost by 2.9%”, it’s now often reduced to “won” or “lost”. That’s not enough granularity. That feedback is too simple.Similarly, driving is a complex feedback loop, but there’s no real granularity. There’s any number of “lose” intensities, from “you made that guy honk” to “you crashed into a yak-racing arena”. However, there’s no “win” intensities. If you do “good enough”, you do good enough. Not enough feedback!At the heart of every good game is a beautifully reactive reward system stapled to a feedback loop. First person shooters are excessively good at this, with a multi-axis set of reward/penalties. Like health. Yeah, you can run out of health and lose. But more often, taking a hit of any kind lowers your health only somewhat. You can use that as a measure of your success so far.All good games have these kinds of clear, high-grain feedback.They don’t need “goals”. They don’t even need to make sense. The things that set games apart from every other kind of system is that weighted feedback loop.And I’ll tell you more about it sometime soon. Or, at least, what I think about it. [...]

NPR, or non-photorealistic rendering, has been fairly prevalent in the past few years, according to a classmate’s “book” report, meaning that there is no truly good reason to represent photorealistically.

The graphics have to be good, but they don’t have to look like real life. Those are two entirely different metrics that are often conflated.

Games aren’t there yet. But it’s much more expensive and difficult to reach photoreal in realtime than in a movie.

It’s a commonly held opinion that games will increasingly pursue “non-traditional rendering,” as the push to photoreal makes making games harder. The first time that started coming up a lot, we got cel shading.

What Will was saying was that photorealism is an attempt to represent the external appearance of things as accurately as possible. But once painters mastered realism, they started playing with the formal qualities of art, and exploring ways of conveying internal qualities, and not just external ones. They developed other forms of painting that moved past realism, and therefore past straight representation.

Or, at least, that’s how the story goes.

http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_zero_gravity_pen.htm

Like they say, pity it isn’t true. It would be the very epitome of poor government spending, but I guess it’s just not that easy. =P

I’d obviously be interested to know what people think about that.

I had to wrap my mind around what it meant to be a “chair-equivalent” first, but once that settled reasonably well, a card game using a standard deck (which I presume you mean) isn’t bad. But even dropping the “standard deck” portion might not lose too much, either. See:

http://www.dvorakgame.co.uk/

However, as a study of Art History (my wife is an artist with an MFA and my BA was going to be Art History at one time), I’m a little curious as to how photorealism to abstraction translates into building games?

I’ve made myself out to be a noob before, so I won’t argue when I say this idea has me a little off balance. I have to admit I haven’t had time to read everything here, but this struck me as odd:

Games tend to be externally representational right now…

I’m a little skeptical on this comment. Before I comment further, can you expand just a bit on what this means? If not, just call me a noob

How about a piece on why I see so many great ideas (from many sources), but so few great games. What goes wrong in translation from idea to game?

Modern games have the same problem as blockbuster movies. So many things have to go right to have a great movie. Only one or two things have to go wrong to have a terrible movie even if everything else went right. (To pick a random example: Ocean’s Twelve). Both require large, interdisciplinary teams. Both are trying to create an immersive experience for the player (or viewer). And lots of things can break immersion. A boring movie is a bad movie, and a boring game is a bad game.

Say Hollywood releases a couple movies a week. Every week I look and see if any of them look good, but there’s only been a handful of movies since Christmas that looked like they *might* be any good. Over 75% of them I could tell at a glance would be bad. To confirm my guess I usually check their rating at rottentomatoes.com. Most of the movies that looked bad to me got ratings below 50%, meaning they got generally negative reviews from over half the critics whose reviews were counted! So its not just me.

Why does Hollywood spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year making downright bad movies? Because people pay for (some of) them anyway. Maybe that’s why we have so many sequels of sequels of FPSes lining the shelves at gamestop. A more interesting question is how can Hollywood line up a star-studded cast, pay them each millions, hire successful writer and director, and then end up with a bad script, bad plot, bad dialogue? It happens so often, and sometimes even great star performances can’t overcome this. Similarly, many games with great technical execution, great Shiny graphics and so on, are just boring. Or not fun to play. Or have a weak story or weak characterization. Players won’t make an emotional investment in the characters. Something is missing, and despite all the things the team got right, the game can’t rise above the things they got wrong.

After some discussions, I think I have an answer, which I’m going to throw out for further discussion and dissection: the standard card game.

I’d obviously be interested to know what people think about that.

How about the traditional/board/card games industry as a model? Non-computer games work to capture the essense of an experience with minimal mechanics and elegent & efficient & novel interfaces. Why does the computer games industry always reach so far away when it has a rich world to tap right next door?

I think one of the reasons that computer games get done so poorly is that the publishers and developers confuse graphics & programming (which consume a lot of resources & time) with design (which consumes a lot of thinking and very few resources). Look at theatre or anime or regular games or any other entertainment except for mainstream computer games (and movies) – the power & effectiveness of the art comes from lack of resources and using that constraint as a spur for creativity.