Month: July 2014

  • When is a Clone

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 28 Comments

    Just some relatively incoherent notes here, originally written in an email… this post may serve as useful background as it expresses many of the same thoughts in a more coherent form. This was written in part in response to all the discussion around cloning going on in the game industry these days. As it happens, today I read this Gamasutra blog post:

    Everything that can be invented has been invented.

    – Svyatoslav Torick

    Which prompted me to post this here.

    “Game” here used in a strict formal sense, to save me from typing โ€œludic artifactโ€ over and over again.

    taflMost games can be described as rules (e.g., processes that are largely based on conditionals, limits, and actions) and sets of numeric values (number of an asset type, values for things, etc). You also have a variety of metaphors and presentation elements that are used to convey these: visuals, sounds, etc.

    In general, if we see a game that has all the same rules and all the same scalars, but uses different presentation, we can consider that โ€œa reskin.โ€ It is exactly the same as a Lord of the Rings chess set or the like.

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  • Interactive Mountain

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 15 Comments

    mountaingameEveryone is talking about Mountain.

    Mountain is a game where you see a 3d mountain. It can be turned. You can play some notes on the keyboard. The mountain does things on its own. Trees grow, clouds, etc. It “says” things. Stuff falls from the sky. It’s pretty.

    There is nothing you can do to affect the mountain, at least not that anyone has discovered.

    Now, obviously this is the sort of thing that would get called “not a game.” And in fact, while praising it, some get perilously close to saying exactly that, in academic lingo:

    Just to be clear: Mountain is not a text. It shouldnโ€™t be treated as one. Mountain is best understood as an exercise in formรขโ‚ฌล โ€”รขโ‚ฌล itโ€™s a small, contained work that depicts and explores a mountain as an object.

    At Critical Proximity I pointed out that the avant-garde/art/whatever games would have been called “formalist” in any other medium, so I like this observation.

    Here’s Brendan Keogh reacting negatively to Mountain:

    I thought I would write a piece about how it makes a point of nothing-ness in a really interesting way. In its menu, where it explains the controls, both โ€˜keysโ€™ and โ€˜mouseโ€™ are said to do โ€œNOTHINGโ€ despite this being clearly false (keys play musical notes and the mouse rotates and tilts the mountain). It seemed like an explicit commentary on videogames and nothingness, and I thought that would be cool.

    But I found itย so boring.

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