Game Design Research Orgy

Obsidian's Chris Avellone, guest-posting on David Edery's fine Game Tycoon, has some interesting things to say about game design research. He gets to research the Alien universe for to make a game thereof, the lucky bugger. Anyhow, I left a huge, rambling comment on it, repeated here just to slow down the IntarWebs:

This is great stuff, Chris. I’m absolutely in agreement with you about the importance of expanding your frame of reference. There are already enough games made out of bits of other games, TV made from more TV, movies made of elements of movies. My feeling is that most geeks/devs don’t need much encouragement to keep on consuming the media they’re already into, but need as much encouragement as they can get to start checking out new stuff, especially when it’s old stuff: history, literature, visual arts, let alone news coverage, scientific research or, gulp, Real Life.

You make some excellent points here and your illustrations would drive me mad with envy if they didn’t make me giggle so much, but I’d emphasize the difference between raw data and usable knowledge. For me, it’s part of what separate Pro’s from Paying Punters – Paying Punters point and clap at the puppet show; Pro’s get themselves backstage and work out which string pulls which limb. I don’t think people need much more practice at remembering the Cool Bits from games and movies and TV shows, but almost everyone needs more practice in working out why they’re cool, what it is about that technical solution that made it better than another, how was it put together, and what was so compelling about its presentation: the What isn’t as important as the Why and How.

For instance, why did New-Monster-Every-Week one-or-two-episode morality play SciFi TV series like Star Trek and Doctor Who come up with the Transporter beam and the Tardis respectively? To what production problem was that the solution? Why didn’t they go with an expensive but heavily repeated sequence to get their protagonists to and from their weekly new locations, like Thunderbirds? The relative production costs of a single special effect shot compared to a three-minute model montage will tell you more than any retro-con backstory explanation.

So my addendum to your advice to budding devs is to take all the games, TV shows and movies they love, and see those finished works not as monolithic blocks of Cool, but as a consequence of a series of design, direction and production decisions, decisions that can be analysed and reverse-engineered. Steal from the very best, I say! Just learning a few of the technical terms used by screenwriters, storyboard artists, directors, coders, sound designers, composers, actors and developers will give you more insight than memorizing every line of dialogue in every episode of every season of every franchise of StarTrek. Technical language is a kind of toolkit that lets you build something new, not just repeat something old. Knowing every episode featuring the character Data is just, well…data.

Being able to analyse the Cool Bits doesn’t mean you appreciate them less, quite the reverse – it makes the Cool Bits cooler. As an example, take the famous lots-of-short-shots montage technique pioneered by Sergei Eisenstein. Every movie nerd will be able to tell you about the famous Odessa Steps sequence in The Battleship Potemkin, and most will know that Brian DePalma recreated it almost shot-for-shot for the train station shootout scene in The Untouchables (even the Great steal from the Best). The more I read about the critical theory that built up around Eisenstein’s technique, the more I appreciated his achievement, and dug the visual syntax of cinema, and how long and broad a shadow it casts on all subsequent movie and TV editing. But this was as nothing compared to the slack-jawed awe I felt when I found out that it was his work-around for a potentially show-stopping production problem: only very short lengths of filmstock were available at the time, so he invented a way of telling stories with very short shots. That’s not just smart, that’s flaming, strobing genius! Future developers, be inspired!

"Fornicate, Using Your Actual Genitals"

Unimprovable, as is the Increase and Persist letter he was sent by Second Life's lawyers.
...
OK, it was actually "Proceed and Permitted", but that doesn't scan as well. As ever, the rule of thumb with misquotations is that they have better rhythm and internal rhymes than the actual factual verbatim: e.g. "Me Tarzan, You Jane", "Elementary, My Dear Watson"," Play It Again Sam". If if does not have that swing, it does not mean a thing. Which reminds me of the awesome Dave Barry's Rhythmic Test For Political Affiliation: sing and clap along to "Hit The Road, Jack". If the result is "Hit the Clap...Clap" you are a Republican, if "Hit the Road - Clap - Jack - Clap", you are a Democraticperson.

(via BoingBoing, as almost all of my online life seems to be)

There's a reason they're called that

Sloth: 1 Science: 0

Edit: As my wretchedly Funnier-Than-Me friend David points out, the story should be titled "Sloth completes groundbreaking three-year study on human persistence..."

Le Blog Bérubé, we hardly knew ye

On of the defining features of this smoking shambling excuse for a blog is a consistent ability to get around to things far, far too late. While tidying my cyber-shelves, I find this draft claiming it's about time I hooted and pointed at Le Blog Bérubé. So, now, a month after it slipped beneath the waves and the last bubbles popped upon the surface, the time is ripe for me to make grand prancing motions towards it. Obviously "introducing" a Koufax winner (OK, runner-up) to my non-existent readership is akin to dramatically disclosing the existence of Nelson's Column to Londoners, or the night sky or the tendency of things to fall towards the earth, but that's pretty much the purpose of BongoLudo - tardily re-exposing what everyone already knew with a queeny gasp and antic gestures of profound revelation.

Setting aside Bérubé's new opus "What's Liberal About The Liberal Arts?", let me count my debts to him and his "web" "log". Pre-Firstly and leastly, he did me a permanent solid by using the term "The InterNets" (instantly misappropriated and bandied about by me, here and elsewhere), but he provides an enviable Trifecta of webbery.

Firstly, Bérubé is a proponent of pointy-headed Literary Theory who actually appears to love books, and literature. This has proved a massive challenge to me, my clothes still shredded and smoking from my escape from the Clutches of Theory, but I hope I'm man enough to not actually change any of my cherished beliefs and admit there might be something to it.

Secondly, he's an actual participant in what I don't really want to think of as being the front lines of the culture wars - entering into disputation with various luminaries I don't want to specify, because naming calls, you understand? (said with squinty eyes, like Kevin McNally in the wretched Pirates Of The Caribbean cash dairy infomercials), thus actually doing what hardly any folks dare do - stop rolling their eyes, roll up their sleeves and actually engage in debate/abuse/parcheesi.

And thirdly, lastly, and by no means leastly, as well as the Byzantine politics and back-lit lit crit, he write enormously touching accounts of his life as the proud parent of Jamie, a smashing sounding urchin who has Down's syndrome. Nice to see that his other offspring Nick gets the odd mention also.

The Jamie stuff has me piping my eyes and emitting strange sighs and I can't add anything evey remotely useful. The added piquancy, I guess, is that Bérubé is a fully-fledged Literary Theory Person, a species I'd given up all hopes of being inspired by. I speak from a veritable pedestal of ignorance: my grip on po-mo literary theory is akin to that of a pair of tin sugar tongs on the pelt of a galloping mammoth – it simply affords insufficient purchase for any useful purpose. His blog is the first thing I've read that made my check my headlong flight, if not actually retrace my steps or meekly submit my neck to the yoke again.

Anyway, kudos, au revoir and thanks to the Bérubatollah. The web's a duller (if faster) place without ye.

Does not suffice...

I can't be the only one viewing the brou, ha and other ha over Blood Diamond and the ice cartel's Chris Morris-esque self-parody and then pointing mutely at The Atlantic's 1982 article Have You Ever Tried To Sell A Diamond? Odd to think of diamonds as semi-precious stones completely unconnected to notions of love or devotion. Surely one of the greatest marketing successes since St Paul Inc.?

T'Atlantic has a roundup of their ice coverage here, which leads one to hop skip jump via Anil Dash and Cory Doctorow to the NY Post's alps-atop-alps horror-beyond-horror story on the amputee extras used in the movie being stiffed by Warner Bros. Sometimes I think this is what the internet is for.

Absence and Toons

Apologies for another prolonged absence. All manner of stuff going on, hardly any of which fell into conveniently bloggable increments or tropes. But just now, Joseph Barbera dead at 93. Wow, what he lived through, and saw, and made. "Was Scrappy-Doo the Echt Shark-Jumping id-hound?", I hear you ask. And, as Danny Baker often asks, what happened in the Flintstones to the sabre-toothed cat Fred dumps outside, and is then dumped by in the title sequence? "One day Fred will finally win the fight/When he puts that cat out for the night". Baker reckons the cat was in the pilot, but then got greedy, made his agent renegotiate the contract for the rest of the series, and was then cut entirely, but they'd already filmed the title sequence and recorded the music.

Vital News, Affecting All Bipedal Lifeforms

And a verily merrily Grimble to all our reader.

2007? That's a Sci-Fi year.

First Compressions

Via the excellent Alex Ross of the The New Yorker, some excellent thoughts (none of them mine) on compression in modern beat combo music. Everything Louder Than Everything Else is very good, but The Death Of Dynamic Range is just brilliant. Much to over-mull here, but howsabout them waveforms? Exactly the kind of clearly illuminated and illustrated expertise I promise shall never darken the towels of this blog. You have my word on that.

The God Deluge-In

Those InterWebs are awash with reviews and reviews of reviews of Dawkins' The God Delusion. I have nothing to add to the melee other than slack-jawed praise for Stephen Tomkins of Ship Of Fools. Now THIS is how to review someone you don't agree with. That all such commentary should be as fair-minded.

Nomenclatchoo!

Am snivelling with Man-Flu, which can only be a partial excuse for being, once again, last to the feast. Here I am, puffing and chewing and huffing over Leavitt's Freakonomics. I have precisely nothing original to add to the general hooplah, other than "Yes, IntarWebs, I too found it an enjoyable and interesting read". (Be unafraid, gentle reader, that slamming sound you just heard was the presses being stopped and the front page being held.) I particularly like the chapter on baby names, the observations thereon (Jewish/Old Testament monickers get popular with gentile baby-namers, but never the other way round) and the predictions for the future. Observation, Theory, Testable Prediction, that's science, homes!

I can't remember who linked to it (my apologies, IntarWebs), but out-check this Baby Name Graphinator (that may not be the proper term, possibly). It visualises, no, wait, surely we're doing the visualising. It, uh, represents the relative and absolute popularity of American baby names. I particularly like how, as you type successive letters of a name, it shows all the names that stilly apply. Pitifully simple and straightforward to those whose mind works that way, but mine doesn't, and I coo and ooh at it as if it were a kitten in a wellington boot.

There's piles of fun to be had tracing names as they wax and wane, but the oddest case of all is "Adolph". It's enormously popular in the 1880's, still a biggun' up until a precipitous drop around 1910 (and isn't it great to be actually looking at a plunging graph line that does actually literally look like a craggy precipice?). The rate of decrease stays pretty steady right through up to the 1930's but then stays stable throughout the 1940's and 50's before dwindling in the 60's to die out in the early 70's. EHHH?

I'm struggling to picture an expectant couple, or one newly blessed with issue, in the late 40's or 50's, possibly returned from fighting in Europe, saying to each other "Honey, you remember how back before the war we weren't going to call our children Adolph? Well, I've been thinking..."