Fear and Loathing at the UCLA Hammer Museum
i.
April 22-23 I attended Narr@tive: Digital Storytelling, a UC Digital Cultures Graduate Conference at the UCLA Hammer Museum. Everyone was so nice. Too nice. Too damn nice.
The University of California system has a solid graduate program and provides excellent resources for cross-campus events. By excellent resources I mean that they are exceedingly generous in picking up the tab when the conference heads en masse to the local pub.
The organizers were likewise generous with their time, in that they spread out 19 presentations, two keynotes, and one roundtable over two days. (Two days on chairs I wouldn’t put in even the most despised Sim household. This chair provides: comfort 0.) Two days which could have accommodated another dozen presentations, the addition of which would perhaps have offered some high points to an otherwise middling assembly.
There are two ways to design a conference: leave everyone yearning for more, so that they furiously exchange business cards before catching a taxi to the airport, or give everyone a solid 20-30 minutes so they can practice their public speaking skills. If you choose the latter design, a good way to spice things up is to run concurrent sessions, so that attendees are forced to choose between “Diegetics and the Other: Uncovering Narrative in Hypermedia” and “Narrative and the Other: Dude, where’s my diegetic?” But that didn’t happen here. As I said, everything was nice.
An Economy of Rules (part 5)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
some considerations
The rules of surface are motivated by considerations on the lower levels. Craft puts pressure on surface through the mastery of tools; a master of craft will be seen as someone who uses the “correct” tools, and so their surface will be defined by the tools of craft. Structure determines the relative importance of certain relationships, so it determines which of the elements would best be served in the surface presentation. Idiom affects surface through its influences on structure and craft, and also, as I discussed with the anime RPG, idiom often pulls in certain rules of surface by referring to idioms which are specific to certain elements.
An Economy of Rules (part 4)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Rules of idiom
The rules of idiom are rules about the genre of a game. A game falls into a genre when it satisfies the idiomatic characteristics of that genre.
A Real Time Strategy (RTS) game might be described idiomatically in this way:
| 1) Activity takes place in “real time”. |
| 2) The playfield is preexisting according to some set of parameters. |
| 3) The production of units (the pieces which the player or a computer can manipulate) requires the consumption of playfield resources. |
| 4) There is a set of direct dependancies which determine which units may be produced based on the current state. |
| 5) There is conflict between opposing sides. |
| 6) Combat between units of different types is non-symmetric. |
Looking at “Grow”
Michael posted a link to the Grow Flash game. [grandtextauto.org: Grow]
It is an interesting game that essentially boils down to a logic puzzle. You have twelve elements that need to be selected in the correct order, though there are certain incorrect subsequences that produce interesting results.
Detailed spoilers inside.
RTS musings
I’ve been thinking about RTS games recently, in part as the idiom of choice for my next rules essay. Although I haven’t played any of the latest generation of RTS games (the ones which require a monster system with a 3D video card, i.e. the ones that won’t run on my 4 year old laptop) I get the sense that they’re still the same beast, half resource management, half balance between offensive and defensive strategy.
One of the shortcomings of the genre is the shallowness of the [in-game] production infrastructure. The construction of units is simply a matter of consuming resources. Some games incorporate some kind of maintenance cost, some small amount of resource consumption per time unit or an overall limit on the number of active units. But changes to the battlefield don’t really have any effect on active units — if, in Starcraft, the enemy destroys my barracks, I don’t lose any active marines, I only lose the ability to produce more marines.
Ultra Rare Holo Foils
I recently bought a full set of Neopets cards on eBay for $85. It’s a collectable card game, like Magic: The Gathering, only the monsters in Neopets are cute and colorful fantasy animals.
A full set of Neopets cards consists of 234 cards, of which 30 are ultra rare holo foil cards, 66 rares, 60 uncommons, and 78 commons. The difference between the rarities comes from the fact that you get a different number of each type in a package of cards, so that you get around 1 rare card for every 2 uncommon cards, and 2 uncommon cards for every 4-5 common cards. Cards come in booster packs, each of which contains 8 cards, and the boosters have a suggested retail price of $3.49.
(updated)
An Economy of Rules (part 3)
Part 1
Part 2
Rules of structure
Proposed structure rule: Nonlinear plots are better.
In the old Scott Adams Adventure game, there was a dragon sleeping in the woods. If you wanted to get rid of the dragon, one possible solution was to take the wine bladder and fill it with swamp gas, then use the bladder as a bomb to blow up the dragon.
It turns out that you don’t want to do this, because the resulting explosion will also destroy the dragon eggs, a treasure you want to collect. But the game lets you do it anyway, with the result that you can’t win the game.
An Economy of Rules (part 2)
Part 1
I’d like to take a look at some specific rules and see where I end up.
Rules of surface
A proposed surface rule: Games should always have screenshots on the box.
At first glance, this appears to be a reasonable rule. In order to know if I want to play a game, I should be able to see what it looks like. Of course it would always be better if I could watch the game in motion, or perhaps play a demo of the game, but the screenshot is an adequate substitute. The screenshot can also serve to verify that the game is in fact the game you are looking for, “Yes, I saw a demo of this game and here it is.” The screenshot of a sequel game can help you decide that the game looks better (or worse) than the previous game.
Collusion Detection
There are many reasons to go to a symposium: to hear new ideas, to share your ideas with others, to learn about a topic of interest, to see the faces of people you have only corresponded with. I go to symposiums to argue.
It usually takes half a day or more for me to work up a good head of steam, however, and so I didn’t reach that point this past Friday while attending the Story Engines symposium at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. In retrospect, if I had boiled over, it would have been to accuse the gathering of a certain amount of complicity. This wasn’t a symposium to draw out the conflicts which surround games as cultural objects, it was pulse check conference to make sure everyone was talking about the same thing, and using the correct terms.
Collision Detection
Notes on Bang the Machine: Computer Gaming Art and Artifacts at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California.
“[This exhibition] has been put together neither in a spirit of adoration nor vilification, the two most common forms for taking games seriously.”
(Revised: February 7, 2004 8:30 PM)