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#1 2009-10-28 02:50:06

xot
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Registered: 2007-08-18
Posts: 1,239

Audience Participation: Interactivity vs Interpretation

Paul Eres (aka rinkuhero) just posted on the TIGSource blog about neat little Flash game called Small Worlds.

I really like it, it's an oddly pleasing diversion. It's well crafted and I find it truly eye opening from a design perspective.

On the surface, it illustrates the alluring power of atmosphere and simple exploration. But it also cleverly blurs the lines between gameplay and graphics, and between goals and rewards. It forces us to question what we truly value from these design elements. The interplay between these four simple but deftly executed features results in an surprisingly engaging experience.

I think that it is the designer's challenge to the player to use their imagination that makes this most interesting. Video games, compared to other forms of expression, are traditionally selfish and dictatorial. They rarely offer the option to interpret and personally contextualize what is inherently a shared performance between the author and the audience. To my mind, this difference is hugely significant, and may be the true barrier to video games being accepted as art, and by extension, accepted as something of value.

What games have you seen that require something from the player beyond dutifully responding to the marionette strings attached to them by the game designer? What rewards can game playing provide beyond the dull satisfaction of jumping through a hoop on command? In an experience so fully controlled by the designer, do players play the game, or does the game play them? This is a young medium and there is still a lot to learn about it. In 100 years, I don't doubt we'll still be asking the same questions.

Whatever your feelings about games as an expressive force, the most vital question remains: Is it fun? What do you think of Small Worlds?


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#2 2009-10-30 19:38:17

icuurd12b42
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Registered: 2008-12-11
Posts: 303

Re: Audience Participation: Interactivity vs Interpretation

Neet game, finished it in 5 minutes. Long enough for thing type. I think I would get bored after that. But discovering art in this manner is a great idea.. I think it would beniufit from releasing a new set of images to discovere, every week or so. I dont think a huge one shot 30 hour game would be possible otherwize.

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#3 2009-10-31 06:52:14

xot
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Registered: 2007-08-18
Posts: 1,239

Re: Audience Participation: Interactivity vs Interpretation

Episodic. That's an interesting idea. I agree that this only works in short doses. I thought it was just the right amount of time to explore. I'm not sure where the author might take things. I think with much more content the whole experience might suffer. I'd be afraid of things becoming too detailed and less interpretive.

The fact that it doesn't have traps or enemies allows you to really relax as you play and frees your mind to reflect on what you are seeing. The hub world does a really smart thing in the beginning. You start of in a dome and you work your way down to where you soon encounter blinking lights. It tells you something is wrong here. When you work your way outside you see the second dome. It's been smashed. It's a dramatic reveal and I think it is the hook that makes you want to keep playing. No other information is given. You find yourself asking "What happened here?" which turns you into a detective looking for clues to the story. The story is never overtly revealed, it exists only as an internal construct unique to the player. If you lack imagination, you will probably become bored quickly. The worlds linked to the hub world, which are much more surreal, really challenge the player to make sense of them. It's a fun process for the imaginative mind.

As pure mechanics, it's interesting that the only goal is to explore and reach the end, and the only reward is to see what you've explored revealed before you. It links them together in such an immediate and continuous way that the goal and reward mesh to form the same thing. Most games delay rewards, and require completing numerous small challenges to reach the greatest of them. Completing individual challenges doles out rewards in chunks. By removing traditional challenges this turns the play process itself into the reward, which is much more like real play as a child would experience it. This game keeps things incredibly simple, even the interface is sparse with left, right, and jump as the only controls. Furthermore, the entire game and everything in it represent only a handful of state changes. Conventional wisdom says this game has no right to be as satisfying as it is.

I don't think this would ever work if the graphics weren't so evocative. They are our only link to understanding the world. Yet the graphics are so simple and vague. It seems like a bit of a paradox that these graphics would be at all captivating compared to what's being seen today in AAA titles. Complexity has been the trajectory of game design for a long time now; just keep throwing in more stuff to dazzle and distract. For the most part these graphics are anything but dazzling. They shouldn't even merit a second look and I don't think they would if they weren't revealed at such a slow and measured pace. That's the thing that provides the player the opportunity to let their imagination try to make sense of it all. Here we see gameplay having an immediate impact on perceived quality of the graphics. Likewise, since we are playing at the micro level, virtually every individual pixel is an important gameplay element. Without them there would be no gameplay. So often we think of the concepts of graphics and gameplay as being opponents in the graphics versus gameplay debate. It's interesting to see them so intimately fused.


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#4 2009-10-31 11:56:46

RaiSoleil
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Registered: 2009-08-02
Posts: 16

Re: Audience Participation: Interactivity vs Interpretation

Inspiring. Any meaning in the simple graphics is really all in our imagination - the flickering fluorescent tubes (4x1 white pixels), the snow (1x1), the water (3x1 pattern) - in comparison with high-def 3D graphics, which strive to show us all the exact details. The author has reduced the elements of mood to their simplest form - in the case of the flickering lights, glowing lines and a subtle effect on surrounding pixels. We see that and, although it bears little resemblance to the real thing, we know what it is and what it means.

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#5 2009-11-02 21:56:34

xot
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Registered: 2007-08-18
Posts: 1,239

Re: Audience Participation: Interactivity vs Interpretation

Playing this reminded me a bit of the first time I watched Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away. I saw it in Japanese without subtitles. I don't speak Japanese. Trying to create in my mind a story based on the film's surreal imagery was a real challenge. I couldn't make sense of the film but it stretched my imagination so greatly is was still a very satisfying experience. When I later saw the film dubbed into English with a coherent, clearly stated plot, it seemed to lose a lot of its charm.


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