(I am assuming that once the player can see how the system works, they aren't engaged on an emotional level. I could be entirely full of crap. Opinions!)
It got brought up a few times in the Fallout: NV thread, but the repeated use of the exact same lines by different voice actors really stood out like a sore thumb to me and struck me as lazy resource management
If you have to go to the trouble of having multiple actors record a line, at least make each a variation of that line
how interesting would it be to have a short, semi-weekly game dev podcast from some of the folks here at arenanet as we develop guild wars 2?
assuming it's interesting to anyone but me, how do you continue to make it interesting week after week without asking the same questions? and how do you make it accessible to both technical and non-technical audiences? (full disclosure: I don't listen to any dev podcasts so this paradigm is probably well-established)
You could bring in guys from different departments to talk about their work each week, talk about big successes/failures, things that aren't doable yet but that they'd like to do, etc. Irrational Games, Bungie, and Insomniac games all have good dev podcasts so you could also listen and see how they do it
how interesting would it be to have a short, semi-weekly game dev podcast from some of the folks here at arenanet as we develop guild wars 2?
assuming it's interesting to anyone but me, how do you continue to make it interesting week after week without asking the same questions? and how do you make it accessible to both technical and non-technical audiences? (full disclosure: I don't listen to any dev podcasts so this paradigm is probably well-established)
It would be insanely interesting to me and a number of folks I know
having one week be talking t a level designer about what he did this week and troubles he ran into, things we did well, whatever, and then next week talking to a concept artists or an animator or a technical artist or a programmer or anything would be awesome. Talking about how they got there, what skills they use in their job, how they relate to their job, things they enjoy outside of work and how they may or may not relate to game creation, etc
not even GW specific stuff, but I always think hearing from the folks actually making games is WAY more interesting then hearing from the hype machine about how exciting a game is going to be
(I am assuming that once the player can see how the system works, they aren't engaged on an emotional level. I could be entirely full of crap. Opinions!)
It got brought up a few times in the Fallout: NV thread, but the repeated use of the exact same lines by different voice actors really stood out like a sore thumb to me and struck me as lazy resource management
If you have to go to the trouble of having multiple actors record a line, at least make each a variation of that line
(I am assuming that once the player can see how the system works, they aren't engaged on an emotional level. I could be entirely full of crap. Opinions!)
It got brought up a few times in the Fallout: NV thread, but the repeated use of the exact same lines by different voice actors really stood out like a sore thumb to me and struck me as lazy resource management
If you have to go to the trouble of having multiple actors record a line, at least make each a variation of that line
Oh, yeah, if you want something done procedurally, at least until we get text-to-speech software significantly better than is on the market now OR fantastic on-the-fly dialog-splicing of prerecorded words or syllables, you should really take VO out entirely.
takyris on
0
Options
RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
(I am assuming that once the player can see how the system works, they aren't engaged on an emotional level. I could be entirely full of crap. Opinions!)
It got brought up a few times in the Fallout: NV thread, but the repeated use of the exact same lines by different voice actors really stood out like a sore thumb to me and struck me as lazy resource management
If you have to go to the trouble of having multiple actors record a line, at least make each a variation of that line
you guys underestimate how much time and money goes into recording and creating this stuff, and how much money and time any dev cycle has allocated to creating them
i'm probably using procedurally generated conversation for the detective thing, because it cuts down on my writing load and it makes sense to do from a 'limited viewpoint' perspective - repeating similar lines wouldn't really be a problem because you're asking questions about evidence all the time
(I am assuming that once the player can see how the system works, they aren't engaged on an emotional level. I could be entirely full of crap. Opinions!)
It got brought up a few times in the Fallout: NV thread, but the repeated use of the exact same lines by different voice actors really stood out like a sore thumb to me and struck me as lazy resource management
If you have to go to the trouble of having multiple actors record a line, at least make each a variation of that line
you guys underestimate how much time and money goes into recording and creating this stuff, and how much money and time any dev cycle has allocated to creating them
(I am assuming that once the player can see how the system works, they aren't engaged on an emotional level. I could be entirely full of crap. Opinions!)
It got brought up a few times in the Fallout: NV thread, but the repeated use of the exact same lines by different voice actors really stood out like a sore thumb to me and struck me as lazy resource management
If you have to go to the trouble of having multiple actors record a line, at least make each a variation of that line
you guys underestimate how much time and money goes into recording and creating this stuff, and how much money and time any dev cycle has allocated to creating them
I'm... actually not really underestimating.
No, you're just making assumptions based on anecdotal evidence
RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
edited January 2011
I actually kind of enjoy offending people
Karl come down and help me design rooms for this haunted mansion, I already have three room concepts basically figured out and an idea how to make them work
text-to-speech software significantly better than is on the market now
same issue. performance is an art and for art you need a human. sure, a lot of the performances in videogame VO are far from art, but saying 'ah hell, we'll just make a kick-arse speech reader, more content more quickly and we don't need to pay those pesky actors!' is to me resigning to failure
edit: that's not to say it won't happen, because it probably will. but it'll be a sad day.
No, you're just making assumptions based on anecdotal evidence
I was in a meeting two hours ago with the Mass Effect 3 VO director, in which we talked about the costs of getting specific actors for a given number of sessions.
I can't guarantee that it holds true for every company out there, but I'm willing to put some confidence in what I'm saying.
takyris on
0
Options
RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
No, you're just making assumptions based on anecdotal evidence
I was in a meeting two hours ago with the Mass Effect 3 VO director, in which we talked about the costs of getting specific actors for a given number of sessions.
I can't guarantee that it holds true for every company out there, but I'm willing to put some confidence in what I'm saying.
I fully expect we will be able to create excellent procedural narratives within the next century, actually.
good luck with that!
edit: i suppose you may be right, if you've got very low expectations for an 'excellent narrative'
Eh, a century in the age of computing is a pretty goddamn long time.
we aren't talking about computers
we're talking about art
And this is where we need to look at games differently. The ongoing need to compare games to other art forms, and judge them by the standards of those art forms is simply wrong and helps nobody. Can games tell stories in the way that movies and books tell stories, and as well? Nope, and I'd argue that the harder you try to do so, the more you abandon the defining quality that sets games apart - interactivity with the person consuming the art.
"You know what you and I get to live through? The birth of a new art form. The percentage of human beings that get to experience that has got to be so un-fucking-believably small"
- Quintin Smith, The Journey of Saga, pt. 6
That particular quote blew my mind when I read it, as I hadn't thought of things in that way before that point, and once I had I couldn't get that idea out of my head. To respond to bsjezz's statement, the question shouldn't be whether the story that is procedurally generated is art, as that is just a part of the game as a whole. The game itself, and the means by which it generates and tells it's stories, and how it interacts with the player, that is the art.
Even leaving the procedural generation argument aside, will a story told through a video game ever be as good as a novel written by a great author? The novel is almost pure storytelling, where a (good) game needs to relinquish some authorial control to the player, and make allowances for interaction and playability. It's that interaction, that involving the player in the story and allowing them to make it theirs that will let games do what novels cannot, and as the medium matures, that's where they will be comparable as art forms.
text-to-speech software significantly better than is on the market now
same issue. performance is an art and for art you need a human. sure, a lot of the performances in videogame VO are far from art, but saying 'ah hell, we'll just make a kick-arse speech reader, more content more quickly and we don't need to pay those pesky actors!' is to me resigning to failure
edit: that's not to say it won't happen, because it probably will. but it'll be a sad day.
Although it occurs to me that it'd probably be viable, ish, for robotic or otherworldly characters; akin to recycling the same audio for the alien languages in KotoR, when you don't need a line specifically voice acted by an actual person
Supercomputers or security robots wouldn't be so bad with robot voices!
we're talking about teaching computers how to create things with artistic merit
i don't know how you can know anything about procedural storytelling or ai development and think this is a sentence that makes sense
I resent this a little, assuming you're opposing B-zero's assertion that it's possible.
that's cool, i really don't mind if that offends you
I didn't say offended. It just seems a little naïve unless you base your definition of art around precluding the possibility - but seriously, I fucking hate this whole argument, so I'm not expecting a response, and that's the last I'll say on it myself.
text-to-speech software significantly better than is on the market now
same issue. performance is an art and for art you need a human. sure, a lot of the performances in videogame VO are far from art, but saying 'ah hell, we'll just make a kick-arse speech reader, more content more quickly and we don't need to pay those pesky actors!' is to me resigning to failure
edit: that's not to say it won't happen, because it probably will. but it'll be a sad day.
Although it occurs to me that it'd probably be viable, ish, for robotic or otherworldly characters; akin to recycling the same audio for the alien languages in KotoR, when you don't need a line specifically voice acted by an actual person
Supercomputers or security robots wouldn't be so bad with robot voices!
Luckily, the RPG idea I'm currently most fond of is almost entirely robots! Think Terminator 2 meets WALL-E
Karl come down and help me design rooms for this haunted mansion, I already have three room concepts basically figured out and an idea how to make them work
if i don't do the global game jam i can be down next weekend. or i'm free on the 29th.
I will say that I felt more emotional attachment to several of STALKER's 30-40 line NPCs than I did to entire characters in some other games I've played. I think it was because the world felt so immersive that the characters automatically felt far more real themselves, even if they only had a few things to say to me. And it also probably helped that nearly everything in that world wanted to kill me, except for several dozen Stalkers scattered about the world.
text-to-speech software significantly better than is on the market now
same issue. performance is an art and for art you need a human. sure, a lot of the performances in videogame VO are far from art, but saying 'ah hell, we'll just make a kick-arse speech reader, more content more quickly and we don't need to pay those pesky actors!' is to me resigning to failure
edit: that's not to say it won't happen, because it probably will. but it'll be a sad day.
Although it occurs to me that it'd probably be viable, ish, for robotic or otherworldly characters; akin to recycling the same audio for the alien languages in KotoR, when you don't need a line specifically voice acted by an actual person
Supercomputers or security robots wouldn't be so bad with robot voices!
As someone playing stuff with TTS (text-to-speech) currently in place... it's pretty bad.
"I'll be there in a minute," with "minute" pronounced my-newt kind of breaks immersion.
In a few years, maybe. Right now, it's pretty painful.
I guess the reason I'm less stressed about robots coming to take my writing job is that ultimately, the idea of a computer making something is a red herring. Computers are already making the narrative to some extent, just by allowing logic branches to give players the illusion that the conversation is responding to them and not simply gating to fire one audio line and set of animations or another.
Unless we get an actual AI, a procedurally generated narrative would still have to be drawing from a pool of plot tools and narrative elements that some game designer has filled.
If in the murder mystery, the computer randomly determines that GIRL X is the murderer, and then randomly determines that GIRL X committed the murder out of fear and not sociopathic urges, and that GIRL X should therefore behave in a HESITANT SHY way toward the protagonist in most cases but be CLIPPED AND MATTER-OF-FACT when discussing the murder, and then in a conversation, the system pulls from the HESITANT SHY file to see which dialog quirks to give her (fire existing text line but with an ellipse after each transition word like "and" or "but", and add one of the SELF-DEPRECATION phrases to the end of lines 20% of the time, like "If you know what I mean," or "I guess that sounds silly,")... that's all stuff that I've added. I've designed that.
It'd be kind of insane, designing something that can go through multiple permutations of dialog selection and always sound realistic, even just in flat text. But on some level, it would also be a fascinating challenge.
fearghill i'm sure you're right, and it's an epiphany we've all come to at one stage or another, but it practically does nothing. yeah games are a bold new artform yadayada you can't tell a story in a game like you can in a book, but that doesn't change the nature of stories: that doesn't mean that stories aren't, at their hearts, still just ideas, distilled down to a concrete representative for the purpose of communicating it.*
er okay maybe i'm starting to let my own wild notions get in the way. (really? me?) but i believe you have to at least try to have an understanding of your art as an artist, and that's my understanding of my art. i'm not going to give up on injecting that art - the art of the authorial narrative, the art of communication by story - into videogames.
waffle waffle. i'm procrastinating on tidying my bedroom (still), you see
* - this is why i think tools for sharing are so important in any game where the player might 'create their own story'. stories are about significance, damn it! they aren't about masturbation. if you've made a truly good story it's worth being consumed by an audience. FACT.
I get emotionally attached to things easily, it always strikes me as odd when i feel no connection to characters in games.
I once felt bad that one of my plastic forks broke, but yet Alyx laid dying and i was hard pressed to care.
don't feel bad. half-life 2 is a game without a protagonist. as drama it is intensely, immediately compromised by the bizzare black void of gordan freeman at its heart.
text-to-speech software significantly better than is on the market now
same issue. performance is an art and for art you need a human. sure, a lot of the performances in videogame VO are far from art, but saying 'ah hell, we'll just make a kick-arse speech reader, more content more quickly and we don't need to pay those pesky actors!' is to me resigning to failure
edit: that's not to say it won't happen, because it probably will. but it'll be a sad day.
Although it occurs to me that it'd probably be viable, ish, for robotic or otherworldly characters; akin to recycling the same audio for the alien languages in KotoR, when you don't need a line specifically voice acted by an actual person
Supercomputers or security robots wouldn't be so bad with robot voices!
As someone playing stuff with TTS (text-to-speech) currently in place... it's pretty bad.
"I'll be there in a minute," with "minute" pronounced my-newt kind of breaks immersion.
In a few years, maybe. Right now, it's pretty painful.
I was about to glibly suggest that designers have one script for the subtitles that the player will see, and another that's phonetic for the machine's benefit so that it doesn't screw things up, and then it occured to me how incredibly obnoxious that sort of added workload would prove
I guess the day we actually have believable living characters is the day we get close to creating something we won't be allowed to switch off
(...actually that life-support-implying analogy always struck me as strange because, well, a computer can survive being turned off for years and come back right as rain.)
I didn't say offended. It just seems a little naïve unless you base your definition of art around precluding the possibility - but seriously, I fucking hate this whole argument, so I'm not expecting a response, and that's the last I'll say on it myself.
well, no. it's just really hard to make intelligent agents.
I get emotionally attached to things easily, it always strikes me as odd when i feel no connection to characters in games.
I once felt bad that one of my plastic forks broke, but yet Alyx laid dying and i was hard pressed to care.
don't feel bad. half-life 2 is a game without a protagonist. as drama it is intensely, immediately compromised by the bizzare black void of gordan freeman at its heart.
Gordon
For fuck's sake, GORDON
I don't care if you're being ironic, it's fucking Gordon
I get emotionally attached to things easily, it always strikes me as odd when i feel no connection to characters in games.
I once felt bad that one of my plastic forks broke, but yet Alyx laid dying and i was hard pressed to care.
don't feel bad. half-life 2 is a game without a protagonist. as drama it is intensely, immediately compromised by the bizzare black void of gordan freeman at its heart.
It always weirded me out because my Dad's name is Gordon, and it's not really a common enough name to brush off instantly.
I didn't say offended. It just seems a little naïve unless you base your definition of art around precluding the possibility - but seriously, I fucking hate this whole argument, so I'm not expecting a response, and that's the last I'll say on it myself.
well, no. it's just really hard to make intelligent agents.
Goddammit now I am responding, but yes, yeah. Yeah, exactly.
But I mean, when we were vaguely alluding to all this, the timeframe we were talking about was a century. I'm not saying that's enough, or nearly enough, I have no real idea - all I was trying to imply was that it's incredibly hard to tell with these things.
Similarly but separately, I also just don't like the occasional gross misunderstanding that machine intelligence needs be a "less sophisticated" form of intelligence than ours, incapable of art. But yeah, it's a pretty terrible discussion to have either way.
I get emotionally attached to things easily, it always strikes me as odd when i feel no connection to characters in games.
I once felt bad that one of my plastic forks broke, but yet Alyx laid dying and i was hard pressed to care.
don't feel bad. half-life 2 is a game without a protagonist. as drama it is intensely, immediately compromised by the bizzare black void of gordan freeman at its heart.
Gordon
For fuck's sake, GORDON
I don't care if you're being ironic, it's fucking Gordon
Groudon?
BahamutZERO on
0
Options
UnbrokenEvaHIGH ON THE WIREBUT I WON'T TRIP ITRegistered Userregular
fearghill i'm sure you're right, and it's an epiphany we've all come to at one stage or another, but it practically does nothing. yeah games are a bold new artform yadayada you can't tell a story in a game like you can in a book, but that doesn't change the nature of stories: that doesn't mean that stories aren't, at their hearts, still just ideas, distilled down to a concrete representative for the purpose of communicating it.*
er okay maybe i'm starting to let my own wild notions get in the way. (really? me?) but i believe you have to at least try to have an understanding of your art as an artist, and that's my understanding of my art. i'm not going to give up on injecting that art - the art of the authorial narrative, the art of communication by story - into videogames.
waffle waffle. i'm procrastinating on tidying my bedroom (still), you see
* - this is why i think tools for sharing are so important in any game where the player might 'create their own story'. stories are about significance, damn it! they aren't about masturbation. if you've made a truly good story it's worth being consumed by an audience. FACT.
There's plenty I agree with here, particularly in terms of sharing stories, but we may not be taking that in the same direction. I want to make games that people do Let's Plays of, that they tell their friends about the awesome moments they experienced in. Games with linear, designer driven stories fall somewhat flat here, as if your friend has played the game you're telling them what they already know, and if they haven't you're spoiling it. I had to stop reading Kuribo's Shoe's Steam playthrough blog because he was a day or two ahead of me in Alpha Protocol for that reason.
My favourite game discussions come when two people have played the same game but had very different experiences. This can happen with choices and branching storylines, and has been done well in the past, but there's a limit to how far we can go with that simply due to the sheer amount of extra content that must be created. I am in awe that Bioware has taken it as far as they have, and as far as they appear to be attempting with ME3. For player driven, nonlinear narrative to keep progressing, the best options I see are emergent storytelling through dynamic content (create the world and the characters, then run it as a simulation with the player effecting things), procedurally generated content (not ideal for all types of story, I acknowledge), and player generated content.
#3 is my current favourite, and if Minecraft's success is any indication, one that is going places.
the best interactive story i've experienced is flower.
it's not emergent or procedural. it doesn't branch with the player's choices or offer any depth of role-play. you're a god-damned flower petal. but what it does is issue an interactivity which perfectly presents the key emotional points in the story. there are soaring moments of joy, buffetting moments of sheer threat and peaceful moments of contemplation.
it also uses factors other than interactivity - the fantastic level design and the menu, an essential framing context, for example.
what is very apparent is that this is a traditional story - an artful communication not compromised by dilution from the audience - and yet it was only possible in videogames. its language is the game. there is not written or spoken english in the entire goddamned thing.
in a perfect world i'd want to see games divide into into those like flower, and rich procedural worlds where the pretence of the developer's own story is ditched, and the player himself uses the massive opportunity for tying emergent scenarios together into stories which they can share.
I get emotionally attached to things easily, it always strikes me as odd when i feel no connection to characters in games.
I once felt bad that one of my plastic forks broke, but yet Alyx laid dying and i was hard pressed to care.
don't feel bad. half-life 2 is a game without a protagonist. as drama it is intensely, immediately compromised by the bizzare black void of gordan freeman at its heart.
Posts
i don't know how you can know anything about procedural storytelling or ai development and think this is a sentence that makes sense
It got brought up a few times in the Fallout: NV thread, but the repeated use of the exact same lines by different voice actors really stood out like a sore thumb to me and struck me as lazy resource management
If you have to go to the trouble of having multiple actors record a line, at least make each a variation of that line
You could bring in guys from different departments to talk about their work each week, talk about big successes/failures, things that aren't doable yet but that they'd like to do, etc. Irrational Games, Bungie, and Insomniac games all have good dev podcasts so you could also listen and see how they do it
It's an srpg, and I already have the setting/rules/classes/skills set up, but man there is a lot of sprite work to be done
I am debating making a companion webcomic to go along with it, but first I'm going to have to stop being a useless pile of butts
It would be insanely interesting to me and a number of folks I know
having one week be talking t a level designer about what he did this week and troubles he ran into, things we did well, whatever, and then next week talking to a concept artists or an animator or a technical artist or a programmer or anything would be awesome. Talking about how they got there, what skills they use in their job, how they relate to their job, things they enjoy outside of work and how they may or may not relate to game creation, etc
not even GW specific stuff, but I always think hearing from the folks actually making games is WAY more interesting then hearing from the hype machine about how exciting a game is going to be
Man this is a severe pet peeve of mine
Walking around a town and you hear
Greetings, stranger! Greetings, stranger. Greetings, stranger! Greetings...stranger.
It makes me feel like I'm on The Truman Show
Oh, yeah, if you want something done procedurally, at least until we get text-to-speech software significantly better than is on the market now OR fantastic on-the-fly dialog-splicing of prerecorded words or syllables, you should really take VO out entirely.
you guys underestimate how much time and money goes into recording and creating this stuff, and how much money and time any dev cycle has allocated to creating them
I'm... actually not really underestimating.
Yes Man for best performance since nate drake
I resent this a little, assuming you're opposing B-zero's assertion that it's possible.
No, you're just making assumptions based on anecdotal evidence
that's cool, i really don't mind if that offends you
Karl come down and help me design rooms for this haunted mansion, I already have three room concepts basically figured out and an idea how to make them work
same issue. performance is an art and for art you need a human. sure, a lot of the performances in videogame VO are far from art, but saying 'ah hell, we'll just make a kick-arse speech reader, more content more quickly and we don't need to pay those pesky actors!' is to me resigning to failure
edit: that's not to say it won't happen, because it probably will. but it'll be a sad day.
I was in a meeting two hours ago with the Mass Effect 3 VO director, in which we talked about the costs of getting specific actors for a given number of sessions.
I can't guarantee that it holds true for every company out there, but I'm willing to put some confidence in what I'm saying.
fair enough
Also, Karl, Edmonton winters put hair on your chest.
(It is going to get even colder than it is today. I walk five minutes to work and it is already a walk I am dreading.)
And this is where we need to look at games differently. The ongoing need to compare games to other art forms, and judge them by the standards of those art forms is simply wrong and helps nobody. Can games tell stories in the way that movies and books tell stories, and as well? Nope, and I'd argue that the harder you try to do so, the more you abandon the defining quality that sets games apart - interactivity with the person consuming the art.
"You know what you and I get to live through? The birth of a new art form. The percentage of human beings that get to experience that has got to be so un-fucking-believably small"
- Quintin Smith, The Journey of Saga, pt. 6
That particular quote blew my mind when I read it, as I hadn't thought of things in that way before that point, and once I had I couldn't get that idea out of my head. To respond to bsjezz's statement, the question shouldn't be whether the story that is procedurally generated is art, as that is just a part of the game as a whole. The game itself, and the means by which it generates and tells it's stories, and how it interacts with the player, that is the art.
Even leaving the procedural generation argument aside, will a story told through a video game ever be as good as a novel written by a great author? The novel is almost pure storytelling, where a (good) game needs to relinquish some authorial control to the player, and make allowances for interaction and playability. It's that interaction, that involving the player in the story and allowing them to make it theirs that will let games do what novels cannot, and as the medium matures, that's where they will be comparable as art forms.
Although it occurs to me that it'd probably be viable, ish, for robotic or otherworldly characters; akin to recycling the same audio for the alien languages in KotoR, when you don't need a line specifically voice acted by an actual person
Supercomputers or security robots wouldn't be so bad with robot voices!
I didn't say offended. It just seems a little naïve unless you base your definition of art around precluding the possibility - but seriously, I fucking hate this whole argument, so I'm not expecting a response, and that's the last I'll say on it myself.
Luckily, the RPG idea I'm currently most fond of is almost entirely robots! Think Terminator 2 meets WALL-E
if i don't do the global game jam i can be down next weekend. or i'm free on the 29th.
As someone playing stuff with TTS (text-to-speech) currently in place... it's pretty bad.
"I'll be there in a minute," with "minute" pronounced my-newt kind of breaks immersion.
In a few years, maybe. Right now, it's pretty painful.
I guess the reason I'm less stressed about robots coming to take my writing job is that ultimately, the idea of a computer making something is a red herring. Computers are already making the narrative to some extent, just by allowing logic branches to give players the illusion that the conversation is responding to them and not simply gating to fire one audio line and set of animations or another.
Unless we get an actual AI, a procedurally generated narrative would still have to be drawing from a pool of plot tools and narrative elements that some game designer has filled.
If in the murder mystery, the computer randomly determines that GIRL X is the murderer, and then randomly determines that GIRL X committed the murder out of fear and not sociopathic urges, and that GIRL X should therefore behave in a HESITANT SHY way toward the protagonist in most cases but be CLIPPED AND MATTER-OF-FACT when discussing the murder, and then in a conversation, the system pulls from the HESITANT SHY file to see which dialog quirks to give her (fire existing text line but with an ellipse after each transition word like "and" or "but", and add one of the SELF-DEPRECATION phrases to the end of lines 20% of the time, like "If you know what I mean," or "I guess that sounds silly,")... that's all stuff that I've added. I've designed that.
It'd be kind of insane, designing something that can go through multiple permutations of dialog selection and always sound realistic, even just in flat text. But on some level, it would also be a fascinating challenge.
I once felt bad that one of my plastic forks broke, but yet Alyx laid dying and i was hard pressed to care.
er okay maybe i'm starting to let my own wild notions get in the way. (really? me?) but i believe you have to at least try to have an understanding of your art as an artist, and that's my understanding of my art. i'm not going to give up on injecting that art - the art of the authorial narrative, the art of communication by story - into videogames.
waffle waffle. i'm procrastinating on tidying my bedroom (still), you see
* - this is why i think tools for sharing are so important in any game where the player might 'create their own story'. stories are about significance, damn it! they aren't about masturbation. if you've made a truly good story it's worth being consumed by an audience. FACT.
don't feel bad. half-life 2 is a game without a protagonist. as drama it is intensely, immediately compromised by the bizzare black void of gordan freeman at its heart.
I was about to glibly suggest that designers have one script for the subtitles that the player will see, and another that's phonetic for the machine's benefit so that it doesn't screw things up, and then it occured to me how incredibly obnoxious that sort of added workload would prove
I guess the day we actually have believable living characters is the day we get close to creating something we won't be allowed to switch off
(...actually that life-support-implying analogy always struck me as strange because, well, a computer can survive being turned off for years and come back right as rain.)
well, no. it's just really hard to make intelligent agents.
Gordon
For fuck's sake, GORDON
I don't care if you're being ironic, it's fucking Gordon
It always weirded me out because my Dad's name is Gordon, and it's not really a common enough name to brush off instantly.
Goddammit now I am responding, but yes, yeah. Yeah, exactly.
But I mean, when we were vaguely alluding to all this, the timeframe we were talking about was a century. I'm not saying that's enough, or nearly enough, I have no real idea - all I was trying to imply was that it's incredibly hard to tell with these things.
Similarly but separately, I also just don't like the occasional gross misunderstanding that machine intelligence needs be a "less sophisticated" form of intelligence than ours, incapable of art. But yeah, it's a pretty terrible discussion to have either way.
Video games.
Groudon?
There's plenty I agree with here, particularly in terms of sharing stories, but we may not be taking that in the same direction. I want to make games that people do Let's Plays of, that they tell their friends about the awesome moments they experienced in. Games with linear, designer driven stories fall somewhat flat here, as if your friend has played the game you're telling them what they already know, and if they haven't you're spoiling it. I had to stop reading Kuribo's Shoe's Steam playthrough blog because he was a day or two ahead of me in Alpha Protocol for that reason.
My favourite game discussions come when two people have played the same game but had very different experiences. This can happen with choices and branching storylines, and has been done well in the past, but there's a limit to how far we can go with that simply due to the sheer amount of extra content that must be created. I am in awe that Bioware has taken it as far as they have, and as far as they appear to be attempting with ME3. For player driven, nonlinear narrative to keep progressing, the best options I see are emergent storytelling through dynamic content (create the world and the characters, then run it as a simulation with the player effecting things), procedurally generated content (not ideal for all types of story, I acknowledge), and player generated content.
#3 is my current favourite, and if Minecraft's success is any indication, one that is going places.
it's not emergent or procedural. it doesn't branch with the player's choices or offer any depth of role-play. you're a god-damned flower petal. but what it does is issue an interactivity which perfectly presents the key emotional points in the story. there are soaring moments of joy, buffetting moments of sheer threat and peaceful moments of contemplation.
it also uses factors other than interactivity - the fantastic level design and the menu, an essential framing context, for example.
what is very apparent is that this is a traditional story - an artful communication not compromised by dilution from the audience - and yet it was only possible in videogames. its language is the game. there is not written or spoken english in the entire goddamned thing.
in a perfect world i'd want to see games divide into into those like flower, and rich procedural worlds where the pretence of the developer's own story is ditched, and the player himself uses the massive opportunity for tying emergent scenarios together into stories which they can share.
god what
what is this