Darryl Long

The State of the Art

After watching Clint Hocking’s presentation on “Dynamics: The state of the Art“ it gave to me a new perspective on the importance of dynamics in a game. He emphasises in the first quarter of presentation to explaining the importance of the Kuleshov Experiment and the effect that it had in the film industry. The experiment involved showing the same expression of a man alternating with different scenes/objects to see what the audience would perceive. The audience believed that the man had a different expression for every scene shown e.g. hunger, grief, lust etc. This is called the Kuleshov Effect and it has become a fundamental method of filming and portraying the meaning of a scene or film. This is an process of discovery is important as it has now become the basis of most film techniques, however this process of how to convey meaning at the very basic level has not yet been discovered for games.

Hocking emphasises the importance of dynamics and narratives are to game meaning and design and how for different people, the same game may have different meaning. The example he uses is that in a game where you would have a large amount of free choice such as Far Cry 2 would have different meaning or give a different experience to different players. Another example of this would be something like Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, the game facilitates to a large number of players who would see and play the game in a different way. For example a player might see it as a story driven game and follow the main story completely whereas another player might not even pay attention to the story and rather enjoy exploring the world instead. A game without a narrative also tells a different story Hocking uses the example of Tetris, instead with having a narrative of sending people off to camps when the ‘train’ (row) has been filled completely, people would then view the game in a completely different light seeing as it has a dark meaning behind finishing a row or blocks.

Therefore there are multiple ways to convey meaning through games not simply being through rules and dynamics, and because we are yet to discover the basic way in which to convey meaning to our players we must work even harder in manipulating our rules, dynamics and aesthetics to fulfil that role.

Narrative?

Bernband is an 8-bit exploration game in which you are an alien in a world filled with aliens and you simply explore the world. The game has no objective, there are no puzzles to solve, no aliens to shoot and nothing to buy, you just walk around and explore. The controls are extremely simple, ‘wasd‘ to move, ‘space’ to jump and ‘esc‘ to exit the game.

Gun Godz is a first person Doom-like shooter in which you are given a gun and are thrown into world inside a jail where you have to shoot your way out and escape. These games are extremely different in the fact that one is simply an exploration game and the other you are running and gunning these creatures. In Gun Godz you are thrown into a linear world working through each level and fighting your way through the environment and enemies, whereas Bernband you are thrown into an alien world in which you aren’t actually able to interact with anybody/anything and are merely there to observe and explore.

However these games are more alike than you think in terms of their design, in both games you have been thrown into a world with no narrative and only the rules and dynamics of the game to tell you what to do, using conventional settings both games are able to guide you to your narrative without telling you explicitly. Gun Godz you find yourself in a jail, with a weapon shooting your way through corridor after corridor, they use bars typically found in jails as well as prisoners who behind bars to show that some people are trapped, you might then assume that you were a prisoner and that you are trying to escape yourself. In Bernband you are at first quite confused when you enter the game, you find that the controls are very basic, you walk around and you think, ‘what do I even do in this game?’ , and after a while you just spend your time enjoying what you find in the game. The game uses preconceived notions to represent things that you find in a completely alien world, from the picture above you can see that even though its filled with aliens you can still tell that this is a classroom filled with students.