Not, in fact, dead April 14, 2009
Posted by Ian in Creative Agenda, Simulationist, Small Idea.add a comment
Nor even taking a break from nerdly endeavors like game design. I’m just quietly trying to put together a game that operates as much as possible within the confines of the game’s fiction, that incorporates ‘mechanical’ elements into the fiction, ideally in a kind of non-disruptive way.
If it keeps shaping up nicely, I’ll start to talk more about it.
This seems faintly familiar… March 19, 2009
Posted by Ian in Creative Agenda, Game Design, Personal Reflection, Simulationist.add a comment
I’ve been fiddling around with Uns in some of my spare time and trying to figure our how to relate the spatial and temporal elements of the game. It is not too complicated, really, but when I was thinking through the discrete spatial locations and movement between them, I kept having this faint sense of familiarity. It was like I was mimicking something I couldn’t quite remember.
Character ownership (comedy, epic, tragedy) February 26, 2009
Posted by Ian in Applied, Creative Agenda, Game Design, Personal Reflection, Simulationist.add a comment
As I think about what it might look like to play Uns, I keep wondering about this issue of character ownership. Superficially, the game is all about the character ownership. There is one player, one main character, and everything basically happens for the sake of them.
But that really doesn’t capture what the game is about. The rigid constraints of the module system (here are the places you can go, period) makes any sense of ownership more limited. The character serves as a screen to be drawn through the setting, an organizing element that structures play, helps narrow down what can or ought to happen where.
Comedy / Romance February 19, 2009
Posted by Ian in Personal Reflection, Small Idea.add a comment
As I toy with what I want to do as a mock-up for Uns, I realize that there are plenty of games that focus on delivering the drama, where drama equates to tragedy and disaster. When I start to think about design, my instincts go in exactly the opposite direction. I want the hope of happily ever after.
It’s kind of obvious, really, but I want a game that does romance, in the Greek Romance sense Bakhtin talks about in The Dialogical Imagination. I want a game where, yes, there are all these occurrences between the story’s beginning and it’s happy ending, but I want the ending to be happy.
I know, it is sort of a simple thing, but I want to affirm it, because it’s easy to lose sight of that, and easier to still to realize that there has to be something in the game that facilitates that. This is where the computer game comparison comes in since plenty of computer games are structured to produce this sense of satisfaction and happily ever after.
Anyway, enough rambling.
