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.
Black box simulations February 9, 2009
Posted by Ian in Actual Play, Creative Agenda, Game Design, Personal Reflection.add a comment
Ask me a simple question…I dare you. The soul of my wit is surely not brevity! So, in response to a question Mo asked me, I have this elaborate answer. Here’s her question:
Do you think you gloss A/B and go to C because you have an internal black box that takes it for granted?
The basic answer is yes, I do have something of an internal black box that takes this for granted. The long answer is yes, and let me start taking the screws off that black box.
