The_A_Drain

When I'm in the grips of Major Depressive Disorder I generally don't play any videogames. Because I can't. I can barely do anything aside from sit and stare at a wall while my brain pulls no punches in bombarding me with intrusive, unwanted negative thoughts and suicidal fantasies. It literally expends every piece of energy I have just to show up to work and pretend to be working for the day while I try desperately not to fall asleep at my desk.

When I'm just feeling a bit shitty I usually go to something retro, something comfortable. Resident Evil 2 or something, maybe re-start Fallout for the 100th time.

My mum played a crapton of Tetris when I was a kid but apparently that's literally it. She may have played Space Invaders at one point.

Actually, I think I remember her having a go on Wii Sports that christmas...

My dad started gaming heavily in his late 30's when he couldn't work anymore due to being registered blind, and as far as I know he's still doing that I guess. I dunno, I've not seen him in like 15 years, less said about that the better. (But how can he game if he's blind?! He's got Usher Syndrome so won't be totally blind until later in life)

Use twitter, there's also tons of helpful threads and info at places like http://www.pixelprospector.com/indie-resources/ and (even though I despise the place) Reddit. And if you can't find emails on those, you can often find an email address if you go digging around deep enough, or at worst send someone you think might be interested a PM. I've even posted comments on youtube videos and had content creators respond and start a dialogue that way (although that's probably less doable now most comments sections are turned off)

Good luck, sincerely, I hope you do well and everything is sweet and your stress levels are minimized. Because I've fucking tried it, I spend 3 years trying to get something off the ground, hopping from freelance project to freelance project to pay the rent while I did, and almost went insane from stress and am now financially crippled as a result.

So really, from the bottom of my heart, I wish you luck.

Have you ever coded Zombie enemy AI?

It can be as simple or as complex as you want.

Nowadays off-the-shelf military enemy AI is incredibly cheap and easy to implement, so are a lot of other kinds of AI. So choosing a type of enemy for your game, especially if you do have a large budget, isn't really anything to do with how easy it's going to be to code.

Plus with Zombies you have to make certain art and rigging considerations if you want them to have things like limbs that fall off, or legs you can blast off and then they switch to a set of crawling or limping animations.

Both of these comments are starting to touch on the kind of discussion I'm really interested in.

I mean, this is something that's pretty unique to games (I mean, it's not, as you said you could watch a film at 2x speed, or blank out some words in a book, but those aren't really the same as what we can do with games) in my opinion. The level of interactivity players have can extend beyond the superficial and into the inner-workings of the piece itself.

I personally think that it's important the creators artistic intent be preserved, because even small superficial changes such as removing the black bars change the way that works is being significantly, and if that's the way the creator intended me to view that work then that's the way I want to do so. Whether I find that enjoyable or not, because that's a key distinction in the battle of 'are games art?'. Not all art is supposed to be enjoyed, and a lot of art is intended to make people uncomfortable, frustrate, or shock, or etc.

Mostly these discussions seem to be relegated to plot, story and character, and people harp to film for comparisons. But I think if we want to seriously begin taking games as an artistic medium then you have to be able to accept that we're going to start seeing games that will do things that might not be in the best interests of player enjoyment, or might exist specifically to make players uncomfortable (I'm looking at The Walking Dead here as a good example, but it's an example where that stuff is relegated to story and character)

As a creator, you could easily argue that those black bars and the weirdly focused FOV exist specifically to frustrate the player and NOT to enhance their interaction with the game. And that would be valid from an artistic viewpoint. But entirely invalid from the viewpoint of a consumer product. So it really depends which side of that fence you fall, and I think this topic is only going to get more interesting over time as the medium grows and more developers start to experiment with being artists (and as things get easier to develop, more existing artists experiment with games) because we've still got an incredibly long way to go. Last year when people were calling The Last of Us a sure sign that the medium was now 'mature', I heralded it as a sure sign that the medium was in it's teenage years, desperately aping it's heroes (film and television) in a bid to appear mature, but still a long long way off.

But, as Alex Navarro quite thoughtfully pointed out, this only works if you consider artistic vision in any way infallible. These are (for now) consumer products. You're paying $60 for it and as a lot of people have said in this thread, your enjoyment of that product comes first. And that's not wrong, as Rami Ismail said in his Luftrausers criticism response there's no wrong way to interpret a videogame, and not all of those interpretations are going to be something the creator wanted or even thought of. And the great thing about videogames is that we have the ability to let people have different experiences with the same piece, this is inherent in the mediums interactivity. So extending that into the realms of letting the user customize a piece of work I think is an area we should be exploring, and not saying for definite one way or the other whether it's a good or a bad thing, it's yet another unique and interesting thing we can do with games that you can't readily do in another medium.

My personal experience with The Evil Within specifically, so far has been that I really think the camera is a huge frustration, so much so I don't even think changing the FOV and removing the black bars would help me enjoy the product, the animations are labored and forced, the enemies have too many lengthy grab animations, and the game is incredibly stingy with ammunition but doesn't give you much choice about using it or conserving it, because it keeps locking you in gated segments of the level and forcing you to defeat a horde of enemies, often not even giving you the stealth option it goes to so much effort in Chapter 3 to force you into being aware of. In my opinion, it's a very poorly designed game from the bottom up, but then my experience (as somebody who thought Resident Evil 4 was the death knell for the Survival Horror genre, not a re-invigoration of) is going to be different from a lot of other peoples who think it's great. The PC port being a bit shit isn't helping, either.

But this discussion specifically has gotten me thinking about how the lines between creative intent and player interaction don't have to be solid, they can be blurred and I think that can be ok, it's something that's unique to our medium and I think will provide a lot of interesting opportunities and discussions in the future as the medium matures.

Quite honestly I'd been on a bit of a break from games, so I bought a ton of stuff in the Christmas steam sale and then the next time I even looked at the steam store was to buy a bunch more stuff in the summer sale, and since that ended I've not even launched the steam client until launch day for Wasteland 2, which I promptly downloaded but didn't play until last weekend.

So, I didn't even know the curator stuff existed until somebody mentioned the changes that were coming to it. The social side of Steam has never been something I've used or wanted other than a handful of instances where people talk to me over the messenger app instead of facebook. That's me anecdotal experience with it.

Ah it's amazing that you expanded upon the brief thoughts that came up in Bombin' in the AM because I was slightly disappointed that conversation didn't go further because I think it's a really interesting topic, how creative intent can be interactive in a purely interactive medium and how that can bring about new ways to present somebody elses work, for example there's the mod/hack aspect of changing the game to better suit your preferences, such as this but there's also other ways of presenting somebody elses work that are outside the original intent of the creator, such as speedrunning or depending who you ask, professional competition level play, as a lot of what's involved in that was often never dreamed of by the creator. And then that conversation itself can tie back into the whole "who owns the rights to x" discussion that's being had over things like Let's Plays and Speedruns at the moment, as those change the content in a way the creators never intended.

I was talking about this with someone last night actually and they had some really interesting things to say about it from the perspective of a fine artist, and I'd not had such a passionate conversation about games (that was positive) in quite a long time.

These are the kinds of exciting discussions people should be having these days, particularly if people really do want the medium to be taken seriously as a form of art.

I've still (partly purposefully, partly life getting in the way) not seen ANYTHING from this game beyond the original trailer.

But based on the whispers on the wind I have heard, it's not changed too dramatically from that original showing, at least in terms of what I liked about it. So sure, I definitely want to play it, but it all kinda depends on time and whether or not I remember. I'm kind of tied up, my backlog is like thousands of games, and even if you only count the blockbusters from the past 2 years I've still got more games than I could finish in like, the next 6 months+. So I dunno, god... damn I hate working 9 hour days with a 4 hour commute on-top.

None of the above. Even if it wasn't for the lack of time thanks to work, I'm not personally interested in any of those (apart from GTA V, but I did that last year) so if I do find time to game on the 18th, it'll probably be an hour of whatever I have on my PSP while I'm commuting or on lunch.

I really like where this article was going, and it seems fair given all the awful shit that's happened the past week or two that needed to be talked about, but it seemed like you had more to say on the subject and it's a really interesting topic to me that I'd love to get more thoughts from you on.

For me this topic ties closely to something that seems sacred in a lot of modern game design philosophy which is that letting the player fail is 'bad design' and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that in my opinion, it's a philosophy that has its heart in the right place. But there's a lot wrong with the general approach to dealing with that, in my eyes, most developers choose to just make their games easier (or as an act of defiance, harder, is it just me or are bullshit one-hit-kills becoming more of a thing again these days? They were certainly far too prominent in The Last of Us) but very few are beginning to step into the realms of re-defining what death actually is in a video-game, something that hasn't really been done since developers were freed of the need to gobble quarters to keep the money rolling in. And in the case of games like the Souls series or Shadows of Mordor actually re-defining what failure is in a game, in those games failure doesn't mean death and death doesn't mean failure, while the distinction there might seem arbitrary I think it's important because there are other ways than death to fail at something and developers nowadays are quick to polish those rough edges away, when perhaps we should be embracing failure-states more as learning opportunities for the player? Or opportunities to provide more or varied content or contexts for actions within the game worlds. It's an exciting prospect to me and one I hope very much will be explored beyond "Hey, dumbass! Press the A button now or die!", QTE's remain a favorite for providing simple, near unfailable interaction into an otherwise complex scene. Perhaps if failure is embraced more and approached creatively we can see a new era of complex and exciting boss battles, for example. Who knows.

I think this is a huge topic that could go on for entire theses, so I was just a little disappointed you hadn't touched on the subject a little deeper. I'd love to see a follow-up article.