Prolonging the failure
Delays, delays. There is no wizard melting yet, sorry.
The onslaught of GDC and a bunch of Europeans rampaging through my life, work, and house have put a halt to normal activities. Hopefully GDC will result in my writing up some stuff though, as the show’s been incredibly fun so far, and a few panels have been extremely entertaining, occasionally mind-blowing. In particular is one lecture today by Clint Hocking on the different elements that are explored in video games (both as players and designers), splitting them up into spatial exploration (the game’s environment and world) and systems exploration (discovering a game’s rules, limits, basic mechanics), but going from there to propse how games could (and should) involve self exploration as well.
I’ve so far made Hocking’s talk sound lame and trite, but it was some truly amazing stuff. It immediately triggered mad discussion between Marek, Steve and myself about the talk and its implications, my possibly misguided insisting that Suspension of Disbelief is somehow involved, and other good video-gamey things that I rarely get to talk about despite working every day at a game company. And, it was the only panel to do such a thing at the show so far. So, clearly good stuff.
I’m still processing… and apparently falling asleep… at the moment, but God willing I’ll put up some impressions from the show in the near future.
March 12th, 2007 01:40
I’ll melt you. ¬¬
March 12th, 2007 10:40
[…] My personal favorite by far was Clint Hocking’s beautiful and thought-provoking talk on exploration. Clint established a clear distinction between spatial exploration (exploring and mapping out a game’s geography in your head) and systems exploration (poking around the gameplay’s possibility space). He then suggested a third type, namely self-exploration (the player reflecting on the decisions made in the game, seperate from the desire to optimize within the systems). The concept is tough to explain, and I’m completely using my own words here, but maybe you can get the gist of it from Clint’s slides and the accompanying paper. The slides approached Will Wright levels of awesome, and I had a lot of fun discussing the ideas (and even moreso, the intentions behind Clint’s talk) with Jake and Steve afterwards. […]