Re: Cameras and Player Info

["Todd Gemmell"]

>>But that's the snide answer. Think about the concept more as simile. Even
>>in the DVDs with multiple camera angles the director still chose all those
>>angles. The question is really about forcing the player/audience to look
>>at a particular subset of the world.
>
>I see your point, but myself, I think the camera angles are redundant to a
>degree. Think of roleplaying games for the computer or the various video
>game systems. We'll take the Mario game for the Nintendo 64. That game had
>a camera which you could move around, and view every angle of the action in
>real time. The only time people really used it was when the autocamera of
>the game screwed up and didn't give them a good view of their problem.
>

I disagree. For one giving the player control of the camera is a very cheap
(read as: easy to program) way to make the player feel in charge. This also
allows the player to find or miss events in a realtime enviorment. This
presents an opportunity once again to make subtle changes in the story. The
most compelling reason I can think of allowing a player some camera control
in an interactive story is that it's a two way mirror. You can sample what
is in the camera frustrum and use this information to enhance the story.

>Most of the time, I just sat there and swirled the camera around really
>fast just so I could see the edges of the screen blur (or attempt to). Will
>there be a point that by adding interactive camera angles to a story that
>it's too much? If we're not doing good camera work in our story in the
>first place, what makes us think that we'll improve the story by allowing
>the player to control the view?
>


To clarify my view on cameras. I think a player should have "some" control
over a camera but that the player is actually wrestling control away from
the smartcamera control. I think 90% of the time the players will allow the
smartcamera to dictate the view but when they do take active control they
are telling you something.

>>When reduced to text it's kind of the same issue that the interactive
>>fiction people struggle with, how to represent the world beyond the story
>>elements without getting bogged down in all the tired little details.
>


Well I tend to agree. Whether the storyverse is rendered in 3D polys or
rendered in text , the goal is to give enough for the human imagination to
fill in the rest...

>What about animation with a bit of still life? Think the closeup of the
>eyeball in the original Psycho. That was a photo, but damn, it looked good
>for that minute it was on screen - the slow descent into the eye was all I
>needed to create that scene.
>


This is a case where a "very" smart camera would work.

>Starship Titanic probably did one of the best jobs commercially as an
>interactive fiction game - and did better on the website, making it more
>interactive by sending email to your box, and using cookies to control
>different aspect (which would have to be used in any sort of interactive
>web game/story, I think).
>

I am a big Douglas Adams fan but I hated the SST interface. The natural
language parsing was no better than 20 year old Infocom technology.

>Yet Starship Titanic was basically filled with encounters only. You saw a
>guy, perhaps the background pulsed, perhaps his eyes shifted from back and
>forth. You filled in the details of the scene by looking at the picture,
>and then filled in the body of the story by reading the text.
>

Hmm the problem I have with games of this style is that there is no sense of
life. For me personally I get more from reading pure text. I think it has to
do with smashing two media (text & graphics) in a non too smooth way. I
think works fine for information media but not for story telling.

>>> Another idea we had with this HTML world/game was to grab information
from
>>> the player first - where they lived, if anyone died recently, some
personal
>>> information from them that would help us to make the story closer to
>>> reality for them... again, that something that could be linked to.
>>
>>Now we're talking. When that headcold wears off howzabout riffing in this
>>direction for a while?
>
>In the very preliminary stages of talking about this, the major first step
>to be hurdled was sex. We all know we're different, so I'll cut the crap
>with furthering the discussion.
>
>With females, we had fallen into the stereotype roll, which as I look on it
>now, was probably going to be our first error. We had questions like "Have
>you known anyone who has been raped? Or yourself?", "Do you have
>children?", "Do you have a wellpaying job?", "Has anyone died in your
>family?" and so on.
>
>Before I go on, I'll assert that the questions wouldn't be as blunt as
>that. They would more be based upon a personality test. I give you a
>situation of someone being raped or the like idea, and then based upon your
>answer, you'd be ranked in some sort of "probably knows someone who was
>raped", "probably raped herself" or "has no clue what we're talking about".
>
>The spidering could go on and on. Based on that answer, we could get more
>personal, or based upon a positive answer to the "wellpaying job" question,
>we could go more business like - all to hook you up with the "right"
>character as part of the game.
>
>The male questions were similar, only tainted by the sex idea.
>
>In our game, we had a core set of characters. Say 10. Each of these 10
>closely linked to major personality that could be devised from the
>questions. There was the business like woman, or the raped female. There
>was the heartbroken husband who had lost his wife, or the sportser jock guy
>who used to play football in college yet now works at a shoestore. There
>was the kid who was just beat up by the neighborhood bully.
>
>Those were our basic ideas. Comments?
>


Hmmm I am very in favor of gathering information about the player but people
generally don't like to fill out surveys. I think it would be more useful to
surreptitiously gather information about the player and make use of that.
Trust what people do not what they say.

-T