Re: Interactive storytelling and me; and a challenge

["Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes" <kamikaze@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu>]

Wed, Jun 01, 2005 at 09:47:18PM +0300 in <ff7ba12a050601114752657d18@mail.gmail.com>,
Benja Fallenstein <benja.fallenstein@gmail.com> spake:
>On 6/1/05, Brandon J. Van Every <vanevery@indiegamedesign.com> wrote:
>> Also, if you spend all your time building
>> violins rather than playing them, you're a craftsman, not an artist.
>True. Well, I don't; I'm not working on generic engines, but
>particular stories/storyworlds.

  That depends on your definition of "art".  I use an anthropological
one: any skilled activity that is not essential to survival.

  So building violins is an artform in itself, it is not just something
done to reach the point of playing a violin.  Stradivarius was an
artist.

  I've written a lot of frameworks and tools for making art that are
themselves art.  They may not be exactly the art I want to eventually
produce, but they're a necessary learning step and still fulfill my
creative urges.  Even the most famous painters drew bowls of fruit and
flowers when they started.

>So for the moment, I'm following the approach of creating something I
>want to play myself. You don't seem to have a lot of faith in that
>approach; I think it's fundamentally the right thing to do: The best
>stories, in mass-market or in minority markets, are written by people
>who love that kind of story. If it turns out that as a result, readers
>find it hard to approach the resulting piece of interactive
>storytelling, I'll have to think about audience engineering, but not
>yet.

  I'd agree.  If you're not having fun playing your own game, you've
lost one of the major drivers to improve your game-creating skills.

>> The adventure game industry died for a reason.

  Because the publishers are idiots.  Infocom tried to branch into
business software.  STUPID.  Everyone else jumped on the "more
graphics=better" bandwagon, stopped putting gameplay in their "games",
and then wonder why 90% of the published games fail to make their money
back.  STUPID.  Now that games are getting even more expensive, the
publishers get even more conservative with new game styles, and there's
little left but sports games, sequels, and media tie-ins.

  Having been in the industry at one time, with the shit I saw, it's a
miracle that industry-published games don't suck even more than they do.
The execs all run on cocaine, the programmers run on sleep deprivation
and youthful stupidity.  This is not an industry that does anything for
good reason.

>> Computers got more popular, people got dumber.  Meanwhile, production
>> values increased.  So we got more and more expensive adventure games
>> chasing a smaller and smaller percentage of smart people.
>I should say that I *do* believe that a mass audience can be capable
>of and interested in doing what a piece of interactive storytelling
>asks from its reader (i.e., making choices). I accept that there may
>(or may not) be a problem now, but I do think that if so, we can get
>people to change. I'm not going try to support this thesis with
>polysyllabic arguments -- I just believe it's true.

  My theory is that there's an vast, unfulfilled market of would-be
IF/Adv/RPG ("non-twitch-based choice-driven entertainment"?) players in
the world.  People like stories, and like interacting with stories.
People like shouting back at movies because they want something
different, but they do want some structure, they don't want to be forced
to start from a blank page to make their story decisions.

  Watch what people do when someone else is telling them a story
verbally.  They demand more detail here, they make suggestions there,
they're pushing back at the linear story they're being delivered.  At my
last count, there were about 6 billion of these hairless house apes just
walking around with pockets full of cash and spare time to spend on
better entertainment.

  Only a tiny tiny minority of them are satisfied with the computer
games being sold currently.

>> >I think that's a crapload of nonsense, but I don't think there's any
>> >point in discussing it. :-) Let's just agree to disagree here,
>> >discussing this won't move interactive whatever forward.
>> You seriously don't understand the issue that money tracks talent?
>I understand that a lot of great art gets made without artists being
>paid for it.
>> No money, then talented people are going to go find other ways to get paid.
>They will find other ways to get paid, and continue to do the
>non-paying thing in their free time (speaking as a statistical trend,
>not a universal rule, of course).

  From <http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/000932.html>,
#7: "Keep your day job":
    Or geeks. You spend you weekdays writing code for a faceless
    corporation ("Cash"), then you spend your evening and weekends
    writing anarchic, weird computer games to amuse your techie friends
    with ("Sex").

  This is me.  This is a lot of us, probably 99% of all people making
indie games.

-- 
 <a href="http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/";> Mark Hughes </a>
"I think [Robert Heinlein] would take it kindly if we were all to refrain from
 abandoning civilization as a failed experiment that requires too much hard
 work." -_Rah, Rah, RAH!_, by Spider Robinson