[pingback The Nature of Order // Book Two]
This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.
Show posts MenuQuote from: Ian BogostBy holding everything at a distance, we trap ourselves within our imperfect minds. Irony doesn't protect us; it only makes things worse.
--Play Anything
Quote"[In 2005 the idea was brewing that game design should be about] experiences, such that the starting point for any game project was not technology or genre, but the experience a player was meant to have."(78)
A dichotomy is presumed: the starting point is 'technology or genre' or 'experience', not both. However, genre is plainly rooted in experience, and (in video games) experience is rooted in technology.
Speaking more generally, feeling (which I substitute for experience) is rooted in that felt artifact, which must be understood in the context of its creative process (that is, the process which resulted in its creation).
Therefore the idea as described removed focus from process, in favour of focus on some particular result, and furthermore implied or was based on, and by virtue strengthened, the foundational assumption that any return to focus on process was not game design, ergo not valuable to the game designer.
"Casual games, as I prefer to define them, are games . . . that appeal to a broad audience and are easy to start playing. . . . they provide flexibility, allowing players to decide . . . what length of game sessions. . . . a casual game is designed to fit into the player's life." (84) ". . . some of the core tenets of casual and independent games were completely opposed: if independent games were meant to express the developer's personality, then casual games were meant to be products made to please the audience, often belonging to a different demographic than the developers." (86)
Note to self: Choose festivals based on the people you want to see. This much should be obvious, but it's not been... Think about what type of player you want to meet, and select a festival that... is for those players? What's to be done if that doesn't exist? Think about the long game of each festival: what do they aspire to 5 years out? Can I be a part of that? Improv on the scale of decades. Play along.
Wow, p150-156 is all about Authentically Opaque games and is critical of them! I disagree with Juul's opinions, and agree with Blow's and Anthropy's. Juul concludes with "Perhaps the sign in New Super Mario Bros. Wii is not a problem." (156) but from whence does this argument rise? He says opaqueness can "[lead] to interesting new games, without being true as a universal claim about video game design" but universal claims are all I'm interested in. Patterns, dawg.
But what purpose does opacity serve?
"Perhaps . . . authenticity also can be an oppressive way to think about games or culture. . . . ideas of authenticity help us think of new games to make and to consider that more people should make games, but . . . has the potential of shutting down innovation and change as well, of narrowing the range of games that can be made or played."(186)
I cut away a few elements of Juul's tone to help me understand the heart of the statement; these were "Perhaps the truth is that authenticity..." and "if misused, [authenticity] has the potential of [negative effects]."
These belie Juul's own bias... he too wants to find the truth... and he has an idea of what is use and what is misuse. I wish that he would make these claims outright, but I suppose this is not that kind of book, as explicitly seen in the following quote,
"I have throughout tried to avoid absolute is questions: Is this game independent? Is this game authentic? It can be better to ask as questions: How is this game understood as independent, as authentic?"(180)
Noncommittal. Use better words to which you can commit, then.