Future Cinema

tomorrow’s class: workshop time for your final projects

hello everyone – tomorrow’s class will give you time to work on your projects (due next week). The lab will be open and available and I will be there BUT – if your group would like to meet onsite downtown to test your project and feel that would be a more meaningful use of your time than coming to York please just let me know. Regardless of whether or not your group will meet in the lab or downtown i will need a representative of the group to email me with the exact preferred location of your piece so i can work out or schedule for our final class together. So be in touch – Thanks!

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A(s)century

https://googledrive.com/host/0B8Vp_6RrfYFmd0FCS3ExbU5jNms/A%28s%29century.html

Indiewire article on interactive cinema

http://www.indiewire.com/article/are-interactive-films-transforming-modern-storytelling-sundances-new-frontier-has-the-answer

Virtual Reality and the Home Console

Playstation recently announced “project morpheus”, a home console VR technology. Check it out:
Playstation Blog: Introducing Project Morpheus

Ingress

http://www.ingress.com

I wanted to mention this in class today but I couldn’t remember what it was called. It’s an AR game created by Niantic (an offshoot of Google) that has been in beta for a year as invite only guests have been building the game. Now it is opened up to all of Android and rumoured to be arriving to iOS in 2014. Here’s the Wired article I was reading about it if anyone is interested: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2014/01/a-year-of-google-ingress/

Molle Industria

Molle Industria

Game Studies issue 1, Vol. 1

That Cloud Game

The main focus of Tracy Fullerton’s book and proposal is that games should always strive to be “play-centric.” While many people talk about a game’s feature advancement or technological innovations, Fullerton argues that the entertainment value or player experience should be the primary objective of all games. I immediately have a problem with this idea as I don’t think it is fair to assume that players aren’t getting enjoyment out of feature advancement, or even enough enjoyment to play the game. The highest metacritic user scores usually go to games that combine both, so is it as naive to say that gamers only care about experience as it is to say they only care about graphics? Cloud aims to focus on emotions that are missing from most major game play. Most people describe the games they like as being “addictive, stimulating and competitive,” so Fullerton created a game that was tranquil, relaxing and joyful. She compares it to a “core game” in that it offers an emotionally rewarding experience without much time commitment, where it is almost impossible to fail yet is not “easy.” Players of Cloud are not given any points or special abilities and are only awarded by taking aesthetic pleasure in their creations. In Chapter 4, Working with Dynamic Elements, Fullerton lists 10 types of players and it seems only one, the artist, would be interested in her game Cloud. I am a collector. I spent my childhood wandering back through Mario levels to find the one coin I missed. But many games, like Mario, allow collectors to play with competitors and achieves since there are multiple objectives. Can we really assume that a large number of people want to play a game based on relaxation? And is the artist a popular enough game player that this game can interest even 10% of gamers? What is the social context of cloud? Is it more along the lines of an empathy game, with the goal of getting players to understand themselves? Finally, she continuously makes a point of saying that play testing at an early stage is not industry standard, but I just can’t believe this. Playtesting has been a part of every game manufacturer since the 90s. She even notes the 3000 hours of playtesting Halo 3 underwent. Surely this must have been at various stages of game development? I can’t find any evidence to back up this claim, but I don’t believe that they most successful games out there, that outsell the biggest blockbusters in the world, aren’t going through the same kind of audience testing as movies?

A boring “interesting” concept

Throughout the book on game designing, there was one recurring theme which managed to catch me by surprise each time. At a time when people are still arguing about console and PC gaming, this book actually advocates games like Dungeons & Dragons and Go Fish. I’m sure that no one would argue that these are not “games”, but the understanding here seems to be that, in this case, “game” refers to something that takes place on a screen. However, what is it that separates those “games” from these “games”? As the author mentions in her comparison of Quake and Go Fish, there are certain similarities among these games. The similarities are very obvious, and yet, this disconnect between technology and the archaic world of paper cards makes the audience blind to this. When this realization is made, it creates a wider range of objects fro which to gain inspiration for future endeavours.

Poetics of space.

I’ll say right off the bat, that a lot of this book goes right by me, but there were a few parts that I found very interesting.  Just in general, it is interesting watching someone struggle with building a philosophy of things that are as transient as dreams, imagination, and poetry.  He is quite aware of the paradox, pointing out that the very act of describing and analyzing a flight of the imagination pretty much kills it, nonetheless, he does his best to construct a coherent philosophy, and quite often succeeds.  In terms of the type of work we are discussing in this class, his book definitely has some relevance.  The choice to take a story out of a conventional venue, like a cinema, and to place it in other locales out in the world is not one that is generally made simply ‘because’, hopefully there is a reason to do so.  His book attempts to explore, both the inherent meaning in different types of spaces, as well as how they affect the person experiencing them.

Although I don’t know how it might relate to the type of work we are doing in class, the chapter on miniatures, in particular, had a lot of resonance for me. In my own filmmaking, I have worked almost exclusively with models and miniatures for over fifteen years, and so I suppose I have developed my own philosophy of miniatures, although not nearly so expansive as his.  I have tended to think about them more from the perspective of the artist, pondering the drive to build tiny worlds, so his analysis of it from the perspective of the viewer, and the effect miniatures have on their mind and imagination was very interesting to me as I haven’t given as much thought to that side of it.   There were a few quotes that really stood out for me.  “The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it. But in doing this it must be understood that values become condensed and enriched in miniature.”  And, “values become engulfed in miniature, and miniature causes men to dream.”  It is certainly my experience that miniatures and models cause my mind to light up imaginatively in ways that are different than when I experience something similar first hand.  I’ve looked at the model ships in the AGO collection, and I’ve seen actual tall ships, and for some reason my mind takes imaginative flights of fancy far more readily from the models.   I’m not sure if that has something to do with the training of childhood, where the mind can easily slip from a toy, into a world of imagination, or something else, such as the unreality of the scale, or the feeling of superiority and control you get from looking at a miniature.  Reading this book has actually made me start to regret my thesis, because my original thesis proposal was a film that explored exactly these ideas, with the main character being a dioramist(?) So that within a film made using scale models, the characters would be themselves making scale models, much like the world’s within world’s that Bachelard refers to in the work of  Cyrano DeBergerac amongst others.

Set and Console Translation

First, she discusses SET (116-7). Which is amazing.

But, she makes an interesting case for Geometry Wars and Super Mario 64, both of which use the kinesthetics of the game controller (224-5). And, both games were adapted for the DSi, to greater and less success, which is an interesting study of how intrinsic game hardware is to game play. Both games, theoretically, adapt well to the mobile gaming system, but in replacing the responsive joystick central to both games with the direction pad the play changes. In Super Mario 64, it’s very difficult to maneuver Yoshi around the series of obstacles that rely on the precision of the N64 controller (which was really amazing). Nintendo is (usually) very good about closely linking hardware to games, and using the benefits of the hardware. The 3-D world of Super Mario 64 was stunning, and the gameplay relies on exploring that world which could not exist as a two dimensional image. The direction pad on the DS is radically less sensitive, and in turn, the game is deeply frustrating even though it’s pretty much exactly the same game that was lauded for the N64. Geometry Wars, on the other hand, is a flat, arcade-style game that’s great for the DS, and the adaption to the keypad is much less awkward, and it’s connection to the hardware is less ingrained (it was originally a virtual arcade game within Project Gotham Racing 2). So, while Super Mario 64’s close connection to the console was what made that game so successful, it was also the reason that it was less successful when translated to a different platform.