Finally, more than a whole two months after I released the game, the very last Adventure Architect article for Chivalry is online. A snippety snippet:

“Yet, despite this, what I find myself more concerned about is how Chivalry presents itself as an artistic experience; that is, how far does it come in reaching out and inspiring people in the same way that my favourite works of art do? Admittedly, I don’t think I’m the greatest of storytellers, and still have a long way to go before I get anywhere near where I’d like to be in that regard. That said, my impressions of my games are coloured by the fact that I know them inside and out, and therefore cannot see them as an audience would. This is where player feedback becomes important to me. It becomes my measuring stick to gauge where I am with respect to creating my ideal gaming experience, and what I can do to come closer to that ideal in future projects.”

Go on now, read the rest for some delicious postmortem goodness!

Social gaming, they say, is the New Hawt Thang™ these days. Everyone’s into those newfangled MMOs, after all, so that seems to be the way you need to go as a developer in order to strike gold, isn’t it? Yet, there’s a huge problem here. Even though games with social aspects to them are supposed to be ridiculously popular, I just can’t get into them.

Now, there are many reasons why this might be the case; namely, they usually have too much violence and acquisition-based gameplay, they’re huge time sinks I can’t afford to waste my energy on, etcetera etcetera. But one that really stands out is the fact that they don’t appear to suit my personality. I’m a rather strong introvert, you see, which generally means that dealing with people is exhausting for me, and I often need time alone to “recharge my batteries”, so to speak. Hence, having to spend a big chunk of my leisure time trying to socialise with other people is horribly unappealing, particularly since I have to do a lot of it in the real world as it stands. The situation is even further exacerbated when one has to deal with immature teenagers and the like who type in horribly undecipherable netspeak and act extremely racist and/or sexist under the guise of anonymity, who appear to show up even more in online games than they do in real life. Ugh.

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I had a conversation with a friend yesterday about unresolved endings in movies. Having grown up in Canada, I’m quite accustomed to the Western convention of giving stories a clear beginning, middle, and end. However, I’m also half-Persian, and the vast majority of Persian movies I’ve seen have the bizarre tendency of ending right at places where you’d expect some kind of dénouement to occur. This has historically bothered me, but given some time to think about it, there are times when an unresolved ending actually works. If you’re doing a slice of life-type story, which a lot of Persian movies are, it gives you the feeling that life goes on outside of the vignette you get to see in the film. It’s a message that can make a very powerful point, if done well. [1]

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