First things first: my friend Lee and I have started a new blog for Stage!, the game we’re codeveloping. A few things have changed since the last time I talked about it here, namely, it’s now an interactive comic book rather than an adventure game proper, and it’s going to be made in Flash. [1] So far, only Lee has been posting, but it’s interesting reading regardless, and I’ll be following suit once I think of interesting things to add on my part. Have a looksie.

Second, I’ve posted a mini-review/critique of The Graveyard over on the Adventure Gamers staff blog. It’s an artsy interactive piece that I mentioned in passing in one scene of DREAMING, [2] and although I personally wasn’t too crazy about the execution, don’t let that stop you from taking a peek anyway.

Finally, I’m heading over to the other side of the world tomorrow — specifically, to Israel, followed by a small selection of European countries. Don’t mess up the place while I’m gone, okay?

It’s been more than two years since the first time I got paid to develop video games, and almost two months since I started working in the industry full-time. Sometime between then and now, I appear to have semi-officially transitioned from “hobbyist” to “professional”: a career dream I’ve had ever since I was prepubescent. Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about what that entails, and how this niggling detail has affected my work now and will continue to affect it in the future.

Initially, I’d thought — and sort of worried, to be frank — that once I started getting paid to develop games, I’d stop wanting to do freeware projects anymore. That has since come to wind up being far from true. Instead, I’m learning to see my job and my personal work as complimentary. The things I learn at my job — techniques of the trade, words of wisdom from those who have been there — helps inspire my personal projects, and in the meantime, what comes out of my own stuff — the willingness to try new things without the pressure of making sure it sells well — improves my craft and therefore makes me more useful to people who pay people like me to do stuff for them.

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This just in: I’ve gone and joined the Blogs of the Round Table. Okay, so the reason I’m doing this now instead of, say, sometime in the last several months I’ve been reading Man Bytes Blog is becaues this month’s topic, broadly speaking, is on character relationships in games, and as most of you know, it’s a topic I just can’t resist. And of course, it never hurts to get more exposure. So, here we go…

There are obviously many kinds of character relationships in games, and this time around, I’m going to focus solely on the relationship between the player and the player character. I’m sure I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog that I take a slightly unorthodox view on what this relationship must entail, which is that I play games not to be the main character, but rather to be the main character’s conscience. I say “unorthodox” because it seems like a lot of the leading interactive storytelling theory out there seems very concerned with giving the player a lot of freedom to act in whatever manner they choose (i.e. “being oneself”) and being able to respond to said freedom in a dramatically coherent fashion. From a programmer’s perspective — and I work as a programmer, so I should know — the fact that this problem is difficult and complex is a huge part of what makes it so fascinating.

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Last night, I went to watch a talk given by critically-acclaimed sandbox game designer Will Wright, who put forth the opinion that the best stories are those that can be easily deconstructed. Like Legos, you should be able to take parts of a story and put them together in alternate ways, or combine them with different stories. You should be able to answer questions as to whether Darth Vader would win in a fight against Lord Voldemort. In other words, the best stories are those that tend to result in fan fiction.

I found myself unable to disagree more. Whatever happened to “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”? If a story’s parts are easy to separate, then it means that characters must be clear-cut archetypes, often representative of one particular attribute. I don’t enjoy such stories, because I like my main characters to be complex and three-dimensional, like real people are. As many of you no doubt know, my view on concepts such as “good” and “evil” is that they’re relational rather than absolute. Archetypes always tend to act the same all the time, with consistent value judgements applied to such actions. This not only makes for boring storytelling, in my view; it can potentially be harmful as well. Look at some of our world leaders and their polarizing “you’re either with us or against us” rhetoric, for example.

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First things first: now that the deadline for artwork submissions has “passed”, so to speak, I think it’s time to give a tally of sorts. I have received a total of fifteen scenes, which will definitely be more than enough for what I need, so I won’t accept any more unless you’re really, really burning to join in on the fun, in which case I might make an exception or two. Four of these scenes have already been written, which means that there has been progress, so to speak. I can’t really give much of an estimate as to when this project will be up for public consumption, though, particularly given that I’m now working full-time at Hothead and there’s no telling how much of my creative energy this will eat up in the not-too-distant future. [1]

I will, however, reveal that the title will be Des Rêves Élastiques Avec Mille Insectes Nommés Georges, or DREAMING for short. Yes, I decided to revisit my love for obscenely long titles, last seen in TGTTPOACS, except this time you can, you know, actually pronounce the acronym. Plus, this time, the title’s in French, so you know it’s all artistic and avant-garde and stuff. Titter titter.

All right, now that the administrivia is over and done with, let’s get to the real topic of this post, which is the difference between a story-based video game and a movie. Now, this is something that’s frequently brought up whenever people discuss the role of storytelling in games. I get the impression that to most gamers, the difference is “gameplay”, e.g. dexterity challenges, logic puzzles, and anything else with rules, goals, and clear win/lose states. The argument therefore is — and forgive me in advance if I’m attacking a straw man here — that if you remove all the gameplay, all you’re left with is a “movie”, and usually one that is highly inferior to everything in your prized DVD collection, to boot.

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I read a post over at Man Bytes Blog today about themes of isolation, how they’re so popular in movies and such these days, and how not enough games intentionally exploit said themes, even despite the fact that games are inherently isolating. And then I felt really really good about myself because lo and behold, my most recent games actually do deal quite a bit with isolation in their subject matter. Of course, being a little indie designer whose work attracts a niche audience the size of a protozoa, no one really cares all that much. Still, maybe that Corvus Elrod dude might get a kick out of the fact that hey, not all proponents of “games as art” lie purely on the side of theory. Some of them, you know, actually make stuff.

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I’ve had my eye on Hothead Games ever since I found out that Ron Gilbert was working for them. The fact that they do episodic indie games, have a good relationship with the Telltale folks, and are based in my current hometown is nice enough, but honestly, any company that’s smart enough to hire the creator of the Monkey Island™ series — one of the defining inspirations of my formative indie adventure game developer years — is definitely worth working for.

Bearing this in mind, I’m very proud to announce that as of this coming May, only days after my long-awaited graduation from university, I am going to be working at Hothead full-time as a programmer. [1] They’ll be putting me on DeathSpank, the episodic adventure/RPG that Ron’s been trying to get made for the past handful of years, which I’m super excited about because it espouses many ideals similar to what I attempted with Chivalry is Not Dead, namely morally complex situations and a silly, satirical outlook on your average video game story. In other words, you should all be looking forward to it, if you aren’t already.

P.S. Happy Pi Day!