IAM Blog Engine

ran across this on reddit, looks actually pretty interesting. Developed by students @ DePaul, anyone know ppl over there?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tKF_subEMA

I’ve been preventing the inevitable with Brave Story for the past week.  I know the game is about to end but I don’t want to put myself in the same situation I was in a few months ago, with a freshly completed game and still weeks of blog posts to write on it.

One of the side missions to complete is to capture all the birds in Vision.  To gather all the goalfinch feathers and then win at bird brawls.  Most of the birds are hidden in dungeons that are spread out across the maps of the game, and their locations aren’t designated on the mini-maps…so, I’ve just been wandering around the terrain, looking for them and trying to finish one more tedious task in the game.

You need the birds throughout the game to complete other sorts of tasks that NPCs delegate to you.  Breeding birds of different colors to get the outcome of another and so on and so on.

Despite the common association of the word “simulation” with semiotic theory, it’s use in that context is generally sociological and has little relevance to the analysis of video games. Baudrillard used the term to describe an inferior copy that misappropriates the meaning of an authentic object, rather than in the scientific sense of a system model. Frasca’s expansion of Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic model to include the “mental model” of simulation theory (which he calls the “interpretamen”) is an extremely novel approach to understanding the interpreted meaning of transformations that arise through the manipulation of simulations.

I also like his insight that the need to identify a real referent source system is an unnecessary product of the historical use of simulations in scientific testing. His Tetris example not only illustrates how an observer will project their own interpretations of meaning onto the represented system, it also exemplifies the kind of pretentious pseudo-literary analysis that can emerge when an author misidentifies their interpretation as the (actually non-existent) source system.

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Calvin Pohlhammer joins us again this week, and we cover two sort of general gripes: 1) Amateur reviewers equate money spent with hours played and score good short games poorly, and 2) Companies are more likely to run an old series (Halo, Call of Duty, Starcraft/Warcraft) instead of starting a new one.

The first discussion talks about things like amateur vs. professional reviewers, buying your own games, good short games, Bioshock’s game extending sections, and where to draw the line in terms of using techniques to artificially expand the time a player spends in your game.

We move from that into a discussion about new IP. Coming off our one of our past discussions about favorite series, and company mentality, we discuss the risks involved in starting a new IP, how a company goes through selecting an IP (based on some of my first-hand experiences), and Calvin throws down a whopper: Games will never be taken seriously by the general public until companies stop running franchises into the ground, and start creating new works of art instead of the next toy.

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Are games art?

I haven’t gone through a single class in this school without being asked that question. So then you have to define art, right? Well, I’ve already established that the definition of art is personal to each individual, so that means this entire conversation is deemed null and void, right?

Apparently not.

Me? No. I don’t think any game has achieved “high art” or whatever you wish to call it. There’s been games that are art. I mean, my definition of art is any piece that the creator makes to evoke a thought or emotion into the observer. So yeah, under that definition, lots of games have been art.

That said, I can’t say that one of those games has been good. Now I don’t mean good in the fashion that “This game is good.” I mean I haven’t played a game that has done a good job of conveying their emotion or feeling. I’ve cried in games before, but it required a lot of personal effort to immerse myself into that story, and some event in that game usually had some personal tie to a real life event I’ve experienced.

Games have tried too. Everybody holds Bioshock on a pedestal, one that I believe it rightfully deserves, but it shouldn’t be so damn high. The storytelling in Bioshock sucks. It presents great themes and thoughts, but does it present them well? Hell no.

I’m not going in depth on this too much, we’ll be talking about this till kingdom come in class. But I’m going to present one question that’s more important when it comes to “games as art.”

How many of us really care?

I played another DLC for Fallout 3. The plot of the DLC is that you help out a bunch of solider get into a locked weapons cache by getting in a VR simulation of a historical battle as a means to unlock it. The entire Fallout timeline is an alternate version from our own reality. The Fallout, the Chinese were an enemy to the American before the nuclear holocaust took place. Eccentually, you play this realistic symulation and take on several missions where advance the DLC plot to retake Anchorage, Alaska back from the invading Communist Chinese army. You are remined that you are in a simulation from little instances in the world, such as entire areas being blocked off by some semi-transparent wall or bodies disappering in a electric flash when they die.  Also new character animations are introduced with this DLC to gain a sence of realism of being in a artic-like setting. NPC cluch their arms around them or rub them in an effor to stay warm. Much of this is very reminecent of Assassin’s Creed, where the game takes place in a simulation where the main charater is conroling a avatar generated in a space to look like the Middle East. After the simulation is over, you unlock the weapons cache and get access to all the weapons you used in the simulation. The DLC’s purpose os to get a sense of how the world of Fallout came to be, and what the world was like pre-apocalyptic war.

Once again, our reading contains a very subjective and flimsily made point written by someone who is relating everything to first-person shooters and who carries no authority. Are these seriously the only games people play anymore or have the majority of the ‘authors’ we’ve read made references almost solely to first-person shooters just to prove their tenuous point?

Daniel Radosh’s article is ridiculous. In fact, I was almost offended that I had to read this crap. I would rather read that dense academic tripe than have to read more of these juvenile, unfounded articles. Who is this guy to define what art or ‘Art’ is? A blogger and a ‘journalist’ for the New York Times who only has a Bachelor’s degree? Also, did I miss something? Is the New York Times still taken seriously? Where are Radosh’s statistics? I want some facts. If he can criticize other journalists on their sources, he should provide some.

Who are these gamers that are “feeling a sense of emptiness”? They certainly aren’t the masses (like Radosh) going out to stock up on all of the hundreds of first-person shooter games that have been released in the last 6 years. I know that I and other gamers I know feel a sense of emptiness because we found great artistic value in the well written and beautifully constructed RPGs that came out of the RPG boom in the 90s and early 00s.

Film achieves its artistic potential by offering experiences that are emotionally and aesthetically profound — stories that resonate deep inside us, reveal truths about humanity, and alter our perception of the world. It’s hard to think of a single video game that can match the artistic accomplishments of the most mediocre Oscar bait.

Clearly, Radosh hasn’t seen most of the shit that has been nominated for the Oscars. Or won. Chicago comes to mind. And I’m not surprised Radosh can’t think of any games that match his definition of ‘art’. What is his experience in the gaming world? Halo, Splinter Cell, etc. The Pro Wrestling of the video games-fake crap that the masses want.

I can only speak about what I know, and I define art as something that moves me or makes me think. RPGs have done that and I have yet to meet a gamer who hasn’t been moved, influenced or been completely drawn in by at least one RPG. Besides, anyone who has played Gradia or Legend of Dragoon can tell you that those games contain exactly what he says do not exist in video games.

Maybe before someone like Radosh writes something like this, he should try playing other games besides Halo and actually do some research so that he doesn’t make ignorant blanket statements.

I agree that games have not achieved “fine art” yet but I think most videogames do not tell good narratives. Movies can tell good narratives because they are good at making people emotionaally attached to the narrative. I don’t know if videogames can become “fine art” or create good narratives because they are not using real characters. Maybe I’m just throwing this out there but the reason why videogames cannot create “fine art” because it is fantasy. In a movie, human can relate and sympathize with the story and the charaters because people who are acting are fantasy like setting but they are real. Video games are pure 100% fantasy and people cannot sympathsize with video game narratives becuase it is fantasy. I think Role-Playing games are closer to a ”fine art” status because they try to question human morality. I played a couple of role-playing games that challenged me to make decisions based on morality.

http://www.vg247.com/2009/11/06/reggie-there-is-no-wii-hd/

The Wi should of had HD when they launnch like the PS3 and the Xbox 360. There were rumors saying saying that Nintendo is developing a Wii HD. But Reggie Fils-Aime, the Prsident and Chief Operating Officer of Nintendo of America said there is no Wii HD.. But does it mean there no Wii HD or they are developing Wii HD but they are going by a diffrent name. I guess is that there are not making Wii HD but planning to use HD in the next generation console since they are planning really soon to make a new console.