Category: video games

Wil Wheaton at PAX East

So the one piece of regular PAX programming that I really, really wanted to see was Wil Wheaton’s keynote. (My sister met Wheaton at Emerald City ComiCon a few weeks earlier and he mentioned to her that the keynote was going to touch on interactive storytelling, so I was especially curious to see it.) But, alas, like a bazillion other people, I couldn’t get in.

I did recently get to watch it online, though. (PAX East 2010 – Wil Wheaton Keynote from Matt Waldron on Vimeo.)

A lot of the speech is about gamer solidarity, the awesomeness of playing D&D in his childhood, and so on, but at around 40 minutes in, he starts talking about his experience playing Dragon Age: Origins. He tells about being in a situation where he is forced to do something that loses his favorite character from his game party, because of the choices he’s made up to that point about the main character’s development and alignment. And of course the fact that that moment was the product of his own decisions made it that much more powerful.

From there, he goes into a longer riff about the power and inevitable rise of interactive storytelling. Later, he gets a big cheer by mentioning Heavy Rain, and I sympathize, even though in practice I was not happy with a lot of things about the game.

It’s a keynote, not a deep analysis of the concepts of choice and complicity in gaming, but it’s definitely cool to see the narrative aspect of games singled out this way. And encouraging, too, to have a writer who is willing to stand up and speak for what interactive stories can do well. Too often even game-industry writers seem to be focused on the reverse.

Act 1 of Clockwords is out

Clockwords is a casual wordplay/defense game by Gabob, for which I contributed story content. It’s coming out in acts. Act 1 is now available, with more of the story, more kinds of letters, and various gameplay refinements. For those who played the prologue version, there’s now a more staged structure to the gameplay, and no microtransactions are required. (Yay! I don’t like microtransactions.)

Hard mode is really genuinely hard, too, which leads to more interesting tactical play.

Conscript conversation scripting

At GDC I picked up a copy of the latest Game Developer magazine, and then forgot about it until a couple of days ago someone mentioned that that very issue contained an article by Brent Friedman on conversation coding that mentions Inform 7 and TADS 3, as well as outlining his own system. HELLO. So I did a little luggage archaeology and had a look.

Friedman outlines (and provides code samples of) Conscript, a language he’s developed for scripting conversations.

First of all, for those curious about the IF coverage, what Friedman says is fairly brief, and potentially misleading. For both TADS 3 and Inform, he describes a way conversation might be implemented in that language, while implying that it’s the sole way possible — footnoting, for instance, just one of the numerous I7 code examples on the topic.

All the same, I was happy to see IF mentioned as a place where this work is being done, and also happy that Friedman didn’t feel the need to explain in detail what IF is. (But then, I got the impression from GDC that modern IF is a bit better known among professional developers than I would have expected.)

Second, as to Conscript itself, I had mixed feelings.

Continue reading “Conscript conversation scripting”

Recent Playing: Ka, Vanitas, various XBox games

I’ve been moving horribly slowly through the JIGComp games and will probably not finish all of them. I did play all of Dan Efran’s “Ka”, however, and liked it enough that I have put my review over on IFDB.

On my iphone, I’ve been — playing is the wrong word. Tinkering around with the experiential artwork “Vanitas”, produced by Tale of Tales. Again, it’s not really a game, and this time it’s also not really a story, even in the vaguest sense: the app provides a virtual wooden box you can open and close. Each time you open it, there’s something new inside: a collection of odd objects, from coins and feathers and needles to skulls and flowers. The idea is an evocation of those old master vanitas still-life paintings, the ones that are supposed to remind us of the mortality of flesh and the brevity of human existence. I always really liked those for their elegance and technique. The “Vanitas” app functions in much the same way. You can play around with the objects in the box, turn them over with a prod of your finger, prick the soap bubble. Rotate the phone and they slide over one another. Things like that. It’s appealing for more or less the same reason that the paintings are, if you like those sorts of thing.

My XBox crusade continues, and I’ve tried Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (really so very much not for me); more of Fallout 3 (we are nearly done now, I think); Assassin’s Creed 2; and Rise of the Argonauts. Rise of the Argonauts makes me see in funny colors: the ways they’ve rewritten the mythology are not in support of especially compelling gameplay or story. Assassin’s Creed 2 has a silly framing story, but gets much better after that; I’ve only played a couple of hours, but I’m much enjoying the characterization of the protagonist (who seems to have been lifted from one of the spare non-speaking Montagues, and is keen on punching other young Italian men, and wooing women at balconies). Even better, it’s all about scampering around and over a period-accurate version of Florence. I’ll probably have more to say about that, and about Fallout 3, later.