229: Symphony of Play

[More Fun To Compute]

Oh, and what do you mean Bioshock is named as an offender. Named by whom?

Clint Hocking wrote a long piece on it.

Also: 'good' plus 'extra layer of meaning' does not always equal 'better.'

That's sort of what I mean. Infinity Ward couldn't say that they want to make a game about saving the whales then say that they should make a military FPS about saving the whales because it's story they are telling that is the important thing and the FPS angle is just levering their fanbase and skills. It seems like some people do think like this, up to a point.

Your analogy is more akin to a co-op game with a section that one man goes solo while the other watches. If you must match the music analogy, a game with cutscenes is like a man playing a player-piano who sits back every now and then to let the piano do its own thing.

I suppose that some people do perform with drum machines and samples but we are probably pushing this music thing past breaking point now.

 

[Acidwell]

I don't buy it. So games have cues as to how a player plays them (some games have terrible triggers: COD4) and not everyone can just play one. Great, so what?

There is a reason being cinematic is good, and the article fails to realize this, GAMES ARE VISUAL! So why therefore, is it wrong to have emphasis on them flowing visually? The article rants on, but does not make that many concrete arguments in it.

And also, why must we even have these categorization? A game can be cinematic, fully interactive, and whatever it is the article wants them to be. If you guys haven't noticed, games incorporate more than one artistic aspect to them. There is interaction, visual art, sound, music and an array of writing in them. We can have all of these at once.

Well if you try to emulate cinema then you have the pacing set and you can't take into account people being stuck on a certain part and breaking the flow of the story and therefore losing people interested in the plot.

Only if the devs forget that they are making a game and not a movie. Ultimately I think most of the things that people complain are flaws with games are just implementation, and not intrinsically there.

Thats true but its the implementation that need to be improved so that the entire package can work together rather than having to pick between story,flow and game-play

 

[Jaebird]

Perfect example to go along with this: Coheed and Cambria.

Amory Wars sucks as a standard story (in my opinion), but when it's told as music, it's one of the greatest tales ever told.

 

[Ollie Barder]

For those that misinterpreted parts of the article; reading musical notation is a purely visual exercise. Whilst the musical feedback is subsequently aural, the way it is parsed is remarkably similar to how games are played. That was the point really.

The argument made also stipulated that games should indeed find their own narrative voice but in order to do that the medium needs to acknowledge its functional roots. Musical performance was merely an analogy used to make that point.

 

[Ollie Barder]

Do you mean how a lot more creative work goes into implementation of gameplay than the initial design or that game designers spend all of their time in meetings about filling in forms properly?

Neither really, which is the point I suppose as a designer's job is not what most people assume it to be.