Blog - Games as a Medium for Portraiture

Friday, March 7, 2008

Brenda posted on her blog a game design challenge:
Make a memorial game for Gygax.

I don't know if I'll have time to participate in this as I'm currently buried under too many other designs at the moment (I keep saying yes to projects...)
I also haven't yet thought up a solid idea that seems suitably Gygaxian. (Gygaxish?)

In attempting to think up a concept, however, I ended up revisiting an idea which I wrote a paper about for one of my classes. I had written about games as a potential medium for portraiture. That is, the creation of a portrait of someone using game mechanics.

I won't get into a debate about whether or not games can be considered an art form, or medium. I am under the belief that they are.
Although games can communicate ideas through their narratives, music, audio, visual art, etc... the one element unique to games alone is communication via game mechanics and dynamics.
There have been games that certainly wield such elements with artistry and use them as effective and powerful communication tools.

So, if mechanics are the medium with which a game designer "paints", then it is interesting to consider how artistic forms common in other media could be adapted into mechanics. One that struck me as interesting was the portrait.
Certainly, portraits have been painted for ages. When I was a film student, I had a film assignment that was to create a self-portrait using video.
Look at a dictionary definition of the word portrait, and you'll often find entries that not only refer to a visual image of a person, but even verbal descriptions. Some I've read just define portraits very broadly, as simply "a likeness".
Under such terms, portraits have certainly been done in probably every media.

Games, via game mechanics, have the unique power to make the audience (in our case the player) actually experience something, rather than just passively absorb it.
We could talk of putting the player in the main character's shoes, to make my argument more people-centric.

So, it should follow that if you replace a fictional character with a representation of a real life person, then games could be a fascinating medium for portraiture.
If you can design a game or simulation which makes the audience understand, through the direct experience of play, what life for that person is/was like, then that would be simply amazing.

I can think of games that come close to that, or possibly fit the bill.
For example, a properly simulated battle of Waterloo in a war game can get you at least into the mind of Napoleon, and allow you to understand the choices he made. However, the game wasn't likely designed to necessarily make you feel that way. More likely, that is just a side effect of the game proper. In other words: the game is more about the battle than it is about Napoleon himself.

I've also seen games that let you experience the plight of a particular group.
You could count that as a group-portrait, I suppose.
Again, however, all the examples I can think of were side-effects of a game focused on something related to, but not necessarily about the people involved. None seemed to me to be intentionally created as works of portraiture.

Finally, the few games out there that feature real people in them tend not to really attempt to simulate the life of that person at all. Often the person is just there as the star and playing a character role, like Jet Li's character of Kit in Rise to Honor. Although the Def Jam fighting game series lets you play as real-life rap stars, we're not expected to believe that we're experiencing what life is actually like for any of those people. I can't say that I've actually played it, but 50 Cent: Bulletproof might actually come the closest in this area since at least some parts of the story somewhat are based on events in 50 Cent's life. Somehow I get the feeling that if I played the game I wouldn't find it all that successful as a work of portraiture, though.

So I don't find any of the above to be particularly satisfying examples.

Passage, although it's not the life of a real person, at least does let you experience a life entirely using game mechanics, in much the way I'm suggesting.
I'd like to see a game that does that, but for a real person.


Could I pull this off for Gygax? I doubt it.
I don't know enough about his life, honestly, for me to even want to attempt to simulate it.

But it's something interesting to think about.

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 2:40 AM  0 Comments Links to this post



Blog - A Line About War

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Over the holidays this winter I stumbled randomly upon the DVD set of season 1 of Jericho, and got very wrapped up in the show (What can I say? I love me some post-apocalyptic fare, which likely explains my obsession with the Fallout RPG series...)
In any case, the show is on my mind once again, because season two premieres tonight. Huzzah!

For those not familiar with the show, it follows a small town in Kansas through nuclear attacks on the United States and the resulting aftermath.
How am I getting to the topic of games from this?
In one episode from season 1 (I don't exactly remember which episode exactly it was, but I'm going to take a wild guess and say maybe number 5?) there was a scene in which some of the characters were playing the card game War.
This scene began with a terrible line that was something along the lines of: "I hate War. Nobody ever wins."

Now, two things strike me about this line that are relevant to game development:

1.) It's an interesting example in pop culture of an abstract game system expressing an idea. Even though the card game never claims to be a terribly realistic simulation of warfare, the characters in the show have made the observation that the game nonetheless (by accident or by design) expresses messages on the nature of war.

2.) The line is awful because it's an example of on-the-nose writing.
If you are ever given the task of writing dialogue for games (or any media, really), then please for the love of God know what writing on-the-nose means and then avoid doing it at all costs.

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 4:09 PM  0 Comments Links to this post