GamaRoundUp: Crawford, Prophecy, Sex
June 24, 2006 2:00 PM | Simon Carless
We realize that, especially if you're busy and frivolous and don't care so much for some of the straight business news we run on big sister site Gamasutra, you may not have spotted every interesting feature we ran this week. Thus, we'll round up the neat stuff regularly, starting... now!
- A recent interview with Chris Crawford had the veteran game designer ranting and raving about the state of video games, so we asked our audience of game professionals what they thought - and the responses, including comments from employees of Obsidian, Harmonix, Crystal Dynamics and more, were pretty darn interesting.
- Published in edited form in the June/July issue of Game Developer, Gamasutra managed to get the full, extended 8,000 word (!) postmortem for Quantic Dream's pretty darn interesting console title Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit, as described by creator David Cage. So go check it out now.
- We're still running reports from the recent Sex In Games Conference, and the latest is a look at how adult games get distributed. Peter Payne from J-List is esp. fun rounding up the kinds of Japanese adult titles: "Payne explained how he has expanded his catalogue to cover: fetish titles like Let’s Meow Meow! (furry / cat-girl game), transformation games (no, not robots, but titles like the X-Change series where boys are mysteriously changed into females and have to complete tasks such as sexual conquests in order to transform back to a male and retain the hand of their girlfriend), Yaoi (boy-on-boy games – which are particularly popular with females) and general bishoujo (pretty girl) / romance games."
There's also plenty of other stuff, for example - a chat with Square's Kosei Ito about mobile Final Fantasy titles, an interview with Capcom Mobile, mentioning a Western-developed Phoenix Wright for cellphones, and bunch of interesting columns, including commentary from Steve Palley and Jim Rossignol. Go poke 'em, now!
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1 Comment
One of the Gamasutra comments asks:
"What's so innovative about Storytronics that we haven't seen in a good D&D game?"
I've posted about this in a couple of places so far, I'm not really trying to defend or promote Crawford's work, but I know just a little about it, and I really like the idea (even if I don't yet understand how to use it), so here goes again:
Ultimately, Storytron can be best described, I think, as "sandbox storytelling," a system by which the essential events of a story are not hard-coded but generated by an algorithm.
Thus, it is essentially a simulationist approach, and is geared towards highly open-ended games. It mostly solves the problem of players wanting to do things the developer never intended (although it is probably possible to design a restrictive Storytron world, though that would be discarding what may be its coolest feature).
It also means that game worlds can't have as many "blind spots," places that don't have to be defined because they never come up in play, and there may also be a greater potential for the game to get in an unwinnable state... if there's such a thing as "winning" the game at all.
It is definitely an interesting idea. IMHO, of course.
John H. | June 24, 2006 4:39 PM