Blips: Theatrically Inclined

Source(s): At the gates of Temple Studios: Where gaming and theatre collide,  The immersed audience: how theatre is taking its cue from video games
Author(s):Tristan Jakob-Hoff, Thomas McMullan
Site(s): Eurogamer, The Guardian

Starting off the week, here are a couple articles from across the pond that center the Punchdrunk theatre group, whose recent performance, The Drowned Man, is finding common ground within the video game community. As both Jakob-Hoff and McMullan's pieces report, theatre and games actually have quite a bit in common, especially in staging/level design, making crossover function rather naturally. Punchdrunk has been putting on performances with interactive elements for years, and even inspired certain aspects of Gone Home, but The Drowned Man appears to be their most ambitious project to date.

Not only are there interactive components to The Drowned Man, but the performance takes place in a 4-story complex, with actors on different floors performing simultaneously (if I'm understanding the description correctly). So you could be opening a "prop" drawer and reading a note for additional narrative context while a soliloquy takes place above you, and another viewer is selected and pulled into a room next door for a one-on-one performance. It's the sort of show that you can't see the entirety of in just one go. And that's a key difference between working in digital and real world "theatre;" in games the action can be programmed and instanced to always make you the center of attention, and thus able to have every actor wait on your arrival to begin. But I also like the idea in live theatre that the world doesn't revolve around you; in some ways, I find there's more immersive potential in that arrangement.

Blips: Encore, Encore

Source: Performance and Replayability
Author: Michael Lutz
Site: Correlated Contents

"Replay value" is kind of an odd concept, no? Some games are clearly built for repetitive play, and others aren't, but more than anything, the desire to play a game again is entirely contingent on the player. I'll keep playing Tetris over and over, trying to improve my score or get to a higher level, but for most games that have stories with definitive endings, even if they're bad, skippable stories, I never touch them again. When I played Uncharted 2 earlier this year, I unlocked a bunch of character skins, one of which let me swap the Nathan Drake character model with a skeleton. I thought this was pretty amusing, and probably would have tried playing with it for a bit, but that game starts you off having to tortuously climb a vertical train car. If you're going to let me break the game in all these other ways, why not just let me skip sequences too?

In a recent piece on his blog, Michael Lutz compares playing games to live performance. Because of the interactive nature of games, repeat playthroughs will never quite be the same as the time before. If I want to play the beginning of a game a second time with a different character, I'm not really "replaying" the game, I'm continuing to play it under different circumstances. Even without New Game+ options, the experience will be different. You may develop a further appreciation for certain nuances in the game's mechanics or pacing, which changes your focus from what you paid the most attention to the first time around. When a stage actor performs in back-to-back shows, the second time isn't a reperformance of the first, it's another performance, based off the same material. While there are some well-known strategies for getting players to keep engaging with games once they've seen the ending, rarely is replaying the game the actual intention.

Blips: Excessive Motion

Source: The Body of the Gamer: Game Art and Gestural Excess
Author: Thomas Apperley
Site: Academia.edu from Taylor & Francis Online

OK, let's see how quickly I can break down this essay by professor Thomas Apperley about game art and human body glitch aesthetics. Putting aside whether video games are art, there exists game art, which is art that makes use of games in some fashion. This could be a straight-up art game, or it could be something else that makes use of the glitch, performance, or social aspects of games. The definition of game art is not simple to categorize and seems to be ever-expanding. Apperley's main focus is on motion controls and how they call more attention to the bodies of players than button-based interfaces do, and that the expressiveness of bodies at play using motion controls is ripe for implementation in game art, though not all that much game art has taken up this mantle. Apperley proposes that as far as game art is concerned, the human body acts as a glitch itself, though what he terms gestural excess. An example of gestural excess would be like when you're playing tennis in Wii Sports, and instead of performing a slight wrist flip to swing the virtual racket, you swing your entire arm as if you were actually playing a game out on a real court with real equipment. That excess motion is not factored into how the game interprets the controller motions, nor is your stance or your offhand. These are game behaviors, but they do not help players succeed in the game, and can in fact be detrimental to players' in-game success. Motion controls turn the role of glitch back onto the players when it comes to certain aspects of how the body interacts with games, but as these devices become more sophisticated and able to process minute gestural details, the window for gestural excess will begin to close.

How'd I do? I still recommend checking out the whole essay which cites a ton of neat examples of game art, most of which were new to me. I think Bennet Foddy's games fit into this discussion in an interesting way too, seeing as they get a lot of mileage out of the physicality of button pushing. A game like GIRP turns your computer keyboard into a timed game of Twister that you play with your fingers, and the ever-popular QWOP simultaneously simulates and abstracts muscular rhythms. I was a DDR player for a few years and definitely fell into the non-excessive "only do what's necessary" category, but not out of principle; I just wasn't good enough to have the time or energy to showboat. Then, when the Wii came out, dancing games that only tracked the Wiimote just seemed dumb. I couldn't understand why someone would dance an entire routine when the game only cares about the position of your right hand –too much excess.

Still, I worry that the time for game art to comment on these issues may be past us now. Wand-like motion controllers have fallen out of public favor, and only touchscreens and the new Kinect remain, the latter of which is attempting to cut out excess as much as possible, down to the minutiae of facial expressions. I fear we may have to wait until some kind of nostalgic reverence for the Wiimote emerges before we see game art of the sort of which Apperley identifies.