Some of the things that go into videogames make no sense in the traditional game paradigm; therefore ‘videogame’ is a misnomer — we’re not creating a game on a screen, not all the time; many new videogames are interactive experiences that rely on game mechanics to communicate a certain feeling, but they also use a vast array of other tools such as the impact of visuals, sound, writing and cinematics.

So I would deem most independent or simpler games, those games made by purists who rely only on game mechanics, whose designs could potentially be translated to paper or real life, to be videogames. The games that larger developers are producing now are turning into something more than that, and I think that will end up bending those conventions.

For example, I believe the definition of game writing will become more concise and develop into its own format, different from what is used in film and television — because it needs to in order to support an interactive experience, as opposed to just a borrowed convention stacked onto a game.

And I currently live in a world of bullet points and concise summaries that forget subtleties; a wall of text is a breath of fresh air.

I appreciate what you mean about eastern design sensibilities in that sense, although even if there’s not a focus on emotional response, there is a focus on player response at least in the classic risk vs. reward balancing that is practically iconic about Japanese games (look at Mario, Street Fighter, etc.). But that response will inevitably be emotional in some capacities, and part the general communication process w/the player. Stephane Bura has an interesting breakdown of the sort of emotional responses some of those types of decisions make here: http://www.stephanebura.com/emotion/ (couldn’t quite work it in to the post itself, but relevant anyway).

That project sounds pretty intriguing – good luck with it, & I hope to see it sometime.

As I was reading the post, I tried to connect what was being discussed to my own games that I’m currently working on. Personally, I stick to “classic” (eastern) design principles and philosophies. Because of this and my other bits of style, I generally never consider emotional responses in games. Sure, I want my products to be entertaining and satisfy the player, but talk of virtual actors and simulated humans extends far beyond my aims.

However, I am doing some interesting new things with images and music in my latest project. By using realist characters with “true to life” facial expression coupled with music created from the player to create the language through with the player is to continue to communicate with, I hope a new connection between audio and visual emotional stimulation can be created.

Ah, wishful thinking in the early stages.

And Understanding Comics is all well and good, I’ve read, I get it. But to Steve’s point, ask any random bus full of people if they read books, comics, play games, or watch movies and almost all of them will say they watch movies but many fewer will say the others. My current theory on this (the short version) is while the abstraction let’s you identify with the character (becoming it), adding in the details the image has had removed is more work than perceiving the details in a actual human, in part because so much of our brain is devoted to doing just that. And therefore if it takes more work or skills to enjoy the medium that way, that seems to be a limiting factor (the question is whether this is still more work than learning to play a game, and we’re screwed anyway, or if this is fact the limiting factor – we won’t know until we do it, of course).

What about the effects the characters from animated films such as “Toy Story”, “The Incredibles”, even the lamps from “Luxo Jr.” etc. have on us? These are wildly popular, contain abstracted humans as characters (or not even human in Luxo Jr.’s case), and are highly emotive. You can certainly feel their emotions quite strongly.

Do we even need to wait for highly realistic looking characters before we can express greater emotions in video games? The characters in the Team Fortress 2 shorts seem quite expressive.

And Scott McCloud addresses the issue of abstracted representations of humans can be more acceptable to us than realistic ones – Amplification Through Simplification.

From “Understanding Comics”: “When we abstract an image through cartooning, we’re not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details. By stripping down an image to its essential ‘meaning,’ an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t.” And, “…when you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face you see it as the face of another. But when you enter the world of the cartoon you see yourself. We don’t just observe the cartoon, we become it.”

Sorry, ran out of time to take this idea further.

I imagine that this will come when characters and spaces don’t have to be constructed by hand anymore. I’m picturing a process like radiosity rendering.. fire this device into a room in real life, and it bounces a bunch of beams or particles all around it, reading the color and shape of the space (or actor) and automatically digitizing it. Basically I’m picturing a camera that generates fully 3D images, which can then be associated with physical properties within the simulation. Who knows if this even makes sense or will be possible, but I’m picturing a day when ‘level design’ will consist of building a movie set and then capturing it with this 3D virtualization device; same with character modeling, but with an actor in a booth. Animation fully procedural based on the properties of the actor and the environment. We’ll see.