Eye contact

Paraphrased from Wiki

Eye contact can suggest intimacy or hostility. Eye contact and facial expressions provide important social and emotional information; people, perhaps without consciously doing so, probe each others' eyes and faces for positive or negative mood signs. In some contexts, the meeting of eyes arouses strong emotions.
Cultural differences:

In the Islamic faith, Muslims often lower their gaze and try not to focus on the opposite sex's faces and eyes after the initial first eye contact, other than their legitimate partners or family members, in order to avoid potential unwanted desires. In many cultures, such as East Asia and Nigeria, it is respectful not to look the dominant person in the eye, but in Western culture this can be interpreted as being "shifty-eyed".

Animals of many species, including dogs, often perceive eye contact as a threat. 

The great differences, and the inter-species connection goes to prove that eye contact is a very powerful henomena.

Insect & animal colonies...

Colonies... The game I described earlier (with Aukje) has a system similar to colonies. A mass of individuals. While my focus is from the 'individual to other' interaction and not the wider 'many individuals as single organism' idea colonies could still provide an interesting framing device/ context.

Ants
Ant colonies are often used to portray ideas of individualism in popular media (Antz, A bug's life, Adam Ant). It might be because they're a colony type insect that is very common, and the common ant is not harmful. They can be quite entertaining to play with.

Bees
Not so friendly, not quite as often used. But also exhibit some amazing collective behaviors.

The human ant colony

This is a section of the script from the film Waking Life. 

              A guy and a girl pass on the street.  

Girl:         - Excuse me.  

Guy:          - Excuse me.  

Girl:         Hey. Could we do that again?
              I know we haven't met, but I don't want to be an ant. You know?
              I mean, it's like we go through life...
              with our antennas bouncing off one other,
              continuously on ant autopilot,
              with nothing really human required of us.
              Stop. Go. Walk here. Drive there.
              All action basically for survival.
              All communication simply to keep this ant colony buzzing along...
              in an efficient, polite manner.
              " Here's your change." " Paper or plastic?" "Credit or debit?"
              "You want ketchup with that?"
              I don't want a straw. I want real human moments.
              I want to see you. I want you to see me.
              I don't want to give that up. I don't want to be an ant, you know?

Guy:          Yeah. Yeah, I know.
              I don't want to be an ant, either.
              Yeah, thanks for kind of, like, jostling me there.
              I've been kind of on zombie autopilot lately.
              I don't feel like an ant in my head, but I guess I probably look like one.
              It's kind of like D.H. Lawrence had this idea of two people meeting on a road...
              And instead of just passing and glancing away,
              they decided to accept what he calls "the confrontation between their souls."
              It's like, um-- like freeing the brave reckless gods within us all.

Girl:         Then it's like we have met.

Following a lead from a film analysis: 

Martin Bauber

Ich-Du

Ich-Du ("I-Thou" or "I-You") is a relationship that stresses the mutual, holistic existence of two beings. 

Ich-Es  

The Ich-Es ("I-It") relationship is nearly the opposite of Ich-Du. Instead, the "I" confronts and qualifies an idea, or conceptualization, of the being in its presence and treats that being as an object. All such objects are considered merely mental representations, created and sustained by the individual mind. Therefore, the Ich-Es relationship is in fact a relationship with oneself; it is not a dialogue, but a monologue.

Buber argued that human life consists of an oscillation between Ich-Du and Ich-Es, and that in fact Ich-Du experiences are rather few and far between. In diagnosing the various perceived ills of modernity (e.g. isolation, dehumanization, etc.), Buber believed that the expansion of a purely analytic, material view of existence was at heart an advocation of Ich-Es relations - even between human beings.

So what have we been playing all this time?

Blasts from the past(s).

SNES - 100 Super Nintendo games 

Many similar games here. Plentiful platformers with variety of quality, some classic RPGs. Personally I've played a couple of these, but most SNES games are too early for my demographic.

 

 

100 Game Maker Games 

Impressive quality for games that were likely made as hobby projects.

 

100 PS1 Games
Lots of violent games. More sport games. 95% 3D. Good portion reality based. A lot of Thirdperson. Lots of robots & anime influence. 

 

100 More PS2 Games 

When paying attention, there really is plenty of fighting/shooting games. Interesting. There is definitely more FPS games, I suppose now the hardware can handle it enough.

 

Top 100 Board Games

A great series on board games. Has the daughters favorites, and then the fathers for a great fix of perspectives.

Progress!

No, I'm not talking about fanatical love of the microchip - I'm talking about my major project, silly! Ideas are abundant. Here are some notes..

Post-Roy
After talking with Roy, I was taken back to the Joey game experiment I made earlier in the year. Using video games to literally swap places with others, as the "step into their shoes" saying goes. Teaching people to see beyond the surface impression of others, and to understand their motives. Perhaps working with stereotypes engaging in stereotypical behavior, but in truth simply going about their business. The surface impression breaks down when the players switch places and come to understand what was really going on.
A side note from something Roy said: Teaching about systems of ecology. Eg: Have some complex detailed way to create a potion, but then have some ecological disruption change or remove one of the ingredients so that now because of some small change the potion can no longer be made. :)


Post-Aukje
Talking with Aukje was very helpful, it helped ground an idea into a specific experience. What this particular idea came down to was the transitional moment when two strangers pass each other on the street. They both know the other is there, but often avoid eye contact.  
Why?
I think it comes down to eye contact being deeply personal. When eye contact is made with another, and is acknowledged by both, by smiling for example, a real connection is made. This is why I feel listening to music on the street, amongst others, feels... rude. It is an open statement that the person is separate and closed, not willing to communicate.
A game could simply express this concept of passing by strangers and making eye contact (or not).
A strong idea, a detailed game description will likely follow :)

Artificial confusion

Ever played a split-screen game and thought you were the other player? 'Your' avatar was not quite doing what you told it to, but it almost was, and then you realise you're actually the guy far behind that you were taunting a second ago.
I made a quick prototype based on this idea with the intention of occasionally switching the players controls so that their avatar appeared to disobey their commands. This idea stemmed from the recurring idea of different-views-of-the-game-world-but-in-the-same-world that I keep having.
This was also to practice my digital prototyping and networking skills. The new networking system I used turned out to be slower than the previous, so at least I know that much!
The method I used, here, was to pass the actual controls being pressed over the network so that they can be passed on to the right avatar, and easily switched. Because of latency issues, however, it just didn't really work.

You can download it here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9238729/Control_005.exe

Challenges and Rewards: “Why can't Call of Duty actually be about duty?"

From http://www.design21sdn.com/feature/2250

“You can’t just have a fun game and then tack on an ethical message. The message has to be the mechanic,”

“A game about Darfur or Hurricane Katrina sounds horrific,” he says. ”In entertainment, the whole goal is to have the audience experience an emotion then [empower them to] let it go. The problem with playing Darfur is Dying is, not only am I feeling awful, but I can’t stop feeling awful because it’s a real. There’s no end so now I feel even worse. It’s not bad enough that I read about Darfur in the newspaper, my country won’t do a damn thing and there’s not much I can do about it either. Let’s say you play the game and save Darfur or whatever – it’s a frustrating experience because it’s a game and you didn’t actually do anything. In the end you can only feel bad about it.” He maintains that expecting gamers to behave honorably is completely counterintuitive to the appeal of computer games and points to games like Fabel and Knight of the Old Republic as revealing of players’ true nature.

Prisoner's Dilemma

Okay so those horrible grey windows (click image for larger version) are my implementation of Game Theory's Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma.
The idea is to have players understand the strategies - the dominant strategy in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) is to consistently co-operate. Note that this is only the dominant strategy if the number of rounds is unknown. I feel the IPD game has the best moral implications, as it proves that cooperation is sustainable. The game reflects on reasoning and rational decision making.

This program features networking - it should work over a LAN or the net, as it is important that players cannot see the decision made by the other player before making their own.

Portfolio

Download My CV/Resume

Organized by descending relevance.

Warm, dull, angry water

 

Completed for a Digital Media Studio project part of a Bachelor of Visual Communication Design at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand.

I aimed to reflect and communicate a mood in the context of a film.

Simulated with RealFlow, modeled in Maya and rendered with Mental Ray, cut in After Effects.

Watch it in HD

Little nausicaa

 

A short animation designed for a Massey University paper, completed as a personal project. Created with Maya 2009 and Photoshop CS3.

dod_vigilance

DoD_Vigilance is a custom map made by myself for the HL1 & HL2 mod Day Of Defeat.

This map was in development for ~3 years, and was completed in 2007 as part of the Community Assembled Map Pack (CAMP) . CAMP1 achieved over 40,000 confirmed downloads, it was advertised on Steam's News and dod_vigilance made it to #5 and stayed in the Top10 for several months.

A map that was made from blood, sweat and tears.

For a bit of trivia, it was originally made for DoD:Gold Source but ported to DoD:Source before release. It was also approximately completely re-textured 3-4 times.

For download and discussion, see the CAMP1 Thread here: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums...

Watch it in HD

Tommy and Simon

 

This a short sequential art piece. Made from cut paper composted with Photoshop. Below is the entire book, click on the images to enlarge

Debate for an art game

I was reading Serious Games by Ritterfeld, Cody, and Vorderer and was think about motivation to play a game. Why play a game with a 'message'? I came up with 3 ways to market it.

• Ninja the message in.
• Declare this is a serious game.
• Call it an art game.

Ninja the message in:  For this to work, the game would have to stand on its own as a good, solid game. While a great way to get a message 'out there', it requires a very solid game, well polished and marketed. And this simply isn't what my project is about, its too much of a detour.
Declare this is a serious game: Again, the game would have to be a solid game, well polished. On top of that, the 'message' would have to be iron-clad, here-is-my-message kind of thing. Again not really what I want to do.
Call it an Art Game: This means it is not commercialized, does not have to sell itself as a game for masses to pick up. It does not required masses of polish and can be far more ambiguous. This method would allow me to concentrate on the design of the mechanics and gameplay, rather than spending all the time creating cutesy graphics to just get someone to pick the game up in the first place.
Now the question arises, am I allowed to do an art game? It is a Bachelor of Design, after all - not fine arts. I suppose the argument would lead to 'designing of mechanics'.
:D

SRK framework

This is in response to an article on GameCareerGuide.com over here.

The article is on the application of the SRK framework to Game Mechanics. SRK means Skills, Rules, and Knowledge based behaviors.The SRK framework is a method for separating tasks into categories to find any problems within a system of people. Skill-based behaviors are those that are subconscious, such as driving a car, or at a video game level - moving, aiming, selecting etc. Core mechanics are repeated tasks within a game that should not require any thought to process, and should be skill-based behaviors.
Rule-based behaviors are mostly skill-based behaviors with a conscious cognitive overlay, a planning and thinking of how and what skills to apply to a situation. Such as changing lanes, or aiming a gun with iron-sights ingame.
Knowledge-based behaviors is conscious-level thought and used to problem solve. They are slow and taxing but are used to learn new behaviors.

In relation to my project, it seems from observations that skill-based behaviors should not be spatially-based as these require much practice and are difficult for new players. I noticed a female friend of mine having trouble with the platform movement in Braid (skill-based), but had no problem with the selection and placement skills required in Plants vs. Zombies. She excelled at the rule-based level of choosing and placing good plants, and also at the knowledge-based level of learning and ranking the contextual use of each plant's attributes. A computer requires good mouse use, so all users already have this skill and it would be a benefit to bring that into a game to lessen the learning curve.