The juxtaposition of commercial/mass-market imagery and Chinese Revolutionary iconography and nostalgia are nothing new in the Chinese contemporary art scene (or print T-shirt scene, for that matter)…
To see these things placed in the context of 8-bit gaming, specifically those ubiquitous Mario Brothers, is something a little less explored.
It brings a new element into play; combining the Japanese origin of the context for this piece – Mario – with the dissonance already rising from the mix of both historical (and current?) hyper-nationalistic sentiment and the wave of mass consumerism in China.
In the piece, the Revolutionary soldier throws Coca-Cola cans at Mario. What more is there to say?
Playdead just announced that Limbo is headed to XBLA. Looking forward to seeing this at GDC.
Limbo looks fantastic, and there’s something just so archetypally elegant about that little stroll in the woods; its evocative of Miyamoto’s childhood hillside wanderings, and my own memories of the intersections of exploration and imagination.
Are atmospheric silhouette graphics all that it takes to impress me these days? I think no – Feist and Limbo in particular look to be particularly subtle and refined in gameplay and sound as well – but there still is something to be said for simplicity of visuals taking such a strong position in the indie community now.
One of our tenets is to look closely at what the big studios do, then do the exact opposite.
This is a stylistic as well as practical decision. What happens if non-mainstream style is appropriated, to some extent, by the mainstream (as things often do with very near everything besides games)? What’s next?
The “Avatar Machine” was created by Marc Owens, a recent participant at the designers in residence program at the Design Museum in London.
Incorporating a physical, wearable costume inspired by (and apparently directly derived from) low-poly in-game character graphics, a suspended, back-mounted camera system, and a head-mounted visual interface, the Avatar Machine essentially allows a participant to move about and interact with an environment while viewing him/herself in the third person – an entity in a 3D world, viewing oneself outside oneself.
His statement for the piece:
“The virtual communities created by online games have provided us with a new medium for social interaction and communication. Avatar Machine is a system which replicates the aesthetics and visuals of third person gaming, allowing the user to view themselves as a virtual character in real space via a head mounted interface.
The system potentially allows for a diminished sense of social responsibility, and could lead the user to demonstrate behaviors normally reserved for the gaming environment.”
Game nerds everywhere rejoice (…?). Gamers are intimately familiar with the experience of visualizing a self-representational entity from a 3rd person/over-the-shoulder/behind-the-back viewpoint, as it remains a standard convention of perspective in 3D games. With that shared experience as the context for the piece, it would be wild to be able to have it translated to your actual, physical self and environment, though I expect gamers and non-gamers would approach that experience very differently.
“The system potentially allows for a diminished sense of social responsibility, and could lead the user to demonstrate behaviors normally reserved for the gaming environment.”
For the most part, the language of third-person perspective 3D games is the language of violence. To a lesser extent, it also includes spatial navigation, exaggerated physical movement/capability, AI interaction, and so on – but pick up any 3rd person perspective game, and chances are good that the predominant way of affecting the virtual environment is through a physically destructive capability.
Is this what the statement suggests is the end effect of the Avatar Machine on the user?
Bearing that in mind, this hypothetical seems a bit bold to me. Can it potentially lead users to this conclusion? Or does it encourage it? Is that almost the intention of the piece?
Additionally, how much of this is enabled by the simple fact that a weapon representation is incorporated into the costume itself? Is anti-social behavior encouraged more by the simple fact that the Avatar Machine includes a modeled sword?
The language of 3rd-person games: arrows and guns. …And swords.
If anti-social behavior is simply suggested by a sense of viewing yourself from a traditional violent game perspective, would the implications be the same were the user unfamiliar with these paradigms of gaming? If you’ve never experienced a third-person perspective violent game, or controlled a polygonal fighter in a virtual environment, why would you have any inclination of these things in the Avatar Machine?
For non-gamers, people unfamiliar with this viewpoint and its conventions in games, I think what would be most notable is a sense of detachment; a sense of being outside yourself.
Therefore, does Owens suggest that this sense of detachment would lead a user to said gaming-environment-type actions without having game experience? That the natural conclusion of a sense/perspective of physical personal detachment is this diminished sense of social responsibility, contextual game experience notwithstanding?
Another thought: what would be the difference in self-perception if there was no “costume,” no polygonal wearable parts? Having the outfit – clunky, low-res models reminiscent of late 90s era 3D game tech – adds an immediacy, a visual impact to the piece, but doesn’t necessarily say anything about self-perception; the user’s place in the environment as an individual. Rather, wearing it, you become a generic bunch of abstracted polygons.
What if it incorporated appropriately digitized textures of your face, clothing, hair, etc. to a generic model, a la some existing attempts at in-game player texture mapping for custom characters? What if you were no longer “blond spiky-haired hero” and instead a differentiated, distorted representation of yourself as an individual? How then would you approach your place in the environment?
“Real Kanojo” (Real Girlfriend) recently got some press.
To the best of my knowledge its the first dating/erotic simulator game to approach the uncanny valley of photorealism. Technologically speaking it also is by far the most ambitious thing I’ve heard of, incorporating webcam-based face-tracking that she can respond to, 3D stereoscopic glasses support to get the full bosomy effect, and so on. I’m not incredibly familiar with the topic, but dating sims and their more explicit variations have never quite caught on in the west like they have in Japan. Neither have Love Pillows – but hey, why not. Obviously, being a bit taboo here, this kind of release has generated a fair bit of interest and buzz.
Inevitably though, Lionhead’s early Natal showcase demo (Milo) comes to mind. Facial recognition first, speech recognition? Use of the real-time motion capture to capture the player’s physical body and movements? Natal could read your virtual position relative to an in-game entity, allowing interaction and influence. Although Natal most certainly will be limited in most respects, particularly in speech recognition, anything seems possible with that as a starting point.
When the Wii was released, there was definitely some speculation about the use of Wii in potentially adult contexts, and even on DS as well. One female game designer concepted an early abstract design built around the DS hardware constraints that centered on the use of the touch screen in “teaching techniques of female sexual gratification to a female target audience.”
Anyway, what I most enjoyed about hearing about this game is seeing some of the surrealistic visual rendering bugs that seem to be prevalent in the release for lower-capacity PCs. The level of photorealism combined with the sexual/fantasy/wish-fulfillment nature of this software seem to heighten the bizarreness of these images – making them all the more twisted. These two images were by far the highlights for me.
When people play this kind of game for arousal, the purpose is to get lost in the fantasy – to imagine it as if it were real, or to imagine yourself brought into in its unreality. Very few other types of games and interactive experiences result in something like this. Playing a FPS or RPG is traditionally all about escapism – but there is not an intended (usually) physical response in something as primal and fundamental as sexual desire (or release) in the player. Seeing the body/object sharply twisted and fragmented in this way is like a swift slap in the face – taking the player away from the fantasy immediately. Playing a non-erotic game and experiencing these kinds of bugs can be humorous or irritating – but I doubt quite as much as surreal or jarring as within this context.
Kotaku called it a “Real Girlfriend Gallery of Horrors“, but I think I’d be more likely to play a game with this kind of bizarre imagery as part of the gameplay than the original.
The first look at From Software‘s 3D Dot Heroes Game (PS3) recently made the rounds through the blag-o-web, but is so far limited to a number of nice looking high-resolution screenshots and some vague information about the context of the game.
Despite being intrigued, I’m fairly confounded by the popular reaction, especially from reader comments.
Beyond some critical observations, reader comments mostly consist of “WANT”, “ZOMGs”, and hyperbole about how the game is “the most (insert beautiful/creative/anticipated/pretty here) thing ever”. The look certainly is attractive, but I don’t know if I would go THAT far.
A comment on GameSetWatch smartly pointed out the similarity to an older prototype of the Yuusha No Kuse Ni Namaikida games. The “8-bit graphics redone as voxel graphics” idea itself is certainly not original, as 3D tribute art and mods of this kind have been floating around for some time now. For example, see Justin Buonvino’s DeviantArt.
The question is – is this a cleverly managed/optimized birds-eye view in the same engine? Or different rendering altogether? I suspect the latter.
Essentially the game appears to be a tribute (or potentially parody) to both the aesthetics and conventions of 8-bit Japanese RPGs. Apparently the player starts out in a traditionally 2D 8-bit world which somehow turns 3D. Depending on how central this dimensional shift is to the context and/or gameplay of the game, it could actually be hilarious – imagine the mass chaos such a alteration would cause in the 8-bit residents’ lives – or at least very interesting.
I absolutely can get behind the self-referential, ironic nature of this idea. However, aesthetically speaking, the appeal so far seems to be driven on nostalgia alone, along with some basic post-processing work – a tilt-shift style focus and so on. It’s attractive, but what we’ve seen at this point doesn’t suggest too much beyond being a 8-bit-style game in 3D.
Don’t get me wrong – there’s nothing that suggests this game will be bad! It absolutely COULD be genius self-referential parody or tribute. It doesn’t even need to be brilliantly inspired to still be a solid game. However – so far there isn’t much to suggest it WILL any of those things either. What may be compelling about this title entirely remains to be seen.
My point is that that the popular reaction to this early news seems to have jumped the gun – and that 3D Dot Heroes could very easily fall into the trap of relying entirely on a visual-nostalgia gimmick. I certainly hope that won’t be the case!
Gel? Stalfos?
Now I am being a little hypocritical as usual… An 8-bit JRPG-inspired/tribute game that would get me drooling and ZOMGing? A Dragon Quest I or Legend of Zelda remake that looks, plays, and feels like one of Fumito Ueda’s games, in all their atmospheric, minimalistic glory.
Edit:
Now THIS I would pick up in an instant… if it were somehow possible to have an abstract, voxel graphics Asteroids/Pong/Space Invaders/Mario/Pac-Man mashup be coherent in the least as a game. Or maybe not. “>
So the recent extended trailer for Gagne’s Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet is out. The animation looks fantastically smooth and well-conceived, but to be perfectly honest the Scandinavian black metal makes me cringe. Personal taste, that’s all. If it must be metal, may I recommend Sunn O)))? Better for atmosphere!
I’m particularly impressed with some of the larger creatures – the snapping one in the corridor actually seems to be genuinely frightening. Here’s hoping for more of those moments. Also, the potential of environment scalability could be interesting in this context – the trailer does flash a brief scene of your ship appearing smaller than it usually does in an open space. Scrolling-tunnel gameplay does eventually get old and is certainly nothing new.
The release of this trailer seems to have generated a lot of excitement tempered slightly by comments on the unoriginality of the gameplay and the origin of the aesthetic. I’m all for old-school/simplistic/subtractive gameplay these days (within reason), but commentary on the silhouette aesthetic has definitely got me thinking.
The look is highly minimal, with a “shadow puppet” sort of contrast between flat black foreground images and saturated colors in the background. Gagne, an animator with decades of animation/film industry experience, has explored this visual style before, and Tartakovsky‘s work on Samurai Jack also comes to mind. However as this aesthetic seems to have become an indie game trend these days, it merits some game-specific analysis.
World of Goo did not utilize this look throughout the entire game, balancing a more colorful look with the high contrast look in certain levels, and actually tied in a somewhat unexpected “digital” art style at a certain point in the game. Regardless, the game art maintained its stylistic consistency well throughout. It’s also a great game, incidentally.
Feist has won awards for its visual design (equal parts shadow puppets, Miyazaki sootballs, and Where the Wild Things Are) without even having been released yet. The vibe reminds me of indie exploration games like Knytt, which had an incredible atmosphere. The silhouette look and the music push what I’ve seen of the game so far in that direction as well.
Patapon for PSP is another obvious one and is pretty much a straight unadulterated expression of the silhouette look.
Am I missing any big ones?
Functionally, the shadow puppet/silhouette look seems to be, in a sense, a return to traditional arcade game aesthetics – albeit in inverse. Both vector and pixel-based graphics of games like Tempest and Robotron 2084 relied on the use of brightly colored foreground graphics over a black background, due to the challenge of providing visuals that would be as playable as possible within the constraints of current rendering limitations. Picture Robotron 2084 on a highly colorful backdrop with flat black characters, and voil?†, you essentially have the shadow puppet look.
The advantage of this look thus has much in common with its minimal ancestors. High contrast of in-game objects lends itself well to simple, straightforward gameplay, minimizing clutter. If the gameplay mechanics work to this end, playability can be improved by a look this simple and contrasted.
Other advantages are more representative of the times. Shadowed foregrounds and characters can create a highly moody look, which can be good for building a certain sense of atmosphere. Compare this with the look of LocoRoco for example: LocoRoco also has flat, simple foregrounds, but with a colorful style that is more reminiscent of well lit Katamari Damacy levels or Saturday morning cartoons – a style that doesn’t lend itself to a compelling atmosphere (despite how good Katamari Damacy is).
Another positive of this visual style – it seems that it can only be good for development costs – the creation of flat shadow characters and environments would seem to be much less costly than creating a modern platformer look like Braid. Also, the de-emphasis of texture and depth can lead to increased polish in surface details or animation, as several of these games have demonstrated.
Anyway, that all being said, I’m looking forward to seeing how Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet turns out. Did I mention I dislike the music? I really dislike the music.
I just heard about this. WayForward is reimagining A Boy and His Blob for Wii. The original was one of my NES favorites back in 1989.
In spite of my excitement to see this material and gameplay getting picked up again, I’m not sure how I feel about the art style and music. The original game was certainly not cartoonish at all and I feel would call for a less watercolory/Disney art style, although I certainly see the appeal in creating an aesthetic akin to Saga Frontier 2 or Legend of Mana on PSX.
I personally would love to see something Eric Chahi-esque in a Boy and his Blob remake.
Still… this is wild.
Now THIS is more like it! Musically speaking. This remake of the old theme makes it easy to see why the original was so memorable. Despite the fact that hearing this was tremendously satisfying, it would be pretty nifty to have a quirkier approach to the arrangement. Makes me think of Koji Kondo on Mario Galaxy (conventional orchestral) vs. … well damn near every earlier Koji Kondo Mario composition and arrangement.
Despite my endless moaning and groaning, this could be a pretty kick-ass old school platformer on Wii, purely on the strength and potential of the original gameplay concept from ’89.
– The imagery of Love made me recall discussions I periodically have with my artist girlfriend. I show her various videogames that I considered to have new and unique art styles. She responds that it looks almost the same as every other 3D game, even ones i would consider to be very different. These conversations lead to the realization that “large differences” in art direction of most 3D games in reality are only slight differences when considering the overall effect received by the viewer. While the differences in atmosphere, color tone, detail of textures & shapes, and light’s interaction with the environment may be significant between games like Shadow of the Colossus, Half Life 2, Gears of War 2 & Okami, the similarities outweigh the differences. They all consist of objects of certain colors and shapes placed within a 3D environment where light sources determine color intensity & darkening viewed from a mobile camera: essentially, the modern definition of rendering a 3d environment.
– Her primary question is: With technology at the state it is, why isn’t exploration of other methods of visually representing space more common? Can we visually create the atmosphere of walking down a city street without attempting to recreate each individual lamppost or garbage can? Can we rethink digital 3d space in a manner distinct from the legacy of games like Wolfenstein?
– As far as I can figure, there are 2 general methods of at least partially achieving this goal.
– The first is to create a 3D space in the traditional sense, but then apply complex filters to change the viewer’s perception of the world.
– The second is to rethink from the ground up how to make the viewer perceive movement through an environment while viewing a 2D screen.
The announcement of Love is exciting to me on many levels.
A game that is as freeform and open to personal innovation as Dwarf fortress that takes place in a dynamic public place shared with friends and strangers is very compelling. You would have the ability to work with friends to test the limits of the toolset and your imagination while simultaneously being able to be inspired by other citizen’s creations and their alternative methods.
The fact that Love is the brainchild of a single person is equally inspiring and leads me to appreciate the product even more.
However, what I want to reflect on right now is the art style and how it resonates with an ever growing personal desire for videogames and their art direction.
Love is a world built out of very simplistic 3d shapes and structures. However, by using tricks that involved complicated uses of “edge polygons” and alpha textures, the game distorts these simple shapes to be slightly more fluid and dynamic in their appearance. There are no hard edges only skewed lines and somewhat blurry intersections.
This effect in practice creates a very painterly landscape where the colors and shapes themselves are alive. As you move through the land it feels as if you are progressing through a 2d image or painting: the painting is changing as you move, rather than you are moving around a static, sterile 3d space.
This somewhat new representation of a 3d space in a videogame sparked abstract discussions about the goals developers can have now that our technology has progressed to a sufficient level. For example, can we try and recreate how we view the world, rather than simply creating digital representations of objects existing in the world?
I’m going to muse a bit about this topic in my next post, part 2.
Tektite? Is that you?
The question is – is this a cleverly managed/optimized birds-eye view in the same engine? Or different rendering altogether? I suspect the latter.
Gel? Stalfos?
