Comments on: Ueda and A Boy and His Blob and A Girl and A Horse

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 12 May 2010 02:37:13 +0000

How bleak! Nice little experiment, thanks for sharing that Jordan. I’d like to post a screenshot or two of that in the future, it brought to mind some other recent stuff I’ve seen.

axcho, thanks for the comment! Definitely a good question about how AI-human relationships could learn from human-human asynchronous play relationships…

It seems most of the motives for play that social games provide have to do with established/potential peer relationships that take place outside of the game environment, which the game serves as metaphor for. I suppose it wouldn’t be too far fetched to suggest the next GTA could involve a social networking site/social game metagame though. That could work, but again it would be within the context of real-world commentary/parody. Would be curious to hear your take.

By: Jordan Magnuson

Jordan Magnuson — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 01:09:48 +0000

Nice read. Very interesting connection to make between Ueda’s games and Blob.

Also interesting coincidence that I just made a notgame with a somewhat similar kind of “lonely world setting” to these games, but specifically lacking the companionship aspect to make up for it: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-17/?action=rate&uid=1382

By: axcho

axcho — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 17:30:33 +0000

Character relationships in games is something I’m really interested in exploring. It’s a kind of experience that I find very compelling but that I rarely find in games. Your article gives me lots of ideas – it’s the best discussion that I’ve found of the game design considerations involved. Interesting point about loneliness strengthening the bonding process, and about actions that express connection and mutual need.

I also wonder if techniques from social games could apply to AI characters – like Nicole Lazzaro’s ideas about social emotions and such. Have you ever thought about that?

By: chenzhuo

chenzhuo — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 06:14:20 +0000

An old ambition of game designer: Create the interactive narrative elements in their work.
I think the special relationship between player(protagonist) in Ueda’s game is because the dramatic lonely world setting. Although these game lack the role-playing feeling but player have stronger tendency to project the selfhood with the protagonist. And based on this result, player needs lean on his emotion to someone. The beautiful part for designer is, he didn‚Äôt need to pretend this will happened in the game world because it definitely will be there in some way.

When compare the game like ICO with Modern Warfare2; it is like the Pure literature vs Genre Fiction. The audience of Pure literature like games are far less than Genre Fiction, but the skill and spirit of literature always on the shoulder of the first one. Sometimes there are benchmark production come out which have high interactive narrative skill and also make genre game player satisfied, we called them GTA or Bioshock:))

By the way, The dog of Fable2 make me remember the famous character ‘dogmeat’ in Fallout1, who is the most loyalty and toughest dog I have ever met in video game.