Moving from the holodeck to the game board, Janet Murray explains why we make dramas of digital simulations.
An explanation of the concept "gameplay".
The concept of gameplay is widely used within gamestudies, game design, and game culture, to describe not how a game looks, but how it plays: how the player interacts with its rules and experiences the totality of challenges and choices that the game offers.
One of several essays Jim Andrews wrote to accompany his shoot-em-up poetry game Arteroids.
Arteroids is about cracking language open.
The future and the present are involved in the emergence of new media language that multiplies the symbols of writing, and changes writing from dealing with solely typographical material to multimedia composition and cognizing.
Andrews looks at the relationships, kinships, and tensions between interactive art and interactive games. The intersection of art and game is play.
The Atari Video Computer System dominated the home videogame market so completely that "Atari" became the generic term for a videogame console. The Atari VCS was affordable and offered the flexibility of changeable cartridges. Nearly a thousand of these were created, the most significant of which established new techniques, mechanics, and even entire genres. This book offers a detailed and accessible study of this influential videogame console from both computational and cultural perspectives. Studies of digital media have rarely investigated platforms—the systems underlying computing. This book (the first in a series of Platform Studies) does so, developing a critical approach that examines the relationship between platforms and creative expression. Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost discuss the Atari VCS itself and examine in detail six game cartridges: Combat, Adventure, Pac-Man, Yars' Revenge, Pitfall!, and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. They describe the technical constraints and affordances of the system and track developments in programming, gameplay, interface, and aesthetics. Adventure, for example, was the first game to represent a virtual space larger than the screen (anticipating the boundless virtual spaces of such later games as World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto), by allowing the player to walk off one side into another space; and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back was an early instance of interaction between media properties and video games. Montfort and Bogost show that the Atari VCS—often considered merely a retro fetish object—is an essential part of the history of video games. (Source: The MIT Press)
"Prom Week" is an innovative new social simulation game from the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz. Unlike other social games like The Sims, Prom Week's goal (as with its spiritual and technological predecessor, Façade) is to merge rich character specificity with a highly dynamic story space: a playable system with a coherent narrative. When I was brought on board as the lead author a year before release, I had no idea the scale of work I was getting myself into: overseeing a team of (at times) eight writers to create over eight hundred hand-authored scenes tightly integrated with pre- and post-conditions, inline variation, and animation choreography. Each scene had to be specific enough to be narratively satisfying but broad enough to cover as wide a possibility space as possible, putting severe limitations on how dialogue could be written. As the project progressed, we developed a number of survival strategies for sharing authorship with algorithms, managing complexity (and coherency) in process-intensive fiction, and working with programmers to produce and refine the tools we needed to do this "quantum authoring." The result was a huge win for interactive storytelling: emergent character behavior and reactive stories from our cast of characters. In this talk I'll share key insights along with demonstrations of our custom authoring tool and unique gameplay moments.
Each Prom Week scene narrates a specific change in the underlying social simulation, which recreates (in painful accuracy) the last week before senior prom for a cast of eighteen high school students. Each type of social change--such as two characters breaking off a relationship, or one impressing another with his coolness--needs a pool of hand-authored scenes that instantiate this change dramatically. The most specific scene for a given situation is chosen, so in addition to a generic break-up conversation, authors could create more specific scenes (a break-up between two shy characters, or for a jilted boyfriend). Scenes are often dynamically personalized further through character-specific vocabulary and references to recent events. Characters are not authored directly, but instead given a set of permanent traits (clumsy, sex magnet), temporary statuses (popular, sad), and starting relationships with and feelings towards other characters. This bundle of definitions helps the system select an appropriate scene for each character to perform in a given situation. As writers, it was tremendously exciting to see the system start performing our characters correctly, without having to hand-tag scenes as being appropriate for specific characters. I'll show some examples of this happening in my presentation.
At ELO 2010 in Providence, we presented our initial thoughts on what authoring for Prom Week might be like ("Authoring Game-based Interactive Narrative using Social Games and Comme il Faut," Mike Treanor). We're excited to come full circle and share our post-mortem results with the electronic literature community.
(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)