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Mar. 6th, 2003 10:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jfbWe're almost done.
Saw Mindbenders, Cinequest's annual collection of short films that are, you know... weird. Some of these are kind of one-note, but at least they're interesting notes. My favorite was Baggage, about a man who watches videotapes of faraway places rather than travel and get real memories of his own, and who begins to lose track of the difference.
Then downtown. Tonight in downtown San Jose there was Cinequest, the Game Developers Conference, and a Mardi Gras celebration. I'm not sure I've ever seen the parking garage over the Camera 3 full. I know I've never seen every parking garage in the neighborhood full. I lucked out and got a spot on the street, but I was already late.
Late for DxD forum #1. Advertised as a panel, it was actually a talk with examples, followed by a long Q&A session, by Michael Wohl, a principal designer of Final Cut Pro and also the director of Want, showing at Cinequest. It was mostly the same conversation about digital cinema that we have every year, but he was fun to listen to and had a couple of new things to say.
One of his big things was "interactivity", which brought the usual question: Would people really rather interact with a story than be told a good story? And the usual answer: Check out video games. He talked about some vampire game that has fluid transitions between gameplay and cut scenes. It all got me to thinking about Tomb Raider II.
When I played this game five years ago, I was really excited about a scene on, I think, the second level. I use the term "scene" loosely, but it seems right. I was walking cautiously through some underground location--I mean, Lara Croft was walking--when suddenly she turned a corner and [cut] a giant derivative boulder came rolling down from her left! [cut] Thinking quickly, I turned her right and ran. [cut] Over her shoulder I could see the boulder gaining. Keep running! [cut] Looking ahead, at the bottom of the slope there's a hallway that goes both ways--turn left [cut] and the boulder rolls past [cut] but now the walls are closing in! Jump right and... whew... catch my breath.
It was completely thrilling. They'd set things up so that the right thing to do was always clear, but I had to think fast to do it. I was in control--which meant I was viscerally involved--but I was guided by the situation. Plus, they'd set it up so that if I did the right thing, the changing camera angles would make use of decades of learned lessons about film grammar to make it an exciting scene just to watch.
Never finished the game--on the next level, I think, there was some thing where you had to ride a rope-suspended glider down to the ground, and I forget the details but basically after an hour of trial and error I never figured out the right sequence of running, jumping, and gliding to survive the descent.
Here's my point: I finally realized tonight that one way of describing the problem with interactive stories is, they create an opportunity for me to make the story suck. If I'm in an area that's too lethal, then suddenly it's a story where the hero dies in the middle. If I'm in an area that's safe but there's nothing obvious to do next, then suddenly it's a Tarkovsky film. What that one sequence of TR2 did, at least for me, was strike exactly the right balance to make me feel like I was telling the story, but at the same time make sure I could tell the story right.
... Then I came home to practice, so now I'm home, and I'm going to practice.
Saw Mindbenders, Cinequest's annual collection of short films that are, you know... weird. Some of these are kind of one-note, but at least they're interesting notes. My favorite was Baggage, about a man who watches videotapes of faraway places rather than travel and get real memories of his own, and who begins to lose track of the difference.
Then downtown. Tonight in downtown San Jose there was Cinequest, the Game Developers Conference, and a Mardi Gras celebration. I'm not sure I've ever seen the parking garage over the Camera 3 full. I know I've never seen every parking garage in the neighborhood full. I lucked out and got a spot on the street, but I was already late.
Late for DxD forum #1. Advertised as a panel, it was actually a talk with examples, followed by a long Q&A session, by Michael Wohl, a principal designer of Final Cut Pro and also the director of Want, showing at Cinequest. It was mostly the same conversation about digital cinema that we have every year, but he was fun to listen to and had a couple of new things to say.
One of his big things was "interactivity", which brought the usual question: Would people really rather interact with a story than be told a good story? And the usual answer: Check out video games. He talked about some vampire game that has fluid transitions between gameplay and cut scenes. It all got me to thinking about Tomb Raider II.
When I played this game five years ago, I was really excited about a scene on, I think, the second level. I use the term "scene" loosely, but it seems right. I was walking cautiously through some underground location--I mean, Lara Croft was walking--when suddenly she turned a corner and [cut] a giant derivative boulder came rolling down from her left! [cut] Thinking quickly, I turned her right and ran. [cut] Over her shoulder I could see the boulder gaining. Keep running! [cut] Looking ahead, at the bottom of the slope there's a hallway that goes both ways--turn left [cut] and the boulder rolls past [cut] but now the walls are closing in! Jump right and... whew... catch my breath.
It was completely thrilling. They'd set things up so that the right thing to do was always clear, but I had to think fast to do it. I was in control--which meant I was viscerally involved--but I was guided by the situation. Plus, they'd set it up so that if I did the right thing, the changing camera angles would make use of decades of learned lessons about film grammar to make it an exciting scene just to watch.
Never finished the game--on the next level, I think, there was some thing where you had to ride a rope-suspended glider down to the ground, and I forget the details but basically after an hour of trial and error I never figured out the right sequence of running, jumping, and gliding to survive the descent.
Here's my point: I finally realized tonight that one way of describing the problem with interactive stories is, they create an opportunity for me to make the story suck. If I'm in an area that's too lethal, then suddenly it's a story where the hero dies in the middle. If I'm in an area that's safe but there's nothing obvious to do next, then suddenly it's a Tarkovsky film. What that one sequence of TR2 did, at least for me, was strike exactly the right balance to make me feel like I was telling the story, but at the same time make sure I could tell the story right.
... Then I came home to practice, so now I'm home, and I'm going to practice.
