Games, Interactive Design, Wii,
8/20/07
This is so right on, I couldn’t pass it up. In a speech at the GCDC in Germany this afternoon (covered in this article at GamesIndustry.biz), Stormfront Sudios President and CEO Don Daglow made some excellent points that deserve to be repeated far and wide.
“If it changes the player’s view of what interactive entertainment is; if you think differently about it; if you have a new perspective after playing the game that you didn’t have before, to me that’s next-gen,” Daglow said in a refutation of conventional wisdom that you can’t create a next-gen experience without dramatic increases in processing power. I couldn’t agree more.
The most significant innovations waiting in the wings for interactive art and entertainment are absolutely not about processing power, better algorithms, or any form of rocket science, though they may be enabled by technological innovation (as with the Wii remote). They are simply smart design, inspired thinking, artistry, and most importantly, perspective—an actual point of view on the world that arises from one’s personal experience.
Another Daglow quote: “We’ve spent a quarter of a century saying ‘the machine is holding me back’... The only problem is that now the machines are so powerful, we’ve lost our excuse.” This became really clear to me in the waning years of the last console generation (PS2, Xbox, GameCube), when I started to get bored with gaming in general. Everything was a retread; new versions of old games with upgraded graphics. I was shocked out of my complacency, however, when the Wii controller was first announced (evidenced by the fact that as soon as I heard the announcement I immediately estimated the dimensions of the remote and built a Duplo version the same size to start imagining what was possible…)
Daglow defends the Wii as a next-gen platform from the skeptics who doubt that it’s lesser-powered processor qualifies it as such with a blunt truth that should be remembered and repeated:
“Nobody gets to tell us what we think is next-gen - we get to decide for ourselves.”
Amen to that.
Making music out of the data of interplanetary exploration.
Making music out of the data of interplanetary exploration.
Here’s a list of links to works cited in my recent talk “Storytelling in the Age of Divided Screens” at Gallaudet University.
I’m very happy to announce the launch of “Timeframing: The Art of Comics on Screens,” a new website that explores what comics have to teach us about creative communication in the age of screen media.
To celebrate the launch of Upgrade Soul, here’s a screen shot of an eleven year old prototype I made that sets artwork from Will Eisner’s “The Treasure of Avenue ‘C’” (a story from New York: The Big City) in two dynamically resizable panels.
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