GDC EU 2012 Talk

[Thomas]

In case anybody wanna watch me ramble about the self, presense and storytelling you can do so here for free:

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016433/The...esence-and

[Paddy™]

Fantastic, thanks Thomas

[Traggey]

Interesting talk indeed, thanks for sharing!

[nemesis567]

It's really pleasant to see that people with certain influence like you can actually come down to questions like the ones you did came to. If I was unsure I'm now certain that you are more than qualified to do what you do. The questions, the mood, and what you take by example also says a lot.
The presentation itself is amazing, and it seems that you too came to the conclusion that it all comes down to imagination. That's what we're loosing and that makes it twice as hard to see the right path for videogames in this case. If you start moving away from mainstream games you start to notice their boldness a lot more, mostly when you manage to play the simplest game and be surprised by the emotional response.
I believe that you're wrong when you say that most people want not the challenge but the immersion. You're overextending your self and generalizing it. Although I agree with the concept in your saying, I believe with some certainty that the greater percentage of players play games for the "fun" in it and not for the "art". The good thing is that you're an independent company, and by such reason, directly or indirectly you attract the group of players that look for what you try to achieve.
I think you forgot to mention something of greater importance as you talked inside this specific theme of evolving what storytelling games are. Maybe as a developer you already had the feeling of creation somewhere and noticed that there was always something missing in other games done by someone else, thus breaking in a certain way immersion. And I believe we can generalize games just that far without removing the entire game concept so what can be done to fix this problem? The game's subjective personality? We can't make the game entirely dynamic (and this comes down to what you talk about choices) and we can't just stop it and let people recode their game to their liking, so what's missing that can let people be exactly who they are in games. Of course RPG's for instance have a lot of customization, but that's far from what I intend to say when I talk about this subjective factor. I'm talking about a lot deeper, maybe even less rational factor that like I said some of you developers might have felt before. This thing that fills the last bit of the game so you can fully recreate the game scene whatever it is in your brain. It's actually hard to explain but I'm sure you can somehow understand what I'm trying to describe here. And if so, how can we achieve this dynamism? Of course simplicity helps a lot, because your brain does most of the work, so you create your own personal game scene, but if we want to progress into something that can be enjoyed by a wider base of players we can't keep it that simple. What can be done to fix this?

Either way, I'm waiting for the next Amnesia hoping to see some new mechanics that reflect your thoughts somehow in the levels I mentioned.

[Acies]

It's great to see how passionate you are thinking about and talking about games! The talk about movement controls and the benefits of "multi-tooling" simple commands (running causes you to jump over crates in Assassin's creed) and the disadvantages of them (running up walls when wanting to look at a fruit).

Do you think that since the keyboard of the PC have more keys available; would it be viable to, instead of "multi-tooling", adding more keys for movement? The classical example is that in "the game world" I'm standing by a box which I clearly would be able to climb "in the real world" (through using my hands) but I'm only allowed to jump stupidly beside it - slightly taking you out of the experience as you talked about.

Although the example (experiments) of the hand and hammer as well as "the tool" becoming an integral part of the body was interesting examples it makes me think more of how the mouse and keyboard becomes an integral part of the body. I can assume that they were ideas pointing to as to how the player becomes the protagonist (to some extent).

I have been thinking about how a game can make the player form an emotional bond (of caring for, liking) a character in the story of a game. Do you have any input or ideas on that?

[Artyom]

Awesome! There's to few of these out there!

[Adrianis]

So glad this talk is available for free now! Thanks for letting us know. I've been browsing the GDC vault for a while trying to find it, but the subscription price is too high

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The talk about movement controls and the benefits of "multi-tooling" simple commands (running causes you to jump over crates in Assassin's creed) and the disadvantages of them (running up walls when wanting to look at a fruit).

Do you think that since the keyboard of the PC have more keys available; would it be viable to, instead of "multi-tooling", adding more keys for movement? The classical example is that in "the game world" I'm standing by a box which I clearly would be able to climb "in the real world" (through using my hands) but I'm only allowed to jump stupidly beside it - slightly taking you out of the experience as you talked about.

If you haven't already, check out how that is handled in Thief 1 & 2, and other dark engine games like System Shock 2. There when you jump into an object that you should be able to climb up (i.e. it has an edge at your body level when in the air) and hold down the jump key, you climb it. It's really simple and effective, not flashy, and you never end up climbing a wall when you want to steal a candlestick

[Draug]

This was very interesting, thank you.

[Googolplex]

Very interesting presentation, Thomas!
Was the GDC europe in cologne? Oh man, I would like to meet you there!!!

You're talking about games where the player is in the story and not just jumping through cutscenes etc.
When you like such games with great story telling and open world, you should play the Gothic series, especially the first two.

Or did you already played them? I'm interested what you think about Gothic. You can compare it much better to Ultima series instead Skyrim. The developers of Gothic used Ultima as their main inspiration.
Actually there is no better RPG than Gothic I & II.

Try this games when you want playing an RPG with excellent story telling.