Slides from Jon Weinbren’s talk “Is interactive narrative an oxymoron?” at European Developers Forum early September.
That title sounds vaguely familiar, wait, it’s in Andy Cameron’s Dissimulations article from 1995.
[…] the term interactive narrative is an oxymoron
Perhaps it’s time to adopt a cyclical view of history?
Or perhaps it just tells us something basic about the video game medium.
*
More interesting, Warren Spector’s keynote “The Emerging Emergence” threads ground that is becoming familiar (perhaps I’ve been to too many Harvey Smith talks). I am certainly trying to spoon-feed the students at my current game design course with this stuff.
Question: Will discussions of emergence reappear cyclically in the future?
As Warren Spector pointed out, Emergence is nothing but a new idea :) It’s have been there for a while. I am still puzzled by the fact that it’s not used that much nowadays. Despite the success of some games, from GTA to the recently released Fable, there is still a vast majority of non-emergent gameplay games out there…
Maybe it’s because it’s so hard to control a production when you try to do emergent gameplay? Or maybe it’s because we dont have the appropriate tools to express emergence easily?
But in a way, emergence is not the new, but the old thing. Basically all traditional games are emergent (in one way or another). Or perhaps we tend to use emergence primarily for fairly realistic simulations with lots of object interactions? Is GTA more emergent than Chess or Go?
It’s funny how many people from different areas are coming to the same conclusions about the nature of emergence. Every time I read something new from Harvey, in particular, I’m thinking “Holy crap, I thought of that a while ago (because I am awesome) – are you reading my mind?”. I guess we’re all just reacting the same way to the same stimulous. Fatalism. Blah blah.
You know, there’s a lot of Object Orientated Design methodologies that are all about mastering the implications of emergence so that the designer can structure his message (if any) from a level of separation away from a static narrative – a message out of the machine. Interesting that there has been no crossover, considering how closely linked games and programming are (in that programming is a formal description of algorithms – game rules).