Andy Nealen at PAX East Indie Rantīut yet it’s difficult to see fun in a world of rules. Andy Nealen ( Osmos, Hemisphere Games) said at the “Indie Rant” at this year’s PAX East that he wants developers to stop making puzzle platformers and go make something else. Enough already! This is a ludological problem and here I am Moriarty and Juul: I can see through the arty veneer. checkmateīut as discussed last week, if you run your keyboard through twenty random platformers on Newgrounds or Kongregate, you can quickly tire of the platformer trope. At the same time a segment of games studies was trying to divorce itself from notions of story and narrative, it was recruiting from players who had been gripped by games that had let them spend some time somewhere else.) 5. (Aside: As games have become serious business, game studies as an academic field has expanded. If the setting was interesting or beautiful, they wanted to be there: they were happy to ride shotgun, even if they couldn’t always wield a shotgun. Mechanics were almost becoming incidental to some players. Whilst the rise of the cinematic-burdened AAA title might have been attributed to shady marketing attempts at overselling limp mechanics, something that echoed the concept of narrative was going on in games. This does mean that the strong position of claiming games and narratives to be completely unrelated (my own text, Juul 1999 is a good example) is untenable. Games and narratives can on some points be said to have similar traits. Although Juul still maintained that narrative and games were difficult to reconcile he conceded: Ironically, this appeared in the same inaugural issue of Games Studies that contained Aarseth’s and Eskelinen’s shots at narratology. Three years later he published a piece called “ Games Telling Stories?” in which he softened his position. Players were no longer shooting blocks and dodging pixel balls they were sweating and surviving in Black Mesa, fighting their way out of a catastrophe, trying to piece together what had gone so wrong. It was published when game story was becoming more and more important to players and 1998 was notable for being the year that Half-Life blew everyone away.
“I illustrated this a silly platformer with background art by Michelangelo, dialog from Shakespeare, characters from Ingmar Bergman movies and music by Bach… but it was still just a platformer… may have an arty veneer, and explore important topics and themes, but it’s all bolted on to familiar game mechanisms that are not essentially synergistic.”Ĭlearly both men take issue with propositions like One and One Story (referenced last week) but I found some of Juul’s arguments oddly anachronistic. Juul also demonstrated that narrative ended up as digital paint which is a similar to an argument put forward by Brian Moriarty in last year’s GDC and also here on Electron Dance: Games and narrative were “two phenomena that fight each other” and attempts to merge them would inevitably “zigzag” between the two. He asserted that narrative was not just unimportant in games but actually burdensome. In 1998, Jesper Juul presented a paper titled “A Clash between Game and Narrative” at the Digital Arts and Culture conference, based on his ongoing postgraduate research. This is the second article in The Academics Are Coming series.
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