RE: [-empyre-] games experimentation

["Jim Andrews" <jim@vispo.com>]

i'm following the discussion with interest. intriguing to hear from people
developing computer games for gallery environments. a couple of questions,
if i may.

what is machinima?

being a director developer, i subscribe to the dirgames list and
occassionally read it. most of the effort there seems to cd or shockwave.
and the shockwave stuff is usually short shrift, like a $5000 budget for
some sort of promotional game for a commercial site. so it's mostly quickie
reruns of well-known game concepts. no discussion of art, per se. technical
questions about external casts and so on. the list is a valuable technical
resource for lingo programmers. and that's how most director lists are.
there isn't really any successful list devoted to art game programming that
i'm aware of. are there some?

perhaps a more interesting question now. i'm wondering if people developing
art games have had the same experience i have had that often you find
yourself wanting both a 'game mode' and a 'play mode'? art and game are
related primarily via the notion of 'play', it seems. you can play to win or
'just for fun', play chess or a guitar, etc, several notions of 'play', some
important to the activities and approaches of art, some not. you could say
art is enlightened play (on a good day). thought of that the other day. in
any case, in the couple of projects i've worked on 'art games', i have found
myself in a situation where some of the features i've wanted to program were
'play to win' oriented while others were more concerned with 'art play',
explorative, compositional, features. and usually they are not suited to the
same 'mode' of play (game mode/play mode). i've found the game mode/play
mode distinction useful as a design paradigm and wonder if others have too.

in game mode, you 'play the cards you're dealt'. whereas in play mode, you
have more tools to explore the materials and maybe compose aspects of the
game yourself or change environment parameters and so on. play mode is not
competitive. game mode is. it seems a game without a game mode is more like
a guitar than a game. and a computer game without a play mode is usually not
very enlightening: playing to win a computer game can't be taken seriously
for very long.

ja
http://vispo.com/arteroids