Set in a strange California, Mojave is a dialogue-centered driving sim about a man stuck in the desert, and the being who helps him out of his predicament.
I’ll admit that if I were to get into the games industry, I’d want to lead a team making larger-scale projects. The difficulty is balancing this with creating something of narrative or artistic interest, and one of the Creative Directors that has succeeded in doing this is Neil Druckmann, the C.D. at Naughty Dog for The Last of Us.
Druckmann is actually an alumni of CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center. It was there that he met one of the co-founder’s of Naughty Dog, Jason Rubin, and I was through him that he got his first job in video games, interning at Naughty Dog. He was promoted to a full-time gameplay programmer a few months later.
After a few years programming at Naughty Dog, Druckmann managed to convince one of Naughty Dog’s presidents to look at his design work, and obtained the chance to work in design. Druckmann’s first role in design was for the Uncharted series. While he also did design work, he was also heavily involved in writing Uncharted.
When Naughty Dog decided to allocate resources into a new game in 2011, Druckmann was chosen for his past work to lead development.
Druckmann was a man who wore many hats. In college he studied criminology and computer science, at the ETC he developed artistic skills, and in preparation for leading The Last of Us he took acting classes in order to learn how to communicate with actors.
Title (working): Tomorrow’s Problem
Description: A first-person drinking/driving/walking sim following the gonzo wanderings of Clockwise and Cabaret, a talking lizard-man and an accountant on his day off. The player, playing as Clockwise, attempts to piece together an episode where the pair broke onto a country club by collecting tapes and then progressively re-living the events of each tape to find the next.
Research Statement: I’m exploring the idea of inflicting the player on the world, in the style of Postal or Goat simulator, but with a focus on short form narrative instead of pure violence. I want to explore the idea of what the cost of individuality is, and how it is preserved in modern America, and I want the player to feel free but out of control.
In terms of experimentation, I am trying to combine pixel graphics, low-poly 3D and text in a psychedelic setting. I want this to be a game mostly lacking a sense of linearity but possessing multiple strong characters. I also want to experiment with using Cabaret as the ‘protagonist’ while having the player control his partner, and using multiple short-form narratives instead of one main story.
I want the player to feel a mixture of amusement and a sense that the player is in too deep, out of control.
Ultimately, I will consider this a successful game if I manage to preserve the identities of my pre-existing characters in this game, and make an experience that inherently engaging to charge around in.
Mock screenshot:
This is one of two versions the style I was considering. I want some environmental object to be pixel-based, but I am also considering making the main characters using pixel art as well.
Game references:
Non-Game References:
Concept 1: Clockwise Golfcarts
This idea re-uses the characters from Fishing the Mojave, my Flick Game., and golf carts. In the strictest sense, this game wouldn’t be a walking sim in that I wanted the player, via the feet of Clockwise (the lizard man), to spend either some or all of the game behind the wheel of a golf cart.
I haven’t decided concretely on a story or setting yet. I need to find a way to balance a coherent. narrative with the unexpectedness inherent to the universe of these two. I want an environment full of interesting and unexpected things to find and look at.
Concept 2: Over the Edge
This idea follow our unmanned main character’s interactions with their drug dealer, Fisher. Set in Fisher’s apartment, the story here would revolve around Fisher’s interactions with different kinds of drugs, and our protagonist’s attempts to keep him alive. Naturally, I wanted to make this game abstract. Visually I was thinking of taking queues from films like Enter the Void and Requiem for a Dream.
In most critical discussion of ‘walking simulators’, there’s a set of games constantly referred to as a starting point for discussion of the genre: Games like Dear Esther, Gone Home and Proteus. However, lumping these games together is, in my mind, somewhat unhelpful, because there are some fundamental differences between them.
To me, Gone Home is not a walking simulator. Dear Esther isn’t even a walking simulator. Proteus is a walking simulator.
The difference boils down to the different ways these games are engaging. Gone Home and Dear Esther are both heavily reliant on their narratives, and this gives them a very clear motive to play. You traverse the environment to resolve the narrative. At no point does the player have to ask themselves ‘what should I be doing right now?’ because the game tells them what to do: in Gone Home you want to piece together the story of your disappeared sister, so they stomp around the house looking for clues. In Dear Esther you want to piece together the Island’s mysteries, so you follow the path to get your next monologue.
Proteus is different. There is no narrative, only environment. In my opinion, Proteus does a better job of approaching the ‘notgame’ space much better than anything Tale of Tales has ever come up with.
When playing Proteus, You have to decide what you’re doing because the game doesn’t. As a result, It’s engagement is exploratory. The player of Proteus decides to go climb that mountain for the same reason the player of GTA decides to take a motorcycle careening down the wrong side of the highway; Because It’s an option that exists within the game’s rules and the player wants to.
I believe that this difference is important enough to warrant considering two different types of walking simulators: let us call these Novel Walking Sims (those with a linear narrative that could be told in another medium) and Sandbox Walking Sims (those with a narrative generated by the player, and as a result unique to interactive media).
To be honest, I didn’t enjoy Proteus all that much. Walking Sims, in the strictest sense, lack mechanical depth, and instead rely on other types of depth (usually narrative) to engage the player. Proteus doesn’t have any intrinsic depth at all. This does something interesting however: Classifying a novel walking sim as a game is much easier than classifying a sandbox walking sim as one, because a novel walking sim still has an objective that can or can’t be attained.
Instead of asking whether walking sims are games, perhaps we should be asking what parts of a walking sim make it not-a-game.
A game about a dead woman, a live orphan, and the legal grey area of resurrection.
www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/gdebree/Maryam-1.0-all.zip
“I wanna go fishing. We should buy a boat.”
“We’re in the middle of the desert.”
“Details,details.”
For over a month during high school, I played a game called Receiver for at least an hour every day. Initially this was because I was hell-bent on beating it, but as I tried to finish this short little game over and over it became an abnegative, almost meditative experience. Receiver is a first-person shooter made by Wolfire Games, originally developed as part of the 7 Day FPS Challenge. At its core, it’s a game where the player moves through a semi-randomly generated world, fighting robots and collecting a set of 11 tapes. This concept is expanded into a game which, for the right player, uses its mechanical difficulty to highlight its themes and create extremely engaging gameplay.
Receiver’s main claim to fame is its gun mechanics, which are some of the closest to operating an actual gun you can find in video games: every action you can perform with a handgun has a key bound to that action in-game. For example, if you’re using the basic handgun and want to reload, you have to remove the clip from the handgun, put the gun in its holster, insert bullets one by one into the clip, pull your gun back out of its holster, put the clip back into the gun, and cock said gun. The closest thing you get to a tutorial is being able to open a list of all the key commands for your gun, and the devs decided to give you a convenient ‘drop whatever you’re holding’ button that has no purpose in-game beyond letting the player accidentally drop their gun while attempting to use it.
On top of that, Reciever’s world operates on a relatively simple, but extremely harsh, ruleset. taking a single bullet kills you. Getting hit by one of the small flying, electrified drones kills you, falling off of the endless skyscraper you’re exploring kills you. Falling relatively short distances kills you: Indeed attempting to travel down a flight of steps at a full sprint is liable to kill you.
The interesting thing about having a game that’s so difficult to actually operate is that is requires an extremely high level of focus for the player to learn and play the game. By necessity it requires extremely deep immersion. The kind of immersion that, once you get good at playing, has you trying to dodge a slew of bullets by near-leaping sideways out of your chair when you mess up.
However, it is not the game’s mechanical difficulty alone that makes it special. It is that fact that it’s difficulty is almost exclusively mechanical difficulty. If it were simpler to play, you would likely see every environment that it has to offer in under an hour, and anyone remotely versed in FPS and stealth gameplay would see nothing new. To put it simply the game is highly repetitive.
This combination of challenge is, for a normal gaming audience, terrible. But Receiver isn’t so much a game as it is a sort of skill. This is why I am willing to call the game meditative. Zen buddhism explores the concept of unconscious mastery of a skill as a form of meditation: That being able to do something extremely complex tasks without thinking allows the actor to enter a special mental space. The historical example for this idea is archery, but the exact same idea of unconscious mastery through repetition is ever-present in, and fundamental to, Receiver.
I never actually beat Receiver, and I have only found one documented case of it being beaten . This game, that I devoted days to can be beaten in 25 minutes. Frankly, I would have been unsurprised to learn that it was in fact unbeatable. The game’s story is based on the concept that you are trapped in some form of lower reality, and collecting the tapes (messages from higher beings) will somehow set you free. A simple enough narrative that has a strong links with both buddhist philosophy and the game’s mechanics. Receiver is very cyclical. the second you fail you start anew, with a similar but different map, possibly a different gun, but the same goal and exact same behaviours. And it is because so little changes when you play it that this Zen state is explorable in Receiver.
A game about Lee Harvey Oswald, The man who most probably shot JFK.
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/gdebree/curtain_rods/curtain_rods_2.html
