Links For January 27, 2015
Interview: “After the Death Card” with Eleanor Hyde
So, the first time I played Journey I thought “I want to make theatre that makes people feel like this.” It is so powerful to DO something which makes see your world, your friends, yourself through a different lens. Different things are possible. That was the thing I found was missing in the storytelling I had been doing. When we go to a play or watch a movie we are watching someone else do things. We can be empathetic to their journey, we can understand, but it isn’t happening to us. In a game, I am doing things. I am making choices and the story is happening to me.
Formalism is often accused of ignoring the player in favor of a focus on the designed system. (This accusation is especially ironic, given that the type of games that formalists tend to be interested in are the ones with lots of player agency, the ones whose beauty emerges from deep play, while the games that formalists are less interested in are the ones with lots of pre-authored content.)
For Game Oven, the artistic freedom that allowed us to follow this process was getting harder and harder to maintain. All of us felt the financial pressure of three full time people, an office, and a whole bunch of contractors for 2D art, 3D art, music, sounds, and trailers. This pressure removed much of the creative downtime we needed and gave us less and less time to think about new games or to make new prototypes. This ultimately left us where we are today, at a point where we are in need of another vision for a beautiful game, but where we don’t have one, and don’t have the financial resources to find one and make one.
New Stories | A games retreat celebrating diverse creatorship.
New Stories is a retreat designed to celebrate diverse creatorship and bring together several indie games communities (digital, tabletop, LARP, and beyond).