When reading the Lowgren chapter and listening to some of the discussion in class I was reminded again of the games of Jenova Chen et al at thatgamecompany (I know I’ve used them before but for some reason their work seems to resonate with me in relation to this class), particularly in when Lowgren talks about immersion, not necessarily the whole VR stuff but when he talks about “engaging so deeply in a task at hand that the world around it ceases to exist”. This to me resonates with the concept of flow, explored by Chen in his MFA thesis, “Flow in games” and the following ACM Viewpoint paper. The initial game prototype that accompanied the thesis can be played here and was developed further to be thatgamecompany’s first game for the Playstation Network.
Their newest game Journey (which I will admit I haven’t played, only read about and watched an interview with Chen which you can view here) seems to incorporate the quality of ambiguity, the player not knowing why they are travelling through the desert, and what they are supposed to do other than travel through the environment. There is also for me an element of the personal connectedness spoken about by Lowgren, as while playing you may come across other players who you can interact with through the “songs” of the avatar and by accompanying each other which reminded me of the Italian “drin”/”squillo” mentioned in the chapter. The diagetic nature of the connection bot allowing traditional communication but through use of the songs and actions within the game a connection with other plays can be formed.
Anyone have any thoughts?
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April 5, 2012 at 4:25 pm
kevinwalorski
I was chatting with a friend last night who reported multiple playthroughs of this game and learned some pretty interesting stuff –
First off, even though one of his other friends owns this game, there is no way to actually explicitly play cooperatively with someone of your choosing. I believe there also intentionally isn’t voice chat, you have to rely on the cues discussed above. So the connection you speak of seems to carry a much different meaning than say entering a game world with either close friends, or at least strangers with voice communication to complete the challenges at hand.
Journey’s online component is making me think of another game I also have not played, but have only heard about. As much as I cringe linking to an IGN article, scrub to 3:16 to get a sense of a different take of online interaction (http://ps3.ign.com/articles/119/1197278p1.html). I’m not sure if Dark Soul’s online servers are still running, but there seemed to be some similarities (as well as differences) to Journey’s take on the coop experience. For instance, players could join another player’s world to assist in defeating a difficult boss. In addition, due to the game’s old-school harshness, players can leave messages throughout the world to theoretically aid others in warning of dangers ahead. This also enables the potential of trolling of course, but it is a clever way of merging the single player experience with the online world — it adds an entirely emergent layer to the game that poses its own set of challenges.