
Defining Environment Language for Video Games - okket
https://80.lv/articles/defining-environment-language-for-video-games/
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munificent
Great article. I want to call out one point:

    
    
        > The more life-like a space appears to be, the more we begin to expect it
        > to allow for the affordances we have in real life. But games only enable
        > players the actions developers explicitly allow for and implement.
        > Unfortunately, that aspect of game development doesn’t scale with
        > computing power in the way art has.
    

This is one of the reasons I got out of the game industry. Schatz (and many
game devs I've worked with) seem to take this as an immutable _fact_ when,
really, it is a _choice_ developers have made. They decided to make games with
realistic artwork and limited interaction. The realistic art is nice, but when
everything is a polygonal shell with baked in lighting, then the set of things
you can do with it becomes very small.

The _computer_ doesn't force you to build games that way. The best counter-
example I know is Minecraft. In Minecraft, the art is decidedly unrealistic,
bordering on abstract. But, in return for that, the world is _incredibly_
interactive. The entire world can be generated procedurally and freely
remolded by the player.

When you play many games today, you will never ever do anything a level
designer and game programmer didn't explicitly implement support for. You may
fail to advance to the next scene if you don't push the right buttons at the
right time, but the overall play experience is not too far removed from a film
(and so many game designers out there have _deep_ film envy). That's fine, but
it's not super appealing to me.

In contrast, when I play Minecraft, I play in a world no one on Earth has ever
seen, and I build things no one has ever built.

But many game developers, and especially producers, don't like games like
that. One problem is that, like the film industry, big game companies are
making bigger and bigger budget games. The main problem becomes controlling
risk. A realistic on-rails game where the player works through a single
scripted narrative is a controllable experience. You can reliably estimate how
much players will like it.

With emergent and procedural gameplay, it's really hard to predict if the end
result will be fun or not. For every Minecraft, there's a million sandbox
games that don't have everything balanced _just so_ to get it to hang together
in that magical way (see: Spore, No Man's Sky). That's a risky bet for a
producer deciding what kind of game to make next.

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__david__
> In Minecraft, the art is decidedly unrealistic, bordering on abstract. But,
> in return for that, the world is incredibly interactive.

Absolutely. But the flipside of this is that Minecraft has no story. It's sort
of up to you as a player to do what you want and make your own adventure.
Naughty Dog, on the other hand, is famous for their games' stories. I suspect
interactivity and story are at odds. I also agree that the more sandbox-y a
game is, the harder it is to make it compelling for a long amount of time.

I personally don't think one end of the spectrum is better or worse than the
other. There are games with _extremely_ limited interactivity (walking
simulators) that I've had a blast "playing". I've also sunk a ton of hours
into Minecraft.

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jdkuuuu
“story“ only conflicts with game possibilities when you don't accept player
created stories. Players will stumble through movie-like stories handed to
them, but the stories they tell friends are more often about dynamic
interactions within a framework (“i made my first house in minecraft over a
period of weeks and then accidentally blew it up“).

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__david__
Maybe I didn't express myself correctly, but I agree. I do think that player
created narratives will be more personal and maybe more memorable but pre-made
stories tend to be deeper and more intricate. And I don't think one is better
than the other.

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kmill
I noticed in the buffer example's image the text

    
    
        ...et '*weapons-pistol-upgrade-only*]
    

That looks Lisp-inspired to me. Does anyone know if Naughty Dog still uses
something Lispy to compile game data? (I'm not talking about writing the game
engine itself in a Lisp.)

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tedajax
Yes, Naughty Dog's internal scripting language has always been their own Lisp
flavor and I imagine that they use the same scripting language to define game
data.

~~~
pandaman
Racket [http://cufp.org/2011/functional-mzscheme-dsls-game-
developme...](http://cufp.org/2011/functional-mzscheme-dsls-game-
development.html)

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falsedan
For more along these lines (specifically about _The Last of Us_ ), I cannot
recommend James Howell's in-progress critical analysis _The Rootwork Bulding_
[0] highly enough. It discusses the affordances of the level design, and how
the game advances the the Joel-Ellie relationship via gameplay.

[0]:
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7vAeDYh8SvShredLiTbO...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7vAeDYh8SvShredLiTbOX7optQMNN39m)

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LeicaLatte
Like a HIG for 3d worlds and games. Very nice!

