The Graveyard is a very short computer game designed by Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn. You play an old lady who visits a graveyard. You walk around, sit on a bench and listen to a song. It's more like an explorable painting than an actual game. An experiment with realtime poetry, with storytelling without words.
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The full version of the game is exactly the same as the trial, except, every time you play she may die.
...Chris Crawford, 58, legendärer Computerspieldesigner und scharfer Kritiker der heutigen Game-Industrie, trifft bei der Game Developers Conference in San Francisco auf Wunderkind Jason Rohrer, 31, der mit seinen metaphorischen Computerspielen innovative Wege verfolgt.
Discuss...del Toro: In the next 10 years, we’re going to see all the forms of entertainment—film, television, video, games, and print—melding into a single-platform “story engine.” The Model T of this new platform is the PS3. The moment you connect creative output with a public story engine, a narrative can continue over a period of months or years. It’s going to rewrite the rules of fiction.
Wired: It sounds like you’re talking about an entirely new form of storytelling.
del Toro: Think about the way oral tradition became written word—how what we know about Achilles was written many, many years after it made its way around the world with different names and different types of heroes. That can happen when you allow content to keep propagating itself through different kinds of platforms and engines—when you permit it to be retold with a promiscuous form of mythology. You see it when people create their own avatars in games and transfigure their game worlds.
gguillotte: I've been watching procedurally generated content for a while. Love comes to mind, a PG MMO. What sort of impact is this going to have, where content generation is automated?
Richard: it depends if the generation of the content is the game or is filler
Richard: procedural content can work - I've spent many, many hours playing Rogue for example
Richard: using procedural content to create a canvas for virtual worlds seems a perfectly rational thing to do
Richard: however, the designer has to put their soul in it somewhere: either this is by modifying the procedural content or by creating the framework that creates it
Richard: now the former is the traditional way for designers to speak to players; if a designer wants to speak through the content-generation rules, well
Richard: that would be possible but we don't have the vocabulary for it yet
