Surfacescapes Demo Walkthrough from Surfacescapes on Vimeo.

In any case I had a bit of extra time off, and given that the weather outside was strongly encouraging indoor pursuits, I decided that some extended computer game play sessions were in order. Particularly I finally got around to playing Bethesda’s Oblivion, which I picked up a few months ago but haven’t got around to yet.

I should point out that I played its predecessor Morrowind a lot, both for my own enjoyment, and as I analysed it for my Honours thesis. Needless to say, I am very accustomed to the way Morrowind plays, and the feeling and experience of playing it. I think it is this familiarity that caused Oblivion to feel kind of strange at first – it’s similar enough to Morrowind that I expected the experience of play to be like Morrowind, yet different enough that things kept happening in ways that were unexpected and jarring. This was particularly true of the combat mechanics, gone were the fairly simple tactics at play in Morrowind (do more damage more quickly than your opponent), in were all sorts of being knocked back and around, movement, and timed blocking. And lets not mention the changes to the GUI menus, which have me constantly clicking around looking for things where they ’should’ be.

Though I’ve gotten used to it now, I think these misplaced expectations are a good example of some of the things I’ve been writing about with regards to the importance of familiarity in videogame play. Importantly the expectations I had about Oblivion weren’t some sort of consciously held belief about how the game would play, I just sort of implicitly expected to be able to stand there and belt my opponent with my sword, ala Morrowind.

Speaking of the thesis, I believe my work plan to have it finished some time in August has been approved. Of course this will mean that I’ll remain too busy to post much here, which of course is largely the previous situation for the last 12 months extended anyway.

However, whilst I was doing some editing to the aforementioned chapter, I started thinking about what was the most appropriate way to refer to arguments made in the earlier parts of the chapter later in that chapter.

I had been using something along the lines of “as mentioned above….”, until I realised that ‘above’ only really works in a word processing context where the pages scroll vertically (unless of course you submit your work in the form of a physical scroll, but I think that might fall outside the submission guidelines for PhD theses).

‘Earlier’ seems more appropriate, but it brings to mind Aarseth’s (well I think it was Aarseth) point that books and such are not necessarily linear mediums, as the reader can open to any page they like if they so wish. In either case, I find it interesting that one relies on spatial relations, whilst the other draws upon temporality. Not that it really keeps me up at night though, that would be coffee.

Julian has also recently released the source code for levelHead, as well as adding a new video of the work in action on selectparks. All of this is good news, as I’m hoping to write about levelHead as part of a chapter on tangible interfaces, but so far haven’t got much to go on. Interestingly, Noah comments that the one thing he struggled with was correcting between the the augmented environment and the tangible environment when tilting the controller-cube backwards and forwards, but otherwise found the cube easy to manipulate effectively.

Actually there’s a couple of cool things on the selectpark blog that i’ve missed over the last few months, particularly a short post on the limitations of a particular kind of computer vision. Might have to set up the RSS tracker I lost when I was given a new computer earlier in the year again.

Also unexpected, but pleasantly so, was the discovery that my DiGRA 2007 paper Notes Towards a Sense of Embodied Gameplay was used as an optional reading for a MSc (Media Technology and Games) course on Game Culture at IT University of Copenhagen taught by T.L. Taylor. Not that I’m bragging mind, it was just nice to think that my work is being used to teach students at arguably the best university for game studies in Europe.

Anyway a clarifying footnote later, the actual theory itself piqued my interest, as it seems to have some fleeting resonance with the layered model of the interface I developed in my DiGRA 07 conference paper . The crux of the theory is that things can be explained firstly by anthropomorphising them, in the sense of treating them as a rational agent, and then considering it at different levels of abstraction, from the most concrete physical stance, through the function and purpose orientated design stance, to the titular intentional stance that is concerned with thinking and intent.

Whilst the theory seems, at least from what I can glean from its wikipedia entry, to be concerned with things work, i.e. make predictions, rather than the with the different levels at which we actually interact with things, in the case of my paper, the interface, there is something to the most abstract layer, the intentional stance, which I think may help we elucidate the most abstract level of my model, which I termed the conceptual level for lack of anything more effectively descriptive. Perhaps what I was trying to get at with that layer is that our use of the interface, both in its physical and software manifestations, is not just arbitrary but directed and meaningful at a higher level, that it is intentional. Might be some lucky timing as I will probably need to revisit the paper in my thesis writing sometime soon.

Whilst doing a google to check what accessories are available for my new phone (note: not actual size) last week, I found out that it also has an accelerometer that I didn’t know about. Of course I did the first thing any reasonable person would have done, and downloaded an application that makes lightsabre sounds as you swing the phone around. Yes its naff.

I played quite a bit of Assassin’s Creed over the weekend, and I can get why some people have a problem with it – I only completed a couple of missions and there’s really not any variation. However I was quite happy just to leap through the cities, Parkour style, and having epic sword fights anyway.

Interestingly I don’t recall hearing anything about the game’s meta-narrative, so I was quite surprised very early on in the progression of the game when you find out that your avatar isn’t actually a 12th century assassin, but rather his 21st century descendent who being forced to relive his ancestor’s life through the quite Lamarckian notion of genetic memory, so effectively you’re playing a character who is playing a character.

The game manual, set out in part as an instruction manual for using the genetic memory accessing apparatus, the so-called ‘animus’ , even makes reference to this strange twist, stating that the system became much more useful after switching to a videogame style controller set. This is interesting in itself as the control design of the game diverges from the norm in its ‘free running’ mode, where the player has to only hold down two buttons to move rapidly through the environment, scaling walls and leaping gaps, rather than the more usual approach of requiring the player to accurately time these actions.

In a way this approach kind of makes sense within the conceptual context of the game, the player is ’steering’ rather than controlling their character, and as it results in no jumping puzzles I quite like it. Interestingly the game refers to the in game interface that your actual avatar uses as ‘contextual puppeteering controls’, with the four face buttons assigned to the head, each hand, and legs of the avatar. This is interesting in terms of embodiment, however it’s implementation is a little quirky. For instance the weapon hand is assigned to the left most button, even though the avatar wields his weapons with his right hand. Another unrelated quirk is that while playing scenes which revert back to the player’s immediate avatar the game remains in a third person view when perhaps a first person one, effectively what the player is experiencing narratively during the main part of the game, would have made more sense.

In any case its an interesting game because of both the narrative and the control design in terms of embodiment, specifically because of its blending of first and third person perspectives, and in terms of what Hirose describes as embodiment as a process, rather than a static state.

So far this approach seems to be falling into place relatively satisfactory, though I haven’t got as much work done today as I was hoping to due to a series of minor distractions. I had a meeting this morning with the lecturer and other tutors for the course I’m teaching in next semester, which went on for longer than I expected. Then, checking The Age website whilst eating lunch I noticed that they were about to start a live stream of a dissection of a giant squid at Melbourne Museum. Having finished my lunch I thought that it was too good an opportunity to miss seeing a 250kg mystery of the deep being cut apart, I guess I have an unhealthy curiosity in giant cephalopods, luckily I’m not alone.