Ecce Sigum

Immanentize the Empathy

Playing With(in) the Rules

John Winkelman

In Twisty Little Passages, Montfort distinguishes between three types of story or narrative: Diegetic, Hypodiegetic, and Extradiegetic (from diegesis). The 1001 Arabian Nights is useful for describing the differences: The framework story is diegetic, each of the individual stories is hypodiegetic, and the physical book itself, the paper and ink, is extradiegetic.

In the world of Interactive Fiction, Diegetic commands are those which control the “player character”. Extradiegetic (e.g. meta-) commands are those which control the game itself. Hypodiegetic commands are those which are made through the player character, and which influence other characters in the game.

Moving from Interactive Fiction out to User Interaction, we find some parallels. Using the navigation links in a website is diegetic. Using the web browser controls is extradiegetic. Perhaps using in-system tools (e.g. a price calculator or a store locator) could be considered hypodiegetic.

Someone pointed out a few years ago that web developers and usability experts, nominally working in a “new” field, could take many lessons from the video game industry, which has been working on many of these same problems for more than 30 years.

You Never Have Enough and You Never Run Out

John Winkelman

I just regretfully informed Team n3kk1d that I will not be joining them in the MS-150 this year. Too much to do, and not enough time in which to do it.

This Saturday I and many of my classmates will journey to Midland to compete in the Midland Open Martial Arts Tournament. This will be our fifth(?) year competing, I think.

Next Saturday from 1:00 to 2:00 PM our school will perform at the 2005 Grand Rapids Arts Festival. We have been doing this for about as long as I have been a student.

It comes down to this: If I have time to train for a bike rally, then I have time to train for a kung fu performance.

The design for es.o is slowly coming together. At this rate, I should be ready for the 2006 May 1st Re-Boot.

Spore

John Winkelman

A couple of days ago I came across the teaser site for Spore, the next game by Will Wright, the fella who brought us Sim City.

In Spore, you are responsible for evolving the life on your planet, from the level of denizen-of-the-primordial-soup all the way up to galactic overlord.

Gamespy has a long article about/interview with Wright about Spore, among other things. One paragraph struck me as particularly intertesting:

Clicking on the egg brought up a creature editor, and allowed the player to “evolve” with a new generation of critters. The editor was amazingly flexible. Wright could give his creature extra vertebrae, he could give it fins or tails to move faster, he could add claws or extra mouths, whatever he wanted. More importantly, all the creature animations weren’t hard-coded; they were dynamic. If he put six tails on his creature, the game would figure out how a six-tailed creature would move. The critter was completely his.

I immediately thought of two artificial life-ish experiments: Sodaplay and Framsticks, both of which involve creating (and with Framsticks evolving) creatures to test for survivability and fitness.

Supposedly the game will be out in 2006.

The Status of My Status

John Winkelman

I have been too busy spending time with a beautiful woman to post much over the past couple of weeks. Or rather, my creative energy has been directed elsewhere. So now seems a good time to make some changes.

Sometime in the next few days ES.O will go down for a little while as I switch over to a more robust, feature-rich content management system; probably TextPattern. So: New look, new functionality, and new purpose. I freelance now, so the front page will be more professional…whatever that means.

Rather than try to retro-fit all of this old content into the new framework I will probably take all of this stuff and shuffle it over to a subdomain; something like archives.eccesignum.org, or the like. Regardless, it will be linked from the new site.

When, exactly? You will know when you see it.

Gaming and Surfing

John Winkelman

As I dive deeper into the theory and structure of the training courses, I realize that a lot of basic usability features of web pages and applications map closely to the features of adventure games which we consider vital and part of “good gameplay”.

Consider personal inventory. You are in a small room. You are wearing a backpack which contains a coil of rope and some food . Compare this to any of the numerous checkout screens at Amazon.com. Your shopping cart is used in the same way: You put something in it, and while you move from page to page (room to room) the things you put in the cart stay in the cart. They are available for you to use whenever you need them.

Consider navigation. In an adventure game it is considered poor form to put the player in a room from which there is no escape. By “no escape” I mean that the player character is alive and well, but cannot backtrack and cannot go forward. The only way out is to restore a saved game or manually restart the game (play with the game rather than within the game). This is analogous to hitting a page in a website where there are no navigation elements and the only way to move to a different part of the site is to hit the web browser’s “back” button (restore a saved game) or type a new URL in the address bar (restart the game).

I am sure there are many more parallels, but these seemed to be the obvious ones.