There is something very special about David OReilly.

The External World from David OReilly on Vimeo.

I recently encountered two interesting examples of interactive storytelling.

The first is “1979: The Game”, a work that explores the history of Iran in 1979, during the Iranian Revolution. Russia Today interviewed the creative force behind the game, Iranian-born American Navid Khonsari (of Ink Stories).

Here’s a video:

And here is an quote on why the game is set in Iran – touching upon how games can present a unique form of engaging interactive storytelling:

I became to realise that there’s a number of different sides to a story, and that this aspect if introduced in a game kinda revolutionises the way we play games.

It’s not a matter of good guys going after bad guys or bad guys going after good guys. It’s a matter of a whole bunch of people in a number of different colours, whether they’re Iranian, American, pro-democracy, pro-theocracy. Whether they want to just make money on the side by sneaking in alcohol, or whether they want to make sure that everyone follows the religious rules of Islam.

These are all different stories, and to be able to actually convey that and let people interact as those players, I thought would just open up this entire genre of gaming.

The key point is that games can allow players to make meaningful decisions to guide the narrative. Rather than have the authors’ views (explicitly) imposed upon them, players form their own unique experience. This approach may make the game more like a documentary film.

I generally feel that player experience will be guided somewhat (often implicitly as a result of game design decisions; I wrote about this in a post on narrative in Minecraft), but players can explore a wide range of roles and reach their own conclusions as to the effects and merits of their actions.

Khonsari later talks about how “there are no good guys” to which Anastasia Churkina inquires “In the game, or in the real world?”. Khonsari’s response:

In the real world, in the real world. In games it might exist, but games are really a reflection of what we’re seeing in entertainment, what we’re seeing in politics.

The second example is “Touching Stories” by Tool of North America.

Here’s a video:

Clearly this work is coming at the convergence of games and film from the other direction (film), and it appears to be more of an exploration of how interactive elements can be used to interface with a branching story (rather than completely empowering players to make difficult moral choices).

Still the limited interactivity is probably more to do with subject matter and technology (filmed scenes rather than simulated 3D environment). Most of the appeal of this project come down to the high production values and focus on an accessible user interface and playful interaction, and I feel that this project has the potential to open up interactive storytelling to a wide market of people who wouldn’t ordinarily play video games.

I feel that the most intriguing characteristic of video games is the option for players to essentially write their own stories. Game designers essentially write meta-stories – frameworks within which players are invited to contribute to events as partners.

In many games, the player contributes little more than slowly progressing the story and there tend to be negative ramifications if the player acts against the game designers’ intent. However, games have the capacity for much more and I’m glad to see mainstream developers pushing games in that direction.

I spent yesterday at a workshop presented by the Department of Culture and the Arts, ScreenWest, and Murdoch University. It was called: Digital workshop: from concept to pitch.

Here’s a blurb from the event webpage:

Spend a day with digital professionals and workshop a hypothetical digital project from concept to pitch. You will work as part of a small team of creatives, mentored by digital pros and at the conclusion of the day you will have the skills and knowledge to prepare a digital project submission for X|Media|Lab Perth 2011.

I didn’t have many expectations at the start of the day. Primarily, I figured that various pitched crossmedia projects may require some game development work and I wanted to let participants know about the local game development community and Let’s Make Games.

After a brief registration process and introductions, we broke out into assigned teams (which involved more introductions) and started working on project concepts. My team decided to get behind a concept I suggested involving a think-global-act-local-cultural-exchange-competitive-activism crossmedia reality program.

At the end of the day, we won the People’s Choice Award (which was nice). More interesting though was that the winner of the Mentors’ Award (presumably for project most suitable for X|Media|Lab and the X|Media|Lab Perth Development Award) was a video game.

It’s no surprise that the game project won. It was a very well designed and pitched project with a clear market, positive social impact, and a number of potential funding partners. It looks like a lot of good clean edutainment fun, and I hope that the game is eventually developed in Perth by local developers.

So it’s not surprising, but it is interesting. Mostly because the funding agencies involved (DCA and ScreenWest) do not currently support funding of games.

Consider this excerpt from ScreenWest’s Terms of Trade (written in July 2009):

3.4 ScreenWest doesn’t provide development funding for:

h) Development of Computer Games.

So what does this all mean?

Clearly, attitudes towards games are changing – not just within the general public, but also within the screen industry. I’m very glad that a game won the Mentors’ Award, and I hope that this is an indicator that games will soon no longer be excluded from funding in Western Australia.

Overall, the workshop was invigorating and reinforced a feeling of opportunity for different media professionals to work together. I met some great people who inspired me with their work, and I felt that I could positively contribute in many areas. Thanks to the organisers and participants!

I was lying down, reading comics on my iPod, when Pete came up for a cuddle.

So as not to upset him, I ended up with my arm in an awkward position for ages. Then I had to contort my other arm in order to take this photo:

In related news, I have a beard now… although I may shave it off tomorrow. Also, the scar above my eye is surprisingly clear in this grainy photo.

I’ve uploaded a gameplay video of my Global Game Jam 2001 entry “It’s lonely being alive” (which I mentioned in my last post).

Check it out (switch to HD)!:

Now those of you who don’t play games (or still running Internet Explorer) can get some idea as to what I got up to last weekend.

I made a game for Global Game Jam. Check it out at:

• http://globalgamejam.org/2011/its-lonely-being-alive

Here’s a teaser image:

And some text from the game opening:

After sucking the life out of our planet to fuel our consumption… we left in the hope that we could find life elsewhere.

We wanted to keep living (in the manner to which we had become accustomed).

Life in a luxury capsule isn’t so bad… right?

More details are included on the game page on the Global Game Jam website. (I think that you can vote for me and stuff there…)

Update: Oh, I should mention that it works in Chrome/Chromium, Safari, and (kinda in) Firefox. Performance is best in Chrome/Chromium.

Update: Fixed the embed over at the Global Game Jam site, and changed linked above to point there (click on the “play” link on the linked page).

Every Australia Day I have the same thoughts:

1. Australia Day should really be on a different calendar day
2. We should really be a republic by now
3. We should really change that flag

Australia has an appalling record of gross mistreatment of Indigenous Australians. Scheduling the national day of Australia to fall on a date representing colonisation is: At best, in awfully poor taste; At worst, an instrument for wilful and malicious socio-cultural subjugation.

Speaking of subjugation, why do we still support a foreign monarch? In this day and age… it’s pretty amazing (and embarrassing). Surely we can work out some other model of governance.

So every Australia Day I come to the same conclusions:

1. We should become a republic
2. We should mark the date we do so by making it the new Australia Day
3. And we should remove the Union Jack from the flag

It seems pretty straight-forward to me. Maybe we could even become a republic on January 26 – provided we do something to properly reconcile all Australians (a simple “sorry” isn’t enough). Hmmm, I’m sure that it will happen eventually.

I’ve been playing a fair amount of Minecraft recently, and I figured that I would write a series of blog posts about: narrative in the game, the community, and my experiences hosting a server.

For those who don’t know about Minecraft, here’s an introductory video:

On the face of it, Minecraft is a simple game. There are no explicit objectives or story – just a blocky world in which players can mine resources and build structures. It appears to be just a playground – void of narrative and themes.

That being said, it’s the strong implicit objectives and stories that create the player experience. Rather than rigidly defining a story like a book or film, the game acts as a subtle narrative mirror. Within its environment and events, it creates emotive situations in which players write their own personal stories.

Each player’s story is unique, but likely familiar to any other player. I suppose it’s like a “reading” of a novel. Part of the story is written by the author, but a large part is constructed by the reader (based on their personal experiences and views).

Here’s a common reading of the first hour or so of Minecraft:

I find myself alone in an idyllic world full of greener-than-green grass and bluer-than-blue sky. There are trees, and mountains, and streams. I wander around seeking a higher vantage point. The world seems to go on forever. It’s quiet and peaceful.

I dig holes and collect dirt. I cut wood from trees, but for some reason they don’t fall over. The disconnected sections just float there in some old Warner Bros. cartoon. This world is unlike my own.

Gentle music plays and the world begins to turn dark. A square moon slowly rises into the night sky. I hear something: “Braaahhhh”. I’m being attacked by monsters! I try to run, but I can’t escape. I die.

Shortly after death, I’m resurrected nearby. I barely make out the silhouette of the monster that killed me. It’s standing in a pile of dirt and wood. The dirt and wood that I so painstakingly procured!

Throughout the night I die and reappear numerous times. I’m frustrated and a little embarrassed by my powerlessness. I read about what to do and formulate a plan to survive the next night.

As the the sun appears, I breath a sigh of relief. Many of the monsters burn to ash as the sunlight touches them. Phew! Others remain, but they are easily avoided in the light of day.

I recover the wood I collected earlier and make wooden planks. I construct a workbench and build an axe, and a pick so that I can collect coal. I build a rudimentary house and light it up with torches.

When night falls again, I hide in my house and block the entrance with a pile of dirt. I can hear monsters groaning outside. I feel trapped, but safe. I’ll gather more resources in the morning.

After the initial experience, Minecraft poses many questions to the player:

1. What is out there? Beyond that sea? Underneath your feet?
2. If you could build anything, what would you build?
3. How should one live within the environment?
4. Why is this room here? Who built this?

And players will often reach similar conclusions:

1. There are many exciting things to discover, many just beneath you.
2. I’ll end up building something that reflects my personality.
3. It’s best to utilise and complement what is already there.
4. It’s a mystery… what does the author have in mind?

I can appreciate that many of these themes may not have been placed there (consciously) by the creators of the game, but they are there. Maybe an indicator of good writing (and game design) is that universal stories are ingrained in the work.

Those experiences, those questions, and the audience’s participation in interpreting them – form the basis of truly great art, and a fantastic game.

Simon made some animated GIFs to use as loading indicators for an HTML5 game we are working on. Here’s one of them:

Although animated GIFs are easy to place on a basic webpage, it turns out that they aren’t so great for scripting (since you don’t have much control over playback). Sprite sheets are better in this regard, since you can have pretty fine-grained control over the animation.

So I searched for conversion methods and found this very useful TIGForums post explaining how to generate sprite sheets from animated GIFs using ImageMagick.

Following the instruction in that post, I ran:

montage DanceLoading1.gif -tile x1 -geometry '1x1+0+0<' -alpha On -background "rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0)" -quality 100 loading_1.png

And I ended up with this sprite sheet (click for full-size image):

Unfortunately, it looks like there are bits missing. The problem was that the animated GIF was optimised to use “combine” mode. This means that the image stored for each frame only includes pixels that need to be changed from the previous frame.

Here’s a close-up of where things went wrong:

In order to resolve this problem, I needed to change the GIF to use “replace” mode, which forces it to store a complete image for each frame. I opened the image in GIMP and saved a new copy with appropriate settings:

I then ran the same montage command on the newly exported file, and got pretty much what I wanted (click for full-size image):

Or so I thought… have a look at frame 35:

What is the deal with that? I checked the GIF image exported by GIMP and it’s there as well. Gah. It must be a bug in GIMP.

Nevermind, there must be a way to first convert the GIF via ImageMagick’s command line operations. After reading some documentation, I came up with the following:

convert -layers dispose DanceLoading1.gif temp.gif
montage temp.gif -tile x1 -geometry '1x1+0+0<' -alpha On -background "rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0)" -quality 100 loading_1.png

And it works. Yay!

On my birthday last year, Heidi took me down to the Vetwest animal rescue to introduce me to the “Ginga Ninja”, an abandoned cat with an amputated leg and a reattached ear.

I was pretty apprehensive that he would get along with Bruce, and that we could properly take care of him. However, they were pretty happy for us to take him on a trial basis (which has since become permanent). On the drive home, we decided to call him Pete (after Peg Leg Pete).

He’s pretty cute. I took some photos of him the other day: