Of Videogames and Visualisations

Saturday, December 11, 2004

Reality play: threads on digital games

Troy Innocent's Reality play: threads on digital games is mostly twaddle. Apart from the vague mention of Joseph Goguen's idea of Semiotic Morphisms, possibly to give the article some "technical" status, it's about a 3D videogame in which the visual representation of the player's avatar and immediate surroundings change, e.g. tree icons change into the word "tree", or a different graphical representation of a tree, as the player collects "energy" items.

The reason I include this article here is that, while I think Innocent could have written a much shorter article to communicate the same amount of "information", it does illustrate a videogame in which the underlying game has been separated from its visualisation. The article also mentions "ontology", but rather than present a conceptual schema for the videogame itself, Innocent waffles on about "being in the game space".

It's unclear whether he is sure about what exactly goes into a videogame at the beginning of the article: "Digital games are hybrid media built from a mix of simulation, experience design, rule systems, multimedia, and a fair proportion of the unknown" -- the unknown?! -- but he goes on to say, "I play games. I make game art. I teach students how to make games", so I suppose I'll have to take Troy Innocent's word for it, what with him being a senior lecturer. His profile at Monash University says he's "been exploring and charting the digital realm since 1989" -- I think he's gotten lost in this article.

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