A tendancy toward the Mundane

Image courtesy of   http://www.improvisedlife.com/2009/09/17/cherish-the-mundane/   -  and definition of Mundane courtesy of google

This is a ramble I wrote probably more than a year ago, but follows a theme that I have been exploring since we started this blog, and am still exploring:  my own interest in the mundane when it comes to video games.

It must be a product of growing older - that's the only thing I can chalk it up to - but my interest in action and adventure has severely declined, and my interest in the mundane has increased.  On this blog I've talked about  Bike Riding, Flying like a Bird and Riding the Train. I notice a similar trend in my preferred comics;  American Splendor, Harvey Pekar's slice of life comic book;  Love and Rockets, Dykes to Watch Out For - even Larry Gonick's Cartoon Guide to History (of the universe).  These works aren't terribly exciting, but I really enjoy them.  

The non-game game is a big phenomenon right now, and it's my favorite.   Proteus, To the Moon, Gone Home, Dear Esther are all big standouts from the last two or three years.  Come to think of it, Animal Crossing is still huge, and it's a highly Mundane game.  And then there's Nintendogs, The Sims, Civilization; Mundane games are nothing new, yet are still making headlines.

Let's take a look at the definition of Mundane, shall we?

mun·dane
  [muhn-deyn, muhn-deyn]  Show IPA
adjective1.of or pertaining to this world or earth as contrasted with heaven; worldly; earthly: mundane affairs.2.common; ordinary; banal; unimaginative.3.of or pertaining to the world, universe, or earth.
Origin: 
1425–75;  < Latin mundānus,  equivalent to mund ( us ) world + -ānus -ane; replacing late Middle Englishmondeyne  < Middle French mondain  < Latin,  as above

Word Origin & History
mundane 
late 15c., from M.Fr. mondain (12c.), from L. mundanus "belonging to the world" (as distinct from theChurch), from mundus "universe, world," lit. "clean, elegant"; used as a transl. of Gk. khosmos (seecosmos) in its Pythagorean sense of "the physical universe" 

[Isn't this interesting?  The second definition is the one with which I am more familiar.  However, the first is not one I'd heard before.  I rather like it.  Earthly, yeah, that works for me.  Heaven is a place on earth, after all.]

James Portnow, writer for Extra Credits, is fond of saying:  'when you're making a game, you're crafting experiences'  This comes to mind for me whenever a game idea pops into my head.  A common feeling I have is that I would like to 'reverse engineer' an experience and see what happens.  Like I had a goofy idea that it would be fun to remake mario bros 1 but give him a cell phone and have the player get calls and texts while playing the game.  Just to play with the feeling of interruption I usually have when I get those calls and text.  It would be like a social media simulator mashup with a platformer.

I've noticed lately I have a tendency toward the Mundane when I come up with game ideas.  Like, for example,  I ride the Amtrak between Sacramento and Davis every work day.  And I spend most of these days staring out the window and watching the scenery go by.  I love it.  It's relaxing.  It's beautiful.  And it occurs to me that I want to simulate this experience with a game.  How boring eh?  And yet...

When the weather was better, I rode my bike to the train station on the American River Bike Trail.  And I had similar feelings.  I love the scenery I love the way the foliage surrounds me and I sometimes feel like I'm going through a tunnel of greenery.  And I want to make this into a game setting.  I don't really care.  Probably an RPG.  I just want to simulate the experience in game format.  I guess I'm just oriented toward games, mostly 8 and 16-bit RPGs.  Probably FF VI more than any other.

There's a theme with these two ideas:  they're both travel-based.  What I enjoy is the relaxed pace of moving forward, and the great scenery.  Essentially my idea is for an 'on-rails' kind of a game.
As an aside:  I've heard people say  more than once that the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings are essentially travel novels.  That works for me.  Makes sense.  I like it.  While the LOTR movies had hours and hours of extended action sequences, the feedback I tend to notice regarding the books was 'Tolkien sure likes to spend a lot of time describing things.'  The man appreciated the little details, and lately I find that mundane details are what I'm looking for in games, rather than roller-coaster excitement.


-D


PS:  I never played Pokemon Snap, but I wonder if it fits in with this idea.  Originally, when I heard about that game, I remember thinking "what a stupid game.  I'll never play that"  "bo-ring" and other, admittedly, immature thoughts.  Granted, I hadn't played any Pokemon games at the time, so I didn't really have interest. I didn't even know how badass squirtle was yet.  Perhaps I will have to watch out for it to pop up on  half.com.

Yep, there it is, five bucks.  Once called 'the best game ever' by my friend Orangeleecy.  One of these days, I'm going to check it out.

Tetris Dreams part II

This is an old post I started a few months back when I was playing the first Final Fantasy.  I decided to return to the post, and I think I found something worth fleshing out.  I often use this phrase:  'as I'm riding the American River Bike Trail', which is where I often come up with video game ideas.  I like to imagine dynamic systems of life in terms of video games, and riding that bike trail tends to bring them to mind.  I enjoy doing this.  It's sort of like Tetris Dreams.  

The Iconic Fighter Guy

"Tetris Dreams" is a phrase I have heard a bunch.  Lately I've noticed that I get daydreams about different games.  Especially those with a simple interface.  For example:  I'm playing FF1 right now, and I'm sort of dreaming about it.  Stray thoughts at work, zoning out doing data entry, and I see the battle screen.  And the iconic fighter guy.  The others are there too, but he's the easiest to pick out.  It's sort of floating in the distance.   

Bagging groceries is like Tetris, kind of.  More complex, actually.  Because there is shape, weight and surface tension.  In Tetris, it's just shape.  I mention this because I've been bagging groceries at the local food co-op as means to keep me occupied and earn a discount on groceries. 

I think that some video game day dreams come from staring at the same screen for long enough.  Thats' why Tetris lends itself so easily, because of the simple patterns and repetition.  However, it may be more than that.  The images from Tetris or Final Fantasy may come easily because of their simplicity, but there are other video game daydreams that I have, which are based on mechanics instead of graphics.

Tony Hawk is the prime example.  After dumping countless hours Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, I couldn't ride in a car without imagining myself grinding on every available edge, doing kickflips as I hop from edge to edge.  It's tons of fun, and oftentimes I imagined the car itself doing these tricks.  Come to think of it, when really bored riding in a car, I used to imagine Mario (from the first game) running alongside the car, jumping over the fences, buildings and other obstacles along the side of the road.  It seems that there is something triggering about moving along the road at an even pace, watching the scenery go by.  

In further support of the connection between motion and video game dreams, a lot of my little video game ideas come when I am riding my bicycle, or riding the train.  In fact, when I used to commute by train, I would stare out the window at the Yolo causeway and imagine wandering around exploring.  Watching the seasons change and the effect it had on the plant life made me want to develop a game that had this sort of dynamic scenery.  It was very peaceful.  Around that time I discovered Proteus, which did a very similar thing to what I was imagining. Of course, I wanted to stick the environment into an RPG, because that is probably my favorite video game genre.

When it comes to RPGs, I often day dream about player statistics.  Levels, experience, strength, durability, attack damage and so on and so forth.  I imagine my experiences playing RPGs in my youth have become such a part of me, that the process of balancing equations in order to achieve in-game actions is just a part of me.  I enjoy pondering human systems in terms of RPG status sheets, hunger, thirst, tiredness, allergies, illness.  In the end, it's just tossing dice and applying meaning to the results.  Which is a great deal of fun.

-D

  

Miscellaneous Update Post for the coming February

Hey there, people.  I've been experiencing writers block lately, which means it's time for a random babble of a post.

I put four hours into the Stanley Parable, which I devoured like a great novel.  That game is so great.  I think I've about exhausted the narrative.  And I really wish there was more.  I worry about redundancy and over-marketing, but I would happily play a sequel to the Stanley Parable, and happily play through the games themes and methods again and again until they become tired.

I also want to mention that the Stanley Parable does a lot in terms of video games as art.  Thinking of Roger Ebert's famous dissing of video games as being devoid of artistic intent, the Stanley Parable plays with choice, and futility in a very special way.  Even though the Stanley Parable is like a choose your own adventure book, the fact that it is a video game, and not a book, goes a long way for my sense of immersion.  I love the way a good book immerses me, but the illusion of choice present in a video game is used very well in the Stanley Parable. I really think it qualifies as a work of art, and as a unique one.

On a different note, I've been volunteering a local thrift store lately.  Also at the bicycle repair co-op and the food co-op.  Good times.  I really like the thrift store - I'm in the book room.  I love books!  I love going through them, it's easy!  There is a TON of turnover in the book department, and we have to give away boxes full of books every day (and we receive at least as many every day).  It can be heart-wrenching getting rid of some of them, and I do my best to save the ones I think really deserve to stick around.  I think that I can do a lot of good there.

The books that we see the most of are Self-Help/Health Books, biographies and thrillers.  These books tend to be in great condition, as though they were only read once, or even never read at all.  Often times they are heavy slabs of pages and take up lots of space on the shelf.  I guess that the biographies are often bought as gifts, and generally bulky books are inconvenient to read and to store.

Umm,  in further stuff, I've started watching a show called 'Lost Girl.'  This Canadian show seems like a resident of the house that Buffy built.  A Faerie underworld full of people who feed on humans and have special powers.  The lead character is a succubus who feeds on sexual energy, leading to a healthy dose of fun sexy times.  But like any good show, what makes it good is the characters.  My favorites are Kenzi, Hale and Trick.  And the Morrigan.

Oh, also, today we got rain in Northern California.  First time in, idunno, sixty days?   This summer we had seven days in a row over 105 degrees, and in December we had seven days in a row below 32.  These were both records for this area.

And that's all the news fit to print.

-D

Lone Star and Barf

Howdy Y'all,  I'm writing these days from the great state of Texas.  The Lone Star State.  Keep Austin Weird.   Don't Mess With Texas is the motto of the state department of transportation.  The idea was a campaign to prevent littering.  But now people use it to puff up their chests.  

What am I doing here?  So far a lot of yardwork and housework.  I'm sleeping on the couch of a little two bedroom house, one of which is under construction.  And I'm working to earn my keep.  I haven't been here long, and I'm still getting established.  I'm saying this by way of excuse for why I'm not writing much lately.  I'll get my feet eventually.  Just today I wrote two pages on a wacked out dream I had, and yesterday I wrote three pages on how cool crowbars are.  They're really cool, everybody.  

Austin is a really cool town.  There are so many bike paths that I can avoid car traffic pretty effectively, and I feel very safe riding my bike.  It's also really big.  I'm a 40 minute ride from downtown, yikes!  And it takes at least 15 minutes to get to any commercial establishment.  Everything is bigger in Texas, I guess :P

But in general Austin is great.  Not much different from other college towns I've been in, except for all the Texas flags everywhere.  Not as many accents as I expected.  In fact, if this place weren't surrounded for miles and miles by Texas, I'd love to live here.  But... yeah..  the Texas thing... 

Also, I got lucky and missed the heat.  When I was here in July of last year, it was over a hundred degrees every day for a week.  And that was not a heat wave, that was just normal.  

Okay, this is just a spit of a post.  Adios, Amigos!

-D

September Update - 2013

My last day at work was August 16th.  I immediately went on a multi-day bike ride with my sister, who was in town.  And then, keeping with the family theme, visited with my family over the next couple days.  Finally, the last week of August, I got some time to really enjoy my unemployment.  

I've been blogging my thoughts like a maniac, so you can expect to see an increase in my posting frequency.  I haven't actually spent any time playing video games, which might go to support my theory that I like talking about games more than I like playing them.  I don't mind this much.  It's mostly a timing thing - games take a long time.  Hours and hours, and, despite my unemployment, I find myself to be pretty darn busy.  I'm not bored, that's for sure.  To be fair to games, I haven't really been watching TV, Movies or reading all that much, either.

I also want to point out that I didn't partition very much space to my Windows HD, so I am unable to have many of my steam games installed, especially the big ones (Portal II, Portal).  Which is a bummer, because I love those games.  The obvious solution is to reformat and re-partition my hard drive, which I am avoiding because it takes forever.  But, I may have discovered a workaround for the above problem.  I have installed steam on my janky old apple laptop!  I have a good 60 free gigs on the thing, and a bunch of my steam games work for Mac!  I was pretty thrilled to see this.  Working games include:  VVVVVV, Portal, Braid, Bit.Trip.Runner, Limbo.  Pretty cool, huh?

Of course, now I have a new adventure: seeing what games will actually play on this crappy old thing, and, beyond that, how long they'll play before the computer overheats.  Seriously, this laptop gets so hot, it burns my leg! So it is no longer, functionally, a 'lap' top.  Anyway, further adventures in Steam, hooray!  Next stop:  steam for linux (if I can ever get that to work). 

I did stop by Kongregate to play some flash games, as indicated in my previous post.  Flash games are mostly short-run, so they work better with my current lifestyle.  I've also been on a blogging tear since settling into my unemployment.  I've produced maybe six draft posts this week.  Of course, it remains to be seen if they will see the light of day.  These random, multi-topic posts are the easiest. I like doing them, it's nice to just sort of 'check in' without having to make some sort of point.

The way I begin postings usually goes in one of three ways:  1) I come up with a topic and write a few paragraphs, 2) I come up with a topic and write a few sentences, 3) I come up with a topic and write a few pages.  Then I sit back and let the post ruminate for a couple of days before returning to it.  The first approach is the most reliable- often times the post is nearly fully formed when I finish the initial writing.  The second will sometimes develop into a post, if it's an idea I am inspired by.  The third approach rarely turns into anything coherent.  Sometimes I will chop up a multi-page rant-fest and turn it into a couple different postings, but just as often, the draft sits in perpetuity, never to be finished.  It's not writers block in these cases, it's editors block.

Alright, on to the climbing gym, the bike kitchen, the thrift store, the yoga studio, the laundromat and Hamburger Patties, which is closing on September 2nd  :(


-D

Game Idea: A frog, riding a bicycle!

The title is a joke on the fact that this is a frogger-like game idea.  I guess it's also a paperboy-like idea, with a touch of grand theft auto 2.  Or maybe it's not much like either game, but when I originally imagined it, it was a one-screen atari game, like frogger.  The gist of it is - it can be rather difficult and dangerous to commute to work by bicycle.  You have to deal with cars that can easily kill you or break your bones, and you must do this while racing the clock. These factors could be combined to make a good game. 

As I rode to work one day, I mapped out, in my head, the course I would take, based on the streets I thought were the safest but speediest.  As it turns out, I was incorrect in my assessment.  I thought I could take P to 10th street and have an easy time of it, but when it crosses 16th street, P st loses the bike lane.  After that, it turned out 10th St doesn't have a bike lane either.  This made my ride a little bit more harried than I originally intended. 

I realized that riding a bike safely around town during rush hour is actually pretty tough.  It occurred to me that a frogger-like game where you ride a bike from point a to point b could be a pretty fun game.  Traffic is a factor, time is a factor.  And both these things are affected by the layout of the streets.  You hit a car, you lose a life.  You hit a pedestrian, you lose time, but probably not the full turn.  Different times of the day equate to different traffic patterns, and you can learn a map after repeated plays. 

It’s kind of like a maze.  But you can technically hack your way through much of it.  The initial city is a grid, about 26 x 26, but there are one way streets, high traffic areas and construction zones to contend with.  Stop signs, stop lights and pedestrians will slow you down as you desperately try to make it to your destination on time.  Ignoring the traffic laws may save you time, but it could also get you killed.  I guess you could have a bike helmet item that preserves one life, perhaps a spare tube to repair flat tires.  

The basic idea has the layout of the whole city grid open and visible to the player.  But a ‘fog of war’ approach may be more appropriate.  Or maybe just a scrolling overhead view.  It’s hard to say.  Oh, maybe there could be a map before the level starts, and then actually playing the level would go by memory.  I haven't worked out all the details, but it's fun to think about.  I think it's a game that writes itself.

Having ridden my bike through a few different cities, I know that the danger and difficulty can vary greatly.  For different levels, there can be different cities, with different grid and traffic layouts.  Sublevels within the different cities could just involve moving a few pieces, changing the destination, whatever.  Plenty of room for easter eggs hidden throughout.  

Apart from Paperboy and maybe a BMX trick attack game, I've never seen a game built on riding a bicycle.  It may sound like a humble proposition:  commuter bikes aren't exactly built for tricks.  But dodging traffic and racing against the clock is always fun, provided the programming is sharp.  But I'll leave that part to someone else :)

-D