I’m reading Story by Robert Mckee, and I think he’s confused the creation process with the deconstruction process.  Just because you’re good at demolition doesn’t mean you can build something.

But maybe the most valuable learning involves creating the theory as you go along.  So I’m scrapping the dogma and creating my own theories on story creation.  Here’s 3 concepts that feel right to me.  Feel free to try it on, but I’m of the opinion you’ve got to make it your own before it fits.

1. The only way to bring a unique emotion into reality is to have someone experience it themselves.  This is done by taking facts and stringing them together to create emotional moments, and then stringing those together until you achieve the right amount to create the one unique emotional moment you’re looking for.  If your story doesn’t have at least one unique, emotional moment, it’s probably just a series of facts (Murder, Shouting, Crying, Shock) and ultimately, not worth telling.
2. It takes more time to create a good short story than a long story. Therefore don’t seek to create a short focused piece during the learning process.  Create long stories that combine too many ideas, and then eliminate, bit by bit.
3. To generate internal conflict, take a character with 2 core characteristics and put them in a situation where they must sacrifice one for the other.  For example, “the desire for revenge” vs. “safety of a loved one”, or ambition vs. ethics.  All decisions are about sacrificing one thing for another, but the really tough ones are those which involve two things we don’t want to part with.

Twitter.  For inane chatter and revolution organization.

Contains graphic violence, found via http://twitter.com/#search?q=Tehran

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via http://iranelection.posterous.com/

I eat like a pig.
I barely taste food, as soon as a morsel of dinner is on its way down my stomach I’m already shoveling more food into my gaping hole of a mouth.  There are no pauses in between, no time to taste ingredients, it’s all just one fluid mechanical process, resulting in hunger fulfillment.  To even try and slow down down feels forced, painful, like it’s unnatural not to consume everything in front of me in one huge gulp.

Thinking is the same as eating.  I have a thought, and before that thought is over I begin thinking about something tangentially related, and then something else, and on it goes into infinity.  Today I was in the shower, trying to focus exclusively on using soap, when suddenly, forcing it’s way into my brain, came the memory of the store keeper who sold it to me in Israel, taking out his calculator and showing me the price in US dollars.  And then, before this thought was extinguished I began mentally recording the experience for use in a blog post about overthinking.  This post.

Finally I was able to get myself refocused on reality, but it wasn’t long before I was spiraling back out into space.  It’s the same sensation as being stuck in the undertow at the beach, forever pummeled by waves.  And just as you’re getting your footing, CRASH, you’ve lost all balance and are pulled back under. Read more

For most of my life I I’ve believed I’m brilliant.  I guess it never really occurred that you might have to create something brilliant before you’re brilliant.   But I always felt I was unique enough that I must be brilliant.  And then walking the streets on a saturday night eating chocolate raisins out of a plastic container, it occurred to me:  What if I’m just some guy?

I thought how I might act differently, think differently, see things differently.   I thought, I have no reason to believe I’m brilliant.  There’s no way I could know that now.  And maybe you don’t get to tell yourself what you are.  Maybe you let yourself show you.

Challenging this self imposed identity felt oddly freeing.
Once you realize that preconceived notions about yourself are actually inhibiting you, its hard not to let go.

Maybe I’ll be free enough to be myself.

I have just come across the world of art games, a tiny genre hiding among millions of time wasters, brain teasers, and violence simulators.  I’ve been waiting for games to transcend the category of entertainment and become something emotional, meaningful.  For the first time I’m actually experiencing just that.  Here’s what I’ve come across.

Passage is a game which is absurdly simple, in which something extraordinarily complex has been accomplished.  You move a pixelated character around a screen, until he gets old and finally dies.  It’s minimalist, short, and somehow deeply powerful.

The first time you play it you spend half the game bored, exploring, trying to find something interesting, and then at some point you realize your character is aging.  It’s interesting to experience the impact an aging avatar has on the player.  Most games are structure around an endlessly repeating game play mechanic, but if a character ages, decays, then eventually he must die.  Still, the first time playing this game there is an expectation that something will happen, there must be some purpose, some goal at hand.  Prepare to feel disappointment.  In the beginning you find a girlfriend who, if you approach her, will follow you for the rest of the game.  That’s it.  Your characters grow old, you explore the territory, and eventually, she dies, and then you die.  Pretty anticlimactic the first time around.
But the second time around, if you’re still interested in playing, there is room for experimentation.  Now that you know that nothing is going to happen, you can make your own goals, play the game without expectation, and that’s where things get interesting.

The third or forth time I was messing with the game, I decided I was going to go exploring, so I ditched the girl and went off, seeing how far I could explore the more cavernous region of the map.  Then I decided it was getting late in my life, and I returned to the beginning to find the girl.  I had to hurry, I was very old.  When I finally made it back as an old man, the girl was gone, instead there was just a simple gravestone, and after a few seconds of surprise on my part, my character died of old age.   Never have I felt such a massive emotional impact from a game before.  And no film is capable of presenting such a personal experience.  There were no prerendered cut scenes or preconceived dialogue.  It all happened in that moment.

I want to see more games like this.  Now I’m not sure if everyone can have as personal experience play a game like this, maybe I was just lucky.  But there is something here.

Game makers have long tried to create a film like experience through video games, and to them I have these words:  Stop.

Stop creating cut scenes.  Stop sandwiching story in between slices of action.  Stop trying to develop characters, construct multiple endings, multiple choice dialogue.   The medium of games is different than the medium of film.  We need to back up, and create something with fresh eyes.
Linear game play turns into story time interspersed with interactive gun battles.

Sandbox games tend to be no better, and no amount of clothes, house, car customization can make up for the fact that you’re essentially playing in someone else’s shoes, buy someone else’s rules.

Art games tend to be unique, pretty, clever, or some combination there of, but usually settle for amusing us rather than impacting us deeply.

I’m not interested in game design, playability, or game play mechanics.  Someone make a game that’s meaningful, that changes us.

Games should be personal experiences, where game play isn’t seperate from the story,, instead, gameplay is the story.  How we play must tell us something about how we are.