I remember trying to follow one character in Fallout 3. Maybe it was the dad. I got quite far but then got ambushed and lost track of him. I worried about him. But later I found out that he was...
I remember trying to follow one character in Fallout 3. Maybe it was the dad. I got quite far but then got ambushed and lost track of him. I worried about him. But later I found out that he was okay. It was a huge relief.
I kind of miss having games create that illusion for me. These days I'm far too cognisant of how games work. But back in the late 2000s, I hadn't really played video games for over a decade and games like the then new Fallout or Morrowind felt magical, almost like real living places. I mean, obviously I knew they weren't, but the difference to something like Commodore 64 games or early PC games was massive. I didn't know where exactly the boundary was between what was possible and what just make-believe.
Come to think of it, maybe I should take another decade long break from gaming. It might freshen things up again.
I couldn't take a break from games entirely... But something I find great was avoiding genres for years at a time. Then you jump back with the new tech and concepts and it pushes the nostalgia...
I couldn't take a break from games entirely... But something I find great was avoiding genres for years at a time. Then you jump back with the new tech and concepts and it pushes the nostalgia button as well as the "this is so much better!" One
Bethesda's games since Oblivion were designed more for players to fast-travel than follow NPCs through the world. Doing the latter can often lead to hilarious farce due to the bizarre and uncanny...
Bethesda's games since Oblivion were designed more for players to fast-travel than follow NPCs through the world. Doing the latter can often lead to hilarious farce due to the bizarre and uncanny way that NPCs talk and act.
Did you play Shenmue when it came out? Arguably the first game where you could follow NPCs throughout the day - I'd love seeing an old guy walk causally around during the daytime and then stumble...
Did you play Shenmue when it came out? Arguably the first game where you could follow NPCs throughout the day - I'd love seeing an old guy walk causally around during the daytime and then stumble around wasted when night fell ;)
I'm afraid Shenmue came out during that time when I wasn't really playing many video games, so I completely missed it. I get motion sickness pretty easily and early 3D games are particularly bad...
I'm afraid Shenmue came out during that time when I wasn't really playing many video games, so I completely missed it. I get motion sickness pretty easily and early 3D games are particularly bad experiences. As the industry moved increasingly from 2D to 3D towards the late 90s, I slowly lost interest and my focus switched to other things until I got interested in games again in the late 2000s.
I'm trying to think what could be my earliest memory of NPCs seemingly living their own lives. While many games defnitely created that illusion (Little Computer People in particular comes to mind, it was sort of like the 80s precursor to The Sims), and for my child's mind everything certainly felt alive and magical to some extent, I might say that Ultima VII was probably the first one where all the pieces really felt like combining into a complex, living world. Its NPCs seemed to go around and do things for reasons totally unrelated to me or my story, had daily routines and value systems, and reacted to things that were happening around them. It was quite fascinating.
Very cool. I remember buying Pagan Ultima 6 but was told to return it to KMart because the title scared my parents. That's my only experience with a series that I wish I had more touchpoints with....
Very cool. I remember buying Pagan Ultima 6 but was told to return it to KMart because the title scared my parents. That's my only experience with a series that I wish I had more touchpoints with. Same situation with you and Shenmue - my gaming window hadn't begun when Ultima was a thing.
The algorithm just a couple of days ago spit Any Austin's Cod MW video into my recommendations and I was kinda hooked. While the videos are kinda about nonsense, I really like the earnestness in...
The algorithm just a couple of days ago spit Any Austin's Cod MW video into my recommendations and I was kinda hooked.
While the videos are kinda about nonsense, I really like the earnestness in how he chooses to interact and experience these games as art and I'd go as far as to say he kinda changed my mind about art in general. While obviously art is in the eye of the beholder, I've thought about it as the audience interacting with the artist's intention instead of just experiencing what's in front of you, the artist be damned.
Anyway, not like that's really an original thought but I guess I just generally enjoy the attitude in the videos.
(And it's pretty cool what one lone dev might do in a corner that no one might ever see. Nice to see them get their dues.)
The idea is sometimes called "death of the author," after the title and thesis of a 1967 essay by that name by French literary critic Roland Barthes. Fair warning: it's a pretty dense read, for...
The idea is sometimes called "death of the author," after the title and thesis of a 1967 essay by that name by French literary critic Roland Barthes. Fair warning: it's a pretty dense read, for all its brevity.
Barthes was responding to a long tradition of critics focusing intently on the author and what he means by his work, and paying almost no attention to how the work is interpreted by the reader. This is bass-ackwards according to Barthes. Before a reader can read a work, the author has to put it down; it has to actually be written. It has to exist outside of the author. Since the medium of literature is language, and since language is systematized to some extent–otherwise we couldn't convey meaning at all–then inevitably the reader is going to bring their own experience and their own understanding of language to bear on the work, which is always going to produce something different than what the author intended.
I have some reservations about this formulation, because I wonder if literature actually needs an audience at all to qualify as literature. I remember Kurt Vonnegut played with some version of this idea in his novel Galapagos, in which (*spoiler*) the narrator is revealed at the end to have been the ghost of a man dead for a million years, who wrote the text in the air with the tip of his finger. That scenario seems at least literature-adjacent, although it's worth noting that I came across this idea because Vonnegut wrote it in a book.
Anyway, I think Any Austin is firmly in this tradition of reader-response criticism. I appreciate how he looks at the seams in games, both logical and topological, that are products of the exigencies of game design. You get hints of that in some criticism that selves deeply into the technical side of games, but only Austin ever asks us to just dwell in those spaces for a while. For the time being it's a unique perspective.
Well, if anyone seeks to analyze a literary work, then such work will naturally be read by at least one person - - the analyst. So the question is dissolved by the pragmatics of analysis. In...
Well, if anyone seeks to analyze a literary work, then such work will naturally be read by at least one person - - the analyst. So the question is dissolved by the pragmatics of analysis.
In practice, even the most "author killing" academic will seek to understand something about the author, and will try to convey that context to the reader.
The "death of the author" doesn't mean completely ignoring the author, but rather understanding that the intentions of the author are one among many other aspects that are also worthy of attention.
This is not about completely removing the author from analysis but rather about removing biographical aspects from the position of an ultimate source of truth.
Both in film school and also in the literature department as a graduate student, regardless of how much they might love Barthes, no one would ever completely remove the author from their analysis.
That's kind of what I was ineptly trying to get at with my tangent about literature without an audience. Death of the Author is about criticism more than it is about literature or art in...
That's kind of what I was ineptly trying to get at with my tangent about literature without an audience. Death of the Author is about criticism more than it is about literature or art in themselves. Barthes wrote it in the heyday of post-modernist criticism, and was responding to the firmly modernist idea that the Author (capitalized to differentiate this character from the person actually writing the words down) codes a distinct and immutable meaning into his work which the reader either gets or fails to get. I think Joyce or Eliot would agree, provided they weren't given much time to think about it. They certainly spilled enough sweat encoding things into their work.
If we're talking about art without audience, this might even be true, but the moment interpretation happens you have this other entity, the reader, who was completely external to the process of creation, and who drags in a wealth of meaning and context no author or Author can really fully contend with. I suppose you could read Ulysses without knowing that Joyce chose to set it in the same city and on the same day he had his first date with his wife, or that Eliot was an American ex-pat in the UK during the Blitz when he wrote most of the "Four Quartets," but I think any interpretation you would reach wouldn't be as satisfying as if you did know those things. But it could be done.
Getting back to the subject of this post, I think a lot of Austin's work exemplifies this possibility of finding meaning divorced from authorial intent, maybe not as much with his explorations of game watersheds or NPC pathing, but certainly in his "Unremarkable and Odd Things You Never Looked At" series. The game designers who created those spaces certainly never intended people to examine them closely, not did they as author or Author (that is, consciously or otherwise) encode any particular meaning in them. Austin doesn't himself try to explicate meaning in them either, beyond noticing that they exist by necessity due to the nature of the medium itself. He mostly just asks us to inhabit those spaces and describes some of the things he feels while doing so.
I think he's onto something with this approach, but I don't think he's found the best subject or format for its expression yet. He's probably come closest with the employment survey videos, and I think part of why those work as well as they do is because they involve a fictional surveyor and employment bureau with individual voices distinct from both each other and from the audience the games' creators had in mind while creating.
I find Bethesda's Radiant AI system fascinating as an emergent gameplay tool, and like to think I know a fair amount about it. I'm going to be cocky and start with my understanding of Bethesda's...
I find Bethesda's Radiant AI system fascinating as an emergent gameplay tool, and like to think I know a fair amount about it. I'm going to be cocky and start with my understanding of Bethesda's Radiant AI technology, which governs all NPCs and their interactions: If an NPC has a programmed desire to be somewhere ("sent home," normal commute between cities as in Oblivion, around town like the scaled-down behavior in Skyrim and forward), the NPC fulfills its desire simply: It walks.
When the NPC is not in your worldspace the NPC is updated in a low-res simulaton along with any interacting NPCs that are along its path. My favorite example is Malborn who you can save in the main story quest. If you complete his own quest, Find the Thalmor Assasin he flees across the border to Morrowind. However, he can die on his voyage if three frost trolls spawn, which are fully simulated.
A note is that in FO3 and FNV, IIRC, most followers are "essential," meaning they can't die. In Skyrim there's a different flag used where NPCs will de-aggro on them when they're critically low, and return to combat with them once they heal enough to fight again. In Skyrim they did away with the earlier mechanic with NPCs going between cities on their own generally (Ma'iq is a spawned random event) except for The Silence has been Broken in which you have to follow a target's itinerary, and he walks everywhere. You can even complete the quest on the road if you can find him.
I'll watch the video and explain any differences or new things I learn.
The big revelation was:
I wonder if god struggles to comprehend our behavior the same way we struggle to comprehend hers
The rescued NPCs were interesting, and I would be curious to know if they are the "Don't look or the world breaks" scenario in effect.
I did nail the in-engine NPC behavior in general, but these rescued NPCs seem to be special cases with no destination in mind.
I was also wrong on the essential mark, at least for dogmeat, but I would've thought he was essential as well.
Just a heads-up for those who enjoy Any Austin's videos and humour, happen to like electro/synth funk, and like me haven't really paid much attention to the end of his videos: I just realised that...
Just a heads-up for those who enjoy Any Austin's videos and humour, happen to like electro/synth funk, and like me haven't really paid much attention to the end of his videos: I just realised that he also does music as The Excellent Man from Minneapolis and has released a pretty brilliant album called 7 Songs.
He's wearing a Prince necklace and t-shirt on the cover, so that kind of gives you an indication of what to expect. It's the Minneapolis sound, with humour that reminds me a little of Chromeo, but with the kind of mood and observations that make me think of the early, independent, pre-fame The Weeknd releases. I'm not saying that Austin is or will be the next The Weeknd, or Chromeo, or Prince, but I personally really like the album.
I remember trying to follow one character in Fallout 3. Maybe it was the dad. I got quite far but then got ambushed and lost track of him. I worried about him. But later I found out that he was okay. It was a huge relief.
I kind of miss having games create that illusion for me. These days I'm far too cognisant of how games work. But back in the late 2000s, I hadn't really played video games for over a decade and games like the then new Fallout or Morrowind felt magical, almost like real living places. I mean, obviously I knew they weren't, but the difference to something like Commodore 64 games or early PC games was massive. I didn't know where exactly the boundary was between what was possible and what just make-believe.
Come to think of it, maybe I should take another decade long break from gaming. It might freshen things up again.
I couldn't take a break from games entirely... But something I find great was avoiding genres for years at a time. Then you jump back with the new tech and concepts and it pushes the nostalgia button as well as the "this is so much better!" One
Bethesda's games since Oblivion were designed more for players to fast-travel than follow NPCs through the world. Doing the latter can often lead to hilarious farce due to the bizarre and uncanny way that NPCs talk and act.
I remember following many NPCs in Skyrim when quests finished just to see where they would go. I do think a lot of them have routes to destinations.
Did you play Shenmue when it came out? Arguably the first game where you could follow NPCs throughout the day - I'd love seeing an old guy walk causally around during the daytime and then stumble around wasted when night fell ;)
I'm afraid Shenmue came out during that time when I wasn't really playing many video games, so I completely missed it. I get motion sickness pretty easily and early 3D games are particularly bad experiences. As the industry moved increasingly from 2D to 3D towards the late 90s, I slowly lost interest and my focus switched to other things until I got interested in games again in the late 2000s.
I'm trying to think what could be my earliest memory of NPCs seemingly living their own lives. While many games defnitely created that illusion (Little Computer People in particular comes to mind, it was sort of like the 80s precursor to The Sims), and for my child's mind everything certainly felt alive and magical to some extent, I might say that Ultima VII was probably the first one where all the pieces really felt like combining into a complex, living world. Its NPCs seemed to go around and do things for reasons totally unrelated to me or my story, had daily routines and value systems, and reacted to things that were happening around them. It was quite fascinating.
Very cool. I remember buying Pagan Ultima 6 but was told to return it to KMart because the title scared my parents. That's my only experience with a series that I wish I had more touchpoints with. Same situation with you and Shenmue - my gaming window hadn't begun when Ultima was a thing.
The algorithm just a couple of days ago spit Any Austin's Cod MW video into my recommendations and I was kinda hooked.
While the videos are kinda about nonsense, I really like the earnestness in how he chooses to interact and experience these games as art and I'd go as far as to say he kinda changed my mind about art in general. While obviously art is in the eye of the beholder, I've thought about it as the audience interacting with the artist's intention instead of just experiencing what's in front of you, the artist be damned.
Anyway, not like that's really an original thought but I guess I just generally enjoy the attitude in the videos.
(And it's pretty cool what one lone dev might do in a corner that no one might ever see. Nice to see them get their dues.)
The idea is sometimes called "death of the author," after the title and thesis of a 1967 essay by that name by French literary critic Roland Barthes. Fair warning: it's a pretty dense read, for all its brevity.
Barthes was responding to a long tradition of critics focusing intently on the author and what he means by his work, and paying almost no attention to how the work is interpreted by the reader. This is bass-ackwards according to Barthes. Before a reader can read a work, the author has to put it down; it has to actually be written. It has to exist outside of the author. Since the medium of literature is language, and since language is systematized to some extent–otherwise we couldn't convey meaning at all–then inevitably the reader is going to bring their own experience and their own understanding of language to bear on the work, which is always going to produce something different than what the author intended.
I have some reservations about this formulation, because I wonder if literature actually needs an audience at all to qualify as literature. I remember Kurt Vonnegut played with some version of this idea in his novel Galapagos, in which (*spoiler*) the narrator is revealed at the end to have been the ghost of a man dead for a million years, who wrote the text in the air with the tip of his finger. That scenario seems at least literature-adjacent, although it's worth noting that I came across this idea because Vonnegut wrote it in a book.
Anyway, I think Any Austin is firmly in this tradition of reader-response criticism. I appreciate how he looks at the seams in games, both logical and topological, that are products of the exigencies of game design. You get hints of that in some criticism that selves deeply into the technical side of games, but only Austin ever asks us to just dwell in those spaces for a while. For the time being it's a unique perspective.
Well, if anyone seeks to analyze a literary work, then such work will naturally be read by at least one person - - the analyst. So the question is dissolved by the pragmatics of analysis.
In practice, even the most "author killing" academic will seek to understand something about the author, and will try to convey that context to the reader.
The "death of the author" doesn't mean completely ignoring the author, but rather understanding that the intentions of the author are one among many other aspects that are also worthy of attention.
This is not about completely removing the author from analysis but rather about removing biographical aspects from the position of an ultimate source of truth.
Both in film school and also in the literature department as a graduate student, regardless of how much they might love Barthes, no one would ever completely remove the author from their analysis.
That's kind of what I was ineptly trying to get at with my tangent about literature without an audience. Death of the Author is about criticism more than it is about literature or art in themselves. Barthes wrote it in the heyday of post-modernist criticism, and was responding to the firmly modernist idea that the Author (capitalized to differentiate this character from the person actually writing the words down) codes a distinct and immutable meaning into his work which the reader either gets or fails to get. I think Joyce or Eliot would agree, provided they weren't given much time to think about it. They certainly spilled enough sweat encoding things into their work.
If we're talking about art without audience, this might even be true, but the moment interpretation happens you have this other entity, the reader, who was completely external to the process of creation, and who drags in a wealth of meaning and context no author or Author can really fully contend with. I suppose you could read Ulysses without knowing that Joyce chose to set it in the same city and on the same day he had his first date with his wife, or that Eliot was an American ex-pat in the UK during the Blitz when he wrote most of the "Four Quartets," but I think any interpretation you would reach wouldn't be as satisfying as if you did know those things. But it could be done.
Getting back to the subject of this post, I think a lot of Austin's work exemplifies this possibility of finding meaning divorced from authorial intent, maybe not as much with his explorations of game watersheds or NPC pathing, but certainly in his "Unremarkable and Odd Things You Never Looked At" series. The game designers who created those spaces certainly never intended people to examine them closely, not did they as author or Author (that is, consciously or otherwise) encode any particular meaning in them. Austin doesn't himself try to explicate meaning in them either, beyond noticing that they exist by necessity due to the nature of the medium itself. He mostly just asks us to inhabit those spaces and describes some of the things he feels while doing so.
I think he's onto something with this approach, but I don't think he's found the best subject or format for its expression yet. He's probably come closest with the employment survey videos, and I think part of why those work as well as they do is because they involve a fictional surveyor and employment bureau with individual voices distinct from both each other and from the audience the games' creators had in mind while creating.
I find Bethesda's Radiant AI system fascinating as an emergent gameplay tool, and like to think I know a fair amount about it. I'm going to be cocky and start with my understanding of Bethesda's Radiant AI technology, which governs all NPCs and their interactions: If an NPC has a programmed desire to be somewhere ("sent home," normal commute between cities as in Oblivion, around town like the scaled-down behavior in Skyrim and forward), the NPC fulfills its desire simply: It walks.
When the NPC is not in your worldspace the NPC is updated in a low-res simulaton along with any interacting NPCs that are along its path. My favorite example is Malborn who you can save in the main story quest. If you complete his own quest, Find the Thalmor Assasin he flees across the border to Morrowind. However, he can die on his voyage if three frost trolls spawn, which are fully simulated.
A note is that in FO3 and FNV, IIRC, most followers are "essential," meaning they can't die. In Skyrim there's a different flag used where NPCs will de-aggro on them when they're critically low, and return to combat with them once they heal enough to fight again. In Skyrim they did away with the earlier mechanic with NPCs going between cities on their own generally (Ma'iq is a spawned random event) except for The Silence has been Broken in which you have to follow a target's itinerary, and he walks everywhere. You can even complete the quest on the road if you can find him.
I'll watch the video and explain any differences or new things I learn.
The big revelation was:
The rescued NPCs were interesting, and I would be curious to know if they are the "Don't look or the world breaks" scenario in effect.
I did nail the in-engine NPC behavior in general, but these rescued NPCs seem to be special cases with no destination in mind.
I was also wrong on the essential mark, at least for dogmeat, but I would've thought he was essential as well.
Just a heads-up for those who enjoy Any Austin's videos and humour, happen to like electro/synth funk, and like me haven't really paid much attention to the end of his videos: I just realised that he also does music as The Excellent Man from Minneapolis and has released a pretty brilliant album called 7 Songs.
He's wearing a Prince necklace and t-shirt on the cover, so that kind of gives you an indication of what to expect. It's the Minneapolis sound, with humour that reminds me a little of Chromeo, but with the kind of mood and observations that make me think of the early, independent, pre-fame The Weeknd releases. I'm not saying that Austin is or will be the next The Weeknd, or Chromeo, or Prince, but I personally really like the album.