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| Games and the Imagination Part II |
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JaydRyu Member since: 4/3/2002 |
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 Posted - 9/11/2004 9:48:44 PM |
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| Loved the article, always wanted to read some of the Jungian theory. Certainly some information when writing game content. |
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Anonymous Poster |
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Posted - 9/27/2004 10:51:22 AM |
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| Reading this article my first thought was "Geez, put down the bong and the 20th century European philosophy books and get back to making games." I appreciate the idea of creating vivid characters and themes by using archetypes that resonate with humans, since they, of course, are the ones that experience the stories. This is hardly a new idea. Using themese like this in stories - which are a part of us - has been done unconciously for centuries in mythology and conciously in literary fiction and art films for years and years and years. As for games, personally I think they suffer from overly-archetypal characters. Old sages, heroes, deformed monsters with dark powers, etc. etc. In fact, I'm bloody sick of it. The real question is, where are the flawed or complex protagonists that are not necessarily heroes? Nothing I do in my life resembles anything like a quest for a golden goblet. Life in 2004 is dealing with crap like my country going to war for a reason I don't agree with and my hardworking pal losing his job so his managers look better due to lower operating costs and me trying to just get by in a world that seems way beyond my understanding. The only thing games seem to offer for me today is 100% escapism. Not insightful comment into the human condition, or parody, or metaphor or anything else. Just escapism to mythical goblins, fast cars or an army that always fights for good where dying is temporary and doesn't really hurt. Back to your essay, I don't really see you adding much, especially not anything really useful or game-specific. While reading it I felt like you were trying harder to impress us with uncommonly used words and reading list than you were to educate or inform. Please try to come up with something new and something relevant to computer games in part III. Chuck some new ideas (or a mix of old ones) around, experiment with your own games, show us and we'll tell you if we think there are parts that work. We are game developers, not arts professors. Write for us. |
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RolandMoritz Member since: 9/7/2004 From: Austria |
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Posted - 9/29/2004 5:28:52 AM |
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| I think the article was very informative and well written...and I am personally pretty sure that he wasn't smoking any bongs during the writing of this article... But seriously: I agree with the points AP made about escapism in modern games, and how cooky-cutter-like and unimaginative and just all in all not representative of anything a normal person can relate to games are nowaday...BUT I do not really see how the writer of the article said anything that would make this even worse; maybe you just did not really understand what the "archetypes" described in the article are. There are a lot of "archetypical" characters in modern games, that is true, but those are not the ones C. G. Jung talks about, those are cliches that were copied from older games and other forms of entertainment simply because they worked in the past, and not because they represent parts of the collective unconsciuosness (well, actually they do, otherwise they wouldn't have worked, but they degenerated over the time and are now used just because they sell well and because nerdy, sexually frustrated geeks love imagining themselves as big strong knights who get all the girls...). In my opinion, games CAN definitely gain from a more conscious use of symbols and archetypes...the "quest for a golden goblet" type of thing is just the most unimaginative and over-used way to apply this knowledge... And if you had the idea that he was just trying to impress us with uncommonly used words...I don't want to insult you, but well, don't judge others after your vocabulary is all I can say about that...I mean, you don't attack someone who writes a technical paper about some fancy new algorithm because he is using "uncommon words". But back to the article: I really enjoyed reading it, it was a refreshing diversity from the more technical tutorials, and I look forward to seeing more of this in the future... |
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Anonymous Poster |
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Posted - 9/30/2004 8:14:47 AM |
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| I have nothing against bong-hits, they are fun but tend to lead to long winded discussions about ideas such as this about the inner mind that cannot be proven one way or another. Nothing wrong with this, but a computer game development site is probably not the place. The purpose of specialised language in a technical paper is to represent complex ideas or theories with just a few words so that you can build on them to work at a higher level. This is why maths uses symbols, for instance. This is supposedly the purpose in the humanities essays, too. Often though, the actual act of WRITING takes precedence over clearly communicating ideas. Showing off vocabulary, saying the same thing in complex and unique ways becomes more important than the message. I think the writer of the article does this to an extent, this has a place but I just want my info as quickly as possible. As for Jung's ideas, I recently read that the characters in the Sims 2 were based around Meyers Briggs. This is actually a pretty good idea. I remember testing myself and my friends and seeing a pretty good match. It wasn't like star signs, though. I read other ones and they didn't seem to mesh with myself as well. There are good ideas from philosophy and psychology that should make it into computer games, but yeah, give me an algorithm for INTP, then we'll talk. |
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