Tom;
Kassen, thanks for your mail, to be honest even though I've never got into
> 2d fighters myself I am a huge shmups fanatic and they 2 genres share a lot
> in terms of their hardcore community, obscure terminology and strategic
> forms.
Indeed, they do. That and swapping out the buttons of Hori HRAP's :-) (Sanwa
for me). I've been playing more SHMUPS than fighters myself lately, mainly
as dedicated human opponents are hard to come by. SHMUPS have very
comparable "interface semantics", often with a much smaller vocabulary but
more nuances. I'd be hard pressed to find a 2d fighter equivalent of the
"stick shaking" of Psyvariar, a concept that I'm still trying to translate
in a musically sensible way to my own system. I would say though that I
experience the controls of fighters as more "linguistic", though I'm open to
debate there.
> Im planning to investigate some of these subcultures in more detail so I
> might get back to you for even more obscure stuff later if thats ok..
>
>
I hope you do, actually, because these questions are very much at the core
of my own thinking about realtime interfaces for intuitive expression. We
may need to take that off-list because I now find myself inclined to launch
into a monologue on how Shikigami No Shiro could be said to be about
attempting to express the same concepts (getting to the end of the level)
using very different vocabularies (the rather different abilities of the
characters) and I'm really quite sure that would alienate nearly everyone
while not being immediately relevant to livecoding.
> You reminded me to post a link to
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEkS199jTuA
> This is a guy playing both players in ikaruga on a handmade split
> controller. Ikaruga has one of the most simple yet deep gameplay/scoring
> mechanics. Its hard for people to understand the level of skill on display,
> but showing his hands in the vid is a really nice element that re-introduces
> the visual elements of performative virtuosity etc
>
>
Was that handmade? I thought that was simply a standard Naomi cabinet.
That's one of the great videos in this field, I agree, I can hardly do that
level single player and without chaining. Ikaruga is a work of art. With
it's extremely simple interface and rules it reminds me a bit of how all
logical operations could be expressed using just "not" and "and" (or "or")
gates, but Treasure managed to create puzzles that are challenging to solve
using those and have multiple solutions. Even though no literal "code" is
involved to me this still seems akin to livecoding in a way. I have to admit
though that this won't be clear from that video to all list members, but
maybe with some thought these concepts could be condensed to a clear text.
I'm in favour of any research that could use Daigo v.s. Justin Wong as a
footnote, so let's go!
> Anyway, please keep posting anything you think might help!
>
>
I'll post relevant things on-list when I think they are of general interest.
Please contact me off-list for more specialised topics; I'm quite passionate
about this field.
As a side-note; I think it's somewhat odd that a reading list on game-design
would include novels but wouldn't include games to be played. One might read
Neuromancer (I think I'd suggest Snowcrash instead) but one could also see
Avalon (the film) or one could play .hack (the game). That said; as a
dance-music producing son of a architect I do feel that dancing about
architecture is a entirely valid thing to do, so who am I to complain?
Yours,
Kas.
Received on Thu Jan 21 2010 - 01:10:24 GMT