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The goal of this blog is to motivate myself and others for further practice as well as provide details that might explain what's going on..


Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Self-mastery mod for Skyrim?

Forgot to write about this in the previous post.

Related to Skyrim. Found that it had so many conflicts and mistakes in the game design. The atmosphere (graphics, music, map layout) is well suited for a game that would improve player's self awareness. It's just so calm and beautiful .. would like to just sit and observe without thoughts nor actions. However, the AI, quest designers and dialogue writers have missed it entirely. Almost all beings treat the player as if he/she posed a threat to their life - this is not how it works in the nature. In the nature, a being attacks you only if they see no other way to protect either themselves or their nest. Nature respects its inhabitants and its inhabitants are expected to do the same. The graphics and music portrays this, in my opinion, but the animals and people living in the environment don't follow the law .. they look really artificial and dumb, when compared to their atmosphere (a tree, a rock, a butterfly). Also, when there's a quest where a wise old man or spirit is involved, they usually speak rubbish instead of wisdom. The rubbish has been tampered with, to confuse the player so that they would think there's at least some truth to what the wise old man is saying. There are at least thousands of deep stories and wise quotes on the internet, waiting to be put to good use ..

.. which brought me and a friend to the idea of game development again. We shared some ideas, but in the end nothing seemed just right. It takes tough algorithms to extract player's psychology, look for flaws and auto-generate game content that would show ways to improve themselves. Also, how many people would actually like to play something that only serves the reason of being frustrating to play?

Before falling asleep, I found myself in a very simple game environment. I was in a bubble of pitch black darkness. Since it was completely dark, my mind started synthesizing all sorts of colorful images there, to fill the void which it considered uncomfortable. Symmetry had been designed into the bubble so that these images were slightly distorted and mirrored around. This made it easier to detect and realize the thoughts and images that my own mind was projecting. So simple, promotes self-mastery and is really fun to play with.

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