I haven't posted for a few days, but that's ok because no one reads this anyway.
I finished re-reading Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett for the 4th time. Love it, clearly.
Interesting thing is this: I still get the people involved confused. I don't even know if the story makes a whole lotta sense, actually. But it's so hard-boiled and poisonous I don't care.
The crux is Old Man Elihu wants his corrupt little mining town back from the gaggle of gangsters who have taken it from him. Our Continental Op from San Francisco comes to clean house and gets a little dirty doing it.
For most MMO's the quests are "Go here, kill 8 [blank], bring their heads to [blank], choose reward."
The fun in that is the technique with which the killing is done. Race, class, and talent allocations can vary immensely and reflects your play style.
Our Op in Red Harvest stays just far enough ahead of the opposition to keep alive and keep his job. Barely. But he stays ahead of his readers as well. So when he reveals the "whodunit" we're just as surprised as everybody else in the story.
How would that work in a game format that usually has no 'cut scenes'? Could you add cut scenes? Are cut scenes interesting enough to warrant the larger file sizes? And when you have a game (or server) update would you want to have to redo affected cut scenes?? No, no you wouldn't.
How do you have a cool "reveal" moment in a game when the audience IS the decision-maker?
And:
Is there a Noir story without a "reveal"?
If you find one, lemme know.
6/6/08
Bass Akwards
I finally got around to googling "noir mmo"...
I come up #2. Crazy. However, there are other people with interesting noirish ideas as well.
They may be worth checking out as well, after you've ingested everything from my site, including all 22 hours of music.
• A Korean Fist-fighting MMO: Noir-Online (youtube)
The official site is here.
• A Forum post by PhoenixTheOn: Here
• And my favorite article from Gamerony (Dec 2007): Game Noir
This is a great read.
Gee, maybe there could be 100k people interested in playing this game.
Marketing would be aimed at convincing some Hollywood types to make another L.A. Confidential;
starting a viral campaign, "Find the Fedora" (where people use their GPS phones to race each other to the tattered hat gently resting on the tattered porch of some crappy house on Ivar); and enigmatic ads with dark falcons sitting very still.
Could be fun.
I come up #2. Crazy. However, there are other people with interesting noirish ideas as well.
They may be worth checking out as well, after you've ingested everything from my site, including all 22 hours of music.
• A Korean Fist-fighting MMO: Noir-Online (youtube)
The official site is here.
• A Forum post by PhoenixTheOn: Here
• And my favorite article from Gamerony (Dec 2007): Game Noir
This is a great read.
Gee, maybe there could be 100k people interested in playing this game.
Marketing would be aimed at convincing some Hollywood types to make another L.A. Confidential;
starting a viral campaign, "Find the Fedora" (where people use their GPS phones to race each other to the tattered hat gently resting on the tattered porch of some crappy house on Ivar); and enigmatic ads with dark falcons sitting very still.
Could be fun.
For the Thrill of it
A site to check out for all you shamus wanna-be's is Thrilling Detective.
A whole helluva lotsa stuff for your perusal. Including web novels... I liked "Ace in the Hole",
but that's because I'm dirty inside.
And 1 million links. I counted.
A whole helluva lotsa stuff for your perusal. Including web novels... I liked "Ace in the Hole",
but that's because I'm dirty inside.
And 1 million links. I counted.
Ben Hur, 1866
There's a great overview of detective novels by William Marling, PhD, over here.
One nice gem from Edgar Allen Poe, the creator of the detective novel:
One nice gem from Edgar Allen Poe, the creator of the detective novel:
[a] tale, a species of composition which admits of the highest development of artistical power in alliance with the widest vigour of imagination.The site presently focuses on the Hard Boiled school, and has a nice number of related links, including Film Noir. Definitely worth checking out.
6/4/08
Framerate Cityscape
There's an inherent technical problem in a noir mmo.
WoW runs ok on my laptop, but not in the main cities - Undercity and Orgimmar (that's right I play Horde...wanna fight about it?). My framerate can sometimes drop as low as 8 fps. That's unplayable unless you're crafting, chatting, or on the auction house.
Almost all quests in WoW are outside the cities, so rendering is greatly reduced. But in a noir game nearly everything would happen in-city. And people should be able to play and have fun on a computer system a few years old. So the game would have to be massively instanced. (For those of you who don't know what "instances" are, basically it's a specified area that loads especially for you or your group. Other players/groups that come into that area get their own "instance" independent from yours. This means that your computer only renders the NPCs and players in your group, not the 10 million other players in the area).
Apparently other games like EverQuest didn't do instances, and so your group might run into another group in a dungeon and so you would have to fight/figure out which group got to continue and kill the main baddie.
You don't want your game to be playable to only those with the fastest/best/most expensive computers...you want people to play who use their computer for other things beside avoiding real life.
But at the same time, if you make everywhere instanced, what's the point of it being an mmo? You can't really interact with anyone. You might as well make a single player game with a mutiplayer component like GTA IV.
Sony Online Entertainment has a game coming (actually by some of the guys who made EverQuest) called The Agency, which I'm looking forward to that may deal with these very issues. We'll have to see...
WoW runs ok on my laptop, but not in the main cities - Undercity and Orgimmar (that's right I play Horde...wanna fight about it?). My framerate can sometimes drop as low as 8 fps. That's unplayable unless you're crafting, chatting, or on the auction house.
Almost all quests in WoW are outside the cities, so rendering is greatly reduced. But in a noir game nearly everything would happen in-city. And people should be able to play and have fun on a computer system a few years old. So the game would have to be massively instanced. (For those of you who don't know what "instances" are, basically it's a specified area that loads especially for you or your group. Other players/groups that come into that area get their own "instance" independent from yours. This means that your computer only renders the NPCs and players in your group, not the 10 million other players in the area).
Apparently other games like EverQuest didn't do instances, and so your group might run into another group in a dungeon and so you would have to fight/figure out which group got to continue and kill the main baddie.
You don't want your game to be playable to only those with the fastest/best/most expensive computers...you want people to play who use their computer for other things beside avoiding real life.
But at the same time, if you make everywhere instanced, what's the point of it being an mmo? You can't really interact with anyone. You might as well make a single player game with a mutiplayer component like GTA IV.
Sony Online Entertainment has a game coming (actually by some of the guys who made EverQuest) called The Agency, which I'm looking forward to that may deal with these very issues. We'll have to see...
6/3/08
In a Noir kind of Mood
So H felt like watching a couple of movies the other night, and to my wonder surprise and glee
brings out two movies she "hasn't seen yet"... Asphalt Jungle and Kiss Me Deadly. Woo!
So, clearly I realized I was in love with this girl. Lucky, since we're married.
All this Noir talk had gotten her in the mood to see some great gritty flicks.
You may have noticed the "Quote of the Week" update...one of the little gems from Kiss Me Deadly
(Velda seems to get the great lines).
So I wanted to post something...not a "Review" of the film, but a pervasive concept I think needs to be in my noir mmo. And that is "escape".
*Spoiler Alert*
In one of the endings of Kiss Me Deadly, Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) and Velda (Maxine Cooper) get out of the house a few seconds before it erupts in flames... and there they are struggling in the surf and the credits roll. The problem is, the 'box of doom' that has been opened is connected to 'The Manhattan Project', 'Los Alamos' (This is a great line too where Wesley Addy says 'I'm gonna say a few words...they're just a bunch of letters', etc).
This means they haven't escaped anything...the whole western seaboard hasn't escaped. L.A., San Francisco, San Diego...over. The effort to escape the house is of course entirely fruitless.
The other ending has them merely limp out of the room before the explosion/The End.
The first ending is better because it embodies the fruitless struggle of humanity...we try as hard as we can to scrape by...and for what? As Jim Morrison says, "No one gets out of here alive".
So how does this relate to my noir mmo idea?
Obviously we can't have people die at the end of every mission.
But maybe there's a way to have NPCs provide heavy existential motivation. For Mike Hammer, it was the demise of his good friend Nick (Va VaVoom!) the local mechanic (who seems an inspiration for Roman Bellic, your cousin in GTA IV).
I think NPCs have come a long way in providing emotional motivations for the player...for single-player games. Not sure yet if mmo's quite pull it off.
brings out two movies she "hasn't seen yet"... Asphalt Jungle and Kiss Me Deadly. Woo!
So, clearly I realized I was in love with this girl. Lucky, since we're married.
All this Noir talk had gotten her in the mood to see some great gritty flicks.
You may have noticed the "Quote of the Week" update...one of the little gems from Kiss Me Deadly
(Velda seems to get the great lines).
So I wanted to post something...not a "Review" of the film, but a pervasive concept I think needs to be in my noir mmo. And that is "escape".
*Spoiler Alert*
In one of the endings of Kiss Me Deadly, Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) and Velda (Maxine Cooper) get out of the house a few seconds before it erupts in flames... and there they are struggling in the surf and the credits roll. The problem is, the 'box of doom' that has been opened is connected to 'The Manhattan Project', 'Los Alamos' (This is a great line too where Wesley Addy says 'I'm gonna say a few words...they're just a bunch of letters', etc).
This means they haven't escaped anything...the whole western seaboard hasn't escaped. L.A., San Francisco, San Diego...over. The effort to escape the house is of course entirely fruitless.
The other ending has them merely limp out of the room before the explosion/The End.
The first ending is better because it embodies the fruitless struggle of humanity...we try as hard as we can to scrape by...and for what? As Jim Morrison says, "No one gets out of here alive".
So how does this relate to my noir mmo idea?
Obviously we can't have people die at the end of every mission.
But maybe there's a way to have NPCs provide heavy existential motivation. For Mike Hammer, it was the demise of his good friend Nick (Va VaVoom!) the local mechanic (who seems an inspiration for Roman Bellic, your cousin in GTA IV).
I think NPCs have come a long way in providing emotional motivations for the player...for single-player games. Not sure yet if mmo's quite pull it off.
From the Comments
I wanted to elevate what my friend Ted posted in the comments to a full-fledged Post. I think his insight into the visual contrast of noir is interesting. I'm including my comment after it, which is kind of a "me too!" thought.
So here's my thought:
"Film Noir" as we understand it today really comes out of the European directors and cinematographers and screenwriters who came into the Studio System and brought a different worldview and a different film style with them. So in a way it might be fair to say "Noir" and "Southern California" are really in opposition to some degree: while we've seen depictions of 1930s - 1940s SoCal in a "Noir" style, those who lived there in that period would likely have thought in other visual terms. (What comes to my mind is the American Regionalism / American Scene Painting style.)
So it could be interesting to use opposed styles -- one view that has the golden light Southern California really has, even if filtered through a lonely Hopperesque take, and another view that has the harsh and heavy dark nightworld we find in the best Noirs.
Heck, it seems that's often the Noir subtext: one wrong step and you leave the golden world and end up in the dark....- 5/31/2008 07:52:00 PM
So true... The best stories/films in that style are always about "accidents"; mild mistakes that turn deadly, or a chance meeting with disastrous consequences...
Your best intentions become the means to your end.
That may be the best way to describe "Noir" style:
The confluence of light and dark, visually and thematically, and what lurks unseen taints the beauty of the visible.
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