Column: 'Blogged Out: Perspectives'

Welcome to 'Blogged Out', the news report that looks at the world of developer blogging and the conversations being had with the community at large. This week we look at performance, Second Life, and the source of fresh ideas. Different Perspectives This week we've been nuzzling through the undergrowth of offbeat and tangential blogs in and around game development. A new blog on the block by artist and theorist Adam Nash has some interesting things to say about how he understands games. Nash begins to make important distinctions in first post, which reads: "[Unreal Tournament 2007] will be hailed for its realistic graphics. But, like Half Life 2, the graphics are not realistic, they are cinematic. In other words, they present the world much as a series of Hollywood blockbuster-style shots. This is a crucial tendency in contemporary real-time 3D graphics, even though it is called "realistic." Distinctions like these are useful. 'Realism' is one of the vaguest and least useful terms in descriptions of contemporary games, a term that regularly appears out of nowhere to cause arguments, often because no one really knows what it means. Discussions about realism quickly devolve into fruitless missions to define 'realism' in games, and that really gets old fast. Games can be simulations, games can be models, but they are always abstract and they are all 'real' in their own way. Musical Flairs As Nash's blogging progressed over the last month he has revealed his real preoccupations, which although the coincide with gaming materials are actually about live interactive performances. Nash has produced 3D systems which mix geometry and sound to broadcast unusual audiovisual experiences. Of course the periphery of gaming offers outside perspectives for a musician and performer. Stylistic projects like Rez and rhythm games like Guitar Hero offer ideas about how games can also be performances, while other games are toolsets which /could/ give rise to performances, such as The Movies or Second Life. For Nash though Second Life tantalises with possibilities that it cannot deliver. "I want the space itself to become part of the performance, or rather that the performance /plays the space/," explains Nash. "So, when a user accesses my performance they access their personal instance of it, in the same way that thousands of users currently all access a live mp3 shoutcast at the same time. There is no need for the avatars of every person accessing the performance to gather at the same coordinates, they just need to access the performance." It is this kind of insight into what games suggest to people that really fascinates me: the idea that each new gaming project spontaneously generates imaginative possibilities not yet realized by any interactive system. People whose business lies well outside the understood boundaries of gaming development are often those who think well beyond what they are presented with. This is one of the reasons why blogging has become such an important and fertile area for new ideas in development, as well as for journalists like me. It's all very well understanding how something works, but if you're being paid to critique it's also important to understand how it doesn't work. This is the way in which Nash's discussion of Second Life is illuminating for me: "My understanding of the way that SL performances work from a technical point of view leads me to believe that this problem [of not allowing a completely free instanced experience to be created by its users] is a direct consequence of what I dislike most about SL: that it has land. It really seems counterproductive to recreate the rarity/greed model of real estate in virtual space. In the case of live performance, the streams are explicitly tied to a block of "land," therefore all audience must "go" to that "land" in order to hear it. Braindead, if you ask me. I'm already logged in, just stream the audio to me please." The Limits of Non-gaming This idea of how Second Life is bigger than Nash's concerns about performance. His thoughts about 'land' are an interesting topic because they suggests something about where Second Life is limited by its gaming heritage. There has been a good deal of discussion about how Second Life is something beyond gaming some kind of 3D web, or the "germ of the next operating system." But I suspect that really the genetics of gaming is still there under the skin, only this time it is a game of economics and socializing. This is a game defined by the rules set by limited terrain and limited cashflow. Perhaps the thing that comes after Second Life will satisfy the needs of some like Nash - someone whose vision requires a world of endless instancing and a Dungeon of infinite resources. [Jim Rossignol is a freelance journalist based in the UK – his game journalism has appeared in PC Gamer UK, Edge and The London Times.]