The Naked Game

This would be really cool…. for someone with no knowledge of code. “OMG! like you mean these lines do this and that?”

Since the word “art” was mentioned I expect this game will be universally reviled around here just as I am sure if Pixel had made it it would be loved.

in before the word art in quotation marks

To that last statement, I’ve done it! I was working on a game about 10 mos. ago where the engine constructed allowed for a developer to modify the variables (and a little of the code) in real-time, modifying a running server or client while people were playing.

It was great. The typical hack to do was make everyone’s FOV angle really high, so that everyone had fish-eye lenses of sorts. It went beyond that to “steering” AI in the right direction, etc.

Yup, I’m in agreement with Derek on this. It is a lovely and nice idea, but the whole deep and profound meaning stuff just *really* put me off.

Not because I dislike that sort of thing too much, more it felt ill fitting and sellotaped on afterwards.

The earlier version before the page was cut in half and replaced with quotes was even more boggling.

Basically, it’s a good enough concept to stand on its own two feet without any of the baggage it comes with now.

I think that, for once, this actually is art, and deserves a bit of pretentious discussion on the matter. I think it is profound, and I could tell you why in great detail. What videogame is more universal than Pong? And what better way to expose the nature of the rules that define interactivity than through interactivity itself? Personally, I’d like to see this done with more simple games, like PacMan, Breakout, or Space Invaders.

I think programmers, in general, are going to have trouble with it. After all, it’s little different from what they do everyday. But what makes it art isn’t what you do, but why you do it. The author has done something very interesting and I applaud him completely. This is such a better argument for games as art than Passage ever was because it makes blanket statements about ALL games.

Anyway, whatever my opinion is worth, I’m impressed.

its interesting, and I am all for art games, but throwing a bucket of paint randomly at a canvas isnt quite monet.

I feel the same here, passage and the like really made me feel something, this made me go ‘ooh, thats kind of neat’.

dont get me wrong, if this was taken and applied to something which allready had a strong ‘feeling’, then you could really get new reactions from people.

but then I think I’m from one of the first generations that just didnt think pong was all that great =p

>> Personally, I’d like to see this done with more simple games, like PacMan, Breakout, or Space Invaders.

I think it would be difficult to do something like this for those games, since even though they are often given as examples of simple games, a game like Pacman is not really that simple. Functions for controlling the movement of pacman and the ghosts will quickly be too complex (for non-programmers at least) to turn off arbitrary lines and see what happens in a clean way. (And the code would also take much more than a single screen.)

Then again maybe something similar could still be achieved but in a different way, for instance by not showing the actual code but some kind of higher level interface instead.

Me and JP have been using the term “Naked Game Design” for yeears.

Funny that it should come up elsewhere.