One to Watch: The Witness

The pleasure of having a memory as full of holes as mine is you get to discover things over and over and over again. I rediscover things all the time: old songs, old movies, my sense of wonder at the world. Then I lose them again. But one thing I hope not to lose this time is the fact that Jonathan Blow, indie games darling and creator of Braid, is heading up a team working on a game called The Witness.

I should point out that there's no indication The Witness will come to the PC. It has been seen working on the Xbox 360 but it has been said that it will be released on multiple platforms.

So what is it? As far as has been seen, the player wanders an island from a first-person perspective. The island is littered with points of interest - a bungalow, a lighthouse, a gazebo, a raised platform etc - with puzzles scattered around. The puzzles seen so far as kind of connect-the-dots logic puzzles but I think we can expect more than that. A lot of time and effort has been poured into the graphics engine, making the world beautiful and shadows pass realistically across the ground and walls as the sun crosses the sky. The graphics themselves are apparently, as of late August, placeholder but they give a good sense of the atmosphere the team are working towards.

The immediate point of reference is Myst, or more recently Dear Esther which of course lacked the puzzles and added the voice-over narrative. If anything it looks like a room-escape puzzle that forgot to be bound to a single room.

The Witness was showing at PAX this weekend, alongside my favourite in-development indie game SpyParty and Monaco. According to the games' development blog, the idea was to keep it pleasantly low key and actually reduce the attention it got so players could take as long as the required and/or desired. I wonder if they also didn't want to include anything that could influence the players and spoil any feedback they might get.

All that was known of The Witness last time it passed through my awareness was the at the top of this post. A door with a blue square on it at the end of a dark corridor is very little to go on but already excitement was growing. Until the game is released sometime late in 2011, I predict that excitement is going to blossom and boom to ridiculous (though not necessarily undeserved) levels. This is definitely one to watch!

From Kotaku via The Witness official twitter. Yeah, you read that the right way around.

Kotaku: Race and Games Discussion

No, not the 100 metres at the London Olympics.

Kotaku yesterday (on Monday) posted an intelligent and thoroughly well prepared article on the 'Non-White Gamer's Experience', or more specifically on the lack of non-white protagonists. Author Owen Wood has interviewed a variety of games commentators who feel less then well catered for and come to some well reasoned, if controversial, conclusions on the matter. Best that you go read the article in its entirety. The comments at the bottom are particularly revealing about the attitudes of the wider gaming populace - largely that it doesn't matter ...

And , as I started to read the article, I felt the same way. Race for me has always been something of a non-issue. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't in the past noticed a character or person's race, but after they open their mouth their personality is a far greater factor in my understand and opinion of them. The nearest thing to race that has a major influence from my perspective is culture or possibly sub-culture and, besides, few games characters have felt particularly 'white', whatever that means. (Mostly they're stereotypes of other sorts: the Dennis Nedry-like obese computer genius from FEAR, the insecure man-child obsessed with comic book merchandise from Max Payne 2).

As I read on through the article, however, I came to realise that characters' race does matter but only as part of a greater issue - a need for a wider variety of compelling characters that aren't stereotypes (and not stereotypes of white western males either). Two, maybe three* examples of well written black males in the history of video games and maybe only twice as many women of any race is a pretty awful track record.

But how would I, as a white middle class western male, begin to fairly and believably write and portray in computer graphics anyone from any significantly different background without falling back on stereotypes and cliché? I can only hope to do them justice by carefully studying people around me but it has got to be better when a development team is formed from a wide range of people with different backgrounds, cultural heritages and experiences of people.

This isn't about about implicit prejudice. It isn't even about race or lack of representation. It's about sheer lack of variety and adequate attention to design.

* By my reckoning: Charlie (The Longest Journey and Dreamfall), CJ (GTA: San Andreas) and that guy from Farhrenheit/Indigo Prophecy

Valve 'Would Love TF2 Movie'

You've got to love the Meet the Team videos. Seriously, it's like a law or something. Valve have been lovingly crafting them since Team Fortress 2 came out in Oct 2007 and each has been a blast and a technical improvement upon the last. Each player has their favourite: personally mine is Meet the Sniper simply for its last line, though Meet the Spy is clearly the most detailed work.

Anyway, the point is Kotaku have a few quotes from Valve's writer Erik Wolpow and desinger on TF2 Robin Walker that you should read. Among them are some insights on the origins of Meet the Team, statement of desire for a TF2 movie or short and a reitteration of plans for a TF2 comic (which seemed to pass me by the first time).

With Meet the Spy, Valve have shown what they can do with three minutes twenty seconds. To be honest, I believe even a relatively short film at 90 minutes would be pushing their creative ability and I know they don't have the time for it. To make it viable, Valve would either have to hand it over to someone like Pixar, who have plenty of experience and resources to make full length digital animation, or create a whole new branch of their company to handle the project.

So a full length movie of Team Fortress 2 is pretty much out of the question. But a ten minute short is absolutely plausible. Even better for Valve, it could be a source of revenue. Just sell it on Steam and iTunes, maybe to specialist short film TV channels. Wouldn't even have to charge people much for it, given the huge fan base Valve have. Yeah, so keep your fingers crossed for hot RED on BLU action.