Quagmire

  Electric Sheep created by a genetic algorithm with mutation and cross-over "The electric things have their life too. Paltry as those lives are." - Rick Deckard  Christopher Alexander is an architect who wrote extensively on architecture, design and life. He identified patterns in our living environments and the quarters we spend our time in. He looked at the patterns that have emerged over the ages and as such taken on a descriptive approach to architecture. In doing so, Alexander has made a blue print for other disciplines to pick up and apply to whatever they feel like, but it's not a simple copy and paste I am afraid. Let's look at one of the patterns to make it more tangible. Presented here below are fifteen, of many, patterns that Alexander describes in his seminal book  A Pattern Language . We'll look at Graded Variation in particular, because it neatly ties in with the Electric Sheep above. A selection of Patterns from A Pattern Language You may wonder at...

Michael Douglas as Nicholas van Orton in The Game by David Fincher “I don't care about the money. I'm pulling back the curtain. I want to meet the wizard.” -   Nicholas van Orton Jesse Schell at the Game Development Conference (GDC) After I saw Jesse Schell's lecture at GDC on The Nature of Order in Game Narrative I was intrigued. Intrigued because Schell gives the viewer a guideline of what kind of patterns they can use in the creation for their game when it comes to narrative. I believe that these patterns can also be used to analyze narrative in video games and in so doing as an analyst or tester you can "pull back the curtain". Unlike Nicholas van Orton though, I am not a millionaire and I do care about the money. There is business to be made and I will tell you why. I believe narrative is an often overlooked part of video games for creators and critics alike and that it, just like any other feature of software, can be subjected to thorough analysis and measu...