Scale and Perspective in video games (1️⃣🥃|📅🎮📰)

Ludic Encumbrance Club

Party Chat Peoples discuss scale and perspective in video games. Once a major driver of innovation, scale was relegated to the indie scene after big studios lost their inner child.

1:00 - What are scale and perspective, and why the discussion?

2:55 - One of the earliest forms of play, and it never grows old

4:00 - Child development / cognitive science - how arousal and valance spark creativity

6:30 - Scale used too cheaply if at all in big tent video games

8:15 - Adult scientists explore scale and perspective

9:10 - Scale, the original Kickstarter video game fail

10:55 - Fairy tales and superhero stories explore scale

11:20 - Portal and F-Stop, the sequel that never happened

17:25 - Maquette by Graceful Decay makes scale romantic. Also buggy

21:40 - Motion Sickness Part 1 - inherent risks when games scale objects bigger

22:30 - "I Wanna Be the Guy" The Movie: The Game's 8-bit nostalgia scales a boss fight

26:10 - Early video games using scale birthed several modern genres

29:30 - Tabletop roleplaying games added math to miniature toy fights, became RPG genre

33:30 - Maquette: What it did right, ie using scale to mirror emotional states

34:00 - Warhammer, a tabletop miniature wargame, and its math mechanics

37:15 - Superliminal, a bug-free puzzle game exploring scale and perspective well

41:40 - Motion sickness part 2 - the only issue in Superliminal and arguably out of their control

43:20 - Horizon Zero Dawn and scale of difficulty (damage scaling)

45:10 - Katamari Damacy - a comedic masterpiece of scale, but is it a game at all?

51:10 - Everything (2017), philosopher's lecture translated into a scale-based indie game

1:01:50 - Giant Celebration (still in beta), a VR puzzle game using scale to hide objects

1:03:02 - Motion Sickness part 3 - VR's motion sickness complications, plus controls issues

1:08:45 - Augmented reality, the inevitable next frontier for scale play (See Pokemon Go)

1:09:15 - Positional audio, 7.1 surround sound headphones, console support for helpful audio

1:11:25 - Potential for immersion in VR, using the game equivalent of IMAX movies

1:13:00 - Donut County's donut hole swallows rising scale objects like Katamari's sticky ball

1:15:10 - Pokemon Sword & Shield's dynamax, another cheap big studio take on scale

1:18:20 - It Takes Two uses scale thematically and well to dramatize relationship issues

1:21:45 - The Crew 2 live map feature demonstrates what big studios can do already

1:26:15 - Older strategy video games used scale to enable multiple views of war battles

1:27:20 - Challenging major studios to create a new franchise based on scale and perspective

1:29:35 - Scale inspires creativity, using scale through both space and time

1:31:25 - Summary and exit