Hey, yeah, just what I''m talking about the whole time, I know what you mean... and I think such a game could be really good when well done (and of course really, really bad when not well done); the problem is only that there will be very few people in the game programing "scene" who will be able to do this IMHO, they are game programers after all , but I digress...(no insult intendet). And form the top of my head I can''t really think of any game like this...maybe Planescape Torment, but I haven''t played it that far, but form what I can see so far it comes quite close to what you think about, Moth.

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Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind...

unless i''m mistaken, surrealism is more than just a fantasy world like DOTT, and I CERTAINLY would not call SimCity surrealism.

but, going back to the original poster, true surrealism would be incredible... but very hard (if not completely impossible) to achieve.

i guess you could start off by defining what exactly ''surrealness'' is... my opinion is that a truly surreal universe is one in which the perception and fundamental laws of our universe are completely abandoned. Dream universes are surreal, because anything can happen in a dream. But this then raises a lot of questions - in our universe if you jump off a cliff, you fall... but in a surreal universe what should happen? does gravity exist? can someone be in more than one place at the same time? (well, why not?)

unless you make a game where absolutely random things happen all the time (which would render the game unplayable by someone used to this universe) you can''t achieve total surrealism.

so the next best thing is to try and approximate it, by having a different set of rules about how your universe works.

an idea me and my friend came up with a while ago was a game where basically the universe consisted of millions of floating islands suspended in space. as we tried to work out the possible physics of it all, we realised (very quickly) that our universe would not allow anything like that. (e.g. the presence of gravity would imply mass attraction, but then why werent all the islands stuck together in one large lump, or why weren''t they spherical?). so we started working out a series of universal laws that worked differently from our universe... for example, that gravity was present everywhere, and it always pointed in a certain direction.

so you could do all sorts of wierd things, including some sort of re-configuration of how time flows - like you could start at the middle of the story, play to the end then play the beginning and finally find yourself back where you started.

so i think a surreal universe would be a cool setting for a game, and you could play around with a load of things to make the gameplay very original.

anyone have any comments on the huge amount of shit i''ve just written?

I guess the really difficult part would be orienting the player to this alternate universe, without turning them off completely. One thing that seems to work is distracting ''em with pretty pictures, then hit ''em over the head with the insanity. 8P Too much of it though and players get resentful. Another thing that works a little better is starting out in a quasi-normal setting, then gradually working in the surrealism.

However, for numerous examples on how this can be done horribly, see 90% of Japanese imports, and just about anything that came out of the 80''s. Alot of these games unintentionally resembled "Waiting for Godot", which doesn''t work out nearly as well as it sounds. I don''t know if video games are really ready for surrealism, though, since for surrealism to really work, there has to be an existing set of symbols to play around with, for that queasy disorientation to really set in.

Here''s an idea, not really a game, but could be fun for a level in an FPS: replace all your enemies with Atari 2600 sprites, and all the sounds with "Beep" and "Boop", keeping all the original scenery. Huh, now I have to pull out my Doom editor and make a MOD!

Hmm, I don't think you guys really know what surrealism is. Surrealism is a series of nonsensical, abstract imagery that seemingly have nothing to do with each other but are in fact subconsciously linked in the human mind and juxtaposed concrete information and images.

What you guys are talking about is what the gaming industry has labeled "surrealism" because a bunch of designer hacks thought it would be cool if they called their game "surreal." Truthfully, what you guys are talking about is somewhere between a mystery and the "amnesia cliche," where the main character starts the game not knowing where he is or what he's doing.

EDIT: Just occured to me, one of the first (if not THE first) games that fits the original posters description is Myst.

Edited by - AtypicalAlex on August 13, 2000 3:43:30 PM

I choose the funky icon.

Yeah! Surrealism rocks! My programmer and I have been mewssing with the idea of a game where you see sound! Think about it! Not as well but only, sound. Cool ay? Or a game where you, with out waring shift worlds like the Maxx, so you walk down the street and then your in a desert and a crab is nibbiling at your toe so you grab it and squish it against a bolder, then your back on the street again, and your pounding an old ladies dog agains a lamp post. :-) he he he funky $hit.

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I have to agree with Alex; I don''t think very many people here really know what surrealism is. Most think it''s just like "hey cool, let''s let things happen without a reason and make everything really weird just for the fun of it"; it''s just what Ernest Adams writes about in "Bad game designer, no twinkie"; if you want to make surrealism, you have to put something behind the wackyness (although I don''t really know what, I''m not an artist after all ...)

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Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind...

Reasoning behind surrealism. Noted . I recommend you read that article... It is quite good

-Chris Bennett ("Insanity" of Dwarfsoft)

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