“A true sense of mystery requires a half-glimpsed pattern,” he said. Eventually, however, he decided to keep puzzles in order to impose a pattern on the experience. Roberts revealed that he considered removing puzzles for the game altogether, in order to allow players to stumble across secret connections in the game world. This led him to consider how Gorogoa’s delivery mechanism could be used as a kind of cosmic acrostic, whereby different, seemingly unrelated frames could be used to create puzzles and meaning. The larger possibility of how the frames could be connected to tell a story is what led Roberts away from traditional comic book-style sequential storytelling. Whenever you put multiple frames together, your mind looks for connections." Roberts likened this feeling to the detective running red strings between seemingly connected clues.Įvery feature of Gorogoa's design Roberts explained, flows from this central theme: the search for meaning hidden all around you in the worlds you inhabit. “And once you put together multiple frames, you are putting together a gallery exhibition. “Once you add interactivity, you transfer the properties of the frame to whatever you’re zooming in on,” he said.
These revelations led Roberts to consider how he might tell a story that resonated with these inherent properties of a comic book frame. And a frame is mysterious it begs the question: what’s beyond the boundaries of what you can see?”įinally, Roberts said, a frame is like a prison: a box, or fence around whatever is inside, that creates an unconscious tension in the viewer. "A frame is an act of affection you see things in a frame because they’re precious. “It leads the viewer’s attention and represents curation: it cares about what it contains, isn’t neutral, and represents a choice about what to include and exclude. With Gorogoa, Roberts wanted to make the frame poignant and intentional. “When you work on a comic you cannot ignore the frame,” he said. Working in the comic book medium led Roberts to think carefully about frames-those squares and rectangles through which a comic book author tells a story-and, more broadly, how we encounter so much of the world, be it via smartphones or televisions. “I had to do something with it, even if it wasn't going to be a comic.” “Through that process I came to realize that composing the page was more interesting to me that sequential storytelling,” Roberts said. In a talk titled, ' Gorogoa: The Design of a Cosmic Acrostic', delivered at the Game Developers Conference 2018 in San Francisco, Roberts told a packed room about his attempt to write and draw a comic book, which stalled ten pages in.
0 kommentar(er)
