More remarks on VR-transitions ...
Spatial and/or temporal transitions in films are a
change of the scene and obviously this demands a great
deal of storytelling knowledge. So I agree with Jed on
that.
But then - using a "jump" option as, for example, in
the mentioned Myst seems to be a bit of a cheap trick.
I do not remember how often I missed this one hidden
switch to open a secret chamber in the caves of Myst -
just because I used to jump through this cave. No fun
at all!
But Myst is not a true 3D world and all it can offer
are transitions between screens (just as Bad Day on
the Midway with its jump cut approach). I am not sure
whether this - technically speaking - screen jumping
offers a variety comparable to cinematic language.
"True" 3D worlds have more options to chose from:
"Soul Reaver" changes seaming less between the world
of the living and the world of the dead, for example.
And most 3D action titles offer some kind of camera
work when the character enters or leaves a certain
location.
One possibility to use transitions for storytelling
without jepordizing the whole environment could be:
change this camera work accordinly to the designer's
demands.
Depending on what the user did see so far, how his
interaction did influence the upcoming scene behind
the door, what stage the world is in ... etc. the
camera could approach the transition between to
locations differently each time. For example it could
jump from a third person pov to a first person one or
change to an extreme camera angle.
I cannot play Resident Evil anymore, because I always
get the same transition between rooms - what a wasted
opportunity.
IMHO the mentioned western trail from nowhere to
somewhere heads towards another discussion: Can a VR
environment offer the pleasure of a road movie? Or
does it offer the pleasure of a digital journey?
Somehow the question of transition has to be solved
very differently for these two ... u-o
but I better get back to work before it gets too
complicated ...
michael
> Niclas wrote:
>
> >Maybe transitions is the poor author's
> >tool to tightening up a discontinous story? Maybe
> it's just storytelling
> >make-up?
> 'fraid I disagree pretty vehemently. Unless
> your story takes
> place all in one room, it requires transitions.
> I would define a transition as any method of
> getting from one
> setting to another. Some transitions are simple and
> straightforward:
> walk through this door into another room. Over fast
> and easy; you
> can do that in realtime.
> Some transitions are slower and more complex:
> maybe you walk
> across street, maybe you supposed to be hit by car
> to make story
> proceed. Can't just fade out/fade in across street;
> gotta make
> interactor leave building, walk across street.
> At the far end of the scale are transitions just
> don't make sense
> to do in realtime. You want a prologue that takes
> place fifty years
> before? You gotta have transition to main action,
> 'less you want
> interactors to sit through fifty years of dull
> story. (For that
> matter, how you gonna handle flashbacks without
> transition?) Say
> you're doing a Western, and the character starts out
> in Cheyenne.
> You could make interactor play through every grimy
> dusty step of the
> long trail to Dodge City, but if your story don't
> really start 'til
> they get there and find out the Sheriff's been
> killed, why bother
> playing through travel time?
> To put it in the terms you were using, a
> transition satisfies the
> sub-goal of putting a character at a particular
> place and/or time.
> That's an essential sub-goal of any story that
> happens in more than
> one place and/or time.
> (In Myst and Journeyman Project, there's a
> transition between
> every node of the graph and the next; every time you
> move, you go
> through a transition in which you can't control the
> character's
> actions. It's pretty to watch, but frustrating at
> times.)
> Now, to get back to Miriam's ideas, I actually
> think that the
> jump-cut (perhaps with establishing shot) is often a
> perfectly
> adequate transition. Most people've been watching
> movies (and TV)
> all their lives; they're used to the language of
> (American) cinema.
> There's room for lots of different kinds of
> transitions, of course:
> from tracking shots to fades to wipes. But if
> you're playing a VR
> game and someone says "You better get over to the
> old Same place
> right away," and you touch/click the door handle,
> and the screen goes
> blank and then you find yourself standing in the
> corn starch outside
> a mansion, you'll probably understand what happened.
> As often, there's an analogous situation in
> roleplaying games, and
> I admit that it's sometimes a problem there. For
> short distances and
> time jumps (let's call those local transitions),
> it's not so much of
> a problem: the player says "Okay, let's go over to
> the old abandoned
> brewery and check out these rumors of ghosts," and
> the GM says "It's
> dusk when you arrive; shadows are stealing across
> the empty lots; the
> kids are being called in to dinner from stickball
> games. There's
> broken glass in the street." (Assuming the GM
> doesn't have an
> incident planned to happen en route. And many GMs
> will take any
> outdoors transition as an opportunity for a randomly
> generated
> encounter that may or may not be relevant to any
> sub-goals. But the
> ones that aren't relevant are generally thrown in as
> artificial
> obstacles, or sometimes to get the characters
> paranoid and/or worn
> out by the time they arrive.) But for non-local
> transitions, you've
> got a problem: nobody wants to play out the
> three-day walk to the
> next town in detail, and yet three days is a lot of
> time for a group
> of people to spend together (especially if, as is
> often true in RPGs,
> the characters have just met and don't know each
> other well yet), and
> they're likely to spend some of that time talking
> with each other, so
> skipping over the details of the transition means
> cheating the
> characters out of interaction time. I usually
> compromise: play
> through a couple of in-character conversations that
> happen along the
> way, and just tell them in general terms what
> happens for the rest of
> it. "You trudge along the winding path through the
> woods. For more
> of the first day the ground is flat and the air is
> still; you can
> hear forest creatures out there somewhere, but none
> of them bother
> you. You talk about home, and you sing songs to
> help pass the time.
> Early on the second day the path begins to rise, and
> you find
> yourself weaving through wooded hills..." And so
> on. A lot harder
> to do that in a visual setting, though again we can
> steal from the
> language of cinema and use montage.
> ...Anyway, a lot of the problem with that
> situation in an RPG is
> that part of the point of the game (for many of us)
> is interacting
> with other characters in-character. In the near
> term, VR games are
> likely to be fairly limited in that respect; you're
> unlikely to want
> to spend an hour engaging in banter and chit-chat in
> character with a
> computer-controlled character. So skipping through
> the long hours of
> travel may not be such a bad thing.
> One other point while I'm thinking of it: if
> you're going to use a
> jump-cut transition, you do have to be careful to
> make sure you know
> what the interactor intends. If they click the
> doorknob by accident,
> you don't want to jump-cut to an hour later at the
> mansion outside of
> time -- they can't easily recover from that without
> losing a lot of
> in-game time. (They click the car to go back to
> their place -- but
> now it's two hours later than it was before the
> accidental click.)
> Perhaps some sort of undo mechanism is in order? Or
> a confirmation
> query? ("You are about to spend an hour driving to
> the old Same
> place. Do you really want to do this?") Or do a
> fade or montage or
> other sequence that takes a small amount of time,
> with a Cancel
> button prominently displayed during that sequence,
> so you have a few
> seconds to change your mind...
> Gotta run.
>
> --jed
>
> Jed Hartman
> Fiction Editor
> Strange Horizons
> http://www.strangehorizons.com/
>
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