Samsara

- Team T34MVV0RK (Becca & Nicole)

----------------------------Game Concept

Samsara is a gaming about falling. Each level is broken into "atmospheres" that each have different objects to avoid or collect.  If an object that is meant to be avoided is mistakenly collected, the player is not necessarily punished for this, however, the perception of the player changes and they are reincarnated.

It is in fact, when the player chooses to not touch the controller that they are able to leave the cycle of Samsara. This is not essential for playing the game, however, but instead completes the dialogue/questions and begins the cycle again when the player chooses to play again.

Rather than outright teaching the user how to operate in the game, the game runs on a trial and error basis.  There is a high score, but the high score is found in the menu only. Instead of being presented with the score at the end of each play, the player instead decides to continue or stop playing the game. This is to centralize the focus of the game to the activity rather than the outcome.  Haptic feedback is another interesting component in this game because it is through these vibrations that the player becomes aware of where significant items are awaiting.

---------------------------- The Translation

In our history of Samsara, the original game is created by a Japanese company and published in the US by a company called Funnertainment who translated the game poorly. This is to reflect on the late 80s/early 90s of console games, originally dominated by Japan as a whole. Only in the last decade has this radically changed with the availability of information and tech that allows non-industry others to produce quality games, to the deep disgust of many Japanese publishers.

Many games through the history of the console have suffered severely from poor translations, losing the cohesion of their narratological/cultural contexts, but still maintaining its original qualities of gamic action potential.

One must ask if the loss of the cultural context is detrimental to the experience of the game. Our expectations in games may vary in someone else's culture.

In the American release of the original Samsara, Funnertainment attempted to modify the game to cater better to American audiences, losing most of the ties that correlated to eastern thought. In turn, the game became a cult-classic with the urban legend that you will die if you actually see yourself falling in the game. With the loss of its reference to Buddhism, Samsara is only a terrifying game where you fall to your death. The context, left to the American youth, changes to something more sinister.

---------------------------- The Remake/Design Methodology

As Luke Plunkett said in our class, the industry seems to be stagnant. The rate at which innovation seems to occur in the industry has slowed significantly. All too often, we only see re-releases or ports of older games.

Remakes aren't necessarily bad, but when games transition from pixel-based construction to more fully rendered environments, new agency is both gained and lost. For example, when one looks from the Super Mario Bros. tradition to Super Mario 64, the games are completely different, but still run by the same contexts. In Samsara's 'history', the game initially exists for the Sega Genesis, a system that wasn't capable of producing 3D graphics, but could create the illusion through parallax. So which version is better? Does the transition help realize the concept or does it destroy it?

We believe that even now, much can be learned from older games in terms of usability and teaching gamers certain kinds of intuition. But perhaps even this is constraining the game designers today from rediscovering what gamic action could be.

Graphically, the remake of Samsara takes the original logo and simply flattens the text and removes the bevel. This graphical trend can be seen in the remakes of Galaga, Centipede, and various other games from around that era.

It seems that game logos presently are more graphically clear and less illustrative. The involvement of the game's branding with the actual gameplay is more important in present games. More often, the actual logo of the game is directly incorporated into the visual language rather than a simple logo that is never seen again throughout the game. In this sense, the logo is introduced and becomes transparent in its presence, but remains as a clear visual cue.

A good example of this is in Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. The Dovahkiin dragon diamond symbol is both a logo and a visual motif within the game.

The logo for Samsara is a simplification of the older logo with the intention of referring back to the illustrative quality of its originating era as a cue for fans of the original, but also to modernize it for present audiences.

Often with the treatment of older logos and logotypes, the logo is cleaned and simplified, but sometimes still has a non-sequitur to the actual gameplay.

---------------------------- An Argument for Countergaming

In Galloway's article about countergaming, he concludes that countergaming has been relegated to predominantly aesthetic mutations in mods rather than focusing on what makes games unique: gamic action.

We will argue that Samsara explores gamic action more closely in that its reward and feedback systems, similar to the Japanese title L.S.D., does not adhere to general game conventions. Players have a choice in what they do, but instead there is ambiguity in whether their choices are good or bad. Instead, action in the game perpetuates the game and introduces the player to slightly different outcomes based on actions. The player can cycle through a vast number of combinations of scenarios, but it isn't until the player does absolutely nothing that the game completes the metaphorical cycle of 'samsara.' Beyond the metaphor is the diegetic non-action of the operator with the ambience act of the machine. Together, they achieve the 'game over', the nondiegetic machine act, which in turn generates the metaphorical release from samsara for the machine. The ambience act ends and the game can never be played again beyond that point.

In the original Samsara, characters' auras changed depending on actions of the player.