After being tasked with watching “Dynamics: The State Of The Art” by Clint Hocking and being asked some questions about the talk, here are my answers.
Why does Hocking think dynamics are so important?
As highlighted in the final words of his talk “dynamism is revolution”. So by breaking down the meaning of the words.
Dynamism
The theory that phenomena of matter or mind are due to the action of forces rather than to motion or matter.
Revolution
A forcible overthrow of a government or social order, in favor of a new system.
And to splice these separate but aligned meanings into a sentence you get something like this; A phenomena of bottom-up social mindset from action, constrained by circumstance. To describe this sentence in a way that reflects Hockins opinion of the importance of dynamics, one could say that the meaning of the phrase “dynamism is revolution” is to say that; dynamics are important in the way that they do not enforce meaning, but give meaning a reason for being, that each individual to their own understanding the dynamics will resolve their own meaning from them.
So to answer the question: Why does Hocking think dynamics are so important?
Hocking believes that dynamics give the constraints that produce deeply personal meaning. So without dynamics you cannot create content that produced deeply meaning full experiences.
Summarize at least one of Hocking’s examples of a game’s dynamics.
In the talk, Hocking explained the dynamics of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory(2005), and how its dynamics are the fundamentals of “Chaos Theory” those being, sensitivity, proximity, and fragility. How the game produces this is by putting you in close proximity to sensitive systems, that can have a catastrophic cascading effect, and reinforcing the importance of these with the fragility of the situation. Distilling the feeling of “on the edge of Chaos” that the games design was aiming for.
References
Hocking, Clint. “GDC Vault – Dynamics: The State Of The Art”. Gdcvault.com. N.p., 2016. Web. 17 Oct. 2016.
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