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This page contains an archive of all entries posted to GAMBIT in the Thoughts category. They are listed from oldest to newest.
Reviews is the previous category.
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Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.
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February 6, 2012 11:05 PM
Warm Praise for The Snowfield
A few weeks ago our summer 2011 game The Snowfield was chosen as a Student Showcase Finalist at the Independent Games Festival. I was Product Owner on the project, I want to share some of responses we've gotten so far.
Cold, Comfort, Harm: The Snowfield - Rock, Paper, Shotgun
In the Bleak of Winter: The Snowfield - The Nocturnal Rambler
This Week's Best PC Games - PC Gamer
And Then the Whimper: The Snowfield - SPACE-BIFF!
The Snowfield is a Haunting and Mysterious PC Game - GameThunks
There's a lot of good praise here, and a lot of valid criticism. Two things stand out for me.
The goals of the project was to create an open and emergent system, the theory being that this would encourage players to tell their own stories. In the end we weren't able to implement a lot of the depth and complexity we'd planned for, but we did try make the few simple mechanics and behaviors we had as evocative as possible. The going assumption in commercial game development is usually that narrative evokes emotion, but we wanted emotion to evoke narrative, to motivate players to dramatize their experience in the retelling. This quote from the SPACE-BIFF! blog does exactly that:
At one point I brought a soldier the letter he had been muttering about (or was it just any old letter, written by some other sweetheart to some other brave boy?). He stood there for a few seconds with the paper pressed to his face while I trembled and hoped to return to the warmth of the fire. He took so long that I turned away and began to head up to the bombed-out house where a few fellow soldiers had congregated. My conscience caught up to my numbness and I turned back to retrieve him. But he was gone, disappeared into the bitter grey.
I was also heartened by the write-up at The Nocturnal Rambler, for mentioning that The Snowfield reminded him the devastating final episode of Blackadder Goes Forth. Aside from real historical research, the two main inspirations on The Snowfield were the British sitcom Blackadder and Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory, both wickedly damning portraits of an especially damnable war. They are the two pieces of popular media that made me aware of WWI as a great human tragedy, and we tried to imbue some of their uncompromising sensibility into the game.
The Snowfield was an overly ambitious project, but that's typical of a lot of experimental games. Even though we accomplished a fraction of what we envisioned, it's nice to see the release version having impact on people. You're always so close to a project you're involved in that it's hard to know whether it works for an audience at all. Though I feel there's still a lot of untapped narrative potential in the project, the feeling evoked is apparently so strong for some it hardly matters. Also context, the fact that The Snowfield is being read against commercial war games, seems to lend it additional impact. It had never occurred to me, as one blogger mentioned, how few games (if any) deal with the aftermath of battle.
January 25, 2012 10:09 AM
Dice Are Fun; rand() Isn't.
I am a longtime fan of Games Workshop's Blood Bowl, an American football-inspired miniatures game set in the Warhammer universe. In the game, each player controls a team made-up of characters from a fantasy race, such as dwarves, orcs, elves and humans, among myriad others. Gameplay is turn-based, and the object is to get the ball into the opponent's endzone, thereby earning a touchdown and scoring 1 point. Each team has sixteen turns, and at the end the team with the most points wins.
The game is almost entirely dice-driven: if you want to do anything other than move a player through empty space, you're going to have to roll dice and deal with the outcome. The rolls are affected by your player's various statistics, skills, and proximity to hostile players. Most of these rolls use standard six-sided dice, with a set of special "block dice" to use when players hit each other. The game is in fact extremely violent: it's not uncommon for a player to die during the match, and some players bring a variety of weapons with them onto the field. The secret to being a successful Blood Bowl coach is knowing how to weight all these random factors in your favor, and when to take risks. Nothing is ever guaranteed, of course, and you have to accept that when you sit down to play.
This mix of randomness and violence leads to a game characterized by tactics and mayhem. Indeed, one of the game's great appeal is its hilariously juvenile world that has been built-up over 25 years. It is both a wonderful satire of modern sport culture and downright funny in its own right. Just mentioning "Blood Bowl" to someone in the know always elicits a smile. This point is especially important: that the game is often fun because it is so chaotic and unpredictable, and most Blood Bowl players I know have one or two great stories about how the dice saved, or ruined, the day.
Luckily for us fans of the game, in 2010 a new digital version came out on multiple platforms. Digital Blood Bowl dates back to the mid 1990's: I mostly learned the game playing an MS-DOS version. Recently I've been playing the PSP version, leading a team of Wood Elves through the campaign mode (and kicking quite a bit of ass, if I do say so myself). Playing this way has lead me to think a lot about the social nature of play, and to realize that how I interpret randomness in a game is heavily context-based. To illustrate this, I offer the following anecdote:
Early in the campaign, there was a moment when the ball was mid-field, stuck in a mess of players and not moving anywhere easily. It was the AI's turn, and while it is not particularly good, it managed to break a hole in my line. One of their players ran through the opening towards my endzone, and blitzed one of the linemen I had left behind for safety. The block die came up "both down," both players failed their armor rolls, and both rolled a 12 on the injury table. Yes, really.
In layman's terms: one of their players got into my backfield and hit one of my players so hard that they both died on the spot.
In some sense, this should have been an epic moment. I'd never seen this particular combination of results. Had I been playing at a table with a friend, this moment would have immediately become legend. We would have laughed and cursed for a good twenty minutes before resuming the game, and we would tell the tale to our friends and fellow Blood Bowl-ers for years. Songs would be song for the brave Dwarf so desperate to hit an Elf that he killed himself in the process. It would have been a truly amazing moment.
But, staring into a small screen by myself, all I could think was, "well, I can't afford to replace that guy," and all I could do was quit out and restart the game with an air of annoyance.
There are two reasons for this.
The first has to do with pace and feedback. Had this event happened in a tabletop game, there would have been a lot of suspense and tension around the dice rolls. Seeing the "both down" result, watching each player fail their armor checks, seeing the first player die, thinking and laughing about how great it would be if the other died, and then watching in amazement as those last two dice come up 6. Describing it now, I wish I could have seen it play-out that way. However, the PSP handles these rolls automatically, and displays a continuous text-based log of all the dice rolls and their results. Practically speaking, this event, which would have taken 2 or 3 minutes in a real game (which includes time to talk about what's happening and hope for a dramatic outcome), was over in 3 seconds.
The second has to do with our relationship to randomness. As humans, we never quite rid ourselves of the belief that we can somehow intentionally influence random outcomes. Every child who plays games believes that he or she has some degree of skill with respect to rolling dice or drawing cards, and as we grow-up we never quite shake that belief. In my gaming groups I'm a notorious roller of 1s. Whether or not I roll badly more often than anyone else I don't actually know, but we all share that belief anyway. In some ways these ideas are superstitious, but with dice there is also the knowledge that we did, in fact, make that happen. There is always the knowledge that if I threw the die a little harder, or maybe in a different direction, a different result may have occurred. The result may have been more-or-less random, but it's still my fault that the randomness went that way.
Playing such a game on a computer, however, removes all of these factors. Randomness was just random, and I really had nothing to do with it. Add in the fact that there is room for error in software - the constant suspicion of a bug somewhere - and the randomness becomes less exciting and more suspect: you start to wonder if bad luck is a bad bug, even though you know it's probably just luck.
In these respects, then, randomness in a game is very human. We find it fun because of our complex relationship to the way we generate these random values, and much of the fun comes in sharing that with other people. Computers dehumanize randomness, and games such as Blood Bowl, which rely heavily on dice, do not translate well into digital media. The Blood Bowl experience is simply better with another person across the table, not across the network.
I enjoy rolling dice on the table: their tactile nature, the sounds, the tension, and my own implication in the result. A random number function removes all of these elements, and leaves me wondering if I can trust it.
October 21, 2011 1:23 PM
Digital Archaeology: Investigating the Spacewar! Source
Here at GAMBIT we've been working on a project that aims to replicate the first computer game written at MIT, Spacewar! In the process we've been learning a lot about the way that games were written for the machines in the pioneering days of computing.
 Spacewar! is game of space combat created for the DEC PDP-1 by hackers at MIT, including Steve "Slug" Russell, Martin "Shag" Graetz, Wayne Witaenem, Alan Kotok, Dan Edwards, Peter Samson and Graetz. You can play the game running on a Java emulator here. You can also run the game on the Multiple Emulator Super System (MESS) implementation of a PDP-1 by following the instructions here. The Spacewar! source code we've taken as the base version of the game is also available through that site. Our goal, however, is to make a version of the game that runs on an Arduino that we can demonstrate in the foyer of the lab.
As part of this project we're trying to understand what's going on in the PDP-1 source code that the emulators use. This has meant teaching ourselves the PDP-1 assembly language MACRO from old manuals written in 1962. It's been slow going, because a lot of information is either buried in the technical documentation or was just assumed knowledge that has been lost over time. It's also been very rewarding though and creates a feeling of connection to the minds of those hackers back in the 60s.
Looking around on Google it seems there's not that much information on the Spacewar! source code, and in trying to understand it we've come up with a few tips that might help someone else out:
- Get the manuals for the PDP-1 and also for MACRO. They're available from the Bitsaver's archive and are very helpful. We have noticed that there seem to be errors in some of the example code in the MACRO manual, which were very confusing for me at first. The later examples, however, seem to be correct and are helpful in introducing some of the key concepts in the Spacewar! source.
- Look at the compiled version of source code. There are two listings of the Spacewar! source code. The spacewar.mac file is handy for reading clean code, but the spacewar.lst file contains translations of every instruction into machine code, which is very useful for understanding exactly what's going on with the layout of everything in memory, which in turn is critical for understanding a lot of the low level memory manipulation that the code does.
- MACRO inlines all macro definitions. The MACRO equivalent of functions are (somewhat confusingly) called macros. When you look through the .lst file you'll notice that wherever a macro was used in the .mac file MACRO has gone through and expanded it out inline by introducing temporary variables for each of the macro's arguments. This is what all the strange labels starting with "ZZ" are. Once you know this, reading the source code becomes a lot less confusing.
- All numbers are in octal by default. This took us a long time to work out, although we should have realized it sooner. Unless the MACRO directive "decimal" has been issued in a macro definition the assembler interprets all numbers as octal. All the machine code and addresses that are in the .lst file are expressed in octal.
- There is no stack. For programmers used to working at a C level of abstraction or higher, this was very confusing for us at first. As mentioned above, macros look like function when you write them, but when they are processed by the MACRO compiler they all get inlined. There is no stack pointer. There are no stack frames. Everything is just one big blob of data and instructions mushed together.
- Labels are used both for naming variables and controlling flow. This was very hard for us to wrap our heads around at first. As mentioned before, there is no separation in memory between data and instructions. A coder would just have to make sure that they never let the program counter point to a place in memory that contains data rather than an instruction. The Spacewar! coders will commonly use a label to name an address in memory that they want to jump the flow control to and they'll also use a label to refer to a memory location that they are only going to store data in. As far as we can tell there is no naming convention which distinguishes them. Sometimes data can be stored immediately next to instructions in memory. Thankfully, however, the majority of the game object data is stored in a big contiguous block of memory after the instructions, rather than being completely interleaved.
- Including the symbol "i" after an instruction makes it indirect. We never found an explicit statement of this, but I inferred it from looking at the opcodes in the .lst file. Indirect instructions take a memory address as an argument which tells them where to find the real argument. This idiom is very commonly used in Spacewar!
- Space delimiters mean addition. So for instance "law 1 3 5" is equivalent to "law 9". Plus symbols also mean addition!
- Parentheses define constants. MACRO automatically allocates some memory to hold the constant, stores its value there, and then replaces the constant symbols with the memory address of the constant. For instance when MACRO reads the instruction "lac (2000" in the preprocessing phase, it causes some memory to be allocated, say address 027703, and then stores 2000 in that address, replacing the original instruction with "lac 027703". This is all done prior to execution. We found this very confusing at first.
- Get used to seeing a lot of "dap". The instruction "dap x" deposits the accumulator contents into the argument portion of the memory address x. This lets you change the argument of the instruction stored at that memory address. One of the most common idioms that the Spacewar! programmers use is to manipulate the flow of the program by writing "jmp .", which is a command that says "jump to this address" (which would result in a tight infinite loop if it were actually execute) and then to use the dap instruction to overwrite the target of the jump from "." to some other address that they load into the accumulator. This makes it hard to look at the code and immediately tell what the flow control is going to look like without tracing the execution, since you need to know what the "." is going to be replaced by when the program is actually running. They use a similar idiom for loading data, for example writing "lac ." which if executed straight up would load the contents of the current address (i.e. the "lac ." instruction itself) into the accumulator, but they then use dap to conditionally change the target from "." to some other location that contains data that they want to operate on.
- Think in bits. Spacewar! is written very close to the machine. The programmers have used a frightening array of bitwise manipulation tricks that you don't often see in modern programming. They rotate bits in memory using bit-shifting so that they can store two short numbers in space normally used for one long number. They shift number representations around so that they're in the left or right side of a memory address depending on where a particular instruction call requires that it needs to be, which crops up quite frequently with the display instruction "dpy". They use clever number representations, such as 2's complement, to do fancy arithmetic tricks. They use MACRO to repeatedly double numbers in the preprocessing stage so that they get bit-shifted to the location in memory that they want before execution. They add together the bit codes of instructions to create combined instructions. These tricks are very rarely commented and working out exactly what this "clever" code is doing and why often requires a lot of poking around and reverse engineering.
- Use MESS as a debugger to understand what's going on. The MESS PDP-1 emulator maps ctrl + most of your keyboard buttons to the switches on the PDP-1. You can turn on the "single step" and "single inst." switches and then hit ctrl-p, which will cause the PDP-1 to go into debugging mode and let your step through the code line by line by repeatedly pressing ctrl-p. By reading off the "memory address" lights and converting from binary to octal you can look up where the program is up to in the .lst file and follow the program as it's being executed.
Working on Spacewar! is fascinating. The programming style is unlike anything we've ever worked on before and has certainly made us think about low level programming in a whole new way. For anyone who is interested in computing history and low-level programming we strongly recommend checking it out.
October 18, 2011 1:17 PM
Reflections on A Closed World Criticism
The past month there has been much discussion and press about A Closed World, the summer project for which I served as game director this summer last. The response is overwhelming, by which I mean we are humbled by the attention we have received, and that it is difficult to maintain consistent correspondence with all who wish to discuss the game or have their specific questions answered. Truth be told, this latter burden has fallen harder on Todd than me, as I have been content to remain largely silent regarding my thoughts on the game. I felt that my role as game director afforded me the opportunity to have a voice on a compelling project, but the spirit and heart of the game belongs first with Todd as the caretaker of the goals, and with the talented team of developers we had working on the team during the eight week cycle.
This is in no way an attempt to minimize my involvement with the project. I'm proud of the game, and especially proud of the fingerprint traces I have left all over it. I think, especially when held up against other games I have been involved with at GAMBIT, a pattern emerges that marks my presence in the projects - specifically, the trace of a design approach that tries to emphasize and interrogate player subjectivity.
It is this design approach, and recent specific criticism of the game, that has compelled me to write this post voicing my opinion.
 Much has been made of the game's opening monologue and the initial question: "are you male or female?" The most common criticism of this specific part of the game is that the question reinforces notions of a gender binary that excludes many for whom the male/female gender dichotomy excludes. Many suggest that they stopped playing the game upon being asked the question, and others couldn't or refused to see much beyond the question and the binary choice presented the player.
The language of the question is important. The game asks, quite simply "Are you male, or female?" The "you" in the question is intentionally obscure. Most players will immediately assume that the question functions as a basic character creation choice, that you are simply choosing a gender for your character. They assume that the gender choice at the start of the game will effect narrative aspects of the game, and specifically that it will shape the romantic relationships in the story of the game.
The question is more profound, and the criticism that transgendered communities are excluded by the binary mechanic speaks to the profundity of the opening statement. The question is asked in an attempt to frame the entire experience of gender in the game. It is meant to ask not only what is your classification, rather, and more importantly, how do you classify? The great challenge for me during the entirety of the project, as a person for whom questions of gender have never personally been at the fore, is how do we, as a society and as individuals, concieve of gender, and how do we present gender in games. The question is masked as a standard game mechanic of character creation, while trying to do much more. In asking the question we were trying to emphasize the players' subjectivity, and specifically, the players' personal notions of gender and identity.
The question works best when paired with the procedurally random assigment of gender to characters in the game. The frivolity with which the program assigns gender held against the boldness of the opening question creates a tension in the game that problematizes socially accepted notions of gender, gender roles, and more specifically how we conceive of and represent gender in games.
 Allow me an anecdote. I often reminisce about the surprise with which everyone discovered that Samus from Metroid was a woman. There is so much complexity wrapped up in the revelation that it is hard to untangle. We discover Samus is a woman because she either A) removes her helmet and has long hair, or B) removes her armor revealing her swimsuit. This early depiction of gender raises many questions. Is Samus' long hair and/or swimsuit an adequate signifier of her gender? Why would a community be surprised to discover that the protagonist is a female? To what extent does Samus' gender have anything at all to do with the experience of Metroid? For me, the instance of Samus speaks to the culturally situated notions of gender that we were trying to problematize with A Closed World.
As I mentioned before, a pattern has emerged with games that I work on at GAMBIT. With Seer, and more obviously with Yet One Word, a goal of the project was to cave in the screen and invite players to reflect on their playerness. I am particularly fond of games that do this. Dance Central and B.U.T.T.O.N. remind players of their subjectivity by emphasizing their very corporeality. Sports and many board games do something similar. As the steep incline of technology has driven digital gaming toward an emphasis on photorealism and surround sound, designers have pushed for a specific kind of immersion pinned to the virtually real; forever chasing the Holodec. For me, I am interested more in games that are immersive not because they transport, rather because they reflect and force the players' gaze back on themselves as subjects. Indeed, it seems to me that this is a strength of interactivity, creating meaning by reminding players of how they are interacting.
For many, this has worked. Players have remarked at their surprise when they found themselves making assumptions about gender in A Closed World. The game invited these players to reflect on their own conceptions of gender, and how they were applying their notions to their experience of the game.
We have said, and it bears repeating, to the extent that we could, we wanted A Closed World to raise questions, not to provide answers. For me, the strength of the project is not in the narrative at all. Indeed, many of the accusations levied against the game's story, that it's overly reductive, simplistic, and possibly trite, have some merit. Hey, stories are very hard. For those looking for a game about gender and sexuality power dynamics, about the oppressive cultural hegemony of our heteronormative society, or about the deep personal challenges constantly faced by marginalized individuals, I fear this game may leave you wanting. Some of the expectations for what the game meant to accomplish may have been confused by our paratextual rhetoric surrounding the game, which we are continuing to iterate on and improve. Also, if you are looking for a robust and detailed procedurally profound combat system, you won't find it here.
Where A Closed World shines for me is in how it invites players to reflect on their conceptions of gender. We start the game by emphasizing gender only to deemphasize it procedurally, attempting to turn the tables on the player that they might consider what their expectations were going into the game, and how those expectations may be challenged. The turn may seem simple, but I believe it is elegant in its reflective capability. That people, through playing the game, have been asking these questions, of us and of themselves, suggests to me that we may have accomplished that goal.
October 13, 2011 12:00 PM
What's in a name? Making an #Occupy board game at the Cardboard Jam.
 I was happy to host the second Cardboard Jam at the GAMBIT Game Lab with Darren Torpey of Boston Game Jams (and Boston Indies and countless other Boston game development groups). Sixteen local developers, researchers, and students joined us for two days of rapid iteration of board, dice, and card games. After a few hours of brainstorming and pitching ideas to the group, we coalesced into five teams and spent the remaining 20 hours creating games. By day one's dinner time, we were trading people around to test all of the games. All five games were finished and playtested by the end of the game jam, with rules and pieces that could be picked up and played by others.
OCCUPY
The theme of our game jam was Occupy. I emailed Darren the week before the game jam started and pitched the theme to him - I've been keeping up with the Occupy events around the nation, especially OccupyWallStreet and OccupyBoston. He liked it and so it was then presented to the jammers at the start of the brainstorming session. They came up with dozens of ideas; some pitched mechanics for which 'occupy' was a good fit and others pitched fictions and themes based on the word. Having a verb as our theme was useful in that all of our pitches seemed to gel well with the theme.
We grouped the pitches by shared aspects and from there the jammers formed into teams. My team of four chose to explore a two mechanics: Conway's game of life and RoboRally-style programmed moves with cards. We placed these two pitches next a few other cards that were similar and got to work. One of these related cards was a pitch I came up with, where the players could be groundskeepers at a park during OccupyWallStreet and the NPC actors as police and protesters. I never mentioned this theme again to the team, but I think it was in the back of my mind throughout the event.
Continue reading "What's in a name? Making an #Occupy board game at the Cardboard Jam. " »
July 8, 2011 10:36 AM
Knowing When to Compromise
So as some of you may know, or have read or heard about, this summer at GAMBIT I am the product owner of a game design team, in order to do some research on why queer/LGBTQ characters and themes aren't making it into games. If you read "Playing It Straight" in Edge back in October, you probably know what sparked me to want to do this. I am in the weird position of being an ethnographer studying the process of my team (who are all great) and being the person who the team is supposed to be appeasing, if that makes any sense. I often have to quell the urge to get too involved.
An issue came up Wednesday that I wanted to discuss because of its broader implications, which is the nature of our in-game protagonist.
A major inspiration for our game has been old SNES-era RPGs like Earthbound, and so the team has been at work developing enemies, the setting, the main character, and the encounters that make up the meat of such a game. They've had a ton of great ideas, most of which I don't want to get too deep into, especially since we're only halfway through the 8 week creative process, and I don't want to open up my team to critique before it's time. I also can't share any of the assets they've made with you until the game is done. But it is enough to know that they've been working hard on concepting out these ideas.
Part of the challenge of this process is that the GAMBIT summer program is only 8 weeks long, and so we are constantly under that Sword of Damocles; a really common thing to hear ourselves say is "That'd be a great feature! If we have time, let's put it in!" and then quietly we accept that the time probably won't materialize and that's okay. We're going to make the best game we can in the circumstances. Well, one of the features that I asked for in the game but which we really had to give a low priority was selectable gender for the player's avatar.
Sexual identity and gender identity are inextricably linked, and separating them is incredibly difficult, if not impossible. It's also worth noting that, at least in mass media in the US, homosexuality is often conceived of as a white, male, upper middle class phenomenon, though lesbians are increasingly visible. But queer people of color and lower socio-economic status are often pushed aside, and transgendered and bisexual individuals usually get cut as well. There are many reasons for this, and not all of them necessarily appropriate for this post. It is enough to say that we have every reason to want to include a range of experiences in our game, and not contribute to the trend of queer content being mostly about white men with money to burn.
To that end the team decided to design a main character who was purposefully androgynous, so that the player could read whatever gender they wanted into the avatar. This was a decision I was behind; to me it was a compromise that wasn't quite as good as being able to create what you wanted, but which was (unlike that feature) likely to make it into the game in the time we had and which contributed to the ideals of the game. Now, that's the first part of this equation.
The second is that we are also starting to address what is the most critical, and most challenging, part of this process: getting the queer content into the game. Without talking too much about our plans, part of our current thinking is that there will be, at some point in the game, short scenes from the in-game avatar's memories that establish the avatar as a queer character, and that the memories would be resonant with the experiences of queer people... in as much as that's possible, since there is nothing like a "universal queer experience." The best we can offer, I believe, is a series of experiences that many queer people can look at, and feel a degree of empathy and resonance with, but which also involve themes that any player can relate to and understand. It is, as with many decisions about this process, not perfect, but as close as we can get. Creating this game has been, I have found, a series of compromises.
This week we had a very tight deadline, because at the GAMBIT Open House yesterday every team's games were playable by the public for the first time, meaning we were soliciting public feedback. Everyone was under a time crunch to get something that, while perhaps not polished, is enough that we can get good feedback about the game to head into the second half of the program. One of the things my team worked on Wednesday afternoon was creating one of those scenes, describing a time when a queer person's identity might make them feel inadequate somehow.
It's tough to do, especially since for the moment we're trying to use only images, not words, but what we discovered while talking it through is that working within the restriction of an androgynous main character was introducing a particular set of challenges to the process. As I said before, gender identity and sexual identity are very tightly knit. Part of the challenge is that we have to establish the character as queer inside the context of the mini-scene. But how can that be easily done, in a way that is reasonably able to be understood by the average player?
This is a legitimate challenge and I think it's more at the core of these issues not appearing in games than any sort of institutional homophobia among either devs or players. As my game director, the awesome Abe Stein, said during our prototyping work this spring, "Unless they're actually having sex on screen, how do you know? How does it get said?" It's the question that's dogged us. If you want to establish a character as gay or lesbian in a social world, how do you do that without establishing, even in some small way, their gender expression? For bisexuals this is even more complicated, and I would dare say that gender expression and its relation to one's identity is at the core of the issues transpeople face. In short: can we actually accomplish this with an androgynous character?
It's important that the team finds a solution that works for them; the game is as much theirs as it is mine... probably more so, considering they're behind the creative work. I didn't want to say "yes, keep the androgyny" or "no, pick a gender," because I don't want to limit their creativity, nor underestimate their ability to find a creative solution. I want them to go at the problem with all their effort, and find a solution that they're comfortable with. That said, as I left them to think this afternoon, I did say that it might be in order to tell the story they want (and, in some part at least, that I want) to tell, an androgynous main character might be more liability than good. What I asked them to do was weigh the pros and cons of the situation, then decide.
But that conversation haunted me all the way home. I make no claims that my little game is going to change the universe, no matter how incredibly awesome my team is. In fact, I said multiple times during our prototyping phase that if we fail, even that is still "useful" because I am studying the process and not the result, though that is what I call my 'inner ice-cold sociologist persona' coming to the fore. The truth is I want our game to be socially responsible; Abe uses the word 'tasteful' in this instance, and that's not entirely off the mark. If we slip into old tropes just to make a game with some queer content, that's a "part of the problem instead of the solution" scenario.
That said, I wonder where the line of compromise is, because part of this research is to examine how the constraints of the process can affect creating queer content, too. And compromise is at the heart of any text that's produced. My friend, talented writer Karen Healey, had to deal with a very similar sort of scenario regarding the cover of her debut novel Guardian of the Dead. What's the point at which you say "Okay, I am an advocate for [x], but I understand that to make what I want happen, I have to give in and accept compromise position [y]"? It's tough, and any decision you make sort of gives you that pit of the stomach feeling you get when you're forced to give up something you really want, just to make something else work.
Part of me is asking myself, "If our game goes out with a white male protagonist, have I done the community a disservice?" I don't know the answer to that. I want my team to find their own answer to that, too, and as long as it makes sense I will back their play. But I thought that this dilemma really gets at the heart of why I'm doing this research in the first place, and why I think this is a genuinely difficult thing for game designers out there to do right now. If we want to see these characters and themes make it into games, we need strategies to deal with the difficult and often ambiguous issues that come with crafting games where sexual identity is meaningful in some way.
July 6, 2011 9:54 AM
The Conversation Continues: On Disciplinarity
Following up on our previous "digital conversation" regarding design, we felt it would be nice to continue the dialogue by adding a new voice. This time our friend Doug Wilson from IT University of Copenhagen joins the fray as we dissect the notion of "game studies" as a discipline, and explore the interdisciplinary nature of research on games.
Abe:I have been thinking about "game studies" as an academic discipline relative to other, older, more traditional educational departments like Political Science, Anthropology, Sociology, or Philosophy. The fact is, many game studies scholars are approaching video games from different perspectives with drastically different theoretical lenses and research methods. The single unifying thread tying various scholars in the game studies domain is the supposed object of their inquiry: games... no wait, players! Crap... never mind.
While this certainly makes for some exciting conversations, one of my concerns is that with so many scholars approaching game studies from so many different directions, it becomes hard to have a coherent conversation. For example, someone might write a text that is approaching games from a philosophical lens, in the most traditional of senses, positioning his/her argument somewhere in a long history of broader philosophical discourse. To fully understand such a text, one would need to read it within a certain philosophical context. Simply reading the text as a "game studies" document, would be limiting. This is fine for someone who wants to put in the time reading and becoming familiar with Philosophy as a course of study, but what about everyone else?
With so many lenses, so many methods, and so many perspectives, how could anyone be accurately categorized as a "game studies" scholar? Nobody would have the time to familiarize themselves with the entirety of thought necessary to be so broad an academic. Would it not be more useful to be aligned with others who are working in the same discipline, that is to say, philosophers studying games with other philosophers, sociologists studying players with other sociologists, and anthropologists studying games played with other anthropologists?
Doug:
Is game studies a legitimate "discipline"? And should we even want it to be one? These questions have been addressed many times before, perhaps most famously by Espen Aarseth in his 2001 editorial for the very first issue of the Game Studies journal. For Aarseth, the question seems to be inextricably intertwined with academic politics. He worries that "the fundamentally unique aspects of the games" will be overlooked if left to the analyses of other, already existing fields.
(If I could give stage directions in a blog post, I would write here: cue 2001 era "ludology vs. narratology" dispute).
For me, however, the question inevitably leads back to a more general one: how should we structure interdisciplinary research? And when and why does an interdisciplinary endeavor become its own stable discipline?
On this question, I can only share my own personal struggles. Currently, as a PhD candidate, I find myself immersed in design theory, political science, and contemporary art - three fields which I only grazed in my previous educations (a self-designed BA in "digital humanities" and an MS in computer science). As a result, I worry constantly that I might be misreading a certain theorist, or that I might be naively rehashing old debates. To compound this problem, I do my work at IT University of Copenhagen's Center For Computer Games Research, an interdisciplinary group that houses researchers from a diversity of fields such as artificial intelligence, sociology, philosophy, and interaction design. This means that I have few colleagues who are able to give me thorough, literature-grounded feedback on my work. For better or worse, I find myself in a situation where I am largely on my own.
I do think this constellation of disciplines works well for project-based research. In our department, for example, several computer science and serious games researchers are teaming up on large international multi-disciplinary projects. Humanities-based research, by contrast, still seems to be a very solitary, individualistic endeavor. Or at least that's the prevailing culture. You write your manuscript, solicit feedback, publish it as a book, then repeat. If I can be frank, I'm not convinced that I have the suitable training for that kind of work. I've always viewed myself as more of a "glue" person, amplifying and connecting the ideas of collaborators.
Thus, Abe, I'm inclined to agree with you. As far as "basic research" goes - especially basic research in the humanities - I do think it might be more useful to frame one's work within more "traditional" disciplines. Speaking from personal experience, I do worry that my academic work has suffered from my lack of grounding in a "home base."
Speaking as a practicing game designer, however, my interdisciplinary background has served me very well indeed! It has been tremendously empowering to be able to pull from disciplines as disparate as computer science, design research, and art theory. Moreover, my ability to "speak the language" of multiple disciplines has made it easy for me to collaborate with different types of people (i.e. programmers, artists, musicians, etc). Game development is, after all, a highly interdisciplinary endeavor.
In summary, I don't think it's a coincidence that my PhD research (e.g. here) has ended up focusing so intently on my ongoing design practice. That wasn't the plan when I originally applied for the PhD, but it makes sense that my deeply interdisciplinary background would be better geared to project-based work. As such, I suspect that the answer to your question, Abe, might be: it depends on what kind of research you hope to do!
Jason:
Interdisciplinarity is certainly a big word around video game development and studies. Comparative Media Studies, the academic department that GAMBIT is affiliated with, puts enormous emphasis on interdisciplinary work. Doug's history is a perfect example of the advantage of this kind of work.
But as Abe has hinted, the multitude of scholars working under the guise "game studies" runs the risk of dilution. Subscribe to the DiGRA mailing list for a weekend (why is it always busy on the weekend?) and you will see many people arguing vehemently from a variety of perspectives, and it's hard to say whether anything is ever accomplished. I think this is at least partially because of the vast differences between subscribers. Hence the importance of indicating where you are coming from and what your perspectives are.
This line of thinking leads me to another point: I sometimes whether now is a good time for the study of "games" generally. The problem is that "games" is an enormous category including, at the bare minimum, both human experience and cultural artifacts, and it is easy for a theory applicable to one game to break down upon application to another. The field desperately needs more genre- and medium-specific studies of games, and those studies need to proclaim their perspective and focus. Interdisciplinarity is certainly valuable, but if I am attempting to describe a board game, and Abe is trying to apply those ideas to baseball, something is going to be lost in that communication. Similar problems occur when comparing games across (or even within) genres. As another example, in response to Abe and I's last conversational blog post, we had an interesting discussion with Doug on Twitter, and it became apparent that we were even operating under different understandings of "rules" - understandings that where shaped by our respective backgrounds, interests, and areas of research.
While this sounds pessimistic, I actually think it represents an enormous potential for widespread investigation, experimentation and research. "Game" is an extremely broad term and there is room for people with all manner of background and interest. I think a simultaneous mix of diversification and specialization - more people studying more games more specifically - would be invaluable in that it would create a stable base for the field.
Abe:
It may be that I am the biggest pessimist of we three, for I am very afraid of the dilution of a scholastic field like game studies. I am often found asking for some higher standard, some greater sense of rigor in the realm of game studies, one I would be greatly challenged to live up to myself. Indeed, I often find myself slipping into the comforts of lazy analysis or reporting - the comforts of working over ideas without taking the time to dig deep enough into the history of the topic. Shame on me. Perhaps this is why I find myself trying to focus my work on the realm of sports and sports video games from the perspective of cultural anthropology, to have a stronger sense of home.
It comes back to this concern I have that without a well structured, historical and contextual lens, we may not even know in what direction we are looking. I try hard to imagine what a standardized "game studies" curriculum could be: what exacting standards, what theoretical frameworks, and what history would define expertise in the field. Regrettably my thoughts darken and I inevitably envision top ten lists of important video games, that regurgitate the same narrow, fan informed perspective. Can we agree that it is no longer enough to simply like games, or even to eloquently critique them, rather we need to ground analysis in a history of thought? But what history then?
I agree with you both about interdisciplinary emphasis. Starting my work in video games as a sound designer surely taught me the importance of all the constituent parts of game design. That said, I still feel that theory necessarily depends on the works of predecessors. This is the nature of philosophy. I think some of the conflict comes from the conflation of the study, and the creation of games. That, however, is another huge discussion.
Doug:
Abe, I suspect that some of us game studies people could benefit from examining the history of other academic disciplines. For example, how and why did "computer science" become a stable academic discipline? Why didn't it just evolve as a sub-field of existing university departments like mathematics and electrical engineering? Despite my graduate comp sci degree, I don't actually know enough history to offer a coherent answer.
(More wishful stage directions: cue historians of science!)
But before I defer to the experts, I'd like to ask a leading question: is the professed object of study - the computer game - too narrow in scope? A discipline like biology is quite broad, spanning diverse interests such as molecular genetics, ecology, developmental biology, etc. The discipline of art history studies not only painting, but also a wide variety of different forms and traditions.
Yes, I do think "game studies" has (unfortunately) positioned itself as the study of digital games specifically. But even if we accept that game studies scholars are branching out into non-digital areas like board games, we might still ask why games studies is so socially and professionally isolated from other academic traditions like sports studies, folklore studies, play theory, etc. Can we ever hope to call ourselves a proper discipline as long as we remain so isolated from (and irrelevant to) those other communities that also study play and games?
Gosh, it would be so nice to build some stronger ties to the sports studies community in particular! (Abe, I bet you'd agree here).
Jason:
I think that in this post we have accidentally managed to identify an interesting tension: dilution and amorphousness versus collaboration and inclusion. Clearly there are benefits to be had from incorporating other fields of inquiry into game studies, but there are also benefits to establishing "game studies" as a concrete discipline.
From whichever perspective one takes, however, it should be immediately clear that citing one's object of study as "games" or even "computer games" is not a very accurate or useful label. Doug, you asked, "is the professed object of study - the computer game - too narrow in scope?" I would be inclined to answer that present studies of computer games does not suffer from narrow scope, but rather lack of focus. The necessary questions of someone who studies "the computer game" should be "which aspects of which games in what context?"
For me, anyway, the take-away from this collaboration is that I now find it hard to have strong opinions either way. Games are a fundamental and ubiquitous aspect of the human condition, and we have barely scratched the surface of understanding precisely what they are, how they work, what roles they serve, and why they even exist. At this point "game studies" simply needs more of everything.
June 1, 2011 11:22 AM
The Knit and Purl of Facebook Games
And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.
- The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
 I had the good fortune of running into Naomi Clark, formerly of Gamelab, now chief designer at Fresh Planet at a serious games conference we both spoke at last weekend. Seeing her reminded me of the great talk she delivered with Eric Zimmerman at GDC last March entitled, "The Fantasy of Labor: How Social Games Create Meaning."
In their presentation, Clark and Zimmerman spoke about desire, about Suit's "lusory attitude" about cultural narratives, and specifically about how currently popular social game mechanics are related to a common western narrative about the fantasy of industrial labor - that hard work and determination will lead to wealth, popularity, fame, and success.
I remember hearing them speak and wishing they had pushed the idea just a bit further. They did argue that games could impoverish otherwise meaningful and important human interactions and cultural traditions. Specifically they talked about "gifting" in social games comparing the mechanic to the tradition of the Native American potlatch.
I think social games, as presently constituted on Facebook, often reinforce an all too familiar, and oppressive narrative of rags-to-riches determination in the face of arduous labor, that such work can lead to the "american dream" of wealth and prosperity, even as the chasm between wealthy and needy continues to spread, almost out of sight of one another. It also reinforces the notion that a community of wealth can support one another, driving a larger divide between the "connected" and the "disconnected."
Fiction
Imagine arriving in a new world, a land that seems to tip with the weighty overflow of opportunity. That very opportunity is why you came in the first place. You start with little, and you don't even know the language: the rules of their particular grammar. You experiment here and there, trying this and that to see what might work. Your work is by appointment, of course - work, rest, work, rest, work, rest, and gradually you begin to build a small little world for yourself, one farmhouse, or tree, at a time.
For some reason, however, the next step ahead begins to seem farther out of your reach. You finger the lining of your pockets for loose change, wondering "could I afford that jacket," or "would it hurt too much to buy that candy?" You look around you and see others with their extravagant, opulent farms. How did they get so much? They must have worked so hard to get where they are, just like I am working. Soon, soon I will have that too.
And yet, with all your hard work and determination, some things still seem, always, out of your financial reach. You begin to realize that you can't join the country club down the road unless you know the right someone, unless you own the right car, or the right clothes. You are excluded on the basis of a class you didn't even know you occupied. You remember all your hard work, you look back at your modest farm and wonder. You try to remember why you came here in the first place.
You discover that there are people willing to loan you the money, whenever you want, so that you can buy what you need. You don't worry too much about it, because it is not money, you see, it is some strange kind of fictional currency. You know you will be held accountable for it in the future, but by then you'll have the biggest, brightest, most luxurious farm around, and you won't need to worry at all about finding money to pay back, that will be easy. Just keep digging, and working, and clicking and you'll get there. You do all this so that your kids won't have to.
But you still cannot seem to afford that next tree, or that next piece of fence. You splurge one day on a magazine, or watch some television, but all you see are beautiful, expansive, well decorated and lavish farms that make your home seem like a dust bowl. Click, click. Just keep clicking, digging, cleaning. Work hard and all this can be yours.
Non-Fiction
 A reported 2% of the social game audience accounts for a vast majority of the money made by Facebook game developers. So called "whales" are players with enough discretionary funds, or perhaps a lack of economic discretion, to be spending money on in game items. These players live the Facebook dream, building massive farms and "winning" the games' economic systems. What of those who cannot spend with the same freedom, or worse, those who are encouraged to spend what they do not have?
Please understand that I am not insinuating that there is anything nefarious or insidious about current social game design on Facebook, per se, on a commercial level. I do not intend to suggest that if these developers have a market they should not avail themselves of it.
However, I do have deep concern about how our cultural products can have a tendency to reinforce, or re-tell narratives that may have a negative effect on society. I have a lot of concern about games especially, as I worry that "play" is becoming more and more commercialized and commoditized.
Suffering a failing Farmville farm pales compared to the struggles of poor Americans attempting to scrape out an existence, pushing against an economic and social system that continues to undermine their very survival. However, the rhetoric of hard work as the primary solution to poverty, helping to keep wealth concentrated in the hands of a staggering minority, can be found in many nuanced, even un-intentioned domains, like Facebook games.
Why do games specifically concern me? Besides the fact that I work at a game lab, and study games as a job, I am concerned about how a culture's stories are written. We need look no further than popular sports in America to see how games and the culture that surround them are tightly woven into the fabric of our collective experiences. People argue, evangelize, and hypothesize on the myriad "measured" effects of games on individuals for learning or behavioral change, and regardless of how the pendulum seems to be swinging on any given day, we must wonder how Facebook games may be reflecting or reinforcing a social status quo that has many suffering while few thrive.
No, Facebook games are not responsible for poverty, of course not. But maybe with each mindless click, with each laborious click, we are replaying, in part, the story of so many who wanted to work and could not succeed, despite earnest effort and serious struggle.
This post can also be found at Abe's blog, A Simpler Creature.
May 19, 2011 10:45 AM
A Conversation Regarding Design
 Below is a "digital conversation" between me and Jason Begy. It started as a chat in the GAMBIT lounge and we thought that it might be interesting to concretize our ideas some by writing them down. We took turns writing paragraphs to each other continuing on for a few days. It should be stated that these are ideas we are still working out, and we simply wanted to lay bare some of our recent thoughts to perhaps move them forward. Enjoy.
Abe:
I think our understanding of "design" with regards to games needs to be looked at more closely. The attachment of games to consumer objects, either packaged board games or software, seems to have skewed our understanding of what the creators of the game are actually doing. We seem to think that the fundamental operations of games are somehow being written by designers, with a direct authorial linkage like that of a painter to painting, a songwriter to song, or perhaps more frequently referenced, a director to a film. However, I stand behind the assertion that a game not-played is not a game at all, which implicates players in authorship. More dramatically, the organization of rules by a designer does not a game make either, which is to say, at best designers are configuring details and assigning symbols to preexisting forms, no small feat, but not wholly authorial. Allow me a parallel: a carpenter doesn't design the use of a chair as an object for sitting, rather she suggests only how a user might sit in it, should the user feel inclined to do so. The user may always place their belongings on said chair instead, thus rendering it a table.
Jason:
Previously on this blog I have referred to a board game as a mnemonic device: whatever "state" it can be said to contain only exists in the minds of the players; the tangible pieces are there to lighten the cognitive load. Any meaning the boards and bits have is assigned and maintained by the players enacting the game; the "rules" as-writ are suggestions for a method of play, and the pieces facilitate that method. This is a key ontological distinction between video games and non-digital games. In a video game the rules are enforced by the underlying code: they are much more rules than the suggestions accompanying my copy of Carcassonne. I cannot chose to interpret Mario's in-game function in a way other than that dictated to me by the game. And yet your objection fits equally well: a board game in its box is just a collection of pieces, and a program not running is just lines of code. All of these points and ideas beg the question: What exactly is a rule?
Abe:
Recently, casually around the lab, on twitter, and on my blog, I've been referring to rules and rule systems as "non-things." By this I mean to suggest that the idea of a rule does not exist until it is initiated. I fully acknowledge the playfulness of the language I am using here by calling a rule a "non-thing;" on one hand dismissing it and simultaneously reinforcing its existence through reference. However, I think it is important to distinguish the difference between an abstract understanding of a system, presumed cause and effect, and an actualized system that has been engaged, especially in the field of game design. In the digital realm this asks us to examine the relationship between computation and the user, to examine our understanding of the space of play, and to perhaps rethink what a designer actually creates. Some people making games are doing really interesting work in this area. The Copenhagen Game Collective's great game B.U.T.T.O.N. comes to mind. The space of play is radically expanded, rules are opaque rather than transparent, and the value of the game seems to reside in the liminality of computation and performance. Then again, board games seem to have done this sort of thing for a long time. Are video games actually so radically different? I'm reluctant to submit to "platform studies."
Jason:
If a rule is a non-thing until enacted, can we talk about potential rules? Or our understanding of the rules we would follow, if we were to play a particular game? It seems logical to say that a rule of football (any kind) is that players must not step out-of-bounds, or at least there is a consequence for doing so. If I am not playing football right now, is this still a rule? The dichotomy is akin to the difference between a note as indicated on sheet music and as performed in some fashion. Not being one myself, I would imagine that most musicians recognize there is a difference between a written note representing a perfect instantiation of a given tone, and the subtleties of that same note performed. I am currently unsure of to what extent this dichotomy has been theorized, but it seems to me to be a promising and relevant parallel.
Another entry point into the vagaries of "rule" is to ask of a non-digital game or sport, Is a given rule a do or a do not? For example, in football the rule could be "always stay in-bounds" or "do not step out-of-bounds." Either the positive or the negative communicates the idea. But some rules are not susceptible to negation. In Monopoly, that Boardwalk costs $400 is a positive rule, and it is difficult to effectively describe this rule as a negative. In baseball you must hit the ball with a bat, in hockey you cannot throw the puck into the net, and so on. Once again video games are not susceptible to these tricks of language, as the rules are hard-coded. Perhaps the un-debatable nature of video game rules is where the idea of "rules-as-designed-things" comes from.
Abe:
At the risk of positioning myself lest I be accused of being a social constructionist, I think that rules, hard-coded or not, necessarily depend on the society that adopts and engage them, even in the case of a video game systems.
One of my favorite things to watch is when Matt (the lead designer at our lab) plays a game for the first time. He is always looking for ways to "break" the game - immediately pushing on the boundaries of the game's affordances to find "something else to do." Matt's play is discursive. He may fall into patterns eventually, but he is first exploring the vocabulary and grammar of the system and finding ways to "play" with it. He creates a network between himself and the game (as code, platform, text and context), through play, that defines the game as played. Even a game that has minimal coded affordances can invite creative play. Again, this is one reason why I think B.U.T.T.O.N. is brilliant. It calls the relationship between player and game to our attention.
That musical note comparison is very interesting. What does that written note really represent? If I am playing the score on a piano tuned a half step down, am I expressing the same piece of music? Do the relationships between the notes matter more than the relationship between the written note and its physical manifestation? What role does the listener have in this mode of communication?
Something tells me we are having a discussion that is part of a larger philosophical discourse that extends far beyond just game studies. I only wish I could somehow know it all, making my writing more thorough.
Jason:
I also think it's problematic to throw-out the role of the video game designer entirely. Playing against the rules of the game to see what works and what does not is certainly possible, but it only functions in the context of the system's affordances. Everything you can choose to do is in some way enabled by the code running the game. Certainly unexpected and unplanned behavior crops up, allowing the player to do things the designers never intended, but this is still a result of how the system functions.
One thing that continually returns to mind here is the MDA framework, which posits a high degree of designer control over player behavior. That such control is possible becomes apparent in very simple video games, such as Don't Shoot The Puppy. Here the player only has two possible actions: move the mouse (thereby shooting the puppy), or do not move the mouse. In the context of the game, the designers have a high degree of control over my actions simply because they have not given me many choices. Video games are deterministic in a way that other, non-digital games are not.
I do agree with you in that this is clearly part of a larger discourse that neither of us are particularly well-versed in at the moment. However, these are important questions to ask, especially when working in an environment that privileges the designer by default. Furthermore, this line of thinking reveals some of the problems with lumping all game-like activities under one banner. Clearly video games, sports and board games have a lot in common, but they are also clearly different, and there is room in game studies for more nuanced inquiries into all of them.
May 5, 2011 9:52 AM
On Object Orientation: An Antapologia for Brian Moriarty
This is an antapologia for Brian Moriarty. Antapologia is greek for a formal counter argument to an apologia, which is greek for a formal defense.
 At GDC last March Brian Moriarty delivered an impassioned, and now infamous defense of Roger Ebert's even more infamous claim that video games are not, and could never be, art. Moriarty built a somewhat circuitous and dare I say specious argument that drew many cheers and contrarily much ire from the game development and game studies community. He invoked philosophy and faith, Shoepenhauer and Dylan (Bob), to argue that with the exercise of free will exhibited by players engaged in play "sublime art" is necessarily precluded. "Sublime art," Moriarty incanted, "is the door to a perspective of reality that transcends Will." His diatribe reached its philosophical climax with the seemingly simple, albeit nonsensical utterance, "Sublime art is the still evocation of the inexpressible."
I will resist the urge to poke at his house of cards. I will not, in this letter, suggest that he engaged in "pretentious rhetoric" to the point of philosophical obfuscation. I will not argue that he unabashedly rejected wholesale the last 100 years of philosophical discourse about art, intertextuality, mass media, and the collapsed distinction between high and low culture. I will not intimate that in mocking Duchamp, declaring The Fountain to be nothing more than a piss pot, he unwittingly stumbled into Duchamp's magical urinal, reiterating for the entire audience, the artist's brilliant statement. No, if you want to read the myriad ways his argument has been dissected and scrutinized, read twitter transcripts. Better yet, read his apology yourself and make up your own mind.
I am far more concerned with how Professor Moriarty framed his argument. I am disturbed by the distorted lens through which he is looking at games, and I am noticing that his vantage is shared by many in the game community. I cheekily call it object orientation, with the full pun intended.
Game designers have become obsessed with the artifacts of their supposed creation. I blame digital games. Games have become commodities, not as constrained performances, rather as obscured or even invisible systems, executed by machines, and operated upon by players. Best Buy, Amazon and Game Stop sell them to us as disks and cartridges or even downloaded software, and we engage them on a superficial interface level while far more complex rules and operations act as the Wizard to our conference with the great and powerful Oz.
Don't get me wrong, I am grateful for the explosion of interactive possibility afforded by computation. However, I am concerned that our understanding of what a game is and is not has been distorted by an obsession with the "game" as object or artifact, rather than the game as performance.
I know, by heart, the rules of chess, and I buy chess sets as a matter of convenience, not necessity. One can play chess with almost anything so long as the parties involved agree upon the signification of the play objects and the space. I dare not even attempt to count the number of times I've played soccer with t-shirts for goals, baseball with a stick and rock, or even charades with nothing but the people with whom I shared some space. Games are not the objects that afford their engagement, they are defined by the engagement itself. A game not played is no game at all. Software does not a game make.
Moriarty spent nearly 7,500 words pontificating on the lack of expressiveness in video games. He argued about the imagery, and the sound, and even waxed philosophically about engagement and interactivity, choice and will. All the while he ignored the most expressive act of the medium, that which defines it, which is the playing itself.
 Moriarty said "I'm here because of this sentence: 'No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers.'" He repeatedly illustrated his obsession with the auteur and art as artifact. Was Mikhail Baryshnikov not an artist? Is the choreographer of a dance the only artist to whom we owe appreciation for the performance? What about those engaging in the act itself? Does Moriarty look at the score for Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, without listening to it, and in reading the notation unperformed experience a "still evocation of the inexpressible?" I'm guessing not.
The art of dance and music and theater is performance. Sure society has established conventions by which we value and measure that performance, which subsequently gives value to the rules or constraints by which the performance is enacted (sound familiar).
However, the act of engaging, of playing, that willful and practiced activity is, in fact, the dynamic evocation of the sublime expressed.
For many who make and study games, the artifact of the creation is the essential component to their livelihood. I understand why, especially in our exceedingly commercial and material culture, we want to value the object in hand, and deify its supposed "creators." However, a video game not-played is no game at all. Rules unrealized are not enforced, and cease to exist. Systems uninitiated are chaotic non-things. Designers have grown attached to the perception that they are creators of artifacts. In truth the act of game design is more like composing a musical score or choreographing a dance; the "object" of the creation is not fully realized until it is engaged through performance.
This post can also be read at Abe's blog, A Simpler Creature.
April 18, 2011 5:13 PM
The Sublime Joy of Flight
Playing Pilotwings Resort this past week has reminded me why I love flying games so much... at least when they get out of my way and let me fly. I never liked flight sims, an unwieldy genre that's more about dials and switches than the joy of aviation. The flying games I love are the ones that strip away all that techno-fetishistic noise and just let you feel how amazing it is to actually fly.
My first real encounter with this sort of game was the original Pilotwings on the SNES, and the new Pilotwings for the 3DS is a similarly pleasant love letter to aviation aimed at a mainstream audience. Both games have extremely simplified flight controls, minimal UI, and breezy music that creates a deliberate mood. In the 3DS version you can't even control the throttle. The game controls it for you, and you can only temporarily boost or break.
Pilotwings Resort is quite nice, but it also leaves me craving for a deeper, more textured exploration of humankind's romantic obsession with flight. To date the only game that has really satisfied this craving was Sky Odyssey, a little known PS2 launch title that everyone seems to have forgotten, but which, to me, represents one of the best, most complete expressions of Man versus Nature in a video game.
Sky Odyssey is one of the most exciting games I've ever played - a superb action game. It also has a oddly spiritual dimension, a thick sense of human smallness at the edge of an expansive Unknown. It is not, in this sense, unlike two of my other favorite games: Demon's Souls and Shadow of the Colossus, both games that achieve a phenomenal sense of scale and use it to evoke the sublime. It is absolutely no coincidence that the composer for Shadow of Colossus also wrote the music for Sky Odyssey, as the share the same sense of awe for the tiniest of warriors squaring off against Nature's Fury.
The first time I got this feeling is when I saw The Right Stuff as a kid. There is a scene in that movie when a (heavily mythologized) Chuck Yeager, played by playwrite Sam Shepherd, steals a conventional aircraft and tries to fly it into outer space. In spite of its hokiness (mostly thanks to Bill Conti, who also scored Rocky) this scene does manage to express something unspoken about humanity's (not just America's, as the movie seems to suggest) inherent, sub-rational desire to break free of Earthy limits.
The shit you do in Sky Odyssey all feels similarly reckless, extravagant, and irrationally irresistible. Each level is about trying to survive horribly exciting things, like having to perform a daring mid-air refueling from a speeding train as it's going through a tunnel. Or flying your plane through an underground cave as its collapsing. Or attempting to slingshot your plane over a mountain twice the height of Everast by dropping your fuel at the summit and then coasting on air down the other side. Or catching air currents to shoot your plane through the heart of the lightning storm. Or, to top it all off, flying right into the eye of a fucking hurricane.
The developers of Sky Odyssey do everything in their power to try and convince you that nothing could be more exciting than flying. They throw every conceivable exciting thing that could possible happen to a plane at you, and the earnestness of their romantic vision is so desperate it's almost heartbreaking. They even concoct an elaborate framing narrative to justify their whimsy, something about the last unexplored island on Earth in the twilight of aviation's golden age, when (at least in the minds of Sky Odyssey's makers) there were still some legitimate mysteries left on this planet... and aviators - those amazing men in their flying machines - were the lone explorers of the last frontier.
This brand of nostalgia feels a lot like Hayao Miyazaki, in that it is a Japanese evocation of a romantic 1930/40s centered around flight technology of the era. Porco Rosso is probably the most direct expression of this in Miyzaki's canon, showing a particular love of the pre-war era, an exotic fascination with the West, and a transcendental sense - present in all his work, but most directly expressed in this film - of what it means to fly. I am thinking of the moment when, after being separated from his friends in battle, the protagonist encounters them again above the clouds only to realize they didn't survive after all, but are in fact spirits ascending - still in their planes - to join the rest of the dead in heaven.
Aviation as a concept holds the promise of transcendence, of somehow being able to reach heaven through creative use of technology. Those who know me know I like Kubrick, so take this as you will, but I can't help but think "Sky Odyssey" might be a riff on "Space Odyssey". 2001 is a movie about God made by an atheist. The desire for spiritual transcendence, to commune with forces we don't understand, seems to be a hard-wired human need. Secular attempts to grapple with this, I suppose because of my own atheism, feel a lot more interesting than religious ones... perhaps because religious mythologies are "known", whereas scientific rejection of them lands spiritualism squarely back in the realm of the unknown.
What does flying mean to us? In Pilotwings Resort (and in most conventional flight sims, I'd wager) it's a fun way to relax, but in Sky Odyssey it can be a serious encounter with our own existence. There are times, somewhere in the clouds, when the you seem to leave Earth entirely and enter another world, a world of unfamiliar colors and lights. What is that place?
April 7, 2011 5:00 PM
On Failure: Baseball's Theology of Redemption
In a chapter on games and cultural rhetoric, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman write about the symbolism and cultural significance of soccer. They posit "Soccer, like all games, embodies cultural meaning."(516) Invoking Sutton-Smith's understanding of rhetoric, they articulate the discursive meaning making of game play; with signification both depending on and informing the culture in which the games are played. They continue:
Another way of saying that games reflect cultural values is that games are social contexts for cultural learning. This means that games are one place where the values of a society are embodied and passed on. Although games do clearly reflect cultural values and ideologies, they do not merely play a passive role. Games also help to instill or fortify a culture's value system. (516)
Religion scholars and social anthropologists conceive of religious ritual in a similar way. While necessarily specific to the cultures and communities that practice them, rituals are meaningful, often symbolic activities that reflect and inform the values and ideologies of the community of practitioners. Religious rituals apply dogma to practice, often instantiating abstract principles or ideas in objects or actions. Rituals serve as portals to the divine, experiential access points rife with meaning. Without delving into the complexities of sacrality, and acknowledging that there are myriad nuances to religious life that invite the separation of sacred ritual from profane experience, for the sake of this piece I would like to accept that religious ritual and sport have similarities in the domain of cultural rhetoric and meaning making.
I consider baseball as I consume it. More so as spectator than player, I am, from April to October, immersed in the culture and experiences of Major League Baseball proper and the game of baseball in general. Working in the field of game studies, it is no surprise then that I am often wondering about the game I love so much, questioning how its formal properties and context inform the game as such.
Recently I have been interested in how repeated failure in the game of baseball, established through the formal properties of the game and understood by a community of parishioners, invigorates a common Western rhetoric of redemption. Additionally, we might ask how a community of baseball understands this redemption theology through the ritualistic performance of the game played.
Baseball is a game composed largely of failure. Ted Williams had the most successful hitting season in the games history batting .406 in 1941, failing in almost 60% of his 456 at bats. Christy Matthewson, one of the greatest pitchers ever still allowed 2.13 runs for every nine innings he pitched, winning 67% of his games. These players were exceptional. In 2010 all the pitchers in Major League baseball averaged 4.08 runs per nine innings while batters hit .257 over the year, meaning all hitters failed 3 out of 4 times they hit. Naturally the sophistication of the game allows for degrees of success even in these failures. It is understood, however, that the game of baseball is very hard to play.
The rules of baseball mandate repetitive failure. Largely a defensive game, each at bat has nine players on one team working together to stop one player from succeeding in scoring, by controlling a small ball in a very large field of play. Even in the repeated one on one conflict, pitchers hold a tremendous advantage over the batter. Only in baseball does the defensive player control the ball, and therefor has the advantage of knowing what they are going to attempt to throw as a pitch. Only the defense may handle the ball, the offense forced to attempt a crude bludgeoning of it with a club. The violent nature of offense in baseball demands further investigation, but for our sakes here it is enough to recognize that to win one must score runs, and to score runs one must overcome severely difficult circumstances and repeated failure.
Out of constant failure emerged a rhetoric of redemption in baseball. A long game, usually played in long seasons, batters will often get 4-5 at bats in a game and at the professional level as many as 500+ at bats over the course of the season. Baseball is a game of second, and third and fourth chances. Many of the mythologized histories in the American game are about redemption.
Take for example the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1940's and 1950's. Known for their vociferous and loyal fans, the Dodgers won five pennants from 1941-1953, only to lose in each World Series to the dominant, Bronx based New York Yankees. The slogan "Wait 'til next year!" became a cry of solidarity for the Dodger faithful, expressing both the pitiful frustration of repeated failure, and the pride of a communal misery. Similar circumstances emerged in cities all over America where teams suffer droughts and unique patterns of failure: Boston's curse, Chicago's goat, The Curse of Captain Grant, all circumstances and mythologies that created communal bonds in misery and in the promise of redemption. Baseball players invoke this promise regularly, eagerly anticipating the next opportunity even as the stale wind of a strike out silences a crowd. Baseball players are taught to yearn for those redemptive moments, to strive for them as a road map to excellence. To succeed in baseball, you must fail often, for all do. You must be ready for the next chance, for the shot at redemption and salvation.
 Redemption and salvation are central themes in Western Judeo-Christian, and Judeo-Muslim theology. Notions of atonement, baptism, repentance, salvation, sacraments, and Christ's salvific grace helped shaped the course of Western religion and culture for millennia. The values emerging from these rich religious histories permeate America's dominant cultural rhetoric, even as the country expands, and populates, absorbing more diverse cultures and heritages. Redemption is a core value in American culture, and the foundation of a common meta-narrative of achievement in the face of adversity. Americans esteem achievement in the face of adversity in the highest light, regarding such narratives as more valuable than success through support, or out of luxury.* We might argue that a twist in this common narrative emerges when the cause of adversity is of one's own making.
It would be no great leap to suggest that a long history of redemption narratives in Western culture has effected the creation and culture around the game of baseball. It would seem too that baseball's unique resonance in American culture may in fact be connected to the thematic symbolism of its play. Sure other countries in Asia and Latin America have embraced the sport in their own way, however their cultural relationship to the game is different that that in America. Though perhaps no longer the most popular, baseball remains America's past-time; a ritualistic performance that permeates and tints the very fabric of the nation's cultural narrative.
*It is of course important to note that cultural rhetoric and meta-narratives have a complicated relationship to cultural practice, and I do not intend to suggest my own valuation of these common themes. If you want to know, go ahead and ask me.
March 29, 2011 10:07 AM
Games: Necessary Non-Obstacles
One of game studies' fundamental gaps is the lack of a solid theory of meaning. That is, how games can mean, represent, signify, etc., anything at all. This problem is immediately apparent in Jane McGonigal's new book, "Reality is Broken." Early in the book McGonigal adopts Bernard Suits' definition of a game as "the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles." While I am only through the second chapter, so far the book has relied heavily on this definition. However, as this post aims to demonstrate, this definition of "game" is both fundamentally flawed and illustrates the kinds of problems that arise because we do not understand how games can mean.
McGonigal cites several examples of games that fit this definition, notably golf (which is one of Suits' examples). Indeed, sports seem to fit Suits' definition extremely well, as every sport I can think of is about adhering to arbitrary rules in order to accomplish some ordinary feat. In golf the unnecessary obstacles are the various rules that prevent us from merely walking to the green and dropping the ball into the hole. Similarly, ice hockey would be much easier if players could pick up the puck and throw it into the net. Everyone would be an expert player of darts if they were allowed to walk up to the board and simply push their darts into the sixty-point segment. In these cases it is true that players are choosing to try and overcome obstacles that seem quite unnecessary, if your goal really is to arrange particular objects in a particular state.
However, this definition does not make much sense when we apply it outside of sports. While McGonigal makes an effective argument for its application to Scrabble, I would like to apply Suits' definition to Monopoly. In Monopoly the goal is to be the last player in the game, which happens when you have money and your opponents do not. The necessary question that arises here is: what does it mean to "have money?" How does a Monopoly player have money, and what distinguishes her from the other players that do not have money? One answer might be location: players typically signify their possession of game money by placing paper slips in front of themselves. Seen through the lens of Suits' definition, one might argue that the goal of Monopoly is to place the paper money in front of yourself, while preventing others from doing so; the "unnecessary obstacle" in this case is the game itself, the processes one must undertake before being "allowed" to put the money in front of oneself.
I hope I am not alone in finding this phrasing deeply unsatisfying. When explaining Monopoly to a new player, would you ever tell them that the goal is to put the money in front of yourself? Rather, the goal is a particular configuration of the game state. The physical aspects of Monopoly--the board, pieces, money--are mnemonic devices that allow players to keep track of the state. To "have money" in Monopoly is not to position it in a certain way (like positioning a golf ball), but rather to perform a series of processes that then give meaning to the money and define its state. These processes create the meaning of the money. Without them, Monopoly money really is just slips of paper; its physical location is meaningless. Thus the game is the opposite of "unnecessary:" it is entirely necessary in creating the meaning required to satisfy the goal. Without the game the money has no meaning.
I would argue, then, that in this sense games are not obstacles at all. The OED defines an obstacle as "something that stands in the way or that obstructs progress; a hindrance, impediment, or obstruction." If your goal is to "have money," then the game is the opposite of an obstacle: it is the enabler of that progress, that goal. Without the game that goal does not exist and cannot be fulfilled. As an analogy, games can be thought of as modern, highly technical modes of transportation, such as a car. Cars, like games, are complex to operate and handle. They require some degree of learning before they can be used effectively. However, they are often necessary to reach our destination (goal). It makes little sense to refer to a car as an obstacle when we so often depend on it to reach an end state. The car, like the game, is needed to reach the goal.
If we think in terms of the goal, as both Suits and McGonigal do, then the game is the opposite of an unnecessary obstacle.
March 28, 2011 11:11 AM
Of Rockstars and Revolutions
This post originally appeared on Matt Weise's blog Outside Your Heaven.
A few years ago I wrote blog post comparing the graphic novel Persepolis to the video game Just Cause, lamenting that while a revolution would be a great setting for an open world-style AAA game we would likely never see it, because AAA developers seem to have neither the interest for nor the balls to treat the subject as anything other than a GTA-style violence-fest. Persepolis, a touching and complicated personal account of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, is closer to what I wanted to see in a game that dealt with such potent concepts. Just Cause, while fun, was - like GTA - a joke when it came to addressing the topics it raised.
Four years later it seems like someone is trying to make my dream come true... at least in theory. To my amazement this person is former Rockstar writer/designer Navid Khonsari, an Iranian-American who is apparently putting his full weight behind a commercial video game based on the 1979 revolution, called simply 1979: The Game.
I'd never heard of him before, but Khonsari was apparently one of the driving creative forces behind the PS2-era GTA games - GTAIII, Vice City, and San Andreas. So not only was he at Rockstar, he was specifically involved in the initial birth, evolution, and maturation of GTA as a mass-cultural phenomenon, setting the tone for all Rockstar's subsequent creative output as well as their public image as the badboys of the industry.
Given my sour stance on Rockstar (I find their use of irony more evasive than genuine, rendering their supposed "social commentary" insincere in most cases.) I admit that I didn't want to believe Khonsari might be making my dream game: a sophisticated political statement, occupying a space outside America's dominant narratives, with a AAA budget behind it, and made by an articulate visionary who is also a good game designer. Yet I have to admit... this interview comes close to creating such an impression.
It's interesting what he says about fiction versus non-fiction. This, I guess, explains how the same mind that (partially) produced GTA: Vice City can also produce 1979: The Game. I don't agree with what he says. The mercurial relationship between fact and fiction is not so simple. Myth shapes reality and reality shapes myth. I don't believe that labeling something 'fiction' is a free ticket out of treating social, political, or whatever content with subtlety or complexity.
Khonsari seems to be arguing that GTA's pseudo-ironic vapidity was justified by the fact that it was "in the crime genre", which is how he distances 1979: The Game from it in terms of social outlook. Yet if we look at the crime genre outside games we see a massive swath of approaches and styles, from shallow and cartoony to mature and serious. GTA didn't have to be Scarface. It could have been The Wire, and the fact that Khonsari glosses over this fact seems calculated.
That said, his over-simplified construction that non-fiction demands social responsibility seems to serve him well as a mass-cultural stance. It's certainly an easy way to justify both GTA and 1979: The Game at once. A more complicated stance would certainly be harder to explain to his rather skeptical interviewer, which makes me wonder whether Khonsari himself believes it or whether it's something he just tells journalists. Either way, if it helps him get such a game made and distributed I can't fault him too much for it... though it could be a problem if such rhetoric became commonplace.
There are virtually no gameplay details, so who know if this game will ever even see the light of day. It is significant though, I feel, that a former Rockstar designer is taking a vocal stance on such a game, chatting it up to the international press and making an impassioned argument about the value and place in the AAA market for such games. It really makes me reconsider my take on Rockstar, considering that perhaps not everyone there is satisfied by the company's approach to controversy. If so we'll hopefully see more Khonsaris in the future.
March 15, 2011 1:38 PM
Shinobido - The Lost Ninja Simulator
This post originally appeared on Matt Weise's blog Outside Your Heaven.
I am embarrassed to say I was unaware of Shinobido's existence until a few months ago, when the design lead of Fallout: New Vegas recommended it to me over drinks at Austin GDC. I was mildly shocked to learn it was by Acquire, the makers of the original Tenchu, and that it continued that game's more open-world approach to stealth that the later Tenchu sequels abandoned.
I had no idea Acquire had lost the Tenchu license, and that after they lost it they created Shinobido as its spiritual successor, combining its open level design with the choice-driven narrative structure they pioneered in Way of the Samurai, their other main series. Given my love of Tenchu, Way of the Samurai, and open-world experiments in general I was flabbergasted this game somehow got by me... until I discovered it had been localized for PAL regions only. Apparently it was too experimental for us yanks.
After searching for several weeks (and being shipped a Norwegian copy by mistake) I managed to procure the U.K. version of Shinobido. To me this was the "real" Tenchu 3, the game that continued to build on the design agenda of Tenchu and Tenchu 2. The latter had actually expanded on the open-world aspects of the original, added a level editor, but was marred by the fact that the PS1 hardware couldn't quite handle the size of its world.
Shinobido looks a bit like Tenchu 3 at first glance, only unlike From Software's PS2 sequel it isn't just a streamlined version of Tenchu 1 with prettier graphics. It's a crazy, ambitious experiment that feels more like a "ninja simulator" than a game. It's over-arching structure reminds me a lot of Deus Ex (though it obviously comes from Way of the Samurai) with three opposing warlords all seeking your service in their quest for political power.
Each "phase" of the game involves a series of opposing job offers, only one of which you can take. What really makes this interesting is how elegantly the high level politics connect with the low level gameplay. You can accept missions against lords who like you, and they will be none the wiser if you are clever enough not to get caught. This is, in fact, how a faction system should work: as a matter of NPC perception, not global switches.
Failing a mission does not mean death in Shinobido. I means humiliation, the loss of reputation with a lord. In fact, you can only "die" during certain boss fights, something which the game warns you about beforehand and gives you the option to opt out if you aren't confident you will survive. Although you can cheat this system with save/loading, it is extremely tedious to do so, making Shinobido a game about weighing the political consequences of every moment.
You have to be very good at being silent in order to navigate the politics effectively, and the way the game brutally punishes any form of grandstanding reinforces this. Taking on multiple opponents, martial arts movie-style, is quite impossible. A group of startled guards will simply rush you, screaming into the night for anyone in earshot to help. Soon the whole damn neighborhood is awake, your lord will be furious, and you feel like the worst ninja ever.
Though Shinibido nominally follows a Tenchu-like mission structure it's really an on-going simulation of faction politics, with the missions serving as on-the-ground reflections of the current political climate. High level goals have low level consequences, like when, having delivered a box of weapons to a lord in one mission, you find all his soldiers equipped with them in the next... making him harder to betray, should you feel so inclined.
To me this is a much cleaner, more interesting variation on the faction politics of Deus Ex 2, in which faction decisions didn't seem to effect the core gameplay as directly or as obviously. I love the idea that a faction is a living organism with persistent features that change based on your story decisions, and Shinobido deserves credit for showcasing this idea well, even if it doesn't explore the idea fully.
Other points of interest: Shinobido one of the only stealth games I've played where guards will actually pick up and carry dead comrades away, something which seems like it should be addressed a lot more but somehow never is. The game also does a brilliant job of incorporating its level editor (one of the clear hold-overs from Tenchu 2) into the fiction, presenting it as the "garden" outside your house that you "decorate" it between missions, adding straw dummies for training but also traps to ward off invaders, who appear periodically in the form of a fortress defense mini-game.
Physics are a big part of Shinobido's gameplay, which is usual for a Japanese game, and is the source of some of its flaws. In a game with consequences this steep, the unpredictability of collision at times can be very frustrating, though it does contribute to general sense that being a properly elegant ninja takes real dedication (the animation for when you trip over a dead body, for example, seems designed to humiliate).
I haven't finished Shinibido, but I like a lot of its design conceits. The way it connects its faction system to its moment-to-moment experience makes a lot of sense, at least conceptually. I think it would be more interesting of the simulation aspects were more persistent, less branchy... meaning that it would be nice if characters and events would exist in the world whether or not you accepted a mission about them. I would have liked to have been able to simply decide for myself to assassinate Sadame, attack a shipment of weapons, etc., and watched the political fallout from the shadows.
February 5, 2011 3:39 PM
2010 Retrospective - Part 3: Taxidermy, Porn, Politics
Another of 2010's critical darlings, Amnesia is a game I felt I had to play given my interest in horror. It's certainly good, but the sheer amount of praise it's gotten alarms me. It has been called the first great survival horror game in years, one of the scariest games ever made, etc. It isn't any of these things. What it is is a polished, well-made, extremely reverent fan work... so reverent it borders on fetishism. The makers of Amnesia clearly love survival horror. A bit too much.
Amnesia cannot be a "great" horror game to me because it does not possess an imagination of its own, like Silent Hill or Resident Evil once did. Outside of its clever interface design (and an admittedly phenomenal encounter with an invisible monster) it brings nothing new to the genre... unless mid-90s point-and-click horror games are so old they qualify as new again. I understand that people lament the death of survival horror, of the days before action gameplay creep reduced the genre to a thematic subset of third-person shooters. But I've played plenty of games recently that evoke those lost tensions and manage to be original. Demon's Souls, Deadly Premonition, and Hell Night were all superior "survival horror" experiences to me. Compared to such fresh experiments, Amnesia's strictly lock-and-key puzzle design and effective-yet-monotonous atmosphere feel like calculated exercises in fanboy taxidermy. It enshrines, rather than reinvents, the genre.
Other M is a game I liked quite a lot, in spite of its gag-inducing gender politics. It's a bit unfair how the game design itself drew criticism from a lot of people, who seemed loath to consider its gameplay and story separately, heaping them both into the same sour judgement. In a world of God of War clones, Other M's novel 3D gameplay was refreshing to me, re-capturing the excitement of mid-90s 3D experimentation. The story though was rightfully considered shit by almost everybody. I am not the sort who demands Japanese games conform to an American liberal standard of what women should be (Celes is still one of my favorite game characters), but Other M had me choking with disgust... not only for how it portrayed Samus, but for just how pointless it was to the series.
Samus relationship with Adam, her former commanding officer, had been explored in Metroid Fusion, and Other M hits virtually all the same story beats, even though it is supposedly a prequel. Really it's just a thinly veiled remake of Fusion (right down to the reappearance of certain bosses) only with the melodrama cranked up so high it could shatter glass. Metroid was never exactly a feminist manifesto, but it also never portrayed Samus's gender as a point of weakness. Other M does, saddling her with a band of macho marines that call her "princess" and -- I swear to god -- have to save her when her suit (her only source of power, apparently) luridly evaporates off her naked body any time she suffers a crisis of confidence. It's like a porn-parody of Iron Man.
Raging fans tended to blame Team Ninja, given their penchant for bimbo characters. As far as I know though, they were mostly tapped for visual design of Other M, which may explain why all the women in the story (not just Samus) look like 9-year-olds who've just found their mother's make-up case. The writer of the actual plot was still long-time series helmer Yoshio Sakamoto, and I'm sure this was his honest attempt to "humanize" a character he felt responsible for.
It's a shame because, after the macho (read: American) militarism of Metroid Prime 3, I was keen to see the series given back to a Japanese developer, who have always treated the militaristic aspects of the mythology with more ambivalence (the military turn out to be the villains in Fusion). The medieval sexism of Other M however had me missing Prime 3, a game where the military seems to A) employ women and B) allow them to wear normal clothes. Between the two games, Metroid has the worst aspects of both cultures covered. Maybe the next game should be Swedish.
Silent Debuggers is a game I had never heard of until last year. It was on a list of overlooked Turbografix-16 games, and the description intrigued me. It is, in fact, one of the better variations on the film Alien I've ever seen in a video game, nailing a lot of elements that later variations failed to get right. Especially good is the game's modeling of the motion-tracker from the film, which emits an audio pulse when a creature is close. Because of the game's primitive "fake 3D" approach, which is just a bunch of static 2D images of 3D corridors that it flips through as you move, it creates the impression that each move is a "step". Hearing the motion-tracker go berserk when you take a single step into a room and hearing it instantly go silent when you step back out achieves a crisp clarity of cause-and-effect that even the Alien vs. Predator games didn't really have.
I also really liked how the game, which came out in 1991, prefigures the brutal resource management of survival horror, forcing you to constantly ration ammo and health, both of which can only be replenished from finite supplies located in the core "safe" section of the ship. (Use them up and you're fucked.) This, combined with the fact that the whole game is on a single timer, and you must find a way to escape before the ship explodes, creates a surprisingly tense experience, in some ways akin to the white-knuckled thrill of System Shock 1's final sections. I didn't finish Silent Debuggers, because it got rather hard and somewhat repetitive after a while, but that didn't diminish my impression of just how effectively it captured a particular kind of suspense, a kind many games try for but few achieve.
I played Bethesda's Fallout 3 like everyone else, and enjoyed it like everyone else, but it still felt like a watered-down version of Fallout to me--the bloated Hollywood remake to Black Isle's lean, sassy original. This could be seen primarily in terms of the writing, which was cartoony and obvious compared to the sharp satire of Fallout 1 and 2, and in terms of the game's general moral view, which was much more binary. Fallout 3 was definitely a post-KOTOR Fallout, tending to view the wasteland much more in terms of obvious heroes and villains. (Thanks Three-Dog, for letting me know which ghouls are "okay" to kill.) New Vegas, thankfully, is a return to the more murky moral universe of the original games, and not coincidentally given that Obsidian is partially made up of refugees from Black Isle. To my mind this makes New Vegas a more "legitimate" Fallout sequel, with a stronger continuity of tone and attitude.
I didn't even come close to finishing New Vegas, but I didn't have to to feel refreshed by its less jokey, more complex take on post-apocalyptic politics. Its faction system, while more "top down" than I'd prefer (I don't like how factions magically know you killed their members, even if no witnesses survive), presented an intriguing tangle of opposing world views, all of which seem to have their own logic and potential for corruption. One person's hero was always another person's villain, and the way New Vegas repeatedly asks you to make political decisions based on incomplete or distorted information is commendable. Like Alpha Protocol, it stubbornly insists on seeing the world in more complex terms than the majority of triple A games do... and that's easily worth the price of a few bugs.
I have a longer post about Shinobido waiting in the wings, so I will not go into great detail about the game here, aside from saying it was a game I'm very glad I played. Released outside Japan only in PAL regions, it was an obscure and original alternative to the Tenchu series, made by Aquire after they lost the Tenchu license to From Software. For anyone who's a fan of stealth, non-linear narrative, or faction-based politics Shinobido is a must-play, if only to see a completely original take on these ideas.
Shalom: Knightmare III
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow & Legacy of Darkness
January 24, 2011 1:13 PM
2010 Retrospective Part 2 - Nostalgia, Sin, Editing
I originally passed on Retro Game Challenge but picked it up after I heard it wasn't just a compilation of retro-style games but actually used 80s game culture as a framing device, even to the point where you have to consult "game magazines" to make progress. This seemed rather charming.
I got through most of the game, and found it to be a consistently clever, if slight, experience. I say "slight" because the 80s cultural aspects are indeed more of a framing device than something explored thoroughly. (I could never figure out why you or your friend didn't seem to age between 1982 and 1987.) Also, perhaps more importantly, I felt there was a big missed opportunity in the localization. American, European, and Japanese 80s game culture were all distinctly different, and the way the game coyly wants you to pretend otherwise is disappointing.
The best thing about Retro Game Challenge is how well it demonstrates how creative goal design can give a lot of depth to supposedly "simple" mechanics. The meta-game involves becoming an adept "gamer", not just finishing games, which means you have to play the same games over and over in order to perform esoteric tasks that make creative use of each game's mechanics. This aspect of the game is very well realized, and actually does a good job of re-creating the mindset of what it meant to be a young gamer in the heyday of the NES. Of course, one could easily imagine this sort of game also being a cutting commentary on the self-serving propaganda machine of Nintendo and the Stalinist grip it maintained on the culture... but I don't suppose we'll ever see that on a Nintendo platform.
Sin and Punishment: Star Successor I played because it is a shooter by Treasure, and two of their previous efforts in this vein, Gunstar Heroes and Ikaruga, are among the sublime game experiences of my life. Not that I was expecting this from Star Successor, which was a sequel to one of their more obscure, experimental shooters, an early 3D effort on the N64 that I'd only played briefly.
I didn't finish Star Successor, but my deep respect for Treasure inspired me to play it a fair amount, in spite of the fact that I'm not a big fan of its mechanics. It's basically a rail shooter where you control two avatars: your target reticule and your character, who floats around freely via a jet pack. Games where the main concept is "move a cursor around the screen and shoot things" always feel tedious to me (which is one of the reasons I can appreciate, but never really enjoy, Rez). Star Successor mitigates this tedium somewhat with melee attacks and a charge shot that, if used cleverly, do not require the player to hold down the 'fire' button the whole game. But still... like Geometry Wars, Space Giraffe, and other shooters in which liberal swarms of seemingly chaotic elements flood the screen endlessly, you inevitably feel that you're fighting a losing battle against entropy.
To some people this may not seem much different that the harsh bullet-hell challenges of Ikaruga, but, to me, there is something so logical about what Ikaruga throws at you that falling repeatedly in that world feels like a failure to master order, not a failure to master chaos... which, to a personality like mine, constitutes a very big difference.
Aside from Red Dead Redemption, Heavy Rain was probably the triple A game last year that left me the most thoroughly unimpressed... at least in terms of artistic ambition. Yes, it's much better than self-proclaimed game auteur David Cage's previous effort, Fahrenheit, but that's hardly saying anything, considering what a train wreak of interface design and pretentious bullshit it was.
Heavy Rain is an incredibly misguided game, with an utterly bone-headed philosophy of how to create narrative engagement, but with production quality so slick and expensive (though, I would argue, still not very "good") it managed to hoodwink a lot of people into thinking it was somehow what interactive narrative should be. Predictably, the best moments of the game are the ones that are the least cinematic, like when you find yourself with a whole evening to kill, and you have to responsibly manage dinner, your son's homework, your work, and relaxation, all while time ticks away.
Heavy Rain isn't a bad game; just a stupid one. Its interface design is interesting, doing a decent job of marrying symbolically gestural controller actions to on-screen character actions. This is the game's only real contribution (and the big improvement over Fahrenheit), since everything else it does has been done before, mostly in the mid-90s "interactive movie" craze that almost killed videogame storytelling. It's as if Cage got bonked on the head in 1995 and woke up in the era of the PS3. His approach to narrative design is basically "cinematics" that you can control the speed of because they are rendered in real time, and require pressure-sensitive controller actions to make the "film" run through the projector. The game is basically the experience of being David Cage's editor, more than it is anything else.
I would feel a lot kinder toward Heavy Rain if all its stumbles, indulgences, and genuinely clever moments weren't hamstrung by Cage's dull imagination, whose idea of "good writing" is on par with a mediocre X-Files episode. His notion of "gritty reality" seems to come entirely from American television, the sort where everyone's hair and teeth are perfect and everyone wears designer clothes but we as viewers are instructed to believe they represent "average" people. Only if you buy into this kind of Hollywood ruse daily will you buy into Heavy Rain, the first videogame to really nail the depravity of bourgeois cinema.
I wrote a rather long post about Shattered Memories months ago, so I won't bother to recount my thoughts in detail here. My feelings about the game are primarily positive. It doesn't deliver what it (absurdly) promises: a psychological horror experience tailored to the individual user. But it does deliver a well-realized, agreeably fresh take on survival horror, and one that surprisingly manages to demonstrate an nuanced understanding of the original classic upon which it is based.
One of Shattered Memories' best features is its excellent interface design, which uses the wiimote modesty and intelligently, not overreaching the hardware's capabilities. Also, it's one of the few games I've played that seems to achieve the right level of graphical fidelity in the environment to forgo the use of superimposed text. This really makes one examine the environment, not just look for hotspots and items, which subtlety encourages a measured, more detective-like approach to basic navigation. This was one of the few games in recent memory that I actually played twice in a row, and enjoyed doing so.
I actually enjoyed Obsidian's much maligned "spy RPG". The game did have polish issues, but a lot of the design conceits it received heavy criticism for (like the way your pistol stat dictates the speed of your aiming reticule) were identical to other, well-respected Action/RPG hybrids. One wonders what these reviewers would have said about Deus Ex ten years ago.
I didn't finish Alpha Protocol, mostly because its world and plot got so complicated it was hard for me to re-orient myself when I failed to play it for more than a week. Also, my interest waned after I realized how the game was less of a simulated world and more of a heavily-scripted tree that just happened to have a ridiculous amount of branches. Obsidian isn't unique in defining "choice" this way (it's basically the way Bioware, Bethesda, and virtually every other Western RPG developer has for the last decade) but in the case of Alpha Protocol it began to bother me since, being used to espionage-themed games that take a more simulation-based approach (Metal Gear, Hitman, Deux Ex, etc.), I increasingly found myself unable to do fairly basic things, like backtrack or explore to gather my own intel. The missions are surprisingly linear, with your "choice" exclusively relegated to how you dispatch people based on how you've built your character. I suppose this is true to the ads that said "Your weapon is choice.", but I guess I was expecting it to be more than just a weapon.
Still, Obsidian deserves credit for doing what bigger companies seem consistently unwilling to do: create a murky, morally complex world. Not that Alpha Protocol reaches the level of daring political statement (alas, Fallout 2), but it does manage to make you feel like the U.S. isn't particularly better than every other corrupt government... which is always nice.
Next Up!
Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Metroid: Other M
Shinobido: Way of the Ninja
January 19, 2011 2:27 PM
2010 Retrospective Part 1 - Sex, War, Religion
It's 2011 and many have already posted their "Top Ten of 2010" lists. Every year I find it hard to take part in such list-making, mainly because I spend my year playing whatever the hell I feel like, regardless of whether it is old or new. So here's my rather unconventional list for 2010. These are the games I played last year, why I played them, and what I thought of them.
2009 was the year of Demon' Souls, one of the best games of the decade, so naturally I decided to explore its roots. By the new year I had got as far as the original King's Field, though not the one you might remember. The "King's Field" we got in the West was actually King's Field II. King's Field I never came out here, but was fan-translated some time ago.
Though I never finished it, I played King's Field a good while, enough to see that it was even more like Ultima Underworld than its sequels. Demon's Souls reminded more of Underworld than any game had since Looking Glass Studios went out of business, and it was surprising to me how much its spiritual predecessor felt like a "Japanese Underworld", right down to the color palette, making it an interesting alternative to the actual Japanese port of Ultima Underworld, a game that was strangely (if fascinatingly) crippled by its cultural transition.
King's Field held my interest for a few reasons. It's a rare example of early 3D gaming (circa 1994, two full years before the Playstation hit non-Japanese regions) and, even more rarely, a Japanese first-person game, something that is uncommon even now. I'm not sure if there even is an earlier example of a first-person game by a Japanese developer, which gives the game historical value. It also, like many pre-millennium games, isn't interested in holding the player's hand. It just drops you into a (mostly) non-linear world and let your exploration alone be the shaping force behind the experience. If not for the fantasy setting, it would be a survival horror game in the most classic sense (much like Demon's Souls) which made it absorbing despite its crude simplicity.
Bayonetta I think was the first triple A game I played last year, and I don't have much to say about it other than I thought it was not terribly deserving of the controversy it generated. A videogame crassly objectifying women isn't news, and I personally didn't find Bayonetta's deliberately outrageous attitude towards its own indulgences as unique as many bloggers and critics seemed to.
As a game I found Bayonetta more interesting that your average brawler, with a rich move-set and more expressive strategic possibility than, say, God of War. I also found its world extremely beautiful, and its vision of Purgatory--in which normal humans are oblivious to the demonic battles going on around them--a rare example of interesting metaphysics woven into incidental level design. The writing however, in spite of being somewhat self-aware, was mostly clumsy, and the gameplay was samey enough after a while that I finally lost interest.
If anything, Bayonetta made me think a lot about what a much smarter, more daring game could do with similar ideas. I actually love the idea of using sex as a weapon, and positioning that against Christianity as an opposing force seeking to snuff it out has extremely rich--and exquisitely controversial--potential. Of course, being a Japanese game, Bayonetta is either unaware of or uninterested in making any statements about the connection between Western religion and sexual repression, but I can't look at the game without imagining how one might transform it so. I'd love to play a game where you were a witch beating the shit out of male Puritans, who were so stunned by your naked body they literally would stand agape as you pummeled their self-righteous faces into mush. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that I was reading His Dark Materials while playing Bayonetta as well, and wondering why a game about a war between Heaven and Hell couldn't have... well... more balls, so to speak.
Another game I played mainly because of its tenuous connection with Demon's Souls. (It was also by From Software, but in collaboration with an outside developer.) It was nice, but I remember losing interest when I realized Zelda was its only real reference point. The art style, somewhat misleadingly, presents the game as a love-letter a much broader range of 8-bit games, including Dragon Quest, and I think it would haven been more interesting if the gameplay had been a similarly eclectic mish-mash of styles. As is, Dot Heroes is essentially Zelda 1 re-skinned, with a lot of jokey dialog about 8-bit game conventions, but with no challenging of those conventions within the actual game design.
If you want to know what I think of Rockstar's current best-seller and critical darling you can read my previous posts on the subject. Suffice to say, I was not as taken with Redemption (or John Marston) as most people were, though I do admit that, for a blockbuster game, I enjoyed it a fair amount. This will no doubt be remembered as the game of 2010, but for me it was the game that proved that the audience Rockstar insists on pandering to will forever prevent them from generating work of moral or political sophistication.
Over-reliance on RPG conventions aside, Peace Walker was a refreshing return-to-form for Hideo Kojima. MGS4 was a bit of a travesty, an unfocused mess that's conceptual sloppiness and dearth of imagination was obscured by its stellar production value. Peace Walker, however, is a clear, confidant, and clever game that knows exactly what it's going for and achieves it with elegance... primarily in terms of gameplay but also, with a few caveats, in terms of story as well.
The first half, in which Kojima and his co-writers weave together myth and politics in Cold War-era South America, is pretty great, but then again I suppose I'm partial to a game where the Nicaraguan Sandinistas are portrayed as good guys. (Suck it, Reagan!) The second half, which suffers (though not greatly so) from the same navel-gazing Metal Gear mythology fan-wanking that destroyed MGS4, isn't as sharp or interesting, but still manages to crash-land into a semi-intriguing meditation on the symbiotic relationship between peace and war.
Gameplay-wise Peace Walker is note-worthy for how it brilliantly condenses 20 years of game design into a single, streamlined gameplay system, hacking off time-honored conventions left and right (no crawling?) but somehow retaining the essence of the franchise. It's the game that people who think Kojima isn't a game designer (or, at least, doesn't employ them) should play... though they obviously won't.
November 18, 2010 2:35 PM
How RPG Elements Hurt Good Games
Peace Walker is the stupidest boss in the history of the Metal Gear series. It takes 30 minutes to beat, has a reoccurring instant fail phase, no weak points, and approximately a gazillion patterns that are impossible to avoid. The only way to kill the thing is to just pelt it with endless missiles while absorbing as much damage as possible before your healing items run out.
I know this is a type of boss design (most commonly found in Japanese RPGs) but it is one I personally hate. It is the polar opposite design philosophy of what Metal Gear used to be, which was more puzzle-oriented, like Zelda. Metal Gear bosses used to be about learning patterns, exploiting weaknesses with specific weapons, crippling the enemy to give yourself an advantage, etc. The bosses in Peace Walker swing completely in the opposite direction, into stat-driven endurance battles. This is where the Monster Hunter influence goes too far, reducing Metal Gear to a straight-forward grind-fest.
I love the Pokemon stuff, the kidnapping and army building, but in some ways it was better in Peace Walker's predecessor, Portable Ops, when these elements were simply a meta-game laid over a core game that was still recognizably derived from classic Metal Gear. While it's true that Portable Ops marked the first time bosses lost some of their puzzleiness (mostly as the result of letting players design their own arsenal) they never required grinding to win.
 
Unlike in Peace Walker, weapon and tool development in Portable Ops was holistic, not incremental. In other words, items did not have various "levels" of power or effectiveness. You didn't have to "upgrade" your rocket launcher to make it do more damage. A rocket launcher was a rocket launcher, and you either had one or you didn't. Sure, there were the RPG-ish elements of needing scientists to build weapons, and what they created and how fast they created it were based on a rudimentary stat system, but once you had an item in the field stats didn't matter. It was about which weapons/tools you had, not what "level" they were.
I can't stand the way Peace Walker scales difficulty by scaling enemy statistics. This essentially means the only way you progress in the game is by scaling your own statistics. It's less about how good you are and more about how many fucking rations and supply markers you have, so you reach a point where you simply outlast the enemy simply because you put endless hours in the game. It's the kind of game design that devalues learning and skill in favor of not having a life.
If there was any doubt about Peace Walker's "damage sponge" difficulty philosophy it is proven by how the game omits any and all permanent effects that might give players a strategic upper hand. Setting anti-tank mines or blowing up a fuel tank only stops land vehicles "temporarily" even though they should in all rights stop them permanently. It's clear each boss is designed not to be "too easy" for players who want to pound away on it with their snazzy guns. Since everything has hit points now it's just a matter of hitting bosses--anywhere--until they go down. This is a far cry from the tank battle in Metal Gear Solid 1, where one grenade would disable its treads and another down the top hatch would finish off the gunner. The main challenge was getting close enough to the tank to do this, and the fight was perfectly interesting, logical, and satisfying.
Given how excellent the simple puzzle-logic of Metal Gear boss fight have been in the past, it feels dumb for Peace Walker to simply abandon all of it in favor of straight-up RPG stat-grinding. The better fights in the game--the PUPA, the ZEKE fight, and if you choose to try and stealth the vehicle bosses--retain some of the old Metal Gear strategic thinking. When it comes to the later bosses, though, it's so stat-heavy and grind-necessitating the game feels more like Dragon Quest than tactical espionage.
I always loved Metal Gear's reliance on tools with discrete uses rather than stats with incremental effects. This is what put the series in the same category as Thief and Hitman--all superb games about using sharply-defined tools to make decisions in a richly simulated world. Peace Walker takes a disturbing turn away from this, sort of like when Irrational "improved" System Shock by adding stats... taking a richly simulated world and reducing it to a mere RPG (albeit a good one).
This isn't to say stats always work against strategic decision-making. It depends on how they are implemented. When they seem to exist only to augment things like health or damage they do. But when used in other ways they don't. Metal Gear Ac!d, the short-live Metal Gear spin-off series released on the PSP some years ago, indulged RPG conventions without undercutting this sort of tool-decision-making. It's hard to imagine anything more RPG-ish than Ac!d's turn-based, card-based combat system. Yet I have to confess that--when put side-by-side with Peace Walker--both Ac!d games manage to express the strategic thinking of classic Metal Gear in a way Peace Walker seems to totally lose sight of.
 
Even though Ac!d featured a "card deck", in which actions could only be "played" based on which cards happened to come up in your "hand", all these actions had discrete functional values, not arbitrary incremental values. Drawing the card of a particular tool or weapon meant you got to use that particular tool or weapon. Pistols, rocket launchers, etc. all had specific strategic values. It wasn't just about how powerful they were. There was no rocket launcher "+1" or "+2" because challenges did not scale primarily in terms of how much HP enemies had (like they do in Peace Walker). Like any true turn-based strategy game, the Ac!d series was all about, well, strategy. It was about how well you could out-think your opponent by seeing several moves ahead of them and using your resources accordingly.
I remember spending hours on some screens of Ac!d, just trying to figure them out like puzzles. I specifically remember a screen full of snipers perched on ridges, and having to figure out how to use my current card deck to sneak past them. It was hard but rewarding once I developed a successful strategy, the way any turn-based strategy game is. In this sense Metal Gear Ac!d recalled Front Mission, Vandal Hearts, or even the original X-Com--all turn-based strategy games where cleverness was more important than how high you had grinded your characters.
Metal Gear Ac!d was a PSP launch game, and at the time I remember Hideo Kojima claiming he was skeptical as to whether the real-time tactical stealth gameplay of Metal Gear would "work" on a portable platform, hence Ac!d's "experimental" turn-based approach. Ac!d was predictably criticized at the time for "not being a real Metal Gear game" even though most people admitted it was quite good turn-based strategy game. Portable Ops, in obvious response to this, was intended as the the first "real" Metal Gear game on the PSP console, and Peace Walker was even more hyped as a full-blown main series installment, even though in some ways Ac!d was more true to the concept of tactical espionage action.
Thinking about Ac!d again makes me wonder if Peace Walker's more frustrating battles would actually be fun if they were turn-based. Even if they were they probably wouldn't be as fun as Ac!d, because they'd still be just endurance tests, which is the least interesting type of strategic problem I can imagine. Two opponents hit each other until one of them dies. Brilliant. If I wanted that I'd play...
...well I wouldn't play Metal Gear, that's for sure.
October 4, 2010 12:11 PM
Deadly Premonition Is "Interesting" with GAMBIT Lead Game Designer Matthew Weise: Video
On Friday September 17th, 2010 GAMBIT Lead Game Designer Matthew Weise spoke before a packed house during a Friday Games At GAMBIT and proclaimed that Access Games' new offering "DEADLY PREMONITION" is "interesting" and even during one verbal frenzy describes the game as ..."good". The game has received wildly mixed reviews from variety of websites. "Destructoid" describes the game as such: "Deadly Premonition is like watching two clowns eat each other." Matthew Weise vigorously scrutinized this game during this 45 minute entertaining rampage at the GAMBIT lab which is now here for you to watch on glorious video! Video Produced by Generoso Fierro , Edited by Garrett Beazley.
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September 28, 2010 12:19 PM
Sexual Nightmares in Silent Hill.
This post originally appeared on Matt Weise's blog Outside Your Heaven and contains spoilers for Silent Hill 1, 2, and Shattered Memories.
I just finished my second play-through of Silent Hill Shattered Memories, studio Climax's remake of Silent Hill 1. As much as I dislike the developer's pretentious claims about their game "playing you as much as you play it" I have to admit it wasn't too bad. After their mediocre Silent Hill: Origins I had Climax pegged as a bunch of Silent Hill 2 fanboys whose idea of "improving" Silent Hill 1 was to turn it into Silent Hill 2, i.e. to make it about the psychology of a sexually troubled protagonist. Sure enough Shattered Memories does this, but in a more original and thoughtful way than I expected.
The idea of Silent Hill becoming the "personal nightmare" of people who have past traumas connected with it was actually invented in Silent Hill 2, not 1, and since everyone seems to agree that Silent Hill 2 is the masterpiece of the series its "formula" has become highly fetishized, especially by Western gamers. What people forget, though, is that the "it's your nightmare!" twist of Silent Hill 2 was originally surprising because it was someone else's nightmare in Silent Hill 1. It was the nightmare of a girl named Alessa, a poltergeist who had been horrifically abused by her mother and whose latent psychic power had exploded in adolescence and transformed Silent Hill into a living manifestation of her pain.
Harry's search for his daughter Cheryl (whom you eventually discover is a phantom projection of Alessa) in Silent Hill 1 wasn't about him at all. It was about him baring witness to Alessa's anguish, and Alessa was in a sense the real main character. Virtually every screen was symbolic of some horrible thing that had happened to her, making her interior psychology the literal subject of the player's exploration. Silent Hill 2 revised this slightly. It suggested the town itself had a quality that caused reality to take the shape of people's trauma, which was necessary to explain why you were in a nightmare other than Alessa's. This revised explanation defined the Silent Hill mythos from then on--which is fine because it was quite good--but a downside is that a lot of people seem to have forgotten that Silent Hill 1 was just as "personal"... and in some ways more tragic and harrowing.
The guilt James suffers from murdering his wife in Silent Hill 2, for me at least, does not compare to what Alessa went through. She was abused by her religious fanatic mother, burnt to a featureless husk, and then imprisoned in a hospital basement for nearly a decade, tied to a wheelchair, in a straight-jacket, with nothing to do but lose her agonized mind. Alessa's trauma might have been less everyday than James', but it hardly seemed unreal to me. On the contrary it seemed to be the sort of unthinkable fate we don't allow ourselves to imagine most of the time, because it would shake the foundations of our belief in civilization... that humans are more than just animals.
Alessa in Silent Hill 1 was for me an Ann Frank-like figure, a case study in what happens when the sickest shit human beings are capable of collides with the everyday trivialities of growing up. The astonishing contrast of Silent Hill 1's imagery--an elementary school that turns into an Auschwitz-style prison, dolls and children's toys scattered about rusty syringes and barbed wire, endless bodies in straight-jackets trapped in cages--touched on something unspeakable. They never talk about it in school, but as a kid it's hard to read Ann Frank's diary and not imagine what it was like when people like her died in death camps. The world you explore in Silent Hill 1, to me, is very close to what I imagine the wrecked mind of a young Holocaust victim would look like if it were captured in their final, tormented moment.
Shattered Memories, somewhat smartly, doesn't try to address the same set of ideas. It isn't about horrific abuse. It isn't about disfiguring burns, imprisonment, wheelchairs, straight-jackets, or rusty metal. It is, though, still about the interior traumatic mindspace of a teenage girl, and the vehicle used to explore it is still her father. You still play as Harry looking for Cheryl in a snow-swept Silent Hill, and the world still oscillates between reality and a nightmare version of itself. But the nightmare imagery is different (snow and ice, not rusty medical torture) and appears--at least initially--to represent Harry's mind, not Alessa/Cheryl's.
The impression that you are in Harry's nightmare stems largely from first-person "therapist" scenes. Periodically the story stops and a sleazy therapist appears, urging the player to do little "exercises" before continuing. They range from answering questions about sex and family to taking Rorschach tests and drawing pictures. What they are supposed to do is "tailor" the nightmare imagery and narrative to reflect your--meaning the player's--psychology. Since Harry is the player's avatar, all this manifests in-game as if your sexual, social, family issues were Harry's. If you tell the therapist you sleep around, all the women around Harry dress sexier, seem more seductive, and in the nightmare world disfigured naked women chase you. However...
...in the ending you discover you're not in Harry's mind at all. You're in Cheryl's. The game ends when you finally reach the mental health clinic, thinking you'll find Cheryl. You run down the hallway, burst into the room, and you're in the therapy room you've been seeing the whole game. The camera finally cuts--for the first time--to a reverse shot of who the therapist is speaking to. It's Cheryl. Harry, you discover, died in a car crash years ago, and the whole game has been a waking dream Cheryl's been describing to her therapist.
This ending is unexpectedly touching. The therapist explains Cheryl has constructed a heroic fantasy of her father trying to "find" her, because she felt so abandoned after he died. He postulates that she blames her mother for her father's death (since he left because of a divorce) and that as a result has developed an honest-to-god Electra complex--seeking out surrogate "fathers" in all her sexual relationships with other men and seeing all competing women as surrogates for her mother. This is actually foreshadowed throughout the game, with Harry being constantly seduced by a teenage, slutty version of Cheryl's mother Dahlia, and through rumors of a nameless teenage girl (obviously Cheryl) who is ridiculed for pursuing older men.
In the first ending I got (just one of several) Cheryl stares at the phantom father, the idealized male of her subconscious, and says goodbye to him. In that moment he crystallizes into a statue of ice, a rather horrific event you've seen happen throughout the game to other people, much to Harry's astonishment. To see it happen to Harry himself--you--is pretty striking. You're already reeling from the shock that you're not Harry but Cheryl, and the wave of melancholy she feels at saying goodbye to her father feels like an echo of you saying goodbye to your avatar. It's "letting go" of a phantom surrogate, a decoupling of yourself from a fantasy construct you have affection for but know isn't real.
This twist is in a lot of ways a very good one. It feels dramatic, satisfying, surprising, and functions nicely as a metaphor for the player's relationship with the game (Harry is, after all, Cheryl's "avatar" too). Where it perhaps falters is in its implied mechanics of human psychology. The twist that you're not in Harry's mind but Cheryl's is clever, but it also requires you to believe that the psycho-sexual dreamscape of a middle-aged man is interchangeable with that of a young woman. If the game "creates your own personal nightmare" based on how you answer the therapy questions, doesn't that diminish it as an expression of Cheryl's personal nightmare? Is Cheryl just an empty vessel for the player? She doesn't seem to be, since there are lots of hints in the game as to specific things which happened to her and specific traumas she has, so whose mind is it?
The obvious answer is both, but I wonder if the developers at Climax have a subtle enough view of sex and gender to give such duality proper breathing room. If I'm a man who "tailors" my dreamscape to involve a lot of extremely male-driven sexual anxieties, what does it mean that I'm revealed to be a woman in the ending? Is that what women are afraid of? Skimpily dressed cops and naked booby monsters?
I suppose you could argue that Cheryl isn't directly afraid of those things herself, but that she imagines (rightly or wrongly) that those are the sorts of things that might distract her father away from her. There is possibly some credence to this, especially if you view the story as a series of seductions--some literal, some figurative--that Harry/the player narrowly escapes... rather like what Tom Cruise's character goes through in Eyes Wide Shut. I wonder, though, how absurd Kubrick's film would have seemed if in the end you discovered Tom Cruise was just a figment of Nicole Kidman's imagination? Would anyone have believed his fantasies were in reality the product of her subconscious?
The somewhat cavalier view Shattered Memories takes to dream logic is arguably the result of its "adaptive" narrative system, in which dream images and symbols are interchangeable based on the player's choices. I am not convinced this system helps the game. One reason Silent Hill 1 and 2 endure as artworks is because they have consistent, meticulously designed dreamscapes worth studying and interpreting over multiple play-throughs. Shattered Memories may be trying to do too much by wanting to create a similar experience that dynamically changes. The big "innovation" of Shattered Memories seems to be that the nightmare is the player's nightmare, but it possibly makes a fatal mistake by assuming it can be the player's nightmare and someone else's nightmare at the same time. As an experiment in interactive narrative it's interesting, but as a portrait of a fictional character it may have been stronger had it been entirely static.
My second ending wasn't as satisfying as my first. Cheryl seemed more bitter than bittersweet about her father, watching stoically as he turned to ice. Afterwards there was a clip of a sex video Harry apparently made with Michelle and Lisa (two characters encountered earlier in the game) which assumedly Cheryl saw at some point. This explains their presence in her dream as "seduction obstacles", and may also explain the "TV static" motif of the interface at times. There are many other examples of videos too, and Kauffman (the therapist) suggests that Cheryl watches home videos obsessively. In any case, my new answers to the therapy questions apparently turned Harry into a womanizer and an adulterer, which made Cheryl resent him. Oddly Kauffman still talks about her "idolizing" him, inventing a fantasy where he is coming to save her.
In my first ending instead of the sex video I got a video of Harry leaving and Cheryl being sad. Not only do I like the ending a lot more emotionally, it also frankly seems to make a lot more sense. Choosing more sexual and/or cynical answers seems to make the story reflect this in a rather literal fashion. In my first game Cheryl seemed like a nice, if a bit introverted, girl who idolized her father in ways that (unconsciously) lead her into unheathly relationships with men, which made her bitter-sweet "letting go" of her father sort of touching. In my second game Cheryl seemed to be a slut and a criminal whose "positive" fantasy of her father was less easy to explain.
I don't mind the choices you make changing things, but one thing I had (incorrectly) assumed is that the player's choices simply change how Cheryl's psychology is expressed, not what Cheryl's psychology is. Playing again therefore isn't even exploring the same mindscape, but a different mindscape... which is sort of interesting... except that this requires the "meanings" of the dream imagery to be so interchangeable they fail to feel as subtle or as purposeful as those in the original Silent Hill games. The genre swap of the ending "twist" is a variation on this problem, and is further complicated by the fact that the player may be male or female, in which case it would be possible for the game to be the nightmare of a woman (the player), role-playing a man (Harry), who is secretly a figment of a woman's imagination (Cheryl).
The paint-by-numbers dream logic and dime store Freudianism Climax adopts in order to make their adaptive narrative workable does not seem able to embody such complexity, at least not to me, yet it's unclear whether Climax themselves are silly enough to believe they do. The beginning "psychology warning" feels tongue-in-cheek, but on the other hand the story clearly wants to be taken seriously as a psychological thriller. This leads me to believe the writers and designers of this game actually expect the player to take some of their more absurd constructions--like Kauffman--seriously, as if he weren't obviously an awful therapist and a fucking asshole and a maniac. He leers at you the whole game, makes constant sarcastic comments, and blows his top at the end, smashing his wineglass and screaming in a fit of rage over Cheryl's inability to "get over" her fantasy. This sort of ludicrous Hollywood crap makes you think no one at Climax has ever even talked to someone who's been to therapy, let alone gone themselves.
Overall I found Shattered Memories pretty interesting, in spite of its over-reaching pretension and occasional bad writing. I really liked the first ending I got, which seemed to quite cleverly pay homage to Silent Hill 1 (it's all about Cheryl) while simultaneously paying homage to Silent Hill 2 (it's all about the protagonist), while still maintaining some of the pathos associated with the series' best moments. Maybe one of the reasons the ending affected me is because I still have this lingering sympathy for Alessa as a character, and I like the idea of her overcoming her past in order to live a normal life. Silent Hill 3 sort of dealt with this idea, as a direct sequel to Silent Hill 1 in which Alessa is reincarnated as a girl named Heather and given the opportunity to take revenge on the cult that abused her.
Shattered Memories feels more touching to me though, especially when read against Silent Hill 1. I like the idea that life can still be scary and difficult even if you were never the victim of horrific torture. Cheryl in Shattered Memories doesn't know how lucky she is, to have her skin, all her limbs, to be able to walk, to run, to speak. But that doesn't make her happy... anymore than it makes the rest of us happy who take such things for granted.
September 14, 2010 1:27 PM
Defining Characters in Games
A few weeks ago, Kate Finegan from Kotaku contacted me for an interview, asking questions about videogame characters. Instead of responding to her questions one by one, I found it easier to address her questions in the form of a short essay, which she then quoted in her piece. I was glad to have contributed to such a fine article, so I encourage you to go and read it.
Kate sent me many questions, so my response was rather wide. Since only a few ideas made it to the article, here goes the original response that I sent to Kate. Thanks to her for letting me post it here.
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September 13, 2010 2:47 PM
What Metroid Other M Can Teach Us About 3D Game Design.
This post originally appeared on Matt Weise's blog Outside Your Heaven.
Metroid Other M has problems, mostly revolving around its badly-conceived integration of narrative and its dopey gender politics. But one thing I do like is its unorthodox take on 3D game design, which is conceptually very good. The game offers a fresh take on what it means to navigate and interact in 3D space, hearkening back to the days before developers had 3D "figured out", when it was common for every game to experiment with 3D differently.
I like how Other M takes place in 3D space but "pretends" to take place in 2D space. At a glance it looks like a "2.5D" game, the sort where the world is 3D but the player is confined to a 2D plane. Last year's Shadow Complex, which was an unabashed (and quite decent) Metroid clone, was basically a 2.5D game, though it did offer limited ability to shoot into the background. This is where Shadow Complex ran into problems however, since its manual aiming system was fidgity when it came to deciding whether "up" meant "up" in 2D space or "back" in 3D space.
Other M solves this problem by providing a genuine 3D world, with full three-axises of movement, but retaining a 2D-like level design and camera system. Movement into the background or forground is constrained not by some invisible wall but by actual level architecture, which is made up of long narrow corridors and sharp right-angles. The camera always remains at an orthogonal angle to Samus, with obscuring structures becoming transparent as the player runs behind them. The effect is somewhat like being trapped in an ant farm, but a slightly wider ant farm than normal, giving the player some limited room to move laterally.
This is an interesting idea for a 3D navigation system. It seems designed to utilize the simplicity and clarity of 2D controls while boasting actual 3D gameplay. Other M controls with the d-pad, which might seem limiting but makes perfect sense given the strong orthogonal logic of its spaces. You don't miss analog movement simply because the level design doesn't require it, and the problem of aiming at enemies--which can come from any direction--is solved by an extremely good auto-aiming system.
In some ways the ballsiest thing Other M does is take aiming almost entirely away from the player and hand it over to Samus. All the player has to do is tap the button and Samus will automatically blast left, right, up, down, or where ever enemies happen to be. The only thing she won't do is turn to blast enemies directly behind her, so it is up to the player to position Samus so that she has a clear shot. This mostly consists of moving her to one side of an enemy swarm so the autoaim can do its trick.
What I like about this is it turns combat into more of a navigation problem than an marksmanship problem. In a sense the player is the driver and Samus is the gunner, which reinforces Other M's navigation-focused design philosophy. Combat is not a trivial element (even with Samus's smooth moves it still requires some player skill) but primarily Other M is a game about moving through space, not fighting things. This is why, in spite of whatever other problems it has, it still feels like a proper Metroid game, because at its core the ratio of combat-to-exploration is similar to classic 2D Metroid.
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I find this approach pretty clever, especially in how it solves the problems so many other 3D Metroid clones run into, most notably Castlevania. That series' big mistake, I feel, was to become more combat focused in the switch to 3D. Those games also kept the orthogonal level design of their 2D counterparts, but they went with traditional 3D cameras and analog movement, presumably because it would be difficult to fight enemies otherwise. What this did, however, was turn Castlevania into almost a straight brawler, in which exploration felt like a tedious afterthought.
What 3D Castlevania seemed to misunderstand about its 2D predecessors (and the Metroid games that inspired them) was that combat was never the center of the experience. It was merely something you did along the way, something which--in games like Symphony of the Night--seemed to exist primarily to make you feel cool as you glided elegantly through space. Alucard remains one of the most absurdly overpowered protagonists in videogames, and the sense that he could do incredible (and beautiful) things easily--i.e. with minimal input from you--was part of the appeal.
Samus in Other M is similar. It is slightly thrilling the way she responds in a complex fashion to minimal input, like when she appears to catch a glimpse of an enemy out of the corner of her eye and twist her body like some combination ninja/ballerina/gunslinger to blast it just before it gets her. I like moving Samus around just to see how she'll "handle" the situation. It's this sense of surprise that makes a player/protagonist relationship interesting, a fruitfully ambiguous fusion of self and other. When Samus does something cool, I feel cool, even if it was primarily her doing it.
Other M's design is refreshing ultimately because it demonstrates a willingness to re-think 3D as a problem. In this way it reminds me a lot of early 3D games like Fade 2 Black, Mega Man Legends, and Metal Gear Solid--all sequels to 2D games that deliberately preserved the orthogonal logic of 2D game design. Other M, however, benefits from a decade of 3D gaming, which allows it to mix-and-match 3D techniques that weren't around during the heyday of 3D experimentation. My favorite is how it switches to an off-set, over-the-shoulder camera (similar to Resident Evil 4) in certain rooms. In these rooms Samus slows to a walk and Other M suddenly controls like a conventional 3D game, but if you walk out of the room the camera and the controls switch back to orthogonal.
Other M uses this primarily to create suspense, or when the player enters a room too small for running. It feels nice and logical, like Samus has "decided" to have a closer look at a space. Unfortunately Other M doesn't really capitalize on these moments to build itself into a rich fictional world. Not that it has to to be a good game, but environmental narrative depth was one of the things Metroid Prime--Other M's single 3D predecessor--did exceedingly well. Other M borrows certain elements from Prime, like its 1st person camera with a "scanning" function, but it doesn't seem interested in using it to impart narrative information to the player, only gameplay information.
The only scannable objects in Other M are game items, whereas in Prime virtually everything in the environment--gameplay-related or not--was scannable, and would yield information that fleshed out the gameworld as a coherent fictional space. Other M has nicely detailed environments that easily could have supported a deeper scan function, but the team chose not to tell the story this way, instead opting for absurdly overblown, unskippable cut-scenes and a fairly linear game progression. When things like the over-the-shoulder camera and first-person scan function are used for narrative effect, it is always in highly controlled (and highly frustrating) ways that quickly degenerate into "find the pixel".
Other M doesn't really follow through on the rich possibilities suggested by its fresh 3D paradigm, but I want to stress that the paradigm is very good, and I feel the game deserves credit for showcasing it. With better narrative design the game's elegant combination of first-person, over-the-shoulder, and orthogonal 3D schemes could have been shaped into a dense and rich experience on par with Metroid Prime, while simultaneously recapturing the fast-paced acrobatics of classic Metroid that the Prime series played down. The fact that it's crippled by bad narrative design, unnecessary linearity, and (towards the end) an over-reliance on combat makes it a less-compelling final product but not a less useful experiment. It's willingness to rethink 3D as a problem gives it a freshness many better games lack, and in many ways it generates the sort of experimental excitement 3D games haven't in over a decade.
September 10, 2010 2:41 PM
Amnesia - Adventure Gaming in the Age of First-Person Shooters
This post originally appeared on Matt Weise's blog Outside Your Heaven.
I spent a few hours with Amnesia: The Dark Descent last night, and what strikes me most about the game so far is not its atmosphere (which is excellent) but its controls, specifically in relation to the game's somewhat nebulous genre. It's billed as a "horror game", and that it obviously is, but it's also a 3D first-person game that's not a first person shooter. What it reminds me of most are old first-person point-and-click adventure games like Uninvited, Shadowgate, and Deja vu. What Amnesia really feels like is an update of these types of games, and what's clever about it is how it reverse-engineers adventure game verbs out of what is essentially a post-Half Life 2 physics-based FPS.
Part of what defines adventure games are their "verb + object" interaction scheme. In classic adventure games players chose these verbs from a list, and later games found ways to reduce and consolidate verb sets (though there were both pros and cons to this reduction). Amnesia has only two verbs--grab and throw--but the developers use these verbs to "create" most other traditional adventure game verbs on the fly with game physics and traditional WASD controls.
Since there is no "open" verb the way you open doors is by "grabbing" the knob and moving backwards or forwards, which pulls or pushes the door open. Because it's physics-based, you can do this slowly or quickly, or you can slam the door shut with a right-mouse click. Left mouse is "grab" and right mouse is "throw". If you are grabbing a doorknob, "throwing" means you slam the door. If you are holding an object, it means you throw the object.
The world of Amnesia is designed around puzzles and exploration, not combat. There are monsters and it is possible to die, but the way you progress is by solving puzzles, puzzles that more or less emerge out of game physics. They are traditional adventure game puzzles--like stand on a box in order to be able to reach the lever that opens the secret passage--but since all these things are governed by physics, not hard-coded cause and effect, they contain the subtle possibility of alternate solutions which (in theory) gets you out of the common adventure game trap of "guess what the desginer is thinking".
What impresses me most about all this is how logical, minimalist, and intuitive it all is. I can easily imagine someone who's never played adventure games easily understanding the controls and logic of Amnesia. It almost feels like a deceptive experiment to corrupt modern FPS gamers into liking adventure games, which I am all for. Anyone familiar with Half-Life 2's physics and "grab" mechanics will easily understand how Amnesia works, and they'll have no idea they're really playing Shadowgate.
I am still very early in the game, so I'll be interested to see if my initial impressions stick, or if the game transforms itself into something else along the way. Regardless, Amnesia has already proven it is possible to adapt certain conventions of adventure games to modern first-person 3D gaming, and do so intuitively and fluidly, which is itself a minor achievement.
September 6, 2010 8:17 PM
Why I Didn't Like Scott Pilgrim.
This post originally appeared on Matt Weise's blog Outside Your Heaven.
I am 33 years old. I grew up on the NES, and yes, I remember Clash and Demonhead and Crash and the Boys Street Challenge. Those were my games; that was my generation, and I walked out of Scott Pilgrim unimpressed. I feel it's important to explain why, since the gamer community seems to be going hysterical about the film, even as it's failing at the box office, putting it on the fast-track to cult status before it even hits DVD.
There doesn't seem to be much room to be down with gaming but not down with the film. It's almost as if you have some cultural duty as a gamer to like the film, since it is one of the first films by a director who "gets" gaming culture. The problem for me is that Edgar Wright's SPACED, which he made with his Shaun of the Dead co-writer Simon Pegg and actress Jessica Hynes, and which he made over a decade ago, was a thousand times better than Scott Pilgrim as a look at gamer culture. A kind of dream-like mediation on what it meant to be a 20-something Londoner in the late 90s (during the height of the Playstation 1), it was more real, more clever, more complex, and far more intelligent. By comparison Scott Pilgrim is a pantomime cartoon that confuses caricature with character in ways that seem below Wright's directorial talents.
Sometimes I wonder if Sin City "ruined" comic book movies, since nowadays people seem to have this idea that the proper way to adapt a comic is to simply mimick it on-screen in a grotesque combination of special effects and slavish, puppet-like acting. Although certain actors in Scott Pilgrim handle this better than others (notably Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Jason Schwartzman, who aren't "real" but seem to find the right note for their stylized performances) it largely results in a kind of wacky, sustained phoniness, as if you're watching a sketch comedy stretched out to the tedious length of a feature film. I am not against stylized craziness, but content of this sort needs a strong undercurrent of emotional and psychological reality to ground it, to make all its flights of fancy feel like poetic expressions of something real, and not just empty exercises in pop-cultural chic. One way to achieve this is for the actors to behave naturalistically, to provide a counter-balance to the unreal style. Suspension of disbelief works when we believe actors believe what's happening to them, and by and large the performances in Scott Pilgrim are way too telegraphed, way too controlled, to achieve that.
If you compare Scott Pilgrim to Wright's previous work, you'll see this is a big difference. SPACED, Shaun of the Dead, and Hot Fuzz all are about the mundane reality of real people colliding with fantastic genre worlds, and in each case the acting and dialog provides a clear counterpoint to the highly stylized world of the genre. The thing that makes Hot Fuzz not a Michael Bay movie is its deliberately down-to-Earth (though still comedic) acting and dialog, and the reason Shaun of the Dead is, in a lot of ways, superior to the George Romero films that inspired it is because the level of dialog and acting is far above Romero's ever was, making the characters frankly a lot more believable. SPACED, which is more about the imagined worlds of genres (including those of movies, science fiction, and videogames) colliding with the everyday life of Londoners, has a similarly dialectic approach to fantasy vs. reality. The fantasy largely comes from Wright's direction, in his stylistic references to Quentin Tarantino, Sam Raimi, and various Playstation games. The reality comes from Pegg and Hynes, who wrote the dialog and play the two leads. Though Hynes wasn't a writer on Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, Pegg was still a co-writer. Scott Pilgrim marks the first time Wright has worked without Pegg as a grounding influence, and one has to wonder if the monotonous fantasy overload of Pilgrim isn't the direct result.
I don't mind if other people like Scott Pilgrim. I'll admit the film is clever in certain ways, and I am not above feeling a small thrill at some of the references. Still, I must stress the thrill is rather small, and I would never confuse this kind of thrill for nuanced writing, acting, or storytelling. Gamers are still, in certain ways, a marginalized culture, largely misunderstood by the mainstream, which is why we often embrace whatever meager representation comes down the Hollywood pipeline. But a movie isn't good just because it validates your culture, and I personally find my aesthetic sense of film is too strong to accept a movie like Scott Pilgrim based purely on such criteria.
You know what would be better than seeing a Clash and Demonhead reference in a movie? Seeing one in a good movie, the sort which I know Wright is capable of, and which I hope he'll do again if given the opportunity. Until then I'll still be recommending SPACED to anyone who wants to know what being a gamer is like.
August 27, 2010 2:42 PM
Revisiting Riddick.
This post originally appeared on Matt Weise's blog Outside Your Heaven.
I just played Starbreeze Studios' Chronicles of Riddick for the first time in several years, and I was struck--yet again--by how good the game is. In general I dislike "macho" games, so when one cuts right through my disdain for testosterone-fueled bravado I sit up and take notice. The only game in recent memory to have this effect on me was last year's underrated Bionic Commando, which I found genuinely thrilling, nuanced, and superbly designed in spite of its meat-head protagonist. One might imagine it's the sheer polish and professionalism of these games that makes me gladly overlook their juvenile swagger. But if that were the case I'd also like God of War, Halo, Gears of War, Call of Duty, and just about every other AAA game that features men unironically kicking ass. Such games tend to bore me, so why does Riddick make being a bald asshole in a wife-beater seem interesting?
Some of it is undoubtedly Vin Diesel's voice performance, which is so humorless and dead-pan it easily qualifies as camp. Camp alone, though, doesn't save a game for me. Mad World was similarly campy yet bored me to death in the first hour, probably because it was about nothing but smacking people around. Starbreeze's Riddick, however, is about a hell of a lot more than that. It is a surprisingly subtle game that combines stealth, shooting, boxing, and conversation more elegantly than most other 3D games I can think of--easily better than Deus Ex, which is one of the more historically famous examples of such genre-bending. (Although, to be clear, when I say "better" here I mean it strictly in a usability sense, not in the sense that Riddick in any way approaches Deus Ex's ethically complex narrative universe.)
This is perhaps the big difference between a game like Riddick and many other "macho" games. The obvious production quality of most of them is in service of game design goals I have no real interest in, goals that seem to grow out of their macho attitudes. God of War is a brawler, and Gears of War and Call of Duty are both shooters, which we might include under some uber-genre of "Men Breaking Shit". No matter how good these games are all their quality is squarely aimed at trying to make punching, shooting, and eviscerating people more fun... as if there weren't enough of this in games already.
I was at GDC the year God of War 3 premiered at the Sony keynote, and I remember--to my astonishment--the audience going bonkers when Kratos ripped a griffin in half in mid-air. The same thing happened at E3 a few years earlier, at a presentation when duel-wielding in Halo 2 was revealed. People just went nuts. It's not so much that gamers like this sort of thing, but that so much time, effort, and money goes into advancing it. Should I be impressed that ripping off heads is more fun now than it's ever been? Am I supposed to believe this is some sort of important frontier in game design that we need to direct millions and millions of dollars toward?
I don't see how such things advance the medium. They seem to advance only their own genres, which are both static and narrow in the experiences they are hell-bent on providing (again). What lessons, for example, could a developer trying to make a narrative game aimed at senior citizens learn from God of War? Games that have more eclectic design goals--even if they involve men breaking shit--tend to be more useful to the ongoing advancement of game design. Riddick might be about male rage, but it's also an experiment in the complexities of immersive role-playing, of what it means to "feel" like a certain kind of person in a certain kind of situation. An experiment of this sort feels more potentially useful to me than figuring out yet another way to skin a hydra. Starbreeze's game remains one of the better examples of how developers can combine elements from various familiar genres to create a game that doesn't seem to be dictated by genre logic but by fictional logic--the logic of story, character, and world.
Viewed in parts Riddick's various game systems are obviously ripped-off several famous games--including Punch-Out (for puzzle-like boxing), Thief (for light-based stealth), Deus-Ex (for conversation and choice), and Half-Life (for non-cinematic narrative devices)--but viewed as a whole none of its influences feel derivative since they are all so artfully combined. Take for example the brilliant tutorial sequence, where Riddick escapes captivity and blasts his way to freedom so you can learn the basic game mechanics. Most games come up with with lame reasons as to why you are stripped of all your badass abilities after the first 20 minutes, but Starbreeze's choice to structure this as a daydream--a pathetic fantasy you are having before you go to prison--was a small stroke of genius. The contrast between the agency felt in Riddick's fantasy and the brutal lack thereof in the following credit sequence, in which the player (in handcuffs) is only allowed to move the camera as they are marched into prison, is quite effective, and shows a synthesis of familiar conventions into a cleverly expressive whole. The "on rails" opening is of course lifted from Half-Life, but it's actually much better than Half-Life, because here it is more than a formal experiment in delivering narrative information. It is being used to illustrate a point about freedom and agency, of fantasy versus reality, that eases the player smoothly into the challenging "prison" of Starbreeze's game design.
I could go on about the various unoriginal game conventions Riddick expertly bends to its will, a will that seems to have little in mind besides making you feel like you are Vin Diesel. That I don't particularly want to be Vin Diesel is mitigated by the fact that this game makes you feel like Vin Diesel so well it is hard to play the game without wondering why more games don't achieve a similar level of protagonist-player fusion. Batman: Arkham Asylum is one of the few games in recent memory to really follow Starbreeze's example, ripping off other games left and right but arranging their familiar elements in such a way so that they cease to feel like "parts" of other games and instead blend into a sharp procedural portrait of an iconic protagonist.
I guess my ideological view of game design is that we should be spending our time exploring how to shatter genre, not reinforce it... but we don't have to start from scratch if we want to create a particular effect. Lots of individual game conventions have been experimented with in literally thousands of games over the past few decades, and lots of them create specific effects rather well. It's is a shame, then, that so many of them have become arbitrarily grouped together in the prisons we call "genres" when they can be mixed and matched to achieve cohesive, expressive effects. Developers should not be thinking "lets make an RPG" so much as "lets make a game that makes you feel like a knight"... or a firefighter, or a grieving parent, or a professor, or anything really. Most of all developers should be aware that they have a massive palette of design tools to achieve these things, not just those arbitrarily bound together by formula.
An artful combination of the right game conventions--even familiar ones--will achieve their own expressive coherence, a sum much greater than their respective parts. It would be nice if there were more games that did this well. Then I might not have to settle for one starring Vin Diesel.
August 11, 2010 5:00 PM
What does researching adventure games mean?
The editors at Adventure Classic Gaming invited me to write an article about research in adventure games. This was my opportunity to explain adventure game fans what I do and, more importantly, why they should care too. What I explain in the article, although focused on adventure games, is my understanding of what games research may be (we games researchers are still figuring that out).
An excerpt from he article:
The academic study of videogames has become an interdisciplinary research field. Game studies scholars come from a variety of disciplines, such as education, sociology, game studies, and computer science. The objects of their studies are just as diverse: specific genres (e.g., casual games (1) or role-playing games (2,3)), players, formal aspects of game design, to name but a few. Adventure games are also part of this rich research landscape, and their status in the field of game studies remains to be defined. This article is an introduction to the study of adventure games and how research can inform not only scholars but also game developers and fans of the genre. [...]
There is much that can be learned from adventure games and their long history (by videogame standards). Developed between 1975 and 1976, Adventure (Figure 1), also known as Colossal Cave, is commonly cited as the first adventure game (6). Decades later, adventure games are still released both commercially by development studios and non-commercially by dedicated enthusiasts. Computer technologies have evolved, and adventure games along with them, going from text to mouse input to touch screens. The evolution of the genre has not been linear, but rather has branched into different subtypes of adventure games. This has led to new interactive fiction (also known as text adventure games) being released along new point-and-click adventure games, both by commercial developers and by aficionados of the genre.
You can read the rest of the article at Adventure Classic Gaming.
August 11, 2010 5:00 PM
What does researching adventure games mean?
The editors at Adventure Classic Gaming invited me to write an article about research in adventure games. This was my opportunity to explain adventure game fans what I do and, more importantly, why they should care too. What I explain in the article, although focused on adventure games, is my understanding of what games research may be (we games researchers are still figuring that out). My own work with Rosemary is one the examples of hands-on research on adventure games.
An excerpt from he article:
The academic study of videogames has become an interdisciplinary research field. Game studies scholars come from a variety of disciplines, such as education, sociology, game studies, and computer science. The objects of their studies are just as diverse: specific genres (e.g., casual games or role-playing games), players, formal aspects of game design, to name but a few. Adventure games are also part of this rich research landscape, and their status in the field of game studies remains to be defined. This article is an introduction to the study of adventure games and how research can inform not only scholars but also game developers and fans of the genre. [...]
There is much that can be learned from adventure games and their long history (by videogame standards). Developed between 1975 and 1976, Adventure, also known as Colossal Cave, is commonly cited as the first adventure game. Decades later, adventure games are still released both commercially by development studios and non-commercially by dedicated enthusiasts. Computer technologies have evolved, and adventure games along with them, going from text to mouse input to touch screens. The evolution of the genre has not been linear, but rather has branched into different subtypes of adventure games. This has led to new interactive fiction (also known as text adventure games) being released along new point-and-click adventure games, both by commercial developers and by aficionados of the genre.
You can read the rest of the article at Adventure Classic Gaming.
August 2, 2010 10:53 AM
Metal Gear: Game Design Matryoshka - Part 4: Soldiers Are People Too.
This post originally appeared on Matt Weise's blog Outside Your Heaven.
MGS3 was the moment when the Metal Gear series transformed from refining its core concept (military espionage) to expressing new concepts (mortality, survival, etc.). It did this by taking the ever expanding system of actions, goals, and behaviors built up over the course of four games (MG1, MG2, MGS1, and MGS2) and re-organizing them along the contours of a particular theme (surviving nature) which grew out of a particular setting (a sprawling wilderness). The following games in the series follow the same basic design exercise, of choosing a setting and theme and allowing them to guide the rearrangement of familiar elements into a new system of meanings that make the game "about" something new.
Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops (PSP 2006) looks almost identical to MGS3 at first glance. A budget sequel made on a portable platform, it reuses a large amount of art and gameplay elements from its immediate predecessor. Yet the way these things are reconfigured makes the ultimate experience quite different. MPO boasts almost all the same core actions as MGS3, including interrogation. In this game however interrogation takes on a whole new meaning. Interrogated soldiers now give two kinds of information, expressing either loyalty or disdain for their commander. If they are disdainful you can knock them out and drag them (like in MGS2/3) to an extraction point. Once extracted, they will "join" your cause, becoming playable characters in future missions. You can recruit loyal soldiers as well, but they take longer to "convince" to join your cause.
Time, unlike in previous Metal Gear games, is an important part of MPO. Instead of a single, on-going "mission" MPO is broken into several smaller "missions" accessible from a map screen. Going on a mission shifts the clock forward 12 hours, turning day to night or night to day. This day/night cycle has implications for many traditional Metal Gear mechanics, including sneaking and stamina. The camo system from MGS3 is gone, but now visibility is determined by time of day. Night missions provide better cover than day missions, and stamina is replenished not by living off the land but by resting. Players can choose to "wait" a 12 hour cycle in order to replenish stamina. (After all, running three missions in a row means you just went 36 hours without sleep.) The same low-stamina effects from MGS3 remain (shaky aim, etc.) but they require different strategies to deal with. Food can replenish stamina, but since MPO takes place in primarily urban environments there are no animals to hunt. Food must be found in storerooms or other buildings, and there is simply not enough to sustain one indefinitely.
Another major change in MPO is the radar, which replaces MGS3's dual radar system (itself a split-in-two version of the radar from earlier games) with a general aureal sensor. Clever players will recognize that this sensor is basically a visualization of the directional mic from past games, showing which direction sound is coming from and how loud it is but nothing else. This makes navigating around MPO's urban environments fairly tricky, as great care must be taken to guess where enemies are based on sound. In true Metal Gear fashion, however, MPO alleviates this anxiety by adopted another special case mechanic from past games and blowing it up into a core game system.
Both MGS2 and 3 allowed players to done disguises at certain key points, which allowed them to walk freely among the enemy provided they did nothing "suspicious" (like, for example, wave a gun around). MPO approximates this mechanic by considering all uniformed ex-enemy soldiers "in disguise" when they are on a mission, blending in with enemies of the same uniform. When playing this way a chameleon icon appears on the screen, indicating your cover is intact. In this state you can walk around at your leisure, explore areas, and find items all without having to sneak. Do something "suspicious" though, like skulk around a corner or crawl into an air vent, and your cover is blown. These tensions are further alleviated by "field data", dots that show up on your map telling you where items and enemies are. This is the exact same data that was procured in MGS3 via interrogation, only now it is gather by dispatching "spies" into the field. Unused recruits can be assigned to several jobs of this sort, including weapon development and medical research. These jobs have various effects on how you perform in the field, making them essential to mission planning.
At its simplest MPO is a game about the tensions and logistics of kidnapping, the way MGS2 was a game about the tensions and logistics of murder. It's about winning the hearts and minds of the enemy and building your former foes into your own guerrilla army. These logistics, which existing Metal Gear mechanics are reconfigured around, grow out of a theme, this time derived from the overarching Metal Gear mythology. Snake/Big Boss's transformation from a solo operative into a great military leader, which had long been part of the Metal Gear backstory, doesn't just guide the narrative of MPO but the entire game design, a design where every "enemy" is just an ally you haven't made yet. In the next installment, we'll see how this increasing focus on soldier behavior leads to a procedural model of the psychological effects of war.
July 21, 2010 2:46 PM
SCUMM: The Joys of Exploration
I had the chance to write about the Lucasfilm / Lucasarts SCUMM games (e.g. The Secret of Monkey Island, Loom, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max Hit the Road) for Design Aspect of the Month. The article is a defense of these games in terms of their game design, which encourages the player to explore the world. The writing in these games is certainly excellent, but it would not be as enjoyable or famous if it weren't supported by the design.
You can read the article in two posts: Part I and Part II.
July 10, 2010 7:12 PM
Why Red Dead Redemption Is Disappointing
This post originally appeared on Matt Weise's blog Outside Your Heaven.
In a previous post I praised Red Dead Redemption for almost being a great world simulation. Really what I meant is that it looks like one if you squint hard enough. Although what I said before basically holds, I would like to elaborate on exactly what it does that keeps it from being a genuinely robust simulation of real emergent consequence.
First of all, there are different rules for different situations. Shooting someone in the leg or arm is non-fatal... except when the game arbitrarily decides otherwise. For example if someone steals your horse and you shoot them in the leg to knock them off, it is for some inexplicable reason always fatal. The same goes for large scale shoot-outs, the kind where several dozen enemies are shooting at you from behind cover. In these situations shooting people in the arms or legs simply kills them, apparently for no reason other than in such circumstances you're "supposed" to kill people. This is made clear by an omnipresent, ever-helpful on-screen prompt, which pops up from time to time to inform your what your goal is. "Kill the outlaws" is a typical prompt, which makes unambiguously clear what sort of behavior is expected (and allowed). Even though Redemption supports a much wider range of behaviors than killing, the game frequently flips certain ones on and off like a light switch in order to force the player into a singular challenge with a singular solution.
Having a voice "tell" you your goals is of course a way of preventing you from developing your own. A real world simulation would simply have consistent rules and let any emergent outcome they support be fair game. If Rockstar had the balls to rely on this consistency, to trust that it in and of itself is interesting enough to carry a game, they'd be making more than just virtual theme parks. Historically they seem to back away from any emergent possibility that might not cater to their juvenile audience, which is why they promise richly simulated worlds but then always cop-out by forcing the player into canned situations. Because what kind of wild west sim would it be if you could go through the whole game without getting into a single gunfight? A great one, obviously. Or, to be more accurate, an actual one.
It's ironic that a game which promises and even bases its narrative on the concept of "freedom" offers so little of it. This is why Redemption is best when it gets out of your way and just lets you solve problems according to consistent world rules. Missions are uniformly awful, boring affairs where you are ordered by a voice from the sky to kill people en masse. One can expect shoot-outs in a Western of course, but by the standards of any Western film the amount of people you kill in Red Dead Redemption is ludicrous. Any given mission qualifies you as a mass murderer, as you kill literally dozens upon dozens of people all by yourself--more than Clint Eastwood ever did in every Western he ever appeared in combined. This is made possible largely by the way the game approaches difficulty design. John Marston is an indestructible tank, who can be shot endless times in the chest, face, or where ever and still pop heads with his winchester like he's the fucking Terminator. It's Westworld alright... except you are Yul Brynner.
It's both interesting and disappointing how games like Red Dead Redemption create painstakingly simulated worlds built on recognizable genre logic but intervene the moment any emergent consequence falls outside the "normal" borders of power fantasy. It says much about the gap between my sensibilities and Rockstar's that being an indestructible killing machine ordered by God to kill people seems, to me, entirely at odds with the game's surface image of being a "serious" and "adult" game experience. Rockstar typically likes to project this kind of image, as if they were somehow the vanguard of "mature" videogames, though I personally find it to be a ruse most of the time... both in terms of their instant-gratification / zero-consequence game design and their conveniently nihilistic narratives. The frontier in Redemption is arbitrarily sick, featuring cannibalism, bestiality, grave robbing, etc. While I'm not against such content on principle Redemption exhibits the typical Rockstar trait of exploiting such ideas for simple shock value, or as sick jokes, without really dealing with them.
The game is filled with the usual Rockstar gallery of meaninglessly grotesque crazies. Major characters are taken seriously, but minor characters feel more like the punchline of a dirty joke than actual people. (A guy who has sex with his horse? Hilarious!) The professionally done, decently acted cut-scenes seem calculated to obscure this, and it's only videogame culture's maturity complex--which tends to define "maturity" the way a teenager would--that allows such content to historically pass for "serious" work. It's interesting to think how superficial our concept of "seriousness" is, when something that simply looks and sounds like a real movie gets lauded regardless how morally simplistic it is underneath, whereas something that has cute characters or lower production values gets ignored even though it might be suggesting much more complicated and ambivalent things about heroism, violence, etc.
Rockstar's dime-store cynicism comes out even more in Redemption's total lack of variation in world events. It might have felt different if the behavior of the people you encounter was randomized (as in sometimes a hitchhiker might not want to rob you, etc.) but they aren't, which means you get cynical about people really fast. This could be seen as a sort of commentary, but after a point it feels so shallow and simplistic it's yet another example of the petty nihilism that permeates all Rockstar's efforts. "The world is ugly and everybody's bad" might be a kind of social commentary, but it's a very cheap, childish kind... the sort you might expect from a high school emo poet. This is why Rockstar at the end of the day tends to feel like the Coen Brothers at their worst: people for whom ironic distance is not a mode of thought but a substitute for it.
Rockstar's worlds are stupid, ugly, and weird for arbitrary or petty reasons. They seem more about the narcissistic pleasure of feeling repulsed by (and therefore superior to) other people than trying to understand them. You see this pattern again and again in Rockstar games--in Vice City, in San Andreas, in GTAIV--of a snarky, aloof protagonist encountering weirder and weirder people, all of whom seem crazy and whose craziness seems to exist for no other reason than to give the player something to chuckle at. It's entertaining, but it's hardly nuanced, mature writing... it's precisely the opposite.
This is all not to say that Redemption has no redeeming aspects as a world simulation or as a serious treatment of the topics it raises. At times, when the Rockstar-ness of the game recedes into the background and you are just left alone in its beautiful frontier world, it's quite nice. The best parts of the game, of course, are those that least resemble Grand Theft Auto, notably the hunting, trading, cattle rustling, etc. The combat can be interesting, but only when the game gets out of your way and lets you try to solve problems on your own, and when it gives you the leverage to do that by not changing the rules on you. As I said before, it has all the pieces of a great Western simulation. They are just crippled by the fact that it's a Rockstar game, which traps it in a definition of "maturity" that leaves much to be desired.
June 11, 2010 2:00 PM
Joga Bonito
Much of our work at GAMBIT focuses on digital games. This is not unreasonable given the long history of digital game innovation at MIT, and it is important for us to stay on the leading edge of this rapidly emerging mode of communication.
However, we would be remiss in not pausing for a moment today to reflect on the event that will put a stranglehold on the collective conscious of the entire world for the next four weeks.
As the world's greatest footballers, and greatest football fans descend on South Africa, I am reminded of the power of elegant game design to unite people - under the banners of nationalist pride, and in equal measure, by showing and sharing their (com)passion for a truly beautiful game.
There is some irony in the world's most popular sport being one that forsakes the use of the evolutionary tool that helps set us apart as a species. The simplicity of the rule has enabled the sport's dominance as the world's most popular game. You don't need much to play. A simple ball can be found or fashioned from many things. You don't need official goals, or uniforms, or bats, or pads. You don't need bases, or uprights, or wickets, or even a stadium. You only need some space, and the most abundant available resource, some people. No wonder the sport thrives.
 This simplicity, I think too, serves as a reminder of our unity as global citizens. No amount of dollars, or ready-made suburban homes, or skyscrapers, or cable television rights can be divisive enough. Some of the best players' skills are honed barefoot in the sand. Everyone can play, and many millions do.
So my spirit is invigorated this morning as the first ball is kicked-off. Amazing that a simple game can stir so much passion in so many, and can serve as a reminder of the basic humanity we all share. Joga bonito everyone, and enjoy the momentary pause in the earth's rotation as we all hold our breath in expectant pause before the exhale of triumphant jubilation - goal.
And I can't leave this without declaring my support, blood orange since my youth:
Hup Holland Hup!
May 29, 2010 8:16 PM
Rockstar's Westworld.
This post originally appeared on Matt Weise's blog Outside Your Heaven.
I am currently having more fun playing Red Dead Redemption than any other open world game in recent memory, and certainly more fun than I've had with a Rockstar game in several years. The last Rockstar game that felt similar was Grand Thief Auto: San Andreas, largely because of its heavy emphasis on role-playing elements. Grand Theft Auto IV was marketed as if it were a role-playing experience, but it didn't have San Andreas's benefit of a clear genre reference to build its various game systems off of and give them coherence. The clarity with which Redemption identifies itself as a Western, and the surprising extent to which it allows that to inform its world design, puts it head-and-shoulders above every other Rockstar game. Though it suffers from some vestigial design conventions inherited from GTA (mostly having to do with GTA's open world strategy of being a theme park rather than a holistic world simulation) it offers the player more choices, more expressive ways of behaving, than many open world games.
What's striking about Redemption is how unlike GTA it is, in spite of following a lot of the same conventions. It's pretty ironic, considering the associations of Westerns with guns and violence, that Redemption is one of the least violence-centered open world games I've played... even less, I feel, than RPGs like Fallout 3 or platformers like inFAMOUS. The fact of the matter is in the world of Red Dead Redemption there is a whole hell of a lot to do that doesn't involve killing people. I spent the first several hours of my game simply hanging out on a ranch, learning to tame horses, herd cattle, hunt, trade, forage, play cards with the locals, and in general just enjoy the beautiful countryside. I've heard the first few hours of the game criticized as "slow", but I wonder if this is just because no one asks you to kill people until a good while in. The only violence I engaged in (not counting hunting) in my first few hours was night watchman duty for a small ranch, where I was delighted to discover that killing was only one tool in my toolbox of available actions. All it took to scare off some cattle rustlers was pointing my gun at them. More belligerent trouble-makers could easily be disarmed with a well-placed shot, and if they still didn't feel like running they could be wrestled to the ground and knocked unconscious. And this was before I was given the lasso, which is originally for breaking in wild horses but works just fine on people too. Folks can be intimidated, knocked out, humiliated, scared, tied up, carried, untied--all without being murdered. Any combination of these things usually gets the job done, and the job is usually trying to maintain some semblance of order in an already fairly civilized (by video game standards) world. Probably the biggest irony of Red Dead Redemption is that its vision of a frontier civilization feels more peaceful and less violent than most video game worlds. The countryside isn't overwhelmingly hostile like it is in virtually all other open world games. Animals largely mind their own business, and most of the people you meet are friendly. You will occasionally encounter a hungry pack of wolves or some bandits, but these are always the exception, not the rule. You'll hear gunshots often in the distance, but you can simply mind your own business and go along your merry way. Life's too short, after all. And the open sky too beautiful.
The world of Red Dead Redemption is more indifferent than hostile. It isn't trying to kill you by default, and this may be why your range of responses to it involve a lot more than killing. When violence erupts, you know there's a range of ways to respond, depending on what sort of person you want to be and how you want others to regard you. The social simulation aspect of Redemption fits nicely in with the rest of the world. Murdering someone in the street is considered a crime, even if it was part of the duel, as is hogtying or assaulting random citizens. I once shot dead a man threatening a prostitute with a knife, and I was promptly run out of town by the authorities. Murder in defense of the weak or even in self-defense is frowned upon... unless you happen to wear a badge, in which case you basically have a license to kill anyone considered an "outlaw". Bounties always pay better if they are alive, but most gangs refuse to come quietly, so killing tends to become a natural consequence of law enforcement in practice. Of course, you can try to shoot everyone in the leg, hogtie everyone, etc.--and you may even get a few of them--but when you're pinned down in a canyon by seven snipers who have no qualms about killing you where you stand, pacifism becomes the quick road to suicide.
As a simulation Red Dead Redemption isn't as nuanced or as consistent as it could be, which hinders role-playing at times. I blame this primarily on the game's adherence to the "Rockstar formula" for how it attempts to integrate story and world design. Rockstar games have always been more like theme parks than proper world simulations. Story missions and challenges are like rides in a theme park, and the open world mostly serves as a fun space to explore while traveling from one "ride" to another. The rules that govern the open world are built on the story's theme, but they cannot be very complex or have very serious consequences because that would inhibit the players ability to experience all the "rides". There has always therefore been a disconnect between story and world in Rockstar games, and Red Dead Redemption is no exception. As an experience I feel the game would be a lot stronger if your behavior in the game world actually effected the story. For example, it would be nice if the sheriff of Armadillo wouldn't talk to you if you were an outlaw. Likewise it would be nice if all your actions in general had more lasting consequences. The fact that the game responds to you killing everyone in a town by having the town become a ghost town is great, but the fact that everyone respawns six days later is silly... just like the fact that a killing spree gets you in jail, but only for a week or so. Rockstar still doesn't want to prevent players from basically doing whatever they feel like at any given moment... like any paying customer at Disneyland.
The dissonance created by Red Dead Redemption's theme park structure, along with its occasional bugginess and thematic verisimilitude, makes it feel at times like a computerized version of Westworld, that old sci-fi movie from the 70s about a Western theme park populated by robotic cowboys. When the spell of Redemption breaks down, when the simulation suddenly feels shallow or the narrative inconsistent with my personal player behavior, it feels suddenly like I'm a customer in a Western-themed amusement park, not a carefully role-played persona in a richly simulated world. However when the spell holds, when the stars align and none of the various elements contradict each other, it's the wild west simulation I've waited my whole life to play.
May 26, 2010 5:13 PM
There is No Magic Circle (in Video Games)
(This post originally appeared on Jason Begy's blog, Game Bitiotics.)
Video games have no magic circle, but board games do.
The difference between these two media is, essentially, one of reaction and proaction. If I may be allowed to indulge in a McLuhan-esque theory for a moment, video games are a reactive medium. As a player, I am continually reacting to the game state as-defined by the computer. The computer communicates the current state to me (the means by which it does so varies considerably from game to game). I then process this information, make a decision, and the feedback loop continues. This is of course the same regardless of the nature or genre of the game: in this sense Farmville, Grand Theft Auto and Quake are all the same thing. In multiplayer games the situation is only slightly different: a varying number of people are affecting the state, but the state is still processed, maintained and communicated by the computer.
Board games, however, are a proactive medium. In these games the state is essentially a mental construct shared amongst the players. Each will have (approximately) the same idea of what the state currently is, and when the state is altered each must update his or her own construct accordingly. The actual bits, cards and so on can be thought of as reminders that communicate the state, used so that we do not have to keep everything in memory. These games are fundamentally proactive: as a player, it is up to me to process and update the game state, in addition to choosing how I will alter it when my chance comes. Without the player's shared understanding of the rules and the state the game breaks down. As such, everyone must actively maintain the information in the system that both defines the state and the rules.
With this in mind, I want to address Huizinga's famed "magic circle." Recent scholarship agrees (seemingly unilaterally) that the magic circle is porous at best. While Huizinga implies that a game is somehow set apart from reality, in practice this is never the case. Anyone who has ever intentionally lost a game, bragged (or annoyed by bragging) about winning, or bet on an outcome knows this firsthand. In short, our real lives permeate the games we play, and they cannot be cleanly separated.
As such, it seems that as a theory the magic circle as-described is incomplete, or even incorrect. However, I propose that we should view the magic circle as the information feedback loop maintained by the players of a board game. The magic circle implies that something special and distinct from ordinary reality is occurring during a game. When we play a board game this is exactly what happens: the objects we play with are imbued with a special significance. Paper money is "worth" something, flat discs can "jump" over each other, placing a token in a certain place earns "points." The meaning and information we attach to these objects belongs to the other half of the information feedback loop, a loop drawn between the players-as-players and players-as-processors. This loop is the magic circle, a circle that transforms random cubes of wood into bits of information that we are then somehow able to act upon in a meaningful way. When the game is over the paper money still has value, but it is of a different type.
Six victory points.
With video games the feedback loop is fundamentally different. We do not need to attach any special meaning to Mario, the computer provides it for us. We see and interact with the objects in a video game without any special manipulation of our own cognitive processes. There is no magic circle here, only reaction to a state that is just partially under our control.
I want to conclude by noting that this is not an attempt at a value judgment that privileges one medium over another, despite whatever connotations "proactive" and "reactive" might have in today's business-jargon-infused world. Rather, I believe that board games and video games have some fundamental differences, and this short piece represents a first stab at delineating them.
May 15, 2010 2:57 PM
Letting the World Be - The Inherent Politics of Stealth?
This post originally appeared on Matt Weise's blog Outside Your Heaven.
This phrase appears if you pause Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. It appears in English under a bit of Kanji, the same Kanji that appeared on ads before the game's release. It also appears in-game on Snake's suit. I'm not sure how diegetic it's supposed to be, if the implication is supposed to be that it's been consciously chosen by Snake and Co. or if its just so supposed to be a symbolic statement by Kojima, but it clearly is important in light of the game's narrative arc... or, more accurately, the series' narrative arc. "Let the world be" is a variation on what Big Boss (the supposed "villain" of the series) tells Snake at the MGS4's end, which sums up his (and assumedly Kojima's) entire world-view, the sum-total of everything he's learned over the course of his political and military career, which spanned most of the major conflicts the 20th century and involved as its principle enterprise the creation of a country in opposition to (among other things) the United States' military hegemony over the world.
This phrase is, at the end of the day, probably the biggest problem I had with MGS4 (and I had many). I felt it was a disappointing cop-out to the provocative 20th century counter-mythology Kojima and his collaborators had developed over the course of 20 years, but which flowered primarily in the latest three installments (MGS2, MGS3, and MPO). I realize Kojima doesn't want to advocate war or revolution, but going so far as to have Big Boss--the series' fascinating ideological enigma--flat out say it's categorically bad to try to change the world was to me a betrayal of every interesting moral/political contradiction the series had previously (and boldly) reveled in.
Not change the world? Let the world be? That's always the right political choice, huh? That's what you've got to say to Gandhi, Malcolm X, and anyone else who ever felt injustice demanded change? Maybe not "by an means necessary", but surely there is change worth fighting for, and surely the means are up to each one of us to either support or denounce based on what we personally consider necessary. Surely the lesson cannot be "fighting for anything is bad". Or am I misunderstanding the phrase "let the world be"?
"Letting the world be" may be the absurd ideological resolution MGS4 attempts to force on otherwise rich material, but it interestingly mirrors the ideological resolution of another great stealth series, one that isn't nearly as absurd. Thief III (or Thief: Deadly Shadows, as it was publically known), the final if little played installment of the (mostly) brilliant Thief trilogy, actually had a similar kind of thematic arc. The Thief series was about Garrett, the greatest thief in the world, rejecting the way of his mentors, the Keepers. The Keepers used stealth to observe the world and be its chroniclers, sort of like historians. But Garrett chose to use the skills they taught him to steal rather than learn. The Keepers have a philosophy of balance, which manifests politically as a strict policy of non-involvement, which is why they practice stealth. Thief III was about Garrett realizing how corrupt the Keepers had become, about how they really were meddling in political affairs, and how he activates an ancient fail-safe designed to wipe out their age old store of knowledge. Garrett does this not out of altruism or a conscious belief in their values (which he thought he had rejected) but out of a desire to keep the Keepers from messing with the delicate political balance he profits from by stealing. (Wars are bad for business.) In doing so he ironically was the one true Keeper left, because he wanted balance, and achieved it through stealth.
The Metal Gear and Thief series both feature central villains whose original intentions to change the world for the better become hopelessly corrupted, which necessitates their destruction by a reluctant, stealthy (anti)hero. "Leaving the world as it is" (to uses Big Boss's phrasing) has an interesting resonance in both cases, especially when one realizes this concept is fundamental to the gameplay DNA of the stealth genre. In stealth games players must ask themselves at any given moment "do I interfere?". Sometimes intervention is best. Someones it is not. But it's not coincidental, I feel, that both these series are stealth-based, which means that "to let the world be or to not let the world be?" is a political question the player answers in microcosm every time they make a decision during play.
Are stealth games fundamentally about the morality of covert versus overt intervention in any given circumstance? Is it worth killing someone to steal something? What about to save the world? Am I just the ultimate non-interventionist if I play Thief or Metal Gear without touching or altering anyone? Have I agreed to "let the world be"?
Funny that I find doing "pacifism runs" of stealth games so satisfying, such an exquisite test of my obsessive-compulsive moral conscience, but still I find the ideological conclusion at the end of MGS4 so infuriating. Maybe it's because MGS4's story is stupid in about 20 other ways, or maybe it's because I feel the real world geopolitical problems Kojima mythologized demand a less bone-headedly sentimental resolution. Thief took place in a steampunk-ish medieval fantasy world, but it still managed to generate a resolution that was subtle and complex, not silly and reductionist. If Big Boss's final lesson had to be that "stealth" is the best political strategy for a war-torn world filled with suffering, that could have been an interesting notion had it been treated as the beginning of a conversation rather than the end of one, as a question rather than (absurdly) an answer.
Part of me thinks Kojima was just so intent on ending the series in MGS4--in tying up all its loose ends, even its thematic ones--that he reached for easy solutions more out of desperation than any genuine ideological agenda. Big Boss's weird apoliticism at the end of MGS4 seems to have been thrown totally out the window, for example, in Peace Walker, which is about Big Boss defending a seemingly defenseless country (Costa Rica circa 1974) from covert U.S. military occupation. Of course, one might assume this just represents a step on his road to regret (he doesn't see the "error" of his ways, according to MGS4, until 2014), but on the other hand it's really hard to imagine Kojima suggesting that letting a super power walk all over a smaller country is the "right" thing to do. Indeed, all advertising for the game seems to suggest precisely the opposite.
The stealth genre may be the ideal one for posing political questions surrounding use of force to the player, precisely because it is the only game genre where violence is always a question. Is violence necessary? Do I really need to kill this person? What if I sneak past him? What if he tries to kill me? Then do I kill him, or do I run away and sneak by him later? I know there's a way to do this without killing anyone, but I also know it's the hardest possible way to do things. Every time I take the easier way out, or try to rationalize my mistakes, and the resulting bloodbath, as inevitable (and therefore justified), have I done what politicians, generals, and soldiers do when they make the decisions we pay them in order to not make ourselves?
It's a question worth asking, and one that the player (not the developer) should be answering.
May 14, 2010 1:46 PM
Tipping Point Mini Post-Mortem and Updates
With the (now only semi-) recent press coverage I was asked to put together an update about the Flash version of Tipping Point and talk a little bit about the board game.
Over January 2009 I was asked by the lab to pull together a small team to design a board game for Sloan professor Nelson Repenning. The design goal was for the game to demonstrate the pitfalls of "firefighting" in project development. Also known as "crunch time," Repenning et al.'s research shows that when companies divert extra resources to a project that is running behind, other projects suffer and will eventually require crunch time themselves. Although companies that regularly engaged in this process were often proud of their firefighting ability, the overall result was a gradual downward spiral that was difficult to escape without drastic measures. This is of course an extremely high-level summary, but it was this general behavior that we tried to recreate in the game.
The game that resulted was Tipping Point. While I am happy with the overall design, there are a few problems that we are aware of but lacking resources (mostly time) to address.
 The board game.
First of all, the game is very abstract, and the link between mechanics and fiction is tenuous. In the game each player "owns" one or more projects, and the players must all work together to finish a set number of projects in order to win. Projects are represented spatially: each exists as a growing cross on a grid. Each turn players grow their own projects one space in each direction. If any project grows to the edge of the board it is game over for everyone. If projects collide they combine into a single project that grows faster and is harder to complete. To combat this players place "concept work" or "production work" tokens on the board, preventing project growth. Once a project cannot grow it is completed.
Projects then can be thought of as becoming larger and more unwieldy over time, so in a sense the game represents time spatially. While that is not unheard of (see analog clocks), the link between stopping growth (what the work tokens do) and getting something done (what they represent) is non-obvious. In playing the game it feels like you are just containing the projects, not actually accomplishing something.
The projects themselves are also somewhat strange. As I said before each player "owns" one or more projects at any given time. Ownership is only used to control project growth: projects grow on their owner's turn. While in testing players tend to prefer finishing their own projects there is no real incentive to do so. In other words there is no competitive element, which at this point is the first thing I would add. If players received a score based on when their own projects were finished it would add an interesting competitive dimension on top of a cooperative design.
Additionally, because of how the work tokens function the best strategy is often to delay finishing projects for several turns. Procrastination is generally not considered good project management, and is at odds with the research the game is supposed to support.
All of these issues are related to the aforementioned weak link between mechanics and fiction. Simply put the game could easily be about anything at all (or just remain totally abstract) and it would play just as well, if not better. While we were certainly thinking of the research during the design, there was a certain amount of shoehorning: the way the tokens function feels right for what we were going for, but the names "production work" and "concept work" are pretty awful and obviously forced. As a result the documentation for the board game is very difficult to follow. Part of that is the terminology but also just a lack of time here as well: the rules could certainly be improved but during the semester resources are scarce. I hope to return to them at some point but right now there is no clear opportunity to do so on the horizon.
(If anyone out there is having trouble understanding the rules please email me at jsbegy-at-mit.edu. I will be happy to answer your questions, and knowing what was problematic will help me fix them in the future.)
At this point I personally find the tension between the play experience and fiction just as, if not more interesting, than actually playing the game. As it stands I think the game feels more like being in school than working for a company, which is a result of the way the difficulty progresses. At the start of the game each player only has one project, so there are four in total. After every other project is completed (after the second, fourth, etc.) another project is added to the mix. By the end of the game there will be seven projects on the board at the same time. This works well in that it motivates a certain behavior, but feels more like being in school: as the semester closes the work load ramps up, just as in the game. During my various stints in corporate America I never had quite that experience. Certainly there were busier times than others, but never the same type of extreme ramp-up (adding projects / final exams) followed by a complete stop (winning the game / end of the semester).
Having said all this, I do think it is an interesting game. It is something more of a puzzle than most board games I am familiar with, and the gameplay creates an interesting group dynamic. Because new projects are placed semi-randomly much of the time playing is spent in discussion and planning as players try to determine who should be doing what and when as players balance between focusing on current projects and preparing for the placement of new ones. Discussion becomes such a focus it caused us to include a "turn token," basically a piece of paper the players pass around so they can remember whose turn it is.
I personally still enjoy playing it and am proud of the game and the team. Reactions around the lab were generally positive as well, which lead to the development of the Flash version over the Spring 2009 semester.
Designed as an exact replica, the Flash version attempts to recreate the four-player experience via hot seat multiplayer. As a result it is simple to play by yourself, but at the cost of the group dynamic. We had initially hoped this version might be a way to play with fixes for some of the problems mentioned above: we had many discussions about including a scoring mechanism and changing the fiction to something else entirely, but with an even smaller team than the board game there simply was not enough time. (If at this point you are wondering why you should take time management advice from people constantly running out of time you are probably not alone.)
As it stands the Flash version is much more abstract, using very iconic graphics designed more with usability in mind. For example, in the board game concept work tokens are pencils and rulers, while in the Flash version they are just black circles. This version has not been playtested outside of GAMBIT's QA department, so what difference these graphics will make is currently unclear. I personally am looking forward to seeing player reactions, as my thesis research concerns abstract games and how they are interpreted.
Despite the game's shortcomings, overall I am happy with the design. While playtesting I never got tired of playing, and would find myself forgetting to look for bugs and instead focusing entirely on my strategy. I hope you find it just as enjoyable.
April 26, 2010 12:00 AM
Cold War Punk.
This post originally appeared on Matt Weise's blog Outside Your Heaven.
Hideo Kojima's political mythologizing, which was so frustratingly absent from Metal Gear Solid 4, seems to have returned with a vengeance in Peace Walker. Returning to the Cold War era seems to have energized him and his team, with a game that looks to be more colorful and focused than MGS4's mish-mash of half-realized ideas. A lot of this might have to do with the fact that Peace Walker is clearly a game he wants to make, not one he thinks fans want him to make. No one asked for a euphoric, philosophical, Wagnerian extravaganza set against the backdrop of Nixon's resignation, but Kojima and Co. seem determined to deliver a bizarre, science-fiction version of the politically-charged 1970s whether you want it or not.
Cold War Punk. What else could you call it? MGS3, with its strange James Bond-inspired retro-futurism, certainly was this, and now that we have this label we could easy include things like the Fallout series. Such works exploit the iconography of that era to create fantastic worlds, alternate 20th centuries whose familiar symbolic landscapes are reconfigured into operatic counter-mythologies of world history. They mythologize the 50's, 60's, and 70's the way Sergio Leone mythologized the American West, turning it into a larger-than-life fantasy world that comments on the real world through exaggeration.
The symbolic universe of Peace Walker already seems a thousand times richer than MGS4. The use of television as a visual motif, of using what I can only assume is a riff on the emergency broadcast system (the TV images that was supposed to show if there was a nuclear attack), is instantly evocative. And the modification of the peace symbol, so that it looks like a bomber jet, perfectly embodies the contradiction at the center of the game's story, that war and peace are inseparable.
This is expressed in a Kant quote that presumably begins the game, that peace is an "unnatural" state, that the natural state of human affairs is war, that peace must be "created" by war. This doesn't seem to be a conclusion Kojima agrees with so much as a terrifying philosophical position that explains the madness of the Cold War. The title of the game is a reference to Metal Gear, the walking nuclear deterrent. By threatening war it ensures peace, thus it is the "peace walker", a walking machine that creates peace out of war. It is a monster that embodies the Kantian contradiction, just as the modified peace symbol does, as does the visual motif, seen in the Maurice Binder-style trailer, of one finger versus two fingers.
 
One finger extended can press a button and end everything, but raise another finger and you have "peace". The way the trailer ends, with the emergency broadcast system image, with the modified peace/war symbol at its center, being "pressed" by a single finger (as if it were a launch button), only to have a second finger at the last moment extend and create "peace", right before the TV image violently cuts and the world is plunged into (nuclear?) oblivion... this all represents a marvelously coherent appropriation of pop-cultural symbolic language to express what the game's about. It's the madness of nuclear brinkmanship distilled to a single, potent image.
It's because of this trailer that I did a little reading and realized that the peace symbol is, in fact, a direct reference to nuclear disarmament. It is an iconic abstraction of "N" and "D" in semaphore code, so the attempt to also associate "fingers" simultaneously with nuclear destruction and nuclear disarmament seems a fitting extension. If the difference between peace and war is one finger, how hard is it to extend that extra finger? But even then, what would it mean? One finger can press a button, but does two fingers necessarily mean peace? Kojima mentioned in an interview that even 'v' is ambiguous. It could be 'v' for victory. Is victory the same as peace? Is peace only created through victory, through war? Peace Walker layers all these double meanings on top of each other, so that they become a haze of contradictions we feel lost in.
 
It is a very Kubrickian view of war, and indeed Kojima seems to be drawing from Stanley Kubrick in both subtle and unsubtle ways. Not only is there a character in the game called "Strangelove", everything about the game seems to suggest war's absurd duality, a view that was most directly expressed in Full Metal Jacket, in the scene where Matthew Modine's character is questioned by his commander as to why he would wear a peace symbol on his helmet. His response is ""I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, the Jungian thing..."
"Jungian" would be a good way to describe the insane symbolic universe of Metal Gear, with its bizarre characters, technology, and iconography that seem to rise out of our (or at least Kojima's) pop-cultural unconscious. Kojima's graphic design team is incredible, and they seem fascinated by collecting symbols and icons that elegantly capture the big ideas they want to explore.
Unfortunately, Kojima doesn't seem able to capitalize on these rich symbolic systems--to really back them up with content--as well as you'd hope, the way people like Alan Moore do in Watchmen (another work we might call Cold War Punk). This has especially been a problem lately. MGS4 was more about oogling tits and teary reunions than really examining in detail the socio-political implications of a war-driven global economy. Kojima sometimes seems to make the mistake (which, I'd argue, is a common pattern among fans-turned-practitioners) of confusing symbolism with content. At his best moments, his symbolic labels and operatic exaggerations serve to reinforce an underlying depth (The Joy and The Sorrow in MGS3) but at other times they insistent on a depth that just isn't there or--at worst--blatantly contradicted by crass presentation (the Beauty and the Beast Unit in MGS4).
 
What Kojima and his team are consistently excellent at is showmanship. What he's really promising with such ads is that his games will be about these ideas, and he has delivered enough in the past (mostly in MGS2 and MGS3) to still make such hype genuinely exciting. Most game makers don't even seem interested in promising such things. And even if Kojima doesn't keep these promises, maybe somebody inspired by his tantalizing sound and fury will.
UPDATE
It has been brought to my attention that what I thought was an artistic riff on the U.S. emergency broadcast system was, in fact, a PAL test pattern. The color bars that I showed above (known as the "SMPTE color bars") are the NTSC test pattern. The black and white image to its right, known as the "Indian Head test pattern", is what the NTSC test pattern was before the color era. Both test patterns have vague connotations of nuclear disaster in the U.S., because the Emergency Broadcast System used to show the test pattern on television and state that this is what would show in the case of a nuclear attack. I have personal memory of this, having grown up in the 80s in the U.S., which is perhaps why I and other American game makers associate the SMPTE color bars with national emergencies.
I had originally assumed that Peace Walker's test pattern was some combination of the SMPTE color bars and the Indian Head circles, but it's actually just a copy of the PAL test pattern. This makes me wonder if the theoretical practice of showing test patterns in the case of nuclear attack was as strong in PAL regions during the Cold War as it was in the U.S. Peace Walker seems to suggest it was, although I'd be interested to hear if this was (or still is) indeed the case.
Another possibility for the choice of the PAL test pattern is the association of "P-A-L" with "Peace At Last". PAL stands for "Phase Alternating Line" but when it was first introduced industry insiders sometimes joked it stood for "Peace At Last" or "Perfect At Last" because of how superior they felt it was to NTSC. Though somewhat oblique as a reference, it seems possible that this was one of the main reasons for the choice of the PAL pattern, since it would give Peace Walker's television motif the same contradictory connotations as the rest of its symbols. If the PAL test pattern simultaneously suggests nuclear attack and "Peace At Last" that seems to fit right in line with Kojima's dualism.
April 8, 2010 11:18 PM
PAX Pox vs. Pipe Cleaners
 I have been a part of the PAX Pox team from the beginning. I was there to witness the game in its earliest stages. Back in the day, the game wasn't initially about spreading quirky infectious diseases. At one point it was about stealing access codes from evil GAMBIT scientists bent on taking over the world. At another, it was about stealing ID numbers and taking over territory from other players. Later on, the game abandoned thievery and domination all together and evolved into a competition to build iconic game characters out of LEGOs. Oh, those were the days! Overly complicated, resource-intensive, how-will-we-even-make-this-work-for-500-people, frustrating days...
It took a lot of time and failure to come up with a presumably straightforward game that could attract at least 200 dedicated players. Many of the earlier iterations really could have been developed into interesting party games for maybe 10+ people. However, the complexity of their systems could not be properly explained without at least 3 pages of rules -absolutely unacceptable to use for a game at PAX East, or any convention for that matter. Because these games couldn't be explained in less than 2 minutes and required a lot of materials or GM time, there was no feasible (or cheap) way to scale these for a large convention space without removing major components of the game.
These conclusions drove us to focus on creating a game where simplicity would be absolutely required. From this and other critical ideas, PAX Pox was born! It has one core game mechanic. It can be explained easily without a pamphlet. Most importantly: it's simple! PAX Pox was quite possibly the most straightforward game I've ever helped to develop. We infected over 4000 people and attracted at least 500 infectors. It was beyond satisfying to walk around the expo hall and see badges covered with infection stickers. PAX Pox was a success! This is why I was so surprised to find out that even with all of our hard work developing a simple and interesting game for PAX convention goers there was an even easier alternative: Pipe cleaners.
Yes, pipe cleaners. 
PAX East was made of lines - lines to get in the convention center, lines to go to concerts, and lines to get food. The higher ups at PAX East thankfully were aware of this and designed "line games" to keep the crowd entertained during a 2+ hour wait. One of their games turned out not to be a game at all and just involved giving a large group of adults tons of pipe cleaners. I can't express the sheer joy and excitement people showed when they got their hands on a pack of pipe cleaners. Of course, I shouted with glee like a 5 year old girl when I saw Enforcers tossing them into the crowd. People really took to the pipe cleaners and spent time meticulously weaving head gear, making Companion Cubes, or whatever their imagination called for.
At one point, collaboration entered the mix and we started to trade for different colors. Though, the biggest collaborative event had to be joining together to make an extremely long pipe cleaner chain that stretched to the corners of the waiting room. These cheap artifacts from kindergarten were tapping into the creative conscious of a group of adults and giving them an outlet to interact cooperatively with one another. However, no matter how much fun it was at the time, the pipe cleaners didn't have staying power. Many people left behind their creations once it was time to leave or threw them out later. I packed mine away with the thought of playing with them later, but "later" still hasn't come.
I'm bringing up the pipe cleaners because they present an interesting concept when thinking about designing convention games. Compared to PAX Pox, this was the simplest form of play: hand them out and let the players define their own rules or game. No need for GM-player interaction, score tracking, or even explanations. The problem is that a game which tries to follow this is only as fun as the player allows it. Without a clearly defined goal or structure, there is no incentive for the player to continue with the game or even retain interest. This is where PAX Pox succeeds because even though the awards were buttons and stickers, they still provided some kind of attainable goal for the players. The rules created a space for players to explore and test strategies, while the achievements gave them a way to track personal progress. PAX Pox may not have been as simple as a pack of pipe cleaners, but it was able to create dedicated players that were willing to play the game for all three days of PAX East. This is where PAX Pox succeeds as a convention game. This resilience among players, I have now learned, is something that should be considered as equally important as simplicity when designing convention games.
Worst case scenario, GAMBIT could invest in buckets of Play-Doh and hand them out at the next PAX East...
March 1, 2010 4:00 PM
Metal Gear: Game Design Matryoshka - Part 3: Man versus Nature
This post originally appeared on Matt Weise's blog Outside Your Heaven.
It may be fair to say that all Metal Gears up to and including MGS2 had similar design agendas. They were attempts to model, at increasingly levels of complexity, the core concepts of military espionage. Basic things like sneaking around, taking down enemies silently, and what to do when they found you were the main things being experimented with and revised. This all changes with MGS3.
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (PS2 2004) on the surface seems much like MGS2. It has the same basic controls, the same mechanics of sneaking, of holding enemies at gunpoint. It has the same enemy alert phases from MG2, with their expanded enemy behavior from MGS2. It has the choking from MGS1, and (in a fashion) the same radar system. MGS3 reshuffled these familiar elements, however, giving them new meaning in a different context. A lot of it grew out of a decision to partially remove the radar, by breaking it up into two separate radars that (thanks to finite battery life) could not be used indefinitely. The radar first introduced in MG2 and revised in MGS1 showed enemy position, movement, and terrain with 100% accuracy. The radars in MGS3 showed neither terrain nor enemy vision. One showed moving life forms; the other stationary life forms. And since screens in MGS3 (thanks to its wilderness setting) were filled with animals as well as enemy soldiers, using these radars became a game of detective work, one that required cross-referencing with the player's knowledge of the current terrain and its wildlife. If the difference between soldiers and animals could not be determined, the player's directional mic (which could hear footsteps) was often the only way to definitively tell. The directional mic was introduced in MGS2, where it had limited, special-case application. In MGS3 it became part of the player's core gameplay vocabulary. Unlike MGS2 the player began the game with the directional mic, which made listening a new core action at the player's disposal. By limiting the player's ability to see, but enhancing their ability to hear, MGS3 made the process of simply finding enemies a major aspect of play.
Fighting an invisible enemy--of finding them before they found you--became the defining tension of play, which gave the expanded enemy interrogation mechanics a whole new value. Interrogation went from a cheap way to get items (in MGS2) to the primary mode of gaining gameplay-related information in MGS3. The choke action from MGS1 was retooled to be non-lethal: now a grabbed enemy could be squeezed for info. A chatty enemy could give away the positions of his comrades, which showed up on a sub-screen map. This effectively recreated the same radar information enjoyed in past games, though only after significant thought and planning. Discovering enemy positions in order to avoid (or subdue) them was much more important in MGS3 because the alert phases were much, much longer. Enemies would now search for a matter of minutes, not seconds. Even if the player escaped with their life, they were punished by having to wait for an agonizingly long time for enemy units to perform their sweep-and-clear patterns. Impatience could result in endless chases and gunfights over a wide variety of terrain. And although the player could sometimes call off an alert using the enemy's radio frequency (another useful bit of info that could be procured through interrogation) the only surefire way to achieve your objectives was patiently shaking down soldiers for field info, until you were 100% certain your imaginary map of the situation matched reality.
Interacting with these re-tooled old systems were MGS3's new systems, namely its camouflage and stamina systems. The camo system allowed the player to change Snake's outfit at any time, into a variety of patterns and colors. The closer the pattern and color was to the texture Snake was currently on (grass, gravel, tree bark, mud, sand, etc.) the higher the "camo index". An index of 0 was total visibility. An index of 100 was total invisibility. What was interesting about this system is how it reconfigured the entire game map in an instant based on the player's chosen camo. Similar to Ikaruga, which involved as its principle player action the inversion of hot (dangerous) and cold (safe) space, MGS3 offered players the strategic affordance of deciding for themselves what spaces would be hot or cold. A tree trunk was as perfect hiding place in tree bark camo; a horrible one in snow camo. In past Metal Gear games the configurations of hot and cold space were always fixed, and this fluidity made MGS3 a different strategic animal than other games. It wasn't about finding safe spots so much as creating them, something which was only made possible by its organic (and often vast) wilderness environments. Although there were a few indoor locations that required the symmetrical, ordered thinking of past games, most spaces in MGS3 were messy and sprawling. Some screens contained acres of chaotic, tangled undergrowth, where textures and colors mixed and swirled together in crazy ways. Learning to read and exploit the potential of the natural world was really the main challenge of MGS3. Both you and your enemies were at its mercy, rendered obscure by its twisty madness. Using nature better than your foe (who were also somewhat camouflaged but, unlike you, couldn't change their camouflage) was the order of the day, and it meant the difference between success and failure.
The theme of wilderness survival reached much farther than just manipulating visibility (and therefore combat advantage). It was also woven into the mechanics of health, which departed sharply from past Metal Gear games. Health was no longer replenished by healing items. The player had to wait for their health to recover naturally over time, which was essentially an expansion of the bleeding-recovery mechanic from MGS2. Like bleeding had previously, overall health in MGS3 would recover faster if the player lied still. Lack of stamina would also impede health recovery, as well as cause a host of other ill conditions. Like the directional mic, MGS3's stamina meter was a core game system generalized from a past game's special-case function. It was essentially a re-tooling of the grip meter from MGS2, which governed how long a player could hold onto a ledge. Unlike the grip meter, the stamina meter was on-screen at all times, and would deplete for a variety of reasons. Running, swimming, fighting, hanging, or just natural hunger: all these things would make stamina deplete. Low stamina caused not only slower health regeneration but also diminished aiming ability. The screen would shudder while in first-person mode, making it harder for the player to perform effectively in battle. All this necessitated catching and eating the live animals littered throughout MGS3's wild world. Only by eating the right animals (and avoiding the wrong ones) could the player maintain their health and their physical combat performance.
Far from being just a localized mechanic, eating and stamina in MGS3 was a global system that governed all human behavior, not just Snake's. All enemies had stamina, which depended on stores of food rations scattered throughout the wilderness. Sneaking into and blowing up one of these store houses would cause all enemies in the nearby area to starve, giving them all the same low-stamina effects you would suffer under similar conditions. Their aim became worse, and a single punch would cause them to fall unconscious. Destroying the enemy's non-food resources was another way to manipulate their behavior. Blowing ammo stores made them less likely to waste bullets unless they had a clear shot. This, combined with the fact that enemy soldiers would not shoot a comrade you were holding, gave shrewd players enormous leverage should they find themselves cornered by an group of numerous--but tired and under-equipped--enemies. Taking a hostage, backing towards an exit, and then making a break for it as the few bullets your opponents had missed you by a mile was just one way to bend these logics to your ever improvisational advantage.
Metal Gear Solid 3 is a great example of existing game mechanics reconfigured to create a different game from its predecessors. With the core mechanics of military espionage more or less solidified after MGS2, MGS3 feels like a conscious experiment to explore new flavors of (rather than just better or more complicated) stealth gameplay. It does this by focusing on a setting and a theme, and allowing that setting and theme to both inspire new mechanics and reshape existing mechanics. As a result MGS3 is a game about wilderness survival as much as it is a game about sneaking behind enemy lines, a fact that can be felt coherently in every aspect of its design. This man versus nature conflict, embodied globally in the game system, might explain why enemy soldiers seem a bit more human than before, for now they are unambiguously subject to the same forces as the player. In many games the rules that govern non-player characters and those that govern player-characters are different, but in this game they are the same. Understanding this, that your foe contains all the same human frailties you do, is your key to to defeating him in MGS3's unforgiving world. As we'll see, this gradual humanization of the enemy will only increase as the series progresses.
February 18, 2010 2:00 PM
CSCW 2010
Following up on my post about the workshop, there was this whole rest of the conference there too. Most of it didn't have a very game-oriented agenda. Fair enough, it's supposed to be a conference about work. That's really broad. I would not expect the specific topics of the work of making games nor the work of completing games to take up a large portion of the conference.
By the by, if you ever want to eavesdrop on some lecture I'm attending, give me a follow at http://twitter.com/marleigh I tend to tweetcast, though I warn you, I don't tend to check twitter other than when I'm tweetcasting. And speaking of, anyone know of a tool to archive one's twitter feed?
These days, CSCW (which stands for computer supported collaborative work) seems to mostly be about large-scale social media. Twitter has risen to join Wikipedia as the cliche thing to study, though there was surprising representation from online dating sites as well.
Anyway, there were three gaming talks that I knew of.
Neunundneunzig Zehn Luftballons
The first one was a panel about the DARPA Red Balloon Challenge, where 10 balloons were anchored throughout the US and $40,000 went to the team that found the most, the implication being that teams would use crowdsourcing and social media to win. I actually hadn't heard about this at the time. Pity, because it sounded fascinating. The panel was from MIT (winners, hooray my alma matter!), Georgia Tech (second place, hooray my other alma matter!), and Penn State. MIT used a pyramid scheme for incentive. Anyone who found a balloon got $2000, the person who recruited them got $1000, and the next two people up the ladder got $500. It encouraged you to have as big a network as possible. They also learned it's really hard to give away money, what with taxes and all.
Another interesting finding reported by the MIT team was figuring out malicious false reports. Some were easy to spot (report of a balloon in California coming from an IP address in Montana), but language was another clue. Since reports were in the form of free text, people who actually were in the location tended to refer to nearby landmarks (e.g. "by the libaray," "near the statue.") Fakers had no such references. The Georgia Tech team also had problems with false reports, but much less than MIT did. The Georgia Tech team was giving the prize money to charity, so they figure people felt bad about scamming them.
Amy Voida, yo mama plays Wii
The second gaming talk... I was lame and didn't go to. I'm sorry, there were all those overblown snowstorm reports about Boston, and I was trying to figure out if I was getting stranded. Anyway, it was by Amy Voida, who does ongoing research about console gaming as a social group activity. Luckily her paper "The Individual and the Group in Console Gaming" is online, though has the usual problem of academic papers, which is that it's pretty opaque to people not used to reading academic papers. Pity I missed the talk, the twitter feed reports "amy voida on trash talking during gameplay. she claims it reinforces power relationships and is, basically, bad. like yo mama #cscw" Does that not sound like an awesome talk?
Norman Makoto Su: "HADOKEN!"
The last gaming lecture, I did get to see. Norman Makoto Su is a rather adorable PhD student over at UC Irvine who spends all his free time playing violent video games, Street Fighter IV in particular. See kids? Playing video games makes you graduate!
What? It makes as much sense as most of the other arguments about what video games make you do. Ahem.
Anyway, the talk was called "Street Fighter IV: Braggadocio Off and On-Line", and was delivered with an insider's knowledge and a researcher's eye. Basically it looked at the social, competitive culture that had grown up around Street Fighter II and how it changed with the introduction of Street Fighter IV, which is basically an online console game you play from home. It was especially interesting to hear as a designer, since I could immediately see things to try if one wanted to transfer some of that culture over. Introduce guilds to create rivalries. Allow games to be automatically recorded and downloadable, so people can mash them up to add soundtracks, obscene gestures, whatever. In game taunts that take dexterity to execute ala Mortal Kombat, so players can humiliate rather than just defeat... Really, when one stops to think about it, there are many ways to make this rather off-putting game even more appalling.
Yeah, this culture is clearly not for me. But I did enjoy his discussion of it.
February 17, 2010 2:00 PM
Fun at CSCW? Seriously?
Last week, I attended the conference for Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) in Savannah, Georgia. Mmmm... shrimp and grits.
I was there mainly to contribute to a workshop called "Fun, Seriously?" Yes, for those who follow this blog, this is where the wacky Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure paper I cowrote with Philip Tan was for. Here we are at the conference, dressed up for a roleplaying segment organized by Henriette Cramer and Helena Mentis called "Player's vs. Haters," exploring various attitudes toward fun in the workplace. I'm wearing a genuine Dutch Girl Scout uniform provided by Henriette to represent the military. Words cannot describe how much I covet that shirt.
My segments went ok, I think. I did an overview of some video game literature that I thought would be relevant, which were Nicole Lazzaro's "Why We Play Games: 4 Keys to More Emotion", Mahk's "MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research", and the four page redux of Jenova Chen's thesis, applying Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow theory to video games. There was also an extra bonus rant about the concept of the magic circle of games as a safe place to play, where we digressed into an extra extra bonus rant about Ender's Game, which I cannot properly convey here without spoiling the ending. Fun times.
My second segment did not go as well. I was trying to use an actual problem I was having at work about people mistaking playful behavior for a lack of seriousness to frame a debate about social cues, but we got bogged down in the details of my particular issue. Which was fine as a therapy session, but not really the goal. Ah well.
Beyond that, Andrew Sempere guided us through a bit of Second Life, thus creating the first positive experience I've ever had with the system. I made a glowing pink ellipsoid! All by myself! Henriette and Helena, besides the dress-up activity, asked people to bring examples of papers and presentations and such where the format was fun. We all seemed to show up with objects with high production values, which is sort of a difficult way to incorporate fun. I wish I could draw; I'd love to submit academic papers in comic book form. And last but not least was Zach Pousman, skyping in to talk about using data from print queues to be playful, not creepy.
The big takeaway is that I need to hang out with the IBM Research guys more. Besides Andrew, organizers Li-Te Cheng and Sadat Shami were there to represent the cooler side of IBM. Seriously, they're like four blocks away. We should be having lunch together and stuff.
We're also doing a blog now, so if you want to follow our thoughts on the subject of fun in the workplace, get over to the Fun, Seriously? blog. I've promised to be the wacky one with the fringy ideas, and Andrew's promised to make snarky comments. Should be good times.
February 11, 2010 10:00 PM
Metal Gear: Game Design Matryoshka - Part 2: A New Dimension
This post originally appeared on Matt Weise's blog Outside Your Heaven.
For me the Metal Gear series doesn't fit the franchise model of "same game plus one new feature". It feels more like a 20-year-long prototyping exercise in espionage dynamics. Rules are reshuffled from game to game to create different flavors of emergence. Sometimes the same mechanics dropped into new kinds of level architecture creates a different experience. Unlike most videogame sequels the Metal Gear games are actually different games. Well, except for one.
 Metal Gear Solid (PSX 1998) is notable in that shares more with its immediate predecessor than any other game in the series. MG2's additions of crawling, the radar, and enemy alert phases remained unchanged in MGS. Even the wall-tap, which MGS added as a way to distract enemies, was functionally the same thing as the wall-punch from MG2. One thing it did add was camera manipulation. Being the first Metal Gear game in 3D, Solid essentially took MG2's design and dropped it unchanged into a 3D space. Hiding under things now forced the player into a low angle view. Pressing against a wall caused the camera to swing down into a landscape view, allowing players to see down long hallways. And at any time the player could enter "first-person view mode" which allowed them to look at the surrounding environment through Snake's eyes, although in this mode they could not punch, shoot, or otherwise interact. Certain weapons, like the sniper rifle, allowed such actions in first-person, but they were the exception. By and large combat and movement happened in the same top-down perspective as in the 2D Metal Gears. The camera was pulled much farther in on Snake, giving the player a more limited view of the surrounding space. This is what necessitated the various camera actions, to approximate (albeit with some new cinematic flair) the kind of spatial understanding that was effortless in earlier games.
Gameplay-wise the only new core actions MGS added were in hand-to-hand combat. Players could now grab, choke, and throw enemies. These new moves were useful because of another big change: punching was no longer lethal. Fisticuffs now simply knocked enemies out temporarily, which necessitated alternate silent take-down methods. In MG2 players could always punch enemies into oblivion if weapons failed. In MGS the same behavior would only delay a threat, not eliminate it. And since choking was a lot harder than punching, attempting silent take-downs in MGS generated a lot more anxiety. There were more possible outcomes, more ways to both succeed and fail than before. This, combined with the stronger need to observe before acting thanks to the camera limitations, gave the system largely inherited from MG2 a higher-stakes kind of tension.
 Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (PS2 2001) added a slew of elements that changed the core experience. New kinds of environmental architecture prompted the existence of new moves, including hanging off ledges, somersaulting over obstacles, and hiding in lockers. More significantly, all guns could now be aimed and fired in first-person, which made marksmanship a key factor in play. Precision was necessary because enemies now responded differently to being shot in different locations. Leg shots hampered movement, arm shots hampered aim, and head shots were fatal. Another big change was enemies would now respond to threats of violence rather than just violence itself. Pulling your weapon on an enemy would make them surrender, at which point training your weapon on different parts of their body would terrify them into revealing items or information. Disposing of these soldiers once at your mercy became another new aspect. For the first time players had the option non-lethal take-downs, in the form of a tranquilizer gun. Enemies could be put to sleep for long periods of time (as opposed to briefly dazed, like in MGS). Bodies now needed to be hid before other enemies saw them, which players could do by dragging them to lockers and other hiding places. Soldiers responded to fallen comrades with complex group tactics. Enemies now functioned as units rather than individuals, performing complicated sweep-and-clear maneuvers. Enemies on the offensive would try an flank the player, cut off exits, or call for reinforcements.
The stealth basics of MG1 and the expanded palette of MG2/MGS did not prepare you for the dense and subtle world of MGS2, which required a very different approach to problem-solving. You couldn't just run around killing everybody anymore, even if you did so quietly. Your strategy had to include removing evidence of your encounter. This catapulted Metal Gear into into a new realm of Hitchcockian suspense, as the game was now basically about the logistics of murder and not getting caught. Bodies were not the only evidence to be dealt with. Snake would now bleed when shot, leaving telltale trails of gore for soldiers to follow. Bandages would stop bleeding, but the easiest way was to simple stop moving for a period of time, further reinforcing the value of tactical stillness. The collective fury that would be unleashed on the player if caught made covering your tracks imperative. Engagements had to be kept on an individual level, to prevent group tactics by any means possible. The highest moments of tension were those between when the player was discovered and when the group was alerted. Unlike in MGS, where public alerts would sound the moment anyone saw you, enemies in MGS2 needed to communicate with HQ before the group responded. Killing an enemy just as they reached for their radio was a crisis averted, just as disabling a radio with a well-placed shot was a free ticket to make mistakes.
MG1, MG2, and MGS were fun little cat and mouse games, but MGS2 was really where the series opened wide as a possibility space. The number of dynamic outcomes involved in any given encounter, based on the various cascading levels of enemy behavior, was huge. More importantly, MGS2 required different types of thought and problem solving than previous Metal Gear games. Just because you were good at MGS did not mean you were good at MGS2. Enemy soldiers were different behavioral animals, ones which demanded private attention to be dealt with effectively. MGS2 is when your relationship with the enemy became intimate. "What do you do with enemies once you have them?" increasingly became the key question of the series, and as we'll see many of the big design changes--at least in the next two games--revolve around this idea.
February 1, 2010 8:06 PM
Metal Gear: Game Design Matryoshka - Part 1: The MSX Years
This post originally appeared on Matt Weise's blog Outside Your Heaven.
I just finished the demo for Peace Walker, and I am struck by how streamlined its game design is compared to previous Metal Gear games. The number of core actions available to the player have been significantly reduced, at least at first glance. Some have just been made context-sensitive, while others have indeed been eliminated. Given that Metal Gear is basically a 20 year old game design, one where the core mechanics can still be traced with impressive fidelity back to the 1986 original, its interesting to chart how they've mutated over the course of roughly eight games.
 Metal Gear (MSX 1986) had a fairly small set of core mechanics. The player could move, punch, and shoot various weapons. Enemies would patrol around and attack if you crossed their line of sight, which was pretty straightforward since they had no peripheral vision. Levels were simple affairs where each room was a single screen, and all level design architecture was in right angles. (There was no diagonal movement.) Escaping to the next room/screen meant escaping your pursuers. Enemies could be dispatched up-close and quietly, via punching, or from a distance and loudly, via weapons.
 Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (MSX 1990) added quite a lot of new elements. The biggest was probably the radar system, which was really several new design elements working in concert with each other. Unlike the first game, enemies in MG2 would follow you from screen to screen. Thanks to a 3x3 grid radar, the player could see which of the adjacent screens had enemies and which did not. If an enemy spotted you, they went into high alert and gave chase. If you managed to break their line of sight (usually by escaping to the next screen) they would begin searching for you. Since moving to the next screen no long constituted "hiding", new hiding mechanics were introduced. Crawling allowed you to hide under tables and sneak into air vents, which was now the only way to shake pursuers.
MG2 still contained all the same core player actions established in MG1, only now some of them were given additional meaning in the context of the new system. Punching, which before was only useful as a silent take-down technique, became a mode of distraction. You could punch walls to make noise, which would lure enemies towards you. This example of appropriating old mechanics and given them new meaning in the context of a larger dynamic system is primarily what makes Metal Gear an interesting case-study, an on-going game design matryoshka in which each new design encapsulates the last but still manages remain a distinct experience.
January 27, 2010 10:54 AM
Now on TechTV: Picopoke with Kevin Driscoll
Last year, my assistant Claxton Everett and I sat down with Kevin Driscoll, a recent graduate of the Comparative Media Studies Master's program and the product owner for Picopoke, one of our Summer 2008 prototype games and a finalist in the 2009 Independent Games Festival. Kevin has since gone on to become a Ph.D. student in the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California, but his memory lives on around the lab in the form of our five-part interview, which has just gone live on TechTV.
In it, Kevin explains what his group was trying to do with Picopoke, who plays Picopoke, whether or not Picopoke can actually be considered a game, and why they chose to build it on Facebook. The videos aren't very long (the longest is just over two minutes, the shortest is less than 45 seconds) and they're all very informative, so go check 'em out!
I'd like to extend my warmest gratitude to Kevin for sitting down with me for the interview and for sharing his insight, and to Claxton for all his hard work and much-appreciated assistance! Oh, and Kevin, if you're reading this, appreciate the weather out there in sunny LA. Right now Boston's a big, sloppy, melty mess...
January 24, 2010 7:52 PM
Tracing the Design Heritage of Demon's Souls
This post originally appeared on Matt Weise's blog Outside Your Heaven.
My fascination with Demon's Souls has spurned a quest to discover where the hell its brilliance came from. Most people say it's a descendant of King's Field, the cult first-person RPG series Demon's Souls developer, From Software, did some years ago. I have only really played one King's Field game, King's Field: The Ancient City for PS2, and not for very long. Although there is some resemblance, I think another series, one that isn't as well-known outside Japan, may be the real ancestor.
Shadow Tower was another first-person RPG series by From Software, one I'd never heard of until I began poking around the Internet. Some descriptions I read made them seem a lot more like Demon's Souls than King's Field, so I tracked them down to see for myself.
There are two games in the series: Shadow Tower for the PS1 and Shadow Tower Abyss for the PS2. I managed to grab them both off ebay and played each for a few hours. Shadow Tower is available in English. Shadow Tower Abyss isn't. This a shame because Abyss is by far the superior game, and the one that is, I feel, much closer in style, atmosphere, and gameplay to Demon's Souls.
 The first game is okay. The controls are the clunky non-freelook ones common to many Japanese first-person games, but otherwise Shadow Tower does feel like a somewhat slower, awkward Demon's Souls. Weapon degradation is a major aspect of the game, and encounters with minor enemies can be pretty epic. And, of course, you upgrade weapons by collecting souls, although in Shadow Tower you actually have to pick them up as items. The importance of blocking is also another big similarity, with you being able to map a weapon to one hand and a shield to the other. It doesn't even remotely approach the sublime combat system of Demon's Souls, but you can definitely see the template being set.
The world is rather non-linear and rewarding of exploration. While I am not one to bash PS1-era graphics for being what they are, I do feel that the ones in Shadow Tower are somewhat repetitive. Like Demon's Souls there is no map, but unlike Demon's Souls a lot of environments look the same. This can make the game pretty tedious unless you are prepared to make a paper map as you play. From what I played the game seems actually less linear than Demon's Souls, with more alternate paths available.
The story for Shadow Tower is extremely minimal. There is a tower that is, er, forbidden. You go in. That's it. The games does contain some of Demon's Souls's brooding sense of silence and loneliness. (Like Demon's Souls there is no music.) The environment does seem to be imbued with some elements of narrative. There is writing you come across from past explorers, which looks a lot like the player messages in Demon's Souls, only here they are just baked in as part of the story.
One of the biggest arguments for this game being an ancestor to Demon's Souls is the intro cinematic, which features a knight getting the crap beat out of him by a variety of monsters. The game really seems to suggest a similar sense of mortality and exhausting on the part of the protagonist that was one of Demon's Souls main distinguishing features. People familiar with Demon's Souls's non-U.S. box art will remember the knight riddled with arrows, ambiguously either dead or battle fatigued to the point of collapse. One gets the sense that Shadow Tower was an early attempt to create a player experience shaped around similar ideas.
 Shadow Tower Abyss is very similar to its predecessor, except that it has superior art direction, narrative design, and usability design. The real good news is that it has an option for dual-analog Western-style controls, which is something King's Field never had. In this mode the weapon buttons are the trigger buttons, and players can switch back and forth on the fly between weapons in the right or left hand. (I didn't get a shield in Shadow Tower Abyss, but I'd be surprised if there aren't any.) This makes it almost identical to Demon's Souls's control scheme, which makes the gameplay nice and fluid.
Shadow Tower Abyss has firearms, which is probably the biggest thing which makes it feel different from both Demon's Souls and the original Shadow Tower. It takes place in the present day, and you begin the game with a gun. It isn't designed at all like an FPS though. Guns are useful, but they run out of ammo, which is why you need to deck yourself out with the knives, swords, and other melee weapons you find. It feels like you are an FPS-protagonist who somehow wandered into a Demon's Souls-like game, which is interesting. Functionally speaking the game is not that different, since firearms basically take the place of bows, but it's still an intriguing twist.
The story and world in Shadow Tower Abyss really makes me wish my Japanese was better. The thought and detail put into its environmental narrative is much closer to Demon's Souls than the first Shadow Tower. It's use of sound, light, and color is also closer to Demon's Souls in terms of establishing a mood, and suggesting danger around the next corner. There are a fair amount of NPCs, all of whom you can kill for no reason if you wish. I wandered around for a while just trying to figure out what the fuck was going on, where I was, and just what all these creepy tunnels were built for. The game has a fairly Lovecraftian vibe, with you basically thrown into this scary cave which leads you deeper and deeper into a complex netherworld. In this sense Shadow Tower Abyss really reminded me of Hell Night, another (wonderful) game I played recently that also achieved a similar effect, what I'd called the 'Ultima Underworld Effect'. These are games that really make me feel like I'm a normal human being trapped in a cave or some other such subterranian world, which is where a lot of their elemental power comes from. The lack of load screens helps this feeling a lot, as does the non-linear space design. You really feel like an explorer, not some videogame badass who's just in it for the asskickery.
If I had to recommend one of these games, I'd obviously recommend Shadow Tower Abyss. It can probably be played and completed without understanding much Japanese, and the world and feeling it creates is thick and memorable. It's no Demon's Souls, but it's recognizably similar and effective in what it does. If you want to trace the design heritage of From Software's towering masterpiece, Shadow Tower Abyss is a great place to start, possibly a better place than King's Field.
January 18, 2010 2:21 PM
Games That Made Me - Part 3: The 00s
This post originally appeared on Matt Weise's blog Outside Your Heaven.
There's only one game released this past decade that made the sort of impression upon me that earns it a place on this list. I've loved plenty of games in the past 10 years, but only one that really changed my idea of what videogames can be...
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (Playstation 2, 2001)
My feelings about Metal Gear Solid 2 are intense to the point of incoherence... much like the game itself. A lot of why I love the game has to do with when it was released, which was right after 9/11. For me the game served a function that must have been similar to the film Dr. Strangelove when it was released at the height of the Cold War. As daring, irreverent political commentaries in games go, there is MGS2 and then there's nothing. Okay, well maybe there's Fallout 2, the game that ends with you wiping out the last remnants of a fascist, genocidal U.S. government. But that's just the end of the game. MGS2 is a balls-out 'fuck you' to America's worst dystopian impulses from the moment you press 'start' to the moment the final credits roll. That it seemed to be about America's post-9/11 nationalist hysteria was, of course, an accident of its release timing. But that doesn't change the fact that it functioned so well as a bombastic parody of Bush's new world order.
Because of MGS2 I still think of the people who run my government as "The Patriots": the faceless, powerful elite that are just out of democracy's reach. Whereas games like Deus Ex gave me the same old international conspiracy theories I'd seen in the X-Files, MGS2 gave me a deliciously national conspiracy theory: a horrifically corrupt U.S. government with a puppet democracy and a global censorhip agenda. The Patriots were responsible for everything in MGS2, including the game's intentionally linear design. You follow their instructions and do everything they ask you to, and thereby prove you are willing to be controlled. It's the same game design-as-mind control metaphor Bioshock would use years later, only MGS2 never contradicts itself by pretending rebellion from within the constraints of a designed system is possible. As the authors of your "game" The Patriots' stranglehold on you is absolute, a fact which they rub in your face by the end. A videogame is not a democracy, because the player does not have the ability to rewite the rules. But you don't really want a democracy anyway, do you? Not if you're being sufficiently entertained...
The way MGS2 positioned videogames, with their coyly disguised limits, as metaphors for similar kinds of deceptive government was, in a word, brilliant. It really did have a lasting effect on how I think about both games and government, which to this day is rather cynical. I suppose I feel as incredulous about Warren Spector's utopian notions of "shared authorship" as I do about Obama's promises of hope and change. They are nice promises, but really what does it mean to say a choice is "meaningful" when it is someone else deciding what "meaningful" means? Is the choice between the Left and Right in America a meaningful one? Is the ability to choose between path A or B in Mass Effect a meaningful one? Both game companies and politicians would like us to believe so, but it is important to recognize that these "choices" have been pre-defined within limits we, in fact, have no ability to influence.
MGS2 darkened my view of games forever, and it still remains a remarkable example of astonishingly irreverent political commentary in a mainstream videogame. My demand that games be controversial on political subjects as well as hijack massive commercial budgets for the sake of naked personal statements is due entirely to MGS2. Splinter Cell, Call of Duty, and even Fallout 3 are inferior versions of MGS2 by this metric. In fact, nearly all games are inferior by this metric.
Final Thoughts
There are many, many games that remain important to me that I have not included on this list. Stuff like Super Punch-Out, Gunstar Heroes, Ikaruga, Snatcher, Symphony of the Night and many other of my favorite games are not ones I can really trace back to a "taste genesis", a prototypical game experience that I feel prepared me for loving these games. Looking at the games that influenced your taste is not really an exercise in listing all the games you love, but listing the games that determined the types of games you love. That's why Ikaruga is not on the list in spite of being one of my favorite games ever: because my love of it in no way lead to a love of shmups.
While I like games of all sorts of genres, there are certain types of games I keep coming back to, certain groups of aesthetic choices I tend to look for my enjoyment in. The games I listed--Frantic Freddie, Super Mario Bros., Ultima: Exodus, Bionic Commando, Ultima VII, System Shock, Thief, and Metal Gear Solid 2-- are not necessarily even my favorite examples of the game types they represent. But they are the ones that helped me developed the road map by which I found some of the best games I've ever played, and, more importantly, the tools to understand why I like them.
Ultima VII --> Arcanum, Fallout 1/2, Majora's Mask, Planescape: Torment
Final Fantasy VI --> Suikoden 1/2, Odin Sphere
System Shock --> Metroid Prime, Demon's Souls, Silent Hill 1/2, Hellnight
Thief --> Metal Gear Solid 3, Hitman 2
Metal Gear Solid 2 --> Killer7, Eversion, Passage, Shadow of the Colossus
January 11, 2010 4:54 PM
Games That Made Me - Part 2: The 90s
This post originally appeared on Matt Weise's blog Outside Your Heaven.
Ultima VII: The Black Gate (PC, 1992)
Ultima VII was the reason I got into PC gaming. For a 13-year-old who had been weened almost exclusively on Nintendo, the deep dark world of The Black Gate was transcendental. It was clearly for adults, but not in the crass, pandering way most games are now. Blood and sex is all handled in a witty fashion, and you don't get the sense the developers were impressed with themselves simply for having it. It was, just like everything else in Ultima VII, just part of an astonishingly rich world. Ultima VII was the first time I'd ever seen a game with no loading screen, with characters who weren't just signposts, and with party members who responded dryly and dynamically to many of your actions. My love of persistent, seamless game worlds and witty, complex dialogue comes entirely from Ultima VII. Any Elder Scrolls, Grand Theft Auto game, and, yes, most Bioware games are inferior versions of Ultima VII to me.
Final Fantasy VI (SNES, 1994)
Final Fantays VI was the first game I played that really moved me. This probably had something to do with the fact that I was an emotionally sensitive teenager, but I think it also had something to do with the game's delicate (and arguably unique) sense of loss and tragedy. Unlike all other RPGs I know you don't stop the end of the world in FFVI. It happens, and it has a devastating effect on the group of characters you have gotten to know. The completely non-linear final sections of the game, in which the player has to slog through a dying world in an effort to pull their friends (kicking and screaming if necessary) back towards hope, remain some of the most emotionally intense hours I've spent with a controller in my hand.
It may be nostalgia talking, but I feel that FFVI's melodramatic indulgences have aged a bit better than many other Japanese RPGs, largely because of the pixel art graphics and understated nature of the characters. Very few games in my experience earn the right to engage in the sort of emotion Final Fantasy VI does, and it's probably the main reason I like melodrama in games but hate it when it's done badly.
System Shock (PC, 1994)
System Shock is probably the most immersive experience I've had with a game, period. To me System Shock isn't so much a game as it is a place, a place I remember going. Though I had a very similar experience with Ultima Underworld (a game which System Shock is basically a cyberpunk re-skinning of), System Shock still looms larger in my imagination as the game which made me consciously realize what a first-person suspense story set in a virtual interactive environment could be.
The implementation of a rogue A.I. as a metaphor for the game's designers was a masterstroke which made otherwise pedestrian use of game conventions (puzzles, power-ups, etc.) into a secret engine which fueled the narrative. Matching wits with the game became matching wits with SHODAN, which allowed for all kinds of devious reversals and thwarted expectations without the player's suspension of disbelief so much as shuddering. This all built towards a sublime final moment in which you literally lock wits--as in, you lock consciousnesses--with SHODAN via a cyberspace terminal connected directly to your brain. Having failed to destroy each other physically you face her on her home turf: as software. SHODAN attempts to overwrite your mind--which is expressed visually as her face overwriting your computer screen, pixel by pixel, while you desperately try to delete her mind from the inside out. It's stuff like this that not only makes System Shock a phenomenally memorable game, but also one of the best game-based examples of cyberpunk fiction that I am aware of.
System Shock also did wonderful things with keeping physical space coherent without resorting to putting the player on-rails. There were no load screens that weren't disguised, no cut-scenes that weren't explained as either remote surveillance footage or recorded messages. None of the games which later borrowed these devices (with the possible exception of Portal) used them as holistically or as consistently as System Shock did. My demand for complete coherence in fictional 3D spaces as well as my taste for environmental narratives--real ones that require detective work, not ones that are handed to you on rails--comes from System Shock. Games like Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Bioshock, and especially System Shock 2 are all inferior versions of System Shock as far as I'm concerned.
Thief: The Dark Project (PC, 1998)
Since stealth games are the closest thing I have to a favorite game genre, I suppose I should include Thief: The Dark Project. Also by the makers of System Shock, Thief was great for a lot of the same reasons, but several new ones as well. The biggest thing I took away from it, I think, was the idea that stealth games are in a sense nerd revenge fantasies. They are about a smart weak person taking down a bunch of strong dumb people. Garrett's internal monologue in Thief is about how I imagined my own internal monologue in high school: full of smug superiority, mute rage, and ample wit. This might be why the dumb A.I. (still smarter than a lot of game A.I.) never registered as a flaw to me: the opportunity to taken down idiotic meatheads was clearly a feature, not a bug.
Aside from this Thief impressed upon me, subconsciously perhaps, the notion that violence in games doesn't have to be a foregone conclusion. The stealth genre is one that is basically predicated on the idea that violence is a choice, which might explain why I find its natural contours so appealing. Violence is after all a brutish solution to any given problem. But Thief wasn't boring enough to suggest alternatives based on moral grounds. Rather it suggested that pacifism can be more about narcissism than morality... an intriguing notion that probably speaks more closely to the real reasons behind the behavior of players (such as myself) who obsessively refuse to kill. It's not about right and wrong. It's about one drop of blood ruining my masterpiece. An artist like Garrett--like me--is clearly above such a thing.
Thief is one of the reasons I'm not particularly impressed by many stealth games, but why I try every one I can find in hopes they will generate the complex set of feelings and ideas that it did. Certain games in the Hitman and Metal Gear series approach this, but none of them quite achieve Thief's sense of exquisitely smug empowerment.
January 10, 2010 1:43 AM
Games That Made Me - Part 1: The 80s
This post originally appeared on Matt Weise's blog Outside Your Heaven.
There is a theory in psychology that we go through life looking for surrogates of our parents. Similarly, one can imagine that many of the games we encounter early in our lives are the standards by which we consciously or unconsciously judge games afterward. We perhaps look for the games which shaped our tastes in every new game we play... and are usually disappointed when we don't find what we want.
Looking at the games which shaped us helps us understand why we like certain games and dislike others, or, to be more specific, why we see certain games as inferior versions of other games. I don't think this is anything to be ashamed of, as long as one doesn't pretend there's any objectivity to be hand in this process. We like what we like for complex reasons that were formed reflexively and unconsciously, by our natural gravitation towards certain works of art. Discovering why we gravitate towards some things and not others is a process of self-discovery, and one that is arguably required to intelligent criticism.
Frantic Freddie (C64, 1983)
The first game I remember playing for any significant amount of time. I have no idea how it shaped by gaming tastes other than being the first time I became genuinely obsessed with a game. I never did finish it.
Super Mario Bros. (NES, 1985)
The fist game I can remember that pulled me into a fictional world. I remember going to Chucky Cheese with my parents and dropping endless quarters on a Play Choice 10 just to play the first level of Super Mario Bros. I don't know why I found it so captivating, but I distinctly remember reality dropping away and be being only aware of what was happening inside the arcade cabinet. It was like reading a book or being underwater.
Ultima: Exodus (NES, 1987)
My first RPG and, interestingly, a twice-translated port of a port. Ultima: Exodus for the NES was a surprisingly faithful re-creation of Richard Garriott's pioneering original. All the Japanese developer (Pony Canyon) did was make it cuter. I didn't think much about it at the time, but my experience with the NES Ultima: Exodus--which was, ironically, my first exposure to "Western"-style open-world RPGs--may have profoundly altered the course of my taste development as I got older. I probably wouldn't have gotten into PC gaming if I hadn't first experienced a taste of it on the NES. I wouldn't have known what Ultima was, so I wouldn't have gone crazy when I saw the Ultima VII box in a PC store a few years later. (VII?! Holy shit! It was like getting a game from THE FUTURE!) To this day I am one of the few people I know who loves both Japanese and Western game design aesthetics about equally, who gets just as excited about Final Fantasy as Ultima, who doesn't regard one as an inferior version of the other. I think this has a lot to do with the fact that my first "Western" game was filtered through Japanese sensibilities.
Bionic Commando (NES, 1988)
Bionic Commando was the first game with a story and characters I really loved. They weren't complex at all, but for some reasons the game's presentation--with game design logic being totally dictated by dramatic logic (and not, as is usually the case, vice versa)--enthralled my friends and I to no end when we were 11. This game is still the reason I never mind an irregular difficulty curve as long as it makes sense story-wise. If the last boss is flesh and blood and I have a bazooka... well... he shouldn't take more than one hit, should he? Certainly not if he's Hitler.
December 2, 2009 10:02 AM
Character and Author Intent
At a recent open playtesting session I had the latest build of Pierre: Insanity Inspired running, hoping to get an idea of just how hard the game is and whether anything should be done about that (with only six levels your difficulty curve can easily become a wall). During the course of the night I had a rather interesting encounter with one tester in particular.
For those of you unfamiliar with the game, Pierre follows the adventures of an eccentric artist cat who may or may not be insane. The gameplay takes place on a rotating disc. The titular character, Pierre, is moving around on the outer edge of the disc, which is being bombarded by various falling objects. Some of the objects must always be avoided, and others must be collected at certain times. The game's research goal is to investigate how different types of failure communication can affect player performance. In other words, does the way we tell you that you screwed up matter?
To emphasize the failure feedback, we created a secondary character who pops onto the screen to yell at the player when he or she is hit by a hostile object, or collects an object at the wrong time. The aforementioned tester asked me what the relationship between the two characters was, and I answered honestly: I really do not know. Said tester informed me that my lack of knowledge was "inexcusable," which I found to be a rather intriguing - if slightly hostile - response.
The question is an interesting one, though I had only considered it in terms of authorship and intentionality. Playing the game, it seems to me that the unnamed character does have a relationship with Pierre: in some instances it would seem he wants Pierre to succeed, otherwise he would not get so angry when the player does something wrong. At the same time, when the player fails a level, the character is seen in the background, laughing at and taunting Pierre and the player. Sometimes he is frustrated by Pierre's failure, sometimes he relishes it. So what is going on here? One might point to the title, noting that Pierre himself is probably what "insanity inspired" refers to, hence we cannot take any of his perceptions at face value. But the unnamed character is often addressing the player, not Pierre, and so cannot be a product of Pierre's mind.
During the design of the game our focus was on addressing the research question. Adding a secondary character was merely a way of emphasizing the feedback to the player. Given our intentions, are questions such as "what is the relationship between Pierre and the unnamed character?" even meaningful? A better question might be, "what do you think that relationship is?" Or more importantly, "why do people infer or desire a relationship?"
Although it was never stated outright, I always felt that we were relying on what Scott McCloud calls closure - letting the player fill in the gaps with his or her imagination. There is a lot of space in the game's plot and world, space that - I would hope - the player feels free to complete for his or herself.
To return to the aforementioned tester, then, I wonder what they think of other games with light characterization. Certainly Miyamoto had his characters in mind when designing Donkey Kong, but what are we to make of the relationship between Pac-Man and Blinky? Or Q*bert and those spring-like snakes? Did Mario and Luigi fight a lot growing up? Why are the Black and White kings trying to kill each other? And do these relationships even matter?
In analyzing any work - be it literature, film or games - we tend to think about who the characters are, why they made the choices they did and what might have happened differently. But characters are not people. They do not have agency and they do not make choices. Characters are just devices, like metaphor, irony, or game mechanics. Pierre's unnamed antagonistic cheerleader serves his function, and I am happy to leave his existence at that.
You are free to come up with your own interpretation.
November 24, 2009 2:39 PM
(Everything I Do) I Do it for You
 We Belong
I cannot recall with any certainty when precisely the Game of the Week idea was born. That is to say, I cannot pinpoint a singular moment where the idea for a running web series of behind the scenes content from our 9 week summer program came about, which likely speaks to the fact that it was not a "pop" into your head idea, but one that developed from a collection of conversations and ideas at the office.
I do remember that I was thinking about web traffic, and how we could draw more attention to our GAMBIT web presence. A good friend of mine, when talking to me about personal fitness, told me that doing the same action, everyday, for thirty days will make that action habitual. I am not sure of the scientific merits behind this statement, it may be the equivalent of Cosmopolitan science (lose 50lbs in 1 week with these 5 tips), but the core idea of doing an action repeatedly for an extended period of time, leading to a habitual continuation of that action, seemed like what we needed for our website.
I have a daily Internet routine. I check my email. I read the same news sources for the game industry. I flag particular articles that are of interest to me for reading later. Depending on what season, I check my fantasy sports team(s). I am a single hit to these sites, but more importantly, I am habitually hitting their sites. A primary goal for the GOTW series was to create habitual visitors, like me, to our site.
The Search is Over
We had huge coffers filled with content from the summer. We had digital coffers and hard-copy coffers. Even in a relatively short 9-week production cycle, the absolute glut of concept art, prototyping materials, game design documentation, production documentation, sound assets, concept music, etc. is impressive. At no point in the entire GOTW process was there any concern that we would "run out" of material to present. We knew we had the goods, there was some question as to how to present them.
Faithfully
I have an unrelenting fondness for 1980's power ballads. Maybe it is the Roland Jupiter-8 String patch. Maybe it is the soaring vocal lines. Maybe it's the hair.
It was a late afternoon at the lab, and while playing around on the keyboard, I started hammering out "Separate Ways" by Journey. Why? I don't know, cause it is awesome!?! A few hours later plus a ridiculous vocal session, and the parody, "This is the Game of the Week," was born. I was simultaneously proud and ashamed. It was somewhere between a moment of greatness and downright absurdity. I couldn't stop giggling however whenever I listened to it.
We concocted some hair brained schemes to replicate the hilarious original video for the song. It involved an abandoned train station, jean jackets, mullet wigs and Ms. Pac Man. Like many brilliant ideas, we released it to the ether, where it continues to haunt and inspire us to new levels of ridiculousness.
Video Killed the Radio Star
The lab had begun taking steps to keep video records of our work, and to publish small video podcasts about the projects here at the lab. This coincided nicely with the GOTW series, so we took the opportunity to interview each embedded staff member from each game to get insight on the projects. This was, to me, the greatest success of the GOTW series. I was learning things about the projects that I never knew from these interviews, and more importantly it put live faces and voices on the great people who make this lab churn out great work all the time. It is tremendously important that we are not singularly defined by what we've done, rather, we should also be known for the efforts and passions of those who are doing the work. I think the video podcasts presented that voice fantastically.
Digging in the Dirt
 With the tremendous quantity of material available for the series, the next step was to organize, collect and schedule the posts for our blog. This is where the project began to hit a bit of a logjam.
Each team had some organization to their materials, but no single team had their work meticulously archived for later use. This is not the fault of the interns from the summer, for we had not asked them to do such archiving work, but as we worked to submit these posts for publication, digging through all the data and even literally thumbing through all of the hard copy concept art and documentation became time consuming and difficult.
I felt there were times when I missed documenting important parts of the design process for some of the teams simply because I ran out of time to look for the artifacts or simply couldn't find them. I knew there were earlier builds for many of the projects complete with temp art and important design steps to acknowledge in the GOTW series, but they may have been left out simply because the artifacts of their existence were not properly archived.
Take Me Home
I wish I could tell you that our web readership jumped to youtubian levels as a result of our efforts. I wish I could point you toward the handful of news sources that picked up the series and gave us a mention. I really wish I could tell you that. I can't because it didn't happen, and if I did, you would call me a liar.
However, I do believe that what we learned from the process is most important, and moving forward we have tested and proved the concept of a "Game of The Week" series on our website. We have also learned to improve the organization of our archiving process across the board.
I do hope some of you had the time to read through some of the content from the series, and if you have not seen it yet, I encourage you to head over and look at some of the work our student-interns created over the summer. I hope it inspires you to do some great work of your own, or maybe just stop to play for a little bit longer during your usual day.
After all, we made these games... for you.
November 10, 2009 10:00 AM
Confessions of an Impatient Cheater
I have a confession. I never beat The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past without infinite magic. I used infinite lives to finish Hyperzone, Thunder Spirits, or any of the other SNES scrolling shooters that I loved. My first full play-through of Final Fantasy 6 was made a little easier by starting the game with four of the most powerful weapons and accessories. Game Genie made it all possible. Did I miss out on some of the fun by cheating my way through challenges?
"Some of the puzzles will be hard. But when you manage to solve those hard puzzles, you will feel very good about it. The game will feel very rewarding. Don't rob yourself of that feeling by reading a walkthrough! Please do not use a walkthrough." That bit of advice is from Jonathan Blow's official Braid "walkthrough." He even encourages the player by confirming that "All the puzzles can be solved. Some of them might take an hour or two, but you will get it. If you try. And you will feel cool and smart." Of course, this is assuming that the cool and smart feeling you get as a reward outweighs the two frustrating hours you spent staring at a single-screen puzzle. For some players I'm sure it is a sufficient reward. I'd compare the feeling to that of players spending hours memorizing enemy patterns in Ikaruga to get a high score or making a record speed run of Super Metroid. This hard fun results in an emotion called fiero.
The key distinction between a high score or speed run and finishing Braid is that mastery is a choice. The player chooses how much time they want to devote to perfecting their play, but will already have experienced all of the game's content. Braid requires 100% mastery just to progress to the ending. If the player wants to see the mind-blowing twist at the end, they are supposed to just tough it out.
But what if the player isn't as affected by fiero, if it isn't their personal "ultimate Game Emotion"? What if their biggest emotional reward is curiosity or relaxation or excitement? That player wonders what happens in Tim's quest for his princess, wants to see what the next puzzle's twist on time manipulation is, or finds the art direction fascinating. Wouldn't their net enjoyment of the game be increased if they used a walkthrough to avoid some of the frustration? Wouldn't it be nice if they could press a button and have the avatar automatically progress through the next puzzle so the player could still see the solution? That's what a feature in New Super Mario Bros Wii can do, and it has been faced with very mixed reactions.
A major element of the argument against such an automated walkthrough is that it promotes accessibility over engagement. Leigh Alexander claimed "History has also never disproven... the principle that any medium and any message degrades the wider an audience it must reach. Art was never served by generalization, nor language by addressing all denominators. Entertainment for the masses ultimately becomes empty." Well now, dissecting that argument can fill a blog post in itself. But in the case of Braid, the casual player won't be able to experience some of the most artistically challenging content. It's not that the art is difficult to interpret; the art is in fact hidden behind a barrier. Anyone can look at a painting and see every detail. They can read every word of a novel or watch every second of a movie. Understanding or appreciating the art is a different matter. Imagine if halfway through a novel you had to take an SAT-style verbal skills test to unlock the second half.
What Game Genie allowed me to do was complete the game. I was playing SNES while in elementary school and didn't have the skills or patience to memorize attack patterns, but I really wanted to see what happened in the next level. In some cases, I was able to play around more freely with the mechanics when aided by cheat codes. For instance in Link to the Past, magic is limited such that some of the more powerful items can only be used sparingly. I remember using infinite magic to turn the Cane of Somaria into my primary weapon since creating a magic block that explodes in four directions was a fun twist on combat.
One of the reasons I feel the quality of my experience playing games with Game Genie was preserved is that the game didn't do everything for me. In Zelda I still had to solve puzzles (though I did use a strategy guide occasionally). Even in shooters where I had infinite lives, I would try to kill as many enemies as possible and would be disappointed when I died. I determined my own level of challenge by choosing not only what cheat codes to use, but how to approach my play experience. The automated walkthrough still allows a player to be challenged by puzzles; it is a choice whether or not to use the feature. If a player doesn't want to their experience to be "spoiled," then they could just not use the walkthrough. Or they should only use the walkthrough on puzzles that have them completely stumped. It's only different from including an easy mode if you think the challenge of the gameplay trumps the desire of a less skilled (or less patient) player to continue forwards.
November 5, 2009 5:38 PM
Tim Schafer's Metal Metaphysics.
NOTE: I wrote the following immediately after finishing Brutal Legend for the first time. It contains complete story spoilers, so be warned.
Okay, I see how the story works now. Yes, Eddie is from the future. His demon mother traveled to the future--which is apparently our present--and died soon after she had him there. Eddie's belt buckle was a originally a talisman intended to return her to the past if it ever touched her blood. This is, apparently, what we see happening in the opening cinematic. Eddie is crushed by a stage prop, blood splashes on his belt buckle, and suddenly the metal god Ormagoden appears to bring him back to the past (and apparently heal him in the process). This is why Eddie sprouts demon wings during battle scenes, why he wields demon weapons with ease, etc. It all makes sense, was clearly thought all out, and, yes, was foreshadowed from the very beginning. Yet...
My problem with Brutal Legend is that it tries too hard to justify a romantic logic that needs no justification. I see now that I was mistaken, but my original impression of the gameworld was that it was basically Eddie's fantasy. Either his dying fantasy of a heavy metal paradise--the world as he wanted it to be--or some future version of Earth which had been destroyed and remade according to his musical tastes. At first I felt the legends you find all over the gameworld, which say things like "In the Beginning...there was Ormagoden...", were suggesting that Eddie's love of metal had been so powerful that his death created an actual god. I thought the legends were explaining what happened between the moment the opening cut-scene faded out (with hundreds of fans cheering the newly created Ormagoden as he screamed fire into the sky) and when Eddie woke up in the temple. I thought that 10,000 years had passed, and his love of metal--personified as a giant metal god--had shattered and rebuilt the world according to what Eddie thought was cool. This is why all the silliness of "And God created... Tailpipes! And Said they were... Awesome!" felt genuinely funny and clever to me. I thought Tim Schafer had come up with an ingenious way of explaining how a world that functioned on the logic of heavy metal album covers could exist: by suggesting that a roadie's true metal-ness had spontaneously granted him the power of creation. Because, I mean, come on... that's the only explanation that could possibly suffice, right? Heavy metal album covers are funny precisely because their logic is so nakedly inexplicable, that you simply have to surrender to the knowledge that there is no possible organizing force at work other than their makers' love of leather, cars, bikes, the occult, and musical equipment.
Near the beginning it felt to me like Brutal Legend understood this very well and had its tongue placed firmly in its cheek. The only organizing force for all its absurd imagery seemed to be Eddie's love of metal. Why do all these things exist and the world work this way? Because Eddie thinks they're awesome, obviously. This was explanation enough for me, and I felt the game gained a lot of charm from expressing the romantic logic of metal fandom with such uncompromising clarity. This was only enhanced by the implication of an either morbid subtext (Eddie's actually dead) or apocalyptic subtext (the world was actually destroyed) which kept the fantasy from seeming mindlessly fetishistic.
To find out I was totally wrong, that Schafer actually expects me to believe that this world--this world of tailpipes, leather, mudflap girls, choppers, giant stereo speakers, and 1980's hair-styles--actually existed thousands of years ago on our actual planet Earth? I find that explanation less believable than no explanation at all. But then I suppose if I start asking such questions and saying it doesn't make sense, I'd simply be told it was like questioning the logic of a metal album cover. You could easily make that argument, that if I'm okay with it begin Eddie's fantasy, I should be just as okay with it being Tim Schafer's fantasy. But somehow I'm not... maybe for the same reason I prefer the outright fantasy of Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 to the absurd pseudo-science of Metal Gear Solid 4. There's a quote I remember from a film critic criticizing the Midichlorians in Star Wars: Episode 1. He said "Adding physics to the metaphysics doesn't work." By trying to explain something magical too much you run the risk of making it seem both less magical and unsatisfactorily scientific.
Metal obviously needs no explanation. If Schafer had the conviction to really base the foundation of his entire story on this assumption it would have carried his vision all the way through to the end. Instead it only carries about half way, when explanations of the world's complex mythology begin to dilute a simple, compelling truth: that the best and only reason to do anything in Brutal Legend is because it fucking rocks.
October 5, 2009 1:00 PM
Platforming and Politics in Shadow Complex
I finally finished Shadow Complex, getting 100% of the map and items. I enjoyed it a fair amount, though it does get samey after a while. The game is, in the end, more similar to Metroid than I first thought. While it begins like Out of This World or Flashback in terms of exploration and combat, it steadily becomes more like Metroid as your character becomes powered-up with various sci-fi gadgets. Running on water, triple-jumping--you name it. By the end you're zipping around the 'shadow complex' like a super-bouncy rubber ball, spraying bullets in all directions and punching people into oblivion with your bionic fist. Environments blur past. And although the gun-based combat is still at its core very un-Metroid-like, the super-powered-ness of your character eventually causes it to blur past as well.
The way Shadow Complex gradually morphs from a tentative, tactical exploration game to a run-and-gun shooter is interesting, though it betrays the fact that its visuals are not ideally designed for either style. As I mentioned in my previous blog post Shadow Complex's environments seem mostly designed to be taken in slowly, with lots of localized detail. Yet as the game gets faster the carefully nuanced nature of each screen becomes easily ignored, causing most environments to leave the same gray/brown impression. I had to constantly check my map in Shadow Complex, since often that was the only way to tell where the hell I was.
I never had this problem in Metroid, which always manage to separate each chunk of the game world with nicely distinct visual styles. Shadow Complex's more "realistic" visual aesthetic may look cool and more 'next-gen' than the 2D games that inspired it, but the net result is geographic distinction eventually stretches into incoherent mush. This is something nearly every other Metroid-inspired game does better than Shadow Complex. All the recent 2D Castlevanias, for example, have very clear environmental differences between map sectors. Leave it to the Japanese, I guess, to understand the value of iconic visual design and how it supports gameplay as a user feedback system. This is something that our Western obsessions with poly-counts and dynamic lighting get in the way of frequently, and it's one of the main things that, I think, separates Shadow Complex culturally from other Metroid-clones.
As for the story, I have to admit I was somewhat disappointed that the right-wing ideology I was bracing myself for didn't come off as strongly as I'd hoped. The only real evidence of it is fairly subtle, based on a few lines of dialogue you overhear at one point. It is between two enemy soldiers talking about "The Restoration", which is what they call their secret plan to take over America. The first step apparently involves "liberating" San Fransisco and New York, which one soldier says makes sense because those are two big cities "with governments that will want to hop on board as soon as we surface". The soldier goes on to explain how the rest of the country will probably have to be conquered by force, but that they first want to be seen as liberators and win some popular support. While most reviewers of Shadow Complex seem to have either missed or ignored this small detail (most people seem to think that The Restoration wants to nuke San Fran, for some reason) I took it to mean pretty obviously that The Restoration is some group of left-wing extremists, for whom the full cooperation of left-wing American cities (such as San Fran) is a foregone conclusion.
Unfortunately, none of these hinted-at politics fully surface in the end. Instead the game retreats to a highly generic characterization of its villains which feels more like a grab-bag of rotten politics both the (American) Left and Right can agree on... rather than anything which could coherently be called a political point of view. At the end, when the main bad guy gives his Big Speech, he rattles off a bunch of hogwash about America falling from grace and that it will be a great country again, thanks to The Restoration. He makes several references to imperial Rome and says America will be a great empire after they take over, sounding--and looking, thanks to the black uniform and red armband--more like a Nazi than anything else.
My first impulse is that referencing Nazism so heavily represents a retreat from any anit-liberal stance the game might have... though considering how both the Left and Right in the United States have appropriated Nazism to attack the other side, my assumption may be misplaced. Shadow Complex could easily represent for conservative players a typical right-wing fantasy scenario: the heroic fighting off of a left-wing conspiracy to take over the country in which the Left, finally, shows their true totalitarian colors. There is certainly nothing in the game to contradict this.
Hold on...
I just read the Boston Phoenix review of Shadow Complex, and listen to this...
There's not much to say about the paper-thin plot, but I should mention that Shadow Complex takes place in the world of Orson Scott Card's Empire series of books, a bizarre critique of the dangers of liberal political thought. Its antagonists are part of a left-wing organization called the Progressive Restoration whose aim is to overthrow the government and, it would seem, institute a policy of mandatory gay marriage and strict recycling laws.
Well well. Hardly politically neutral, is it? I'm quite disappointed, actually, that Shadow Complex couldn't have been more out-of-the-closet, so to speak, in terms of its right-wing ideology, even if it is merely inherited from Card's books. I think I would have been tickled to death by playing an unabashed right-wing Metroid-clone. That, at least, would have been less boring.
What bothers me more than anything is the seeming inability of commercial video games to address any political controversy head-on, to be upfront about advocating any political point of view. I mean, why not come right out admit what The Restoration stands for? Why tip-toe around what the book doesn't? Are they worried about alienating liberal gamers? They didn't alienate me. I still played it. I got 100% items, for godsake, and I had a ball killing endless streams of lefty no-gooders. Hell, if Shadow Complex taught me anything it's that the Left have some seriously cool robots, and that socialism is, apparently, functional enough to fund a terrifyingly advanced techno-army.
Even the most rampant homophobe would have to admit that shit is pretty badass.
September 24, 2009 2:45 PM
(Some) Games Are Media: A Response to Frank Lantz
At the end of August, Frank Lantz of Area/Code posted a really intriguing thought piece to Game Design Advance that asserts that "Games Are Not Media", which is an expansion upon a similar thought grenade that Lantz lobbed into the audience at last year's Game Developers Conference. Here's how he sets up the piece:
I should start out by explaining the purpose of the claim. It's meant to be a provocation. I want to challenge certain habits of thinking and talking about games.
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