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.
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 postShadow 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.
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.
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. I'm not attempting to clarify a small point about our critical language or clean up a detail about our conceptual framework. I want to give these things a rude shove and shake us out of a bunch of comfortable and familiar assumptions so that we can look at games with a fresh eye.
I'm not going to present a carefully constructed definition of the word "media" and try to show that games don't fit. Instead, I want to point out some common associations the word tends to conjure up and show how games challenge them. I know it's difficult to talk about games as a subject without using the word media. I find it hard myself, and I'm sure there will be many situations in the future where I'll use the term. But when I do I will feel an uncomfortable twinge that will remind me of the ways in which the word is a poor fit, and I hope to instill a similar impulse in you.
As it so happens, this is something that GAMBIT US Executive Director Philip Tan and I have been going around and around about since before GAMBIT opened its doors. (Philip prefers to describe a game as a single session of constrained play, like a baseball game, whereas I prefer to describe a game as the thing that has rules, pieces, players, instruction manuals [or not], discs [or not], and so on as required.) Philip and I have finally come to some more or less common ground on this topic, partly due to a long conversation at lunch over Lantz's provocation. So some congratulations are in order – Lantz certainly achieved his goal of getting people to talk about it. The only problem is, how Lantz addresses what he perceives as common assumptions which lead us to believe that games are media is brilliant, but it's those common assumptions he's perceiving which I'd argue are incorrect.
As a matter of fact, I will now spend the next several thousand words arguing that very thing...
It's tough to say, but I think I actually prefer the story of Resident Evil 4 to Resident Evil 5. Yes, I know how that sounds. RE5's story is, in a lot of ways, much better than RE4's. It's far less cheesy and far more coherent. But... well, I suppose it comes down to the fact that RE4 at least didn't reduce the entire series to a Michael Bay movie. RE4 eventually became like an idiotic action movie, of course, but only near the end... and even then it in no way reflected on the rest of the series because the plot was essentially self-contained. RE5, on the other hand, does a good job of giving the franchise a sense of closure, but the sort of closure it gives is pretty underwhelming. So everything--the whole saga--was just a build up to Wesker's doomsday plan... and that all ended when Chris shot him in the face with a rocket launcher? Yay. I guess... I guess that's the end of Resident Evil. And I only waited 13 years for it.
I imagine most people would wonder how someone could care about the overarching storyline of Resident Evil, and for good reason. It's inane and moronic, and I wonder myself why it bugs me when it is especially bad, as in the case of RE5. My guess is that I had such a powerful experience with the first two games--before the backstory became silly--that I still harbor some frustrated fascination with the narrative possibilities of the franchise, though they have been repeatedly unrealized. I'm not naive enough to hope each new game will satisfy me, but for some reason I never tire of charting the ever expanding, Byzantine stupidity of the storyline, as well as noting whatever flickers of inspiration it may have along the way.
RE5, to my astonishment, made me miss RE4, mostly my virtue of how seriously it took itself. I guess Japanese developers are beginning to get really good at making games for Western audiences, which is depressing. RE5, with the possible exception of Wesker, is almost indistinguishable from a Hollywood action film. Chris and most of the other characters are so goddamn sober you get the feeling that the game is taking itself way too seriously. RE4, by comparison, has a lot more tell-tale signs of Japanese-ness. The story in RE4 was moronic Hollywood pap as well, but its Hollywood tone was undercut at several moments when you could see the playfulness of the designers winking through. The way Leon could sit in Saddler's throne, the hilarious laser hallway sequence, the skirt gags with Ashley, the giant clockwork Salazaar... all these things made it feel less like a Hollywood movie and more like a Japanese distortion of a Hollywood movie. In RE5, unfortunately, it seems like they've finally gotten it right. It feels like a real Hollywood movie, with none of that weird cultural dissonance that normally makes Japanese games interesting. It doesn't feel playful design-wise like RE4 did. It is dead-fucking-serious about giving kids reared on Gears of War and Halo exactly what they want and expect: wave after wave after wave of dudes to shoot, giant bosses to kill, and an uber-macho hero.
I never thought RE4 could seem subtle or reflective, but it is by comparison to RE5's stripping away of every element that didn't fit the design paradigm of Western multi-player co-op games. Virtually every screen in RE5 is a variation on the same concept--fight off hoards of enemies in an arena-like map--whereas RE4 had a lot more variety in its level design. It had long stretches where you were alone, being hunted by just one enemy, bits where you just explored, and even parts where you played as Ashley and could not use weapons. And RE4 was still what I'd call an over-the-top action game. It apparently wasn't action enough for RE5, however, which pulls out all stops, dispenses with all variation, and gives you head-popping hysteria from beginning to end. Given the fact that the main protagonist is now a steroid-guzzling meat head, rather than a slim pretty boy, I suppose this is all just part of the same cultural shift.
Of course, it's not unusual for Japanese games to harbor a fetish for Hollywood action cinema. Resident Evil has had it since the very beginning, but it was always redeemed somewhat by its total failure to be what it obviously wanted to be. The series was always at its best when combining the colorful characters of anime/manga with the apocalyptic horrors of George Romero. It was always at its worst when attempting to imitate Michael Bay and cater to the action market. In RE4 Michael Bay seemed to be on the offensive, but there was still a lot to like about the series. In RE5, however, the transformation is complete, rendering the series dead to anyone who ever loved it for its odd combination of Japanese character design and storytelling and the existential terror of Western zombie cinema.
The Pleasures of Old School Resident Evil - Dying Alone
I recently decided to give Resident Evil: Outbreak, the franchise's first and much maligned foray into online multi-player, a second chance. I'm glad I did, because there's actually a lot to like in Capcom's messy little experiment.
As a multi-player experience Outbreak remains hopelessly broken, but as a single-player experience I've come to realize it has certain unique merits. Most interesting to me, it marks a return to stories of average people struggling to survive as opposed to the super hero bullshit more recent RE games indulge in. Just the fact that it is comprised of mostly average locations (a bar, a hospital, a hotel, the city streets) and involves normal people as playable characters (a waitress, a doctor, a reporter, a college student) automatically makes it a hundred times more intriguing than the Michael Bay swill Resident Evil 5 crammed down our throats a few months ago.
What I love about Outbreak is how it explores many of the more unglamorous actions readily found in zombie cinema. Instead of kicking zombie ass you spend most of your time bracing doors, hiding in lockers, crafting makeshift weapons out of rubbish, and prolonging your inevitable zombie infection with various drugs. Outbreak has so many interesting ideas that it might have offered players a perfectly nice single-player experience... that is, if the option of playing solo was unlocked from the very beginning. There is a solo mode, I discovered, but it can only be unlocked by finishing the game. This is absurd, because it's what the default offline mode should have been. Tragically the default offline mode saddles the player with a set of broken A.I. companions, who do very little besides ruin the atmosphere by acting like imbeciles and screaming random canned phrases.
Tantalized by the prospect of playing Outbreak single-player, I decided I was going to slog through the game with the broken companions in order to be able to access the solo mode. However, even playing it with companions is proving to be more compelling than I expected. The companions are broken, mood-shattering, and idiotic... but all the same I sort of missed them once they all died and I was the only one left. I played the second scenario as Yoko, the college student, and I really began enjoying the game once all my companions were dead and out of the way. This is the solo mode experience I wanted, and it was pretty evocative. I was trapped in the underground research lab from RE2, and I was trying to escape. I made a few serious mistakes along the way and ended up falling to the ground on the top level. Unable to stand, I crawled in desperation towards the nearest exist. But the virus rapidly overtook me. I finally turned around near the door and awaited my death, thinking that if only one of my friends were alive they could have helped me up and through the door.
I died there on the floor, just an anonymous citizen of Racoon City. I wasn't a hero. I wasn't one of the protagonists of the main games who gets to kick ass and do flips. I was just a normal girl whose greatest asset was a backpack... and that wasn't enough to save me in the end.
Spending an hour trying to survive, only to have it all end in a lonely whimper, was an intriguing experience I haven't had in many games, let alone Resident Evil games. It was satisfying precisely because it was frustrating and awkward. The frustration and awkwardness had an interesting existential dimension all other RE games lack. Even the fact that I couldn't save my game was a plus in this regard, since it made me truly afraid for my life. If one views Outbreak as a series of Racoon City short stories--all short enough to justify the lack of saving--in which the point is to force the player to face their own uncomfortable mortality... the game is not at all unsuccessful. I think if it had been marketed as such, as a collection of survivor stories in which the muli-player aspect was optional and the single-player mode was the default, it would have been received quite differently by both critics and players.
After many, many months, we're finally retiring our Rock Band 2 drums. We showed them a lot of love... probably too much love. I mean, look at those drumsticks! Did someone chew on them?
Some folks from Harmonix came by our lab to chat, and I guess they were impressed by our obvious devotion to their game. The hacked-together plastic-tape solution was less impressive. (They still work!) So yesterday we found a whole new set of drums, shipped from the west and on our doorstep. Thank you, Harmonix!
Let's not forget the good times we've had. Here are a couple of pics of the old GAMBIT drums to remember them by, next to the the shiny, new ones taking on the mantle.
This is actually the fourth set of videogame drums in the office. The first one was a knockoff set for Drummania, and it's still sitting around just in case Bemani fever breaks out again. The second was my kit from the original Rock Band, which has a dead red pad but probably just needs a little solder. The white drums were a gift from David Nieborg of Gamespace.nl fame, and we never properly thanked him either. (Thanks, David!) This doesn't count all the various drum machines that have come through the lab. We've got a real percussive thing going on here.
I was thumbing through my notebook the other day and noticed some old design sketches I did for Rosemary. Thought I'd scan them in and make a blog post for posterity. Posterity. That would be you, dear reader.
The backstory is that in late fall 2008, Clara Fernández-Vara asked me to help with her adventure game project, Rosemary, which was having significant usability problems. In particular, the memory mechanic wasn't getting across. Since that's the big twist of the game, having it not work was a major problem.
Starting Point: Memory Palace
This is a mockup of the design I was given, the Memory Palace. It was named after a method of memorizing things by remembering them spatially. Memory objects would appear at the bottom as you played, and then could be placed in the room. If a group of them were placed correctly, new information was revealed.
It had a few problems. The method of interaction was different than the rest of the game, the 3D nature of the space made placing 2D objects within it sort of odd, the fact that a group had to be placed at a time was unclear, what happened if one object was placed correctly and the rest incorrectly, where would the new information appear, adding and removing memory puzzles from the game required redrawing the art asset, yada yada. On top of that, Rosemary already has a few kinds of physical space, the present world and the past world. Adding another set of functionality that also had a spatial representation got confusing quickly.
I asked Clara if it was alright if I tried to rework the interaction from the ground up, and she said yes. Clara is awesome. I then proceeded to brainstorm, which I mostly did in my sketchbook. I'm going to cheat and show these out of order, leaving the idea we ended up implementing for last. In practice, it was the first one I came up with, but I wanted some more ideas to show Clara and the rest of the team. It's pretty rare that the first idea is the best one, and I didn't want to commit to one concept too quickly.
Discarded Idea: Fortress of Solitude
If you've seen the Superman movies, you probably already know the idea. I was playing with the idea of memory crystals like they had in the film. You have a hole and a set of crystals. Whichever memory crystal you put in first determines what grouping you're going for, and the right additional number of holes appear for you to put more crystals in. When you get the combination right, the crystals are absorbed and the new information is displayed.
Discarded Idea: Block Toy
Riffing off the Fortress of Solitude idea, I wondered if having any memory fit into any slot was too much, and we should restrict the number of combinations. This reminded me of one of those toddler toys where you have shaped blocks that the child puts into the right hole. By using shape this way, we can help the user understand what she's missing---e.g. a star-shaped memory---without being too heavy-handed. The shapes could correspond to the type of memory as well, like people, objects, places, whatever.
Discarded Idea: Clay/Oozerts
I would say this was my weirdest idea, despite a lack of comic book references. The inspiration was one of those Play-Doh extruder things I had as a child. A sausage grinder would be a similar albeit ickier metaphor. Memories were clay objects. You put some of them into a press and the new information was squooshed out as a new object, which could then be fed back into the press for yet more information, etc. In order to help understand which objects go together, each squooshed object takes a certain amount of space in the press, sort of like in our fractions game, Oozerts. Glancing at it should tell you whether the press is overfull, underfull, or just right. Or you can use the press anyway and see if your new object is missing a leg or has an extra head or something.
I'm telling you, it could totally work.
Discarded Idea: Fill in the Picture
A book full of holes. Put the right objects into the right holes, and it turns into a completed picture. A fine idea, but not too original.
Implemented Idea: Photo Album
What's not to like? You've got this photo album with photos missing, you collect photos as you go, you put the photos back in the album which tells you more stuff. Easy interaction, ties in with the memory theme nicely, doesn't require much in the way of new art assets, and easily scalable if a puzzle is cut from the game at the last minute. And for hints, we have captions.
Captions were part stories, part Mad Libs. They were some sort of description which went with the pictures but with blanks. As you put a picture in the slot, the blanks filled up with words. The story would make sense if it was the right photo, or be nonsense if it wasn't. In the example in the sketchbook, switching the photos would reveal, "Bob played with his movie poster. 'Arr!' he said in a torn and tattered voice." So you either get success or you get silliness, a win either way.
Photo Album Mockup Draft
Clara and the team really liked the Photo Album idea, so I sketched it out a bit more clearly. I like fine markers on regular letter paper for this sort of thing, since the it photocopies easily. Always keep the original and make copies to take to meetings. Then you can cut them up or mark them up on the fly, but still be able to go back to the original.
Photo Album Mockup Final
I switched to Adobe Illustrator for my final mockup, since it's easier to do layers and stuff there. Notice how I still just scanned my draft mockup for the main window rather than redraw it all in Illustrator. The point of the mockup is not to be fancy. All it needs to do is communicate the idea. That last image was the printout that was hanging on the wall of the Rosemary development room for the artists and designer to reference.
And there you have it. To see the final implementation, go play Rosemary.
I've never read Ender's Game, in spite of having been given a copy by a programmer friend of mine nearly a decade ago, so I've got no idea on how well Shadow Complex embodies the writing and ideas of Orson Scott Card. The game was recommended to me solely on the basis of its similarity to Super Metroid, long hailed as one of the greatest 2D exploration-based games ever made. Shadow Complex is a recent attempt by an indie developer (Chair Entertainment) to resurrect this supposedly long dead style of game. Of course, it's difficult to say this style is dead when Konami releases a new 2D Castlevania--all of which follow the template of Super Metroid so completely they've been affectionately dubbed "Metroidvania"--virtually every year. This is why if Shadow Complex were merely a Metroid clone, like Castlevania, it wouldn't be worthy of note. Thankfully it's much more than that.
I played the game for about an hour last night, and already I've had a dream about it. In the dream I am swimming in the murk of an underground lake. The lake is dark, but I can see some shadows, which I make out to be debris from a man-made platform. The platform is to the left of me, and I am swimming underwater so as not to be seen by the soldiers on the platform, who are looking for me with flashlights. As I swim forward I have the desire to turn left, to move around platform, near where the debris are. But I can't. As I swim toward them my vision darkens, as if the darkness of the water, itself compounded by the darkness of the cave, were weighing on me, pushing me down into the Earth. I can't move to the left. I can't move to the right. I can only move forward, being content to simply watch the mysteries to either side of me pass beyond my sight. I turn on my water-proof flashlight to better see these places I cannot go. The murk is illuminated and I'm in a bubble of feeble light, far beneath the earth, underwater, surrounded by a quiet darkness. For some reason I don't need air. I just float there, in the strange womb of rock and water, thinking to myself quietly, wondering what lies beyond, but equally content just to stay put, feeling my surroundings, until I am ready to explore.
Shadow Complex
Such are the pleasures of a game like Shadow Complex, and I have not felt them in a long time. They are pleasures I would not necessarily associate with games like Super Metroid, which feel to me less about reflection and more about moving through space. Shadow Complex reminds me a lot more of older exploration-based 2D games, most notably Out of this World, Flashback, and Pitfall II. These games had a sense of stillness that I feel Shadow Complex captures rather well. I'm not entirely sure where it comes from, but I think it has something to do with how the game divides itself into "screens" with discrete challenges, rather than long winding tunnels and paths. Both are fine ways to design a spelunking game, but the former encourages players to parse their mental image of the game world into focused sections, with each representing a single coherent idea. The "underground lake" I dreamed of is just such an example. It is an individual screen the player comes across instantaneously after walking through a door. Like Pitfall and Flashback (and unlike Metroid) screens "cut" between each other in Shadow Complex, creating the decisive impression of leaving one finite space and entering another. The lake, therefore, feels like a single area, not part of a larger area. The fact that I am faced with such a specific space with such specific boundaries encourages me to regard it as a destination rather than a pathway to other places. It is of course a pathway as well, but I'm much more likely to stop and take note of my surroundings, to think "Wow. I just found an underground lake!" than allow my environment to blur past me as I hurry along. Metroid seldomn encouraged this sort of mental orientation towards one's environment, which I think has not only to do with its seamless spacial transitions (which pan, as opposed to cut) but also its tile-based visual design. The environments in games like Flashback or Out of this World were not created out of tiles but were each totally unique pieces of background art. Shadow Complex exhibits the same sense of personality, which gives it a much different psychological atmosphere than a mere Super Metroid clone.
There are no doubt elements cribbed directly from Super Metroid, most obviously the map system and tool-activated backtracking. The gun-based combat, however, seems taken directly from Flashback or Blackthorne and in general has very little to do with the alien-squishing distractions of Metroid. The discreteness of Shadow Complex's spaces has a lot to do with this, for most combat-oriented screens feel like a single playfield in which players are encouraged to think, plan, and execute a complex strategy. Failing because I didn't get my gun out fast enough or because I stuck my head out from behind cover at the wrong moment feel right out of Flashback, as does the stealth-like aspect of enemies not noticing you until you let them. Again the keyword is 'reflection'. Finite playfields in which enemies don't notice you encourage reflection before action, as opposed just barreling forward and reacting to threats as they arise. Unlike the spelunking aesthetics of Metroid, which have remained alive and well in Castlevania, Shadow Complex's more reflective, screen-based approach is one that hasn't been explored in a while. The Prince of Persia remake on XboxLive Arcade that came out a few years ago is the only thing that comes close, and it certainly didn't innovate on this style of game in any significant way. Shadow Complex really seems to be picking up a thread that's been lying dormant since Delphine Software chose to go 3D with their Flashback sequel (the regardlessly excellent and underrated Fade 2 Black) rather than 2D.
Flashback
Pitfall II
The prospect of playing a game where every room is a discrete new space, where every challenge is a two part problem of thought followed by action, where I can stop and think and feel and reflect on each new idea the game presents me; all these things are what make Shadow Complex a welcome experience. Any game that can make me feel that dense feeling of habitation that Out of this World did is alright by me, even if the story is filled with things that give me pause. I have no idea how things are going to turn out in the plot, but so far I'm not crazy about the kidnapped girlfriend (Really? That's the best idea you got?) or the implications that the protagonist's journey will be one of submitting to his militaristic father's worldview. Knowing what little I do about Card, but having heard more than a few times about his allegedly fascist tendencies, I really wonder where such elements are going, even if the game isn't written by him. I doubt, though, that any power-worshiping ideology the game might have would turn out to be something other than amusing to me. You can throw a rock and hit a game of questionable politics, after all. I'm just surprised and delighted that one of these games would let me stop and smell the roses on my way to becoming a superman.
Being a games scholar is being a pioneer in undiscovered countries. It's exciting and adventurous, but it's also difficult and painful. Maybe it feels more of a pain because I'm in the middle of re-writing my dissertation, getting it ready for my committee to review before the defense.
At times, I miss Literature, I miss Film Studies, I miss my Shakespeare. They are established fields, and coming up with a significant contribution is really hard. But they have a set of established materials and tools. Research is like furnishing your house, and studying Literature is like going to IKEA--you go and select your pieces, and put them together following the instructions. In Game Studies, we have to come up with our own design, go to the forest, cut down our trees, make our boards, and assemble them. Thank goodness we can borrow the saws, hammers and nails of other academic fields, from Media Studies to Computer Science, although it is becoming evident that we need to make our own tools as well. We can also take some boards from IKEA and build something completely different. We shouldn't abuse it, however, or else we won't be using the materials that are inherent to our field. So far, the contributions of IKEA to game studies have been rather strange.
This metaphor is the result of having re-written my introduction and the methods section of my dissertation, and still not being happy with it. I find myself talking about foundational concepts that are still debated and in flux. How are games a type of performance? What do narratives have to do with games? What is a gameworld? What is a simulation? All I want to do is get around to talk about adventure games, which is the bloody topic of my thesis!
Don't get me wrong--it is because I like challenges that I'm in this field. The moment a theory or an idea clicks and makes sense is wonderful, precisely because one has to go through all these pangs. Perhaps I just want to figure too much out; I want the answer to life, the universe and everything, while I should just write "42" and talk about Monkey Island to get it over with. Or perhaps I'm just pissed off because I'm missing out on a gorgeous summer and working on my dissertation on a Saturday night.
I found myself, most uncommonly, at a loss for words.
I had convinced myself, before we even sat down, that I knew what I was getting into - this was a game and I was the one in control. I listened to the chittering skeptic, the grumbling cynic latched on to the inner lining of my stomach that has been there for so many years, and I said aloud "I'd like to see the other game if we could..." having already started crafting the clever ways I would politely tear this horrifying, and dangerous idea to proverbial shreds. As we began playing, the layers of meaning unfolded, and the indigestion of my doubt began to quiet. With each roll of the dice, with every turned card, with every tiny forward lurch grinding wheels against tracks, my eyes and heart opened, I sank deeper into my chair, and a gaping wound was fingered. Most uncommonly:
I found myself at a loss for words.
Play Brenda Brathwaite's Train and forget what you think you know about "games." Play Brenda Brathwaite's Train and remember why, in the grandest of senses, we are here. Play Brenda Brathwaite's Train and remember because remembering, the very act of first knowing again, is our most important human faculty.
I wanted to tell Brenda, right then and there, why it was important, though I suspect she already knew. I wanted to articulate clearly and eloquently what I felt, to the person who so clearly articulated to me, through the power of her work, what she obviously felt and continues to feel. The academic in me was still able to craft logical arguments stating, this lead to that, and this assumes that, and if this then that therefore this and subsequently ta da. Tidy. But standing there, shaking her hand, or perhaps holding it, the only clear word I could muster, the word that was formed by my thumping, pulsing engine not my ticking jolting nerve center, seemed then, not quite right, but today, the best I could find. The only word that could try to say "thank you" and "how?" and "why?" and "I know" and "It's ok, is it ok?" and "I'm sorry" and perhaps most resoundingly "never again" all together in one massively, all-encompassing, super-powered word; it was the king of all words, the meteoric explosion of meaning in the singularity of one word:
Valuable.
Writing it now on this page it again seems insufficient. I am slowly coming to terms with the fact that it is very hard, nay impossible to make real with words what exists in the domain of feelings. How can it possibly compare to experience? These shoddy symbols, these crossed t's and dotted i's, cannot assume the overwhelming responsibility of making manifest my emotions. The unspeakable cannot be spoken, and so I apologize, to you Brenda, to you the reader, to any who have not yet enjoyed the true privilege of experiencing what I experienced a few days ago, for at this point I am again, quite uncommonly, at a loss for words.
****WARNING - SPOILERS FOR BIONIC COMMANDO (2009) FOLLOW****
In a previous blog post I explained why I felt Grin's Bionic Commando was a well-designed 3D update of an old school classic, in spite of getting a bum rap from critics. Now that I've finished the game I feel like defending another aspect that's gotten pummeled by the gaming press: the story. While I'm not about to claim the story for Bionic Commando isn't silly, I don't find it to be nearly as random or meaningless as critics have claimed. While it seemed disappointingly slight for most of the game, I have to confess that the ending--while abrupt--did have a certain, unexpected dramatic logic that put the rest of the plot in perspective.
I had read several reviews that cited the ending as being sudden, stupid, and meaningless. So I was preparing myself. Although I disagreed with most critics about the gameplay, the criticisms of the story as being adolescent, techno-futuristic military nonsense didn't seem so off. A certain level of kitch was undoubtedly intentional (this is a sequel to a game that featured purple Nazi's and an undead version of Hitler, after all), but I can't say I cared for the overtly and seemingly un-ironic tone the game was striking as a macho power fantasy. It's hard to use kitch as your alibi when your protagonist is constantly screaming like a roid-raging jock ("Yeah, suck on that!") in a way that is obviously meant to be a "reward" for the player. That's never how I imagined Spencer when I played the original NES game as a 12-year-old, so playing Grin's update was a mixture of pleasure at seeing the world and characters extended but also frustration at seeing them fall victim to modern video game stereotypes. It also didn't help that the actual plot seemed to involve very few meaningful events and in general advanced very little over the course of the game. Basically the whole game boils down to you finding and stealing this weird canister that Super Joe wants, and then being betrayed by Joe who defects to the terrorists and uses the canister to initiate some weird master plan--called Project Vulture--which is never really explained.
Given the thin narrative set-up and obnoxious protagonist I wasn't holding out for a very satisfying ending, but I found myself liking it. It was indeed abrupt and the twist with Spencer's wife was goofy, but... I dunno. I guess what I liked was how the game built up to a simple, emotional moment and then just ended. I was thinking the whole game that the plot seemed strangely in the background, like there was all this complex stuff going on but it never really seemed to manifest in any coherent way. Although I'm sure lazy writing and a "game first, story second" development mentality probably contributed to this feeling, it all suddenly seemed to make sense given the climactic final moment.
If you look at Spencer as someone who really doesn't care about a goddamn thing except finding out what happened to his wife--not about what Project Vulture is, not about who the mysterious sniper is, not about Mag, not about saving the country--then the final sequence, where he chases Joe into the sky for apparently no other reason than to force him to explain his wife's death, makes a certain amount of sense as a narrative climax. The fact that Emily was somehow "used" to create Spencer's arm had been obviously hinted at, and in light of reviews I'd read I expected the reveal of this plot point to be a big, cheesy display. But it wasn't. I liked how Spencer screams at Joe to tell him what happened, how Joe refuses, and how Spencer smashes his face into putty and crushes the mysterious canister in a selfish rage, causing a massive explosion. You get the distinct impression Spencer killed Joe and wiped out his army not for any greater good but because of sheer personal hatred. It's an unexpected moment that almost makes the goofy story feel character-driven.
Spencer's sole motivation is to confront Joe.
I like how they never say straight out what happened to his wife, and I like the implication that, in the end, Spencer knows but doesn't want to face it, which is why he kills Joe. One of the reasons this seems like an interesting ending, rather than a cop-out ending, is that it isn't twisted into some feel-good Hollywood resolution. The only resolution is Spencer finding out what happened to his wife and then losing his mind as a result. It's not even clear whether or not he lives in the end. The final shot is of him falling silently to earth, assumedly not caring whether he lives or dies anymore. For such a macho game, which tries so hard to ape the feel of hyper-masculine Hollywood cinema, the sudden nihilism of the ending is striking. Most video game badasses don't end up being consumed by their own hatred and committing suicide an instant before the credits roll.
The End?
If I were to give the writers more credit than is due (and I probably am, but what the hell) I'd say that Spencer's relationship with his bionic arm--and the player's relationship with the arm--is intended somewhat as an expression of his relationship with his wife. One thing that stood out for me was how Spencer's characterization in-game was different than in cut-scenes. In cut-scenes he's always sullen, but in-game he's always screaming his pleasure any time he does something amazing with the arm. For a guy who hates his life he clearly loves to swing around, take giant leaps, and soar through the sky. The first time he sees the arm he smiles, suggesting that--even though he doesn't give a shit about Joe or the mission--the thought of being with his arm again is enough to win him over. As both the cinematics and gameplay constantly remind you, his arm is the only thing that makes him feel alive, which, in light of the final plot twist, appears to be a subtle kind of foreshadowing.
Spencer's last memory of Emily.
I feel moderately embarrassed defending the narrative and thematic virtues of Bionic Commando. On the surface the story is both slight and silly, and the game's muscle-bound macho-man attitude is not something I'm a fan of. However, I do think the ending is weird enough, and the story decisions probably deliberate enough, that it's fair to take the story (just like the gameplay) on its own terms and accept that perhaps there's a method to its madness. I'm not arguing for it being art so much as I'm arguing that the story and themes are not devoid of logic or purpose, as many reviewers have suggested.
I think, ultimately, what I liked about the ending is how, in its overwhelming of gameplay logic with dramatic logic, it hearkened back to the original Bionic Commando, moreso than Rearmed did. Rearmed was a great remake in many ways, but one thing I didn't like is how it turned the emotionally-fueled finale of the original into a series of "proper" gameplay challenges. The original Bionic Commando's ending was great because it wasn't hard, but because it gave the player a series of easy challenges that seemed motivated by nothing more than the dramatic momentum of the story. Destroying the Albatross, killing Master D, and escaping the complex were all easy, hence there was nothing to distract you from the dramatic feeling of the moment. The final sequence of the next-gen Bionic Commando, with you soaring into the sky after Joe, dispatching winged goons on the way in marvelously epic fashion, offers the same sort of dramatics-over-gameplay thrill. There is no "proper" last boss fight in Bionic Commando like there (disappointingly) was in Rearmed. There is just the final confrontation with Joe, in which all of Spencer's pent up angst--quite literally--explodes.
The final, thrilling flight to the heavens.
One last thing: the stuff with Spencer's wife's brain (or brain pattern--it's kind of unclear) being "used" to make his bionic arm is indeed silly, but I suppose I don't find it as shatteringly dumb as some people do because it seems derived from the metaphysics one often finds in Japanese science fiction (remember, although Grin is a Swedish developer, Bionic Commando is originally a Japanese franchise, and Capcom was involved in the production). Specifically it reminded me of an anime I saw a long time ago called Roujin Z, about a medical robot "possessed" by the dead wife of the old man it is caretaker of. The notion of the mind, the self, or the soul being embodied in a machine and connecting with another person's "soul" through some technological interface is common in anime/manga sci-fi. It's the entire basis for Ghost in the Shell, the seminal Japanese cyberpunk that Grin's Bionic Commando owes more than a little to. I'm not claiming that it's brilliantly written, but this plot twist does not seem like random bad writing to me so much as a symptom of the East-meets-West genre cross-pollination that, in general, makes Bionic Commando more interesting and quirky than your typical Western action game.
I don't read game blogs as much as I should, which is why I was not fully aware of the backlash Heather Chaplin got for her GDC rant this year. It seems that several prominent bloggers gave her some real shit about what she said, and I want to pipe up and defend her a bit. I understand how one could be upset by her fiery rhetoric and judgmental attitude, but I really feel like a lot of her critics missed her point.
I took Heather's point to be that game developers have no one to blame but themselves for the preponderance of male power fantasy-oriented game culture, and that hiding behind the popular excuse that the medium somehow "isn't there yet", either technically or artistically, is both cowardly and disingenuous. This was all summed up in her opening statement: the medium isn't immature; you are.
I didn't find this offensive in the slightest, mostly because it jibes pretty easily with my experience of working at a commercial game company. I didn't feel Heather was talking about me personally. I felt like she was talking about a certain kind of person who works in games, the sort who likes to disguise the bankruptcy of his own imagination with lame excuses, the sort who would say "Hey, I had no choice but to make a bloody game with floppy tits! The medium's not art yet! It's not my problem!"
People with this attitude I feel deserve all the smackdown Heather can dish out. Not because they enjoy male power fantasies, but because they don't take any responsibility for enjoying them. I didn't take her to be saying that all men who enjoy such fantasies are hopelessly childish, but that it is childish to enjoy such fantasies and pretend like they are not childish. The male-dominated games industry needs to own up to the sort of culture it is perpetuating and not try to weasel out of any debate that would hold them responsible for facilitating and maintaining these cultural norms. They need to call a spade and spade and understand that this is a choice they are making in design meetings, in marketing meetings, etc. It isn't some mystical phenomenon they have no control over. They have complete control over it. At the end of the day our current game culture is what they've created. It's didn't create itself.
Simply admitting that, owning that, acknowledging that responsibility--that's what I felt Heather was really calling for in her angry rant. That's maturity. That's what "real men" would do. It's not that creating or indulging in male power fantasies is somehow inherently wrong, but nurturing a culture based around them as the dominant form of gamer culture and then turning around and saying "Hey, it's not our fault!" is cowardly. It's a patronizing slap in the face to anyone who feels under-represented by the current culture. Mature adults (male or otherwise) should have more integrity than that. And when you're dealing with people of integrity - who enjoy blowing shit up but realize that's not what everybody wants - you have the possibility for real dialogue and real change.
Last winter, I participated in the GAMBIT Video Game Adaptation Workshop. After a short lecture on transmedia adaptation, participants were broken up into two teams and given the task of creating a game based on an existing IP (intellectual property) within a couple of hours.
Originally, my team's ideas were vague. We knew we wanted to create a game based on the Peanuts comic strip by Charles M. Schulz, but were having problems honing in on what aspect of that universe to focus on. Our initial idea was to have a series of mini-games, but this solution seemed to just multiply the amount of games we needed to make. We decided to focus on a mini-game that reflected the psychological struggle between Lucy and Charlie Brown. For those not familiar with the comic, Lucy runs a psychiatric advice stand. Charlie Brown comes to Lucy for advice and usually ends up getting insulted and ridiculed.
The game is card-based, and only the hearts and spaces of the deck are used. The hearts represent positive, or happy, points, while the spades signify negative, or sad, points. The higher the face value of the card, the greater the emotion that the card represents. In the game, one person takes on the role of Lucy and the other of Charlie Brown. Lucy's goal is to make Charlie Brown as miserable as possible. Charlie Brown's goal is to stand strong and not end up an emotional wreck.
At the beginning of the game, each player is dealt 5 cards. A round begins by each player choosing one of the cards in their hand and placing it facedown in front of them. These cards represent the conversation between Charlie Brown and Lucy. Both players turn their card over. Whoever has the card with the higher face value is winning the round. Let us assume that Lucy has the higher card. The emotion that she is able to place into her words overpowers the strength of Charlie Brown's words. Charlie Brown now has the option of bringing up a counterpoint that has more emotion behind it than any statement previously presented that round, i.e. placing down another card with a higher face value than Lucy's. If Charlie Brown takes advantage of this opportunity, he becomes the current winner of the round. Lucy has the option of countering this counter-argument to regain her position as winner. The round continues in this manner until no one can, or wants to, present a stronger argument. Let us assume that Lucy wins this round. She gathers the cards that have been played and places them in her emotion pile. This pile represents her current emotional status. If the sum of all of the face values of the spades is higher than that of the hearts, then she is sad. If the opposite is the case, then she is happy. If the numbers are equal, then she is in a neutral state. The same is true for Charlie Brown and his emotion pile. Both players draw cards until they have 5 again and another round begins.
The game continues until the players cannot draw cards so that each has the same number of cards in his or her hand. When everyone has run out of cards, both players' emotion piles are summed. Whoever is happier wins the game.
One of the challenges of creating this game was to make the experience of playing as Lucy and Charlie Brown distinct, while making sure there was no clear advantage to being one of the characters as opposed to the other. For example, it would make sense to have the winner of the game hinge purely on Charlie Brown's emotion pile. If Charlie Brown is unhappy then Lucy must be happy about his misery. If he is happy, then Lucy must be upset that she was not able to mess with his psyche. However, we felt that this placed an unfair burden on Charlie Brown's player. The differences between playing as one of the two characters arise when a tie occurs. If there is a tie at the beginning of a round, then Charlie Brown is considered the winning character. This aspect of the game allows Lucy to present a counter-statement. Lucy wants to make Charlie Brown sad, so she doesn't want him winning the conversation. If there is a tie at the end of the game, then Charlie Brown wins. Lucy can't stand having Charlie Brown be as happy as she is, but Charlie Brown is content with the position.
I was genuinely shocked when we did a test-play of this game during the workshop. When we were coming up with the rules, the game felt too simple. There was too much that went into luck and not enough into strategy. However, as I watched others play, I realized that a lot of the fun of the game came not from the technical aspect, but the emotional one. It was about trying to read your opponent's next move and act accordingly. The challenge that this task presented was enough to entertain the players. Choosing the card that they could play provided enough control over the game for them to feel like they had a say in who won the round, even though luck was probably the greatest factor. However, the players still seemed to realize the level of luck involved, so every small victory was something to celebrate. I believe that this level of emotion as opposed to strategy was key to tying in the game with the comic strip. Perhaps this is a direction more games should go in: less strategy, more emotion.
(Peanuts, Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and representations of the characters are copyright United Feature Syndicate, Inc. and appear here for educational, non-commercial purposes only. For more information on Peanuts and Charles M. Schulz, please visit snoopy.com or the Charles M. Schulz Museum.)
I broke down and finally decided to get Bionic Commando last Sunday. I'm really glad I did. The game isn't without problems, but honestly: what is wrong with the critics? It's not bad at all. I'm finding it a hell of a lot of fun, frankly. I could barely pull myself away from it Monday and played it almost the whole day.
The only way I can explain the reviews is that people were expecting something else. They were expecting something across between Gears of War and Spider-Man 2, and what they got was... well... what they got was a 3D version of Bionic Commando. God forbid there'd be a game you actually have to get good at before you begin to feel really empowered. Being a bionic badass is not easy, I'm sorry. It takes some skill and practice, but once you get the hang of it (pun intended) you feel all the more satisfied because it was you who performed that amazing stunt.
I only really began to master the arm last night, and it was immensely satisfying to intentionally execute a complex strategy that required absurd acrobatics. It was the part where you fight your first flying machine, which looks like some weird futuristic hover-bot. I realized that my arm--which was capable of smashing the robot to pieces--couldn't reach it, and my other weapons were useless. I noticed that it was hovering high above and in the center between four connecting catwalks. I knew the only way to get to it was to back flip off one catwalk away from it, spin around in the air, and use the momentum to slingshot myself around the catwalk and up directly into reach the machine. Everything went smoothly and for a moment I felt like a ballet dancer--albeit a muscular one with a rocket launcher--gliding in zero-gravity.
Yes, the radiation zones are a little annoying... although not nearly as annoying as the reviews suggest. Yes, the story is goofy... but no less goofy than the original (although the dialed-up macho-ness is moderately aggravating). But seriously, overall Bionic Commando is a very satisfying experience, with design elements noticeably derived from the classic original. Of all the criticisms levied against it, I am especially baffled by the common complaint of it being "linear". Unless you were expecting GTA, it's not linear. It basically follows the same format as the original game of progressing through levels, finding hacking points, weapon drops, etc. The levels have a progression, but they are hardly linear in the strategic sense. The way you approach new enemies are always improvisational, and there are very few obvious paths in the platforming. I would say it has big, wide-open levels that progress along a loose "path" confined by some constraints. I actually prefer this, because it allows for more focused level design, more meaningful level architecture. It's not the random free-for-all you'd find in a GTA-style world. I like the idea that I have a specific problem, like 10 soldiers on the top of a building, and I just have to deal with it using whatever I can find in one square city block. The mechanics and affordances feel perfectly balanced and suited to environments of this scope. It's all intentionally designed this way and it works.
I'm sort of fascinated by games like Bionic Commando, games that on the surface seem like they are following the lead of modern triple-A games but in fact hold secret allegiance to their classic roots. I think it is similar to ExciteTruck in this way. ExciteTruck was also a game that critics seemed lukewarm to, but I thought it was fantastic. To look at it and even to play it for a bit it seems like it has very little in common with its NES-era original. But after a while, the more you play it, the more you realize that, as a system, it is really expressing the same experiential concepts as ExciteBike. ExciteBike was all about managing your engine heat so that you can jump as spectacularly as possible in order to get ahead of other racers. Guess what? That's exactly what ExciteTruck is about. Once I realized that I saw the game for what it was: a marvelous update of a classic game that shrewdly targets and preserves certain key aspects of the original game experience. This is also a good description of what Bionic Commando does.
It is interesting to think what it means to update a classic game, as a design problem. It seems like many developers express their fan-love for a classic game through mechanics, even more-so than through story and visual aesthetic. Bionic Commando, of course, has a "modern" visual aesthetic targeted at today's market. The hero is badass by the standards of 2009, not 1988, and the world is full of brown tones and brooding characters. But under all this Bionic Commando does its damnedest to make you feel like the original game did 21 years ago. It's all about precision swinging, near-death drops from absurd heights, and surprising enemies from behind only to leap off into nowhere for a daring escape as you reach for something--anything--to save you from falling. Unlike Spider-Man 2, in which falling is not very deadly, Bionic Commando is about making you fear the ground. Rad Spencer is a super hero of sorts, but one who's far more mortal than Spider-Man. One missed swing and its over. "Death defying" is a term often used when describing game experiences, but it seldom means anything in the literal sense. Mistakes in Spider-Man 2 are not fatal, so the player isn't really defying death. In Bionic Commando they are... and that gives the experience a certain thrilling edge that more forgiving games lack.
Apparently I'm not the only one who feels this way about Bionic Commando. If you want a really excellent review of the game, try this. I think the reviewer sums it up well when he says:
Bionic Commando improves when you do, and you've got little choice but to improve. It's one of a startlingly few games out there which drives a real wedge between newcomers and seasoned players - not because the latter have levelled up a thousand times, or bought a cannon that fires electrified African Elephants, but because their skills have actually developed through practice, allowing them to soar and tumble through Ascension City's architectural thorn bush with an ease that is entirely self-made.
Warren Spector doesn't update his blog often, which is why I was surprised to discover he had actually written about Hideo Kojima's GDC 2009 keynote a while back. He says:
In describing his creative process, Kojima talked about identifying a problem (e.g., Get a Character Over That Wall) and then coming up with a bunch of ways the problem could be solved. Eventually, he settles on the coolest solution and executes that solution. I was dumbstruck that he goes to the trouble of thinking up all those answers but then limits the player to only one. In other words, the concept of choice belongs to developers, in Kojima's world, not to players!
I was at the keynote as well, and this is a wild misrepresentation of what Kojima said. The metaphor of "getting over walls", which Kojima used as a visual aid to his talk, was an illustration of his development process, not his game design philosophy. The talk was strictly about how he and his team approach production challenges. Kojima didn't even mention his personal theories of player agency, let alone explain them.
Spector's willingness to misread Kojima this way concerns me, because it is indicative of the way Kojima is often misread by Western game designers. It makes me wonder whether the people who pick on him for his supposed crimes against interactivity have ever spent a decent amount of time with his games. Spector goes on to say:
My thinking is, if you're only going to offer players one way to solve a problem, well, for starters, maybe you really want to make a movie... But, if you're going to go to the trouble of thinking up a bunch of ways to "get over the wall," as he put it, why not attach some consequences to different wall-climbing approaches and let players in on the fun?
Why not indeed? Kojima must have asked himself the same question, since there are about about a dozen ways to tackle any given problem in Metal Gear, with Snake Eater and Portable Ops offering the player especially rich possibilities. These two games are on par with the dizzying emergent complexity found in Thief and Hitman, which puts them among the best stealth games ever made in my opinion.
I am seriously beginning to think that very few of Kojima's critics have actually played his games in any significant capacity. (And by "significant capacity" I don't meaning having played MGS1 11 years ago when everyone else did. I meaning having played and finished at least a handful of the other dozen or so games he's made over the course of his career.) Kojima's got lots of problems, but choice-driven emergent dynamics isn't one of them. If criticism of Kojima's work were a little more informed we might be having useful discussions about his virtues and vices as a game designer instead of taking cheap shots.
I like adventure games. I'm referring specifically to the traditional point-and-click graphical adventures. The first one I played was Torin's Passage way back in elementary school. It was the funniest game I had ever played and had the most sophisticated plot (but keep in mind that the next closest was probably Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time). Torin's Passage was developed by Sierra and written by Al Lowe of Leisure Suit Larry fame. As a simpler and more accessible variant of the typical adventure games, it was perfect for a kid new to adventure games. There were no verbs to select, generally straightforward puzzles, and even an in-game hint system. What really drew me in were the elaborately animated characters, full voice-overs, and hilarious dialogue. The world of Torin's Passage was a twisted fairy tale that was light-hearted with an underlying dark edge. I fondly remember the mountain-top guru with a yiddish accent, the slapstick shapeshifting of Torin's pet Boogle, and the emotional revelations during the final encounter. The intriguing characters and plot-twists made me begin to realize that actual stories could be told through games.
But what do I remember of the puzzles and various interactions? There was the hill where I had to hunt way too long for just the right blade of grass to click. There was a frustrating sound puzzle whose solution seemed arbitrary. There was a puzzle where I had to give a bag of rosin to a man with a violin without any prompting, and I didn't know what rosin was. To remind myself of any other puzzles, I had to look at an online walkthrough. In typical adventure game fashion, most situations boil down to clicking on the right objects and using the right inventory items. And in typical adventure game fashion, the actual playing of the game is a whole lot less memorable then the non-interactive writing and art. I never think "Oh man, it was so cool when I clicked on the shovel and then on the wall and a secret passage opened! I'm so good at this!"
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of memorable in puzzles in other games. The Secret of Monkey Island's insult battle springs to mind. Then again, that was a break from the standard mechanics. Hearing people talk about the lack of new adventure games, they frequently say they miss the complex stories, the humor, the interesting situations. Who misses the actual interactions? Are the point-and-click mechanics merely the most convenient method to tell the story? I'm sure many readers would take issue with my assumptions (or even better, are yelling indignantly at their monitors), but bear with me: We're getting to the good stuff.
The MDA framework for analyzing games has been gaining recognition and is featured in the annual GDC Game Design Workshop. MDA gives us a lens to see the relationship between players and game mechanics. Mechanics are rules and low-level processes that govern the game. Dynamics are the behaviors that emerge due to the mechanics. Aesthetics are the emotional responses the player experiences as a result of the dynamics. It's important to note that "aesthetics" in the context of MDA are solely based on mechanics and interactions, as opposed to art, music, writing, etc. Here we find one of the shortcomings of MDA. It must be understood that MDA only accounts for one facet of "fun." That being said, the fun that arises from mechanics and dynamics is certainly vital. This interactivity distinguishes games from all other media.
Let us consider how the MDA framework may shed some light on adventure games. Typical point-and-click adventure games have one of two sets of primary mechanics: either the player must select a verb before clicking on an object, or the game assumes a verb depending on context. The challenge is similar in both cases, involving discovering what to click and in what order. The resulting dynamics involve logical reasoning, recalling an earlier clue, or frequently trial and error. Think about the aesthetics that follow. The player is proud of themselves for coming up with the right solution. There is a sense of discovery as they find new objects or learn new information. While we can come up with more types of "fun" for this, notice how the non-mechanical elements of the game still are central to these aesthetics. Discovery is much more exciting when the object is visually interesting or important to the narrative. Puzzles (using the primary point-and-click mechanic) rely on the narrative and context. Abstracting an adventure game by removing art and story could still be an interesting puzzle, but much less appealing. In fact, would you be able to tell the difference between adventure games?
Adventure games seem to have been astonishingly stagnant in terms of mechanics. The interface for selecting verbs has changed, but adventure games released in the last few years function the same as they did 15 years ago. From a purely mechanical standpoint there is more difference between Super Mario Brothers 3 (1988) and Super Mario World (1990), or Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998) and Majora's Mask (2000), than there is between The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) and the Sam & Max Save the World (2006). Adventure games are almost less of a genre than a single game with different stories and puzzles. But it's the emphasis on story and puzzles that frequently set point-and-click adventures apart.
There has been plenty of evolution in adventure game mechanics, it just has occurred in other genres. Survival horror games frequently have puzzles requiring item acquisition and usage, but that mechanic is usually paired with real-time combat. Action-adventure games like the Zelda series have adapted similar elements. Role-playing games feature fully animated sequences with spoken dialogue. Each of these genres use elements of adventure games in conjunction with other sets of mechanics that form the primary interactions. I'm currently playing through The Longest Journey, and while I'm very invested in the story and am amazed by the visuals, the game mechanics just feel old. Point-and-click adventure games haven't faded away by accident, though the proud few continue to be some of the most humorous games available. They still have a place in the game industry, but it's like listening to vinyl records. Records have their own charm and many people would argue that their sound has more personality than CDs. Once in awhile I get a kick out of listening to my parents' old Beatles album, but I have 6500 songs on my computer that I can play instantaneously. There is still a market for albums to be released on vinyl, but it is a niche market that shows little signs of changing.
April 30th 2009 is the date Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty takes place... or, more specifically, it's the date the final boss fight takes place, in which a katana wielding ex-president of the United States battles his adopted son atop the ruins of Federal Hall in New York City. MGS2 primarily takes place on April 29th 2009, with the events of the story lasting through the night and into the early morning. At daybreak on April 30th a giant submersible fortress, secretly built in New York Harbor to be the nerve center of a government censorship operation, surfaces and smashes through Manhattan, finally grinding to a halt on Wall Street.
Hideo Kojima's research is always meticulous, but he was off by 30 years in the case of April 30th 2009 being the 200th anniversary of George Washington's inauguration. Washington was sworn in as the 1st president of the United States on April 30th 1789, which would make the 200th anniversary 1989, not 2009.
The date could be a mistake, or maybe Kojima simply fudged the facts so his story could have thematic coherence. April 30th 2009 is extremely significant in MGS2. The reason Raiden pauses, mystified, when Solidus questions him is because his girlfriend, Rosemary, has asked him the exact same question over and over again: do you know what day it is today? She asked this because April 30th is the two year anniversary of their relationship, which Raiden has forgotten. When Solidus reveals that it's also the date the United States was born, and that he had chosen this day to overthrow the corrupt government and begin anew, it brings two seemingly unrelated aspects of the story to a single, devastating conclusion.
The connection between Raiden's relationship with his girlfriend and his relationship with his government, between the personal and the political, is the hook off which MGS2 hangs all of its ideas about video games, gamers, citizenship, and society. Raiden is a soldier who does what he's told, but he's also a gamer who's learned to follow orders by playing video games. Rosemary is his girlfriend whom he met two years earlier, but their chance encounter was actually orchestrated by the government in order to manipulate Raiden. Rosemary is a spy for The Patriots, the secret government body which dictates all American policy. Through Rosemary they control Raiden's life, observing him and shaping him into the perfect citizen: one who is easy to manipulate by appealing to his self-interest. Raiden never realizes Rosemary is lying to him because he's too interested in himself to notice... much in the same way he is too interested in himself to notice the government is lying to him. Raiden is just concerned with his own sense of elation, with his own sense of accomplishment, of achieving his objectives, of being rewarded... much in the same way the player is.
Raiden's performance (and, by extension, the player's) is so perfect, his ability to be manipulated so complete, that his behavior pattern is used as the basis for the government's censorship program. Who is the model citizen any police state would want? Someone who does everything they are told with Pavlovian precision, who goes through every room, collects every item, activates every cinematic, defeats every boss. Gamers, in their endless desire for gratification, are the perfect citizen. They just want to be told what to do, and they'll be happy.
Complacency as a player versus complacency as a citizen, selfishness in a relationship versus selfishness in a society: all these distinctions melt away in MGS2, leaving the player disgusted with one's self for wanting to be entertained. That's why MGS2 is a great game, and why every April 30th gamers should be reminded what utter tools we all are.
The Pleasures of Old School Resident Evil - Hollywood Infection
Resident Evil: Code Veronica is not Reisdent Evil 4, although it is the fourth game in the RE series. In some ways (like the way in which it actually continues the story of RE2) I prefer it to a tepid narrative exercise like RE3. In other ways I find it undercuts the apocalyptic anxiety that even RE3 managed to maintain. Code Veronica is the point in the series where the shift from horror to action--at least in terms of characterization--happens most clearly. It is when the protagonists cease to be normal people and become action heroes.
I find it significant that Code Veronica was the first Resident Evil to be released after The Matrix (in March 2000). Claire, whom we last saw as a modestly skilled biker in RE2, inexplicably behaves like Chow Yun-Fat in the opening cinematic, dodging helicopter bullets and obliterating a room full of security guards with her powers of slow motion. Of course, it wasn't until RE4 that these sorts of action hero acrobatics made it into gameplay, but they are first introduced into the fictive universe of RE in Code Veronica, causing an unmistakable tonal shift. The shift moves the series away from the horror film roots of George Romero and towards the big Hollywood action of Michael Bay or the Wachowski Brothers. It's not about regular people trapped in a horrifying zombie outbreak anymore. It's about secret islands, villains with master plans, and ass-kicking heroes taking them down. Oh, and there are some zombies in there too.
Claire, fresh out of John Woo school, gets serious in Code Veronica.
To be fair, Code Veronica only embodies this in the cut-scenes, with the gameplay remaining the slow, Romero-esque suspense of earlier RE games. This gives the game a weird tonal contrast, between the action movie plotline and the horror movie atmosphere and pacing. This is partially what makes Code Veronica more interesting (at least story-wise) than RE4, since it seems to exist in some awkward purgatory between Hollywood gloss and indie grit.
It's true that RE has never been fully an imitation of Romero. There has always been a layer of Hollywood action mixed in with the more Romero-esque elements. Both RE1 and 2 end with "escape before the explosion" sequences, both which seem lifted directly out Aliens. Both RE1 and 2 tend to leave their zombie movie conventions behind at their most climactic moments as well, opting for spectacular last boss encounters with creatures that are anything but zombies. But still, it's worth pointing out that even in these moments the feeling in RE1 and 2 was of more or less normal people being set against these odds. Claire is just a biker looking for her brother, and Leon is just a cop. Neither of them know kung-fu, neither of them can jump or flip--in short, they are only as good as the weapons they have... much like we might imagine ourselves in similar circumstances. Chris and Jill in RE1 are similar, even through they are the members of a supposedly "elite" police unit. The S.T.A.R.S, at least in RE1, are not super heroes. They are basically no different than the S.W.A.T. team in Romero's Dawn of the Dead: real people without super powers. The only difference between them and zombie food is the fact that they still have some bullets left.
In the early Resident Evil games zombies were the great equalizer that brought everyone down to the same level. RE2 suggests there's not a damn difference between a biker and a cop when it comes to being trapped in a city overrun with zombies. It's exactly this sort of humanizing subtext that gets gradually eroded over the course of the series, until we finally arrive at Leon in RE4 who can dodge lasers like Neo.
The Pleasures of Old School Resident Evil - Political Shenanigans
I suppose I'm just a sucker for politics, but I find the backstory in Resident Evil 3 pretty interesting when it touches on the machinations of the Umbrella Corporation and their dealings with the U.S. government. Almost everything else about the story--in which a group of survivors attempt to escape zombie-infested Raccoon City--is forgettable. RE3 works best when it functions as a world-building exercise, least when it functions as a zombie survivor story.
Jill, whom you play the majority of the game, is a motivationless cypher in a ridiculous outfit. Carlos, the other character you play, is both a stereotype and a moron. Nemesis, the boss monster who chases you throughout the entire city, is just a rehash of the far-scarier Mr. X from RE2. On the other hand the world of RE3--the destroyed city you get to explore with all the fragmented narrative information it contains--is quite interesting. Ironically, the written information one comes across in RE3 (in the form of diaries, journals, reports, and pamphlets) is better written than in most of the other RE games. One of the big reasons RE1 remains the scariest game in the series is the fact that the various documents strewn throughout the Arklay mansion were effectively cryptic, forcing the player to piece together information. RE2 was a major step backwards from this suspenseful storytelling, featuring a collection of journals and notes that left little room for interpretation, often referring to "zombie attacks" like everyone already knew what they were. There's a reason Simon Pegg in Shawn of the Dead admonishes his best buddy not to use the "zed word". Why, his friend asks? "Because it's ridiculous" is the answer. It is ridiculous, because it reminds us that "zombies" are movie monsters ingrained in our pop-cultural consciousness, and casually acknowledging the fact diminishes their impact. RE1 never crossed this line, but RE2 was lazy about it. RE3, however, seems to consciously avoid using the term "zombie" as well as return to a deliberately cryptic backstory. The result is that the backstory feels like the real story of RE3, a story in which Raccoon City is the main character and Jill, Carlos, and Nemsis are simply vessels to reveal this story to the player.
This would be a fine storytelling strategy, provided the forestory involving the characters wasn't lame to the point of distraction. Unfortunately, the care with which the Raccoon City backstory has been crafted clashes greatly with the crassness of Jill's hotpants adventure. I don't need a great forestory. I don't need RE2's story. But Capcom could at least have the decency to give me something on par with RE1, where the characters are little more than witnesses but at least believable ones. Jill seems like she's fallen into RE3 from out of a summer wear modeling photo shoot, which gives a subtle sheen of "you've got to be kidding me" to even the best moments of RE3.
Regardless, the political aspect of RE3 remains interesting. If I remember correctly, RE1 implied that one of Umbrella's main clients was the United States, and that the zombie outbreak was merely an accidental byproduct of research concerned with creating military bio-weapons. RE3 seems to be the only other game in the series which picks up this thread, suggesting that Umbrella lobbyists in Congress are trying to stall government intervention in the Raccoon City disaster, assumedly in order to salvage as much of their research as possible. These ploys fail and an atomic bomb is dropped on Raccoon City in the closing cinematic. It's the government, and not Umbrella of course, which makes the decision to blow Raccoon City off the face of the Earth. If you take RE1 into account, the subtle implication is that the government dropped the bomb simply to cover its own ass, so that no evidence would remain of their involvement and Umbrella alone could conveniently take the fall.
Well, that's one way to deal with a zombie outbreak.
Even though RE3 is a side story, this one event--the destruction of Raccoon City--is in many ways the most interesting piece of world-building in the whole series. It contains all sorts of fascinating implications, none of which are ever explored by subsequent Resident Evil installments. My biggest disappointment with Resident Evil 4 was how the old politics of RE were forgotten in favor of what felt like a sudden rash of Bush-era xenophobia. Gone is the idea that you are somehow up against both corporate and government corruption. Next thing you know you're the loyal servant of Uncle Sam, in whose name you gladly exterminate the biohazard-infected locals of various foreign countries. They deserve it because, it turns out, they plan to use their biological weapons for world domination. Never mind that Umbrella was selling biological weapons to the U.S. government just a few years earlier, and for God knows what purpose. Apparently it's okay if the U.S. has them because... well... they're the U.S. It's just not okay for anyone else to have them.
In retrospect I am amazed (although I obviously shouldn't be) at the complete moral blindness the series has exhibited towards Umbrella's clients. Who are they? Aren't they partially responsible for the horrors of Umbrella's research? One of the things that was so scary in the original Resident Evil was the fact that the perpetrators were, shockingly, a pharmaceutical company. What's scarier than a monolithic corporation motivated by nothing but greed, to whom a zombie outbreak is a tragedy only because it might affect their stocks?
This is what made Umbrella so chilling back in the day. One imagined they were like the Omni Consumer Products corporation in Robocop: a bunch of uptight suits whose disinterest in human life was so extreme it became black comedy. You can just imagine some executive sweating that he'll lose his Christmas bonus over the Arklay mansion debacle, and this is largely what gave Umbrella its terrible ambiance. Unfortunately, as the series continued and the mythology grew more elaborate, the Umbrella Corporation morphed from a simple capitalistic enterprise to a sinister organization determined to do evil for its own sake. The most significant jump in this direction was Code Veronica, which revealed Umbrella was partially owned by a dynasty of sadistic maniacs. Resident Evil Zero pushed this trend even farther, making Umbrella seem more like a cabal of sorcerers than an actual corporation. With Umbrella's motivations sinking ever further into the fantastic, the notion that they were a company with clients (one of which was the U.S.) sank into the background and finally disappeared completely. In the end Umbrella was the villain, not unchecked capitalism... which would have been a lot scarier if you ask me.
Sissies, Musketeers, Street Fighter, and Floss: The Game Design Workshop 2009
The Game Design Workshop at GDC 2009 began with a series of lists. During the opening presentation, the 100+ workshop participants received a crash course in the MDA Framework, eight kinds of "fun," four possible aesthetic goals, and various dynamic models. As a professor here likes to write all over our papers: "Jargon!" Personally, I enjoyed the presentation. Marc LeBlanc et al laid out a solid foundation for the formal approach to game design that would shape the next two days. After reading Rules of Play, a 20 minute lecture was hardly daunting. But not every designer has the same theoretical background. There were plenty of programmers, artists, and others who were just interested in the design exercises and getting their feet wet in another discipline. More than a few participants found the presentation to be too technical and uninteresting. How does this all jargon fit into the actual process of design? Hopefully some of the participants skeptical of the theory discovered the applications along the way.
We spent most of the first day creating variations on Sissyfight. Originally designed by Eric Zimmerman and released on the web (as Sissyfight 2000), a simplified card-based version has become a mainstay of game design exercises. Six players are each assigned distinct colors and have a deck containing a card for every action and a card for every color. Once all the players have placed their selected action and target cards face-down, the cards are flipped and the actions resolved. In the simplified version, the commands are a basic attack (deal 1 point of damage), a team attack (deal 2 damage per team attacker, but fails if there's only one), and defend (receive half damage, rounded down). The game continues until there two players are left with health tokens.
With our 6-person teams, we discussed and analyzed the game before creating our own variation. One of Sissyfight's strong points is how its simple mechanics work to convey the theme of schoolyard girls taunting each other. Without the name, it's still an engaging game, but keeping the theme in mind lends the game a lighter humorous quality. The question we faced was how could we change the mechanics to communicate a different aesthetic. With 20 ideas, from monster trucks to debating, we gradually narrowed down our options. The idea we settled on was a combination of tribal and spiritual warfare. Two distinct conceptions of the theme were playtested. First we split the players into two tribes to make the game 3 vs 3. When that turned out to be too unbalanced without extensive complications, we returned to an earlier idea of converting followers. The result was a pool that all damage went into, which could then be claimed by a player if they were the only one to take that action in a turn. But as we iterated, we focused more on making the new mechanic interesting and balanced than matching the theme.
In contrast, another team did a game about bacteria where every card had a post-it note renaming the actions to things like infect and mutate. Each of their changes also were more geared towards following the theme, though it seemed to have some fairly arbitrary limitations. What was really interesting was how they saw the player interactions during the game. My team generally avoided ganging up on any one person and kept the scheming to a minimum. The other team played with constant discussion of alliances against other players and actually incorporated this as a phase in their game progression. With the same set of rules, the two groups had completely different social dynamics. Maybe this was reflected in our design process too. We tended to listen and discuss every person's ideas and tried to incorporate all input. But as a result, our prototyping process slowed. The other group seems to have made firmer decisions and then had time to incorporate the theme more fully. On the flipside, our team really polished the changed mechanic. The difference here actually brings to light one of my problems with the MDA framework. The A in MDA refers to aesthetics that result from the mechanics and dynamics, separate from any visual or narrative aesthetics. I don't disagree, but I worry that MDA overemphasizes the mechanics influence on aesthetics. Simply renaming the cards and describing the gameplay from within the theme added a lot to the bacteria team. Would Braid have been nearly as effective without its elaborate artwork and music? But thats an issue for a different, and much longer, post.
Following our second coffee break of the day (there was no shortage of caffeine during the conference) we began Elective A. We had a choice of three activities and I participated in Robin Hunicke's Facebook game session. Each team had to come up with an idea for a social Facebook-based game and then present their proposal to a team of producers who assign a sponsorship to the game. The next iteration would then have to somehow incorporate the sponsor. One of my favorite proposals was a collaborative art game where the best results would be printed on Threadless tees. But for such an interesting activity, I left pretty disappointed as did the rest of my team. See, the youngest person at each table was placed onto the producer team. I can see that Robin was trying to give us a special role, but in the end we had very little to do aside from listening to pitches, picking a sponsor, and giving a few suggestions. On top of that, Robin was obviously very excited about the activity and ended up doing a fair amount of the talking for us. Don't get me wrong, she's a blast to work with, her enthusiasm was infectious, and she gave great input. Just next time: Can we play too?
For the second elective that spanned the last hour of Monday and all of Tuesday morning, I chose "The Three Musketeers." Similar to the Sissyfight activity, we were given a simple game that we would make changes to. Three Musketeers is a simple two-player asymmetric board game. Rather than make a thematic change like with Sissyfight, we were asked to preserve the theme while adding a third player (and a fourth if possible). So if you have The Three Musketeers against Cardinal Richelieu's men, who is the third player? Some teams added d'Artagnan or another third distinct side, though most ended up splitting either the Musketeers or the Cardinal into two. With the asymmetric sides, it was particularly difficult to add a player while maintaining a balance. My team, again using an iterative process (moral of Game Design Workshop: iteration is good), where we had two pairs of Musketeers working independently. But the Cardinal's win condition was to have any three Musketeers in a line. This meant that the two Musketeer players had to strike a balance with each other. By the way, is there really no flash implementation of Three Musketeers? Someone fix this!
Next up was a short activity where each team chose an existing video game and create a paper version that conveyed the aesthetics (using the MDA definition) rather than the mechanics. Now this is a fascinating thought experiment. My team chose Street Fighter and we quickly developed a rock-paper-scissors style play. The designers on the team revealed very different conceptions of how the game would actually play. One designer was convinced that the game needed to be frantic and fast-paced, with players throwing dice or placing cards as fast as possible. This proved to be impractical, but revealed how players see Street Fighter in different ways. It's the difference between button-mashing and strategic choice of moves. A less experienced player would throw out whatever moves they could while an expert player would be planning moves in advance. Our version kept a similar distinction by implementing a time limit. Players place three actions (high, medium, low attacks, and directional movement) face-down on the table. Once one player has placed all three cards they count down from three. If the other player hasn't placed all their cards, they have a missed move. The result is that if the player doesn't plan ahead and constantly reorganize their cards, they could fall behind. The actions we specified definitely could use some adjustment (jump and crouch gave no advantage, only added a disadvantage), but the idea was so successful that I hope to make a fuller implementation at some point. After we presented our game, a man came up to me and explained that he made the Street Fighter card game, and it was very similar to what we had done. I guess we were on the right track.
And finally, to close out the workshop, I signed up for Iron Game Designer. Each team was given an identical bag of objects to make a game with. Rather than giving us typical game-related objects, we had rubber pencil toppers, elbow braces, plastic two-pronged forks, floss picks, a comb, and a plastic bag. One group made a board game using the objects to replace traditional pieces, but the others mostly grew out of throwing things. It was certainly fun, and a relaxing end to the workshop, but using a floss pick and the forks as bow and arrows isn't exactly a useful design exercise.
Still, the workshop as a whole was a resounding success, giving us a chance to come up with unique ideas and make some rapid prototypes. I'm not sure how much I learned that could be articulated, but the activities provided plenty of food for thought. Would I recommend the Game Design Workshop for next year's attendees? Absolutely. Will I attend again? Doubt it. There are other summits those two days that I'd like to attend. As far as the Game Design Workshop, I'd be more interested in a workshop held locally every other month or so; essentially a game jam of exclusively non-digital games where go through a variety of small projects.
In the recent, but not immediate, past, a few devel-oggers were discussing trying to maintain an archive of MUD history. Raph Koster, Richard Bartle and Brian Green (among others) talked about the difficult balance of relevance and authority in trying to get MUD history documented on wikipedia. While there appeared to be (in common Wikipedia fashion) some sort of compromise put together (in the sense that no one left happy), it left me thinking about the enormous difficulties in trying to get a decent, much less accurate, archive of games. I'll only tackle a bit of it, but I had to tip the hat to the source of the concerns, and it revolves around (surprise) us.
The Pleasures of Old School Resident Evil - Narrative Confusion
WARNING: What follows will probably only make sense to people who have played and finished most of the cardinal Resident Evil games. Read at your own risk.
"It's up to us to take out Umbrella."
--final line in Resident Evil 2
In my imaginary alternate universe where Resident Evil remained consistently interesting, the next game would have been exactly that: taking out the Umbrella Corporation, or at least seriously attempting to. This is sort of what Code Veronica did, but beginning with RE3 the series began its side story-obsessed, franchise-milking holding pattern that completely derailed the narrative momentum of RE1 and RE2.
If we can take Code Veronica as the "real" RE3 (which, from my understanding, is what it was originally intended as) then "RE3" and RE4, at least conceptually, extend directly from Leon's line at the end of RE2. Code Veronica picks up Claire's thread as she attempts to infiltrate Umbrella's Paris branch, and RE4... well my suspicion is that RE4 at its genesis was a companion piece to Code Veronica, a game that extended the globe-trotting pursuit of Umbrella established in RE2. That's the rationale for the European location, and I imagine the original story was similar to the final one except that it was Umbrella (and not the locals) who were masterminding things. If RE4 had been released soon after Code Veronica, instead of the endless remakes and side-stories, I imagine that's what it would have been. However, Capcom kept it in development for years and when it was finally ready they had more or less lost the thread established in RE2, hence RE4 feeling more like a reboot than a sequel. This resulted in a strange experience for anyone who actually remembered RE2, since RE4 finally brought back Leon yet dropped Umbrella out of the story completely. Since Leon's entire motivation at the end of RE2 seemed based on taking down the Umbrella Corporation, it left him with no personal motivation in RE4. This is why RE4 felt so frustrating to me. As a follow up to Code Veronica (which felt very much like a sequel to RE2, in spite of its shortcomings) RE4 is almost entirely non sequitur. Story-wise it feels like RE4 should have been a side story, or even another game franchise altogether. RE5, ironically, feels much more like a real sequel to Code Veronica... finally arriving a whopping nine years later.
Not if Capcom has anything to say about it.
Being a story person I tend to want narrative and thematic significance to dictate which games in a franchise are central and which are peripheral. But the Resident Evil franchise, clearly, does not function that way. It seems much more based on gameplay and/or marketing considerations than story. Of course, I wouldn't expect it to be based on story alone, but many game series, like Metal Gear or Half-Life for example, seem to tailor the size and relevance of their stories to the size and relevance of their gameplay innovations, which themselves correspond to the size and relevance of each game's marketing push. Capcom seems to give no shit about this whatsoever in regards to Resident Evil, which is partially what makes the series mythology such a convoluted mess. The result of such a system is that fans have to wait an untold number of years, and be strung along like puppets, while waiting for interesting things to happen in a storyline. And given the frustrating, relatively poor quality of RE's stories, one wonders at the point of even bothering. I certainly do.
Jumping is a mechanic so pervasive that we rarely stop to think about it. It has gone from the defining trait of a genre (platformers) to being included in all manner of action games, adventure games, and first-person shooters. As a means of traversing space it is nearly universal in video games, but in every day life it is nearly absent. How often does an average adult actually jump over something? Adult jumping is limited to hopping over puddles, which is a far cry from leaping over pits and on to platforms suspended in midair. How has this mechanic become so ubiquitous in video games?
One potential answer lies with imitation. While they were not the first video games where you jump over enemies and onto platforms (an honor which may fall to Donkey Kong), the Super Mario Brothers games on the NES were hugely successful. This success spawned a wealth of imitators, leading to countless games where jumping over things was the primary means of interaction. That the Sega Genesis came with Sonic and the SNES with Super Mario World only further ingrained platforming in the gaming consciousness. While the success of these games may help explain the ubiquity of jumping today, there is the still question of how the mechanic came to be in the first place.
Because early video games were two-dimensional, they were limited in choice of perspective. For the most part they had to be a top-down view, as in Adventure:
Or a side view, as in Pitfall:
Top-down games had odd perspective issues in that characters were typically drawn as seen from the side, not from above, as in Dark Chambers:
In a side view perspective game featuring a human avatar, you run into the problem of movement. In shooters like Defender the ship can simply fly in all four directions, because (in theory) that's how spaceships move. But a person is bound by gravity, and simply walking back-and-forth along the ground is not terribly interesting. Burgertime solves this by having multiple platforms connected by ladders: if an enemy is approaching, you can spray them with your pepper, or try to out maneuver them by moving to a different platform. The pepper only sprays directly in front of you; doing nothing but would get old fast. The fun of the game comes from the multi-layered levels. On the other hand, in games like Donkey Kong and Pitfall jumping is the main method of avoiding hostile entities. In other words, jumping provides another way for a gravity-bound person to move vertically, hence making use of the limited 2D space. Of course in the real world we avoid things like rogue barrels and hostile mushrooms by simply walking around them, so jumping in a 2D game might also be thought of as an abstraction of depth.
Burgertime
Of course all of this is highly circumstantial and somewhat arbitrary. Besides, board games with jumping long predate video games and have developed all over the world. In his fascinating book The Oxford History of Board Games, author David Parlett devotes an entire chapter to games where one piece captures another by jumping over it (the following information is taken from Parlett's book). According to Parlett, the earliest game known with this mechanic is Alquerque: the game is described in a manuscript written in 1283, and may be the game called Qirkat mentioned in Kitab-al Aghani, an Arabic book of songs and poetry probably written before the author died in 976. Alquerque is largely accepted as the predecessor of what is called Checkers in the United States, and Draughts (or a variation thereof) in Europe. However, similar games have been found all over the world. Games such as Konane (Hawaii), Siga (Egpyt), Dablot Prejjesne (Sweden), Tobi-Shogi (Japan), Kolowis Awithlaknannai (Mexico), and Koruböddo and Lorkaböd (Somalia) all feature jumping capture.
The long popularity and widespread use of jumping indicates that the mechanic itself has some sort of intrinsic appeal. People tend to have positive associations with height, a topic explored by Lakoff and Johnson in Metaphors We Live By. Lakoff and Johnson refer to such associations as "Orientational Metaphors." For example, in Christianity Heaven is described as somehow "above" the Earth (as in the geocentric model of the universe that long dominated European thought). Our language expresses the same idea, with phrases such as "jumping up and down," "on cloud nine," "free as a bird" or simply "things are looking up." The opposite is true: Hell is underneath the Earth, we feel "down in the dumps" or "under the weather." (There are of course a few exceptions, such as "I'm down with X" or "high on Y," though whether these are positive or negative phrases depends on who you ask.) This psychology is not limited to humans: many dog behavior experts say that when your dog jumps on you she is being dominant, trying to put you in a submissive position within the pack. In season two, episode three of The Dog Whisperer ("Buddy the Animal Killer"), Cesar Milan recommends stepping over your dog to assert your position as pack leader. In his words, "over means dominant."
When a game piece jumps over another, it is in a superior position than its Earthly (boardly?) victim. The act of jumping your piece over your opponent's has an intrinsic satisfaction regardless of the in-game effect; this simple pleasure is extremely evident when watching beginners play Street Fighter. They jump frequently, almost constantly, relishing the motion: kicking your opponent is less satisfying than leaping into the air and then kicking him. That jumping leaves you extremely vulnerable is fairly obvious yet totally ignored. In his new book Game Feel, Steve Swink presents a picture of Super Mario Brothers tracing Mario's movements: his jumping creates a curved, arcing line. For Swink the shape of Mario's jumps have an intrinsic aesthetic quality: "Whether it's the motion of the avatar itself, animation that's layered on top of it or both, curved, arcing motions are more appealing" (306).
There is more to jumping than psychology and aesthetics, however. In many games jumping is fun because of the associated risk. In a Mario game a mistimed jump will send you into a pit or cause you to collide with the enemy you intended to stomp on. In the old Sonic games your speed increased that risk, as a single jump could carry you through several screens worth of space, leaving you unable to tell where and on what you will land. This may be the reason the new Street Fighter player jumps so insistently: they are playing to have fun, not to win. Jumping can mean power not just over an opponent but over the environment itself: would Master Chief seem so powerful if he could not jump over a small rock or fence? The ability to jump in a first-person shooter gives the player more control over the environment, which makes the game feel less linear: jumping out of a window is more satisfying than backtracking to look for stairs. Jumping was frequently used in later 2D beat-em-ups to create the illusion of 3D space. In these games the player primarily moves in four directions: left and right, towards the player and away. Jumping adds height, so the player now feels like they are playing in three dimensions, as in Battletoads. The same could be said of first-person shooters: without the ability to jump you feel stuck to the ground, as though you are a 2D entity in a 3D space.
That jumping has been a part of games for so long indicates that it appeals to players on a very basic level. When studying video games it can be easy to forget that games have thousands of years of history behind them, and that is a long time for a mechanic to remain fun. Jumping's prevalence also suggests a strategy for inspiration: do other common themes in language, myth and psychology exist? And if so, can they be adapted into a game?
Of all the team sports adapted to computer gaming, only baseball can boast the unrivaled consistency of wearing nearly the same interface for over twenty-five years. As early as 1983, games like Color Baseball for the TRS-80 mapped the cardinal directions of the Tandy Joystick to the four bases of the infield diamond.
Color Baseball also featured a top-down view of the entire field that persists in today's lastest games. The context-sensitive control scheme follows the movement of the ball around the field. When a hit leaves the infield, the focus naturally switches to the outfielders. And after a player fields the ball, the position of the joystick indicates to which base it will be thrown.
To quote one reviewer, "everything just seems to make sense on-screen."
By 1987, the ideal interface for a 2-player computer game adaptation of baseball is firmly in place, as demonstrated by RBI Baseball for the NES. The primary innovation over Color Baseball is the differentiated pitching and fielding scenarios. Like a typical TV broadcast, much of the game is presented as a one-on-one duel between pitcher and hitter. Various statistics and cropped views of the field adorn the central channel but the perspective does not change until either the batter makes contact with a pitch or the pitcher attempts to pick off a baserunner.
Notably, both views feature the same orientation such that "down" on the gamepad maps to home plate, "up" maps to second base, and so on.
World Class Baseball for the TurboGrafx-16 improved upon RBI's two perspectives with flyballs that grew significantly larger and left clearly defined shadows on the field as they flew higher, making it much easier for players to judge where and when they might land. Additionally, this title provided fielders with a few fancy leaps and dives without sacrificing the simplicity of the minimal control scheme.
As seen above, multiplayer World Class Baseball gameplay hits the right sense of casual pleasure to approximate the sandlot, alleyway pickup game. And who doesn't like the cool Miami take on baseball stadium organ music?
Although visual conventions were firmly established in RBI Baseball and World Class Baseball, Baseball Stars is often remembered as the quintessential 1980's baseball title because of its sophisticated statistical system. RBI, like many games, was the product of a licensing arrangement with Major League Baseball and bore the names, logos, and likenesses of real teams and players. Baseball Stars, on the other hand, maintained a Little League baseball fiction in which gamers created their own players and teams that could be stored in cartridge memory and persist across multiple seasons.
Rumors abound of hardcore Baseball Stars fans who continue to maintain active teams after two decades of play.
At the end of the 1980s, baseball game designers began to experiment with the traditional interface. Earl Weaver Baseball, primarily a home PC title, offered simultaneous presentation of both perspectives by vertically splitting the screen. Weaver is also notable for its landmark AI, the product of numerous interviews between legendary manager Earl Weaver and the equally legendary game designer Don Daglow who wrote Baseball for the PDP-10 in 1971, the earliest known computer simulation of America's favorite game.
Other experiments were less successful. In particular, Roger Clemens MVP Baseball and the Bases Loaded series broke the persistent orientation rule established by earlier titles in an effort to present a more TV-like, multi-angle experience. In each of these games, the "camera angle" swung around such that they broke the dependable relationship between the gamepad's cardinal directions and the baseball diamond's bases.
(To get a sense for this disorienting new system, fast-forward the above video to about 1:15.)
The contemporary MLB Power Pros demonstrates the durability of those early baseball game innovations. It features an accumulative statistics system like Baseball Stars, major league licensing and cartoonish character design like RBI Baseball, and the simple play style of World Class Baseball.
While efforts to adapt other sports continue to struggle to find working control schemes, baseball maintains a calm confidence. What are the characteristics of baseball and early console gaming that made effective adaptation possible? In what ways could it have gone off course?
Sports gamers tend to be an opinionated bunch. What titles did I miss?
The Pleasures of Old School Resident Evil - Battling Rampaging Sex Monsters
While the Resident Evil series has its share of female protagonists, they tend to be less capable than their male counterparts. The female protagonist of RE1, for example, comes equipped with a designated male savior who assists her the entire game. This cycle of the main female protagonist needing to be saved at various points by men is reiterated throughout the series, notably appearing in RE3 and RE: Code Veronica. RE4 doesn't even feature a female protagonist and is instead based entirely around a male protagonist babysitting a helpless teenage girl.
Resident Evil 2, interestingly, doesn't feature any such devices and thus feels significantly less misogynistic than the rest of the series. Of RE2's four playable characters--Claire the biker, Ada the spy, Leon the cop, and Sherry the civilian--three of them are female, and two out of those three are not portrayed as being at all submissive or needing help (Sherry being the exception). The lone male playable character, Leon, is not particularly masculine. He has androgynous features, and his attempts to "take charge" get undercut repeatedly by the women in the story. Claire bosses him around most of the time, and Ada repeatedly ignores his advice. ("Why doesn't anyone listen to me?" he laments midway through the game.) Leon is not portrayed as a joke exactly, but he is certainly not a hyper-masculine hero. The rest of the men in RE2's story--sadistic Police Chief Irons, sleazy reporter Ben, and mad scientist William Birkin--are in general selfish, awful people who meet horrid ends.
THE CAST OF RESIDENT EVIL 2
Leon
Ada
Claire
Sherry
Chief Irons
Ben
It's significant, I think, that the antagonists in RE2 are predominantly male, while the protagonists pitted against them are predominantly female. I am not speaking of the zombies, of course, but the male characters who are the real villains of the story. The most significant of these is Dr. William Birkin, Sherry's father, who has been transformed into a rampaging mutant by a virus he engineered. Birkin spends the entire game chasing after his daughter in a effort to infect her with his virus, which he spreads by attacking people with his writhing, telescopic tentacles. This lingering threat--with its thinly veiled implications of incestual rape--is the real horror at the heart of Resident Evil 2, the horror Claire spends the whole game trying to save Sherry from, the horror that is, in certain ways, much scarier than a mere zombie apocalypse.
Dr. William Birkin
William Berkin is more or less portrayed as a rampaging sexual predator in RE2. Frustrated that he can't find his daughter, he chases down every other character over the course of the story and forces his tentacles down their screaming throats in an attempt to reproduce. The allusions to tentacle porn are obvious, although they become more complicated when one considers that Birkin's victims are almost exclusively male. These men (one of whom is Police Chief Irons, himself a rapist and murderer) are "incompatible" with his DNA and therefore explode as they give birth to new, unbelievably disgusting creatures. Birkin wants to impregnate Sherry because, as someone who shares his DNA, she won't reject the virus... but fuse with it and mutate, like he is. In the terms of the story, Birkin's monster rape rampage is not motivated by sexual desire. Yet from the player's perspective (and Claire's) the horror is obviously sexual. The fact that the over arching narrative is about saving a little girl from being impregnated by her own father is upsetting and impossible to shrug off.
I am not arguing that the sexual politics of RE2 are terribly progressive, only that they are effective. It's true that the goodness and strength of the women in the story is more or less confined to gendered behavior patterns: in Claire's maternal devotion to Sherry and in Ada's romantic devotion to Leon. But RE2 gets thematic and dramatic mileage out of these patterns in ways that other RE games don't. It recalls the effective use of gender and sexuality in the earlier Alien films, specifically Aliens. RE2 is obviously indebted to Aliens for the idea of a warrior woman protecting a little girl from a monsterous sexual threat. But it works in RE2 for pretty much the same reasons it works in Aliens, with the added, far more disturbing layer of actual incest. The fact that RE2 pits such likable anime archetypes against such genuine psychological distress is part of what makes it stand out against the trite garbage of later Resident Evil games.
A successful recipe for flash games has been to break off a piece of the real-time strategy genre. Desktop Tower Defense and its ilk focus entirely on the defensive base-building aspect. Games such as Epic War and Age of War are more offensive with the player creating waves of units that march towards the enemy base like lemmings off a cliff. There are plenty of variations on these formulas, and some games incorporate more direct control a la Scorched Earth or Worms. But a new game from Casual Collective (a pair of developers including the creator of DTD) puts a new twist on the micro-RTS.
Minions consists of brief (10-15 minute) multiplayer matches where 2-12 players are split between red and blue teams attempt to destroy the opposing color's base. Control is fundamentally similar to an RTS, except that each player only controls a single tank. The tanks are chosen prior to the match from 8 classes, each of which has 3 unique abilities. As time progresses and damage is done to opposing towers, tanks gain experience that with each level increases health, damage, and lets a point be spent upgrading one of the three abilities. The time between re-spawns increases with the player's level. Assisting each team are 4 defensive towers in addition to their home tower and uncontrollable mini-minions sent out periodically.
If Puzzle Quest has the scope of a hardcore game with casual mechanics, Casual Collective seems to be attempting the opposite with Minions. Given the single map and relatively small variations between classes (at the mechanics level), Minions is very repetitive yet I can't seem to stop playing. The multiplayer competition ensures that matches are always unique. Although the downside of multiplayer-only is that you always have to deal with other players. And as with any multiplayer game, the players can be a mixed bag. You can't damage players on your own team, but I guarantee there will be times when you wish you could. Sure it's disappointing to be teamed with a noob, but the game is easy enough to learn that they're not noobs for long. The real issue is from players who just don't care.
There are no experience points or rankings that continue between matches. You receive some points at the end of match that increase your account's level on the site, but that's a cumulative point total between all games on the site and doesn't impact the games. Not only are there players that wander haphazardly around the map making friends with the walls or taking a 5 minute break, in a majority of matches at least one player will disconnect. And the balance is such that a team with a player-advantage has an almost guaranteed win (assuming they stood a fighting chance previously). Is there a solution to this? A penalty on a player could take away the casually approachable nature of the game. A better method might be to assist the abandoned team. There could be an increase in the power or frequency of mini-minions, or a reduction to that team's re-spawn times.
The site's forums are filled with such suggestions but it remains to be seen if Casual Collective is going to spend the time to update the game. Within the last two weeks a much-needed "switch teams" button was added to the lobby screen. But that's the sort of basic feature that should have been included in the first place. Adjusting any sort of balance within the game would be much riskier. Adding a balancing mechanism for players that leave probably wouldn't increase traffic significantly. It's something everyone's used to in online games. There's plenty of talk in the forums about adjusting the classes because of perceived imbalances, but are people not playing because of that? Doubtful. Any time I conclude a class is too powerful, a few matches later I'm proved wrong. It's just a matter of rock-paper-scissors type match-ups. Yeah, three Cutters seem unbeatable when against a group of Docs and Shoutys. But throw in a Splodge and a Stinger and watch the Cutters get torn to pieces.
As far as class balance, the only thing that desperately needs to be changed is how extra experience is awarded during a match and how points are calculated at the end. Experience gets a boost from damaging towers, but certain tanks are relatively ineffective against them and are better used to fight back opposing tanks. Points at the end are assigned with some arcane formula based on the ratio of kills to deaths and the damage done to towers. First of all, kills are only measured in killing blows; it doesn't matter if you did 75% of the damage to a whole group of enemies, if you don't land the final blow, you get no credit. Haven't we moved past that in games? Almost all MMORPGs now divide experience among group members based on their contributions, however their class might count that. A healer would even get credit for how much they've healed. But in Minions, the Doc is a pretty thankless class. The Doc is unlikely to do much damage, and has to chase after their teammates who ignore any semblance of formation since the healing ability affects a small radius around the Doc. Adjusting the balance and rewards would be nice, but what the game desperately needs (and should help increase traffic) is more maps. One small map is just not enough. Let's see a brutal maze of towers or a lopsided map for uneven teams. At least rearrange the basic map to create some variation. It can't be that difficult to do.
Flash games have the advantage that they can be updated very easily: the webmaster just uploads a new swf file. Being able to instantly release fixes makes full upgrades less important. Why wait for a whole batch of version 1.1 upgrades to release the second map? If there's a fix or a new addition, it can just go straight up. A simple notice on the site about each fix would keep players coming back. I'm no business expert, but when a developer is hosting their own game (or has easy update access), why not avoid "release" versions and just update bit by bit? It seems to work for Google, and they even keep the beta status.
The Pleasures of Old School Resident Evil - Sherry Birkin
Resident Evil 2 actually has some of the best voice acting in the series. This is, of course, not saying much, since Resident Evil has long been famous for horrid, hilarious acting. But I think it's worth pointing out that there are many subtle layers of badness when it comes to acting, and RE2 at times is so significantly better than RE1 (and, if you ask me, many RE games that followed) it comes as a shock.
The writing is still hammy, but the voice actors do a better job of making it feel believable. I am thinking mostly of Sherry here, the lost little girl you are supposed to protect in Claire's scenario. She sounds more like a real little girl than almost any other character I can think of in a localized Japanese video game. I dunno who they got to voice her, but whomever she is she's really good. Sherry sounds entirely like a natural, native English-speaking 11-year-old. This may not seem like an achievement, but when you compare her to the often grating attempts by English-speaking voice actors to approximate Japanese archetypes she's a refreshing contrast. Steve Burnside in Resident Evil: Code Veronica, for example, doesn't sound remotely like a real English-speaking teenager. He sounds like he's being goaded by a Japanese voice director to match the inflections of a Japanese archetypal teenager. There's not a shred of this sort of arch phoniness in Sherry, which makes her a surprisingly compelling character.
I played RE2 so long ago (back in 1998) I'd forgotten all the subtle touches that make Sherry and Claire's relationship endearing. Sherry has some very simple A.I. that, from the perspective of 2009, at times reminds one of Yorda in Ico. She runs a little slower than Claire, so that if you run for too long Sherry will be left behind. This often happens without you realizing it, not becoming clear until you try to exit a room causing Claire to say "I can't leave Sherry behind". When you go find her, she's always sitting by herself in a corner, arms hugging her legs, staring at the ground. When you get near her, Claire's head will automatically turn to look at Sherry, and Sherry's head will automatically turn to look at Claire. After a few moments of this connection, Sherry gets up and follows again. All the time Sherry is looking up at Claire as she walks, even when Claire is fighting zombies. When nothing is happening, and both characters are standing still, they will just look at each other. If you stand still long enough Sherry will actually run to Claire and hold her hand. I like the economy of this animation, since Claire doesn't change position at all--it is simply Sherry reaching up and touching Claire's hand. She then just stands there, staring up at Claire, until you move again. Sherry will even hold Claire's hand if there's a gun in it, which seems incredibly cute to me, like she's so desperate for contact she'll wiggle her hand in between the gun handle and Claire's palm if she has to.
This is all ridiculously simple. Sherry's behavior is not some massive feature; just a small detail. But it's a wonderful detail that does quite a lot to suggest a relationship between two characters. This, combined with surprisingly good voice acting, makes the experience of playing Claire in RE2 one of the better examples of an emotionally compelling sidekick I can think of, at least in the game's I've played. One imagines this is what a good game based on the Ripley/Newt relationship in Aliens would be like. I especially like how the behavior suggests particular psychology. Sherry is a neglected, introverted child. You get the feeling (through various story cut-scenes) that her parents don't care about her much. The way she simply "gives up" when Claire gets too far ahead indicates this. She's used to being left behind, and she deals with it simply by shutting down. This makes one feel pretty awful for leaving her behind, even though it has no adverse effect on gameplay. It makes going back to find her not just a simple gameplay hurdle but an act of proving to her that you're not like her parents.
All this makes me wonder why there aren't more children as sidekicks in video games. Most of the other characters I can think of that function in this way--as sidekicks you have to protect--are grown women being protected by men. Although many of these games are good, they always have to explain away the annoying gender politics through some complex reasoning, like Yorda in Ico being mute or Emma in Metal Gear Solid 2 being drugged. But when you have an adult protecting a small child the relationship feels more natural. Of course you'd have to watch a kid at all times; of course they'd become paralyzed with fear when cornered; of course they'd lag behind; of course they'd become emotionally attached to you. They're a kid.
A lot of the believability problems of a video game protector/protectee relationship are solved (or, at least, given a more compelling explanatory framework) by simply making the relationship one between an adult and a child. That is, after all, the inescapable subtext of any such protector/protectee relationship: that you are an adult and they are a child. Ico, for example, forces you to treat Yorda like a child, which makes it necessary to explain why she would act like one. The explanations can range from the rational ("She's been abused by her mother.") to the offensive ("She's a woman.") The nice thing about RE2 is that it simply avoids this by making the player character a confident, focused adult woman and the sidekick a little girl who, quite believably, is scared shitless by zombies and needs help.
In early January, experiencing the kind of doldrums that readers of an academic blog about video game
research are no doubt quite familiar with, I picked up a little expansion to that one game. It took me a while to hit the new level cap of 80. After a few lucky runs, I was in a pretty good spot, and felt up to tackling some of of the end-game content. Poking around a friendly chat channel for a group, I signed up to run a dungeon I’d been through once before, only to be told I was undergeared and unknown, and was bounced from the group. A week later, I managed to connive my way back into the group to tackle a set of the toughest dungeons in the game. By the end of our run, I had managed to upgrade almost all of my equipment, including snagging some of the best gear available for Shamans who specialize in Restoration. This should make my life easier: I’ve got status, I can clear the hardest stuff in the game, right?
The Pleasures of Old School Resident Evil - Slow Zombies
It's funny that, a few years ago, I passionately hated the Resident Evil formula so much I couldn't imagine ever liking it again. I loved RE back in the day, but by the time 2005 rolled around I'd had it with the fixed camera angles, the clunky tank controls, the endless locked doors, the ridiculous backtracking, and the unbelievable puzzles. This is the big reason I welcomed Resident Evil 4's changes (sans the moronic story) with open arms and vowed I'd never look back. Funny how you never appreciate some things until they're gone.
Cornered in Resident Evil 2
While RE4's more action-based approach revitalized the series and introduced new zombie film-inspired dynamics into the gameplay, it also opened the door for RE to become far more of a generic action game. Playing Resident Evil 1 and 2 again recently has made it clear to me just how slow, methodical, and tense survival horror once was. It's not that RE4 isn't suspenseful, but the old RE's embody an entirely different sort of suspense, one that's more subtle. In certain ways the earlier RE's better embody the George Romero spirit simply by being so contained. This seems counter intuitive, since Romero's apocalyptic visions of average people facing horrific odds seem more suited to bigger virtual environments with more complex dynamics. In a sense this is true, but consider for a moment how the earlier RE games made such small goals feel so big. Getting from the second floor of a single building to the first floor exit is a monolithic undertaking in Resident Evil 1, one that constitutes a major strategic challenge. Doing something as mundane as run down a single hallway or cross a single room requires a level of planning that adrenaline-fests like RE4 are simply not interested in offering. They've abandoned this sort of slow-burning tension along with the "slow" zombies of yesteryear. While I am not down on "slow zombies" as much as Simon Pegg is, I do agree that fast-moving zombies (or parasite-infected people, or whatever they are now) does inherently alter the feeling, dynamics, and meaning of a zombie scenario, whether it be a game or film. In the case of games it seems to translate into the gameplay genre shifting more towards the mainstream, overlapping heavily with the first-person and third-person shooter genres to the point that the two become almost indistinguishable.
Ready to rock in Resident Evil 4
As Resident Evil 5 rapidly approaches, I am bracing myself for a game that feels significantly more like a Hollywood action film than a low-budget horror film. Resident Evil has always had some elements of Hollywood action, ever since RE1 jettisoned its brooding atmosphere at the eleventh hour in favor of a big guns, big explosions finale. Yet Resident Evil always had at least one foot firmly in Romeroland. I am only now realizing how many of its "outdated" conventions helped effectively create that feeling.
Recently I was at a gathering with some colleagues from around the lab. During the course of the evening the discussion turned to some of the more obscure game consoles that appeared in the early to mid 90's. At one point I happened to mention owning a Nintendo Virtual Boy and all but two of the games released in the US (still need Jack Brothers and Waterworld; well, maybe "need" is too strong a word). The response was largely negative: why would anyone pay good money for bad games and bad headaches?
Red Alarm on the Virtual Boy
Certainly a valid question, but when I told the story of a time in summer 2004 when I passed on the chance to buy a Philips CD-i and a bunch of games (including the three Zelda atrocities), there was disappointment, as though the CD-i were somehow less awful than the Virtual Boy. For me, these reactions highlight a frequent conundrum. I love going to independent game shops to see what they have lying around. There is always a certain thrill associated with finding something rare, be it a Wonderswan color or a sealed 3DO. However, the fact that video games are consumer products results in a strange situation where unpopular products become rare. This happens when a system lacks good games, so few people buy it, and hence few are manufactured. In video games, "rare" items can be really good or really bad. So there is this ongoing question of whether an uncommon, albeit crappy, find is worth the money. After all the same money could just as well go towards something I know to be quality. But at the same time there is an almost ethical concern as well.
The problem with video games, especially console games, is their ephemeral nature. Games only become obsolete, but hardware wears out with use, rendering associated games unplayable. Finding uncommon hardware for sale thus carries a sense of gravity: I was fortunate to find this item, and while it may not be fun to play it needs to be preserved (using eBay here is no fun). In a sense, this is part of my heritage, and should go to someone who will appreciate it. Of course, the idea of preserving game history is a paradox: games are meant to be played, but that Jaguar will only last so long before something fails, and does it not also deserve preservation?
If games are your sole concern there is always emulation. Of course emulators are a hot-button topic, and there is a lot to be said. First and foremost I appreciate Nintendo's efforts with the Wii's Virtual Console. This is an excellent way to preserve gaming history, and while there are many titles lacking they are moving in the right direction. Also notable is Classic99, which emulates the TI 99/4a home computer and is apparently distributed under license from Texas Instruments. It even comes with a few games to get you started. While I wish this was something more companies would do as a service to the community, Nintendo has shown that there can still be a market for these games, and any reluctance to release "official" emulators on their part is completely understandable.
The TI 99/4a Home Computer
For the purist, however, emulation is hardly an option, and not just because emulators are rarely completely accurate. While the success of a given platform has at least something to do with the quality of games available, part of the overall experience comes from the hardware itself. Sure the Dreamcast had plenty of great games, but I will always associate those games with the nagging sense that no human being designed the controller. Similarly, the unreliability of the old NES makes for lots of good stories. A good friend of mine is a big fan of Marble Madness, but his NES can barely function long enough for him to finish the game before the hardware crashes. Thus it is both a test of his skill and a race against the console itself. Towards the end the sprites transform into random characters, signaling the imminent crash. It really improves the game.
There is something to be said for playing games on the hardware they were meant for, to have the experience as originally intended. To do otherwise is like watching a cell phone bootleg of a movie: you know what generally happened, but the experience is nothing like being in the theater on opening night. Ultimately I regret not purchasing the CD-i, even though that money went to much better games. A few weeks later I went back to the store but the system was gone, and prices for one now are prohibitively expensive. If you can find one.
Late last month, GAMBIT's co-PI Henry Jenkins was kind enough to allow me to guest-star over at his blog Confessions of an Aca-Fan and share with his readers my interview with CarneyVale's artist Desmond Wong. Today we'd like to invite Henry into our blog to share his interview with Georgia Tech's Michael Nitsche. Take it away, Henry!
What Architecture and Urban Planning Can Tell Us About Games: An Interview with Georgia Tech's Michael Nitsche
For a while there, it looked like the debate between the ludologists (who focus on game play mechanics) and the narratologists (who focus on storytelling) was going to define the range of perspectives in games studies. As someone who was falsely labeled a narratologist for a bit, I found this model of the field constraining and distorting. Now, of course, we've seen an explosion of different perspectives in the academic study of computer and video games. One of the most promising approaches emphasizes the spatial dimensions of game design, a topic which was, in fact, the real focus of my own early writing on games (and not coincidentally a recurring focus of the work of Espen Aardseth, a card-carrying Ludologist), suggesting that space is not only the final frontier but also the common ground of many of the first generation of game scholars.
Michael Nitsche, a games researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology (better known as Georgia Tech), has written a significant new book, Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Worlds (MIT Press, 2008) which sums up what we can learn about games by examining them as spatial systems. His writing is informed not only by work in games studies but also from media studies, performance studies, urban planning and architecture. As he discusses in the interview below, this work has been informed by his work with the Digital World and Image Group at Georgia Tech.
I had a chance to visit Nitsche and his colleagues down in Atlanta late last fall and came away tremendously impressed by the spirit of collaboration and exploration which exists within that particular academic community. The Georgia Tech folks are doing cutting edge work across many different research areas. I am lucky enough to have Michael's colleague, Ceila Pierce, presenting the opening colloquium this term, sharing her work on the construction of fictional ethnic identities within multiplayer game worlds.
Here and next time, Nitsche shares some thoughts about the theoretical stakes of thinking about games space.
You come to this book both as a game designer and as a game theorist. How have the two perspectives informed each other here? To what degree do you see your design work as a mode of experimentation with the basic building blocks of games as a medium? Can you describe for us some of the projects you've worked? How does work with games done in research centers differ from the kind of work which occurs within commercial games companies? What value do you think university-based game research brings to the evolution of games as a medium?
Most examples in the book are drawn from commercial video games but it does include a wide range of research projects, too - including some of my own practical experiments. We need these experimental game projects to fill in the gaps left by commercial titles.
Commercial video games have to make money and they often have to be streamlined and optimized to reach that target - university-based games research projects have all kinds of limitations but they thankfully do not have to sell. This allows us to explore some of the more complicated areas that commercial games have to avoid to stay afloat.
My own work has always been a mixture of theory and practice but I have to admit that I somehow lack a single direction in the experiments I have conducted. I have worked on educational virtual environments, procedural game spaces, virtual and mixed media performance spaces, augmented reality prototypes, and these days I start to experiment with location-based handheld applications. In my case these experiments are truly explorative. They start off with a relatively simple question and snowball into more and more challenging test beds. While a commercial game production has to streamline the design at that point and focus on the core, research projects remain free to explore. I like that - a lot.
At Georgia Tech we are used to testing theory and analysis in such an experimental set up. So, shortly after I joined the faculty here, I started the Digital World & Image Group. One of our first major projects was Charbitat, an experimental game that creates a 3D world around the virtual player depending on how you play the game. First, we focused on the question of procedural space generation and how to design for these new and dynamic worlds. But once we had the functional prototype up and running, we moved on to look into procedural quest generation, dynamic camera control and patterns to support spatial navigation in infinite worlds - all based on the original game prototype. Any commercial developer would have cut this additional research, which is why this kind of gradual experimental discovery is only possible in a non-commercial environment. This certainly does not mean that academics should tell developers how to create their games, but it shows that research projects can offer additional information because they are free to explore venues that are locked off by deadlines and budgets in commercial production.
Other areas are not covered by commercial games, yet. For example, I am very interested in game worlds as performance spaces where players do not play to achieve certain high scores but instead to express something effectively. Consequently, some of my projects deal with virtual puppetry or augmented reality performance spaces.
I also have done quite a lot of work in machinima. The industry might recognizes the promise in these areas but it is simply not clear how these ideas might work out in a viable single application. So here the university-based research project can break completely new ground.
Many accounts of game theory have emphasized the tension between ludological approaches, which focus on game play mechanics, and narratological approaches, which focus on story telling. Does a focus on game spaces give us a different way of thinking about the relations between these two approaches?
I believe it does. Space is certainly not the single answer to all of our problems but it surely predates play as well as narrative. We learn how to deal with space before we start to tell stories or play games. If we translate this into video games, space becomes a higher category, one that can include narrative qualities as well as ludic ones.
I started to look into expressive 3D game spaces around 1999, when I began my studies at the University of Cambridge's Department of Architecture. This was just around the time the debate about narratology and ludology heated up. We did a lot of work with video but I felt somewhat shielded from the divide because even in the darkest controversies nobody ever argued against the importance of space in games. From where I was standing, you had to ask whether there is really a substantial divide at all between ludology and narratology. For me, both become part of how we deal with spaces and are not opposites but complementary to each other.
In the book I talk about Story Maps, a form of imaginary map that we form in our mind as we play our way through a virtual environment. These maps are shaped by what we do in the game world as well as how the action it told through various forms of presentation in sound and image. Sure, there is a strong narrative element in these maps but they can only be created when the game is played. So I could never really fully see the divide because my work seemed to be right in the middle of this discussion without conflicting with either.
A key goal throughout the book has been to map the many different devices that shape the player's perception and experience of games space. What value is such a catalog to the game designer? What do you see as some of the under-developed opportunities in the creation of expressive game spaces?
Game Studies has covered a lot of ground and opened up a wide range of approaches, which is good. What I suggest is a combination of different fields. That is why the book references various disciplines from architecture to film, to drama and literature studies.
Game designers very often use these and other references already as they collect ideas and inspirations. They do this often intuitively and this book might help to stimulate this messy process and provide an additional perspective.
Any designer worth their salt is aware of the fundamental role of a video game such as Mario 64 for the way we design games today; this book offers an additional view at some details regarding these innovations specifically for 3D game worlds. It does not suggest a single solution or a unique missed opportunity but instead discusses a range of available options by looking at the underlying basics.
For example, the whole argument of the book is built on the idea that game worlds are not simply polygon masses arranged in a certain way in the engine. Instead, we should look into different layers where game spaces come to life. These include the play space in the living room of the player, as well as the fictional and mediated spaces generated by the presentation and the imagination of the player. The rule-based level is only one of five layers for game space analysis. The task, then, is to find the connections between the different layers. New interfaces such as the Wii remote or webcams are good examples for these connections. They put much more emphasis on the world in front of the screen. But what can we make of this expansion into the physical space? Among other things, the book invites us to think about ways these connections into the living room can be made more effectively.
Throughout the book, you draw heavily on ideas from architecture and urban planning. What do these fields have to contribute to games studies?
There are some obvious parallels, such as the relevance of urban planning for the design of free-roaming game worlds or the way architectural styles are copied in video games. However, I would argue that we have to look a bit deeper to identify more fundamental parallels.
One example for a more direct connection is the way we read large-scale environments no matter whether it is a real world like my hometown or a virtual one like an online world. We gradually form a cognitive map based on certain key features and navigate through the world based on this map. Architectural theorists like Alexander or Lynch have done extremely valuable work in precisely this area and a range of research projects has shown that the same ideas apply to virtual environments.
However, games offer different means to accentuate a players' development of a cognitive map. Designers have full control over the space and the possible actions in it and use it to dramatize the experience. That is why we also have to take theatrical spaces into account.
Most virtual worlds are designed not for a "live-like" experience but for overly dramatic ones. These game worlds would fall short if they would provide "only" realistically functioning virtual cities. Instead, they have to deliver virtual stages, full or extraordinary events and opportunities that are not available in real world designs. That is why we have to add these dramatic functions to the architectural ones and combine dramatic moments with cognitive maps.
Likewise, architecture is very helpful in the discussion of specific spatial structures, such as paths, arenas, or labyrinths. They clearly reflect and reference existent architectural structures but we have to add the game specific elements that usually enhance their dramatic impact. The labyrinths of Doom or Silent Hill are not just navigable virtual architectures but the actively put the player into a highly engaging dramatic situation.
The video game world tells the player where she is projecting her actions. It positions the player via spatial means and uses references to architecture and urban planning. At the same time, it is a dramatic positioning. Players do not enter a game world as a neutral observer or visiting tourists but as cops staged in the middle of a gang war, a superhero with the power to destroy or rescue Metropolis, a lost soul that only tries to escape and survive.
These options are embedded in the game world's architecture, its presentation, and its functionality. Urban planning, architecture and performance studies help us to balance and connect these features better.
You also suggest that the design of games space has been heavily influenced by our shared understanding of cinematic conventions. Which aspects of film form exert an influence on the design of game worlds?
Video games, film, and television are all part of the moving image media family. They share many aspects, differ in many others and continuously add to each other's vocabulary through their shared origins. There are at least two connections that we have to take into account when we discuss game spaces and their visual representation.
On the one hand, a large number of games try to remediate cinematic visuals. There is no reason for a lens flare effect in Unreal Tournament because there are not physical optics involved. But the programmer included it. Neither is there any technical reason for suddenly increasing grainy imagery in sections of Fatal Frame. But the images are altered nevertheless. These are rendering effects applied to the game world in order to recreate cinematic visual effects and to achieve distinct dramatic impacts.
Most of the time, we have to read and understand a game world to interact meaningfully with it. That is why visualization is a very powerful form of expression in digital games and not necessarily subordinate to interactivity. Cinematic traditions are built into these games to direct our reading of the world. Because designers constantly develop new visual expressions for their games, we cannot pinpoint a single cinematic reference point for video games. The main visual traditions of 3D game cinematography (following camera, overhead view, first-person point of view and pre-defined viewing frames) have all connections to existent cinematic traditions but they have developed their own specifics over time.
The interactive following camera, for example, changes the way that the main character is visually situated in the game world and often becomes not only a visual but also a action controlling device when the hero is programmed to always run in the direction the player points the camera. Equally important is the question of montage of different viewpoints in video games. Film has developed multiple techniques of montage and games seem to gradually follow with some own concepts that are organized around their interactivity.
In many 3D games players not only control the virtual hero but have also taken on the role of virtual cameramen and editors. Maybe the most surprising fact is how seamlessly audience can accept this responsibility. The camera work in the newer Prince of Persia titles is highly developed and might be influenced by the player in the midst of equally complex game play situations. Nevertheless, players seem to readily adapt to that task. Nowadays, a player not only accepts the role of the virtual hero but also that of the "man with the movie camera." And this transition happened extremely smoothly overall. Maybe because of our familiarity with cinematic techniques.
This points to the second main connection between games and film: players have developed certain expectations towards the moving image. We have been educated by television conventions and cinematic visual storytelling and look at game through this expectation.
This allows players to understand the elegant intro sequences of the Half-Life games as descendents of the classic long opening shots that we have seen in Altman's The Player or Welles' Touch of Evil. Players bring this kind of media literacy to the game and can read it through their proficiency in film and TV visual storytelling. So we expect games to work a bit like movies because film and TV are essential sources of our visual literacy.
This is a two-way street, of course, and with the growing role of games as media for socialization the influences starts to shift. We can see that games start to educate our visual expectations and drive shots in television and cinema productions. So instead of a single influence I would argue for a growing shared ground that is based on the tradition of the moving image.
As you note, game designers rely on a range of spatial metaphors to discuss
their craft -- drawing parallels between games and gardens, sand boxes,
amusement parks, labyrinths, mazes, and arenas or talking about games as being
on "rails" or "tracks." Which of these analogies are most productive for
thinking about games space? Which do you think are confusing or misleading?
The book does not directly pick up the discussion of games as gardens or sand boxes - not because these metaphors are misleading but mainly because to me it seemed that a lot of detail is lost in such an approach. These are very useful approaches and often well applied in other works but a bit too large for the detailed analysis I had in mind. In my case, I tried to look into more precise spatial subcategories - like the path, the arena, or the labyrinth.
So instead of discussing the overall summary of a virtual space, which indeed might work and feel like a virtual garden, the focus is on details that might evoke this impression. I call these details evocative narrative elements and they work like spatialized hooks that affect the way the player experiences the game universe. They support the player to make sense of the virtual world and the situations in it and offers opportunities to connect and contextualize the events in relationship to each other. Finding a item important to the player, defeating an opponent or saving a friendly character, discovering the value of a certain item and overcoming threshold - all these can be evocative narrative elements that are situated in the game world.
However, how the player truly interconnects these hooks is up to her. Evocative narrative elements can add up to a fuller picture of a garden of a sandbox-like world, but in the end this depends very much on the player.
That is why I suggest a different metaphor in the end of the book, namely that of the kitchen. The kitchen caters for the growing role of players in the formation and re-usage of game environments. Following established recipes or gradually experimenting with new ones might be translated in the players' actions in innovative titles from Spore to Little Big Planet to Second Life or MetaPlace. And getting all the set up right might just about decide the fate of worlds like Sony's Home.
Michael Nitsche is an Assistant Professor at the School of Literature, Communication,
and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology where he teaches courses on virtual
environments and digital moving images. Michael heads the Digital World and Image Group, which works the design, use, and production of virtual spaces, Machinima, and the borderlines between games, film, and performance. His work combines theoretical analysis and practical experiments and his collaborations include work with the National Film and Television School London, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, Turner Broadcasting, Alcatel Lucent, and others. He is author of Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Worlds (MIT Press, 2008), and has published on Game Studies, virtual worlds, digital performance, games and film, and machinima in numerous publications. In a former life he was co-author for a commercial videogame, professional Improv actor, and dramaturgist.
(This interview originally appeared at Henry Jenkins' blog Confessions of an Aca-Fan on February 6, 2009.)
The Independent Games Festival recently announced the finalists for this year's Seamus McNally Grand Prize, and all of us here at GAMBIT were thrilled to find our game CarneyVale: Showtime included on the list. Showtime, which was developed by the GAMBIT Singapore Lab using XNA and is available for download now on Microsoft's Xbox LIVE community service, is the spiritual sequel to our summer 2007 prototype game Wiip. We sat down Desmond Wong, a recent graduate of Nanyang Polytechnic who was the lead artist for both Showtime and Wiip, to discuss how art was used to link the growing CarneyVale franchise together.
CarneyVale: Showtime
How was the art style chosen for Wiip?
During the concept stages of Wiip, the team was trying to settle on a suitable theme for a whipping game. We tried all sorts of ideas and eras ranging from cowboy western to jungle tribal. However, none of the themes had that special factor to them, they felt too overused and unoriginal. Eventually, the idea of being a ringmaster settled in. We knew it would be cool to be a raging ringmaster with a ferocious whip, and the idea of a mysterious circus quickly came into play.
My initial concepts for Wiip were very dark and creepy, with outlandish animals and clowns. Although interesting, we knew that we needed something cuter and more approachable. Fortunately, the team had another artist who drew really cute and wonderful things. We had her take a stab at the early concepts, and she came up with her own cuter renditions. Eventually, the final product ended up as something both cute and creepy at the same time, a perfect balance between the two.
Art trailer for Wiip
How did the art style change between Wiip and Showtime?
If Wiip was the growing child, then Showtime is the maturing teenager. For Showtime, the art style took a more circus city feel to it. It was literally a city with circus performances on its streets. With that, we could have all assortments of neon signs, glowing lights and bustling color. The genral rendering of the characters also took a more mature turn. instead of kiddy characters, the characters in Showtime are more proportionate and grown. The style of shading also changed, employing more tones of shade and detail.
Despite all the changes, the art style was generally kept to roughly the same feel. The bright and colorful characters and scenery were still present, and the quirky designs never disappeared. It was just an art style evolving as time went on.
Who or what would you cite as the inspirations behind CarneyVale's art style?
The biggest inspirations for the art style for Showtime were definitely Cirque du Soleil and Las Vegas. I remember the team watching video performances by the Cirque du Soleil troupe, and the costume designs just blew my mind away. Las Vegas was also a huge inspiration to the art style. Being a city circus, I looked to Las Vegas for its neon lights and signboards to give life to CarneyVale. I also used Las Vegas a lot when trying to merge a circus and city together. I would look at photos of that city, and imagine it with circus elements on it, and it would always work.
Artists such as Yoji Shinkawa also give me tons of inspiration. Famous for his work in the Metal Gear series, what I really like about his works is his ability to generate such a distinct style of his own. The way he paints and conceptualises his ideas are what I respect most about this particular artist.
<a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=9c5941d9-8996-41e6-aaa1-e2c127bf19b2" target="_new" title="CarneyVale: Showtime trailer ">Video: CarneyVale: Showtime trailer </a> The trailer for Showtime
How did you consciously use the art style to tie Wiip and Showtime together?
The colors were the main things. When I was working on Showtime, I made sure that my color palette contained all the colors I used with Wiip. This was mainly the reds and yellows, however, I made sure to inject new tones and colors to keep things fresh. I also made sure to include the familiar red and white curtains from Wiip in Showtime as well. This served as a link between the two games, and added a distinct circus vibe to the game as well.
The general details for the items in the world were also kept consistent to tie the two games together. For example, I employed a certain motif in Wiip that I reused on some of the props in Showtime to keep the world whole and seamless. Most importantly, the narrator for Showtime is the main character from Wiip. No better way to tie two games together than that.
What's your usual workflow like? How do you go about creating a piece of art for the game?
Usually I start with an idea. Ideas can come from anywhere. I got the idea for the Grabber prop by walking past those toy machines where you had to direct a hand to grab the toy you wanted. When I have a general idea down, I take it to the paper and pen. I sketch my ideas out and make sure to do as many variations of it as I can. I also find it very useful to get input from the people around me at this stage when the idea is still fresh and at its infant stage.
Around this point, I start choosing the best few concepts and proceed to creating art for the game. I use Photoshop to draw out and color the art, and once that is done, I export it out and get it ready to be put into the game. From here on, it's mostly seeing what works and what does not. For example, the launcher for the missile looked good on paper, but when it was put into the game, it was a little too big and bright. The good thing is that once the art is there, it's mostly just tweaking to strike the perfect balance between making it look good and work well too.
If you were to do a third game in the series, what new types of imagery would you like to explore?
Wiip took place inside a busy circus tent, and Showtime took place in a bustling city at night. For the third installment, I would really like to see how the game would look like in outer space. We initially wanted to bring Showtime into space for the last few performances, but scrapped the idea in the end. What I really want to try is actually put Slinky in a world where gravity is at its weakest. The image of Slinky doing a double back flip in slow motion while floating upwards is too good to throw away.
Being outer space, I could go crazy with the art style. There are just so many quirky things an artist can design when he isn't restricted. Imagine shooting through the stars on a flying comet as you are flung through rings of fire in front of a multi-colored nebula. It would be nothing short of legendary.
The winner of the Independent Games Festival's Seamus McNally Grand Prize will be announced at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this March. Keep an eye on this blog for more details!
(Note: this post previously appeared over at GAMBIT co-PI Henry Jenkins' blog, "Confessions of an Aca-Fan", at www.henryjenkins.org. For a veritable cornucopia of media studies-related interviews, essays and insights, be sure to bookmark that site.)
My name is Elliot, and I'm addicted to alts. I think my problem began when I was only 12 years old and, giving in to peer pressure from my friends, I began to play Sierra's The Realm.
The first time I opened this early MMORPG, I was overwhelmed by choice. While other games presented you with a character that you could then tweak, The Realm had a level of customization I'd never seen before. You could select your race, appearance, and, most importantly, your class. A Fighter required a big weapon and a simple bludgeoning style of play. A Wizard had 6 different schools of magic to choose from, each requiring different tactics. A Thief wasn't overly effective in battle but had very useful non-combat skills. And an Adventurer was the hybrid reject that wasn't good at anything. Now contrast that with the Final Fantasy-esque Japanese RPGs that were my favorites at the time. In almost all cases, a character was provided for you and it was the story that pulled you through the game. You had much more flexible advancement paths, but multi-character parties allowed you to try out many different paths. Regardless of how you set up your characters, the overall style of play was consistent. Without the story to motivate me to devote time to the game, I quickly became bored with my first character, decided to try a different class, and created my first "alt" (alternate character). I had alts in each of the classes before deciding that there were other games I wanted to spend time on (and that didn't tie up the phones).
Much to this player's dismay, characters do not get a nudity bonus.
Years later, my habit reemerged in greater strength when playing World of Warcraft (WoW). This time there were more classes with more distinct differences. First came a hunter, but the pet mechanic confused me a bit. Not being able to decide on a single character with all the available options, I made a whole set of characters each of whom I took to between levels 5 and 10. I finally settled into a Warlock that became my main until a year long hiatus. But when I resumed playing, I wanted a different experience. Each class had such specific roles in groups that a change seemed refreshing. First I rolled a priest, and then a paladin. Took a break to level a druid to 10, but I got tired of that too. I needed that rush of excitement when playing a new class. My favorite section of the game was the early levels where you would learning an entirely new set of abilities and strategies, while advancing quickly and being guided through tightly organized quests.
Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) gave me my fix. The classes introduced more varied combat mechanics and comparatively ambiguous group roles. Again, I had two phases of playing with a long break in between. Each time I leveled a few characters to 5-10, and then took one farther. But despite my greater investment in LOTRO's world, the same issue occurred. I got past that opening excitement, combat became repetitive, and advancement slowed. And boy did it slow. LOTRO is sort of a "thinking-person's" WoW. The plot is much more involved, the world is less over-the-top fantastical, but boy is it slow.
Two motley crews of warriors face off in Warhammer Online.
Now I've found Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (WAR). LOTRO and WoW had little differentiation between races (beyond the starting area) in terms of gameplay. WoW has 9 classes while LOTRO has 7 (though 2 more will be added in next month's Mines of Moria add-on). But WAR had 3-4 classes for every race! That's 20 different classes! Of course there's overlap and some redundancy, but even the mechanically similar classes have significant aesthetic differences. To make it even better, WAR takes care to let low levels jump right in to both elaborate scripted events involving many players as well as arenas where players from the opposing factions can battle for dominance. Will the game still hold my interest after playing for awhile? Doubtful. But for the time being, I'm enthralled with my High Elf Swordmaster. And my Dark Elf Disciple of Khaine. But a Human Bright Wizard's sole purpose is to blast fire everywhere? That sure sounds like fun too. Maybe I need a Bright Wizard alt. And a Chaos Marauder can mutate his arm into a saw, club, or claw? Oh Warhammer, why must you taunt me so?
A few weeks ago I made a rather odd purchase: both Spore and Grand Theft Auto III. This was to be my first GTA experience. I had always assumed the series was just lowbrow entertainment riding on shock value. I bought the game because I felt I needed to know about it as an academic, not because I expected to enjoy it. Spore, on the other hand, I fully expected to love. The creative potential in designing your creature, cities and armies, combined with the expanse of time and space contained in the game, made me wonder if you could ever run out of ways to play and things to explore.
Having played both for a few weeks now, I am forced to admit that I don't particularly enjoy Spore, yet GTA3 has been non-stop entertainment. Part of me really feels bad about this (as though I am now a stereotypical gamer), so I have been trying to understand the reason for my preference.
While they seem quite different, these two games are both about exploration. Exploration is the fundamental promise of Spore: a whole universe populated by the strange creations of people all across the world just waiting to be your backyard. Not long after the release of the creature creator EA and Maxis announced that over one million creatures had been uploaded to their servers . The idea of cruising across the universe, encountering creatures weird and wonderful, was an idea that appealed to many. Even your home planet would be populated with these creatures.
There was also the prospect of exploring the system behind Spore. How would other creatures react to me? What strange things could I create, and how would the game handle them?
The Crunkmaster is a carnivorous quadruped known for inventing post-modernism before the chair.
However, Spore does not allow for this kind of leisurely exploration. The game creates an environment where the struggle to survive is just that, and inaction equals death. From the very beginning Spore pressures you to act, as bigger fish in the pond start trying to eat you. At this early stage it's easy to outrun them or quickly evolve some defenses. In the creature phase, the game adds more pressure in the form of migration. After the first time your nest migrates the game does a poor job of alerting you. When you discover your nest has moved, finding the new nest is an immediate priority, otherwise you cannot heal or mate. This happens frequently enough that, when combined with basic survival, you always need to be doing something.
In the tribal phase your nest is constantly attacked, either by other tribes or wild animals. Even tribes you have never encountered somehow know you are there, and will walk across the entire continent to attack you. In order to keep up you must deal with the other tribes to expand your village and your population. The civilization stage is no better. Soon after evolving I was confronted by two foreign boats: the first offered a trade route, the second was shelling my city, and the situation deteriorated rapidly. As with the previous phases, inaction leads to defeat.
The worst case, by far, is the space phase. Almost immediately after blasting off I was confronted with numerous other races. The first two or three were benign, interested in establishing trade routes, buying my spice, and sending me on errand-boy missions to find stuff on their own planets. However, it wasn't long before I started receiving ominous transmissions to the effect that someone hates me and we are at war. I'm not really sure why, maybe it's because Matt evolved racism. I largely ignored these messages, assuming the game would give me a chance to comprehend this new phase.
My first goal was to establish an economy. I started a few trade routes and went about terraforming a few planets. However, it wasn't very long before those ominous threats turned to action, and I soon found all of my planets, and my allies' planets, under attack. I had no time to do anything but run around the galaxy fighting off the invaders, which really isn't what I wanted to do in the first place. Of course I was unable to stop all of the attacks, and before I knew it my allies had been conquered. I was broke and alone in an extremely hostile universe.
Throughout the whole game the only opportunity I had to explore was at the end of the tribal and civilization stages. At these points I had control over my immediate surroundings and was free from hostility. However, that glowing button demands you continue your evolution, never hinting at what awaits on the other side.
Frustrated, I turned to Grand Theft Auto III, and was surprised to find that the game was made for exploration. There is so much you can choose to do even on the first island that just exploring the game space is fun. Aside from the mundane places like the gun store and the hospital, there are plenty of hidden shortcuts and ramps waiting to be found. The game rewards knowledge of such places: shortcuts make timed missions easier, and launching your car off a ramp can result in a monetary bonus.
Just taking a look around. Really.
The game system behind Liberty City is even more fun to explore. I spent quite a few hours just learning the behavior of the police. I learned that shooting at their car usually gets you two wanted stars, while running down a pedestrian or carjacking (within police sight) nets you just one. I subsequently learned that grand theft auto and manslaughter are equal offenses. I also noticed that if the police ram your car into a crowd of pedestrians, subsequently squashing a few of them, nobody stops to help them.
There's also plenty to discover about the civilians in the game. If I steal their car and don't go anywhere, will they take it back? How much can I push them around before they attack me? Answering these questions and finding new questions is incredibly entertaining and rewarding. I have to believe that Rockstar knew this, and that is why the game does not pressure you to move forward.
While there are always missions you could be doing, there is no penalty for ignoring them. Early in the game no agent seeks you out and incites conflict; it is entirely possible to play endlessly without any conflict at all. Once a conflict ends, it is forgotten. That guy you ran over? Nobody from his gang comes seeking revenge. Previous arrests? The police don't notice. The people of Liberty City live wholly in the present. Even if you have a one-star wanted rating the police will give up if you just wait it out. This lack of pressure gives you ample opportunity to explore both the game's space and system.
Exploring a game can be a great source of fun and excitement, as seen in one of gaming's favorite traditions: the Easter egg. Hunting for hidden items, techniques, and spaces is essentially the same as the large-scale exploration present in games like GTA3 and Spore. Finding that secret room is like finding the hidden ramp or (I would imagine) the strange new species. It seems to me that the discovery of the unexpected is a source of limitless fun, and in this regard GTA3 is far more successful than Spore.
I am playing SPORE, and it is actually fun. I'm surprised because every game that has ever had Will Wright's name on it I have never enjoyed much.
I confess. I am not a fan of Will Wright's games. I appreciated them. I see what's great about them, and I am happy games like The Sims are so popular. But brilliant or not Wright's work has historically not been my taste. God games just don't hold my interest, I guess because I want dramatic situations, and for that I need an avatar. I want to know who I am and why I should care. This is why I never was able to get into Sim City because I just can't care about a city, about crime rate charts and economic graphs. The Sims was a step in my direction, because I do care more about people, about their daily lives, fears, dreams, and heartbreaks. But even then I couldn't bring myself to be that interested, partially because suburbia is something I'd rather forget, but also because I'm still just playing with dolls. The worst that could ever happen is a few of them break.
SPORE is different because for the first time in a Maxis game I am someone. I'm my little creature. I have agency. I make decisions. I'm not a god. I'm just a spunky dude trying to survive. SPORE is all about creating the creature you want to create, about being what you want to be. The key word here is you. It's not about playing with dolls. It's not about managing charts. It's about waving goodbye to your mate and children, walking out into the wilderness, spying some weird creature, going over to it, and wondering if you should try to communicate with it or kill it. The feeling at all times in SPORE is that these things are happening to you, not some silly dolls you are creating. For players like me it is a very different emotional experience when I, me, make the decision to kill a mother and eat her eggs because I am starving and want my own children to survive.
The fact that SPORE takes all the explosive moral, social, political, and spiritual dimensions present in The Sims and Sim City and brings them crashing down into the first person makes it emotionally unlike other Maxis games I've played. I chose to make my species carnivorous just to see what it was like, but I began having second thoughts when I faced the dilemma described above. I made friends with a few races, but when I got too hungry I tried to pick the most alien-looking race to kill because I didn't want to feel bad. (Woohoo! I just evolved racism!) In the process I discovered there is no creature in SPORE that cannot express simple emotions like fear, love, anger, and sadness. Children would always squeal in terror when I attacked their parents. When threatened they would always run and cower behind the nearest adult. Cornering the last members of a species, tearing the last adult limb from limb, and then hunting the screaming children down and ripping them to shreds was more disturbing than anything I ever felt playing Grand Theft Auto.
My child-eating Bozomorph
Any game that gives me this kind of experience is clearly fantastic. It made me feel bad, but hey, that's Darwinism. That's what I get for choosing the path of a meat eater. Welcome to evolution. There's going to be a lot more children dead by the time we get into outer space and bring our culture, whatever it may be, to other worlds.
I've only seen a fraction of SPORE, but so far it's making me think of many interesting things. It occurs to me that the game isn't really about simulating evolution. It's about us, the players, with our supposedly civilized minds, stepping into the shoes of our ancestors and seeing what choices we would make given similar circumstances. The answer is both chilling and obvious: we would be forced to make the same brutal decisions they made. It's sobering to think that genocide might be a prerequisite to civilization. Would we not be here had we not made those choices way, way back in the day? Is it even fair to use the word "we" since we are an entirely different species now? But even if we are different from the uncivilized animals of the past, does the fact that we wouldn't be here without them make us connected in some way? Don't we still, in certain circumstances, act exactly like our animal ancestors?
I'm interested to see whether or not I can shed my barbarism as I aim for the stars in SPORE. Will Wright has said on multiple occasions that Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was one of the major inspirations for SPORE, that in a way SPORE is 2001 made into a system that users can play with. 2001 is about alien intervention in the course of human evolution. Highly advanced aliens give primitive humans the intelligence to use tools, which of course these barely sentient animals use as weapons to kill and conquer each other. This is the beginnings of technology, and the film draws an explicit connection between murderous brutality and technological development. Civilization is fundamentally a contradiction, always being built on the corpses of the defeated. This extends to the modern day, when space fairing humans are still poised to destroy each other with nuclear weapons. In the climax of 2001 the humans finally shed their own destructive technology and thus earn the right to join their makers in interstellar, evolutionary adulthood.
The beginning of civilization in 2001: A Space Odyssey
Will there be any such absolution in SPORE? I'm excited to find out. After millions of years will I really evolve? Will I really be more sophisticated? Or will the same might-makes-right logic apply in the age of space as it does in the most primitive, terrestrial life? If so, what does that tell us about the moral value of civilization?
A truly apocalyptic game should not be confused with a game that merely contains apocalyptic elements. The industry is overflowing with games about "saving the world" which means a great many game stories feature some sort of apocalyptic threat. Most of these games do not qualify as genuinely apocalyptic since the threat never actually materializes. There are, however, games where the end of the world cannot be avoided, where watching civilization go up in flames is core to the experience. Games of this sort are often unforgettable, and if you haven't experienced them you are really missing something. Here are a few of the best ones...
Fallout (PC, 1997)
The apocalyptic nature of Fallout is right there in the title. In this game you are a survivor of the nuclear holocaust, part of a small community of people who escaped into Vault 13, a government-funded nuclear shelter miles underground. There your people have lived for nearly a century, functioning on the knowledge that human civilization has been utterly destroyed. Something goes wrong with Vault 13's automated water system, and you are the lone volunteer whose job it is to brave the surface in search of replacement parts. Thus begins your encounter with the horrors of nuclear devastation.
Fallout's sense of apocalyptic finality is established in the opening credits. They are haunting, featuring a scary Ron Perlman narrating how the world ends against real-life images of nuclear death. Its documentary vibe leaves you with the feeling that everything really is over. Everything you knew about this planet is gone, reduced to ash. And you were on the last lifeboat, with no home to come back to. By the time you reach the character creation screen, the mood is palpable. You feel the death, the hopelessness, the finality of it all. And then you're told to get out of your cave and explore, else the last handful of humans will be snuffed out forever, and Earth with be nothing but a rock, floating silently in space, waiting for the Sun to swallow it.
Of course you eventually discover you are not the last person left in the world, that there were other survivors of the holocaust, and that human civilization is, slowly, hobbling back into existence. But this is up to the player to discover on their own. Much of Fallout is about finding these people, about the player pulling back the veil of hopelessness themselves, piece by piece. Fallout goes to great lengths to ensure that you begin with this sense of hopelessness, that it is a very terrifying part of your journey. I don't think I've ever felt so alone as I have in a videogame as when I stepped out of Vault 13 for the first time, the voice of Ron Perlman still echoing in my head, wondering what out there could possibly be alive.
Odin Sphere (PS2, 2007)
Odin Sphere is one of the most apocalyptic games ever, featuring mass death and destruction on such a fabulous scale that by the time you even reach the last boss the entire world is already destroyed. When you, as the Valkyrie Gwendolyn, fight Levanthan, a dragon so gigantic to twists back and forth across the visible sky, the known world has already been swallowed up completely by the sea. This gives the last boss fight an eeire feeling, since what you are trying to accomplish is not entirely clear. It's certainly not saving the world. You and Levanthan feel like the last two creatures on Earth, and your only choice is to destroy each other. What's left afterwards, assumedly, will be nothing.
Odin Sphere is based very loosely on Norse mythology, with the concept of Ragnarok being central to the game. There are five playable characters in Odin Sphere: a Valkyrie, an knight, a fairy, and a witch. Each of them plays a part in the apocalypse, and for most of the game the player assumes they are destined to avert this apocalypse. But no. What happens is they all play a part in ensuring that the apocalypse happen correctly. Over the course of the game you collect books which cryptically describe the end of the world. If you interpret them correctly, and make the right choices in the final hours, the world ends with a chance of beginning again in the future. If you make the wrong choices, the world ends permanently. But either way, the world ends. The oceans boil. The skies fall. Cities are swallowed. People die by the millions. When they say Ragnarok in this game, they mean fucking Ragnarok.
The desperation of Odin Sphere is summed up by a brief cut-scene* at the end. Gwendolyn's lady in waiting, Myris, whom you've been friends with the whole game, stands atop the last mountain on Earth as it sinks into the boiling sea. She pleads, assumedly to God, that just two people survive so that her death and the deaths of untold millions won't be in vain. Then she sobs as the mountain crumbles into nothing. You only see this cinematic if you make a mistake near the end and get one of the "bad" endings. However, it is clear that this scene does take place, off screen, even in the good ending. As Gwendolyn is flying up to fight Levanthan, she looks down and sees the mountain crumble, apologizing to Myris that she couldn't save her. So there you have it. Even though in the best ending Gwendolyn and her lover alone survive to repopulate the world, civilization still gets wiped out in a wave of unimaginable horror. That's about as happy as Odin Sphere gets, making it one of the most melancholy games you will ever play.
Final Fantasy VI (SNES, 1994)
Every Japanese RPG is about saving the world. Final Fantasy VI is the only one where you don't. Midway through FFVI, when the typical genre elements are coming together, when the ancient power that will ravage the world is about to be unleashed, and you, the lone heroes, stand together to stop it... the unthinkable happens. You fuck up, and the world is ripped to pieces. Cut to one year later. The land is a waste. The sea is an endless brown sludge. The sky is red. All your party members are gone--dead, for all you know--and you are alone on a small island in the middle of a dead world, waiting to die.
Final Fantasy VI has balls, to say the least. I remember opening the package for the first time and looking at the game map. It had two sides. On one was the World of Balance, which looked all nice and green, and on the other was the World of Ruin, which looked like Earth after God used it for toilet paper. I had assumed the World of Ruin was some kind of netherworld, some magical dark reflection of the World of Balance, which you would go to periodically though out the game. It never even occurred to me that it represented a permanent change to the game, that after a certain point in Final Fantasy VI that brown turd of a world would be the only one you had. This reality came as big of a shock to me as it did to the characters in the story. I remember sitting there slack-jawed in disbelief as the continents ripped themselves apart before my eyes, followed by the ominous on-screen text: "On that day, the world was changed forever..."
The rest of the game is about surviving in this horrible world, about pulling yourself up, out of the misery, and finding something to live for. It's not easy. You have to travel around this wasteland, gathering up all your old friends one by one, having to convince each one not to give in to despair. You start with nothing but a wooden raft. The beautiful overworld music has been replaced by the sound of desolate, ceaseless wind. And there isn't a pixel of green color to be seen as you trudge across the desert landscape. None of this ever goes away, making the final hours of the game a painful adjustment process. There is hope to be found, you eventually discover, as well as beauty, in this dead world. But, by God, you have to work to find it. The sense of loss Final Fantasy VI is unlike any other game. No other game so decisively takes everything away from you and simply tells you to deal with it.
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (N64, 2000)
How can one of the most apocalyptic games be one in which you avert the apocalypse? Isn't that breaking the rule? Majora's Mask certainly is a game where, at the end, you successfully save the world and avert the impending apocalypse. However, by that time you've experienced Armageddon more times than you can count. Majora's Mask is a game about time travel. In this game the only way to save the world is to witness its end over, and over, and over. Each time the world ends you just rewind time with your magical Ocarina and let it happen again. You have to study it. You have to find the key that will help you, one day, successfully prevent it. But that day is long in coming, and you will fail countless times before you succeed, making this the most brutal, relentless, and numbing apocalyptic experience in videogames.
In Majora's Mask the world is ending in three days, and that is not enough time to save it, even though you are Link, the hero of all the Zelda games, whose saved the world countless times before. This time, however, things aren't so easy. The moon is crashing into the earth in 72 hours, and you've got exactly that long to stop it. Majora's Mask takes place in real time, meaning the clock is ticking. Look up at any moment and you will see the moon inching closer. Your magical Ocarina can slow down time, but not stop it. Either way that moon in crashing, so you'd better hurry up and do your hero thing. Oh, wait. You got stuck in a dungeon and it took you 2 days to get through it? Tough shit, Link. Get ready for the end of the world.
The most harrowing thing about Majora's Mask is the people you meet. They are all in various stages of denial about the end of the world, and as you get increasingly familiar with them, with their daily lives, you become a witness to how they all deal with death. I doubt anyone who played Majora's Mask can forget the story of Anju and Kafei, two lovers kept apart by a curse. Over the course of the 72 hours you see Anju's misery at being away from her lover, how it makes the looming apocalypse all the more horrible for her. You know at 2:00 on the Second Day she will go for a walk and cry by herself in the park, and that she will run for the hills, without Kafei, at 6:00 on the Third Day. If you try really hard you can unite them, although you cannot ever lift the curse that has transformed Kafei. The best you are able to do is lead Kafei, in his cursed form, to Anju in the final hours, so they can share a final moment together before the end. As the moon is tearing the town apart around them they thank you and prepare for death. Such bitter moments are typical of Majora's Mask, and they will haunt you even after you finally solve the time puzzle and save the world.
Conclusion
It occurs to me that all of these games except one are Japanese. The scholar in me thinks this probably has something to do with the stronger apocalyptic tradition in Japanese pop-art. Japan has a strong apocalyptic sensibility, which some say is connected with their shared cultural experience of the atomic bomb. Interestingly, the only game on this list which features actual nuclear devastation is the non-Japanese one. Perhaps for the Japanese nuclear war hits too close to home? On the other hand, you see them dealing with apocalyptic anxiety pretty openly through fantasy. It's hard to find a Western game that forces players to deal with the finality of apocalyptic change, realistic or imagined, whereas in Japan it is a little easier. That's how it appears to me at least, based on these examples, which, I admit, are pretty narrow.
* Unfortunately, the only clip I could find of this cut-scene was in English. The English voice-acting is somewhat hammy, so I apologize. One of the great things about Odin Sphere is that it has a Japanese language option, making it a lot easier to take seriously all its melodrama. Watch this clip with the sound off if you want. It's subtitled.
Hardcore Gaming and The Price of Indie Development
Everyone who's played Braid seems to agree that it's pretty hard. I myself was able to finish it without too much trouble, although there were a handful of puzzles I found frustrating. There are others I've spoken to who are having a much rougher time with it, complaining that it demands too much of the player too quickly.
Braid is definitely a hardcore game. It is brutally difficult at times, both in terms of puzzles and platforming. On the other hand it is a very beautiful, unusual game that one imagines might appeal to a diverse audience. The intro especially seems to suggest a casual aesthetic, with minimal instructions and simple controls that ease the player into the experience. However, it betrays this simplicity quickly by escalating difficulty at a steep rate.
It's not simply that Braid is hard. It's that Braid reverses player expectations so continually and so rapidly it gives less determined users almost no time to build a stable foundation of competency. Put another way, it teaches the player a solution once and then immediately undercuts that solution in the next puzzle. For example, in World 2 there is a puzzle where you must rewind time in order to open two separate doors with the same key. This puzzle is clever and takes some figuring out, but once you get the principle it feels rewarding. However, the next puzzle actually punishes the player for employing the same strategy. In the new puzzle using the same key on two different doors actually breaks the puzzle, forcing the player to restart the level.
The second puzzle is a devious riff on the first, a trap of sorts set by the designer that forces the player to question their existing mental model and adjust. On one hand this is excellent game design, since it keeps astute players on their toes. On the other, it expects the player to comprehend, internalize, and adjust to new mental models with zero iteration.
Whether or not this is a flaw of Braid is an interesting question to consider. From the point of view of my own game experience I can't say that it is, but from the point of view of many players it might be. I certainly don't think a gentler difficulty curve would have hurt the game, but perhaps Jonathan Blow felt he didn't have the luxury of easing players into his puzzles as much as one would in a longer commercial game? I can easily imagine how an indie developer, having lived with a game design for several years, would want players to experience the true depth his core mechanics afford. It would be disheartening to spend all that blood and sweat and then just give players 25% of the complexity you know your system can support. On the other hand, an indie game of modest scope means the game will likely be short, which further means that the ramp up from easy to hard puzzles will be extremely steep. Given that Braid has only 35 screens, it has no choice but to up the ante significantly between puzzles in order to reach its peak by the end. There are only two ways to alter this curve: lower the peak or lengthen the game.
As an indie developer functioning on scant resources, Jonathan Blow perhaps didn't have the option of lengthening the game. It seems fair to assume, though, that he had the option of lowering the peak and chose not to... assumedly to give users the "full experience" of Braid. While I can understand this, it is a decision that may have cost him some players. Some people just can't scale a cliff that steep.
All this makes me wonder whether there is a paradox in indie development. Indie games in some ways can take risks that bigger games cannot, and they can attract game designers who have strong personal statements to make. But these strong personal statements may bump into a wall when the limited scope of indie games "forces" developers to choose between depth or accessibility.
Even if this paradox exists (and I'm not convinced it does, but it's intriguing to consider) I think there are some clever ways around it. Braid in particular I think would have benefited greatly had Blow taken a page from Miyamoto and made only a percentage of the levels mandatory. Mario 64, Mario Sunshine, and Mario Galaxy all employ an excellent system by which players only need to finish about 60% of all the levels in the game in order to unlock the final level. This means that, if players choose, they can skip the harder levels and play mostly the easier ones and still finish the game. Going back and finishing all the levels afterwards becomes a more hardcore task that only players of a certain level of dedication will do. These games successfully appeal to both kinds of players without flatly sacrificing content.
Braid is so modular that it seems like a similar system could have been implemented with virtually no change to the current game. I don't understand why Jonathan Blow felt it was necessary to force players to gain every single puzzle piece in order to even have the option of finishing the game. Braid basically forces players to 100% the game on the first play through, which seems needlessly demanding. To my mind, making some of the puzzle pieces optional for completion would have not only made the game easier on more casual players; it would have enhanced the invitation to interpretation that characterizes Braid, motivating players to go back, after the ending, and find more puzzle pieces to unlock the mysteries of the story.
Perhaps not all these choices were up to Jonathan Blow? I'd be interested to hear what he has to say about why Braid was balanced the way it was. I can only speculate of course. Still though, I think this is proof that Braid is an extremely useful game to analyze. It seems like future indie developers have alot to learn from it, both good and bad.
[WARNING: The below post contains some small spoilers.]
Braid is a very strange game. I just finished it and I'm not sure what I feel. I wasn't expecting something so... lyrical, maybe? I don't know what the right word is. Braid is one part poetry, two parts hard-core puzzle game. I'm not sure how seriously the metaphorical layer is meant to be taken. On one hand the poetic bits feel very "separate" from the game. You can simply ignore all the text if you want. Yet the graphics, the lovely Van Gogh-like art style, is a bit harder to ignore. The music also does much to create an introspective, dream-like mood. Even without the text, it's difficult to take Braid simply as entertainment.
The big mystery of the game, I suppose, is what the gameplay has to do with the story. There clearly is a connection, but it seems deliberately obscure. On the most basic level, Braid's traditional platforming elements and time manipulation stuff seems intended as a loose metaphor for the trials, mistakes, and corrections in a relationship. The "princess" of this game seems like some weird ideal of romantic love that the protagonist is forever in search of. Or maybe she's a metaphor for failed relationships? I have no idea really. Whatever the case, it is clear that she is a metaphor, which, at least, is something Braid seems determined not to let the player walk away from the game without realizing.
I haven't put much thought into interpreting Braid. I finished it after several hours of play, and my immediate impression is one of dreamy confusion. I confess to reading most of the text quickly, without really trying to find a coherent thread in it. I'm not sure if there is one, or if the text bits are meant to be disjointed fragments. The only reoccurring theme is the princess. This is probably why the final sequence, where you finally find the princess, gave me an emotional reaction. I couldn't believe I got so close to her, and even cooperated with her, only to have time rewind, and have her disappear like a phantom. Did I do that on purpose? Why was rewinding the only thing I could do? I wanted to be with her, if only to get some answers to all these bizarre feelings and images. But she just vanished.
Braid makes the most sense if you conclude that everything in it represents a dreamer's waking life filtered through a host of subconscious symbols. It feels like the dream of a gamer, an expression of the collective unconscious generated by a life-time of game playing. This, to me, explains all the references to other videogames, which are all videogames with princesses. Braid may be an attempt by a gamer to make a game that expresses the connection between frivolous game conventions and real life, of how silly ideas like "save the princess" seep into our consciousness and become part of our shared cultural experience. It may be an attempt to reform that silliness, by giving these ideas metaphorical value they normally lack. Braid could be seen as a critique of games like Mario in this way, where "saving the princess" is just some meaningless goal. Here it is meaningless as well, but its phantom nature has been twisted into a meditation on the elusiveness of happiness. The design goal of Braid, in essence, seems to be to reformulate the words "I'm sorry, but the princess is in another castle" as an existential crisis. So that when the dinosaur eventually asks you "This princess... does she even exist?" you honestly don't know. Even at the end, when you find her, she may still just be a phantom... one that you are forever chasing.
Bionic Commando was, in many ways, the game that made me love videogames. Oh sure, I played Super Mario Bros. and other games excessively before that, but Bionic Commando was the first time I became genuinely obsessed with a game as a fictive experience. Why do I still like games with stories? Why do I still hope every game I play has an epic final sequence that I'll never forget? It's because of Bionic Commando. It's because it set the bar. It's because I was 11 years old and suddenly some dude put a bazooka in my hand and said the fate of the world depended on me shooting Hitler in the face while free falling off a cliff.
Bionic Commando Rearmed is a remake made by fans who, as far as I can tell, had the exact formative experience I did. Their interviews read like what I just wrote in the above paragraph. It's for this reason that Bionic Commando Rearmed will be Rated 'M', even though there seems to be nothing in the trailers that's particularly bloody. It's because Bionic Commando wouldn't be Bionic Commando without this:
WARNING: What follows are major spoilers for Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.
There was an article at Kotaku a while ago about tragedy in videogames. More specifically, it was about tragedy in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. The following passage sums it up:
That's what feels so unusual about MGS4 even compared to the other MGS games. This is a sad story, one that feels destined to end in defeat. Snake is aging and dying. He's literally become toxic to the people around him. And his back hurts. (Which you'll see him clutch in pain if you let him crouch too long). MGS4 is the rare effort of video game blues and tragedy.
I find it amazing that people are saying such things about Metal Gear Solid 4, a game where the good guys win, the bad guys lose, the world is saved, and everyone lives happily ever after. Somehow the fact that Guns of the Patriots has a schmaltz-drenched Hollywood ending doesn't stop Kotaku from concluding:
Gamers are used to being asked to save the day and be the hero. Metal Gear Solid 4 is so unusual in that it's the rare game that asks them to be interested in something else: a march toward defeat, an interactive tragedy. That's what feels novel.
Hailing Metal Gear Solid 4 as a tragedy is wrong on so many levels I hardly know where to begin. First of all, MGS4 isn't a tragedy. Secondly, even if it were it wouldn't be an interactive tragedy. Thirdly, Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 qualify as better tragedies than MGS4. And fourthly, there are several other games out there I can think of which are both more tragic and more interactive than any Metal Gear game.
MGS4 may present itself as bleak and cynical, but its ending proves this entire attitude is a smokescreen. The Metal Gear series has grown more and more morally complex with each installment, but all that comes tumbling down in Guns of the Patriots, crushed to death under a mountain of fan-service. The Patriots, the totalitarian puppet masters of America first introduced in MGS2, are dismantled in an instant by a computer virus without the mechanisms of modern civilization so much as shuddering. This is followed by a 20 minute scene where two long-time series characters get married. Then there is another 20 minute scene where even more characters are reunited with lost family members, accompanied by ample tears of joy. Somewhere in the middle of all this Snake decides not to kill himself, at which point his long dead father, Big Boss, shows up thanks to some ridiculous plot magic, gives Snake a 30 minute monologue about the value of life, and promptly dies. Taken all together this is an endless, pummeling assault of mushy sentiment and convenient resolutions. It's all about as tragic as the end of Independence Day.
Metal Gear Solid 4: Everyone Gets Married.
And even if the ending of MGS4 was tragic, even if Snake died, even if destroying The Patriots meant leaving a gaping hole in the world that only anarchy would fill, and even if no one got married at the end, MGS4 would still not be the "interactive tragedy" that Kotaku claims it to be, because it would still not be interactive. There is not a shred of meaningful choice the player is given during the cut-scene strangled final hours of MGS4. Is that what tragedy is? Just a bunch of cut-scenes? Wouldn't tragedy, realized in a procedural way, be a system in which it is impossible to reach a proper win state? Wouldn't it be a game in which the player's own inability to master the system and reach their end goal is cathartic, illuminating, and meant to encourage reflection on the limits of choice and agency a fundamentally unfair world? Wouldn't it be something like Deus Ex, where at the end the player is actually given the choice between anarchy or totalitarianism... and both kind of suck?
In Deus Ex there is no perfect solution to the world's problems.
The frustrating thing is, Metal Gear has historically been quite clever at working tragedy into its gameplay structures. While they never aspired to the clear-cut open-endedness of Deus Ex, Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 did some wonderful and subversive things with genre, exploiting videogame conventions for commentary on the horrors of non-agency in the face of corrupt political power. You want tragedy? Try Metal Gear Solid 2, the game where the bad guys win. In the final stretch of that game The Patriots rub your own pathetic lack of agency in your face as you soldier on, their willing puppet, forced to complete the "story" they've designed for you: killing the terrorist and saving America. Is it just a clever excuse for MGS2's own lack of player choice? It certainly is. It's also a very effective metaphor for totalitarian control. You have no freedom to do anything beyond what that game forces you to do, and that's the chilling thought MGS2--quite intentionally--leaves you with: you are a slave. Metal Gear Solid 3 is a variation on this theme. This time the player is forced into a familiar genre, the James Bond film, but the morality is turned upside down. Killing anyone results in their ghosts haunting you. And your final objective, to kill your mentor and friend whom the U.S. government has branded a traitor, must be carried out with cold determination. The game even pauses in the final cut-scene so the player can pull the trigger himself. Metal Gear Solid 4, by comparison, doesn't come close to the bleakness of these two games. Anyone who claims it does clearly has put no thought into the matter.
The Patriots give you a pep talk before the last boss of Metal Gear Solid 2.
Even Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 are not the best examples of tragedy in videogames. They are interesting examples (far more interesting than MGS4) but they still don't come close to what other games have done. I've already mentioned Deus Ex, but there are many others. How about Fallout, where your reward for saving the world is being kicked out of your home and forced to wander a nuclear-irradiated wasteland? How about Shadow of the Colossus, where the player must literally let go and accept the fact that Wander will never be with his lover again? How about Suikoden 2, where you are forced for murder your best friend before the game is over? How about Ikaruga, where the goal of the entire game is to survive to the final boss so you can commit suicide? Or how about the mother of all tragic games: Planescape Torment, the game where the "best ending" is going to hell to atone for your sins? The length of Torment's entire playtime is about discovering what a bastard you really are, how you've hurt all those around you, and how the most noble thing you can ever hope to do is accept responsibility for all your wickedness. How's that for a win state?
Your best friend dies in your arms at the end of Suikoden 2.
Those you've wronged demand justice in Planescape: Torment.
I can't imagine how someone could be aware of all these things and still be impressed by Metal Gear Solid 4. I want nothing more than to see a real watershed in procedural tragedy, but if people think Guns of the Patriots is it we've got a big problem.
Using only cardboard and packing tape, the Halo Kid achieves an astonishing level of detail in his work. To date, he has crafted all of the weapons in Halo 3 and built a custom set of armor. More subtle, yet even more fascinating is the way that he uses his body to perform Master Chief, the player-avatar in Halo 3.
After showing off each weapon to the camera, Halo Kid steps back into the frame to demonstrate the weapon's proper use. In doing so, he mimics the body language of Master Chief with surprising accuracy. Slowly spinning on the balls of his feet, he aims a laser, reloads his rifle, kneels down repeatedly, and silently mimes a pistol's recoil. These actions looks strange and unnatural to the non-player because they were designed within the limitations of the gamespace. By removing them from their original context and performing them in his garage, the Halo Kid places the movements of Master Chief in relation to the archetypical human body rather than other computer-generated body-representations.
In-game, we see the best that the dev team could do within an imperfect technical environment. Presumably, Master Chief might move differently were the game able to more finely compute his movement while maintaining a smooth physical simulation. The dance of the Halo Kid, on the other hand, is the result of a sequence of deliberate human choices. By using his relatively more free human body to mimic the constrained motion of an anthropomorphic avatar, the Halo Kid denies compromise in Master Chief's movement. No matter how awkward they may appear, Master Chief moves deliberately. The Halo Kid's imitations permit viewers to see Master Chief move without constant reference to a distracting technical context.
When thinking about the visual evolution of games, I generally assume that developers steadily progress the from left to right along the "uncanny valley". In this case, however, Halo Kid confounds this common understanding by positioning the movement of his own body somewhere closer to the dreaded corpse-pose at the valley's punto más bajo. While developers struggle to bring human likeness to the avatars in gamespaces, fans like the Halo Kid willingly yield a bit of their free movement to enjoy the mild bondage that characterizes life in a 3-D game engine.
Posted by Kevin Driscoll on July 17, 2008 2:42 PM
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July 17, 2008 11:08 AM
The best thing to come out of E3 '08
You need to watch this. The Trailer for Duke Nukem Trilogy:
Watch the whole thing if you can. You don't want to miss the multiple MS Paint guns or the Duke Nukem Crotch Shot.
What you have just viewed is the trailer for a game that will never, ever get made. It's like the people at Apogee are going for the world's longest Shaggy Dog joke, and the punchline will somehow involve bubble gum. I mean, the damn thing has a visual chorus of the three titles flying by. Hilarious!
Posted by Eitan Glinert on July 17, 2008 11:08 AM
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June 30, 2008 1:58 PM
Rockman Lovers Drivin' Lamborghinis
Over the weekend, I spent some time watching this video:
Everybody can learn something from Shakespeare. Scholars refer to his deep understanding of the human condition as one of the keys to his universal appeal, across languages, cultures, and time. Understanding his plays was a motivation to improve my English when I was a teenager (I'm not a native speaker and no, I didn't learn my English all from Shakespeare, else thou wouldst be reading Early Modern English now). I find what I learned studying Shakespeare during my undergrad and graduate school relevant and useful to what I do now as a videogames scholar. The relevance of Shakespeare does not only have to do with writing, but also with the design of the game, from how to give cues to interaction to how to involve players into the gameworld.
So videogame makers, particularly designers and (obviously) writers, can learn quite a few things from the Bard of Avon. Let me count the ways.
Throwback videogames, digital distro, and atavistic joy
The relentless march of technological progress burdens game developers by forcing teams to repeatedly spend time and energy learning the idiosyncrasies of the latest gear rather than sharpen their skills on a single toolset. As a result, few gaming platforms are explored to the depth that other creative technologies have enjoyed. Compare the number of DJs still playing vinyl records on Technics-1200 turntables to the population developing new SNES titles.
"[The simple fun of a classic Mega Man game] doesn't fit into the grandiose and expansive world that the consumer gaming industry has become, and so you have to make games that match the current expectations."
The unnamed force here is the cash factor. Consumers paying top dollar for the latest-gen console expect to be dazzled. Developing a title that could have come from that grey box in the closet is incredibly risky. Fortunately, the growth of digital distribution is sufficiently shifting the financial balance to permit long tail niche development to seep into gaming. (Though Geoffrey makes a good point in complicating notions of "niche" in his earlier entry on the subject.)
The latest issue of Nintendo Power reveals that the next installment in the Mega Man series will be a "new NES game" complete with chiptune soundtrack and faithful 8bit graphics.
Screenshot from Mega Man 9 on the Wii (as printed in Nintendo Power).
According to the article, the popularity of retrographics on t-shirts and other nostalgic bric-a-brac convinced Capcom that it was the "right time" to revive the original Mega Man aesthetic.
This announcement is an encouraging sign that the unfortunate neglect of past platforms by the mainstream gaming industry is beginning to ebb. Free from the need to create playable demos of the latest hardware, studios can nurture a unique language and approach to game design and development.
Innovation along many axes will finally break the brutal linearity characterizing many of the last decade's popular titles (Doom begat Half-Life begat Halo 3...). The beauty of Flash-based titles like Dino Run is an early indication of the potential in joining a persistent platform to yesterday's aesthetics.
In its pursuit of "the upper-limits of 8-bit", I suspect Inafune's team will be surprised to discover a ceiling of considerable height. Let's hope they inspire others to similarly explore past aesthetics, constraints, and joys.
Ever since I first heard about Nintendo's WiiWare, Sony's PlayStation Network and Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade, I've been excited about the opportunities these services provide for so-called 'long tail' content. We've already seen new inroads being made into episodic gaming by Telltale Games' Sam & Max and Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People and by Penny Arcade and Greenhouse Games' On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode I. All of these games are based on relatively niche properties, but are garnering some real attention despite never appearing on a single Best Buy endcap.
Today I caught word of two more intriguing projects coming to WiiWare, although their 'niche' status is somewhat debatable.
A few weeks ago in Game Set Watch, movie and screenwriter Justin Marks chided the game industry for calling the story in Grand Theft Auto IV "Oscar-worthy". In the article, Marks wondered if gameplay as narrative is the answer.
The adventure of Niko Bellic, complete with its comic assortment of ethnic cliches, is pretty much on par with the rest of the franchise's self-conscious worship of movie archetypes and genre tropes. And there's nothing wrong with that. Rockstar has made clear that's all they've ever wanted to do, and they've done a damn fine job at that (although I do miss some of that charming humor from Vice City and San Andreas).
The problem here is not the quality of the story, but the manner in which it is incorporated into the gameplay. After skipping over countless cut scenes so I could get to the action, I slowly began to regard plot in GTA IV as being something akin to the Clinton marriage: why do they bother with the charade? Is there anyone in this country who honestly thinks these two people still sleep in the same bed?
After all the incredible advances in their game engine, why does Rockstar insist on making its story an accessory – a needless, comparatively inferior element? More to the point, how did narrative become such a side bar to the real point of gaming, i.e. our ability to play out our deepest fantasies in a virtual world?
I found myself nodding in agreement at the start, but then wincing at some old, overworn ideas as his essay continued. By the time the essay started to near the end, Marks was returning to some familiar, obvious claims:
We need to stop thinking about story as a device to make us care about the gameplay (it doesn't), and start thinking about the gameplay as the narrative itself (thus, making us care). Now that the technology has finally reached a breaking point, a place where we can genuinely craft sophisticated worlds, we have to understand that plot is not forced upon those worlds artificially, but grown from our interactions within their environments.
Story design needs to be less checkpoint-focused and more focused on implementing a meta structure that makes us believe we are shaping events with our choices, even if these choices have already been made for us.
The "story on rails" has now been exposed. Game engines are strong enough that we can see the seams in the narrative fabric. It's no longer acceptable that we can take our girlfriend on a date and never once have her mention the fact that we're carrying a missile launcher by our side. We need to believe our actions have consequences within the virtual universe and that the experiences we are living are wholly unique, even if they aren't.
This is all very, very old news. Marks' assertions and observations are fair enough, except that like most generalizations, when extended out to encompass everything it falters and fails.
You never realise how blissful it is to have a quiet day just sitting in a chair at the office until you've spent two weeks' worth of very hectic orientation activities with 45 budding game developers.
The official Singapore-based orientation activities for the GAMBIT '08 students have finally drawn to a close yesterday. We ran them through a huge series of talks, workshops and team-building activities, focusing in turn on all aspects of game development - the entire gamut of design, production, art, audio, code, QA, localization, research, audience and genre, cultural differences, professionalism, the various game companies in Singapore, and even how to pass their first hiring interview in the industry. It was insane. It was crazy. It was one of the most enjoyable times of the year.
Actually, now that I think about it, it was way longer than two weeks. It started nearly a month and a half ago, when we first invited the new generation of Scrummasters to sit in on the different meetings we had ongoing in the Singapore lab. They observed and watched as Zul and I, the two producers in the lab here, conducted our Sprint Planning, Daily Scrums, Sprint Reviews and Retrospectives, and design meetings. They asked questions, and we tried to pass on to them as much of the lessons learned over the last year as we could.
Then we turned it over to them.
The Seven Samurai Scrummasters took charge of their teams from Day One of the official orientation period. This time around, everyone's going in thoroughly-briefed. Throughout the entire orientation period, the teams sat together, ate together and worked together. They know each other, they know their project and platform, they know the challenges that lie ahead, and they hopefully know just how intense it's going to be, since we pulled back quite a few of last year's generation to give talks about the various roles which they played.
Already, this generation is forging legends and memories of its own: from the epic Scrummaster vs. Scrummaster showdown during the orientation card games, to that unforgettable night at Hooters, to all the in-jokes about mentors... this generation has become, in just this short period of time, the seed of something great. I can't wait to see what they're all going to come up with over the next 9 weeks or so.
This summer's going to be a blast!
...
Okay, that's enough effervescence for today. A more detailed writeup, accompanied by videos, will be up as soon as we can make it. In the meantime, you can check out the photos.
Dino Run is the best game of 2008. The premise is simple: a meteor hits the Earth, sets off a doom wave, and all the animals start running. A light homage to Pitfall, Dino combines the the exhilirating platform sprinter vibe of Sonic with the expressive vector graphics of Another World, the addictive multiplayer of SNES Mario Kart, a terminal micromusic soundtrack, and hats - really nice hats.
All hyperbolic comparisons aside, I had a fascinating experience with Dino Run that has set questions of intimacy and co-presence loose in my mind for the last few days. I was up late the night of Dino Run's release finishing school work. I took a break, found an acquaintance on IM, and convinced her to do the same. We agreed to meet up in "Dino Central" and, after a little messing around, we were running for our lives.
Having played the game a bit in lab that afternoon, I quickly leapt ahead of my dino buddy. Yet, despite every indication to keep on running, when I saw her little icon falling behind on the race map, I stopped, turned my dino around, and ran left to find out if she was stuck!
Critical moment here, folks. The decision to turn around is counter to the very core imperative, not to mention the driving narrative, of Dino Run: GO TO THE RIGHT.
I caught up to her easily and the two of us ran through the rest of the map within a few hundred pixels of one another. Why didn't I just blast through the level and leave her behind? It wasn't the same impulse that would cause me to go easy on a n00b in Street Fighter or for my sportier friends not to stuff me everytime I take a shot when we play (irl) basketball. I didn't turn around simply because I wanted to make the game fun. I turned around because to run ahead would have been to abandon her.
I can recall experiencing only one other moment of similarly strong emotional projection. Last year, a friend from my place of work invited me to visit a particularly spectacular build he had completed in Second Life. We met up in-world sometime in the evening and he lead me around his Zen garden, water fall, and tea house. As the tour came to an end, he lead me up a mountain to a tiny notch he'd carved for two avatars to sit and look out over the sea. Clicking on one of the orbs he'd installed on the ledge, I saw my short, gender-ambiguous avatar begin to snuggle up against my colleague's well-dressed male avatar.
I immediately felt like I had made a social faux paus and was compelled to apologize. After just a few minutes in SL, an environment I did not visit often, I had so fully given over my sense of self to my on-screen avatar that the nerves along my skin reacted to the unintended intimacy. Goosebumps (piel de gallina) stood visible along my forearms and my heart sped up. My body was reacting as though it had actually touched someone inappropriately rather than the avatar I was controlling with minute movements of my hands and wrists.
As my friend and I ran along the back of apatasaurus, I felt a similar blurring of boundaries, a sense of screen empathy. My dino-friend and I do not live in the same city and we know each other primarily through our work interests. Meeting up to play Dino Run seemed no different than chatting on gtalk until I actually saw our dinos running around in their pixelated world. It felt unexpectedly as though we were changing the terms of our friendship. Rather than work buddies, we are now friends who get together occasionally for recreational activities, however virtual they may be.
There is something both liberating and frightening about this experience of the projected self. It challenges the perceived edges of selfdom. If my selfness is so quick to jump ship for a cute little pile of dino-pixels, what is keeping it coming back to me everytime I turn the browser to another URL? Or is the self constantly shifting when I am connected to the network? Is my experience with the little dino just a more tangible manifestation of an everyday leapfrog: from username to inbox to avatar to photoshop tool to blinking cursor?
Posted by Kevin Driscoll on May 16, 2008 8:38 PM
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May 7, 2008 1:02 PM
The Pros of Cons
Over the course of the last couple of years, I have been fortunate enough to attend a wide variety of different professional gatherings either as a speaker or simply as an attendee. This list includes SIGGRAPH's Sandbox Conference, the MIT-hosted Media in Transition Conference, FuturePlay in Toronto, South by Southwest (SXSW), the Bethesda Small Press Expo (SPX), the Game Developers Conference (GDC), WonderCon and, most recently, the New York Comic-Con. Most of these events are accompanied by several common denominators: some semi-hectic travel arrangements, some dubious hotels, a number of thoroughly excited and geeky conversations between equally excited and geeky people, and a not insignificant amount of griping about the nature of the event in question.
At almost every event, people complain that this year's isn't as good "as they used to be", that the event wasn't "what they expected it would be", or something along those lines. Of all of them, though, nowhere was that griping louder than at this year's GDC in San Francisco. Speakers and attendees alike groused about how the event was changing after the collapse of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3); while GDC had always been solidly technical, academic and theoretical in nature, E3 had long been the agreed-upon blow-out demofest for marketing types and the public. If GDC was a library, E3 was an amusement park. Following E3's implosion due to ever-escalating costs and increasing ROI concerns, the marketing departments had turned their attention on GDC. The result of this was a huge amount of tension because of an increased confusion about what GDC was supposed to be.
If you look at the list of events I outlined in the first paragraph, almost all of them fall neatly into one of two categories: conference or convention. A conference is typically an event attended by people who largely share a similar profession, gathering in one place to talk shop. A convention is typically an event attended by people who largely share a similar hobby, gathering in one place to buy stuff they can't get elsewhere and geek out. At both types of events people go to hang out with 'their tribe', others who are passionate about the same things, and to listen to (and hopefully meet) people they admire or who do things that the attendees find incredibly cool. Both events are (or at least should be) fun, but they're often fun in different ways. To reuse a metaphor, conferences are libraries and conventions are amusement parks.
I attended GDC for the first time this year, and although this might not be a popular opinion among the old guard, I was grateful that there was some degree of convention involved in the conference. I like my conferences with a dash of convention -- I like it when I can come out of a great discussion about a particular topic and immediately buy some of the books, games, comics or what-have-you under discussion so I can dive right into them once I've returned to my hotel. This gleeful quasi-intellectual consumerism is improved even further when those things can be obtained at a 'trade show discount' of 20% or more. Throw in a cheap branded cloth attendee bag full of freebies and coupons and I'm a happy boy.
That said, even I had to agree that this year's GDC felt incredibly schizophrenic. The high point of this for me was the Microsoft keynote. I went in excited and hopeful that we'd hear some new announcements concerning indie development on the Xbox Live Arcade -- and, to be fair, my wish was granted. However, it was very much a case of "be careful what you ask for" -- while I was hoping for an in-depth demo of how independent developers could build, distribute, market and profit from games on Microsoft's XBLA, what I got was little more than a long, extended sales pitch. There was little to no hard data, no real how-to discussion, and absolutely zero discussion of the business model attached to this SHINY NEW PIECE OF AWESOME that Microsoft was trotting out and expecting the audience to fawn over. Instead of a technical document we got a press release -- or, worse, a total fluff piece. This was crystallized when the so-called 'keynote' ended with a flash of pyrotechnics and Cliffy B exploding onto the stage, chainsaw gun in hand, to announce Gears of War 2.
Now, again, I'm not saying there's no place for this kind of thing. Quite the contrary, in fact -- but that place is a convention, not a conference. With E3 gone, GDC is in danger of ceasing to be a conference and openly becoming a convention, which I think might be a horrible mistake. While at the New York Comic-Con, I found myself thinking that this was the kind of place where those types of announcements might have been more warmly received. Konami had a huge prescence on the trade show floor there, where they were demoing (among other things) their upcoming Hellboy game. The New York Comic-Con and the San Diego Comic-Con have both become increasingly less dependent upon comics and become more all-media geekfests with panels on comics, video games, feature films, television and so on. Even the less high-profile Wondercon, which was happening the exact same weekend as GDC and in the other half of the exact same convention center, had a notable showing of video game-related content. I found myself thinking then, much as I did later in New York, that the overlap in the two events' Venn diagram was huge -- but very few attendees of either conference was aware that the other was going on until they actually got there and noticed the swarm of OTHER nerds doing interesting things across the street.
This is, obviously, a huge missed opportunity. Instead of having developers grouse about Microsoft's convention-like "keynote", why not deliberately organize both events at the same time with a shared ticket option for those who want something from both worlds? Conventions usually offer panel discussions and lectures in classrooms in addition to their trade shows, as well as scheduled big announcements from the most high-profile corporations in attendance. When those are sales pitches, attendees accept that as what they are -- but they aren't being sold as keynote lectures. Similarly, attendees of GDC who had been expecting that kind of big pyrotechnic display would have been deeply disappointed in the excellent-but-dry-by-comparison keynote lecture on far-flung futurism by Dr. Raymond Kurzweil.
GDC is currently trying to court two very different audiences, which can certainly be done successfully through a clearer terminology and a clearer marketing strategy. By delineating which parts are conference and which parts are convention, GDC (and the Comic-Cons, for that matter) can expand their audiences and capitalize on the increased amount of cross-interest between these different-but-similar entertainment industries. The key is simply remembering what parts are libraries and what parts are amusement parks.
Bottom line: no one is happy when someone tries to give a lecture on a roller coaster.
Last week I bought a game I swore I wouldn't buy: Just Cause. I swore I wouldn't buy this game when I read that its politcal premise--the overthrow of a corrupt South American regime through guerrilla warfare--would involve the typical American rhetoric that, it would seem, no war-themed game can exist without: the protection of American interest. Thus a game that could have been, provocatively, Che Guevara meets Grand Theft Auto became yet another emulation of Chuck Norris barf bag cinema, the kind where some helpless country needs a swaggering yank to pull it, kicking and screaming if necessary, to democracy. This is why in Just Cause you are some CIA dude, and not just a suffering citizen of the (fictional) country who's finally had enough. One might imagine that a horrific dictatorship would be reason enough to go guerrilla, but in Just Cause we need the threat of WMD's which could possibly be used on America to justify ass kickery. Viva la Revolucion!
The notion fills me with disappointment. I know better than to expect a serious, documentary-like experience from a mainstream videogame, and yes many games are just elaborate power trips. But what's wrong with a power trip in which the indigenous population gets empowered in a way that isn't filtered through America's big brother mythology? Ugh. Still, I bought it last week.
I bought Just Cause because I played it at a friend's house, and it turned out to be pretty fun. The American aspect of the story is more or less in the background. Your avatar is Latin American at the very least, though he does appear to work for the CIA. The story itself is still moronic, full of Hollywood cliches. But those cliches make for fun gameplay at times, like when you perform all manner of ridiculous stunts. My friends and I had a ball riding cars, boats, and even planes like surfboards as we ran from government stooges. After that, I decided to swallow my political angst and pick it up for cheap.
Then, yesterday, my girlfriend and I went to see Persepolis.
Violence and Games, One Student's Perspective (Part 1)
Earlier this month,I went to the Boston State House to witness a hearing on House Bill 1423. The bill would amend Massachusetts law to explicitly include video games as in the list of media regulated with respect to content, and to additionally include violence that is "patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community" as a type of obscenity. Of course, being a public hearing, there was a fairly extensive docket for the Judiciary Committtee that day, including a bill to change access to criminal records (CORI) , judicial appointments, marijuana law reform, and something or other about casinos.
Teaching game design workshops is always an experience and I jump at every chance of making another one. So when my friend and colleague, Prof. Michael Wagner from the Danube University in Krems, Austria, suggested to host a biannually Game Design Bootcamp as part of his game studies master course, and that I was supposed to teach it, I was delighted. The three day kick off workshop was in early January 2008. It was fun, it was different. It was an experience I'd like to share with you.
The Game Developer's Conference, GDC for short, is the annual meeting of the entire video games industry: from studio executives to indie developer to academics, just about everyone who works with games for a living either attends or follows the proceedings. Last year I covered some of the more interesting presentations; this year I'll discuss some of the prevalent themes to come out of the conference.
The teaser trailer of Duke Nukem Forever was released last month, and the anger that makes me rant a bit about First Person Shooters still lasts. I play FPSs on occassion, mostly because it's homework, though I enjoy them most in a LAN party against other people in the same room. But there are a few things about FPSs that really bug me, which have less to do with the genre itself and more with a series of myths revolving around FPSs being the quintessencial videogame genre.
There have been several TV shows this past fall that have included videogames as an important part of certain episodes. I'd like to say this is a symptom of acceptance of videogaming as general cultural practice. Unfortunately, it's a lot easier to explain: product placement. Traditionally this means products are displayed at some point during a show (have you noticed what is the only game console that appears in Heroes?); now games are actually being written into episodes as key plot elements. The challenges of this product placement strategy are how to display the game, as well as how to portray the culture of the people who play videogames.
Roger Ebert just gave his first favorable review (as far as I'm aware) to a movie based on a videogame. Naturally this doesn't stop him from bashing games. But at least it's a slight variation in his normal behavior.
The [Hitman] movie, directed by Xavier Gens, was inspired by a best-selling video game and serves as an excellent illustration of my conviction that video games will never become an art form -- never, at least, until they morph into something else or more.
He goes on to explain how the story is not bad and that the movie actually has interesting characters. But this is all undercut, he claims, by the scenes of endless shooting in which 47 appears invincible and in which truck loads of people die. These scenes are "no doubt from the video game," he concludes.
Ebert's status as a crank when it comes to videogames is well documented. Yet it's still interesting to see just how ignorant he is of the medium, let alone the genres, he's criticizing. Anyone who's played Hitman knows that it's not about walking down hallways killing endless streams of people. It's about planning a hit for hours, getting every detail right, and then finally striking in total secrecy. A good player will not kill anyone except the person they are supposed to kill, which means the Hitman games often become excruciating studies at avoiding violence in every possible way.
WARNING! METROID PRIME 3: CORRUPTION PLOT SPOILERS BELOW...
The Galactic Federation sure is great in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. They help Samus Aran kick Space Pirate butt and save the universe once again. Corruption ends with a massive, Return of the Jedi style space battle. Samus leads thousands of Federation ships in an assault on Phaaze, the source of a radioactive disease that has been infecting the galaxy for three consecutive games. Yay for Samus! Yay for the Federation! Yay for me, who waited six years for all this!
I met a Massachusetts senator last week who loved games. At first I wasn't sure if he was the real thing, since he kept gushing about how much he liked "Grand Theft Miami." But he did seem to have a basic knowledge of someone who had actually picked up a controller. Even though he got the name wrong, he seemed to understand the difference between GTA: Vice City and GTA: San Andreas. At one point his aide jumped in about how much he loved Halo, Call of Duty, and a slew of other FPS's. Yes, these lawmakers loved games where you blow shit up real good. And they weren't afraid to admit this to people they didn't even know.
As a new semester gets going full-swing for MIT students and faculty, with classes and projects threatening to subsume all memory of summer, it seemed an ideal time to reflect on the accomplishments of a group of students that eschewed summer frivolity for nine weeks of hard work. The GAMBIT Summer Program brought brilliant students from Singapore's tertiary education institutions together with MIT students to form six crackerjack video game development teams (and one sound design odd couple). Over nine weeks, we brainstormed, designed, illustrated, coded, argued, redesigned, recoded, and came out the other end with the 6 games we've featured on the site before.
For a taste of what the summer experience was like, check out the video at the following link:
Originally, my team's ideas were vague. We knew we wanted to create a game based on the Peanuts comic strip by Charles M. Schulz, but were having problems honing in on what aspect of that universe to focus on. Our initial idea was to have a series of mini-games, but this solution seemed to just multiply the amount of games we needed to make. We decided to focus on a mini-game that reflected the psychological struggle between Lucy and Charlie Brown. For those not familiar with the comic, Lucy runs a psychiatric advice stand. Charlie Brown comes to Lucy for advice and usually ends up getting insulted and ridiculed.
