A lot of my readers are older gamers, or younger gamers with an interest in gaming history, so I wanted to share something I ran across this week, because I think we're exactly the sort of people who should be helping out with this.
Game industry figure Ernest W. Adams wrote a worthwhile article about online gaming, the social problems associated with it, and what might be done about it here. It was originally written for Gamasutra's Designer's Notebook series, but wasn't ultimately published there, so the good folks at the freethought blog Butterflies & Wheels ran it in its intended form a few days back.
I don't do a lot of online gaming, and when I do, it's almost always with friends. If I create a match, most of the time it will be a private session with invited players, for exactly the sorts of reasons Adams cites. But after reading his thoughts on the sorry state of the online gaming "community," I think I have a social duty to participate and fight the problem instead of avoiding it. I'm going to do more online gaming, and be more vocal with my disapproval when people act like immature jerks.
I encourage other grownups to do the same. And by "grownups," I mean that if you're twelve, but can carry on a proper conversation in-game, without invoking epithets, name-calling and accusations of cheating, and take your losses and victories like a decent human being... you count. Moreso than a lot of of the technically-qualified "adults" out there.
It's not just a matter of etiquette -- it's a matter of encouraging participation from everyone in our favorite hobby. Excelsior!
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Friday, July 27, 2012
Sunday, July 1, 2012
Physical Reality, Virtual Reality
I'm always fascinated by the way our brains work when it comes to games. It doesn't take a lot to fool us into feeling like we have "been" to a place that exists only as a map in a computer, if we have had to do the work of learning our way around it. It seems that the process of exploring and discovering triggers the brain's handling for real-world geography, even when the world we're working with is completely virtual. What we see and hear and sense feels immediate and "real," but it's all being processed and interpreted by our brains; our internal hardware can't necessarily distinguish between real and virtual inputs at a certain level.
So it was interesting to hear from Mr. Neil Bradley this week, the at-the-time uncredited author of an old SoftSide text adventure I covered a while back called Crime Adventure. He emailed, and I reproduce with his kind permission, this interesting bit of background:
So apparently it can work the other way around too -- creating a virtual recreation of a familiar environment can also encode memories associated with that environment. Neato!
So it was interesting to hear from Mr. Neil Bradley this week, the at-the-time uncredited author of an old SoftSide text adventure I covered a while back called Crime Adventure. He emailed, and I reproduce with his kind permission, this interesting bit of background:
I wrote it originally for the TRS-80 Model I. It was based on my Portland, Oregon neighborhood at the time. There's a 7-11 at 114th & Halsey that I called the "arcade." There was a Gateway bowling alley on 102nd that I moved right along side it. The Tsein-Tsein Chinese restaurant is across the street. Mr. Fenwick was actually Mr. Forsberg, a nice old guy who lived up the street from me who was BIG into golf. There was a family of Gypsies who lived nearby (inspiration for the fortune teller). Wow - this is bringing back memories!
So apparently it can work the other way around too -- creating a virtual recreation of a familiar environment can also encode memories associated with that environment. Neato!
Monday, August 29, 2011
On Unhappy Endings
I recently played through Ubisoft's 2008 Prince of Persia game, from the long-running series created by Jordan Mechner way back on the Apple II, and last week wrote about its unique approach to difficulty; the player is given immortality, but must still fight through short segments of the game unassisted, so progress must be earned. I was still playing the game last week, but have since wrapped it up.
This next and final thought about the game comes with a warning, as there will be some...
***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****
Prince of Persia 2008 wraps up in the expected fashion -- we defeat the last of the four main bosses who dominate the combat sequences, take on an "ultimate" boss, and then take on the REAL boss in its native form to finish the game, with all manner of pyrotechnics and a satisfying degree of difficulty.
Except...
The game doesn't actually end there -- the battle won, our hero Prince (not necessarily a real prince) looks on helplessly as his female guide and companion, the (genuine) princess Elika, gives up her own life to seal the deal. You see, she died once before, and her life was restored by a bargain made by her father, the King, with Ahriman, the Zoroastrian Big Bad; and so, having cleaned up the resultant mess, she must make a final sacrifice to put the world back into balance.
I like this ending -- it's heroic and sad at the same time, as the player has witnessed a growing degree of respect and affection between these two. And it seems right -- melancholy, but completely right -- as the Prince slowly carries Elika's body out of the temple while the credits roll.
Except...
The Prince then puts her body on a slab, in the sunlight, and we see that four small trees have appeared on stone platforms in the desert surrounding the temple. And control is returned to the player.
Now what? Well, we can try to respect Elika's wishes and just ignore the trees, but the game won't actually let us go back the way we came -- there's an invisible barrier that keeps the Prince from leaving, or committing suicide in existential despair. So there seems to be nothing to do but find a way to climb up to each of the trees, and then hack each one down with the Prince's sword.
Why are we doing this? Well, when it's done, the temple doors open, and then the Prince can go inside and cut down the very Tree of Life Elika gave herself to preserve, and carry her recovered life force back to her body. When she wakes up, she asks him, simply, "Why?"
And then he carries her off again, while the dark spirit Ahriman emerges from the temple and sweeps across the desert, leaving only darkness in its wake, and undermining everything Elika and the player have tried to accomplish during the past 15 hours or so.
It's a major storytelling misstep, in my opinion -- the player is forced into a course of action that seems selfish and anything but romantic, and whatever respect we have gained for the Prince is in the final analysis destroyed by his actions. The only mitigating factor is a constant mystical whispering in the background, a chorus of voices that insist he has no choice -- and in truth he does not -- but because the player is in control, albeit limited to a single course of action, it feels like he SHOULD. Why can't we show that he loves Elika by honoring her sacrifice, instead of bringing her back to life at the expense of her (and the player's) accomplishments?
In a movie, I could understand -- even appreciate -- this sort of an ending. I have nothing against unhappy or mixed conclusions; the hero brought down by a tragic flaw can be a dramatically interesting figure. But this is a game -- the player has come to identify with the Prince, and respect Elika's strength, and has invested quite a bit of time in getting to know these characters. By imposing this climactic "plot twist" on the story, the game dispels much of its own magic. If it were played out as a difficult choice, with more of a moral struggle involved -- if there were even the illusion of options available -- I would feel differently. As it stands, it's a letdown -- neither happy nor unhappy, just ambiguous at the expense of interactivity.
I'm glad the 2010 Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands game did not try to continue this storyline -- I'm not sure I could play a game in which the hero must now try to undo his own evil, a well-intentioned but misguided deed, when he could have just walked away, if only the designers would have allowed it.
(A note: on consoles, there is a downloadable extra Epilogue chapter that reunites Elika and the Prince temporarily to fight the evil he has unleashed. She is not happy with her resurrection, and at the end, she leaves him alone and goes off to fight her own battles. The PC version does not include this epilogue material, but I am glad to know it exists and follows the main game's ending in a wholly appropriate way.)
This next and final thought about the game comes with a warning, as there will be some...
***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****
Prince of Persia 2008 wraps up in the expected fashion -- we defeat the last of the four main bosses who dominate the combat sequences, take on an "ultimate" boss, and then take on the REAL boss in its native form to finish the game, with all manner of pyrotechnics and a satisfying degree of difficulty.
Except...
The game doesn't actually end there -- the battle won, our hero Prince (not necessarily a real prince) looks on helplessly as his female guide and companion, the (genuine) princess Elika, gives up her own life to seal the deal. You see, she died once before, and her life was restored by a bargain made by her father, the King, with Ahriman, the Zoroastrian Big Bad; and so, having cleaned up the resultant mess, she must make a final sacrifice to put the world back into balance.
I like this ending -- it's heroic and sad at the same time, as the player has witnessed a growing degree of respect and affection between these two. And it seems right -- melancholy, but completely right -- as the Prince slowly carries Elika's body out of the temple while the credits roll.
Except...
The Prince then puts her body on a slab, in the sunlight, and we see that four small trees have appeared on stone platforms in the desert surrounding the temple. And control is returned to the player.
Now what? Well, we can try to respect Elika's wishes and just ignore the trees, but the game won't actually let us go back the way we came -- there's an invisible barrier that keeps the Prince from leaving, or committing suicide in existential despair. So there seems to be nothing to do but find a way to climb up to each of the trees, and then hack each one down with the Prince's sword.
Why are we doing this? Well, when it's done, the temple doors open, and then the Prince can go inside and cut down the very Tree of Life Elika gave herself to preserve, and carry her recovered life force back to her body. When she wakes up, she asks him, simply, "Why?"
And then he carries her off again, while the dark spirit Ahriman emerges from the temple and sweeps across the desert, leaving only darkness in its wake, and undermining everything Elika and the player have tried to accomplish during the past 15 hours or so.
It's a major storytelling misstep, in my opinion -- the player is forced into a course of action that seems selfish and anything but romantic, and whatever respect we have gained for the Prince is in the final analysis destroyed by his actions. The only mitigating factor is a constant mystical whispering in the background, a chorus of voices that insist he has no choice -- and in truth he does not -- but because the player is in control, albeit limited to a single course of action, it feels like he SHOULD. Why can't we show that he loves Elika by honoring her sacrifice, instead of bringing her back to life at the expense of her (and the player's) accomplishments?
In a movie, I could understand -- even appreciate -- this sort of an ending. I have nothing against unhappy or mixed conclusions; the hero brought down by a tragic flaw can be a dramatically interesting figure. But this is a game -- the player has come to identify with the Prince, and respect Elika's strength, and has invested quite a bit of time in getting to know these characters. By imposing this climactic "plot twist" on the story, the game dispels much of its own magic. If it were played out as a difficult choice, with more of a moral struggle involved -- if there were even the illusion of options available -- I would feel differently. As it stands, it's a letdown -- neither happy nor unhappy, just ambiguous at the expense of interactivity.
I'm glad the 2010 Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands game did not try to continue this storyline -- I'm not sure I could play a game in which the hero must now try to undo his own evil, a well-intentioned but misguided deed, when he could have just walked away, if only the designers would have allowed it.
(A note: on consoles, there is a downloadable extra Epilogue chapter that reunites Elika and the Prince temporarily to fight the evil he has unleashed. She is not happy with her resurrection, and at the end, she leaves him alone and goes off to fight her own battles. The PC version does not include this epilogue material, but I am glad to know it exists and follows the main game's ending in a wholly appropriate way.)
Monday, August 22, 2011
Fairness, Difficulty and Game Design
Real life has been intruding on my gaming and blogging time of late, so the next few weeks may be a little light and late on content. But to wind down now and then I have been playing the 2008 Prince of Persia -- it's not really a reboot, nor is it a remake of Jordan Mechner's original, so the name gives the impression Ubisoft temporarily ran out of interesting sub-titles.
The game took some critical flak upon release for the fact that the player really can't fail. That is, whenever the Prince (in this game, a bandit rogue who's not royalty in any official sense) is about to fall to his doom or get overtaken by an enemy, his female companion Elika (a genuine princess with magical powers) flies near and rescues him, returning him to the nearest safe ledge or throwing him back into battle. It's sort of a frequent-checkpointing system, and the fact that there's never a true "game over" scenario was seen as a flaw in some quarters.
But after playing through the 2003 and 2010 Prince of Persia games, I'm finding this approach perfectly comfortable and not at all damaging to the experience. The 2003/2010 games both featured a time-reversal mechanic, where the player could back out of a mistake as long as some of the "sands of time" remained in a magical dagger. This "fail-safe" mechanic isn't really that different -- it provides an infinite number of retries, true, but it also forces the player to get through each stretch between checkpoints without the ability to do an immediate rewind. This has the effect of breaking the game up into very small sections between checkpoints -- but each of these sections has its own challenges, and the difficulty still ramps up, especially in the area of combat. In this game, instead of battling hundreds of random minions and the occasional bosses, most of the fights involve several colorful bosses who must be faced and defeated several times before a final showdown.
There are some visible automatic difficulty adjustments afoot -- I've noticed that the bosses regenerate health at a less dramatic rate as the battle drags on when I'm not doing well -- but there's also a joy in fighting a smooth, clean battle that gets muted and disrupted by Elika's magical rescues. So while the player isn't punished for failure by dying and having to start the battle over from the very beginning, there's still an incentive to get the timing and moves down to deal with each boss as effectively as possible. And the acrobatic platforming challenges at the core of the Prince of Persia franchise aren't weakened at all by this title's approach -- in fact, the lack of the ability to rewind a missed jump makes the small milestones more significant.
All this has gotten me thinking about how video game design has changed over time when it comes to balancing difficulty and challenge in a "fair" way. Games are often perceived as being "easier" today than they used to be, and I think that they are. But that's not necessarily a bad thing -- early gaming's idea of difficulty often amounted to sheer brick walls of challenge that turned away more players than managed to scale them. So I think the Prince of Persia approach is valid -- it never allows the player to skip over a tough section, but it rarely forces the player to go back through a section already mastered just to get to, and fail at, the next difficult step. Maybe I'm just getting older -- my arcade gaming skills are not what they were twenty years ago -- but I appreciate a game that lets me demonstrate I can handle a tricky bit once, and then allows me to move on to something new.
Don't get me wrong -- I enjoy a good challenge, and I don't want to feel like I've gotten through a difficult section based on dumb luck. But when I sit down to play a game, I want to make some progress toward finishing it; while getting stuck and fighting through a hard section is classically Old School, having to do the same thing over and over to the point of frustration is very Institute of Quit and Play Something Else.
We know it's bad design when a game doesn't change itself up to offer new challenges, but becomes repetitive and simplistic and padded. I can't think of any reason why a game's save/checkpoint system should impose the same kind of bad design on the experience, when there are other options available if designers are willing to rethink some long-standing expectations.
Comments?
The game took some critical flak upon release for the fact that the player really can't fail. That is, whenever the Prince (in this game, a bandit rogue who's not royalty in any official sense) is about to fall to his doom or get overtaken by an enemy, his female companion Elika (a genuine princess with magical powers) flies near and rescues him, returning him to the nearest safe ledge or throwing him back into battle. It's sort of a frequent-checkpointing system, and the fact that there's never a true "game over" scenario was seen as a flaw in some quarters.
But after playing through the 2003 and 2010 Prince of Persia games, I'm finding this approach perfectly comfortable and not at all damaging to the experience. The 2003/2010 games both featured a time-reversal mechanic, where the player could back out of a mistake as long as some of the "sands of time" remained in a magical dagger. This "fail-safe" mechanic isn't really that different -- it provides an infinite number of retries, true, but it also forces the player to get through each stretch between checkpoints without the ability to do an immediate rewind. This has the effect of breaking the game up into very small sections between checkpoints -- but each of these sections has its own challenges, and the difficulty still ramps up, especially in the area of combat. In this game, instead of battling hundreds of random minions and the occasional bosses, most of the fights involve several colorful bosses who must be faced and defeated several times before a final showdown.
There are some visible automatic difficulty adjustments afoot -- I've noticed that the bosses regenerate health at a less dramatic rate as the battle drags on when I'm not doing well -- but there's also a joy in fighting a smooth, clean battle that gets muted and disrupted by Elika's magical rescues. So while the player isn't punished for failure by dying and having to start the battle over from the very beginning, there's still an incentive to get the timing and moves down to deal with each boss as effectively as possible. And the acrobatic platforming challenges at the core of the Prince of Persia franchise aren't weakened at all by this title's approach -- in fact, the lack of the ability to rewind a missed jump makes the small milestones more significant.
All this has gotten me thinking about how video game design has changed over time when it comes to balancing difficulty and challenge in a "fair" way. Games are often perceived as being "easier" today than they used to be, and I think that they are. But that's not necessarily a bad thing -- early gaming's idea of difficulty often amounted to sheer brick walls of challenge that turned away more players than managed to scale them. So I think the Prince of Persia approach is valid -- it never allows the player to skip over a tough section, but it rarely forces the player to go back through a section already mastered just to get to, and fail at, the next difficult step. Maybe I'm just getting older -- my arcade gaming skills are not what they were twenty years ago -- but I appreciate a game that lets me demonstrate I can handle a tricky bit once, and then allows me to move on to something new.
Don't get me wrong -- I enjoy a good challenge, and I don't want to feel like I've gotten through a difficult section based on dumb luck. But when I sit down to play a game, I want to make some progress toward finishing it; while getting stuck and fighting through a hard section is classically Old School, having to do the same thing over and over to the point of frustration is very Institute of Quit and Play Something Else.
We know it's bad design when a game doesn't change itself up to offer new challenges, but becomes repetitive and simplistic and padded. I can't think of any reason why a game's save/checkpoint system should impose the same kind of bad design on the experience, when there are other options available if designers are willing to rethink some long-standing expectations.
Comments?
Monday, August 8, 2011
Clouds of Convergence, Fogs of Divergence
Over the past few months I've been paying attention to PC gaming again, after years away, and have written a little bit about the apparent convergence afoot. More PC games are featuring native support for the XBox 360 controller for Windows, for example, which means that the mouse-and-keyboard standard is starting to give way, at least for games that work better with a gamepad. The availability of a standardized controller solution, along with ease of porting thanks to similar hardware, means more games are appearing on both platforms, pulling the historically separate XBox 360 console and Windows computer platforms together.
Something broader and potentially more significant is also happening, with several practical implementations of the "cloud computing" concept in the world of video/computer games. I was surprised when I recently purchased and downloaded Batman: Arkham Asylum via Steam (thanks to an attractive sale price), because at startup the game requested I sign in with my Games for Windows LIVE ID. I would not even have such an ID, if not for the fact that Microsoft merged the Games for Windows infrastructure with Xbox LIVE a few years ago, for reasons that were not at the time completely clear.
Now this technical decision's practical upshot is apparent -- my gamerscore on the XBox 360 is being augmented by achievements I'm earning on the PC, which is nice, because as much as I've been enjoying playing some fine/cheap games on the PC, I feel like my XBox history is being neglected. The merged LIVE game list is now platform-agnostic, so it doesn't matter whether I unlock achievement points on the XBox 360 or the PC, or on a Windows 7 phone, or, presumably, on any future Microsoft gaming platform. So my gamertag is no longer just a persistent gamer profile on one platform -- now it is portable, it resides in the "cloud," and any changes to it will be reflected by all compatible clients.
Beyond the gamer profile, Microsoft also announced at E3 that XBox 360 profiles and game saves will be moving to the "cloud," allowing much greater portability and removing the need to re-acquire a user's profile when moving from one machine to another. We won't see game save integration across platforms, I don't imagine, but it's still a big step in abstracting the important content from the individual, physical machine, which is really just a delivery device.
This is all very cool, but here's the rub: On consoles, a single, official achievement/save/distribution system generally exists. By comparison, PC gamers have an unlimited choice of channels for obtaining, downloading and launching game content, but as these Internet-integrated features mature, there's greater potential for competing solutions to become inconvenient and confusing.
See, Steam has a similar Web-based solution for profiles and achievements, and now has the Steam Cloud (a serendipitous coincidence of nomenclature) for portability of game saves -- but, of course, it's a completely separate system from Microsoft's. Steam's services and development tools are great for small teams, and Mac publishers, who want to support an achievement system without having to build it from scratch, like, say, Ubisoft's Uplay. Uplay is yet another online system, with more limited scope but an interesting points-based reward system that allows players to earn items of actual value, like downloadable content and themes.
Electronic Arts is also jumping into the fray -- they announced plans a few months back, and recently implemented a big change. EA's own online store will now be known as Origin (no relation to Richard Garriott's old Origin Systems brand), and EA will not be distributing its expected next big hit Battlefield 3 via Steam after all, but only through Origin. EA will have its own Origin client software, and the company has also talked about supporting cloud saves and achievements down the road, building on its own online profile system that's been used for matchmaking, tournaments and leaderboards for a few years now.
From the gamer's perspective, any new system of this sort is inconsistent and therefore inconvenient and of less value than a more established system, and developers aren't immune to these headaches either. Competition and diversity are usually good in the long term -- the best solution will eventually win out, or more likely developers will figure out how to integrate multiple popular save/achievement systems and everyone will move on to other concerns.
But for the player, we're dealing with convergence, divergence, offline, online, game saves and patches and achievements and profiles... Maybe (well, definitely) I'm just getting old, but sometimes I just want to sit down in front of the TV, grab a one-button joystick and plug in a cartridge.
Something broader and potentially more significant is also happening, with several practical implementations of the "cloud computing" concept in the world of video/computer games. I was surprised when I recently purchased and downloaded Batman: Arkham Asylum via Steam (thanks to an attractive sale price), because at startup the game requested I sign in with my Games for Windows LIVE ID. I would not even have such an ID, if not for the fact that Microsoft merged the Games for Windows infrastructure with Xbox LIVE a few years ago, for reasons that were not at the time completely clear.
Now this technical decision's practical upshot is apparent -- my gamerscore on the XBox 360 is being augmented by achievements I'm earning on the PC, which is nice, because as much as I've been enjoying playing some fine/cheap games on the PC, I feel like my XBox history is being neglected. The merged LIVE game list is now platform-agnostic, so it doesn't matter whether I unlock achievement points on the XBox 360 or the PC, or on a Windows 7 phone, or, presumably, on any future Microsoft gaming platform. So my gamertag is no longer just a persistent gamer profile on one platform -- now it is portable, it resides in the "cloud," and any changes to it will be reflected by all compatible clients.
Beyond the gamer profile, Microsoft also announced at E3 that XBox 360 profiles and game saves will be moving to the "cloud," allowing much greater portability and removing the need to re-acquire a user's profile when moving from one machine to another. We won't see game save integration across platforms, I don't imagine, but it's still a big step in abstracting the important content from the individual, physical machine, which is really just a delivery device.
This is all very cool, but here's the rub: On consoles, a single, official achievement/save/distribution system generally exists. By comparison, PC gamers have an unlimited choice of channels for obtaining, downloading and launching game content, but as these Internet-integrated features mature, there's greater potential for competing solutions to become inconvenient and confusing.
See, Steam has a similar Web-based solution for profiles and achievements, and now has the Steam Cloud (a serendipitous coincidence of nomenclature) for portability of game saves -- but, of course, it's a completely separate system from Microsoft's. Steam's services and development tools are great for small teams, and Mac publishers, who want to support an achievement system without having to build it from scratch, like, say, Ubisoft's Uplay. Uplay is yet another online system, with more limited scope but an interesting points-based reward system that allows players to earn items of actual value, like downloadable content and themes.
Electronic Arts is also jumping into the fray -- they announced plans a few months back, and recently implemented a big change. EA's own online store will now be known as Origin (no relation to Richard Garriott's old Origin Systems brand), and EA will not be distributing its expected next big hit Battlefield 3 via Steam after all, but only through Origin. EA will have its own Origin client software, and the company has also talked about supporting cloud saves and achievements down the road, building on its own online profile system that's been used for matchmaking, tournaments and leaderboards for a few years now.
From the gamer's perspective, any new system of this sort is inconsistent and therefore inconvenient and of less value than a more established system, and developers aren't immune to these headaches either. Competition and diversity are usually good in the long term -- the best solution will eventually win out, or more likely developers will figure out how to integrate multiple popular save/achievement systems and everyone will move on to other concerns.
But for the player, we're dealing with convergence, divergence, offline, online, game saves and patches and achievements and profiles... Maybe (well, definitely) I'm just getting old, but sometimes I just want to sit down in front of the TV, grab a one-button joystick and plug in a cartridge.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Bill Willingham Makes New Fables Game Canon
I'm surprised this hasn't been getting more press -- in Telltale Games' Day 1 video from the San Diego ComiCon, Fables comic book creator Bill Willingham states that the upcoming Fables game storylines will be "in canon"; that is, part of the series' official continuity.
This is a pretty rare thing for game adaptations -- Telltale Games historically has become very good at creating stories that fit into existing universes without impacting them in any significant way, but it always makes the games feel like second-class citizens. To have Willingham onboard and treating this story/these stories as canon may allow for some more interesting and/or significant developments.
The closest example I can think of in adventure/comic book game terms would be the Scott Adams QuestProbe series done with Marvel in the mid-80s -- but even there the Chief Examiner seemed to get revised a bit as the series went on, morphing from (I maintain) Scott Adams himself in the first game to a more generic character by the third. The fourth game was never published, but the tie-in story did appear in an X-Men comic book later on, so I think the whole Chief Examiner storyline counts as Marvel canon (to the degree anything can in the ever-mutable world of superhero comics.) But the storytelling in those games was pretty simplistic -- navigating Spider-Man around inside an office building for the entire duration of the game and forcing the Hulk to solve puzzles never quite felt right; even if the related comic book stories are official, the games themselves don't necessarily deserve that status.
So this is potentially something new under the sun. Perhaps the Fables universe, with its myriad characters, just has so many story possibilities that Mr. Willingham feels comfortable calling the game canon without feeling like it will limit future developments. But I'd like to think his statement expresses sincere confidence and trust in Telltale's ability to treat his world and characters with integrity, respect and honesty, something the company has been able to do very consistently with their licensed games in the past.
Time and results will tell the full story. But I look forward to seeing how this one turns out.
This is a pretty rare thing for game adaptations -- Telltale Games historically has become very good at creating stories that fit into existing universes without impacting them in any significant way, but it always makes the games feel like second-class citizens. To have Willingham onboard and treating this story/these stories as canon may allow for some more interesting and/or significant developments.
The closest example I can think of in adventure/comic book game terms would be the Scott Adams QuestProbe series done with Marvel in the mid-80s -- but even there the Chief Examiner seemed to get revised a bit as the series went on, morphing from (I maintain) Scott Adams himself in the first game to a more generic character by the third. The fourth game was never published, but the tie-in story did appear in an X-Men comic book later on, so I think the whole Chief Examiner storyline counts as Marvel canon (to the degree anything can in the ever-mutable world of superhero comics.) But the storytelling in those games was pretty simplistic -- navigating Spider-Man around inside an office building for the entire duration of the game and forcing the Hulk to solve puzzles never quite felt right; even if the related comic book stories are official, the games themselves don't necessarily deserve that status.
So this is potentially something new under the sun. Perhaps the Fables universe, with its myriad characters, just has so many story possibilities that Mr. Willingham feels comfortable calling the game canon without feeling like it will limit future developments. But I'd like to think his statement expresses sincere confidence and trust in Telltale's ability to treat his world and characters with integrity, respect and honesty, something the company has been able to do very consistently with their licensed games in the past.
Time and results will tell the full story. But I look forward to seeing how this one turns out.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
On Steam and Platform Convergence
So. It seems that one big thing I've been missing out on in the PC gaming world is Valve's Steam, a digital distribution system for PC games. I finally took the time to visit the Steam website, after hearing about it here and there over the years, after I picked up a number of adventure titles on the cheap during Telltale Games' big summer sale and decided to see if other games were available at such reasonable prices. As it happens, Steam was also having a big summer sale, and so I downloaded the client application, and grabbed a couple of free demos, to see where things stand these days.
That might have been a mistake -- but I don't think so, really.
Now, my laptop is a decent little machine, but it's not a gaming powerhouse. Its integrated graphics chip isn't up to playing the latest 3-D PC games, as was clear when I tried out the Duke Nukem Forever demo. I had to minimize all the graphics settings to achieve 8-10 frames per second, which wasn't really playable.
But while most of the recent XBox 360/PC crossover games arrive on the service on release day, Steam isn't limited to those new titles. There's a broad range of titles from nearly 50 publishers available. And thanks to some attractive sale prices -- yes, I got suckered in -- I was able to pick up id's Quake, Valve's Half-Life, all 5 X-Com titles, and 5 of the Ubisoft post-Jordan Mechner Prince of Persia titles, all for under US$40.00 total. Yes, I can't play some of them now -- buteventually someday in the near future I intend to upgrade my PC gaming equipment. And for the time being, I can play many of these titles, and consider picking up Her Interactive's Nancy Drew adventures, Lucasarts' LOOM, and quite a few classic older games which will run just fine.
What Steam does really nicely, and what gives the service a distinct advantage over rummage sales and piracy, is the packaging. X-Com: Ufo Defense is a DOS game, and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time is a 2003 Windows 2000/XP game. Quake originated as a DOS game but runs under more modern engines as delivered by Steam -- the id Windows engine, as well as the graphically improved QuakeGL engine. Steam hides a lot of these messy details; the service provides game-specific launchers and an environment that makes downloading, installing, patching, and running a wide variety of titles straightforward -- we don't have to mess with process settings and video resolutions and obsolete floppy disks to get these games working. There are glitches here and there, but for the most part Steam's approach takes those familiar PC techie concerns off the table; we buy, download, and play. And we can be satisfied that it's all legal, so at least some of our purchase price will make its way back to the developers, or at least the publisher.
We do have to mess with the controller settings, with older games; I have a Logitech gamepad I have used for years, and Microsoft makes a nice Windows-compatible version of its familiar XBox 360 controller. But older games, if they support a gamepad input at all, need to have the buttons and movement controls defined. The PC has always been customizable to a degree unheard of on consoles, but the downside is that nothing is very standardized, so the user has to do some work before getting down to serious gaming. And yes, some PC games are optimized for mouse and keyboard play, or simply require the additional precision, which is why it's nice that we can also get reasonably priced wireless keyboards and mice these days.
Newer games are a different story -- the 360 controller has rapidly become a standard on the PC as well, at least for action games, and many crossover games work with the 360 gamepad out of the box. This brings me to another realization: we are finally seeing the long-expected but never-quite-achieved convergence of the PC and console gaming platforms. This is, in part, because new PCs have HDMI outputs, making it easy to put PC video and audio on the living room system without the Windows (or Mac) desktop becoming a blurry, unreadable mess. It's also happening because the technology curve is starting to slow -- the technology gulf between a console and a PC today isn't nearly as wide as it was when the Atari 2600 had to compete with the Commodore 64.
As supporting evidence, I note that Steam plans to take advantage of this trend with an initiative they're calling the "Big Picture" -- like MAME front ends that can be driven with an arcade joystick and buttons, the goal is to present a modified Steam client optimized for the non-desktop PC environment. Native controller support for this mode will be important -- required, according to Steam's publisher information -- and if this concept works we may soon have a PC equivalent of the console interface: once the front end is launched, the experience won't be much different from what we see on our familiar plug-in-and-play boxes. Except, of course, we won't be swapping discs anymore; all the content will be downloaded over the Internet and stored on the gaming PC, while we sit back and play wirelessly.
Of course, getting a solid gaming machine up and running will cost more than a console normally does, and in many cases will not be suitable for double duty as a normal desktop machine; some non-gaming tasks just need to be done at close range with coffee, pencil and paper nearby. And some titles will remain console exclusives; Nintendo's not going to bring Super Mario Galaxy to this platform any time in the foreseeable future. But there are plenty of fine games that run conveniently on the PC or Mac under Steam, with a wide range of titles drawn from more than 15 years of gaming. And as game budgets have gone up, the PC market has become more closely tied to the XBox 360 market; it's not difficult to develop for both platforms, maximizing sales and spreading out the development cost, and a relatively current PC can outperform the aging 360 by a fair margin, making this essentially a homebrewed "Super 360" proposition, with the advantage that it can be upgraded from time to time if it starts to seem a little long in the tooth.
I've been excited and optimistic about the prospects for downloadable gaming for several years now, so it's been a pleasant surprise to discover just how far ahead of the consoles the PC gaming world is in this regard. Pricing is reasonable, title selection is good, nothing goes out of print, and the technology works better than I would have expected.
Now if only Steam would feature a little retro console content... I'm still looking for that single solution, but for now I have to be content with a mishmash of the Wii Virtual Console, the sadly short-lived Microsoft Game Room, various classics collections on various platforms, and genuine vintage hardware. Maybe the emergence of the 360 gamepad as a standard will help.
I remain excited and optimistic.
That might have been a mistake -- but I don't think so, really.
Now, my laptop is a decent little machine, but it's not a gaming powerhouse. Its integrated graphics chip isn't up to playing the latest 3-D PC games, as was clear when I tried out the Duke Nukem Forever demo. I had to minimize all the graphics settings to achieve 8-10 frames per second, which wasn't really playable.
But while most of the recent XBox 360/PC crossover games arrive on the service on release day, Steam isn't limited to those new titles. There's a broad range of titles from nearly 50 publishers available. And thanks to some attractive sale prices -- yes, I got suckered in -- I was able to pick up id's Quake, Valve's Half-Life, all 5 X-Com titles, and 5 of the Ubisoft post-Jordan Mechner Prince of Persia titles, all for under US$40.00 total. Yes, I can't play some of them now -- but
What Steam does really nicely, and what gives the service a distinct advantage over rummage sales and piracy, is the packaging. X-Com: Ufo Defense is a DOS game, and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time is a 2003 Windows 2000/XP game. Quake originated as a DOS game but runs under more modern engines as delivered by Steam -- the id Windows engine, as well as the graphically improved QuakeGL engine. Steam hides a lot of these messy details; the service provides game-specific launchers and an environment that makes downloading, installing, patching, and running a wide variety of titles straightforward -- we don't have to mess with process settings and video resolutions and obsolete floppy disks to get these games working. There are glitches here and there, but for the most part Steam's approach takes those familiar PC techie concerns off the table; we buy, download, and play. And we can be satisfied that it's all legal, so at least some of our purchase price will make its way back to the developers, or at least the publisher.
We do have to mess with the controller settings, with older games; I have a Logitech gamepad I have used for years, and Microsoft makes a nice Windows-compatible version of its familiar XBox 360 controller. But older games, if they support a gamepad input at all, need to have the buttons and movement controls defined. The PC has always been customizable to a degree unheard of on consoles, but the downside is that nothing is very standardized, so the user has to do some work before getting down to serious gaming. And yes, some PC games are optimized for mouse and keyboard play, or simply require the additional precision, which is why it's nice that we can also get reasonably priced wireless keyboards and mice these days.
Newer games are a different story -- the 360 controller has rapidly become a standard on the PC as well, at least for action games, and many crossover games work with the 360 gamepad out of the box. This brings me to another realization: we are finally seeing the long-expected but never-quite-achieved convergence of the PC and console gaming platforms. This is, in part, because new PCs have HDMI outputs, making it easy to put PC video and audio on the living room system without the Windows (or Mac) desktop becoming a blurry, unreadable mess. It's also happening because the technology curve is starting to slow -- the technology gulf between a console and a PC today isn't nearly as wide as it was when the Atari 2600 had to compete with the Commodore 64.
As supporting evidence, I note that Steam plans to take advantage of this trend with an initiative they're calling the "Big Picture" -- like MAME front ends that can be driven with an arcade joystick and buttons, the goal is to present a modified Steam client optimized for the non-desktop PC environment. Native controller support for this mode will be important -- required, according to Steam's publisher information -- and if this concept works we may soon have a PC equivalent of the console interface: once the front end is launched, the experience won't be much different from what we see on our familiar plug-in-and-play boxes. Except, of course, we won't be swapping discs anymore; all the content will be downloaded over the Internet and stored on the gaming PC, while we sit back and play wirelessly.
Of course, getting a solid gaming machine up and running will cost more than a console normally does, and in many cases will not be suitable for double duty as a normal desktop machine; some non-gaming tasks just need to be done at close range with coffee, pencil and paper nearby. And some titles will remain console exclusives; Nintendo's not going to bring Super Mario Galaxy to this platform any time in the foreseeable future. But there are plenty of fine games that run conveniently on the PC or Mac under Steam, with a wide range of titles drawn from more than 15 years of gaming. And as game budgets have gone up, the PC market has become more closely tied to the XBox 360 market; it's not difficult to develop for both platforms, maximizing sales and spreading out the development cost, and a relatively current PC can outperform the aging 360 by a fair margin, making this essentially a homebrewed "Super 360" proposition, with the advantage that it can be upgraded from time to time if it starts to seem a little long in the tooth.
I've been excited and optimistic about the prospects for downloadable gaming for several years now, so it's been a pleasant surprise to discover just how far ahead of the consoles the PC gaming world is in this regard. Pricing is reasonable, title selection is good, nothing goes out of print, and the technology works better than I would have expected.
Now if only Steam would feature a little retro console content... I'm still looking for that single solution, but for now I have to be content with a mishmash of the Wii Virtual Console, the sadly short-lived Microsoft Game Room, various classics collections on various platforms, and genuine vintage hardware. Maybe the emergence of the 360 gamepad as a standard will help.
I remain excited and optimistic.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
The Upgrade Cycle Looms...
I'm a fairly eclectic gamer -- I have never considered myself to be exclusively a PC gamer or a console gamer, and I appreciate the strengths of both. For purposes of this discussion, I'm going to ignore many differentiating factors, like controllers, networking support, moddability (is that a word?) and software libraries. I'm mostly interested in how the respective PC and console hardware life cycles operate.
Consoles are meant to be affordable and simple to use -- every game published for a specific machinewill should run on every version of the console available, with no fundamental performance differences. The box itself needs to be refreshed every so often to keep up with technology standards, of course, and each new generation usually means buying a whole new set of accessories and games. Still, there's something to be said for plugging a new console in, hooking it to the TV, loading up a game and jumping into the action.
PCs do a lot of the pushing of gaming technology standards -- horsepower that gamers and critics are thrilled to see on a new console is usually at least a few years behind the state of the art on the PC. When consoles do occasionally take the lead in some area, like the SNES' sample-based music chip or the original Playstation's dedicated 3-D hardware, PCs are usually able to catch up with and surpass those new features within a year or two. But this also means that PCs are never completely "current" -- there is always some new hardware, some new investment that can be made to make the gaming experience that much more "complete."
I'm thinking about this lately because console gamers don't have to deal with "max settings" and frame rates -- either a game looks good and plays smoothly or it doesn't, and there's usually nothing that can be done to fix any issues. PC gamers, on the other hand, often end up playing the endless "performance tweaking" game more than any other. I have spent many hours adjusting both PC and game settings, trying to get the most out of whatever hardware I'm using at the time, and then testing out familiar games, relishing any discernible improvement after I've added new hardware or think I've established a better performance balance.
What I'm dealing with at the moment is this: I do most of my PC gaming (and a lot of my old-school emulated console gaming for this blog) on a laptop computer. It's a decent mid-range 2009 machine, with dual-core CPUs and enough memory to eliminate a lot of the "wait time" that always used to annoy me about Windows. It runs my standard tools and utilities with aplomb, and I rarely feel like I'm waiting on the computer; I'm very happy with it for general purposes. But given space and heat limitations, it's inevitable that my laptop's integrated graphics hardware is far from state of the art -- it can manage a passable 50 frames-per-second with 3D graphics using the Passmark Medium Complexity 3D test, but falls precipitously to a chuggy, unplayable 9 fps on a High Complexity test.
Now, I'm not playing Crysis 2 or anything that really pushes the standards on my laptop, but I do play a lot of the current adventure games and might play some other types of games if my hardware were up to it. But even with something graphically straightforward like Tales of Monkey Island, I can't turn the detail all the way up without seriously impacting the frame rate. And any scene with fog or smoke effects tends to make my hardware stutter -- it will do its best, and I can make just about anything playable if I lower the resolution and settings, but it's a far cry from what I'm used to on the XBox 360, and revives those old PC gamer cravings for just a bit more power.
The larger issue is that laptops are self-contained and not generally very upgradable; they're also designed to use minimal electricity, which is why they usually don't have powerful graphics chips. So aside from playing with the built-in graphics hardware's settings, I can't really do very much about this situation. So I find myself contemplating a new hardware purchase -- but not a gaming laptop, as they are expensive and my current machine is fine for everything else I do.
I am considering buying a relatively cheap tower PC with a decent amount of memory, buying and installing a relatively current graphics card with fast, dedicated memory, hooking it to the TV with an HDMI cable, and using a remote keyboard, mouse and controller to make the experience as console-like as I can.
This project, of course, will entail quite a few decisions about cost vs. power. But I enjoy doing that kind of research every once in a while, and I suspect an inexpensive desktop machine today will be more capable than my laptop of two years ago, especially with a graphics hardware upgrade. And, to be honest, all I truly care about is being able to run, say, Back to the Future: The Game at 720p or 1080p with full detail settings; that's demanding by my current hardware's standards, but it shouldn't be a lot to ask on a desktop machine.
So this may be a new little project for me to tackle. Of course, I will also have to do a little self-analysis in the process, i.e., wondering whether I'm tempted to do this because there isn't a new console launch on the horizon this year, and subconsciously I really just want a new toy to tinker with in the meanwhile. That can be a whole game in and of itself. I'll keep you posted.
Consoles are meant to be affordable and simple to use -- every game published for a specific machine
PCs do a lot of the pushing of gaming technology standards -- horsepower that gamers and critics are thrilled to see on a new console is usually at least a few years behind the state of the art on the PC. When consoles do occasionally take the lead in some area, like the SNES' sample-based music chip or the original Playstation's dedicated 3-D hardware, PCs are usually able to catch up with and surpass those new features within a year or two. But this also means that PCs are never completely "current" -- there is always some new hardware, some new investment that can be made to make the gaming experience that much more "complete."
I'm thinking about this lately because console gamers don't have to deal with "max settings" and frame rates -- either a game looks good and plays smoothly or it doesn't, and there's usually nothing that can be done to fix any issues. PC gamers, on the other hand, often end up playing the endless "performance tweaking" game more than any other. I have spent many hours adjusting both PC and game settings, trying to get the most out of whatever hardware I'm using at the time, and then testing out familiar games, relishing any discernible improvement after I've added new hardware or think I've established a better performance balance.
What I'm dealing with at the moment is this: I do most of my PC gaming (and a lot of my old-school emulated console gaming for this blog) on a laptop computer. It's a decent mid-range 2009 machine, with dual-core CPUs and enough memory to eliminate a lot of the "wait time" that always used to annoy me about Windows. It runs my standard tools and utilities with aplomb, and I rarely feel like I'm waiting on the computer; I'm very happy with it for general purposes. But given space and heat limitations, it's inevitable that my laptop's integrated graphics hardware is far from state of the art -- it can manage a passable 50 frames-per-second with 3D graphics using the Passmark Medium Complexity 3D test, but falls precipitously to a chuggy, unplayable 9 fps on a High Complexity test.
Now, I'm not playing Crysis 2 or anything that really pushes the standards on my laptop, but I do play a lot of the current adventure games and might play some other types of games if my hardware were up to it. But even with something graphically straightforward like Tales of Monkey Island, I can't turn the detail all the way up without seriously impacting the frame rate. And any scene with fog or smoke effects tends to make my hardware stutter -- it will do its best, and I can make just about anything playable if I lower the resolution and settings, but it's a far cry from what I'm used to on the XBox 360, and revives those old PC gamer cravings for just a bit more power.
The larger issue is that laptops are self-contained and not generally very upgradable; they're also designed to use minimal electricity, which is why they usually don't have powerful graphics chips. So aside from playing with the built-in graphics hardware's settings, I can't really do very much about this situation. So I find myself contemplating a new hardware purchase -- but not a gaming laptop, as they are expensive and my current machine is fine for everything else I do.
I am considering buying a relatively cheap tower PC with a decent amount of memory, buying and installing a relatively current graphics card with fast, dedicated memory, hooking it to the TV with an HDMI cable, and using a remote keyboard, mouse and controller to make the experience as console-like as I can.
This project, of course, will entail quite a few decisions about cost vs. power. But I enjoy doing that kind of research every once in a while, and I suspect an inexpensive desktop machine today will be more capable than my laptop of two years ago, especially with a graphics hardware upgrade. And, to be honest, all I truly care about is being able to run, say, Back to the Future: The Game at 720p or 1080p with full detail settings; that's demanding by my current hardware's standards, but it shouldn't be a lot to ask on a desktop machine.
So this may be a new little project for me to tackle. Of course, I will also have to do a little self-analysis in the process, i.e., wondering whether I'm tempted to do this because there isn't a new console launch on the horizon this year, and subconsciously I really just want a new toy to tinker with in the meanwhile. That can be a whole game in and of itself. I'll keep you posted.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
On Mass Effect 2
One of the aspects of gaming I am most interested in, from a historical and ongoing perspective, is the development of interactive storytelling. It's a real challenge to balance gameplay and story -- a game that's too linear doesn't feel interactive enough, but a game that's totally open or abstract doesn't lend itself to compelling experiences of the sort we associate with books, theatre and movies. (Note that a playable game can survive just fine without an interesting story, even sans plot and characters per se -- see, for example, Tetris -- but I'm interested in the tension between these two elements when attempts are made to do both well.)
One of the most visible and successful recent implementations of truly dynamic storytelling is in Bioware's Mass Effect series. I've recently finished playing through Mass Effect 2, and while it feels a bit like a placeholder between the dramatic ramp-up of the first game and the presumably exciting climax to come in the third and final chapter due later this year, and it doesn't raise the bar the way the series did when it first burst onto the scene, it still does many things well.
There are, of course, ramifications echoed here of decisions our character made in the first game, and foreshadowing of more substantial impacts in the third installment. In my own experience's case, we now have a human at the head of the Alliance council, and he's not a well-loved leader; there is as a result growing tension between the spacefaring species, and I had to work harder to earn the trust of non-humans as a result. And I admit that I'm not entirely happy with some of my decisions in my first trip through Mass Effect 2 -- I won't spoil the ending with the details, but I damaged a potentially important friendship and lost some good friends and teammates more permanently along the way. So I will probably play it once more before Mass Effect 3 arrives, to try to remedy those issues, or at least see how they might play out with a little more finesse and insight applied.
This level of branching complexity is what makes the Mass Effect series so interesting -- the developers have invested considerable effort in alternate storylines and events that any one player is unlikely to see. It's not unusual to play through these games a few times to try different things, but the ripple effects of our decisions are not immediately visible, and I expect that by the time we all get to the third game, there will be quite a few different scenarios available based on our individual decisions in the first two chapters. I'm not about to go back and play through the whole story from the first game on, at least not any time soon, but the temptation is there.
Moreover, there are genuine emotional engagements within Mass Effect's storytelling -- surprisingly so in some cases. I was very glad to see a couple of "old friends" from the first game re-up for this very different mission, in a very different context. And there's a little more humor in the writing of this second episode -- when we get to know a character well, we often discover personality quirks that are very real and very funny at the same time. Plotwise, we are assembling a team of intergalactic badasses to take on a serious threat to the future of all known civilizations -- but they are also credible sentient creatures with personalities and flaws that make them interesting and "human," for lack of a better word.
Bioware's technology has improved for this second outing, with a more consistent frame rate (I played on the XBox 360), fewer of the strange physics glitches seen in the first game, and better-disguised loading time. There are, of course, still a few notable bugs -- my Shepard character is a female space commander, and at least one gender-inappropriate pronoun slipped through in the dialogue. I also managed to get Shepard stuck in a mass of cables in one subterranean level, making her unable to leave the area to continue the mission, and forcing a reload from the nearest checkpoint. Fortunately the autosaves are fairly generous -- almost any time we open a door we're able to restart from that point.
I waited to play Mass Effect 2 until it had been out long enough to drop to the $19.99 price point, and I will likely do the same with Mass Effect 3. But I'm ready to sink my teeth into it and see how this all plays out when the time comes.
One of the most visible and successful recent implementations of truly dynamic storytelling is in Bioware's Mass Effect series. I've recently finished playing through Mass Effect 2, and while it feels a bit like a placeholder between the dramatic ramp-up of the first game and the presumably exciting climax to come in the third and final chapter due later this year, and it doesn't raise the bar the way the series did when it first burst onto the scene, it still does many things well.
There are, of course, ramifications echoed here of decisions our character made in the first game, and foreshadowing of more substantial impacts in the third installment. In my own experience's case, we now have a human at the head of the Alliance council, and he's not a well-loved leader; there is as a result growing tension between the spacefaring species, and I had to work harder to earn the trust of non-humans as a result. And I admit that I'm not entirely happy with some of my decisions in my first trip through Mass Effect 2 -- I won't spoil the ending with the details, but I damaged a potentially important friendship and lost some good friends and teammates more permanently along the way. So I will probably play it once more before Mass Effect 3 arrives, to try to remedy those issues, or at least see how they might play out with a little more finesse and insight applied.
This level of branching complexity is what makes the Mass Effect series so interesting -- the developers have invested considerable effort in alternate storylines and events that any one player is unlikely to see. It's not unusual to play through these games a few times to try different things, but the ripple effects of our decisions are not immediately visible, and I expect that by the time we all get to the third game, there will be quite a few different scenarios available based on our individual decisions in the first two chapters. I'm not about to go back and play through the whole story from the first game on, at least not any time soon, but the temptation is there.
Moreover, there are genuine emotional engagements within Mass Effect's storytelling -- surprisingly so in some cases. I was very glad to see a couple of "old friends" from the first game re-up for this very different mission, in a very different context. And there's a little more humor in the writing of this second episode -- when we get to know a character well, we often discover personality quirks that are very real and very funny at the same time. Plotwise, we are assembling a team of intergalactic badasses to take on a serious threat to the future of all known civilizations -- but they are also credible sentient creatures with personalities and flaws that make them interesting and "human," for lack of a better word.
Bioware's technology has improved for this second outing, with a more consistent frame rate (I played on the XBox 360), fewer of the strange physics glitches seen in the first game, and better-disguised loading time. There are, of course, still a few notable bugs -- my Shepard character is a female space commander, and at least one gender-inappropriate pronoun slipped through in the dialogue. I also managed to get Shepard stuck in a mass of cables in one subterranean level, making her unable to leave the area to continue the mission, and forcing a reload from the nearest checkpoint. Fortunately the autosaves are fairly generous -- almost any time we open a door we're able to restart from that point.
I waited to play Mass Effect 2 until it had been out long enough to drop to the $19.99 price point, and I will likely do the same with Mass Effect 3. But I'm ready to sink my teeth into it and see how this all plays out when the time comes.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Angry Birds: A Usability Study
Human factors engineer Charles Mauro has written a detailed dissection of the popular iPhone game, Angry Birds, looking at what makes it so addictive from an interface and brain-science perspective. It's lengthy and geeky, and fascinating if you have an interest in understanding how humans experience games from a cognitive perspective. I don't have anything to add -- here's a link.
The End of Game Manuals?
It seems that game manuals are becoming less and less important as the game industry matures. Once upon a time, players really needed the documentation to confirm that variation 83 was actually different in some way from variation 82, or to understand that the red blob with a white blob on top of it was actually a healing potion. But modern games tend to build the instructions into the early rounds of play, and many games now fall into one of many well-established genres with more-or-less standardized rules and controls.
The current trend toward downloadable games is also a factor -- when there's no physical box on a shelf, there's no way to include a print manual. And in fact, I rarely look at a contemporary game manual unless I just can't figure out something basic and critical, like how to save and exit the game, or if I want to check out the development credits without actually finishing the game (also less necessary than in the past, as more games today include a "credits" option on the main menu.)
Ubisoft recently took a little heat from fans and game journalists over the single-page manual included with Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, but I'm not sure this is a bad thing in the long run. It's an ecologically progressive direction, for one thing, and while the collector in me likes the idea of having something physical in my hands, if I'm rational about it I have to admit that I really have no good arguments against this trend.
See, if I miss manuals, it's mostly for nostalgic reasons. I'm recalling past times when I was not driving the car, could not postpone other errands to rush home, and so could only read and re-read the manual, building anticipation for playing the actual game as soon as circumstances permitted. I don't personally run into that situation much as an adult. And modern games have plenty of resources available for tutorials and learn-as-you-play tips, so I have no problem with treating pick-up-and-play-ability as an aspect of modern game design standards, and letting the paper manual vanish altogether.
What do you think? Are game manuals rightly fading into the past, or is that collection of decorated paper still a vital part of the gaming experience?
The current trend toward downloadable games is also a factor -- when there's no physical box on a shelf, there's no way to include a print manual. And in fact, I rarely look at a contemporary game manual unless I just can't figure out something basic and critical, like how to save and exit the game, or if I want to check out the development credits without actually finishing the game (also less necessary than in the past, as more games today include a "credits" option on the main menu.)
Ubisoft recently took a little heat from fans and game journalists over the single-page manual included with Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, but I'm not sure this is a bad thing in the long run. It's an ecologically progressive direction, for one thing, and while the collector in me likes the idea of having something physical in my hands, if I'm rational about it I have to admit that I really have no good arguments against this trend.
See, if I miss manuals, it's mostly for nostalgic reasons. I'm recalling past times when I was not driving the car, could not postpone other errands to rush home, and so could only read and re-read the manual, building anticipation for playing the actual game as soon as circumstances permitted. I don't personally run into that situation much as an adult. And modern games have plenty of resources available for tutorials and learn-as-you-play tips, so I have no problem with treating pick-up-and-play-ability as an aspect of modern game design standards, and letting the paper manual vanish altogether.
What do you think? Are game manuals rightly fading into the past, or is that collection of decorated paper still a vital part of the gaming experience?
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Advancing the Art: Telltale Games' Hint System
I've recently started playing Telltale's new adventure, Back to the Future: The Game, still in progress at this writing with the first two of five planned episodes released. I'm not going to talk about the game in detail at this time, or any time soon -- suffice it to say that the voice casting is first rate, there are lots of dramatic plot twists, and it feels very much like a sequel to the original movies.
What I do want to talk about is Telltale's approach to balancing gameplay and storytelling, where many of the challenges lie for any game designer hoping to reach a broad audience of hardcore and casual players. Regular readers will know that I love playing the old classic text adventures, but I can also recognize that there's a reason the genre never saw long-term mainstream success -- most such games have too many fatal dead ends and what-do-I-do-now moments to engage all but the most dedicated adventurers.
Telltale has opted for a friendlier approach with its recent point-and-click adventures -- solid puzzles are there for the dedicated, but the company has invested significant effort in a hint system ensuring that any player should be able to experience the whole story. (The hints can, of course, be calibrated or turned off altogether as the player desires.)
What I like about this approach is that it never feels like the player is breaking down and resorting to a walkthrough -- the assists are woven into the storyline and dialogue, subtly at first but becoming more explicit the longer the player fumbles or seems at a loss. Some of these hints are obvious -- for example, the lead character may mention something along the lines of, "What I should really be worrying about is..." to get the player back on track. But many of the hints are as cleverly designed as the puzzles they support, so that a skilled player won't necessarily see them, and a novice player isn't denied those "A-ha!" moments that make adventuring so much fun. It's like Infocom's escalating Invisiclues, but the implementation is more subtle and free of the temptation to skip ahead.
Case in point (which I will try not to spoil in any detail): The second episode of Back to the Future involves a speakeasy password puzzle that recalls a similar situation in Ron Gilbert's Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. I got stuck for way too long on that one back in the day, but in this modern context Back to the Future gives us progressively more explicit hints if we just hang back and watch others interact with the doorkeeper. Even though I was on the wrong mental track to a possible solution, and really did need the hints, I still had the pleasure of discovering my error and "solving" the puzzle without having to "cheat" by resorting to an external source. This approach to hints feels much more organic than a list of clues -- it nudges the player along without pulling him or her out of the experience. In fact, I might not even have realized I was seeing the hint system at work, had I not reached the third stage of the process, where watching another speakeasy patron fumble through the puzzle with more of his thought process exposed finally turned on my personal lightbulb.
I know the standard arguments about this sort of thing -- but as the hint system can be turned off, I don't think they apply. There are other limitations to Telltale's approach from a classic adventure gaming perspective -- the player sometimes feels more guided than I might prefer, with non-interactive cutscenes and limited options, and sometimes good storytelling comes at the expense of more detailed interactivity. Some "puzzles" really are just a matter of using this item with that item, a criticism of the genre that goes way back, and some dialogue trees all lead to the same result, with the available options provided only for the sake of humor and characterization (not that there's anything wrong with that, it's one of the things I love most about Telltale's output.)
But for me, bottom line, while I enjoy solving a good puzzle, I'm not too proud to take a hint when I need it, that is, when my patience with myself wears thin. What Telltale Games has done very nicely, in my opinion, is to recognize that everyone has their own threshold for beating their head against a given wall, and the Telltale Tool provides a sophisticated means for designers to accommodate those differences. Trying to balance friendliness and storytelling with gameplay is not easy, and at least as far as adventure games go, I can't imagine a better solution than this.
Telltale's hint system may be a small thing, but I believe it advances the art and the accessibility of interactive storytelling in some important ways and should serve as a model for interactive fiction moving forward.
What I do want to talk about is Telltale's approach to balancing gameplay and storytelling, where many of the challenges lie for any game designer hoping to reach a broad audience of hardcore and casual players. Regular readers will know that I love playing the old classic text adventures, but I can also recognize that there's a reason the genre never saw long-term mainstream success -- most such games have too many fatal dead ends and what-do-I-do-now moments to engage all but the most dedicated adventurers.
Telltale has opted for a friendlier approach with its recent point-and-click adventures -- solid puzzles are there for the dedicated, but the company has invested significant effort in a hint system ensuring that any player should be able to experience the whole story. (The hints can, of course, be calibrated or turned off altogether as the player desires.)
What I like about this approach is that it never feels like the player is breaking down and resorting to a walkthrough -- the assists are woven into the storyline and dialogue, subtly at first but becoming more explicit the longer the player fumbles or seems at a loss. Some of these hints are obvious -- for example, the lead character may mention something along the lines of, "What I should really be worrying about is..." to get the player back on track. But many of the hints are as cleverly designed as the puzzles they support, so that a skilled player won't necessarily see them, and a novice player isn't denied those "A-ha!" moments that make adventuring so much fun. It's like Infocom's escalating Invisiclues, but the implementation is more subtle and free of the temptation to skip ahead.
Case in point (which I will try not to spoil in any detail): The second episode of Back to the Future involves a speakeasy password puzzle that recalls a similar situation in Ron Gilbert's Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. I got stuck for way too long on that one back in the day, but in this modern context Back to the Future gives us progressively more explicit hints if we just hang back and watch others interact with the doorkeeper. Even though I was on the wrong mental track to a possible solution, and really did need the hints, I still had the pleasure of discovering my error and "solving" the puzzle without having to "cheat" by resorting to an external source. This approach to hints feels much more organic than a list of clues -- it nudges the player along without pulling him or her out of the experience. In fact, I might not even have realized I was seeing the hint system at work, had I not reached the third stage of the process, where watching another speakeasy patron fumble through the puzzle with more of his thought process exposed finally turned on my personal lightbulb.
I know the standard arguments about this sort of thing -- but as the hint system can be turned off, I don't think they apply. There are other limitations to Telltale's approach from a classic adventure gaming perspective -- the player sometimes feels more guided than I might prefer, with non-interactive cutscenes and limited options, and sometimes good storytelling comes at the expense of more detailed interactivity. Some "puzzles" really are just a matter of using this item with that item, a criticism of the genre that goes way back, and some dialogue trees all lead to the same result, with the available options provided only for the sake of humor and characterization (not that there's anything wrong with that, it's one of the things I love most about Telltale's output.)
But for me, bottom line, while I enjoy solving a good puzzle, I'm not too proud to take a hint when I need it, that is, when my patience with myself wears thin. What Telltale Games has done very nicely, in my opinion, is to recognize that everyone has their own threshold for beating their head against a given wall, and the Telltale Tool provides a sophisticated means for designers to accommodate those differences. Trying to balance friendliness and storytelling with gameplay is not easy, and at least as far as adventure games go, I can't imagine a better solution than this.
Telltale's hint system may be a small thing, but I believe it advances the art and the accessibility of interactive storytelling in some important ways and should serve as a model for interactive fiction moving forward.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Games Are Art -- Experiential Art
I've written about this before, but a recent discussion with a fellow gamer at a party has spurred some new and more coherent thoughts. I believe that the primary obstacle to establishing video and computer games as an art form, with a serious body of criticism and scholarship, is that games are fundamentally not the same as other established media. And we don't have all the words we need to do the serious stuff yet.
If you and I see the same movie, we may have very different reactions and opinions about it, but our experience of the film is likely to have been very much the same. The storyline, the cinematography, the acting -- and the ultimate edited record of the production -- will be presented to us as-is. It will start in the same place, end in the same place, and move through the same sequence of events at the same pace. The images and sounds, bar environmental and equipment differences, will be identical.
The same applies, I would argue, to books, poetry, music, sculpture, painting, dance, theatre, puppetry... any presentational art form you care to name. Our personal tastes and knowledge will inform our reactions, but our experience of the work as presented will be consistent.
I don't mean to discount the effort we put into understanding and appreciating a work of art, reflecting the greater effort invested in its creation. There's a very real interaction, even centuries removed, between the viewer's perception and the artist's intent. But it's likely that if you and I have similar tastes, we will have consistent impressions of the same work, or at least we can have more nuanced arguments about it.
Games, on the other hand, really have to be experienced to be appreciated or criticized. You may have noticed that watching someone else play a videogame is rarely interesting; if it's a familiar game, you've seen it, and if it's unfamiliar, you can't always tell what's going on.
I suggest that this is because, in this medium, the artist's (or artists') work is only truly expressed through the player's experience of it. Without a player actively engaging the work, it's just a collection of bits gathering dust or running through a demonstration cycle. The art, if it exists, only manifests while a player is playing.
As supporting evidence, I note that good game design may, indeed, be experienced differently by different participants. Some players are motivated by story -- "get this challenge out of the way so I can see what happens next." Some by the opportunity to demonstrate skill -- "I'm trying to beat all my friends' high scores." Others are more exploration-oriented -- "I don't care if I ever finish this, I just want to spend some time in this world and see and do whatever I can." And many of us (these are not mutually exclusive types) enjoy the simple pleasures of mild addiction sans withdrawal complications -- "Match three. Yes! Can I match three more?"
I would further argue that games are actually a collaborative art form. And, to be clear, I'm not talking about the cheap, switch-throwing "interactivity" of Dragon's Lair, a choose-your-own-adventure book or pick-the-ending DVD, where long stretches of watching are interrupted by brief flurries of activity. I'm talking about an ongoing, intensely concentrated period of engagement.
Each player's experience of a particular game is deeply personal; mine will have elements in common with yours, but I believe that I am genuinely helping to create my own version of the "art" at hand, in collaboration with the game's designers. I am exploring the game's parameters and applying my own habits, interests and preferences to the manner in which I approach it.
Moreover, I am actively participating in the development of the game's "story," my specific memory of it, even if that story is only about how effectively I can shoot at a target or stack irregularly-shaped blocks. As the player, I have a stake in the game session's development that nobody outside my own head can fully understand. I can describe moments and share impressions with others, of course, and I do that via this very blog. But I can't completely articulate what it's like to play a particular game, nor can I transplant my experience into your head. You have to go do it yourself, and your mileage may vary. It's a purely internal phenomenon, truly one's own private thing.
So, let me set this forth for future debate and argument next time I feel like tackling it:
If you and I see the same movie, we may have very different reactions and opinions about it, but our experience of the film is likely to have been very much the same. The storyline, the cinematography, the acting -- and the ultimate edited record of the production -- will be presented to us as-is. It will start in the same place, end in the same place, and move through the same sequence of events at the same pace. The images and sounds, bar environmental and equipment differences, will be identical.
The same applies, I would argue, to books, poetry, music, sculpture, painting, dance, theatre, puppetry... any presentational art form you care to name. Our personal tastes and knowledge will inform our reactions, but our experience of the work as presented will be consistent.
I don't mean to discount the effort we put into understanding and appreciating a work of art, reflecting the greater effort invested in its creation. There's a very real interaction, even centuries removed, between the viewer's perception and the artist's intent. But it's likely that if you and I have similar tastes, we will have consistent impressions of the same work, or at least we can have more nuanced arguments about it.
Games, on the other hand, really have to be experienced to be appreciated or criticized. You may have noticed that watching someone else play a videogame is rarely interesting; if it's a familiar game, you've seen it, and if it's unfamiliar, you can't always tell what's going on.
I suggest that this is because, in this medium, the artist's (or artists') work is only truly expressed through the player's experience of it. Without a player actively engaging the work, it's just a collection of bits gathering dust or running through a demonstration cycle. The art, if it exists, only manifests while a player is playing.
As supporting evidence, I note that good game design may, indeed, be experienced differently by different participants. Some players are motivated by story -- "get this challenge out of the way so I can see what happens next." Some by the opportunity to demonstrate skill -- "I'm trying to beat all my friends' high scores." Others are more exploration-oriented -- "I don't care if I ever finish this, I just want to spend some time in this world and see and do whatever I can." And many of us (these are not mutually exclusive types) enjoy the simple pleasures of mild addiction sans withdrawal complications -- "Match three. Yes! Can I match three more?"
I would further argue that games are actually a collaborative art form. And, to be clear, I'm not talking about the cheap, switch-throwing "interactivity" of Dragon's Lair, a choose-your-own-adventure book or pick-the-ending DVD, where long stretches of watching are interrupted by brief flurries of activity. I'm talking about an ongoing, intensely concentrated period of engagement.
Each player's experience of a particular game is deeply personal; mine will have elements in common with yours, but I believe that I am genuinely helping to create my own version of the "art" at hand, in collaboration with the game's designers. I am exploring the game's parameters and applying my own habits, interests and preferences to the manner in which I approach it.
Moreover, I am actively participating in the development of the game's "story," my specific memory of it, even if that story is only about how effectively I can shoot at a target or stack irregularly-shaped blocks. As the player, I have a stake in the game session's development that nobody outside my own head can fully understand. I can describe moments and share impressions with others, of course, and I do that via this very blog. But I can't completely articulate what it's like to play a particular game, nor can I transplant my experience into your head. You have to go do it yourself, and your mileage may vary. It's a purely internal phenomenon, truly one's own private thing.
So, let me set this forth for future debate and argument next time I feel like tackling it:
Games represent a new and unique art form that is experiential, not presentational, in nature. The art of a game is collaborative and ephemeral, expressed primarily in the moment and the player's memory.Discussion in the comments or via email is always welcome.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Games and Critical Thinking
There's always talk, generally unsubstantiated, about the negative affects of videogames on lifestyle and attitude. So once in a while it's valuable to point out some demonstrably positive effects of the hobby.
One benefit that doesn't get much press, in part because commercial media outlets don't necessarily recognize its value, is development of critical thinking skills. Playing games of any kind encourages us to understand the rules of the situation, and if we're clever we can figure out how to exploit them for gain or protection. Videogames, moreover, are uniquely positioned to encourage exploration and questioning -- the world is artificial, designed, so if something appears unusual, there's probably a reason behind it worth investigating. A waterfall may lead to a hidden area; an unusual patch of wall may hide a secret passage; a flashing, unexplained light in the distance is something we ought to investigate. From Adventureland to Grand Theft Auto, game worlds reward players for being suspicious and inquisitive, and testing our fundamental assumptions -- the greatest rewards are often reserved for those with an urge to do so.
Real life, of course, is vastly more complex and unpredictable than any video or computer game. Major life decisions involve circumstances and emotions and timing and confluences of factors beyond what any game engine could readily muster or manage. But within specific problem-solving domains, approaching a real-world situation as a game can have great benefits, enabling us to understand the situation better, stay objective and figure out what's behind anything that seems a little off. A sense of play can be a valuable asset.
I've been thinking about this because recently my wife and I had a window salesperson in for what proved to be an entertaining evening (for us.) This was not something we solicited -- someone knocked on our door a while back, offering a free estimate, and we had been thinking about replacing our windows at some point for better energy efficiency, so we agreed to meet with a sales rep and look at the possibilities. It's not a must-do by any means, but it's on our long-term list.
We knew we were in information-gathering mode going in, which the salesperson did not seem to know, although we told him several times; he may have assumed he could overcome that and talk us into a sale. So we had an advantage from the get-go -- this was a recon mission from our point of view, and if we had some numbers in hand at GAME OVER, our goal would be accomplished. We were not in a mood to be sold anything on the spur of the moment, and any salesperson would have found it difficult to move the goalposts.
As gamers, my wife and I are skeptical by nature and inclined to probe the situation -- so as the presentation got underway, we both made mental note of sales tactics that were not exactly lies, but seeemed exaggerated to favor the selling proposition. What we noticed did not make us inclined to take the company up on its offer, even as the price dropped and dropped in the face of our casual disinterest, which the sales rep interpreted as active resistance. Not once did we say, "Can you do better on the price?" All we said from point one was that we were interested in an estimate. Preparing for combat, we had no other estimates in hand, and we knew we were naive and ignorant about the whole subject of replacement windows going in. But we knew the general rules of the game, so we assumed our opponent would try to take advantage of our lack of hard data, armoring us against his attempts to do so.
The salesperson seemed not to notice this, of course, because his job, as he stated toward the end of the whole debacle, was not to write quotes, but to close sales. He assumed from the get-go that we were "upset" (his word) with our existing windows, which was not really the case; we know they could be better-insulated, but we have no emotional drive to replace them. He insisted on taking a certain seat at our kitchen table, which I presume was meant to gain some sort of psycho-tactical advantage, though I couldn't fathom the rationale. He assumed that we would take his word for the quality and superiority of his products, and asked me to read aloud from a couple of magazine articles supporting his claims; I did so good-naturedly, but quickly. I assumed this was meant to encourage me to internalize the material and think of it as my own words, an effort I did my best to contravene.
Then he brought out a heat lamp for a demonstration that seemed fishy at the time, and in retrospect may have been very deceptive; I wish I'd asked for a more direct A/B comparison at the time, but only thought of better experiments later on. What transpired was this -- he turned the infrared/red light lamp on and asked us to feel the opposite side of his sample window, observing that the glass remained cool to the touch; then he sent us outside and turned it on again, beaming a palpable level of heat through our existing sliding glass door. It seemed like an impressive demo, but I couldn't help recalling that I felt no such heat near the lamp itself during the first pass at our kitchen table -- which means that the lamp may have two modes of operation, light-only and light-and-heat, or that it had warmed up by the second round, or that other factors like distance from the glass were being manipulated in the salesperson's favor. I also don't know how much relationship an infrared lamp really bears to natural sunlight -- the frequency range is different, certainly. Given the source alone, I was inclined to dismiss the demo as flashy, irrelevant and skewed, at least until we had a chance to do some independent research on the actual differences between what the salesperson claimed were R 0.5 and R 4.8 windows.
By this point, we had a pretty good handle on our opponent's algorithm. Unscrupulous salespeople usually follow a script that makes the most rudimentary AI bot look sophisticated -- maximize profit and commission, don't brook any questions or delays, and close the sale NOW. The grains of salt with which we received his statements were getting larger and larger as he estimated our likely savings from upgraded windows, based on his guess about "a house this size," and gave us a number that was clearly exaggerated, as it claimed an annual savings in heating cost that amounted to more than half our gas and electricity costs combined.
In the end, he had made a reasonable case for what he had to sell, but didn't seem to understand or could not accept that we were not going to make a decision in this meeting. As we had stated up front, we were meeting to obtain the estimate; of course, we wished to verify his claims for ourselves, comparing pricing and options from other vendors before committing to anything. He actually feigned personal insult to his ethics when we suggested that we naturally assumed he would promote the products he was selling, and did not expect him to present any counterarguments, but that we could do that research on our own. At this point, the algorithm shifted to a price-based approach.
It became a boss battle of attrition, though all we had to do was keep our shields up. We repeated that we were not going to make a decision right now, because this was the first estimate we were obtaining and we intended to do some more homework and shop around a bit. He responded by doing "a little better" on the price -- a range that started at one number, then with "discounts" and "deals" and "incentives" came down to less than half of that. When he thought he had softened us up a bit, as we were giving each other inside looks, he claimed to have been paged and stepped outside for a while. Guessing that his expectation was that we would talk each other into it now that we had a "great deal" on the table, we laughed and resolved once again not to do anything at this time.
When he returned, and was met with our consistently lukewarm response, he went into a "now or never, yes or no" spiel, a completely unsupported assertion insisting that we had to do this tonight or we probably never would. This was a transparently self-serving argument -- we could have done this two years ago, or five years ago, and we can just as easily do it two years or five years in the future. If his company doesn't want the business, someone else surely will take it on. But it was his "experienced opinion" that we'd never get such a deal from his company, or anyone else, ever again... although he could now come down to about a third of the original price quoted.
When we pointed out for the umpteenth time that price wasn't the central issue, we just had no reason to commit to this right now, and that it seemed foolish for him, from a business perspective, to walk away and not be willing to discuss the deal further someday, he began swearing on his "father's grave" that he would not be able to offer us the same low, low price at a later date. Which may in fact be the case, as business circumstances do change, but the missed opportunity for us to spend what was still a fairly large and discretionary amount of money seemed to be a much greater tragedy in his eyes than it was in ours. We knew the "retail" price range now, and how far he was willing to come down if forced to do so, which was quite a bit more than we had expected to get out of the discussion. His algorithm's unwarranted confidence that it could get us to sign on the dotted line by focusing solely on price adjustment ultimately tipped his hand, completely.
There was some hesitation on our part, truth to tell - the final price did seem reasonable, at least much moreso than the original quote. But we also learn from videogames that stress and risk are temporary, that if a problem seems intransigent there is probably another, better solution available, and that we can always go away, level up, power up, come back and try again. So our reply, given the proffered ultimatum, was that if we had to make the decision right now, our answer remained a clear and resounding no.
It was an interesting transformation to watch -- the salesperson metamorphosed from a glad-handing, friendly guy who laughed at all our lame jokes and humored our questions into a frustrated, ticked-off individual who seemed determined never ever ever to sell us windows no matter how hard we might beg, just for spite. Before he went his way in the highest of dudgeon, I had the distinct impression he wanted to stamp his feet so hard he would disappear into the ground.
You know that sound when Pac-Man dies? That dvvuu-vvuu-vvuu-vv-wk-wkkk sound?
It's nice to be the monster once in a while.
One benefit that doesn't get much press, in part because commercial media outlets don't necessarily recognize its value, is development of critical thinking skills. Playing games of any kind encourages us to understand the rules of the situation, and if we're clever we can figure out how to exploit them for gain or protection. Videogames, moreover, are uniquely positioned to encourage exploration and questioning -- the world is artificial, designed, so if something appears unusual, there's probably a reason behind it worth investigating. A waterfall may lead to a hidden area; an unusual patch of wall may hide a secret passage; a flashing, unexplained light in the distance is something we ought to investigate. From Adventureland to Grand Theft Auto, game worlds reward players for being suspicious and inquisitive, and testing our fundamental assumptions -- the greatest rewards are often reserved for those with an urge to do so.
Real life, of course, is vastly more complex and unpredictable than any video or computer game. Major life decisions involve circumstances and emotions and timing and confluences of factors beyond what any game engine could readily muster or manage. But within specific problem-solving domains, approaching a real-world situation as a game can have great benefits, enabling us to understand the situation better, stay objective and figure out what's behind anything that seems a little off. A sense of play can be a valuable asset.
I've been thinking about this because recently my wife and I had a window salesperson in for what proved to be an entertaining evening (for us.) This was not something we solicited -- someone knocked on our door a while back, offering a free estimate, and we had been thinking about replacing our windows at some point for better energy efficiency, so we agreed to meet with a sales rep and look at the possibilities. It's not a must-do by any means, but it's on our long-term list.
We knew we were in information-gathering mode going in, which the salesperson did not seem to know, although we told him several times; he may have assumed he could overcome that and talk us into a sale. So we had an advantage from the get-go -- this was a recon mission from our point of view, and if we had some numbers in hand at GAME OVER, our goal would be accomplished. We were not in a mood to be sold anything on the spur of the moment, and any salesperson would have found it difficult to move the goalposts.
As gamers, my wife and I are skeptical by nature and inclined to probe the situation -- so as the presentation got underway, we both made mental note of sales tactics that were not exactly lies, but seeemed exaggerated to favor the selling proposition. What we noticed did not make us inclined to take the company up on its offer, even as the price dropped and dropped in the face of our casual disinterest, which the sales rep interpreted as active resistance. Not once did we say, "Can you do better on the price?" All we said from point one was that we were interested in an estimate. Preparing for combat, we had no other estimates in hand, and we knew we were naive and ignorant about the whole subject of replacement windows going in. But we knew the general rules of the game, so we assumed our opponent would try to take advantage of our lack of hard data, armoring us against his attempts to do so.
The salesperson seemed not to notice this, of course, because his job, as he stated toward the end of the whole debacle, was not to write quotes, but to close sales. He assumed from the get-go that we were "upset" (his word) with our existing windows, which was not really the case; we know they could be better-insulated, but we have no emotional drive to replace them. He insisted on taking a certain seat at our kitchen table, which I presume was meant to gain some sort of psycho-tactical advantage, though I couldn't fathom the rationale. He assumed that we would take his word for the quality and superiority of his products, and asked me to read aloud from a couple of magazine articles supporting his claims; I did so good-naturedly, but quickly. I assumed this was meant to encourage me to internalize the material and think of it as my own words, an effort I did my best to contravene.
Then he brought out a heat lamp for a demonstration that seemed fishy at the time, and in retrospect may have been very deceptive; I wish I'd asked for a more direct A/B comparison at the time, but only thought of better experiments later on. What transpired was this -- he turned the infrared/red light lamp on and asked us to feel the opposite side of his sample window, observing that the glass remained cool to the touch; then he sent us outside and turned it on again, beaming a palpable level of heat through our existing sliding glass door. It seemed like an impressive demo, but I couldn't help recalling that I felt no such heat near the lamp itself during the first pass at our kitchen table -- which means that the lamp may have two modes of operation, light-only and light-and-heat, or that it had warmed up by the second round, or that other factors like distance from the glass were being manipulated in the salesperson's favor. I also don't know how much relationship an infrared lamp really bears to natural sunlight -- the frequency range is different, certainly. Given the source alone, I was inclined to dismiss the demo as flashy, irrelevant and skewed, at least until we had a chance to do some independent research on the actual differences between what the salesperson claimed were R 0.5 and R 4.8 windows.
By this point, we had a pretty good handle on our opponent's algorithm. Unscrupulous salespeople usually follow a script that makes the most rudimentary AI bot look sophisticated -- maximize profit and commission, don't brook any questions or delays, and close the sale NOW. The grains of salt with which we received his statements were getting larger and larger as he estimated our likely savings from upgraded windows, based on his guess about "a house this size," and gave us a number that was clearly exaggerated, as it claimed an annual savings in heating cost that amounted to more than half our gas and electricity costs combined.
In the end, he had made a reasonable case for what he had to sell, but didn't seem to understand or could not accept that we were not going to make a decision in this meeting. As we had stated up front, we were meeting to obtain the estimate; of course, we wished to verify his claims for ourselves, comparing pricing and options from other vendors before committing to anything. He actually feigned personal insult to his ethics when we suggested that we naturally assumed he would promote the products he was selling, and did not expect him to present any counterarguments, but that we could do that research on our own. At this point, the algorithm shifted to a price-based approach.
It became a boss battle of attrition, though all we had to do was keep our shields up. We repeated that we were not going to make a decision right now, because this was the first estimate we were obtaining and we intended to do some more homework and shop around a bit. He responded by doing "a little better" on the price -- a range that started at one number, then with "discounts" and "deals" and "incentives" came down to less than half of that. When he thought he had softened us up a bit, as we were giving each other inside looks, he claimed to have been paged and stepped outside for a while. Guessing that his expectation was that we would talk each other into it now that we had a "great deal" on the table, we laughed and resolved once again not to do anything at this time.
When he returned, and was met with our consistently lukewarm response, he went into a "now or never, yes or no" spiel, a completely unsupported assertion insisting that we had to do this tonight or we probably never would. This was a transparently self-serving argument -- we could have done this two years ago, or five years ago, and we can just as easily do it two years or five years in the future. If his company doesn't want the business, someone else surely will take it on. But it was his "experienced opinion" that we'd never get such a deal from his company, or anyone else, ever again... although he could now come down to about a third of the original price quoted.
When we pointed out for the umpteenth time that price wasn't the central issue, we just had no reason to commit to this right now, and that it seemed foolish for him, from a business perspective, to walk away and not be willing to discuss the deal further someday, he began swearing on his "father's grave" that he would not be able to offer us the same low, low price at a later date. Which may in fact be the case, as business circumstances do change, but the missed opportunity for us to spend what was still a fairly large and discretionary amount of money seemed to be a much greater tragedy in his eyes than it was in ours. We knew the "retail" price range now, and how far he was willing to come down if forced to do so, which was quite a bit more than we had expected to get out of the discussion. His algorithm's unwarranted confidence that it could get us to sign on the dotted line by focusing solely on price adjustment ultimately tipped his hand, completely.
There was some hesitation on our part, truth to tell - the final price did seem reasonable, at least much moreso than the original quote. But we also learn from videogames that stress and risk are temporary, that if a problem seems intransigent there is probably another, better solution available, and that we can always go away, level up, power up, come back and try again. So our reply, given the proffered ultimatum, was that if we had to make the decision right now, our answer remained a clear and resounding no.
It was an interesting transformation to watch -- the salesperson metamorphosed from a glad-handing, friendly guy who laughed at all our lame jokes and humored our questions into a frustrated, ticked-off individual who seemed determined never ever ever to sell us windows no matter how hard we might beg, just for spite. Before he went his way in the highest of dudgeon, I had the distinct impression he wanted to stamp his feet so hard he would disappear into the ground.
You know that sound when Pac-Man dies? That dvvuu-vvuu-vvuu-vv-wk-wkkk sound?
It's nice to be the monster once in a while.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
The Concept of Depth in Games
There's a laudatory term that occasionally gets thrown around when we talk about videogames as an art form, but is not very clearly defined. What do we mean when we say a game is "deep"?
Depth in a game context is generally meant to signify the same thing it does when we talk about literature or film -- complex and thought-provoking, with layers of meaning that reveal themselves only when we invest the effort to discover them. In the interactive medium, this may mean that the story branches in interesting ways, or that we can choose to discover things about the game's world that aren't strictly necessary to finishing the game, but the discovery is rewarding in itself.
In this sense, contemporary open-world games with role-playing elements are generally considered to be deeper than the linear action games of old -- the player can choose which challenges to tackle, and in which order to tackle them. Some general constraints must exist to preserve the structure of the game's storyline -- an area may be off-limits early in the story, opening up after some significant event occurs -- but the player feels free to wander around, experiment and explore. As the form has matured, depth has also come into play in character development. We may make decisions while defining our character, if such options are offered. More significantly, how we interact with other characters, and with whom we choose to interact, may affect the story and our own role in the unfolding drama.
But this is not always the case -- some games don't have a story of any substance, and so complex, character-driven games make fine examples, but don't provide us with a solid working definition.
When we say a game is "deep," it can also, simply, mean that there are a number of interesting and worthwhile options available to the player. I spent some time with the Raiden Fighters arcade trilogy recently, and each game allows the player to choose a fighter from a lineup of aircraft with different handling and weaponry capabilities. For purposes of balance, this usually means that a slower craft has stronger weapons, and vice-versa; a fast, heavily-armed option would tend to make the other choices irrelevant. Good design attempts to ensure that each player finds an option that suits his or her style, without a burdensome disadvantage compared to other players.
Is my choice of which plane to fly against the incoming enemy forces a story point, or an intellectually interesting decision? No, but yes; it makes a difference to my experience of the game, and my preferences will likely differ from those of another person. Action really IS part of the meaning of video and computer games when we look at them as art; the choices we make become part of our own experience. Whatever art a game may offer is collaborative in nature -- the designer gives us a framework, and we explore that framework as we see fit. We may have fun in ways the designer never intended, or miss something the designer felt was important because our interest is drawn to something else.
So in terms of gaming, I suggest that "depth" really means choice: freedoms by design that allow each player to experience the game in a personalized, somewhat unique way.
This simple definition has complex ramifications. For example, it means there can be "false depth," an illusion of choice that doesn't really mean anything in gameplay terms. An example manifests in a common criticism of fighting games -- a broad array of available characters sometimes masks the fact that several of them are essentially the same. If there's no clear reason to pick one character as opposed to another, very similar one, these are not "choices" at all. Exaggeration makes us feel cheated.
I think this gets at something fundamental about games: interactive entertainment's true value, as art, has to be driven by interactivity. Looking at a game on a screen, watching someone else play it, is wholly insufficient. Game appreciation has to incorporate experience. And therefore depth has to exist at the gameplay level -- we have to develop a personal stake in what happens, a style of approaching it that reflects who we ourselves are, as much as the game's designers. Too much repetition or clumsy "game-iness" about the action reveals the illusion -- if we begin to feel like we're just pushing buttons at random, the fun vanishes.
Don't get me wrong -- music, graphics and storyline are important, and aesthetics can contribute energy and atmosphere that engages our minds and emotions beyond the game's mechanical objectives. But just as a good movie cannot be made from a bad script, regardless of budget, neither can a good game be built on poorly designed mechanics. Audiovisuals may dazzle long enough to get a few glowing reviews into print, but the truth will out over time.
So I would argue that Ric Ocasek was wrong. When we assess a game as art, it doesn't matter whether it was "deep." What matters is where we've been.
Depth in a game context is generally meant to signify the same thing it does when we talk about literature or film -- complex and thought-provoking, with layers of meaning that reveal themselves only when we invest the effort to discover them. In the interactive medium, this may mean that the story branches in interesting ways, or that we can choose to discover things about the game's world that aren't strictly necessary to finishing the game, but the discovery is rewarding in itself.
In this sense, contemporary open-world games with role-playing elements are generally considered to be deeper than the linear action games of old -- the player can choose which challenges to tackle, and in which order to tackle them. Some general constraints must exist to preserve the structure of the game's storyline -- an area may be off-limits early in the story, opening up after some significant event occurs -- but the player feels free to wander around, experiment and explore. As the form has matured, depth has also come into play in character development. We may make decisions while defining our character, if such options are offered. More significantly, how we interact with other characters, and with whom we choose to interact, may affect the story and our own role in the unfolding drama.
But this is not always the case -- some games don't have a story of any substance, and so complex, character-driven games make fine examples, but don't provide us with a solid working definition.
When we say a game is "deep," it can also, simply, mean that there are a number of interesting and worthwhile options available to the player. I spent some time with the Raiden Fighters arcade trilogy recently, and each game allows the player to choose a fighter from a lineup of aircraft with different handling and weaponry capabilities. For purposes of balance, this usually means that a slower craft has stronger weapons, and vice-versa; a fast, heavily-armed option would tend to make the other choices irrelevant. Good design attempts to ensure that each player finds an option that suits his or her style, without a burdensome disadvantage compared to other players.
Is my choice of which plane to fly against the incoming enemy forces a story point, or an intellectually interesting decision? No, but yes; it makes a difference to my experience of the game, and my preferences will likely differ from those of another person. Action really IS part of the meaning of video and computer games when we look at them as art; the choices we make become part of our own experience. Whatever art a game may offer is collaborative in nature -- the designer gives us a framework, and we explore that framework as we see fit. We may have fun in ways the designer never intended, or miss something the designer felt was important because our interest is drawn to something else.
So in terms of gaming, I suggest that "depth" really means choice: freedoms by design that allow each player to experience the game in a personalized, somewhat unique way.
This simple definition has complex ramifications. For example, it means there can be "false depth," an illusion of choice that doesn't really mean anything in gameplay terms. An example manifests in a common criticism of fighting games -- a broad array of available characters sometimes masks the fact that several of them are essentially the same. If there's no clear reason to pick one character as opposed to another, very similar one, these are not "choices" at all. Exaggeration makes us feel cheated.
I think this gets at something fundamental about games: interactive entertainment's true value, as art, has to be driven by interactivity. Looking at a game on a screen, watching someone else play it, is wholly insufficient. Game appreciation has to incorporate experience. And therefore depth has to exist at the gameplay level -- we have to develop a personal stake in what happens, a style of approaching it that reflects who we ourselves are, as much as the game's designers. Too much repetition or clumsy "game-iness" about the action reveals the illusion -- if we begin to feel like we're just pushing buttons at random, the fun vanishes.
Don't get me wrong -- music, graphics and storyline are important, and aesthetics can contribute energy and atmosphere that engages our minds and emotions beyond the game's mechanical objectives. But just as a good movie cannot be made from a bad script, regardless of budget, neither can a good game be built on poorly designed mechanics. Audiovisuals may dazzle long enough to get a few glowing reviews into print, but the truth will out over time.
So I would argue that Ric Ocasek was wrong. When we assess a game as art, it doesn't matter whether it was "deep." What matters is where we've been.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
In Praise of Resident Evil 5
Capcom's venerable Resident Evil series disappointed some gamers with the fifth core title released last year. Resident Evil 5 built on the more action-oriented style of play established in RE4, but emphasized cooperative play with online and local support for two players. So ingrained in the game's design is the team approach that the single-player experience relies on an automated partner character, who seems to spend most of her time getting in the way and wasting healing herbs.
I wasn't in a rush to play RE5, given its lukewarm market reception, but on Valentine's Day this year my wife and I were in the mood for something new and picked it up at its discounted price (on disc, just a few days before it debuted as a downloadable XBox On Demand title.) I have played through most of the Resident Evil games over the years, but my wife's direct experience with Capcom's bio-horrors has been limited to the two Wii light-gun shooters; they're great fun, but they're a different sort of experience.
Fortunately, Resident Evil 5 really shines with two local players who know each other well. The split screen allows each character to explore on his or her own, but the game mechanics for assistance and healing also mean it's not a good idea to become separated. It's valuable to have one player (usually me) covering for any unexpected attacks while the other (usually my wife) scavenges for ammo and healing herbs. We've been having a great time planning strategies, exploring, and hastily improvising during those panic-inducing Majini onslaughts. And when we die, as we occasionally do, we're grateful for the breather and the chance to upgrade our equipment and plan a new approach.
With two players, Capcom's design preserves what RE has always done well -- the series has become more action-oriented over time, but this fifth chapter still maintains a palpable sense of tension and surprise throughout, especially during sections where the players are forced to separate. Helping my wife jump across the street to another building, then doing my best to protect her from the rampaging infected using a sniper rifle from a distance, while she fought her way downstairs to unlock the door so I could join her -- this is the stuff memories are made of.
So kudos to Capcom for taking a chance and taking a popular series in a bold new direction. Videogaming is too often a solitary exercise; what's great about RE5 is that we've now both "been to" this virtual world, and we've done it together. So I must respectfully disagree with some players' reaction to the latest Resident Evil -- the co-op approach may not be what everyone wanted, but the design takes the concept seriously, and it works spectacularly well. RE5 remains hardcore enough to be challenging -- ammo and supplies are always limited -- but it's also welcoming and flexible enough to allow two players of disparate experience to have intense, challenging fun together.
We couldn't have asked for a better Valentine's Day gift.
I wasn't in a rush to play RE5, given its lukewarm market reception, but on Valentine's Day this year my wife and I were in the mood for something new and picked it up at its discounted price (on disc, just a few days before it debuted as a downloadable XBox On Demand title.) I have played through most of the Resident Evil games over the years, but my wife's direct experience with Capcom's bio-horrors has been limited to the two Wii light-gun shooters; they're great fun, but they're a different sort of experience.
Fortunately, Resident Evil 5 really shines with two local players who know each other well. The split screen allows each character to explore on his or her own, but the game mechanics for assistance and healing also mean it's not a good idea to become separated. It's valuable to have one player (usually me) covering for any unexpected attacks while the other (usually my wife) scavenges for ammo and healing herbs. We've been having a great time planning strategies, exploring, and hastily improvising during those panic-inducing Majini onslaughts. And when we die, as we occasionally do, we're grateful for the breather and the chance to upgrade our equipment and plan a new approach.
With two players, Capcom's design preserves what RE has always done well -- the series has become more action-oriented over time, but this fifth chapter still maintains a palpable sense of tension and surprise throughout, especially during sections where the players are forced to separate. Helping my wife jump across the street to another building, then doing my best to protect her from the rampaging infected using a sniper rifle from a distance, while she fought her way downstairs to unlock the door so I could join her -- this is the stuff memories are made of.
So kudos to Capcom for taking a chance and taking a popular series in a bold new direction. Videogaming is too often a solitary exercise; what's great about RE5 is that we've now both "been to" this virtual world, and we've done it together. So I must respectfully disagree with some players' reaction to the latest Resident Evil -- the co-op approach may not be what everyone wanted, but the design takes the concept seriously, and it works spectacularly well. RE5 remains hardcore enough to be challenging -- ammo and supplies are always limited -- but it's also welcoming and flexible enough to allow two players of disparate experience to have intense, challenging fun together.
We couldn't have asked for a better Valentine's Day gift.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Dynamic Storytelling in Mass Effect
I've recently been playing Mass Effect, the sci-fi RPG from BioWare (and yes, I know Mass Effect 2 has already been out for a while. I tend to retro-game, even when playing recent releases.) I've completed it twice, and I am pleased to say that the experience was very different each time.
One of the early goals of "interactive fiction" was to present the player with an interesting world, a compelling plot, and some freedom to explore and experience it. The dream has never been fully realized -- there are always compromises involved. Budgets (more than technology) still prohibit creation of fully-detailed, fully-interactive environments -- see Sega's Shenmue as a noble experiment -- and early ideas like AI-driven characters have proven artistically inferior to simpler rule-driven and scripted interactions. But Mass Effect comes as close to the ideal as anything I've seen, and the design team's choices point toward the future of dynamic narrative in games.
As Mass Effect gets underway, the player has considerable freedom in choosing character class and gender, and can select from several possible background stories -- while the stubbly male career soldier John Shepard is the standard seen in promotional images, it's far from the only way to go. This is nothing new in RPGs, but the dialogue-heavy gameplay and side plots take the player's options into account in complex and surprising ways. There are still limitations -- the player character's first name can be anything one enters, but the last name is always locked down as "Shepard," because it allows voiced dialogue to refer to "Commander Shepard" consistently, without having to mention his or her first name. Dialogue is modified to use appropriate gender pronouns, although at least one "he" appeared to have slipped by QA when I was playing as a female adept.
More interesting is that some characters and situations react differently to male and female Commanders, and some situations develop differently for characters with different classes and backgrounds. Many do not; the game is set in a future world where equality and cross-species interaction is taken for granted, after all. And the seams where specific interactions are inserted or modified are sometimes apparent. But the care the designers took in this area is appreciated, especially considering that it's impossible to see everything in a single playthrough, and most players will never see all the variations available.
Mass Effect's overall story structure is particularly impressive, given that it's the first of a three-game series. The primary plot is constrained for the sake of dramatic storytelling, but there are some subtle variations in its development, and many subplots and side stories can be opened up. The main story arc is developed in the core Missions, but there are also many incidental Assignments that can be discovered and pursued (or ignored) along the way. When the player has finished the central story, the game ends on a satisfying note. But prior to wrapping up the plot, the player has freedom to wander around the galaxy and take on minor tasks as he/she chooses. These extra Assignments necessarily provide only small rewards, and are not nearly as fleshed-out as the Missions; most take place on non-descript planets with generic, repeated building structures, and the objectives are similar -- clear out this base, find this object, meet this person. Many of the resulting events are described in text popups, without spoken dialogue or animated cut-scenes. But taken as a whole, these sub-stories provide a broader variety of player experience than most games aspire to, and players who hope to earn all of the achievements and see all of the content will spend plenty of time on these incidental storylines.
The game's ambitious scope extends to its Paragon/Renegade morality scoring system, based on the player's actions and dialogue choices. If the player chooses to be a hero who always does the right thing, Paragon points are scored; the player can choose to take on illegal tasks and get paid under the table, or cause civilian and animal casualties, earning Renegade points.
This has been done before, but Bioware's designers have ensured that some painful choices are hard to avoid, and it's likely that players who are trying to do the right thing will still rack up points on both sides of the board. Backed into a corner, sometimes cold-blooded gunplay is the best of poor options. And it's not a trivial matter of siding with good or evil in the cartoonish sense -- political and personal beliefs can often be expressed in dialogue choices, even when the net effect is the same within the story. I was pleased to discover better solutions on my second playthrough -- one loyal squad member survived a potentially fatal disagreement on my second try, and the villain Saren allowed a glimmer of his better side to emerge on the brink of the galaxy's destruction, providing a more sympathetic perspective on the character than I had seen earlier. The game's approach really gives the player ownership of the character, and ensures that one gamer's experience is likely to be different from another's.
Everything in Mass Effect's plotline is handled with richness and depth; there are romance subplots based on conversation and affinity, and the player's own preferences will influence these deeper relationships in surprising ways. To be sure, there are moments when the stitching shows through -- some dialogue can be repeated, and certain scripted events are beyond the player's ability to influence -- but those moments are surprisingly rare.
What intrigues me most is that some of the choices made in Mass Effect have far-reaching implications that manifest in Mass Effect 2 and the future third installment. I've played through the first one a couple of times now, with different characters and attitudes, and have thoroughly enjoyed both experiences. I'm looking forward to seeing what fresh hell my well-meaning decisions may have inadvertently created in the next phase of the story.
One of the early goals of "interactive fiction" was to present the player with an interesting world, a compelling plot, and some freedom to explore and experience it. The dream has never been fully realized -- there are always compromises involved. Budgets (more than technology) still prohibit creation of fully-detailed, fully-interactive environments -- see Sega's Shenmue as a noble experiment -- and early ideas like AI-driven characters have proven artistically inferior to simpler rule-driven and scripted interactions. But Mass Effect comes as close to the ideal as anything I've seen, and the design team's choices point toward the future of dynamic narrative in games.
As Mass Effect gets underway, the player has considerable freedom in choosing character class and gender, and can select from several possible background stories -- while the stubbly male career soldier John Shepard is the standard seen in promotional images, it's far from the only way to go. This is nothing new in RPGs, but the dialogue-heavy gameplay and side plots take the player's options into account in complex and surprising ways. There are still limitations -- the player character's first name can be anything one enters, but the last name is always locked down as "Shepard," because it allows voiced dialogue to refer to "Commander Shepard" consistently, without having to mention his or her first name. Dialogue is modified to use appropriate gender pronouns, although at least one "he" appeared to have slipped by QA when I was playing as a female adept.
More interesting is that some characters and situations react differently to male and female Commanders, and some situations develop differently for characters with different classes and backgrounds. Many do not; the game is set in a future world where equality and cross-species interaction is taken for granted, after all. And the seams where specific interactions are inserted or modified are sometimes apparent. But the care the designers took in this area is appreciated, especially considering that it's impossible to see everything in a single playthrough, and most players will never see all the variations available.
Mass Effect's overall story structure is particularly impressive, given that it's the first of a three-game series. The primary plot is constrained for the sake of dramatic storytelling, but there are some subtle variations in its development, and many subplots and side stories can be opened up. The main story arc is developed in the core Missions, but there are also many incidental Assignments that can be discovered and pursued (or ignored) along the way. When the player has finished the central story, the game ends on a satisfying note. But prior to wrapping up the plot, the player has freedom to wander around the galaxy and take on minor tasks as he/she chooses. These extra Assignments necessarily provide only small rewards, and are not nearly as fleshed-out as the Missions; most take place on non-descript planets with generic, repeated building structures, and the objectives are similar -- clear out this base, find this object, meet this person. Many of the resulting events are described in text popups, without spoken dialogue or animated cut-scenes. But taken as a whole, these sub-stories provide a broader variety of player experience than most games aspire to, and players who hope to earn all of the achievements and see all of the content will spend plenty of time on these incidental storylines.
The game's ambitious scope extends to its Paragon/Renegade morality scoring system, based on the player's actions and dialogue choices. If the player chooses to be a hero who always does the right thing, Paragon points are scored; the player can choose to take on illegal tasks and get paid under the table, or cause civilian and animal casualties, earning Renegade points.
This has been done before, but Bioware's designers have ensured that some painful choices are hard to avoid, and it's likely that players who are trying to do the right thing will still rack up points on both sides of the board. Backed into a corner, sometimes cold-blooded gunplay is the best of poor options. And it's not a trivial matter of siding with good or evil in the cartoonish sense -- political and personal beliefs can often be expressed in dialogue choices, even when the net effect is the same within the story. I was pleased to discover better solutions on my second playthrough -- one loyal squad member survived a potentially fatal disagreement on my second try, and the villain Saren allowed a glimmer of his better side to emerge on the brink of the galaxy's destruction, providing a more sympathetic perspective on the character than I had seen earlier. The game's approach really gives the player ownership of the character, and ensures that one gamer's experience is likely to be different from another's.
Everything in Mass Effect's plotline is handled with richness and depth; there are romance subplots based on conversation and affinity, and the player's own preferences will influence these deeper relationships in surprising ways. To be sure, there are moments when the stitching shows through -- some dialogue can be repeated, and certain scripted events are beyond the player's ability to influence -- but those moments are surprisingly rare.
What intrigues me most is that some of the choices made in Mass Effect have far-reaching implications that manifest in Mass Effect 2 and the future third installment. I've played through the first one a couple of times now, with different characters and attitudes, and have thoroughly enjoyed both experiences. I'm looking forward to seeing what fresh hell my well-meaning decisions may have inadvertently created in the next phase of the story.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
The Value of Gaming Patience
If you pay any attention to the little XBox Live doohickey posted alongside this blog, you'll likely have noticed that I'm almost never engaged in playing the latest and greatest XBox 360 games. As I write this, I'm still working my way through Bioware's excellent sci-fi RPG Mass Effect, while all of the cool kids are gearing up for Mass Effect 2.
Part of this is because the blog consumes much of my available gaming time. Playing, writing, research and editing all take time away from trying out the new stuff. I still consider it gaming time, because it's directly related to my hobby, and I certainly don't begrudge the effort it takes to do this. But it's an inhibiting factor when I'm staring a brand new, 40-hour game in the face that may take me several months to tackle.
But as my free time has become more limited over the years, I've also realized that a little patience makes it easier to be picky and focus on the high-quality experiences, and also makes my gaming a lot cheaper.
See, I could have paid $60 for Mass Effect when it came out, then bought the additional downloadable chapters for $10 apiece. I have no doubt I would have gotten $90 worth of entertainment out of the experience. But as it turned out, I paid $20 for a new copy of the Platinum Edition, with the DLC content included, thereby saving myself no little cash. I didn't necessarily pocket that extra money --during the holidays, when I had some extra time for games, I picked up Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts for $10, Raiden Fighters for $15, and Shadow Complex for $10 (normally $15 on XBLA.)
Were any of these games hurt by the delay? Well, it's very difficult to get an 8-player Banjo-Kazooie race going on XBLA, because nobody seems to be playing it online anymore, if they ever did. So the multiplayer-related achievements for that title will likely remain out of reach. But I am still enjoying all of these games -- the technology is still current, the games are still worthwhile, and playing them "late" doesn't damage my own experience in any measurable way.
The economics also apply to retro gaming -- while a few rare titles are pricey and hard to come by, most vintage games can be had now for considerably less than their original retail price. Some quality computer titles have been released into the public domain by their authors for no-cost enjoyment, and downloadable channels provide many classic games at reasonable prices.
And there's still satisfaction in finally getting around to acquiring that great game or system I never tracked down during its heyday. Lots of great stuff is still out there, waiting.
Personally, I know that someday I will buy that arcade-quality Neo-Geo console -- the one that taunted me with its $600 price tag and $200 games back in 1989.
Mostly because I already have several cartridges for it, still new in the box. $30 each on closeout.
Part of this is because the blog consumes much of my available gaming time. Playing, writing, research and editing all take time away from trying out the new stuff. I still consider it gaming time, because it's directly related to my hobby, and I certainly don't begrudge the effort it takes to do this. But it's an inhibiting factor when I'm staring a brand new, 40-hour game in the face that may take me several months to tackle.
But as my free time has become more limited over the years, I've also realized that a little patience makes it easier to be picky and focus on the high-quality experiences, and also makes my gaming a lot cheaper.
See, I could have paid $60 for Mass Effect when it came out, then bought the additional downloadable chapters for $10 apiece. I have no doubt I would have gotten $90 worth of entertainment out of the experience. But as it turned out, I paid $20 for a new copy of the Platinum Edition, with the DLC content included, thereby saving myself no little cash. I didn't necessarily pocket that extra money --during the holidays, when I had some extra time for games, I picked up Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts for $10, Raiden Fighters for $15, and Shadow Complex for $10 (normally $15 on XBLA.)
Were any of these games hurt by the delay? Well, it's very difficult to get an 8-player Banjo-Kazooie race going on XBLA, because nobody seems to be playing it online anymore, if they ever did. So the multiplayer-related achievements for that title will likely remain out of reach. But I am still enjoying all of these games -- the technology is still current, the games are still worthwhile, and playing them "late" doesn't damage my own experience in any measurable way.
The economics also apply to retro gaming -- while a few rare titles are pricey and hard to come by, most vintage games can be had now for considerably less than their original retail price. Some quality computer titles have been released into the public domain by their authors for no-cost enjoyment, and downloadable channels provide many classic games at reasonable prices.
And there's still satisfaction in finally getting around to acquiring that great game or system I never tracked down during its heyday. Lots of great stuff is still out there, waiting.
Personally, I know that someday I will buy that arcade-quality Neo-Geo console -- the one that taunted me with its $600 price tag and $200 games back in 1989.
Mostly because I already have several cartridges for it, still new in the box. $30 each on closeout.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Gaming for the Lizard Brain
Recently I've been playing a couple of videogame sequels with my discretionary gaming time -- Ys IV: The Dawn of Ys on the PC Engine, and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts on the XBox 360.
One of the things that interests me about videogames as an art form is the way these electronic constructs connect to our brains and emotions as human beings. There's an experiential component to gaming that isn't present in non-interactive media -- while at a conscious level we know we're just playing a game with rules and objectives, our brains are still processing the game world like any other environmental input, mapping it out and filing useful landmarks away for future reference. The part of our neural complex that handles that work doesn't necessarily care if the input is real or artificial -- the wiring for spatial relationships and recognition of our surroundings seems to function in exactly the same way. And while we know the characters we encounter in videogames are wholly artificial, cartoonish and mechanical approximations of intelligent entities, social and emotional impressions and attachments can still develop.
This is nothing new, of course; good fiction, and bad fiction for that matter, can introduce us to people and places that don't exist and convince us to care about them. What makes videogames different, it seems to me, is that these connections form at a deeper level, as compared to simply reading or watching a story play out on a stage or screen. Because we have been empowered to explore and learn, without necessarily being led down any specific path at any specific moment, we feel like we have been to these places, learned our way around them, and gotten to know the characters in them. And if those characters have helped or hindered us in some memorable way, we can develop emotional responses to them like goodwill, irritation, esteem and mistrust. Our deep-seated lizard brains behave like these virtual events have really happened to us, even though our "higher" processing regions know it's just a game.
And so, when we revisit a familiar game world in a new release, a genuine sense of nostalgia can be triggered. We know things have changed since our last visit, and there's genuine pleasure in finding out exactly what has gone on in our absence. At the beginning of Ys IV, I ran into several characters I first encountered almost twenty years ago while playing the original Ys I & II. They hadn't aged much, of course, as in story terms only two years had passed. But I was quite frankly surprised at how glad I was to "see" them. I know they're not actually people; I know they don't remember me; I know they consist of digital drawings and scripted dialogue, and that they function primarily as storytelling devices. But some part of my emotional history is tied up with these characters -- even if it was only for a few weeks twenty years ago, our association mattered in some way that my brain recorded for the long term. And so when Dogi takes me out for a drink, or Lilia rushes to the house the morning after my arrival to greet me, at some level I respond emotionally to these simulacra as if they really were long-lost friends. The bond is not as strong as those formed in the real world -- but it's a difference of degree, not kind.
I never played the original Banjo-Kazooie at the time of its original release, but playing the new game motivated me to go back and look it up. And even though the timing is inverted, and the graphics of the original game are much more primitive, I feel nostalgic as I explore the world of Spiral Mountain as it was earlier. There are areas that feel familiar, and areas that do not; the characters are largely as I remember them from the later game. And it seems that whatever cosmetic differences my higher brain is capable of perceiving don't filter down into this experiential domain -- perhaps in the same way that real-world memories of people and places are imperfect, but certain details stick with us. And that storage mechanism is perfectly capable of handling virtual worlds and people.
There have been a number of failed experiments and genres over the decades as game designers work to create compelling interactive entertainment. My hypothesis is that most often, bad games fail because they break the rules of our lizard brains -- too little interaction, too little control, too few choices. We don't necessarily want or need realistically drawn and voiced characters -- a game doesn't have to look just like the real world, or pretend that it's not a game. What we want is a world we can explore, learn about and attempt to master; an environment that contains, if possible, some semi-intelligent entities that can play an emotional role in our quest. We want a gameworld that makes us feel like we've accomplished something, that we will live to see another day, and that we have a reason for wanting to do so.
That exercise satisfies something deep-seated in us, something that evolved long before our more sophisticated neural capabilities developed.
Good gaming is all about the lizard brain.
One of the things that interests me about videogames as an art form is the way these electronic constructs connect to our brains and emotions as human beings. There's an experiential component to gaming that isn't present in non-interactive media -- while at a conscious level we know we're just playing a game with rules and objectives, our brains are still processing the game world like any other environmental input, mapping it out and filing useful landmarks away for future reference. The part of our neural complex that handles that work doesn't necessarily care if the input is real or artificial -- the wiring for spatial relationships and recognition of our surroundings seems to function in exactly the same way. And while we know the characters we encounter in videogames are wholly artificial, cartoonish and mechanical approximations of intelligent entities, social and emotional impressions and attachments can still develop.
This is nothing new, of course; good fiction, and bad fiction for that matter, can introduce us to people and places that don't exist and convince us to care about them. What makes videogames different, it seems to me, is that these connections form at a deeper level, as compared to simply reading or watching a story play out on a stage or screen. Because we have been empowered to explore and learn, without necessarily being led down any specific path at any specific moment, we feel like we have been to these places, learned our way around them, and gotten to know the characters in them. And if those characters have helped or hindered us in some memorable way, we can develop emotional responses to them like goodwill, irritation, esteem and mistrust. Our deep-seated lizard brains behave like these virtual events have really happened to us, even though our "higher" processing regions know it's just a game.
And so, when we revisit a familiar game world in a new release, a genuine sense of nostalgia can be triggered. We know things have changed since our last visit, and there's genuine pleasure in finding out exactly what has gone on in our absence. At the beginning of Ys IV, I ran into several characters I first encountered almost twenty years ago while playing the original Ys I & II. They hadn't aged much, of course, as in story terms only two years had passed. But I was quite frankly surprised at how glad I was to "see" them. I know they're not actually people; I know they don't remember me; I know they consist of digital drawings and scripted dialogue, and that they function primarily as storytelling devices. But some part of my emotional history is tied up with these characters -- even if it was only for a few weeks twenty years ago, our association mattered in some way that my brain recorded for the long term. And so when Dogi takes me out for a drink, or Lilia rushes to the house the morning after my arrival to greet me, at some level I respond emotionally to these simulacra as if they really were long-lost friends. The bond is not as strong as those formed in the real world -- but it's a difference of degree, not kind.
I never played the original Banjo-Kazooie at the time of its original release, but playing the new game motivated me to go back and look it up. And even though the timing is inverted, and the graphics of the original game are much more primitive, I feel nostalgic as I explore the world of Spiral Mountain as it was earlier. There are areas that feel familiar, and areas that do not; the characters are largely as I remember them from the later game. And it seems that whatever cosmetic differences my higher brain is capable of perceiving don't filter down into this experiential domain -- perhaps in the same way that real-world memories of people and places are imperfect, but certain details stick with us. And that storage mechanism is perfectly capable of handling virtual worlds and people.
There have been a number of failed experiments and genres over the decades as game designers work to create compelling interactive entertainment. My hypothesis is that most often, bad games fail because they break the rules of our lizard brains -- too little interaction, too little control, too few choices. We don't necessarily want or need realistically drawn and voiced characters -- a game doesn't have to look just like the real world, or pretend that it's not a game. What we want is a world we can explore, learn about and attempt to master; an environment that contains, if possible, some semi-intelligent entities that can play an emotional role in our quest. We want a gameworld that makes us feel like we've accomplished something, that we will live to see another day, and that we have a reason for wanting to do so.
That exercise satisfies something deep-seated in us, something that evolved long before our more sophisticated neural capabilities developed.
Good gaming is all about the lizard brain.
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