I work a student job at Towson University that involves:
1. Sitting at a desk
2. Checking student ID's
3. Signing in students' guests
It's a decent job for an English major with too much assigned reading and not enough time to do it in, but during the summer, with no class, barely fifty students living in my building, and my inclination toward gaming, I'm sure you can guess how my shifts go.
Nights, however, are handled by non-students. These night workers are security guards who, despite usually having another job, don't usually have an extra dollar. Most mornings I happen upon these adults doing adult things - reading, listening to bad music, staring at the wall bored because they forgot a book or music, and listening to radio broadcasts from churches (on Sundays). So I was surprised to find last night's security guard on her laptop playing what looked to be a Bejeweled knock-off. This after just the night before last another security guard knew i was playing Words With Friends just from the sounds of the letters hitting the board. The one that was playing the Bejeweled-esque game seemed shockingly engaged - finishing a game, checking her score compared to what appeared to be built in high scores (as opposed to actual leader boards) and starting again. This is gamer behavior. I saw a gamer partake in said behavior last night. Except the player in question had just finished possibly the best 'new' old game of the year in 4 days and, upon finishing, immediately set out to be the best player in the room on a re-imagining of another classic.
If competition is the main draw for score-based and multiplayer gaming, the second most important aspect has to be the fact that the competition is against someone that matters. The appeal of Words With Friends is the exact same one that is exhibited by the Call of Duty series on Xbox 360 - because all of your friends play, you can, in theory, be better than all of your friends at something.
Many of my recent posts have focused on the game as a tool for expression. I acknowledge the shortcomings of Janet Murray's school of thought, but those shortcomings don't make it any less interesting to read about (even if the ludologists would say it's all a bunch of pretentious crap). But it's important to view games as simply games sometimes too. If the story-rich single player experience is the game as art, competitive multiplayer is the game as sport. If this is true, we start to understand why games like Call of Duty and Words With Friends are mainstream. They're not just for mainstream gamers, but even the non-gamer. What a task the industry has - getting that Bejeweled fan to pay for Puzzle Quest 2, or that guy that only has an Xbox for the latest CoD to give Alan Wake a try. I wish them luck.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Games are Everything
Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing.
If this is true (and I think we all know it isn't, but just for the introduction, bear with me), then video games offer us an accessible avenue to one of the great senses of euphoria available to the conscious mind inside the functioning human body. While winning may not be the only thing for most if not all of us, it still offers us something that is unattainable nearly anywhere else - a sense of accomplishment paired with a feeling of superiority. While it doesn't need to be stated again how unique the role of a game is, some of the ways in which a game operates need to be outlined. Ludologists seem content to search only for differences between games and the other arts. This line of reasoning will make their arguments invaluable in the future, when everyone can see games in the same way they might see literature or film. But currently games are seen my many (most importantly, all major media) as trivial time wasters. If comic books are unintellectual sub-literary stories for nerds (not the case, of course), then video games are some combination of that realm (now often of the 'choose-your-own-adventure' style) combined with sport... but still for nerds. It's no wonder their having such a hard time getting taken seriously aside from the money they generate. But games aren't about revenue, their about interaction, and often narrative (whether implied, overt, or whatever). If video games already interest you, you can look at them however you like, and read theories and articles covering a wide array of lenses through which to view games. To get non-gamers to care, we have to compare games with other forms of entertainment and art. Luckily there are already plenty of examples to help us prove the importance of games, even to someone with no interest in playing them.
Film
from Lost Highway -
Ed: Do you own a video camera?
Renee Madison: No. Fred hates them.
Fred Madison: I like to remember things my own way.
Ed: What do you mean by that?
Fred Madison: How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.
Maybe the easiest connection to see is between modern games and film. From the extensive cut-scenes of Final Fantasy VII to the 'play an action movie' appeal of Uncharted 2, games have been working in as much film appeal as possible since technology allowed any similarities at all. With graphical supremacy being an easy path to increasing sales, visual aspects of games (or at least mainstream games) will always be at the forefront of innovation, much like the skyrocketing of special effects in the horror movies of the late 70s and early 80s.
A similar wave of innovation may currently be taking over the gaming industry, as Nolan North (Uncharted's Nathan Drake), Ikka Villi (Alan Wake), and Aaron Stanton (L.A. Noire's Cole Phelps) lead the way in contributing body, face, voice, or all three to game characters. My hope is that this style of motion- and facial- capture will become cheaper and more accessible with continual successful uses in games. If theater is dying, somebody needs to pick up the slack, and there's no reason every triple-A title can't utilize technology of this nature to enhance realism (which is what most of them are in an arms race toward anyway).
Certainly the visual appeal of games can work in the same way that films appeal to us, but often they are less appealing. Every gamer knows at least one person who routinely skips cut-scenes 'to get to the gameplay'. There's also the issue of length. More often than not, a game will take more than ten hours to complete, with some games stretching out to over one hundred. How can we be expected to keep everything straight? How can we remember the opening scenes of a game when we played them two months ago? And how can developers put any matters of great import into cut-scenes when they know players can skip them or simply won't pay attention to them?
Gamers don't want everything presented to them exactly as developers dictate (if we did, we'd be watching film, right?), we an opportunity to complete what's set out before us by developers, and create our own experience, narrative, and memories out of them. We want things the way we remember them, not necessarily how they happened. This, among other things, serves to link games to novels.
Literature
About a year ago (or two, I'm not sure) I read John Fante's Ask The Dust. The book is set in L.A. (maybe a good ten years or so before our man Cole Phelps was put on the LAPD payroll) and follows the misadventures of Fante's alter-ego, Arturo Bandini. If I remember correctly, and I may not, I read it in my spare time over the course of a two- or three- week period. That's how most books go - I read occasionally, every once in a while hitting a little spree of a few hours (usually one when the thing starts picking up, another as I near the finish), and I go on like this until the thing is done. My friend Daniel prefers to finish books as quickly as possible, reading all day as often as he can. It doesn't surprise me in the least that our gaming habits mirror our reading habits. My loves for gaming and reading were strengthened when I realized how similar the processes are. Here we can also find a link between the sense of accomplishment gained from reading and finishing of a novel and the one gained from playing and beating a game.
When I was young, I saw the first Harry Potter movie in a theater and fell asleep. The fact that films are, for the most part, designed to be viewed with strangers in theaters, and that they can and will go on without you if you stop paying attention or lose consciousness means that they're remarkably separated from the game-playing experience, and that lets us understand why gamers so often see it acceptable to skip cut-scenes. L.A. Noire occupies an odd spot that lets you skip gameplay as well as cut-scenes, even going out of its way to tell you that you can, while it hides the ability to skip cut-scenes. But other than this example, games very often reflect books. Books are read alone, at one's own pace. Books are too long to remember in entirety with perfect clarity, so we choose which parts to remember and which to forget.
The part of Ask The Dust that I remember most clearly is a scene in which Arturo finally kisses Camilla, a Mexican waitress he's been boyishly vying after the attention of. Their relationship is more like how I would interact with an ex-girlfriend than a current interest - immature, malicious. And so when Arturo finally kisses Camilla, she bites his lip, drawing blood. There's a lot of other stuff in there, but that's the one piece that rose above the rest. This is certainly because of the rocky relationship I had with the first girl I ever had sex with, who was born in Venezuela, and the lip-biting that took place between us.
In Ian Bogost's Unit Operations, he uses the example of the Bukowski poem, "A woman on the street." The poem is an example of 'the figure that fascinates' in literature. Fante is possibly the single largest influence on Bukowski and so like this woman on the street, Camilla is very much a figure that fascinates, but one which the protagonist spends some time with before they are forced to separate. Anyone that has played Ico will remember one scene without fail. Near the end of the game, Ico and Yorda cross a bridge that begins to collapse. Ico is further ahead and could easily keep running and escape the castle in which the game is set (or so it seems, as players that attempt this will fall to their death. Look, I've played this game three times, I had to try to break it eventually). However escape, the goal of the entire game, is put on the back-burner (or possibly taken off of the stove completely) as Ico turns around to run back to Yorda. Even this isn't enough, as players must complete a short Yorda-less section before being reunited, but at that point, the player knows everything will be alright. It's that short time, those few seconds on the bridge at which point I (and a small, but equally devoted group of other gamers) realized that I didn't want to go on without the girl. With her frail body and inability to help me with puzzles, she had made things difficult every step of the way. She didn't speak anything that I could understand, and even her subtitles were in a language made of foreign looking symbols. But I had to go back to her. She's the figure that fascinates, and given the choice to continue my journey with her or alone, there was only one real option.
It's in moments like these, among hours of other obstacles, be they puzzles, boss fights, or that 35-page section that does absolutely nothing to progress the plot, that games and novels operate in the same way. We go through it all to remember very little with any clarity, but those moments make the experience for us.
Experience is everything
What makes literature and film Art as well as entertainment, is the implied emotional experience that each suggests. I value bonding over Street Fighter as much as bonding over watching or playing football, but that comparison isn't as important, as I find most young sports fans are willing to add Call of Duty or Madden to their list of competitive activities. It's the intellectual crowd and the elitists that need to be won over - though I'm sure I can only hurt my chances calling them a "crowd" of "elitists." To win over the haters, the industry needs not only to show the ability of the medium to mirror film and literature, but its ability to mirror the right film and literature. It's an uphill battle when Gears of War outsells Alan Wake, but if Heavy Rain, Team Ico games, the Bioshock series, and Metal Gear Solid are any indicators, video games as a medium will eventually garner enough respect to move them up the ladder to industrial-art-entertainment.
If this is true (and I think we all know it isn't, but just for the introduction, bear with me), then video games offer us an accessible avenue to one of the great senses of euphoria available to the conscious mind inside the functioning human body. While winning may not be the only thing for most if not all of us, it still offers us something that is unattainable nearly anywhere else - a sense of accomplishment paired with a feeling of superiority. While it doesn't need to be stated again how unique the role of a game is, some of the ways in which a game operates need to be outlined. Ludologists seem content to search only for differences between games and the other arts. This line of reasoning will make their arguments invaluable in the future, when everyone can see games in the same way they might see literature or film. But currently games are seen my many (most importantly, all major media) as trivial time wasters. If comic books are unintellectual sub-literary stories for nerds (not the case, of course), then video games are some combination of that realm (now often of the 'choose-your-own-adventure' style) combined with sport... but still for nerds. It's no wonder their having such a hard time getting taken seriously aside from the money they generate. But games aren't about revenue, their about interaction, and often narrative (whether implied, overt, or whatever). If video games already interest you, you can look at them however you like, and read theories and articles covering a wide array of lenses through which to view games. To get non-gamers to care, we have to compare games with other forms of entertainment and art. Luckily there are already plenty of examples to help us prove the importance of games, even to someone with no interest in playing them.
Film
from Lost Highway -
Ed: Do you own a video camera?
Renee Madison: No. Fred hates them.
Fred Madison: I like to remember things my own way.
Ed: What do you mean by that?
Fred Madison: How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.
Maybe the easiest connection to see is between modern games and film. From the extensive cut-scenes of Final Fantasy VII to the 'play an action movie' appeal of Uncharted 2, games have been working in as much film appeal as possible since technology allowed any similarities at all. With graphical supremacy being an easy path to increasing sales, visual aspects of games (or at least mainstream games) will always be at the forefront of innovation, much like the skyrocketing of special effects in the horror movies of the late 70s and early 80s.
A similar wave of innovation may currently be taking over the gaming industry, as Nolan North (Uncharted's Nathan Drake), Ikka Villi (Alan Wake), and Aaron Stanton (L.A. Noire's Cole Phelps) lead the way in contributing body, face, voice, or all three to game characters. My hope is that this style of motion- and facial- capture will become cheaper and more accessible with continual successful uses in games. If theater is dying, somebody needs to pick up the slack, and there's no reason every triple-A title can't utilize technology of this nature to enhance realism (which is what most of them are in an arms race toward anyway).
Certainly the visual appeal of games can work in the same way that films appeal to us, but often they are less appealing. Every gamer knows at least one person who routinely skips cut-scenes 'to get to the gameplay'. There's also the issue of length. More often than not, a game will take more than ten hours to complete, with some games stretching out to over one hundred. How can we be expected to keep everything straight? How can we remember the opening scenes of a game when we played them two months ago? And how can developers put any matters of great import into cut-scenes when they know players can skip them or simply won't pay attention to them?
Gamers don't want everything presented to them exactly as developers dictate (if we did, we'd be watching film, right?), we an opportunity to complete what's set out before us by developers, and create our own experience, narrative, and memories out of them. We want things the way we remember them, not necessarily how they happened. This, among other things, serves to link games to novels.
Literature
About a year ago (or two, I'm not sure) I read John Fante's Ask The Dust. The book is set in L.A. (maybe a good ten years or so before our man Cole Phelps was put on the LAPD payroll) and follows the misadventures of Fante's alter-ego, Arturo Bandini. If I remember correctly, and I may not, I read it in my spare time over the course of a two- or three- week period. That's how most books go - I read occasionally, every once in a while hitting a little spree of a few hours (usually one when the thing starts picking up, another as I near the finish), and I go on like this until the thing is done. My friend Daniel prefers to finish books as quickly as possible, reading all day as often as he can. It doesn't surprise me in the least that our gaming habits mirror our reading habits. My loves for gaming and reading were strengthened when I realized how similar the processes are. Here we can also find a link between the sense of accomplishment gained from reading and finishing of a novel and the one gained from playing and beating a game.
When I was young, I saw the first Harry Potter movie in a theater and fell asleep. The fact that films are, for the most part, designed to be viewed with strangers in theaters, and that they can and will go on without you if you stop paying attention or lose consciousness means that they're remarkably separated from the game-playing experience, and that lets us understand why gamers so often see it acceptable to skip cut-scenes. L.A. Noire occupies an odd spot that lets you skip gameplay as well as cut-scenes, even going out of its way to tell you that you can, while it hides the ability to skip cut-scenes. But other than this example, games very often reflect books. Books are read alone, at one's own pace. Books are too long to remember in entirety with perfect clarity, so we choose which parts to remember and which to forget.
The part of Ask The Dust that I remember most clearly is a scene in which Arturo finally kisses Camilla, a Mexican waitress he's been boyishly vying after the attention of. Their relationship is more like how I would interact with an ex-girlfriend than a current interest - immature, malicious. And so when Arturo finally kisses Camilla, she bites his lip, drawing blood. There's a lot of other stuff in there, but that's the one piece that rose above the rest. This is certainly because of the rocky relationship I had with the first girl I ever had sex with, who was born in Venezuela, and the lip-biting that took place between us.
In Ian Bogost's Unit Operations, he uses the example of the Bukowski poem, "A woman on the street." The poem is an example of 'the figure that fascinates' in literature. Fante is possibly the single largest influence on Bukowski and so like this woman on the street, Camilla is very much a figure that fascinates, but one which the protagonist spends some time with before they are forced to separate. Anyone that has played Ico will remember one scene without fail. Near the end of the game, Ico and Yorda cross a bridge that begins to collapse. Ico is further ahead and could easily keep running and escape the castle in which the game is set (or so it seems, as players that attempt this will fall to their death. Look, I've played this game three times, I had to try to break it eventually). However escape, the goal of the entire game, is put on the back-burner (or possibly taken off of the stove completely) as Ico turns around to run back to Yorda. Even this isn't enough, as players must complete a short Yorda-less section before being reunited, but at that point, the player knows everything will be alright. It's that short time, those few seconds on the bridge at which point I (and a small, but equally devoted group of other gamers) realized that I didn't want to go on without the girl. With her frail body and inability to help me with puzzles, she had made things difficult every step of the way. She didn't speak anything that I could understand, and even her subtitles were in a language made of foreign looking symbols. But I had to go back to her. She's the figure that fascinates, and given the choice to continue my journey with her or alone, there was only one real option.
It's in moments like these, among hours of other obstacles, be they puzzles, boss fights, or that 35-page section that does absolutely nothing to progress the plot, that games and novels operate in the same way. We go through it all to remember very little with any clarity, but those moments make the experience for us.
Experience is everything
What makes literature and film Art as well as entertainment, is the implied emotional experience that each suggests. I value bonding over Street Fighter as much as bonding over watching or playing football, but that comparison isn't as important, as I find most young sports fans are willing to add Call of Duty or Madden to their list of competitive activities. It's the intellectual crowd and the elitists that need to be won over - though I'm sure I can only hurt my chances calling them a "crowd" of "elitists." To win over the haters, the industry needs not only to show the ability of the medium to mirror film and literature, but its ability to mirror the right film and literature. It's an uphill battle when Gears of War outsells Alan Wake, but if Heavy Rain, Team Ico games, the Bioshock series, and Metal Gear Solid are any indicators, video games as a medium will eventually garner enough respect to move them up the ladder to industrial-art-entertainment.
Friday, June 3, 2011
The Return
Historically, I've been a quitter. Books - I didn't finish any non-required reading until college. Film - I fell asleep; okay, I still do half the time. Games - I'm known for starting them all (usually all at the same time), and finishing almost none. Shit, I thought I had nearly quit this blog. To the six of you I kept waiting, I apologize.
Times have changed. Recently I started finishing games consistently. I used to discard anything that didn't mesh nearly perfectly with me from the get-go. Recently I finished the excellent (?) L.A. Noire after a dreadfully irritating start. Next I plan to finish up the totally disappointing Bioshock 2, and (hopefully) finally finish a Pokemon game with Pokemon White. These games all have their ups and downs, but the downs used to be the kind that would turn me to quitting - control issues, inferiority to predecessor, caves…
All desire to quit has been washed away as of late though. I just want to finish - everything. While this is part of a very legitimate excuse for lack of posts, it also seems a good place to start for the resumption of regular posting. There's a lot I have to say (really, I've had ideas for three or four essays) about L.A. Noire. I also have some thoughts on the popularity of online competitive play, especially with the new multiplayer darling Words With Friends (and also how multiplayer gaming can recreate the accomplished feelings one gets when finishing a single-player experience). Then there’s the inevitable something that will come out of finishing Twin Peaks and playing Alan Wake again. For now, this is all you get.
Many go back to old games to relive the magic of childhood gaming (you know, Roller Coaster Tycoon, or Ocarina of Time for the sixth time) and others continue with classic, sometimes stale series years after their prime. I've stumbled upon my own way of reliving these experiences. It’s a method that many game nerds have been utilizing for quite some time to varying degrees of satisfaction. I stopped being so judgmental and just started playing.
Back in the golden days of the N64, young Ross would play anything, and for as long as he could in most cases. Not fun? Maybe it’ll get better. Too hard? Try again. Ready for bed? Just a little longer. People, in general, seem to have a soft spot for pretty much every game they played as a kid. It’s not just the typical, “A Link to the Past is awesome; VII was the best Final Fantasy,” business either. Once a friend brought up Chameleon Twist and I got excited. Chameleon Twist. I had to see numerous lists of all-time worst games to realize that maybe I wasn’t bad at Superman 64, but it was bad at itself…
The point is this – I’ve been playing games again, really playing games. I’ve been playing things just for the joy of interacting with digital interfaces, progressing through a story, and just to be able to say that I finished. I’ve wanted to post something for weeks, but I’ve been too busy playing games with damn near all my free time to do so.
So often people let reviews, friends, gameplay footage, and a slew of other things dissuade them from simply trying games. This wasn’t the case with me, but I had what might be a worse problem. An example: Let’s say I paid full price for a new game, but then hastily decided that I didn’t like it and trade it in at Gamestop only three days later. Now let’s say that that actually happened – and it did – with Red Dead Redemption. Imagine my surprise when I finished the (in every way) inferior L.A. Noire with a general sense of satisfaction.
This is the first post in a long while, and it may take me a couple weeks to get another one together. In the meantime I have homework for the readers (yes, the aforementioned six of them). Play a game that you quit, never tried before, didn’t have time for, or that you let yourself believe you didn’t like. Pick something on the shorter side and actually finish it. It’s really fun. I'm going back to grinding for levels in Pokemon now.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Roles of Narratives in Video Games
This was my final paper for my New Media Theory class. The professor was very lax on sticking with MLA format (which explains why I, you know, didn't stick strictly to MLA format). It's probably too long for a blog post, but I told myself I'd post it here, regardless of quantity (or quality).
The importance and reasoning behind narrative in video games is thoroughly contested. Most famously, Janet Murray seems to think that the ultimate goal for video games is to become a form of perfect interactive narrative. Ludologists like Espen Aarseth and Markku Eskelinen argue that what we mean by “narrative” cannot occur in an interactive game. As the gaming industry develops, it seems that neither of these purist approaches hold true. Because video games are still developing we may not be able to say for certain that either is definitively right or wrong, but that they both contain elements of worth. Certainly Ian Bogost finds a way around these all or nothing arguments and we may do the same. I have found that video games are on a narrative spectrum. This is not to say that all games contain what we would call “stories,” but rather, that we at least associate a story with every game. There are reasons that we find the need to construct, decode, and control game stories. In turn there are reasons why developers make the decision to include the level of narrative that they do in a given video game. It is the human mind that creates and plays games that strives for narrative framing in the untraditional format of the video game and it is for this reason that narrative should be neither the ultimate goal, nor the burden from which to become unencumbered.
Problematic when discussing narrative in games is that it’s just that – narrative in games. Game mechanics rarely do anything resembling telling a story and when they do it’s something closer to conveying an emotion then recounting events. Even arguments for how to improve narrative seem to veer away from mechanics and focus more on aesthetics. Sande Chen, writer of PC RPG The Witcher (2007) makes a strong point about the importance of aesthetics in helping to better convey the plot of a game:
One of the strongest tools to convey meaning is thematic expression, which can be integrated not only in narrative, but also in other game elements, such as art direction, game systems, sound design, and music. Developers who yearn for mass-market appeal can use this multidisciplinary approach to create meaningful and more emotionally charged games. (Gamasutra)
Though Chen does mention “game systems” her example is one that is still based in aesthetics and focuses on drawing player attention to what the designer intends as the player progresses rather than on controls. This is the equivalent of claiming that players should have a better understanding of in-game items by simply redesigning the menus. Still her point is in some ways unarguable:
To build a meaningful game, a narrative designer joins together and balances these disciplines in game development so that the story can shine in a game. When done successfully, the game expresses themes that connect to audiences. It becomes more than simply a game, but a meaningful experience.
Bioshock (2007) was hailed by critics as an achievement for the industry and was met with very strong commercial success. The plot of the game is strong (especially so in the context of the typically weak plots of video games) but said plot also worked in conjunction with the audio/visual aspects of the game. Strong orchestration and licensed tracks from the fifties combined with one of the most striking visual styles in recent games to present a world often called ‘engrossing’ or ‘immersive.’ This seems the best example of a perfect execution of what Chen writes about, but what about the gameplay mechanics? Suddenly all high praise is forced back down to earth – Bioshock uses a modified version of the Unreal Engine for a first-person shooter that is focused on upgrading weapons and collecting inventory and currency from the world. In comparison with its unprecedented visuals, sound, and writing, the gameplay falls flat. That is not to say that it doesn’t hold its own in comparison with most other first-person shooters, but it is certainly not as groundbreaking in this regard.
Bioshock exemplifies a problem that often occurs in the realm of games. Even if a developer is firing on all cylinders and is able to put something out that seems new or fresh, they still often opt for tried-and-true gameplay mechanics. Perhaps it is that developers (or maybe more likely their publishers) are wary of producing something that is totally new for fear that it will not sell. Outspoken designer David Jaffe (Twisted Metal, God of War) thinks that delivering plot and aesthetics are antithetical to delivering something speaking “the true language of video games”:
Jaffe goes onto explain his thesis, believing many modern cinematic games don't properly play upon the raw 'real' emotions videogames can elicit: tension and release, fear and anxiety, triumph and defeat, and confusion and joy over challenges. (Jaffe, 1Up)
And though he may put himself firmly in the ludologist camp with statements like these, perhaps he’s correct – the story doesn’t need to be there for it to be a game, so why not focus on mechanics instead?
Much like a narrative changes as it progresses, so too has the role of the narrative in the video game. The earliest mass-market video games were largely what we could, for now, consider non-narrative affairs. Tetris (1984), perhaps the most abstract popular video game ever, is much more about blocks than it is about characters. But the majority of games, even very simple ones, were not so abstract. Donkey Kong (1981) is a game about traveling up several slight inclines and jumping over obstacles. However many gamers would say Donkey Kong is about “saving the girl from the gorilla.” This description conveys nothing about the gameplay, but is probably much more likely to get the average person interested than the game about “blocks that fall constantly and only go away when you line them up."
Another good example of simple narrative elements encapsulating the experience is in the Legend of Zelda (1986 – Present) franchise. These games almost always take up the same narrative description as games featuring Nintendo’s other beloved protagonist, Mario (1981 – Present). The objective of nearly all of the early releases in these series is to traverse the in game space to save the princess. This minimal but archetypal style of story framing has held up in video games and could also be applied to PlayStation 2 launch title Ico (2001). If we consider the popular reimagining Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2003) the simple narrative summary does hold true, but something problematic occurs. The other games are minimal in narrative digression. There is little dialogue and the focus is on the actual playing of the game. The Sands of Time often has characters interacting with each other in ways outside of the player-enemy relationship. The game is not truly about saving the princess so much as working alongside her, understanding the relationships between characters, and exploring the psychological effects of the events of the game on its characters.
This style of game – the one in which the player is presented with a world and associated story through which to progress – was very popular during the console generation of The Sands of Time. However during that generation, some games began to implement player choice as a prominent selling point. Games such as Deus Ex (2000), Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003), and Fable (2004) allow players to choose not only how they progress through challenges and combat, but also – in the case of the latter two – whether to be good or evil. It is this level of sway over narrative that the player has been at since these games. Very few other games, Heavy Rain (2010) is one, allow players more choice or control than style of combat and good/evil decisions, but if the past progression of such things is any indication of the future, and I think it is, then games implementing more widespread choice should start to become commonplace in the next several years.
Using this brief history as context, how can we seek to better understand the progression of the role of narrative in games? As mentioned before, I see games as placed on a narrative spectrum and it is this concept that informs the narrative based categorization of games which I propose. We find that in the past, some games were without direct explanation of any kind outside of rule set. For games like these, such as Pong (1972) and Tetris, I will use the term Interpretive. The more pronounced narratives such as those in the examples of Mario, Zelda, and Ico can be called Implied – they are set forth, but not expanded on. Overt narratives can be split into two categories. Static-Overt is set narrative; Stoic-Overt can be swayed in some way by the player.
It’s interesting to note that even though narratives were no more a goal of many early video games – especially those used as simulations for military purposes – than they are of board games like checkers or go, developers saw improvements in technology as opportunities for more fleshed out stories to go along with their increasingly complex gameplay mechanics. Overt-Static narratives go back as far as early Japanese Role Playing Games do, but the first among these games that intrigued on an international level for reasons of narrative was Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy II in the U.S. (1991). Because of its overwhelming (and continued) success, IV led the Japanese Role Playing Game, or JRPG, to focus more on writing than gameplay. The JRPG seems well set in the Static-Overt category of the narrative spectrum, with the majority of releases within the genre remaining firmly in the Static-Overt set. The few that step outside of these restrictions often do so in terms of gameplay – Final Fantasy V (1992) allows players to choose battle classes for each of their characters; Suikoden (1995) is famous for allowing the player to choose from over one-hundred characters to recruit. 1995 saw the release of the groundbreaking Chrono Trigger, which allows players to kill or spare a major villain and also has at least thirteen distinct endings based on when and how the player decides to finish the game.
This inclination toward a fuller story and more choice in role-playing games was used as the basis for what many now call the Western RPG. Prior to the mid-nineties many role-playing games developed in the United States were “dungeon crawler” affairs in which player characters would ascend or descend maze-like floors of an enemy infested space. These are clear candidates for the Implied portion of the spectrum, as many give only brief in-game explanations or rationale before dumping the players into a town to equip themselves and eventually do battle. This was the original intent of the first game in the now incredibly prominent series, The Elder Scrolls (1994 – Present). Focus shifted toward presenting the player with what now gets put into the catchall category of “freedom” – a large world to explore and choice of what to do in it.
Recent games that have implemented elements of Western RPGs in conjunction with other genres (such as the third-person shooter in Mass Effect (2007) and the first-person shooter in Fallout 3 (2008)) have been met with critical and commercial success. This application of Murray’s agency with more accessible and well-received genres naturally leads to success. But are these games giving us any actual freedom? Do our choices really matter? Jan Simons points out that, “the trick of the trade of game design is indeed to make the player believe she is in control.” Here we come to one of the many problems facing games today. Player perception is sometimes far removed from the reality of the gaming experience.
As stated before, critics and players alike have responded positively to choice-making mechanics being present in games like Fable and Mass Effect. However this ‘choice’ is referring to a rather superficial one. Consider the choice a player has when constructing a narrative from a game with implied narrative. The game Tank featured on Combat (1977) involves two players, each controlling one tank. They traverse a map from a top down view trying to fire upon one another until one tank is destroyed. Any number of war scenarios could be constructed to fit this gameplay model.
In Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray describes her interpretation of Tetris in the following way:
Every time a complete row forms, it disappears. Instead of keeping what you build, as you would in a conventional jigsaw puzzle, in Tetris everything you bring to a shapely completion is swept away from you. Success means just being able to keep up the flow. This game is a perfect enactment of the overtasked lives of Americans in the 1990s – of the constant bombardment of tasks that demand our attention and that we must somehow fit into our overcrowded schedules and clear off our desks in order to make room for the next onslaught. (144)
Murray’s interpretation however is just that – an interpretation. And considering that Tetris was developed in the 1980s in the U.S.S.R., her interpretation certainly isn’t one that the designer intended. When I first played Tetris I thought of it as a way to build up a symmetrical design, or a staircase, or whatever I could muster with the blocks I was given. (This inherent desire within gamers to build with blocks probably stems from a the combination of the childhood desire to do so and the importance in gaming culture of blocks and boxes. This is still going strong with the recent overwhelming success of Minecraft (2009).) Later I discovered how the game actually worked and it held little significance. At some point I saw a television show or film that involved an assembly line, conveyer belts, and/or shipping from a factory. Suddenly Tetris had meaning again – it was a representation of boxes on conveyer belts that needed to be shipped. Because Tetris is so abstract, there are probably an infinite number of interpretations for it.
Games are probably at least partially more narrative driven in the current state of the industry because of desire to convey a message. As mentioned earlier, Bioshock is universally viewed as a triumph in terms of in-game storytelling, but has very traditional gameplay. This is most likely because trying to convey the dangers of a strict Objectivist society, the difficulties one faces when confronting stem-cell research, and the danger of mental conditioning are much more difficult to present through gameplay than through dialogue and action. When asked what the role of story is in game, Warren Spektor, creator of Deus Ex had this to say:
Games are all about the player experience -- about DOING things, not about watching things or hearing about things. And that means that a narrative game has to put the player experience first and the narrative second. However, left to their own devices, most players aren't very GOOD at crafting compelling experiences -- just as most readers aren't good writers, and most moviegoers aren't great directors. And that's where story comes in. The answer for narrative games is, I think, to empower players to do well the things they do well and let developers do well the things THEY do well. So what is it that players do well? Given the right toolset, they're great at making plans and trying to execute them. And they seem to like making choices and then responding to the consequences of those choices. (Stories, 1Up)
With this, Spektor brings up a number of valid points. Given an interpretive narrative, most players won’t actually interpret anything. While recently playing Geometry Wars (2005) one friend asked another about the game. (Oddly enough the question, “what is this game about?” is just as common as “what do you do in this game?”) The one who had played the game said something about how the game controlled and let the other try the game himself. Neither of the two ever took time to think about if the game was supposed to have a message or meaning. There’s a clear disconnect between mechanics and narrative that is just starting to be bridged in the sloppiest fashion with Stoic-Overt narrative games. For most, unfortunately, there is little being done.
Consider games with narratives that are not conducive to intriguing gameplay and games that try to include stories when their gameplay is not conducive to stories. The prevalence of the ‘movie-game’ (a tie-in video game released at the same time as a major motion picture) has dwindled dramatically because of waning sales. These lacking sales were based on mostly poor reviews for the majority of movie-games. This is because major motion pictures might have interesting characters or plots, but usually don’t contain enough in terms of gameplay opportunities to warrant a full price video game being produced. Likewise there are many games with praiseworthy mechanics whose developers feel obligated to include story (however inappropriate) with. Maybe the best example would be the entire genre of fighting games. In almost every case gameplay focuses on two fighters facing off in a set of (up to) three matches. Of course developers then seek to add backstory to each character and reasoning for any and all of them to be fighting each other. This nearly works, albeit in a rather deficient fashion, as it’s even able to account for why two friendly characters would fight each other. But what about when winning a match implies the death of the other character? First-person shooter Doom (1993) features an implied narrative – as the only surviving space marine on a base on Phobos, a moon of Mars, you must fight your way out through demon-infested floors – that completely falls apart when competitive multiplayer is introduced. Suddenly all demons disappear and only other human characters are present. As Spektor points out, players are very adept at completing tasks when given a rule set, but then it becomes the developer’s job (or so many of them seem to feel) to create feasible justifications for everything that takes place in a game. If players can play games like Geometry Wars or Bit.Trip Beat (sic) (2009) without stories and be content, or play mode that acts as a continuity error – such as Doom’s competitive multiplayer mode, but need stories even when they’d probably be better off without – such as in fighting games – how much of this trend is player desire and how much is industry standard?
It seems developers have become increasingly uncomfortable with leaving human players in control of human characters without context for their setting and actions. Perhaps it is natural to want to associate games with stories, but this does not always hold true. Likewise there are times when we are content to play without an overt story or an implied narrative. A game does not require narrative to be a game, but gaming critics have made it a requirement to get the highest praises. How many developers are putting in superfluous narratives in hopes that their game will be better received? My hope is that developers figure out to put the right amount of narrative into their games. Puzzle games and fighting games don’t need stories; they are nearly perfect examples of games (with such refined mechanics) without such things. Meanwhile a story that is best told in an interactive fashion such as Heavy Rain has the task not of finding or abandoning a story, but on matching gameplay to the tasks at hand.
It is natural for developers and gamers alike to desire narratives in video games. They are easy both to present to others and to understand and follow in comparison with creating or reading gameplay mechanics. Video games are beginning to get the perception of having ‘made it’ by out selling the film industry in terms of revenue in recent years. I would say that this perception is far from the truth, as developers and players still have very little to go off of in order to understand their medium and how to use/read it effectively. My hope is for more experimentations, educated approaches, and legitimate attempts at unique experiences as the industry moves forward. Narratives are not the end goal, nor the shackles, but simply an aspect of gaming that should be used in a responsible and planned manner if at all in the future.
Monday, May 2, 2011
Myth and Keyboard
I just bought a new mouse for a family computer today. I was none too keen to start my homework, so I thought maybe a little stalling on Steam was in order. I've been picking at Portal 2 on my Macbook Pro sort of, but after beating it on PS3 and watching my brother play much of the game, I thought I'd go another route today.
A couple years ago, a buddy of mine played through Half-Life 2 on the Orange Box for Xbox 360. I tried, but eventually gave up on a vehicle section that just felt too awkward. Playing the vehicle-based parts of Half-Life 2 on a mouse and keyboard has been much much better, but I just found a spot that has me cursing the things. Antlions. No one should have to deal with antlions on a mouse and keyboard.
I had forgotten why I was giving "the best PC game ever" a break, just to find that it wasn't a voluntary break - I'm kind of stuck. I'm at a segment I remember seeing a lot of hype about. You take Gordon Freeman across a desert area without touching the sand. Just use the gravity gun to place items in front of you! You can jump on them and avoid the sand (and antlions). This is a pretty smart gameplay idea; it uses the unique abilities of the gravity gun, it makes you slow down and think about your decisions, it changes things up.
This would be good, if the keyboard wasn't the most outdated piece of technology in the gaming industry. Why would Valve give you these tiny spots to land on when you can only move at one (sprinting here is pretty damn inadvisable) speed?
PC kids like to point out how superior m/kb controls are when compared with controllers, but it simply isn't true all of the time. If PC gaming is going to stick with this completely deficient manner of movement control, why would the flagship PC first-person shooter have an extensive platforming section? Why is Braid so difficult when I've just recently conquered Little Big Planet 2 (which has more difficult level design, and relies more on quick responses)? The same could be asked about Trine, which I've taken a break from simply because it isn't enjoyable enough to continue.
Mice are phenomenally sensitive (and thus, accurate) devices; there's no comparison between the dexterity in a wrist and the dexterity in a thumb. For perfect aim on first-person shooters, yes the mouse is king. But PC gamers shouldn't be so haughty as to think their keyboard is worth anything past the button count.
Part of the appeal of PC gaming is that you use the devices already at hand. This has paid off with the aforementioned high button count of the keyboard and precision of the mouse, but consoles are making progress. Most prefer use of an Xbox 360 controller over a mouse and keyboard for first-person shooters. I don't want to say that "because most people like this, it is better than that," we only have to look to the music industry to see that that isn't true. But I would like to point out the necessity in innovation when new hardware is released once every six to eight years. Sony catches flak for not changing their controller enough; Nintendo has faced the fact that for the hardcore, they've possibly changed their controller too much. But then look at the 360 controller - an improvement over the original Xbox controller in every regard, and seen by many as the best console controller ever. Let's not forget the increasingly prevalent incorporation of motion control into traditional styles of gameplay either. That may be - with some serious improvements in technology as well as implementation - where the big changes are made. With console control constantly improving, and things staying the same on the PC front year after year, it's only a matter of time before console controls move from dumbed-down knock-off to visionary trend-setter. This has already happened in the realm of the fighting game, and the two- and three- dimensional platformer.
A couple years ago, a buddy of mine played through Half-Life 2 on the Orange Box for Xbox 360. I tried, but eventually gave up on a vehicle section that just felt too awkward. Playing the vehicle-based parts of Half-Life 2 on a mouse and keyboard has been much much better, but I just found a spot that has me cursing the things. Antlions. No one should have to deal with antlions on a mouse and keyboard.
I had forgotten why I was giving "the best PC game ever" a break, just to find that it wasn't a voluntary break - I'm kind of stuck. I'm at a segment I remember seeing a lot of hype about. You take Gordon Freeman across a desert area without touching the sand. Just use the gravity gun to place items in front of you! You can jump on them and avoid the sand (and antlions). This is a pretty smart gameplay idea; it uses the unique abilities of the gravity gun, it makes you slow down and think about your decisions, it changes things up.
This would be good, if the keyboard wasn't the most outdated piece of technology in the gaming industry. Why would Valve give you these tiny spots to land on when you can only move at one (sprinting here is pretty damn inadvisable) speed?
PC kids like to point out how superior m/kb controls are when compared with controllers, but it simply isn't true all of the time. If PC gaming is going to stick with this completely deficient manner of movement control, why would the flagship PC first-person shooter have an extensive platforming section? Why is Braid so difficult when I've just recently conquered Little Big Planet 2 (which has more difficult level design, and relies more on quick responses)? The same could be asked about Trine, which I've taken a break from simply because it isn't enjoyable enough to continue.
Mice are phenomenally sensitive (and thus, accurate) devices; there's no comparison between the dexterity in a wrist and the dexterity in a thumb. For perfect aim on first-person shooters, yes the mouse is king. But PC gamers shouldn't be so haughty as to think their keyboard is worth anything past the button count.
Part of the appeal of PC gaming is that you use the devices already at hand. This has paid off with the aforementioned high button count of the keyboard and precision of the mouse, but consoles are making progress. Most prefer use of an Xbox 360 controller over a mouse and keyboard for first-person shooters. I don't want to say that "because most people like this, it is better than that," we only have to look to the music industry to see that that isn't true. But I would like to point out the necessity in innovation when new hardware is released once every six to eight years. Sony catches flak for not changing their controller enough; Nintendo has faced the fact that for the hardcore, they've possibly changed their controller too much. But then look at the 360 controller - an improvement over the original Xbox controller in every regard, and seen by many as the best console controller ever. Let's not forget the increasingly prevalent incorporation of motion control into traditional styles of gameplay either. That may be - with some serious improvements in technology as well as implementation - where the big changes are made. With console control constantly improving, and things staying the same on the PC front year after year, it's only a matter of time before console controls move from dumbed-down knock-off to visionary trend-setter. This has already happened in the realm of the fighting game, and the two- and three- dimensional platformer.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Portal 2 vs. Stacking or The Evolution of Puzzle Games
I recently completed two fantastic games. Both are crowning achievements for their respective developers. Both feature fantastic writing and unique visual aesthetics. Both use what could be generically defined as "puzzles" as their gameplay challenges. Still, these are two vastly different games.
Certainly Portal 2 is the more popular of the two by leaps and bounds. As with any Valve release, buzz was palpable. It also has the benefit of using possibly the most impressive and mind-bending piece of in-game equipment around - the portal gun.
The crux of Stacking's gameplay is nothing to scoff at though, as entering other characters' bodies has never been handled by a design idea that was this simple, or this ingenious, before. And there's always going to be a reasonable amount of interest in whatever Tim Schafer is working on.
Portal 2 has been getting universal praise for being an improvement over its predecessor in every aspect except, of course, originality. Most gaming publications have deemed it the best game released this year. I would go so far as to say that it's the best game Valve has released, combining the single-player mastery that made the Half-Life series so polished and the teamwork expertise that keeps people playing the Team Fortress and Left 4 Dead series.
Stacking has gotten good reviews as well, but not to the same extent. For all its originality and charm, some still take issue with paying fifteen dollars for a game that can be completed in three hours. But I argue that in Stacking, a puzzle game, that short length may also be one of its greatest strengths.
The separation between these developers' approaches is clear. Double Fine likes working on widely different projects; the results have been mixed. In addition to Stacking, I liked Double Fine's Psychonauts, but other releases haven't been as relevant to me. Valve are perfectionists, not innovators. Every major Valve release since Half-Life 2 has used the same engine. The reason Portal was so well-recieved is because it offered something truly new, which was especially impressive considering the developer it came from. Valve had an innovative idea, but wouldn't invest in it until it proved itself successful - thus Portal 2 is a "real game" rather than a two hour experiment with new technology. But what does this mean for the gamer, one like me who may play these games at the same time?
Portal 2 has its foundations laid in gameplay that goes all the way back to the first Prince of Persia (and probably further) - you enter a room, examine the way it hinders your progress, and attempt to maneuver through. There is one solution and you make attempts until you discover that solution. Portal 2 is the pinnacle of this kind of puzzle game design, and as such the player is often cursing themselves for not realizing the way through a room that, in hindsight, seems obvious. Well, there's something interesting. The player reaction evoked from spending too much time on one particular puzzle is one of self-condemnation. I muttered the phrase, "Wow, I'm dumb" more times than I'd care to admit to while playing Portal 2. No matter how much difficulty a player might have, the developer never gets the blame. Valve avoids too much player frustration by stripping the rooms down to little more than what is necessary to complete them. This often translates into a player reaction equivalent to a lolwut. How should one progress a stage that doesn't have a floor? How is one to avoid perfectly placed turrets? There's always a way, but these things take time. That's the crucial aspect here, time. Some players have reported seemingly fake completion times for Portal 2, while I'm sure some are still working on it. I'm sure that if I mentally muscled my way through all of Portal and Portal: Still Alive without any help, I would have been perfectly equipped to complete Portal 2 in five or six hours. On the other hand, I'm suggesting a friend play the first Portal before attempting this game or its co-op component. With less emphasis on quick shooting or precise jumping, success in Portal 2 depends almost wholly on one's thought process being in line with the level designers'. This is classic puzzle design, but games like this only succeed when they're as interesting as Portal 2 is, and have a developer behind them as good as Valve is.
Stacking presents things differently. The mindset here is that the developer provides a world with a lot to see and do, and the player decides how much of this world to partake in, with very little participation absolutely necessary for completion. Scott Justner wrote an excellent article on Stacking's design and its effects for Popmatters that points out the strength of this approach. Stacking is a game where confusion and frustration have been pre-emptively eliminated by requiring only one of several solutions for each of the games challenges, as well as implementing a hint system that encourages making a couple guided attempts before giving in and getting told the solution to a puzzle. My experience with Stacking was similar to my experience with Braid. I completed Stacking over the course of a handful of play sessions. Some days I felt like exploring and messing around with stuff, others I just wanted to progress the narrative. The end result is that the pacing of the game was always 'right'. You can't hit a slow spot, and if you want to slow down, you won't run out of stuff to do.
The difference in experience between these two games was pretty drastic for me. Portal 2's level design is great, but there were a series of rooms that just didn't click with me. I think it makes perfect sense that these rooms involved the new gels that serve as the biggest change in the gameplay outside the inclusion of the co-op mode. I had a lot of practice with how the portals of the Portal series work. These gels were new though, and accordingly frustrating when I first had to use them for anything past the simplest of puzzles. By the time I got to the end of the game I understood, for the most part, how to use the gels in conjunction with the portals and had little trouble. That said, there were still quite a few times I needed youtube guides for levels in Portal 2. There's a great sense of failure when you admit your own unwillingness to make any further attempts at something in a game, and much of my Portal 2 experience was dowsed in that sense of failure. I didn't have to consult any outside help for completing Stacking, and, even better, was able to complete all sorts of extra-curriculars without any frustration.
These differences reflect the evolution of the industry through the lens of the puzzle game. Games used to be about repeated attempts, deductive reasoning, and mastery. The direction we're moving in is toward a fluid experience, user-determined solutions, and completion. This new direction leads to player having less negative experiences while playing a game, making them more likely to purchase the now-standard DLC.
The reasoning behind the reception for each of these games makes sense. Portal 2 is one of the best things to come out of the tried-and-true puzzle game paradigm. Stacking is far less about polished or perfect design as it is about presenting that design in a more player-friendly fashion. Despite their flaws, they're both excellent. Since games are separated between disc-based releases and downloadable games for awards, I would say that these two titles earn the top spot in their respective categories. The possibility that these games could get knocked from their top spots is largely irrelevant - gaming's infamous summer slump is coming, and these are certainly the most advisable choices for filling that time. Unless, you know, you wanted to read, or something...
Certainly Portal 2 is the more popular of the two by leaps and bounds. As with any Valve release, buzz was palpable. It also has the benefit of using possibly the most impressive and mind-bending piece of in-game equipment around - the portal gun.
The crux of Stacking's gameplay is nothing to scoff at though, as entering other characters' bodies has never been handled by a design idea that was this simple, or this ingenious, before. And there's always going to be a reasonable amount of interest in whatever Tim Schafer is working on.
Portal 2 has been getting universal praise for being an improvement over its predecessor in every aspect except, of course, originality. Most gaming publications have deemed it the best game released this year. I would go so far as to say that it's the best game Valve has released, combining the single-player mastery that made the Half-Life series so polished and the teamwork expertise that keeps people playing the Team Fortress and Left 4 Dead series.
Stacking has gotten good reviews as well, but not to the same extent. For all its originality and charm, some still take issue with paying fifteen dollars for a game that can be completed in three hours. But I argue that in Stacking, a puzzle game, that short length may also be one of its greatest strengths.
The separation between these developers' approaches is clear. Double Fine likes working on widely different projects; the results have been mixed. In addition to Stacking, I liked Double Fine's Psychonauts, but other releases haven't been as relevant to me. Valve are perfectionists, not innovators. Every major Valve release since Half-Life 2 has used the same engine. The reason Portal was so well-recieved is because it offered something truly new, which was especially impressive considering the developer it came from. Valve had an innovative idea, but wouldn't invest in it until it proved itself successful - thus Portal 2 is a "real game" rather than a two hour experiment with new technology. But what does this mean for the gamer, one like me who may play these games at the same time?
Portal 2 has its foundations laid in gameplay that goes all the way back to the first Prince of Persia (and probably further) - you enter a room, examine the way it hinders your progress, and attempt to maneuver through. There is one solution and you make attempts until you discover that solution. Portal 2 is the pinnacle of this kind of puzzle game design, and as such the player is often cursing themselves for not realizing the way through a room that, in hindsight, seems obvious. Well, there's something interesting. The player reaction evoked from spending too much time on one particular puzzle is one of self-condemnation. I muttered the phrase, "Wow, I'm dumb" more times than I'd care to admit to while playing Portal 2. No matter how much difficulty a player might have, the developer never gets the blame. Valve avoids too much player frustration by stripping the rooms down to little more than what is necessary to complete them. This often translates into a player reaction equivalent to a lolwut. How should one progress a stage that doesn't have a floor? How is one to avoid perfectly placed turrets? There's always a way, but these things take time. That's the crucial aspect here, time. Some players have reported seemingly fake completion times for Portal 2, while I'm sure some are still working on it. I'm sure that if I mentally muscled my way through all of Portal and Portal: Still Alive without any help, I would have been perfectly equipped to complete Portal 2 in five or six hours. On the other hand, I'm suggesting a friend play the first Portal before attempting this game or its co-op component. With less emphasis on quick shooting or precise jumping, success in Portal 2 depends almost wholly on one's thought process being in line with the level designers'. This is classic puzzle design, but games like this only succeed when they're as interesting as Portal 2 is, and have a developer behind them as good as Valve is.
Stacking presents things differently. The mindset here is that the developer provides a world with a lot to see and do, and the player decides how much of this world to partake in, with very little participation absolutely necessary for completion. Scott Justner wrote an excellent article on Stacking's design and its effects for Popmatters that points out the strength of this approach. Stacking is a game where confusion and frustration have been pre-emptively eliminated by requiring only one of several solutions for each of the games challenges, as well as implementing a hint system that encourages making a couple guided attempts before giving in and getting told the solution to a puzzle. My experience with Stacking was similar to my experience with Braid. I completed Stacking over the course of a handful of play sessions. Some days I felt like exploring and messing around with stuff, others I just wanted to progress the narrative. The end result is that the pacing of the game was always 'right'. You can't hit a slow spot, and if you want to slow down, you won't run out of stuff to do.
The difference in experience between these two games was pretty drastic for me. Portal 2's level design is great, but there were a series of rooms that just didn't click with me. I think it makes perfect sense that these rooms involved the new gels that serve as the biggest change in the gameplay outside the inclusion of the co-op mode. I had a lot of practice with how the portals of the Portal series work. These gels were new though, and accordingly frustrating when I first had to use them for anything past the simplest of puzzles. By the time I got to the end of the game I understood, for the most part, how to use the gels in conjunction with the portals and had little trouble. That said, there were still quite a few times I needed youtube guides for levels in Portal 2. There's a great sense of failure when you admit your own unwillingness to make any further attempts at something in a game, and much of my Portal 2 experience was dowsed in that sense of failure. I didn't have to consult any outside help for completing Stacking, and, even better, was able to complete all sorts of extra-curriculars without any frustration.
These differences reflect the evolution of the industry through the lens of the puzzle game. Games used to be about repeated attempts, deductive reasoning, and mastery. The direction we're moving in is toward a fluid experience, user-determined solutions, and completion. This new direction leads to player having less negative experiences while playing a game, making them more likely to purchase the now-standard DLC.
The reasoning behind the reception for each of these games makes sense. Portal 2 is one of the best things to come out of the tried-and-true puzzle game paradigm. Stacking is far less about polished or perfect design as it is about presenting that design in a more player-friendly fashion. Despite their flaws, they're both excellent. Since games are separated between disc-based releases and downloadable games for awards, I would say that these two titles earn the top spot in their respective categories. The possibility that these games could get knocked from their top spots is largely irrelevant - gaming's infamous summer slump is coming, and these are certainly the most advisable choices for filling that time. Unless, you know, you wanted to read, or something...
Monday, April 18, 2011
Doing DLC Right
I'm a little late to the Stacking party, but it seems like my slacker attitude is going to pay off. I'm already at 33% completion after a few relatively short gameplay sessions, but the DLC, The Lost Hobo King is waiting for me. Stacking is an odd case in that I'm genuinely excited to dive into the DLC immediately after finishing the game. I usually consider Game of the Year editions if they're available, but often I end up in one-and-done situations. I'll finish the game with no desire to try any of the extras, or I attempt to play extra content, only to stop out of boredom or indifference. More Challenges in Arkham Asylum? Adding co-op modes to the competitive arenas of Uncharted 2 or Battlefield: Bad Company 2? Extra characters whose locations and interactions have a clearly 'tacked-on' feel in Mass Effect 2? I'll pass on all of them. The problem with all of these examples is that they use the mechanics of the game to go about content that it was not originally designed for.
The original set of Challenges in Arkham Asylum is in place mostly for the presence of a competitive multiplayer experience by way of leader boards. They also served as a place to stick the PS3 exclusive Joker playing. Modes like this have worked for some games (I completed all of the arena challenges in God of War 3) but for the most part they're bound to be an inferior addition in place simply to bolster the hour count for a game. Arkham Asylum wasn't about the combat. It was a complete package. Because this is the case, any successful extra content would have to take advantage of every aspect of the original adventure to be successful.
The rise of online co-op DLC is pretty disheartening. There's a big difference between the Zombies maps that Treyarch includes in its Call of Duty games and the co-op modes of Uncharted 2 or Bad Company 2. Zombies has maps and gameplay mechanics specifically designed for the mode itself, and even though I don't personally care for the mode, I know good design when I see it. Meanwhile, Uncharted and Battlefield take the gameplay from their single player mode, make it harder to compensate for player count, and offer it up as something worth paying for.
Mass Effect 2's DLC wasn't too far off track; you use the all of the gameplay mechanics of the original game, and the new characters and quests are on planets that were in the original game. The problem stems from the lack of depth when compared with the original game. Zaeed and Kasumi are interesting both in aesthetics and personality, but the lack of in-depth dialogue with said characters interferes greatly with the immersion the Mass Effect universe offers. If new characters are added to Mass Effect 3 after the release, I hope they get the same treatment that the original cast gets.
I'm currently only partaking in one DLC experience and it's going really well. Borderlands takes place in a setting that's initially intriguing, but quickly deteriorates. The first of the DLC's for Borderlands solves this problem by giving us a setting to explore that's a stark contrast to the vast deserts and ghost towns of the original journey. Gearbox knew what they did right (the mmo-style gameplay and pacing) and offered more of it in a new setting. I have hopes that the Borderlands DLC's will all be better than the original game - Gearbox has taken they're gameplay model, changed nothing, and simply allowed the player to exist in areas with more and stronger enemies with better loot at the end of the corpse trail.
This is what excites me about the Stacking DLC - more of the same. If done wrong, this method is viewed as lazy, boring, a rip off, etc. But Stacking has something going for it that the aforementioned games are missing, genuine charm and originality. When a world is unique, you want to explore it further; when characters are funny, you'll talk to everyone. Usually searching aimlessly for an item (or in the case of Stacking, more dolls) upsets me. "I'm already wasting time playing this game. I don't want to be wasting time inside the game too." Its an old standby for me, but in Stacking, I've abandoned the complaint. In Stacking, you're constantly rewarded for just wandering around trying stuff out. They've packed the game with content, but it's not spread over too large an area. The result is that you're in constant mini-adventures, all of which will at some point give you something to laugh (or at least smile) about. The appeal of The Lost Hobo King is that the player is playing what's essentially a sequel story. New worlds, new dolls, and new stories await. There's nothing 'tacked-on' about it, because it's essentially a whole new game, simply using the same mechanics. This wouldn't work if players got bored with the world of Stacking by the end of the original story, but as we know, boring isn't what Tim Schafer does.
The original set of Challenges in Arkham Asylum is in place mostly for the presence of a competitive multiplayer experience by way of leader boards. They also served as a place to stick the PS3 exclusive Joker playing. Modes like this have worked for some games (I completed all of the arena challenges in God of War 3) but for the most part they're bound to be an inferior addition in place simply to bolster the hour count for a game. Arkham Asylum wasn't about the combat. It was a complete package. Because this is the case, any successful extra content would have to take advantage of every aspect of the original adventure to be successful.
The rise of online co-op DLC is pretty disheartening. There's a big difference between the Zombies maps that Treyarch includes in its Call of Duty games and the co-op modes of Uncharted 2 or Bad Company 2. Zombies has maps and gameplay mechanics specifically designed for the mode itself, and even though I don't personally care for the mode, I know good design when I see it. Meanwhile, Uncharted and Battlefield take the gameplay from their single player mode, make it harder to compensate for player count, and offer it up as something worth paying for.
Mass Effect 2's DLC wasn't too far off track; you use the all of the gameplay mechanics of the original game, and the new characters and quests are on planets that were in the original game. The problem stems from the lack of depth when compared with the original game. Zaeed and Kasumi are interesting both in aesthetics and personality, but the lack of in-depth dialogue with said characters interferes greatly with the immersion the Mass Effect universe offers. If new characters are added to Mass Effect 3 after the release, I hope they get the same treatment that the original cast gets.
I'm currently only partaking in one DLC experience and it's going really well. Borderlands takes place in a setting that's initially intriguing, but quickly deteriorates. The first of the DLC's for Borderlands solves this problem by giving us a setting to explore that's a stark contrast to the vast deserts and ghost towns of the original journey. Gearbox knew what they did right (the mmo-style gameplay and pacing) and offered more of it in a new setting. I have hopes that the Borderlands DLC's will all be better than the original game - Gearbox has taken they're gameplay model, changed nothing, and simply allowed the player to exist in areas with more and stronger enemies with better loot at the end of the corpse trail.
This is what excites me about the Stacking DLC - more of the same. If done wrong, this method is viewed as lazy, boring, a rip off, etc. But Stacking has something going for it that the aforementioned games are missing, genuine charm and originality. When a world is unique, you want to explore it further; when characters are funny, you'll talk to everyone. Usually searching aimlessly for an item (or in the case of Stacking, more dolls) upsets me. "I'm already wasting time playing this game. I don't want to be wasting time inside the game too." Its an old standby for me, but in Stacking, I've abandoned the complaint. In Stacking, you're constantly rewarded for just wandering around trying stuff out. They've packed the game with content, but it's not spread over too large an area. The result is that you're in constant mini-adventures, all of which will at some point give you something to laugh (or at least smile) about. The appeal of The Lost Hobo King is that the player is playing what's essentially a sequel story. New worlds, new dolls, and new stories await. There's nothing 'tacked-on' about it, because it's essentially a whole new game, simply using the same mechanics. This wouldn't work if players got bored with the world of Stacking by the end of the original story, but as we know, boring isn't what Tim Schafer does.
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