January 30, 2009

After Life

In his post on a short experience in World of Warcraft, PeterB hits on something fairly profound:

Throughout the parts of the game that I've seen, never once while in-game have I had to sit and wait for a "Loading..." screen. If you have to descend into a cave to search for loot, it flows smoothly from the outer world. Fly across the ocean to another continent, and you watch the scenery below you as your griffin beats his wings beneath you. Surely there is some sort of loading or paging going on under the hood, but the user never feels it.

I describe this achievement as 'technical', but its impact on the immersiveness of the game can't be understated. Like so many other people, I have a short attention span. "Loading" screens do more than provide entertainment while the computer gets work done, they provide a cognitive break. When I'm playing a game and a load screen appears, more often than not I will look away. Maybe I'll go get a cup of tea, or pause the game, or check my email. World of Warcraft doesn't have these cognitive breaks, except for those that the player makes for him or herself by retreating to a safe place. The end result (at least for me) is a sort of tunnel vision composed of equal parts concentration and fatigue. You eventually look up and find that several hours have passed, and you hadn't noticed.

If this sounds very familiar to you, maybe you've been playing Geometry Wars 2. I certainly have. Despite promising myself that I'd stop trying to beat a pesky leaderboard score, I wasn't able to kick the habit. The thing about GW2 is that it's really, really easy to spend a relatively long time chasing high scores in it, partly because the gameplay is very good, but additionally because restarting a level is practically instant. I can be playing Pacifism, run into an enemy, and before I've finished yelling at the game I'm already back at the start of the level. Just hammering the A button--which, helpfully, is not used for anything else in GW2--runs the user through the menu as fast as they can thumb. There's no death animation. There's no menu lag. There's nothing, in other words, to provide the "cognitive break" that Peter's discussing above. Instead, the game is constantly rewarding players with stimulation. Combined with the quick start-up of XBox Arcade titles, this means I end up playing a lot more Geometry Wars than I probably intend to do, because it's easy to get into it and surprisingly hard to get out.

You can, in fact, judge how likely I am to stick with any given game by determining how quickly and effectively it reloads after I die. I was astonished by reviewers who punished the new Prince of Persia for simply eliminating death-by-falling: that's exactly what I want! Hurl me directly back into the action, don't make me sit through a non-game sequence first! We can even take this further: the less I am punished for any failure, the more likely I'll keep playing. That doesn't mean the game is easier--feel free to make tasks difficult. But when I fail, I don't want to have to replay large chunks in order to reach that point again. I'm an adult, I understand: the failure itself is punishment enough. Anything else is just kind of rubbing it in.

Let's take this even another step, outside gaming: the less my workflow on any given task is disrupted by either failure or success, the more progress I find I can make. For example, I used to do my audio work at the Bank in Pro Tools. Unlike a lot of people, I really like Pro Tools. It has a fantastically well-designed toolkit for patching and editing audio (one day, I'll write a post about how the connection routing of audio software is possibly its most crucial feature). As a result of this incredibly flexible routing matrix, bouncing audio from multiple tracks into a single mixdown track is a joy. There's just one problem: partly as a consequence of that design, Pro Tools can only bounce in real-time. So while the user experience of mixing is very pleasant, it involves a lot of sitting around and waiting for the audio to play through the mixing bus. During that time, I tended to get distracted--or, on long projects, even leave the room to work on something else.

Nowadays I do my audio work in Cubase or Sonar, neither of which is anywhere near as graceful as Pro Tools. Bouncing a track in these apps requires 1) soloing the tracks in questions, 2) running a mixdown command to export the mix to a file, and 3) importing the newly-created file to its own track. Both Cubase and Sonar kind of apologetically include options during mixdown to automate this process, but it still feels clumsy compared to the Pro Tools mixer. The advantage they have, however, is that these packages can bounce audio as fast as the computer can process it, usually far faster than realtime. As a result, I don't enjoy my new Cubase workflow nearly as much as I enjoyed editing at the Bank, but on many projects it has made me much more productive, and not just because non-realtime bouncing is technically faster. There's no "cognitive break" during which time I would be tempted to multitask.

I think there are two interesting items of note here. The first is to note the degree to which gaming often associates punishment (including death, which barely deserves the name) with wasted time. It's the accepted method of "charging" a player for failure--either take away their time during an animation/reload/restart cycle, or force them to spend substantial time recovering lost ground, or both. This actually strikes me as particularly perverse, given that the audience has grown older, and has less spare time to spend. There are plenty of currencies that could be used punitively in design: loss of experience, equipment, or even simple mockery. And yet we return, over and over again, to design decisions (no quicksave, sparse respawn points, long menu trees) that make failure above all a lengthy and slow process.

Second, I think it's kind of funny that--even though gamers are often considered part of a "multitasking generation"--one of the most important factors in a game's addictive potential is its determination to keep the user focused on a single task for as long as possible. You'd think, if the trend were really so pronounced, that the most successful tools and entertainment would be those that work around a multitasked mindset, not one of constant obsession. It's almost like that kind of generation-gap jargon were just some kind of nonsense buzzword invented by would-be social critics.

July 2, 2008

Cricket

I love this portion from Gamasutra's interview with No More Heroes audio designer Masafumi Takada:

How large is the audio team size?

MT: Right now there are four people.

And do you have a sound studio here? Like a foley room and stuff?

MT: No. I do everything at my desk. Even if you don't go all the way to a studio, if you have a microphone and a tape recorder you can recreate sound effects anywhere, like this [Takada demonstrates at his desk].

So here, in this office?

MT: Here, after everyone leaves and goes home.

No More Heroes had great sound design, although a lot of it was either synthesized or in the music. But it's both amusing and oddly heartening to imagine the head sound guy recording foley effects at his desk in an empty office.

June 3, 2008

Purple Haze

It's a shame that Haze, the PS3's recent shooter, has gotten such poor reviews for bland design and inconsistent storytelling, because I think the basic concept deserves better. Let me first explain my impressions of that concept, since they apparently might be entirely unrelated to the finished product.

Haze (as I understood it) was supposed to be a meta-game commentary, in many ways. The story's fictional soldiers are dosed up on a drug that leads to some conspicuously game-ish effects--dead bodies simply vanish from the field, enemies are highlighted against the terrain, and their wounds and cries of pain are filtered out.

There's a potential here for what could honestly be a horrifying moment. We're used to games where the enemies just disappear once killed, which tends to nullify the impact of the action. Or where there's no real realistic visuals for the horrible wounds inflicted by weaponry, and the reaction to being shot is as simple as a flinch and a canned sound-bite.

Imagine a scene where the player suddenly stops being dosed, while teammates remain on the drug. They're still cheerily massacreing people left and right--but now you can hear the victims pleading for mercy, see the sickening effects when they're hit, and stumble over the mounds of dead lying around. It would be like watching a DVD of Commando, only to realize too late that you'd accidentally put Saving Private Ryan into the player instead.

Indeed, that scenario isn't just a commentary on video games. It remarks on how we treat violence in a variety of media. And I don't even think it's entirely a negative commentary, but it is thought-provoking and has room for subtlety. In this theoretical situation, fellow soldiers aren't monsters, they're just blissfully unaware of the consequences of their actions. They're gamers, in more ways than one. The point shouldn't be to turn on these former allies and kill them in revenge, but to open their eyes to the truth. Ultimately, the question is: when we discover that our actions might not be harmless, how will we react to that new ethical uncertainty?

Sadly, Haze doesn't seem to have taken that route. Instead it demonizes the drugged soldiers, and turns the game into just another shoot-em-up. Several reviews have commented that once the player character changes sides and can't use the performance-boosting chemical anymore, the game loses what little individuality it had--and what a loaded statement that could have been, when gamers found themselves wishing for the comfort of selective perception. In Wired this week, Chris Kohler has written about how these questions can surface (albeit in a limited and unintentional manner) in Ninja Gaiden 2. But Haze had a chance to address them directly, taking advantage of next-generation console power for a thoughtful and provocative message, and it blew it.

April 29, 2008

Pongversation

Just an idea I had last week.

Possibly useful information: the physics are not terribly complicated--returning the ball with the edge of the paddle does not change its trajectory. But it will sometimes put a little spin on the response, if you take my meaning.

September 21, 2007

Master of Unlocking

Metroid Prime 2 just makes me tired. My old roommate was a Prime nut, and bought the game to play on a GameCube that didn't even belong to him. When I moved out, he gave it to me, and it's just kind of been staring at me ever since, from the shelf where I keep all the other games that I don't play. Many of them, I will never play, but I don't get rid of them. I think in the back of my mind, I'm assuming that at some point I might contract a horrible illness or something and be bedridden for a week, in which case even Baten Kaitos might look pretty entertaining.

The original Prime is in a slightly adjacent category on the shelf: games that I've started, played a significant amount of, and then have not touched for months. I'm actually at the last boss for Prime, but I just can't bring myself to pick it up and keep going. After long enough, I start to forget where I am in these games, and then I definitely won't pick them back up, because I'll have no idea what's going on. At the same time, I certainly don't want to start over, because I remember full well how many hours it took the first time. If I don't run through a little bit of Twilight Princess soon, it's going to join the half-finished category, which would be a shame.

But with Prime 2, I just started the other day. I figured that with Prime 3 out, and being more of an FPS (my favorite genre), I might want to complete at least one game in the series before failing to finish the next one. But after fifteen minutes, I was confronted with the following demands from some half-translucent alien bug:

1. The energy power station is broken, and should be fixed, which requires the player to
2. "Cleanse" (i.e. sterilize with a laser beam) a Dark Temple (or some such nonsense), but you can't get into the temple until you
3. Gather three keys that are hidden across the world, each of which will probably be placed behind impenetrable barriers until the player can
4. Upgrade the power suit's capabilities with another beam, or visor, or something crazy like that.

I get a little Scott Evil just thinking about it. "Seriously? All that, just to fix your generator? Look, I've got a toolkit back in my spaceship. I'll go back, get a screwdriver, and we'll fix it together." And then Space Roach McGee has the nerve to tell me that I've got to do all of that three times, at which point he will send me on another long quest gathering parts to fix his lawnmower or something. Who does that?

I think what annoys me most of all about it isn't actually the fetch quests, it's that they're explained as "looking for keys." People in video games do not seem to understand the point of keys. It is a wonder that they don't suffocate after rolling the windows up in their cars. I love this idea that they have, which I think came from bad fantasy novels: when in danger, lock something up and then scatter the keys. Or even scatter them preemptively, because evildoers might be able to master hugely destructive weapons and build their own army, but they'll never take the time to look for your three hidden whatsits, right?

Hey, maybe they're right. Works on me. I just hope the Evil Overlord doesn't have access to a slim jim or a metaphorical credit card to slide into the door jamb.

The whole concept is just silly, and annoying, and juvenile. I almost prefer the way games used to handle it, before they started thinking that they could tell you a story. Remember how Doom handled limiting the player? Now there's a game that practically embodied the phrase "key hunt." Being a janitor in Doom must have been the worst job ever.

"Hey, I've got to mop the floors upstairs. Anyone got a key?"

"Naw, of course not. We keep the upstairs door key all the way across the building, on its own little lighted pedestal."

"Okay. I'll just grab the other keys while I'm there."

"Well, you can't do that. We keep the other key in a room over there, behind a door that you can't open without the first key."

"What is wrong with you people?"

The cleaning staff for the Doom probably cheered when the demons invaded, hoping that someone would finally give them a keyring, or a master key. I can't imagine how disappointed they were when the Imps called a staff meeting and said something like, "Now, we're going to switch all our door locks to the weird crystal skull system..."

August 3, 2007

Reaping the Consequences

If permadeath in RPGs is anything like Fire Emblem, don't ever sign me up with the hardcore.

Permadeath--the idea that a video game character gets one life, ever, and must start completely over in case of fatality--is generally restricted to gung-ho online gamers, who can usually be considered insane in the first place, or the Steel Battallion series, which is unquestionably mad (sure, I'll pay $200 for a video game that comes with a fake cockpit for the giant robot and deletes my save game if I die. Then we can practice home trepanation for fun). But it's also a "feature" of the Fire Emblem series, a series of cute wargames that permanently removes from play any units that fall on the field.

If I were trapped on a desert island (one that somehow had power generators--what kind of desert islands are these scenarios, anyway?) with a single game, it'd be Advance Wars, so I figured I'd like Fire Emblem too--same company, same basic gameplay with a few twists. I could handle the death thing, I figured. I was wrong. When a character gets wiped out, they make this little speech about how they'll never see Paris or something, and it hits me right in the perfection reflex. I can't help it: I immediately restart the level from the beginning and try to get through it without losing any of the main characters. I have to start the battle over, actually, because the designers have anticipated that I might just save a game while everyone is alive and then reload it, so they added backup autosaves after every turn. I appreciate the idea, but I wish they'd just let me cheat.

This wouldn't be so frustrating if it weren't the astonishing weakness of some of the troops. Of course, if the player doesn't use them, they won't get any stronger, so you've got to take them out--at which point the enemy AI will probably also take them out, if you know what I mean. I've played through the fifth level at least twenty times now, and this Ross kid keeps biting the dust. Which means I keep starting over. I've about reached the limit of my patience with it.

If I just let the virtual grim reaper carry off the odd straggler, I'd probably have a much easier time. But games elicit a powerful impulse to do things perfectly and minimize loss. I'll only play through this thing once, probably, so I don't want to miss out, and I don't want to get slammed in later levels because I let one too many units pass on. Instead, I may just pass on the game. I am not this hardcore. I've got better things to do.

Indeed, if the permadeath experience is indicative of anything, it's how little tolerance for mistakes that games instil in players, and how players react to that. The people who are the biggest fans of permadeath are not really interested in realism, I'd guess. They're interested in perfection--they want to force players to play a completely clean, rational, sterile strategy. Perhaps it appeals to their heightened sense of order. Maybe they're just jerks. Either way, their obsession is unnatural compared to other media. While my other hobbies--music, writing, a rare sketch or two--can find new opportunities or inspiration in mistakes, I'm not aware of any game that rewards errors, other than the sense of recovering from them. That's too bad. Mistakes add richness to life. They're at the heart of scientific progress, and the inevitable byproduct of any creative endeavor. We should be encouraging mistakes in interactive media. I just have no idea how to do it.

I know how I'm not going to do it, and that's playing through level five again. It gets one more try, and then me and Fire Emblem--and permadeath with it--are quits.

June 11, 2007

Me Me Me: Interactive Entertainment and Narcissism

So there's the story behind an acclaimed niche game, taken from Mobygames:

And then there's the plot summary for an acclaimed niche movie, taken from IMDB:

No, that's not entirely fair--but I'm not trying to be fair. After all, I could nominate any number of movies to take the place of that latter description. They might not have the exact same theme as Junebug, but films with shaded or outright unlikeable characters, open storylines, and no clear sense of resolution are a dime a dozen. Whereas you'd be hard-pressed to find a game that doesn't put the player into the position of being a Hero in the classical sense, complete with journey and bold nemesis to be defeated. You almost certainly can't find an interactive narrative that centers around Southern family dynamics.

This isn't about the violence, per se. It's about the kinds of stories that these media can tell. See, I'm just not sure that you actually could make a game that doesn't put the player into the position of an active, heroic force. Interactivity grants agency, and agency for most people means trying to make "better" choices. Even assuming that someone could make an interactive version of Sherrybaby, for example, who'd want to play it? Would it honestly have the same impact?

The form of the medium shapes the stories that it can tell, and I wonder if we are reaching the limits of that for interactive entertainment. Maybe that's a good thing--that it is ultimately a hopeful medium. But it is also a narcissistic one. By necessity, it casts its audience as someone who can Make A Difference, and sets aside any of the smaller stories about people who can't. That might even encourage a false hope--we don't all grow up to be President, you know.

Netjak put up an editorial that scooped me on this a little, but I think they're ultimately addressing a more limited problem. Healey is asking for more than just "save the world" plots--I'm hoping for a plot that doesn't save anything at all. What do you think? Is this an inherent lack of depth in interactive entertainment? Is hopelessness part of the button-pressing palette?

Answers that we are better off without the angst in the first place will not be accepted. A little angst is good for you. It builds character.

* * *

Apparently this is now a Round Table post. Who knew?

March 9, 2007

Sound Games

These experimental games from GDC sound incredibly cool. They use sound input, either from a music file or live from the player, to generate and control the game. I'm especially intrigued by this:

I once thought it would be cool to make a rail shooter that worked in a similar way, but where the environment was generated from the wave--bass sounds might create the ground landscape, while treble would create enemies or obstacles. Barret's take is more interesting, because it lets the player trigger the music from a landscape generated from the sound file, thus giving the player a real investment (similar to the incentive of finishing a Guitar Hero song, not because of the score, but because you want it to sound good).

November 15, 2006

Street Sense

The World Bank Institute's Urban and Local Government division is holding a game design competition. Designers are asked to submit proposals for a board or card game that will teach the concepts and benefits of street addressing, and the winner will recieve a $6,000 consultancy contract to fine-tune the game before publication. Runners-up may receive short contracts to discuss their concepts if there are interesting aspects for consideration. If you're interested, you can find the call for proposals here, but hurry: the competition closes at the end of November.

Why street addressing? For Americans this sounds like a silly assignment. My manager stood up at the meeting and explained that it's actually a huge economic drain in lesser-developed countries, including places we typically think of as mostly-developed. For example, she said, when she worked in East Germany during its transition from communism to democracy, the street signs had been removed but new ones hadn't been posted. Finding the firms for which she was consulting on any given day without clear addresses took a great deal of effort, and harmed productivity. Convincing local governments of the benefits of street addressing, as well as the methods for implementation, can be really important.

My thought, and feel free to steal this, is a card game where each player is trying to reach their destination in a fictional city. By playing street sign and address cards, they build a set of directions and move closer. Other players can play obstacle and inefficiency cards that represent a lack of good orientation, sending opponents off course and moving them farther away. The first player to reach their final destination, say by assembling 20 "direction points," wins the game. It's like Magic: the Gathering, but for street addresses. I can just see myself trying to explain that to my colleagues. "Magic: the Gathering? Thomas, you are such a dork."

November 2, 2006

Difficulty Spike

Psychonauts is a pretty funny game. It's one of those games where, if you could cut out all of the game-related bits like jumping and solving simple logic puzzles, it would make a funny cartoon. Sadly, it is not a cartoon. It's a platformer, and those parts of it are not nearly as clever as the writing and voice work. So I've visited GameFAQs at least once, because I'm less interested in proving how well I press buttons and more interested in jokes. I refuse to be ashamed of that.

I'm trying to make a rule for myself: if I'm stuck for more than half an hour on a puzzle, and I don't feel like I'm enjoying the process, I cheat. My time is valuable, and if I drag on for too long, I'll lose interest in the parts of the game that I do enjoy. I know that I'll forgive myself, and if the writing is good, I'll forgive the game for making me forgive myself. Something like that.

What I find, however, that I can't forgive is a game where cheating doesn't help, and where it is literally out to waste my time. I recently started and stopped playing Killer 7, all in the space of a week. It's the game equivalent of a David Lynch movie--lots of bizarre events, no overt explanations, overwhelming levels of gore (albeit in a strange kind of cel-shading that actually highlights the blood). When the game is playing with logic puzzles, it's a lot of fun--the shootout with two undead executives, who can only be defeated by disturbing their immaculate ties, is funny and just right in terms of challenge. But too much of the other puzzles simply revolve around picking up items, collecting random objects, and conducting glorified key hunts.

It's not just ridiculous, in this day and age, that we're still playing games with puzzles that were old when Zork came out. It's a little insulting. Killer 7 is written with a story that is confusing, thought-provoking, and challenging--whether or not it's any good, we can agree on those items. Why burden that story with drudgery? I am sick of having to work to get to the good parts. If the designer isn't interested in being as clever with the non-cutscene parts of the game (Hey, Squaresoft!), I'd rather just watch the movie version.

Which, of course, the makers of Metal Gear Solid and Halo have done or are planning to do. Good for them.

Future - Present - Past