The Plush Apocalypse

Real quick, some lighter fare - it’s a blog meme! Shane started it, Darius followed suit, and now here’s my list of my 10 most impactful games.

The most interesting thing is trying to define impactful - whether it’s affected my personal life in some direction, affected my design sensibility, or just sheer number of hours played, it’s tough to define and these games cover all those reasons and then some.

• Landstalker - If I wasn’t such a Sega fanboy at the time, this might have been a Zelda game, but this game helped cement my love for the intercoupling of story & action, and showed me games can be funny, too.
• Toe Jam & Earl - My friend Jason & I spent months playing this game. It is even today a pinnacle of co-op gaming. And its sequel also serves as another fine example, of just how bad a sequel can be.
• Facade - While the procedural storytelling elements are still innovative today, I just loved the feeling that when I typed in whatever curse word riddled nonsense I picked, they stared at me awkwardly like real people. It made me want to stop talking like a crazy person to them.
• Ghouls n’ Ghosts - This was the first game I properly got hooked on. I’d come home from school everyday for several weeks and play it for hours on end. It was what made me realize the power of the medium, that a game could keep me that transfixed for so long. I knew from then on what I wanted to do was make games, because you could really effect people. Then that shit with having to repeat the game at the end happened, and my faith that I could design better games was forged.
• Ocarina of Time - both for the briliance of the structure & the amount of time I spent with it.
• Planescape: Torment - the writing, the themes, amazing.  A staking point in the argument for the occasional depth of pop culture.
• Diablo - this one falls under sheer time, including both single player playthrough and cooperative play throughs. Co-op story games ftw. I remember playing it for 24 hours straight, stopping only to pee. At some point I was driving somewhere (with a full night’s sleep, I swear), and my gas tank gauge morphed into a half-full red health globe. This is why I’ve never played WoW. 
• Nitrous Oxide - Technically Rez is the better game, it’s just Nitrous Oxide came out first and I played more of it. But it gave me a fascination for synesthesia, which Rez furthered.
• Resident Evil - Horrible translation, but when those dogs jumped through that window, you were scared. Don’t remember that happening before then.
• Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines - While very buggy, the game featured some mind blowing moments. I almost had a heart attack playing the hotel level (there’s impact), and it was my escape from some other personal life stresses at the time.

Chronological Order:

• 1988 Ghouls n’ Ghosts
• 1991 TJ&E
• 1992 Landstalker
• 1996 Resident Evil 1
• 1996 Diablo 1
• 1998 N2O
• 1998 Zelda: Ocarina of Time
• 1999 Planescape: Torment
• 2004 Vampire: Bloodlines
• 2005 Facade

Metacritic: Actually only 1 game is on Metacritic, Planescape: Torment at 91.

Various stats:

• 5 Action/RPGs 
• 2 platformers
• 1 adventure(?) game (Facade)
• 1 Shooter/Racer
• 1 Action/Survival Horror
• all 10 games involve navigating an avatar around a 3D space
• all 10 games feature action in that they rely on reflexes to some, even slight, degree
• 5 American games, 5 Japanese games
• 0 puzzle games (although 9 could be said to have puzzles)
• 2 ”open world” games (3, I guess, TJ&E kinda is too).
• 4 PC games
• 6 Console games (Genesis: 3, N64: 1, PS1: 2)
• 1 game that is a continuing title in a series (G&G), unless you count Vampire (not really)
• 4 games that kicked off a series
• 3 games that stand alone
• 1 game that loses a lot of value on replay
• 7 games with strong story elements
• 3 multiplayer games
• 4 years since the last entry on the list. I think it’s a matter of my tastes having changed a long time ago & the industry not really catching up, but I could just be a snob. Or worse, nostalgic. Ick.

Interesting. My list is much less varied, but at the same time I like a lot of other games in different genres, many of which I would put in a list of my favorite games over these. It was actually pretty hard to define impactful. Part of Shane’s definition helped, that you would prosletyize these games to anyone who hadn’t played them. Or being able to summon strong personal memories of the time playing them.

Well, I’m just throwing down the contenious terms in that title. Narrative, character driven. Maybe the use of lament if you think it’s pretentious.

Character driven is the tricky one. See, I thought this was the designation for the types of stories I want to describe - stories where there is little to no plot, and consist almost entirely of characterization. Robert McKee in Story does use this term in one spot, but then proceeds to tell you that it doesn’t matter what type of story you’re writing, you should read his book regardless (mostly true anyway).

Googling also fails miserably. A number of bloggers seem to use the term to describe a story whose plot is driven by character’s action, as opposed to external, uncontrollable events. Using character driven to describe this kind of story seems redundant. A story whose events are driven by character decisions is just a well plotted story. Then what the hell are we gonna call the stories in the above paragraph?

Characterization driven stories may be a little more accurate, but I’ve moved past the need for accuracy at this point. I’m talking about movies like Lost In Translation, Coffee and Cigarettes, etc. (And so yes, Bill Murray seems to be in a lot of these types of films in his lower-profile work, so the story thing could just be a confounding factor.)

It’s pretty rare that these stories work though, especially in indie film, but part of the problem is that when people start writing they may not know how to plot well, and so they go for stories like these. These stories are harder to make, not easier. When they do work, they make the character sketches compelling by pacing how you find out information about the characters, and each piece of information’s contextual relation to everything that’s come before.

My point, that I finally have arrived at, is that these stories are all about character exploration.

What is a type of play that games do very well?

Sort it out.

There are games, especially ones that have been deemed as having successful stories, that do a little of this. Bioshock and it’s audio tapes for example. I can’t seem to come up with another example from a game that does not use audio recordings, messages left on a computer, etc. There’s Facade, which does kind of qualify. I think perhaps there is a way to play the game that results in a well-plotted player story, but the time is more typically spent learning about the characters & playing with them.

Instead of fighting our way up the river of designer created sequential plot vs. player driven plot, instead of making the assumption that everything, mechanics and narrative, must blend together better and better until designers have reach this assumed ultimate peak where everything is perfectly integrated and all our brains will explode in gameplay-narrative ecstasy, how about… not?

Screw plot. At least sometimes (and more Bill Murray wouldn’t hurt either, just in case).

Despite what you might think about the title, this is not a post about Resident Evil 5. I’m not referring to a game using racist imagery or themes to propagate existing social biases, but the creation of new group stereotypes. While I’ve often thought a game where the player-character is subjected to racism could be a powerful transformative experience for someone who is not a subject of such prejudices, I haven’t thought often about the reverse.

Why would that be a good thing? There’s a powerful theme there looking at how intolerance is formed, how it can impact us while we are unaware of it, and how to avoid it’s sources of influence. The point would be to generate these biases in the player, only to expose them as false later on. Their own discovery process would ideally help them consider other prejudices they might have.

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A few weekends ago I took part in the second annual EALA Game Jam. This year some folks from Pandemic were able to join us as well (so I supposed that should be the first annual EALA & Pandemic Game Jam). Nothing like bonding late at night staring at computer screens drinking pizza and beer while making games.

My game was a short abstract take on the financial crisis. To be fair, I spent a little more of my spare time on it afterwards, to add the tutorial and tune the difficulty, so it’s more like a couple weekends of effort than the straight up one weekend gamejam. Turns out tuning simulations for meaning is hard.

It’s built, like most of the other games were, using Angel, which is a (mostly) 2D prototyping engine that’s available open source on Google Code. It’s also spawned an XNA-based brother, AngelXNA. Or should the gender of a game engine be female? Anyway, check them both out for your prototyping needs.

I’d like to link to more of the other games here (since they’re way more fun than mine), but am not able to - hopefully EA will put up it’s own site for the jam soon.

Before you play it, definitely check out the in-game tutorial. And with all that, here’s my game: STCK

Off topic, but, since I’m the AI section editor, trying to round up some good articles:

http://www.gameprogramminggems.com/subform.html.php

Deadline for submission is July 10th. Submit ‘em if ya got ‘em!

This past week Michael Abbott of The Brainy Gamer was kind enough to have myself, Justin Keverne (of Groping the Elephant), and Matthew Gallant (of The Quixotic Engineer) on a new edition of the Gamer’s Confab. A lost edition of the confab, sadly, as computer error has denied it from existance in a form that you could enjoy.

However, I certainly enjoyed it, as it was a great conversation about games with meaning, and no technological difficulties can take that from me (so there, computers). There was one particular point that we talked about that I wanted to share, because it was a connection I hadn’t really made myself. A point or, more likely, a theory. Interesting, in any case.

In discussing games that have a deeper impact on us or changed the way we thought about the world, Michael brought up The Path. One experience he had with it, while not going too much into it since it was his play-through, involved something he had done to put his avatar, one of the girls, into a dangerous situation. The exploration of how much a game actually allows, how dark it allows you to be, is a natural, if unsettling, compulsion. And bad things happened to her, of an implied sexual nature, possibly that she was raped - but they were implied through imagery, so Michael had to interpret and decide what actually happened. He was upset with himself for exploring that choice, and with turn of events, but not upset with the game.

I couldn’t but help think of a parallel in Mass Effect where the player is given two conversation options, one not violent and another more so, but not drastically. Only upon chosing the slightly more violent option, the player-character pulls out their gun and kills another character. Everyone I know who played through that sequence has directed their frustration at the game for giving them a choice and not telling them what the consequences would be. They suffer from that pretentious sounding but nonetheless exceptionally accurate term ludonarrative dissonance.

The game gives you a choice whose consequences are unknown and you have to interpret what the consequences of will be, given the context of the game and story at that point. If you’re greatly wrong, you’re thrown out of immersion in the game by being confronted with the fact that you’re not on the same page with its story.

Giving the player more choice allows them to feel like they own the narrative, and that’s a good thing, but given our current technology and methods, you will run into problems like this with large player choices.

The interesting thing that happened to Michael is that he wasn’t frustrated by the game, and did not blame the game for his decision. By using ambiguity & implication over heavy handed exposition in describing the results of a player’s choice, you make the player complicit enough to get past that barrier and accept the choice as their own. By taking part in the interpretation of the effect as well as the decision, the player’s ownership of the decision is increased.

Not something you can apply to every decision in a game, but used judiciously it might help you squeeze through some tight spots. Or so the theory goes. Check out the rest of the podcast, with Mary Flanagan and Suzanne Seggerman, at The Brainy Gamer.

Well, April was a pretty blog-unfriendly month, but fun. Moved into a new apartment with the g/f, game-jammed (will put that up soon, hopefully), missed out on contributing to another excellent Blogs of the Round Table (seriously, I should at the very least finish writing my January entry on Catch-22).

So, in order to satisfy my blogging guilt, I’m going to resort to what the internet was made for - taking apart a quote out of context. Well, not so much out of context in the light of all the press on Six Days in Fallujah. Anthony Krouts, VP of marketing for Konami said, shortly after the game was announced:

“We’re not trying to make social commentary. We’re not pro-war. We’re not trying to make people feel uncomfortable. We just want to bring a compelling entertainment experience.”

The disconnect from this statement and the notion that Atomic Games would be interviewing insurgents for their perspective is kind of amazing, and, I’m just guessing here, probably some of the reasoning behind why Konami dropped the game like a hot potato with a IED stuck in it.

No matter how often it happens (and it does) it always suprises me when I’m told a pitch about a sensive topic that the pitcher is using for their game because they know it’s timely, but insists they won’t make a statement about it in their game.

The notion that you can make a game set in modern day Iraq without making a political statement is complete nonsense. You can’t even make a game set in ancient Iraq without making a political statement.

So even if you set out with that as a conscious goal, by not saying anything, YOU ARE STILL SAYING SOMETHING. Soldiers didn’t have rechargeable, HALO-style health in Iraq. They didn’t respawn, and I highly doubt they had fun.

Still, I suppose some credit should be given to both the Konami and Atomic Games folks for not mentioning the word fun, and coming the realization that a piece of entertainment need not absolutely and totally dispense with all seriousness in order to be compelling. That doesn’t really sound like the Gears of War clone described in the previews, but hey - the first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one.

If you set out to avoid commenting on the war, in the best case you’d end up with a theme closer to Black Hawk Down, that the horrors of war are survived only through the brotherhood shared between the men fighting. The notion of humanizing the war to highlight the fact that, whatever politics caused it, people are still losing lives, is a useful theme for people to see because of how easy it is to lose sight of that.

Such a theme can still influence someone’s political opinion. Perhaps people interpret it as highlighting the need to support our troops more with better resources, or temporarily increasing their numbers. Or perhaps it is interpreted that the toll on human lives is unacceptable and must be stopped no matter the ramifications. You can’t control what interpretation people are going to take away from a work focused on such an emotional topic that you better take very careful thought as to what you do and don’t include in it.

Ridley Scott can navigate that political minefield to bring us that perspective, but if you’re not Ridley Scott your chances are much slimmer. It’s actually easier to make a statement about the politics of the war than it is to create that kind of empathy.

If you set out to be as unbiased as possible and truly include all perspectives, that is also making a hefty statement in American political culture. The idea that you would actually talk to insurgents to get their perspective is fascinating to me for two reasons - because of the total disconnect people in western culture have with the notion of risking your life for a religious worldview thereby potentially increasing people’s cultural understanding, and pushing on the notion of games as a form of documentary.

Sadly, that perspective is absolutely untenable as being apolitical in modern America. I’d like for it to be otherwise, but it’s obviously unrealistic in a world where you couldn’t even mention a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq with being screamed at by the talking heads (albeit not The Talking Heads, although I’d rather live in that world).

Regardless of all of the above, I actually hope Atomic gets Six Days in Fallujah made. Whether it deals with these issues or avoids them, through the discussion around it we take one step closer to people accepting that they can be dealt with in the form of a videogame.

The critics rant session this year at GDC was pretty entertaining, and more charged than some rants of years past. Usually there’s a lot of agreement as to the problems, this year it seemed more divisive. My collected thoughts below (probably too random to deserve that description but not intellectual enough for “musings” so hey).

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About a month ago Steve Gaynor posted a nice consideration of storymaking - the ways in which players create or embellish their own stories of playing a game. To me, as an AI/gameplay programmer (what I get paid to do), and as a systems designer (what I often need to do), it’s interesting to me to think about how to build systems that encourage the player to narrativize their experience - to view their play as an exciting story that they have had, at least in part, some hand in creating. This is one key path to creating depth and meaning via game mechanics.

This behavior naturally has a spectrum - from the player turning to a friend and describing their experience in the stream-of-conscious expression that is punctuated by descriptions of explosions and character death, to the player attributing & creating more narrative aspects than are represented in the game itself (say, if you’ve ever been a creatively repressed teenager with too much time on your hands playing a party-based RPG, or anybody that could get past going to the bathroom and other more mundane aspects of The Sims). 

How can we create systems that encourage the player to do more of this, formulating their own stories about their play? Without the resulting mess of narrative & mechanics overwhelming.

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Time for a little glass-half-empty action (I’m in a mood). Patrick Kolan at IGN posts his “Ten Trends That Are Saving Videogames.” Previously he covered “Ten Trends That Are Destroying Videogames,” which I agree suck, but are nowhere near as potentially damaging as the ten trends “saving” us.

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