Monthly Archives: June 2009
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.Â
- 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 -Â 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/RPGsÂ
- 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
- 0Â puzzle games (although 9 could be said to have puzzles)
- 2Â “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)
- 4Â games that kicked off a series
- 3 games that stand alone
- 1 game that loses a lot of value on replay
- 7Â 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 &Â 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.