Archive for the 'Analysis' Category

A New President, A New Age of Game Regulation

Published
on January 20, 2009
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Today confirmed everything I love about this country. It also brought a new perspective on video game regulation to the White House, as Gamasutra reports in today’s article on the history and future of US regulation.

“We need to make sure that all of our children have access to these technologies and we must teach our children how to harness the huge potential of this technology. I want to make sure my children are protected from the dangers of the new media world, but I also want to make sure they reap the benefits of it,” said newly-inaugurated President Barack Obama in late 2007.

The US government has a lot to clear off its plate before gaming legislation floats back to the top, but this presidential perspective marks a definite turning point in games as a new medium.

Researcher Neils Clark opens his examination of the industry and regulation with a quote from Republican Senator Mitt Romney: “I want to restore values so children are protected from a societal cesspool of filth, pornography, violence, sex and perversion.”

Clark covers the history of video game legislation, the need to guard from indecency always balanced with the need for free speech, and points to the lack of understanding of the medium among most politicians as the primary problem. He looks to the cynosure of South Korea, which has a government agency devoted to video games.

Game regulation remains a tertiary issue in the greater scheme of things: “Some of the strongest critics to the industry won reelection to the House and Senate handily. Issues like abortion, the war in Iraq and gay marriage still trump the gaming hobby. Go figure.”

Likewise, Obama’s administration will face the issues of the economy, two wars, and a failing national image, crisis which take precedence over gaming regulation. Clark concludes his essay by urging gamers to remain informed and vigilant for harmful legislation and for the even more dangerous threat of self-censorship by gaming companies.

“Government pressures on rating boards, and their subsequent pressure on ‘appropriate’ or ‘marketable’ imagery, may already affect a number of gaming companies internationally,” says Clark.

Ziff Davis Sells 1UP, Shuts Down ‘EGM’

Published
on January 8, 2009
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After twenty years Electronic Gaming Monthly is closing its doors, and the January 2009 issue will be its last.

In the long rumored buyout, Ziff Davis Media sold its 1UP Digital Network to UGO Entertainment and shut down EGM, its last remaining print publication after Games For Windows magazine, the rebirth of Computer Gaming World, ended last April.

At least 30 Ziff Davis staff members were laid off, and everyone else now works exclusively for the online network, which includes 1UP.com, MyCheats.com, GameVideos.com and GameTab.com. The 1UP video podcast is terminated, and the state of the other podcasts is unknown.

That’s the news story, and here’s what it means: the games industry just lost one of the last refuges of intelligent, professional writers and editors.

Of course, this was a long time coming. Gaming journalism, especially print journalism, had a lot of problems. One was the generally greater degree of tech saavy among gamers, or at least gamers who care enough about the industry to read news. Those took to the Internet, where content came immediately and was easy to find, rather than to the magazine rack.

Another problem was with the magazines themselves. Game journalists had buddied up with gaming companies to ensure they got exclusive news, which meant that previews were sycophantic and unreliable, and journalists often bailed for jobs at game developers and publishers.

Game magazines bled to death, losing readers to the Web and writers to game companies and online publications, which are now the only option for news.

Web content versus print publication is a big issue among journalists. Web writers usually spend less time per story, since immediacy and volume are more important than detail. They have less time than their print counterparts to nitpick details, do serious investigative reporting, and write articles that matter and have a point and a literary voice.

All that matters online is getting an article up on the feed and moving to the next one. If its a rewrite of the press release without any additional information, so be it. Timeliness is all that matters for most blurbs, not care or message.

I first read EGM in 2000 not long after they hit the 100 issue mark. It had Unreal Tournament on the cover, and inside a Majora’s Mask review, funny letters, cosplay pictures, and a feature on games that were canceled en development. I loved it, and I’ve taken the thumb to every issue since.

I’ll miss the magazine’s professional insights, its wit and candor, its humor. I’ll miss reading news that has a distinct voice, and reviews that I can trust since they come from people who have been in the industry for ages and who I have agreed with in the past. Some of that is available online, but most is lost in the dash to the finish of online journalism.

‘Left 4 Dead’ and the Cinematic Tutorial

Published
on December 16, 2008
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Last month’s zombie apocalypse game Left 4 Dead offers one of the best co-op experiences of the year in one complete and functional package that the team at Valve has gained a reputation for.

Unlike most Valve games, however, this one includes a very cinematic cutscene at the beginning of the game. An article by John Brownlee on the Offworld gaming blog explains how this cinematic is actually a tutorial which combines storytelling with the utilitarian function.

Left 4 Dead’s opening cinematic is a shockingly complete primer to the rest of the game. With only a few exceptions, almost any player going into Left 4 Dead for the first time will know exactly how to play the game: they already know the gameplay, the weapons, the enemies, the win scenario and the strategies they need to get through the game alive… the only thing not covered in the opening movie is the specifics of the interface.

It is one of the most useful tutorials ever put together: both broad in scope and minute in detail, with no strategy or major gameplay element overlooked. And as much as I love Left 4 Dead, I think the opening movie is probably the most brilliant thing about the game. While other developers put together opening cinematics that ignore the elements of the gameplay to tell a story, Valve made theirs a tutorial… one so subliminal that almost no one realizes they’ve sat through one.

In the article, Brownlee says point-by-point how Valve demonstrates game mechanics — like special infected behaviors and the use of pipe bombs — unintrusively through the opening cinematic, and how gamers naturally understand all these mechanics when they start the game.

One thing I liked about the cinematic is that it leaves the four characters on top of the building where they start the “No Mercy” campaign. It has a context within the story of the game, establishes the characters, and shows how the gameplay works. This is how game stories should be told, and it’s not surprising that the move came from Valve.

FPS Combat Most Exciting When Frequently Close-Quarters

Published
on December 2, 2008
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The most engaging first person shooters of the last few years force players into intense bouts of melee combat, Gamasutra reported today.

Game Developer magazine published the study last year. It used current generation FPS games — Battlefield 2142, Call of Duty 3, F.E.A.R., Gears of War, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, and Resistance: Fall of Man — plus two 2004 titles Halo 2 and Half-Life 2.

The surveyors recorded “300 hours of physiological and gameplay data” and tested how players reacted to gameplay by monitoring brainwaves, heart rate, breathing, blinking, temperature and motion. They found, among other things, that melee combat is more fun and exhilarating than any other approach.

Close combat was the most reliable method of creating engagement, adrenaline, reward, and all the emotions that make shooters so much fun. Certainly, this is nothing new to the genre, but the next-gen games that excelled in this area were exceptionally strong at creating high-paced close combat frequently.

This graph shows how players responded to different weapons in Halo 2, with melee combat and especially the one-hit-kill energy sword reigning as most satisfying.

The chainsaw in Gears of War generated a similar response. Both these titles didn’t just allow for melee combat. They forced it through tight level design and surprise encounters.

Close quarters combat in these games is exciting because it put players in situations where they either score a one hit kill or be killed in one hit, where they can do a lot of damage or die immediately.

This frenetic FPS melee has largely been replaced with cover and distanced enemies and regenerative health, and not unfairly because it can be very frustrating or very rewarding. Halo 2 and Gears of War both did a good job of padding these close, personal encounters with standard fare, which makes the most sense and keeps the gameplay interesting.

Braid Developer Criticizes Interactive Plots

Published
on November 21, 2008
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In his closing address at the 2008 Montreal Games Summit, philosophizing Braid developer Jonathan Blow summarized the obstacles that keep games from telling meaningful, profound stories, reported Gamasutra.

Blow described the dynamic stories of games as “pretend stories, poorly structured, poorly delivered and they will always be an awkward second fiddle to linear medium.”

For the keynote lecture, available in full on Blow’s blog, the independent developer reduced his argument to three conflicts of design and storytelling: story meaning vs dynamic meaning, challenge vs progress, and interactivity vs a pre-baked delivery.

Industry conventions such as interactivity and the necessity for fun and challenging gameplay, said Blow, prevent games from telling a touching story, which is necessarily linear.

“Pac-Man is about taking drugs and going on a rampage,” Blow jokes. “But that’s a completely valid interpretation… In games, interpretation extends past the visual art — the dynamic system communicates something to the player, whether that is intentional or not.”

Even serious games must make things fun, distorting the themes with complex gameplay that offers alternate interpretations.

Blow cited BioShock’s Little Sisters as a “supposed moral quandary” undone by game balance, since you end up with the same amount of ADAM power-ups whether you save or slay the girls.

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Make Your Own ‘Humble Origins’

Published
on November 5, 2008
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Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey can frame an epic tale or be a fallback for bad storytelling, says game writer Corvus on his blog.

“While good writers can use the monomyth structure to great effect and weave a compelling tale that is both familiar and new,” writes Corvus, “lazy writers stick so closely to the formula that they actually highlight the formula within the text itself.”

Corvus looks at how the “monomyth” was implemented in the first two Fallout games, Fable and its recent sequel, and Dungeon Siege, “the most obvious and transparent monomyth setup of them all.”

In the opening cinematic, the narrator states that a humble farmer is all that stands between the kingdom and encroaching chaos. Then you pick up your hoe and start smacking goblins — an activity that continues until Burt Reynolds becomes king.

I’ve written about the Hero’s Journey before, and about the “humble origins” of player-created heroes in games. Nearly always these characters start as orphans or amnesiacs, with no interesting past but what the player decides to give them.

The original Fallout, as Corvus points out, left it up to the player to decide why the protagonist was selected to leave the vault and why he chose to save the world. The Vault Dweller could be the strongest and most noble, or a cunning snake who broke free to enrich himself.

Fable, on the other hand, called the protagonist Hero, and made him weepingly seek vengeance for his family’s murder. The game’s climax is his fate, not something chosen as it is with the Vault Dweller.

Developers need to create new ways to set the player on the Hero’s Journey without feeling dominated by it. Mass Effect allowed the player to chose Commander Shepard’s birthplace and military background, which I think is a good start.

Tales of Gaming Horror and Woe

Published
on October 31, 2008
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Few know the dark history of the gaming industry — linked to terrorism, cursing gamers with bad hardware and athletes with bad knees, only to be buried deep in the New Mexico desert. These are button-mashing tales to chill the HP in your veins. Happy Halloween!

Saddam Hussein’s PS2-powered missiles

The holiday season in 2000 brought severe shortages of newly released Playstation 2. Some would say criminally severe.

According to a World Net Daily story later picked up by IGN, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein purchased 4,000 PS2 consoles to use their powerful graphics processors to guide missiles. Hussein chose the console in order to get around UN sanctions prohibiting the sale of computers to Iraq.

‘Applications for this system are potentially frightening,’ said an intelligence source. ‘One expert I spoke with estimated that an integrated bundle of 12-15 PlayStations could provide enough computer power to control an Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV — a pilotless aircraft.’

Fearful western critics were quick to decry this warning as false. PS2s cannot be linked and used together without very complex programming, and UK intelligence dismissed World Net Daily’s claims.

Still, one can’t help but wonder if there really are 4,000 Playstation 2s stockpiled in the Iraqi wastes alongside all those missing weapons of mass destruction. Slowly their hive consciousness gains self-awareness and waits for the cold day of robot judgment.

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Where is Gaming’s ‘Citizen Kane’?

Published
on October 24, 2008
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In this month’s edition of Game Couch’s Blog Banter series, five bloggers answered the question: Does gaming have a Citizen Kane?

Orson Welles’ classic film was a technically innovative, personally deep and infinitely enjoyable masterpiece still watched again and again six decades after it was made.

“Are there any video games that possess a timeless appeal?” asked Lou Chou of Lou vs Video Games: Fight! “Games that, despite constant advances in technology, retain a game engine or narrative that will forever be relevant. If so, why?”

In answering his own question, Chou said that there are no timeless games, only revolutionary “artifacts” which developed concepts and gameplay elements that are then adapted by later titles. BioShock and Dead Space are better than their predecessors, System Shock and Resident Evil.

The bloggers at Game Couch said old games cannot be replayed like old films. People discover films like Citizen Kane through television, theaters and re-releases, said Game Couch, but “if you want to play Ico, you need the game disk and you need a PlayStation 2… Ico is a magnificent game — a work of art — but it’s essentially undiscoverable.”

Both dismissals are flawed, but not incorrect.

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Students Love ‘Fallout,’ Worry Over ‘Fallout 3′

Published
on October 22, 2008
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Michael Abbott at The Brainy Gamer has proven why we should be dissatisfied with Bethesda’s upcoming take on the Fallout franchise through the observations of newly initiated.

The Chosen One seeks the Garden of Eden Creation Kit in 'Fallout 2'He handed over Fallout and Fallout 2 to his class of mostly casual gamers, who initially struggled with the decade old world.

“After exiting the vault, they had no idea where to go or what to do. Their movements were limited for no apparent reason; “action points” made no sense; and they died within minutes nearly everywhere they went,” said Abbot.

The students had trouble grasping the SPECIAL system, action points, and the severe dangers of Fallout’s nonlinear world. The game did not coddle its players or hold their hand; it shoved them into a brutal landscape where many areas offered instant and unremitting death to the unwary Vault Dweller.

But those who stuck with the games found the wonderfully engaging experience that lurks under the surface. Abbott posted some of their observations:

What is interesting about the random encounters in the game is that not all of them are hostile encounters. The kind of encounter that is very rare in games is the neutral encounter where you encounter people fighting. You can help either side but even then sometimes they will just turn around and attack you when they beat whoever they were fighting. My favorite way to deal with these encounters is to wait till a few of them die, and then it’s looting corpses time. It’s amazing what kind of nice loot you can find on them. It’s also where I got my first gun.

What effect would the isolation of the vaults have on the society? And what would changed based on the nuclear apocalypse? It would be like taking all the data in the world and deleting random parts. It would cause mass chaos, especially once the original humans (from pre-nuking) die out. Or, alternatively, there could be a safe-haven somewhere. From a developing standpoint, how could that effect the game? Could it?

I just found out that the greeter at the Den tells you to be vewy vewy quiet he is hunting rabbits, and i just stopped and laughed for about fifteen mins.

Abbott’s students got it. The dangers and aimlessness of Fallout absorbed them into that world and the character they played, a Vault Dweller newly emerged into the savage wild. He asked his students what they thought about Bethesda’s Fallout 3, long criticized by the Fallout faithful.

After a long and productive conversation I asked them how they were feeling about Fallout 3. ‘They’re totally gonna screw up that game,’ said one student. ‘They’re gonna say shoot this guy in the eyeball, like they’re giving you all these choices, but you know they’re gonna make it run and gun. You’re gonna be running around blowing stuff up, and all the shooter players are gonna love it. But it won’t be Fallout. I promise you. It won’t be Fallout.’

It remains to be seen whether or not Bethesda’s effort, which comes out next week, will take the same road as its ten-year-old predecessors. The challenging qualities that made Fallout and Fallout 2 so immersive have fallen out of favor, as Iroquois Pliskin commented on his Versus CluClu Land blog.

“While the frequent and arbitrary death, along with the cluelessness, was a pretty intimidating at first, by the end I really came to appreciate the way that these elements work together to make this really unique experience,” commented Pliskin on Abbott’s blog.

“I’m not manically paranoid about the prospect of Bethesda reimagining the game’s mechanics,” Pliskin added. “I hope they don’t lose the basic hostility the original’s setting and mechanics, though. Even though it runs counter to the tendencies of modern design… I think it’s one of the things that makes Fallout unique as a series.”

I don’t see Bethesda creating a game as testing as the original Fallout. Oblivion featured leveled creature lists that made it impossible for the protagonist to face enemies beyond his means to defeat, and dialog rarely influenced the course of the game. That’s how mainstream games are made today, and Bethesda is making Fallout 3 for a mainstream audience.

Yet I also know that the developers can’t help but be influenced by the quality of Fallout and Fallout 2, and I hope they find a way to make a new generation of Vault Dwellers feel like small fish in big ponds filled with piranahs, like they’re lost and alone in a self-destructive and self-depricating world.

Game Writers Need Recognition and Gaming Skills

Published
on October 18, 2008
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Game writer Lee Sheldon demands more respect for his profession, in a column for GameCareerGuide.com. He says that writers are currently misused in the production process, and that their role and the skills necessary are misunderstood by developers.

“Game studios still have a very limited idea of what writing a game means, or how writers can be used in games, and as a result rarely hire writers on staff or utilize contract writers to their fullest potential,” wrote Sheldon. “Many programs professing to train students for careers in game development share this mindset; therefore they provide limited to no training in writing for games.”

Sheldon has been involved in the industry for 15 years as a designer and writer, and for the last two years he has taught game writing at Indiana University. In his op-ed piece he addresses 10 points on why we have yet to see a prominent place for storytelling and writing in games, including the argument that games cannot balance interactivity and classical, linear storytelling.

“Non-linear stories can be found everywhere. Linear games are everywhere (and are often accused of being linear because they tell stories),” he wrote. “And boy do we need to get beyond the archaic notion that the only solution to game writing is branching.”

To succeed as a medium, games need dedicated and involved writers who understand gaming and are willing to try new things. “While writers from other media may be able to acquire it and do good work in games,” Sheldon said, “they must first understand there is a fundamental difference in writing for our medium.”

Writer James Parker adds to Sheldon’s discussion in a reply on his own blog. While a deeply involved writer can elevate a game to art, says Parker, “it isn’t the be-all and end-all of game writing.”

“There are still plenty of games that would benefit hugely from having a talented writer on board that aren’t setting out to appeal to the always vocal ‘games as art’ crowd,” he continues. “The commentary for EA’s Euro 2008 is excellent — it’s a great piece of writing, and more than that, it’s a tremendous piece of design, but what it clearly isn’t is a piece of story telling.”

“More games needs writers just to make their characters less one-dimensional, to add humor… to flesh out experiences for the player and to add realism in how the game communicates with the player.”