Archive for the 'Analysis' Category

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.”

Authorial Control in MMOs, and How Players Can Change the World

Published
on October 12, 2008
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I’ve written a little about authorial control on this blog, but never addressed how interactive storytelling can apply to the phenomenally popular, naturally static worlds of massively multiplayer online games. A blog post by Snipehunter on Dopass.com poses a question popular among players: How can MMO developers deliver control to players?

It’s impossible for a player to be immersed in a world where independent choice and exploration are untenable, writes Snipehunter, the alias of a game designer with experience on the MMO Auto Assault. To create the “illusion of reality,” MMOs need to give authorial control to the players.

The PvE aspects of World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, and Auto Assault, Snipehunter takes note, are “basically a linear game… You’re guided, some might cynically say ‘by the nose,’ the whole way, with no encouragement (and in some cases active discouragement) to explore or make your own choices, along the way. For some players, I think, this amounts to having the game ‘happen to them’ instead of ‘making it happen.’”

In his blog post, Snipehunter reminisces on the more open world of Ultima Online. “I didn’t ask the game for a to-do list of chores,” he wrote.

“Instead, I decided for myself what my goals would me. ‘I’m going to get a boat’ or ‘I want to explore Avatar Isle’ were, in essence, the quests I wrote for myself. I went to that world specifically to be able to make those kinds of choices; to write my own experience as an adventurer in that world. I decided what my role and level of impact in the world was.”

Snipehunter said that this is the experience MMO players want when they ask for control. “Hand written quests and hand authored raids and events are a huge boon for MMOs,” he concluded. “They allow the skills of good writers and good designers to be leveraged to provide heroic experiences you can’t get in an open, true virtual world.”

As it stands, players can take the initiative to set up events like this, but there are no in-game tools to support the crowd of players looking for a role-playing experience. Interactive storytelling is about involving the player in the process of creating and populating a world, and Snipehunter’s idea, albeit simple, is a very good start.

The Journey or the Destination: What Makes Games Art?

Published
on October 8, 2008
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“Too often we are so preoccupied with the destination, we forget the journey,” goes that age old and oft repeated aphorism, one that critics of the artistic potential of video games should consider.

Games have not yet been accepted into the zealously guarded enclave of artistic mediums, and many avid gamers, including myself and an industry insider pseudonymed Matthew Wasteland, want that to change.

Most people in the video game industry, and many people who write about them for a living, hope for games to be taken seriously as art or literature. It’s just around the corner, we believe— the day the establishment flings open the door to us and lets us in, apologetic tears streaming from their eyes. ‘We misjudged you,’ they’ll cry, ‘Just like we initially misjudged movies, jazz, and prose poetry.’

Matthew’s column on GameSetWatch does not feed these sentiments, but rather explains why video games have been dismissed by critics outside the industry. I disagree with Matthew’s position, but its a well-stated one that offers a good opportunity to address one of the most common criticisms of games as a medium.

In his column, Matthew explores the problems of a game based on Herman Melville’s classic Moby Dick. “No matter how much freedom the player was given to navigate the ocean in his own self-directed way,” writes Matthew, “the predetermined story of Captain Ahab’s obsession wins out, and at the end of the game, Moby Dick destroys the Pequod no matter what happened in the intervening time.”

Matthew’s argument is that the fixed outcome of Moby Dick is what makes it so powerful. To simply follow the linear plot that works for the book fails to take advantage of the interactive potential of games, says Matthew, but to implement interactivity and allow the player to change the ending would take away its power.

This puts us in a strange bind: we’re either imitative of, and beholden to, the arts that preceded us (“if you want a good story, why not read a book?”), or we are unmoored in a postmodern haze, trying to argue that a quantum superposition of many possible outcomes is just as artful as a linear story (“this painting is a work of art and self-expression— but it doesn’t matter if that part is red or blue or green”). Neither of these options is fully satisfying.

Roger Ebert raises this same criticism — that art requires authorial intent, and the guiding hand of the creator must take the viewer down a set path to a pre-established conclusion and lesson — but I don’t agree with it. The journey is what moves us in Moby Dick, and it has the power to do so with or without the climactic destination.

Moby Dick is not a powerful story because of the final destruction of Captain Ahab; it’s power lies in the whaler’s obsessive journey, which would have destroyed him whether it succeeded or not. Ahab’s character is what makes Moby Dick art because his humanity makes the story’s grand themes resonate with and inspire the reader.

A Moby Dick game, to use Matthew’s example, would let the player speak directly to Captain Ahab and personally define Ishmael’s relationship with the crew. Interactivity would allow a much more personal experience with the story, one that would retain the grace of artistic satisfaction whether or not it ended as Melville intended.

Building a game with the power of Moby Dick is not about setting up plot points and an ending for the character to follow as if they were reading a book. Making an artistic game requires constructing an open-ended journey for the player which will be powerful no matter how she ends it because of the human characters she meets along the way.

In addition to his position with an independent developer, Matthew is a columnist with Game Developer magazine and runs a blog called Magical Wasteland.

Make Game Difficulty Work For You

Published
on October 4, 2008
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Game designer Daniel Boutros looks at how to give games a challenging difficulty without frustrating the player in a feature on Gamasutra. The article, originally published in Game Developer magazine, establishes two tenants for how effective levels of difficulty.

  • A player must always feel like the failure of a challenge is entirely his own responsibility, and not a fault of a poorly designed product.
  • “The player must understand how and why he failed, so that he can learn from his mistake and increase the feeling of failure being his responsibility.

Boutros traces the traditional method for increasing difficulty to Rare’s shooter GoldenEye, where higher difficulty levels simply meant enemies do more damage. “In the tough mode,” says Boutros, “the game becomes very classically rooted in trial and error, using memory play as the core consistent play type. The only way a player can survive with meager resources and a damage disadvantage is by trying, dying, remembering, and restarting.”

In other words, play through and die until you’ve figured out where every sniper is, know which doors hide enemy ambushers, and know exactly where to point your rifle to take them all out. That’s not fun, and it does not create an immersive experience.

Increasing enemy damage or numbers, charging AI aggression, implementing a time limit, and restricting player resources like ammo or health are the simplest ways to increase difficulty, but the easiest solution is never the best. Rather than simply doubling enemy damage, Boutros argues that developers need to integrate these techniques thoughtfully and budget time for testing and fine-tuning them.

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The Archetypal Hero in Video Games

Published
on September 13, 2008
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All of human literature, fiction and myth can be reduced to two archetypal plots: a man goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town. These basic formula are even more true of role-playing games, where the story must leave room for a main character who is controlled and sometimes even created by an unpredictable player.

The interactive aspect is what set video games apart from other media. In a traditional story, authorial control over a character’s disposition and history is absolute. Games follow the same structures and conventions of plot.

The most significant impact of these binary plots on gameplay is a reduction in the degree of creativity the player can exert over the protagonist, especially that character’s past. The man who goes on a journey must come from somewhere defined by the game’s creator; the stranger who comes to town is liberated from an established history, transferring responsibility for creating history from author to player.

Man goes on a journey

Scholar Joseph Campbell wrote extensively on the hero’s journey, that fateful series of events that drew mythic and modern heroes like Odysseus, Conan the Barbarian, Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker to epic adventure. The journey begins with the hero’s call, sometimes refused, and the crossing of the threshold. Guided by mentors like Obi-Wan and Merlin, he overcomes a series of trials, receives a boon, and returns home with boon in hand.

Because they must have a home from which they set out, these characters often have pre-established backgrounds that fit into the plot. Link starts The Ocarina of Time as a normal kid in Kokiri Forest, and Crono’s mom wakes him up so he can cruise the Millennial Fair in Chrono Trigger. In games where the player can choose the hero’s race, gender, and appearance, he becomes an orphan (Jade Empire) or an amnesiac (Knights of the Old Republic).

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‘Fallout 3′ A Modern Flavor For the Cult Classic

Published
on July 27, 2008
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The upcoming Fallout 3 can’t be just like the decade old originals, so get over it. But Bethesda, who got rights to the game from worn-down original studio Interplay, looks like they’re doing a good job of adopting everything that made the originals so unforgettable and putting it in a next-generation title.

Some have made a rabble-rousing hubbub over changes to the design. A shift in perspective from isometric to first person or behind the head, unkillable children, and a reduction in party size from four to two have all drawn venomous ire from the franchise’s cult followers.

Fallout 3 definitely looks different than its predecessors, which were rendered in 2D sprites and came out about a decade ago. Even as a big fan of Fallout, I don’t mind the changes and am happy with the new game’s presentation so far.

Fallout 3's protagonist wanders a post-apocalyptic town.

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