Softcore Gamer http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/ Gaming news from outside the mainstream. en-us Copyright 2008 Tue, 26 Aug 2008 11:09:10 -0800 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification Untangling Braid: Puzzling Link. ]]> http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2008/08/untangling-braid-puzzling.html http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2008/08/untangling-braid-puzzling.html analysis classification design philosophies difficulty fun genre innovation learning level design motivation recommendation xpost Tue, 26 Aug 2008 11:09:10 -0800 Story is King ACM Siggraph conference in Los Angeles, and the first of several keynote talks that will be given this week. Ed Catmull, President of Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar, talked about managing creative environments. One of the key points he made early in his talk had to do with the wisdom he came upon early in his career: "The story is the most important part of a movie." This seemed like an important truth to have discovered, until he gave it a little more thought. Movies ARE stories, he realized. Saying that the story is the most important part of a movie isn't wisdom, it's a tautology.

Immediately after Catmull's keynote, I attended another very interesting session, a panel presentation about the production of the movie Kung-Fu Panda. One of the panelists who spoke about his experience on the film was the director, John Stevenson. While talking about production schedules and character design, he prefaced himself by saying that story is king. He said it in an offhand manner, as though it was so obvious that it barely rated mentioning. Story was the first thing and the last thing that they worried about, the most important consideration governing all aspects of the production from beginning to end.

Listening to these two men talk about their medium and share a perspective that relates moviemaking to storytelling in such a profoundly fundamental way, I couldn't help but think about the video game industry, where story is so often treated as an afterthought. Of course, games are not movies, as we well know. But, as a proponent of games as a storytelling medium, I have to ask myself: is story in games the same kind of tautology as story in movies? Or are the differences between the media such that story will always be something extra that must be added to a game in a fundamentally different way than to a movie?

Hearing Stevenson talk about the process of developing the movie's story at the same time as the character models, environments, and technologies was something of an eye-opening experience for me. When I think of movies, I usually think about a traditional live-action development pipeline where the script is written and pretty much set before filming begins. Modern CG animated movies, clearly, are a different beast. More than anything, this reminded me of a talk I saw given by Ken Levine last spring at GDC. At the time, I was shocked at the way he talked about the story in Bioshock evolving and changing in significant ways until very late in the production cycle, even within a couple months of the ship date. Bioshock, at the moment, is one of the industry's most important examples of story in games, so the fact that the game was not built around an already-fully-developed story was somewhat disconcerting to me. Thinking about it in relation to Kung-Fu Panda, however, makes it seem more reasonable. In both of these media, this sort of process occurs because it can: unlike actors and live-action footage, digital models, environments, and technologies can be re-scripted and reimplemented as the scene evolves and changes. In the blockbuster environment in which Dreamworks and 2K operate, overlapping the writing and production is cheaper than having a distinct writing stage. It also allows the writing to be integrated into the iterative design process, which is something I hadn't considered before, but could be an important point in developing interactive media.

Don't look for any real in-depth analysis of these ideas here; I'm still in conference mode and my brain is stuck in an intake-cycle. But I'm eager to hear any thoughts you have to contribute to this conversation, if anyone is interested in taking these ideas further. ]]> http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2008/08/story-is-king.html http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2008/08/story-is-king.html cinema industry story in games writing xpost Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:42:29 -0800 Negligence
I haven't been writing because I've been busy working on other projects, including a number of interesting games that are now in various stages of the development process. Hopefully I will be talking about some of them in greater detail soon, although I'm well aware of my track record when it comes to making promises about future posts.

I do plan to pick up on the writing schedule here on Softcore Gamer, though. Among other things, I am beginning classes at USC in a couple weeks and I have been given a new blog over at the Interactive Media Division. For the time being, I plan on cross-posting relevant content on both blogs, but regardless of how things shape up I will continue to post here on an extremely irregular schedule, just as you're used to.

In sadly related news, I've heard nothing out of HardCasual in quite a while. Hopefully those guys are going through a similar period of productive non-writing and will eventually return, because I really enjoyed their take on game culture and the industry.
]]> http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2008/08/negligence.html http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2008/08/negligence.html link metapost projects school Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:25:13 -0800 Just Links
  • An animated (in Yahtzee-esque fashion) video about sexual content in games, or rather, the lack thereof. The argument, which is basically the same one I would make, is that the seeming inability of game developers to incorporate sexual themes in a mature and artistic manner is detrimental to the medium. Honestly, there's nothing here that I found groundbreaking, but Daniel Floyd does a great job of summing up the issues in a clear and entertaining way.
  • A fantastic post by Emily Short about the structure and process of writing IF by breaking a story down into scenes of distinct types and intents. If you have any interest in interactive fiction, as I increasingly do, this is definitely worth a read.
  • A very funny post by Leigh Alexander that lays out what Hillary Clinton needs to do if she still wants to win the nomination. (Hint: Agents are go.)

Hope you enjoy those links; sorry there's not more by way of analysis here. I just needed to break back into writing a little bit, because it's been so long. Hopefully the first Photopia post will be coming shortly.

]]> http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2008/05/just-links.html http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2008/05/just-links.html design humor interactive fiction link metapost process sex structure writing Wed, 28 May 2008 09:49:24 -0800 And How Does That Make You Feel? top ten video game emotions jumped out at me. It's over at Only a Game, and it's based on a survey of around a thousand gamers. The results are interesting, plus I learned a couple great new words: fiero, the sense of triumph over adversity, and naches, the feeling of pride in the accomplishments of a student. A cursory analysis of the survey data seems to suggest that casual gaming is big; a feeling of triumph is great, but softer emotions like curiosity and amusement are even bigger.

I'm also pleased to have seen this because I was unfamiliar with Only a Game. But scanning through their archives, it seems they've worked on some very interesting things.

I'll give you the basic run-down here; for an actual analysis of these results, check out the original article.

10. Bliss
09. Relief
08. Naches
07. Surprise
06. Fiero
05. Curiosity
04. Excitement
03. Wonderment
02. Contentment
01. Amusement

And the emotions at the bottom of the list were

20. Sadness
21. Guilt
22. Embarrassment

I have a couple problems with this study, although I'm thrilled so see research being done in this area. My major concern is that the survey's scale seems to conflate two distinct ideas: the effectiveness of emotions in games and the desireability of emotions in games. There is no room on the scale to describe, for example, an emotion that I would like to feel, and which I actively seek out in games, but which is not effectively presented. I'd also like to see a better breakdown of what emotions players recognize as being present in the games they play, independent of their effectiveness. Do the respondents mean to say that they don't like feeling sad, or that games are bad at making them feel sad?

The author notes that this is only a preliminary study. There's an enormous amount of potential here; quite honestly, this article leaves me with more questions than answers. I'd love to see a follow-up that addresses trends within demographics and even within individuals - do the same people who seek out fiero also seek out curiosity, or do these emotions represent two different types of gamer, the acheiver and the explorer? How does a person's reaction to negative emotions in games relate to their reaction to similar emotions in other media - do people who enjoy tearjerker movies also seek out sadness in games? I'm also curious about how these players go about seeking out their emotions of choice, and where they find them. Which genres, and which games specifically, give them the emotional high they're looking for?

Very promising research. I'm hoping to see a lot more of this sort of thing in the future. ]]> http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2008/04/and-how-does-that-make-you-fee.html http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2008/04/and-how-does-that-make-you-fee.html analysis classification emotion motivation statistics Mon, 14 Apr 2008 09:32:37 -0800 In All Seriousness colossus.pngI've been having some serious trouble formulating a response to this post over at HardCasual. A couple days ago they called out me and the rest of the blogosphere for the way we've handled You Have to Burn the Rope. HardCasual's point is that YHTBTR is a "smart" game, like Passage, and that games journalists are making it out to be merely "clever," by which they seem to mean "good only for a cheap laugh." I've been reading HardCasual for a couple weeks now, and I like it a lot, but something about this rubbed me the wrong way. I do agree, though, that YHTBTR is worth a bit of deeper analysis.

Aside from being funny, what, exactly, is YHTBTR saying? It's an almost perfect example of a classic action-adventure puzzle of the sort you might find in a Zelda game. It's simple, but its simplicity shouldn't be overestimated. Under normal circumstances, a player would naturally spend a couple minutes jumping around bullets and throwing axes before he or she figured out how to beat the Grinning Colossus. The point, of course, is that these aren't normal circumstances, and the game takes every available opportunity to point out the solution to the puzzle ahead of time. Knowing the solution removes all - well, almost all; there's still some platforming that requires twitch-play - the challenge from the game.

What's interesting to me is what that leaves you with: this super-simple, ultra-short, minimally challenging game is a perfect test case for an experiment about the relationship between difficulty, accomplishment, and fun. I've played YHTBTR a dozen times now, despite the fact that there is very little reason to do so. One play-through is almost exactly like another; it's impossible to lose, and no significant way to win with style. There's no emotional build, and likewise no significant narrative arc. The credits song is catchy, but I've already got it as an MP3, so that isn't a great motivator. The only good incentive, as far as I can make it out, is an emotional burst associated with winning, even in the absence of a challenge.

Possibly I'm reading my own reaction all wrong. It's conceivable that the real attractor to this game is the relatively high production value. Certainly, YHTBTR is well polished. Its graphics are solid, its interface is very well designed, and its self-aware sense of irony is downright charming. But it seems to me that there is something about burning that rope; maybe not a feeling of accomplishment, exactly, but a sense of satisfaction, or at least completion, that provides some sort of positive reinforcement. Something which indicates that - or rather, reinforces my belief that - at least for some gamers, myself included, a game can impart a sense of joy that is unrelated to its difficulty.

Is this what Kian Bashiri was trying to way with his game? I don't know; maybe not. It's what I got out of the game. If you're interested in the author's intentions, there's an interview with him over at IndieGames that's worth checking out.

The problem I have with HardCasual on this issue, aside from the pretentious tone that they adopted and the fact that they seemed to spend more energy complaining about the blogosphere's reaction to the game than on their own analysis of it, is that the production of FAQ files and video walkthroughs is not counterproductive to the message of YHTBTR. In fact, from my perspective, it's an excellent demonstration of the game's lesson. Creating elaborate guides for this game simply reinforces the central point that the puzzle is not a significant challenge, and doing it with the evident joy expressed on blogs like Rock, Paper, Shotgun or my own supports the thesis that a game without a significant challenge can still be fun. I think the fact that these fan-creations were so quickly aggregated on the YHTBTR homepage is further evidence that, far from detracting from the game, these artifacts are very much in keeping with what the game is trying to accomplish. ]]> http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2008/04/in-all-seriousness.html http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2008/04/in-all-seriousness.html absurdity analysis controversy design philosophies difficulty emotion failure fun genre humor learning linearity link motivation music narrative experience response user interface Fri, 11 Apr 2008 22:39:54 -0800 YHTBTR: A Meditation on Game Difficulty colossus.pngI woke up this morning and checked Rock, Paper, Shotgun to find this gem of a flash game. It's pretty short, although the difficulty is not what you would expect for this kind of thing. In fact, it's so extreme that you can't help but feel that the designer is making a larger comment on the difficulty of games in general, or perhaps the role of difficulty as an element of a game's design. Regardless, the game is enough of a conceptual treat that I'd recommend you give it a try so that you can see what it's about, even if you don't finish it. And for those of you who stick it out to the end, the credits song is the best thing since Still Alive.

(If you want to get to the end but are having trouble, there are several resources available. Check out the official game manual first, and then IndieFAQs has a walkthrough and RPS has a puzzle guide. There's also a video walkthrough on YouTube.)
]]> http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2008/04/yhtbtr-a-meditation-on-game-di.html http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2008/04/yhtbtr-a-meditation-on-game-di.html absurdity difficulty humor Sat, 05 Apr 2008 09:22:18 -0800 Photopia: A Recommendation [Spoiler-Free!] text.pngAlright, usually I have no compunctions about spoiling a game when I attempt to dissect, analyze, or even just comment on it. Especially if the game, like Photopia, is ten years old. But this situation is different, because I know there are people out there who don't get as much vitamin IF as they should, and because the game in question is so overwhelmingly about narrative experience that spoilers would ruin it completely. That said, Adam Cadre's Photopia does touch on a number of themes that I'd like to talk about in greater depth. Which makes for a dilemma.

So here's what I'm going to do: today, I'm going to recommend that you go play Photopia. If that's not enough to make you actually do it, then let me mention that the game comes well recommended. It won the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition and has recently been favorably reviewed by both Play This Thing! and Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Go ahead and read those reviews if you need convincing, they won't spoil anything either.

Photopia is interactive fiction, light on the interactive. The story is extremely linear, and although it does contain a couple puzzles, they're simple and pretty straightforward. There should be little of the adventure-game-style frustration that often accompanies this kind of game, although it is text-based so you will have to work with a parser. The other thing I'll say about it is that it's only about forty-five minutes long, and it's worthwhile to find yourself a little block of time to play through the whole thing. I played it over the course of two days, and I wish now that the experience had been uninterrupted. Oh, and also, I want to repeat RPS's advice: when the time comes, for God's sake, talk to Alley about astrophysics.

After you've had a chance to play the game, I'll talk some more about the specific things it sparked for me. So here's your warning: sometime in the future, subsequent entries on this blog will contain Photopia spoilers. And you will be much better off, as a reader of this blog and as a human being, if you've played the game before that time comes. You have been warned!

ETA: PTT! has links to the game and relevant interpreters, so go there for the download.
]]> http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2008/04/photopia-a-recommendation-spoi.html http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2008/04/photopia-a-recommendation-spoi.html difficulty emotion interactive fiction interactivity linearity metapost narrative experience recommendation story in games text user interface Wed, 02 Apr 2008 11:27:57 -0800 Happy First of April! live-action-zelda.pngHappy April Fools' Day, everyone. A funny thing happened to me today: I got a letter informing me of my acceptance into the Interactive Media grad school program at USC's School for Cinematic Arts. I was introduced to the program by Jamie last summer and worked hard to put together what I felt was a strong application at the end of last year, so I'm both relieved and excited to get this news. I think this program is an excellent fit for me and exactly what I want to spend the next three years doing. I'm also nervous as hell because going back to school will mean completely changing my life around. This is not a bad thing in itself - from the right perspective, it's a very good thing - but change is always scary.

I do want to point out the comedically bad timing on the part of the Cinematic Arts Admissions Committee. Sending out acceptance letters on April Fools' Day? That's a good way to cause a lot of nervous breakdowns. Er, did that come off as unappreciative? Sorry. Please don't send me another letter on April 2nd taking it all back. Thanks!

Seriously, though, we've been conditioned not to believe anything we read on April Fools' Day - especially those of us who are connected to the tech industry and get our news from the Internet. Most of our trusted news sources and the iconic companies they report on have a history of prankishness that comes out this time of year. I like the way John Murrell put in today's Good Morning Silicon Valley: "...maybe we need a day like this each year. Thanksgiving reminds us to be grateful; April Fools’ reminds us to be skeptical. Both qualities are helpful year-round." In case you missed them, there were a couple great April Fools' Day gags today. My favorites included IGN's exclusive trailer for a live-action Legend of Zelda movie (which clearly represents a great deal of effort for a joke and, frankly, makes me wish it wasn't April first; this movie would be terrible but I would probably go totally crazy and I would definitely stand in line for it on opening night); the trailer for Blizzard's new cutting-edge version of WoW, Molten Core; and ThinkGeek's revolutionary Betamax to HD-DVD converter.

Have a happy April and stay skeptical! ]]> http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2008/04/happy-first-of-april.html http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2008/04/happy-first-of-april.html fanboyism fun humor industry link marketing school Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:51:10 -0800 Scribblathon
Unless you're talking to Tim Schafer, in which case what you get is brain candy.

To be fair, the reason that Schafer's article takes off where the others in the series fall flat has less to do with Schafer than Ludwig Kietzmann, the author of the feature. What makes Schafer's response so much fun is that he actually tries to engage with the question as though it were a game. Ron Gilbert did exactly the same thing, albeit in not quite so playful a way, in the first part of the series, but Kietzmann refused to give him any traction. Essentially, when Gilbert played, the "GDC Quest Quiz" challenge wasn't a game, because it wasn't interactive in any sort of meaningful way. When Schafer played, it was. And it turns out, games are fun. ]]> http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2008/03/scribblathon.html http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2008/03/scribblathon.html alpha fun industry interactive fiction interactivity link structure text Sun, 09 Mar 2008 12:31:08 -0800 The Joy of Text text.pngThis post started out as a review of The Baron and I had enormous difficulty writing it, for two reasons. First, because The Baron is a deeply complex game with many interesting features and powerful thematic elements that I did not want to spoil. And second, because reviewing games is not really what I'm interested in doing here. So instead of reviewing The Baron I will simply say, "The Baron is a deeply complex game with many interesting features and powerful thematic elements; you should play it," and then address a couple interesting points about interactive fiction.

I am not an expert on interactive fiction. Honestly, although I'm a fan, I have pretty limited experience. I only played a few pieces of IF last year, and of those the only one that provoked the same sort of contemplation as The Baron is Floatpoint. In these two pieces, however, I'm impressed at how well an in medias res approach to storytelling works. In each piece, the player is dropped unceremoniously into a complex and unfamiliar situation. In each, the first order of business is an exploration of the narrative space to answer some fundamental questions: Who am I? Where am I? What is my relationship to this place and to these people? What is my role in the world, and what is my goal? These elements of the story are authored, not left up to the player, but they have to be discovered or inferred by investigation of the game world. Certainly, this is not an approach common to all IF games; nor is it something that is likely to appeal to all players, although I love it when it is done as well as it is in these games. It seems a technique that is much less common in mainstream games, however, and although that may have something to do with the fact that IF is already a niche genre and therefore attracts more niche styles-of-play, I think that text-based games lend themselves more to this sort of technique.

Graphical systems, by their nature, are capable of conveying much more information at a glance than text-based systems. In games, this functionality is largely devoted to representation of space. In the typical 2D or 3D game, at any given time the majority of the player's screen will be filled with some sort of view of the world. Because of the visual nature of this representation, almost all information about the player character's environment is conveyed implicitly. In a 3D game, the player may have to swing the camera around to see things from a different angle, but he or she doesn't have to make an express effort to get an understanding (at least, a basic or superficial understanding) of the composition of the space surrounding the character. In contrast, the explicit exploration of space is one of the common processes by which a player interacts with a text-based system. In order to come to an understanding of environment, the player does have to make this sort of express effort to investigate elements of the scene. At the beginning of The Baron, for example, a basic look command will inform the player that the room contains a table. It's necessary to examine the table to discover that a framed photograph rests on it; it's further necessary to examine the photograph to find out what it depicts. This sort of interaction is not at all unreasonable in a text-based system, but no analogue occurs in a graphical system where the table and photograph are apparent in a cursory inspection.

It seems to me that this sort of spacial exploration runs nicely parallel to the narrative exploration that in medias res storytelling demands. In fact, in many cases the character and general backstory can be folded into the description of space and significant objects (including non-player characters) in the environment. In the case of the photograph on the table, examining the picture could trigger a memory or some other description that relates the character to the world. (This technique is used in The Baron, although not at this particular moment; I believe this sort of "folded-in" discovery is also employed in Floatpoint, along with more explicit exposition.) This makes the process of narrative exploration much more natural - or, at least, piggy-backs it onto a more natural process - to mitigate player confusion and frustration. In our graphical analogue, the player has no reason to explicitly examine the picture, since it is already visible, and therefore there is no place for secondary information to be accessed intuitively.

This idea of exploration is particularly interesting in The Baron because of the cyclical nature of the game. On the first pass, the player is exploring the physical space and the narrative space, trying to come to an understanding of the environment and the character. Subsequent passes are devoted to exploring the possibility space of user interaction, trying different actions and seeing what the consequences are; because of the cyclical set-up and the thematic focus on motivated action, this sort of exploration of possible actions becomes a central game mechanic over the course of multiple plays-through of the game. Using the process of choosing an action as a game mechanic in this way is another area where I believe the text-based interaction of IF has an advantage over graphical games.

The set of valid options may be just as limited as with a graphical interface, but the set of potentially valid options is larger. Usually, in a graphical interface, there will be a limited number of points of interaction (places to click, for example) and a limited number of types of interaction (items to use, for example). The set of potentially valid options is a combination of interaction types and points. This set may be very large, which could make finding a valid option non-trivial, but it is clearly finite and, moreover, can be easily enumerated. The set of potentially valid options in a text-input interface includes any imperative phrase the player can think of. Even if, depending on the sophistication of the game's text-processing system, this set is severely restricted by practical considerations, it is still usually much harder to enumerate than its graphical counterpart. (Technically, it is just as enumerable, but for the player - who usually doesn't know the extent of the set of valid commands - it is harder to process.) This can makes the player feel like he or she has unlimited options - at least until it becomes apparent the fact that a subset of the potentially valid options will not be understood by the system. This, unfortunately, is another inherent quality of text-based interaction, and I would say it is the major drawback and the reason that text-based games has fallen so far out of favor. And perhaps minimizing that particular player frustration is a reason to avoid text as an interface mechanism, but games like The Baron both prove that great experiences can come out of a text interface and remind us of some of the things we sacrifice when we make graphical games. ]]> http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2008/01/the-joy-of-text.html http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2008/01/the-joy-of-text.html choice design philosophies genre in medias res interactive fiction motivation narrative context pc possibility space response review story in games text user interface Wed, 23 Jan 2008 21:54:34 -0800 Happy New Year jenga.pngHappy new year, everyone! I've been on vacation for the past couple weeks, but now I'm back in L.A., trying to overcome this holiday inertia. And you know what that means: obligatory end-of-the-year post! Er, admittedly, a couple weeks late. Nonetheless! With a little prompting from Ethan Kennerly, I'm going to run down the list of favorite moments from gaming in 2007.

10. Super Mario Galaxy - I lent my Wii to a friend for the end of the year, so the only Mario Galaxy I got to play was an extended romp following Thanksgiving dinner at Jamie's. I'm not sure that I'm ready to accept the proposition that it's as much fun as Mario 64 was, but it is fun. Long-jumping off of a platform and into orbit around it is one of the more satisfying things I've ever done in a game. But that isn't why Mario Galaxy gets a favorite-moment mention. I love collective play - when many people connect with each other over the shared experience of a game as it's being played - but I don't get nearly enough opportunities to play games in the environment you need to achieve it. The night I played Mario Galaxy, however, I was playing with a room full of happy, friendly, and turkey-stuffed people sharing the experience. A collective intake of breath accompanied every near-suicide as I attempted to navigate the Sweet Sweet Galaxy, and only by our collective force of will, and Jamie's cat-like reflexes as my P2, did Mario clear that last platform to safety. I think it was one of the few times this year that I got to feel the sublime sensation of shared play; certainly it was one of the most fun.

9. Bioshock - I still haven't played enough of Bioshock to give it a proper review, but I've played more of it than I had when I reviewed it the first time. And I have to admit, there's a lot to like about this game. It deserves a spot on this list just for the absolutely stellar atmosphere and environmental design. As for a favorite moment, well, on several occasions through the game I've experienced a quiet awe as, after clearing an area of zombie-like Splicers, I had a chance to walk around and take it all in. Perhaps my favorite such instance occurs before Splicers even enter the picture when, upon entering the lighthouse at the start of the game, I found a space somehow cavernous and claustrophobic, beautifully and lovingly and richly decorated, yet disquietingly empty. The air was filled by that haunting music, and I felt like I was looking in on something that had once been grand, and was forsaken.

8. Trauma Center: Second Opinion - I don't know why I love Trauma Center the way I do - it's much too hard for me, and that usually turns me off right out of the gate. But there's something entrancing about it, especially at the early levels, when I know that I can succeed as long as I don't screw up, and that knowledge makes me work furiously to finish before the patient flatlines. My favorite moment comes when Derek shouts, in one of the only bits of voice acting in the whole game, "I will save this patient!" It's cheesy, maybe, but the character's frank determination is infectious. And it's refreshing to play a game where success involves saving lives, rather than taking them.

7. Sam & Max: Season One - I was vaguely aware of Sam & Max, as a franchise and as a modern episodic game, before I picked up Season One this summer. I didn't realize that I would get quite such a kick out of it. After too long, this was my return to adventure gaming, and it was easy to remember why I loved the genre. The games are witty and clever but simple; the lack of complex or abstract puzzles puts the focus squarely on the story, which is fun and funny and nicely compact. Playing six 2 to 3 hour games made me realize that, while marathon games like Oblivion have their place, short games can be an incredible joy. My favorite moment was getting thrown into an old-school text adventure in the episode Reality 2.0. I'm just that much of a geek.

6. The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass - You may remember that I was a little skeptical about Phantom Hourglass in the days leading up to its release. Drawing a path for your boomerang would be cool, no questions asked, but the whole concept of drawing on your map seemed a little gimmicky to me, and I was afraid it would bring down the whole game. Boy, was I mistaken. Phantom Hourglass is fun, although due to the onslaught of games this holiday season I haven't gotten to play as much as I'd have liked, but my favorite part by far was the dawning realization that I had seriously underestimated how developers could use that little gimmick to add innovation and depth to the play mechanics. For as many times as I've talked about data as content and information as currency, I had to play the game to understand how well treating information as a prize could work.

5. Once Upon a Time - I played Once Upon a Time for the first time during the week after Christmas, with my sister, while we were snowed in up in the mountains. I was extremely pleased to see how simple the game is, and how much fun it was to play. It falls into an odd and delightful cooperative-competitive category, where each player is ostensibly trying to win in a zero-sum fashion, but really everybody's goal is just to keep the story going. My favorite moment was when Captain Bart, the king-cum-pirate, instructed his lover to poison the kindly old woman who had cooked them nothing but potatoes every day. That's the kind of plot twist you just don't see in many of your commercial games.

4. Elite Beat Agents - Rhythm games have always held a strange appeal to me. I'm terrible at them, which is what makes it so strange. Also, I tend to get bored relatively quickly. I have a Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix mat gathering dust from the brief period when I was bursting with excitement about that game. Ditto the bongos from Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. In fact, the only rhythm game that has stayed consistently fun since the time I got it is Guitar Hero II, which I guess is what I love so much about Guitar Hero. I got tired of Elite Beat Agents pretty quickly, too, but damn was that game fantastic while I was playing it. I absolutely love the idea of people being able to overcome any problem with a little luck, perseverance, and the support of a team of snazzy male cheerleaders dancing to pop hits. The wonderful, cheery absurdity of the story was like, well, music to me. Favorite moment: Cheering on a parrot in a scuba helmet to the tune of Y.M.C.A. Also, the phrase "Agents are GO!"

3. Mass Effect - Mass Effect was, by far, my most anticipated game of the year. And it lived up to it's promise as a worthy successor to Knights of the Old Republic, which is one of my favorite games of all time. Certainly, the game isn't perfect, but most of its problems boil down to the fact that some of the secondary systems aren't as well designed or polished as the rest of the game. In other words, it's important to continually stress how not-perfect the game is because it's really so damn good. As with KOTOR before it, I'm partial to the romantic subplot in Mass Effect. I guess that my favorite moment of the game was when I ultimately turned down Kaiden's advances in favor of pursuing Liara. I'm used to any romance in a game like this being linear, if optional. Having to make a choice, and follow through with it by explicitly rejecting a character that I had rather gotten to like over the course of the game, was emotionally potent, especially because the characters and situations were so well presented.

2. The Baron - The Baron deserves a proper review, and I'm still planning to give it one eventually. For anyone who isn't familiar with it, this is a work of interactive fiction that I found through the Play This Thing! blog last summer. It's a cyclical game, meant to be played more than once, and on the first play-through it's a good example of what the form brings to the table. The game is structured as a short series of encounters, where the overall organization is almost entirely linear, but there are many ways to navigate each individual encounter. The text interface makes me feel more of a sense of freedom in my interaction with the world, and it's worth playing the game just to remember what we lose by using graphical interface systems. There's a moment of realization at the end of the game, however, that imbues the whole experience with an additional layer of meaning. Maybe because I didn't really see it coming, or maybe because of the subject matter of the game, this was one of the most powerful moments I've ever experienced in gaming.

1. Portal - Come on, what's not to love about Portal? I can't even count all the favorite moments that came out of this game: perfecting the double-fling, discovering the graffito-ridden back rooms, Jonathan Coulton's song, reading the history of Aperture Science on aperturescience.com, the cake... Clearly I'm obsessed, but Portal is in many ways a masterpiece of a game. If I have to pick just one favorite moment, though, it's the line, "There was even going to be a party for you. A big party that all your friends were invited to. I invited your best friend the companion cube. Of course, he couldn't come because you murdered him."

]]> http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2008/01/happy-new-year.html http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2008/01/happy-new-year.html choice difficulty ds emotion episodic games favorite moments fun hands-on games holiday season humor information as currency innovation level design linearity retrospective rhythm games shared play user interface wii xbox 360 Sun, 13 Jan 2008 10:22:19 -0800 Up for Air cache.pngThis time of year is always busy, but this year has been especially busy for me. This is the first chance I've had in a long while to come up for air and leave a post on the blog while I'm here. Other projects have kept me from updating for the past several weeks, which is a shame mostly because I left a lot of interesting comments hanging on the previous entry. Certainly there is a lot to be said on the relationship between games and movies, and it's a topic that I hope to revisit in the near future.

For the moment, let me share with you a bit of what I've been working on lately. Here's the Cache website, which is intended to be the public face of a series of projects that Jamie and I are currently working on, all related back to one key idea: creating narrative through a process of discovery rather than role-playing. The first such project, titled CONTROL, is currently in a beta stage and can be downloaded from the website.

CONTROL is based on a card game created by Jamie and Mike Rossmassler. There are 256 cards, laid out in sixteen four-by-four grids. Each card in the grid represents a space; each of the sixteen sequential pages represents a fifteen-second span of time. The player chooses a card and reads it: it describes the space during that time. The player chooses more cards, or turns the page in order to increment or decrement time. After a few such moves, the player selects one card out of his or her hand to set aside; the others are returned. After sixteen turns, the player has build up an inventory (a cache, if you will) of sixteen carefully-selected cards which tell a story.

This story represents the creative aspect of the game. Although the player doesn't create, or even influence, what is written on any of these cards, they get to choose which ones to include and which to ignore, and how they should be assembled. The results can be surprisingly unpredictable. Some players are documentarians; others take artistic license with their stories. Once the game is completed, the story remains, an artifact of the experience.

We're looking for feedback from playtesters so that we can continue to improve CONTROL and the other games that will follow. You can help by downloading and playing the beta version and filling out our survey. Any feedback is appreciated! This is an experimental game, so we're trying to push boundaries, but ultimately we're trying to figure out how to make it fun, as well.

Special note to people who have already played an earlier version of CONTROL: There were a couple versions that saw closed beta testing. One was the original paper prototype that Jamie and Mike put together. Another was an early digital version that suffered from a massive memory leak. If you played one of these versions, I encourage you to at least register your email address at the Cache website. The memory leak has been fixed, and the most recent version added in a much-requested feature that was missing from the original release. We will continue to update the game with features, based on feedback and our own wishlist, and we'll notify you occasionally when a new version goes live.
]]> http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2007/12/up-for-air.html http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2007/12/up-for-air.html agency cache coming soon link marketing playtest projects story in games Wed, 12 Dec 2007 14:57:43 -0800 Games Rock jacks.pngLast week, RJ Layton posted a scathing editorial on the relationship between movies and games - not about the generally terrible results of making movies based on games or games based on movies, but rather about the use of cut-scenes, full-motion video, and non-interactive segments in game design, as well as the apparent cinephilic mentality of game designers. The post has already generated quite a bit of discussion: a response from Jamie Antonisse, a follow-up in which RJ speaks to a specific example of this phenomenon, and my own bizarre romp through rhetorical fallacy. As entertaining as it was to draw analogies to body image and substance abuse into the conversation, I feel like I have more serious things to add. A lot of them, actually, and maybe I'll get to some more of them eventually, but today I'm going to concentrate on one important point: emotion.

RJ and Jamie both bring up emotion, its role in storytelling, and its devilishly cinematic associations. I'd like to focus a little more closely on this complex relationship between emotion, film, and games. RJ seems to be of the opinion that a game which focuses on story and emotion, or at least one that markets itself around those terms, is likely to have hold cinematic qualities in esteem; in his words, "controllers with no player holding them, some pretty music, and a close-up of the a character’s face." Which isn't to say that games are devoid of admirable content with emotional significance. RJ illustrates this point with exemplars like the sense of triumph that comes with beating Punch-Out!! or the sense of pride that comes with managing urban growth in SimCity. Jamie echoes this by describing sadness and bemusement as "filmic" emotions, which are better expressed in movies than games, in contrast to other emotions like triumph and frustration, which are better expressed in games than movies.

I think, as far as the exploration of emotion in games goes, Jamie strikes gold with this point, but he doesn't delve as far into it as I'd like. I would similarly organize emotions around two categories, passive (or filmic) and agency-based. Passive emotions are a response to some external stimulus. Agency-based emotions, alternatively, are a response to first-party actions. Passive emotions cover a broad range and include simple emotions like joy, sorrow, and horror; relational emotions like love and jealousy are more complex passive emotions. Agency-based emotions include triumph, remorse, and pride. These emotions imply a previous action on the part of the person experiencing the emotion.

In crafting a narrative experience, cinema can utilize the whole extensive range of passive emotions. It's no surprise that movies have become adept at using these emotions to tell stories. After all, storytelling in film - or at least the contemporary incarnation of the medium - is based entirely around building emotion to a cathartic point. But no matter how a movie presents its story, it is still an instance of a passive medium, and as such it's limited by the distinction between emotions. The narrative of the film has no direct access to any of the agency-based emotions.

Let me stay on this for just a moment, because even though it follows logically, I think it might be a controversial point. Jamie mentions, in his post, feeling a sense of triumph in the movie Return of the King. I'm making the claim that a movie cannot make the audience feel triumph, because the feeling of triumph implies an action - specifically, a successful attempt at overcoming an obstacle - as the basis for the emotion. A movie cannot truly inspire an agency-based emotion, but it can use character identification to simulate it. Return of the King, like any good movie, makes the audience identify with one or more characters as, through the course of the story, the characters experience emotions. In this case, the character portrayed in the movie makes a successful attempt to overcome an obstacle, and experiences triumph in response to this action. The audience, if they are identifying with the character, does not feel triumph directly but does feel joy in sympathy with the character's triumph.

Identification is a device that the film industry uses - very effectively - to trick the audience into thinking they are experiencing an agency-based emotion. But in every case, the audience's feeling is once-removed from the emotion in question. The absolute best that a movie can hope for is that the audience becomes so deeply immersed in the film and sympathizes so deeply with a character that they literally forget that they are removed from the action on-screen. If this ever happens, it is exceedingly rare; and if it were to happen, it would involve some sort of hypnosis or delusional psychosis or other strange psychology that I'm not comfortable with. The point is that, in any reasonable example, the experience of a sympathetic response isn't the same as the actual emotion on which it's based.

Access to a complete range of emotions is one of the greatest advantages games, as a medium, have over cinema. Games can inspire any of the passive emotions that movies do by telling a story in a traditional, cinematic sort of fashion. But games have an extended emotional repertoire, and some of the agency-based emotions that are exclusive to the medium pack a serious punch. Triumph, as has been frequently mentioned, is common in games. Shame is used in Guitar Hero through the boos and jeers of the audience before the player fails a song. Honor and remorse are employed by Bioshock in its touted rescue/harvest mechanic. Humility is a component of the excellent work of interactive fiction, The Baron (on which I will spend more time in the future). Frustration is part of the emotional range of any of the multitude of games that are purposefully difficult.

My personal favorite example of agency-based emotion, because it effected me so strongly when I experienced it, is the use of regret and self-loathing in KOTOR, when the player feels compelled by his or her allegiance to the dark side to betray two of the protagonist's companions. This experience demonstrated to me that the power of effectively-used agency-based emotions can absolutely dwarf that of passive emotions. At the moment, the video game industry has not matured to the point that these emotions are being used to their full potential. But story in games is being continually explored and expanded, both by independent game designers and mainstream games. The effect that interactivity has on emotion will be developed and refined until games regularly deliver the same level of emotional narrative that cinema is used to. At which point, the ability to tap directly into the full set of agency-based emotions will give interactive media greater affective power than passive media has ever had. ]]> http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2007/11/games-rock.html http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2007/11/games-rock.html agency cinema classification controversy emotion narrative experience response state of the industry story in games Thu, 08 Nov 2007 23:19:17 -0800 Here's to the Reinvention of Genres mario64.png1UP has posted a glowing preview of Super Mario Galaxy, due out this month on the Wii. As 1UP points out, the esteemed Mario saga is credited with inventing the platforming genre with the original Super Mario Bros, and then reinventing it with Super Mario 64. They claim the newest game reinvents the genre yet again. Early buzz has been overwhelmingly positive, but this article makes the first mention I've seen that Galaxy may be Game of the Year material. In a year that includes the breathtaking - albeit over-hyped - Bioshock, the beloved - what else? - Portal, and the mind-blowingly fantastic - oh please oh please - Mass Effect, that's saying a lot, and it's also great news for Mario fans. I've been looking forward to the game for a while, despite the fact that, well, it's a platformer.

Still, as much as I rail against the platforming genre, I absolutely loved Mario 64. How much of that was the novelty of exploring 3D space in a new sort of way? Some of it, certainly - but not all of it, because even today I can play the game and thrill at the experience. It's just a marvelously well-put-together game, and I have fun playing it despite all the jumping around on platforms it asks me to do. So, will Super Mario Galaxy live up to this precedent? I'd hardly dared hope, but with advance reviews as encouraging as this one, it's starting to look like a real possibility. ]]> http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2007/11/heres-to-the-reinvention-of-ge.html http://softcore-gamer.com/blog/2007/11/heres-to-the-reinvention-of-ge.html genre link nintendo wii Thu, 01 Nov 2007 09:46:08 -0800