Results tagged “innovation” from Softcore Gamer

Brenda Braithwaite posted a very eloquent eulogy for the text parser as a method by which players can interact with games.

I am regrettably forced to announce the death of the text parser. It is a death that I suffer with great sadness and fond memories of its life. I am not sure exactly when it died.

It's really very nicely written, so you ought to visit her site and read the whole thing. I started to write a reply in the comments under her post, but it turns out I have a lot to say on the subject, so I moved it here. For anyone interested, here is my response:

I can't help but wonder what brought on this sudden funereal outburst. Did something happen that causes you to suddenly toll the death knell for text-based games? I'm especially curious because it seems a bit premature - or, at least, somewhat misleading.

All your points stand, and you have presented them beautifully. Text parsing was once the dominant modes of player interaction - at least within certain genres - and now it is not. I do not expect it will ever reclaim that position. The modes that replaced it are, frankly, more evolved. They are better suited to the things that are typically demanded of a user interface, and more accessible to a wider audience. These facts are unlikely to change.

But I hope you're willing to recognize that there is more to gaming than the mainstream. The fact is, today there is a vibrant community of text-based game designers producing interactive fiction. It's not mainstream, but that hardly makes it irrelevant. Modern IF frequently pushes against boundaries that most designers ignore: emotion and conversation models, narrative voice, dynamic plot, emotional agency. Games like Galatea, Photopia, Floatpoint, The Baron, Violet - these are games that all aspiring designers should play, not because they represent the dominant form, but because they demonstrate mechanics and techniques that are commonly absent from the traditional corpus.

I would argue, although this comes down to little more than guessing at future trends, that IF has the potential to be relevant outside the relatively small circle of designers and design-enthusiasts, as well. The audience for games is expanding, and I believe that when all is said and done, it won't be a simple bifurcation of the market into casual and hardcore camps. Art games - experimental games - are now getting more exposure than has ever before been possible. I would place your Mechanic is the Message series firmly in this category, along with a number of the interactive fiction pieces produced in the last five years. I believe the audience for this sort of game is growing, and will eventually establish itself as a significant segment of the games market.

(And Twitter may not be able to revive the popularity of textual interaction as we remember it, but I am far from convinced that we won't see a new sort of text-based game that enjoys success through modern technological trends. These phenomena are simply too new for the possibilities to have been thoroughly tested.)

But that, really, is neither here nor there. My point is that, although the text parser may have passed its heyday some time ago, it's hardly fair to call out its death while talented and hardworking designers are busy iterating against important design problems in precisely that format. To do so suggests that the work being done in interactive fiction today is irrelevant - merely a throwback to the glory days of text adventure games. Nothing is farther from the truth.

"Interesting Interactions" is a term that Jamie Antonisse coined last year - or, anyway, one that he used that I haven't heard anywhere else - and it's something that has stuck with me for a long time. It's a description of what modern mainstream video games don't do well. He was talking about Bioshock in the original context, but it's an industry-wide issue. And it's something that I come back to a lot when, for example, I read this article about the survival horror genre on Sexy Videogameland.

Leigh Alexander has had survival horror on the mind the last few days, which makes sense, I suppose, since she's been playing Silent Hill: Homecoming. I never really got into survival horror, as a genre, in games or cinema. I played a bit of Fatal Frame on the Xbox, and it was interesting, but it didn't really stick with me. I do love Shawn of the Dead, but that's really less a zombie movie than a romantic comedy with zombies. I did just buy a copy of Last Night on Earth, the board game, which I am super excited about trying out. But with few exceptions, survival horror is just not really my cup of tea.

So I didn't get particularly excited about Leigh's initial post about Silent Hill. (Although I admit I perked up a bit at the part where she talks about redefining genre labels, for survival horror games and role-playing games.) And I haven't even read her review of the game on Kotaku. But her follow-up today did catch my eye. Apparently, Leigh attributed some of the mechanics of the survival horror games of the early nineties more to technical limitations than deliberate design decisions, which inspired a response from producer John Tynes, of Microsoft Game Studios. Mostly, Tynes addresses this particular issue, stating that 3rd-person combat is a hard problem, but not for any technical reason. "We weren’t waiting for better chips to enable third-person action; we just had to keep iterating from game to game until we got somewhere that worked."

The really good stuff comes at the end, though:

The fundamental problem here is that videogames have not evolved past combat as their primary form of interaction. The branching-tree dialogues of the BioWare games is the only popular alternative route we’ve found to deliver meaty, game-defining (and game-filling) interaction. The evolution of the survival horror games towards a more action-oriented approach is for that reason: you can solve environmental puzzles, or you can have long, rambling conversations with agenda-defined NPCs, or you can kill things. I would posit that survival horror is not enhanced by long branching conversations with NPCs, so that leaves puzzles and combat. That’s all we’ve got so far in our toolbox for these kinds of games.

That, of course, is embarrassing. There are experiments in other directions, as with Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy. But for now, what console games do well is killing things, and when you look at the survival horror genre, it’s clear that its biggest weakness – without stepping outside the problem set they’ve defined – is in crappy combat. They’ve solved that now, and in the process have exposed the real failure: we don’t know how to make moody, atmospheric games that last 10-20 hours without stuffing them full of killing things. We have to step outside of the initial problem set of survival horror and ask how we can give players meaningful, game-filling interaction in a moody, suspenseful environment without resorting to combat. We have a long way to go.

I think this is a great quote. And I agree with Tynes: violence is old hat. For whatever reason - because it's simple, because it's intrinsically high-stakes, or because it's a form of fantasy fulfillment - combat is the form of conflict resolution that modern games have focused on, more than any other. We've collectively put a lot of cycles into the problem, we've gone through a lot of iterations on various approaches, and we've come up with some great solutions. That's fantastic. But it's not enough. Conflict is broader than violence; drama is more subtle.

(I'm reminded of the character Michael Scott from the American version of The Office, who said on his approach to improvisational acting: "What is the most exciting thing that can happen on TV or in movies, or in real-life? Somebody has a gun. That’s why I always start with a gun, because you can’t top it. You just can’t.")

We need to spend some of that energy developing solutions to the unsolved problems, the harder problems: compromise, debate, passive aggression, perseverance, leadership, wit, lateral thinking, personal growth, politics, love. These are all types of conflict resolution that haven't been explored nearly as much as combat. These are all interesting interactions. (And, to be fair, violence isn't the only sort of interaction that's been popular amongst game designers. Economic simulation has also been iterated on quite a lot, as have competitive sports - though combat seems to be explored the most, by a wide margin.)

Just to be clear: there are a lot of game designers out there who have experimented with interesting interactions, in independent games and in mainstream games. People have done great work in these areas, and are continuing to do great work. But we have to remember, as Tynes says, that we still have a long way to go. I'm not calling on anyone to stop putting violence in your games. But keep in mind, when you're designing, that there's a lot more than combat out there. Ask yourself if you're including an interactive element because it's the best thing for the design, or the easiest, most familiar thing for the designer. Sometimes it's good to get reminders about the more interesting interactions, so that we can work on solving those problems, too.

Over at my IMD blog. Link.

Happy 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."

Game|Life reports that developer David Braben is claiming Bioshock and Halo 3 aren't next-gen games. Obviously this is an incendiary comment intended to stir up controversy and draw attention to Braben's upcoming "techno thriller" The Outsider, which I had never heard of before now. So, congratulations, Mr. Braben, mission accomplished.

Braben can make this statement because he's not using the generally accepted definition of "next-gen." According to his own definition, games "must give the player the chance to change the story beyond simply following a good or evil path" in order to qualify. I consider this an admirable proposition, in some sense - certainly, I agree with him that Bioshock and Halo 3 represent a traditionally linear sort of game design, which results in a fundamentally predictable narrative experience. This has advantages and disadvantages over a nonlinear system, such as can be found in, for example, Second Life, Civilization or Animal Crossing. I also agree with Braben that the industry could stand to see more exploration and innovation in the nonlinear game space. But the fact remains that, while Braben might consider this the criteria for creating a next generation game, no one else does.

In common understanding, generations are strictly defined and indelibly related to hardware cycles, and games are classified by the cycle during which they're released. For the most part, it's a clear-cut classification. Braben is clearly trying to redefine generations based on something other than hardware; presumably, as artistic movements based on universal design philosophies. Movements are similar to generations in that they're sequentially progressive - each iteration is a reaction to its predecessor. But I don't think that's an accurate description of the way games are developed. First of all, it would be difficult to pin down design philosophies that come anywhere near universal at a given time. There's simply too much variety in the industry. Additionally, even though one could argue that games are designed as reactions to previous games, there generally isn't a stable progression to it. Rather, a game's design is likely to include a number of philosophical precepts, each a response to a different (or, more likely, many different) earlier games.

The best way to classify games uses genres rather than artistic movements. Genres are relatively stable and tend to coexist rather than occur sequentially. Generally, games are well suited to this sort of organization, but certainly there are clusters or sequences of games within some genres that can be classified or analyzed differently - and, for that matter, there are many cases of games that straddle genres, or fuse them, or defy them. Genres are complicated, and a favorite subject of mine, so no doubt the discussion of how genres are differentiated and how games are classified within them will continue to be a common theme of my posts.

While I think all this is fascinating (and maybe that's just me), I suspect that Braben's intention isn't to imply a different sort of classification system for games. I think he's merely trying to use the phrase "next-gen" as a synonym for "cutting-edge" or "avant-garde," or maybe even "buzz-worthy." Which I don't think is particularly accurate, either. The claim that Bioshock and Halo 3 don't push the envelope is simply wrong, even if the envelope they're pushing isn't the same one Braben is interested in. Game design is eminently multi-dimensional, and these games, along with Portal, and others, no doubt, are breaking ground in one particular dimension of it: narrative context.

Certainly this is true of Portal, which hints throughout at the larger world in which the game takes place, and contains just the right amount of mystery to ensure the player is considering the implications of the things they are presented with throughout the course of the game. And that's for new players who are unfamiliar with the Half Life universe - for anyone who has played through that saga, Portal preserves much the same sort of mystery by hinting strongly that it exists within the established universe but being coy with details such as when it takes place and how it influences the larger world. I'd walk on thin ice to talk any more about Bioshock (although I have acquired the game, now, so expect more informed analysis in the future), but my impressions of that game lead me to believe it also invests heavily in the backstory of the setting. Details like the frequently-referenced dancing couple are excellent examples of a focus on creating a rich, detailed atmosphere as a backdrop that continually informs the plot - and may in some cases, I would argue, be a more important component to the narrative experience than the plot is. I'd also make the claim that Halo 3 plays a very strong hand in terms of creating and engaging the audience with a substantial backstory. For the past several years, Microsoft and Bungie have invested an enormous amount of marketing capital into accessories to the Halo franchise: a series of paperback books (that aren't about the main characters of the game), a pair of world-class ARGs (again, detailing events that occur outside the scope of the games), and two incredible television campaigns for Halo 3 (Neill Blomkamp's three part series and the Believe campaign, which are remarkable in that they do not show content from the game or deal directly with the plot or characters from the game). The purpose of all of these products, aside from obviously generating awareness and excitement for the games, has been to expand the Halo universe. I think it's also worth noting that Halo 2 broke from the original's precedent to detail the social and religious organizations of the Covenant, drawing the focus of the narrative away from the simple Space Marine story and instead swinging our attention around to the explore the political landscape of the game world.

Are these games the first in history to include backstories? Of course not. But they raise the stakes, elevating the idea of narrative context and carefully designed atmosphere and its role in game design to a new height, much as Braben is - I can only assume - attempting to do with nonlinearity.

So, to conclude, David Braben's disparagement of Bioshock and Halo 3 is without qualification baseless and completely out of line. I wish it were more unusual for a developer or publisher to make this sort of outrageous claim in an attempt to draw attention to themselves, but the fact of the matter is that it's a common and effective tactic. Certainly it has brought The Outsider to my attention, and I will be curiously following its progress from now on. Any attempts to experiment and break new ground in any aspect of game design is welcome news to me. We'll just have to wait and see if the game can live up to the significant promises its designer has been making.