Results tagged “link” from Softcore Gamer

I apologize for my absence. Grad school has been keeping me somewhat busy.

I'm on break, now - home for the holidays - and still recovering from the semester, but hoping to make some substantive entries before the next few weeks are past. This is not one of them, however. Today, I merely want to link you to a story that made me smile. Hopefully, it will do the same for you.

Perhaps you heard, a couple weeks back, about the data released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project? I'm talking about the study showing that more than half of American adults play video games. Culture is sometimes slow to shift, but it's only a matter of time.

"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.

Gosh, it's been a while since I wrote anything here, hasn't it?

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.

I've got a couple good posts planned to follow up on Photopia, but in the meantime, I just want to point out a couple of things that you may or may not have seen floating around the Internet.

• 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.

I'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.

Happy 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!

Since GDC, Joystiq has been running a feature wherein they "target[ed] various industry folks with a typically contrived adventure game puzzle" in order to, I don't really know, give them a taste of their own medicine? Honestly, it was a half-baked idea. In theory it sounds sorta clever, but when people are asked to respond to a nonsensical hypothetical without context or a common understanding to the rules or purpose, well, mostly what you get is confusion.

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.

This 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.

1UP 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.

Unlike some others around here, I'm still having trouble with this whole blogging thing. I love having a place to comment on, respond to, and analyze gaming news, but I seem to have a recurring Pascalian problem with writing long and rambling entries. It's a tricky form, it turns out. Not to worry - I'm past the busy weekend and ready to get back to writing, and I'll get the hang of this whole thing eventually. In the meantime, here's a bit of a link dump.

• Happy Halloween! Here's a vegetable representation of our favorite little obsession.
• And even more impressive, a life-sized example done in foam board and looking damn beautiful. [ETA: For the impatient, an unofficial cuddly version.]
  
• Funny and I-swear-to-God-not-Portal-related bit of satire over at Sexy Videogameland. If you've ever played an RPG - well, pretty much any game, really - then you'll recognize this game cliche. [ETA: The saga continues.]
  
• Yahtzee Crowshaw is absolutely brilliant, and his sarcastic reviews over at The Escapist are a new favorite stop on the web.
• Keita Takahashi's in the news because he wants people to have a life outside of videogames, but mostly I want to point out his awesome hat.

Befitting the tossed-together nature of this post, something completely unrelated: Guitar Hero III came out yesterday and I'm trying to figure out if I should spring for the new Les Paul, or if I'm good with my old X-Plorers. Any advice?

Busy weekend, busy week; I've been stressed out and too busy to write. Expect more following this weekend, including: interactive fiction, gender and sexuality, and my wonderful companion cube t-shirt.

In the meantime, treat your ears with some more Portal-inspired music, courtesy of Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Looks like the viral marketing is really starting to kick in; it seems that a lot of people are talking about Portal, and encouraging people who don't usually play games to check it out. This track, created by the aptly-named Victims of Science, is very well done and I will be listening to it alongside Still Alive for a while yet. Also, on that subject, check out this interview of Jonathan Coulton. Apparently Still Alive will see an official release over Steam before too long. And, Valve promised cake but never delivered. The cake is a lie!

I have a confession to make. I've been listening to "Still Alive" on endless repeat for four days now. I can hear GLaDOS speaking in my head. My dreams are filled with promises of plush Companion Cubes. In short, I've gone completely crazy over Portal. Fortunately, I'm in very good company. And I've discovered a lot of outlets for my obsession.

It started with wallpaper. Lots of wallpaper. And YouTube videos: some musical, some involving mods to the Source engine, and some of them a little of both. When I discovered the papercraft, and was able to assemble my own faithful companion, I knew it couldn't end there. I needed something wearable.

Now, I'm no artist, but I thought that I might be equal to an ultra-simple iconographic style. So I came up with a couple designs that I'm not too embarrassed about, and I want to share them. Click the images below for higher resolution versions (CC-BY-SA), in case you want to reuse them or play with them. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them!



If the Weighted Companion Cube could talk, and the Enrichment Center takes this opportunity to remind you that it cannot, it would tell you that it loves you. I put this on a gray ringer t-shirt with black trim.



The symptoms most commonly produced by Enrichment Center testing are superstition, perceiving inanimate objects as alive, and hallucinations. Also common: overestimating the cuddliness of objects. I think this would look good on a gray sweatshirt.



To ensure maximum satisfaction with the Aperture Science Weighted Companion Cube, proper care guidelines must be followed. I can't imagine this on a shirt, but it looks nice on a coffee cup.

I've spent the day playing "Still Alive" on endless repeat and obsessing endlessly about Weighted Companion Cube so this will be brief. I wanted to point to a couple things that have made the rounds in the past week on the off chance that anyone missed them, but then I'm probably going back to playing through Portal with the commentary on.

First and foremost, if you didn't see Raph Koster's stint as guest-writer over at Penny Arcade last Wednesday, you need to go read it now. He quickly sketches a design for a large-scale construction MMO, by all appearances off the top of his head, but I found the whole thing awe-inspiring. He takes an idea that, in its briefest form, holds absolutely no appeal to me, and makes it sound downright fun. I pulled a quote that I like: "Games are made out of smaller games – turtles all the way down... And for each game, we need to have a range of challenges. What’s more, ideally these challenges need to not be just 'beatable,' but they should be 'winnable with style.'" I think this is a great design paradigm for all sorts of games, not just MMOs. In any case, I have to stress again that you should really take the time to read his whole piece. It's extremely well written and made quite an impression on me.

If you're interested in reading more, there's an article over at Sexy Videogameland that also deals with the way MMOs are put together - specifically, all the attention that's currently being to making "sticky" gameplay experiences and compulsion loops. The author draws a connection between these sorts of compulsion loops (specifically used in a game I'm unfamiliar with named Kwari) and actual compulsive behavior, like gambling addiction. It's an interesting and disturbing train of thought, and it actually nicely summarizes why I tend to stay away from MMOs.

And lastly, Joystiq has a video of Will Wright doing a short Spore demo. What's it doing here? Well, Spore isn't multiplayer, but it is massively online, so that's something. If you've been following Spore, there's absolutely nothing here that you haven't seen before (and if you haven't been following Spore, then you should start doing so right away) but it's worth watching because, hey, Spore. Plus, it's a short video.

I've been sick, hence no post yesterday. I've got some things in the works, though, don't worry. In the meantime, head over to RPS for the latest (and possibly last) entry in the Worst Ninja series. Alec seems to have finally made it, thanks to a little luck and a lot of persistence. He's got the outfit; he's got the magical axe; he's even got a veritable menagerie of loyal companions. But how will he achieve the command of superior power? If you think the answer will be in any way satisfying, you haven't been paying attention to his coverage of Ultima Online. The conclusion to a fantastic series, and definitely worth a read.

I just saw the latest in an ongoing series called The Worst Ninja over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun. It details the trials and tribulations of a gamer determined to play Ultima Online without assistance. "Without assistance" is the key here, meaning the author is trying to learn how to play the game using just the included materials; no Googling, no asking for help. Unfortunately, the included materials are woefully inadequate, and hilarity ensues. I've never played Ultima, but I have enough experience with bad UI that I can sympathize. The writing is witty and biting, and whether you're specifically interested in interface design or just in need of a laugh, I'd highly recommend all three articles in the series thus far.