Results tagged “response” 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.

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.

This 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.

Last 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.

This is an intervention. As someone who loves games, I'm very concerned about the medium's unhealthy relationship with cinema.

I'm not the only one who sees a problem. Others have spoken out, time and again, and voiced their support. But it's a big problem, and one that must be faced, so I'll say my piece as well.

I understand how it happened. Games were young and impressionable; movies were older and popular. Popularity is hard to resist. Games looked at film and film seemed glamorous. And, well, pretty. Movies were entering the age of special effects, after all, and had practically reinvented spectacle. They had a tendency to show off a bit. Games, on the other hand, hadn't undergone the same technological development that cinema had. As a graphical medium, they were, at best, plain. And they knew it.

So games harbored the desire to be as pretty, as popular, and as well-respected as movies - and more, on some level: they wanted to be movies. This aspiration guided their development. They adopted the language and mannerisms of film - incorporating lens flares and other artificial camera effects, for example, and relying on non-interactive sequences to support the narrative. They frequently referred to their stories as "cinematic," using the term as a blanket affirmative. And they fixated on their appearance, often to the point of neglecting other important characteristics like story, accessibility, or artificial intelligence.

Movies can hardly take great exception to their younger sibling's emulation, even if the games industry's recent success has been a source of some small jealousy. Imitation, after all, is the sincerest form of flattery. But it's clear to me that this attitude has passed well beyond the bounds of a healthy respect, or even an infatuation, and into the realm of dangerous obsession. Games are being produced in which the story is conveyed entirely in non-interactive sequences, and bears no relationship to gameplay. Some of these games go so far as to use cut-scenes as incentives, to reward players for enduring long, boring, or repetitive bouts of interactivity. Worse still, many games have taken to limiting their emotional range to correspond with that of film, severely inhibiting the impact they have on players. All of this comes at the expense of natural, interactivity-based design decisions, which are habitually suppressed. These impulses are only allowed to bubble to the surface in private, experimental settings, and never where they might be exposed to a larger audience.

This preoccupation with movies is starting to have adverse effects on the health of the industry. Games seem to have forgotten that the things that make them different are the same things that make them special. Perhaps what's called for here for is a period of rehabilitation, cut off from the injurious influence of cinema. It sounds extreme, I know, but the situation is desperate, and the only way it can be resolved is for the games industry to learn to trust its own strengths, rather than depending on film for support. It would mean reevaluating all the assumptions that have been made over the years, and replacing the myriad design conventions that favor cinematic qualities over interactive ones. This would certainly be a difficult process, but one that would ultimately be of benefit to the medium.

In the end, it's my sincere hope that the games industry has the wisdom to admit that it has a problem, and the strength of will to overcome it and establish a healthy relationship with movies. Videogames are still a young medium, and it would break my heart if they missed out on all the experiences they can have by using cinema responsibly. But it must be understood that the current behavior has got to stop.

On a personal note: Games, you never had to put yourself through this. You don't have to deny yourself and try so hard to be like cinema. You were always my favorite, just the way you are.

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 don't know exactly why I'm so excited about the launch of Valve's Orange Box today, since I have no personal investment in the Half Life series and I won't even get to play the thing until later this month, when I trade the PS2 I've been using back for my 360. But I've been looking forward to Portal since, well, since the first time I heard about it. Which is a little ridiculous because, as much as I love to have a game take advantage of the ethereal nature of virtual worlds to screw with the laws of physics, there's good chance I'm not going to love the game itself. I'm trying to steel myself for a hardcore approach to spacial puzzles (read: platformer) with a killer difficulty curve. Even so, I can't help get excited about it.

But the point is, I've started to get excited about the other games included in this package. I'll finally get my chance to play Half Life 2, for one thing, which is supposed to have been the "Thinking Man's FPS" before Bioshock stole the title away. Episodes One and Two represent a step forward for episodic gaming, a cause to which I have been whole-heartedly converted. I love the style and aesthetic of Team Fortress 2, and by all accounts it's well balanced and a great deal of fun. And, quite frankly, whatever you think of these individual games, you have to admire the whole shebang. The contents display enough variety to appeal to a pretty decent range of tastes, and give everyone a chance to explore something they might not otherwise try.

Maybe more than anything else, this spoiler-free review of Episode Two by John Walker over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun has got me itching to find out what I've been missing all these years. Whether or not you're a Half-Life fan, I'd recommend you check out the article, which heaps all sorts of eloquent praise on the game. John was impressed by its style and polish, among other things. "Better than any FPS before, Episode Two disguises its linearity not by presenting you with false choices, but by making the only path on offer the only path you’d ever want to take. Go back and you’ll realise there is only ever one route. But you still picked it." I'm always impressed by this sort of attention to level design, which is perhaps the keystone to creating an effective narrative experience in a linear game. By definition, linearity limits a player's ability to make choices, which can severely decrease the player's sense of agency. Designing a linear game that doesn't feel linear is an impressive feat, and it allows the game effective use of the entire range of agency-based emotions, from pride to helplessness to regret.

By any measure, it seems the Orange Box is scoring high marks. To make your Orange Day celebrations complete, I'd also like to point out the first Team Fortress 2 machinima that hit yesterday, also brought to you by Rock, Paper, Shotgun. General agreement seems to be that it runs long, but it's elegant and touching and occasionally pretty funny. I have a soft spot in my heart for machinima, probably because I desperately want it to be possible to put together a great film without a huge art budget, and possibly because I love to see what creative people can do with constraints. (My abiding affection for the Red vs. Blue series probably falls in there somewhere, too.) Certainly, TF2 seemed to treat this film well. I haven't played the game, so I don't know how the camera works, but I was personally pretty impressed by some of the cinematography that they pulled off.

Some might take issue with a review of a game written by someone who hasn't played it. Especially when the game is as monumental as Bioshock. But if all bloggers restrained themselves from offering opinion simply because they didn't know what they were talking about, well, it would be a much smaller blogosphere. And I suppose I'm no different from the rest of them.

Although I've had some things to say about the game for some time, I'm particularly inspired to write this now in response to Jamie Antonisse's spoiler-free Bioshock review written earlier this week. All I've played of the game is the demo, but based on that experience, reading a range of posts and articles on the subject, and my conversations with other gamers (including Jamie) working their way through it, I feel like I've gotten a fair sense of the story and gameplay. Without the benefit of actually playing the thing, I may fall on the crutch of revealing the twists and turns of the plot. Readers beware, here may be spoilers.

I shared Jamie's initial disappointment with the linearly militaristic structure of the game. Bioshock seems to follow a traditional given-path philosophy of level design, where the player is presented with a bounded path through space that must be followed to the end. Along the way, the player encounters obstacles that block progress along the path, which must be overcome in order to continue. Typically, and in Bioshock it seems almost exclusively, these obstacles are enemies that have to be destroyed. What Bioshock does well is allow the player a lot of choice with respect to how those enemies are destroyed. What it fails to do is give the player significant alternatives to killing the enemies that bar the path, or deviate from the path.

Not that this is a bad thing; precisely this sort of given-path level design is historically and currently the industry standard for making games. But the context surrounding this particular game led me to expect more, particularly in the areas of player choice and narrative, where it received particular praise. And by making this sort of structural choice, the game necessarily limits player choice to specific domains: weapons systems and combat tactics. Don't get me wrong, it may handle player choice within these specific domains extremely well. I just can't help feeling confined by the small bounded space in which I can act freely.

I'm omitting a major game element here, and it's the one that gets the most press: the Little Sisters. Little Sisters pose a different sort of obstacle to the player, and offer the the opportunity to make a moral choice rather than a tactical one. Narratively speaking, this is much more interesting, especially if the player is aware of the all-or-nothing nature of the choice. The internal, emotional process of making a decision, above and beyond coming up with a solution to a short-term problem, is at the heart of what interactive media can offer the art of storytelling. Bioshock certainly captures this, and does it in a way that beautifully echoes the overarching objectivist themes. But again, the game's use of this choice mechanic is quite limited: disparate instances in which the player is asked to make essentially the same decision. And the consequences of this decision on the plot are disappointingly shallow, only seriously impacting the ending cinematic.

I will speak primarily about the plot and ignore some other aspects of the storytelling, since plot is an integral part of the narrative and also the most accessible to me without having played the game through. The plot is certainly rich and compelling, but not what I expected from a game that was marked as a milestone for story in games. It's chock full of twists and revelations, but these are of the same class of story elements that games have been drawing from for years. My personal love of overwrought science-fiction aside, I think it's telling how little of this sort of thing is found in the great works of other media.

So my fundamental question is, why has Bioshock been singled out to receive these accolades? Not that it isn't deserving of honors, but is it more deserving than other games? To what extent does it truly break new ground? It seems to me that other games have done more to push the envelope in areas such as designing game mechanics around player choice, incorporating agency and morality, painting a rich backdrop, and telling a compelling story. One thing that Bioshock does remarkably well is atmosphere; perhaps that's the key. The art direction for this game is awe inspiring, and certainly contributes to the way the story is told. This is a point on which Bioshock excels, and if that is the source of all its praise, then it's well deserved.

Still, I for one can't help but be a little disappointed by this modern masterwork of interactive media. It's hardly the revolution of emotion and story in games that was promised. So many of the key elements - a city full of crazed, violent survivors; an amnesic protagonist unwittingly fulfilling his destiny; the mentor's betrayal; epic battles against armor-plated behemoths; mind control - seem to be archetypes plucked from stories and genres that employ them specifically to fill out an otherwise ridiculously thin plot. I've been waiting for the advent of the character-driven drama in games, for story based around the interpersonal conflicts arising from the individual and sympathetic fears, desires, anxieties, and compulsions of the characters. Bioshock, for all that it does well, does not deliver that.