Games and Art

Most videogames are not art. I don't just mean "most videogames suck". I don't mean Madden or Call of Duty or other series that rehash the same principles under an annual release lack soul. I don't mean repackaged upgrades/expansions like Super Street Fighter 4: Ultimate Championship Edition are just cheap cash-in attempts. I mean legitimately good games that I love -- games like Final Fantasy VI, Ocarina of Time, or Mass Effect 2 -- aren't inherently art.

That's not to say that these games aren't, in a way, artful. There is skillful work of all manner in play in these games and others. There's writing. There's composing. There are models and environments to draw and render and animate. There's A.I. scripting and software design. Years ago, I would feverishly point out to these facets of game design and insist that games must be art. This agglomeration argument doesn't work for me anymore, though.

Many games have moments where they reach the level of art. There are scenes of catharsis and closure in adventure games and RPGs of all generations that (due to limitations of writing or presentation if nothing else) would lose their teeth if not for the connection that control gives you to the protagonist(s), and thus the world they inhabit. There are points in Mass Effect 2 and 3 where your decisions catch up with you and you're stuck having to choose between options you don't like with no idea of how things will pan out. Then you remember that, so long as you've been consistently good or bad, you'll almost certainly get a dialog option -- eventually -- that lets you satisfy all parties. But that doesn't make the game, as a whole, art.

In order for anything to be art, it must take advantage of the inherent, or at least prevalent, characteristics of its art form. For games, this means delivering messages and fostering ideas and discussions that are most effectively conveyed through the participatory nature of the medium. Few games are dedicated to this task, but it seems like examples of this are increasing, and I think that has something to do with the fact that we're finally beginning to understand this medium as multiple generations of people who grew up with it are finally working together to determine its future.

I think it's fair to take into account the technological context of a game when deciding if it's art. The original Legend of Zelda, for instance, seems to have a better claim to being art than any of its successors. Why? Because the entire game is exploratory. You begin helpless. An unfamiliar old man cautions you and gives you a sword. And you find your way and unlock the mysteries of the world around you on your own. You bomb walls and burn bushes and stab octoroks and, through cryptic clues, slowly discover the intention of the designers with as little overt instruction as possible. Lack of instruction was a common thing in older games, but generally there were people who gave obvious directions or level design that limited your options and made things pretty clear (I can't go to the left, I guess I'll go to the right). The Legend of Zelda had none of this, and that's part of what makes it so thrilling and frustrating to go back and play today.

For similar reasons, I'd call the original Metroid (and maybe even Super Metroid, if only because of Metroid's relative obscurity at the time) art. Nearly any time a game asks you to play with it and not just play it, I'd call that art. This falls apart in more sandbox-y games like Sim[fill in the blank], where developer intent is minimal, but I'd generally classify those more as toys than games -- a discussion for another day. Unfortunately, this is increasingly hard to do as genre norms and design conventions create a context in which we can figure out what a game wants from us without a whole lot of explicit instruction. It's still doable (this is what Jonathan Blow is trying to do with Witness), but it's harder.

Another example of how games approach art is by abusing, rather than obfuscating, the goal oriented nature of a "game".

As an example: At various points in the end of the classic SNES RPG Earthbound (also known as Mother 2), the developers break the fourth wall to ask you, the player, your name. Come the end of the game, it turns out that your characters, no matter how well leveled, cannot defeat Giygas. Instead, you need to use Paula's "pray" ability until, eventually, you, the player, pray for Giygas to die, causing him to take massive damage.

As a good little Christian boy, the intent of this was lost on me. "Of course praying can defeat evil," I thought. What was really going on was this: Shigasato Itoi, the creator of Earthbound, was trying to be subversive. The only reason that Giygas dies -- the only reason that these characters and this world can be saved -- is because the player wants it. The player doesn't even have to want Giygas to die for the sake of the characters, but only because he or she wants to finish the game. At the climax of the game, Itoi sucks you out of the moment by fantastically breaking the fourth wall and asks you to come to terms with the time and effort you've put into this ultimately meaningless experience.

Does it work? Not entirely. Is it admirable? Yes.

It's a technique that is accomplished infinitely better by Shadow of the Colossus, one of the best examples of games as art that I can think of. Some of what makes SotC great are the exploratory elements. The only instruction available to you is the beam of light that will appear to direct you to your next goal if you hold your sword up to the sun. The game world is large and empty and filled with small spots of quiet beauty that you can find if you're willing to just wander aimlessly.

The entire game itself consists of 13 fights with enormous creatures who you only learn how to defeat as you struggle to survive against them. You're never told explicitly why you're doing this, as I recall. It's just suggested that you're taking the only course of action you know to revive your lost love -- whose body you place on a stone slab inside a gigantic temple at the beginning of the game.

It's also suggested that what you're doing is taboo, and as your progress through the game you begin to get a sense of why. Every time you kill a Colossus, you're not only extinguishing the life of a magnificent being that, other than your intrusion, has lived in peaceful solitude for time immemorial. You're unleashing palpable darkness that both enters physically into yourself and gives rise to discomforting shades in the temple that serves as your home base.

But you have no choice. The nature of the game is such that you either have to continue doing this or put it down or simply ride your horse around the barren landscape as you try to decide between the two.

At the end, your misgivings are proved correct, and while your love is brought back, it's to life alone in this now completely empty country.

It's powerful and beautiful and perhaps one of the greatest games ever made. People have complained about the awkward controls, but they're meant to be. You're not a God of War or any other sort of ultimate bad ass. You may be a great warrior, but you're still on your own fighting against living mountains. It's not meant to be easy or fluid. It's meant to be gut wrenching and panic inducing, and the moment of triumph as a Colossus collapses to the ground and dissolves into nearly nothing is meant to be as total as the moment of conflicted-ness following it as you again see something ominous penetrating your soul.

Maybe less powerful, but likely more important, are games that ask us to think about the norms in gaming. This is what I see happening more and more, especially in small, one-shot indie games.

One of the most famous individuals in game design is Peter Molyneux. This is the man created the "god game" in Populous and took it to new levels in Black and White. He tasked players with taking on the role of the villain in Dungeon Master, and attempted to create a game world that would respond dynamically to the player's behavior in the Fable series. The thing about Molyneux is that, as much as for his games, he's famous for over-promising, and also for making promises and talking about ideas that gamers as a whole often don't care about. The use of the Dog as a surrogate HUD in Fable 2, for instance, or his talk about creating a sense of "touch" by using Kinect in Fable 3 (a feature that disappeared long before the game saw release).

Molyneux's lofty and occasionally absurd ambitions have given rise to a brilliant Twitter parody known as Peter Molydeux. This is a guy who asks questions like "What if your avatar was afraid of you and you had to gain his trust?". Kind of ridiculous, but sometimes, you just need to run with ridiculous ideas and see the result. Fortunately, game developers all around the country agreed with that sentiment, and a couple of weekends, we got the Peter Molydeux Game Jam, in which hundreds of developers/development teams spent a weekend making a game/prototype based on a Molydeux tweet.

There are half a dozen games about talking suicidal businessmen off of ledges. There are games about being a bear who needs to hug people in order to breath, but you will kill people if you hug them for too long. There are games in which a pair of lovers need to parkour their way out of a city but become distracted/incapable if they are too far apart. Most impressively, there are games like Recidivism, where you need to continually watch the death animation of every enemy you kill until they fill up the screen and/or you die.

For better or worse, videogames are violent, and rarely do they ask you to confront that notion. Again, there are instances (such as the airport scene on Modern Warfare 2 or, better yet, having to deal with the zombies of every person you killed during one of the boss fights in Metal Gear Solid 3), but these are isolated. Making games, even short, tiny ones, that ask us to think about and stare at the things that games tend to force us to do is good. It gets us to question why these activities are the only ones we engage in, and it asks us to open up our minds to new approaches.

The interactive nature of games can make for powerful storytelling in the traditional sense, but traditional design concerns make it relatively easy for player to simply escape the stories that game makers may be trying to tell. The attitudes that most people take into games simply aren't conducive to articulating the sorts of ideas that we see in books and movies. This is why the agglomeration argument doesn't work and why storytelling isn't the measure by which we consider games as art..

What games are good at is confronting us with ideas about leisure and how we spend our free time. This, then, is how games become art: by building into their structure questions about how and why we play them and what their limitations are. A game is are art when it changes the way we play and think about games as a whole.

Events like the Molydeux jam give me hope that people will take time to think about games at this level and to make statements about the state of gaming through games more regularly going forward. The importance of the ideas being expressed may not make immediate sense to people outside the culture, but that happens with all art, and it doesn't matter. Art isn't about appeal. It's about truth. And we're finally reaching a point where we're willing to pursue that.

Mass Effect 3 and the Stories We Think We Tell (Spoiler Free)

Finished Mass Effect 3. If you're an active resident of the internets, you've probably heard that a whole lot of people aren't just displeased with the ending, they actively hate it -- to the point that Bioware is caving and preparing an alternate ending (try searching around if you want to know more). I'll admit that the ending feels a little contrived at points (and the post credits scene is laughably bad), but it could be waaaay worse.

Here's the thing to know: in the minds of the game's creators, the message of this series was never simply about survival. For them, the whole of the series was about organic vs synthetic life (and the presumed deficiencies of organics). In that light, the ending makes perfect sense.

Unfortunately, this overarching "organic vs synthetic" plot line was never made nearly as explicit as the "fight for survival" that dominates the rhetoric of the characters. Yes, the synthetic nature of the Reapers makes them a unique sort of enemy, but it's their unknowable-ness (a combination of their origin, their age, and their limited appearance), not just their unnaturalness that makes them daunting.

You could just as easily have had an advanced organic race that shows up every several thousand years to check in on the modern races and assimilate or destroy them as they see fit. The Reapers didn't need to be synthetic to be effective, they just needed to be insurmountably powerful. Being synthetic is one path to that. Simple sci-fi technobabble is another.

It would be hard to do more with just the Reapers themselves to enhance the clarity of the message that the writers were trying to deliver, though. They need to be somewhat remote so they can remain effective boogeymen. Besides, Sovereign and Harbinger both bring out the whole "gaaah, you are puny organics, we are your future, cower! COWER, I SAY!" rhetoric on those rare occasions where you do get to communicate.

In order to make this story work, you need to have a world that's built around paranoia about the limitations of organics from the start. You need to have the advanced races terrified about the technological and cultural plateaus that they've been sitting at, sometimes for millennia. Humanity has only been part of the interstellar scene for about 30 years by the end of Mass Effect 3, and yet we're as advanced as any other species in the galaxy.

You need to have more incidents of failures to contain or control artificial intelligence, possibly all having gone and merged with one another to form some heterogeneous variation on the Geth. You need to have these scarier Geth floating around the edges of "civilized" space before things ever start, using their unique intelligence to devise technologies and solutions and threats that we've never conceived of. The Reapers need to not be the only threat, but the biggest and most sudden. The Reapers need to be a realization for the existing fears that are already plaguing the population.

Instead, we have a peacetime galactic government that is focused on politics as usual and just the one incidence of failed A.I.. Worse, the Geth don't seem to be improving much upon the same technologies everybody else in the galaxy is using, and once Legion shows up to provides a mouthpiece for them, they suddenly become more accessible -- making it seem like collaboration could be a legitimate option if organics are willing to set aside their (limited) fears.

Fixing these problems of setting would be an important step, but the rest of the problem is harder to address. Part of the reason the basic survival narrative seems so dominant is because it's next to impossible to provide a gameplay goal built around anything else. This stripped down story was always going to engage the player's attention because surviving is what they spend roughly half of the game doing. The only solution I can see is to make fights with synthetics lifeforms more imposing. Make sure that they are so much harder to kill than simple security robots. Make these fights feel distinct and more tense. Don't just send Shepard and friends off to kill them in droves, but let a handful of Geth be a significant challenge.

With these (not insignificant) changes, I'm sure people would have still complained about the ending because it's an ending and it's never going to satisfy everybody (and there are some contrived elements to it). But the complaints would have been for different reasons and could at least have been in line with what the writers were envisioning. As it stands, I'm glad to know what I know and I'll be glad to let that knowledge shape how I play through the game in the future. It was a fun trip, even if I'm not certain it was as strong as either of the first two games.

Thoughts from the Half-Way Point: Mass Effect 3

Unless I opt to move my 360 into my room, the NCAA tournament is going to put a massive damper on my ability to play Mass Effect 3 over the next several days. As such, I figure this is as good a time as any to sit back and reflect some on the experience so far. I'll try to avoid spoilers, but at this point, so much of the game depends on what you've done before, that there are only a few plot points that would obviously follow no matter what your Shepard has done.

That's really the first mark in the game's favor. After so many decisions in ME1 seemed to be largely without consequence beyond the cosmetic in ME2, everything you've done before suddenly takes on added significance. More important, the blatant good/bad dichotomy has lessened remarkably, as the bulk of decisions seem to be much more grey. To this end, even the Paragon/Renegade divide has been diminished, with many decisions simply serving to enhance your "reputation" -- a catchall that contributes to both scores. I finally have a compelling reason to revisit Mass Effect 1 and alter my decision making at certain junctures just to see how certain quests change and how that will affect my ability to prepare the galaxy at large.

The increased value of your decisions wouldn't matter if they didn't continue to contribute to strong storytelling, though, and I'm happy to say that they do. The overarching plot is, of course, a bit generic (help prepare an army to challenge a seemingly unstoppable enemy), but the power is in the setting and the bond that each player gets to establish with it. There are so many characters at this point and so much history that we've been exposed to that it's hard not to feel an attachment when a familiar face pops up or when you get closure from a character or event that you expected to be left by the wayside. Of course, not every character can be included in a satisfying way. Some additions are brief and seem forced in as nothing more than an excuse to let some secondary or tertiary character saunter by as a reminder of their existence and then contribute unseen to galactic readiness (this holds especially true of any character that showed up exclusively in DLC). But, we can't expect miracles from the writers, and satisfying everybody was never an option.

Honestly, I only have two real complaints about the story so far. First of all, too many characters have changed or accomplished too much since the end in Mass Effect 2. The game tells us that it's been six months since Shepard turned him/herself in for trial on Earth. How in the hell have some of these people picked up the positions they have since then? Grunt, Jack, even Garrus: I'm looking at you. Second, the game really needs to give a better glimpse into Cerberus' motivations. It sounds like that's going to play a much more serious role going forward. For those of you farther into the game than I, a certain major plot event just took place on the Citadel. I get that it's not meant to make immediate sense from the perspective of the player/our characters, but there's no coherent attitude/belief system of which the player is aware that would allow the event to make sense. People make choices for reasons other than "wouldn't it be dramatic if...", and that's the only attitude that could possibly seem to be driving the Illusive Man at this point.

With the important part out of the way, it's time to talk briefly about gameplay.

In terms of controls, we're mostly looking at a fine tuning of the systems in place in Mass Effect 2. Gunplay sometimes feels a bit loose, but that happens with most 3rd person shooters. The improved mobility is nice, and I find my infiltrator using his cloak to sprint up and beat down fools as often as to pick out a careful headshot. The changes made to armor sorts of abilities -- each carrying the option to purge the added defense in order to gain some other temporary advantage -- are fun and make them seem more active. I also like that these armor abilities (along with the infiltrator's cloak) don't incur their cooldown until they are purged or their period ends. It makes it a lot easier to use traditional powers in conjunction with these prolonged effect abilities. Combat, in general, is as fun as it's been, and that makes multiplayer a much better option than anybody would have expected.

First, though, I have a couple of complaints about things at the design level. The least important but most glaring of these is the new resource collecting system. You run around star systems using your sensors in an attempt to ping for things that could be useful in the preparations you're supporting. This isn't so bad by itself, but each time you run a scan, you make Reapers more aware of your activity in the region. Do it too often (basically, 3 times), and they're off and chasing you and you need to get your ass out of the system! Except...you don't. The game autosaves each time you enter a system. There's no good reason not to just go around firing off your scanners like crazy, determine where everything is, Reapers be damned, let them catch you, and then have that autosave reload so you can fire off your scanners in the two or three places you need to to collect everything from a system. It's a silly waste of time that tries to add a sense of high stakes and consequence where there are none.

Slightly more annoying is a shift in combat similar to some things I complained about in Dragon Age 2: namely, inexplicable waves of enemies. Reinforcements will jet pack in or jump down from balconies or come through otherwise sealed doors at every opportunity, just to inflate challenge. It makes it nearly impossible to develop any high level strategy the way that you sometimes needed to at the upper difficulties of Mass Effect 1 and that were occasionally beneficial in Mass Effect 2. It keeps the action going, and things are fun enough that I don't mind too much at the default difficulty, but I'm going to be cursing up a storm during my inevitable Insanity attempt. In the prior two games harder difficulties just started to feel natural once you adapted to what they expected of you. I don't see that happening here because the source of difficulty is different.

Finally, the designers seem to have responded in the worst possible fashion to the complaints that Mass Effect 2 lacked side quests. There are now dozens and dozens of meaningless fetch quests you can go on (largely connected to the new resource system) and lots of time consuming, fluffy interactions available at the Citadel (and possibly other hubs if there are any). The fetch quests remind me a lot of Dragon Age 2 and the various weird things you would find while you were going about your adventuring only to suddenly know that somebody would give you money/experience for them. In this case, at least you overhear conversations about the things to know that you're looking for them, but it's similarly arbitrary. The more traditional quests, while at least providing some sort of context, but they mostly involve talking to a sequence of people/terminals and then getting some sort of payoff when a tertiary character from some previous sidequest in a previous game shows up at the end.

The good news is that, other than establishing mood, all of these serve simply to increase the resources you can bring to the fight with the Reapers, meaning they can be avoided without consequence if you just sink some time into the multiplayer!

I haven't done much with the multiplayer so far. Spent an hour or so going through a few rounds with Andy before I'd really gotten into the single player. I'm looking forward to going back. For the most part, it's class-based horde mode with unlockable persistent upgrades in the form of both level gaining and new equipment. Each player gets to control a stripped down version of one of the base classes, each with three hotkeyed abilities and two weapons (or at least the Sentinel only gets two weapons, maybe the Soldier gets more?). You're dropped in hostile territory and confronted with a series of randomized enemy waves and objectives and asked to survive as many as you can, up to 10. The longer you last, the more experience you get and the more you improve the ability of the galaxy to fight off the Reapers. Good stuff, and I'm eager to do more once I buy a Gold subscription again (note to MS an EA: the 2-day pass you shipped with the game succeeded in ensuring that I'll reup for a full year in short order after letting my account lapse).

All said, I'm roughly 20 hours in, and I'm thoroughly enjoying Mass Effect 3. There are decisions that confuse me and a lot of additions that seem to exist purely to occupy your time, which is frustrating after 2 was so tight and focused. Still, I love this setting and these characters. I'm eager to see how the story of Commander Shepard wraps up in each of the four iterations I've created for it. I'll be sad to see it come to an end.

Skyrim

In the less than 3 weeks since it's launch, I've played far more of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim than is healthy or wise -- especially considering I'm technically still a graduate student with projects and research to work on. I'm level 40, deal 30x damage with daggers when I sneak attack, and can warp the mind of anybody I feel like. Obviously, this says something something about the overall quality of the game.

I like the improved design of the world, which feels sprawling and real and waiting to be explored in a way that Oblivion and even Morrowind didn't. This is especially true in the case of caves and dungeons, which feel much more intentionally designed instead of assembled piecemeal -- which, in turn, makes it a lot harder to resist heading towards every little landmark that pops up while wandering the countryside. I like the mechanical tweaks in terms of leveling, especially the perk tree borrowed and enhanced from Fallout 3. I like the new deathblow animations and heft they add to the otherwise traditionally floaty combat.

What I don't like is the strange way that this otherwise very open game suddenly foists an unreasonable amount of structure on you as soon as you begin a quest line.

By and large, Elder Scrolls games leave you free to pursue them however you like. You can join factions, become the champion of cities, or act as an unattached wanderer picking up odd jobs as you see fit. You can approach missions and jobs whatever way you like -- sneaking around, befuddling enemies, and stabbing them in the back; launching off explosions; and quaffing strength enhancing potions before crashing the gates with your broadsword are just a handful of options.

What you're not allowed to do, though, is make any sort of impact on the gameworld beyond activating the specific series of flags that the developers put in place.

For example (spoilers, obviously):

I joined the Thieves' Guild because, well, that's just something that I always do. I discovered pretty quickly that, in Skyrim, the Thieves' Guild regularly acted as pawns for Maven Blackbriar, a local noblewoman who had the connections to keep them out of trouble. I didn't like this. Not one bit. I actively messed up the first job I was sent on for her, burning down more beehives than I was supposed to, in the hopes of incurring her wrath and maybe starting to turn the guild against her. The result was me not getting paid and her husband sending some wussy assassins after me*

The next mission involved me poisoning the product of a competing mead maker. I tried to think of ways that I could subvert this task -- cleaning out the rodent infestation but keeping the poison to contaminate the Blackbriar brewing vats. No dice. No option to lie to my superiors or report the task as finished before I'd done the final step. I couldn't even kill Maven if I wanted to because, as a quest-giving NPC, she is rendered invincible by the plot.

(end spoilers)

This lack of options defines all of the long-running quest lines of the game. For single jobs and fetch quests, it doesn't seem like such a big deal. But when I'm interacting heavily with a smaller cast of characters for a prolonged period of time, it's strange that I don't really have many options for how my character can behave. Maybe I get a couple of dialog options, but they have no impact, and I'm given no macro-level control over my character's actions.

When a game is telling a story -- even with this game is telling a story, as with the main plot -- this isn't such a huge deal. I can get behind the fact that I'm just an agent driving along the actions that must happen, maybe with a couple of opportunities to change the outcome. When a game actively attempts to be open and leave you most of the control, it's more than a bit frustrating to have that control ripped from you on issues that feel important. Joining an organization, in my mind, shouldn't just be an opportunity to act out a subset of the plot and change the comments that guards make to me as I walk by. It should be a way to define who my character is and make the game world, and not just the game, my own.

I spent over 100 hours playing Oblivion without even really getting started on the main plot. Maybe I was just less sensitive to this phenomenon, but I felt like I was having a truly unique experience in that game. I'm well under that in Skyrim and I'm now to the point where I'm ready to just plow along and finish the story. This doesn't feel like my story in the same way that did, and as much as I've enjoyed playing, I'm ready for it to be over.



*The best part of this pathetic assassination attempt was that they found me when I was chilling at the Wizard's College, where I was already archmage, and my buddies there incinerated them before I knew what was going on.

Imagining An Ideal Multiplayer Experience for Mass Effect

The news is out, Mass Effect 3 will have multiplayer. At first blush, this seems like potentially troublesome water. Obviously, with squad AI being less than great, it could be a real boon to have a friend just pop into your game and control one of your teammates for you, but I don't think that's what this is going to be. For one thing, that would create all kinds of logistical troubles with the power wheel (can either teammate simply pause the action at any time to use a special ability a la Secret of Mana back in the day?), enemy AI (which tends to focus on Shep whenever possible, making it exploitable by a smart teammate), and victory conditions (I'd hate to be the second player who gets screwed and has to restart because Shepard acted the fool). For another, that seems like something that could have been announced back at E3 when they were already showing off new ways to control your squad with Kinect.

No, I'm guessing that this is going to be a distinct gameplay mode, either a side story a la the Splinter Cell coop missions or a set of traditional competitive gameplay types with a Mass Effect spin.

This, obviously, could suck.

That said, it doesn't have to. Imagine this:

Our basic template is Monday Night Combat, and if you haven't played MNC by now, shame on you. In short, it's a third person, class based, squad shooter where each class has three abilities they can level up as a round progresses. That's the foundation we need, but not with the standard, DOTA-esque gameplay mode, which just isn't something most people have an aptitude for (90% of the time, I've wound up on a team who think the objective is just to kill people and we get massacred).

Now, instead of those classes, we move ahead with the Mass Effect classes we all know and love: Soldier, Infiltrator, Engineer, Sentinel, Adept, Vanguard. These are differentiated by access to various Tech, Biotic, and Combat abilities.

Instead of shields or barriers, Soldiers have heavy armor that does not regenerate and health that does. They have access to all weapon types and can swap between three weapon ammo types: Incendiary (DOT), Cryo (slow/freeze unprotected enemies), Disruptor (increased damage to both shields and barriers).

Engineers have stronger than normal shields and can only use pistols and SMGs. However, they get access to Overload (heavy damage to enemy shields, temporary damage increase to unprotected enemies), Sabotage (prevent usage of the current weapon), and Combat Drone (moves around zapping nearby foes, knockdown burst on destruction).

Adepts have extra-powerful biotic barriers and also only get to use weaker weapons. They get warp (heavy damage to enemy barriers, temp. damage increase to unprotected enemies), Throw (knockdown, added damage to unprotected enemies), and Stasis (immobilization but increased defense).

Infiltrators have shields and can use rifles along with pistols and smgs. They can cloak temporarily as their unique ability and get to select at spawn time between one of Overload and Sabotage and one of Cryo ammo or Incendiary Ammo.

Vanguards have barriers and can use shotguns along with pistols and msgs. The can use Biotic Charge to move quickly between locations (effect of charging into a target TBD). They then get access to one of Warp and Throw and one of Cry and Incendiary Ammo at spawn.

Sentinels can spawn with either shields or barriers. Their special ability lets them swap between the two, quickly recharging to the opposite form of protection if their current form is depleted. They can only use pistols and SMGs and get to choose one of Overload and Sabotage and one of Throw and Warp.

A single round would consist of small-ish teams (6-8?) competing in traditional objective modes. Control point, attack/defend, CTF with Cerberus being pit against Citadel forces. Deathmatch is possible, but certainly plays less strongly to the class-based structure. As you kill people, get killed, and complete objectives, you unlock currency (at differing rates) used to boost your abilities for the remainder of the round.

Outside of matches, players can make a number of larger modifications to the way they want their classes to play. Superficially, they can control what race and appearance they want for each of their classes -- though obviously with less granularity than they get with Shep. They can also adjust the upgrade path for their abilities (different levels can increase AoE, reduce cooldown, up damage, or have other effects depending on the ability). I know that the main game is also going to have some fairly involved weapon customization, so maybe bring in some of that, too, in order to keep things from becoming too rote.

If they take this basic stripped down version of the traditional Mass Effect level tree along with the improved gunplay that they've already brought into the mix and provide adequate balance along with an effective way of aiming powers, I think they could come up with a pretty compelling experience. I'd certainly play it.

Brief Thoughts on Kinect

Microsoft Research has finally released its free SDK for developing Windows applications that utilize Kinect -- the natural user interface device originally sold as an Xbox 360 peripheral.

I've never thought much of Kinect as a game controller. As much time as Microsoft has spent trying to sell it over the last couple of E3s, the only really great thing they managed to do was sell it as a means of interfacing with the main menu hub. The games have all been iffy, especially attempts to integrate it into the traditional genres with anything other than voice recognition. It's hard to make immersive game experiences without any sort of controller, even if only because of constraints on the camera and physical movement of your avatar around the game environment. The result is sports minigames, dance games, and an assortment of on rails experiences -- not bad intrinsically, but certainly more limited than Microsoft wants us to believe.

Still, the basic interface manipulation powers -- both based on physical, three dimensional gesturing and voice recognition -- is potentially revelatory. Looking through the hacks that have been popping up since the initial release of the device, you can see so many applications for recognition of three dimensional movement of the hands and arms alone -- and this sort of tracking makes full body identification essential so as to not get distracted by other noise. I'm greatly hopeful for the sorts of applications that will result from heavier use of Kinect and other NUI devices in traditional computing.

Still, Microsoft was brilliant in releasing this as a toy first. Even if that isn't ever going to be the best use of the technology, we needed a phase where people were excited about the sheer novelty of this thing in order to develop a proper vocabulary for developing with it. Had this originally shipped as some much vaunted peripheral (a la the Magic Mouse), it would have been laughed at for its lack of support and non-existent consistency of use between applications. Instead, we had a period where that was expected because its primary purpose was as a fun diversion -- a way to sucker people out of their money instead of as a meaningful productivity tool. Months later now, we have experience determining current best practices for recognizing and translating certain behaviors and a proper set of verbs for describing interaction with this thing and an API for productivity development that supports these verbs out of the box.

Kudos, Microsoft. Here's hoping that you can pioneer NUI support in Windows 8 as you continue your positive trend of starting to give a damn about your customers.

LA Noire Frequently Gets Lost in the Filler

Let me start by saying that the core mechanics of LA Noire, the crime scene investigation and the interviewing/interrogating of witnesses, are as great as advertised. The face mapping technology is fantastic, even if I occasionally think Cole Phelps looks less like Aaron Staton and more like Ryan Gosling. It's eerie in a good way, somehow managing to largely avoid uncanny valley territory. While big, obvious tells make deciding whether to trust or doubt people is fairly straight-forward in the early going (and knowing your evidence is enough to let you know when to make accusations of lying), it gets more nuanced later in the game as the crimes get more serious. Does your PoI look nervous because she's holding out on you or just because she's a 15-year-old girl being grilled for information on the death of her mother?

I adore the use of music in the crime scene investigation portions of the game. The music itself is moody and carries with it the seriousness of the actions behind your task. The chimes that indicate an examinable object are subtle but helpful, and short fanfare that cuts off the music once all clues are found is incredibly useful. I like that there are always things to pick up that aren't useful -- even if plenty of them would be in this day and age of DNA testing. I also like that plenty of clues are only useful in helping you conduct your investigation and won't actually be strong enough to serve any purpose in your interviews and accusations.

Similarly, as has become the norm with Rockstar games, the atmosphere is impeccable. It feels like a 1940's hardboiled crime serial, even if your role as a "real cop" rather than a private detective necessitates a less pulpy approach. The music, the style, the characters all work out great. Despite what one of my roommates seems to think, all of the actors so far have provided strong performances. Between the period nature and the abundance of familiar faces, LA Noire has actually done a fair bit to satisfy my Mad Men itch while I wait to catch up on Season 4 via Netflix.

That said, roughly half-way through the game, I can't condone the various 9.0 and higher ratings that everybody seems insistent on giving the game simply because this core gameplay mechanic doesn't account for the bulk of the game.

You see, you don't just move from scene to scene and talk with witnesses. You need to drive all around an expansive LA. The city has been compressed from real life, but it's still huge. The intro talks about LA as being a new sort of city, one built around the automobile and the ability to commute from your own home on the outskirts. The game takes this seriously, as you're regularly going to be spending 5-10 minutes driving, stuck in traffic trying to get where you're going. Sure, you can speed and navigate your way around somewhat more quickly, but the cars handle so poorly, and the AI governing other drivers is so flaky, that you're likely to cause a fair bit of damage, both taking you out of the experience of being one of the few "good cops" in the LAPD and reducing your post-case rating.

Then, when you're on your way to your next scene, you're virtually guaranteed to get a call on the police scanner about some crime occurring in a completely different part of the city. You can, of course, choose not to respond to these, but they increase your detective rating, and it's just hard not to do anything when you hear "officer under fire". These street crime cases nearly always result in shoot-outs, which just aren't fulfilling -- both because the gun play isn't terribly well developed and it just feels like bad police work. If these were just an occasional diversion, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, but I once started a case only to spend 40 minutes driving around and responding to three such incidents before I ever reached the scene of the crime.

Finally, the basic character handling isn't a hole lot better than the cars. Wandering around a crime scene and getting stuck on corners because Cole moves more like a mannequin than a war hero turned star policeman is just strange. Chasing down perps isn't a whole lot smoother, especially since the camera just doesn't keep up with all of the turns you have to make. Complaints here are reminiscent of some I made about Assassin's Creed 2 last year, except more aggravating considering I'm just running through alleyways and climbing drain pipes, not attempting death-defying acrobatics high above the streets of medieval Venice.

So, as much as I'm loving LA Noire, I find that I can't play it for protracted periods of time. One case is about my limit, and I'm often ready to quit even before then if I'm moving frequently between sites. The new ideas it brings to the table are fantastic, but slapping it onto a modified version of an existing Rockstar engine and bloating things up with extra tasks just wasn't necessary. Moving to different sites around LA for crimes would give the same sense of scope without forcing you to drive it, and the street crime inserts its way into things far too insistently.

Still, I'm enjoying the cases themselves and the back-story about Cole's experiences in WWII (that this largely seems to tie into the Battle of Okinawa, an event to which I have strong personal ties, only makes it more fascinating to me), and the subplot that seems to be developing through the newspaper stories is also intriguing. I'd definitely check it out to see if you have the patience.

8/10

Dragon Age 2 and Balance in Story Telling.

So, now that the game has been patched to properly support DirectX 11 and it no longer crashes my computer at regular intervals, I've been spending more time with Dragon Age II than I probably should be this late into the semester. The direct successor to 2009's Dragon Age: Origins, itself the long-developed spiritual successor to Bioware's much beloved Baldur's Gate franchise of genre-defining PC RPGs, there was a lot expected of this game. Cursory glances around the internet would suggest that it has failed, and while the game certainly has its failings, I would happily direct most of the people who are incessantly bitching about its "simplifications" (of which there are far fewer than one would be led to believe) to a post I wrote addressing similar complaints about Mass Effect 2 last year.

The most obvious and most frequently cited failings of the game are the unfortunate bi-product of a blatantly rushed development cycle. Environment reuse stands out particularly. I clearly recall the first time I was running through a cave and my map showed an area that lay sitting behind what was so obviously an unmarked door that I spent nearly 15 minutes running around the cave trying to find some lever to open it so as to plunder the riches that must be waiting for me on the other side. I can understand reusing resources, and even building dungeons/instance areas piecemeal from stock parts. Simply re-using the exact same environments with certain areas sealed off, though, is sloppy. At the very least, keep the map from reflecting the unreachable areas.

The second trouble area is the general flow of combat. Now, for the most part, I like many of the changes made here. Full disclosure, I rarely used the top down view in Dragon Age: Origins. As far as I was concerned, it existed almost solely to target area of effect spells without getting stuck on specific enemies. As such, being stuck with the lower, more cinematic camera angle doesn't bother me. The faster animations don't bother me at all, and, contrary to what many people seem to be saying, this is the only significant difference in how combat plays out between Dragon Age 2 and DA:O. In fact, there are a wider variety of skill trees available to work through and, due to the absurd bonuses from cross-class combos, greater attention to be paid as to how your party members' skills will mesh together. Combat is just as tactical and engaging as it ever as.

The problem I have with combat is the way fights are now entirely scripted. Sure, it wasn't uncommon in DA:O to open a door and find a room full of enemies you'd have no choice but to fight, but that wasn't always the way things worked. There were plenty of fights in Origins that I only managed to win by scouting ahead with a rogue and using ranged attacks to carefully pull outlying enemies away one or two at a time before engaging the main force. This doesn't work in DA2. Enemies aren't persistent on the map. Instead, they only appear when you step into a designated area. Then, as the battle rages on, more will show up (either dropping in from the city walls or mystically appearing right out of the ground) to take advantage of the fact that your AI controlled teammates shot their wad against your will and are either stuck in cooldown or have no stamina/manna left. It's an irritation that seems designed to force you to play the game within a somewhat limited framework endorsed by Bioware. Fights are rarely tough enough that I would have liked to have the option to do things the old way, but it just doesn't feel even remotely organic.

These aren't major complaints, though. They are quirks that you adapt to as you get into the real meat of the game -- the combat itself and the story telling. Having already touched on the first topic to the extent I need to, I'll turn my attention to the second.

One of the first posts I wrote on this blog was about Chrono Trigger, a game I have played more times than I care to count. In that post, I credited its success and longevity not just to its innovative combat mechanics, wonderful score, and engaging plot, but to the overall story-telling style and the way it merged the perspectives of its creators' signature franchises (Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy). I'll recap the argument in brief here.

Historically, Dragon Quest has been a series about exploration and creating a world filled with people whose problems you get tangled up in. Caring about this world, more than about any particular vendetta of your own, is what drives you to complete the plot and defeat whatever evil is looming on the horizon. Final Fantasy, on the other hand, has long been primarily concerned with its own characters and their struggles. Nearly everything you do winds up having some particular meaning for some member of the cast, and you finish the game because you want to see their problems resolved. Chrono Trigger manages to combine these approaches by throwing you into different eras of your world's history. At each step, you have some larger goal towards finding the cause of humanity's destruction, but you also help resolve the problems of that particular era. Further, each era lends you its own voice to your party in the form of a playable character to whom you develop attachment, furthering your attachment to the game world as a whole.

Nearly all RPGs (except, perhaps, for open world games like the Elder Scrolls series) fall into some point on this world vs. character spectrum of story telling. Few nail the balance as perfectly as Chrono Trigger, but Bioware games tend to come close. I think that the problem that many people have had with both DA2 and Mass Effect 2, is that both shifted focus slightly, relatively to their predecessors, in the direction of character-focused story telling in an effort to better find that balance.

Let's look quickly at Dragon Age: Origins. Throughout everything you do, the threat of the Blight looms in the background, and your personal motive of being a Grey Warden -- not only sworn to stamp out the blight but the only individuals capable of it due to your ties to it -- drives you to continue. And yet, you need to put your concerns on hold as you run around the country side, easing political tensions and freeing up factions to pledge resources to your crusade against the Darkspawn. You become directly involved in the fate of every civilization in the nation of Ferelden (perhaps too much so, but whatever) and are made keenly aware of the tenuous balance that you're trying to keep in place. Meanwhile, your companions travel with you and have problems of their own that they would like to put behind them -- from Alistair learning to cope with his lineage to Morrigan asserting freedom from her mother to Shale learning some semblance of respect for squishy beings. These stories are engaging, and the banter between particular party members may help to dictate who you bring with you in battle, but they don't drive you directly to defeating the blight or hook you deeper into mythology of Thedas.

Similarly for Mass Effect. You move between planets, uncovering details about Saren's plot and eventually learning about the Reaper threat. You come to an understanding about how humanity's ambitions impact their relationship with the established space-faring races and how you, as an exemplar of your species, will inevitably impact that. Your companions are an entertaining diversion, but contribute nothing to the real plot beyond providing key information at certain points.

Both Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age 2 tell much smaller stories. In ME2, the entire game revolves around recruiting and building trust with a squad capable enough of determining why the Collectors are abducting human colonies. You focus on your crew because their allegiance and dedication is the only thing that will get you out alive. As much as I enjoy the game and the characters, I'll admit that this story is almost too small, and there are a couple of revelations that could have been handled better.

Dragon Age 2 is about a slowly building avalanche. It's a story about how one man and his decisions -- fueled by his relationships -- change the entire history of a city on the brink. Because Hawke is meant to be affected by his experiences with his companions, we spend a lot more time with them and their personalities are much more thoroughly established. We see them engaging one another, developing friendships and rivalries within the group instead of just with you. The nature of the game as a story within a story (one of your party members is relating the true events of your life to a less-than-friendly interrogator) places unfortunate limits on your freedom. These are events that have occurred, and there is a framework that must be followed. But by building so much around your relationship to your friends and family and the organism that is the city of Kirkwall, we can see different reasons that some of these same, unavoidable events could have come to fruition.

Compounding this is the fact that Dragon Age 2 only barely touches on the major topics of Dragon Age: Origins. Nearly the entirety of the game takes place far removed -- in time and space -- from the events of the first game. Few familiar characters show up, and none of the lingering questions are answered. Taken together with the drastic change in tone, it's a shock that people expecting another grand, nation-spanning adventure weren't ready to deal with.

For the most part, though, it's an interesting approach and, so far, an engaging time. It had some bugs out-of-the-gate, but it really doesn't deserve the hate that's been spewed its way by PC vanguards insistent that any sort of streamlining (to visuals or gameplay) is a sin meant to take advantage of the supposed naivete of console playing "babies". I'd definitely recommended it to anybody who likes games with strong writing and entertaining combat -- in that order.

Eclectic Update

I'm feeling really bored right now, so I'm going to pretend I'm a 14-year-old girl from 2004 and treat my blog like a diary for a night, just for shits and giggles. No single topic, just a bunch of loosely connected thoughts and facts about my life of late. If people actually like this, maybe I'll do it semi-regularly.

So, the Firefly stuff sort of imploded. Didn't realize how little I'd want to sit and watch TV, even Firefly, during the busier parts of my summer. I have not had a weekend to myself since June 11 and won't have one until just before classes start on the 23rd. I have either been elsewhere or had my grandparents in town or, in the case of this weekend, been packing any time a weekend rolled around for the last eight weeks. That might seem irrelevant during the summer, but when you consider the fact that my parents tend to forget that I am an adult and lay claim to most of my weekday evenings, it has added up to me having precious little time to enjoy this summer. In fact, the two best days I've had at home in my two and a half month stay were the two that I spent downtown on Jury duty. I got to explore and meet people and catch lawyers off guard and sit and read in peace. It was actually pretty awesome.

Speaking of reading, I've done a lot of that this summer. I mentioned that I finally got around to Pride and Prejudice in my (intentionally) somewhat controversial post on Mr. Darcy awhile back and wrote about my thoughts upon re-reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Beyond those two, I also read or re-read: Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere which, while not my favorite of his novels, is likely his most accessible; Boneshaker, a very solid first entry into Steampunk by Cherie Priest; Mossflower, easily my favorite of the Redwall series; and the first five books in Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series.

I wrote a little bit about the first book in this series and my thoughts on Fantasy as a whole when I started into it last summer. I'm happy to say that I have, by and large, quite enjoyed the books. They aren't without their faults. My biggest issue at first was that the first two books and more clung so closely to genre norms that I often saw Startling Revelations coming hundreds of pages in advance. During the third book, though, Butcher proves that all of the tropes were not a framework but mere scaffolding, and the series begins to move based on the considerable merits of its own setting and politics. More consistent problems, for me, include an occasional tendency towards the highly visual writing that makes Fantasy a difficult genre for me and Butcher's tendency to delve into unnecessary repetition of basic facts to make sure his audience is following along (how many times in a book do we need to be reminded of the importance of body language to the Canim?). By and large, though, Butcher keeps the pace flowing rapidly and the books are a solid read for fans, or lapsed fans, of Fantasy.

All of this reading got me to finally start working a little bit on a writing project I've been muddling over for years. Unfortunately I'm not talking about The Littlest Hobo, which tends to just make me go to very, very dark places. I've mostly got the loose details of a setting and a protagonist in place and am still trying to find the plot. I've got a couple of pages of establishing material written which I may post in the not too distant future. If anybody else would like to read about a "professional" medical test subject's experiences in a corporate dystopia, let me know.

I've been watching HIMYM with my mom lately (which is both weird and perfectly natural) and I've noticed that none of the characters beyond Barney, and, to a lesser extent, Robin, are terribly consistently defined in terms of personality. Ted can be perfectly charming and respectful in one episode and nearly as big a sleaze as Barney in the next; Marshall can't decide if he's the straigh-man or the goofball; and Lilly swaps between erudite and childlike at a whim. Honestly, though, I think that's part of why the series works and an important distinction between it and Friends, to which it will probably always be compared. None of us fills exactly one role in our social groups. We put on and take off hats as the situation demands it. It's nice to see characters who are similarly varied, even if the end result is sometimes more like season 5 and less like season 4.

Been cooking lots of Mexican/Tex-Mex lately. It's kind of like when I was first learning to cook and all I could really make was stir-fry and chili. My family was so blown away that they kept on asking me to make that same thing. Now I keep on getting talked into making tacos, guacamole, and salsa for people. As much as I love it, I'm hoping to move on to something new soon. Lots of ideas for soup recipes, especially ones that involve lentils and kale (though not together...yet). Here's hoping that the occasional weirdness of cooking at altitude won't kill that plan.

Not a lot of videogame action this summer. The same thing that killed the Firefly coverage killed that. Did finally cave in and pick up Jade Empire on Xbox Originals, though. I was...a bit disappointed. After reading IGN's 10.0 review, I was expecting something a little more. Part of the problem is that silent protagonists don't work as an emotional repository when the rest of the world talks. Bioware obviously realized this by the time they were making Mass Effect, and it's amazing how taking a certain amount of control away from the player -- giving the protagonist his/her own voice and words -- enhances attachment and even ownership. Bioware is apparently going a step further even in the Dragon Age sequel, allowing the user to select only the tone of the response, not even giving any sort of textual summary at the time of choosing. I'm excited to see how that will work out.

That's it, I guess. Hopefully everybody found something of interest.

Videogames Storytelling and the Problem with Plot Twists

This has been brewing for awhile, but I'm still not quite sure how to say anything on the topic coherently. Let me start by saying I don't require the games I play to be narrative driven. I've sunk more time than I care to think about into Borderlands since it came out last October, and the biggest drive in that game is to gain levels and pick up loot. It's good clean fun built around the random positive reenforcement that we love so much. When games do try and compel progression through narrative, though, I like that narrative to be able to stand on its own merits, preferably with writing that doesn't make me cringe. Unfortunately, this seems to be too tall an order for many game creators. This is largely because videogame writers don't seem to know terribly well how to handle what I will generically call "twists" for now -- i.e. those plot elements that shift the immediate focus of the action or the meaning of those actions that have already occurred.

Prime example: towards the end of April, I picked up Assassin's Creed 2 -- nearly universally lauded as one of the best games of 2009 -- on the cheap and started playing through it. The first half of the game is quite enjoyable. I didn't even mind the "ancestral memory" conceit used to link the games in the series. The story (technically the story-within-the-story, but the main plot for all intents and purposes) is a simple but relatively compelling one of revenge against those who have unjustly wronged your family. It felt good saving the city of Florence from these corrupt men. Moving on from there, things start to get a little bit less enjoyable plot-wise as you move on to unravel the larger conspiracy that said men were pawns in, but the city of Venice is even more fun to explore than Florence, so it works out alright for the most part. All the while, there are opportunities to unlock secrets about the larger story surrounding the game -- the historical and modern activities of the Assassins (proper noun) and the Templars in which Ezio, the effective protagonist, is not a part.

This background information is generally pretty ridiculous. It involves elaborate plots and partnerships, not to mention ancient aliens (and alien-human hybrids!). One of the major failings is an attempt to assign roles in this conflict, particularly among the Templar, to far too many historical figures. If a historical figure has ever been vilified in any medium, whether it's Hitler or Edison, they were secretly a Templar. Anybody whom the game creators thought was a Pretty Cool Dude, be it Dante or Tesla or Machiavelli, was secretly a friend of the Assassins. It's unnecessary, distracting, and ridiculous; but it's also entirely optional and thus tolerable...until the last hour or so of the game.

Suddenly, in a major "twist", the alien relics show up within the main plot of the game. And then you have to kill the (evil, Templar-colluding) Pope, who bears another of these relics. And then you find a message recorded and left by the super-powerful-but-now-extinct aliens (whom ancient man thought to be gods) about how the sun is going to blow up someday, so screw your petty conflicts. It's ridiculous, it comes out of nowhere, and it leaves you saying, just like it does the sub-protagonist, "What the ****!?". I have no use for twists of this sort in any sort of story. If it doesn't make sense within the context of what we've been told or shown. If there have been no details to suggest that something is happening other than what we've been led to believe. If the mechanism that instigates the revelation requires supernatural origins. If the entire point is to cause surprise or speculation rather than concern or curiosity...leave it be.

Unfortunately, this is mighty common in videogames, including those that have story as a primary component and not just a generic motivator. I've been slowly working my way through Tales of Vesperia the last several months; and I can't help dropping it for awhile every few weeks because of the absurdity of its plot. The character interactions are mostly pretty great, and the first large story arc -- setting out to retrieve a stolen artifact necessary for the survival of your hometown -- is, again, straightforward and effective, even if I ran into plenty of problems with annoyingly "creative" words made up for the game (as always, xkcd proves right). After that first arc concluded, though, I realized that they were intentionally keeping everything about the workings of the setting as nebulously defined as possible so that they could make up as much crap as they wanted to to prolong the story. Pretty much every single major shift in the plot for the last 20-30 hours has begun/ended with the "genius mage" character going "oh snap! these magical crystal thingamabobs we've all relied on for basic survival for centuries are reacting in some weird way that nobody has ever documented before or thought to be a remote possibility! But now that I've observed it once I understand it completely and can say conclusively that we need to go do X next!" Either that, or some ancient, wizened creature says "puny mortals. you cannot comprehend what's really happening...unless you go do Z, in which case, yeah, you can comprehend it just fine. So...yeah, go do Z." It's ridiculous and makes it legitimately hard to play the game at times.

Even games from the same series or writer can use plot twists exceedingly well in one entry an quite poorly in the next. I complain about its popularity a lot, but Final Fantasy VII is a great game that has a handful of twists, all of which work. None of them seem too far-fetched (even if at least one is borderline traumatic in its surprise), and all work to make the eventual revelation about Cloud's real past and his relationship with Sephiroth make sense. Final Fantasy IX, on the other hand, doesn't handle its twists nearly so well. Whether it's Zidane's origin or the final boss, once you get past the second disk, the big twists all come out of thin air. Hell, as much as I love it, Mass Effect 2 even slips a little bit with the final encounter. I'm willing to overlook that as it makes a certain (if small) amount of sense based on what we know at that point, not to mention the fact that nobody makes any real claim to understanding beyond conjecture what was happening.

That really touches on the key thing. If a twist happens after it has been telegraphed, whether it's through subtle hints that take on greater meaning after the event or more obvious foreshadowing, that's good use of a twist. If a twist happens and there is no prior evidence to explain what happened or to make us think that such an event might happen, but the next portion of the plot is (at least in part) dedicated to illuminating the twist -- to seeing the characters come to understand why their world has suddenly changed and what that means, then that's a good use of the twist. However, if a twist occurs out of nowhere and somebody, instead, immediately comprehends the significance and cause of the event based entirely on knowledge which the audience didn't even know might exist, that's poor use of a twist.

Don't get me wrong. This isn't something that just happens in videogames. I'm still upset with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for this sort of sloppy story telling. It just seems to be more readily accepted in videogames, and it shouldn't be. People have been using games to tell legitimate stories for 20 years or more now. We shouldn't allow the overly-frilly drivel that passes for plot in most of our games today. I'm not demanding narratives that are going to blow my mind. I'm not even demanding narratives that are universally complex and multi-faceted. I'm asking for one simple thing: If you're not willing to take the time to make sure everything makes sense, keep it simple. Moreover, realize that if the characters are ever spending less time in a state of shock or confusion than the audience, you're probably doing something wrong.

Blurring Genres

People who have seen me play action games, especially games that allow me to save anywhere and reload quickly, know that I have an odd habit of not being content with merely completing a section of the game. By and large, I feel challenged to a way of progressing through the challenges posed to me in a way that causes me the least damage while progressing through the sequence as smoothly as possible. Depending on the specific style of the game, this can mean anything from stealthily removing guards one by one from the shadows to removing the heads of every enemy from the greatest distance possible to using surgical explosive strikes to deform the environment and eliminate the threat.

This could be understood as a desire to preserve my characters life in case another difficult situation is right around the corner, but I intuitively understand it more as a path finding exercise. I feel that, of all of the possible ways to get through a game, there must be some ideal path, one that the game mechanics best support and that is most in line with the character I am manipulating and the atmosphere I'm working in. In this way, the game is much like a puzzle for me to solve, and the experience of iteratively improving my solution is therapeutic in a way.

Now it seems that the fine folks at Ubisoft, and particularly the team behind the Splinter Cell series, have come to the same conclusion. I downloaded the demo for Splinter Cell: Conviction the other day, and while I will say that it doesn't feel like Splinter Cell as I know it, it is a perfect, even planned example of the action game meets puzzle game approach. Mike Fahey at Kotaku came to a similar conclusion during his hands on last month, but I couldn't have realized the extent to which it worked until I played the game for myself. Figuring out where enemies are, the order in which to mark them, and finding the proper guard to melee in order to set off the chain is entirely a matter of trial and error, of learning the level, and of following the path you've decided on until it either shows its imperfections or gets you through the level ideally. You can make up for a botched sequence by getting back to cover and either popping off the enemies individually or sneaking back into the shadows and starting over again; but doing so is both harder and less fulfilling, seemingly be design.

I'm not certain if Splinter Cell: Conviction is a game I'd actually go out and buy, but it's interesting knowing that other people see these games the way I do and that maybe I'm less "weird as hell" and more "ahead of the curve".

The Significance of Statistics in RPGs

Mass Effect 2 just came out, and it is incredible. It's not without fault -- if I wanted to, I could pick out plenty of gripes both minor and less than -- but these faults are only apparent to me when I analyze it from outside the experience. At any time that I have actually been playing the game (and that's nearly 40 hours at this point), I have been absolutely enthralled by the characters, the story, and the gameplay.

One thing that the developers did in an effort to make the game more accessible was to streamline the combat and the bookkeeping. There's much less equipment to deal with and fewer abilities for each character to sink experience into. Looking at reviews on Amazon, I see that this has caused a furor among many shut-in genre snobs complaining about how this somehow diminishes the game as an RPG. To these folks, I have one word: bullshit.

In the days of pen and paper role playing, stats were assigned to player characters to allow the game master some way of determining what was feasible for the players to do in the game world. It's that simple. In the modern era of videogames, no human being needs to determine what players are or are not capable of doing. We can write elaborate rules that determine that for us and hid them away behind the scenes in physics engines and other computations. Even if hit points and damage modifiers are in effect, the player only needs to be made aware of their existence and general impact, not every specific facet of how they work. This allows us to have rules governing player behavior that are infinitely more complex, which allows for scenarios that are more consistent and more elaborate, and the players' blindness to the exact functioning allows for an experience that is more engrossing.

In the early days of videogames, it wasn't possible for players to have any control over the plot or the game world. For the most part, if there was any sort of significant plot, everything ran on rails with the player being the vehicle for advancing the plot, not an agent actively participating in its progression. Combat, then, was the only thing that the player had any sort of say in. So, in order to give a sense of individuality, games gave players more control over how they were to engage in it. Statistics and customization, tools that formerly existed to provide regulation of the game world, turned into mechanisms by which players were allowed a sense of personal identity in their character. Certainly, pen and paper games had player controlled proficiency development of this nature before the era of videogames; but they weren't essential to the genre. Unfortunately, the proliferation games allowing player directed character growth and boasting that they have "RPG elements" has apparently made it the defining aspect of the genre.

Truth be told, these sorts of customization options only lead to min-maxing and metagaming, the eternal enemies of immersion. Agonizing decisions about what's best instead of what's fitting; elaborate plotting of intended builds and ideal combinations; overwrought mappings of stimulus to optimal response. How can an interactive story survive when the player is more concerned with how he or she intends to play it than with how it will unfold? How can you effectively extend yourself into a character when you are entirely preoccupied with controlling him or her?

Statistics and customization are not the defining characteristics of the ideal role playing game. They are a cancer. What was once a healthy, functioning component of the genre has swollen and now threatens its very livelihood. They are a parasite, slowly killing the host on which they rode into popularity while simultaneously attempting to assume its identity. The folks at Bioware recognized this and have made an attempt to put them back in their proper place, and the result is hatred.

Statistics do not make an RPG. Role playing makes an RPG, and the Mass Effect series, taken as a whole, allows for deeper role playing than any computer game I've ever seen. I never could have predicted the way that certain decisions I made in Mass Effect 1 could have impacted the game world in Mass Effect 2; and I've spent the last couple of days consumed with questions about what the final effects of choices I made in this middle chapter will turn out to be. I am very nearly as curious about what this universe would look like for characters with other tendencies (as anybody who has heard me discuss a hypothetical "violent space lesbian" is aware). I am more attached to the character of Commander Shepard as I have brought him to life than I have been to any other character I have ever played.

Certainly, there is nothing wrong with player control over statistics or ability development. They allow you to impart some notion of who you feel your character is and how they interact with the reality around them. When they become the focus, though, something has gone terrible wrong, at least if you're trying to create a pure Role Playing Game. Anybody who discounts Mass Effect 2 not as a game, but as an RPG because they tried to relegate character growth to its proper place is missing the point and shutting themselves out of one of the best gaming experiences of all time.

Videogame Round Up

As most of you know, I play lots of videogames. And yet, I have only talked about games a couple of times in this blog, both back near its very beginnings. As such, I'm going to go through a quick back-log of the various games I've played for the last several months (maybe ranging back past the year mark). I tend to do pretty thorough research before committing to buying or playing a game, so it's safe to say that all of these are quality titles. Because of this, I'm not going to give any sort of elaborate review so much as a quick run down.

Wii/Gamecube:
For the two years previous to the current year, I was fortunate enough to have roommates who owned Wiis. I took ready advantage of this to get in some quality gaming time on the console.

Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

I started this game in December of 2007, played it and enjoyed it thoroughly for the better part of a month, and then wound up putting it down when life got busy. I picked it back up and finished it in September/October of '08, and I have to say: it ranks among my favorite Zelda titles. I know this is a controversial statement, but the entire game was just fun. Sailing never got too tedious for me (I collected all of the sea charts while I was chilling with people and never paying too much attention), and the vibrancy of the animation was just captivating. I loved simply watching this game, which made controlling it a treat. There weren't terribly many dungeons, but after the "meh"-fest that was Twilight Princess and its bevy of single-purpose items, I didn't really care. Also, as much as I cussed out Zelda for stealing my bow (which is and always will be my favorite item), the final Ganon fight was probably the best in the entire series. Also: Splüsh.

Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

I hit this one up over the summer on the Wii's virtual console. It seems that everybody either adored the game or couldn't stand the 3-day contrivance. I can honestly say that I'm not in either camp. There were only a couple of times that the 3-day thing proved to be a hindrance, and only one of them was in a dungeon (and that was entirely the result of me being OCD and needing to collect faeries). In general, I loved the way the game played -- *when I was Link*. Link seemed to move more naturally than in Ocarina, and the bunny hood made things even better. The problem was with the alternate link forms. Deku link worked fine, even if he was a bit powerless. Goron Link and Zora Link, however, were seriously lacking in precision when rolling and swimming respectively. I can appreciate rolling Goro-Link being unresponsive. It makes sense with the nature of the movement. But if you're going to do that, don't require precision in navigating certain dungeon features. The crap-shoot movement of Zora-Link, though, was unacceptable, and made the entire 3rd dungeon a way bigger chore than it had any cause to be. The end game was also completely unfulfilling. Maybe that's because we never had any meaningful interaction with the final villain (a la way too many Final Fantasy titles), but not only did I have no clue who I was fighting, I didn't really care when the game was over. I'm not even going to get started on how useless Epona (who was the whole reason for the adventure) was. It's a game that's worth playing, but definitely more on the Zelda 2/Twilight Princess end of the spectrum rather than the OoT/LttP end.

Paper Mario and The Thousand Year Door:

I took this one on over the summer, too. Just a straight-up enjoyable time. Not terribly difficult, but not overly easy, either. The game constantly threw you in new situations and kept me grinning with its humor even if I didn't laugh out loud at much of it. There's not much to compare it to other than the first Paper Mario or the GBA/DS Mario and Luigi titles. Turn based battles with some minor real time elements to keep things interesting. Environmental puzzle solving with a bit of simple platforming. Lots of great Nintendo humor.

Super Paper Mario:

I actually got to this one right after I finished Wind Waker. A very different game from the previous Paper Mario games in that the emphasis is much more strongly on the environmental aspects and the turn based battles have been done away with. This game actually did have moments that made me laugh aloud (the World 3 "boss battle" comes to mind), but the more active nature of the normal gameplay eliminated a lot of the constant stream of light humor from its predecessors. Being able to swap characters was a lot of fun, but I wish they'd done more to make Mario useful outside of "flipping". Bowser's fire breath, Luigi's super jump, and Peach's impenetrable umbrella all kept me from playing as Mario except when I needed to.

Mario Kart Wii:

This game served as an apartment OCD outlet as we finished unlocking everything. While my multi-player experience is limited, I'm comfortable saying that it's a solid Mario Kart experience. I was skeptical of the addition of motorcycles at first, but when I started playing, I changed my mind. The reason? Kart handling between Mario Kart 64 and Double Dash changed significantly, and Motorcycles basically handle like the 64 karts (with which I am infinitely more familiar). Track design seemed good, and I *adore* playing Sherbet Land (one of my favorite tracks of all time) with the wider lanes.

Smash Bros Brawl:

As much as I enjoy the game, it ultimately receives a resounding "meh" from me. I find that, even though Ness (my favorite character) is much improved in Brawl, I prefer Melee in nearly every way. It's faster, more technical, and less random. Brawl is most certainly the better party game, but it will never touch Melee for sheer 1v1 fighting quality. For lots of people, this isn't an issue, but it's entirely what had me addicted to Smash for nearly 2 and a half years.

PS2:
I've owned my PS2 since launch day, and it has served me well ever since. For the last couple of years, though, my play time on it has been rapidly diminishing. While I occasionally grab a used PS2 or PS1 game on the cheap intending to give it my full attention, I haven't actually finished a new game since...oh...Okami? FFXII, Rogue Galaxy, and Disgaea are all on the list of games that I've begun, enjoyed, and ultimately left by the wayside for something shiny and new. Sadface.

Xbox 360:
I finally gave in to peer pressure in late August and bought myself a new console. Hooray for sizable tax returns. While my game library is still fairly small, I've been mightily impressed by what I've played so far.

Shadow Complex:

The best Metroidvania style game since either Super Metroid or Symphony of the Night. Take your pick. Shadow Complex was a delight and, at $15, possibly the best gaming investment I've made in years. As implied above, it's and action/adventure game in the style of Metroid and the "more recent" 2D Castlevania games (i.e. PlayStation era on). You run around shooting fools, find new equipment that lets your revisit old areas in new ways, and shoot more fools. It's not terribly long (maybe 7 or so hours to get 100% completion on your first run through and 3-5 after that), but it's good enough that I played through the main game at least 4 times. "Sequence breaks" abound as well, especially as you unlock new perks for leveling up (unlimited foam? yes, please). It's even possible to beat the game with only 4% of the items (my minimum was somewhere around 11%). If you have a 360 and $15 lying around, which I know most of you do, I can't recommend this game enough.

Mass Effect:

Simply put, one of the best RPG experiences I've had. Most of the cast is incredibly interesting (unfortunately, the two possible love interests are the chief exceptions); the combat is fun once you adapt to it (though not without its challenges); and the plot actually had me going "oh shit, oh shit, fuck, shit, reapers, gotta stop the reapers" come the end. The game has a few hitches (crappy squad A.I., texture load, boring planetary exploration), but the overall arc of the game is absolutely excellent. Being an old-ish game, you can grab it new for $20, and the sequel is dropping in late January making now an excellent time to check it out if you haven't already.

BlazBlue:

I wish I had somebody to play this game with. From what I've played, it's an outstanding free-form 2D fighter. Everybody in the small cast plays incredibly differently, even if the fundamental controls are the same fire-ball and shoryuken motions those of us weaned on Street Fighter have known for years. I spent a good week just fiddling around in training mode, learning what cancels into what and I still find new ways to mix things up every time I go in. Please, please, please, somebody pick up this game so I have an excuse to pop it back in.

Team Fortress 2:

I would list the entire Orange Box, but I played through Half Life 2 years ago and I've tackled Portal more times than I care to count. Both are stellar experiences. TF2 is where I've sunk most of my time on my 360 copy of Orange Box. It's been a lot of fun, but I can't help feeling let down when I know how gimped the 360 version is compared to the PC. No new maps. No new game types. No new alternate equipment or hats. Valve says they're waiting until they've done all of the class updates so they can provide it as a single batch of DLC; but who knows when that will be. If I knew more people playing this on the PC (and if I had a mouse and a proper gaming surface), I'd probably be online on a regular basis.

Borderlands:

This is where the bulk of my last month has disappeared to. Celebrated game designer Cliff Bleszinski has called it "Diablo for the generation raised on FPS", and I can't agree more. The cooperative mob grinding, shoot & loot experience is both incredibly nostalgic and fundamentally new. The best fun, by far, comes from playing with others, but I've still sunk in plenty of time by myself. My level 50 hunter now has maxed out sniper rifle proficiency and is getting close with pistols and SMGs making most of the game a joke, but I still find myself booting up to run through the same old areas hoping that maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to improve on my current equipment. I can't wait for the "Zombie Island of Dr. Ned" DLC pack to drop so I have new places to pillage with the horde of friends who picked this up with me.

DS:
The little handheld that can, I have spurts where I'll play my DS more than any other system.

Prof. Layton and the Curious Village:

A great puzzle game with a remarkably thorough story. I mostly figured out the plot before the end, but it was still a fun ride; and a couple of the puzzles really made me think. Some of them even did so because they were actually clever and not just kind of stupid! I really enjoyed the ambiance of the game and plan to pick up the second game as soon as I find it for a reasonable price.

Scribblenauts:

Another puzzle game, but with an incredible fresh conceit. Scribblenauts is a game where you enter in words and the object appears in reality for you to interact with and solve the task at hand. I actually haven't played this one as much as I probably should have, but that's because my roommates became immediately obsessed with it after I got it. I'll have to bring it with me on vacation for de-stressing. I will say that I have had few videogame experiences more thrilling than seeing a ledge too high for me to reach, typing in the word "kangaroo", and riding on a kangaroo as it jumped up the ledge.

Dragon Quest IV:

A great entry in a great game series. Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen doesn't do much to differentiate itself from other games in the series. It doesn't have the spectacular plot of DQV or the class system of DQVI. It doesn't have the pseudo time-travelling aspects of DQVII or the gorgeous, immersive world of DQVIII. What it does have is a solid balance of characters with unique, playable back stories and some very interesting subplots (which, as always, are the driving force of the moment to moment gameplay). Being a DQ game, it's got some pretty tough bits, but it's a fun ride overall.

Final Fantasy IV:

Holy shit. I've played lots of incarnations of FFIV. I played it on the SNES. I played it on the PS1. I played it on the GBA. I played roms of the Japanese SNES original. This is, by far, the most difficult iteration of FFIV ever put to game code. Enemies have been toughened. Equipment options have been changed (Cecil can no longer use bows? Edge can no longer use claws?). This version of the game has forced me to use spells and abilities that, in previous versions, I always looked at as simple novelty. Blink (and Edge's Mirage) quickly became my favorite spell in the whole game. And even still, there will be times when you arrive at a new area and you will have no choice but to accept that, if you run into a certain enemy mob, you will die. Despite all this, though, it's still Final Fantasy IV. It's one of the best stories in the whole Final Fantasy series, and the new translation and presentation only make it stronger. Pick it up.



Okay, I think that about covers it. Hopefully some people found this interesting. If nothing else, I enjoyed having the diversion.

Why the Wii and DS deserve your respect

I'd like to state right now that I'm not writing this to be an idiot fanboy and declare Nintendo the winner of the current console war. I don't own a Wii of my own for a reason, and it's the same reason I don't own a PS3 or a 360. The software isn't there, and most of the software that would make me buy any of the systems for myself isn't even in the pipeline. I also know that nothing I'm going to say here is revolutionary. It's all stuff that I'm sure has been said before, but I've talked to a number of people lately who still didn't get it, so I'm going to throw it out there for anybody else in that boat.

I am writing this to try and explain some of what makes these two systems so popular with the general public. It's not Nintendo's hype. They've talked about how they're revolutionizing the way people play games, but the people who are important in this discussion haven't heard any of that rhetoric; it's all aimed at jaded gamers who've been screwed for supporting Nintendo two generations in a row now (though much more by the Gamecube than the N64).

What really makes the Wii and the DS so amazing is the same thing that made the mouse amazing. It's the shift from instruction to interaction and the elimination of the whole hurdle of perception that comes with it.

Those of us who are long time gamers may not get this. Playing a game with a controller is the most natural thing in the world. Yet, to a computer enthusiast, so is manipulating Linux through the command shell. To the uninitiated, both are incredibly esoteric and don't do anything to ease you into the process. There are very few people who start playing console games as adults for this very reason. As children, we're more open to ideas that don't make logical sense, so learning to manipulate a distant character through arcane series of button presses isn't as hard to cope with. To somebody who has lived sufficiently long though, the concept begins to grow ridiculous.

Nintendo is changing this. Much as the mouse (and, thus, the Graphical Operating System) opened the world of computing to the masses by creating a more intuitive sense of navigation through physical motion and interacting with data, the WiiMote and the DS's stylus based controls allow gamers interact with a game in a way that makes logical sense. If I tap the bubble, it pops, if I swing my arm, my character swings his bat. It's a direct correspondence of motion that has been missing in the past and that has left the unexposed scratching their heads in confusion.

This is a trend that should have been noticed years ago, as this sense of intuition is the exact same reason that DDR and other Bemani style games were such a cross over success all around the world. When you eliminate the curve of learning how to play a game instead of just playing it well, you open up its appeal to a market that traditional games can't even imagine.

This is why the Wii will continue to sell well, and will probably dominate the console sales market, much as the DS has (in Japan, the number of DS's is about to surpass the number of Playstation 2's, an incredible feat considering the market saturation and age of that old juggernaut). Despite these strong console sales, though, Nintendo won't post the profit numbers of either Microsoft of Sony, because their hardware to software sales ratio won't look at all similar once the two traditional game makers big war horses come out to play in the coming years. The type of people who buy just a Wii aren't going to buy all of the games that we consider "good". Whereas 90% of 360 owners will buy Halo 3, I'm willing to bet that only somewhere around 40% of Wii's will be accompanied by copies of Metroid Prime: Corruption, maybe less. It's all in the demographics.

The shift is important, though, as the Wii's hardware sales, and the sale of it's casual and "non" games, will be staggering, and it will make other companies take note. As time goes on, the system will become refined, and video games will become truly main stream. Temporarily flagship genres such as the RPG will fade back into cultdom as the video game console is brought into the open and multiplayer gaming makes a shift back from the internet back to the living room (with online elements still in tact, I'm sure), the entire demographic of gaming will shift.

I'm certainly not proclaiming the death of traditional videogames. There are some experiences, especially the more cinematic ones, that benefit little from a truly interactive control style. The biggest system sellers of this generation, and more than likely the next, will remain in the style to which we are accustomed. But the winds have begun to blow, and those of us interested in the industry, seriously or casually, need to be prepared.

What Makes Chrono Trigger so Amazing

In recent months, I've realized that if I actually want to consider a career in game design (a real career, not the sort people who go into game design programs outside of DigiPen wind up in), I need to consider what makes a good game. Chrono Trigger has been my favorite game probably since my first hour with it back in...oh...1998? It makes as good a starting point as any.

For those of you reading who are video game dorks of my magnitude (of which there are few), I think that the simple reminder that it was worked on by both Hironobu Sakaguchi and Yuji Horii should really be enough. Most of you don't know what that means, though, so I'll go into some depth.

Hironobu Sakaguchi is the father of Final Fantasy. I'm sure that most of you have at least passing familiarity with that name if nothing else. The Final Fantasy series is the global de facto series for Japanese Style Role Playing Games. Epic, cinematic stories of a small groups struggle for personal freedom and the fate of the world are what really defines the Final Fantasy series.

In this case, the important aspect is the personal one. In order to involve the players in the game, the Final Fantasy series has, starting with entry 4, tried to emotionally attach the players to the characters they are in control of. Everything is about the tribulations of the protagonists, and if they didn't have their own reasons to be on their quest, nobody would do anything about the world's crisis (granted, the world would rarely be in its sad state of affairs without the player characters' actions in the Final Fantasy series, either).

Yuji Horii, on the other hand, is the creator of the Dragon Quest series. Even more popular in Japan than Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest takes a vastly different approach to story telling. With few exceptions, the characters in Dragon Quest games take a back burner to the world the games take place in. As you explore the world, you get to know its citizens as you help them to put their troubles to right. While the plot may have reasons for you going to each place, as soon as the next town needs your help, the overarching quest takes a back seat to the immediate needs of the world's common folk.

Slowly, trends emerge and it's made apparent that whatever being or force you were out to put to rest is the same one responsible for everybody else's troubles, but you as the player want to beat him not because of your characters' vendettas, but because he, she, or it is posing a menace to a world that the designers have shown you is worth saving.

Simply put, Chrono Trigger combined these elements. The cast is colorful, fleshed out, and ingrains itself within you. Each member has his or her reasons for wanting to be a part of the journey, but each character's personality and goals are also deeply ingrained in a place that you have visited. Their quest isn't for their own behalf, so much as that of their time. While they have their own personalities that you grow to care about, they aren't out to save the world to fulfill a personal grudge, they're out to do it for the people and places close to them. Because of this, in caring about the characters, you necessarily come to care about the world that is so dear to them.

There was no way this game would have been a failure, even without the joint direction of these two incredible individuals. An amazing score that first introduced the considerable talents of Yasunori Mitsuda to the world at large, an innovative combat system involving combination attacks and area of effect attacks that others have been failing to improve on ever since, one of the first uses of the New Game+ concept along with over a dozen endings to make said New Game+ worthwhile, and some of the best art of the SNES era would have easily cemented its place as one of the great games of the 16 bit era. Ultimately, though, its success and legacy as an RPG can't be contributed purely to these superficial facts.

What makes Chrono Trigger the enduring classic and the gold standard to which modern J-RPGs are still compared is is the simple fact that, by working together, Horii and Sakaguchi make you care about the whole package more than you knew a game could. And it is in your love of these characters and the world they so desperately want to preserve that the incredible bonuses become even more awe inspiring.