Playing your part

One of the problem with video games that have a story component is that the player you represent can behave inconsistently with the "story of the game". Games that do not have a story component, such as most Will Wright-style games, are the exception. An example of this problem is the very detailed story and character development of Grand Theft Auto IV, and yet the cartoonish violence which is actually fun and deviates from the character that the story has built for you. Also, in some levels of the Thief Series, it is sometimes just easier to sprint through an entire level instead of being stealthy, and thus having the entire complement of guard and monster AIs making a racket trying to find you.

Elsewhere, video games have adapted strange conventions to prevent this problem, such as the "silent protagonist" seen in many first-person shooters that avoids the sticky issue by simply shutting up.

One potential cool way to synthesize story and gameplay is to somehow reward or punish the player for acting more or less like their part. I hadn't yet seen this in a game yet, until I was reading the Wikipedia entry for Valve's upcoming game, Left 4 Dead. The Tank, concept art seen below, is one of the playable zombie characters in the game.

Obviously, this character is not meant to just sit still and remain pretty. Strategic thinking also doesn't seem to be suggested by its form. To quote the article:
"Also, the tank has a "Frustration Meter" which means that control will be taken away from a human player if the Tank does not engage the survivors for a certain time."
Cool! There are other varieties of playable infected that have different characteristics, and they don't have this same description. So, the game designers are suggesting a certain "play character" in their design. I can't wait to see what more comes of this.

Suggestion: make the physical appearance and gameplay characteristics change automatically based on the game learning a player's "style".

Note: The most famous silent protagonist is Gordon Freeman, the main character of Valve's Half-Life series. Valve is great.

City 7: Toronto Conflict Reactions

I've had the install file for City 7: Toronto Conflict sitting on my desktop for a long time, but I've been too lazy to install it. So, here it is. It's a mod for Half-Life 2 that represents an alternate timeline where, at the beginning of the game, Gordon Freeman gets teleported to Toronto (City 7) instead of Half Life 2's City 17. I played the game for an hour (so far) and I've recorded my reaction's, a la Games for Lunch. So here's my stream-of-consciousness thoughts:

- sweet, the first two minutes are exactly like in Half Life 2.

- I've teleported, and someone says he recognizes me, then runs off. Odd. I definitely get a "Valve" feel from this. Good job team. I definitely had low expectations, as I thought it would just be an excersize in modeling Toronto's landmarks, which doesn't count as game design at all. It looks like they used the same character models, but used new landmark art with a ton of new voices. Its definitely unnerving to see the trademark Half Life 2 walls next to a Future Shop.

- Holy shit! The parking meters are just like in Kingston. This both increases my immersion and destroys the fourth wall.

- No reaction from the Combine guards when I stand awkwardly in front of them. Darn.

- I tried to get past that pool into what looks like an elusive area. I climbed up onto the fence next to the park and smacked into an invisible wall. That sucks.

- I like that I'm not given any explicit goals in the beginning. Still exploring around is nice and, by the nature of the exploration, equates me with the conventions of this new world without forcing it down my throat. It does help that I'm naturally inquisitive.

- I walked past some guards into an area that was restricted and was instantly plugged full of combine gun energy. A warning would have been nice, like some warning shots at my feet or nose.

- Hmm, still want to get across the pool...in the middle of the pool...uh-oh, sniper lasers...dammit. dammit. First death.

- Restarted. There are humans wandering around, one of them complained about "typical combine maintenance". Ah, some things never change.

- I'm on a roof now. Yay, I found a crowbar! Now what? It occurs to me that I could kill a lone combine and steal his gun, but they all are in the open. I go to the one nearest to the stairs that go up to the roof and smack him a bunch of times. When he dies, he gives me a grenade but I'm still in a smacking frenzy and it goes flying uselessly. The explosion draws about five more combine and I still only have a crowbar, so I run back up to the roof. They don't follow. Maybe some of them will drop a gun, so I try to skirmish out, entice a few and lure them up to the roof, but it isn't happening. They just stay down there, and then mumble something about "losing the target". Lame.

- I try the same thing a few times, doesn't go anywhere. I go to a point on the roof where I can watch a crowd of people. Someone mentions something about "Hank" going nuts. Suddenly, Hank runs out, kills a combine with his pistols and tries to make a run across the pool. Hilarious. Results are similiar to my attempt, but it appears that Hank didn't bother to save his game. So, I guess the designers are telling me that that approach is futile. Or are they? I mean, I DO have an MIT education and I'm wearing a hazardous materials suit.

- I look around, and pick up a filing cabinet (?) to step up onto the roof. It looks like there is an area enclosed by a red fence that I can now reach. I gleefully grab a medkit and hold it (my health is at 100%, but you never know when you may need more) and trounce over to fence, standing directly on top of it. I throw the medkit down so that it lands on the ground inside, and then gleefully smack into another invisible wall. I can't jump down! The medkit sits inside the fence, mocking me. Lame.

- I go into the "restricted" area I went to before and manage to kill about four more combine this time before I bite the dust. I was picking up some health packs I found and managed to stay alive by skirmishing out, killing a combine and taking his grenade, then returning to behind a box as they all shot at me. If only they clumped so I could take them out all at once, but it looks like I'm not that lucky.

- Wait? What is that on top of those discarded(?) train cars? A generic supply crate? Goody!

- I manage, with some difficult box-moving maneuvers, to get a box on top of another box to get on top of the crate. Somehow, though I'm most likely making a racket and looking like a moron, the combine ignore me. This is pretty odd, considering that they seem to keep a tight control on the other humans.

(Oh yeah, I forgot to mention all the rations humour. Hilarious)

- I got to the top! I gleefully bash open the crate to find...no guns. Its some energy batteries for my suit. Well, now my health totals 170 or so. Now should I make a run for it?

- I turn on the sprint and race through the crowd of combine and people to cross the pool. Somehow, I avoid sniper fire and fly up a staircase and wham, into a door which is clearly non-interactive due to its pixelation. I get swarmed by about 5 combine, and its game over again.

Verdict: I'm looking forward to keep playing this, considering that its design strategy closely follows Valve's, which is superb. The jury is still out on whether or not the goals should have been clearer.

Also, "Enter the Mind"? Lame! What am I, twenty? I need to change that.

Psychosomnium

Wow. I just played another excellent example of platformer turned into a compelling mind-fuck indie game. Playable here.

UPDATE: I didn't really emphasize enough how important it is that you play this game, like right now. It questioned my meaning of existence, and its ending left me shocked for a long time afterwards. Please, please play it. And then comment here.

Neuroticism is optimal?

I just read this article:

Neurotic software has winning personality

Austrian researchers made several different AI classes (agressive, defensive, normal and neurotic) and pitted them against a real-time strategy game's built-in AI engine. Turns out the neurotic AI was the most successful of them all

In other news,

Lately I've been watching a lot of Johnathan Blow's speeches, where he often mentions "unethical gameplay" (article). He defines unethical gameplay, in one specific case, as designing a game with "rewards" built in. So, the user keeps playing a game for these moments of reward (cutscenes could be one example) while the underlying gameplay is crappy or uninteresting. He says that the play that results from the game should be interesting in of itself, not because of the "rewards" that the game doles out.

Both of these items are interesting to me. While the majority jury is out on whether violent games cause violence (I don't think so) I am of the belief that the cognitive structure of a game has a significant effect, in the short term at least, on how you behave. After playing a few hours of the Thief series, I find I always stick to the shadows in real-life for a while afterwards. After playing a "twitch"-style casual game for 15 minutes, I have a little trouble concentrating and feel hyper afterwards. But these are always short-term effects. The violence in videogames is different because it is representational. I'm not going to get deep into this right now, but you aren't actually ACTING violent, you are DOING violent things. If you're doing them with a friend, such as completing Halo 3 on Legendary (me and my housemate yesterday) then the primary behavior that is being encouraged is cooperation.


So, if game designers want to design ethically, they should think of the type of personality that a game encourages. Cool.

Finally, womanly slapping as a gameplay element

LINK to Rose Camellia

The plot of the game follows Rose, a low-born widow of the eldest son of a noble family who was only married yesterday. She must defend her stake to the family mansion by slapping every female in her way. Fantastic! The gameplay is entirely controlled by mouse-tracing, so you literally are dragging your mouse across the other character's face to attack, and then across your own back to evade. Here's a few screenshots:

Games and Education

The link below is to "Statetris", a game where you play tetris with the States of America. After playing it for about 3 minutes, I think I've learned more about the geography of the states than in my previous 22 years of life. Awesome!

http://www.mapmsg.com/games/statetris/usa/

Quagmire

I'm stuck here.

I'm looking exhaustively at school programs for next year, specifically game design program. I have a little .txt file I keep full of all of them, and one has really caught my eye. It's the Vancouver Film School Game Design Program. It's a twelve-month intensive program, where I drop $29,000 to have myself shoved into the gaming world. It's exciting me a little too much, and I'm scared.

I mean, something I could have wanted very badly could become true, suddenly, with very little preparation or thought. There are two alternatives here:

One

The slow, easy, careful route. I take another computer science degree, maybe 2-4 years or something. Talk my way into a few jobs. Build some experience. Or, I could even try to start in Q&A right after this degree. Move to some a major centre first, and see what I can do.

Two

VFS. My still-bloodied fetus being shot out into the games industry still crying and screaming and wide-eyed, unable to crawl.

<too much information>

Anecdotally, the way I was actually born was only my head popping out first. I then apparently looked around the room without any crying, taking it all in. Then, after a short pause, the rest of me came out. This came to my knowledge through an awkward conversation with my mother.

</too much information>

At some point, I want to be able to pursue game design from an academic standpoint, and I'm afraid that charging head-long into the industry, with only a superficial game-oriented education will limit me in that respect. I've been thinking alot about it, and jeff orkin seems to have done it right. He's an academic primarily who consults on some wicked games, like F.E.A.R., for example. Oh, and if you read this blog you should check out his "The Restaurant Game Project". He's trying to mine several gameplay experiences to create an AI. That's a really bad explanation - just check it out.

I geuss I'll just have to wait and see what happens.

Giggity giggity.

Wii!!!!!

I just got back home from my glorious friend Ryan's house, where he introduced me to the Wii. Thus, I shall expound on it.

We played Wii Sports, as he didn't have any other two-player games, so keep in mind this is only reflective of Wii Sports on the Wii, not any other title.

After the first 10 minutes of "Holy shit! The pointer turns UPSIDE DOWN when I turn my hand UPSIDE DOWN!" and "Ahhh! It moves like me!" I got into the groove, while still being pretty damn excited. This console has a ton of potential, provided the design is done well. Ryan said that golf sucked, so we stuck to bowling, tennis, boxing and baseball. Overall, I prefer boxing or tennis, although I'm much better at boxing. Ryan likes baseball. I was struck hard at the intuitiveness of the game. Some things had to be taught, like in baseball you press certain buttons to pitch the ball particular ways. I loved how intuitive tennis felt, when your character moved around for you and all you had to do was swing the racket. In boxing, I think I felt more in control than I have in any game. However, there's no point in ranting how awesome it is, because I could go on and on.

Criticism:

There is, quite obviously, so much under-potential here. I began to notice that, while it seems like the characters are following your exact moves, they actually determine what type of move you are doing, and use that instead. For example, in baseball, a twitch will do instead of a full-fledged swing. I also noticed that during tennis, after sweating my ass off while swinging the Wiimote left and right, Ryan told me to calm down and just twitch my hand. Sure enough, twitching does it. It actually doesn't even matter which way you twitch your hand. The timing is more important than direction. Bowling got boring rather fast for more, but I'm not a bowler anyway. During boxing, I actually won 8 AI matches in a row, propelling my Mii's skill level up higher and higher. When the crowd cheered, I would raise my hands up high, but my avatar did not respond. How cool would it have been if it had raised its hand too, and the crowd had cheered louder? When you win a round, there's some deliciously funky music that comes on as the camera pans around your avatar. The music just DEMANDS dancing, but the avatar only responds by lamedly continuing to punch. I want to fucking dance! Why put dance music in there, and not let me dance? WHY?!

All in all, a great title for some quick fun, especially for non-gamers. I can see its just BARELY scratching the surface, though.

Now, I clearly haven't see that many Wii games come out, but I do hope that they continue to be well designed. Hopefully, the direct accelerometer data from the Wiimote comes straight into gameplay, not a simplified version. In my opinion, bastardizing such a beautiful wealth of real-world mineable data is, really, a huge waste. One can only dream.

Mailroom!

Holy crap! It's Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media

Psssstthhh!

I know I'm supposed to be in Southeast Asia right now, but The Escapist has a great four-part article by Warren Spector (Deus Ex, Thief, Wing Commander, etc.) on Storytelling in games.

link.

What I learned in Montreal

On Wednesday, I took a bus up to a meeting of IGDA Montreal, to one of their casual meetings about the games industry. It was all really interesting, and too hard to sum up here, but here's what I learned:

- Montreal is becoming more and more the Hollywood of Games.
- I have childish writing.
- read realitypanic.com - Jason Della Rocca's blog for info on an ongoing dispute with the lawyer Jack Thompson.
- You can smoke indoors in Montreal if it's wrapped in 100% tobacco paper.
- If you want to be taken seriously, have a business card.
- "Nobody wants just another shiny gun."
"I DO want another shiny gun."
- Chris 'Wombat' Crowell from A2M is one cool creative director badass.
- Everything that ever happens will be as a result of cool people that you meet in college.
- Big studios are getting progressively larger, while really small studios are becoming more abundant.
- The game industry is moving towards a freelance/union model.
- being the only non-French speaker at a table is an awkward position.
- get a French girlfriend in Montreal to force yourself to learn French.

Hooray!

Eidos to open games studio in Montreal

This makes my (very early) day.

How can games be Art?

Whether or not games can be considered art causes a lot of contention.
Article on Gamasutra
Games Are Art
Roger Ebert's article

My opinion, obviously, is that they ARE, for the following reasons:
1. They can be judged as good or bad.
2. They can indirectly express to the user's what is not expressible through direct explanation.
3. They can effect a user's emotional state.
4. They can have subtext, as in more depth that appears on the surface.

(I realized I wrote the above definitions with "observer" initially, and I had to change all those words to "user".)

One of the arguments against games being art, according to Roger Ebert and some others, is that they do not have complete authorial direction; the author does not have complete control over what happens. I guess it seems to him that every time a form of media becomes briefly interactive, then it ceases to be art and briefly becomes something else, becoming art again once the interaction phase is over. But, I want to ignore any arguments about that here and instead try to figure out what parts of a game (if its even okay to consider them separately) can contribute to the artistic value of the whole game.

Traditional Storytelling
Games can and do have excellent stories, comparable or better than anything seen in film, books or television. This type of art is well-known, and telling it through a game's viewpoint is very interesting. Examples of this include The Dreamfall series and God of War, both of which are well-known for their story-telling ability. As games grow up, they begin to find unique ways to tell stories. The Half-Life series is famous for this, telling the entire story with no narrative explanation from the first-person viewpoint as events are happening.

Interactive Storytelling
This is a new form to gaming, essentially derived from Choose-Your-Own-Adventures, but much more flexible. Good examples include The Wing Commander series and Deus Ex. These both have branching storylines with multiple endings. There is a lot of academic work in this field, which I keep track of at a blog called Grand Text Auto.


Traditional Audiovisual Aesthetics
This is what is usually shown in the form of screenshots. I, personally, think that this work is very admirable but effort could be expended much better elsewhere. Still, there are some very beautiful games out there, such as Myst or Riven or Shadow of the Colossus. Unfortunately, when a game is advertised, this is usually the only part of the game that the consumer sees.

Formal Rule Sets
This is where games started long ago. Chess is a good example, so are modern RPGs, or the MMORPG Eve Online, which has over 30,000 players and a persistent virtual economy. Games that have too much emphasis on this part of their design tend to only be attractive to a small audience, something the predominantly science and engineering background male games industry struggles with. I'd also like to extend the idea of formal rule sets not just to slow-paced RPGs but also to faster-paced First-Person Shooters. When you are fighting in an FPS, your thinking can be quite advanced, for example:
"The enemy has a Covenant turrent placed behind the rock and there are three grunts with sticky plasma grenades. I can't drive my Warthog in because they'll stick me so maybe I'll drive a Ghost over and ditch it while equipping a needler so as to take out the Gold Elite. I'll save my only frag grenade to turn over the turret and take the dead Gold Elite's plasma gun to take out the remaining grunts."

Fertile Area for Emergent Gameplay
When a game has formal rule sets, but there are no clear goals, emergent gameplay occurs. This is a bit of a buzzword in the games industry right now. Anything by Will Wright is an excellent example of this (Sim City, Sim Life, Sim Earth, The Sims, upcoming Spore). These are really fun, and they have a very wide audience appeal.


The Action-Response Relationship with the User
This is the way in which the game (on whatever platform) responds to user input. Of all the above-mentioned experiences, this is unique to electronic interactive media, and what I'm really interested in. This is the same effect as improvised interactive theatre, where the user is playing a role. Through this method, games can do amazing things, like explore the nature of experience and sanity. Advanced interactive storytelling is also possible, such as with Facade. Examples of this are rare, but they are becoming more common. The best example I could find is a game called Eternal Darkness:Sanity's Requiem where there is a "sanity meter" which depletes during gameplay. As the sanity of the player gets lower and lower, strange things happen in the game world, and the fourth wall is broken with terrifying effect.

The reason why I find games so attractive is that they have so many different ways to express themselves, and I think we are just hitting the tip of the iceberg.

Super Columbine Massacre RPG

An excellent column in The Escapist on satire, violence in videogames, videogames not getting the same treatment as other art forms and the meaning of experiencing something.

For the record, I have not played the game mentioned in the title, but after reading the article I kind of want to.

I hear typing

This post is in the vein of more game design thoughts.

I've played alot of different video games. And I'm saying, alot. More frequently, I'm playing modern console games. Generally, these are more leaning towards casual, low-commitment play.

Recently, though, with a few of the more modern games, I'm getting this sense. Its hard to explain - I'm not sure exactly what it is. Its not a good feeling, surely, but I'm not sure if its bad either, and maybe its just me. Its the same sort of feeling I get when I'm watching a scene from a film or movie and an actor says what they're thinking instead of acting it or showing it. I feel insulted, like I'm being spoonfed. Is it because I might have a higher literacy level than the film's intended audience in the medium we're looking at? I hate thinking that way, because that makes me appear snobbish, which I may be.

Either way, its an issue.

Specifically, the feeling I'm getting from games recently is that I'm being spoonfed. Not that the puzzle or obstacle is too easy, just that its forced and unnatural.

For example, in Half-Life 2:Episode 1 There is a moment where Alyx Vance and Gordon Freeman come to a door. Previously we've seen doors like these where you turn a knob on the side but, in this case, the knob is missing. Alyx says "Something's missing." Now, Half-Life is intended for the adult audience, and somehow I feel a little let down when I turn 180 degrees to see a pile of boxes. Sure enough, after some aggressive maneuvers with the gravity gun, I find the knob at the bottom corner of the pile and I attach it to the door to continue on.

My reaction is "Why did you bother to waste my time with such a simplistic puzzle?"

My later reaction is that I felt spoonfed. I felt like, not only was the puzzle easy, but that I was pushed along. Also, it felt very symbolic - too symbol. This particular puzzle can be generalized to:

"Something is missing, find it to continue."

Valve calls puzzles of the type above "gates" (Ref. Half-Life 2, Ep 1 Commentary). Specifically, making sure something happens before the player can go on. Valve often mentions in the above commentary that they put in these types of puzzles to fight "combat fatigue"; meaning it is good to bracket intense combat with slower-paced puzzle-solving. I call this particular puzzle "symbolic" because I feel it is general, and has little to do with the actual situation the player is in.

My overarching issue is that this archetypal puzzle has nothing to do with our situation: Gordon, Alyx, the Combine, or even the particular type of door for that matter. It feels cartoony. It basically could have been "let's stop the gameplay until this chess-playing demon allows us to pass." For me, it brings my focus out of the realm of the game universe.

I worked with a playwright last year on The Time Project, which eventually became Heterotopia. One of the nuggets he left with me was that often playwrights, when listening to their own work, will often hear the clacking sounds of a typewriter. They are unable to experience their own work separate from the fact that they created it as a piece of work; they are unable to experience their play as a play itself, but also as something that was constructed.

I think that's the feeling I'm getting. I hear typing - I can tell Half Life 2:Episode 1 is a game (and many others too). This shouldn't happen.

When I had two guys over at my house last week to volunteer for the Kingston Improv Games I rented a bunch of games for my housemate's Playstation 2. One of the games was Shadow of the Colossus, which I think is one of the best games I've ever played. To give an ultra-short synopsis, you fight 16 colossi (10-200m in height) in this deserted land in order to bring to life a young woman that you brought in on your horse Agro. Its a very still, moving and, at times, sad game. Although at times I felt I could hear the typing, it never made me break from the reality of the beautifully-constructed universe.

So, here's the challenge: Let's make gameplay that relates directly to the environment we're in and doesn't break our focus from it.

PS. Half-Life 2:Episode 1 is a fantastic game. It's just the most readily available example I have. Valve does an amazing job.

IN OTHER NEWS:

The Deviants coming up next week. Watch here for press release/pictures/etc.

Flash Games I've Made

I've decided to catalogue all the flash work I've done into one easy-to-access post.

Open the Door

What is it?

The Interactive Universe

I just discovered the most amazing game - Samorost. The control of this game is such that you play a character (in the loose sense) navigating about a world in a puzzle-solving mode. But, the cool part of this game is that you get to make choices about your environment which should be beyond your control.



In typical puzzle games, the player would only be able to make choices that the player's character could make, physically.

For example
You walk into a casino. You are presented with a choice to play either the slots or craps. Whether you win or lose is based on your skill and luck (if you actually play the game-wthin-a-game) or is pre-determined by the designer.

In the new style of the game (I'm not sure if it has a name yet) you get to make the choice about the outcome, like if you lose or win big at the slots. This sounds a little ridiculous at first. Doesn't it ruin the point of the game, which is to test your skill?

No.

Not when the game is about storytelling, and when the goal of the game being played is to produce the most interesting story, or a particular story the designer had in mind.

In Samorost, you can control parts of your environment which are beyond the normal control of your character, for example:

A bird's flight.
When a fish bites on a rod.
Which branch a monkey swings on.

The gameplay element is still there, as there is a set of correct choices to advance the story, but the choices that can be made are not confined to what is physically possible from the embodiment of the character's point of view.

OR

I had said that in Samorost you are playing a character in "the loose sense". The irregularities I pointed out about the character being able to do things beyond their control do not matter if you treat the game player as a "god" of the universe, with his/her own agenda. Then, what I had called the player's characters before is now just a character in the broader universe. I don't think this is necessary though.

I see a parallel between choices in this game sense and choices that I make as an improviser. When I play a story-based improv game, I play a role, and if I'm playing improvisation properly, I make good choices that drive the story forward and make it interesting. This is done by feeding, endowing, offers etc.

For example

Someone passes me a (mimed) envelope. I say something like
"I see, its the inheritance from my grandmother."
Or
"Oh no! A death threat!"
Or
"Strange...just an address and a time."

All of which would advance the story. I wouldn't make a choice like:
"Its the utilities bill."
Or
"Another Christmas card from the Jefferson's."
Or
"Its the wrong address."

NOTE: The wrong choices here could potentially lead to stories, but they aren't as immediately interesting as the first three.

The choices that I as an improvisor should make are any that advance the story. Not a choice that my character made, but one that I as an improvisor made about the universe. So, I don't think its necessary to view the gameplayer as a "god" of this particular game, Samorost. It takes some emotional attachment away from the player's character, which I might add is really cute. The objectives of the character (stop an object from hitting his home in Samorost I, rescue his dog in Samorost II) are less personal if the gameplayer is treated as a god, and not an extension of the character. This lowers stakes (BAD IMPROV!)

Coming up, I'm trying to introduce these sort of choices in my choose your own adventure, "A night on the town". I'm writing it in flash now, and once the story structure is down I'm going to go through again and make the language prettier. Keep watching!