Pixels Killing Pixels

GTA IV: Reiteration

2008-05-15T13:13:00.000-07:00

GTA IV is a great game, everybody knows this. Being a great game I feel the need to stake my personal claim in it and just use it as an excuse to repeat things that I've already said. That being: video games allow for a different sort of expression than other art media can allow for.

I'm tremendously impressed with the scope of this game. When I heard people say such things I assumed they were talking about the number of streets, realism of textures and environment layouts, the complexity of the foot and car traffic, the usual GTA stuff. What I've come to realize is that beyond that there's a huge amount of smaller detail put into it. An enormous amount of audio and visual commentary on media and urban culture. It's this smaller detail that actually is what excites me about the game.

Prior GTA games, and sandbox games in general, have had to be large in (virtual)physical scope to allow for experimentation and invention. The only thing they've managed to really reinvent, however, is basic gameplay. GTA III is exciting due to the fact that you are able to just run around and not actually play the game, but all that running around is still set in established platforming and racing paradigms. It's not really special except for the fact that you can just pick up and play in a non-linear fashion.

GTA IV has actually broken into the realm of social commentary in a way that only video games can do. It's paving the way for games to express certain things in ways other media can't.

GTA IV is actually approaching a virtual reality world. The game is detailed to the point that just existing in it is commentary on city life and social norms. None of the easter eggs are too hidden or too expository. They're not so complicated that you'd be distracted by them, but are detailed enough that you can spend an entire play session just on the internet or listening to the radio.

I'm very excited about this game because it's better than a satirical blog, better than a gag youtube commercial, better than game filled with pop culture asides, better than a comic book caricature of a city. The ability to have an agenda and move freely through the environment makes the commentary more real and more poignant than it would if the situation was more static.

Bottom line here is interaction in and of itself is a valuable expressive tool. A lot of this game is clearly designed as commentary, to be noticed as satire, not simply as entertaining. By being able to interact with this environment at your leisure, and by having so many different things so detailed, you are able to selectively and efficiently experience the aspects of this world that are meaningful to you. Whether you take in the gestalt feeling of the city as you play missions, wander around looking for graffiti, drive around listening to the radio or go looking for the building architecture, so much time has been spent on so many aspects that each one has appreciable depth and insight. And since the world is still one entire piece, it's all fluid and cohesive. You are guaranteed to run into things you may not have been interested in and be exposed to criticisms you may find shocking or provocative. It's like an art gallery where you come for a particular artist but end up noticing others passively.

I don't think this would be nearly as effective if it wasn't a game, either. As much as a lot of this game's value comes from the non-goal oriented extras, it has sooo much more charm than Second Life, which is arguably far more radical, but not necessarily more influential. The fact that the game has a decent story with a likable character is just another aspect of the game's various artistic and expressive avenues, but it's also a key component in motivating you through the world. There could be the same amazing world with the same amazing detail, but without a story and goals, who would play? I don't even mean this to sound like "you have to throw people an entertainment bone to get them to sit down and think about something." The story is like a path of arrows guiding you through a dauntingly honeycombed museum. It's too easy to just wander to the most familiar and attractive aspects of a completely open environment, and too easy to zone out of a continuous narrative. The game aspect of this work is a pivotal aspect of it's strength.

You go Grand Theft Auto IV! I spell your whole title out with pride!

You Might Not Get It

2008-05-06T20:50:00.000-07:00

You Have to Burn the Rope is a video game joke. That's never really happened before as far as I know. There are games that have jokes in them and games that are overall silly, but in YHTBTR (gonna just...ctrl+c that so I don't have to say it over in my head again) the entire game is a joke. Whats better, and what makes it blog worthy, is that it's ALL joke. What I mean is, the game isn't a set of jokes, or a comedic setting, but a set of intertwined satirical gaming elements that are a joke once they've all been completed. Whereas Penny Arcade and Sam and Max tell jokes, YHTBTR is a joke. It's Ravel's Bolero of video games.

Like with Portal, YHTBTR is a seldom seen example of a game who's form and content, interaction and narration, work together and form a complete idea. It may be simple, but it's exciting to see.

It also happens to bring to light somethings that I hope becomes more of an intentional aspect of gaming. Absurdity and abstraction. As Internet culture grows and tastes become more niche, I feel like absurdist humor becomes more interesting. In television and movies, jokes have to have a clear reference point. You have to allow for lots of people to "get it", so it has to be based on something concrete and recognizable. Online gags no longer have to be anything except exactly what the creator intended. They're hard to explain and they deal with very specialized insights in very focused way.

YHTBTR is a very non specific joke that has to do exclusively with video game culture and ties closely into the Internet Bizarre. But not all gamers get it! It's so indirect and so subtle (despite its total overtness) that many gamers, according the the creator, don't get it!

I don't know, I'm sure this is an overreaction on my part. But this is more of what I want to see! This is a game being art, not art being found in a game. This game says something with itself, not from within itself.

Yea, Well I Played flOw Before It Got Licensed.

2008-02-26T14:49:00.000-08:00

Well, it was the tenth one, but it's the first time I've heard of the Independent Games Festival, a little get together within the much larger Game Developers Conference. The games up for awards at the festival show exactly what I was hoping would happen with game design; independent designers are experimenting with format, presentation and content in ways that money-flailing companies puss out of.

Now, I don't want to sound like I think these games are better than well funded, popularized ones. Far from it. Most of these games look clunky, unfinished, and are often not all that fun to play. However, it is notable that while Microsoft is showing off it's gelatin physics and lighting advancements, smaller designers are actually trying to think about new ways to make games.

So, here's a quick rundown of the stuff that caught my eye.

Fez and Psychosomnium (which was not at the IGF, but is another indie game) really strike me as interesting.

Fez uses a gimmick of shifting between 2D and 3D environments. It does so, however, in a really intelligent way. The 2D world is not just a constrained angle of the 3D. It's an entirely different environment, created when the 3D world is compressed to a 2D perspective. The result is often vexing, since we expect the 2d world to mirror the 3d one. In Fez they're really two separate worlds. Objects which exist a great distance apart in the 3d perspective are right on top of one another in the 2d one. Distances and objects in the 2d world are truly not in the same space as those same objects in the 3d one.

Psychosomnium is a simple side scroller that is a set of puzzles with counter intuitive solutions. They're only counter intuitive, however,from the perspective of a gamer. The game intentionally takes familiar gaming obstacles and creates solutions that are unconventional or downright opposite from what one would expect. The result is engaging and thought provoking.

What I love about these two games is that they effectively use a virtual world to comment on virtual worlds. Fez's dynamic reminds me that we often do try to make our games and imaginary scenarios mimic reality to the point that we forget that it's games' ability to not be realistic that is their strength. Psychosomnium makes me think about the sort of logic that accompanies gaming strategy, and how it may be a set of rationale entirely localized within the gaming community.

The other two that I'm trying to make parallel to one another, but really don't seem to, are Audiosurf and Crayon Physics. There are a lot more to talk about but I think anyone reading this would rather I wrap it up.

I have to say, I think Audiosurf is overrated. It's fascinating, but after playing it for a little longer than I'd intended to, I feel a little let down. It doesn't manage to make the music and visuals sync up as much as would impress me. It's fun, it's addictive, but it doesn't change my perspective much on either my music or video games. Having said that, it is very cool. It excites me because it seems like a game being used as a means more than an end. This may just be me, but the fun of this game is that it uses your music, not because the game itself is that much fun to play. That means that the game is a conduit between me and my music. It's using interaction and narrative to achieve a goal beyond interaction and narrative. That's exciting.

Crayon Physics. It's fun. It's way fun. It's...not very unique except for it's charming appearance and the fact that it functions so seamlessly. I really think it's the appearance that gets me and makes it valuable. I'm tempted to link it to Audiosurf in that it seems like Crayon Phyiscs is more of a means than an end but... no, no it's an end. The point is to play, and nothing more. To play though, is to doodle. And as someone who remembers doodling long into his academic life, nothing is more exciting than the idea of your doodles coming to life. Crayon physics uses textures and colors that are so dead-on nostalgic that you almost want to just draw box after box and watch them bounce around. Many of my favorite moments of playing it come from screwing up the puzzle and seeing my gritty-lined creations explode into motion. Achieving a goal in the process is just the icing on the cake. It's shallow, but man... it gets you right *here*. ow...

I think the value of these games, on the whole, is the fact that tap into the hearts and minds of, well, gamers. They draw on gaming nostalgia, gaming in-jokes, gaming what-ifs, and gaming "man I wish they still made"s. Combine these minds with a budget, and a whole new vibrant gaming culture could emerge!

Playing in the Pixel Box

2008-01-20T23:04:00.000-08:00

Amidst all my talking about games as art I'm constantly reminded that this isn't what draws us to gaming. In fact, I don't think the meaning underlying any art is what draws people to it, at first anyway.

Explaining why I play video games is something I feel like I've been solicited to do for a long time. By parents, peers who aren't interested in games, and especially adults who have a "concern for how you're spending your time." It's not easy to explain, and something tells me I shouldn't have to. I don't have to explain why I like the color red, or what makes a singer's on-pitch voice appealing.

But, I am called on to explain why I like the sound of a distorted guitar, and what makes noise music appealing. So maybe a little exploration into the appeal of playing video games is worthwhile.

I think the first thing to say is that if you like video games, you probably like the sights and sounds of them. You probably like the bright colors, you like the sound effects, the music, the movements on screen. Seeing and hearing the images and sounds is inherently pleasing for the same reason any image or sound would be. And yes, games have a particular look and sound (we'll get to feel later) that you don't necessarily find elsewhere. This is particularly true for those of us who played them in the 80's and early 90's. We grew up with MIDI sound effects and pixelated images. At the time they may have been substitutes for better images and sound, but now they're pleasing for their nostalgia.

The real reason I think we play, however, has to do with the ability to have selective emphasis over what is inherently pleasing, and be creative with a set of tools that are entertaining in and of themselves. I should note that I'm going to skip over the entire phenomenon of immersion and escapism. What I'm talking about here is the appeal of playing video games in an abstract sense. What motivates interaction?

Interaction is a form of creation, I think. Within established boundaries that are predetermined we are able to make the game go how we want. The game itself is pleasing, and interacting with the game is like choreographing the sights and sounds and motions that we enjoy.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I got into video games first by watching. I would watch a friend, or a friend's older brother, play. I liked the sounds and the motions and wanted to see the game happen. When I was offered the controller, the beauty of the game became a little fractured. The graphics didn't move so fluidly, the motions and colors didn't interact as well. I didn't make as good a choreography as they did. But, when I practiced, when I got a little better, all of a sudden I didn't want to watch. I wanted to play. Because playing made it mine. I was able to "create" the graphics and sounds to my specifications. That degree of control and pride in having helped make the enjoyable thing is what hooked on gaming.

Playing a game makes the sounds, the sights and the motions that are inherently pleasing personal. They become yours by the fact that your decisions create them in time. The more you are able to control the aspects that you are drawn to the more pleasing the game becomes. This seems to be both the reason people may have a hard time with RPG's in which you have only to press "attack" to win, and why people get so excited about being able to customize an avatar.

Some say that gaming is appealing because it's a challenge, that the fun is in overcoming obstacles and that the reward is a sense of accomplishment at having beaten the game's puzzles. While I absolutely agree that that is true, I can't help but think that I never play games to be done with them. I play to play. There may be a goal in gaming, but the fun of playing in my mind is in "creating" the game as I go, not destroying the game by ending it. Gaming is like being given a set of light and sound toys to play with, and being given a task to help you decide how to play with them. Like being given blocks to play with and being told "build a tower." While you will surely feel pleased with yourself at having built the tower, you're playing with blocks because blocks are fun to manipulate and control.

As player, you are conductor and decide how the game unfolds. The game dynamic breaks down when you are given so much control (or so little) that you can't make the game dance the way you want it to. If you have an idea in mind of what you want to conduct, but the tools you have won't let that become realized, it becomes frustrating and not fun.

I think the fear that people feel when they see us playing has something to do with the understanding that while we are being creative by playing, we aren't being very creative. There are lots of boundaries and while our desire to be creative and proud of ourselves is satiated by gaming, we don't really have much to show for it. And this is why I want games to have meaning. So that while we are playing in our sandbox, being creative within limits, we are also learning.

Kill Your Friends

2008-01-16T21:04:00.000-08:00

I think the demographics enjoying video games are seen as more homogeneous than they really are. Music and books aren't all marketed to the same people, but in general I feel that the biggest variety of acknowledged gaming demographics that exists is between age groups. And even then ESBR ratings are overlooked pretty heavily, leading to the "why are video games so violent? you know kids are playing them!" crap.

There's also the "casual" and "hardcore" demographic distinction, but from the abysmal reception of most of the titles designed for "casual gamers" and frustration with games sacrificing complexity for accessibility, I think it's safe to say that casual gamers are people who don't much care for video games. The only successful marketing toward casual gamers that I know of is the Wii.

It's no longer fair to draw the line at PC or console either. But there are real video game demographic disparities.

There's an entire approach to games that I like to call "sport-gaming". Yes sports games are often included in this, but I'm not referring to simulated sporting events. I'm referring games who's primary draw is competition with other people. It seems to me that this is use of the gaming medium that differs fundamentally from games which are designed to be immersive or tell a story. All games try to be fun, but sport-games rely on the fun of competing with other people.

Here's the distinction: sport-gaming is not about immersion, story telling, exploration, or information. The game is actually a little incidental. Despite graphics being present, you aren't playing a soldier and you aren't fighting an alien. You are you, and they are them. The actual people. You don't die or destroy, you lose or win. Rather than being judged based on a narrative or complexity or originality, sport-games are judged based on how they allow you to interact with others. I sometimes see Halo matches as basically touch football. The game is just a way for you to play a sport against someone

Experiencing a game as a sport makes the game a conduit between you and others. There is still a lot of focus on the game, but once you become familiarized with it, the game itself becomes almost invisible and the activity becomes much more about outsmarting and outperforming others. I think this is in fact why there's so much trash talk among people playing online games. It's not the same as playing against your friends. When not face to face, the desire to "better" becomes heightened, as does the need to create more tangible social contact.

There is a demographic of gamers who primarily play sport-games. Many games try to appeal to both types of gaming, narrative and sport. Often times this works perfectly well. I really like playing Starcraft's story. I have no interest in Gears of War online. There are a lot of gamers out there who seem to exclusively play games as sport, like game jocks. I seem to remember Gears of War not truly being accepted by 1up and IGN until it had sufficient multilayer maps and modes. Starcraft practically is an organized sport in Korea.

Part of this divide I think has to do with when you started getting invested in games. For those of us who grew up with an NES, I think there's more of a tendency to see video games as not really "games". Indeed this is where I see their value, as interactive narratives. While our parents asked "what's the point of this game" and were confused when we had a difficult time answering, we understood why our friends spent hours on games with "no real point".

On the other hand, there's an entire generation of gamers who only really began investing time in games during the X-Box era of online gaming. The growth of video games as a profitable industry I think is indebted to this type of gamer. Men young and old have video games, and many of them have no interest in fantasy narratives of any kind. They watch action movies for the explosions, watch sports to bet, and play games as sport. They pay for online subscriptions and they buy lots of titles.

Most of us participate in both worlds, but there are some who almost exclusively play online, and those who avoid online games like we avoid Hollywood clubs. It may be coming through that I don't particularly care for this type of gaming. I think it's like playing real life sports without any of the physical fun of playing real life sports. I'm trying very hard not to be snobby. But as much as I can admit that this is a useful way for people to interact, and a valuable way that video games have become embedded in culture, I do think that it's stifling gaming from being the expressive medium I think it should be.

Sport-gaming has to be repetitive. Rules have to be second nature, resources have to be familiar. The point is how you use the established game elements against others. If maps weren't small enough to memorize, controls simple enough to be predictable, and gameplay repeated enough to be accessible by players of different experience, the game wouldn't work. Playing the actual game can't be difficult or complicated, or the addition of unpredictable opponents would make the experience unbearable.

Video games are like comics in that they are just lucrative enough for them to be mass-marketed, but niche enough for the marketers to not know almost anything about the breadth of people they're marketing to. I don't think we as game consumers really know where we fall in game culture sometimes either. Maybe it's bad to draw lines in the sand and "other" different types of gamers, but I think some discussion of different types of gamers would be valuable.

The Best Game

2008-01-10T21:03:00.000-08:00

It’s clearly an overstatement to say that Portal is the best video game. That’s like saying The Siren is the best painting. There are too many factors involved in the art to be able to say that. But, I can say that Portal may be one of the best examples of an actualized video game that exists.

Portal is a complete interactive narrative, executed in such a way that its separate elements reinforce each other without interrupting each other. This is not something most games achieve and those that do do so by being very simple, visually and thematically. The simplest parts of the game are its premise (you have a gun that makes portals and must get from A to B) and the solution to it’s casual plot (the computer flipped out and killed everyone, and is now running on it’s own.) And honestly, a simple premise that becomes complicated and an archetypal plot that is introduced in a roundabout, mysterious way are elements of good games and good stories respectively. The graphics, mechanics, environment and puzzles are fairly complicated.

As far as a gameplay goes, Portal is executed extremely well. It has all the elements that decades of gaming have taught us are important for the experience to be fun. Its game mechanics are straightforward, the learning curve is natural, and the game stops before it becomes tedious. Your ability to play with portal technology freely lets you feel like you have been allowed to exploit the idea as far as you might like to. There's nothing I wish I'd been able to do but couldn't.

Portal has a plot. Well, Portal has a story. Not very original, but entertaining. What’s great is that Portal’s story is told brilliantly, almost without any expository information for nearly the entire game. The hardest thing in gaming, it seems, is to integrate a narrative with free control. Things like cut scenes and environmental boarders make play separate from story. They make a distinction between when you are playing and when you are listening. Portal tends not to. At all. The plot comes entirely from auditory and visual clues that may or may not be noticed by the player the first time, or any time, they play. All narrative information comes through almost subconsciously. Although the story telling value of hidden rooms and GLaDOS’ intonations depends on the player’s attention to them, there is no separation between the world and the player. The gameplay and story are one. What you see and hear in the process of playing is all that’s needed to communicate the game’s narrative. What makes things more perfect is that the passive plot and active play reinforce each other perfectly. The environment is much more real the more you explore it, using the gun is more fun because of GLaDOS’ comments, and failure more frightening as GLaDOS’ backhanded compliments remind you of the immediacy of the danger facing your Every[wo]man character.

This sort of symbiosis wouldn’t be possible if Portal’s simple features were not so simple. That being said, this game is a new archetype of how to do a game right. It could have easily been the same game it is now minus the monologues and visual cues. It could have been a ton of fun without any of it’s humor. But the added voice, the hidden graffiti, and environmental story clues make the game. As does the humor. I’m not sure what to say about the song except “kudos” and “thank you”. All games should have this much personality.

I don’t remember where I heard it, but I heard it that game design companies were hiring people as staff writers specifically. What I hope happens is that they don’t write simply dialogue, or general plot elements. I hope that part of video game writing involves writing plot as gameplay. I hope writers will storyboard and sketch and pitch ideas to the concept artists. I hope the timing of game elements and the layout of the environment will be territory of writers as well. In fact, games should have directors. Do they, Warren?

Shooting Fish in Hell

2007-08-30T11:34:00.000-07:00

I've been anti-first person shooter for years. My opinion is turning around, and it's thanks to something else I've denounced for a while: graphics. Well, not just because of graphics, but technology in general.

My first point in this argument is that I love Doom. Love, love, love Doom. So it's not that I don't like the first person shooter genre. I also played Quake. Also played Unreal, Half-Life, Marathon, Medal of Honor, Halo, and Hexen. Couldn't stand any of them (though to be fair it's cause I could never run Half-Life well enough to really play it, so that's not fair). What became frustrating was the way everyone talked about Halo as if it was the greatest thing to happen to video games since...well Doom. I've never thought Halo could hold a candle to Doom. Is that an actual phrase? Hold a candle?

Three games that have recently come out have turned me somewhat. Gears of War, Battlefield 2142, and Bioshock. And you know what, let's throw Metroid Prime in there, though I'm not going to talk about it. I'm sure there are more that are worthy of note, but these are the ones that have started affecting my point of view.

Doom was not the first of it's type, but was nearly, and was definitely the first to do it's type well. Doom has an appeal that I think is really the basic motivation for all first person shooters. Shooting things. I know, I know, that sounds obvious and a little too simplistic. But honestly, that's saying something. For all it's flash graphics and bullcrap, Halo is basically just tracking and shooting moving targets. There's an element of strategy to it, but seriously, I've never seen a game of Halo that was really much more than point and shoot gameplay. It's not like an RTS where you have an actual strategy. Doom's levels were complicated, varied, colorful, expansive, and highly interactive. Many elevations, many, many enemies, lots of variation of enemy difficulty. It had the basic elements of lots of games of its time. It had simple gameplay mechanics applied to complicated game environments and with no story whatsoever. The atmosphere was palpable though.

Future games in the genre basically did exactly what Doom did, but started putting emphasis on weapons, enemy designs, graphics, realistic physics engines, and all sorts of things that really affected gameplay very little. WHO CARES IF HE FALLS REALISTICALLY?! Once he's dead, you can't shoot him anymore AND THAT'S ALL YOU DO IN THE GAME! A lot of money and energy have been put into technology without the fruits of those labors affecting the gaming experience very much.

Explaining what it is about shooting things that's exciting is hard for me to do. It has something to do with power, something to do with destruction, something to do with mechanical telekinesis. All I can really say is that I think shooting things is fun in and of itself. The fun in shooting moving things is in the challenge. Tracking, hunting, aiming, shooting. Combine that with sports mentalities and you have Halo and Unreal. Combine it with WWI backgrounds and you have Medal of Honor. It's still just pointing and shooting at moving objects, combined with avoiding getting shot (which usually consists of nothing more complicated than running away from things shooting at you). Games have made the attempt at "innovation" in the genre by making the guns' discharges more tangible, enhancing the sense of reality with better AI, and impressing us with nifty explosions and lighting. These things alone do not necessarily enhance immersion, and certainly have next to nothing to do with gameplay (save perhaps the AI).

But this may not really be the fault of the newer games. Halo and Unreal are really impressive for the ground the break in terms of gaming technologies. One of the reasons I think I like Doom so much is exactly because it has crappy graphics. Monsters are iconic, knowable, easily recognizable. Levels are geometric, simple, easily memorable. Games with better graphics tend to be more realistic, but in doing so become less easy to relate to, less easy to become immersed in. Characters may sacrifice individuality for realism (the first Quake's monsters were hard to tell apart sometimes). Levels may become visually impressive, but unplayably repetitive or uninterestingly simple. I always felt like, when playing Unreal, there was no point to being on a server with so many people when only a few could fit in a room at a time, and in open spaces where lots of people could be there was basically nothing but a large platform. I longed for the days when I was avoiding dozens of monsters. I wondered why there were so many people playing when I only ever saw one or two at a time.

The first game to make a big step in the right direction for FPS games was, for me, Half-Life, which tried to make a realistic looking, complicated, story driven game. It's still aim, shoot, run, but the story elements make the immersion actually meaningful and necessary. Story elements follow action continuously and a convoluted plot drives discovery. With Half-Life my problem was the environments were just realistic enough for me to demand them to be more so, but just unrealistic enough for me to be constantly reminded that I'm in a game. Gears of War and Bioshock are the first FPSs that really, really makes me feel like I'm in someone else's shoes, using the tv as a window.

The realism of the first person perspective has hurt the genre's immersive power, counter intuitive as that may seem. It's the one perspective that we actually have a frame of reference for. Game designers can make us believe things more easily when they are clearly unrealistic. We have no frame of reference for a pixelated environment, for overhead views of troops, for third person polygons. We can believe that it all works together because all we know about the world is what's on the screen. When games try to become realistic, especially from the first person perspective, the believability breaks down. We know what the real world looks like for first person perspective, and any deviation is immediately noticeable. Gears of war was able to be incredibly immersive by being not only exceptionally realistic, but simultaneously stylized aaaaand, not really a first person shooter. While it in essence is still just that, the fact that the game doesn't make you distrust what's on the screen makes it much easier to be drawn in.

Bioshock and Half-Life 2 have also been able to make a game believable, partly also by being stylized, but also by being incredibly well rendered and lit. Physics aside, objects in these games have real weight. Now they're not the first to do it. Doom 3 was pretty damn amazing. But Bioshock's environments in particular are colorful, engaging, complicated and continually believable by virtue of its amazing textures. Bioshock is the first FPS that has really drawn me in with graphics and atmosphere alone. In fact, when I take a step back, that's really what the game is. The action is relatively humdrum. But lighting and sounds are scary enough to make me uncomfortable, and the contents of rooms are detailed enough to insist that I explore every inch of the well rendered city.

Aside from graphical believability, finally there are some FPSs that are changing the formula. Gears of War is perhaps the first real step away from what Doom established. A new type of gameplay. Not aim, shoot, run. Granted it's not much different; it's cover, aim, shoot, reposition. But hey, I'll take what I can get. It changes the tempo of gameplay substantially and requires an entirely different mindset. The pinch of strategy that's added into Gears combined with the difference in environment interaction make for a breath of fresh air.

(By the way, if Splinter Cell is an amazing breakthrough in gameplay for the medium, let me know cause I never got into it.)

Battlefield 2142 is my first introduction to a massive multiplayer FPS that actually was immersive. It's environment, the number of people on a server, the variety of gameplay, and the gravity of some of the challenges in any given match make it feel like a real battle. Aside from the fact that dying is a frequent occurrence, it feels like you're actually in a war. I think the scale is really what does it. I applaud Halo for previous attempts, but the scale of Halo matches and no story just makes it feel like a game. Fancy graphics make it feel like an expensive game. Battlefield 2142 actually feels worthy of the graphics that it boasts, even without a story. The game's scale allows for strategy on an immense level. Makeshift military rank, massive numbers, real-time speech, and specialization of units makes this game really feel like a community with a purpose. This feels like a war simulation, not a shooting gallery or a football game.

FPSs I think have tremendous potential. I think they have a ton of ways to exploit our forced perspectives exactly because the point of view is so near and dear to us. While other game genres have continually experimented with ways of interactive with a particular style of gameplay, FPSs have pretty much stayed in the shallow end. Now that the technology that the genre relies on is finally becoming standard, that may change. Games like Portal make developers look like they're finally starting to take their water wings off and look toward the diving board.

Having and Eating: Immersion and Customizaiton

2007-08-05T15:00:00.000-07:00

The internet is one of the best things that's ever happened to us. Don't try to deny it. We all love it for different reasons. For my part, it's the ability react to what you consume. I think that may be the most fascinating thing about electronic culture. We can all contribute, and everything we consume can be manipulated in some small way to make it our own. Part of our identity online.

This is a big reason why I love and have faith (gah! faith! get it off me!) in the video game medium. Interactive art is something that's been part of post-modernity for a long time and it's a/the fundamental principle of video games. It's a toss up between what's more important to me in gaming, the interaction or the narration. All I can really say is I've never found a perfect balance. As I've said before, I think the two facets are part of a tipping scale: the more interaction, the less narration.

This is a blog about Magic: the Gathering. It is, not really, but sort of a plug. But you know what, for a long time I've felt that there was something about Magic and gaming that went hand in hand perfectly. I'd meet gamers who'd turn their noses at Magic and say to myself "Either you never learned to play Magic, or you don't really like gaming." It took me being bribed with free cards, but now I've finally given some to why I feel that.

Magic: the Gathering makes an interesting bridge between interaction, in the form of customization, and narration, in the form of established goals and game structure. It's really very similar to real time strategy games like Starcraft and Civilization. You have an established repertoire of game resources (units in RTSs, cards in Magic) and each one has an established use. After that, the way the game goes is up to you. In RTSs this comes in the form of organization, build up, how you use your units, what sort of player you want to be. Are you going to turtle, like a puss, or rush, like a dick. Magic is the same way. In both games and Magic there's an element of preliminary planning and an element of on-the-fly interpretation. I think this may be one of the reasons that people get turned off to Magic. The preparation is pretty lengthy, and spontaneity is more limited once the games starts. But herein lies my excitement for Magic. It's tremendously complicated with enough different avenues to allow just the construction of decks to be exciting. Thousands of cards and complicated rules make for a lot of creative leeway.

I remember sitting in class in high school and thinking about better ways to use the Zergling's burrow ability better, but there was no way to try until the game started. And even then it was a crap shoot because anything could happen once the game started. With Magic I can take my time planning, refining, experimenting. Then, during the game, it's my planning and my luck versus my opponent's. For this reason, I think Magic is great for anyone who actually likes Myst invading their daily chores, but would really like solving the puzzle to mean more than being able to solve the puzzle.

There's another trade off to be had between customization and immersion. I think the hierarchy goes thusly: video games -> Magic the Gathering -> Dungeons and Dragons. The relation is how much you have to fight the knowledge that you're sitting in a room being a nerd in order to enjoy the fantasy you're trying to live. The point of all of these really is to pretend you're something you're not. To fantasize.

Video games, with their noises and colors and moment to moment concentration really lets you forget that you're sitting on a couch pushing buttons. The biggest enemy to a good game of Magic, for me, is silence. Nothing makes it harder to maintain my fantasy of being a badass spellcaster than the awkward, silent stare of an empty apartment broken only by my own reluctant voice saying "I cast ~~Magic Missile~~ Pyroblast". If there's one thing I like about Magic these days, it's the attempt to make the artwork more realistic and more situational. A good remedy for self-consciousness in Magic is a creature who's artwork is not only unarguably fun to look at, but helps put you in escapist role of a murderous wizard. Engaging flavor text (oh yea...flavor text) also serves to cement the cards in some tangible world. I've always loved the Weatherlight series for attempting an actual story with it's cards' texts and images.

On the one hand, it requires more effort to become immersed than simply looking at graphics. On the other, the fantasy becomes very personal. It's your deck that you built. In gaming you are almost always forced into the role of someone else. In Magic you have a lot of freedom to engage the fantasy world on your own terms.

And although one might feel a little bad sitting in a room playing a card game, there's definitely something nice about knowing who your opponent is rather than suspecting the trash talking prick who sniped you doesn't have his Adam's apple yet.

I suppose I should talk a little about the specific expansion that I'm being bribed with. As this is a core set there's not a lot to say about the set itself. The artwork gets better and better, which again is basically all the immersion aspect of it, so better art means better immersion. It's really interesting to see the cards that make it in and the ones that don't. There's a culture to Magic that core sets represent. Card popularity and usefulness (not to mention neutrality) are reflected in each new core set. I remember when Serra Angel was removed, I think from 6th. I don't know how long it's been back for, but it feels like the game is complete again. Cards that have served you well or inspired a deck theme become beloved characters in an amorphous story and it's always nice to see who's popular in the fantastical battlefield.

I don't know why it seems strange to become attached to cardboard and totally acceptable to fall in love with pixels. As far as I'm concerned they're both doorways into creativity and escape. I'd generally encourage anyone who plays video games passionately to take a swing at Magic. All the major themes of fantasy lore are in it. The qualities of elvishness and orcishness, the life giving power of nature, the corruptive side effects of evil-derived power. But more than in almost any fantasy interpretation, this one lets you take a look at all the powers in fantasy and really do whatever you're inspired to do as long as you can afford the cards. I'm really not sure why there's never been anything close to a successful magic/video game hybrid, and I'm not even going to touch it. I think it's still a great idea. But what I'll say is this. We want to live somewhere else sometimes. We want to be powerful. And when it comes to being part of another world, there's something about complete customizable freedom that not even MMORPG characters can match.

Avante-Game

2007-05-12T19:36:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if it actually works this way, but it seems to me that art starts as amature experimentation, develops when it becomes lucrative and is funded, and only becomes fully explored when amature experimentation can be done at a level that's close to what is being done by funded artists.

This has certainly been the case with art media in the past (dammit I'm still not talking about actual games...) with writing, painting, photography, music and movies.

Writing is easy. When the masses can get their hands on pens and paper, you get literature. Painting was, for quite some time, something done for royalty and aristocracy. Mass production and the breakdown of feudal social networks allowed for painting to progress beyond establish styles. At this point whoever wants to paint can paint. Period. Same with photography. The Kodak hand camera was downright feared by professional photographers of the turn of the century. They thought it would ruin photography as an art and make it crude. They didn't know that some of the greatest stylistic breakthroughs would come from a six year old.

Anyway, the trend is partway finished with video games. Tetris and Pong were created by programmers as playful experiments and theoretical tests. But games are hard to produce and few people have the expertise to make one from scratch. In fact, the barriers preventing just anyone from creating a game have been so massive that video games have been an entirely business oriented art for just about its entire history. Only recently have we finally found a method of producing video games without the need to be funded.

Flash and other internet animation programs are allowing people with relatively minimal programing knowledge to experiment with appearances and game formats and make games in their spare time.

That being said, I'm pretty sure not much real experimentation has happened yet. Many of the best flash games are still only experimenting with visual styles and simple game layouts. There are still very few games that are actually trying to make some statement using the gaming structure.

However, I do think this is a way really good games can and will be made. It takes someone with nothing to lose to make soemthing that's never been attempted before.

The alternative is for some decently large companies to put their necks on line. I'm sure many would claim that this is already being done, but in actuality I think very few companies have really put themselves out on a limb for the sake of making a really artistic game. Though some of my very favorite games could be considered the result of just that.

The new online formats that the major platform systems include are facilitating this sort of avant-garde game exploration. Flow, one of the most beautiful, albeit simple, online games I've come across has been picked up by Sony and has been ported to the PS3 as a downloadable game.

I'm honestly not very sure how seriously independent game designers are taken by the game industry, but there are some really great things being made. I'm hoping that as people experiment with creating games fans will begin to expect different things and turn to each other for their games the same way we've done with video and music entertainment. When that happens, maybe people with money will perk up and fund some amazing ideas.

Link Orgy

2007-05-02T11:00:00.000-07:00

Here's a great interview from Wired with Orson Scott Card. I particularly like his comment about protagonists in games. As I see it, Card's Empire project (the simultaneous writing of a novel, comic, video game and I think a movie) is an amazing step in the right direction for games. It's juxtaposing video games with other story telling media, which will hopefully do something to legitimize games and encourage publishers to take writing in games seriously. I've always enjoyed Card's series, so it'll be really interesting to see how a sci fi writer who's work I'm familiar with deals with game design. I just hope it isn't awful...

On a related note, Terry Pratchett's daughter Rhianna Pratchett is hot as hell. She's writing for Heavenly Sword, and among others, wrote for Escape from Monkey Island, which now that I think about it has humor very similar to her father's books. Just to complete the circle of fantasy incest, I'm currently reading a collaboration between Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, and if you need a link explanation of Neil Gaiman so help me God I'll slap your head Stuart Style.

Doing, Making, Saying and Thinking

2007-04-12T19:19:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been a long time coming, but I think I'm finally ready to get into the real heart of the matter.

How can video games be more expressive as art forms?

I would like to show that we can expand our notions of what interaction entails in video games. There are many unexplored ways to express ideas through gaming and make gaming more meaningful.

What you have control over, and the form that that control takes, affects two things: how you experience a narrative, and how developers can express ideas to a player.

The form of interaction enables a player to ask questions about themselves and what the game is trying to tell them. If the player’s interaction takes the form of ____(control over movement, behavior, plot direction, which character to use, etc), then questions could be: How does it feel to ____. How does the story change when I _____ differently? What is my reason for ____ing? Or, as Nico puts it, “It’s not about saying ‘what would it be like to be in someone else’s shoes?' It’s about saying ‘now that I’m in these shoes, what do I do with them?’” The way the player answers such questions, or the degree to which the answers are left open ended, is how video games can express subjective and specific messages to players, either directly or through metaphor and allegory.

It is my belief that just about all stories require a certain kind of participation. We enjoy hearing stories because we project ourselves onto the characters and into events in the stories. The appeal of nearly all fiction and entertainment is escapism and fantasy fulfillment. We imagine ourselves in the world of stories we read about, watch and listen to.

Different types of stories appeal to people differently because they cater to different fantasies.

Action/adventure tends to cater to the fantasies of being in control of exciting situations, performing acts of violence, feeling "alive" by way of adrenaline rushes and risk taking. If you enjoy watching the Governator shoot a bunch of identityless drug runners, you probably enjoy the idea of committing acts of violence without the guilt of being responsible for emotional trauma that such acts would cause in real life (there's nothing wrong with this, btw).

The majority of video games come in the form of action/adventure. There's nothing wrong with action/adventure, but it's near exclusivity in games limits the way a game can be expressive by limiting the types of questions a game can force a player to ask and the way a player interacts with the story.

Horror seems to fulfill the desire to be in a scary or otherwise traumatic experience and survive. Confronting deep rooted fears and being able to survive them and punish those who would inflict them upon you is enjoyable. There's a cathartic pleasure in experiencing things that are uncomfortable, granted you won't be permanently injured.

The reason people project themselves onto characters in a romance seems pretty clear. It's fun to be in a romantic relationship. It's more rewarding when it takes some work, bla bla bla. Having a relationship work is fun.

It’s a little harder to explain why we like drama, but I think it has to do with voyeurism and a really simple fascination with how the lives of other people differ from our own. Watching other people make decisions and go through events gives insight into other people’s minds and into our own. It makes us ask the question “how would I deal with that situation?”

I think it’s a good idea to analyze this because it’s important to see how different story types target different fantasies and change their form to fulfill them. This is what video games should be doing more of and aren’t. In order to effectively express something in games, we should be looking at what it is about a story we think people are going to want to engage in and make control over that the main vehicle of the game’s interaction.

Video games as a medium should be extremely capable of fulfilling these fantasies. Rather than participating in a story indirectly, through projection, players participate directly through the games interactive aspect.

In fact, gaming has fulfilled the fantasy of committing non-emotional acts of violence better than most shoot-em-ups have. I think this is because they allow for more choice. More than most, the action genre isn't about voyeurism and watching someone else’s choices. It's about pretending you are Ahnold. FPS's have done this better than any violent film. They actually let you choose who to shoot and what to do. What they lack now is the desire to use this experience to ask the player questions and make them think. Some games have tried to do this, but I think using the interaction to ask questions should be more of a primary focus of a game. The interaction should be a means as well as an end, not just an end. (sniff sniff, I smell Kant...)

Horror has been fulfilled much more poorly, and romance almost not at all. At least in the States. Action/adventure encompasses nearly the entire gaming repertoire, including children's games. I think the reason for this is that the fantasies of horror and romance are more time consuming to fulfill and require more dedication. The fantasy of shooting something can be fulfilled in a matter of seconds or less, and can be done so over and over and over for as long as a person is still entertained. The fantasy of surviving something traumatic requires much more time. First danger has to be established in some believable, palpable way, then some sort of survival must be achieved in order to complete the fantasy. Resident Evil attempts to do this by utilizing atmosphere , surprising zombies (band name) and guns. Atmosphere presents the danger, zombies/surprise makes it palpable, guns create resolution. It’s not entirely effective since I think there's too much resolution and not enough danger. There’s too much killing of zombies and not enough fear of being eaten. Horror movies work because most of the movie is establishing danger, killing off identifiable people one after another to give you the sense of "oh man, everyone I projected myself onto is dying, I could die in this imaginary world!" and only at the end letting the last person/people survive. A good horror game should take the appealing part of the genre, being placed in trauma and escaping it, and make the game about controlling that.

While talking about this, Nico and I came up with what we think is a good idea for a horror game.

Romance takes forever. In order to fulfill the fantasy, you have to make a relationship. The more complicated it is, the more believable it is, the more it fulfills the fantasy. Part of the appeal is the struggle to get what you want (the other person). The more time it takes, the harder it is, the more rewarding it feels when you get it (them). Dating games that I've seen, particularly dating sims, tend to try to fulfill it too quickly, too shallowly, and appeal too much to the physical aspect of a relationship. For a dating game to be worth playing, it would have to use player participation to immerse a person in the experience of forming a relationship, not just a means to expositorily get from "unlikely meeting" to "first kiss". So how could interaction enhance our appreciation for such a fantasy?

Again, Nico and I think we're clever and have come up with an idea.

When it comes to drama, I think we are too short sighted in trying to come up with game formats. I thought about mentioning GTA or Metal Gear as examples of drama done fairly well, but then I decided that that wasn't true. In action stories, the behavior that we get invested in is the violence, the running around, the action. But in a drama that is simply not the case, and we shouldn't be trying to let a person participate in a drama by having them run around and control where the person goes. Like romance, much of what draws us to drama is dialogue and story events. The interaction should reflect that, giving some control, or at least influence, primarily over the story events and dialogue. The best example of this sort of idea that I can come up with off the top of my head is Black and White, where your decisions affect the appearance and behavior of the game continuously. I imagine an effective drama game doing something similar, having a player make constant decisions and being motivated by being able to see different results from different decisions. The game wouldn’t be about getting the character through the plot, but letting the player determine the plot.

I think video games are thought of as low brow entertainment by lots of people because they have done a very good job of appealing to a very limited set of fantasies. The exceptions, games like The Sims, Katamari, Guitar Hero, Second Life and Hotel Dusk, seem to have felt the pressure to be widely appealing and easily accessible, limiting their expressive potential. One of the few games that I think has really broken the mold, and done a good job of not compromising, is Riven. But that doesn't mean games have to be either artistic or entertaining! Games, like all media, have the potential to be both. We just have to think outside the box a little more.

HorrMMOr

2007-04-12T18:39:00.000-07:00

Now this game idea is one that Nico and I are pretty excited about. Partly because it sounds like lots of fun and would be a new type of game, but also because it shows what could happen if the notion of what a game is supposed to be like was tweaked just a little.

Nico and I suggest a horror MMORPG. You may say "...thats really not a very novel idea." Well, bite me, yea it is. Here's why.

Like I've said, games have a pretty high tendency to focus on action and adventure. Even survival horror games like Resident Evil, which claim to emphasize staying alive over shooting everything, are still pretty much about shooting everything. That's not what horror movies are about. Horror is about being scared, feeling victimized, embracing trauma, and living through it.

This game that we've devised would put a player in an MMO world of spooky, creepy and otherwise frightening surroundings full of critters and dangers. And it would not give you the ability to defend yourself. Not to any substantial degree. Maybe you could kill little monsters that bug you, but basically you'd be in constant danger of being killed by all the horrors

There would be safe spots, camps and outposts, where you and other players could meet each other and mingle without being threatened. You could form groups and go exploring together.

In fact, the game would be set up such that you have to have a group.

If you go outside the camp, you would be able to make your way around for a while, running from things, hiding, fighting back against small assailants, but it would be impossible to go very far without help. With friends you could actually survive. But not by killing monsters. A monster would have the ability to kill everyone if you tried to just attack it. No, your friends are there to cooperate to lure monsters away, gain access to places that a single person couldn't (stand on each other's shoulders to get up high, use your combined strength to move things, etc) and to just help each other. A wounded person could require help from his/her comrades to be carried to a safe place to recuperate, whereas they would only be able to crawl and be devoured if alone.

Experience, we figure, would be gained not by killing monsters, but by actually exploring places you've never been, or where nobody's been, and by collecting information about the world. I like the idea of there being a plot, a reason all this is happening, that none of the players know. By finding pieces of paper, computer files, whatever, that provide the community with info, you gain experience and skill points. When you take back info to a camp, that camp could have an archive of all the info that's been found. New info would give more exp than info already found by someone else.

The thing that Nico seems to be really excited about is the idea of a class system based in the modern world. Skill points could be given to things like medical knowledge, physical prowess, or specific abilities like psychological analysis, military experience, cpr or dissection. I see people being doctors, therapists, cooks and the like, who would be able to heal the wounded, have more physical strength, calm down people who are getting too stressed, or (one of my favorite) examine a fallen creature for discovery experience. Just like being a cleric, or sorcerer or whatever in D&D, a good party that survives the dangers of this world needs to use its different members' abilities to meet challenges. With the right people, you could even kill something, on occasion.

I think this is a really cool idea because it makes use of the notion that the fun of the game is putting yourself in danger and somehow getting out of it. The fun in the game is exploring and finding out what's out there. Immersion is the main motivation. The heavy focus on exploration and attention to environment leaves a lot of room open for expression. An interesting story and complicated artwork would really fit in a game like this, and enhance all of the gameplay, rather than detract from it.

Romantic Comedy

2007-04-11T16:28:00.000-07:00

In the spirit of taking an alternative view as to what interaction can be, Nico and I came up with this idea for a romance game. The idea behind it is that the appeal of romance and romantic comedies is the fulfillment of a relationship fantasy. The parts of romantic stories that we enjoy have nothing to do with adventure or action, but entirely to do with social interaction. Therefore, that's what a game of this type should do.

The game would allow the player to choose from one of, lets say, a dozen people from different walks of life, who each start the game in some preset place in a small town environment. You walk around and find one of the other players, and try to start a relationship with them.

Interaction would take the form of making decisions about where to go with the person and what to say to them. Each recipient of the player's interaction has something of a plotline attached to them that the player discovers as they play, hopefully ending with some sort of romantic fulfillment.

Sounds sort of boring. Also sounds like every dating sim ever. But, I think if you give the interaction enough variation, it could end up being something really exciting and really different.

I imagine dialogue working this way: Each character has a number, lets say 1000, of established sentences that they can say at any point in any conversation. A player enters text via a keyboard, and gets a list of sentences that contain those words. Sort of like predicted text in a cell phone.
ex:
"i like you" yields
[ I think I like you! ]
I like it when you do that.
I can't believe I liked you!
Do you like the place I took you to?

The player selects a sentence, selects one of three or so tones that the sentence should be said in, and the computer recipient reacts differently depending on what's said, what tone it's said in, and what mood they're in.

The plotline for each computer character could also differ depending on what the player says and how they play the game. Either there would be certain elements of the plot that only get revealed when conversations go a certain way, or there could be multiple avenues for each plot to go (the first seems more feasible to me).

The game ends when you piss the person off so much, or when the conversations don't go anywhere, and the person leaves to their home, or wherever they go, and they won't take your calls or talk to you. There would be no "Game Over" screen, just the inability to continue the relationship with that person. If that happens, the player has to go find someone else.

I see this sort of game having lots of opportunities for expression. For example, not every character would have the same things that are available to them to say. You could have characters with different dialects, different vocabularies, different levels of education, different interests, and all are reflected in what is available to the player to say. Certain people might not work well with others, making the game more challenging if you pick two mismatched people to try and make the relationship work.

Plotlines could also contain commentary on social behavior. I had the idea that one character could be older and have an Auschwitz tattoo on his/her arm. If the player mentions something about this, you get added insight into the tattoo bearer's story, even an addition to their story. However, not all playable characters would have dialogue relating to such a thing, so depending on who you pick, you won't be able to access that part of the other person's story, and maybe not have as good a chance of having a relationship with them.

What I like best about this idea is that it takes control of a different aspect of a story and gives a good deal of free control over it. Rather than assuming that control over a character means telling them where to go, this idea shows the potential to control a person by telling them what to say and how to think.

Playing Something

2007-01-23T10:51:00.000-08:00

I’ve been trying to find games to write cultural criticism of, and I’ve been having a hard time. See, I play mostly single player games, I always have. I like stories, I like narration. This is the main reason I’m so frustrated with the industry and feel the need to make a damn blog about it. However, video games are very culturally relevant. My problem is the games that have become cultural phenomena are frequently games I don’t play. Online games, massive multiplayers and open ended games like The Sims and online communities like Second Life (which by the way I just heard about. God I’m lame) have become so popular and addictive that they’ve become the poster children for gaming in popular culture. Which makes it frustrating when I don’t play them. I don’t even like them. In fact, I’ve avoided them ever since Starcraft was more popular in online form than single player. I didn’t even play Unreal Tournament for more than a few minutes before deciding that a shooter without levels wasn’t worth my time. Granted this has been to my detriment, as I’ve missed out on an entire aspect of gaming culture, but thinking about my taste has brought me to an interesting conclusion.

Games which are open ended, which have little or no linear narration, are much more interactive than games which have an established framework or story. That is to say, the game relies on the players’ input and changes depending on what the player does. Most games are really more participatory than interactive. Like books, they require the audience to be engaged, but the story remains the same. The player is constrained by the game’s rules, levels, plot, whatever. One perspective has been that games are not making full use of their medium by not being more interactive, that if they are only going to be participatory, they might as well be movies. However, the more a game has an established narrative, the less possibility there is for reciprocal interaction. Conversely, the more interactive a game is, the less narration is possible, hence World of Warcraft and Second Life. This, however, seems to actually be one of the reasons for the widespread popularity of games like WOW and online shooters. You get to play it how you want to.

Something amazing happens when you get people playing games that are really open ended. The flow of expression is reversed from the direction it normally goes in art. Ideas in art generally go from the artist to the audience. In a single player game the creators are presenting ideas that are being received by players. Open ended games actually take the expressive ideas of the players and inject them into the game and into the community. The game becomes less a finished work of art, and more of an art medium for the players to express themselves with. The players become co-artists with the creators, not just consumers of the art. This is very nearly unique to gaming I think. It’s like a visual artist presenting a work that’s paint and brushes and a blank canvas and saying to the audience “GO!” The artist’s work is part what s/he presented, but mostly what the people do with it. Even with online shooters the game is not so much the level and the guns and more about the people you play against/with. The game is about you and your friends, vs. Doom which is all about the levels and the enemies.

Games like this are appealing because the purpose is still to be fun, and are recognized in broader culture (and sometimes over-analyzed) because observing people play not only reveals what's inside the heads of the game developer, but of the players. Indeed because there is nothing that you have to do in WOW or the Sims, everything you do can be read into as being something that you want to do, whereas in God of War you can actually place some of the blame on the developers for forcing you to do such violent things. That's bs of course cause you chose to play, but I think the role of the player really is more intimate in open ended games.

I don’t consume art to express myself, I do it to learn about other people and their ideas. I play for stories and new ideas and immersion, not to be part of a community or share my own ideas. I guess this means I oughta give online games a second chance. I would learn about gamers and what gaming means to a big portion of both players and observers of the genre. But I want stories dammit! I want to see single player games being more artistic and expressive. Thank God for Eternal Darkness and Killer 7.

Super Corporate Mascots Melee!

2007-01-05T16:43:00.000-08:00

I've been talking about theory a lot lately and I think it's time I got back to actual games. After all I've only written on one actual game this whole time. So I'm going to focus on one that we all know and most of us love.

I love Super Smash Brothers Melee. It makes great use of the Gamecube’s graphics, its gameplay format and engine are innovative, it’s accessible, it allows for lots of personalization of gameplay, it’s really great. I’m not going to talk about all that. What I want to have happen is what the Esquire article mentioned. I want to provide criticism of this game, not a review. So, I want to talk about what this game says about society and those of us who play it, not from the perspective of a person buying a game, but from the perspective of art criticism.

Nintendo owes much of its longevity to the popularity and accessibility of its iconographic characters. Starting of course with the Mario franchise, which established no less than a dozen easily recognizable character icons of the Big N, Nintendo has been steadily making an attempt to create brand loyalty by encouraging players to form emotional bonds with its pixels. This has been remarkably successful. Few will openly admit to hating the Mario character. Even if you hate the games, the Mario character is charismatic and cute. But how can he be? He has no personality! There is next to no story for Mario to be part of! In fact much of his character bio was projected onto him after his inception.

The fact of the matter is that iconic images allow us to form emotional bonds easily by being open ended and subjective. Nintendo has a tendency to make their characters as iconic as absolutely possible, cartooney and simple.

Most people who love the game (or at least the ones I’ve talked to) will agree that the characters in Smash have moves and fighting styles that suit the character’s personalities to a surprisng and pleasing degree. Lots of this has to do with the moves coming directly from the characters' games of origin. Mario performs most of the moves from his various games, Link has some of his weapons, Kirby can eat people, etc. But often times people (my friends) get the feeling that other characters who are hardly even featured in their own games (Fox, Captain Falcon, Game and Watch) have moves that suit their characters’ personalities. Just like the U.S. audiences read into the simplest aspects of the Mario graphic and came up with “Italian plumber”, the game designers have included simple, archetypal behaviors for their icons. We eat it up and project personalities with nearly no information. We choose characters that we claim to like, although we have nearly nothing to base our liking on. We claim to dislike a character's personality, when what we really don't like is the fact that we suck with them. I know I get frustrated when i like a character that I'm no good with, even though the only real contact I've ever had with the character is using them within the game. This is a very real phenomenon and is not limited to Smash in any way. People anthropomorphize everything. What’s neat about Smash is that it illustrates not only that we are all very eager to do so, but that we seem to do so in a similar way. We agree that cute things are small, quick and light, that villains are big and slow and self-confident, that heroes are modest and powerful, and that old crappy hand held games (Game and Watch) are funny and quirky.

This doesn’t bring me to my next point at all, but I’m going there anyway. Again, what I think is so cool about this game is its illustration of Nintendo’s icons. But this game is particularly interesting as it illustrates, and spawns conversation about, Nintendo’s game history as it relates to other brands. Looking at the characters in the game you can basically see Nintendo’s retail history, from black game crystals to Pokemon. This is in itself interesting, but it becomes more interesting when we say “man, I wish there were some more characters. But who would they be?” Now we start thinking about who owns what. We say “oh, they forgot Bomberman...good.” or “oh, Nintendo bought Sega, they could include Sonic! Can’t they put in Final Fantasy characters? No, those are owned by Square.” The very fact that we know who owns what says something about consumer culture. But the fact that the characters we know and love are so deeply linked to the brands which created them is something unique to video games, and comic books I suppose. Video game cross-pollination in games like SNK vs. Capcom and Soul Caliber 2 removes us from the imaginary world of the game and puts us in the shoes of enthusiastic consumers, to the financial benefit of the company I would think. We begin to form opinions of a company based not on the quality of their products, but on the basis of which brand icons we care about. It's hard to hate Nintendo when you love Mario. It a good reminder of how deeply incestuous business and creativity are, and how much of our cultural history recorded on sales receipts.

So yea. Awesome game. Maybe sometime in the future I can talk about that fact.

Video Games On Tape

2006-12-18T15:43:00.000-08:00

In response to the idea that the length of recent blogs makes them difficult to respond to and comment on, I’m going to try something a little different for the next segment of discussions. I’m going to do one blog on one idea. So no “Thirty Year Old Art: II”, just some more issues that relate to part one, starting with one that I have a really hard time fitting into any other discussion very well.

As far as how people consume and interact with them, video games are an interesting combination of movies and books. This was really surprising to me when it came to light (thank you Stuart) because I'd always sort of assumed that video games were most similar to movies. My concept of a video game was basically a movie that was interrupted by gameplay, or a movie in which you controlled the action. The only similarity I saw to books was the fact that they had a story. But the way games are experienced, not just the way they look, is in fact very similar to how people read.

Obviously different kinds of games share different things with other art forms. Abstract puzzles have little in common with any narrative art. But for the most part, and especially in the post 8-bit video game era, games have taken on much of the visual style and appeal of manstream movies and video media of similar subject matter. For example, science fiction settings in video games tend toward the robots and lasers that mainstream film uses. Explosions, gunfights, highspeed chases, panoramic landscapes, shapely figures and dramatic camera angles have all worked their way into video games as the technology to create interesting images becomes cheaper and more accessible to developers. Especially as CGI becomes a staple for action/adventure movies, the visual style of movies becomes imitated by video games. Video games and movies always seem to be interwoven, as they make direct use of each other's subject matter and pump out movies of games or, much more often, games of movies. Direct inbreeding of the two media never seems to work though. I wonder why...

The fact of the matter is that video games and movies employ vastly different methods of engaging an audence. Movies, television, music, theater, painting and sculpture are all what I would consider arts which require passive participation by the viewer. The audience participates in their mind, relates to the work in a personal way and adds to the work by bringing their own perspective, but the art will continue whether or not the people are paying attention or even present. A person can zone out in a movie and the movie persists. This is not the case in either literature or video games. The art will only exist if the viewer actively invites it to. If you stop reading the book, the story stops. There can be no story without the abstract shapes being translated into meaningful ideas as they are read. Similarly, there can be no video game unless someone plays it. It is true that a person can zone out reading a book too, or absentmindedly play a game without any thought, but the disruption to the artwork in these instances is substantial and different from the way a person can passively observe a movie or listen to a song without focusing.

I think this may be something that turns people off to gaming the same way people sometimes get tuned off to reading. There is a significant amount of effort involved in each that is needed to get the information contained in the artwork. Books and video games require some imaginative input from the audience to be fleshed out in their entirety. In 8-bit and 16-bit RPG gaming especially there's a lot of imagination necessary to become immersed in the world. The graphics and dialogue are limited and beg the player to mentally fill in the dramatic and visual gaps to make the story come to life. Those who are willing to do this find themselves in wonderfully emotional and exciting stories. Those who aren't find a flat, unengaging series of electronic bleeps, pixellated bodies and simplistic dialogue. Obviously there's a lot of imagination that goes into reading a book too, since you can't actually see or hear anything you read. The images and ideas in a written story only exists in the mind of the reader.

Games also need some imagination and thought to complete at all. Decisions have to be made, puzzles need to be figured out, initiative has to be taken to get anywhere. That is of course the point of playing, but especially for non-gamer types, this may be too much to do for the sake of having a story told to them. In fact, in this respect games require more effort that books do. Video games are sort of a half way point, which sometimes makes them difficult for people to enjoy. They require more effort than just sitting and watching, and don't allow for as much imaginative oportunity as a book. I think this middle ground is also a reason some people love them so much.

The other really interesting parallel between video games and books that i think is worth mentioning is the fact that, more so than most other arts, video games and books require a vocabulary in order to be experienced at all. This is more true in books than in games. Obviously books require literacy, but more than that, books require understanding of the specific vocabulary that is being presented in the story. Many children would be considered literate are completely unable to read many books, despite their ability to pronounce the words on the page. Even many movies in a foreign language can be understood by what seems to be a fairly universal vocabulary of images. I know I can follow spanish telanovelas about as well as I probably could if I spoke spanish. Games require a vocabulary also. Games have commonalities in what's expected of the player, the sorts of solutions that will probably solve certain problems, how to control an object in the virtual world, etc. The best example of this is fighting games. Street Fighter II's quarter-circle-punch has been a staple in video game vocabulary since its inception. When a player new to the entire genre comes to the controls, the motion is completely alien and sometimes incomprehensible. Just the fact that video games require instruction manuals and training for each game shows how much of a vocabulary is require to experience the game. Both video games and books understand that this is a potential barrier between their art and the audience, so both have developed "media supplements" in the form of walkthroughs and line/cliff notes. These allow the art to be accessible to people who would otherwise pass it by due to a failure to develop the necessary vocabulary.

So there ya go. Books and Video games. Now, how do we get more old people to play video games...

(it's still pretty long isn't it...)

The Thirty Year Old Art: Part I

2006-12-08T09:14:00.000-08:00

Art is a difficult thing to talk about.

As much as it is an extremely old and intimate aspect of society, it is notoriously difficult to define. Disputes about what art is have been the subject of artwork for centuries. I’ve never had an art teacher who didn’t look at least a little uncomfortable when the subject was raised, or an art class that was satisfied with the conclusion. The definition expands and contracts regularly. However, there must be some boundary. If there is none, there is no such thing as art. If everything is art, the word becomes meaningless. I feel that art is one of the most important things in the world. For a person who things the point of living is experience, and I do, nothing seems more meaningful than a human endeavor who’s purpose includes experience for experience sake, and the communication of experiences.

So what is art to me that makes it so easy for me to say that video games are clearly included? Well, for me, art is this (don’t worry I’ll explain): anything presented for consideration of the thing as it exists apart from the rest of the world. An apple eaten as food is not art. And apple looked at as an example of an apple is art. And apple looked at as an example of an object is art. Eating an apple is not art. Presenting yourself eating an apple is art. The taste of an apple is art if the taste is presented as such. Art can be seen to have many purposes, or none, but for me art serves the function of providing experience and conveying information. Words cannot say everything. It may help us understand others, or simply be enjoyable and enhance ourselves and our personal environments. It is essential to understanding our nature as people, and subsequently to be a responsible person.

Art can be anything. Any sense, any object, any idea. Through art we have the potential for self-expression. This, of course does not make everything good art, but the different ways in which human experience can be communicated are limited only to the number of things that can be experienced. Video games often employ so many conventional examples of visual and auditory art that the supposition that they are somehow excluded from the Art umbrella I think is irrational. They create emotional experiences, are often aesthetically beautiful, and certainly require skill and craft to create. So, yea, video games are definitely art.If you don’t like my definition, here are a few more. Video games still fit into them pretty nicely.

“The use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others.” Britanica Online
“Any human activity which doesn't grow out of either of our species' two basic instincts: survival and reproduction.” Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics
“An application of human creativity that has some form of appreciative value, usually on the basis of aesthetic value or emotional impact.” Wikipedia

I feel like it’s a good idea to explicitly say the purpose of this two part blog rather than just try and convey it in a topic paragraph. The purpose is (inhale) to explore video games as a viable high art form and encourage their expressive potential. Why try to encourage games to be more expressive and artistic? Partly because I love video games, but honestly, video games have become repetitive. As technology grows ever more amazing I see it being used in games the same way it has been used in movies: to make existing ideas more sparkley. Video games, a medium defined entirely within technology, should advances exponentially as technology does. Now don’t get me wrong, it has changed in profound ways! Games have morphed so fast it’s hard to keep up sometimes. From Super Mario Brothers to World of Warcraft? That's petty amazing. But even still, I’m bored with a lot of the next generation games. I’m tired of shooters, RPG’s, platformers, fighters and virtually every established genre feeling like they really haven’t progressed significantly in any way besides their graphics. I still get more of a kick out of my SNES than I do out of my PS2. This is partially nostalgia of course, but is also due to the types of ideas and interfaces that exist in some older games. For example, my favorite shooter remains Doom II, despite playing Half Life, Quake II, Metroid Prime, Halo and Descent (remember Descent? Yea you do!) to name a few. I want to see what video games can really do.

The other reason sounds more pretentious, but I believe in it. Every art medium has something it is able to express about life, experience and humanity that no other can. There are things that can be said through song and sound that nobody can ever depict any other way. There are stories that, when told through a movie format, will be understood in a way a book could never express. There are written ideas that could never be expressed visually or sonically. There is something special about every mode of communication, and video games are capable of expression. This means that they have something special they are capable of saying, and I want to hear it. At this point in the history of video games, I think they’ve been able to show us a lot about ourselves, but I think they’ve been imitating other art forms too much. I remain convinced that they have not really plumbed the depths of their expressive potential.

This first discussion I am going limit to exploring the qualities of the video game medium and how those qualities relate to art in general. A second blog will follow discussing the artistic/expressive potential and achievements of video games.

Dissecting art into parts is a task often more difficult than defining what qualifies as art in the first place. Most definitions settle around Form vs. Function, or something along these lines. The problem becomes the fact form and functions often merge. Form usually entails the physical manifestation of artwork, and function defines the social impact of a piece, be it intended by the artist or not. Clearly these two get mixed up, since many forms of art explore aesthetics for aesthetics’ sake and form is heavily used to convey information and is integral in the function of an artwork. The two seem inseparable, but I’m going to separate them anyway. A good work of art is one that uses form effectively to achieve a functional goal. I don’t think it can be said that some art has no goal whatsoever, because someone did it for some reason. If it was entirely accidental, it was not presented, and therefore not art by my definition.

I see form in video games as having two major parts: narration and interaction. In point of fact, video games don’t need much in the way of narration, since many abstract video games exist, but I feel like it’s fair to include narration as a basic component of video gaming since so much of the medium’s expressive potential comes from narration. All games have some form of narration, even if it isn’t much. Tetris’s graphics are a form of narration I think, albeit an extremely simple one.

When I talk about narration, I mean anything that allows the game to convey information to the player about the game’s world. This includes setting, story elements, gameplay graphics and sound, extra-gameplay graphics and sound, visual prompts, anything that lets the player know about the imaginary game world. I think it’s fair to say that just about all games, video or not, have some element of narration when considering this definition. The lines of a football field communicate to the players the imaginary world of the game, where imaginary boundaries become meaningful. Board games represent imaginary worlds where one plays with the use of a plastic avatar. What is unique about video games is the vast scope of narrative possibilities. Especially with fourth and fifth generation consoles, the possibility of creating cinematic-quality narratives becomes easily achievable. It isn’t technology though that allows for this communicative ability. Some of the most amazing stories to come out of games have come from 16bit systems. Video games really do have the potential to have stories as complicated and lengthy as any novel or movie, and thanks to the booming market and technological investment, the look and sound of just about any movie as well. Of course, video games are not movies or books. They are separated from being “just games” by their narrative potential, and separated from simply being narratives by their interactive potential.

Interaction in gaming is represented by control schemes, game engines, button configurations, controller layouts, on-screen commands, and what sort of visual perspective the player is forced to take (this last one bleeds into narration a bit, but whatever). The interactive element of gaming is what sets it apart from any other art medium. Interactivity in gaming forces the player into a particular persona and a particular perspective. It also makes isolated aspects of the game particularly intimate to the player. By allowing control over certain aspects of the imaginary world and not others (as must be the case in any video game) game designers force the player to become more familiar with the things they have control over and interact with, and less familiar with elements which are completely beyond their influence or participation. This happens in all art media of course because we can only handle one perspective at a time. When watching a movie, you are forced into the perspective of the camera, and sometimes the person the camera is focused on. When viewing a painting or sculpture you are limited by the object's orientation in space. I think this is more palpable in video games because of the harsh contrast that is sometimes created between what the player can see, and what the player can control. It's important that the player be more focused on their character than on the background textures and the sound effects, else they are likely to make mistakes and fail in the game’s objectives. However, the case may be made that the more blurred the separation between what you can interact with and what you can’t becomes, the more immersive and effective a game becomes. Personally, I think this is a stylistic element of gaming that will not work all the time. Certain games are more effective when you are aware of the fact that you are playing a game, and some require the sense of loosing one’s self in the imaginary world in order to fulfill their function.

In the course of reading up on this subject, the issue was raised that a distinction should be made between interaction and participation. This actually has a lot to say about the nature of games as art. There seems to me to be a fundamental distinction between a situation in which there is a specific narrative which a player is able to have some degree of participation in, as in an RPG, and a situation in which there is some substantial amount of give and take between the established game narrative and the player. The few games that i can think of that are decent examples of this type of interaction are MMORPG's, The Sims (especially the later ones) and that-really-neato-game-Nico-showed-me-at-Warren's-house (TRNGNSMAWH). I’m actually going to leave this for the next blog since I think it has less to do with establishing the nature of video games, and more to do with the specifics of how expressive and valuable video games are and can be.

At the heart of the controversy surrounding video games and art is the next subject. The function of video games. First of all, some comments on my view of the function of any art. I’ve mentioned it before, but I think it bears repeating. Much of the purpose of art is the communication of information. Thoughts, feelings, stories, perspectives, and even objective reporting can sometimes be conveyed more effectively through artistic craft, and I think this is one of the most important reasons that we value art in culture. The words we speak to one another do not allow us to understand each other well enough. But through art, we often get a little closer to the truth hidden inside each person's head. Each art form allows for acute understanding of humanity in a way that the other art forms simply couldn't do. Video games must do this as well, and being such a unique art, must also tell us something special about ourselves that we would never know if they didn't exist. What is that special something?

Art may convey information because the artist intended it to do so, or it may do so without the artist even knowing that it’s happening. It is the case that anything that is consumed conveys to the consumer information. You can’t experience anything without having some impression left on you. So there is no such thing as art which conveys nothing to its audience. However, many many works of art are made with the express purpose of being beautiful. The pleasurable nature of art is for many people its only value, and probably the other reason it is so important to us. Despite the fact that I think this is limiting, it must be accepted that this is also an extremely important aspect of artwork. Unless a work of art is enjoyable on some level, it won't be experienced by anybody.

The function of nearly all video games is entertainment as far as i can see. This of course does not mean there is a purely lowest-common-denominator appeal in gaming. Games range from mind-numbing keg-drinking fuck-screaming frat house center pieces to very subtle and sophisticated imaginary explorations. Even so, the function is entertainment. This is, however, the point of most art that exists in any medium. The majority of art is created for its aesthetic appeal, hence the stereotype that art must be aesthetically appealing. And let's not forget that just because the function of a work of art is to be entertaining does not mean that it is necessarily low brow or shallow. Art may seek to entertain by being intellectually provocative, or may couple elements of hedonic enjoyment with more complicated messages. This does exist in the video game world, although examples are often few and far between. Often enough the most complicated alternative function of a video game besides entertainment is to tell a story, which arguably is the same thing. If the point of the gameplay is to be fun, and the point of the story is to be enjoyable, then the game really is only about entertainment. However, just as a very serious movie can use expensive camerawork and special effects to reach an audience, so can a video game have enjoyable gameplay and a very sober plot.

I think one of the reasons that video games become targets of the label "pure entertainment" is that often times there is too much effort going into making the gameplay, the interaction of the game, entertaining and not enough going into making the gameplay and story mesh. When the narration and the gameplay don't make enough sense together, or don't rely on one another enough, they seem like separate entities. Because of this, the gameplay can be viewed as pointless and meaningless. The fact that video games' best defense by the public is "it builds hand-eye coordination" is insulting. You might as well say that's the reason to let your kids try out for Little League. That and callouses. But when a game's narration and interaction are too disjoint or too undeveloped, the game looses the qualities that make video games so amazing and becomes simply objects moving through space at the commands of fingers. Either just a hand-eye exercise, or a hand-eye exercise interrupted by a cartoon. To be expressive and worthy of our time, games need to not only create interesting narratives and gameplay, but merge them together to create one complete work.

An example of a game which I think uses gameplay and story elements together well to serve its point (though that point is agian only entertainment) is Metal Gear Solid. The Playstation one, not the Game Cube version which I think beomes distracting and overly complicated. While it may be argued that the controls, perspective and engine are clunky and difficult to use, I think that this game utilizes different gameplay modes and puzzles to keep the player feeling like they are Solid Snake in the story that the FMV sequences illustrate. The game frequently tries to make all the rediculous little errands you have to run make sense and tries to remind you constantly why your character is doing all this crap. The way the gameplay is set up you really can't diverge much from how one would imagine the story playing out. When you are supposed to be stealthy, you are stealthy. It's not that you can't kill the enemies, but it's very hard to survive if you let people know that you're trying to kill them. Few of the different gameplay elements seem superfluous, and with the exception of battling gigantic robots on foot with a rocket launcher, the game is damn near plausible. Whereas many RPG's could probably be made into books or movies without losing too much of their appeal as stories, MGS's very interesting plot is reinforced by it's gameplay, and the gameplay would be very near unenjoyable were it not for the story. Few games manage to really merge gameplay and narration this way. It is almost more important to make the gameplay make sense with the plot in this case than it is to make the gameplay enjoyable by itself. I think this is a good example of a video game, who's function is still pure enjoyment, executed in such a way that it becomes art worthy of consideration by other art media. Other examples of games that are complete, successful examples of the video game art medium in my opinion are Super Mario Brothers, Doom, Final Fantasy 7, Starcraft, Katamari, The Sims, Riven and Shadow of the Colossus to name a few. I notice when I'm trying to think of examples that I don't include many games with a plot. The absence of plot and the extremely simple narration is one of the things that makes Super Mario Brothers and Doom work for me. Very few games have been able to create a well rounded work of art while maintaining a decent story. I think the reason for this is that a complicated, engaging story requires a level of complex interaction that is very difficult to design, and even more difficult to make enjoyable and appealing to a wide audience. It's much easier to make an exciting story, and pair it with somewhat unrelated but very exciting gameplay.

Where i find video games truly come up short is when I try to think of games who's function is not entertainment. A work can be entertaining without entertainment being it's function (at least as far as the creator's inentions are concerned). For anybody who enjoys abstract shapes and unconventional imagery, cubism and abstract painting are indeed entertaining. But this is not necessarily their function as presented by the artist. Jackson Pollock's work is not so much about showing how pretty and aesthetic abstraction can be as it is about exploring what art is and how art could/should be produced. The function of Pollock's work is to present questions about artistic aesthetics and the process of creating emotionally expressive paintings. For many, his art is downright ugly. Yet even some who don't care for the way his paintings look still have a certain respect and appreciation for what he is doing with paint and canvas. Pollock's work is an extremely well executed merging of form and function, each working together to reinforce the other, a true example of how to express ideas visually. Few games approach the design process with the intention of using the interactive and narrative capabilities of gaming to convey a message to an audience. games like Grand Theft Auto may contain insights about culture and gaming, but the purpose is still to entertain. The only problem with this approach is that it limits the sort of artistic repertoire that games are allowed to make use of. There are established formulas for what is going to excite people and what sorts of game genres are going to entertain a mass audience. Games usually are based in some sort of action or competition with the computer or other virtual beings. control schemes are limited to ones which are consistent, easy to understand and easy to commit to reflex. Again, this is not a bad thing, but games need not be limited to such conventions. Games could make more use of multiple or unpredictable control types, or more exploratory and constructive, less action based gameplay (Katamari, Myst). I wish I could make better suggestions, but honestly it's hard for me to think of how games could achieve a greater depth of expression. Still, I insist that they are limited by so little that they must be able to convey information in their own special way that is as valuable as a novel or a dance.

Before I shut up, I'll mention that I'm not oblivious to the fact that many works of art, video games definitely included, are valuable not because of what the artist intends, but what the artist's work unintentionally says about the world he or she is living in. Such is a value of World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto, Counter Strike and Miss. Packman among many others. By deciphering what it is about playing games that is enjoyable we learn about our own culture as well as what makes us people. A game's artistic function may be completely devoid of any intention, and simply be the impact that it's had upon society.

Video games are an complicated art form, complicated further by the politics of culture and technology. They've only been around for a little over thirty years (Pong was available in 1972). Many of us have been alive during their entire evolution. Only in the last five or so years have video games created such a social impact that the medium has become an issue for discussion and allowed them to contribute to the Art Debate. A hundred years ago music was defined in such terms that much of what we listen to now would not be considered music. The notion of listening to Merzbow would not even have been entertained, it would be valueless. Video games have undergone many evolutions, but like all art in it's adolescence, video games have only been experimented with for a short while. Video games may become different in the future in ways we don't imagine now (ahem, Wii). There's still a lot we haven't played.

Gotta Catch Em All!

2006-11-17T15:55:00.000-08:00

Consumerism is something I think we all accept as part of our lives.

We can sometimes blame it on capitalism or sometimes on our particular version of product advertising in this country, or even live in a state of denial and say that we consume because we need the crap we see on TV. There is something fun about consuming, though. I'm not sure if I think it's natural or the result of some social something-or-other, but I am embarrassed to admit that getting stuffff (extra f's to emphasize the uselessness of said stuff) is a great joy. Only my poverty keeps this in check. That, and video games. Few forms of entertainment have been able to make such wonderful use of this drive to collect than video games. Equipment, abilities, items, power-ups and level-ups have long been a recurring element of gaming. From Doom to Soul Reaver, Metroid to Diablo, Blaster Master, Gradius and every RPG ever, games often require you to amass items and abilities, and there is a certain enjoyment to collecting them for the purpose of having them. What is interesting is that the desire to find virtual items is similar to the desire to purchase, and looking at how the desire to have manifests in gaming gives interesting insight into the desire to consume in general. The compulsion to consume exists in a greater or lesser degree for each of us, and brings a different degree of pleasure for each. Some gamers will pass by treasure chests in favor of advancing the story. Players may ignore every side quest that does not required to understand the plot or finish a level. But the desire exists frequently enough to warrant a little examination.

I love stuffff. As a kid I collected everything that resembled a dinosaur, had all the ninja turtle toys and attempted to get the play sets, collected stickers, coins, stamps, rocks, animals (short lived thanks to parents), knives, cards, comics, and I do believe at one point any object which I figured I could one day in the future use to fashion a robot including spark plugs, springs, circuit boards and wheels. I had this great fantasy of being the sort of person who has anything you could possibly need when you need it, no matter how obscure.

There is a certain security that comes from collecting which is created by the ability to have a tangible record of the past. By taking photographs we ensure that the past did indeed happen. When we collect things we not only find a way to pass the time and feel productive, but we have a log of all the productive things we've been doing and what fruits our labors bore. Each time we collect another level we are reminded that we're doing well. Every treasure chest means we're going the right way. It's comforting, being able to see and label those landmarks. Buying new furniture makes a new apartment feel like a life change rather than a new space. Souvenirs can be anything as long as they remind you of the place you got them in or the people you were with. It's fun to see armor and weapons and effects build up on characters. One of my favorite parts of Super Metroid was to start a new game after beating it, just so I could be reminded of what the old Samus looked like. It made me the experience of the game feel more solid when I could really see the changes that had occurred in the course of the game. I still want to be able to see all of my books and DVDs in one place, just to compare the ones from my childhood to the ones from a few months ago. Comparing them makes the changes I've gone through as a person more definable, more real.

The letdown comes when we take a look at the receipts our lifestyle has left us only to realize that we've wasted our timeHowo...how much money have you spent on Magic cards? Wow, that sure is a loStamps.stamps. In the realm of video games these emotions are played upon in very interesting ways. There is a fair amount of disagreement as to how much hoarding of stuffff is too much. I tend to draw the line at utility in most games. Collecting stops being fun when I can't possibly need what I'm going for. When another level means nothing, when I have the best weapon I'm likely to get, when collecting these damn in-game cards means all that's going to happen is I'm going to get more cards WHOOPTY DAMN DOO, it's time to put the packrat to sleep. It becomes necessary for a game to provide constant obstacles in order to make searching out collectibles make sense. If nothing else we are going to need something to try our new toys out on. Yet the compulsion to collect and the joy that comes from collecting sometimes is surprisingly strong. People begin inventing reasons to collect.

My favorite delusional reason: it's an investment! BULL! You are never going to sell those cards so take them out of that damn plastic sleeve! You don't need two copies of that comic cause it's never going to be worth enough to bother selling. Interestingly enough, video games took this excuse to such an extreme that it actually became a practical reason. Kids in my highschool started saying they weren't wasting their time because they planned to sell their character. Every day after school they would sit and play Everquest with the express intent of selling the login id on eBay. To my knowledge they never actually did since they had become too attached to the character in the mean time (we'll sell the next one, we swear). This has even gone so far that there are warehouses in China and Korea filled with people playing World of Warcraft for the express purpose of selling gold, characters and items. Video games have actually allowed compulsive collecting to become profitable!

Yet even as I poke fun at people for collecting useless things, I remind myself how much fun I still have going to Amoeba and filling my basket with cd's I already have on my computer. Like it or not, collecting stuffff is fun for many of us. And so at long last has come a game who's entire purpose, whose ENTIRE purpose, is collecting. Enter the extravagant and glorious Katamari Damacy. The very fact that the game is so rediculous absolves us from the guilt of collecting frivolous things. There is no chance of deception, this game is next to meaningless. And that's what makes it great! How can you feel bad for collecting useless things when thats all there is in the game? It's bright colors and stylized graphics continually pound in the message that that this game wants you to just have fun! Somehow it's a great feeling to be plopped down in a bizarre, vibrant world of recognizable objects and pick them up one after another, eyes ever focused on what's in front of you, rarely pausing to consider what you just got. Sifting through the managery of junk you've collected back in the menue screen becomes immediately and depressingly boring. The whole fun is in obtaining.

Colossal Yarn

2006-11-10T17:30:00.000-08:00

The realm of fantasy is boundless.
The worlds we create are reflections of our imaginations and desires. Yet we tend to see similar worlds represented in fantasy, ones we can all understand and relate to. This is by no means a mistake. If nobody can relate to our fantasy, nobody can join us in our world. And so, thanks to well known fantasy epics and centuries of composite folklore, we have a schema for what a fantasy world looks like. Fantasy oriented video games often reflected this.

Our fantasy worlds are full of goblins and dragons, giant insects and fire. There is good and there is evil. You can be what you want, but the lines are there. We fight with swords and we fight with magic. We struggle for make-believe glory and for the greater good of unreal worlds. We find friends and foes, we live life as we expect life to be led, albeit in a place we will never see. We have never experienced anything like Shadow of the Colossus. This game has taken elements of fantasy that are so ingrained that it almost seems like just another take on an old concept. It's not. It's new. All of it.

First it's important to see what makes this game familiar. Young boy protagonist with sword, damsel in distress. Pretty standard. Fantasy world: monsters, magic sword, lack of technology, large European style architecture, vibrant natural surroundings, horse.
Okay I think that's about it for the environment. Now for gameplay. Largely puzzle oriented. Use environmental and behavioral clues to figure out monster's weak spot. Prince of Persia style platform obstacles. Finding hidden items in the world boosts your stats. This is basically the game. This doesn't even begin to describe the game.

Shadow of the Colossus is amazing because of the intensity and complexity of the emotions that the game evokes. Playing creates a visceral, palpable reaction which I feel is more powerful and tagible than in the majority of the games. While it is an important quality of any game to be emotionally engaging (or you simply wouldn't want to play it) Shadow manages to create an environment that is staggering in its emotional depth. While many of the game and environment basics are familiar, the way they are presented makes the game a unique play, as does the multitude of familiar game and genre aspects that are left out.
The way the player interacts with the graphics is different from nearly every other game, especially one with a fairly straight forward platform engine. The vast, beautiful landscapes and haunting, glorious Colossi draw the player in purely on the basis of wanting to touch and experience all that can be seen. The slow, meditative pace of the game (including the absence of plot, believe it or not) forces onto the player an intense focus on the immediate and enables the player's unconscious interpretations of the world and events to exist unchallenged.

One of the most valuable experiences one gets from playing SotC is the mesomorizing effect that playing it has on all who view it. The act of traveling from one places to another in this game is an event. Vast landscapes and monolithic terrain dwarf Wander and much of the time spent moving from one place to another is spent looking at where you are going and what you are passing by. This means that players are less able to think about the act of traveling a means of getting somewhere, and must instead view it as something to be paid attention to in and of itself. From the start of the game, the protagonist's slow trek across the tremendous bridge that separates the game's environment from the rest of the imaginary world sets up the player to anticipate entry to the foreboding castle at the end of the path. Yet because the bridge is so great and the time spent crossing so long, the player must begin to notice the surroundings and the immense bridge itself. This coupled with the fact that the bridge and the path to the castle are so breathtakingly beautiful makes the idea of reaching the end secondary to the wonder of watching the journey to get there. Such becomes the case with all travel in the game. Whether through mountainous valleys or by gigantic cliffs and always through vast open fields, it often becomes necessary to stop and remember where you were going after getting lost in the scenery. Like a zen garden this focus on the immediate small details of the world means that the player becomes more familiar with the world, more immersed in what the character is doing moment to moment. The game environment stops being simply a background to be passed through, and becomes an examination of the sublime nature of things huge and vast. Players are therefore more likely to consider what would in other games be an unremarkable progression of gameplay (such as the arrival at the resting place of a Colossus) to be a more meaningful and powerful event. After riding with Wander, scouring valleys and meadows and becoming lost in the environment, the arival of battle becomes more impactful and more significant. Victory and defeat become more intense when the player is more focused on and invested in the subtleties of the world he/she is playing in.

It isn't just the journeys that make the game enchanting though. Because of the game's heavy use of the puzzle-like gameplay needed to figure out how to get Wander up onto the Colossi, it becomes necessary to watch the monsters go about their animations for a few minutes while trying to figure out the solution to a given problem. This is something players are welcome to do, too, since the animation and style of each Colossus is so amazing that we would sit and watch even if it wasn't necessary.

Apart from the hypnotic visuals, the game implants it's emotions in the player with numerous ambiguities and it's considerable lack of exposition. There are next to no clear explanations for the reasons behind any of the events in the game or what is going on at any time. Where many games would begin an adventure with murky questions and slowly reveal details until a clear picture is presented, Shadows maintains its secrecy the entire way through. This is infuriating and brilliant. Like the extensive trecks that are necessary to move about the game, the limited information that is dangled in front of your face throughout serves to force your attention to the task at hand and immerse yourself in the moment. Yet there is just enough information provided to you for you to feel like you know what's happening at some level. Wander is trying to save a girl (don't know who she is or what is wrong with her) and enlists the help of a deity (not sure what sort) who provides him the solution of killing the Colossi in order to save the girl (unknown why this will help). The end of the game does enlighten us to one of these mysteries, which allows just enough closure for the player to not feel cheated. In the mean time, this ambiguity allows the game to be so recognizable, yet so indefinable, that it approaches surrealism. Players are searching the entire game for clues as to what is going on, and as such are paying attention to every detail. Players begin to see Wander's appearance changing, make note of the subtle changes in the game after each conquered boss, and explore the landscape and starting castle for anything out of the ordinary. This search not only strengthens the emotional focus on the immediate, it allows each player to fill in the information slightly different. The plotline becomes largely subjective, and the value of certain tidbits changes from one player to the next when so little is made clear, making the plot very personal to each player. The male-female relationship, the tremendously melodramatic self sacrifice and the utter impossibility of the feats that Wander must face lead the player to search for meaning in the task at hand and form his/her own motivations for Wander. The longer the player plays, the more they become immersed in the world and invested in searching out and defeating the Colossi, the more they stretch to understand what is driving this boy to such a task. By the end of the game, Wander's beaten and deformed body compliments the mental state of the player.

Of course none of this would matter if the actual gameplay, the Colossus battles, were not something special. Well, the Colossus battles are something special. The emotional attachment and intimacy created by these battles completes the effect of the game as a whole. Shadow is nothing if not visually beautiful, and nothing shows this off more than the Colossus introduction animations. The very first encounter the player has with one of the giants is immediately an emotionally complicated experience. Subtle nuances of the game ensure this. The game forces the player, in true Shadow fashion, to watch the beast before being able to engage it. Even when the player is allowed to control Wander and approach the Colossus, it moves to quickly for Wander to catch up. There is no music and no sound save the tiny crunches of Wander's feet, and the enormous tremors of the giant's. The player is likely to be overtaken by awe at this point. The creature is not a threat yet, and the size and creative desing of its body is amazing and unexpected. When the monster sees Wander, the music enters and calm awe turns to "how the hell am I going to kill this". The entire battle is a combination of recurring excitement, anxiety and tension. Once the puzzle is solved and the creature's defeat is only a matter of time, the player is once again able to gaze at the Colossus with an affectionate eye, soaking up the rich detail of its texture and the oddly familiar, aboriginal design of it's character. Excitement heightens as the final blow draws near and as Wander's sword finally plunges into the behemoth's sigil relief and joy washes over the player at the completion of the seemingly impossible task! And then a funny thing happens. That relief is clouded by guilt and sadness as the monster falls. Bittersweet music accompanies the glorious creature as it topples from it's graceful stance. For a moment I become sad and secretly wish I had not done what I spent so much effort doing. I remind myself that it's for a greater cause, which I course I don't understand. With conflicting emotions battling in the player's mind, he/she is sucked back to the starting castle, where numerous bizarre visual recurrences provide a disturbing and confusing congratulation.
Such is the nature of each battle. Each creature is surprising and majestic, each one scares the hell out of you, each is a joy to explore and a feat to destroy, and each time the victory is soured by the destruction of something amazing. Except for the last one. That guy was an ass.

Investment of this sort is next to nonexistent in most other games. The depth and variety of emotion that is interwoven in a careful and sophisticated way makes this game feel like one of the few truly complete games that exists. Nothing feels like it was left out by accident, nothing feels overdone to a fault. The melodrama makes sense when you feel it so clearly. Playing this game expands the notion of what fantasy is and what it means to be part of another world.

The Value of Video Games

2006-11-09T16:49:00.000-08:00

I suppose it must be a given that anything created by a culture is demonstrative of that culture’s values and attitudes, but to make a statement that a medium is expressive of a worldview suggests to me that the expression is somewhat specific and significant. What does WOW really say about society? That we like fantasy? That being part of an online community is fun? That we like to talk and escape reality and have attached out emotions to certain characters? That whacking monsters with a club is fun, especially when it lets us whack bigger monsters? Among the profound social messages found within GTA is that we are indeed a people with aggression to vent, and that it is possible to enjoy the fantasy of wrongdoing without becoming criminals. I’m not sure I would really label those as worldviews and values. Games don't tend to have anything to say.

The reason for this is likely the lack of intention in the game developing community. It has only been in the last ten years that game consumers have been adults in large enough numbers for games to be marketed exclusively to adults. It almost never occurs that a game is designed without entertainment being its exclusive purpose. There have been only a few games that have the express purpose of conveying a specific idea to an audience, while being entertaining at the same time. (I can only think of a few examples of this, including Oregon Trail, America's Army and educational computer software. More games may be added to this list soon, however.) What becomes thought provoking is analyzing what we are entertained by. The developers create something that is enjoyable, and it is the sociological puzzle of discovering What is it about this game and these characters that holds our attention and imagination is worthy of debate, not the message of the game itself. There is no message in the game itself. Even the most subtle and sophisticated games are designed to be entertaining alone. What becomes exciting is to see what variations of graphic interaction are indeed enjoyable, and what they tell you about yourself. In fact, video games have more in common with pornography than they do with film or literature. They are designed to tap into our hedonic enjoyment of experience without compromise. This becomes increasingly true as games become more adult. And this is indeed their value. They allow us to express our desires and explore what excites us by giving us control over our entertainment.

What becomes unique in video games that is different from any other medium is the intrinsic interactive nature of them. Where as immersion and experience are facets of most other art media, they are seldom the primary objective of them. A truly wonderful video game need not have any story, any characters, any anything except some sort of kinetic interaction. Of course, this is true about games in general. The most significant difference between Tetris and solitaire is the equipment necessary to play them.

The unique aspect of video games that is unmatched by any other medium is the ability to provide the enjoyment of a game, the enjoyment of interaction, with the enjoyment of narration. Arguably the most awesome video game of all time is Super Mario Brothers. Even when discarding its cultural and historic value, Super Mario Brothers couples interaction and narration that is simple enough to be absorbed quickly, and varies both enough to be surprising and continually engaging. Its incredibly basic platform gaming enables any player to understand its rules immediately, and allows for a large degree of play variation. Whether it’s navigating enemies’s behaviors or numbers, or dealing with a level’s design or movement, the game seldom repeats an obstacle long enough for the solution to become automatic and mindless. Similarly the narration, the environment look and character appearance, is abstract enough to be universally surreal and familiar enough to be immediately endearing. Simple graphic design means that minor color, enemy and architecture motifs add an unexpectedly large emotional element to what is essentially a meaningless kinetic puzzle. While the game is addictive and wonderfully entertaining, it is the emotional attachment to the world that has allowed the franchise to endure.

Such is the truth with all video games. Whether it is the emotional attachment to the gameplay or the game environment, it is emotion and not thought that draws us to gaming. We play so that we can feel, not so that we can think. This is perhaps the most unfortunately assumed aspect of gaming, because for us to think and feel together makes us better people.

Blood

2006-11-09T16:45:00.000-08:00

Blood is an interesting thing isn’t it? Seldom is there a sense of apathetic acceptance for the presence of blood, save perhaps in the medical and meat packing industries. In most other contexts the presence of blood is met with some sort of emotional response. When seen in the context of a real person it is met with fear and revulsion. On the news it is a magnet for attention, capturing fascination and fascinated horror. If placed in a truly fictional environment it can elicit anything from disgust to elated excitement. Obviously there is something special about blood, but it cannot be chalked up to simply the fact that it is part of our body. We can see images of brains and think them mundane or bizarre. We can see skeletons and be entertained by their humorous visage. The disassembly of the human body is not alone enough to subject us to disgust and fear. Nor is the presence of violence alone enough to satisfy our desire for violence. The presence of the prodigal red liquid is necessary to satiate our bloodlust. Its absence serves to sanitize copious violence. What is it about blood that can instill us with such phobia? Why does the sight of it in flight bring such unparalleled relief to our secret primal desires?

Blood denotes tragedy and violence. It signifies crisis and loss of comfort. It is the aftermath of something horrible, and the beginning of some new horror to come. Moreover, it means something is wrong. It means something in the safe and predictable world has gone awry. Yet it is not always so.

Blood is just under the surface of every part of our bodies at all times. To see it is to know that some membrane has broken; its natural brightness staining and shattering the earth tones of our clothing and living spaces and lives.

It is one of the few untamed liquids in our domestic world. Our environments are composed of solids and shapes. Geometric and manipulateable. Liquids become imprisoned in vessels. The few times when liquids are permitted to leave our control are often regarded with caution and disdain. With few exceptions, blood is never contained. Its arrival is unexpected and surprising. Its recognition is automatic. Once it appears, standard and practiced behaviors come into place. Halt its flow, dispose of its residue, eliminate its threat to our psyche. Blood is to be controlled and disposed of.

Blood is evil.
Yet blood is our life.

To die is to loose the flow of blood in the body. Brain damage, heart stopped, loss of blood flow, loss of oxygen. Heart wound, unable to pump blood, loss of oxygen to cells. Asphyxiation, loss of oxygen, blood is rendered useless.

Blood is our band-aid. Its course is our body’s tried and true method of maintaining its shield from the threats of the external. It is our life and it flows from us, escaping its incarceration in our bodies, betraying its life giving properties as it ventures into the world around us, leaving us behind.

I was cut once at work. A staple punctured my thumb. It managed to miss any significant nerves. I felt nothing. Blood left my finger freely. My first reaction was typical. My heart rate increased and I went for a rag. But the absence of pain changed the situation. Stopping the blood meant stopping the pain. But there was no pain. No reason to stop it.

I let it flow. A thin thread of my life trickled down my thumb and circled my knuckle. Held away from my body, its bright color dazzled me. It meandered over and traced my veins, creating an ironic dichotomy. I was entranced. My fluid inside come to visit my eyes, benign and elegant. Untamed and nimble. The unseen beauty of my body revealed in contrast to the external world in which my body thrives.

Its vivid color. Its unmistakable brilliant crimson glow.
My blood stopped its dance of its own accord and I was genuinely sad for its absence. My coworkers were mortified. I was bleeding. Bleeding! Wash your hands! Nurse your wound! Fix yourself!

Fear of blood has been rationalized by the threat of infection, but exists because of the circumstances that accompany its entrance into our safety. At the same time, the semi-universal fear of blood is met with a semi-universal attraction to it. Whether triggered by hormones or environment, whether it brings delight or simple fascination, people pay attention to blood.

I’m sure not everyone has bloodlust. I’m sure not everyone who seeks blood has a desire to see it. But thirst for violence exists. And violence is not complete without blood. Death is not true without proof of life’s absence. If we desire death, we desire the image of life leaving. Of pain coursing and safety spilling.

At times however, bloody violence can be grounding. A blood-smattered surface is an effective conveyance of a violent act, and is more tolerable than perhaps seeing the act take place, or further, of experiencing the suffering of the victim. It may in fact be soothing to have one’s senses washed with red warmth rather than be forced to endure the empathic sensation of pain.

Yet this is not what I see bloodlust to be. To me, searching for the sight of life fluid strewn on one’s body and environment is not so much the want to create sadistic pain and suffering, but is more a draw to the powerful image of profound destruction.

All the afore mentioned imagery serves to imbue blood with magical symbolism. To draw another’s life from their body is to create an elegant destructive act. It is creation from destruction, control over the untouchable, ultimate freedom from restraining taboos. To see blood is to witness the disassembly of the most fragile and sacred of paradigms. To create blood it is to experience the most tantalizing of destructive acts. To create blood is to witness the reversal of the elusive property of life. To experience dynamic death with eyes and skin and nose is to know elusive life with the same senses in a more tangible way than is ever possible.
However, not all thirsts for blood can be attributed to such a spiritual exploration. There is also a definitive expression of power in killing, and especially in drawing blood. To be in combat can be experienced not only as the fight for one’s self, but as the fight for someone else’s self. Victory exalts the victor in any contest, but in a contest where life is the reward, triumph means the prize of two lives, the winner’s and the loser’s. This relationship may not be experienced clearly without the tangible aid of life lost, the visual and visceral witnessing of life leaving the body. To coerce the life from another’s body, draw the profound red ocean from another’s world, is wearing victory, displaying the fascinating macabre of your own mortality in front of your own eyes, holding your own death before you while maintaining the safety of life. It is selfish in the utmost.

A final interpretation of this bizarre enjoyment harkens back to the idea of destruction as creation. Whether correlated to hormones or to gender specific child rearing behaviors, like the thirst for violence an enjoyment exists which focuses on the chaotic destruction of objects.
Breaking things is fun. It is a pleasure that may be related to that of careful dissection of objects, an endeavor viewed as much more benign. The fascination with how things are constructed is one that is not at all uncommon. Engineers often regale friends with tales of their earliest interest in taking machines apart to see how they work. Few children have never felt a sense of fascination for a diagram of their own muscular structures in a biology book. Knowing how things are put together is interesting. Taking them apart is entertaining. Breaking them can be exciting. Watching an object smash into pieces, seeing the textures and weights and viscosities mix and interact can be fascinating. The act is violent. It requires force, creates noise. Muscles flare and hormones churn. The result is a temporal sculpture. Dynamic artwork with the element of surprise as one of its rewards. Objects which are familiar and plain become transformed into dancing arrays of novel shapes. Tensions are released as plastic coverings shatter and wheels tumble into space. The rigidity of the world is stressful. Objects resist our will and obstruct our desires. The physicality of the world around us exerts a sort of power in the sense that we are unable to change it. Breaking objects fills some of us with a sense of control over our environment that nothing else can match. Not only control, but dominance. Nothing alludes to power the way destruction does. Whether it is a fallacy or not to associate the destroyed with the weak, the destroyer with power, it is done. The powerful have the power to tear us apart.

Among the objects in the world which exert more power over our free will, which limit us in infuriating ways, is our own human form. Our body constricts our desires and imaginations. It is our most intimate possession and our most intimate obstacle. The fear of pain and death suffocates our behavior and puts blinders on our willingness to act. Yet this fear cannot lessen the desire to destroy, to master and control and rule, the human form. In fact, it may even serve to heighten it. How exciting to command control over the human body. How freeing to separate one’s self from the confines of height and weight, breath and pulse, hunger, thirst, thought. The fantasy of disembodied life endures in religion and folklore. Persistent thought and experience after death is life’s reward for many. When reason falters in the face of emotion and passion overtakes the mind and imagination, murderers become triumphant knights of the human condition, triumphing over humanity and surpassing the human form. To destroy the body can be to vicariously liberate one’s mind and free the ethereal self from flesh for the brief moment that act is in progress. Creating gore may for a brief instant exalt a mortal to a position of spirit. To destroy a body might feel like conquering all of humanity.