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.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Kill Your Friends
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.
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.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
The Best Game
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?
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?
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Shooting Fish in Hell
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.
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.
Sunday, August 05, 2007
Having and Eating: Immersion and Customizaiton
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 castMagic 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.
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
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.
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Avante-Game
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Link Orgy
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
