Reject genre
Genre is repetition
Genre is not design, it is mimicry
Genre is safety-- copying proven mechanics as a method of risk mitigation
Relying on genre is reiterating the experiences of an established archetype
Deconstruct genre and repurpose the relevant components to your own ends
Design toward the novel experiences of uncommon characters
Express feelings you've had in your own life; convey them to the player through interaction
Embrace adaptations; use an existing fictional character's arc of experience as an aesthetic target
Utilize the MDA framework; strive to achieve verisimilitude of player response through meaningful interaction
Simulate all facets of a character's experience, not just those that are easy or familiar
I do not want to continuously inhabit the role of the one-dimensional superhuman dynamo gunning down waves of enemies. I do not need more power fantasies, juvenile wish fulfillment, or violent catharsis.
Give me new roles, new worlds, new feelings. Design.
4.29.2008
Credo
3.03.2008
Takeaway
My third year at GDC was as exhilarating, thought-provoking and completely exhausting as my prior visits; I wouldn't have it any other way. While most attendees I talked to were similarly enthused about the experience overall, a sentiment that frequently came up was that this year's conference 'lacked direction' compared to earlier years. People I talked with seemed to have trouble finding a thesis, and felt there was less overall excitement about making games than there had been in the past.
I won't say my reading of the conference is more correct than anyone else's, but I did attend a number of sessions that seemed to share a common thread. The message I got from GDC relates to thoughts I've been having on game design lately, so I may just be seeing it from my own skewed perspective. But GDC did at least help to push my thinking on these issues forward, for which I am grateful. It got me thinking about the character-driven "ungame."
The thread ran through the following sessions I attended: the Conflict Resolution Without Combat roundtable; Jonathan Blow's Design Reboot; Clint Hocking's I-fi: Immersive Fidelity in Games; Ray Kurzweil's Keynote, The Next 20 Years of Gaming; and the Are Games Essentially Superficial panel discussion.
I began the conference proper at the Conflict Resolution roundtable, which I simply observed. The intention of the session was right-headed: how do we stop making games that resolve conflict through killing and violence? Answers proposed by the attendees ranged from negotiation (talking your way out of a fight) to fleeing (the excitement of evading a fight) to bluffing and intimidation (scaring your opponent into surrendering from the fight.) What I wondered was, why is the fight presupposed? Why are we pitching ways to mitigate traditional, direct conflict between two parties? The value of this topic wouldn't seem to be in figuring out ways to extract the violence from the same old mano a mano, confrontation-and-domination style of conflict we're used to, but in finding entirely new ways to achieve the desired aesthetic response in the player-- tension, moment-to-moment investment, success. Someone brought up Sid Meier's Railroads, wherein conflict arises from a number of different railroad companies vying to buy up the same land and put each other out of business financially. Someone in the roundtable objected and said that the game described doesn't actually feature conflict then. I was bewildered; are we in the design discipline so fucking stunted that we can't classify anything but "kill or be killed" as conflict? Indirect conflict, like trying to succeed financially in Rollercoaster Tycoon, or emotional conflict like when you mistreat an NPC in an RPG (or hit an animal with your net in Animal Crossing) and then feel guilty about it, should enter our design vocabulary as easily as shooting, stabbing, or conquering an enemy nation through force.
Skipping ahead, I attended the Are Games Essentially Superficial panel, moderated by Rusel DeMaria and populated by Ken Levine, Chris Taylor, Peter Molyneux, and Louis Castle. DeMaria introduced the session by describing a game he'd worked on: it was set during the French Resistance of WW2. The player controlled Resistance fighters pushing back against the Nazi occupation. He described how he skinned the save/load screen with a calendar of the time period, and players could click on a date to read about an event that happened on that day in history if they so chose. However, he was quick to point out that the game itself was about fighting and explosions, so that it would "still be fun." Ken Levine talked about building a high-bodycount FPS then adding a small moral quandary on the side, of saving or killing the Little Sisters. Chris Taylor talked about making Total Annihilation, in which his goal was to create a "kickass RTS," but then tweaking the fiction of the game so that all the units on the battlefield were robots instead of people: a traditional war where technically no one died (he also noted that most likely "nobody but me" cared or even noticed this element of the game since it only really existed in the instruction manual.) Molyneux described the good/evil dichotomy which ran through his traditional combat-based hack-and-slash RPG, Fable.
All I wondered was, why was the approach to the "positive impact model" of game design taken by these industry luminaries simply to build familiar violent conflict and dress it up with a little side-order of moral intrigue or bloodlessness? I pictured someone ordering a Diet Coke with their bacon triple cheeseburger. I even took the mic during Q&A and asked, "Why are you pasting a history lesson on top of a game about fighting and explosions? Shouldn't the approach be to make the entertaining core interaction of the game be the positive thing itself, instead of having a little tiny positive thing off to the side of a standard commercial game? Can that be profitable?" I got shut down pretty harshly by DeMaria, who said "Yeah, but you just have to make it a really great game," and then announced that they were out of time. Thanks for that. The point stands that a true "positive impact model" of game design would come out of exploring entirely new, inherently positive core interactions, instead of dressing up the direct, violent conflicts we're used to with a little happy face button. Perhaps games like Animal Crossing, The Sims, Harvest Moon, or Chibi Robo are models we should work on applying to our mainstream, hardcore space.
In between, I attended Jonathan Blow's Design Reboot and Clint Hocking's I-fi talks.
Blow covered a lot of ground, but focused on the idea that both designers and players are guilty of taking the path of least resistance towards the feeling of easy validation: simply throwing tons of cannon fodder at the player and reveling in a false feeling of power as they're all mowed down, or a game like Peggle which is infused with so much randomness as to only be a step above Pachinko, then throws tons of flashing lights and fanfare at the player when they "win" largely by pure dumb luck. Blow pointed out that as games become higher budget, developers and publishers must attract the largest possible audience to recoup their investment. In the current paradigm, this means taking familiar, challenge-based genres like FPS or RPG, and making them wildly idiot-proof so that millions upon millions of players with little-to-no investment in the experience can plow through them without getting frustrated. This dilutes the core value of these experiences-- exploring the games' systems and using your own reasoning and understanding of the gamespace to legitimately prevail over your obstacles-- and leaves the player only with empty fanfare as they mindlessly mash through linear pathways, guided by the hand each step of the way so that their experience diverges as little as possible from any other player's. He suggested we needed to turn back the clock, scale back production scope, and begin exploring entirely new forms of interactive experience and challenge that might appeal to more people, as opposed to sucking the life out of interactions we've already charted to the nth degree over the last 10 years. We need to pretend our current understandings of shooters, brawlers, and RPGs don't exist; instead, we need to start shining lights down all those paths we've ignored in favor of safe territory that we know "works." We need a design reboot.
I strongly agree, though some of the thrust of his talk seemed misguided. He focused on how games should be legitimately challenging, or on the current crop being dumbed down. I agree that, with the current popular genres noted, overcoming mechanical or logical challenge is an important aspect of a satisfying experience. I just hope that he isn't discounting games where this sort of challenge-- the challenge of mastering an overt ruleset to avoid a failure state-- is foreign to deriving satisfaction from the experience. A true design reboot would wind back the tape all the way past the idea of binary winning and losing, of defeating or mastering a system whatsoever. What I'm talking about is coexistence with the system, instead of confrontation with it.
Hocking's I-fi talk described "immersion" as a binary state achievable by appealing to either the right brain or left brain-- either through fully engaging the senses via audiovisual output, or fully engaging the logic centers of the brain through elegant and satisfying interactive systems. He described the glorious failure Trespasser as an appeal to full systemic immersion: integrating what would traditionally be HUD elements into the gameworld itself, attempting to simulate a hunter/prey ecosystem, affecting a realistic physics system, procedural animation, and a player character that actually existed physically within the gameworld. On a different level, he described traditional games like chess as achieving mental immersion via outstandingly elegant overt rulesets which immerse the devoted player entirely within the possibility space of the pieces moving across the board. He said that while games like Bioshock successfully appeal to the senses, video games are regardless fighting Hollywood on their home turf when they try to out-audio/visual the movies. Games that concentrate on systemic immersion play to the strengths of our medium and draw the player into the game itself, as opposed to trying to keep their fickle attention with surface presentation elements.
The inherent conflict here is that games currently have a greater ability to present convincingly realistic visuals than convincingly realistic systems. Characters and worlds may look incredibly lifelike and appealing, but still behave in mechanically hollow ways-- a character like Alyx looks much more convincing than she acts. How can a game reconcile its ability to convince players to look without being able to convince them to feel? Aren't engaging systems inherently abstracted, like chess, whereas engaging audio/visual experiences inherently lifelike? Similarly, if we're talking about games as a mass medium looking to overthrow Hollywood, aren't "gamey" games which challenge the player to digest and master a unique formal ruleset the wrong way to go? Samyn's distinction states that "games are not what is interesting and new about this medium!" Games as we know them have been around for ages, and are occasional pastimes but never mass medium that is meaningful to people on a daily basis. Rules, winning and losing don't drive people to consume a creative work-- familiar human experience and emotional resonance are what speak to people, and overcoming a formal system is not expressive on these levels. I wonder if perhaps the most immersive systems are ones we aren't even aware of: the systems that invisibly govern our own world, like physics and biological processes, the ones Trespasser wrestled with, as opposed to the overt formal systems that govern a chess match.
Lastly, I'll mention Ray Kurzweil's rather astounding keynote address, titled The Next 20 Years of Gaming. Kurzweil presented a great deal of very convincing research showing how the efficiency and miniaturization of computing technology has increased at an exponential rate and will continue to do so on into the future; according to his examples and projections, within 30 years we will be able to fully simulate a human brain, transmit sensory information directly into a user's nervous system via non-invasive technology, and track a person's full range of bodily state and motion via internal nanomachines. We as players will be able to believably inhabit artificial worlds populated by fully-simulated human beings. Technology will allow us to virtually exist in places we've never been before.
In other words, technology is marching towards the personal holodeck-- one that takes place entirely within the individual user's perception, and is populated by fully simulated human minds. In this world, people will use simulated experience simply to be in a place they currently aren't-- to exist in another locale, real or imagined, populated by personalities they've never met before. The rules of these simulated worlds will be the rules of our world-- physics, light and shadow, human perception-- not the simplified and abstracted rulesets of today's video games. These simulated worlds will not themselves be games; if one wants to play a game in a simulated world, they will pick up a virtual chessboard or soccer ball and issue their virtual companions a challenge. Just being there will be what matters.
So, like many people were asking after GDC08 ended: where's the point?
What I derived was that we as designers need to take ourselves outside of our current understanding of mainstream game development: we need to reconsider our presumptions of direct confrontation and conflict, formal rulesets and mechanical challenge; we need to consider video games as something other than games since, considering Samyn's distinction, interactivity is what's so engaging about the medium, not winning or losing; we need to stop diluting our current understanding of games to appeal to a mass audience, and instead find new sorts of interactions that don't rely on memorization, reflexes, mechanical facility and frustration as core dynamics; we need to look toward the future when our machines will be powerful enough to fully simulate our own world, when the engaging aspect of virtual experience-- which video games are the first formative steps towards-- won't be learning rules or skillfully manipulating an input device, but rather exploring an intriguing location populated by interesting people and things-- interesting because they are new and different, not because they are a challenge we enjoy overcoming. We need to start futureproofing our discipline now by laying the groundwork for that non-confrontational, informal virtual experience we'll be having in a few decades time. We need to start leaning on interactivity itself as the means of immersion, as opposed to well-conceived formal rules or convincing surface presentation. We need to give our players inviting, populated worlds, and then simply allow them to explore and enjoy, instead of exploit and dominate-- the character-driven "ungame." We need to start building our own future, now.
That's what I got out of GDC.
2.09.2008
Wager
[Thank you to everyone who has added thoughtful response to this post:
Borut Pfeifer took my bet, as did my friend Marek Bronstring. Michael Samyn contributed an important distinction to the argument. N'Gai Croal was kind enough to lend his considerable insight to the issue in a pair of posts, working from a wide base of media criticism. John Walker lent his thoughts to my, Borut, and N'gai's pieces in an entry on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. It is heartening to see so much knowledge and passion enter into this debate.]
I'm not normally a gambling man, but I'm in a betting mood. Maybe a bit pessimistic, too. And I'll bet you that video games will never become a significant form of cultural discourse the way that novels and film have. I'll bet you that fifty years from now they'll be just as mature and well-respected as comic books are today.
I feel this way due partly to the inherent formal obstacles to video games' wide acceptance, and partly because of the uninspiring mindset prevalent among the developers and players of games. I make the comics comparison because I believe the two media have much in common at a high level.
Video games are hard for people to get into. The barrier for entry is higher than perhaps any other popular entertainment medium. To read a book, all you need to do is go to a library, pick one up, and start reading (which isn't usually an obstacle considering the high literacy rate in the modern world.) At the advent of popular film, you only needed to walk to a movie theatre and pay your nickel (or nowadays, ten bucks) to see the latest release. Processing the experience isn't an issue: sit, watch, and you've received an experience equal to anyone else in the audience.
Television brought moving pictures into the home, and presented a more significant obstacle: the large sum required to purchase a television set. But this was a one-time fee, and once installed, the viewer needed only tune in, sit down, and enjoy. Cable television, VHS, DVD, satellite, all required a nominal entry or recurring fee and specialized hardware, but the media received was passive and accessible. It required no physical investment or learned skill to enjoy.
Then came the internet; the fee for entry was highest of all, requiring a home computer, and the physical and skill investments were equally taxing: one had to frequently interact with a mouse and keyboard, know how to type, and understand the interface of their chosen operating system and the conventions of the internet well enough to get online and navigate effectively. But the received media itself was familiar-- static words, images and video-- and the required skills could be picked up from a suburban gradeschool or common office job. As the relative price of a home computer dropped and usability of the web increased, the internet became the new millennium's shared media experience of choice.
How do video games fit into this scheme? Their popular debut fell between television and home video, and was highly accessible: Pong, Pac Man and Centipede arrived in bars, movie theatres, bowling alleys and arcades, and one needed only drop in their quarter and try their hand. Sure, they were more like electronic carnival games than any sort of meaningful media experience, but they touched lots of people and indoctrinated them into the conventions of video games. Home games such as the Atari and NES came next, gradually overtaking the popularity of arcade games and putting standup cabinets out of business. These home consoles had major barriers to entry: the high financial cost of the unit itself as well as each game cartridge, the physical requirement that one constantly be manipulating a control pad or joystick while taking in the experience, and the skill investment of learning how to excel at them without failing. Home PC games became popular at this time as well, and only rebalanced the same barriers: PCs were significantly more expensive than home consoles but had less general usefulness than they do now, while still requiring constant input and mental investment in deciphering play mechanics to avoid failure.
Over time, the technical and systemic complexity of video games have increased, while the barriers to entry have largely remained undamaged. Taking inflation into account, the cost of a home console unit has stayed largely constant since the mid-80's (and the price of a competent gaming PC has similarly kept pace;) controllers have sprouted more buttons, gyroscopes, and analogue sticks than ever; and it's still extremely common for games of high quality to be too difficult for a non-gamer to play effectively.
In other words, the very nature of interactive games bars them from ever truly gaining mass acceptance, and therefore mass cultural relevance. The strength of video games, what makes them unique, interesting, and affecting, is that they engage in a dialogue with each individual player. They ask you to invest yourself in the experience, to explore and understand the logic of their gameworld, and to activate the experience by doing. Video games require you to be involved, to take responsibility for your actions onscreen. They expect more out of you than film, television, the internet or a book does. You get from video games what you're willing to put in. The audience at large only wants to take.
People don't want to enter into an agreement that requires them to be constantly fiddling with a complex input device. They don't want to expend effort understanding an interactive space. They don't want to face failure while trying to be entertained. They simply want to sit back and enjoy. They want media that will go on without them. They want received experience. Passiveness. They want to relax in front of the television set, doing not much of anything.
That is one aspect of why video games will never be a relevant cultural medium.
The second is the form of expression itself used by video games, and the pervasive attitude of the people who create and consume them.
The mode of expression in a video game is the interactive system. The simplest game would contain one system. Pong, for instance, is born out of the interplay of three systems: player input moves the paddles up and down; the ball bounces back and forth according to a simple physics simulation; a score increments based on the ball leaving one or the other side of the screen. So, you move your paddles to affect the ball, which affects the score. Fast forward to a popular contemporary game like Grand Theft Auto 3, Halo, or The Sims. The number of systems in constant interplay is countless. One must be systems-literate enough to process the outputs and required inputs of these webs of interactivity to gain any benefit from the experience. Compared to film, television and books, which all use plain talk and linear plot to express their meaning, video games speak to the audience in a completely different language. They are not an extension of normal everyday experience the way that popular, passive media is; the interactive system wields its own unique semiotic vocabulary and grammar. It is alien, unfamiliar, other. This isn't to say that film doesn't have its own grammar; but it's a grammar used for viewing the familiar and dramatic through a specific lens. Receiving meaning through personal dialogue with an interactive system is an altogether different beast.
This is one way in which comics are similar to video games. Comics speak to the viewer through their own complex set of symbols and conventions, born of a marriage between graphic design, illustration, and prose. At their best, comics exploit this mode of communication to its fullest, best demonstrated probably in the work of Chris Ware. He uses his incredibly deep understanding of the language of comics to express human experience in a way that no other medium could, instead of fighting against the constraints of the page. One could similarly say that games are at their best when they demonstrate a deep understanding of how interactive systems communicate with the player, and convey human experience in ways that no other medium could. Also like video games, Wares' comics require physical and mental investment by the reader: one often has to turn the entire book round in circles to view images or text that are oriented at 90 degree angles to one another, track panels that wind around and underneath one another, or lean into a page to decipher minuscule drawings and text.
But comics and video games are alike in another way: they both remain marginalized, infantilized media, where the Wares are the rarest exception and the medium in general holds little to no value outside of very specific circles. The highest ideal of the vast majority of creators is to force the medium into being something it's not, and the largest segment of the audience consists of juveniles, in age or mindset, who haven't "graduated" to more respected forms of entertainment.
Browse the racks of a standard comic shop, and the books on the mainstream shelves will be filled with flashy illustrations depicting laughable actions stories, absurdly-proportioned women, and superheroes. Likewise, browse the racks of an Electronics Boutique and you're bound to find mostly sports stars, Japanese children's cartoons, burly men with guns, and women in shameless, implausible dress. The medium infantalizes itself through its chosen subject matter. Based on surface alone, I can't blame the outside viewer for thinking little of the medium at large.
But content aside, the majority of both comics and games aim squarely at being something they're not-- movies-- and become less compelling experiences for the effort. Mainstream comics feature vaguely lifelike renderings of idealized humans in action-packed situations (sound familiar?); they are drawings of movies, instead of being comics for comics' sake. Clearly the same applies to mainstream games, aiming for "realism" in visuals and juvenile coolness in character and story, trying to be "cinematic" without understanding that the real value of a video game comes from being uncinematic, unrealistic; from embracing the otherness of the form and expressing human experience in ways that a movie never could.
Film and novels never had to overcome the stigma of starting out as children's distractions. They may not always have been respected artforms, but they were at least always seen as entertainment, if low-brow, aimed at adults. But like comics, video games are never going to grow up. Some sixty years after the wartime comic book boom, the vast majority of comics are still male wish fulfillment trash sold to children, poor drawings of stills from movies that no one would want to fund or film. A small subset, represented by the catalogues of publishers like Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly, is mature and thoughtful, looking to express relateable human experience in a way unique to the medium, aimed at readers who have an appreciation for the form. And an even tinier sliver, zines and underground publications, embraces the experimental and avant garde, attempting to push the boundaries of the medium and catering only to those most passionate and inquisitive as to what the future of comics might be.
Likewise, the overwhelming majority of video games, the big 99 percent, are adolescent male fantasy or cheap cash-ins: army men, sports cars, cartoons and zombies and superheroes, trying (and failing) to reproduce the realistic rendering of film, trying (and failing) to be "cinematic" by inserting frail little fake movies throughout the experience; a small subset tries to exploit the medium in thoughtful ways and express something unique or meaningful through interactive systems-- maybe the The Sims systemically mirroring everyday life, or Ico expressing a tender relationship without words. And there's that tiny, marginalized sliver of experimentalism represented by The Marriage, Passage, or any number of other no-budget independent projects that toil in obscurity, trying to expand what games can be. And at this rate, that's all there will ever be.
As they are now, games will remain marginalized and juvenile like comics. I believe that only the rarest developers will be able to exploit what makes games unique and powerful, and the rest will remain flashy male power fantasies, selling but lacking significance. The development and publishing community at large are not trying to change this, and the audience does not seem to want it. Without addressing serious barriers to entry and core design philosophy issues, I do not believe that games will be accepted and respected as a valid medium of expression, ever. Video games have the potential to say great things, but they currently do not have the means to say them to very many.
The odds are stacked. I say games are never going to grow up. Care to make a wager?
[ADDENDUM: After receiving some comments, I expanded my point a bit. Below, I clarify a few issues.]
I'd like to clarify that I'm not talking about the ratio of good vs. crap product, or the ratio of "art" versus "non-art." I'm not talking about quality or artfulness at all. I'm talking about broad cultural relevance to the lives of the general population.
90% of all creative endeavor is crap, but at least with film, television or books it's culturally relevant crap. And the good stuff is rightly respected, because it can speak to anyone who might take it in.
The good 10% of comics and games are lost because the medium itself isn't relevant to the viewership at large. Even the games that are great, the ones that I can read as being valuable, are almost always hidden under the juvenile veneer of big guns, tanks, zombies, robots and so forth. Much like The Watchmen is a legitimately great comic, it's inaccessible to people outside the limited group that understand how it reworks the popular superhero context. To anyone outside the fanship, it's just a comic about guys in tights, just like Half-Life 2 is simply another game about shooting monsters.
Games could lower their barrier to entry: we've seen it in The Sims, where the only required input is clicking and then choosing an action. No memorization of keybinds, no reflex-based gameplay or required facility with a gamepad. Accessibility of interface doesn't translate to simplification of the range of expressable interactions. Why has no one taken the lessons from the Sims-- the ones that have made it one of the most successful and enduring franchises in video game history-- and applied them to other types of games? Direct input-- having a "jump button" and "shoot button," etc.-- limits accessibility.
Filling a game with explicit failure states requiring replay of level segments upon death limits accessibility. Why are the games we focus on so concerned with life-or-death situations? Why is violence the only kind of conflict we've refined to such a level of fidelity? It's easy and it sells to the established market. The situations and conflicts expressed in games don't relate to most people's lives. Games don't pursue the kinds of headings you see in a video rental store-- romance, drama, comedy. Our designs still hinge on simple actions-- "shoot gun," "drive car," "solve puzzle."
Suits and investors need to be concerned with this shit. Who do you want to be backing further down the line: an insular, stunted medium like comics, or a full-grown, culturally-relevant, and hey, PROFITABLE, medium like film? We aren't going to reach that point by catering to the current hardcore. And we're not doing ourselves any good by assaulting the casual gamer with the deluge of crap that's been thrown at the Wii audience so far. We're going to expand our customer base by trying to give them new, subtle, interesting approaches to interactive experiences that are universal and human. We need to give them access to this form that we already know is so great, and fill it with content that they can identify with, get something enriching out of.
I don't know if that's going to happen. My bet still stands.
[NOTE: On manga: After receiving a number of comments, I feel I should address this aspect.]
I am familiar with the cultural relevance of manga in Japan. It's a wonderful medium that grew up with Japan's baby boom following WW2, and has blossomed into an element of everyday life there. The variety of art styles and subject matter is unprecedented, depicting everything from young boys' adventure stories to soap opera-style dramas for housewives and niche volumes on playing the flute or cooking pasta, and everything in between. Manga is available at any newsstand in a wide variety of forms, and read by millions on trains, at cafes, and at home.
Which is why I don't say that video games are heading down the path of manga. I could make a post about how games should be more like manga, and in fact I think we're seeing some of that positive influence now, especially coming from, unsurprisingly, Japan: Cooking Mama, Phoenix Wright, Trauma Center, and more tackle interactions that games in the past have hardly touched. It's good.
Overall, the Japanese video game market is receding, and game development at large seems to be driven by the west. Manga is lovely, but this post is not about how games are or aren't like manga.
[NOTE: On box office: Many people have brought up sales numbers for games, and film adaptations]
I'm not arguing that games are going to "die" or that they don't make money; clearly games now make a lot of money. My note about fostering an industry that will be "profitable" is meant in the longterm-- I don't think that games in their current state have created an effective framework for a sustainable industry. If we only cater to the hardcore and the very casual, we create a revolving door when those groups start to lose interest, either by "growing out" of hardcore games or finding nothing interesting past Tetris and Zuma. We would do well to create a lifetime market.
Many have directly equated games' financial success with cultural relevance; someone even went to far as to say that Halo 3's retail release was "covered by every major news outlet," as if that seals the deal: video games must be just as important to people's lives as TV or movies are, right? I seem to remember 'every major news outlet' covering the death of Superman in the early 90's as well. It's a silly leap of logic to make.
The idea that film adaptations of comics being successful means that comics themselves are a "significant form of cultural discourse" is completely misguided. Films are co-opting comics to bolster their own success; movies are the significant form here, not comics. Do all those millions of people who watched Spider-Man the movie also read the comics they're based on, much less consider the broader comic form as something relevant to their everday life?
I'd wager not.
12.15.2007
Clarification
As a companion piece to my post "Dead Men" below, my friend Chris published a different article of mine singing the praises of Kane & Lynch over on the Shacknews blog. My post "Noir"was also graciously linked by Simon Carless on Gamasutra's blog, GameSetWatch. I'd like to extend my gratitude to them both for spreading my words around.
I think that my heavy evangelism of Kane & Lynch, along with my posting of "Dead Men" immediately after "Noir," and finally relating that game to the "noir mindset," may have given off a bit of a false impression, though. While I do think that K&L is admirable for affecting some of noir's most compelling narrative approaches, it's not "THE GAME" that epitomizes that theoretical overall production I outlined in "Noir." "Noir" described a game that, to my knowledge, does not exactly exist at present. There are a few reasons that Kane & Lynch isn't that game.
1) Scale of production: Kane & Lynch is a full-scale commercial production that aims for "triple A" status. It includes a full singleplayer/co-op campaign as well as a separate, full-featured competitive multiplayer game mode. It uses a graphics engine that has been updated to current-gen standards which, while not on par with the cutting edge of Unreal 3 tech, attempts to wield all the visual bells and whistles of its contemporaries. It was released across three current-gen platforms, and boasted a fairly massive intercontinental advertising campaign. Perhaps to its detriment, Kane & Lynch was a "big game" in every applicable respect. Conversely, a noir game will fully embrace a narrower production scope, intentionally modest level of graphical fidelity, and low-intensity approach to marketing/distribution.
2) Scale of Conflict: While the personal conflicts that drive Kane's character arc are compelling, and the narrative itself largely maintains a direct, visceral and human scale, the physical conflict acted out by the player is a different thing entirely, maintaining the status quo of mowing down hundreds of faceless enemies over the course of a video game. The noir approach does not embrace the flood of cannon fodder common to contemporary action titles, but instead promises an experience buoyed by its characters' internal conflicts, and only punctuated by sudden outbursts of violence that are meaningful to the player's understanding of the gameworld. Noir and Rambo do not mix; the handful of deaths in Kane & Lynch that do truly matter are diluted by the dozens upon dozens in between that are completely meaningless. Interestingly enough, the one of the only action games that makes a genuinely compelling experience out of killing as few people as possible also comes from Io Interactive: the Hitman series.
So, I'll apologize if my message with "Noir" and "Dead Men" seemed to be, "here is a description of the noir approach, and here is a perfect example of that approach made reality." Not quite: as a story and character study, Kane & Lynch is as successful an attempt as almost any action game you might compare it to, and owes much to the noir mindset; as a game however, while executed well for what it is, doesn't attempt to alter the paradigm of the traditional big budget, wide-release, AAA shooter production.
But halfway there is a good start.
12.02.2007
Noir
Thanks to Simon Carless for graciously posting about "Noir" on GameSetWatch, and re-publishing the essay as an article on Gamasutra.com
In the late 30's through the 50's, American film was a spectacle-based business. The market was dominated by the studio system, and blockbuster epics and musicals ruled the public consciousness. The stars, budgets, and sets were enormous. It didn't take long for the entire enterprise to become very bloated. Eventually, pricetags began outstripping profits in an arms race to sensory overload. It was during this era that film noir was born.
Film noir was a pragmatic school of filmmaking, rebelling against popular big-budget fluff out of pure necessity. These were B-films, low investment projects quick to produce and intended simply to fill out an evening's double bill. Under the constraints of little money or time to build unique sets to shoot on, or to stage scenes featuring armies of extras, or to exploit complex lighting, camera setups, or special effects, noir filmmakers had to seek out new ways to build tension onscreen and keep their audience engaged. They did so by focusing on flawed, unpredictable characters living out street-level conflicts between individuals in the mundane, modern-day urban world. They drew from pulp novels and crime fiction for their source material, and benefited immeasurably from the influx of expatriate German Expressionist filmmakers fleeing the Nazi expansion throughout Europe at the time. Instead of building a fantastical set, film noir would film in vérité city streets and back alleys. Instead of dousing dozens of dancers with massive lighting rigs and filming them with a drove of whirling camera cranes, noir filmmakers would frame individuals frankly in dramatic up-shot, a single spotlight casting ominous silhouettes across the ceiling.
Film noirs like Out of the Past, Kiss Me Deadly, and The Big Combo made a new kind of entertainment out of the very limitations that constrained them, and went on to influence everything from the writers of Cahiers du Cinema and the French New Wave of the 60's, to the Coen brothers' films of today. Necessity being the mother of invention, film noir created something unique and affecting, something that has lived on, out of the need to engage people without relying on the spectacle of the day's million-dollar blockbusters.
Maybe you can see where I'm going with this.
We are currently a hit-driven industry, and the games that get media and player attention are those with the most money behind them to provide the biggest spectacle. In the commercial sector, everyone is vying with the likes of Mass Effect, Bioshock, and Halo 3 for mindspace; if you want to be taken seriously by "the gamer public," you have to hit not just the game design mark, but the whizz-bang cutting-edge graphical mark as well. You have to bring millions of dollars to the table just to qualify, which leads to extreme risk aversion by publishers and developers, and a tendency over time to lose players who are tired of the same old thing dressed up in more and more expensive clothes. When your game is backed by tens of millions of dollars, you can't use it as a testing ground for wild new mechanics and dynamics never tried before; however, when you're building a low-budget 2D platformer, even your successful experiments won't make an impact on the medium at large, the "big games" that get everyone talking. What we've got left is a huge gulf between popular, full-experience 3D action/adventure games that need to be financial blockbusters to survive, and marginalized casual/handheld/movie licensed games that don't register on the mass consciousness radar. We need our B films. We need that freedom to explore truly meaningful new avenues of interaction, quickly and nimbly, without the pressure of an eight-figure budget and multi-year dev schedule weighing down on the whole enterprise. Noir already scouted this territory for us.
Noir begs game developers to reign in the scope of their production budgets, and the conflicts they depict. The noir approach promises games wherein the player isn't saving the kingdom, world or galaxy; wherein the ubermensch doesn't mow down a thousand men; wherein we can experience familiar settings in a new way, and infuse the everyday with the extraordinary. The noir approach promises games that are direct, visceral, and intentionally oppose epicness-- games that deliver their entire message with immediacy, before you lose sight of how the story of their interactions began.
Games that take film noir as a cue shouldn't emulate the surface-- trench coats, cigarettes, femme fatales and old LA. Games should emulate the structural and emotional underpinnings that made noir work as an experience. We can do this with readily-available, inexpensive tech; we can leverage older 3D engines and simpler lighting & shader models in the same way noir filmmakers used location shooting and expressionistic cinematography. We already have our Gone with the Winds and Wizards of Oz, and a dozen Busby Berkley spectaculars to fill in the gaps; we need our Asphalt Jungles, our Kiss Me Deadlies, our Gun Crazies and Double Indemnities and Out of the Pasts. We've proven we can do big. Noir shows us how to take the small road, explore its every twist and turn, and connect with our audience in new ways.
11.12.2007
Length
A straightforward post today: the games I play are just too long.
I'm currently playing The Witcher, which is a pretty great game-- a solid PC RPG with a unique tone-- but I've probably put 15 or 20 hours into it, and I find myself wishing it were over. Not because I'm not enjoying it, but because I feel like I "get it"-- I've seen what the game has to offer, I've played through the available breadth of interactions, and now I'm simply repeating the established inputs in slightly different contexts. Maybe I'm casting a more powerful spell at a new enemy, but it's only a surface difference from the same dynamic found in the first hour of the game; maybe I'm navigating a new dialogue tree with a new character, but only the words are different while the interaction is the same. The prologue and first chapter of The Witcher were so fresh, fun, engaging, and perfectly cohesive as a unit, that I wish the first six hours had been the entire game, and left it at that. At the rate I'm going, I don't know if I'll see the ending at all.
I have a novelty-seeking personality, and always want to consume as many different films as I can, play through as many different games as possible, listen to a new album, fully digest it, then move on to the next. I'm not an MMO devotee, and I don't usually replay games I've already completed. But even finishing single-player games in the first place isn't all that common, and I know I'm not alone. From what I've been told, according to market research, fewer than half the players of any given commercial game make it past the 50% point of the campaign, and the dropoff increases rapidly the further you go. So, fewer than 50% of players make it past the second island of GTA3, or past the Berserker in Gears of War, or past the castle in Resident Evil 4. And forget about actually seeing the end credits. So I ask you: if only half your players even make it halfway through your games, why aren't we making games that are half as long?
I think Portal demonstrates how much greater a game can be for matching its length to its content. Portal hit that perfect mark at which the player had learned all the available inputs and play techniques, been given just enough to master them all, and experienced a complete narrative arc by the moment the end credits roll. Portal was 4 hours long because it only needed to be 4 hours long, no more, and probably no less.
In the same way, how long does it take the player to fully absorb all the mechanics and artifice of, say, F.E.A.R.? After a few hours, you've got a handle on all the movement controls, the battle tactics, the slow-mo effects; you've become familiar with Alma, the replica soldiers, and the general tone and rhythm of the game. At what point do you transition from exploring a new set of experiences, to rotely going through the motions just to reach the ending? I believe that in most games the transition point comes well before the conclusion of the included content, and it's at this moment most people put down a game for good, forgoing half the game they paid for; I believe the research bears this out.
I want all games to be as tight and compact as Portal-- greater length should be reserved for games of greater depth. I want to absorb the atmosphere and full range of interaction a game has to offer, then reach a resolution before it all becomes stale. I don't like that my arc of interest in Rogue Galaxy, Rainbow 6 Vegas, Halo 3 and Persona 3 ended long before I completed their campaigns. I want to finish these things without having to trudge-- I want the six-hour game that I can enjoy and complete and make a clean break from instead of just giving up. A six-hour game is reasonable; I can burn through a six-hour game in a night if I'm really dedicated, or play an hour a night and actually finish it in a week instead of a month. I want an hour or two to get acquainted with the world, a couple more hours to master the techniques embedded in the game dynamics, and then a final hour or two to really revel in the depth of the systems and finally resolve all the narrative elements. I want this to be true of all the games I play: action, adventure, and RPG. Stop making me force myself to finish your games.
I want to see a structure like this: develop your core gameplay, refine all the systems, then create a full, cohesive, well-paced 6-hour campaign that expresses it all in a compact fashion, a campaign that can stand on its own, that follows a complete narrative arc and provides me a satisfying resolution. Put an entire game into the first island of GTA3, or the prologue and first chapter of The Witcher, or the first act of Half-Life 2, and release it at retail as the "base game." Let me take away that single experience if that's all I want. Then, release the remainder of the campaign in chunks-- "Extensions" if you will-- that add further hours of content onto the base experience. If I'm satisfied with just the base game, I've given you my money and don't feel cheated out of an ending; then, if I just can't live without more content, I'm free to extend the game by buying more chunks of content from you and adding it onto the end of the base campaign. Do I want the game to be six hours, or 16, or 26? That all depends on my level of engagement with the world you've created. But regardless of what it is, I don't want to feel like I've missed out on a resolution to the game's conundrums just because I didn't have the level of commitment required to slog through a dozen hours of filler. The GTA structure would be perfect for this kind of release-- the base game is the entire city with just the core story missions woven through it; further Extensions weave more missions and characters into the existing gameworld, or provide access to a new island. It's a gameworld that expands outward at the player's will.
Think of it: how often do you walk out on a film halfway through? I'd wager not as often as you buy or rent a game without ever finishing it. How is it not a red flag to the industry that the player rarely sees the ending of the game you've made for them? We need to open our eyes. Give me base games that I can finish comfortably, or extend if I so choose. Leave me wanting more, instead of feeling relieved when it's finally over.
10.29.2007
Gun
I was briefly very curious about GUN, the Neversoft game.
The original announcement of the game only revealed the title and an ominous tagline on a black background: "Pull the Trigger. GUN." And, to someone immersed in the video game dialogue, how provocative is that?
Popular games, following the sea change caused by Wolfenstein and Doom, have been about the power and allure of the firearm. Firing guns at living targets encapsulates the two biggest psychological draws of video games: being able to do something you otherwise can't in the real world, and a sense of power and control over a chaotic situation. I expect most people who play shooter games haven't actually fired a gun in the real world, much less killed, or even badly injured, another person. It's unthinkable on some level, but on the other hand it has the appeal of the taboo-- I can't actually shoot someone... but what is it like? It's an experience that is familiar to the audience via film and television, but even then still only secondhand; games deliver the visceral sensation of actually doing. Games play out the audience's illicit love affair with the firearm. And not just America's, but Japan's and Europe's. A fascination with instant death.
I've fired real guns. Admittedly, my motivation was game-related-- I'd virtually shot so many guns in my life that I felt a need to have the real-world experience to back it up. After a trial shot or two, I was actually rather good; games had taught me to line up the sights and adjust for recoil. I've only gone shooting once, in a quarry with some friends and some beer cans. And midway through our session there, I pictured actually having another person in front of the gun when I pulled the trigger. And it's just terrifying to even imagine, once you know what the shooting itself is actually like. Once you've gained first-hand knowledge of how it feels to fire a real gun, it's easy to construct the rest of the scene.
It's horrific. It's not like in a video game where a blood decal appears on the bad guy's shirt and he peacefully ragdolls into a floppy pile. In games, if anything, shooting someone is simply about neutralizing them, not actually hurting them; enemies shot non-fatally don't express pain, and fatal wounds silence the target instantaneously. It's the sterilized version of the act. The ideal killing. And it happens a hundred times more in any given shooter game than in all the action movies of a year combined. Never has so little screentime been devoted to so much gun violence.
So the teaser for GUN held an enormous amount of promise. The title alone--GUN-- begs a game about the gun itself: about our relationship to it as entertainment consumers and game players; about the presence of the firearm in our society, about the implications and effects of gun violence, the power of the gun itself and the lives it affects. A deconstruction, an analysis, maybe even a meditation. A game that acknowledges all the things that shooters normally take for granted, and asks the player to consider them anew, through their own actions and decisions.
Then the tagline-- "Pull the Trigger"-- adds another layer of reflexivity to the prospect. In most shooter games, pulling the trigger is a foregone conclusion. The game begins with a gun in your hands, and never asks if you're going to fire it, but where and how often. Could GUN be a game wherein the gun itself is an element of the world that isn't grafted to the player's hand? Where the decision to even pick up a gun, much less fire it, is an actual decision, with gravity and import? In the vast majority of films, aside from such as Predator and Rambo 2, the simple act of picking up a gun is meaningful, foreboding, and dangerous. The entire dynamic of the film changes at that moment. This character might kill another person now. And an actual shooting-- again, in a film with humanity-- has impact and sobriety to it.
Consider the following scene from Taxi Driver: the climactic gun battle in the flophouse, immediately before the ending of the film.
In some ways, the setup is much like that of an urban shooter game: the heavily-armed lone hero storms a nest of criminal activity and cleanses it through the barrel of a gun. But unlike in a game, it's not "cool" or clean or fun. It's harrowing and bleak, filthy and gory and frightening. Only three people are killed, but the scene has more impact than all the combined hours of gun violence I've played out in video games this year. Why is that? Why do games only glorify the gun, without addressing the ugliness and the aftermath, or the compulsion to kill? Could this mysterious "GUN" game actually question our assumptions about the gun's role in the modern video game?
No, as it turned out, GUN was just a cheap GTA-alike set in the old west. It could hardly be less high-minded if it tried. Neversoft continued its financial success by carrying the torch of the Tony Hawk and now Guitar Hero series, and GUN faded into obscurity.
Hopefully, somewhere, the spirit of the game that GUN could have been is still alive, waiting. It's just too bad that the perfect title is already taken.
*note: images used are from Larry Clark's photo series Tulsa.
10.11.2007
Ideas
I've heard variations on the sentiment: "The least valuable commodity in the games industry is ideas," "ideas are a dime a dozen," or "ideas are like assholes..." But I think this is a fallacy. People who believe the above are thinking of video game ideas wrongly. The kind of ideas that have no worth, and maybe the kind most common, start out such as: "You're a space marine, and an evil galactic corporation has taken control of your homeworld..." or "I've got a great idea for this game that's like GTA, but in feudal Japan..." They're narrative or setting ideas, vague framing concepts for the artifice that props up a game. But they're not ideas for a game. When we look at the popular landscape of video games, we see derivative mechanics and stale dynamics. We don't see new ideas for what a game can be or how a familiar genre can be approached in a unique way, and when we do see a spark of something new that works, it gets copied and rehashed by half a dozen minor studios without ideas of their own. So I disagree with the aforementioned "truisms." I think one of the most valuable commodities in the games industry today is truly unique and feasible ideas for new gameplay mechanics.
The example here is the newly released Portal. It's a compact "big game" the history of which is fairly well-known now: Narbacular Drop was the senior project of a group of students at Digipen video game college. It was a first-person perspective game wherein the player was required to solve puzzle rooms by placing and rearranging pairs of interconnected portals on surfaces at their choosing, allowing them to pass otherwise insurmountable obstacles. Valve saw the team's work and brought them on internally to continue developing their game concept into a full product. What we come away with is an extremely polished, cohesive, and advanced version of Narbacular Drop, in the form of Portal. And I'm confident in saying that the three or four hours I spent completing Portal (and two or so more playing it again with Developer Commentary turned on) were some of the very best hours of gaming I've ever experienced.
The point is this: the Narbacular Drop team was adopted into Valve because of the idea they came up with, not for a setting or story (which were ditched from the original version) but for a truly new mechanical concept, one which they were able to demonstrate was novel, feasible, and led to a wide range of engaging gameplay dynamics, and was therefore worth building a big game around. The key to this entire saga was the idea itself behind the point-to-point portal mechanic, and its application to a familiar framework, the first-person perspective action game. Embracing and investing in these kinds of ideas is the only way that big games will be able to overcome the widespread rut of killing a thousand grunts in slightly different ways. And as Portal proves, when an experienced, skilled and dedicated crew of developers pushes a novel gameplay concept to its fullest potential, the results can be absolutely astonishing-- a big game literally unlike we've ever played before.
I think I'm in love with Portal a little bit. It shows how things can be done right.
10.05.2007
Harvey
There's a candid, and very interesting, interview with Harvey Smith up at gamasutra right now. Smith talks about his upcoming game, Blacksite: Area 51, as well as a range of political, business and general design issues with the very engaging interviewer on the piece. Harvey Smith was lead designer on Deus Ex and Deus Ex 2: Invisible War, and Blacksite will be his first game for Midway Studios Austin.
The interview touches on a couple of subjects that I've taken interest in myself: he explores the idea of games as a vehicle for subversive political statements and the appeal of using residential and everyday spaces as settings for games in ways that are quite thoughtful, as well as being lent gravity by his long and influential career.
Whenever I've had a chance to read Smith's thoughts online or see him speak in person, I've always been impressed, and felt that he wants a lot of the same things out of games that I do, and thinks about these issues deeply. I wish he kept a blog!
10.04.2007
Ubermensch
What is it like to be a mafia crime lord? Judging from the film The Godfather, it involves ruthless business dealings behind closed doors, cigar smoke-enshrouded conferences with your consigliari, the pain of exchanging your own humanity for the good of the Family, suddenly losing your loved ones to a hail of bullets, sending out hitmen to do your wetwork, and only occasionally getting your own hands dirty.
Judging from The Godfather video game, it involves a one-man army systematically eradicating hundreds of rival gangsters to conquer every business in the city one block at a time.
The same goes for any other role explored through an action game-- what was it like being a soldier in WW2? You ran down streets killing dozens of nazis at a stretch, blowing up tanks, planes and bridges single-handedly while absorbing, and near-instantly recovering from, hundreds of gunshot wounds. What is it like being a New York police officer? You gun down dozens of heavily-armed criminals on an hourly basis (sometimes with the assistance of slow-mo abilities.) A secret agent? A ninja? A yakuza thug? A space marine? A refugee in an underwater utopia gone wrong? Hell, an MIT-educated nuclear physicist? They all frame the same hook: single-handedly destroy a constant stream of hostile cannon fodder through binary violent conflict. Be a force of nature that crushes his enemies by the truckload. Be an Übermensch, a being that has surpassed mere humanity.
There are generally two aspects of the player character that set it apart: The first is the very autonomy granted via the PC being controlled directly by the player, as opposed to the surrounding characters who all follow programmed behaviors within the gameworld. The PC is an extension of an external force, the human, while NPCs are extensions of the machine.
But the form of the second aspect is specific to each given game, and is a mechanic or set of mechanics that improves the player's chances of survival numerically-- a designed-in advantage that makes the player outright more powerful or hardier than his enemies. Sometimes this power is supported by the game's fiction and sometimes not, but regardless always functions to elevate the player character above his foes, allowing him to kill them off in droves. In Crysis, it's the super-advanced "nanosuit;" in Max Payne or F.E.A.R. it's the ability to engage slow-mo "bullet time;" in Half-Life it's the hazard suit; in The Darkness it's Jackie's demon shroud; in Gears of War it's the ability for the player to regenerate health and be revived by his teammates; in Halo it's Master Chief's recharging energy shield, and so on and so forth.
For most games it's the simple logical fallacy of the player being the only actor in the world capable of refilling his own health. Do you see enemies in any shooter or action game slugging down medkits or painkillers during a fight like the player is able to? Do enemies in the Half-Life universe ever use the med stations placed around the world? Why don't the enemies in Halo or Gears of War have recharging health like the player does? The closest I've seen is the enemies in BioShock running up and using health stations, but they still don't use portable medkits to recharge their health in the midst of battle the way the player does. This imbalance between the player's and enemies' abilities in most combat-based games is simply nonsense, but it gives the player the edge to survive, to rise above his enemies.
The need to cast the player as an Übermensch stems from these games' inability to make a clean break from their roots: the old-school arcade shooter. Let's look at Robotron 2084. In Robotron, the player is presented with a sequential set of rooms. Within each room are two general types of actors beside the player: hostile enemies, who wander around in set patterns, and innocent civilians, who also wander aimlessly. Enemies will attempt to kill both the player and the civlians; the player's goal is to touch ("save") the civilians before they can be destroyed by the enemies, and to clear all the enemies from the room in order to move on the to next. The player character's advantages, beside being an autonomous agent of the player, are the ability to rapidly fire projectiles in each of 8 directions, quicker and more nimble movement than his foes, and the ability to use extra lives to continue once killed. The fiction of the game explains the situation of the player facing a massive enemy force and having extraordinary powers this way:
Inspired by his never-ending quest for progress, in 2084 man perfects the Robotrons: a robot species so advanced that man is inferior to his own creation. Guided by their infallible logic, the Robotrons conclude: the human race is inefficient, and therefore must be destroyed. You are the last hope of mankind. Due to a genetic engineering error, you possess superhuman powers. Your mission is to stop the Robotrons, and save the last human family.
Single-player games have the potential to be something else. I don't want to be an inhuman, one-man army anymore. Games could instead couch the player as a normal person within a functional gameworld, an equal actor in parallel with all the other characters, an individual that isn't tied to a progression of power from pistol to machine gun to rocket launcher. When I say I want a "GTA with gravity," I necessarily want to play a truly human character. Not a superbeing that can instantly refill their life bar at will, or respawn, unscathed, at a hospital when they die. Not a Man on a Mission to destroy the droves of hellspawn that have invaded the planet. Not an invincible killing machine with a nanosuit and slow-mo powers, or the result of a genetic engineering error. Just a person. Games need to find their humanity.9.29.2007
Inhabit
A day or two ago I went on one of those great, all-morning voyages, starting at one blog then skipping from link to link, reading new articles and presentations I hadn't been exposed to before, downloading new games and demos to try, and just generally soaking in a flow of information that organically led from one node to the next. I started at Clint Hocking's blog, which led to Jonathan Blow's blog, which led to a great rundown of interesting indie games, the transcript of a Raph Koster talk on the spectrum of subject matter in current games, actionbutton.net which is a kind of nauseous Tim Rogers endeavor but had interesting game reviewing from other writers at least, the Realtime Art Manifesto by the team behind The Endless Forest, and more. A good day.
So, via that list above, I downloaded some indie games I hadn't tried before, including Knytt, which is a legitimately lovely, atmospheric little platformer in the vein of Metroid, but with a completely different tone. It's about a dumb little cat who gets abducted by aliens, then must explore all different parts of a surreal planet to collect missing spaceship parts and return home. I played through it in a couple of hours and it made me feel good.
But, all this made me think: Koster is right when he says that mainstream (hereafter referred to as "big") games currently draw from an extremely narrow set of influences 95% of the time (Jake and Chris and I went and saw a double feature of Total Recall and Terminator 2 the other night at the Castro, and we were noting how almost every big action game in the last 20 years has been trying to recreate the experience of these movies.) And I'm sure that Blow would champion indie games as one avenue that consistently explores new and innovative territory in game design. I've talked with friends in the industry about how we wish games could portray some interaction besides gun violence with the attention usually afforded combat, and certainly non-violent, or at least differently-violent, interaction is one trademark of indie games. I want games that do new and different things. I want games to progress, to convey a wider and more nuanced range of experiences. So even though I appreciate them in the brief time I give them, why aren't indie games what drive me?
Over my years of playing video games, I believe that I've come to a sharper and sharper understanding of what specific elements about all the games I've played most interest me. Playing a wide range of games over time is an ongoing process of exploration--exploring systems, exploring your own reactions to the overall productions--one which eventually allows you to delineate just what it is about games that makes you keep playing, keep paying attention. In my case, I can sum up what I want to do in a game this way:
I want to fully inhabit a single, human character within a believable and functional playable space, to express a complete and satisfying narrative arc by affecting change in the gameworld itself through my own meaningful decisions.
And the above, taken in sum total, I believe lies outside the scope of the indie game sphere. Not that I don't appreciate indie games at all, but in my experience their strengths lie in a number of specific areas-- expression of meaning strictly through inventive mechanics; conveying atmosphere via primitive visuals and sound; trying out new kinds of interaction that haven't been explored before, through highly abstract means-- that don't address the above. Indie games can be groundbreaking, freed from enormous financial investment and publisher demands, but they can't, as far as I've seen, provide me the fully-realized gameworld and inhabitable player character that a big game is capable of.
Which is to say that I can still enjoy indie games, but only briefly, or from afar, at least in their current state. But with the technology available today, indie games could also encompass my ideal core experience that I describe above, given the right approach. Tools are available, relatively cheaply or freely, to construct fully-realized functional worlds in true 3D, but low fidelity (outdated big game engines like the Unreal Engine 2, the Half-Life engine, old versions of Lithtech, etc. as well as open source 3D engines like Ogre.) The form of big games hasn't progressed in exceptionally significant ways since the turn of the millennium; there is nothing being done today, mechanically, that can't be accomplished with the engine technology of 2001. A small, dedicated team, with just the slightest amount of backing, could create a complete game on the scale of, say, System Shock 2, but with an indie outlook-- a setting and cast of characters that expressed an entirely different experience than what is usually encountered in a big game, an open-structure, believable world that exists unto itself, a unique set of mechanics leading to new, progressive dynamics, new forms of interaction, and so forth. By utilizing the technology of yesterday, but the forward-thinking design sense of today, indie teams could convey the "big experience" in ways that conservative, high-fidelity big games aren't allowed.
Beside an arbitrary adherence to exploring the "old-school" space, there's no reason for all indie games to remain 2D, or tile-based, or side-scrolling, or shoot-em-upping, or any other standards of that realm. And with digital distribution gone from a reality to practically the standard on PC, there's no reason for an indie team not to build something amazing that goes beyond the miniature scale of most indie games, and deliver it directly to an audience that would stand up and take notice. I want to love indie games. But I guess I want to love what they could be, not quite what they are.
7.28.2007
Benefit
So, what makes video games unique? What makes them special, as a form of entertainment? What does the player get out of playing a game that other pastimes can't give them?
There are obvious formal differences between video games and other types of analog games, and between video games and other forms of non-game entertainment. But, what does that amount to, from a player-psychological point of view? In understanding what a video game is, the question becomes: why is the experience compelling? What are the universal benefits across genres?
As I see it, all video games provide the player with two primary motivational elements: an artificial sense of entropy, and an artificial set of goals. In addressing these elements, the player receives a tangible sensation of control, and of accomplishment.
Any given video game drops the player into a situation with a high degree of entropy, in one form or another. Through play, the user brings order to the entropic situation. I believe that it's an inherent human psychological need to bring order to disorderly situations-- it's satisfying on some base level that we all share, whether it's straightening up an untidy room or weeding a garden. Every video game is in essence a disarranged sliding tile puzzle, or a Rubik's Cube, waiting to be set straight. Video games give this ageless conflict between order and disorder a wide variety of highly complex forms, and provide the player with tools to exert control over the chaos.
One clear, recent example of this aspect of games is Katamari Damacy. As the Prince of the Cosmos, the player is dropped onto the Earth, and told to gather up objects by using his katamari, to build huge clumps of mass that are then shot up into space and turned into stars. In practice, each level of the game is a large space populated with scattered detritus, clutter, and wandering critters, and the player is given a tool to gather up all this junk into one huge pile. At the start of the level, the space is highly entropic; through the player's input, order is brought to the space, consolidating the scattered bits into one central, manageable form. It's a satisfying sensation-- I've never met anyone who wasn't sucked in by the katamari.
But I think every single video game you've ever played shares this dyna